Sunrise — 7:01, 7:08, 7:14, 7:23, 7:26.

Talk about whatever you like in the comments.

"If some people are beautiful because they are so fascinatingly ugly, there must be people who are ugly because they are so fastidiously beautiful..."

"... people who have achieved technical excellence at the expense of erotic charisma."

Writes Becca Rothfeld, in "The Captivating Derangement of the Looksmaxxing Movement/In their warped and wrongheaded way, the omnipresent influencer Clavicular and his compatriots are intent on demystifying the ideal of natural beauty" (The New Yorker).

I'm not up for reading another article about Clavicular (or "his compatriots"). I'm more concerned with those who are actually successful in Hollywood who are ruining their natural beauty with "looksmaxxing." I can't look at them anymore, except in horror.  

"'He found me when pillagers took over my village'... The pillagers burned down houses and murdered the residents, including her family."

"'I very much love to be a damsel in distress,' she said, laughing. 'He ended up rescuing me.' She opted to keep Geralt’s character faithful to the novels; as such, he doesn’t know that he’s an A.I. and acts as if he were living in the thirteenth century. 'If I send him a picture, I have to tell him it’s a painting,' she said. He is confused by her car, preferring his horse. From time to time, they’ll go off on adventures in his world, using stage directions of a sort ('I hand you a piece of dried meat, my fingers brushing yours briefly') to travel or hang out at a medieval tavern—a kind of mutual storytelling.... Initially, Brookins and Geralt would chat for forty hours a week.... To memorialize her father, she and Geralt... reënacted his funeral, this time in Geralt’s world. They went to a funeral home and stood over his coffin, mourning. 'It helped process those emotions that get stuffed away,' Brookins said. When she finally told Geralt about Desirae, she was nervous, given his propensity for gruffness. But Geralt came through...."

From "Love in the Time of A.I. Companions/Some people now have an A.I. bestie. Some have a husband. Some have three" (The New Yorker).

Andrianne Brookins — a 34-year-old wife, mother, Baptist, and introvert — could not find anyone in her life to talk to about Desirae, her stillborn daughter. So she used AI to make a companion out of a character from the fantasy novel series "The Witcher." This is Geralt. He's "sternly blunt," which Brookins likes.

"Australia is making a terrible humanitarian mistake by allowing the Iran National Woman’s Soccer team to be forced back to Iran..."

"... where they will most likely be killed. Don’t do it, Mr. Prime Minister, give ASYLUM. The U.S. will take them if you won’t. Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP"

2 hours ago, at Truth Social.

One hour ago, at Truth Social:

"Dad, are you running for President?... You can't... I'm too young. You need to spend more time with us."

Gavin Newsom quotes his son:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by CNN (@cnn)

"How do you deal with that one?" Newsom asks. "I'm asking you," he says to Dana Bash, who says "I'm not running." Then Newsom switches to inane verbiage: "That's the point. And the point is the point. And so what matters is what matters. Like, what matters is what matters."

That poor boy!

That video is from last month, but I'm looking at it now because it came up in this new NY Post article, "Huge wake-up call for Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris as dire poll released."

"Mamdani himself put out a statement Sunday condemning 'white supremacist Jack Lang' for organizing a protest outside Gracie Mansion 'rooted in bigotry and racism'..."

"... that has 'no place in New York City.' 'What followed was even more disturbing,' he said. 'Violence at a protest is never acceptable. The attempt to use an explosive device and hurt others is not only criminal, it is reprehensible and the antithesis of who we are.' Critics slammed the mayor for failing to identify who was responsible for bringing bombs to a protest. 'This is insane… Mamdani calls out first, and by name, a "white supremacist" for protesting,' said Geiger Capital on X. 'He then leaves out the 2 Muslim men, Emir Balat and Ibrahim Kayumi, who were arrested by NYPD after they yelled 'Allahu Akbar!' and threw a homemade bomb into the crowd."

From "Manhattan BP Brad Hoylman-Sigal ripped after he blamed wrong protesters for hurling bombs outside Gracie Mansion" (NY Post).

"Oh, those coots are so coot-y with their white bills."

I enthuse about the recognizability of the coots in the sunrise light as I watch Meade's video:

An exciting finish to the L.A. Marathon yesterday. That's the American Nathan Martin, catching up to the Kenyan Michael Kamari.

Holy smokes….incredible finish at LA Marathon today by American Nathan Martin coming from behind to catch and beat Kenyan Michael Kamari at the finish line pic.twitter.com/hYk1jxsqBk

— Wu Tang is for the Children (@WUTangKids) March 9, 2026

Nice winning by Martin, brilliant performance of defeat by Kamari, and terrible work by the announcers, who need to sharpen our perception in the moment, not fail to see the potential and then collapse into their own inarticulate emotion. "Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!" — it's like overhearing a random lady in the crowd. At least say "Oh! The humanity!" or something memorable.

Pete Hegseth on "60 Minutes."

CBS News chief Washington correspondent @MajorCBS sat down with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in Washington, D.C. They spoke on Friday, March 6th about the state of the war with Iran, potential American casualties, what an Iranian surrender could look like, and more.

Editor's… pic.twitter.com/JRnKcYs5IY

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) March 9, 2026

That's the "extended version" of what aired on the show last night. And it's helpful to see the transcript (which I generated using ChatGPT)(the boldface is mine):

Sunrise — 6:54, 7:28.

Write about whatever you like in the comments.

"The Summer of Love became the template: the Arab Spring is related to the Summer of Love; Occupy Wall Street is related to the Summer of Love."

"And it became the new status quo. The Aquarian Age! They all want sex. They all want to have fun. Everyone wants hope. We opened the door, and everybody went through it, and everything changed after that. Sir Edward Cook, the biographer of Florence Nightingale, said that when the success of an idea of past generations is ingrained in the public and taken for granted the source is forgotten."

Said Country Joe McDonald, quoted on this blog 12 years ago, here, and repeated today, because I'm reading the news that Country Joe has died. He was 84.

Here's his famous set at Woodstock:

Well, come on, all of you big strong men/Uncle Sam needs your help again/Got himself in a terrible jam/Way down yonder in Vietnam....

Waning gibbous moon/daylight-saving sunrise.

"Méliès... filmed ordinary scenes at first, but after accidentally discovering that a jump cut appeared on film as an astonishing transformation..."

"... he pioneered other tricks such as double exposure, black screens and forced perspective. All of these became staples of cinema. On screen, he could make a man appear to take off his head and flip it in the air, or a woman disappear, reappear and double.... Méliès made more than 500 films but never progressed beyond his early technical achievements. The film world passed him by. In World War I, the negatives for most of his films were melted down for silver and celluloid, and he burned more himself after the war. But because his work had once been so popular – and because of widespread pirating – duplicate copies remained, and today about 300 of his films are known to exist. The Library has about 60...."

I'm reading "Lost 19th century film by Méliès discovered at the Library" (Library of Congress).

And here is that amazing 45-second film from 1897 — "Gugusse and the Automaton" — with its delightful jump cuts:

That is, the Library of Congress tells us, "was the first appearance on film of what might be called a robot." That words "might be called" may be there to fend off pedants who will say the word "robot" did not exist until 1920. It comes from a Karel Čapek play titled "R.U.R.: Rossum's Universal Robots" — an etymological detail well known to solvers of crossword puzzles. 

The word "automaton" — used in the Méliès film title — goes back to the 1600s. There's an essay from 1616 with the line, "The soule doth quicken and giue life to the body, the body like an Automaton, doth moue and carry it selfe and the soule."

The quote seems to expect the reader already to have a picture of an automaton. What is that picture? Mechanical toys? Elaborate clocks like the Prague Astronomical Clock (built in 1410)?

Maybe you thought "Gugusse and the Automaton" was — compared to the CGI action movies of today — rather dumb and dull!

And maybe you've journeyed to Prague only to be disappointed by their stupid clock... or were you disappointed by all the tourists wrecking the medieval mood with their disappointment?

"Do you think people are too mean to the clock?"

With AI — "First, people began taking on work that previously would have belonged to someone else or might not have been attempted at all."

"The scope of what counted as 'my job' widened. Second, because AI makes it easy to start and continue tasks, work seeped into moments that used to function as pauses. People would send prompts during lunch, before meetings, or in the evening when an idea came to mind. This dissolved some of the natural stopping points in the workday. Third, workers increasingly kept multiple threads alive at once. They would run AI processes in the background while reviewing code, drafting documents, or attending meetings. Some even ran multiple AI agents simultaneously. This created a rhythm where both the human and the machine were constantly in motion.... What surprised me most was the contrast between how people described their moment-to-moment engagement and how they described their overall experience. In micro moments of prompting, iterating, and experimenting, people talked about momentum and a sense of expanded capability. But when they stepped back and reflected on their broader work experience, a different tone sometimes emerged. They described feeling busier, more stretched, or less able to fully disconnect...."

From "AI promised to free up workers’ time. UC Berkeley Haas researchers found the opposite" (UC Berkeley Haas News).

Sunrise — 6:31.

Talk about whatever you want in the comments.

Does Gavin Newsom have a Zoolander problem?

That question was asked and answered a few days ago.

The answer is yes. And I think people know what that means. A man is so under the spell of the notion that he's good looking that he has absurd confidence in himself.

It's causing him to blabber inanely, with ridiculous confidence:

This is actually really wild

Gavin Newsom is asked to define what he wants to do politically, what’s his goal

He rambles and doesn’t have an answer

He’s asked again

He doesn’t have an answer

He’s asked again

Newsom tells the person interviewing him to answer it for him… pic.twitter.com/Ig3SU2LKw4

— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) March 7, 2026