Decompression

 Was it Thursdays that Arthur Dent could never get the hang of?  Thursdays are my nemesis.  Nemeses?  For instance, last Thursday Microsoft decided I needed a new version of Windows indistinguishable from the previous one except that I had to leave the computer on all night to "install" it.  I sleep in this room.  The last thing I need is a screen that keeps blinking on and off.  In dread of what tomorrow may bring, I'm considering staying in bed with a tin helmet suitable for repelling meteorites.  

Some amusing vignettes from our sick sad world:

In Catanzano, Italy, an unnamed hospital worker has been named "king of absentees" after collecting 538,000 Euros despite not showing up for work in fifteen years.  A police operation codenamed Part Time (I would have gone with Dolce far niente) is investigating him and several supervisors who must have been in on it.  Most hospitals have people on the payroll who don't actually do anything; I wonder how they caught him.

Yesterday a man was killed by a grizzly bear near Yellowstone National Park.  He had bear mace in his pack and was fishing -- two reasons the grizzly may have considered him a threat.  (Bears eat fish, too.)  Today in Grand Teton National Park Evan Matthews was running when he encountered a black bear, but Matthews engaged the bear in conversation ("I don't care if you're hungry, I'm not your food...We could take a walk if you want...") and returned intact to his car.  There's a lesson here, I think.

Black Lives Matter is being blamed not only for the riots that failed to occur here but for trying to cancel Jane Austen.  The Austen Museum in Chawton, Hampshire, has changed its website to reflect interest in the slave trade (her father was a trustee of a sugar plantation in Antigua) and tea-drinking, the principal activity in her novels now seen as a symbol of British imperialism.  Predictably, this has caused the right-wing press to lose its bottle.  No, nobody's burning piles of Mansfield Park; calm down and stop making fools of yourselves.  Have some tea with sugar.

Now that Trump is waddling around Mar a Loser (thanks, Evan) talking to himself, Vladimir Putin has to do his own blustering and whining.  Beset by problems of his own creation (the failing health of Alexei Navalny, the war with Ukraine, constant protests and worsening relations with the West), he says anyone who threatens Russia "will regret it like they've never regretted anything before."  Where have I heard that?  Does Stephen Miller write for both of them?

As Republicans pound their chests and wail about the deficit that would result from the Biden administration's infrastructure bill, no one seems overly concerned about the $1.3 billion in loans and contracts that went to ApiJect Systems Corp. last year to manufacture syringes for covid vaccines.  Not only have no syringes been approved, much less made, but the factory which was to create 650 jobs in North Carolina remains unbuilt.  (The land has been cleared, which is something.) Half of adults in the US have now been vaccinated, so if ApiJect doesn't get moving they'll have to wait for the next pandemic.

For an ex-academic, Gym Jordan never seems to learn anything, especially about trying to out-shout Black women.  Last week he went after Anthony Fauci about covid restrictions and Maxine Waters told him to "shut your mouth."  Yesterday he tried to amend a hate-crimes bill to prevent defunding of police, even though the bill has no such provision.  Val Demings, a former Orlando police chief, said it was irrelevant and he talked over her, too.  "I have the floor," she yelled.  "What?  Did I strike a nerve?"  As much as I'm enjoying the sorrows of Statutory Gaetz, I can't wait till it's Coach's time in the barrel.

Here's a traffic stop with a white driver and a Black Arizona State officer.  It went by the book despite Julian Navarrette being clearly impaired, failing a Breathylizer test, and telling the officer, "N***** I'm from Arizona, dude, I'm not from New York," after begging, "Don't put my fucking career at risk." (Nazarrette is a sheriff's deputy who was off-duty.)  No shots were fired.  I'm glad there's video, they can use it in the police academies.