I like that a required part of any book about the Spanish Civil War or the Normandy campaign is the “my God was Hemingway a self-centered prick” anecdote

Come sit by my side, if you’re Scandy Do not leave for expensive Swedish raves Just remember the Red River Valley* And the Norwegian churches made of staves *Original may be about a different Red River. Really, who can say

Update to this post: am in Fargo, ND of all damn places, where my hotel is above a rock solid food hall where I got a perfectly decent lobster roll and a good Galician wine.

We recently got a Corolla hybrid and I have now spent a total of $40 in gas to get between Madison and (almost) Fargo, having started on a half tank. Hell yeah. This concludes the dad post.

Stopped briefly in Minneapolis on my drive to Fargo. Frowning to make sure everybody knows that I disapprove of what a hellhole it is

Roadtrips are for eldritch horrors

Something fascinating about the International Brigades is how many people who had fought on different sides in other wars fought together in Spain. Not so surprising for WWI, but there were also some White Russians serving together with Red Army vets from the Russian Civil War. Also Brits and IRA.

Hello there, it’s your pal VO Nguyen Giáp. Couldn’t help but notice the skill issue you got going on! Probably don’t want advice from somebody who beat Japan, France, America, and China. Your thing sounds hard too.

Generally I start from the premise that everything is political and go from there, it serves me pretty well in making some degree of sense of the world

This post is absurd. First, I’m 37, and second in high school I read about the Civil War. WWII is now. C’mon man.

My diagram of the course of elite impunity in the US in the last 20 or so years

A life principle of mine is that if you’re close to a Great Lake you need to visit it if at all possible, and Grant Park in Milwaukee is a fantastic place for that (and also to represent a proper NBA team)

Listening to a book about the International Brigades and one takeaway is that, for all that the Spanish Civil War is treated as a precursor to WWII, it’s also a hangover of WWI. Middle-Aged Germans, French, and Brits trying to instill the lessons of Verdun and the Somme into eager young communists

About to watch “School Week” on GBBO, pretty excited to learn about the eldritch horrors to which children are subjected on that side of the ocean

*In 1938, extreme high Tory accent* And so I say to Herr Hitler, who I know is a great aficionado of the Operas of Wagner, leave the Bayreuth Festspielhaus and do your job

Best fans in Catholicism

Who knows if it will work when he's actually mayor, but this is why I really like Mamdani's "we're going to show how pro police we are by taking lots of their jobs away from them" framing

This is a horrible way to treat one of our best posters, donate if you can!

Pretty cool that I was going to play a Billy Bragg song on YouTube and it was like "ok but have you considered being a landlord???"

JUSTINIAN, to Belisarius: "You're still trying to replace the province of Italia. I told you we can't do it. But we can rebuild it in the aggregate."

I was thinking about this today. I was a 14 YO in the MN suburbs just starting to pay attention to politics. My family and I actually went to the Wellstone memorial and I was confused why everyone was so offended. All of this seems quaint now (minus the part about losing the senate seat)

*Beach Boys voice* We come on the sloop Bucky

The massive community garden at the UW Lakeshore Preserve is one of the loveliest places in Madison

The best genre of art is trippy light shows in botanical gardens

It’s easy to scoff at this, but Oxford generating artificial intelligence is how the British Empire was run

I’ve lived my entire life in the Midwest except for 3 years in NYC and 1 year in Paris and I’ve been surrounded by more leftists and progressives here than in either of those other places. Bubble, sure, but guys like Klein aren’t “speaking for the heartland,” they’re looking for a permission slip

Got a new work computer and, because I’m still a 15YO at heart, I put some lefty history nerd stickers on the case (plus a sandhill crane) so that when I’m on it at the airport on work trips people will not make the wrong assumptions about a white guy in a suit.

Happy Friday from Sinéad O'Connor singing "the Foggy Dew"

Extremely disappointed that @pocan.house.gov voted present instead of no on this.

That rule about always reposting the Tom Holland Umbrella video, but for Lincoln Battalion content

The ignorance or dismissal of what Khalil is sacrificing relative to Kimmel is pretty wild here. It’s informed by a lot of things but one of them is that I think a certain class of Americans thinks that if you’re educated and get deported you just go waltz into a nice life in Europe or something

What's the best genre of music and why is it left-wing Irish folk history songs www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQbX...

The 1st Grader just said “I’m way too elegant to go outside,” I’m apparently raising an upper class Victorian

Delta Connection - early morning St. Louis - Minneapolis - Bismarck, ND in November 2016, right after Trump won the first time, for my uncle's funeral

Our kids’ school was doing a fundraiser at Portillo’s tonight, and the 4YO, currently vehemently anti-vegetable, is *not* a fan of Chicago style hot dogs

You’ve heard of Irish Car Bombs, can I interest you in my new Brigate Rosse cocktail?

RIP Robert Redford, and also more movies need to score dramatic chase scenes with jaunty piano music www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccRD...

Something I find ironic is that the old stereotype of out of touch DC/NY/SF/LA elites who don’t understand the interests and anger of the country applies very well to the national leadership of the Democratic Party now, in almost exactly the opposite sense of how it was originally meant.

Me: everything is politics and anyone trying to be “apolitical” is either naive or actively reactionary Also me: I absolutely did not need to know that Prue from Bake-Off has a son who is a far right MP

Happy Sandhill Crane Sunday

Just finished “The Ghost Road,” the last of Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy. The best novel I’ve read in a long time, probably since A.S. Byatt’s “The Children’s Book” (clearly I have a thing for artists and WWI as a theme). Every book in the trilogy is so different, but they meld extremely well.

This is exhausting, just get to the part where Italy switches sides

Watching the 2023 Mission Impossible and the Russian sub guys speaking English with bad accents transitioning to the Amsterdam drop transitioning to riding a damn horse in the Arabian desert is such a great goofy ass action movie opening

Look, am I ready for fall weather? Yes. Am I above using an 80 something mid September day in Madison to go full summer mode with pesto, caprese, white wine, and grilled chicken? Absolutely not.

Parenting questions in the age of K-Pop Demon Hunters: “Daddy, what does ‘fit check for my napalm era’ mean?”

There’s a park near our house where a cricket league meets, and we biked past it today when a bunch of South Asian women, some with hijabs, some without, were playing. At the risk of earnest posting, any vision of America that doesn’t think that’s cool as hell is my enemy.

Sorry to @dieworkwear.bsky.social but the main point of this painting is that menswear was way cooler in the 1700s

I am as a God among carpenters (put together a Wayfair Adirondack rocking chair while drinking whisky on a Friday night)

Mozart in the Jungle

One of these is about kids