Random Thoughts: Mike Pence is Connor Roy

2023-06-01: Mike Pence is the 2024 presidential campaign's Connor Roy.
Headline: "Mike Pence is a man without a constituency."

2023-06-01: Ted Lasso series finale (with spoilers): True to the end, Ted Lasso stays nice win or lose. Laughs were never the main goal here (warm fuzzies were), and became less a goal as the series wore on. Series could continue without Ted, with a sharper edge (I'd watch that), but won't. B-

2023-06-04: TIL: "In a typical year, the country builds more three-car garages than one-bedroom apartments."
How Parking Ruined Everything - The Atlantic

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2023-06-05: Picking winners and losers, Texas legislature edition.
The Texas legislature isn't satisfied with creating incentives for companies to build on-demand power sources, such as natural gas plants and batteries. They want to restrict the incentives to natural gas power plants alone.

2023-06-06: Clearly it's a merger in name only. Even the PGA guy said Saudis are bringing money, the PGA is bringing the history. That describes a buyout, not a merger.

2023-06-08: The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel finale (with spoilers): In flash-forwards, Season 5 already showed us Midge's future success with a Joan Rivers-like career. In the finale it focuses on her big career break getting a slot on a Johnny Carson-like late-night talk show. Series was best in Season 1 when it dwelt on her standup act. The finale brought us back to the joy of that. A-

2023-06-08: I can't help but picture Pat Robertson being welcomed by God into heaven and warmly being told to join all the people Robertson condemned on Earth.

2023-06-08: Chris Christie and Mike Pence launch (almost certainly doomed) Presidential bids? Why? The most likely reason is pure and simple revenge. They know they can't win, but they think maybe they can keep Trump from winning.

2023-06-10: Barry series finale (with spoilers): In shootout between Hank's gang and Fuches's, the wrong guy walked away. Sally knew she was a bad person, but was redeemable. Cousineau brought his ending on himself. Barry was such a broken man, he could have had no other ending. Artistically, it was so much better than Hank's tear-jerker. B+

2023-06-10: Movie offerings this weekend: Transformers, Spider-man, Little Mermaid, Super Mario Bros., John Wick, etc. I know it's the start of summer, and the movie industry is in a crisis, but the choice recently has been poor.

2023-06-13: "Colossal asteroid the size of 99 narwhals to pass Earth Thursday - NASA."
Americans will do anything to avoid using the metric system.

2023-06-13: Want to feel really old? Johnny Carson, 30-year king of late night talk shows, has now been off the air longer than he was on.

2023-06-16: I just voted as a shareholder of the Green Bay Packers. I withheld my vote for Mark Murphy, Chairman of the Board. It's not a football decision. It's a business decision. He's bad for business because he's bad at football.

2023-06-20: July 4th marks freedom for white Americans. Juneteenth marks freedom for all Americans, fulfilling what was only promised on July 4th. Juneteenth should not become only an African-American holiday. It should become an American holiday celebrating our country's second birth of freedom.

2023-06-23: TIL: "Corn" in England doesn't mean maize, or not exclusively maize anyway. So the famous Corn Laws of 1815 applied to a lot more than maize. From Wikipedia: "The Corn Laws were tariffs and other trade restrictions on imported food and corn enforced in the United Kingdom between 1815 and 1846. The word corn in British English denoted all cereal grains, including wheat, oats and barley."

2023-06-28: Texas heat wave: Extreme nighttime temperatures a symptom of climate crisis | CNN

2023-06-29: "Race Neutral" Is the New "Separate but Equal" - The Atlantic

2023-06-29: What does SCOTUS consider to be Constitutionally acceptable race-neutral admission categories?
"43 percent of white students admitted to Harvard were recruited athletes, legacy students, the children of faculty and staff, or on the dean's interest list (as relatives of donors)—compared with only 16 percent of Black, Latino, and Asian American students. About 75 percent of white admitted students "would have been rejected" if they hadn't been in those four categories."

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