Star Trekking: TNG By Character - Jean-Luc Picard

Welcome to Star Trekking, my blog berth for my Star Trek fandom.

A few months ago, I did a look back at Star Trek: The Next Generation where in over 7 different posts, I picked one episode from each season to spotlight, beginning here and ending here.  

 

Starting today, I’m going to take another pass through TNG, this time focusing on one cast member per post.  This will include the regular cast as well as significant recurring characters.

 

In light of the recent passing of Patrick Stewart, I’ve elected to start at the peak, the top dog on the Enterprise D, Capt. Jean-Luc Picard.

 

As the Captain, Picard is central to almost every episode but I want to look at the episodes that provide an unique focus on the son of the vineyard farmer turned space explorer.

 

We’ll Always Have Paris

Picard spent most of the first season being stern and aloof, keeping a certain remove from those under his command.

This episode gives us some perspective on the young man Picard was before.  Apparently he was a bit of a cad not above ghosting a woman he was ostensibly in love with.

JENICE: We have unfinished business.

PICARD: Yes, we do.

JENICE: Why didn't you come to meet me that last day in Paris?

PICARD: I was afraid.

JENICE: Oh, I didn't want this.

PICARD: What?

JENICE: The truth.

PICARD: Oh, you want me to lie?

JENICE: Of course. A nice, soft, painless lie.

PICARD: Oh, I got the days confused. I thought it was Tuesday when it was Wednesday. I went to the Cafe Moulin instead of the Cafe des Artistes.

JENICE: Ah, that's better. 

 

Samaritan Snare

This is NOT a good episode but we can’t talk about Picard’s character development without it.  

The episode establishes Jean-Luc has an artificial heart and the circumstance of how it came to be.  Picard makes a rather momentous decision to open up to Wesley as he shares the tale of his reckless youth and how he came to be stabbed through the heart by an angry Nausican.

PICARD: My mates and I were at the Bonestell Recreation Facility, which was something of a dead rough crossroads at the time, filled with an assorted bunch of galactic riffraff. When a trio of Nausicaans came in, they were clearly spoiling for a confrontation with a group of fresh-faced Starfleet officers such as ourselves. 

Well, everyone in the group had the good sense to give these Nausicaans a wide berth, to stand off. Everyone, that is, except me. I stood toe to toe with the worst of the three, and I told him what I thought of him, his pals, his planet, and I possibly made some passing reference to his questionable parentage. And the next thing I knew, all three of them were on me and I was fighting for my life. I was actually doing quite well for a while.

WESLEY: You fought them? And won?

PICARD: I had this one Nausicaan down in this somewhat devious joint-lock when, unbeknownst to me, one of his chums drew his weapon and impaled me through the back. Curious sensation, actually. Not much pain. Shock, certainly, at the sight of serrated metal sticking through my chest. A certain giddy warmth. In fact I do actually remember that I laughed out loud. Well, it pierced my heart, of course. Well, if we'd not been so near to a medical facility, I would surely have died.

WESLEY: Really? Then what happened?

PICARD: Nothing. I was no hero, Wesley. I was an undisciplined, loud-mouthed, opinionated young man who was way out of his league. I learned a very hard, very painful lesson that day, but I learned it well. I hope you never have to learn it the same way. 

This line "I do actually remember that I laughed out loud" will be relevant later.  

Captain’s Holiday

Another episode that does not hold up as one of TNG’s best but it puts Picard in a position of being cut off from the resources of his ship and in a relationship with Vash, a woman who has not quite moved on from the recklessness that marked Picard’s youth.

  

Q-Pid

Q returns and places Picard and the crew in Sherwood Forest as Robin Hood and his Merry Men.

WORF: "Captain, I MUST protest! I am NOT a Merry Man!"

Vash returns and puts Picard in the awkward position of having his responsibilities as a Captain and his life as a man come into conflict.  

Family

TNG does something unprecedented with an episode without an alien threat or some cosmic crisis to contend with. 

