Yesterday, today.

"President Trump is the best builder and developer in the entire world, and the American people can rest well knowing that this project is in his hands."

Said a White House spokesman, quoted in "Trump’s Ballroom Design Has Barely Been Scrutinized/Architects Say It Shows" (NYT)(gift link because there are some detailed graphics).

Also quoted is Carol Quillen, the president and chief executive of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which is suing over the ballroom. She says: "Even if we are slow and we make mistakes and we fight, that process has meaning to us."

Have you ever paused to contemplate the meaningfulness of red tape? Maybe the deliberation and drawn-out procedure is subtly, secretly the very best part of what we do together, the very heart of democracy. 

"Certain pro-meat influencers even treat plants as hostile combatants. 'Plants are trying to kill you'..."

"... the influencer Anthony Chaffee says, repeatedly. Chaffee, who received his bachelor’s degree in medicine, surgery and obstetrics at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin, has compared the long-term health risks of eating salad to smoking cigarettes. Kennedy hasn’t gone that far, though at the Annual Meat Conference, he denigrated vegetables. 'Most plants do not have the complete chain of amino acids that we need,' he said."

From "The Dogma of Meat/From Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s food pyramid to online influencers, beef has become more than just a source of protein" (NYT).

The Times doesn't elaborate the anti-plant argument, so it just sounds kooky, but what's the argument? Something about plants producing chemicals to ward off the creatures that would eat them? That was my guess, and, looking it up, I see that's the argument. To quote Grok: "Plants can’t run away or fight back, so they manufacture hundreds of different secondary metabolites (natural pesticides and toxins) as a defense strategy.

Have you heard from Newsom's wife?

In 2023 Gavin Newsom did what he called a "Red State" tour and visited Alabama, Florida and a few other red states.

Newsom's wife said she brought her children to the red states so they could learn about racism, sexism, and bullying first hand. pic.twitter.com/CBx8gfUBc9

— MAZE (@mazemoore) March 29, 2026

"And this is what he does to me!"

"Tiger Woods Banned From Driving Trump’s Grandkids Around."

Hot news from The Daily Beast.

The headline seems ridiculous. The real news is that "even before his latest car crash, the Secret Service had barred Woods from driving around Vanessa’s children."

Imagine having 5 children and dating a man who can't be trusted to drive a car. But then he's also world-famous for his very high level physical skill at something most people can't do even decently well. The high/low conflict is mind-bending. I guess the tie-breaker is whether you truly love him. Or maybe if the kids — Kai Trump, 18, Donald III, 17, Tristan, 14, Spencer, 13, and Chloe, 11 — think you with him is good for them.

"He never discusses the way he wants me to play things"/"He hired you for the job. He wants what you have."

A conversation between Kim Novak and Jimmy Stewart about Alfred Hitchcock.

Quoted in "Kim Novak: 'Sydney Sweeney looks sexy all the time. She could never play me'/The 93-year-old star of Vertigo talks about Alfred Hitchcock, the trouble with being pretty and why a biopic about her love affair with Sammy Davis Jr won’t happen" (London Times).

Also: "[Tippi] Hedren has said [Hitchcock] made a pass at her and told her he 'expected me to make myself sexually available to him,' although she never did. Novak says she and Hedren didn’t talk about him. 'I’m not denying that if she’s saying it, but I never saw him pay any attention to women other than his wife, who was often on the set, and he was certainly never interested in me in that way. Maybe that’s why I never wanted to discuss it with Tippi — I have a hard time believing it because to me you have to see it to believe it. If he was like that with Tippi that was an odd exception.'"

The article has photos of Novak and Sweeney that inspired me to jot down this AI prompt: "I'm noticing that actresses of today will pose for photos with their mouth hanging open, slack jawed. I believe that in the past, the lips would be kept together (unless the actress was smiling/laughing/talking). Is my observation accurate?"

Answer, from Grok:

Sunrise — 6:17, 6:37, 6:44, 6:47.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

"[Cesar] Chavez became infatuated with so-called Silva Mind Control meditation and what he believed was its power to influence events and people."

