A glance at the headlines tells me that the big revelation this week is that the solution to America's gun violence epidemic is to build an oversized ballroom on the public dime. If only JFK's motorcade had thought of that. 

But enough dwelling on the news of the day, we've got some light extemporania to distract ourselves with. Right after some more weighty matters, of course.

We're electing a new governor where I live this year, as the current occupant is being termed out, allowing him to pursue his twin passions of podcasting with right-wing charlatans and finishing fourth in the New Hampshire primary. As this will be an election without an incumbent, we have quite a few candidates vying to be California's next governor — perhaps too many, as it turns out.

The voter information guide I received in the mail over the weekend lists 41 potential candidates for governor. That number is certainly inflated with no-hopers like Barack D. Obama Shaw (campaign slogan: Please read no further than my first and middle names) and LivingForGod AndCountry DeMott (and yes, that name is capitalized exactly like that), plus a couple of candidates have subsequently removed thenselves from the race. Eric Swalwell is gone after credible accusations of sex pestery and former State Controller Betty Yee dropped out after failing to gain enough traction in polls.

By my count, based on the premise that they've either held elected office or have garnered enough backing in polls to be considered legitimate contenders, that leaves eight credible candidates in the race. Even that might be overstating it, as the likes of former Los Angeles mayor Anthony Villaraigosa and current State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond have the kind of voter supporter that can charitably be called "statistical anomalies." And this is proving to be an area of concern for Democrats.

California uses what is called a top-two primary system, meaning all the candidates are thrown into a big pile for the primary vote and the top two vote-getters advance to the general election in the fall, even if they're in the same party. 

With so many Democrats in the race and no one really emerging as a front-runner, some polls have placed two Republicans — Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco — in the lead. In others, California — a state in which Democrats hold a very large advantage in voter registration — could wind up picking between two GOP choices in the fall, unless at least one Democratic candidate gets their act together by the Jume primary.

(Chad Bianco, the blowhard sheriff of Riverside County deserves special mention in this space. You may remember him from the 2024 presidential election when he claimed to have thwarted a potential assassination of Donald Trump at a rally in his jurisdiction; turns out he just arrested some rando Trump supporter who happened to be packing heat. As a consequence, the rando Trump supporter is suing Chad Bianco. The sheriff also tried to lend credence to Donald Trump's election rigging fantasies by seizing ballots from a special election in Riverside county, alleging that something fishy was going on. The only thing fishy was Bianco's investigation, which he's since been forced to abandon. For this fealty from Chad Bianco, Donald Trump has rewarded him by endorsing his opponent.)

The situation seems to be adjust with a little more than a month to go before the June 2 primary — Xavier Becerra, who was the state attorney general before leaving to serve in the Biden cabinet, has seen his numbers improve now that we've fired Eric Swalwell into the sun — but I still see people huffing and puffing on social network about how a top-two primary is a terrible way of doing things. And let me tell you, as a Californian, it is not.

A top-two primary forces incumbents to remain on their toes, lest they have to face an opponent from within their own party instead of some easily beatable joke candidate from the opposition party who's only on the fall ballot to make up the numbers. Pete Stark was a pretty good congressman in the 1970s and 1980s, but by the time he ran for re-election in 2012, he had lost more than a few miles per hour off his fastball. Still, he served a solidly Democratic district, and would have kept going returning to Washington until six of his friends carried him out horizontally... except he had to face a more on-the-ball Democrat in the 2012 general election, which he lost. 

(His opponent was... um... Eric Swalwell, but nobody knew about the sex pest stuff at the time.)

Indeed, up until now, California's top-two primaries have generally meant that two Democrats face each other in the fall election, given that the California Republican Party finds itself at odds with the things people in this state tend to value. (Function democracy, a coastline that’s not covered in oil derricks, gay people not hunted for sport — that sort of thing.) Kamala Harris got elected to the Senate in 2016 by besting another Dem, and Dianne Feinstein's final election forced her to stave off a more liberal candidate. That this year's gubernatorial election could feature two Republicans is less a reflection of the flaws of the top-two system and more an indictment of the current crop of Democratic candidates who have a) failed to generate much enthusiasm up until now and b) neglected to clear the field for candidates with a better shot.

I still think California is going to have a Democratic governor after this next election. And I hope that panicky pols don't scrap the top-two primary system just to cover up for their own failings.

Alan Sepinwall's What's Alan Watching newsletter tackled the imminent launch of an animated Stranger Things spin-off by exploring the 1980s practice of turning popular shows into Saturday-morning fare. The free version of the newsletter cut off before I could really see which older shows merited a mention — buddy, I'd love to subscribe, but I'm a little short on regular income at the moment — so I don't know if Alan mentioned any of the three programs that I immediately think of when my thoughts turn to Saturday morning cartoons spun off from the sitcoms of the day. And I do think about such things often.

Laverne & Shirley: Were children really so into the Laverne & Shirley sitcom that ABC felt a need to do a Saturday morning version? Apparently so, because for 21 glorious episodes in 1981 and 1982, that's exactly what we got. 

But it wasn't just a regular version of Laverne & Shirley as they went about their daily adventures in the great Milwaukee area. In the animated series, Laverne and Shirley had joined the army, apparently mirroring an episode from the original series that had aired a few seasons earlier. In the cartoon, however, their immediate superior was a pig voiced by Ron "Horshack" Palillo.

What was a pig doing in the United States Army? 9-year-old me wondered every time I tuned into the animated version of Laverne & Shirley. More to the point, how had the pig impressed Army brass enough to the point where they promoted him to the rank of sergeant? Did the other non-commissioned officers resent Sgt. Squealy's unprecedented rise? Given the timing of the series, did the pig serve any significant time in Vietnam?

These are questions that plague me to this day about Laverne & Shirley — that and where the hell were Lenny and Squiggy, since it seems like those would be the Laverne & Shirley characters who actually appealed to children.

Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams provided the voices for their animated characters, which I find interesting since the two famously did not get along on the set of the sitcom. I suppose it's easier when you're recording your lines in separate audio booths.

The Brady Kids: This was not really a 1980s cartoon, since it made its debut in 1972. For the first season of the show, all the real Brady Bunch kid actors supplied their own voices, though by Season 2, Barry Williams and Maureen McCormick apparently decided they had better things to do.

It's kind of hard to blame them. All I remember is that the Brady kids got trapped on an island where they had strange and wonderful adventures accompanied by a mynah bird and a pair of pandas called Ping and Pong. (It was the '70s. Our children's TV shows were not enlightened.) But online descriptions of the show tell me that the Bradys eventually returned from the island for less strange and wonderful adventures, and the mynah bird came with them. At some point in each episode, the kids sang a song. I guess Mike and Carol were pretty checked out at this point.

The Super Globetrotters: This one wasn't based on a TV show per se, though the Globetrotters were regulars on Wide World of Sports at this point. Of course, the regular basketball playing Globetrotters lacked super-powers, which is something these animated Globetrotters had, because apparently that bucket full of confetti trick just wasn't enough to entrance the youths.

Nate Branch could turn into liquid and Curly Neal had bouncing limbs or some such thing. Sweet Lou Dunbar stored gadgets in his hair — sure, why not? — and Twiggy Sanders could transform into a coiled spaghetti man. Geese Ausby had the ability to multiply. I swear to you I am not imagining these things.

Any time I think of 1970s/1980s cartoons, I flash back to a car ride with my wife when I told her that there was a Gummi Bears cartoon — there was you know — and she looked at me like I had horns growing out of my head. Singing the Gummi Bears theme song to prove my point did not convince her I was on the level and/or sane, which I think is the mark of a real well-crafted Saturday morning cartoon.

My wife and I watched 1989's Road House this week because much like Mount Everest, it was there. And while we're going to skip the usual weighty analysis I give films in this space — we're talking about Roadhouse for Gods's sake, which has no lasting value beyond inspiring the greatest host segment in the history of Mystery Science Theater 3000 — there was a part of the movie that I think deserves further explanation.

If you are not familiar with Road House, permit me to change that: It stars Patrick Swayze as an elite bouncer contracted to clean up a particularly rough-and-ready honkytonk somewhere in Nowhereseville, Missouri. In doing so, he runs afoul of Ben Gazzara, the local big wheel whose iron grip over the town will apparently be loosened if the patrons at the dingy watering hole are no longer distracted by their daily routine of getting drunk and punching one another in the face.

When Patrick Swayze's disruption in the bouncing industry begins to yield results, Ben Gazzara springs into action. In three consecutive scenes, he has his underlings torch the auto parts supply store run by a kindly old man, sets his goons to start a pier-six brawl inside the titular road house in defiance of Patrick Swayze’s version of law-and-order and — in perhaps his most egregious action — sends his head goon to drive a Bigfoot-style truck over the inventory at a car lot owned by a rival businessman to keep him in line.

That last bit of business is witnessed by dozens of people who sputter in outrage but do little else. And that's where Road House started to fall apart for me — Ben Gazzara employs a handful of goons or so and one of them, frankly, is mordantly obese, presumably for comic purposes when he gets punched. The townsfolk outnumber Gazzara and his henchmen twelvefold. Why are they willing to suffer these abuses instead of rising up to throw off the shackles of their oppressor? Have they decided it's easier to let the out-of-town bouncer solve their problems?

Ah, but here is where Road House throws us a narrative sucker punch, much like the one that fells Ben Gazzara's mordantly obese goon. 

At the risk of spoiling the ending of a 37-year-old movie — seriously, if you don't want to know the exciting conclusion to Road House, kindly turn away from this newsletter and set fire to your phone or computer or whatever you might happen to be reading this on — the denouement sees Patrick Swayze pick off Ben Gazzara's henchmen through a series of roundhouse-kicking one-on-one confrontations. Yet bringing down the 59-year-old Ben Gazzara is too big an ask for the lithe 37-year-old Patrick Swayze. Ben Gazzara has the drop on our hero and with a pull of the trigger can send this bounder to the big road house in the sky.

Only then, do the owners of the auto parts store, roadhouse and car dealership appear with their shotguns to take turns plugging Ben Gazzara like they're in a yokel revivial of Murder on the Orient Express. (I guess that spoils the ending of Murder on the Orient Express, too. Uh... sorry.) Then, they dispose of the weapons so the local police in Ben Gazzara's pocket will be unable to solve the crime. End of movie.

It is here that we learn the true message of Road House: Only through collective action can we hope to bring tyrants to heel. James Dalton, welcome to the resistance.

While looking up some scores in the ESPN app a while back, I noticed that ESPN had started adding betting odds in a big ugly box that took up valuable screen real estate on my iPhone. Even worse, there didn't seem to be a way to make the odds go away. So I started using Apple's own Sports app to see if it was a better alternative to the what the self-proclaimed Worldwide Leader in Sports had to offer.

Friend of the newsletter Jason Snell was nice enough to post the results of my ESPN vs. Apple Sports findings at Six Colors. I won't spoil the results for you — daddy needs those clicks, children — but let's just say there are pros and cons to either app.

Speaking of self-promotion: Your Phil wants regular employment. My qualifications are here, send me any and all job opportunities and offers.

Here's some other solid work being done by people who aren't me.

After starting out the year on kind of a cold streak in terms of my reading list — see previous newsletters for pans of books by Joe Posnanski and Anthony Bourdain — I've now polished off a couple of offerings I've really enjoyed. Previous newsletters have already mentioned the Simpsons book Stupid TV, Be More Funny by Alan Siegel-not-Sepinwall, and the positive column gets another entry in the form of Stars and Strikes by Dan Epstein.

Epstein specializes in books about baseball, particularly the baseball of the 1970s, with a lot about the music of the era thrown in for good measure. A previous effort, Big Hair and Plastic Glass, looked at the decade as a whole, but Stars and Strikes narrows things down to the 1976 season. That being 50 years ago, it seemed like an appropriately timely read.

Why 1976? Well, it was the bicentennial, and baseball as our nominal national sport played a roll in that. But Epstein argues that the 1976 season is significant for other reasons — on the field, you had Cincinnati's Big Red Machine reaching its competitive apogee, the emergence of the Steinbrenner Era Yankees and colorful owners like Ted Turner and Bill Veeck. Off the field, 1976 brought a number of labor issues to the fore, and Detroit Tigers phenom Mark "The Bird" Fidrych emerged as a cultural phenomenon.

There's not as many original interviews as I like in my baseball histories, but Epstein does do a pretty exhaustive job of pulling together reports from that time into a compelling narrative. The book's appeal won't really extend beyond baseball fans, but I'm firmly in that demographic so I ate it up.

And that's the Phil for this week — thanks for reading. Remember to be nice until it's time not to be nice.