… Ready for the oven.

But for some reason Don McLean just ain’t in the mood this year.

And neither is the stinkin’ rich genius who made and marketed the gun Wee Hitler used on all them little kids. Hey fella where’s your sense of fun? What’s with you and McLean?

Better not be any more cancellations. We gonna pah-tyyy!!!

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Ten minutes later:

Whoops! Plumb forgot the whole Ukraine thing. But I still love assault weapons, specially for teens!

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U.S. Sen. John Cornyn was slated to speak at the convention but his team told news outlets on Tuesday the Republican had notified the NRA he would not be attending because of an “unexpected change in his schedule”…

F-a-a-a-ck… they’re dropping like… And now that pussy Abbott says he ain’t sure he’s going either…

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Finally some good news! The NRA announces that Motörhead will replace Don McLean and will sing Dancing on Your Grave!

Just let it … hang out there…

Here’s a thought. Start at the bottom, or the top, which, as always, is Mississippi. Number One for least restrictive gun laws in the country. Number One for gun homicides.

Start there. I don’t say try to change it; Mississippi will always be like this.

But, for once, as a nation, pay attention to Mississippi. Gun-wise, it has the worst of everything. Gun-wise, it is, for states that want to change, that can change, the basest baseline. Ask yourself: What exactly is Mississippi doing? How can we not do that? How can we be better than Mississippi?

He arrives in the early morning on his bicycle, on which he’s balancing a broom. Leaning his bike against a bench, he takes the broom and, at the start of each windy walkway onto the beach, begins to sweep the sand off of the boardwalk.

Of course we’ll do something. We’ll make Texas’s gun laws even looser.

America, America, God shed his grace on thee. What other country produces killers like this, able to post $100,000 bail! Even our subway shooters are rich here!

Plus America gave him all the guns he could hope to use to murder a wonderful man just trying to get across town to meet his brother for lunch.

But none of this would be possible without rapid parole and bail for people who shouldn’t get bail and an unsecured public transit system. You need all the elements to be in place. New York, New York! If Abdullah can make it there, he can make it anywhere.

[Depp’s] trial affords many glances inside [his] extravagant yet bleak fortress: the insulating layers of handlers and yes-men; the huge, empty homes loaned out to hangers-on; the noxious mix of paranoia, dependence, and impunity bred by ultra-celebrity; the disorienting suspicion that everything is permitted and nothing necessarily has to be true…

The New Yorker thinks about the Depp/Heard trial.

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

Interesting parallels with Michael Jackson, especially the desperate self-drugging. Maybe TS Eliot had it wrong. Humankind cannot bear very much unreality.

… hope.

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And:

Never have I been so ashamed of my country as on February 24 this year…. Those who conceived this war want only one thing — to remain in power forever, to live in pompous tasteless palaces, sail on yachts comparable in tonnage and cost to the entire Russian navy, enjoying unlimited power and complete impunity.

Russia’s ex-representative to the UN in Geneva writes a Dear Vlad letter.

NASA has Identified ‘Something Weird’

Happening to the Universe

… for another couple

of weeks. Mr UD has

finished his semester,

the dog is off to the

kennel, and we are set

to leave.

Blogging continues,

as always, at the seaside.

… this photo in the New York Times, part of an ad campaign for Parachute, an upscale bedding company. (There’s a Parachute store a thirteen-minute walk from La Kid’s trendy DC apartment.) What strikes me is the dirt on the bedroom floor, and on the pants of the person troweling.

In the bedroom. Troweling in the bedroom.

Other elements of the image – washed-out whites, distressed terracottas, and palely flowering plants – are familiar from the hyper-minimalist, organic design world, and UD herself is a paid-up member of that world… Often, when UD visits her neighbors’ houses, she thinks They put everything in. I take everything out…

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

Mr UD is fond of this guy… something of a crackpot … named Bede Griffiths, who just kept getting more and more and more ascetic in his spiritual life, and for sure that ain’t me. Like only wearing a loincloth and sleeping under the stars. But I recognize myself, somewhat, in this pallid pictorial. Remember that Mr UD’s father was a noted Corbusierian, so there’s that influence in our (midcentury) house, and its simple pollinator gardens/unrefined forests, as well. We’re definitely on the spectrum.

Anyway, there’s above all the devil-may-care, so-what-if-I’m wearing-white-slacks thing to note in this image. I get the whole bringing the garden indoors trend, but wow. Does this woman not have a cat/dog to gambol in the loam and track it all over the house? Or am I supposed to be too cool to worry about that? Is it bourgeois to worry about that? Croyez-moi, I don’t care when stuff in the house gets dirty and dog-haired, etc.; but I’m thinking I draw the line at potting plants on my bedroom floor.

Don’t never get tired, ’round these blog-parts, of reading and writing about university football.

Take Texas A&M, jest about the filthiest jock shop in America. Up in that there headline its athletic director is ahuffin and apuffin cuz filthy U Bama coach Nick Saban said tother day Texas A&M was (lawdy!) corrupt. How dare he! We is going to the filthy SEC and making a formal complaint because I never!

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

Saban also badmouthed filthy Jackson State, and their coach (he’s the highest paid person on campus and doesn’t know that the past tense of pay is paid) is also on fire with righteous indignation…

But hold on. Let’s avert our eyes from this latest dust-up and look hard at the home of Jackson State University, cuz that’s where the big news story is, only no one gives a shit about some obscure state capital shooting itself to death.

Did you know that Jackson Miss has the highest gun homicide rate in the entire nation?

In gunny America, that ain’t no story. It’s gotten virtually no coverage. But ol’ UD thinks it a better use of your time to consider why Jackson is shooting itself to death than to follow the mutual insults of a couple of rich old hicks.

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

Not that it’s all that mysterious how Jackson got there. First, lose most of your cops and make it impossible for the ones left to mess with anyone holding a gun. Make sure your court system is backed up to the point of paralysis, and headed by judges who don’t put people away. Encourage absolutely everyone to open carry the most astoundingly powerful weaponry.

Your state has America’s weakest gun laws and – how bout that – its highest gun death rate!

Reduce your civic life to total gun culture, so that even thirteen year olds carry and kill. You start at thirteen, and even if you’re caught you don’t go to jail. Many years of carnage lie ahead of you. Even if you get blown away by, say, 23, that’s still ten years of killing in the streets of Jackson.

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Why wouldn’t you send your kid to Jackson State?

Trump-Backed Candidate Who Said Christ Would ‘Reign in Idaho’ Loses Primary

Teehee.