Friday Night at the Movies

Last night, I watched Coyote vs. Acme. Of course it was good! The plot was simple, the nostalgia was elevated, the cartoons were familiar, and violence was absurd and straight out of the 1950s. Take your kids, they’ll have a grand time! Although, to be fair, if you don’t have kids, you might want to stay home, unless you’re a real fan of Warner Bros. animation, or you just love to see anvils falling on characters’ heads.

My curse is that I couldn’t watch it without wondering what the world would be like if we had to share it with colorful, invulnerable characters who could build destructive weapons that could wreak horrendous devastation on humans and our property, but which could do them no lasting harm. The answer was clear: they’d become CEOs of corporations and destroy us all.

Bonus: I volunteered as projectionist for the 7:00 show, but no one volunteered for the 9:00 movie, so I stayed to cover that one, too. It was light work, since only two people showed up for Insidious: Out of the Further. I sold them their tickets and a few concessions, but then I could just sit in the theater and watch the whole thing, undisturbed.

It was awful. I have never liked the genre of supernatural horror; even in the long ago times, I detested The Exorcist and didn’t find it at all scary, just silly. The problem with these movies is that the screenwriters have no constraints, they can just invent random abilities and constraints, and the whole point is to generate “spooky” situations for the human protagonists. This whole movie was a couple of wide-eyed frightened people scuttling through a dark haunted house with flashlights — so bad lighting, an occasional ghost popping up for a jump scare, and an arbitrary series of hoops the good guys had to jump through to banish the ghosts. It was stupid. And this was the sixth movie in the franchise! I walked out.

I found the previews far more entertaining, which isn’t saying much. Crawlers is coming out later this fall!

OK, normal, real spiders become threat because of abnormal, unreal behavior. I’ll probably watch it. It’s fun to watch stupid people freak out over a situation I’d probably find charming.

Another movie coming out is Spider Island. It’s the same premise as Crawlers, or Arachnophobia, for that matter. I kind of suspect that Arachnophobia would be far superior.

The main feature of this movie is that it is set on a tropical island resort, so we’re going to get lots of spiders with pretty girls in bikinis. It’s not a combination that appeals to me, so I’ll probably skip it unless it’s shown right in front of my face.

If only we could get rid of all the anti-immigrationists so easily

Milo, looking glum

I’m torn. I think the government has gone way overboard on deportations — let the people pursue happiness! — but yeesh, it’s Milo Yiannopoulos.

Far-right political commentator and deportation advocate Milo Yiannopoulos is currently in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody facing a final order of removal, according to U.S. officials and agency records.

Yiannopoulos, who is British, was apprehended in the New Orleans area and is being held in a Louisiana ICE holding facility, the U.S. officials said. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said Yiannopoulos came to the U.S. legally in 2019 but “chose to overstay his welcome in violation of our nation’s laws.”

I was feeling a twinge of sympathy, both because I hate ICE and because he sure looks down in the dumps in his mugshot, but then, I was served with some quotes…

California needs ICE checkpoints at supermarket entrances, gas stations, strip malls, intersections and government buildings, with on the spot deportation for anyone who can’t prove they are in the US legally, he posted on social media in June 2025.

Total legal immunity for ICE agents when they’re on duty, he wrote in September 2025.

There is one concrete thing we must insist on this administration delivering, he wrote in June 2025. It matters a lot more than debts measured in imaginary money. We have got to deport millions and millions of people. Without that, nothing else matters.

Yeah, throw his ass out of the country.

Quality entertainment with TNT and exploding cigars

I am working the Morris Theater tonight, and we are showing…

I’ve been looking forward to this, but at the same time I am being reminded that my childhood was filled with horrific cartoon violence — and we laughed and laughed. Was my mind poisoned by Warner Brothers?

I also remember the great Saturday morning tragedy, as Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd and the whole gang were gradually phased out, replaced by the insipid ersatz sit-com bullshit of Hanna-Barbera. If there is a sequel to Coyote vs. Acme, I’d like it to be a war movie where Acme-fueled Warner Bros. protagonists demolish the Flintstones and the other cheaply animated dreck dribbling out of Hanna-Barbera.

It’s another Incitatus moment

The Roman emperor Caligula threatened to make his favorite horse, Incitatus, a consul. Historians agree he didn’t actually accomplish that, it was more of a demeaning joke against the aristocracy and a way to brag about his power, but still…that’s one of the many stupid, hateful things we remember him for. Caligula has not fared well in history. Historians can argue down to this day that Caligula was the worst Roman emperor of all time, for his capriciousness, his venality, his narcissism, his greed, his ineffectiveness as a leader.

