TGIF: Bloodbath & Beyond

Welcome back. Our immigration debate in Dallas (April 11) is around the corner. Ann Coulter will be on stage—her book covers remain an enormous inspiration aesthetically and religiously for me. Buy tickets to the debate here and try to get a spot at the afterparty. I expect lots of “where I TGs.”

Meantime, I am still blushing from Dana Perino’s endorsement of this column. So we’re making TGIF free this week and exposing me to the open web. (I usually only write behind a paywall, which is where I feel safe, and that’s where I’ll return after this week.)

→ Polls show Biden gaining a bit of ground: Biden has been trailing Trump across the board but two new polls show him nudging ahead, and here’s an Economist graphic showing the tiny Biden surge (I already hear the chants of blue wa—). Small but real. His approval rating fell or stayed flat after the State of the Union, but rose among people who watched it. The fun part about these months is no one has any idea, so the talking heads read whatever tea leaves they can find and then get on cable for hours, and we all pass the time together. It’s only slightly more sane than people who think God is talking to them through the radio. “A new Quinnipiac poll says that most Americans prefer for there to be a president.” And then it’s forty minutes of discussion. 

→ Trump in a cash crunch: Trump has posted a whole lot on Truth Social (seven times in two hours) about his need to secure half a billion for his bond and how hard it’s been. Like a sorority girl who didn’t know there were fees when you use your credit card abroad, he’s in a major cash crunch. His lawyers say he just doesn’t have the money yet. Call back tomorrow! This was, of course, part of the goal of the New York AG’s not at all politically motivated prosecution here. My main worry now is that Donald Trump is the Republican presidential candidate and needs money bigly, and I don’t like the big money options (TikTok interests, corn interests, Qatari interests, Hunter Biden’s secret art buyers, just all stressful bad people). Anyway, crossing my fingers that whichever billionaires buy the next presidency are nice ones! 

→ Bloodbath-gate: The great American tradition of random Trump phrases being taken out of context and turned into huge scandals lives on. The latest is “bloodbath.” Here’s the full quote from his rally (apparently I’m the best reporter in the world—which I knew—since I was able to access the whole thing):

If you’re listening President Xi, and you and I are friends—but he understands the way I deal—those big monster car manufacturing plants that you’re building in Mexico right now, and you think you’re going to get that, you’re going to not hire Americans, and you’re going to sell the cars to us now, we’re going to put a 100 percent tariff on every single car that comes across the line, and you’re not going to be able to sell those guys. If I get elected—now if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole—that’s going to be the least of it; it’s going to be a bloodbath for the country—that’ll be the least of it—but they’re not going to sell those cars.

The media went wild. 

Both NPR and the NYT blasted headlines that Trump warned of a “bloodbath” if he loses, with the Times adding: “Donald J. Trump once again doubled down on a doomsday vision of the United States.” No mention of cars or tariffs. What are tariffs, even? Nancy Pelosi went on CNN: “He’s even predicting a bloodbath. What does that mean? He’s going to exact a bloodbath?” What does it mean, well. . . Trump wants his supporters to slaughter you! Trump is going to have the army do a genocide! Again, no mention of cars. 

Now, if you look at his actual words, he was using the word bloodbath to describe an economic crisis related to, like, trade and cars. Which is an extremely common thing to do. So, okay, CNN, let’s just look at past CNN headlines: “Asian stocks plunge after bloodbath on Wall Street.” And: “The bloodbath in the cryptocurrency market is taking a gigantic toll on online brokerage stocks Robinhood and Coinbase.” And: “Despite a slowdown in bankruptcies, August was still a bloodbath.” (Thank you, Drew Holden, as always, for pulling those and more together.)

When it comes to Trump, the media always goes to the fullest, dumbest lie they can find when the actual policy idea he’s presenting is often already bad enough. Because the important thing, lost in the spasms of panic over a fake scandal, is that a 100 percent tariff on imported cars from anywhere is a bad idea. I know they’re from Japan, but my gut says: Trump wants my Honda to cost how much? Absolutely not! That beautiful CRV—pragmatic, cheap, and sexless—is how I communicate my values to the world. It says, the interior of this car is sticky and also crunchy. You try to make my Honda cost twice as much and I’ll go for blood—and I mean actual blood.

