Arthur D. Hlavaty

This year’s scandal in the minor league football championships is inappropriate grabbing.

The Republicans are shocked that people could react to a presidential election by refusing to go along with what the winner wants to do. Where could we ever have gotten an idea like that? Over on the other side, there are people suggesting that we do to Trump everything the Republicans did to Obama—yell “you lie,” make fun of his name, call his wife a whore—because, hey, they did it. Jim Wright suggests we act civilized instead.

The Conan Doyle estate is infamous for trying to control all presentations of the Great Detective, and I always figured that they were too strict but someone had to do that or we’d have TV shows bringing Holmes into the present and making Watson into a woman. Anyway, the new show has decided that Holmes must be an action figure because audiences won’t identify with an intellectual crime solver (you know, like POC or queers). Someone at the Grauniad complained, and there is a defense of the new approach, complete with alleged poetry, noting that Doyle himself stooped to that sort of thing.

Thanx to Tor.com.

It is like an eternal recurrence. The Republicans, with their simple childlike faith in the Market, deregulate it. It breaks. The Democrats fix it. Trump wants to start it all over again. If we can’t break the pattern here, let’s look at the next step. President Obama made the same mistake with the bankers that Flounder made with the brothers of Animal House: He trusted them. Perhaps President Duckworth or President Harris or whoever will learn from history.

Thanx to Charles P. Pierce.