Fungus of the Day.

Not that I'm considering eating it, but can you identify it?

I tried using ChatGPT to identify it:

ME: what is this fungus that is yellow and looks like macaroni

"During the second week of Lent, on 'Cat Wednesday,' cats were tossed to their deaths out of the belfry tower onto the town square below."

"At the time, the animals were seen as a symbol of witchcraft and evil, so their deaths were celebrated. The last live cat was thrown in 1817, but Ieper (also called Ypres in French) developed Kattenstoet in 1937, a tradition to both acknowledge the city’s gruesome history and celebrate cats. The parade, which was held on Sunday, May 12, is filled with elaborate floats, costumes and performances. Afterward, a person dressed as a jester tosses stuffed animal cats from the belfry, down to the onlookers below."

From "A City With a Medieval History of Killing Cats Now Celebrates Them/Cat lovers from around the world gathered for Kattenstoet, a cat parade in Iepers, Belgium" (NYT).

I expended my second-to-last free gift link of the month on that because there are some cool and amusing photographs of the place. And there are still 10 more days — and all that Trump-trial business still remaining! Too bad! Belgians twirling in cat costumes and tourists cavorting in cat ears beat out NYT reporters informing us, moment by moment, about whether Trump's eyes are open or shut.

"I know it’s a quaint wee village and this is a strong mural, but I did my own research into the women who were killed there, and I wanted to get people talking.

Said street artist Bobby McNamara, quoted in "'Rather insensitive': Fife council to remove menacing witch mural/Mural by Rogue One found to be not in keeping with historic area, after complaints about portrayal of women accused of witchcraft" (The Guardian).

[T]he row comes as the drive for posthumous justice for the thousands of people persecuted as witches in post-Reformation Scotland is growing, with campaigners pushing for an official pardon after the former first minister Nicola Sturgeon issued a formal apology last International Women’s Day to those tortured and often executed under the Witchcraft Act 1563.... The charity Remembering the Accused Witches of Scotland (RAWS) estimates that during the great witch-hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries there were approximately 350 known accused witches in Fife, with up to 28 accused in Pittenweem itself, most famously Janet Cornfoot, who escaped from the local tollbooth but was caught and returned to Pittenweem, where she was lynched by a mob....

RAWS wants "respectful and dignified" "memorialisation" of the women who were unjustly accused and punished, but the mural shows a Halloween-style stereotype of a witch. Supporters of the mural are calling its critics "snowflakes" and emphasizing economics: "I think the mural is fantastic and I absolutely endorse it. It’s about time somebody was milking the place for the tourism it deserves." 

McNamara accepts the death penalty imposed on his mural: "As a street artist, you’re used to murals coming and going. I’m surprised it’s lasted this long and everyone’s got something out of it, whether that’s publicity for me, the pub, the village or for the women."

"Mr. DeRuvo initially decided to forgo shoes because of agonizing bunions, but he has stayed barefoot for reasons that transcend physical comfort."

"In that time, he has become a litmus test of people’s forbearance and their willingness to tolerate a stranger’s unconventional lifestyle and perhaps even try to understand it. There are questions he is asked frequently that he is always happy to answer. How does he manage snow and ice? Doesn’t he get sharp objects stuck in his thick calluses? But that’s the simple stuff. 'Navigating the terrain is easy,' Mr. DeRuvo said. 'Navigating people is tricky.; When asked to leave a shop or a restaurant, he normally does so without protest, said Mr. DeRuvo’s wife, Lini Ecker, a shoe-wearer who serves as a bridge between her husband and a world that generally asks for conformity. 'When someone has put on their "I’m in charge personae,"' she said, 'once they start, they can never change their minds.' On occasion, Mr. DeRuvo pushes back. 'If I’m feeling feisty,' he said...."

From "He Took His Shoes Off 20 Years Ago. He Hasn’t Put Them Back On. Joseph DeRuvo Jr. has lived a mostly barefooted life for nearly two decades. The experience has given him a thick skin" (NYT). 

He has a job that works with barefootedness: Pilates instructor.

We're told he has other quirks: He prefers to use chopsticks and "He needs reggae music to play in the background at almost all times."

"Chollet celebrates not only the witches of the past, but also the so-called 'witches' of today..."

"... independent women who have chosen not to have children, aren’t always coupled, often defy traditional beauty norms (letting their hair go gray), and thus operate outside the established social order."

From "A French Feminist Tells Us to Embrace Our Inner Hag" (NYT)(reviewing "IN DEFENSE OF WITCHES/The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial"). 

Since [Mona] Chollet’s childhood, the word ["witch"] “has had a magnetic hold on me,” she writes. “Something about it fizzes with energy. The word speaks of a knowledge that lies close to the ground, a vital power, an accumulated force of experience that official sources disdain or repress.”...

Sometimes, by choice or by circumstance, a woman becomes what Chollet calls a “femme fondue,” or dissolving woman, who becomes overwhelmed by “the service reflex” and disappears into motherhood or child care, losing her grip on the first person. 

We're told that the book refers to all of these feminists: Rebecca Traister, Gloria Steinem, Susan Faludi, Adrienne Rich, Susan Sontag, Elizabeth Gilbert, Audre Lorde, and Rebecca Solnit.

What about Mary Daly?! 

When I think of feminism and witches, I think of Mary Daly. As Wikipedia puts it: "Daly said it is the role of women to unveil the liberatory nature of labels such as 'Hag,' 'Witch,' and 'Lunatic.'" That links to a page in Ruether, "Women and Redemption: A Theological History" where we find this snappy paragraph:

"They’re progressive, positive young women, and they’re tragically boring, which is less the fault of their woke makeover than the film’s conviction that it’s incompatible with conflict or distinct personalities."

Writes Alison Willmore in The Craft: Legacy Is Progressive, Positive, and Tragically Dull (New York Magazine) about a sequel to a 1996 movie that I don't know about you but I saw. The idea for both movies is 4 high school girls who do witchcraft. The old movie was about the personal flaws of the 4 characters and their interpersonal problems. In the new movie....

The witches in "The Craft: Legacy".. use their blossoming powers on behalf of the community... effacing slut-shaming graffiti from a locker and humiliating a homophobe by turning his jacket rainbow-colored. As their pièce de résistance, they use a spell to transform a sexually menacing bully named Timmy... into an emotionally open young man who holds forth about heteronormativity and how much he loves Princess Nokia — not just for her music, but for her politics.... 

[In] an interview that writer-director Zoe Lister-Jones did with Vanity Fair... she explained... that [the 1996 movie was] “about women whose power was too overwhelming for them to harness and was turned on each other.”...  [The new movie] is so reluctant to subject its characters to any stress that it consigns most of its major dramatic developments into its barely coherent last half hour, which is when a foe finally emerges.... 

Spoiler alert... 

... a knitwear-clad warlock Jordan Peterson... 

Willmore wants more of this villain and blames the director for wanting to protect viewers from conflict and stress. It's funny — as if the movie is making an argument against movies. Why get yourself all upset about fictional characters? Just watch TikTok, why don't you. 

Here's some TikTok I thought was pretty funny... but it might stress you out if you're one of the millions of people who are swaddling and comforting Joe Biden, the man you are hoping will protect us from our enemies.

What if a woman had been caught — like Jeffrey Toobin — masturbating on camera during a Zoom business call?

This is my second burning-a-witch-at-the-stake post of the day... and I did not go looking for more witch-burning material. It fell on me in the normal course of blogging. 

I'm reading "Rose McGowan slams Jeffrey Toobin defenders amid ‘#MeToobin’ scandal" (NY Post): 

“Can you all imagine if a conservative woman was caught masturbating on an @zoom meeting like #MeToobin? If it had been a liberal woman? If it had been a [woman of color]?” the #MeToo activist wrote Tuesday on Twitter. 

Responding to another Twitter user, she mused, “Do you think there’d be liberal ‘intellectuals’ rising to defend her? She’d be burned at the stake.”

Really? I think if a woman mishandling her computer camera exposed herself accidentally, there would be tremendous sympathy and an immediate understanding that it would not be talked about — about like what you'd do if you walked in on someone using the toilet. If the circumstances indicated that she was intentionally exhibiting herself — could that have been the case with Toobin? — then I think people would regard her as having a very serious mental problem and would close ranks around her and try to protect and help her. In either case — accidental or intentional — I don't think a woman would have been as badly treated as Toobin — who has been ruthlessly ridiculed and humiliated.

2 questions of balance: 1. Does Amy Coney Barrett weigh as much as a duck, and 2. Is Facebook applying its anti-violence policy equally to conservatives and liberals?

Regular readers know I'm not a fan of the Babylon Bee website. I don't think it's original or sophisticated enough, but I very much want the big social media platforms to apply their various content-related policies with neutrality as to viewpoint. They ought to test any censorship of the right by asking whether if the equivalent material were presented by the left, they'd do the same thing. 

I'm reading a Fox News article about Facebook's decision to censor a Babylon Bee piece titled "Senator Hirono Demands ACB Be Weighed Against A Duck To See If She Is A Witch." The fictional quote from Hirono is: "Oh, she's a witch alright, just look at her! Just look at the way she's dressed and how she's so much prettier and smarter than us! She's in league with Beelzebub himself, I just know it! We must burn her!" And: "In addition to being a Senator, I am also quite wise in the ways of science. Everyone knows witches burn because they are made of wood. I think I read that somewhere. Wood floats, and so do ducks-- so logically, if Amy Coney Barrett weighs as much as this duck I found in the reflection pool outside, she is a witch and must be burned.'" 

The threat of burning and the verbal image of burning a human being — a specific, famous person — is violent. It's certainly not a true threat, because witch burning is a familiar trope in American discourse and because, if somehow we're confused about whether literal witch burning is a possibility, we can be confident that Barrett weighs significantly more than a duck.

Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon tweets: "So after a manual review, Facebook says they stand by their decision to pull down this article and demonetize our page... They say this article 'incites violence.' It's literally a regurgitated joke from a Monty Python movie! In what universe does a fictional quote as part of an obvious joke constitute a genuine incitement to violence? How does context not come into play here? They're asking us to edit the article and not speak publicly about internal content reviews. Oops, did I just tweet this?" 

I'm not impressed by the "regurgitated Monty Python" argument. Not everyone knows the movie. I saw it long ago but didn't remember this part, which actually isn't a good reference point if the aim is to make Hirono look stupid and wrong. Watch:

There, you see that the character who proposes the duck-weight test is attempting to devise a method of convincing the mob that the woman is not a witch. So the Bee lacks originality — cutting and pasting text from a movie script — and it isn't even very good at selecting what text to use.

But Facebook doesn't have a policy against unoriginality, inapt quoting, and lame humor. Facebook teems with that stuff. The question is whether equivalent violent language — with reference to a real person — is censored the same way when it is posted by non-conservatives. I don't know the answer, but if Dillon wants to make an argument that works on me, he needs to point to similar things from the other side that Facebook has not targeted.

"As a queer, trans, disabled person who goes by they/them, I'm this SJW snowflake. I don’t want to sit down with cops. The Christian right is making strange bedfellows right now."

Said Dakota Bracciale, the owner of Catland, quoted in "Inside the Brooklyn Witches’ Antifa Hex on Kavanaugh/Despite protests, the Brooklyn antifa witches’ hex on Brett Kavanaugh went on. Both vengeful hate and intense love filled the event" (The Daily Beast).

Bracciale — "who goes by they/them" but calls themself "I" — made "strange bedfellows" with the police to arrange for security during Catland's planned event purporting to call violence down upon Brett Kavanaugh.

Catland is a Brooklyn shop that sells "spiritual literature, healing crystals, tarot cards, burnable incense, and other occult accoutrements."