→ Fox buries their own scoop: Mike Pence went on Fox News to announce that he would not be endorsing President Trump: “It should come as no surprise that I will not be endorsing Donald Trump this year. . . I’m incredibly proud of the record of our administration. It was a conservative record that made America more prosperous, more secure, and saw conservatives appointed to our courts in a more peaceful world.” When Fox News’ Martha MacCallum asked who would get Pence’s vote in November, he said: “I would never vote for Joe Biden, but how I vote when that curtain closes—that’ll be for me.” What if Pence is a secret Marianne Williamson guy? 

After this, Fox quickly moved on, nothing to see there. But of course, other stations grabbed onto the news. And so you had a funny situation of Fox News getting a pretty big scoop—that Trump’s one-time vice president officially refuses to endorse him—and then quietly tucking it away. Every time someone has a falling-out with Trump, his fans always have an excuse, like oh, we always knew that one wasn’t really a true believer, he was bad for this or that reason. But if that’s the case so often, then you are arguing that Trump is very, very bad at picking his staff, which is mainly what presidents do. Either way, friends, it’s a ding on Trump. 

→ America’s rushed retreat: Since Biden took office, America has evacuated 11 embassies around the world, most recently asking Americans to flee the one in Haiti. Biden has been a surprising big win for the isolationists, despite his funding for Ukraine and Israel. America under Biden says to the China-Iran-Russia axis: folks, we’ve done enough, it’s still a mess, take it from here, good luck with Barbecue. I still want us to be the World’s Policeman, even though I know the isolationists these days are cool and in my comments section. Hello, friends who think we need to solve all of our own issues first! Still, I’m a simple interventionist, a neo-whatever, an evangelist of my nation: I think American values are the best values and should be imposed everywhere we can possibly get them. Like did you know that Islamic fundamentalist lawmakers in the Gambia just voted to lift the nation’s ban on female genital mutilation? The decision has been postponed for further study, lord knows what that means—three-quarters of the adult women in the Gambia have been horrifically mutilated already.

That’s something Americans rightly used to care a lot about fixing and part of what our diplomatic soft power, at its best, was all about. Now we leave Barbecue with a stack of laptops and Jeeps and we run. 

→ Doctors are giving C-sections because they’re scared of the A-word: Doctors in Louisiana are giving doomed C-sections to women with failing pregnancies instead of standard abortions. So the care is worse and more dangerous and impacts future births, but it skirts the A-word a little better. And House Republicans sent a letter this week opposing Biden’s effort to expand veteran access to IVF. Their reasoning: “IVF is morally dubious and should not be subsidized by the American taxpayer. It is well known that IVF treatments result in a surplus of embryos after the best ones are tested and selected. These embryos are then frozen—at significant cost to the parents—abandoned, or cruelly discarded.” There’s an effort to pretend that this isn’t happening. But it is. Many in the Republican Party want to effectively ban IVF, by making it so every embryo created must be implanted (i.e., put in the womb). For my Catholic friends, I know this is a truly held belief. My only complaint is that these politicians should stop trying to pretend this isn’t their argument. If you think embryos are people, that’s okay, man, just say it, try to sell me on it. It’s the sneakiness that gets me freaked out way more. 

→ Double-check that your lawyer passed the bar: A test called “the bar” that is intended to gatekeep who can become a lawyer has been consistently accused of being a bar that gatekeeps who can become a lawyer. And of course: that it’s racist. It’s gaslighting. It’s girlbossing (which is a bad thing these days). So now Washington State has joined Oregon, Wisconsin, and New Hampshire in saying that the bar exam is optional. An expert tip for going forward: double-check that your lawyer passed the bar and is licensed to practice law and stuff. At this rate, medical school exams will be optional pretty soon, and then I don’t know what to tell you. Go with god. Trust your gut. Does he seem like someone competent in kidney transplants? As you move through life, learn to give quick, casual IQ tests along the way. Maybe pretend they’re just riddles, and you’re a riddle person. Wear a hat to make this more believable. 

And in related news, here is the trend on high school graduation rates and SAT scores from The Economist:

→ Oh, Tucker: Tucker Carlson gives me sharp pains all across my brow. This week he said the following entirely nonsensical tidbit: “Moscow has not been degraded by postmodern architecture that destroys your spirit.” Moscow, where you find many fields of miserable brutalist Soviet concrete hellholes. Moscow, which, except for their cool swirly onion building, looks like a community college. I guess Russia is warlike and cruel and the food is bad, which they read as manly, and so the right likes it? Well. Russia is not aspirational to me, personally. All I’m saying is if the right wants to fetishize a place as Western Culture Bastion, can’t they pick somewhere nice like Australia? Paris? Uh, Rome? Tucker Carlson in Australia with some tan, blond men frolicking on the beach before tucking into a flat white. . . . Bring colonialism back, baby, that looks fun!

