Happy holiday fun time news

 It's the queen driving to the Royal Windsor Horse Show, no silly headgear, just a great-grandmother in a Range Rover having a good time.  No one has seen her this happy in years.  Is there a gilly in her life?

Or maybe she's enjoying the public reaction to the newly unveiled statue of her troublesome ex-daughter-in-law at Kensington Palace, which manages to capture none of Diana's charisma or glamour.   Ian Rank-Broadley threw in images of three random children, so visitors could well be puzzled about why a nanny is being so honored.  Remember the statue of Lucille Ball before the sculptor fixed it?  Not that bad, but not good.  

Los Angeles police confiscated a cache of illegal fireworks and detonated them in an iron containment truck which was not so contained.  Seventeen people were injured, cars overturned and windows shattered in South Central's greatest gender reveal party ever.

Good touch, bad touch:  Joe and Jill Biden visited the site of the Surfside, Florida, condo collapse, speaking to families and search-and-rescue workers, praying at the makeshift shrine and pledging federal disaster funds.  (This was before the awful discovery of the remains of a firefighter's seven-year-old daughter.)  Tonight the Big Liar will be in Sarasota to rant some more about the "stolen" election and the criminal charges his company faces in New York.  Even Ron DeSantis plans to miss it.  At least he won't be tossing paper towel at grieving relatives.

TBL has joined the chorus demanding to know who shot angel-martyr Ashli Babbitt as she climbed through a broken window during the January coup.  (But does she have a song like Horst Wessel?  Get to work, Nashville.)  I'd rather know who trampled Rosanne Boyland on the Capitol steps.  And was she carrying a "Don't Tread On Me" flag?  Oh please, please.

Richard Templeton thinks the Library of Congress needs to be renamed because people think it's just for Congress.  I think people who use libraries know perfectly well that this is not the case, and furthermore suspect that many members of Congress can't read.  Templeton suggests calling it the National Library of Congress, which would hardly solve his imaginary problem.  

We need to think again about supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia if women soldiers are required to wear high heels, if only in parades.

It's no easier to be a female athlete.  Did you know marijuana makes you faster?  Neither did anyone else on earth, but that was the rationale for the USOC suspending Sha'Carri Richardson from track and field.  Did you know that swimming caps made to accommodate the hair of Black athletes are some kind of cheating?  It was a surprise to British swimmer Alice Dearing.  You probably knew that displaying anything but reverence for the national anthem is forbidden, but Gwen Berry doesn't care.  Also maybe reconsider giving bouquets to the lady athletes unless you also give them to men.  Flowers for a hammer-thrower?

 

I don't THINK so.

A cargo ship sank off the coast of Sri Lanka carrying 25 tons of nitric acid and other chemicals.  This has caused hundreds of dead sea turtles, whales and dolphins to wash up on the country's beaches.  

"This is the political persecution of a political enemy.  This is what Vladimir Putin does.  Just ask Navatny [sic]," Junior Trump whined on Fox News.  He refers to Alexei Navalny, currently on hunger strike in Putin's gulag after barely surviving novichok poisoning and a previous hunger strike.  It's exactly the same as Allen Weisselberg being released on his own recognizance after being indicted for tax evasion.  Because this week Holocaust references are on the back burner except for that moron in Washington state who didn't get the memo.  Li'l brother Eric found another way to metaphor exaggeratedly:  "No different than the mullahs."  Like "critical race theory," "mullah" is a term they can't define.  They just know BAD!

In short, the planet's melting but the lights are back on Broadway.  Somewhere between the two we try to survive and be kind, goddammit, as Kurt Vonnegut said.  The lightning's gonna get you if it's gonna get you.