Hey! Remember these hot news stories?

• The COVID pandemic? It’s still going on! We’ve got five times the number of new infections as this same time last year. No one cares.
• The war in Ukraine? There’s even more shelling of civilians now! No one cares.
• School shootings? Give it a week, we’ll stop caring about those, too. In a week, there will probably be a couple more, and we won’t even notice.

There are probably some other major events, but I forgot them.

Can an entire country, or possibly an entire species, come down with acute Alzheimer’s disease?

A few fleeting thoughts about these maps:

• I notice that the two states in which I lived the longest, Washington and Minnesota, are among the safest. Coincidence? I think not.
• I have driven across North Dakota and Montana and Idaho. Those bloody dark colors do not lie, although they and Wyoming are also among the more thinly populated states.
• What’s going on in the deep South? Those are places I’ve rarely visited, again suggesting the importance of my talismanic presence.
• Of course, everyone in Europe must be better drivers than most Americans. Or, possibly, they are sensible and don’t drive as much.
• I am intrigued by the mysterious vast empty space in the North Sea. Is it possible that a hidden land mass lurks somewhere in the open ocean there?
• Avoid Wyoming at all costs.

Not to see a replay of the low lights of my life.

To be fair, if I wanted “humor” untethered from reality I’d be reading Garfield, I guess.

I’m beginning a course of physical therapy this morning — my back pain is currently at manageable levels, so it’s time to work it over and get my core up to a better state for the long term. I am not looking forward to it, but it would be nice to get into a stable shape.

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Hey, I’m back already, and that wasn’t nearly as bad as I imagined. I pictured brutal gym coaches yelling at me as I worked out on big heavy machines, but it wasn’t like that at all. I got an ultrasound treatment of my lower back, and then a nice firm back massage (it was difficult to stay awake), and finally we ran through a set of 3 stretching exercises I have to do every day. They were exercises I can do lying down in bed! I’m also supposed to continue taking long walks, but I was doing that anyway.

Now the only danger is that I’m feeling so relaxed that I want to go take a nap.

Maybe if I had more French, I’d be able to appreciate these more. There exists a book of Mother Goose rhymes written by Luis d’Antin van Rooten that has to be mind-bending if you are bilingual.

His book Mots d’Heure Gousses, Rames, as you might expect from the title, is written in French – but rather odd, archaic-sounding French. The book ostensibly contains a collection of poems, which have scholarly footnotes attached to them. In fact, the brilliant idea behind this book is that if you read the French poems aloud they sound exactly like English nursery rhymes spoken with a French accent. This is called homophonic writing and here’s an example from the start of the book:

French poem	Nursery Rhyme	English translation
Un petit d’un petit S’étonne aux Halles Un petit d’un petit Ah! degrés te fallent Indolent qui ne sort cesse Indolent qui ne se mène Qu’importe un petit Tout gai de Reguennes.	Humpty Dumpty Sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty Had a great fall. All the king’s horses And all the king’s men Couldn’t put Humpty Together again.	A child of a child Is surprised at the Market A child of a child Oh, degrees you needed! Lazy is he who never goes out Lazy is he who is not led Who cares about a little one All happy with Reguennes

That almost makes me want to learn French just for the wordplay. My second language was German (now extremely rusty, I’m afraid), and I don’t think you could do anything similar, because the pronunciation is so close to English already. I wonder if you could do something similar with Italian?

I said that my wife was off grandmothering right now. We also got my granddaughter Iliana a little present: a package with a bunch of rubbery squishy slugs.

They were a big hit, as I knew they would be.

My wife is away for a while, being a grandma to Iliana. That would be fine with me, for a little bit at any rate, but our cat is not taking it well. The evil cat does not like change. On Saturday night, she leapt into our bed while I was sleeping, snuggled down in Mary’s spot, and then at 3am started horking up vomit all over the sheets.

So last night I banished her from the bedroom altogether. The whole rest of the house was hers to possess.

I get up this morning to find…

She had puked in the hallway.

She had barfed in the bathroom.

She had ralphed in the dining room.

She had upchucked in the kitchen. The kitchen was her masterpiece — she had tossed her cookies and then gone back to her full food bowl, chowed down on it, and then heaved up the barely digested contents of her guts all over the place.

I know it’s not pleasant to read about, but pity me, who has to clean it all up.

I guess I know which human in our household she misses the most.

I count two films by Robert Eggers as just about the best movies of the last decade — The VVitch and The Lighthouse — they’re thick with an otherworldly atmosphere and a fearfully weird kind of horror. So of course tonight I had to go see The Northman.

It was OK. Not as compelling as the other two movies, but I enjoyed it as a grim, fatalistic saga of bloody revenge. I think it was less exciting to me because the primary elements of the story — howling with the wolves, vengeance, berserker rages, betrayal, and vicious fights against the backdrop of an erupting volcano — were so familiar. That’s the mundane experience of growing up in a Scandinavian-American family, don’t you know.

Also, finally, we get some affirmation of our religious beliefs. Yes, when I die in battle, a Valkyrie will descend to carry my soul into the sky to Valhalla, where I will spend eternity feasting and fighting. I saw it in a movie now, so you know it has to be true.