Ok, biatches. Got my most recent Dispatch from the Crab Wars article up on my Substack. Hope y’all like it. Or at least don’t hate me more than you did before!
Olympics hockey update: Canada is trailing 2-1 to Czechia in the 2nd period of the quarterfinal. The last time Canada was down in best-on-best Olympics hockey was 2010, when one of the Canadian stars, Macklin Celebrini, was *4* years old.
My co-worker's daughter has regular seizures, and has lost two jobs because of them. A couple days ago she dislocated her shoulder in her sleep. Before she can have shoulder surgery, she needs a surgically implanted stimulator to help get her seizures under control. The soonest the location to which she was referred can get her in is early June. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?!
While the prospect of the current tour isn’t especially interesting to me, I’m also thinking that Bruce performing in Boston in May might be a perfect reason to plan a weekend trip to one of my favorite cities.
There's a local Boston BarPod group on Discord. If you make a trip and willing to plan a little extra time here, it's possible they might be able to organize a meetup that overlaps with your trip. It seems like the people most active in this local Discord are based very close in, that is, in Boston proper, or Cambridge or Somerville, versus suburban Boston or eastern MA, but I could be mistaken.
Many such cases, but I find this phenomenon of people needing to agree with an artist’s politics before they can like their work to be very tedious. A friend of mine who never really expressed much interest in Springsteen is now all about him after this streets of Minneapolis song and the NO KINGS on the new tour poster.
My mother said something positive about Bad Bunny the other day. For context, this is a woman who has expressed disdain toward nearly all popular music for the last half-century, although her tolerance has grown slightly during the last fifteen years. I'd *expect* her to say something like "he sounds like he's drunk, there's too much percussion, and the lyrics seem questionable."
More like "uh, OK, mom. Have you actually listened to Bad Bunny, like, ever?" I could see her liking Ricky Martín or Luis Fonsí a lot more easily than Bad Bunny. 🙄
Mixed feelings after the passing of Jesse Jackson. He once called NYC “Hymietown”. But he has also been an important leader in the civil rights movement as far back as 1960.
My own parents were active in civil rights organizing on campus at the Claremont colleges in Southern California in the mid ‘60’s. I studied the civil rights movement in high school and while later attending college, and grew to revere the student organizers of the ‘60’s who later became prominent political figures like Jesse Jackson, Bayard Rustin, Julian Bond and John Lewis.
But Jesse Jackson was also a longtime and vocal supporter of Palestinian rights and critic of Israel. He was aligned with the vocal anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan. However, he did occasionally try to mend his relationship with the Jewish community and he encouraged Jewish civil rights activists to be part of his “Rainbow Coalition”.
In light of how the more recent movements like BLM, Me Too and now the “Student Intifada” for Palestine have become increasingly anti-Zionist and dangerously anti-Semitic, it is also hard not to blame influential longtime leaders like Jesse Jackson for planting the seeds of hatred.
The legacy media will claim Mr. Jackson grew and changed over time: if so, than why didn’t he use his position of influence after the massacres of Oct. 7, 2023 to speak out against the virulent racism being displayed by the Pro-Palestine protest movement and the subsequent alarming rise in violent attacks against American, British and European Jews?
At the end of the day, I will acknowledge the passing of a great American civil rights leader while also acknowledging his legacy may now be doing more harm than good.
My husband went to a Henry Louis Gates event yesterday. During his talk, he called for a moment of silence in honor of Jesse Jackson. A few minutes later, he called for another moment of silence because "it's what Jesse would have wanted." The crowd all laughed knowingly. (This was at the infamous Jeremiah Wright church.)
My son’s friend Spencer, the same boy who created the event “Weigh TJ’s soul against a feather,” also sent the groupchat a photo of himself in a picturesque landscape in Massachusetts with the caption, “mogged by the beauty of nature”
BARpod trails the world my teenager lives in by a year or two. I tried to tell him about looksmaxxing and he just rolled his eyes and was like “are you really just now hearing about this?”
This reminds me when I was a teenager "your mama" jokes filtered through to us and we started saying "ya mam" as a northern English play on it. It became very ingrained in my particular social circle.
The 22 yo female I just checked in for a gender dysphoria double mastectomy is autistic. Mom did most of the talking during the check-in process.
Patient had a hysterectomy for "abnormal bleeding" almost two years ago, and last Oct had an appt regarding getting a mastectomy. Four months seems like a very short wait time; and, it's not that I disbelieve that some young women have abnormal bleeding for which a hysterectomy could be a reasonable solution, but the sheer number of these which I see leads me to believe that this is a fraudulent diagnosis.
Anecdotally, I’ve known women with ‘abnormal bleeding,’ miserable cramps, endometriosis, fibroids. None of these women were taken seriously at 20 and the few who eventually had a hysterectomy in their late 30s or 40s — after having children — practically had to beg.
That seems to have been changing in recent years (perhaps even overcorrecting). I don't think women should have to wait 10-20 years if a hysterectomy is warranted, that seems needlessly paternalistic, but there seems to be a "Hysterectomy for you! And you! Hysterectomies for everybody!" vibe (at least where I work.)
I wonder if women who have gotten impatient waiting to be rid of their uteri have discovered the gender dysphoria loophole.
On the other hand, I remember being a young woman. Most of us joked about wanting a hysterectomy because it seemed like life would be easier if we didn’t have to deal with periods or pregnancy. I grew up with women who were so miserable every four weeks that an easy way out would have been tempting. Especially if we had grown up calling major surgery a cutesy euphemism like ‘bottom surgery.’
What’s crazy is that there’s a high-efficacy (not perfect but high) for many period-related problems which seems to be very low risk, which is continuously taking hormonal birth control. Maybe there are risks such that you don’t want to do it population-wide but certainly it’s a much lower-risk intervention than a hysterectomy. From what I’ve heard it’s nearly universal among female doctors. My wife has been doing it for years and loves it. I think when I mentioned it here some women said they had tried and had problems, so it may not work every time, but it sure seems worth a shot.
Same! My brother and I h have loved them ever since "Superman's Dead" was released. I think I've met one other person who knew of them (prior to meeting me).
Sad news. I ran into a bald 9-11 year old boy, with a scraggily gross beard (not clear on if it was real, or somehow prosthetic or what, looked real), who was going by Dorothy.
The child was legit off-putting to behold. Like if you made Gollum pale, 10 years old, and slapped a beard on him.
I am sadly hoping it is some sort of bizarre medical condition, but I sort of suspect gender woo. Or maybe both?
Have you seen this story? It turns out (a) under the right conditions a truck can fly for a hundred feet and (b) Scholls Ferry Road is an autocorrect nightmare. (Pronounced like Shoals.)
We may see a big war in the Horn of Africa in the coming weeks. I've generally only talked about the Horn of Africa in the context of liking Ethiopian food and chanting: "From the valley to the sea, Somaliland will be free!"
The brutal Sudanese Civil War (weird that there's no college protests going on about it) may spill over into Ethiopia. This civil war pits the SAF (backed by Egypt, Turkey and Eritrea) against the RSF (backed by the UAE and Ethiopia). Rivals Ethiopia and Eritrea back opposite sides. They briefly allied a few years ago against the Tigrayan people of Ethiopia. Now, however, tensions are ratcheting up between Ethiopia and Eritrea, with Ethiopia claiming there are Eritrean soldiers within it. The Ethiopian army has had to withdraw from lots of areas in the country's north, with various militias seizing territory. This could get very bad very fast.
I generally express neutrality on the desirability of immigration per se, but for the record, I think we should admit all the Ethiopians and Eritreans who DON’T want to fight, so they can open more restaurants here. Injera on every corner. We can do this.
Really sad situation and I wish I understood wtf they’re fighting over.
I'm not as comfortable pontificating about Africa as I am about, say, Ukraine and Syria, so take this with a grain of salt.
In Sudan, the civil war started with rival warlords duking it out after the army (the SAF) and the rebranded-genocide-in-Darfur-militia (the RSF) overthrew the civilian government together. However, it has morphed into a proxy war over water rights and the Nile with Egypt supporting the SAF because they'll support Egypt's claim for more water and Ethiopia supporting the RSF for the opposite reason. The UAE is also involved in terms of Red Sea passing control.
