"The blog has made Glab into a hip town crier, commenting on everything from local politics and cultural happenings to national and international events, all rendered in a colorful, intelligent, working-class vernacular that owes some of its style to Glab’s Chicago-hometown heroes Studs Terkel and Mike Royko." — David Brent Johnson in Bloom Magazine
Today, Friday, February 28, 2025, is the first day people like you and me are banding together to send a message to the sons of bitches who think they can take over this imperfect, often wicked, just as often benevolent, too often crazy mixed up nation.
It’s simple. Do not use your credit card. Do not shop at a chain or sprawling corporation. Don’t buy any crap you don’t need to stay alive. If you must shop, do it at a small, local business. Use cash only.
On the home front, I’ve been experimenting with different scone recipes. I’m addicted to scones. Which is odd because, generally, any culinary thing from the British Isles excites me about as much as the prospect of vacuuming the house. But scones? Oh, baby, count me in.
I found one recipe that calls for only butter as the fat and another that calls for both butter and cream of tartar. Both turned out terrific, if a tad funky-looking. Basically, I just roll a little ball of dough in my hands and then smash it down like a hockey puck.
I’ve tried mixing in chocolate chips and fresh blueberries. Raisins ought to be good too. I sprinkle powdered sugar on top of the scones after they’ve been out of the oven for a few minutes. By the way, some recipes call for too much leavening so you might want to experiment yourself
If you’ve a mind to, try this recipe:
Simple Scones
INGREDIENTS
2 cups All-purpose flout
1/3 cup sugar
1/2 tsp Baking soda
1/2 tsp Salt
8 tbsp Frozen unsalted butter
1/2 cup Chocolate chips, blueberries, raisins, or whatever
1/2 cup Sour cream
1 large Egg
Powdered sugar to sprinkle
DIRECTIONS
Preheat oven to 400ºF. Cover a baking pan with parchment paper.
In large-ish bowl, mix flour, sugar, salt and soda together. Using your grater, grate or shred frozen butter into mixture. Then squish it all together with your hands and fingers until the mixture starts looking like coarse crumbs. Add your chips or fruits or whatever, combining everything with your hands.
In a small bowl whisk the egg and sour cream together until you get a nice liquid. Stir this into the dry mixture and mix with your wooden spoon until everything looks like a bunch of dough-y clumps. Then, using your hands, knead the dough for about a minute and form it into a big ball.
Cut the ball into eight equal portions. Form each into a little ball and then smush it down into a small hockey puck. Place pucks on the parchment and bake until golden brown on top, about 15 minutes.
Eat.
I was surprised to learn how easy it is to make scones. By the way, I agree with Larry David. On Curb Your Enthusiasm, Season 10, Episode 1, he gets into a big argument with Mocha Joe over scones, among other coffeehouse-y things. Mocha Joe says scones should be soft; Larry David advocates hardness. I’m with LD. Not hard like they’re stale, but more like they’re…, um, substantial.
In non-culinary news, I’m juggling my work on a book-length history of radio station WFHB, my Big Talk radio interview program, and my and Tristra Newyear’s Do One Thing local events podcast.
I’ve been on a cool run these last few weeks on Big Talk. Yesterday, I sat down in the studio with singer/songwriter Krista Detor and her partner, musician, producer, and audio engineer, David Weber. The two of them run The Hundredth Hill artists’ retreat on their wooded 50-acre tract of land north of Bloomington. Krista tells the tale of attending a women’s artists’ retreat at Hedgebrook on Whidbey Island in Washington state a few years ago. She came home to Bloomington amped up to start something like it right here and, around seven years ago, she and Weber started building out guest rooms for residencies.
Their retreat offers stages, a recording studio, and a bunch of other features that help writers, musicians, actors, poets, and any other kind of creative types actually do…, well, creative things.
Hey, if you catch this week’s Big Talk with guests Krista and David, you’ll find out that Hundredth Hill almost was named after a fruit jelly you could spread on your scone. Well, maybe not almost, but someone suggested it. Don’t you just love random associations?
In other news, I’ve been invited to guest on Steve Volan’s The 812 Show podcast. He, Tristra, and I have been logrolling each other for a while now, hoping to goose interest in our respective podcasts.
And speaking of geese, this week’s Do One Thing, Episode 9, dropped this morning. I’m already working on next week’s episode and I’ve dug up a neat thing for you to do at the Goose Pond Fish & Wildlife Area, about 50 miles west-southwest of Bloomington. If you’ve never been out there, now’s the time to rectify it.
It’s been a month since the Plastic Emperor has taken over this holy land. And, make no mistake, he has indeed taken over. This is his country now, no matter how many well-meaning folks spout platitudes about democracy and The People and all the other civics class bullshit. The checks and balances that have occasionally worked throughout our history are now mere annoyances for him. Just you watch as he defies orders, contempt of court rulings, sanctions, injunctions, and every other hammer at judges’ disposal and says, essentially, What the fuck are you gonna do about it?
He will. The Brennan Center for Justice this month published a neat little article on what the courts can do when the Emperor flips them the bird. It all reads comfortably but, like any bedtime story, it’s fantasy. As a last resort, the courts can sic the US Marshals on him and his mob but do you really want to bet he wouldn’t then mobilize the military to thwart them? I wouldn’t.
The man is now drunk with power and the party he slithered from is petrified of crossing him. That party controls the House of Representatives, the Senate, and most of the nation’s statehouses. The US Supreme Court has been in his back pocket ever since the grotesque Mitch McConnell gamed the constitutional nominating process, twice. Don’t even pretend anymore: the Plastic Emperor owns all the levers of government as well as you and me.
So, what do I do about it?
My erstwhile party doesn’t seem to offer much hope. The one thing the Democratic Party has failed to do since the P.E. and his trophy consort descended from his Trump Tower Valhalla in June 2015 is create and maintain a solid plurality of voters. The party I’ve identified with all my life (even as I held my nose most of that time) has been more obsessed with painting the words “Black Lives Matter” on pavements or coercing corporations into allowing employees to offer the choice of He, She or They in their email signature blocks.
And, by the way, nobody gets away with dropping the N-bomb anymore. This, even though most corps.’ board rooms and upper-level managements remain pale as fish bellies.
No, the Dems seem to have forgotten that, to win elections, they must hearken back to the lessons they learned in kindergarten, that 2 is more than 1, that 3 more than 2, and so on. In other words, election winners have to garner more votes than the losers do. The Democratic Party in this 21st century has been far more interested in telling potential voters they want nothing to do with them. As I wrote a while ago, when the people of West Virginia wondered how they’d make a living if the coal mines were closed Dems labeled them anti-environment or when people responding to the Black Lives Matter movement cried All Lives Matter, rather than saying, Hey, I’m glad you agree with me!, those on my side of the fence called them racists.
The Democrats, the Left, the Progressives — all of whom I consider nominal soulmates — have worked harder to shun potential voters rather than embrace them.
So, back to my original conundrum: what do I do? My gut instinct is to tell MAGA voters to go to hell. Especially those who, as some reports have indicated, are experiencing buyers’ remorse. I wanna scream, What’d you expect, dummy?! But then I remind myself that numbers win in an election, and if people who voted for the Plastic Emperor want to switch sides, well then, come on down!
And, the truth is, many of the grievances and dissatisfactions MAGA people harbor are the same as my gang’s. We mutually despise billionaire tax evaders, high grocery prices, unaffordable rents, $4.00 a gallon gasoline, government waste, what used to be called “limousine liberals,” wealth inequality, tyrannical bosses, nitpicky regulations, wages nobody can live on, and…, and…, well, I could go on and on.
The Democrats could have put together an unbeatable coalition had they not been so dead set on enforcing philosophical purity. (By the way, the hackers and bots in the employ of Russia and China did their part to splinter that potential voting bloc with their social media misinformation campaigns.) Had the Democrats been more focused on strengthening their numbers than, say, forcing Al Franken to resign the Senate because of some dumb-assed video he appeared in years before, maybe we wouldn’t be ceding America to the MAGA Mobsters today.
I’m not saying all the MAGA-ites would have been welcomed. No, the white supremacists, the sexists, the homophobes, the Christian Nationalists, the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the militia members, the Moms for Liberty, the Identity Evropa/American Identity Movement, the Aryan Brotherhood, the Westboro Baptist Church, the Family Research Council, the Aryan Nations, the Ku Klux Klan, and the American Patrol — all of whom are in thrall to the Plastic Emperor, can indeed go straight to hell. But their numbers still do not constitute a plurality of the voting populace. The non-radicals who normally vote Republican, who, frankly, aren’t terribly comfortable with the Plastic Emperor as Leader of the Free World, just might have helped stem the MAGA tide.
Rebecca Watson, whom I usually agree with, published a podcast this week titled, “No, I will not Welcome Ex-MAGA to the Resistance.” The title says it all. Some of the comments endorsing her stance include:
They had a name for Nazis that were only Nazis because of economic anxiety or similar issues. They were called Nazis.
The most infuriating thing about this is that people have been speaking out against Trump and his actions for a literal decade now and yet the people who voted for Trump three times are acting like there was no way to see it coming.
“I didn’t realize oppressing you would hurt me too”
And so on. All true, largely. Nevertheless, my side will never win unless we hold our noses and say to erstwhile MAGA-ites, Hey, join us. I think. At least right now.
The other day I wrote that from now on I’ll be referring to 45/47 as The Emperor. It was a neat way of avoiding writing his actual name, considering doing so acts as an emetic upon my system. And, since this Holy Land is indeed an Empire and the sovereign ruler of great power and rank in question wishes to be the monarch of all he surveys, I figured, hell, let’s call it like it is.
But events of the last few days have caused me to tweak the monicker. Friday, The Emperor issued a ukase reversing the Biden Administration policy of replacing all single-use plastic utensils in federal food service operations with paper-based products. “I will be signing an Executive Order next week ending the ridiculous Biden push for Paper Straws, which don’t work,” The Emperor wrote on his Truth Social website.
The tweak, ergo, is this: he is now The Plastic Emperor. Or Pemp, for short.
There can be no more definitive act of this or his first presidency than making a big deal out of what federal employees suck their Diet Cokes through. It is picayune, mean, pointless, petty, infantile, infuriating, and, ultimately, destructive.
In fact, the most important descriptor listed above just might be infuriating.
Let’s explore the possibilities.
He really believes it is better for the world if, in federal cafeterias and military mess halls, plastic straws, sporks, and bowls are used as opposed to recycled and/or recyclable paper-based items.
He despises Joe Biden so much for beating him in the 2020 election, that, if he could, he’d outlaw the breathing of air because…, well, that’s what Joe Biden does.
It pisses off The Libs.
Possibility Number 1 can immediately be stricken off the list inasmuch as Trump has no concern whatsoever for what is better for the world. Plus, that possibility would entail him weighing competing ideas and coming to a rational conclusion. Paper or Plastic? Hmm, let’s see. What do the experts, the scientists, those who know what they’re talking about think about this? Please bear with me as I mull this for a while.
Nah. That can’t be it.
Possibility Number 2 comes nearer the truth. He was so pissed at Biden for cutting off his access to classified government materials after it was discovered he’d stored such stuff in an unsecured Mar-a-Lago bathroom that one of the first things he’s done this term is to cut off Biden’s access to that material. Ex-presidents, by tradition, get daily intelligence reports and the like — but now not Joe Biden. And, it can be assumed, Biden didn’t even store the stuff where he moves his bowels. So let’s say Possibility Number 2 counts for about 35 percent of The Plastic Emperor’s decision on plastic straws, etc.
So, we’re left with Possibility Number 3. Bingo. Social media, late night humorists, wits and wags, all lit up is response to this particular Executive Order. Nothing pleases MAGA Nation and its strings-holder more than making the opposition boil. The Germans, appropriately, would immediately come up with some kind of lengthy compound word to describe this weird drive to derive pleasure from seeing others get red in the face. The phenomenon is a bit different than schadenfreude — gaining pleasure from others’ suffering — although there’s plenty of that in there, too. It’s more specific, though. Did we piss you off? Good! Hahahaha!
Yep, The Plastic Emperor’s edict on plastic straws is picayune, mean, pointless, petty, infantile, infuriating, and, ultimately, destructive. His presidencies in a nutshell.
I have been grappling with what to call our current president since saying his legal name pretty much makes me want to retch. Back when he first appeared to be a threat to become the Leader of This Holy Land in early 2016, I started calling him Li’l Duce, a play on Mussolini’s monicker, Il Duce. Making You Know Who littler (or li’ler) than one of the 20th century’s greatest tyrants seemed the perfect insult; he hates — hates — being minimized, you know.
Of late, I’ve taken to calling him 45/47, which is impersonal and not insulting but does sort of hearken to the idea of a convict’s number, which, by rights, he ought to be wearing on his back. Then again, nah, I don’t care if he goes to jail, I just want him out of the White House, out of the headlines, and out of my mind.
So what should I call him now? It came to me this afternoon. It’s perfect. From now on in these precincts, one Donald J. Trump of Washington, DC by way of Palm Beach, Florida and New York City, will be referred to as The Emperor.
Because, for chrissakes, that’s what he wants to be and that’s what all his executive orders and actions and pronouncements and intestinal gas emitted during these first 12 days of his reign redux are aimed at. The United States of America, after all, is indeed an empire. We like to kid ourselves that we’re not but we are. Our military encircles the globe, the tentacles of our corporations reach into every crevice of the planet, our dollar is humanity’s currency, our language is taught to school kids on every continent, and every living person knows who Taylor Swift is. This is an empire.
The Emperor believes this empire ought to be run in accordance with his wishes. He knows best. And only he can fix it. He’s told us so.
Plus, he loves other emperors, either of great magnitude like Vladimir Putin, or bush leaguers like Kim Jong Un and Viktor Orbán. He wants to be just like them. He’d love nothing more than to be dubbed the Supreme Leader of the United States.
So, let’s make him happy. And, in doing so, it is to be hoped, by calling him The Emperor I can scare the bejesus out of Pencil Nation and do my micro-part to foment resistance against him
