heavens to betsy! the perfect spinoff for better call saul

One of the most delightful things about the Breaking Bad universe created by Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould is that even minor characters feel like they could anchor their own show. But there’s one pair in particular who practically beg for it: Craig and Betsy Kettleman.

Yes, I am proposing a full spinoff about the Kettlemans.

And it should be called Heavens to Betsy.

Think about the possibilities.

Betsy Kettleman is one of television’s great comic creations: wildly ambitious, absolutely convinced of her own brilliance, and completely incapable of recognizing how bad her plans actually are. She’s a schemer who lacks two critical tools for scheming: patience and intelligence. Her plots are always just a little too loud, a little too obvious, and a little too reckless.

And yet she barrels ahead anyway.

Craig Kettleman, meanwhile, is the perfect comedic counterweight. He’s a timid, slightly bewildered man who knows the plan is terrible. You can see it in his face every time Betsy explains the next brilliant idea.

Craig: “I don’t think this is a good idea.”
Betsy: “Craig.”
Craig: “…okay.”

And off they go into another catastrophe.

What makes the Kettlemans funny isn’t just that they commit crimes—it’s that they commit crimes in the most amateurish way imaginable. Remember early on in Breaking Bad, when Jesse and Walt stole a barrel of methylamine from a warehouse? I'm talking about that level of incompetence or worse. They’re not criminal masterminds. They’re not hardened operators. They’re the kind of people who would attempt a sophisticated fraud scheme after reading half an article about it online.

Every episode practically writes itself:

1. Betsy hatches a bold new plan to “get what they deserve.”
2. Craig raises mild objections.
3. Betsy steamrolls those objections.
4. The plan spirals out of control in increasingly ridiculous ways.
5. Craig suffers the consequences.

And, crucially, there is a running gag.

In every episode of Heavens to Betsy, the Kettlemans have a lawyer.

Not the same lawyer.

A new lawyer.

Betsy insists on hiring “top legal talent” to support whatever the current scheme is. The lawyer—who is invariably competent, cautious, and increasingly alarmed—spends the episode trying to explain why what the Kettlemans are doing is illegal, inadvisable, or both.

Betsy interprets this as negativity.

Or worse, a lack of vision.

By the final act, as things are collapsing, the lawyer is urgently advising them to stop, to cooperate, or at the very least to not say another word.

Betsy responds by firing them.

On the spot.

“We need a lawyer who works with us, not against us.”

The lawyer exits, stunned.

Craig, watching this unfold, realizes—correctly—that the lawyer was the only thing standing between them and total disaster.

It is, of course, too late.

For example, imagine an episode where Betsy decides the Kettlemans should start a “consulting service” helping small businesses reduce their tax bills. Her plan is to charge huge fees for advice she mostly invents on the spot.

Craig points out that neither of them knows anything about tax law.

Betsy reassures him that “tax law is just numbers.”

Within a week they’ve accidentally advised a client to commit three different felonies and attracted the attention of both the IRS and the state licensing board. Craig spends the episode trying to quietly undo the damage while Betsy insists the problem is simply that they “need better branding.”

Or imagine another episode where Betsy decides the family should get into real estate. She’s convinced the key to success is buying distressed properties cheaply.

Unfortunately, the property she finds is cheap because it’s currently being used by an extremely unfriendly criminal organization.

Craig realizes this almost immediately.

Betsy insists they have “every legal right” to renovate it.

Things escalate.

Rapidly.

And then there are the moments where the Kettlemans brush up against the larger world of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul—without having the faintest idea what they’re dealing with.

In one episode, Betsy becomes convinced that they need to “scale up” and start working with more serious, high-level operators. Through a series of wildly misguided assumptions, she identifies Lydia Rodarte-Quayle as a “corporate logistics expert.”

Which, to be fair, is not wrong.

It’s just…incomplete.

Betsy aggressively pursues a meeting—emails, voicemails, an unsolicited “proposal packet” with color-coded tabs and completely nonsensical projections. Craig, meanwhile, is quietly unraveling.

The meeting, when it finally happens, is excruciating. Betsy pitches something like “regionally optimized embezzlement services for mid-sized municipalities,” while Lydia stares at her with a mixture of confusion and alarm.

By the end, Lydia is taking steps to ensure she never hears from these people again, while Betsy insists this counts as a “successful first contact.”

It does not.

Or worse: Betsy decides they need “muscle.” Not because they actually need it—but because, in her mind, serious businesses have muscle. Through a chain of terrible decisions, she ends up attempting to establish a relationship with associates of Jack Welker.

Craig immediately understands that this is not a situation they should be anywhere near.

Betsy interprets their hostility as a negotiation tactic.

She responds by trying to out-negotiate them.

There has to be a scene where Betsy is confidently explaining payment structures and “long-term partnership opportunities,” while everyone else in the room is trying to figure out who these people are and why they are still talking. Craig, sitting next to her, looks like a man actively reconsidering every life choice he has ever made.

The resolution, of course, is not success.

It’s survival.

They walk away convinced they’ve taken a bold step into the big leagues.

They have not.

And then there’s the episode that really defines Heavens to Betsy.

In the aftermath of the Wayfarer 515 plane collision, Betsy becomes convinced that what victims’ families need is “financial guidance.”

Specifically, theirs.

She creates a “support and recovery service” to help families manage settlements and “maximize outcomes.” In practice, it consists of vague advice, homemade pamphlets, and a fee structure that is both confusing and aggressively expensive.

Craig immediately senses this is a terrible idea—not just legally, but morally.

Betsy reframes it as compassion.

“Craig, we are helping people.”

They begin reaching out with unsolicited mailers, awkward phone calls, and deeply inappropriate in-person visits that somehow manage to be both overly cheerful and wildly tone-deaf.

Every interaction goes badly.

Craig tries to scale things back. Betsy insists the problem is “messaging.”

Naturally.

What makes it work is that the Kettlemans never quite grasp why people are reacting so negatively. Betsy thinks it’s a branding issue. Craig understands, dimly, that they’ve crossed a line—but doesn’t have the backbone to stop it.

The inevitable result isn’t profit.

It’s consequences.

And a hasty retreat.

Followed by Betsy insisting that “the concept was sound.”

What would make Heavens to Betsy work is that the Kettlemans would never become competent. In a franchise full of masterminds, professionals, and terrifyingly disciplined operators, they would remain exactly what they are:

People who wander into crime the way someone wanders into a glass door.

Again.

And again.

And again.

And the audience would know, from the moment Betsy unveils the plan, that this is going to end horribly.

The only suspense would be how.

In a universe famous for brilliant criminal strategists, Heavens to Betsy would give us something even better:

The world’s least competent crime duo.

Which is exactly why their show would be amazing. And it's exactly why Joe would give it a ten!

cinema history class: island of the doomed (1967)

The session: Spring is in the Air, and the Plants are Growing
Keith shows four movies about carnivorous plants.

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 2: Island of the Doomed (1967)
Directed by Mel Wells

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
Never heard of it.

Plot Synopsis:
Unsuspecting tourists to a remote island, guests of a reclusive botanist, start dying one by one.  They uncover the terrifying truth as they struggle to survive. 

Plot:
On a tropical island science has gone very, very wrong—and, against all odds, the plants steal the show. Seriously: the plant design is by far the best thing in the movie. It’s creative, vaguely (and sometimes not-so-vaguely) sexual, and just grounded enough in reality to feel almost believable. You keep thinking, “Okay… this is ridiculous… but also… kind of impressive?”

Structurally, Island of the Doomed is actually working from a very familiar horror template: a group of people trapped in an isolated setting, unable to escape, getting picked off one by one as tension (theoretically) builds and the survivors scramble to understand what’s happening. That formula has powered countless effective horror films—and here, the twist that the killer is a sentient plant is genuinely one of the movie’s stronger ideas. On paper, that should be enough to carry things.

Unfortunately, the movie takes its time getting to anything worth caring about. We spend a long stretch with a collection of characters so unlikable and dull that I eventually found myself rooting less for their survival and more for their creative demise. Others in the room saw it as a slow burn, though I had some trouble seeing it that way. There are hints of style along the way—the opening credits feature animation that feels like it wandered in from a Pink Panther short, and at various points I caught flashes of James Bond film series swagger and the campy energy of Batman—but none of it quite coalesces early on.

Then, near the end, everything finally clicks into place. When the character I will charitably refer to as “Miss Bitchypants” has her run-in with the plant monster, the movie suddenly wakes up. From there on out, it delivers the kind of action, tension, and outright weirdness you’d hope for from a premise like this. Even better, the closing act reframes some of the earlier material in a way that almost—almost—makes the slow build feel intentional.

In the end, the final act is what saves the film. Not too little, but definitely too late. Still, I walked away thinking: there’s a better version of this movie hiding inside the one we watched.

Of course, none of that stopped Joe from giving it a 10.

when i'm the only one who shows

There are five regulars in Keith’s Thursday night film class. Five distinct personalities, five different rhythms of laughter, five overlapping commentaries that somehow turn even the dumbest movie into a communal event. It’s a small enough group that every absence matters—and last week, the math got weird.

Dave and Ethan are both out for a while (reasons respectfully unblogged), which brings us down to three. Bobbo, meanwhile, was on his annual pilgrimage to Battle of the Alamo—because of course he was—so we knew he’d be out. That left Joe and me -- and Keith, of course.

And then Joe didn’t show.

No explanation as far as I know. I showed up expecting to see him, and Keith gave me the news: "No Joe." So for the screening of From Hell It Came, the attendance sheet read: one student, one instructor, and one extremely judgmental tree monster.

I’ll say this: it wasn’t a bad experience. Keith and I leaned into it. There was as much back-and-forth as usual. more running commentary, more room for my particular silliness. At one point I even found myself doing a passable Bobbo impression—snapping my fingers to match the background music, which felt equal parts tribute and séance. The movie itself, as previously documented, was gloriously stooopid, and that helped.

But it was also undeniably strange.

I sat in the middle of the room instead of in my usual spot on the side. There was no one to my left. No one to my right. And no one behind me. Keith, as always, took his usual spot off to the side, watching the screen at that slight angle he seems to prefer, beer in hand, like a projectionist who wandered into his own audience. The physical geometry of the room stayed the same, but the energy was different.  Not better. Maybe not worse. But different.

It got me wondering about the logical extreme: what happens if no one shows up?

Would Keith still run the class? Deliver his intro to an empty room? Let the movie play while he sits at his angle, occasionally chuckling, then wrap it up with closing remarks addressed to the void?

I asked him.

The answer: no. No performance for the ghosts of cinema past. He wouldn’t go through the motions. He’d probably still sit there with a beer and watch something—but it wouldn’t be class. No preamble, no postgame analysis, no ritual.

Which raises the next question: what happens to the movie we missed?

Turns out Keith is a completist. If nobody shows, the film doesn’t just vanish into the ether. It gets rescheduled. We’d watch it the following week, even if that throws everything off. The syllabus bends; the canon remains intact.

There’s something oddly reassuring about that. This isn’t a conveyor belt—it’s a shared experience, and if the “shared” part disappears, the experience doesn’t count.

Still, I hope we don’t test that hypothesis.

Because as much as I enjoyed my one-man screening—my brief turn as the entire audience—it drove home something essential: these nights aren’t really about the movies. They’re about the reactions, the interruptions, the running jokes, the accumulated weirdness of a handful of people who have watched far too many obscure films together.

Take that away, and even a killer tree monster starts to feel a little lonely.

cinema history class: from hell it came (1957)

The session: Spring is in the Air, and the Plants are Growing
Keith shows four movies about carnivorous plants.

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 1: From Hell It Came (1957)
Directed by Dan Milner

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
Never heard of it.

