Strange days

 And this is America, 2025:

Green dildos flying out of the stands at WNBA games.

Some social media warrior claiming he and his pals are doing it to promote their crypto business.

An offshore betting site creating a market around the stunt, offering users prop bets on when and where the next dildo fling would happen, and what color the dildo would be.

I am not making any of this up. These things are happening.

The dildos are flying. An anonymous source whose internet handle is a character in a Quentin Tarantino film told ESPN his group is responsible and, by the way, how 'bout investing in our crypto coin? And a betting site in Panama is indeed tapping into Dildogate to claim its piece of the pie.

And this is America, 2025. Love it or say, "What the actual (bleep)?"

Me, I more and more feel like Col. Kurtz at the end of "Apocalypse Now," except I'm not mumbling, "The horror ... the horror ..." I'm mumbling, "The weirdness ... the weirdness ..."

And it's not just Dildogate, which gets weirder by the minute.

It's surfing the web the other day and seeing some hard-right loon in the Wall Street Journal claiming Caitlin Clark's civil rights are being violated because all those mean black girls in the WNBA are picking on her because she's white.

It's Major League Baseball playing a game in the infield of a NASCAR race track because ... oh, hell, just because.

It's the Department of Homeland Jackbootery pumping out a graphic for its "Speedway Slammer" immigrant gulag that features an IndyCar with the number 5 on it -- which happens to be the car number of Pato O'Ward, the only Mexican driver in the IndyCar series. 

None too subtle, these folks.

Strange days, here in America 2025. Bigotry and weirdness and naked greed gleefully held up as virtue while what we used to regard as virtue -- honesty, propriety, mutual respect and plain old common decency -- fall out of favor.

Dildogate, for instance, is nothing but misogyny as a sick lounge act. But sure enough, in America 2025, someone figured there was a buck to be made off it.

And the most heinous part of that?

They were right.

According to ESPN, a Forbes value tracker has seen the price of the aforementioned crypto coin spike 300 percent in the last week. And searches for "green dildo" on Google Trends have increased 3,700 percent since July 29.

Strange days. Strange country.