… 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.

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.