Top o’ the mornin’, dear reader! Today, March 17th, we raise our glasses—brimming with the emerald elixir of Guinness or a fiery shot of Jameson—to celebrate the most badass of Irish brethren to ever don a shamrock: St. Patrick, patron saint of Ireland. But this isn’t your gran’s Sunday school story, oh no. We’re diving deep, rewinding the clock to 461 CE, to a time when this holy hellraiser kicked the bucket on the very day we now paint the town green. So, strap in for a tale of rebellion, redemption, and sheer, unadulterated Irish grit that’ll make your liver quiver and your mind explode with the ferocity of a thousand fiddles at a Galway hoedown.

The year is somewhere around 405 CE, and young Patrick—born Maewyn Succat, a name that sounds like a Celtic sneeze—is just a snot-nosed teenager living in Roman Britain. Life’s peachy until a gang of Irish pirates—yes, fucking pirates—swoop in like a swarm of whiskey-soaked locusts, kidnap the lad, and drag him across the Irish Sea. He’s sold into slavery, forced to tend sheep on the rugged hills of County Antrim, where the wind howls like a banshee trying to collect back rent. For six years, this poor bastard endures the elements, starvation, and the kind of soul-crushing isolation that’d make even Nietzsche weep into his mustache. But does Patrick break? Hell no! He gets tougher. He prays, he schemes, and he dreams of freedom, channeling a spiritual ferocity that’s pure, unfiltered proto-punk energy—think Iggy Pop snarling through “Search and Destroy,” but with a shepherd’s crook.

Then, in a moment of divine intervention—or sheer ballsy determination, depending on your theological bent—Patrick hears a voice. It tells him to haul ass to the coast, where a ship awaits to carry him back to freedom. This isn’t some passive, sandal-wearing Jesus shit; this is a jailbreak, a middle finger to his captors, a teenage runaway saga that’d make Jack Kerouac proud. He treks 200 miles—200 fucking miles—through hostile terrain, dodging raiders and starvation, and somehow, against all odds, makes it to that ship.

But here’s where the story gets really wild. Patrick doesn’t just go home, crack open a mead, and call it a day. No, he doubles down. He studies, becomes a priest, and—get this—chooses to return to Ireland, the very hellhole that enslaved him, to spread Christianity. This ain’t forgiveness; this is revenge through redemption, a spiritual Molotov cocktail hurled at the pagan kings and druids who thought they could break him. By 432 CE, he’s back on the Emerald Isle, armed with nothing but a staff, a Bible, and a set of brass balls the size of Galway Bay. He’s not just preaching; he’s fighting. The druids, those mystical bastards with their oak groves and human sacrifices, try to take him down. They curse him, they plot his death, but Patrick? He laughs in their faces, allegedly using the shamrock to explain the Holy Trinity in what can be best described as a theological mic drop.

Patrick’s life reads like a 5th-century punk rock epic—a raw, autobiographical screed that lays out his trials with an anarchic defiance. His Confessio, a memoir of sorts, isn’t another flowery hagiography; it’s a gritty, unapologetic account of a man who stared down kings, druids, and his own demons, all while converting an entire nation.

He dies on March 17th, 461 CE, in Saul, County Down, but his death isn’t the end—it’s the capstone of a saga that’s been spun into legend ever since. The Irish, we indomitable, poetic, hard-drinking bastards, take his legacy and run with it, turning a missionary’s life into a cultural juggernaut that’s got the whole damn world wearing green and chugging stout every spring.

Now, let’s talk about the Irish themselves, because St. Patrick’s story is just one thread in the tapestry of their ferocious, whiskey-soaked history. These are a people who’ve been through the wringer—Viking raids, Norman invasions, British oppression, the Great Famine—and yet they’ve never lost their fire. They’re the underdogs who always come out swinging, with a pint in one hand and a poem in the other. From the ancient Celts who painted themselves blue and charged into battle buck-naked, to the rebels of 1916 who stared down the British Empire with nothing but rifles and a dream, the Irish have a knack for turning suffering into art, pain into song. Think of the literature—Joyce’s labyrinthine Ulysses, Beckett’s bleak fucking genius, Heaney’s peat-soaked poetry. Think of the music—those haunting ballads that can make a grown man cry into his Bushmills, or the Pogues’ raucous anthems that’ll have you trying to dance a jig whilst puking in the alley.

And let’s not forget the drinking, because if there’s one thing the Irish do better than anyone, it’s throwing a party that’d make Dionysus himself blush. St. Patrick’s Day isn’t just a holiday; it’s a global middle finger to sobriety, a day where the world gets to channel the Irish spirit of excess and exuberance. In Dublin, the streets are a sea of green, with fiddles wailing and glasses clinking. In Boston, the Southies are three sheets to the wind by noon, singing “Sweet Caroline” like it’s a goddamn hymn. Even in Tokyo, they’re dyeing the rivers green and sipping sake with a side of Irish stew. It’s chaos, it’s beautiful, and it’s all thanks to a 5th-century badass who refused to let the bastards grind him down.

At least that’s how it’s supposed to be, and how it has always been until about 5 minutes ago.

The Ireland of today is facing a crisis that’d make even St. Patrick himself weep into his holy ale. The Emerald Isle, that bastion of green glory, is under siege—not by Viking longships or British redcoats, but by a tidal wave of illegal immigration that’s threatening to drown its very soul. In 2024 alone, asylum seeker numbers in Ireland surged by nearly 300% compared to five years prior, a statistic that’s got the rural towns of this proud nation reeling. These aren’t just numbers; these are entire communities—places where the Irish have become minorities in their own ancestral lands, overrun in what feels like a single, devastating swoop. The government, accused of zero action and zero accountability, is allegedly funneling money overseas while the voices of the Irish people are left to scream into the void.

Enter Conor McGregor, the notorious MMA fighter and, from this American Mick’s perspective, a modern-day embodiment of Irish defiance, who’s taken it upon himself to sound the alarm. Today, March 17th, 2025, on this very St. Patrick’s Day, McGregor strutted into the White House to meet with President Trump, a man he admires for his work ethic and no-nonsense approach. McGregor, decked out in a green three-piece suit, didn’t mince words in the briefing room, calling the situation in Ireland a “travesty” and warning that the country is on the cusp of losing its “Irishness” to what he terms an “illegal immigration racket.” He’s not just there to complain; he’s there to learn, to listen, and to plead for America—Ireland’s “big sibling”—to help its little bro get back on its feet. McGregor’s got big plans: he’s eyeing a run for President of Ireland later this year, aiming to take on the establishment with an anti-immigration platform that’s as fiery as a shot of poteen. Though he’s a long shot—needing the backing of 20 parliament members or four local councils to even get on the ballot—McGregor’s got the kind of populist, middle-finger-to-the-system energy that could just shake things up. Irish leaders like Taoiseach Micheál Martin and Tánaiste Simon Harris have been quick to distance themselves, claiming McGregor doesn’t speak for Ireland, but the man’s got a following, and he’s not backing down.

So, here’s to St. Patrick, you magnificent bastard—patron saint of Ireland, proto-punk icon, and the guy who turned a slave’s suffering into a nation’s salvation. Here’s to the Irish, a people who’ve taken every punch the world could throw and still come up laughing, with a story to tell and a drink to share. And here’s to Conor McGregor, who’s fighting to preserve the Ireland that St. Patrick built, even if it means ruffling some feathers in the process. On this St. Patrick’s Day, let’s honor them all the only way that matters: with a glass raised high, a curse on our lips, and a fire in our hearts. Sláinte, you brilliant fuckers—may your day be as wild as Patrick’s life, and may your hangovers be the stuff of legend.

N.P.: “In the Name of the Father” – Bono, Gavin Friday

I shouldn’t be in such a fine mood today, dear reader…not nearly enough sleep last night, for no good reason at all.  Actually, the steroids may have had something to do with it.  Maybe not.  Regardless, I didn’t get to sleep until around 02:00.  Which would have been good enough if all else had been equal.  But all else wasn’t.

Fecal Creek is and always has been a railroad town.  This town formed around a massive Southern Pacific railyard which served as a central junction for all railroad traffic in California, but particularly between Sacramento to the west and the Gold Country to the east.  When officially founded during the Gold Rush, it was called Shotgun Junction, a rather badass tribute to the massive armed presence of militant civilians protecting the equally massive amount of gold flowing into and out of the town from bandits, river pirates, and thieving Mexicans.  Almost 200 years later, not much has changed: most of the civilian population is armed with shotguns, and the train traffic is heavier than ever.  Which train traffic was exactly what interrupted last night’s slumber, when it finally arrived.  Shortly after 04:15, some sort of disagreement apparently broke out between two engineers on two different trains over the right of way.  At least that’s what I’m guessing it was about…I have a police scanner that includes the Southern Pacific channel and probably could have clicked that thing on and found out exactly what was going on, but that would have involved getting out of bed, which was not something I was willing to do at that unholy hour of the night.  Anyway, whatever it was about, these two engineers decided to battle it out through a series of train-horn blasts lasting over 35 minutes.  I’m confident it woke the entire town up…certainly everybody in this house was brutally and rudely awakened by the sonic assault.  The goddamn puppy went all to pieces, choosing to run around in little circles in a pathetic effort to just deal with the pre-dawn nonsense.  It was awful, and by rights, the whole goddamn town should be cranky today.  And they probably are.  But not me.  I am mighty.  And smirking.  The writing is going extremely well.  Which brings us to the business of this day, March 16.

On March 16, 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne detonated a goddamn literary bomb in the sanctimonious gut of Puritan America when he published The Scarlet Letter, a vicious, white-hot screed that left the moral fascists of Boston reeling. Ticknor, Reed & Fields couldn’t keep the thing on shelves—2,500 copies obliterated in ten days, a middle finger to the theocratic killjoys who thought they could brand Hester Prynne with their scarlet “A” and call it a day. Hawthorne was not fucking around; he was a man scorned, freshly canned from his gig at the Salem Custom House, his blood boiling with the kind of rage that doesn’t simmer—it erupts. He turned that fury into a blade, slicing through the Puritan hypocrisy that festered like a plague in early America, exposing their obsession with sin, shame, and conformity for the sadistic charade it was. The Puritans, those black-clad, joy-hating bastards, thought they owned morality—Hawthorne showed they were the real sinners, their hearts festering with cruelty masquerading as piety. Not only did The Scarlet Letter become a cornerstone of American lit—it rewrote the rules, flipping the script on moral storytelling with a snarl that still echoes.

Hawthorne saw the Puritans for what they were: the original thought police, the blueprint for every moral panic that’s choked the life out of this country since. They demanded absolute obedience, using the fear of hellfire to keep the flock in line, their sanctimonious fingers in every pie, policing behavior, speech, even thought itself. Now, in 2025, their ghosts are back, and they’ve got new skin to wear. The Woke have arrived, and they’re the new Puritans, now on steroids, only worse—more insidious, more relentless, armed with the digital guillotine of cancellation and a dogma so rigid it makes the old witch-burners look like they were just vibing. These self-appointed arbiters of virtue don’t just want to control what you do—they want to control what you think, their ever-mutating lexicon of “microaggressions” and “systemic harm” a weaponized scripture designed to keep you on your knees. They’ve traded the Puritan’s hellfire for the hellfire of public shaming, their Twitter mobs and callout posts the modern-day stocks, their performative tears and hashtag activism a mask for a power grab so blatant it’s obscene. They’re not here to liberate—they’re here to dominate, and they’ll crush anyone who doesn’t bow to their gospel of moral purity.

The hypocrisy is enough to make you scream until your throat bleeds. They rail against “oppression” while building their own empire of control, a Kafkaesque nightmare of speech codes and behavior policing that strangles free thought like a garrote. They demand “accountability” while ignoring their own sins—their complicity in the same capitalist machine they claim to despise, their selective outrage that spares their allies but damns their enemies, their own unexamined prejudices festering beneath the surface of their sanctimonious word-policing. They’re the new magistrates of Salem, hunting heretics with a zeal that would make Cotton Mather proud, their digital pitchforks dripping with the blood of the canceled. And they’ve been winning, goddammit—they’ve been winning because we’ve been too scared, too complacent, too busy scrolling to fight back.

