Firehose #148: Fever Dreams

Also: NBA-hating Second Sunday penciled in for 8 pm ET!

It’s tough to process weird national news when you’re too weak to even visualize turning on the TV to watch the NBA Finals. (I did locate the remote by the end of the first quarter of Game 1, fret not.) Everything blends into an unsettling if occasionally humorous hallucination…. Tyrese Halliburton did the Epstein Files on Dan Bongino so that Laura Loomer can keep borking Stephen Miller’s wife, that kind of thing.

Premature rumors of my death notwithstanding, you’ll still have me to kick around for a while; just in somewhat macerated form for a day or three, as will be visible to paying subscribers who participate in our Second Sunday of the month Zoom call. Which is provisionally penciled in for 8 p.m. ET tomorrow, not because I don’t want to watch Game 2, but because someone chose the second Sunday of the month to fly all day across the country with his family. We will hopefully send notice out to y’all more than 30 minutes in advance this time; if not, don’t blame me.

* Let’s just get this party started with some appropriate Arch Stanton/Randolph Carter surrealism:

* A bit more closely tethered to the news, Kmele this week took his regular turn on Tangle’s Sunday thingie, where he & crew talked about “Kmele’s recent appearance on CNN, the nature of cable news debates, the impact of Trump’s tariff policies,” and so forth. Then on Thursday the gang did an Elon vs. Trump emergency pod, from which r/WeTheFifth group found or harvested a live video snippet of when they all discovered the Epstein Files troll in real time. I prefer this video tho:

* What IS even real, man?

The above advertises the last moment or so before this week-long physical (psychological?) collapse, when we wrapped up a Reason Roundtable devoted largely to a topic I wisely sidestepped in Episode #508: Artificial Intelligence.

* Said Roundtable is taping live here in NYC at The Village Underground on July 15; get your tickets here.

* ‘Tableist Nick Gillespie (Special Dispatch #72, #379, Members Only #251) was a guest Thursday on The Moynihan Report, answering the eternal question, “What happened to ‘The Libertarian Moment’?”

* Earlier this week, as teased on the most recent M.O. #252 (we’ll sort the numerology problem soon, I swear), Moynihan interviewed Mark Kriegel, author of the new Baddest Man: The Making of Mike Tyson.

* Comment of the Week, whose designation maybe benefits a bit from my recent media consumption habits, comes from Colin B:

Ben Franklin was absolutely a greater political troll than Elon Musk.

There’s evidence that he spawned the legend of the Jersey Devil in order to troll a rival. He was a huge satirist.

* Speaking of which, we’re only two episodes in, but the Welch family has six non-teen thumbs firmly up for this show, not least for the Terry Gilliamesque intro:

* Say, I don’t know if you people have heard, but I spent the first half of the 1990s in Prague! Ian Willoughby of Radio Prague International was kind/bored enough to interview me about what things were like back then. A selection:

“One of the [best] memories I have in Prague is the last time I was there, for Havel’s funeral; I was fortunate enough to go to both the very solemn occasion up in St. Vitus [Cathedral] and then the great after-party at Lucerna.

“I was in the warren of the backstage areas of Lucerna, and the Plastic People were over there. And they invited me in, because I know a couple of guys involved with them.

“It was the Plastic People of the Universe, not an insignificant band in the history of the world on some level, and they were like, hey, you want some hash?

“[Laughs] I remember this as like the dividing line in my adult from young life, because if I was a young man I would say the chance of smoking some hash with the Plastic People before a Havel funeral concert is like the definition of something I'm going to do.

“But I was like, ‘No, I want to remember this, so I'm cool.’ And also I don't really like smoking hash.”

Here’s my report from said funeral, and a 2021 piece about “The Anarchic Interlude.”

Walkoff: In the course of rooting around for some usable Psonic Psunspots video, I discovered today that there is (or probably was) an XTC cover band with the very best name: Nigels With Attitude. Anyway: