Firehose #172: It’s Giving Giving Season

Also: So very many splodey-boats

Over at my day job, our annual fundraising Webathon is going great guns; thanks to all you generous double-dippers here who have contributed. If you haven’t mashed the button yet but were planning to, please note that there’s a “Comments” thingie on the form, where you could write things like, I dunno, “It would have NEVER occurred to me to do this if it weren’t for The Fifth Column; boy, you’re sure lucky to have that Matt Walshelch guy around!” Or, you know, anything else that comes to mind.

* As part of the aforementioned Webathon, The Reason Roundtable did one of those ask-us-anything situations Thursday, with hair-hero Robby Soave (veteran of Fif’ Episodes #332 & #517) replacing also-hair hero Nick Gillespie (Special Dispatch #72, #379, Members Only #251), who is busy awaiting arrival of his third child! The names Moynihan and Kmele did come up….

* Robby also went on The Moynihan Report this past week, to talk about Donald Trump curious use of the pardon power:

* Additional Moynihanning was provided by our pal Eli Lake (#52, #65, #141, #174, S.D. #51, #326, #368, #407, M.O. #184, M.O. #244). Per the write-up, the two psychos talk about punk rock, Socrates, Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, Noam Chomsky, and the “unauthorized use of the military in Venezuela against drug boats”:

* Speaking of splodey-boats, the Roundtable editing whizzes chopped & clipped my Monday commentary on same into this:

* As referenced on #535, Kmele was back on CNN this week with Abby Phillip (#532), talking about redistricting, Somali-Minnesotan fraudsters, and Trump’s animus thereof:

* On M.O. #289 w/ Andy Mills (veteran of not TWO but just one previous episode, #457), Moynihan mentioned his self-hating jealousy disdain for Massholetastic, Damon/Affleck career-launcher Good Will Hunting. Here is the original Louis CK deconstruction:

* We’ve had a lot of video in this email (as well as in this podcast nowadays!), so let us for a moment privilege the written word, care of our favorite humorist (and Miami live-show exemplar!) Dave Barry, in a piece titled “My Brain,” and subtitled “Such as it is.” A must-read for those of us of, and/or with parents of, a certain age. Excerpt:

You know the kitchen drawer where you keep your mystery keys, and the remote controls that don’t control anything you currently own, and your collection of inexplicably sticky random coins, mostly pennies, some of them Canadian and a few from countries you cannot recall ever visiting such as Finland, and the flashlight whose batteries have been dead since 2011 and appear to have contracted some kind of battery leprosy, and the electronic adapter thingie that might once have had something to do with either a Palm Pilot or a Sony Betamax, and your arsenal of dried Sharpies and other completely nonfunctional writing implements, and at least three rock-hard tubes of vintage Super Glue, and the manufacturer’s warranty for the waffle iron you donated years ago, unused, to the Salvation Army, and the clump of disintegrating rubber bands that appear to be trying to mate with a naked cough drop, and the many other random items you are keeping handy in your kitchen drawer that are of absolutely no possible use to you or anybody else ever?

That kitchen drawer is my brain.

* More words on brains, this time more harrowing than humorous, from our good friend Ethan Strauss (#185, #333, #383, M.O. #151, #408), about his son’s autism. Excerpt:

He’s very sweet, but I can’t really communicate with him, at least not in the way other parents usually can with their kids at this age. It’s changed me. It’s changed us. It’s torn me down and opened me up. I tried to face it all stoically, only to buckle. I’m just not very stoic about this I guess.

My boy loves music, for which I am grateful. When I arrive to pick him up, he often runs over to me with a smile. Other times, he’s either lost in his own world, or is completely locked in on a need. Instead of stating what he wants he’ll grab an object, or take my hand to drag me there. The latter is called “hand leading,” and it’s a symptom of autism. In a way, it’s both more and less intimate than standard conversation. We can’t exchange thoughts, but while struggling to connect, we’ve got touch. It hurts that my little guy can’t clearly tell me what’s on his mind, but I’ve come to treasure the tactile sense of his soft fingers, physically tugging me towards his mind.

You tell people your kid is autistic and they often respond with positive stories of children who later led independent lives. It’s difficult to know how to feel about these tales because the condition is such a capacious “spectrum.” My child is autistic-autistic. Until further notice, he’s not the “quirky, but good at math,” kind. He’s the “flaps his arms and makes noises instead of words” kind.

* OK, now let’s privilege some audio. FIRE fiend Greg Lukianoff (#216, M.O. #183, #427, M.O. #276) went on The Daily (the New York Times podcast originally midwifed by … Andy Mills!), for an episode titled “The Lonely Work of a Free-Speech Defender.” Never Fly Coacher and history-podcaster extraordinaire Jack Henneman went on the History Impossible podcast of Fifth subscriber Alexander von Sternberg for a long conversation about King Philip’s War specifically and the teaching of history generally. M.O. #179 character and (like Henneman!) forthcoming guest on my miniseries-within-a-pod about the Revolutionary War Ken Layne, is expanding his Desert Oracle dynasty to include a new offshoot called The Eldritch Republic, a “collection of uncanny true tales from America’s strange history & folklore.”

* Comment of the Week comes from Sally Jane:

That’s awesome! My story is nowhere near as cool, but I met Gene Simmons in 1989 (I think, maybe ‘90) when KISS did a show in my hometown of Cedar Rapids, IA. The day after the show, my brother’s friend is working a shift at Chuck E. Cheese and calls us to say Gene Simmons and Shannon Tweed are there with their son (who was a toddler) and to get over asap. So we get there, I grab a cocktail napkin and ask Gene for his autograph. He asks me if I have a pen, which I don’t, and instead of looking for one, I brilliantly respond, “Uhhh…” He stares at me for a second and says, “Do you speak English?” 😆 Thankfully a kind lady loaned me a pen, probably because I was holding up the line, and that cocktail napkin has been in a scrap book ever since. I now always travel with a pen (just in case!) but I wonder if celebrities even sign autographs anymore. Anyway, that was my brush with Gene Simmons; just another dumb-looking teenage chick asking for his autograph. 😆

Walkoff is a tribute to another real one who left us recently: