July 31, 2025
A Co-nun-drum
This past weekend, I met a nun who played basketball for Harvard. Yes – this was before she committed her life to the religious service.
I don’t know if the Pope is allowing 6’1” forwards wearing habits to juke people yet. I’d imagine he’s still getting settled into his new cubicle and getting to know his coworkers, who are inevitably saying things like, “You never worked with Francis, did you? Yeah, things were totally different back then. Management was way chiller before he left.” Coworker stuff. Vaping in the bathroom on company time. You know the drill.
So, yeah, it’ll probably take a second to get the Papal Documents about nun forwards. Regardless, I couldn’t get the image of a sister in Lebrons 20s out of my head.
I started wondering. What would happen if an NBA All-Star Team played a pickup game against a quintet of nuns? What is the right, just, and biblical way for a wall of 6’7” men to act in that situation? Should they decimate them? Let them pass for easy layups? Either option is equally pathetic.
I’ve pondered that dilemma for 0.2 seconds, and the answer is now obvious. Everyone knows the Space Jam Michael Jordan Superstar Team could absolutely level some Carmelites, no problem. We don’t need a commentated four-period massacre to figure that out. Simply put, NBA-ers have nothing to prove.
Instead of making martyrs of these pious women, the All-Stars could play a fun-loving match against the nuns where no one gets hurt. Similar to how a parent well acquainted with the slings and arrows of outrageous capitalism might choose to go easy on their kid, who has yet to understand a piggy bank, during a game of family Monopoly. A few cheeky three-pointers and screens on offense, a few layups and rebounds let past the defense, and a good-spirited handshake after the final buzzer to cap off the evening. The players go home happy and are sound asleep by 9PM.
Conundrum addressed. But that dilemma was too easy.
What’s really sinister to consider is what a group of 30-something, rec league men would do when faced with the same question: How do you play a pickup game against nuns?
These are not men with life-size cutouts in department stores displaying their wingspan and hand size, nor are they men with white-lined lips featured on the cafeteria Got Milk? poster. They are not the NBA's finest.
Rather, these are men who are starting to question the feasible lifespan of their marriages. Men who are still grappling with the knee injury that left them benched their junior year of high school. Men who are coming to terms with inheriting their father’s hairline, with no ticket to Turkey in sight.
In essence, these are men who have everything to prove. Ponder with me. How would they play against these nuns?
July 29, 2025
My public response to the Sydney Sweeney jean ad controversy
Apple skin in my teeth
Tongue licking pearls
Invisible searcher, uneven looker
You know not how perfect your cross is
How fitting
Pass away the day
Wishing for fine summer corn silk
To run between the ivories
Condemnation by dissatisfaction
Apple skin still there
Failed pink servant
In a sole moment of shortcoming
Of vulnerability
Cast away for atrophied, single-use tools
A cross borne, hidden in the tomb
July 25, 2025
ALBUM REVIEW: Let’s talk about Count Bateman
Frog’s fourth studio album, a 2018 project from Daniel Bateman, quicksteps the lines between rooted Americana ethos, cartoonish and off-kilter lyricism, and twangy indie rock mashedness. It’s warmly acoustic and falsetto in a way that’ll remind your parents of the Neil Youngs and Newport Fests of old, but beat-drivenly odd and dreamy enough for your matcha-drinking friends with septum piercings to add to their pretentiously titled Spotify playlist.
In essence, it’s the perfect album.
There’s no pretending that this review can exist, in any way, objectively. I think this piece of media is as integral to my sensory landscape as the lullabies my mother sang to me in my first few days of breathing and pooping on planet earth. It soundtracked the ebbs of college life into my current mini adulthood.
With 10 tracks, Count Bateman has a total listening time of 32 minutes. So, grab your headphones, clean out the earwax, turn on noise cancelling, and listen with me. I’m not even asking for your perfect, undivided attention. 32 minutes is the ideal companion length for a dinner recipe, commute through traffic, unwilling cardio session, or grocery store jaunt. No excuses!
Track 1: Hartsdale Hotbox
When the rapture comes to take us all, I think I’ll hear the plucky acoustic intro to this song instead of heaven’s golden horns. Quickly followed by the album’s opening lyrics, “Read something strange out of King James.” The internal rhyming is as addictive as the content of the lyrics themselves. I, too, have read something strange out of King James. And the NIV. What an excellent welcome into Count Bateman.
