My wife and I sleep every night to the sounds of The Golden Girls.

That probably sounds odd. It was not a show I watched growing up, and I don’t feel akin to any of the characters. The stories were mainly simple and sometimes clever, but often fun.

Without a doubt, I have seen every episode of The Golden Girls at least twice. I may have seen more episodes of The Golden Girls than any other television show. That fact alone would have blown my 16-year-old self’s mind.

Today, it is a comfort—a way for our minds to settle and go to sleep. I might prefer something else, but it continues to play every night. I can tell you my two favorite episodes (“The Case of the Libertine Belle”, “The Actor”), my favorite guest star (George Clooney), and what happens during the days and nights of Sophia Petrillo.

The show ended in 1992 after seven seasons. The last of the Girls departed for that great wicker couch in the sky just over two years ago.

It was a slight surprise that a murder mystery novel set in The Golden Girls’ universe has now appeared. Rachel Ekstrom Courage has written Murder by Cheesecake. In it, Dorothy goes on a date with a man who, as you might imagine, ends up dead. Of course, the Girls must find the killer.

I sent it to my wife, who promptly bought the book.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll read it too.

Many Bothans died to bring us this beat…

I’m a sucker for ambience channels on YouTube. I find them relaxing and good for writing. So, I was interested in this one featuring the TARDIS from Doctor Who.

The official Doctor Who YouTube page is showcasing the console room with a 24/7 “live” video of the Fifteenth Doctor’s TARDIS. It’s obviously his, thanks to its cool minimalist design and that out of place yet super cool jukebox.

The walls do end up changing colors which is also cool. No comment section. Just chill vibes hanging out in the TARDIS. It’s smaller on the outside, don’t you know.

Thom Hogan, at his website, goes through the problems with cargo shipping with 145% tariff sitting on it:

The problem starts with cargo ships. Because no one wants to pay 145% tariffs unless they absolutely have to, a lot of cargo originally destined for the US will never leave an Asian port. Three weeks later, the US West Coast ports suddenly are operating at much lower levels (current Long Beach estimates are for a 25% year-to-year decline in May). This leads to temporary employment cuts at the ports, but also leads to less need for further domestic shipping (i.e. trucking and rail). Which leads to more temporary employment cuts. Meanwhile, no new product shows up at retailers, leading to eventual product shortages and further temporary employment cuts.

Employment cuts lead to less discretionary income and less spending in the overall economy, which starts a slow downward spiral where future orders are lowered, thus future cargo ships don’t get loaded in SE Asia for the US, and on and on.

June is going to be the start of a very difficult time!

His focus (no pun intended) is photography gear, but it’s true of everything coming over on a boat from China. Some products will be available, but at astronomical prices and some products just won’t be on shelves.

Here’s what’s going to happen… your local dealer in just about anything is going to go out of business unless something changes fast. The big box stores will still be around, but they will significantly less on the shelves and the prices will be through the roof.

I wish I could say what to stock up on, but the thing is nearly everything most people buy comes from China, Mexico, or Canada in some form or another. It’s going to be bad.

No one wins a trade war. In fact, trade wars are monumentally stupid. Of course, we have a monumentally stupid person in charge.

I found a new musical act to add to my Spotify collection. God is an Astronaut was in my Discover Weekly and I’m really digging their sound. Incredibly distinctive and rocking with a psychedelic undertone. I hear all kinds of instruments. Great drum parts. It’s instrumental progressive rock. I kind of love it. They are sort of like Explosions in the Sky, but more rocking.

There are 12 albums of music to listen to with this band. All instrumental progressive rock. Amazing. I just started with the one song that came up in Discover Weekly, but now I’m listening to the Spotify This is God is an Astronaut essential tracks playlist. It’s 50 songs, 4 hours long.

Perfect work music.

Will Leitch, writing on his Medium account, outlines what he feels is the red line moment in this current administration.

There are certain red line moments, however, in which something happens that’s so ghastly, so monstrous, so (the word has to be used) evil, that if we cross that rubicon, if we step across that red line, there is no returning. There are times when you have talk about it, and do something about it, because if you don’t, it will be too late. I have a book to promote. I have a family to spend time with. I have work to do. I have baseball games and movies to watch. I have so much of the world I want to take in, and write about, and absorb. We all do.

But we have to talk about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and what has happened to him and, many, many people like him. Because if we do not rise up about this — this, specifically — I am not sure we can come back.

