Alex Willis

Found at 8:23 pm on Sept. 28 on Alejandro Kirk's Wikipedia entry. You know it's gonna get removed as the baseball obsessives scour everything for clinical rigor, but in the meantime, let's enjoy life's little editorial grand slams. #bluejays #toronto #kirk #grandslam

Highest compliment from daughter, 5y: "I wish we had another dad so you could be a kid like us and we could play with each other like kids and you didn't have to tell us to do things."

Some people go the convertible route; others, a boat. But my midlife crisis is the mildly deflating realization that Star Trek: Voyager might actually be the best post-TNG Star Trek series.

It feels like the random and arbitrary nature of this is entirely the point -- to keep people off-balance, and to increase their feelings of vulnerability. At this point, what does an average foreign national entering the US believe their own risk of detainment to be?

Fires have started in Nova Scotia. Painful memories from 2023. Many friends and family in the area. Besides COVID, few things have united Canadians in the 2020s, from coast to coast, like wildfires. It's not synchronicity -- it's an actual pattern.

Next up: queue

All 37 remaining people who talk on phones exclusively do so by holding it in front of their mouth, bellowing as if mic technology was in its infancy, while the interlocutor bleats back on speakerphone -- because holding a phone up to your ear while talking would be a humiliating defeat.

Cars are the ultimate risk mitigator: if you kill someone behind the wheel, you are basically given the "airbag" of relative immunity.

I'll never understand the 20th and 21st century's obsession with the car, and the relentless need to pattern our lives and ethics around these fucking things.

Can journos stop referring to shootings as "brazen"? Unless it is accidental, any intentional (and especially any public) shooting is inherently brazen. The number of "surreptitious" shootings per year has got to be vanishingly small; most of the time, the brazenness is the point.

Nice. Is their side hustle an in-house therapist to deal with the inevitable cases of psychosis that will emerge when their patients go full Lawnmower Man in the middle of having their vas deferens lasered? Why not offer LSD or mushrooms on top of the nitrous? Make "tripping balls" a reality.

I'm in awe at Valerie Bauerlein's "The Devil at His Elbow". As a true crime fan (I'm basic; don't judge), I was familiar with the Murdaugh saga; had seen the Netflix specials, etc. But this book is on a whole other level. Meticulous, Gothic, relentless. Author as True Detective, not law enforcement.

I would characterize the air quality in Toronto today as "umami".

Bless the Park Attendant and his Water. Bless that he gets breaks in the shade. May his chemicals cleanse the pool. May he keep the wading for his People, Ages 0-12.

"Baba, it's so hot my butt is melting." #withrowpark

When the bombs went off, I just ran On London's streets, movement became a kind of salvation, a solution to help absorb the horrors around me

I have been silently dreading the 20th anniversary of 7/7. The full impact of what I witnessed that day only fully manifested within the last 5 years -- an unwelcome visitor. It has taken work to accept that this event changed me, and that seeking support to address this was not a sign of weakness.

It’s not just that the President of the United States has announced on social media that the US has bombed Iran, it’s that the President of the United States bombed Iran so that he could announce it on social media.

As a late Gen Xer, I am fascinated by our sandwiched role between our neighbours' respective pathos.

Boomer: Something bootstraps! Forever jobs! Fuck the world!
Millennial: *pops pill* I guess we'll have to work forever to clean this up
Gen X: *long exhale, puts down bong* that's a bummer, man

I'm confused. Did the IRS stop collecting income tax information? Or perhaps this is a Freudian slip, reflecting that the Crypto Barons in Washington are now just fully avoiding fiduciary responsibility of their own interests relative to the public trust?

LinkedIn in 2025 is All AI, All The Time. If you're not looking at AI slop images hastily assembled by motivational "thought leaders", you're reading anxious posts about AI taking all our jobs. I can appreciate the ontological dimensions of the AI threat, but the site is just too sweaty right now.

My 5yo son this morning, acting as waiter, holding paper and pen, approaches me in bed and asks, "For your father's day breakfast, would you like: coffee, alcohol, milk, or water?"

(For the record, my response was "yes.")

City of Toronto garbage bin, High Park

It might be fashionable to dislike mothers in law, but when your Chinese MIL makes you a ready supply of homemade jiaozi for on-demand lunches, you remain eminently unfashionable.

I was nearly dethroned as the editor of my undergrad newspaper for over-playing this in the newsroom, just after it was released. Persecution!

The most grating sound in the world is Democratic voters breathlessly defending themselves with some version of "I didn't vote for this". Yeah, well, technically neither did the other side, but in balance, it doesn't seem too disruptive to either group.

"The staffer noted that even if some of the grants are reinstated, “delaying funds isn't like smoothly landing a plane for a brief pause to refuel—it's more like crashing a plane into the side of a mountain.”"

The enstupidification of "regulation" as a political position (for/against) is a lost opportunity, but the historical decline in civics precedes it by several orders of magnitude. One is either for or against "government"; decades ago, we ceased being "citizens" and became "taxpayers"; etc.

At least the Transformer "Jazz" is not returning on first results?

...

...yet.

Yes, it's a new era of product licensing, and SEO is a critical tool in that consolidation of meanings. Hasbro, for example, is starting to do this with their D&D line. "Beholder" will now typically return the monster.

Most of the "men" we need to worry about haven't got a fucking clue who Anthony Bourdain was. The rest of us are here on Bluesky, clutching our pearls, bemoaning the death of civility, and wondering if maybe AB took the smart way out.