I know this news will be important to a number of my readers: the fourth season of Arrested Development is coming out next month. Netflix announced that they will be releasing 15 new episodes that will constitute a fourth season. All of the episodes will be released at once at 12:01 am Pacific time on 26 May.

The weird thing about this is that I’ve been checking Wikipedia often to see if anything had been announced. There hasn’t been a thing. I had begun to give up hope. One problem is that everyone (especially the kids) are getting older. But more important, many of the stars have become much bigger and thus, much more expensive. Now, it seems quite suddenly, Wikipedia reports that on 7 August of last year, the gang began shooting the new episodes.

Because I’m a pessimist at heart, I’ve suddenly become very worried. I was looking forward to the fifth season of Breaking Bad, as well, and it turned out to be a total disaster. I’m more hopeful for Arrested Development. It can take off in any direction. That wasn’t true of Breaking Bad. The problem with it is that the producers decided to turn the protagonist into an antagonist; it isn’t just that I don’t like that; the show is supposed to be believable and that change just isn’t. Arrested Development is a series about a bunch of really narcissistic characters. I’m sure they won’t change that and so there should be no fundamental problem plaguing the show as there has been for Breaking Bad.

So set your calendars and watches. I know I’m going to be there at one minute past midnight to watch one or more episodes. I’m sure I will have much to say here in the afternoon of 26 May.

Afterword

If you don’t have a Netflix subscription, I’m sure you can get one of those one month trials and start some time in May. Provide a little time before, so you can catch up on the show. They currently have the first three seasons on Instant Watch. But be sure to leave enough time afterwards to watch all 15 episodes. In my case, that would be about half a day.

Those clever devils at Quinnipiac thought to ask people whether they thought the same sex marriage issue should be settled by the Constitution or by the states. The results were: 56-36 in favor of Ye Good Ol’ Constitution. Everyone wants the Constitution to decide this one. Except… Are you ready for a shocker?! Republicans think the states should decide by the relatively narrow margin 49-45. What does that tell us?

Primarily, it tells us that people who know they are losing a battle grab onto states rights. The argument goes like this: Sure, you godless homo huggers can have your gay-boy marriage, but leave me and mine here in our intolerant state alone! And so what we have here is the conservative movement hunkering down and trying to stop the inevitable march of progress from touching them. They’re probably hoping North Korea bombs us back to the stone age before they have to give in on one of the two issues that God really cares about. (The other is that every zygote is sacred.)

The sad thing is that the conservative clowns on the Supreme Court are most likely going to do the same thing. “Oh, this is a state issue; why are we even talking about it?” I wonder if they really think that future Americans will find this dodge compelling. Certainly, when we see some person on the TV from years ago talking about “states rights” we don’t hesitate from thinking, “Bigot!” I suspect people like John Roberts think that their faith will protect them—that people will give them a pass because they were just following their religion. Of course, so were the bigots of the civil rights era.

It has been no secret that we are heading at breakneck speed toward sexual orientation equality. What is interesting about the Quinnipiac poll is that it shows that the Republicans understand it too.

Welcome to the 21th century guys! We look forward to you catching up!

The great French director Eric Rohmer was born on this day back in 1920. And Anthony Perkins was born back 1932.

Overrated, but reasonably good writer Maya Angelou is 85. Record producer Clive Davis is 81. Hugo Weaving is 53. And David Cross and Robert Downey Jr are 49.

But the day belongs to McKinley Morganfield, or as you probably know him, Muddy Waters. He was born on this day back in 1913. Here he is doing “Got My Mojo Working,” which I think explains just about everything you need to know about why he was so important:

This song has been going through my head for days. It is a great one at least: Edwin Starr’s “War”:

What a great live version: totally kick ass band. And Starr sounds great— regrettably just a couple of years before he died.

Matt Yglesias caught a remarkable series of tweets this morning from Rory Cooper. Cooper is Eric Cantor’s Communications Director and as such is committed to idiotic conservative beliefs. Earlier, White House Communications Director Daniel Pfeiffer said, “You don’t want to balance the budget for the purposes of simply balancing the budget.” Well, that was high-larious to Cooper. What idiots those guys are at the White House thinking you don’t want to reduce the debt just for the sake of reducing the debt!

Regular readers should know that this is how conservatives think. This is why they are so concerned about debt to GDP ratios instead of the debt interest burdens. Or to put it more simply: they don’t even know why they want to balance the budget, they just know that it is the good and moral thing to do. And this makes perfect sense when you consider that the Republicans are only using the budget deficit as a reason to lower taxes (!) and cut social spending.

You may remember David Frum’s series of tweets lampooning the NRA proposal that all we need is an armed guard at every school. Cooper was trying to do the same thing with his tweets this morning. Like with this one:

Except, of course, this is not the same thing. You don’t feed your kids for the sake of feeding them, you feed them for the sake of nourishing them and not causing them to die. Under normal circumstances (with a booming economy), you want to balance the budget so that the government’s borrowing is not taking capital away from the private sector. But right now, that isn’t the case at all. In fact, the private sector is sitting on loads of cash that they aren’t spending. So in fact, we don’t want to balance the budget because doing so right now would be really bad for our economy.

But conservatives don’t understand this. In fact, they think that reasonable economic principles that have been well understood for 70 years are high-larious. Because they are ignorant. And evil.

Afterword

In later tweets Cooper claims that balancing the budget is good for economic growth. As I pointed out: in the current economy this is not true. But there is no convincing him. He just keeps repeating “economic growth.” There is actual science behind that belief and Cooper does not understand any of it. It’s just talking points to him.

Giovanni Carmine, an art curator in Switzerland, had an interesting idea. It also turned out to be horrifying. He took a number depictions of women in great pieces of art throughout history and altered them into our modern standards of beauty. That is: he made them painfully skinny. We aren’t talking here about Rubenesque models who we know to be plump. He took women who I’d always thought of as being pretty thin—women like the model for Mona Lisa.

I recommend clicking over to the Ensemble Magazine article, The Mona Lisa Retouched, According to the Ideal of Beauty Now. What really stands out is how sickly the women look compared to the originals. But if you look at the new imagines for a while, you soon see that they aren’t distortions. They really are what the modern world thinks of as beautiful.

And that’s why it is horrifying.

Note: the Mona Lisa above is probably the least horrific of the many examples.

All my life, I’ve been disappointed with “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” It just doesn’t make any sense. What exactly am I supposed to get from it? I don’t suppose it matters. But back in 1783, Washington Irving was born on this day, so I’ll let it pass. Someone else I’m not a big fan of: Leslie Howard. He was born in 1893. The great Bay Area columnist Herb Caen was born in 1916. And Marlon Brando was born in 1924.

Doris Day is 89 today. Que Sera, Sera? I don’t think so! I didn’t even know she was still alive. Marsha Mason and Wayne Newton are 71. Tony Orlando is 69, so tie that around your old oak tree! Alec Baldwin is 55. He doesn’t look a day over, I don’t know, 55? And Eddie Murphy is 52.

The birthday prize goes out to the grrrrreat Jane Goodall who is 79 today. I’m sure you all know about her groundbreaking work on chimpanzees. But you may not know the story about the Far Side cartoon above. When it came out, Goodall was in Africa. Her people went crazy and sent an angry letter. But when Goodall came back and saw the cartoon, she thought it was funny as hell and the whole controversy was over. However, all money made from that cartoon goes to the Jane Goodall Institute.

Happy birthday Dr. Goodall! May we be able to say that many, many years into the future.