Scotty Bowman look-alike fielding a call from Charlie
The best hockey manager ever (in my opinion), Scotty Bowman, was born on this day. He shares it with: Roman Emperor Trajan, Dr Samuel Johnson, actress Greta Garbo, comedic actor Fred Willard, rocker Dee Dee Ramone, scumbag Rick Pitino, actor James Gandolfini, uniballed-man Lance Armstrong, soccer player Ronaldo, and model Keeley Hazell. Feel free to fight me over the Scotty Bowman claim. But you’d be wrong.
Making it interesting without Yelich
A very big slate of games last night in the major leagues. At the top of the mountain, the Astros, Yankees and Dodgers all won. The Brewers and Nats won, while the Cubs and Cardinals lost. So the NL Central and Wild Card races got a little more interesting. In the AL, the Athletics won as did the Indians, with the Rays losing. SO that WC race is also getting hotter. Enjoy it, friends.
The UCL group matches started yesterday with Liverpool and Chelsea both falling. The big match today is Real-PSG. Have fun watching that. And if you’re a PSG supporter, be prepared to boo your best player. That seems to be in fashion over there.
OK, moving on to…the links!
(((Who))) will win?
Israel’s election still hangs in the balance. I’m kinda interested to see how this one turns out. Either way, I’m sure the Palestinians will send over several gifts to the winners and losers alike. Just kidding. Those won’t be gifts, they’ll be bombs.
That above story dovetails to this one. I, for one, am not surprised by this at all. When places like UCLA are telling Jews they have no business on the student council and ignorant BDS campus groups are popping up like mushrooms, with the wild-eyed support of morons like Ilhan Omar, AOC and a bunch of others…yeah, this is not surprising.
Wait…what? IS this kind of thing available to anybody that wasn’t wearing a uniform for a good part of their life? Also, the names of the parties just add to the weirdness. Thanks a lot, asshole.
I tried not to be as depressing with the links today. I only partially succeeded. Either way, enjoy them. I’ll sit here trying to avoid the flooding that’s coming to much of the city. Have a great day, friends.
More can and must be done, however, to rebuild trust, to avoid repeating past mistakes, and to prevent future health consequences similar to those experienced during and after the Gulf War. Our troops must be assured that when we send them into battle, they will be protected by the best military technology, the best leaders, and the best medicine. Protection also means proper education and training, as well as provision of critical information, including information about investigational new drugs that may be administered to our troops for their protection against chemical and biological threats.[i]
At the end of multiple hearings on Gulf War Syndrome and many inquiries into the DoD’s use of experimental and investigational drugs during the Gulf war, in 1997 Congress (finally) decided that enough was enough. Representative Patrick Kennedy (D, RI), introduced a bill on the floor of Congress to provide some small measure of protection for service members. In its original form, the bill imposed three requirements on the DoD: either prior to, or within 30 days of, administering an investigational new drug, the DoD would have to inform military members that
The drug being administered is investigational;
The reasons why the drug is being administered;
The potential side effects of the drug, including side effects resulting from interactions of the drug with other drugs or treatments being administered to the individual.
Representative Kennedy’s remarks made clear that the bill was the direct result of inquiries into the Gulf War and what he perceived as a DoD cover-up of possible chemical exposures of U.S. troops. He noted that the trust between soldiers and the government
“has been called into question. One need merely read newspaper articles surrounding the Persian Gulf war to see what I mean. On February 28, the New York Times ran an article entitled: ‘Pentagon Reveals It Lost Most Logs on Chemical Arms;’ ‘Missing From Two Sites: Gulf War Veterans Now Raise Questions of Cover-Up or Criminal Incompetence.’”[ii]
Mr. Kennedy went on to cite another article that revealed that the Army had been warned by the CIA five years prior (to the article) about the possible exposure of troops to chemical agents and that the DoD had claimed that it only became aware of the exposures the prior year. Additionally, Kennedy referenced the DoD and FDA negotiations that took place prior to the Gulf War regarding a waiver of informed consent detailed in the previous chapter. He criticized the DoD for failing to comply with the conditions the FDA had set forth in order to grant the waiver of informed consent that the DoD legally needed and had negotiated in order to use both pyridostigmine bromide and botulinum toxoid on troops. Oddly enough, however, Kennedy then seemed to concede that the DoD could now use investigational drugs without informed consent because “[u]nfortunately, for our troops, the threat of chemical and biological weapons have become an increasing reality[.]” Mr. Kennedy seemed to believe that, at the least, “the men and women who served in the Gulf War had a right to know that the vaccines administered to them were investigational” and that “[t]he same service members had a right to know about the side effects of the investigational drugs.”[iii] As an author’s note, I feel compelled to add that Representative Kennedy did swear an oath to “defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies foreign and domestic” and “to bear true faith and allegiance to the same.” Which can only mean that either (a) Kennedy believed that it is perfectly fine for the U.S. government to experiment on its troops, or (b) he doesn’t know very much about the Constitution. (‘Both’ is also an acceptable and likely answer).
To his credit, however, Kennedy did introduce the bill in order “to ensure that in the future our troops are informed of investigational drugs, and to help ensure that our service members can and will trust their government.”[iv] The legislation received some discussion on the floors of both the Senate and the House, always with reference to the Congressional investigations surrounding Gulf War Illness and the mistakes made with pyridostigmine bromide.[v] Finally, as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 1998 (from October 1997 to October 1998), Mr. Kennedy’s proposed bill became 10 U.S.C. §1107. In something that couldn’t be made up, within a year of this bill being approved and becoming law, Secretary of Defense William Cohen announced that he would begin the inoculation of all U.S. military personnel with the anthrax vaccine.
As this vaccination program was kicking off, the Senate Armed Services committee was already calling high-ranking DoD officials to explain how the program was going to work in light of the Persian Gulf experience and even the then recent deployment of troops to Bosnia. In fact, members of the committee pointed to the Presidential Advisory Committee’s review of the DoD’s efforts in Bosnia and pointed out that they were deemed “an abysmal failure.”[vi] This committee even addressed the issue of how the DoD proposed to handle the administration of clinical protocols in accordance with FDA regulations. It is important to note that here the DoD was acknowledging that it had to comply with clinical protocol requirements of the FDA if it administered a drug in such a way as to render it an investigational new drug. An FDA official opined that “we [the FDA] believe that they [DoD officials] understand… [the need to comply with IND procedures]. We believe that they have the capability of complying with all of our IND rules and regulations. As to whether they will comply in the next deployment situation, obviously we can’t predict that.”[vii]
The Acting Secretary of Defense for Health affairs, Gary Christopherson, tried to assuage the concerns of committee members by admitting that the Bosnia experience[1] was a “situation where we believed we ought to be able to do an IND and do it well, it still did not come off 100 percent. It did not meet their standards. It did not meet our standards in there.”[viii] He went on to add that the DoD and the FDA were engaged in a “conversation” to improve their compliance with the FDA’s regulations. In a bit of backpedaling, Mr. Christopherson implied that there was some kind of agreement between the FDA and DoD that there would not need to be full compliance with the requirements of the Nuremberg Code, the FDA’s regulations, and the DoD’s own internal regulations. He offered that “[t]he one thing that I think both FDA and we have come to somewhat – not necessarily a conclusion, but close to – is that in real combat situations it’s very difficult if not impossible to do a full investigative new drug protocol.” This did not seem to arouse much comment from any of the Senators, despite the clear implication that DoD was not going to comply with the requirements for informed consent for an IND procedure. One other question not raised (of course) was how combat would be defined. Even if the DoD were granted a waiver for combat exigencies, would Bosnia and other peacekeeping operations fit the justification given for the Gulf War?
At the same time that the Senate hearings were going on and the anthrax program (AVIP) was going forward, the FDA was also trying to determine if the interim rule that it had published to allow DoD to use investigational drugs without informed consent should become a final rule. That rule, granting the DoD waiver, was still “on the books” as the interim rule pending finalization. The FDA solicited comments by October 29, 1997. This means that (legally speaking) as late as autumn of 1997, the DoD still had a waiver from the FDA’s requirements of informed consent. The language of the rule was broad and did not specifically exempt just those two products, although that was the agreement reached in 1990. Now, as the DoD was preparing to use another investigational drug in Bosnia and not doing it particularly well, the FDA was asking whether or not the DoD should be allowed to maintain the waiver. This produced some interesting exchanges in committee hearings in Congress. In 1996, the Director of the FDA brought forward Ms. Mary Pendergast, a doctor at the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER), to answer the question about this rule.
REP. NETHERCUTT: So your conclusion five years later is that waiving the Informed consent requirements is acceptable?
PENDERGAST: Yes, basically. It’s not the preferred option, but there are some products that you cannot ethically test. . .
REP. NETHERCUTT: Okay. I’m trying to get to now. . . as to why you feel it’s acceptable to do that.
PENDERGAST: If there is another war —
REP. NETHERCUTT: Which is prospective.
PENDERGAST: Yes. If there is another war and if there is a circumstance where the military might need to give prophylactic treatment to its troops, then we would create simply the framework that would give them the opportunity to come to the FDA to ask for permission to waive informed consent. It’s not saying that we would waive it during peacetime; it’s not that we would automatically waive it, rather, we would create a framework that would permit them to ask for permission.
KESSLER: I think the presumption is, if it is at all possible, you get informed consent. That certainly is my personal position.[ix]
In this exchange, the head of the FDA, Dr. Ronald Kessler, asserts that informed consent would not be waived during peacetime at the same time that the FDA has on the books an interim rule that allows the DoD to waive informed consent, not just for combat, but also for the “the immediate threat of combat.”[x] How immediate would the threat have to be and what level of combat would it have to be? One can only envision that the DoD would get to make both of these determinations; certainly the FDA is not going to question a military officer’s determination that combat is imminent or immediate or of sufficient ferocity to be deemed combat.[2] Thus the rule is really no rule at all in terms of limiting the application of when the DoD can waive informed consent.
In a 1997 Congressional hearing on Bioethics, this issue also came up by Dr. Arthur Caplan, a professor of Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. He offered quite simply that “the handling of the waiver with respect to the troops was unethical.”[xi] His opinion was that even with the waiver of prior informed consent, the DoD should have informed troops after the fact, if nothing else; that “the Defense Department – and those military agencies have not – did not do what they needed to do to after the fact inform people when they were exposed to innovative or experimental substances.”[xii]
His second point of contention was that “there’s still been no formulation of a policy about what we do with respect to research on our troops. We don’t have it today. We didn’t have it six years ago. And I find it incredible that we have not had more than an interim rule to guide us with respect to research in the military.” At the time he said this, the FDA’s interim waiver rule for 50.23(d) was still in effect. Another doctor looked back even further and questioned the underlying assumption of the waiver, which, unfortunately, more people have not done.
BENJAMIN WILFOND: I think I was not convinced this morning that they ever gave a clear reason why it was not feasible to have given – asked for consent in the first place. I mean, presumably if you ask the soldiers: You may be exposed to nerve gas. This medication may help you, but we really don’t know and would like to do a project. Would you like to participate? Most of them would probably say yes.[xiii]
Some discussion ensued and there was the usual deference about the “quick” mustering up of forces, but Dr. Wilfond continued to question the assumption: “my point is that there’s still no – it’s not clear that they couldn’t have done it ahead of time either.”[xiv]
This is an important issue that seems to get swept away amidst the rhetoric and large questions, but it is a particularly pragmatic point but deserves some attention. Every member of the Armed forces has, at one time or another, stood in line awaiting some inoculation. There is absolutely no explanation by these people in Congress why – if a member of the Armed Forces has to stand in line to get the shot – there would not be sufficient time to obtain the member’s informed consent? Even if the requirement for written consent were waived, if medical records have to be annotated anyway, how much more difficult would it be for the corpsman or medical personnel to hand a sheet out to everyone as they are standing in line? Or, how hard would it be to include a standard medical brief along with all of the other briefs that servicemembers have to receive when deploying, during which the ranking surgeon explains that this is the only possible treatment for the known threat. As both Doctor Wilfond and another doctor pointed out in their testimony to the Congressional committee:
CAPLAN: We took a lot of testimony at the Presidential Advisory Committee on this matter, and it was summed up fairly well by one of our people who came to testify to us who said, if someone is shooting very large bullets at you which may be filled with biological weapons, the likelihood of your refusing an antidote is zero.[xv]
This may or may not be true: indeed, my own informal surveying concludes quite the opposite. The troops will take the known risks of being shot over the unknown risks of (yet another) DoD boondoggle with unproven chemicals being shoved into one’s body (a point to which I will return in detail later in this book). Despite these committee hearings, most of which had an FDA representative attending and concurring in the recommendations of others, the FDA had still not issued a new rule to replace the interim waiver rule from the Gulf War in late 1998. By this time, Congress had held so many hearings on the issue of informed consent and military members that it moved from the committee level onto the floor of Congress.
