SATURDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: LIES AND THE LYING LIARS WHO TELL THEM REDUX.

Some ragged guy was playing this on the train. Slaps, is that still the term?

Late again, Bullwinkle! And I’m busy and must be brief. I will only say in addition to the Free REBID Posts announcement (yes, soon, friends, be patient) that this has been a banner week for disinfo and misinfo, with dicks like Marco Rubio declaring the recent positive U.S. jobs report a fraud and, especially, Elmo and his bots claiming the administration isn’t sending help to the Helene-hit districts. It reminds me that, before the Crushing Boer took it over, Twitter was a valuable source of news and information, and now it’s just a perch to take pot-shots at the fakes and feebs who run rampant on it. I hate to give vibes-based reasons for voting the right way, as there are plenty of more solid ones (like the other guys are fascists with a Nazi program), but a valid motivation for shoving all the way back on the MAGA bullshit is that, despite their self-portrayal as champions of the common people, they’re mobbed up with the most evil billionaires with the craziest dystopian plans for any of us who aren’t in the Big Club, and they’re so confident of their ultimate victory that they’re showing their asses even now.

OK, here you go: Roy Edroso Breaks It Down free issues for non-subscribers for the week – one, my debate notes from Tuesday. I can understand the people who are mad that Walz didn’t go after the asshole more aggressively; I myself would have been pleased to see the bark stripped off him. (I bet some of you would have preferred Al Franken to be the Minnesotan in charge of smacking up Vance.) Some say that’s just “not him,” and that may be true, but I’m guessing the Harris campaign wants Walz to be earnest old uncle Tim as a point of difference from the competition – vote for us if you don’t wish to be ruled by madman -- and coached him to preserve that equity rather than get mad and blur the distinction. I also share the doubters’ concern that, in playing Concern rather than Fuck You, Walz came over as less butch than Vance, and that risks turning off the knuckleheads. But you know what? They’re lost already – Harris needs to maximize the sane-people vote. 

The other freebie is another episode of Received Opinion, where the pundits celebrate Trump’s New Leaf, yet again, in the nanosecond gap between I Will Help The Suffering Multitudes to I Will Kill All The Foreigners.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: IF THEY'RE HITLER AND YOU KNOW IT EDITION.

We had lunch at a Turkish restaurant and much of the pleasure
was in the Turkish pop playing in the bakcground.

The mental disintegration of Tubby is getting harder for his enablers in the Prestige Press to normalize, but they keep trying. Yesterday when Zelensky had to meet with Trump to protect Ukraine’s interests, Trump ranted to reporters afterward that the beleaguered wartime leader – who had to maintain an embarrassed silence while standing next to him – had announced there was “absolutely nothing wrong” with Trump’s 2019 attempt to strong-arm him into incriminating Joe Biden (for which Trump was first impeached). This is not only untrue but nuts; Trump's behavior was more appropriate to a lunatic who thinks he’s president than someone who actually had the job and wants it back. 

Hilariously the Murdoch propaganda sheet New York Post actually got closer to truthfully characterizing this event with their headline, “Trump praises Zelensky in Trump Tower after accusing him of ‘nasty little aspersions’” than the Washington Post, which soberly declared “Trump meets with Zelensky, opening new chapter in a fraught relationship.” The New York Post didn’t get religion – it just went for the soap-opera angle to sell papers. Thus in their crassness they at least gave a glimpse of the weird pettiness of Trump’s act, while people who read the classier paper could skim the news and think “Famous foreigner met with both world leaders, everything is normal,” which is of course the Prestige Press’ suicidal strategy for this election campaign.

We who have free souls, it touches us not – and that’s why one of the free Roy Edroso Breaks It Down posts this week is about pushing back on this fluffery and calling the MAGA philosophy and behavior just what it is – fascist, even Nazi. Yeah, I know there are simps out there who’ll cover their ears and wince when you do that, but they’re hopeless. You want people who are only getting the soft-soap to focus on the hard reality, and it makes more sense to tell them what’s Nazi about these guys – and it is puh-lenty – than to try and chase down every stupid obfuscation by the Access Annies. 

The other freebie is about the Olivia Nuzzi nonsense and that, too, has to do with how people who – for reasons I can’t guess – chose a career in journalism cheerfully betray their craft by loudly defending the anti-ethics of one of their superstars. They act like they don’t know what’s unethical about a reporter having a romantic relationship with a candidate while slagging their opponent, though I’m sure they get drilled on this sort of thing at their expensive journalism schools. It’s as if the confusion is not over what behavior is wrong, but rather what right and wrong even are.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: ...AND FUBAR, TOO, EDITION.

Hey greybeards! Sounds pretty good, huh? 2017. 
Modern stuff's hard to keep up with, but nice when you catch it.

I keep starting these F 'R-T-H posts with variations of "Wotta week, huh?" and I'm beginning to feel like I'm actually summoning the mayhem that inevitably escalates thereafter. Maybe it’s time to rechristen this feature “Situation Normal: All Fucked Up” in honor of our veterans. 

I see someone wanted to kill Tubby again, this time while he was golfing, and his fans are mad because no one gives a shit. I have two responses to this: First, the Secret Service and FBI et alia are running down assassination threats to Biden, Harris, et alia all the damn time; second, I was alive when President Gerald Ford, of all people, fielded not one but two actual attempts on his life (one involving Squeaky Fromme!) and we all just rolled with it because FOLKS WAS TOUGHER IN THEM DAYS. The late underground comics author Willy Murphy did a hilarious Arnold Peck strip inspired by that, showing Ford manning a mounted machine gun to help the Secret Service defend him from multiple assailants – here and here. So lighten up, Fanatics. (Willy Murphy was the greatest.)

Oh, and the Prestige Media Pantsing Proceeds Apace, with Maggie “Access Annie” Haberman blubbering that an “industry” (low-paying, believe me!) “on the left” that is “dedicated toward attacking the media,” and she wants everyone to know she and her fellow media swells are working darn hard not be Very Bias in their coverage of the guy who wants to deport millions of people and spreads racist lies to his millions of deranged followers. 

Minutes later we all find out Olivia “Forget Sleepy Joe, RFK Jr. is Where It's At” Nuzzi got suspended by New York magazine because she’d been having a “relationship” (no tongues, she swears) with the man himself. Very “how it stated/how it’s going,” that. 

And we haven’t even discussed that Mark Robinson shit! I’m not one to kink-shame, though as always with kinky conservatives there’s a big honking gap between the Republican gubernatorial candidate’s Death to Sexual Deviants policy and his pee-and-porn shadow life. Come on man, be free! As for the Black Nazi stuff, well, you have to remember it’s a significant part of his base. 

It has been observed that it will be hard for Democrats to use this material against him because so much of it is unacceptable in family-friendly media, but I think if they play it right the long bleeped-out sections with do the job fine. 

Oh, yeah, the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies – this week we have two: One, a meditation (wait, come back! It’s good!) on why conservatives seem to love AI "art." Two, another scene from the villain’s-lair of Elon Musk. Eat it up, and subscribe so you never miss an issue! 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: DOG SOLDIERS EDITION.

Ha ha, get it. Cool tune tho.

Helluva week, huh? I know, I said that last week, but it’s still true. I guess the highlight was Tubby’s wipeout in the debate on Tuesday – and my near-contemporaneous account thereof is our first Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebie for the week. I’m not a positive-thinking kind of guy but I could see right away Trump had made a mess of it – I’d say he shit the bed, except with him I suppose that’s literally an everyday thing. Suffice to say any normal person viewing his ravings will have figured out he’s lost his mind, and even a few MAGA joy-poppers may have gotten sick of his malignant Billy Madison routine, too.

One proof-point of the catastrophe is the hysterical post-facto attempt by rightwing media outlets to convince viewers not to believe their lying eyes. You’d think that’d be a tough sell after wingnuts like Karl Rove and Andrew C. McCarthy threw in the towel, but here’s PJ Media (yep, still in business, God knows why) claiming “ABC whistleblower to reveal Harris campaign was given SAMPLE QUESTIONS” – which, number one, lol as if, and number two, if you need a mole to tell you the moderators will ask questions like “when it comes to the economy, do you believe Americans are better off now than they were four years ago?” you’re in the wrong business. 

Of course the more intense and disgusting MAGA cope is their doubling-down on Trump’s insane racist tirade about pet-eating Haitians in Springfield. JD Vance laid that groundwork (after the Ohio neo-Nazis shoveled it to him), as chronicled in our other REBID freebie.

While there’ve been a lot of funny jokes about this online, I find it ominous that the Republicans haven’t ditched it for some newer outrage. The story has been thoroughly debunked, but I don’t think these guys are even trying to convince people that it’s real anymore – they just want to keep the image of black foreigners eating dogs in front of white voters, in hopes that it will circumvent their frontal lobes and panic them into defending their race by voting for the Head Bigot in Charge. 

You remember when they were telling voters that Obama ate dogs, right? Their act doesn’t change much decade to decade, apart from getting wormier.

For our last freebie please enjoy my latest Mar-a-Lago Throne Room scene set directly after the ass-whipping, starring Tubby and the new glimmer twins, MTG and Laura Loomer. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: GET ME REWRITE (FOR TRUMP) EDITION.

My local coffee shop plays a lot of neo-soul.

I missed ‘Round-the-Horn last week, sorry! I was on an extended Labor Day break, during which I visited New York, which was partially the subject of my first return post at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down (yes, let’s get right to the freebies, shall we? No point in making you wait like kids at a rec center poverty Christmas event). The main subject is actual age and wisdom, but you may find it interesting even if you are neither old nor wise.

The second freebie imagines the logical next step in J.D. Vance’s self-humiliation campaign. The guy is amazingly bad; every few days it seems new clips are unearthed of him talking about how much he hates women and wishes to see them reduced to broodsows and unpaid domestic help. People blame his nomination on lazy vetting by the Trump brain trust, but I think it was a purposeful choice that events have proven useful. You may have noticed Tubby tergiversates a lot these days on political issues – as with his vague and inconsistent yammerings about reproductive health care. Some of the anti-abortion groups have complained about it, though I’m sure nearly all of them know he’s lying to confuse the suckers, and approve of it as pro-life taqiyyah; still, some MAGA creeps are mad that he sort of admitted he lost the 2020 election, and he's bound to piss more of them off as he blunders into November.

So Trump needs to send signals to the faithful that, despite all the bullshit, he's still the same cruel rightwing scumbag he’s always been. That’s where Vance comes in: Even when he tries to temporize and glad-hand he can’t help but reveal his hatefulness and contempt toward anyone different from himself, and this keeps the hardcore incels happy.

In other news: One of the many ways our Prestige Press coddles and enables Trump is by restating his increasingly weird gibberish as something resembling coherent statements.  This “sane-washing” has of late been addressed by press critics like Parker Molloy and others, especially since Trump’s recent mouthfarts at the Economics Club of New York were treated like Delphic wisdom by the New York Times. While some Prestige Press-adjacent commentators like Rachel Maddow and Philip Bump are hip to this, their newsdesks decidedly are not (e.g. AP: “Trump suggests tariffs can help solve rising child care costs in a major economic speech”). I think an under-appreciated effect of this presidential election – especially since all the journos’ obsession with presidential age vanished with the end of Biden’s candidacy, despite Tubby’s increasingly obvious mental deterioration – is that the media is losing the trust of its last constituency – liberals who long defended it out of a sentimental feeling for the Fourth Estate that its actual practitioners stopped living up to a long time ago. I’d like to think some reform might come out of it – but then I look around at all the other institutions of which I could say the same, and think again. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: STEALIN' YOUR GALL EDITION.

No easy way to be free.

Hey Democrats: Nice save! I started the week “too busy” to watch but I figured I’d catch the Obamas and, well, I got hooked. There was the usual convention cheese, and I don’t mean that unkindly: You can’t have a convention without, for example, dull speeches by replacement-level up-and-comers (boy, we dodged a bullet with Shapiro, huh?). But there was real top-shelf oratory (very much not excluding that of the nominees!), genuinely clever bits like having the Harris nieces give America (and Tubby) a Kamala-pronunciation lesson, and even some decent music. 

