Ball Don't Lie

It's not safe or reasonable to be a fan of things. The word "fan" of course carries with it the connotation of unseriousness, something frivolous and disposible to attach some portion of your finite emotional energy to. You can be a fan of, to make the obvious example, the Los Angeles Lakers say, in a way that people aren't really "fans" of dialectical materialism or quantum gravity. Or I guess you could be, but people who know better would peg you as a dilettante and a poseur. Yes, I'm still talking about the Lakers.

Being a fan of a thing is/was/should be a notable and consequential category shift that separates the laity from the experts, but like many things that underpinned our intellectual and social equilibrium in the past, those immanently separable ideas have been hurtled at one another with a terrible speed until they collide and we all end up with Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert Kennedy Jr. Sounds exciting and novel until you realize we're all like two weeks away from a government-funded program promoting the health benefits of botulism.

All things being equal, I'd have taken the sweats, the cramping and the gut-liquifying invasion of food-borne illness over watching the U.S. Men's National Soccer Team get stomped into oblivion by Belgium in the round of 16 at the World Cup this week. The emotional investment in something like this--a World Cup, even more fleeting and ephemeral than a fixed annual league sports team one might follow--was a mistake I (knowingly, excitedly, monetarily) chose for myself 32 years ago when the World Cup was first in the United States. I, like many others, ended up one of the success stories of a marketing push, which is itself embarrassing, but also puts me in the same group as novelist John Green and many others more prominent and interesting than myself. Or to put it another way, it's really them who should have known better, those media savvy elites. I'm just some blinkered schmuck with two degrees in history, what do I know about critical thinking, context awareness and perspective? I had no chance.

A lopsided 4-1 drubbing should carry some kind of poetic leitmotif bookending to wrap things up neatly since we opened with a surprising 4-1 win, but that's not really how sports works. Well, it does, but if you try to bring it up, you just end up the guy who wants to talk about sports that nobody wants to talk about sports with.

I didn't write about the steady, professional, grind-it-out win over Bosnia and Herzegovina (both at once!) last week, as much as I wanted to, for a couple of reasons: 1) I was very aware that I was "in it," that a World Cup experience only exists really between your team's opening group match and the final one, which is almost always a loss, so I decided glide with the experiential current, without commenting on it, and 2) I actually really meant to, but sometimes when I start typing these blogs, I get distracted by my first paragraph and go way off the rails. Instead you got some kind of rant about job seeking that ended with a joke about sexting with an AI. Given the result against Belgium vs where my head was at last Thursday post-Bosnia, in retrospect I went with the much less embarrassing option.

Yeah, the US won a knockout-round game for the first time since 2002, but it was a made-up knockout round that never existed before 2026, which means we ended up going out at exactly the same stage as we always do. The high water mark of modern US men's soccer continues to be a Torsten Frings handball on the goal line that wasn't called, pre-VAR era, in our lone quarterfinal appearance. Stupid, frustrating, painful lore still gets to be foundational lore, unfortunately, moreso when there's nothing better presenting itself as a replacement.

It's been a lot, emotionally, over something that means literally nothing. Did I cry real human tears after the Bosnia and Herzegovina win? I did, it's true, and I'm not a cryer. I honestly hadn't cried since I randomly watched a YouTube short about a stray puppy that was very cold but was brought inside and got warm. And that was like 4-6 days before the game. It had been ages. I'm a rock, typically.

There's a real danger to hope, of course, but it's not the one you're normally thinking of, that it exposes you to the risk of a real soul bludgeoning when it inevitably crashes against the rocks of experience. The real danger is that, in the crush of disappointment, deciding on the cynic's truth that all hope is delusion, an indulgence a genuinely happy human would never/could never afford themselves if they were being truly responsible.

I've considered this all week and the best counter-argument I can come up with is: what if your team gets mollywhopped 4-1 and are never really in it from the first minute? Then you got to hope beforehand AND get absolutely inoculated against the negative effects by the numbing ice-burn of cold reality way, way before the last whistle. You can watch the whole game in a state of digusted disbelief and low-burning rage instead of the annihilating weight of near-miss devastation. I guess what I'm saying is, if we had to go out at this stage, was it easier to be me or to be an Egyptian fan?