Occult — from "classical Latin occultus secret, hidden from the understanding, hidden, concealed, past participle of occulere to cover up, hide, conceal" (OED) — means "Of or relating to magic, alchemy, astrology, theosophy, or other practical arts held to involve agencies of a secret or mysterious nature; of the nature of such an art; dealing with or versed in such matters; magical." Historical example:

1711 Ld. Shaftesbury Characteristicks III. Misc. ii. i. 53 From this Parent-Country of occult Sciences..he was presum'd..to have learnt..judicial Astrology.

Judicial Astrology!

Anyway, this Catland shop has done a fine job of getting publicity. And the Christians who protested did the hard work of making this stupid story viral.

But I want to talk about Judicial Astrology. Is it anything that our cursèd Supreme Court might do? Wikipedia — I love Wikipedia!! — has an article, "Judicial Astrology"!

"Right now we’re living through a full-fledged crisis in our democracy. No, there are not tanks in the streets, but what’s happening right now goes to the heart of who we are as a nation..."

"... and I say this not as a Democrat who lost an election but as an American afraid of losing a country. There are certain things that are so essential they should transcend politics. Waging a war on the rule of law and a free press, de-legitimizing elections, perpetrating shameless corruption and rejecting the idea that our leaders should be public servants undermines our national unity. And attacking truth and reason, evidence and facts should alarm us all."

Who knows whether all or some or none among the graduating class at Yale were alarmed when Hillary Clinton intoned those words? But I do note that somebody was sitting right there in the front row wearing a witch's hat...



So if we're doing witch hunts, I found one. I mean, I know there's a hat thing going on at Yale. the linked article (in the New Haven Register) does talk about it:

It is Class Day tradition for the seniors to wear silly, imaginative headgear and Clinton held up a Russian fur cap, saying, “I brought a hat too — a Russian hat. Look, I mean, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em!”

Join the Russians.

Meanwhile, at the other hyper-elite school: "Hillary Clinton will receive Harvard’s prestigious Radcliffe Medal for her 'transformative impact on society.'"

"Thus the only plausible approach for Catholicism is to offer itself, not as a chaplaincy within modern liberalism, but as a full alternative culture in its own right — one that reclaims the inheritance on display at the Met, glories in its own weirdness and supernaturalism..."

"... and spurns both accommodations and entangling alliances (including the ones that conservative Catholics have forged with libertarian-inflected right-wing political movements).... [I]t’s the pope’s traditionalist adversaries who are more likely to don the sort of 'heavenly' garb being feted and imitated at the Met — while from his own simple choice of dress to his constant digs at overdressed clerics and fancy traditionalists, the pope believes that baroque Catholicism belongs in a museum or at a costume gala, and that the church’s future lies in the simple, the casual, the austere and the plain.... Francis and other would-be modernizers are right, and have always been right, that Catholic Christianity should not trade on fear. But a religion that claims to be divinely established cannot persuade without a lot of fascination, and far too much of that has been given up, consigned to the museum, as Western Catholicism has traced its slow decline.... [T]here is no plausible path [forward] that does not involve more of what was displayed and appropriated and blasphemed against in New York City Monday night, more of what once made Catholicism both great and weird, and could yet make it both again."

From "Make Catholicism Weird Again" by Ross Douthat (NYT).

Cannot persuade without a lot of fascination....

The etymology of "fascination" takes us back to a Latin word that means spells and witchcraft. The oldest meaning (now obsolete) is "The casting of a spell; sorcery, enchantment" (OED). Another old meaning is "The action and the faculty of fascinating their prey attributed to serpents, etc." (Example from 1848: "The fascination of the serpent on the bird held her mute and frozen.") The meaning we think of when we hear the word is "irresistibly attractive influence." Examples, from Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Marble Faun" (1860):

Donatello, of whose presence she was possibly not aware, now pressed closer to her side; and he, too, like Miriam, bent over the low parapet and trembled violently. Yet he seemed to feel that perilous fascination which haunts the brow of precipices, tempting the unwary one to fling himself over for the very horror of the thing; for, after drawing hastily back, he again looked down, thrusting himself out farther than before.

"If there was an assault, can we then have an investigation, a trial, and a verdict. This Crucible-like environment needs to stop..."

