… Or, actually, none of the time.

You know the old English proverb: Be careful what you wish for. The radical anti-abortionists in Idaho made it so women have to have babies – babies babies all the time! – and now we see the rather odd result: Ob/gyns can’t leave the state fast enough; and now an entire hospital has shut down its obstetric unit.

Ain’t dat funny? If you live in Sandpoint, you can’t have a baby or get any kind of natal care there! Wonder where the regional hospital that has some ob/gyns plus the budget to pay for all the lawsuits is.

And hey how bout that death penalty for mothers idea? That‘ll incentivize women to make babies babies all the time too!

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And then there’s Texas.

… and even though his name still emblazons the Arkansas State Medical Board website (he appears twice!), his apparent practice of billing the government – always at the severest level of illness – for patients he’s reportedly never seen has attracted the attention of the Attorney General.

Maybe update the web page? Maybe not so cool that the just-resigned CHAIR of your state’s medical regulator has all this time possibly been a bigtime Medicaid fraudster?

Crime-ridden SF suffers from – along with everything else – constant smashing of car windows to grab anything worth grabbing. A CNN reporter wrote that

her rental car was broken into outside City Hall even with hired security monitoring the vehicle. [Another person shared] a story from a visiting friend, who purportedly lost $10,000 in valuables and is now “scarred forever.”

A local pol ridicules the “scarred forever” thing cuz getting your car smashed and your valuables taken is nothing – this dude’s been car-smashed repeatedly, as have his friends, plus he has friends who have been murdered, for fuck sake! So you lost ten thou and there’s glass everywhere! Big deal! SF = crime, babe, and if you don’t like it move to the suburbs where a bunch of weasels want their families to be safe!

Why don’t our “beautiful sunsets go viral”? Why does it have to be these petty crimes that after all are a structural part of urban life everywhere?

Fond collegiate days.

‘Miami Design Preservation League walking tour waits while firefighters hose the blood off the Ocean Drive sidewalk from this morning’s fatal spring break shooting.’

Oh little town of Tenby!

On the western coast of Wales!

Town everyone did envy

For its beachy hills and dales

Its strands so nice and sandy

Its waves so wild and free

Its seals so fun and randy, its porpoises so dandy!

It was a place where tourists loved to be.

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Then rats as big as kittens

Or well – let’s face it – cats

Decided to be smitten

With its cliffsides and its flats.

They love to run about and mate

Inside the cliffside holes

They propagate and propagate.

They’ve taken quite a toll.

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The cliffs are all eroding

The townsfolk stupefied

The signs are all forboding…

It’s time for raticide!

… getting it up.

A Catholic university puts its ethos front and center, and suffers particularly acute derision when three of its students act with such rank cruelty as to attract the attention of the nation.

A double amputee had left her wheelchair near a set of stairs in the bar where the Mercyhurst hockey players were drinking (she was using the bathroom), and one of them – a star player, son of a famous player – pushed it down the stairs, messing it up.

So there’s an everyday human reality. A woman who can’t walk nonetheless negotiates the complicated, difficult business of getting out of the house and socializing with friends; in order to go to the toilet, she has to put her chair aside and be carried into the Ladies’ by one of her friends, placed on the seat, helped to wash her hands, etc, etc. After this challenging feat, she is eager to reclaim her chair, but it’s messed up at the bottom of a stairway.

Here’s another everyday reality: Three beautiful, young, able-bodied, drunk athletes who play at the highest collegiate level in what is routinely called the world’s cruelest sport notice a wheelchair at the top of some stairs in a bar. They don’t notice the camera directed precisely at them. Too drunk, too stupid.

One of them – son of a Canadian ice hockey legend – is therefore filmed hurling the chair to the bottom of the stairs and then returning to steady soaking with his buddies.

Forced by outraged bar personnel to apologize, he perfunctorily does and then says: “Do I still have to go?”

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All three have been suspended from the school’s team, but the suspension won’t last long. They have also been barred from the bar. These are of course small things.

Global press attention, with all the gory details and the viral video, is not a small thing. The contempt of their community is not a small thing.

The mandated sensitivity sessions to which they will be subjected are not small things, but they’re not that big.

The lawsuit we might expect from the woman, reasonably enough claiming humiliation and other forms of injury, is a big thing.

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For people to respond very intensely to cruelty, it needs to come in, as it were, bite-sized form. We have trouble truly grasping mass cruelty; we have no problem whatsoever, since we viscerally, intimately, feel it in our own bones, grasping singular cruelty. The arrogance, the nonchalance, with which this guy dispatched that woman’s lifeline, her dignity, her absolute necessity, and then turned back to the bar, is just too bloody manifest, I’m afraid. In this matter, the whole world’s a stage. Da guy’s a regular Iago.

