The top of the list is obvious. We all know that there’s fun to be had in Vegas, Orlando, Miami, The Big Apple, The Big Easy, Austin, etc.

What I’m interested in is the bottom of the list. What is the least fun place in America? According to their metrics, the not-hot spot in the Lower 48 is South Burlington, Vermont. That’s hard to believe, because while you’re there it is only a ten-minute drive to the World’s Tallest Filing Cabinet. (Adjoining Burlington, the actual location of the Filing Cabinet Extraordinaire, is also ranked in the bottom quarter.)

The absolute lowest is Pearl City, Hawaii, which is just around the corner from one of the most fun cities, Honolulu. That’s kind of the story of America, isn’t it?

There are plenty of places larger than South Burlington that simply are not on the list, for whatever reason. The place that I call Wisconsin’s dullest city, Fond du Lac, should be able to match South Burlington for sheer boredom, but was not evaluated.

“WWE legend Sunny, whose real name is Tammy Sytch, was sentenced Monday to nearly two decades in prison and nearly a decade of probation for a deadly DUI crash in Florida last year.”

The woman we see today is pretty much unrecognizeable as the 1990s rasslin’ diva. I lost track of her DUI arrests several years ago, but the fatal crash was something like her 7th DUI. At a point like that, judges tend to view the defendants as incorrigible and a menace to society.

Rest assured that there is a very good reason:

The company has acknowledged to passengers that it has no ship

That does seem like a major obstacle to a successful cruise, not to mention a significant impediment to success in the cruise indiustry in general.

Joking aside, this is a nightmare for the passengers who signed up, many of whom sold or rented out their homes in anticipation of living at sea for three years. Furthermore, the company waited so long to make the announcement that many passengers are stranded in the original departure city.

Today is the 60th anniversary of the Kennedy Assassination.

November 22, 1963. Seeing that date in writing still gives me the chills, even when it is abbreviated to simply November 22.

It’s strange to see how unimportant that date is to younger people, even though it remains possibly the most memorable day of our lives for me and my classmates. We were just the right age – old enough to worship JFK as the eloquent, dashing young hero-President who got us through the Cuban Missile Crisis and let his adorable kids play in the Oval Office, but not old enough to be cynical about his recklessness, or his philandering, or anything else that would have shattered the myth of Camelot.

Since he was our unsullied idol, his death was elevated to an immeasurable level of tragedy. For us, he was Achilles, the seemingly invulnerable icon somehow brought down by a cheap shot, and there was nothing to limit our sadness. Because we shared our grief with an entire nation, our feelings were echoed again and again by our relatives and by every talking head on every TV channel across the republic. We were bathed in sorrow, immersed in our sense of loss. The limitless resonance of those feelings made that weekend more memorable than the times when I lost my parents or my dearest friends.

When I look at the calendar and see that it is November 22nd, all of those memories return as if they had happened last week, yet for those in subsequent generations, it’s just the day between the 21st and the 23rd. I suppose life works like that.

– December 7th was that kind of day, but no longer resonates the way it did for The Greatest Generation.

– For at least two generations, April 14th was that kind of day, and then it wasn’t. I can always remember that Lincoln was killed in April because it was when lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d, but it’s not in the top of my mind that it happened on the 14th, or that it happened on Good Friday. When I see the date April 14 on the calendar, it doesn’t give me the kind of chills I experience when I see “November 22” in writing.

For those of us in the early boomer demographic, November 22nd is our day, our generation’s, more even than September 11th. Perhaps for me, it reverberates even more than December 25th or July 4th because it is so personal, so particular to our age group and our most powerful, enduring memories.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starship was forced to self-destruct in a second launch disaster

This brings back a lot of memories. When I was in elementary school, the teachers would often wheel an old B&W television into the room so we could watch the latest NASA launch. Failure followed failure (see video below). It seemed to us that we would never have a successful one.

But take heart, Elon. Within about a decade of those early failures, Neil Armstrong and the Buzzer were strolling on the moon and returning safely.

In case this page is inacccessible to you through a pay wall, here are the key facts

“In the American creator economy, no platform is quite as direct or effective as OnlyFans. Since launching in 2016, the subscription site known primarily for its explicit videos has become one of the most methodical, cash-rich and least known layers of the online-influencer industry, touching every social platform and, for some creators, unlocking a once-unimaginable level of wealth.

More than 3 million creators now post around the world on OnlyFans, which has 230 million subscribing “fans” — a global audience two-thirds the size of the United States itself, a company filing in August said.

And with help from a pandemic that isolated people at home, fans’ total payouts to creators soared last year to $5.5 billion — more than every online influencer in the United States earned from advertisers that year, according to an analysis into the creator economy this spring by Goldman Sachs Research.

If OnlyFans’s creator earnings were taken as a whole, the company would rank around No. 90 on Forbes’s list of the biggest private companies in America by revenue, ahead of Twitter (now called X), Neiman Marcus Group, New Balance, Hard Rock International and Hallmark Cards.”

Kevin, we hardly knew ye.

The House has never removed its leader before.

I read Cassidy Hutchinson’s book, in which McCarthy comes off as a decent human being, which kind of surprised me. Unfortunately for him, his cowardly groveling and kowtowing to the nutbags did him no good at all in the long run. He’d have been far better off compromising with the Democrats.

(Matt Gaetz, by the way, comes off as a total creep in Hutchinson’s story, which probably comes as no surprise to most people.)

This ouster means that they can’t conduct any House business now, despite the fact that another shutdown is looming. The temporary speaker can’t conduct any business except when it involves electing a new one, and I can’t imagine how either party is ever going to produce enough votes to do that. It’ll be messy.

He will now be able to devote his remaining life to the things that are really important to him, like Satan worship.

Joking aside, there’s no denying his influence. Say what you want, but the man re-made journalism and made a fortune in the process. The only debate involves whether that was a good thing.

“Radical left-wing feminists in Chile with “ponytails inserted in their butts and performing dances” in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the military coup against Salvador Allende.”

(In an event sometimes called “the other 9/11,” the USA backed the overthrow of Allende, a democratically elected Marxist, by a military coup. The Nixon administration wanted to prevent the spread of Communism during the Cold War.)

I don’t think the ponytails are actually in their butts, so the quote above kind of overhypes the protest. Nonetheless, the impact is approximately as promised – women in thongs or with bare butts, some waving strap-on ponytails. I assume they are anti-coup, but isn’t this counter-productive? After seeing the vid, I want to join the CIA and foment a military coup so more women will do this.

One year after the attacks, Dave Barry wrote a moving piece about the ground where flight 93 went down, and the courageous passengers who fought back against the terrorists. That author is the same Dave Barry who writes glib and humorous articles, but there is nothing trivial or funny in this piece.

“The passengers and crew on Flight 93, when they set out from Newark that morning, had no cause in common. They were people on a plane bound from Newark to San Francisco. Some were going home, some traveling on business, some on vacation. People on a plane. Which makes it all the more astonishing, what they did.”

I wrote in the Fun House on Sept 12, 2001:

The fun is absent from the fun house. Our thoughts are with the victims, and the families of the victims. And with the fragility of our own lives. The most frightening thing for everyone is that we can imagine ourselves in their places with only the slightest change in circumstances

As any history professor will tell you, people don’t much care for the minutiae of dates. Yesterday morning, most Americans could identify only three by heart.

  • July 4, 1776
  • December 7, 1941
  • November 22, 1963

Now there will be four.

The rapes took place in 2003, when he was still on That 70s Show.

A sideshow of the trial was the embarrassment for the Church of Scientology.

The women blamed the church for their hesitancy in going to police about Masterson. They testified that when they reported him to Scientology officials, they were told they were not raped, were put through ethics programs themselves, and were warned against going to law enforcement to report a member of such high standing.

The church said in a statement after the verdict that the “testimony and descriptions of Scientology beliefs” during the trial were “uniformly false.”

Masterson is the husband of Bijou Phillips.