where are your gloves and your helmet?

Made it through "The Way To Eden" aka the SPACE HIPPIES episode last night.

It gets a lot easier to slug through if one spends as much of the episode as possible knowing that Adam, the grinning one with the curly orange hair, went on to play the leader of the Good Ole Boys band in The Blues Brothers. Kind of hilarious imagery results, although it still helps to turn the sound off during the musical numbers.

It then gets a lot harder to slug through upon realizing it's about a group of utterly dedicated people loudly and unquestioningly following a leader who screams HEALTH FREEDOM, YOUR SOCIETY MADE ME ILL, I REFUSE TO SUBMIT TO WHAT SCIENCE SAYS WILL KEEP ANYBODY SAFE and then goes about setting events in motion intended to kill everybody on board the Enterprise, after having them storm all the vital parts of the ship in the name of FREEDOM. Because none of them like or want to deal with society or accept the fact that things are not to their liking. And their idea of countering situations they don't like is to yell the same insult over and over and over as if that were an argument.

(I am aware that actual hippies and 60s activists were reacting to incredibly repressive sit-down-and-shut-up-you-little-idiots conditions in the real world. But this was a Star Trek episode that had all the authenticity of a Very Special Episode about racism written by old white men, and it understood hippies about as well as the script for "Miri" understood children, and portrayed them about as well as the 35-year-old actor in "Miri" who was supposed to be someone who'd been twelve for two hundred years.)

Face masks are satanic and God can't hear you pray through them

Joe Biden will hurt God if elected

COVID-19 fucking up the economy is God getting sniffy about Trump's attitude and making him do the economy thing all over again

... yanno, no offense or anything, but the God of the right wing sure sounds like a great big crybaby wuss, and frankly, the opposite of almighty. Christianity, are you really gonna sit back and let these guys talk about God that way?

*looks at news*
*looks at Twitter*

*sigh*

"The nearest of those old ones is Napoleon. We know that because two chaps made the journey to see him. They'd started long before I came, of course, but I was there when they came back."
"But they got there?"
"That's right. He'd built himself a huge house all in the Empire style—rows of windows flaming with light…."
"Did they see Napoleon?"
"That's right. They went up and looked through one of the windows. Napoleon was there all right."
"What was he doing?"
"Walking up and down—up and down all the time— left-right, left-right—never stopping for a moment. The two chaps watched him for about a year and he never rested. And muttering to himself all the time. "It was Soult's fault. It was Ney's fault. It was Josephine's fault. It was the fault of the Russians. It was the fault of the English." Like that all the time. Never stopped for a moment. A little, fat man and he looked kind of tired. But he didn't seem able to stop it."

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (1946, Harper Collins edition 2001) 11-12.

dear political organizations, social organizations, ngos of all stripes:

if you are emailing me about something that has happened
and if information about the thing that happened became known more than half a day ago
and your email does not contain any new information about what happened
YOU DO NOT GET TO LABEL YOUR !*@()%*^!@)($^!@&$ EMAIL 'BREAKING'

it already broke




(Fight For The Future, I am looking at you, especially since you sent me an email about this very same subject YESTERDAY. you are NOT ALLOWED to say 'OMG BREAKING NEWS~!!!!' when you broke this specific piece of news to me yesterday. this is how I decide what organizations I will accept mail from and what organizations get the spam bin. Take your 'breaking' and cram it sideways somewhere difficult to explain to a radiologist.)

I wanted to post this yesterday, but couldn't get myself together enough to do it: my cat Shula had a stroke yesterday.

The doctors at Angell Animal Medical Center are wonderful people, but they'd apparently found other underlying medical problems that had never turned up before.

Shula is with Bast now.

I miss you, fuzzy boo.