Workin’ for the Weekend #52: Kmele's Bomb-Loving, Gustavo's Gushing, and Moynihan's Last Exit to Europe

Also: Yer missin’ a great party in the comments!

Hi gang! A little text/video post while we clear through some tech/editing issues on our audio backlog…. Sorry to have taken last weekend off, but I just couldn’t peel my eyes away from the sweet ChiSox uni & defiant chicken legs of Bill Schulz (Episode #79, Special Dispatch #72), seen here attempting to burn off the booze-sweat at last Sunday’s Baseball Hall of Fame induction ceremony in Cooperstown, NY. It was our second consecutive year there, which makes this an official Annual Tradition, one that has now expanded to include the entire weekend’s dork-ass festivities, including the inductee parade, Jim Downey walking tour (!!!), and ritual purification in the surprisingly warm waters of Lake Ostego. Obviously made a playlist.

* Alert listener Ken Roucka in the comments (which, unlike this post, are available only to paying subscribers!) points us to Jim Downey talking with Dennis Miller about his Weekend Update partner in crime, Norm MacDonald:

* Usually what happens in subscriber-only episodes stays in subscriber-only episodes, but Moynihan’s deep readings/recitations of various R&B sexytime lyrics on Members Only #174 leaked out of the laboratory, care of the ever-vigilant Busty Wimsatt, in case you freebie fence-sitters needed a push.

* More Oppenheimer talk: Kmele went back on Pirate Wires July 24 with host Mike Solana and Founders Fund partner Trae Stephens for an episode titled “Thank God for the Atom Bomb”:   

* Speaking even more of Oppenheimer: While I do not typically cross streams with Reason Roundtable references in this space, it is nonetheless true that, as discussed, Nick Gillespie (SD #72, #379) on Monday criticized the picture on grounds that Moynihan would hate:

* Another episode reference come to life (c/o the delightfully monikered Percival3D): Harold Bloom interviewed by Charlie Rose, circa 1994:

* So, Neneh Cherry was indeed the stepdaughter of Don. Via JimF, here’s some seriously funky evidence, from 1983. See what I mean about the party people are missing in the comments?

* There is a subset of you wonderful people who do not tire of asking us, Why don’t you guys debate that one libertarian-adjacent dude lobbing social-media insults in your general direction? While I cannot provide explicit fan service in that regard, I can point to my Reason colleague Liz Wolfe going on the podcast of Dave Smith to answer for her (and Reason’s) criticism of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.:

* One libertarian-adjacent social-media antagonizer dude we did have on, because of his significant impact in the world of ideas and policy, was anti-DEI crusader Christopher Rufo (#322). Rufo has a new book out, with the appropriately hyperbolic title of American’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything, and an op-ed on the topic this week in The New York Times, causing many left-of-center heads to explode. Reason published a critical review of the book from the Cato Institute’s Paul Matzko (headline: “How Chris Rufo Became the Thing He Hates”), prompting Ben Domenech (#107) to ask, “why [do] Reason libertarians hate Chris Rufo so much” despite Rufo’s “close affiliation with the libertarian ideology they claim to espouse.” Rufo’s response to the review: “As usual, Reason magazine is wrong. The thing I hate is libertarianism and, thankfully, I have not become that.”

* From the I-am-not-worthy files, the great L.A. Times columnist Gustavo Arellano (#306, #377) has a piece out in his non-Substack email newsletter (subscribe here) titled “Random Cool People I Know—Matt Welch, My Libertarian Godfather.” Overlong excerpt:

I first encountered him online, around 2000. He had a funny personal blog with a goofy photo of him in a cowboy hat, and an even more caustic one on LA politics and culture called L.A. Examiner. I can’t remember how I found out about him – maybe by reading LA Observerd? But I love his observations, and he seem to be living the life that I imagined a writer to be, with media friends of various political persuasions (Luke Y. Thompson, Amy Alkon, Ken Layne, Tony Ortega, and the late Cathy Seipp were the bold-faced names) getting drunk all around town. […]

Matt was a great editor [at the L.A. Times], who loved nearly all of my ideas and made my stories better. He never pressed any politics on me, probably because I was already a rancho libertarian even though I didn’t know it at the time. At one point, I even tried to recruit him to helm the [OC Weekly] — I remember a lunch with him and his wife in Little Saigon at a French-Vietnamese restaurant, to see if she might like Orange County (they didn’t).

Once he joined Reason and I began to write books, Matt would have me come out in videos for them, or commission me to pen the occasional cover story on food-related themes. He praised me on social media, and vice versa. And when I left the Infernal Rag, he told me what he had essentially told me for a good decade:

You need a place to write? I got you, fam. […]

He name-dropped my coverage on rancho libertarians on Bill Maher’s show, and plugged Taco U.S.A., on Megyn Kelly’s podcast, who proceeded to ridiculed the very idea of a taco book, to which Matt pushed back. And I’ve appeared on The Fifth Column, the sharp podcast he co-hosts with some other guys.

* In honor of Moynihan’s (half-)ancestral homecoming in Italy, here’s a piece of mine from this week: “Say Goodbye to Permissionless Travel: Americans will need government approval to visit Europe in 2024. Meanwhile, Europeans who have been to Cuba are discovering they can't come to the U.S., because terrorism.” Reciprocity’s a bitch.

* Comment of the Week comes from Chris McKeever:

I lived in France for a lot of my childhood in France in a small mountain villages called Mazamet. Far off the beaten path from tourist traps or obnoxious Brits vacationing, it was fairly rare to have non-native French speakers there. Enter my Irish-American grandfather when he was visiting us one summer...

Apparently he was a man who looked like he knew things because he was regularly approached with small talk. Despite our best efforts to teach him “Je ne parle pas français”, what he always ended up saying was a variation of “NO SPEAKY” (sadly not making that up) followed by a series of hand gestures that a meth addict would make practicing sign language. His confidence only seemed to grow with each local who walked away confused.

This will now forever be how I imagine Moynihan interacting with the locals while traveling abroad and I think he should just embrace it.

Outro music, quite a few keys lower than the original, is a more recent version of the song that’s been stuck in my head ever since seeing a certain movie this weekend….