Sean McDevitt

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 18:00:00 -0500

Why the Modern World Looks So Drab

I tend to listen to or watch The Ezra Klein Show when he has either someone I’m already fascinated by or a topic I’m curious about. It took me a bit, but I finished this conversation between Debbie Millman and Ezra Klein about the driving forces behind the trend of pushing design into vulgarity.

President Trump and the modern right have a theory of beauty. You see it in Trump’s gilded Oval Office, his imagined arch and his executive order requiring classical and traditional styles for certain federal buildings.

This isn’t my theory of beauty, but it is a theory. And it’s a response, in part, to something that a lot of people have been feeling, and not just on the right: that the modern world is ugly, or getting uglier.

I’ve seen at least a dozen articles or videos over the last few years asking, “Is the world getting uglier?” They point to the drabness of new apartment blocks, the sameness of new cars and the reign of “greige” in homes and fashion.

Amidst a modern design aesthetic that looks ‘same-same’ and boring, we now get extremes. The Cybertruck, for example, looks ugly just to get attention. I’m positive that’s not a good thing.

One thing it got me thinking about: everything isn’t getting uglier. Affordable things just have to be cheap to produce, and that’s how you end up with cookie-cutter homes and bland cars.

Style costs extra. So does expression. So does taste.

The Uncredited

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 06:00:00 -0500

Several years ago, on a vacation in Door County, I walked into a little radio control shop in Ephraim with no plan beyond killing a few minutes. Every hobby shop feels the same. Tires hang on pegs along one wall. Batteries and chargers under glass. The guy at the register undoubtedly knows more about gear ratios than anyone you'll meet all week.

Then I saw them. A couple of boxes on the shelf. I’m sure it was a Blade helicopter and a Losi buggy. I knew those boxes. I knew every word on them, because I wrote every word on them.

So I did the thing you're not supposed to do. I told him.

"I wrote the copy on those," I said, pointing.

He looked at the boxes. He looked at me. Then he said something like “Huh,” and went back to what he was doing, which was something close to nothing.

That was it. No follow-up question. No story about a customer who loved that heli. He wasn't rude about it. He just didn't care, and standing there in his shop, I realized he had no reason to.

I've been a copywriter at Horizon Hobby since 2011. Most people hear "copywriter" and picture taglines. Some of it is. Most of it is a relay.

It starts with a marketing brief from a product developer. That's the raw material: specs, features, who the product is for, why it's better than the last one. From that, I write the announcement content, which we call the AC. It's the launch copy, the taglines, the feature bullets, and the what's-in-the-box list. The AC gets pulled into the product's web page. It also feeds the box art copy, which covers pretty much every panel on the box. Every inch of that cardboard is spoken for.

Then comes the sell sheet. I take the final AC and the final box copy and boil them down to one page that our salespeople send to retailers when they call. Its whole job is to get a shop owner excited about something he hasn't seen yet.

A shop owner like the guy in Door County.

For all I know, one of my sell sheets is part of why those boxes were on his shelf. If so, he cared about my writing a lot more than he let on. He just didn't know it was mine.

Which is fine. That's how it's built.

I don’t think about it often, but those products and the copy on them get shipped to hobby shops all over the world, and the copy gets translated into languages I can't read. Somewhere right now, a kid in a shop I'll never see is turning a box over and reading my sentence in a language I don't speak.

If I sat with that for very long, it would flatten me. It's too big. So mostly I don't sit with it. I write the next brief. I fix the next feature bullet that needs updating. I look up final specs. The work stays small on purpose, because small is where the sentences get good.

Most of the writing in the world works this way. Somebody wrote the directions on the back of the frozen pizza box. Somebody wrote the sign at the trailhead telling you how long the loop is. Nobody knows their names and nobody asks. Their words do the job and get out of the way.

That's what box copy is supposed to do. It has a few seconds to make somebody want the thing, and a few more to tell them the truth about it. If a reader stops to wonder who wrote it, I've done something wrong. My name would only get in the way.

I've had bylines. And I’m proud of the stuff I wrote with my name on it. But I'd bet the uncredited stuff has reached more people than everything with my name on it combined. I can't prove it. I'd still take that bet.

There's a kind of pride in that I didn't expect. It's quieter than the byline kind. It doesn't need anyone else in the room.

The owner in Door County taught me that without trying. He looked at those boxes and saw products. Good ones, I hope. He didn't see a writer, and he shouldn't have. The words were doing their job long before I opened my mouth.

