Monthly Archives: February 2018

IT’S ALL HAPPENING!

by John Walters | 6 Comments

by John Walters

A note (we almost forgot): Yesterday, on an unseasonably sublime February afternoon here in Gotham City, we happened across Jerry Seinfeld sucking a lollipop, strolling along with a man we think was George Wallace. Seinfeld’s home is located near MH worldwide headquarters, but we had never encountered him in the wild. As is our habit with such celebs/heroes, we thanked him by NOT approaching him/snapping a photo. But it was a pretty cool moment.

Tweet du Jour

 

Starting Five

A Good Guy With A Gun Store*

*The judges are still mulling, ‘Show Us! You’re Dick’s!”

Taking the law into its own hands so to speak, Dick’s Sporting Goods announced this morning that it is IMMEDIATELY ending all sales of assault rifles. The national retailer also announced that it would no longer sell any gun to anyone under 21 and that it would no longer sell high-capacity magazines.

“When we saw what happened in Parkland, we were so disturbed and upset,” said Edward Stack, the CEO whose father founded the store in Pennsylvania in 1948. “We love these kids and their rallying cry, ‘enough is enough.’ It got to us.”

Stack

“The whole hunting business is an important part of our business, and we know there is going to be backlash on this,” said Stack. “But we’re willing to accept that. If the kids in Parkland are being brave enough to stand up and do this, we can be brave enough to stand up with them.”

 

We can’t help but wonder if Mr. Stack saw On The Waterfront last night and got a major case of conscience. Either way, a good guy with a gun store is about to make a huge difference. And the tide of the battle is beginning to turn.

2. They Went From Jared

Pretty much everything about Jared Kushner is creepy, from his father, Charles, who set up his uncle with a hooker and recorded it to end his marriage as revenge for Jared’s aunt (the man’s wife and Charles’ sister) squealing on him, to the fact that his family’s largest real estate holding is 666 Fifth Avenue. Apparently, General Kelly agrees as yesterday the White House Chief of Staff ended the whole “interim security clearance” conundrum by denying Jared security clearance.

 

Ivanka, you could have done so much better. Your spouse is a louse.

3. Ryan, Lyin’ and Dyin’

Yesterday Speaker of the House Paul Ryan said he was, quote, “very, very, very troubled” by the events at Parkland. You know, that more than twice as many people were murdered in about five minutes as the Manson family butchered in two nights. But when Ryan, who has received more money from the NRA than any other current member of the House of Representatives, was asked about possible legislation to ban the sale of assault weapons or to raise the minimum age to 21, he went down the laundry list: mental health, the failure of law enforcement to respond yada yada yada…everything BUT making it more difficult to obtain a gun.

 

Here’s the thing: In 2001 a few thousand American were killed on one September morning and we don’t recall many politicians making a big deal about the fact that FBI field agents had warned their bosses about suspicious characters taking flying lessons without bothering to learn how to land; we don’t recall too many of them taking on TSA for not doing a better job.

What we do recall is the swift passage of the Patriot Act (Oct. 26), a piece of legislation that threw “unlawful search and seizure” (Fourth Amendment) and “habeas corpus” (Sixth Amendment) out the window in return for Americans feeling better about catching Muslims. Exponentially, by a multiple of 15 or so, more Americans are killed each year by guns and yet men like Ryan will not make a single move toward any type of reasonable weapons legislation, decrying all as an attack on the Second Amendment.

Funny how that works.

4. LeBron Keeps It Real

 

For someone who never attended college, LeBron James has a pretty decent understanding of how big-time college hoops works. Here’s the problem for us, fans of college hoops:

1) We don’t have any problem with college basketball players getting a bigger share of the pie, particularly when the NCAA is so unabashedly mercenary that they hold the Final Four in massive football stadiums that detract from the quality of the game itself (among other things).

2) We DO think that having an annual rotation of the central cast of characters (i.e., the players) has only hurt the game as we fans feel like orphans who are being shuttled from home to home. There’s a reason Love, American Style never became a big success as a show. College hoops is more like Love Boat, with coaches and commentators being the ship’s crew (and yes, this means that Bill Raftery is Captain Stubing). Either way, love him AND hate him, having someone like Grayson Allen around helps fans care about the game. From a marketing standpoint, fans need more guys like him.

By our Love Boat analogy, Marvin Bagley is the Charo of college hoops. Or maybe the Bert Convy.

3) Neither we nor any of the PAY THEM proponents have any real idea how paying players will affect the future of college hoops (or football). Nothing occurs in a vacuum. Ostensibly, paying players will help them, which is great, but on the other side it won’t curb the underground market and it will lead to a plethora of labor issues because now players will be employees (“Trae Young To Miss March Madness Due To Tax Evasion”). That may not be a suitable reason to refrain from paying them; I’m simply pointing out the Law of Unintended Consequences.

The root of the issue is simple: Too many college athletes are (and long have been, for a century now) athletes first and college students second (and often third or 44th). The crisis will never be averted until you create a league for players who are in college simply as hoops vocational training (pay them) and another for those who are primarily students. And schools can make the choice of which road they prefer to go down. That’s the simple answer.

But, as Jalen Rose suggested yesterday, nothing will probably change until players boycott the NCAA tournament. It could happen. It may happen. It should happen.

5. Mercedes Rule?

“Diesel” does sound very German, no?

In Stuttgart, Germany, one of the country’s most pollution-choked cities, a court has ruled that city officials may be allowed to ban diesel-powered cars downtown in order to improve air quality. Stuttgart is the Detroit of Germany, Deutschland’s car capital. Also, the local soccer team plays in Mercedes-Benz Stadium, but soon you may not be able to drive a Mercedes to go see them play.

Music 101 

Whole Lotta Rosie

Vintage AC/DC from 1977. Bon Scott on lead vocals, Angus Young on lead guitar. The Australian response to Queen’s “Fat-Bottomed Girls.”

Remote Patrol

The Bridge On The River Kwai

8 p.m. TCM

Are you enjoying TCM’s “31 Days of Oscar” as much as we are? I know people say jazz, but I’d argue that the greatest art form that America has given the world is motion pictures. And this 1957 Best Picture winner from David Lean is one of the all-timer greats. Starring Sir Alec Guinness (“What have I done?”) and William Holden, the film won seven Oscars and was filmed in Sri Lanka. There’s something to be said for going on location.

IT’S ALL HAPPENING!

by John Walters | 11 Comments

by John Walters

Tweet du Jour

Apparently, witches do exist.

Starting Five

Worst Responder*

*The judges will also accept, “Donald, Duck!”

Cadet Bone Spurs, who received five deferments from Vietnam and who literally took an escalator down to announce that he’d run for president, boldly proclaimed yesterday to the nation’s governors that, unlike those Broward cowards, ” I really believe I’d run in there, even if I didn’t have a weapon, and I think most of the people in this room would’ve done that too.”

Rrrrrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiighhhhhht.

Not coincidentally, Robert Mueller once did charge through machine gun fire to retrieve a wounded fellow Marine in Vietnam. Maybe he can tell Donnie boy all about it if they have a one-on-one chat.

2. No-Gun Warriors

Here’s the thing about comic book superheroes. They’re out there fighting the worst villains imaginable, and all of them are unarmed. Superman? Faster than a speeding bullet, but he never fires one. Spider-Man? Nope. Captain America? Carries a shield to deflect fire but he’s never packing heat himself.

And the list goes on. Kinda makes you wonder what the D.C. Comics and Marvel Comics folk were trying to say to youngsters, no?

3. Davis Love

The Pelicans’ Anthony Davis puts up 53 points in a 125-116 victory against the Phoenix Black Hole Suns. It’s the sixth-year big man’s fifth 40-plus point effort in the past 10 games, all wins, which shows you what happens to Davis’ offensive game when Boogie Cousins is off the floor.

Davis is averaging 28.2 ppg now, second-best in the NBA. He’s also second in the NBA in blocked shots. He’ll be getting some MVP love at season’s end.

4. Welcome To The Big East

Saquon Barkely would’ve been the Big East’s best player last season.

Have you ever made one wrong turn and then, instead of going back to a point where you knew where you were, plowed ahead hoping that somehow you’d find the correct route, only to make more wrong turns and be seriously lost? (Didn’t you just describe your career, JW? Hey, shaddup!).

Anyway, as we saw that the Midwest-centric Big Ten is holding its conference hoops tourney in NYC this week and looked at Power 5 conferences last night, with Rutgers in the Big Ten and Missouri in the SEC and West Virginia in the Big 12, that’s what we thought of. Now, number one, it’s basketball season and not football season, but this is a football season idea. And number two, we’re not here to solve all the nation’s problems, just our little quadrant. But here’s our idea, and there is no good reason that this could not happen.

Create a sixth power conference, the Big East. The following schools would be members: Penn State (currently Big Ten), Pittsburgh (currently ACC), Temple (AAC), Rutgers (Big Ten), UConn (AAC), Syracuse (ACC), Boston College (ACC), Buffalo (MAC), Maryland (ACC), Navy (AAC), UMass (independent) and Army (independent).

A dozen northeastern schools, from as far south as College Park north and as far west as Pittsburgh. Easier travel. Greater fan interest in the northeast quadrant. Right now you only have one super-sexy school among the dozen, but that might change as these schools played in a league whose identity matched their geography. That’s a freebie for you, FBS.

5. Cornutopia!

The U.S. News & World Report has just named Iowa as the Best State for 2018. Iowa, which as a friend once informed us is an acronym for “Idiots Out Walking Around,” is home to numerous caucuses and zero national parks. Iowa also has zero major professional sports teams, which we believe enhances the quality of life, i.e. the absence of such.

Now, we’ve been to Iowa a few times and found it exceedingly pleasant. Kinda cold in the winter time, but we loved Cedar Falls and Des Moines, too. Still hoping to make it to Ames. But “Best State?” Somewhere Vermont is hemming and hawing. As is Oregon.

The top five, according to the ranking: Iowa, Minnesota, Utah, North Dakota, New Hampshire. The bottom five: from 46-50: Alabama, West Virginia, New Mexico, Mississippi, Louisiana. “S-E-C! S-E-C!”

Music 101 

Green Grow The Rushes

There are quite a few songs that you could nominate as REM-iest REM tune (“The Flowers of Guatemala,” “Camera,” “Pilgrimage,” etc.), but this track’s sweeping harmonies near the end merit its inclusion. From the 1985 Southern-Gothic vinyl, Fables of the Reconstruction.

Remote Patrol

On The Waterfront

8 p.m. TCM

“You don’t understand. I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let’s face it.” And that’s how you get a one-way ticket to Palookaville. In this 19564 classic, Marlon Brando, in one of the greatest performances in Hollywood history, gets the short end of the stick in dealing with organized crime. Eighteen years A quarter century later, in an even more highly acclaimed film, he would become the head of organized crime. For both roles he deservedly won Best Actor Oscars.

“

IT’S ALL HAPPENING!

by John Walters | 3 Comments

by John Walters

Tweet du Jour

 

Starting Five

Sean Gone?

“Career-ending,” ESPN’s Jay Bilas said Saturday morning on a live edition of ESPN’s “College GameDay” in Lubbock. “I can’t imagine [Sean Miller] ever coaching in college again.”

On Friday night ESPN reported that FBI wiretaps heard Miller talking with a sports agent, Christian Dawkins, about paying $100,000 to ensure star player Deandre Ayton signed with the Wildcats. In the aftermath Ayton’s family has issued a statement that they are “outraged” and “disgusted” by reports implying that he was involved in any illegal (by NCAA standards) behavior.

Miller: 99% perspiration, 1% inspiration

Miller, who did not coach Arizona in Eugene on Saturday, has only said that “I…am confident that I will be vindicated.”

Did Bilas overstep? Or is Miller whistling in the graveyard? Meanwhile, flood warnings will be in effect if and when Miller sits down with an FBI interrogation unit.

