Every day we awaken to find that the world isn't even the place it was the night before. Predictably, that constant instability has led to fear, fear to anger, anger to hate, and hate to suffering. The goal should be to try to curtail that path, not accelerate it. Any man can only take so much injustice, cruelty, and bad taste before hopelessness wins.

Which is why I'm demanding that Kroger return to its previous recipe for Bread and Butter Chips.

Back in the good old days, the ingredients were listed as "Fresh cucumbers, sugar, water, vinegar, and less than 2% of: salt, spices (including mustard and celery seed), calcium chloride, turmeric extract (color), gum arabic, natural flavors." The result: deliciousness!

But now? Kroger pickles have become a "Product of Vietnam" with ingredients "Cucumbers, sugar, water, vinegar, salt, mustard seeds, celery seeds, gum arabic, natural flavor, turmeric oleoresin (for color)." Those may look like small changes (just 3% more salt and 2% more sugar), presumably to keep the price down, but they translate to soggier, sweeter, inferior pickles. Blech. I'll never underestimate the value of calcium chloride again.

If I have to watch as the United States sides with corporations, racists, and the enablers of pedophiles over the welfare of its own citizens; disavows medical and climate science; scuttles the global economy; turns its back on former allies Europe and NATO; solicits bribes from criminals and tyrants around the globe; murders people in international waters and its own streets; and bullies media conglomerates, law firms, and astronauts to deny its immoral behavior — you know, all the things 78 million American people voted for in 2024 — then at the very least I should be able to enjoy my favorite pickles as the legacy of the America I used to know crumbles around me. If you can't find joy in the little things, what's left?

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"Played any new good games lately?" asks Friend Brian as we're queueing up our 215th hour of Borderlands 3. Sadly, the answer is "no."

I spent most of the spring and summer playing the fantasy-genre tactics game Unicorn Overlord and loving it. (Considering that I spent more than 100 hours 100-percentiing that game, you won't be surprised to hear that I rate it a 10 out of 10!) Finding a worthy follow-up has been a bigger challenge than the game itself.

Part of the problem has been that I've been trying to get by without spending a lot of money. Like everyone else in America, I feel that everything is too expensive, but saying that I'm saving money because of the post-pandemic economy has put a squeeze on my income would be an exaggeration if not an outright lie. I'm really just a cheap bastard. (If I could be sure a game I bought was going to give me a hundred hours of entertainment, sure, I'd pay up. But there are only so many Unicorn Overlords and Borderlands 3s out there.)

Because I pay Xbox (current Gamerscore: 161,005) for the ability to play online with friends (proving that I have more money than brains, as very few of my friends even have an Xbox), Microsoft offers me access to some games for free. Using that program, I tried Snow Runner. It belongs to the genre calling themselves sims: virtual duplicates of real world situations with a minimum of added gamification. Imagine an application in which you manipulate only one digitally rendered straw of hay a time while you look for a single pin and you'll get the idea. Heck, that would probably be more fun than Snow Runner.

Snow Runner is a game in the same sense that pushing a single Tonka truck back and forth through a mud puddle is a game. Like any competent drug dealer, Snow Runner gives you a couple of trucks, but the rest you have to explore to find for yourself (or outright buy to unlock). By "explore," I mean "trudge very slowly into deeper and damper quicksand from which there is no escape." If you google Snow Runner, you will find many comments from players admitting they expect others will find it boring and bemoaning what it might say about them that they find enjoyment in it. All I can say for sure is that apparently there are a lot of masochists in the world.

The fifth time my truck got stuck in a ditch (forcing me to reset to my distant garage) was enough for me. I grew to hate this so much that the main reason I'm posting about video games today is so that I can tell the world how much Snow Runner sucks. I think Xbox gives it out for free to punish people looking for free games. I'm starting to get the message.

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Press Briefing by President Woodrow Wilson, issued on January 26, 1919:

MR. WILSON: Thank you very much. Thank you, everybody. Thank you.

We've had a tremendous week uniting the country in our fight against the Spanish virus. I have reminded people of the importance of masks when you can't socially distance, in particular. A strong message has been sent out to young people to stop going to crowded bars and other crowded places.

