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Homecoming Mum in Caldwell, TX Now Heavier Than the Girl Wearing It

Hal Cranston
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Homecoming Mum in Caldwell, TX Now Heavier Than the Girl Wearing It

CALDWELL, TX — The homecoming mum that Kaylee Brunson, 17, will wear to Friday night’s game against Cameron weighs eleven pounds, four ounces on the bathroom scale her mother used Wednesday morning, which is roughly a half-pound more than Kaylee weighed at birth.

The mum, assembled over six weeks at the Brunson kitchen table, contains four silk chrysanthemums the size of dinner plates, eighteen feet of trailing ribbon, two cowbells, a small battery-operated string of LED lights, a laminated photograph of Kaylee’s boyfriend Trent, a second laminated photograph of Trent’s truck, and a stuffed armadillo holding a felt football.

“We are well past the point where this is a corsage,” said Lorna Pflueger, who has run Pflueger Floral on Highway 21 since 1994 and built mums for three generations of Caldwell homecoming royalty. “What I am building now is a wearable parade float. I do not know when it changed. I know that it changed.”

Caldwell High School nurse Becky Almendariz confirmed that her office has, for the second consecutive year, pre-stocked an institutional bottle of ibuprofen, an ice pack rotation, and what she described as “the good athletic tape, not the cheap tape,” specifically in anticipation of homecoming-related neck and shoulder complaints among the junior class.

Kaylee herself, reached at the kitchen table where the mum currently occupies the entire surface and one chair, said she was excited but had been advised by her mother not to sit, lean, turn quickly, or attempt the stairs while wearing it. She added that the cowbells, in retrospect, may have been a miscalculation.

The boys are not exempt. Trent Mendoza, 17, will wear a coordinating garter on his upper arm that contains its own stuffed armadillo, three feet of ribbon, and a working LED display that spells out KAYLEE in scrolling red letters, powered by a 9-volt battery taped discreetly to the inside of his sleeve. Mendoza’s mother declined to weigh it but described it as “a lot.”

Tradition holds that the mum is presented by the boy to the girl, but Pflueger noted that the economics have inverted in recent years, with parents on both sides routinely splitting an invoice that, on her books this season, has averaged $340 and topped out at $612 for a senior whose mum required a custom shoulder harness.

Caldwell ISD has not formally addressed mum size, though athletic director Ron Kosub said in passing Tuesday that he would prefer if the LED elements did not, as occurred last year, set off the metal detector at the stadium gate and require a six-minute hand inspection of a sophomore.

Kickoff is at 7:30. Kaylee plans to remove the mum at halftime, store it carefully on the bleacher beside her, and, at her mother’s insistence, drink a full bottle of water before attempting to put it back on.

The JV Concession Cheese Hasn’t Separated Once in 40 Years and Cheryl Is Proud of That

Brooke Ellery
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The JV Concession Cheese Hasn’t Separated Once in 40 Years and Cheryl Is Proud of That

Wyatt is number 54, the field lights came on at 7:14, and somewhere between the National Anthem and the opening kickoff a booster mom named Cheryl handed me a paper boat of nachos with a smile that said congratulations on your purchase and absolutely no follow-up questions.

The cheese on those nachos was the same temperature as my hand. It was the same temperature as the bleacher. It was, I am convinced, the same temperature as it had been when Cheryl scooped it from the warming bin at 6 p.m., and it will be the same temperature when the custodian throws the tray out tomorrow morning. Real cheese moves. Real cheese pools, separates, betrays you in front of your son’s friends. This cheese held its shape like a small orange brick. Cheryl told me, beaming, that the booster cheese has not separated once in 40 years. She said it like it was a school record.

I posted a picture in Stadium Foods and What’s Really In Them and a woman named Pauline who used to do quality control for a regional dairy co-op said the only way a cheese sauce stays emulsified that long is if there’s no actual dairy load-bearing in it, and that what I was eating was technically a ‘shelf-stable analog’ classified somewhere between processed cheese food and weatherproofing. Pauline is now my second-favorite person in that group, behind only the woman who blew the whistle on the soft pretzels at SeaWorld.

