WTF! "The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague has determined that the late Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic was not responsible for war crimes committed during the 1992-95 Bosnian war."[CounterPunch] I first got wind of this on LJ and see it only on marginal websites. On the surface, it is kind of fucking shocking - if there is anything to it. Looking over this, I am thinking that the critical question is who composes this tribunal? ... ... Ah, here is one problem with the movie "Suicide Squad": "According to users on Reddit who saw the test screening, most of the cut scenes involved the Joker, specifically the Joker beating up Harley Quinn." [ONTD] ... ... On a reading break, thinking about my glum menu for the week, I remember that I still have a T-bone steak in the freezer ... ... Sugar has been busy with music lately, even Periscoping a concert she went to last night, and someone asked her if she has any plans to come to SXSW 2017, and Sugar said, "No plans of yet, but I sure would love to see Austin some day." That's an interesting proposition: the idea of seeing her in person, in real life, so to speak. Of course even if she were coming to San Antonio, even to Mercado Mall, the odds are close to nil that we should meet. That is probably for the best, though. She is such a figure in my head that it would probably be a crippling blow to my psyche to meet her, to feel in the flesh her utter indifference, even the slight contempt, toward me, that is, if my psyche were not already destroyed. Daimon says, "Is that mall still up?" Huh, I don't know. I have no idea. That's how often I get out. For us to meet, she would have to get lost in my neighborhood and trip over one of my cats ... ... In order to take it a little easier on my little golden books, I have opened up another Shakespeare play: Lear. It's great for my little post-nap reading, but I am not reading as much during my meals, having a number of halfway-decent recordings to run through. Maybe I can also hit Shakespeare in the morning. As with my naps, I can spend a good ten minutes acclimating myself back to conscious existence with some Shakespeare. Recently, I've been content to prop myself up and catch some "Fox & Friends", mostly to see if the infobabe is dressed in a short skirt, or else some yoga stretching or female-fitness motivation videos on YouTube. I venture to say that it would be a healthy turn to spend that time on Lear. Pi says, "Female fitness motivation videos? Motivation for what, exactly?" To exercise, I guess. Daimon says, "As it spurred you to exercise? Masturbation doesn't count." It's really an under-appreciated pastime - a dirty little secret. Pi says, "I thought you were turned off from Shakespeare, at least for such transitory reading. Didn't you drop 'Timon of Athens'." Yes, but it was the particular play that I found problematic rather than Shakespeare in general. For this sort of reading, it really has to be pretty top-flight work from beginning to end. Timon doesn't rank, I feel. Indeed, it now occurs to me that Timon is a very poor variation of Lear, maybe even a sort of preliminary sketch leading up to the grandiosity of Lear ... ... I still struggle over the issue whether I should try to write more seriously. Lately, because of our little dialogues here, I have been wondering if I should work on a serious dialogue. However, as I cannot even fix on a subject, I come back to the old conclusion that there are so many beautiful and glorious and powerful things written that I would do better to use my time reading and hunting for quotes and ideas and simply try to amass as big and wonderful a collection of such gems as I can, and to just bask in their brilliance through my dying days, rather than vainly pretending that I can add to the world's treasures myself. Whatever writerly inclinations and ambitions I have will simply have to be exercised here, or should I say exorcised? The main problem with this answer is that it reduces one to being a spectator of life in the world, which cannot help but leave one feeling a little empty and hollow inside. One naturally wants to be a player in the game and to leave one's own mark in the memory of man ... ... Nicholas Kristof: "ONE persistent narrative in American politics is that Hillary Clinton is a slippery, compulsive liar while Donald Trump is a gutsy truth-teller. Over all, the latest CBS News poll finds the public similarly repulsed by each candidate: 34 percent of registered voters say Clinton is honest and trustworthy compared with 36 percent for Trump. Yet the idea that they are even in the same league is preposterous. If deception were a sport, Trump would be the Olympic gold medalist; Clinton would be an honorable mention at her local Y. Let’s investigate. One metric comes from independent fact-checking websites. As of Friday, PolitiFact had found 27 percent of Clinton’s statements that it had looked into were mostly false or worse, compared with 70 percent of Trump’s. It said 2 percent of Clinton’s statements it had reviewed were egregious “pants on fire” lies, compared with 19 percent of Trump’s. So Trump has nine times the share of flat-out lies as Clinton. Likewise, The Washington Post Fact-Checker has awarded its worst ranking, Four Pinocchios, to 16 percent of Clinton’s statements that it checked and to 64 percent of Trump’s." [NYT] ... ... I was set to spend some quality time on chess tonight, but then I remembered that I need to go through the Times's Sunday columns. But they were good columns and worth the time. Kristof, not really a star writer, has become a useful fact-checker: last week it was on Trump's racist episodes, this week it was who was more dishonest, Trump or Clinton ... ... Maybe noodles and chocolate donuts don't go together? Man, for a second there, I thought I was going to have to throw up, maybe into the trash can here in the big room, not daring to see if I could make it to the bathroom.