"One day, he is a man who loves his wife and has just bought a terrifically expensive mattress for their bed."

"The next he tells her, his eyes narrowing into a shape she had never seen before: 'I thought I was happy but I’m not. I thought I wanted our life but I don’t.' He tells her she can have everything, including custody of the children. 'I don’t want it,' he says. 'I don’t want any of it.'"

From "Her Life Was an Old-Money Dream. It Collapsed in a Moment. Born into exceptional privilege, Belle Burden had it all: love, money, family. Then her marriage fell apart" (NYT).

Now, I clicked on that link because the headline bugged me. I keep seeing these sudden-collapse headlines. Articles are always offering to pinpoint the moment when things changed. There's one on the front page of The London Times right now: "The moment Landman’s teenage blonde changed American TV." It's annoying me. They think we're manipulable by our belief in the magic moment.

But I'm blogging because of the mattress, the "terrifically expensive mattress." I think I've blogged about that mattress: "[T]he most preposterously priced mattress, a king-size Grande Vivius, costs $539,000...." I've made a new tag, "mattress," and adding it retrospectively, which is a much bigger task than you might think. There are so many posts about someone known as "mattress girl" and I've repeatedly blogged about the line "it balances on your head just like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine."

But really, if you were the stay-at-home wife to a rich man, would the purchase of a terrifically expensive mattress make you think he is more likely to stay or less likely to stay? He might want to cushion your fall, to pacify and lull you. What is the meaning of a mattress?

AND: Maybe the mattress was the tipping point. That mattress was exactly what made him see that the life they'd formed together was her vision of the good, and he couldn't relate to it at all. She wanted grand material things and he didn't want any of it. You don't need me, you have the mattress. 

Have you experienced this "Derisive Term for White Women Spreads on the Far Right" or is the NYT pushing it at us to foment contempt for conservatives?

I'm reading "After Renee Good Killing, Derisive Term for White Women Spreads on the Far Right/Vocal Trump supporters are demonizing Renee Good, her partner and their allies, with some even using an acronym: AWFUL, or Affluent White Female Urban Liberal" by Clyde McGrady.

I hadn't seen this term, and I read all sorts of things every day, so that makes me think this term isn't really a thing... though I've certainly noticed that people of the right are passing around a lot of videos of highly emotional left-wing white women.

But then I asked Meade, and he had heard the term and it seems to be catching on. 

Needless to say, I don't like the term. I don't like expressions of contempt and I don't like commentators  trading on the idea that women are over-emotional. I also don't like freaking out and yelling in public (or at home), but you can say just that, without contributing to sex-based hatred. 

Despite that NYT headline, McGrady's column isn't really about the term AWFUL. It's more about the phenomenon of going after activist liberal white women:

"What's the original version of the adage 'Friends don't let friends [blank]'? Is it about drunk driving? is it 'vote Republican'? What's the first one and where did it go from there?"

Just a random A.I. prompt of mine. That came up this morning.

Yesterday's equivalent was: "What was that hippie poster that was mostly text and included something like and if we find each other it will be beautiful?"

On Thursday, my idle musings got me to: "What is the old waltz most associated with ice skating?"

Without A.I., things like this would float along, fermenting, festering, and maybe one day you'd happen to run into the answer and think aha! I've been wondering about that for the longest time. Now, you can get the answer immediately, and it doesn't amount to much other than that I've destroyed the groundwork for what might have been a delightful aha moment somewhere done the road.

"There is no evidence that Gladis and her pod are attacking humans or that they intend to harm people at all."

"In fact, wild orcas have never been seen treating people as prey. They do, however, have a thing for 'fads,' where they take up behaviour that has no obvious benefit. One famous example involved a female in the Pacific northwest who, in 1987, was seen wearing a dead salmon on her head. The trend spread. Other orcas across Puget Sound were soon spotted with their own 'salmon hats.' And then, as abruptly and as mysteriously as it started, the fashion fizzled out. Other orcas have been seen draping kelp over their backs or heads.... To scientists, the behaviour with the boat rudders looks similar. After wrenching one free, Gladis and her companions tend to bat it around for a while, then lose interest and swim off.... One [researcher] believes the orcas see the yachts, with their long detachable rudders, as 'giant toy dispensers.'"

From "Orcas blamed for yacht attacks are speaking their own language/Scientists studying killer whales linked to hundreds of encounters with boats near Gibraltar have discovered that the pod communicates using a unique dialect" (London Times).

"President Trump is, Joe Manchin believes, the 'most charming person in the world.'"