He is a sheet metal worker in Maryland, a union member, a part-time student at the University of Maryland, where he is working toward a vocational license. He is married, with a five-year-old autistic child who is also deaf; he is the stepfather to two other children, one autistic, one who has epilepsy. He is from El Salvador and emigrated to the United States in 2011, when he was 16, because his parents, being extorted by a local gang, feared he would be murdered by them. He is not a United States citizen, but he is married to one and the parent to three, and he has regularly checked in with immigration authorities every year since he arrived, who have consistently affirmed his right to be here. (Including a ruling by a federal judge in 2019 that he belonged in the United States.) He works, he pays taxes, he raises a family. He has no criminal record, and no connections to anyone who does, despite desperate, pathetic attempts to pretend that he does. He is just a regular person, like you, like me, like just about everyone you know.

On March 15, he was taken by this adminstration to a gulag in El Salvador, the CECOT, Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo for no reason. He was in the United States legally. He is not a member of the MS-13 gang contrary to what others in the administration continue to lie about. The Trump administration has already said his literal abduction was an “administrative error.” The Supreme Court ruled that he must be returned. Trump illegally sent a man to a notorious prison without due process and is now defying a Supreme Court ruling by not finding a way to bring him home.

This is the red line.

So who’s next? It could be someone very close to you. It could be you. It could be anyone. I have spent years and years writing about my fear about this time, the struggles of raising kids during this time, of wondering what there will be left for them to inherit, of trying to grasp how much they will have to fix.

But this world — a world that is being explicitly telegraphed, that may be leading to a battle with the Supreme Court that could cement it — is a world that there is no coming back from. This isn’t about politics. We’re not talking about tax policy, or regulation, or balancing the budget. We’re talking about fundamental human decency vs. evil here. I know people who voted for Trump. I care about people who voted for Trump. But if you really look at this, with eyes even slightly open, there is nothing any American, or human, can defend here.

There is so much going on. There is so much to take in. But Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a bright red line, because if we do not stop this from happening to him — if we do not get him home, if we do not stop this, instantly — we will not be able to stop it from happening to anyone. It is difficult to figure out what fights are worth going to the mat for, amidst all the chaos. It can be overwhelming. It is overwhelming.

But I cannot think of a fight more important than this one.

I am already so very tired of all of this.

Warren Ellis —

At some point, we realise all our little hopes and dreams for the web are pointless because it’s all out of our hands. And yet we can’t shake those dreams off, because it seems to us like the culture is so busted that the only way to connect it up is through the open web. Because the open web is open access and some form of the web pervades most of our lives now.

Sadly, the web we have is the mediocre network-tv version.

But this is where we all were forty-odd years ago with relation to the previous generations of dominant media. We lived inside broadcast television and print culture that we had no control over. So we got zine culture and tape culture and even a pirate radio revival.

People in the US in the Sixties used to talk about going out to “find America.” Now I see people doing their damnedest to find the web.

John DeVore, writing at his Medium site, destroys Joe Rogan and his continued use of the R-word.

During a recent episode of his hit podcast, Joe Rogan dropped the R-word and declared that it’s back — a “great cultural victory.” I shrugged at his giddy claim, then reluctantly proceeded to listen to a comedian with intellectual aspirations bicker with a prickly, war-horny historian about Nazis and current events for almost three hours. It sounded like a high school debate between angry virgins who hate their mothers, and the podcast passed through me like Pepto-Bismol.

But I kept returning to the pride in Rogan’s voice about his “cultural victory,” as if he were a conquering general recounting a fabled campaign, or an immortal Viking spinning a valiant myth.

He was impressed by his own splendid influence, and many joined him. I did not. I don’t influence anyone, which is probably for the best.

I rather liked this bit.

The rise of the R-word slur worries disability advocates who rightly fear its comeback will result in the spread of prejudice towards people with disabilities. Their concern is justified.

I think it sucks because it is, for lack of a spicier word, boring. Dropping the R-word must feel like freedom to those inconvenienced by empathy, and that’s just a boring way to live. A man’s life should be an epic poem, not a foul little fart.

“A foul little fart” is poetry. He ends it thusly:

So use the R-word if you want, but be honest with yourself: your love of the R-word comes from a sad, dark hole inside of you, and at the bottom of that hole sits your eternal soul, Gollum-like, a naked, hairless creature whose deeds and words will never be remembered.

I’ll ask nicely… stop using the R-word. You sound like an asshole.

Patrick (H) Willems explains why The Wachowskis' Speed Racer (2008) is The Most Important Movie of the 21st Century.

I could not agree more. It’s one of my favorite movies that critics did not get.

I just saw this video from a few weeks back and needed to share. Texas politician James Talarico delivers a sermon against Christian nationalism that does not mince words.

I didn’t get it when I first read The Great Gatsby in high school. I loved the symbolism, but not the writing. It was too flowery, I didn’t understand the story’s context, and there wasn’t an “in” for a kid from central Illinois.

The Redford movie helped, but it was the 2013 film that made it click for me. The cast, especially Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, and Carey Mulligan, made the story come alive. Yes, it was all glitz, glamour, and over the top, but it also conveyed the sadness and class warfare I was too young to get in 1985.

Earlier in the month, Fresh Air/NPR had a great story about the 100th anniversary of the book’s publication. “Great works of art are great, in part, because they continue to have something to say to the present: They’re both timebound and timeless. And, boy, does Gatsby have something to say to us in 2025.”

The article never uses the best line from the book to illustrate its point, but I will.

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

I think, with just a little imagination, we know who Fitzgerald would be talking about today. We know who the modern-day equivalents of Tom and Daisy are in this world.

The privileged and wealthy act without considering the consequences of their actions on others. They do not care and can’t be made to care. Furthermore, they can escape the repercussions of their actions because of wealth, status, or both.

Fitzgerald was writing about the moral corruption and societal decline of the wealthy elite during the Roaring Twenties. I can only imagine what historians call this Twenties decade… the Ruinous Twenties?

Here’s a fun collection of movie mistakes, including a recently solved one from Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith that I had never heard of before.

Movies are handmade, and just like any other art form, sometimes the seams that hold movies together become visible to the audience.

My favorite is the one in The Abyss. I still can’t believe it remained in the Final Cut.

Erin Morton is a junior in the BFA Musical Theatre program at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music and she absolutely blisters the paint off of the walls with her performance of Radiohead’s “Creep.”

I got chills and I never get chills with covers. Honestly, I really don’t care for Radiohead, but “Creep” is their only song that has any kind of mass appeal. I know the band hates it, but whatever.

Her choices across the board are pretty incredible. The soft to loud control is uncanny. Pure talent.

Omar Shams has a crazy thought.

Assuming progress in industrial automation, humanoid robotics, artificial intelligence, and space technology continues as currently envisioned by these industries, we will in just a few short decades be able to deliver payloads of a self-assembling farm of robots to mine the Moon, create chip fabs, build, and ultimately tile the Moon with GPUs. The Moon has a surface area of 14.6 million square miles, roughly the size of Asia. If we very conservatively tiled even half the Moon with GPUs and solar panels, the Moon could sustain a billion times the compute of the Colossus cluster and, with a few turns of Moore’s law driving chip technology forward, even a trillion times the compute.

The Moon thus transformed will come to resemble something out of science fiction concepts of planet-sized factories or Factorio—a popular video game among engineers working on these very technologies. This level of compute would effectively turn our Moon into a planet-scale supercomputer and represent a giant leap in Man’s capacity to control our destiny.

David Brooks thinks there needs to be a civic uprising to combat the Trump regime.

It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.

Who is going to lead it?

The next and final season of The Sandman is dropping this summer. And just like Cobra Kai and Stranger Things, it’s going out as a two-parter: six episodes will air on July 3, followed by the final five on July 24. The most recent trailer from Netflix tells the tale.

Last year, executive producer Neil Gaiman, who co-created the original Vertigo comic with Sam Keith and Mike Dringenberg, was accused of sexual harassment by multiple women over the years. While it doesn’t matter what I believe to be the truth, Gaiman’s projects in various stages of development have been universally shut down. So, I think fans of Sandman are fortunate to be getting a second season.

Ivaylo Durmonski asks the question, Why can’t we quit social media? He draws many conclusions, and all of them are right. It just depends.

Marvel’s latest trailer for Fantastic Four: First Steps digs deeper into the Fantastic Four’s lives and the movie’s plot.

I’m sure the fact that Sue is pregnant with, at least from the comics, Franklin , means that nothing reality-warping will happen. Nope. Not at all.

Seth Rogen’s attack on Trump was edited out of a science awards show coverage.

It’s amazing how much good science you can destroy with $320m and RFK Jr, very fast.