The bright, carouseling instrumental backs lyrics all about existing in the place you grew up. I take it as a reflection on the immaturity and reversion that go hand-in-hand with trying to be an adult in a place where you’ve always been. It’s about the meeting point between yourself, your past selves, and all the ghouls and goblins you associated with in high school.
The direct reference to Conan in this song sets the stage for one of my favorite Frog-isms: their unrelenting naming of things. The Apples in Stereo, Coldplay, Julia Stiles, Conan, Colbert, Scions, Cadillac Escalades. It gives Frog’s lyrics such a personal texture, which I consistently love across their entire discography.
Track 2: RIP to the Empire State Flea Market
The song sweeps in a little more downtrodden than the first track, with Bateman’s falsetto kicking in soft and muppet-like over a harmonica. It’s like a lost media tape of a ‘70s Americana Sesame Street appearance. How wonderful!
The Empire State Flea Market is no longer in operation, hence the name of the track. This is Bateman’s lament for the closing of the market, a place where he often took his wife when they were first going out. According to Bateman, “She always used to play this game where we’d describe people to each other by who’d play them in a movie.” For me, the vibe of this song feels like the equal whimsy and loneliness of being a passive peoplewatcher and waiter.
(Waiter as in one who waits, not one who serves food.)
With its mourning words, like the repeated “You don’t get what you want,” Frog mixes the fire and ice of lyrics both cartoonishly goofy and emo.
Track 3: Black Friday
In the ever-shifting leaderboard of my favorite songs on this album, Black Friday is not currently on the top. I’m a fan of the one-handed, elementary piano flair and the coincidental dog barking interruption. Black Friday reinforces a broader theme of the album: love and loserdom. Like a modern spin on Pride and Prejudice.
Brownie points for “In this country, we go tat for tat, wasted, bumming a cigarette” for being a pleasing, rhythmic lyric and decent vocal stim to repeat while folding laundry and sorting socks.
Track 4: Borned King
Borned King had a latent reveal for me. I overlooked it for far too long, but in the past six months it has probably been my most listened to track on the old Bateman-ator. It was almost as if I myself was a medieval prince awaiting the crown of this song.
The instrumental alone makes you want to do summersaults through Moo Moo Meadows. It’s as bright, light, and hurdling as the dough of a pizza crust being tossed into the air by a fat and jolly chef.
You spend four minutes being berated by imagery. Bateman writes from both his own point of view as a New Rochelle boy, but also weirdly as a minor court figure in the Middle Ages. You’ve got glinting armor, cocaine in cabs, villagers, castles, grocery stores, magistrates, men’s bathroom stalls, and the state of Michigan – with happy-go-lucky “da da da’s” to tie it all together in a pretty little medieval carrying sack.
Out of this song, we have one of my favorite love lyrics of all time. “Sometimes when I look at old pictures of you, I could just crawl right through the frame.” It’s partially the words and partially the way Bateman says it with half-spoken sincerity and want. As a razor-sharp, observant encapsulation of what it means to love someone, for me, this lyric is only rivaled by Cameron Winter’s “Love will make you fit it all in the car.”
Track 5: Touch
Touch makes you feel a little grimey. I think it focuses on the nonlinear transition from naivety to jadedness, from innocence to world-weariness. These are themes that are called on again in later Frog releases, too. Like Grog’s “Going Back to Stanford.” The instrumental really sounds like how college boys with unbrushed tongues and bad intentions act towards women.
Brooding, frank, tired, and laggy, you’ll feel like you’re sitting in the not-so-fun kind of dive bar.
Track 6: It’s Something I Do
Alright, I know I said Borned King had one of my favorite lyrical encapsulations of love. But I think It’s Something I Do rivals it.
This song bleeds cautious optimism. It’s perky and plucky, with a cutesy little piano moment in the middle of the song. To me, it’s all about the hesitant, exciting pursuit of a new love. The title of the song comes from the repeated lyric: "I’m thinking of you, it’s something I do." Love. Love Love. If there’s not already an Elliott Smith lyric similar to this, there should be one.
Yeah, it’s a super simple lyric. But one thing about me? I love the irony of matter-of-fact lyrics about factless emotions. I’m thinking of you. It’s something I do. That’s exactly what it feels like when you first accept your lot as a moron who loves.
Another lyric that I’d put in this category is also written by Cameron Winter – “I see myself in you.” Yes. So simple. So true.
Track 7: Taste
Another grimey track! This one is all about bumming around at night and giving into temptation. I love the scale-climbing bass that kicks in with the chorus of this song. With its mention of Toyota Camrys, you start to suspect this entire album is really just a long-winded way of listing cars.
According to Bateman, this one almost didn’t make it on the record. I think it nestles perfectly between two love songs, acting as a preamble to the starlet that is “You Know I’m Down.”
Track 8: You Know I’m Down
Day by day, this song gets closer to overtaking “Judy Garland” as the band’s most streamed song. Rightfully so. As is probably true for many, this is the first song I ever heard off Count Bateman. It’s one of those songs that is so utterly unique and infatuating, you immediately have to click in to listen to the full album.
I will have a lifelong adoration for this song. It’s a piece of media I will hand down to my children in a gilded box like it’s a great-great grandmother’s collectible porcelain painted egg. I will request it be played as my limp body is dropped into the warm and wormy soil. I will put it in a time capsule for the half-human, half-microchipped Tesla drone people of the future to enjoy as they deliver Amazon packages.
Objectivity has no place here. This song fucking rocks.
The opening synth-y stuff, whatever the hell it is, makes me feel a physical sensation in my heart. It’s the kind of physical reaction that makes you understand why the greatest Medieval minds thought emotion, soul, and memory were stored in the chest cavity.
One of the lyrics is literally “trouble and toil, bubblin’ oil, grab some potatoes and bring ‘em to boil.” Yeah. A fantastic love song.
It’s silly, sincere, warm, intimate, knowing, poppy – it’s a piece born from loving someone in all their batshitted quirks. There are references to Shakespeare and Peter, Paul, and Mary, so I’m sold.
If you’re only going to listen to one song on the album, make it this one. It’s the Frog gateway drug! And Daniel Bateman almost left it off the record – thank you to his brother for telling him not to.
Track 9: Got the World at Your Fangs
Equally poppy to its predecessor, Got the World at Your Fangs builds wonderfully. A glockenspiel guides you into a bubbly chorus that calls back to the theme of a new, uncertain love. The title of the song is great. Love the lyric, “do you love me? / do you think of me / drunk at a party?” I’ve had that twisted, degenerate hope before. Yeesh.
Track 10: Miracle
Before Borned King got its latent appreciation, this song was the sleeper favorite. Bateman referred to it as his “gospel music.” It follows a similar dark picking to Taste and Touch, and I’m not really even sure what the song is about. Grief? Separation? I couldn’t tell you. But the chorus has this sweet, sweet falsetto paired with a simplistic bassline and drum beat.
The simplicity of the song makes my inability to grasp its meaning all that much more infuriating. I am begrudgingly sent off.
El Fin
I always hesitate to recommend albums like Count Bateman to people, because, for me, it has become an entity entirely removed from its original form. I am planets away from the first-time listening experience. No track is left untouched by years of bias.
I think of the striped blue sweater and flared brown pants I wore as I listened to “RIP the Empire State Flea Market” in my college dorm room. Or my time solo traveling Bulgaria, sitting on a Sofia bench to eat a slice of corn-topped pizza while “Borned King” played in my ears.
Year by year, each track has been branded, marred, and pockmarked by my own life.
Deeply loving a piece of music is like holding onto a baby blanket you’ve had since birth – the thing is slimy, crispy, hole-ridden, and stained with mysterious substances. It doesn’t even resemble what it was the first time you held it as much as it resembles the spaghetti dinners and nose-running colds you’ve had with it in hand.
But recommending a beloved piece of music to a friend is not like handing over this disgusting, infested baby blanket. Instead, it’s like buying them a brand-new one, and saying “go forth and destroy yours as I have mine.”
Go forth and destroy Count Bateman!
July 23, 2025
The Hellman’s Mayonnaise Retrospective
It really feels like just yesterday Richard Hellman played with some eggs in the back room of a New York City deli and came through the swinging doors holding a concoction that would change ham and cheese sandwiches forever. And tuna salad too, for that matter.
This year, we’re celebrating 120 years of Hellman’s Blue Ribbon Mayonnaise. Gosh, the days are slow but the years go quick. Time flies! Happy 120, Richard!
I don’t have a high budget for this year’s celebration, but I’m told I’ll be given The Bit company card when the Hellman’s Blue Ribbon Mayonnaise quasquicentennial comes around in just five short years. Basically, hold on to any tuxedo rental coupons that might come your way between now and then.
For this year’s celebration, we’re gonna take a peek behind the Wonderful Wizard of Sauce’s curtain. By that I mean, we’re gonna deconstruct the mayo to its raw materials and review the secret recipe.