Next time I walk into a hobby shop, I'm keeping quiet. I'll find the boxes I know, give them a little nod, and let them do the talking.

They're better at it than I am anyway.

Be seeing you.

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 15:07:00 -0500

Mike Ditka, RIP

Mike Ditka died today at 86, his family announced. No cause was given.

His football résumé would carry anyone. He was the first tight end in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and he coached the 1985 Bears, who went 15-1 and crushed New England 46-10 in Super Bowl XX. It’s still the franchise’s only Super Bowl title.

The personality was even bigger. Ditka fought openly with his own quarterback, Jim McMahon, and his own defensive coordinator, Buddy Ryan. Then he turned himself into a cottage industry: restaurants, commercials, Halloween costumes, some acting and, of course, the famous SNL sketch.

Defector’s Ray Ratto argues that no sports figure ever fused with a city the way Ditka did with Chicago. The Bears traded him as a player and fired him as a coach, and he came back anyway. In Ratto’s words, he “wore his town like a sweater vest.”

Wed, 07 Oct 2026 21:00:00 -0500

JumpStar

My ex-wife taught me how to play Chinese Checkers, and we used to play quite a bit. I have a nice marble gameboard set, but I don’t play the game very often anymore.

Maybe that’s about to change.

JumpStar is the world’s strongest Chinese Checkers AI engine. Designed to emulate AlphaGo and Stockfish, but for Chinese Checkers.

You can play it online or download an iOS app.

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 21:00:00 -0500

How to Stop Being Outraged

JA Westenberg:

If you spend 45 minutes a day angry at strangers online, you’ll give them about 270 hours this year. That’s nearly seven full 40-hour work weeks, handed to people you’ll never meet, about events you can’t change.

I used to spend at least that. For about two years, I woke up, grabbed my phone, and read something that made me furious. By 7:30 I had posted a reply. By lunch I had checked the replies a dozen times. I would spiral, doomscroll, research, and rage, and through it all, I told myself I cared.

…And then I read a study that made me feel utterly ridiculous.

I really like her 14-Day Outrage Fast.

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 21:00:00 -0500

Worse

Justine Calma: Trump finalizes rule to make cars less fuel efficient

The US Department of Transportation finalized its plans today to weaken fuel efficiency standards, calling it “among the largest deregulatory actions under the second Trump Administration.”

Republicans don’t care about you. They care about corporations and shareholders making money. They care about their stock portfolios. Gas is too high? Tough shit. Groceries super expensive? Eat more ramen.

Stop voting for these people.

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 21:00:00 -0500

Between

It’s somewhere between autumn and Indian Summer here. Soon, I’ll stop wearing nice shorts to work and switch to jeans and golf pants. The light jacket is next.

As always, by Halloween I will miss the passing of summer. It’s a mental shift, but a good one. I’m thinking about quarter-zips, chili and soups, and stacking the print books and magazines to curl up with in the evenings.

I need a wind-down drink that isn’t alcoholic. I wonder if we have any Chamomile tea in the house?

Ignorant versus Stupid

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 06:00:00 -0500

Almost twenty years ago, John Scalzi had a couple of observations that I found incredibly interesting:

People who don’t know what they’re talking about don’t like to have that fact pointed about, especially if you use the word “ignorant” in context to the fact.

People like to confuse “pointing out the fact you don’t know what you’re talking about” with “being hostile,” because it makes them feel better about themselves. It’s generally not worth arguing to them that it’s not necessarily hostile to point out when someone doesn’t know what they’re talking about, but inasmuch as many people who don’t know what they’re talking about are invested in appearing like they do know what they’re talking about, and in the process of trying to make it seem like they do know what they’re talking about will make more statements that show their lack of knowledge, thus necessitating further pointing out that they don’t know what they’re talking about, it’s certainly understandable that they would regard it as hostile. And of course, eventually one may indeed become hostile toward people determined to continue to not know what they are talking about.

Besides the fact that point number two has an unwieldy sentence, Scalzi says people don’t know the difference between ignorant and stupid. I wholeheartedly agree. Nearly everyone I know uses the terms interchangeably when, in fact, they do not mean the same thing.

Opinion is another aspect you can’t overlook. For years, I argued with my father that not everyone was entitled to their opinion; they were entitled to an informed opinion. Another way of looking at it is that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not everyone is entitled to their own facts. I didn’t use that argument with my father, but I think he would agree facts are facts and cannot be changed.

What changes are the interpretations of the facts.

For example, I believe there’s a force called gravity that keeps me firmly on the planet. I don’t think God’s hand keeps me clinging to the planet. I don’t believe the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s noodly appendage keeps me grounded. It’s gravity. It’s gravity because science has explained gravity to me. We observe, describe, and understand it. Gravity is a scientific fact.

I deal with stupid people by ignoring or avoiding them. I do the same with willfully ignorant people. These are people who choose to stay misinformed about a subject because that’s the way they “want it to be,” and they’ll present their incorrect “knowledge” to the masses. They have some sort of “reality distortion field” surrounding them. People offended by someone wearing a mask on a plane or in a grocery store are stupid. People who think evolution or a global pandemic doesn’t exist are willfully ignorant. Both of these groups deserve to be shunned.

Ignorant people don’t understand everything about a subject. Ignorance, in and of itself, is not a bad thing. Many people are ignorant about a great many things. It’s what school and teachers and books are for — to change ignorance into knowledge.

What I know about Division 1 College Football could fill an ice cream sample cup. I know a great many things about this sport. However, I have never coached football at any level, let alone D1. I acknowledge I am ignorant and would never walk into a room of D1 coaches and presume to know what I’m talking about or even to pass judgment on their decisions in-game and out. I could never do what they do. I don’t even presume to think I have an inkling that I could do what they do.

My problem with the ignorant and stupid is when they push an agenda of ignorance and stupidity where it doesn’t belong.

For example, the very concept, presumption, and promotion of Intelligent Design is like me walking into Coach Bielema’s office in the Henry Dale and Betty Smith Football Performance Center and saying, “I know better how this here football program should be run.” I may even have a tiny bit of knowledge about football or coaching, but for the most part, I’d be making it all up as I go. How do you think this would make fans feel? How about the coaches and donors?

I would imagine the Illinois coaching staff would punch me in the face and escort me out of the building, probably by the seat of my pants, interacting with a boot. They might try to be nice first. They might try to ignore me or even teach me the errors in my thinking, but ultimately, they’d get fed up and kick my ass.

That’s how I feel about proponents of Intelligent Design or anti-vaxxers or any number of conspiracy theory nuts. They need their asses kicked out of schools and school boards, out of science classrooms and teachers’ institutes. They need to be removed from public office. They need to be removed from positions of power and responsibility. I’m tired of being nice to the willfully ignorant.

Religion belongs in our science rooms about as much as I, in my hoodie and shorts, belong on the sidelines of a D1 Football program calling plays. That is to say, not at all.

The problem is when science-ignorant people (willfully or not) have a religious agenda, and they are trying to sell it as a viable alternative to science. Spiritual teachings are acceptable in the context of a Sunday school or church. You can certainly study the Bible or the world’s religions in a classroom setting. My problem is when you start trying to shoehorn religious beliefs and ideas into a science classroom.

Intelligent Design or, more accurately, creationism is the antithesis of science. Scientists theorize and experiment to learn about the world and the universe around them. A scientist can’t simply say, “I can no longer comprehend this concept. A miracle must have occurred.” With creationism, any questioning about the belief system is categorized as sinful. In science, you’re supposed to explore, test, and peer review.

Science is how we get vaccines to stop worldwide pandemics.

Science doesn’t care one iota about religious, philosophical thought, or personal choices. All three subscribe to the idea of truth. Still, only one uses empirical evidence, peer-reviewed testing, and experimentation to discover the nature of the universe. Others use an ancient book of dubious origin by unknown authors and Facebook memes.

When I go to a medical doctor, I want someone who has studied medical science, not someone who has studied philosophy or the nature of faith. Sure, knowing philosophy is great when faced with moral choices, but it won’t help me get a heart transplant or survive a deadly disease.

When someone needs help, the first thing you do isn’t get down on your knees and pray, but call 9-1-1. You, dear reader, are much more practical than you give yourself credit for, and the world is much better off because of it. Science is practical and real. That iPhone you are using to call 9-1-1 was also created by science.

America is lagging in science education because religious fundamentalists, anti-science morons, and the willfully ignorant push through their agenda of fear to tired and scared school boards and principals, to social media users unaccustomed to doing even a thimble’s worth of research, and to people who need someone or something to blame for their lot in life.

Ignorance can be fixed by the desire to learn.

Change ignorance to knowledge, don’t be stupid, and recognize willful ignorance when you see it. Or, you know, the Flying Spaghetti Monster will touch you with his noodly appendage.

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 05:00:00 -0500

New Music

A couple of albums dropped that I think everyone should listen to because I think they’re pretty amazing.

