"I just can't stand it when I see kids that are making $70,000 a year spending $28 for lunch. I mean, that's just stupid."

"Think about that in the context of that being put into an index fund making 8% to 10% a year for the next 50 years."

Said Kevin O'Leary, on "The Diary of a CEO" somewhat recently.

I'm only interested in that statement because Tim Dillon got so mad about it on his show the other day:

To Tim, O'Leary is saying, essentially, "They just want to push you into a form that is not human.... You are stupid and you are an idiot because you didn't go and make yourself a tuna sandwich or a turkey sandwich and bring it into work.... There used to be the days of the 3-martini lunch, people would spend two hours at Smith & Wollensky's getting bombed and having fun and enjoying their life. Now people eat a bowl of slop and they're not even allowed to do that. They don't even want them doing that...."

Half a century ago, I made one tenth of $70,000 working in a ridiculous job in NYC, so I guess, by O'Leary's standard, I'd have been a fool to pay $2.80 for a sandwich, which I think I did, not every day, but it probably felt like a splurge. Actually, turkey for making a sandwich at home was considered expensive.

"If I could cook you one meal, what would it be?"

"Oh, uh, deep-fried PB&J."

"[Wendy] Duffy’s son, Marcus, died at the age of 23 after choking on a tomato that became lodged in his windpipe while he was sleeping."

"Nine months later, she tried to kill herself by overdosing and had to be put on a ventilator for two weeks. Ultimately, she said, no amount of medication or therapy can make her whole again and that she 'can’t wait' to die. She’s already chosen what she will wear on her deathbed and told the Daily Mail that Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars’ 'Die With A Smile' will be playing as she passes on.... [Duffy said] she paid Pegasos, a Swiss assisted-dying nonprofit organization, $13,500 to euthanize herself under its care... This time, she said she wants it to be 'neater.' 'I could step off a motorway bridge or a tower block but that would leave anyone finding me dealing with that for the rest of their lives,' she said."

From "Physically healthy mom to end life by euthanasia at Swiss clinic after death of her son" (NY Post).

Did you think it was possible to fall asleep while eating and choke to death? Sit up, pay attention, or don't eat. You could kill yourself and kill your mother.

"Interesting legal questions aside, the trial took on a dadaist sheen, befitting the act itself."

"The juror told me that she and her fellow jurors used words like absurd, laughable, and waste of government money. 'We’re supposed to be looking at the evidence, but a clear majority felt it was nonsensical, like Don’t waste our time or money,' she said."

I'm reading "Inside the Sandwich Guy’s Jury Deliberations/Can a flung sandwich cause bodily harm?" (The Atlantic)(gift link).

"At one point, sandwiches were served for lunch, an irony not lost on a jury spending hours contemplating the many possible uses of the breaded form (nutrition, satiety, projectile). 'Then we had lots and lots of jokes about the condiments,' the juror told me...."

The word "nullification" does not appear in the article. "Ultimately, the juror said the group decided the case on its merits..."

"The straitlaced court proceedings seemed to crack at times as lawyers played video of Dunn bobbing up and down, hurling expletives at a group of law enforcement officers patrolling a popular nightlife area..."

"... at 14th and U Streets NW, as a bystander chuckled at the scene and offered running commentary. ('No, Superman!') Jurors also saw video of the sandwich being thrown, the short-lived foot chase that followed and Dunn’s statements after the arrest: 'I did it. I threw a sandwich. I did it to draw them away from where they were. I succeeded.'... Defense attorney Sabrina Shroff... displayed a photo of the wrapped sandwich on the ground and pressed the agent to clarify whether it had really exploded. Lairmore said... 'I had mustard and condiments on my uniform, and an onion hanging from my radio antenna that night,' the agent said. During closing arguments Wednesday, Shroff questioned whether [the officer] really felt threatened, noting that his co-workers gave him a plush toy sandwich as a gag gift, which he displayed on his office shelf, and an insignia that he affixed on his lunchbox, showing a likeness of Dunn hoisting a hoagie above the words 'Felony Footlong.'"

