It’s not even the Fagles translation, he’s such a fucking casual

A fighter pilot getting interviewed on a podcast: “You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose.”

An sec football coach giving a halftime pump up speech: It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities

Birbiglia is good too. Mark Normand is an ass about some things but he thinks a lot about writing. Seinfeld and Louis CK and Chris Rock in that old Talking Funny special.

I love listening to him talk about process and writing. And I HATE almost everything people write about writing process.

Actually the only people I really like to read / listen to talk about it are comedians…

That probably is significant

For sure. Comedy is hard. Premises are funny. Conclusions… conclusions are hard.

Blazing saddles cheats and just goes to absurd.

So does Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and a lot of flying circus sketches

SNL grads coming out of the Lorne michael school of comedy make incredible sitcoms. He teaches them how to make television practically, on budget, simple, fast, loud. And lots of movies also with great premises.

If there is one common flaw, it’s they never seem to know how to wrap it all up

always. its who we are, unabashedly

‘Rah, sir

this is probably actually the memento mori i needed to snap back in today, good call

Happy birthday to Hugh, Haseeb, and all the terps and techs who served with them. To Marines on bsky, and all over the world. Young, old, alive, passed on, grunts and pogs, ground and wing. I love you all dearly, you are my family. Slice some cake with a sword, and pour one out for Chesty tonight.

But because we choose to believe it, and live it, it all takes on meaning.

Those families didn't get special treatment in the Team America system. But we got to put them in our system because of that connection. And Team America benefitted from H+H's expertise because of that connection.

So the moral here is... its all true. Marines are the silliest, dirtiest, dumbest, most foul-mouthed. They are also sure they are the superlative example of all those, loud about it, and incredibly self-important. And in some ways, yeah, it's all propaganda and self-promotion.

It was a lunch that changed my life. And the lives of a lot of those families on the list. And it happened because Abram knew Marines were goofy, and Gunny and I could connect easily because... we were both Marines. We knew each other and were brothers before we ever met in person, just from that.

Team America has ended up able to help a lot of those families get to the US. There are a dozen or more families, at least, who have arrived here in St. Louis specifically, that I've got to meet. I've met the men, who get jobs here, and their sons and daughters, who go to American schools.

We made lunch plans. The retired gunny brought alone Haseeb, an SIV himself, who Hugh had worked with in Afghanistan. The two had developed an efficient system for getting COM approvals. They knew SIV better than almost anyone I had met. And had a list of 70 families with impeccable paperwork

One of them stuck out to him. This insanely aggro Marine had put together a slide deck in his ask for help. A slide deck. That include cursing.

Abram thought Marines were quite strange and funny, and so he forwarded the email to me. I saw the guy was from St. Louis, so thought I'd connect

What else was there to do with the time? There wasn't any pathway or plan at that point. Honestly, Abram was a model example of "find the thing you can do, and do it"

So he started slogging through about 4000 unread emails, full of horror stories and pain and desperate for help, and responding

When the NEO ended, things were dark, and uncertain. Despite the incredible system, thousands of emails remained unanswered. But the team, and one guy in particular, Abram, army officer vet, was determined that everyone who emailed Team America got a response, from a person. So he went to work.