The first is Introverse by Basement Alchemy. I reviewed it back in March when I purchased an advance copy from Shai Pelled himself.

If you like indie rock with a 90s flair but a modern sound, this is for you.

The second is Dancing While the World is Ending by Stanley Simmons. It’s the sons of Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley of KISS coming together to put together a traditional rock and roll album.

Their influences are strong in each song. A couple of tracks have a strong Fleetwood Mac vibe. A couple of others sound like Tom Petty. The title track riffs on “Are You Gonna Be My Girl” so hard. “Starve the Beast” could be a B-Side from The Black Crowes.

Like Wolfgang Van Halen’s music not really sounding like Van Halen, Evan Stanley and Nick Simmons don’t sound like KISS. And that’s a good thing.

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 16:00:00 -0500

John Torra and Quiet Riot

This weirdly made me happy.

I had heard that Quiet Riot held open auditions to be their new lead singer. One of the auditions actually went viral. John Torra just nailed it. He sounded exactly like Kevin DuBrow.

The band picked him, and his first show was just the other day. Quickly, I found the clip of him singing “Cum On Feel the Noise” and “Bang Your Head (Metal Health)” and it was phenomenal.

Sure, he kinda looks like Meatloaf singing Quiet Riot, but that voice is awesome.

UPDATE: The full show just dropped.

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 14:30:00 -0500

Jack Smith Did Not Conspire Against Donald Trump While Watching Steph Curry Score 60 Points In An Overtime Loss To The Hawks

David Roth, writing at Defector, absolutely nails this moment in time.

The most salient part of the accusation that Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt lodged against former special prosecutor Jack Smith in a Senate hearing on Tuesday is that it was wrong. It was ecstatically and grandiosely wrong, and obviously wrong in ways that even a rudimentary blog-level fact check would have caught. It was wrong in ways that would only be possible at this particular low ebb in American political and broader executive function—based on unverified and unvetted information given only to Republican Senators by the Department of Justice, too-hastily put to oafish misuse by well-credentialed chumps of roughly equal laziness and ambition in the pursuit of a spiteful but otherwise opaque end.

In that sense, it is extremely familiar. If it hadn't ended with Schmitt dangling upside down and blustering like the previously undiscovered suburban version of Yosemite Sam after becoming ensnared in his own malfunctioning perjury trap, it might not even have been news at all. In absolute terms, it was as stupid as more or less anything that's happened on the floor of the United States Senate in a century or so, a half-assed 16x-speed gloss on McCarthyism from people who do not really know what that or anything else was, and whose attention spans have left them incapable of parsing even your wordier memes. In relative terms, this is just what our government is like much of the time.

It is not difficult to see what Schmitt was trying to do, and it is extremely easy to see how and why he and his staff of pale and chittering Renfields screwed it up. That failure is grounded in a tragicomic lack of Ball Knowledge, but also in either a more overtly comic inattention to detail, an aversion to even light investigative work, or both. Schmitt et al went through the DOJ's dump of Smith's text messages and believed they had found evidence of him secretly attending an Atlanta Hawks home game against the Golden State Warriors on Feb. 3, 2024. Accusing someone of attending a Hawks game is rude on the merits, but neither libelous nor scandalous in its own right; why Schmitt believed this was newsworthy, let alone a suitably bouncy springboard to soft-launch his own Vice Presidential ambitions, is something else entirely.

I love reading Roth more than almost any writer when describing the political environment we are in currently, but it’s important to remember this continues to be utterly exhausting. These people all just suck so much. In the real world, all of these people would be fired on the spot for incompetence.

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:32:31 -0500

Timelines

If the Cubs winning the World Series in 2016 is what broke the world as we know it, (which has long been my theory) would the White Sox winning it reverse it all?

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 06:00:00 -0500

Got to Choose

I learned recently that Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” has been the number one single on the Billboard Hot 100 for 24 weeks. It doesn’t surprise me because I hear this song every damn day.

To be fair, it is a conventionally written country song with a conventionally normal voice in Langley. There’s the barest hint of twang. There is slide guitar in it. It fits in the 1970s, 80s, or 90s. It has just enough pop sensibilities to cross over, which is why I hear it every day.

For the longest time, I had no idea what she even looked like.

There is absolutely nothing cutting-edge or, frankly, musically interesting about this song. It is a well-crafted Nashville song. It has a relatable story, which I guess helped it break out of the country demo.

Personally, I liked it the first 100 or so times I heard it, but now it is so overplayed that I have an irrational tick every time I hear that opening guitar riff.

