Hook 'Em: A Longhornucopia

University of Texas football is having a moment, or more accurately, a series of moments that might be called a mixed bag. The Longhorns staged a comeback for the ages last Saturday night in Austin, coming from behind to beat top-ranked Ohio State, a win that propelled them to No. 1 in this week’s poll. In the immediate afterglow, Coach Steve Sarkisian all but blew off ESPN sideline reporter Holly Rowe, offering a few words and a Hook ‘Em Horns hand signal to viewers before jogging off to the locker room. 

It was a mite rude and pissy, but hardly a serious transgression, given that those brief exchanges are uniformly value-less. But because nothing rude and pissy occurs that cannot be made worse, various creators fired up the AI meme machine and produced fake interviews between Sark and Rowe that made the rounds on social media. One has him flashing a middle finger at the camera while smoking a cigar and Rowe munching an oversized cupcake, while another has Sark violently slapping Rowe to the ground and running off. 

Longhorns quarterback Arch Manning, he of the House of Manning football dynasty, was asked at a Monday presser if he had seen any of the AI video interviews. With others off-camera laughing around him, Manning beamed and said that he had seen a couple and offered, “I saw an AI edit of Sark’s interview. Y’all seen that one? That’s a good one — of him slapping Holly Rowe. It’s hilarious.” 

What the actual hell? A man backhanding a woman upside the head and knocking her to the ground – even artificially created – is “a good one” and “hilarious?” Really? Maybe you chalk it up to Manning being a 21-year-old meathead and locker room bro culture. Hey Arch, remember way back in August about Good Good Golf’s bobsled run into the dumpster after their TV commercial that featured a man pushing a woman to the ground for touching his new driver? All fun and games, right? 

In any case, blowback was swift and Manning on Tuesday apologized on Instagram for his remarks. “There is nothing funny about it,” he wrote. “It’s easy to say I didn’t mean it, but I know my words and actions were hurtful to a lot of people. I do not take that lightly and am deeply sorry for that.” He apologized to Rowe specifically: “I have a ton of respect for her and appreciate her showing me grace in this moment. I need to do better and will be more thoughtful going forward.” 

Exchange “thoughtful” for “guarded” and “cautious” and we might be on to something. 

In the runup to Saturday’s game, ESPN’s GameDay was in Austin. One highlight was a UT freshman nailing a field goal for $1.2 million, followed by hugs and handshakes from Longhorn celeb-alum and regular sideline presence Matthew McConaughey and a pledge to donate half the money to charity. A less successful segment featured Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who droned on for almost ten minutes about the Protect College Sports Act and its importance in restoring order to college athletics. 

Cruz is one of the bill’s co-authors, though its language and provisions have changed repeatedly, so “sponsor” is probably a more accurate description. Regardless of the final version, which might come up for a Senate vote in the coming weeks, the upshot is a measure that will reduce the leverage that college athletes have gained through various court rulings and NCAA fecklessness. 

The PCSA has both bipartisan support and significant opposition. Some of the pushback might be due to Cruz himself. He was relentlessly booed and heckled during his segment, and it’s not a stretch to wonder if some people will reflexively oppose the bill, figuring that anything he lends his name to is worth resisting. 

Former Minnesota Senator Al Franken wrote in his autobiography: “I like Ted Cruz more than most of my other colleagues like Ted Cruz. And I hate Ted Cruz.” The late Senator Lindsey Graham once said in a speech at the Washington Press Club that, “If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you.” 

Cruz’s general prickliness was more than matched by a gent named Bo French, a Republican running for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission. He was so inspired by the Longhorns’ victory that he posted a photo of a section of celebrating students whose skin tones suggested their ancestors didn’t arrive on the Mayflower. 

“I heard UT graduation this year looked like this,” he wrote on Elon Musk’s shitscape site. “I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.” In case dogs didn’t hear the whistle, he continued, “I weep for the families in Texas who can’t get into UT because they prioritize foreigners over Texans” and added, “Like body-cams exposed criminals, social media is exposing how many Americans have been displaced by foreigners.” 

Hard to know where to start with this. First, French offered no evidence that those kids in the pic weren’t native Texans. Second, UT Austin doesn’t prioritize foreigners over Texans; state law requires that 90 percent of first-year students must be state residents, and 75 percent of those must be automatically admitted; as recently as 2023, applicants in the top six percent of their high school class were also automatically admitted. Foreigners also happen to pay higher tuition than in-state students, which helps Texas state schools maintain lower than average in-state tuition rates. 

