I made multiple attempts to acquire this book through physical retail channels– I’m not sure why, but I really wanted to buy it in person– before noticing it was like 60% off or something like that on Amazon and giving up and ordering it, and it shows up with that … thing on the spine. I’m genuinely considering returning it and just reading it on my Kindle, because that’s going to bother me every single time I look at the book for the rest of time.
Maybe I’ll go to Half Price Books tomorrow and see if they have an earlier edition.
I hate that I have to write this. I hate every fucking second of it.
I don’t have the tools, emotionally or intellectually, to deal with a world where things like video and photography are not, in any way, helpful in determining what is real or not. Combine that with a political apparatus that is primed to lie at every given opportunity regardless of whether lying makes any sense and I exist in a world where a former Speaker of the House just released a photo and a statement to prove he was still alive and I still have legitimately no idea whether he is still alive or not.
Well, okay, that’s not quite true. I have opinions, I suppose. I have no rational basis for those opinions, unfortunately. No actual evidence. Just … fucking vibes, I guess, and I don’t really want to live in a world like that.
So, just in case you’ve been under a rock or you’re reading this in 2032, Mitch McConnell went into the hospital in early June and completely vanished from the public eye. It is July 14, as I’m writing this, and he just resurfaced yesterday (Christ, was that only yesterday??) with a statement and a picture where he is rather conspicuously sitting with a copy of the sports section of yesterday’s Washington Post.
The statement has literally no value at all in determining reality. Statements from politicians are routinely written by staff members and are just as likely to contain lies as anything else they say. It’s genuinely meaningless. It also doesn’t really match up with what we’d already learned, or at least thought we had– weren’t there recordings of the 911 dispatch? Reports that they’d administered CPR to someone on site? Any real explanation of why they waited a month to give the public any information at all about McConnell’s condition other than “he’s fine”? Even if he’s completely telling the truth, and wrote the whole statement, pneumonia in someone that elderly is not trivial. That’s not “doing fine,” and hospital-induced pneumonia tends to be a lot harder to eradicate than other kinds.
(Remember Herman Cain? He was doing fine too, until he was dead.)
No, even if the statement is real, it’s wildly insufficient, and part of the problem is that now I want to know more about where the 911 information came from, because if thatwas made up, we still have a large problem.
And then there’s the picture.
Now, to be clear, I think a lot of complaints about the picture, most of which have been uttered with the entire chest of the utterer, are bullshit. To wit:
“Why is he in street clothes? Why isn’t he hooked up to an IV?” He literally said in the statement he was in rehab. You get to wear regular clothes in rehab.
“Where’s the fingernail on the middle finger of his right hand?” Probably attached to the third knuckle of his finger, which is curled underneath his hand.
“His wife’s in China!” You sure about that? Show me where you have access to her schedule. I have no idea whether any part of the story about her “fleeing” to China three days after he went into the hospital is true or not, for the record, and I wouldn’t know how to look up any part of it if I wanted to look into it.
“The Washington Post doesn’t even have a sports section any more!” Yes the fuck they do. I genuinely saw someone alleging that, along with several claims that it was from some other date, or a different newspaper.
“The pillow is floating in the air behind him!” You can literally see part of the chair behind the pillow, idiot. Top left corner, level with his mouth.
The one complaint I’ve seen that makes sense to me is that he looks healthier in that picture than he has in months, and honestly I can’t argue with that one. There have also been some people pointing out that his hair looks less white than it has lately, which I also can’t dispute. But one way or another a still photo is not enough to dispel a month of complete absence from the public eye that only ended when another Republican senator died. I’ve seen this guy go to la-la land on camera enough times that as far as I know somebody’s waving a stuffed unicorn around behind the camera and they got a smile out of him. It’s simply not enough evidence, which disgusts me.
And of course, with all that comes tons and tons of different versions of the photo that we know have been faked with varying degrees of obviousness and varying levels of intent. Some of them are clearly people clowning; other people appear to be faking the picture better, like a few that I’ve seen that have added some hallucinating AI text into the newspaper. There’s a whole rant here about how people will yell “IT’S AI” at literally anything nowadays; it’s rapidly becoming a phrase that very well might not mean anything more than “I don’t like that.” There is lots of talk that the photo matches one that his staff released in 2023, just with the newspaper changed, but I’ve not seen any sourcing to that claim, nor could I really believe it if I did.
What’s the solution? In the short term, I want a Goddamned press conference, or at least an interview recorded on video. He doesn’t have to put on a suit and parade out behind a podium. Drop a laptop in front of him and have a few reporters ask him some questions over Zoom, I don’t care. And of course that would be something that could be faked too, so pick a couple of reporters with decent reputations. I don’t need hard-hitting questions. Thirty seconds of the fucker telling us what happened in such a way that makes me think he’s alive and he’s mentally capable of doing his job. A whole lot of people won’t believe it anyway, but I think it’d be good enough for me, and right now this photo isn’t enough.
