"I picture 5 people in a barrel... A table made of bread etc... Green garbage-less grass stretching in yoga poses..."

Meade writes, in a text that quotes this:

"A group of five people sat around a campfire in a barrel next to a table of bread, donuts, oranges, graham crackers and water. Green grass with no garbage stretched out between the clusters of tents.”

The quote comes from an article in The Wisconsin State Journal, "City softens approach to close homeless camp, explores options for men's shelter site."

I had to read the quote carefully to see what was so funny about Meade's interpretation and then I laughed a lot. 

A group of five people sat... in a barrel next to a table of bread.... Green grass... stretched out.... 

Of course, the problem of homelessness isn't funny, though if you have the patience to read the linked article, you might find the slow-moving confusion of city officials something to laugh at.

FROM THE EMAIL: Douglas is reminded of the 3 Wise Men of Gotham. Here's the nursery rhyme:

Three wise men of Gotham,

They went to sea in a bowl,

And if the bowl had been stronger

My song would have been longer

But what's the story behind that? Wikipedia explains: 

The story goes that King John intended to travel through [the village of Gotham, Nottinghamshire]. At that time in England, any road the king travelled on had to be made a public highway, but the people of Gotham did not want a public highway through their village. The villagers feigned imbecility when the royal messengers arrived.

Wherever the messengers went, they saw the rustics engaged in some absurd task. Based on this report, John determined to have his hunting lodge elsewhere, and the wise men boasted, "We ween there are more fools pass through Gotham than remain in it."

According to the 1874 edition of Blount's Tenures of Land, King John's messengers "found some of the inhabitants engaged in endeavouring to drown an eel in a pool of water; some were employed in dragging carts upon a large barn, to shade the wood from the sun; others were tumbling their cheeses down a hill, that they might find their way to Nottingham for sale; and some were employed in hedging in a cuckoo which had perched upon an old bush which stood where the present one now stands; in short, they were all employed in some foolish way or other which convinced the king's servants that it was a village of fools, whence arose the old adage, "the wise men of Gotham" or "the fools of Gotham". ...

Reminded of the foolish ingenuity of Gotham's residents, Washington Irving gave the name "Gotham" to New York City in his Salmagundi Papers (1807). The most notable use of the name in this context was by Bill Finger in naming the home of Batman, Gotham City....

Perhaps — in a similar way — the homeless people of any given town might trick the authorities into leaving them alone. It may be wise to appear to be the opposite of wise.

"Dear Ted, What has happened to us? I don't know. I feel myself in a spiral, going down down down..."

"... into a black hole from which there is no escape, no brightness. And loud in my ears from every side I hear, 'failure, failure, failure...' I love you so much ... I am too old and enmeshed in everything you do and are, that I cannot conceive of life without you ... My going will leave quite a rumor but you can say I was overworked and overwrought. Your reputation with your friends and fans will not be harmed ... Sometimes think of the fun we had all thru the years ..." 

That is the suicide note of Helen Palmer, the first wife of Theodore Geisel AKA Dr. Seuss. Here's her Wikipedia page. She was born in Brooklyn, he was born in Massachusetts, she went to Wellesley, he went to Dartmouth, and they both went to Oxford, where they met. 

She later stated, "Ted's notebooks were always filled with these fabulous animals. So I set to work diverting him; here was a man who could draw such pictures; he should be earning a living doing that."...

For about a decade following World War II, Ted worked to feed a booming children's book market... [relying] heavily on the encouragement and editorial input of Helen. In fact, throughout much of his career, he relied on her support. After realising that her husband was having an affair, Helen committed suicide in 1967 with an overdose of barbiturates after a series of illnesses spanning 13 years. ...

About Helen's death, Ted's niece Peggy commented: "Whatever Helen did, she did it out of absolute love for Ted." Secretary Julie Olfe called Helen's death "her last and greatest gift to him." Eight months later, in June 1968, Ted married Audrey Dimond, with whom he had been having an affair before Helen's death.

That links to a 2000 article in the NYT: 

Audrey Dimond was married with two children when she fell in love with Ted Geisel. Mr. Geisel, 18 years her senior, was also married. In the wake of their affair, Mr. Geisel's wife, Helen, committed suicide, causing, as Mrs. Geisel puts it, ''a rather large ripple in the community of La Jolla.''

Mrs. Dimond divorced her husband to marry Mr. Geisel, 64, and when she did, her daughters, 9 and 14, were sent away to school.

''They wouldn't have been happy with Ted, and Ted wouldn't have been happy with them. He's the man who said of children, 'You have 'em and I'll entertain 'em.' Ted's a hard man to break down, but this is who he was. He lived his whole life without children and he was very happy without children. I've never been very maternal. There were too many other things I wanted to do. My life with him was what I wanted my life to be.''

Did you know and remember this story? I didn't. Had I read it in the NYT back in 2000? I must have, but it was shocking news to me when I encountered it as I was poking around on Geisel's Wikipedia page this morning after blogging about the current to-do over the man. 

ADDED: Palmer was herself a children's book author. This is her most famous book:

Knowing what happened to her, it's hard not to imagine her answer to the question: Commit suicide! 

And it's hard not to think of the super-greedy boy as Geisel. Some people thought the book was actually written by Geisel, and Snopes took the trouble to debunk a rumor which it states as: "Dr. Seuss once wrote a children's book since banned due to its references to suicide and violence."

The Snopes piece is long and interesting, going beyond getting the authorship straight and delving into why the book could be understood to have a violence problem: 

Some of the prose in Do You Know What I’m Going to Do Next Saturday? does sound a little odd if read without the context provided by its accompanying photographs, a feature the creator of the “Banned Book” page capitalized upon. For instance, at one point the child narrator declares:

Did you ever beat more than one kid at a time?

Well, I’m going to beat five kids at a time.

And then I’m going to beat their fathers, too.

The photos show a boy playing tennis with kids and volleyball with men.

Likewise, the following lines are a little difficult to fathom when considered in isolation:

I’ll dump water on Sam.

I’ll make him take a walk.

I’ll make Sam walk about a hundred miles.

The photos show kids hiking and playing. 

Even the innocuous can sound ominous when taken out of context:

I’ll run around and yell and yell.

Next Saturday I’ll yell my head off.

I’ll blow horns. I’ll blow and blow.

Next Saturday I’ll blow my head off.

No one is going to stop me next Saturday.

In the photo, the kid is playing a tuba, but you can see you don't want to hear your child say "Next Saturday I’ll blow my head off"!

You Know What I’m Going to Do Next Saturday? was never “banned,” and nothing about it was really the least bit unwholesome....

Yeah, well, actually it is. The whole point is that there are double meanings and the photo is always the good meaning, but you can still figure out the dangerous meaning. That's why it's funny. And once you know the author killed herself, aren't you ready to keep it out of the hands of your little darlings?

"So... I don't get what's 'problematic' with Madonna's putting her son's incredible dance on Insta? Thanks, in any case, it was great to see it."

That's the first comment I read on the New York Magazine article, "What Do We Want From White Celebrities Right Now?" Here's the section that labels Madonna "problematic":

[S]ome celebs have shown up to protest. Others have “opened up their purses” and lent their voices to decry racism and support detailed and specific calls for reform. But just like the rest of us, they have some problematic colleagues: Madonna celebrating her son’s interpretive solidarity dance; Ashton Kutcher posting an incongruously emotional video about Black Lives Matter that veered off on a bizarre and lengthy tangent about parenting; Ellen DeGeneres tweeting “for things to change, things must change”; Drew Brees’s willfully ignorant understanding of peaceful protests and inability to have his mind opened by the steady murders of Black people on film.... More of these bizarre blathers will surely come....

Here's Madonna's son's interpretative solidarity dance. The son is black, it helps to know. You can judge for yourself. According to Madonna: "David Dances to honor and pay tribute to George and His Family and all Acts of Racism and Discrimination that happen on a daily basis in America." Yes, it's miswritten. She didn't mean "to honor...  all Acts of Racism," but that is what she said.

Maybe I don't understand the way dance works these days. I was driving home this morning at 5:30 a.m. and a man up ahead of me was crossing the street in the middle of the block. I drove slowly. It didn't matter to me. There was a red light up ahead anyway. Midway through his crossing, he did a little dance, complete with pirouette. Was he dancing for me? Was he honoring some abstraction?

There was this guy...



And this...

Let's analyze the comedy stylings of Woody Harrelson.

This Woody Harrelson character is saying that if we #defundthepolice he and his friends would just start murdering people, which is a weird way to show support of the police but fandom is wild sometimes pic.twitter.com/8gITCs1TFw

— Paul F. Tompkins (@PFTompkins) June 9, 2020

This made me look up Woody Harrelson to see what exactly are his politics. I found "Woody Harrelson: I'm an anarchist" (Politico, 2013):

So you dislike Democrats as much as you dislike the GOP?

It's all synchronized swimming to me. They all kneel and kiss the ring. Who's going to take on the oil industry or the medical industry? People compare Obama to Lyndon Johnson, but I think a better comparison is between Obama and Nixon. Because Nixon came into office saying he was going to pull out of Vietnam, and then he escalated the war. A lot of us were led to believe that Obama was the peace president, but there are still, I think, 70,000 troops in Afghanistan....

Do you want to get more involved in politics?

No. I don't believe in politics. I'm an anarchist, I guess you could say. I think people could be just fine looking after themselves.

So... presumably the real Woody would like to dismantle the police, and he adopts a redneck character to taunt the abolitionists. He has the character speak as though he would wildly kill people if left to his own judgment of how to behave in a police-free America. I'm going to guess that what Woody is trying to do is make fun of the people who want to scare us out of getting rid of the police. What do you think?

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Commenters question whether that's really Woody Harrelson, but couldn't get to a definite answer whether it is or not! I did a search and found "George Floyd protests: Is Woody Harrelson defending police brutality? Video of lookalike man baffles internet" (at meaww):

In the video, a man who resembles Harrelson, (perhaps it is Harrelson himself, we wouldn’t know) is supporting the police saying the public needs to deal with him before attacking the cops.... While the video has garnered a lot of attention...

Garnered!

... internet users are rather concerned if it’s actually Harrelson who has featured in it. While one wrote, “I'm scared to even look up what's going on with Woody Harrelson”. Another tweet read, “@WoodyHarrelson stop with your hillbilly mean guy videos. I'm skeert.” However, a few have established that it isn’t Harrelson but a random man who holds a striking resemblance to the actor....

Meanwhile, a few were convinced that the viral video was in fact a parody by Harrelson. “I ain’t gon’ lie, I thought this was Woody Harrelson doing a parody of a redneck,” wrote one follower.

I'm going to say that if it isn't Harrelson in the video, then Harrelson ought to have done something by now to disavow the video or try to get it taken down.