Everyone’s trying to get excited about the Japanese guy; but as is so often the case, UD finds literature much more amusing and interesting than life.

(The only fun the actual abdication story has afforded UD so far is the phrase “the declining ratio of male imperial members.”)

Garrett Park wakes up, and UD watches it happen on today’s walk.

As UD walked along Strathmore Avenue, a big red fox slowly crossed in front of her, gazing at your blogeuse the entire time. Two families in town keep chickens, and a neighbor told me the other day that a fox got into one of the henhouses and went to town.

The burqa has been a background story for awhile. To be sure, one country after another around the world has been restricting or outright banning this grotesque garment, and when each new law gets passed, there’s some press attention. But now that Sri Lanka, in the wake of the latest extremist atrocity, has banned them, the burqa’s on the front page again.

And what UD has long predicted – vanishingly few people and organizations are objecting to the ban – does seem to be underway, in Sri Lanka and around the world. So far, in all the articles and opinion pieces about it, UD has only found one attack on Sri Lanka’s new policy. More common has been acceptance without comment, or enthusiastic approval.

I’m not sure what’s taken the wind out of burqa-defenders’ sails – and maybe they’ll regain their energy – but I’m thinking the 2017 decision of the European Court of Human Rights not only to uphold but rather eloquently to defend Belgium’s burqa ban began the discouragement. Defenders were always up against large majorities of pro-ban citizens (85% of Swedes; 66% of Brits, for instance) in all countries in which the burqa is an issue, so… you know… democracy and all… And for all their talk of so few women wear it (not true; in England, which still allows them, numbers are going up) and it has nothing to do with national security and it’s perfectly possible to assimilate these women into our country as full citizens and it’s a religious obligation, a personal choice, and I don’t want to talk about the eight year old girls you see wearing them … for all of that, opponents just don’t seem to be making their case at all.

You can see the problem if you look more closely at Megara Tegal’s attack on the policy. Of course she shouts islamophobia, but given the sort of countries that now have bans – Denmark, for instance – it’s very very difficult to throw that one against the wall and make it stick. Eventually Tegal will have to call virtually every European country, along with increasing numbers of Muslim countries, islamophobic (Morocco; Algeria; Egypt’s close to banning them). So let’s see what else she’s got.

Muslim women who have covered their faces for over 20 years, are now afraid to leave their homes.

Think of it – there are women in the world who have never gone outside without entirely covering themselves in black. Even their digits; even their eyes (you’ve seen the get-ups that only give the wearer one eye-hole)! I’m afraid I don’t respond to this statement as an argument; I respond to it as a horror. Nor does what Tegal fails to mention – these women are very likely afraid to leave their homes because their husbands will beat them if they go outside uncovered – help her case. She’s up against the obvious – the burqa is an insanely blatant mark of the worthlessness of women within certain tribes.

Two images from this morning’s walk through Garrett Park.

Now … how can that happen? You take a real squeaky clean athletics program like Auburn and you hire TWO dirty coaches in succession! Bowman was spozed to be the good guy who replaced the bad guy, but he’s another bad guy! It’s just like when the University of Southern California appointed Varma to replace Puliafito! Well, I’m sure head coach Bruce Pearl don’t know anything about it.

ISIS Claims 3 Of Its Terrorists Blew Themselves In Sri Lankan Raids

UD‘s dinky but massively over-educated town (UD has often thought the town should take its motto from The Importance of Being Earnest — a slightly revised version of Algernon’s If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated… Here it would be If I am geographically a little under-sized, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated.) has a mayor and a town council, and there’s a real race for the council this year. Garrett Park’s YouTube channel features the candidates’ forum, which you might not find as engrossing as I do (I know almost all of the people featured in the video, and I’ve known some of them for fifty years), but I think it’s a pretty interesting slice of a certain sort of American life.

Civil discourse dominates, along with a really striking love of the town – its amazing trees and gardens, but also all the stuff it manages to pack into its tiny size – a post office, a popular restaurant, a train station, a town hall, three swimming pools, a farmer’s market, basketball courts, tennis courts, quite a few parks (another park’s on the way, because Laetitia Yeandle, who spent a long distinguished career at the Shakespeare Folger Library, has given the town her house and land) (and speaking of Laetitias and Earnest, my talented cousin Karen will be performing Miss Laetitia Prism in an upcoming production of Earnest, and if you’re local you should try to go because I KNOW this woman, and I know she was born to play Prism), an elementary school, a church… It’s quite a jewel, Garrett Park, and some residents really don’t take to making any changes.

References throughout the forum to sidewalks refer to the anger some townspeople have expressed over GP having scored a big grant to add sidewalks to some of its streets. Although most people agree they improve safety (with very little traffic and a beautiful setting, GP is jammed with pedestrians, cyclists, etc.), some think sidewalks are out of keeping with GP’s natural, lightly-paved, character… And I can understand this, though I don’t agree – I can understand because I grew up across the street from Wells Park (I now live down the street from it) and I recall being upset years ago when Park and Planning paved a path into the park. I sort of knew I was overreacting and being irrational, but that park had always been open land with swing sets and now…

Fact is ol’ UD has responded with some alarm to virtually all changes in town, and yet she now loves and appreciates the changes. They were made by the sort of people running for council (although all the candidates at the forum are men, another member of the council is a woman, and the mayor is a woman) – judicious, intelligent, hard-working. Most of these volunteers have full-time jobs as … well, lawyers… I mean, some are engineers or architects (those, along with the odd CPA, are the best sort of council members, because they actually know how certain things work), but I guess traditionally most have been lawyers. One of the people running this year owns Founding Farmers restaurants plus other enterprises and must be insanely busy; but his heart seems to be in his work on the council.

I liked in particular one thing this guy – Dan Simons – said at the forum. A citizen asked a question about citizen participation in the workings of the town – she acknowledged that by any standard our little town boasts huge numbers of serious volunteers (UD for years, as you know, attended and reported on town council meetings for the GP paper, The Bugle; and Mr UD was a town council member himself), but she still found bothersome the fact that plenty of other citizens don’t volunteer. “They don’t even know we have a mayor and a town council!”

Simons said that the town does a lot and might do even more to draw people in to the business of running it, but: “When I first moved here I had two little kids, start-up businesses, and other responsibilities, and I had no time for any of that. It happens when the time is right; and for some people it’s never right, and I think that’s okay. Some people just want to live here.”

In her big ol’ lawsuit against some Brazilian woman who’s been publishing romance novels plagiarized from a thousand sources (earlier post about the Brazilian bad girl here), bohemoth-of-the-bodice-rippers Nora Roberts uses the term “multi-plagiarism” to describe the crime.

While UD prefers the alliterative poly-plagiarism, she’s not sure we need either term, since in her experience (and faithful readers know we’ve been studying and tracking plagiarism on this blog for centuries), most plagiarizers not only plagiarize repeatedly from book to book, article to article, art installation to art installation; they also plagiarize far and wide within the work, gathering many prose patches in order to realize the rich tapestry, the coat of many colors, that is the stupendously simulacral artifact.

And if you think about it from the copyists’ point of view, the more bricolaged the book the better, ja? Less likely any particular plagiaree will notice… Wise word thieves also make an effort to steal from the obscure dead rather than from enraged, high profile, rich, and extant people like Nora Roberts…

Like her many Harvard precursors, Miss Brasilia blames everything on It’s hard to get good help these days.

Chris Keller is the “last officer standing” in the Men’s Garden Club.

But otherwise it’s such a clean program!

At drug firms there’s truly a science

To being the Chief of Compliance:

A grasp geographic

Of best towns to traffic

Plus conspiracy, greed, and connivance.

KAPOW! College football is corrupt!

Fuckin’ bombshell, man.

Sad opinion piece in the New York Times, by a Hasidic Jew distraught at the failure of significant numbers of his fellow orthodox to protect their children – and the rest of us – from disease. Here’s the most interesting passage of an essay that rehearses ironclad destructive know-nothingism in several aspects (these most notoriously at the moment include the un-education of children and certain grotesque forms of circumcision) of the larger ultraorthodox community – not merely in the anti-vaccination preaching of a powerful subgroup within that community.

Whether out of shortsightedness or strategic malice, some of our religious leaders have directly fostered an atmosphere where thorough research is sneered at, the scientific method is doubted and the motivations of professionals are assumed to be nefarious and steeped in anti-religious animus.

Hardly shortsightedness, is it? I mean, that’s a pretty innocuous word, suggesting that if we can only point out the longer-term results of various rabbis’ behavior, they will maybe change it. No, the author’s use of the phrase strategic malice is far more interesting. The author’s rightly seeking a nasty motive for a nasty set of behaviors. Malice against whom? Strategic in regard to what end? (If he’d written ignorant malice, we could say What do you expect, given the appalling state of education in many American yeshivas? Weep for where the rejection of enlightened modernity lands you…)

The author repeats the word strategic at the end of his essay: Certain religious leaders are exhibiting “the strategic deployment of a siege mentality.” What’s the percentage, for powerful rabbis, of inculcating in their followers an outside-world-rejectionist mentality so severe as to mentally and physically cripple significant numbers of their children for life, and to put the health of the rest of us at risk because of their followers’ behavior? Answer: It’s obvious. These men are insanely power-hungry. As in other abusive, endgame cults, this is how cult leaders totally control people. Unto besieged death.

And, to use the technical term, this is nuts, ain’t it?

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

Nuts it may be, but it’s hardly unprecedented or enigmatic behavior. Mildly cultic groups notoriously spin off radical subcults (see Warren Jeffs and the like), and respectable sects know to shun their various psycho subsectarians. Maybe they’ve got people sucking infants’ penises and thereby infecting and sometimes killing them. Maybe they’re infecting their own children with measles. “While it is reasonable to allow adults to martyr themselves to their religion, it is not reasonable to allow them to martyr their children,” says an observer.

UD‘s pretty sure it ain’t reasonable to allow adults to self-martyrize either; but anyway the theme within some orthodox Jewish communities of – in a remarkable number of ways – martyring their children is lately unignorable. Yet these communities – often modern as well as ultra – seem incapable of the shunning that other secretive and tight-knit religious communities are able to accomplish. (Not that they don’t love to shun! They just seem to shun the wrong things.) Nor is New York City’s government willing to go there. So here we are.

Read it once for enjoyment, and a second time to learn how to write well.