Last week, Republican congresswoman Nancy Mace voted to remove Kevin McCarthy from his position as Speaker of the House. Now, she’s supporting the lamentable Jim Jordan to be McCarthy’s replacement, despite repeated accusations that Jordan failed to act on allegations of sexual abuse while he was a wrestling coach at Ohio State University. When asked how she squares that with her professed support for the victims of sexual assault, Mace had this mealy-mouthed reply:

“Yeah, I’m not familiar or aware with that. He’s not indicted on anything that I’m aware of. And so I don’t I don’t know anything and I can’t speak to that. … I don’t know anything about that.”

Perhaps before supporting someone to be Speaker of the House and third in line for the presidency, Mace should learn something about that.

Earlier this week, a random Bostonian on Reddit posted a new thread entitled “Help borrowing forklift to ride a pumpkin down the Charles River”. It is exactly what it says, a request for someone with a forklift to help him get a massive pumpkin into (and hopefully, out of) the Charles River, so as to fulfill his “life’s dream to row a giant pumpkin down the Charles River”. Sure!

Is this a good idea? Probably not. But it is an idea, you have to give it that. Boston.com went in-depth on these whimsical water voyages, talking to all manner of gourd experts about the ersatz boats. Pumpkin boats have long been a thing, and in fact, another local named Christian Ilsley motored one across Boston Harbor back in 2017.

Christian Ilsley’s 2017 pumpkin boat

Time will tell if Redditor Benjamin621 joins the ranks of Boston-area pumpkin boat captains.

Here’s a novel excuse:

A New Jersey electrician who is running for a seat in the State Assembly admits he once smeared poop on the doors of a day care center ― and he says it’s Barack Obama’s fault.

…

Although Viso admitted it was wrong, he offered a bizarre excuse with echoes of Republicans this week blaming the Democratic Party for the ouster of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.). “I was a young man. It was a horrible time, and I made a mistake,” Viso, 52, said. “Obama came into office the year before.”

Even the absolute most charitable interpretation of this, that Viso is trying to say “It was so long ago, you know, just after Obama came into office”, is nonsense. That would be 2010, which is only 13 years ago, and Viso was around 39 at the time.

I try very hard to be understanding of others. We never know someone else’s life, or what they’re going through. But at a minimum, this man should have realized that he has no place running for public office.

For my day job, I have Google Alerts set up for the names of our products, as well as our company. Very rarely, they return an unrelated result, like this one:

There’s always a chance our company’s name will get used when someone has a rare and unfortunate death due to a brain-liquifying amoeba. Fortunately, today’s mention is just a general interest explanation. It’s more than a bit horrifying, but an interesting read nonetheless.

Here’s a horrible new formulation of language:

Back in the spring of 2022, professor of linguistics David Pesetsky was talking to an undergraduate class about relative clauses, which add information to sentences. For instance: “The senator, with whom we were speaking, is a policy expert.” Relative clauses often feature “who,” “which,” “that,” and so on.

Before long a student, Kanoe Evile ’23, raised her hand.

“How does this account for the ‘whom of which’ construction?” Evile asked.

Pesetsky, who has been teaching linguistics at MIT since 1988, had never encountered the phrase “whom of which” before.

Hey, neither have I! And it sounds both clunky and wrong.

“I thought, ‘What?’” Pesetsky recalls.

But to Evile, “whom of which” seems normal, as in, “Our striker, whom of which is our best player, scores a lot of goals.” After the class she talked to Pesetsky. He suggested Evile write a paper about it for the course, 24.902 (Introduction to Syntax).

Well, if it seems normal then…no, no, it’s still just clunky and wrong! Look, I try not to be too prescriptivist when it comes to language. English evolves, and that’s both good and fun. But this? This is nonsense. Every single example in the linked paper could just use the word “who” instead of the grotesque “whom of which” or “whom which”.

Never Use Alone is a safe drug use hotline which has one simple goal: to prevent people who are using drugs from dying.

It seems probable that instant karma recently came for a vacuum thief in Philadelphia.

A decade ago, I had a fairly positive impression of Elon Musk as the real-world version of Tony Stark. However, in the intervening years, the man has shown himself to be tremendously flawed. Worse, becoming the world’s richest man has seemingly led to him regressing, rather than maturing. Last year, I referred to him as both “an overconfident idiot” and “a colossal freaking moron”, and nothing I’ve seen since has altered my thinking.

Musk is particularly in the news of late not just due to his ownership of Twitter, which he recently officially renamed to “X Formerly Twitter”, but also because of Walter Isaacson’s new biography. That book, titled simply “Elon Musk”, is by all accounts not very good. Among other things, it has been referred to as an “insight-free doorstop”. At 688 pages, I don’t imagine it will be worth my time.¹

Thankfully, others have taken the time to read it and pull out something of value. Dave Karpf has done a particularly fine job of detailing the flaws in both “Elon Musk” (the book) and Elon Musk (the man). His piece begins with a scene from the book in which Musk is playing poker:

“Elon just proceeded to go all in on every hand and lose. Then he would buy more chips and double down. Eventually, after losing many hands, he went all in and won. Then he said “Right, fine, I’m done.” It would be a theme in his life: avoid taking chips off the table; keep risking them.

That would turn out to be a good strategy. (page 86)

Karpf then notes the following:

There are a couple ways you can read this scene. One is that Musk is an aggressive risk-taker who defies convention, blazes his own path, and routinely proves his doubters wrong.

The other is that Elon Musk sucks at poker. But he has access to so much capital that he can keep rebuying until he scores a win.

Isaacson, our narrator, doesn’t grasp the difference. He doesn’t understand poker well enough to recognize Musk as the grandstanding sucker at the table. So he portrays Musk’s complete lack of impulse control as a brilliant, identity-defining strategic ploy. (If you go all-in and lose six times, then go all-in a seventh time and win, then you’re still down five buy-ins.)

It’s that parenthetical that really stuck with me: “If you go all-in and lose six times, then go all-in a seventh time and win, then you’re still down five buy-ins.” Quite so. Karpf spells things out even more clearly later in the piece:

If you want to be hailed as a genius innovator, you don’t actually need next-level brilliance. You just need access to enough money to keep rebuying until you succeed.

That sure seems to be a fitting explanation for the truth about Elon Musk.

Footnotes:

1. Also, I’ve had a distaste for Isaacson ever since he was the speaker at my college graduation. His speech was structured around lessons he’d learned researching his biography of Benjamin Franklin, along the lines of “Lesson number one: ‘Haste makes waste’. What that means to me is…”. The address was terribly dull, and when Isaacson intoned “Lesson number ten…”, I was eager for what I assumed was its imminent conclusion. Then he said “Lesson number eleven…”, and I’m quite certain I groaned audibly.

   Once he hit eleven, there was simply no telling how much longer that borefest would continue! 15 lessons? 20? 50? Thankfully, if memory serves, the speech mercifully wrapped up at a dozen lessons. And yet, there are times I worry I might still be seated in that audience listening to him drone on, with everything since being nothing but an escapist fantasy. Does “One Foot Tsunami” even exist, or have I just dreamed it up? ↩︎