Rachel's Play "Shooting Stars" Published

Fun!:

Brandon: This is bigger than that! We can create our own artistic colony! A kind of commune...

Deborah: But…

Brandon: We can create group works when everybody else can just do solo work! We can put Shooting Stars on the map. Everyone will be talking about us.

Deborah: Audiences can’t gather -- they won’ t be able to for months, maybe years--

Brandon: There are still audiences, baby! Just on computer screens. And if we move in together, when everybody else is stuck in their little six footbubbles, we can come together and create! Collaborate! Make something big!

A Review of the Darell Richards' Slaying?

Interesting podcast here, concerning a Black man killed by cops in my neighborhood in September, 2018:

But Tim Foster, in whose backyard Richards died, questions whether the story adds up. He says police told him an inconsistent story about what had happened. For example, they said they’d recovered a suicide note in Richards’ backpack, but it later turned out to be a homework assignment. With protests against police violence sweeping the nation in the wake of George Floyd’s death, Foster is coming forward to tell his story.

Playbook Fail

And this is why Biden is the nominee:

For the past few months, Trump and the conservative propaganda apparatus have struggled to make the old race-and-gender-baiting rhetoric stick to Biden. But voters don’t appear to believe that Biden is an avatar of the “radical left.” They don’t think Biden is going to lock up your manhood in a “testicle lockbox.” They don’t buy that Biden’s platform, which is well to the left of the ticket he joined in 2008, represents a quiet adherence to “Kenyan anti-colonialism.” Part of this is that Biden has embraced popular liberal positions while avoiding the incentive to adopt more controversial or unpopular positions during the primary. But it’s also becoming clear that after 12 years of feasting on white identity politics with a black man and a woman as its preeminent villains, the Republican Party is struggling to run its Obama-era culture-war playbook against an old, moderate white guy.

An Oral History Of Phoenix's Hottest Day

June 26, 1990:

Rob Birmingham, bartender: I lived in Tempe at this wild apartment complex known as Desert Palms. Some asshole parked in my reserved parking spot, so I baked some Toll House cookies on his car hood right around noon. By 4 p.m., the bottoms were pretty cooked. I was kinda hoping that the owner would come out to see me eating one off of his ride.

The Travails of a Theater Company on the Outskirts of Phoenix

I can sympathize:

Luna says Hale has a longstanding reputation among local theater professionals for what Luna calls “certain casting practices.”

...The outrage over Hale’s blackface routine has resurfaced, according to Luna and others, because of the troupe’s recent response to the issue on social media. After Hale principals were called out on Facebook about the blackface routine and its alleged discriminatory practices, the playhouse posted an apology on PHX Stages, a website that promotes local theater.

“The apology was wishy-washy,” Luna says. “It didn’t say ‘Black lives matter,’ and it didn’t address the situation of discrimination at Hale. And they never posted it on their webpage, I guess so their audience won’t see them apologize for racism. They don’t want to offend the audience, and I guess they think the audience won’t see them apologizing on social media.”

The Alamo Community Suffers A Loss

This Covid is terrible:

Now, the residents of the Alamo Navajo community in central New Mexico have been left to grieve the coronavirus-related deaths of Pino and two other members of her immediate family in isolation as they continue precautions aimed at slowing spread of the illness.

Marie Pino, 67, taught elementary school for decades and, interested in a new challenge, had started teaching middle school science last year. She died May 13, weeks after burying one of her three sons, Marcus Pino, 42, who coached the school’s basketball team and was determined to engage teen boys in the sport he loved growing up. He died April 16.

Marie’s husband, Ira Pino Sr., 65, was an emergency medical coordinator who went on to pastor a church during the last decade of his life. He died May 31.

“They’ve left a hole in our school community,” said Barbara Gordon, a school counselor and athletic director at the 300-student tribal school. “We haven’t been able to see each other since this all happened.”

Their deaths, three of the five coronavirus fatalities in the remote outpost of the Navajo reservation, are an example of how the pandemic has devastated many Native communities.

The Navajo Nation, which spreads across several states, has a higher per capita infection rate than any single state, its health department has reported. That may be because of factors like higher rates of poverty, lack of access to running water in some areas, and the rural nature of some communities. Alamo families may travel several hours to see a doctor.

Trump Needs Vote-By-Mail, And He's Torpedoing It

What an idiot:

Democrats have opened up a 302,000-voter advantage over Republicans in vote-by-mail enrollment, an edge that could pay big dividends in President Donald Trump’s newly adopted must-win state.

Five months before Election Day, more than 1.46 million Democrats have signed up to vote by mail compared to 1.16 million Republicans, according to state Division of Election data released Friday. By comparison, in 2016, Democrats held an advantage of about 8,800 in vote-by-mail enrollment.

