There’s the job market. Which is a lot like a beaver — say, a Brown graduate — who discovers that he has to defend his dam against all comers, which is pretty much the way of nature. Only the government doesn’t want beaver dams anymore. At which point he becomes a federal bureaucrat. Or… he becomes thinner, smarter, and more opportunistic.

What do you do in the latter case? You become a predator. And a killer. But small and clever.

Now you’re a jumped up weasel. Interestingly enough, these exist in varying forms on four different continents. Won’t torture you with the Tasmanian Devil. You can do that for yourself. Incredibly brave idiot mammals who will do anything to win. (Think Crimson Tide.) Because they never give up. Same thing said about both beavers and jumped up weasels. Thinking yet? Little like us maybe? The way we used to be? Before we got so fat and lazy and stoned and stupid? Hardworking, relentless, and courageous. We’re us but nature still shows us what’s underneath our flaccid pretensions.

Hard-wired, folks. Try this. The mongoose are nothing compared to the honey badgers. Nothing. Who can take the balls off a hyena at no minute’s notice? Meet Stoffel, the smartest mammal you’ve ever met. And the meanest. (Think Fight Club.)

Which makes the Ann Arbor team the wimps we always knew they were. Kidding. There are no more wolverines in Michigan, but the ones we have left are still North American. Therefore nicer than the tiny monsters from Africa. (You didn’t watch the PBS honey badger piece yet, did you? Give yourself a break. DO IT! You’ll laugh your ass off, I promise.) Why in the hell hasn’t Stan Lee created a female superhero Honey Badger character? Chauvinism, I suspect. Not really. Just a want of knowledge and imagination. Honey Badger would completely kill Wolverine of the X-Men tales.

But wolverines are cool too. They’re not even scared of bears. 30 lbs isn’t big.

Think about civilization. It’s programmed in. Most mammals are conscious. Probably most life forms are conscious.

Even Michigan Wolverines. Hopefully, Ohio State Buckeyes don’t suffer from the same frailty.

Life consists of beavers and honey badgers. Capitalism consists of arbitrating between cooperation and aggression. Beavers are ambitious if not aggressive and even honey badgers are cooperative to a point. Life is like that. Capitalism is both these things. No conflict. Just a stretching synergy.

What part of this don’t you get? Maybe this part.

Sredni Vashtar. Do one thing for me. Save my country from Brown. And Harvard.

If the end is near, you want to gulp scotch with this one. She’s got some eyes on her.

Edna said I was neglecting the seasoned set by picking Miss Fisher. Guess she was right. I’d been looking for people who are closely associated with a fictional character. When I look older for an End of World companion I find a fertile field. Top of the list, this one.

Helen Mirren is the ace of aces among women. Quite beautiful without being pretty.

She is closely associated with a fictional character, Jane Tennison. Over quite a few years we watched her, totally undolled up, survive a constant stream of male chauvinist attacks and yet solve the crime. Along the way, of course, she fell into loneliness, isolation, promiscuity and alcoholism — the point at which she started receiving acting awards.

Now she’s a Dame of the British Empire. Why? Because of all her great acting? NO! Because she’s the jolliest competitor in the sport of Getting to Be a Dame. Quite simply, there is no British actress, however well Shakespeared or Redgraved by the Thespian establishment, who has been more eager to throw off her clothes and and show off her boobs and bush than Dame Helen Mirren. Even into late middle age.

This is the safest for work. The movie was called The Cook, The Thief, The Lover, and the Most Tits and Trim Ever Displayed at Cannes by a Woman Over Forty.

She’s done some great acting too. Like there was the Jane Tennison stuff. she stewed, stormed, fretted, and fought her own base instincts to just tear off that blouse, rip down those panties, and be her younger, freer self.

That’s more like it, Detective Chief Superintendant.

Seek, and find, the truth, wherever it lies.

There it is. At least for now. But what of later’ when I’m 64?

Oops. My son shouldn’t have seen that. But he’s not really my son, except in the movie. Actually, he’s my current main squeeze.

So. If there are only days left till the, you know, EOTW, the very best bet is probably Helen Mirren.

But maybe you need an old guy too. This is getting complicated.

If you haven’t seen her, you don’t know what you’re missing.

She wasn’t meaning to be critical, because she really liked the post about Captain Hastings and the End of the World, but she had an obvious question: What about the women?

I floundered for a long time by my reckoning, tossing out three names in 20 seconds, and then as the clock was ticking ominously toward the half minute mark I came up with the answer.

Miss Fisher. She’s like a female Hastings with a brain. Not to mention a sex drive. She’s like this rich Australian flapper detective trollop. Meaning no offense. Her wardrobe is perfect. She has an Hispano Suiza that would look nice in bed with Hastings’s Lagonda, and she carries a golden revolver in her garter. What more do you need? Oh, right. Champagne every day, if not every hour, and she has her own Hastings, a police inspector who is traditional and handsome, but not at all stupid, because attracted as he is to Miss Fisher, he is not suicidal. Which is where the End of the World comes in. Why the hell not ravish Miss Fisher?

Think about that as you enjoy these photos. Make up your own captions after this first one.

This portrait of Miss Fisher from her wilder days was the maguffin in one of her mysteries. She liked making her police inspector blush at the sight of it.

You know, I’m thinking Hastings could handle it. He may be dumb as a fence post, but he’s a man’s man and Miss Fisher likes that.

Thus, our End of the World couple.

Since we pretty much are at the end of the world, it might be time to decide what roles we want to play in the last few deals of the cards.

Hercule Poirot was Agatha Christies’s most eccentric creation. The anti-Holmes if you will. A plump Belgian with a Mr. Potato Head mustache and a sidekick who made Holmes’s Watson look like a nuclear physicist. Captain Hastings.

But Hastings had his points. Invariably good natured, so well born that he never took offense at the Belgian’s condescension, and, here’s the key point, actually better dressed. Poirot was always overdressed. Hastings had that just threw-on these Savile Row rags look that made all the difference. Tie a bit askew, but everything else a triumph of English tailoring. And he had the hero thing down to a tee if you could only get his attention long enough.

He was the forerunner of Nero Wolfe’s Archie Goodwin. Just as much an action man but not (nearly) as clever. Both in love with clothes, cars, and fine dining. Archie had a better feel for the ladies though. Hastings somehow knew the ladies would find him.

Where were we? Time to figure out how to ride out the apocalyptic storm. How better than to be an idealized version of a character beloved throughout what remains of the civilized world?

P. G. Wodehouse. …One I’ve written about before. I read the first definitive biography of him a few years back, and what’s clear about him — as for so many other humorists — is that his life was in many ways sad, even though he lived to great old age, produced about a hundred novels, and umpty-gazillion short stories. He was a man of baffling contradictions and therefore a more useful source of insight about the U.K. than most of the “serious” writers in his country who were contemporaries or came later. He seems to us locked permanently in the England between the two world wars, a fantasy realm of country estates, two-seat roadsters, gentlemen’s clubs, and aristocratic aunts with lorgnettes and no knowledge whatever of everyday English life. Yet he is the source cited by Evelyn Waugh, the deadliest satirist of his age, as the master of dialogue from whom Waugh learned how to eviscerate pretension and hypocrisy in the most maliciously brilliant novels of the twentieth century. In person, Waugh was witty and mean; Wodehouse was everywhere described as dull. Wodehouse was afraid of assertive women, indifferent to sex, not because he was gay, it seems, but because his personality was formed by distant, even cold, family relations, and then frozen for good in adolescence by his happier experience in boarding schools when he finally escaped from home. Then he managed to get himself exiled forever from Britain by being a “good sport” on the radio when he was interned by Germans in the early days of World War II. He never went home again. He never complained. Because that’s the way Brits are. No matter what they do to you, you have to petend to have the emotional range of a cricket bat.

Yes. yes! Let’s be dull, preternaturally cheerful, well dressed, almost deliberately obtuse, and faintly absurd. I give you the Cary Grant version of Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster. Dumb as Dirt and quickest to pick up a check.

Always ready with the Lagonda.

The right hat for every occasion.

Well dressed as any Poofster.

Gravely up for the end of the world without the slightest notion of what it entails.

Does it get any better than that? I want to be that man. Most women want someone to be that man. He orders champagne with ultimate sangfroid right before Obama makes everything go away. Perfect.

Rocky Marciano. The only undefeated heavyweight.