Plot Synopsis:
On a Polynesian island, they executed an innocent man. To take his revenge, he rose from the grave in the form of Tabanga -- the tree that kills. 

Plot:
Grading From Hell It Came is surprisingly difficult. On the one hand, it’s objectively kind of a piece of crap. On the other hand… I had a pretty good time watching it. It’s the kind of movie where you spend most of the runtime shaking your head, but you’re still entertained enough that you don’t regret the experience. In the highly technical terminology of cinema criticism: it’s dumb, but it’s fun-dumb.

One thing that struck me immediately is that the supposedly South Pacific island natives look suspiciously like white guys from middle America who wandered in from a Rotary Club meeting. Some of them even have neatly trimmed 1950s sideburns. The effect is mildly surreal. It’s as if the island culture evolved entirely within a suburban barbershop in Ohio.

Tonally, the movie is all over the map. At times it feels like an episode of Gilligan's Island—the tropical setting, the earnest-but-goofy dialogue, the sense that everyone is one coconut radio away from a sitcom plot. Other moments veer closer to The Three Stooges, though notably without the eye-pokes and frying pans. Instead you get a lot of characters wandering around looking confused while a homicidal tree lumbers toward them.

And speaking of wandering around, we get a classic movie quicksand scene. Now, I’m perfectly willing to forgive the usual cinematic misunderstandings about how quicksand works. Movies and television have been getting that wrong for decades, and at this point it’s practically a tradition. But what I cannot forgive is the fact that this particular patch of quicksand is emitting steam. Steam. From quicksand. Why? Is the island built on top of a geothermal spa? Is the quicksand boiling? Is Tabanga running a sauna franchise? The film offers no explanation.

The monster itself, however, is actually pretty good. Tabanga—the vengeful walking tree—is a genuinely memorable design. The bark-covered body looks convincingly wooden, the branch-like arms are nicely creepy, and the face has this magnificent carved wooden frown that gives the creature a weirdly expressive look. If you were six or seven years old and watching this in a dark movie theater in 1957, I can absolutely see how this thing might have scared the hell out of you.

Another pleasant surprise is the score. For a movie this goofy, the music is oddly effective. It’s dramatic, atmospheric, and sometimes far better than the scenes it’s accompanying. The composer clearly understood the assignment even if the rest of the production occasionally wandered off to chase butterflies.

The movie also has a faint but unmistakable anti-nuclear message, which was a staple of 1950s science fiction and horror. The suggestion is that atomic experimentation has tampered with forces that humanity doesn’t fully understand, helping unleash the monstrous Tabanga. It’s not exactly subtle, but it fits comfortably alongside the era’s broader anxieties about radiation, mutation, and mankind’s enthusiasm for pressing buttons labeled “DO NOT PRESS.”

And yet… damn, this movie is stooopid. I mean that affectionately, but still: stooopid.

For this particular screening, I also had a unique viewing experience. For various reasons, none of the other regulars could make it, so I ended up being the only person in the class. Watching a movie like this alone is a strange thing—you don’t get the shared laughter, the groans, or the running commentary that usually makes these nights so much fun. Keith did kind of make up for it, reacting with me -- more actively than he usually reacts when the room has more people in it. I can’t say for sure how everyone else would have rated From Hell It Came, but I do know one thing: Joe would have given it a 10.

cinema history class: the crawling eye (1958)

The session: The Cold Can Kill Ya!
With plummeting temperatures, Keith shows us four movies with achingly cold settings

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 4: The Crawling Eye (1958)
Directed by Quentin Lawrence

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
Never heard of it.

Plot Synopsis:
A series of mysterious deaths near a Swiss mountain coincide with a strange radioactive cloud that never leaves the summit. Scientists discover the cloud hides telepathic, tentacled creatures that descend from the mountain to hunt humans, forcing the investigators to confront the monsters before they spread beyond the isolated alpine town.

Plot:
The Crawling Eye is a fascinating artifact of 1950s science fiction. One of the more interesting aspects for me was seeing Forrest Tucker in a relatively restrained leading-man role. I’m so used to him as the loud, blustery Sergeant O’Rourke on F Troop (and in a similar mode on Dusty's Trail) that it almost feels like watching a completely different actor.

The movie takes its time getting where it’s going. For a while it’s a slow-moving mystery about a strange radioactive cloud hanging over a mountain and the unexplained deaths of climbers who wander too close to it. Eventually, though, the movie shifts gears and gives us a full-on climactic confrontation with the titular creatures — enormous tentacled eyeballs that emerge from the cloud and begin attacking everything in sight.

Visually, the fiendish eyes are…well, interesting. They’re certainly memorable. But aside from that central effect, there’s not a lot in the way of spectacle. The real standout, oddly enough, is the sound design. The noises the creatures make — especially the awful, squishy shrieks when they’re injured — are surprisingly effective and do a lot of the heavy lifting in making the monsters feel threatening.

This is very much classic 1950s sci-fi territory: scientists, mysterious radiation, remote mountain laboratories, and alien invaders whose plans are never entirely explained. In fact, the movie never really tells us what the creatures want. Are they scouts for a conquering alien race? Are they colonizers preparing Earth for takeover? Or are we simply dealing with an extremely unfortunate case of cloudy with a chance of eyeballs?

While I can appreciate the film on its own terms, this particular brand of 1950s creature feature isn’t really where my main interests lie. This one was much more a Bobbo choice -- and his rating relative to mine reflected that.

Yet, despite its flaws — the pacing, the limited effects, and the somewhat vague alien agenda — The Crawling Eye is kind of low-key great in its own way.

And all jokes aside, I just know that Joe would have rated this a 10 -- if he had been there.

the big arch: mcdonald's gets it right

When I go to McDonald’s, which isn't very often, my default order is a Big Mac. I genuinely love the taste of a Big Mac. The sauce, the lettuce, the pickles, the whole odd architectural arrangement of the thing — it’s a very distinctive flavor.

But there’s one problem: A Big Mac doesn’t satisfy.

I eat one, and when I’m done, I immediately feel like I could eat another. And after that… maybe another. A Big Mac is delicious, but it never quite leaves me feeling like I actually ate.

So when McDonald’s introduced a new burger called the Big Arch (currently being offered for a limited time), I figured I’d give it a try. OK. That's not quite accurate. I was champing at the bit, waiting for the grand introduction. And after making the rounds of distributing our shaloch manos baskets to friends and neighbors, the next stop was McDonald's.

One important thing that I noticed was simple but important: one was enough.

The Big Arch actually satisfied me. I ate it, finished it, and didn’t feel the urge to immediately order a second burger. That alone puts it in a very different category from the Big Mac.

Meat vs. Everything Else

My theory is that the key difference is the ratio of meat to “other stuff.”

The Big Mac has two thin patties buried under a lot of bun, lettuce, and sauce — plus the famous middle bun, which seems designed primarily to increase the bread-to-meat ratio.

The Big Arch, by contrast, is built around two much larger patties, with white cheddar cheese, onions (both fresh and crispy), pickles, lettuce, and a tangy sauce. The toppings are there, but the meat is clearly the main attraction.

And since meat is the thing that actually satisfies hunger, this feels like the correct design philosophy for a hamburger.

A Familiar Flavor…for a Moment

When I first bit into the Big Arch, I briefly got a hint of Big Mac flavor. That’s probably coming from the sauce, which is clearly related to Big Mac sauce but seems a bit tangier.

But that sensation lasted only a moment. Very quickly it felt like I was eating what the Big Mac has always pretended to be: an actual burger.

A Big Mac is delicious, but, while it is burgerlike, it never really feels like a burger in the traditional sense. The Big Arch does.

Is It Basically a Double Quarter Pounder?

A colleague of mine — who asked not to be named (I don't know why) — told me that the Big Arch is essentially very close to a Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese, just with different toppings.

Instead of ketchup and mustard, you get the tangy sauce. Instead of the standard American cheese, you get white cheddar. There are more onions, and the overall construction is a little different.

I haven’t tested this theory yet, but if the Big Arch disappears (and it’s currently being advertised as a limited-time item), I may experiment with the Double Quarter Pounder as a substitute.

The Cheese Question

One thing I’m still unsure about is the cheese.

The Big Arch uses white cheddar rather than the standard American cheese McDonald’s puts on Big Macs and Quarter Pounders. I think it’s better — it certainly tasted better to me — but I’m not entirely confident that wasn’t just the overall burger being better.

More research may be required.

Final Verdict

The bottom line is simple: I would absolutely order the Big Arch again.

In fact, I’d go further than that. It’s way, way, way better than any burger McDonald’s has ever sold before.

Which raises an interesting question: What would Joe rate it?

I can’t say for sure. But if a made-for-TV movie about frozen scientists can earn a 10, I suspect a McDonald’s burger that finally gets the meat-to-everything-else ratio right would at least be in contention.

cinema history class: a cold night's death (1973)

The session: The Cold Can Kill Ya!
With plummeting temperatures, Keith shows us four movies with achingly cold settings

(note: This is not an official trailer)

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 3: A Cold Night's Death (1973)
Directed by Jerrold Freedman

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
Never heard of it.

Plot Synopsis:
After a scientist dies under mysterious circumstances at an isolated research station, two investigators are sent to continue his work and determine what happened. As strange occurrences mount and tensions rise, the men begin to suspect that something more than the cold and isolation is lurking in the facility.

Plot:
The movie is essentially a two-man show, and it works beautifully on that level. Robert Culp and Eli Wallach carry the most of the film, and their performances create a slow-burn tension that never lets up. Much of the movie is just the two of them talking, arguing, speculating, and gradually becoming more suspicious of both the situation and each other. It’s a reminder that when the acting is good enough, you don’t need elaborate spectacle to hold an audience.

In many ways, the film is an endurance test. The pacing is deliberate and the mystery unfolds slowly, which may try the patience of viewers expecting constant action. But that patience is rewarded. The final reveal is handled with remarkable restraint and effectiveness, and it lands as one of the best executed reveals I can remember seeing. It’s the kind that suddenly re-contextualizes everything that came before it. It's not quite Sixth Sense level reinvention, but it's up there.

One thing the movie does extraordinarily well is make you feel the cold. The isolated research station, the howling wind outside, and the sense of being trapped in a hostile environment all come through vividly. And when Robert Culp is stuck digging outdoors, you shiver for him. Of the three films we watched so far in this session, this one was probably the most thematically appropriate for a “The Cold Can Kill Ya!” session.

I did have one small but persistent annoyance. Throughout the film, the scientists repeatedly refer to the chimpanzees used in their experiments as “monkeys.” If this were just ordinary people talking, I wouldn’t think twice about it. But these are supposed to be scientists studying primates. You’d think they’d know the difference between a monkey and an ape.

The movie is also interesting in a broader cinematic context. It feels strongly reminiscent of The Thing from Another World, with its isolated research station, creeping paranoia, and sense of an unseen threat lurking nearby. At the same time, it clearly anticipates elements that would later appear in The Thing. That creates a nice bit of cinematic symmetry: a movie influenced by a 1951 film that in turn feels like a precursor to the 1982 remake.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the whole experience is that this was a made-for-TV movie. Television movies from that era are often remembered as cheap or disposable, but this one is neither. It’s tightly written, well acted, atmospheric, and genuinely suspenseful.

And, of course, Joe gave it a 10. While I didn;t, I can understand where that 10 comes from.
 

strategically asking about cheese

Sharon and I try to get breakfast together regularly. Almost always on Saturdays — which is why we call it Dadurday. We do miss a week here and there. Life has a way of scheduling over the things that matter most. But in principle, Saturday morning is ours.

We usually go to the Landmark Diner in Roslyn. I usually order a burger. And I say this without exaggeration: their burgers are among the best I’ve ever had. Perfectly grilled, great flavor, emotionally reassuring.

And then comes the question:

“Do you want cheese?”

This is where things become complicated.

In theory, I like cheese on a burger. In practice, I like pepper jack on a burger. Other cheeses are...other cheeses. American is tolerable, I guess, though it hardly counts as cheese. Cheddar is serviceable. Swiss is OK. Blue cheese is, in my considered judgment, gross. I understand that some people claim to enjoy it. I wish them well.

Plain is also good -- burgers din't need cheese. Whether I want pepper jack or plain depends on mood, weather conditions, and perhaps deeper existential factors.

Early on, when asked about cheese, I would inquire about options. Pepper jack was not among them. Sometimes I would specifically ask. The answer remained no. Sometimes I declined cheese. Sometimes I chose a different cheese.

But over time, I realized I was not merely ordering lunch.

I was participating in a game.

This is a classic signaling problem. The diner is a rational actor. Its objective function is simple: maximize profit by selling food people want. My objective is to consume a burger, ideally topped with pepper jack.

However, information is imperfect.

If I simply decline cheese, the diner concludes I have no cheese demand.

If I hear the list and decline without commentary, the signal is noisy. Perhaps I’m indecisive. Perhaps I’m temporarily lactose-averse. No actionable data.

If I select cheddar or Swiss, then from the diner’s perspective, the equilibrium holds. The absence of pepper jack did not cost them a sale. No incentive to adjust supply.

Which leads to my optimal strategy.

To shift the equilibrium, I must create a credible signal of unmet demand.

So now, I:

Express interest in cheese.

Ask what kinds they have.

Specifically inquire about pepper jack.

Upon learning (again) that they do not have it, I decline cheese and note, gently, that I would have taken it if pepper jack were available.

This transforms a private preference into observable lost revenue.

I am, in effect, conducting a one-man market intervention.

Will this tip the curve? Probably not. It’s entirely possible that my weekly inquiry disappears into the noise of a busy Saturday shift. The kitchen may not be maintaining a Pepper Jack Request Ledger.

But in game-theoretic terms, I have at least moved from a pooling equilibrium (all cheese preferences indistinguishable) to a separating one (my preference clearly signaled).

And I have done so politely.

None of this is criticism. The people at Landmark are great. Truly. Always friendly. Always welcoming. Always patient when I ask for the cheese list as though new dairy products might have entered the market since last week. It’s consistently a terrific experience.

Dadurday, of course, is not actually about cheese.

It’s about sitting across from Sharon and talking. About her week. About what she’s thinking. About whatever small or large thing is occupying her mind. It’s about carving out time before the day accelerates. And even if we're spending some of the time on our phones, that's OK.

The burger is excellent. The game theory is mildly amusing.

But the real equilibrium I’m protecting is this one: we show up.

And if, someday, the server says, “Yes, we have pepper jack,” I’ll smile, order it, and Sharon will probably roll her eyes — because she has heard this analysis before.

Which is, in its own way, part of the tradition.

the alphabetic struggle for the presidency

Political historians tend to divide American history into eras — Founding, Reconstruction, the New Deal, the Cold War, the modern age. These divisions track ideology, party realignments, wars, and economic upheaval.

But beneath those visible shifts lies a quieter contest — measurable, cumulative, and surprisingly dramatic.

The running total of letters in the surnames of Presidents of the United States.

By counting, day by day, the cumulative occurrence of each letter across administrations, a pattern emerges. The results are not random. They form arcs. They show reversals. They reveal consolidation and realignment.

What follows is the verified history of the struggle for alphabetical supremacy.

The Founding Volatility (1789–1825)

The republic begins with N in the lead, thanks to the two N’s in Washington. The early administrations of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison allow N to establish an initial advantage.

That stability proves short-lived.

In 1801, under John Adams, A briefly takes the cumulative lead — the only time in American history that A sits atop the standings. The moment is fleeting. Later that same year, under Jefferson, N reclaims the lead.

The early republic is not yet settled. Margins are small. A single presidency can alter the balance.

In 1825, during the administration of Monroe, O overtakes N for the first time. At this point, it might appear that O’s long reign has begun.

History, however, remains unsettled.

The Nineteenth-Century Tug-of-War

The middle of the nineteenth century reveals a system in flux.

In 1837, under Van Buren, N retakes the lead.
In 1853, under Fillmore, O reclaims it.
In 1857, under Buchanan, N takes it back again.

The margins during this era are narrow, and leadership changes hands through incremental accumulation rather than dramatic surges. No letter establishes durable supremacy. The system oscillates.

This is the Alphabetic Reconstruction Period — unstable, competitive, unresolved.

The Roosevelt Realignment (1933)

The next decisive shift comes in 1933.

Under the second Roosevelt, O retakes the cumulative lead. Unlike earlier reversals, this one holds. For more than five decades, O remains on top.

The twentieth century does not invent O’s strength, but it consolidates it. Coolidge, Hoover and Roosevelt reinforce what had previously been contested ground. From 1933 forward, O governs the cumulative standings with quiet durability.

Other letters rise but do not displace it.

The Eisenhower Acceleration and the E Near-Miss

The closest challenge to O during its long reign came not from N, but from E.

The groundwork was laid by eight years under Eisenhower — the only instance in presidential history in which a single letter appears three times in a surname. No other administration has produced such concentrated orthographic reinforcement.

Those years produced a measurable compression of the gap between E and O. And that continued under Kennedy with his two E's. By the time Kennedy died, E had narrowed the difference to just 32 cumulative occurrences (53,378 to 53,346).

Had Kennedy completed his full term — and, speculatively, a second term — E would have overtaken O for the first time in American history and solidified its lead.

It is tempting to search for deeper significance in that near-miss.

But the data are dramatic enough without inventing motive for the alphabet.

E ultimately settles into a stable third position.

The Modern N Restoration (1987–Present)

In 1987, under Reagan, N retakes the cumulative lead.

This time, it does not relinquish it.

From that point forward — through Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, and beyond — N maintains its position at the top. What had once been a volatile rivalry stabilizes into a modern alignment.

As of the projected end of the current term in 2029, the standings are clear:

N: 67,786
O: 65,916
E: 59,190

The margin is not overwhelming, but it is steady.

After nearly two centuries of oscillation and mid-century consolidation under O, the system has returned to its founding configuration — N on top.

What Does This Reveal?

The early republic was volatile. The nineteenth century oscillated. The twentieth century consolidated. The late twentieth century realigned.

These are phrases historians already use to describe American political development.

Here, they apply equally well to cumulative orthography.

It would be irresponsible to claim deeper meaning. The letters accumulate because surnames contain them. The graph rises because time passes.

And yet, when viewed across 240 years, the pattern feels structured. A led once. O governed for decades. E nearly staged a coup. N reclaimed supremacy and has held it since 1987.

History is written by the winners.

Even when the winners are consonants.

cinema history class: curtains (1983)

The session: The Cold Can Kill Ya!
With plummeting temperatures, Keith shows us four movies with achingly cold settings

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 2: Curtains (1983)
Directed by Richard Ciupa and Peter R. Simpson

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
Never heard of it.

Plot:
Thursday night at Cinema History Class brought us Curtains — but with a twist before the first frame even flickered. Keith, our usual ringmaster of celluloid mayhem, ceded the podium to his friend Chris Gullo, who does some acting but is also known as a film historian and author (with books on Peter Cushing, Donald Pleasance and others to his credit). More to the point, he recently wrote about Curtains for Dark Side magazine and was clearly champing at the bit to share his research. He did so with enthusiasm, context, and just enough behind-the-scenes intrigue to make the film’s rough edges feel like part of the legend. He even raffled off a vintage lobby poster. Bobbo won it. I’ll admit to a flicker of envy, but then I realized Bobbo will treasure it in a way I probably wouldn’t. The universe distributes ephemera wisely.

As for the film itself: it’s very good. Genuinely tense. The jump scares are plentiful enough to keep your shoulders up around your ears, but not so relentless that you never get to exhale. There’s a rhythm to the dread. And the imagery — especially that now-iconic skating scene with the doll-faced killer — is striking, eerie, and memorable. Even when the narrative wobbles, the visuals carry authority.

That said, the script doesn’t give us much to hang onto in terms of character. The actresses assembled for the audition blur together; their rivalries are sketched rather than etched. A stronger investment in who these women are might have elevated the body count into something more tragic than procedural. One performer who does stand out, as he almost always does, is John Vernon. Vernon brings that oily gravitas of his — cultured, manipulative, faintly amused — and you can’t take your eyes off him. Even when the movie falters, he doesn’t.

And falter it does, especially at the end. The finale is ambiguous in a way that left me more confused than intrigued. Not so much “Let’s ponder the implications” as “Wait, what exactly just happened?” As Chris explained in his talk, much of this unevenness stems from behind-the-scenes conflict between director Richard Ciupka and producer Peter R. Simpson. Simpson reportedly took a heavy editorial hand, reshaping scenes and even adding the ending — shot much later — that Ciupka didn’t want. In fact, Ciupka was so unhappy that he declined to have his name on the finished product; the film is credited to “Jonathan Stryker,” which amusingly is the name of the manipulative director character within the story. That tug-of-war also explains some of the more puzzling continuity glitches — including the moment when a body falls from a window and appears to execute a physics-defying 90-degree turn into another window. That wasn’t supernatural horror; it was post-production horror.

Still, for all its production scars, Curtains lingers. The atmosphere works. The set pieces work. The mask works. It’s the kind of flawed genre piece that invites discussion — which, in our little Thursday enclave, is half the fun anyway.

Joe missed this session, but he would have given the film a 10 and Chris Gullo’s presentation a 10. The raffle would have gotten a lower score — unless he won. In that case, it would have been a 10 too.

the crossover chicago needs

 Television keeps rebooting things that already ended properly. Meanwhile, one of the most structurally inevitable crossovers in TV history has never happened:

Married... with Children and Shameless.

They share a city. They share a worldview. They share a spiritual allergy to self-improvement.

And here’s the key: Married…with Children never had a real finale. It didn’t conclude. It just stopped in 1997. The Bundys were left wandering Chicago continuity without narrative supervision. Shameless ended — and in doing so, it killed Frank Gallagher.

Chicago now has a vacancy.

And Chicago does not tolerate a vacuum in dysfunction.

What Happened to the Bundys

The Bundy house survived decades. What it could not survive was property tax reassessment and a variable-rate mortgage Bud once described as “strategically aggressive liquidity optimization.”

Al described it differently.

“We didn’t lose the house. The house lost us. It couldn’t handle the pressure.”

Bud Bundy, improbably successful in crypto-security compliance, convinced his parents to extract equity. Then the market shifted. Then taxes rose. Then Al ignored mail.

“I don’t open envelopes,” Al explains. “That’s how they get you.”

Peggy refused to “downsize into moral surrender.” Kelly assumed escrow was a person. Bud called it “temporary dislocation.” Al called it:

“Living proof that America hates a man who once scored four touchdowns in a single game.”

Bud purchased a distressed two-flat on the South Side as a “cash-flow property with urban upside.” Al’s review:

“So we downgraded from a house we couldn’t afford to a neighborhood that can’t afford us.”

Bud also acquires the commercial note on the building housing the Alibi. Al finds this out the hard way.

“So my son doesn’t own the bar,” Al says. “He just owns the panic attached to it.”

The Gallaghers, Post-Frank

Frank Gallagher is gone. The Gallagher house still stands — stubborn, dented, defiant.

Fiona Gallagher returns to stabilize paperwork and destabilize herself. Lip is sober and tense. Ian and Mickey are married and combustible. Debbie is running three side hustles and one emotional deficit. Liam is the only adult within a five-mile radius.

Bud shows up to inspect his investment.

Al comes along. Al surveys the block.

“I like it. It’s like our old neighborhood — but honest about it.”

Inside the Gallagher house, Al studies the chaos.

“This isn’t neglect. This is efficiency. Why clean something you’re just going to disappoint again?”

Within weeks, Al has adopted Frank’s old stool at the Alibi.

“Relax,” Al tells the regulars. “I’m not replacing the guy. I’m just here to lower expectations.”

Fiona and Bud

Fiona meets Bud in his upgraded form: tailored suits, controlled tone, generational resentment. They bond over paternal disappointment. Al finds out.

“You’re dating my son?” Al says to Fiona. “That’s like trading in a broken appliance for a refurbished one.”

Kelly discovers the affair and arrives on the South Side in full influencer mode. She launches a lifestyle stream titled “Suburban Goddess Goes Urban.”

Al watches one episode.

“You know, Peg, if stupidity were electricity, we could power this block.”

Debbie immediately monetizes Kelly’s following. Lip distrusts Bud’s money. Al distrusts Bud’s existence.

“I raised him to be a failure. Now he’s a success. Where did I go wrong?”

Peggy Finds Her Climate

Peggy Bundy thrives. The Gallagher block runs on entropy, unpaid utilities, and creative denial. Peggy calls it “community.” She and Mickey bond instantly.

Peggy to Al:

“I finally found people who understand that housework is a social construct.”

Al replies:

“So is marriage. And yet here we are.”

Marcy and Carl: The Cougar Doctrine

Marcy D'Arcy meets Carl Gallagher. Carl is younger. Uniformed. Confident in the vague way authority sometimes is. Marcy frames it as mentorship. It escalates.

Jefferson objects. Marcy informs him she is “evolving.”

Al weighs in:

“Marcy trading in Jefferson for Carl? I guess she finally decided to date someone with arrest authority instead of just arrest potential.”

Carl, navigating midlife suburban ambition, asks Al for advice. Al considers this.

“Son, if a woman tells you she sees potential in you, run. Potential is what women see when they don’t like the current model.”

Liam writes a school essay titled Late Capitalism and the Migration of Sitcom Predators.

The Central Conflict

Bud restructures the Alibi’s lease. Al explodes.

“I don’t need a landlord. I need a liver.”

Bud pitches a neighborhood redevelopment scheme involving digital escrow and tax incentives. Al’s summary:

“So the plan is we fix everything by charging ourselves more?”

The deal unravels. Fiona nearly leaves again. Marcy files paperwork. Carl investigates a complaint that circles back to Bud. Kelly livestreams the collapse. Peggy orders takeout.

The Gallagher house remains theirs. The Alibi survives. The Bundys remain displaced. Al returns to his stool.

“You know what the difference is between me and Frank Gallagher?”
He takes a sip.
“Timing.”

Why This Isn’t Nostalgia

In the 1990s, the Bundys were exaggerated stagnation.

In the 2010s, the Gallaghers were exposed precarity.

In the 2020s, those aren’t different genres.

They’re neighbors.

Married…with Children never got a finale. Shameless lost its patriarch.

Chicago still has room for one more man sitting where responsibility should be.

Al Bundy walked so Frank Gallagher could fall down the stairs.

Now somebody has to keep the stool warm.

you always remember your first subway map

Last year the subway system introduced a new map — or perhaps it had already begun phasing it in before 2025 and I only noticed when the old one had mostly disappeared.

That old one — the map that replaced the 1972 Vignelli diagram — had been with us since 1979. Designed by Michael Hertz Associates, it became simply the subway map. It lasted more than forty-five years.

And yet, to me, the definitive New York subway map is still the Vignelli map.

Which is odd.

Because it was only in use for seven years.

Abstraction

The Vignelli map was beautiful — provided you already knew where you were going.

If you knew you needed the F to West 4th Street, it was perfect. The design was schematic, rational, almost electrical. Lines ran at 45- or 90-degree angles. The subway looked like a circuit board. It felt solvable.

It treated the subway as a system.

It did not treat New York as a city.

Distances were abstract. Central Park was a tidy shape. Boroughs were compressed or widened. Landmarks were mostly absent. If you were trying to understand where things actually were in relation to each other above ground, the map could mislead you.

I learned that the hard way.

Woodside and the Popsicle Sticks

Still during the Vignelli era, I decided I needed to go to an art supply store in Woodside to buy popsicle sticks for some craft project. I don’t remember how I figured it out, but I determined which stop on the 7 train was closest and concluded that it would be a short walk.

The map seemed to confirm this.

I got off the train and started walking.

And walking.

And walking.

Eventually I reached the store and bought my popsicle sticks, but the walk was much longer than I had anticipated. The map had flattened distance. Stations that appeared neatly spaced were not, in fact, equidistant in real life. And Queens, with its relatively sparse subway coverage compared to Manhattan, has a way of stretching space between stops.

The Vignelli map had made the trip look like a hop.

Reality was a hike.

It was a beautiful system diagram. It was not a pedestrian guide.

The Hertz Correction

The 1979 redesign tried to fix that. The Hertz map overlaid the subway lines onto something resembling actual geography. Shorelines curved. Subway lines curved. Parks looked like parks. You could approximate direction and distance.

It also introduced one of the system’s smartest ideas: trunk-line color coding through Midtown Manhattan.

The B, D and F were orange because they ran on the Sixth Avenue trunk.
The N, Q and R were yellow because they ran on Broadway.
The 1, 2 and 3 were red; the 4, 5, 6 green; the A, C, E blue.

The color didn’t belong to the letter. It belonged to the trunk.

Which meant the letters could change color.

The Q has not always been yellow. From 1988 to 2001, when it ran via Sixth Avenue, it was orange. The V —  which existed for just under a decade, from 2001 to 2010 — was orange for the same reason. The M used to be brown, part of the old Nassau Street trunk, before rerouting through Sixth Avenue turned it orange.

