Sunrise.

That's my only photo. I saw a flash of lightning and chose to head back home. But Meade made a target of himself out on the dock, and he kept going all the way to the primary vantage point. There, he took this:

And he made an awfully nice video:

"We’re like Adam and Eve trying to build the futuristic garden of Eden where you can just exist and your world takes better care of you than you could yourself."

Said Kate Tolo, 30, quoted in "My extreme life with Bryan Johnson, multimillionaire biohacker/He’s the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who famously injected his teenage son’s blood in a bid to reverse his biological age to 18. Kate Tolo is his collaborator and girlfriend. So what’s it like to be in a relationship with a man who has an obsession with staying young?" (London Times).

Johnson is 49.

I don't think 49 and 30 is such a bad age gap, but she does sound kind of naive... as presented to the public. Who knows what they are really like or how they're collaborating? How do I know they even have a sexual relationship? Well, there's this:

"Ha ha. Wouldn't it be funny if I started it up again? 18 years have passed!"

"But in the larger scheme of things, what is 18 years? The whole idea was to liberate myself to wander around on the time line."

I left a comment on an old blog post, here.

Unsaid things.

That's a favorite tag of mine and I've even blogged about the tag.

In 2014, I said: "I feel that I've found the psychic key to my favorite tag: 'unsaid things.'... Did you know that before I started blogging I believed myself to be a person without political opinions? I used to read the New York Times every day and feel that I had no opinion. It was such a distinctive feeling — no opinion was my opinion — that for a while, to counteract it, I challenged myself, upon reading at least one article a day, to arrive at an opinion. What do I think of that? In blogging, early on, I had to tell myself to stop before moving to the next item and write one more sentence. You have to say something about that. I had to make it a discipline: To write one more thing...."

And in another 2014 post, I wrote: "Unsaid things is one of my favorite topics, and things that fall into this category are things that, aptly enough, most people would leave unsaid. There's a convention in human society not to outline the secret motives of others. As long as someone hasn't actually said something, you ought not to act as though you know what that thing is. But I'm here to transgress on that convention. I think I can and should do it...." (7 reasons why are said at the link but I will leave them unrepeated here.)

So naturally, I'm powerfully drawn to this article by Ariana Eunjung Cha in The Washington Post: "The 'Gen Z stare' — and the decline of saying things out loud/We’re speaking fewer words every year. Scientists worry what that’s doing to our brains" (gift link).

First, I don't like the focus on the number of words.

"Gloria Steinem, lodestar of the modern women’s movement, dies at 92."

A Washington Post obituary (gift link).

In a tribute to feminism, the obit waits until the 6th paragraph to tell us how she looked: "With her willowy physique, her fashionable miniskirts and her straight, parted hair, she brought glamour as well as passion to her work, challenging the popular perception of feminists as bra-burning radicals."

Paragraph 8: "Ms. Steinem burst to the fore in the 1960s not as an activist, but as a high-flying freelance journalist for publications including Esquire, Cosmopolitan and Vogue. She experienced firsthand the sexism that she would later fight on behalf of other women. Ms. Steinem recalled a taxicab conversation between the renowned writers Gay Talese and Saul Bellow, in which she said Talese remarked in her presence, 'You know how every year there’s a pretty girl who comes to New York and pretends to be a writer? Well, Gloria is this year’s pretty girl.'"

Here's the NYT obituary: "Gloria Steinem, Personification of the Women’s Movement, Dies at 92/She challenged sexist assumptions, helping women develop a sense of self-worth and gain a measure of equality at work, at home and in society at large" (gift link).

The NYT tells us how she looked in paragraph 4: "For more than half a century, she personified the women’s movement and became its most enduring symbol; her tinted aviator glasses and curtain of streaked-blond hair parted in the center made her one of the most recognizable women in the world."

Sunrise.

"Trump is going to get his ballroom — even if courts conclude it’s illegal."

Said lawprof Leah Litman, quoted by Adam Liptak in "Trump’s 'Lightning Speed' Outpaces the Courts/In his breakneck construction of a grand ballroom and in many other initiatives, critics say, the president has tried to outrun judicial review" (NYT gift link).

When the ballroom case was argued before a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in June, Judge Patricia A. Millett asked... If the government were to move very quickly to bulldoze the Statue of Liberty... was it true that “nothing can be done” by the courts? 

Yaakov Roth, a Justice Department lawyer, did not try to duck the question. “I think that’s right, yes,” he said.... 

When the case reached the Supreme Court last month, the challengers warned the justices that Mr. Trump had “decided to try to outrun judicial review.” In response, Solicitor General D. John Sauer did not exactly deny the charge. He crowed that a 250-person crew had been working 20 hours a day, seven days a week, and that the project, which he said included key security upgrades for the White House, had passed the point of no return....

It's in the structure of things that the Executive has speed as a tool. Remember when Justice Robert Jackson quoted Napoleon — "The tools belong to the man who can use them"?

Recent birds.

