Bette Midler Updates Woody Guthrie’s ‘All You Fascists Bound To Lose’

Let’s turn the screws, you perverts bound to lose

Add Bette Midler to the growing ranks of musical artists offering up protest songs for our current crisis. 

Midler has updated Woody Guthrie’s classic, All You Fascists Bound To Lose, with new lyrics hitting many of headlines and moments we’re all living through under the current administration. Here’s a sample:

We’ll battle ICE together until they cut and run
Just like in Minneapolis and when the midterms come
You’re bound to lose, you fascists bound to lose

All you fascists bound to lose
All you fascists bound to lose
I said all you fascists bound to lose
You’re bound to lose, you fascists bound to lose

To hell with all the cowards who hide behind their masks
We’re gonna win the midterms, we’re coming for his ass!
He knows it too, that bastard’s bound to lose

Trying to distract us from the Epstein files
You gas and beat and murder us, protectin’ pedophiles
Let’s turn the screws, you perverts bound to lose

Give it a listen. Share it around. The fascists may be bound to lose, but everyone has something to gain when they do

You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.

 

Baseball Is Back

Play Ball!

Baseball is back. Or so they tell me. Opening day kicks off today and the long hard march begins to whatever the season will yield.

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While I primarily root for the Chicago Cubs I’m a baseball fan and like with most sports I follow, I’m most interested in a good game more than I am rooting for a particular team or matchup. I like to see close contests and races, not runaway division races.

I follow the White Sox as well, because hey, I live in a town with both American and National League clubs. Interleague play  between the American and National leagues has taken some of the specialness out of that. And since the White Sox have felt like a minor league team for so long it’s a change in the game that works in my favor.

Chicago papers used to have great baseball writers. Those days are gone. But this column from Paul Sullivan caught my eye as we head into the season. I don’t think it ranks up there with the best of years ago, but  Baseball Returns After A Long, Hard Winter, And We’re Grateful To Welcome It Home, does sum up how most Chicagoans feel as we approach opening day in a game that keeps changing, but never changes.

But for much of the next seven months, a three-hour game provides a temporary respite from spiking gas prices, growing airport lines, conflicts abroad and madness at home. Any chance to ignore the real world and immerse ourselves into a fantasy world, even one with nonstop gambling ads, is most welcome.

No, the game is not as good as it used to be. Just ask your parents.

He captures the feelings, the changes, and the feelings about the changes well. When he says radio is still the best medium to enjoy the game, I agree. I listen to the radio broadcast most times I’m watching a game because TV commentators are more carnival barkers than they are baseball announcers.

It also reminds me of my younger years when that was the only way I could catch a game except for the Game of The Week on Saturdays. That always felt like a terrible Catch 22. I’d rather be out playing the game on a Saturday afternoon and would have to give that up to watch a game with my grandfather.

When cable TV game along to our neck of the woods, so too did Chicago’s WGN which brought Cubs games into my world. So I became a long suffering fan long before I moved to the Windy City in an apartment eight blocks from Wrigley Field.

The Cubs were terrible then, and if you waited until after the beginning of the third inning you could saunter into ball park and watch the rest of the game without a ticket. A friend and I did that often.

Of course living in Chicago in later years and watching the Cubs finally win a World Series a decade ago was one of the sports highlights of my life. Those were certainly different days in what seems like a different world.

But a triple is still one of the most exciting plays in sports. The games are back. Let’s hope for some good ones and a few triples along the way.

Play ball!

You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.

 

Paying The Pump

Up, up, and away

We’re back home after spending five days and nights with the grandkids. We drive a well worn path out and back, always stopping at the same places for whatever fuel we need for the car or our bodies.

Thanks to the war that isn’t a war that’s almost over, unless it’s just beginning, it was not really a surprise what we were seeing for gas prices. These before (on the left) and after shots are from our stop on the way out of town and our way back in.

CleanShot 2026-03-25 at 17.48.31@2x.

That’s quite an increase in five days. We typically stop at truck stops for refueling, and listening to truck drivers complain in the restrooms this trip was a lesson in invective. Although that didn’t seem to have an effect on what felt like typical truck traffic.

For the record, on our last trip before this one prior to whatever we’re calling what’s happening in Iran, we paid $2.69 a gallon at this stop.

You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.

 

Last Night with the Kiddos

We’re heading back home in the morning after spending a few days helping my daughter out with her kids while our son-in-law is away on work. Damn, they grow up fast and furious. 

Lots of big hugs and kisses after family movie night tonight watching How To Train Your Dragon.

We’ll be back at it again soon, but it never feels like it’s soon enough.

Flip Flopping In The Fuck You Fours

There’s zero harm when my grandson decides to turn on a dime from one story to the next. One emotion to another. He’s a kid. It’s cute. It’s funny. Often hysterical.

That said, at times his gyrations remind me of those of the idiot in the White House. Both know everyone is paying attention and crave it. My grandson will grow out of this. Most kids do. When adults stay stuck in that mode, it’s always trouble on scales large and small.

I can’t speak as to why the decaying sociopath destroying everything in his path, and those who enable him, seem to think this behavior is okay, beyond theorizing that there are more than I could have ever imagined like him to make me shudder. I’ve tried to understand it and can’t. I just know at some point what’s cute in kids is misery for the rest of us on this planet now that we’ve let this tyrant stay in his terrible two’s and fuck you fours.

It upsets me that I can’t enjoy these moments with my grandson without thinking about this.

You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.

