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Sunday Tiedrich

everything fucking sucks right now, so let’s just take a moment to savor JD Vance getting the shit booed out of him at the Winter Olympics opening ceremony in Italy.

announcer: “there’s the vice president, JD Vance and his wife Usha— oops, those are not— uh, those are a lot of boos for him.”

we all saw this coming. imagine being so universally loathed that the International Olympic Committee has to beg everyone not to heckle you.

The International Olympic Committee was forced to ask fans not to boo the U.S. delegation led by Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio during Friday’s opening ceremony for the Milano Cortina Winter Games.

is it any wonder that Mr. Heartbeat Away gets booed everywhere he goes? he pretty much goes out of his way to be as unpleasant as possible. look at the embarrassing spectacle Couchfuck creates as he leaves the Milan Prefecture after meeting with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

forty — forty! — armored vehicles completely clog the narrow streets of Milan, bringing everyday life to a standstill.

it takes an entire four and a half minutes for every one of JD’s vehicles to clear the building and clownfuck their way into local traffic.

Vance treats the streets of Milan the same way he treats a couch. he’s just going to ram it in there — and if anyone doesn’t like it, that’s just too damned bad.

it’s all so unnecessary — because watch what happens once all that bullshit runs its course: out comes Lauren Ware, the wife of US Ambassador Tillman Fertitta — on foot. no pomp, no circumstance, and no dumbfuck motorcade.

one person with a small security team — as happens when you’re not such a ginormous piece of shit that everyone can’t wait to heckle you.

because Lauren Ware doesn’t make a point of being an asshole, she can wander wherever she wants — while JD Vance can’t even walk through Union Station in Washington DC without people screaming ‘GO FUCK A COUCH’ at him. remember this, from last August?

“oh look, it’s Couchfucker. you gonna fuck a couch, buddy? GO FUCK A COUCH, JD VANCE, GO FUCK A COUCH!”

JD’s motorcade was so disruptive that he almost fucked up the American figure skating team’s chances of competing.

MILAN — The start of the women’s short program at the Olympic figure skating team event was drawing close Friday afternoon, but American star Alysa Liu couldn’t get to the Milano Skating Arena. She and her coach and choreographer were stuck on an official Olympic bus, blocked from the arena parking lot by the motorcade of Vice President JD Vance, who attended the team event. “We almost didn’t make it,” Liu’s coach, Phillip DiGuglielmo, later said.

ace job, you dumb-ass.

imagine training for years to compete in the Olympics — and almost missing your one shot at glory because some furniture-fucking asshole is on an ego trip.

could someone please remind JD that his job is to stand over there and wave a flag and clap for our Olympians, and not be the constant chaotic center of attention?

for fuck’s sake, he even brought his own food with him. who does that?

A cargo plane transported food from the United States for the delegation, while two other planes brought armored vehicles to be used during official movements.

come on — Couchfuck is in Milan — one of Europe’s greatest cultural centers. shouldn’t he be taking advance of the experience? I sure as shit would. what’s the issue, JD — are there no doughnut shops in Milan?

let’s find out. because I’m a responsible journalist and everything, I googled ‘doughnut shops in Milan’ — and guess what:

so what was JD’s problem? how hard would it have been for him to learn enough of the native language to say ‘how long have you been selling doughnuts? HA HA! that’s great’?

look, JD — I’ve done all the hard work for you, via Google Translate.

‘da quanto tempo vendi ciambelle? AH AH, fantastico.’

you’re welcome, bro. it’s called being a responsible journalist.

thanks to Donny and his henchmen, the whole world hates us now. we’re the playground bullies of the planet, kidnapping a leader here, threatening to invade there, and just plain tariffing everywhere.

or, like Couchfuck McGee in Milan, we’re just creating ego-driven chaos for chaos’ sake — because fuck you, that’s why. none of these shitwits are big on consent.

it’s all so fucking embarrassing.

President Donald Trump’s team offered to unfreeze federal funding for the paused Gateway tunnel project if Democrats in Congress agree to rename Penn Station and Washington Dulles International Airport after him, according to someone with direct knowledge of the negotiations.

only weak and fragile fuckwits need this kind of constant affirmation.

if Donny is that horny to have his name on something, might I suggest the Donald J. Trump Federal Correctional Institution?

let’s guess who could be its very first inmate.

and now for your heroes of the day: the voters of Louisiana’s 60th district, where Democrats flipped a State House seat in a deeply red state.

Louisiana Democrat Chasity Verret Martinez defeated her Republican opponent by double digits in the special election Saturday night for a state House seat in a district President Trump won by 13 points in 2024.

Martinez won 62% of the vote compared to 38% for her Republican opponent, Brad Daigle, according to unofficial results from the Louisiana Secretary of State.

in 2024, Donny won this district by 13 points. just fifteen months later, Democrat Chasity Martinez’s crushed her Republican opponent by double digits — a 37-point swing from red to blue.

in special election after special election, Democrats keep prevailing by significant margins. that’s how fucking radioactive Donny and his fascist policies have become.

there’s a blue wave a-comin’.

this is going to be my closing message for the foreseeable future:

practice self-care. do what you need to do to keep sane. if that means you need to disengage with my daily posts for a while, I get it. this community of ours will still be here when you return.

to all the people who have signed on in the days since the election, welcome aboard. settle in as we all try to deal with the shitfuckery that’s ahead of us.

we are all in this together, and we are all here for each other.

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Released 42 Years Ago Today

Alan Parsons Project: Ammonia Avenue (1984)

I don’t think this was the first CD I ever bought, but it might very well have been.  Surprisingly, I don’t remember where or when I got my first CD player either—other than it was sometime after I got my tax refund in the spring of 1986. I do remember I used to cue up Pipeline on my brand new Yamaha system back in the day and absolutely crank it.

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New Acquisition

After stumbling across that Erasure video the other day, I realized that I didn’t have this in my collection—or even in iTunes. I’ve corrected that.

I remember buying this back in ’92 when it came out. At the time I was an ABBA purist at heart and absolutely hated it. But after seeing that video the other day, I realized that over the past thirty years I’ve…mellowed. Now the only thing that disappoints me about this is that this isn’t a full-length album; it’s just an EP, barely clocking in at a bit over 17 minutes total..

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Begging Off Another Family Function

Today was the local “memorial service” for Ben’s uncle from Albuquerque who unexpectedly passed a few months ago. Held at the family homestead in Scottsdale, it was to be an informal affair (no priest, and no formal eulogies unlike when his grandfather passed last year). Ben left early today to pick up food and set up things, and I was going to join him later this morning.

I headed out with every intention of attending. I stopped at Window Coffee to pick up my morning beverage (something that surprisingly I can swallow successfully in small sips) to nurse while I was at the gathering. As I was leaving I got a text from Ben asking me to bring the salad he’d forgotten that was in the refrigerator. I texted back and said I was already on my way but I’d be happy to go back and get it—since I’d also gone off without my watch and felt naked without it.

As I was heading home, he called and told me not to bother. “There’s more food here than we’ll ever eat.” I still needed to get my watch, so I continued home.

Once there, I was [figuratively] attacked by our increasingly-codependent doggos and kept thinking about the “more food here than we’ll ever eat” comment and I grew increasingly despondent. I mean, there was going to be no memorial service and by all accounts it was another family gathering where eating and drinking was front and center where people break off into their little groups and I find myself sitting alone in a corner. After I brought in the mail and grabbed my watch before leaving again, I was confronted with two pairs of big brown eyes all but begging me to stay home, I called Ben. I knew he would be disappointed, but I told him I wasn’t coming—for those exact reasons. Since Christmas Eve dinner had been such a disaster for me, he said he understood completely and didn’t want me feeling uncomfortable in that situation.

[It’s not like I haven’t tried eating; yesterday at lunch I forced a bit of pork burrito down before pureeing the remainder, but I was still regurgitating bits of pork this morning so it obviously didn’t go anywhere. Where it had been hiding out for the last eighteen hours is anyone’s guess. I suggested another swallow study to my therapist last week so we can actually see where this shit is getting stuck and that might facilitate a different approach to the therapy.]

Now you’ll excuse me while I take the contents of my lunchtime mini charcuterie board and throw it in the blender….

 

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4 Dimensional Chess

Bill and Hillary Clinton just walked into the Epstein fight saying “put us on live TV” and James Comer’s first instinct was to kill the cameras. They are not asking for special treatment, they are using their very real political brilliance to demand transparency in a case where Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act requiring full unredacted release while the trump administration still dragged its feet and slow walked compliance. By planting their flag on “public or nothing,” they flip the script and force Republicans to explain why secrecy suddenly matters more than sunlight.​

That stance is not just moral high ground, it is a trap. The more the Clintons insist on testifying in public, the more obvious it becomes that the real panic is on the right, where trump’s orbit brushes up against names and records that have never fully seen daylight. By embracing an open hearing, they are effectively daring Comer and his allies to keep shielding a system that still has trump era fingerprints all over what remains hidden.​

This is how you turn years of right wing Clinton obsession inside out. If Republicans refuse public testimony, they look like they are protecting trump and the remnants of his Justice Department rather than pursuing the truth. If they cave and allow it, they risk an on camera reckoning that ties the unreleased files, the stalled transparency law, and trump’s own connections into one long, unedited narrative that does not break their way.

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Tiedrich Thursday

imagine you’re a war correspondent for a major American newspaper. you’ve been assigned to cover the war in Ukraine. conditions totally fucking suck. there’s no heat, electricity or running water.

but you’re not bothered by any of that shit. you love your job — because it’s enthralling. there’s nothing else like it in the world.

now imagine you’re in the middle of doing all that, when out of the clear blue, you get an email telling you that your job’s gone fuckity-bye.

if you’re Washington Post reporter Lizzie Johnson, you don’t have to imagine — because that’s exactly what just happened.

“I was just laid off by The Washington Post in the middle of a warzone. I have no words. I’m devastated.”

oh, lovely. how the fuck is Lizzie Johnson supposed to find her way home? what the hell?

and it wasn’t just Johnson who got told her job had been sent to a big farm upstate, where it will have lots of room to run around. over three hundred of her Post colleagues got shitcanned yesterday morning.

here’s just some of the carnage: metro DC news, cut way back. the sports section, gone. book and theater reviews, gone. podcasts, gone.

but perhaps most egregiously, they’re cutting their foreign bureaus. if you want to know what’s happening in places like Kyiv or the Middle East, don’t look at the Post. it’s no longer their responsibility.

how the fuck can you even call yourself a major newspaper if you’re not covering what’s going on in the world? this is the Washington Fucking Post we’re talking about, not the Podunk Pennysaver.

here’s how devastating the cuts were: Peter Finn, WaPo’s International Editor, demanded he be fired on the spot, rather than take any part in this fuckery.

Peter Finn, the section’s editor, requested that he be laid off rather than be involved in planning the cuts once he learned about their scope, according to two people with knowledge of his decision.

the Washington Post’s corporate overlords claim they had no choice but to make these cuts, because the paper lost over one hundred million dollars last year. but these same overlords want to make one thing perfectly clear: these mass firings are actually good news.

do you want to know the real reason the Post is doing this? it’s because they love you — the reader — so much!

I shit you not. check out this dollop of industrial-strength bullshit-speak.

“The Washington Post is taking a number of difficult but decisive actions today for our future, in what amounts to a significant restructuring across the company,” the Post said in a statement. “These steps are designed to strengthen our footing and sharpen our focus on delivering the distinctive journalism that sets The Post apart and, most importantly, engages our customers.”

oh, I see. the Post is gutting its staff and reducing its coverage in order to make it all better. sure, now that you’ve explained it, that makes perfect sense to me.

there are really only two words that come to mind when faced with this level of piss-on-your-head-and-tell-you-it’s-raining corporate-ese. the first one rhymes with fuck, and the second with you.

let’s lay the blame for this atrocity exactly where it belongs: at the feet of Jeff Bezos, the Donny-snuggling gazillionaire who laughs like some fucked-up cartoon villain.

it was Bezos’ own disastrous decisions that led to the Post bleeding money.

first, a week before the 2024 election, Bezos phoned up the editor of the Post and told him not to run their planned endorsement of Kamala Harris. Bezos didn’t want to make Donny mad, just in case he happened to win. hundreds of thousands of angry Post subscribers canceled their subscriptions in response.

then, in February 2025, Bezos announced the Post was no longer going to tolerate ‘left of center views’ on their editorial page. instead, they were going to focus on ‘personal liberties and free markets.’ once again, hundreds of thousands of subscribers canceled their subscriptions.

why would Bezos deliberately antagonize his readership? because doesn’t give a shit. he’d rather curry favor with his new despot snugglebunny, Donny Convict.

Jeffrey Beez is not a newspaper guy. he doesn’t bleed black ink, as the saying used to go. he’s a business honcho. the Post is a just line item on a spreadsheet.

listen to your Uncle Bernie Sanders.

“If Jeff Bezos could afford to spend $75 million on the Melania movie & $500 million for a yacht to sail off to his $55 million wedding to give his wife a $5 million ring, please don’t tell me he needed to fire one-third of the Washington Post staff. Democracy dies in oligarchy.”

democracy dies up Jeff Bezos’ ass.

let’s be clear here. Bezos spends his money like a drunken sailor. he flushed $75 million down the shitter on that bogus ‘documentary’ about Dear Leader’s Slovenian rent-a-wife — and didn’t think twice about how much it cost. sixty million got pissed away on a wedding for his personal flotation device.

Jeff Bezos’ current net worth is TWO HUNDRED AND SIXTY-ONE BILLION DOLLARS. think about this: Bezos could give every person on the planet a billion dollars each, and have $253 billion left over. that’s still more money than he could possibly spend in his lifetime.

the hundred mil that the Post lost is a rounding error to someone with that much moolah.

if he wanted to, he could personally fund the Post and give it away for free — and not even notice the money missing from his bank account.

fuck it, Bezos could sell the Post to someone who would care about putting out a quality product — but he won’t. he’d rather destroy it. owning some hallowed institution and clownfucking into irrelevance is the hip new thing. all the cool oligarchs are doing it.

I swear, these morbidly wealthy shit-kazoos are so easy to hate. and they wonder why people walk around wearing Eat The Rich t-shirts.

heroes, that’s what we’re in desperate need of right now.

no one ever went to bed with fascism and came up smelling like roses. no one ever said ‘gee, I’m so glad the Washington Post partnered with Nazis.’

fascist regimes come, and fascist regimes go. when this current nightmare finally runs its course, no one is going to say ‘wasn’t it awesome how Jeff Bezos slobbered all over Dear Leader’s ass?’

the people we’re going to look back on with admiration are the ones who stood up said ‘take your Nazi bullshit and stick it where the sun don’t shine.’

which bring us to today’s hero of the day: Jordan Perry, the manager of the Lake Theater & Cafe in Lake Oswego, Oregon.

Perry booked the Melania ‘documentary’ into his theater (as a bit of a joke, he explained in a blog post) — and he advertised it with a marquee that read ‘to defeat your enemy, you must know them. Melania starts Friday.’

