Q. How primitive was it?

A. It was so primitive that the patient questionnaire for office visits (which was inscribed on a stone tablet) consisted of one question:

If the patient chiseled “YES” or “NOT SURE,” the standard medical treatment was for the physician to drain the patient’s blood, because in ancient times blood was mistakenly believed to be the leading cause of disease. (We now know that it is actually mucus.) If the patient chiseled “NO,” the physician would still drain the patient’s blood, because in ancient times the physician was also the undertaker.

Contrast that primitive scenario with a visit to a modern medical office, where, before you are allowed to come into direct contact with a doctor for any reason, including to wish him or her a happy birthday, you are handed a clipboard and required to fill out a questionnaire that looks like this:

This questionnaire — which you must fill out completely on every single office visit, even if your previous visit was earlier that same day — requires you try to remember your entire medical history dating back to your birth, including:

Filling out this questionnaire can be tedious, but it serves a purpose that is vital to the functioning of a modern medical office, namely, keeping you occupied while you’re waiting three hours or more to see the doctor, who is running behind schedule.

Q. How far behind schedule?

A. The doctor is still in medical school.

IMPORTANT: If you ever, somehow, get to see an actual doctor in person, remember to ask him or her about the prescription drugs advertised on TV. I’m talking about those commercials alerting you to the many, MANY alarming medical conditions that you never heard of before but that you might very well be suffering from, which is why the announcer always instructs you, in an authoritative voice, to “Ask your doctor about (name of drug)!” There are a LOT of these drugs, so to make sure you ask about all of them, you should print out the boldface question below and read it to the doctor verbatim. (All of these are actual TV-ad drug names, which I got from a list maintained by my wife.)

QUESTION TO ASK YOUR DOCTOR:

“Doctor, what about (deep breath) Apretude, Arexvy, Austedo, Biktarvy, Bimzelx, Breztri, Cabenuva, Caplyta, Comirnaty, Cosentyx, Dovato, Dupixent, Emgality, Eucrisa, Farxiga, Fasenra, Humira, Ibrance, Ingrezza, Jardiance, Kerendia, Kesimpta, Keytruda, Kisqali, Latuda, Linzess, Lo Loestrin Fe, Mounjaro, Myfembree, Nubeqa, Nucala, Nurtec ODT, Ocrevus, Opdivo & Yervoy, Opdivo Qvantig, Opzelura, Ozempic, Pluvicto, Qulipta, Quviviq, Reblozyl, Repatha, Rexulti, Rinvoq, Rybelsus, Saxenda, Skyrizi, Sotyktu, Stelara, Taltz, Tepezza, Trelegy, Tremfya, Tresiba, Trulicity, Ubrelvy, Ultomiris, Vabysmo, Veozah, Verzenio, Vraylar, Xeljanz, Xifaxan, Zepbound and Zeposia?”

Unfortunately, your doctor will be unable to answer this question, because he or she is running behind schedule and thus will have exited the examination room somewhere around Pluvicto. This is probably just as well, because for the majority of these drugs the side effects include death.

But my point is that we’re lucky to be living in a modern era when medical science is constantly discovering new diseases for us to suspect that we might have. At the same time, the medical profession is developing exciting new breakthrough procedures for treating patients, such as the one discussed in a recent medical journal article, which I am not making up, with this headline:

This article was brought to my attention by Rob Stavis, who was my roommate at Haverford College, where, on the day he was accepted into medical school, we held a celebration party that culminated with a group of us hanging out in the dormitory showers, fully clothed, with the water running full blast but at a moderate temperature, drinking bourbon from a shoe. (Side Note: I do not recommend this. It makes bourbon taste even worse than usual.)

Anyway, somehow Rob went on from there to become a licensed physician, and although he’s now retired, he keeps up with the medical literature, which is how he stumbled across the Coca-Cola article. In brief, it states that a woman showed up at the hospital with a fecaloma, which is a large hardened mass of poop. (I don’t mean she was carrying it around like a snow globe. It was inside her.) The doctors, after unsuccessfully trying other cures, finally solved the problem by giving the woman two enemas, one liter each, of Classic Coca-Cola. Yes: Coke enemas. Giving new meaning to the slogan “Things go better with Coke.”

It’s not clear how the doctors came up with this idea. Maybe they were having lunch in the hospital cafeteria, trying to figure out what to do about this pesky fecaloma, when one of them happened to take a swig of Coke and let out a loud belch, and the others went: “Bob, that’s IT!” The important thing is, the Classic Coke enema worked, which is great news for massive fecaloma sufferers, of which you could very well be one. Ask your doctor about Classic Coke! You might also want to mention (Why not?) Dr. Pepper.

One final piece of advice regarding modern medical care: If at all possible, you should avoid having to experience it personally. I base this statement on viewing two seasons of the popular TV medical drama The Pitt, which is an extremely realistic portrayal of what happens in a modern hospital emergency room. What happens is, every few minutes a patient arrives in an ambulance, and he or she immediately receives a massive dose of medical care. Here’s a typical Pitt patient being cared for:

The scary part is, this patient was suffering from hemorrhoids.

No, seriously, The Pitt is a great show, and it reminds us that ER doctors, nurses and staff do a heroic job of providing critical care in an often brutal environment. I don’t know how they do it. As a medical coward, I could NEVER do it. I can’t even look directly at a fictional portrayal of it. I watch roughly 85 percent of The Pitt with my hand over my eyes, so this my view:

So my hat is off to the ER workers, and in fact to all the members of the medical profession, for the vital services they provide. I’m just saying I’m happier when they’re not providing them to me personally.

But enough about me. Time now to hear — speaking of vital — from you generous paying subscribers, without whom this Substack would not exist. Today we are conducting three scientific polls:

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As I stand before you today, preparing to deliver your commencement address, I am reminded of the advice I once received from a very wise man.

“Dave,” he told me. “If you ever have to deliver a commencement address, make sure you go to the bathroom ahead of time.”

I wish I had remembered that advice 45 minutes ago, before I put on this rental graduation gown. Because right now my bladder is approaching Defcon One, if you know what I mean. What I mean is, the surrounding organs are cowering in fear. So I will keep this brief. I may sprint off the stage in mid-sentence.

I will begin, as is customary in commencement addresses, with a joke or humorous story that sets a lighthearted tone yet serves to impart a meaningful lesson. A man goes to see his doctor, who runs some tests and says, “I’m afraid I have bad news. You have a rare disease that is extremely contagious and is almost always fatal.” The man says, “Ohmigod! What are you going to do?” The doctor says, “I’m going to put you on a strict diet of pancakes and pizza.” So the man says, “Will that cure me?” And the doctor says “No, it’s the only food we can slide under the door.”

Ha ha! But all joking aside, Class of 2026: Sometimes life sucks. That is the meaningful lesson I am imparting to you via this lighthearted story. Life is unfair. You are about to experience this truth personally, because, through no fault of your own, you’re graduating into a terrible job market. There are more than two million of you receiving bachelors’ degrees this spring, and according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, you will be competing for a total, nationwide, of eleven full-time positions, of which three are with Applebee’s.

So your employment odds are not good, Class of 2026. Many of you will wind up back home living with your parents. Make no mistake: Your parents love you very much. But for the past four years they have been fantasizing about being empty-nesters, about enjoying a childfree, carefree lifestyle with the freedom, if the mood strikes them, to have passionate spontaneous sex on the family-room floor. Granted, it’s highly unlikely that this mood ever would strike them, and if it did, they’d be looking at tens of thousands of dollars in orthopedist bills. But the point is, as much as your parents love you, they were looking forward to loving you from enough of a distance that they would not be doing your laundry.

OK, I have just been notified that two of the three Applebee’s positions have been filled, in both cases by summa cum laude Harvard graduates. So as bad as the job market was when I started this commencement address, it’s worse now.

Why is it so brutal? A big reason, of course, is Artificial Intelligence. Which is pretty ironic, right, Class of 2026? I mean, you thought AI was great when you were using ChatGPT to do to all those class assignments for you, thereby freeing you from the drudgery of having to physically read books and write papers about them, which was putting a damper on your college experience. But now that very same AI has come back to bite you on the butt by taking away your jobs. It’s not fair, Class of 2026. It sucks! That is the heart of my commencement message to you.

At this point you’re thinking: “Really, Dave? Do you think this message is helpful? Do you seriously believe we need to be reminded that things are bad? Also, do you think we need to be lectured about technology by a person whose iPhone photo library contains several hundred extreme closeup images of his own left forefinger? In fact do you think there’s ANYTHING relevant we can learn from an old fart who graduated from college many decades ago in a completely different era, a time when good jobs were plentiful and a three-bedroom house cost $87.50 and families of four ate dinner in business attire with huge amounts of product in their hair at a tiny round table that was missing some chairs and for some reason had five place settings?”

Point taken, Class of 2026. Right now you don’t need negativity. What you need is specific, practical career advice to help you succeed in these difficult times. So here it is: Avoid going into any field that AI can do better than you. Basically that means you should rule out anything you studied in college. In fact when you come up here on stage to receive your diploma from the president, maybe you should tell him or her you’d rather receive a full tuition refund.

Ha ha! I am of course joking, Class of 2026, although I note that your parents are nodding in vigorous agreement. But the point is, you need to find a career doing something that AI doesn’t do. Welding, for example. There’s a big demand for skilled welders, especially in Industry, because Industry requires many pieces of metal, and without skilled welders these pieces would be lying separately all over the ground.

Also, believe it or not, welding is fun. I know this because in 1961, when I was in eighth-grade shop class at Harold C. Crittenden Junior High in Armonk, N.Y., we were for some reason permitted to use an acetylene torch, which produced a flame with a temperature of SIX THOUSAND DEGREES. Yes! You cannot even imagine the range of objects we melted when the shop teacher wasn’t looking. To this day I am at a loss to explain why the authorities allowed eighth-grade boys to get anywhere near that thing, or how we avoided turning the entire school into a smoking crater. But it was fun.

Although I did not prove to be an adept welder. I spent the entire school year attempting to weld three pieces of metal together to form a magazine rack, which, when completed, was supposed to look something like this:

This was going be a gift for my mom, but I could never, no matter how much acetylene torching I did, get the three metal pieces to stick together, the result being that the Barry family magazines continued to lie around our living room in a lawless unregulated sprawl. But my mom loved me anyway, just as your moms love you, the members of the Class of 2026, although they’re not wildly excited about having you move back in with them. So think about welding. You’d probably be better at it than I was. That is the new heart of my commencement message to you.

I will conclude my remarks by wishing all of you graduates, no matter what career path you choose, the best of luck with your job searches, bearing in mind that the final fulltime Applebee’s post has just been filled by an MBA from Stanford. I hope you all attain a level of success that enables you to attain the lifestyle you dream of, which I fervently hope involves become a paying Substack subscriber.

And now, Class of 2026, I have to go. I mean, I really have to go. Because I

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I mean, when you look at photos of famous billionaires, do you see anything extraordinary about them? No. You see a group of people who appear to be regular humans, except for Mark Zuckerberg.

So what do these billionaires have that you don’t? Is it simply that they’re more intelligent than you?

Yes. Of course not. You’re plenty intelligent! The answer is that these billionaires do certain specific things that you don’t do.

Consider your morning routine. If you’re like most people, by which I mean me, your morning routine consists of very cautiously climbing out of bed, then wobbling into the bathroom and spending quite some time in there, followed by coffee. Then maybe going to the bathroom again. Then maybe some more coffee. Before you know it, your morning has flown by.

No wonder you’re not a billionaire.

For a fascinating insight into what actual billionaires do in the morning, we turn, as we so often do, to the New York Times, which on April 11 ran a major story profiling Lauren Sanchez Bezos, who is married to Jeffrey Bezos, who is not just any billionaire: He is the richest man in the world, for his height. Here’s a photo of the Bezoses arriving at the 2026 Vanity Fair Oscar party, which you personally could not get into if you showed up in a U.S. Army battle tank. And yes, this is a perfectly natural way for a person to stand.

What is the morning routine of the Bezoses? Here are the first 155 words of the Times profile, which I swear I am not making up:

A lot of things make Lauren Sánchez Bezos ridiculously happy. Helicopters. Fashion. Protecting the narwhal. Her little sister, Elena. Her five best girlfriends. And, of course, her new husband, Jeff Bezos.

She and Mr. Bezos do everything together. On a typical day, the newlyweds wake up around 6 in their new, roughly $230 million compound on Indian Creek, an exclusive private island in Miami often called “Billionaire Bunker.” They don’t touch their phones. Instead, they begin each day by listing 10 things they’re grateful for — and they can’t repeat what they named the day before.

From there, the couple drink their morning coffee in a sunroom and watch the sun rise: hers from a mug that reads “Woke Up Sexy as Hell Again,” his from one she got him that spells HUNK in symbols from the periodic table. They play pickleball. Six days a week, they work out for an hour with a private trainer.

Notice what’s missing from this morning routine? That’s right: Billionaires don’t go to the bathroom. They have staff for that. Billionaires start their day by being grateful for things. And we’re not talking about one or two things: They’re grateful for TEN things. APIECE. Before sunrise.

You think that’s easy? It’s not. I know because Michelle and I tried, for just one morning, to come up with ten things to be grateful for at the crack of dawn, or in our case the crack of roughly 8:15 a.m., b.c. (before coffee). It was a struggle. Here, unedited, is what we came up with (we did not consult with each other):

Clearly we were both running out of things to be grateful for, and this was on our first day. The Bezoses, according to the Times, do this every single day, without repeats.

Granted, they have more things to be grateful for than most of us. Helicopters, for example. Apparently they have plural helicopters. Which is nice, but still: If every single morning the Bezoses have to come up with ten new things apiece to be grateful for, that’s 20 new things per day, which means — multiplying 20 things by 365 days — they have to generate 7,300 Unique Gratitude Units (UGUs) per year, which is more than the entire state of New Jersey. Before breakfast! Assuming they even eat breakfast. I doubt that I am physically capable of producing that quantity of gratitude, let alone having enough energy left over to protect the narwhal. I didn’t even know the narwhal was in trouble.

I was pleased to note that the Bezoses’ morning routine, like mine, includes coffee, although my personal coffee mug does not spell HUNK in symbols from the periodic table. My mug is less upbeat:

Also Michelle’s and my morning exercise routine is less strenuous than the Bezoses’. We don’t have a personal trainer, nor do we have a pickleball court on our compound. If I’m being completely honest, cards on the table, we don’t even have a compound. So what we do for exercise is walk around our neighborhood in an effort, usually unsuccessful, to get in the recommended 10,000 steps per day. (The Times story doesn’t mention how many steps the Bezoses get in per day, although I assume it’s in the millions.)

Michelle and I enjoy our walks, because we get to witness the natural beauty of nature, which lately has taken the form of peacock sex. We live in a peacock-intensive part of Miami, and apparently this is mating season, because the male peacocks, who usually just lug their tail feathers around in a boring horizontal clump, are raising them up and fanning them out in large studly displays to make it known that they are down to procreate by getting it on with the ladies.

During one of our walks last week Michelle and I came around a corner and there, in a driveway, looking right at us, was this peacock, whom I will call Rex (not his real name):

Rex was flashing his sex beacon, but it was not immediately obvious who his target was, since the only visible female in the area was Michelle, who belongs to a completely different species and wears a wedding ring.

But then suddenly from the bushes emerged a peahen — let’s call her Denise — who had definitely swiped hard right on Rex’s Tinder profile. What happened next happened so fast that I barely had time to record a video of it after getting the written legal consent of both parties involved.

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING VIDEO CONTAINS GRAPHIC PEACOCK SEX AND IS INTENDED FOR MATURE AUDIENCES, WHICH, SINCE YOU’RE READING THIS SUBSTACK, CLEARLY DOES NOT DESCRIBE YOU.

Here’s the video. Watch the beginning closely, because that’s where the hot action is:

To recap: As the video begins, Rex has just pounced on Denise (not that she objected) and is wrapping his wings around her so that they can share an intimate moment, a romantic and sensuous interlude during which he physically expresses his deep, sincere and undying passion for her. This interlude lasts for approximately two seconds. Rex then briskly backs up and turns to face the garage door. At the 0:10 mark Denise crosses behind Rex, walking away but moving slowly, as if she’s giving Rex a chance to turn around and maybe ask for her phone number.

But Rex does not turn around. Rex continues to face the garage door, as if it is the most riveting thing he has ever seen, as if it’s a large-screen TV showing the deciding final seconds of the Peacock Super Bowl. At around the 0:45 mark, Rex slowly turns and takes a look around, but Denise is still in the area, so Rex turns back to the garage door. Clearly Denise is on her own now, procreationwise .

That’s how it is for peahens. A few days later, not far from where I took the sex video, I came across a mama peahen with six cute li’l peacocklets in tow:

Aww. But notice there’s no adult male around. The father — and it could very well be Rex — is somewhere else, maybe displaying his plumage to another female, or pretending to be fascinated by a garage door, or golfing. Because men are basically scum that is the way of nature.

What does this have to do with billionaires? Nothing. I just wanted an excuse to post a peacock sex video. But getting back to our topic: The narwhal is in trouble, and we all need to do our part. Thank you.

And now, speaking of trouble, let’s hear from you paying subscribers.

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On the night of January 28, 2024, in Lake Arrowhead, California, three automobiles — a Rolls-Royce and two Mercedes Benzes — were allegedly attacked by a bear. The car owners filed claims with their insurance companies, including security-camera videos purportedly showing a bear climbing into the cars and ripping up the interiors. The three insurance companies paid the owners a total of $141,839.

That might have been the end of the story — just another case of a wild creature, compelled by natural predator instincts and of course Global Climate Change, going on a violent rampage against luxury-automobile upholstery, as carnivores have been doing in the wild for literally millions of years.

But it was not the end of the story. In fact it was only the beginning of the story — a story that could be the plot of a major crime-thriller motion picture starring, at bare minimum, Jason Statham. Because as fate would have it, the Lake Arrowhead vehicle attacks happened to come to the attention of an outfit whose name is virtually synonymous with being a department involved with insurance in California. I refer, of course, to the California Department of Insurance.

When state investigators looked at the security-camera videos of the alleged bear attacks, they noticed something interesting: All three videos were taken by the same camera. This would suggest that either:

(A) By pure random coincidence, three luxury-car owners, unbeknownst to each other, all happened, on the same night, to park their luxury cars, one after another, in exactly the same spot where a bear was repeatedly attacking luxury cars, as if the bear was having luxury cars delivered to this location via DoorDash.

Or:

(B) Something fishy was going on.

So the investigators showed the videos to a biologist in the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. You can view the videos for yourself here, although you won’t be able to make out much detail, because the security-camera lens apparently was fashioned from a used Smuckers jar. But the wildlife biologist — I see Ryan Gosling playing him in the movie — saw enough in the videos to confirm what the Insurance Department investigators already suspected: It wasn’t a bear that attacked those cars.

It was a beaver wearing a bear suit.

No, seriously, it was a human being wearing a bear suit. So the investigators got a search warrant, and in one of the suspects’ homes they found what is known, in the world of professional crime detection, as a “clue”:

FYI, those pointy metal things at the bottom, which apparently ripped up the car interiors, are called “meat claws.” They’re used by barbecue enthusiasts to shred meat. I can’t believe they are even legal in California. (By “they,” I mean “barbecue enthusiasts.”)

This investigation, which the California Department of Insurance dubbed “Operation Bear Claw,” resulted in the arrests of four men, and last week three of them were sentenced to jail for insurance fraud.

This story should serve as a reminder to all of us, but especially anyone contemplating breaking the law, of one of life’s most important moral lessons: Get rid of the bear suit you moron Crime does not pay.

I congratulate the California Department of Insurance for solving this case, and — even more important — for coming up with the title of the movie. Right now I’m leaning toward casting George Clooney as the bear.

I’m also seeing a lot of potential for tie-in “merch.” Party City could make a killing with this costume on Halloween:

I can’t believe I’m giving these ideas away for free.

I do have one important piece of advice for anybody who may be thinking of wearing a bear suit, whether it’s for Halloween or to commit insurance fraud, especially in a warm climate: Make sure you hydrate.

I say this because I have had some experience wearing a large furry animal costume, although in my case it was a monkey costume. I once spent an entire day — a warm day — trudging around Key West inside a monkey costume. I did this for Journalism. You can read the entire story, which I wrote for the Miami Herald’s Sunday magazine, Tropic, here. But to summarize:

In the early 90s, a Massachusetts-based company was using two small uninhabited Florida keys as breeding grounds for rhesus monkeys, which are highly valued as biomedical research subjects. There were nearly 4,000 monkeys on these keys, which are about 25 miles from Key West. Some people were unhappy about this. Environmentalists thought the monkeys were wrecking the ecosystem by beating up on the mangrove trees and pooping all over the place. Some locals worried that the monkeys might escape, possibly during a storm. As one county commissioner put it: “If you have a hurricane, you’re going to blow those monkeys all over the Keys.”

That was the big concern back then: Monkeys all over the Keys. So in a professional journalistic effort to gauge the magnitude of that menace, I rented a monkey suit and spent a day wearing it around Key West, accompanied by a photographer, to see what kind of impact a loose monkey would have on the public. Here’s a photo of me at the historic home of Ernest Hemingway, pretending to look at a tourist map (I am third from left):

So how did people in Key West react to my presence? They were, in a word, unimpressed. In fact they barely noticed me. Really. As I wrote in my story:

“Ah,” was the general public reaction. “A giant monkey.” (Not everybody felt this way, however. A few people said, “Ah, a bear.”) There were times when, wearing a monkey suit, I was one of the more conservatively dressed people around.

So I concluded, based on my investigation, that an influx of monkeys in the Keys would not be that big a deal — especially not in Key West, which regularly experiences considerably weirder phenomena, such as Fantasy Fest, an annual multi-day celebration wherein throngs of people traipse around in public dressed in, basically, paint.

But getting back to my point, which by now you have forgotten, and who can blame you: It got really hot inside that costume. Also sweaty. After a few hours it smelled like I was sharing it with a flatulent musk ox. So you need to hydrate.

This concludes today’s Substack, which I will now turn over to you awesome paying subscribers so you can express your views on today’s topic, whatever it may have been. Please note that after the poll below you’ll find a Special Literary Supplement in the form of a video of me interviewing my pal Adam Mansbach about his new book.

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SPECIAL LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

My friend and sometimes co-author, Adam Mansbach, who wrote the number-one New York Times bestselling guide for young parents Go the F*ck to Sleep as well as a bunch of other books, not all of which contain the f-bomb in the title, has a new book coming out May 5 titled Go the F*ck to College. I recently conducted a profoundly unprofessional Zoom interview with Adam during which we talked about the book and a wide variety of other literary topics, such as how to make matzah ball soup. Here’s the interview:

So they needed a band.

There are many performers they could have invited. The Rolling Stones, Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, Wayne Newton, Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, Reformed Bunny, Cher and the late Jimi Hendrix are just a few of the many names I could type in this sentence.

But Omaha did not want just any band. Omaha wanted a band whose members met certain strict musical requirements, specifically that:

1. They had some connection with libraries.

2. They did not expect to be paid.

And so Omaha chose the Rock Bottom Remainders. This is a band of authors who have been performing, in various permutations, since 1992, without ever once playing a song correctly all the way to the end. The lineup varies from show to show; the authors who made it to Omaha, aside from me, were Amy Tan, Ridley Pearson, Mitch Albom, Matt Groening (creator of “The Simpsons”), Scott Turow, Alan Zweibel and my brother Sam Barry. We had two non-author ringers who are actual musicians, Josh Kelly on drums and Erasmo Paolo on saxophone. Also on hand were our manager/wrangler, Ted Habte-Gabr, and our endlessly patient sound man, Gary Hirstius.

The party we played at was called LOUD AT THE LIBRARY! Here’s the poster:

The band flew into Omaha a couple of days before the party. Here’s an interesting geographical fact: When you drive out of the Omaha airport, which is in Nebraska, en route to the city of Omaha, which is also in Nebraska, you almost immediately come to a sign that says WELCOME TO IOWA. This is because an Iowa city called Carter Lake, instead of being on the east side of the Missouri River along with the rest of Iowa, is now, because the river changed course, over on the Nebraska side. On the map it looks as though Iowa is invading Nebraska, as part of its ruthless ongoing quest to gain control of the world’s supply of corn.

Omaha is in the Midwest, so everybody there — It’s a stereotype because it’s true — is nice. And it’s a real city, featuring major stores, good restaurants, serious museums and several tall buildings. Although I would not describe it as “bustling,” at least not compared to Miami. Here’s a photo Michelle took of me on a major street near our downtown hotel at 5:30 p.m. on a weekday. This is not a staged photo for which we had to wait until there was a break in the traffic. This WAS the traffic.

But we were not in Omaha to relax. We were in Omaha to play a “gig” (musician lingo). It had been nearly two years since our last one, which meant we needed all the rehearsal time we could get. So on the day before our big library performance, about half of the band went to the zoo. Omaha has a world-class zoo, which gave the Remainders a special tour, featuring an opportunity to get fondled by a snake, an experience we see Amy and Matt enjoying here.

Photos by Robin Zweibel

I passed on the zoo tour, because I’m afraid of snakes as the band’s guitarist, I wanted to practice playing “chords,” which is the technical term for the musical units that, when clumped together, form into rock songs. “E” is the main one. In the photo below I’m practicing chords in the hotel with Erasmo, who’s playing “notes.” Note that, in an effort to not annoy the other guests, he’s playing his saxophone with the horn part still inside the carrying case. Because that’s the kind of thoughtful rockers we are.

On the eve of the big show, the whole band gathered for a group dinner, during which the conversation turned, as it so often does when hard-partying rock musicians on tour get together, to our prostate glands. The average age of our band members is approximately 120, so we had a LOT to talk about. At one point we went around the table asking everybody’s PSA level, and the average was alarmingly high, even when we factored in the women, who were all zeros.

But enough about our musical preparation process. It’s time to describe:

THE GIG

We played on a stage that had been set up in the new library building, which is spectacular. If you ever need to borrow a book in Omaha, you should definitely do it there. There was a fine crowd on hand, consisting of several hundred donors, civic officials and library staffers. Also — this is an absolutely crucial element for anyone attempting to enjoy a Remainders performance — there was an open bar.

We took the stage at the wild-and-crazy-rock-’n’-roll-animal hour of 8:30 p.m.

Here’s one key to the Rock Bottom Remainders’ signature “sound”: The three men on the left in the photo above — Scott, Alan and Matt — appear to be backup singers, but as you will see in the video below, only one of them, Scott, is actually singing. Alan is moving his mouth, but no sound is coming out. Matt isn’t even moving his mouth. He’s just bobbing around in what he believes to be a rhythmic manner.

All videos by Sophie Barry

But this band is not just about music. It is also about impactful human drama, as you will see in the next video, wherein we attempt with limited success to execute the introduction to the iconic 1964 Shangri-Las song “Leader of the Pack,” featuring Amy as the heartbroken girlfriend, Alan and Matt in Marge Simpson wigs as the gossipy high-school girls, and Amy’s husband Lou DeMattei as the badass motorcycle dude. (Lou provides the revving sounds.)

In the next one we’re performing the deeply moving part of the song where the leader of the pack has a tragic motorcycle crash. “I begged him, don’t text and drive!” wails Amy. It’s very sad. There was not a dry pair of underpants in the house.

In Amy’s other dramatic role, she performs “These Boots are Made for Walking” dressed in a dominatrix outfit. Here she is dominating Matt, who’s wearing a dog collar and performing his only signature dance move:

Digression: The day after the library show, Amy was going through security at the Omaha airport, and a jar of protein powder in her luggage somehow triggered a TSA security alert as a potential explosive. Here, as Amy wrote in an email to the band, is what happened next:

Four grim-faced TSA agents proceeded to examine every single item in two suitcases and duffel. This was not a general swipe of the inside of the suitcase and carry-on. Not just a peek inside pouches. Four TSA agents at two counters removed everything from my bags — every item in clothing packs, items in my makeup bag, medical pouch, and dental kit, my hairbrush, flip flops, dirty underwear, AND every single carefully curated item of my dominatrix costume — pulling it out in front of everyone. Police cap, whip, chains, studded cuffs, collar, slinky outfit, blonde wig...

I did not get the protein powder or special container back. They put it in a special box and will take it to a special place in the airport that destroys explosives.

So thanks to quick action by the TSA, we can all breathe a little easier, knowing that we, as a nation, are safe from Amy’s vegan, plant-based, non-GMO protein powder — which, as Amy noted in her email, “can cause explosive diarrhea.”

But getting back to the Remainders’ library show: We had a special guest performance by the late Elvis Presley, portrayed by Mitch Albom, who in this video transforms seamlessly from Leisure Suit Elvis into Jailbird Elvis:

Speaking of masculine and manly stud-muffin sex gods, we also did songs featuring Scott, Ridley and my little brother Sam.

Photos by Laura Barry

And since we’re an author band, we did several songs with literary themes, including one that I wrote called “Moby Dick,” which musically is a flagrant ripoff of “Alley Oop” by the Hollywood Argyles. It’s also, I believe, the only rock song ever written whose lyrics include the word “baleen.” Our performance of it features Alan wearing a whale costume and spitting water onto the crowd, which for some reason — probably the open bar — the crowd actually seemed to enjoy:

The lyrics include these words, taken directly from Herman Melville:

Ahab messed up, he fell off his ship

Moby swallowed his leg like a Pringle chip

You may have noticed that the shirt I’m wearing has a photo on it. That’s Greg Iles, who was a longtime member of the Rock Bottom Remainders, and who died last year after a long, tough fight with blood cancer.

Greg was a great writer and an excellent musician — way too good for the likes of us, though he loved being in the Remainders. He was also a really, really good guy. We miss him a lot. Toward the end of the Omaha show we did a little tribute to him, and we invited his widow, Caroline Hungerford, to join us onstage so we could serenade her with (of course) “Sweet Caroline.”

So that was nice. In fact the whole Omaha experience, aside from Amy having her underwear ransacked by the TSA, was great. We thank the library folks for inviting us, and for their wonderful hospitality, and above all for the open bar. Also we promise not to quit our day jobs.

And now, speaking of great, let’s hear from you paying subscribers, one of whom happens to be notable national-security threat Amy Tan.

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ARTEMIS II MOON-MISSION UPDATE

It’s going great! As I write these words, the four Artemis astronauts are on their way back to Earth in their Orion spacecraft, having traveled around the far side of the Moon, where they were treated to a breathtaking view of spectacular lunar rock formations never before seen by humans.

So the mission has been a success, although there have been a couple of minor glitches. One involved Microsoft Outlook, the blight upon humanity popular software program that was installed on Orion so that the astronauts would still be able, even in space, to receive emails from fake PayPal accounts.

Early in the mission the crew discovered that Outlook wasn’t working, and nobody could remember the password or the 67-character Product Activation Code. So the crew called Tech Support, and after several hours on hold they spoke to a person in Asia identifying himself as “Patrick,” who tried a few things that didn’t work, and finally suggested that they unplug the entire spacecraft, let it sit for ten minutes, then plug it back in. So they ended up just using their iPhones. Problem solved!

The other glitch involved the Orion toilet, which as it happens was featured prominently in last week’s Substack. During the mission the toilet malfunctioned twice, necessitating the implementation of NASA’s Inflight Commode Repair Action Plan (ICRAP), which saved the day, although because of the high gas prices these days it was not cheap.

Here’s the thing: The Orion toilet, which is officially named the Universal Waste Management System, was built by Lockheed Martin for a price — I am not making this up — of twenty-three million dollars. So why does it keep malfunctioning? Let’s take a close look at it:

Notice anything? As a number of people, including several alert commenters to this Substack, have pointed out, this toilet bears a striking physical resemblance to a device that can be found in many American households, including mine:

Am I saying that Lockheed Martin bought a Shop Vac at Home Depot for $75, gussied it up a little and sold it to the American taxpayer as a space toilet for $23 million? Yes. No. That would be libelous. What I am saying is that if NASA is looking for a new toilet supplier, I’m willing to do the job for just $20 million. In fact I have already made the necessary engineering modifications.

Give me a call, NASA! I accept Venmo!

But never mind these minor glitches. The important thing is that the Artemis II mission has been a big success. We congratulate the courageous crew members, and we welcome them back to Earth, although the way things are going down here, they may wish they had stayed up there.

Which brings us to our:

FLORIDA NEWS ROUNDUP

Our top Florida story concerns a 20-year-old social-media influencer named Braden Peters, known online as “Clavicular,” who is, by his own admission, extremely attractive.

Clavicular is a star — he has more than a million followers — in the world of “looksmaxxing,” a Gen Z trend in which young men obsess about their looks, do extreme things to improve their looks, go around comparing their looks to the looks of other young men, and just generally engage in narcissistic douchebaggery youthful hijinks.

Back in March, Clavicular and his posse were on an airboat in the Everglades when, according to published reports, they encountered one of the most fearsome sights, if not THE most fearsome sight, in all of nature: a dead alligator. Now some people, upon finding themselves in that situation, might have panicked. But Clavicular and his posse are not “some people.” They are looksmaxxing streamer-influencers, and they knew exactly what they had to do: Shoot the dead alligator.

Fortunately, this being Florida, they had handguns. Also bullets. They had a LOT of bullets, as you will see if you click on the link to this video of the action, which Clavicular posted. You really should click on it, but here’s a still photo:

It’s hard to tell exactly how many rounds they fired, but it appears to be somewhere around 30. Which may seem like a lot, but as any experienced outdoorsperson will tell you, in a situation like that you can’t afford to take any chances. Not with a dead alligator.

Unfortunately, the Florida State Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, instead of hailing these young men as heroes, went on Formerly Twitter and posted the following snippy statement:

So apparently the state does not approve of the actions of Clavicular and his crew. But consider this: Since they took action in the Everglades, not one single Florida resident has been attacked by a dead alligator. Coincidence? Don’t make me laugh.

I also have some exciting personal Everglades-related news. A fine environmental conservation group called Friends of the Everglades held its annual fundraiser luncheon in Coral Gables on March 20, and I was the keynote speaker. But that’s not the exciting part. The exciting part is that the big award — the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Defender of the Everglades Award — went to Jessica Namath, daughter of Joe Namath, so Joe was at the luncheon. He was my athletic idol in 1969 when he quarterbacked the New York Jets to a wildly improbable upset victory in Super Bowl III. So I had to ask if I could get a picture with him, and he graciously agreed. Eat your hearts out, Gen Z looksmaxxers:

Friends of the Everglades is deeply involved in the effort to shut down Alligator Alcatraz, the immigration detention facility that was hastily slapped together out in the Everglades last July and is costing taxpayers more than a million dollars a day. As I pointed out in my speech, aside from being bad for the environment, Alligator Alcatraz is stupid. I mean, if we need an unpleasant place in Florida to send detainees, we don’t have to build it. We already HAVE one:

Trust me: After spending a few hours in the line for Space Mountain, those immigration detainees will be begging to go back to their countries of origin.

OK, that’s my roundup of the news from Florida and outer space, not that there’s a huge difference. Now let’s open the floor to you highly intelligent, yet at the same time impossibly good-looking, paying subscribers. Today we have two polls:

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It has been a long time coming, but finally, on Wednesday evening, after years of preparation and a brief launch delay caused by a long line at the TSA checkpoint, NASA’s Artemis II spacecraft — named for Artemis II, the Greek goddess of large federal contracts — blasted off, with a crew of four, from what is currently named the Kennedy Space Center, although that could change if the president finds out about it.

The space center is of course located in Florida, which is considered the best state to launch rockets from because, as this chart shows, it contains relatively little gravity.

After departing from Florida, the Artemis II spacecraft is scheduled to circle the Earth a few times to get its bearings, then leave Earth orbit and head for the Moon, with a brief layover in Atlanta. After looping around the Moon, it will return to Earth, finally splashing down, depending on wind direction, in either the Pacific Ocean or Long Island Sound.

The Artemis II mission is a very big deal for NASA, and for the USA in general, because we have not been to the Moon since the disco era. You older readers remember: Back then we were always going to the Moon. It seemed like every time you turned on the TV, you’d see Apollo astronauts with fighter-pilot-y names such as “Pete” bounding around on the lunar surface like giant spacesuit-wearing rabbits, demonstrating that the Moon, like Florida, has very little gravity, as well as no state income tax.

The bounding Petes were entertaining, but those Apollo missions also served a vital scientific purpose. The astronauts brought back samples of the lunar surface for laboratory analysis, which proved conclusively that the Moon — as scientists had long suspected — is covered with rocks. This finding correlates closely with data later sent back by NASA probes to Mercury, Venus and Mars, all of which, as it turns out, are basically large spherical piles of rocks. In fact scientists now believe that the solar system is pretty much entirely made up of rocks. And that is why America must get there before China does.

Artemis II is the first step toward achieving that goal, as it speeds toward the Moon carrying a widely diverse crew consisting of three Americans and one Canadian, plus a state-of-the-art space commode. Here’s a video in which the Canadian crew member, Jeremy Hansen, accompanied by a cheerfully jazzy soundtrack, shows off the Artemis II toilet, which Jeremy is pretty excited about because it incorporates a sophisticated technological advance in the form of: a door.

This represents a major upgrade in Moon-travel accommodations from the days of the Apollo spacecraft, which did not have toilet doors. They didn’t even have toilets. What they had was plastic bags. And if you, like so many of us, have ever tried to poop into a plastic bag in zero gravity, you know things can get messy. An example of this is the legendary but absolutely true incident that occurred on May 23, 1969, during Day 6 of the Apollo 10 mission, as discussed on live microphones by Commander Tom Stafford, Command Module Pilot John Young, and Lunar Module Pilot Gene Cernan. Here’s the official NASA transcript of their conversation, which you will think I am making up, but I swear I’m not:

Stafford: Oh — who did it?

Young: Who did what?

Cernan: What?

Stafford: Who did it? (Laughter)

Cernan: Where did that come from?

Stafford: Give me a napkin quick. There’s a turd floating through the air.

Young: I didn’t do it. It ain’t one of mine.

Cernan: I don’t think it’s one of mine.

Stafford: Mine was a little more sticky than that. Throw that away.

Young: God Almighty!

(A few minutes later:)

Cernan: Here’s another goddamn turd. What’s the matter with you guys? Here, give me a—

Stafford/Young: (Laughter)

Stafford: It was just floating around?

Cernan: Yes.

Stafford: Mine was stickier than that.

Yes! That actually happened. I, for one, cannot believe it never got made into a major motion picture starring Tom Hanks.

But enough of this juvenile bathroom humor. You should be ashamed of yourself for even reading it. Because at this very moment, those four brave Artemis II crew members are whizzing (Har!) through the cosmos in their tiny craft on a bold and courageous voyage of exploration unlike anything that most earthbound civilians can even imagine, although I did once take a solo ride in a Waymo in Miami traffic, so I have a pretty good idea.

The Artemis II crew members will not land on the Moon, but they will pave the way for future Artemis missions that will. And if all goes according to plan, in time these missions will lead to the establishment of permanent human habitations on the Moon, requiring the development of highly specialized technology capable of withstanding the extreme conditions on the lunar surface.

Of course that lies far in the future, which by definition has not yet occurred. Right now we’re in the present, and we’re rooting for the Artemis II crew to complete their mission, and to return home safely. And to remember to leave the lid down.

And now let’s hear from you amazing paying subscribers.

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If you don’t — if you’re a skeptic who believes only in science — then please explain the following documented incident:

Early on the morning of April 17, 2016, 54-year-old Ramona Fendecker was asleep in her home in Zanesville, Ohio, when she had what she later described as a “terrifyingly real” dream — a dream in which her 21-year-old son, Todd, a student at Boston College, was involved in a serious automobile accident.

At exactly 3:21 a.m., she was awakened from that dream by the ringing of her phone. Disoriented, drenched in sweat and trembling in fear, she sat up in bed and answered it.

The caller was a Massachusetts state trooper.

Are you getting chills yet? Well you should be. Because as unbelievable as it may sound, the trooper was calling to remind Ramona that she did not, in fact, have any children, so she should stop worrying and go back to sleep.

Go ahead, Mister or Mrs. or Ms. Skeptic: Explain THAT with your “science.” You can’t, and I will tell you why: I made that particular documented incident up. But that does not detract from my central point, which is this: Strange things happen. We all know it. There are inexplicably weird, sometimes disturbing, phenomena that we cannot account for using logic and rationality. The Kardashians are only one example.

Recently I encountered such a phenomenon in a Florida town called Manalapan, which gets its name from the Native American word “Manalapan,” which means “Napalanam spelled backward.” I was in Manalapan to attend the wedding of two fine young people, Ashley and Jacob. The wedding — which, as is typical of the modern American wedding, had been in the planning stages for approximately 311 years — was to take place on a hotel lawn overlooking the Atlantic, a popular local ocean.

In other words, it was going to be an outdoor wedding. This meant that the weather forecast for Manalapan for Saturday, March 14, was crucial. Am I saying that it was as crucial as, say, the weather forecast for the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944? Of course not. It was WAY MORE CRUCIAL than that, because (a) the D-Day landings did not involve professional hairdressers, and (b) the Allied Forces had not paid a large nonrefundable deposit for the use of France.

So as the wedding week arrived, the eyeballs of the wedding party rarely strayed from the weather app on their iPhones. And what those eyeballs saw was not good. Here’s what it looked like on Tuesday evening:

That’s right: After literally weeks of sunny weather, rain was coming at EXACTLY the wrong time, with an 80 percent probability for the wedding day. That meant that in all likelihood the ceremony would have to be moved indoors, to a ballroom.

At this point you may be thinking: “OK, but what really matters is that they’re two people in love, surrounded by friends and family, about to embark on a life together. That’s much more important than the specific venue where they take their vows, which makes absolutely no difference in the long run.”

You’re right, of course. And when I say “You’re right, of course,” I of course mean ARE YOU COMPLETELY OUT OF YOUR MIND? We’re talking about a WEDDING here. The bride has been dreaming about this moment since before she was born. She has a specific vision in mind, of her and the groom gazing lovingly into each other’s eyes in front of a romantic backdrop featuring palm trees swaying gracefully against a brilliant blue sky as gentle ocean swells softly kiss the white sandy beach, and you’re saying this is essentially the same as tying the knot in a hotel ballroom THAT DOESN’T EVEN HAVE A BEACH, LET ALONE SOFTLY KISSING OCEAN SWELLS???

Forgive me for shouting in capital letters, but frankly you were asking for it, with your idiotic statement about the venue not mattering. It mattered a LOT, which is why, as friends and loved ones gathered in Manalapan for Ashley’s and Jacob’s Big Day, everybody was talking about the weather. Which was horrible. It rained, sometimes at monsoon level, all day Friday, and the forecast for Saturday, no matter which app you checked, was for more of the same.

But guess what? Saturday was glorious: bright sun, brilliant blue sky, all day long. The ceremony was spectacular. Ashley was radiantly beautiful; Jacob was rakishly handsome; the ocean swelled gently and the palms swayed gracefully; and at the end of the ceremony, as if on cue, roughly two dozen pelicans, in V formation, flew spectacularly past directly over the newlyweds. It was a great wedding, followed by a joyous reception featuring a band that inspired me at one point to do several pushups on the dance floor — real ones, not the kind where you go only halfway down — which is a sure sign of a good wedding band. I should mention that there was also a well-stocked bar.

The next day the weather was horrible again, pouring rain. Yet somehow, in the midst of all the storminess, Ashley and Jacob got their perfect day. Of course this sometimes happens with weather, right? Surely there’s a scientific explanation for why all the forecasts were wrong!

Or is there?

I ask because of something I learned a few days after the wedding — something that suggests there might have been another reason, a non-scientific reason, for the miraculously good wedding-day weather.

I’m talking about witchcraft.

Yes. What I learned is that Ashley and her mom, leaving no stone unturned, had, among other strategies, employed the services of witches, which it turns out you can hire for a very reasonable price on the global online marketplace Etsy. There are pages and pages of Etsy witches, offering to perform a wide range of spells:

Many of the spells involve either money or love, but Ashley and her mom were strictly interested in the weather. I texted Ashley to ask what the procedure had been for her witch, and she texted this back:

So Ashley did not take the witchcraft effort 100 percent seriously. Nevertheless, despite the fact that she failed to say her manifestation list, she got perfect weather, PLUS a perfectly timed flyover by a squadron of pelicans, which wasn’t even part of Ashley’s spell request and which the witch apparently tossed in as a freebie.

You can call me a dedicated highly professional award-winning journalist if you want, but when I stumble across a story that as far as I can tell has been completely ignored by the so-called “mainstream media” — namely, witches controlling the weather — then by God I am going to get to the bottom of it no matter how many minutes it takes.

So I decided to hire an Etsy witch. Her name is Grandmother Pendragon, and I selected her because her ad says she offers a “custom spell” and a “same day cast.” Plus she looks like a witch, but the nice kind, not the kind that tried to eat Hansel and Gretel.

The spell I asked Grandmother Pendragon to cast involved a college basketball game. My local school, the University of Miami, was going to play Purdue University, which is in Indiana — a state that has absolutely nothing to do with having sex with caribou,1 so please get that disgusting image out of your mind — in the NCAA “March Madness” men’s basketball tournament. Miami was the underdog, but I figured that with Grandmother Pendragon on our team, we had a shot. So I asked her to cast a victory spell. Ordinarily this would have cost $22.99, but she had a 50-percent-off sale going for March, so I ended up paying only $11.93, including tax.

Shortly before tipoff in the big game, I received via email an extremely authentic-looking .pdf file from Grandmother Pendragon explaining in detail how she cast the spell. Here’s the first page:

There’s more, but you get the idea. Clearly this is a witch who knows a little something about the game of college basketball.

So I was feeling hopeful as the Miami-Purdue game began. And I felt even more hopeful when Miami took the lead. You may say, “Dave, that wasn’t because of a spell cast by some Internet ‘witch’ who is almost certainly generated by AI. That was because of the actions on the court of the actual, physical Miami basketball players.”

Perhaps! But perhaps there’s more to it than that. Let’s consider this photograph, which captures a moment of the action during the game:

Look closely at this photo. Look especially closely at the faces of the players, these four in particular:

Do you see it? Their expressions? Clearly these young men are seeing something unusual. Something... disturbing. Something that the other people in the arena — the spectators, the coaches, the officials — cannot see, but that is clearly visible, and troubling, to the players directly involved in the game.

What is the “something” these players are reacting to? I think I know. And I think that, deep down inside, you know, too.

That’s right: Miami was leading because Grandmother Pendragon was playing defense for the Hurricanes. She had them up by one point at halftime. And she kept them close until the final minute of the game.

Unfortunately, in the end Purdue won. I guess I can’t complain. Because ultimately, basketball is a game that rewards skill, physical size and that intangible quality we call “heart,” and it was clear, as the game wore on, that the Purdue team had hired a witch with more of those things than Grandmother Pendragon. Next time I’m going to pay full price.

But enough about me. It’s time now to hear from — speaking of winners — you lovely paying subscribers.

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Q. When should I use a semicolon?

A. You should use it when you reach the end of a sentence and realize you left out some potentially relevant information.

EXAMPLE: Steve possesses all the requisite qualities to be Director of Human Resources; by the way, he is a practicing cannibal.

Q. What is the purpose of the exclamation mark?

A. It is used to indicate that even though the exterior of a major appliance may have a boring “ho-hum” appearance, beneath the surface something wild and exciting is happening:

Exclamation marks may also be used to indicate that the subject of the sentence is a liar.

EXAMPLE: Lurleen claims she wears a size four(!!).

Q. What is the correct spelling of “hemorrhoid?”

A. Nobody knows.

Q. Please explain the usage of the phrase “in lieu of.”

A. This is a French expression — meaning, literally, “trompe l’oeil” — that is used, grammatically, to introduce a conjugal accusative clause.

EXAMPLE: Brenda divorced Earl in lieu of the fact that he came home multiple times with his underpants on backwards.

Q. What is the proper way to end a formal business letter?

A. The standard wording is: “With warmest human regards, I remain [Your Name]”

Q. Should I actually write “Your Name?”

A. Yes, although if that feels too personal, you can go with “The Undersigned.”

Q. Does your author band, the Rock Bottom Remainders, have in its repertoire a song about grammar titled “Proofreading Woman,” and is there video of you performing it 15 years ago during a benefit concert for the Free Library of Philadelphia?

A. Unfortunately there is:

Q. Is that Ridley Pearson on bass, and Mitch Albom playing keyboards while wearing a bad Elvis wig?

A. Yes.

Q. My question concerns the United States Tax code, which contains many absurdly complex sentences such as this one, from Section 1411(d):

The term “modified adjusted gross income” means adjusted gross income increased by the excess of (1) the amount excluded from gross income under section 911(a)(1), over (2) the amount of any deductions (taken into account in computing adjusted gross income) or exclusions disallowed under section 911(d)(6) with respect to the amounts described in paragraph (1).

How can this abusively unclear writing be made more understandable to the average American taxpayer, who is required to somehow be able to comply with the tax laws?

A. It should be reworded using short, simple words, as follows:

The term “modified adjusted gross income” means adjusted gross income increased by the excess of (1) the amount excluded from gross income under section 911(a)(1), over (2) the amount of any deductions (taken into account in computing adjusted gross income) or exclusions disallowed under section 911(d)(6) with respect to the amounts described in paragraph (1) OR YOU WILL GO TO JAIL.

Q. With regards to condiment preservation, is it necessary to refrigerate ketchup and mustard?

A. No.

Q. Is this sign grammatically correct?

A. It is not. Grammatically, the sign contains a gastroenterological phrase, and therefore it requires a suppository interjection, as we see in this corrected version:

Q. What is the grammatical subject of this sentence:

It would behoove whomever left them marmot pelts on the divan to lay low for a spell.

A. In this case the grammatical subject is the individual who is doing the behooving.

Q. So it’s the behoover?

A. Correct.

Q. That would be Francine.

A. Well it’s her divan.

BONUS WRITING TIP FOR ASPIRING NOVELISTS WISHING TO APPEAL TO GEN Z READERS:

The hottest-selling fiction genre right now is “romantasy,” which combines romance and fantasy, so make sure you include both of these elements in your plot:

WRONG: Ariadne entered the room.

RIGHT: Ariadne entered the room and had sex with a dragon.

And now, speaking of hot, let’s hear from you paying subscribers.

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But there’s good news this year: In an effort to speed up the proceedings, the Academy has established a strict ten-name thanking limit. If an Oscar winner attempts to thank more than ten people, the orchestra leader will subtly signal that the limit has been reached by pushing a button that activates a trapdoor on the stage, shown here being tested by Tom Cruise, who does all of his own stunts.

