Some days you start at the periphery and work in to -- what? As we know, things fall apart, the center cannot hold. Everything is flying away from galactic central point at the speed of thought and one day our insignificant little star, the sun, will gutter and go out like a Gwyneth Paltrow crotch candle. So, Jupiter.
Jupiter was the Moscow Zoo alligator who died today at 84. He was born in the United States in 1936 and given to the Berlin Zoo. It was bombed in 1943 and for the next three years he wandered the streets (or possibly sewers) presumably living off Berliners. British troops discovered him in 1946, which must have been quite the Two Ronnies sketch, and gave him to the Soviets as fast as possible, and they sent him to the Moscow Zoo. (He was treated a lot better than most Germans in Soviet hands.) I've seen
The Third Man about a hundred times and I know Jupiter should have been repatriated (was he born/hatched in Jupiter, Florida?), but what the hell, we had lots of gators at the time. I guess they fed him well because most gators live to be around fifty, though there's one in Belgrade who claims to be in his nineties. Says he knew Gavrilo Princip but the numbers don't add up. Anyway, Jupiter RIP.
In other animal news, senior economic adviser
Kevin Hassett went on CNN to offer cheerful predictions of recovery and to say the quiet parts out loud, referring to the American workforce as "human capital stock," which sounds like something Smithers would say to Mr. Burns. Any day now they'll be heading back to work, marching in lockstep like the shift workers in
Metropolis, making America greater than ever, so much greatness.
Aboveground
the Leader was busy, golfing away like a man half his
weight age, then back to the Shite House for some insult-tweeting about female Democrats, followed by random abuse of Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Joe Scarborough and Jeff Sessions. Then it was time to attack the media for questioning the appropriateness of playing with toys in the middle of a pandemic and on a weekend supposedly devoted to war dead. His newest re-tweet ghost writer is somebody called John Stahl, a loser who failed to get elected to the House from California and has a nice line in trash-talk that saves Donzo a lot of time. And the death toll from Trumpvirus inexorably closed in on 100,000. Laid a wreath and sent the First Escort out to lay another one. Working!
Trump continues to maintain that Jeff Sessions was "not mentally qualified" to be attorney general, meaning he was willing to perjure himself but not to derail the Mueller investigation. He has no qualms about
Mike Pompeo, who showed up on a right-wing fringe channel in Australia to threaten the government over a road-building partnership between China and the state of Victoria. Within hours the US Embassy had to clean up the mess caused by the Secretary of State's verbal diarrhea, which is how we live now.
Is Twitler itching for the howls of the mob? What do you think? He spent a significant portion of the day railing at the Democratic governor of North Carolina for suggesting that a packed crowd of sweating, drooling, orgasming Republicans in the Spectrum Center might be unwise, and
threatening to move the August hatesapalooza to a friendlier state no longer in "Shutdown mood." I'm sorry, Governor Cooper, when he's right, he's right. Jam them in there ass-cheek by swollen jowl, just in time for the late-summer surge. Coronavirus is licking its lips. (I know, viruses don't have lips. Go with me.) I see the arena has a homicide hornet over the door, so maybe you could release a few thousand of those, too.
The rest of the news is just nuttier than squirrel poop, as
Juanita Jean would say.
Queen Elizabeth once hid in a bush in the Buckingham Palace garden to avoid talking to her awful guests the
Ceausescus. I've always said they don't pay this woman enough.
The
"Beast of Corfu," described as a serial rapist, was chased off a cliff by pursuing police. I think I saw this in
Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.
"A hospital in Trinidad and Tobago has admitted a monkey was discovered inside the building, but angrily denied a snake was with it, too."
Read it. You know you want to.
The
World Health Organization has concluded that hydroxychloroquine is too dangerous for further clinical tests. No problem! The
Department of Veterans Affairs has already tested it on 1,300 patients, some of whom are still alive. But people who take it for lupus and other conditions are
facing a shortage and paying more, because doofuses are somehow obtaining it without prescriptions. (Jury's still out on what Trump is being fed by his doctor, who will lie on command but will probably draw the line at assassination. The most popular theory is Flintstone vitamins.)
You think you're bored?
This idiot is shooting letter carriers with paintballs in Washington, D.C., and Maryland. I didn't get a stimmy check either, but I'm not taking it out on them. Idiot.
You think you want to eat in a nice café again? The CDC warns that the shutdown has caused
food shortages for vermin, making them more aggressive than usual. Rats!
In my room!