The heat wave continues, so I posted a picture of movie stars looking glam to cool things off. It didn’t work but it’s good to see Paul Newman, Orson Welles, Angela Lansbury, and Joanne Woodward first thing in the morning.

The Long Hot Summer is a good, not great movie based on a novel by William Faulkner. Faulkner knew from heat and he wrote long sentences. I try not to do that but don’t always succeed. Oh well, what the hell.

I’m feeling unfocused and when that happens, I write a potpourri post.

The Supreme Court ended its term with a bang that made many whimper myself included. They did the right thing on the voting case then followed up by tossing out affirmative action and the Biden student debt relief plan. The first ruling is constitutionally suspect and the second involved what right-wing judges say they’re against: legislating from the bench.

The student debt relief case reinforces my point about the right in 2023: They’re not conservatives. A genuine judicial conservative would defer to the elected branches instead of ruling based on their own political preferences. SCOTUS has a reactionary majority, not a conservative one. Every time I see headlines using the C word, I cringe.

Repeat after me: Don’t Call Them Conservatives. It makes them sound sensible, not unhinged. Me, I’m just overheated.

That was Louisiana’s own Chris Thomas King. He’s a second generation blues man. His father owned a club in Baton Rouge that I occasionally frequented in my LSU days: Tabby’s Blues Box. That has nothing to do with SCOTUS, but it’s a fun fact. We need all the fun facts we can get right now.

I might as well post a tune by Rockin’ Tabby Thomas before we order pizza:

There’s a weird culture war controversy raging in New York City over pizza ovens:

“Conservative media, and some New York City pizza purveyors, are up in arms over a proposed requirement regarding how they are to operate their coal or wood-fired pizza ovens, known in Five Boroughs pizza lore to be the source of the city’s delicious pies. The New York Post fanned the flames last week with an article which, inaccurately but explosively, alleged that climate change activists were threatening the livelihood of the city’s pizza purveyors by passing a new regulation which forced them to install pricey filters on their ovens, supposedly cutting carbon emissions at the cost of an iconic staple.

It’s almost too perfect a setup. Gritty, street smart pizza owners vs. well-intentioned but impractical NYC libs. Tradition vs. modernity. Real people vs. namby-pamby do-gooders. Even recognizing that the setup is based on a falsehood (the real regulation proposed by New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection still requires a feasibility assessment for potentially installing emission controls in an effort to reduce particulate matter in the air), it’s great theater.”

The vast majority of own the libs stories are untrue. Another reason the purveyors of right-wing lies shouldn’t be called conservatives. They’re projectionists.

The pizza controversy was strictly local until The Louse DBA Ron DeSantis butted in. DeSantis filmed a Fox segment at one of the coal oven pizzerias. He weighed in with his trademark overkill anti-woke rhetoric:

“They just want to control,” he says. “You have an itch on the left. They wanna control behavior. We saw the same thing with COVID, a lot of that wasn’t about your health, it was about they wanted to control your behavior. So they just don’t want people to be happy and be able to make their own decisions.”

The Louse doesn’t strike me as a happy person. Control freaks rarely are. He wants to control everything in Florida. But even he can’t stop Florida Weird. He’s a good example of it: a joyless man who wears a perpetual glower in a state that’s allegedly America’s playground. How weird is that? In his case, we’ll call it Right-Wing Florida Weird.

What’s next in Right-Wing Florida Weird? It’s too hot for bonfires but The Louse strikes me as a book burner:

Back to the heat. I function well when it’s 90 degrees or less but when it creeps over 95, ennui and exhaustion take over. The AC in our house struggles to keep it cool when a heat wave strikes. Instead of whining, I hunker down and reduce my activity, indoors and outdoors.

I’m not like the characters in the film version of The Long Hot Summer. There’s not much hunkering in this Newman centric photo montage:

I was hoping that image would cool things down. Who’s cooler than Paul Newman? Movie magic didn’t work this time. It’s too damn hot.

Let’s try some reverse psychology with the last word. It goes to John Fogerty: