Hayley Williams states in a new interview with Clash Magazine that people should feel welcome at her upcoming tour and makes clear… “I don’t want racists around, and I don’t want sexist people around, and I don’t want people there who think that trans people are a burden.” pic.twitter.com/vuTiweBFez
I made the mistake of reading the comments on a Facebook article tonight.
Hayley Williams, a singer I had never heard of (more on this shortly) told Clash magazine that she doesn’t want any racist, sexist, or transphobic people to attend her concerts.
Since Hayley Williams’ statement is so vague as to be meaningless, the comments devolved into a war between older folks who smugly asked “Who?” and younger folks who seemed to regard Hayley Williams as some profound thinker.
Although my Gen X instinct is to yawn and roll my eyes at yet another instance of celebrity political preening, the aforementioned trend of the comments raises a question: when is it okay to leave youth culture behind?
In 1985, I thought that Def Leppard and Rush were the most important musical forces in Western Civilization. My parents (then right around 40) knew nothing of them. And my grandparents (then in their 60s) barely knew that MTV existed.
No—scratch that. My grandparents probably didn’t know that MTV existed. And they had certainly never seen a music video.
I’m going to suggest that there comes a time in adulthood when it is perfectly permissible to stop keeping up with youth music. I don’t feel ashamed that I had never heard of Hayley Williams. Nor do I tout this lacuna as a badge of honor.
I’m 57, and I continue to learn. I read multiple books each month, and I study new foreign languages. But I’m at a point in life where knowing the latest pop culture icon just doesn’t seem as important as it did in 1985.
Young people, for their part, should neither ridicule nor resent this. Let me ask the youngsters out there: do you really want 50- and 60-something adults to have a say in what is “popular” on the youth scene?
My guess is that you would prefer us to stay far, far away. And the vast majority of us are happy to leave youth culture to the young.
Who should pay on a first date? This question has been coming up a lot in my social media feeds in recent weeks. I must therefore conclude that many people are in a quandary. And since daters tend to skew young, I’ll also assume that young people are especially in a bind over this.
Many young men seem to fear that the money they spend on a first date is a sunk cost that may lead nowhere. The young lady may decide she’s not interested in you, or the dreaded, “I like you a lot—as a friend.”
This can, indeed, be the outcome. But this is nothing new. Young men faced the same range of possibilities in the 1990s, when I was a twentysomething. Such outcomes were possible in the 1980s, when I was a high school student. They were the same in the 1970s, and so on.
A first date is not, and has never been, a sure thing.
And yet, men do the inviting, and men do the paying. I’m not going to play a dirge on my violin for you because you’re a man and you end up paying for first dates. Just like I’m not going to play a violin dirge for women who complain that they must bear the burden of childbirth. Nature—and that includes human nature—is not egalitarian. There are downsides to being a man, there are downsides to being a woman. Deal with it.
Nevertheless, a little common sense can mitigate some of the economic “risk” involved in a first date.
I’m not a gambler, but an occasional (and financially solvent) gambler once told me: don’t gamble money that you can’t afford to lose.
When applied to the first date, this means: cheerfully pay, if you’re a man, but keep the first date modest in scope. The details of this will obviously depend on your age, working status, region, and socioeconomic level.
No, this is not the name of a new science fiction story I’m working on.
Anyone who owns a WordPress site has noticed a sharp increase in traffic from China and Singapore since early October. These visits have a one hundred percent bounce rate. They don’t represent actual users, but scraping bots.
I would support a total Internet firewall between the USA and China. While bad traffic comes from all over the globe, a disproportionate amount of it comes from China, Russia, Turkey, and Brazil.
Since the Chinese government doesn’t allow its citizens to read what the 老外 have to say anyway, this would be no real loss for the average human Internet user in China. And it would save the rest of us a lot of headaches. Just saying!
I was in the locker room of my gym this afternoon. A man in his early sixties (just a few years older than me) was desperately searching for his cell phone.
I felt sorry for him. I helped him out by checking the area immediately around his locker.
This story had a happy ending. His phone, it turned out, was in his gym bag all the time.
The two of us got to talking about how those damn cell phones have become yet one more thing that a person needs to keep track of.
We were both old enough to remember when a man only had to keep track of his wallet and his keys. Life was so much simpler back then.
But nowadays, the loss of a cell phone can be just as life-changing as the loss of either a wallet or keys/car fob. So you had better not lose or misplace it.
In 1985, no one had to worry about losing their cell phone or having their email hacked. Cybercrime did not exist. Nor did the many neuroses associated with social media.
I don’t plan to abandon my iPhone anytime soon. But it’s worth noting: twenty-first-century technology enslaves us as much as it frees us. There was a time, not so long ago, when we happily did without all of it.
“The Lottery” (1948) is one of those short stories that generations of high school students have read. And sure enough, I read “The Lottery” as a high school student in the 1980s.
I recently reread the story. “The Lottery” packs a powerful punch in less than 4,000 words. Having read this story, no one can doubt Shirley Jackson’s skills as a writer.
(Likewise, I won’t summarize the story’s plot here. If you haven’t read the story yet, then do so now and then come back to this essay.)
Shirley Jackson died in 1965 at the age of 48. We can only imagined what she might have accomplished, had she been given another three or four decades to write.
Shirley Jackson
“The Lottery” seems to imply that sinister things are happening in small-town America. Stephen King, who has cited Jackson as an influence, has often written about the evil fishbowl of the American small town. Many of King’s novels and stories—‘Salem’s Lot, “Children of the Corn”, Under the Dome, etc.—reprise this theme.
Shirley Jackson was born in 1916, and Stephen King was born in 1947. I was born in 1968, and I can’t say for certain what life in small-town America might have been like in say, 1959. I have no firsthand experience of that world.
Throughout my lifetime, however, the big cities have been the epicenters of mindless violence in American life. Crime rates are almost uniformly higher in our big cities. Our big cities are often sources of grassroots mass violence: the Los Angeles riots of 1992 and the urban riots of 2020 being but a few salient examples.
Here in Cincinnati (near my home) a group of inner-city residents beat several people half to death over this previous summer.
Since 2020, residents of big blue cities have famously fled urban states like New York and California for more bucolic settings in states like Texas and Tennessee.
None of the above diminishes the impact of “The Lottery”. But perhaps this story, now published almost 80 years ago, needs to be “reimagined”. It would be interesting if a short story-writer were to pen a 21st-century version of “The Lottery”, set not in a small town, but in inner-city New York or Los Angeles.
For all you writers and aspiring writers out there, consider this a free writing prompt.
Regular readers will know that I’m a language aficionado, and I encourage others to learn foreign languages.
Language-related news stories, moreover, tend to catch my attention. This is especially true when I have a connection to the story, however tenuous.
The son of a woman I attended grade school and high school with has recently gone viral because of his Spanish study. Bad Bunny’s music has apparently motivated the young man to learn the language.
First he went viral on TikTok. Then the mainstream media picked up his story. The above video clip is his recent interview with Telemundo.
This young language learner’s mother and I are friends on Facebook. It would probably be most accurate to describe her as a friendly acquaintance in real life. We were a year apart in school, and I haven’t had any in-person contact with her in forty years.
Nevertheless, I remember her as a kind person with a sunny disposition. I’m glad that her son has received this recognition for his efforts.
Tuesday was Veteran’s Day here in the USA. Many GenXers, myself included, had grandparents of the World War II generation.
My maternal grandfather was born in 1921 and enlisted in the US Navy in December 1941, shortly after Pearl Harbor. In the video below, I relate some of the stories he used to tell me.
In the spring of 1981, my seventh-grade English teacher assigned our class “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”, a short story by James Thurber.
The eponymous lead character is a middle-age man who has gone into a trance in his day-to-day life. Walter Mitty is married, but there is no spark between him and his wife. (The Secret Life of Walter Mitty was published in 1939, before the advent of no-fault divorce.) The story’s sparse 2,000-odd words don’t tell us much more about the details of Mitty’s circumstances, but we can easily imagine him as a low- or mid-level administrative employee in an office somewhere.
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947) theatrical release poster
To escape the dullness of his actual life, Walter Mitty retreats into various daydreams. He is alternately a US Navy hydroplane captain, a bomber pilot, and a brilliant surgeon. Mitty’s daydreams of a more glorious existence are inevitably interrupted when someone—often his wife—scolds him for zoning out.
I was twelve years old when I read this story for the first time. I remember enjoying some of the imagery of the story. But as a seventh-grader, I simply could not get my arms around the ennui and resignation that often accompanies middle age. I had not yet been on the planet for thirteen years. Everything was still new to me.
I recently reread Thurber’s story at the age of 57. What a difference 45 years can make, in the way one interprets a work of fiction.
I wouldn’t describe myself as a Walter Mitty. I don’t daydream about flying a navy hydroplane while I’m driving a car, as Mitty does. But at the age of 57, I do understand how a person can become disconnected from the larger world.
American society is forever fixated on the future, and that naturally tends toward a youth obsession. Once you reach a certain age, you tend to fall off society’s radar. People are much more interested in what younger folks are doing.
The flip side of that is that you, in turn, are much less interested in what most other people are talking about. This doesn’t necessarily lead to constant daydreaming. But it does lead to a sense that you are not as fully a part of this world as you once were.
This process might be unavoidable, and it might not be completely unhealthy, either, for aging individuals or for society at-large. Society would never change if the concerns of the same cohort of people forever dominated the zeitgeist. For the individual, gradually losing touch with the world—even in late middle age—might be viewed as an advance preparation for leaving the world entirely.
Anyway, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” has apparently struck a chord with a lot of people since it was first published. The story was made into a movie in 1947, and then again at 2013.
As I posted last week, I decided to change my Internet service from Spectrum to a local Cincinnati-based vendor. My dad is also discontinuing his use of Spectrum, and I’ve been helping him with his changeover details.
Tuesday I called Spectrum to cancel my service. I thought this would be straightforward. I was wrong.
You can’t simply cancel. Spectrum has set up a system whereby you have to answer twenty minutes worth of questions, and endure repetitive sales pitches from a representative who is obviously compelled by management directive.
If you don’t go for the Spectrum sales pitches, Spectrum resorts to scare tactics. Did I know, I was asked, that the company I’d chosen to replace Spectrum would probably damage my utilities when burying the fiberoptics cable? And what about their poor customer service? Wouldn’t I rather cancel my new service and go back to Spectrum?
No, I repeatedly said, and the questions were rephrased to me in a slightly different way.
Needless to say, this all became quite frustrating. But you can’t simply hang up—or your service will never get canceled. It’s the perfect Catch-22.
After going through all that, I thought: what the heck is going on here? I did some research, and it seems that Spectrum has lost around 117,000 residential customers in the second quarter of 2025.
The company’s real problems began last year, when the end of the COVID-era Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) ended government subsidies for low-income households. My guess is that Spectrum then decided to raise rates on its other residential customers. That caused the company to lose even more users.
The CEO of Charter Spectrum, Christopher Winfrey, enjoyed a total compensation package of $89.1 million in 2023.
Last year that was downgraded to a measly $5.75 million because of the Spectrum debacle. So Winfrey is now working for near starvation wages, as he struggles to undo the damage that he and his management team have wrought. (Don’t worry, though—Winfrey’s package still includes personal use of a corporate airplane.)
But Spectrum is not going to have me and my dad as customers. Not even if Christopher Winfrey personally calls me and offers the use of his private jet. (Okay—I might consider if Spectrum throws in the use of Winfrey’s corporate jet. But that’s the only way they’re getting me back.)
-ET
THE EAVESDROPPER
Three of your coworkers are planning a murder. Will you stop them, or become their next victim?
The biopic Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere hit cinemas on October 24. Box office results were underwhelming. On its opening weekend, Deliver Me from Nowhere earned $9.1 million, trailing behind Black Phone 2 and a romcom called Regretting You.
I love horror. But if a horror film is beating your movie, there is most likely a problem somewhere.
I vaguely remember the TRS-80 Pocket Computer. Introduced in 1980, this little device was manufactured and marketed by the Tandy Corporation/Radio Shack. (Every shopping mall in the 1980s had a Radio Shack.) Science fiction author Isaac Asimov appeared in a series of marketing spots for the gadget.
1980 Radio Shack ad featuring the TRS-80 Pocket Computer and Isaac Asimov
I didn’t own a TRS-80 Pocket Computer, however. The MSRP was $169.95. In present-day money, that’s about $670—the cost of a base-model iPhone.
And of course, the TRS-80 Pocket Computer had a minimal functionality when compared to an iPhone. It couldn’t make phone calls, play music, or take photos. It couldn’t surf the Internet—which didn’t yet exist, anyway.
The TRS-80 Pocket Computer was programmable in BASIC (which couldn’t do much for the average consumer). Other than that, it was basically a glorified pocket calculator.
Herein lies an important realization about 1980s tech: it was very expensive, and it didn’t do much. Even if you could afford it, you usually concluded that you could do without it.
Yesterday President Trump announced an additional 10 percent tariff on Canadian products. The president claims to have done this because the Canadian province of Ontario aired an anti-tariff commercial that featured quotes from US President Ronald Reagan.
The commercial uses quotes from a 1987 Reagan speech. Among the included Reagan quotes are “Over the long run… trade barriers hurt every American worker and consumer,” and “When someone says, ‘Let’s impose tariffs on foreign imports,’ it looks like they’re doing the patriotic thing by protecting American products and jobs. And sometimes, for a short while, it works — but only for a short time.”
President Trump called Ontario’s use of the Reagan quotes “dirty play”, and accused the Ontario government of “twisting Reagan’s words”.
I remember Ronald Reagan. Reagan was basically the president I grew up with. I was in junior high when Reagan took office in January 1981, and in college when Reagan left the White House in January 1989.
Throughout the 1980s, the Democratic Party was known as the party of tariffs and protectionism. Congressional Democrats like Dick Gephardt, Dan Rostenkowski, and Lloyd Bentsen repeatedly sponsored bills that would impose protective tariffs on our trading partners, especially Japan and South Korea.
Republicans generally opposed these measures. Opposition to managed trade, and the promotion of free trade, was a consistent theme of both the Reagan and the George H.W. Bush administrations.
Republicans of the 1980s were almost universally opposed to protective tariffs. Democrats were in favor of them.
Once again, folks: I remember watching all of this on TV as it happened. At the time, Americans were concerned about the struggling US domestic automobile and electronics industries. Trade-related debates were constantly in the news.
Outside of Congress and the White House, opinions varied. Critics charged Democrats with being too cozy with the unions (who favored protectionism). Republicans were accused of favoring business and economic growth over the concerns of the working class.
Forty years later, we can have a spirited debate about which side was correct, but two basic facts are indisputable: the Republican Party of the Reagan era was pro-free trade, and tariffs/protectionism was the default Democratic Party position.
There is, of course, another side to this. Neither of our two major political parties is what it was in the 1980s, back when the world made a lot more sense.
The Democratic Party used to be the party of farmers and factory workers. The Republican Party, on the other hand, used to function as a pro-free market, pro-business party.
In the 1980s, then, we had one party to make sure the people were taken care of, and one party to make sure there was money to take care of the people.
Today the Democratic Party is the party of Drag Queen Story Hour, open borders, and other fringe positions. The GOP, meanwhile, has become the party of MAGA, at times indistinguishable from a personality cult. At the national level, I’m not sure if there are any Republicans remaining who are willing to oppose President Trump’s positions when he goes off the rails. (Maybe Rand Paul, a little.)
But here’s the point, where Reagan is concerned. You can choose your own interpretation of history, but you can’t choose your own historical facts. If you want to claim that Reagan and the GOP of the 1980s were wrong about free trade, you can do that. But you can’t deny that Reagan and the GOP of the 1980s were opposed to protective tariffs and in favor of free trade. Those of us who were there remember the truth.
-ET
****
TERMINATION MAN
A ruthless business consultant meets an even more ruthless client. But is he willing to commit murder in order to complete the job?
There is an old chestnut about placing a frog in a kettle filled with room-temperature water. Beneath the kettle is a burner.
If you heat the kettle a little at a time, the frog won’t realize that the water is getting hotter. As a result, the frog will unwittingly remain in the kettle until the water reaches the boiling point, thereby killing it.
(Since this is the internet, please note: I do not recommend boiling frogs; nor were any amphibians harmed in the writing of this post. The above is merely a metaphor.)
After dabbling with dial-up Prodigy internet services for a few years, I enrolled with Time Warner Cable for broadband internet access in 2003. Time Warner Cable did an excellent job, providing quality service for a reasonable price.
How I wrote a horror novel called Revolutionary Ghosts
Or…
Can an ordinary teenager defeat the Headless Horseman, and a host of other vengeful spirits from America’s revolutionary past?
The big idea
I love history, and I love supernatural horror tales.“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” was therefore always one of my favorite short stories. This classic tale by Washington Irving describes how a Hessian artillery officer terrorized the young American republic several decades after his death.
The Hessian was decapitated by a Continental Army cannonball at the Battle of White Plains, New York, on October 28, 1776. According to some historical accounts, a Hessian artillery officer really did meet such an end at the Battle of White Plains. I’ve read several books about warfare in the 1700s and through the Age of Napoleon. Armies in those days obviously did not have access to machine guns, flamethrowers, and the like. But those 18th-century cannons could inflict some horrific forms of death, decapitation among them.
I was first exposed to the “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” via the 1949 Disney film of the same name. The Disney adaptation was already close to 30 years old, but still popular, when I saw it as a kid sometime during the 1970s.
Headless Horsemen from around the world
While doing a bit of research for Revolutionary Ghosts, I discovered that the Headless Horseman is a folklore motif that reappears in various cultures throughout the world.
In Irish folklore, the dullahan or dulachán (“dark man”) is a headless, demonic fairy that rides a horse through the countryside at night. The dullahan carries his head under his arm. When the dullahan stops riding, someone dies.
Scottish folklore includes a tale about a headless horseman named Ewen. Ewen wasbeheaded when he lost a clan battle at Glen Cainnir on the Isle of Mull. His death prevented him from becoming a chieftain. He roams the hills at night, seeking to reclaim his right to rule.
Finally, in English folklore, there is the 14th century epic poem, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”. After Gawain kills the green knight in living form (by beheading him) the knight lifts his head, rides off, and challenges Gawain to a rematch the following year.
But Revolutionary Ghosts is focused on the Headless Horseman of American lore: the headless horseman who chased Ichabod Crane through the New York countryside in the mid-1790s.
The Headless Horseman isn’t the only historical spirit to stir up trouble in the novel. John André, the executed British spy, makes an appearance, too. (John André was a real historical figure.)
I also created the character of Marie Trumbull, a Loyalist whom the Continental Army sentenced to death for betraying her country’s secrets to the British. But Marie managed to slit her own throat while still in her cell, thereby cheating the hangman. Marie Trumbull was a dark-haired beauty in life. In death, she appears as a desiccated, reanimated corpse. She carries the blade that she used to take her own life, all those years ago.
Oh, and Revolutionary Ghosts also has an army of spectral Hessian soldiers. I had a lot of fun with them!
The Spirit of ’76
Most of the novel is set in the summer of 1976. An Ohio teenager, Steve Wagner, begins to sense that something strange is going on near his home. There are slime-covered hoofprints in the grass. There are unusual sounds on the road at night. People are disappearing.
Steve gradually comes to an awareness of what is going on….But can he convince anyone else, and stop the Headless Horseman, before it’s too late?
I decided to set the novel in 1976 for a number of reasons. First of all, this was the year of the American Bicentennial. The “Spirit of ’76 was everywhere in 1976. That created an obvious tie-in with the American Revolution.
Nineteen seventy-six was also a year in which Vietnam, Watergate, and the turmoil of the 1960s were all recent memories. The mid-1970s were a time of national anxiety and pessimism (kind of like now). The economy was not good. This was the era of energy crises and stagflation.
Reading the reader reviews of Revolutionary Ghosts, I am flattered to get appreciative remarks from people who were themselves about the same age as the main character in 1976:
“…I am 62 years old now and 1976 being the year I graduated high school, I remember it pretty well. Everything the main character mentions (except the ghostly stuff), I lived through and remember. So that was an added bonus for me.”
“I’m 2 years younger than the main character so I could really relate to almost every thing about him.”
I’m actually a bit younger than the main character. In 1976 I was eight years old. But as regular readers of this blog will know, I’m nostalgic by nature. I haven’t forgotten the 1970s or the 1980s, because I still spend a lot of time in those decades.
If you like the 1970s, you’ll find plenty of nostalgic nuggets in Revolutionary Ghosts, like Bicentennial Quarters, and the McDonald’s Arctic Orange Shakes of 1976.
***
Also, there’s something spooky about the past, just because it is the past. As L.P. Hartley said, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
For me, 1976 is a year I can clearly remember. And yet—it is shrouded in a certain haziness. There wasn’t nearly as much technology. Many aspects of daily life were more “primitive” then.
It isn’t at all difficult to believe that during that long-ago summer, the Headless Horseman might have come back from the dead to terrorize the American heartland…
Whenever I go to Japan, a book haul is always near the top of my to-do list. Japanese-language books are not impossible to acquire in the United States; but it’s seldom as convenient as placing an order on Amazon.
This title would loosely translate as History of the Showa Era that Citizens Don’t Know.
As the cover image suggests, there are numerous chapters about the Japanese Imperial Navy and World War II.
One of the many rewards of learning a foreign language well is that your potential reading list will be vastly expanded. Some of my favorite books are Japanese-language titles.
