Men's Lifestyle March 7, 2026 0 Comments

How One Administration’s Words Took a Knockout Punch at the English Language—and Why You Can’t Afford to Ignore It

So here we are, diving headfirst into yet another bizarre weekend round-up where reality feels stranger than any workout challenge or diet fad I’ve ever tackled. You know that moment when you think you’ve seen it all, only to have the universe toss you a curveball that makes you question if the world’s just gone mad or if you’re the one who’s missed the memo? Yeah, that’s the vibe right now. Allegations swirling around, political spins so thick they could double as a protein shake, and biblical sci-fi battles playing out in the headlines — it’s as if the chaos is set on shuffle, and no one’s hit pause yet. Makes me wonder: can a little clarity and honesty ever break through this fog, or are we destined to keep sprinting in circles, chasing truth like it’s some elusive muscle group in a sea of misinformation?

Buckle up — this one’s a wild ride through the odd, the profound and the absurd, guaranteed to have you scratching your head and maybe, just maybe, chuckling at the madness of it all.

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7 min read

Out on the Weekend

(Permanent Musical Accompaniment to the Last Post of the Week from the Blog’s Favourite Living Canadian)

Folks are certainly hearing footsteps now. From Politico, about currently unverified allegations against Donald Trump:

The woman’s central allegation, according to FBI summaries of her interviews with investigators, known as FBI 302s, is that Trump hit her after she bit his penis when he attempted to force her to perform oral sex.

Good lord.

The three files come as Democrats are investigating whether the department purposefully withheld materials that included sexual assault allegations against Trump. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the allegations “completely baseless accusations, backed by zero credible evidence, from a sadly disturbed woman who has an extensive criminal history. … The total baselessness of these accusations is also supported by the obvious fact that Joe Biden’s department of justice knew about them for four years and did nothing with them—because they knew President Trump did absolutely nothing wrong. As we have said countless times, President Trump has been totally exonerated by the release of the Epstein Files.”

I’m endlessly interested in how these people use a form of English with which I’m not remotely familiar. Call it the “superlative dialect.” Nothing is ever simply a win. It’s always the greatest victory that there absolutely ever was. Nobody is ever simply cleared. They’re absolutely exonerated of everything including Original Sin. John the Baptist had nothing on these folks. I know this is nothing except a ludicrously inflated example of political spin. But I wonder if English is one of those things that’s going to need years of rehab once these people blow town.

The woman said other people were present, but she couldn’t recall who. Trump asked them to leave the room, then said “something to the effect of, ‘Let me teach you how little girls are supposed to be,’” according to the interview notes. Trump then unzipped his pants and put her head “down to his penis,” she recalled in the interview. She said she “bit the shit out of it.” In response, she said he pulled her hair and punched her on the side of her head. “Get this little bitch the hell out of here,” the woman recalled him saying. At that point, she said, people reentered the room. The FBI interviews don’t contain information about how the incident ended or how the woman exited the encounter.

These are the most extraordinarily weird times in the history of the human race. Now they’ve got me doing it.

One correction from a post from earlier this week. I mentioned that we’d all be better off if Patmos had blown up before John could inflict Revelations on future generations. But I didn’t mean to suggest that I have given up on my long-held belief that Revelations is some of the best sci-fi ever written. I mean, honestly.

The wall was made of jasper, and the city of pure gold, as pure as glass. The foundations of the city walls were decorated with every kind of precious stone. The first foundation was jasper, the second sapphire, the third agate, the fourth emerald, the fifth onyx, the sixth ruby, the seventh chrysolite, the eighth beryl, the ninth topaz, the tenth turquoise, the eleventh jacinth, and the twelfth amethyst. The twelve gates were twelve pearls, each gate made of a single pearl. The great street of the city was of gold, as pure as transparent glass.

That’s some first-class prose right there. It makes L. Frank Baum’s Emerald City look like a housing development in north Las Vegas.

I was reminded of all of this in the wake of James Talarico’s victory in the Texas Democratic Senate primary because the politicized element of American evangelical splinter Protestantism has been delivering all manner of bovines all over social media because Talarico is engaging them on their own ground. For decades now, because of their organization, their money, and a compliant political media, these people have managed to define their interpretation of Christianity in political contexts as all of Christianity itself from the stable in Bethlehem to the New Hampshire primary. It has driven me crazy ever since I saw its beginnings at a thing called Washington For Jesus in 1980. There is no single “Christian” position on, say, women’s rights because there is no single “Christian” position on Jesus Christ. They are not used to having to defend their theology as theology in political campaigns. Between Talarico and my pal John Fugelsang’s best-selling book, Separation of Church and Hate, and the eternal salience of the 25th chapter of Matthew, we may have a fair fight for the first time in a long while.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: “Funky To The Bone” (Freddi / Henchi and the Soulsetters)

Weekly Visit to the Pathé Archives: Here, from 1930, is an actual town crier bringing the news. I’ll take him over Bari Weiss’s CBS twice on Sunday.

Were cheaper eggs, which we didn’t get anyway, really worth all this? From the Wall Street Journal:

Just weeks ago, a solid January jobs report had raised hopes that the labor market was finding its footing after months of fitful hiring. Friday’s report wilted those green shoots, showing a loss of 92,000 jobs in February and an increase in the unemployment rate to 4.4%. The readings ended optimism about stabilization and reanimated worries that the labor market has been quietly deteriorating…The report landed at an awkward moment for the White House, which has spent the past year arguing that its program of deregulation, trade deals and tax cuts would unleash a new era of job creation. Instead, the opposite appears to be happening: Hiring has slowed, and the administration’s fluid tariff program and now the military campaign in Iran have injected the kind of uncertainty that businesses cite when they stop adding workers.

The Middle East conflict has raised the prospect of another bout of price increases in an economy where inflation has been above the Fed’s 2% goal for five years. A jobs report that might otherwise have opened the door to rate cuts was instead wrapped in inflationary risk.

I’m trying to come to grips with the notion that nervous bankers may be our last hope.

Discovery Corner: Hey, look what we found! From ZME Science:

Scientists working at the El Caño Archaeological Park recently cracked open a thousand-year-old burial chamber glittering with gold. Located in the Natá de los Caballeros District, about 124 miles southwest of Panama City, this site served as a massive necropolis for the Gran Coclé culture. Researchers first spotted the anomaly, dubbed Tomb 3, back in 2009. They noticed a dense concentration of broken ceramics and metal scraps scattered in the dirt. However, they waited until the 2026 excavation season to fully uncover the subterranean complex as their hands were tied with other tombs at the site, some of which were also brimming with important cultural artifacts and yes, a lot of gold. But more on that later.

The excavation team discovered a central figure laid out flat, surrounded by the bodies of several other individuals, who were probably sacrificed. Besides the remains, the “Lord of Tomb 3” lay swaddled in a fortune of gold, including massive gold pectorals, gold earrings, and intricate gold ornaments depicting crocodile teeth and bat wings. According to archaeologist Julia Mayo, the sheer volume of gold was a direct social marker. “The individual with the gold was the one with the highest social status in the group,” Mayo told AFP.

If this leaves you thinking about a gilded Oval Office and a monstrous golden ballroom, shame on you for thinking such horrible things. A thousand years from now, people will not know how nuts it all was.

Hey, Smithsonian, is it a good day for dinosaur news? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!

These massive creatures may have weighed more than 10 tons, making them the largest land predators on record, but they needed to be quick on their feet to nab meals. Previous research suggested that the animals’ feet hit the ground heel-first, like humans, but T. rex’s living relatives —terrestrial birds—run on their tiptoes to reduce their contact with the ground and allow for speedy sprints, reports The New York Times’ Jack Tamisiea. So, researchers behind the new study examined fossilized footprints left by the dinosaurs long ago, as well as leg features of four T. rex skeletons of various sizes in museums across the United States. That data helped them mathematically reconstruct the extinct animals’ gait, allowing them to estimate their speeds and how their feet may have hit the ground. Analyses hinted that T. rex probably moved by striking the ground with its toes first in quick strides, which helped it travel fast and stay balanced.

The Tip-Toeing T-Rex. Not every yoga student can master that one.

I’ll be back on Monday for whatever fresh hell awaits. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line and wear the damn masks, and take the damn shots, especially the boosters and any New One. In your spare time, spare a thought for all the people in ICE detention, and the victims and their families in the Tumbler Ridge school shooting in Canada, and for the shooting victims in Austin and for the brilliant journalists of the Washington Post, and for the citizens of the occupied city of Minneapolis, and for all he people suffering from the severe cold brought by the current polar vortex, and for all of us in the path of Snowpocalypse I of 2026, and Bomb Cycle No. 1, and the people in the flooded areas of southern Africa, and in the flooded areas in Ireland, and in the flooded areas of Brazil, and for people suffering from the outbreaks of measles, a particularly brutal flu, and Legionnaire’s diseaseoutbreak in Harlem, and for our LGBRQ+ citizens, who deserve so much more from this country than they’re getting.