… and has always been struck by his gracious cautious senatorial demeanor. Pleasant, genial. Certainly not full of himself, but also not very commanding a presence.

Man, has that changed.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/28/arts/music/springsteen-streets-of-minneapolis-ice-protest-song.html

The only sensible way to look at this is if these guys weren’t helping international criminals steal money they’d be senior officers in the German High Command. Let them have their fun.

You may recall Christopher Buckley’s God is My Broker: A  Monk-Tycoon Reveals the 7 1/2 Laws of Spiritual and Financial Growth. Brother Owens is the man!

So the magic trick seems to be: You agree to be snowed by my impressive advanced degrees, and I spend decades signing off on/taking part in research fraud.

There’s too much grant money and associated professional advancement and oh yeah investor money at stake for anyone to care too awfully much about whether images or data emanating from top of the heap sites like Dana Farber is – you know … I mean – impeccably accurate … And as long as loser assholes like Sholto David don’t actually subject our work to close analysis it’s a win-win situation for everyone!

I mean except for sick and dying people. But we’re running a business here.

… a creation of satirist Daniel Greenberg in his novel Tech Transfer, lives again as story after story lately features massive theft of federal/state tax dollars.

A ‘thesda tale from UD’s neck of the woods…

Yesterday a woman in a $2.3 million house exited her three-car garage in a black Porsche Cayenne ($100,000 – $190,000 value) to defend her right to the house, in which she’d been squatting for nine months.

In her defense, she pointed out the house lacked a no trespassing sign.

“We need to post one of those in front of our place pronto,” UD advised Mr UD. “A big one.”

That’s only a half dozen. She couldn’t think of a few more? Religion? Sexual preference? Body shape? (Moving toward a dozen here… Hold on. Lemme think.). Physical disability gets us to ten, but I’d love to get to twelve…

Age and genetic information. Tada!

Best part of the Jack Smith hearings.

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.

… 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.

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

… 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.

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.

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.”