And so forth

 Shall we pretend it's just another day and get on with the relentless march of derp?  Yes, let's do that.

Good news for New Yorkers:  You can now be reduced to mulch and applied to the tomato plants like people in Vermont, Colorado, Washington, Oregon and California, as A382 takes effect.  (It doesn't seems to have a catchy name like the Maggot Hatchery Bill of 2022.)  The gist of it is that a deceased human can be broken down into "a heaped cubic yard of nutrient-dense soil" in six to eight weeks.  It doesn't require fossil fuel like cremation or take up space like burial in a metal casket in a cement-lined grave.  Of course it does require that the funeral industry make its customary profit.  For centuries you could dig a hole and place meemaw in it, suitably shrouded, and let her decompose organically, but this is the twenty-first century and meemaw has to go into a box like this:

It's green, it's trendy, and the Catholic Church doesn't like it.  Sounds like a winner.

Presumably the Church has other plans for Joseph Ratzinger alias Benedict XVI.  There has never before been a Pope Emeritus so I don't know if the ritual hitting-him-in-the-head-with-a-hammer was performed.  Nor do I know of plans to canonize him or deify him or whatever they did with Wojtyla.  I only know he won't get composted.  If they're smart they'll wait until after Pele's funeral, which is going to rivet the world.

As the Confederate monuments are hauled off to warehouses and the debate over "heritage" sputters, Ukraine is about to embark on a similar argument.  There are calls to close the Mikhail Bulgakov museum and birthplace in Kyiv because of his antipathy to Ukrainian nationalism.  Bulgakov may have "glorified" Russia and the tsar, as the writers union asserts, but any reader of The Master and Margarita knows how little use he had for Stalin.  With their customary ham-handedness the Russian used their brief occupancy of Kherson to promote Pushkin and destroy Ukrainian-language books, but that doesn't mean Ukraine has to follow the same tired playbook.  American intellectuals are appalled by the systematic stripping of books about sexuality and race from our public and school libraries.  I hope Ukraine won't make them question their support.

Mark Meadows may be indicted for the insurrectionary messages he exchanged on January 6 but he got a belated Christmas gift from North Carolina attorney general Josh Stein.  He will not face prosecution for voting from an address in the state (a trailer) where he has never actually lived, or apparently visited.  He's a very important white man who absent-mindedly registered in the middle of a busy campaign, not some Black woman with a felony conviction.  Let's move on, right?

The designer Vivienne Westwood died last week and Julian Assange wants to be let out of jail to attend her funeral.  Were they close?  Westwood "dressed as a canary and suspended herself inside a giant birdcage outside the Old Bailey in July 2020 to protest his potential extradition."  So yeah, I guess.

Danny Rampey (R-Winder) won't be taking his seat in the Georgia House after he was arrested for stealing prescription drugs at the retirement complex he manages.  So why won't George Santos do the same?  Every day there's fresh reason -- stories about how the NYPD have no record of his claim that he was mugged and robbed of his rent money, how he and his sister trashed the far-from-luxurious apartment they shared, and who knows what else by now.  I'll bet all the untraceable money in his campaign came from D.B. Cooper.

I don't know.  I think he looks better in yellow than dripping with cheap brown hair dye.

John Roberts's annual report on the state of the Opus Dei Court is out and it's a page-turner.  It doesn't mention Roe or The Leak or the Clarence-Ginni issue and it doesn't care about the court's record low approval rating, but it's very concerned about the physical safety of justices.  They have to put up with people waving signs and making noise and sometimes they even have to skip dessert.  It's not "Hang Mike Pence" but it's an assault on their dignity.  This will not stand, man.  Rights?  You ain't seen nothin' yet!

I'll bet you're impressed I can segue from The Big Lebowski to The Jazz Singer.  It's what I do.