Other people frighten themselves by watching scary movies; UD just watches this.

“We’re sleepwalking into a disaster. I shouldn’t say we are — we already have sleepwalked into a disaster.”

The Louvre, the Prado, and (I can attest) the Uffizi are all an ordeal, “like the Metro at rush hour,” and everyone’s too greedy to do anything about it.

https://iwpr.net/global-voices/tanzania-inside-trade-body-parts-driving-fgm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfZWp-hGCdA&list=RDUfZWp-hGCdA&start_radio=1

Fatma, don’t lose that pussy!
Its market price is hot
Send it off to a trader
They pay a lot

Fatma don’t lose that pussy
That you cut with a dirty knife
It’ll make a magic potion
And a bloodied clitless wife

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Shouldn’t the mutilated women, children, and babies get - as it were - a cut?  The scheme seems a mite unfair.  They after all are supplying the raw materials.  

Prosecutors said he included a fraudulent invoice in his [loan] application, which said he had been paid more than $800 for a “Three layer cake — 80’s Themed – Orange, Blue, Black and White — Tie dye color.” 

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Guy was soft on crime too. His bribery deal with funeral home directors was totally dependent on dead victims.

Chacun à son scandale goût to be sure, but for UD the Secretary of Labor scandal’s got it all over the Somali daycare scandal. The latter offers scraggly whistleblowers bursting into dank suburban offices, while Madame Secretary OTOH lolls poolside in a bright yellow bikini at Vegas venues, glugging booze and shacking up with her tax-subsidized sex-partner-subordinate …

Sex drugs and rock and roll, baby! All the Somali thing offers is a clot of religious hypocrites hiding behind hijabs; if any of it’s true, the Labor thing’s got everything we want in a scandal – rippling flesh, naughty fucking at high-end hotels, abuse of office, adultery, alcohol, theft of taxpayer funds… And the thing just broke! Bet there’s more.

Read every word, including the comments, and wonder about the demise of the Democratic Party no longer.

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 the usual primitives. 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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.