FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Good show, too.

•   Just wanted to pass along a street scene: Some years back I first noticed in our DC neighborhood an ice cream truck that worked local housing projects and was not a unit from Mr. Softee or Kool Man, as I recall from New York days, but a hard-used delivery van painted brown (not by Earl Scheib but by, apparently, non-professionals using many layers of house paint) that announced its arrival, not with a recorded jingle or chimes, but with an old-fashioned, covered metal burglar alarm mounted on its side. A side window had been cut and fitted with sliding lucite doors and I guess they had a cooler back there for the popsicles and Nutty Buddies. The other side was windowless and decorated with decals of Disney characters. I had not noticed it for a few years, but yesterday as I biked through the alley behind some Pinnacle housing, the truck was parked and serving to a gaggle of kids. I can't say for sure the burglar alarm was still there because I hadn't heard it ring and I was riding past on the blind side, but I noticed for the first time that above the Disney decals the proprietors had stuck colorful, squiggly letters to the van, the kind of letters you see in low-budget child care centers, and the letters read DREAMS OF PARIS.

Oh, here's another local ice cream vendor -- at least I think it's ice cream:

•   As mentioned last week I am very busy with the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down newsletter (to which I bid you subscribe, it's cheap and as a Monday-through-Friday publication may add shape to your quarantine-malformed weeks), and this sadly reduces the time I can spend on alicublog. But! From time to time I release one of my issue to non-subscribers. Here's one from this week about the Liberace ladies vs. Alex Jones. Enjoy!

•   On that head, like I said, I don't look in on the cartoon characters that have been alicublog's primary dramatis personae as much as I used to, but I did recently make a quick visit to the land of Rod Dreher. Quarantine has put the zap on his head pretty bad, and it's not getting better. He's had a full-length sputter about Norma McCorvey aka Jane Roe, who apparently revealed at the end of her life that she'd been grifting when she declared herself pro-life, followed by testimony from another wingnut (and fellow culture-warrior) saying McCorvey was "truly pro-life" ("I never heard her say anything about money"), so there. (Any of these people ever see Citizen Ruth?) In the sputter, though, are a few gems, including this:

I’ve seen this kind of thing in all kinds of activists, left and right, over the years. Again, it is possible that some pro-life leaders coldly chose to exploit McCorvey. Again, I think it more likely that it was unconscious. That doesn’t make it right, but I think this kind of thing is common in the world of political activism. I do know, though, of one pretty hardcore pro-life activist, a Christian who had no scruples about deceiving pregnant women about his crisis pregnancy centers. Other CPC workers distanced themselves from him, because they knew he was dishonest, and they were afraid that he would hurt the reputations of all CPCs. This guy believed that the cause justified anything. Eventually he got in trouble over his deceit.

Gasp -- a guy who runs a "crisis pregnancy centers" being dishonest? What's next -- dishonest snake-oil salesmen? Elsewhere Dreher, who sometimes tsk-tsks over egregious racist murders like that of Ahmaud Arbery, actually does the yeah but what about all the black people who kill white people bit, and even throws in some gay-thrill-killer shit, citing the murder of Jesse Dirkhising, which even Andrew Sullivan has stopped using as a distraction. And here's the closer from Dreher's latest post on COVID-19 in Europe:

One thing is for sure: Covid-19 is going to take care of the immigration crisis to Europe. No government will be able to remain in power if it allows more of the Third World poor to flood into their nation under these economic conditions.

This sort of thing is why, when someone identifies themself as a Christian to me, I assume he's a vicious bastard.