How hot is it here in Texas? A couple of weeks ago I took a large hunk of old shriveled-up clumped-together ice cubes out of my freezer and dumped it over the railing of my little apartment patio. A few minutes later I heard a sound like rocks being ground up. A white-tail deer was chomping on its giant popsicle.

I remember watching the news on TV one evening in the early 70’s. I would have been 10 or 12. Back then the big 3 networks allowed an anchor or correspondent a few minutes at the end of the broadcast for a short op-ed piece, maybe once a week. On this particular night, David Brinkley—ABC’s answer to CBS’s authoritative father-figure Walter Cronkite—was describing something some scientists had just discovered called “global warming.” He concluded his piece with a big smile, declaring (as best I remember), “’Global warming’…you can’t see it, smell it, or taste it, and we have a long time to figure out what to do about it. Now that’s the kind of problem I like!” And I had a funny feeling that this problem was serious and that nothing serious would ever be done about it…because responsible grownups like David Brinkley were treating it like a joke. And here we are.

With the wisdom of hindsight, I can see now how wrong it was for Hillary Clinton to disparage Donald Trump’s supporters as “a basket of deplorables.” After all, mean-spirited insecure gun-worshiping racist xenophobic anti-democratic anti-intellectual misogynistic bible-thumping flag-waving Trump-adoring conspiracy-subscribing morons have feelings too.

There was much press over the past week over whether one should go see Barbie or Oppenheimer or both. The former is a feel-good fantasy based on a plastic doll marketed to little girls. The latter is about the man who brought nuclear weapons into the world.

You’ll find me curled up in a dark closet, eating cheese curls and watching A Fistful of Dollars again on my phone.

The doll won, by the way. Maybe that’s a good thing.