The day that Fancy Boys Club went live, Taylor Swift released Lover. Since then, I have reviewed every album she has released since then. Unlike Jordan Holmes. whose series known as “The Swiftening” was an aggressive evisceration of her entire catalog, I have been able to find positive highlights in all of the music from pop’s reigning queen. However, today, when thinking about the song “Cruel Summer”, finally released as a single, I slowly realized something: I had forgotten to review Midnights, Swift’s tenth studio album which came out nine months ago.
Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria AKA Pablo Escobar, in case you were unaware, wasn’t merely Colombia’s drug trafficker, he was Colombia’s drug lord. When you’re a drug lord you have both time and money.
Theory with the relationship of time and money is such – you generally have, and should have, one or the other. When you have a lot of money, you probably don’t have a lot of time; when you have a lot of time, you generally do not have a lot of money. Trouble happens when you either have a lot – or a little – of both.
Pablo Escobar had a lot of both. The idle mind so to speak which is, according to the world’s most popular book thrusted upon millions, the devil’s workshop. And, to compound this dilemma, Pablo Escobar was a man who was constantly hiding in plain sight. Why? Again, drug lord. Lords, given time and money, can do what they want when they wish.
Therein lied his problem. When you have scads of money but can’t go anywhere since a better part of the world pretty much wants you eradicated, what do you do? You build a palatial estate. A given in my mind. But what do you fill it with? Things you would like to see but can’t. Pablo couldn’t travel without an army of muchachos, low flight pattern and a private landing strip. There’s only so far you can travel in that manner.
Fuck it, he may have claimed, you won’t let me see them in person, then they will come to see me. So, he brought four hippos to put in his own mini-zoo and let them have the run of his 7,000-acre estate, Hacienda Nápoles. He had other animals, but giraffes and camels are apparently easier to control.
A hippo is not even as controllable as Pablo Escobar and he was nowhere near being controllable. Nearly two decades of drugs, money, bribes, women, etcetera is a long run. Pablo, as a drug lord, eventually had his jig come up. No matter how many police and politicians you buy, the end will come sooner or later. For Pablo Escobar, it came with a self-designed “maximum” security prison built for him on property he owned through an agent. This, in a few years, took a turn once the people of Colombia found out the luxurious life he was leading continued in “prison.” They protested, he was scheduled to be sent to a harsher place, escaped via a bribed guard (naturally), then was gunned down in his Medellín hideout the day after his 44th birthday on December 2, 1993.
At this point you may be asking yourself, and you should, “wow what an insane life of crime and excess, but what of the lives of those 4 hippos?”
Did you hear about the Colombian who tried to cross the Magdalena River? Of course, you didn’t because I killed him. I’ll be here… well, forever.Continue reading “Escobar’s Hippos”→
He married my mother. She’s a God-fearing woman who has kept the gutsy farm girl in her for her entire life. She’s not one to shy away from anything… and apparently neither was Ernest John Cubbon.
Ernie and my mother met at church. She was the hottie with 2 young kids in tow in a failing marriage and he was the pastor/minister/reverend – I’ll stick with pastor purely for the alliteration. Being a Presbyterian pastor was his vocation for most of his working life after he finished his stint in the Air Force. He was the pastor at five different churches in his lifetime. Helping people became commonplace. Never mattered why or what they needed assistance for, or if they were monied or poor, Ernie was there.
I’m not sure Elon Musk has had a good week since he bought Twitter, but this last seven days has been especially bad for him.
With sites like Bluesky and Mastodon off and running as well as what feels like Musk’s own sabotage, Twitter is no longer the cool social media app to be on. The platform, at its height, represented everything the internet could be: a great community filled with laugh and smart ideas and fun. Musk has gotten rid of those and added more nazis and things he wants you to pay for.
Then, with Threads (Mark Zuckerberg’s foray into mini-blogs) revealed a week ago, Musk watched as his site’s numbers cratered while users signed up in droves for what was called the Fediverse, which is sadly not a social media site all about Kevin Federline. Elon handled this in a manner that could only be called “predictable to Elon”, calling the Zuck a cuck and then returning to Twitter 8 hours later to challenge him to have their penises measured.
Look, I should dislike Musk. And I do. That turd bought a thing I liked and turned it into something I like dramatically less. But there’s also another feeling I cannot help but have when I look at his behavior. And that’s pity.
Because right now, Elon Musk has BDE. Big Divorce Energy.
Sometimes, a story is better than what actually happened. Here’s the start of my story…
On Friday, I was driving with my family to get a copy of our house key. My toddler was sleeping in his car seat after a fun morning at the zoo, and my wife and I were listening to the 90’s alternative playlist she had made for our vacation which had gotten cut short earlier in the week (full disclosure: this playlist also had on “The Hand That Feeds”, a song recorded in 2005 for Nine Inch Nails’ brilliant With Teeth; I was willing to let this transgression pass as the song is an absolute banger). As we drove to the Buikema’s Ace Hardware on 75th Street in Naperville, my wife (who grew up in the area) said, very non-chalantly, “I can’t remember if it is this Ace or the one on Washington St. that used to have the monkey.”
I tried writing this post a month ago. I know my scattered history of writing over the past year would lead this to be believed to be a lie. I really did, though. And when I did, naturally I suffered a low end mental breakdown in my attempt. Not even writers block. I couldn’t even pretend the ability wasn’t there. My brain, best known for sabotaging me numerous times in the past, was triggering a shutdown of my abilities to function as a human being. I suppose that makes sense. I was trying to write about how I nearly died earlier this year. I was breaking down because I realized I’d learned nothing from it.
Let’s rewind it back to the end of January. Now, I know i’ve never been seen as the picture of health. I’m more of a human Operation game of a person. Waking up in pain is nothing new to me. I have a bad knee, two bad ankles, a bad hip, a perpetually gout inflicted elbow, various dental maladies, OH, and I started randomly feeling like I was going to pass out this winter.
In 1976, I was a teenager and got my heart broken. Was it a girl? No. It was the Denver Nuggets. 1976 was the final year for the ABA. The NBA was going to take a few teams, the ABA was folding, the NBA was taking 4 teams from it and we all knew it before the season was even over. And yet here we were in the final ABA finals, Denver Nuggets vs. The New York Nets. David Thompson vs. Julius ‘Dr. J’ Erving.
But my love affair with the team and with basketball started way before 1976. I remember as a child going to the Denver Coliseum to watch the Rockets. Coach Stan Albeck had Byron Beck, Ralph Simpson, Julian Hammond and Larry Brown among others. They were fun to watch but didn’t go anywhere in the playoffs.
The Rockets had no choice but to change to a different name. The NBA had informed the ABA that if they were to absorb a few teams one of them would be the one on Denver. But the NBA said ‘ahem… Denver, we already have a Rockets team in Houston. Pick another name… and you won’t be shooting with that red, white and blue striped ball anymore either when you get here.” As such, the Nuggets were born in 1974, two years before the “merger” which wasn’t so much a merger than it was a takeover. The NBA absorbed the Nuggets, Nets, Indiana Pacers and San Antonio Spurs.
But that was the way it was for the Rockets, then the Nuggets… until 1976. No respect, but they didn’t earn it either. And here I was in 1976, a 14-year-old glued to the radio listening to Game 6 of the ABA final (it was not on TV until a delayed telecast much later). The Nuggets had them, they had Dr. J on the ropes. They were down 3 games to 2 and it was back at Nassau Coliseum for Game 6 and they were up. Starting the 4th quarter the Thompson-led Nuggets had the Nets by 14 points, so I went to sleep. Woke up to find out they lost 112 to 106. Series ended and just crushed me as the Nets won 4 games to 2.
They never got back to the finals. Oh, they made the Western Conference Finals.
With the official announcement that hate-filled potato Ron DeSantis is entering the race for the presidency, we finally have the possibility of a candidate who could overtake former President Donald Trump. However, and maybe I’m crazy, but there seems to be a really easy way to derail the Trump campaign and, quite frankly, it fucking baffles me that no one has directly asked Trump this question.
Fancy Boys Club 