Thanks for the run, U.S. men's team. And, in retrospect, thanks for being so awful in the last stage that you never let me get so delusional to think you were actually going to be competitive. You didn't have to do that for me, but a show of such incompetence can only be interpreted as an act of love and care for your supporters, to ease us out of the tournament; so we can transition back to focusing on things that really matter, like electoral politics and the spectre of unemployment. Bless you, boys. What a public service.

Some Star Sneezed, Now They're Paging You In Reception

I was about to start complaining about the false promise of technology and how it doesn't eliminate work, it more transmogrifies existing (analog, physical, three dimensional) work into a more abstracted (emotional, time-management, expectational) work. It's similar to the law of conservation of energy, but applied to labor: you can never really create or destroy labor, you just transfer it into another form. The romantic version of this is the idea that every bit of creation was released in the Big Bang, meaning we are all made from the same stuff that makes stars and planets and bugs and sand and in the end we will return thus, back into the cycle of generation and regeneration. If nothing else, it's a thing to say on a first date if your actual personality starts to lose coherence under the pressure.

I'm not being ungrateful or naïve, I don't think, to note that things are just different since the promised Digital Revolution actually had the mundane audacity to actually occur, slowly and incrementally and in the midst the distraction of a thousand thousand false dawns and blind alleys of so many Microsoft Zunes and Google Glasses. I'm not going to pretend that I didn't fall for any of those gimmick-based Great Leaps Forward because I'm some kind of stoic visionary impervious to marketing. I bought a Wii U for god's sake. No, I've just been saved by my antipathy toward spending money. Yes, there were people who laid out thousands of dollars for 3D televisions when those were a thing, but I think of the version of myself who is capable of doing that and I don't know him. It's a dark and foreboding alternate timeline where I'm certain I spend an embarrassing amount of my time and energy trying to figure out how to access the boutique pornography purpose-made for the device. Eh, maybe he's happier, who am I to judge?

To be certain, sure, the world has become less physically burdensome in some material ways, but I'm not sure how that has directly translated into any kind of an easier life. It was supposed to liberate us from the drudgery of a work-centric life and fulfill the promise of the buzzwordy "work-life balance" concept that every new job lies to its employees about. The problem is that there's no technology that is not corrupted by its contact and deployment by people, who tend to ruin everything. Like sure, you could work anywhere now, but that just means you can work anywhere, at any time, regardless of whether or not you should be off the clock, and be monitored while you are or aren't doing it. Oh yes, but also, just to be clear, you can't actually work anywhere when or why you want to, according to your own needs, because, again, people are in charge and people are petty and stupid and bad at everything. You still have to have the same commute, the same shackling to a building that isn't the one your family lives in, but now when you get there, everything is digital and therefore obviously so much more efficient! Look, we used to do this on three sheets of paper and now we do it on 11 PDF files! Which nobody quite 100% understands how to format or use in the same way, so they all come out a tiny bit differently formatted or tweaked, which someone else has to put out an email about that no one will read, and then attempt to reconcile! And which, honestly, you should probably print out a copy anyway just for your own records, you know, just in case!

Please do not misunderstand me: this is not "the Good Old Days were better" here. That's not me. Although, objectively, in a lot of ways things are pretty bad right now and we could do with some reversion, but I'm only talking politically and I mean, like, 2022 at most.

