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Shitposting since 2005

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This planet has lost so much with the passing of Dolly Parton that it’s difficult to even find a foothold for the grief, a place to begin to process all that she was and all that she gave us.
In the coming days, there will be countless, well-deserved tributes devoted to her seismic songwriting and singing career, her formidable business acumen, her indefatigable optimism, and her easy, infectious joy.
Dolly will be rightly eulogized for the effortless grace she moved through the world with, for the gentleness she extended to every person in her path, and for the humility she somehow managed to hold onto despite reaching near-sainthood status among fans, admirers, and peers alike.
Her life and career have and will provide an inexhaustible treasure trove of lessons for those of us who remain—and for those on the horizon of history who will not have had the great fortune to live here while she did.
Far more eloquent people than I will find ways to capture in words her ineffable spirit and the limitless wisdom they will glean from her in matters of faith, songcraft, and empire-building.
All I can say is that Dolly Parton knew how to be human better than just about anyone.
For me, one of the biggest takeaways of Dolly’s passing is the way she reminded us what wealth and influence can do when they are in the hands of someone whose life is oriented outward, someone who remembers what it is to lack, someone who values being human over being a billionaire.
With a staggering personal portfolio of publishing royalties, tour revenue, licensing deals, business ventures, property investments, and the spoils of a lifetime in the highest echelons of the entertainment business, Dolly Parton could have had more with every little effort.
She could have followed the lead of the Musks and the Bezoses and the Zuckerbergs and the Ellisons. She could have hoarded her fortune, growing more narcissistic and tight-fisted. She could have partnered with the legion of malevolent power-holders, motivated only by the insatiable allure of more. She could have exploited the influence she acquired to amass even greater fortune.
Instead, Dolly Parton spent her life giving her wealth away.
She started the nonprofit Dollywood Foundation, marshaling her resources and influence to fight illiteracy in her beloved Tennessee community.
She created Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, which to date has donated over 300 million books to children all over the world.
She raised money for the American Red Cross and HIV/AIDS-related charities.
She helped fund cancer centers and hospitals.
She donated a million dollars during the throes of COVID to expedite vaccine development.
She provided wildfire relief following the Great Smoky Mountain Wildfires, financially supported victims of Hurricane Helene, and worked to preserve the American Bald Eagle.
Living in a country music ecosystem often populated by homophobia and racism, she risked losing financial opportunities and fan support by advocating for the LGBTQ community and for people of color.
Over and over again, Dolly Parton reminded us that money and power do not alter character but reveal it. She leaves this planet as an enduring folk hero and a universally beloved national treasure because she never allowed her lofty place in the culture, her legend status as a performer, or her considerable riches to make her forget where she came from or why she was here.
We’ve gotten so used to seeing the wealthiest people on the planet being the least compassionate, the most unapologetically cruel; rejecting their better angels and courting their inner demons. We’ve watched them partner with despots, devour the vulnerable, and pillage the planet to further the gap between themselves and the disparate humanity they end up in contempt of.
Dolly Parton was the antithesis of this. We could always count on her to get it right, to do the decent thing, to model dignity, to always pass the good human test. That’s why her loss hits so hard, and why we owe it to her to remember what she taught us about the point of being here: to stay human.
Whether we have five bucks to our name or we’ve amassed a small fortune, whether we toil in obscurity or receive the praise of multitudes, Dolly Parton’s life stands as a reminder that we are not our achievements or our accolades or our net worth. We are not our career successes or our social standing or the kudos we merit.
As she so eloquently testified for 80 glorious years, the measure of a life is in what we do with what we are entrusted with, how we treat people around us, and the person we are in both lack and abundance.
Among Dolly Parton’s the countless roles and titles at which she has so excelled, her single greatest performance was as a human being.
That has made her among the richest people to ever grace this planet.
Share your memories and gratitude for Dolly in the comments.
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Bloated, blubbery, burger-basted, belt-buried, button-buckling, Big-Mac-breathing, bronzer-baked bag of bullshit Donald Trump has spent DECADES making fun of other people for being fat.
Rosie O’Donnell?
“Big fat ass.”
Alicia Machado?
“Miss Piggy.”
Beauty contestants?
Weighed, shamed, humiliated.
JB Pritzker?
“Big fat slob.”
This from a man who has spent the better part of his adult life treating McDonald’s like a fucking primary care provider.

The Hamburglar-in-Chief has been publicly inspecting, grading, ranking, insulting and humiliating other people’s bodies for as long as most of us can remember, dispensing unsolicited judgments on women’s faces, asses, aging and size with all the breathtaking confidence of a man who apparently believes every reflective surface he encounters is legally required to sign an NDA.
But before I go one fucking inch further, I need to make this clear.
I do not give one solitary shit what anybody weighs.
Fat is not a character defect.
Cruelty is.
Hypocrisy is.
And when it comes to this sloppy, saggy, sloth-like, slovenly sack of soft orange aspic and self-righteous shit, every accusation is a confession.
And again, I’m not fat-shaming anybody. Hell, I weighed 238 pounds after my daughter was born, and MAGA shidiots still mock my body a hundred fucking times a day.
I have spent most of my life in some kind of argument with my own body.
Too much. Too big. Too soft. Never good enough.
There were years when I was anorexic, years when I had reduced my entire worth to the disappearing number on a scale and convinced myself that hunger was virtue, that shrinking was winning, that if I could just make myself smaller and smaller, maybe I would finally become acceptable enough to deserve love, safety, approval, peace.
That is what this shit can do to you.
It can make you stand in front of a mirror and slowly erase yourself with your own hands, inch by inch, meal by meal, pound by pound, while some diseased little voice in your head keeps telling you that disappearing is the same thing as becoming beautiful.
And the thing that finally cracked through all of that was my dad.
My dad, who was not a crier.
My dad, standing in front of me with tears running down his face, begging me to eat because he was watching his daughter slowly kill herself.
I remember that moment with horrible clarity because I had never seen my father look at me like that before.
And suddenly I could see myself through his eyes.
Not as a waistline.
Not as a number.
As his daughter.
As somebody he loved.
As somebody he was terrified of losing.
There is something almost unbearable about realizing that the thing you thought was making you better was breaking the heart of the person who loved you most.
So no, I do not believe thinness is goodness or fatness is failure. A number on a scale cannot tell you whether somebody is beautiful, disciplined, worthy, lovable or decent. I know how poisonous that equation becomes once it gets inside your head and starts speaking to you in your own voice.
Bodies change because lives happen to them. We have babies. We grieve. Hormones go haywire. We get older. We survive things that leave evidence behind.
None of that subtracts one fucking ounce from somebody’s humanity.
So I am not mocking Jabba the Gut because he gained weight.

I’m mocking a lifelong bully who has spent decades using other people’s bodies as fucking target practice, then suddenly expects grace, delicacy and discretion when the same standard comes knocking on his own fucking door.
But Jo, we know the Earl of Extra Value Meals is a great big fat person. Why are you writing about this now, you may be asking.
Well, that’s because according to a recent piece in the Washington Post, our ponderous, paunch-packed, pants-straining POTUS has gotten FATTER.
Not a little heavier.
Not retaining water.
Not experiencing an unfortunate convergence of camera angle, sodium and an aggressively pleated pair of trousers.
FATTER.
According to his May medical report, Girth Vader weighed 238 pounds, fourteen pounds more than the year before and twenty-three pounds more than the figure reported at his Georgia booking.
Now.
Let us discuss that Georgia number for one delicious fucking second.
The Count of Monte Cholesterol was booked at the Fulton County jail in 2023 and somehow emerged listed at six-foot-three, 215 pounds.
Two hundred and fifteen.
Sure.
And I’m Zendaya.

That number had all the forensic rigor of a carnival guess-your-weight booth run by Rudy Giuliani after three warm martinis.
And the booking information was self-reported.
SELF-REPORTED.
Donald Trump.
We are supposed to believe a man who lies about crowd sizes, election results, golf scores, his wealth, the weather and probably the number of McNuggets left in the box suddenly becomes George fucking Washington when somebody asks what he weighs?
Please.
If the form had asked penis length, he’d have written, “Thirteen inches. Many people are saying fourteen.”
Bench press?
“Six hundred pounds. Strongest president maybe ever.”
Body fat?
“Negative three percent. Doctors crying.”
So yes, 238 is twenty-three pounds above the 215 reported in Georgia, but comparing an actual medical measurement to Donald Trump’s self-description is like comparing NOAA data to a fisherman who says the bass was the size of a Buick.
And even using his claimed height of six-foot-three, 238 puts him about a pound and a half from the BMI threshold for obesity.
One point six pounds.
That is not a margin.
That is a condiment.
That is a Filet-O-Fish and an enthusiastic application of tartar sauce.
The man who has spent decades calling women pigs is now approximately ONE McDONALD’S VALUE MEAL away from having to list Grimace as his emergency contact.
