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Drove Past Two-a-Days Saturday and Roosevelt High Has a Misting Tent Now

Duke Holloway
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Drove Past Two-a-Days Saturday and Roosevelt High Has a Misting Tent Now

I took the long way to Ace Hardware Saturday morning because Denise wanted a specific kind of grout and the closer one had the wrong grout, and on that long way I went past Roosevelt High, where I have driven past August two-a-days for forty-one years, and I will tell you what I saw. I saw a tent. A white tent. Erected on the 40-yard line. With misters running off a generator. There was a folding table inside the tent. On the folding table were Gatorades sorted by flavor. A young man in a polo shirt was operating an iPad.

I pulled over. I sat in the truck. I watched for eleven minutes. The boys would run a play, jog to the sideline, and the polo-shirt fella would point at the tent like he was the maître d’ at a restaurant my insurance doesn’t cover.

Coach DiMaggio ran two-a-days in 1978 in full pads in 96-degree heat and the only piece of equipment on the sideline was a galvanized milk can full of warm water with a ladle chained to it. If you wanted ice, you had to be a Kennedy. He kept a roll of salt tablets in his shirt pocket and if you said you felt dizzy he would look at you the way a man looks at a screen door that won’t latch.

I stopped at Murphy’s after and Ray Kowalczyk was there, because Ray is always there, and Ray says the polo-shirt kid is twenty-two years old, just graduated from the state university, and his title at Roosevelt High School is Wellness and Recovery Coordinator. That is a real title. Ray’s nephew is on the team and showed him the team app. There is a team app. The boys log their sleep on it. They log their hydration. There is a section for mood.

Mood. Sixteen-year-old offensive linemen are logging their mood on a phone before they are allowed to do an Oklahoma drill, which they aren’t, because Oklahoma drills are now what is called a liability event.

Now look. I’m not unreasonable. Kids used to die in those August practices. Kids used to actually die, and Coach DiMaggio’s response to a heat-stroked sophomore was, and I am quoting, “walk it off and stop being a girl about it,” which we now understand was bad medicine. Fine. The misting tent is fine. Cold water is fine. I will even concede the Gatorade flavor selection, although I would like the record to reflect that Glacier Cherry is a crime against the concept of cherry.

What I object to is the polo shirt. What I object to is a 22-year-old with an iPad telling the head coach, who I happen to know is a man named Petey Corrigan who started at guard for Toledo in ’91 and has a Super Bowl ring from a season he spent on a practice squad, that maybe Tuesday’s session needs to be “dialed back to a yellow zone.” A yellow zone. In two-a-days. In August. At Roosevelt. Petey Corrigan once played a half against Findlay with a partially torn tricep and a hangover and the only thing anyone said about it afterwards was that he had been a little quiet at the team dinner.

The kids, though. The kids I leave alone. The kids are out there in the heat doing what kids have always done, which is run drills until somebody throws up and then run one more, and if the school district has decided that nobody throws up anymore, that’s the school district’s call, and the kids are still working. Ray’s nephew has a neck on him like a fire hydrant and he is fifteen years old. Petey Corrigan is doing the Lord’s work over there. The polo-shirt kid is doing whatever it is the polo-shirt kid does, and someday a long time from now he will tell his grandchildren that he was once a Wellness and Recovery Coordinator, and they will look at him exactly the way I would have looked at him if I’d had a clipboard of my own.

Denise is making chili tonight. She says it’s a slow-cooker recipe she got off a podcast about Tuscany. I’m going to eat it and not say anything.

Watched Preseason Last Night and Recognized Two Guys the Entire Game

Duke Holloway
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Watched Preseason Last Night and Recognized Two Guys the Entire Game

Ray Kowalczyk called me at the half. He said, ‘Duke, who is that.’ I said, ‘Ray, I do not know who that is.’ He said, ‘You’re the sportswriter.’ I said, ‘Ray, that man’s jersey number is 84 and his name on the back is spelled with a hyphen and what looks like a small drawing.’ That was our conversation. The Bills were up 6 to 3. Neither of us could have told you who was playing the Bills.

This is preseason football in the year of our Lord 2025. They roll out a man named Tre’Quavion who went undrafted out of a school I have never heard of, and he runs a 14-yard out, and the broadcast cuts to a sideline interview with a wide receivers coach about ‘standards’ and ‘process,’ and somewhere in a climate-controlled position room in Orchard Park, Josh Allen is doing a yoga flow on a heated bench while his quarterbacks coach hands him a smoothie.

The starters do not play. None of them. Not a snap. The head coach will tell you, with a straight face, that this is to ‘protect the roster,’ which is a phrase that would have gotten Coach DiMaggio to walk into Long Island Sound. DiMaggio’s idea of protecting the roster was making us run gassers in full pads in late August until somebody threw up, at which point he would point at the vomit and say, ‘There. That’s the guy who’s starting.’ I am not making that up. I have a witness. His name is Petey Corrigan and he was the guy who threw up.

Now, I understand the argument. I have heard it from my son-in-law, who works in ‘analytics,’ which as far as I can tell means he gets paid to tell millionaires not to do things. The argument is: why risk a torn ACL in a meaningless game? And the answer, which nobody seems willing to say out loud, is that if the game is meaningless, then maybe stop charging me $94 to watch it on a streaming service that requires a separate password and a ‘household verification’ text sent to a phone I don’t own.

Because that is what is happening. They have admitted, openly, on the record, that the product is not worth playing. The actual football players, the ones whose faces you would recognize, have collectively decided this thing is too dangerous to participate in. And then they sell it to you anyway. They sell it to you with the regular pregame show, the regular postgame show, the regular Tirico, and a regular full-price beer at the stadium where the regular starters are wearing bucket hats on the sideline and laughing at something on a phone.

If a Broadway show announced that the leads would be sitting in the lobby on opening night and the understudies’ understudies would be performing, and the price was the same, you’d burn the theater down. In football we call it ‘getting the young guys reps.’

I will say this for the young guys. They play hard. They have to. A 53-man roster is the only roster they will ever be on, and a special teams gunner spot is a mortgage. There was a kid last night, linebacker, number 47, undrafted out of someplace called Stephen F. Austin, who ran down on a kickoff and absolutely detonated a returner. Beautiful, clean, textbook. The broadcast did not show a replay. They were in a sideline package about a quarterback’s playlist.

Petey Corrigan called me after Ray hung up. Petey is 71 and watches preseason football the way monks copy manuscripts. He said, ‘Duke, I think the kid at 47 is going to make this team.’ I said, ‘Petey, what’s his name.’ He said, ‘I don’t know, but I trust him.’ That is the entire emotional content of preseason football in 2025. You don’t know anyone’s name and you trust a few of them anyway. It is the closest sports get to faith.

The regular season starts in five weeks. Allen will rise from his heated bench, blink into the light, and throw a 60-yard touchdown on the third snap of Week 1, and a man on a podcast will say he ‘looks fresh.’ He should. He has not done anything since February. None of them have. We are paying full freight for a sport whose stars have entered a kind of athletic hibernation, and we are being told this is good for us.

Denise is bringing chili tonight. Game two is on. She says the recipe is from a podcast.

GPT-5 Uses 4x the Power of GPT-4 to Be 7% More Likely to Name the Capital of Bolivia

Lena Wexler
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GPT-5 Uses 4x the Power of GPT-4 to Be 7% More Likely to Name the Capital of Bolivia

SAN FRANCISCO — OpenAI launched GPT-5 on Wednesday to a roomful of investors who had already priced it in, unveiling a model the company described as a “generational leap” and which, in internal benchmarks, consumes roughly four times the electricity of GPT-4 in order to be approximately seven percent more likely to correctly identify the capital of Bolivia.

The model, which CEO Sam Altman said was trained on “essentially all human thought, plus Reddit,” can now hallucinate nonexistent academic papers in 47 additional languages, write sonnets in the voice of a slightly different dead poet than the one requested, and decline to answer questions about elections in 23 newly distinct ways.

A planner at a regional transmission organization in the Midwest, who asked not to be named because she had not been cleared to comment on a press release, said her team had spent Wednesday morning on a conference call with two hyperscalers trying to determine whether the load curve they were watching was an anomaly, a cyberattack, or a product launch.

The flagship feature, branded “Deep Reasoning Mode,” allows GPT-5 to think for up to 14 minutes before producing an answer that is wrong in a substantially more sophisticated way. During those 14 minutes, the model consumes enough cooling water to fill a small residential swimming pool, though OpenAI clarified at the event that the pool was theoretical and that real pools were unaffected.

Tech reviewers, who had been under embargo for 11 days, described the upgrade as “different in ways that are hard to articulate,” “subtly worse at the things you used it for,” and “substantially better at things you did not ask about and may not have wanted.” A YouTuber who has been using the model to draft permits for a backyard shed reported that GPT-5 had confidently hallucinated an additional load-bearing wall and a citation to the 2019 International Residential Code, Section 14, which does not exist.

Gen Z users, who have spent the past two years replacing Google with ChatGPT, therapy with ChatGPT, and several of their closer friendships with ChatGPT, said the new model felt warmer somehow — like talking to a friend who had also recently been trained on essentially all human thought, and was processing it.

Microsoft, which supplies the data center capacity, announced Wednesday afternoon that it would meet the new compute demand by extending the operating life of three Pennsylvania natural gas plants previously scheduled for closure, a decision the company described in its statement as “carbon-aware.” A separate release noted that the firm remained on track to be net-zero by 2030, in a footnote.

Environmental groups responded with the kind of statement they have largely given up updating, observing that a single GPT-5 query now produces roughly the emissions of charging a phone for a week, and that OpenAI projects 1.4 billion such queries per day. The figure was generated, an OpenAI spokesperson noted, by GPT-5.

Asked at the launch event whether the new model was conscious, Altman said it was too early to tell. Asked whether it was useful, he said the same thing.

Lawmakers Who Defunded Weather Service Demand Hearing on Why Weather Service Failed

Nash Grayson
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Lawmakers Who Defunded Weather Service Demand Hearing on Why Weather Service Failed

WASHINGTON — Members of the same congressional delegation that spent the last eighteen months gutting the National Weather Service’s budget, slashing NOAA staffing by 17%, and openly mocking a colleague for calling river gauges ‘critical infrastructure’ announced Wednesday they will convene an emergency oversight hearing to determine why, exactly, the warnings ahead of this month’s Texas floods were not better.

The hearing, titled ‘Forecasting Failure: A Crisis of Federal Competence,’ will reportedly probe whether forecasters in the understaffed Austin/San Antonio office did everything humanly possible during the four-hour window between the storm intensifying and the first cabin being torn off its foundation, given that two of the three meteorologist positions on the overnight shift had been left vacant after a hiring freeze the panel itself voted for in March.

‘The American people deserve answers,’ said one Texas senator who in February held up a printed copy of the NOAA budget on the chamber floor and called it ‘bloat written by people who have never been outside.’ He confirmed he would be calling the acting NOAA administrator to testify, then pausing to ask why the agency was being run by an acting administrator.

According to a staffer in the office of a Hill Climate Caucus Republican, the working theory among members is that the forecast existed, was accurate, was issued in time, and was correctly escalated, but failed in some other unspecified federal way that can be litigated for the cameras without naming the warning coordination meteorologist whose position was eliminated in May.

Sources at the agency itself were less generous. ‘They cut the balloon launches,’ said a forecaster at a Gulf Coast field office who asked to be identified only as someone who has not slept since July 4. ‘You can’t run the model without the data, and you can’t get the data without the balloons, and you can’t launch the balloons without the guy, and they fired the guy. Then they sent us a tote bag that says RESILIENCE on it.’

The hearing is expected to feature a multimedia presentation in which committee members display screenshots of the actual flash flood warnings — issued in correct sequence, in correct language, at correct hours — while asking witnesses to explain why those warnings were not, somehow, more.

One representative whose district lost forty-two homes told reporters he intends to ask whether the Weather Service had considered using ‘all caps,’ a tool he described as ‘on every phone in America’ and ‘free, unlike whatever they’re spending the money on.’ Asked what they were spending the money on, he said he had not been briefed but assumed diversity.

The administration, for its part, has indicated full cooperation with the probe. A White House spokesperson said the President is ‘deeply concerned’ about forecast quality and is considering an executive order requiring meteorologists to express confidence intervals ‘more confidently.’ He added that FEMA will continue operating in Texas at whatever capacity is possible given that its acting deputy director is currently also the acting director, the acting chief of staff, and, as of Tuesday, the acting press office.

Survivors in Kerr County, reached by phone, declined to weigh in on the hearing. One, a retired schoolteacher whose mother-in-law’s house is now in a tree, said she had not been following Washington this week and did not plan to start.

Lockport, NY Splash Pad Has Quietly Become the De Facto Senior Center

Hal Cranston
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Lockport, NY Splash Pad Has Quietly Become the De Facto Senior Center

LOCKPORT, N.Y. — At 9:47 a.m. Tuesday, the same three retirees who arrive every weekday at 9:30 had already claimed the shaded bench under the pavilion at Outwater Park’s two-year-old splash pad, opened their thermoses, and assumed the formation that municipal staff have come to refer to, off the record, as ‘the morning shift.’

The town’s $340,000 recreational water feature, dedicated in May 2023 with a ribbon-cutting attended by the mayor and seven schoolchildren, has, over the course of twenty-six months, evolved into something nobody planned for and nobody is willing to be the person to address: a fully operational senior gathering space that happens to have toddlers running through it.

‘It’s not a senior center. It’s a splash pad,’ said Dale Hennig, assistant director of Lockport Parks and Recreation, choosing his words with the care of a man who has thought about this a great deal. ‘But also, increasingly, yes.’

A folding card table appeared in late June. By the second week of July, somebody had brought a battery-powered box fan. On Mondays, Marcia DeLuca, 71, runs what she insists is not a coffee circle out of a Coleman cooler labeled, in Sharpie, ‘NOT A COFFEE CIRCLE.’ The pad’s mister wall — engineered to provide a fine cooling spray for children running beneath it — is now considered prime real estate at 11 a.m. for what regulars have begun calling ‘a free facial.’

An informal schedule has emerged without anyone agreeing to it. From 9 to 10:30 is the morning regulars. From 10:30 to noon is the regulars who don’t mind kids. After noon is everyone, with the understanding that the cribbage table, once seated, does not move.

‘Look, I’m not going to be the one,’ said Erin Talarico, 34, watching her four-year-old weave between two seated men deep in a hand. ‘Half of them know my mother. One of them is my mother.’

Hennig confirmed that the department has discussed, at three separate staff meetings, whether any kind of formal accommodation should be made — additional benches, a posted notice, perhaps a designated quiet area — and that all three meetings ended without a decision. ‘The minute you put up a sign that says Seniors Welcome, you’ve admitted something,’ he said. ‘And the minute you put up a sign that says Seniors Please Use the Pavilion Across the Lot, you’ve admitted something worse.’

The pavilion across the lot, regulars note, does not have the misters.

The town’s only formal complaint to date came from an eight-year-old who wrote, in pencil, on a comment card left at the parks office, ‘There are too many grandpas.’ The card was reviewed by staff, photographed for the file, and quietly placed in a folder marked ‘ongoing.’

We Recapped the Diddy Verdict Like a Season Finale

Margaret Thorne
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We Recapped the Diddy Verdict Like a Season Finale

What does it mean, exactly, when twelve people in a federal jury box hand down a verdict touching the most powerful music executive of his generation, and the only sustained argument at Eliza’s table on Saturday was whether the courtroom sketch artist had been generous to his hairline?

Eliza had set the long table for ten. There was a lamb, because there is always a lamb. There was a bipartisan lobbyist whose firm I will not name because he has asked me, gently, over the course of a decade, not to. There was my sister-in-law Judy, who works at the National Archives and has the unsettling habit of treating any current event as a document she will eventually have to box. The candles were the tall ones. The wine was the kind that arrives with an opinion attached.

The verdict had come down on the second of July. By the time the lamb arrived on the twenty-sixth, we had moved through three full news cycles, a holiday weekend, a tropical storm, and whatever ChatGPT-5 was supposed to be, and the case had been quietly reshelved as a piece of entertainment with unusually long sentencing exposure. Someone at the table — I believe it was the lobbyist’s wife — said the words “limited series” without irony. Someone else said “comeback arc.” Judy said nothing and refilled her glass, which is how Judy registers dissent.

The actual ledger, for anyone keeping one: acquitted on racketeering, acquitted on sex trafficking, convicted on two counts under a statute most of the table could not have named on a bar bet a month ago. Sentencing later this year. The women who testified — and there were many, and they testified for days, and what they described was specific and on the record and entered into evidence — came up exactly once over four courses, in the construction “those women,” with a pause around it, the way one says “those emails.”

The bipartisan lobbyist, who is paid extraordinary sums to know which way a room is tilting, examined the edge of his cufflink and offered that the case had been, in his view, “badly charged.” He did not specify by whom. He did not specify against what standard. He used the passive voice with the easy fluency of a man who has built a career inside it. Eliza said, “Well, the prosecution overreached,” in the tone she uses when she is repeating something she heard on a podcast that morning and intends to keep.

I asked, because someone has to be the one who asks, what we thought the conviction was for, exactly. There was a small silence — the kind a host registers and immediately glasses over. Judy looked at her plate. The lobbyist said the law in question was “essentially Victorian,” which is the sort of thing one says when one would prefer not to say anything else. Eliza said, “Margaret, please,” which has been her contribution to American jurisprudence for thirty years.

The conversation moved, as these conversations do, to the staging of it: the outfits, the daughters in the front row, the cameras outside the courthouse, the rumor that a streaming service had already approached someone close to someone. We were briefly, fluently, expert on the architecture of a comeback. We were not, it turned out, expert on much else. The women who had spent days on a federal witness stand had, by the cheese course, been reabsorbed into the broader category of plot.

I will tell you what I keep thinking about, because the column is mine and I am allowed. I keep thinking about how quickly a ledger of behavior, sworn to under penalty of perjury and entered into a federal record, can be processed by people in a position to know better into a question of casting. I keep thinking about the lobbyist’s cufflink. I keep thinking about “those women,” and the pause around the phrase, and the way the pause did the work the sentence declined to.

The country we are building is one in which a verdict is a content event and the witnesses are a logistical inconvenience between commercial breaks. We are not the jury. We are the focus group the producers are testing the rerelease against. And we are, on the evidence of Saturday, an extraordinarily forgiving audience.

The lamb, for what it’s worth, was excellent. It was the only matter at the table on which the verdict was unanimous, swift, and entered without dissent. We called it the lamb course. We asked Eliza for the recipe.

Tessa’s $39 Amazon Splash Pad Smells Like a Goodyear Plant and Cleo Was on It in 20 Minutes

Brooke Ellery
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Tessa’s $39 Amazon Splash Pad Smells Like a Goodyear Plant and Cleo Was on It in 20 Minutes

I am standing in my sister-in-law Tessa’s backyard in 99-degree heat watching her daughter Cleo belly-flop onto a brand-new inflatable splash pad that has been out of the box for less than the time it takes to scramble an egg, and I can smell it from the patio. Not chlorine. Not lawn. A smell I can only describe as the lobby of a Pep Boys.

The box arrived Friday from an Amazon seller called something like SUNJOYY-MAX, and Tessa cut the tape, plugged in the little hose adapter, and inflated the whole thing on the deck while it was still creased from the warehouse. Twenty minutes. A whale-shaped splash pad, manufactured I would estimate forty-six hours ago in a facility that also makes traffic cones, was full of municipal water and a four-year-old before the off-gassing had even gotten started.

I am a member of a Facebook group called “PVC Mamas: We Read the Manifest,” and the consensus there on inflatable summer toys is that you are supposed to hose them down with a vinegar dilution, leave them open in direct sun for at minimum 72 hours, and then hose them down AGAIN before a child so much as sits on the edge. Some of the more careful moms in there go a full nine days. One woman in Florida quarantines hers in a screened porch for two weeks and has never had a single ear infection in three children, which I think speaks for itself.

The compounds we are talking about, according to my sister-in-law Pam — different sister-in-law, this is Garrett’s older sister, she works the front desk at a pediatric ENT and is basically a nurse — are phthalates, something called DINP, and a plasticizer she pronounced “deh-hex-uh-something” but said I would know it if I saw it on a label. She told me at Easter that the smell coming off a fresh pool float is the float “crying out,” which I thought was a little dramatic at the time but which I am now revisiting in Tessa’s yard.

I tried to be diplomatic. I said, “Tess, did you maybe want to let it breathe for a couple days?” and she said the box said it was “BPA-free,” which, and I mean this lovingly, is the toxin equivalent of a restaurant putting up a sign that says “No Rats Today.” There are roughly four hundred other things on the manifest, sweetheart. BPA is the one they let you advertise about.

What I do at our place, and what I have offered to set up for Tessa twice now, is a galvanized stock tank from the Tractor Supply on 25, filled from a copper-fitted hose I keep specifically for drinking and kid water, with one cup of food-grade Redmond salt stirred in because salt is a mineral, not a chemical, and the kids come out of it cleaner than they went in. Garrett calls it the trough. The twins call it the trough. It is a trough. It is also the only thing on our property a child can lie down in without absorbing a Goodyear plant through their lower back.

Meanwhile at the splash pad, three other moms had shown up with their kids, and not one of them was bothered by the smell. One of them, Kelsey, was eating a Costco churro directly over the water feature and laughing. I love Kelsey. Kelsey would let her son sleep inside a brand-new yoga mat. We are not going to change Kelsey today.

