"I swear to God if I were a young woman today I would choose celibacy over having the government in charge of my body. Stripping woman of the right to bodily autonomy is in itself a form of rape."

So writes one commenter at the Washington Post article "Woman charged with murder after allegedly taking abortion pills, going to hospital/The 31-year-old Georgia woman went to the emergency room with severe pain after allegedly taking abortion pills at home, according to police and court records."

We're told "Alexia Moore delivered a 22- to 24-week-old fetus 'with cardiac activity' in December, according to an arrest warrant, which cited Moore’s medical records. The newborn, a girl, died within an hour."

Delivered a fetus? The child was born alive, then died. I think they mean that they detected cardiac activity while it was in utero, so they delivered what was, on delivery, a baby.

"Think about the 250th. A lot's going to happen this summer on the Mall. But come the end of the year, what's still going to still be on the Mall? The bronze bison."

From "Smithsonian brings bison back to the National Mall with gigantic statues" (WaPo)(gift link, because this is all about the photographs).

Andy Beshear seeks to distinguish himself as the anti-Vance.

I'm reading "Andy Beshear Delivers a Scathing Attack on JD Vance in Ohio, Stoking 2028 Tensions/Mr. Beshear, the Democratic governor of Kentucky, sharply criticized Mr. Vance as both angle for potential presidential runs" (NYT).

Speaking at a local Democratic Party gala in the Ohio county where Mr. Vance grew up, Mr. Beshear accused the vice president of talking down to the people of Kentucky.... And he argued that “Hillbilly Elegy” — Mr. Vance’s well-read memoir about his youth in Kentucky and Ohio — amounted to “poverty tourism” and “trafficked in this tired stereotype” about the region.... 

Mr. Beshear has repeatedly accused Mr. Vance of overstating his blue-collar roots and misrepresenting himself as a product of Appalachia.

Waking up at 3 a.m. — "the quiet interstice of night"....

"A defibrillator delivers up to 1,000 volts to a patient’s heart; inmates executed by electric chair typically receive about 2,000."

"A typical lightning strike, by contrast, transmits 100 million volts or more. But lightning races through the body in milliseconds, and therefore often spares it. Some people... recall the moment vividly.... the flash of light whiting out all vision; the sound, which many survivors say is the loudest they’ve ever heard. The pain, for some, is excruciating, yet others feel no pain at all. 'It felt like adrenaline, but stronger,' one survivor reported. 'I felt an incredible pulsing,' another said, 'a burning sensation from head to toe.'... [Afterwards, f]orgetfulness, sleep problems, sexual dysfunction, and headaches that manifest as intense pressure—like 'my eyeballs are just popping out,” one person told me—are common. Some people become hypersensitive to noise; others lose their hearing entirely. A few, almost miraculously, are freed of a prior ailment: a bad leg healed; vision, once impaired, restored.... Some have to relearn simple things, things they’ve done their whole life—how to read, how to sing, how to ride a bike.... One woman told me she often feels as though water is running down her limbs.... Inexplicable odors can emerge; food can taste like cardboard or glue...."

From "What 100 Million Volts Do to the Body and Mind/The odds of being struck by lightning in America in a given year are one in 1.2 million. How does the experience reorient a person’s sense of chance, of fate?" (The Atlantic)(gift link).

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:

More clips from the show: here.

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...."