Sunrise.

Oh, no! Now, we have to call Lake Ontario "Lake America."

I'm reading "Trump signs order renaming Lake Ontario as Lake America, escalating Canada feud/President Donald Trump called Canadian officials 'nasty people' and said the country 'has been ripping us off for a long time on trade, very sadly.'"

“We filed all the necessary papers, documents, everything else,” Trump said. “We notified all the various people that we have to notify. So we’ve done everything that you have to do. And this is official, effective immediately.”

"A man who parked a truck carrying a guillotine in the heart of Washington was arrested by the United States Capitol Police on Tuesday...."

"The police arrested Philan-Tam-Duy Le, 35, of Julian, Calif., for 'being in possession of the guillotine,' the department said in the statement. He was charged with carrying a dangerous weapon. 'It did have a real blade,' the police’s public information office said.... The man had driven to the nation’s capital from California, the police said. The truck was parked not far from the Library of Congress and other prominent Washington buildings.... It was unclear whether Mr. Le had driven the truck across the country with the guillotine on it, a journey that could have been more than 2,500 miles."

From "Man Accused of Bringing Guillotine to D.C. Is Arrested/Philan-Tam-Duy Le, 35, of Julian, Calif., was taken into custody for 'being in possession of the guillotine,' the police said" (NYT).

Is "being in possession of a guillotine" a crime? There's this at Law Commentary:

D.C. law bans several weapons by name, including machine guns, sawed-off shotguns, switchblade knives, and knuckles. It also covers other dangerous weapons when someone possesses them with the intent to use them unlawfully against another person. A guillotine is not specifically listed.... Prosecutors must establish that it qualifies as a dangerous weapon under the law and address the required intent....

D.C.’s highest local court applied that rule last year in Carrington v. United States, throwing out a weapons conviction involving an umbrella because prosecutors had not shown that it was likely to cause death or serious injury in the way it was used....

 The police asked Le if it worked and he said, "Yeah, it’s the real deal, man."

I went back to see the APT production of "The Chairs" again.

Hard to get tickets at this point, but go here. It's not impossible. What a fantastic performance! I don't know that I've ever heard a more enthusiastic standing ovation.

How often have you gone back to see the same theatrical production? I can only think of 2 other occasions, both in this theater (the indoor theater at APT). 

"I can’t count how many messages I’ve received over time about my appearance. Especially that I have ugly teeth and thin hair."

"The fact that I have an ugly 'wart' on my nose and good advice on getting Botox. I’m fine with my body. Such as it is, when you are a woman approaching 50."

Wrote Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, who got a text that asked "Do you want to get that little spot on your nose fixed?"

She's quoted in "'I’m Fine With My Body': Danish Leader Responds to Unsolicited Beauty Advice/Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen had just returned from Ukraine when she received a message from a plastic surgeon asking if she wanted to fix her nose" (NYT gift link).

The Times makes this a discussion of the pressure on women to meet beauty standards. I think that's an important issue. I'd like to see it tied to the massive celebration of Dolly Parton, who went to an immense amount of trouble to manifest her ideal of highly exaggerated feminine beauty.

But what I want to talk about is the facial phenomenon often called a "wart." First of all, it's not a wart!

Devilish imagery.

 

That's at the top of the WaPo home page.

The red glow of the photograph is transfixing. If you can tear your eyes away from it and look to the text, you see "Mike Collins" and "KKK and Nazi." Emotional tainting accomplished. There's little potential for your mind to travel on to pull out "former... staffer" and "what appear to be," let alone to click through to investigate whether there's really anything to damage Collins.

Clicking gets you to this article (gift link):

"Reading Count of Monte Cristo in One Sitting."

Its a TikTok thing. I'm seeing 12 videos in this group. Check it out. Reading "The Count of Monte Cristo" is a thing these days, but why? It's super-long, so people have been avoiding it, but word has got out that it's a very exciting, gripping read. If you like — or think you might like — video of people reading, click through. It really is people reading — reading "The Count of Monte Cristo."

By the way, I have not read "The Count of Monte Cristo." It was my father's favorite book, or so he often said, often conjoined with the opinion that he hated "The Return of the Native." I have read "The Return of the Native" and 4 other Thomas Hardy novels. My son Chris recently read "The Count of Monte Cristo," though his main reading project is biographies of U.S. Presidents.

This post was inspired by a comment from Jaq on my previous post, which is about the decline of childhood reading. Jaq wrote: "Just bought The Count of Monte Christo [sic] through your link, and there it sits, like a cinder block on my coffee table, will I finish it? Now I guess I’ll have to, but it will hardly fit in my hip pocket the way I always sported one as a teenager. You can’t blame kids though, we are the ones who invented the crack, I mean smartphones."

And here's the latest photograph from a presidential biography sent to me by Chris. The scene is JFK's reception for black leaders on the 100-year anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation:

"Looking back, I grew up in the last great age of childhood reading. Juvenile bookworms..."

"... were still a regular sight in the early Noughties. You could glimpse our kind on trains and in cafés: wan, bespectacled and dreamy, trailing after our parents, clutching our grubby, sticky copies of The Chronicles of Narnia or Northern Lights. It was the era of Philip Pullman, of Horrible Histories, of Artemis Fowl. Above all, it was the age of Harry Potter, with its feverish midnight queues of miniature witches and wizards up past their bedtime to get their hands on the latest instalment (my sister and I went to the cavernous, warehouse-sized Borders bookshop at Silverlink Retail Park wearing bin bags for Hogwarts capes).... [A]s the age of print fades away and the angry, distractible age of the smartphone dawns, I think we find ourselves facing a post-literate world that will resemble the pre-literate world: less democratic, less rational and less enlightened...."

Writes James Marriott in "The 36 books that changed my life/An obsession with words got the Times columnist through his eccentric childhood and his parents’ divorce. Now 33, he has written a book — in praise of reading, of course" (London Times).

I don't know if that link will work for you to see the list, but it's an excellent list. I've read many of the books, and I was motivated to buy one of them on the spot — "The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous." Another — "In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civilization in Early Modern England." — I would have bought if there had been an audiobook. 

Marriott's new book is "The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society," and I will buy that too when it comes out in October, assuming there's an audiobook. There are some things I know I need to walk to read. 

If you use any of those links to buy a book, I receive a commission, and I'm telling you that because I believe that transparency is required, but in fact, I only link to books that I wanted to mention anyway.

Sunrise.

"He was the world’s most mature 12-year-old. He had a fantastic case of arrested development; he could sense immediately, 'This is what kids will love.'"

Said Art Spiegelman, quoted in "Len Brown, the Kidlike Creator of ‘Mars Attacks,’ Dies at 84/He brought a juvenile creative sensibility to the Topps Chewing Gum company, where he was able to unerringly predict what would appeal to adolescents" (NYT gift link).

The terrifying global invasion ['Mars Attacks'] played out in 55 vivid cards. But parents’ complaints about the gory incidents that were depicted — a dog being destroyed, for example, as a boy “cried out in horror” — kept them from being distributed nationally.... 

His many projects in the 1960s included helping to create a card set devoted to Soupy Sales, the mischievous TV personality. During the 1970s and ’80s, Mr. Brown was part of the team that created two major sticker series: “Wacky Packages” mocked consumer products, parodying them with names like Cap’n Crud, Jolly Mean Giant and Ratz Crackers; “Garbage Pail Kids” spoofed Cabbage Patch Kids, the wildly popular, round-faced dolls that came with adoption papers.

"I was hesitant in that, if it worked, it might be a difficult image to shake off. But then, really, I’ve always thought it wasn’t worth doing unless you took a risk, really. So I just took the risk."

Said Tim Curry, quoted in "Tim Curry, Star of ‘Rocky Horror’ and Much More, Dies at 80/The actor’s gift for garish eccentricity was indelibly appropriate for the outlandish, cross-dressing mad scientist Frank-N-Furter" (NYT gift link).

Here's Curry — who had a stroke in 2012 — discussing his roles:

"Even as Trump’s Standing Slips, He Slingshots a Political Novice to Victory."

Headline at the NYT for the story about Darline Graham's victory in yesterday's primary runoff.

You can see the story the Times wants to tell, even as the facts on the ground don't line up exactly right:

Some of the luster had seemed to come off Mr. Trump’s political brand in recent weeks. His approval ratings have drooped, his party’s midterm outlook has darkened and his chosen picks in several races for governor and the House have fallen short.

ADDED: He slingshots her. It's like something Wile E. Coyote would do to himself to cross a canyon. Or what the Lost Boys did to Robin Williams:

The Mythbusters tried it:

"Meta on Wednesday reached a landmark settlement with 47 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories, agreeing to pay up to $17.1 billion in penalties..."

"... and make major changes to its products over claims it endangered children with addictive social media platforms. In a dramatic capitulation, the owner of Facebook and Instagram agreed to the financial penalties for violating federal child privacy and states’ consumer protection laws, the states announced. Meta also agreed to limit how long teenagers can spend on its platforms and to bans on features that stoke mental health issues, striking at the heart of the company’s business of engagement for advertising.... Meta still faces numerous other lawsuits from school districts and individuals.... 'Meta wouldn’t settle unless it sees the writing on the wall and feels really exposed,' said Nora Freeman Engstrom, a law professor at Stanford University."

I'm reading "Meta to Pay Up to $17.1 Billion in Landmark Settlement Over Social Media Addiction Claims/The social media giant settled with 47 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories, and agreed to make major changes to its products over claims its platforms endangered children" (NYT gift link).

"Women in rural Devon are being coached on how to give birth in the back of a car after their local hospital shut its maternity service."

That's in the London Times.

Catherine Mchomvu, an antenatal class teacher at the Devon Antenatal Family Centre, said it was important that women and their partners had supplies, including towels, blankets and water in the car....  “It’s about trying to create the birth environment that you would normally have in the hospital or at home, in your car.

And here's an article from 12 days ago: "'Maternity deserts' leave women with two-hour journey to give birth/Mothers-to-be fear delivering their babies on the roadside as NHS staffing shortages and closures leave swathes of England without nearby maternity care."

The Royal Family pays tribute to Dolly.

Remembering the late, great Dolly, who brought joy, comfort and inspiration to so many - including the millions of children given free books through her Imagination Library. We will always ❤️ you. pic.twitter.com/wdKHKGALlH

— The Royal Family (@RoyalFamily) August 26, 2026

Sunrise.