"I don’t know about anyone else, but a table full of very distinguished people just told me that they HATE, immediately after a mandatory time change, going home at night – and it’s DARK."

"It’s depressing! One of the gentleman stated that, 'I just hate going home in darkness.'"

Writes Trump, who seems to believe Daylight Saving Time is a valuable political issue.

Who cares about the delicate feelings of the distinguished gentlemen arrayed around Trump's dining table?

Who were these guys? AI billionaires? I'm more concerned about children forced to get to school in the morning while it's still dark. Guys in their cars feeling melancholic... that's not a hot political concern.

And as long as I'm reacting to Trump's Truth Social account, there's this: "If Republicans win the House of Representatives and the Senate in the 2026 Midterm Elections, I’m going to give all Adult Citizens in the United States of America, $5,000. Thank you for your attention to this matter, and I look forward to signing those checks!"

Just awful.

"To understand the religious dynamics of the Texas race, it’s important to absorb the true depths of the 'God gap' in American politics."

Writes David French, in "The ‘God Gap’ Is Narrowing in Texas" (NYT).

That gap isn’t just about white evangelicals (although it certainly is partly about them), and it’s one of the Democrats’ chief obstacles to obtaining a durable political majority. Any discussion of the God gap does have to begin with white evangelicals. Their numbers are vast (far more than twice as large as Black Protestants, the most loyal religious Democratic voters), and they vote in lock step. In 2024, white evangelicals voted for Trump by a 65-point margin, 82 percent to 17 percent. Trump lost all other voters by 18 points, 58 percent to 40 percent....

"I never liked that term, 'guy's guy.'"

Said Meade, reading the previous post, the one about the man who shot the rooster named Nixon.

That sounds like one of those sentences that makes me think I'm experiencing another bout of transient alexia.

What's wrong with the phrase "guy's guy"? I'd ask Meade but he's watching that video I sent him, the one with a guy named Larry listing a lot of things he's not going to do anymore now that he's 72.

Left to my own devices I went looking for "guy's guy" in my blog archive. I believe I've only used the phrase once: "Now, if everyone would please dial down all the criticism and let Obama get on with his un-self-conscious guy's guy agenda, it will all work out just fine."

That was in an October 26, 2009 post called  "Obama's White House boy's club." And I was using the phrase jokingly echoing something the NYT had written: 

"The [rooster] was named Nixon, after the former president, 'basically because he was a jerk' said his owner, Bill Leimgruber...."

I'm reading "The Chickens Came Home. So Did the Roosters. In Vermont, a single bird set off a feud over what, exactly, constitutes farm country, mirroring a battle dividing communities across America" (NYT). 

Last fall in Merrimack, N.H., a former town councilor infuriated by one bird spent months pressing for an ordinance with fines that climbed to $500, prompting one 40-year resident to ask: “We’re an agricultural town. If people moved here and now, all of a sudden, don’t want to listen to the noises of the deer, and the roosters, and the raccoons and the loons, why did they move here?”...

Because of the covid lockdown and because of the rising price of eggs, a lot of people were buying chicks, and some of those chicks grew up to be roosters. 

Fluky quirk of baseball deemed heavenly intervention.

"Ueck decided to put his hand on it, swat it down, so Chourio could catch it. Thanks Ueck." 😂 - Pat Murphy https://t.co/nYnasQhATv

— MLB Network (@MLBNetwork) October 4, 2026

A more down-to-earth look:

So I'm sitting almost right on the line in the pressbox, my initial thought was that Ty France's ball was going to either hook foul or if it stayed in play it was gonna be caught near foul territory. Balls hit at 49 degrees or higher usually don't leave the yard. Trevor Megill said postgame he thought it was going foul, Jackson Chourio thought he had a shot at it off the bat.

— Russell Dorsey (@Russ_Dorsey1) October 4, 2026

Sunrise.

The ultimate process clusterfuck.

So embarrassing:

Reporter: "Attorney General, on your Facebook page three days ago, you wrote, ‘What this young woman has been forced to endure is horrific and unacceptable. I'm holding her in my heart and in my prayers. To her and to all survivors, you're not alone. We stand with you.’ Why did… pic.twitter.com/AtHcuaPumE

— RedWave Press (@RedWavePress) October 2, 2026

"Musk offered to donate his sperm to Zilis to conceive children through IVF in 2020, she testified, and the pair had twins in secret in 2021."

I'm reading "Elon Musk splits with longtime business confidante, co-parent 'with no warning'/Shivon Zilis, the mother of four children with Musk, said their breakup was sudden but wished him the best" (WaPo).

I don't understand what the "split" was from.

"The co-pilot who tried to hijack a flight bound for Israel... used a crash ax to attack the captain in the cockpit, UAE officials said."

"The co-pilot attempted to 'take control of the aircraft' and carry out a 'terrorist act,' UAE Attorney General Hamad Saif Al Shamsi said.... The UAE statement answers one of the questions over potential security lapses that emerged following the incident — how the co-pilot was able to access a weapon on board. A crash ax is normally used for emergency evacuations, Marco Chan, a former pilot, said in an interview. 'If none of the exit doors are available, the pilot can … use the ax to crack' designated parts of the plane’s structure which are designed to open more easily to create an exit route. In current Boeing 737 planes, the crash ax 'is usually located just behind the first officer or co-pilot' in the cockpit, said Chan...."

WaPo reports.

Great. There's an ax.

"Well, she’s still trying to proceed as normal, and she’s trying to tell herself that she can just go on with her life as if this didn’t happen."

"And she’s very excited about the Halloween party at Chi Phi at the fraternity. And you can tell from the text messages that she wants to go to the party. She’s getting ready for it. And then just before the party, there’s another moment that moves her thinking in this new direction. She gets a phone call from the president of the fraternity.... And he tells her, you can’t come to the party. You’re not invited. And he adds that it’s for her own good, because there are so many rumors swirling about what happened by both women and men. And there’s so much judgment about her. She shouldn’t come to the party. She sends a text message to one of the seven guys.... And she says to him, 'I knew this was going to happen. The women will always get the short end of the stick... You all... 'are not my friends....' This anger continues in the text messages... her telling of the events [has] now really changed...."

From yesterday's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast, "The Firestorm Over a Rape Allegation at Cornell/The New York Times has reviewed a trove of documents related to the case. Our reporter explains what we know."

I blogged about that podcast yesterday, but didn't have a transcript to excerpt. Today, I'm giving you the excerpt I wanted verbatim. 

Someone who styles himself ExHedgeFundGuy makes a TikTok clip out of a classic Camille Paglia interview and fails to include her name.

I'm not going to link to it because I don't want to reward this. TikTok is full of unidentified speakers taken out of context.

I'll link to this presentation at Real Clear Politics: "Camille Paglia on Frat Parties and Consent: 'He Is Right to Think You Have Consented.'" That went up on October 1st.

 

Camille Paglia, essentially, has the last word on the Cornell 7.

Don’t dive into the sea and act surprised when you get wet. pic.twitter.com/Poe3jpxvAZ

— Akhenaten 🇺🇦🏴‍☠️ (@SplendorEternal) September 30, 2026

RCP has the clip I'm seeing at TikTok plus the full interview, and we can see that it is from a BBC interview in 2017. But Paglia has made this point since the early 90s.

It's a good idea to talk about the Cornell case in light of the strong challenge presented by Paglia, and she deserves to be cited by name. There's a lot of material from 35 years ago, from various authors, that could enrich the present-day discussion. For example: "Fraternity Gang Rape: Sex, Brotherhood, and Privilege on Campus."

This is a very old topic! Let's not act as though people are just noticing this problem. 

"Books that get called weird girl lit tend to deal in uncanny or dreamlike circumstances."

"In Ottessa Moshfegh’s 'My Year of Rest and Relaxation,' a woman uses drugs to hibernate her way through a deep depression. In Mona Awad’s 'Bunny,' a cult of women M.F.A. students make rabbits explode with the power of their creative minds. In Kate Folk’s 'Sky Daddy,' a woman is erotically fixated on airplanes. In an interview, Moshfegh said she finds the weird girl label 'patronizing,' 'conservative' and 'misogynistic.' She maintained that the word 'weird' in this context perpetuates oppressive expectations about what a woman should be. 'There’s nothing weird about interesting stories about people,' she said. 'That’s what novels are. And I would challenge anyone who’s using that term to tell me what a normal girl is supposed to read or write.'"

From "What Is ‘Weird Girl Lit,’ Anyway? Romantic delusion. Social alienation. Body horror. Just a few of the elements celebrated online — if not always by the writers who earn the label" (NYT).

Yeah, what is a normal girl supposed to read or write?

From the comments over there: "A lot of fiction is about weird people. Many have been male. Holden Caulfield, most of Philip Roth, most of Thomas Pynchon, Ignatius in 'A Confederacy of Dunces,' Sherlock Holmes, the whole Karamazov family. You could argue that Elizabeth Bennett is a weird girl, considering Regency norms. Oh, Lady MacBeth, Medea, definitely weird. It's an advantage to an author to have a weird character or two. It's like Tolstoy said, 'All happy families are the same.'"

Sunrise.

A new addition to the OED: "will-they-won't-they."

Why did we have to wait so long for that?

Definition: "Relating to or characterized by prolonged uncertainty about whether something is going to take place; spec. relating to whether a romantic relationship will develop between two people."

I see it counts as a TV trope:

This is a Fan Speak term used to describe any relationship that is obviously filled with Unresolved Sexual Tension but the characters resist going into a full blown relationship for a rather long time. Usually the two characters will be presented so that "they will" is the conclusion to root for; only rarely is the question of whether the writers think they should is in any real doubt....

"Will-they-won't-they" reminds me of "The Mock Turtle's Song": “Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the dance?”

"Dale Byrne, Carmel’s mayor, called the issue a matter of public safety. In an interview, he recalled an episode from July when he was visiting a friend’s home..."

"... and the man suddenly turned pale, losing consciousness. Mr. Byrne called 911 and tried to describe the location where the ambulance should arrive, but the dispatcher did not understand how to find the home without an address. He was transferred to another dispatcher, then another. 'He could have had a heart attack, and you’re asking me to explain how my street address works,' Mr. Byrne recalled."

From "After 110 Years, a California Coastal Village Yields to Street Numbers/Driven by emergency response needs, Carmel-by-the-Sea reluctantly adopted street address numbers this summer, igniting concerns over its vanishing identity as a beachside village" (NYT).

"I was so badly hurt that I had fallen to the ground. But I knew I had to act. I could feel the aircraft was going down."

Said Capt. Smit Machchhar, from a hospital bed, quoted in "'I Couldn’t Let All of Them Die': Pilot on FlyDubai Flight Recalls Sudden Attack/Capt. Smit Machchhar, who was stabbed by his co-pilot midair between Dubai and Tel Aviv, said he 'had to act' to prevent a crash despite serious injuries" (NYT).

ADDED: More, from the translated transcript: