I will wax a little poetic, then. ;-)

Nashville has had a machine since at least the late 60s for harvesting songs basically provided for free by writers desperate for a break, and routing them them through overproduced studios full of controllable singers even more desperate than the songwriters. Now, to be fair, the occasional gem slips through, more when the model was less refined, and then there’s folks like Dolly Parton who infiltrated it like a virus and then took it over to explode with decent music.

Still, other than what Steve Earle called “The Great Credibility Scare of the 80s” when he, Dwight Yoakam, Lyle Lovett, KD Lang, and Melissa Etheridge (among others) were allowed to bubble to the top of the scene, there’s always been a grifter business mindset that’s somehow worse in country because, as a direct outgrowth and expansion of certain varieties of folk music, audiences ask for authenticity when all they really want is cultural validation (hint: for country-adjacent music, authenticity usually looks a lot like it does in other genres). Bubblegum country therefore somehow feels dirtier than bubblegum pop, and it gets even worse as product categories ossify and Nashville country gets targeted to a more and more specific segment of the public.

I’m fully aware that even the stuff I like, the “Rockabilly [and] other various fusion efforts” broadly called “Americana,” is subject to its own tropes and business pressures, but being smaller and targeting a different niche, there’s at least room in the conversation for artistry and risk, and thankfully good music isn’t as hard to get made as some other forms of entertainment, so there’s a lot of it out there waiting to be found.

Also, nothing wrong with some nasal vocals in the right context, LOL. I do grow weary of “High and Lonesome” bluegrass vocals after about two songs, though.

Patrick Stewart was also deeply involved in the creative decisions on Picard seasons 1 and 2. He got to the point where he just wanted to do what he wanted to do, and since he is Jean-Luc Picard, what he wants is ipso facto the right choice:

“What I’d like to see at the end of the show,” I told them, “is a content Jean-Luc. I want to see Picard perfectly at ease with his situation. Not anxious, not in a frenzy, not depressed. And I think this means that there is a wife in the picture.” You see, the line between Jean-Luc and me has grown ever more blurred. If I have found true love, shouldn’t he?

Sometimes you do not want your actor actually in charge of their iconic character, and genuine embrace of it can manage to make it worse if they’re not writers. I will do my occasional hornet’s-nest kicking and say that Mark Hamill’s take on Luke Skywalker after filming The Last Jedi was similarly myopic, but in a direction that more fans at least think they wanted, and since we’ll never see his choices play out he still gets the benefit of the doubt.

This, and not ironically.

It is a slippery thing, this two weeks — not a measurement of time so much as a placeholder. Two weeks for Mr. Trump can mean something, or nothing at all. It is both a yes and a no. It is delaying while at the same time scheduling. It is not an objective unit of time, it is a subjective unit of time. It is completely divorced from any sense of chronology. It simply means later. But later can also mean never. Sometimes.

That’s just reckless! You’re a maverick who doesn’t play by the rules! I’m too old for this shit!

I actually do think the point is there more as an alignment guide for a potentially sloppy stack of punched paper (see also the manila envelopes with brads built in), but I would be lying if I said I never skipped the hole punch when it was just a couple of sheets.

Yeah, that’s the main gist. DoD is straying from their lane because Hegseth is a raving Christian Nationalist, and not even one of their better advocates, and that is a LOOOOOOW bar. This all stems from a published list, screenshot in the article, that still includes Mormons but doesn’t preface them with “Christianity” like it did for the others.

I wouldn’t be surprised if he personally redlined a Word doc to delete “Christianity” from the Mormons’ line before approving it for release, and maybe without any particular emotional animus, just parroting what he remembered from Sunday School that one time he wasn’t hungover. The fact that the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Adventists made the cut might also argue for there not being a ton of theological rigor to the decision.

I think Mormons get too defensive about wanting to be included in other Christians’ theological definitions of Christianity (literally can’t happen… The Mormon Trinity is polytheistic by almost any standard, to say nothing of extra books and other heterodox beliefs), but those invested in one group or another’s theology can overlook that there are other contexts (shared history, cultural practice, self-iidentification, etc. etc.) that can generate just as much passion and be internally reasonable. It’s almost like the separation of church and state is a pretty good fuckin’ idea, especially in a pluralistic republic…

I guess, but that’s some pretty unnecessary gatekeeping when one is dealing with the definitions assigned by a secular government who, in your analogy, is not in the business of evaluating wellness and healing practitioners’ truth claims at all. All the various outgroups that became heretics when a very political conference wrapped up in Asia Minor didn’t suddenly stop identifying as a Christians, and the fact that some provincial American conman steeped in Great Awakening Protestantism inadvertently reinvigorated some of their ideas 1500 years later doesn’t make it nonsensical for his marks and their descendants to self-identify as Christians. The state has a very good reason (and no bar) to evaluate whether a given “healthcare provider” is going to harm the public by claiming certain titles, but the situation with religion is very different, particularly for a bit of minor military bureaucracy (historical contextisn’t even really relevant here). Unforced error by the MAGAs.

