… the Russian police.

Only two channels these days: You can watch Johnny Depp fall to pieces, or watch Vladimir Putin fall to pieces.

High-steppin’ strutters now limping into old age, grandiose world-conquerors who’ve lost it all, both of these woman-haters currently bloat and tremble on the global stage as their badly over-played machismo bites them in the butt. Women, says Depp, famously, are “cum-guzzlers”; Angela Merkel and Hillary Clinton represent, in their freakish rise to male power, a personal insult to Vlad.

To be sure, one of these people might destroy the world, while the other has merely a film career to nuke (if you want to throw in Will Smith – currently staging a reincarnation in India – go ahead), but both offer the riveting and enlightening spectacle of the power of delusion and the delusions of power. Putin pursues a hopeless war; Depp presses one hopeless lawsuit after another, with profound carnage along the way. Our role is to be disgusted (and, in the case of Putin, afraid) as we fail to take our eyes off of the very worst outcomes of a reactionary ethos.

… silver linings. And of course there’s Macron’s victory over Le Pen.

Newsweek.

… dinner before tomorrow’s ceremony awarding Stewart the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. The whole thing’s vegan. She snapped a pic of the first course:

WUSA9 counted more than 60 gunshots over a 19-second span with the [Connecticut Avenue] shooter reloading once in the middle of the 2 volleys of bullets.

The video [taken by the shooter] is unstable at times and the sheer terror of it all is seen more clearly in freeze frames taken from the footage.

The shooter appears to have modified the camera to include a red bull’s-eye on the screen. First, taking aim at a poster for a recent fundraiser in the Edmund Burke School window. A few frames later, after the shots start, you can see four bullet holes in that same window. Just feet away, a young student appears to be ducking.

A couple of frames later, the bull’s-eye in the video appears to be tracking the students as they run for their lives. Then the shooter turns his sights back on the street and a person in a yellow vest who dives between parked cars to shield himself from the gunfire.

A student has apparently been shot at the school where my colleague Faye Moskowitz taught for years; two other people, near the apartment of our old friends the Elkins, have been shot. Hundreds of rounds went off, they say, and hordes of heavily armed police are still seeking the gunman. The area for blocks around has been locked down. The gunman is/was reportedly in this building.

Upper Connecticut – a broad beautiful leafy thoroughfare.

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

I was sitting in the den overlooking Connecticut, Steve just told me, and I heard what sounded like some sort of machinery. Then I realized it was repeated gunfire. Di was just in its vicinity, at the grocery. I tried calling her, but she didn’t pick up. She just bought a new phone and doesn’t know how it works. I was frantic.

Finally she figured out how to make a call. She didn’t lock down. She sneaked across Connecticut and took a long roundabout way home. I met her outside our apartment, and at first we couldn’t get back in. I had to convince the police blocking the door that I live there.

Right now I’m looking at an incredible police presence up and down the avenue. I’ve never seen anything like it.

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

Update: Now dead by his own hand, the Connecticut Avenue shooter seems to have lacked the whatever to massacre in the way of his role model, Vegas massacrist, Stephen Paddock.

[The] alleged shooter [on Connecticut Avenue] died by suicide while officers were entering a fifth-floor apartment where he had set up a “sniper-type setup” with a tripod. Six firearms, including several long guns, and multiple rounds of ammunition, were found inside the apartment.

Compare that to his hero, Paddock.

Twenty-four firearms, a large quantity of ammunition, and numerous high-capacity magazines capable of holding up to 100 rounds apiece were found in the suite. Fourteen of the firearms were .223-caliberAR-15-typesemi-automatic rifles: three manufactured by Colt, two by Daniel Defense, two by FN Herstal, two by LWRC International, two by POF-USA, one with a .223 Wylde chamber by Christensen Arms, one made-to-order by LMT, and one by Noveske. The others were eight .308-caliber AR-10-type rifles, one .308-caliber Ruger American bolt-action rifle, and one .38-caliber Smith & Wesson Model 342 revolver. Some of the AR-15 rifles were fitted with vertical forward grips and bump stocks, the latter of which allowed for recoil to actuate their triggers at a rate of 90 rounds in 10 seconds. The AR-10 rifles were equipped with various telescopc sights and mounted on bipods. Paddock was found to have fired a total of 1,058 rounds from fifteen of the firearms: 1,049 from twelve AR-15-style rifles, eight from two AR-10-style rifles, and the round used to kill himself from the Smith & Wesson revolver.

You’ve been gone so long!

Once again we get to hear your song.

Aesthetic

Garden piano starlight and stone:
The pursuits of my parents
Present as my own. 

Also dogs, and birds.

The play of words.

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Is there nothing that is mine alone?

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

Instead of her spaniels a runty pit.
Purcell in place of his Hindemith.
And perseids more than constellations.

For eight years, police have been trying to prove that Charles Adelson had Dan Markel killed. Anyone who followed the appalling story of a man killed simply because he wanted to share custody of his children knows that the evidence has always pointed to the brother of Markel’s ex-wife, but authorities only recently had sufficient proof of the conspiracy. Now a trial can proceed.

Benson failed to detect on John Eastman

Any obvious Mark of the Beastman.

‘It was only much later

He came out as a traitor!

We ask you to leave us in peace, man.’

This writer stresses America’s fast-growing 4 – 14 shooter cohort: The NRA’s putting Glocks in Christmas socks, and our littlest ones are shooting them all over the place — at themselves, at party guests, at their families.

It’s a curious development. The onrush of America’s infantile infantry.

… they will come.

Spring, UD‘s garden.

Leave it around and it just might kill your kid.