How to photograph a celebrity.

From "Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977-2002)," the new David Sedaris book, this entry from May 5, 1994:

As part of the publicity I’m doing for the book (Barrel Fever), I was interviewed and photographed for Avenue magazine. The talking part I’m fine with, but I hate having my picture taken. First the photographer had me pose with Dennis (my cat) while wearing a cat mask. Then she had me pretend to hang from the antlers in the living room. Next I was told to close the louvered doors on my neck and then to hold my freeze-dried turkey head up to my nose. Just as she was running out of film, the photographer said, “Can we try something silly?”

That made me remember I wanted to promote this book Chris Buck sent me, "Uneasy: Portraits 1986-2016." It has 338 photographs of celebrities — including one of David Sedaris (that's not from 1994) — often photographed in some odd, quirky way.

For example, there's Billy Joel sitting on the end of a bed holding one of those theater "applause" signs, there are separate photos of Moby and Ike Turner doing that old little boy's trick of positioning a finger to make it look like his naked penis, there's Margaret Atwood pushing the side of her face and outspread hands against a screen door (photographed from the other side of the door), Casey Affleck lying on a table pushed into the corner of a gaudily wallpapered room, Russ Meyer burying his face in cake shaped like 2 breasts, Philip Seymour Hoffman half-hiding behind underpants hung on a clothesline, and George McGovern wearing just a Speedo and (apparently) doing the twist. Much more!

I recommend it highly, having looked at all the pictures and admired the great variety and the gameness of the celebrities. Since they are mostly not actors and models but writers, musicians, and politicians, people who haven't spent their lives figuring out how to look interesting, it takes some ingenuity: Where can you put them, what can you say to them to try to get a photograph that will affect us in a way that has something to do with who this person is?

The perfect walk.

"Wisconsin" is a lot harder to spell than "banana."

You may think it's funny that — of all the states — Wisconsin is the one whose name is the most-searched-for word spelling by the people who live there. But the most-search-for spelling in New Mexico is "banana."

That conversation about Kathy Griffin.

Just now. That's Chris on the left in gray. I'm on the right in blue:

"But for the first time, the Beatles have given us an album of special effects, dazzling but ultimately fraudulent."

"And for the first time, it is not exploration which we sense, but consolidation. There is a touch of the Jefferson Airplane, a dab of Beach Boys vibrations, and a generous pat of gymnastics from The Who.... With one important exception, 'Sergeant Pepper' is precious but devoid of gems. 'A Day in the Life' is such a radical departure from the spirit of the album that it almost deserves its peninsular position (following the reprise of the 'Sergeant Pepper' theme, it comes almost as an afterthought). It has nothing to do with posturing or put-on. It is a deadly earnest excursion in emotive music with a chilling lyric.... What a shame that 'A Day in the Life' is only a coda to an otherwise undistinguished collection of work. We need the Beatles, not as cloistered composers, but as companions. And they need us. In substituting the studio conservatory for an audience, they have ceased being folk artists, and the change is what makes their new, album a monologue."

From the NYT pan of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," released 50 years ago tomorrow.

The pan is from 50 years ago, but here's Jon Pareles today in the NYT, with "The Beatles’ ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ at 50: Still Full of Joy and Whimsy."

“Sgt. Pepper” was not universally adored when it appeared. The New York Times panned it, not entirely incorrectly, as “busy, hip and cluttered.” As pop tastes have swung between elaborate musical edifices and back-to-basics reactions, “Sgt. Pepper” has been by turns embraced, reviled and simply ignored.

But now that rock itself is being shunted toward the fringes of pop, it’s a good time to free “Sgt. Pepper” from the burden of either forecasting rock’s eclectic future or pointing toward a fussy dead end. It doesn’t have to be “the most important rock & roll album ever made,” as Rolling Stone declared in 2012, or some wrongheaded counter-revolutionary coup against “real” rock ’n’ roll. It’s somewhere in between, juxtaposing the profound and the merely clever....

Yeah, we tease him a lot cause we've got him on the spot, welcome back...

Welcome back, welcome back, welcome back....

"Dear Virgie, I am an elementary school teacher. Recently, there has been some teasing around weight that happened in my classroom."

"My co-teachers and I really want to introduce the idea of body positivity and body diversity to the class. My students are 10 and 11 years old. I was wondering if you had any activities or ideas for opening up this discussion at this age level."

Virgie — at Wear Your Voice/Intersectional Feminist Media — responds with a 5-point list, but I was disappointed that none of them were actual "activities." Maybe you can help me think of some kind of classroom role-playing or game that would work in a classroom of 10 & 11 year olds.

Covfefe.

pic.twitter.com/sZtH4TbB2T

— Stephen Green (@VodkaPundit) May 31, 2017

Have you followed the "covfefe" kerfuffle?

More here (at the NYT).

Personally, I find it easy to decipher the typo. Trump tweeted: "Despite the constant negative press covfefe." That much-pondered tweet is now gone, I think, but he now has: "Who can figure out the true meaning of "covfefe" ??? Enjoy!"

Well, I can. He meant to write "Despite the constant negative press coverage." It still needs more work, being an introductory clause with no payoff, but "covfefe" is "coverage." And "covfefe" is comedy. I'm not going to say it was comic genius to type it, but it's pretty interestingly comical not to explain it and to run with it and encourage us to "Enjoy!" like he's serving up a big plate of tasty food....

"Trump family sources tell us Barron was in front of the TV watching a show when the news came on and he saw the bloody, beheaded image."

"We're told he panicked and screamed, 'Mommy, Mommy!' As it was put to us, 'He's 11. He doesn't know who Kathy Griffin is and the head she was holding resembled his dad.'"

Reports TMZ.

Do I need to look to see if any Trump antagonists have succumbed to the opportunity to attack Barron?

Charging fearless bull girl dog pissing.

The actual sculptor of "Charging Bull" expressed his outrage at the "Fearless Girl"'s impinging on the space his bull needs to mean what he intends the bull to mean, and he (Arturo Di Modia) has chosen the litigation route. We talked about that here.

But there another path, one that free-speech advocate love: More speech.

So here comes another sculptor Alex Gardega adding another sculpture to the Bull + Girl set. He's installed "Pissing Pug" at the girl's feet:

“I decided to build this dog and make it crappy to downgrade the statue, exactly how the girl is a downgrade on the bull,” said Gardega....

He made it crappy and pissing, but it's not crapping. It's only pissing. It's "crappy" in that it's crudely made.



Gardega quote in the video: "I wanted it to be very lo-fi punk rock, so it would be a step down... The girl, in my mind, is a step down from the bull, and I wanted it to be a step down."

"Free speech or die, Portland. You got no safe place. This is America, get out if you don’t like free speech."

"Death to the enemies of America. Leave this country if you hate our freedom.... You call it terrorism, I call it patriotism. You hear me? Die.”

Those are 2 statements by Jeremy Christian, from his appearance in the courtroom as he was arraigned after the murders on the MAX Green Line train in Portland. I read those statements first "in the NYT, which uses the verb "shouted" and a photograph of Christian with his mouth wide open to convey the tone of his speech. I was unsatisfied with the NYT because it shifted to the subject of Mayor Tom Wheeler's rejection of permits for "alt-right" events in Portland.

Looking for more detail about the arraignment, I switched to The Washington Post, which has video of Christian making the above-quoted statements. The video makes a different impression:


I was surprised how scripted Christian sounded, as if he were delivering a memorized speech. I also heard an additional sentence, after "Leave this country if you hate our freedom": "Death to Antifa." I'd been inclined to think of Christian as a ranting lunatic, but the delivery of these lines makes him seem more controlled in his structure of beliefs — not that the beliefs are cogent.

Christian leaps from the love of freedom of speech to a sentence of death to those who don't like freedom of speech. "Free speech or die" seems like a variation on "Live free or die," but you have to misunderstand "Live free or die," which is supposed to express willingness to die for the cause of freedom, not a desire for other people to drop dead if they don't value freedom above everything else.

Perhaps it's disgusting to analyze the words of a person who has done something so evil, but Christian's words are being quoted and used. He's not being hidden away and denied a voice, so it's not as if I can close the door and say don't listen to the rants of a madman.

He's being quoted and used as a jumping off point for things people want to say, and what's particularly irritating — aside from the rank sensationalism of bloody murder — is the blithe assumption that Christian's agenda is racism. You can see that the arraignment quotes have no racist content at all. The statements from the murder scene (and in a recording made of him on a train on an earlier occasion) were anti-religion (and not just anti-Muslim). Where's the racism?

The WaPo article proceeds to talk about the "long and violent history of white supremacist and other racist activities" in the Pacific Northwest. It gives us a quote from a professor of urban studies at Portland State University, Karen Gibson: “The idea that Portland is so liberal supersedes this dark, hidden secret about racism.” Maybe so, but the article never establishes that Christian is a racist.

WaPo drags in Donald Trump:

Some residents said President Donald Trump has caused those racist demons to stir again....

“I don’t have that feeling like it can’t happen here — the way people talk about Portland — because we’ve got racism. We’ve got all kinds of things,” said Murr Brewster, who came to see a memorial at the city’s transit center. “It’s everywhere and the trouble is, it’s getting more and more prevalent.”

Primed, we hear next about Mayor Wheeler's effort to stop the planned rally, which, we're told, is billed on Facebook as "a Trump Free Speech Rally." Then this paragraph galumphs in:

Christian attended a similar rally in late April wearing an American flag around his neck and carrying a baseball bat. Police confiscated the bat, and he was then caught on camera clashing with counter-protesters.

That might put him on the pro-Trump side. But where's the racism? Was he armed with a bat because he wanted to fight the counter-protesters? That fits with "Leave this country if you hate our freedom. Death to Antifa."

Elsewhere, I'm seeing assertions that Christian was actually for Bernie Sanders. And here's a piece in The Oregonian, premised on a deep read of Christian's Facebook page: "His posts reveal a comic book collector with nebulous political affiliations who above all else seemed to hate circumcision and Hillary Clinton." And:

The question of whether Christian was a Trump supporter or a Sanders supporter, doesn't have an either/or answer, except: he definitely was not a Clinton supporter.

"Bernie Sanders was the President I wanted," wrote Christian in December. "He voiced my heart and mind. The one who spoke about the way America should gone. Away from the Military and Prison Industrial Complexes. The Trump is who America needs now that Bernie got ripped off."

But on Nov. 11, he posted that he was unable to bring himself to vote for Trump.

"I've had it!!! I gonna kill everybody who voted for Trump or Hillary!!!" he said in another post in early January. "It's all your fault!!! You're what's wrong with this country!!! Reveal yourselves immediately and face your DOOM!!!"

I'd say that sounds like a Bernie Sanders supporter. After Sanders dropped out and endorsed Hillary, he had nowhere to go. I don't know why white supremacists are getting blamed for Christian's insanely murderous rage. It would make more sense to blame the those who've been inflaming anger on the far left.

But back to the NYT, where this post began, because after reading The Washington Post, I did see more reason in the shift from what Christian said at the arraignment to Tom Wheeler's rejection of pro-free-speech rallies. Christian made free speech sound like an ugly, evil cause related to murder. Now, you should see that the violence Wheeler uses to justify repressing a free-speech rally is violence from those who oppose the rally, the counter-protesters. But Christian's extolling of free speech may obscure that. His jumbled, awful remarks at the arraignment are useful to anyone who would like to shape our brains to think: Free speech = Violence. And: To suppress speech is to suppress violence.

And who doesn't wish that the police could have arrested Jeremy Christian when they had him speaking and carrying a baseball bat at a rally?

"Two Kurdish German men accused of helping to kill their sister in 2005 because of her Western lifestyle were acquitted Tuesday in a Turkish court...."

The NYT reports (in an article by Patrick Kingsley).

A child of Turkish-Kurdish immigrants, Ms. Surucu was brought up in Germany before her father pulled her out of school and sent her back to her family’s ancestral village in Turkey, where at 16 she was forced to marry a cousin, according to German news reports.

After the marriage ended in divorce, she returned to Berlin and gave birth to a son, Can, but soon left her parents’ home to live as a single mother.

Prosecutors said that her conservative and religious brothers felt dishonored after she began refusing to wear a head scarf and started dating a German man. A German judge described the attack by Ayhan Surucu as “an ice-cold, execution-style murder.”...

A German court jailed Mr. Surucu in 2006, but acquitted Mutlu and Alparslan Surucu of involvement. A German appeals court later overturned the elder brothers’ acquittal, partly because of the testimony of Ayhan’s ex-girlfriend, who said they had helped him plan the murder.

I would like to see a more detailed explanation of the German court's opinion. The brother who shot the gun was convicted and imprisoned, and his ex-girlfriend implicated the other 2 brothers. I'm guessing her testimony was deemed unreliable hearsay and a violation of due process. [ADDED: Wait. I'm misreading this. I'm not used to seeing an appeal from an acquittal. The appeals court overturned the acquittal, so it seems that the trial court excluded the ex-girlfriend's testimony, and the appeals court said it could be used.]

But the two brothers were able to leave for Turkey, where they lived freely for several years.

In a German documentary released in 2011, Mutlu Surucu said his sister’s “lifestyle change” justified her murder. “Why does a woman need to dress up so prettily?” he reportedly asked. “Why does she need to go out on the town? To attract men.”

It troubles me to see a quote of the questions about the sister's behavior but not for the idea that Mutlu Surucu "justified her murder." To express understanding of the killer's motivation is not to be an accomplice to the murder.

These honor killings are horrible, but they shouldn't undermine our commitment to the rights of the accused.

I'm just trying to understand the article as printed in the NYT. I have to read between the lines, but I'm assuming the brothers were not retried in Germany because there wasn't enough evidence once the testimony of the ex-girlfriend was excluded. That's why they were able to leave Germany and "lived freely" in Turkey. [ADDED: I'm wrong here. We don't have an answer to why Germany didn't do a new trial. Perhaps the ex-girlfriend's testimony was not that promising.]

Why did Turkey prosecute them? Was it because of the documentary? Was Mutlu Surucu prosecuted because he expressed an offensive opinion about women dressing prettily and going out on the town?

The NYT article, at first glance, looks sober, but it's actually — in a low-key way — sensationalistic. And it shows the unfortunate tendency to disregard the rights of the criminally accused whenever it's too much trouble or a distraction from the attitude chosen for the article. [ADDED: My criticism of the NYT was based on my misreading of what the German court's did, so I'll say it's too strong. But I would like more detailed reporting on what courts have done and consistent regard — even when you hate the crime — for the rights of the criminally accused.]

Clematis.

"A transgender student’s presence in the restroom provides no more of a risk to other students’ privacy rights than the presence of an overly curious student of the same biological sex..."

"... who decides to sneak glances at his or her classmates performing their bodily functions. Or for that matter, any other student who uses the bathroom at the same time. Common sense tells us that the communal restroom is a place where individuals act in a discreet manner to protect their privacy and those who have true privacy concerns are able to utilize a stall. Nothing in the record suggests that the bathrooms at Tremper High School are particularly susceptible to an intrusion upon an individual’s privacy. Further, if the School District’s concern is that a child will be in the bathroom with another child who does not look anatomically the same, then it would seem that separate bathrooms also would be appropriate for pre-pubescent and post-pubescent children who do not look alike anatomically. But the School District has not drawn this line. Therefore, this court agrees with the district court that the School District’s privacy arguments are insufficient to establish an exceedingly persuasive justification for the classification."

From the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals opinion in Whitaker v. Kenosha Unified School District, which affirmed the grant of a preliminary injunction to a Wisconsin transgender student wanting seeking access to the bathroom of choice. (For a shorter read, here's a Slate article about the case.)

So... this happened.

Kathy Griffin Beheads Donald Trump in Shocking Photo Shoot (PHOTO) https://t.co/UM9GHRrFf5

— TMZ (@TMZ) May 30, 2017

ADDED: Last month there was a controversy about a University of Alaska Anchorage professor's painting of a Captain America holding up the severed head of Donald Trump.

The holding up of a severed head is a traditional theme in Western art. There's Perseus with the head of Medusa...



... and Judith with the head of Holofernes:

"How the Self-Esteem Craze Took Over America."

By Jesse Singal in New York Magazine. Excerpt.

The self-esteem craze changed how countless organizations were run, how an entire generation — millen[n]ials — was educated, and how that generation went on to perceive itself (quite favorably). As it turned out, the central claim underlying the trend, that there’s a causal relationship between self-esteem and various positive outcomes, was almost certainly inaccurate. But that didn’t matter: For millions of people, this was just too good and satisfying a story to check, and that’s part of the reason the national focus on self-esteem never fully abated. Many people still believe that fostering a sense of self-esteem is just about the most important thing one can do, mental health–wise....

Another day at The Peony Café...

... where you can get a closer look at anything you like.

And consider shopping via The Althouse Amazon Portal. I know what I'm buying today: "Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977-2002)," by David Sedaris. Just out today! I buy the Kindle version and the audio book (even though Amazon isn't offering the cheap add-on "Whispersync" after I've bought the Kindle text). There is no better reader of his own books than David Sedaris. I've listened to all of his books many, many times and am always glad to get another one, whatever he sees fit to serve up to us.

"Portland mayor asks feds to bar free-speech and anti-sharia rallies after stabbings."

That's the hard-to-believe headline at The Washington Post.

Quite aside from the mind-crushingly unAmerican idea of banning free speech about free speech, why is the federal government involved?

The federal government controls permitting for the plaza where both rallies are set to take place. The city of Portland will not issue any of its own permits allowing organizers to hold the events elsewhere, [Mayor Ted] Wheeler said.

The organizer of what is called the “Trump Free Speech Rally,” Joey Gibson, said: “There’s going to be more intensity, there’s going to be more threats. They’re using the deaths of these two people and Jeremy Christian — they’re using it to get Portland all rowdy about our June 4 rally and it’s absolutely disgusting.”

The ACLU — it's still true! — supports free speech:

“It may be tempting to shut down speech we disagree with, but once we allow the government to decide what we can say, see, or hear, or who we can gather with, history shows us that the most marginalized will be disproportionately censored and punished for unpopular speech. If we allow the government to shut down speech for some, we all will pay the price down the line.” 

WaPo found a Portland State University professor, a "longtime activist" named Tom Hastings to reject the ACLU position: “I know these lines are perceived as pretty fuzzy when we’re dealing with constitutional First Amendment rights. But there’s no long fuse anymore. Everybody’s fuse seems to be quite short.” What?! Things are "fuzzy" and "fuses" are deemed short, and that's enough to throw out the free-speech tradition?!

WaPo tells us that Portland has a problem with "anarchists" getting violent at "peaceful anti-Trump demonstrations."

In April, Portland’s typically family-friendly rose parade was canceled after antifa activists threatened to shut down roads if a Republican group wasn’t barred from the event. And earlier this month, dozens of “black bloc” anarchists destroyed property at May Day protests.

So violence gets its way? What a twisted response to the horrible murders!

"David Benscoter honed his craft as an investigator for the F.B.I. and the United States Treasury, cornering corrupt politicians and tax evaders."

"The lost apple trees that he hunts down now are really not so different. People and things, he said, tend to hide in plain sight if you know how and where to look. 'It’s like a crime scene,' Mr. Benscoter, 62, said as he hiked down a slope toward a long-abandoned apple orchard planted in the late 1800s.'You have to establish that the trees existed, and hope that there’s a paper trail to follow.' About two-thirds of the $4 billion apple industry is now concentrated in Washington State — and 15 varieties, led by the Red Delicious, account for about 90 percent of the market. But the past looked, and tasted, much different: An estimated 17,000 varieties were grown in North America over the centuries, and about 13,000 are lost."

From "Hunting Down the Lost Apples of the Pacific Northwest" (in the NYT).

"Saying you’re going to be a bloody difficult woman right at the start of the negotiations..."

"... tends to make sure you do get a bad deal rather than working with partners across Europe. Theresa May has made us look like ogres across Europe. We’re a laughing stock."

"Saying you’re going to be a bloody difficult woman" — It sounds like the sort of thing feminists in America would celebrate. It's a giant step — an ogre step — beyond "She persisted." I mean, I know that sort of thing doesn't work when the woman is on the conservative side, but it's funny to think about how these insults can be flipped and how they would be flipped if a conservative were criticizing a liberal.

In other Theresa May news, the Telegraph has an entire article about how you can tell a man in the audience listening to Theresa May speak is mouthing the word "bollocks." If May were liberal, it would be possible to denounce the man as a despicable sexist.

"As tensions continue in Portland following the racially charged murder of two men on Friday..."

"... the top Republican in the city said he is considering using militia groups as security for public events."

“I am sort of evolving to the point where I think that it is appropriate for Republicans to continue to go out there,” [said Multnomah County GOP chair James Buchal]. “And if they need to have a security force protecting them, that’s an appropriate thing too.”...

The main reason Buchal gave for his attraction to the militia groups was the cancellation of the Avenue of the Roses Parade, an annual Portland community event scheduled for 29 April, after organisers received an anonymously emailed threat of disruption. The anonymous message claimed “Trump supporters and 3% militia” were encouraging people to “bring hateful rhetoric” to East Portland. “Two hundred or more people”, the email said, would “rush into the middle and drag and push those people out”.

When the parade was called off, Buchal issued a statement in which he bemoaned a “criminal conspiracy to commit crimes of riot” and a letter to Mayor Wheeler in which he lamented “rising lawlessness” in Portland....

"Then on Dec. 16, 1989, Panamanian troops shot and killed an unarmed American soldier in Panama City, wounded another and arrested and beat a third soldier whose wife they threatened with sexual assault."

"'That was enough,' President George Bush said in announcing the invasion, which included more than 27,000 troops. A White House statement as the invasion got underway said the United States had acted 'to protect American lives, restore the democratic process, preserve the integrity of the Panama Canal treaties and apprehend Manuel Noriega.' Political commentators at the time assigned other motives, including a way for Mr. Bush to shake off perceptions of weakness; his poll numbers rose significantly after the invasion.... Panamanian forces were quickly overwhelmed as Mr. Noriega escaped into hiding, surfacing days later on Dec. 24 at the Vatican Embassy in Panama City.... American troops descended on the embassy, and a standoff followed. For a time, American forces blasted heavy metal music (including Van Halen’s 'Panama') to torment Mr. Noriega and prevent reporters with directional microphones from hearing conversations between military and Vatican officials. He surrendered on Jan. 3, 1990...."

From the NYT obituary for Manuel Noriega, who has died at the age of 83, after all these years in prison.

"From the sex addict to the vicar, men open up about their manhood — every penis tells a story."

"Me and my penis: 100 men reveal all," in the Guardian, where if you scroll past the first screen you will be confronted with 100 small photographs of waist-to-knee male nakedness. It's tasteful in the sense that we're channeled into viewing these things in a clinical, critical way. These are photographs by from a book by Laura Dodsworth. (Here's her book, "Manhood.")

Does Dodsworth remember her subjects by their penis or by their face? “Face,” she says instantly. “The photographs took only about 10 seconds, then I spent 30 to 60 minutes interviewing them...."...

Did the project make her think differently about men? “Yes, there was a feeling of falling in love with men. It was really lovely.”...

What surprised her most? “A lot more men feel a sense of shame or anxiety about their size, or an aspect of their performance, than I would have thought. What really moved me is how much that shame and inadequacy had bled into different parts of their life.” She says many were teased as children about their penis and never recovered from it....

"Someone attempted to move Christian away from the girls he was verbally harassing with a slight push or shove."

"'Touch me again, or I'm going to kill you,' Macy heard Christian respond. Namkai-Meche was holding up his phone, Macy said. She wasn't sure if Namkai-Meche was trying to show Christian something on the phone or was recording the interaction. Suddenly, Christian hit the phone away and stabbed Namkai-Meche in the neck, she said. 'It was just a swift, hard hit,' she said. 'It was a nightmare.'"

A witness, Rachel May, describes what she saw on the MAX Green Line train in Portland.

It made me think of what James Hamblin wrote in The Atlantic, in response to the Gianforte/Jacobs "body-slamming" incident: "

"The visceral instinct to physically attack a person who has just attacked you is strong; the surge of adrenal hormones makes it feel possible and necessary. That circuitry is increasingly vestigial, but overriding it and playing the longer game requires an active decision...."

Hamblin was praising Jacobs for not reacting to a shove with violence. The ground for the praise was that it's so hard to override the bodily urge to hit back. As Rachel May tells it, Jeremy Christian — who'd been using words (very offensive words) — received a "slight push or shove" and managed to restrict himself to words (a dire warning, "Touch me again, or I'm going to kill you"). He was working on the difficult override of what Hamblin called "the surge of adrenal hormones" that makes physical retaliation "feel possible and necessary." And what came next, the trigger Christian didn't override, was the phone in the face, presumably Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche's effort to get the paranoid/racist's awful behavior on video to show the world.

Also at the link, May's touching story of helping and praying for Namkai-Meche as he died of Christian's attack. She gave him the shirt of her back, literally. Namkai-Meche's last words to her were: "Tell everyone on this train I love them."

I'm averting my eyes from the mugshot.

I feel some respect for the man's privacy, and it's painful to see him exposed and brought low like that, a human icon of our time.

At the Peony Café...

