Out at our usual sunrise vantage point, I encountered a mystery object.

I'm glad I didn't rely on guessing. I used AI and I know what it is.

Madison at 4:45 a.m.

"At some point in the not too distant future, we will be taking Kharg Island, and other oil infrastructure points, and assume total control of their Oil and Gas Markets..."

"... much like we have with Venezuela, which is working out brilliantly for both Venezuela and the United States of America. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP"

Trump at Truth Social.

If you had to argue that birds are right wing or left wing, what side would you take and how would you support your position?

That's a prompt I used on Grok this morning after seeing the typo — speako, really — I'd made in a prompt earlier this morning when I used AI to identify a bird. It was a Rose-breasted Grosbeak. I'd said: 

"It's got black and white on top and white on the bottom and there's some right orange patches."

"right" = bright, of course.

Meade said, "Yeah, 'right' orange patches sounds nazi." Hence, my new prompt.

Do not click for more if you don't want to read AI-written material, but I do think this one is at least worth scanning. It's a crisp outline. Grok takes the position that birds are right wing:

"Ms. Gilbert is not a provocateur in the style of Banksy, and she is not making a political statement. Her work, filled with shining suns, wizards and dragons..."

"... is warm and incorporates inclusive sayings like 'Be seen' and 'I love all of you.' The message is perhaps muddled by the price tag. Reserving all of a subway station’s walls and other surfaces, a package advertisers sometimes call 'station domination,' can cost more than $250,000 per month, said Seneca Mudd, a managing partner at Brand Bravery, a marketing firm helping to coordinate Ms. Gilbert’s plan. He declined to give the total cost of the ad-space purchase, but said that it was over $1 million, including station rentals and marketing expenses...."

From "The Mystery Artist Filling Subway Ad Space With Whimsy/Sue Sarah Gilbert, a Rockefeller descendant in Seattle, raised $1 million to place her drawings in New York City stations" (NYT)(gift link, so you can see the charming artwork).

From the comments over there: "I see this story a lot differently than the journalist. A woman from a family of billionaires uses her financial connections to fund a vanity project so full of itself that it includes QR codes for people to send photos of themselves enjoying it. The art itself is simple and juvenile, like something a grade schooler would draw. This is the type of art a parent would put on a fridge, but because Ms. Gilbert has friends with deep pockets it’s being put up for months in the New York subway."

Are you "upset" or just unsettled?

I'm reading "Are You 'Triggered' or Just Upset? This popular term is often misused, experts say, which may cause more harm than good" (NYT).

When people use the term trigger instead to refer to everyday things that incite annoyance or offense, they run the risk of conflating traumatic experiences or mental health struggles with everyday challenges, several experts said.... Using triggered to describe negative everyday experiences may also cause people to misinterpret discomfort as danger. They may start to think that bothersome experiences or everyday challenges are harmful, rather than seeing them as opportunities for learning and growth, Dr. Needle said.... 

Sometimes, the word trigger can also be used sarcastically or dismissively, Dr. Needle said — as in, “Oh, you’re just triggered” — to minimize someone’s legitimate negative reaction to a comment or action. “It is basically a way of saying your response is a ‘you problem,’ a sign of weakness or oversensitivity, rather than acknowledging that something genuinely hurtful was said or done,” she said.

I love the name Dr. Needle. She's a clinical psychologist, Rachel Needle.

The headline suggests that the word "upset" is a good substitute for "triggered" when you're not talking about having a flashback to a trauma. But isn't "upset" also pretty dramatic, if we take the dying metaphor seriously? Have you been knocked over, capsized, overturned? 

I've noticed recently that political writers are turning to the word "unsettling." There was the very conspicuous NYT headline: "Several Women Who Dated Graham Platner Recall 'Unsettling' Behavior." 

Great catch, by U.S. Senator Eric Schmitt.

Left it all on the field.

Republicans win 11-2

Honored to be named MVP. 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/5vZtOifN2n

— Eric Schmitt (@Eric_Schmitt) June 11, 2026

Here's his Wikipedia page. I see he's 50 years old.

"In an open schoolyard... the researchers instructed participants to roam at will.... Within seconds, 80 percent of people were moving in a counterclockwise direction."

"'It’s not a gradual drift but rather a bias that emerges almost immediately,' Dr. Echeverría-Huarte said. Dr. Echeverría-Huarte and his colleagues wondered if the behavior might be emerging collectively, similar to how pedestrians split into two opposite-moving lanes on crowded sidewalks. But when they tested participants alone, 75 percent still moved counterclockwise, suggesting that the tendency is individual."