Materially, for someone like me who is in the process of looking for a job, this is a great example of exactly what I mean. Go to any job-posting site, LinkedIn or Indeed or whatever, or a more specialized site like your state's career board or USAJobs for federal work. All of them present the same promise--the same lie--in the exact same way: click this one button to apply! If you're on LinkedIn, though, clicking the "one button" opens a new window to take you to the site of the company to which you'd like to apply directly. Now technically, from LinkedIn's experience, they are correct. You pushed that one button on their site and now you can go apply, but that's not what's implied. There should be a process triggered when I hit that button that involves satellites and lasers, 1,000 secret workers in India, whatever it takes (barring AI because AI is stupid and broken and is bad at everything you ask it to do) to trick me--I'm begging you please trick me--into temporarily losing sight of the border between technology and magic. Like back in the early days of smartphones where you could get that app that made it look like you were drinking a beer.

Alas, the job listings take hours to sort through because now the sites are using AI to "help" me find listings, more than half of which aren't suited to me at all. So I'm being presented volume as though it is abundance, which aren't really synonyms when you factor in quality or usefulness. And then the application process for every single place is arcane, byzantine and discrete. Some are fairly simple, sure, but I will tell you--and this is absolutely true--so far my record for one application is five hours. There are so many assessments, so many questionnaires, so many just basic formatting quirks and "helpful" capture technology that I'm basically re-entering my résumé line by line every single time.

At least the end-to-end process is faster though, right? Well, the accessibility of every listing means the amount of applicants is going to be silly vs. the old analog days, so there's software to help curate the pile, but the pile is now nine miles high. I have no desire to going back to showing up with a paper CV to hand to a receptionist and then sit around in blind hope the right person saw it. That labor still exists and the anxiety isn't any less, it's just now the blind hope is around the AI-powered pre-sorting metadata-and-keyword-scrubbing alogrithm deciding if your own application is worthy to advance to actual human eyes for review. It's just now I can apply to way more things than I used to be able to. Great. Who doesn't love an online quiz?

If this just was nostalgia, I'd be feeling OK about it because honestly, the future is the past is the present. Literally everyone I know who has gotten a job in the last 12 months has gotten it because a friend or family member worked there. If I really wanted to be on the cutting edge I'd get myself a chatbot girlfriend. I'm sure the same basic LLM is in charge of one or several AI departments somewhere. Degrading yourself sexually and emotionally in exchange for work is as time-tested as anything. I'm on it.

Quacks

Nobody wants to be sick. Well, excepting hypochondriacs, but I would argue even they don't actually want a disease or infirmity, they either want a) to be perceived as being ill for the sympathy or more likely b) just some relief from the all-encompassing terror of the idea that you might one day become actually sick. See, you can't get tuberculosis if you already have tuberculosis, so for the duration, you get a little bit of a break from living in constant dread of it. I was initially going to say "you can't get cancer if you already have cancer," but that's literally how metastasization works. I didn't want to be responsible for putting that idea in the heads of any hypochondriacs who happen to be reading, but who am I kidding, they would have gotten there way ahead of me.

It's weird on a personal blog to have a medical procedure get crowded out by anything else as a topic, but apparently I thought it was much more important to let you know about the time I cried at a soccer game, which happened the same week. I live a full life.

About ten days ago then, I found myself following a familiar doctor's instructions to roll on my side while I was laid out on a gurney and explaining to me the three-part cocktail of drugs they'd be dosing me with before forcing a probe-mounted camera into one of my existing orifii.

It shouldn't have been surprising that it was the same doctor who performed my colonoscopy three years ago I suppose since I've been getting my care from the same medical group, with the same primary care doctors, since 2000. Considering the order of events meant we were going ass-to-mouth, I figured the intervening three years between scopings was more than enough time to give the equipment a thorough wipe-down.

In this case I was being knocked out and probed not for preventative reasons but in response to a persistent complaint that put me in the care of a gastroenterology specialist in the first place. As anyone who has been annoyed (me), inconvenienced or debilitated (not me, thank god) by a chronic issue, the impulse for some kind of actionable information eventually far outweighs any anxiety that might come with a medical procedure. Yes, a lady I didn't know had to stab me in the hand to insert the IV port for my drugs, but that was really the worst of it. I guess I could have been anxious that the primary drug used to knock me out was fentanyl, but I'm neither a habitual user nor a police officer, so I'm not cursed with that casual sensitivity that only cops seem to get.

So yes, nobody wants to be sick, but if they do find something--and I want to emphasize, I'm looking for something treatable here--they can give you a pill or a modified diet or schedule a second (minor!) procedure and you can go back to eating whatever you want without feeling nauseated for no reason, just as a random example. But to my minor chagrin, I've now been told I have a world-class esophageal tract, stomach and duodenum. I don't know what a duodenum is, but mine could apparently walk the runway at Paris Fashion Week, that's how fit it is. They even gave me a printed out page with a grid of pictures of my absolutely faultless innards which was, yes, equal parts as reassuring and gross.

The takeaway is I still have random bouts of nausea not seemingly triggered by anything specific. I have a prescription for a proton-pump inhibitor from my GP, but that's speculative, as much to give me something probably as it is specifically indicated. I also have a follow-up appointment with my gastroenterology specialist for late July. Of course I live in fear now that she's going to tell me that I'm doing great.

Clear Plastic Bags

OK, I spent all of last week's post lubing you up with what I consider normal foreplay--apology, minimizing my own needs out of embarrassment, talking too much about price--so it would be cruel and inconsiderate to deny you any further. The best I can do is a description of the act, but that feels appropriate for our level of intimacy and, well, it works for me. You're into what you're into.

What I got into was USA vs Paraguay for the team's first 2026 World Cup game. The locale was "Los Angeles Stadium," stripped of its corporate-sponsored name, which I normally would approve of as an anti-capitalist pinko, but I know it's just because FIFA don't get a cut of the sponsorship loot. Like any social media user with more than three followers, the mantra is the same: no free clout.

It should be noted that, like a lot of these stadiums, it's not in the city it's named for at all. Before we got to the stadium at all, we had to negotiate parking, which I found for $90 in the small lot of an old 1930s-ish theater converted into a church along Manchester Blvd. in Inglewood, where the stadium actually is. I know: $90 for parking?! Yes, but that was just because my partner and I were willing to walk the 0.7 miles to the stadium to avoid a) the inescapable triple-digit prices for locations nearer the event site, with the highest I saw over $600 and b) the ingress and egress traffic in the immediate vicinity of the other suckers who got duped into paying face-value-or-more prices for admission that should by rights have come with two bedrooms and one-point-five bathrooms.

Hoofing it in and out might sound like kind of a bummer, but we got to see a little bit of Inglewood, which is leafier and quieter than its media coverage during my 1980s childhood would have suggested. It's unsual as a Southern Californian to spend any time on foot in a community not your own (or even your own. So many hills! And you don't want to risk running into any neighbors), so that part carried novelty of its own, not to mention a chance to build up the atmosphere on the way in and decompress on the walk out. Plus it's a real dad-coded treat to walk out of a stadium right past lines and lines and lines of unmoving cars and then drive out unimpeded from the little off-site parking lot that feels like it's just for you. That's almost worth $90 of anybody's money. It's only worth $10 of my money when I do it at Angels baseball games, but these days I'm not sure there are enough attendees to qualify as "traffic."

Getting to the stadium, which I've been to for other football (soccer) and football (American throwball type) events, like everything else touched by FIFA, it was the worst version of it the could be managed. It was surrounded by a 15-foot-high fence, forcing all 70,000-plus in through I think three or four narrow entrances. We arrived on site around 90 minutes before kickoff to a line along the fence that seemed to be a mile long.

It was at this point that I began to despair. I could hear roars from the stadium I couldn't yet access and began to die from FOMO. In retrospect, all I was missing was a naff "pre-game ceremony" touched with that FIFA magic combination of corny, extravagant and unnecessary, but I began to complain to my partner that there was NO WAY we were going to make it through the ENDLESS line in time to get in by kickoff.

