I got to thinking about the design language of Star Wars' "second tier" of droids, and some of their possible influences...

---

airnow.gov - this seems like a good resource to know about if you're near or downwind of the forest fires.

---

$1 Trump Coins Being made what a blatant disregard for widely known and accepted law.

Oh it's a "commemorative coin"? Yeah, that's like Vanilla Ice saying he didn't steal from Under Pressure, see, it goes "bump bum bump badda BUM bump" not "bum bum bump badda bum BUMP"

And then his bullshit response "very unusual but I was honored by it," and "its very cute they gave me a coin."

Right. "Cute". And not your idea and/or tailored to his idiot predilection for putting golden something on everything, like a dog talking its walk

Repetition is the only form of permanence that nature can achieve.

---

50 funniest tweets ranked...

---

a trophy for trump - but is it gold enough?

Lindsey Graham is dead at 71. In 2016, he dared America on camera: "Use my words against me." This is his obituary. These are his words.
The facts first, plainly. Graham died Saturday night at his Washington home of what his office calls a brief and sudden illness. He served four terms, chaired the Judiciary and Budget committees, and spent decades as one of the loudest voices in American foreign policy.
By sunrise the whitewash had begun. Trump declared him a "true American Patriot." Netanyahu called him a beloved friend. The eulogies will tell you about his service.
They will not tell you about the ledger. So we will.
In December 2015, Graham looked into a camera and called Donald Trump a "race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot." By February 2016: "I think he's a kook. I think he's crazy." That May he wrote: "If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed... and we will deserve it." He refused to vote for him.
Then Trump won, and Lindsey Graham discovered golf.
By late 2017 he was scolding the media for calling the president, yes, really, a kook.
His best friend was John McCain, a man Trump mocked for being captured in Vietnam and kept mocking after he was dead. Graham wept for McCain on the Senate floor, then deepened his devotion to the man who spat on his grave.
The words he wanted used came in 2016, when he swore that if a Supreme Court seat opened in an election year, the next president should fill it. In 2018 he repeated the promise and added: "hold the tape."
In October 2020, as Judiciary chairman, he rammed Amy Coney Barrett onto the Court eight days before the election.
In November 2020, Georgia's Republican secretary of state said Graham had called him asking about tossing legally cast mail ballots. Graham denied it, fought the grand jury subpoena all the way to the Supreme Court, and lost.
On January 6th, with the glass still on the Capitol floor, he announced: "Count me out. Enough is enough." He was back at Mar-a-Lago within months.
He cheered the country into Iraq. Three weeks ago he was on television promising that if diplomacy failed, Trump was "going to take the Strait of Hormuz."
Honesty requires one more line: he was, to the end, one of Ukraine's most reliable champions in the Senate, and he died the day after standing beside Zelensky in Kyiv. Even a ledger this dark has an entry in the other column.
But the ledger is the legacy. A man who saw exactly what Trump was, said so in the plainest English of his era, and then spent nine years kneeling to it for relevance.
He asked us to use his words against him.
Consider them used.

---

We're all living in a prequel. We're all going to die, and we're all in a prequel

Reminds me of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog "I've got some spoilers... who wants to hear a spoiler? It's a spoiler: You Will Die Alone"

US Cyclospora cases mount as CDC lags on tracking - your tax dollars not at work. Thanks DOGE! Good job Trump. Never been a finer time for explosive diarrhea.

---

Saw a bunch of fireflies at Cooper Park in Brooklyn last week. Bioluminescence feels like magic.

---

For a hot minute, and for the first time in months, I'm at inbox zero, and same for instant messaging. (Procrastinating on some light interview prep is a helluva drug)

I gotta decide if it's worth trying to keep up as a daily discipline or not. Like, I really don't want to think about most of this crap over the weekend, but even a weekend's worth of pileup is the snowball that starts rolling...