The Pig City News Weekly Register Hoedown Quarterly Review Times a Thousand: The Podcast

著者： Robert Long Foreman will die if people don't listen to his podcast.
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  • It is now mandatory for all US citizens to have podcasts, with episodes coming out at least twice a month. If I don't achieve a certain unspecified number of listeners, I will be executed. Help me. Please.

    robertlong4man.substack.com
    RobertLong4man
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It is now mandatory for all US citizens to have podcasts, with episodes coming out at least twice a month. If I don't achieve a certain unspecified number of listeners, I will be executed. Help me. Please.

robertlong4man.substack.com
RobertLong4man
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  • Badolescence

    Badolescence
    2025/04/03
    Late at night last week in another country, my family and I talked with a Canadian couple about what America has come to. We agreed that what’s happening is bad, and I listed the good things that come to mind when I think of Canada: the Kids in the Hall, Alice Munro, Sidney Crosby, Leonard Cohen. “Where would we be without Leonard Cohen?” I said—though, to be honest, without Leonard Cohen I wouldn’t be different. Probably not at all. I like his songs, but I don’t know them well, not like I know the work of, say, Dave Foley, Bruce McCulloch, and the other Kids in the Hall. If you could take everyone who is currently dismantling what passes for our federal government, and force them to watch one movie, read one book, listen to one album, spend an hour with one painting, or engage with an artifact from another artistic medium, in the hope that it might fix them somehow, and pull their souls back from the brink of hell—which is where they are currently going, and trying desperately to pull us all with them—then what would that book, movie, album, painting, poem, or whatever, be?I, for one, would make them watch this 1982 film of a Randy Newman show that features appearances by Ry Cooder and Linda Ronstadt.The government dismantlers would have to watch the whole thing. The only way it works is if you watch the whole thing.Would it work? Would it solve the problem of them? No, not most of them. I know that. Maybe the better question is this: when this is all over—and it will be over, someday, after more people die, and we all suffer a while longer, maybe a lot longer—how do we fix those who are responsible for all that is currently going down? Let’s imagine they can be fixed. Let’s project a future in which there are consequences for those who do what are truly the worst things. What does rehabilitation look like, for the lunatic who wants all our kids to get measles, so that only the strongest of them survive? If they put me in charge of trying to fix our current Secretary of Health and Human Services, I would force him into detox for six months and subject him to mandatory viewings of that Randy Newman show and the 1966 John Frankenheimer film Seconds, in which an unhappy man is given another chance at his adulthood, and can pursue his dream of being an artist, rather than a guy behind a desk at a bank. Mere days into his new life, he finds that despite how he now looks like Rock Hudson and can paint all day long and have all the passionate sex he wants, he is still miserable. The cabinet member in my care would have to read “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” more than one time. He would have to read Song of Solomon and do chores.I would probably not, in the name of solving his poisoned soul and mind, show that broken man the hottest new TV show on Netflix, the British show that's called Adolescence. I don’t think it would help get the job done.If you don't know, Adolescence is a scripted show about a young teenage boy who murders a young teenage girl. The show spends its four episodes contemplating what led him to do that. It points fingers at the culture at large, the rhetoric that adolescent boys are exposed to via Instagram and elsewhere. Andrew Tate’s name comes up at least one time. Andrew Tate, if you don’t know, is an ugly man who brags online about treating women horribly in real life. I doubt he can be fixed.Adolescence is, if nothing else, an interesting TV show. I don’t regret watching it. There is no denying the feats that it performs, with every hour-long episode consisting of one continuous shot. In the first installment, we start with a couple of detectives in a car, discussing apples, and follow them to the suspect’s house, where a SWAT team, or something like it, battering-rams the door and holds the family at gunpoint. They take the kid to the police station and interrogate him. As they go from place to place, via car, there are no cuts in the action. It’s really something. The creators of the show must have had to choreograph everything the actors did with great meticulousness, especially on that first episode, with its police station full of people who walk through the frame in one direction or another. If even one of those blokes made a wrong move, like at minute forty-seven, they would have had to start all the way back again at the beginning. The fourth episode shows us the family of the adolescent boy, who is away in prison, a year after he committed the murder. They are getting by and still trying to wrap their heads around what happened. In some of the final minutes, the mother and father do their best to determine where they went wrong, how they brought up a kid who would commit murder at age thirteen, and what elements of the outside world must have guided his hand as he stabbed his victim many times. When that last episode ended, I felt a little bit like I had just watched an extended and technically impressive version of the anti-drug public ...
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    26 分
  • Stories Are Made out of Eggs

    Stories Are Made out of Eggs
    2025/03/12
    Incrediwife and I had the sort of conversation folks like us are having now. We discussed what new breakfasts we can eat, to replace the ones we usually have, which are made using several eggs. We are not egg fiends, but we consume them most mornings, often with kale or bell peppers scrambled in there. I love cuisine.Now, thanks to the ghouls who are running our country, many of whom have never shopped at a supermarket, because they have always been so rich they have had others do everything for them, a dozen eggs in Kansas City cost $7.50. We have to moderate our egg consumption so we don’t lose too much money.Ours, I realize, is not yet an extraordinary hardship. We have tofu in our refrigerator at all times. A tofu scramble is always an option. We like oatmeal. I have a vegan brunch cookbook. Incrediwife, our kids, and I are prepared for this moment.I don’t know, though, what the next moment will be like. Will more people take the turn we have, and start making tofu scrambles instead of cooking eggs? If so, that could make tofu scarce. What will the next shortage be? And what’s going to happen if thousands more retirees stop getting the Social Security checks that have kept them from going hungry and unhoused? That’s a much bigger problem than my household not having eggs. I thought about getting a chicken coop and putting chickens in it. Chickens lay eggs. We could feed the chickens whatever we want, and take their eggs from them despite their protestations. We don’t have much of a backyard, but we have no neighbors in back of our house. There are only the woods out there. We could handle chickens. They make nice sounds.I looked up chicken coops online, and my first thought, when I saw this one on Chewy.com, went something like, No way. I cannot imagine confining chickens to such a limited space for their entire lives, strictly so I can continue stuffing my face with their eggs. They would have no room to move around! They would not feel joy. It’s without a doubt one of the most absurd thoughts I have had recently. Because, you know, chickens would be lucky to live in a small coop in my backyard. It would be about a hundred thousand times better than the places most of them live. You know? So, yes, eggs cost too much, and I expect things to get a lot worse. Things can always get worse. And they will.But sometimes, when I enter a room, and one of our cats is there, I say hello to him. You’re allowed to say hello without expecting a response. I don’t expect a response from the cats.And starting a paragraph with a conjunction is a great way to abruptly change the subject in your newsletter. But I am so tired of watching scenes in TV shows where one character tells another about their shared history. They retell a scene from their past, and the scene they retell is one they were both present for, which both of them remember. It happens on A Thousand Blows. It happens on Yellowjackets, and probably every TV show. Even the good ones do this thing that drives me up the wall. I wanted to provide an example of this in action, but when I tried googling it, not expecting much, or knowing how to describe what I’m going on about in a succinct google search, I found a website that’s meant to help people whose televisions have recently begun to address them specifically. Like, the programs aren’t for a broad audience of people anymore, the TV shows are instead directed at this one person. Their TVs are trying to tell them something important through the TV shows. It is apparently a symptom of mental illness, to become convinced that the TV is doing that. I know why people on television tell each other about things from the past that both of them remember with clarity and don’t need to have explained to them. They are speaking to one another for the sake of the viewers. They are telling each other things they both already know so that whoever is listening will learn about them. It’s a way for the writers to demonstrate for whoever is watching who these characters are, where they came from, and how and how well they know one another. It is a symptom of what some people like to call “character development.” And it is not only unnecessary, it’s a boring thing to sit through. It’s a way to check a certain kind of box, a way to help those who write in teams, the way TV writers do, feel like they are doing their jobs. If you’re writing a story and it’s going well, you don’t have to go out of your way to develop characters. That’s what’s supposed to happen in the course of telling your story. We learn who the characters are through their actions and from how they speak. If you feel like you need to stop and have a character explain to the audience who they are, that’s a sign that of one of three things: * You are William Shakespeare, it’s the sixteenth or seventeenth century, and the rules are different because it’s the past and you’re writing for the stage.* You’re ...
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    20 分
  • You Have Got To Be Squidding Me