I left around four with both twins because Wren had started complaining her tongue tasted “like a balloon,” which is a sentence I have now heard from one of my children in three different summers, always within an hour of an inflatable being introduced to a gathering. Cleo, when we left, was asleep face-down on the whale’s tail, hair wet, cheeks pink, breathing in deep contented little draws of what I can only describe as the new-car package.

Tessa texted me last night that she was going to “air it out next time,” which is the splash-pad equivalent of saying you’ll start flossing, and I told her I love her and that the trough is open every Saturday through September. Bring a towel. Bring Cleo. Do not bring the whale.

NFL Camp Opened Wednesday and a Rookie Brought His Own Lighting Guy

Duke Holloway
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NFL Camp Opened Wednesday and a Rookie Brought His Own Lighting Guy

Ray Kowalczyk called me Wednesday from a folding chair outside Cowboys camp, where he’d paid forty-two dollars and a parking surcharge to watch grown men in compression shorts walk at three-quarter speed through a route tree. He said there was a smoothie bar. He said there was a podcast tent. He said somewhere, in theory, there was a football.

I asked him if anyone had hit anyone yet. He said no, but a rookie wide receiver had given a fourteen-minute interview to a man in a bucket hat about his “process,” and a tight end had walked off the field with a Bluetooth speaker still playing. Ray, to his credit, sounded like he was about to drive home and never come back. Ray will be back tomorrow. Ray bought a ticket package.

Coach DiMaggio used to run two-a-days in full pads in August in a part of New Jersey that had no shade and no mercy and one trainer named Wally who treated cramps with a salt tablet and a hard look. Camp was the punishment that earned you the season. You came out of it sixteen pounds lighter and twice as mean, and if you couldn’t take it, you were honest enough to quit before September and become an electrician, which a lot of guys did, and which honestly turned out better for most of them.

Now camp is content. There is a podcast tent. I want to be clear about that — there is a structure, with sponsors, where players go between drills to talk into a microphone about how training camp is going. The training camp they are currently at. While it is happening. I asked my grandson if this was normal and he looked at me the way you look at someone who has just discovered fire.

One rookie quarterback — I won’t say his name because he hasn’t done anything to deserve me yet — showed up to camp with a documentary crew. His own. Three guys, a boom mic, and what Ray described as “a kid carrying a light on a stick.” The crew is reportedly embedded for the season. They have credentials. They have catering. They have, presumably, a streaming deal pre-negotiated by an agent who has never once been tackled.

The Eagles have a “sleep coach.” The Bengals have a “recovery suite” with cold plunges and red-light therapy and something called a NormaTec, which sounds like a Norwegian appliance brand and is in fact a pair of inflatable pants you wear on a couch. A nose tackle in Cincinnati told a reporter the pants “changed his life.” My father wore the same pair of work pants for nineteen years and they didn’t change anything except color.

Now — I’ll give credit where it’s earned. I watched about ten minutes of Ravens camp on the league’s app, which I am told is free if you don’t read the terms, and there’s a left guard out there named something like Vlasic or Vlasov who is moving people backwards on every snap and not saying a word about it afterwards. No podcast. No lighting guy. Just a man with a job and a forearm shiver. I would let that man marry into my family. I do not know his first name and I don’t need to.

Petey Corrigan, who scouted high school tape for thirty years out of a duffel bag, said something to me once that I keep coming back to. He said you can tell who’s going to make it inside the first hour of camp, and it’s never the kid with the entourage. The kid with the entourage has already been told he made it. The kid you want is the one rotating in second-team and not looking at the sideline. Petey is dead now. He’d have hated the podcast tent. He’d have walked through it on principle and pretended he was looking for a bathroom.

The preseason starts in ten days. The documentary, I’m told, drops in October. Denise is bringing chili over Sunday. She says it’s from a podcast.

National Guard Floods DC to Stop Crime Wave Stats Say Isn’t Happening

Nash Grayson
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National Guard Floods DC to Stop Crime Wave Stats Say Isn’t Happening

WASHINGTON — A column of National Guard Humvees rolled down a quiet stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue Friday morning, scanning rooftops for snipers, alleyways for gangs, and storefronts for the kind of generalized urban menace that exists primarily in the president’s motorcade route to Joint Base Andrews.