So it should be a fun and exciting broadcast. The biggest excitement, as always, surrounds the Oscar for Best Picture, because whatever movie wins that coveted honor will achieve instant fame and be remembered forever, as exemplified by last year’s Best Picture winner, the title of which, as we all know because none of us will ever forget it, was...

(googling)

...OK, apparently it was a movie called “Anora,” which was of course the unforgettable story about a person, or possibly a place, named “Anora.” As far as we know.

Who will win Best Picture this year? Will it be “Encounter at Farpoint,” or “The Naked Now,” or “Code of Honor,” or even “The Last Outpost?” Probably not, because these are not Oscar-nominated movies. These are the titles of the first four episodes of season one (1987-88) of the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation. I’m just listing them here to drive home the point that the average person such as (no offense) yourself is pretty much oblivious to what the film industry is up to these days.

This is definitely true of me. I’ve seen only two of this year’s ten Best Picture nominees, “F1” and “Marty Supreme.” “F1” is a Brad Pitt movie, starring Brad Pitt in the role of Brad Pitt. If you enjoy looking at Brad Pitt, you will enjoy “F1.” My wife certainly did.

As for “Marty Supreme,” if I had to summarize its central theme in two hyphenated words, those words would be: “ping-pong.” This movie contains a tremendous amount of ping-pong, including some of the most compelling CGI-enhanced ping-pong action sequences ever captured on film, and I include “The Godfather” parts I and II in that statement.

I didn’t see any of the other Best Picture nominees, but I understand that two of them are horror movies: “Sinners,” which is about vampires, and “Frankenstein,” which is a reimagining of the 1931 classic, so that the monster, instead of being a primitive and violent brute, is now a sensitive and articulate creature who yearns to engage in normal human pursuits:

Which movie will win? We’ll find out Sunday night, or possibly, if the trapdoor gets stuck, Tuesday. In any event, I’ll be watching.

I always watch the Oscars, but not because I’m rooting for any particular actors or movies. I’m rooting for the jokes, and the people who write them, because I have been one of those people. I was one of Steve Martin’s writers when he hosted the Oscars in 2003, and again in 2010, when he co-hosted with Alec Baldwin. Here’s a picture of me backstage with Steve (I call him “Steve,” because we’re friends) (my point being, I am friends with Steve Martin) during the 2003 show:

That’s me in the back uncharacteristically wearing a tuxedo. Sitting next to me are Bruce Vilanch and Rita Rudner, who were also part of the writing team, along with Beth Armogida, Dave Boone, Andy Breckman, John Macks and Robert Shapiro. These are all very funny people, and Steve, in addition to being — it bears repeating — my friend, is a comedy genius, so that was a highly entertaining group to be part of. Plus I got to have several experiences that could only happen in L.A. during the Oscars.

The first one happened a week before the show. I flew out from Miami to LAX, where I was greeted by several enthusiastic and attractive young Oscar staffers, of which there seemed to be thousands. They escorted me to a garage and handed me the keys to a brand-new and startling large Cadillac Deville (Cadillac was a sponsor that year) which they said was mine to use for the week. They also told me there was a “gift basket” for me in the trunk. I assumed it would be something along the lines of fruit.

So I drove my enormous Cadillac across Los Angeles, a distance of 12 million miles, to where I was staying during the Oscars, which was Steve Martin’s house, because, as I may have mentioned earlier, Steve is a personal friend. I rang the doorbell, and Steve came outside to help me bring my stuff in. So I opened the Cadillac trunk to get my gift basket, and...

WHOA. Turns out it was not fruit. It was the legendary Oscars swag basket, containing, according to press reports, more than $20,000 worth of luxury goods, including jewelry, cosmetics, perfume, clothing and gift certificates for restaurants, spas, resorts and other luxurious experiences. These were provided by companies hoping that their products would be used by glamorous movie stars, although in some years, and 2003 happened to be one of them, baskets were also given to the writers, even though writers don’t have the celebrity “cachet” of, say, Harrison Ford, or for that matter the person who maintains Harrison Ford’s lawn sprinklers.

The gift basket in my trunk was a large Longaberger wicker hamper, bulging with swag, tastefully wrapped in gauze and tied with a bow. I tried to lift it out, but it was quite heavy, and as I struggled with it, the ribbon broke, the gauze came apart and the hamper fell open. Suddenly — I should mention here that Steve Martin’s house is at the top of a steep hill — dozens and dozens of luxury goods, many of them in exquisitely tasteful packaging, were bouncing gaily down the street in the general direction of Japan.

As I went scrambling after these items, my good friend Steve, without regard for his own personal safety, immediately ran into his house and came running back out with a camera so he could record me. Because that’s the kind of friend he is. Fortunately I was able to retrieve the gift-basket items, although I should note, in case the Internal Revenue Service monitors this Substack, that rolling down the hill reduced their estimated total retail value from $20,000 to $17.50.

So the gift basket was a nice “perk” of writing for the Oscars. Another one was that Michelle and I got to attend the Governor’s Ball, an exclusive post-Oscars event attended by many film-industry VIPs, including all the winners, nominees and presenters. Michelle and I sat at Steve Martin’s table (Steve happens to be a personal friend) which meant that a parade of famous celebrities stopped by to congratulate him and in some instances — here I am referring specifically to Julia Roberts — even nod vaguely in our direction. So that was exciting.

When the ball ended, everybody left at pretty much the same time, which meant that hundreds of people, many of them famous, some of them holding Oscar statuettes, most of them used to having assistants handle things for them, were milling around outside in this big confused Very Important Mob, wondering where their stretch limos were. It was a surreal scene, but also a reminder that Hollywood celebrities, as much as we idolize them, in the end are really just human beings no different from you and me, except they’re richer and more talented and way better looking.

Anyway, I’ll be watching the movie stars on the Oscars broadcast Monday night. But mostly I’ll be listening to the jokes, and hoping they get big laughs, because I know how good that makes the writers feel, backstage in their little room.

And now it’s time for me to present the Oscar for Best Supporting Subscribers...

...to you wonderful paying subscribers, without whom — and I say this in all sincerity — I would not have any paying subscribers.

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I am 78 and a half years old. At this stage of my life, my definition of “aging well” is “still not dead.” Nevertheless I was curious to see what trajectory I’m on, so I clicked on the article, which lists four physical tests you’re supposed to take. The first one is called the “Sitting-Rising Test.” Here’s how the Times describes it:

The goal with this assessment is to go from standing to sitting on the floor, and back up again, using the least amount of support as possible. The test is scored on a 10-point scale — five points for sitting down and five points for standing up — and you lose a point for every hand, knee or other body part you use to help yourself. Subtract a half point if you’re unsteady or lose your balance.

The Times quotes the doctor who designed this test (we’ll get to him in a moment) as saying that people in their 30s or 40s should “aim for a perfect 10” on this test, and that a person over 60 who gets an 8 is in “very good shape.”

So my goal was to get an 8, although I would have settled for a 7, or even, given my advanced age, a 6. I took the test in the privacy of my bedroom, going from standing to sitting on the floor, then back to standing again, using as few body parts as possible to help myself. I don’t mean to brag, but on my very first try, with no practice and without warming up, I scored somewhere around minus 137. There was no way I could keep track of the exact number of body parts I used to help myself get down and back up, but it was definitely most of them, including at one point, I believe, my spleen. Also if you count a bedpost as a body part, my actual score was closer to minus 138.

So based on this test, my trajectory was not looking great, as suggested by the following medical chart.

But here’s the thing: I don’t think I ever could have scored a 10 on the “Sitting-Rising Test,” even when I was much younger and fitter and did not have hair sprouting from both ears. In fact I question whether ANY normal non-Olympic-gymnast human could get a 10 on this test. So I did a little research into the man who created it, a Brazilian doctor named Claudio Gil Araújo. Here’s a link to a YouTube video in which he explains the test. For your convenience, I have snipped out a snippet showing the key section wherein, under Dr. Araújo’s supervision, a normalish-looking young man goes, seemingly effortlessly, from standing to sitting, then back to standing, without using any extra body parts:

So this video is proof that a regular human can get a perfect 10 on the “Sitting-Rising Test,” right?

NOT SO FAST. When we analyze this video more closely, we discover something very interesting at the 1:05 mark, as the test subject rises back up. Here’s the freeze-frame:

Do you notice something odd? That’s right: When we zoom in, we see that the test subject’s head, which is sharp and clear in the rest of the video, becomes, for a few milliseconds, a blurry, almost shapeless, blob:

What could cause this? I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: “Dave, that isn’t ‘odd’ at all! What’s obviously happening is that the strain of standing up is causing the so-called ‘young man’ to momentarily begin de-morphing back to whatever its real shape is.”

Bingo. You are absolutely correct, as we see when we use the power of AI to digitally enhance the blurred image:

That’s right: Dr. Araújo has designed a “simple aging test” that only space aliens and possibly Simone Biles can pass, and the New York Times totally fell for it. We can only speculate whether there are other examples of extraterrestrial beings posing as humans in our midst that the Times, in its naivete, has failed to detect.

So I decided not to even attempt the remaining three of the Times article’s “simple tests,” which, to judge from the degree of difficulty of the first test, would probably require me to dunk a basketball blindfolded. Although just to confirm that I was not insane, I decided to ask some other aging individuals what they thought of the “Sitting-Rising Test.”

One of these people is my next-door neighbor, Liz, who is my age. When I encountered her, she was outside her house, where she was waiting to talk to some workers who had just arrived in a Florida Power & Light truck. They were here to perform maintenance on our electrical grid, which is the system by which we get electricity into and out of our homes, as explained in this diagram:

HOW THE GRID WORKS: Electricity, in the form of “volts,” flows from the Power Plant through wires to your house, where it goes from the outlet into the toaster and passes through the toast or English muffin before exiting the toaster and making its way, salmon-like, via wires back to the Power Plant, thereby completing an “electrical circuit” and enabling the power company to sell the same volts to you over and over again at an enormous profit.

Florida Power & Light had informed our neighborhood via email that to do their maintenance they needed to turn off our electricity, but they didn’t say exactly when or for how long; Liz was waiting for the workers to get out of the truck so she could ask them. I told her about the “Sitting-Rising Test,” and she decided, while she was waiting, to attempt the test right there on her lawn. She got as far as putting one knee down — which is already a one-point deduction under Dr. Araújo’s scoring system — and wisely elected to bail on the test. I, on the other hand, stupidly decided to take another stab at it, and — there being no bedposts in Liz’s yard — I wound up sprawled face-forward on the grass.

That’s where I was when the supervisor of the Florida Power & Light crew, whose name is Tom, approached us. I briefly explained the “Sitting-Rising Test” to him, and he immediately declined to even attempt it, despite the fact that he’s a mere whippersnapper of 61. “If I got down there,” he said, “I’d never get back up again.”

So the overwhelming consensus of a broad range of older Americans, consisting of me, Liz and Tom, is that the “Sitting-Rising Test” is unrealistic. On the other hand, my wife, Michelle, who turns 61 in a week and is highly competitive, immediately, upon hearing about it, took the test and, with me monitoring her, scored a legit 9 out of 10. Which for me is good news and bad news. The good news is, her health trajectory seems to be excellent. The bad news is, she may eventually decide to return to her home planet.

And now, speaking of weird happenings in the skies, it’s time for a...

KENTUCKY MEAT SHOWER UPDATE

As I reported last week, Kurt Gohde, an art professor at Transylvania University in Kentucky, was planning to re-create the Famous Kentucky Meat Shower of 1876 in Owingsville, Kentucky, last Saturday by having a small airplane drop 1,876 specially wrapped pieces of beef jerky. I emailed Kurt to ask him how it went, and he replied: “People seemed to love the meat rain.” He provided this video, taken by Ruth Adams, showing the plane dumping bunches of jerky as it makes three passes over a clearly delighted crowd:

If this video doesn’t make you feel proud to be both an American and a human being, then I honestly don’t know what would.

Speaking of being an American: This Sunday, remember to set all your clocks either forward or backward by an hour without having the faintest idea why. JUST DO IT, CITIZEN.

And now let’s find out what you always thoughtful and informative paying subscribers have to say.

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Yes, something is indeed “coming in the air,” and that something is: Meat. Tomorrow, February 28, meat will literally fall from the skies over Kentucky as part of the festivities marking the 150th anniversary of the historic Kentucky Meat Shower.

I am not making this historic event up. It occurred on March 3, 1876, in a place called Olympia Springs in Bath County, Kentucky. Shortly before noon on that historic day, a woman named Rebecca Crouch was making soap on the family farm when she witnessed hundreds of smallish pieces of raw meat raining down from the heavens. The New York Times published a story about this event, headlined:

FLESH DESCENDING IN A SHOWER

AN ASTOUNDING PHENOMENON IN KENTUCKY — FRESH MEAT LIKE MUTTON OR VENISON FALLING FROM A CLEAR SKY

Of course if a meat shower occurred today, the Times would have no journalistic choice but to link it to Global Climate Change. But nobody had heard of that in 1876, so people were baffled. They weren’t even sure what kind of meat it was. The Times reported that “two gentlemen, who tasted the meat, express the opinion that it was either mutton or venison.”

My initial reaction to that was: “They TASTED it? Yuck!” But then it occurred to me that I routinely eat “Slim Jim” brand snack cylinders, which for all I know — the ingredient list is unreadable — are made from weasel rectums.

So far be it from me to judge the gentlemen who tasted the Kentucky mystery sky meat. To this day, nobody knows exactly what kind of meat it was; guesses include beef, lamb, deer, bear, horse and others. There is only one surviving specimen of the fallen meat, which is preserved in alcohol in a small glass vial with a faded label that says “Olympia Springs.” Efforts have been made to analyze the specimen’s DNA, but it’s too old and contaminated and stanky. It looks like something you’d find lurking behind the jar of expired tomato sauce in your refrigerator.

This vial is normally kept on the campus of Transylvania University, which is Kentucky’s oldest university and has nothing to do with vampires so stop your juvenile snickering. The meat-shower specimen is one of the exhibits in the Monroe Moosnick Medical and Science Museum, which is named for Monroe Moosnick, who was a beloved Transylvania U. chemistry professor before he died. In addition to the Kentucky Meat Shower specimen, the Moosnick museum houses many 19th-century scientific and medical artifacts, including a hairball 14 inches in diameter — once believed to be a world record — that was removed from the stomach of a cow; and a “Tobacco Smoke Clyster,” which is a device that doctors once used to try to revive drowning victims by blowing tobacco smoke up their butts. I am not making any of this up.

But getting back to the historic Kentucky Meat Shower, the big question is: What caused it? The most widely accepted theory, which also happens to be an excellent name for a rock band, is: vomiting vultures. Apparently when vultures are threatened or scared, they vomit as a defensive measure, a tactic also employed by human infants to indicate that they do not care for pureed squash. Vultures are common in Kentucky, so the theory is that a large flock, which had previously chowed down on some form of meat, was flying over the Crouch farm, when something startled the vultures, causing them to launch their collective lunch.

That historic event occurred 150 years ago, but its spirit — the spirit of meat falling from the sky — lives on in Bath County, which tomorrow will observe the sesquicentennial with a big celebration in Owingsville, the county seat, a few miles from the site of the 1876 shower.

The celebration, which begins at noon, will include a baloney-throwing competition, a meatball toss and a “mystery meat chili cookoff,” among other activities. But the big excitement will come at 4 p.m., when, if all goes according to plan, a truly once-in-a-lifetime event will occur in Bath County, as described on the official website, fleshfalls.com:

That’s right: Tomorrow it will rain meat again in Bath County.

How is this possible? To find out, I spoke with the man behind the operation, Kurt Gohde. He’s a professor of studio art at Transylvania University, and he also happens to be the world’s foremost authority on the Kentucky Meat Shower. He became interested in it when he joined the Transylvania faculty in 1998, and he was surprised to find that nobody seemed to know much about the meat shower. “I didn’t set out to become the expert,” he says, “but it turned out it wasn’t hard because there just wasn’t another person.”

When I spoke to Kurt he was busy getting ready for the sesquicentennial celebration, but he took the time to explain the plan for the big 4 p.m. meat rain, which involves a flyover by a squadron of specially trained and recently fed vultures.

No, that’s a joke, obviously. PETA would never allow that to happen. The actual plan, as explained to me by Kurt, is that at 4 p.m., a small airplane will fly over Owingsville and drop 1,876 individually wrapped pieces of beef jerky.

I asked Kurt if he had any safety concerns about this plan, and specifically whether he was familiar with the legendary episode of WKRP in Cincinnati about the radio station’s Thanksgiving turkey-giveaway promotion, in which live turkeys were dropped from a helicopter and, in the immortal words of WKRP newsman Les Nesman, were “hitting the ground like sacks of wet cement.”

Kurt said that he was, indeed, familiar with the fictional WKRP turkey drop, and that when he was planning his actual jerky drop, he consulted with a Transylvania U. physics professor who’s a friend of his: “I asked him to tell me, if my pieces of meat weigh about what a nickel weighs, what speed will they be when they reach the ground. When he responded I was already well into the planning, and he said it should be about 130 miles an hour. And I had a little bit of hard time breathing, to be honest, because that seemed bad. So I said, that seems to be a problem, and he said, that’s only a problem if lethality is a problem for you. And I’m like, of course that’s a problem.”

So Kurt had to redesign the aerodynamics of the packaging to make sure the jerky pieces would fall at a less lethal velocity. “I ran some tests,” he said, “and they will actually hit the ground at between 8 and 12 miles an hour. So that’s way better.”

Each of the 1,876 jerky pieces to be dropped tomorrow will be numbered. The idea is, if you find one, you can go to fleshfalls.com, enter your jerky number and see if you won a prize. The prizes include one of my books, autographed and personalized, which I am happy to donate because I think the Kentucky Meat Shower re-enactment is a truly great thing. In fact I asked Kurt if I could invite you Substack readers to attend. He immediately replied: “Absolutely! Tell them they should come.”

Kurt said that if you go, you should stop by the Bath County History Museum, where you can meet him and see the historic meat-shower specimen in person. He also said he’d give you Substackers the inside scoop on the precise location of the jerky drop, which so far is a secret.

I hope some of you can make it to Owingsville tomorrow. I’m genuinely sorry that I can’t be there. I’ll be stuck here in Miami, where the only falling meat is in the form of the occasional frozen iguana.

One final thought: This year, as you know, America is celebrating its 250th birthday. I’m sure many solemn and meaningful commemorative events are being planned, but wouldn’t it be great if we got Kurt Gohde involved? Look what he’s done with limited resources and just one small plane; imagine what he could do if he had access to the entire U.S. Air Force.

Picture the scene: It’s July Fourth, a quiet day until... What’s that sound? At first it’s distant, barely audible, but it grows steadily louder until it fills the skies — the deep thrum of huge bomber engines high overhead, the planes themselves all but invisible. Then the skies begin to darken, as if obscured by clouds, but it’s not clouds: It’s hundreds of millions — no, it’s billions — of units of beef jerky, raining down from the skies and landing, at a velocity of 8 to 12 miles per hour, all over this great land of ours, except on California, which would get the vegan option.

Or maybe it’s not raining units of jerky. Maybe — I’m just spitballing here — it’s raining units of something even better, like affordable housing. We’d have to check with the Transylvania U. physics department on the feasibility of that. But these are details. My point is that a fun, goofy, wonderfully American thing is happening tomorrow in Bath County, Kentucky. Wouldn’t it be great if our national birthday celebration had some of that vibe?

At least that’s what I think. Now (speaking of fun and goofy and wonderful) let’s find out what you paying subscribers think.

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I will reveal later whether or not I survived, but first let me give you a technical explanation of how these amazing futuristic machines work.

Each Waymo vehicle is equipped with 29 cameras as well as an array of laser, radar and audio sensors, which collect literally millions of data points per second and feed them to a sophisticated AI-controlled onboard computer, which is in constant, instantaneous contact via satellite with a 14-year-old boy somewhere in Asia — he goes by “Kevin” — who steers your car remotely with a joystick.

No, that’s probably not how it works. I have no idea how it works. I do not fully understand how toasters work. But however Waymo does it, it has to be a better system for operating vehicles than the one we currently employ in Miami, which involves using Miami drivers.

Miami drivers are the WORST. That is not just my opinion: That is the conclusion of a recent study of annoying driving behavior in 40 U.S. cities, which found that Miami drivers are the most annoying of all, with a score of 98.50 out of a possible 100. By contrast, New York City — where the default mode for car horns is “honking,” so that drivers have to press the horn button only on those rare occasions when they want it to stop — had a score of only 81.02. Amateurs.

The study ranked Miami drivers as the most annoying in the nation for behaviors such as speeding, texting, texting while speeding, texting while speeding and eating a breakfast burrito while also sipping a latte and simultaneously applying nail polish, never signaling anything, not having the vaguest understanding of the concept of “lanes,” refusal to yield to anybody or anything including inanimate objects such as buildings, being too busy texting to notice that the light has turned green which is why the cars behind you are honking you stupid idiot, and just generally being assholes annoying.

Miami drivers also ranked worst for aggressive driving behaviors such as tailgating, cutting people off and getting into confrontations. The study does not specifically mention firearms, but I’m fairly confident that Miami leads the nation, if not the world, in instances of motorists indicating their displeasure with other motorists by shooting at them, which is why when I worked at the Miami Herald I had bumper stickers printed up that said:

I never actually put this sticker on my car, for fear that some Miami motorist might take offense and shoot at me. (You think I’m kidding. I am not kidding.)

My point is that I, for one, welcome the arrival of Waymo’s self-driving cars. Even if they’re not perfect — even if there’s some “glitch” in their software that causes them, at random times, to deliberately aim at pedestrians or oncoming trucks — they would still be above-average drivers in Miami.

So I was excited when Waymo announced that it was beginning operations here. I immediately went on the Waymo app and requested a ride. I invited Michelle to accompany me, but she declined on the grounds that she was busy, and also (she didn’t say this part out loud) she preferred not to die in a horrific fiery crash. I assured her that Waymo cars are actually much safer than human-operated vehicles, according to statistics provided by Google, which...

...OK, it turns out that Google owns Waymo. But my feeling is, if we can’t trust huge unfathomably rich and powerful and secretive tech corporations with our lives, who can we trust? So I was undaunted by Michelle’s concerns.

OK, maybe not completely undaunted. I admit I was experiencing a few daunts as I stood on the sidewalk, waiting for my Waymo — one man, alone, about to boldly venture into the unknown, very much like Charles Lindbergh, who in 1927 took off from New York in a tiny single-engine plane and headed out, solo, across the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean, with no guarantee that he would ever make it to Europe, let alone catch his connecting flight.

After I had been boldly standing on the sidewalk for several minutes my Waymo arrived, whirring driverlessly to a stop. It took me a minute to figure out how to open the door — you have to tap the “Unlock” button on your phone — after which I got into the back seat, closed the door, buckled my seatbelt, tapped the “Start Trip” button and settled back into my seat as the Google brain-probe needle inserted itself, smoothly and painlessly, into my skull.

No, that did not happen, as far as I know. What happened was, the car, with nobody in the driver’s seat, started driving itself — turning the steering wheel, accelerating, braking, signaling turns — while soft music played and an invisible lady with a soothing voice gave me an airline-style safety briefing. She also addressed any privacy concerns I might have, assuring me that the Waymo’s microphones are usually turned off. “So sing your heart out!” she said. “We can’t hear you.” I fact-checked this claim, as you’ll hear in this video:

How good a driver is Waymo? Pretty good! At least my Waymo was: It was smooth and decisive without being aggressive, and it responded immediately and correctly to all the activity around it, both vehicular and pedestrian. It worked its way through heavy traffic, negotiated some clogged narrow streets and got me efficiently to my destination without hitting anything. My only criticism is that it’s too polite for Miami. At one point, another car cut us off, and the Waymo merely braked to avoid a collision without making any effort to let the other motorist know that he was an idiot. I think this flaw could easily be corrected by modifying the Waymo design to incorporate a robotic Digital Gesture Of Disapproval Module (DGODM) as depicted in this conceptualization:

Other than that, the Waymo concept seems pretty solid. It took me safely from my house to my local independent bookstore, Books and Books, and back, a trip of about 3.5 miles and 15 minutes each way; the fares, which you will be pleased to know are fully tax-deductible if you’re writing about this topic for your Substack, were $25.26 going and $21.84 returning.

I had a question about the fares, so on the ride home I pressed the button on the console to connect with Rider Support, and I had the following conversation with what I am pretty sure was an actual human:

So there’s no tipping on Waymo. At least not as of now. Things could change if “Kevin” decides he needs a new scooter.

Anyway, that’s my report on Waymo, which is whirring its way soon to a city near you whether you like it or not. So let’s find out what you always-thoughtful paying subscribers think about this.

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I realize that some of you — maybe most of you — did not see it coming. You’re like: “What? Valentine’s Day AGAIN?”

Yes, again. You men seem to have trouble grasping the fact that Valentine’s Day happens every single year, as do certain other occasions on which you, as a man, are expected to surprise your “special someone” with a thoughtful romantic mandatory gesture, including her birthday, Christmas/Chanukkah, Mother’s Day, your wedding anniversary, the anniversaries of various other major life events such as your first date that you frankly don’t remember but she definitely does, and any time when you need to brighten her mood by giving her flowers and a card that says, simply: “I’m sorry.” (Never mind for what. She’ll think of something.)

In other words, to be a man in a relationship is to be like Lucy and Ethel in the classic “I Love Lucy” candy-factory episode, wherein the gals try desperately to keep up as the candies come at them faster and faster on the conveyor belt...

...except that instead of candies, the conveyor belt is bringing you men an endless procession of occasions requiring thoughtful romantic gestures on your part. And right now Valentine’s Day is coming at you fast, so you need to stop your whining and develop an action plan for tomorrow.

Step One is to make a reservation at a nice restaurant for a sophisticated and romantic time such as 8 p.m. That will be for Valentine’s Day 2027. For this year, you’re WAY too late to get a romantic time slot, but the restaurant might be able to squeeze you in for the 4:45 p.m. “Total Loser” seating. Make sure the restaurant has a Special Valentine’s Day Menu, meaning the management has tripled the prices and replaced all the identifiable foods such as cheeseburgers with dishes that look like this:

Perhaps you’re thinking: “What is that? It looks like somebody attacked a veggie platter with a weed whacker.”

For your information, that is an actual dish created by a famous chef, and according to Oprah.com, it is, quote, “The Most Gorgeous Food You’ll Ever See.” This dish represents a style of trendy modern “haute cuisine” (French, meaning, literally, “hors d’oeuvres”) wherein the chef pays great attention to “plating,” or arranging the various food parts (”partes de food”) on the plate so as to create maximum visual artistry as measured by the total number of dollars the chef can charge you per grape. This dish is so visually artistic that you should not even attempt to eat it. You should just sit there in the restaurant admiring it, then ask the waiter for a doggie bag (”bagge du chien”) so you can take it home and keep it in a terrarium, where it will serve as a tasteful lizard habitat.

Here’s another example of modern artistic cuisine that I am not making up, created by another famous chef. It’s a pigeon dish, but it’s not made from one of those lowlife New York City pigeons that live on a diet of cigarette butts and used Kleenex. It’s made from an upscale French pigeon, and it is prepared thusly:

This dish makes an artistic culinary statement, specifically: “The pigeon is dead, but it is nevertheless reaching up from the grave in an effort to poke out your eyeball.” As the French say: “Yumme!”

At this point you men may be thinking: “Dave, these haute cuisine dishes look expensive. Is there a restaurant where I can take my special someone on Valentine’s Day that is more affordable, yet still offers the possibility of romantic excitement in the form of being suspended in a sling over a prize pit?”

Yes, there is. That restaurant is Dave & Buster’s (or as the French say, “Le Dave et Le Buster’s”) which is running a Valentine’s Day promotion involving the Human Crane, which is a giant version of an arcade claw machine. For $25 you get to dangle from a crane and try to grab a prize.

Usually the prize is a cheap inflatable toy, but for the Valentine’s Day promotion Dave & Buster’s is putting three-carat diamond rings in the Human Crane prize pits at five select locations in New York and California. So if you happen to be a guy living in a select location, and you’re looking to impress a special lady by giving her an opportunity to dangle for a chance to win a $15,000 diamond ring or (this is much more likely) a cheap inflatable toy, AND you prefer a dinner menu that does not feature a threatening pigeon extremity, then this is definitely the way to go.

Which brings us to the question of what kind of Valentine’s Day gift you men need to purchase for your special someone.

“No problem!” you’re thinking. “I’ll just stop at the drugstore or supermarket and buy her a box of chocolates and some flowers wrapped in plastic with the price sticker clearly visible!”

That’s a great idea! Then you can stop by the Time Travel store and go back to 1997, when these would be acceptable gifts for Valentine’s Day!

Please forgive my sarcasm, men, but you need to understand that this is 2026. Because of a phenomenon scientists call Holiday Bloatification, which is caused by global climate change, every holiday has become a much bigger deal than it used to be, which is why for example Halloween currently lasts two months. So for Valentine’s Day, you men will have to do better than supermarket chocolates and flowers. You need to give your special someone a gift that requires MUCH more thoughtfulness, by which I mean money.

What specific gift should you buy? For objective advice on this topic, let’s turn to Martha Stewart, who suggests that you give your special someone, to show your undying romantic passion: a pot. Really. As Martha states in this Page Six article, “Good cookware is an essential part of celebrating Valentine’s Day at home.” By fortunate coincidence, Martha happens to have a line of Valentine-themed cookware for sale, including this cast-iron Dutch oven:

What makes this pot a romantic Valentine’s Day gift, instead of a boring ho-hum cooking vessel, is that it’s pink and heart-shaped, so that when you give it to your special someone, she will want to have sex with you right there on the kitchen floor. If you really want to “wow” her, you could also give her the Martha Stewart limited-edition Valentine-themed “Thinking of You” commode set.

Ha ha! I am of course joking around with the help of AI. Martha Stewart does not sell Valentine-themed toilet brushes. Although if she does start selling them, we’ll know where she got the idea.

Speaking of sex: The New York Times Wirecutter website ran a list of “The 42 Best Valentine’s Day Gifts for Her” and one of the suggestions is the Sex Deck. This is a deck of cards, “co-authored by a British National Health Service doctor,” which depict 50 different sexual positions for you and your partner to try based on your “anatomy, flexibility and preferences.” Yes! Fifty positions. Although one Amazon reviewer wrote: “We have seen a few positions that honestly, you would have to be an acrobat to really get into them.”

But assuming you know a good orthopedic surgeon, the Sex Deck might be the perfect Valentine’s Day gift to “reignite the flame” in your relationship. Because over time, relationships can get stuck in ruts. Back in December I was waiting for a flight at the Dallas/Fort Worth airport when a middle-aged couple sat down next to me and had the following terse conversation:

MAN: It says our flight is on time.

WOMAN: I know.

MAN: I know you know. You know everything.

After that, they sat in audibly hostile silence until it was time to board the plane. Clearly the sparkle was gone from their relationship. I’m wondering if the Sex Deck could bring it back, so that instead of sniping at each other, they could be having erotic conversations like this:

MAN (reading card): OK, to do the Backwards Wheelbarrow, you’re supposed to...

WOMAN: I know.

MAN: I know you kn… Wait a minute! HOW DO YOU KNOW THE BACKWARDS WHEELBARROW?

So on second thought, maybe the Sex Deck is not the ideal gift for every relationship. But my overall point is this: Valentine’s Day is tomorrow, and many of you men are not ready. So right now is the time for you to get busy with your plans to make it a very special day for your very special someone, a day she will never forget.

Or at least you should take the price sticker off the flowers.

And now, speaking of special someones, it’s time to hear from you paying subscribers.

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In an effort to address your concerns, this past week I spent four days in Mexico, despite the very real physical risk that a portion of my expenses would be tax-deductible. Although I frankly have no idea what my expenses actually were. I say this because the money used in Mexico is the “peso,” and when I got pesos down there from an ATM, it printed out this:

As I interpret this, it means that when you pay for something in pesos, and you want to know how much it is in dollars, you have to divide, or possibly multiply, the price by 16.1248, which is impossible to do in your head, especially when you factor in the margaritas. So I did a lot of rough estimating. If the price of something was, say, 1,420 pesos, I’d roughly estimate that it was somewhere in the range of three to 167 dollars. Fortunately this is close enough for tax purposes.

The specific place I went to in Mexico is a town called San Miguel de Allende. It was built centuries ago by people who made all of the streets out of large chunky cobblestones in an effort to keep the area from being overrun by elderly Americans.

This effort was unsuccessful. Today there are herds of elderly Americans gamely hobbling all over San Miguel de Allende. And with good reason: It’s an impossibly beautiful place.

You hobble down beautiful street after beautiful street, past all these beautiful old weathered-wood doors, behind which will usually be some kind of small business -- a shop, or an artist’s gallery, or a restaurant that you may rest assured will have excellent margaritas.

As you hobble along you may encounter traditional Mexican cultural things, such as a mariachi band or large, vaguely disturbing puppets.

Or you may meet a man who happens to be in a position to offer you a very special price on a hat.

You might see people rehearsing a traditional Mexican folk dance in which a man pretends he’s about to sever a woman’s foot with a machete on a basketball court.

If you’re really lucky you’ll even run into a famous professional burro, Benito the Wedding Donkey, who has his own website but is not too stuck up to pose for photos with tourists.

So it’s definitely a touristy town. But it’s not tacky, and the people are remarkably nice. I’m not talking about the fake-nice kind of nice that you often encounter in touristy places, where you know the locals really wish you’d just hand them some money and go away. The people of San Miguel de Allende are warm and welcoming and genuinely just... nice. In fact as far as I could tell — remember that I’m a professional; do not attempt this kind of generalization at home — everybody in Mexico is nice.

