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Author Archives: 34orion
Meet John Doe
I was searching for comfort on my streaming services the other day. You all know what kind of a week it has been. You get the point. And while we are at the point-making part of this ditty, you may … Continue reading
The Absolut Worst
This week I had lunch with the guy who literally wrote the book on Absolut advertising. And it got me thinking: what if I pitched Absolut today?
So I did. With a little help from AI.
The results are… something. 🍸 Continue reading
Posted in culture, Humor / satire, opinion, personal essay, Politics and Society, Trump cuts, Trump Opposition
Tagged Absolut Vodka, Advertising, blog, humor, kash-patel, life, Marketing, Media, music, political commentary, politics, Pop Culture, rfk-jr, Rolling Stone, satire, travel, trump, trump-administration, writing
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America, We’ve Been Punk’d
“After two Chopin Martinis, six blue cheese stuffed olives and forty-five minutes of listening to me list the indignities perpetrated by the Trump administration this week, he turned to me and with a wicked grin said in mildly slurred speech, ‘What if this is a very elaborate episode of Punk’d.’ Imagine this…” Continue reading
Posted in culture, Humor / satire, Politics and Society, Trump Opposition
Tagged comedy, fiction, humor, life, writing
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When The Wolves Howl
An old Russian parable about wolves and survival isn’t just a story—it’s a strategy. When the howling starts, loyalty has a shelf life, and someone always gets pushed off the sled. Continue reading
Making Airport Lines Great Again
After 3.3 million miles, airports once meant escape and possibility. Now they feel like a monument to Trump’s ego—longer TSA lines, performative fixes, and policy driven less by competence than by the refusal to ever admit being wrong. The magic didn’t fade. It was suffocated. Continue reading
Posted in opinion, Politics and Society, Trump cuts, Trump Opposition
Tagged federal policy, government policy, Homeland Security, ICE, life, political commentary, travel, travel-tips, trump, tsa, US politics, writing
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The Butterfly and The Bloviator
Trump made a Pearl Harbor joke to the Japanese PM’s face. Hegseth declared war on religious extremism while sporting a Crusades battle-cry tattoo. Bondi’s DOJ dropped the Breonna Taylor charges. And my friend Morgan told me karma would sort it all out. This week’s post is part political autopsy, part philosophy, and ends — improbably — with a butterfly. Continue reading
Washington Knew. (Trump, Not So Much.
Which brings us to our current journey of historical dementia, perpetrated by a president who is no doubt psychologically altered, a secretary of defense who is more concerned about bringing on the rapture than the consequences of war, and a Congress that is vertabraically challenged. These are the men who not only forgot history but are now rediscovering it at a cost to the American taxpayer of roughly $1 billion a day. Continue reading
Posted in opinion, Politics and Society, Trump cuts, Trump Opposition
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Photographs and Memories
During a visit with my cousins in São Paulo, a worn folder of old photographs opened a doorway into my family’s past. Inside were images spanning continents and generations—from Vienna and Hungary to Brazil and the United States.
One photograph from 1922 showed two young sisters about to be separated by an ocean. Others revealed relatives shaped by immigration, war, and survival in the twentieth century.
Then one image stopped me cold: a young lieutenant in the United States Army.
It was the first photograph I had ever seen of my father as an army officer Continue reading
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Blame it on Rio 
VE Day: The Thread We Lost
Seventy-five million people died in World War II. The men who stormed those beaches didn’t do it so we could debate eighty-one years later whether what’s happening here qualifies as fascism. They did it so we would know it when we saw it. Continue reading →