BREAKING: Word-for-word from the New York Times!

MONDAY, JUNE 25, 2018

The end of the road for the West: As you may have heard, it's all anthropology now.

For at least thirty years, our society has been descending into the war of the all against all. It has also been descending into the inviting realm of the utterly foppish, silly, ridiculous, dimwitted, loony and dumb.

No modern org is as silly and foppish as the New York Times. The famous newspaper proved it again, in spades, with its revealingly ludicrous "Here to Help" feature on Thursday, June 14.

"Here to Help" is a daily, hard-copy feature on the Times' "reimagined" page A3. The Times redesigned this utterly silly, jaw-dropping page more than a year ago. The entire page seems designed to let us see one of two things—

How dumb the New York Times thinks we are. Or how dumb the Times itself is.

On June 14, the Here to Help feature tackled a difficult modern problem. How can a subscriber get to sleep if his or her bedroom is too warm, even with the AC on?

You probably think we're misstating that day's "Here to Help" objective. If you have air conditioning, and you know how to turn it on, what are the odds that your bedroom will be so warm that you'll need further help?

Who could actually have that problem? Your question makes perfect sense. But, this being the New York Times, the feature started like this:

Here to Help
4 WAYS TO KEEP YOUR BEDROOM COMFORTABLY COOL THIS SUMMER

When the temperature rises, it doesn't matter if you have air conditioning or get a great breeze through the open windows; it's tough to get cool enough to fall and stay asleep. If you can't (or won't) buy a bunch of stuff to keep your bedroom cool, there are a lot of things you can do without spending money at all. ALAN HENRY

"It doesn't matter if you have air conditioning; it's tough to get cool enough to fall and stay asleep?"

Obviously, that sounds untrue. But that's the way the June 14 Here to Help feature started.

At that point, The Crazy took charge. Alan Henry listed four ways to get cool enough to nod off. This first technique was, by far, the least crazy of the bunch:

Build a homemade "air-conditioner." Fill a bowl with ice and place it in front of a room fan. The breeze over the slowly melting ice will send chilled water vapor into the air in front of the fan. Combined with the fast-moving air, it will give you a nice, chilly breeze.

Now you have your AC on—and you have a fan blowing air over a bowl filled with ice.

Henry wasn't certifiable yet. But as we said, this was page A3! So our second tip went like this:

Put your sheets in the freezer. This one’s low-tech, but it works surprisingly well if you’re willing to make your bed before you settle in for the night. Pop your sheets—or even just your fitted sheet or top sheet—into a resealable plastic bag and into the freezer. When it's bedtime, you'll be rewarded with a cool set of sheets you can put on the bed and enjoy—at least until the sheets warm up from your body heat, of course.

Just pop your sheets in the freezer! Now you have the AC on, and you get to snuggle in between two ice-cold sheets!

Has anyone ever done that? Everything's possible, of course. As if to prove that very point, Henry proceeded to this:

Sleep "Egyptian style." It works by ditching a blanket or comforter for a top sheet alone, and then dousing that top sheet in cold water before bed. Wring out the sheet until it’s just slightly damp, but still cool. Then curl up under it and enjoy the cool sheet against your skin while you fall asleep.

Interesting! For starters, it sounds like, if you're hot, you should ditch your blanket or comforter!

Who else would ever have thought of that? But Henry didn't stop there!

If you've followed this third instruction, you have your AC blasting away and you're on your frozen bottom sheet. Making it even easier to nod off, you've curled up under a top sheet which you've doused in cold water!

(On-line, Henry adds a note of caution: "If waking up to clammy sheets bothers you, this may not be for you.")

For some people, the top-and-bottom wet/frozen sheets, mixed with the air conditioning, still may not be enough. This was Henry's fourth tip:

Fill a water bottle with ice water and take it to bed. Grab a hot water bottle (the silicone kind that you’d normally fill with hot water) and fill it with a combination of cold water and ice. Wrap it in a towel or other absorbent cloth, and keep it near your feet while you sleep. Like the other methods on this list, as the ice melts and the water warms up, it will lose effectiveness, but it will keep you cool enough to fall asleep, and hopefully to fall asleep.

At this point, you have your AC on; you're on a frozen top sheet. You doused your top sheet with cold water—and you have an ice-cold "hot water bottle" cooling off your feet.

We haven't changed a single word from the June 14 hard-copy Times. We've reproduced its text word-for-word, from the top to the bottom.

Our assessment:

A newspaper which publishes matter like this is plainly involved with The Crazy. In some significant, puzzling way, that newspaper has perhaps unknowingly made a pact with pluperfect foppish inanity.

This Hamptons-based newspaper lost its way a very long time ago. It's very hard for liberals to see this, partly due to the newspaper's powerful brand, partly because we ourselves aren't overwhelmingly sharp.

That said, this foppish inanity runs all through this ludicrous upper-class newspaper. Katherine Boo tried to warn us, but we were too dumb to understand, and the Dowdism kept creeping on.

Source material: We've shown you every single word of the June 14 hard-copy feature.

Online, the feature is more detailed. Before the A3 editor cleaned it up, it was a very tiny bit less completely nuts.

For more on Stone-Cold Alan Henry, you can just click here. This is our modern upper-end press corps. Are you surprised Trump's in charge?