Glen F Jones

OMG, they were rooting for their fellow corgi like it was the Super Bowl.🤣❤️

251 years ago, a bunch of alcoholics walked into a bar called Tun Tavern and accidentally founded the world’s most lethal autism support group. Since then, we’ve conquered battlefields, lost billions in gear, married strippers, eaten crayons, and somehow made standing in formation at 0430 a matter of national security. That being said, the enemy fears us. The Navy regrets us, and medical refuses to see us. Happy 251st Birthday, Marines. You government-issued psychopaths. 🦅🌎⚓️

For twelve years, an American at a bar near my office has been drinking ginger ale out of a whiskey glass. Nobody was supposed to know. That was the whole point. The bar has eight seats, under the train tracks. When a train goes over, the glasses hum. The owner, Mr. Tamura, is 74. He has poured drinks there for 46 years. He says a bartender's job is to listen, and to remember who takes ice. The American is Arlo. Sixty-four. From a mill town in Oregon. Big hands. Bad knees. Starts laughing at his own jokes two lines before the punchline. He came to Tokyo in 2003 to sell Oregon lumber to Japanese homebuilders. That was the official reason. The real reason, he told me, was that Tokyo was the farthest place he could find from what he'd done. Arlo was a drinker. The funniest man in the room at nine. A different man at midnight. He missed things. His son Nate built a volcano for the third-grade science fair. It didn't erupt. Arlo wasn't there to see it not erupt. And one night, when Nate was eleven, Arlo drove him home after six beers and put the truck through a neighbor's fence. Nobody was hurt. Nate didn't cry. He didn't talk. He just sat in the passenger seat and looked at his father. Arlo still sees that look. Every day. His wife took Nate the next week. Arlo didn't fight it. He said he didn't deserve to. So he came here. And for eleven years, he sat at Tamura's bar and drank the way he always had. In Japan, a bartender doesn't stop a regular. It isn't his place. Tamura's own older brother drank himself to death at 49. Tamura poured him his last glass. He has never said whether that has anything to do with what happened next. He doesn't have to. One night in March 2014, Arlo came in and showed Tamura a photo on his phone. Nate's college graduation. Cap and gown. Big smile. Nobody had told Arlo. Nobody had needed to. He sat there for an hour with his glass. He didn't touch it. Then he slid it away from himself and said, "Tamura-san. Something with nothing in it." Here is what Tamura knew, that Arlo didn't. In Japan, when a regular quits drinking, he usually stops coming. He loses his seat. His people. His whole evening. He goes home alone to a quiet apartment. And a lot of those men start again. Tamura did not want Arlo to lose his seat. So he took Arlo's usual glass. The heavy one. Put in the big round ice, same as always. Filled it with ginger ale. Set it on Arlo's coaster. And charged him the same price as the whiskey. Arlo says it's the most expensive ginger ale in Japan, and the best deal he ever made. In Japanese bars, regulars can keep their own bottle on the shelf with their name on a little tag. The next week, between forty bottles of whiskey, there was a new one. Ginger ale. The tag said ARLO. The office workers saw a big American drink "whiskey" all night, every night, and never get drunk. He became a legend. A department manager challenged him one Friday. The manager went home in a taxi at ten. Arlo walked to the train. Arlo never corrected anyone. Neither did Tamura. In 46 years, that bar has kept exactly one secret. It's a good one. Arlo found a meeting. At his first one, he stood up and said what you say there: "Hi, I'm Arlo. I'm an alcoholic." And the whole room answered, "Hi, Arlo." He told Tamura about it. Tamura, who speaks maybe a dozen words of English, dried the same glass for a full minute. The next night, when Arlo walked in, Tamura looked up from the ice and said: "Hi, Arlo." He has said it every night since. Every year, the meeting gives Arlo a bronze coin with a number on it. He gives each one to Tamura, who keeps them in a small sake cup on the shelf, right in front of Arlo's bottle. There are twelve now. Two years in, Arlo wrote Nate a letter. That's part of it too. You try to make things right, if you can. "I'm not asking you to forgive me. I just want you to know I'm not drinking, and where to find me." At the bottom, he didn't write his apartment. He wrote the address of the bar. Nate never wrote back. The bar's mail comes in the afternoon. Every night for ten years, when Arlo sat down, Tamura shook his head. "Nothing, Arlo." "That's okay," Arlo said. Every night. This spring, an envelope came. Oregon postmark. Tamura didn't wait for Arlo to sit down. He met him at the door with it. "Dad. I'm 33. I'm an alcoholic. I kept your letter in my sock drawer for ten years. I never answered. I didn't know how. Last October I put my truck through a fence. Same as you. Nobody got hurt. I sat there in the dark and thought about you looking at me. Then I found a meeting. This October I get my one-year coin. In my group, somebody who matters to you hands it to you. I'd like it to be you." Arlo read it twice. Then his shoulders folded in, he bent over the bar like something had hit him, and he made a sound Tamura had never heard a man make in 46 years. And Tamura did something he had never done. He came out from behind his own bar, sat on the stool next to Arlo, and put one hand on his back. They stayed like that until the last train. Last month, in a meeting room behind a church in Oregon, thirty people sat in a circle with bad coffee in paper cups. When they called for one year, Nate stood up. Arlo walked across the room. His knees were bad. It took a while. Nobody rushed him. He held out the coin. His hand shook so hard that Nate had to steady it with both of his. Arlo tried to say something. Nothing came. So he said the words he'd said at every meeting for twelve years. "Hi. I'm Arlo. I'm an alcoholic. And this is my son." Thirty strangers answered, all together, "Hi, Arlo." Then Nate told the room: "My dad's been sober twelve years. Five thousand miles away. By himself. I figured if he could do it there, I could do it here." The next night, a photo came to Tamura's phone. Two paper cups of coffee, touching, like a toast. Tamura printed it and taped it to the shelf. The day after that, there was a second bottle of ginger ale up there, next to Arlo's. A new tag, in careful capital letters: NATE. "Everybody needs a place," Tamura told me. On the top shelf of a tiny bar under the train tracks in Tokyo, between forty bottles of whiskey, there are two bottles of ginger ale now. Same last name.

Hang it in the Louvre! #MotoGP

The first customer my friend Koji ever had in America returned his bread. "There's no melon in it," the man said. He was right. There isn't. It's called melon bread because of the way the top looks. Every child in Japan knows this. The man asked to speak to the manager. Koji was the manager. And the baker. And the guy who mopped the floor. I've known Koji since we were nine. He is 41, very serious, and the most stubborn man I have ever met. He bakes Japanese bread. The soft, sweet kind. Milk bread like a cloud. Bread with sweet red beans inside. Curry bread, which is basically a doughnut with dinner in it. Koji's father ran a bakery in a little Japanese town for 38 years. In 2015, he closed it. Not because the bread was bad. Because the town ran out of children. The school closed. Then the post office. Then him. Koji says his father turned off the oven for the last time and sat alone in the dark kitchen until it was light outside. Koji's wife, Leah, grew up in a Vermont town of 2,100. Three years ago, her mother got sick, and they moved there. Koji found an empty storefront on Main Street. It used to be the hardware store. Before that, the bakery. The town had been without one since 1987. Koji thought that was a sign. It was not a sign. People came in, looked around, and asked if he had "regular bread." They held the red bean buns up to the light, like they were checking for a hidden message. A man in an orange hunting cap asked why there were beans in bread. "Where I come from," he said, "beans go with ham." Most days, Koji sold about twenty pieces of bread. He baked two hundred. Every morning at 4, he was in the kitchen. Every morning at 6, he unlocked the door and bowed to an empty room. Leah says he never once skipped the bow. Only one customer came every single day. An old dairy farmer named Mr. Pelletier. 81. Came in at 6:02, bought one black coffee, sat at the window table for exactly twenty minutes, and left. Never bought bread. Never said more than "Mornin'." Every night at closing, Koji had a hundred and eighty pieces of bread left over. In Japan, throwing away food is close to a sin. So every night, after dark, he packed it into boxes and drove it to the food shelf at the Congregational church. He left it at the side door. No note. No name. He told nobody. To him, leaving free bread at a church felt like admitting he had failed. Eight months went by like that. By October, the savings were almost gone. Koji sat down with Leah and a calculator, and the calculator won. He told the landlord the bakery would close on October 31st. He told almost nobody else. On his second-to-last Friday, Mr. Pelletier came in at 6:02, as always. Bought his coffee. Then, after eight months of black coffee, he pointed at the glass case. "The one with no melon in it." He ate it at the window, chewing slowly, looking out at the street. "Well," he said. "Don't need a melon." Then he left without another word, and Koji assumed that was a kind way of saying goodbye. The next morning was Saturday. At 5:40, Koji looked out the kitchen window, and there were headlights on Main Street. Pickups. A snowplow, blade up. A fire truck from the volunteer company. A minivan with three nurses coming straight off the night shift. The high school hockey team, in their jackets, half asleep. The pastor from the Congregational church. The woman who runs the food shelf, holding a cardboard box he recognized. His box. The line went down the sidewalk, past the closed movie theater, past the post office, down to the gas station on the corner. And at the very front, at 5:40 a.m., in his old wool cap, stood Mr. Pelletier. Koji unlocked the door. He was so confused he forgot to bow. The woman from the food shelf came in first. She set the box on the counter. "Eight months," she said. "Every night. Families in this town have been eating your bread since February, honey. We couldn't figure out who it was. We asked everybody." She pointed at a melon bread in the case. "Then a little boy at the food shelf told his mom the bread with no melon in it was his favorite. And somebody remembered a man down on Main Street who got yelled at about a melon." The whole line laughed. Koji did not. Koji was standing behind his own counter with his face pressed into his apron. They bought everything. Every piece. Two hundred, gone by 7:15. The hockey team bought forty curry breads and ate them on the sidewalk in the snow. And then people kept coming in. There was no bread left. They paid anyway. Ten dollars. Twenty. A snowplow driver put down fifty. "Put it toward next week," they said. One after another. "Next week. Next week." Koji tried to tell them there was no next week. Nobody would let him finish. At 8, Mr. Pelletier walked up to the counter. He took off his cap. Leah had never seen his whole head before. "Son," he said, "this town lost its bakery in 1987. Lost the hardware store in '99. Lost the movie theater after that. They tell us the school's next." He settled the cap on his head again. "We're not losing you." That was two Octobers ago. The bakery is still open. He still bakes two hundred pieces of bread every morning. He sells about a hundred and seventy. The rest still goes to the food shelf every night. Now everybody knows. Now there's a note on the box. Leah writes it. It just says, "From Koji. No melon." The hockey team calls the curry bread "the dinner doughnut." Nobody has asked for regular bread in a year. And every morning at 6:02, Mr. Pelletier comes in, buys a black coffee and one melon bread, and sits at the window for twenty minutes. Last month, Koji's father got on a plane. His first one. He is 72. He stood on Main Street in a little Vermont town and looked at his son's bakery without moving. Then he went inside, put on an apron without asking, and started kneading. In Japan, his town ran out of people. In Vermont, the people decided that wasn't going to happen twice.

This Corgi had four grown men in hell

I am getting profoundly sick of women (many of whom possess advanced degrees in subjects that require several years of graduate study) who hate stwelve-year-old boys, explaining to the rest of civilization how we need to relate to them. Now, before anyone gets carried away, I am also a woman. I have been one for more than fifty years. I was never a boy. I am a tomboy, which means I spent a fair amount of my childhood doing things that would cause a modern Gender Studies department to call an emergency faculty meeting. The difference is that I don't have a PhD in anything, (worthless or otherwise) so I haven't developed the intellectual confidence necessary to believe I know absolutely everything. I'm kind of dumb that way. For example, I have this radical theory that boys should be encouraged to read whatever the hell interests them. For a great many boys, this will be... (Please sit down. This may be upsetting.) BOY STUFF. Sports! Soldiers! Hunting! Explosions! Airplanes! Tanks! Dinosaurs eating other dinosaurs! Some boys will prefer chemistry or astronomy. Some will love cooking. Some will be fascinated by fashion. Some will want to read about ballet, and some will want to read about a Sherman tank driving through a ballet recitle while firing its main gun at a home ec class. THIS IS FINE. Nobody is proposing that we issue every male child a football, a rifle, and a copy of The Art of War at birth, then arrest him if he expresses an interest in soufflés. We're suggesting that if you want boys to read, it might help to give them books about things they actually want to read about. They probably know what interests them better than the woman who spent 8 yearas at university, and written tons of papers about how awful men and boys are. I realize this is a controversial educational theory, requiring another $400 million in federal research grants. But here's something else I've noticed. Whenever the subject of boys comes up, an astonishing number of women immediately begin explaining how boys need to be understood, engaged, reimagined, reconstructed, and possibly returned to the manufacturer for a firmware update. You know who might have some useful insight into what it's like to be a boy? MEN. Yes! MEN! Those strange, hairy creatures who were (in most cases) ACTUALLY BOYS at one point! I know. It's an outrageous suggestion. Now, being a woman, I don't have firsthand experience with boyhood. But I've discovered this remarkable intellectual technique called LISTENING TO PEOPLE WHO DO. It's fascinating. You ask someone about their experiences, and then (and this is the really important part) you SHUT UP long enough to hear the answer. Sometimes you even learn something. One thing I've learned is that a great many boys enjoy traditionally masculine things. Not all boys. Not every boy. Not every minute of every day. But enough boys that pretending otherwise requires a level of deliberate obtuseness normally associated with government procurement. Thank you for attending my TED Talk. That'll be $650. I'm kidding. It's free. I haven't figured out how to get a university to pay me for stating the obvious. I'm not a Democrat anymore. But seriously. We've spent two generations "rethinking how we engage with boys." Judging by the educational and social problems facing young men, I think we're entitled to ask whether some of that rethinking has been an enormous, expensive failure. Maybe it's time to stop treating ordinary boyhood like a defective social construct requiring professional intervention. Maybe it's time to let Grandpa, who was once a boy himself, take the kids fishing. Or shooting. Or teach them how to rebuild a carburetor, throw a football, or make something useful with their hands. And if one of those boys wants to learn ballet or bake a cake instead? LET HIM. MAYBE THEN we can find someone (most likely a woman) to help him otu. That's the entire point! Give boys opportunities. Give them books. Give them good male role models. Let them discover their interests without turning every preference into an ideological emergency. And for the love of everything holy, STOP ACTING LIKE ACKNOWLEDGING THAT BOYS AND GIRLS OFTEN HAVE DIFFERENT INTERESTS IS SOME KIND OF CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY. I'm not suggesting women have nothing useful to contribute to raising or educating boys. I'm suggesting that perhaps, just perhaps, we should spend a little less time lecturing men about what boys need, and a little more time asking men what being a boy was actually like. It's a crazy idea, I know. But after fifty years on this planet, I'm beginning to suspect that the people who insist they know the most about boys are frequently the people least interested in listening to them.