Dave's Fiction Warehouse

Apparently not complicated enough for Gemini. F unny story about AI: a few days ago I was building a crude little cabinet with two sliding drawers. I was fiddling with the measurements and grew tired of adding and subtracting fractions each time I decided to change a dimension. Hey, I thought: I bet AI can do this faster. And it did. I typed in the prompt and in seconds it crapped out a cut list for each piece of plywood I’d need. Just one problem: I noticed that one of the pieces was off by a full inch.  I mentioned this to Gemini, and a couple seconds later got this response: “You are correct. My original calculation was in error. Here is the corrected version of the cut list.” Thank you so much, Gemini! You’re a real lifesaver! But you have raised a haunting question: If you botch a relatively simple math problem, might you also shit the bed in other, more important areas? I t took the Internet about 20 years to evolve from miraculous tool to utter shit. It’s only taken AI — whi...

It looked bigger in the barn. H i there. Just stopped in to make sure the pipes haven't frozen and somebody's still feeding the racoon. Check and check.  I do pay a couple of troubled youths to drop by from time to time. They are not diligent, but neither are they expensive. I pay them in empty beer bottles from Bayern Brewing , which are redeemable for a piddling discount on the next six-pack. Not a livable wage, but I assume they have other income streams. Petty theft and so forth. Anyway, the place looks OK. Graffiti is minimal and the tramps haven't burned the sofa. Knock wood. The toilet seems to be clogged, but maybe that will discourage further use. I'm thinking of selling. This being Missoula, developers have expressed interest in buying the Warehouse and chopping it up into 450-square-foot condos. Each unit would rent for $5,000 a month or sell for 750 large. Seems steep, but around here that's called affordable housing. You're welcome. I just like to g...

I ’ve been looking at this all wrong. All this time I’ve been viewing this Trumpian madness as temporary and fixable. Yes, we have malignant fools steering the ship now, but soon they’ll be undone by their own incompetence and tossed overboard. This can’t go on. Right?  Wrong. This situation looks to be a lot less temporary than I’d hoped. Not long ago we were sailing along with fair winds and a following sea, and then somehow the crazies mutinied and abruptly changed course. Now we’re headed straight into the storm of the century. Also, there are icebergs. The gale-force winds don’t quite drown out the maniacal laughter of the flaccid old Ahab up on the bridge. This will end, as all things do, but it will not end soon, and it will not end well. I just finished Ian McEwan’s latest novel, “ What We Can Know. ” In it, he imagines a historian 100 years hence, surveying this time with a mix of nostalgia and incredulity.  Humanity is still limping along in 2125, in a chastened worl...

T oday was supposed to be the Rapture. Again. I haven’t kept meticulous records on these predictions, but I’m pretty sure at least 165 Rapture dates have come and gone since I was first made aware of the phenomenon around 1970. That’s based on a conservative assumption of three end-of-time dates per year. Spoiler alert: Every one of them was 100 percent wrong. We’re all still here, righteous and sinners alike. Well, except for the billions who have sadly expired of non-theological causes over the past five-plus decades. I’m this close to concluding that all Rapture predictions are utter bullshit. Speaking of percentages, the author of this latest forecast, South African pastor Joshua Mhlakela , said a couple of weeks ago that he’s “a billion percent sure” this time is the charm. I would like to remind Pastor Josh, and a certain American president , that percentages don’t become more dramatic with the addition of random zeroes beyond 100. Anyway, if you and yours do experience the Rap...

R obert Redford was probably a better director than an actor, mostly because he was too damned good-looking to be fully believable in any of his best-known roles. But it’s hard now to imagine anyone else playing them.  I’m thinking mostly of “The Sting” and “Three Days of the Condor” and of course “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” For those of us who were young men in the early 70s, this is the way we covertly longed to look and be. Not that we ever could. We lacked the wardrobe. And the smile. And the tousled hair. And yeah, the easy charm and the good looks and the journeyman acting talent.  Check out the opening scene in “The Way We Were”: Redford standing at the bar, ostensibly passed out on his feet, resplendent in his Navy dress whites. There were and are better actors, but none of them – even Paul Newman – ever looked that cool. I’m guessing that the look in Barbra Streisand’s eyes during that scene didn’t require a whole lot of method acting. She was genuinely smit...

T he other day I was briefly gladdened by the internet rumor that Donald J. Trump had finally shuffled off to Buffalo — or wherever a guy like that goes when his time is up. Probably not Buffalo. It was false, of course. Everything is false on the internet, without exception. But my reaction prompted a bit of soul-searching. First, I wondered: Have I ever in my lifetime been cheered by the idea of someone else’s demise? Nope. Well, Ted Bundy maybe, but I can’t think of anyone else offhand. Takes a special kind of person to convince me that their absence would make the world a better place.   Second: Would it though? Trump has already poisoned America to the extent that it seems unlikely to recover any time soon. He’s gutting every public good, destroying trust in elections and governance, putting troops on the street and enlisting tens of thousands more masked, steroidal thugs to enforce his personal whims. Whatever happens to Trump in the years to come — and I hope it’s somet...

I t’s been a slow year (not counting the endless carousel of Trumpian atrocities) so maybe it’s time once again to go to the mailbag. Remember mailbags? How they used to bulge? They were fun. Dear Dave : So what have you been reading lately? That is, assuming you are not yet too old to decipher printed material beyond, say, a third-grade level? – Made-Up in Montreal. A: Thank you, although I would point out that we live in a country where a third-grade reading level is considered overkill.  Anyway, I just finished “ Fingersmith ,” by Sarah Waters. It’s set in Victorian England and involves a 17-year-old thief sent to pose as a maid for a 17-year-old heiress. The thief’s mentor, a charming villain known as Gentleman (think Fagin, only better looking), intends to seduce the heiress, marry her, and then ship her off to one of England’s excellent madhouses. He promises the young thief, Sue, a share of the proceeds. Twists ensue – so many that this gentle reader had to stop once in a w...

M artin Cruz Smith died last month, but I didn’t really mark his passing until last week. That’s when I finished his last book, “ Hotel Ukraine .” Smith was a great story teller, and his character Arkady Renko is the most memorable of the hundreds of fictional detectives I have known. I’ll miss them both. “Hotel Ukraine” is set immediately before and after Putin’s invasion of the country in 2022. Like nearly all of the 11 Renko novels, this one has him investigating an individual murder amid the vast corruption of the modern Russian state. This time it’s a diplomat, beaten to death in the titular hotel in Kyiv. As we all know by now, when high-profile figures die anywhere near Putin, there’s not a lot of pressure from the top to crack the case. Far from it. If the plot feels sort of familiar, the story is well-told and timely. We get a glimpse of the Bucha massacre and a fascist paramilitary that closely resembles the Wagner group. (You’ll recall that Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin ...

T his summer I accompanied the brunette to her 50-year high school reunion. I really didn’t want to go. I mean, I skipped my own 50th reunion six years ago, and the one before that . The 10- and 20-year reunions were fun, but after a while they begin to seem as dreary as that face I see in the mirror every morning. So I told Tess no. For some reason she kept at it.  I finally relented. I’ve gotten better at discerning the things I must refuse and the things I probably shouldn’t. I bought a new shirt and a new pair of shorts and steeled myself for an introvert's nightmare: a weekend of small talk among total strangers. At least, I thought, they’d all be unaware of the countless regrets and embarrassments that define my own memories of high school.  We drove to Ellensburg, a middling college town best known for its rodeo and unceasing wind. The former classmates gathered Friday night at a dive bar on the edge of town. There was the obligatory guy in a MAGA hat and another in one...

A coastal trail near Ardmore. W e’re going to Ireland in a few days. It’ll be our third time there. Mostly we’re going because a few months ago we got a killer deal on round-trip tickets between Seattle and Dublin. How cheap? You don't want to know. Ever been? It’s a pretty easy place to be a tourist. Sunshine is rare, but the people are generally friendly and that accent makes them seem even more so. They don’t yet hate Americans. Few places in Ireland are very crowded. That has become my primary condition for traveling anywhere these days. I always feel a bit uneasy before a trip abroad. I like being in a new place, but I loathe the process of getting there when air travel is involved.  There’s a poem by Derek Walcott that I always think of the night before traveling. “Tomorrow, Tomorrow.” I’ll post it here from memory; my apologies if the wording and punctuation is not precise: I remember the cities I have never seen, exactly. Silver-veined Venice. Leningrad, with its toffee-twi...

L ike a few million others, we’ll be back on the street tomorrow. Singin’ songs and carryin’ signs. Still trying to come up with original slogans. Can’t use the ones from two weeks ago. We thought things were bad then but they’ve only gotten worse.  Now Trump and his minions are openly defying the Supreme Court and laughing about it. They’re still getting rid of people solely on the strength of the boss’s whim. Which, when you think about it, is pretty much the last stop on the train to Treblinka. I wonder if these nationwide protests are too little, too late. But this is no time to sit at home. Here in Missoula, the April 5 event didn’t feel like a protest so much as a party or a wake:  A gathering of a few thousand like-minded people aggrieved, bothered and bewildered by what appears to be the rapid disassembly of America.  It was kind of uplifting to see that our months-long sense of anger and dread was widely shared. But the protests didn’t generate enough headlines a...

The original cast of MAGA W hat happens when a rapacious, hateful and thoroughly corrupt gasbag gains complete control of a government?  Well, we’re finding out, aren’t we? But this is not specifically about Trump. It’s more about this book I just finished: “ A Fever in the Heartland .”  In it, Timothy Egan relates the sordid saga  of a Trump-like figure who managed to take over the state of Indiana in the early 1920s.  At the height of his power as Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, David C. Stephenson controlled much of the Midwest and believed he had a shot at the White House. If his depravity hadn’t escalated to an actual sex slaying, he might have. Even then it was touch and go. “Fever” is a great example of what Egan does so well: Take well-trod episodes of American history and structure them almost as novels, with villains and heroes and quite a bit of  dramatic tension.  In a lot of fiction, it’s the villain who keeps you turning the pages. You can’t...

Y ou can imagine my pride in discovering that my work is among the millions of pirated books and papers used by Meta to train their newest AI model (dubbed Llama 3).  Thus far I’ve found only three short stories out of the dozen or so I’ve written, but hey: It means I’m in good company! A lot of famous authors are justifiably pissed off. The Atlantic reported on this today. Basically, it describes how Meta employees briefly thought about licensing the material, but quickly decided it would be a lot faster and cheaper just to steal it. Especially since most of it had already been pirated and amassed online via Library Genesis, or LibGen.  Atlantic writer Alex Reisner set up an interactive database so authors can enter their names and see how much of their stuff Meta has scooped up free of charge. That’s how I ended up discovering my stories.    I’m of two minds on this. On one hand, I guess it doesn’t hurt to have my words comprise a synapse or two in the vast Meta h...

A ccording to this piece in the New York Times , more Americans are forgoing the doggy bag  –  apparently unconcerned that there are starving children in Africa who would be delighted to dine on their unfinished mac ’n cheese.   The story says the average American leaves about 53 pounds, or $329 worth, of food on their restaurant plates each year. That’s hard to credit: how many restaurants do these average Americans hit in a year? For me it’s maybe five or 10. No wonder they’re getting fatter . And that’s without cleaning their plates! But back to the takeout box. There appear to be a variety of reasons people don’t ask for them:  young dating couples don’t want to seem cheap, post-covid social stigma about sharing entrees,  the unwillingness to go clubbing with half a Cobb salad at your side.   All of which is another reminder that I have little in common with these crazy “average” Americans.  I rarely leave restaurant food on my plate. I’...

I used to live near the Canadian border. The northern boundary of the folks’ ranch was a stone’s throw from the 49th parallel. There was a switchback road you could drive up to see the border itself – a 20-foot swath in the timber that stretched out to the horizon (that’s my son and brother-in-law in the photo). Even back in the ’70s I remember thinking it was pretty incredible to have such a long, totally undefended border between two sovereign nations. Not even a fence, then. Sometimes, hiking or hunting, we’d stroll across the border just to say we had. Other days we’d drive through the border station at Roosville to pick apples or buy Labatt’s. Each way, the guards would make small talk and wave us through. Then 9/11 happened. Then, 15 years later, so did Trump. Then Covid. And now, an older, meaner and more disordered Trump, who no longer seems to be kidding when he raves about annexing our more civilized neighbor to the north. Plus the tariffs. Don’t get me started about the stup...