The reason I went there, aside from to provide you with keen journalistic insights about Mexico (It’s nice!) was to hang out with three guys — all named Robert — whom I’ve known since 1965. That was many decades ago, but we are still a quartet of studly hombres, as you can see in this photo of us posing next to a picturesque fountain with our hot-babe wives.

We four guys met as freshmen at Haverford College, where three of us were part of a rock band — perhaps you have heard of it — called the Federal Duck.

The guy on the right is Robert “Buzz” Burger. He was the band manager by virtue of having business acumen, by which I mean a car. Next to him is Libby, his wife of nearly 60 years; the Federal Duck played a role in their courtship. What happened was, we were playing at a freshman mixer between Haverford, which was then all-male, and a nearby all-female institution named (I am not making this up) Beaver College. Libby was one of the Beaver freshmen, and Buzz wanted to impress her. So even though, as manager, he was not technically one of the musicians, he asked the band if he could play rhythm guitar on “Wipeout,” which is a song consisting mainly of drum solos. When the big moment arrived, Buzz strapped on a guitar, and we performed “Wipeout,” and Buzz for the most part correctly executed all three of the chords. It is frankly impossible to imagine how any woman could resist such a thoughtful and romantic gesture, so you will not be surprised to learn that when “Wipeout” ended, Libby...

...OK, Libby was not there. It turned out she had left the mixer earlier with another guy. So Buzz was bummed. But guess what? The next day Libby, having somehow been made aware of the situation, called Buzz to apologize, and he asked her out, and a couple of years later they were married. A lot has changed since then — for example, Beaver College is now “Arcadia University” — but Buzz and Libby are still together, which is why to this day, whenever I hear the phrase “tender and seductive love ballad,” I think “Wipeout.”

The guy next to Libby Burger in the photo is one of my Haverford roommates, Robert “Rob” Stavis, with his wife, Helene. Unfortunately, Rob was not a member of the Federal Duck, but he did become a prominent neonatologist who saved the lives of hundreds of babies. So he’s not a complete loser.

The tall guy wearing a hat is Robert “Bob” Stern, standing next to his wife, Daphne. Bob was my college roommate for three years, one of which we spent crammed into a tiny room containing two beds and a massive festering pile of unwashed laundry, which we kept under control by periodically spraying it with Right Guard deodorant.

Bob was not an original member of the Federal Duck, but he was a gifted, classically trained violinist. So when our original bass player graduated, we asked Bob if he’d be willing to replace him, and Bob said sure. This meant he had to learn, from scratch, how to play electric rock-and-roll bass guitar, a process that took him, including snack breaks, maybe 10 minutes. It turns out that rock bass is a lot simpler, musically, than classical violin, because of the number of notes involved, as we can see from this typical sheet music:

After graduating from Haverford, Bob pursued a music career for a while, but after developing pneumonia on tour he decided to do something healthier. So he became a dentist, and he built a successful practice. His life was cruising along beautifully when, at age 53, completely out of the blue, he developed retinal tears and detachments in both eyes, suddenly and permanently costing him most of his vision. Just like that, his dentistry career was over. It was, as Bob says, “brutal.”

But Bob’s a resilient guy; in time, he picked up his violin and became a fulltime musician again. He and Daphne now spend part of every winter in San Miguel de Allende, which is where Bob met the famous Mexican virtuoso guitarist Gil Gutierrez. They hit it off, and now Bob plays regularly with Gil, in the U.S. and Mexico. In fact our group trip to Mexico was planned around an opportunity to see our old buddy perform. Here’s a snippet of Bob with Gil:

I don’t know the name of the song they’re playing in this snippet, but it’s definitely not from the repertoire of the Federal Duck. It has WAY too many notes.

Watching Bob play was the highlight of our trip to San Miguel de Allende, but we also spent quite a bit of time exploring the local culture, by which I mean shopping. My wife, Michelle, is extremely good at cultural exploration. If you dropped her by parachute onto a polar ice cap a thousand miles from the nearest human habitation, she would, within minutes, find a gift shop, and it would be selling at least one item that would look really cute in our house.

So San Miguel de Allende was a target-rich environment for Michelle, who bought several cute items. I asked her, as I always do, where she plans to put them, since all the accessible surfaces in our house are already occupied by cute items she bought on previous trips; she answered, as she always does, that she would “find room.” I’m beginning to suspect that Michelle has a completely different house somewhere I don’t know about, where she keeps all the old cute items she had to move to make room for new ones.

So we came home from San Miguel de Allende with souvenirs, but also great memories of hobbling around with good old ancient friends in a beautiful — And nice! — place, which you will be relieved to know appears to have an adequate supply of margaritas. Although by the time we left they may have been running a little low.

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Yes, the beloved rap artist and brand spokesperson for an estimated 300 products will once again be part of the NBC Olympics broadcast team, as he was for the 2024 summer games in Paris, where he seemed to pop up everywhere.

I’ll definitely be watching Snoop Inc. and company. I’m a big fan of the Winter Olympics, which I covered as a credentialed media person in 1994 (Lillehammer), 1998 (Nagano) and 2002 (Salt Lake City).

If I had to describe, in one word, the fun and excitement of being a professional journalist at the winter games, that word would be “unpleasant bus rides.” I say this because to get to the competition venues, you often have to travel long distances on winding mountain roads in hot buses filled with members of the international press corps, a group not known for taking regular showers, if you catch my drift. These buses can get very crowded, so you might wind up standing for hours pressed so tightly against an aromatic photographer from some vowel-free nation that by the time you reach your destination one of you is definitely going to have the other one’s baby.

But despite the bus rides, I enjoyed covering the winter games. Once I even got to try my hand at an actual Olympic event, namely curling. This is a sport that originated in Scotland in the 16th century, when some Scottish people, who we can assume were pretty hammered, discovered that if you slid a heavy stone along a frozen surface, and then ran next to the stone frantically sweeping the ice with a broom, you would look like an idiot. From these humble origins curling went on to become hugely popular worldwide, by which I mean in Canada and parts of Wisconsin.

I tried curling at the Nagano Olympics in 1998, under the guidance of the U.S. women’s curling team captain, or “skip,” Lisa Schoeneberg, who graciously gave me a lesson at the Olympic practice facility. It was harder than I expected, because it turns out that ice — nobody warned me about this — is slippery. The first time I tried to slide the stone, I fell down. But after just a few tries, thanks to Lisa’s patient coaching and my natural athletic ability, I continued to fall down. Here I am demonstrating my form as Lisa looks on approvingly.

That was fun, but the best part of the 1998 Olympics, for me, was Police 90. This was a karaoke bar in Nagano that became a hugely popular hangout for both media people and athletes. It was wild scene: You had the international press corps — which in addition to not being known for personal hygiene is also not known for sobriety — and you had actual Olympic competitors, sometimes wearing medals, belting out truly terrible versions of karaoke songs selected from a list of titles written in a language that was vaguely similar to English, so that, for example, the band Los Lobos appeared as “Ros Rovos.”

If you wanted to do a song, you were supposed to put your name on a signup sheet. My fellow columnist Mitch Albom and I signed up to sing the absolute worst song we could find on the list, which was “Johnny Get Angry,” the 1962 hit by Joanie Sommers about a girl who, wanting her boyfriend to be more assertive in expressing his feelings toward her, sings: “Johnny get angry, Johnny get mad! Give me the biggest lecture I ever had! I want a BRAVE man! I want a CAVE man!” And if that’s not enough to convince you of the badness of this song, consider this: It has a kazoo solo.

Needless to say Mitch and I were excited about performing this song, but when our turn came, the karaoke microphone — there was only one — had disappeared, although we could hear male voices bellowing into it from somewhere deep in the crowd. So as the intro to “Johnny Get Angry” began to play, Mitch, with me trailing, plunged fearlessly into this roaring, drunken mob, where he managed to locate the microphone, which was in the meaty grip of what I believe was the Austrian four-man bobsled team. (I am not making any of this up.) The Austrians did NOT want to relinquish the microphone, and they outweighed Mitch by a combined total of roughly half a ton, but he somehow wrested it away from them in time for us to sing almost the entirety of “Johnny Get Angry.” Talk about a proud Olympic moment for America.

Speaking of which: The other highlight of that evening was that I got to hold a silver medal that had been won by an American, Gordy Sheer, in the two-man luge. He was with his teammate Brian Martin, who had won a bronze in the same event. A group of Americans had gathered around to congratulate them, and we decided we should celebrate their medals by singing our national anthem. Unfortunately Police 90’s list of karaoke songs did not include “The Star Spangled Banner,” so we had to settle for singing the most patriotic-American-sounding title they had, which was “The Red River Valley.” It’s not the most upbeat song, but at least it doesn’t have a kazoo solo.

My point is that except for the bus rides, I have fond memories of the Winter Olympics, and I’m looking forward to watching this year’s games. They’re being held in Italy, which is an ideal location from the standpoint of access to Italian cuisine. Unfortunately it’s not so great from the standpoint of engaging in winter sports, because Italy, thanks to — you guessed it — global climate change, currently has approximately the same annual snowfall accumulation as Guam. As a result the organizers will have to manufacture a massive amount of artificial snow, which involves the use of chemicals, although an official spokesperson insists that there is “virtually no risk” to the health of skiers or snowboarders, “as long as they don’t fall down.”

Another potential Olympic headache is the ice hockey arena, which has been plagued by construction delays. This is a chronic problem in Italy, which is littered with unfinished buildings like this one:

As it stands now, the Olympic ice hockey arena will be mostly finished in time for the games, but because of plumbing problems there probably won’t be any actual ice. This means the hockey competition could consist entirely of players punching each other. As a result the current gold-medal favorite is Cuba, which until this week didn’t even have a hockey team.

The good news is, the ice skating arena is finished. This means we’ll be able to watch the most dramatic and telegenic of all Winter Olympics sports: figure skating, with its unique blend of athleticism and mascara. The U.S. team is strong this year, but as always they will face tough competition from the Russians, who reportedly have developed a technique that enables their male skaters to throw their female partners as high as 30 feet into the air. “They’re going to be tough to beat,” predicted one analyst, “assuming they can solve the problem of the landings.”

This concludes my comprehensive preview of the 2026 winter games. Now let’s hear from you paying subscribers, who in my opinion are the gold medalists of subscribers.

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1. Greenland.

2. Where King Charles III will go to the bathroom.

I will take these crises one at a time.

Greenland is a large island or possibly iceberg off the coast of Canada that President Trump would like to conquer acquire legally. Why? Strategy, that’s why.

Geographically, Greenland happens to be located in a strategically critical location, namely, right next to outer space. In fact the United States already has a Space Force base in Greenland, which is named (Google this if you don’t believe me) “Pituffik Space Base.” The base gets its name from the Inuit word “pituffik,” meaning “sound of a seal farting.” Here’s Vice President Vance on an official visit there last March, during which he and Mrs. Vance officially observed base personnel participating in squinting exercises.

The other strategic reason we want to legally acquire Greenland is natural resources. Greenland has an abundant supply of certain rare and highly desirable natural resources that we are sorely lacking in the United States, specifically the state of Indiana, as detailed in this article:

Speaking of the Hoosiers: I want to digress for a moment here to congratulate them on winning the national professional college football championship with their plucky team of 31-year-old student-athletes. I also want to sincerely apologize for an error I made in an early version of last week’s Substack, in which I carelessly referred to their school as “The University of Indiana.” As many Hoosiers immediately let me know, that is not the correct name. The correct name — please make a note of it — is “The Indiana University of Indiana.”

But getting back to Greenland: Technically it belongs to Denmark, a Scandinavian nation also known as Norway, or, more familiarly, “Sweden.” The Trump administration’s position is that Denmark should let us have Greenland, on the grounds that (a) we want it, and (b) nobody currently lives there except for the inhabitants.

Unfortunately, Denmark doesn’t want to give Greenland up. This means it could come down to an armed conflict between the two nations, which most experts believe would last approximately as long as an Arby’s commercial, because Denmark is not a major military power, as we see in this recent photo of the entire Danish army, taken during a pastry break:

The Greenland dispute has worsened the relationship between the United States and our NATO allies in Europe, which was already pretty bad because the Europeans hate America for creating this insane metastasizing Frankenstein-monster tipping culture wherein you’re expected to pay a minimum 22 percent gratuity on every financial transaction you enter into, including with vending machines. So a forcible U.S. takeover of Greenland could be the “final straw” that results in the complete collapse of NATO, thus clearing the path for increased Russian and Chinese aggression, which in turn could ultimately spiral into a global thermonuclear war. Fortunately, that’s a worst-case scenario that probably won’t happen. In the reassuring words of one high-level U.S. State Department official who asked to remain anonymous (Marco Rubio): “I personally am moving to New Zealand.”

For now, all we can do about Greenland, as Americans, is hope that President Trump, as is his wont, gets distracted by some other bee in his strategic bonnet, such as constructing a casino on the lunar surface. Meanwhile, we also need to be aware of the other looming foreign-policy crisis, which, as I mentioned earlier, is where King Charles III will go to the bathroom.

I found out about this crisis from an online magazine I subscribe to called PRO, which stands for “Portable Restroom Operator.” PRO, in its own words, covers “portable restroom, mobile wash station, and temporary sanitation and waste-disposal news for industry leaders.” I am not, despite what you may have heard, a leader in the portable-restroom industry, but over the years I have found PRO to be consistently more entertaining than many publications that are actually trying to be entertaining. For example, here’s a headline, which I am not making up, from the January issue:

That’s right: A publication devoted to portable toilets is inviting its readers to... Dive in!

But PRO is not just entertaining: It’s also informative. Each month it has a roundup of portable-restroom news, and this was the lead item for January:

This item linked to an article in a UK newspaper, the Daily Star, concerning King Charles III’s upcoming April visit to the White House. The article quotes Will Scharf, who is the White House staff secretary and an assistant to President Trump, as stating that because the White House doesn’t currently have a ballroom capable of handling big events, when the king visits, “more likely than not, he will be hosted in a tent on the South Lawn with porta-potties.” Scharf said this “is not a good look for the United States of America.” He contrasted it with the accommodations provided for President and Mrs. Trump in September when they visited King Charles and Queen Camilla in Windsor Castle, which as you can see was an extremely fun time for everybody.

These are the facial expressions of people who know they can “let their hair down” and enjoy themselves because they have access to high-class toilets. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for guests at large White House gatherings, who, to judge from the statements of presidential assistant Scharf, are probably, during peak demand times, peeing in the rosebushes.

The good news is, this situation will change drastically once construction is complete on the president’s massive new White House East Wing strategic ballroom, which will have the capacity to host a major state dinner and a tractor pull at the same time, and which will obviously have great toilets, toilets that will be the envy of the rest of the world, toilets that will have the power, if the need arises, to suck down a mature sheep. The bad news is, for now we have a situation wherein, to quote the Daily Star, the reigning monarch of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, attending a formal dinner in his honor, “could be using a bathroom a bit like this”:

This is worrisome. If something goes wrong — if Charles gets stuck in there, or if, God forbid, Pete Hegseth some drunken guest decides to tip His Royal Majesty over — we could find ourselves at war with both Denmark and Britain. This is something we should all be thinking about, although I personally intend to stop here.

Speaking of tipping, it’s time for all of you brilliant yet at the same time physically attractive paying subscribers to express yourselves.

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“Hoosiers” is of course the nickname that people from Indiana proudly use to refer to themselves, and for an excellent reason: They have no idea what it means.

Really. Indianans have come up with many different explanations for the origin of “Hoosier,” but they’ve never been able to agree on which one is correct. They can be sensitive about this. Years ago I wrote a column in which I suggested — purely as a joke, because as a professional humorist I am always kidding around in a non-serious vein — that for all we know, “Hoosier” could be a Native American word that means — and let me again stress that I intended this in a purely comical way — “has sex with caribou.”

Unfortunately, my lighthearted attempt at humor did not sit well with many Hoosiers, who wrote to inform me that I am a stupid idiot. One man buttressed his argument by stating (I am not making this up): “Indiana has no caribou.” Case closed!

So I want to apologize to the good people of Indiana for my tasteless and juvenile attempt at humor, and warmly welcome them to my city. A huge herd of Hoosiers is headed this way because on Monday night, Miami will host the game that will determine who is the national champion of professional college football, and as fate would have it, the University of Miami Hurricanes will be squaring off against none other than the Indiana University Fighting Wildlife Molesters.

No! Sorry! That is offensive, and I move that it be stricken from the record. Indiana University happens to be a fine educational institution, as befits the great state of Indiana, which has no reason whatsoever to have an inferiority complex when it is compared with other states such as (to pick a state at random) Florida.

