Yikes! What an embarrassment of Mikes!

+1 Mountain Hawk (from a Lehigh alum)

I have no idea what bars you’re going to but if you’re not getting itemized receipts, I’m a liiiitle worried for you. Unless you’re really talking about a shitkicker dive bar (which i am into! i just only know those as cash joints). Everywhere I’ve lived and visited I get itemized bar receipts without having to ask.

The idea of habitually walking on a tab is weirdly baffling to me. I’ve been to a strong mix of places that do and don’t return cards, all across New England, PA, and the South. Drunk or not (and policy or not, to be honest) I guess I always close out because it’s...uh? Tidy?

Dan buried the most important part, which is that the Bangor, PA mayor’s bootleg shirt is an “UNDERDAWGS” shirt that also features that dumb, ugly Pats blockhead thingy getting pissed on.

I also teach comp (not quite as long as you) and I’m taking the dive this semester by teaching a themed class focusing around narrative. Its a good way to talk about the rhetoric of, say, folk tales but also the mind-bending semantic insanity of dissimulating political discourse. Here’s hoping it won’t get me fired!

Abso-fucking-lutely nailed it. Because when you do try to engage one of these people on a topic like this, they have a callow set of responses that only make sense when you realize they truly do not give an actual shit. The reason “emails” and “uranium” and “Kaepernick” boil down to the same single-word dog-whistle…

Even better, make the gift (if you’ve got the scratch) so that it funds that tenure line but also funds full time (TT or not honestly) composition position(s) and roll the whole thing into a requirement of (relatively) minimal rate of adjunct labor.

This comment is woefully underrated. You made me chortle my morning coffee, so thanks for that.

MEMORANDUM

I’ve watched more and more baseball lately and found myself with an old mannish attachment to that game. Still not perfectly safe but not actively hostile to the long term wellbeing of its athletes. It feels a little better.

New York fandoms are complicated and tied to geography, family history (of course) but also stuff like class. It means something particular, across New York state, to be a Bills fan, a Jets fan or a Giants fan. This is especially interesting to observe in semi-neutral territory like the Hudson Valley.

I can’t tell if the two references to “Bar Tool Sports” are a spot-on description of that fucking hellhole or just a bit of cosmic magic rendered in a typographical error. Either way I’m good with it.

This is some top-flight “well actually” Kinja.

I get what you mean, but he was always going to be that way because he came up through a certain philosophy and school, one that those other guys didn’t quite practice. And there’s another critical difference - because Floyd’s style is what it is, he’s never had to perform late-career pivots in style like, say, Ali…

mumble mumble mumble CARAVAN mumble mumble

I hear ya and I think a lot of Sox fans know the Cy Young was a bit of a fluke. Porcello did have a great year, though, and...well, close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.

Same. Maybe I’m down to 1-2 a week but that’s only really a function of how grey I always am. Sigh....

You should try out Maine. You see signs like, “Fried chicken, ammo, movie rentals” and hardcore amounts of liquor in Rite Aid.

I am 30 and I learned to drink like an academic so I day drink and I love it.