UPDATE: today my son, who faces severe speech delays and needs to see faces and be able to see his own, toddled off happily to pre-K at school (he goes b/c CPS has therapy options).
He was returned to me two hours later with a mask forcibly tied to his face by a teacher. Crying.
I am writing this as neutrally as I possibly can because I don't think merely posting an unbroken string of expletives will explain much to anybody, but...I am not in a congenial mood.
"Now could I drink hot blood"
- Hamlet, Act III sc. ii
For the few who seem to have stubbornly missed this point, I would like to emphasize the OPTIONAL in "mask-optional." We made that choice. My little buddy emphatically agrees (he's nobody's fool, even at this age.)
Nobody else gets to make that choice anymore, even in Chicago.
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It is with surprise that I report back to you that both SHAUN OF THE DEAD and I were wrong: Prince's BATMAN album (not really a soundtrack at all) is quite a bit better than I remember it being. I think I just hated "Batdance" so much as a kid it clouded my judgment.
I've spent far too much time thinking about Prince's career than is normal, and one thing that strikes me about him is that it runs in tidal cycles: a low-tide of experiment and confusion followed by a high tide of focus and conceptual unity. Then the tide rolls out again.
The entire opening of his career is a development towards DIRTY MIND. Then the tide runs out a bit w/CONTROVERSY and swoops back in w/his mega-peak in 1999 and PURPLE RAIN. Then retrenchment and a period of indecision/experimentation with AROUND THE WORLD IN A DAY...
He is of course biased about this and has every right to be, because the almost entirely substantively vapid "what's the deal with Nate Silver?!?" cottage industry has been churning along at a low-grade fever pitch since 2014.
Memories are short. But mine is long, and I remember nearly all of political/journo Twitter melting down in the days prior to the 2016 election when Silver committed Irresponsible Journalism (there were pieces written on this!) for suggesting Trump had a ~30% chance of winning.
It was literally the moment -- it should have been earlier, obviously--when I saw those who wrote screaming rants about Silver being a lucky fool who'd blundered into earlier fortune simply pretend they'd never said all that after the election...
tip your servers, people. christ it's not about race or whatever it's about tipping your damn server.
It's funny to see people have long agonizing debates about tipping when it's almost scientifically simple: I don't tip for carryout (I did the work by showing up & schlepping home!), a few bucks for delivery, and 20% for table service unless I'm living in a refrigerator carton.
Never gonna be mistaken for a serious hip-hop fan but I loved this song when I was 11 and I love it to this day.
The way hip-hop broke thru to white suburban kids like me and my brother from the late '80s onwards and became truly *national* American music, as opposed to niche, is actually a really fun cultural story. I remember all the beats. C'mon, if you were around back then you do too.
For me, it began with Run-DMC (and, ugh, Aerosmith). Sugar Hill Gang, all that was when I was an infant. But "Walk This Way?" Conquered every kid's headspace. Then the Beasties. Public Enemy. NWA to piss mom off. Wu-Tang, Tupac. And on and on.
You can learn a surprising amount about a serious person's baseline moral/political priors by asking them what their favorite quotes are. For example, the fact that mine is Talleyrand's "It was worse than a crime; it was a mistake" mirrors, I now realize, a fundamental approach.
There really are a lot of badass (and alternately "famous last words" ironic) 19th-century diplomatic quotes. Here's Bismarck, righter than he'd ever live to know: "The Balkans aren't worth the life of a single Pomeranian grenadier."
"Never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake" is the sort of advice from Napoleon that absolutely nobody on Twitter seems capable of following.