Yes, it’s come to this. Spending almost all of my time with my very confused dog when I’m not sifting through records, emails and bills, fielding kind calls from old friends, worrying myself sick and feeling guilty and lost, I’ve been looking for sources of hope and inspiration in history, culture and entertainment. (Teddy Roosevelt’s wife and mother died on the same night, in the same house.) When one gets down all the way to “Annie,” things are clearly getting desperate.

That clip above of Andrea McArdle at the Tonys is the start of a playlist that shows the actress singing her signature song 34 times from 1977 to 2022. If you skip to the last one, you’ll discover that she sounds remarkably the same. I once staged that song in a revue: on opening night, the dog playing Sandy, a Malamute- Airedale cross named “String,” barked twice at the end of the song, exactly on cue. She had never done it before, and never did it again, but boy, the audience went nuts.

1. Here’s something positive, sort of: The Great Stupid is clearly worse in great Britain than here so far. The Fitzwilliam Museum, owned by the University of Cambridge, decided that as part of its overhaul of its exhibitions to make them more “inclusive,” it needed to slap a sign by a classic British countryside painting noting that such artwork can stir feelings of “pride towards a homeland” but that “landscape paintings were also always entangled with national identity…The countryside was seen as a direct link to the past, and therefore a true reflection of the essence of a nation.” This, however, makes such art problematical: “The darker side of evoking this nationalist feeling is the implication that only those with a historical tie to the land have a right to belong.” In another part of the collection, visitors were told that portraits of wealthy and uniformed personages “became vital tools in reinforcing the social order of a white ruling class, leaving very little room for representations of people of color, the working classes or other marginalized people.” Such portraits, the museum insists, “were often entangled, in complex ways, with British imperialism and the institution of transatlantic slavery.”

2. Staying in Great Britain for the nonce, The Great Stupid isn’t doing much for the country’s artistic tastes. Here’s the latest piece of public art being moved onto a plinth in historic Trafalgar Square in 2026:

Maybe they are doing this to annoy King Charles, who fought against the encroachment of modern architecture and art in London and elsewhere when he was a just a prince.

3. RFK Jr. did it! He’s picked a running mate less qualified to be President than Kamala Harris, and more obscure than Ross Perot’s VP pick, poor Admiral Stockdale of “Who am I? Why am I here?” infamy. Mediaite reports that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will tap Nicole Shanahan, a California-based attorney and entrepreneur once married to Google co-founder Sergey Brinn, apparently because she has lots of money to put into his campaign. I suppose she’s also an anti-vaxxer too. For a Kennedy, especially one named after one of the assassinated bothers, to treat the choice of a Vice President so cavalierly is irresponsible. Shanahan’s Wikipedia page just popped up overnight. Yes, even Jesse Ventura would be a more competent choice.

4. I want to hear one coherent, persuasive argument for why the NAACP “Image Awards” exist in 2024, and how CBS can justify televising them. I tuned in briefly last night to hear some award-winner blather out Authentic Frontier Gibberish as if the gathering of black millionaires were the March on Washington. The awards excluded white, Asian, Jewish, Hispanic and other artists, giving out awards for movies, TV show, books, podcasts and more on the basis of race only.

5. Another unanimous SCOTUS decisions backs Donald Trump. Good. You may recall that an appellate court ruled that Trump couldn’t block obnoxious commenters on his Twitter account on free speech grounds, though the real reason was clearly “We hate Trump” grounds. By time the case got to SCOTUS, it was moot, since Trump was off Twitter and out of office. The issue came up again, however, with some local government officials in Michigan and California who blocked followers who were critical of them on Facebook. The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that social media posts by government officials can be attributed to the state, and thus subject to First Amendment scrutiny, only if the person involved has the authority to speak on the state’s behalf and if the official purported to be exercising that authority on the social media platform. Trump’s tweets obviously did not meet that standard.

6. [added] More DEI silliness: Now there is a new animated Charlie Brown special called “Snoopy Presents: Welcome Home, Franklin” soon to be up on Apple TV. You may recall that Franklin was the ultimate token black, gratuitously inserted into the “Peanuts” strip after Martin Luther King’s assassination by Charles M. Schultz well after the strip had “jumped the shark.” He just hung around; maybe he uttered a punchline a few times, but if so, I missed it. Franklin was a minor player, in the same basic category as Marcy, Sally, Pig Pen, Patty and Woodstock the Bird. But now he has to have his own special, because Charles Schultz inked his face to make it darker than the other cartoon kids. The new special gives us Franklin’s back story, which I’m sure will be hilarious.

I really don’t care about what cartoon specials get made, but don’t African Americans find this obvious pandering insulting?