This morning on Twitter, Alice Cooper is trending....

Alice Cooper is trending…. So here is Alice, me and Groucho Marx.#AliceCooper pic.twitter.com/BM8iEfvNTu

— Micky Dolenz (@TheMickyDolenz1) June 13, 2023

ADDED: I think Alice Cooper is trending because "Johnny Depp was mobbed by fans as he and Alice Cooper stepped out in Istanbul, Turkey ahead of their gig with their band Hollywood Vampires as part of their live tour on Monday" (Daily Mail).

"In its natural state, most of Florida was such a soggy mush of low-lying marshes that mapmakers couldn’t decide whether to draw it as land or water."

"The Spaniards who arrived in the 16th century told their king the peninsula was 'liable to overflow, and of no use,' and white people mostly stayed away until the U.S. Army chased the Seminole Indians into the Everglades in the 19th century. The soldiers forced to slog through its mosquito-infested bogs described it as a 'hideous,' 'diabolical,''repulsive,' 'pestilential,' 'God-abandoned' hellhole. The story of Florida in the 20th century is about dreamers and schemers trying to get rid of all that water and drain the swamp. Eventually, they mostly succeeded, transforming a remote wilderness into a sprawling megalopolis, replacing millions of acres of wetlands with strip malls and golf courses and sprawling subdivisions, building the Palmetto and Sawgrass Expressways where palmettos and sawgrass used to be.... Cape Coral is Florida on steroids, a comically artificial landscape featuring seven perfectly rectangular man-made islands and eight perfectly square man-made lakes. It was built by two shady brothers who made their fortunes selling scammy anti-baldness tonics, then used their talent for flimflam to sell inaccessible swampland to suckers.... 'You can even get stucco,' the land-swindler played by Groucho Marx quipped in Cocoanuts. 'Oh, how you can get stuck-oh!'"

Writes Michael Grunwald in "Why the Florida Fantasy Withstands Reality/Cape Coral is a microcosm of Florida’s worst impulse: selling dream homes in a hurricane-prone flood zone. But people still want them" (The Atlantic).

"He came to office, it seems, on a platform of little else except his clowning.... Once, when called a clown, Zelensky did not argue, but..."

"...  posted a video on Instagram of his own face with a big red nose upon it. The refusal to act like a grownup infuriated Zelensky’s opponents as much as Groucho Marx infuriated his political opponents in Fredonia, in 'Duck Soup,' with his unseriousness.... [W]atching Zelensky now, one does not think, Oh, wow, he once was a comedian! One thinks, This is what a comedian looks like in power.... The one willing to degrade oneself knowingly, as a clown does, is the one afterward most able to act with dignity.... In interviews with the French philosopher and writer Bernard-Henri Lévy in 2019, Zelensky made it clear that he was quite aware of the interconnection between his place as a clown and his role as a leader. When Lévy asked him if he could make even Vladimir Putin laugh 'just as he had made all Russians laugh,' Zelensky insisted that he could. Though, he then added, 'This man does not see; he has eyes, but does not see; or, if he does look, it’s with an icy stare, devoid of all expression.... Laughter is a weapon that is fatal to men of marble'...."

Writes Adam Gopnik in "Volodymyr Zelensky’s Comedic Courage/The Ukrainian leader shows how wit and mockery can undermine brutal authority" (The New Yorker).

From the Wikipedia article "Death from laughter":

"If Dolly Parton were organizing a literary dinner party, which 3 writers — dead or alive — would she invite?"

This answer is amusing because she's so openly declining to answer the question in terms of setting up an excellent conversation:

First would be James Patterson because, since we are both in entertainment, we could write it off as a business expense. (Ha!) Second would be Fannie Flagg — she’s a friend and a very funny author, so I know she would be a guaranteed good time. Third would be Maya Angelou because she would definitely have wonderful stories and spoke and wrote so poetically. As a bonus, I’d ask Charles Dickens to join us — for the street cred. 

That's from a NYT piece with a headline — "Dolly Parton Likes to Read by the Fire in Her Pajamas" — that forces me to crack a Groucho Marx joke — How the fire got in her pajamas, I don't know.

 

Anyway, she names 4, not 3, and Patterson seems only to be there as part of a tax avoidance scheme. Does Dolly Parton ever let her political opinions show? She flaunts her resistance to taxation. That might be conservative. The other thing in that piece that strikes me as conservative is that she expresses — twice — her love of the book "The Little Engine That Could." It's the book she wants all kids to read. I can't imagine a left-leaning person saying that. 

I found this from the Independent: "Dolly Parton’s politics hide in plain sight, whether she admits it or not There’s not much room for ambiguity in our times, as some Hollywood stars have found out, yet Parton’s philanthropy, which includes her funding of a Covid-19 vaccine, means she gets a free pass. But it’s easy to read between the lines." 

I've already read between the lines. A devoted promoter of the "The Little Engine That Could" must be conservative or libertarian. But let's read this: