Ugh.

What can I say. In America, that’s how you define a successful gathering of college students.

Friday for a change a little more lockdown…

The song is beautifully written and scored, Flack’s piano has the right drift/heft for the theme, and of course her strong expressive voice carries exactly the power and pathos the poetry of the piece demands.

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At this late date, UD has lost much of her tolerance for pathos; as she has explained on this blog, she now prefers movies that feature crowds of terrified Manhattanites fleeing monsters (see Cloverfield) to films where you actually have to get to know suffering particular individuals. But for this hugely pathos-ridden song (its triple-sads usually only work when floating on a torrent of vitriol/wit) UD still makes an exception – maybe because, again, at this late date, the words evoke much-beloved actual thwarted young men living and dead (for instance, her ‘thesdan playmate David).

see the sudden smile

someone they can hold

for just a little while…

while a grimy moon

blossoms up above

all the sad young men

they cry

and making love and making love

misbegotten moon

shine for sad young men

let your gentle light

guide them home again

all the sad sad sad young men

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How powerfully she sustains the final me-e-e-n…! How she brings erotic comfort to fierce lost souls. Only the very best performers can save this song from its almost unbearable – almost inartistic! – pathos. Roberta Flack – RIP – could do that.

Sorry. Her widower has told anyone who will listen that she had severe, longstanding, mental illness marked in particular by profound clinical depression. I’m sure it’s true that no one was capable of imagining she’d shoot bullets directly into the heads of her four children; but just as surely her husband, and her close friends like you, were aware that she manifested the perfect confluence of symptoms for suicide/attempted suicide. Anyone with eyes in her head would have taken one look at the loaded weapons in that house and tried to remove them.

I hear you. In Wyoming, even with no weapons inside, she only needed to stroll to the sidewalk in front of her house and ask any of the passersby dripping with Destroyer Carbines if she could borrow one for a sec. But this unusual behavior might at least have tipped off her two older daughters that mommy was really losing it now and they should flee.

UD‘s sick, in this blood-soaked country, of people, post-massacre of the innocents, looking everywhere — nasty mysterious God, the lethal difficulty of childrearing — but at the fucking guns.

A full week!

Leopold Bloom does a fart walk through Dublin at the end of the Sirens chapter in James Joyce’s Ulysses.

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Prrprr.

Must be the bur.

Fff. Oo. Rrpr.

Nations of the earth. No-one behind. She’s passed. Then and not till then. Tram. Kran, kran, kran. Good oppor. Coming. Krandlkrankran. I’m sure it’s the burgund. Yes. One, two. Let my epitaph be. Karaaaaaaa. Written. I have.

Pprrpffrrppfff.

Done.

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A century plus later modern science informs us that an evening fart walk should be part of our health regime. And not only that.

There are alternatives to fart walks as well. As long as the physical activity is vigorous enough but not too vigorous, it can suffice. So, fart texting, for example, probably doesn’t move enough of your body around enough. But fart cycling (as long as it is not too vigorous), fart yoga, fart squats, fart lunges or fart marching could do the trick. 

Germany’s new leader offers some introductory remarks.

… but the melody lingers on.

No indeed – God wasn’t mistaken when he willed four little girls to die agonizing deaths at the hands of a lunatic with a gun. Pastor Lange admonishes us not to think for a second that God’s hand wasn’t in Olivia’s tortured last days with a big bullet in her brain. We would be fools to think that God’s plan for this family didn’t involve the mother going mad and ripping four bullets directly into the heads of two girls and two babies sleeping in cribs, and then plugging herself. Faith means knowing that some day an event that looks like hell will turn out to be heaven.

'Bien sûr, Monsieur Bannon's salute
Was très déclassé - oui, sans doute.
He's not a nice fella,'
Said Jordan Bardella;
'I'm leaving to reread La Chute.'

A Harvard student argues that admissions based purely on the amount of money random parents give — and this sort of quid pro quo gift is typically, apparently, in the hundreds of millions — should be encouraged, and stuff like legacies and athletics not so much. Indeed, Harvard — laboring under a $53.2 billion endowment — would do well to increase the price of pure money admission, lest the school’s wealth drop by a perilous amount.

It’s an interesting model. There are currently 2,781 billionaires in the world, and let’s assume a healthy chunk of them (Musk has eight children and counting) want their kids to go to Harvard. Straightforwardly monetizing Harvard admissions – setting the price as clearly as countries offering citizenship, for instance, set prices – and taking a lot of billionaire kids every year, would top up that b$53.2 by a good amount.

Assuming Harvard’s goal is at least a one hundred billion dollar endowment (which I think most reasonable people would consider a pretty solid pile, plus a rainy day fund), and say they want to reach that goal in ten years (again, a reasonable aim) you could do the math with not much trouble and simply let billionaire applicants know what the winning number would be.

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OTOH –Mr UD proposes targeting much-childed billionaires… oh, okay, here’s a partial list —

• Frank VanderSloot: Has 14 children.
• Farris Wilks: Has 11 children.
• David Duffield: Has 10 children.
• Jerry Moyes: Has 10 children.
• Nelson Peltz: Has 10 children.
• Richard Schulze: Has 10 children.
• Fred Smith: Has 10 children.

— and communicating to them that there will be an auction. Brilliant.

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Update: Gevalt. My buddy Philip tells me the correct ‘number of Muskian progéniture’ is 13.

Update: 14.

We’re one of the most gun-violent cities in America’s most gun-violent state, and you’re telling us to return the six handguns and rifles that fell out of a stolen UPS truck? This is Shreveport!

“They are gone. They are gone,” comments one local. “Gone.”

… Thank God for Mississippi.

Even Alabama has heard of the First Amendment.

What, for example, would be the verdict on a [Harvard] panel discussing the recent bans on transgender women participating in women’s college athletics? The [Crimson] Editorial Board provides a clear answer (in the event that someone supports them): supposedly “bad-faith” attacks and pure political scapegoating — surely not anything worth reasoned debate.

It does not matter that a vast majority of Americans — and a plurality of Democrats — believe that people should only play on sports teams that match their birth gender; such strident language indicates a self-assuredness incompatible with even countenancing that reasonable people can disagree. Implicit in this arrogance is a belief that dissent can only stem from bigotry or ignorance.