Picard's ordeal with the Borg in The Best of Both Worlds remains a source of trauma that Jean-Luc is trying his damnedest not to deal with. Staying with Robert, his stern overbearing brother at the family vineyard sufficiently stirs the emotional pot enough to force Jean-Luc to finally break down and admit to his trauma, to the abuse he suffered at the hands of the Borg and Picard's guilt over not being strong enough.

Jean-Luc's fist fight with his brother in the muddy fields of the vineyard is powerful and cathartic. 

It also leads to a charmingly funny scene when Jean-Luc and Robert awkwardly explain to Robert's wife Marie why there's mud everywhere.

(There's mud, and muddy boots, on the carpet, and drunken voices singing 'Aupres de ma blonde, qu'il fait bon, fait bon, fait bon' dum, dum, dum. Marie enters from outside)

MARIE: What in the world? What happened here?

ROBERT: Ah

PICARD: It's entirely my fault, Marie.

ROBERT: Yes, I fell down, then he fell and then...

PICARD: We both fell down.

ROBERT: We both fell down.

PICARD: Together.

ROBERT: We both fell down together.

MARIE: Have you two been fighting?

ROBERT: Fighting? No, certainly not.

Darmok

This episode is quite a classic. Picard is stranded on a hostile alien world, alone with Darmok, the captain of an alien ship. 

Universal translator be damned, they can't frickin' understand each other.

It is fascinating to watch Jean-Luc's slow build towards epiphany as he pieces together why he and Darmok are on this planet. They are their to learn how to communicate so they can survive the dangers of this planet.  

  

Chain of Command Part 2

I'll be honest, this is not an episode I particularly enjoy. Watching someone being physically and mentally tortured is NOT my idea of entertainment. BUT...

Jean-Luc Picard's grueling ordeal at the hands of Madred, a cruel Cardassian taskmaster is intense and a master class in acting from Patrick Stewart.

The cruelest test by Madred is insisting Picard succumb to his captor's perception of reality.   Madred sits a desk under four lights.  He says he will release Picard from his torments if he agrees there are five lights.

Picard's strength and fortitude are remarkable.

PICARD: There! Are! FOUR! Lights!

Back on the Enterprise, Picard confesses to Deanna Troi that there were cracks in his armor. 

PICARD: I, er, I don't know where to begin. It was...

TROI: I read your report.

PICARD: What I didn't put in the report was that at the end he gave me a choice between a life of comfort or more torture. All I had to do was to say that I could see five lights, when in fact, there were only four.

TROI: You didn't say it?

PICARD: No, no, but I was going to. I would have told him anything. Anything at all. But more than that, I believed that I could see five lights.

Gambit Part 1 and 2  and Starship Mine

These episodes present opportunities to recast Jean-Luc Picard from wise and thoughtful Captain to action hero.  

It's cool to see the bald, thin Englishman that Gene Roddenberry did not see as his next Capt. Kirk being a total bad ass.  

Tapestry

Captain Jean-Luc Picard dies! 

(A bright white void. There is a figure also in shimmering white nearby. Picard touches its hand and then sees who it is.)

Q: Welcome to the afterlife, Jean-Luc. You're dead.

PICARD: Q, what is going on?

Q: I told you. You're dead. This is the afterlife, and I'm God.

PICARD: You are not God.

Q: Blasphemy! You're lucky I don't cast you out, or smite you or something. The bottom line is, your life ended about five minutes ago, under the inept ministrations of Doctor Beverly Crusher.

PICARD: No. I am not dead. Because I refuse to believe that the afterlife is run by you. The universe is not so badly designed.

It seems an alien energy beam to the chest would not have killed Picard if he still had his human heart instead of the mechanical one. 

TNG goes all Quantum Leap on us as Q sends Picard back in time to relive and re-do the youthful indiscretions that led to him being stabbed through the heart by Nausicans.  