"'I wish that people could see that part of him,' the former Democratic senator told The Times. 'And I wish he could show more of that compassion. He’s a tremendous host and he talks to you and he listens to you and he engages with you. He might do whatever he wants, but he still engages.'"

From "Joe Manchin: Democrats have lost their way — I want Trump to succeed/The former senator was one of Biden’s most vital allies. Now he says the Democrats have gone too far left and has joined a record number of independents" (London Times).

Trump embraces the title "King." Either he's laughing in the face of the "No Kings" crowd or he's forgotten about them altogether.

That's at Truth Social.

What's the context? I had to look it up. I found "Trump threatens tariffs to force support for US control of Greenland/Trump's threat marked another escalation of his campaign to control the island, which is a territory of US ally Denmark" (USA Today), which reports on a health policy event at the White House yesterday, where Trump "trumpeted how the threat of tariffs forced other developed countries to accept higher drug prices so U.S. prices could come down."

Trump then added that he might use tariffs to get what he wants about Greenland. He said:  "I may put a tariff on countries if they don’t go along with Greenland because we need Greenland for national security."

And then he praised himself more generally, declaring: "I’m the tariff king and the tariff king has done a great job."

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UPDATE: "Trump Announces 10 Percent Tariff on European Countries in Standoff Over Greenland/The president escalated his drive to take charge of the Danish territory, targeting Denmark and seven other nations aligned with it" (NYT):

Denmark, which oversees Greenland, will be hit with a 10 percent tariff on all goods sent to the United States beginning on Feb. 1, he wrote in a social media post, along with Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, Britain, the Netherlands and Finland. If they don’t relent, he added, the tariff rate will increase to 25 percent on June 1, “until such time as a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland.”

Yikes. 

At the Friday Night Café...

... you can write about whatever you want.

"Does he think westerners are softer? 'Much, much! And getting weaker and weaker. We say in China it’s hard for three generations of a family to be wealthy.'"

"'Because the third, they don’t even know what money means. It’s automatically in their accounts. So people become … a designer.' He laughs. 'China became strong because people work hard with no holidays. Not just eight hours, but ten, twelve hours. That’s how they bring their children to your British schools, Cambridge and Oxford.' The West, he says, cannot take tuition fees from China and then moan when it tries to restrict academic freedom or complain about Chinese spying 'because you’ve become the underdog. You cannot compete with China, so you blame it.'"

From "Ai Weiwei: ‘You in the West can’t compete with China’/The dissident artist Ai Weiwei became a global icon when he was forced into exile by China. So how come the 68-year-old is defending the autocratic regime’s stance on Taiwan, censorship and global politics?" (London Times).

"It wasn’t long ago that casual contempt for white women was the domain of the left, at least that part of the left that took books like 'White Fragility' seriously."

"So it’s striking how easily conservatives, who’ve been stewing over insults to white people for at least five years, have singled out a group of white women as the enemy. But it also makes sense, because everyone hates an apostate. In the right-wing imagination, these women are acting like harpies — an epithet often seen online — when they’re supposed to be helpmeets. Fox News’s Will Cain described a 'weird kind of smugness' in the way 'some of these liberal white women interact with authority.' For MAGA, ICE’s eagerness to put women in their place might be a feature, not a bug."

Writes Michelle Goldberg, in "The Right Is Furious With Liberal White Women" (NYT).

There's a link on "casual contempt for white women." It goes to a 2020 BBC article about the mythic figure known as Karen — "What exactly is a 'Karen' and where did the meme come from?"

Contempt toward women is pervasive throughout the world and throughout history, but it can also be a special left-or-right problem happening at particular times and in particular places. Social media keeps feeding me videos of women acting hyper-privileged and oblivious of the risk or screaming and losing her mind over practically nothing.

"Brendan Liaw was kind of joking when he agreed he was a professional stay-at-home son during his appearance on 'Jeopardy!' in May...."

"'I figured, why not have some fun with it?' he said. 'Better to be a "stay-at-home son" than "unemployed" or "schmuck" or "lazy guy."' He certainly wasn’t expecting to set off a media moment of stories and think pieces on so-called 'trad sons' — adult men who embrace the lifestyle of living with their parents."

From "Stay-at-home sons are here — and they’re not going anywhere Why some young men are finding happiness in their parents’ homes" (WaPo)(gift link).

"'I’m sort of the origin of all this discourse,' [Brendan] Liaw, 28, said. He was speaking from an apartment in Vancouver, British Columbia.... After his 'Jeopardy!' appearance — during which he won almost $60,000 across four games — several media outlets, including Vanity Fair, People and the Wall Street Journal published stories about a rise in 'trad sons' or 'hub-sons.'"

"I’m raging and sobbing simultaneously"/"This makes me weep. What are we?"

"I haven’t heave-sobbed like this in a long time. Dang, that hit HARD"/"Well this hit home. Minnesota girl here."

Comments on this TikTok video:

"What is that Billy Collins poem about poets and metaphors that talks about poetry going on until everything has been compared to everything else?"

A question I asked Grok because I was listening to Mel Torme singing "Windmills of Your Mind."

Here's the poem: "The Trouble with Poetry." Excerpt: "And how will it ever end?/unless the day finally arrives/when we have compared everything in the world/to everything else in the world...."

And here's Mel:

I usually refrain from embedding song videos that only show a still image of the album cover, but that cover is worth gazing upon. Adorably absurd couple. The year was — need I say it? — 1969.

"[H]is policies ranged from ripping up the streets and replacing car transport with bicycles, to putting dishonest drug dealers in the stocks because 'no drug worth taking should be sold for money'..."

"...to disarming police because street violence was usually down to 'some trigger-happy cop in a fear frenzy.' He also cut his hair off so he could refer to his Democratic rival in debates as 'my long-haired opponent.' This might have seemed a satire of politics, populism as a joke, but Thompson was very serious. 'There is common sense in the apparent madness of my campaign,' he told an audience ahead of polling day. 'I am not running for sheriff in the traditional sense, but to help get hold of our destiny and begin controlling development.' He wouldn’t try to force changes, but encourage referendums and create a legal advisory board of lawyers to sit with select citizens to consult with the sheriff’s department. 'We either have a participating democracy or a police state.'... To Thompson, a 'freak' was 'not a beast roaming the streets chewing drugs, but someone who is spiritually disenfranchised, who has not wanted to participate in government.'... Thompson’s individualism... feels at odds with the community spirit and citizen participation required to realise the ascendancy of the collective good.... 'Unfortunately,' Thompson said in his 1970 concession speech, 'I proved what I set out to prove… that the American Dream really is fucked.'..."

From "Hunter S Thompson’s freaks have overrun America/The pioneer of gonzo chronicled his people’s wild descent – and saw what his country has now become" by. Barney Horner (New Statesman).

The boldface is my nudging to tell you that I see what maybe you see: "We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism."

"I presented the President of the United States the medal of the Nobel Peace Prize as a recognition for his unique commitment with our freedom."

That's María Corina Machado, who had the power to make a gift of the object, the medal, but cannot cause Trump to become the prize-winner.

Presumably, she did not give him any of the money — about $1 million — that came with the award. That money means much more to her than to our billionaire President, but more important, visitors to the President can't be handing over piles of money. And she wants something from him. She wants a lot.

He wanted something too, the Nobel Prize, and now he's in the ambiguous position of sort of having it. You just have the medal. It's like Putin's Super Bowl ring.

What do you have when you have the token of winning and you did not win? It's not the token of winning with respect to you, so what is it? 

Sunrise — 7:00, 7:20, 7:33.

Cloudless, but somber.

The man-made clouds were picking up some sprightly pinkness...

"Before Bird by Bird, most of the writing advice I read was about setting standards for smooth, stylish, publishable prose."

"I gravitated to my grandma’s shelf of old-school how-to-write books: Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, Robert Graves and Alan Hodge’s The Reader Over Your Shoulder, William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. These books taught me to be persnickety about punctuation, to cultivate a Jiminy Cricket–style internal critic, and/or to strive to write like a Yale man. I also read classic manifestos like George Orwell’s 'Politics and the English Language,' with its rousing premise that blurry prose is a political sin, and Mark Twain’s 'Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,' which advised me to 'avoid slovenliness of form' and 'eschew surplusage.'"

Writes Briallen Hopper, in "DOES IT HOLD UP?/Anne Lamott’s Battle Against Writer’s Block/Bird by Bird encouraged would-be writers to blast past their hang-ups and embrace 'shitty first drafts.' But there’s more to the creative process" (TNR).

ADDED: Here's the full text of "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses." Sample: "In his little box of stage-properties he kept six or eight cunning devices, tricks, artifices for his savages and woodsmen to deceive and circumvent each other with, and he was never so happy as when he was working these innocent things and seeing them go. A favorite one was to make a moccasined person tread in the tracks of a moccasined enemy, and thus hide his own trail. Cooper wore out barrels and barrels of moccasins in working that trick."