You’ve got a few hours left to make it! I just got back from the event at the Morris hockey rink.

Dancing, music, fancy headdresses, tacos, kids running around with balloon animals and facepaint, drums, drums, drums. It ends at 10, so get here fast.

This might be a better idea than a gun.

It comes in a pack of two, so one for the front door and one for the back.

Best of all, it would be totally honest advertising.

No, just no. I know that language evolves, but sometimes it degenerates in confusing ways. Would you believe “rawdogging” has acquired a new meaning? I know what it used to mean, but now it’s something very different, entirely harmless, and actually rather effete.

A 26-year-old Londoner named West (who asked to use only his first name) went viral in May when he posted about his decision to forgo any entertainment and pass a seven-hour trip watching the flight map. “Anyone else bareback flights?” he asked in the caption.

The concept—referred to in a vivid and perhaps unfortunate parlance as “rawdogging,” “flying raw,” and “bareback”—resonated with many in the comments on West’s TikTok page, @WestWasHere. “Yup, from London to Miami this week…pure bareback no food or water,” one wrote. “I swear barebacking flights make it go quicker,” another added.

“I’ve got DMs on Instagram like, ‘Bro, you need to teach us how to bareback flights,’” West tells GQ.

This has got to be a joke. You need to be taught how to sit quietly doing nothing on a flight?

But West and others have also come to see rawdogging flights as a kind of challenge, like the Tough Mudder or No Nut November, the goal being to see how fully participants can deprive themselves of creature comforts, up to and including free snack and drinks and even bathroom visits. A true rawdogger takes no indulgences.

Wait…I usually take the cheapest flight I can get, with few entertainment options, and since the pandemic I don’t take my mask off for the entire flight. I’m a rawdogger now? I thought I just wanted to avoid catching a disease.

I lied. We weren’t on a spider-hunting trip this weekend. We were visiting our granddaughter and delivering a bicycle. She took to it enthusiastically, and was pedaling all over her neighborhood with us chasing after.

“We” meaning the crotchety, rickety old grandparents, because Iliana’s mom is still recovering. Skatje has some titanium screws holding her tibia together and her patella is somehow secured in position, and there’s an awesome long vertical scar over her shin, so she can’t keep up. We contributed by bringing her daughter a rapid transport device and turning her loose. She was busy biking all over their apartment when we didn’t take her outside and point her at a sidewalk. I know, grandparents are just the worst.

Then we had to make the long drive back home — 7 hours each way! — and I got my usual reward. I got to stand around awkwardly while Grandma got all the hugs and sad farewells, because I’m the homely, repulsive, off-putting, superfluous male, the danger-even-if-not-a-stranger guy. At least I get to console myself with spiders.

Iliana was a natural, though. She’s going to bicycling across country to visit us (or at least, grandma) someday. When she’s 18, she said. She’s 5½ right now, she explained, so she can’t go that far, yet.

Second question: would this ad be any more trustworthy if it were readable?

But it’s what you have to do when the old hole fills up with sewage! Dig a new one, start filling it up.

Although, we are missing a critical step: we should shovel some lime into the old one and cover it up with dirt, rather than leaving it open and reeking.

First thought: I should buy this book. Perfect for Father’s Day.

Second thought: what if I turn a page, and there I am? Or somebody like me.

I think I’ll refrain from finding out.

My sympathies to this woman’s recent struggles, but I am reminded why I despise royalty.

Nope, I didn’t say that at all. It was more like muttering under my breath at the annoying overdose of saccharine and non-news in the news. Fuck off, Kate, and take your annoying kids with you.

Rupert can stop simpering over this one family, too.

(It’s nothing personal, I just get so annoyed at empty propaganda and the excesses of tabloid “journalism”.)

I love this idea out of any country other than the US.

Last month this Scottish city — filled with medieval spires and shadowed by the looming castle on the hill said to have inspired the Harry Potter books — made a startlingly modern decision. Edinburgh’s city council voted to ban fossil fuel advertisements on city property, undermining the ability of not only oil companies, but also car manufacturers, airlines and cruise ships, to promote their products. The ban targeted arms manufacturers as well.

Edinburgh is not alone. Amsterdam and Sydney have cracked down on advertisements for fossil fuels and high-emissions products. France also limited the promotion of coal, gas and hydrogen made from fossil fuels. Even the United Nations Secretary General, António Guterres, has joined in, endorsing a ban on fossil fuel ads this month in a speech in New York this month: “Stop the Mad Men from fueling the madness.”

A fantastically potent tactic, I think. It’s not just that the general public will lose a source of misinformation and propaganda for practices that harm the world, but that media will lose an incentive to peddle petroleum products. What would the news be like if mass media were no longer motivated to downplay ideas, like climate change, because big corporations were no longer sensitive to specific kinds of advertisers?

Here in the US I’d also like to see a ban on advertising pharmaceuticals. I don’t watch broadcast television much at all anymore, but one of the reasons is the infuriatingly stupid ads for drugs. Killing car commercials and Ozempic ads would have interesting side effects on the commentary out of the news room.