We got up early and drove to the other side of the state, through all the heat and humidity, to attend a baby shower for Kat and my son Alaric.

They also announced their engagement at the party. Yay Kat & Alaric!

Right now I need to drink a lot of water and lay down in an air-conditioned room. Later.

My Wednesdays all this month have been consumed with running errands to Alexandria, which have been worsened by the fact that the AC in our car is dead. I’ve just spent a couple of hours in a car with windows rolled down and a roaring hot wind blowing past me. I’m slumped in a puddle of sweat right now.

OK, a distraction: anyone else remember the Hot Stuff comics? How about Wendy, the good little witch, and Casper, the friendly ghost? That’s the trinity that provided me with all of my theological training. It wasn’t any less contradictory and silly than the nonsense the Lutheran church tried to stuff me with, and it was more amusing and more ethical than anything in the Bible.

I get up early every morning, and practically the first thing I do is check the news to see if our ghastly president is dead yet. I have high hopes that sometime in the near future he’s going to suffer a miserable painful death (or a quick painless one, I don’t care), and instead every morning I discover that he has instead done something incredibly stupid and destructive, and our representatives in government have done nothing significant to stop him. And then I feel deep disappointment.

It’s a poor way to start my day, but it’s every day right now. Yeah, I’m a terrible person, but that guy is worse.

Now I have to go for a walk to temporarily clear my head of all this despair.

I’m probably the only person to feel this way.

Serves him right. This sculptor thought he could cash in on the Charlie Kirk frenzy, but it backfired on him — now he’s left holding the bag.

A New York sculptor has been left furious after spending $100,000 of his own money to build a lifesize statue of Charlie Kirk, only to find that no one wants to buy it.

Sergio Furnari, originally from Italy, had hoped the statue of the deceased far-right activist, which he intends to display in Times Square, would raise “millions” of dollars. Instead, he said he has been inundated by messages from people saying they intend to urinate on the sculpture.

Not only do they want to piss on it because Kirk’s reputation is in the toilet, but man, that is one ugly-ass statue.

“I wasn’t a fan of Charlie,” he said. “Like one thing that I couldn’t stand about him while he was alive [was] when he was talking about Palestine. [Kirk would say]: ‘Oh no, Palestine doesn’t exist.’ I thought: ‘Well, this guy must be out of his mind.’”

Instead, Furnari said he made the statue in an effort to “glorify and to exercise the first amendment, this freedom of speech” – although at points during the conversation, Furnari also said he made it to support Charlie Kirk’s wife; to “glorify democracy”; and to “commemorate a person”.

Sergio Furnari with his statue of Charlie Kirk. Photograph: Sergio Furnari
He later added: “Why am I making the statue? The same reason why Michelangelo did the Pietà, or Michelangelo did the David, or Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa. Why? Just to commemorate a moment, you know, a person.”

Right, it’s all the same reason: to make money. He thought it would be lots of money, but it turns out to be negative numbers of money.

Until then, Furnari is left with a 6ft 4in statue of a renowned racist, which he has spent $100,000 making, and which no one wants to buy. Maybe it is cursed after all.

Nice summary. That should be how we remember Kirk — as a big ol’ racist.

I refuse to accept the sacrificial substitution of Sam Neill for far more deserving people.

Sam Neill, the popular New Zealand actor whose career spanned five decades and encompassed more than 150 film and television roles, has passed away in Sydney. The actor, best recognized for portraying paleontologist Dr. Alan Grant across multiple “Jurassic Park” installments, was 78.

Lindsey Graham, zombie Mitch McConnell, and then Sam Neill? That’s not a match in any way.

Also, Jurassic Park? Yuck, retch, bleh. To me, he will always be the cursed, damned villain/victim of the Lovecraftian horror, Event Horizon.

I had to fill in at the theater last night. I was not prepared for the exam.

I hadn’t realized how difficult this was going to be. I was handling concessions: there were 3 of us, Kate handling popcorn, Rowan at the pop machine, and me at the cash register and candy. People would come up, tell me what they wanted, I’d ring it up, call out the popcorn and pop order, and we’d instantly put their order on the counter, and I’d get their money. Sounds easy, right?

Typical experience: parent with 3 kids comes up. I push the buttons for 1 adult and 3 kids. Then they all want concessions. Kid 1 wants a kid box, which comes with popcorn, a small soft drink, and one candy. I ask what they want to drink and to pick a candy — this is a child, these are major life choices. Say they want gummi bears and pineapple fanta. I grab the gummy bears and call out the order and go to punch ’em in, and fumble a bit trying to find the gummi button, while Kid 2 tells me he wants a kid box with a Bueno bar — wait, he ordered the candy before the pop, the point-of-sale system wants the pop first, I have to back track and get the drink order before I can click through, so I mentally file “Bueno” in short term memory while I get that, meanwhile Kid 1 tells me he wants Pocky rather than a gummi bear, so I have to change his order, while Parent tells me he wants a large popcorn and a large root beer, and I still have to figure out what Kid 3 wants. It’s all piling up with the first family to come in.

We had 62 people come to the showing last night.

This was a cognitive test! I don’t think I passed. I struggled all night to keep up. I get to do this exercise every week until I get it right, which is probably good for me.

Bonus observation! A lot of teenagers came in without their parents. This seems to be a common behavior, with parents dropping off a clutch of offspring, each one clutching a $10 or $20 bill, and turning them loose for a couple of hours without supervision. The interesting phenomenon is that the groups of teenagers were either 3 or 4 boys, or a pair of girls, no mixed groups. I guess this is the courtship protocol for young teens — no pressure to ask a person out, the theater is just a safe space to mingle and maybe make a connection. There weren’t many connections made, though. Boys stayed apart in rowdy groups, while I’d see the girls occasionally dart into the lobby to giggle and whisper together and maybe disappear into the bathroom. It was a weirdly inefficient procedure.

I was thinking back to my youth, and I might have been a strange outlier. I always went to the movies alone and didn’t interact with the other kids who were there at all. Maybe someone should have told me it was a way to meet girls, it could have changed my life. When I started dating a girl, going to the movies was not a good option (later we figured out that her subtle hearing impairment, which has gotten more severe over the years, may have been a factor in her disinterest in movies.)

Again, I didn’t see the movies — too busy. It turns out my volunteer work isn’t about watching movies, it’s about a weekly cognitive test and getting a glimpse of young people’s behavior.

It’s unpleasantly hot and humid — we just had a thunderstorm drench us — so I decided to try something completely different and made chlodnik, a cold beet soup.

I found the recipe here. If you try it, caution: the proportions there are sufficient for a whole family of 6 or more. We’re going to have chlodnik oozing out of our pores for a few days. Next time I’ll cut everything in half.

The flavor is interesting. Imagine digging up everything in a Slavic peasant’s garden, chopping it up fine, and drowning it in yoghurt, kefir, and sour cream.

It’s cold, though, which was the important criterion.