 

apparently this caused heads to explode all over the Amazon corporate offices, and they angrily pulled the film from Perry’s theater.

undaunted, Perry changed his marquee to ‘Amazon called. our marquee made them mad. all Melania shows canceled. show your support at Whole Foods instead :(’

in a world of Jeff Bezoses, be someone who antagonizes the shit out of Jeff Bezos.

meanwhile, if any of you know of any war-correspondent jobs that are available right now, you’d really be doing Lizzie Johnson a solid.

this is going to be my closing message for the foreseeable future:

practice self-care. do what you need to do to keep sane. if that means you need to disengage with my daily posts for a while, I get it. this community of ours will still be here when you return.

to all the people who have signed on in the days since the election, welcome aboard. settle in as we all try to deal with the shitfuckery that’s ahead of us.

we are all in this together, and we are all here for each other.

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Torturing Myself

Despite weeks of therapy, getting solid food down the normal route remains…elusive. I can sip my morning iced caffeinated beverage, but it takes me all day to make it through a 16 ounce cup. But don’t worry…it’s not like I’m not getting any regular food; it’s just getting pureed to within an inch of its life and going in the g-tube. My therapists remain hopeful, however, and won’t let me sink too low into depression, so there’s that.

(And TBH, since I’ve added real food back to my diet the cravings have subsided substantially and I’ve stopped losing weight. The worst part now is the expected attendance at social events where eating is the primary reason for gathering. Lately however, I’ve been avoiding them altogether because—my personal hunger aside [I order everthing to go]—it’s just too difficult to sit there and watch people eat.)

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I Could Live There

Linework Architecture: This project is a substantial remodel and addition to an unassuming 1940s single-family ranch in Northeast Seattlewith a focus on sustainability, durability, indoor-outdoor living, and generational flexibility.

Designed during the COVID quarantine, the family realized they needed to rethink how their home should function in the “new normal” and beyond. The owners wanted a house that would serve them now and into the future, no matter the shape of their family, requiring us to rethink how the traditional house is programmed and laid out.

PROBLEM SOLVING

The main house was built on the existing foundation and extended to include a larger kitchen and primary bed and bath. A new garage/DADU was introduced at the rear (northern) lot line and is currently used as a family room above and a flexible work-space below, but could be re-programmed to meet the family’s needs as they change over time.

The new one house/two structure design serves up a multitude of readings. While it currently functions as one for a nuclear family, either structure can be self-sufficient as a rental but also have enough separation to finely balance independence and togetherness for an aging parent or the owner’s handicapped brother.

The 2,250-square-foot house is uniquely situated on a through-lot. While the original house and its neighbors had historically neglected the northern side, it became a defining opportunity to reconnect with the street and form a central garden court by placing the DADU at the rear of the property. Large sliding glass pocket doors open to the central garden court expanding the perceived interior volume and provide a seamless indoor-outdoor experience.

The flow and sequence of space was influenced by the owner’s experience living in a Japanese temple complex, where spaces relate and connect to each other through a common courtyard and garden. The functions were intentionally distributed between the two buildings, pushing the occupants outside and connecting them with nature.

The owners were not interested in formal certification but sought to make the house as sustainable as the budget allowed. The house was converted to 100% electrical with a 15kW solar array, and both buildings are conditioned and heat water by heat pump. The main house is ventilated with an HRV. The exterior envelope is clad in exterior insulation, thermally treated wood requiring no recoating, and the windows are U-0.23. On a holistic level, the home is built small—the house is only 1600 square feet, and the DADU adds another 650 square feet. Together, these moves reduce the net energy use to a verified 3,800 kWh per year, or a 73% reduction from the national average.

Efficiency isn’t all or nothing. By building small, building durably, and integrating sustainability features where possible, the result is a design that dramatically reduces the building’s lifetime carbon cost. Most clients do not have the appetite nor the budget for PHI certification or Living Building Challenge, yet there are still opportunities to make a huge difference when

these measures are applied incrementally and across a portfolio of work.

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