Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! I’m much improved (but still hard to tell where flu stops and jet lag starts). I am hotel blogging from Anaheim, California, immediately adjacent to the famous Disneyland, whose rooftops, peaks, and spirals I can see just outside my room’s window. This is admittedly impressive. But, to be fair —and I say this as no fan of the Mouse— California’s version is not competitive with Florida’s Walt Disney World. Our version occupies an entire swampy county, and includes warnings about resident reptiles. So. Meanwhile, your truncated Weekend Edition roundup includes: Elon Musk flipped a flying car over a row of Teslas while Axios asked what it’s for; an Oregon father on his lunch break did what the officers arrived “minutes later” to find already done; and a Rhode Island grower broke the 3,000-pound pumpkin barrier for reasons that defy all explanation, which is the best kind.
🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍
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Thursday delivered a story that is not getting anywhere near the attention it deserves. Axios’s headline came closest to justice, reporting, “Elon Musk’s flying Tesla is gloriously absurd.” Gloriously absurd is a backhanded compliment, like calling the Wright Brothers’ air-cycle-contraption wonderfully harebrained. Presumably from anti-Musk pique and sneering elitism, not one corporate media platform connected the obvious dot.
First of all: Huzzah! They did it! The car actually flies! True, only for short stints. Yes, only up to about four or five stories high, from what we could see, and even then when launched off a track. Still: it drove straight up! It flew upside-down! It did aerial flips! And it drove itself — with an enthusiastic-looking man-sized robot strapped in the driver’s seat. (Presumably a volunteer.)
Corporate media’s reaction: Ho hum. “It’s hard to imagine what practical purpose a flying sports car might serve,” a bored Axios informed readers, apparently mistaking its catastrophic shortage of imagination for a surplus of insight. Apply the Axios Practicality Test consistently and human progress becomes a long series of embarrassing purchasing decisions. A bicycle shop building an airplane? Why not just take the train? A rocket to the moon? There’s nothing there. And now you’re bringing a golf cart? Gentlemen, there isn’t even a golf course.
Somewhere, an Axios correspondent is standing beside a prototype of the first wheel, asking whether walking has really become so inconvenient.
A flying Tesla might be impractical, extravagant, or a magnificent dead end. Or even all three. But “I can’t imagine a use for it” is not an engineering assessment; it’s an autobiographical confession. True, nobody needs to buy one, much less declare it as the next Kitty Hawk. Still, there’s something deliciously absurd about watching a publication devoted to explaining what comes next confront an attempt to build it— and demand to know why anyone would bother.
Why build it? Why not build it??
How deranged must a person be to take no joy from this at all? How wrapped up in tedious 2026 politics must you be to contemptuously ignore an achievement so vast that all of mankind may claim partial credit just for being here when it happened? We’ve literally been waiting for flying cars since I was a teenager.
Along with robot butlers, flying cars were supposed to arrive in the Year 2000, which to be perfectly honest, turned out to be a terrific disappointment. I blame Obama. (On the brighter side, for some reason, we thought we’d all be wearing jumpsuits, too, like everybody was a car mechanic. But with strangely wide belts. Why we pre-millennials thought jumpsuits were futuristic fashion, I cannot say. Fortunately, that one fizzled too.)
In 1903, Wilbur and Orville’s first flight lasted only 12 seconds. It got off the ground about 10 feet high and only flew about 120 feet down the beach. It used a chain and sprocket transmission. It had no seat belts. (You can imagine what Axios and its Greek chorus of Elon-hating critics on social media would have said.) In 1914, the world’s first scheduled commercial passenger flight hauled former mayor Abram C. Pheil from St. Petersburg, Florida, to Tampa.
And less than 66 years after Kitty Hawk, Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. (Or, if you don’t buy that, America was still close enough to doing it that the mission was believable. The point is aviation came a long way, very fast.)
Apply the Axios Practicality Test to 66 years of aeronautical innovation, and you might as well cancel the entire sequence. For years, the airplane barely went anywhere and was terrifyingly dangerous, satellites just flew around in circles, and the lunar golf cart arrived on a world without a single tee time.
Fortunately, the Elon Musks building those things were not required to first prime political reporters’ imaginations.
Here’s the dot that all the unimaginative critics failed to connect. The significance of the first commercial prototype flying car you can place a deposit on is not whether it was practical. It’s that the age of aviation just entered the age of personal aviation. In other words, right now you can buy and fly an airplane if you want. But you need weeks of training, tests, expensive equipment, storage, special pilot’s licenses and insurance, and prior government approvals for many takeoffs and landings.
The flying car’s significance is not that an individual can finally own a flying machine. Individuals have owned airplanes for generations. It is that flight could become a capability of the vehicle already sitting in the driveway. Not a second vehicle, a separate hangar, and an expensive hobby, but another routine function of personal transportation.
A flying car is not an airplane with wheels that happens to tolerate roads. It is a real car that can also leave the road. If automated flight eventually removes the need for specialized piloting, which seems likely, the distinction becomes more profound: the owner supplies the destination; the machine supplies the aviation. The transition between eras is about flight migrating from a separate category of highly regulated equipment into an ordinary consumer product.
It is not identical, but it’s similar to how Musk’s space company ended the era of government dominating space, and launched the private space era. Of course it’s not going to happen overnight. We have neither personal Jetsons’ rockets nor flying cars yet. The point is: it has begun. And regardless of how absurd Axios thinks it is, the self-driving flying car is one more reason why it is an exciting time to be alive.
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This morning, CBS ran a much better headline than I’d expected, reporting “Hero bystander took down Oregon school shooter, and a teacher tackled him, saving lives, police say.”
Early Thursday afternoon, Griffin Jay John II, 16, shot his way into Bend, Oregon’s Silver Rail Elementary School, killing three young disabled male students —5, 8, and 11— and special needs teacher Megan Lambert, 25. Griffin was a former special needs student at Silver Rail (reports haven’t provided any diagnosis). Police said he carried a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun, jumped a fence, and fired three rounds into a red Toyota pickup after the driver challenged him.
He then went to a side entrance by the playground, shot out the glass in locked school doors, and entered the first classroom on his left, where he began shooting. (The school resource officer was at another school.)
Griffin’s mother, Shauntai Nickerson, has a media history, in which we learn that Griffin struggled with lockdowns and remote learning during covid. In 2020, Nickerson told KTVZ-21 she would be happy when schools reopened: “I think it will be great for Griffin, because I am not certified to teach a special needs student.” She added, “I think it will be great for my son to get the help that he needs from the skilled teachers that he needs to get it from.”
In 2020-21, Bend’s schools closed for more than a year, for safety. A widely circulated photo of Griffin and his mom —posted last month and often described as “haunting”— pictures a troubled home life. Little is known about Griffin’s father, but he is clearly out of the picture.
At least two heroes have emerged.
🔥 First, according to Bend Police Chief Mike Krantz, another Silver Rail teacher (so far unidentified) tried to stop Griffin. She threw her phone at him as a distraction and then tried to wrestle the shotgun away.
The tragedy would have been much worse but for the heroic intervention of Kaylub Giamanco, 36, a lifelong Oregon resident and father of two kids who attended Silver Rail. His mom, Kenda Freeman, told CBS that Kaylub was heading home on his lunch break when he spotted the 16-year-old shooter on the school’s campus.
“Kaylub knew something was not right, so he pulled up onto the grass, grabbed his gun and basically stalked the gunman back into the school,” she said. “He army crawled through a window that the gunman had shot out.” She said her son has a license to carry and has been around guns all his life.
Kenda said Kaylub called her after the incident. “A man went into my daughter’s school and shot kids,” Kaylub had told his mother, “and I looked at him point-blank, and I shot and killed him, Mom.” She said he remains traumatized. “I told him he was a hero, he did what he had to do, and that he did the right thing, and that I was proud of him and he saved a lot of lives,” she said. “And he said, ‘Mom, I couldn’t save them all.’”
Later, Kaylub spoke to CBS reporters. “It’s tough because, well, I’m thankful that my babies are okay. There are babies that are not, and that’s hard to swallow because my heart goes out to those families that didn’t get to bring their babies home,” the heroic father said, through tears. Here’s a picture of Kaylub and his mom, Kenda; it makes a heartbreaking contrast with the picture of the shooter and his mother.
Later yesterday afternoon, President Trump praised Kaylub for his selfless quick thinking. “Thank God we had him; otherwise, it would have been much worse,” Trump said, adding, “It’s a terrible thing, but thank goodness for a man that had a gun and knew how to use it.”
This story confuses corporate media, which wants to run its gun control playbook. That playbook is obviously confused by the “bystander hero with a gun” who stopped the carnage, even though CBS and the other platforms insisted “police arrived minutes later.” They want to say, but are too chicken to say it directly, that Kaylub’s heroic intervention was unnecessary.
Setting aside how many more kids and teachers could have been killed in those extra “minutes,” here in Florida, we understand from painful experience that police arriving at the school is not at all the same as police doing anything useful. Either way, in this case everyone seems to have performed admirably and the scale of the tragedy —horrific though it is— was contained.
Remarkably, this story is receiving much more coverage than usual for a shooting story featuring an effective armed citizen.
