Hey—how are you on this glorious Day of the Taco? 🌮 Yes, yes… I know. I’m a day late on my weekly check-in. Weekends have a way of filling up with distractions and suddenly Monday shows up like, “So… about that thing you were going to write.”
I was actually supposed to be on a work trip to North Carolina this week, but it got rescheduled for April. So I’m kind of re-pivoting from an abnormally planned week to back to regular routine.
Daylight Saving Time still sucks. I’m fairly confident about that. As a kid I probably thought it was amazing to have sunlight until 10pm in the summer. Now that I can barely keep my eyes open past 10pm, I wouldn’t mind if the sun clocked out a little earlier. Honestly, earlier campfires at summer Scout camps? Sign me up. 🔥
The few days after the time change are always weirdly disorienting though. Your brain feels like it got jet-lagged but never actually went anywhere cool. Oddly, this time around I feel a little energized by it. That might have more to do with the warmer temps creeping in than the clock shenanigans, but I’ll take the win.
In more exciting news, we might be adopting a rescue pup. We met a Lab/German Shepherd mix and her foster this past week and she seems like she could be a great fit for our family. She’s only about a year old, so there’s lots of goofy puppy growth ahead, and she’s a bit bigger than our most recent pup. The big selling point: she loves people. Like, enthusiastically loves people. And I always like that in a dog and most of them are like that, they just hate other dogs coming into their space for some reason.
She also did not immediately try to attack our cats, which felt like an important early benchmark. They’re not exactly forming a book club together yet, but nobody has declared war either, so we’re calling that progress. If everything checks out, we might be welcoming her sometime mid-to-late this week. 🐕
And finally, in the continuing saga of Dustin vs. Coffee Makers, I broke another one. I actually got about a year out of it, which in my household counts as a long and honorable service record. Considering I work from home and brew coffee every morning—sometimes twice—I probably should just admit defeat and buy a commercial-grade machine.
Instead, naturally, I bought a new gadget. This time it’s a Ninja machine that does the regular grounds-into-a-pot thing I usually use, and it can switch over to pods for those mornings when I’m running late and operating on the decision-making capacity of a sleepy raccoon.
Anyway, that’s the latest from here: time confusion, possible new dog, and another fallen coffee appliance.
I’ve been eating…Chicago Dogs
The Mrs. and I took a drive up to the city to visit her mom. Lucky for me, that trip conveniently included a stop at Portillo’s—my personal gold standard of Chicago fast food that we used to get when we went to Chicago but can now get locally. The problem with Portillo’s is that I don’t get there very often, which creates a dangerous situation: when I do go, I feel obligated to order multiple items just to make up for lost time. You know, purely out of respect for the establishment. So naturally I went with a Chicago Cheesy Beef piled high with hot giardiniera, and then followed it up with a Chicago Dog—because if you’re already making questionable dietary decisions, you might as well do it properly. If only they made good leftovers. I hear you can get them shipped to you, I really don’t know how that could possibly be good.
I’ve been spinning…Cinderella and Janis Joplin
I went down a bit of a blues-rock hair metal rabbit hole the other day, thinking about where that sound actually came from. It started with reading about Tom Keifer and that gloriously shredded vocal cord of a voice he has in Cinderella. Turns out his raspy style was influenced by a bunch of artists, but especially Nazareth and Janis Joplin.
That made perfect sense. I loved the songwriting and sound of Cinderella almost as much as my mega-fandom for The Black Crowes—maybe even a little more when I was a kid blasting cassette tapes and pretending I understood heartbreak. So naturally that sent me back to Janis Joplin.
Then I started wondering: who inspired Janis? Of course you quickly end up at the blues greats of the early 20th century, especially Bessie Smith. So I spent some time listening to her. Isn’t Spotify awesome? Back in my day, I’d have to figure out how to find Bessie Smith. What a voice. Huge, raw, emotional—like the original blueprint for that raspy, soul-on-fire style that rock singers have been chasing ever since.
It’s kind of fun to think of it as this raspy blues-rock vocal family tree. Bessie Smith → Janis Joplin → Tom Keifer → and who knows how many others down the line. You can probably hear pieces of that lineage in modern bands like Avenged Sevenfold or Shinedown too.
And if you think about the grunge era, those gravel-and-glass voices had to come from somewhere. Of course some of it was built on punk, too. But thinking about Bob Mould, Dave Pirner, Eddie Vedder, Chris Cornell… all tapping into that same raw vocal DNA going back to blues artists like Bessie Smith in different ways.
It’s kind of amazing when you follow the thread backward. What starts as a random nostalgia kick for a hair metal band ends up tracing a line straight back to the blues. Music history is basically one long chain of people hearing something that makes them go, “I want to sound like that” and then they put their own spin on it, add to it.
I’ve been watching…The Pitt and The Artful Dodger
The second season of The Pitt has been just as riveting as the first. A few characters I wasn’t all that sold on in season one are starting to redeem themselves, which has made the whole thing more interesting. There’s a lot of solid character building going on this season—people evolving, relationships shifting, the kind of stuff that keeps you invested beyond just the main plot.
And then there’s The Artful Dodger, which completely caught me by surprise. It pulls you into this really believable version of old-world Australia that’s fascinating to hang out in. The vibe almost feels like an Australian cousin to Deadwood—not quite as relentlessly gritty, but it’s got a little of that same rough edge. There’s even a lead character with a bit of that Al Swearengen energy: rough around the edges, morally flexible, and surrounded by a few more squeaky-clean, modern-thinking characters who balance him out. On top of that, the show leans heavily into medicine, which means you also get a front-row seat to some of the truly wild ailments and surgical practices people had to deal with back in those days. It’s part historical drama, part medical curiosity, and it works better than you’d expect.
I’ve been reading…Maddow.
I’ve been reading more of Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism by Rachel Maddow. I’m about a third of the way through. It’s very well written and incredibly rich in history—but it’s also a tough read at times because of the realities it digs into.
I’ve hit a few sections that reference people from my neck of the woods who were cozying up to fascist movements back in the 1930s. And I’m not just talking about Minnesota. There’s even mention of someone from my birth and childhood state of North Dakota. Growing up, I’d occasionally hear rumors about fringe racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan still existing in some of the more forgotten small towns. I never saw anything like that firsthand, but there’s definitely an isolation in parts of that region—and an old-school, authority-first mindset—that can nudge some people down some pretty dated, not-so-empathetic lines of thinking.
What the book does well is give some context for things we’re seeing in society now that otherwise feel almost impossible to believe. It helps answer the question: How did we get back here? How did these kinds of manipulative political tactics work on people before—and why do they seem to be working again?
What it hasn’t answered yet—and maybe it never fully will—is the harder question: how do you snap people out of it once they’re pulled in? 🤔
I’ve been drinking…Founders All Day IPA
Founders All Day IPA is worthy of a full review soon. I really enjoyed it, felt like one I could drink…All Day. Sorry, but it’s true. It’s well named.
Shameful Plug
Be sure to check out last week’s thursday post where I dive into my top 10 favorite cheesy 80s movies. And I define these as genuinely cheesy at the time because they we critically rotten tomatoes in their time and since.
Quote of the Week
“One big appeal of fascism, if nothing else, was its unapologetic embrace of cruelty. Cruelty towards others, coupled with hypersensitivity towards any slight to oneself.” –Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism