FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Been listening to Jimmy Driftwood lately and --
man, he's strange, ain't he?

•  Every so often I go among the Twitter morons and waste time talking back. It's interesting to see which subjects draw the dumbest respondents -- in this case, it's the removal of the Teddy-Roosevelt-and-the-lesser-races statue from in front of the American Museum of Natural History. Even the TR Presidential Library in North Dakota, to which the statue is being removed, finds the thing "problematic in its composition," and it always seemed kind of gross to me, but apparently its disassembly, which began this week, has got the MAGA types raging about wokeness and cancelculture and all that bullshit. As usual there were respondents who think statues are the only way to learn history and those who think taking out statues of famous racists is totalitarianism. None of the brethren seemed to grasp that it was not their statue to dispose of, and this is something I've noticed about their hot-button issues concerning statues and movies and advertising and other forms of intellectual property: that to them free speech is based on other people doing things with their own property that they don't like. It's an idea of free speech, in other words, that's not about their own right to express themselves, but anger at how other people do. As you might imagine they really didn't like my suggestion that they make their own Rough Rider statues out of Play-Doh and put them up on their front lawns. 

•  Busy day, not much time to do more than pass you some Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies! Here's one on Monday's crop of bizarre rightwing tributes to Martin Luther King, and another with the minutes of a development meeting of the University of Austin Board of Advisors Starring Wari Beiss.  That's just two of the five weekly installments -- if you don't subscribe (cheap!) you're missing out!