Tom Anderson

Working on a new bio. Something appropriate for the times. Might take a while.

[Tom Anderson @_Tom__Anderson_]

@JasmineForUS They're certainly not wasting time. This is central to their main objectives. Good thing for us we're all distracted by a bunch of temporary tariffs, which will magically disappear when the real work is sufficiently complete.

[Tom Anderson @_Tom__Anderson_]

@HwoodScrptReadr But not yet homicidal, though that would make the job more interesting. If a movie was ever made about a script reader, over the edge and hunting down atrocious screenwriters to murder in a style suggested by their own horrendous screenplay(s), who would be the bad guy?

[Mouin Rabbani @MouinRabbani]

Posted by former US Congressman @AdamKinzinger on Facebook. Beautifully written, in both form and substance:

Hey everyone, happy Sunday. Are you ready for some good news? I know I am.

We are told, over and over, that America has gone cold on the rest of the world. That we have decided the people on the other side of the ocean are a threat to be kept out. That the welcome mat got rolled up and put away for good.

Then a soccer team from the North African nation of Algeria showed up in Lawrence, Kansas, and within a week the whole town was wearing green.

For today's Good News Sunday, I want to tell you about one of the best things happening in this country right now. It is happening at a soccer tournament, and it has almost nothing to do with soccer.

The World Cup is here, 48 teams playing across the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Each team in the tournament picks a base camp, one town to live and train in between matches. Germany set up shop in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Spain is training in Chattanooga, Tennessee. And Algeria, playing two of its games up the road at Arrowhead, picked Lawrence and made it home for the summer.

What the people of Lawrence did with that is the part I can't stop thinking about.

It started small, with a whole town of people who had never given Algeria much thought deciding, more or less overnight, that this was their team now. Flags went up in shop windows. Folks pulled on the green jerseys. People drove over just to catch a glimpse of the players. And then a local news crew stopped an older gentleman on a Lawrence sidewalk, standing in front of a storefront draped in a whole row of Algerian flags he had clearly just gone out of his way to find.

They asked him what he actually knew about the country whose colors he was flying. He grinned, paused for a beat, and said something along the lines of: not much yet — but we want to welcome you here. There is no agenda in that man. Nothing performative. Just a neighbor, thrilled to his bones that these strangers chose his town, and perfectly at ease with the fact that he has a lot left to learn about them.

The welcome only got bigger from there.

The University of Kansas, the state's flagship school that calls Lawrence home, sent its marching band out to the training ground. They had spent the previous days learning Algeria's national anthem, note for note, and they played it as the players walked out for practice. Think about what that means for a moment.

These men are thousands of miles from their families, living out of a hotel in the American Midwest, preparing for the biggest sporting event of their professional lives. And the first thing they hear when they step onto the grass is the sound of their own country's song, played by a hundred American college kids in red and blue who learned it just for them. Several of the players stopped walking. A few of them looked like they weren't sure what to do with themselves.

Algeria did its part, too. The team opened a training session to the public and spent the afternoon out on the grass with neighborhood kids, walking them through drills, signing autographs, posing for pictures. There are children from small-town America who are going to be telling the story of the day they trained with a World Cup team for the rest of their lives. And the Algerians have spent the last week calling themselves honorary Kansans, falling hard for a corner of a state most of them could not have found on a map two months ago.

But it's not just Lawrence.

This is happening all over the country, in towns you would never expect.

The city of Alexandria, Virginia threw a street festival with an evening of Croatian food and music, and wrapped a city bus in the team's red and white. After crowds in Spokane, Washington flocked to watch Egyptian superstar Mohamed Salah, a brand-new Egyptian restaurant in town suddenly had locals lining up for food most of them had never tasted. All told, 19 American communities that are not hosting a single match still raised their hand to take in a national team and call them neighbors for a month.

There is a story we get told constantly about who we have become. That Americans have soured on outsiders. That we have decided the rest of the world is a threat. That we look at people who do not talk like us or pray like us or come from where we come from and see a problem instead of a person.

And then a college town in Kansas goes and learns every note of a North African country's national anthem, just so a group of strangers feel at home for a few weeks. An old local stands in front of a row of its flags and tells them, in so many words: we don't know much about you yet, but we are awfully glad you came.

That is who we actually are when nobody is telling us to be afraid. The band on the field, playing somebody else's song as if it were their own. The neighbor who knows next to nothing about you and waves you in anyway. We forget it sometimes. The good news is that it takes about one afternoon to remember.

That, my friends, is good news for your Sunday.
— Adam

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

USA. A backyard. A man. A grill. Four hours.

He never left it once.

Everyone else drifted, drank, wandered, laughed.
He stood before the flames, turning meat with a long fork, immovable.

I knew him at once.
The keeper of the sacred fire.

I took my place beside him.
I said nothing.

This is the first rule.
You do not speak first to the man at the grill.

After a long while, he spoke.

"Low and slow," he said, eyes never leaving the coals. "You can't rush it. Rush it, you ruin it."

I bowed my head.

A blade. A tea. A life.
None can be rushed.

I had crossed four thousand miles of ocean to hear my grandfather's words spoken by a man in a "KISS THE COOK" apron.

"Everything worth doing is slow," I said.

I have never cooked meat in my life.
But I said it as if I had said it a thousand times before.

He glanced at me.
Something passed between us. A current older than language.

His voice dropped, low, almost ashamed.

"My wife says just use the oven."

He shook his head at the fire.

"She doesn't get it."

"They never do," I said.

And this is where the man transformed.

For the first time in years, he had been understood.
He rose to meet it.

His back straightened.
His shoulders set.
His voice fell half an octave.

A teenager reached for the grill.
He lifted one hand without even looking.

