"We’re building a rocket ship as we fly it."

Said Michelle Lujan Grisham, the Governor of New Mexico, quoted in "One year into free child care in New Mexico, too many kids and not enough slots/In a first-in-the-nation experiment with universal child care, demand is outpacing availability and costs are soaring" (WaPo).

Last September, Lujan Grisham took the final step, announcing that New Mexico would be the first to open its subsidized day care to any family, a move estimated to save families $13,000 a year per child.... The announcement was met with applause and cheers, but behind the scenes, state legislators — who said they had not been informed that the program would become universal — were confounded, along with some members of the department’s own staff.

“We were all shocked,” said state Sen. George Muñoz, a Democrat and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. “Nobody knew about it until the day it was in the paper. All of a sudden we were all calling each other, saying, ‘Where did this come from?’ ‘Did anybody from the governor’s office talk to you about it?’ Nope, we were all in the dark.”...

"How all baseball announcers sound."

I like how the one word you can understand is "Moriarity" (that guy's name is Moriarity).

"Her heart’s desire included a $400 sea-foam green jacket from the New York Liberty women’s basketball team that reads 'New York or Nowhere.'"

She'd had more than $200,000 in student loans, but qualified for loan forgiveness, so "One thing I did is I gifted myself an extra loan payment for whatever my heart desired."

She is New York City Council member Tiffany Cabán, who "spends much of her day thinking about how to address New York City’s affordability crisis," and rents a two-and-a-half-bedroom place in Astoria, "where she lives with her rescue dog Ducky."

I'm reading the latest entry in the NYT series "Affording New York," "How a City Council Member Lives on $148,500 in Queens" (gift link, with photos of Cabán place and her dog and her jacket).

It is a nice jacket for a City Council member, and it's nice that she has season tickets to the game ($5,000), and that her salary is going up from $148,500 to $175,500, after she and other council members voted them a raise. Well earned, no? You wouldn't want to try to live in NYC for only $148,500.

The jacket's slogan is "It will Always be New York or Nowhere." You know that wonderful New York feeling: every place else is nowhere. It reminds me of my old saying: Better than nothing is a high standard. But acquiring nothing leaves you intact as a living human being, and you save whatever money you'd have spent on that item that's not better than nothing. But with "New York or Nowhere," it seems you cease to exist if you can't swing life in New York. Life without being in New York is not better than nothing. It's nowhere. 

"He had the hardest time getting off the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children."

There will never be a more obvious sentence to look back on and explain the insanity of our times than the following…

“He had the hardest time getting off the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children." pic.twitter.com/i7dnLg2MlE

— Tandy (@dantypo) September 8, 2026

Said one of the Lindsay Clancy jurors, Kellie Farina, about the holdout juror.

She's quoted in "Three Jurors in Clancy Trial Describe Frustration With Holdout/The three jurors, who voted to acquit Lindsay Clancy of murder, described the tense deliberations in an interview with a Boston TV station" (NYT gift link).

CORRECTION: I'd connected the quote to one of the other jurors who spoke to the press.

ALSO: Another juror "said that the holdout 'completely disregarded' information that nurses on the jury provided to help interpret medical reports from the hospital where Ms. Clancy stayed after she killed her children." Wasn't the juror at least entitled to reject extraneous "information" from an unsworn witness?

Sunrise.

"At these gatherings, even the most peculiar activities are turned into celebration. Beyond amusement, though, I was searching..."

"... for proof that in an age of social isolation and online disconnection, people still hold on to the traditions that bring them together and make their hometowns unmistakably theirs. While I was in Sopchoppy, I asked Gary Revell, 74, why he still grunts for worms. He told me that the times he goes out at dawn in the forest behind his house, the sunlight filtering through the pines, are when he feels closest to God...."

Writes the photographer Nat Segebre, in "The Strange, Hyperlocal Customs of the Country" (NYT gift link)(lots of oddball photos at the link).

That very weird trailer for the Nathan Fielder documentary about Elizabeth Holmes.

Extreme close-up Holmes: "I don't have anything to deceive you on. Of course, I'm not deceiving you. I'm engaging with you as a human being. Why would I deceive you?"

I don't know whose face is more disturbing, hers or Fielder's. 

Here's the NYT article about the film: "Elizabeth Holmes Documentary Upends Telluride Film Festival/The comic Nathan Fielder and the filmmaker Lance Oppenheim teamed up to interview the convicted executive for 'You Can See Everything.'"

