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I was off-line for a lot of Sunday so I haven’t been keeping up with the Cheesecake Factory discourse, for which I give thanks to our Lord and God.
(In case you missed it: former President Obama said that President Trump’s additions to the White House “make it look like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.” Right-wingers immediately flipped their shit; you would have thought he’d worn a tan suit again.)
I once had a co-worker from rural Georgia. After one trip driving around small Southern towns, I remember lamenting to her that every community seemed to have the same three or four chain restaurants. When I travel, I like to eat like the locals eat. I don’t want Bob Evans or Sonic or Chili’s.
She laughed and said in lot of small Southern towns, all of those “local” places were driven out of business.
I said, “well, then where do you go for a fancy meal, like for your anniversary or a date?”
She said, “in a town like where I grew up, Applebee’s was the ‘fancy’ place.”
So there is something to the idea that for a lot of poorer folks, The Cheesecake Factory is a nice place.
However — and as Paul Harris often says, “there’s always a however in life” — in my experience, Cheesecake Factorys don’t tend to be in poorer or rural towns. They tend to be in upscale shopping malls where bougie white people hang out.
(I’m not sure about the plural of “Cheesecake Factory.” Is it Cheesecake Factories? Cheesecakes Factory?)
Anyway, they are self-consciously over-the-top and decadent, designed to appeal to well-to-do families who either are nouveau-riche enough to think the decor and food are “elegant,” or who are in on the joke, and are laughing at the rococo interiors and elaborate, high-calorie entrees and desserts.
Either way, The Cheesecake Factory’s main audience, in my experience, is not struggling blue-collar families. If it was, they’d be in rural shopping centers, not between an Ann Taylor and a Nordstrom’s at malls with names like “The Village at Deerfield Meadows Crossings.”
For all of Obama’s shortsightedness while he was president, the man is a hell of a rhetorician. He knows how to land a joke. And as the saying goes, “A hit dog will holler.”
The fact that Trump’s handlers immediately melted down over the Cheesecake Factory joke indicates that Obama hit a bull’s eye.
Bill Clinton also had a good line — he said that Trump has made the White House look like “the entrance to Liberace’s bathroom.” It was funny, but it was a bit of a dated reference; you’d have to be 50 or older, or extremely hip to mid-century LGBTQ culture, to laugh at a Liberace joke.
But “Cheesecake Factory”? Direct hit, target destroyed.
Anyway, I thought it was liberals who were too sensitive. Obama makes a Cheesecake Factory joke, and suddenly the f–k your feelings crowd needs a safe space.
Hey, MAGA: Go drown your sorrows in a Raspberry Lemon Drop and shut the hell up.
Bipartisanship! Cooperation! The olive branch of friendship!
For some reason I’m now getting emails from the Republican Committee of Allegheny County, I guess because I’m such an influential member of the Pittsburgh media.
Their update is called “The Weekly Trunk,” because it sounds better than “Elephant Droppings.”
In this week’s installment, we learn that America is a Christian nation “as established by our founding fathers,” and people in “other parties” are working to “destroy” this country “because they are traitors.”
The USA is under attack by people who live here but hate our Country. You can do something about it. It’s simple, GET OUT AND VOTE REPUBLICAN!
I’ll go out on a limb and say that this message is not atypical from what Republican Party committees across the United States are sending to their members — members of the Democratic Party are not just wrong or dumb, they are TRAITORS who want to DESTROY OUR COUNTRY.
It’s certainly the message pushed 24 hours a day on talk radio and cable TV.
Remember that when “sensible centrists” tell you Democrats should be listening to Republicans and “reaching across the aisle” to them.
And they tell me it’s swell in Miami Spell Miami and then Ask me why, am I Whoa, M-I-A-am I Feelin’ bad oh man, I can’t believe it The fun I’vе had and I’m gonna have to leave it
I’ll go back up to Tarrytown and tеll the bagel ranch I’ve found a good location for another branch It’s right inside a hotel In Miami Spell Miami and then Ask me why, am I M-I-A-am I In heaven, or am I in Miami?
If you follow me on social media, you know that over the past few weekends I’ve been building a new garden shed in the back yard. We already had a shed, but it’s full, and we also still have a lot of stuff in the garage that would be handier outside.
In the interest of public service, here’s what I’ve learned. For the record, the kit is a 9-by-12.5 feet “Lifetime” brand shed from Costco.
The instructions leave a lot to be desired, and the instructional videos really are misleading. They show two people snapping these sheds together like Lego bricks, and it’s a lot more complicated than that.
You absolutely need a perfectly level, square platform. I built a “skid” platform on concrete blocks, which themselves are sitting on gravel and sand beds.
If you try to put one of these sheds on uneven ground, it is never going to go together, and you are going to be in a world of hurt. Even a concrete patio might not be level enough.
I mean flat and level. If you use wood, don’t go cheap. Get pressure-treated wood rated for ground contact, and try not to get those warped and bowed boards they sell at Home Depot or Lowe’s. Order them from a real lumberyard, if possible.
There was a lot of fiddling necessary to get the parts to fit; the walls are held to the base by giant snap-tabs. (Remember building a “snap-fit” plastic model kit as a kid? Same idea.) The plastic has almost no “give” or flexibility; it’s the same type of resin that heavy-duty children’s toys are made from. Some people suggested using a heat gun to warm up the tabs enough to slide them together. I used a big hammer, a wood block and a lot of swearing.
The last time I built a shed like this, it was a metal kit from Sears, Roebuck — so it’s obviously been a hot minute. I recall the assembly being much easier than this plastic kit, although I may be misremembering. Based on Google street view, that shed is still in the yard of our old house 11 years later, though looking a little worse for wear.
With the Lifetime kit, most of the parts are held together with self-tapping sheet metal screws. Those screws are barely sufficient to hold the pieces together and it’s very easy to strip out the holes. Also, some of the holes aren’t drilled through properly, and that wasn’t the only quality control boo-boo I noticed; a bag of washers was supplied with the kit, and some of them didn’t have holes punched in them. On others, the screws wouldn’t fit through the washers. I ended up going to the hardware store and buying a bag of zinc-plated screws with built-in neoprene washers to keep moisture out.
Speaking of moisture: After the first heavy rainfall, the shed leaked, mostly around the thin plastic “skylights” in the roof. Those skylights are an odd design choice; otherwise, the roof is a fairly clever design in which the rafters double as rain gutters. The skylights are flimsy and almost guaranteed to let rain in; and they don’t provide much light to the interior anyway.
The front doors are another clever design; they come with a neat little latching mechanism and the hinges are built right into the structure of the shed itself, to make it harder for them to jimmy open or come loose.
Unfortunately, poor quality control also let the doors down; the metal rods holding the doors to the structure wouldn’t fit until I shaved them just a little bit with an angle grinder. Similarly, the metal edges of the doors — where the padlock hasp needs to be installed — were just a smidge too tight. They needed copious coaxing with some silicone lube, a mallet, a pry bar and a lot of profanity. And the instructions, once again, are not terrible clear; if you carefully follow the diagram in the instruction manual, you will be installing one of the door edges upside down, and you will have to spend a lot of time removing and reinstalling it. (Ask me how I know.)
Our old shed in the background. They now call me Jay “Two-Sheds” Thurber
So you pays your money, you takes your chance. I think we paid around $1,500 for the kit, delivered; plus I paid another $500 or so for the lumber, concrete blocks, gravel and assorted other hardware, and $9 for a bottle of Advil. For another thousand dollars, we might have gotten a pre-built wooden shed delivered. I’m not 100 percent sure the savings was worth it.
Although it’s done, I’m not putting anything into it until I can waterproof it (I’m going to caulk all of the seams) and possibly reinforce the walls with an internal wooden frame. Overall the shed feels sturdy, but the walls flex easily and I could see them buckling if someone accidentally leans on the shed, or if a tree branch strikes it during a heavy storm. If I recall correctly, the manufacturer claims you can hang objects weighing up to 30 pounds on the walls as designed; I think they’re dreaming. The flimsy plastic hooks provided in the kit will never support 30 pounds, and even if they could, the load would pull the walls apart.
My review: You get what you pay for, and this entire kit definitely feels like it was built to a price point to be sold at Costco — much like their hotdogs.
Hopefully this review helps someone else who’s considering buying one of these shed kits.
I follow a lot of “never-Trump” Republicans — people like Bill Kristol, Mona Charen, Rick Wilson, Adam Kinzinger and Tom Nichols — and I subscribe to conservative publications such as The Bulwark, because I think it’s important for me to break out of a liberal/left bubble and get other perspectives.
I also find that former Republicans bring a lot of insight on what’s going on within their party, and the Trump movement. They were inside the belly of the beast, so to speak, and they saw what was happening over the past 20 years to the Republican Party as it drifted away from small-d democratic values toward authoritarianism. (In a few cases, their work helped bring about America’s transition away from three shared branches of government to an all-powerful president. Don’t forget it and don’t let them forget it.)
Still — if I were a Democratic Party candidate, I would be suspicious of any advice offered by never-Trumpers, especially on what makes a candidate “electable.”
Never-Trump Republicans, it should be noted, didn’t do a fantastic job running their own party, which is why the U.S. and the world are in the fix we’re currently in.
Put another way, would you ask the Pittsburgh Pirates for advice on how to get to the World Series?
So when never-Trump Republicans say “Abdul El-Sayed isn’t electable in Michigan” or “Zohran Mamdani is going too far in New York,” I think, “yes, but you thought Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Mitt Romney were viable candidates for the presidency.”
I remember it very clearly: I was in about the sixth grade. My best friend’s dad was driving us to school one morning and telling us about an article he’d read in Omni or Discover about the greenhouse effect, and how scary it was.
The article, he said, predicted that rising temperatures would melt the polar ice caps and change weather patterns. We could expect massive wildfires, crippling droughts and floods in places not prone to flooding.
It was terrifying thing to tell a kid. It was the kind of thing an 11-year-old kid would remember. (Although I’ve asked my friend, and he doesn’t remember it at all. But he was much more used to tuning out his dad than I was, I guess.)
I also distinctly remember thinking, “Wow! But I’m sure by the time I’m old we’ll figure something out.”
So, anyway, here we are. Instead, BP, Shell, ExxonMobil, Consol Energy, etc., etc., said “nah, we’re just going to burn the planet to cinders instead.”
It really kind of astonishing that we’ve known about whatever you want to call it — climate change, global warming, the greenhouse effect — for 40 years and all of the things that were predicted have come to pass, and the powers that be are now either shrugging and saying, “welp, too bad, what are you going to do?” or actively denying what we all can see and feel.
I sure hope someone in Silicon Valley is able to monetize this: Get fresh air shipped directly to your home each day for just $9.99! Use promo code LATESTAGECAP for 50% off your first order!
I’m not trying to be a “doomer.” There is still time to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. There has already been a big shift away from burning fossil fuels and toward solar and wind power. As the saying goes, the best time to act was 20 years ago, but the next-best time is now.
Needless to say, the President of the United States has responded to the crisis. He’s going to make a televised address to the nation tonight complaining about the 2020 election.
I think I’ll go outside and breathe deeply until I pass out from the fumes.
Here is May’s “Pen Avenue,” my cartoon for Print, Pittsburgh’s East End newspaper.
Print is not available online; you can only read it in (what else?) print. It’s available at Giant Eagle and other stores in Pittsburgh’s East End, or subscribe on the website.
Aspiring radio DJs never ask me for advice (probably because there are very few people who aspire to be on the radio these days), but if I had one recommendation: If you’re not tired at the end of a three-hour airshift, you’re doing it wrong.
I always tell DJs, if you’re not having fun doing your show, why would you expect the listener to have fun? For my three-hour show, I’m tanked-up on caffeine and having fun. At 3:01 p.m., I collapse into a chair and just sit for a couple of minutes.
On the other hand, someone once asked the legendary Dan Ingram — who ruled the New York City radio airwaves for decades on WABC and WCBS-FM — what it took to become a successful Top 40 DJ.
The average pop record is about three minutes long. Ingram said successful DJs only had one real talent:
“You must be able to defecate in less than three minutes.”
For the first time since the 1970s, you can buy a Westinghouse air conditioner or flat-screen TV or electric blanket, but they have absolutely nothing to do with the company that used to be headquartered in Pittsburgh and employ hundreds of thousands of people, including Betty Furness.
The “Westinghouse” logo is little more than a decoration now. Companies in China make the products and importers pay a license fee to stick on a Westinghouse trademark. None of them have any connection to any appliance, radio or other equipment once made in Pittsburgh, Ohio or New Jersey, where the old Westinghouse had factories. They’re trading on nostalgia and whatever good reputation the old Westinghouse company had.
Same thing for RCA. RCA, the company that brought radio, TV, color TV and videotape recorders to the masses and pioneered in computers and satellite technology, hasn’t existed in any meaningful way since 1987. There are products labeled “RCA” in stores that run the gamut from pretty good to absolute junk. Like Westinghouse, companies pay to use the RCA trademark.
General Electric, too. The old GE company no longer exists. Products labeled “GE” are made in China by a variety of firms. Craftsman is no longer made for Sears, Roebuck & Co. and Sears’ old rival, Montgomery Ward, is just a trademark used by the mail-order company that used to be known as Fingerhut.
I was thinking about this when I heard the news that Scott Pelley had been fired by CBS News after 37 years. Pelley was terminated after he stood up to a new hatchet-person sent to takeover “60 Minutes.” The new executive producer of “60 Minutes” has almost no experience in television news and very little experience in journalism at all, but he’s a reliable boot-licker for the new owners of CBS.
What’s happening at CBS is what’s happened to all of those famous U.S. brand names that are just historic trademarks slapped on junk. There is still a “CBS Network” and there will likely still be a “60 Minutes” but what’s inside won’t be the same.
“CBS” is no more than another piece of IP — intellectual property — to be monetized and stripped of all of its value. They did it to American manufacturing; now they’re doing it to journalism. They still publish “The Washington Post,” but it’s a weak imitation of what it was; it’s just another trademark.
Lots of folks are pointing to the ideological component of the changes at CBS, which has been purchased by the hyper-wealthy Ellison family, which is an ally of the Trump administration. I think there’s an ideological component, but don’t overlook the financial component.
The new owners of CBS are ripping the wiring out of the walls to sell the copper. They’re going to monetize whatever IP they can strip. They have 90 years of CBS archives to plunder and turn into cash, after all. What’s left on the air is going to be cheap. (Take the replacement of Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show” with paid programming provided by Byron Allen. Does it remove a thorn from Trump’s side? Yes. Does it also turn an expense into revenue? Also yes.)
Ideologically, once people like Scott Pelley are chased away, “60 Minutes” and other CBS News productions are going to become a kind of half-assed, Fox News imitation, because that’s what the people in charge want to watch. But almost as importantly, it will be very, very cheap.
Sending foreign correspondents around the world to bring back stories for “60 Minutes” is expensive. Putting a bunch of talking heads in a room to yell opinions at one another is cheap.
One other thing. Did you know who owned the trademarks for the old Westinghouse Electric Corp. between 1997 and 2021?
Well, back in 1995, Pittsburgh-based Westinghouse purchased New York-based CBS Corp. But within four years, all of the traditional Westinghouse businesses had been closed or sold, and the parent corporation renamed itself CBS Corp.
That’s right: For 25 years, all of the old Westinghouse trademarks were owned by CBS.
Maybe that’s where they’re getting the idea to transform CBS, the institution, into “CBS,” the trademark — just another hollowed-out brand name, coasting on its old reputation.
