January 22nd, 2026
’[F]ormer Metropolitan Police Force officer Michael Fanone coughed “Fuck yourself” when Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas) opined that police bore responsibility for the Jan 6. security breach at the Capitol.’

Best part of the Jack Smith hearings.

January 22nd, 2026
“[S]ome teachers have been enacting what one instructor, Lena Lee, called “malicious compliance,” collecting spiritually themed posters from faiths as far afield as the Satanic Temple …”

Teehee. If you force teachers to display the Ten Commandments, they will have to comply; but some of them will cover the display wall with additional posters from all sorts of supernatural sources, see, not just Christianly-approved ones.

And again I say teehee.

January 22nd, 2026
Euroweenies hide their Hitlerism inside train conductor …

cabins, but here in America we come right out with it.

At a Miami nightclub called Vichy… I mean Vendome! … some of the country’s highest profile fascists ordered up a Nazi rap song the other night and sang and saluted along with it. A fine time was had by all, plus they’re getting a lot of attention.

As for UD – meh. Millions of people love fascism in one or another of its forms, and she’s having trouble being scandalized by singing Hitlers.

January 21st, 2026
‘“The overriding concept [of] the Golden Gate Bridge story is restricting easy access to lethal means,” [one expert] said. “It’s a way to reduce suicides that John and Jane Q. Public can do. You don’t need a lot of complex psychiatric training to, say, simply lock up the guns.” Or to make leaping into the ocean more difficult.‘

Lock the guns (or take them away). Net the bridges. It works.

January 20th, 2026
As Key West declares February 8…

… Elizabeth Bishop Day (she lived there for a few years and wrote some great poems about it), UD reads through her copy of The Complete Poems and gives Bishop a good think. The last lines of The Bight (my analysis of it is linked to up there, at great poems) became her epitaph —

— and it does rather capture her philosophy, not to mention her life, which was lived with background messiness (drunkenness, loneliness, depression) and foreground … if not cheeriness, at least with a pleasant public countenance. Many of her best, and best-known poems, meticulously observe an operable, operating, world (cargo ships coming and going at harbors, buses traveling Cape Breton), but it’s a lumbering, ultimately go-nowhere, always deteriorating, sort of thing… just like us…

Obviously the thought of life’s desuetude and apparent meaninglessness is awful, and some poems exist to prompt the thought; but what the poet mainly notes along the way is the cheerfulness – and even aestheticism! – we bring to existence nonetheless.

Reading a lot of Bishop’s poems in one sitting saddened me. No one says she has to be Whitman, but her buddies James Merrill and Malcolm Brinnin, let’s say, mixed the melancholy with – not superficial cheer, but merriment at the spectacle.

January 18th, 2026
Massacre Management in Louisiana

They’ve long held the national Number One spot for murders, but when murders happen, they mobilize a whole nothing to see here protocol. Even the NYT plays along, insisting on how isolated and rare a recent massacre at a restaurant was, its neighborhood “hushed” with shock.

Toward the end of the piece the writer does allow as how the restaurant “is within walking distance of the city’s French Quarter … — the site of an attack that killed 14 people a year ago,” but most of the article maunders on about the restaurant’s history – strikingly irrelevant to a mass shooting. Nowhere does the writer note that this sort of carnage is something of a banality in gun-loving LA.

January 17th, 2026
‘[C]onsumers often pressure providers for antibiotics, and may get them, due to perverse incentives. “The salaries and bonuses of urgent care providers are often tied to patient satisfaction.”’

Other people frighten themselves by watching scary movies; UD just watches this.

“We’re sleepwalking into a disaster. I shouldn’t say we are — we already have sleepwalked into a disaster.”

January 16th, 2026
‘The Louvre made … headlines a year ago when its director said in a leaked memo that visiting the museum was “a physical ordeal”.’

The Louvre, the Prado, and (I can attest) the Uffizi are all an ordeal, “like the Metro at rush hour,” and everyone’s too greedy to do anything about it.

January 15th, 2026
Sing it, Tanzania!

https://iwpr.net/global-voices/tanzania-inside-trade-body-parts-driving-fgm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfZWp-hGCdA&list=RDUfZWp-hGCdA&start_radio=1

Fatma, don’t lose that pussy!
Its market price is hot
Send it off to a trader
They pay a lot

Fatma don’t lose that pussy
That you cut with a dirty knife
It’ll make a magic potion
And a bloodied clitless wife

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

Shouldn’t the mutilated women, children, and babies get - as it were - a cut? The scheme seems a mite unfair. They after all are supplying the raw materials.

January 15th, 2026
Corruption with a Cherry on Top

Prosecutors said he included a fraudulent invoice in his [loan] application, which said he had been paid more than $800 for a “Three layer cake — 80’s Themed – Orange, Blue, Black and White — Tie dye color.” 

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

Guy was soft on crime too. His bribery deal with funeral home directors was totally dependent on dead victims.

January 14th, 2026
Ah — THAT’S better!

Chacun à son scandale to be sure, but for UD the Secretary of Labor scandal’s got it all over the Somali daycare scandal. The latter offers scraggly whistleblowers bursting into dank suburban offices, while Madame Secretary OTOH lolls poolside in a bright yellow bikini at Vegas venues, glugging booze and shacking up with her tax-subsidized sex-partner-subordinate …

Sex drugs and rock and roll, baby! All the Somali thing offers is a clot of religious hypocrites hiding behind hijabs; if any of it’s true, the Labor thing’s got everything we want in a scandal – rippling flesh, naughty fucking at high-end hotels, abuse of office, adultery, alcohol, theft of taxpayer funds… And the thing just broke! Bet there’s more.

January 14th, 2026
Berkeley’s Gift to the Trumpians

Read every word, including the comments, and wonder about the demise of the Democratic Party no longer.

January 14th, 2026
‘Take features like home theaters, formal dining rooms and game rooms. These often turn into expensive dead zones — pricey square footage that is very rarely used. Rather than social hubs, they serve as glorified storage for our stuff.’

More thunderingly obvious truths are offered about McMansion Melancholia, this time in the Washington Post… Study after study demonstrates that, if your pointless excess rooms function to hold your pointless excess purchases, you are likely to be unhappy about it.

Gazing at the shit-stashes all about you, you may find yourself toppling over into larger terrains of sadness… As in … ah, the pointlessness of it all!

UD has already described the nothingness of her aunt and uncle’s Potomac MD McMansion, a house intended mostly for status display.

Which display certainly worked, because they were robbed of their jewelry more than once.

January 12th, 2026
The release of a British report describing some forms of male infant circumcision as “child abuse”…

… (it’s unregulated, so deaths and mutilations happen) has outraged circumcision enthusiasts. But for UD’s money, no defender of the practice (look at what they’re up to in New York!) will ever come up to the standard of this 2012 piece by Jeffrey Epstein’s best buddy Alan Dershowitz, which compares anyone with the slightest objection to slicing the dicks of non-consenting infants to Adolf Hitler.

January 11th, 2026
Six Theaters in Search of an Author

Pirandello’s famous title needs only a little tweaking to cover the current crisis at the Kennedy Center. An absurdist wind be a-blowin’ from that riverside, Georgetown-adjacent, wedding cake/airport terminal (architectural observers have not been kind to the building) as performers and institutions flee, leaving a Beckettian wilderness.

Surely the first authentically post-name-change programming should be John Cage’s 4’33” – a work devoid of controversial content. Beckett’s own Endgame should be next, evoking a landscape where botheration about things like gender is rather beside the point. The beauty of these two masterpieces – and nihilistic works like them – is that they fairly demand little to no attendance, so that the collapse of the Center’s audience base will seem apposite rather than embarrassing.

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