The Right takes pride in being American.
The Left takes pride in believing they’re better than America.
More true now than ever. https://t.co/nCzWos5rvf

— Buck Sexton (@BuckSexton) June 30, 2025

Commenter pfdr pointed out the similarity of a piece of music from Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack for “True Romance” (1993). I mentioned this to my wife, the family musicologist, who responded with this Wikipedia entry:

Gassenhauer nach Hans Neusiedler (1536), commonly known as Gassenhauer (pronounced [ˈɡasn̩ˌhaʊ̯ɐ]), is a short piece from Orff Schulwerk, developed during the 1920s by Carl Orff with long-time collaborator Gunild Keetman. As the full title indicates, it is an arrangement of a much older work for lute by the lutenist Hans Neusidler from 1536. It (along with several other Orff Schulwerk pieces) is credited to Keetman on a 1995 release of the Schulwerk. As with many other pieces from the Schulwerk, it has been used multiple times on television, radio, music and in films, including the films Badlands (1973), True Romance (1993) (arrangement by Hans Zimmer), Ratcatcher (1999), Finding Forrester (2000), Monster (2003), Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story (2009), Priscilla (2023),The Simpsons’ 22nd-season episode “The Scorpion’s Tale” (2011), Friend of the World (2020), The Simpsons’ 33rd-season episode “Mothers and Other Strangers” (2021) and Mad God (2021). The piece was used as the theme music for an afternoon radio program also titled Gassenhauer on the classical music station WCLV in Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1970s.

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Suzy Weiss complains on behalf of an entire hapless generation.

In a week or so I will have left my twenties behind for, I’m told, my thirties. I’m not much of a birthday celebrater, but I have been reflecting on the past decade, and marveling at how little I seemed to have learned during it. Sure, I managed to pay my taxes, and apply for a couple of apartments. I can hold a job. Well, I can hold a job where the boss is my sister.

But I can’t do a lot of things. I don’t really drive. I’m too scared to cook most meats. I’ve never ironed anything—I do a poor man’s steam, which is when you hang your garment in the bathroom while you shower and hope the heat gets the wrinkles out. The other day I called my dad to ask how many thousands are in a million. (It’s a thousand!) …

In an airy, wood-accented event space in Brooklyn, a few dozen adults gathered to talk about their next phases of life. …

“Remember,” Alex Simon, the facilitator of this workshop, called out to the room, “Listen deeply. No fixing, no problem solving.” The class, Life Transitions: Crisis and Change, is part of a series she started. It’s called Lifeshop. Simon, 29, started teaching it to undergraduates at Yale two years ago, then adapted it into a three-month course open to the public in New York. It began in March, and since then, she estimates that 900 to 1,000 people have come through the doors.

“It’s all the things that I wish I learned in college but never did,” said Simon.

Those things include: how to listen, how to fight with someone you love, how to apologize, and how to deal with a friendship breakup, as well as navigating big life transitions. You know, those things that every single person has to do but which make most of us feel completely unprepared.

“At every single workshop, people say, ‘I had no idea it wasn’t just me,’ whether it’s navigating an inner critic or feeling like their life is up in flames,” Simon told me. “We have this habit of taking things that are kind of universal and making them a proof of our own brokenness, or inadequacy. The beauty of doing it in a group is that we realize it’s not just us.”

It’s easy to make fun of young people who find it hard to be adults. They’re eons behind where their parents were at their age. Young people today have fewer kids, no houses, and finance everything from clothes to concerts with layaway plans. A new Gallup poll of Gen Z found that fewer than 44 percent of them report feeling prepared for the future.

RTWT

Gen Z has to be this f***** up because so many Baby Boomers were left-wing douchebags.

Lady Caroline, Spey Fly.

BREAKING: Vancouver just renamed Trutch Street to Šxʷməθkʷəy̓əmsəm Street to be inclusive pic.twitter.com/sdKAXj2iky

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) June 22, 2025

Piero della Francesca, Baptism of Christ, 1450s, National Gallery, London.

Towards night, materials for a fire were collected in a public place and kindled. To this the name of bonfire was given, a term of which the most rational explanation seems to be, that it was composed of contributions collected as boons, or gifts of social and charitable feeling. Around this fire the people danced with almost frantic mirth, the men and boys occasionally jumping through it, not to show their agility, but as a compliance with ancient custom. There can be no doubt that this leaping through the fire is one of the most ancient of all known superstitions, and is identical with that followed by Manasseh. We learn that, till a late period, the practice was followed in Ireland on St. John’s Eve. Read the rest of this entry »

A medieval manuscript was peed on by a cat.

The scribe was forced to leave the rest of the page empty, and drew a picture of a cat and cursed the creature with the following words:

“Hic non defectus est, sed cattus minxit desuper nocte quadam. Confundatur pessimus cattus qui minxit super librum istum in nocte Daventrie, et consimiliter omnes alii propter illum. Et cavendum valde ne permittantur libri aperti per noctem ubi cattie venire possunt.”

Cologne, Historisches Archiv, G.B. quarto, 249, fol. 68r

WARMINGTON: Only in Toronto would swimming pools be closed because it's too hot https://t.co/tjDpwPbZw5 pic.twitter.com/dxuj0P52u7

— Toronto Sun (@TheTorontoSun) June 23, 2025

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Actual story.

New from me for @TwitchyTeam

The best Governor (@GovRonDeSantis) in America trolls New York as the NYC Mayor race is looking very very bad

(Link in first comment) pic.twitter.com/lREfI8jy7m

— Just Mindy (@just_mindy) June 23, 2025

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If @ZohranKMamdani does get elected mayor, I can't wait to laugh (and cry) when our esteemed biz leaders in real estate and banking tell New Yorkers how they will "work with him." Good luck with that. BTW we have no real biz leadership in the city. If we had there would be no…

— Charles Gasparino (@CGasparino) June 23, 2025

Brigadier General Stand Watie, C.S.A.

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Watie wasted no time in joining the Confederacy, viewing the federal government—not the South—as the Cherokees’ principal enemy. He raised the first Indian regiment of the Confederate Army, the Cherokee Mounted Rifles, and helped secure control of Indian Territory for the rebels early in the conflict….

Watie became known as a gifted field commander and a bold guerrilla leader. At the Battle of Pea Ridge in Arkansas in March 1862, his troops earned acclaim for capturing a Union battery in the midst of a Confederate defeat. On June 15, 1864, his men scored a major victory by capturing the Union steamboat J.R. Williams. The following September, they seized some $1.5 million worth of supplies on a Federal wagon supply train at Cabin Creek….

Watie was so committed to the Southern cause that he refused to acknowledge the Union victory in the waning months of the Civil War, keeping his troops in the field for nearly a month after Lieutenant General E. Kirby Smith surrendered the rest of the Confederacy’s Trans-Mississippi Army on May 26, 1865. A full 75 days after Robert E. Lee met with Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, Watie became the last Confederate general to lay down arms, surrendering his battalion of Creek, Seminole, Cherokee, and Osage Indians to Union Lieutenant Colonel Asa C. Matthews at Doaksville on June 23.

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“Stand Watie’s gone.”