"Challenges to his authority, real or imagined, would prompt purges or mandates that one potential rival or another relocate. He taped meetings and dispatched union officials to root out what he called 'spies' and 'infiltrators.' He began managing according to the principles of Synanon, a drug-treatment program centered on verbal abuse, attack therapy and public humiliation...."

From "'The Cult of Cesar': Inside the Mountain Compound Led by Cesar Chavez/In his remote headquarters, the United Farm Workers leader began to see himself as not just a union leader, but a visionary healer" (NYT)(gift link).

"I can’t think of one person in a relationship that I would want for myself. I’ve done it before and prefer focusing on me and my own needs."

Says a 33-year-old Toronto woman, quoted at the beginning of a NYT article called "Why Marriage, for So Many, Is Less Appealing Than Ever/From Gen Z to Gen X, a pause in the march to the altar, or a decision to skip it altogether, is becoming more common."

There's also this from Shani Silver, 43, host of "A Single Serving Podcast": "[A]s millennials, we got to the age where we were promised all these things would happen, and they never did.... [We] worked on ourselves throughout our lives to become the desirable partners we were told to become... But the men didn’t rise along with us. They’ve stagnated. There are imbalances in domestic labor responsibilities, emotional labor responsibilities, in running a household... If you marry a man you’re settling for, I don’t see a lot of relationship longevity."

"Here’s a thought experiment: imagine Instagram, but every single post is a video of paint drying."

"Same infinite scroll. Same autoplay. Same algorithmic recommendations. Same notification systems. Is anyone addicted? Is anyone harmed? Is anyone suing? Of course not. Because infinite scroll is not inherently harmful. Autoplay is not inherently harmful. Algorithmic recommendations are not inherently harmful. These features only matter because of the content they deliver. The 'addictive design' does nothing without the underlying user-generated content that makes people want to keep scrolling.... If every editorial decision about how to present third-party content is now a 'design choice' subject to product liability, Section 230 protects effectively nothing...."

Writes Mike Masnick, in "Everyone Cheering The Social Media Addiction Verdicts Against Meta Should Understand What They’re Actually Cheering For" (TechDirt).

I found that because David French links to it in "Don’t Cheer Too Hard for the Facebook Verdicts." French writes: "It’s quite possible that these verdicts will be overturned or heavily modified on appeal. But that process can take years. In the meantime, there will almost certainly be many more trials and many more verdicts that will put social media companies under pressure to increase their own censorship and their own controls over free speech online."

"If you're the mother who was reading Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone aloud to your child..."

"... on the LNER train from London to Edinburgh yesterday, one of my grown up children was listening and says you did the voices brilliantly "

Writes J.K. Rowling, on X — a particularly fine use of X.

I love that there are responses right there, including the crabby ones, like: "Was reading it loud not disturbing others even though your child enjoyed it?"/"I’m the mother and I don’t care what your grown up children thinks"/"Hopefully she verbally edited all the grammatical and editorial errors you so carelessly left throughout the book"/"The best education lies in reading the Bible; fairy tales or magic wands don't solve everyday problems."

But isn't there a magic wand in the Bible though? See Exodus 7:8-13, Exodus 7-8, Numbers 17, Numbers 17:8, Numbers 17:10, Hebrews 9:4.

"I believe that I was born an addict and that I'm hardwired to drink and drug myself to death."

"And in order to overcome that kind of biological drive, you need a spiritual fire."

RFK Jr: “I believe that I was born an addict and that I'm hardwired to drink and drug myself to death.”

“And in order to overcome that kind of biological drive, you need a spiritual fire.”@CPAC pic.twitter.com/nD3TdFTkUP

— MAHA Action (@MAHA_Action) March 28, 2026

"Ilsa was only 19 when she went gaga for Lazlo, who was 37. That's how she ended up married before she understood mature adult love..."

"... which she found with Rick. Now Rick is 37 when Yvonne is 19 and she's got a crush on Rick, but he rejects her. Maybe that's not just his wounded coldness. Maybe it's more he's not a sexual predator like Lazlo."

That's a prompt I wrote to Grok, after watching half of "Casablanca" last night while Meade was downstairs watching Purdue lose its "Elite 8" game.

At the Sunrise Café...

... you can talk all night.

"Pretend I didn't say that. Please. Please. Please, media, disregard that statement. Thank you very much."