Since we’ve made a habit of starting things out with anniversaries (I won’t do sports because soccer isn’t a sport, baseball is dead to me until Angelos sells the Orioles, and it’s not football season yet), today has some doozies. For example, it’s the birthday of Ambrose Bierce, who was the most delightfully acerbic and cynical American writer until Mencken. Ditto Fred Hoyle, the astronomer and science fiction writer who was spectacularly and interestingly wrong regarding the steady state universe, and Arthur Brown, the freakishly influential one-hit wonder.

And because I’m feeling cynical, lazy, perverse, and uncreative, I’ll just jump directly into the news.

 

Glib jocks quiz nymph to vex dwarf.

The sudden freedom for Wilson, 57, came after Cook County Circuit Judge William Hooks ordered his release a few hours earlier. The judge had tossed out his murder conviction last week after finding that notorious ex-Chicago police Cmdr. Jon Burge and detectives under his command had physically coerced his confession.

Kevin Graham, president of the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, who attended the hearing, called Hooks’ ruling “disgraceful.”

Of course he did. And as long as police abuse is attributed to race, race, race, we’ll never get to the root cause of the actual problem.

 

Nymphs blitz quick vex dwarf jog.

In fact, the ubiquitous yellow CAUTION signs that are visible along the highways and roads along the Texas-Mexico border shows a man, a woman and a child running. We knew it all along. We drove right past them, as the little girl’s ponytail is lifted up by the momentum of her family’s desperate flight. Miller, Nielsen, and President Trump (let’s not forget he celebrated Cinco de Mayo with a taco bowl from Trump Tower Grill) are the faces and the voracious guts of a nation that has for far too long exploited and taken, dined and dashed.

Oh NPR, please never change.

 

Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow!

Romney’s tone has changed considerably since the 2016 campaign when he called then-candidate Trump a “phony” and a “fraud.” Things change after a president is elected, Romney said, adding that he’ll get behind good policies while criticizing bad ones.

Romney, steadfast in his principles. Utah deserves him.

 

Jack fox bids ivy-strewn phlegm quiz.

The “Christian activist social justice organization” has 34 employees and 125 volunteers and reported $5.821 million in revenue in 2016 (the most recent year for which financial records have been made public). Expenses for 2016 totaled $5.817 million. Sharpton’s 2016 “base salary” was $250,000. The bonus payment ballooned his total compensation to $687,555.

In addition to his compensation, Sharpton’s hefty expenses–first class air travel, luxury hotels, and a chauffeured car–are covered by the National Action Network. While Sharpton has an office at the group’s leased Harlem headquarters, he often works from a midtown Manhattan office rented by the not-for-profit.

Just rewards for a productive and unselfish career. Remember SP’s slogan: “Non-profit does not mean non-money.”

 

A very bad quack might jinx zippy fowls.

Tens of thousands of anti-Brexit protesters marched Saturday in London to demand a new referendum on leaving the European Union, as a divided Britain marked the second anniversary of its vote to quit the bloc. Organizers of the People’s Vote march say Brexit is “not a done deal” and people must “make their voices heard,” BBC News reports.

Wasn’t the referendum “making their voices heard”? Well, if we keep doing it over, maybe the proles will eventually get it right.

 

And now Old Guy Music. Since y’all rarely bother to listen to it and the most comments I ever got about it was whining and complaining when I put up a great Joni Mitchell song, you get her again. This time, a song from the ’70s centered on an incident of which YouTube commenters seem to be ignorant, the Hanafi Muslim siege in DC, our first clue that the newly-inaugurated Jimmy Carter might not be… the most effective person on the planet. Marion Barry was winged in the shootings, and of course, a major demand was the cancellation of a soon-to-open movie about Muhammed, with repeated references by the gunmen to how Jews run America and that this must cease immediately. Incidentally, the Wikipedia stuff about this and related articles bear many traces of the PC editing that seems to be the fashion in their non-technical articles. In any case, Joni does an interesting compare-and-contrast, and of course, the playing and singing are top notch.