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 21:00:00 -0500

Bobby Hauck Has Gone Fishing

I was more than a little shocked to learn that Illinois Football parted ways with its new Defensive Coordinator, Bobby Hauck, after just four games.

It looks like Hauck asked Bret Bielema to meet early Sunday. Whatever happened, that meeting led Hauck to decide East Central Illinois ain’t for him.

The defense had been a mess. Ten guys on the field against Duke. Nine against Ohio State. Players ran out, stopped, and jogged back to the sideline. Players were unhappy with the system and the communication, and they looked confused, then like they were overthinking.

Somebody had to say it out loud. If Hauck said it first, good for him.

So now, somebody new will have to step up and call the plays. Maybe a few somebody’s on the defense will step up. Maybe the communication issues will be resolved. Maybe.

I don’t know how this is gonna go. We’ll find out on Saturday.

The Queue

Sat, 26 Sep 2026 06:00:00 -0500

Last Tuesday night I sat down with every intention of watching The Mandalorian and Grogu.

I love Star Wars. I've loved it since I was a kid. But I didn't see this one in the theater, and it landed on Disney+ at the start of the month. I had the remote in my hand. Din Djarin and the little guy were sitting right there on the home screen.

Forty minutes later, I was on YouTube watching Rick Beato explain why a song from the '70s still works.

Then came a compilation of the greatest sports plays of all time. Then Ali Abdaal on how to plan a week. Then an hour of the Illini Inquirer, which means I watched two guys talk into microphones about recruiting. I could have listened to that in the car. I know.

I never got to Mando. I’m sure whatever character Sigourney Weaver is playing deserved better.

Here's what bugs me. My streaming queue is loaded right now. Netflix is bringing back Black Doves for a second season, and I wonder when I’ll get to it. East of Eden shows up October 1 with Florence Pugh as Cathy Ames, which is the kind of casting that makes you want to read the original Steinbeck. Apple TV just launched Brothers, where Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson play versions of themselves who find out they could be actual brothers. Somebody pitched that in a room, and everyone said yes. That’s gotta be hilarious.

It keeps coming. HBO's Harry Potter series arrives in December. On the movie side, Supergirl is on HBO Max, Backrooms lands there this week, and Toy Story 5 hit Disney+ on Wednesday.

And that's just the new stuff. The backlog is worse.

I can’t even begin to list all the shows I’ve heard of that I’ve never seen. Here’s an excellent example: Slow Horses. Not one episode. It just started its sixth season, which means five seasons of a Gary Oldman spy show are sitting there that I know I'd love.

I’m behind on Silo. I'm behind on Severance, Dark Matter, and The Diplomat. I'm behind on Shōgun, which I was genuinely excited about, but I just can’t quite finish. I’m pretty sure I’ve missed two whole seasons of Stranger Things.

Then there's Widow's Bay. It just won 14 Emmys, a record for a comedy in a single year. I've barely heard of it. Somewhere, a whole lot of people had a great time watching that show, and I was watching Scott Galloway talk about his recent vacation.

The most recent exception is Lanterns. I've kept up with that one every Sunday on HBO Max. The mystery is pretty good. The acting is superb. It's the only one.

That's a great fall of television. I'm paying for most of it. And I'm watching a YouTube video of Betty White bloopers and comedians ripping into hecklers.

Then I read what Toy Story 5 is about.

Woody, Buzz, and the gang are back, and this time they're up against a tablet. The toys have to compete with a screen for Bonnie's attention.

I laughed out loud. Pixar made a movie about me. I'm Bonnie. The good stuff is sitting in the toy box, and I'm on the tablet. Or, you know, watching YouTube on my TV.

So why does YouTube keep winning? I think it's because it asks for so little. A great TV show wants eight hours and a promise. It wants me to remember who double-crossed whom in episode three. A YouTube video wants 12 minutes. Then it wants another 12, and it's so polite about it that I never notice the evening slipping out of the room.

There's something else, and it's a little harder to admit. These creators feel like people I know. Beato talking through a chord change feels like a conversation at a record store. I've spent so many evenings with Jerad Hill and Joey Schweitzer that they feel like guys I'd recognize at the coffee shop. Ezra Klein feels like a conversation I wandered into and decided to stay and learn a bit more. The characters in Silo are strangers until I put in the time. The YouTube guys are already friends.

Friends are great. But I don't want every night to be the same conversation with the same handful of people.

So here's me thinking out loud about what to change.

