Our recent road trip took more out of me than expected. I want to be normal after my prolonged illness but I’m not there yet. There are worse things than muddling through so muddle I must. It beats the hell out of meddling.

We move from muddling and meddling to melting. A heat dome has been sitting on a swath of the nation including New Orleans. This summer has presented a choice between frying and flooding. That’s what we’re reduced to with a government swarming with climate change deniers including a president who still thinks the Energy Department has something to do with drilling for oil. It does not. I’m convinced that if someone drilled the Insult Comedian’s head, they’d discover a gusher of idiocy. That goes for the entirety of Team Trump. They’re the opposite of Team JFK: They’re the worst and the dullest.

The rollout of AI has been the source of much bemusement in my house, in both meanings of the word. In my quest for a link to David Halberstam’s The Best and The Brightest, I landed on the Penguin Books site. An AI driven pop up box asked for my email address so I could be contacted upon the publication of Halberstam’s next book. He died in 2007.

I couldn’t resist using the Magritte featured image after posting the Dreams cover inspired by it. Who among us doesn’t feel like a falling Belgian right now? I have no clue what that means but it scans well.

This week’s theme song is the title track of my Katrina exile album. The Outsider came out on 8/16/2005. You know what happened 13 days later. Thanks to singer-songwriter Rodney Crowell for helping me get through that mishigas.

I nearly used another song from the same album as this week’s theme song. It’s a perfect encapsulation of the assholery of the Bush-Cheney era and works for Trump-Vance as well.

In the end, I thought the title was too long and too parenthetical for this feature. I leave the parenthetical to First Draft’s new Tuesday morning man:

This week’s second act is short, sweet, and very polite.

A History Of The Advice Column: I don’t know what it is about advice columns, but I’ve always dug them. When I click on Slate, I always read their revolving (rotating?) advice columnists. They used to be called sob sisters but whatever you call them, I read them. It’s one of my quirks as is inserting a song at this point:

There’s a swell review/essay by Merve Emre in the New Yorker of a new book by Mary Beth Norton. Her book contains some classic sob sister exchanges and Emre’s piece goes into the history of the form, which began long before Dear Abby, Ann Landers, or Miss Manners.

Get thee to The New Yorker for the details.

One of Ann Landers’ catch phrases was “wake up and smell the coffee,” that’s why the last word of our second act goes to Susanna Hoffs with her cover of a caffeinated Squeeze classic:

Let’s throw in a song about fancy coffee for the road:

Now that we’re properly caffeinated, we begin our third act with our favorite stolen feature.

Separated At Birth Casting Edition: Britbox just dropped the first two episodes of its series about the Mitford Sisters, Outrageous. It’s off to an excellent start but it’s too early to grade it.

Slate has chimed in with one of its Fact versus Fiction features about the show so I’ve glommed onto it for a group edition of this feature.

Let’s hear Peggy Lee’s take on sisters:

Your Weekly Oscar: Ready for a song about a gang? Don’t tell Kristi Noem, she’ll think the Jets really exist. The malakatude, it burns.

Have I told you lately how much I love Oscar Peterson?

This tune has bupkis to do with OP, it’s my current earworm:

The Best Of Letterman: I have my favorite quiz show on my mind after the Jeopardy Masters shebang. Ken Jennings has improved as host but he’s no Alex Trebek. Here’s a Top Ten List doubleheader with Alex and Ken:

Saturday GIF Horse: The Bear is back. Let’s get oriented by attending a staff meeting. Please be more attentive than the attenuated staff.

One good thing that came out of that meeting is a new third act feature. This is it.

Dream Diary: Most of my dreams are unremarkable and unremembered. The other day, I had a dream that’s remarkable and memorable. It’s a TV mash-up. I am not making this up.

I found myself dining at The Bear with Raymond Burr and Anne Burrell. Cousin Richie was sucking up to Anne but had no idea who Burr was. Anne berated the poor bastard and said, “How can you not know the man who played Perry Mason and Ironside?”

Then the nicest person on The Bear, Sugar showed up, and I woke up. Holy dreamus interruptus, Batman.

This dream only makes sense if you watch The Bear. What can I tell ya?

Speaking of nice people, we’ll let Roy Orbison play us out of this segment:

Let’s close down this virtual honky tonk with some more music.

Saturday Closer: We opened with a Rodney Crowell song, let’s close with him riffing on a Johnny Cash classic. His former father-in-law makes an appearance in this video.

That’s all for this week. The last word goes to the twin sisters who advised America for decades: Pauline Phillips DBA Abigail Van Buren and Esther Lederer DBA Ann Landers.