It’s unclear if French is a true xenophobic twatwaffle or has simply made the calculation that going full bigot is a winning strategy with his base. Contemptible either way. Some within his own party have called him out, notably outgoing Texas Senator John Cornyn, who posted on X/Twitter: “Are other Republican elected officials going to condemn the intolerance and racism, or look the other way while it becomes normalized.” 

Predictably, Cornyn caught some gas from far right corners, including a TV host who blasted him for “liberal moralizing” and for criticizing “a Patriot acknowledging that Texans didn’t ask for their state to become a playground for the third world.” I might argue that Third World residents looking for a playground can find plenty more welcoming locations than Texas. 

So, as the top-ranked Longhorns prepare for a visit from overmatched Texas-San Antonio and set themselves up for a potential playoff berth, laughing off memes about violence against women, flawed legislation stumped by unpopular figures and outright racism by candidates for statewide office in an ethnically diverse country are episodes that even a roomful of McConaugheys can’t pretty up.

Single-Sentence Stories, Part II: Sentence of Dave, and a Math Problem About Literature

Cuing off Zed's sly tip-of-the-cap post yesterday, I thought I'd take us all there more fully. You know, a ham-fisted sequel after a cleverly crafted original.

So, as of today, Dave has written 6,365 posts at Sentence of Dave. As such, presumably he has written 6,365 sentences.

6,365 sentences. Wow.

Except... do you guys remember his existential crisis where he went over to that Park the Bus site and wrote lots of sentences and said goodbye to SoD and then a year later or so came back and just picked the old site right back up New Coke Bobby Ewing style?

What was that about? We're going to call that period his "Lost Weekend" a la John Lennon and go with the 6,365 sentences. Moving right along...

So… has Dave written the equivalent of a novel?

Of course it would be a rambling, hard-to-follow novel. I contend that it would be no harder to follow than Faulkner's novels for me when I read them in high school, or Dave when he's rambling at the Fishing Trip after Tortuga's and some afternoon fun. 

How can we simply evaluate if he's written and published (in blogform) as much as a novel over these 18 years?

AI says that: 

• "Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities contains an estimated 6,400 to 7,400 sentences, based on an approximate word count of 135,000 to 140,000 and the typical long-winded Victorian sentence length of around 19 to 22 words per sentence. For instance, the famous opening line alone runs 119 words long, which is very SoDomish and perhaps Dave's original inspiration."
• "Based on the novel's total word count, To Kill a Mockingbird contains an estimated 6,800 to 7,500 sentences. Total Word Count: The novel has approximately 100,000 words. Average Sentence Length: Standard 20th-century American fiction typically averages 13 to 15 words per sentence. BTW, Dave = Boo Radley."
• "Mark Twain’s American classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn contains an estimated 5,300 to 5,800 sentences. While Mark Twain's prose is highly conversational and written in Huck's unique colloquial voice, his narrative sentences tend to be longer and more fluid than modern fiction, often linking multiple clauses with conjunctions like "and". However, this is balanced out by rapid-fire, localized dialogue between Huck and other characters along the Mississippi River, bringing the statistical average down to about 20 words per sentence. Also, Dave has never used racist vulgarities in SoD."
• "An analysis of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath estimates the sentence count to be between 11,000 and 15,000 sentences. While it is a massive, sweeping novel, its total sentence count is incredibly high because Steinbeck’s sentence-level complexity is uniquely low. Like SoD, it's also super uplifting."
• “An analysis of Ernest Hemingway's modernist classic The Sun Also Rises estimates the sentence count to be between 5,600 and 6,800 sentences, similar to SoD in the way that Jake Barnes is similar to Dave in his sexual virility."

So Dave has worked harder than Twain, nearly as hard as Dickens and Harper Lee, and he’s halfway to Steinbeck. (“Halfway to Steinbeck”… a podcast episode or Random Idiots song title if there ever was one.)

Dave is pretty much Ernest Hemingway. Papa Pellicane strikes again.

Here’s the thing, though. Those authors didn’t work as hard per sentence. Not nearly!

Only the people highlighted in Zman’s recommended Totei article “The Strange Allure of the Single-Sentence Novel” have! Faulkner and his 1,288-word sentence in Absalom, Absalom!, or Joyce and his 4,391-word sentence in Ulysses. (Joyce’s has to be the Lou Gehrig record of his time… and maybe Dave can be Cal Ripken.)

So, in order to do comparative math, we need to know how long the average SoD entry is, wordwise. How do we figure that?

We’re in luck, Super Sleuths! My buddy Arch the AI Archivist gave me this to work with:

If your goal is “give me a defensible ballpark, not a dissertation,” I think we can get there without turning this into the Human Genome Project.

From the archive material I can actually inspect, my best current estimate is:

 An average Sentence of Dave post is probably about 200–250 words.

If you made me put one number on it right now, I'd use ~225 words per post.

I also think the median is appreciably lower — probably around 150–175 words. That's because Dave's distribution is extremely lopsided: there are lots of short posts, but then occasional 500-, 700-, or 1,000-word Dave extravaganzas drag the arithmetic mean upward. You can see that variation directly in the archives: 2010 has compact posts alongside very long one-sentence narratives, while 2024 likewise jumps between tiny entries and several-hundred-word stories. And contemporary Dave does appear wordier.

I'd put a fairly broad uncertainty band around it — say ±50 words — until we've done a genuine large sample. But I'm much more comfortable with 225 now than with my original 150–200 guess.

Oh, and then there's this exchange:

Anyway, I’m actually content to know how much Dave has written, guesstimate-style (like most of my college exam submissions), so let’s do this.  

Holy crap. Sentence of Dave is 5 times wordier than that relative leaflet Ulysses! 

I know, my Math about his English a bit dicey in its precision, but it’s on the right track. Dave’s collective work doesn’t qualify for Single-Sentence Novel acclaim, because, like the unluckiest gal I know, he’s had over 6,000 periods… but if we could tap a few keystrokes and make them all semi-colons… oh, boy. 

Let's face it. Dave is Cal. 

[This is not helping my case with my hometowners that W&M people aren’t nerds.]

Totei and the Art of Single-Sentence Stories

I typically don't enjoy non-fiction books.  For whatever reason, I can't focus on one real thing for that long.  But I do enjoy non-fiction magazine articles.  You're in, you're enlightened, you're out.  All in six to nine pages.

To that end, you should check out Totei, "a magazine about the art of making."  They cover art, film, food, music, design.  And writing.  One particular article about writing hooked me.

"The Strange Allure of the Single-Sentence Novel" is a must-read.  Not because the author's name is Naomi Xu Elegant (and for the record she is not related to FsOG:TB Danny and Jenny Elegance).  But because of the way she writes about people who publish entire works as a single sentence.

Of the Hungarian Nobel laureate László Krasznahorkai who wrote Herscht 07769, a frattily titled 400 page book containing one sentence, she asks:

Why does he do it?  Is it because, simply, he’s a weird man who just wants to write terribly long sentences, and he doesn’t want you to get a word in edgeways?

That's not an unreasonable way to think of authors who write lengthy stories in one sentence.

Of Ducks, Newburyport, a thousand-page sentence by Lucy Ellman, Elegant quotes a review stating "It feels dense at first, a bit like drowning, without a period or paragraph break in sight."  And when she interviewed Ellman she got this quote about long sentences: "It’s the literary equivalent of menopause." Again, all very on the nose.

In her interview with Daniel Krautz, the author of the 2026 Pulitzer Prize-winning 304 page sentence Angel Down, Elegant pulled this insight: "I didn’t know if people would take one look at it and just be like, 'I don’t want to deal with this.' I really didn’t know if I’d just ruined the book. All I knew is that I really liked it—it was really exciting for me to write.” I can see both sides of this based on my own experience reading long stories told in one sentence—not everyone wants to deal with it, but it's an exciting exercise in self-indulgence for the author.

Mike McCormack, author of the exceedingly long sentence Solar Bones, told Elegant that he "is wary of the long sentence. 'John Banville says the sentence is what sets us above and apart from the animals,' he said. 'I would share that esteem. You want to have some seriously good reasons for renouncing the sentence and for writing long outpours.'"

Go read Elegant's article and maybe some others in Totei like this one about a guy who makes guitars using antique wood salvaged from lower Manhattan, or this one about a living sculpture (which is a bit of a knock-off of my man Ben Behin), or this one about Tape Op, or this one about La Marzocco espresso machines.

And when you're done with that, go read Sentence of Dave, pound-for-pound the best single sentences you can get online.

Life Hacks, All Under $20

I recently made some cheap purchases that made my life disproportionately better.  They might improve your lives too.

Cheap, easy coffee

For over 25 years, the only way I've made coffee at home is with a Melitta pour over cone.  The process is simple and the results are delicious.  Put a #2 paper filter in the cone, put coffee grinds in the filter, put the cone on top of a coffee mug, pour hot water over the coffee grounds, put the cone in the sink, drink the coffee, throw the grinds in the garbage once they cool.  I paid $4.99 for each of my two cones in 2006 or 2007 and they still work great.  The only tricky part is you have to periodically lift the cone to see if the mug is full, else it might overflow.

