Just a thought.

 I should write more.

Recycling is good for the Earth and prevents global warming, or not, as the case may be.

In the Capuchin Catacombs in Palermo, which you can enter for a modest fee; I don’t remember how modest the fee was, only that she was modesty personified, a jewel of modesty and Christian virtue, whereas I can remember every detail of her very immodest sister, including the shots afterwards; you can see the cream of Palermitano society hanging on the walls. I do not know why 18th and 19th century Sicilian swells thought that being stuffed and mounted in a church basement was such a good idea, but they did, and who are we, the enthusiasts of the Hula-Hoop, the Pet Rock, and Pamela Anderson to point the finger of absurdity at anyone?

The catacombs form a natural refrigerator of sorts and the galleries feature separate areas for priests, nuns, including the mortal remains of one mother superior hanging from the ceiling doing her impression of the Flying Nun, and one archbishop in full episcopal regalia, with scintillating hints of Congregationalism around the pockets, looking as though someone put him together from cigarette ashes and Elmer’s Glue. There were several galleries of the rich and locally famous, the upper crust in their Sunday best, all of them moldering away along with their social pretensions. Here you have the society swain of 1830 hanging across the way from the rich girl he got in trouble in back in the early summer of 1829. The girl’s parents hang next to her, as if to make sure there’ll be no more of this monkey business here, thank you very much, and the swain hangs between the girl’s two brothers, whose heads are turned slightly towards their sister’s seducer and whose skeletal grins seem to say, “What? Twenty- seven stab wounds weren’t enough? You want more?” And so there they are, the rich in their full if more than slightly moldy glory, awaiting the Resurrection so they can get a change of clothes. Nowhere in the lot is there a poor person, nowhere in the lot is there someone having any connection with the advertising business. Life and death were both unfair in those days. Hanging on the wall after you died just wasn’t good enough for the poor and outcast way back then, although just hanging by the neck until you were dead was.

Nowadays, of course, we live in a much more democratic world and the poor may choose to be interred where they will, and today the same freeze dry technology gives you a great cup of coffee every morning is now available to stiffs, living and dead, of every income level. Why go through the trauma of a wake and funeral when it is possible to have Grandma freeze dried and left in her favorite chair in the corner? Why try to explain the concept of death to your children when you can keep Grandma as part of the family forever? Freeze drying lets you keep those near and dear to you exactly where they were the last time you saw them. You can even buy special attachments for your vacuum cleaner that will let you clean Grandma off before the neighbors notice she’s getting a bit dusty for her age. There’s even a line of clothes for the hip but deceased Grandma so she will never feel out of it, and no, I don’t know how they’ll get those clothes on her, but where there’s a will and you’re in it, there’s always a way. 

Monkeypox

In my quest to expand the boundaries of human knowledge, I have polled five monkeys to see if they regarded the term monkeypox as derogatory. All five monkeys, who, I should mention in the interest of verisimilitude, were not monkeys at all but rather three relatives, a dog, and a Boston Red Sox fan—monkeys are in short supply here in our happy little burg so I had to work with what I had—declared that the term was not derogatory, although the Boston Red Sox fan said he could not be sure, which is the sort of thing you would expect a Boston Red Sox fan to say, given their general lack of intelligence. The dog was ambivalent about the whole thing as well; there is a dogpox and most adult male dogs have had it at one time or another, but the malady is not related to monkeypox in any way and the dog believed that if he didn’t have to worry about monkeypox then he wasn’t going to worry about it. All the participants in the survey, however, agreed that bacon was the greatest thing since boar in a can. 

So, the monkeys are not complaining about the word monkeypox or any other variation of the variola virus. Given the lack of interest in the disease and its terminology in the monkey community, why are people complaining about the disease's name? Apparently, humans can spread monkeypox as well and usually do so at gay raves in Europe, which leads unavoidably to the question, which of the three do we avoid now? Discriminating against gays is illegal, discriminating against raves is boring, discriminating against Europe means that we have to drink American beer all the time. Perhaps the best solution is the one proposed by a friend of mine just as a wedding party crashed into our favorite watering hole: find out who is humping the monkeys and tell them to stop doing it. An admirable solution to the problem, I thought, but this solution does not come with a billion-dollar price tag and therefore is unlikely to generate much support from the pharmaceutical industry.

 

Man of the Year?

Twitter has banned The Babylon Bee from their website over The Bee’s contention that Assistant Secretary for Health Dr. Rachel Levine is not a transgender woman, but a man. This is terribly unwoke of The Bee and the site should be punished for their shameless lack of inclusivity. In this day and age, to be this bigoted is not something that progressive Americans want to aspire to.

So on to other matters. For those of you who are watching Friends for the first time, I should point out that alliteration does not make the entire world kin: Ross is not Rachel, and neither is Richard. Ross is Ross, Rachel is Rachel, and Richard is Richard. So, how you doin’?

 

What the definition of woman is, not the definition of is.

So, this was interesting, I thought. Ketanji Brown Jackson, the President’s nominee to fill the retiring Justice Stephen Breyer’s seat on the Supreme Court, declined to give a definition of woman when Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, asked her for one. Given that in our neo-McCarthyist age saying something that does not conform in every way to the latest twist in Progressive theology is an effective way to damage your career, I can understand why Ms. Jackson felt the need to dodge the question, but I do wonder why she bothered. The Supreme Court is a lifetime appointment, after all, and the chances that the Republicans can stop her nomination are minimal, so why is she dithering, unless, of course, she cannot define woman, which makes me wonder if she cannot define black either. This hardly seems to be likely; a person of Ms. Jackson’s intellect could not possibly get a nomination to the highest court in this our Great Republic without noticing that she has the two characteristics Mr. Biden wants in such a nominee. So we are left with the only answers that make sense: the Progressive Left and their henchmen intimidate Ms. Jackson, as well they should, given the Left’s propensity for destroying anyone who gets in the way of their agenda, or she agrees with that agenda and finds it inconvenient to mention this in a Senate chamber room half-filled with her ideological enemies. Either way, I think we need to pray for the health of Justice Thomas, because allowing the Progressives to have their way on the Supreme Court would be a disaster for the country and the Constitution.

 

The Economist says that Joe Biden was set up to fail...

John Lindsay, who was one of New York's worst mayors, used to say that the reason he was not a success as Mayor of New York City was that New York City was ungovernable. Ed Koch, who was one of New York's best mayors, said that the problem was not that New York City was ungovernable, but that John Lindsay could not govern it. Donald Trump had no trouble governing. Joe Biden does. Sleepy Joe was set up to fail by the very same people who rigged an election to get him into the job he's failing at. The Democrats should have listened to St. Teresa de Avila, who warned several centuries ago that there are more tears shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones. The Dems wanted Trump gone by any means necessary and now he is, so now they own the disaster they replaced Trump with. Strange how life turns out, ain't it?

The January 6th Commission meets...

 ....or you could watch a Harlem Globetrotters game. They both amount to the same thing and the Globetrotters are a lot more fun to watch.