… Andrew Humiston era.

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

From the obituary of Andrew’s father:

Mark is survived by his son Andrew.

Who shot Mark four times at point blank range.

… friends.

Example One: She was chatting with her buddy Peter about Tom Lehrer, and it quickly turned into a competition as to who knew more lyrics and could sing them more convincingly. UD of course won; her parents played and sang Lehrer all through UD’s childhood, and UD has a better voice/vocal memory than Peter.

While UD basked in her victory, Peter said in a musing nostalgic sort of way I remember Tom’s many visits to my parents’ Cambridge house when I was growing up… He was a good friend and very entertaining…

UD bowed to his one-upmanship…

Example Two: Through Peter’s daughter, UD has come to be friends with Alice Hayes, a direct descendent of Rutherford B., and a clerk on the January 6 Committee. Barely out of her twenties, and guilty of nothing, she has just been issued a presidential preemptive pardon!

Preliminary reports suggest a failure of the hotel’s fire alarm system, and a slow response from emergency vehicles.

Whatever happens on Monday, Jan. 20, is not akin to the redemption offered by Jesus Christ. 

When they also run programs, and when it’s a conspiracy, it can be close to impossible.

UCLA – a pretty respectable school – handed the running of its orthodontics school over to a set of buddies who made a point of admitting students from way-rich middle east kingdoms. Once in residence, these students were ordered to come up with, er, supplemental fees in the tens of thousands of dollars, and if they didn’t they’d be out on their oil-rich asses.

Not sure how the school figured out what was going on, but for reasons of its own the school – after throwing the members of the conspiracy out – did nothing by way of prosecution of anyone, and worked hard to keep a report about their malfeasance secret.

As one of the last acts of his presidency, Biden has issued preemptive pardons for Fauci and several other national heroes and heroines who pissed off whatzisname by pursuing truth, justice, and the American way.

SOS says: It’s not a mixed metaphor, but it’s certainly a muddle… To express her anger over the Bidens’ failure to visit her mother while she was in the hospital, Alexandra Pelosi packed every insult she could think of into a mess of a thing in which Lady Macbeth is enjoined to put on her big boy pants and take up football. If you want to complete an effective hit, you need aim and accuracy.

Few people incorporate idiocy and degeneracy as intensely as Unity Mitford did. Reading her newly released diaries from 1935 is a mildly interesting way to spend a snowy afternoon.

A New York high school does absolutely nothing about a violent student brandishing guns.

In an email to Principal Paul Wilbur, Forest Hills teacher Adam Bergstein described [Moshe] Khaimov as “a clear and present danger” who has struck and threatened students and staff, and brought other weapons to school.

Bergstein faulted the city Department of Education for a system of lax discipline.

“Schools are in a constant state of danger because the DOE refuses to hold students accountable for their behavior until it’s sometimes too late,” Bergstein told The Post.

“They rely on restorative justice circles instead of punishing a child when they are dangerous and clearly pose a risk to everyone in a school.”

Only when students made a fuss did administrators rouse themselves a little from their stupor.

The city council. They’ll approve effing anything, especially lounges (bloodbath background here) full of killers.

The mayor has begged them not to, but they all just laugh, y’know? UD doesn’t know whether lounge owners are bribing council members, or whether members just like it in principle when new abattoirs open up, but, you know, welcome to Bama.

Amy Wax loudly espouses views that most reasonable people find repellent. This does not justify punishing her for expressing them. Her suspension, with the other penalties, is a kind of ritual act, an unconvincing performance of moral purity. 

John McWhorter was right back in October, when he defended the free speech rights of U Penn’s benighted law professor; and now that she has, with great fanfare, sued the university for having imposed sanctions on her, this long sad story will continue for some time to play out.

FWIW, ol’ UD figures she’ll win her case and get herself some money and an apology. Her lawyers can easily point to really disgusting speech from U Penn professors that has occasioned not a peep.

That’d be Jews standing around drinking the blood of Gazans, vs Wax showing her racism. Lots of ick to go around at Penn apparently.

Wax is old and has cancer – maybe Penn thinks it can wait this out.

How tonally appropriate that the composer whose works were wiped out in the Pacific Palisades fire was Arnold Schoenberg. His famous atonality swept us away, said Leonard Bernstein, from Keats’s “poetry of the earth,” from our innate, universal, position in a world which sings harmonically to us, to a weird mystical alien otherwordly place. A place whose utterances we do not understand, but which can generate in us an undifferentiated anxiety.

This is in fact the anxiety of homelessness. Just as the homes of Schoenberg’s son and his neighbors have been swept away, making world and psyche rootless and afraid, so most of the composer’s work literally abandons the home note, the first note of the scale, which we leave and return to in harmonic, non-dissonant, tonal, music — which is to say, in virtually all of the music, classical or popular, we all know. The server who approached UD in a Matera restaurant and asked her to join in with him in singing Volare (he had overheard me singing something else at our table) assumed rightly that UD knows the song because of its simple, strongly rhythmic, redundant lines, inanely reassuring lyrics, and sweet, strong, resolution. On vastly more complex levels than this, our innate tonal drive seems to demand that we be housed in a structurally sound musical universe, that the architecture of music be grounded and sheltering.

We can manage the radical ambiguities of Mahler, but the unambiguously ungrounded atonalities of Schoenberg are a musical bridge too far for most people. He seems to have burned down the musical house.

First there was the antisemitic DEI official from the University of Michigan; now there’s the DEI project manager who was recently filmed calling a woman an ugly dumb cunt.

You are surprised? Really? Familiar with the phrase return of the repressed? If your very livelihood forces you to suppress the routine mildly derogatory/belittling shit we all express now and then as a perfectly healthy social outlet, it’s liable to come out — and eventually it will come out — in an explosive extreme form onaccounta the power of all that repression.

It’s normal and necessary for women among themselves to occasionally laugh and call men assholes; it’s just as normal and necessary for men among themselves to demean women. All affinity groups produce a certain amount of derogatory discourse about other groups; it’s called letting off steam. But if your vocation won’t let you – if you always have to pretend to have none of these non-DEI thoughts – then eventually, like Mount Etna, it’s all gonna come rushing back from your depths of resentment at having to deny it, and you are gonna BLOW.

At this stage of his life, [Natrona County Commissioner Dallas] Laird finds that he cries often. He wonders whether it’s his age, or if there’s simply a lot to cry about, or maybe it’s some mixture of the two. [A young man who recently killed himself] was loved, and yet he didn’t seem to believe it. How could that be? What is happening in his community? He thinks that most families don’t know what to do when someone is in crisis, or they can’t afford therapy. Guns are everywhere, woven into the fabric of rural American culture. Hunting elk and moose is a tradition that connects one generation to the next. Children are taught to shoot. Notions about self-protection, and what it means to stand sentry before your family, have become like a religious creed, even when the real danger tends to lurk within. 

Laird believes too many people feel like they’re going nowhere, and that feeling worms its way into the soul, infects it, until the day comes when they grab a firearm. In Wyoming, more than 85 percent of gun deaths are suicide.