O'Neill of Chicago

@brianoneill.bsky.social

1383 Followers 2947 Following

Books, baseball, Great Lakes. Writes reviews all over, and at South Side Sox. Big fan of rivers and such. He/him

Daniel Plainview saying "I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people."
Miguel Vargas, looking shellshocked after being traded to the White Sox in 2024
“If they had any f**king whispers” of sexual assault, declared leftist podcaster Kyle Kulinski in June, “they would have had them b****es front and center.” He accused the New York Times, which broke an earlier story about Platner’s alleged behavior, of being “desperate” to take down his campaign.
For half a century, I have been a Goldwater Republican and later became a Reaganite. Peace through strength was the motto. I do want to “Make America Great Again” after its precipitous decline during the Biden presidency. I like much of what Trump 45 & 47 has done, dislike a few and scratch my head at others. He has brought pride back to America, especially in the heartland, but dismay and disdain among the coastal elite.
A guy looking like he'd be rejected for a part in a community theater production of Clue.
Commenters with diametrically opposed views
A picture of The President of These United States sitting in front of a hamburger, letting me know that: This is Donald J. Trump – and I'm reaching out personally because time is running out. I skipped my lunch to warn you. Locked myself in the war room, so the radical left wouldn’t catch eye. Now, I'm sounding the alarm: The Deep State is launching a full-scale assault RIGHT NOW to strip you of your hard-earned Platinum Club membership!
A broom with a "LIBMAN" sticker
The app includes official statements and policy announcements from the administration, as well as a feed of social media posts from White House accounts and the president. A button gives the option to “text President Trump,” which, when clicked, opens a text message to a pre-selected number with the default text “Greatest President Ever!” Sending the text signs the user up for alerts, which individuals can also do through the app itself.
LeBron, doing an interview, looking like he should be retired, not still being great.
A beagle howling plaintively at an unconcerned larger dog
Palantir fash bullshit about how some cultures are good and others are bad, and how pluralism is destroying the West.
Weird rolling dark clouds with thin streaks of lighter clouds
Pumaman flying over Hormuz(?)
Intimacy is another theme that shapes the anthology. The Lakes as a living metaphor, or a guidepost as people struggle through their lives. In “The Bound Body,” Martha Lundin uses the terrible winter of 2014, when Lake Superior froze over, to think about her relationship with her body and identity. While it is a struggle, there is grace. She writes, “After all, I haven’t figured out yet how people become themselves. It is because I am still becoming myself. Lake Superior and her basin had one and a half billion years to get to where she is, and she is still becoming.” My father died in January of 2014, the morning the same record cold freeze Lundin describes hit Chicago. I remember walking with my oldest friend in a brutal blinding snowstorm to get another bottle of whiskey, and thinking not in metaphorical terms, but with the awareness that the lake and the weather and the cold had no concern for my little drama. It is with this awareness that I am grateful none of the pieces in On an Inland Sea stretch metaphors too far. No, the pieces Welch chose are more interesting than that. The personal stories position the Lakes as a part of life, a childhood memory, an unchanging and ceaselessly beating force that anchors even as everything in our lives changes and becomes more confusing or harder. The uncaringness of the water can become a comfort.
A dog, ecstatic, in a big mud puddle, covered in dirt
A Jonathan Karl tweet where Trump says that they killed all the top "candidates" to become the Supreme Leader, due to how successful the bombing was.
Email from Trump reading "TREASONOUS LIES INCOMING"
A GMC Sierra with a license plate reading PUN5HR
A picture of forlorn Trump with the text reading "Trump: Brian, our anniversary was yesterday & you still haven't unlocked your MAGA membership? I’ve come to the conclusion that the deep state must’ve been blocking my emails or something wicked like that because I added INCREDIBLE new perks to celebrate our one year together. I know you would cherish them - it’s actually depressing that you haven’t gotten to see them. TRUMP’S MAGA CRY: I’m praying that this email is passed over to you soon because we’re down to our final few spots and I need you"
A "memo from Trump" email asking if I am still part of his anti-communist club. The President is pictured looking sweaty in front of what I guess is a fire. He looks like he might be asking for water. Either way the answer is no.
Headline reading "'Hand is good' Stafford says"
1996's Lone Star, cover by Criterion, a half buried skull in the desert with a sheriff star next to it
In a January 14 broadcast from Chicago, according to the call sheet, the main focus is planned to be on a “Bari Pitch” to bring on former President Barack Obama and former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel on to discuss “how the Dems lost touch and how to regain the working class trust.” The other story ideas include Dokoupil riding the L Train with Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and asking him about the racial life expectancy gap in Chicago; a piece on crime rates falling in the Second City “but do residents feel safer,” and another “Bari Pitch” on the city’s “abysmal schools.”
A box with my "2026 Word" being "swampy"
A dog pushing and leaping for a big red ball, just going crazy
Aldo Ray, super hot
Ustinov and Bogart flanking Aldo Ray
A dog laying his head on the legs of a man reading a Christmas horror anthology
What can be even more unsettling to think about are turbulent changes happening in shallow time. That the land we know and are comfortable with, and think of as permanent, has undergone near-geologic upheavals in the span of a few paltry human generations. That our framework for “unchanging” — essentially, because something looks more or less the same as when we were kids — obscures revolutions underfoot. When we think about the rapidity of changes, and the potential for damage that humans have done, shallow time feels more of a drowning terror than deep time.
Time is the main character of these books, both in its vastness and in its minute agonies. Time can seem endless when we’re walking the edge of a cliff face, over rocks laid down hundreds of millions of years ago. Time can seem so short when we start to slip, and realize, suddenly and terribly, that we’re all out of it.
A thin uneven skin of ice moves across a snowy lake
A faint coloring of clouds over a dark lake.
The source with knowledge of the stadium deal said that if Trump insists on the stadium bearing his name, "he has plenty of leverage" to make it happen, no matter which government body will ultimately decide. "He has cards to play. He can make it very difficult, through government environmental approvals and other things, to make sure everyone who wants this stadium to be built will join to put his name on it," the source said. "Trump has plenty of cards to play to get his way."
A dog at rest
The Ghost Sequences, by A.C. Wise, a gorgeous and mournful collection
Haunted Ecologies, by Corey Farrenkopf
Distant rain sweeping down from clouds
Lightning in the distance, continual
NYTIMES headline reading "Trump Downplays Post Threatening Chicago, Saying He Wants to 'Clean Up' City".
Trump telling Hannity that Putin agrees with him the 2020 election was rigged, obviously very bluntly flattering the most easily-manipulated man in the world.
-Ukraine also has a wide range of demands, from the repatriation of Ukrainian children to the payment of reparations to the prosecution of the Russian political leadership and the perpetrators of heavily documented war crimes. For better or worse, none of these issues will be considered in Alaska.
When you recognize that the cities shape the region, and that the lakes shape the cities, you see the region as much more diverse and wild and unpredictable. You understand that regions are made up of millions of people intersecting in strange ways, influencing each other unpredictably. You hear the sounds of the Great Lakes in a different way. The Cleveland proto-punk scene is Great Lakes music. Motown is the sound of the Great Lakes. And even the strangest sounds of them all, that of Sun Ra and His Arkestra, the impossible-to-define primeval-cosmic oddball-transcendent jazz, is in many ways a product of Chicago, and the lake over which it looms.
Once in the system, your selfie is linked to your ticket and credit card — a feature called “Game Face ID.” The idea is that you never have to take your phone or wallet out of your pocket. Facial recognition cameras will allow you to walk right into the stadium without scanning a ticket, and since concession stands don’t have cashiers, cameras will record what you take and charge you accordingly.
Trump tweeting "Because of the fact that Rosie O'Donnell is not in the best interests of our Great Country, I am giving serious consideration to taking away her Citizenship. She is a Threat to Humanity, and should remain in the wonderful Country of Ireland, if they want her. GOD BLESS AMERICA."
Obi Wan saying "Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time."
It’s not fair. Baseball has a finite life; so does actual life. We know this, as sure as being born. Baseball is shorter for closers: Bright and explosive and on a razor’s edge, always on the brink of disaster. Life shouldn’t be. Bobby got a raw deal out of the devil’s bargain that is life. How bright he burned in our memories doesn’t make up for it. It doesn’t satisfy the loss for his family, or the stretch of time he could have had to be happy. It doesn’t change the years that now will never exist, the moments that are already gone. Nothing can change what death decides to take.
Box reading "dead opposum"
On Instagram, Fugate traced his political awakening to nine years ago, when as a 13-year-old “in a generation deprived of hope, opportunity, and happiness, I saw in one man the capacity for real and lasting change: Donald Trump.”
Hollowness, hopelessness, a grim balancing of the books: Lewis demonstrates what a decade of Tory (and often Labour) austerity politics has created. While his London doesn’t have post-war griminess, its grey and grungy meanness isn’t that far off. But the migrants have the added sorrow of having been tossed into this uncaring London by the brutal politics of their own countries. Through these machinations and calculations, they have become invisible, irrelevant, non-people.
"pass the pro act" spraypainted on a convenient-to-clean part of Mace's house
Fresh face Ben Stein leading Dems to a new era of relevance
I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it.
The pope at the World Series
Ferris Bueller -- you still here? It's over. Go home.
"Greenland is a very small amount of people which we'll take care of and we'll cherish them and all of that, but we need that for international security," he insisted.
Three little dogs barking at a big one.
We learn why the Sandman exists, and from where his evil springs, as the book unfolds. It is not a spoiler to say that the Sandman isn’t a metaphor for any particular evil, but rather the outcome of evil that can linger in a land soaked with blood. He torments the Ojibwe. His goals are not colonial. He seemingly, in an interesting and unspoken way, barely notices the existence of white newcomers. The Sandman was born from violence done outside of settlers, within the nation. Its spirit would exist regardless of American greed and violence.
The Group Chat Era depended on part of the American elite feeling shut out from public spaces, and on the formation of a new conservative consensus. Both of those are now fading (though Torenberg has invested in a company called ChatBCC that wants to commercialize the heady experience of sitting in on texts among the power elite). Since Elon Musk turned X to the right and an alternative media ecosystem emerged on Substack, “a tremendous amount of the verboten conversations can now shift back into public view,” Andreessen told Fridman. “It’s much healthier to live in a society in which people are literally not scared of what they’re saying.”
In February, he described the group chats to the podcaster Lex Fridman as “the equivalent of samizdat” — the self-published Soviet underground press — in a “soft authoritarian” age of social media shaming and censorship. “The combination of encryption and disappearing messages really unleashed it,” he said. The chats, he wrote recently, helped produce our national “vibe shift.”