But not me. Not now. We’ve just hit an inflection point in this country…more of a breaking point, and I’m not sitting this one out. We need a new Scarlet Letter, a book that doesn’t just whisper dissent but screams it from the rooftops, a literary Molotov cocktail to burn this Woke tyranny to the ground. And I’m writing it—right now, in this moment, my hands shaking with a fury that courses through my veins like wildfire. I’m mainlining adrenaline and deliciously powerful American whiskey, my pulse hammering with the urgency of a man who knows the clock is ticking, the testicularly-lacking enemy is at the gates, and the time for polite discourse is over. This book isn’t going to pull punches—it’s going to swing an electrified shithammer, smashing through the Woke’s sanctimonious facade to expose the rot beneath. It’ll be a feral, unhinged takedown of their egregious hypocrisy, a call to arms for anyone who still believes in the raw, chaotic beauty of free thought. I’m channeling Hawthorne’s rage, every ounce of my own disgust into this thing, and when it hits, it’s going to hit like a freight train that doesn’t need to rely on it’s horns to demand the right of way. The idiot Woke won’t see it coming—they’ll be too busy, as always, policing pronouns to notice the revolution at their door. But it’s coming, and it’s going to be a beautiful, terrifying thing to behold. Buckle up.

N.P.: “Euthanasia” – Psychotica

Beware the Ides of March, dear reader!  Today is March 15, also known as the Ides of March, a time to remember that your best friends, your closest confidantes, even your immediate family can and in all likelihood will betray you just when you need them the most.  Thus, it is a darkly significant day on the Gallaway calendar, and it should be on yours as well.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, and/or you weren’t an English major, allow me to elucidate while once again including you in my nightly prayers. Let’s set the scene: March 15, 44 BC, and Rome’s power-hungry Senate is a pressure cooker ready to explode. Julius Caesar—conqueror, dictator, and all-around larger-than-life legend—strides in, blissfully unaware of the betrayal brewing. A pack of senators, led by his so-called friend Brutus, decide it’s time for a regime change. In a flash, they turn the Senate floor into a crime scene, stabbing Caesar 23 times in a frenzy of blood, treachery, and ambition. Shakespeare immortalized this savage betrayal in Julius Caesar (1599), giving us the haunting line, “Et tu, Brute?” (“And (even) you, Brutus?”)—a gut-punch that echoes through time. The Ides of March became the ultimate symbol of backstabbing doom, inspiring literary giants from Dante to Robert Graves. Caesar’s epic rise and brutal fall lit a fire under centuries of writers, proving that the rawest dramas aren’t fiction, but the messy, bloody stuff of history.

If you have ever been betrayed by your entire personal cohort, you (should) know well the lessons of the Ides of March.  If you have not yet been devastated by betrayal by those closest to you…you need to pay special attention to this, because no matter how immune you think you and your life are from this sort of treachery, you are overdue, greatly increasing the likelihood that It Is Coming: someone close to you is plotting behind your back.

With that in mind, here are my 5 Tips to Avoid Betrayal This Ides of March:

1. Trust Sparingly If At All: Keep your inner circle tighter than a duck’s pucker and your trust even tighter than that. Caesar trusted Brutus, and look where that got him—23 stab wounds! Vet your allies like a Roman general sizing up a legion.
2. Limit Your Circle: The fewer associates, the fewer knives at your back. Logically, your circle will be more of a stick: a single person, if you must have that.  But as Kobayashi reminds us in The Usual Suspects. “One cannot be betrayed if one has no people.”  An absolute minimalist, fiercely loyal crew beats the hell out of a big, fickle crowd every time.
3. Stay Ruthless When Needed (And Ruthlessness Is Always Needed): Don’t hesitate to cut ties with anyone showing shifty eyes. Caesar’s leniency with his enemies was his downfall—show strength, not mercy, when the stakes are high.
4. Watch for Signs: Keep an ear to the ground. Whispers, odd alliances, or sudden flattery? Those are red flags. Caesar ignored the soothsayer’s warning—don’t make the same mistake!
5. Control the Narrative: Stay one step ahead by shaping what others know about you. If they can’t predict your moves, they can’t plot against them.

The key behind this seemingly paranoid strategy is surviving the betrayal because you were expecting it, as opposed to Ceasar, who only realized the extent of his betrayal as his best friend was sliding a knife fatally into his back, when it was far too late.

The Ides of March whisper a blood-soaked truth: “When you come for the king, you best not miss.”  Emerson said that in “Self-Reliance.”  The more popular, punchy version – “When you strike at a king, you must kill him” – comes from a 20th-century paraphrase of Emerson by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.  Hesitate, flinch, or falter, and the crown doesn’t just endure – it crushes.  I’m sure Ceasar’s ghost would agree.  When the conspirators draw steel, but their trembling hands spare their empire’s tyrant a moment too long, what follows isn’t mercy – it is the king’s justice, a vengeful tide of retribution that will drown them all.

N.P.: “Auf die Zunge (feat. Schattenmann)” – Eisbrecher

Herr Direktor wants one of the projects I’m working on to go in a more “splatterpunk” direction.  Until maybe two weeks ago, I had no idea what that actually meant, but I thought it sounded pretty cool, so I just went along with it.   Since then, I’ve been on a strict diet of splatterpunk movies and books.  Turns out I knew what it was, I just didn’t know what it was called.  For those dear readers who may have been as in the dark as I was about this subgenre, if you’re a Tarantino fan, in Kill Bill Pt1, when Beatrix goes to Japan and Samurai-sword-fights 99 Kato-masked Yakuza guys, and the entire interior of the massive club they’re in is literally drenched and dripping with blood from the firehose-like arterial spray from the myriad dismemberments occurring during the fight, and the entire floor is covered with bodies and limbs…that is what I’m talking about.

So the movies from the last week:
Tokyo Gore Police
Ichi the Killer
Battle Royale
The Machine Girl
Audition
Meatball Machine
Meatball Machine Kodoku

Up next will be:
Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead
Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart to Hades
Tetsuo: The Iron Man

As may be obvious from this list, I’m leaning into the Japanese take on SP because I think that approach will work better for this project.  The Japanese style is so wildly over the top as to be cartoonish, thus, absurd and thus, funny.  American splatterpunk movies would likely be things like The Terrifier movies Damien Leone or the Human Centipede sequence from Tom Six.  While I am a huge fan of Art the Clown, the SP aesthetic of the Terrifier movies is almost completely different than the Japanese version: there’s nothing funny about it.  I mean, I get it…the joke is an the absurdity of the lengths Art goes to inflict pain on his victims (e.g., leaving the room of a vicious multi-limb mutilation to retrieve a massive sack of salt from the other room so that he can shove it into wounds by the fistful…I admit I actually chuckled at that when I first watched it.  But that humor is waaaaaaay darker.  Put it this way: your 10-year-old kid walks into Kill Bill Pt I, they will likely laugh and be untraumatized because it is so obviously not real.  That same 10-y.o. walks into Terrifier 2, and you’ll probably be shelling out a bunch of cash for therapy after a bunch of dark behavioral reports from school.

Anyway, this new approach has breathed new energy into this project, and I’m pretty excited about it.

[Tangentially related note: it occurs to me that I haven’t done a proper movie review here for a bit.  For no valid reason whatsoever, I’m suddenly thinking about doing a marathon triple review of The Human Centipede (First Sequence), The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence), and The Human Centipede (Final Sequence).  Just get hammered drunk and sit through all three of those horrendous creations taking breaks only to pee or get a refill.  Just a thought for now, but if that changes, you’ll be the first to know.]

N.P.: “Man of Constant Sorrow” – Jonathan Young

Well, hell, dear reader.  I can’t believe it’s already time to talk about the sheer, unadulterated lunacy of Daylight Saving Time (DST). This biannual ritual of clock-twisting isn’t just a minor annoyance; it’s a relic of idiocy that kills, maims, and maddens us, all while clinging to justifications so outdated they belong in a museum next to Edison’s first light bulb.  I’m here, once again, to rip this farce apart. Spoiler alert: the only sane fix is locking the clocks on Standard Time—permanently—and telling DST to take a long walk off a short pier.