Doctors reportedly want him to lose weight, improve his diet and exercise, which presents something of a logistical challenge when your relationship with physical exertion consists largely of lowering yourself into a golf cart, being chauffeured several hundred feet, climbing back out, taking a few swings and then, somehow, with the statistical regularity of sunrise, WINNING another tournament at your own fucking club.
What a goddamn coincidence, huh?
Donald Trump winning golf championships Donald Trump organized at golf courses Donald Trump owns is Crazy Eddie conducting his own inventory audit.

It is Jeffrey Dahmer giving himself a James Beard Award for locally sourced ingredients.
It is the Duggar family presenting itself with a fucking plaque for excellence in safeguarding children.
Call me cynical, but I’m beginning to think the tournament oversight committee may be Donald Trump wearing a different fucking hat.
And the diet?
Good fucking luck.
Big Macs. Filet-O-Fishes. Fries. Diet Coke. Ketchup. Enough processed beige food to make his digestive tract eligible for Superfund designation.
And HE has thoughts about everybody else’s body.
Have you SEEN this motherfucker lately?
He is a walking geological survey of soft tissue, an ambulatory landslide of paunch fold, wattles and grievance, everything settling downward in slow motion beneath a shellac of bronzer until his entire upper body looks less assembled than poured.
There are layers.
There are places where flesh simply disappears behind other flesh and presumably continues somewhere beneath the surface like an underground river system nobody has successfully mapped.
His face descends toward that magnificent NECK FUPA, where the whole arrangement suddenly gets strangled into the collar of his dress shirt like somebody filled an industrial sausage casing with warm custard, twisted the top three times and secured it with a fucking button.
His chin has descendants.
His gunt has advance personnel.
His stomach does not so much hang as occupy.
It has frontage.
It has easements.
It has probably acquired mineral rights.
The suit itself is now less clothing than an engineering challenge, acres of dark polyester pulled over shifting terrain while every button sits there under impossible pressure performing the textile equivalent of holding back the fucking Hoover Dam with a thumbtack.
And somewhere underneath all of that, there is allegedly still a belt.
I choose to believe this because hope matters.
But at this point that poor son of a bitch is a spelunker trapped beneath an orange landslide, tapping desperate Morse-code messages toward the surface while rescue crews consult geological maps, lower microphones into exploratory shafts and tell his family they heard something around lunchtime but can no longer establish contact.
And THIS is the guy calling other people fat.
Donald Trump.
A man built like an Oompa Loompa had a baby with Hodor, stuffed it with fryer grease and warm mayonnaise, wrapped it in a contractor bag full of wet bath towels and let Steve Bannon raise it in Stephen Miller’s basement.
A bulbous, belly-billowing, butt-bolstered heap of beige buffet wreckage for whom there is no longer any meaningful border between ass and abdomen. Those territories have completed reunification, abolished customs and begun issuing a common currency.
And whatever the FUCK that bulky mystery apparatus is protruding from the general vicinity of his ample ass beneath his jacket only makes the silhouette more bewildering. I don’t know whether it’s medical equipment, some kind of brace, communications gear, structural reinforcement, or the emergency flotation device required by maritime law once a human stern reaches that displacement, and I am not going to pretend I do.
His side profile has gone full M.C. Escher: things bulge where physics says they should retreat, fabric disappears into one crevice and turns up three zip codes south, and his shirt enters the waistband at one longitude while God alone knows where the fuck it comes back out.
And somehow perched above this entire slowly settling mass is that lacquered apricot comb-over, floating there with the structural credibility of fiberglass insulation stapled to a cantaloupe.
Yet this motherfucker has spent the better part of HALF A CENTURY looking at OTHER PEOPLE and finding fault.
The monumental, cathedral-sized fucking nerve.
A man shaped like somebody tried to smuggle a beanbag chair into Le Cirque by putting cuff links on it, walking around America with the aesthetic standards of Anna fucking Wintour.
And my FAVORITE part?
Trump recently brought up William Howard Taft, famously our heaviest president, and said he has to be careful because he could surpass Taft if he “allowed it to happen.”
ALLOWED IT TO HAPPEN?
Donald.
The gravy boat has left the harbor.
Ronald McDonald is checking your pulse.
William Howard Taft’s ghost is standing barefoot on a celestial bathroom scale screaming, “COME GET YOUR BOY.”
As though forty years of cheeseburgers have been submitting zoning applications.
As though adipose tissue requires an executive order.
As though the fries are stacked outside the Oval Office saying, “Mr. President, we just need your signature on the thigh.”
The rules are always for somebody else.
The judgment is always for somebody else.
The humiliation is always for somebody else.
He can insult women’s bodies, but mentioning his is cruel.
He can ridicule somebody’s size, but noticing his is unfair.
He can spend his entire adult life treating physical appearance as evidence of human worth, then demand an entirely different moral framework the instant the bathroom scale starts producing opposition research.
No.
Fuck that.
Eat whatever the fuck you want. Wash it down with Diet Coke. Commute from golf cart to golf cart. Stuff yourself into a suit with enough excess fabric to cover a regulation tennis court.
Fine.
Live your life.
Nobody should give a shit.
But maybe don’t spend DECADES calling women pigs.
Maybe don’t call other people fat slobs.
Maybe don’t publicly humiliate beauty contestants over their bodies.
Maybe don’t tell somebody with a “serious weight problem” to go home and exercise when your own cardiovascular regimen appears to consist of lifting a cheeseburger to your mouth and stabbing the elevator button.
Because eventually the scale comes for everybody.
And after a lifetime of pointing those tiny little snausage fingers at everybody else, sneering at women’s bodies, humiliating beauty queens and behaving like God personally appointed him the fucking Commissioner of Acceptable Waist Circumference, the mirror has finally returned his call.
So I have just one question for the corpulent, creased, cholesterol-coddled, cream-filled colossus of congealed cheeseburger grease currently forcing every seam in American menswear to reconsider its career choices:
WHO’S THE PIGGY NOW?
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I know what I’m supposed to believe.
I’m supposed to believe that America is still in its infancy, that it is a beautiful but complicated idea, that we simply haven’t become what we can and will become.
I’m supposed to remember that history is cyclical, that all barbaric regimes are temporary, and that every evil empire invariably falls.
I’m supposed to hold fast to the dream that we will emerge from this scalding present crucible, transformed and made better by the conflict.
I know that I’m supposed to believe that we have still not seen our best days yet, and that when we eventually do, it will be worth all the struggle we’ve endured to claim the nation our forebears dreamed of.
In the past, I’ve often believed that. I’ve written it. I’ve preached it.
Now, I’m not so sure.
250 years into our collective lifespan, we are as afflicted with systemic racism as we’ve ever been, white nationalism has completely infected the entirety of one of our political parties, and we are teetering perilously close to extremist minority rule that will in effect, permanently silence the voices and votes of the vast majority.
With every bit of the planet’s accumulated information now literally in the palms of our hands, too many of our people are still believing easily disprovable falsehoods, still falling victim to nonsensical conspiracies, still vulnerable to baseless lies about their neighbors.
Even with the benefits of hindsight of our shameful and bloody history, a toxic cocktail of overt racism, neanderthal theology, intellectual ignorance, and self-preservation has rendered a large swath of America hostile to Science, terrified of diversity, and irrationally violent toward vulnerable people.
And perhaps worst of all, a substantial portion of this nation remains emotionally tethered to one of the single most reprehensible human beings on the planet, despite a decade of prolific lawlessness and unrepentant moral filth. His ineptitude, immorality, predation, and criminality have not proven to be dealbreakers but selling points.
How are decent, reasonable people supposed to work with this?
How do we find common ground with those who insist on dehumanization of those who are different?
How can we engage in constructive conversation or honest dialogue with people whose reality is so arbitrary, whose truth is so malleable, whose moral goalposts are forever shifting?
How can we forge a new and more equitable America, while so many Americans live perpetually backwards, pining for a bygone day when fewer people had a voice or a vote?
How can we coexist with those who would rewind this nation to a time when women, people of color, and LGBTQ human beings had their value determined, their options dictated, and their futures defined by straight, white men?
If our families and friendships and workplaces and churches and political systems are all still this saturated with supremacy, can an interdependent community of disparate humanity with equitable access to life, liberty, and happiness ever be a reality here?
Romanticism and misplaced optimism aside, is America as we envision it still possible, with MAGA’s poison having infected its bloodstream?
It may of course still be possible, yet with every year I think it becomes less and less probable. The longer we live as a nation with these untreated collective cancers of heart and mind, the greater opportunity they have to metastasize exponentially and the less chance we have of eradicating them for good.
History reminds us that the more we abide brutality and tolerate discrimination, the more normal they become, the more difficult they are to excise. Our present normalis not sustainable if we’re ever going to grow into something truly beautiful.
I want this nation to become what the songs and the anthems declare we can be, but I’m not sure we all share that desire. I think many of us want the ugliest atrocities of our past to be our future, and that may be a disease too invasive to be healed of for the rest of us.
There’s an old saying: when the horse is dead, dismount.
The ride may be over for America.
Maybe this horse is beyond saving.
Yes, I’ll show up again today, leveraging my time, my resources, and my voice in the cause of equality and empathy; to do all I can let freedom ring and let justice roll down like a river, though I admit, it feels like a fool’s errand.
Still, I want to know I left this life doing everything I could to help us get well, and that’s what will propel me back out into the fray once again.
I’m waking up in this America that is, and will be fighting like hell to craft the America that could be, as futile as that sometimes seems.
For ten interminable, exhausting years, MAGA has been an invasive, insidious national cancer.
I wonder if we can survive it.
What about you? How do you view the damage of the last decade? Do you see our demise as a foregone conclusion, or do you feel hopeful that transformation can and will come? Let me know in the comments.
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Rest in Power, my Queen.
From USA Today:

Dolly Parton, the groundbreaking country music icon, has died. She was 80.
Parton’s death was confirmed by her family on Tuesday, Aug 25. The iconic “Jolene” singer had been facing health issues in the last year of her life and had recently missed a planned public appearance.
“My family and I have shared a lifetime of beautiful memories with Dolly, but so have you,” Bryan Seaver, Parton’s nephew, said in a video announcing her death on Aug. 25. The video was posted on the singer’s official social media pages.
“She has always been on your television, your record player, your CD, and on your phone playlist, becoming an extended part of your family, whether you liked it or not,” Seaver said.
Here’s what we know.
A cause of death for Parton has not been released, but the singer had been open about her health struggles since 2025. In October, Parton spoke candidly in a video message that was released after her sister raised concerns by publicly asking fans to pray for the singer.
At the time, Parton said she was doing “OK” but had “some problems” to deal with and was undergoing “a few treatments.”
“Back when my husband, Carl, was very sick, that was for a long time, and then when he passed, I didn’t take care of myself,” Parton said. “So I let a lot of things go that I should have been taking care of. So anyway, when I got around to it, the doctor said, ‘We need to take care of this. We need to take care of that.'”
Parton added at the time the she had to “cancel some things” as she underwent “a few treatments.”
In May, Parton shared a health update as she canceled all of her Las Vegas shows. In a five-minute video, she told fans she was “responding really well to meds and treatments” and “improving every day,” though she said it would take “a little while before I’m up to stage performance level” because her medications and treatments “make me a little bit swimmy headed.”
“I’ve always had problems with my kidney stones,” she said. “…My immune system and my digestive system got all out of whack over the past three years, and [doctors] are working real hard on rebuilding and strengthening those.”
“I have great doctors, and I’m doing really well, and they assure me that everything I have is treatable, so I’m going with that,” Parton added.
[more]
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Feeling old?
Boston – Boston (1976)
In my pre-disco days, this was definitely on my playlist (and probably everyone else’s if memory serves).
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As you can see, there’s been a very noticeable improvement. The combination of the prednisone and a weekly (vs. biweekly) dose of Duplixent has definitely turned the tides.
My upper body looks even better, and while there are a few small blisters still forming overnight (usually on sites that are already healing) it’s nothing like the dozens of new ones that I used to wake up to every morning.
When I saw my dermatologist last week, she said it may take up to six months of Duplixent to totally knock this out. Okay, other than the cost, I’m fine with that. My only concern is what happens when I’m weaned from the prednisone. We agreed that I may need to stay on a much-reduced dose for the duration when this round of treatment wraps up. That’s one of those wait-and-see things.
Being on a high dose of prednisone for an extended period is not without its own set of side effects, the most recent being fluid retention in my lower legs. I could barely get my shoes on yesterday, but before I flew into a panic (my thoughts went to very dark, cardiac-related places even though my heart is in great shape), I thought I’d google “prednisone and fluid retention” and sure enough—to my profound relief—the swelling ankles and calves is a definite side effect. I spoke to my nurse friend and she advised to up my water intake significantly. Also—since I’m now officially an old man—I got several pairs of compression socks which have really helped. (It’s not like I’m going to be one of those guys who wears them with shorts.) It’s only been one day on both those therapies, so again, we’ll see how it goes, but so far, so good.
And did I mention the fungal outbreak on my palms and soles? Another side effect. If it’s not one thing, it’s another. Lamisil is my friend these days.
The wheels on the bus go round and...oops.
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This is an interesting series. All of them are different, but Disk 1 always has a kind of a mellow, laid-back, coffee-in-the-morning vibe, while Disk 2 is 80 minutes of hard core dance.
This one in particular has a decidedly middle-eastern flavor.
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