This is the day before my birthday, once a relatively welcome event, now taboo, as December 1 was the day I found my wonderful father dead in his favorite chair after he died in his sleep at the age of 89. I can’t shake the sense that my father’s exit from the world was of more import than my entering it, though I know he would disagree. My sister has convinced me to let her tale me to see “Wicked” tomorrow evening, which will be the first movie I have seen in a theater since 2019. I consider this excursion ethics research and an obligation of cultural literacy. Is the film “woke”? Is it another Hollywood propaganda effort but one that is subtle enough not to alienate audiences, like Disney’s recent output? Are conservative critics just seeing the movie through jaundiced eyes? Are there any songs in the show that are genuinely memorable, unlike the songs in virtually every other Broadway hit musical since “Les Miz”?

As was pointed out by commenter John Paul here, the film version of “Wicked” has an unethical title, as it is in fact only the first act of the musical despite clocking in at over 150 minutes, almost as long as the stage show. There will be a “Wicked” Part 2 for sure: if the film had tanked, it would have been quietly cancelled, like the the planned second installment of “The Golden Compass” and the promised sequel to “Silverado.”

Now ponder this deranged NYT comment on a Times story about the film:

Yikes. Yeah, a musical spin-off of “The Wizard of Oz” would have overcome the epic incompetence of the Harris campaign if only it had been released earlier. That may be the wackiest excuse for Trump’s win yet.

Meanwhile…

1. In the category of stunning life incompetence: I’m a bit dubious about anyone being this dumb, but according to the British tabloid The Daily Star, a couple seeking medical advice after their efforts to have a baby proved futile had to be told that it’s much harder to conceive when the man is using a condom. Apparently, since both had been told since puberty never to have sex without one, it never occurred to either that sometimes unprotected sex was not only wise but crucial. In another sex-related story, couple was arrested in Miami as they were having sexual relations on top of one of the giant elephants in the work “Elephant Herd” that will be a feature of a soon-to-open art fair. Gee, I hope they used protection…

2. Is this unethical? I may have asked this before: I have to surf the web incessantly to find the ethics lessons, stories, conflicts and dilemmas, and increasingly an being told to turn off my ad-blocker (which often can’t be turned off) or be blocked from the page. Of course, often I have to play the “Where’s Waldo?” game of searching for the hidden click-on message “Continue without supporting us you cheap bastard”) which sometimes only appears after you have refreshed the page three or more times. But I have also discovered that with many sites, if you refresh the blocked page, there is enough time before that “We see you are using an Ad-blocker” screen pops up to “select all,” copy it, and paste it in a Word document.

3. How petty can one be? NeverTrump Republican Adam Kinziger, who happily participated in Liz Cheney’s rigged Star Chamber partisan hearings to spread propaganda about the January 6 Capitol riots, resorted to this gratuitous insult on “X”:

Fortunately for Trump, his worst enemies are just as infantile as he is. As a response to the election goes, this tweet is on par with a typical “Your mother…” insult.

4. From Yahoo! News: “A South Carolina mayor died while being pursued by law enforcement on Tuesday, just days after the town’s entire police force quit due to a “hostile work environment. McColl Mayor George Garner II veered into eastbound traffic and collided head-on with an 18-wheeler during the police chase. Garner was connected to an active investigation by the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, sources told WBTW, though details of the investigation are not clear. ‘The pursuit was not related to any laws being broken. The pursuit was taking place in an effort to protect the well-being of Mr. Garner,’ the coroner said…”

Mysteriously. Gee, what a fun town!

5. This kind of thing will get Pete Hegseth confirmed as Defense Secretary even if he doesn’t deserve to be. The flat learning curve of the Axis of Unethical Conduct is epic. Its contrived impeachments and partisan prosecutions of Donald Trump probably won him more supporters than they lost, and now the news media is scraping the bottom of the barrel to smear the Fox News host nominated by Trump to “shake up” the military establishment. In today’s digital New York Times we find “Pete Hegseth’s Mother Accused Her Son of Mistreating Women for Years.” Apparently Mom wrote Hegseth an angry email during his divorce saying that he “belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego.” No details that can be checked of course; the email wouldn’t qualify as evidence under the loosest of trial standards, and Hegseth’s mother now disavows the message, telling the Times that she had sent Hegseth “an immediate follow-up email at the time apologizing for what she had written. She said she had fired off the original email “in anger, with emotion” at a time when he and his wife were going through a very difficult divorce….she defended her son and disavowed the sentiments she had expressed in the initial email about his character and treatment of women.”

“It is not true. It has never been true,” Mrs. Hegseth told the Times in last week’s interview. “I know my son. He is a good father, husband.”

She also said that publishing the contents of the first email was “disgusting.” She is right about that, but do you want to lay odds on whether a Democrat in the Senate hearings quote the email anyway? I also want to point out that the Times headline is deceitfully ambiguous. I read it initially to say that for years, Hegseth’s mother had accused him of mistreating women, when the article only says that she accused him of mistreating women “for years” in a single email.

An accident by the Times, I’m sure….

6. Interestingly, since the election all of the assorted banned or self-banned left-wing, Trump Deranged or otherwise agenda-driven trolls have been silent.

7. Today’s sample of Trump-Deranged hysteria and fear-mongering comes from Times op-ed author Kati Marton. Its title on the home page is “I’ve Seen the Future Republicans Want for Our Country” but it has morphed into “Why I’m Not Giving Up on American Democracy,” which is only slightly less silly. (Democracy worked just fine this month, as an incompetent, totalitarian-trending party with a terrible, unqualified Presidential candidate was rejected by enough voters.) Here’s a sample:

“How is it that Mr. Trump’s open admiration for Mr. Orban was not enough to warn away more American voters? Beyond showering praise him, Mr. Trump has already ripped pages from Mr. Orban’s playbook: threatening to revoke the broadcast licenses of news channels he derides as “fake,” striving to bypass the Senate’s confirmation process and appointing lackeys to high positions…As much as I miss my parents, these days I am almost relieved that they are not alive to see the current version of the country they considered the greatest on earth, the United States. They would now barely recognize it.”

The author also sinks to the “wrong side of history” argument. If there are features in the U.S. that her Hungarian parents would not recognize, I am confident that those developments did not come from conservative policies or those advocated by the President-Elect.