Kelly wrote about hot and cold. Specifically: “Every couple I’ve ever known, of every combination of people, has a hot one and a cold one.
“This isn’t about looks, but about reactions to temperature. Every couple has one person who always thinks it’s on the cool side, while the other always thinks it’s on the warm side.” And for the most part, I think he’s correct. But he’s NOT right about my wife and me.
It’s because my wife has a far greater tolerance for the extremes than I do. I’m the temperate one. In the house, I need it warmer in the winter AND cooler in the summer than she does, by about three degrees Fahrenheit. So I HATE it when she bakes in the summer, but LOVE when she does so in the winter.
The first floor has, thank Allah, air conditioning. When I climb the stairs, it feels like another climate. Why doesn’t she have the fan on in our bedroom? The fact that we aren’t currently IN our bedroom is not a reason.
The GREAT outdoors?
It is even more true outdoors. She is NOT a sun worshipper, but I actively avoid direct sunlight if possible. Partially, it’s the vitiligo, but I also fear heat stroke. I almost ALWAYS have a cap on, preferably white or a light color. Long sleeve shirts may seem counterintuitive, but I can’t afford to burn. And, if I can find them, sunglasses.
I LOVE sunglasses. And that applies to the winter as well, with the glare of the snow. Because I got frostbite when I was about 15, my feet are particularly susceptible to the cold. If my head, ears, hands, or feet are cold – and this is true, indoors or out – I’m pretty miserable.
My wife can tolerate about 20 to 85 F, but I’m more of a 25 to 80 F guy. Or maybe 28 to 77. My tolerance for the cold outdoors has definitely lessened. I remember riding my bicycle when it was 20F; now it has to be 35F.
In 6-3 rulings, SCOTUS strikes down New York’s concealed-carry law
Also, SCOTUSoverturns Roe v. Wade; I wrote about it here and here. Now what? Kelly is not happy either. And Clarence Thomas believes SCOTUS should reconsider contraception and same-sex marriage rulings. Plus, can we trust tech companies to protect privacy?
June 12, 2022, Pride Parade, Lark St between State and Lancaster Sts, Albany, NY. The car that was the basis of the First Presbyterian Church Albany float stalled out; this was the improvisation. Photo by Jay Zhang, first used by the [Albany] Times Union. Used with permission.
Now I Know: The Fired Employee Who Got The Last Laugh and When Shouting “Cr*p!” is a Wish Come True and Capture the Flag, updated and A Fishy Train Line That Goes Nowhere
About Me (kinda sorta)
Mark Evanier answers my question about mandated representation in cartoon animation in the 1980s. “Doing the right thing for the wrong reason”
Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Keaton, Oscar Isaac, and the THR Drama Actor Roundtable
THR Tony Nominees Roundtable: Hugh Jackman, Ruth Negga, Jesse Williams, Mary-Louise Parker, and Sam Rockwell on Broadway in the Time of COVID
Now I Know: The Town That Keeps Tooting Its Own Horn and Here’s Something About Gary and I Guess You Could Say He Was Too Sharp and When North Dakota (Briefly) Tried to Secede From the United States and How to Turn Donuts into Dough?
America’s guns have changed in my lifetime. “Comparing the United States to other countries is one of the most powerful arguments for gun control. Recurring mass shootings are a problem unique to the US, requiring an equally unique explanation. Other industrialized countries also have… all the other factors NRA-sponsored politicians and pundits raise to divert attention from guns. “
Cruz’s suggestion of one door entrance to schools for safety is problematic. But having one EXIT to a building is a fire hazard. (See any number of factory and nightclub infernos.)
Cruz says, if we limit guns, it wouldn’t have changed the outcome in Uvalde or Buffalo and that we need to do more about mental health. What if we raised the age to 21 to buy these AK-15-type weapons? 18 y.o.’s brains are not developed. The shooters in Uvalde, Buffalo, Newtown, and too many others were under 21. New York State just passed such a law.
