Surveying which food trucks are operating at which beer gardens today and gasped at one listing $15 egg rolls and a $22 salad.

As someone who lives near the eastern Sierra Nevada brewery there is something special about a Pale Ale out on the brewery lawn, but I’ll note that their taproom specials are usually subtle styles that they’d have trouble selling at scale.

A factor I hadn’t considered but makes sense as part of my general Year of Toxic Vibes hypothesis:

Flock Of Dimes (and Sylvan Esso) cover Crowded House's "Don't Dream It's Over" Flock Of Dimes (and Sylvan Esso) cover Crowded House's "Don't Dream It's Over"

I love that my favourite cover of it is by one of my favourite younger artists.

www.avclub.com/flock-of-dim...

This absolutely doesn’t exist any more but “Sunday tea” (a meal of mostly light and mostly sweet food in contrast to Sunday dinner) was a reality to me and melds with Antiques Roadshow.

The Blue Riband is the perfect compact afters for 80s Sunday tea for that reason.

I am northern: I read the Sunday Post at my grandma’s when young (Oor Wullie and the Broons but also the Query Guy) and saw waxpaper-wrapped Mother’s Pride Scottish Plain in shops and Tunnocks’s milk chocolate wafers are mid.

Sacrilege but milk chocolate Tunnocks waters are not as good as Blue Riband; dark chocolate is a different mattter.

apropos of fuck all I have been back with @harikunzru.bsky.social‘s “Into the Zone” which has aged far better than most podcasts by not really intending to be timely but by intending to be worth something.

www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/int...

Lowell was a terrible fuckup but he was a generational fuckup of the tranquilized fifties and

www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57035/...

It is strange to me that I actually hit Lowell’s “For The Union Dead” before I hit any revisionist confederate shit (this is a credit to Christine Gerrard, the very best English teacher of American Lit in Oxford) but I feel like my hierarchy is correct.

I kind of knock Zohran for not doing a video from Grand Army Plaza which is the most broadly monumental civic space designated as a commemoration of the correct winners and a fuck you to the losers.

As a general rule: the current president’s actual business has always been in trading secrets and scuttlebutt and the irony is that while he will always be given a pass by his followers, for everyone else the truth will out.

“American democracy at the state level depends on either wealthy patricians who can’t be bought or lifelong public servants who never care to feel rich” feels simultaneously absurd and kind of fitting.

It probably helps that while the ROK’s car-making industry was not starting with batteries and electric motors from scratch it seems to be quite competent at making cars with batteries and electric motors.

Here for the multimodal transportation options.

this fucking year won't be taking this from us

A small confession that until Oxford I thought fritillaries (a word I knew only from Blyton, I think) were a kind of butterfly.

America, where the luxuries are cheap and the essentials are bloody expensive.

I had the reverse experience at Tesco about a year ago after a long absence: bread for £1.20? So many things for under a pound?!?

The SVB run showed how many VC-funded startups had a customer base that was mostly other VC-funded startups and you can get away with that for some things but, um,

My paternal grandmother was a church-door Catholic (received into the church when she got married) but the closest she ever came to swearing in my presence was the way she said the word ‘convert.’

It’s hard for me to articulate the difference between e.g. Oli Frey’s covers for Crash!/ZZAP 64 and Dragon magazine in the mid-80s but the latter definitely felt *foreign* to me in a way a lot of American things did before the web.

I went out to Robbinsville for the eclipse and you know anywhere west of Bryson City is Vols NC, it’s a different place.

Oh, I get it, I’ve seen the halfback houses around Cashiers and the old tarpaper roofs in Graham County.

He is the Linz Was Right™ president.

Welcome to Middlesboro They're mighty proud of their meteorite crater.

For @npwrth.bsky.social there is a good old thread on the FMTTM board about someone from the old country who arranged a visit and the mayor literally showed up to greet him and flew him over the area in his Cessna.

flic.kr/p/axk8yj

i think this is an under-appreciated aspect of the tension - namely that we're habituated to believing government just doesn't work. don't get mad at unions for being unions, get mad at governments for refusing to govern. this includes managing the unionized workers competently!

“The federal government gave vast acreage to white Protestants and then cheap mortgages to white Catholics and Black people didn’t do enough with the pittance we finally reserved for them” is the most accursed retcon of the parable of the talents.

My particular liberal enclave (at least within the city limits, it drops off fast) is probably more liberal than a lot of UK towns but that’s more an agglomeration effect. The difference between Asheville and Murphy is staggering.