Until recently!  We went on vacation and forgot to bring our cones so zwoman ordered two from Amazon for $7.84 apiece and when they arrived we were surprised by their new design.  It now has two holes along the base so you can see the level of the coffee in the cup without lifting the cone.  Brilliant!

If your K-cup machine breaks, or if you're sending a youngster out into the world and they need some housewares, get one of these.

Keep your outdated charging cords

I assume that everyone's home has a drawer like this.

Ok, maybe you don't have a cat brush or a fabric shaver (although you should) or an old AppleTV remote but you probably have a bunch of charging cables and blocks.  And if you have Apple products (not looking at you Squeaky) you probably have cables that don't work with all of your devices or all of your blocks.  In my case, my iPhone requires a USB-c charger while my iPad, keyboard and mouse need a Lightning charger.  Those Lightning devices are old so I have a lot of Lightning cables that accrued over time, including a few very long ones that weren't cheap.  For $7.19 you can get a pack of four little dongles that turn your Lightning cable into a USB-c cable.  They even come with little silicon tethers so they're always with the cable!  Similarly, for $6.98 you can get four dongles and tethers that turn your USB-c cable into a Lightning cable.  You can use all your cables to charge everything for about fourteen bucks.  And when you're traveling with your new iPhone and your old iPad you only need to bring one charger.

Keep all your old peripherals

I recently started a new job and they issued me a laptop with only three guzzintas, an HDMI port and two USB-c ports.  The power cord uses one of those USBs so when I'm working from home my peripheral connectivity is limited.  For $16.95 you can get a 7-in-1 USB hub that provides another HDMI port, two USB 3.0 ports, a USB-c port, and SD/TF slots (which you'll probably never use).  Now I can use two monitors and my old camera and speaker/mic, all at the same time.  Even if you already have a big baller hub at home, this one is nice for travel, especially if you've got one of those big baller travel monitor extenders (I bet Danimal rolls thusly given his big baller balls).  

For $38.96 you can make your life a lot easier and/or give someone a helpful gift.  Enjoy!

Next Step, Profit

Unbeknownst to us, although the Teej might've felt a disturbance in the force, researchers at the University of Zurich have been quietly working on one of our enduring challenges. That being solving the problem of how, exactly, to extract riches from underwear. 

My friends, we may have a breakthrough.

The summary of a recent Science News article tells the whole story:

More than 1,000 volunteers buried cotton underwear across Switzerland to help scientists measure how active different soils are. The faster the fabric disappeared, the more biological activity was taking place underground. Gardens showed the fastest decomposition, while lawns had the least, revealing how strongly land management can shape soil life.

Researchers enlisted the help of those 1,000 volunteers for a study entitled "Proof by Underpants". (As if Trey and Matt weren't involved.) Each volunteer buried two pairs of cotton underpants at sites around Switzerland. Two months later, the volunteers dug up the underpants, photographed them, and sent the images to the research team in Zurich.

The results were interesting scientifically. Turns out that private gardens are the most active biological sites, as measured by the decomposition of the underpants. Agricultural fields and meadows were next, with lawns the least active. 

Now comes the slightly harder part. We have findings that are a signpost towards the future. All we have to do is:

• Collect underpants
• ? (but it somehow involves soils)
• Profit

I think you all know the next step.

The First Time... Ever I Saw Your Face... and Heard Your Jokes

It's pretty cool to see these fresh faces get their shot at the mountaintop. Carson. This is it. 

Nervous. Fidgety. Almost each of them stammers or stumbles at least once. 

And each of these people crushed it.  

You all are in for a treat tonight, and I think you all sound like you're in the right mood for it, because this is a young comedian, this is their first time on the Tonight Show with us, and they're very funny. 

They've come all the way from ____ to be with us, so won't you please give a warm welcome for...

Drew Carey, from Cleveland, OH - 11/8/91

Steven Wright, from Boston, MA - 8/6/82

Garry Shandling, from Tucson, AZ - 3/18/81

Ellen DeGeneres, from Metairie, LA - 11/28/86

Freddie Prinze, from New York, NY - 12/06/73

A Good Boi* at Twilight

*Eight times out of ten 

He barks too much. He likes people more than other dogs, but not that many people. He doesn’t go for walks as much as outdoor sniff sessions. He’s a quirky, funny, stubborn little nugget, but he’s our quirky, funny, stubborn little nugget. As he approaches his 17th birthday, he’s slowed considerably and is less steady on his paws. His movements are more deliberate. He doesn’t see or hear as well as he used to. He pees and poops more frequently. He exhibits brief bursts of energy, followed by lengthy stretches in recline – all traits he shares with his hooman dad. 