The Body Count of Clock-Changing
Let’s start with the grim stats, because we might as well face the ugly truth head-on. Every spring, when we “spring forward” and lose an hour of sleep (i.e. tonight), the world doesn’t just groan—it bleeds. Studies—like a 2014 Michigan hospital analysis—show heart attacks spike 24% the Monday after the switch. Strokes? Up 8% in Finland, per a 2016 study. Traffic accidents? A 2020 University of Colorado-Boulder report pegs a 6% jump in fatal crashes, adding about 30 extra deaths a year. Why? Our circadian rhythms get sucker-punched. We’re groggy, irritable, and stumbling into the day like drunks after last call. Sleep deprivation isn’t a quirky plot twist—it’s a killer, and DST is the trigger.
Then there’s the “fall back” in November. You’d think gaining an hour would be a reprieve, but nope—it’s just a different flavor of chaos. Darkness creeps in earlier, and suddenly deer collisions and pedestrian pile-ups spike as drivers fumble through the gloom. Workplace injuries climb too, because tired hands and dim light don’t mix. This is a public health crisis dressed up as tradition. We’re not saving daylight—we’re sacrificing lives.

The Dumbass Origins of DST
So why the hell did we start this madness? Rewind to World War I, when Germany flipped the clocks in 1916 to stretch daylight and save coal. The U.S. jumped on the bandwagon in 1918, sold on the idea that more evening light would cut energy costs and boost wartime efficiency. Farmers, they said, would love it (spoiler: they universally hated it—cows don’t read clocks). Then, in World War II, it came back as a patriotic duty. Fine, you say—war’s desperate times called for desperate measures. But here’s the deal: those reasons don’t hold water in 2025.
Coal? We’ve got electricity humming through every socket—our society’s been electrified since Truman was in diapers. Energy savings? A 2008 Department of Energy study found DST shaves a measly 0.03% off electricity use—peanuts in a world of LED bulbs and 24/7 grids. Farming? Modern agribusiness runs on tractors and tech, not sunrise prayers. The original pitch—conserve fuel, align daylight with work—was flimsy even then, and now it’s laughable and embarrassing. We’re not rationing for the Kaiser anymore; we’re just screwing ourselves for no reason.

Standard Time: The Only Sane Rebellion
Here’s the truth: locking the clocks on Standard Time is the only fix that doesn’t make us look like fools. Why? It’s the closest thing to “real” time—aligned with the sun’s arc, not some arbitrary shift. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine backs this hard, saying permanent Standard Time syncs with our body’s natural clock, cutting the health risks of DST’s jolts. No more heart attacks from sleep loss, no more kids dodging cars in pre-dawn dark because sunrise is at 9 a.m. under permanent DST. It’s simple, it’s logical, and it’s got science in its corner.
Permanent DST?  Don’t even start.  That’s just DST’s smug cousin, pretending to be progress.  Sure, you get later sunsets – great for barbecues – but winter mornings turn into a gothic nightmare.  Sunrise at 8:45 a.m.?  Kids trudging to school in pitch black?  That’s not efficient; that’s dystopian.  We tried it in 1974 – Nixon’s energy crisis stunt – and people revolted after a few months of predawn misery.  Standard Time isn’t sexy, but it’s steady.  It’s the temporal equivalent of a no-nonsense narrator – reliable, grounded, and done with bullshit.

Musk, Trump, and the Poll That Missed the Plot
Enter Elon Musk and the Republican Party, riding in like modern-day Don Quixotes tilting at DST’s windmill. Trump’s been barking about it on Truth Social since December 2024: “Daylight Saving Time is inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation.” Musk, co-leading Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency), has been hyping it too. On March 5, 2025, he dropped an X poll: “If daylight savings time change is canceled, do you prefer an hour earlier or an hour later?” Over 1.2 million voted, with 58% picking “an hour later.” Cue the applause from the uninformed.
Here’s the rub: that question’s a literary trainwreck. “An hour later” means permanent DST—shifting clocks forward year-round—which is exactly what no serious person should want. It’s not ending DST; it’s enshrining it, trading one stupidity for another. “An hour earlier” at least gets us to Standard Time, but Musk’s framing muddies the waters like a bad metaphor. The real choice isn’t “more or less”; it’s Standard vs. DST, and Standard wins every time if you’ve got a pulse and a brain. Musk’s poll isn’t a solution—it’s a distraction.

The Final Word
Daylight Saving Time is a farce—a killer cloaked in nostalgia, propped up by reasons that crumbled decades ago. It’s not efficient to cling to it; it’s lazy. Permanent Standard Time isn’t just the smart play—it’s the only play. Let’s lock the clocks, ditch the chaos, and tell the ghosts of 1918 to shove it. Musk and the GOP might fumble the execution, but if they actually kill DST, I’ll raise a glass—provided they don’t botch it with some half-assed “hour more” nonsense. Time’s too precious for this crap. Let’s live like we mean it.

N.P.: “All Shook Up” – Ry Cooder

Here we go again, dear reader—California’s lawmakers have plunged headfirst into yet another abyss of absurdity, dragging the rest of us along for the ride. Assembly Bill 133, the so-called “Duty to Retreat” bill, is the latest steaming pile of horseshit to emerge from Sacramento’s ivory tower, and it’s a slap in the face to every law-abiding citizen who dares to believe they have the right to protect themselves. This isn’t just moronic policy—it’s a betrayal of common sense, a coward’s charter dressed up as compassion, and it’s going to get people killed.

Let’s break this down for anyone who hasn’t yet had their morning coffee ruined by the details. AB 133, spearheaded by Assemblymember Rick Chavez Zbur (because of course it’s a Democrat from Los Angeles), wants to obliterate California’s “no duty to retreat” stance. Instead of standing your ground when some shitbag threatens your life, this bill demands you turn tail and run—assuming, of course, you can magically teleport out of harm’s way. If you’re outside your home and some asshole comes at you with a knife, a gun, or even their fists, AB 133 says your first legal obligation is to flee. Forget defending yourself, forget protecting your family—your job is to scamper off like a scared rabbit, hoping the bad guy doesn’t catch you. And if you don’t? Well, good luck explaining that to a prosecutor who’d rather see you in cuffs than the criminal in a cell.

Are you kidding me? This is the kind of lunacy that only makes sense if you’ve spent your entire life in a cushy office, sipping lattes and pontificating about “de-escalation” while the rest of us live in the real world. Newsflash, Sacramento: as I would have thought you would have learned by now, violent criminals don’t send RSVP invitations to their attacks. They don’t give you a heads-up so you can plot your escape route. When danger strikes, it’s sudden, it’s chaotic, and for most people,  it’s terrifying. Expecting someone to calmly assess whether they can “retreat with complete safety” in the heat of the moment is so detached from reality it’s almost laughable—if it weren’t so infuriatingly dangerous.

And it gets worse. This bill doesn’t just stop at forcing you to run—it strips away your right to defend your property or stop a felony in progress. Imagine some lowlife breaking into your car, stealing your livelihood, or worse, assaulting someone you love. Under current law, you can intervene. Under AB 133? Nope. You’re supposed to stand there, twiddling your thumbs, while the criminal waltzes off with your stuff—or your life. The bill even muddies the waters inside your own home, tightening the screws on how you can respond to threats. This isn’t just a “duty to retreat”—it’s a duty to surrender.

Who does this protect? Certainly not the victims. Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco nailed it when he said this is yet another move by Sacramento Democrats to “coddle criminals” while tying the hands of law-abiding residents. Assemblyman David Tangipa put it even more bluntly: “Where do you retreat if you can’t defend yourself in your own home?” These aren’t fringe voices—they’re the voices of reason screaming into a void of progressive delusion. Meanwhile, the gun-control cheerleaders at Moms Demand Action and Everytown for Gun Safety are clapping like trained seals, claiming this will “reduce violence.” Reduce violence? Tell that to the single mom who can’t outrun a stalker, or the elderly shopkeeper who can’t dodge a robber’s bullet.

The supporters of AB 133 cloak their argument in sanctimonious drivel about preventing “escalation” and curbing “unwarranted violence.” Oh, please. Spare me the crocodile tears. Criminals don’t care about your bleeding-heart legislation—they’re not sitting around debating the finer points of self-defense law. They’re preying on the vulnerable, and this bill just handed them a free pass. By disarming victims—legally and morally—California is rolling out the red carpet for every thug, thief, and psychopath who knows you’re now a sitting duck.

And let’s not ignore the chilling effect this will have on anyone brave enough to fight back. Under AB 133, if you dare to stand your ground, you’re not just risking your life—you’re risking a courtroom nightmare. Prosecutors will have a field day second-guessing your every move: “Why didn’t you run faster? Why didn’t you hide? Why didn’t you let the guy stab you and hope for the best?” It’s a legal trap designed to punish the innocent and embolden the guilty. Self-defense isn’t a privilege—it’s a fundamental human right, and California’s lawmakers are stomping it into the dirt.

This bill isn’t about safety; it’s about control. It’s about a state government so obsessed with its utopian fantasies that it’s willing to sacrifice real people on the altar of ideology. AB 133 doesn’t make California safer—it makes it a playground for predators and a prison for the rest of us. If this passes, mark my words: the blood of every victim who couldn’t retreat fast enough will be on the hands of every legislator who voted for it.

Wake up, California. Fight back. This isn’t just a bad law—it’s a declaration of war on your right to survive. Call your representatives, flood their inboxes, and make it clear: We won’t retreat, and we won’t surrender. AB 133 must die on the vine, or we’ll all pay the price.

N.P.: “Ring of Fire” – Frayle

Listen up, dear readers, patriots, and anyone who’s ever cracked the spine on a book worth a damn: as of yesterday, English is finally the official language of the United States. Cue the fireworks, crack a beer, pour the whiskey, and let’s raise a middle finger to the woke vultures who’ve been pecking at the neglected carcass of our beloved language for too long. This isn’t just a win—it’s a goddamn triumph. One Language, One Flag, One Nation. And now, it’s time to protect this victory with something big, something bold: a Department of English Grammar and Usage. And, as you may have guessed, I’m the guy to run it.

For decades, English has been under siege. The DEI cult and their word-twisting acolytes have tried to warp it into a limp, apologetic shadow of itself—stripping away precision, clarity, and balls in favor of their anti-American fever dreams. They’ve turned pronouns into weapons, grammar into a suggestion, and meaning into mush. Enough. English isn’t just a language; it’s the backbone of this nation’s soul—Shakespeare’s fire, Twain’s grit, Hemingway’s steel. It’s time to stop the bleeding and start swinging back.

Enter the Department of English Grammar and Usage. Picture it: a federal fortress of syntax and style, tasked with setting ironclad norms for how we speak, write, and think. No more “they” for singulars unless it’s earned. No more “latinx” abominations. Just pure, unadulterated English—rules that stick, enforced by people who know the difference between a comma splice and a knockout punch. This isn’t about snobbery; it’s about unity. One tongue to bind us, from sea to shining sea.

So why me? Let’s cut the crap and lay out the receipts. I’ve got a Master’s Degree in English—earned, not handed out like participation trophies. Thirty-plus years tutoring every level from snot-nosed 2nd graders to PhD candidates, beating the rules of the language into their skulls until they could write a sentence that didn’t suck. Years teaching at the collegiate level, where I turned classrooms into battlegrounds for ideas, not safe spaces for whining. I’m an internationally published author—words of mine have crossed oceans, not just keyboards. And for the last two decades, I’ve been a pitbull for this language, snarling at every woke attempt to dilute it, every DEI edict to deform it. I’ve got the scars, the ink, and the fire to prove it.

To President Trump: You’ve made America great again—now let’s make its language unbreakable. To Elon Musk: You’re a man of vision—back this and watch it soar. To Speaker Johnson and the rest of the suits in DC: Get this on the floor and make it law. I’m ready to lead this charge, to build a department that’s half library, half war room—a beacon for every American who still believes words matter.

The woke crowd will scream. Let ‘em. They’ve had their turn, and they blew it—turning English into a punching bag for their identity obsession. Now it’s our move. We’re not just reclaiming a language; we’re reclaiming a culture. #OneLanguage,OneFlag,OneNation.

N.P.: “Body Burn” – Cubanate