DOGE security guy wins the award for least fucks given pic.twitter.com/MHXbTjeeTz

— Ashley St. Clair (@stclairashley) February 7, 2025

This is how new taxes start.

They claim only to apply to a small percentage of households in order to gain a majority vote, but then rapidly evolve to cover everyone. https://t.co/q6cWEcFBgr

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 4, 2025

Not anymore https://t.co/XF0rgU0sTa

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 3, 2025

That is an insane misallocation of resources! https://t.co/uQEPtGA1oJ

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 4, 2025

DOWN with rosemary and bayes,
Down with the mistleto,
Instead of holly, now up-raise
The greener box, for show.

Green rushes then, and sweetest bents,
With color oken boughs,
Come in for comely ornaments,
To re-adorn the house.
Thus times do shift; each thing his turn does hold;
New things succeed as former things grow o.

Tintoretto, Presentation of Jesus at the Temple, 1550-1555, Gallerie dell Accademi, Venice

From Robert Chambers, The Book of Days, 1869:

From a very early, indeed unknown date in the Christian history, the 2nd of February has been held as the festival of the Purification of the Virgin, and it is still a holiday of the Church of England. From the coincidence of the time with that of the Februation or purification of the people in pagan Rome, some consider this as a Christian festival engrafted upon a heathen one, in order to take advantage of the established habits of the people; but the idea is at least open to a good deal of doubt. The popular name Candlemass is derived from the ceremony which the Church of Rome dictates to be observed on this day; namely, a blessing of candles by the clergy, and a distribution of them amongst the people, by whom they are afterwards carried lighted in solemn procession. The more important observances were of course given up in England at the Reformation; but it was still, about the close of the eighteenth century, customary in some places to light up churches with candles on this day.
Read the rest of this entry »

Anita Pallenberg preceded her out the door in 2017.

The two beautiful blondes not only brightened the lives of Mick and Keith, they served as muses and mentors to the then comparatively far less worldly and sophisticated young men. The pair of muses also added vocals occasionally in the background of songs like Sympathy For the Devil.

Nigel Jones penned a nice tribute in the Spectator:

Anyone of a certain age is aware of the urban legend that links Marianne Faithfull, a Mars bar and Mick Jagger. But Marianne’s death [two days ago] at the grand age of 78 (given her lifestyle, how did she get that old?) really does remove one of the last living links with the golden age of rock and roll in its wildest youth.

For Marianne embodied every cliche associated with rock excess: the lover of three of the original five members of the Rolling Stones (Mick, Keith Richards and Brian Jones), she also took on David Bowie, but had the good sense or taste to reject the amorous advances of Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix.

After the affair with Mick ended, Marianne had a lost weekend in the 1970s lasting for five years while she was deep in the throes of heroin addiction. Squatting on a wall in Soho that became her ‘home’, the experience was not wholly negative: she said that it taught her the essential goodness of humanity when she was kept alive by being fed by a Chinese restaurant and given free cups of tea from the owner of a vending stall.

Marianne owed much of her resilience and distinction to her fascinating family roots: her mother Eva was a baroness from a long line of Austrian aristocrats, and her father was a British army intelligence officer. (His name was Major Robert Faithfull, so her singular and highly inappropriate surname was not a showbiz pseudonym.) Her mother’s great uncle was the 19th-century writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch – the man who involuntarily gave his name to ‘masochism’ after his novel Venus in Furs, a hymn to female domination.

Marianne’s parents had met and married in the immediate postwar Vienna of The Third Man. Eva evidently shared her daughter’s fiery spirit: another legend relates that she saved her own mother, Flora, from being raped by a Russian soldier by taking his gun and shooting him dead.

——————

Tim Stegall takes her loss hard.

[D]ammit, it’s not everyday that Marianne Faithfull dies.

I have been obsessed with Marianne, the daughter of fallen aristocracy and descendant of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, since before I could shave. Her arc was just so damned compelling. She was a folk-pop thrush who sang and looked like a fallen angel. She was Mick Jagger’s muse, the woman in the fur rug at the Redlands bust. She co-wrote “Sister Morphine” (and recorded its best version, backed by the Stones). It was she who first uttered the phrase “wild horses couldn’t drag me away” to Jagger, following a drug overdose. Then: homeless addict. Then: punk-inspired singer in her early ‘30s. Then: Gothic cabaret artist who could give Nick Cave a run for his money, whose ravaged voice served her scorched material well. Back in the ‘90s, she also wrote a compelling memoir Faithfull: An Autobiography, co-written with David Dalton, who penned some of the most gripping books in the rock ‘n’ roll canon. She even included a killer recipe for roast chicken. After that, my criteria for a great r’n’r memoir changed forever: There had to be at least one recipe among the tales of ODs, rehab, and the subject’s first exposure to Ray Charles.

Marianne debuted with what was reportedly the first Jagger-Richards original, “As Tears Go By,” a song their manager Andrew Loog Oldham had practically forced them to write. As the New York Times’ obituary noted, she later reflected in 1987 that it was “a very strange song for two 21-year-old boys to write, and an even stranger one for an 18-year-old girl to sing.” But how could anyone watching TV in 1964, stumbling across this gorgeous, lapsed Catholic schoolgirl with, as Salman Rushdie put it, “the voice of a slightly zoned-out chorister,” possibly resist? The song’s melancholy was almost beside the point—she was hypnotic.

New York Magazine literally cropped all the black people out of this cover photo and then complained that “the entire room is white” https://t.co/gCatY1lZzG pic.twitter.com/VhoaiJhqg1

— Christopher Barnard (@ChrisBarnardDL) January 27, 2025

Just when you think you’ve seen it all… Trump playing tennis with Serena Williams, barefoot in a full suit pic.twitter.com/C1ITFVGvgc

— Jessica (@RealJessica05) January 28, 2025

And in stocking feet wearing a suit and tie! Trump is a character.

To fully understand just how remarkable today’s exchange with Colombia was, you need to understand how Washington DC has traditionally worked through these sorts of issues, and the different way it works now under Trump.

I’ll illustrate.

Traditional Approach:

1. Colombia…

— Cynical Publius (@CynicalPublius) January 26, 2025