I decided to write about him while he’s still with us because I’m not sure I’ll be able to after he’s gone. Yeah, I’m gonna be a wreck. 

Truth is, I was skeptical about owning a dog. I like dogs, and plenty of friends had and have dogs that I enjoyed. But I never owned a dog growing up, and working as a newspaper guy, with its long days and odd hours and periodic road trips, didn’t seem to lend itself to the care and feeding of a dog. 

My wife returned from a road trip to visit family and had bonded with a cousin’s dog, a lively little Yorkshire terrier, and said she would like to have a dog again. She grew up with a cocker spaniel she loved and thought the companionship would be a nice addition to our little duo. With some hesitation I said, sure, let’s give it a go. 

We settled on something in the poodle-mix family; my wife has a mild allergy to animal dander, and poodles and their various cross breeds have hair, not fur, so they don’t shed. Several months later, we saw an ad in the paper that a nearby family had a litter of cock-a-poo puppies (cocker spaniel-poodle mix) available. When we visited the family and were wondering how to choose, the guy suggested that I sit on the floor cross-legged near the puppies and see if any of them react. Sure enough, one little fellow about the size of a cornhole bag crawled toward me and climbed into my lap. 

Four weeks later, in early Dec. 2009, we brought Nappy home (brief aside: Nappy was my nickname in high school and college; I had a curly Afro and Stevie Wonder’s “I Wish” was all over the airwaves at the time – “Looking back on when I was a little nappy-headed boy …”; my wife learned of my nickname from friends and insisted our dog be Nappy Jr.). He was an active, bouncy puppy who grew into a 22-pound, crotch-seeking missile. When one of us returned home, he bounded toward us and launched upward so that he collided with our bits, his tail spinning like a helicopter blade. There’s no question that he loves both of us, but very quickly he became “my dog.” 

Almost from day one, he followed me everywhere. I had to change the way I walked around the house when he was little, a kind of shuffle rather than picking up my feet because he was often so close that I frequently clipped him or stepped on him. I do roughly 99.6 percent of the feeding, walking, peeing and pooping duties. He’s disrupted my sleep pattern for years, either by flopping on top of me in bed overnight or mewling at us at 5 or 6 a.m. that he needs to go outside. 

Some quick calculations estimate that I’ve made approximately 43,000 trips outside with him and picked up about 7,750 pounds of poop. Between food, toys and vet bills, my wife jokes that we’ve spent the equivalent of two years of college on him, and he’s no closer to a degree than the day we got him. Sometimes, you just write the checks and don’t think twice. 

I concluded that any shortcomings in his behavior or training were my fault, not his. We’ve never boarded him because he’s our guy and we want him with us and because he seems to have a neurotic streak that caused us to worry that he might gnaw off a paw if he went days without seeing us. We’ve taken only car trips to places with dog-friendly accommodations since we’ve had him. I haven’t been on a plane since the middle of 2009. I wouldn’t change a thing. 

Dogs are a marvel, a blessing. They’re always happy to see us and love us unconditionally. They ask nothing more than belly rubs and ball-playing sessions and car rides with the windows open. Our little fellow is winding down. I can see it, I can feel it. I’ll be a mess when it happens and it will leave a huge hole in my heart, but I’m grateful for every day we had with him. Now, if you’ll excuse me, at least one of us has to pee.

Emergency Masked Rapper Filler

Lonnnng weekend for your boy. Harrisonburg and back on Friday with our exchange student to check out the Green Valley Book Fair, show her Buc-ee's for the first time (a monument to American excess), and visit James Madison University. Followed that up with a round-trip 12-hour drive to/from Columbus, OH on Saturday and Sunday sandwiched around a fantastic wedding of a friend's daughter (and a mini-summit with Danimal). Topped it off with a cookout with Marls and fam and a few too many beers. Marls might've overserved himself on Johnny Walker Gold, as well.

So you can see why I might've slacked on my content creation duties. Not sure what excuse the rest of you mopes have (The Teej flew to South Korea, so he's good.).

Quick filler it is, then. Tom Hardy is a talented dude, but he often plays to a type. He's also long been a fan of old-school American hip-hop. Turns out his talents go beyond playing a tough guy with a penchant for a quip. 

Hardy recently joined the hip-hop supergroup Czarface (which incudes rap duo 7L & Esoteric and Wu-Tang Clan member Inspectah Deck) on their new album "Czarface Meets Frankie Pulitzer". In this case, Hardy and Frankie Pulitzer are one and the same.

Hip-hop heads will have a more informed opinion than I, but to me, this sounds like credible flow that takes us back a couple of decades, stylistically. Hardy/Pulitzer is the dude in the mask. Enjoy, and let me know if I've got it right.

Lewis Hamilton knows where all the coolest barns are

Lewis Hamilton is perhaps the greatest Formula 1 driver ever.  His list of racing achievements is preposterously impressive.  After repping Mercedes for 19 years, he moved to Ferrari in 2025, giving him access to preposterously impressive cars.  And it appears that he knows where all the most preposterously impressive barns are.

Hamilton recently posted his barn find Ferrari F40 on Instagram and I almost passed out.  Much like the street-parked F40 I wrote about previously, there should be no such thing as a barn find F40.  But this guy found one.  And he has access to all the finest mechanics at Maranello to restore it.  Officine Classiche y'all!

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A post shared by Lewis Hamilton (@lewishamilton)

I'm jealous on many levels.  But I can't hate!  Look at how much he loves the car, you can practically see him morph into a 10-year-old as he looks at it, sits in it, rubs the badge.  He's in love.

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A post shared by Lewis Hamilton (@lewishamilton)

Call me if you know a barn with something even half this fantastic stored in it.

Food is Dumb. Or Is It?

We've seen some things around here, my friends, gustatorially speaking. We've eaten the KFC Double Down. We've chowed our way around multiple state fairs. We've tried (and enjoyed) pizza-flavored vodka.

The G:TB Taste Team has been handed another challenge, should we choose to accept it. 

Pringles are great, though not part of my regular rotation these days. Don't eat a lot of chips of any provenance, really. And I do love a dill pickle - I eat at least one a day. I can take or leave vodka.

All of which makes me mildly curious about Sugarlands Distilling's new Pringles Dill Pickle Potato Vodka.

Here's the product description from InternetWines.com, where you can purchase a 750 mL bottle for $21.99 (or could, before it sold out):

"Sugarlands Distilling took the briny bite of Pringles Dill Pickle Potato Crisps and turned it into a spirit that's tart, savory, and unapologetically bold. Think sharp vinegar, crisp dill, and a salty potato twist all in a pour that packs a serious punch.

Pop the top, pour a shot and let the flavor speak for itself. Perfect for picklebacks, martinis, or any cocktail that needs a little snap. Embrace the brine."

I can see the concept here. Little brininess adds something to a lot of different drinks. Color me curious.

An Argument for and Against AI

Over the past several years, I've worked in two businesses that leverage AI in one form or another to solve customer challenges. I'm keenly interested in the debate over the technology's utility, impact, and future, and I'm more informed than most on the topic. Some people that think AI is a technological panacea that'll usher the species into a lasting era of bliss. Others believe AI will be cause the end of humanity. And at the moment, it's wildly overhyped by people who have an vested interest in the technology's success, which is a real problem.

The truth, as is so often the case, lies in the middle. AI is a tool. It can be very useful. It can also lead to some very mediocre if not downright stupid outcomes. 

Case in point, the rest of this blog, in which I'll illustrate the useful and the mid over the course of one recent interaction with Claude.

I was curious about whether I could use AI to help plan a road trip. In this case, a month-long tour of the country centered around seeing musicians I like in smallish venues in smallish cities/towns. I started my exploration by offering Claude the following prompt:

"i am a big fan of singer-songerwriter musical acts, like rhett miller, andrew duhon, jeff tweedy, jay farrar, cat power, carbon leaf, brandi carlile, tyler childers, noah kahan, waxahatchee, avett brothers, haim, etc. i'd like to take the month of november and tour the united states and listen to live music."

please create an itinerary for my that starts and ends in northern virginia that allows me to see artists live in mid-sized or small cities across america. make sure i spend at least two nights in each location and get to see at least one live performance. the venues should be small to mid-sized, as well."

It took me four or five iterations and refinements to get to an itinerary that I liked. After I'd reached that point, I asked Claude to, "synopsize this entire series of prompts and responses as a blog post, using the tone of voice of gheorghe: the blog (https://gheorghe77.blogspot.com/). make the itinerary the last thing in the post."

What follows is Claude/Gheorghe's response - my reactions will follow in italics:

So I've got this problem, and the problem is that I like exactly one genre of music with the burning intensity of a thousand suns, and that genre is "sad and/or earnest people with acoustic guitars," and the sub-problem is that the specific practitioners of this genre I love most — your Rhett Millers, your Tyler Childerses, your Waxahatchees, your Carbon Leafs (Leaves? the Carbon Leaf discography?) — do not, as a rule, play the Xfinity Center. They play rooms that hold four hundred people and smell vaguely like spilled Yuengling. Which is exactly how I like it, but it does mean that "catching a show" requires actual research, unlike, say, Taylor Swift, whose tour schedule you could find by asking a golden retriever.

Okay, so this is...decent. Not sure why Claude thinks I only like one genre of music. The voice is an amalgamation of Gheorghies. I definitely spy some OBX Daveish stylings in the mix.

Naturally, since I am both lazy and a person living in the Year of Our Lord 2026, I asked an AI to plan me a month-long, coast-spanning music pilgrimage instead of doing it myself like some kind of caveman with a road atlas. What followed was four entire drafts of a road trip, escalating in ambition and geographic absurdity, and I feel like you should get to enjoy the ride too, because honestly it was a journey (pun very much intended, I regret nothing).

Again, solid. A little try-hard, if I'm being honest. I hope we don't sound like that.

**Round one: November, start/end in Northern Virginia.** Reasonable ask, I thought. Big loop through Richmond, Asheville, Athens, Nashville, New Orleans, Austin, Memphis, Louisville, Knoxville, back home. Charming. Comprehensive. Almost entirely make-believe, as it turned out, because — and this is a very "living in the future" kind of problem to have — none of my guys had actually announced November tour dates yet. Not one. The robot did its diligence, came back, and basically said "I built you a lovely map of vibes but the actual bands part is aspirational." Respect for the honesty, mild personal humiliation for me.

The quotations around things that don't require quotations are starting to pile up. Some em dashes in there, but that's actually on brand.

**Round two: same request, but October instead**, because October is closer and therefore bands might have gotten around to telling anyone where they're playing. This is where things got good. Turns out Jason Isbell is doing a three-night stand at the Ryman. Turns out Old Crow Medicine Show is rolling through small-town Pennsylvania. Turns out Jeff Tweedy is doing a solo lap through Ohio with his kid's band opening. Carbon Leaf — a Virginia band, mind you — is out in Kansas City and Chicago being Virginian at people. Real dates. Real, bookable, small-venue shows. I felt like a guy who'd been handed an actual treasure map instead of a napkin drawing.

"Real dates. Real, bookable, small-venue shows." is an AI tell - one of the first in the text thus far.

**Round three: forget the loop, start on the West Coast and work back home.** This is where the trip stopped being "a nice drive" and started being "a bit."  It turned out Iron & Wine — not on my original list, but close enough in spirit that I'm retroactively adopting him — is doing a whole honest-to-god coast-to-coast October tour, Seattle to South Carolina, and I basically hitched my itinerary to his tour bus like a barnacle. Which was efficient! It was also, in retrospect, a little much — I looked at the finished draft and realized I'd built a road trip that was 70% one guy's calendar. Bold move for a project explicitly premised on my loving lots of different artists.

The analysis part of this segment was pretty dumb, if we're being honest. And again with the extraneous quotations.

**Round four, the correction: no more than two shows per artist, please.** This is the "actually think about what you're doing" round, and it's the one that stuck. Rebuilt the whole thing with real variety — Carbon Leaf, Andrew Duhon, Iron & Wine, Shovels & Rope — capped at two apiece, no single act allowed to hog the whole trip like it's their solo project. There were still a couple of honest gaps (sorry, Asheville) where nobody's calendar cooperated.

Fine. No complaints.

**Round five: "I'll fly for anything over 400 miles," I said,** like some kind of aristocrat, and this single sentence fixed everything. Suddenly the Isbell/Ryman residency — previously geographically impossible without a week of pure interstate suffering — fit right into the middle of the trip. Memphis, which had been sitting there as a sad empty stop with no band attached, got adopted by an Iron & Wine date that the flights made reachable. Turns out the solution to "my itinerary doesn't make sense" was, the whole time, "money," which, yeah, tracks.

So here's where we landed. Five artists, capped at two shows each, three flights for the genuinely brutal legs, and a route that goes from a Virginia band playing a Seattle dive bar clear across the country back to actual Virginia. I did not confirm any of this personally, so don't yell at me if Carbon Leaf cancels — yell at the robot, or better yet, yell at Ticketmaster, the true villain in every version of this story.

Closing stronger that we opened, for sure.

---

Five artists, no repeats beyond two apiece, one month, roughly forty thousand emotional dollars in gas and airfare. Wager accordingly.

The last bit doesn't make a ton of sense. Forty thousand should be a number, not text. I don't know what emotional dollars are. Meh.

To sum up, I think the final product - the itinerary - is quite good, and something that would've taken me or any other human a long, frustrating time. That's a good use of the technology. The writing is okay, and if you weren't picky about your words, you might be okay with it. That's lame if you're looking for a shortcut for a term paper or a training manual, and it's dangerous - at least professionally - if you're putting together a legal brief or an op-ed. Or targeting attacks on Iranian schools.

