How ya gonna keep em

Buried and choked

After they’ve learned

To breathe?

*********************

… make UD think of Kitaj’s If Not, Not:

Horror among the palms. Among the blue skies and blue ponds and pools of a languid landscape. As in D.M. Thomas’ novel The White Hotel, or the book/film The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, the effort is to convey the world as both a highly evolved beautiful secure retreat, and a far-too-delicate entity subject to sudden lurid conflagration. Foreground, on-goingness. Background, the vile, all-arresting catastrophe.

[A Capitol rioter] was scheduled to plead guilty in D.C. federal court Wednesday to a misdemeanor of unlawful picketing or parading in the Capitol but when Judge Emmett Sullivan asked [him] why he wished to plead guilty, he blurted out: “I wanted to go to trial but the prosecutor said if I didn’t go to trial they would put a felony on me so I think this is probably the better route. I believe I’m innocent.”

Sullivan replied that he “can’t take a plea of guilty if you say you’re innocent.”

… As part of the conditions, [Anthime] Gionet must notify the court if he changes his home address but a pre-trial services officer told a judge in October that Gionet had left home in Arizona and moved to Clearwater, Florida without telling anyone.

Officers said they only found out when Gionet had a run-in with local law enforcement over someone apparently throwing cans at his house. Months earlier, his release conditions were tightened over a series of run-ins he had with Arizona police.

A judge declined to revoke his release. Then a month later, Gionet was charged with defacing a Hanukkah display at the Arizona state capitol.

He was also sentenced to 30 days in jail in January for assaulting a bouncer in Scottsdale, Arizona, in 2020 but is appealing it.

You won’t begin to understand America until you understand why no one commenting on Naomi Judd’s suicide has asked that question. No one will ask that question, which goes to levels of responsibility for locking guns away from critically self-destructive people.

Some people might say it’s madness to have a houseful of loaded guns around someone who has made it screamingly clear that she wants to die. But those people wouldn’t be Americans.

Oh. And here’s where UD gets all excited:

He’s more scathing about the “postliberal” intellectuals of the American right, with their admiration for Hungary’s Viktor Orban, like the legal scholar Adrian Vermeule (whom he describes as having “flirted with the idea of overtly authoritarian government”) and the political scientist Patrick Deneen.

The more high-profile outing of our enemies, the better. Bravo, and keep bashing.

Plagiarizing a momentous, hugely public, sure to be filmed and widely broadcast, commencement speech runs all sorts of obvious risks. Take the Canadian med school dean, some of whose audience, quickly identifying the source of the talk while he talked, started reading along out loud from the original as he shared poignant personal memories.

More recently, there’s the Arab-origin student speaker at Duke who found another Arab-origin student commencement speaker – this one from Harvard – and just went ahead and pilfered/proclaimed aloud all of her private thoughts/memories.

So at the Duke Chronicle you’ve got two stories covering this curious affair: The first adoringly applauds an intimate evocation of minority angst; then, fast on the heels of the rave review comes a cold clinical side by side analysis of the two speeches with the obligatory yellow highlighting.

*******************

The foot thing? The Harvard lass quoted an Arab-American writer who described how we learn:

“…running barefoot, the skin of our feet collecting sand and seeds and rocks and grass until we had shoes, shoes made of everything we’d picked up as we ran.”

This seems to ol’ UD a singularly icky bit of writing, featuring little logic and mucho weirdness – shoes made of sand seeds rocks and grass? getting stones between your toes as a learning experience? – but okay, the Harvard speaker quotes it, and then revises and extends:

“[Sarah] Abushaar related the quote to her and her fellow graduates’ four years of “running through Harvard Yard” where the “skin of [their] feet [collected] a world of experiences.”

Still don’t like it. Skin of our feet? Still kinda dumb and gross.

Who cares. But Priya Parkash cleans it up nicely:

“Over the last four years, the sole[s] of our shoes have collected a world of experiences…”

Babe, she doesn’t even go there — she sees what UD saw, which is that the whole bare feet crunching down on stones that somehow enrich our experience thing doesn’t work, so as she plagiarizes through the document she brings a bit more sense to the metaphor or parable or whatever it is. She puts shoes on those feet.

*******************

Still, once you’ve walked a mile very much inside someone else’s moccasins, there will be serious implications, especially when you’ve gone and made Duke, already a little shaky when it comes to its status vis-a-vis schools like Harvard, feel positively parkinsonian.

*****************

Not that you can’t make poetry out of retentive feet.

And whence they came and whither they shall go
The dew upon their feet shall manifest.

I’d have plagiarized that.

… of the way we were...

In May 2000, the entrepreneur Kurt Andersen said raising money for a media start-up called Inside was as easy “as getting laid in 1969.” That was a few weeks after the stock market peaked. Seventeen months and one merger later, Inside shut down. (Mr. Andersen clarified in an email that he did not actually have sex until the 1970s.)

The top-to-toe burka, with its sinister, airless little grille, is more than an instrument of persecution, it is a public tarring and feathering of female sexuality. It transforms any woman into an object of defilement too untouchably disgusting to be seen. It is a garment of lurid sexual suggestiveness: what rampant desire and desirability lurks and leers beneath its dark mysteries? In its objectifying of women, it turns them into cowering creatures demanding and expecting violence and victimisation. Forget cultural sensibilities.

More moderate versions of the garb – the dull, uniform coat to the ground and the plain headscarf – have much the same effect, inspiring the lascivious thoughts they are designed to stifle. What is it about a woman that is so repellently sexual that she must diminish herself into drab uniformity while strolling down Oxford Street one step behind a husband who is kitted out in razor-sharp Armani and gold, pomaded hair and tight bum exposed to lustful eyes? (No letters please from British women who have taken the veil and claim it’s liberating. It is their right in a tolerant society to wear anything including rubber fetishes – but that has nothing to do with the systematic cultural oppression of women with no choice.)

But not before UD, who does Wordle just as a new game begins, at midnight, played. She had a devil of a time with FETUS, and she usually breezes through Wordle. She got, quickly, three of its letters, but all three kept being in the wrong place; and she had to stare for about fifteen minutes (an outrageously long Wordle time) at the alphabet, and shift letters around here and there in her head, to figure out what the word could possibly be.

She got FETUS in four moves, which is more than respectable given its difficulty, only to be told by her fellow players (there are four of us) that they all got a different, easier word.

ADIEU

QUOTE

ERUPT

FETUS

Campaign slogan, Afghan Supreme Leader Haibatullah Akhunzada.

His song:

A bag of bones under a full-body wrap!

Now tell me which leader can do better than that!

******************

UPDATE: Comes now a charismatic young challenger to Akhunzada…

Campaign slogan: We CAN do better than that! I guarantee that that corpse will be a nine-year-old girl with no clitoris, just sold off to a seventy-year-old man!

No fear of life in prison either, I guess.

‘Kings Pointer Robert Levine, 74, fired five shots at an unfamiliar fellow condo resident, Herbert Merritt, 64, while he was walking his dog near the 15th hole of the golf course at Kings Point early one evening last month, according to the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office.

Levine, driving a golf cart, pulled up to Merritt, and confronted him about walking his dog too close to the golf course, according to the arrest report.

The verbal confrontation took a potentially life-and-death turn when Levine pointed a handgun at Merritt, who then ran, as Levine pursued him around a tree in the cart while shooting at the fleeing dog owner, the arrest report said.

One of the shots hit Merritt in the left ankle, wounding him and dropping him to the ground. Levine wasn’t done, according to the report. An eyewitness told deputies that the golfer kicked Merritt in the head, then went to golf cart, pulled out a club and began hitting the fallen dog owner with a club, while still holding the handgun in his other hand.’

…. to watch Beetlejuice on Broadway. She is – as her photo indicates – inches away from the madness.