Fog and coldness once again this late-afternoon Friday here in California’s Central Valley — close to finishing out an average day set in a not-average age.
Also end of the fabled work week on a note of surreal images of a time of pure weirdness. Apparently, not a heavy-duty Friday news dump today, thus we conclude with more a whimper than a scream, though, there’s enough vile, creepy shit floating around to make anyone screech like a bloody murderer.
One of the yell-at-the-moon items is the continued living of the T-Rump, one of the most horrible of human beings ever to plague humanity. If he’s not lying he’s not speaking.
Yesterday after funeral services for Melania Trump’s mother, Amalija Knavs, held at a church down near the infamous Mar-a-Lago estate, T-Rump and his wife had a reckoning of sorts. She looked like she’d told him to haul his fat ass into another car — you’re not riding with me:
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) January 19, 2024
Reaction from the InterWebs was pointed — some examples (Raw Story):
“Imagine getting friendzoned by your wife,” tweeted influencer and cybersecurity expert Travis Allen.
X user Lyle Scout noted that Melania appeared to make the decision to ride by herself on the spot, as the former president stood by the vehicle apparently waiting to sit next to her.
Liberal social media personality Carla Nicol thought Melania’s coldness could be due to the ongoing E. Jean Carroll defamation trial, tweeting “No hug or kiss goodbye. Could be Melania was unhappy he was rage tweeting about a woman he sexually abused during the whole service?”
“Imagine getting friendzoned by your wife,” tweeted influencer and cybersecurity expert Travis Allen.
X user Lyle Scout noted that Melania appeared to make the decision to ride by herself on the spot, as the former president stood by the vehicle apparently waiting to sit next to her.
Liberal social media personality Carla Nicol thought Melania’s coldness could be due to the ongoing E. Jean Carroll defamation trial, tweeting “No hug or kiss goodbye. Could be Melania was unhappy he was rage tweeting about a woman he sexually abused during the whole service?”
And on the topic of the T-Rump being a self-centered, self-deluded psycho:
Whale, whale, you’re the WHALE! ? W the great @ddiamond: https://t.co/IoV1Sxi4fm
— Ashley Parker (@AshleyRParker) January 20, 2024
Details via The Washington Post this evening:
Donald Trump this week bragged about purportedly acing a widely used cognitive test that was administered to him when he was president, suggesting that the test included identifying drawings of three animals.
“I think it was 35, 30 questions,” the former president said in Portsmouth, N.H., of the test, which he said involved a few animal identification queries. “They always show you the first one, like a giraffe, a tiger, or this, or that — a whale. ‘Which one is the whale?’ Okay. And that goes on for three or four [questions] and then it gets harder and harder and harder.”
The only problem: The creator of the test in question, called the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, or MoCA, said it has never included the specific combination of animals described by Trump in any of its versions over the years.
In fact, Ziad Nasreddine, the Canadian neurologist who invented the test, said the assessment — intended primarily to test for signs of dementia or other cognitive decline — has never once included a drawing of a whale.
“I don’t think we have a version with a whale,” said Nasreddine, who added there are three versions of the test currently in circulation.
He and other physicians allowed for the possibility that Trump was just offering hypothetical examples. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
For nearly four years, Trump has periodically boasted about his performance on the cognitive test, always tweaking the questions he alleges he aced, from correctly reciting a series of words in order — “Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.” — to, most recently, identifying an animal — a whale — that did not appear on the test.
Experts also note that the assessment is not an I.Q. or intelligence test, though Trump has often talked about it as if it was.
“It’s a very, very low bar for somebody who carries the nuclear launch codes in their pocket to pass and certainly nothing to brag about,” said Jonathan Reiner, a cardiologist and professor of medicine and surgery at the George Washington School of Medicine & Health Sciences.
Addressing the crowd of supporters Wednesday night in Portsmouth, Trump continued with his riff on the test, seeming to wholly invent another hypothetical question.
“Then it’s multiply 3,293 times four, divide by 3,” Trump crowed. “They have plenty of tough stuff.” (The answer: 4,390.67).
In that telling scenario, it’s hard on the gut knowing, maybe, there’s a chance, that the lying, cruel asshole could become the most-powerful man on earth next year.
What a pisser, or what?
Except we’re here already:
Week’s end, or not, yet here we are once again…
(Illustration out front: Edvard Munch‘s ‘The Scream,’ lithograph version, found here.)