It was a chilly, cloud-covered sunrise this morning.

That's my photograph. Later, it got warm and sunny and you can see the blue sky as the background for an eagle in flight, video'd by Meade:

Write about whatever you want in the comments... except the return to Earth of the Artemis astronauts. Go one post down for that.

Artemis splashdown, live.

"Kristi Noem's husband, Bryon, had an on-off secret online relationship with a left-wing dominatrix for more than nine years..."

"Bryon fantasized about 'leaving' Kristi for the woman he worshipped as his 'goddess' and discussed his desire to transition his gender through surgery and hormone therapy. Sotomayor – a 5ft sex worker known as Raelynn Riley with extra-large 2500cc breast implants – has shared dozens of phone recordings and online messages with the Daily Mail.... 'He needed to just talk and talk, and it felt more personal than I was comfortable with,' said the 30-year-old from Colorado Springs who says she made tens of thousands of dollars off the relationship.... 'F*** your family,' Sotomayor texted Bryon in November, later calling the whole Noem clan 'gross.' 'Love that,' he responded. 'Besides the fact of who your wife is, no one is prettier than me. No one is as powerful,' she continued. 'F***ing true. Do you want me to be a woman?' he wrote.... 'I need to be your trans bimbo slut,' he wrote Sotomayor...."

That's what it says in The Daily Mail.

Kamala knows how to be President, because she "spent countless hours in my West Wing office, footsteps away from the Oval Office."

Here's Kamala Harris at the National Action Network conference, when Al Sharpton asked her if she's going to run for President again.

"Listen, I might [run again]. I'm thinking about it. Let me also say this. I served for four years being a heartbeat away from the presidency of the United States. I spent countless hours in my West Wing office, footsteps away from the Oval Office. I spent countless hours in the Oval Office, in the Situation Room. I know what the job is. And I know what it requires...."

So she spent untold hours in a room near his room. But what was he even doing in his room? Weren't there other people in other rooms doing everything for him? So yeah, she knows what it takes, and she feels up to it, and, if that's the job, we're all up to it.

"I want you to imagine a guy today, if R. Crumb never existed, but he emerged as R. Crumb today and put that work out. He would 100% be labeled in the Andrew Tate camp, right?"

 

Duncan Trussell had sent Joe Rogan an R. Crumb drawing, and it sets Joe off:

A look at Trump's Triumphal Arch... with the Lincoln Memorial in the background, at a distance.

From "Trump officials unveil designs for president’s controversial 250-foot arch/The arch is intended to commemorate the United States’ 250th anniversary. Military veterans have sued to halt the project, saying it would alter key views of Arlington National Cemetery" (WaPo)(gift link). Excerpt:

"It is his nature to be very deliberate. We don’t have time to be very deliberate in the year 2026."

Said one UW regent, Timothy F. Nixon, quoted in "Top Regent Defends Firing of Wisconsin University Leader/In testimony before state lawmakers, regents suggested that Jay O. Rothman had been well aware of the board’s concerns about his leadership" (NYT).

There's also: "Mr. Nixon, paraphrasing Abraham Lincoln, also cast doubt on Mr. Rothman’s contention that he had not known about the board’s misgivings, saying his claim had 'all of the substance of the shadow of a starving pigeon.'"

The oft-repurposed Lincoln hyperbole is: "as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death."

"Everyone seemed to agree that the patients were self-aware — that they could feel, that they had a grounding sense of being a someone who feels."

"But nobody knew exactly how much they retained of themselves: whether they knew themselves as a particular someone, or the someone they once were. It was impossible to know. In the view of these researchers, covertly conscious patients occupied a phenomenological gray space that was inaccessible to scientific probing and even to the human imagination. But some researchers believed that at least some of the patients were largely intellectually intact.... Tabitha learned that once a patient was diagnosed as 'vegetative' and then admitted into a nursing home, it was almost impossible for family members to get a second opinion and a new diagnosis and then, maybe, though only maybe, a new insurance-company authorization and entry into a rehabilitation program. Instead, when a family member, sitting at the bedside, reported the early flickerings of consciousness in a loved one, she was usually dismissed as seeing what she wished to see...."

From "Vegetative Patients May Be More Aware Than We Knew/New research is upending what we thought about the consciousness of patients, leaving families with agonizing choices" (NYT)(gift link, because there's a lot more material at the link, very well presented, including much about the Terri Schiavo case, the recent research about covertly conscious patients, and the vigilance of one wife at her husband's bedside). 

"But much of the ube flavor in foods and beverages doesn’t come from the yam itself."

"In T. Hasegawa’s low-slung building in an industrial district about 10 miles northwest of Anaheim, Calif., teams of food chemists spend their days trying to create concentrates of flavors — some that exist in nature and others that don’t, like 'unicorn' or 'glazed donut' — for food and beverage companies. First, the chemists analyze the composition of real food... to identify the molecules responsible for aroma and taste. Then, natural extracts, oils and aroma compounds are combined to create concentrated versions of the flavor.... 'You can’t just put blood orange juice into an energy drink.... It would require so much juice that there wouldn’t be enough room for other ingredients.' Compared with Dubai chocolate, which exploded in popularity a few years ago thanks to TikTok and its photogenic bright-green filling, ube has been more of a 'slow burn' flavor.... 'It had been on our radar for three years before we named it the flavor of the year'...."

From "A Must for the Next Food Craze? Be ‘Social Media Gorgeous.’ The ascent of ube has little to do with the purple yam’s taste or Filipino origins. It’s the color, flavor experts say" (NYT).

"The lack of outside help for [Janet] Mills has left some Democrats in Maine with the impression that Schumer and other powerful Democrats are leaving her to twist in the wind..."

"... as she fails to make up ground in the polls. With Platner ads airing regularly on television, Mills supporters have begun complaining to Democrats close to the governor about the lack of a response, with some wondering why Schumer recruited the governor to run if no help would be provided when she did.... Republicans have needled Democrats on the apparent lack of support for Mills in the ad wars, using it to paint Schumer as out of touch with the Democratic base. 'Chuck Schumer is bailing out his preferred candidates across the map, but Janet Mills’ air support is nowhere to be found,' the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s regional press secretary, Samantha Cantrell, said in a statement. '“As Maine’s Democrat base turns to the radical liar Graham Platner, Schumer’s dream of beating Susan Collins is slipping further out of sight.'" 

From "Is Chuck Schumer leaving his top candidate recruit twisting in the wind? Maine’s Democratic governor, Janet Mills, has gone negative against Graham Platner. The attacks have not worked, and Minority Leader Charles Schumer so far has declined to bail her out" (WaPo).

" I Made a Network of Every Home Run in MLB History."

At the Sunrise Café...

... you can talk all night.

"For almost everyone, writing books is a low-paying job! For most it pays literally nothing!"

Lindy West gives us a striking example of working very hard to get publicity for a new book and barely selling anything. Is this a specific example of female readers repelled by the author's finding a way to stand by her polyamorous husband or something much more general in book publishing these days:

"What if your world should fall apart?"

Why not eat 11 doughnuts?

This is so insane

“Crumbl Cookies is now selling a cookie with the amount of sugar you would get, not in 1, not in 5, BUT 11 of these Krispy Kreme donuts”

This one cookie has 69 ingredients including one that crosses the blood brain barrier

How is this legal?? pic.twitter.com/ygUcmxo6n2

— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) April 8, 2026

This made me think about the old expression "That's the way the cookie crumbles." The OED traces that expression to 1955, when a Cincinnati Enquirer columnist, Ollie M. James, wrote: "Well, as we say in the publishing business, sometimes that is the way the cookie crumbles." It was perceived at the time as a cute variation on "That's the way the ball bounces." I remember the late '50s excitement over "cookie crumbles" and other variations on the old "ball bounces." But the only other variation I can remember is "That's the way the grapefruit squirts."

Here's Tom Waits, "That's the Way." He remembers:

"They provided $0 to deal with the ongoing genocide of MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+."

Canada's New Democratic Party Member of Parliament Leah Gazan:

NDP MP Leah Gazan: "They provided $0 to deal with the ongoing genocide of MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+,"pic.twitter.com/9KXxlKUuf0

— Defiant L’s (@DefiantLs) April 8, 2026