The podcasts go back where they belong, in my ears. The Ezra Klein Show and Pivot were made to be heard. Watching Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway sit in front of microphones adds almost nothing. Same for Light the I and the Illini Inquirer. The new rule is I listen to those on my dog walks and in the car. That alone gives back hours of screen time.

Next, I need to decide before I sit down. The trouble starts when I pick up the remote with no plan. The home screen is a buffet, and YouTube is the dessert table by the door. If I've already decided it's Star Wars night, I'm halfway there.

I’m not ready for YouTube to come off the TV yet. My wife and I watch old Family Feud collections and America’s Got Talent auditions on it during dinner. I might need to rethink what I’m subscribing to though. Do I need the video versions of podcasts? Probably not. Especially since my goal is to keep those as podcasts.

None of this makes YouTube the villain. Beato makes me hear songs I thought I knew in a new light. Hill is showing me how to make a personall productivity system. Those guys earn my attention honestly. The problem is proportion. I've been eating dessert for dinner and wondering why I'm still hungry.

Lanterns tells me I can still do it. Something about that show got me to show up every Sunday. I finish the episode, and then I want the next one. A feed can't give me that feeling, because a feed never ends. That's the whole design.

I haven't seen Toy Story 5 yet. I'd bet on Woody, though. It's Pixar.

Tonight, it's Mando and Grogu. Remote in hand. Plan in place.

Be seeing you.

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 09:15:00 -0500

Purpose

Seth Godin --

I don’t believe we’re each born with a purpose. We have more freedom than that, the freedom to choose the impact we’ll make.

Our work, though, does have a purpose. The change we seek to make. The people we’re here to make it for.

When we commit to work with purpose, it transforms us as well as the people we’re engaging with.

Who’s it for, what’s it for… if we can continue to return to the purpose of this product, this meeting, this ad–then we can find a common language and coordinate our efforts to make a difference.

Resistance pushes us in many ways. It pushes us to imagine that our work isn’t for us, we’re just biding time until we get to the real stuff. It pushes us to deny responsibility or to blame the system. And mostly, it pushes us to refuse to name the purpose of how we’re spending our time.

Stuck is just another word for being conflicted about our purpose. The knot holds us back because we’ve become entangled in goals that are mutually exclusive.

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 21:30:00 -0500

Super Intelligence

President Donald Trump, in a prepared speech before the United Nations General Assembly yesterday:

The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the artificial intelligence — being spoken of so much, now — here and after officially called “super intelligence”, changing the name. The use of the word “artificial” makes intelligence fake, it makes it sound fake, and it is not fake. It’s actually amazing. But we have to be careful. In fact it is exactly the opposite of what it purports. From this point forward, all of United States’ documents and hopefully the world’s will be changed to use the much more accurate term “super” as opposed to “artificial”. So it’s “super intelligence”. In other words, welcome to the world of super intelligence dash SI. SI. Let’s see if that goes. It sounds much better. It is much better. And it’s much more accurate. Let’s see if I have any power. Maybe I do, and maybe I don’t, we’re going to find out pretty soon. Super intelligence.

He’s so abysmally stupid. I feel so much safer now that he’s addressing the nation’s top concerns regarding AI.

Every time this moron speaks, all I hear is this bit from Billy Madison.

The world will cheer the day he leaves the stage.

Wed, 23 Sep 2026 21:30:00 -0500

Illinois Basketball Student Tickets Sell Out

Student season tickets for the 2026-27 Illinois Basketball season sold out in just nine minutes this year, a new record. It’s the sixth straight season that student tickets have sold out. Last season’s tickets sold out in 18 minutes, and two years ago they sold out in 26 minutes.

Expectations are stratospheric.

Sat, 19 Sep 2026 10:00:00 -0500

KISS: The Official YouTube Station

KISS has officially launched the KISS 24/7 YouTube station for nonstop music, live performances, music videos, and classic moments.

What I wish I’d had as a kid...

Baker's Bridge

Sat, 19 Sep 2026 06:00:00 -0500

The plan was all too simple, which usually means it was a bad one.

Baker’s Bridge had a spot where the planks were missing, and the ground dropped away underneath it. You could maybe walk over it, but you certainly couldn’t ride your bike over it without your front tire getting stuck. It didn’t matter because we were never going over the bridge.

The goal was to jump the corner. We’d come at that corner fast enough on a bike, and get serious air. That was the entire appeal. Not distance, not style. Height. We wanted to know who could get highest off that corner, and the only way to settle it was to go.

Then somebody said we should do it back to back to back. No gap. Three of us, one after another, close enough that we looked like one long train.

I was second.

We always started on the street to build speed. We jumped the curb and landed on the grass, down a sloping dirt path between the houses, and hit the bridge. The first kid, Mike, went off the corner and something went wrong in the air. I was already committed by then. I remember the precise moment I understood I was going to hit him, and I remember that understanding it did not help even slightly. I caught his back wheel, and we went down together into the dry creek bed, which had never really had water running through it and was mostly patchy brown grass and bare dirt.

The third guy, Jeff, came off the corner a half second later, saw the whole situation laid out below him, and somehow threaded the gap between us.

He won. Nobody ever said so out loud, but he won.

Nothing broke. You’d think someone might have broken an arm or a wrist. Nope. Maybe some skin off an elbow and a knee. Mike’s bike needed some wheel work. The only real casualty was pride, and pride heals on its own schedule without anybody’s help.

We didn’t tell anyone.

Not because we’d have been in trouble, though we probably would have been. It just wasn’t a thing you did. You didn’t bring that home. You handled it at the creek, walked the bikes back, cleaned yourself up in the driveway before dinner, and went back the next day. Telling a parent would have changed the terms of something, and all three of us understood the terms without ever once discussing them.

I couldn’t tell you the year, and I could only guess at the month when all of this happened.

The bridge was one stop on a map that existed only for us. There were other points. The woods were down the road and across a fairly busy Evergreen Avenue. That set of woods had a real creek that had water in it some of the year and not the rest. We’d splash around in it all summer, come home soaked from head to toe, and strip in the garage before putting on fresh clothes for dinner.

On the other side of Baker’s Bridge there was an empty lot where we played baseball in the summer, with bases we made out of cardboard and rocks and ground rules about ghost runners and home runs that everybody understood.

I remember choosing sides by hand over hand. One captain tossed the bat straight up, handle first, and the other caught it one-handed. Then came the climb, fist over fist up the handle, each of us squeezing in above the other’s grip until there was hardly any wood left. The last one who could hold on, or even just palm the knob and keep it there, won first pick of players or first turn at bat. Nobody argued.

Look at that list for a second. A bridge that was falling apart. A creek that was dry half the time. A lot with nothing on it.

Every single place that mattered to us was a place nobody else had figured out what to do with yet.

Most of the time, the kids in the neighborhood didn’t have a park we could hang out at. There weren’t any playsets or walking paths.

We had the leftovers. Places in our neighborhood were waiting on a purpose, and until the purpose showed up, it was ours. I’m not complaining. It’s closer to the opposite. Nobody assigned us that bridge, and nobody could take it away either, because you can’t take away something you were never using.

Today, there’s a park with a playset and a walking path near the woods where we played. The lot has three houses on it now. Baker’s Bridge is long gone.

I could make that sound like a loss. It would be easy. But I bet there are kids in those houses, or there were, and one of them has a spot in the backyard that means something to him the way that empty lot meant something to me. That’s what was always going to happen.

What I lost isn’t the lot. It’s that I was eleven or twelve and the whole neighborhood was unclaimed, and now I’m old enough that everything I drive past or look at on Google Street View belongs to somebody else.

The bridge taught me something the lot couldn’t, though.

I hit the ground hard that afternoon, got up, and made a decision that nobody supervised or reviewed. I decided I was fine. I was the only one in a position to make that call, and I made it, and I turned out to be right.

That’s a strange kind of education. I’m not going to argue it was better or worse. Some kid somewhere made that same call and was wrong, and I know how that story ends. But I got a version of childhood where the adults weren’t watching, and I found out what I could handle by handling it.

A tiny scar runs along my left arm. Small, faded, nothing anybody would notice. I know exactly where it came from, and I’m one of maybe three people alive who do.

I spent time with Jeff recently, and we reminisced about Baker’s Bridge, getting soaked at the creek, building snow forts and treehouses. Climbing fences and trees.

We were young, wild, and free. I can close my eyes and remember. What a time to be alive.

Be seeing you.

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 12:01:00 -0500

Jon Ossoff is Doing Something Different

Elaine Godfrey, writing in The Atlantic, has a smart profile/examination of the Jon Ossoff moment.

Some Democrats are predicting—or perhaps manifesting—that if he wins in November, Ossoff will turn immediately toward a bigger project: running for president in 2028. Ossoff has repeatedly denied that he is interested in doing this. If he won, he’d have to give up his hard-fought Senate seat, which, if Georgia elects a Republican governor this year, would be politically perilous for Democrats. Ossoff, who has two daughters under the age of 5, is also very protective of his family life.

