More thunderingly obvious truths are offered about McMansion Melancholia, this time in the Washington Post… Study after study demonstrates that, if your pointless excess rooms function to hold your pointless excess purchases, you are likely to be unhappy about it.

Gazing at the shit-stashes all about you, you may find yourself toppling over into larger terrains of sadness… As in … ah, the pointlessness of it all!

UD has already described the nothingness of her aunt and uncle’s Potomac MD McMansion, a house intended mostly for status display.

Which display certainly worked, because they were robbed of their jewelry more than once.

… (it’s unregulated, so deaths and mutilations happen) has outraged circumcision enthusiasts. But for UD’s money, no defender of the practice (look at what they’re up to in New York!) will ever come up to the standard of this 2012 piece by Jeffrey Epstein’s best buddy Alan Dershowitz, which compares anyone with the slightest objection to slicing the dicks of non-consenting infants to Adolf Hitler.

Pirandello’s famous title needs only a little tweaking to cover the current crisis at the Kennedy Center. An absurdist wind be a-blowin’ from that riverside, Georgetown-adjacent, wedding cake/airport terminal (architectural observers have not been kind to the building) as performers and institutions flee, leaving a Beckettian wilderness.

Surely the first authentically post-name-change programming should be John Cage’s 4’33” – a work devoid of controversial content. Beckett’s own Endgame should be next, evoking a landscape where botheration about things like gender is rather beside the point. The beauty of these two masterpieces – and nihilistic works like them – is that they fairly demand little to no attendance, so that the collapse of the Center’s audience base will seem apposite rather than embarrassing.

LOL as if Iran will listen to her. She probably hasn’t even had her clitoris surgically removed.

On the meaning of his late in life song ‘A Thousand Kisses Deep’:

“We don’t write the play, we don’t produce it, we don’t direct it and we’re not even actors in it… Everybody eventually comes to the conclusion that things are not unfolding exactly the way they wanted, and that the whole enterprise has a basis that you can’t penetrate. Nevertheless, you live your life as if it’s real. But with the understanding: It’s only a thousand kisses deep, that is, with that deep intuitive understanding that this is unfolding according to a pattern that you simply cannot discern.”

******************

From ‘Continuing to Live’:

And once you have walked the length of your mind, what
You command is clear as a lading-list.
Anything else must not, for you, be thought
      To exist.

And what’s the profit? Only that, in time,
We half-identify the blind impress
All our behavings bear, may trace it home.
      But to confess,

On that green evening when our death begins,
Just what it was, is hardly satisfying,
Since it applied only to one man once,
      And that one dying.

********************

From his memoir, Palimpsest:

I’ve… been reading through this memoir, adding, subtracting, writing over half-erased texts, ‘palimpsesting’ – all the while looking for clues not so much to me, the subject, if indeed I am the subject, as to what [my] first thirty-nine years were all about… [on] the small planet that each of us so briefly visits.

… Opry will move in to take its place.

***********

The authority of the board to overrule Congress and rename the center is disputed, and The [NY] Times has continued to refer to its legal name.

Gambia can’t wait to bring back FGM.

Many people … pretended to suffer from cognitive impairment to join the trial, for example by intentionally drawing a clock incorrectly. [T]he participants whose data had to be tossed out included many grandmothers who saw a chance to make thousands of dollars a year by simultaneously joining multiple trials for which they did not qualify.

You gotta figure the grandkids are monetizing la nana by priming her for multiple clinical trials — not only training her in drawing a clock with the six up and the twelve down, but in how to tremble uncontrollably, and in how to shriek psychotically. South Florida runs so many trials that the kids must have a system of charts – South Dixie Highway: Parkinson’s, Dolphin Express: Alzheimer’s – to keep track of diseases and locations. Do they deprive granny of water and meds for a few hours prior to testing, for greater symptomaticity?

Veteran UD readers know what to make of people who, like the Wizard of Oz and Harold Hill the Music Man, are always tossing around advanced degrees. They are almost invariably con men.

… AND it’s Texas A&M!

Anyone paying attention to that intellectual έρημος CANNOT be surprised that their BOT has now begun banning long stretches of Plato from classrooms because … uh… gender?

”What kind of university” does this, asks the miscreant who tried to teach a Dialogue or two.

The kind of university that tells the miscreant he either dumps transy P. pronto or he can teach Ethics and Engineering instead! UD is not making this up.

The local AAUP says

“A research university that censors Plato abandons its obligation to truth, inquiry, and the public trust — and should not be regarded as a serious institution of higher learning.”

Who da fuck ever regarded A&M as a serious anything? Have you read UD’s years of posts about that football-addled joke?

***********************

Reminds UD of Benedictine College in Kansas, where

Sometimes, people here quietly admit, it goes too far. Like the students who loudly proclaim how often they go to Mass, or the young man who quit his classics course because he refused to read the works of ancient Greek pagans.

************

UPDATE: Great title! Texas Plato Massacre

UD has zero interest in his motives, but Minnesota’s governor lazily presided over a fraud-ridden state, and he has certainly done the right thing by dropping out of the next election.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/minnesota-fraud-schemes-what-we-know

************

“A really bad thing happened, and it demonstrated a real failure of public management that has to be addressed. And the scale of it was just incredible,” said Harold Pollack, a social sciences professor at the University of Chicago and longtime defender of safety net programs. “The Trump people are going to take this thing and they’re going to run with it so aggressively, it becomes a little bit easier for us to overlook the important substance here.”

They’re way proud of their Nobel winner, but he ain’t around. Wouldn‘t live in his home country if you paid him.

Pretty much no one’s around. No one under thirty. Shitty economy, and the joint’s run by a weirdo at once hyper-puritan and heavy into fuckywucky cuz the birth rate’s pathetic plus everyone’s leaving.

All very odd. Very malsain.

Lots of countries have lousy universities, but Greece is a real scandal, given the nation’s history and cultural significance. Lately it’s been trying this and that – it’s even allowed private universities to operate!

It has also, most recently, legislated against “dormant students,” hundreds of thousands of people who’ve remained enrolled for ten, twenty years while doing absolutely nothing. Fully half of Greek university students retained this status until the government finally decided it was kind of stupid.

So they’re inching along. But it’s a fundamentally corrupt, demoralized system, so good luck.

Christopher Hitchens famously compared some forms of religious life to “celestial North Koreas,” where one is compelled to praise one’s secular or divine god unceasingly. As Rick Plasterer, an evangelical, puts it:

God is always the final authority in our lives (Acts 5:29, certainly for Christians, and really should be for everyone). We are commanded to pray without ceasing (i.e., frequently, I Thess. 5:16-18) and certainly before meals (I Tim. 4:4-5).

Now, if you’re France, or Quebec, and you regard yourself as a secular country, or province, you do not want to live an unceasingly religious civic life; you positively wish to assert as a fundamental value, as a definitional identity, freedom from clerical existence. Religious life belongs in religious institutions – churches, mosques, synagogues, parochial schools – and of course in the domestic sphere. The shared public realm visibly, in an everyday way, ought to proclaim that God (whichever God yours happens to be – final-authority Gods abound, and you can ask Lebanon what it looks like when everyone designates a different one) is a private matter, and belongs mostly out of sight.

If it is true that for many religious one is commanded to pray unceasingly, or frequently, and if, on top of this, one takes a, well, evangelizing approach to faith (“really should be for everyone”), a country’s going to have a hell of a time establishing a public life based on shared (the vast majority of French and Quebecois, when asked, confirm that they are strongly secular/anticlerical) secular values, as in the equality of the sexes, sexual freedom, free thought, individualism, and a broad contempt for the array of surviving primitive and destructive religious practices that bedevil advanced and less advanced nations. How to establish and safeguard a truly secular realm?

Legally and constitutionally. Quebec already has some forms of restraint on people who want to gather in the streets and pray, and on people who want to wear burqas; but it wants more of this, and proposes tougher legislation. Since by definition most religious people do not understand why anyone wouldn’t like their ways (they bear after all salvational truth to us), there’s a kind of impasse here. But, like France, Quebec will proceed to assert and defend its foundational values.

January 1, 2026


A cold hawklike sky scans the labyrinth
At the top of my property.  What gives?

The circles are meant to yield useful hints
About what it actually means to live.

But hasn't it been hundreds of years since
Padding around little pagan... ?  Forgive,

But surely you've read last century's black prince?
The Psychopathy of Everyday Life?

The title's wrong.  I simply can't convince
Myself to follow ideas that don't outlive

Their own time.  OTOH hellish pits
Remain impressively generative,

Though for me make nothing happen... Look, it's
Silly, okay, to turn about the glyphs

Expecting to score existential hits -
Thoughts to be cherished like the thought of heaven

To quote Stevens.  My paver walk permits
At best a chance to - with passion! - relive

The lives of people I've loved.  At best it
Is a chance to toast my dead convives.