The third and most recent one begins with the standard “do you have a favorable or unfaborable opinion of this person” question. So we’ve got Michelle Wu, Josh Kraft, Donald Trump, and…Marty Walsh?!
What possible reason could Mr. Research-Polls (I picture him as an extremely sweaty, bespectacled white guy with a mustache in a dirty Hawaiian shirt hunched over a bank of monitors in a dark room, though of course I know everybody in Florida has AC) have for asking me about Marty Walsh? He’s not running for anything!
Yesterday I traveled to scenic Worcester, Massachusetts, to watch the Worcester Red Sox (The Boston Red Sox’ AAA affilliate) play the Buffalo Bisons.
It was a beautiful day for baseball, and even counting the cost of driving 35 miles to Worcester and paying to park, it was still cheaper than going to a Red Sox game 3 miles from my house. Every seat in Polar Park is a great seat, and the atmosphere was fun. 4 mascots, because why not? Mascot race! Baby race! Kids trying to do things on the field on order to win stuff! The vibes were positive and family-friendly, and though the WooSox (doing business as the Wicked Worms of Worcester for the penultimate time! Catch them on September 5 vs. the Scranton/Wilkes Barre Rail Riders and say goodbye to this particular alter ego!) lost 6-3, everybody I went with had a wonderful time. (Baseball purists such as my friend Eric might object to the incessant stimuli—song snippets between at-bats, the aformentioned races and such between innings, etc. But I loved it!)
And, of course, I have some notes, mostly involving concessions.
I’ve seen a bunch of think pieces lately about pro wrestling, and how Trump was briefly involved with WWE, and how pro wrestling involves pretending that unreal things are real, and that explains Trump, or something. Sprinkle in a little condescension for wrestling and its fans, and you’re done!
In April 2024, I bought an ebike—a discontinued Bird bike (you know, the people who litter the sidewalk with scooters!) that was deeply discounted and, because I got it at Ocean State Job Lot, it came with a large store coupon that they call Crazy Bucks, which meant I got to torment my family for the better part of a year by going, “I’ll pick up some seltzer! I still have 250 Crazy Bucks!”
So I went down one of those internet rabbit holes yesterday looking at left-wing gun clubs. Not because I’m thinking of buying a gun, but just because I thought it might be interesting to see what the arguments for gun ownership were from the left, and whether I found those arguments more compelling than the right wing ones.
So I watched 2 Japanese horror movies over the weekend. I wasn’t doing a theme night or anything—I just like watching horror movies from other countries and cultures because even indie American horror movies tend to lean pretty hard on familiar tropes, whereas outside of the US, you get filmmakers making weird, idiosyncratic movies that are harder to find here. (See, for example, Oddity or Frewaka, both from Ireland, both excellent.)
I am not a big money donor to my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania. I’m not even a small money donor. So I’m sure they won’t care, but I just want it publicly noted that Penn is a repugnant institution. Here’s the email I sent the alumni office, the president, and the trustees:
Hi folks! Just wanted to drop this in here because I haven’t seen it mentioned elsewhere, but in addition to all the other horrible things medicaid cuts will do (like possibly kill my mother, who has dementia and diabetes and relies on care paid for by medicaid to stay alive), they will also harm public schools.
Allow me to explain! If your child needs Speech, or Occupational Therapy, or possibly some other interventions, they can get these from the professionals in your public school district starting at age 3. Free of charge to you, the parent! Good deal!
Assuming these services are not done as part of a Head Start program (which I believe has also been cut to the bone, so probably they won’t be), your public school district can bill Medicaid for the time these service providers spend servicing children who are not currently enrolled students.
Since these services are legally mandated, they won’t be able to stop offering them when Medicaid is cut. They’ll just have to shift the money from somewhere else.
You can probably connect the dots, but I’ll do it for you—the money has to come from somewhere. So deferring maintenance on the physical plant will probably be first on the list. Well, maybe cuts to the arts will be first. Athletics? Other extracurriculars? The loss of Medicaid funding will make public schools, particularly urban public schools who serve the highest number of students and the highest percentage of special needs students, less functional. And then the education privatizers will swoop in and say, “See! Public education doesn’t work! We need to privatize the whole thing! Just connect the kids with AI chatbots and we’ll call that education!”
Uggh. Anyway, if you’re reading this you’re probably already appalled, but I just wanted to raise awareness about another side effect of the Big Horrible Bill.
Disney doesn’t seem to understand the whole “absence makes the heart grow fonder” thing, so they’ve been shoveling Marvel and Star Wars content at us more or less nonstop for years, to the point where I have no interest in either anymore.
But then I read a thing about how terrible people are mad about Ironheart, so I decided to give it a try. Watching TV: it’s basically activism!