I happen to be picky about my words, as I suspect most of us are, so this isn't good enough for me. It lacks a bit of heart, even as Claude tried to emulate our tone. And there are bits of off-sounding language that sours the whole thing for me as a reader. In the end, I think AI's ability to fake human writing is a technological marvel, but it's not nearly the most interesting nor I think enduring capability AI has. That comes from its ability to synthesize and make sense of massive amounts of information, draw inferences, and generate logical data quickly, and reasonably accurately. 

Frankly, that's good enough to be really compelling. Shame the foofs that have a stake in AI's success can't just focus on that instead of moonshot claims about rendering human work redundant.

The Best of Us

There are a million different things we could say about Dolly Parton. We could emphasize her kindness, her humanitarian efforts (she fucking helped fund the development of the Moderna COVID vaccine!*), her authenticity, her acting, her self-awareness, her loyalty to her husband and her roots, her genuine affection, her ability to laugh at herself and with others, her damn near singular manner of embracing her sexuality on her terms and not the culture's - especially given the era she came to prominence in, her songwriting, her...all of it. Absolutely one of a kind, and the universal outpouring of love for her in the wake of her passing will not be matched in my lifetime.

(* Apologies for cursing, ma'am.)

And there are a million different pieces that have and will be written about the indelible mark she left on our world. I'd rather spend time reading those than trying to find a new angle. 

One of the most interesting things I've seen since she left us this week is directly connected to the thing we knew her for first. The number and diversity of the artists that have honored her with their live performances over the past few days is remarkable. She touched performers from Eminem to Brandi Carlile and so many beyond that, famous and not. Here are just a very few of the musicians that made time to remember one of one:

I mean, Pitbull loved Dolly!

Jack White's been performing Jolene for years. Here he was the night after she passed.

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The everlovin' Bands of His Majesty's Royal Marines, for goodness' sake.

The Avett Brothers were probably a good bet.

@avettbros The Avett Brothers perform a mashup of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” and “Pretty Girl from Annapolis” at their show last night. 🦋 #dollyparton #dolly #avettbrothers #livemusic #cover ♬ original sound - The Avett Brothers

But I don't that anyone other than Dooger would've guess Amyl and the Sniffers loved her.

Amyl and the Sniffers pay tribute to Dolly Parton at their show in Dublin: "I f**king love Dolly Parton so much" 🤘

🤳: danleith_comedy pic.twitter.com/BrujVYltXS

— Far Out Magazine (@FarOutMag) August 26, 2026

Gheorghasbord

Truly a wide range of cultural flotsam that's tickled my fancy and/or given me cause for consideration over the past week or so. From sports to music to current political events, as always, we span the globe to keep you entertained.

I mentioned the kerfuffle the Sullivan brothers of the MLS Philadelphia Union got into against Inter Miami a few days ago. I told you to find the video. I know you, so I'm sure you didn't. So here it is. You'll see Quinn Sullivan (the older of the brothers at 22) get disrespected by Miami defender Ian Fray (Fray put his nuts on Sullivan's head) and respond with a textbook bodyslam. Cavan Sullivan (potentially the best 16 year-old male player the U.S. has ever developed) rushes to his brother's aid and squares up with Miami's much-taller Yannick Bright. Holds his own, too.

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There's actually a G:TB connection here, tenuous though it may be. Quinn Sullivan has dated a girl who grew up in my neighborhood for several years. My wife and I are good friends with her mom. She played at Radford and did a year as a graduate transfer at the University of New Hampshire. Where she met and became friends with...Yannick Bright. Small world, y'all.

Also, remember the name Cavan Sullivan. He's contributing significantly to Philly's attack this season, with six goals and nine assists in 25 matches across all competitions. Despite the fact that he's 5'7" and 150 pounds, he's tough and strong and unafraid to mix it up with older and stronger men. He's been under contract with Manchester City since he was 14, and will almost certainly head to Europe when he's old enough for the appropriate visa. Says here he'll be a USMNT mainstay for the next 15 years.

Speaking of balls, which we were, at least obliquely, check out this scene from a recent Kacey Musgraves concert:

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And veering wildly from the ridiculous to the profound, I commend to your attention New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie. The Virginia Beach-born, UVA-educated (nobody's perfect) is one of the clearest thinkers and writers about the current American moment. He writes a great deal about the politics of race and culture, but he's good on a wide range of topics. This video essay offers typically-thoughtful advice to the Democratic Party should it find itself in the majority in Congress after November's midterm elections. I sure hope the party leadership is listening.