Representative Christopher Shays, a vocal opponent to the waiver granted to the FDA, rose as the speaker pro tempore in the House on June 16, 1998. He pointed out that there had been 13 hearings in three and-a-half years looking into Gulf War Illness. During this time, various agencies had testified in order to “try to get a handle on the problems that our Gulf War veterans have faced when they returned home. Out of the 700,000 that have returned, almost 100,000 have had some types of physical problems to deal with and have sought to have their illnesses be dealt with by the Department of Veterans Affairs.”[xvi] Mr. Shays noted that after 11 hearings, there had been a number of findings and recommendations made, among them that
“the VA and the Pentagon did not properly listen to sick Gulf War veterans in terms of the possible causes of their illness[;] [that] there is no credible evidence that stress or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder caused the illnesses reported by many Gulf War veterans[; and] that Congress should enact legislation establishing the presumption that veterans were exposed to hazardous materials known to have been present in the Gulf War theater.”[xvii]
Most importantly, Congressman Shays recommended that “the FDA should not grant a waiver of informed consent requirements allowing the Pentagon to use experimental or investigational drugs unless the President signs off and approves.”[xviii] This recommendation would become the cornerstone of a new version of Representative Patrick Kennedy’s first, more modest legislation. Interestingly, all it really did was seek a return to the “common rule” set forth in the Department of Defense’s own regulations, the Department of Health and Human Services regulations, the FDA’s regulations (prior to the waiver), the Nuremberg Code, and the federal statute passed which codified the Nuremberg Code. All of these regulations and laws have always stated that “the informed consent of the subject is absolutely essential” and all of them stated a presumption that “informed consent is feasible except . . .” in certain limited circumstances, usually when the subject was incompetent or incapable of giving consent or in a life threatening situation where the subject could not consent.[xix] As an example, the DoD’s own regulations state, unequivocally:
Except as provided elsewhere in this policy, no investigator may involve a human being as a subject in research covered by this policy unless the investigator has obtained the legally effective informed consent of the subject or the subject’s legally authorized representative. An investigator shall seek such consent only under circumstances that provide the prospective subject or the representative sufficient opportunity to consider whether or not to participate and that minimize the possibility of coercion or undue influence. The information that is given to the subject or the representative shall be in language understandable to the subject or the representative. No informed consent, whether oral or written, may include any exculpatory language through which the subject or the representative is made to waive or appear to waive any of the subject’s legal rights, or releases or appears to release the investigator, the sponsor, the institution or its agents from liability for negligence.[xx]
The FDA and DHHS regulations are identical, almost word-for-word. Additionally, the same regulation goes on to assure the subject that the only way that informed consent could be waived is if an appropriate Institutional Review Board, composed of doctors and other experts and members of the given community, determined that
The research involves no more than minimal risk to the subjects;
The waiver or alteration will not adversely affect the rights and welfare of the subjects;
The research could not practicably be carried out without the waiver or alteration; and
Whenever appropriate, the subjects will be provided with additional pertinent information after participation.[xxi]
This language is hard to reconcile with the policy in the Gulf war that Mr. Shays noted that “our troops were ordered to take an experimental drug referred to as PB . . . It was used . . . as an experimental drug to do something it was not designed to do. Our troops did not have the option to decide whether or not to do this. They were under order. If they did not live by their order, they would be prosecuted by the military.”[xxii] Congressman Shays, looking back at that moment, probably had no idea that his words actually foreshadowed what was to come under the anthrax vaccination program that had just begun in April of 1998. Notwithstanding his intent to prevent just such occurrences – the threat of forced/coerced inoculation – embodied in the legislation that was to pass later that year, courts-martial were already beginning for those who would try to exercise the very rights being re-issued to them under the new version of 10 U.S.C. §1107.
The 1998 version of 10 U.S.C. §1107 was passed as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 1999, in October 1998. The differences between the 1997 version and the 1998 version are startling and important to note, not only for their legal effect, but for what they reveal about the rational for making the changes. The original (1997) 10 U.S.C. §1107 required the Secretary of Defense to provide written notice to service members of the use of an investigational new drug or a drug unapproved for its applied use “unless the Secretary of Defense determines that the use of written notice is impractical because of the number of members receiving the investigational new drug or drug unapproved for its applied use, time constraints, or similar reasons.”[xxiii] This means that the Secretary of Defense had almost unfettered discretion to determine that written notice was not feasible. The only condition or enforcement mechanism was that the Secretary was supposed to provide Congress a written explanation if written notice was not used. The 1998 version, however, in sharp contrast, would strike that language out (from “unless” to the end), thus eliminating anything except written notice. The new version would then add one significant paragraph, (f) and change the current (f), the definitions section, to (g). The new paragraph, unchanged since 1998, reads as follows:
(f) Limitation and Waiver.—
In the case of the administration of an investigational new drug or a drug unapproved for its applied use to a member of the armed forces in connection with the member’s participation in a particular military operation, the requirement that the member provide prior consent to receive the drug in accordance with the prior consent requirement imposed under section 505(i)(4) of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (21 U.S.C. 355(i)(4)) may be waived only by the President. The President may grant such a waiver only if the President determines, in writing, that obtaining consent–
(A) is not feasible;
(B) is contrary to the best interests of the member; or
(C) is not in the interests of national security.
2. In making a determination to waive the prior consent requirement on a ground described in subparagraph (A) or (B) of paragraph (1), the President shall apply the standards and criteria that are set forth in the relevant FDA regulations for a waiver of the prior consent requirement on that ground.
This portion of the statute vests the decision to use or not use investigational drugs with one person and one person alone, the President of the United States. While the President appoints a cabinet member, the Secretary of Defense, to be his representative on military affairs, this law specifically lifts the power to make these decisions out of the Secretary’s hands and placed it squarely on the President.