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We need to talk about that dream you always had: buying a farm. The underreported aspect is that hobby farming means spending six months of your life sweating profusely in order to produce something that your children will refuse to eat unless it is deep-fried into the shape of a dinosaur. But there is also a surprising upside. It is seasonal, another technological breakthrough, and even inspiring (in its own way). On Wednesday, NBC affiliate WJAR-10 reported, “Rhode Island grower sets Guinness World Record with 3,156-pound pumpkin.”
There is much to unpack here, but let’s begin with the basics: gardening. For most of us, ‘gardening’ consists of purchasing a delicate little tomato plant at Home Depot, lovingly placing it on the back patio, watering it with high hopes, and then watching it be helplessly devoured in real time by hordes of microscopic insect life with the collective appetite and efficiency of a commercial woodchipper.
Then there are the Giant Pumpkin Growers.
Giant pumpkin growers are not normal people. Giant pumpkin growers are individuals who see a tiny seed —a seed that could easily fit inside your nasal cavity, not that I am recommending you try this— and say: “I bet I can turn this into a vegetative mass roughly the size and density of a 1998 Honda Civic.”
And now, one of them has actually done it.
I mean, of course, Mr. Ron Wallace of Coventry, Rhode Island. (Ironically, the world’s largest pumpkin comes from Rhode Island, which, as you know, is our nation’s smallest state. It consists mainly of dramatic ocean views, Netflix-worthy mob folklore, and roughly forty-seven square feet of buildable dry land.)
Just recently, Ron hauled his homegrown pumpkin entry onto an industrial scale at Frerichs Farm in Warren, Rhode Island. When the dust cleared, the official scale read—and I would not make something like this up— 3,156 pounds.
For a pumpkin. Whew! Let us put this number into perspective. A pumpkin weighing 3,156 pounds is heavier than:
An above-average Atlantic walrus.
A loaded subcompact hatchback.
The collected works of the Internal Revenue Service printed in lead binders to survive nuclear wars.
Ron’s monstrous growth is not a fruit. It is a land mass. It has its own gravitational field. If you walked too close to it, your wristwatch could experience time dilation, and migratory Canadian geese would begin circling your head.
🔥 Forget about flying cars. According to Guinness World Records, Ron is the first human being in the history of the planet Earth to breach the mythical 3,000-pound pumpkin barrier. He smashed through a record that had been set literally one week earlier by a British grower named Ian Paton, who grew a 2,857-pound squash, only to have Ron come along seven days later and basically say, “Cheerio, chap, that’s a delightful little radish, now behold my gargantuan orange asteroid.”
Now, it is fair to ask who validates momentous scientific claims like whose pumpkin is fattest. Perhaps the United Nations? NASA? The Department of Homeland Security?
No. There is a real organization. It is known as The Great Pumpkin Commonwealth. They are deadly serious.
The Great Pumpkin Commonwealth sounds like a fictional totalitarian regime invented by Charles M. Schulz where Linus van Pelt rules with an iron fist and forces everyone to sit in cold dirt patches waiting for a silent, vengeful deity. But believe me, it is very real. They have inspectors. They have clipboards. They have a website. Commonwealth agents inspect these gargantuan blobs with calipers and flashlights and classified examination devices to make sure they are structurally sound.
Structural soundness is critical.
It turns out that the ultimate tragedy in competitive pumpkin growing is an event spoken of only in hushed tones, and known grimly around the sport as a “catastrophic blow-out.” I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking about what happens about three hours after entering a raw oyster eating contest at a dive bar in Cozumel, Mexico during Spring Break. No. This is much worse.
🔥 A catastrophic blow-out occurs when a giant pumpkin, having absorbed hundreds of gallons of water, suddenly experiences structural failure and essentially detonates into forty square yards of lukewarm, fermented baby food. You do not want to be standing downwind of a 3,000-pound blow-out unless your idea of a good time is smelling like an unwashed compost bin until sometime in the fall of 2038.
Ron Wallace, however, is a seasoned professional. He knows and accepts the risks. He is, in fact, the Michael Jordan of mega-squashes. Back in 2006, he was the first guy to cross 1,500 pounds. In 2012, he became the first grower to top 2,000 pounds. And now he has cracked 3,000.
Ron told reporters that this was his first year growing inside a greenhouse, where he applied a “scientific approach.” That is code language to men and dads everywhere.
Whenever a man tells you he took a “scientific approach” to a lawn hobby, it means he spent thousands of dollars on specialized equipment, rigged up an automated drip-irrigation network that looks like the cooling system for a nuclear submarine, and treated his backyard like a classified Ukrainian biolab.
Apparently all that lawn science paid off. It’s almost unnatural. During peak growing season, a pumpkin like Ron’s can gain sixty pounds a day. It basically swallows a 10-year old child every 24 hours. You could literally pull up a lawn chair, crack open a beer, and watch it swell like a furious, orange, inflatable beanbag.
🔥 The obvious question every sensible person will ask at this point is: Why?
What do you actually do with three thousand pounds of pumpkin?
You can’t carve it into a jack-o’-lantern. If you tried to carve a face into a 3,156-pound pumpkin, you wouldn’t need a kitchen knife; you would need a Stihl gas-powered chainsaw and a mining permit from the Department of the Interior. If you put a candle inside it, the candle would look like a lone birthday sparkler sitting in the middle of an abandoned subway tunnel.
You certainly can’t bake it into a pie. Competition-style giant pumpkins are not bred for flavor. They are notoriously stringy, watery, and have been described by professionals as tasting like moist cardboard seasoned with lawn clippings. Even if you did try, you would end up with roughly 1,400 pumpkin pies, which is enough to cause a widespread digestive catastrophe across the entire Northeast corridor.
No, Ron did not grow this pumpkin to eat it. He grew it because he is an American, dammit, and in America, if something exists in nature, our fundamental civic duty is to feed it weird organic products until it becomes terrifyingly, unnaturally huge. Like building a flying car, you don’t grow two-ton pumpkins because it is practical. You do it for the utter joy of living in a timeline where 3,000-pound gourds that gain 60 pounds a day exist.
Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, breaking the 3,000-pound barrier has taken a toll. Ron is tired. He said he might take next year off to “finish projects around the farm.”
I think this is a wise move. Because if Ron keeps going at this rate, by 2030 he is going to produce a pumpkin so dense that it collapses into a localized black hole, sucking Coventry, Rhode Island, and parts of eastern Connecticut straight into the fifth dimension.
Nobody wants to have to explain that to the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth.
Have a wonderful weekend! We’ll return on Monday, the final day of traveling for a while, with a brand-new roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary.
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Under massive pressure from Trump there is a new bill that passed the house judiciary committee called The Shut Down Sanctuary Policies Act. What this bill would do is finally empower the victims of the crimes of illegal aliens too sue local and state officials that release criminal aliens from custody. What the bill aims to do is impose the toughest crackdown on states cities and localities that refuse to turn over illegal aliens that are under federal detainers, people here illegally that have been charged or convicted of a crime, but instead sanctuary city officials just release them onto the streets. This bill creates what is called a right to private action which allows victims or families of illegal alien crime to sue the municipalities, cities, state or local officials who release violent offenders and they offend again. I can only say it’s about FREAKIN TIME! This federal bill would strip state officials from what they call civil immunity. So people like Maura Healy, Michele Wu, Mamdani, Kathy Hokel, Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker, etc. would no longer be able to hide behind this civil immunity for their absolute criminal disregard for the safety of American citizens, by letting these murderers, rapists, child molesters, etc. back out onto the street. The great thing, if we can get Thune to get this through the senate, is it’s a tool for victims and their families to finally get justice.
This bill also cuts off federal funding for any and all sanctuary states that continue to break federal law by harboring or releasing illegal aliens.
Here’s one of thousands of horrific stories the paid off “street walking” media refuses to report and gives a look into how these satanic state officials destroy lives and families across America. Really who do these scumbags think they are.
An illegal “trans gender” man, wanted for horrific sex crimes against children in New Jersey and in Massachusetts, deliberately followed a 14 year old boy from the Thomas Jefferson Park in East Harlem into the bathroom of a bodega across the street and viciously raped the boy. The boy after being viscously and sadistically raped somehow managed to crawl out of the bodega and flag down witnesses on the street. The police were called and “Nicol” Suarez was arrested the following day.
The big story inside the story is Maura Healy, Massachusetts Governor, had Suarez in custody. ICE had sent the detainer to local law enforcement in Medford Ma. and directly to Maura Healy and said you’ve got a dangerous criminal, a child rapist, a sexual predator, illegally in this country from Columbia, we want this person, don’t let this person go. This person was arrested, this person was released without bail, and hence this person disappeared. Local and state police and mainly Maura Healy, let this animal go, and he fled to New York where he struck again. Tom Homan on X said, “America wants Maura Healy in prison”. When is enough enough? Well I guess if the RINOS can redeem themselves just once this bill, which would be law, covered by meddling judges, would make a huge difference! I could tell you a thousand stories but I think this one is enough.
God gave you the flu, Jeff, because he knew that at a cellular level the repairing that your body would undergo would ALSO strengthen your humor gene, not that it needed to be stronger, but your humor is out of the gate of healing like a rocket ship. I laughed the whole way through this today. Practically every sentence giving me the giggles.
What a joy and blessing you are to us. ❤️ I begin my day with C&C and the sun shines no matter the weather.