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Mere weeks after the end of World War II, a prosperous but widely-despised New York mogul takes his young wife on a skiing vacation to the Norwegian mountains. While there, she vanishes, apparently into thin air.

Interpol and the FBI turn up nothing.

Three months later, she mysteriously reappears, to all appearances unharmed. No explanation for her disappearance is ever forthcoming.

After a difficult pregnancy of nearly ten months' duration, she delivers an outsized, obstreperous baby with a head of unnaturally orange hair.

You will, perhaps, have wondered why, in certain circles, a certain disgraced ex-demagogue is known as “President Half-Troll.”

"An Outstanding Mediocrity"

A near-contemporary of Plato, Mediocrates was a fourth-century BCE Athenian philosopher best-known for his controversial teaching that one should avoid all extremes.

Mediocrates apparently taught that a balanced life requires conscious effort to avoid standing out from the norm: in fact, the deliberate avoidance of all extremes, even extremes of virtue. In this, he differs from virtually all of his contemporaries, from whom the pursuit of aretê, “excellence”, was the ultimate goal of life.

For his doctrine of deliberate non-striving, he came to be known as the “Philosopher of the Middle”; indeed, his very name itself may be translated “halfway up the mountain.”

If Mediocrates wrote down his teachings, none of his writings have survived. He is, however, credited with originating a number of common sayings, including “Keep your head down,” “Just go with the flow, man (voc. ἄνερ, áner),” and "The higher up the tree the monkey goes, the more of its bottom you see."

According to the only known story about Mediocrates, a student of Aristotle once quoted him in the course of a debate.

“Who?” replied Aristotle.

How 'bout a little satire, Scarecrow?

I asked a number of my friends who they thought was the biggest homophobe in contemporary American politics. Virtually all of them said: “Well, you've got plenty to choose from, but....”

So two-step to this, Greg Abbott, misGovernor of Texas, Homophobe-in-Chief.

Legal queer-bashing is still queer-bashing.

The Queer-Basher's Polka

(To the tune of:  In Heaven, There is No Beer)

In Heaven, there are no queers;

that's why we bash 'em here.

AP: Washington DC

Why the Republican cowardice?

On the eve of the vote which will, in all likelihood, end with Senate Republicans once again shamefully failing to impeach disgraced ex-president Ronald Rump for crimes of which he is transparently guilty, many Americans will be wondering: why do Republican members of Congress so often seem to lack even the slightest amount of courage or moral conviction? In fact, there's a very good reason.

None of them have spines.

In 1989, a little-known statute was passed by Republican leadership that requires all incoming Congressional Republicans to undergo surgical removal of their spines before their term of service begins.

“It's a relatively simple procedure,” says Dr. Mark McKinney, a DC surgeon who, over the course of almost four decades, has performed the operation on more than 150 Republican Senators- and Representatives-elect, “and we fit them for the brace that enables them to stand upright at the same time.”

He adds that some also choose to have optional lobotomies performed at the same time.

Has anybody else noticed that there's nary a vegetable bouillon cube to be found at the stores?

I know, I know. Vegetable bouillon cubes are outré, taboo to serious cooks. Well, la-dee-da.

Me, I like them. They're quick, they're easy and, when you cook vegetarian, tossing one in can add that extra layer of base flavor that makes the difference between good and really good.

But—dammit—there aren't any to be had.

I ran out just before Thanksgiving. Since then, I've looked for more every single time that I've been at the store.

Ix-nay.

Then I discovered the reason why.

You know all those baby-eating cannibals that the Q-Anon election-deniers are so worried about?

In the pagan world, local custom takes priority. One could regard this as a general principle of pagan social protocol.

If in your valley, you keep Yule in one way, then when I'm visiting you over the Winter Solstice, that's damn well how I'm going to keep Yule too, regardless of how I may celebrate back at home.

Hey, you have the perfect right to be wrong if you want to.

Needless to say, there's a certain amount of tension here with the universal human belief that the Right Way to Do Something Is—of course—the Way That I Do It.

In practice, it's a balancing act. If you tell me that your name is Xfghstk, pronounced “Tom,” I will call you Tom to your face. What I call you behind your back is another matter, and you can't say you weren't asking for it.

To extend this principle of Local Priority, I generally ride with the idea that the local pronunciation is the correct one; still, that horse will take you only so far. When I hear native Midwesterners drawling out Nyaaawlunz, in verbal caricature of some son or daughter of the Crescent City, I cringe. Maybe that's how they say it Down There, boyo, but Up Here at this end of the Mississippi we say New Orleans. That's four syllables, mind you, not three. Dialect is dialect, but affectation, after all, is affectation.

Case in point: Appalachian. North of the Smith and Wesson Line, we say: AppaLAYshun. South of it, AppaLATCHun.

This raises problems for inveterate listeners to National Public Radio such as myself. Unfortunately—NPR being based in DC—this means that the NPR Received Pronunciation is AppaLATCHun.

I confess, I grind my teeth whenever I hear this. (It bothers me in particular when Aaron Copeland's Appalachian Spring gets deformed into AppaLATCHun Spring. Shudder.) From Southrons, I'll accept that pronunciation, since they have their own customs, and probably don't know any better.

When, however, I hear fellow NPR-listening Northrons parroting that pronunciation, I invariably feel the need to intervene.

“In the part of AppaLAYsha that I come from, we say AppaLAYsha,” I admonish.

AP: Washington D. C.

Twenty-four hours after being locked out of his Twitter account, the lifeless body of Donald Trump has been discovered in a White House bedroom.

“It would appear that the immediate cause of death was spontaneous cranial frangor,” said Trump's personal physician, Dr. Malachi Mavet, adding: “In short, his head exploded.”

Doctors at Walter Reed Medical Center suggested that the inability to Tweet may well have precipitated the explosion. Trump, of course, has long been known for his compulsive and logorrheic Tweetstorming.

“His last action as president was, literally, to paint the room red,” said a close personal aide, speaking on condition of anonymity.

While investigators found no evidence of foul play, the investigating FBI forensics team was mystified by the total lack of any cerebral material.

“There's blood, hair, skin, and skull here everywhere,” said one investigator, “but so far no brain matter.”