3. The Secretary of Defense may request the President to waive the prior consent requirement with respect to the administration of an investigational new drug or a drug unapproved for its applied use to a member of the armed forces in connection with the member’s participation in a particular military operation. With respect to any such administration –
(A) the Secretary may not delegate to any other official the authority to request the President to waive the prior consent requirement for the Department of Defense; and
(B) if the President grants the requested waiver, the Secretary shall submit to the chairman and ranking minority member of each congressional defense committee a notification of the waiver, together with the written determination of the President under paragraph (1) and the Secretary’s justification for the request or requirement under subsection (a) for the member to receive the drug covered by the waiver.
The crucial portion of this new law is that only the President could waive the requirement for informed consent. Furthermore, even if the Secretary wishes to request a waiver, he cannot delegate that request, putting him- or herself on the hook, as well, if something were to go wrong. The President could also only grant the waiver in writing, and then the Secretary has to submit a copy of the waiver and his justification for requesting it in writing to both the House and Senate Committees involved that have cognizance over military affairs AND appropriate the money for such operations.
This section thus vests political liability for the decision to waive informed consent with the President. Second, it provides Congress with the weapon to veto the Presidential decision with its mightiest tool – control over the appropriations to conduct such an operation. While there is still an ongoing battle over the two provisions of the Constitution that vest control of the military in two different branches of government,[3] ultimately Congress could win such a battle by denying the funding for any military operation under its plenary power to appropriate money. Perhaps the most important aspect of the statute comes from the enabling public law. The National Defense Authorization Act for FY 1999, which passed and enacted the second version of 10 U.S.C. §1107, contained two notes that would affect any existing waivers of the requirement for informed consent. The first paragraph (paragraph (2) of the 1998 act) explains that the new paragraph (f) applies to any new operation involving service members. The second of these two clauses addressed the possible “grandfathering” of any pre-existing waivers and states that
(3) <10 USC 1107 note> A waiver of the requirement for prior consent imposed under the regulations required under paragraph (4) of section 505(i) of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (or under any antecedent provision of law or regulations) that has been granted under that section (or antecedent provision of law or regulations) before the date of the enactment of this Act for the administration of a drug to a member of the Armed Forces in connection with the member’s participation in a particular military operation may be applied in that case after that date only if –
(A) the Secretary of Defense personally determines that the waiver is justifiable on each ground on which the waiver was granted;
(B) the President concurs in that determination in writing; and
(C) the Secretary submits to the chairman and ranking minority member of each congressional committee referred to in section 1107(f)(4)(C) of title 10, United States Code (as added by paragraph (1)) –
(i) a notification of the waiver;
(ii) the President’s written concurrence; and
(iii) the Secretary’s justification for the request or for the requirement under subsection 1107(a) of such title for the member to receive the drug covered by the waiver.
Thus, the statute not only looked forward to future operations, it also reached back and effectively wiped out the existing interim FDA rule and waiver that the FDA still had not changed. The FDA would update its regulations in May 1999, incorporating all of the requirements of 10 U.S.C. §1107, some 7 months after the passage of the act and some eight plus years after it issued an “interim” rule for Desert Storm.
Endnotes
[1] In the Bosnia deployment, the DoD vaccinated troops against a tickborne encephalitis with an investigational drug.
[2] This is not a game of semantics, either. Our predecessor veterans in Vietnam, having spent time in the “Arizona Valley” near Da Nang or serving near the DMZ, might not characterize the role of our troops in Bosnia as “combat”, yet any time a bullet flies from a hostile rifle, there is the possibility for death and harm. The FDA is certainly not going to gainsay the military in such matters.
[3] The Constitution, in Art. I, §2, names the President as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. Art. II, §8 grants Congress the power to make rules for the land and naval forces, to raise armies, and the power to make all necessary rules in carrying out its duties under Art II.
[i] 143 Cong. Rec. E 637, April 10, 1997 (remarks of Representative Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island).
[v] See, e.g., 143 Cong. Rec. H. 9137 (Oct. 23, 1997). Section 766 of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 1998 contained this bill under the subtitle Persian Gulf Illness (Subtitle F).
[vi] U.S. Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs Holds Hearings on the Nomination of Togo West to be Secretary of Veterans’ Affairs and U.S. Biologic Vaccines for Gulf War Veterans. Statement of Senator Rockefeller. March 17, 1998.
[vii]Id. Testimony of Mr. Randolph Wykoff, Associate Commissioner for Operations, Food and Drug Administration.
[ix] Testimony before the House Committee on Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies, (March 12, 1996).
Happy Tuesday, everybody. I’m thinking about asking my doctor when I see her next week if I can have their technology contract. Their “web portal” is always down, I got an email from them to confirm an appointment that just had a time of day, but no date. I know I can do better working on this as side hustle. And, it just pisses me off that I can’t do anything without calling their office. I just want to fix it for my own convenience, but I might as well make a little money off it, right?
Also, after much feedback yesterday, I’ve decided to change my title from “Lead Architect” to “Head Nerd in Charge” — so I am now the HNIC of this project.
Women can’t be psychopaths, right? She’s certainly no criminal mastermind: “The attacker left a cellphone in a case that contained her driver’s license, as well as a wallet with documents that included her name”
The scarab-colored Corniche purred North along FDR drive with the top down on a beautiful Manhattan Fall day. Tonio chatted away with his agent in the back seat and they took turns exchanging her flask of VSOP with his joint of some really good weed the bellhop had sold him. Yusef, Riven’s driver, exited at Ninety-Sixth Street. As the car passed the Marx Brothers Playground, they both giggled.
“Marxists.”
“Inorite?”
Finally they arrived at Elaine’s and Yusef double parked outside. Elaine herself greeted them and led them to a choice table where they could talk privately, yet see and be seen. There was an old man dozing at the table. Elaine flicked his ear and he woke up, startled.
“Time to go, old man,” said Elaine, tipping his chair forward slightly to encourage him to stand up, “the future is here and needs its table.”
Elaine snapped her fingers and a busboy appeared and quickly cleaned the table. The old man shuffled off desultorily.
Tonio looked at Riven quizzically.
She leaned in and made as if to fix some imperfection in his collar. “Salinger,” she whispered, discretely. Shortly, they were seated.
“Cocktails,” asked Elaine, brusquely.
“Pink Gin with a twist, please.”
“Dry Martini with olive, please.”
“Coming right up,” said Elaine, turning and trundling towards the bar.
“No shit? I thought Salinger was a recluse.”
“Hiding in plain sight.”
“Ah…”
“So, you’ve arrived,” said Riven with a twinkle in her eye.
“It’s still sinking in. When I got the check I thought it was a joke.”
“Hi, I’m Holly. I’ll be your waiter today. Pink Gin for the lady?”
Holly delivered their drinks, then pulled lunch menus out her apron and handed them each one, opening them beforehand. They sipped their drinks and perused the menu.
“May I interrupt?”
“Joe,” said Riven, “this is my new author, Tonio. Tonio, this is Joe Stefko, founder of Charnel House publishers.”
“Don’t get up,” said Stefko. “So, this is the Tonio of whom I’ve heard so much about?”
“Yes. Pleased to meet you, sir.”
“Call me ‘Joe,’ Tonio. Why don’t you come by tomorrow afternoon for our quarterly authors’ cocktail party. Dean will be there. And Harlan, supposedly, but you never know with him; odd bird, and all. Okay, kids, gotta run.”
“Oh, Tonio, you are still innocent aren’t you?”
For some reason it was raining in Elaine’s. And getting darker.
Tonio awoke in the alley behind Acropolis Pizza. Stavros Gallasaris, beloved local restaurateur and inseminator of countless MWC women, was pissing on the cinderblock wall next to him. Gallasaris finished then shook out his fat cock, splattering Tonio with more droplets.
“Hey…”
“Nothing you no take before, malakos. Wakey, wakey.”
Gallasaris was right. Tonio had sucked his boss’ cock on a regular basis since starting work at Acropolis. There was just something irresistible about goaty little men. Especially uncircumcised ones.
“Another rejection?”
Tonio nodded.
The form letter from Virginia Journal of Speculative Fiction lay on the ground next to him, along with the SASE. Tonio had waited to open the letter until his break just before closing. It had been a long, hot shift; he must have dozed off in the relative cool of the alley.
Dear Author, Thank you for your submission, but it does not meet our needs at this time. Best Wishes, Mimsey Borogrove, editor.
“I tell you, Maria’s cousin Spheniscidos he print your stuff. You get free magazines. Might help you.”
Tonio shook his head. He had seen the girly magazines that Gallasaris’ in-law published. Stavros kept a big stack in his desk drawer, and always had one open while Tonio was blowing him. The magazines did contain stories, but they were obviously pasted in as filler – barely titled, uncredited, no “continued on page 69.” Some of the stories appeared to have been cut off randomly in the middle, presumably when the typesetter had finished filling any space not taken-up by boobs or advertising.
“Let me know you change your mind, he say lotsa good writers get started in Playboy.”
Tonio knew that. Playboy had just published an excerpt from Roald Dahl’s forthcoming adult novel My Uncle Oswald. But there was a big difference between Playboy and Titties. Hefner had his pick of established authors, and your manuscript wouldn’t get read unless it was submitted by an agent.
The hippies at the Green Dragon Bookstore had a purple ink fanzine; it was something. But they kept trying to get him to play this weird make-believe game stuff that sounded interesting but ridiculously complicated.
“Go ahead, clean up. Drunk girls at table three stiff you, smells like they puke all over ladies toilet.”
My lord, can somebody please tell these Browns fans to pump the brakes a little. Everybody beats the shit out of the Jets. And its time to push the panic button in Chicago, even though the Cubs won, with Rizzo going down for at least a week and the Brewers white-fucking-hot right now. Those Brewers won and the Nationals lost to tighten up the NL Wild Card race. Meanwhile, Cleveland won and both Oakland and Tampa Bay lost to pull back a little closer in the AL.
This should be fun.
Everybody has 11-12 games left and shit is tiiiiiiight. Meanwhile the division races are all but over and we’re just watching to see who ends up with the best record for home field purposes. The Astros and Yankees are now tied for the distinction with the Dodgers a game back. Grab your popcorn.
UCL Group Stage matches start today with Naples-Liverpool headlining with Dortmund-Barcelona. I’m excited to see how well these teams physically hold up now that their schedules are much heavier than other teams in their leagues.
I know how he feels.
General Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben was born on this day. Dude was a badass. Oh, and so were SC Justice (and oft-times an idiot) Warren Burger, country legend and drunkard Hank Williams, Sr., actor Roddy McDowall, motorsports god Stirling Moss, the lovely Anne Bancroft, another dipshit SC justice David Souter, fortunate basketball coach Phil Jackson, underrated actor John Ritter, football player (and eventual legend) Pat Mahomes, and others. Its also the day Wil E. Coyote and Road Runner made their debut. Meep! Meep!
Alright, now on to…the links!
Oh look, CNN are openly cheering someone who abandoned the presumption of innocence for political grandstanding to launch a campaign. Not to mention completely ignoring her sordid past of what some might call “overzealous prosecutions”. Others might call it sociopathy. I’m one of the latter. This woman is as dangerous an opponent to the rule of law and the fundamentals of due process and the presumption of innocence this nation has seen since FDR rounded up all the Japanese-Americans and stole their shit.
Anti-Semitic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar
When meddling in a foreign election is alright. Nice hypocrisy, shithead. Oh, and nice way to say a person’s “existence” is a bad thing. The last time a high-profile Dem politician said that about a head of state, he got murdered and the entire region went further int o the shitter.
Cancel Culture claims another scalp. Oh, and apparently it is “punching down” when you make an Asian joke. Comedy is not quite dead, but it sure is on life support.
Artist’s depiction of a monster calculating how tall a roof is.
Lat’s see how the leftards will try to spin this one. Maybe they’ll find some sweet tea and a bag of skittles in their getaway car. Either way, I assure you there will be a push to make the criminals here into victims.
I didn’t want to talk about it, but it’s part of the journey: my 2016 Kia is destroyed, not my fault, I was in NM when it happened, but. What was supposed to be a turnaround trip turned out to be the wife in the hospital and the son with the keys, and wouldn’t give them back. Next I hear the car was destroyed, as I predicted, and insurance is fucking us, as I predicted.
San Dimas!
Why did we stop here? Sleep and gather some things from storage; keyboards! Bass guitar!
Bullhead City AZ
Vacation, all I ever w, oh nevermind, it’s still hot as… Arizona, so I built a hillbilly smoking area, it works well enough I go into the AC afterwards and get cold.
I saw this at Smith’s, no one noticed?
I noticed Smith’s had build your own 6 pack, but I already tried everything they had, so normal beer for now, except,
a real nice oat ale.
What the Hell am I doing?
It appears that my job title may change again. East coast work, which could keep us on the road for another six months, we are getting tired. If we save enough cash, then we finish in AZ, by the river and I work local.
More change?
We have no idea what we are doing now, my job is in jeopardy, which also means I may have no vehicle to drive, well and truly fucked. I made sure to bring my gauges, just in case some HVAC comes my way, til then, spooky time….
Happy Monday everybody. I am in the first day of my new work assignment in upgraded capacity. This basically means I am the only developer on the team, so I have awarded myself a promotion to Lead Architect. Sure, I’ve got nobody to lead for a few days, but that’s just a minor quibble. Also, I’ve been teaching myself a new code framework, and its about as much fun as sex with whiskey dick. The payoff.. is coming… any time now… whoops, nope. Maybe next time. And having left that picture in your minds, here’s some links.
I respect the cut of this Florida Man’s jib. It takes real balls to mail the State a bill for $2.5M. Guess what happened next?
Brutal. But not unfair. Me, personally, I’d give Taggart until the end of this season to figure out how to not blow leads.
Note: A preview from my upcoming autobiography, Life’s Too Short to Smoke Cheap Cigars (Or to Drink Cheap Whiskey.)
In the Beginning…
Young boys and fishing seem to go together like peanut butter and jelly. The problem is that fishing also goes along with fishhooks, like bologna and cheese. Worse still, fishhooks and perforated skin also seem to go together, like bulls and china shops.
My twelfth summer was the first in which I spent a lot of time out on the trout streams by myself, or with companions nearer my own age; always before that I had the benefit of a wise and beneficent father, who kept me from getting tangled up too badly in barbed, pointy objects of recurved steel. This summer, however, my main fishing companion became the thirteen-year old local miscreant and walking disaster, a fellow named Jon. Jon had recently attained the magic age of thirteen, and now possessed the assured wisdom of being, officially, a Teenager. His wisdom did not extend to extracting fishhooks, or even to preventing fishhooks from being emplaced in his (or my) anatomy.
Problem was that Jon was a bit clumsy; turning thirteen had come hand in hand with a growth spurt of vast proportions. Seemingly overnight he shot from four feet eleven to five feet ten, with hands and feet expanding to the size of canoe paddles. This was a recipe for awkwardness unlike anything we’d seen before.
Bad Snags
A bright June morning found us making a three-mile hike through the hills to a favored spot on Bear Creek a mile short of the Upper Iowa River; smallmouth bass found their way up the large, slow creek from time to time, and fat trout lounged in the deep pools. Several of the large pools were favored fishing spots; we set up on the bank of one large, deep, still stretch, across from a limestone cliff face alive with chittering cliff swallows. Trout were rising in the early sunshine, and all was well with our world.
“I know just what to use,” Jon assured me, tying a #2 spinner to his line. This spinner had a triple hook on the tail and another right behind the spinner blade; Jon promptly got one hook in his thumb, and another in his index finger.
“Ow! Hey, help me out here!”
Jon wasn’t the sort to suffer in silence. A series of yelps, barks and shouts accompanied my efforts to extract the spinner from Jon’s flesh. As the positioning of the hook made it necessary to lean over Jon’s hand, all of the various epithets were directed into my left ear at the range of about twelve inches. What’s worse, Jon had a set of lungs that enabled people to hear him a good mile downwind; I was subjected to the approximate noise level of a jet airliner on takeoff.
“HEY!”
“OOOOWWW!!!”
“WATCH THAT!”
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING!?!?”
“AAAYYOOOOOOO!!!”
When I finally started to actually try to get the hooks out, things got worse.
A typical fish hook.
The yelping, barking and shouting was heard at incredible distances. The caretaker at the Girl Scout camp about a mile off later reported hearing horrible sounds, as though someone was skinning a pack of wildcats, live. Old Amos Shepherd was tending a sick heifer when the caterwauling reached his farm three-quarters of a mile upstream. His dairy herd of Jerseys stampeded, no doubt thinking a pack of freshly skinned wildcats was closing in; the only way Amos saw to avoid being trampled was to grab a passing cow’s tail and hang on for dear life. Unfortunately for Amos, the Jerseys’ could run much faster than his 72-year old frame was equipped to keep up with; this resulted in his being practically airborne for the duration of the stampede. Folks living on the lower Bear Creek road were treated to the sight of a herd of Jerseys charging flat-out down the road, with a skinny old man joining in on the stampede, clinging on to one cow’s tail for dear life and running in incredible ten and twelve foot bounds.
After about fifteen seconds, during which we were unknowingly surrounded by panic and chaos, I finally worked the hooks loose and handed Jon back his spinner.
“Try to be a little more careful!” I admonished him. Jon rubbed his bleeding hand, wincing. “Don’t worry, I’ll get it” he assured me.
To his credit, Jon managed to get this spinner tied on without further incident. Stepping to the bank overlooking the pool, he let out a little line, drew his old spinning rod back, flicked it forward with a practiced flip of the wrist – and sunk the hook in the back of his head.
“AAAYYOWWP!”
Jon wasn’t the only kid to have difficulties wish needle-sharp fishhooks. We all faced the necessity of extracting a barb from one portion of our anatomies or another, sooner or later. And the worst of all fishhook injuries were, of course, not self-inflicted. No, for when you feel the hook sink into your own flesh, you can stop its progress; when someone else sinks it into your cringing soft tissue, you have no control over their mistaken belief that they’ve just tied into a four-pound trout.
And that brings me to Wimpy Neidert.
There’s Always A Townie.
Every school seems to have a kid like Wimpy. Our version was, at twelve years of age, roughly five foot three, and just about as wide as he was tall. Topping the roly-poly frame was a pudgy, freckled, amiable face with Coke-bottle glasses, topped by a tangle of blistering red hair. Wimpy wasn’t often found along on our outdoor excursions; couches and television were more his forte, usually accompanied by a large bag of cheese puffs and a dozen or so cans of pop. In fact, Wimpy had difficulty walking farther than the distance from his parent’s house in town to the bus stop; he arrived at the stop red-faced and wheezing.
In other words, Wimpy wasn’t material for the Presidential Physical Fitness Program. Needless to say, Jon and I were a bit surprised to find Wimpy accompanying us on our annual trip to the Upper Iowa River for the early summer sucker run. Wimpy would have preferred to stay home, in fact, and eat cheese puffs while watching television; but a trick of history intervened.
Wimpy’s father and Jon’s dad were best friends. They had gone to school together, joined the Army together, went to Vietnam together, and were to that day frequently seen together imbibing cold beers in various local watering holes. Wimpy’s father wasn’t pleased with his son’s rotund frame and slothful outlook; as we discovered later to our chagrin, Jon’s Dad volunteered our services to take Wimpy out fishing, “to get him out in the fresh air.” Both Dads agreed it would do Wimpy good to tag along with us; we weren’t so sure. The sucker run was beginning, though; we had a nighttime outing planned to go snag suckers; it was too late to back out now.
And so it came to pass that late one Friday evening Jon and I were pushing our old bikes along the lower Bear Creek road towards the Upper Iowa, ambling along in the growing darkness as Wimpy puffed along behind us, astride his ancient coaster bike, accompanied by a host of groaning, creaking and squeaking sounds. Wimpy’s bike was making some noise as well.
It was close to ten o’clock by the time we arrived at the river. Jon and I were disgusted at the delay, but we waited patiently as Wimpy, gasping, parked his bike, arranged his fishing gear, and finally followed us down a fifty-yard trail, over a wooden style spanning a barbed-wire fence, and across a cow pasture to the river.
The surface of the river was as smooth as glass in the moonlight, the mirror-like surface broken here and there with the ripples caused by large white suckers cruising just below the surface.
The sucker run was an annual tradition. Every year, in spring and early summer, white suckers ascended smaller streams from the Mississippi to spawn. Living in the rich, silty Mississippi enabled some of the suckers to grow to prodigious size; ten-pounders were routine, twenty-pounders not unheard of. Since the single-minded fish didn’t feed much while spawning, we pursued them with snagging gear, heavy bait-casting rods with twenty-pound line, tipped with huge treble hooks cast inside lead weights. The trick was to cast past the ripples in the river, and bring in the hook in jerks, bouncing it along the bottom, hopefully to snag in the sides of a large sucker.
This, of course, was a recipe for disaster with Wimpy along.
We split up there on the bank of the river. Wimpy, still red-faced and wheezy, stayed put; I went upstream a hundred yards or so, and Jon opted to try his chances downstream an equal distance. Silently, in the darkness, we made our way to our fishing spots.
The night was cool, the stars twinkled overhead in the velvet-black sky, from the hill above the river a hoot owl called once, twice, and then dropped down the hillside to whisshhh by ten feet over my head. Magical evening. I cast and yanked, cast and yanked, and on my third try hooked into a reasonable sucker; in a few moments I had the six-pound fish flopping on the bank.
An actual portion of the actual river.
Downstream, Jon was having less luck. Repeated efforts yielded not one fish; at his chosen spot the water was a bit deeper, and the bottom-hugging fish left no revealing ripples on the surface. Not one to be defeated by a primordial fish with the brain the size of a chick-pea, Jon redoubled his efforts, yanking the hook vigorously along the bottom. A small crowd of cows started to gather behind him on the bank, their curiosity piqued by the spectacle.
In between, unknown to either Jon or me, Wimpy was finally beginning to enjoy the evening. His tackle box contained no fishing gear. Wimpy settled himself on the steep dirt bank, feet dangling over the water, and extracted from his box a bag of cheese puffs, a bottle of pop, a flashlight, and the latest Captain America. He had just settled in for a nice read when the bank gave way, landing him with a loud splash in the river.
Upstream, I heard the splash, and thought little of it. Cattle were grazing up and downstream from us; loud splashes are not uncommon when cattle are near water. Downstream, Jon heard the splash, thought, “beaver,” and noted the location in order to return with a few traps the coming fall. Wimpy landed in about three feet of water and came up spluttering. Then, with a panicked start, he noticed his cheese puffs bag floating away downstream on the current. Grunting his annoyance, Wimpy splashed away in pursuit.
As it would happen, Jon chose that moment to try another spot, a few yards upstream at the top of a steep bank where the river undercut the shore. The cows followed; cows rarely get any sort of entertainment, and so are easily amused, even at the sight of a boy trying to snag a sucker.
They were about to get the show of their lives.
Jon, on the high bank, couldn’t see the river well in the darkness. He hadn’t been able to see any telltale ripples before anyway, so nothing lost; he began anew his routine of casting and yanking, casting and yanking. A splashing sound intruded on his senses; he wrote it off as a cow. He wasn’t far off in that assessment.
Wimpy had pursued his cheese puffs bag downstream, finally catching up to it in a swirl of water where the river undercut a high bank. Reaching out a pudgy hand, he snagged the fugitive snack. An odd sensation then; something slowly slid up his left leg, feeling oddly like… like… twenty-pound fish line.
On the bank, Jon was bringing in his triple hook again, rod tip bouncing up and down in vigorous, slightly annoyed jerks.
Wimpy felt the line riding up higher, now past the knee. The full implications hadn’t sunk in yet; he froze in indecision.
Jon felt a slight resistance on his line. He lowered the rod tip, gave a slight yank, felt the resistance again.
Wimpy felt the line now past the thigh; he still hadn’t quite figured out what was going on. He was about to find out.
Jon grinned to himself in the darkness; visions of ten-pound suckers filled his head. He lowered the rod tip, took in a little slack with the reel, braced his thumb tight against the spool, and gave,
one …
mighty…
YANK!
This is what they feel like when they are embedded in your anatomy.
The huge, lead-weighted triple hook leaped clear of the bottom of the river, gaining speed, propelled by the springy tip of Jon’s fishing rod, sped on its way by Jon’s young, strong arms, his muscles hardened by a youth spent tossing hay bales and wrestling dairy cattle. The line sang as it ripped clear of the water; the hook, still gaining speed, rose, sped towards its unintended target, to sink itself not in a ten-pound white sucker, but directly into the crotch of Wimpy’s cut-off painter’s pants.
Jon, feeling the hook hit something solid yet slightly yielding, leaned his weight into the rod to set the hook deep. And set the hook he did; two prongs penetrated deep indeed, ripping through denim and cotton to find the most sensitive portion of Wimpy’s anatomy, while the third ripped through to sink itself in the bottom end of Wimpy’s zipper, and to anchor itself there as though set in concrete.
No breaching whale ever rose from the water more impressively than Wimpy broaching from the Upper Iowa that night, propelled by the agony of the two needle-sharp prongs impaling the Neidert family legacy. On the bank above, Jon recoiled in horror, faced with what was either a red-haired, screeching whale broaching unaccountably from the shallow river, or a red-tipped missile fired from an unseen enemy submarine somehow concealed in the river. Jon engaged reverse gear and hit the gas; he proceeded exactly three feet before colliding with a curious Holstein.
The cow reacted as cows do, butting Jon in the small of the back with some force, sending him stumbling forward, over the bank, into the river; he went down the bank as Wimpy went up. Somehow, he had the presence of mind to hang onto his fishing rod. He landed in the river with a loud splash and surfaced just in time to be yanked back up the dirt bank face-first.
Wimpy had cleared the high bank in one phenomenal surge, and set off across the pasture, wailing in agony, trying to flee the impaling points. Before Jon could react, the line went taut, yanking him over the bank and dragging him through a thin line of trees into the open pasture.
Upstream, I heard the initial scream, followed by a series of splashes; I reeled my hook in and made for the open pasture myself. There I was greeted by an incredible sight.
Wimpy was charging across the pasture, screeching like a banshee; about twenty feet behind him was Jon, skidding face down through the pasture, hands clenched on his fishing rod. Wimpy hit the fence at the end of the pasture, rebounded with an audible TWANG from the barbed wire, and reversed course. Jon was carried along, airborne briefly in a half-loop as Wimpy set off for the opposite end of the pasture. Fascinated, the cows clumped along behind. I winced as I saw Jon dragged face down through a series of fresh cowpats. I had to do something.
“JON!” I shouted. “STOP HIM!”
Summoning a terrible strength from somewhere deep within, Jon managed to flip himself over, get his feet under him, and haul back on the rod. Wimpy fought like the lunker he was, but in the end a final yank from Jon stopped him, cringing and sobbing, in his tracks. Wimpy dropped like a poleaxed steer.
I approached cautiously. Wimpy was on the ground, moaning, both hands clasped over his nether regions. Jon was muttering words that would have earned him a clout from his mother as he knelt next to Wimpy; at first I thought he was examining Wimpy in concern for his injuries, but as I drew closer I saw that Jon was using Wimpy’s shirttail to clean cowpat off his face.
“Think he’ll be OK?” I asked Jon.
“If he has any kids, they’ll be stupid.” Jon replied.
“Big surprise there, huh?” I grinned at Jon. He flicked a bit off cowpat off his ear. The Holsteins gathered around, their eyes wide. They hadn’t had this much fun in years.
The journey home was less than pleasant. In the lead, Wimpy walked, or rather waddled, with shrieks of agony at regular intervals; neither Jon nor I professed the expertise to perform the necessary extraction. Jon followed, answering every shriek with a shouted imprecation. I brought up the rear, a good twenty yards back, the better to avoid Jon’s rather strong barnyard odor.
And then…
It took a long drive to town to the local Emergency Room to finally extract the hook and thus ensure the continuity of the Neidert line, but Jon and I weren’t there to see it. Breaking free as soon as we delivered Wimpy to his father at Jon’s house, we headed off to an upper stretch of Waterloo Creek near the Hooper farm for a bit of nice relaxing midnight trout fishing.
There, on the moonlit creek bank, all was peaceful. Jon looked over at me, grinned, and drew his rod back to cast. He flicked the rod tip forward briskly, lodging his spinner’s hook firmly in his left ear.
The Astros managed a sweep of bottom-feeders Kansas City to get back on track and tie the Yankees again for best record in baseball, with the Dodgers a mere game behind, as we head into the final couple of weeks of the season. This is gonna be fun. So are the Wild Card races, to be honest. I’d not want to face Cleveland right now. Or the A’s. Hell, or Milwaukee. Enjoy the next 14 days!
You know who is not enjoying things right now? Arsenal or Everton fans. Meanwhile Liverpool stay perfect to start the season with maximum points as Man City lost to Norwich in a surp…wait, they lost to Norwich?!?! LOL, good times. UCL group games start this week as well, which is pretty sweet.
Bye-bye playoff chances
And in football, Tennessee actually won a game, Ohio State pounded Indiana, Maryland shit the bed, as did USC, and Kentucky, and Florida State. While in the NFL, a couple of future HOF quarterbacks went down for what looks like an extended period, as their teams both lost. The Patriots keep rolling, the Bengals are a joke, the Rams found a way to win, the Vikings didn’t and the Kansas City Chefs look incredible. I know I’m missing a few things, but I can’t just cater to the sensible people on here who are sports fans, so I gotta keep it brief lest the uncultured sports-haters blow a gasket.
The Nick Gillespie of magicians
Railroad tycoon Charles Crocker was born on this day. So were: former British Prime Minister Bonar Law, department store magnate James Cash Penney, bluesman BB King, actor Peter Falk, hall of fame cager Elgin Baylor, actor and amateur boxer Mickey Rourke, magician David Copperfield, baseball players Tim Raines and Orel Hershiser, and actress Amy Poehler. Meh.
Alrighty then, let’s get this week started with…the links!
Purdue Pharma has filed bankruptcy as vultures circle in an effort to steal the personal wealth of its owners. Because, you know, they put these drugs on the market without getting FDA approval, forced patients to take them without a doctor’s prescription, and continued to drug people with them by not disclosing any potential side effects found during the approval process. LOL, just kidding. They complied with every regulation put in place and doctors were all given literature describing everything known from trials. Well I hope they manage to keep their fairly-earned wealth and these grifter AGs end up with jack shit.
Artist’s depiction of Corn Pop, post-Biden intervention
Poor Corn Pop. Glad to know Joe Biden was there with his chain to teach you the error of your ways. And I’m glad that the Sharks and the Jets were all finally able to set their differences aside.
If you find the results of this policy surprising in the least, then you must not have been paying attention. But its ok, their intentions were honorable. I guess. No wait, they weren’t. Their intentions were to get rid of homeless people so they wouldn’t have to look at them.
And oil prices spiked and stocks are expected to have a bumpy ride after a drone attack on the largest refinery in the world in Saudi Arabia. Please don’t drag us into this, Trump. I’m begging you. I know you tweeted some stupid shit last night, but please, please, please don’t stick America’s dick in this meat grinder.
I wouldn’t be doing him or music in general justice if I didn’t mention that Ric Ocasek, frontman for The Cars, died yesterday at the age of 75. Dude was a hell of a musician. So enjoy a song of theirs.And enjoy a second one. Aw hell, let’s do three (with extra funky keyboards).