2. America Fourth!

Any sport in which you can win a gold medal while wearing khakis is a sport the MH staff oughta try

The PyeongChang Olympics ended with Norway as our new hibernal overlords. The Norwegians would win 39 total medals, most of any nation. Germany finished second with 31 medals, although they equaled the Scandinavian nation’s gold total of 14. Finishing third? Canada, with 29 medals, and then came the U.S.A. with 23.

Gold medals for the Yanks? Four in snowboarding, and one each in women’s hockey, freestyle skiing, alpine skiing, and our first ever in women’s cross-country and men’s curling.

In Saturday’s women’s 30K cross-country ski race, Austrian Teresa Stadlober was in second place with just 7K remaining when she veered right on a downhill slope as the rest of the field correctly turned left. Stadlober’s wrong turn cost her a spot on the podium, as she finished 9th. “I had a blackout,” said Stadlober, who admirably shouldered the blame for her blooper. “I don’t know why I took the wrong way.”

Only Michael Phelps and Larisa Latynina, both summer Olympians, own more Olympic hardware than Bjoergen.

The race’s winner, Marit Bjoergen of Norway, won five medals total in PyeongChang. That’s more than any other athlete. The 37 year-old retires with 15 Winter Olympics medals total, the most of anyone in Winter Olympics history, and eight golds.

3. Black Pander

Walters. Thankfully, no relation.

As Black Panther was eclipsing the $700 million mark at the box office in just its second weekend, a CPAC communication director Ian Walters was telling a table full of people at a CPAC dinner Friday night, “We elected Mike Steele as chairman because he was a black guy, that was the wrong thing to do.”

Well, that got out. And then CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp, a Notre Dame alum (we’re sorry, world) went on air with Steele and did a horrible job of whitesplainin’ Walter’s remark. As for Steele, who has been a Republican for 41 years, did he not realize how overtly racist a majority of the GOP has become in the last 10 years? Was this a revelation to him?

Michael Steele joins Christopher Steele as folks who get under the GOP’s skin. Funny that a party so irrationally in love with coal is so irrationally in hate with Steele.

4. What’s Up, Doc?

This is Timothy Cunningham, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta. Nearly two weeks ago Cunningham, 35, left work claiming that he felt sick. No one has seen him since. This sounds like the start of a dystopian biohazard sci-fi horror film.  “I feel like I’m in a horrible ‘Black Mirror’ episode,” says his sister, Tiara Cunningham.

Cunningham, who has degrees from Morehouse and Harvard,  left behind his wallet, car keys and dog.

5. Rome Snow

The Eternal City had its largest snowfall in six years this weekend. Was it only a week or two ago that Paris morphed into a winter wonderland, too? You’re next, London.

Snowball fight in St. Peter’s Square

 

Reserves

Walker Capital

You need not be a Mindhunter to ascertain that NFLX is a good stock to own

Among high school friends, the MH staff is known as “Walker” and a year or so ago we began offering stock tips to those friends (all of whom have greater net worth) as Walker Capital. With that in mind, we’d like to apologize for our MH Stock Pick of 2018 (GBTC).

We’ll still own it, the accountability of having chosen that. But there’s no reason you need to own the stock. So what do we suggest? No big surprises, but we highly recommend Amazon (AMZN), Boeing (BA), Nvidia (NVDA) and Netflix (NFLX).  Just trying to help. Look where the stocks are year-to-date—AMZN up 29% , BA up 20%, NVDA up 24% , NFLX up 47% —and we’ll keep an eye on where they’ll finish at the end of the year.

Music 101

Cult of Personality

In terms of crunchy guitar rock, Living Colour is/were the Michael Steele of the genre. The New York City band won a Grammy in 1989 for Best Hard Rock performance for this song, which went to 13 on the Billboard chart. And chances are future members of Rage Against The Machine owned the band’s debut album, which featured this song.

Remote Patrol

The Best Years Of Our Lives

8 p.m. TCM

Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, etc. This film that focuses around three U.S. servicemen returning home from World War II and the difficulties they face garnered a total of seven Academy Awards. Also, The Godfather comes on at 6 p.m. on AMC if you want to see another movie indirectly revolving around a returning World War II hero.

AMERICAN IDIOTS

by John Walters | 3 Comments

by John Walters

Let’s preface this essay with two notes: 1) Let’s not for a moment overlook that while President Trump was speaking at CPAC, news broke that former Trump aide Rick Gates reversed field and opted to plead guilty on two counts in the Russia probe. Ultimately, that will have a far more far-reaching effect than anything Trump said at the latter-day Reichstag  gathering 2) Earlier this week a tweep advised me that perhaps I’d be more effective if I didn’t tell people that I thought they were idiots when I debated points with them. He’s mostly correct, but it’s nigh impossible not to think of Trump’s disciples and the NRA extremists as morons, and they’ve done or said nothing to disabuse me of that notion. So if I speak to them as if they’re morons below, it’s only because they’ve earned the designation.

What is the calculus of tragedy? What is the arithmetic of stupidity?

There are, in the most conservative estimate I can find (and I know how much the NRA worships conservatives, and vice-versa), at least 25,000 high schools in the U.S.A. So let’s grant Donald Trump and NRA director Wayne LaPierre their wish and place a concealed weapon with an ADEPT staffer at every high school, making them a hard target. Never mind the expense of that nor the fact that public high schools are tragically under-resourced.

Let’s put a gun in every high school.

Two effects: 1) If someone really wants to do damage, he (not “or she”; it’s never a female) will simply move on to middle schools or elementary schools. Yay! Another Sandy Hook! 2) You’ve suddenly placed a lethal weapon in a community filled with people who are either underpaid or at the most emotionally volatile and fragile stage in their lives. What could possibly go right?

 


This is actually the solution to the problem.

Let’s tackle number two first. Never mind the stupidity in imagining that a gunman with an AR-15 would attack a school and that some staffer would A) engage him and/or take him out and B) that there’d be no collateral fatalities due to this. Let’s just assume all potential gunmen leave high schools alone. You still have 25,000 campuses with a gun. Now let’s say in a normal year 50 high school students are murdered in mass shootings. That would be awful.

However, do you realize that it would only require 1/5 of 1% (or .2%) of those guns to fall into the wrong hands and account in even a single fatality to equal that amount of carnage? In other words, if at one out of every 500 high schools in the USA one person killed another person due to a gun in that school, you’d equal the amount of deaths in mass shootings. Instead of getting a splash of blood like you did at Douglas High, you’d get trickles of blood at various high schools that would not have the same BREAKING NEWS effect, but would almost certainly lead to more gun deaths.

As to the first effect, a gunman attacking a softer target, there are more middle schools and elementary schools in the USA than high schools. At the very least, twice as many. So you want to arm them, too? Now you’re back to the problem I just addressed.

Either way, putting more guns out there amongst more people will ALWAYS lead to more deaths. Why? Because you can’t change human nature. People are still going to become angry or jealous or emotionally unhinged, and that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re—what was the President’s word?— “sickos.”

But people get upset and are emotional wrecks. They are emotionally fragile. Teens especially so. And to assume that in a high school environment some of those 25,000 weapons are not going to go missing, or be stolen, and that after that happens that there will be no fatal consequences, well, I’d call that being tragically naive on Trump’s part if I didn’t know that like most things he says, it’s really just incredibly dishonest.

 

He actually said this. And the CPAC gang, all of whom consider themselves evangelicals or Christians or God-fearing, cheered. Which makes them hypocrites, because it’s the POLAR OPPOSITE of what Jesus taught. But they’d rather be hypocrites than let go of their AMERICA FIRST! perspective.

The variable that we cannot alter is human nature. The variable that we can modify is gun accessibility. Australia enacted stricter gun laws in 1997 after the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, which was carried out by one man with an AR-15, claimed 35 lives. The Aussies have not endured a single mass shooting (five or more fatally shot) since. Japan has strict gun laws and in a free nation of 127 million people suffers fewer than 10 gun-related fatalities per year.

