When packing your six year old’s pistol for school

Please help him to follow this one simple rule:

If shooting at teacher

He’s too short to reach her

So tell him to stand on a good sturdy stool.

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Little tyke didn’t manage to get a good shot off; looks as though his teacher will survive.

Success will take patience: This was apparently his first attempted murder, and I’m sure there will be others. Over time, he will learn proper stance, a steadier hand, etc.

Dad! Ball’s in your court. Beyond the obvious (much more father/son time on the shooting range), you’re going to have to pack multiple weapons in the lunchbox from now on, so that your child is able to choose the most appropriate weapon for any given situation.

No fear: The boy has his whole life ahead of him, and this is America.

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And a final, special message for the teacher: Apparently you caused the whole thing. Instead of letting the boy kill the classmate he was fighting with, you insisted on confiscating the weapon, which angered the boy and forced him to shoot at you. DO NOT – EVER – ATTEMPT TO GET BETWEEN A SIX YEAR OLD AND HIS RUGER. I suppose it didn’t even occur to you that this was probably a Christmas present, and one that he’s probably been begging for since he was three. Now it’s in the hands of the cops, and who knows how long it will be before his parents will be able to replace it with a junior AR-15.

Looks as though, because of you, Richneck Elementary School is going to have to wait some time before it gets its massacre. But all in good time.

… mind.

Royalty is ridiculous – this we all, including royals, know. Glued to their gowns the gapers may be, but the Disnoid trashiness of the spectacle in its modern pointless form is the main thing, especially after the death of Elizabeth, the only royal who seemed to mean something (but what?). The old kings (Juan Carlos, Gustaf of Sweden) are the moral degenerates you’d expect the idle meaningless rich to be ; younger kings (Charles, Felipe) are visibly embarrassed/annoyed by the whole enterprise. They want to mean something, but the whole point of royalty is that they are never allowed to.

The least unpleasant place to be in this dead living world is very safely distant from the throne itself. Baby Edward is clearly the happiest of the Windsors; when he ventures out on his few vague royal thingies no one knows who he is, and this lack of crowd and media interest allows him to pursue a modest and contented private life without, for instance, worrying hysterically about the physical safety of his children every moment they are on display in a world of violent crazies targeting royals just because. Remember the HUGE fuss Prince Harry recently made about royal security for his lot. He was right to fuss. Royals are serious targets – from the media (that’s how Harry lost his mother) as much as from crazed individuals with guns and knives. His grandmother was attacked while on horseback during a ceremonial function; a berserk man got into her bedroom. Etc.

The royal world’s most unpleasant place to be features in the title of the destined to be much-read SPARE by Harry.

You can see the problem currently in three royal houses: England, Denmark, and Norway. Harry claims that at his birth his father washed his hands of the insultingly stupid Diana, remarking that “my work here [shtupping Diana enough to produce an heir and a spare] is done.” This, and the internationally broadcast death of one’s mother in a traffic tunnel, cannot be a solid foundation for a happy life. Harry has suffered bitterness, resentment, and mental instability for years, and it’s not his fault that the strong-willed, highly intelligent, and absolutely non-royal woman who has stabilized him repels his royal family. If he can come to terms with having very little relationship with that family, he will continue to generate his own family, friends, and meaningful projects stateside.

The spare in Denmark is super-pissed because his mother the queen, in a gesture lots of other contemporary royal houses are also making, has stripped his four children of prince and princess titles, reducing them to the risibly low count/countess. The gesture acknowledges the pointless expensive absurdity of modern royal houses, and seeks to make them much smaller objects of republican discontent. Prince Joachim is taller, smarter, and more articulate than the crown prince, clearly believes he himself should be king on his mother’s death, and has not at all hidden his rage at his mother’s swipe at his kids. He’s moving his family to (where else) America, and seems disinclined to look back.

Norway is the most … baroque example of surreality among the surviving royal houses of Europe. The rightful heir to that throne, if you don’t count her lack of a penis, is Martha Louise, the elder of the king’s two children. Her brother seems a presentable, somewhat full of himself, king to be; but you can’t blame Martha for being a little annoyed about how things worked out. She too lives in the United States, with her New Age Shaman husband to be. Her failure to be lifted up to the throne of Norway has meant the freedom to pursue a large set of incredibly stupid beliefs and rituals in Los Angeles.

Their blastula’s Fetal Prelude will emerge in ghostly notation on its ultrasounds.

As yet another faux minority person bites the dust, UD thinks nostalgically of Jessica Krug, a colleague of hers at GWU, who was similarly given to pickling herself in Brown Skin Girl.

Can you blame them? Hope it’s fine champagne, left over from New Year’s festivities. Party on, Dems.

As pundits have noted, it’s chaotic.

The MAGA conspiracy theorist has fingered vaccinations as the cause of the football player’s on-field collapse; but Marjorie Taylor Greene has countered with a theory based on the player’s given name.

“DAMAR” backwards is RAMAD which is one letter short of RAMADA, the international hotel chain owned lock stock and barrel by George Soros in cahoots with Dominion Voting Systems. I leave the rest to you.

At the stroke of midnight, a 62 year old Michigan man drove celebratory bullets from his AR-15 into the bodies of two of his fellow revelers, whose bloody deaths microseconds into 2023 set a new world record for fastest end to a new year.

Police are withholding some details because “we don’t want this to become a trend.”

JUST WALK AWAY D.J.

[Sing it.]

And when I made the ask about your special day
The day you tried to kill Mike Pence to make him pay

You walked away, D.J.
The sixth of what? Nothing much to say.
The ballroom’s empty and your face has gone all pale:
Guest list’s in jail.

Yes deep inside their cells
The Proud Boys sit
They’ve been condemned to hell
You don’t give a shit

So walk away, D.J.
The shit still follows close behind
As bitter rains burn down upon your weary eyes

You lose your mind.

… as I read updates on the reported Idaho killer. So many accounts of the suspect suggest an intellectual interest in what it would feel like to kill someone, coupled with an arrogant sense of one’s exemption from ordinary morality. Both murders involve[d] lengthy strategic planning and stalking; all victims died by slashing (shooting lacks the up-close visceral thrill of feeling yourself putting someone to death), and all perpetrators went to impressive lengths to get away with the crimes.

L&L were wealthy brilliant elitists who arrived at their fate via a peculiar take on Nietzsche’s superman; Kohberger’s homicidal fascination drew him toward formal study in criminology. Just as crazy people can be drawn to psychiatry (see, most famously, the fictional Hannibal Lecter), so mass killers may be drawn to criminology, a field in which they can spend all day luxuriating in lurid details.

One hundred years after L&L, Kohberger has the cultural advantage of a zillion slasher films/video games, etc. etc. It will be interesting to find out if he is a fan of these.

Answer: Nope.

From New Year’s Song, by Ted Hughes

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… Now there come the weak-neck snowdrops

bouncing like fountains and they stop you

they make you take a deep breath

make your heart shake you

such a too much of a gift for such a mean time

nobody knows how to accept them

all you can do is gaze at them baffled

and the worst cold’s to come

… and that’s saying a lot – has yet another nationally broadcast meltdown. Drink and violence and litigiousness have long been Steve Sarkisian’s (scroll down) game plan, and the resulting embarrassing spectacles in front of trustees, obscene actings-out in the larger community, and, in this latest instance, psychotic attacks on team staff, have totally endeared him to the nation’s premier football programs. He pulls in a huge salary and is massively lionized at one dominant program after another.

He hasn’t yet started pulling out a gun during his special moments (This is How We Do It), but once he does that, he’ll be guaranteed the head coaching spot at the school of his choice.

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The world of university football/basketball coaches is mainly a variant of Trumpworld. Everyone loves the athletic Trumplets’ sick dirty twisted lying ways, and when the sickest and dirtiest die, the, uh, what’s the word, encomia are enmazing! You’d never know from American sports journalism that Bobby Knight or Mike Leach (one of America’s most fanatic Trumpers) was anything other than a fine inspirational example to us all when his sadistic treatment of players comes to a permanent end. And so it is with another manifestly insane person, Steve S.

Of course a few sissy nay-sayers are calling for him to be fired. They seem worried that the school he rules – Texas, Austin – may suffer reputational damage through having made a gibbering lunatic the highest-profile, highest-compensated person on campus.

To which UD says: Fiddle dee dee! It’s Texas, sweetie!