It has been about two weeks since I last wrote here and it is raising my level of angst. It’s not like nothing has happened during that time, or that I haven’t thought about it, but, for some reason, unknown to me, I could never string together an interesting series of comments.

Mort Saul died last month and I wanted to say something, but what? I was a big fan of Saul’s but I haven’t seen or even heard of him for years so Saul’s dying, in Mill Valley at 94, was a shook mostly because I didn’t even know he was still alive. At first glance, dying at 94 seems like a pretty good run, but Saul actually died, as a comedian, when he became obsessed with the President Jack Kennedy Assassination and was canceled. Still, he was the most famous and successful comedian in the country for a while and he revolutionized stand-up. Before Saul, comedians told jokes, Saul riffed on the news, ad-libbing – well, seemingly ad-libbing – making comments on the day’s news from the folded newspaper he carried.

Today, Dave Chappell seems the most like Saul and, like Saul, people are campaigning to cancel Chappell over one, or, maybe, several. of his riffs. In Chappell’s case, it is his remarks in his last Stand up gig for Netflix, The Closer, on transgender people that got him in trouble. I’ve watched The Closer twice and, while Chapell makes several jokes at the expense of trans-people, to my ear, he is never is degrading. Just funny. I think, as importantly, both Saul and Chappell own up to what they have said, they know their jokes should be funny and, if that humor offends somebody, they don’t try to brush it off as “I was only joking.”

That is not the case with, say, the new “Go Brandon” meme that is making the rounds with some Conservative politicians and pundits in Washington. “Go Brandon” somehow became code for “Fuck Biden” but when challenged, the pundits brushed it off as “Just a joke.” But no joke is just a joke, every joke has a target, every joke is commenting on something, even a joke as unfunny as “Go Brandon”, and to brush it off is just a sign of cowardice.

Lastly, here are some pictures I took a couple of weeks ago. While we were at Michele’s family cabin in Olympic Valley, we drove down to Lone pine on Highway 395 and then back up into the mountains on the Cottonwood Pass Road to a little over 10,000 feet, to see what the Sierras looked like with their new dusting of snow.