"Not yet."

The boy retreated. He did not argue. He could not have argued.

A woman asked when the food would be done.
He told the flames, not her.

"It's ready when it's ready."

Three people approached.
Three were turned away with a single word each.

By the fourth hour, no one questioned him.
The whole party had arranged itself around the man and his fire, the way a village arranges itself around a shrine.

Then he turned to me.
He held out the fork.

"Watch it a sec. I gotta pee."

I have stood at the gate of lords with a naked blade in my hand.
Nothing has ever weighed as much as that fork.

I did not move my eyes from the coals.
I did not touch the meat.
I did not know how.
I would not learn.
To learn would be to break the moment.

When he returned, I handed back the fork without a word, as one returns a sword to its rightful master.

He served everyone before himself.
He ate last, standing, still watching the fire.

We never traded names. We did not need to.

He believed he had finally met a man who took grilling seriously.
I believed I had finally met America's last samurai.

Neither of us will correct the other.
Not now. Not ever.

So I have made a vow.

Every summer of my life, I will return to this country.
I will find a backyard. I will find a man at a grill.
I will stand beside him and say nothing until he speaks.
And when he says "low and slow," I will bow my head as if my grandfather had spoken.

I will die before I tell him I do not know how to cook meat.

"KISS THE COOK," his apron commanded.

I have obeyed.
I will obey again.

[Hunter Biden @HunterBiden]

I see your profile picture. That’s Johnny Cash. My hero too. Arrested seven times. Smuggled 668 amphetamines across the Mexican border in 1965. Took every drug there was and drank like I did. Cheated on his first wife. Slept with more woman than I ever did. Hit bottom in a cave in Tennessee in 1968 trying to crawl off and die. And then he got up. He got clean. He spent the rest of his life singing for prisoners and addicts and the people the country threw away because he knew he was one of them.

That was the whole point of the Man in Black. He wore it for the poor and the beaten down. He wore it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime. He wore it for the ones who never heard a word of Jesus. He wore it for the addicted and the dying. He wore it as a standing witness that no one is past saving.

You picked his picture. You did not pick his message. Try listening to the words.

[Tom Anderson @_Tom__Anderson_]

@chiefjimchris I don’t think as many people rode it though

[Tom Anderson @_Tom__Anderson_]

@KMH27777734 @MrPitbull07 Post a photo of one of the bees.

[Tom Anderson @_Tom__Anderson_]

@orsonscottcard Just like bees. You have to take time to get the water out, and ignore almost everyone who tries to tell you a better way to make honey. (Sorry; everything is about bees; the rest is tripe. Probably obvious what my new obsession is.)

[Dr. Clown, PhD @DrClownPhD]

The Lord Of The Force: A New Fellowship

Credit: Art-ficial Studios on YT

[Tom Anderson @_Tom__Anderson_]

@DanielAdamGruen Overrated. Just stuff it all in a desk drawer in Prague; it’ll take a while but the wait will be worth it.

[Tom Anderson @_Tom__Anderson_]

@MichaelARothman So, now I’m confused, thanks a lot. Just how, exactly, are we supposed to spell Auntie Em?

[Tom Anderson @_Tom__Anderson_]

@HwoodScrptReadr Makes sense. Followed. AI is probably fine for reviewing Hallmark movie scripts though. Even writing them.

[Tom Anderson @_Tom__Anderson_]

@JamesTate121 @john_nordic Great essay. He’s right about kale, though.

[capitolhunters @capitolhunters]

For those still behind: Melania's Epstein presser yesterday ("I was not a participant") was almost certainly driven by Amanda Ungaro, an Epstein victim who had a child with Paolo Zampolli, who brought Melania to the US. Zampolli just got Ungaro deported; she's vowing revenge. 1/

[Tom Anderson @_Tom__Anderson_]

@storyandplot I would love to become a screenwriter in my waning years. I don't know that I care that much about the art; I just want my revenge against the infinitives.

[Tom Anderson @_Tom__Anderson_]

@JasonArnol20410 @ThoNg676733 Gee and Holy Cow. I never knew until just now that Ringo Starr ever played with Supertramp.

[Tom Anderson @_Tom__Anderson_]

@storyandplot This makes a lot of sense to me, as someone who will never write another screenplay, since I spend far too much time being sober nowadays. But starting with a full understanding of characters, then letting them play it out themselves as the pages evolve, seems ... character limit

[Tom Anderson @_Tom__Anderson_]

@storyandplot +1. It's so good I'm all out of cliches to describe it. Needs an entirely new one.

[Molly Ploofkins @Mollyploofkins]

Go ahead Afroman

[Jesus Freakin Congress @TheJFreakinC]

This is the funniest thing I’ve seen on the internet.

Afroman had his house raided by Ohio Adam County deputies… who found absolutely nothing… broke his door, trashed his place, allegedly had $400 go missing… and then they refused to pay for the damages.

So, like any reasonable rapper would do…

He turned his home security footage into music videos, mocking them.

And then, the deputies sued him for FOUR MILLION dollars… because they didn’t like being made fun of.

And Afroman’s response?

He dropped ANOTHER music video.

In his own words:
“Unconfidential informant lied to Police to get out of some trouble. Adam County Sherriff officers made a mistake by believing the lie. Raided my house, found nothing, refused to pay for the damages and filed a lawsuit against me, Afroman, for exercising my freedom of speech! This is me holding trial in one song. I hope you enjoy it.”

They said his videos “ridiculed” them… so he decided to show them what that actually looks like.

And the best part?

A jury basically said… yeah… you don’t get to raid someone’s home, end up in their surveillance footage, and then cry because they used it to make fun of you.