Best part of the Jack Smith hearings.

Teehee. If you force teachers to display the Ten Commandments, they will have to comply; but some of them will cover the display wall with additional posters from all sorts of supernatural sources, see, not just Christianly-approved ones.

And again I say teehee.

… cabins, but here in America we come right out with it.

At a Miami nightclub called Vichy… I mean Vendome! … some of the country’s highest profile fascists ordered up a Nazi rap song the other night and sang and saluted along with it. A fine time was had by all, plus they’re getting a lot of attention.

As for UD – meh. Millions of people love fascism in one or another of its forms, and she’s having trouble being scandalized by singing Hitlers.

Lock the guns (or take them away). Net the bridges. It works.

… Elizabeth Bishop Day (she lived there for a few years and wrote some great poems about it), UD reads through her copy of The Complete Poems and gives Bishop a good think. The last lines of The Bight (my analysis of it is linked to up there, at great poems) became her epitaph —

— and it does rather capture her philosophy, not to mention her life, which was lived with background messiness (drunkenness, loneliness, depression) and foreground … if not cheeriness, at least with a pleasant public countenance. Many of her best, and best-known poems, meticulously observe an operable, operating, world (cargo ships coming and going at harbors, buses traveling Cape Breton), but it’s a lumbering, ultimately go-nowhere, always deteriorating, sort of thing… just like us…

Obviously the thought of life’s desuetude and apparent meaninglessness is awful, and some poems exist to prompt the thought; but what the poet mainly notes along the way is the cheerfulness – and even aestheticism! – we bring to existence nonetheless.

Reading a lot of Bishop’s poems in one sitting saddened me. No one says she has to be Whitman, but her buddies James Merrill and Malcolm Brinnin, let’s say, mixed the melancholy with – not superficial cheer, but merriment at the spectacle.

They’ve long held the national Number One spot for murders, but when murders happen, they mobilize a whole nothing to see here protocol. Even the NYT plays along, insisting on how isolated and rare a recent massacre at a restaurant was, its neighborhood “hushed” with shock.

Toward the end of the piece the writer does allow as how the restaurant “is within walking distance of the city’s French Quarter … — the site of an attack that killed 14 people a year ago,” but most of the article maunders on about the restaurant’s history – strikingly irrelevant to a mass shooting. Nowhere does the writer note that this sort of carnage is something of a banality in gun-loving LA.

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 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 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.