“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?
I saw Chaotic Wrestling and the Boston Pops this weekend. Sadly, not together. But still!
I have read all of the Murderbot books and really liked them, so I was excited to see that Apple was making them into a series. I watched the first 2 eps and have some thoughts!
Just me and the dog this weekend, and you know what that means. Horror movie time!
So I went to a house party for my representative in congress, Ayanna Pressley, last night. I’m as frustrated with the Democratic Party as anyone, but Ayanna Pressley is one of the best Democratic politicians in the country, and I believe that those of us who haven’t given up on electoral politics have a responsibility to support the left wing of the Democratic Party wherever possible.
Representative Pressley is super cool and a great speaker and funny and charming and spent over 2 hours in conversation with our host. It was really energizing to spend time listening to her. I have some takeaways from things she said.
Here’s the problem with memoirs: readers may find themselves interested in different facets of the story than the author is interested in. This was a common theme in reviews of my two memoirs (along with “why does he use so much profanity?”), and I find it a pretty common complaint I have when reading a memoir.
And so it is with Sarah Wynn-Williams’ Careless People.
I was awakened by the dog barking at 2:30 AM. This was followed by pounding on my front door. I stumbled downstairs to see what was going on, but, it being the middle of the night, I could only see the person on my porch backlit by streetlights.
“Who is it?” I said.
“SECDEF, Motherfucker!” came the response. And I knew Pete Hegseth was on my porch again. Reluctantly, I opened the door.