Yeah. Well. FWIW, so do I. Not only has a prior court found it likely Depp abused; Heard’s testimony came across as reasonably believable.

Depp’s got some other stuff going against him too. I guess no one can call off his Charlie-Manson’s-girls fan club in and outside the courtroom, but the spectacle is pretty fucking twisted. As is the spectacle of a 53-year-old man stewing in a sort of hopeless, squalid, immaturity — in a real cluelessness about how more or less normal adults behave.

UD admires Depp’s admiration of Hunter Thompson and Marlon Brando – he has a right to choose his heroes – but when he trumpets the admiration, it opens the door – wide – to Heard’s description of the drugged and drunken chaos with which she dealt. Her being much younger than Depp doesn’t help either, since it makes more plausible her claim of some naivete in entering into a relationship with an established addict.

Lastly, lemme just say: It’s probably not the best preparation for life as a wealthy, influential, powerful, cultural figure with complex pressures and responsibilities to drop out of high school at the age of sixteen and almost immediately find yourself in the outrageous fantasy world of the movies. Heard dropped out too, but she went on later to earn a high school degree. Depp missed the disciplined setting and systematic thinking of high school, much less college (college, said Bartlett Giamatti, is a free AND ordered space), and instead learned that exceptionally keen emotional intuition, plus heedless impulsivity, will get you where you want to go.

Yet that mix seems ultimately to have landed him in financial and reputational peril. Don’t wanna seem preachy, but you really need more than that.

To the tune of Clementine.


Tried the hijab, tried abaya
Tried to keep our peckers down
But your nostrils we espy - ed
And our stiffies went to town

Only burqa only burqa
Only burqa keeps us down
We are lost and gone forever
When you wear just half a gown

O you whorish godless creatures
How you make our wieners fizz
When you show your brazen features
All the streets are lined with jiz

Only burqa only burqa
Only burqa keeps us down
We are lost and gone forever
When you just wear half a gown

Not to mention, more modestly and locally, Potomac, Maryland, down the street from ol’ UD, many of whose McMansions house a rich diversity of foreign kleptocrats…

I mean, first they came for the Armenians (starting with A, I presume), and I did not speak out— Because I am not an Armenian. Then they came for the Brazilians, and I did not speak out— Because I am not a Brazilian. Then they came for the Croatians, and I did not speak out— Because I am not a Croatian. Und so weiter.

If my government truly takes the wonderfully named Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Awards Program seriously, expect all those exciting new super-thin luxury towers overlooking Central Park to thin to nothingness, babe. More critically, expect UD’s little house’s price (currently overvalued, by some online estimates, at close to a million dollars) to plummet as all the nearby rich people who are propping the poor thing’s value up go to jail.

Seriously, do you really want to go down that path?

Alliteration-wise, this is good; but we can do better.

PER PROSECUTORS, PLAGIARISM PINNED ON PERUVIAN PRESIDENT

? Something like that? … Anyway, it’s fun to see the dude pushing all the buttons everyone else in a high position pushes: This is a nefarious plot to bring down his utopia of joy and justice; standards for scholarship were different then; it was duly vetted and passed by a thesis committee and then a rigorous group of examiners; cheap gotchas like this tarnish the dignity of all Peruvians…

Sam, Sam

The No-Roe man

Writes his big opinion

Now he’s on the lam.

Fences up at SCOTUS

Catch us if you can!

Clerks are put on notice

Sam the No-Roe man

Headline of the day.

An expert notes the firestorm of Republican ads featuring more and more desperate firearm brandishing.

UD gets this guy’s point that by 2024 guns in ads will be so routine that candidates will be blowing up Planned Parenthood offices to demonstrate their fervency.

But what about after that? What happens when not only guns are a snooze, but bombings elicit a shrug?

UD anticipates that, by 2028 or so, self-immolation will be the only way MAGA fanatics will be able to attract our attention.

They’re all over the news, and they’re of two kinds:

1. The reasonably explicable variety, which features people unable to sustain high levels of isolation and rigor, as in the recent rash of suicides on a navy ship. The numbers got so high that the navy evacuated the ship. These suicides share traits with prisoner suicide.
2. The more mysterious phenomenon of highly successful people destroying themselves at the height of their power and influence. Here we might think of the 2019 death of Alan Krueger; more recently, several young women athletes, all of whom had just won tournaments and awards, killed themselves. A highly promising young tv star just killed herself. On the verge of her induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame, Naomi Judd killed herself.

The cases of Judd and Krueger seem to involve a kind of existential exhaustion after years-long struggles with clinical depression. The powerful drugs, the endless therapy sessions, the setbacks – everything takes a toll on someone already fatigued and undermined. OTOH, although many young suicides have already exhibited some signs of being troubled, there’s nonetheless an impulsive – almost panicked – feel to some of these deaths. Bizarrely, their fate doesn’t seem gradual, but rather the outcome of a sudden access of horror at the thought of existing for one more second. Their end resembles a psychotic break featuring an insupportable hatred of being.

UD covered it on this blog; Love’s drunk jealous on and off boyfriend kicked in her locked (to keep him out) off campus house door and bloodily beat her to death, for which he’s currently serving a 23-year sentence. And now Love’s mother has won a $15 million damages case against him.

Okay, back to the current legal drama coming out of an arrogant gin-soaked world…

She’s wilded her front lawn, so no lawn guilt. She’s actually not keen on azaleas (too many of them; too pastel), but a lot of her garden is gifts from her mother’s garden, and she’s sentimental about keeping the gifts, even if they’re not what she would have chosen. The above-ground wires you see always make me remember my big-shot developer Uncle Mario, who found this ancient technology shocking.

This is UD‘s front garden; dedicated readers will also be familiar with the back, which features a recently installed pollinator garden plus lots of woodland. Photos of that when it does something interesting.

My representative, Jamie Raskin:

The leaked Alito draft opinion “would apply also to the right to privacy in contraception… [It’s] an invitation to a Handmaid’s Tale-type legislation all over the country… [It] makes us in the image of Hungarian illiberal democracy… [It will] carve out and destroy the rights and freedoms of the people.”

This massive international art exhibit has opened with surrealistic performance art from Russia: Sergey Lavrov gave an “absurd” interview on Italian television, in which he called Hitler a Jew.

… decided that name wasn’t quite … appropriate … or … haha… decided it was too appropriate… there’s been a dynamic linguistic reappraisal going on in the sports world generally.

For instance, now that Little Leaguers all over the country have been dropping and rolling on the field as bullets fly, we’re beginning to revisit some baseball slang that, if used, could cause pandemonium.

Words and phrases currently being assessed include:

bang-bang play

battery

dead red

fireman

five-tool player

heat

moon shot

platoon

twin killing

bleeder

base hit

hit and run

shot

slugger

Gevalt.

… as Gerard Manley Hopkins would put it if he were writing his famous poem today. How could anyone who knows, even a little bit, our simulacral world, be surprised that the notorious Washington Post opinion piece currently ruining April Heard’s life wasn’t even written by her?