As noted above, ultimately the GOP got 27,554 more of their registered voters to use mail ballots in 2016. They accomplished this despite being slightly behind in applications at this point in the campaign. But an 8,800 voter disadvantage in June is quite different from a 302,000 voter disadvantage. It will take a herculean effort by Trump’s ground team to make up this deficit, and it’s probably not possible unless the president quickly and emphatically changes his opposition to vote-by-mail.

Zebra Club Closes Again

I watched the folks go into this reopened place, and worried:

After weeks of operation with little social distancing, midtown Sacramento bar and grill the Zebra Club has temporarily closed following a customer‘s positive coronavirus test.

A handwritten sign on the door at 1900 P St. Tuesday informed customers that the Zebra Club would be shut for at least a few days.

“It has come to our attention that a customer has tested positive for coronavirus,” the sign reads. “We are taking a few days as precautions to disinfect our bar and have our staff tested for the safety of our customers.”

My Little Pony Has Put Up With The Nazis For Too Long

A bigger problem than they realized:

Derpibooru hosts millions of My Little Pony artworks, plenty of which are simple tributes to magic, friendship, and magical friendship. But a substantial number of them are extremely, jarringly violent. An image that I recently viewed on the site depicts a My Little Pony character presiding over three lynchings and one beheading of cartoons drawn to represent various marginalized groups. Derpibooru even lists “racist” as a searchable category, and more than 900 pieces of art are tagged as such.

For years, this has been the status quo in the world of My Little Pony. In supposed deference to principles of free speech and openness on the internet, the presence of self-described Nazis within a fandom that idolizes compassion-oriented cartoon characters has become a coolly accepted fact. The community has sorted itself largely into two camps: those who think anything goes as long as someone finds it funny, and those who would rather ignore toxic elements than admit that not everything is perfect.

Until now.

Siberia Is Baking

Inevitable:

A small Siberian town north of the Arctic Circle reached 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit on Saturday, a figure that — if verified — would be the highest temperature reading in the region since record-keeping began in 1885.

“This scares me, I have to say,” environmentalist and 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben tweeted in response to news of the record-breaking reading in Verkhoyansk, where the average high temperature in June is 68°F.

Washington Post climate reporter Andrew Freedman noted Sunday that if the reading is confirmed, it “would be the northernmost 100-degree reading ever observed, and the highest temperature on record in the Arctic, a region that is warming at more than twice the rate of the rest of the globe.”

Now Everyone Is Jumping On Brad Parscale

The judgements are too hasty. Parscale's Facebook campaigns for Trump have been very effective, because they aren't sophisticated. Blunt force and repetitiveness are exactly what you need in politics. So, too many blue seats in Tulsa means goodbye to Brad. Maybe the campaign will now be outsourced to overly-sophisticated Russian bots:

As Last notes, the realization that Parscale is running a disastrous campaign that is headed for a loss in November seems to have finally hit Trump on Saturday night if the video of a dispirited president walking back to the White House after the disastrous Tulsa rally is any indication.

Using the line, “Look at the big brain on Brad” from the film “Pulp Fiction” Last suggested that Parscale — who has never before run a political campaign, much less a presidential campaign — is not the “genius” that he purports to be, and the columnist wondered why the campaign manager has yet to be fired.

Keeping The Plants Happy

A serenade:

It's not uncommon for performances at Barcelona's Gran Teatre del Liceu opera house to be sold out, but musicians played to an unusual audience on Monday to mark Spain's lifting of lockdown -- as thousands of plants filled its seats.

The event was the work of conceptual artist Eugenio Ampudia and included a performance from the UceLi Quartet string quartet.

A total of 2,292 plants were packed into the theater, while the string quartet performed Puccini's "Crisantemi," according to a statement from the Liceu.

Although humans were not present in the audience, spectators could watch the "Concierto para el bioceno" via livestream.

Covid Is Going To Be Around Awhile

The doctors are worried about family gatherings and graduation parties. While walking dogs, I've seen several large family gatherings in progress, but these were held outdoors, which are presumably safer than those held indoors. It's extended, intimate contact that seems to exacerbate everything:

A week-long surge in coronavirus cases culminated with 267 new cases Friday through Sunday, the biggest three-day increase by far since COVID-19 hit the region three months ago.

But to the surprise of health officials, most of the spread is not happening at newly reopened nail salons, restaurants and barbers, or at previously hard-hit nursing and assisted care living centers. The surge also does not appear to be related to police brutality protests held in the earlier this month.

Instead, virus trackers are finding the recent surge is happening inside homes, often among extended families and friends during events such as graduation parties. While much of the infection spread in Sacramento is among whites, recent data show an increase among Latinos as well.

The Other Six Deadly Sins