A mazon boycott update : Still pretty sure this is the path of wisdom, not to mention a fun way to flip Bezos the bird. Best of all, it’s proving easier than I thought. One star Yesterday our digital meat thermometer quit working. In simpler times, I would have jumped on Amazon and ordered another one. After all, that’s how I acquired the cheap piece of crap that just broke. It was only $11. What a bargain! Then I thought: Wait a minute. Maybe the low, low price has something to do with the low, low quality. It lasted a couple of years and now it’s more plastic for the landfill. Also, it was a pain in the ass that it quit working while my wife was cooking chicken. She had to check for doneness the old-fashioned way. The horror. Anyway, I looked up the best meat thermometers online, careful to ignore the sponsored ads, the cutesy soliloquies from paid influencers, and of course anything Amazon. I found three possibilities – all quite a bit more than $11. No matter; I was going for quali...

O nce again , I’m watching bald eagles with their young. The nest is 145 feet up a pine tree in California’s Big Bear Valley. It’s snowing. You can hear the wind, see the tree moving with the stronger gusts. Occasionally, an eagle will cry out; another might swoop into view with fresh killed food.  For those of us peering at our various screens, it looks bitterly cold. But eagles are creatures of air and altitude. Pretty sure they can handle most any weather. An eagle tending a winter nest is the picture of stoicism. You can almost envy them. They have no better place to be, no better thing to be doing. No concerns beyond this job at hand: keeping their young alive long enough for them to be eagles too. It’s fascinating to watch. More than you’d think. I don’t know how long the average viewing session is for these particular nest-cams, but based on my own experience, I’d say about as long as most TV episodes.  True, nothing much happens. But the same could be said of “Severan...

I s it wrong to find joy in the misfortune of others? Absolutely. Unless one of the others happens to be Leon Musk. Then it’s fine.  The precipitous slide in Tesla’s stock price , the recurring outages on X, the images of flaming and vandalized Cybertrucks: These are a few of my favorite things. Hey, sue me. Sometimes you just have to stop and smell the roses.  The only thing that keeps me from breaking into actual song is knowing that even when Leon loses $100 billion, he remains the richest man in the world. And he still has the ear of the most powerful stupid man in the world, which grants him full access to the treasury of the most wealthy nation in the world. So no matter the vagaries of the market and public opinion, Leon needn’t cut back expenses any time soon.  Also, Trump says he’s buying a Tesla as a show of support for this strange South African immigrant he’s put in charge. That should turn things around! But since it’s Trump, Leon should maybe get it in writ...

E very couple of years, I decide to join the wife in giving up something for Lent, which apparently started today. I’m not particularly religious, but I figure it doesn’t hurt to occasionally practice some self-discipline.  So, what to give up? The most obvious thing would be wine, just because I rarely go a day without a glass or two. But it says here that Lent lasts 40 days, so … no.  It’s a fine line.  You want to give up something that matters, but not something that life would be altogether meaningless without. So I think this year it will be Amazon. Makes sense because I’ve already gone six weeks without ordering anything from Amazon. That’s 42 days, right? Duration of Lent and then some!  Easy peasy. Just kidding. I’m boycotting Amazon for the next 40 days too, and I hope for a long time after that. I expect a few small benefits: a significant reduction in shoddy merchandise around the house; a lot fewer boxes piling up in the garage; the satisfaction that der...

O scar thoughts. Well, only one.  My wife first pointed this out but I tend to agree: celebrity breasts seemed much less enhanced this year. Smaller, more natural. We’ve grown used to seeing the splendid gowns draped over a couple of child-size bowling balls and there was less of that last night. What can it mean? Is it a trend? I was thinking it might be related to the rampant use of Ozempic/Wegovy among the Hollywood set. But Tess pointed out that in the past there have always been really thin women with impossibly large golden globes (my term, not hers). So I don’t know. We’ll be tracking this here at the Warehouse. Can’t comment on the various winners and losers, since (a) I saw only one of the nominated films (“Conclave”), and (b) Hulu decided late in the show that we had witnessed enough and abruptly shut down. I think it had something to do with that endless soliloquy by Adrien Brodie, which added an hour or so to the run time. Still, I hate Hulu and you should too.

