FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

• Hey baby (above) has been in my head for awhile. The other day someone directed me to a funny item in McSweeney's or something like that (can't find it now) in which a woman writes clever reviews of her street harassers. It was okay, but in my book no Hey Baby, partly because it didn't have Pat Place on guitar, and partly because, if we're going to use mordant humor to cope with endemic sexism, I prefer it with a little scrappiness, which is Maggie Estep's big plus here: she's like some cute, adenoidal raven. It's also partly because, of course, that place and those days are written in my heart, which breaks to think how lost they are. Maggie Estep is dead; John S. Hall, the King Missile guy who tangos with her here, keeps his oar in, but is mainly a lawyer. Now they are old, now they are young; they change all in a moment as their thought changes. It is sometimes a terrible thing to be out of the body, God help us.

• It had been remarked elsewhere that CNN's reason for getting rid of Jeffrey Lord was bullshit; Lord was clearly using Sieg Heil as a joke, not as an ode to Hitler. It's also bad tactically, because it gives Lord the opportunity (which he swiftly seized) to play the First Amendment martyr. But this false move has its merits. First, it goes to show how pusillanimous CNN is, and may convince people who should but don't know better that Big Media is not their friend. I know this overlaps with the POV of the Breitbart Bund, but the reason they have gotten over so well with it is its kernel of truth -- the nets are certainly not their friends, either, and the Breitbarters' acknowledgement of their gutlessness was what made it so easy for them to manipulate the mainsteam press; they knew that the media "moguls" would bend with the first hard word borne on hot air. That's how we wound up with an administration full of feebs, cranks, and fascists -- these people first colonized the airwaves as the browbeaten refs went "let's hear them out, it's only fair," and when we got crypto-Nazis in the White House and memos about "cultural Marxists" at the NSA, no one could remember what was insane about it.  That's why Jeffrey Lord, whom I have shown time and time again to be a meretricious piece of shit, was on CNN in the first place.  Which brings up the other silver lining of CNN's unfortunate decision -- bad as it is, it reduces the opportunity for Lord to normalize his shabby arguments and further dumb down the discourse. So I won't wring my hands too much about the reasoning. As the Google Bro incident and their many other flops-on-the-pitch show, they'll scream foul no matter what.