... you can talk about anything you like.

(And please consider shopping through The Althouse Amazon Portal.)

"I just want to say thank you to the people who put their life on the line for me."

"Because they didn't even know me and they lost their lives because of me and my friend and the way we look."

"I’ll watch ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ with you if you’ll watch Sean Hannity with me."

Caption on The New Yorker's "Cartoon of the Day."

I think you can see that without a subscription, but if not, it's just a man and a woman sitting side by side on a sofa, looking forward at the TV. The woman has the remote control and is vaguely smiling. The man has his mouth open, signifying that he's the one delivering the remark we're to see as a zinger.

It's funny because:

Men and women can never agree on the same show.

The man really, really doesn't want to watch "The Handmaid's Tale."

Both shows are equally bad, but no one person can perceive them as equally bad.

Men think in terms of making a deal, and, like Trump, they go for the "big ask."

When the woman gets the remote control, the man needs to compensate by seeking a feeling of control in some other way, which is why he's attracted to right-wing politics.

She's smiling because her show is first, and given the theme of rape and the oppression of women, he'll ruin their living-room "date night" if he insists on compelling her to do anything.

pollcode.com free polls

ADDED:

"Here on land, the seasteaders propose, ideas about how to govern societies have stagnated. Politics is too entrenched..."

"... societal change comes slowly, if at all.... Seasteads would upset [the] dynamic, since each floating city would be small enough and modular enough that individuals could come and go freely, shopping for governments and social structures. If residents didn’t like one utopia, they could simply sail off to a new one.... [T]he Seasteading Institute makes clear that it will not be operating the cities itself. The particulars of each seastead’s political system should be determined by its inhabitants—or an oligarch, if that’s the way it turns out. 'Any set of rules is OK,' the organization’s FAQ page emphasizes, 'as long as the residents consent to it voluntarily and can leave whenever they choose.'"

From "Libertarians Seek a Home on the High Seas/The unlikely rise—and anti-democratic impulses—of seasteading," by Rachel Riederer in The New Republic, who observes that the seasteads represent "a very particular set of politics," politics based on the free market," and:

When [government] works, it protects the vulnerable and guards the commons—essential tasks at which the free market so often fails. Ocean dwellers will also need those protections. Much as we might like to, we can’t escape the political, even by walking into the sea.

Memorial Day.

"Trump is not an atheist, confident yet humble in the search for a God-free morality. He is not an agnostic..."

"... genuinely doubtful as to the meaning of existence but always open to revelation should it arrive. He is not even a wayward Christian, as he sometimes claims to be, beset by doubt and failing to live up to ideals he nonetheless holds. The ideals he holds are, in fact, the antithesis of Christianity — and his life proves it. He is neither religious nor irreligious. He is pre-religious. He is a pagan. He makes much more sense as a character in Game of Thrones, a medieval world bereft of the legacy of Jesus of Nazareth, than as a president of a modern, Western country...."

Okay, that's where I draw the line, Andrew Sullivan. Imagine what you like about the interior of Donald Trump's soul — knock body-slam yourself out — but I've had it with opinion pieces that assume familiarity with Game of Thrones. I don't watch it, and less than 10% of Americans watch it. I don't really mind being confronted with pop culture references I don't get. Why, only yesterday, I got stuck on a pop culture name I didn't remember seeing before, and I looked it up, watched a video, was a little offended but also amused and entertained, and I made the post better with a quote and a link. But Game of Thrones comes up again and again. It's dull, always the same reference. I gather that it has to do with vicious, hard core politics — killing your rivals? — and I'm picturing seething Trump haters staring at it, muttering: Trump!!! 

But one more thing: Pagans are pre-religious? That's awfully ethnocentric and arrogant. From  Owen Davies, "Paganism: A Very Short Introduction" (at Wikipedia):

It is crucial to stress right from the start that until the 20th century people did not call themselves pagans to describe the religion they practised. The notion of paganism, as it is generally understood today, was created by the early Christian Church. It was a label that Christians applied to others, one of the antitheses that were central to the process of Christian self-definition. As such, throughout history it was generally used in a derogatory sense.

So otherizing, Andrew. Bereft of the legacy of Jesus... that's how you accept insulting people these days? I stopped reading.

Kittens.

"For the first time since 1973, panther kittens were spotted north of the Caloosahatchee River, which had formed the northern boundary of the panther’s habitat. In March, a pair of panther kittens tripped an automatic wildlife camera in the Babcock Ranch Preserve, a forested expanse thirty-five miles west of Lake Okeechobee. That means that a female panther swam across the Caloosahatchee and recently mated with a male panther on the other side. (Male panthers, which are larger and have a bigger range than females, have been spotted north of the Caloosahatchee River for many years.) The news cheered scientists and state environmental officials, who have been trying to coax a female panther across the Caloosahatchee for more than two decades."

From "The Return of the Florida Panther," by Dexter Filkins (in The New Yorker).

Some feminist logic.

After quoting something I said about body-slamgate, Instapundit says: "But personally, I’m now sufficiently woke to praise Gianforte for body-slamming rapist Ben Jacobs":



And: "Thanks to male feminist Jordan Hoffman for enlightening me."

Note: Hoffman's post is about the exclusion of men from a movie theater's showing of "Wonder Woman" (which is the topic of my last 2 posts).

"Strange to see Althouse on-board with AnCaps/libertarians about the right of businesses to discriminate as much as they like."

Writes James in the comments to yesterday's post about the female-only showings of "Wonder Woman," which I'd discussed in terms of PR for a movie I find mind-crushingly boring. I'd quoted a writer at Wear Your Voice/Intersectional Feminist Media who made hyperbolic fun of the "cishet men" who are acting (feeling?) outraged over the exclusion.

In blogging the controversy, I quite consciously chose to ignore the legal issue. Not everything has to be approached from a legal perspective. There are many paths into a subject, and opting for law talk can foreclose other interesting insights. Teaching law school classes, I would often begin a discussion of a case with the question whether we (or anybody) should want a particular matter controlled by a legal restriction, monitored by the government. It can be more enlightening to open up that inquiry before you get to a discussion of whether what was done in fact violated a statute and whether a constitutional right trumps the statute. It can help you think about how broadly to interpret that statute and that constitutional right.

I didn't want to talk about the law yet. Other bloggers have announced flatly that what the theaters are doing is against the law, and I acknowledge that those laws exist and should be taken seriously. The theaters are exposing themselves to legal proceedings. I can see some plausible defenses. We could talk about freedom of association cases like Boy Scouts v. Dale. This isn't like a restaurant wanting to exclude a particular type of person. The exclusion has to do with the expression of ideas. But I'm not the movie theater's lawyer, and I haven't worked out the argument. 

In any case, there's a such thing as civil disobedience. I don't know if the freedom of women to assemble in a public space and watch a super-hero movie without men in the room is the sort of thing that's worth risking the consequences that are part of civil disobedience, but it's one way to behave in this world and sometimes good things ensue. For example — to get back to the aspect of the controversy I forefronted — PR.

Anyway, thanks for the challenge, James. I had to look up "AnCaps."

Anarcho-capitalists hold that, in the absence of statute (law by centralized decrees and legislation), society tends to contractually self-regulate and civilize through the discipline of the free market (in what its proponents describe as a "voluntary society").

You know, I'm not the type.

Romper pride.

"12 Babes Show Us That Rompers Are For All Shapes And Sizes."

"Art should challenge us...."/"Why is that?... Are we 'challenged' by Constable and Turner? The Chartres Cathedral? The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel?"/"Absolutely!"

From the comments to the post about the dismantled "Scaffold" at the Walker Art Center. The one in the middle is Michael. The first and third comments are from me. I'm the one who loudly proclaims "Absolutely!," even as Michael says:

Where was this cliche [that art should challenge us] born? Marcel Duchamp?... This idea of art is a modern thing and a concept that has as its fruit an unlimited amount of crap produced for people paying up to be "challenged."

A few notes and pictures:

1. The Chartres Cathedral. It represents the challenge to be a Christian. What greater challenge is there? Here's a modern public art display animating the old cathedral:



2. Turner.

"Turner... was a sharp critic of the industrial and commercial change sweeping mid-19th-century Britain. Casting a locomotive as a dark, sinister beast carving a pitiless path through the landscape in Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway (1844), he drew attention to the threat posed to the natural beauty of the English countryside by the industrial revolution...."

