Sick of this sh**

👀 What I’m watching: The Chair Company

📜 What I’m reading: A 238-year-old document

🧱 What I’m building: A giant LEGO set

🌯 What I’m eating: The best breakfast burrito in KC

👨🏼‍💻 What I’m processing: Saturday

I had the full-on flu from Monday all the way to Friday last week (thanks again Chris and Micah for covering me on the brilliant Friday newsletter). When I was in school, this would have been ideal. No school all week, then suddenly a beautiful snowstorm for the weekend? Yes, please! But Adult Dave wanted to make videos, especially during this particularly precarious time in America.

Today, my brain is functioning at like 94% of it’s full power. I’m like Scarlett Johansson at the end of Lucy. Here’s what I’ve been up to and I’m working on, as my brain slowly grows more powerful.

For whatever reason, when I have the flu, I tend to gravitate towards absurdist comedies that, prior to my bed-ridden state, I haven’t watched. It’s like people that go out in the desert to do hallucinogens. I’m taking my cloudy thoughts to a premise that also doesn’t make sense. I don’t know why I do this to myself.

Last time I had the flu, I watched a lot of Portlandia. Naturally, this time around, I watched the entire first season of The Chair Company. What a trip.

I’ve admired Tim Robinson, mostly from afar, for a while. It’s a pretty common internet take that his comedy and sensibilities were mismatched for SNL’s more mainstream approach to comedy. His success post-SNL with Chair Company, I Think You Should Leave and Friendship is so well-deserved.

Even if you don’t get his comedy, you have to appreciate someone making something completely unique and original. And while I’ve been on the peripheral, I caught this genius sketch from his Netflix series a couple years back:

I watched all of The Chair Company in basically one day. I don’t know what to say, exactly. It was brilliant. It made no sense. I laughed out loud multiple times. I cringed deeply, which was by design, of course. The premise alone could easily be a short eight-minute sketch, and part of me wonders if it was originally. It’s not hard to imagine Robinson walking into HBO’s offices and pitching one sketch as a joke, only for executives to greenlight it as a nine-episode series (now renewed for a second season). I mean, these are the same people who temporarily changed HBO Max to “Max.”

Here’s the basic set-up: a man has to give a big rousing speech in front of his company. It goes well. Then, he sits down and his chair collapses, humiliating him in front of everyone. From then on, he privately launches a full-on investigation into the chair company. The motivations of the main character and everyone around him shift constantly, sometimes prompting me to question my own comprehension of the show. But you don’t watch this show for the plot. You watch it for the completely random scenes - and for that reason alone, I recommend it.

By Saturday, my brain was fully functioning, but based on some posts by right-wing pundits, politicians and random MAGA accounts, I started to wonder if I had the Second Amendment wrong this whole time. So I looked it up again:

We’ll get to the shooting itself later on in the newsletter, but first I’d like to address this Bizarro MAGA World reaction to a U.S. citizen lawfully carrying a firearm, with a permit, in an open carry state.

Here’s the obvious part: to say a protestor can not or should not be armed is a direct contradiction to literally everything the NRA and its many fans and donors have been saying for decades.

But there’s another part of this that’s bothered me for many years as well, and it’s something I’ve repeated in many videos.

This “fight” that Americans been waging for years, that has directly led to the death of hundreds of children in schools, has been “won” by a group in a small, vocal minority. And now members of that same minority group have selectively chosen Saturday’s shooting as the exception to the rule. I’ll be making a video unpacking this soon.

Move over, adult coloring book. The best way to relax for many aging millennials, including myself, is to build giant “adult” LEGO sets. You may have even seen my Home Alone LEGO set make a cameo in previous videos:

This is a recent phenomenon I’ve excitedly contributed to the last few years. Wirecutter even posted their favorite “adult” LEGO sets. It makes perfect sense to me. LEGO had it’s first major resurgence in the late 90s. As a kid obsessed with Star Wars and Harry Potter, I was the target demographic for their two new major licensing deals: Star Wars and Harry Potter.

Now in adulthood, it’s becoming a bit of a tradition that my wife gets me a giant LEGO set for my birthday each year. This year was no exception. On Saturday, when I turned [REDACTED] years old, I got an incredible new set: Barad-dûr. Finally, LEGO is making up for not also licensing Frodo and the gang in the early 2000s.

I’ve only just started putting together this 5,471 piece set. I figure it should take me the length of the LOTR trilogy. And just in case, I’m rewatching the Extended Editions.

*Bill Hader as Stefan voice*

Kansas City’s best breakfast burrito is at Rochester Brewing and Roasting Company. It’s got eggs. It’s got potatoes. It’s got cheese. You can get chorizo, or sausage, bacon, or veggie. Trust me. I’ve had it no less than 20 times. It’s always made fresh. It’s always delicious. Their coffee is just okay.

After seven Border Patrol agents grabbed, beat, disarmed and forced Alex Pretti to his knees, they shot at him at least 10 times. Or did they execute him?

We are very careful about how we use language at Local News International. There’s about 60 years of journalism at The Washington Post, The AP, PBS, local television and more between the three co-founders. So, when Renee Good was killed, I opted not to call it “murder.” It sure felt like murder, but by its dictionary definition, it was not. Murder requires premeditation.

When Pretti was violently taken down yesterday, the word “execution” entered my head, and many others online. Once again, those hardened journalistic tendencies took over and I looked up “execution.”

The first definition didn’t quite fit:

He hadn’t been previously condemned. Importantly, he was an upstanding citizen, a nurse who took care of veterans. He was a hero. But he wasn’t condemned.

This definition, however, feels closer to what happened:

It certainly looks and feels political. Pretti was protesting a highly-politicized police task force, armed and protected by the government. And that task force killed him for it, plain and simple. We don’t know the individual thoughts of the Border Patrol agents (though one did say “boo hoo” at another protestor, moments after they killed him). At this time, I am leaning towards using “execution” in our video. But for now, I’m processing. This is one of the biggest advantages we have at LNI. We’re too small to do constant breaking news. And it would be irresponsible. Instead, we find the facts and correct the record after the Internet explodes, so you don’t have to wade through the miserable mess.

Tomorrow’s first video will be a fact-checker on what happened before, during and after Border Patrol agents killed Pretti. If there’s anything specific you’d like me to fact-check, let me know: [email protected].

And please follow and support The Minnestota Star Tribune’s ongoing coverage. It is excellent.

Then I just want to say this: don’t let all the horribleness get to you. A lot of wonderful things happened this weekend. The first general protest in 80 years saw as many as 50,000 people in Minnesota brave the -9 degree weather on Friday.

It’s always better to be a good person, in the end, holding on to humanity and protecting your fellow human beings. Look for the bright side, like former 90s child actors in Instagram comment sections.