"Man, that Fanta tastes fantastic."

Don't think it gets better than #Brewers rookie Cooper Pratt celebrating with soda.

"They didn't have sparkling cider, so I got some Fanta... tastes special after that one, frick!"@lanceallan | @CBS58 pic.twitter.com/Nnw8UWTkq0

— Cameron Ezeir (@camezeir) October 8, 2026

That non-drinking is not because he's underage. He's young but not that young. 22. 

Pratt says he couldn't find "sparkling cider" — that's the classic Mormon substitute for champagne. 

Andy Beshear seeks to distinguish himself as the anti-Vance.

I'm reading "Andy Beshear Delivers a Scathing Attack on JD Vance in Ohio, Stoking 2028 Tensions/Mr. Beshear, the Democratic governor of Kentucky, sharply criticized Mr. Vance as both angle for potential presidential runs" (NYT).

Speaking at a local Democratic Party gala in the Ohio county where Mr. Vance grew up, Mr. Beshear accused the vice president of talking down to the people of Kentucky.... And he argued that “Hillbilly Elegy” — Mr. Vance’s well-read memoir about his youth in Kentucky and Ohio — amounted to “poverty tourism” and “trafficked in this tired stereotype” about the region.... 

Mr. Beshear has repeatedly accused Mr. Vance of overstating his blue-collar roots and misrepresenting himself as a product of Appalachia.

"The swan, who had recently lost his mate, would not move away from a vending machine at Tri-Township Park in Troy, Ill."

"The swan stared at his reflection below the Dr Pepper dispensers, thinking it showed his mate, park officials said. The swan needed a new partner, but the parks department would not be able to budget for new swans until April, said Sandy Pensoneau, the office manager at the Tri-Township Park District.... Park regulars had been clamoring for a response, Ms. Pensoneau said. 'The people that walk the park every day, they’re like, "Hey, you guys need to do something. This is sad,"' she said...."

From "Swan Seeks Mate: Must Like Cold Lake and Small Flock/An Illinois parks department sought help from the community to find mates for two swans after they lost their companions. Residents responded" (NYT).

"Academics are unsure if removing soda from SNAP would improve public health."

"Data is scarce: No state has piloted a change, and researchers can’t remove people’s benefits for a study because of the arbitrary harm it might cause. Lisa Harnack, a professor at the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health, found a way to test the concept by finding people who were eligible for SNAP but not enrolled. She created a 'SNAP-like program' that gave some people normal SNAP benefits and gave others similar benefits but excluded soda (participants could still buy whatever other food they wanted with their own money). Her first study found lower calorie intake and improved nutrition among the people who couldn’t purchase soda with their benefits, but her follow-up study did not.... [Another] study found it would probably reduce rates of obesity — but even so, [the researcher said]... 'If you try to solve this problem using SNAP as a lever, so only SNAP people are impacted by it, what we’re likely to do is just increase stigma for people who are trying to make ends meet.'"

From "Should Food Stamps Pay for Soda? Colorado and Texas are among the states aiming to change what food and drink can be bought with SNAP benefits" (NYT).

"Replacing high fructose corn syrup with cane sugar would cost thousands of American food manufacturing jobs, depress farm income, and boost imports of foreign sugar, all with no nutritional benefit."

Said John Bode, head of the Corn Refiners Association, quoted in "Trump's Coke push will cost thousands of farm jobs, corn group warns" (Axios).

Oh, that's rich — we're supposed to feel sorry for the folks who make high fructose corn syrup. 

"Will Hutchins, who had a comically genteel starring role during the craze for television westerns in the 1950s, playing a sheriff who favored cherry soda..."

"... over whiskey on 'Sugarfoot,' died on April 21 in Manhasset, N.Y., on the North Shore of Long Island. He was 94.... Mr. Hutchins’s character, Tom Brewster, was the sugarfoot in question: an Eastern law student seeking his fortune as a sheriff who sidles up to the saloon bar to order a sarsaparilla (Wild West root beer) 'with a dash of cherry.' He abhors violence, tries to stop women from throwing themselves at him and lovingly gives up his share of drinking water for his horse. Mr. Hutchins played the role for comedy, following up a villain’s insult with a dramatic pause, only to critique the man for not being 'sociable.'... [H]e was likely to end a fight not with a killing but rather a comment like, 'All right now, how about that apology?'... [Hutchins said] the best advice he had received about comic performance was to act as if you were doing something no less severe than 'Hamlet.' "In order to make people laugh, you have to act seriously,' he said. 'Chaplin was just as sad as he was funny. Buster Keaton never smiled.'"

