… Jersey-style.

I cover a lot of these, and a lot of them happened most recently on and around July 4, but the basic point is that mass shooters keep shooting up our crowd events: parades, fireworks displays, rallies, high school graduations, sports events etc., etc. I think the great symbol of this social movement will be the 2017 Las Vegas Harvest Music Festival massacre (‘1,000 rounds, killing 60 people and wounding at least 413 others. The ensuing panic brought the total number of injured to approximately 867.’), but that mad motiveless killer’s death toll will inevitably be surpassed by another person who for no reason at all wants to kill everybody.

But it’s the smaller stories, the daily stories, you’re missing, and that’s too bad because the death of American public events is happening all around us, small story by small story. You can find gobs of them on this blog, like the decision yesterday by the town of Pahrump (not far from Las Vegas) to suspend “Movies in the Park … until further notice,” because a crowd can’t gather in Pahrump without people shooting at everyone. Movies in the Park becomes Mossbergs in the Park and that’s the end of the matter.

Winn [allegedly] took tens of thousands from a former employer, and … lied about being made homeless and about the circumstances under which the couple’s house was repossessed in the memoir [The Salt Path]. [An investigation] also cast doubt over the legitimacy of [Winn’s husband’s terminal] diagnosis.

Und so weiter. How eager we are, again and again and again, to buy what a moment’s serious thought would reveal as almost certainly incredible hard luck stories. The more extreme, the more incredible, the more gullible we. Homeless! Half dead! Treated like shit by strangers! Bring it on!

We never learn. The imposters are exposed, and we move on to the next patently impossible memoir.

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In this, as in so many things, our model is Lady Bracknell:

Now produce your explanation, and pray make it improbable.

… let me live it as a Putin flunky…

An insider at NPR describes the woke-shrinkage effect that has left even daily listeners like Les UDs wondering why so much of the language coming from the station smacks of a re-education camp.

 In a document called NPR Transgender Coverage Guidance—disseminated by news management—we’re asked to avoid the term biological sex. (The editorial guidance was prepared with the help of a former staffer of the National Center for Transgender Equality.) The mindset animates bizarre stories—on how The Beatles and bird names are racially problematic, and others that are alarmingly divisive; justifying looting, with claims that fears about crime are racist; and suggesting that Asian Americans who oppose affirmative action have been manipulated by white conservatives.

UD still gives NPR money. But she can’t stand the ideology-lecture feel of the place (not all the time; some of the time); she hates it that more and more of its stories/points of view make it sound like Chesa Boudin.

She gets that NPR has always leaned left. Les UDs do too. But Uri Berliner is right that lately it has tilted way the hell over.

Owls were about last night.

The original from which the owl drew inspiration.

… for actually answering the stupid how do you feel question.

The flat monotone, one hand protectively held against his face.

The sheer oddness of seriously depressive content coming from a tall handsome champion athlete… The oddness of soulfulness offered to a highly lit studio of jock-journalists…

In the midst of life we are in death. In the midst of superficiality we are in depth.

One source has him also saying that he wants “to solve myself,” which made UD think of her guru, Adam Phillips, who warns it ain’t gonna happen. Also Philip Larkin:

‘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 other good things can happen – settling into who you unchangeably are, and the suffering that life inescapably generates, in a such a way that your “appetitive” energy remains reasonably high (in this case, that a win on the court actually makes you happy and motivates you to win future matches). Since you’re never going to solve yourself, the better path is away from Who Am I and toward simply the daily appetitive enjoyment of your existence — an enjoyment that should indeed involve the enjoyment (or at least you find it interesting; or at least you find it tolerable!) of incessant conflict and uncertainty.

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And as happens so often in life, the Zverev scene was taken directly from Waiting for Godot:

the skull in Connemara in spite of the tennis the labors abandoned left unfinished graver still abode of stones in a word I resume alas alas abandoned unfinished the skull the skull in Connemara in spite of the tennis the skull alas the stones

A house burnt to a crisp by a flare gun! Hundreds of bullets in all directions shatter the night! Happy Fourth!

Doesn’t it have people who monitor online crowd event activity?

Is the place asleep?

Does it have a death wish?

Its poor police chief still thinks this is about babysitting. He needs to be fired and replaced by someone who understands the gravity of the situation.

Yeah, well. Everyone’s kind of expecting gunplay, so when you announce an active shooter from the stage — even if turns out to be only a fight (unpleasant enough , but unlikely to rip out your family’s internal organs) — the whole place stampedes away.

And how many people are then going to turn to their terrified kids and say Okay coast is clear let’s go have some fun!!!! ?

London’s mayor put out some rainbow flags and BOY IS HE IN TROUBLE.

“The [flags] will be ‘rolled back’ whether you like it or not, Mr. [Khan],” [wrote Joshua Charles]. “The options are: 1. Repentance now; or 2. Eternal punishment later.”

… DARES you to deny that Ulysses is the greatest twentieth century novel.

Garrett Park Fourth of July parade, whose theme this year is The Novel.

Photo: Frances Eby

Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of guns, University Diaries lands us, tonight, in adorable Hidden Springs, Idaho, an Ada County planned community way out in the foothills of some mountain. Hidden Springs sits way out there all by itself, neat farmhouse style homes in pristine nature, and who can blame it for boasting of its many amenities?

But nowhere on its website will you find disclosure about gunfire from an illegal shooting range just down the road a tad.

For that you have to consult the local press which, in a series of articles, has followed the range owner’s belief that the “government” (whatever that is) has no power whatsoever over my private property, fuck it, and if I want to charge people hither and yon to fire their guns on my private property any old time I can fucking well do it and don’t come at me with shit like permitting applications and public hearings.

 In response to complaints from Hidden Springs folks, the range’s owner says “residents shouldn’t be surprised to hear gunfire because the discharge of firearms in rural Ada County is common.” Suck it up MAGA world the noise I’m making is a drop in the noise bucket of all the daily bangbang here see and you know it. Live by the gun or move away.

I don’t wanna be around when the inevitable (cough) ‘visit’ from the local police happens… I’m thinking Ruby Ridge…

‘To an American like me, appalled by the practice [of female genital mutilation] and allowed to listen in [to what West Africans say about it], the conversation reflected something hopeful — not only [a girl named] Sesay’s resistance but also the way that more girls are pushing past the taboo of talking about female genital mutilation, or F.G.M. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to report on the practice, because traditionally it has been unmentionable, but it seems to be losing its silencing power. In a journey across Sierra Leone and Liberia, I found some young women were reluctant to discuss the topic, but many others were willing to candidly discuss it...

[I]nfections are common but often go untreated because of the insular nature of the societies. Girls sometimes die … and then are buried quietly and secretly…

F.G.M. is so horrific and widespread that it should be much higher on the global human rights agenda. To their credit, organizations like the United Nations Population Fund, UNICEF and U.N. Women have long spoken out against the practice, as have many aid groups…

When someone like Sesay opens a biology textbook, she learns about infection and scar tissue and trauma. But she also absorbs a far more dangerous idea in the eyes of the cutters: that she has a right to say no. And that is the quiet revolution already underway — in classrooms, in whispers among friends, in small communities like Sesay’s, where a daughter brings to the table the talk of girls’ rights.‘

In 2021 … 62 percent of Americans said that transgender athletes should be able to play only on teams that matched their gender at birth; by 2023, that figure had risen to 69 percent. This is not bigotry at work. This year, the same pollster found that a solid majority of Americans — 56 percent — favor policies protecting trans people from discrimination. Americans are broadly fine with transgender people. They are fine with gay people. They just reject replacing the fact of biological sex with the phantasms of gender ideology…

[F]ighting a losing battle to allow trans women to compete in women’s sports and for biological men to be in women’s intimate spaces and to perpetuate risky, inadequately tested sex changes on children, including gay and lesbian ones, is dumb, offensive to common sense and risks a much bigger backlash.

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U Penn has now rescinded trans swimmer Lia Thomas’s medals.