In the Horn, Ethiopia is still bitter that Eritrea got all of the coast line (again, Red Sea passage issues) and Eritrea has designs on Ethiopian territory as well. Ethiopia is a patchwork of different ethnic groups (Tigrayans used to be top dog and now they're not) and a lot are filing a power vacuum, or potential power vacuum as Ethiopian/Eritrean tensions rise.
Ok, biatches. Got my most recent Dispatch from the Crab Wars article up on my Substack. Hope y’all like it. Or at least don’t hate me more than you did before!
https://open.substack.com/pub/benjaminplatt/p/crab-season-the-cure-for-winter-depression?r=4ffiwz&utm_medium=ios
Olympics hockey update: Canada is trailing 2-1 to Czechia in the 2nd period of the quarterfinal. The last time Canada was down in best-on-best Olympics hockey was 2010, when one of the Canadian stars, Macklin Celebrini, was *4* years old.
My co-worker's daughter has regular seizures, and has lost two jobs because of them. A couple days ago she dislocated her shoulder in her sleep. Before she can have shoulder surgery, she needs a surgically implanted stimulator to help get her seizures under control. The soonest the location to which she was referred can get her in is early June. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?!
Horrendous
While the prospect of the current tour isn’t especially interesting to me, I’m also thinking that Bruce performing in Boston in May might be a perfect reason to plan a weekend trip to one of my favorite cities.
There's a local Boston BarPod group on Discord. If you make a trip and willing to plan a little extra time here, it's possible they might be able to organize a meetup that overlaps with your trip. It seems like the people most active in this local Discord are based very close in, that is, in Boston proper, or Cambridge or Somerville, versus suburban Boston or eastern MA, but I could be mistaken.
BRUCE!
Many such cases, but I find this phenomenon of people needing to agree with an artist’s politics before they can like their work to be very tedious. A friend of mine who never really expressed much interest in Springsteen is now all about him after this streets of Minneapolis song and the NO KINGS on the new tour poster.
My mother said something positive about Bad Bunny the other day. For context, this is a woman who has expressed disdain toward nearly all popular music for the last half-century, although her tolerance has grown slightly during the last fifteen years. I'd *expect* her to say something like "he sounds like he's drunk, there's too much percussion, and the lyrics seem questionable."
Go, mom.
More like "uh, OK, mom. Have you actually listened to Bad Bunny, like, ever?" I could see her liking Ricky Martín or Luis Fonsí a lot more easily than Bad Bunny. 🙄
My elderly commie friend is suddenly a Bad Bunny fan too. Until now, she didn't even like amplified music!
I should add...she hates football, but wanted the Patriots to lose the Super Bowl because of their "awful name."
https://open.substack.com/pub/anitabartholomew/p/move-along-nothing-to-see-here-just?r=27m7e&utm_medium=ios
"Catcalling" a man. LMFAO.
https://substack.com/@stevestewartwilliams/note/c-215066492?r=7en6t
Please, please, please, please.....
Mixed feelings after the passing of Jesse Jackson. He once called NYC “Hymietown”. But he has also been an important leader in the civil rights movement as far back as 1960.
My own parents were active in civil rights organizing on campus at the Claremont colleges in Southern California in the mid ‘60’s. I studied the civil rights movement in high school and while later attending college, and grew to revere the student organizers of the ‘60’s who later became prominent political figures like Jesse Jackson, Bayard Rustin, Julian Bond and John Lewis.
But Jesse Jackson was also a longtime and vocal supporter of Palestinian rights and critic of Israel. He was aligned with the vocal anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan. However, he did occasionally try to mend his relationship with the Jewish community and he encouraged Jewish civil rights activists to be part of his “Rainbow Coalition”.
In light of how the more recent movements like BLM, Me Too and now the “Student Intifada” for Palestine have become increasingly anti-Zionist and dangerously anti-Semitic, it is also hard not to blame influential longtime leaders like Jesse Jackson for planting the seeds of hatred.
The legacy media will claim Mr. Jackson grew and changed over time: if so, than why didn’t he use his position of influence after the massacres of Oct. 7, 2023 to speak out against the virulent racism being displayed by the Pro-Palestine protest movement and the subsequent alarming rise in violent attacks against American, British and European Jews?
At the end of the day, I will acknowledge the passing of a great American civil rights leader while also acknowledging his legacy may now be doing more harm than good.
My husband went to a Henry Louis Gates event yesterday. During his talk, he called for a moment of silence in honor of Jesse Jackson. A few minutes later, he called for another moment of silence because "it's what Jesse would have wanted." The crowd all laughed knowingly. (This was at the infamous Jeremiah Wright church.)
My son’s friend Spencer, the same boy who created the event “Weigh TJ’s soul against a feather,” also sent the groupchat a photo of himself in a picturesque landscape in Massachusetts with the caption, “mogged by the beauty of nature”
As a Massachusetts native, I think he shoulda speld it as "naycha" to give it that local feel :-)
This is a very useful note – – thank you
"Mogged" gets used outside of Substack? GAHHH kill it with fire
BARpod trails the world my teenager lives in by a year or two. I tried to tell him about looksmaxxing and he just rolled his eyes and was like “are you really just now hearing about this?”
Next stop, SNL for this young comedic genius. Or at least, Kill Tony.
I don’t recall using such incoherent slang as a kid.
Type shit
This reminds me when I was a teenager "your mama" jokes filtered through to us and we started saying "ya mam" as a northern English play on it. It became very ingrained in my particular social circle.
I am going to start using it again.
Shit just realised this was double cultural appropriation.
😅
a sample of Greg’s present-day slang:
dagnabbit
goldurn
newfangled
highfalutin
gimcracks and gewgaws
Sad!
Poppycock!
100% accurate Greg lore
The 22 yo female I just checked in for a gender dysphoria double mastectomy is autistic. Mom did most of the talking during the check-in process.
Patient had a hysterectomy for "abnormal bleeding" almost two years ago, and last Oct had an appt regarding getting a mastectomy. Four months seems like a very short wait time; and, it's not that I disbelieve that some young women have abnormal bleeding for which a hysterectomy could be a reasonable solution, but the sheer number of these which I see leads me to believe that this is a fraudulent diagnosis.
Our culture is BEYOND fucked.
Enmeshed mother-child relationships are playing such a big role in this.
A hysterectomy at 20.
Anecdotally, I’ve known women with ‘abnormal bleeding,’ miserable cramps, endometriosis, fibroids. None of these women were taken seriously at 20 and the few who eventually had a hysterectomy in their late 30s or 40s — after having children — practically had to beg.
That seems to have been changing in recent years (perhaps even overcorrecting). I don't think women should have to wait 10-20 years if a hysterectomy is warranted, that seems needlessly paternalistic, but there seems to be a "Hysterectomy for you! And you! Hysterectomies for everybody!" vibe (at least where I work.)
I wonder if women who have gotten impatient waiting to be rid of their uteri have discovered the gender dysphoria loophole.
On the other hand, I remember being a young woman. Most of us joked about wanting a hysterectomy because it seemed like life would be easier if we didn’t have to deal with periods or pregnancy. I grew up with women who were so miserable every four weeks that an easy way out would have been tempting. Especially if we had grown up calling major surgery a cutesy euphemism like ‘bottom surgery.’
What’s crazy is that there’s a high-efficacy (not perfect but high) for many period-related problems which seems to be very low risk, which is continuously taking hormonal birth control. Maybe there are risks such that you don’t want to do it population-wide but certainly it’s a much lower-risk intervention than a hysterectomy. From what I’ve heard it’s nearly universal among female doctors. My wife has been doing it for years and loves it. I think when I mentioned it here some women said they had tried and had problems, so it may not work every time, but it sure seems worth a shot.
Happy 56th birthday to Our Lady Peace frontman Raine Maida, one of the most distinctive rock vocalists.
Our Lady Peace - "Car Crash"
https://youtu.be/EC2fWkTNki8?si=VEXd2ZJI1G0f5J0C
Was always baffled why that band wasn't bigger in the US. They were right in the post-grunge/rock-pop sweet spot of the mid-1990's.
Same! My brother and I h have loved them ever since "Superman's Dead" was released. I think I've met one other person who knew of them (prior to meeting me).
Friend-of-the-pod Chris Rufo on friend-of-the-pod Nick Fuentes. Doesn’t include “having sex with women is the gayest thing possible”.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/nick-fuentes-investigation?utm_source=virtuous&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=cjdaily&vcrmeid=iYCsnvt0c0GPwXFGWUxFA&vcrmiid=y3uo7CzAPEiluB7_fzAzxg
Dalton Clodfelter is a suspiciously perfect name for a Nazi Groyper influencer.
Nazi Furry Groyper.
Sad news. I ran into a bald 9-11 year old boy, with a scraggily gross beard (not clear on if it was real, or somehow prosthetic or what, looked real), who was going by Dorothy.
The child was legit off-putting to behold. Like if you made Gollum pale, 10 years old, and slapped a beard on him.
I am sadly hoping it is some sort of bizarre medical condition, but I sort of suspect gender woo. Or maybe both?
If you know that he's biologically a boy, and he goes by Dorothy, it's definitely gender woo. Doesn't explain the beard though.
Could have been a girl with a legitimate hormonal condition. At that age seems more likely to me.
Let's hope so.
Have you seen this story? It turns out (a) under the right conditions a truck can fly for a hundred feet and (b) Scholls Ferry Road is an autocorrect nightmare. (Pronounced like Shoals.)
Edited to add link: https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/new-video-pickup-truck-launching-tigard-home/283-03da6736-971c-4946-b5e8-06551122d25d#
Ford Explorer Sport Trac. You don't see many of those anymore.
And I guess now there's one less.
wat?
I know I scrolled too far and too late when REBEKAH JONES starts showing up in the comments of Pitt commentary
We may see a big war in the Horn of Africa in the coming weeks. I've generally only talked about the Horn of Africa in the context of liking Ethiopian food and chanting: "From the valley to the sea, Somaliland will be free!"
The brutal Sudanese Civil War (weird that there's no college protests going on about it) may spill over into Ethiopia. This civil war pits the SAF (backed by Egypt, Turkey and Eritrea) against the RSF (backed by the UAE and Ethiopia). Rivals Ethiopia and Eritrea back opposite sides. They briefly allied a few years ago against the Tigrayan people of Ethiopia. Now, however, tensions are ratcheting up between Ethiopia and Eritrea, with Ethiopia claiming there are Eritrean soldiers within it. The Ethiopian army has had to withdraw from lots of areas in the country's north, with various militias seizing territory. This could get very bad very fast.
I generally express neutrality on the desirability of immigration per se, but for the record, I think we should admit all the Ethiopians and Eritreans who DON’T want to fight, so they can open more restaurants here. Injera on every corner. We can do this.
Really sad situation and I wish I understood wtf they’re fighting over.
I'm not as comfortable pontificating about Africa as I am about, say, Ukraine and Syria, so take this with a grain of salt.
In Sudan, the civil war started with rival warlords duking it out after the army (the SAF) and the rebranded-genocide-in-Darfur-militia (the RSF) overthrew the civilian government together. However, it has morphed into a proxy war over water rights and the Nile with Egypt supporting the SAF because they'll support Egypt's claim for more water and Ethiopia supporting the RSF for the opposite reason. The UAE is also involved in terms of Red Sea passing control.
In the Horn, Ethiopia is still bitter that Eritrea got all of the coast line (again, Red Sea passage issues) and Eritrea has designs on Ethiopian territory as well. Ethiopia is a patchwork of different ethnic groups (Tigrayans used to be top dog and now they're not) and a lot are filing a power vacuum, or potential power vacuum as Ethiopian/Eritrean tensions rise.
Didn’t Ethiopia and the Tigrayan rebels rack up about a quarter of a million dead when they got it on about five years ago?
At least yeah
No Jews, no news
The simplest explanation is the most likely explanation.
If Ana Kasparian from the Left, and Tucker Carlson from the Right, can't somehow blame the Jews, nothing to see here . . . move along.