I’ve been struggling to come up with a good excuse for keeping the British monarchy around, and I’ve come up with two. Just two.

1. Inspiring the Irish to write lovely diatribes against kings, queens, and other such useless “influencers”.
   

   Having a monarchy next door is a little like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and has daubed their house with clown murals, displays clown dolls in each window and has an insatiable desire to hear about and discuss clown-related news stories. More specifically, for the Irish, it’s like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown.

   Beyond this, it’s the stuff of children’s stories. Having a queen as head of state is like having a pirate or a mermaid or Ewok as head of state. What’s the logic? Bees have queens, but the queen bee lays all of the eggs in the hive. The queen of the Britons has laid just four British eggs, and one of those is the sweatless creep Prince Andrew, so it’s hardly deserving of applause.

2. Giving conservatives apoplexy as they twist themselves into knots to defend the indefensible.

   British TV personality Piers Morgan on Wednesday doubled down on his criticism of Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, after being pressured out of his high-profile anchor job at “Good Morning Britain.”

   In typical style, he dug in his heels, refused to apologize and announced he would be back.

   “On Monday, I said I didn’t believe Meghan Markle in her Oprah [Winfrey] interview. I’ve had time to reflect on this opinion, and I still don’t,” he tweeted.

   Morgan sensationally resigned Tuesday after his network was flooded with complaints about his coverage of the interview. He had said he “didn’t believe a word” Meghan told Winfrey, specifically her assertion that she felt suicidal and was offered no help from Buckingham Palace.

These are all worthy accomplishments, but also rather superfluous. Irish writers have a long history of beautiful writing and hardly need a royal cause to motivate them; for that matter, the Scots and Welsh have also achieved much in spite of the English appendage to their homelands. While I’m happy to see Piers Morgan blow himself up, conservatives will seek out and detonate outrage no matter where it comes from. If they aren’t rushing to support the British Royal family, they’ll just latch on to some other victim, like Pepe LePew.

Come to think of it, a British royal and an entitled, oblivious cartoon skunk do have much in common.

Spotted in Morris: crude, ugly “WE ALL MATTER” sign, dirty American flags and blue line flags, and to top it all off, “JESUS” on the roof. It really needs a few Trump signs for that special je ne sais quoi, but maybe those went down after the colossal failure.

I’m sure the neighbors appreciate the reduction in property values all around — it keeps the taxes lower, you know.

Adam Rutherford presents a balanced assessment of Darwin.

Darwin was a liberal, and an abolitionist, perhaps influenced by his taxidermy tutor in Edinburgh, a Guyanese man called John Edmonstone who had once been enslaved. But we must be honest in our assessment of him and his work. He was a man of his time, and The Descent of Man contains many passages that seriously jar today, being scientifically specious and politically outmoded. Darwin never mentions Edmonstone by name, only as a “full-blooded negro with whom I happened once to be intimate”. He speaks of how the “civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races”.

In the more elegant quotations, you may note the typically Victorian use of “man” to mean all humans. It is less forgivable given Darwin’s belief that women were intellectually inferior: “If men are capable of a decided pre-eminence over women in many subjects, the average of mental power in man must be above that of woman.” At least part of his incomparable legacy is that we now know this to be incorrect.

That’s fair. Basically, everyone who lived over 50 years ago was stuffed to the gills with wrong ideas — wrong as we know them to be now, and 50 years from now the next generation will be appalled at what the majority believes now (“You went to church, and thought capitalism was good?”) — but at least he was in the vanguard of those trying to bring about a better world for all.

Still, when Bill & Ted fetch him back to the modern day in their telephone booth, I expect to be disappointed. I can imagine Darwin tut-tutting on Twitter about all those women in comic book movies, and suggesting, in the name of the betterment of mankind, that maybe those ladies should be home tending the children, and maybe they aren’t better than a dog anyways, what with all these modern ideas. Let’s keep him in the 19th century!

Hmm. Maybe we could use that telephone booth to send a lot of 21st century babblers back the 19th, where they’d be happier.

I had a phone conversation with my son, who currently lives in San Antonio, Texas, about the current situation there. They’re having rolling blackouts to deal with the cold and power failures, and oh boy, did his wife give us an earful. She’s disgusted with Texas — she’s from South Korea, and they’d never allow this kind of collapse of services in Korea. They spent a few hours standing in line to get food and water, and today they’re going to the Army base to try and take showers, since they haven’t had any running water for several days.

Meanwhile, Senator Ted Cruz fled the state to vacation in Cancun, Mexico. I’m surprised that Mexico would allow such riff-raff to cross their border. I am not surprised that Chickenshit Cruz would run away.

And (ex)-Mayor Tim Boyd of Colorado City, Texas, posted an amazing rant on Facebook that is so beautifully representative of how Republicans think.

The mayor of Colorado City, Texas has resigned after sparking outrage with a Facebook post where he told residents complaining of power outages during an unprecedented cold snap to “get off your ass and take care of your own family.” Tim Boyd, who announced his resignation Tuesday, also wrote that “if you don’t have electricity, you step up and come up with a game plan to keep your family warm and safe.” “No one owes you or your family anything; nor is it the local governments responsibility to support you during trying times like this! Sink or swim, it’s your choice!” he wrote. The town, with a population of about 4,000, is located in Mitchell County, where many were left without power as record-setting cold weather batters much of the state. In a subsequent post, Boyd apologized, writing, “I was only making the statement that those folks that are too lazy to get up and fend for themselves but are capable should not be dealt a handout.”

Uh, what, exactly, is local government for? When I elect a mayor, or a city council, or a state representative, what I want is a good steward of the resources of my region, who will take responsibility and use those resources to help every citizen. Did this mayor regard his position as a sinecure, or an opportunity to bleed off what he could into his pocket? Maintaining the services that all of those people paid taxes for is not a handout! Even if a citizen did not pay taxes for reasons of poverty or disability, that does not mean you get to deny a responsibility to them. Even Boyd’s “apology” is an insult and a failure to recognize his mayoral obligations.

My daughter-in-law is correct. We should try to be more like South Korea, where the civic infrastructure is taken seriously.

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Texans are screaming in outrage, so ol’ Chickenshit Ted is cutting his inappropriate vacation short. But of course he’s got to squeeze out a little extra chickenshittery: he’s asking for the Houston police to protect him from his constituents!