Does that sound familiar?

At least Trump has actually done the thing he claimed he was going to do: he has signed an Executive Order declaring that Lake Ontario is to be renamed Lake America.

resident Donald Trump on Thursday signed an ‌Executive Order instructing Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to rename Lake Ontario as “Lake America.” ​

The change is set to take effect immediately, he said. Trump earlier in the week had floated the idea of a new moniker for the lake, which borders the Canadian ‌province ⁠of Ontario and the U.S. state of New York.

It is absurd. Not only is it not going to happen, but it also highlights the fact that Executive Orders as a tool for governing have been corrupted and are totally useless. No one except brain-dead MAGA clowns are going to call it “Lake America”.

“The name is more than 400 years old, pre-dating both the Confederation of Canada and the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America,” said Carney on Thursday. “We know that America is changing. Their trading relationships, their foreign policies, their national monuments, their hydronyms.”

Insisting that Canadians are aware of the “naming reality,” Carney rejected Trump’s directive for the lake, which borders the Canadian ‌province ⁠of Ontario and the U.S. state of New York.

The governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, has also rejected the whole idea.

History and the world are going to be laughing at our idiot president for a long time to come. You might say that at least he hasn’t put a horse in the Senate, but I think a lot of the candidates he has endorsed, and all of the nitwits in his cabinet, would serve us better if they were horses. Put Burgum in harness and run him in the Kentucky Derby, he’d be more useful there than as Secretary of the Interior.

It’s over, Mike

The Mike Lindell saga in Minnesota is over. He had been throwing his familiar temper tantrum over losing the primary election, which is his right, and it was also his right to demand a recount, if he was willing to pay for it.

He was not willing to pay for it.

Lindell failed to formally request and pay for a recount by a Monday deadline. He went to the high court to seek a more-expansive recount than a state-approved plan. He objected to the structure in which only votes for him and Lisa Demuth would be counted by name and all others would be combined in a third pile.

Therefore, it is settled: Lindell lost. The election for governor in November will be between Demuth and Klobuchar. Lindell can go cry into his pillows.

Nothing is correct in this illustration

I know a little bit about development, so this abomination made me want to punch an anti-choicer.

The mother’s abdomen doesn’t change size over 9 months, the fetal proportions are all wrong up until about 6 months, the embryo is not a blastula at 1 month, I don’t know what that bean is doing in there at 2 months, then suddenly it becomes a literal newborn at 3 months, the embryo is not located somewhere in the midbody, the fetus is not co-localized with the vertebral column, and its feet do not protrude from the abdomen, and its head does not displace the heart. It’s a disgraceful mass of misinformation.

This is what happens when you combine profound ignorance with AI slop, all motivated by an irrational ideology. You can find them on YouTube (40,000 followers) and Instagram (110,000 followers), where anyone can be an expert in science and medicine.

Have you been wondering what Ken Ham thinks of Dolly Parton?

No? I don’t blame you. He’s a rather repellent character who always gets everything wrong.

In case you don’t bother to watch that video (you are very wise), he cites the fact that she was a Christian, but one who tolerates LGBT people, and even wishes them happiness. God hates gays! That’s not an interpretation, according to Ham, it’s literally a commandment.

Conversely, I found Parton’s simple Christianity to be silly, but that didn’t matter. She lived a life of joy and kindness, and if that wasn’t enough to get her into Christian heaven, then that’s just another reason Christianity is wrong.

Who would you choose to represent your beliefs, Ken or Dolly? The answer ought to be clear.

Oh no — I’m an ineffective brainwasher!

The evidence is in. We liberal professors are doing a bad job at indoctrination — it’s not our hard work that is persuading students, we’re just coasting on a general trend that education liberalizes.

We study whether Democratic college professors make their students more liberal. We link voter data to salary records from 33 state flagships and show that faculty skew Democratic, especially in the humanities and social sciences. We then use student transcripts from one flagship to estimate causal effects. Students become more liberal during college regardless of major and sort toward ideologically similar instructors. Exploiting plausibly random variation in when instructors teach courses, we find no effect of faculty partisanship on student partisanship. Text analysis shows exposure to liberal topics reflects student demand rather than instructor supply, leaving little room for indoctrination.

Damn. Are the Democrats going to cut my Professional Indoctrinator stipend now? I’ve been saying for years that I don’t teach political perspectives in my classes, but nobody believed me, and they kept passing those big checks to me.