On the passing scene.

I said to myself, "Self!" I said, "That's an old Emeril Lagasse gag." "It predates him," Self replied. "In any event," I said, "I hate to do a Random Thoughts type column, but I have all these little bits that don't cohere into a solid blog post." "Hey, Thomas Sowell did them frequently for years before his retirement," Self said. "If it's good enough for him, it's good enough for you." I agreed.

Item 1: Via Instapundit -- have we reached peak 2020?

One can hope, but we still have a presidential election to decide, and the mobs are still running the streets in some cities (except by the mayor of Chicago's house, because shut up, peons).

Obviously we need Batman now more than ever.

Item 2: I wish we could box up some water and send it to California, because this has been an unusually wet summer here. Foggy mornings and rain. Usually by mid-August the grass stops growing for a while because it gets scorched, but that never happened this year.

This morning's dampness featured the visit of a stink bug on the kitchen window. The brown marmorated stink bug is yet another damn invader from Asia, like the Chinese Death Virus, first spotted in the United States in Allentown, Pennsylvania in 1996. Hmm... Isn't that around where our friend Stiiv lives? I'm sure it's a coincidence.

I wrote our little stink bug friend a haiku.

Stink bug under glass
Kindly leave my country now
Take the 'rona too

Item 3: While we have no wildfires here, we did get one wild, fiery sunrise this week.

That looks like Wrath-of-God stuff.

Item 4: The Indianapolis 500 runs today, weather permitting, before a 25% capacity crowd. Certain persons in the house here are very excited. I'm not a big racing fan, but I'll watch; I watched it a couple of years ago and enjoyed it. I hope they don't do any politically correct bows to the current crisis in the run-up to the race. A sport where people burn fossil fuels while speeding around in circles is never going to get the approval of the PC crowd, no matter whose rings they kiss.

Item 5: Autumn is knocking at the doors, and I'm not just saying that because of the Halloween candy in the supermarket. Saw a big Canadian goose V in the sky this morning. It was not heading south, though; actually, it was heading east. Maybe these were Canadian geese with poor sense of direction.

Also, the chestnuts are on the way:

But the dahlias haven't given up yet.

Item 6: My favorite online gags of recent note:

And with that, I hope you have a lovely Sunday, and keep your sense of humor whatever happens next. Good luck, Karen Doe; I hope Higgins comes home soon.