From "Jury finds D.C. ‘sandwich guy’ not guilty of assaulting officer.Sean C. Dunn admitted he flung the hoagie at a federal agent. His attorneys called it a 'harmless gesture' of protest as Trump commandeered D.C. police" (WaPo).

"I could feel it through my ballistic vest. It kind of exploded all over. You could smell the onions and the mustard."

Testified CBP Agent Gregory Lairmore, quoted in "Border Patrol agent recalls moment DC sandwich slinger’s sub 'exploded all over; him: ‘You could smell the onions'" (NY Post).

The lawyer for Sean Charles Dunn, on trial for assault, appealed to the jurors' sense of proportion: "It was a harmless gesture at the end of him exercising his right to speak out... He did it. He threw the sandwich. And now the US Attorney for the District of Columbia has turned that moment — a thrown sandwich — into a criminal case, a federal criminal case charging a federal offense."

This makes me think of the old saying "My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins." In this case, it's not a swung fist but a flung sandwich, but there's definitely a nose, a nose offended by the stench of onions and mustard. 

"The submarine sandwich’s... phallic yet floppy nature can also be seen in this context as a mocking reflection of the administration’s strutting, performative, hollow machismo...."

"'He thought it was funny. Well, he doesn’t think it’s funny today,' declared Ms. Pirro, playing the nation’s sputtering high school vice principal sick of all these disrespectful kids, in a video announcing that Mr. Dunn would be charged with felony assault.... Attorney General Pam Bondi... condemned him as 'an example of the Deep State we have been up against for seven months.' That seems like a lot of firepower brought to bear on a single sandwich-throwing paralegal...."

Writes Bruce Handy, author of "Hollywood High: A Totally Epic, Way Opinionated History of Teen Movies," in "I’ll Have My Resistance on a Roll. Hold the Mayo" (NYT).

As you may have noticed, the prosecutor failed to get an indictment, disproving at long last "that grand juries aren’t in fact willing to indict ham sandwiches."

By the way, what's the origin of that old joke? Let's read Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities":

"A protester holds up a Subway sandwich during a 'Fight the Trump Takeover' protest in front of the White House"/"A protester holds up a piece of bread as he walks past the National Guard."

Captions under photographs at "How a thrown sub made ‘Sandwich Guy’ a resistance icon in Trump’s D.C./A DOJ employee was fired and charged with a felony after chucking a footlong at a federal agent. Now his likeness is a symbol — and for sale on T-shirts" (WaPo).

"Dunn was an international affairs specialist in the criminal division of the Justice Department, according to a person who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss personnel matters."

I'm reading "Man who threw sandwich at law enforcement was DOJ employee, Bondi says/Police allege that the man approached law enforcement officers, including Metro Transit Police and U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers, and began yelling obscenities" (WaPo).

U ST NW MAN THROWS SUB SANDWICH AT OFFICER: "The defendant was repeatedly yelling, cursing and berating an officer within inches of his face and ultimately assaulted him. He was arrested and the charge of assault of a police officer will be filed in district court tomorrow… pic.twitter.com/0mmJvdIVba

— Allison Papson (@AllisonPapson) August 13, 2025

"Many days pass in darkness, the sun and moon and stars blocked out by volcanic smoke and toxic ash, a pall sometimes red, orange or yellow. Water is rationed."

"People buy homemade toilet paper from peddlers on the street using the tabs from aluminum cans as currency. There’s no internet, no television or radio. Wandering immigrants seeking asylum sleep packed in the tail of a crashed jetliner.... The possession of books is illegal. In their indefatigable resourcefulness, people fabricate their own media to clandestinely convey text, like the 'halceamadon,' a complexly folded piece of parchment paper containing a microscript written backward. At the crux of it all is a cohort of intractable women who resist the prevailing regime and struggle to live authentic, exuberant lives in the face of tyrannical repression and widespread deprivation....."

Writes Mark Leyner, reviewing "Brother Brontë" in "I’ll Have the Psychedelic Dystopia With Everything on It/Fernando A. Flores’s new novel imagines a bleak world where books are illegal and deprivation is the norm. It’s a blast" (NYT).

At one point, Leyner asserts, "'Brother Brontë' is like that mythical sub sandwich with literally everything on it."

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: "I'm reading about 'a mythical sub sandwich with literally everything on it.' What's that?" and "The NYT used the expression as if it might be from some comedian and I got the impression that 'everything' was portrayed as literal, beyond just food, and including every item in the world, in the universe. Reminds me of the old Woody Allen [?] joke about a Zen monk asking at a deli counter, 'Make me one with everything.'"

In its answer, Grok formulated a joke I actually liked: "I ordered a sub with everything—now it’s got salami, provolone, the Andromeda Galaxy, and my childhood trauma, and the guy’s still asking if I want it toasted!"

"The next morning he arrives on set eating an egg sandwich and starts screaming that he’s not going to let me direct this film; I’m a nobody; he can cut me out at any moment."

"Oh yeah, he was a pig. He was an asshole.... He was not nice to the girls in the film and he was so f–king arrogant. I really, really disliked him."

Said Cher, about Peter Bogdanovich, the director of "Mask," quoted in "Cher blasts ‘arrogant’ director after he said she was most difficult actor to work with: 'He was a pig'" (NY Post).

Egg sandwich!

Don't get me started on the topic of egg sandwich.

I was going to discuss Cher's use of the semicolon, but the quote is not from Cher's book. It's from an interview originally published in The London Times, so it's a British approach to punctuation, about which I've got nothing to say.

Did Cher dump on Bogdanovich before he died? Even if she didn't, I can't help siding with her against a man who would eat an egg sandwich in front of people who don't have the option to walk away. And the screaming... Have you ever seen anyone scream with egg in their mouth?

"So if your parents don’t want you, I’ll take you."

Trump to a kid: “So if your parents don’t want you, I’ll take you.” pic.twitter.com/uX0bf4opgP

— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) June 22, 2024

That little video was taken at this event: "Trump goes to Tony & Nick’s for a cheesesteak, completing a Philly trilogy/This was Trump's third cheesesteak stop in Philly at three different shops. That may be a record for a presumptive presidential nominee" (Philadelphia Inquirer)("it was unclear whether Trump ordered his steak 'wit' or 'witout'").

Donald Trump hits up Tony & Nick’s, formerly Tony Luke's, for a cheesesteak prior to his rally in North Philadelphia.pic.twitter.com/cjyEJkgXW0

— Rob Tornoe (@RobTornoe) June 22, 2024

"Last August, a woman in Chicago opened her Too Good to Go bag and found seven pounds of smashed cake..."

"... (which she and her friend, the friend confessed, gobbled down). Someone who goes by Cassie Danger on Reddit reported receiving a 'corn sandwich' from a Choc O Pain in the Hoboken/Jersey City area, that is, a roll containing a handful of canned corn niblets topped with a couple of lettuce leaves."

Writes Patricia Marx in "Spoiler Alert: Leftovers for Dinner/How to host a dinner party for nine using a pre-trash haul from Too Good to Go and other food-waste apps. Carb-averse guests, beware" (The New Yorker).

Marx's 9 guests arrived and dumped out the "surprise bags" they'd ordered from the app Too Good to Go (which packages food left over from 6,987 NYC stores and restaurants):

"On winter evenings in Rock Creek Park, strollers may observe the President of the United States wading pale and naked into the ice-clogged stream, followed by shivering members of his Cabinet."

From "The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt" by Edmund Morris (Amazon commission earned).

I finished reading this 1,162-page book yesterday. The last 2 sentences are fantastic: "As he ate his sandwiches he saw below him in the trees a ranger approaching, running, clutching the yellow slip of a telegram. Instinctively, he knew what message the man was bringing." Teddy, with sandwiches, ranger with telegram.

I was going to say "The last 2 sentences are perfect," but the "As" suggests a precise moment in time and so "sandwiches" — in the plural — is hard to picture/believe, even if Teddy did have multiple sandwiches for lunch. "Below him in the trees" is understood. He's in the mountains. (Here's the drop pin on Google maps).

The natural thing for me to do at that point was to go back to the beginning of the book. Is it wonderful or dismaying to see how many things surprise you when you reread a book you've just read? But there's the President, wading naked into Rock Creek — in winter, to be seen by casual passersby — on page 24. (Here's the drop pin for Rock Creek Park.)

Bob Dylan sang "But even the President of the United States/Sometimes must have to stand naked." But I've always thought of as meaning that the President must, like anyone else, need to get naked to take a shower. Or it's all metaphor, expressing an imperative that the President be fully exposed. But it will never be required that the President strip naked for winter river wading in full view of onlookers. 

"There are calls to burn down your home, Mitch; to smuggle guns into DC, and to storm the Capitol."

"I hope that sufficient security plans are in place, but I am concerned that the instigator—the President—is the one who commands the reinforcements the DC and Capitol police might require."

Mitt Romney texted Mitch McConnell on January 2, 2020, quoted in "The Juiciest Revelations From Mitt Romney’s Tell-All Biography" (NY Magazine).

Romney wrote that he'd just heard "from Angus King, who said that he had spoken with a senior official at the Pentagon who reports that they are seeing very disturbing social media traffic regarding the protests planned on the 6th."

Another "revelation" from the book:

"US First Lady Jill Biden was caught on camera inspecting her cheese and pickle sandwich at Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's coronation lunch today."

Ha ha ha. Thanks, Daily Mail.

Who hasn't wanted to look into the mysteries of a foreign sandwich?

You travel all the way to Britain and the Prime Minister serves you some hinky sandwich?!

"A customer allegedly asked an employee, who had been drinking, to remake a poorly made sandwich and she became confrontational about it..."

"... so another employee remade the sandwich. When the customer left, [the drunken maker of the first sandwich]  followed and had to be restrained by another employee when she tried to fight them. Columbia Falls Police Department made contact with the woman who denied the allegations despite three people giving the same account of events."

From "Law roundup: Sandwich artist can’t handle critique" (Daily Inter Lake).

Also that same day: "A woman allegedly went outside to 'smoke her bud' and saw a small white pill. She told officers she believed two men put her prescription pills in the pipe while she wasn’t in their apartment. She was advised to stop spending time with them if she was concerned about their behavior."

"Still, the baguette is under threat..."

"... with the country losing 400 artisanal bakeries a year since 1970 — a decline that is especially significant in France’s rural areas, where supermarkets and chains have overtaken traditional mom-and-pop bakeries. To make matters worse — and in a sting to French pride — sales of hamburgers since 2017 have exceeded those of jambon-beurre, sandwiches made with ham on a buttered baguette."

 From "A Slice of France, the Baguette Is Granted World Heritage Status/More than six billion baguettes are sold every year in France. But the bread is under threat, with bakeries vanishing in rural areas" (NYT).

The article links to this 2007 discussion of the deep cultural meaning of bread: 

Wisconsin breakfast.

"The Dutch like to say, 'Acting normal is crazy enough.' And we think that rich people are not acting normal."

"Here in Holland, we don’t believe that everybody can be rich the way people do in America, where the sky is the limit. We think 'Be average.' That’s good enough...”

Said Ellen Verkoelen, "a City Council member and Rotterdam leader of the 50Plus Party, which works on behalf of pensioners," quoted in "The Country That Wants to ‘Be Average’ vs. Jeff Bezos and His $500 Million Yacht/Why did Rotterdam stand between one of the world’s richest men and his boat? The furious response is rooted in Dutch values" (NYT).

“When I was about 11 years old, we had an American boy stay with us for a week, an exchange student,” she recalled. “And my mother told him, just make your own sandwich like you do in America. Instead of putting one sausage on his bread, he put on five. My mother was too polite to say anything to him, but to me she said in Dutch, ‘We will never eat like that in this house.’” 

At school, Ms. Verkoelen learned from friends that the American children in their homes all ate the same way. They were stunned and a little jealous. At the time, it was said in the Netherlands that putting both butter and cheese on your bread was “the devil’s sandwich.”...