Pun Salad

The punters at Polymarket seem to think this more likely:

BREAKING: The odds of Jesus Christ returning this year have doubled overnight.

4% chance. pic.twitter.com/fPOVV8aFSA

— Polymarket (@Polymarket) February 4, 2026

I suppose you'd see longer odds as you got more specific, for example "Jesus Christ returning at Levi's Stadium on February 8, 2026, disrupting Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl. That link goes to Philip Greenspun's speculation on BB's set list. "Monaco" sounds as if it could be rated NSFSBHS ("not safe for Super Bowl Halftime Shows"). Phil excerpts the lyrics (in English), which I won't do. But here's ChatGPT's analysis:

Well, I'll watch anyway, just in case JC shows. In that event, future postings may be put off indefinitely.

Also of note:

• Federalism was fun while it lasted. Yuval Levin engages in some long-memory whataboutism: Nationalizing Elections Is a Very Bad Idea, as It Was When Democrats Tried It. (NR gifted link)

  When Joe Biden entered office with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress in 2021, the Democrats insisted that their first priority would be to nationalize American election administration.

  A bill to do that, the so-called “For the People Act,” was H.R. 1 and S. 1 in the 117th Congress. In the immediate wake of a crisis of confidence in our election system created by a president who refused to accept his loss of a close election, the Democrats sought to have an exceptionally narrow Democratic majority in Washington take over key election-administration rulemaking in every state and impose new and often looser rules involving voter registration, ID requirements, eligibility, ballot harvesting, early voting, drop-boxes, mail-in voting, locations and hours of polling stations, voting by felons, campaign donations, and more. It was madness. Utter civic vandalism.

  The problem wasn’t even that their doing this would change the results of elections. It’s unlikely that it would have. The problem was just that this would be a needless assault on public confidence in the system at a moment of already collapsing trust. But anyone pointing this out at the time was sure to be dismissed as a racist partisan hack (believe me).

  Pun Salad's postings relevant to the "For the People Act" back in 2021: here, here, here, and here. I'd forgotten just how awful it was.

• I would have deleted "Maybe" from the headline. Tom Foley has a more modest proposal: Maybe It’s Time to Close the Kennedy Center for Good. (WSJ gifted link)

  Washington isn’t a cultural center the way New York, Nashville and Los Angeles are. It has no cultural infrastructure to support artists and art-based institutions: no Juilliard, no Grand Ole Opry, no University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. Washington doesn’t even have a bohemian or hip section of town where artists prefer to hang out. Given scant home-based talent and difficulty recruiting the best talent to Washington, the programming at the Kennedy Center hasn’t been competitive with what large-city performing arts institutions offer.

  The building is another problem. People try to be nice about it, but let’s face it, it’s cold, flinty and cheap looking. It lacks grace and grandness. Designed by Edward Durell Stone, it suffers from the out-of-date look of similar 1960s architecture. It’s a bunch of rectangular boxes stacked on top of each other. Too many straight lines and flat surfaces. It’s jammed into a tight space along the Potomac as if it were a low-budget real-estate development without enough money for land worthy of the building.

  The exterior and interior are bland. The building has no elegant approach. Despite its exterior Carrara marble surfaces, the building looks lightweight and poorly made. The pillars surrounding the building don’t fit it. The interior is cavernous with no comfortable, welcoming spaces (including the boardroom). Even the President’s Box feels as though the National Park Service manages it, which it once did.

  In the 1970s, when we lived in suburban Maryland, Mrs. Salad and I used to frequent the American Film Institute's small movie theater at the JFK Center, which showed classic movies, cheaply. The AFI boogied out of DC proper in 2003, moving out to a renovated theater in Silver Spring, Maryland. That was long after we moved back to New Hampshire, where the movies are more expensive, but everything else is nicer.

Recently on the book blog:

[Pictured book here is pretty close to my hardcover copy, obtained from the Science Fiction Book Club back in 1981 or so, unread until now, about 45 years later!]

I was encouraged at the beginning of this book; it threatened to have interesting characters, a unique setting, some intriguing ideas, some sly humor, … but it just went on too long, and got silly and incoherent, and I forgot what all the fuss was about.

It's set mostly on the planet End of Nothing, where a group of robots have established the "Vatican-17", a thousand-year-old project to create an ultimate true religion. In support of this effort, they have enlisted human "Listeners", and developed technology to send Listeners throughout space and time, so they may experience the variety of life's instances. For example, what it's like to have been a trilobite, back on early Earth, burrowing in the warm ocean mud.

Into this stable setup comes Tennyson, a doctor on the lam from planet Gutshot; he essentially stows away on the starship Wayfarer, helmed by a cynical captain, whose only purpose is to ferry passengers and supplies to End of Nothing. Also on the ship is Jill Roberts, a journalist who's been hired to write a history of Project Pope, describing its major findings. Once on the planet, they encounter Decker, who got stranded on End of Nothing after a long-ago starship disaster, and now leads a hermit-like existence with "Whisperer", who appears to him as a sentient cloud of sparkly dust.

Complications arise when one of the Listeners, "Mary", an older lady, claims to have encountered Heaven on her journey. Can that possibly be true?

So, not bad, but after a few hundred pages…

Plop, plop, plop went Poppler.