From "Will Hutchins, Gentle TV Cowboy Lawman in ‘Sugarfoot,’ Dies at 94/He starred in one of the westerns that dominated TV in the late 1950s. After losing traction in Hollywood, he became a traveling clown" (NYT).

Here's a snippet that shows the beginning of the second episode, "Reluctant Hero." I like how our law student character is reading what looks like a casebook as he rides his horse into town:

Watch the whole first episode — the pilot — here. Look for Dennis Hopper as Billy the Kid and Slim Pickens as Shorty.

And here's a clip from an episode of "Bronco" where Will Hutchins — as the Sugarfoot character — has a conversation with Theodore Roosevelt!

"Ben Wikler's rise to Democratic stardom has a very Madison backstory."

A nice article in the local paper, The Cap Times.

I especially liked the part about The Yellow Press, which was sometimes edited right here in the house we now call Meadhouse:

[In high school,] Wikler and his friends had founded a satirical publication called The Yellow Press.... The newspaper... dovetailed with the rise of another Madison-area satirical publication, The Onion, where he later worked part-time as a headline writer. But while The Yellow Press included [silly topics] and occasionally rankled an administrator or two — an article titled “Prom Night Is Such a Romantic Night to Get F-----” landed the kids in hot water — the paper included serious subject matters. ...

Time didn't have much choice: Trump is the "Person of the Year."

Here.

It's a very long article. Excerpt:

Trump’s political rebirth is unparalleled in American history. His first term ended in disgrace.... He spent six weeks during the general election in a New York City courtroom.... An assassin’s bullet missed his skull by less than an inch at a rally in Butler, Pa., in July.....

Trump has a ready explanation for his improbable resurrection. He even has a name for its climactic final act. “I called it 72 Days of Fury,” he says as the interview gets under way. “We hit the nerve of the country. The country was angry.”... While Democrats estimated that most of the country wanted a President who would uphold the norms of liberal democracy, Trump saw a nation ready to smash them, tapping into a growing sense that the system was rigged....

Whether Trump can actually fix the root causes of Americans’ anger is another question....

To many Americans, his defiance in the aftermath of the shooting—rising bloodied, fist in the air, chanting “Fight!”—made him an inspirational figure for the first time. “A lot of people changed with that moment,” Trump tells TIME, sipping Diet Coke from a glass at Mar-a-Lago....

Much much more at the link. 

"Everybody says this who meets with him, but like, he's, he's an incredible host. So we, we met with him at Bedminster Golf Club in, in New Jersey...

"... which is like, you know, absolutely beautiful, you know, we had a great time.... [What did Trump serve at dinner?] Oh, he said, he said what do you guys want to eat? And I, I just, I, for some reason I was just like, I, I, I, I know exactly what to say and I'm like, meat, I want meat. And so he literally ordered every meat dish. And, and by the way, he ordered every meat dish and nothing else. [There were no sides?] There were no sides.... It was all meat and it was glorious. There was so much meat. I don't think there was room on the table for sides. [Were there drinks or no alcohol?] There? It was a diet coke. He, he, he, he mainlines diet coke. And I was mainlining it right next to him."

Said Marc Andreessen — with questions from Bari Weiss in brackets — in this "Honestly" podcast episode. This is a great podcast. (Andreessen, to quote Weiss, "got his start as the co-creator of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser... He then co-founded Netscape... [and] now runs a venture capital firm... [that] invested in Airbnb, Coinbase, Instagram, Instacart, Pinterest, Slack, Reddit, Lyft and Oculus to name just a few.")

There's a nice "lightning round" at the end of the podcast. After asking about the food Trump, the "incredible host," served at Bedminster, Weiss asks: "Tomorrow you wake up and you're the DNC chair, what's the first thing you would do?"

Bobby surrenders.

Make America Healthy Again starts TOMORROW. 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/LLzr5S9ugf

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) November 17, 2024

Why Andy Beshear will be KH's choice for VP.

It's obvious. Just look at the lineup (at WaPo): 

The force that makes her want a white man — she on her own maxes out the desired intersectionality — will make her exclude the white men who would add intersectionality — Pete Buttigieg and Josh Shapiro. That leaves 4. One is unusually unattractive. Two look old, just as KH and her accomplices are kicking old to the curb. They can't re-old. That leaves Andy. Wonderful Andy. He's 46! Just old enough to make J.D. Vance look too young. 

I don't know anything about Andy other than that he's the Governor of Kentucky. I tried googling his name and the first thing that popped up was "Andy Beshear issues apology to diet Mountain Dew after argument with JD Vance." What got him attacking Diet Mountain Dew? 