3. The Sistine Chapel ceiling.

Michelangelo worked at Schumacher pace. Adam's famous little penis was captured with a single brushstroke: a flick of the wrist, and the first man had his manhood. I also enjoyed his sense of humour, which, from close up, turned out to be refreshingly puerile. If you look closely at the angels who attend the scary prophetess on the Sistine ceiling known as the Cumaean Sibyl, you will see that one of them has stuck his thumb between his fingers in that mysteriously obscene gesture that visiting fans are still treated to today at Italian football matches...

The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis will dismantle "Scaffold," a sculpture "partly inspired by the gallows where 38 Dakota Indians were hanged in Mankato in 1862."

The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports:

"I regret the pain that this artwork has brought to the Dakota community and others," [said Walker Executive Director Olga Viso]. "This is the first step in a long process of healing." She said that [L.A.-based artist Sam Durant] told her he was open to seeing his work dismantled because "it's just wood and metal — nothing compared to the lives and histories of the Dakota people."...

For the second day in a row, protesters gathered Saturday afternoon outside the fenced outdoor exhibit, holding signs with messages such as "Not your story" and "Hate crime." Earlier in the day, messages that had been placed on the fence Friday were removed, exacerbating tensions....

Rory Wakemup, a Minneapolis gallery director who specializes in contemporary native art, initially thought "Scaffold" was a ruse. He was shocked to hear that community leaders had not been consulted about it.

"Anything this heavy needs to have approval from a wide range of the community. There's no singular voice that can just do this," he said. "It's opened a wound and sets [Indian relations] back years."

We're told that the artist, Durant, "intended to raise awareness about capital punishment and address America's violent past." That's a comfortably safe political position for an artist in present-day America. Art should challenge us, and this artist chose to challenge the people who support the death penalty and the people who don't think enough about the violence done to Native Americans. But a work of art, left standing in public, cannot fine-tune its message. It can't say think only of it in these terms and not other terms.

Durant and the art museum obviously didn't intend to inflict pain on the Dakota people. Apparently, they assumed the Dakota would feel good about the amplification of their story in the public space, but they assumed wrong.

What an embarrassing show of elitist obliviousness! They assumed their well-meaning presentation of a painful story — a blunt replica of the gallows — would work as they intended, to inflict pain on the the right people, the sort of white people who voted for Trump, who'd think it makes sense to say Make America Great Again, when all the good people know America was not great.

And they didn't think about the possible impact on the very people whose story they wanted to beat the ignorant folk over the head with.

Why didn't they think to ask?! Wakemup — great name — got it right. You should have consulted with some people in the Dakota community. Show some respect for the people you want to show yourself off respecting.

I found this story because the commenter dustbunny brought it up in the comments here. She said: "Looks like censorship to me." It's not censorship in my book. The museum and the artist spoke first. Some people spoke second in response, and the response made the museum and the artist decide to change what they would say going forward. It's just like a conversation whether X makes a remark, Y says that's a terrible thing to say, and X then says, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said that. I call that persuasion.

You know, public sculptures are big intrusions on a city. They just sit there. It's a lot worse than a book that was published and now sits where you don't have to read it. These sculptures are big, and they are in our space. A great deal of thought should be given to what belongs as a permanent fixture in our shared public places. A 2-story gallows is an awfully bad idea.

What were the mental processes of the elite arts people who decided this was a good idea? Now, they have to backtrack, because their mistake was so bad and they want to salvage their reputation. They're dismantling the thing they should never have put up. That's not censorship. That's belated shame.

At the Armor-and Ambivalence Café...

... you can, in writing, appropriate anything you want.

(Photo taken on my iPhone yesterday at "Samurai: The Way of the Warrior" at the Chazen Museum ("a selection of more than ninety objects from one of the most important collections of Japanese arms and armor outside of Japan... armor, lacquered objects, helmets, swords, sword guards, saddles, stirrups, arrows, quivers, and bows from the Museo Stibbert in Florence, Italy").

Balance bike racing.

"Male fragility has been breaking all over the basements of social media and the stench of unwashed boxer shorts and toxic masculinity is wafting upwards gaining our attention..."

"... simply because certain theaters are hosting screenings exclusively for folks who identify as women and femmes. On Thursday, a theater franchise called the Alamo Drafthouse announced* that they would be hosting woman-identified only screenings for the release of the film... Now, of course, this made cishet men angry, because when everything has always belonged to you and entitlement happens to be one of your defining characteristics, it must be really hard to be excluded from a few screenings of a film centered around a female-lead. Of course you’re upset at not being invited to see Wonder Woman, that’s totally discrimination. Keep crying those salty tears.... I am no stranger to the wrath of white man-babies and it is clear that the more space women make for themselves – especially women and femmes of color – the more misogyny and racism we will be met with. The only thing we can do is keep carving out safe spaces for ourselves to heal and flourish."

Writes Laura Witt at Wear Your Voice/Intersectional Feminist Media.

ADDED: This is some great PR jujitsu.** Men are squealing to body-slam their way into a movie they'd have distanced themselves from. The woman-superhero purveyors have learned something since the lady Ghostbusters flop of 2016. The new idea is to act like you don't want men to see the movie. Suddenly, it's desirable. This movie is playing hard to get. Such a delightfully old-fashioned way to lure men.
_________________________

* The announcement read:

“The most iconic superheroine in comic book history finally has her own movie, and what better way to celebrate than with an all-female screening? Apologies, gentlemen, but we’re embracing our girl power and saying “No Guys Allowed” for one special night at the Alamo Ritz. And when we say “People Who Identify As Women Only,” we mean it. Everyone working at this screening — venue staff, projectionist, and culinary team — will be female.”

** Sorry for the culturally appropriative metaphor.

"Brown and black skin and indicators of non-whiteness have been newly weaponized since the Trump regime was installed..."

"... and many of us are managing our Otherness more than ever as a matter of survival. And along comes a white woman by the name of Stacy Jacobs, whose gimmick is wearing saris in protest of Trump’s reign. She hashtags her fashion activism #BordersAreForSarees and #ProtestSarees. Her Instagram feed is filled with pictures of her in a sari every time Trump does something awful.... [T]here is a growing and disturbing trend of supposedly progressive and liberal feminists who seem to think that their political wokeness gives them free license to appropriate other people’s cultures. Under the guise of globalistic rhetoric, these so-called progressives justify and defend their cultural appropriation as the natural course of our globalized society — a post-racial society in which differences can be erased because they have decided so — veritably denying that cultural appropriation exists at all. To these fauxgressives, everything belongs to everybody and they have the right to transform these cultural and spiritual practices as they see fit. Like metal yoga, 'fuck you' yoga and beer yoga, not only has an ancient Indian spiritual practice been culturally appropriated, it has been mutilated and Frankensteined together into a monstrous shadow of itself."

From "This White Woman's 'Protest Saris' Are Peak Appropriation," by Sezin Koehler in Wear Your Voice/Intersectional Feminist Media.

"Some say 90 minutes is simply how long it takes to pace through all the sacred asanas, and that we shouldn’t tamper with tradition."

"But there is nothing traditional about most of today’s yoga studios, which are more about monetizing relaxation than they are about honoring whomever yoga is supposed to honor. I recently went to one class, supposedly a hybrid dance-yoga endeavor, in which the instructor shimmied around a stage to Jason Derulo. We’re not exactly meditating in the Indus Valley anymore...."

From "Yoga Classes Should Be Shorter/The light in me honors the light in you, but it is also extremely busy," by Olga Khazan (in The Atlantic), who got what she was asking for, comments denouncing her for "#whiteproblems" and bumbling through the puzzle of "cultural appropriation." (Is it better or worse to take less of the culture?)

ADDED: "Been around the world, don't speak the language/But your booty don't need explaining...."

Understanding the creepiness of wholesomeness.

Here's a piece by Amanda Petrusich in The New Yorker: "Miley Cyrus's Creepy Return to Wholesome." Do we think that a young woman is pure until she're not, and after that, if she presents herself as healthy and good, it's a disgusting fraud, and we've got to point fingers at her and call her out, so that no one is deceived into allying with this loathsome slut? That seems awfully retrograde for The New Yorker. Perhaps they never liked wholesomeness in the first place. Okay, now, I'll read the thing.

1. At the Billboard Music Awards, Miley Cyrus was introduced by her younger sister Noah with the (obviously scripted) line: "For the first time in years with pants on, my big sis, Miley Cyrus." Here's how that looked. The "pants" are very short white cut-off jeans. She also had the kind of off-the-shoulder blouse that we were just talking about in the Michelle Obama context. Instead of dancing about, Cyrus stood planted at the microphone, in the take-my-voice-seriously style of singers like Adele.

2. Cyrus has a video in which she "pets a dog, runs with balloons, and flashes her gold engagement ring." The song, we're told, "is a mix of Laurel Canyon and Nashville, equal parts bohemian and smarmy." Which doesn't sound wholesome. Petrusich says it's "lifeless." Lifeless isn't wholesome. Wholesomeness relates to goodness and health. Lifelessness is death. But Petrusich happens to prefer Cyrus's more vigorous demeanor in her song "Wrecking Ball" (which is about celebrating body-slamming ("I came in like a wrecking ball/I never hit so hard in love/All I wanted was to break your walls")).

3. Cyrus had a period a couple years ago in which she indulged in the white privilege of "trying-on and discarding of black culture," and now she's "essentially scrubbed her music and image of any hints of the hip-hop and R. & B.," and that might be "sinister."

4. Now, she seems to be doing a "good-girl routine," and it might be "a sendup" of — among other things — "our racially polarized political climate." Pop music is full of "artifice," we all know, and part of the "charade" is a cycle of "reinvention." Cyrus already reinvented herself from "Hannah Montana" to game sex object. To go back to "guileless, fresh-faced ingénue" is to pendulum swing between the 2 most obvious options for a female pop star.

5. Cyrus is getting married, we're told, and that seems to mean she needs to "find[] a new way to be (or act) virtuous." But what she's doing now is so "banal": "pretty, tamed, straight, still, white." Why is the "path forward" for young women so "narrow"? She can "become less selfish and wayward only by embracing antiquated notions of femininity and propriety."

Is that "creepy"? "Creepiness" is the headline-writer's word. Perhaps Petrusich's point is more that the reinvention is just banal and boring. A girl veers into badness for thrills and excitement. What comes next should be a better form of emotional satisfaction, not retreat to the starting point. But is retreat "creepy"?

Being boring and uncreative isn't really creepy. The creeping sensation — to get back to origins — is a feeling in the flesh, a "chill shuddering feeling, caused by horror or repugnance" (OED). If that's your point here, New Yorker, you've got to take this to the next level, to what I said in the first paragraph of this post and say that the pose is gross because what looks wholesome is actually unwholesome, and you feel revulsion.

But that wouldn't fit with the conclusion you chose, which was itself banal and boring, that after the innocence and debauchery, there's a new third stage, something less "less selfish and wayward" but not just "femininity and propriety." I guess that's supposed to sound like feminism, but I'm a bit creeped out by the statement that "femininity" is an "antiquated notion" and "white" is "banal."

Who's really creepy here?

By the way, if you declare "femininity" a "notion" — even without the "antiquated" —  how can you be trans-friendly?

"Wisconsin is the nation’s leading producer of sand used in hydraulic fracturing...."

"Wisconsin sand, prized by frackers for its grains’ ideal size, shape and durability, is shipped to drilling sites including Texas, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Canada...."

“This resurrection of the sand boom is important because it’s happening at a time when some communities are suffering because agricultural prices are low,” [said industry consultant Kent Syverson, chairman of UW-Eau Claire’s geology department]....

While the northern white sand found in the Midwest remains the highest quality and generates the highest yields for fracking, it costs $60 to $70 per ton to ship it to Texas, and more companies are exploring the possibility of using [lower-quality] Texas sand instead to save on transportation costs....

The article — "Sand industry back in business in western Wisconsin" — doesn't explain why this great sand is in Wisconsin. Ah, here, from the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences Arts & Letters:

Frac sand is defined by its purity, shape, and toughness. It is more than 99% quartz, the grains are highly spherical, and it is extremely hard to crush....

Quartz is comprised of silicon and oxygen. A silicon atom in quartz has four positive charges, and to each of those is bonded a negatively charged oxygen atom. It balances nicely, four negatives bonded to four positives. Many minerals contain silicon bonded to oxygen, but the special attribute of quartz is that its silicon atoms share oxygen amongst themselves: Each oxygen atom in quartz is completing the charge balance for not one but two silicon atoms. That means the atomic scaffolding in that tiny grain of rock is so inter-bonded that a billion years of weathering can’t break it down....

The quartz-rich crystalline rock of the Precambrian era is very old. According to [Wisconsin’s State Geologist James] Robertson, these sands spent nearly a billion years near Earth’s surface, relatively free of overlying rock, where they underwent a cycle of repeated weathering, re-working, and rounding before being swept into the Cambrian sea that eventually deposited them in today’s Wisconsin....

After a billion years, all that was left was the most resistant of all minerals: quartz. And even the quartz started weathering after a while with the hard edges of the sand grains getting chipped away, leaving more spherical bits of quartz.

These well-sorted, atomically fortified grains fit the frac sand bill. This sand, Robertson says, has a crush resistance of 4,000- 6,000 pounds per square inch (psi). That means each grain has the ability to maintain its shape while thousands of pounds bears down on it. Together, the grains can and do bear even more pressure from overlying rock thousands of feet deep.

“You can’t have a bunch of wussy sand that falls apart when you squeeze it,” Robertson says.

ALSO: Recently, in The New Yorker: "The World Is Running Out of Sand/It’s one of our most widely used natural resources, but it’s scarcer than you think."

"The visceral instinct to physically attack a person who has just attacked you is strong; the surge of adrenal hormones makes it feel possible and necessary."

"That circuitry is increasingly vestigial, but overriding it and playing the longer game requires an active decision," writes James Hamblin — in "How a Man Takes a Body Slam/In an assault in Montana, two very different ideas of masculinity" (The Atlantic) — praising the Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs for his "judicious, prescient reaction" to the body-slamming he seems to have received from Greg Gianforte.

Hamblin likes the idea of "redefining strength" by accepting, in the moment, that one has been "physically overpowered" and not getting caught up in "the idea of masculinity as an amalgam of dominance and violence." Instead, Jacobs, speaking "as if narrating for the audio recorder," said “You just body-slammed me and broke my glasses." He also "started asking for names of witnesses to the assault who will be assets to his case as it plays out in courts of law and public opinion," and reported the incident to the police.

Of course, Jacobs's choices were not merely a matter of overcoming physical impulses and meritoriously eschewing violence. I don't know how much of an impulse to retaliate on the spot he may have felt. I don't really know how violently he was hit. I don't even know if he did something first toward Gianforte and Gianforte was doing the old tit for tat retaliation. But narrating the audio, dropping it on line, going to the police, and taking names for litigation purposes is also a form of dominance. Some people would even call it violence. Why, here's an article in The Atlantic from just last June: "Enforcing the Law Is Inherently Violent/A Yale law professor suggests that oft-ignored truth should inform debates about what statutes and regulations to codify."

You know, if somehow I were given the choice between getting body slammed and getting charged with a crime and the question were How hard would the body slam need to be before you'd prefer to get charged with a crime?, I'd say pretty damned hard. And I'm just a little old lady. I'd rather be body-slammed than get sued in tort. If you body-slammed me, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't hit you back.* But I'll tell you one thing: If you sue me, I will defend to the hilt, and —  where ethically appropriate — there will be counterclaims.

___________________

* And I have been body-slammed, at rock concerts, when I was trying to stand out of the range of a mosh pit and some young man came flying out obliviously. And sometimes it was intentional, an effort to provoke non-moshers to listen to the music the properly physical way. But I didn't call the cops or take names or file lawsuits.

IN THE COMMENTS: EDH says:

A "body-slam" is lifting someone completely of the ground and then driving their body to the ground.

It's not the same as "slam-dancing" on the periphery of a mosh pit, where one person slams his body into someone else's.

Wait. Let's get some shared understanding here. Does anybody think Jacobs intended to refer to the professional wrestling move? Here's a careful, precise demonstration of what that is:

Goodbye to Gregg Allman.

The rock star — who "struggled with many health issues over the past several years" — died today at the age of 69.

Let others stress the music. I remember his relationship with Cher. This detail is stuck forever in my mind:

They had a disastrous first date; Allman sucked on her fingers and tried to kiss her, and Cher fled. Against her better judgment, she agreed to a second date. Allman took her dancing, and they started to connect. "Pulling words out of Gregg Allman is like . . . forget it," she told Playboy that year. "Things started to mellow when he found out that I was a person — that a chick was not just a dummy. For him up till then, they'd had only two uses: make the bed and make it in the bed."

And then:

Maybe people don't want to relate to real human beings anymore, and we're consuming these movies to help us adjust to the "uncanny valley," so we can settle down there someday soon.

I'm reading "Male Stars Are Too Buff Now," by E. Alex Jung (in New York Magazine).

