Things I did not know

When I started working my way through Dante's Comedy (somebody else proclaimed it "divine"), I was unaware that this is the 700th anniversary of his death.  Or of the even more important news that Magnum is releasing a series of Dante-themed ice cream bars, each sounding slightly less unpalatable than the last.  Inferno is already on the market, described as charcoal ice cream (?) with raspberry and salted dark chocolate.  It's available only in Italy, but perhaps Ben & Jerry will join the festivities with Francesca da Rhubarb or Guelph Ripple.  Anyway, I'm enjoying the highly readable Allen Mandelbaum translation.

Tim Scott's response to Joe Biden's speech went as well as you might expect.  For the record, I did not refer to him as "Uncle Tim" -- that was Toure and the president of the NAACP, Derrick Johnson.  Nor did I describe his warm reception at Fox News as receiving "head rubs from white hosts," as Stephen Robinson did.  Not because I'm classier, but because there are some things white people should only think.  But yeah, it was pathetic.  Scott once spoke movingly of the humiliation he felt when being pulled over or stopped by Capitol police, but that was in 2016, before Trump executive-ordered all the racism away and brought peace with justice.  He couldn't help boasting to Sean Hannity about the congratulatory phone call he got from President Greater-Than-Lincoln.  It's nice to be appreciated, if only by someone who called Africa and Haiti "shithole countries" and Elizabeth Warren "Pocahontas."  I'm sure there's a good reason security guards shadow Scott while he shops -- he is pretty gangsta.

July 4 seemed like an optimistic date for America's "re-opening," but from where I sit it's wide open already.  The masked and unmasked crowded into Disneyland, Churchill Downs and Las Vegas this week as if 572,000 of their fellow citizens had not died over the last year.  Baseball always starts out with thin crowds so it's hard to tell if that's by design or through lack of interest.  Vaccination has fallen off, too.  West Virginia is offering people a hundred dollars to get the shot (not cash, a savings bond that won't mature for years).  Florida never closed at all.  It's the year of magical thinking.

Everyone who has contact with Trump beyond bringing him Coke or Super-gluing his neck hair into a pompadour winds up indicted or insane.  The latest sad specimen is former lawyer Lin Wood, who posted on Twitter some pictures he took last year as "proof" that Trump is still physically present in the White House and that "Joey" was nowhere to be found.  This must be what his former partners meant by "bizarre, messianic behavior."  

I don't smoke, but I think it's nuts to talk about banning menthol cigarettes, supposedly to discourage young people from becoming addicted to smoking.  From what I've heard that's now the result of vaping, not that I'd ban e-cigarettes either.  We're finally emerging from the long, doomed effort to prohibit Americans from using marijuana, only 87 years after alcohol prohibition flopped.  Why create a new black market, a new class of criminals, a new public health disaster?  There will always be people who harm themselves and the government can't prevent them.  Federal agents will still have plenty of work chasing down cocaine and heroin without adding Kools to their agenda.  It's like tossing bricks into the caves where the Rightzis congregate (although we all had fun with Larry Kudlow's warning about Biden outlawing "plant-based beer").

The most awful video of the week was Loveland police assaulting Karen Garner and dislocating her shoulder, then sharing the body-cam torture porn with fellow officers ("Ready for the pop?  Hear the pop?  We crushed it").  Three officers have resigned but no charges have been brought yet.  The second most awful was rioters spraying a substance into the face of Brian Sicknick on January 6.  Two men have been charged with assault on a federal officer but not with homicide; the autopsy determined that Sicknick died after a series of strokes.  Both may be less appalling than the shooting by police of Andrew Brown, Jr., in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, but we won't know until the judge allows more than twenty seconds of it to be made public.  Brown was shot in the back of the head.  I feel like I'm doing a weekly countdown like Casey Kasem with the latest hit songs and I hate it.

Bobby Paul Edwards forced a Black man with intellectual deficits named John Christopher Smith to work in his Conway, South Carolina, restaurant for five years.  The Court of Appeals has ruled that Edwards must pay Smith over $500,000 for what was essentially slavery.  The Biden administration is said to be thinking of reviving the long-simmering issue of reparations for the slavery that was finally ended by the Thirteenth Amendment.  Now they have a benchmark to use, from the state whose senators insist there is no racism in America.

Sorry, Burners, this year's Burning Man Festival has been cancelled.  It ain't over till it's over.