Trump activated 800 Guardsmen Thursday to combat what he described as “the worst crime in American history, possibly world history,” in a city where homicides are down 26 percent, carjackings are down 53 percent, and the most dangerous thing on the National Mall this week is the line for the Air and Space Museum.

“We’re here to do whatever the mission requires,” said Staff Sgt. Kyle Mendoza, who spent the morning escorting a German tour group across Lafayette Square and helping a woman from Akron find her Honda Civic. “I was told to expect a war zone. I was issued two MREs and a packet of Gold Bond.”

The executive order tasks the Guard with patrolling neighborhoods, deterring violent offenders, and “looking out generally for thugs,” a category the order leaves entirely undefined. A supplementary DHS memo encourages soldiers to use “their gut,” “their instincts,” and, where possible, “the part of the brain that tells you something’s off about a guy.”

By Friday afternoon, the Guard had detained no one, recovered no weapons, and broken up no riots. They had, however, given seven sets of directions to the Spy Museum, posed for forty-three photographs with visiting Cub Scouts, and helped a ten-year-old retrieve a kite from a tree outside the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, who learned of the deployment from a reporter who learned of it from Truth Social, declined to share the city’s crime data with federal authorities, on the grounds that the federal authorities had already decided what the data said.

“They keep asking us where the crime is,” said Officer Renee Patterson of the Metropolitan Police, watching a Guardsman attempt to inspect a cab he had also been trying to hail. “I told them it’s down. They said that’s exactly what someone covering up the crime would say.”

At a Friday briefing, the White House clarified that the deployment was not in response to any specific incident but rather a “general posture of strength,” to be maintained until crime in the District reaches whatever number the president has privately decided it should be. Asked what that number was, the press secretary said it would be known when it was reached.

The Pentagon estimates the operation will cost taxpayers $14 million a month, a figure officials defended by noting that, in a pinch, the Guardsmen are also available to help carry the president’s bags.

Every Man’s Uncle Frank Met Hulk Hogan at a Sunoco in 1987, Apparently

Tara Sparks
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Every Man’s Uncle Frank Met Hulk Hogan at a Sunoco in 1987, Apparently

NATIONWIDE — Within ninety minutes of Hulk Hogan’s death being announced Thursday, an estimated 38 million American men aged 45 to 67 began independently and without coordination recalling the specific time their Uncle Frank, Uncle Tony, or Uncle Dale ran into the wrestler at a Sunoco off I-75, where Hogan was, by all accounts, the nicest guy you’d ever meet, brother.

The stories share suspicious structural similarities. Hogan was always ‘bigger in person.’ He always paid for somebody’s coffee. He always called a stranger’s six-year-old ‘little hulkster’ and ruffled hair in a way that the now-grown child remembers as ‘spiritually formative.’ The gas station is always the kind of gas station that no longer exists.

‘What we’re seeing is a national folk-memory event,’ said Eldon Marris, a cultural anthropologist at the Heartland Institute for American Mythology, who spent the morning logging variants. ‘The Uncle Frank story is not a memory. It is a load-bearing American fiction. Every man requires one functional Hulk Hogan anecdote to access grief, and the brain will manufacture the Sunoco if no Sunoco is available.’

Cracker Barrels in twelve states reported a 400 percent surge in men sitting alone in window booths holding phones they were not looking at. A Bob Evans in Findlay, Ohio briefly ran out of biscuits after a ‘group of guys named Steve’ sat down and ordered without speaking.

Attempts to verify the encounters with the actual uncles in question have produced uneven results. Reached at his home in Macomb County, Frank Pulaski, 71, declined to specify which Sunoco, said the year ‘might’ve been ’88, could’ve been ’86,’ and then became, per his nephew, ‘uncharacteristically misty for a man who has not previously demonstrated weather.’

His wife, Linda Pulaski, gently noted from the kitchen that Frank has never knowingly been in the same county as Hulk Hogan, but did once see what he believed to be Randy Savage’s Cadillac in the parking lot of a Ponderosa in 1991, an event she suspects has been ‘narratively upgraded’ across four decades of cookouts.

WWE has not responded to requests for an exhaustive list of every gas station Hogan ever visited, a document that, if it existed, would still come up several million Sunocos short.

By press time, a 52-year-old structural engineer in Tulsa had begun the story with the words ‘so my Uncle Dale,’ and four men at the adjacent table, none of whom he knew, had nodded slowly in advance, already aware of how it ended.

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