The Hunting Wives (Netflix 2025)
First things first: yes, some big names are on board, but this show is trash. But that’s never stopped me from enjoying a tv show before, and it didn’t stop me this time!
First things first: yes, some big names are on board, but this show is trash. But that’s never stopped me from enjoying a tv show before, and it didn’t stop me this time!
I’ve sifted through a bunch of questionnaires and news articles to try to figure out who to vote for on Tuesday, and I thought I’d share some thoughts.
A note on me: I’m significantly to the left of most folks in city government. I don’t agree with everything Mayor Wu has done, but overall I believe she’s doing a good job. I’d like to see more bike lanes and center-lane busways, and a more aggressive push for rent control, but overall, I’m a fan.
A note on strategy: I’ve had people asking me about “bullet voting,” where you vote for fewer than the 4 people you’re allowed to vote for in an attempt to boost the vote totals of your chosen candidates. But this is really a strategy for when you’re trying to get a single candidate into a body that’s largely against your priorities. We’re lucky in Boston right now in that our city council is pretty progressive. There are a number of bad candidates in the mix, so we need to fill the available spots with progressive candidates in an effort to shut the conservatives out.
Here we go!
The obvious choices:
Ruthzee Louijeune
Henry Santana
Louijeune is a star. Santana is a reliable vote on the right side of the issues. They get 2 of my 4 votes.
The less obvious choices, but both are getting my vote:
Julia Mejia—you know that person at work who is really annoying in meetings and talks for ages about things that are only tangentially related to the topic at hand? Yeah, that’s Julia Mejia. But she is a reliable progressive vote, and I’m not the one who has to sit in meetings with her. (With the exception of the occasional community meeting.)
Marvin Mathelier—I’ve been put off by his campaign materials in which he touts his status as a small business owner (of Ula Cafe, which has gotten significantly worse since he took it over) and a Marine (I mean, fine, but Pete Hegseth was a marine too. It’s not a relevant or impressive qualification for city government). But looking at his questionnaire answers, he’s on the right side of a lot of important issues, and people I know and respect have been really impressed by him.
The Nopes:
Erin Murphy—The “Old, racist Boston” candidate . I mean, okay, it was her sister who sent racist communications to her fellow city councilors, but I think the difference between Erin and her sister is just that Erin is smarter at hiding her bigotry. Hard no.
Frank Baker—Another conservative. Let me say this—the only vehicle I have ever seen parked in Jamaica Plain with a Trump sticker belongs to a family with big Frank Baker signs all over their yard.
Will Onuoha—Yet another conservative candidate. In pre-election forums and questionnaires, hewed very closely to Murphy and Baker in his answers.
Alexandra Valdez—Not terrible on most issues, but said in a forum that she supports Boston Police sharing their inaccurate, racist gang database with Federal authorities through the Regional Intelligence Center, so that’s enough to get her a no from me.
Rachel Miselman—unlike right-wing democrats Murphy and Baker, Miselman is an actual Republican. No actual fascists on Boston City Council, please.
Yves Mary Jean—possibly interesting candidate who hasn’t attended any candidate forums or filled out any questionnaires. This isn’t a serious candidacy, so I assume he’s doing some resume building here.
Okay, I wrote a clickbait-y headline. I don’t know this for a fact. I’m just inferring it.
I answered the first push poll I got from research-polls, a shady outfit that turns out to be one guy in his condo in Fort Lauderdale. So now I get ‘em all!
The third and most recent one begins with the standard “do you have a favorable or unfaborable opinion of this person” question. So we’ve got Michelle Wu, Josh Kraft, Donald Trump, and…Marty Walsh?!
What possible reason could Mr. Research-Polls (I picture him as an extremely sweaty, bespectacled white guy with a mustache in a dirty Hawaiian shirt hunched over a bank of monitors in a dark room, though of course I know everybody in Florida has AC) have for asking me about Marty Walsh? He’s not running for anything!
Yesterday I traveled to scenic Worcester, Massachusetts, to watch the Worcester Red Sox (The Boston Red Sox’ AAA affilliate) play the Buffalo Bisons.
It was a beautiful day for baseball, and even counting the cost of driving 35 miles to Worcester and paying to park, it was still cheaper than going to a Red Sox game 3 miles from my house. Every seat in Polar Park is a great seat, and the atmosphere was fun. 4 mascots, because why not? Mascot race! Baby race! Kids trying to do things on the field on order to win stuff! The vibes were positive and family-friendly, and though the WooSox (doing business as the Wicked Worms of Worcester for the penultimate time! Catch them on September 5 vs. the Scranton/Wilkes Barre Rail Riders and say goodbye to this particular alter ego!) lost 6-3, everybody I went with had a wonderful time. (Baseball purists such as my friend Eric might object to the incessant stimuli—song snippets between at-bats, the aformentioned races and such between innings, etc. But I loved it!)
And, of course, I have some notes, mostly involving concessions.
I’ve seen a bunch of think pieces lately about pro wrestling, and how Trump was briefly involved with WWE, and how pro wrestling involves pretending that unreal things are real, and that explains Trump, or something. Sprinkle in a little condescension for wrestling and its fans, and you’re done!
I know my other Josh Kraft pieces are a bit wordy, so I’m going to try to keep this succinct, so you can send it to your friends and neighbors.
In April 2024, I bought an ebike—a discontinued Bird bike (you know, the people who litter the sidewalk with scooters!) that was deeply discounted and, because I got it at Ocean State Job Lot, it came with a large store coupon that they call Crazy Bucks, which meant I got to torment my family for the better part of a year by going, “I’ll pick up some seltzer! I still have 250 Crazy Bucks!”
So I went down one of those internet rabbit holes yesterday looking at left-wing gun clubs. Not because I’m thinking of buying a gun, but just because I thought it might be interesting to see what the arguments for gun ownership were from the left, and whether I found those arguments more compelling than the right wing ones.
So I watched 2 Japanese horror movies over the weekend. I wasn’t doing a theme night or anything—I just like watching horror movies from other countries and cultures because even indie American horror movies tend to lean pretty hard on familiar tropes, whereas outside of the US, you get filmmakers making weird, idiosyncratic movies that are harder to find here. (See, for example, Oddity or Frewaka, both from Ireland, both excellent.)
I am not a big money donor to my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania. I’m not even a small money donor. So I’m sure they won’t care, but I just want it publicly noted that Penn is a repugnant institution. Here’s the email I sent the alumni office, the president, and the trustees: