🕞  Question: Before 13th-century engineers invented clocks with hands, how did people describe rotation?  There being no clockwise (and likewise no counterclockwise), what did our ancestors say when they wanted to twirl one way or the other?  Sundial-wise?

🇺🇸   Republicans, led by rich ideologues like the Kochs and the Ziklag Group, have been hard at work for decades to put in place voter identity laws (to suppress black votes), partisan redistricting (to disenfranchise Democrats), parental vetoes on public education (to maintain white christian dominance) and bathroom/sports legislation (to put their personal stamp of disgust on gays and transgenders).  Democrats, tragically and near laughably, continue to ignore the long game, still preoccupied with digging for nuggets in the social justice mine.  I’ll know the game is over, and indeed lost, the day I start to get called Whitex.

📉 Victoria Freile, a reporter for Gannett Media, set out to quantify how Trump’s recent speech to Congress impacted his approval rating and that of Congress.  Freile wrote that “Trump’s approval rating nudged down slightly from 47.8% … to 47.6%” while Congress “showed an increased approval from 27.8% to 28.6% and disapproval rating edging from 54.4% to 54.1%” [emphasis added].  Ms. Freile must be getting paid by the word, because I would have simply said “Unchanged.”

🦄 Hey, fellow old people!  Just asking on behalf of a friend: If I get a root canal, will the Tooth Fairy still leave a quarter under my pillow?  Or was that only in effect during the Biden Administration?

🎈 When one is on top of the world, one finds pleasure in art, flavors, intimacy, travels and beautiful skies.  When one is not, all those may be forsaken for a warm blanket and a comforting hand.  Rediscovering Maslow.

🥕 Every time I make a salad, and I have to cut off and discard some marginally-imperfect part of a vegetable, I can’t help thinking that someone on the other side of the world would have eaten this scrap.  Not that such attitudes have ever put such scraps in the mouths of those who — in our haughty First World paradigm — would supposedly appreciate them.

💻 Quiz:  Something is new and different with this familiar Windows screen — what is it?  (Hint: it’s not the direction that the dots twirl.)

What’s different is that Windows Update used to say, “Don’t turn off your computer” instead of “Please keep your computer on.”  Apparently, some middle-manager at Microsoft decided that don’t was too harsh, so he had his team change it to please.  Because Microsoft wants so badly to be your friend!

🤖 The next time Martians visit Earth, one of two things will happen: (a) the Martians will express their confusion about why we say Sword Swallowers with different sw sounds; or (b) they will rightfully ask, how did Earthlings ever come up with that idea?  In either case, I’m uneasy where things will go from there.

💡 Speaking of our planetary friends, Jupiter is so massive that it pulls back on the Sun.  As a result, both bodies orbit a point in space — their mutual barycenter — that is hundreds of thousands of miles outside the surface of the Sun.  May this fine point of physics provide you some comfort the next time you curse the fact that everything revolves around Trump. I am being serious here, in that there must be a barycenter outside of Trump’s sphere that both he and we orbit.  Donald Trump is not that huge — we have pull too.

🎭  I’m considering writing a play.  The major characters would be Ali Khamenei of Iran, Kim Jong Un of North Korea, Vladimir Putin of Russia, and Donald J. Trump of the USA.  In Act I, an unusual confluence of circumstances causes each of these autocrat’s airplanes to crash on the same deserted island in an unspecified ocean, with all parties surviving.  Act II allows the principals to joust with one another for dominance, each being granted a long soliloquy in which some parties are elevated and others are ridiculed.  Act III reveals the wants and needs of each of the castaway tyrants and how his fellow island-mates fail to satisfy them.  The play ends tragically and ironically in that the weakest man survives, being that he is the most desperate among them.

🔥 On a lighter note…