Good morning. It’s been a short while since I posted anything, other than my weekly roundups. So lets hit up a few subjects and get the ball rolling. Lets start this off with some music and I might as well surprise you a bit. As, I’ve said before, my music tastes are all over the place. So it’s a good morning for some Bruce Hornsby and the Range – Mandolin Rain.
What I’ve been Watching
You’d have to be living under a rock — or possibly in a rock, Vulcan-style — to have missed HBO’s Lanterns. Not that you’d know it from the marketing. HBO is promoting this show with the same energy I bring to promoting my own blog, which is to say: they mentioned it exists, once, and then went back to whatever they were doing.
Full disclosure: I was a Green Lantern kid. Comics, Saturday morning cartoons, the whole ring-slinging deal, right alongside Batman. So when they announced a Green Lantern movie with Ryan Reynolds, tiny childhood me lost his mind. Adult me then watched that movie and understood loss on a much deeper level. Somewhere in a writers’ room, a group of allegedly sane adults looked at “cosmic space police officer wields the most powerful weapon in the universe” and said “you know what this needs? A CGI poop monster.” Nobody stopped them. I think about that decision more often than is healthy.
Lanterns is the exact opposite of that fever dream, and it’s not close. Kyle Chandler plays Hal Jordan as a guy who’s been doing this job long enough to have complicated feelings about it, and Aaron Pierre plays new recruit John Stewart with the kind of quiet authority that makes him feel senior even while he’s technically the rookie. Together they’ve basically got the buddy-cop chemistry of a much grumpier Friday Night Lights, which tracks, since Chandler is out here essentially coaching again — just with a power ring instead of a playbook.
Critics keep comparing it to True Detective, and it’s earned: swap the bayou for the American heartland, add a murder investigation, and let two mismatched cops slowly get on each other’s nerves and grow on each other in equal measure. Kelly Macdonald rounds things out as the local sheriff who’s got her own tangled connection to what’s going on in town, and who — understandably — finds having two space cops turn up in her jurisdiction to be A Lot.
The show takes its time. It’s more interested in who these guys are than in oversized space spectacle, which is a gamble for a series built around a cosmic superhero concept — but on the strength of what’s aired so far, it’s paying off. It leans grounded, a little moody, occasionally very funny in a dry way, and it trusts you to sit with two flawed guys figuring out how to work together before it worries about the size of the light show. So far, no poop monsters. I’ll take the win.
A short scene below
Golf Corner
Rory McIlroy said something at the BMW Championship this week that made me laugh out loud at my desk. Someone asked him whether LIV golfers should get a lane back onto the PGA Tour, and instead of the usual diplomatic non-answer, Rory basically went “wait, hold on — did they even bring anything to LIV?” That’s not a defense of LIV, that’s a full drive-by. The man didn’t even raise his voice and still somehow ended three careers.
Tariffs, Beef, and a Guy Named Ronald
So this week Trump announced the U.S. is waiving tariffs on 300,000 metric tons of imported ground beef for 90 days, specifically to bring grocery prices down. Ground beef, for the record, is currently running about $6.89 a pound — up 57% over five years — and this move comes conveniently a few months ahead of the midterms. Funny how that works.
Here’s the part that made me do a spit-take with my coffee: this is the same administration that has spent two years insisting, repeatedly, that tariffs don’t get passed on to consumers. That foreign countries pay them. That prices staying flat has nothing to do with it. And now, apparently, the fix for high beef prices is… removing a tariff. Huh. Wild coincidence that taking a tax off a product makes it cheaper. Almost like tariffs are a tax that raises prices. Almost like that’s how math works. It only took two years, one election cycle’s worth of grocery bill outrage, and a Truth Social post to arrive at the conclusion econ 101 students reach in about a week.
I keep seeing people online invoke Ronald Reagan’s name to defend the current tariff regime, and I have to be honest — I don’t think Reagan would recognize it. Now look, I’m not going to pretend Reagan was some free-trade choir boy who never touched a tariff in his life; he slapped duties on Japanese electronics, leaned on Japan over motorcycles and cars, and protected steel and textiles when it was politically convenient. The man was a politician, not a libertarian econ professor.
But even his critics at the time — the ones who called him the most protectionist president since Hoover — were talking about a handful of targeted, negotiated actions in specific industries under specific pressure. Not a blanket tariff regime slapped across nearly every trading partner and huge swaths of consumer goods, groceries included, that then needs a Friday-morning carve-out because beef got too expensive. Reagan’s own line was that tariff walls “provoke retaliation and drive up costs for consumers” — and then he’d go negotiate a narrow exception anyway. There’s a pretty big gap between “targeted trade pressure with reluctant exceptions” and “tariff everything, then quietly un-tariff the stuff people are mad about.” Anyone waving the Reagan flag while cheering on this version of it either hasn’t read much Reagan or is hoping you haven’t.
Life Update
Today’s the day for my outpatient surgery. I won’t go into details or all that fun. If I’ve been talking to you about it, consider yourself lucky that you’ve been one of the people I’ve decided to bore with these details.
As always, thanks for reading. All ten of you. Yes, I counted, and yes, I’m including the guy who I’m pretty sure just has this on an RSS feed he forgot to unsubscribe from in 2019. Truly, the numbers are staggering. See you next time, whenever that ends up being.
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