It was at this point I should have realized that I was emotionally NOT OK. Being faced with an exceptionally long queue outside a well-attended event, even a pointless queue badly run by disinterested staff, is not an appropriate trigger for genuine human despair, especially if you're there at 4:30 for a 6 pm start. The line snaked through fine, we passed through security and got into the stadium to our last-row (literally last row, top deck) seats in plenty of time for kickoff and I started to notice I was actively, visibly shaking. When my ass finally hit the seat, I lost the ability to resist occasionally softly crying as I realized a thing I hadn't really dared posit I'd be able to do since the idea was planted way back in 1994.

This is where I shout out and celebrate my partner for her patience as I spun out, composure-free, for a good 40 minutes during the security-line pseudo-crisis. She made a much better showing of it when we finally went to Acadia National Park in Maine back in October, a lifelong goal of hers. She climbed up mountains and walked trails and smiled alot, bosh, job done, no fuss. But it's to be expected. Men are so emotional.

I won't go through the blow-by-blow of a phenomenal, cathartic, comprehensive performance and victory by the normally profligate and masochistic US Men's National Team. I was there for the experience of being there, so a sweeping victory and mostly stress-free dominance of their opponents were all cherries on an unexpectedly rich, many-layered cake.

Once I calmed down, I was more or less present enough to appreciate the thing as it was happening all around me. Sometimes you just need a prosaic incident to ground yourself, like someone spilling beer on you or considering whether you want to spend $9 on a bottle of water. For me it was the first time I refused to participate in the "U-S-A! U-S-A!" chant. Nothing will bring you back to yourself like second-hand embarrassment and a gentle contempt for your neighbors. That part didn't cost $2600, so that at least I can recommend without reservation.

You Just Might Get It

I've never really been a "bucket list" type of person. Certainly I've had notions of things in my life I'd like to experience at some point, but once I got past "touch real boob," nothing else could really match that particular goal for urgency. I do not miss being a teenager. Or, OK, in my early 20s.

I've absolutely been lucky enough to see and do things that will go down as whatever the opposite of regret would be. The younger goofy Anglophile I was got to spend some real time in London and criss-crossed the UK by train on more than one trip. As a even goofier lifelong Tolkien dork, I've gotten to walk along the bottom of the sheer-walled cleft valley in Switzerland that inspired him to merely describe a thing that exists--that you can exist in--and only make you feel like it was otherworldly.

Also I had three kids. That was definitely something I aspired to, but I knew enough people who either achieved that goal accidentally or were biologically locked out of achieving it at all, so a lot of that felt too far out of my hands to count as a goal. Plus I feel like I should say a lot of the work of gestating and birthing I outsourced to my now-ex-wife at the time, so I can't claim a lot of credit for the labor involved. Like that regrettable pun, it's just a thing that kind I just put myself into the right position for and waited for it to redound to my benefit.

I have been the plus-one to a few other people's bucket list realizations, which has been great. This accounts for 100% of my visits to any national park or national forest or national monument. Every time I was the correct amount of amazed and appreciative, but none of those trips were ever going to be my idea. It turns out that most national parks occur almost entirely outdoors, which is also where they keep the bears.

I find myself on the brink of doing a thing tomorrow that I never seriously bothered to hope for, but is happening anyway. I have two tickets to the opening game by the US men's national team in a World Cup hosted here in the US. I don't really think I can call it an unbridled positive given a) the tickets were extortionately expensive and b) all of that money is going to the most hilariously corrupt world organization that isn't the Trump Administration. My two nosebleed seats cost a grand total of nearly $2600, but I've decided to call it a bargain and a boon considering the sequence of incredibly unlikely events that led to them being available. Consider:

-The World Cup was awarded to the U.S. as a co-host instead of some other petro-state as a vehicle for their sportswashing programs (see Qatar 2022 and Saudi Arabia 2030).

-There was a lottery for tickets. I happened to "win" mine but my girlfriend didn't. Totally arbitrary.

-Not only is the tournament partially here, but the U.S. team was based on the west coast, including the first game, in the greater Los Angeles area which is exactly where I live.

-Workers at SoFi Stadium negotiated a settlement this week, avoiding a strike and a picket line that I would have refused to cross.