Sunday Morning Reading

Epidemics of reading, opinions, and the wild ways of artists

Spending a few days with the grandkids this weekend and into next week, yet still managed to find some time for a little Sunday Morning Reading. It’s a lesson in learning, watching as they begin to put it all together, compared to so many of the adults trying to own the world who seem stuck and unable to grow, or suffer some sort of reversion. With kids, it’s innocence. The rest of us have no excuses. Just stories. Makes you wonder what turns that on and off.

In the large discussion around screen time and attention spans, Carlo Iacono says What We Think Is A Decline In Literacy Is A Design Problem.The section looking back to “reading epidemics”  in the 18th and 19th century are more illuminating than any screen.

The First Casualty of Trump’s War In Iran Was The Truth. So says David Remick. That’s always true in warm even before the first bullets fly. But it’s become the truth in all aspects of how we try to survive together. Funny how we revert back to our early childhood ways of dealing with the world before disgarding the truth was supposedly trained out of us.

Everybody has an opinion about this war that we can’t call a war. Here’s one that I found interesting from Frida Ghitis. Check out What Everyone Gets Wrong About Iran.

David Todd McCarty tells us How I Learned To Hate AI. The more you know…

Chris Castle takes a look at The Great White House AI Copyright Dodge: Managed Decline, Global Spillover, And The Rise Of The Chief Personhood Denier.Hat tip to Stan Stewart for this one.

With everyone focused on The Strait of Hormus, Richard Bookstabler takes a look at our financial straits in I Predicted The 2008 Financial Crisis. What Is Coming May Be Worse. For the record, I didn’t predict the last one, but anyone with two nickels to rub together can predict the outcome of the one we’re heading into.

I did any number of odd (in all senses of the word) jobs in my early life supporting myself as an artist. Emily Watlington takes a look at The Wild Ways Artists Have Made Their Livings, From The Renaissance To Today.

Notes From A Burmese Prison is a comic by Danny Fenster and Amy Kurzweil. More than worth your time. Extrapolate the specific location and situation to any troublesome moment and remember whoever the guards are, you can’t trust them.

(Photo by the author)

If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. If you’d like more click on the Sunday Morning Reading link in the category column to check out what’s been shared on Sunday’s past. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.

AntiFreeze: A Web Based Solution To Track ICE

Life and the web finds a way

Remember ICEBlock? The app created for iPhone users to track and alert others of ICE activities nearby? You know the one that Apple and Google blocked. There were several others that got blocked as well.

In this moment of something new and horrible to distract attention from the latest happening almost every hour, ICE activities might have faded from the headlines, but those activities haven’t ceased.

joshuahacks has created a progressive web app called AntiFreeze. From his post on Daily Kos:

AntiFreeze lets anyone anonymously report an ICE sighting. When someone submits a report, every user within five miles gets a push notification on their phone in real time. If ICE is spotted four blocks from your house while you’re making dinner, your phone buzzes and tells you.

But it’s not just alerts… Open the app and you can see a map or list of every reported sighting within 25 miles from the last 72 hours. So even if you missed a notification, you can check what’s been happening in your area before you head to work, drop your kids off at school, or go to the grocery store.

No login. No account. No personal data collected. Completely anonymous.

You can read all about it and find out how to use it on that post. As the developer and author says, “It works. It’s free. And nobdy can take it away from you.”

Who’d a thunk that the web could be the answer?

(images are from screenshots of The AntiFreeze app and website

You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.

 

The Potholes of the Internet

“Your Frustration Is The Product”

Some call it enshittification. I largely agree with that when it comes to the Internet. But that’s true in most endeavors that result in building something. Anything made for good, can and will be used in ways that turn it into a shitty experience.

20160824 121009.

I’m not just talking about advertising and how it’s junked up the web. I’m also talking about human nature, and how there’s a part of too many of us that see something wonderfully created to solve a problem, who then consequently turn it into a range of unintended consequences that leave us mourning our losses at the expense of somebody else’s gain.

Any one of us could run down a list of things in each of our lives that demonstrate that history, so I won’t even begin to spool one out. Have at it yourselves.

In the majority of instances the road to ruin is typically a path worn thin by greed and there’s never been a road we travel that doesn’t eventually fill with potholes. But back to the Internet and enshittification.

If this excellent post by Shubham Bose called The 49MB Web Page doesn’t make you yearn for a simpler age, I’m not sure what will, assuming you were alive and on the Internet before things went south. Remember, there’s a generation for which the way things are today on the Internet is the way things always have been.

Here’s Bose’s lede:

If active distraction of readers of your own website was an Olympic Sport, news publications would top the charts every time.

I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. It took two minutes before the page settled. And then you wonder why every sane tech person has an adblocker installed on systems of all their loved ones.

It is the same story across top publishers today.

The entire piece is worth your time if for no other reason than that misery loves company. We’re all in that same boat and there does’t seem to be any shoreline in view, given how the waters are being churned up anew by Artificial Intelligence.

As Bose puts it:

Your frustration is the product.

Back in the day I can remember getting a credit for complaining that my newspaper was delivered wet and unreadable. Good luck finding someone to express your frustration to these days.

(Photo by the author)

You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.

 

Took A Little Trip Into The Theater of the Mind

Take me to the water

My wife and I took a little trip downtown today to check out David Byrne and Mala Gaonkar’s immersive theater production, Theater of the Mind. I’ll be writing my thoughts up about it soon. I will say it’s quite an experience. 

Until then, enjoy the juxtaposition of these signs and banners for Theater of the Mind and the next door World of Whirlpool. As we walked up I found the proximity more than amusing, and somehow fitting given the body of Byrne’s work and the fact that both are housed in historic Reid Murdoch Building adjacent to the Chicago River.

The latter is not a theater experience. But then again, who knows? 

Below is a promo for Theater of the Mind.

You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.