Chaos, Cruelty, and Corruption.

With everything going on, you will be forgiven if you didn’t notice that Amanda Feilding died a few weeks ago at 82 (a noble age, to be sure – she was two months younger than I am). You will also be forgiven if you don’t know her as the Countess of Wemyss and March (thanks to her husband, the Count), or by one of her nicknames, such as Lady Mindbender or The Crackpot Countess. (I get all of this from the New York Times, of course.) Or perhaps you are personally familiar with at least one of her two children, whom she named Rock and Cosmo (perhaps she named them after her favorite dogs – that, I don’t know).

Before she married the Count (she probably called him James), she had a number of boyfriends,  including an affair with Bart Huges, a scientist from Holland who experimented (along with Amanda) daily with LSD, and who was a student of and a proponent of “trepanning”. What? You don’t know what trepanning is? Neither does my computer’s spell check, so don’t feel bad.

Trepanning, according to her obituary is “believing that puncturing the skull relieved pressure and increased blood flow, perhaps creating a permanent high.”

From the NYT article: “No surgeons were willing to participate, so she bored the hole herself in her attic – with a dental drill – after injecting herself with an anesthetic. She filmed the procedure and made a short documentary about it called “Heartbeat in the Brain” (1970). A screening of the film at the Suydam Gallery in New York made several viewers faint. ‘In the film, Ms. Feilding cut off her fringe and applied the drill’, Anthony Haden-Guest wrote in New York Magazine. ‘Minutes flitted by like hours as she lost one and a half pints of very Technicolor blood.’”

The Times goes on to say that she had other friends who were in to trepanning, including another long time live in boyfriend, writer Joseph Mellen. Never heard of Joseph Mellen? He is known for his book Bore Hole, which is – of course – about trepanning. Mellen is still going strong (or at least going) at the age of 86. He is the father of Rock and Cosmo.

It is important, in order to keep your sanity, to know about people like Feilding and Mellen, and to understand that it is possible that a little trepanning might help our current president. After all, we know it couldn’t hurt.

In the meantime, back here on earth, we see that the result of the 11 million (at least that is the number being thrown around) No Kings protestors is a statement by the president that ICE should pick up the pace and deport more people, especially from Democratic governed cities. And there is some question about whether Trump meant it when he said that there should be no deportations of agricultural or hospitality workers. No proof yet that anyone is paying any attention to that. And, come to think of it, if ICE rounds up you and four of your friends, but decides only to deport you, are you an ICE pick? Enquiring minds……)

More reality now. In Rehovot, Israel, an Iranian attack has apparently severely damaged buildings, one in particular, at the Weizmann Institute, showing that no military attack is without significant danger to the home front. Thinking about this, I realize that an air attack, as Israel is making in Iran, does not let the locals under attack to come out with bouquets of flowers to thank the attacking forces for causing havoc in their home towns. There is no real way for those being attacked to show their appreciation, except for a quid pro quo attack on the attacker, it would seem.

Perhaps this is a necessary action that Israel is taken; it is hard to judge that from here. But it is going to come at an enormous cost, and might draw the United States in further, especially if Iran holds true to its pledge and attacks our bases in their general neighborhood.

In the meantime, our non-trepanned president has landed in the 51st state for a G-7 meeting, where everyone will be pleased to see him, I am sure.  Why doesn’t he just announce the annexation while he is in Calgary and call out the King’s Guard (or whatever they might be called) and federalize them, sending them to our southern border to fight the Mexicans?  This is what a real man would do, I think.  And if any member of that august body claims that he cannot be activated because of bone spurs?  He will know exactly how to deal with him. And it won’t be pretty, I will tell you that.

Finally, I see that E. Jean Carroll still has her $5 million verdict against the First Assaulter, as the Court of Appeals refused to review the case. Time for collection, I think. I am waiting for Carroll to bring an action to garnish Poor Donald’s presidential wages. I would love to see the court’s deal with that.

Chaos, Cruelty, Corruption