I tried to ask Cheryl what brand the cheese was and she told me the booster club gets it in a #10 can with a label that just says CHEESE FOOD PRODUCT and a lot number. She was thrilled to share this. She said they buy it by the pallet from a restaurant supply in Hickory and that the same can does the nachos, the soft pretzels, AND the baked potato bar at homecoming. One can. Three menu items. An entire football season. I asked if I could see the can and she said it was ‘in the back,’ which is a phrase I now understand means ‘I am not going to let you see the can.’

Meanwhile the hot dog situation behind her is, candidly, a federal matter. They are microwaving the hot dogs inside the plastic sleeves. Cheryl confirmed this without me even asking. She said it ‘keeps the juices in.’ She said it like she was passing down a recipe. Garrett’s cousin Mae, who works the front desk at a pediatric clinic and has basically nursing-level instincts about plastics, has told me a hundred times that you do not microwave anything in a sleeve, much less a sleeve that is touching a cured meat made of three different mammals. The plasticizers leach. They just leach. That’s what they do. They are leachers.

The Gatorade situation I will spare you, except to say that the booster club offers it in five colors, and three of those colors do not occur anywhere on earth that is not a Gatorade bottle or a poison dart frog. Cleo asked for the blue one and I told her the blue one was specifically engineered in 1987 to make a child run for 90 more seconds and then lie down for the rest of her natural life. She took a juice box from my tote with the resigned dignity of a child who knows her mother.

I had, of course, packed for this. Sourdough turkey sandwiches on the loaf I started Wednesday, a thermos of raw milk from the Yoder farm, a baggie of soaked almonds, and four hard-boiled eggs from the girls (the chickens, not my daughters; my daughters do not lay). Marlene saw the spread, looked at her own paper boat of glowing nachos, and asked if I had a spare egg. I gave her two. That’s what neighbors do.

Wyatt scored a touchdown in the third quarter, ran straight to the concession stand at halftime, and ate three baskets of nachos in the parking lot before I could intercept him. Cheryl gave him the fourth one for free. He was glowing slightly under the field lights. I’m telling myself it was the eye black.

Wednesday Practice Lasted 22 Minutes and Two Starters Were ‘Resting’

Duke Holloway
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Wednesday Practice Lasted 22 Minutes and Two Starters Were ‘Resting’

I turned on the local sports report Tuesday night and a man in a quarter-zip told me, with a straight face, that the team had a ‘light Wednesday’ planned. Twenty-two minutes of walkthroughs. Helmets optional. Two starters listed as resting, which the team’s official injury report described, and I am not making this up, as ‘general maintenance.’ That’s not a football term. That’s what the dealership says when they want $400 for an oil change.

Coach DiMaggio used to run us until somebody threw up, and then we’d line up on the puker and run again, because the puker was now part of the drill. Practice in August started at 6 a.m. and ended when Coach decided his coffee tasted right. We did not have a ‘maintenance day.’ We had a Tuesday, and on Tuesday you hit a sled until the sled apologized.

Ray Kowalczyk called me about it before I’d even finished the segment. Ray played one season of small-college defensive line in 1971 and has been a credentialed expert on football ever since. ‘Duke,’ he said, ‘they had a guy in a vest standing behind the quarterback holding what looked like a shower curtain.’ I asked what the shower curtain was for. He said it was a ‘visual barrier’ for ‘mental reps.’ I told him I needed to sit down.

Apparently the modern professional football player does something called pre-hab, which is rehab you do before you’ve been hurt, in case you get hurt later, which you might not. There’s a guy on staff whose entire job is to make sure nobody pulls anything. His title is Director of Performance, and he has a podcast. Of course he has a podcast. Everybody has a podcast. My dental hygienist has a podcast and she only has fourteen teeth showing.

Petey Corrigan played fullback for a semi-pro team sponsored by a steel mill in 1972. Broke his hand on a Sunday, taped it to a wooden spoon his mother used for gravy, played the next Sunday, scored twice. The wooden spoon is in his garage. I have seen it. There is a brown stain on it that he insists is gravy. Petey did not have a Director of Performance. Petey had a wooden spoon and a wife named Linda who told him to walk it off.

The new vocabulary is what kills me. ‘Soft tissue.’ ‘Availability.’ ‘Workload.’ A quarterback in California sat out the team’s voluntary throwing session because his ‘arm care specialist’ wanted him to focus on ‘rotational hygiene.’ Rotational hygiene. That’s two words that should never have been introduced to each other, and now they’re married and have a $1.2 million practice facility.

My grandson, who is twelve, came home from his middle school football practice last week and told me he’d done his ‘activation work.’ I said, son, when I was your age activation work was the bus ride. You activated by being yelled at. He said his coach gave them resistance bands. I asked where the resistance bands came from. He said the booster club bought them after watching a TikTok. I went outside and stood in the yard for a while.

The team I grew up watching practiced in pads on Wednesday because Wednesday was the day you found out who was tough. Coach used to say if you couldn’t go three hours in full gear in the heat, you sure as hell couldn’t go three hours in November when it counted. Now Wednesday is for ‘film and flexibility,’ which sounds like a yoga retreat for accountants. The starters do twenty minutes of jogging and then disappear into a room with curtains and music. I’m told there are smoothies.

I’m not saying these guys aren’t athletes. They are. They run faster, lift more, and can identify a Cover-2 from a parking lot. But somewhere between Petey’s wooden spoon and a 22-minute practice with a shower curtain, somebody decided the goal of football was to not play football until absolutely necessary. The whole sport is now in maintenance mode. The starters are saving themselves. For what, nobody seems to know. The Super Bowl, I guess. Or possibly retirement.

Denise is bringing chili over tonight for the Thursday game. She says it’s from a podcast. I asked which podcast. She said it didn’t matter, the chili was the same. That’s the most football thing anybody has said to me in a month.

Apple Orchard Charges $89 Admission, Apples Sold Separately

Tara Sparks
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Apple Orchard Charges $89 Admission, Apples Sold Separately

CHESTER SPRINGS, PA — Wexler Family Orchard, a fourth-generation pick-your-own operation that until last fall charged seven dollars and threw in a free cider donut, has begun charging visitors $89 per adult to enter the property, with apples available for an additional fee starting at $1.40 each.

The new pricing structure, which the orchard’s website describes as ‘an immersive heritage experience,’ includes general admission to the parking lot, access to a roped-off corridor between two trees, and one (1) photograph in front of a wooden sign that says HELLO FALL Y’ALL.

Apples, hayrides, the bathroom, the corn maze, the petting zoo, the pumpkin patch, the second pumpkin patch behind the first pumpkin patch, the cider donut, and stepping off the corridor are all separate add-ons ranging from $4 to $62. A printed map of the orchard costs $11. Looking at the printed map costs nothing, but you must hold it the whole time.

‘We’re not an orchard anymore, we’re a destination,’ said co-owner Margie Wexler, who confirmed the family had recently hired a brand consultant from Brooklyn whose previous client was a hot sauce. ‘Guests aren’t paying for apples. They’re paying for the apple of it all.’

According to a TikTok by user @autumnbrooklynn that has been viewed 4.1 million times, the gift shop sells a single Honeycrisp displayed on a pedestal under glass for $24, marketed as ‘The Original.’ A nearby placard explains it is not for sale, but visitors may take a picture with it for $9, or kiss the glass for $14.

Brittany Hoeffel, 34, drove ninety minutes from Allentown with her husband and two children expecting to spend roughly $40 on the outing. The Hoeffels left four hours later having spent $612, including a $48 ‘tree access fee’ and a $22 charge for what was described on the receipt only as ‘vibe.’

‘My daughter cried because she wanted to pick an apple, and the cheapest apple was $1.40, and we’d already spent $89 to be looking at apples,’ Hoeffel said, holding a single Gala in a burlap sack stamped with the orchard’s logo, which cost $19. ‘I had to explain to a six-year-old that the apple is not the product. She is the product.’

Wexler defended the model by noting that nearby competitors had introduced similar tiers, including a Lancaster County orchard that offers a $340 ‘Founder’s Tier’ granting access to a haybale shaped like a chair, and a Bucks County operation that began charging visitors to leave.

The orchard’s busiest weekend of the season is projected to gross more than its entire 2019 harvest, despite zero apples being sold to anyone who didn’t also purchase the $14 ‘right to chew’ upgrade. A spokesperson confirmed the orchard is currently in talks with a private equity firm and will likely be renamed Q4.

As of Tuesday afternoon, a hand-painted sign at the entrance reading WELCOME TO OUR FAMILY FARM had been replaced with a vinyl banner reading EXPERIENCES START AT $89, beneath which a small child was being charged $6 to cry about it.

Pentagon Sinks Third Venezuelan Boat, Says It’ll Find the Drugs Eventually

Nash Grayson
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Pentagon Sinks Third Venezuelan Boat, Says It’ll Find the Drugs Eventually

CARIBBEAN SEA — The U.S. Navy on Monday confirmed it had reduced a third Venezuelan vessel to driftwood in what Pentagon officials are calling a streamlined new approach to maritime drug interdiction, one in which the boarding, the search, the warrant, the evidence, the indictment, and the trial have all been efficiently consolidated into a single Hellfire missile.

The strikes, which administration officials describe as a “series” in the way HBO describes a series, mark the third time in as many weeks that the United States has sunk a boat first and assembled the case against it in a press release filed sometime later that afternoon.

“We are highly confident every vessel struck was trafficking narcotics,” said a Pentagon spokesman who declined to identify the specific boats on the grounds that “honestly, they’re sort of the same boat at this point.” Asked what evidence supported the claim, he gestured at a satellite photo of the ocean and said the absence of the boat in subsequent photos was, in his view, telling.

The administration has so far declined to release names of the dead, the cargo manifests, the intelligence intercepts, the targeting rationale, or any document that does not consist entirely of the word “cartel” repeated in larger and larger fonts. A senior official familiar with the program said the legal framework was “being workshopped” and would likely arrive sometime after the boats stopped existing.

According to a memo circulated within Southern Command, vessels are flagged as probable narcotraffickers using a rigorous three-part test: the boat is made of fiberglass, the boat is in water, and the boat is operated by Venezuelans. A fourth criterion — actual drugs — was reportedly removed from the checklist last month for slowing things down.

President Trump praised the operation at a Monday gaggle, telling reporters the strikes had already prevented “trillions” of fentanyl from reaching American shores, a figure he confirmed was a feeling rather than a number. He added that the cartels were “shaking,” a claim difficult to verify given that the people aboard the boats were, by the administration’s own account, definitely cartels and definitely also dead.

Relatives of one of the men killed told reporters the deceased had been a sardine fisherman who left the harbor at 4 a.m. with two coolers, a thermos, and a portrait of his daughter taped to the dashboard. The State Department, asked about the discrepancy, issued a statement noting that sardines and cocaine are both, technically, found in the ocean.

Inside the Pentagon, officials say the program has been a runaway success by the only metric anyone is tracking, which is the number of boats that no longer exist. A planning document obtained by reporters lists the next phase as “Boat 4,” followed by “Boat 5,” followed by a section labeled simply “keep going.”

Legal scholars not currently employed by the Department of Justice have raised mild objections, noting that summary execution by cruise missile of unidentified persons in international waters represents what one called “a vibe shift” in U.S. drug policy. The White House dismissed the concerns, pointing out that the boats had multiple opportunities to not be Venezuelan and chose otherwise.

A fourth strike is reportedly already scheduled for later this week. Officials say the target has not yet been selected but expressed confidence that, by the time the missile arrives, it will have been a drug boat all along.

RedZone Viewer Hasn’t Blinked Since 1 P.M., Wife Says He’s ‘Fine, Probably’

Tara Sparks
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RedZone Viewer Hasn’t Blinked Since 1 P.M., Wife Says He’s ‘Fine, Probably’

DUBLIN, OH — Local accountant Marc Vesely entered the seventh hour of an unbroken RedZone trance Sunday, achieving what one bystander described as “the kind of stillness usually associated with taxidermy.”

Vesely, 41, has not blinked, urinated, or acknowledged his own name since Scott Hanson’s opening whip-around at 1:00 p.m. Eastern. A half-eaten Bagel Bite remains balanced on his left thigh in apparent defiance of gravity, fantasy implications, and the laws governing matter.

“He’s fine. Probably,” said his wife, Allison Vesely, glancing into the den from the kitchen, where she has been raising their three children alone since the start of Week 2. “He grunted at the dog around 3:40, which I’m choosing to interpret as a Jaylen Waddle thing.”

Dr. Nora Plimpton of the Beacon Sports Medicine clinic in nearby Powell confirmed the syndrome is “clinically routine for September,” affecting an estimated 14 million American men each Sunday between Labor Day and the AFC Championship. Symptoms include octobox-induced pupil dilation, the spontaneous shouting of names like “BREECE” and “PUKA,” and a reflexive whisper of “come ON, kicker” approximately every nine minutes.

Hanson himself, the ageless Joe Pine of the seven-hour whip-around, appeared on the Vesely family’s 65-inch Hisense for the 411th consecutive Sunday, his tie unmoved, his bladder allegedly mythical. To the children of the household, he is a co-parent. To Allison, he is the other woman.

The Vesely children — Lucas, 9, Mia, 7, and Henry, 4 — have walked past their father at least 22 times Sunday and successfully extracted zero responses, including one attempt in which Henry placed a Cheez-It directly on his father’s forearm and waited 14 minutes for acknowledgment. The Cheez-It is still there.

Vesely briefly stirred at 4:11 p.m. when the channel cut to a Bengals goal-line stand, raised both arms in a posture sports psychologists call “the involuntary touchdown,” then resettled into the couch indentation he has occupied since the second Obama term. He has yet to address the smoke alarm that began chirping at halftime.

“He took the kids to swim lessons yesterday and was a great dad,” Allison said, folding a load of laundry on the coffee table six inches from her husband’s unmoving knees. “I just lose him from September to February. It’s like having a husband with a timeshare in his own face.”

As of press time, Vesely had begun emerging from his fugue, blinking twice and asking the room a single question — “who hit?” — before the late window kicked off and he was lost again until approximately 11:45 p.m., or whenever Hanson finally admits he, too, is a man.

GameDay Spent 11 Minutes on a Sign That Said ‘Hi Mom Send Money’

Duke Holloway
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GameDay Spent 11 Minutes on a Sign That Said ‘Hi Mom Send Money’

Saturday morning, 9:04 a.m., I am on my second cup of coffee and ESPN has not shown me a single football. They have shown me a man in a banana suit, a sorority girl holding a poster of her own face, and a graphic explaining what an offense is. I came here for college football. I am being held hostage by signage.

I started keeping a notebook last year because Denise said I was yelling at the television in a way that worried the dog. So now I tally. By the first commercial break this morning, GameDay had aired eleven minutes and forty seconds of crowd signs, two minutes of a kid proposing on the riser, and a four-minute segment about which mascot would win in a fight. Football, the sport: zero minutes. A clip of last week’s punt: thirty-one seconds, and they cut away before the punt landed.

The sign that broke me said HI MOM SEND MONEY. They held on it for what felt like a week. The host laughed. The analyst laughed. A graphic appeared with the kid’s Venmo. I am not making that up. The kid had a Venmo. His Venmo was on national television at 9:11 in the morning, and somewhere in this country a real defensive coordinator was trying to install a coverage and could not get a producer on the phone.

Coach DiMaggio used to say the only sign he wanted to see at a football game was the scoreboard, and if you couldn’t read it you were sitting too far away or you weren’t paying attention. He coached us in 1979 in a windbreaker that smelled like Vicks and cigar smoke and he would have set fire to a foam finger on principle. I think about him every time a sideline reporter asks a 19-year-old to describe his “why.”

The new analyst desk is four men shouting and one man in a vest. The vest used to be Lee Corso, who at least had the decency to put a mascot head on and stop talking. Now the vest is a gentleman whose entire job appears to be saying “that’s a great point” while another man yells about a parlay. There is a parlay segment. On the pregame show. For college kids. Before lunch.

My buddy Ray Kowalczyk called at the half — meaning the half of GameDay, because actual football has still not happened — and said he had given up and driven over to the high school in Westfield to watch a JV game in the rain. He said the JV coach made his quarterback run laps for showboating after a first down. Ray said it was the most beautiful thing he’d seen all year. Ray cries at car commercials, but I believe him.

My grandson informs me his favorite quarterback at Auburn has an emoji. Not uses one. Has one. It’s a little tiger wearing sunglasses, and you can put it in your texts, and there is a mattress company involved somehow. The kid has thrown four career passes. Two of them were completions. He has a brand consultant and a podcast called The Pocket, which is what he is calling his pocket now, as a concept. I asked what they talk about on the podcast and my grandson said “his journey.” The kid is twenty.