"What was weird was [Vance] joking about racism today and then talking about diet Mountain Dew. Who drinks diet Mountain Dew? But in all seriousness, he ain't from here. He is not from Kentucky. This is a guy who would come maybe in the summers for some period of time, or to weddings or funerals."

"I knew that if they are hungry, they are angry.... I told him I had to inject insulin, trying to distract them from the fact I have children who are police officers … I offered them drinks: Coke Zero, water."

Said Rachel Edri, quoted in "Chilling new image shows terrorist with Israeli woman who cooked for them to escape hostage nightmare" (NY Post).

"[O]nline life today descends from where it started, as a safe harbor for the computer nerds who made it."

"They were socially awkward, concerned with machines instead of people, and devoted to the fantasy of converting their impotence into power. When that conversion was achieved, and the nerds took over the world, they adopted the bravado of the jocks they once despised.... But they didn’t stop being nerds. We, the public, never agreed to adopt their worldview as the basis for political, social, or aesthetic life. We got it nevertheless. Musk’s obsession with X as a brand... reminds us that the world’s richest man is a computer geek, but one with enormous power instead of none. It calls attention to the putrid smell that suffuses the history of the internet. I’m kind of tired of pretending that the stench does not exist, as if doing otherwise would be tantamount to expressing prejudice against neurodivergence. This is a bad culture, and it always has been. Foul nerddom is part of what invented, popularized, and profited from the internet’s commercial rise. Twitter did its part to hide all that, with its unoffending avian verbs, its adorable birds, even its charming fail whale...."

Writes Ian Bogost in "The Ugly Honesty of Elon Musk’s Twitter Rebrand/The platform’s new logo seems a little juvenile. So does the internet" (The Atlantic).

Where does this intense disgust come from? Is Ian Bogost the sort of man who felt naturally privileged to run the world before those horrible nerds broke out of their cage? Or is he being funny and he's one of the nerds? Wikipedia: 

"My husband and I both do the shopping, but I’m the one who usually goes to the big grocery store. I kind of like it."

"I like to look at the packaging and the strange products—like the 'outer-space-flavored' soda that Coca-Cola released last year."

From an interview with the cartoonist Roz Chast, interviewed — at "Roz Chast’s 'Fireworks Megastore'/The artist discusses stumbling across surprises while shopping, and rebelling against efficiency" — about her new New Yorker cover.

Have you ever done artwork based on the visual stimulation of shopping? This was based on Chast's encounter with one of those big fireworks stores:

"So now the Bud-lash is a whole thing, as is the backlash to the Bud-lash."

Writes Emily Stewart (at Vox), voxsplaining the fuss over Dylan Mulvaney and Bud Light.

Radio personality Howard Stern said he’s “dumbfounded” at all the hullabaloo, wondering on air, with regard to Kid Rock and [Travis] Tritt, “Why do you care so much?” ...

Anheuser-Busch, which is getting a ton of earned media out of this, appears to largely be riding the wave.... 

"He awoke to the sound of water dripping into a rusted sink. The streets below were bathed in medieval moonlight, reverberating silence."

"He lay there grappling with the terror of beauty, as the night unfolded like a Chinese screen. He lay shuddering, riveted by flickering movements of aliens and angels as the words and melodies of 'Marquee Moon' were formed, drop by drop, note by note, from a state of calm yet sinister excitement. He was Tom Verlaine, and that was his process: exquisite torment. Born Thomas Joseph Miller, raised in Wilmington, Delaware, he left his parental home and shed his name, a discarded skin curled in the corner of a modest garage among stacks of used air-conditioners that required his father’s constant professional attention...."

 
Writes Patti Smith in "He Was Tom Verlaine/Patti Smith remembers her friend, who possessed the child’s gift of transforming a drop of water into a poem that somehow begat music" (The New Yorker).

I've got 7 TikToks for you tonight. Let me know what you like best.

1. You know how Mom just loves to sit outside at the restaurant.

2. Vying for the title Best Ginger. 

3. Singing all the parts.

4. "Can we play dead yet?"

5. The difference between the South and the Midwest. 

6. That girl who just got engaged.

7. That fake Coke everyone's making.

"You don’t like that kind of beauty?"/"Good grief, what’s likeable in such snakiness?... In our true Russian understanding concerning a woman’s build..."