Having been unveiled, he will have to live his unveiling. The next time he trods the boards, he might want to prepare for boos.

… goes on in front of our Rehoboth Beach balcony. We love to watch it.

Everyone does. It draws crowds.

Here’s a thing UD has learned about UD as UD has gotten up there in years.

Time was she loved poignant films featuring tender damaged people brutalized by the world (A Patch of Blue, Forrest Gump); now she has trouble handling the vulnerability/cruelty thing (zillions of films feature this theme), and instead leans toward disaster films where thousands of extras go SPLAT under asteroids.

She seems done, that is, with main characters we deeply glomb onto and watch disintegrate; now she wants a smoking hulk of an earth inhabited by five families who manage to get to the shelter or to Planet New (Greenland, Knowing).

She’s zooming out, in other words, of the whole condition humaine thing…

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And when she reads articles like the one I’ve quoted from in my headline… When she feels the desperate pathos behind names like People Matter Festival…

When she realizes that both the cease fire and the mass education in basic compassion campaign are taking place in Miami-Dade Florida in preparation for Spring Break, she feels that familiar, heavy, useless, unbearable empathy creeping in upon her… An entire American city pleads for a temporary putting down of guns, knowing the gesture is hopeless and that multiple young people will be shot to death during what used to be a fun innocent week… A city government – again, hopelessly – reminds its populace that you really shouldn’t shoot people to death because PEOPLE MATTER…

UD can’t handle how pathetic this is. UD can’t wait til Greenland 2 comes out and she doesn’t have to think about this shit.

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Here we go.

Love the way the reporter describes a barely-underway spring break (March 17 is Day One of the cease fire) as “relatively calm and peaceful.” LOLOL

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UPDATE: Wotta shocker.

You know, there are many things you can do to “close” your city to violent, unmanageable, crowds. You’ll need cooperation from owners of bars and hotels; you’ll need a temporary shift in traffic patterns, coupled with a huge uptick in traffic enforcement. You’ll need a lot of help from police around the state; they’ll have to come in and help you.

You will need to place portable jail cells along beaches and boulevards, so you can immediately arrest high, drunk, armed, dangerous people as they shoot into crowds. Not a very pretty picture; not a very festive picture. But modular cells make sense when lethality overwhelms your city. Remember that when you attract scads of young people, you attract rival drug-selling gangs. These are responsible for some of the killing and much of the menacing/fighting/unrest. If you attract a smaller crowd, you’ll attract fewer gun-bearing drug dealers.

Do not forget social media: Get the message out strongly and early in the game that – as Miami’s mayor keeps saying – your city doesn’t want spring break. It simply endures it.

… but the Latin for “The person who plants, preserves” – which is the Roosevelt family motto – appears above the door of the building leading to Pope Farm Nursery, which supplies plantings for parks around UD‘s Montgomery County. UD and her sister visited Pope today – an insanely beautiful clear-full-blue sky day – and gazed at rows of green shoots in little green buckets.

Thank goodness he only implied it. Wouldn’t want to rush to judgment.

It’s only funny if you lack a thick description of Lake Charles, LA. If you lack boots on the ground knowledge of one of America’s most godforsaken, violent, hopeless locations, what McNeese University just did will look “absurd,” “ridiculous,” and all the other nasty adjectives everyone’s throwing at the place today.

What that school (23% four year graduation rate) did was hire a basketball coach so utterly filthy (recruiting violations and the like up the wazoo) that the school knows he’ll be hauled in front of the NCAA for all his prior bad shit.

‘Course McNeese U., as part of the Greater Lake Charles We Don’t Give a Shit, Motherfuckers region, could give a rat’s ass about what a bad boy good ol’ boy Will Wade’s been; but it does know the NCAA’s after him, so the school needs to do something, uh, preemptive.

So in a maneuver Jean Arp would approve, the school suspended Wade pretty much same time it hired him. Welcome! You’re suspended for five games! See, NCAA? We’re punishing him before you even finish investigating him! We’re not bad boys down here. We’re good boys!

What’s that you say? Wade’s preparing a lawsuit against the school, demanding ten million dollars in damages for humiliation and mental anguish? No prob cuz we’re so rich.

Everyone’s been looking for Larry for two years, and all this time he’s been hiding in plain sight among his fellow undergraduate fellows in the James Madison Program at Princeton University.

Woke locales at Princeton might produce some obnoxious disrupters of campus speeches given by conservatives; the Madison Program houses a violent seditionist, someone the FBI has been tracking down for two years!

Now that he’s been captured and is preparing for trial, it will be interesting to know whether the dude is more broadly violent. Like was his ecstasy at being part of a mob injuring police officers confined to just that one event, or has he found other outlets?

We might never know. But the lad is articulate, and has a lot to say. Let’s look forward to his Patrick Henry moments in front of the judge.