Who needs Facebook when you have all the trivia in the world at your fingertips on Google and the NYT and The Manchester Guardian and my friend Gabi who sends me all the articles she thinks I should read? (I do that, too.)

I've just been browsing (googling) among the new-to-me women comic writers/humourists/essayists - um, what else? Are they satirists? Not sure. Remember George Kaufman (You Can't Take It With You) said satire is what closes on Saturday night. These women all have TV credits and awesome (aka funny?) presence so they are not strangers to a New Yorker audience. They write for Amy Schumer and The Good Place and South Park and then drop casually into Shouts and Murmurs and Daily Shouts in the New Yorker. One of them, Megan Amram, came up through the ranks (is that the right word?) of Twitter with such amazing thoughts that she attracted a following immediately. Wow. I can't attract a following of pigeons in the park, but then, I've never tried.

In my day, a long time ago, women weren't supposed, or even allowed, to be funny. I used to love games, deliberately confusing words for humour's sake, but most of my listeners, if indeed, they listened at all, didn't get it. Never mind. The first funny women who came to prominence on TV and in the entertainment world got their laughs by denigrating themselves. Remember Phyllis Diller? Roseanne? (She's coming back, I hear.) Oh, and before that, Fanny Brice? A woman couldn't be beautiful or even good looking and funny too. You couldn't laugh with her; you had to laugh at her.

I'm going to think some more about that. Long long thoughts.

Friday (the 27th) I had two chunks of flesh cut out of me for biopsies. One was a a wart which is viral as everyone knows, but if it persists must be checked for malignancy. The other was something on my back that had started to bleed. Just dry skin, I'm sure, because I swim every day. I think I've already said I feel like a bear with need of a tree trunk to rub my back against. But it also must be checked. Does anyone check a bear?

So I mustn't swim for a while to allow the wounds to heal without getting infected. Next week I won't feel like this but right now it's holiday time. Not that I slept in, but that I could read the NYT and The Manchester Guardian without watching the clock.

Lots of thoughts - TBA

I still couldn't find my copy of Dinnerstein's Mermaid and Minotaur because it's on a high shelf of a bookcase and my library steps are covered with papers I'm working on and I'm afraid of heights. But I googled it and I was right in my opinion that if everyone had read and followed her advice in child-rearing, then we wouldn't have MeToo and Time's Up and all these recriminations today and we'd still have Charlie Rose and Garrison Keillor and even Woody Allen. (O, how the landscape has changed!) Dinnerstein's idea was that men should share fully in the nurture and raising of children so that we would then, obviously, end up with boys with a different attitude to women. Of course, Rose and Keillor and Allen wouldn't be like that. The world would be a different place.

If-onlies go too far.