Man hands.

A Drudge theme right now:



A topic that came up in the Dali thread, where I'd said "What path did your eye take and how many points of interest did you take in before you saw... the snake around her wrist?" and holdfast said: "before you saw...the creepy man-hands?" Closeup:



Classic "Seinfeld" bit:

"Justin Bieber is a gifted singer, but he is also a controversial young foreign singer. In order to maintain order in the Chinese market and purify the Chinese performance environment..."

"... it is not suitable to bring in badly behaved entertainers. We hope that as Justin Bieber matures, he can continue to improve his own words and actions, and truly become a singer beloved by the public."

Said the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Culture (responding to an inquiry from a Chinese Bieber fan).

What could be more surrealistic than exhuming the surrealist?

You might say, no, it's not surrealistic. There's nothing more down to earth than digging a decayed corpse out of the ground. But Salvador Dali — the surrealist in question — was extracted not from some graveyard, but from a crypt within his own museum.

Here's the NYT article about the exhumation, done according to a court order in a case about whether Pilar Abel, "a 61-year-old Tarot card reader," has a claim to "the worth hundreds of millions of dollars that Dali left to the Spanish state." So it's not as though Dali avoided writing a will. He tried to give all his money to the government. (Am I wrong?)

The tombstone was lifted with a pulley to allow access to the painter’s coffin below. Forensic experts then collected hair, teeth and nail samples, as well as a couple of bones...

Are they making a collage?!

... which will be replaced once the DNA testing is completed.

Ms. Abel wants to be recognized as Dalí’s daughter, born as a result of what she has called a “clandestine love affair” that her mother had with the painter in the late 1950s in Port Lligat, the fishing village where Dalí and his Russian-born wife, Gala, built a waterfront house.

Dalí died at 84 in 1989, seven years after Gala, with whom he had had an unusual and childless relationship: Gala moved to a castle overlooking Púbol, another Catalan village, and Dalí could only visit her there if she extended a written invitation....

Gala was 10 years older than Dali. From her Wikipedia page:

Due to his purported phobia of female genitalia,* Dalí was said to have been a virgin when they met on the Costa Brava in 1929. Around that time she was found to have uterine fibroids, for which she underwent a hysterectomy in 1936. She was Dalí's muse, directly inspiring and appearing in many of his works.

Here's the most prominent image, "Portrait of Galarina":



What path did your eye take and how many points of interest did you take in before you saw...

"When something is threatened to be taken away, people start to rally around it."

Even the people who didn't want it in the first place.

"These Americans Hated the Health Law. Until the Idea of Repeal Sank In" (NYT).

This can't be a surprise to anyone, and it's also not a surprise the Republicans have no idea what to do next. That's why Obamacare had to be stopped before it started, so people didn't become reliant on whatever it was, even though it was never good enough. But it wasn't stopped. So what are Republicans going to do? The only hope, it seems, is for them to fall short of having enough power to do anything.

"It’s very, very scary to think about not having health insurance. If the condition doesn’t kill you, the stress of having it does, in this country. The fact that people do without health insurance is a sin, in my opinion," says one woman, quoted in the NYT article.

But think what it's like for the Republicans. The stress of having political power is killing them. One way back to health is to fracture into parts that can get back to playing from the comfortable minority position.

Remember the old affirmation: I’m so glad I’m a Beta... I’m really awfully glad I’m a Beta...

O.J. Simpson and his lawyer caught on a hot microphone talking about how O.J. is like Trump.

They're talking about the author of the book "Guarding the Juice: How O.J. Simpson Became My Prison BFF," who's said things like "O.J. Simpson is not suffering in prison. He's eating well. He's exercising well. He's got a flat screen TV." O.J.'s lawyer compares that to news reports about Trump that say things like "he gets two scoops of vanilla ice cream with his chocolate cream pie, instead of the single scoop for everyone else."

O.J.: "That guy [the author of the book, (Jeffrey Felix)], he's shameless."

O.J.'s lawyer (Malcolm Lavergne): "Kind of like President Trump. Trump gets two scoops. Everyone else gets one."

O.J.: "Oh, I heard that. I heard that."

At the Succulent Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

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"Are you humbled by this incarceration?"/"Oh, yes, sure. I wish this would have never happened."

Said O.J. Simpson, winning parole.

He also said: "I’m in no danger to pull a gun on anybody. I’ve never been accused of it. Nobody has ever accused me of pulling any weapon on them."

Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson never accused him. They were dead. But O.J. — chattering away and seemingly under the impression that he is well-loved — didn't seem to see any need to avoid statements that would make us think of those old murders.

Still, he was acquitted of those murders, and they had no role in the parole board's decision (or so they said). He'd served 9 years for armed robbery, and he met the standard and deserved parole. But why didn't he act humbled and remorseful and keep his statements short?

That would have worked better in the effort to obtain parole. It must be that he believes he can be popular. That might seem delusional, as I heard Jeffrey Toobin on CNN call him. But it might not be wrong. From Page 6: “Everyone in town is shopping him a reality show.”

"Suprihmbé is a proheaux womanist thot scholar who wants to promote freedom, is Morrison political, and likes cats."

Okay, I just learned a new word: "proheaux."

The quote in the post title is the blurb about the author of something I was reading (at Wear Your Voice), "Being Naked With My Son/My nudity does not offend my son, because he has not been exposed to trivial conversations about modesty. My nudity means nothing to him." Excerpt:

Why is my nakedness around my child an issue? Why is him seeing my genitalia in a non-sexual manner an issue? Is he worried my child is going to develop some sort of Oedipus complex? According to Freudian lore, my son being just about around 5-years-old, is in the phallic stage. Freudian psychology is heterocentric and cissexist–it deals in binaries and doesn’t take into account a spectrum of identities. For its time it was revolutionary–but science is permeated with sexist and racist men, polluted with biases.

... At this age my son is supposed to have formed some sort of erotic attachment to me. Yet here he is, playing pretend in our living room, oblivious to the projected sexual nature of our being naked and sweating in our little house.

Ah! Freud came up. I brought up Freud this morning, in the context of the hard, pointing prong of Callista Gingrich's hair, and as I did that, I was thinking, life was so much more interesting when adult conversation flowed easily into Freudian speculation. Then prissy demands for science spoiled the fluid fun. Suprihmbé seems to be saying that Freud's work was patriarchal, but the rejection of Freud's ideas for their failure to fit the rigors of science is also patriarchal, so there is perhaps something of the counter-patriarchial in restoring Freudianism, sparingly and strategically, such as in the discussion of Callista's pointy prong.

But that word! Proheaux. I looked it up and got another article by Suprihmbé: "proheauxism: a working definition." Key to understanding the coinage: Heaux is a way to spell the plural of ho. (Do you have a better idea? I wrote "the plural of ho" because I didn't.) The definition has 4 parts. I'll just quote #3:

Sex positivity for black and brown women and femmes. Specifically sex worker & trans inclusive. Might be: a professional heaux, a refined heaux, an elegant, sensual woman of divine sex. One who owns oneself, regardless if she is attached to a man or masculine person or not. One who understands and reveres the power of healthy femininity (and masculinity) and understands that this power is beyond the physical. It is political, it is economic, it is survival, it is personal. Fuck classism. Fuck respectability. Fuck the norm. Fuck free emotional labor.

Trump has a script?

"Trump goes off-script and fumes about Sessions and Russia probe." (Politico.)

“The style and fashion of Mod will always be my favourite. It’s a timeless look that everyone from all over the world recognises."

"Mod is something that stretches across generations; there are no age, class or race boundaries, which is so rare."

"The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again."

"A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad."

Wrote Kingsley Amis in "Lucky Jim," quoted in "The Metaphysics of the Hangover."

Amis may go over the top, but still: A small woodland creature of the night voids himself there, then finds it a convenient place to end its days. (Elvis Presley, stepping to the mic in Vegas, complaining, maybe, of his own hangover, once growled, “My mouth feels like Bob Dylan’s been sleeping in it.”) But the night before—ah, the night before—the mouth was a source of great pleasure—the marvelous taste and scent of the wine, the beer, or the spirits.

"How would you feel about your ex boyfriend getting a robot that looked exactly like you, just in order to beat it up every night?"

"I mean, it might be alright, it might mean he can be calmer and more normal with you - think about Aristotle’s theory of catharsis. But we really haven’t discussed this as a society. We’re drifting towards it and the technology is very close to being available, but we just aren’t talking about it."

From "Why female sex robots are more dangerous than you think" (in the UK Telegraph).

I'm in favor of these robots (I realized as I was commenting in the last post about "sex" robots), and I'm interested in the way some people seem so afraid that robot girlfriends will be treated badly, rather than feeling encouraged that men (or women) without companions will get psychological comfort and pleasure from a full-sized replica of a human being.

I'd like to flip the question that I put in the post title and ask "How would you feel about your ex boyfriend getting a robot that looked exactly like you, just in order to shower it with all the love and conversation you never seemed to want?"

"It is difficult to conceive of a deceit so degrading or a deceit so damaging to the victim on its discovery."

Said the judge (in the UK) as he sentenced Gayle Newland, 27, to 6 1/2 years in prison for "pretending to be a man [by] using a fake penis."

The complainant said she was persuaded by the defendant to wear a blindfold at all times when they met and only found out she was having sex with Newland when she finally took off her mask.

Newland claimed her accuser always knew she was pretending to be Kye Fortune - a Facebook profile she created at the age of 15 using an American man's photographs and videos - as they engaged in role play while struggling with their sexuality.

She said no blindfold was used as they had sex on about 10 occasions at the complainant's flat in Chester in 2013.... The defendant spent "hundreds" of hours talking on the telephone to her friend as Kye and more than 100 hours in each other's company.

"Callista Gingrich’s hair is a fabulous shout-out to a mythic Washington."

WaPo headline for a Robin Givhan essay.

Ms. Gingrich was appearing at her confirmation hearing — she's nominated for ambassador to the Vatican — and her hair was "a perfectly styled chin-length bob with a side swoosh... controlled and proper and smooth."

Yes, but what is "mythic Washington" that has anything to do with Callista's surrealistic hair?

[H]er hair is being discussed because it manages to be both utterly unique and a marker of the kind of place that Washington... once believed itself to be but certainly is no longer.... a mythic Washington: a place of order and comportment, stuffy but reliable, self-conscious, mannered, impervious. And most of all, studiously dignified.

Is it so stuffy and sober? It's got that insouciant, elongated, extra curve...

Who has done that before while saying take me seriously? If Callista Gingrich were a liberal, wouldn't Robin Givhan be enthusing about how modern and impudently playful it was?

Oh, but it's hard, it "does not move or swing a la Anna Wintour’s timeless golden bob."

It's a stiff hard prong, like a horn, for the lady who's going to represent us in the Vatican. If you wanted to say it poked at convention in a delightful new way, you could.

That side swoosh made me think of all the talk of the significance of upward curves in Seurat paintings like "Le Cirque" and "Le Chahut":

What does it mean, the upward curve? I remember reading (long ago) that Seurat thought it meant happiness and joy, but I can't confirm that. Rereading this post, I'm tempted — by the horned devil? — to make the Freudian leap and say it signifies the erect penis. And that's not inconsistent with happiness and joy. And perhaps that's why it's disconcerting — to Givhan and others — that it's so stiff and hard.

"On Wednesday, Kirkland worried about her pet parrot, Rookie, whose cage didn’t fit in her Jeep. After she saw flames cresting a hill near her house..."

"... she left within 15 minutes and had to leave Rookie behind. Rookie likes to imitate the sound of firetruck sirens. But that afternoon, the bird was quiet. Kirkland thinks the parrot sensed something was wrong."

The parrot was right.

Kirkland is Janet Kirkland, 72, quoted in "'An insane amount of heat' as fire near Yosemite National Park moves with frightening speed," in the L.A. Times.

Was it mean of the L.A. Times to use that quote? It should be known that Kirkland saved her 2 dogs, and I can see not wanting a loose parrot in the car with the dogs. You know, you can get a travel-size carrier for a bird.

"On Tuesday, 27-year-old Polish cyclist Pawel Poljanski showed off what his legs look like after 16 stages of the famous cycling event."

Yikes!

After sixteen stages I think my legs look little tired 😬 #tourdefrance

A post shared by Paweł Poljański (@p.poljanski) on Jul 18, 2017 at 10:04am PDT

ADDED: Interesting tan.

At the Succulent Café...

... you can talk all night.

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"Jeff Sessions takes the job, gets into the job, recuses himself, which frankly I think is very unfair to the president."

"How do you take a job and then recuse yourself? If he would have recused himself before the job, I would have said, ‘Thanks, Jeff, but I’m not going to take you.’ It’s extremely unfair — and that’s a mild word — to the president."

Trump, in an interview with the NYT.

There was what looked like an attempt to charm the NYT reporters with a performance by Ivanka's daughter Arabella.

At one point, his daughter Ivanka arrived at the doorway with her daughter, Arabella, who ran to her grandfather and gave him a kiss. He greeted the 6-year-old girl as “baby,” then urged her to show the reporters her ability to speak Chinese. She obliged.

Those last 2 words say: You can't soften us up.

"Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has been diagnosed with a brain tumor, his office said Wednesday."

"The Mayo Clinic Hospital in Phoenix said tests revealed 'a primary brain tumor known as a glioblastoma” associated with a blood clot above his left eye that was removed last week,'" The Washington Post reports.

It was just a few weeks ago, after the Comey hearing, that people were wondering at his "confusing" speech. For example, here, at Vox (on June 8th).

"The Supreme Court on Wednesday temporarily allowed the Trump administration to enforce restrictions on the nation’s refugee program..."

"... but it let stand a court order from Hawaii that grandparents and other relatives who want to travel to the United States to visit family must be admitted while the case proceeds on appeal," the NYT reports.