It’s kind of interesting to see Dolly the subtle songwriter in conflict here with Dolly the inveterate show-woman. Jolene is such a brilliant song because of the state of desperation and weakness the speaker is living in, and it comes out in that swelling but plaintive melody.

But… that’s a fuckin’ bummer when you’re doing a jaunty variety show in peak wig and frontier-fringe glam, and she knows it, so you get the sexed-up version of the back story and some audience banter, and then you up the tempo a bit on the performance.

I reckon there was a reason she’d been pushing back on doing the song on the show, and this performance being just a tiny bit off (imho) is because she just needed to get it done, since despite being a poor fit for the situation, it was also an iconic hit, and she still does it justice even if there are other versions I like better.

The Jack White and Miley Cyrus covers are also really good, btw.

Fair enough, LOL. Just love that it’s “oh I pay TONS of taxes, but asking me to pay more in taxes won’t help anything.”

“The top 1% of taxpayers pay about 40% of all the tax revenue, and the bottom half pay 3%,” Bezos said. “I don’t think it should be 3%. I think it should be zero.”

“People sometimes say that, you know, I don’t pay taxes. Not true. I pay billions of dollars in taxes,”

“You could double the taxes I pay, and it’s not going to help that teacher in Queens. I promise you.”

WT-absolute-F? I think he got oxygen-deprived in space.

Not the main issue of course, but I found this fun:

Both YouTubers said the exposed database records indicated significantly lower customer interest than previously reported. According to Coffeezilla, internal order identifiers suggested roughly 30,000 total orders associated with around 10,000 unique customers, far below earlier public estimates claiming nearly 600,000 reservations.

So this grift will only net them ~$3M, not sixty. My heart weeps for them.

Modi has not held a traditional solo press conference since taking office in 2014, and has rarely answered questions from journalists on his trips abroad.

If not then, when?

That’s a fair take, but for me it just went past the point of willing suspension of disbelief, and I don’t find that meta-narrative compelling. It may well be a reason for me to re-evaluate it though, to decide if I think it’s poorly done versus something where what they wanted to do simply didn’t connect with me.

I recently finished Blue-Eyed Samurai, and Mizu’s increasingly powerful plot armor comes very close to ruining the whole show.

I agree, but ol’ Don is, if nothing else, a curator of interesting writing prompts.

Now I want to know which of Two Princes or Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong you haven’t heard yet. The two-hit-wonder disrespect here is staggering, I say. Staggering!

LOL, fair enough.

I use a fintech for my little glorified garage sale ecommerce site (literally hundreds of dollars of sales so far!). I have no idea how you burn through all that runway to do a slightly better banking app for some random regional bank, plus some agreements with the Credit Card companies and a crypto wallet.

Excellent. Thank you!

I also saw “deputy,” but the common tie seems to be replacing or substituting. I wonder if it was then-current Hungarian jargon for the switchboard operator having to constantly plug and unplug the patch cables.

And Alexander the Great would be proud of her solution at the end of the workday.

That might be even cooler than the brown tie-dye Duel of the Fates shirt I was rocking.

TPM has its charms, but good lord the delusion I invested in trying to convince myself it was better than it was…

Never get involved in a land war in Asia, and never give George Lucas unrestrained creative control.

In fairness, one of the issues is that there’s an absurdly high bar to amend it, and the downright scientific polarization of our political parties in the last 50 years or so has meant that they’re constantly fighting over the middle, meaning there is unlikely to be consensus without something deeply traumatic happening first. The ERA was our canary in the coalmine there, I think. Of course, this makes it even more absurd that SCOTUS has leaned hard into textualist analysis that is completely unsuited to running a complex modern nation-state with a creaky old constitution. We need to take a page or two from papa UK and enshrine certain norms and principals as constitutional matters without obsessing over fucking commas like we do now. The irony of course is that doing so would take a constitutional amendment.

This feels like the sort of blurry case that litigation is actually well suited for. It’s clear there was something beyond an inspiration board, yet the end result is also a blue alien. Evaluate the law, establish a value for the design, and make your case. In typical James Cameron fashion, there’s a sense of “I mean well, so I can’t possibly be an insufferable jackass!”

As a one-time student of Con Law, I will respectfully disagree. It’s clunky, vague, out of touch with the settlement patterns of the country in the last 230+ years, and willfully ignores that political parties and bad actors are a thing. I have come to resent the lionization of the document and its drafters. The basic outline of a democratic republic is laudable and has somehow more or less endured, but it is what it is: a good start from clever provincial lawyers whose ideals outstripped their personal behaviors and helped make it work better than many would have thought, but who were still absolutely dealing with the issues and expectations of elites in the 1780s.

For goodness sake, judicial review isn’t even in there. John Marshall basically made it up. So much with the US Constitution depends on norms and assumptions, yet we worship it like a holy text (e.g. “our own inadequacy to follow its teachings”). This makes it a HUGE problem when some smarmy asshole decides norms don’t matter and the Supreme Court has (rather hypocritically) decided that only the text matters. At a minimum, we need some serious “patch” amendments to lock down things that no one thought anybody would be a big enough asshole to test.

I think it only works if you understand from reading other strips that she’s already dating Mister Bignose McLongface and that he’s no saint.

According to the reddit OP, it’s the Vande Bharat Express in India. The ports look like the typical travel adapter ports that can handle several different plug types, but the UK plug sort of asserts itself visually, LOL.

I’m not sure that ignoring them to listen on an iPod is any better.