Some of those dramatic statistical opposites between those nations and the U.S., which deals with 33,000 gun deaths annually, are due to cultural differences. But mostly it’s because of accessibility to guns.

Trump and the NRA know all of this, of course. But there’s certainly no money in it for the NRA to have less guns manufactured and bought, which in turn means less campaign money for the politicians such as Trump who espouse their views.

Trump wants to build a wall on the border of Mexico and the U.S.A. because ostensibly the wall will make it more difficult for Mexicans to illegally immigrate here. Though even he acknowledges it will be virtually impossible to eliminate illegal immigration. Funny. When you argue that making guns less accessible, basically building a wall between guns and mass shootings, would curtail the amount of gun-related deaths, Trump and his ilk argue that it would not eliminate them altogether. As if that’s a reason not to try it.

 

It’s so easy to call Deplorables on their bullshit hypocrisy. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel with an AR-15 that you bought without even having to show proper identification.

Donald Trump said a lot of stupid sh*t at CPAC on Friday, and the dumber his statement, the more he was cheered. The one thing he said that wasn’t stupid was, “We need more Republicans.” And he’s right. And as long as the people at CPAC continue to piss on the dispossessed and the minorities and on the teenagers who are or will soon be of voting age and are demanding a change in gun laws, they’ll need even more Republicans. They’re drawing from an empty deck, though.

***

Two more thoughts, unrelated to guns but stuff that came to mind today: 1) Did you notice at the start of his speech that Trump turned his back to the audience and patted down his coif, a not-so-subtle message to the blithering idiots who adore him that maybe just maybe that video of him boarding Air Force One on a blustery day two Fridays back was “Fake News?” It wasn’t. It’s just that the glue holds better indoors.

2) I thought about this this afternoon. Ask the CPAC crowd and V.P. Pence why they loathe homosexuals and their No. 1 answer is “because it’s unnatural.” Fine. So how come they don’t despise women with breast implants (and I’m not talking cancer survivors)?

IT’S ALL HAPPENING!

by John Walters | 6 Comments

by John Walters

Tweet Du Jour

 

Starting Five

 It’s Zagitova Time

Like matryoshka dolls, Russian skating phenoms pop out one after the other—and as they age, they become German citizens to retain Olympic status. Last night 15 year-old Alina Zagitova skated to gold in ladies’ free skate for (Olympic Athletes from) Russia while her 17 year-old training partner, two-time defending world champ Yevgenia Medvedeva, earned silver. Last week Aliona Savchenko, originally of Ukraine, was half of the figure skating pairs gold medal duo that won gold in their event.

Zagitova grabbed OAR’s first gold of the Games.

Zagitova and Medvedeva each scored 156.65 in the free skate. The tie was broken because Zagitova scored 1.31 points higher in component scores, which may be the same thing as we used to call “compulsory figures,” which the MH staff is too lazy to look up because, let’s face it, it’s going to be four years before most of us care about this again (which is our way of saying Susie B. will clear it up in the Comments).

These racing snowmen would find themselves in abominable conditions

What’s left in the Pyeongchang Olympics? Men’s hockey gold medal game, four-man bobsled and the women’s 30 km mass start cross-country ski race. We’ve got an idea for an event that could be added to the Winter Olympics final weekend: an arctic ultra event, sort of like the existing Yukon Arctic Ultra. Racers would begin on Friday morning and need to traverse 100 miles using only themselves as locomotion. No stages. No skis or snowshoes. You tote your own gear. It would be like the Summer Olympics marathon, only with a greater likelihood of frostbite.

2. Bloodbath And Beyond*

Wayne LaPierre: a bad guy with a gun lobby

*The judges acknowledge that we pilfered this from an episode of The Simpsons

It occurred to the MH staff that maybe we should start measuring time in terms of mass shootings: “Why, I haven’t seen you since before Sandy Hook” or “We got married shortly after Columbine.” Anyway, here’s what happened in the world of gun nuttery yesterday:

—otherwise sane “legacy media” such as CNN and MSNBC had on guests to honestly debate whether or not we should arm teachers (excuse us, ADEPT teachers), which is like debating whether or not McDonald’s cashiers should also perform appendectomies.