Sure, Florida attracts more than 100 million tourists a year from all over the planet thanks to its many outstanding resorts, hotels and restaurants, its world-class theme parks, its bustling cruise ports, its hundreds of miles of spectacular beaches and its year-round warm weather. But Indiana has... The World’s Largest Ball of Paint. Really. It’s in the town of Alexandria, not far from Muncie, and it weighs more than 11,500 pounds. The official website states: “You’ll be amazed by the sheer size and beauty of the World’s Largest Ball of Paint. It’s truly a must-see attraction for all ages.” If anything that is an understatement, to judge from this official photograph:

For the record: According to Google AI, the state of Florida does not have a single major ball of paint. Advantage, Indiana!

But getting back to the football game: As a University of Miami fan, I am naturally hoping that the Hurricanes, in the spirit of good clean competition and collegiate sportsmanship, eviscerate the Hoosiers and festoon the goalposts with their intestines. But as a longtime resident of the host community, I also want the Indiana fans, as our guests, to enjoy a pleasant stay here involving minimal gunplay. That’s why I have prepared this helpful:

GUIDE TO MIAMI FOR VISITING HOOSIERS

Assuming you’re flying into Miami International Airport, you can expect a smooth, relaxing and carefree arrival experience, from the moment you touch down until the moment you actually exit the aircraft. At that point things could get dicey.

For one thing — this might have something to do with the humidity — major airport parts keep breaking. Fortunately there’s a crack team of maintenance engineers working around the clock to install signage letting you know that they’re aware of the problem and fully intend to do something about it, although not during your lifetime.

I’ve been flying out of Miami International for more than 40 years, and I’m pretty sure these specific elevators have been out of order the entire time:

I’m starting to suspect that there aren’t any actual elevators in there. I think maybe they were stolen by elevator thieves, who fenced them on the elevator black market.

But getting back to you visiting Hoosiers: One thing you’ll notice right away at the airport is that many people are speaking Spanish, which is the dominant language in Miami. Most Miamians also speak some English in the form of hand gestures, but if you want to blend in, you should make an effort to speak Spanish. One traditional way to do this, of course, is to add “o”s to the ends of random words, as in “Where-o is the baggage claim-o?” Spanish speakers love when you do that! But it’s even better if you use actual Spanish words. Here’s a list of helpful phrases you can memorize to use as icebreakers during your visit:

-- ¡Hola, persona española! (”Hello, Spanish person!”)

-- Como probablemente pueden ver por el hecho de que cada prenda que llevo puesta, incluyendo mi ropa interior, es exactamente del mismo color que un camión de bomberos, soy un Hoosier. (”As you can probably tell from the fact that every garment I am wearing, including my underpants, is exactly the same color as a fire engine, I am a Hoosier.”)

-- No, no sé qué significa. (”No, I don’t know what it means.”)

-- ¿Alguna vez has oído hablar de Indiana? (”Have you ever heard of Indiana?”)

-- Es uno de los estados de Estados Unidos. (”It is one of the United States.”)

-- Tenemos una bola de pintura extremadamente grande. No está muy lejos de Muncie. (”We have an extremely large ball of paint. It is not far from Muncie.”)

-- Solo por curiosidad, ¿hay algún caribú por aquí? (”Just out of curiosity, are there any caribou around here?”)

Getting Around Miami

Driving in Miami is essentially a form of suicide can be challenging, so your safest option is to use mass transit. The good news is, Miami has a modern mass-transit system that cost more than a billion dollars to build. The bad news is, it doesn’t go anywhere that anybody actually wants to go. It appears to have been designed by transportation planners who, because of some mixup, were looking at a map of a completely different city. Most Miamians have never even been on it. We watch from our cars as it passes overhead, usually empty, a mystery train bound for who knows where, possibly Cleveland.

So unfortunately to get around Miami you might have to drive. If you do, remember to never make eye contact with another driver, and above all do not do anything that will identify you as a tourist, such as signaling your turns or slowing down for red lights. Also bear in mind that only eight Miami motorists actually have auto insurance, so if you get into an accident, make sure it’s with one of them.

Attending The Big Game

The game will be held at Hard Rock Stadium. Security will be extremely tight. Security personnel will do everything in their power, including tasing, to prevent you from getting in. This is for your own protection.

Also be advised that there is no stadium parking. There used to be parking, because technically it’s a football stadium. But a few years ago Hard Rock management decided to add a professional tennis complex AND a Formula One racetrack, and they elected to build both of them — these are not small items — in the stadium parking lot. You probably think I’m making this up, but I swear I am not.

The result is that there is no longer room in the parking lot for actual parking. Currently the closest you can get to Hard Rock Stadium with a private automobile is suburban Atlanta. This means your best bet is to use our mass transit system, which, since it was designed to serve Cleveland, will not actually take you anywhere near the stadium, so on the plus side at least you won’t get tased.

Another option, of course, is to use Uber, which from downtown Miami to the stadium normally costs around $45, although according to an Uber spokesperson, with surge pricing on game day it’s expected to run “closer to a hundred trillion dollars.” Of course that’s assuming you can actually get an Uber on game day, which the Uber spokesperson called “frankly hilarious.”

So getting into the game won’t be easy. But it will be worth it, because the game promises to be a fun contest between two teams of student-athletes — some of whom are so studious that they have already attended like nine different universities — led by a pair of easygoing, low-key coaches who, as you can see from the photos below, totally don’t mind if a player has to skip football practice because he has an important Poli Sci paper due.

Ha ha! I am of course joshing. This is college football we’re talking about: It has nothing to do with college. And it’s not “fun.” It’s WAR.

So I’m hoping the Hurricanes win, even though they’re underdogs. But I’m also hoping you Hoosiers enjoy your time in my city. And whatever happens in the game, I sincerely mean it when I say, in the words of an old Spanish saying that we Miamians often say in parting: Al menos puedo quedarme aquí en lugar de regresar a esa maldita tundra helada infestada de rastrojos de maíz. (”Godspeed”).

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This is a question many leading thinkers are currently thinking about. In an effort to answer it, let’s consider a recent experiment, conducted by university researchers, in which residents of a small coastal California town agreed to give up their mobile phones completely for an entire month.

At first the townspeople, deprived of their “digital crutch,” experienced feelings of emptiness, disorientation and anxiety; they literally did not know what to do with themselves. But after just a few days, guess what happened? That’s right: Their entire town was wiped out by a tsunami, because they didn’t receive the alerts.

What does this experiment teach us? The most important lesson, of course, is that we should never go anywhere near the Pacific Ocean. But it also teaches us that our phones can be a vital information resource. For example, I have an app on my iPhone called “Is it dark outside?” Really. If I want to know whether it’s dark outside, all I have to do is tap this little icon

and instantly the screen displays this reassuring message:

Unless it’s nighttime, in which case the screen says:

I don’t know how the phone knows this, although I assume it involves an “algorithm.” All I know is, we’ve come a long way since the “bad old days” — you Boomers remember — when we had to manually look out a window to obtain this information.

Speaking of you Boomers: Let’s talk about the need to pee during movies. The question is: When is the best time to go to the restroom without missing anything important? For some movies, by which I mean Cats, the answer is “any old time.” You could schedule a double hip replacement during Cats without missing anything important. But if the movie is, for example, Zootopia 2, which I recently took my grandsons to, and you go to the restroom at the wrong time, you would miss the moment when Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde find out that...

SPOILER ALERT

SPOILER ALERT

SPOILER ALERT

...Pawbert is actually a bad guy. Yes! Pawbert!

But here’s the thing: You can download an app called RunPee

which lists all the movies that are currently playing and not only tells you exactly when you should head for the head, but also summarizes what happens while you’re gone, as we see in this screenshot:

And here’s the best part: When the movie ends, you can use the “Is it dark outside?” app to find out whether or not, when you leave the theater, you will need to squint.

I think it’s safe to say that back when they invented the internet, Al Gore and Thomas Edison could not have imagined that one day, thanks to their brainchild, we would have this kind of information instantly available at our fingertips. Yet these two apps barely penetrate beneath the surface of the enormous foaming vat of knowledge that, thanks to our phones, we can access anytime and anywhere, making us more productive than we have ever been.

Here’s an absolutely true example of this involving me. Two days ago I was driving on US-1 in Coral Gables, Florida, which means I was essentially parked, because traffic on US-1 moves very slowly.

Q. How slowly does it move?

A. There are still some Conestoga wagons out there.

So while I was sitting motionless, I decided to use the time productively by making a dent in the backlog of unopened emails on my phone, currently estimated at 149 trillion. As it happened, one of the first emails I opened, sent in months ago by an alert Substack reader, contained a link to a news story headlined:

My immediate reaction — I’m sure it was also yours — was: What was a duck doing on a roller coaster? How did it meet the height requirement? But it turned out that, despite the wording of the headline, the woman was the one on the roller coaster. She claimed that a duck flew into its path and hit her in the face, knocking her unconscious. She was suing for $50,000; her lawsuit alleged that SeaWorld was negligent for putting a roller coaster near a body of water that would attract ducks. I am not making this up.

Since my car was still motionless on US-1, I used my phone to Google this case to see if there had been any new developments, and guess what I found out? That’s right: President Trump pardoned the duck.

No, that’s a joke, at least for now. What I found out is that just this week, the woman’s lawsuit was dismissed by a judge after lawyers for Sea World filed a motion asserting that — I am still not making this up — the bird that struck the woman was not, in fact, a duck: It was a snowy egret. (This is what is known in the legal community as the “snowy egret defense.”) According to a legal expert quoted in the story, “the judge ordered that SeaWorld can’t be held responsible for the conduct of a bird flying in the air because it wasn’t foreseeable that they would have known it was there and was actually going to hurt someone.”

This seems fair. It would be a different story if a tourist got attacked by the SeaWorld penguins, who are employed by the park and wear uniforms. But it’s hard to see how SeaWorld can be responsible for the actions of a random wildlife unit. Legally, when we, the members of the park-going public, get on a roller coaster, we knowingly assume the risk that we might collide with an airborne bird, which fortunately is an extremely rare occurrence.

OR IS IT?

I ask this question in large boldfaced capital letters because I decided, since I was still not moving on US-1, to do some further research using AI, which is on my phone as well as probably every other appliance I own including my electric toothbrush, and here’s what I learned:

-- In 2019, a girl riding a roller coaster at Warner Bros. Movie World in Australia was hit by an ibis.

-- In 2017, a man riding a roller coaster at Ferrari Land in Spain was hit by a pigeon.

-- In 2012, a boy riding a roller coaster at Six Flags Great Adventure in New Jersey was also hit by a pigeon (presumably a different pigeon).

-- In 1999 (you may remember this one) Fabio, the legendary bare-chested romance-book-cover model and stud muffin, was struck in the face by a goose during the inaugural ride of the Apollo’s Chariot roller coaster at Busch Gardens Williamsburg, an event that resulted in the greatest photograph in the annals of stud muffinry:

Clearly there is a pattern here. Am I saying that there is some kind of ongoing international bird conspiracy, involving multiple species, to exterminate the human race one roller-coaster rider at a time? Maybe. Of course not. But what I am saying is that the SeaWorld snowy-egret attack was not an isolated incident. It was part of what we in professional journalism call a “spate.” In fact we might very well upgrade it to an “epidemic,” in which case it would almost certainly be linked — it goes without saying — to global climate change.

But that is not my overall point. My overall point is that I appear to have stumbled across a major news story here, a story that the so-called “mainstream media” missed completely, a story that I think we can all agree is worthy of a major cash journalism prize, and the only reason I got the “scoop” is that while I was stuck in traffic I had my phone with me. So please don’t ask me to jump on the “mobile phones are bad for us” bandwagon. In fact don’t ask me to do anything, because right now I need to figure out why all these cars behind me are honking.

And now let’s hear from you amazing paying subscribers. Today we have two polls:

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In case you somehow missed this story: In late November, this raccoon got into a state liquor store in Ashland, Va., by falling though the ceiling. Once inside, the raccoon ransacked the store, leaving a trail of broken bottles...

...and apparently consuming a large quantity of booze before passing out in the bathroom next to the toilet. That’s where the raccoon was found by a store employee, who called an animal-control officer, who took it to an animal shelter. When the raccoon finally sobered up, it was hired as director of security by the Louvre Museum.

No, seriously, it was released into the wild. But the photo went majorly viral, and the raccoon became a huge celebrity. We, the American people, LOVE this raccoon. And I think I know why: After the year we’ve been through, we can relate to it. We have had way too much of 2025; it has left us, as a nation, lying face-down on the floor of despair, between the wastebasket of stupidity and the commode of broken dreams.

How did we get here? Perhaps it will help (although I doubt it) if we look back on the events of this insane year, starting with...

JANUARY

...in which outgoing President Joe Biden, preparing to wander out of office, pardons pretty much everybody he has ever shaken hands with — Not that anybody did anything wrong! — thus clearing the decks for America’s new leadership team of President Donald Trump and Executive President Elon Musk.

Even before taking office Trump is working on big things, HUGE things, INCREDIBLE things, including a goal that has been shown, in poll after poll, to be the number one priority of the American public: purchasing Greenland. We need Greenland because it is a vital strategic resource that produces nearly 70 percent of the world’s supply of frostbite. Technically Greenland belongs to Denmark, which doesn’t want to sell it to us, but the harsh military reality is that the entire Danish army has fewer weapons than the entourage of a mid-tier American rap artist.

Trump also wants to take possession of the Panama Canal, which was built by Americans and therefore needs to be physically relocated to the United States; and to rename Mount Denali and the Gulf of Mexico, both of which were also built by Americans.

On January 20 Trump is sworn into office and — after unsuccessfully attempting to kiss his wife, Melania, who as a defensive measure is wearing the wide-brim style of hat popularized by both the Hamburglar and Zorro — he pardons pretty much everybody who was not pardoned by Biden, including the January 6 rioters Capitol tourists, among them the bare-chested, face-painted guy with the horned headpiece, who needs to be out of prison because he is our new ambassador to Great Britain.

In keeping with presidential tradition, Trump signs executive orders reversing all the Biden executive orders that reversed all the previous Trump executive orders that reversed all of Barack Obama’s executive orders that reversed all of George W. Bush’s executive orders that reversed all of Bill Clinton’s executive orders, and so on back to George Washington.

Meanwhile Elon Musk and an elite squadron of really smart 13-year-olds set about the task of making the federal government less wasteful by eliminating the root cause of inefficiency: employees. To accomplish this goal, the Musk team offers buyout agreements to all two million federal workers. The first person to accept is Melania.

No, that’s a joke, obviously. She was third.

In other Washington news, the hearings for Trump’s cabinet nominees produce the greatest oratorical moment in the history of the U.S. Senate, if not the world, when Bernie Sanders, questioning Robert F. Kennedy Jr., points to photographs of two infant garments with anti-vaccination slogans and demands to know “ARE YOU SUPPORTIVE OF THESE ONESIES?”

If these words are not, some day, engraved on the front of a major federal building, we have to wonder why we even HAVE federal buildings.

Which brings us to...

FEBRUARY

...when President Trump threatens to slap tariffs on goods from Mexico, Canada and China, all of which were originally built by Americans. Tariffs are taxes, so this would mean that the American consumer would pay more for these goods. To understand why this is a shrewd business tactic, consider an analogy: You’re in a dispute with your neighbor, Bob. So you go to Bob’s house and ring his doorbell. When he opens the door, you turn around and punch the American consumer in the face. Take that, Bob!

Meanwhile, as Elon and the Musketeers continue whacking away at the federal government, the Washington Post publishes a front-page story that begins: “A 19-year-old acolyte of Elon Musk known online as ‘Big Balls’ has taken on new roles as a senior adviser at the State Department and at the Department of Homeland Security....”

This is followed by several days of cable-TV news coverage featuring platoons of Serious Commentators, frowning to indicate the magnitude of their concern, talking about: Big Balls. They are obsessed with Big Balls. They cannot get enough of Big Balls. The only thing that could have made this episode more magical would have been if there had been a Senate hearing in which Bernie Sanders demanded to know if Big Balls was supportive of the onesies.

Speaking of the Democrats: Recognizing that their main message in 2024 — that anybody who would vote for Donald Trump is a racist idiot — failed badly, the Democrats have decided to win voters back with a more positive message, namely, that they are positive that anybody who would vote for Donald Trump is a racist idiot. This is the kind of tactical shrewdness that makes the Democratic Party such a formidable foe of the Democratic Party.

In yet another alarming aviation mishap, a Delta regional jet attempting to land in Toronto flips over and slides down the runway upside-down, coming to a stop only inches from a waiting clot of personal-injury attorneys. A spokesperson for the Federal Aviation Administration, seeking to reassure the public, notes that “many flights are still landing right-side up.”

Speaking of Canada, in…

MARCH

…the Trump administration ramps up the trade war against Canada and Mexico, which used to be friendly neighboring nations where vacationing Americans went to shoot moose and throw up on the beaches respectively, but which now apparently are our arch-enemies. We’re also in a feud with Europe, because for decades we’ve been spending billions of dollars protecting Europe from the Russians while the Europeans were lounging around cafes without leaving tips.

Our new foreign policy is: Protect your own selves, Europeans! We’re not going to fight the Russians for you! In fact now we LIKE the Russians! We’re chatting on the phone with them right now about how much of Ukraine they can keep!

At least that appears to be our foreign policy at the moment. There’s a lot of confusion about exactly what our strategy is: Either we’re playing four-dimensional chess, or somebody’s slipping Ecstasy into the White House Diet Coke supply. Either way it’s exciting!

In domestic news, President Trump marks his sixth week in office by giving a speech to Congress lasting for much of the seventh week, the gist of which is that he is, in all modesty, doing a better Job than all the other presidents combined plus Jesus Christ. This message does not go unchallenged by the Democratic members of Congress, who, in a bold display of Resistance reminiscent of the civil-rights marches of the Sixties, take courageous high-impact action in the form of...

Holding up little paddles.

Really. That’s the protest they came up with. They also considered wearing their underpants on their heads, but decided that wouldn’t look ridiculous enough.

Speaking of ridiculous: A group of high-level Trump administration officials, including Secretary of Defense War Pete Hegseth, hold a group chat on the Signal app to discuss a sensitive military operation against the Houthis and somehow — this actually happened — include the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg. Despite widespread criticism of this blunder, the administration insists that it was no big deal, and that it’s pure coincidence that shortly after the chat, U.S. military drones destroyed the offices of the New Yorker.

On a happier note, two astronauts finally return to Earth after being stranded aboard the International Space Station for nine months. They say they’re “happy to be home,” but add “that’s the last time we’re booking on Spirit.”

Speaking of space exploration, in…

APRIL

…a Blue Origin rocket blasts off from west Texas, carrying a historic six-woman celebrity crew on a historic mission that lasts for nearly 11 historic minutes, including nearly three historic minutes in actual space, before setting them safely down in… west Texas. Not only does this mission result in a breakthrough scientific discovery — namely, that space is located directly above west Texas — but it also serves as an inspiration to every little girl who has ever looked up at the heavens and dreamed that some day, somehow, she would grow up and become engaged to Jeff Bezos.

Speaking of things going up and down: the stock market is bouncing around like a kangaroo on meth as the financial community, along with the rest of the world, frantically tries to understand President Trump’s tariff strategy, which changes almost hourly as he responds, as a shrewd negotiator, to random neural firings in his brain. Now he’s raising tariffs! Now he’s lowering tariffs! Now he’s raising tariffs again, but only for countries with predominantly blue flags and large yak populations!

As the public sees TariffPalooza disrupting the economy, Trump’s poll numbers begin to slide, presenting the Democrats with a golden opportunity to take advantage of Trump’s vulnerability by offering Americans the one thing that they crave most in these uncertain economic times: a really long speech. This bold stroke is executed by New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, who sets a U.S. Senate record by speaking for more than 25 hours without peeing, forever transforming the lives of the estimated three interns who were listening.

The excitement continues in...

MAY

...when the Washington press corps is rocked by the revelations in “Original Sin,” a bombshell new book by veteran journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, which reveals the shocking revelation that during his presidency, Joe Biden was suffering from dementia, but this was covered up so effectively that nobody noticed it except for everyone on the planet who is not a member of the Washington press corps. The question now is: If Biden was incapacitated, who was actually running the government? We can rest assured that we will soon have an answer, now that the Washington press corps has been alerted.

Meanwhile President Trump takes a break from changing his mind about tariffs to receive the gift of a luxury jet plane from Qatar, a generous nation that expects nothing in return. “Just treat us exactly the same way as you would anybody else who gave you a $400 million gift,” is the selfless attitude of the Qataris.

Also definitely not expecting any special favors are the 200 people who spend an average of more than a million dollars each on Trump’s cryptocurrency meme coin — which is named (really) “$TRUMP” — so they can attend a dinner with the president at the Trump National Golf Club. This is totally ethical. In fact having a personal cryptocurrency has been a U.S. presidential tradition dating all the way back to the Abraham Lin¢oin.

Speaking of Lincoln: On Memorial Day, a somber occasion when America honors its war dead, Trump posts a social-media message strongly reminiscent of the Gettysburg Address in its dignity and thoughtful eloquence. It begins (really): “HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY TO ALL, INCLUDING THE SCUM THAT SPENT THE LAST FOUR YEARS TRYING TO DESTROY OUR COUNTRY THROUGH WARPED RADICAL LEFT MINDS...”

...and so on for 109 thoughtful capitalized words, not one of which mentions our nation’s war dead, but you only have so much space on social media.

Meanwhile the Democrats, according to the New York Times, are spending $20 million on a research project code-named SAM, which stands for “Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan,” intended to figure out how the party can appeal to young men. So far the researchers have come up with a campaign based on the slogan: “The Democratic Party will hit a touchdown out of the ballpark for America! Because, like young males, we enjoy athletic sports games!” The Democrats plan to workshop this slogan with actual young males, once the researchers find out where they live.

In transportation news, Newark’s Liberty International Airport (motto: “Our Motto Has Been Canceled”) is plagued by flight disruptions after staffing problems reduce the number of available air-traffic controllers to one, Marty Fleegleman, who is unable to leave his post and has been peeing into a Gatorade bottle since Christmas. A spokesperson for the Federal Aviation Administration says “there is no reason for airline passengers to be concerned” and reminds pilots planning to land in Newark to “buzz the tower first in case Marty has dozed off.”

In a historic action, the College of Cardinals chooses the first U.S.-born pope, Robert Francis Prevost. The new pontiff, whose official name is Pope Bob I, pledges to reinvigorate the College of Cardinals football program, which last season had zero wins and 12 losses, including a 63-0 shellacking by the Sisters of Mercy.

Speaking of shellackings, in...

JUNE

...seven American B-2 stealth bombers, operating under conditions of strictest secrecy, take off from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri and, in a surprise attack that shocks the world, drop 14 massive “bunker buster bombs,” each weighing 30,000 pounds, on the headquarters of the personal-injury law firm Morgan and Morgan.

No, sorry, wishful thinking. In fact the bombs are dropped on Iran, which the Trump administration claims is trying to build nuclear weapons, although Iran insists that it is enriching uranium for, quote, “peaceful purposes such as agriculture.”

The bombing mission is called “Operation Midnight Hammer,” a name that was chosen over these candidates:

-- “Operation Big Stomping Boot of Consequences.”

-- “Operation FAFO.”

-- “Operation You Talkin’ To ME?”

-- “Operation We Have Come To Chew Bubblegum And Destroy Your Nuclear Facilities, And We Are All Out Of Bubblegum.”

-- “Operation Enrich THIS, Motherf****rs.”

Trump claims that the strike “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program, but Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in a brief public appearance that is cut short when an Israeli drone flies out of his turban, downplays the damage and warns that Iran’s nuclear program will soon be restored, and it will be “more peaceful than ever.”

In another controversial military operation, Trump sends National Guard troops to Los Angeles to quell civil unrest, but by the time the troops are able to reach the scene, after spending 14 hours gridlocked on the 101 freeway, the unrest has pretty much quelled itself. Basically Iran is a more mission-friendly environment.

In politics, New York City Democratic primary voters pick, as their mayoral candidate and almost-certain future mayor, Zohran Mamdani, an attractive and hip young social-media-savvy fellow with an exciting new idea for governing that has never before been proposed and appears to have no downside: giving away free stuff. Among his novel ideas is to have the city operate grocery stores, which would no doubt provide New York food shoppers with a consumer experience every bit as pleasant as the one they currently enjoy in the city’s legendarily reliable, safe and hygienic subway system.

Speaking of financial responsibility, in...

JULY

...a heated debate rages in Washington over the budget bill, as two competing ideologies clash over the nation’s financial future:

— One side believes that the federal government, for a variety of reasons, must continue to spend way more money than it actually has;

— Whereas the other side believes that the federal government, for somewhat different reasons, must continue to spend way more money than it actually has.

It comes down to the wire, but after many hours of passionate debate Congress passes, and President Trump signs, a bill under which the federal government will continue to spend way more money than it actually has. Both sides congratulate themselves, secure in the knowledge that they will be comfortably retired or dead when the massive ticking debt bomb they have helped create explodes all over whatever future generations are stupid enough to not have been born earlier.

With that pesky chore out of the way, Washington resumes being fixated on what Washington has clearly decided is the most important issue facing the nation: Jeffrey Epstein. He is the financier/dirtbag who died in 2019 in a New York City jail cell in what the Medical Examiner’s Office ruled was a suicide, although many people are skeptical, largely because immediately after the word “suicide” on the death certificate are the words “wink wink.”

The federal government allegedly has a massive trove of Epstein-related documents that allegedly either do or do not implicate many alleged individuals, including, allegedly, Donald Trump, who at one time said he was in favor of releasing the documents but is now saying we should forget about them and just move on, thereby guaranteeing that this is the only thing Washington can think about. If a Chinese nuclear submarine surfaced in the Houston Ship Channel, Washington’s main concern would be how it would affect the release of the Epstein files.

In business news, an incident at a Coldplay concert serves as a reminder to corporate executives of the number one rule of career success: Stay off the Kiss Cam.

Speaking of scandals, at the end of the month Eagle Jeans releases an ad featuring actress Sydney Sweeney, who makes a play on words involving “jeans” and “genes.” Naturally, this being 2025, some leading thinkers conclude that the ad is LITERALLY NAZI PROPAGANDA. The professional opinion-having classes spew out thousands of words about this controversy, as Sydney Sweeney and her jeans get sucked into the vast swirling cyclone of crazy that constitutes American political discourse, which is why the overwhelming majority of Americans want nothing to do with it.

Speaking of controversy, in...

AUGUST

...President Trump orders National Guard troops into Washington, D.C., to try to make everybody for God’s sake stop talking about Jeffrey Epstein. Tensions mount until, in a climactic confrontation, a heavily armed Guard unit storms the U.S. Capitol and finds itself in a dramatic standoff with Sen. Chuck Schumer, who addresses the guardsmen through a bullhorn at close range for more than three hours, ultimately forcing them to go lie down.

Meanwhile federal ICE agents, in a raid strongly condemned by civil-liberties organizations, deport the entire California state legislature.

But by far the biggest story in August, if not of all time, is that OMG OMG OMG Taylor Swift announces her engagement to the Future Mr. Taylor Swift, who presents her with an engagement ring believed to be the first piece of manmade jewelry visible from space.

In culture-war news, the Cracker Barrel restaurant chain makes what in a sane era would be viewed as a minor change to its logo. Naturally this sparks a massive backlash, this one coming from the opposite side in the culture war from the one that started the Sydney Sweeney backlash. After a few days of being backlashed, Cracker Barrel announces that it will keep the old logo, and the culture warriors resume their ceaseless hunt for a new thing to be outraged about.

This hunt does not take long, because lurking just over the horizon is...

SEPTEMBER

...when conservative activist Charlie Kirk is assassinated while speaking at Utah Valley University. Everyone agrees this is wrong.

I am of course joking. This is 2025, so a disturbing number of Americans think it’s OK to murder someone for expressing the wrong political views. Maybe you can find some humor in this.

On the Jeffrey Epstein front, a hearing of the House Oversight Committee exposes the world to this classy image:

On display at this hearing is an enlargement of a naughty birthday message to Epstein that was allegedly drawn and signed in the pubic region by Donald Trump. Trump vehemently denies that he created it, even though we all know he did, and has sued everybody involved for a jillion dollars.

Whether or not the drawing is authentic, the photo above is a perfect visual representation of the nation’s current level of political debate. The only way to make it more perfect would be to somehow incorporate Bernie Sanders demanding to know whether the birthday card had anything to say about the onesies.

And the federal excitement continues in...

OCTOBER

...when Congress, which at this point is focusing almost exclusively on Jeffrey Epstein, is unable to pass a funding bill, thereby forcing the federal government to shut down. As a result hundreds of millions of Americans suddenly find themselves forced to try to figure out what, exactly, the federal government does, because pretty much everything seems to go on as usual except for Yellowstone National Park, where the buffalo, upon realizing that they are not being paid, refuse to roam.

Meanwhile it’s an up-and-down month for President Trump. On the upside, he brokers a historic ceasefire deal in the Israel-Hamas conflict that promises to bring permanent lasting peace to the Middle East for the next 25 or possibly even 30 minutes. However this achievement is overshadowed by Trump’s decision to demolish the East Wing of the White House so he can build a huge and classy new ballroom with gold plating on every visible surface including the urinals. The project is expected to cost $300 million, to be provided by generous private donors who simply have a passion for ballrooms and expect nothing in return. Nevertheless polls show that the public largely disapproves of the East Wing demolition, forcing the administration to quietly shelve, at least for now, plans to modernize other aging Washington structures.

Abroad, thieves stage a daring daylight robbery of more than $100 million worth of rare jewelry from the Louvre Museum, which turns out to have the same level of security as a Coke machine. Louvre officials are deeply embarrassed by the brazen theft, and their humiliation only worsens when they discover that the Mona Lisa has also been stolen and replaced by a photograph of Bernie Sanders asking about the onesies, but everybody was too busy taking selfies to notice.

In sports news, federal authorities indict more than 30 people in connection with an alleged insider betting scandal involving the National Basketball Association. The NBA is shocked, shocked to learn that there is gambling going on, as are its official betting partners, FanDuel and DraftKings.

Speaking of surprises, in...

NOVEMBER

...Congress, after pausing briefly to fund the federal government, resumes the crucial work of obsessing about Jeffrey Epstein. The House Oversight Committee releases more than 20,000 pages of Epstein’s texts and emails, which reveal that right up until he got whacked his suicide, Epstein, despite being a convicted dirtbag, somehow managed to remain remarkably influential, corresponding regularly with many prominent people and serving as lieutenant governor of at least three states.

Meanwhile tensions are mounting in the Caribbean, where the Trump administration is using U.S. military forces to deter suspected Venezuelan drug traffickers by vaporizing them and their boats with Hellfire missiles. Some critics charge that these strikes violate international law, but Secretary of War and Hair Gel Pete Hegseth insists that they’re completely legal, noting that all of the missiles clearly display the Miranda Warning.

On a more nostalgic note, it’s the end of an era for the most venerable of all U.S. coins as the Philadelphia Mint produces the last-ever penny, which is presented, in a formal ceremony, to U.S. Treasurer Brandon Beach, who throws it into a wastebasket.

Speaking of ceremonies, in....

DECEMBER

....President Trump, attending the ceremonial FIFA World Cup ping-pong-ball draw, is finally recognized for his tireless, unstinting and selfless efforts to win a major peace award by being presented with the “FIFA Peace Prize,” which is an extremely prestigious and historic honor that has been in existence since approximately 15 minutes before the ceremony began, and which is MUCH CLASSIER than the so-called “Nobel Peace Prize” because in addition to a medal you get a big-ass gold trophy AND a certificate. The climatic close of the ceremony is a performance of the song that, more than any other, expresses the true spirit of both world peace and international athletic excellence: “YMCA,” by the Village People.

Meanwhile in the Caribbean, tensions continue to mount as a U.S. Coast Guard cutter attempts to seize a 250,000-ton cruise ship, the Bloat of the Seas, which Pete Hegseth says is believed to be carrying “a substantial number of suspected Venezuelan cigars.” The mission has to be aborted when the Coast Guard boarding party, attempting to ascend the side of the ship, is driven back by a torrent of buffet selections rained down on them by cruise passengers wielding dinner plates the size of manhole covers.

In another foreign-policy development, Secretary of State Marco Rubio issues a memo directing all U.S. embassies and diplomatic posts to use the Times New Roman 14-point font. I am not making this up. Rubio’s memo reverses a 2023 memo by Anthony Blinken ordering everybody to use Calibri, a sans-serif font. Within hours Russia, a nation that historically has always respected and feared the serif, withdraws all of its troops from Ukraine.

In Washington, the Department of Justice releases several hundred thousand more Jeffrey Epstein documents, of which there seems to be an inexhaustible supply. If all the Epstein documents that have been released to date were printed out, they could cover the entire state of Vermont with a document blanket 11 feet high, of which at least two feet would be photos of Bill Clinton. None of these documents is expected to lead to criminal prosecution, but nobody cares; we’ve reached the point where releasing Jeffrey Epstein documents is simply one of the many things that the federal government does for some long-forgotten reason, which is also why we have a Department of Commerce.

Christmas Eve provides a much-needed break from politics, as children everywhere eagerly anticipate the arrival of Santa Claus, soaring south from the North Pole on his magical, toy-laden sleigh, getting as far as Milwaukee, where he and his undocumented reindeer are taken into custody by ICE.

So it has not been a stellar year. But it’s almost over, thank God. It’s time, at last, to put 2025 behind us and look ahead to the year to come, which is bound to be better, right? RIGHT?

Anyway, that’s what we’ll all be hoping for, as we gather on New Year’s Eve with our friends and loved onesies to watch the big ball drop.

I’ll conclude by wishing a Happy New Year to all of you Substack readers, especially you wonderful paying subscribers. Thank you for your support, and please be kind to each other in the comments. I’ll see you in a couple of weeks.

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