Even the Q’s name is historical shorthand. It descends from “QB” (“Brighton via Bridge”), alongside QT (“Brighton via Tunnel”) and QJ (“Brighton to Jamaica”). Historically, the Brighton Line in Brooklyn was the Q. I wish I could end this paragraph with the snarky observation that today’s Q doesn't go to Brighton anymore. But it does.

The W, despite what my memory occasionally insists, has always been yellow. Broadway. My recollections are not immune to rerouting.

The Loss of Purple

As a kid, I did not think in terms of trunk-line logic.

I thought in terms of identity. I thought of the F as my train.

The F used to be purple.

It was a beautiful purple. Distinct. Singular. Royal.

Then trunk-line standardization arrived and the F turned orange, joining the B and D. Meanwhile the E — which I irrationally regarded as a rival — remained blue (though a darker shade).

This felt like betrayal.

I understood that color now signified shared Manhattan infrastructure. But I also knew was that the F had lost something beautiful. The 7 train became purple, and it has remained so ever since.

Clutter and Compromise

The Hertz map’s weakness was the inverse of Vignelli’s. It tried to show everything. Geography. Water. Parks. Bus connections. Street grids. Transfers. It was useful — and sometimes cluttered.

The new map introduced in 2025 appears to be an attempt at compromise. It returns to schematic clarity — strong geometry, simplified layout — while preserving trunk-line color coding. Instead of a single thick orange band in Midtown, multiple orange services run in parallel. It is less geographic than Hertz, more geographic than Vignelli.

It tries to split the difference.

The First Map Is the Real Map

The Vignelli map lasted seven years. The Hertz map lasted more than forty-five.

And yet the Vignelli map is the one in my head.

It was the map in use when I first became fascinated with the subway — when tracing colored lines across boroughs and memorizing station names felt like decoding a secret system. It made the city look legible.

When I was young, I found it odd that the map wasn’t redesigned every few years. Why not refresh it like baseball cards? Why not issue new editions, with completely new designs?

It took adulthood to realize that redesigning infrastructure costs money. Stability matters. A transit map is not a collectible.

It is a working tool.

I’m not entirely convinced the system needed this latest redesign. But maps are arguments about what matters — clarity or fidelity, abstraction or realism, system or city.

In the end, the definitive subway map is the one you first learned to read — the one that made you believe the city could be understood.

Even if it occasionally left you walking much farther than expected for popsicle sticks in Woodside.

cinema history class: the thing from another world (1951)

The session: The Cold Can Kill Ya!
With plummeting temperatures, Keith shows us four movies with achingly cold settings

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 1: The Thing from Another World (1951)
Directed by Christian Nyby

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
I knew of this movies existence, since Keith showed us the remake a year ago.

Plot:
A group of Air Force personnel and scientists at an Arctic base uncover a crashed spacecraft frozen in the ice. They soon realize the wreck carried a hostile alien life-form that feeds on blood and begins stalking the isolated outpost. As tensions rise between scientific curiosity and military caution, the group bands together to stop the creature before it can escape into the world.

Reaction and Other Folderol:
My watching The Thing from Another World and grading it was unfair to it, and I’ll own that up front. I had seen the remake (titled simply The Thing) at Keith’s about a year ago, and that made it hard not to spend this entire screening waiting for things that simply weren’t going to happen. The two films tell very different stories: the 1951 version is essentially “there is a big, scary alien loose, stalking the base and we need to stop it,” while the remake leans into a far more paranoid idea—an alien that imitates whatever it comes into contact with. As I watched, I kept expecting shape-shifting paranoia and molecular body horror, even finding myself wondering if the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, "Aquiel," was inspired by the later film. Ironically, my understanding is that the remake is actually closer to the original short story than this movie is.

That mismatch probably cost the film a few points in my mental scorecard, because I did like it—just not as much as the remake. I want to believe that’s mostly about plot: the later version simply gives me more to chew on. But I also have to admit that I’m a product of my time, and early-1980s movie sensibilities feel more natural to me than early-1950s ones. Bobbo, being older and much more steeped in ’50s sci-fi, was clearly more in the movie’s wavelength than I was, which is exactly how these things tend to shake out.

A lot of the movie really works. The pacing is solid, the atmosphere is tense, and the setting does a lot of heavy lifting. That said, the human-looking vegetable alien—kept mostly in shadow for understandable reasons—was, at moments, a little hard not to chuckle at. There’s also a scene where the alien runs out of the base while on fire, and I genuinely found myself wondering whether this image somehow planted a seed that later bloomed into Flaming Carrot. I’m not saying it did. I’m just saying my brain went there.

One area where the movie really impressed me was in a couple of its quieter science-fiction ideas. The fact that shooting the vegetable creature doesn’t immediately kill it actually makes perfect sense: plants don’t have vital organs the way humans do, so bullets aren’t automatically fatal. If I went out to my front yard and fired a cannon at my oak tree, it would be damaged, sure, but not “dead” in any meaningful sense — whereas if the oak tree somehow returned fire, I would be extremely dead. Even creepier (and wonderfully so) is the scene where the scientist calmly shows off the tray of plants he's been growing. He explains that he started with little bits of the alien that fell off in one of the scuffles, and he’s feeding them human blood. That moment lands like proper science fiction: unsettling, logical in its own warped way, and far more disturbing than anything that jumps out from the shadows.

One thing that deserves real credit is how believable the human characters are. People argue, make bad decisions, push their own agendas, and react in ways that feel recognizably human rather than purely “movie logic.” That grounded behavior goes a long way toward selling the danger and gives the film a seriousness that still holds up.

And Joe wasn’t there. Had he been, he would have confidently declared this a ten, immediately, without hesitation, and then spent the next five minutes explaining why any objections were missing the point entirely. Because some tens are tennier than others. Or maybe not, since Bobbo gave it a ten, it would be hard to argue that Joe shouldn't.