Something about the convention clicked for me during what I think of as the victim impact statement portion of the proceedings. I certainly sympathize with anyone affected by gun violence, bigotry, reproductive tyranny etc., and I know the testimony works because there are so many viewers who not only sympathize but also relate. I also know that the DNC have brought out victims of Republican policies and politics before – my God, I remember James and Sarah Brady at the 1996 Democratic Convention and Khizr and Ghazala Khan throwing their son’s sacrifice in Donald Trump’s Islamophobic face in 2016. 

But this time it seemed less like an answer to a specific Republican outrage and more programmatic, like the Democrats were carefully laying out a case for, as the nominee says, not going back. And I have to say it reminded me of the Republicans’ Trump-era habit of bringing out relatives of people killed by immigrants. Obviously it’s better to employ the suffering of loved ones to advocate for gun control and reproductive rights than to use it to promote racist MAGA fantasies. But it seemed as if the Democrats were consciously taking a GOP shtick and turning it against them.

Which is OK with me! And it wasn’t the only march the Democrats stole on them – there was the sea of flags, the chants of “USA,” the misapprehending sing-along to “Born In The USA” (very Republican!) and, especially and spectacularly, the general appropriation of patriotic equities like pride in the military, love of family, high school football for crying out loud, and all the other stuff in which Republicans used to drape themselves, but had to abandon because these things made their conman king look and feel as cheap and shoddy as he is. 

Others have noted that the Democrats got the opportunity to employ “joy” as a campaign theme because the Republicans have embraced of fear and misery. But it’s too little noted, I think, that most of what Republicans gave up for Trump and left for Dems were actually among the best things about being American – and they had taken them mainly by subterfuge in the first place, and will have a hell of a time getting them back. Turnabout is fair play and – let the fat fuck think on this, since he likes the B word so much – payback is a bitch. 

Two Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies this week: First, a fantasy of Tubby workshopping his act at Gary’s G Spot; and second, today’s Fun Friday convention special, in which you’re invited to share what you saw at the DNC. Enjoy!   

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: THROUPLE FOR THE NON-SUBSCRIBERS EDITION.

This is a dopey song but you know what, Ruth Brown could sell "Mairzy Doats."

It’s a pretty reliable subscriber boost every four years, I’ll give it that, but still there are all kinds of things about presidential election season that I hate. For one thing, everyone who talks on the subject turns into a little campaign advisor, and 99% of their recommendations are some variant of the “savvy” menace that has afflicted our politics – like, how can we bamboozle Americans into voting for our candidate? Case in point (this guy’s talking about Trump):

It’s the M.K. Brown “Whistle Stop” cartoon all over again (“Do you suppose actually seeing the candidate eat the rat could cost us the election?”). They seem to think you just have to fiddle with the diopters until the candidate looks good to the electorate, notwithstanding the candidate is a demented gorilla. They seem to forget that the purpose of the election is to choose leadership in pursuit of a direction for the country. 

I know, I should talk – but here’s my two cents: I love that the Harris people are running like they’re proud of what Democrats are supposed to stand for instead of trying to safe-legal-and-rare it like a bunch of candy-ass neo-libs. Don’t act apologetic about inflation – cap food prices! Let the GOP holler about communism — even their own voters don’t know anything about it except it has something to do with their Beloved Leader’s Russian boss.

Well, as Marty Di Bergi said, enough of my yakkin’. Or rather, on to my yakkin’ at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down – and get this: after last week’s parsimonious one-freebie serving, this week you get three! That’s like three-fifths of what regular subscribers get in a week! And at $7/month, which is $1.75/week, that’s $0.70 worth of copy. OK, it doesn’t sound like much but what I’m telling you is a subscription is cheap and you should buy one, in fact buy two in case the first one breaks.

First one is a bagatelle in the “how would it be different if Trump were trying (and failing) to get bad coverage from the Prestige Press?” category. Doesn’t it seem that way, though? It’s like Trump’s “economic” address, in which he put a bunch of groceries on a table and then proceeded to yammer about Mexican rapists, and the papers all acted like it made sense. “Trump Lays Out Economic Plan,” the Prestige Press reports from an alternate universe.

Second is “It’s a Wonderful Life” as reimagined by the Wall Street Journal. I know it’s an old rightwing shtick to riff on capitalism-skeptic classics like that movie and A Christmas Carol as if pre-conversion Scrooge and Henry Potter were the heroes, but this one is inspired by a WSJ piece about how Opinions Vary as to whether it’s good that Tim Walz doesn’t own stocks and bonds and is not (by modern political standards anyway) a rich fuck like his opponent. One of the Journal’s interviewees says a Vice-President should be “someone who’s dipped his or her toes into all different elements of the financial world that Americans have to navigate” – which makes it sound as if most of the 61% of Americans who own some form of stocks (including retirement savings accounts) are living off compound interest rather than working people who have an IRA. I suppose some people so strongly identify with their economic masters that when the market dips they go, “what’s the matter, boss, we sick?” But speaking for myself I think it’s great that for once we may get a normal guy in high office.

Last, we have J.D. Vance taking lessons in how to woo the lay-deez. Special guest appearances from the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down stock company! Even this creep’s fellow he-man woman-haters are trying to explain him away — “JD Vance’s demeaning remarks don’t help this valid cause,” moans Ramesh Ponnuru at the Washington Post, who like all old-line “pronatalist” conservative frauds believes in limited government except when it comes to making women pump out more babies. (Ponnuru is also an anti-abortion absolutist, you will not be surprised to hear.) “In an individualistic country such as ours, [pronatalism] risks coming across as bossy, or just plain weird — which is what Democrats have started saying about the Republican ticket since Vance was chosen,” Ponnuru notices, so the obvious solution is to get guys like Vance to “stay far away from demeaning adults who have not had children” – that is, to disguise the contempt they clearly feel and reflexively express for them, perhaps by some variant of the Ludovico Technique. Good luck moving those diopters, guys! 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: MY FATHER'S WALZ.

I'm a sucker for this sort of thing.

The days are discernibly shorter; summer begins its swoon; soon comes the harvest, and maybe some of us will also be stripped from the vines. Catch those rays while you can – after the spectacular late Democratic bloom we’re heading into the dogshit days, with Republicans reaching deep in the bag for old Swift Boat dirt clots to throw at Tim Walz. Will that sway our fellow Americans? If they know any among the tiny percentage who serve in the National Guard, will they just thank Walz for his service, or buy J.D. Vance’s argument that he didn’t serve it right? My guess is these answers are predetermined for most people, who either want fascism or don’t, and we have to hope the minority who can still be persuaded – democracy’s saving remnant, as it were – will see though it. I think normal people are sick of Tubby and the fake outrage of his transparently phony fash sidekick isn’t enough to change that, but maybe that’s just me trying to wring some more cheer from the summer wine. We’ll see! 

Here’s the week’s Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebie. (Yes, just one – come on, subscribe, what are you saving that seven bucks a month for, your grandchildren?) It’s Bolt Upright and the Received Opinion crew trying to make sense of the Walz appointment – though, by the look of things, they’re way behind the curve. (Again, maybe it's just me having a hopium cascade but it could be that, after the Prestige Press' latest self-abasement before Trump and the pushback it has inspired, people are starting to catch on.)

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: WEIRD SCENES INSIDE THE GULLED MINE.

Keep it simple, stupid.

The two Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies for the week (sure, let’s get right to them, it’s a busy weekend with Artscape and all) are related. 

First one is about the now-widespread reference to conservatives as “weird.” As I say in the essay, I’ve been on this beat for a while, and while the post speaks for itself I would add this: 

All political actors are gonna be at least a bit weird (though some, like Obama and Reagan, are particularly good at masking it), but conservatives have a head start, both generally and specifically in 2024. Generally, for the last 50 years at least American conservatism has been about scaring Americans out of asking for what they want (and have a right to expect as citizens of a big rich nation) with a variety of boogeymen – communists, hippies, Black Panthers, Bill Clinton’s penis, Arab terrorists et alia – and into accepting, in place of their birthright, a false sense of moral superiority. Since this is an intrinsically negative approach (sometime papered over with propaganda like “Morning in America,” sometimes amplified with propaganda like “American Carnage,” but always based on fear and self-righteousness), it requires its operatives to employ a version of the Camp Counselor with a Flashlight Under Their Chin routine to keep the bad vibes coming. 

This is exhausting for perpetrator and audience alike, and every so often the act gets stale enough that their opposition gets the chance to call bullshit and reverse the flow. But conservatives soon rev up the hate machine again and summon the voters back.

Th “weird” campaign is meta in that, instead of directly confronting the rightwing panic of the day – in this case, so near as I can tell, trans women and migrant caravans – which may or may not work but would be in any case very tiresome, the Democrats have decided instead to call attention to what years of pulling this act has done to the people who pull it – that is, made them sour, brain-damaged freaks like Trump, Vance, and whoever steps up on any given day to be the Bugfuck Crazy Republican of the Moment --  and to ask Americans if they want to be associated, never mind led, by people like this. The approach has its upsides and downsides, and I’ll be writing more about it in weeks to come, but for now the cries of hit dogs hollering across the nation shows it’s at least a provisional success. 

The second freebie is another episode of Received Opinion with Bolt Upright, showing how the Prestige Press reacts to Trump vomiting racist bile in front of cameras – that is, protectively, since 1.) the PP has been trained from years of ref-working to excuse every Republican lunacy as something they couldn’t have possibly meant and 2.) Trump is their ticket to clicks and engagement so they want him to win. Whether these chucklefucks will be able to drag Tubby across the finish line like they did in 2016 remains to seen. He sure isn’t making it easy for them. (Maybe this is the demented old bastard’s final power play – making himself fatally obnoxious so that his dedicated media enablers finally make themselves look so foolish caping for him that nobody, not even the legacy liberals who haven’t gotten the message, can trust them anymore.)

SATURDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: HARRIS 'N' PARIS EDITION.

A Nugget.

What a week, huh?

I’ve been relieved since I heard the news. The main reasons are obvious: Biden was weak on the trail and the Prestige Press was making it worse, whereas his logical replacement, the VPOTUS, has the jam and charisma to do a better job of it and also offers the PP a fresh enough story that maybe they’ll lay off a bit. Also, the Democratic message is a winner (and not just the Stop Trump part -- but, to paraphrase Sam Spade, if all that doesn’t mean anything to you then forget it and we’ll make it just that), but it was getting obscured before and now it’ll be clearer. 

There are other advantages. Kamala Harris for President is driving Republicans nuts. Despite what their capos are telling them, any astute observer can sense their racist and misogynist instincts seething under the surface – and a few of the MAGA made men are already letting it all hang out. I think it’s already helping: In the absence of Tubby himself, who has gone to ground, J.D. Vance is getting smacked around on his sexist bullshit and he can’t help but make it worse because, as a Republican he-man woman-hater, he can’t let himself be seen to back down for the sake of women’s feelings no matter how many votes he flushes in the process. It’s great when you can make them soil themselves just by existing. 

Plus there’s the couch thing. 

On that note, this week’s two freebies from Roy Edroso Breaks It Down: First, Monday’s episode of Received Opinion with Bolt Upright, in which the Prestige Pressies sputter as the Kamala Express breezes past them; and, second, my essay on why the Harris nomination is really and truly good news.

There’s plenty else worth remarking on – like the shitfit Christers are throwing over the spectacular épater-les-bourgeoisie Paris Olympics opening ceremonies. They’ve been digging up nonsense to be mad about forever, but social media just makes it worse – it's like a million windows on a madhouse. I’m especially touched by all the backwoodsmen saying they’ll never visit the City of Light now. 

I don’t drop Dreher as much as I used to but his sputterfest on the occasion, “The Paris Olympics Go To Hell,” has some choice bits:

This is all satanic. You know that, right? Straight-up satanic. Remember how you read in this space two weeks ago about a conversation I had in Paris with a young man whose former girlfriend is a Paris artist, and through whom he got drawn into the Paris art scene. He told me that it is deeply and widely occult. If memory serves, the darkness he witnessed caused him to break up with his girlfriend and turn to Catholicism.

Well, that’s solid proof right there! No need to cite any actual occultism (has Beetlejuice The Musical opened in Paris yet?). Dreher presents himself as an aesthete yet I doubt there’s an arts scene anywhere in the world that wouldn’t qualify as “widely occult” in his view, possibly barring the Eureka Springs Passion Play. In this post he also cites his buddy who called an exorcist on his wife, a welcome reminder of this classic.