… for actually answering the stupid how do you feel question.

The flat monotone, one hand protectively held against his face.

The sheer oddness of seriously depressive content coming from a tall handsome champion athlete… The oddness of soulfulness offered to a highly lit studio of jock-journalists…

In the midst of life we are in death. In the midst of superficiality we are in depth.

One source has him also saying that he wants “to solve myself,” which made UD think of her guru, Adam Phillips, who warns it ain’t gonna happen. Also Philip Larkin:

‘And once you have walked the length of your mind, what
You command is clear as a lading-list.
Anything else must not, for you, be thought
To exist.

And what’s the profit? Only that, in time,
We half-identify the blind impress
All our behavings bear, may trace it home.’

But other good things can happen – settling into who you unchangeably are, and the suffering that life inescapably generates, in a such a way that your “appetitive” energy remains reasonably high (in this case, that a win on the court actually makes you happy and motivates you to win future matches). Since you’re never going to solve yourself, the better path is away from Who Am I and toward simply the daily appetitive enjoyment of your existence — an enjoyment that should indeed involve the enjoyment (or at least you find it interesting; or at least you find it tolerable!) of incessant conflict and uncertainty.

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

And as happens so often in life, the Zverev scene was taken directly from Waiting for Godot:

the skull in Connemara in spite of the tennis the labors abandoned left unfinished graver still abode of stones in a word I resume alas alas abandoned unfinished the skull the skull in Connemara in spite of the tennis the skull alas the stones

A house burnt to a crisp by a flare gun! Hundreds of bullets in all directions shatter the night! Happy Fourth!

Doesn’t it have people who monitor online crowd event activity?

Is the place asleep?

Does it have a death wish?

Its poor police chief still thinks this is about babysitting. He needs to be fired and replaced by someone who understands the gravity of the situation.

Yeah, well. Everyone’s kind of expecting gunplay, so when you announce an active shooter from the stage — even if turns out to be only a fight (unpleasant enough , but unlikely to rip out your family’s internal organs) — the whole place stampedes away.

And how many people are then going to turn to their terrified kids and say Okay coast is clear let’s go have some fun!!!! ?

London’s mayor put out some rainbow flags and BOY IS HE IN TROUBLE.

“The [flags] will be ‘rolled back’ whether you like it or not, Mr. [Khan],” [wrote Joshua Charles]. “The options are: 1. Repentance now; or 2. Eternal punishment later.”

… DARES you to deny that Ulysses is the greatest twentieth century novel.

Garrett Park Fourth of July parade, whose theme this year is The Novel.

Photo: Frances Eby

Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of guns, University Diaries lands us, tonight, in adorable Hidden Springs, Idaho, an Ada County planned community way out in the foothills of some mountain. Hidden Springs sits way out there all by itself, neat farmhouse style homes in pristine nature, and who can blame it for boasting of its many amenities?

But nowhere on its website will you find disclosure about gunfire from an illegal shooting range just down the road a tad.

For that you have to consult the local press which, in a series of articles, has followed the range owner’s belief that the “government” (whatever that is) has no power whatsoever over my private property, fuck it, and if I want to charge people hither and yon to fire their guns on my private property any old time I can fucking well do it and don’t come at me with shit like permitting applications and public hearings.

 In response to complaints from Hidden Springs folks, the range’s owner says “residents shouldn’t be surprised to hear gunfire because the discharge of firearms in rural Ada County is common.” Suck it up MAGA world the noise I’m making is a drop in the noise bucket of all the daily bangbang here see and you know it. Live by the gun or move away.

I don’t wanna be around when the inevitable (cough) ‘visit’ from the local police happens… I’m thinking Ruby Ridge…

‘To an American like me, appalled by the practice [of female genital mutilation] and allowed to listen in [to what West Africans say about it], the conversation reflected something hopeful — not only [a girl named] Sesay’s resistance but also the way that more girls are pushing past the taboo of talking about female genital mutilation, or F.G.M. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to report on the practice, because traditionally it has been unmentionable, but it seems to be losing its silencing power. In a journey across Sierra Leone and Liberia, I found some young women were reluctant to discuss the topic, but many others were willing to candidly discuss it...

[I]nfections are common but often go untreated because of the insular nature of the societies. Girls sometimes die … and then are buried quietly and secretly…

F.G.M. is so horrific and widespread that it should be much higher on the global human rights agenda. To their credit, organizations like the United Nations Population Fund, UNICEF and U.N. Women have long spoken out against the practice, as have many aid groups…

When someone like Sesay opens a biology textbook, she learns about infection and scar tissue and trauma. But she also absorbs a far more dangerous idea in the eyes of the cutters: that she has a right to say no. And that is the quiet revolution already underway — in classrooms, in whispers among friends, in small communities like Sesay’s, where a daughter brings to the table the talk of girls’ rights.‘

In 2021 … 62 percent of Americans said that transgender athletes should be able to play only on teams that matched their gender at birth; by 2023, that figure had risen to 69 percent. This is not bigotry at work. This year, the same pollster found that a solid majority of Americans — 56 percent — favor policies protecting trans people from discrimination. Americans are broadly fine with transgender people. They are fine with gay people. They just reject replacing the fact of biological sex with the phantasms of gender ideology…

[F]ighting a losing battle to allow trans women to compete in women’s sports and for biological men to be in women’s intimate spaces and to perpetuate risky, inadequately tested sex changes on children, including gay and lesbian ones, is dumb, offensive to common sense and risks a much bigger backlash.

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

U Penn has now rescinded trans swimmer Lia Thomas’s medals.

… Same old pints of blood all over the pavement!

‘The same block was also the scene of a mass shooting in November 2022, when the same nightclub was known as Hush Lounge. One person was killed and three others wounded after a group that had been thrown out of Hush started fighting.

Police shut down the Hush nightclub after that shooting, and Artis Lounge later opened in the same location.‘

But bring it on!!

BamaCarry Inc., an organization advocating for gun rights, announced Tuesday that it has filed a lawsuit against the city of Selma for the detainment and removal of one of its members who carried a gun into a “gun-free zone.”

“This is Alabama—not New York City,” [said the group’s president].

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

Datz right yall! BamaCarry is enraged that a city that’s not New York — not sure what they mean, since per capita there’s much more shooting in Selma than NY — should have any gun laws. They’re going to keep carrying in gun free zones, and they’re going to sue sue sue, because the people of Selma deserve an absolutely open forum for future mass killings.

True-blue American terrorist gets life in prison. Good.

The [police] chief … worked a shift on April 6 and observed a man, who had been in a fight, walking down the street with an AR-15. [The chief] pulled him aside.

“I was like, ‘why are you walking back with a rifle in your hands? You know, the police could have shot you. Someone else could have shot you.’ And he just said, ‘It’s my right to have a gun. I’m not hurting anyone.’ … While I was standing and talking to him, I noticed the outline of another firearm in his waistband. I seized that; thus I was subpoenaed to testify today [on] a charge of a concealed weapon.”

Brave police chief! But get a job somewhere else. Richmond’s a mess, and it’s trying to kill everybody. Know why huge numbers of Richmond police are leaving the force?

“I have worked this [city’s] most violent neighborhoods for 18 years. I have never in my career seen people with guns in their hands confronting police officers. I personally observed a man with an AK pistol in his hand waving it around, saying we couldn’t stop him because he only has 20 rounds in the magazine,” [Anthony] Catoggio wrote in the email, which was obtained by CBS 6 through a public records request.

He added, “What are we gonna do when [there’s] an accidental discharge and the whole crowd opens fire? The chief will give an officer’s family a nicely folded flag and be like, sorry we have no idea who killed your loved one because there [were] 100 cartridge casings.”

Whoa. The police chief’s talking about “stricter laws surrounding guns.” That’s crazy talk! He’s out of a job soon. This is fucking America. In America we have crowds of drunk mentally retarded AR-15 shooters waiting for a little shove, a little pat, a little bit of guff, to set off the whole fireworks display.

Columbia University has far more serious problems these days than a not too expensive settlement of a class action suit. But since we’ve followed, on this blog, the story of one of that school’s own math professors who ran the numbers and figured out the place was gaming its rankings, we should take note of the way Columbia has resolved the matter.

Columbia University agreed to pay $9 million to settle a proposed class action by students who claimed it submitted false data to boost its position in U.S. News & World Report’s influential college rankings.

The latest on this smokin hot monk is that the University of Innsbruck has had a change of mind, and has decided that it does not want to host his habilitation thesis.

Apparently the school lacks faculty expertise in carbonizing flesh.

Perhaps Waldstein should pursue his interests here, for instance, rather than at Innsbruck.