And we need to put an age cap on Congress, too. Not term limits. An age cap. You shouldn’t be allowed to pass laws that fuck up a future you won’t be alive to see. But that’s a whole different post.
Four days after taking the night off because I was 100 pages from the end of Book One, I’m taking the night off because I am 100 pages from the end of Book Two. I think I’m going to take a little break in between two and three, but not long, and if Jay Kristoff ends this one with the same level of cliffhanger that he did the second Nevernight book, I won’t have any choice in the matter. So we’ll see.
I have, like most of you, spent most of the day playing Schrödinger’s Senators, and finally found an upside to waking up at the ass-crack of dawn every day: several of my friends and family members woke up to a text from me reading “Good morning! Lindsey Graham is dead!”. As of this moment, Mitch McConnell’s office has released a statement that he is, in fact, alive, along with a still picture conspicuously featuring the sports section of a newspaper from today. I am unsatisfied; I’m willing to believe that he is alive (the notion that they literally had his corpse in a cold room waiting for, well, something never really sat well with me) but if I were a Kentuckian I would be raising pure bloody hell demanding 1) an explanation for why the fuck he’s been radio-silent for a month and 2) if not an actual press conference, at least a Zoom group interview or something. I’m not willing to go so far as to say the photo is faked, but a still photo of a (surprisingly healthy-looking) person and a written statement is not a proof of capability. I want to know if there’s still a person in there, damn it.
Tornado sirens tossed us into the basement for about 45 minutes last night, and as a Midwestern dad I was contractually required to go outside the very moment the warning stopped to check it out. I was greeted with this weirdness: a little bit of evidence of rain but nothing currently falling, no wind, and near-constant lightning with very little thunder. A dad more committed to his Midwesternness would have gone out during the storm, but my wife is out of town this week and I’m trying to be good.
I woke up this morning and discovered that summer school wasn’t happening, as apparently there were more widespread power outages east of us. I have spent the day since then gradually sinking into a worse and worse mood for some reason.
Actually, that’s not true, I know exactly why; Earth has its first trillionaire, or at least its first official one (call me when Elon Musk goes on hajj and destabilizes Egypt’s entire economy along the way) and meanwhile literally everything is getting worse for everyone else all the time, with no sign that the pattern is ever going to reverse itself. Every opinion I have about Musk is unprintable, even by my standards. I tried to watch the livestream of Trump’s name being torn off of the Kennedy Center and they had to stop work because of the rain (the remnants of last night’s storm, maybe?) and didn’t get a single letter taken down. That kind of day. I can’t even rant properly, for fuck’s sake.
I need someone to face a consequence for something. Anyone. For anything.
Just tossed a job application off into the void, likely to never be heard from again. It’s a moonshot; there’s a national search taking place and, well, that’s probably enough right there to not stress myself out about it. But fuck it, I’m definitely not gonna get it if I don’t apply, and the hour or so it took to update my resume and dash off a cover letter isn’t exactly a massive time investment. It took longer to find a copy of my resume that wasn’t a .pdf than it did to do the writing.
It was a long day today. We started the final round of ILEARN testing today, so <insert rant here> as you see fit, and then I had an interaction with a student at the end of the day that led to me genuinely wondering why I don’t just slap a motherfucker in the face once in a while. To be clear, I was thinking about doing the job application before that— I’ve been tossing it around for a couple of weeks, in fact— but hearing “I’ve been written up 600 times this year and nothing ever happens to me” definitely was a factor in pulling the trigger.
The number is 24, by the way, not 600, and considering that the kid has been absent for nearly eighty days this year (not counting suspensions) I think it’s fair that she does, in fact, have some experience interfacing with the office. I’ve done a good job letting this shit roll off my back this year; life is going to take care of this kid sooner or later, so it doesn’t have to be my job. I normally try to have a little more compassion with my kids, but this one wasn’t even one of my kids, just some random shithead in the hallway being a shithead, so to hell with her.
Anyway, I promised a book review today, which is going to have to wait until tomorrow, but if it helps any there may be a semi-irate in-progress video game review after that? I dunno, we’ll see.
I was going to write a post about how these special editions of the Nevernight Chronicles went on sale yesterday, and I really want them, because I love those books and I don’t have hardcover copies. The problem is the publishers are overseas and, because my government is run by maniacs and fools, they won’t ship to the US. So I was going to see if I could possibly leverage my worldwide fandom to ship a copy to me if I ordered it and sent it to their house instead of mine.
Only it’s sold out now, in barely over 24 hours.
So I’m gonna go play video games instead, and add one more fucking thing to the incredibly long list of reasons why I hate Donald Trump.
I had one of the worst days of my career today, I think, and absolutely the worst single day of the year; I had gone the entire school year without breaking up a fight and today I had to prevent one, break up another, and then put up with some absolutely fucking unhinged and immature behavior from parents that very much should have gotten them arrested and trespassed and somehow resulted in neither thing happening. Then tonight was the literal last band concert I ever have to go to, which I was far too exhausted to properly appreciate, and during which I had to put up with even more shit parenting from what appeared to be two different families in the row in front of us who were bound and determined to ignore their feral-assed children.
I have had more than enough, I really don’t want to go to work tomorrow, I don’t know how I’m going to interact with the kid whose parents showed their asses (“I never realized you were the adult in the house” is probably something I shouldn’t say) and I still have a statement to write about all of that in which I am not allowed to cuss or impugn the parenting, intelligence or sanity of the other individuals involved.
Christ, I have never hated a year as much as I hate 2026.
Fuck, and I mean this with all imaginable disrespect, the BAFTAs.
I wasn’t going to put my two cents in on this one. As a white guy with no particular disabilities it’s probably safe for me to sit it out, and I don’t really need to have an opinion on every single thing that happens. But I learned a couple of things today about the BAFTA’s setup for this event and their reaction to John Davidson yelling the N-word at Delroy Lindo and Michael B. Jordan, and … man, seriously, fuck these guys.
In case you’ve been off-planet: John Davidson is a British disability activist who suffers from Tourette’s Syndrome, specifically the version known as coprolalia, which is the unwanted uttering of obscenities and slurs. There was a movie made about him, called I Swear, and that film was up for some awards at the BAFTAs, so Davidson was invited. Lindo and Jordan were on stage to present an award unrelated to Davidson, and he shouted the N-word, and all hell broke loose.
Now, to be clear: people with disabilities have the right to exist in public. Black people also have the right to exist in public without having the worst slur in the history of the English language shouted at them. How one chooses to sort out those two rights when they come in conflict with one another is something that I’m going to allow people with better qualifications to address, and if you want there are any number of posts and videos out there of people talking about that.
I was already aware that the program was aired in the US on a lengthy (two hours, I believe) delay, and I believe it was broadcast on a short delay even in Britain. And apparently the BAFTAs did see fit to edit it out when an award winner said “Free Palestine!” at the end of his acceptance speech. Two things I was not aware of, however, were that:
Davidson also yelled “Pedophile!” at host Alan Cumming, who is gay … and they edited that out too.
The amazing thing is it’s Davidson himself who is calling them out in this article. You would think “Hey, the Black guys weren’t the only people I yelled horrible slurs at” would not be much of a defense, but it’s really starting to look like the guy yelled a whole bunch of offensive shit that got edited out and the only thing they left in was the N-word. “Pedophile” gets edited out. “Free Palestine!” (not from Davidson, but still) gets edited out. Half-a-dozen uses of the F-word get edited out. The N-word? Nah, that’s fine. It can stay.
That’s a huge fucking problem, and it’s racist as fuck, but it’s a problem that can be laid directly at the feet of the BAFTAs, and not John Davidson. On top of everything else, apparently nobody from BAFTA said anything to Lindo and Jordan afterwards, which is just insane.
I also read another opinion piece, which I can’t find now, that included the words “John Davidson can’t spend his whole life apologizing,” which … I feel like he kind of can? And maybe should. People apologize for things that happened inadvertently all the Goddamn time. You apologize when you hurt someone’s feelings and you feel bad about it. Davidson, by all accounts, seems to be a lovely person, and I cannot imagine that he enjoys yelling racial slurs at people. I don’t feel like apologizing when you do yell racial slurs at people is that big of an ask. This is not a perfect analogy, but I’m a big motherfucker. I try my best to keep all of my body parts to myself in public, particularly when I’m in the midst of a crowd, but the very nature of being large and surrounded by people means that occasionally I bump into them, and anybody that isn’t paying attention and runs into me is very likely to end up on the ground. And do you know what happens when that happens? I apologize. Every time. Whether it was my fault or not. I apologize and I check to see if the person is okay. It’s not an imposition, it’s kind of a required part of trying to be a good person. And it’s not especially complicated, either.
Again, I don’t feel qualified to comment on how to handle the intersection of guy-who-inadvertently-shouts-racial-slurs and people-who-get-racial-slurred-at as a matter of policy. It feels unfair to tell Davidson he can’t be in public and it’s deeply fucked up to keep Black presenters off the stage in case Davidson yells something. But what I do feel comfortable with is the idea that, however you do handle this, you definitely don’t handle it by doing what the BAFTAs did. I can identify fucked-upedness without having to solve society’s problems. And what they actually did is completely fucked up, and some heads need to roll because of it.