Down at the diner, Petey Corrigan still does Saturday college football the right way, which is a radio on the counter, a paper open to the AP poll, and a running argument with whoever sits down. He doesn’t own a smart television. He doesn’t know what RedZone is. He thinks NIL is a kind of valve. He is, by every measure that matters, the happiest man in this county on a Saturday in September, and I will die on that hill.

The game finally kicked off at noon. It was Iowa and somebody, and it was 6-3 at the half, and it was perfect. Three-yard runs. A punt that traveled a country mile. A kicker missed wide left and his teammates patted his helmet instead of filming him. For three hours nobody mentioned a parlay. For three hours I forgot about the banana suit.

Denise is bringing chili. She says it’s from a podcast. I’m letting it go.

Bank’s Entire Hispanic Heritage Month Rollout: 1 LinkedIn Post, 11 Lawyers

Cody Thompson
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Bank’s Entire Hispanic Heritage Month Rollout: 1 LinkedIn Post, 11 Lawyers

CHARLOTTE, NC — Meridian National’s entire Hispanic Heritage Month rollout this year is a single LinkedIn carousel posted at 6:47 a.m. Saturday, vetted by eleven outside attorneys, three internal compliance officers, and a brand strategist who has since taken indefinite medical leave.

The carousel — five slides, beige background, the word “celebrate” appearing exactly once and only inside a quoted employee testimonial — replaces what was previously a six-figure campaign featuring concert sponsorships, branded loterías, and a small empanada cart that idled outside the Uptown branch every September from 2017 through last year.

“Last year we had a mariachi trio in the lobby,” said a teller at the Tryon Street branch who asked not to be named because she had not yet seen the new compliance memo. “This year there’s a printed sign taped above the deposit slips that says ‘Heritage Recognized’ in 11-point Helvetica. The toner is also low.”

Internal planning documents — left in a glass-walled conference room next to a half-eaten Bojangles biscuit and a coffee gone cold in a logo mug — show the campaign budget was reduced from $1.4 million to $14,200, a figure the bank’s general counsel rounded down to “essentially zero from a materiality standpoint” in a memo printed, for reasons no one has explained, on legal-size paper.

Of the surviving $14,200, nearly $11,000 went to legal review of the LinkedIn carousel itself, including a separate engagement letter to determine whether the word “vibrant” carried disparate-impact risk in adjective form. It does, the firm concluded, in seven jurisdictions, and is permissible only when paired with a noun cleared by an additional eight-page rider.

Marisol Reyes, who ran the bank’s HHM programming for nine years before her role was “absorbed laterally” in March, learned about this year’s rollout from a Glassdoor review. “The carousel uses a stock photo of a guitar,” she said. “It is not a Spanish guitar. I checked. It is a Taylor 814ce, which is from El Cajon, California — but only in the sense that the factory is there.”

On the bank’s last earnings call, CEO Trent Halliburton described the new approach as “right-sized for the current operating environment,” a phrase he used eleven times in nine minutes, occasionally substituting “calibrated” or “discipline-forward” when the rotation got stale. Analysts pressed him only on net interest margin.

The LinkedIn post, as of Saturday afternoon, had 412 likes — 38 of them from employees of the bank’s own communications team — and a single comment, since deleted, that simply read “this is a guitar.”

Fantasy Football Draft Bumped Mansfield Town Council to Sunoco Parking Lot

Hal Cranston
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Fantasy Football Draft Bumped Mansfield Town Council to Sunoco Parking Lot

MANSFIELD, OH — The Mansfield Town Council, gaveled out of its usual Thursday-night quarters by a fourteen-man fantasy football draft running into the seventh round, convened instead beside the air pump at the South Diamond Sunoco, where Councilwoman Diane Kowalski moved that the public works budget be approved before it started raining on the agenda.

It is the third time since Labor Day that the council has yielded the VFW Post 6634 basement to the league known around town as the Sunday Sufferers, which has drafted out of that same basement since 1979 and is not, according to its commissioner, currently accepting feedback from elected officials.

“They had it on the calendar in pencil. We had it on the calendar in Sharpie,” said Bob Ridderhof, a retired postal carrier who has run the league for nineteen years and whose laminated draft board was leaning against the freezer chest by 6:45 p.m. “Civic stuff is important. But you can’t punt a snake draft into October.”

Council members, who had arrived expecting a routine vote on a culvert near Cline Avenue, instead carried folding chairs across the parking lot and held the meeting in the floodlight of the Sunoco awning, with Mayor Pro Tem Greg Hassel reading the minutes off his phone while a Chevy Equinox got its tires checked nine feet behind him.

The displacement is becoming a pattern. League records show fantasy night has now overlapped with a zoning hearing, a presentation from the regional water authority, and the swearing-in of a part-time animal control officer named Wendy, who took her oath on the front steps because the basement smelled, by all accounts, like Bagel Bites.

Inside, the draft pressed on under league rules that allow forty-five seconds per pick and have not been amended since the introduction of the wild-card weekend. By the third round, the post commander, Larry Bauknecht, had stopped intervening. “They pay their dues,” he said. “The council, frankly, does not.”

Outside, the council carried on. A motion to repaint the crosswalk by the elementary school passed unanimously over the noise of a diesel pickup idling at pump four. A resident named Cheryl Voss, who had walked to the meeting believing it would be indoors, delivered a four-minute public comment about a neighbor’s chickens while holding a Styrofoam coffee from inside the Sunoco, which she had purchased, she said, to be polite.

Hassel adjourned the meeting at 7:52 p.m. and reminded those present that the next session was scheduled for September 25, contingent on the league’s bye-week strategy and whether anyone in the room had Christian McCaffrey.

Lawmakers Who Gutted 9/11 Responder Fund Pause Briefly to Never Forget

Nash Grayson
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Lawmakers Who Gutted 9/11 Responder Fund Pause Briefly to Never Forget

WASHINGTON — Emerging from a Wednesday markup session in which they voted to trim another $340 million from the World Trade Center Health Program, sixty-three members of Congress reportedly took a moment Thursday morning to lower their heads, fold their hands, and post a black-and-white photograph of the Twin Towers with the caption ‘Never Forget.’

The tributes, scheduled in advance through three separate social media management vendors, went live at 8:46 a.m. Eastern with the precision of a missile test, briefly overwhelming bandwidth in several Senate office buildings as staffers rushed to confirm their boss’s flag emoji had rendered correctly.

‘It’s important, on a day like today, that we honor the heroes who ran toward the danger,’ said Sen. Brent Hollings (R-OK), who in March co-sponsored an amendment redirecting responder cancer-screening funds toward a border drone pilot program. ‘Their sacrifice must never be forgotten, particularly not by me, in public, between now and around 11 a.m.’

According to a press release issued without a single human quote, the Senate Appropriations subcommittee will reconvene at 2 p.m. to continue marking up cuts to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and a small Department of Justice line item dedicated to monitoring domestic extremist networks.

A staffer in the Russell Building, eating a granola bar in a stairwell, said the office had been ‘absolutely slammed’ coordinating the morning’s remembrance posts. ‘We had to flag-emoji forty-seven different versions because the boss wanted it to look organic,’ she said. ‘He hasn’t logged into Twitter himself in nine years. He calls it the Tweeter.’

By 10:15 a.m., several members had already pivoted to afternoon content, including a fundraising email from Rep. Calvin Mosby (R-FL) using the subject line ‘Today We Remember — Chip In $24’ and a floor statement from Sen. Marjorie Penn (R-WY) demanding to know why the FBI hadn’t done more to prevent radicalization, delivered roughly four hours after she voted to cut the FBI’s counterterrorism budget by eighteen percent.

John Vasquez, a retired FDNY lieutenant who has testified before Congress eleven times in support of permanent responder funding, said he had stopped reading the annual posts around 2018. ‘They tag me sometimes,’ he said. ‘Last year a senator’s intern DM’d me asking if I had any high-resolution photos of myself looking sad. For the carousel.’

Devra Holst, who tracks congressional rhetoric at the nonprofit Civic Memory Project, noted that this year’s remembrance posts contained, on average, 14 percent more references to ‘sacred ground’ than 2024, despite a 22 percent decrease in actual votes supporting first-responder health benefits over the same period. ‘The ratio is the story,’ she said. ‘It’s always the ratio.’

At press time, Sen. Hollings had cleared his afternoon for a fundraiser at a Tysons Corner steakhouse, where attendees were asked to wear red, white, and blue, and where the menu reportedly included a $90 wagyu flight named, without apparent irony, the Patriot Cut.

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