If banning them outright seems like too extreme a solution to be politically palatable – and the US even banned at least some assault weapons for ten years, from 1994 to 2004 – here’s another option: Reclassify semi-automatic rifles as Class 3 firearms. Still, The AR-15 Has No Business Being in the Hands of Civilians.
These weapons exist for exactly one reason — to kill multiple people as quickly and violently as possible. 60 Minutes reran a story about high-velocity guns such as the AR-15. Its use in the Uvalde, TX school massacre is why families needed to offer up their DNA and why one girl was identified only by her green sneakers.
Hit the fan
Yet the Congressional talks appear to be unserious, as though mass shootings are just “Something We Have to Accept”
What drives mass shooters? Grievance, despair, and anger are more likely triggers than mental health, experts say.
“Mass shooters’ desire for death and destruction, experts have found, stems from a variety of circumstances and is rooted in an entrenched grievance, despair, and anger, regardless of whether they experience symptoms of mental illness.”
School Police: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. NOT the end-all
MUSIC
Kate Bush’s 1985 classic Running Up That Hill has re-entered the chart at No. 8. The revival of the track is from the new fourth season of Netflix’s Stranger Things.
Fourteen children and one adult are dead. The assault at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, TX was the deadliest shooting at a U.S. school since a gunman killed fourteen students and three staff members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida in February 2018. Wait, now it’s 19 children and two adults murdered. The assault at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, TX was the deadliest shooting at a U.S. school since a gunman killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012.
And… Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) blames CRT? The time for politics – the politics of actually doing something – is now. Not, as Lee Goldberg points out: “The GOP’s answer is to have a third-grade teacher, armed w/a handgun, take [on a shooter]. Are they insane!?” Evil Stalks the Hall at the NRA. How the Uvalde police kept changing their story. The Weekly Sift guy repeats himself.
The Rising Tide Of Color, a 1920 book, “is sometimes cited as the origin of Replacement Theory. It’s available for free at Project Gutenberg, but you need a strong stomach to read it because it’s unapologetically racist in a way you seldom see today.”
D’Souza’s ‘Big Lie’ Movie Is So Bad Fox Won’t Promote It
Subway franchises and Utilities: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
USPSTF Guidance Misses the Mark on Youth Suicide Risk Screening
How many lives could have been saved with COVID vaccinations in each state
He Donated His Kidney and Received a $13,064 Bill in Return
Big ‘Saturday Night Live’ Departures Will Test the Show’s Depth
Before Pixar’s ‘Turning Red,’ ‘Braceface’ and a 1946 Disney Short Tackled the “Taboo” of Menstruation
Now I Know: The Eye Shield That Keeps the Grumps Away and And He Couldn’t Use the Discount Anyway and The €222 Million Nap and The Mystery of the 175-Year-Old Battery-Powered Bell
This is actually a photo of flowers after a Colorado shooting, which tells you all you need to know.
If I were to mention every example of gun violence involving multiple victims in America, this blog would not only be really depressing but also quite monotonous. It’d be, as blogger buddy Chuck Miller mentioned, The Vicious Cycle.
Heck, before I could even write about the Buffalo mass shooting, one was killed and four critically wounded at a Presbyterian church in Laguna Woods, CA, likely motivated by political hatred of the Taiwanese community.
Though I heartily support it, I’m unenthused about calls for gun control. If America isn’t going to respond to 20 six and seven-year-olds murdered at school almost a decade ago, I can’t see it happening in this circumstance, I’m afraid.
It IS peculiar that a teenager who threatened a school graduation shooting last year and was given psychiatric treatment, could still purchase three guns legally.
Broome County, NY
So the Buffalo incident compelled me to note it. Certainly, the fact that the shooter* came from my home county, Broome County, NY in Conklin, just a few miles southeast of my hometown of Binghamton, is a huge factor. There’s just a smidgen of irrational personal mortification.
And the other thing is that the shooter drove 200 miles (322 km), three and a half hours, to find a bunch of Black people** to shoot. He, or someone in his circle, did a demographic dive to ascertain that the ZIP Code where that TOPS grocery store had the highest concentration of Black folks within a reasonable driving distance.
WIVB-TV reports that the name of the gunman matches the one “given in a 180-page manifesto that surfaced online shortly after the attack and took credit for the violence in the name of white supremacy… The excruciating detail provided leaves little doubt of its authenticity.”
Yahoo News and other sources note that the manifesto “repeatedly cited the ‘great replacement’ theory, the false idea that a cabal is attempting to replace white Americans with nonwhite people through immigration, interracial marriage, and, eventually, violence…
“In the manifesto, [he] claims that he was radicalized on 4chan while he was ‘bored’ at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in early 2020. The document also claims ‘critical race theory,’ a recent right-wing talking point that has come to generally encompass teaching about race in school, is part of a Jewish plot, and a reason to justify mass killings of Jews…”
Crazy?
I came across this frustrating conversation about whether the shooter is “crazy.” “Someone must be crazy to do something like that, right?” “If he’s crazy, he’ll use that as his defense.”
The Weekly Sift guy actually addressed this back in 2019 when another shooter targeted Hispanics at a Walmart in El Paso. “His actions made perfect sense if you took seriously what Trump had been saying over and over: Mexicans are invading our country. If your country is being invaded, isn’t the most obvious response to take military gear to the border and kill the invaders? What’s mentally ill about that?”
The same thing [in Buffalo. The shooter] “has been told time and again that there’s a plot to take America away from the white race, and that this plot will eventually result in racial extinction. If he believes that, what’s the logical response?”
Recognizing the dog whistle
“High-profile people like Trump, Tucker Carlson, and Elise Stefanik may not explicitly tell people to go out and kill Blacks or Hispanics or Jews, but how does anything less deal with the problem they describe?” WS describes the replacement theory much more fully here.
Carlson’s defenders point out that the shooter’s manifesto included no mentions of the FOX commentator, as though that takes him off the hook. Also, the document attacked 21st Century Fox for hiring Jewish people. Whatever. It’s standard Vulpine gaslighting.
Stefanik is the Congressperson in a distinct adjacent to my own, and the third-ranked Republican in the House of Representatives. My local newspaper notes that she and “other prominent Republicans made statements critics say align with theory.” She denies it, of course.
Congressman Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) warns that the Replacement Theory is ‘Getting People Killed.’ “Kinzinger, a staunch critic of former President Donald Trump, has repeatedly slammed [House minority leader Kevin] McCarthy (R-CA), Stefanik, [Marjorie Taylor] Greene (R-GA), and [Madison] Cawthorn (R-NC) in recent months.”
Liz Cheney (R-WY) has said the GOP leadership has “enabled white supremacy.” As Rolling Stone noted, The Buffalo Shooter Isn’t a ‘Lone Wolf.’ He’s a Mainstream Republican.
Ahistoric Americans
Just as some people celebrate “representation” and “diversity”, others see a zero-sum game where white people lose out. The targeting of Asian-Americans and Jews and LGBTQ folk – do I need to document those recent mass shootings? – breaks my heart over and over. This is even though, as Carolyn Gallaher wrote in The Hill after the Walmart shootings, The alternate history behind the ‘great replacement’ theory is simply wrong.
This is one of the reasons I fear Kelly, who is a Buffalo-area blogger, may be right. “It’s an entire community of human beings, specifically targeted again. Reminded that they will always be targeted, again. Reminded of this country’s long ghastly history of this stuff, again. Confronted by our nation’s abject refusal to admit its past and atone, again…
“No horror, no injustice, no violent outcome is ever enough for us to collectively say, ‘No more.’ ‘We will be back about our business by, oh, I don’t know. Dinner time today, I guess…
“We are the country we have chosen to be, and I see no reason to believe we are going to choose to be anything other than this.
“And that is how America will fade into history.” America, prove him wrong if you can. Give us more than “thoughts and prayers.” Show that love actually DOES conquer hate.
*or the alleged shooter, if you prefer ** I capitalize Black people here, which I don’t always do, because of some scold in the comments to this post
Kelly wrote about hot and cold. Specifically: “Every couple I’ve ever known, of every combination of people, has a hot one and a cold one.
Belief in 