"... we keep to a type of our own, which we find much more suitable than modern-day frivolity. We don’t appreciate spindliness, true; we prefer that a woman stand not on long legs, but on sturdy ones, so that she doesn’t get tangled up, but rolls about everywhere like a ball and makes it, where a spindly-legged one will run and trip. We also don’t appreciate snaky thinness, but require that a woman be on the stout side, ample, because, though it’s not so elegant, it points to maternity in them. The brow of our real, pure Russian woman’s breed is more plump, more meaty, but then in that soft brow there’s more gaiety, more welcome. The same for the nose: ours have noses that aren’t hooked, but more like little pips, but this little pip itself, like it or not, is much more affable in family life than a dry, proud nose. But the eyebrows especially, the eyebrows open up the look of the face, and therefore it’s necessary that a woman’s eyebrows not scowl, but be opened out, archlike, for a man finds it more inviting to talk with such a woman, and she makes a different, more welcoming impression on everybody coming to the house. But modern taste, naturally, has abandoned this good type and approves of airy ephemerality in the female sex, only that’s completely useless.”

From "The Sealed Angel," an 1873 story by Nikolai Leskov, collected in "The Enchanted Wanderer." That's a character speaking, not the author's attitude.

That passage amused me, as I was listening to the audiobook and hiking in the mud in the Arb today. The story isn't much about women though, but about the Old Believers and their icons. Yesterday, I read the first story in the collection, "The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk."

My reading these stories has nothing to do with the woes unleashed by Russia in the world today. It is a consequence of reading Larry McMurtry's book "Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections on Sixty and Beyond" (which I mentioned a few days ago, here). That book begins: 

"Kuachua Brillion Xiong, 25, of Merced was pulled over for driving aggressively on Interstate 80 in Cass County, Iowa, on Dec. 21. He had an AR-15-type rifle, ammunition and a grappling hook, among other items...."

"He told a sheriff’s deputy that he disapproved of the government and President Biden and that he was traveling to Washington, D.C. He was carrying a 'hit list' of targets saved from TikTok videos.... Authorities described Xiong’s vehicle as 'lived in,' with several empty cans of Red Bull energy drink.... Police also found money in the vehicle 'earmarked' for Xiong’s funeral expenses, and his GPS was set for the White House.... 'Xiong believes that he is the only person remaining who can free the United States of evil and it is necessary for him to kill those in positions of power,' Special Agent Justin Larson with the Secret Service said in the affidavit.... Targets included former Presidents Clinton and Obama, White House medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci and Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg.... He also detailed his plan to get into the White House through what he described as a 'weak spot' and how he would use a grappling hook to climb over the perimeter fencing...."

From "Merced man arrested on way to White House with rifle, ‘hit list’ compiled from TikTok" (L.A. Times).

"After Mitt Romney was photographed drinking a Diet Coke while running for president in 2012, the church posted a statement on its website clarifying its stance on caffeine, saying it 'does not prohibit the use of caffeine.'"

"The Word of Wisdom, the church’s health code, specifically bans hot caffeinated drinks, like coffee and tea. Brant Ellsworth, an associate professor at Central Penn College in Summerdale, Pa., specializes in the history of the church. He said that its clarification about caffeine did not likely spur the popularity of soda shops in Utah... 'Moms can’t function without caffeinated beverages,' said Ms. Durfey, a mother of two. 'We’re exhausted... I don’t know a single mom who cannot [sic] go through the day without some form of caffeine. I think that has definitely aided in the popularity of soda shops, because L.D.S. women can’t have coffee, they can’t drink alcohol. So their vice of getting that relaxation, that energy, and that whole kind of ritual I guess you could say — I feel like soda is their only option.'... As a nod to her hometown, Atlanta, Olivia Diaz, who is 27 and lives in Orem, Utah, likes to order Life’s a Peach — Dr Pepper with peach and vanilla syrup flavorings, and half-and-half to make it 'extra dirty.' (The term 'dirty' refers to the flavor add-ins, and its use in marketing was the basis of a 2015 trademark lawsuit, when Swig sued Sodalicious.)... Many of the dirty sodas, which come in sizes up to 44 ounces, can contain up to 1,000 calories."

From "In the Mountain West, the ‘Dirty’ Soda Rush Is On/With locations now numbering in the hundreds, regional soda-shop chains are spreading far beyond Utah, where they first found popularity" (NYT).

The second-highest-rated comment over there is: "I’m not usually a humorless scold, but this is not a good thing. Completely empty calories, mountains of probably not biodegradable waste, and cutesy names/flavors tailored to an eight year old. I’ll stick with plain old water, and a glass of wine before bed. But then, I’m a grown up. And don’t get me started on 'The Church.' Cheers."