What everybody’s missing. Nobody wants a woman president, let alone Hillary. That’s not who we are. Everybody knows about women. Can’t stop talking, making trouble just because, and always with a chip on their shoulder that somehow hurts women more than men. The ones who are good are rarer than hen’s teeth, and they usually know better than wanting to be in charge of a bunch of Chatty-Cathy’s.

Nobody wants a minority president anymore. Had it with identity politics. Don’t care if you can change your accent in every venue, Barack. So so tiresome. Don’t care if you can speak Spanish, Jeb. Don’t like Spanish. Especially out of the First Mouth.

What we want is a goddamn man in the Oval Office. Someone who says what he means and means what he says, no wimpy appeasing aside.

Trump’s just a flare. Showing how it’s done. Don’t get scared by the press. Don’t back down. don’t apologize. Let loose that left hook when the opening comes.

So far, all the 37 Republican candidates are sissy boys, anxious to say what the mass media insist they say. “We would never depart from the orthodox Democrat standpoint: open the borders, black lives matter more than anyone else’s, abortion’s just not that controversial even if it’s a huge moneymaking proposition for organizations paid for by congress, and this income inequality thing is outrageous: “My Georgetown caterer with all those foxy Spictarts makes more gross income than I do. Outrageous.”

But WSJ and NR are foaming at the mouth that anyone would justify Trump’s comments about McCain. Really? I said worse about McCain years ago. He’s a bad bad man.

Treason.

They’re all wimps. Crybabies. Crawling little worms who think Republicans win by offending no one. Here are the ones I challenge to a debate on the merits: Goldberg, Williamson, Cook, and Nordlinger. I know they’re the smartest of the staff writers. But they haven’t crossed sabers with me when I’m mad.

Bruisers are what we need. Trump is a sad sack but a hard hitter, scrappy in the corners. Christie is a true slugger but vulnerable to both the left hook and right cross. Hillary is the guy who buys all the fights before they are fought. Ever seen Danny Kaye’s Fighting Milkman?

Cruz is Ali, the most gifted natural talent in the game. But all the promoters have decided to fix the fight against him. When Cruz declined to comment on Trump, WAPO’s Jennifer Ruben declared, to her shame, that it was an act of cowardice. Ali punched everyone out. Liston called him a coward until he felt the fury of the seventh round.

Tired of all the court jesters. All too close to the court, all too much in jest for my taste. The country is dying. National Review will go on. Will the United States? Do they even care? Not as long as they keep getting their appearance and speaking fees.

My challenge stands. I can outwrite your top four. Not to defend Trump. But to demonstrate that you have no idea what’s going on outside your NR bubble.

It’s time to punch our way past the twits into contention.

Rand’s heroine of Atlas Shrugged wasn’t a pro-choice, weed smoking alternative rock atheist. She was a railroad executive. Name of Dagny Taggart.

Things her acolytes don’t actually get about her. She was a philosopher. Her fictional creations were people who knew what work was. The hero of Atlas Shrugged was Dagny Taggart, who didn’t care about objectivist philosophy as much as keeping a troubled railroad running. Her first two lovers were the same. Hank Reardon invented a new metal alloy, which the government took from him and called Miracle Metal and Francisco the ore baron who spoke for ten pages about the meaning of the US dollar. Cool. Rand also creamed her jeans over an an architect named Howard Roarke in The Fountainhead. Clearly she loved the doers more than the ideologues and was seeking to preserve and promote their freedom to create.

The acolytes love the philosophy part and never seem to get the hard hard work part. They want to do what they want to do, whenever they want to do it, because they are Ayn’s heirs.

You see, the kindest interpretation of Rand’s atheism is that she just put the whole question of God aside, regarding it as corrupted by collectivist doctrines like Soviet Communism. Fair enough. That was her entire cultural and historical experience as a person born into Stalinist Russia.

As an escapee from that soul destroying system and its educational propaganda, she concentrated on the freeing properties of capitalism, people interacting for personal gain, as an antidote to the death represented by totalitarian government.

None of this makes her a theologian. She was a victim of a vicious system. It certainly doesn’t make her an articulate spokesman for atheism. Raised in a rigid system, she became rigid. Raised in a totalitarian culture, she became ruthless and vicious in her personal dealings. The biographies confirm this.

She could brook no criticism. We all have the weaknesses of our strengths and the strengths of our weaknesses. We can learn from her without being acolyte slaves.

Hence my defense. What she believed in above everything else was the virtue of work and dedication and what rewards it should bring you. John Galt was just a fairy tale that stood her in place of a God she’d been disabled from believing in.

How many of her followers are accomplished at running railroads, innovating in technology, and excelling in acts of creative commercial art? Thinking mostly none. But we can light up a cigarette in her honor.

God bless the child. She was lost but she is found.

What do you think?

Being an angry bitch is the best way to get Maher type ratings.

Sorry. He’s a corrupt politician. That’s all he is. Nobody who is a real war hero runs on that label. Unless he’s a conquering general, which is another kettle of fish. McCain is no conquering general. He’s a relic of the worst chapter in a lost war.

Nor is he a hero. He did his duty, which was brave and admirable. But not heroic. It’s what the military expects. Duty. MacArthur laid it out in his famous speech. Duty, Honor, Country. McCain managed one out of three. He told his captors everything he knew, which takes away Honor and Country. But he refused to be withdrawn from captivity because his captors knew his dad was an admiral. Which gives him half the Honor points back. Hero? I think not.

Yeah. My dad once brought one of these P-47s home with more than 300 bullet holes. He died in ’99. Never was a fan of the war hero from Arizona.

McCain flew about 60 fewer combat missions than my dad did. Who never thought of himself as a hero. He shipped out with six other pilots in WWII and was the only one who came home.

Senator McCain faced nothing like the certain death my grandfather faced as a captain of infantry in the Rainbow Division in the trenches. Here’s what he saw…

At the Argonne Forest…

Nice forest, eh?

At Chateau Thierry…

More nice French scenery

At Belleau Wood…

I think the definition of heroes is up for grabs, frankly.

People called him “Cap” but he never said a word out loud about what he experienced in France as the Americans won the bloodiest infantry war ever fought.

What war was like before Bill Maher made the world safe for shrilly obscene denial.

Don’t get excited. He’s only Cornell.

Cornell needs a rethink. And so does Tom Zampino. Sorry, Tom. I know you mean well.

Don’t get excited. He’s only Ivy League Jerk.

Sad, really. He’s short. Ugly. And only Cornell. How could it be worse? Bill Maher. Man of no character, no interest, no intelligence, no nothing. He’s just a drab. Invite him here. Tell him the Harvard guy is waiting. I’ll fucking kill him. Tell him.

But he won’t come. Cornellians are all cowards.

Nicole. Nasty piece of work.

I had her number ten years ago. Sad to say, nobody else did.

You’re Fired.

The View did what George W couldn’t but should have. Fire her sorry ass.

She saya I’m not photogenic. Well who is at my age?

It’s fun taking pictures of yourself late at night in the coolest sunglasses on earth. Women want you to look good while doing it. Nothing is ever enough for them.

Serena and Novak.

The women soccer players are complaining about not getting equal pay with the men. Never mind the fact that the women’s World Cup earns about $6 million in ad revenue to the men’s $1 billion plus.

Wimbledon seems to be an exception. Men and women, as I understand it, are making about the same in prize money. In which case I’d suggest the women need to play best out of five sets too. You know. The men, who play much better tennis over all, have to play 40 percent more for the same prize. Is that fair?

No. Serena Williams wouldn’t win a set against the top fifty men. She looks like she could go five sets, though. No?

He’s on my newsfeed and he’s from Philly. I don’t need anything more. Here’s the plight of Anthony Denaro.

I’d never take to the social network to ask for help. Neither would you. Until you’re stranded and in real trouble. Which I suddenly am.

Maybe you can relate to this. Successful career, family, and high hopes for the future.

Then, one day, one leg is stiff and numb. You ignore it for a time. Then a doctor tells you you have Multiple Sclerosis, not the TV Martin Sheen kind that goes away at the commercial or when the plot requires, but the kind that relentlessly drags you toward a wheelchair and loss of eye focus and eventual paralysis.

I’ve had an awful prognosis since my first diagnosis. But there is some hope. If I can get back north, there’s a spinal injection that offers me a 20 to 40 percent hope of improvement or even cure.

But I don’t have $28,000. Funny. It’s not the amount of money needed to make a movie. Just the amount of money needed to give me a chance to survive.

So. I’m not Martin Sheen. I’m Anthony Denaro. I have a life, a girlfriend, a mind to share with all of you. And all I need is $28,000. And bit by bit I am dying. You probably can’t save me. But maybe, just maybe, you might.

If you want to contribute, do a search for GOFUNDME.com and Anthony Denaro. If you have bright ideas about how to raise $28K, please describe them in the comments here. The clock is ticking.

It was called a gift from France. He was so pretty, that Bonaparte. You never got it, did you? Why we (meaning they, of course) always get our way, don’t you know.

Everybody knows this crap, right?

So I ran across a Facebook post that referenced Orwell’s Newspeak. I made a mildly snarky comment about my pleasure that millennials were hearing about 1984 and wondered if they had yet started learning Animal Farm. Then this happened.

Started equably enough. (CLICK FOR BIG ENOUGH TO READ.)

The pot went straight to a boil after that.

The shutdown you get with women going for Hillary regardless. Know any of those? CLICK FOR READING SIZE IF YOU’RE AN OLD MAN OR AN OLD WOMAN.

The coup de grace.

Thinking. What an odd idea. You can even do it with a vagina. CLIT FOR BIGGER.

You just get tired. People who insist they are smart, logical, competent, responsible, and thoughtful. Only they vote with their genitals. In what universe does that make any sense? So I took Hillary down. She’s unspeakably drab, an old woman with nothing left in her body but the reflexive desire for power. Do we need that? Do women need that? No. Nobody needs that.

Cassie basking under the cat god.

Hard to know what to say about this girl. She’s as big as a minute, lived for years in the rafters of the garage, and suddenly descended to spend her sunset time with us. She’s not afraid of the dogs. She’s innately afraid of humans, like all of her feral kind. But she bravely overcomes it on a regular if not predictable basis. Sometimes she allows herself to be scooped up and petted. But the picture above is the more usual perspective we have of her. The girl you can’t ever quite possess the way you’d like, no matter how much you love her.

We can see that she’s getting truly aged now. We’ve already lost her sister Penny and her brother Mickey, both beloved in our household despite their feral quirks.

Of course, my wife thinks I’m a sentimentalist, and I am. It was Fitzgerald who defined the difference between a sentimentalist and a romantic: “The sentimentalist hopes love never ends, and the romantic knows it has to.”

I don’t want Cassie to end. When I see her, I keep hearing this, the most sentimental of all songs.

Griselda.

What an old poop am I.

The Incomparable Psmith

What? What? I Say.

Psmith is gone. For several years, Raebert has been a momma’s boy. Maybe three to four times smarter than Psmith. Smarter, actually, than any dog either of us has had. Scary problem solver, intuitive, even telepathic, as if he understands every word you say, unless he doesn’t want to hear. Don’t question it. If you haven’t lived it, you have no idea what it’s like. (Between us we’ve had maybe 40 dogs, many of them geniuses on the dog scale.) The whole time, though, Raebert’s been an idiot-savant, a baby who always connived to get his own way. But suddenly he’s showing the right stuff, assuming the position of pack leader. A glamorous but not homogeneous pack consisting of a Scotty, a pug, a new greyhound, a feral cat, and a brawling orange cat. From their first introduction to the household, they have all loved and catered to him and he paid them no mind. At all. Not since the greyhound Molly died.

Now, finally, he’s getting it. Last night, for the first time ever, he asked to descend to the dog room and hold court over his minions. Saw him in the dark, looking regal on the couch, and I cursed myself for not having anything more than my iAbstractaPhone. But at least I had the flash on.

Psmith was a lord. Raebert’s something else. But they all love him.

We’re as pleased as punch.

The man to make the others man up.

Guess I have to explain its meaning since no one else can or will.

National Review has been fulminating en masse. How dare he? He’s a joke. He drags us all down.

Well, yeah. Off your high and mighty perch. You, like the rest of the Republicans, have your delicate debates with one another about immigration and same sex marriage and political correctness and all the other ways the left is totally carjacking and home invading the American way of life in directions it never thought of and doesn’t want. But actually being rude or (OMG) coarse would be a blasphemy to the ghost of WFB. This nation is in the grip of a kind of Stockholm syndrome. A hard won republican majority is so supine as to be emblematic of the old axiom, “If you’re going to be raped, you may as well relax and enjoy it.” (More fodder for the War on Woman meme, I expect.) Aliens have taken control, under the aegis of the president, an impotent and bought and paid for congress, and a corrupt, totally derelict Supreme Court, and no one knows what to think anymore.

The polls are all over the place. They report that people massively approve the two most recent precedent-destroying SCOTUS decisions. Huh? They also report that 63 percent of people believe the country is headed in the wrong direction, and one in three Americans would consider leaving their country for somewhere else — if there were somewhere better to go. Many of these are the very kids who propelled Obama to power and reelected him. Huh? Ironically, most of those enlightened ones couldn’t find a country on a map, not even their own. Thank whoever for our great public schools.

The Democrats are running an aged, empty crone who has cheated and broken laws at every turn her whole life long without recording a single signal achievement except having a vagina her husband hasn’t desired for at least a quarter century.

The Republicans have acquired a crew of candidates who are so afraid of a predatory press that they can barely stop stammering when asked about their greens fees, Mexican gardeners, bald spots, and choices in music and cuisine. “Please don’t hurt us,” they cry, while Hillary sits (dead?) silently atop a mountain of scandal no one in the nation has the balls to call her on. Okay. That’s how it’s going to be.

Except that the great Republican hope is Jeb, who is a Lyndon Johnson Democrat fluent in Spanish. How cool is that? The strategists are having orgasms in their $3000 suits. “We can win this thing.” Except they haven’t for a long long deleterious time. They are so wired in, so smart, so attuned to the political process that they have failed to understand Jeb fails in every respect. He likes Hispanic immigrants more than Americans, he wants the federal government to control elementary and high school education, he has no real problem with Hillary, having given her some freedom medal or something, and he acts in every way just like — Hillary, a scion, an heir, whose time has come.

Enter The Donald. He comes on the scene like a bellowing bull, albeit with an odd combover, yet even that is a kind of becoming display. If anyone could afford the best efforts of the Hair Club for men, it’s Donald Trump. He’s his own defiant Lion King, a supreme alpha male the Republican Party has lacked for at least eight years.

No matter how angry the precious of National Review editors are about his candidacy, he is saying things the silent majority (yes, that old trope) wants to hear. Obama is destroying the country. It is the market which creates jobs, and Obama hates both markets and capitalism. Obama has made the U.S. a laughingstock on the world stage while the world seizes on our weakness and descends into chaos. An immigration policy which refuses to enforce our borders or deport the worst of illegal immigrants is ensuring a steady infusion of uneducated, unskilled, often violent opportunists, who at best are not part of any high tech, world competitive workforce and at worst are an economic and criminal assault on communities throughout the nation. And the spending, the spending, the debt and the debt.

The Trump appeal in a nutshell. Everyone with a grain of common sense knows what he says is so. And it’s Obama’s fault. And Hillary, more self-involved than Marie Antoinette and more low in morals than Catherine the Great, will only make things worse.

The media attack him because they are afraid. The political environment in this country is more volatile than they dare to admit. The prospect of the coronation of Hillary is oddly at odds with the deep mood of an electorate which has been fooled twice by an image built upon lie after lie after lie. Hillary is the antidote to eight years of blatant, arrogant, self-serving lies? The media are concerned. Time to take out The Donald. Immediately if not sooner. Hence all the sound and fury of the past week or so.

Not saying I expect Trump to win the nomination. But he does have a valuable role to play that could help the republicans win the White House.

What no pundit I’ve read or heard has yet said: A debate including Trump will increase the ratings for what might otherwise be a sorry parade of appeasing platitudes.

Yeah, the army of Republican strategists have their candidates well schooled. Don’t offend anybody. Be nice. When Matt Lauer or Katie Couric assaults you with a bit of misrepresented trivia, answer the question and make sure no one in the whole country misunderstands your sincerity and absolute virtue. Be nice, be outreachingful, be a Democrat but less so. And never lose your temper or demean your opponent the way he and the media will demean you. How McCain lost. How Romney lost. How most of the current 45 Republican candidates will lose.

The Trump opportunity in addition to increased ratings is that some one or two republican candidates will discover that they also possess a pair of balls. The ability to fight back. To say something honest and mean it. Having a pair of balls is the way to beat Hillary in 2016. If no one else does, I may have to side with Trump. Because however much she wants them, Hillary has no balls. Why she hides at Chappaqua and never Meets the Press.

God help me.