Now, IMHO Mormonism is a pretty toxic, high pressure religion, and it believes some shit that strikes the modern mind as particularly goofy, but it’s a religion with a creed that’s very clearly arising out of the Christian tradition. If you want to take different magic sky-daddy theology at face value, then sure, within that framework you can reasonably draw a line and declare anyone on the Arianism line of it as “not Christian,” but that’s not the US government’s job. Absolutely not the hill for the Department of Defense to pick at all, much less to die on, but if it makes some Mormons disillusioned with one oppressive cult of personality, then that could be a good thing.

On the one hand, as an Ex-Mormon, LOL.

On the other, maybe it helps depress gop voter turnout and makes sure the Democrat wins their new district in central Salt Lake City. And maybe MAGA finds Utah is a lot less inclined to run through walls for them in 2028. Nobody does “stoically endure oppression, real or perceived” quite like Mormons.

The way DoD did this is also classic Bible thumper Protestant shit, right out of a Chick tract. Mormons are absolutely not Nicene Christians, but they profess to follow Jesus of Nazareth, so if they want the gummint to lump them in with the Christians, it takes a special kind of stupid and short-sighted religious pedant not to humor them.

More or less. Nominally they were for quickly binding paper that had been through a 2- or 3-hole punch.

Really, they were for making badass clocks in kindergarten.

As I understand it, they do have one more season…

So, I generally agree with you. They’re sprinting through their plot outline to get to their end-game, and the “one season per decade” framing device is creaking under the weight of what they want to do.

Yup. You want to speculate on SpaceX, then no one is stopping you. You may even make a shitload of money if you do it right (based on recent valuations I’m not so sure, though), but maximizing short term capital gains based on vibes is absolutely not what the S&P 500 is used for.

If SpaceX is actually consistently profitable, they’ll be in the index in one year. Is what it is.

This corporate product placement is getting out of hand!

Sounds like this was a pretty fucked up situation, but one wonders why the white cops (can’t say for sure, but the police wrists on the bodycam look very pale) would really have no trouble believing that a white kid out late at night had been tormenting a brown one.

I bet it has way less to do with being “woke” than it does with their actual experience on the job. They also called the ambulance right away, but they did fuck up quite badly by not believing him when he said he’d been stabbed.

To be clear, the Sikh kid needs to go to prison, the police need to be investigated and those officers disciplined, and I grieve for the victim and his family, but people who think that an 81%-majority ethnicity is enduring some epidemic of oppression, because previous white shitheads lulled some lazy cops into complacency, they have some other agenda. I wonder what JD Vance’s is?

Exactly. Missing the forest for the trees is kind of Calvin’s stock in trade, and the adult perspective makes it a lightly but pleasantly layered punchline.

Kills every edged consumable like it was hickory grown in a sand dune, but god forbid you get one drop of sweat on it before you paint…

I think that was Babylon 5 and J Michael Straczynski. You’re thinking of the repeated times when, in the middle of the hardest hitting writing in SciFi, there’s a ham-fisted, horribly conceived episode about a second-rate lounge singer coming out of a Ferengi holodeck or whatever.

New generation just never grabbed people the same way, but at least nobody’s fuckin’ their dead son’s best friend or doing missions in the throes of a serious hard drugs addiction. I’m still interested in how it all plays out, and only one season left, which feels about right.

I will note that it seems like understanding Star City, probably every season they eventually make, will be key to extracting full value out of the plot to FAMK S5. They may be going full Marvel with a cinematic universe.

I suppose to hear them say it, they’d say this is how they’re holding the line on the core use. Shrinkflation instead of inflation, so… Yay?

Lest you think this is a bit out of character…

Doesn’t actually change the message much, once you allow for who Calvin is, which is of course part of the enduring brilliance of the strip.

He is promising… “a Rally to end all Rallies!”

Can we hold him to that?

It’s almost like the tech companies are preying on places that have cheap land and residents with less political influence…

Jesus, at least the meat packing plants and shingle factories employed people they were poisoning.