davidgagne.net

If you can’t get excited about Jack Black as Steve, you really need to spend more time interacting with elementary school children.
We need to work on bringing the phrase, “the whole megillah,” back into regular use. I feel like abandoning this wonderful expression was a bad idea, even though I’ll freely admit that I thought it was spelled “magilla” until about ten minutes ago.
I have started listening to the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast and really love it. Of course, the three episodes I’ve heard so far were ones featuring interviews with Harrison Ford, Tom Hanks, and Jeff Goldblum, three of my favorite actors, so my opinion may be biased. But all three had me laughing out loud at one point or another and it’s nice to hear Conan’s voice again.
A month after the death of his mother, Tiger Woods says he’s recovering after surgery to repair a ruptured Achilles, likely ending his 2025 season.
An 11-year-old boy who pulled the Paul Skenes MLB Debut Patch card will likely sell it for more money than Skenes will make from his 2025 Pirates base salary. – via @jacksongagne.com
Tim Walz to launch national tour of town halls in Republican House districts. (Go get ’em, Tim!)
Madness:
- The Pentagon Keeps Pouring Cash Into Golf Courses – Even As [Administration] Slashes Government Spending
- USDA ends program that helped schools serve food from local farmers
- Department of Justice Official Says She Was Fired After Opposing Restoring Mel Gibson‘s Gun Rights
- Pete Hegseth is expected in the coming weeks to start a sweeping overhaul of the judge advocate general’s corps as part of an effort to make the US military less restricted by the laws of armed conflict. – via @jamellebouie.net
- NIH officials have urged scientists to remove all references to mRNA vaccine technology from their grant applications in a move that signaled the agency might abandon a promising field of medical research. – via @kwcollins.bsky.social

The SNL 50th-Anniversary special drew almost 15M viewers, becoming NBC’s most-watched primetime entertainment telecast in five years. (For comparison, Super Bowl LIX had over 127M viewers.)
Republicans have reintroduced the SAVE Act, a bill that could disenfranchise millions of American voters. Feeling helpless? Email Your Senators to Vote NO. Call Your Senators to Vote NO. It’s not nothing, and it really does make a difference.
“This is a blunt-force budget cut with no clear strategy—gutting programs without considering their impact or even how services could be improved for the American people, often spinning public health into fear and chaos.”
Related: The USDA is scrambling to rehire fired workers who were involved in the government’s response to the ongoing bird flu outbreak that has devastated egg and poultry farms over the past three years.
Senate Democrats have the power to block federal contracts to Tesla and SpaceX. It’s the path to pushing [him] out of politics.
Scratch Huntington Beach, CA off your list of travel destinations. Former Minnesota Vikings player Chris Kluwe was arrested at a city council meeting there after protesting the installation of a disgusting “MAGA” plaque at a local library.
I graduated a long, long time ago and I still bleed orange and blue, but there’s something more than a little disgusting about the University of Florida begging me for cash when they have a $6B endowment and are annually paying millions of dollars to multiple football coaches they fired years ago. – via me
Is ‘Zone 2’ the Magic Effort Level for Exercise?
A new study on more than 17,000 people discovered that too little sex is linked to cardiovascular disease and a higher risk of all-cause mortality.
Major League Baseball will employ what it calls the automated ball-strike system, or ABS, in a big-league spring training game for the first time this week.
Dirpy is a handy site that lets you rip YouTube videos to mp3. (e.g. Doechii rapping about anxiety over the Gotye song Somebody That I Used To Know, Taylor Swift performing You Belong with Me and Untouchable on SNL)

Shrinking (Apple TV+) is probably the best show on TV right now. Jason Segal and Jessica Williams are phenomenal in it and — as impossible as it is to believe — it might be the best work Harrison Ford has ever done on screen. The show was co-created by Brett Goldstein (Roy Kent from Ted Lasso) and the theme song is Frightening Fishes by Tom Howe & Benjamin Gibbard.
Engineers found a bottle with a 132-year-old message deep inside the walls of a lighthouse in the south of Scotland. – via The Curious About Everything Newsletter from Jodi Ettenberg (threads / bluesky)
Is there anything better than college football bowl season?
ProPublica has an online tool that will format a letter to your US health insurance company to demand the records behind a claim denial, which the insurance is then legally required to provide in most cases. – via @broingerm (threads / bluesky)
Rare baseball stats are my jam. When I was an early teen I watched Roger Clemens mow down sixteen Kansas City Royals at Fenway Park and was bored out of my mind. I wish I’d appreciated the feat as much as I did the mini batting helmet ice cream. (I still have the helmet.) It’s wild that there have been fewer 20-K games than perfect games.
On Sunday, December 8, 2024 — in a loss to the Los Angeles Rams — Josh Allen of the Buffalo Bills had the best fantasy football performance ever by a QB. – via The Athletic (threads / bluesky)
Over 21 months, Taylor Swift‘s culture-dominating Eras Tour brought in $2B, more than double the gross of its closest competitor, according to ticket sales figures confirmed for the first time. – via Crooked Media (threads / bluesky)
Staffers at roughly 600 booksellers are receiving $500 holiday bonuses from James Patterson, the bestselling novelist who has been awarding independent store employees since 2015. – via @abcnews
You can find something for everyone in The 2024 Kottke Holiday Gift Guide.

The annual Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards are always fun.
I’m sure everyone has seen it already, but this story about a woman in Washington who called the police after nearly 100 raccoons surrounded her property really is something else.
The Nord-Trøndelag Health Study, a 15-year study of sense of humor and causes of mortality found that laughter is associated with a 48 percent reduction in death from all causes, a 73 percent lower risk of death from heart disease, and an 83 percent lower risk of infection
Evidence of ‘Negative Time’ Found in Quantum Physics Experiment: This will surely delight my youngest, who is obsessed with The Flash and his time traveling adventures. It also jibes with something I posted on Threads recently!
Speaking of Threads, one of Meta’s frustrating problems is that they haven’t managed to brand the term “threading” in a way as organic as Twitter did “tweeting”. It doesn’t feel right to say, “I threaded,” or, “I’m threading,” which makes it not-insignificantly more difficult to casually mention their platform, which I think is a primary reason Threads hasn’t already crushed the decaying bird site.
We’re biologically wired to prevent our children’s suffering, and it can be excruciating to watch them struggle. That’s certainly an understatement. I’ve been desperately trying to not be a helicopter parent but “excruciating” doesn’t come close to describing what it’s like seeing your child suffer. And I promise I’m well aware that a little elementary school teasing or even dealing with high school cliques are light years away from the difficulties other parents – close friends, even – are facing. (Gift link, like most good things online, via Jason’s infrequent newsletter)
In a very odd cosmic coincidence, Hurricane Milton destroyed the roof of Tropicana Field – home of the Tampa Bay Rays MLB franchise – just a few hours after the implosion of the vintage Tropicana casino in Las Vegas (to make way for a new stadium for the Oakland Athletics).