    You Have Got To Be Squidding Me
    2025/02/25
    I have continued to use Little Red Book a.k.a. Xiaohongshu a.k.a. Rednote. It’s the Chinese version of TikTok that got popular in the USA when it seemed like TikTok was going to shut down. I never liked TikTok, but I enjoy Rednote, because I can’t understand what anyone is saying and I can’t determine how nauseatingly bad all of the jokes are. I am pleased to report that a comment I left on a video on Rednote has gotten more than 200 likes. The number is climbing all of the time. Soon they’re going to call me Mr. Worldwide because of my universally celebrated fame, all because of the comment I left on this one video.This is the story of how I left the comment on the video. I was watching footage of a man breaking up logs of wood, using a kind of whirling drill thing. It looks like the drill bit that’s on the front of the vehicle Shredder uses to travel from underground to the surface in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon. Sometimes he would bring Krang with him.On the video, in English, I commented, “please put my head on this.” Now, every time I open the app, I find that a dozen people have liked that comment. Sometimes it’s more than that. It’s an extremely popular comment. But I don’t really want anyone to split my head open with an electric thing, I was pretending.I have also found a man who does livestreams at night, which is daytime here in the USA, of cats and dogs he has taken in. Someone posted in English during a livestream that he rescued them, that they’re all strays. They gather in this outdoor space, and there’s always a pot of something simmering in the foreground, while further back he slices raw meat and fish and feeds them to the cats and dogs. He wears nose plugs. It must smell like a nightmare, all the dirty animals and dead flesh pulsating in the hot Chinese night.I want to travel to China and meet this man. I want to help him feed the dogs and cats. But it’s possible I should stay at home instead and write something about the leafy greens that are in the simmering pot. I wonder what sort of inner life I can extrapolate for those vegetables. Who are their parents? What did they want for their own lives, before they ended up in that pot?Using Rednote reminds me of what it used to be like to use the Internet. I heard Chris Hayes, of all people, talking on a podcast about how in the early Internet days going online could sometimes feel like the moments after you check into a hotel in a new city, when you hit the street to go and get a cup of coffee and see what kind of people you see, whereas now using the Internet always seems to feel more like getting stuck in traffic. And I wouldn’t necessarily put it the same way—going online for me has never quite matched the excitement of being in a new place like that. But using an app that’s based in another country, which has very few American users, does remind me of what the Internet was supposed to be, before it turned into what it is. I wrote an essay that was published on Friday at The Culture We Deserve. You can read it now. It’s about the novel Wieland, by Charles Brockden Brown, which was the subject of my master’s thesis, which I wrote twenty years ago. You know what I can’t believe? I can’t believe the nurse at my doctor’s office laughed at me when I said I wanted to be the healthiest person she’s ever seen. I said I wanted to feel like a man who has something to live for. I told her someone in this world had to lay it all on the line, and that it might as well be me. She laughed for at least the third time that visit. I said nothing could happen anymore unless something took place that was real, that you could feel with your hands. She laughed even harder. The nurse did laugh in real life, though, when I said I aspire to be someone who smokes cannabis all day long and floats through his life without a care in the world. I confessed that I have too much work to do, to be like that. My kids would be against it, I’d probably feel nauseous a lot, and I just wouldn’t act like myself. Also I need to drive places, and I don’t want to do that under the influence. No one would be happy with me if I were like that, but still I kind of wish I could be that kind of person, who’s like the physical embodiment of calm and feeling good. The nurse walked out of the room laughing and said something to the doctor, I think that she thought I was funny. I couldn’t really hear her. She may have recommended that the doctor inject me with Lethal Injection Fluid and get this mess over with once and for all. Although I am rarely calm, and if I am the physical embodiment of anything it’s the sound of Jell-O being fired out of a machinegun, at least I am not a coffeehouse that’s owned by a church. The Kansas City subreddit had a thread going the other day about coffeehouses in the city’s northland, where I live, being owned by churches and Christian groups. One of them advertises that they ...
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    31 分

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