Picard is able to avoid being stabbed by the Nausicans even though it comes at the cost of the very friends he was trying to save.  

But the cruelest twist to Picard's new fate comes when finds himself later in life assigned to the Enterprise as a dull, inhibited low ranking science officer.  Reversing the recklessness of his youth undoes the very path that made Jean-Luc into a Starfleet Captain.  

PICARD: You gave me the chance to change and I took the opportunity. But I admit now, it was a mistake.

Q: Are you asking me for something, Jean-Luc?

PICARD: Give me a chance to put things back the way they were before.

Q: Before you died in Sickbay. Is that what you want?

PICARD: I would rather die as the man I was than live the life I just saw.

So Q rewinds time and....

NAUSICAAN: Coward. Like all Starfleet. You talk and you talk but you have no guramba.

PICARD: What did you say?

NAUSICAAN: I said, you are a coward.

PICARD: That's what I thought you said.

(and Picard hits the Nausicaan. Picard gets stabbed, sees the knife sticking out of his chest, and laughs)

[Sickbay.  Picard is laughing on the biobed)

CRUSHER: His vital signs are stable. Captain. Jean-Luc. You've been injured, but I think you're going to be all right.

Picard's laugh is a nice call back to the story he told Wesley Crusher back in season 2.  

PICARD to WESLEY: I do actually remember that I laughed out loud.

The next episode on my list actually aired in season 5 before Tapestry but I wanted to save what I think is the best Picard centric episode for last.  

Inner Light

An alien probe sends Picard into the life of Kamin on a world called Kataan.

It is a very fascinating journey watch Jean-Luc go from a very reluctant passenger in Kamin's life to fully living Kamin's life as a husband, father and grandfather as the episode covers years, decades in this life. 

One element that helps us track this passage of time is Kamin becomes more proficient at playing the flute.

He also becomes aware of the grim reality that his world is dying. The sun is getting hotter and the water is drying up. 

Kataan is dying.  

Kamin is talking to his daughter and delivers a most moving piece of profound wisdom.

PICARD: Seize the time. Live now. Make now always the most precious time. Now will never come again.

This line has been quoted a lot in the many tributes offered in the wake of Patrick Stewart's passing.  

The probe was the way for the people of Kataan to remind the universe they once existed and they can live on in someone's memory.

We hoped our probe would encounter someone in the future. Someone who could be a teacher. Someone who could tell the others about us.  We have been gone for a thousand years. If you remember what we were, and how we lived, then we'll have found life again.

Back on the Enterprise, Picard is given a box that was recovered from the probe. The box contains Kamin's flute.

And Jean-Luc knows how to play it.

These are not the only episodes that put the spotlight on Jean-Luc Picard but I think I will leave it here for this post. And the episodes covered here are among my favorite moments with Patrick Stewart as the indomitable Capt. Jean-Luc Picard.

No matter the episode, Patrick Stewart always elevated Jean-Luc Picard and Star Trek: The Next Generation to a higher standard.  

So who is next for the TNG character spotlight? I have no idea. I haven't worked out the methodology of my approach yet.

Thanks as always to Chrissie's Transcripts Site for the script excerpts.

Until next time, live long and prosper and make now always the most precious time. 

Movie Time: Penelope

After a month of posts about horror movies of questionable quality and taste, I'm going to turn over November's cinematic posts to the tender mercies of female women of the opposite sex.

We're going to go back 60 years to November 10, 1966 for today's film

It's Movie Time! 

Today's post is about an American comedy caper film called Penelope.

The movie stars Natalie Wood, Peter Falk, Jonathan Winters, and Dick Shawn. 

Guess which one plays Penelope?  

On the surface, Penelope Elcott has a pretty sweet life. Married to a wealthy banker named James, she's a young beautiful woman with an eye for fashion and ensconced at the upper echelons of high society.

So why is she robbing her husband's bank?

She enters the bank as a dowdy grey haired old lady with a sweet smile, a friendly nature and a gun. She approaches a teller and makes an ever so pleasant demand for money.

An alarm goes off alerting there is a bank robbery.

In the ensuing chaos, the "old woman" disappears into a ladies room and later a different younger woman with red hair and a canary yellow suit exits.  

While the police and bank executives are rushing about trying to find the sweet old lady who just robbed them, the now red haired Penelope calmly walks out of the bank.

Later she doffs the red wig in favor of her natural brunette 'do and changes out of the yellow suit.

She gives away a bunch of the money to the Salvation Army and donates the yellow suit to a thrift shop.  

Penelope visits her psychiatrist Gregory and tells him of her criminal activities that began when she was in college and continuing after she got married, stealing various jewelry trinkets from her high society "friends".  Then she moved on to the big time, robbing a bank.

Gregory is torn. Penelope's confession makes him an accessory to her crimes. But she's also his favorite patient. The psychiatrist is working a serious crush on Penelope.

Meanwhile, Penelope's perfect crime is on the verge of being solved: Horatio, a police detective, has a young woman named Honeysuckle Rose in custody as the prime suspect.  

Penelope doesn't want an innocent woman to go to jail. So what's a girl to do? You might suggest confessing the crime should do it.  You might think but Penelope finds that isn't as easy as she thought.

What?  A rich, pretty, high society wife robbing a bank? Really?

Penelope is supposed to be some kind of broad satire taking aim at a wide variety of targets:  vanity, sexism, hypocrisy, capitalism, greed, sex. 

Unsure of it's targets or it's tone, Penelope lands as a muddled mess.  Natalie Woods does her darnedest to salvage this mess with her natural winsome charms which is what drew me to this movie when it popped up on TCM one day.

Peter Falk also holds our attention as the detective Horatio whose rumpled exterior and plain spoken manner belies his intelligence and insight.  Horatio can be seen as a clear forerunner of Falk's iconic role as Columbo.

But Penelope tries too hard to be too many things and sometimes it's disjointed tone just gets weird.

We get a 3 minute sequence where Penelope flashes back to her time in college and a college professor played by legendary comedian Jonathan Winters. The professor is a sex fiend who wants to fuck Penelope.  In an over the top sequence staged like a Benny Hill sketch, the professor chases young Penelope around a laboratory, lustfully lunging and pawing at her as her dress keeps tearing until she's stripped down to her bra and panties before making her escape. 

I don't care if it was the 1960's and it's a scene with Jonathan Winters, attempted rape is not funny.  

Penelope the character deserves better. She's smart and clever as evidenced by the flawless execution of the bank robbery at the start of the film. But as the movie progresses, Penelope has no agency.  She is subsumed and dismissed by the upper crust of society, her husband, the police, even her own psychiatrist who loses his objectivity and wants Penelope to run off with him.

All of this is just part of the joke, the whole point, that in the nascent days of the sexual revolution and women's liberation, a woman as smart and clever as Penelope is sublimated to the perceptions of others.

Penelope only achieves happiness in the end when she finally regains the attention of her husband Gregory.  

All in all, Penelope is not a satisfying experience.

Well, at least Natalie Wood looked good in it, sporting a $250,000 wardrobe from legendary film costume designer Edith Head.  

But while Wood may have looked good, she did not feel good.

After the major success of West Side Story, Natalie Wood was on a hot streak with a series of hit movies and acclaimed dramatic performances such as her role in Inside Daisy Clover.

But her personal life was a mess.  

Following a divorce from Robert Wagner, and the end of her much-publicized affair with Warren Beatty, she'd had a series of brief and unsatisfactory relationships, which had left her deeply depressed. While making Penelope, Wood was in a fragile emotional state. 

Natalie Wood later recalled the making of Penelope as one of the most difficult experiences of her career. "I broke out in hives and suffered anguish that was very real pain every day we shot. Arthur Hiller, the director, kept saying, 'Natalie, I think you're resisting this film,' while I rolled around the floor in agony."

The film was a box-office disappointment and critics were unkind in their assessments.   

The experience of making Penelope and it's resulting poor performance was so negative, Natalie Wood did not make another movie for three years. 

Personally, I found Penelope to be a pleasant enough distraction saved by performances by Natalie Wood and Peter Falk and the gorgeous fashion designs of Edith Head, but yeah, everyone involved in this deserved better. 

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Tomorrow, we go Star Trekking.

Next Saturday, Movie Time returns with a film from the 1930's that puts the spotlight on a female woman of the opposite sex.

Your Friday Video Link: SNL Meets Sesame Street

Last week, we celebrated Halloween by way of Saturday Night Live.

This week, Your Friday Video Link revisits SNL once more, this time through Sesame Street.

I gotta say, Elmo does a pretty good Lorne Micheals impression.

More SNL via Sesame Street at the Update desk.

No fair saying "Sesame Street SNL is funnier than regular SNL".

It's a terribly cliched troll thing to say.

It also might be true and we don't want to hurt Keenan Thompson's feelings.

That's all for now. Everyone be good to one another.  

Banana Split

 It's the day after the mid terms election day and..

You guessed it! 

I'm taking a flyer on bloggin'! 

OK, a quick check in on Cassie and Lauren's pursuit of the world record for longest journey by toy car.

It looked like our intrepid duo hit an insurmountable obstacle that would lay low their toy car adventure.

Yay, Dan the Welder! 

Can he weld it?

YES HE CAN!!! 

The adventure continues! 

Yesterday was election day for the 2026 midterms and it looks good for the Democrats.  

"Good" may be an understatement.  Control of the House AND the Senate? Damn skippy! 

On that subject of the fallout of yesterday's voting, I will probably take a run at that in Monday's political post.

I'm also taking Thursday off as well.  

The blog will be back for Your Friday Video Link. 

Until next time, keep your head down, stay safe out there and remember to be good to one another.

Tuesday TV Touchbase: Ghosts and More (Post Halloween Edition)

It's a post Halloween Tuesday TV Touchbase! 

 Last week, Ghosts returned to the CBS schedule for a Halloween special.

Andrea and I have really missed this series since season 5 ended with an alarming turn of events: Pete vanished! 

Pete is the one ghost at Woodstone Manor that can leave the property. The downside of that ability is that if he's gone too long, he starts to vanish.

Last season, Jay, Kyle (who like Sam can see ghosts) and Pete journeyed to London on a mission to find crucial intel that would save the always imperiled Woodstone Manor.  

On the overlong trip back home, Pete began to vanish to the point of being just a head. And within miles of the manor, it was too late: Pete had completely vanished.  

The special opens with the ghost gang at Woodstone working to hold a séance on Halloween to bring him back.

Kyle is sticking around to help Jay out with the ghosts. Sam sold her screenplay for "Polar Opposites" last season which is being filmed in Australia where Sam is on set.  

TV SHOW FUN FACT: Sam can't see the ghosts through Zoom. Apparently her gift only works for spirits who are present with her.  

REAL LIFE FUN FACT: Rose McIver is on maternity leave for the birth of her 2nd child, hence Sam's temporary write out. For Rose's first pregnancy, Sam stayed behind the reservation desk a lot.

While playing basketball inside the house, Kyle and Jay accidentally break one of the manor's vintage mirrors.

Jay's desperate to replace it before Sam returns. So a near duplicate replacement is located and brought to the manor.

A mirror with a surprise inside: the ghost of Hetty's sister, Margaret.  

TV SHOW FUN FACT: Apparently if you see yourself in a mirror at the moment of your death, you get trapped in that mirror. Which is what happened to Margaret and she blames Hetty for leaving the mirror in the room where Margaret lay dying. But Hetty needed the mirror to do lines of cocaine. 

Besides the thing with the mirror, there's a lot of other unresolved feeling of hurt and betrayal between the two sisters to fuel more than a century of animosity.  

Things take a turn when Margaret escapes the mirror and traps Hetty inside.  

Then things get worse when this mirror also get shattered

That's gonna be a lot of bad luck for Woodstone Manor.

Long story made short: 

the mirror is reassembled 

Hetty has an epiphany about how she hurt her sister over a hundred years ago

Margaret and Hetty do come to an understanding.

Margaret agrees to return to the mirror because she doesn't want to be stuck in Woodstone Manor but she really does want to go to Paris. And she can go wherever the mirror goes. So Jay and Kyle ship the mirror to Paris where ghost Trevor's daughter Abby is going to art school. 

By the way, what the heck happened to Pete?

He pops up at the end, screaming in terror! He believes he just died and has no idea what happened to him or who all these people in the manor!  It's has if everything he's learned and experienced since his death in 1985 has been wiped clean! 

What the hell is up with that?

I supposed we will learn more when Ghosts returns for it's Christmas special in December.  

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Other shows with Halloween themes Andrea and I watched.

Happy's Place   

Isabella introduces her sister Bobbi to Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead.  Some hilarity and drama ensue as the two sisters of different mothers reconcile their relationships with their late father.

The day this episode was filmed was the same day Dolly Parton died. The episode ends with a dedication to Dolly.

Dolly & Reba in 2015

Georgie & Mandy's First Marriage 

It's the 1990's so Missy wants to dress like Ginger Spice for Halloween. Mary Cooper, even more rigid and judgmental than she was on Young Sheldon forbids it. Missy moves in with the McAllisters.

Reddit weighed in on Missy's Ginger Spice look and came to her defense against Mary.  

Cee Cee's third Halloween sees the young tyke dressed as a dinosaur and Georgie puts on glasses to look like Jeff Goldblum from Jurassic Park. The two grandmothers (Audrey & Mary) compete on making Cee Cee her dinosaur costume.  It really irks Audrey that Mary made a better costume.  (Which is rich since that Mary as a super religious nut case doesn't believe in dinosaurs.)

Abbott Elementary

Principal Ava throws a Halloween rave and does not invite the teachers. The teachers come anyway and Ava frets they're killing the vibe.  But everyone's having fun but Ava's pissed they're not having fun her way.

“They’re dancing like they’re free to be themselves!” Ava declares, all annoyed.

Barbara dresses as a "cheesecake factory" and her husband as a "red lobster".

Get it? 

Also, Gregory's secret mission to buy Janine an engagement ring goes awry with a sketchy jewelry store in a strip mall run by a woman who is so obviously high as hell. 

Janine figures out Gregory's secret. It's something she's dreamed of since she was a little girl.

"Gregory's getting me a puppy!"

Scrubs

Turk is disappointed that his youngest daughter has aged out of Trick or Treating.  Dorian has a fantasy sequence (that has NOTHING to do with Halloween, it's just Dorian being himself) where he's Mary Poppins and Dr. Cox is an English moppet. 

Saturday Night Live 

It's Halloween and we get a return of Tom Hanks as David S. Pumpkins.... really? 

Nope! BOO! It's "your one true god", Donald Trump! James Austin Johnson with his patented "interrupt a sketch with a stream of consciousness monologue".

Usually Johnson's "Trump interrupts a sketch" bit works pretty damn well but it seems the audience was really disappointed not to get more David S. Pumpkins.  

Me, I was OK with it. David S. Pumpkins has a limited shelf life for a decent 1 1/2 sketches.   

Inde Navarrette was the host this week. I've never heard of her but apparently she was in this year's best horror film, Obsession.  

Inde does a good job in the sketches and gets a dig in at Shane Gillis' infamous "women at the gym dress like whores" monologue from 2 weeks ago. (Andrea & I skipped that episode to avoid Shane Gillis. What the hell does Lorne see in this guy?)

And Gracie Abrams was the musical guest. Never heard of her either but she has a nice voice.

And that is that for Halloween! 

Now bring on all the Christmas crap! 

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That's all folks for this week's Tuesday TV Touchbase!

Until next time, remember to be good to one another and try to keep it down in there, would ya? I'm trying to watch TV over here.   

Midterm Madness

Tomorrow is the moment of truth, folks.

Election day for the 2026 midterms.  

It's been a white knuckle ride as we barrel towards an election that will answer the most crucial question of our time.

Does Ohio Sen. John Husted have a great ass or what?

Donald Trump's marathon of rally speeches has been the usual litany of fear mongering, lies, hate rhetoric, more lies, self aggrandizing, even more lies, threats, many more lies, racism and did I mention all the lies?

I did not have on my Li'l Donnie Bingo Card an obsession with men's asses.

Der Führer did seek to reassert his heterosexuality by raving about what a great ass Nicki Minaj has!

Other than the unpredicted predilection with posteriors, Li'l Donnie has just been trotting out the same tired bullshit day after day.  

The guy over on Let's Discuss Something (who I believe is named "Chris") dutifully listens to Donald Trump's speeches and provides recaps.  But the most recent rally romp in South Carolina broke him.  

Chris held in there longer than I would have and is to be commended for his sacrifice.

"Thank you for your service, sir!" 

For all of us with more than one brain cell to rub together, we are where you are, Chris.

We are all so TIRED of this... this...  Hell, you know I gotta say it!  

We all are so tired of this lying, petulant, bullying, unintelligent, sociopathic, dishonorable, treasonous, gutless, moronic, heartless, soulless, slimy, loathsome, vile, incompetent, psychotic, crooked, disgusting, reprehensible, revolting, horrible, malicious, obnoxious, hateful, narcissistic, small-minded, despicable god damn, motherfucking piece of shit!

Amen!

So what now?

Tomorrow is election day and if the polls are right, it may well be a significant tipping point in salvaging the sorry state of our nation that Trump has denigrated us to.

If the Democrats take the House and the Senate, we will have a Congress that is actually prepared to push back on Trump's every petulant whim instead of the constant capitulation perpetuated by the corrupt and compromised Republican Party.

If....

"If" is a powerful word.  We know the pollsters are talking a good game that Democrats are genuinely competitive in certain areas where Republicans have long been dominant. 

The term "blue wave" has been bandied about as to what we can expect on Tuesday.  

Could deep red Texas that voted for Donald Trump THREE times actually send Democrat James Talarico to the US Senate over his less qualified and more corrupt competitor Ken Paxton?

When Texans enter the voting booth, will there actually be enough dissatisfaction with the Republican status quo to actually vote for the better candidate?

Or will the calcified mindset of "better dead than Democrat" persist in spite of a diminished economy at home, diminished influence abroad and a Republican candidate diminished by scandal and incompetence? 

Looking at the state of America right now, brought down low by Donald Trump's corruption and mismanagement, it would seem that it would be a fait accompli that the Republicans in power during this downward spiral would have to answer for it.

But old bad habits die hard.

And those who have brought our nation to this sorry state have a persistent track record of avoiding consequences.

I remember sitting with my mother in 2016 watching CNN when Donald Trump was first running for President. She was worried that he might actually win.

I tried to assure her that America wasn't so STUPID to vote for a man so obviously STUPID. 

America made me lie to my mother.

In 2024 with Donald Trump trying to get to be President again, my wife Andrea was worried that he might actually win.

I tried to assure her that America wouldn't be so STUPID again to vote for a man so obviously STUPID again! 

America made me lie to my wife.

As we sit here a day away from election day 2026, I wish I could assure myself that America isn't so STUPID to keeping voting for men and women who blindly support a man so obviously STUPID. 

I'm afraid America might make me lie to myself. 

This midterm madness is stressing me out. 

Please, I do hope we can be better, do better and save ourselves from ourselves.