From "Nearly Everyone, Everywhere, Veers Left When Walking/Researchers are at a loss for why people across cultures and ages, regardless of their dominant hand, have a natural bias toward wandering in a counterclockwise direction" (NYT).

The words "clockwise" and "counterclockwise" suggest that clockwise is the more natural tendency. "Counterclockwise" sounds like going backward. But the clock had to go to the right when it was a sundial (in the northern hemisphere), and that established the tradition. 

The words "clockwise" and "counterclockwise" did not emerge until the 19th century. What did people say before that? I think they used the strange word "deasil" (or "deiseal"), which the OED traces back to 1771 and defines as: "Righthandwise, towards the right; motion with continuous turning to the right, as in going round an object with the right hand towards it, or in the same direction as the hands of a clock, or the apparent course of the sun (a practice held auspicious by the Celts)."

If it is indeed auspicious to circle to the right, then why do we naturally circle left? One thinks of the etymology of "sinister."

Sunrise.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

"If we need to negotiate with bombs, we’ll negotiate with bombs. And we’re very good at it. Nobody better in the world."

Said Pete Hegseth, quoted in "Iran War Live Updates: U.S. Will Strike Iran Again Tonight, Hegseth Says/The secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, said a new American attack would be launched on Wednesday night. Earlier, President Trump said more attacks were coming, a day after he predicted peace" (NYT).

Trump posts a "West Wing" clip decrying the notion of a "proportional response."

Are photos on this blog displaying the wrong way for you?

Are you, like me, seeing some of the photos sometimes display as if they were enlarged behind the frame of the blog and only showing one quarter of the image? You could click on that image and get the whole thing, but only a stupid corner is showing on the blog?

Maybe it's only a problem for me, but I've spent a lot of time trying to fix it at the code level, using Grok, and I've only gotten as far as to understand that Flickr has introduced some new incompatibility with old Blogger templates like the one I've been using for 20+ years.

One solution is to switch to a new Blogger template, but I'm so used to seeing this template that subjectively the newer templates all look wrong to me. If I try to be objective, they still look bad — cluttered, stupid, tricked out. Ugh!

ADDED: If you think you're looking at a photograph that has this problem — the framing will seem puzzling or perverse — you can click on the photo and see it at Flickr.

Can we not all love the new pool?

I stopped by the new Reflecting Pool. It is simply glorious. There were a thousand people, everywhere, taking pictures and just enjoying its beauty. Thank you President Trump for restoring our city’s national treasure. pic.twitter.com/Ii7DlEItfd

— Howard Lutnick (@howardlutnick) June 10, 2026

"It was not clear how the flag got loose."

That's the third sentence in a NYT article titled, "Huge American Flag Flies Into Power Lines, Knocking Out Power for Thousands/The flag hit transmission lines on Saturday night, affecting 5,000 customers in Connecticut."

The power company called the flag "massive" — 40' x 76'.

The article doesn't have comments, so readers were deprived of the opportunity to spin metaphors. If it had, I'm sure Trump would have been mentioned prominently. 

"The idea that trying too hard is deeply uncool is... nothing new. In the ’90s, it was the central dogma..."

"... of the grunge era.... Similarly, the current just-rolled-out-of-bed look might be seen as a pendulum swing away from looksmaxxing, big blowouts and heavily filtered social media photos. Guido Palau, who styled the windswept ponytails at the Prada show, describes the look as 'weirdly bourgeois' and designed to keep people guessing. 'If you’re wearing the most beautiful cashmere jumper and it costs a fortune, you want people to know but not to know,' he says, and messy hair works the same way. 'There’s a kind of inverted snobbery.'"

From "Want to Stay on Trend? Stop Brushing Your Hair. With messy mops showing up on both runways and red carpets, the key to fashion’s new favorite hairstyle is doing less" (NYT).

I've long been a fan of this kind of hairdo. When I was a teen, in the 1960s, I imagined myself becoming famous as the hairdresser who invented the style called The Mess-Up. How could you get people to rave about your brilliant work when what you were doing is messing up their hair? I don't know, but it's genius if you can make that happen. I had the vision to mess up the hair just the right way, the way that looks so nonchalant and witty. 

Life took me elsewhere, but the inspiration of The Mess-Up must have formed an underlying anti-structure.

You know, I didn't stumble across that link myself. Meade texted it to me, and I'm pretty sure that had to do with my criticism of the hair of the women on the various news commentary TV shows he watches. I loathe the shows, but I sit there, often with noise-cancellation AirPods in while I read my iPad, but I do take in the visuals enough to become annoyed by the messy cocker-spaniel ears that festoon the female heads. Make is sleek! Pin it up! Look professional!

At 5:26, an ultra-soft sunrise.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.