A friend just told me what she's being asked to pay for an assisted-living care facility in the USA. It's literally 11 times what I imagined as the top cost possible. I'm going to start parking American old people in wheelchairs on my porch and serving martinis and hors-d'œuvres. I'll get top ratings and they will have a better time.

More seriously it brings up so many issues, from quality of life to impactful living and legacy, but most of all the insane cost of medical care for profit.

American guys I know wax on rhapsodically over how life-changing moist wipees are, how adult-arrived and luxurious, "even for men."

Look. Wipees are just portable bidets for a culture that doesn't have real ones. Get yourself a bidet!

Even the Quakers are talking about Pope Leo as an ally.

Paul Nash. The Menin Road, 1919.

WW1 changed everything forever, and part of everything was art. This may not be the battlefield scene the British War Memorial Committee envisioned memorializing in such a vast canvas, but it was not the first or last time a modern young painter returned a commission to them as a shocking new way of seeing an inimaginable new kind of war.

I think drones may change war, and so also inevitably art, in our decade to a similar extent.

#Painting

I look at a lot of #Painting - a whole lot. And the percentage of canvases that are irregularly shaped or stand out from the wall in 3D is vanishingly small, approaching zero. I have never understood why this is true.

Ah, spring 2026, when the most common topic of conversation is how exactly do we define the threshold of WW3, anyway.

Arguably we're still fighting WW1.

I had a call yesterday from the heart of the LLM socmed crypto beast. Despite the current horror show, her prognosis was that it will not and cannot hold, not even through summer. It's a dead end in every way: practical social economic environmental personal. It made me wonder if the Epstein revelations weren't simply right on time, since it no longer matters what the public knows. The damage is done.

On a brighter note some very high-powered people are ready to go back to subsistence farming.

Why did I eat salami and sardine paste for breakfast?

I should not be left alone.

I tried to repair the damages with a half a banana, sort of a "Just kidding!" for my body, but it has not helped in the least.

When posting links it's a good idea to strip out all the tracker info from the "?" and after. Thanks!

The City of Minneapolis nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

https://thehill.com/homenews/media/5713874-nation-nominates-minneapolis-nobel-peace-prize/

"The emails do not indicate any wrongdoing."

Yes. They do. Every one of them.

#EpsteinFiles

Every day abroad is an adventure. Today it's explaining Bob Ross to a bunch of young video game set designers and... I might as well have thrown a ball of elemental phosphorus onto the table. They exploded in incandescent sizzling! "What, what, WHAT IS THIS???" I have either created magic or a monster. Why not both?