"... and we need to rationally and soberly get back to following the Rule of Law, where a person is innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt, and stop convicting people in the Court of Public Opinion. If he did it, then he deserves to suffer the consequences prescribed for his crimes under the law, but he needs to be able to exercise his rights to a fair trial and to face his accusers in a Court of Law before we all jump to conclusions. And if he is innocent then he should be exonerated. #MeToo should not be about allowing anyone to make accusations about whoever they want to. It should be about providing a supporting environment where women and LGBTQ can seek justice under the law if they have been aggrieved. It should be about teaching men it is not okay to behave however they want. But it should not become Salem 2.0."

That's the top-rated comment on "Eric Schneiderman, Accused by 4 Women, Quits as New York Attorney General" at the NYT this morning. Schneiderman resigned the day the New Yorker article came out, detailing accusations.

Also in the NYT, "Before His Fall, Eric Schneiderman Defended Women and Took On Trump":

Recently, he pushed himself to the forefront of the #MeToo movement, announcing a lawsuit against the company once run by the former filmmaker Harvey Weinstein, who was accused of decades of sexual misconduct.

“We have never seen anything as despicable as what we’ve seen right here,” Mr. Schneiderman said at the time....

He had also raised his profile nationally by repeatedly taking on President Trump’s agenda in the courts.... Even before Mr. Trump took office, Mr. Schneiderman had filed a lawsuit against Trump University. And more recently, he had been pushing to change state law so his office could prosecute Mr. Trump’s aides if the president pardons them.

“Since November of 2016, Eric has led the fight to protect New Yorkers from the most harmful policies of the Trump Administration,” his biography says.... He successfully sued to block what he called President Trump’s “Muslim Ban.” He said he was taking the Trump administration to court over energy-efficiency standards. He said he was defending the rights of sanctuary cities in his state....

ADDED: As long as the witchcraft metaphor is in play, let me show you this, which I encountered after publishing this post:

I once cast this spell on my tv show Charmed. It foretold the future. The future is now.

From Ancient Time
This Power Came
For All To Have
But None To Reign
Take It Now
Show No Mercy
For this Power Can No Longer Be #Charmed

— rose mcgowan (@rosemcgowan) May 8, 2018

"As far as rihanna (who isn’t a citizen, and can’t vote) and all the rest of the celebrities who are using their influence to stir the public, you lot really REALLY need to shut up and sit down."

"Stop chastising the president. It’s stupid and pathetic to watch. All of these confused people confuse other confused people. Hoping the president fails is like getting on an airplane and hoping the pilot crashes. What makes you think, the the USA is going to enter the Middle East destroy a bunch of shit and pull out without any real repercussions ????"

Celebrities pushing back celebrities. That's Azealia Banks.

We'll see how things work out for Banks. So far....

Apparently in response to Banks’ rant, [Rihanna] shared a black-and-white photo of herself with the caption, “the face you make when you a immigrant #stayawayfromthechickens #iheartnuggets #saveourhens.” The hashtags are likely in reference to Banks’ controversial video where she showed herself cleaning up what she claimed was blood from years of sacrificing chickens in her closet. She claimed the sacrifices were part of her practice as a witch.

Banks promptly shared a screenshot of the star’s post — which she curiously decided to “like” on Instagram — and said, “What rihanna meant was ….”

What's at that ellipsis is too ugly to put on this blog. I don't picture Banks winning this fight. 

"Women have one of the great acts of all time. The smart ones act very feminine and needy, but inside they are real killers."

"The person who came up with the expression 'the weaker sex' was either very naive or had to be kidding. I have seen women manipulate men with just a twitch of their eye -- or perhaps another body part."

Wrote Donald Trump in "The Art of the Comeback" (1997). Quoted in "Donald Trump's trouble with women -- an incomplete list" (at CNN). I got there via "Donald Trump doubles down on fat-shaming. It’s unpresidential and medically harmful," by Dr. Jen Gunter, who writes: "He showed he is a man who truly believes the value of a women lies in some superficial attribute that he alone is fit to judge."

I got to Gunter via the journalist Jonathan Cohn, who links to it at Facebook, where he comments "Trump has a long history of fat-shaming, way beyond what he said about Alicia Machado." And you can see that my son John comments there: "Too bad the one link to the 'science' this post is based on doesn't work."

John is right about that. Gunter puts a link on "Science tells us that being labeled 'too fat' can cast the curse of a body image disorder upon girls and young women." It's a dead link, going to an "Oops!" page within Gunter's own site.

Isn't it funny that Gunter has "science" speaking to us in terms of "casting" a "curse." Sounds more like witchcraft!

"'I’d like to burn you at the stake!' growled Betty Friedan at Phyllis Schlafly during a public debate over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) at Illinois State University in 1973."

"Friedan and other feminists were unnerved by Schlafly. She was as sophisticated and accomplished as they were, but profoundly antifeminist. They tried everything to pass ERA and defeat Schlafly, from bribing state legislators to using witchcraft, but to no avail."

Did Friedan really growl or was that humorous hyperbole? I need the video or at least the whole context, which I can't get from the New York Times either, where I first saw this burning-at-the-stake business:

On the left, Betty Friedan, the feminist leader and author, compared her to a religious heretic, telling her in a debate that she should burn at the stake for opposing the Equal Rights Amendment. Ms. Friedan called Mrs. Schlafly an “Aunt Tom.”

I'm reading that today because Phyllis Schlafly has died — after a long public life and at the age of 92. Let's keep reading:

Mrs. Schlafly became a forceful conservative voice in the 1950s, when she joined the right-wing crusade against international Communism. In the 1960s, with her popular self-published book “A Choice Not an Echo” (it sold more than three million copies) and a growing legion of followers, she gave critical support to the presidential ambitions of Senator Barry Goldwater, the hard-right Arizonan who went on to lead the Republican Party to electoral disaster in 1964, but who planted the seeds of a conservative revival that would flower with the rise of Ronald Reagan....

Many saw her ability to mobilize that citizens’ army as her greatest accomplishment. Angered by the cultural transformations of the 1960s, beginning with the 1962 Supreme Court ruling prohibiting state-sponsored prayer in public schools, her “little old ladies in tennis shoes,” as some called them, went from ringing doorbells for Goldwater to serving as foot soldiers for the “Reagan revolution.” 

Little old ladies in tennis shoes... that really was a standard expression, the contempt of the time for the little people, who were openly called little. Back when older women could be frankly minimized as "old ladies." But we still sort out women according to their shoes. And it's less meaningful to be caught wearing sneakers.

According to William Safire's "Political Dictionary," the term "little old ladies in tennis shoes" was "coined in 1961 by Stanley Mosk, then the Democratic Attorney General of California, in a report on right-wing activity." It was then used to attack supporters of Barry Goldwater, specifically the "resolute, intensely dedicated women's group — Western (or at least not Eastern urban), unsophisticated, often white-haired and wearing rimless eyeglasses. They were called 'the little old ladies in tennis shoes' with considerable disdain." Safire tells us that that in 1966, when Reagan was campaigning for governor in California, he recognized the "sexism and ageism" in the phrase and flipped it into a joke, addressing crowds with "Gentlemen — and 'little ladies in tennis shoes.'"

Anyway, goodbye to Phyllis Schlafly. I wasn't on her side in most of this, but I respect the hard work and the strong voice throughout so many decades in the ongoing debate about the kind of America we want.

"Accused of being a witch, the tiny boy had spent months trying to survive on the streets."

"[W]e heard that the child was only 2 to 3 years old.... A child that young cannot survive a long time alone on the streets.... Thousands of children are being accused of being witches...."

"Sorcery is considered such a grave concern..."

"... that, in 2009, the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice created a specially trained unit to conduct witchcraft investigations. Saudi citizens are encouraged to report suspected witches and sorcerers anonymously, to a hotline. (A writer for the Saudi Gazette, an English-language newspaper, lauded the squad’s ability to eliminate 'magic the same way the security forces would defuse explosives.') Last spring, in Riyadh, ten government agencies took part in a state-sponsored sorcery-awareness workshop."

From "Sisters in Law/Saudi women are beginning to know their rights," by Katherine Zoepf in The New Yorker.

The Saudi Gazette no longer displays the quoted article, and I couldn't find it through the Wayback Machine or Google Cache. This might be the relevant text, at Crossroads Arabia. It contains the quoted text — which I've boldfaced — and purports to be "a good piece in the Arabic daily Alsharq from the Eastern Province (here translated by Saudi Gazette)":

"Even as a child, I didn't understand why Darren was so against using the magic."

Wrote MayBee in the comments to last night's post marking the 50th anniversary of the premiere of "Bewitched." I answered:

It's an allegory of relations between the sexes. Darren wants to provide for his wife and protect her. He can't do that if she has powers, or so he thinks. Instead of working together to find a new way to live in which the woman can use her full powers and the man can still feel empowered, he forbade her to use them and she tried to live like that, but she nevertheless acted out on her frustration from time to time, though only to help make their traditional life together work out.

"A fetching suburban house­witch in the person of Elizabeth Montgomery ar­rived on the television screen last night in a series entitled 'Bewitched.'"

For "last night," read: 50 years ago tonight.

Both Miss Montgomery and [Dick] York are extremely at­tractive and personable and there is a durable element of fun in watching someone out of this world solve life's mundane problems by making them go away with a snap of the fingers or a twitch of the mouth....

Agnes Moorehead is play­ing Miss Montgomery's moth­er and, with more substan­tial scenes in the installments to come, should be a reward­ing figure as a senior witch given to disdain for human ways. “Bewitched” promises to be a bright niche of popu­lar TV.

And so it was, for 8 years. Note that the above-quoted NYT review accurately says "twitch of the mouth." We were tricked, perhaps by witchcraft, into thinking we were looking at a twitch of the nose.



MORE: Thoughts on why Darren didn't accept Samantha's use of witchcraft here.

"Considering Which Head or Heads May Roll for a Troubled Website Rollout."

A NYT headline... head- or heads- line.

Is severed head covered in the Obamacare-conforming plans?

The article, by Michael D. Shear, begins:

For weeks, the president and his aides have said they are not interested in conducting a witch hunt in the middle of the effort to rescue the website.

But they've gotten interested. Apparently, a witch hunt is just the right distraction for the holiday season. But heads are rolling, so the image is a guillotine — a reign of terror. But feel free to picture hangings (witch execution, American-style) or burnings at the stake (if you want to go medieval).

The possible targets include Kathleen Sebelius, the health and human services secretary; Marilyn Tavenner, the head of the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services; Mike Hash, the head of the health and human services health reform office; Michelle Snyder, the chief operating officer at Medicaid and Medicare; Henry Chao, the chief digital architect for the website; Jeanne Lambrew, the head of health care policy inside the White House; David Simas, a key adviser involved in the rollout; and Todd Park, the president’s top adviser on technology issues.

Don't pick all women. That would look bad. Maybe Mike Hash and Todd Park, I'd say, just going on the optics of the names. You just need heads. Which heads would look best on a pike?



Ha ha ha. Remember George Bush's head on a pike? Those were the days! Oh, the distractions of yore! What would distract the folks today? Will Obama traipsing about the country for 3 weeks, right up until Christmas Eve eve, do the trick? Think of all the pretty, empathetic people that can be lined up behind him. Just like a choir of Christmas carolers... bringing good tidings of great joy. But heads must roll! It's execution time. More apt for the Easter season, but Christ, you know it ain’t easy/You know how hard it can be/The way things are going/They’re gonna crucify me.

No, no, no. Our modern Messiah must survive. The metaphorical executions must be directed somewhere lower down. I say Mike Hash and Todd Park and then throw in a lady too. Kathleen Sebelius. No, make it Marilyn Tavenner.

That's a nice array of heads. Enough of a purge to settle you down until the new year?