"Police set a dog on the two thieves, who were wearing masks and gloves. They dropped the two paintings in the museum’s garden..."

"... before escaping through a hole in the fence. One of the works abandoned was an 1895 portrait of Madame Stephen Pichon, according to Caroline Amat, the deputy mayor of Cagnes-sur-Mer. The second abandoned painting has not yet been named."

From "Thieves steal four Renoirs — and drop two while fleeing/Works worth millions of euros, taken in the early hours from a museum near Nice dedicated to the painter, are missing" (London Times).

Here's Madame Pichon, pinched in her yellow dress, seemingly knowing she'd be the one the dog-chased thieves would drop in the garden:

But really, you should see the ones they got away with. They're material for the old "Renoir Sucks at Painting" Instagram account. I deplore all theft, and the theft of unique objects is a special problem. And yet....

"In France, we do not ask women to erase themselves. No dogma, no religion is above the laws of the Republic."

Wrote Aurore Bergé, France’s minister for gender equality. And "hard-right" presidential candidate Marine Le Pen said France would "never accept that women’s presence be 'limited.'"

Quoted in "Strike at Eiffel Tower after female staff ‘told to be out of sight’/Women workers at the Paris landmark were allegedly told to make themselves scarce for a visit by representatives of a Hindu religious ­organisation" (London Times).

The Hindu group is BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha, which, we are told, "is close to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling conservative Hindu nationalist party."

Who owns and operates the Eiffel Tower? You might wonder: Isn't it the French government? It is the government of the City of Paris, operating through a public company called the Société d’Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel. The Hindu group asked the Society of Exploitation to limit its interaction with women, and the Society told its female employees to make themselves invisible.

ADDED: Here's a gift link to the NYT article on this story. Excerpt:

Sunrise.

"Mr. Field found his calling by happenstance. As a newly enlisted soldier boarding a troop train during World War II, he was handed a bag..."

"... by a Red Cross worker. It contained a toothbrush, a comb, a candy bar and an anthology of poetry. 'I was on that train for three days,' he said in a 2022 interview for this obituary. 'I read it over and over. I knew immediately that I was going to be a poet. He was just 18 and had never read a book of poetry...."

From "Edward Field, Bohemian New York Poet, Dies at 102/His colloquial language, emotionality and gay topics brought him widespread praise, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship and other literary honors" (NYT gift link).

I'd like to see that anthology. It seems that the book was "The Pocket Book of Verse: Great English and American Poems," which contained 249 poems by 77 poets:

"'Every day, another church is sold,' said Lilian Grootswagers-Theuns, the president of the advisory board for Future for Religious Heritage.... 'This is happening everywhere in Europe...'"

"'... in Germany, Sweden, Spain and Italy. It’s already going very fast,' she said. 'But now we’re going fast-forward. Now, there’s a tsunami coming.' Churches, once central to European cultural life, were typically situated in the heart of a city and built to last. 'Before you even had the nations, you had a European tradition going back to the fourth century of having a church for each city, each village,' said Barbara Welzel, a professor of art history and cultural education.... These days, parishes may merge or unused churches be sold for private use, like homes or hotels. Sometimes communities rally to save their local church buildings and use them as tourist sites, cultural venues or health care centers. Some priests simply walk away. 'In some churches, they really throw away the key,” [Hedwig Fijen, the director of the 'roving art biennial' Manifesta, said.] 'I’ve found sacred objects in the garbage bin.'"

From "What to Do With Europe’s 'Zombie Churches'? These Artists Have Some Ideas. As the continent’s ties to Christianity fade, churches are being abandoned. But some see a chance to transform them into communal spaces like care centers or venues for the arts" (NYT gift link).

"Mr. Godin — 'pie-eyed, pudding-faced and potbellied,' in one writer’s description — was a pain in the derrière most of his life, beginning in Catholic school when he complained to the priests about his lackluster sex life."

From "Noël Godin, Prankster Who Threw Pies at the Powerful, Dies at 80/Splattering figures like Bill Gates, Jean-Luc Godard and Bernard-Henri Lévy, he perfected the art of using whipped cream as a form of protest" (NYT gift link).

A quote from Godin: 

“I have always remained true to the spirit of May ’68. I still live for that time and have always advocated direct sabotage, the sabotage of the professions, the sabotage of the roles into which we are trapped by our day-to-day boredom."

I thought pie-throwers had all switched to shaving cream — just a pie tin full of shaving cream. Did Godin remain pure?

"We use only the finest patisserie, ordered at the last minute from small local bakers,” Mr. Godin told The Observer, a British newspaper, in 1995. "Quality is everything. If things go wrong, we eat them."

Isolated Transient Alexia — a migrainous accompaniment — ever had it?

JAMA Neurology abstract: "Alexia as a transient or paroxysmal neurologic event is a rare clinical finding. John Hughlings Jackson made reference to the paroxysmal occurrence of 'word blindness' as a temporary sequela of neuronal exhaustion at an epileptogenic focus.... A transient episode of alexia in the absence of accompanying neurologic deficit is exceedingly rare.... We recently observed a patient who experienced an isolated, transient alexia that appears to have been a migrainous accompaniment...."

I suspect this happened to me. Here's what I was trying to read and could not make any sense of it, and I struggled from all different angles: "The Story of the Foul-Mouthed Parrot Andrew Jackson Once Had" (an episode of a podcast I like: "Boring History for Sleep"). 

Now, I think that's a type of headline that is objectively hard to puzzle out. I encountered another one this morning in the NY Post: "Missouri foster mom accused of trading teen for monkey avoids prison." Something about the sequence "monkey avoids prison" sends your thoughts tripping over the precipice. 

But that "Foul-Mouth Parrot" headline was entirely undecipherable to me. I searched for an entry point: What is "Story"? What is "Andrew"? "Foul"? I couldn't even think of how to begin to pronounce those words or how words work together to mean something. This not-knowing lasted for about 15 minutes, and of course, I queried A.I. about it. That was after Meade had consulted a different A.I.

And I believe all A.I.s will tell you the same thing if you put this story into it — not the story of Andrew Jackson's parrot or the story of the foster mom's monkey — the story of a reading human suddenly completely unable to read. And we did what A.I. told us to do. That's why there was no sunrise photo yesterday. Our sleep was massively disrupted. I had to get my head examined.

ADDED: I omitted a crucial detail that is why I was thinking in terms of a migrainous accompaniment. About an hour before the alexia, I experienced a scintillating scotoma — a glittering arc'd zigzag in my visual field. I've had that twice before, in 2004 and 2014. In 2014, I treated it as nothing, but it felt like a big deal in 2004. I blogged it as "My scotoma" (deliberately evoking "My Sharona"):

"I am a virgin. I grew up with no friends. I didn't have anyone growing up besides my two girlfriends that I'm still very close with today...."

"And I didn't like like I didn't do extracurricular activities. Like I didn't go out. I didn't have fun. Like I was just school home school home. So like I never had a relationship with anyone. And then I started working. I was serving for about four years at a mom and pop restaurant. I was a waitress.... And then now I'm here and I'm just waiting for the right person. But now everyone knows me and it's like weird. So like I'm trying to date but it's going to be a little weird now. It's hard. It's hard now. So I'm just waiting for the right person. Worth it. You know I'm waiting. Worth 100 million...."

Said Sophie Rain, the 21-year-old biggest moneymaker on "Only Fans," talking to the 70-year-old Bill Maher for nearly 2 hours. Creepy? Or is this helpful insight into a business you ought to understand? She's made $100 million. And yet: lonely! 

But you know the answer when people are so remote and loveless. Animals! She's all:

I love animals. That's what I want to do is I just want to live on a farm. That's that's the goal for me is to own a lot of land and just rescue animals. That's all I want to do....

Maher is all Me too. I love animals too. I'd just love to live on a farm too.

Animals are easy. People are hard. But what do you want from people? If you have 2 very close girlfriends, why would you say I grew up with no friends? 2 is so much more than zero. 2 very close friends seems like more than any number of remote friends. Or do you love remote friends... in social media?

IN THE COMMENTS: Leland writes: "Successful farms don't 'rescue' animals. They raise them, grow them, and then sell them..."

That's true for the restricted meaning of "farm," but there is an extended version of "farm" — watch and see who uses it — that's just a home in the heart of the country.

I want a horse/I want a sheep/I wanna get me a good night's sleep...

Elegant presence of mind in baseball.

Just for the joy of it:

Payton Tolle is the gift that keeps on giving 😭 pic.twitter.com/jaPwFhr3i8

— MLB (@MLB) September 6, 2026

And a effective perception that an out is right there waiting to be had:

1000 IQ play here by Joe Mack pic.twitter.com/kDTsrdZpPS

— Miami Marlins (@Marlins) September 6, 2026