K ind of feels like we should be boycotting everything these days. But it’s daunting when you look at the lengthening list of Stuff to Avoid: Anything controlled by Jeff Bezos : Amazon, the Washington Post, Blue Origin, Whole Foods, Audible, Zappos. Anything controlled by Mark Zuckerberg : Meta, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads. Anything controlled by Leon Musk : Tesla, Starlink, X, SpaceX, PayPal, OpenAI, the United States of America. That’s just the beginning. All three men control dozens of other companies I’m too lazy to list. Then you have all these other conglomerates that happily sucked up to Trump on the whole DEI question: Target, Google, Wal-Mart and McDonald’s – to name but a few.  You see the problem: Fighting back is no longer as easy as shunning Hobby Lobby or Mike Lindell’s shitty pillows. This might involve some hardship. It’s our own fault, really. We’ve been taking low-cost convenience for granted; now the oligarchs have grown so fat they can take us for gra...

Regrets, she has a few I t’s tempting to chortle when a Trump voter reaps the whirlwind. But Ryleigh Cooper, 24, was just a kid during Trump’s first time around, so I can sympathize. According to this Washington Post story, she lost her Forest Service job earlier this month, as part of the ongoing Musk/Trump vandalism of the federal government. There goes a $40,000 annual salary. There goes health insurance. There goes 12 weeks of paid maternity leave. Oops.  Ryleigh said she voted for Trump mostly because of his glib campaign pledge to make IVF treatment free. She didn’t realize Leon Musk was on the ticket. Oops again. Trump doesn't talk about IVF now. At all. He and Musk have bigger fish to fry: parasites to purge, hotels to build in Gaza.  It gets worse: Republicans just approved a budget plan that will raise her taxes, gut Medicaid and shrink all sorts of programs meant to help folks in the middle and lower tax brackets.  If there’s an upside, maybe the IVF thing see...

I applaud the Philadelphia Eagles for apparently declining to sit with Trump at the White House. Hey, it kind of stinks in there! Also, anything that gets Megyn Kelly’s panties in a wad should bring joy to all our hearts. Kelly, noted MAGA apologist and all-around mean girl, has big feelings about the rumored snub. Replying to a fan’s post expressing disgust with the team, she had this to say: “SAME. GO F YOURSELVES EAGLES… F THIS BS!” Harsh words! Which pretty much tells you that the Eagles are on the right side of history here. Like the Eagles, we should all work to erode the autocratic aspirations of the Orange One. Naturally he’ll claim he didn't want them there in the first place. But we know better, don’t we?   I really didn’t care who won the Super Bowl, and in fact didn’t watch one second of it. But if the Eagles have the stones to stick to their guns on this, I’m a fan for life. As they say in Philly: Go Birds!  (EDIT 3/11/25: To hell with the Birds. I see they...

W e all know by now that Donald Trump will do whatever Vladimir Putin tells him to do. And most of us have long suspected that his eagerness to bend over for the Russian president is not based on, say, mutual respect or the shared love of golf. So this claim from former KGB official Alnur Mussayev, reported in the Irish Star , kind of rings true. Mussayev says the KGB recruited Trump while he was visiting Moscow in 1987, on one of his many failed real estate ventures. At the time, Mussayev says, he was running a directorate charged with “recruiting businessmen from capitalist countries.” A man like Trump – clueless, vainglorious, infinitely susceptible to flattery – would have fit the bill nicely. The KGB even bestowed a code name: “Krasnov.” I’ve often pondered those pictures from Trump’s first meeting with Putin in Helsinki, in 2018. In each of them, Trump looks a little sore in the backside, while Putin wears the satisfied smirk of a man whose long game is paying off bigtime. I thou...

