Derek Johnson

David Byrne’s Who Is The Sky tour defies categorization. It is so much more than a concert. And it was beautiful and brilliant. The stagecraft from American Utopia is there, but the integrated video brought another artistic dimension to play with.

November 4, 2025
Orpheum Theater in Minneapolis, MN

Cutting the ACA subsidies will drive up the uninsured rate. Which means come the end of January, the nation’s ERs will be slammed with uninsured patients as their care-of-last-resort. We’ve effectively built COVID and measles time bombs and are now just waiting for them to explode.

You know how a saint needs a miracle in order to be canonized a saint?

Well, if hell exists and Trump wasn’t already fast-tracked to its VIP section, this is definitely the pure evil moment needed for Trump’s devil-canonization.

I wondered how many MLS clubs there’d be if their club-to-national-population ratio matched the big 5 European leagues.

If the MLS had the same club-to-population ratio as the EPL, there’d be ~113 MLS clubs

La Lige -> ~142 clubs

Bundeslige -> ~73 clubs

Ligue 1 -> ~89 clubs

Serie A -> ~115 clubs

Who let Ollie have more than 3 letters in his name?

🎶 You’re at the Applebees, what?
You’re at the IHOP, what?
You’re at the combination Applebees and IHOP 🎶

Trump says Antifa is a domestic terrorist org and claimed every left-leaning and Democratic org is part of it

And we now have a precedent of killing “terrorists” based on 0.00012% chance of truth

It’s stunning how close to a shooting-war we are if that is the minimum term of engagement

Trump says a Venezuelan terrorist “connection” can be up to 3 hops away from you to make you a legal target for death. This means Trump is blowing up boats based on a 1 in 810,000 chance you know someone Trump claims is a “terroist”

A 0.00012% chance

Now let’s look at how Trump defines Antifa…

Well, back in my day we had 39.1” of snow in twin storms hitting the Twin Cities January 20-22, 1982. We only missed 1.5 days of school. Yes, while this is technically different - 1 storm vs 2 storms - it was functionally experienced no differently.

to each according to their need 😂

With Putin’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine and Trump’s escalation toward war with Venezuela, tell me why China wouldn’t take this opportunity to finally go after Taiwan?

And if the US abandons Taiwan, what current US ally will trust any security guarantee we’ve promised? Not sure even NATO survives.

Back in my day they were called trap questions. They help the survey co. assess how seriously to consider a respondent’s results. It’s been over a decade since I’ve been deep in this, but I don’t think things have dramatically changed. Failing a trap question may get you dropped from the results.

wherever it is, it’s gonna be stuck to something else

Judges order USDA to release food stamp contingency funds Two rulings may bring some relief to Minnesota’s 440,000 SNAP recipients, though it’s not clear whether the Trump administration will comply.

Two rulings may bring some relief to Minnesota’s 440,000 SNAP recipients, though it’s not clear whether the Trump administration will comply with the order. www.minnpost.com/national/was...

Trump admin ordered to distribute SNAP benefits, using contingency fund A pair of rulings both found the effort to suspend SNAP payments is likely illegal, with one judge issuing a TRO on Friday. Also: Appeals court rejects court's Bovino check-in order.

NEW: Trump admin ordered to distribute SNAP benefits, using contingency fund. A pair of rulings both found the effort to suspend SNAP payments is likely illegal, with one judge issuing a TRO on Friday.

Also: Appeals court rejects court's Bovino check-in order.

Today, at Law Dork:

It’s great to see the courts issued a temporary restraining order to make Trump use the legally mandated and funded $6B SNAP contingency fund to continue paying benefits in November.

If you burgle someone’s tackle box, that’s stolen fish-lure.

AI might be better than you at a host of things, but it doesn’t mean AI is actually good at these things. A human is bad at a wide array of things. It doesn’t take much for AI to feel like magic.

If you can’t independently verify your ChatGPT answer, maybe you aren’t qualified to use that answer.

Take away every minute Pulisic has played in a league match since the ‘22 World Cup, and Pulisic has seen more playing time in Champions League and domestic cups alone than Reyna has played in all competitions.

If Gio still can’t accept his role in the ‘22 WC fiasco, then he’ll never get it

His clubs get it. He’s logged only 2,402 minutes in all club comps since the WC

Pulisic logged 8,658 minutes
McKinnie 9,886

And don’t blame injuries. Even Tyler Adams with his horrible injuries managed to log 5,586

Gio Reyna tells AP about plans to reboot career with new club and return to US team for World Cup Gio Reyna went to the 2022 World Cup as one of United States’ brightest young soccer stars. He came back amid controversy over his commitment and his parents’ conflict with the then-coach.

If Gio really wants a reboot, he needs to be on a team and in a league where he can get regular starts and 60-75 minutes a match. I doubt he’ll get that in any big 5 league right now.

His career shows he’s temperamentally unsuited long-term as a 15 minute super-sub

apnews.com/article/gio-...

With references like that, Kristi Noem is suddenly rushing to issue these monkeys ICE badges.

a dog laying on a rug with the word whaaaat written on the bottom ALT: a dog laying on a rug with the word whaaaat written on the bottom

I just learned there’s a band name The Big Wu.

Any reference to the greatest Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan movie ever created gets me acting like a dog who heard someone mention a W-A-L-K

I severely underestimated how much people would be willing to let me fuck up their houses based on their responses to Trump demolishing the East Wing of the White House.

I always felt Tedious Utopia sounds like a Fountains of Wayne tribute band, but this new single is fire 🔥

When Trump appointed yet another one of his personal lawyers to head the National Capital Planning Commission, we should’ve known then that he intended to demolish the White House.

I’ve only been home 3 of the last 8 weeks. You people who travel like that constantly are built differently.

Sometimes you search for a metaphor. Sometimes a metaphor reaches for you.

Here’s a live look at Trump tearing down the White House.

Also, watching superstar baseball players look up to their own superstar is kinda cute. Watch them talk about Ohtani and tell me their eyes don’t suddenly light up and they don’t sound like 10 year olds marveling at his feats.

I was thinking more about Shohei Ohtani’s 3 HRs as a batter and 10 Ks as a pitcher in a single game. It kinda felt like watching that one kid in U12 baseball who has hit puberty dominate over everyone else who hasn’t yet.