But national Democrats don’t care much about these caveats, and many consultants can’t wait to draft him into the 2028 race—although none wanted to engage in such speculation on the record. One referred to him as an “S-tier” presidential candidate. On the prediction-market platform Kalshi, Ossoff’s odds of winning the 2028 nomination are higher than any Democrat’s.

Here’s my prediction: if Georgia elects a Democratic governor, Jon Ossoff runs for president. If not, he waits and positions himself later in the cycle.

If he does run, I think he wins the nomination. Outside of Obama and Buttigieg, he’s the best speaker the Democrats have. He’s photogenic, disciplined on the mic, and he reads this political moment better than almost anyone in the party.

Pete Buttigieg will run too, but I don’t see the presidency in his future. Where I do see him is as chief of staff to the next Democratic president. He’d be the best one we’ve had in a long time.

Gavin Newsom will also throw his hat in the ring, and he’s worth watching. He’s tall, he’s polished, and he ran the largest economy in the country. He may be a tough sell in the primary, but I wouldn’t count him out.

I may be in the minority here, but I don’t think Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez runs this cycle. Her smarter move is the Senate. And frankly, I don’t think Democrats are going to nominate a woman this time.

Speaking of which: Kamala Harris should already be president. Biden should have stepped down after guiding the country through COVID. He didn’t. I doubt she’d take it, but she’d make a fantastic attorney general. Or maybe a Supreme Court nomination is in her future.

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 09:00:00 -0500

Motivator

I work out with my wife every morning. We do a circuit at the YMCA or walk two miles before 6am Monday through Friday. Sundays are reserved for a 5K walk we do at a nearby park.

It is my favorite part of the day.

We talk about our days, what we’ve got going on, hopes, dreams, ideas, and more. It’s guaranteed time that’s just for us.

I wouldn’t do any of it without her.

I know this because I had plenty of time without her in my life, and I failed to do any of it.

Don’t get me wrong. I do not usually want to get up and workout. However, doing so constantly reminds me that every day, even if I’m busy or tired, I can do something small to take care of myself. And it’s something for just the two of us.

It’s easy to start, and it’s easy to quit. My wife is the constant.

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 16:00:00 -0500

Does Your College Football Roster Cost $8M or $50M?

The Athletic conducted a comprehensive study of how much money teams spend on college football rosters. It is a lot. They spoke with as many people as possible across the programs to establish basic number ranges.

I wasn’t surprised by Illinois’s number ($19- $23M). I was surprised by how low it is compared to others in the conference. Illinois is below the conference average, with only Minnesota, Iowa, and Purdue spending less.

Unsurprisingly, the best teams are, on average, the ones paying players the most.

Back in the days before name, image and likeness money and the transfer portal, the best predictor of a team’s success was usually its high school recruiting class ranking. Today, it’s the roster budget. A program spending $40 million is expected to beat ones spending half that.

This is clear in the data. The chart below shows the average NIL budgets grouped by Austin Mock’s most recent forecast for whether a school will make the College Football Playoff. The teams with the best shot at a Playoff berth are, by and large, the ones with the biggest budgets

If you want college football to go back to the way it was before, that ship has sailed. Today’s college football is the haves and the have-nots.

Finding donors and the money to acquire the talent needed to succeed is all that matters. Amazing facilities are a given. World-class nutrition and staff are a given. Championship-caliber coaches are a given. The fourth leg on that stool is a $50 million roster budget year after year.

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 09:00:00 -0500

Sweatshirt and Shorts Weather

It is now mid-September. The summer is nearly over. Overall, it’s been an enjoyable summer, but I’m ready for autumn!

The transition from summer to fall is my favorite time of year. I always look forward to the cooler temps, the changing of the leaves, and the crisp fall air. School starts. Football is back. Halloween and Thanksgiving are on the horizon, too.

Fall weather is more inviting. I can sit outside comfortably in a sweatshirt and shorts without it being too hot or too cold.

It’s still too hot, but I know everything will change in just a few weeks.

I can’t wait.

Sun, 13 Sep 2026 21:00:00 -0500

By Hand

Warren Ellis –

Handwriting fixes ideas in the memory better. Thinking on paper is more fluid: you get to think around the notion more flexibly. Making things by hand is better for your brain than talking to a robot, and developing ideas works better on a page than on a keyboard.

(And protecting your brain is likely to be a real creative and commercial asset in a few years.)