Lazy Sunday of the 3-Day Martin Luther King Weekend 2016

I awoke this morning, conscious of a Sin I have not expiated or atoned for, saying gravely, in expiation of it, "I take refuge in the Amitabha Buddha!" One of the looser definitions of a Zen Buddhist like me is: One who does not disbelieve in the efficacy of Pure Land Buddhism. Everything helps, cred'io.  And on this, the only truly Sacred Day in the American Leisure Calendar, I expect, nay demand reasonable concurrence.  Martin Luther King, Jr. (if that's what his name was) may not have been a for-real anything else--and, personally, I quite disliked him, and I was much embarrassed by the pilfered splendors of his unintelligibly grandiloquent, monkey-in-a-top-hat, plagiarized speechifyin'--but he was, for sure, a first rate martyr: Somehow he got himself persecuted, and murdered, by J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, who was, if anybody ever was, the creepiest, ugliest and meanest Epitome of Sheer Power-Mad Evil that the world had yet known, and whose envious, virulent, relentless hatred of MLK was undoubtedly based on the jinormous size of poor Dr. King's penis, and the jubilant success with which King wielded it among the female members of his congregation--as attested by countless extant FBI wiretappings from among the bedsprings of the beds in motel rooms where the good doctor liked to have sex with his faithful female flock, and the listening to which, over and over and over again, were the vile substance and gravamen of J. Edgar Hoover's malevolent, too-personal obsession with Dr. King.  The likelihood is that King, who was not an intelligent man, did not understand the neurotic personalities of Jay-Edgar's preoccupation with him ("Communist? He thinks I'm a Communist?"); but eventually he did grasp, in the last several weeks of his life, that he was about to be murdered, and his speeches from that time show an increasingly haunted awareness of the threat (that Hoover by this time was probably phoning in every other night), and evidence pathetic attempts to deflect it. 

There are a few things that aren't generally known about the Temple de l'Amour at Versailles and the statue that it was built to enshrine, so I'll stick these Lingering Reflections in here.  The statue, representing Cupid carving his Bow (with the Weapons of Mars) from the Club of Hercules, was the last and final masterwork (paid for with a till-then unheard of price of 21,000 livres) of Edmé Bouchardon, universally considered the greatest French sculptor of his day, and was first exhibited (1750) in the Salon d'Hercule at Versailles, and was a critical and a Succès d'Estime, but was popularly disliked by everybody else,  including the king, who found its too-faithful depiction of a recognizably French adolescent boy vulgar (trop novatrice).  Mme. de Pompadour, oddly, loved it, and ordered a copy made for herself, which seemingly was never delivered.  In 1778 a copy was made by a pupil of Pigalle's, Mouchy, for the exquisite Temple de l'Amour in the domain of the Little Trianon, designed by Richard Mique, with sculptural ornaments by Joseph Deschamps.  And god is it pretty.