Seemingly with no conscious motive she found herself drawn more than once to the edges of the tents where there was a different source of powerful attraction––hucksterism of gospellers and evangelicals, foot-bathers and berserkers, Bible salesmen, healers, layers-on of hands and snake-oil salesmen, roustabouts and self-made prophets, exhorters, raisers of the dead, dead levelers. The revelers. The drama of salvation. She’d stand on summer nights outside these tents and halfway listen to the preachers preach, it didn’t matter what the message was–the message was the same each time–people came to watch the message being sold. The events a tent invites, the alibis and cover stories that a tent invents were as attractive as any force in nature, Opal came to realize, as magnetic as any other, every other, vacuum. The preachers raised their healing hands like magnets and the people came, lined up like iron filings to have their pain relieved their cataracts dissolved their sight restored.
– Marianne Wiggins, Evidence of Things Unseen
1.
80,000 citizens left Burning Man in their own vehicles at the same time in triple digit heat and 8-12 hour wait times to even reach the exit gate. The attendees in their cars were reportedly bursting into flames during the wait making for a stunning spectacle coming soon to cable TeeVee near you…
2.
In the ‘How Did I Miss This’ category, Kashyap 'Kash' Pramod Patel, a former Republican aide on the House intelligence committee who Donald Trump weighed installing as deputy CIA director, published a children’s book last May that perpetuates the false claim the Steele dossier sparked investigations into Russian collusion.
The Guardian reported that the 35-page tome, complete with an epilogue that details Donald Trump’s false claims about the FBI inquiry, bizarrely uses the tool of children’s fictional characters to provide a revisionist account of the probe that dogged the first two years of the Trump presidency and eventually led to a special counsel investigation.
Over the course of the book, the narrative lionises Patel and depicts him as a wizard who supposedly shows how “the King” Trump was wrongly accused of “cheating” to take the throne. The book claims the king was accused of cheating by a “shifty knight” – a reference to the Democratic chair of the intelligence committee, Adam Schiff, who claims to have a “paper” from a “steel” box attesting to wrongdoing.
3.
Well, it’s a start. NPR reported that Cowboys for Trump co-founder Couy Griffin, a county commissioner in Otero County, New Mexico, is now disqualified from holding public office because he violated Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment by participating in the Jan. 6 insurrection, as well as mobilizing others to also engage in the siege.
State District Judge Francis Mathew ordered Griffin removed from his post and said that Griffin’s attempts “to sanitize his actions are without merit” and are contradicted by evidence in the case. He wrote, “The irony of Mr. Griffin’s argument that this Court should refrain from applying the law and consider the will of the people in District Two of Otero County who retained him as county commissioner against a recall effort as he attempted to defend his participation in a mob whose goal, by his own admission, was to set aside the results of a free election by the majority of the people of the entire country (the will of the people) has not escaped this court. His protestations and his characterizations of his actions and the events of January 6, 2021 are not credible and amount to nothing more than attempting put lipstick on a pig.”
4.
Actress and legend Gina Lollobrigida, who turned 95 in July, is running for office in Italy. According to the Guardian, she is endeavoring to become a senator with the Sovereign and Popular Italy party (ISP), a new Eurosceptic, anti-Mario-Draghi political alliance that opposes sending arms to Ukraine and “warmongering Atlanticism”.
Now, enjoy my version of Gina Lollobrigida recorded in 2004 and released in 2005 on my CD Lost In the Graveyard.
5.
You all know by now that Queen Elizabeth II, the UK's longest-serving monarch, has died at Balmoral aged 96, after her reign of 70 years and 214 days. Good run there, Liz.
6.
And in the ‘Restaurants You Hope to See Some Day’ category, here’s a Chris Shapan production…
And now…