This week should have been momentous as Donald J. Trump, a man who somehow got voted president in 2016, was indicted. However, because it is Donald Trump, it’s completely and utterly mundane. Honestly, I’m not sure how many times he’s been indicted now. Three times? Six times? Who knows? All I know is that it happened and is probably going to happen again soon (if all things from Georgia seem like they’re going to happen) and will probably keep happening until the slimy fuck is in the ground.
I’d been hearing about it forever. Long before a single brick had been laid. No foundation. No down home decor. I was hearing about Pizza Ranch coming to Shorewood. Apparently a crowd pleaser among people who are easily pleased, they were slapping the pizza buffet right on the frontage road next to the highway, ,for everyone to see! Then nothing happened. And nothing continued to happen.
What felt like years passed before building commenced, and even then, the process was long and drawn out. I’d already lost interest by the time they announced the Grand Opening. I was drawn back in. How can you not be when you are a man of my girth? All You Can Eat pizza and fried chicken. That’s a damn fine time, to me. Damn fine.
Early reports were positive, but I decided to wait until a special day to go. I wanted to go on a holiday to get a real feel for the place, and I found my opportunity. I visited Pizza Ranch for the first time on the 30th anniversary of Nolan Ryan beating up Robin Ventura. What a glorious day!
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.
Fancy Boys Club 