6:34 a.m.

Photo by Meade.

"We decided to erase him."

"At the moment, [Saturday Night Live UK] has a grinning, whooping, gurning American mania to it."

"... [W]e and our US cousins have wildly differing senses of humour.... Much of the best British comedy relies on understatement, subtle wordplay, self-deprecation, self-mortification. It’s why Larry David is the American many Brits find most funny: he, like us, understands that life is a vale of tears, suffering and torturing yourself over mild social awkwardness...."

Writes Charlotte Ivers, in "Saturday Night Live UK review: Britain is funny but this isn’t yet/There’s talent in the cast — shame this Sky One debut was four parts American gurning, one part Princess Diana" (London Times).

A description of the "cold open": "Keir Starmer... and David Lammy... are psyching themselves up to phone Donald Trump, with the help of their 'Gen Z adviser.'... Keir: 'Oh golly, what if Donald shouts at me?' Gen Z adviser: 'You’re looking for more of a special situationship.'"

Also: "In a sketch parodying news headlines, the question is asked whether, once Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is in prison, he will 'be able to keep his mouth shut.' This is followed, I regret to inform you, by the punchline: '"I hope not," said his cellmate’s penis.'"

I don't see what's American about those jokes. And I don't see why the SNL format forces writers to use American-style humor! Worse, don't excuse your bad jokes by claiming they are American. The SNL format — cold open, monologue, sketches, Weekend Update, music performance — is an empty shell into which writers can insert whatever humor the producers want. Take responsibility. Or withdraw into the vale of tears and suffer and torture yourself. Apparently, you find that amusing. 

As for the "grinning, whooping, gurning American mania" — I only know the word "gurning" from the perennial reports of the World Gurning Championships. I see the NYT had one last year: "In This Pageant, the Ugliest Face Wins/The World Gurning Championships in northern England celebrate the centuries-old art of face-pulling."

That's been going on for years. I remember reading about the World Gurning Championships in LIFE magazine in the 1960s:

Here, you can buy that issue of LIFE on eBay. It was March 14, 1969. The cover story is "The Daring Contraption Called LEM." Inside: "The Race for the SST." And here's an ad: "McDonald's introduces Big Mac/A meal disguised as a sandwich." And: "Why is the Camaro the pace car again?/Because it's the Hugger."

That's all so American. And the American point of view was that gurning was a British oddity.

ADDED:

Sunrise — 7:07, 7:08, 7:21.

It looks a bit gray, but the clouds quickly dissipated, and today, the second day of spring, was brilliantly sunny and quite warm — over 70°. Is there anything left of last weekend's big blizzard? Yes. There were a few little piles of snow here and there — amusing mementos. Meade and I took 3 walks today — sunrise, midday, and early evening — totaling 6.4 miles.

Talk about whatever you want in the comments.

"Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!"

Writes Trump, at Truth Social.

That's not the way we've been taught to speak of the dead, but it is the way we have learned that Trump speaks.

And yet imagine what Trump's antagonists will say when he dies. Much worse, I predict.

"The Radical Left Democrats have hurt so many people with their vicious and uncaring ways."

"What they have done to the Department of Homeland Security, our fantastic TSA Officers, and, most importantly, the great people of our Country, is an absolute disgrace. If the Democrats do not allow for Just and Proper Security at our Airports, and elsewhere throughout our Country, ICE will do the job far better than ever done before! The Fascist Democrats will never protect America, but the Republicans will. Just like the Radical Left allowed millions of Criminals to pour into our Country through their ridiculous and dangerous Open Border Policy, the Republicans closed it all down, and we now have the Strongest Border in American History. Likewise, I look forward to moving ICE in on Monday, and have already told them to, 'GET READY.' NO MORE WAITING, NO MORE GAMES! President DONALD J. TRUMP"

Writes Trump, just now, at Truth Social.

He appends this image of himself:

"So, ever since the fight at Thanksgiving, my daughter doesn't speak to me."

Quoggy frounces.

I read a word I didn't remember ever reading before — quoggy. You can see the context in in the previous post: "that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere."

It's not a hard word if you think of its alternative spelling, "quaggy," and understand the "quag" to be like the "quag" in "quagmire."

Quoggy might prove useful in Scrabble... or I should say Crossplay, the NYT game app that plays like Scrabble except that it lets each player experiment with words and try any number of sequences of letters and won't let you enter a word it won't accept as a word. So there's no bluffing and challenging. You end up with some crazy words.

Yesterday, it let me play frounces.

"It is well known that at the coronation of kings and queens, even modern ones, a certain curious process of seasoning them for their functions is gone through."

"There is a saltcellar of state, so called, and there may be a castor of state. How they use the salt, precisely—who knows? Certain I am, however, that a king’s head is solemnly oiled at his coronation, even as a head of salad. Can it be, though, that they anoint it with a view of making its interior run well, as they anoint machinery? Much might be ruminated here, concerning the essential dignity of this regal process, because in common life we esteem but meanly and contemptibly a fellow who anoints his hair, and palpably smells of that anointing. In truth, a mature man who uses hair-oil, unless medicinally, that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere. As a general rule, he can’t amount to much in his totality."

Writes Herman Melville, in Chapter 25 of "Moby-Dick."

"In one particularly revealing passage from 'Good Energy,' she wrote: 'I felt myself as part of an infinite and unbroken series of cosmic nesting dolls of millions of mothers and babies before me from the beginning of life.'"

I'm reading "The danger of letting a mystic lead public health/A look at Casey Means shows the weakness of her nomination and the surgeon general position itself" (WaPo)(gift link).

The Means nomination exposes how unserious the role really is. In her book “Good Energy,” Means recounts hearing an “internal voice that whispered” to her that it was time to try psilocybin — commonly known as magic mushrooms — which she began using in 2021. She described the experience as offering “a doorway to a different reality.”...

"Internal voice that whispered"? — in other words, her thoughts. She thought it was time to try psilocybin, and presumably that worked out well for her. What is unscientific there? What about that makes her unreliable? 

"These nails are sported by nurses in hospitals who, because of these stupid encumbrances glued to the ends of their fingers, cannot properly perform one of the key hygienic routines..."

"... that has been a simple, essential part of infection prevention in medical practice for decades: thorough hand-washing. First line of defense, proven useful for generations. Hospital management has gutlessly acquiesced to this ridiculousness because these days, everyone has 'rights.'Except, apparently, patients who wish to not contract an infection during their hospital stay…."

From the comments section at the NYT article about those very long, overdecorated fake nails —  "Manicures Fit for the Met Gala/Whether at hospitals or on red carpets, people with manicures by Yulenny Garcia, a nail technician in the Bronx, turn heads."

Another comment: "I like the creativity but as a physician… I despair when I see these talons on fashion and entertainment industry folks. Not healthy at all. Just pull up any study on synthetic nails in pubmed. Just imagine HRs in hospitals have given up on young RNs to abide by the no long-nail rules… these nails can cut through gloves and in one case recently caused a rectal tear in a patient. Just think, everyone does them, so how are you going to stop this? Not happy, this is being highlighted...."

It's the first sunrise of spring!

6:58:

6:59:

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

And here's Meade's video interpretation, with me and Elvis:

Well, it ain't no fun with the sun around/I get going when the sun goes down...

"They cut off the internet. No blogs. No channels.... We don't want it. We don't want it. You won't find us on line."

"We don't sit. We don't sit on your internet. We don't want it. We don't want it. Don't sit. Don't sit there. I declare a whole year of everything turned upside down."

Russia's main TV channel is airing songs about how great life is without the internet. Getting even closer to North Korea. pic.twitter.com/KS2Hur0ioc

— WarTranslated (@wartranslated) March 20, 2026

"It makes me happy. When I hear those pile drivers — my wife doesn't love it — but I love it. I love the sound of concrete. I love the sound of pile drivers."

PETER DOOCY: "When they're doing the construction, does it ever wake you up?"

PRESIDENT TRUMP: “It makes me happy...my wife doesn't love it."

"I love the sound of concrete, I love the sound of pile drivers." || @pdoocy pic.twitter.com/4MDWmwdTCw

— Fox News (@FoxNews) March 20, 2026

"I can be brand new. Whatever."

Betsey Johnson's way of being 83:

"I don’t like introspection. There’s something not right, not in my life, not in my existence. I try to avoid it."

Said Werner Herzog, on the Freakonomics podcast, right after he denied that his childhood was traumatic, even though he went hungry in the post-WWII years. He continues:

This is why I believe that psychoanalysis is one of the great mistakes of the 20th century.... I think it is not good if you illuminate all the dark recesses of the human soul. It’s good that we can forget and that we forget traumas. We do not have to unearth them and articulate them in endless sessions with a psychiatrist. And the 20th century is full of very, very deep mistakes. Psychoanalysis is only one. But because of all these monstrous mistakes of this century, I do believe that the 20th century in its entirety was a mistake....

I was also interested in his opinion of art museums: