Fun thoughts and comments from 2025

Various people said various things about stuff.

Trump & MAGA stuff:

“One CBS article about his immigration crackdown said Trump ‘invoked muscular presidential powers,’ which is a bit like saying Jeffrey Dahmer ‘displayed omnivorous taste.’”

“There was a time when it would have been scandalous for a sitting U.S. president to use the office to serve his personal business interests, but that was back when America had attorneys general who didn’t think an emoluments clause was the disclaimer on a moisturizer.”

Regarding the “Trump” to “Kennedy” name for Washington’s performing arts center: “He asks not what he can do for his country, but what his country can name for him.”

“He’s in good shape because he beats so many dead horses. It keeps the arms and shoulders up.”

“One of the reasons MAGA conservatives admire Putin is that they see him as an ally against their ultimate enemy — the ethnic studies program at Columbia.”

Regarding Kash Patel (FBI) and Pam Bondi (DOJ) failing to substantiate accusations they make: “They are running what amounts to a conspiracy theory fulfillment center with unstocked shelves.”

Regarding Senator Joni Ernst saying that she wouldn’t run for a third term in 2026: “She said that she wanted to spend more time with her family, but she didn’t specify which lobbying firm she meant.”

Regarding Senator Lisa Murkowski’s "logic" in voting for Trump’s megabill: “Murkowski delivered a dessert bar to America’s billionaire class just to take home some Tootsie Rolls to Alaska.”

Other stuff:

Regarding America’s history with the Gulf of Mexico: “‘Do we wish to acquire to our own confederacy any one or more of the Spanish provinces?’ Thomas Jefferson mused to President James Monroe in an 1823 letter, as if the Western Hemisphere was a Sears catalog.”

Regarding the Saudi Arabian the Comedy Festival, which paid big-name comedians big bucks to participate: “The festival is an outgrowth of Vision 2030, the grand Saudi project to prepare for the kingdom’s post-oil future. The old Saudi brand was ‘austere theocracy,’ but the new one is ‘fun, fun, fun, but still with beheading.’”

“With all due respect to steak and lobster, I think the best surf ’n’ turf combination is chicken and anchovies. It’s an opposites-attract situation: The chicken is large and plump with a soft-spoken umami; it says: ‘How nice to meet you. I’m looking forward to working together.’ Anchovies, scrawny and electric with salty savoriness, kick in the door, press play on the boombox and say: ‘I’m here. Let’s do this.’”

Regarding an annual communal feast to a Vermont town’s special fellowship: “Whether a vibrant community created the potluck or the potluck created a vibrant community is like asking which came first, the fried chicken or the deviled egg.”

Regarding a New England roadway rest stop with food options beyond the norm, including poutine: “I know what you’re thinking. ‘Rest stop poutine? Are you sure?’ Rest stop poutine sounds like the name of an indie rock band, or a French Canadian laxative.”

Regarding college athlete Jake Dailey, tempted by lucrative social media opportunities: “Dailey, who has 90,000 TikTok followers and 32,000 on Instagram, said he would be thrilled to become a full-time influencer. Otherwise, he plans to become a dentist.”

Regarding obsessive replays to determine what in pro football constitutes a catch. “It’s the affliction of overthinking: If it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck, wait, hold on, it must be a chandelier. It’s further evidence humans can ruin the spirit of anything, if given the time and technology.”

Regarding grammar: “Too demure to be a colon but more assertive than a comma, the semicolon was introduced in 1494 by Venetian printer and publisher Aldus Manutius. What a useful little tool it has been in its primary role of inserting a graceful pause between two related independent clauses, as in: ‘R.F.K. Jr. came to my house; he tore out the medicine cabinet with a crowbar.’”

Regarding “The Little Book of Bitcoin,” by the supremely self-confident pitchman Anthony Scaramucci: “In one passage, he touts the convenience of transporting $500 million in Bitcoin on a thumb drive, which is the best news I’ve heard since my yacht got a new helipad.”

Regarding the book ban scolds who have taken issue with “Maurice Sendak’s ‘In the Night Kitchen,’ which has been proven in the state of Florida to turn straight white Christian boys into polygender Marxists who eat only quinoa.”

Regarding the writer Walter Isaacson’s depictions of the authors of the Declaration of Independence in his new book, “The Greatest Sentence Ever Written,” about the document’s opening words: “He doesn’t carve them into monuments. He lets them breathe as men at work, leaning over a draft, arguing about commas, listening for cadence.” Those founding fathers believed “that words, if built well, can hold our contradictions long enough for us to grow into them.”

“Even Trump’s most positive-sounding coinages are acts of a certain kind of verbal aggression. I sometimes stop to marvel that the House passed something with the actual official title the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act. That goofy bark of a name is a boisterous clap back against opposing views, an attempt to drown out inconvenient facts with braggadocio. It is a linguistic snap of the locker room towel.”

Regarding the book “Sister Europe,” by Nell Zink: “No real sex takes place in this novel, though it’s gently pervy, like Mr. Whipple squeezing the Charmin.”

Regarding a luxury high-rise in Boston: “It was frigid out, and so icy that all over town pedestrians were tumbling. But on the 35th floor of the Millennium Residences at Winthrop Center, life felt as easy as a summer afternoon, and Richard Baumert was marveling at the lap pool: 75 feet long, surrounded by floor-to-ceiling windows, its water a bewitching shade of … let’s call it concierge blue.”

Regarding a proposal to build the tallest skyscraper in the United States in flat Oklahoma City: “I don’t mean to say OKC doesn’t deserve iconic architecture. Far from! I simply think that buildings should reflect the character of a place, like how Santa Fe is all adobe and how Dallas looks designed by a sentient Ford F-150.”

Regarding regulating AI: “The stately metabolism of institutions is no match for the velocity of AI. It feels, at times, like watching policymakers on horseback, struggling to install seatbelts on a passing Lamborghini.”

Regarding movie scripts created by flesh-and-blood humans rather than AI: “There will always be an audience for work that spurns the template — for writers who, shall we say, think outside the bot.”

An old guy test driving a luxury convertible: “For a man of my age and grooming to rumble through downtown Palm Springs alone in a drop-top Aston Martin the color of Superman’s eyes … well, it suggests I’m looking for a party. If anything, I’m just looking for a bathroom.”

Regarding one carmaker’s advantage: “You don’t buy a Subaru so much as you ascend into your final form as an outdoorsy Subaru owner when a ray of light beams down from the nearest REI, and all your clothes vanish from your body and are replaced by Patagonia.”

Regarding an invitation from someone decades younger than she: “A friend of mine in her 40s hosted a birthday party last week at New York’s most glamorous new club with the dress code of ‘drop-dead sexy,’ which gave me a burst of insecurity. People in my circle are very good at ‘drop dead.’ Sexy, not so much.”

An old guy comments on his teeth: “My bottom teeth lean this way and that in a wandering line, like first graders on a field trip.”

Regarding a television drug ad: “You will frolic on the beach at sunset psoriasis-free, with a golden retriever, smiling into the distance. You also may experience sudden loss of cardiac function, seizures of the arms, bone fractures, or intermittent explosive ear discharge. Talk to your doctor.”

Regarding flying: “The way we dress to fly suggests we’ve surrendered to the mortification of the experience. And yet there is nothing worse than disembarking from a plane in full rumple, waiting for your bags at the luggage carousel and running into someone you know while looking like the most crushed version of yourself.”
 

“Patriotism is like the love that a parent has for a child; nationalism is akin to believing that one’s child can do no wrong.”

Regarding the partisan slant of cable television news: “To demand scrupulous impartiality on their broadcasts is like expecting fancy linens at a Motel 6.”

Regarding academia despite its flaws: “The American university system is the envy of the world, and we are burning it down because there’s a couple of nonbinary gender studies professors at Bryn Mawr who say crazy stuff from time to time and there is a brain-dead gaggle of Jew-hating weirdos at Columbia. Of course, there is room for reform. But you don’t have to love every feather on the goose when it is laying golden eggs.”

A eulogy for honest, factual information: “We live in a world of lies, damned lies, and AI hallucinations. A lie, they say, travels halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on. Today, a lie travels so fast that the truth might as well stay in bed.”

“Occam’s razor, the venerable philosophical principle that the truest explanation is likely to be the simplest, has been thrown away. We’re living in the age of Occam’s chain saw, when the preferred answer is the one that makes the loudest noise and generates the most debris.”

Regarding America’s national parks: “Public lands are our public commons, breathing spaces in a country that is increasingly holding its breath. We stand before a giant sequoia and remember the size of our hearts instead of the weight of our egos.”

By Germaine: In a pensive mood