... Zac Efron’s body displays a muscularity I can only describe as “deeply uncomfortable.” The actor told Men’s Fitness that he wanted to “drop the last bit of body fat” for Baywatch and he seems to have meant that literally... Zac Efron does not look like a swimmer. His action-figure physique is much bulkier than you’d see at an Olympic pool...

In 2011’s Crazy Stupid Love, Emma Stone’s character said that Ryan Gosling’s body looked like it had been “photoshopped.” The joke seems practically quaint now.... Stars like Zac Efron and Hugh Jackman have simply been forced to go even further to separate themselves from the pack, to the point where their bodies look truly unreal. We’ve entered a reverse uncanny valley where the real looks unreal: Flesh and blood human celebrities now sport the vein-popping, skintight muscles comic-book artists could once only conjure in their imaginations....

Everything is so fake now. It's not just male actors, it's "female actors" too. Maybe we like fake. That's a lateral thinking explanation that makes sense, being simple. Maybe people don't want to relate to real human beings anymore, and we're consuming these movies to help us adjust to the "uncanny valley" as we move ever closer to the time when we'll be happy to satisfy our sexual and emotional needs with robots.

Here's the above-mentioned scene. (Warning, Emma Stone will shout "Fuck!" before "It's like you're photoshopped.")

"Wise-cracking funnyman Al Franken yesterday body-slammed a demonstrator to the ground after the man tried to shout down Gov. Howard Dean."

"The tussle left Franken’s trademark thick-rim glasses broken, but he said he was not injured.... 'I got down low and took his legs out,' said Franken afterwards.... "I’m for freedom of speech, which means people should be able to assemble and speak without being shouted down.'"

"Yesterday" = January 26, 2004.

The "Simpsons" take on Trump.

"I don't find the idea of wearing a romper that weird. I grew up around motorcycles and cars, and we called what we wore overalls..."

"... but it's the same single piece idea as a romper. I also wear a one-piece when I do competitive road cycling.... It feels easy, and you're not messing around with it every time you sit down. It lays how it lays, and that's it."

Said Shom, one of "5 Real Guys" who test-wore the male romper for Esquire. Shom recommended it: "One hundred percent. Especially the one I'm wearing—I would seek this one out. Actually, where did you get it?"

Guy #2 said: "Damn! This isn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be. Actually... this is a solid look. A classic mechanic's suit...."

Guy #3 said also compared it to "a mechanic's jumpsuit," but didn't like the "dropped crotch"* and didn't recommend it: "Absolutely not. Under no circumstance could I, in good conscience, recommend anybody wear a romper at any point."

Guy #4, who was the only one given a pink romper, didn't mention the pinkness, but said: "It's an interesting feel because there's nothing on your waist. You feel a little naked, actually. I understand why women would enjoy it—it feels pretty good and breezy. Outside of the breeziness, the really low crotch is not great."

Guy #5, the only one who got a print (and it was a loud, fruity** print), liked it: "I felt like a little kid. It really brings out a lot of playful attitude." But he liked looking like a child — "I'd also recommend a regular onesie. I'd also recommend Crocs. Why not? And pinwheel hats." — so he's exactly what I've been talking about all these years about men in shorts: It makes them look like little boys. If that's the look you want, you've got it.
________________

* Technically — and this is my observation — the crotch has to be really low because the entire thing is pulled up by the shoulders. If you lift your arms up or bend your torso forward, the whole thing is going to go up. Men's clothing is normally broken up at the waist, so the parts operate independently. If you make it one continuous piece, you're going to need to account for all the movement of the upper body. This is why dresses make more sense as a one-piece garment: The crotch is out of the action.

** Pineapples.

________________

ADDED: The word "romper" to refer to the child's garment goes back as far as 1902, according to the OED.  The word is used for an adult garment, beginning in 1922, and not always for something worn by women. The OED has a definition: "(a) a fashionable, loose-fitting woman's garment combining esp. a short-sleeved or sleeveless top and wide-legged shorts; (b) (U.S.) a style of loose-fitting men's breeches or knickerbockers (now rare); (c) (Brit. Services' slang) any of several styles of military uniform; (d) a light one-piece garment allowing easy movement of the limbs, worn as sports clothing." Many of the historical quotes relate to men (but always with an "s"):

1941 Amer. Speech 16 186/2 [British Army slang] Rompers, battle dress.
1943 ‘T. Dudley-Gordon’ Coastal Command 85 Sipping hot coffee as he took off his rompers (combined parachute harness and Mae West life-jacket) he told us of his first night raid.
1954 H. Macmillan Diary 24 Aug. (2003) 346, I left the F.O. at noon and arrived for luncheon at Chartwell just after 1pm. P.M. was in bed—so I had to wait 20 minutes till he had got up and put on his ‘rompers’....
1990 D. Jablonsky Churchill, Great Game & Total War 145 In 15 minutes, Churchill, dressed in his ‘rompers’ was in the Intelligence Operations Room outlining his intelligence requirements.

Churchill. 

"Don’t Judge Montana for a Single Body Slam."

A NYT op-ed by Sarah Vowell. I like Sarah Vowell, but this grated on me.

She's talking about all the diversity there is in Montana — "farmers; ranchers; miners; artists, including folk singers, though let’s not underestimate our potters; the inhabitants of two lefty college towns, Missoula and Bozeman, where I grew up; and the coastal refugees such as Mr. Gianforte...."

She goes on:

So what’s the tally — at least 14 varieties of Montanan? Fifteen if we include the summer roofers-winter ski bums affectionately known in my home valley as “dirt bags.” The dirt bags might look like a bunch of Hillary-voting hippies, but based on my five winters during the Reagan-Bush era tending bar at the local ski area, Bridger Bowl, they’re stingy tippers and therefore, I suspect, secret Republicans.

Has it ever been established that conservatives are worse tippers than liberals? Is that even a stereotype? I'm offended that this is offered up as a laugh line, as if, of course, NYT readers will get this. Presumably, it has more to do with the idea that Republicans don't support generous governmental spending, but that assumes that Democrats, who are generous with the taxpayers' money, won't be stingy with their own money.

Research shows that conservatives give more to charity than liberals give.

The liberal vanity about personal generosity, empathy, and goodness, is on display in Vowell's op-ed. I guess I could say it's funny, even if you don't believe the stereotype that Republicans are stingy, because you can laugh at the stereotype that Vowell embodies by saying that. And she keeps it personal. She says "I suspect." And we can picture her as the young bartender, noticing the tip is bad, and getting some solace out of thinking: must be a Republican.

She put him in her tip jar of deplorables. 

"If anything seemed to unite the sartorial choices the first lady made, at least during the day, it was a certain rigidity of line, monochrome palette and militaristic mien."

"She favored sharp power shoulders, single-breasted jackets with wide cinched belts and big square buckles, straight skirts and a lot of buttons. Mostly buttoned up.... For what battle, exactly, is she preparing? Theories have been floated: her husband’s critics; the prying eyes of the outside world; even her own marriage. Maybe it’s the much vaunted revolution the president was fond of saying he led; maybe she, too, is fighting for his agenda. Or maybe it’s just a signal that she is prepared to take her place on the home front."

That's from "Melania Trump on Display, Dressed in Ambivalence and Armor," by Vanessa Friedman in the NYT, trying to understand why Melania Trump wore what she wore on the big foreign trip. (Nice 14-photo slide show at the link.)

By the way, was Trump fond of saying he led a "revolution"? I blogged the whole campaign, meticulously inspecting the rhetoric, and when I search my archive for Trump and revolution, all the references I see to revolution are connected to Bernie Sanders, except where I myself am saying but isn't what Trump is doing a revolution? And I see that when Trump won the New Hampshire primary, he walked out on stage to the tune of "Revolution."

Googling, I see that Trump used the word "revolution" right after the 2012 election. He tweeted: "He lost the popular vote by a lot and won the election. We should have a revolution in this country!" But I don't think "revolution" was his word in 2016.

Please correct me if I'm missing references to "revolution" by Trump in 2016, but I think "the much vaunted revolution the president was fond of saying he led" is off.

As for Friedman's opinion of Melania, it reminded me of Robin Givhan's piece the other day, saying that Melania was dressed for "control and containment." Givhan didn't say "armor," but I used the word in my reaction to Givhan:

I'm not sure where the "control and containment" is supposed to be — maybe in the constricting leather skirt or maybe it's something she's extracting from the President who scampers at her heel — but from the waist up, I'm seeing a more freewheeling style, an eschewing of a fully controlled structure. I'm not criticizing this choice, I'm just saying this isn't the Jackie Kennedy choice of clothing as armor, but a stretchy sweater over something less than the most rigid undergarments. I see an amusing combo of loose and tight.

