Behold the newly painted traffic lines on a highway in Hollister, California.

No, there is no catch, excuse or hidden explanation. Just…morons.

Hollister Mayor Igancio Velzaquez was blunt, if not quite blunt enough, saying, “It just comes down to the contractor. Somebody didn’t read the plans correctly. It was not designed to look very odd.”

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Pointer: Boing-Boing

Time for my favorite way to greet the morning: it’s been a while...

My father had small cards that he handed out, sparingly, that read,

“One day as I sat musing, sad and lonely without a friend, a voice came to me from out of the gloom saying, ‘Cheer up. Things could be worse.’ So I cheered up and sure enough—things got worse.”

On the web, this quote is attributed to the author of a 1988 book, which is obviously wrong: my father had those cards in the Fifties. He liked the quote, first, because he liked the joke, but also because it expressed his philosophy of life in a sly way. He did not believe in feeling sorry for himself, and my father lived what was in many ways a traumatic life. Because he knew that things could always be worse than they were for him at the time—surviving battles in WWII will drive that point home forever– he never despaired, adopted the belief that it was great to be alive, and advised his son and daughter, when they faced setbacks and disappointments, not to wallow, weep or regret, but to move on, look ahead, and, as Winston Churchill, a depressive, would say, “Keep buggering on” without fear or hesitation.

There is always plenty to feel good about, even if, as it is for me today, all that comes to mind is a glorious moment in a movie musical when Donald O’Connor, Debbie Reynold and Gene Kelly were all young, at the peak of their talents, and given the perfect vehicle to express in dance and song, for all time, what it feels like to be happy just to be alive.

1. “Linked” and our nasty, untrustworthy journalists. This headline—“Napping regularly linked to high blood pressure and stroke, study finds”-–was quickly picked up by other news sources that reported research showing that naps might kill you. That’s not what the study concluded. The study found that people who had various health maladies needed to nap because in many cases their issues caused them not to get enough sleep at night. “Although taking a nap itself is not harmful, many people who take naps may do so because of poor sleep at night. Poor sleep at night is associated with poorer health, and naps are not enough to make up for that,” one of the researchers, Michael Grandner, said in a statement.

Ah, yes, “linked.” Guilt by association. Our corrupt journalists gave “linked” a workout when it was trying every day to show that Donald Trump and his associates had conspired with Putin and Russia to steal the 2016 election. Any time you see “linked” in a headline about anything, your ethics alarms should start pinging.

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“And I really wish Trump haters would move away from characterizing his criticisms of the 2020 election as “lies” and attempting to intimidate anyone who wants better election security — calling them a threat to “the legitimacy of American democracy.” Put your efforts into improving the accuracy of our elections, not denouncing the people who are telling you that they’re worried about the legitimacy of American democracy.”

That was blogger/lawyer/retired law professor Ann Althouse this morning on her esoteric blog.

Ethics Alarms has made this same point in various ways for many months. Of course, Ann is right.

While watching Eddie Izzard’s most recent movie on Netflix, 2020’s “Six Minutes to Midnight,” I decided to check out the details of the stand-up comic/ actor’s career. Imagine my surprise to find that the Wikipedia biography of Izzard refers to Eddie as “she” and “her.” This, despite the fact that the performer is and has always been biologically male. By the au currant definition of “transgender,” Izzard would now qualify for the UPenn women’s swim team (if he or she could swim, that is.)

Wikipedia calls Eddie by female pronouns because at various times the versatile performer has said that he wanted to be referred to as “she,” that “he and she” were his preferred pronouns, that he is “genderfluid,” and that he is a heterosexual and transvestite. Izzard is prone to describing himself in such varying terms as “somewhat boy-ish and somewhat girl-ish,””a lesbian trapped in a man’s body,” “a complete boy plus half girl,” and says “she” uses “transgender” as an umbrella term, whatever that means. Izzard has “explained,” “If I am in boy mode, then ‘he’, or girl mode, ‘she'”. In 2020, when “she” played the serious role of a male British spy in “Six Minutes to Midnight,” which “she” wrote, Izzard said announced being “based in girl mode from now on”.

Either Eddie Izzard doesn’t know what he wants or is, or the whole thing is an extended put-on. Either way, this behavior does nothing for the transgender cause except make it appear silly and confused.

1. Is it unethical for a publication to pretend that something is in doubt when it obviously isn’t? Here’s a feature headline from the Boston Globe Magazine: “Can poetry possibly matter in a time like this?” The writer consults a former U.S. poet laureate, whose response is as predictable as it is useless. Of course the answer is “no” regardless of what you think “like this” means,  and the answer has been no for at least 80 years. Poetry has negligible influence of the culture.

Quick: what’s the most recent poem that you can quote a substantial part of from memory? (Lyrics don’t count.) Continue reading →