I wanted to come out again today to share some additional news with you: This afternoon, my political team came to me and laid out our plans for the Armistice celebration in San Francisco, California. It's a place I love. I love that state. The drawings look absolutely beautiful. I never thought we could have something look so good, so fast with everything going on. And everything was going well — a tremendous list of speakers; thousands of people wanting to be there — and I mean, in some cases, desperately be there. They wanted to attend. People making travel arrangements all over the country; they wanted to be there. The pageantry, the signs, the excitement were really, really top of the line.

But I looked at my team, and I said, "The timing for this event is not right. It's just not right with what's happened recently — the flare up in California — to have a big celebration. It's not the right time."

It's really something that, for me — I have to protect the American people. That's what I've always done. That's what I always will do. That's what I'm about.

Fortunately, the data shows that children are lower risk from the Spanish virus, very substantially. When children do contact the virus, they often have only very mild symptoms or none at all, and medical complications are exceedingly rare. Those that do face complications often have underlying medical conditions. Ninety-nine percent of all Spanish virus hospitalizations are adults. And ninety-nine point nine six percent of all fatalities are adults. That means that children are a tiny percentage — less than one percent, and even a small percentage of one percent.

I have a very, very special person who loves children, who is — who is, I think, one of the greatest athletes of all time. A lot of people say "the greatest player of all time." Known as a "center fielder" who could have been whatever he wanted. Some people — he is the greatest player of all time, by far. Substantially more runs batted in than anybody else. In fact, he got the Most Valuable Player award recently.

And he — I'm reading off these stats. I knew he was the best. I knew he was great, but I didn't know it was almost double anybody else. But he's a man who loves children — has children, loves children, works hard with children. We're going to go outside and be with some little leaguers. Ty Cobb — you know, he's the "Georgia Peach," right? My wife said, "Darling, why do they call him the 'Georgia Peach'?" I said, "You know, he's just such a sweet man." And that's exactly what happened.

So, with that, if you have any questions — please.

Q: On the Armistice celebration, were you simply not convinced that you could keep people safe at the convention?

MR. WILSON: I just felt it was wrong, Steve, to have people going to what turned out to be a hotspot. You know, when we chose it, it was not at all hot; it was free. And all of a sudden, it happened quickly. It happens quickly. And it goes away, and it goes away quickly. The key is, we want it to go away without a lot of death, without a lot of problems.

Q: You talk about setting an example on San Francisco. But I — I just wonder: Some people are going to take away from this the lesson that you're pushing too far, too fast. It seemed, for a while, the numbers were going up in San Francisco, and you were going to have a problem there with the Anti-Mask League. This comes up at a time you're pushing for schools to reopen, have the opening of the Major League Baseball season. Isn't — isn't the example of San Francisco that we're — we're pushing too fast?

MR. WILSON: Well, baseball, as an example — we were discussing it a little while ago — you're going to be at an empty stadium. I've agreed — Charles Comiskey is a great friend of mine from the White Sox, and he asked me to throw out the first pitch, and I think I'm doing that on May 8th at Comiskey Park. And I say, "How's the crowd going to be?" And, you know, it's like you don't have a crowd; there is no such thing.

It's going to be interesting, Ty. He's not used to that. I've been at many games. He walks in; the place goes crazy. I think it'd be just as good without the crowd. You were just born with it, you know. Some people are born with it.

I don't know if — this is only for the baseball players, but I've never seen a batter hit a ball where so many bats were broken as Ty. He's got the all-time record. I said, "How do you do that?" He said, "Parents." Great parents, when you get right down to it. Right? "How do you do that?" It's called parents.

Q: That's baseball, but the question really is —

MR. WILSON: Yeah, I just — just to finish, I think — I think that we have to all set examples. I think Major League Baseball is setting the example by, you know, playing to empty stadiums, and so are other sports. You see that. Now, then they'll allow a certain number in. I see golf is now — soon will be allowing people to come in, in percentages. And all of a sudden, we want to get back to normal.

The key is to get back to normal, because nobody wants to see this. But I think it's really good that baseball is opening. It looks like football is opening. It looks like sports are opening. We — we have — it's a tremendous thing, psychologically, for our country.

And we're all — we're all, whether we're — we're going to see right now some beautiful, young Little Leaguers outside with a great future ahead of them. They're already practicing on the front lawn of the White House, and we're going to go out and say hello to them, and it'll be really great.

Thank you all very much. Thank you. Thank you very much.

END

...

Follow-up communiqué by President Woodrow Wilson, issued three days later:

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Worldwide plague? Economy in the toilet? Incompetent government infighting? Whatever, Bruce.

(Yes, I know it's not "Bruce." Don't bring me down!)

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As if having a professional clown^[1] for a president wasn't bad enough, it has recently been reported that Donald Trump might raise the price of comic books^[2].

For years, DC Comics has been using Canadian companies to print their comics^[3]. Under the North American Free Trade Agreement, US companies were able to import those comics duty free^[4]. Given the quality of most mainstream comics today^[5], this has effectively become the equivalent of the US taking in Canada's toxic waste for free, so you can see why Trump would want to stop this in order to make America great again.

Trump's protectionist objectives call for rolling back NAFTA^[6] and raising tariffs of up to 10% on all imports^[7], including presumably comic books. Because if there's anything that helps stimulate the economy, it's stifling imports^[8].

Assuming DC continues their current practice of printing in Canada, they'd pay more to get them to consumers. Something tells me they'd just pass that cost increase on to us^[9]. In 2016, new comics already averaged $3.89 per issue^[10]. By 2018, a single book could cost more than a Big Mac^[11]. If Americans are forced to choose between comics and Big Macs, we might be looking at the end of an industry^[12]. Should that happen, we can be sure that Trump won't notice. He doesn't read^[13].

But I guess I shouldn't complain. Who needs comic books when your president is a living caricature^[14]?

Footnotes follow (because in Trump's America everyone has to justify his own alternative facts^[15]):

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My aunt just dropped off a pile of old books (including a copy of Gone with the Wind published in September 1936) and magazines. Both my mother's and her sister's idea of housecleaning is to swap their clutter from one's house to the other's.

What caught my eye in this stack of old publications was a year-in-review edition of Newsweek published December 29, 1980. Among discussions of such weighty topics as the failure to resolve the ongoing Iranian hostage crisis and the pitfalls in the construction of the proposed MX missile system, the magazine worried about the precarious state of the nation's savings and loans associations, a prescient observation of a situation that would have disastrous effect on the nations's economy later in the decade. As history has borne out, the writers knew their stuff.

Tonally, this issue could have been published yesterday. The lead column is a pointed essay on the failure of the assassination of John Lennon to weaken the NRA's stranglehold on America's stillborn gun control debate. (That argument is parodied in a brief mention of J.R. Ewing's assassination on Dallas in the magazine's centerpiece article.) More than one page mentions the dangers of government bloat and political patronage. In fact, most of the issue is given over to the sorts of End Times discussions about the state of the world that you hear today on Fox News. The takeaway here is that the world has been a shitty place for at least the past 35 years. In its own way, that's kind of comforting.

While the tone and subject matter is familiar, the presentation isn't. I challenge you to find a 2015 news magazine, either in print or on television, where articles quote philosophers and Shakespeare or make off-the-cuff allusions to the Battle of Agincourt. It seems the democratic Internet — where free speech goes to die — has put the nail in the coffin of that style of academic writing. In 2015, pulled quotes from Twitter are the closest we come to educated commentary.

This dumbing down of the national discourse was a danger that the magazine was well aware of. (Paddy Chayefsky's 1976 masterpiece Network, in which an insane man is made the face of the evening news because that's what people want to see, is referenced elsewhere in this issue.) All of page 59 is devoted to warning of the coming of a newspaper focusing on national popular interests, "tentatively called USA Today." In hindsight, that might have been among the first signs of the current Apocalypse.

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Last week, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that he wanted to ban the sale of individual servings of "sugary drinks" over 16 ounces. In a country facing a staggering economy, continued high unemployment, and a politically-motivated class war, it's facing an inability to purchase 64-oz Big Gulps in 7-11 stores in Manhattan that has the population up in arms.

Those who opposed the ban, including misnamed, non-profit mouth-pieces for the beverage and restaurant industries like the Center for Consumer Freedom, have been running ads opposing the proposed law. However, to disguise the issue that no one really cares if they can't buy a Coke in a styrofoam cup large enough to drown a midget in, these lobbyists are attacking Bloomberg as a tyrant determined to take away our American freedoms. That's not advertising, that's propaganda!

If anyone should be concerned that government might take away my Coca-Cola, it should be me. But I really don't mind if I can't buy a fountain beverage larger than 16 ounces. If I want more than that, I can pay for another one. Just because the technology exists to make larger cups doesn't mean that we have to put drinks in them. By that logic, let's start throwing Bounty paper towels into the ocean to see how many it takes to absorb it all, just because a) we can and b) it will help Proctor & Gamble turn a bigger profit this quarter.

Don't try to bait and switch me by telling me that I have the God-given right to be a fat ass. And don't tell me that a maneuver to regulate the destructive business tactics that have contributed to my fat-assery constitutes a Fascist state. Bloomberg is trying to save the Jews, not gas them.

Honestly, I suspect that just like New York's attempt to tax sodas in 2008, this measure will probably encounter too much popular opposition (read: big business money) to ever go into effect. But I don't think we should let the advertisers confuse us by comparing Snapple with Orange Crush. Whether we like government or not, we should't be tricked into buying something something just because we (aluminum) can.

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Has anyone else noticed that Best Buy hates Santa Claus? Their current seasonal ad campaign has customers taunting Santa with electronic gifts and throwing his effigy off a roof. What the fuck, Best Buy?

Why, during the gift-giving season in another year amid a seemingly eternally underperforming economy, why would you hate on Santa Claus? Santa Claus, the beloved Father Christmas figure of millions. Santa Claus, who brings toys to deserving children. Santa Claus, twinkle-eyed, merry-cheeked jolly old elf!

I'm not the biggest fan of Christmas. However, I'm also not about to throw Santa under the bus just try to sell more cell phones. Know when you're outclassed, Best Buy. Some executive will definitely be getting coal in his stocking.

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According to my latest credit card statement, if I continue to pay the minimum balance each month and I make no new charges, I will pay off my current card balance in 23 years. That's far longer than it took to build the Statue of Liberty, the Lincoln Memorial, and the carvings on Mount Rushmore.

Fortunately for me, all of those things cost far more than my outstanding credit card balance, even including interest incurred over the next 23 years. In fact, the reported total payment over the next 23 years wouldn't be enough to buy a new economy car. Whether that says great things about how low my interest rate is or terrible things about the spiraling inflation of the American economy is a thought exercise I will leave up to my readers.

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The Times-Herald reports that the Newnan police department is adding to it's repertoire of offbeat crime fighting techniques by hiring a talking golf cart.

You may recall that earlier this year, the Newnan police apprehended a suspect thanks to the timely assistance of a psychic. (Nevermind that the charges were eventually dropped due to lack of evidence. Damn the courts for not recognizing psychic evidence!) Now Police Chief Buster Meadows welcomes Officer Auto to the force. While I applaud his attempt at equal opportunity employment, I'm not so sure that this is the right pace to set for the force.

Officer Auto -- if that is it's real name -- is a cast off from the Department of Defense. There must be plenty of automobiles looking for work in this down economy. Couldn't we do better than Uncle Sam's lemons? Even Chrysler got a bailout, but we got stuck with a used golf cart?

This rookie is supposed to be assigned to a crack detail that will visit locak elementary schools. But it turns out that the upgrades that give Officer Auto its voice were paid for by donations from drug dealers. This new cop hasn't even hit the streets yet, and he's already on the take! We certainly don't need that kind of moral corrosion dropping by our students' classrooms to give them a lift. Officer Auto? More like Speed buggy!

I say it's time we take back the streets, and give Officer Auto the boot! Let's put the brakes on this situation before it can gain traction in our community.

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