A little voice in the back of my head wondered if I maybe overshared a bit in my most recent post. So this week, I’m piping down and tabling all the tidbits and recent shenanigans I had planned to write about. Sorry.

For one thing, it would be simply too self-aggrandizing to mention that last week I also posted this photo of the most recent U.S. aviation malfunction. How would you caption it? I went with, “‘American right wing is orange, on fire, and making life inconvenient for a lot of people’ seems a bit on the nose, doesn’t it?”

As the saying doesn’t quite go, sometimes life imitates life.

Other recent events I am absolutely not addressing today include USPS chief Louis DeJoy embracing the DOGE infiltration in a fig-leaf effort to help what Reuters calls “the money-losing agency”, as the GOP continues playing its long game to privatize the post office. But if I had brought it up, I would have asked if anyone could tell me the last time that the Department of Defense turned a profit.

(Not that there isn’t a lot of money to be made in, say, invading the wrong country, as long as you pick the right wrong country.)

Would you buy a used war rationale from this man?

I’m also refusing to go on the record about DJT’s executive order trying to punish organizations who challenge his power grab by paying for the government’s legal expenses UP FRONT in case the relief it seeks is denied.

I’m not wading into that, no matter how completely I cannot recall any such standard held to the Trump campaign when it was busy wasting a lot of folks’ valuable professional time in the process of losing its five dozen court cases in pursuit of the Big Lie.

(Over 60 cases lost or dismissed! They could have filled their own March Madness bracket. Winners determined by the entertainment value of the case-by-case judicial scorn heaped upon the campaign for its lack of sense and/or evidence. There were some beauties. Remember the good times.)

Hey, here’s something nobody at all brought up, not too far from me: the FBI found 150 homemade bombs at a residence in rural southeastern Virginia, in what prosecutors believe may be “the largest seizure by number of finished explosive devices in FBI history.”

The search and arrest happened in December, but the news didn’t break until January 2. As you might recall, the country’s attention was already spoken for on January 2, between the vehicular attack in New Orleans and the suicide-by-Tesla in Las Vegas. Prosecutors mentioned that the prisoner, Brad Spafford, had been using a photo of Joe Biden for target practice when he wasn’t busy making pipe bombs, a vest to carry bombs, and other bad stuff.

Spafford’s attorneys counter that there was no evidence that Mr. Spafford was planning any violence. And if they can do that with a straight face, then you can do what you need to do to get through another week of whatever you want to call the current weirdness. Right?

Finally, as some of you may remember, yesterday was St. Patrick’s Day. My best friend for the last chunk of high school was one Patrick Keith McDonald. Thirty-eight years and one week ago, there was an unexpected knock on our front door during dinner.

I walked to the door to find P. Keith, standing there in possession of an unsurpassed shit-eating grin and a right-off-the-rack vinyl copy of The Joshua Tree. The essay about that album’s singles and b-sides will have to wait for another time, another place. Years later, my wife and I would later spend half our honeymoon on Bantry Bay, but in retrospect, that moment is still the most Irish thing that ever happened to me.

I’m a sucker for a new melodic bit showing up late in a song, so rather than sharing the studio version of the first single, which is also on the short list of songs I could hear daily, here’s a 1988 live performance in case you enjoy the band and haven’t heard the “shine like stars” bit. Still gives me goose bumps after the buildup, tbh.