Coming in at the top of the ingredients list, we’ve got soybean oil – the condiment’s primary source of fat. If I were ever to lay hands on the smooth, tender flesh of a green soybean, I’d never think to strip it of its oil content. Milking it – I could probably think of that. I guess soymilk feels a bit more intuitive than soybean oil. And for that reason, I tip my hat to the ingenuity of Hellman’s Mayonnaise before I’ll ever kneel to Silk Soymilk.
Next up, we’ve got water. Mayonnaise is an excellent hydrator. That’s why I put a glass of it on my nightstand before bed.
Eggs! This is my personal favorite ingredient. So many people come wheeling down the condiment aisle with harmful misconceptions about mayo being a dairy product. I think there’s no better time than the 120 year anniversary to dispel these rumors. Not all white foods in this world come from cows. Think of cauliflower, etc.
Fourth, we’ve got distilled vinegar. Excellent for the microbiome.
Lemon juice concentrate. Nothing quite like the hometown feel of a summertime five-cent lemonade stand in your condiment. Those with refined palates can taste a hint of the sun heating chalk-stained sidewalks and the neighborhood tree canopy swaying overhead.
Salt and sugar. Notice, no pepper. Pepper would destroy the pristine, landlord-paint-colored white of Hellman’s. There’s nothing quite like enjoying a mayo sandwich in the kitchen of your rental property, where even the door hinges are coated in a thick repair coat of bargain white. My eyes feast on mayo-colored walls as I chew on a rental-colored sandwich. All is well with the world.
Finally, we’ve got Calcium Disodium EDTA. Let not the name trouble you. RFK actually asked Hellman's to DOUBLE the amount of this ingredient. By 2030, they’re expected to QUADRUPLE it.
See you all at the quasquicentennial – expect a save the date in the mail.
[Editor’s note: The Bit’s perceived endorsement of Hellman’s Blue Ribbon mayonnaise is entirely voluntary. No monetary incentive has been given.]
July 22, 2025
The shantytown is up. Welcome to Hooverville. Tonight’s dinner? Hoover stew. Just like last night, matter of fact. ‘Cept this time we’ve got some peas from Pig-Eyed Earl and a quarter pound of pig shoulder from Thoughtless Jones. It’ll be mighty tasty. And warm. Real warm.
Come down by the wash puddle and we’ll fix you up a slice of Hoover Cobbler. Hoov-Cobb is old Peg Leg’s favorite. And tonight’s old Peg Leg’s birthday – or at least he thinks it is. Haven’t seen anything as homey as a wall calendar in a week and some change. No matter, The Good Lord’s Day of Rest don’t mean too much once you’re living life by the turn of the locomotive engine. You take the work as it comes and say your bedtime Hail Marys hoping work knocks on your knapsack before the next sorry train hopper’s.
I got me a can of tomatoes and a maid’s ration of flour. Quick Hands Pete managed himself a can of sweet Georgia peaches, reckon he got it as payment for all the wood chopping at the old mill last week. We’re making Hoov-Cobb. Peg Leg’s favorite. It’ll be warm. Rumor has it Junkman Charlie found a mighty fine leather shoe with a ruby red lace, just the right size for Peg’s good foot. It’ll be a special evening. Won’t you join?
Train’s coming in tomorrow, headed for Salem I hear. I reckon if the Lord wakes me with the morning light, I’ll hop on and take it all the way to the West. Just like my grandaddy took that wagon across the frontier. Tonight we're having Hoov-Cobb. For old Peg.
I hear they have fruit pickin’ work this time-a year in Salem. And the way I see it, that there washing puddle ain’t gettin’ any cleaner. Matter of fact, it’s drying up.
A rough approximation of the 2025 post-grad job search experience.
July 21, 2025
Hello world. I've been thinking about the subtle, understated beauty of a La Croix can today. If you've never looked at a La Croix can and thought, "huh, there's something there" .... Maybe you need to get closer to life's hint-of-lime scented breath.
I think it's the way the design elements aren't quite centered, and the font isn't quite papyrus. The streaking colors aren't quite representational of any one thing. It forces the viewer to source meaning from their own personal memory bank and play with the focus of their eyeballs, much like a Monet painting might do.
La Croixs are all the same flavor. The various-colored packaging would have you think differently, but it's a lie. Just like how every color of Fruit Loop tastes the same (Tootie Frooties at Walmart).
The La Croix package is not asking you to crave anything, like a greasy McRib box reading "Tangy Temptation" in McDonald's corporate patented font might. The La Croix package is asking you to sit, be still, lament. And, if you’re ready. Take a sip.
