Men's Lifestyle August 21, 2026 0 Comments

Why Is Chief Justice John Roberts Eyeing Trump’s Ballroom Bash? The Untold Story Behind the Curtain That’ll Shock You!

Eight minutes — that’s all it takes to dive into a whirlwind tour of politics, jaw-dropping discoveries, and a not-so-subtle reminder that history loves a good encore. Ever wondered how a septuagenarian senator is still fending off ambitious upstarts, or why the Supreme Court found itself hosting its own version of a Great Gatsby soirée? And just when you think you’ve caught your breath, an archaeological time capsule and dinosaur revelations stomp through, leaving you both awestruck and slightly bewildered. So, grab your coffee, settle in, and ask yourself: How does one keep up with a world that never stops spinning stories this wild? Ready for the ride? LEARN MORE

8 min read

Out on the Weekend

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

Up here in the Commonwealth (God save it!), we are coming to the end of a right nice little Democratic senatorial primary election between the incumbent Edward Markey and rep. Seth Moulton, who was born two years after Markey began his first term in the House. This is the second consecutive time Markey has faced a rising young Democratic star. In 2020, he was challenged by Joseph Kennedy III, the grandson of the original RFK and grandnephew of the sainted President Jack. One of Markey’s most pivotal endorsements came from rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who cited the fact that Markey was out ahead of most of Congress on both cyber issues and the climate crisis. Markey won from here to there.

This time around he faced off with Moulton, whose ambition always has been just a little bit freaky. After defeating incumbent John Tierney in 2014, Moulton wasn’t exactly your typical backbencher. In 2018, he led an attempt to depose Nancy Pelosi as Speaker, but she squashed that easily with the help of AOC. In 2019, Moulton actually ran for … ahem … president. He was harshly critical of both Senator Professor Warren and Bernie Sanders. By August he was out of the race, which earned him a drive-by elbow from then-President Trump on social media. AOC turned up here for Markey this time around as well and, despite an out-of-the-blue Moulton endorsement from the Boston Globe this week, Markey looks to win another term despite having turned 80 back in July.

(Full disclosure: I first met Markey when he was a firebrand in the House, and I was just starting out at the Boston Phoenix. He and I have bonded over his work on Alzheimer’s research. I’m voting for him.)

Hey, Friday was Ballroom Day at the Supreme Court, and Chief Justice John Roberts saluted his boss and let the preposterous beast rise again. From CNBC:

Chief Justice John Roberts, in an order, stayed a federal district court judge’s injunction, which had barred Trump from continuing construction while a lawsuit challenging the ballroom project played out. Roberts’s order came on the same day the injunction was scheduled to take effect. The order is an administrative stay, which could be lifted by the entire Supreme Court.

Cocktails on the helipad. Dancing in the Tackorama. The gracious atmosphere of Palm Beach in 1955. We never be rid of this rube.

Also, this trial balloon of renaming the USS Dorie Miller after a the president is as revolting as anything he’s done ever. (What are the odds that G’ampa thinks Miller was a woman?) Under fire, Doris Miller grabbed a gun. He died at 24, down with his ship in the South Pacific, in 1943. At the same age, what the hell was Donald Trump doing? Nothing good.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: “Ole Miss” (Bunk Johnson) — Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit to the Pathé Archives: Here, from 1926, is a guy named Blanc Djelmake, celebrating his 70th birthday by strolling along a wire above Montmartre. Extra points for dressing like Tom Mix for the event. History is so cool.

Mmmmmmm, yummy nothingburgers again! Heavy on the 30-weight, Mom! From CNN:

“We’ve identified 250,000 noncitizens registered to vote in just four states,” Mullin told reporters.

The Department of Homeland Security said it reached that figure by comparing public voter rolls in Nevada, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and California with federal immigration records. Mullin presented the results as hard evidence supporting President Donald Trump’s long-running, unsubstantiated claims of widespread noncitizen voting.

They sent out the plumber to gloat.

“One thing that I love about numbers, and I love about facts, is they don’t lie,” Mullin said. But in Nevada, the numbers thus far do not show what DHS publicly claimed they do. In July, the department said it had identified 15,903 noncitizens on Nevada’s voter rolls. However, in a meeting with state election officials last week, DHS acknowledged that it had fully reviewed only a fraction of those cases.A recording of the August 13 meeting, plus more than a dozen emails reviewed by CNN, show that DHS officials have “confirmed” just 185 Nevada registrants as noncitizens through manual review. More than 14,000 cases remained unresolved, DHS said, including 6,200 the department labeled “higher confidence matches.”

During a key moment from the meeting, C. Murphy Hebert, the chief deputy in the Nevada secretary of state’s office, asked: “So what you’re saying is the 15,000 number has not been vetted?” “I probably wouldn’t use the sentence, ‘It hasn’t been vetted,’” replied Kimberley Vogt, who leads a fraud division at DHS. “Because definitely we’ve done something with it to get down to 15,000. So I wouldn’t say that. But it hasn’t had a full manual review of each one.”

Oh, okay. I’d use “the sentence” myself, but you be you.

The private acknowledgments contrast sharply with the administration’s public rhetoric and raise further questions about the accuracy of the data the Trump administration has released in recent weeks purporting to show evidence of widespread voter fraud. Earlier this week, the Census Bureau released an analysis claiming that 24,000 noncitizens voted in the 2020 election. Trump quickly promoted it as further proof the election was stolen. But former senior Census Bureau officials raised significant issues with the report, criticizing its methodology, lack of transparency and potential political bias.

I, for one, am shocked. Sincerely, Louis Renaud, Prefect of Police.

Discovery Corner: Hey, look at what we found! From Popular Mechanics:

In 1930, German archaeologist Günther Roeder unearthed the lower half of what would’ve been a massive, 23-foot-tall statue of Ramesses II—one of the most celebrated pharaohs throughout all 31 dynasties of Ancient Egyptian history. Roeder found the statue 150 miles south of Cairo in the Minya Governorate, near the modern-day city of El Ashmunein. In ancient times, this area along the Nile was known as Khemnu. It served as a provincial capital in the Old Kingdom of Egypt (2649–2130 B.C.E.), and was later called Hermopolis Magna when Romans ruled the Mediterranean. Many treasures of the region’s illustrious past were known to be buried in the surrounding desert, and while Roeder’s discovery proved remarkable, the rest of the enormous statue he found remained lost to time…for nearly a century.

In March 2024, a joint Egyptian-American archaeological team announced that they’d finally found the missing upper half of Roeder’s statue. Speaking with Reuters, the experts from the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities reported that the upper half stretched some 12.5 feet tall and depicted Ramesses II wearing a headdress topped with a royal cobra. The discovery had actually occurred weeks earlier, when the team found the fragment lying face down in the earth.

Bring me the head of Ramesses II! He was quite a chap, this guy. Master builder. Temples. A new capital, Abu Simbel. Did like to put his name on things. His palace in the new capital had its own zoo. Of course, he actually built this stuff. None of that “branding” business. There are other modern parallels.

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

“It was the expedition of a century, without exaggeration,” Paul Sereno, a professor of organismal biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago who led the expedition, told ABC News. “It was an adventure and a half, never probably to be matched.” Among the 55 tons of specimens collected during the expedition to Niger in West Africa in 2022 were fossils of a new species of Spinosaurus, called Spinosaurus mirabilis. Mirabilis, being Latin for astonishing.

Well, that’s gilding the spinosaurus a bit.

Sereno, a National Geographic Explorer, says the newly discovered dinosaur was roughly the size of a Tyrannosaurus rex, about 95 million years old and likely had a large, brightly colored scimitar-shaped crest covered in keratin. The carnivore also had interlocking rows of teeth designed for catching slippery fish.

Okay, I admit it. That’s pretty astonishing.

“I envision this dinosaur as a kind of ‘hell heron’ that had no problem wading on its sturdy legs into two meters of water but probably spent most of its time stalking shallower traps for the many large fish of the day,” Sereno said in a statement announcing the discovery. The team found a Spinosaurus tooth and potentially a Spinosaurus jaw, but had to rush back to their camp because they had run out of time. Upon returning to Sereno’s lab at the University of Chicago, the team confirmed they had indeed found a Spinosaurus jaw and something else they didn’t recognize.“I picked up a piece of the base of the crest, and it was such a weird piece of bone that neither Dan nor I could really put it on the skeleton somewhere,” Sereno said.

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 victims of our current epidemics, including the killer countertops. Rep. Max Miller’s wife and child, and for the Iranian people, and the Lebanese people and all the other people downrange in our newest war, and all the people in ICE detention, and the Epstein victims, whose trauma is back in the news again, and the victims of the storms in Hawaii, and the victims of the Canadian wildfires, and also the ones in Spain, and the victims of the floods in Missouri, and the victims of the heat domes, and those affected around the world by wildfires, and the victims of the Venezuelan earthquake, and for the victims of the earthquake in Japan, and the victims and their families in the Tumbler Ridge school shooting in Canada, and for the shooting victims in Austin, and for the families of the victims of the mosque shooting in San Diego, and in Michigan, and in Virginia, and in Louisiana, and for the victims and their families of the shootings in Wilmington, Delaware and Kansas City, and for the families and victims of the mass shooting in Midland, Texas, and for the brilliant journalists of The Washington Post, and for the citizens of the occupied city of Minneapolis and South Burlington, Vermont, and for all the people 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 the storm-clobbered, flooded areas of the upper Midwest, including my alma mater, and in Georgia, and for the people affected by the tornados in Mississippi, and for people suffering from the hantavirus outbreak on the Hondius, the outbreaks of measles, the Hegseth Flu down in Texas, the explosive diarrhea bug, and the Legionnaires’ disease outbreak in Harlem, and the victims of the heat wave in Europe, and for our LGBTQ+ citizens, who deserve so much more from this country than they’re getting.