I was talking about one particular outfit, which you can see at that last link. Friedman, as noted above, has 14 photos of things Melania wore. Some of them indeed have a squared-off look with tight cinching that could be called rigid and militaristic, but other things were loose and flowing, including and especially #5, which was worn during the day. I guess whatever isn't "armor" gets tossed into the "ambivalence" pile, especially that $51,000 flower-encrusted coat she's wearing over her shoulders in photo 14.

Trump antagonists fail to see the comic fakeness of a comic artist's comic fake letter from Trump.

On Facebook, Berkeley Breathed — who does the comic strip "Bloom County" — put up a letter purporting to be from Donald Trump's lawyer. Here's the image of the letter, replete with law-firm letterhead and lawyerly bluster about Trump's supposed legal right over the "commercial" use of his image and threatening to sue for an injunction in federal court (specifically the Eastern District of New York).

The prediction that the "lawyer" will win the lawsuit is (pun intended) cheeky: "To use language that you might understand (per my client's wishes) we will have your ass in a sling before lunch." (The word "ass" is redacted in the posted image.)

Breathed followed that with an image of his own letter, typed on his letterhead (and I mean typed, because there's Wite Out.) He says he's "really, very sincerely sorry" and has taken down all the images that are "upsetting the President."

Is that fake-funny enough for everyone to get it? The NYT reports:

The letters rocketed around the internet. By Friday afternoon, CrowdTangle, which tracks social media activity, showed that the original Facebook post was seen by three million newsfeeds and generated 78,000 interactions — people sharing, commenting or otherwise reacting to it. Many of the people who shared the post on social media seemed to take it seriously.

Fake news. People fall for it, especially when it confirms their suspicions. But this wasn't even news. This was a Facebook post from a comics artist.

[The] website Uproxx, wrote about the letter as if it were real — “Trump Is Threatening the Creator of ‘Bloom County’ Over a Facebook Meme [UPDATED],” the headline now reads. That update at the bottom? A tweet from a BuzzFeed reporter who had confirmed with Marc Kasowitz, Mr. Trump’s lawyer, that the letter was not real.

“This is a fraud, not true,” Mr. Kasowitz, who did not reply to an email seeking comment on Friday, told BuzzFeed.

Fraud! Now, poor Breathed is accused of "fraud." He should sue. (I'm kidding!!!)

"Jared Kushner and Russia’s ambassador to Washington discussed the possibility of setting up a secret and secure communications channel between Trump’s transition team and the Kremlin..."

"... using Russian diplomatic facilities in an apparent move to shield their pre-inauguration discussions from monitoring, according to U.S. officials briefed on intelligence reports," The Washington Post reports.

The White House disclosed the meeting only in March, playing down its significance. But people familiar with the matter say the FBI now considers the encounter, as well as another meeting Kushner had with a Russian banker, to be of investigative interest.

[Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, who attended the meeting,[ reportedly was taken aback by the suggestion of allowing an American to use Russian communications gear at its embassy or consulate — a proposal that would have carried security risks for Moscow as well as the Trump team.

Neither the meeting nor the communications of Americans involved were under U.S. surveillance, officials said.

So... Kushner expressed interest in doing something that was never done. It was a bad idea — WaPo stresses — and if a bad idea was floated and then rejected, what is the story? WaPo says the White House disclosed this meeting back in March and "play[ed] down its significance," but is WaPo playing up its significance? What is the significance?

The FBI closely monitors the communications of Russian officials in the United States, and it maintains a nearly constant surveillance of its diplomatic facilities. The National Security Agency monitors the communications of Russian officials overseas.

Current and former U.S. intelligence officials said that although Russian diplomats have secure means of communicating with Moscow, Kushner’s apparent request for access to such channels was extraordinary.

“How would he trust that the Russians wouldn’t leak it on their side?” said one former senior intelligence official. The FBI would know that a Trump transition official was going in and out of the embassy, which would cause “a great deal” of concern, he added. The entire idea, he said, “seems extremely naive or absolutely crazy.”

But the "extremely naive or absolutely crazy" idea was rejected, so what is the significance? The meeting, we're told, took place on December 1st or 2d, and WaPo says it's part of "a broader pattern of efforts by Trump’s closest advisers to obscure their contacts with Russian counterparts." And yet, WaPo tells us, "It is common for senior advisers of a newly elected president to be in contact with foreign leaders and officials" and "The State Department, the White House National Security Council and U.S. intelligence agencies all have the ability to set up secure communications channels with foreign leaders, though doing so for a transition team would be unusual."  

Unusual? That means it has happened before. And it ultimately wasn't done with the Trump team, so when was it done? Which President's transition team set up secure communications and was it "extremely naive or absolutely crazy"?

I know Trump has been concerned that the Obama administration was "wiretapping" him. How does that fit with this story? Is it that the Trump team was trying to avoid being monitored by the Obama administration, and, if so, is there something wrong with talking about how it might be arranged so that the President elect could interact with foreign leaders without sharing everything with with Obama administration?

"To be sure, Trump got plenty of negative coverage in the press as well, but, during the campaign at least, the negative stories didn’t seem to stick to him with the same adhesion."

"And even now, as investigations of his administration’s connections to Russia splash across front pages, the Times has launched a new feature, a weekly call to readers to 'Say something nice' about him. I ask Clinton if she’s seen it. 'I did!' she says with a wide smile, taking a beat. 'I never saw them do that for me.'"

From "Hillary Clinton Is Furious. And Resigned. And Funny. And Worried./The surreal post-election life of the woman who would have been president," by Rebecca Traister.

AND: Here's the transcript of the graduation speech Hillary just gave at Wellesley:

You may have heard that things didn't exactly go the way I planned. But you know what? I'm doing okay. I've gotten to spend time with my family, especially my amazing grandchildren. I was going to give the entire commencement speech about them but was talked out of it.

Long walks in the woods. Organizing my closets, right? I won't lie. Chardonnay helped a little too. Here's what helped most of all. Remembering who I am, where I come from, and what I believe...

Too bad she didn't remember during the campaign. If she'd seemed at least a bit to be someone who believed in a few things, maybe the negative stories wouldn't have stuck to her with the same adhesion.

Evergreen State College biology professor Bret Weinstein is swarmed and cursed and hounded by students who are scarily deluded about their own righteousness.

[VIDEO NO LONGER AVAILABLE]

The man is condemned for objecting to a "Day of Absence" demonstration that took the form of asking white students to stay off campus for one day.

In the past, the Day of Absence has been a day where black and Latino students leave campus to highlight their significance on campus. This year students wanted to change the format. Instead of leaving campus themselves, they wanted white students and professors to leave campus, thereby creating a safe space for the students left behind. Professor Weinstein objected to that format and wrote and email saying he would not be leaving campus and encouraged others not to do so. 

The students are now calling him a racist and demanding that he resign.

He's also been warned by by the Chief of Police that he's not safe on campus, and he obliged (ironically) by staying off campus. He appears very calm and courageous in the video as he's confronted by a horrible mob, so I'm not sure why he didn't stand his ground and teach his class in the usual place (especially considering his position on the Day of Absence).

There's something in the video that I really like. Professor Weinstein says:

"There’s a difference between debate and dialectic. Debate means you are trying to win. Dialectic means you are using disagreement to discover what is true. I am not interested in debate. I am only interested in dialectic, which does mean I listen to you, and you listen to me."

That's so well put. I've been saying for years I won't debate. Students at the law school would often set up events as debates and ask me to speak on one side of the debate. It was usually a side I wasn't even on, but that's beside the point. I resist the human interaction that is debate. I'd love to think the students would respond to the calmly stated, crisp debate/dialectic distinction, but it got this aggravated comeback:

"We don’t care what terms you want to speak on. This is not about you. We are not speaking on terms — on terms of white privilege. This is not a discussion. You have lost that one."

ADDED: "You have lost that one" is an interesting declaration. It's so arrogant in its faux authoritativeness but if there's "one," there's also another. In this case, the next "one" is this public airing of the video, and it's pitifully obvious that the students have lost this one.

ALSO: This story disturbed me so much, but it took me longer than usual to come over and blog it, because I wanted to research the subject of students attacking teachers. It's a big subject, but I took the time to read "Student Attacks Against Teachers: The Revolution of 1966," by Youqin Wang. If you're wondering how bad things can get, read that.

At the Iris Bud Café...

... finally, you are free to talk about anything you want.

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