There's no getting around $2600 is a lot of money, especially in my precarious employment situation. But, just like my human-child-creation experience, I didn't have to go out of my way at all to make attending a World Cup game live a reality. No travel or hotel or extra food expenses. A bargain, in that context! But that's the evil genius of FIFA, a cabal of cartoonishly brazen pirates banking on how happy and grateful the fan base will be to shovel over their disposible income into the money furnace they've built out of monopoly and graft.

It really, really sucks that I can't wait.

Would You Like To Know More?

The YouTube algorithm isn't any better or worse than the ones running any other social media soma distribution system. It gets a slightly less dystopian rap than the ones aimed at the impressionable and wayward youth, but I think that is less a comment on its qualities and more that it has never been wholly owned by a hostile foreign government for the purpose social infiltration and engineering. With YouTube, we had already proved we could do undermine and spy on ourselves. Plus it has become more associated with Millennials, whom we've somehow always assumed were lost anyway, so addressing it has felt less urgent. Sure, it will suggest a video for something unrelated to anything else in your feed that you had only recently had a conversation about or, magically/creepily, had only thought about, but that's a level of invasive sorcery we've not only grown accustomed to in our tech, but we seem to be actively pining for more of in the fantastical fever dreams of what "AI" is supposed to become capable of. While AI won't be able to do all of our thinking and creating for us--the internal agreed-upon lie AI companies tell tech investors as a shibboleth before they pass some more insane amounts of money back and forth--it will do what all tech currently does, which is redistribute wealth upward into the hands of those who already have most of it. In that way AI is almost as quaintly and comfortably conservative as stodgy old YouTube.

I'm neither a child nor a wine mom, so I spend no time on TikTok, but YouTube has slowly taken over my screen-viewing life over the past several years, certainly since the pandemic. The root of it was just to fill the days of lockdown, running long (four to seven hours!) VODs of Critical Role in the background while I tried to exercise or work or catatonically disassociate, all with mixed results. 

As media distribution has fractured more and more since that period, YouTube has come to take up a plurality of my viewing time. I think for most us, there is no "majority" anymore for what we consume on whatever platform as there are just too many goddamned options. This is much like the way voting seems to work now as well, at least for this cycle in California where I live. Instead of a couple of funded and visible candidates slugging it out, basically everyone has decided they should be in office. I can't tell if it's because media content creator culture has convinced everyone they should be able to launch themselves into the public consciousness with little or no effort or if things have just gotten so bad, way more people than normal are jumping in trying to help. I'm going to gently suggest that with 61 candidates on the ballot for California governor, two of whom are named Barack D. Obama Shaw and LivingForGodAndCountry DeMott, it might be the former.

In my own district, gerrymandered in a counter-move in the very stupid national game to rig the election in favor of one party over another, we got to chose between two incumbent Republicans, five democrats and one unaffiliated rando who doesn't understand how the American duopoly works. The overall idea is going to get the desired result: one of these two Rs will eliminate the other, leaving the GOP at net minus-one nationally. I get it. The lines had to be drawn that resulted in me being stuck in a roughly +10 GOP leaning district instead of one that used to be pretty purple. And in California, the jungle primary system means the top two vote-getters move on to the final contest, regardless of party. Because there are (and I'll say this in italics again) five Democrats running, they have split the vote and will definitely leave us with these two Republican incumbents--or as I like to call it, no actual fucking choice--on the November ballot.

I get it, there's a larger cause. There is a president to rebuke and a whole arm of government to re-establish as a functioning component of civil governance per its constitutionally mandated role. People can argue all they want about what the Founders may or may not have wanted, but they made the whole Article I about just the legislature, so maybe that could do the minimum parts of its job.

But I keep thinking about this YouTube video I got recommended about a drone service in rural England that finds lost pets in the countryside. In this 3-4 minute video, it was actually about how the drone service failed and one of a lost dog's dog-friends had to lead rescuers to a spot where they discovered the lost dog had been chasing rabbits and had become stuck underground, entangled in tree roots. They had to dig the dog out by hand, which they did. The rescued dog, being a dog, was completely peppy and non-plussed post-rescue, just happy to be a dog, incapable of gratitude really or self-recrimination.

