Father's Day is nigh upon us and you will probably say "I don't know" when asked for gift ideas to commemorate the occasion, or maybe you don't know what to get one of the dads in your life. This post aims to alleviate that problem.
Men in Love and/or the Trainspotting collection
If you read G:TB you were probably born between 1968 and 1978 which means you are of exactly the right age to have seen, and been absolutely blown away by, the movie Trainspotting when it came out in 1996.
Barry! The book on which it's based is just as good and it got me into other works by Irvine Welsh including all the sequels and prequels involving the same group of radge jakeys which are available on Amazon as the "Trainspotting collection." This does not include the latest installment, Men in Love, which takes place shortly after the end of Trainspotting and before Porno. This means the new book is a sequel and a prequel. As a fan of the series I enjoyed it greatly. I guess you could come to it cold but I suspect you'll enjoy it more if you already read the other books, or at least Trainspotting. I've cited some favorite Welsh quotes before--my top choice from Men in Love is from Sick Boy (natch) and it's at least tangentially related to Father's Day:
Pah-pah, Papa: even a broken clock is right twice a day. I thank God that out of the billions of retard sperm that this miasmal mongol hound shot from those festering hee-haws intae my ill-omened mother (and countless Leith hoors), that it was the solitary, exceptional, perfect bastard that managed to penetrate her egg and furnish this saintly woman with her only son.
Onlae a dozy bam couldnae relate to that!
zwoman got me one of these small modern CD players for my birthday. It has AUX and optical jacks and Bluetooth so it works with AirPods or any other Bluetooth device. More importantly, it justifies keeping all my CDs, especially the ones that are currently only on Notify (like Done By the Forces of Nature which was removed from Spotify because I suspect it includes exactly zero cleared samples). I dig the Scandinavian vibe of the walnut version. Who doesn't dig Scandinavian vibes?
zson borrowed my softshell to clean out stables in the rain and a horse bit the zipper off (don't ask) so I went to REI to replace it during their recent 25% off sale. They didn't have anything that fit the bill, but I spend a lot of time in fleece jackets and two of them are close to crapping out so I perused REI's selection and discovered Patagonia's new (at least to me) Air Fleece. I'm not sure how it works but it keeps you warm without getting too warm (unlike their Better Sweaters) and the medium fit me perfectly. They are wildly overpriced, even at 25% off, but it's replacing two fleeces (one of which I bought about 12 years ago) and zson is about my size so he can wear it too (so long as he avoids the zipper-eating horse) so I justified it to myself and I'm hoping it will last a long time. I went with the hoodie version because who doesn't like hoodies?
A subscription to The Atlantic
There might not be a better source of content outside G:TB than The Atlantic. It's chock-full of think pieces from deep thinkers, cultural observations from cultured observers, and short fiction from non-fictional writers of all heights. Notable writers include Tom Nichols, Anne Applebaum, David Frum, Robert Kagan, McKay Coppins, Sarah Fitzpatrick, Jonathan Chait, Adam Serwer, Derek Thompson, Annie Lowrey, Jamele Hill, George Packer, Eliot Cohen, Alexandra Petri and a boatload of other Washington Post defectors. They put out new stuff online daily and offer a web-only subscription but for an extra $10 you can get also get the dead tree version mailed to your house along with a tote.
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