Paul Wesley

Didn't know he was on that podcast. I'll attempt to listen to it, but very likely it will end early with me screaming/swearing and turning it off in disgust. He can come across as reasoned and principled as long as you set aside the fact that he carried Trump's water for FUCKING YEARS AND YEARS AND YEARS. He can persuade you that he'll crush Trump in a 2024 debate as long as you set aside the fact that THOSE EXACT DEBATES HAPPENED IN 2016.

The Willie anecdote is pretty remarkable. As if we needed another anecdote to tell us what kind of person Willie is.

Pretty much all you can say, right? Texas fans like to do charts like this for 2008 for Texas vs OU vs Tech. Or 2008 Texas vs Florida. We pretty clearly had a better resume than either OU or Florida, but there was a shit ton of clowning in the coaches' poll (like guys in the Stoops coaching tree voting OU #1 and Texas #5), and that was the year Tebow made his "no one's gonna work harder than me" speech - which the media fucking LOVED (and ignored that it came after Florida lost a home game to a .500 Ole Miss team).

Doh!! I misspoke. I should have said that the same argument that kept *Texas* out of the championship game in 2008 ("should have won your own conference") was suddenly absent a few years later when conference champion Oklahoma State was screwed in favor of an Alabama team that lost a home game and didn't even win their own division.

Great post. 1). Isn't it crazy how much offensive NFL talent Sleepy Mike Sherman was able to assemble for a bumbling and inept Aggie team around 2010-2012, while Texas - fresh off a string of MNC games and multiple top-5 finishes - had no viable quarterbacks, a bunch of skill-position JAGs, and one of the worst offensive lines in the league? 2). Totally agree on 2011 Oklahoma State. They got screwed out of the championship game they deserved. And the argument that was used to deny them their chance ("got to win your own league") was completely abandoned in order to hand Alabama a mulligan and a crystal ball a year or so later.

Just to add: I realize that my post seems equally hopeless, but if Hoyt Richard’s can get out of a cult, there’s still hope for my right wing email-forwarding uncle (who almost certainly sent Trump some money, but still has his hair).

Brisket, you might be right. But that kind of nihilism feels to me like trying to drive out darkness with darkness, and I’m just not willing to live with the resulting hopelessness.

Well, I can't take credit for it. I listened to a podcast the other day where cult survivor Hoyt Richards used the phrase. He recounted leaving the "Eternal Values" cult - and after more than a decade of giving them millions of dollars while they shaved his head and performed group rituals where they verbally abused him, he STILL was vigorously resistant to labeling the group he had left as a cult. This was after many, many years of his very closest friends and his family doing big, coordinated interventions to confront him with "YOU ARE IN A CULT!"

I got no hard feelings for Colorado. I don't know if they were trying to get ahead of seismic realignment or not. I think maybe they just took a big drag from the water bong, and turned down their Phish bootleg long enough to recognize their kinship with Portlandians (and their lack of kinship with the Southwest and the Great Plains).

You probably weren't inviting actual responses, but I think about this question all the time. Forgive me for taking a stab at an answer: 1. Right-wing media has the format and the appearance of news. But instead of news, it relentlessly broadcasts conspiracy theories, and then lines up well-groomed anchors and fake authorities to repeat well-choreographed talking points that are always cynical ("all government is bad"), paranoid ("the left is trying to destroy your white, Christian culture"), aggrieved ("your vote was stolen"), and deeply hostile to experts ("Arrest Fauci!"). Almost every item they broadcast validates and reinforces their viewers's beliefs along one of those axes: government should be destroyed, liberals are evil, deep-state experts are wrong, and you (viewers) have been violated. 2. Conspiracy theories are infinitely more seductive and persuasive than nuanced policy discussions. 3. Experts on civil war (Barbara Walter's book is great) tell us that widespread political violence is most likely in countries that have tainted democracies (she doesn't use that language... she calls them anocracies), and is also far more likely when there is a demographic shift where one ethnic group knows that it is losing its ruling power. 4. It's pretty easy to fool people. It's nearly impossible to convince people that they have been fooled. How many moments have we had - including January 6 - where a lot of us naively thought, "**THIS** will be the thing that finally makes the Republican Party repudiate this fascist clown?" But there's never going to be a reckoning as long as 1. and 2. continue to exist. -- and especially if 1 and 2 exist in a country with the characteristics described in 3.

My mother lives in an "independent living" community. I had lunch with her this afternoon on their campus, and their little bistro/restaurant had a DJ set up. He had two turntables and a big PA. And the DJ used those turntables to crossfade "Runaround Sue" into "Jailhouse Rock," etc. It was beyond amazing - and no, I don't think it was being done ironically. I thought about shooting some video just to show people that I wasn't making this up. Now I wish I had.

I was in undergrad when she did "Mandinka" on Letterman. It made a huge and immediate impression. Mainstream pop and rock was still in the deep pits of hair metal, and the few rock bands that were fronted by women (Heart) were doing God-awful corporate power ballads. And onto that scene comes a young Irish girl who writes her own songs, shaves her head, dresses like a punk, and has a totally unique perspective on the world and an incredible physical voice to match. I wore out those first two records. The songwriting on both of them is just fantastic. If you were older than about 13 or 14 when she tore up the picture of the pope, you'll remember how venomous and ubiquitous the backlash against her was. Sinatra was talking about slapping her, comedians of the day (Andrew Dice Clay) did bits mocking her. I don't think she had a single ally amongst any religious group -- it wasn't just the Catholics, but leaders of all denominations denounced her. Politicians denounced her. Even music fans booed her when she appeared at a Bob Dylan tribute concert. I can remember a few people standing up for the Dixie Chicks in real time. I don't remember a single person in any position of power standing up for Sinead. It's pretty crazy to think how universally she was criticized for saying things that we think of only a few decades later as factual - that black boys were getting killed by the police, that the Catholic Church was enabling child abuse, etc. I have listened to "Emperor's New Clothes" a thousand times, and I'm still really moved by it. "Everyone can see what's going on They laugh 'cause they know they're untouchable, Not because what I said was wrong. Whatever it may bring, I will live by my own policies. I will sleep with a clear conscience, I will sleep in peace."

Man, I am really sad for my beloved home state. Does Texas have anyone in a leadership position who's not an ignorant, thin-skinned fascist looking to systematically grind up all the actual experts in the right-wing hate machine? p.s. This thread makes me want to write a check to The Texas Tribune for reporting these stories. They should be getting more attention.

It was kind of refreshing for a pop music documentary, right? It didn't follow the standard narrative at all. And, yeah - respect to Ridgeley. Very gracious.

That record totally holds up, doesn't it? Very simple songs, but they're catchy, they have hooks everywhere, and the vocal performances are fantastic.

Awesome that you are writing and composing in such contrasting genres.

Person of mass

4 seats, section 114 on the aisle. $1000 Sounds expensive, but with the ticket insurance, face price was right at $250/each. If you want them, you can Venmo me the $. You MUST have the Ticketmaster app in order for me to send you the tickets (photos won't get you in). I've been on these boards since Greg Davis was throwing 2-yard out routes on 3rd-and-long.

Great post, and right on the money. All the old Texas fans - which includes the guys making the decisions for UT today - remember the last 8-10 years of the SWC. It was the early years of cable TV, and conferences were figuring out that Notre Dame didn't have to be the only school getting big $$$ for TV rights. The kind of money that conferences were getting in the late 80's is small potatoes compared to today's massive deals, but at the time, it was still an eyebrow-raising step up in the college football ante. Texas fans found themselves in a league with a 1-state footprint and a bunch of schools with small followings and very little bargaining power. It sent us into a death spiral. Recruits were leaving the state in droves, in favor of OU, Nebraska, Notre Dame, and the SEC schools. Recruits wanted to play in the venerable stadiums filled with 90K fans, not in Ownby or Robertson. I mean, if Texas didn't care about winning anything on a national level, that was a perfectly sustainable business model. But if Texas aspired to be a perennial top-10 team, it's definitely not. It wasn't then, and it isn't now. I would have been perfectly happy in the original iteration of the Big 12, but as the mid-sized public schools (Mizzou, Aggies, Colorado) peeled away and Nebraska collapsed (and blamed Texas for all their woes), our league literally started re-creating the SWC. It's not sustainable. We've seen how that ends for us - watching our home-state talent shun Austin, and watching schools with a lot less valuable brands getting bigger $$$$ because they're in better leagues. And Mitch is right - the school most responsible for a decade of Texas' on-the-field bed shitting is Texas. In the time where this conference realignment continued, we had Mack mailing it in for YEARS before handing off the reins to a couple of clowns. Finally, as for former Kansas State AD Tim Wieser and the rest of the Big 12 officials taking these laughably bitchy shots at us like spurned 14-year old girls: Texas is going to be just fine. No, "we might as well lose to Alabama" was not the logic in Austin. It was more like "we are not going to be able to compete with Alabama as long as we are yoked to 10 shitty also-ran schools in shitty nowhere towns like Manhattan Kansas that are run by shitty also-ran chucklekfucks like Tim Wieser (his psychology degree from Emporia State not withstanding)." And also "we aren't going to be able to compete with Alabama and their SEC money in this modern-day recreation of the gasping, wheezing SWC. Clearly it hurts his feelings that his school hasn't beaten us since three presidential administrations ago, so he's just pretending like they're on the other end of this winning streak. He's going to be really disappointed to see a re-energized Texas program. The jury is out on whether Sark is going to be able to harness that energy the same way Mack did in his first decade, and whether Sark can likewise turn those advantages into a perennial 10-win program. But there's no doubt that Austin is going to be buzzing with excitement and recruiting momentum over the next few seasons.

That was exactly my reaction. I'm not sure how it's going to be worse than 14-0 penalty disparities, or worse than Texas and OU watching their edge rushers get tackled without consequence all season... but It seems like when your league commissioner openly celebrates your failures, it's probably going to get worse.

Someone on these boards recommended this episode of "You're Wrong About," and it speaks to these (impossibly huge) purported numbers. I tried to find a link to the podcast ('m sure it's on all the platforms), but I could only find this link to it on YouTube. They start breaking the numbers down after around 4:15

I have some version of that... maybe Hercules(?). It holds four or five instruments, but I use it even if I'm only trying to temporarily put down one or two guitars. The multi-stand is one of the most cost-effective musical things I own (I think mine was $80 or so). The little individual fold-out guitar stands are just inherently unstable to even a gentle bump from the side. I don't trust them at all, and I almost never use them anymore. If I'm in a spot where there's not enough space for the multi-stand, I just leave the instrument's case on the floor and lay it down between takes.

I just looked up the lyrics. "Lived nine lives, gunned down ten." I might have to keep singing "Lived my life, Gunga Din."

Pretty good episode.