Firehose #144: The King of America

Also: Second Sunday pushed back to May 18, ya mothers!

Is it really so good ta be da king? Up until the time you’re not, probably (see daffy toff pictured above). But before further monarchical musings, an announcement: Our regularly scheduled Second Sunday (of the month) Zoom-call with (either all or just Never Fly Coach) paying subscribers is being postponed to May 18, so that some people with questionable priorities can focus exclusively on Mother’s Day. Happiest of celebrations to all our birthing people!

* Do we show all visiting listeners a good time? Certainly not, given our own hectic schedules and general unreliability. But the NYC Fifdom contingent is Aaron Judge-strong, and enough advanced pestering can get you invited to various public & semi-public events of note. So it was that listener Cal W. was for the past week Aussie-land’s very own Crawling King Snek:

* Cal was part of the Village Underground crowd taking in what we talked about (frankly too much) on Episode #504: The Moynihan Report live, debating free speech with Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) Executive V.P. Nico Perrino, National Coalition Against Censorship Executive Director Lee Rowland, New York Post columnist David Kaufman, and Charles Fain Lehman of the Manhattan Institute. Here’s the vid:

* Cal, like a bunch of us, was also at the Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie taping with the wicked funny/smaht investor/political shit-talker Cliff Asness. I particularly liked the quant/Efficient Market Hypothesis stuff, but the cheap jokes about gimps, and genuine worry about pissing off the Mad King, will also elicit some familiar-sounding audience cackles:

* Speaking of the Manhattan Institute, I was today years old when I discovered that the venerable center-right urban policy think tank terminated its fellowship contract with our past guest Glenn Loury (#121, #188, #366), reputedly over his comments about the Israel-Gaza conflict. What’s more, I learned this from … Tucker Carlson:

Loury also had recent words defending universities (!) and criticizing Manhattan Institute favorite son Chris Rufo (#322), so maybe there were other subterranean faultlines. But still, not a great look from an ignorant distance!

* Before we go much further, I regret to inform you that, whilst hunting down the very first hyperlink on this week’s missive, I discovered that the pantheon of truly dreadful early-‘80s novelty rap songs includes … Mel Brooks:

* Continuing on that theme, here is yet another reason why Donald Trump was right to invent the Internet: On Members Only #259, we answered a question from the executive order-hating Matt T. about what each of us would do if we were president for a day. This sparked a text from our dear old Independents producer, Tim Silfes, asking “Do you remember when we did an episode…called ‘If I Were a King?’ Matt and Kennedy got deep into the policies they’d put in place. Kmele went full Rothbard and refused to give an answer except ‘I would abdicate my throne.’ Hahaha. It was glorious.” To which Kmele spoke for both of us by responding, “That was great (I don’t remember it [at] all!” Then I looked up the ol’ Reason.com archives for the show previews we used to do, and … holy mother of God, look at this lineup:

Your Friday theme episode … is on the intriguing theme of “If I Ruled the World." Meaning, not necessarily me (though we do get into some of my King Rudolf II/George Washington fantasies), but rather the creative imaginations of some of our more, ah, ambitious friends: Geraldo Rivera, Anthony Weiner, Tucker Carlson, Gavin McInnes, Monica Crowley, and Bobby Bones.

The discussion ranges from outlawing train-farts to containing Russia to minimizing state-delivered death.

I wonder if anything interesting happened to any of those people in the ensuing 11 years…. More pressingly: Could the peerless and beloved archivist Busty Wimsatt miraculously produce this piece of important television history from the ether? Like you need to even ask….

* Speaking of Gavin, the old Vice co-founder and later Proud Boys progenitor was the subject of the other Moynihan Report episode from this week, an interview with former Vice correspondent Thomas Morton about his CBC documentary, It's Not Funny Anymore: Vice to Proud Boys.

* Feels like we need a cleansing blast of visual patriotism:

* Speaking of American dominance, we got our very own pope now! Like J.D. Vance’s face and the admittedly deadlier India-Pakistan conflict, basically every meme about Pope Bob from Chicago is funny. Newspaper headlines, too:

Congratulations to God’s favorite White Sox fan!

* Giving devilry its due: Here is the hellbroth produced by combining the A.I. songcrimes Randolph Carter and the insane fanimation of Arch Stanton:

* Let’s doing something nicer for Mother’s Day: Here’s a special episode of Ask a Jew featuring known Jew-moms Chanie Perelmuter and Liora Bar tur, both of whom I’ve had the pleasure to meet!

* Comment of the Week, to which I will append a nightmare-fuel video, comes from Matthew Brannigan:

48:00 The witch character in the Paulus the Woodgnome puppet TV series that was shown on ITV (UK) back in the early 70's used to scare the bejesus out of me as a small child! I haven't seen it since then however Matt mentioning the character made me hunt it out, and there are a couple of very poor quality clips of it on YouTube, but looking at the comments under it seems like I wasn't the only one who was traumatized by the show!

For the Walkoff, surely you didn’t think I would take the obvious route?