Monday Mood [DOT 10/2/25]

10/2/25 MegMegMcGee 44

I don’t know what’s going on I’ve been running around like a crazy person all weekend getting ready to host book club and also speed read the last 1/3 of the book. I assume the horrors continue…

Fun fact, the only $$ the KC takes from the Fed is for building maintenance, as the building is a monument.

Trump says he will appoint himself chair of Kennedy Center
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/07/trump-kennedy-center

Leopards, faces, blah blah blah

Venezuelans backed Trump. Now some worry he’ll deport them.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/02/09/trump-migrants-venezuelans-deport-tps

Sprots!

Super Bowl 2025 live updates: Kansas City Chiefs v Philadelphia Eagles
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/live/2025/feb/09/super-bowl-kansas-city-chiefs-philadelphia-eagles

Have a great day!

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44 Comments

  3. I love the Kennedy Center! When I was in college back in 1924, so my memory is failing, I went down to DC and fell in with KC employees. I can’t remember how. One of them probably hit me up at a gay bar. There was a famous one in Dupont Circle behind a parking lot…

    Anyway, I was grateful for their friendship because I was staying with a friend who went to Georgetown. It was an extended stay, so it might have been Spring Break or maybe even the Christmas break. Problem was, my friend was a woman, and they had sex-segregated dorms and apartment-like arrangements so if I needed to use a bathroom she’s have to go with me and block the door (women only) or I’d have to go to a men’s floor.

    So these new friends (I was sleeping with one of them) let me crash with them. They were all artsy recent college graduates and had their own apartments and side-projects unrelated to the KC. They also let me into the, I don’t know what it was, administrative/green room section so I could make long-distance phone calls. Do you remember how expensive long-distance phone calls were in the 1980s? The KC, with its national and international reach, didn’t study its phone bills very closely, I suppose. Or they probably had WATS lines.

    Anyway, there I was, in that office, staring out at the Watergate and the Potomac, and my “boyfriend” came in and said, “I’d like to introduce you to someone.”

    It was LIV ULLMAN! She made a habit of wandering or being escorted around the venues where she performed and meeting the workers.

    I have more to say about this but I’m exhausted.

    • But you can rest assured that Big Agra is getting their baksheesh. I wouldn’t want to be an independent artisanal dairy farmer in a deep-blue state right now (or any time, really) but God help them.

      And I have a question. The organic milk sold around here is more expensive than its equivalents (that’s not rare. If you slap “organic” on a product you can go up at least 20%, and the definition of “organic” is pretty slippery) but why does organic milk last so much longer than pasteurized milk? If I buy a half-gallon of regular, pasteurized milk it’ll maybe have a sell-by date of three weeks. Organic? Three months.

      • Usually organic milk sold here is ultra-pasteurized and that’s a higher temp and kills basically all bacteria, which extends shelf life a lot.

        I have no clue about raw milk because I don’t see that sold in stores here.

        • Oh, I never knew that. I thought organic milk was verging toward raw milk, rather than ultra-pasteurized. I know that in Europe they don’t, or maybe used to don’t, pasteurize nearly as much as we do. I have eaten metric tons (“tonnes”) of unpasteurized European cheeses and somehow I have survived.

          Tariffs aside, I wish co-President Musk could reform the FDA and the USDA to allow unrestricted access to countries’ food products where the life expectancies are longer than our own. I know that our stats are distorted somewhat because of all the guns and drugs but Euros aren’t dropping in the streets through eating and drinking local, unpasteurized products.

      • Fun fact:  The organic designation is only allowed on products which adhere to a specific set of criteria set by the FDA.  This rule was put in place ages ago.  What you’re probably thinking of as slippery are all of the other markers, like grass fed, pasture raised, free range, etc.

  5. Uh, yes. Trump is planning on ignoring you. It’s your own fucking fault.

    ‘He saw this coming’: Chief Justice Roberts said to be ‘paying attention’ to J.D. Vance

    Vice President J.D. Vance argued Sunday that federal courts “aren’t allowed” to limit the president’s “legitimate power,” after a judge temporarily blocked Elon Musk and other political appointees from accessing sensitive data and payment systems at the Treasury Department. 

    • The construction industry has been backing the GOP like crazy, and now they’re getting big increases in steel, lumber and labor costs. And there’s a strong chance of chaos in the credit markets too.

      They swallowed the right wing narrative that environmental regulations and unions were their big enemy, but overwhelmingly their problems had to do with design and engineering deficiencies on their side.

      It’s a great example of how these guys let ideology override economics.Technically it’s about the money for them, but only at the most superficial level.

  7. Poor Albany.

    This is an “unlocked” NY Times article so you should be able to access it.

    I’ve actually been to Albany. The summer after I graduated high school I became embroiled with a boyfriend who was a little older, Bard College grad, had his own apartment, etc. My family enjoyed my company but had given up on me. I had gotten into my dream college (that illusion dried up like a raisin the sun) and got tons of money to go there so they didn’t really monitor my activities too closely. This was also an era when 18-year-olds weren’t treated like elementary schoolers.

    So off on the Greyhound we went to visit said boyfriend’s family home, which was in an Albany suburb. Both parents worked for the State. They had a huge family and the property they bought contained a barn, which they remodeled into bedrooms and lofts and was where the older children lived, or crashed. Good times.

    Anyway, getting back to the article about how dreadful Albany is, I will concede that they had a pretty bad 1960s urban renewal:

    Another urban planning challenge is how to undo at least some of the damage that former Gov. Nelson Rockefeller inflicted on the state capital in the 1960s when he built the enormous Empire State Plaza, which cut downtown in half and uprooted over 9,000 people from a once-thriving neighborhood [it was a crime-ridden slum–Ed.] that was razed to make way for it. Ms. Hochul’s plan includes $25 million to make the plaza “a more inviting space,” said Mr. Washington, the budget director. [Just like Rockefeller in the 1960s. We never learn.] [Albany is also on the Hudson River, although it’s cut off by a highway, but maybe 100 years from now the highway will be gone and there will be “Riverfests” featuring tribute bands to whoever is/was popular at the time. Keith Richards might perform, because you know he’s never going to die.]

    I read a magisterial bio of Nelson Rockefeller. Why not. It was over 1,000 pages but there were a lot of notes and the index. Nelson Rockefeller was one of the greatest polymaths who ever lived. Before the term RINO was coined people who weren’t considered conservative enough were called “Rockefeller Republicans.”

    NR’s mother founded the Museum of Modern Art and as a young man he was active in its development. When he got to Albany he was upset by the squalor that confronted those working at the Capitol and muscled through a grand redevelopment scheme. Those buildings were built by some of the most prominent architects of the era. Unfortunately, the era was the 1960s (it dragged well into the 1970s because State project, cost overruns, graft, grift, Mob, “unforeseen delays,” maybe a labor strike or two) so there’s a lot of open space and Brutalism, very Bauhaus in a way. They do have The Egg, fabulous, I would live there if it weren’t in Albany.

     

    • Rockefeller was the guy who finally broke Robert Moses. He somehow maneuvered Moses into moving into the leadership of the ’64 Worlds Fair, which lost a lot of money, and managed to reconfigure the big transportation authorities which were the source of Moses’s funding and then basically conned him into accepting the changes before a formal transfer of power was made, and then left him in the lurch.

      It’s a great illustration of how little local control over transportation there is in NYC. Autonomous authorities run things and get the funding, not the city, and the state has power over the authorities. Mayors get to take the blame, and that’s pretty much guaranteed when the press decides to whip up the sentiment of ignorant audiences, as de Blasio found out from NY Post and NY Times crusades.

    • Wow.

      Seeing all these Asians going Team Racism… it’s like they forgot about the Chinese (Asian) exclusion act or the treatment of Japanese Americans during WW2.

      But surely the racists would never abuse gullible/arrogant/stupid Asian people and then toss them away…

  11. To celebrate the Eagles’s win, let me give you a bit of Philadelphia trivia:

    A Philadelphian and I once went on a business dinner in Philadelphia. We went to Bookbinders, RIP, so that’s how long ago this was. I mentioned that I read the morning’s “Philadelphia Inquirer” about something. He said, “You’re pronouncing it wrong. Here we call it the Fluffya Inkwire.” He was right, though. The next day, while en route to my work-related destination, I went to a newsstand and asked for an “Inkwire.” He didn’t blink and handed it over.

     

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