 

—The dude who was armed and whose job it was to provide security at Douglas High resigned. Turns out he wanted no part of confronting an assailant with an AR-15 with his puny service revolver and thus never proceeded toward the shots. Honestly, can you blame him (okay, just a little; it was his job…but it was also a suicide mission). Anyway, that seems to be an answer to the aforementioned debate.

 

The answer to safer schools is not a campus version of Paul Blart: Mall Cop

—at CPAC, NRA CEO (that’s a lot of capitalized letters in a row, sorry) Wayne LaPierre, whose salary runs north of $5 million per year, blasted the “elites” of the nation who want to take away your guns. LaPierre, it should be noted, receives numerous deferments to avoid service in Vietnam due to a “nervous condition,” which afflicts anyone who heads into a jungle to face the Vietcong, but whatevs.

 

—In presidential tweets, the same person who had scribbled in his notes a reminder of “I hear you” accused CNN of scripting questions in its Tuesday night town hall, but then this guy never accuses people of something without all the facts to back up such accusations, so we should probably totally believe him.

 

—This article in The Atlantic by Heather Sher, a radiologist who was working triage after the Douglas High shooting, on how the AR-15 causes relatively catastrophic wounds, is essential reading.

There’s so much more, so much more, but let’s move on (Susie B., you can put addenda in the Comments).

3. Making Fascism Fashionable

Turns out you were always here (if you’re white)

In an email sent to staff members Thursday, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director L. Francis Cissna announced the agency’s new mission statement. The notable difference between the old and new mission statements is that the phrase “a nation of immigrants” has been deleted.

4. Jen’s Back! (Auggghhh!!!!)

Last week in our essay on clickbait, we used Jennifer Aniston on the cover of magazines to demonstrate that before there was internet clickbait, the hardcopy version of that was putting hot mess celebs with good figures on magazine covers. As if to to affirm our assertion, the editors of both US Weekly and People have Ms Aniston on the covers of their mags this week. Reason: She split with hubby Justin Theroux and hey, isn’t Brad Pitt available again?

Remember this cover? Oh wait! Are we being hypocrites???

Meanwhile, we dare you to Google Image “Jennifer Aniston magazine covers.” You’d think she was the best actress in ever just by the volume.

5.  Drexel Comes Back!

In the largest comeback in Division I men’s history, the Drexel Dragons overcame a 34-point deficit to defeat Delaware, 85-83. The Blue Hens led 53-19 in the first half, but then apparently let Drexel charge forward as if they were Washington crossing the Delaware Turnpike (“we all have places to go!”).

For what it’s worth, both teams are now 12-18.

Reserves

The most popular company in terms of hedge fund ownership of its stocks? Amazon. No surprise.

 

***

We recommend this New York Times piece on Trump and empathy. A Douglas High shooting victim whom he visited in Florida said, “I’ve never been so unimpressed with a person in my life.”

****

If, like us, you enjoyed School Ties and Bedazzled, here’s a Where Have You Been? piece on Brendan Fraser in GQ that you might enjoy.

Music 101

Have You Seen Me Lately

Counting Crows: The Berkeley band’s sophomore effort, Recovering The Satellites, dropped when they were America’s band you-most-wanted-to-punch-in-the-face: white lead singer with dreds, America wasn’t ready for that yet, and then he had to be so pretentious with how he changed the phrasings of the song live (that’s why we’re using the album version here; it’s the best version) and also committing the cardinal sin of dating Courteney Cox. Anyway, Adam Duritz can be a little much, a little affected, but he’s got a stupendously good voice and writes wonderful lyrics. Van Morrison-wannabe? Maybe. There are worse things.

Remote Patrol

Winter Olympics

8 p.m. NBC

The final weekend night of the Games. Enjoy your four-man bobsled and if you have enough to drink and are out with friends, try to replicate four bros jumping into a tight space in your nearest booth.