Caught by Meade. On Monday, a great blue heron made good use of its long skinny legs:

 

Yesterday, there was a turkey vulture on the path:

"Wearing vintage clothes in Denmark can be a sign of one’s right-wing politics, he said, but for him, dressing up was an inclusionary practice: 'I’m trying to make it nonpolitical.'"

From "Look of the Week/A First Time Out in Clothes That Have Been Around the Block" (NYT gift link).

"She was a noble and polite girl, a Christian. But all of a sudden she acted like an animal."

Said Mario Cisneros, quoted in "'Don’t Worry About Me': Attacker’s Father Thought She Had Turned a Corner/Pamela Cisneros was killed by the police in Times Square after she stabbed two people, one fatally. Her father said she had stopped going with him to her mental health appointments" (NYT gift link).

"Don't worry about me" is what the daughter said to the father. I originally read the headline to mean that the father was telling us not to worry about him. I do feel sorry for the father. Imagine seeing your daughter, "a noble and polite girl, a Christian," suddenly acting "like an animal," becoming a knife-wielding murderer, and now dead.

Why we're listing to "Undun" this morning at Meadhouse.

There is a Bob Dylan connection:

"Undun" was written by Bachman after hearing Bob Dylan's "Ballad in Plain D," which included the phrase "she was easily undone." Bachman's song tells the story of a girl he had seen at a party who, after dosing herself with LSD, slipped into a coma.

But that's not it. It started with that Fetterman-and-shorts post at 5:50 a.m. In the comments, Temujin said:

"In the mid-eighteen-hundreds, amid the advent of photography, the Victorians shot still-life arrangements of lizards crawling over fruit and dead game birds hanging from a nail..."

"... capturing with their new technology the savagery of hunger, the oneness between natural decay and human appetite. For much of the following century, food photography functioned as a sort of ethnographic art, a form of restrained realism preoccupied with light and shadow, shape and symbolism. But, in the nineteen-thirties, the introduction of color printing to advertising changed how food was shot on camera, and thus conceived of culturally. Dishes were now a thing to be drooled over and sold, products that emphasized the sensual, the luscious, the beautiful.... The surreality of commercial food photography and its later evolution into food porn may have been an artificial and sensationalist representation of the things we ate, but it at least managed to seduce.... Restaurants choosing to showcase computer-generated approximations of the dishes they serve inspire neither gluttony nor lust...."

Writes Brady Brickner-Wood, in "The Unique Horrors of A.I. Food Slop/Why does it feel so unsettling when restaurants use generative A.I. to create their menus and promotional materials?" in The New Yorker.

No 19th century photographs at that link, so I found 2 for you: "The First of September" (1855)(showing 2 dead game birds hanging from a nail) and  William Louis Henry Skeen, "Still Life of Exotic Fruits & Lizard from Ceylon" (c. 1880)(with, of course, lizards crawling over fruit).

Those 2 old photographs are not as exciting as I'd leapt to imagine they were. I should have noticed the promise of dreariness in those words "ethnographic art" and "restrained realism."

My imagination was fueled with images of old still-life paintings like this:

"Jesus? He would have been just one of many Jewish sect leaders of his day, had he not had St. Paul to proselytize and the Roman Empire to finish the job."

"Genghis Khan? The mere beneficiary of heavy rainfall. Adolf Hitler? 'Hitler’s own life before the age of 30 gave no hint of his subsequent qualities as Germany’s leader,' Diamond writes. 'How, then, can we claim that no one else could have become the mature Hitler?' How indeed? Figuring out how to separate historical forces from human agency has puzzled scholars since the days of Herodotus and Thucydides.... Now, [Jared] Diamond proposes a new tool for assessing leaders. Rather than using 'the biographic method' of studying leaders in their own context, he suggests the 'natural experiment.' Social scientists have used natural experiments — finding occasions where life allows them to run comparative data studies — to analyze things like the economic impact of the minimum wage. Diamond claims that natural experiments also have significant potential in political history, religious studies and sports. The problem is, they don’t really work.... Can the natural experiment help us figure out the historical effect of a president being assassinated — or narrowly escaping such a fate?"

I'm reading "What Is It About Jesus Christ and Genghis Khan? In “Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings,” Jared Diamond considers the impact leaders might have had on the course of their civilizations" (NYT gift link).

That's Dan Jones — author of "The Plantagenets: The Kings Who Made England" — reviewing the new Jared Diamond book (commission earned).

"Now I see people now are wearing shorts now with suits, so maybe that's enough to really bring me over to the side [of wearing suits] full time."

Said John Fetterman, wearing a suit for once:

September comes in with a glorious sunrise.

"I enjoy it. From throwing on some wacky stuff to some really slick stuff," said Travis Kelce.

Link to Vogue.

More Kelce fashion-talk: "I kind of take bits and pieces from everybody and everything that I see, and just kind of change things around depending on which situation I’m in and what event I’m going to.”

Why do I find this so funny? "Dog Dad"... the posing... posing as nonchalant.