"A.I. also had a weird habit of making its characters fidget constantly, always running a finger along the edge of a table or adjusting a collar."

"The most reliable marker, though, was something more abstract, and, I suppose, upon reflection, even a little spooky. The scenes generated by A.I. had characters, but, apart from fidgeting, they mostly did nothing.... [After some new directives,] suddenly, every fake passage was filled with characters hopping on a horse, or delivering an important package, or running.... So I loosened the rules a bit... If Claude prefers to write these passages in which nothing seemingly happens and the hallways are always empty and the characters do nothing except idly touch nearby furniture, it’s because we do, too. Claude, I am sure, will soon be able to have one of these characters at least fire up a stove or drive a buggy to Norwich...."

Writes Jay Caspian Kang, in "Can A.I. Produce Writing That We Actually Want to Read?/I recently created a simple test, which convinced me that the answer is no" (The New Yorker).

"Living in the sunlight/Loving in the moonlight...."

"We get to a point where we see the fence. The fence is there, but we can't see over the fence. But the closer we get to the fence, the more curious we are..."

"... about what's on the other side of the fence. And there are some people who just decide that they're too curious — like Hunter — and jump over the fence, right? I'm not doing that. But I'm approaching the fence, and I've lived a terrific life, and only — once again — only in America.... Although I really did admire his note, the 'no more fun' note. It should be a classic."

Says Joe Eszterhas, who is 81 years old now, in this great conversation with Joe Rogan. 

The classic note he's talking about is Hunter S. Thompson's suicide note. I've quoted it before: "No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won’t hurt."

Eszterhas wrote a lot of movies. Is any of them a classic? Here's a list. I haven't seen any of them. Not my sort of thing. Maybe you've seen "Basic Instinct." But anyway, he talks about a lot in that interview. There's a long section about his dinner with Jimi Hendrix, who was, we're told, "the nicest guy... very nice... just laid back."

"Millions of readers bought the books, which became a popular school assignment and one of the widest-read works to explore the interior lives of modern Iranians."

"The series was adapted into a 2007 film that was nominated for the Academy Award for best animated feature. 'Persepolis,' the author Fernanda Eberstadt wrote in a New York Times review, 'dances with drama and insouciant wit,' its inky black-and-white drawings modeled on both contemporary comics and Persian miniatures.... Not quite two decades later, Ms. Satrapi set to work documenting another tumultuous moment in Iranian history: the unrest in 2022 that followed the death, in police custody, of a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, who had been detained and accused of violating a law requiring women to wear the hijab in public. In protest, women across Iran tore off their veils, in one of the most significant cultural and political moments in the country since the 1979 revolution...."

From "Marjane Satrapi, the Author of ‘Persepolis,’ Dies at 56/Her popular graphic novel series, published in the early 2000s, followed an Iranian girl through the Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War" (NYT).

The obituary quotes Satrapi: "Even basic human rights, they deny us. You don’t have the right to dance, you don’t have the right to sing, you don’t have the right to do this, you don’t have the right to do that."

The NYT obituary doesn't say how Satrapi died, but at Deadline, it says: "'Marjane Satrapi died of sadness a little over a year after the death of Mattias Ripa, her husband and the love of her life,' read a statement from close friends and family announcing her death on June 3...."

"The whole art gallery art system became too big, too commercial, too impersonal and too corporate. We all know it’s true."

Said Marc Glimcher, the chief executive of Pace, quoted in "A Mega Gallery Shrinks: Pace Cuts 50 Artists, 50 Staff/A challenging art market is forcing even an established player to contract" (NYT).

"We really are finding our soul. And that means having the number of artists that you can perform extraordinary things for. It means just the really core relationships," Glimcher explained. 

One of the artists who got cut is Glenn Kaino, who said: "It’s been clear to me for a while that their model was optimized for a vision of the art world that never materialized. The art I create is concerned with the world and our place in it.... I’m a romantic about good, meaningful art creating value, and not the other way around...."

"Surveillance footage showed two people dousing a vehicle with gasoline and blocking the doors as the vehicle and its passengers burned."

"One person managed to escape the vehicle and has been speaking to Italian news media about the harrowing event. Mohammad Taj Alamyar, 35, who is originally from Afghanistan, told investigators that he and the four others, who were from Afghanistan and Pakistan, had been working on the region’s strawberry harvests. He said they had asked the men who had arranged their work and accommodations, and who were driving them back from a shift on a farm after work, about wages that had been withheld, prompting the violent response...."

From "Four Men Are Burned to Death in Italy, Highlighting Abuse of Foreign Workers/The immigrants had been working as fruit pickers in southern Italy, the authorities said, apparently as part of a system of criminal labor trafficking" (NYT).

"Race and partisanship have closely tracked each other for decades. But the justices said that under their new standard..."

"... courts must disentangle the two and could step in only if race, not politics, was at play. Analysts who cheered as well as those who criticized the ruling agreed that the justices were signaling that from now on lawmakers — not the courts — should be in the driver’s seat of redistricting."

From "In Alabama Ruling, Supreme Court Signals Limited Role for Federal Courts in Redistricting Fights/In an emergency ruling on Tuesday night, the court’s conservative majority gave a first glimpse into congressional district battles under a weakened Voting Rights Act" (NYT).

"What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!"

Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the birth of Allen Ginsberg. I'm sorry I let it slip past unnoted, but I'm noting it now. Marilyn Monroe had her 100th on Monday. That got way more attention in the media, so I could have observed it, on the right day, but I avoided that. She's had too much attention already. I imagine she's tired of it, tired of the form it takes. 

Here's the whole poem, "A Supermarket in California."

Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas?... We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier....

Pattie Gonia is making it hard for Patagonia to defend its trademark.

Full Instagram video here.

Read the comments over there and check out the NYT article, "Patagonia Is Suing Pattie Gonia Over Trademark Infringement: What to Know/The outdoor apparel company says the drag queen and environmentalist is using its name for commercial purposes. She’s ready to go to court" (gift link).

Mx. Gonia... said the company was trying to take away their name permanently and “erase an activist”.... Mx. Gonia said the timing of Patagonia’s lawsuit, “at the height of anti-LGBTQ politics and attacks,” was purposeful. “They looked at this political moment and thought they could pull this off without a pushback,” she said.

By the way, I think the NYT is getting the pronoun wrong when it writes "She's ready to go to court." I'm seeing this in Outside: "My name is Wyn Wiley, but you might know me as Pattie Gonia, Patricia Gonia, if ya nasty. I’m a drag queen, I’m an environmentalist, and I’m a professional gay person. As Wyn my pronouns are he/they and in drag, my pronouns as Pattie are she/they."

You might think the easiest solution is to use "they," but in that headline, "They're ready to go to court" would be read as referring to Patagonia. Patagonia has already filed suit. The caption on the court papers, I believe, is Patagonia, Inc. v. Entrepreneur Enterprises, Inc. (doing business as Pattie Gonia Productions) and Wyn Wiley (individually, as the owner/founder). I think the person "ready to go to court" is Wiley, so it should say "He's ready to go to court."

2 sunrise pictures, taken 22 seconds apart.

What a striking color shift, as seen by the iPhone. It certainly wasn't apparent to me, the human.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

"So, did your son and Jeffrey Epstein talk about pole dancing as he begged him for money using your limited credibility?"

ADDED: I'm looking at that still and thinking Washington is a waxworks. Old, middle aged, and young — they all seem like waxen simulacra.  

Spencer Pratt's mom...

... has some reservations.

@nbcla Spencer Pratt’s mother, Janet, speaks with NBC4’s Robert Kovacik on why she did not want her son to take on a job that would take him away from his family. #nbcla ♬ original sound - NBC Los Angeles

"Maybe we'll never ever take it down."

Trump taunts.

"Got any more of these cross-literary sparks, or is there another Stafford zinger that cracks you up?"

Grok asked me after I was asking it about the poem "Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape" by John Ashbery, specifically my favorite line, "Olive came hurtling through the window; its geraniums scratched/Her long thigh."

The poem had just come up in a crossword puzzle: 20 Across: "Cartoon character featured in the John Ashbery poem 'Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape.'" There are a lot of cartoon characters in that poem, but the answer is POPEYE. 

I'd said to Grok: "That description of Olive Oyl and the poem title — 'Farm Implements' — made me think of this quote David Sedaris found in the biography of Jean Stafford: 'She was sharp-tongued and once described a fellow writer as 'looking as if she were pregnant with farm machinery.'"

That's in DS's new book (commission earned).

Well, I didn't have any more cross-literary sparks or Stafford zingers, so I said "No. Do you?"

And Grok was all "Yes — plenty." Etc.

"Every chatbot has a dial. Engineers call it 'temperature,' a parameter that controls how predictable or surprising the system’s outputs will be."

"Set it too low, and the chatbot becomes a boring echo; set it too high, and it produces useless noise. The sweet spot places the output just beyond what you could have anticipated — familiar enough to seem plausible, unexpected enough to seem insightful. That gap between what you expected and what the system produced is where something remarkable happens: You supply the meaning. "

From "The real secret to palm reading? These ‘companions’ know it. Artificial intelligence doesn’t understand humans. It reflects them back to themselves" (WaPo)(gift link).

This reminds me: We don't all think the same way. Some of us hear a voice speaking full sentences in our head. That's not me. I've been trying to observe what I have instead of that, and it's almost impossible. Any effort to look at the form of my thoughts causes them to retreat into some backroom of the mind that denies my conscious thinking mind access. I write to see what I think. That's why I blog — not to convince readers to agree with me, but to get my thoughts into language form. And my use of A.I. is similar. I'm getting my own thoughts into dialogue form. It externalizes a debate I could have in my head in a very amorphous and multilayered blob, but working it out in writing and seeing it in writing is extremely helpful to me.

ADDED: After writing that last paragraph, I went and had a conversation with Grok about it. Learned the word anendophasia. 

"Obviously, God wanted 5 more months of me exposing all the failures of our mayor, so it's going to be a fun ride. I hope she's ready!"

"Now, I have 5 months to get deep into every community that hasn't heard my message to make them safe. So I'm actually very excited because I felt very rushed. It's a big city and I was not able to talk to as many people as I look forward to talking to. This is the first time since 2005 an incumbent is going to a runoff."

Spencer Pratt is claiming victory for advancing to the Los Angeles Mayor General Election ‼️

“Obviously God wanted 5 more months of me exposing all the failures of our mayor, so it's going to be a fun ride. I hope she's ready!”

“Now I have 5 months to get deep into every… pic.twitter.com/gZtmYBHSBk

— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) June 3, 2026