So like, I'm happy to do my part I guess and get stuck with the same GOP member of Congress who has been haunting my electoral life since I turned 18, but inside a district like this, where you know what the outcome will be and also that you've been forced to live within a fence with only the worst of your neighbors, I can't help but feel a little like the dog who got stuck underground chasing rabbits. Only in this case, I've been put here deliberately, so there's no drone service coming to help me out.

At least I'm stuck down here with my phone. It's not easy to breathe, but at least I've got videos of professional actors playing Dungeons and Dragons to pass the time.

A Trip to Bountiful

The Mandalorian and Grogu

starring Brendan Wayne, Lateef Crowder, Sigourney Weaver, Jeremy Allen White('s voice), Jonny Coyne, Shirley Henderson('s voice), Martin Scorsese('s voice?!?!?) and Pedro Pascal('s voice, mostly)

directed by Jon Favreau (Swingers, two of the Iron Mans, Elf, Daredevil [the Ben Affleck one])

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NORMALLY THIS IS WHERE A SPOILER WARNING WOULD GO, BUT COME ON, BABY YODA LIVES, IT'S FINE

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One of the recurring segments of the old Muppet Show, was "Pigs in Space," which I remember always looking forward to because it was vaguely sci-fi shaped and I had been exposed to Star Wars by that point. Just to be clear, The Muppet Show in its original first-run airing I was far too young for, though I was definitely alive by then. I don't know why it's important to me to make it clear to you that I was aware of "Pigs in Space" in second-run syndication, probably on daytime television. I'm ok with you assuming I'm a giant dork, but I draw the line at letting you think I'm a Boomer.

In retrospect, I couldn't tell you a single character or plot scenario or even the premise of the sketch beyond the titular pigs in the also titular space, I just know it was presented as something Star Wars adjacent, which was satisfying enough for me at the time. I've looked it up for the purposes of writing this and apparently Miss Piggy was a recurring character, which I should have definitely just have assumed, but again, if asked, I couldn't produce a single piece of trivia about the thing beyond the fact that it made me sit up and take notice, with not only anticipation but a certain amount of relief, as in: oh yes, at last, the space thing is on, no more waiting through this bullshit. Of course as I got older I understood that the "bullshit" was, like, Madeline Kahn being a big bright shining star while co-starring around a bunch of felt socks with googly eyes stuck on, but those first impressions didn't register anything as subtle satire, talent or even actual entertainment. I didn't even apparently actually give the first fuck about pigs, as long as I got the in space.

That's really the best way to understand a lot of my interaction with both Star Wars and Star Trek content these days. It used to be true with Marvel and DC movies as well, things I'd always wanted to see when I was a kid and would sit up a little straighter for when, as an adult, their trailers would pop up ahead of whatever it was I was seeing instead (at that point, probably a totally different DC or Marvel film. We all remember the 2010s). Ever since Star Trek: Enterprise and then The Force Awakens 15 years later, I had to transition through the phase of rising to defend "the good parts" of shakily executed things I wanted to automatically like, to myself as much as (or more than) to other people even though it was evident to everyone that the quality was what it was. It's not that those projects or their postcedents were necessarily bad, it's just that they weren't obviously good either. And then, yeah, eventually The Rise of Skywalker comes out and there's no more room behind you left to retreat, it's all been sawn away by JJ Abrams and you're full Wile E. Coyote, standing unsupported in the sky, suspended by habit and hope vs. the pitiless reality of gravity, a contest that resolves itself exactly in the way you'd imagine, every single time.