→ Mexico will not accept the return of migrants from Mexico: Folks from all over the world are coming into Mexico to then get to the United States. And Texas is finally allowed to catch some of these migrants and send them back. But. . . but Mexico doesn’t want them back! Mexico said it would “under no circumstances” accept any migrants back in Mexico. It’s a one-way ticket sort of thing. You buy a $10 churro at the border and then you continue on your ride, thanks for coming. Also, interestingly, in America, illegal migrants (undocumented, under-papered, citizen-questioning, whatever you want) can now legally own guns thanks to Obama-appointed Illinois federal judge Sharon Johnson Coleman, who just ruled as such. The extent to which gun control has fallen out of fashion cannot be overstated. As soon as people realized that gun control would have to be enforced by cops and not special gun fairies, everyone turned to policies that would make the old NRA blush. 

Speaking of, Chicago is suing the gun manufacturer Glock Inc. Why? Because the guns can be illegally converted into machine guns. It’s way too controversial to go after people who are. . . illegally making machine guns and killing each other with them. Better to do random lawsuits. Remember when Baltimore sued Kia and Hyundai for making cars that were too easy to steal? If I attach a machine gun to the top of my CRV, it’s probably Honda’s fault for making a car that was so tempting.  

→ She’s too pretty to need to come here: Yes, we have to end this bizarre open border experiment, but we also have to make it much easier for immigrants to legally come to the country. And no, I don’t get tired of banging my same centrist drum. 

Folks on the right were freaking out online this week over the image of a young Asian woman in a nice-looking coat, holding an iPhone, waiting politely in line to illegally cross the border, like the Texas border was the 7 p.m. performance of Wicked. Their argument: this girl’s rich, hardly a needy refugee. My argument: all the more reason to encourage her and her friends to come work here, pay taxes here, get PhDs here, shop at our stores. Part of my warmongering is a policy of brain-draining the entire world. By which I mean I want that girl at a Mets game this summer. All I’m saying is, once you end the free-for-all open border that we have, there are many interesting and smart ways to do immigration policy. 

More on squatters, the media, and the First Amendment (overrated) below, but first, another picture from David Mamet. 

→ Tyson Foods is a case study of doing it wrong: Putting aside that factory farms are a moral stain on humanity and that we deserve to be killed by chickens, Tyson once employed 2,200 Missouri workers in one factory. This month, they fired all those workers, decimating one small town’s economy. Now Tyson has announced it will be hiring tens of thousands of illegal immigrants, to much media fanfare. Here’s Bloomberg: “Tyson Is Hiring New York Immigrants for Jobs No One Else Wants.” I mean, that’s obviously a lie, since folks in Missouri really wanted those jobs, or at least really needed those jobs, which is why they had those jobs. That’s ruthless capitalism for you, and I do technically support it. It’s just hilarious that Tyson doing this is framed as a major progressive win. Though maybe it’s not that surprising if you consider that the modern leftist intellectual argument is “Missouri bad bad no like” and “Ew yucky job no want,” then sure. Sure, you guys got a win. A Tyson executive said the company “would like to employ another 42,000 [immigrants] if we could find them.” I’m sure they would. I also like fearful and cheap labor who are unfamiliar with modern workers’ rights, which is why I will never let TGIF intern Julia graduate from college. 

A funny thing is that when people criticized Tyson for this, Salon magazine (still around!) ran a whole thing about how criticizing Tyson for cheaper and less protected labor is part of the right-wing “Great Replacement lie.” Chef’s kiss. I endorse QSalon. And I stand with Tyson, those capitalist monsters. Until the chickens come for their revenge against us. Then it’s a goddamn bloodbath, and I’m with the chickens. 

→ England is so cute: I love this.

In American money: $32,909. That’s the war chest for the prime minister’s rival. Thirty-two grand. Their war chests are barely piggy banks. $32,000 won’t get you a seat on the sewage commission here. It barely gets me out of bed. England. “War chest.” That’s a sweet country. 

Related, the top diversity concern of the day over there is that landscape paintings might make a British soul feel something deep and weird. Of particular risk are “rolling English hills,” which can bring out feelings of “pride toward a homeland.” And we cannot have that! Only shame. From The Telegraph:

Are museums all supposed to apologize now because the English countryside is so beautiful? Maybe just ask your moms to hug you more? 

→ A lot of web privacy experts in Texas all of a sudden: After Texas required that PornHub verify user ages (i.e., viewers have to upload photo ID), the porn giant pulled out of Texas. Using a simple internet privacy tool called a VPN, people can make their computer present as though it’s in a different state than it is. Well, certainly unrelated, web searches for VPNs in Texas have suddenly grown 400 percent. From what I can gather from comedy routines, men can barely find their wallet but if you try and lock down the porn they will go full hacker. The men find the porn on the internet like heat-seeking missiles. Nothing gets between men and online porn. (I am porn agnostic. Or, I have very strong conflicting feelings that cancel each other out, as a modern American but also an old-school feminist, as a libertarian freedom-fighter but also a fascist mom. On this issue I break down. I bow out.)

→ That is the goal of the First Amendment: The entire goal of the First Amendment is to hamstring the American government from doing what it would like to do: control our speech. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is just learning about this horrible reality during oral arguments this week on a case over government censorship during the Covid pandemic. And she is not okay: “My biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways in the most important time periods,” she said. Well, yeah. And: “[Y]ou’ve got the First Amendment operating in an environment of threatening circumstances, from the government’s perspective, and you’re saying that the government can’t interact with the source of those problems.” Precisely correct! 

Justice Jackson suggested that the First Amendment certainly couldn’t apply the same as usual during a “once-in-a-lifetime pandemic.” The 1A is just for the good times! You better believe it’ll be a once-in-a-lifetime climate apocalypse soon. It’s like me with a spicy margarita. Oh, I’ll get a second one—it’s a special occasion! I never do this, but, you know, it is Tuesday, my favorite. Justice Jackson, you and I both know it’s always a special occasion. 

Now to update this: my friends over at Reason think Justice Jackson’s comments are being unfairly maligned and are actually fair and normal, since she is arguing a relatively mainstream view that the government has the legal right to persuade platforms to curtail speech. Comments section, I leave this to you to sort out.

→ This is how ABC covers Daniel Penny:

As though Daniel Penny was wandering around looking for someone to randomly kill that day, rather than attempting to be a Good Samaritan, albeit using too much muscle. I can’t wait for a totally fair trial here. In other subway news, harrowing video this week showed a man defending himself against an armed attacker, while people cowered at the end of the car and begged for the NYPD to arrive. No one rose to help the guy getting attacked. And why would they? 

→ Congratulations are due to Iran: On March 18, the presidency of the UN Conference on Disarmament was officially given to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Read it again, take it in, then take your Lipitor.  

→ Okay, the Deep State exists and it’s great: A few years ago, you were considered a conspiracy theorist for talking about “the deep state.” Okay, Boomer! Here’s the NYT in 2017: “What Happens When You Fight a ‘Deep State’ That Doesn’t Exist.” Well, now it’s 2024 and we can be honest. Here’s the NYT: “It Turns Out the ‘Deep State’ Is Actually Kind of Awesome.” That’s real; that’s the headline. Next it’ll be: “Covid Came From a Lab and That’s the Best Part of It!” After that: “Yeah, Hunter Biden Traded Favors for Cash. And You Wouldn’t? Grow Up! It’s Better Like This!”

→ In news about the Jews: Aldo Soberon, an engineer at Intel, held a bullhorn in Phoenix to say to a cheering rally: “Read my lips: I will not condemn the Houthis of Yemen. I will not condemn the PFLP. I will not condemn Hezbollah and I will not condemn Hamas!” MIT students are openly supporting the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a U.S.-designated terrorist group whose logo is now all over campus. And Harvard students held a community wake after Hamas leaders were captured and killed inside al-Shifa hospital, where they had regrouped. While the ADL filed a federal complaint about Berkeley schools after allegations of, among other things, elementary school students being told by their teachers to write “stop bombing babies” on note cards and then to attach those cards to the door of the only Jewish teacher at the school. 

And locals in Gaza are posting about how gross the new U.S. military–supplied meal kits are and also how expensive the free kits are, which raises the question: Who is hoarding the supplies and selling them to you? Could it be a group called Hamas? And judging from the kit shown, they took the protein source for themselves. Which leads us back to the same old, same old: Hamas is a genocidal death cult that doesn’t care one iota about the lives of people in Gaza.

→ Let’s talk about squatters: In New York this week, a homeowner was arrested for trying to oust her squatters. Yes; the hot new trend in American cities is squatting in people’s homes. See, in New York state, anyone who stays in a house for more than 30 days can lay some claim to the place. They can refuse to pay rent and stay in your house for years, filing form after form, pro-bono lawyers helping them until inevitably you just pay them to leave. So that’s how Adele Andaloro, 47, was arrested for changing the locks on the house her parents left her when they died. The squatters had moved in really fast and put on their own new door and their own new locks, and Adele hadn’t asked them if they were cool with, like, leaving. The squatters were not cool with it. And it was not okay that she changed their special locks. Cuff her, said the squatters, and so the cops did. 

In Washington State, there’s a serial squatter named Sang Kim. He moves from house to house. With each squat taking so long to resolve, this is a pretty good housing system. When his recent victim tried to get back into the property he owned, Sang Kim complained to the cops. And that’s how landlord Jaskaran Singh was issued a restraining order from going within 1,000 feet of his squatter. Squatter’s rights, y’all. Finders keepers. 

The Yale Law School sensibility that got us in this legal tangle is basically this: property ownership is violence, and as a society we should do everything we can to make it hell for the property owners (it’s kind of entitled for you to want to hold the title of your home). And so that’s what our legal system is trying to do at every level. Why do you want to own so much anyway, the Yale Law expert asks? Slaveowners owned too, did you think about that? Why own when it’s so unpleasant and there are so many. . . unforeseeable risks. . . like all these extremely well-protected squatters we have here? 

→ Big push this week for the government to fund “journalism”: Do you think your tax dollars should’ve propped up Vice News? Well, that’s the big push now. Here we have the dean of CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism saying that taxpayers should fund their school and make these degrees free, so that more out-of-work journalists can get cushy jobs giving fake degrees from the scam school (can you tell I have some opinions on journalism school’s value?):

Yes, more than plumbers, builders, doctors, nurses, firefighters, this old nation really needs some more junior content producers for the horoscope vertical. I guess this was concocted in group chats between the NYT editors and their buddies at Jacobin, the socialist magazine, which this week has the same take: 

I’m really sorry that Jezebel and Vice News and Mic.com couldn’t figure out how to be businesses. I liked these places too, Jacobin. We here at The FP are working to make a profitable media company, and it’s not easy. But I do not think the government should prop up TGIF. I do not think Biden should decide what journalism is, beyond the fact that we already prop up NPR. And PBS. A fun game to play with hyper-partisans is always to have them imagine how they would feel if the candidate they don’t like were president: Do you want Trump deciding who gets the American Journalism Slush Fund cash? No one wants that. I hate to break this to Jacobin, but America would not make the BBC. American politicians would make a channel where for four years it’s Dan Bongino and Liver King and slime videos, then for four years it’s Rachel Maddow and Joy Reid and more slime videos. Those would be our only options. We don’t need this. 

→ Whistleblower mystery: John Barnett was the Boeing whistleblower. And in the heat of his damning depositions against Boeing about what he saw on the factory floor as a quality manager for the plane manufacturer, John Barnett was found dead in his truck with a pistol in his hand in the parking lot of a Holiday Inn. 

Barnett had overseen the manufacturing of the 747, 767, and 777 planes, and he saw a lot: titanium slivers that weren’t being properly removed, shoddy emergency equipment, poor accounting of broken plane parts. He said that for pointing these things out, he was retaliated against and isolated. “Complaints seemed to go into a black hole.” He filed a whistleblower complaint in 2017, there are now shocking headlines about malfunctioning Boeing planes, and now the guy who was waving his arms is dead. There is definitely more to this story but what we do know is horrible: a man who was trying hard to protect people who trust that when they get on a plane they are going to get off of it in one piece is dead, under very fishy circumstances. 

Also, he had allegedly told a family friend before his death that if anything happens to him, it’s not suicide. 

→ Real estate mafia broken: Real estate agents have had an iron grip on those 6 percent transaction fees, even though nowadays you can do the whole hunt yourself (which I do online every night in random cities, basically earning myself a real estate license). That grip has broken. The fee is freed! Real estate agents will compete! Spare a moment for the end of a very good scam, though. 

→ The great math fraud: The most influential woman in math education for a while has been Stanford education professor Jo Boaler. She convinced a lot of folks that letting kids test into more advanced math is bad for everyone and should be banned. Also, she’s against timed tests and yadda yadda. Things we used to think of as “school,” which we now understand to be “evil.” And every time Jo Boeler has an opinion there’s always copious “research” behind it. Well, now there’s a very detailed formal complaint alleging citation fraud. In other words, the research doesn’t seem to back her up as well as she claims, and many of those researchers say she is totally misreading their papers. Stanford education school, you know what to do. Commence grants for better fake research into why math education should be illegal across the board. We cannot let the Asian students succeed!

→ Neuralink is so unbelievably cool: You have to watch this video. A paraplegic man can now play chess with his mind. This is like a random Elon Musk side project, like my real estate gig, but now there’s a guy playing chess with his mind right now. 

In actually important Elon Musk news this week (who cares about telekinesis), saucy details of his fallout with Don Lemon have emerged. See, Lemon was going to be the new highly paid Twitter/X talent but then pissed Musk off during an interview (watch it here). The interview was sort of annoying, typical stuff: Lemon going “look at this random racist tweet, is this what you want?” And Musk over and over again saying that Twitter would follow the rule of law and take down illegal content but not mean content. Lemon: What about this other mean tweet? Repeat. Anyway, Twitter/X then leaked to The New York Post all of Lemon’s demands for joining as talent: $8 million salary, $5 million signing bonus, private jet access, massages, plus a free Tesla Cybertruck. I’ve never felt more aligned with Don Lemon in my life. 

Correction: A previous version of this column referenced Google shifting their definition of “bloodbath.” This was based on screenshots of search results that we couldn’t independently verify, so we have removed the reference.

And where do you TG? As always, submit to TGIF@thefp.com. 

Christian: TGIF’ing with the crew out in San Marcos, Texas. 

Lawrence: TGIF from Chugach Mountains of Alaska. There are no excuses not to TGIF. 

Bob writes from Nome, Alaska: The background is the frozen Bering Sea. The small trees are the Nome National Forest, where everyone plants their Christmas trees after the new year. It was only −18 degrees for the start of spring.

Amber writes: I usually TGIF from under my cozy blankets in Michigan. This time I’m in Nashville killing time while my friend adds a pickup to an acoustic guitar.

Laura writes from her house in North Colorado Springs: Most of the snow has blown off the deck but we still have 18–20 inches on the property—preventing us (as newly relocated Texans without the proper snow equipment) from getting out of our driveway. The Air Force Academy is visible in the center of the picture. My son is a junior at USAFA and a huge TGIF fan. #GoFalcons! Pre-ordered 2 copies, Nellie! Happy Friday, Y’all!!! 

Alek writes: TGIF’ing from the chairlift in front of Lone Peak, MT! 

Martha: Onstage at Symphony Hall in Phoenix waiting for rehearsal to begin. 

Rebecca: TGIF from Duck Key, FL, on the last day of our family trip before husband solo sails to Guatemala and the rest of us prepare to return home to midcoast Maine—brace for culture and temperature shock. 

John writes: I’m TGIF’ing in my sugarhouse in western Massachusetts. Just saw the picture from NH in this week’s post but figured I’d share, too. It seems you have a contingent of us maple syrup makers, just like deer hunters (I’m one of those, too). 

Will writes: I TGIF on board the largest cruise ship on Earth, Icon of the Seas. 

Lyric writes: TGIF watching the sun rise over marshland on Seabrook Island, SC. Cree the dog is an avid Nellie fan.

Ken writes: On a bluff overlooking the White River (and soggy cattle) in Baxter County, AR. 

Kristen writes: I TGIF this week from Canon City, CO, with the largest blizzard in decades. After I order Nellie’s new book I must excavate the dog. Also, a debauched spring break is a fundamental human right and your oppression of Intern Julia’s lived experience is a form of vicarious violence. [Kristen, I promise she’s on vacation now! I’ve docked her pay and noted it in her performance review, but she’s off this week.]

Chuck, whose job makes him always win this: TGIF’ing on a Baltic ferry bound for Klaipeda (from Kiel), where I’ll be participating in a maritime security course with the Lithuanian Navy. 

TGIF, everyone.