I can’t believe this is happening, but it is. Biden almost certainly isn’t going to be re–elected eight months hence, and I’m deeply sick of the denialists on this site saying “ohh, pooh-pooh to the polls…the election is several months off” and all that crap.

When The Beast is restored to power in November the HE denial brigade will have to either disappear or change their social media identities or move to Portugal or Vietnam. They’ll certainly have to wear sunglasses and fishing hats for the next 10 or 15 years. Because Trump’s victory will be largely their fault. Because they looked the other way or otherwise fiddled while Rome burned.

I’m not talking about the expected right vs. left dynamic…status-quo, social-justice liberals vs. fired-up MAGA wackos…half of the country is terrified of an authoritarian sociopath winning and the other half believes that purging wokester fanatics is more important than anything else…alas, weakened Democrat fervor will decide things. Centrist moderates staying home on election day out of a lack of enthusiasm for sending great-grandpa back to the Oval for another four years. People sitting on their hands.

2024 is not 2020…the terror of The Beast is right around the damn corner.

National Public Radio’s newly-installed honcho Katherine Maher, by any fair-minded standard a flared-nostril, POC-worshipping, white-male-hating woke storm trooper, has wasted no time in bull-whipping (and nearly terminating) NPR senior editor Uri Berliner for having written a sharply critical 4.9 Free Press article about how NPR went over the woke waterfall five or six years ago and thereby lost the trust of moderately liberal and centrist listeners.

Berliner surely understood that his Free Press article, however truthful and grounded, would be a bridge-burner and that the odds of keeping his NPR job wouldn’t be good.

Right now Berliner is only suspended but you know he’s going to be facing great difficulty in the weeks ahead.

I could never decide where to scatter Tony’s remains. (He passed in the fall of ‘09.) I still have no good ideas. So he resides inside a small wicker storage thing in my bedroom. It’s not grotesque — he’s just there. Inside a dark-blue imitation velvet pouch with a drawstring.

I made a choice during last year’s Cannes Film Festival to sidestep screenings of Wim Wenders‘ Perfect Days, which I re-titled in my head as Toilet-Cleaning Guy.

It’s not that I was afraid of the subject…okay, I was a little bit. I might be an outlier in this regard, but I’m terrified of medium close-ups of turd-clogged toilets.

The film, of course, is about the spiritual (musical, literary, emotional, cosmic) life of Kōji Yakusho‘s Hirayama, and not his day job. Naturally.

Elite critics have praised Wenders’ film from the get-go, and now it’s getting the royal Criterion treatment.

Last month Katherine Maher, 40, succeeded John Lansing as CEO and president of National Public Radio (NPR). In contrast to many NPR predecssors, Maher has never worked directly in journalism or at a news organization. She is, however, an adamant wokester Millennial, or she was, at least, four years ago during the George Floyd riots.

I’m presuming that under Maher’s leadership NPR will not be reverting to that mellow, thoughtful, sensibly measured news-and-reporting outlet that many of us knew during the Obama years and before.

Like much of the liberal realm, NPR began turning into a woke-talking-points platform when Trump took power on 1.20.17, and then veered into hardcore Stalinist woke-ism when the George Floyd riots happened in May 2020.

I’m certain Ira Berliner is very sorry. Me too.

Adding insult to injury Maher is from HE’s home town of Wilton — went to Wilton High School, etc.

Maher (no relation to Bill) turns 41 on 4.18.24. She has an agreeably deep and somewhat raspy voice, and bears an obvious resemblance to Rachel McAdams.

Bob Costas two days ago: “What I’m about to say doesn’t mitigate the crime that [O.J. Simpson] quite obviously committed.

“He was a hail-fellow-well-met, and everything changed on the night of June 12,1994.

“We can hold multiple truths in our head at the same time, even if some of those truths at [that] time confused people…people who are inclined to view it through an emotional prism” — i.e., O.J. murder trial juror Brenda Moran, a.k.a. “Brenda Moron” — “rather than a rational prism.

“It is simultaneously true that there’s a long history of injustice by the [Los Angeles] justice system toward African-Americans, and that continued well into the 1990s and to some extent continues today.

“Plus the Simpson situation was not long after the Rodney King situation…the beating caught on camera and then those officers acquitted…there was a lot of tension, to put it mildly, between the African-American community and the LAPD. All these things are true.

“It’s also true that Mark Fuhrman was a racist who lied about this and used the n-word. It was also presented that some of the chain-of-custody was mishandled. There were mistakes there.

“All those things can simultaneously be true, and it’s also true that it’s impossible to even postulate that anyone other that O.J. Simpson committed those crimes. The evidence, both circumstantial and hard evidence, is simply overwhelming, and there’s no other explanation.”

There’s really, really something wrong with college-age males who are into sexual choking. Ditto the young women who are also allegedly into it, as choking does nothing to heighten pleasure or bring about orgasm.

Yes, this is an actual thing, and there’s something truly foul and psychologically fucked up in the hearts and minds of the eager-beaver perpetrators. I’ve lived a vigorous sexual life for many decades, and I’ve never so much as flirted with even the idea of choking…are you kidding me?

“The Troubling Trend in Teenage Sex“, posted by Peggy Orenstein — N.Y. Times, 4.12.24:

“For the past four years, Dr. Debby Herbenick — one of the foremost researchers on American sexual behavior and director of the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University — has been tracking the rapid rise of ‘rough sex’ among college students, particularly sexual strangulation, or what is colloquially referred to as choking.

“Nearly two-thirds of women in her most recent campus-representative survey of 5,000 students at an anonymized ‘major Midwestern university’ said a partner had choked them during sex (one-third in their most recent encounter). The rate of those women who said they were between the ages 12 and 17 the first time that happened had shot up to 40 percent from one in four.

“As someone who’s been writing for well over a decade about young people’s attitudes and early experience with sex in all its forms, I’d also begun clocking this phenomenon. I was initially startled in early 2020 when, during a post-talk q & a at an independent high school, a 16-year-old girl asked, ‘How come boys all want to choke you?’ In a different class, a 15-year-old boy wanted to know, ‘Why do girls all want to be choked?’ They do?

“Not long after, a college sophomore (and longtime interview subject) contacted me after her roommate came home in tears because a hookup partner, without warning, had put both hands on her throat and squeezed.”

Comment #1: “It’s so strange how a song called Perfect Day is one that I find myself wanting to listen to when my day is everything but perfect.” Comment #2: “This is what having fun with depression is like.” Comment #3: “After listening to this I have a sudden urge to clean toilets in Tokyo.” Comment #4 “You made me forget myself…I thought I was someone else, someone good” might be the most relatable lyric in history.” Comment #5: “This song is like watching something beautiful die.”