1. The Aswan Dam 2. The Leaning Tower of Pisa 3. Chandigarh 4. The road closures for the 2025 Philadelphia Marathon

The AARP should host a punk/hardcore festival. I think it’s time.

I grew up in Delaware County and have lived the majority of my life in Philadelphia. Here is my impression of the HBO drama Task: “Youse didn’t do the crime how I told youse to do the crime! Now I’m gonna kill youse! But first, microwave me a Steak-umms…wiz wit!”

New Club 8 is just the best.

See you again in 25 years. In the meantime, listen to @meettheblackburns.bsky.social

Remember that time they were going to build a basketball arena in Center City and it was going to be totally fine because SEPTA was totally going to up its game with Regional Rail and the Broad Street Line so people wouldn’t feel like they had to drive in?

Possible 2026 Kennedy Center honorees: 1. The guy who yelled “Don’t tase me, bro!” At John Kerry’s Secret Service detail 2. Big & Rich (of “Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy” 3. Pizza Rat

Forget it Jake. It’s Chinatown. Forget it Jake: It’s Chinatown. Forget it Jake; it’s Chinatown. Forget it Jake—it’s Chinatown.

Grief covers a lot of different genres: body horror, cosmic horror, indie family comedy-drama, auteur experimental…

When life gives you lemons, make a lemon cannon.

Egregious AI fail.

Theory: People who say "leap and the net appears" in social situations are the same people who say "we're going to build the plane while we fly it" in professional situations. Different sentiments, united by weirdly cavalier attitudes toward gravity.

“American Pope” sounds like the name of a really weird ___ song.

Peter Medawar is a severely underrated thinker.

Wondering if “Reissue Label Dad” would have any viability as a lifestyle brand.

I interviewed Stephen West of the great “Philosophize This!” podcast. I did so for Orange Blossom Ordinary, which does not have a Bluesky account. Good morning, @estice.bsky.social !

Actual question: What is with this collective need we apparently have to posthumously destroy Joan Didion’s life and work? It’s weird. The Didion/Babitz book was an embarrassment and this looks worse. I’m not even a super fan (except for her Martha Stewart essay which, seriously, I’ll fight you).

At a community college, the programs that accept the most federal $ are the most workforce-oriented. So when you cut federal $ from a cc, the progs u end up shuttering are the ones that do direct job training. Progs that get little if any federal $? History, Philosphy, etc. Let that sink in.

Situation comedy, as opposed to all those comedies that just exist in a fathomless, silent void.

You can pry athleisure from my cold, dead hands.

Most people are not succinct.

If you were wondering how to destroy a multi-billion dollar agricultural sector with bad trade, energy, and health policies, I wrote a helpful how-to guide for @thedispatchmedia.bsky.social

2018 was, in retrospect, an interesting time to start teaching a History of Capitalism class at a community college. Since then, let’s just say the course materials haven’t serenely rolled over from semester to semester.

There’s such a thing as too tactful.

Stop booing Shohei Ohtani. It’s like booing the Grand Canyon. Seriously, people, get it together.

47 = 34 This should be on shirts hats, tailfins, whatever you got.

My favorite Val Kilmer role is one where, weirdly enough, you never see his face. He plays a hallucination of Elvis by the main character, Clarence (Christian Slater). Elvis tells Clarence to do all sorts of crazy things, and is the first tip off to the audience that Clarence is, in fact, nuts.

My favorite comedy writer is the anonymous hero who updates the @metacritic.com tv premiere dates.

Hello this is my office right now. I am the king of society.

What Canada *could* be doing right now: building a wall you can see from space on their southern border. What Canada is actually doing: spending money on billboards that attempt to politely appeal to American economic self-interest. Said it before, will say again: better friends than we deserve

This is a very difficult record to describe but I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that it’s a very improbable mix of vintage Sarah Records and Death in June. Anyway I can’t stop listening and really hope Slumberland or somebody puts it out in the US because overseas shipping is out of hand rn.

When they did this in Somalia it led to a lot of piracy so I guess that’s a form of job creation.

Remember that time we were playing croquet and the Queen was all aggro and she kept sentencing people to death by beheading and Alice had just moved here and she was totally freaked out and finally the Gryphon took her aside and was like “brah, no one is actually getting their heads chopped off ok?”

Future presidential matchups: 2028: JD Vance v [centrist D w name recognition] OUTCOME: R 2032: JD Vance v [progressive D w name recognition] OUTCOME: R 2036: Kid Rock (R) v Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (D) OUTCOME: D 2040: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson v AI crypto celeb (R) OUTCOME: R 2044: n/a

Certainly one of the greatest cover versions of all time.

If the US were to actually attempt to annex Canada, the Canadian approach to insurgency would make the FLN look like BTS. Seriously, this is a largely rural, armed country with highly developed national consciousness and capacity for collective action. It’s not too late to pull back from this.

People gravitate toward the most complex explanations they can understand. Less complex explanations seem naive. More complex explanations seem nonsensical. If this is correct then I believe the above because it’s the most complex thing I can grasp about how beliefs work. And now my head hurts.

The future of social media.

Largely agree (though I don’t think The Apprentice belongs on this pile). But you know what definitely does? People losing their minds because Civil War refused to explain to them who the bad guys were. That was weird.

Why are there suburbs and exurbs but no superurbs?

Two possible explanations: 1. The honey and vinegar are a metaphor but he’s literally gripping them with iron. 2. He’s literally giving them jars of honey (as opposed to vinegar) but the iron grip is metaphorical.

Sometimes I wake up thinking about the Pump Up the Volume soundtrack and then I just think about it all day.

“They’re the donut people.”

The White House is about to issue an executive order abolishing the Dept of Education. In a move with equal constitutional weight behind it, I just signed an executive order abolishing the Atlanta Braves, every Bad Religion album except Against the Grain, and the phrase “breakfast for dinner.”

Here to add that if you live in the greater Philadelphia area, this guy is absolutely ubiquitous: commercials, billboards, etc. If you want to track how this reads to a certain type of voter in the region, picture how your kid would feel if Bluey told them Santa wasn’t real.

Thought: The average American hockey fan has a much better feel for Canada and Canadians than the average American who isn’t a hockey fan. Further thought: The average American hockey fan is probably more clued in rn to how bad the US govt has screwed up by picking a fight w the Canadian govt.

Songs from the late 80s and early 90s about Tipper Gore and/or corrupt televangelists.

Okay but now you gotta cede all that land from the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo back to Mexico. Texas too…

And the new leader of the free world is…

Hello. March 15 in Doylestown at Nomad Supply Co w Christina Ward, @flatwaves.bsky.social and @civilrats.bsky.social Ides of March ok