F or me, SNL’s 50th Anniversary special was about as good as the show gets: 50 percent  worked pretty well and 50 percent didn’t. Over the last few years, the average SNL has hit closer to 30-70. But that’s just me. I loved the two legendary Pauls as musical guests, even with their voices now abraded by age.  I loved the reel of commercial parodies (“Oops, I Crapped My Pants”) – always one of SNL’s strengths. Loved Martin Short and Steve Martin. I liked John Mulaney’s musical history of New York. I even liked the reprise of that hoary “Scared Straight” bit with Keenan Thompson and Eddie Murphy. Kristen Wiig’s return as doll-hands Dooneese was not hilarious, but Will Farrell kept it going. Don’t know if I ever want to see the alien abduction sketch again, even with Meryl Streep. Like so many SNL mainstays, this one has worn thin. Ditto with “Domingo”: funny the first time, and now just dumb. A couple other misses: Where was Bill Hader? Dan Akroyd? And if there was even a fleeti...

I f, like me, you’re running out of things to distract you from the collapse of America, you might check out “Mo,” now in its second and last season on Netflix. It’s a good antidote to the stench of cruelty and corruption wafting forth from D.C. these days.  It’s a smart and funny (and occasionally poignant) show about the trials of a Palestinian family living in Houston. The title character is played by creator Mo Amer. He and his family get by on various jobs and side hustles while trying to navigate the Orwellian hellscape that is the U.S. asylum and immigration system. (When certain blowhards go on about “open borders,” it’s clear they have no idea of the obstacles faced by immigrants not named Elon. Or Melania.)  “Mo” is an excellent show in its own right, but is even better for the way it humanizes folks who, for whatever reason, no longer have a country of their own.  It ain’t easy being a stateless refugee. Especially in Texas, a state that loathes immigrants in ...

Trump's thumb thing is catching on A fter Mitch McConnell's remarkable series of freeze-ups and falls last year , I was kind of surprised to see him back in the headlines in 2025. But of course he was, first by falling down another flight of stairs (as I foresaw), and then, most recently, by actually voting against some of Trump's worst cabinet picks: Hegseth, Patel, Gabbard and noted brain-worm host RFK Jr.  No doubt he meant it as some kind of legacy move, kind of like when John McCain did the famous thumbs-down against the GOP effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act.  But McCain's vote actually mattered, didn't it? Whereas the feeble McConnell was left to close out his career with the emptiest of gestures and the contempt of both Democrats and the Confederacy of Cowards he enabled for so long. I guess that's fitting.  Mitch could have made an historic difference in 2020, when Trump twice faced impeachment. America would have been the better for it. Instead...

I f you're reading this, it means I have successfully redirected my davesfiction.com domain back to this site on Google's Blogger platform. The reason being that hosting is still free here. Kind of. The last two years' worth of posts are on here now, as well as the first two or three years, starting in 2007. I'll be transferring the rest over a few at a time. Meantime, please leave a comment to let me know someone's actually seeing this site. Thanks, Dave Knadler

This better be going somewhere. T here’s a wide line between being too obvious and being too opaque. “ Severance ,” the Apple TV series now in its second season, may have strayed past the far side of that line. It’s an interesting show, but one where you have to sift through fan theories the next day to see if you’re getting it. Mostly, I’m not. “Severance” centers on this mysterious company called Lumon.  Certain Lumon employees exist in two versions: “innie,” when they’re at work, and “outie,” when they’re at home. Not two  physical bodies, I guess, just two exclusive halves of a single consciousness. They enter the elevator as one, come out as the other. The outies are unaware of what the innies do at work, and vice versa. The “work” involves sitting at 90s-era computer terminals and grouping sets of numbers to be placed in on-screen bins. Upper management consists of Mr. Milchick, his adolescent assistant Hanna and a disembodied speaker phone, all of whom are equal parts s...

  Robin Wright and Tom Hanks get an AI makeover T he Robert Zemeckis  movie “ Here ” was released in theaters last fall and has since been roundly savaged by critics. It showed up on Netflix last week, so this unqualified critic decided to have a look. My verdict: It’s not half bad. The movie’s central conceit is its static point of view. From beginning to almost the end, the camera never moves. Through it we witness an extremely brief history of time, and then a pretty long history of a single living room somewhere on the Eastern Seaboard.  Families come and go, from pre-Colonial times to the present, and their stories unfold on this single stage. During a scene from the 60s, say, a frame will pop up showing a portion of the room as it looked in the ‘30s, and then the scene will, after a few more frames, transition to that decade and that story. It’s not the most compelling narrative device, but it’s interesting even when the various stories don't quite mesh. It’s a nov...

T his is a paean to New York Times puzzles. Not sure what I’d do without them, in These Troubled Times™.  Every morning I get up, don my buffalo robe (really just heavy terry cloth), slippers and ridiculous pajama pants, and venture forth with iPad in hand. I  force myself to ignore the news or social media, pour a cup of coffee, and consider the day’s puzzles. First, Wordle . By now it’s probably my least favorite of the puzzles, since it’s going on three years old and the daily solve is starting to seem more a matter of luck than strategy. Wordle used to be based on a large, static dictionary of five-letter words, but now there is a puzzle master whose job it is to mess with your day. You get a lot of words with two sets of double letters or other rare combinations. A great victory for me is getting it in two, an average one is four, and I consider it a defeat if it takes five or six. I’ve been getting quite a few fives lately. Then Strands . It’s like those word-search book...

W e all knew that having a billion dollars grants you some say in government. But it’s surprising to learn that having almost a trillion dollars lets you BE the government. No elections required, no campaign ads or town halls or meeting stupid folks in shitty diners. You just buy your way in. Pay a couple hundred million to get a dunce elected president, and then patiently explain to said dunce how things should be. Occasionally let him think all the big changes are his idea. (For example, punishing South Africa for ending apartheid.) Leon Musk (W-South Africa) has us by the short ones now. He can do for Uncle Sam what he did for Twitter. He can reshape this country into a Cybertruck for the ages: vaguely sinister but inferior in every way that matters – and kind of prone to bursting into flames.  Hard to believe we’re here already. But no one can say we weren’t warned. 

The well-dressed sod-buster   I never read any of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” books, nor did I ever make it through any single episode of the hit ’70s TV show. But that doesn’t mean I can’t shit-post about Netflix’s plan to reboot the series.  On the plus side, Netflix has nowhere to go but up. The original was an overlit schmaltz-fest that didn’t tug at the heartstrings so much as percuss them like Django Reinhardt. It wasted no opportunity to impart some simplistic and saccharine lesson. It was supremely inauthentic. For a gritty, realistic portrayal of family life on the frontier, it’s right up there with “The Brady Bunch,” which ended the same year “Little House” started. At least half of the budget appears to have been spent on Michael Landon’s hair and wardrobe. The pioneer life was one of constant toil, but the TV Chuck Ingalls was always freshly shaven and decked out in pressed business-casual shirts with coordinating suspenders. Did he need the suspenders? N...

  I magine if Bob Dylan had been blessed with Timothée Chalmet’s looks and singing voice. He could have been a big star. Haha. We were getting caught up on SNL episodes the other night and finally got to this one: Timothée (not crazy about that diacritic and double e) up there covering three of Dylan’s lesser-sung tunes: “Outlaw Blues,” “Three Angels” and “Tomorrow Is a Long Time.” He did a pretty good job – just as you’d expect from someone who’s spent the last couple of years learning to ape Dylan’s style for “A Complete Unknown.” As SNL musical guests go, you could do worse. GloRilla, for example, who was on the week before. But I found something about it kind of off-putting.  There’s the shameless movie tie-in, of course, with Oscars only a month out. But then SNL’s stylish staging and video effects made it seem that Chalmet wasn’t paying tribute to Dylan so much as inhabiting the man’s persona. Here was Dylan 2.0 (in the parlance of our times), with a cuter face and clean...

Everybody loves the Super Bowl. Right? A nd so it comes to pass that I have actually lived in both cities represented by this year’s Super Bowl contenders. That’s pretty stunning! It last happened way back in, let’s see … 2023. I forget who I was rooting for then. When I lived in Philadelphia, of course I was a big Eagles fan. When I lived in Kansas City, it was Chiefs all the way. (In Jacksonville, I was a tepid fan of the Jaguars until it became kind of embarrassing.) See, when you live in a city with an NFL team, the mood of the whole metro area waxes and wanes according to the score on any given Sunday. It’s always better when a city is happy. It’s better when even a city’s noted assholes essay a certain bonhomie.  Now that I live in a City Without a Team, I’ve been making less of an effort. NFL football, for me, has always been about pretending some knowledge of the teams to ingratiate myself with those who did care: checkout clerks and waiters and certain relatives who always...