I'm not only older now, but I'm fully on the other side of full psychosis fandom. I still watch the stuff, just now with arms crossed, daring it to impress me; dubious, but with just a crack left ajar for the light of something that is actually good to break through, like Andor or more recently the visually gorgeous Maul--Shadow Lord. The latter may end in a lot of noise and an overused climactic cliche of a Vader reveal (see also Rogue One, Jedi: Fallen Order, etc.), but it's pretty, fluid, thoughtful noise where people do cool flips and shit, so I was down. I'd have forgive Daredevil: Born Again season 2 if there had been one goddamned ninja in it, but no, I had to settle for some decent performances and all the ultimately unresolved angst masquerading as character. I'm going to need way more spin kicks if you want my thumbs-up, show about a guy who is a blind karate man.

I went into The Mandalorian and Grogu with the right kind of skepticism then, with a bar low enough that anything short of "Somehow, Palpatine returned" was going to clear it. The question was by what kind of margin?

And the answer is: eh, enough. I watched the whole thing, on a last-second whim of a plan with my youngest adult child. And I wasn't ever entirely bored, nor did I audibly groan at any of the ideas, characters or dialogue, which is saying something considering it included our first ever look at a Muscle Hutt, the swole-ass son of the merely swollen Jabba.

The Hutt in question is called Rotta, meaning this one is a soft sequel to another Star Wars low point, the cringe minefield that was the pilot film for The Clone Wars animated series. That one I had watched out of parental obligation as I had three children under 10 at that point, all of whom I naively and irresponsibly already exposed to Star Wars, setting my own petard in place upon which I was then hoist. What that awful film brought us as two things: an improving-to-the-point-of-genuine-excellence Clone Wars series over many years and the rise of showrunner Dave Filoni, who now famously has never had an idea he was willing to throw out. On the one hand that gets you the knowing hat-tip of fan service with Rotta in this movie along with Zeb from the Rebels series and a cameos by Filoni himself as an X-Wing pilot, paying off your attention even if it was to stuff you didn't necessarily like on the first helping. On the other hand, you end up kind of wishing for just one new idea.

Look, the Baby Yoda is very cute, as are the even-smaller-than-Baby-Yoda creatures ported in from Rise of Skywalker our wide-eyed Grogu gurgles and waddles around with. The puppet-action of Grogu and his wee alien pals (I'm not looking up the species, nerds, I told you I'm past that) is very charming and carries the last third of the movie as much as any action set pieces do. But overall, this doesn't really pay off or bring forward any character information established in any of the seasons of The Mandalorian, all of which I watched,. Three seasons only really got me some saved time in the beginning since I didn't have to pay attention to any exposition establishing the characters.

To this film's credit, though, there is almost no exposition. All you really need to know is that the silver man and his little frog pal find people, and they're sent off to do so from the geriatric retirement home for X-Wing pilots led by Sigourney Weaver. The main antagonist our title characters mostly interact with, some kind of lizard-robot in a sombrero, is pointedly mute; they just go about their business antagonizing.

It's all very efficient but still feels bloated somehow. It's entirely inessential and doesn't accomplish much in the lore department. In some ways that's a nice break from every other part of the Star Wars franchise very needily screaming in your face LOOK HOW IT'S ALL CONNECTED! REMEMBER THIS GUY FROM THE OTHER THING? YOU LIKE THAT, RIGHT? SAY YOU LIKE IT! But at the same time, you do come away from a series of fights with a series of monsters in an escalating scale of both size and grossness, wondering whom this is for and for what purpose. Entertainment? Sure. But is Star Wars about entertainment anymore, absent the more blatant pieces of fan service? When this film starts, our Mando and Grogu are an established team doing low-level jobs for their preferred employer. It ends with that status quo exactly in place, subtracting only the two hours it took us to get there.

It was fine. My instinct to wait for streaming for essentially a two-parter episode of a show I kind of forgot about was probably the better way to go. But I went with my son, whom I'd gotten into this mess in the first place by letting him watch any of this stuff, which is the kind of experience I'm happy to say is almost as envigorating and appealing as the opening titles of Pigs in Space used to be when I was, like, seven. Almost.

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Note: published on a Wednesday, one day early, because of Having A Life. It's inconvenient, but it does occur occasionally.