Theric Jepson

@thmazing

Untroubling and untroubled for a good fifteen minutes a day. thmazing.com/thbiblio thmazing.substack.com public school teacher | writer | current editor of @irreantum.bsky.social

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Theric Jepson@thmazing· 25d

And I could watch them five more times in the time it would take me to watch the Odyssey!

four short films running from 1917 to 2026

Theric Jepson@thmazing· 25d

He hasn't been lucky this year, either. (see alt text if you can't make it out)

cartoon by edward sorel

uncle sam, depressed, comes home and hangs up his hat

speaking to wife (statue of liberty), says,

"Turns out the whole Star Wars project was part of a con game and I'm out $30billion"

Theric Jepson@thmazing· 27d

Me: When this next issue drops, I will have released 43% of all Irreantum issues! Them: Ahem...

Theric Jepson@thmazing· 27d

(and the rest)

The result is the Noodle Dog—a flavor blast that unfolds in movements rather than bites. Rich butter. Deep roasted garlic. Just enough sriracha to wake everything up without stealing the spotlight. A touch of spice. Then the unmistakable snap of the hot dog, working in perfect symbiosis with silky garlic noodles. Neither ingredient competing with the other, but elevating it. It is at once familiar and entirely new. Equal parts ballpark comfort food and Oakland culinary manifesto. Proof that innovation doesn't always arrive in a laboratory. Sometimes it arrives in a paper tray.

In honor of National Hot Dog Day, we've created a cinematic homage to Chef Myke's creative journey with all the reverence reserved for masterpieces. We hope you'll watch it.

Then we hope you'll come to Raimondi Park and experience the Noodle Dog where it belongs: under the lights, surrounded by neighbors, with the sounds of baseball echoing across West Oakland. Every great baseball city deserves a signature ballpark meal. We think Oakland just found hers.

Theric Jepson@thmazing· 27d

The alt text is the incredible email they sent tonight.

History has a curious habit of preserving the grand while quietly depending on the humble. Nations commemorate treaties, but families remember recipes. Ballparks celebrate championships, but generations recall the taste of a hot dog wrapped in foil, eaten two bites before first pitch. Somewhere between memory and mythology, the American hot dog earned its place—not as a side dish to baseball, but as one of its great co-stars. It has outlasted dynasties, survived fashion, crossed every neighborhood and tax bracket, and remained the one menu item that asks almost nothing of us except to enjoy the afternoon.

Anthony Bourdain once suggested that food tells us who we are. If that's true, then the hot dog tells the story of America at its best: messy, democratic, endlessly adaptable, stitched together from cultures and traditions that were never supposed to fit until suddenly they did. Baseball has always shared that same gift. Every generation inherits the game, then leaves behind its own fingerprints. The game changes. The fans change. The city changes. Yet somehow, on a warm evening with friends, a cold drink in one hand and a hot dog in the other, time briefly stands still.

Oakland has never mistaken tradition for stagnation. This city's greatest ideas have always come from fearless collisions—of people, neighborhoods, music, art, and cuisine. Which is why it feels only natural that Chef Myke would look upon the sacred American hot dog and ask an almost dangerous question: What if garlic noodles belonged here, too?

Theric Jepson@thmazing· 27d

Ah, sweet sweet insecurity. A hard thing to hide.

hegseth announces a testosterone-deficiency screening for soldiers over 30

Theric Jepson@thmazing· 28d

in berkeley??

Theric Jepson@thmazing· Jul 4

Waterhouse's Juliet is one of the best. You see her resolve and her beauty---and that she's only thirteen years old. Too many painters aren't willing to admit the truth of her age.

Theric Jepson@thmazing· Jul 4

STOP TELLING MY SECRETS, BUKOWSKI

Theric Jepson@thmazing· Jul 2

President Gerald Ford, speaking to newly naturalized citizens on July 5, 1976. www.fordforum.org/observer-ess...

Theric Jepson@thmazing· Jun 29

It has become obvious in recent years that the Gmail skin that reflects current weather conditions no longer works. Unless it IS snowing and me and the Weather Channel are wrong.

Theric Jepson@thmazing· Jun 28

The original Harrison Ford:

Theric Jepson@thmazing· Jun 21

The stories of course are the best part but I find these notes particularly useful in 2026 as we get swept away into both nonsense and compromises with absurdities.

Lafayette’s commitment to “principles” remained, like his commitment to liberty, a central feature of his life. He was willing to compromise, but only up to a certain point: Strategic silence was acceptable, active lies were not. Freedom of the press was such an absolute that he refused to sue even ultra-royalists who published slanders about him under the Restoration.

His core beliefs also included moderation, which earned him hatred from left and right alike. “Rarely has a man held to moderate principles with such tenacity,” Laura Auricchio notes in The Marquis. Yet he pointedly rejected the faux centrism that came to be known in French political language as “juste milieu” or “happy medium,” a notion he derided in a speech in parliament in 1831:

Is it the sort of moderation that consists in maintaining the center between two variable points? Which, when we say that four plus four makes eight, and an exaggerated claim pretends that it makes ten, believes it more reasonable to maintain four plus four makes nine?

Theric Jepson@thmazing· Jun 12

I'm not surprised others have already set the images side by side.

Theric Jepson@thmazing· Jun 11

Can we all work together to make sure Hegseth sees this paragraph over and over again. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Hegseth approaches his job as if it’s a vacation rather than public service. He shows up on military bases looking as exuberant as a bored househusband who just got a kitchen pass from his wife for a weekend of paintball with the boys. He sports a pocket handkerchief that looks like an American flag. He carries himself with an effortful swagger that is meant to convey machismo but instead just looks awkward. He talks with practiced drama, like he’s constantly trying out for the lead in a school play.

Theric Jepson@thmazing· Jun 11

Theric Jepson@thmazing· Jun 9

George Orwell still says no.

Dying metaphors. A newly−invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other
hand a metaphor which is technically "dead" (e.g., iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary
word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump
of worn−out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the
trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgels for, toe the
line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, an axe to grind, grist to the mill,
fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles' heel, swan song, hotbed. Many of these are used
without knowledge of their meaning (what is a "rift," for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently
mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current have been
twisted out of their original meaning without those who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe
the line is sometimes written tow the line. Another example is the hammer and the anvil, now always used with
the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never
the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying would be aware of this, and would avoid
perverting the original phrase.

Theric Jepson@thmazing· Jun 9

You mean I, a gentleman, could have been saying these things all along?

neither BALLS TO THE WALL nor BALLS-OUT refer to testicles (in the case of the former one, I didn't see how it could, which is why I looked it up)

Theric Jepson@thmazing· Jun 9

Obsession as anticapitalist text.

Theric Jepson@thmazing· Jun 9

Strong thesis.

What if all you needed to do was tap a button on a screen and any product you could think of would be with you in just a day? What would you rationalize and excuse away? You could do everything and anything you wanted, able to outsource your sense of responsibility or justice to an abstract and impersonal force, able to be a monumental coward and still indulge your own desire.

We’re all so good at this. After all, capitalism trains us to treat other people like things.

Perhaps this is the real value of horror at a moment like this. Collectively, we all inhabit a world in which we’re told that you are the only real person, that consuming things (and by extension people) is the highest good, and that ideas of interdependence are a political trick. Billionaire tech reactionary Marc Andreessen even thinks introspection about one’s own subjectivity is a waste of time, and right-wing Christian influencers will write whole books arguing that trying to think of others is an occult trick and mechanism for the left to politically disempower people. Ultimately, Obsession is a social horror for a world in which everyone else is disposable, leaving those who survive screaming among the blood and corpses utterly alone.

Theric Jepson@thmazing· Jun 9

Taskmaster is joy

Theric Jepson@thmazing· Jun 3

Can anyone tell me what/who (a) Catherine Reel is? kottke.org/26/06/tony-g...

And the sad truth is that, you know, we are just in another wheel of history. And I must admit that after 9/11 and Vietnam and Covid and Watergate and all the things I’ve grown up, I’m 68. I kind of thought, well, I’ve seen all the history I’m gonna see. I don’t feel that way anymore. I don’t feel so special anymore as a human who’s lived on the planet and lived in something called civilization. I think sadly, it’s sort of a Catherine Reel of repetitive stupidity.

Theric Jepson@thmazing· Jun 3

Oh, NOW we're talking. www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026...

Theric Jepson@thmazing· Jun 2

tough choice

Theric Jepson@thmazing· May 30

The headline that just keeps on giving

professional cornhold player

and quadruple amputee

arrested for murder

Theric Jepson@thmazing· May 28

Even with a winning record and the best pitcher in baseball, the Pirates are last. Sigh.

Theric Jepson@thmazing· May 28

This monstrosity:

shared vision the songs of the beatles in which cool people make the beatles suck

Theric Jepson@thmazing· May 24

I...don't get it?

Theric Jepson@thmazing· May 20

I was tempted to rank ALL the movies from the S&S 250 I've seen to get Beau Travail out of the top ten. I would need to go through all 250 to be sure, but I'm pretty certain this would appear and the end of any list I made. (Got to be careful hating Beau Travail doesn't become my personality!)

Theric Jepson@thmazing· May 20

I like Murnau but I think I prefer Metropolis. But this is truly an excellent film. And not technically silent so this list ends up being silent-free, sadface.