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!
Regular readers have been reaching out to me and asking why my blog has not been graced by a professional wrestling recap in quite a while. “Have you fallen out of love with wrestling?” they ask in tremulous voices.
No, dear readers, I have not. I have simply gone legit. Which is to say you can now find my wrapups of Chaotic Wrestling events on the Chaotic Wrestling website!
I will watch just about anything set in Edinburgh, and I like dark mysteries, so I was pretty stoked about Dept. Q. The setup is that a cop who’s kind of a dick gets shot and then gets stuck solving cold cases and looks for a missing prosecutor who is also kind of a dick.
“I think we should watch Sirens,” my spouse said.
“You mean that movie where Hugh Grant is made uncomfortable by Elle MacPherson being naked all the time?” I said.
“No,” she said. “It’s a new Netflix show.”
“Ugh, is it a firefighter drama?” I asked.
“NO. Not that kind of siren,” she said.
“Okay, but what is it?” I asked.
“I’m not sure. Let’s just watch the first episode.”
I recently saw a call for submissions for short mystery stories that said they didn’t want anything political.
Which I guess means they are actually closed to submissions because all crime fiction is political. I don’t mean that every locked-room mystery is explicitly about the moral rot at the heart of the Republican party or anything like that, but crime fiction cannot operate outside the realm of politics.
My experience with urban education is pretty much limited to Boston, but a lot of what I’m going to say will apply to many urban districts.
So let’s start with Boston (or, you know, insert city here’s) “failing schools.” There seems to be a general idea that if you only want it bad enough, you can turn urban schools into suburban schools where everybody graduates, everybody attends four-year colleges, and everybody scores really well on standardized tests.
Got a push poll from supporters of Josh Kraft last night. It came from research-polls.com, which, if you click through, has a website that lists no employees and looks wicked fake.
I fell down a little bit of a rabbit hole trying to find this company. The headquarters listed on their contact info is a shabby condo building in Fort Lauderdale (which immediately put me in mind of Kraft the Elder) owned by an LLC headquartered in an anonymous office park in Temple Place, Florida.
My internet research failed to uncover any grand conspiracy other than this: Josh Kraft, or someone who supports him, hired a “polling firm” that may or may not actually exist to send fake polls from a fake phone number [(413)-343-1039, which a couple of reverse lookup sites tell me does not exist, though another suggests that somebody owns the entire 343 exchange, so I called 343-1000 and went straight to a voicemail with no greeting.].
It’s May. The Election is in November, and Josh is already doing sleazy shit. Expect more, and worse. Was this fake poll commissioned by the campaign? Or did some fan of Josh Kraft who just happens to live in Florida and have essentially unlimited funds hire this guy pretending to be a company in his condo to send this stuff out off the books? Either way, it’s a preview of both the tactics and content we can expect from a Kraft campaign.
But let’s look at the poll, shall we?