Two poetic courtroom-comments yesterday encapsulate the nowadays: The defense attorney for a woman charged with severing the penis of her estranged husband said she “had a break from reality” the night of the attack.
And the prosecution countered: “They say anger is the wind that blows out the candle of the mind.”

Awoke this morning in a disjointed mood — in ‘awoke,’ it’s more of a modifier than a verb. I’ve got a bit of insomnia and awake is really just future-tense of awoke — and quickly felt this cutting-edge outrage at just about everything, especially silly-assed shit.
Actually, the first thoughts were of the lottery, which by itself can piss me off to no end and open up a visual rage against the machinery of foolishness and thin-skinned assholeness, and then onto other ugly mental subject-matters that like the fuckin’-shithead lottery, there’s not much we can do about it.

(Illustration found here).

After finally climbing out of bed and cranking up the old laptop, the news cycle this early Friday is also outrageous and dishearteningly ugly.
Right off the bat, a fire at a psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of Moscow has killed 36 people, including patients who died in their sleep: “There were patients with acute psychosis, alcoholics and one drug addict. We also had patients with schizophrenia.”
That’s some horrific shit, there.
And button that shirt collar as the death toll from that Bangladesh building collapse is getting close to the 300 mark and from reports, there might be 300-400 people still left inside: An industry official has said 3,122 people, mainly female garment workers, had been inside the building despite warnings that it was structurally unsafe.
And a terrible, but weird note of gun violence:

After he shot his way into a home in the small town of Manchester, police say Rick Odell Smith gunned down a great-grandmother, a young couple and three young children.
Then he did something that puzzled authorities.
He scooped up one of the children, a 6-year-old girl who was still alive, and carried her to a neighbor’s home.
Then he jumped into his white Chevy Lumina and sped off.
Police caught up with him hours later and he died in a gunfight with officers.

This after a five-death shooting in Washington state on Monday — guns and guns.

And yesterday, a pathetic gathering in Dallas, Tex., by a bunch of people who should know way-better — the dedication of George Jr.’s presidential library and museum.
I’ve written on this a couple of times this week and it’s really hard to believe that those former leaders of the free world could get up in public and speak good of the ill-minded. I’m disappointed in Jimmy Carter. The man didn’t have to be there, why didn’t he just say George Jr. is an asshole and stayed back in Plains?
President Obama staggered through his little speech for the little shit as if nothing horrible had occurred for nearly a decade, throwing out  beatitudes like George Jr. was humanly-normal:

So we know President Bush the man.
And what President Clinton said is absolutely true — to know the man is to like the man, because he’s comfortable in his own skin.
He knows who he is.
He doesn’t put on any pretenses.
He takes his job seriously, but he doesn’t take himself too seriously.
He is a good man.

Words that make any sane person with any, and I mean, any, sense of history blow huge, humongous chunks.

US News and World Report held a reader poll on whether George Jr. was a good leader, or a piece of shit — the results this morning found here: Sixty-six percent voted him to the shit pile.

And following Obama’s bullshit spiel in Dallas, he traveled to Baylor University in Waco, Texas, for a memorial service for those who died in that fertilizer plant explosion last week, and reversed all former logic and told the crowd, “You are not forgotten.”
Even after obviously forgetting a terrible period in most-recent history.

Anyway, that’s as far as I can go this morning — getting close to work time — and it is a sad, sad state of affairs when a lot of gross shit will have to be swallowed, though, not by the people who produced the shit, but by the folks who are really now the ‘new normal.’
Supposedly, George Jr. cried a bit during his speech, but not for this I’m sure: A third day of widespread unrest across northern Iraq led to the deaths of dozens. At least 96 Iraqis were killed and 79 more were wounded, but the final tally is unknown as many of the casualties went uncounted in the chaos.

And that’s a pisser.