brendan halpin

Here’s something you might not expect about Tom Jones: he is not a nostalgia act.

A lot of people are casting the Internet Archive vs. Hachette suit as some kind of David and Goliath battle, but it’s really a Silicon Valley dickhead moving fast and breaking things vs Goliath battle.

I’m kind of obsessed with celebrity second acts. The great majority of people who enter any kind of entertainment field don’t have any measure of success. Most of the people who enjoy success in one field find that success fleeting. Precious few people find success in two different fields. Here are 4!

Our story begins on August 13, 2024. My daughter and I realized we needed toothbrushes, so we decided to visit our local [NATIONAL RETAIL CHAIN REDACTED].

Recently had an opportunity to pitch a show to British TV. Here’s a transcript!

Me: Thanks for taking the time to meet with me. I’d like to pitch a show.

British TV: Right. Well, shows are what we do. What kind of murders, then?

I went on vacation last week. Spent 7 days in a lakeside cabin with my spouse, my dog, and our three adult children. It was idyllic as fuck.

There was no TV, no wifi and precious little cell service, so I got a lot of reading done! (Thanks to the Egleston Square branch of the Boston Public Library for the books!)

Really excited to have booked such an important guest on the blog today! I sat down with the state of New Hampshire to try to get some insight into this frankly puzzling state. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Brendan Halpin: Hi! Welcome! Thanks for taking the time to talk to me today.

New Hampshire: Happy to do it.

BH: So, I wouldn’t do this if you were a person, but given that you’re a state, I’d just like to say how stunningly beautiful you are.

NH: Aw, thank you!

I saw someone mention that Ocean State Job Lot, where I go for bargain priced seltzer, jam, and nuts, was selling a Bird ebike for 800 bucks with a 400 dollar coupon. (400 bucks buys a lot of seltzer! 50 cases at current prices!) So I went for it.

(You can read part 1 here, part 2 here, and part 3 here. But you don’t have to!)

A few years back I had a fight on social media with the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, which is located in the neighborhood of Boston where I live. The folks running the place hate dogs, and they put out this story about an unleashed dog killing a great blue heron in the arboretum. Except the story didn’t make sense. It came out that someone had seen an unleashed dog in the area the night before the heron was found. When I pointed out that this “unleashed dog” might well have been a coyote, since we’ve got lots of ‘em in my neighborhood, the arboretum’s social media person replied that it couldn’t have been a coyote because the heron was found in a plastic bag.

So I listened to the entire podcast and I thought I would post a little wrapup because I know not everybody wants to invest 3 hours in this and also the descriptions of sexual abuse in the podcast are graphic and would likely be extremely triggering to folks who might otherwise be interested in the story. So I’m going to draw a veil over the explicit details here. You can certainly find them on the podcast.