October 23, 2026
"Interacting with the horses 'helps us attune to energy, ours and theirs, and seems to create a sense of safety — not just in the head, but centered, felt, and grounded in the body....'"
Top-rated comment over there: "You can go to all these wildly expensive resorts and the actual horse encounters are extra? Go to a stable somewhere and volunteer to muck out stalls."
Yeah, take a workation. Oh, no, I can't use "workation" to mean a vacation that consists of doing some romantic form of work like operating a horse-drawn plow or candlemaking or pottery. That particular portmanteau is already being used to mean continuing to do your regular work remotely, in some nice vacation spot.
Meanwhile, there are these elaborate fantasy vacations. Go to the link and see photographs of people lying down while a horse more or less kisses them. I can't imagine going all the way to, say, Indonesia, to submit to the ministrations of a horse. It's presented as therapeutic, but there you'd be, expecting luxury and spirituality, surrounded by other people with the same expectations and dependent on a business that strives to give you what you paid for.
"You might have wondered, as I did, whether it’s even possible to authentically recreate such a famous experiment."
"'Stanford Prison Experiment' has become a cultural shorthand for sinister power dynamics. As a participant, wouldn’t you know how things turned out last time? Wouldn’t you try, equipped with the knowledge that cameras were capturing your every move for millions of viewers, to make things not turn out that way?"
I'm reading "This landmark experiment was horrifying. Why is Netflix performing it again? The Stanford Prison Experiment has been rebirthed for your viewing, uh, pleasure" (WaPo)(gift link).
I'm reading "This landmark experiment was horrifying. Why is Netflix performing it again? The Stanford Prison Experiment has been rebirthed for your viewing, uh, pleasure" (WaPo)(gift link).
"The Justice Department charged two former FBI officials with lying to Congress about an investigation around a laptop belonging to former president Joe Biden’s son Hunter."
WaPo reports (gift link).
In 2020, Floris and Benavides briefed Republican lawmakers about the laptop as part of a congressional investigation into Hunter Biden. Sen. Chuck Grassley (Iowa), then the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, claimed that the FBI officials gave that briefing as a way to frame the investigation as Russian disinformation....
"The Horse-drawn Carriage in New York City is a quintessential New York experience. So sad that, for political reasons, we will see it go!"
Said President Trump, quoted in "New York City Passes Horse Carriage Ban, Ending a Central Park Tradition/A passenger’s death in June became the impetus for the City Council to ban the practice, but the bill will likely face a court challenge before being implemented in 2028" (NYT).
I don't see the "political reasons." It seems as though the ban is precisely about the subject of the ban, the safety and ethics of using horses this way in New York City. Weighing the pros and cons produces a difference of opinion and one side had the power and therefore got its way. I see no basis for saying there was something "political" as if the real dispute was about something else.
Was it "a quintessential New York experience"? Yeah, it probably was. Best seen from a distance though. Did I ever do it? Yeah, once. In the 1970s. Not recommended.
"The thing that you learn as an older person too, is that you really don’t love that many things. You think you do, but you don’t."
"You find that out when it’s too late. By that point you have passed up so many of the great things that you wish you had and you accumulated all this stuff that is absolutely worthless."
Said Isaac Mizrahi, quoted in "A New Guide on the Endless Quest for Personal Style/A new book from the RealReal, the secondhand designer retailer, has ideas for how to develop taste that is your own" (NYT).
Said Isaac Mizrahi, quoted in "A New Guide on the Endless Quest for Personal Style/A new book from the RealReal, the secondhand designer retailer, has ideas for how to develop taste that is your own" (NYT).
"So with the first few BMOs I tried, I combined [the bread, butter, and cheese] into a sandwich, and ate quickly and efficiently with both hands."
"'That’s the burger method,' said Mr. Dyrholm, the Politiken critic. Two friends set me straight. 'It’s just, like, very, very important that you eat it like this,' said Emma Toft Kromann, holding it open-faced. 'If you see someone eating it like a burger, you know they’re not from here,' added Ophelia Ernland. A bolle med ost is the elevenses of a city caught between hustle and hygge...."
From a long NYT article that's just about how people in Copenhagen eat bread with butter and some cheese. The headline is "It’s Sliced Cheese on Bread. And It’s Rocking Copenhagen’s World. The Danish capital is obsessed with this stripped-down snack, and the city’s top bakeries won’t stop until they’ve perfected it."
From a long NYT article that's just about how people in Copenhagen eat bread with butter and some cheese. The headline is "It’s Sliced Cheese on Bread. And It’s Rocking Copenhagen’s World. The Danish capital is obsessed with this stripped-down snack, and the city’s top bakeries won’t stop until they’ve perfected it."
I haven't seen "elevenses" for so long, I almost thought I didn't know the word. I do know it, but I looked it up anyway. Here:
Ha ha. "Fourzes." "Fourzes" does not, like "elevenses," have its own OED entry. (I do think "elevenses" is plural, so that's a quibble with "A bolle med ost is the elevenses.")
Anyway, bread and butter and cheese. Perfect. Why do we even need to be reminded that it's a thing? There's a particular way that it's a thing — in Copenhagen.
ADDED: Wikipedia has an entry for "Elevenses." You've probably encountered the word in classic children's literature:
"Would You Listen to A.I. Music? Maybe You Already Do.... If you were to hear A.I. music, would you recognize it as something made by a machine?"
That's a NYT article. It asks you to listen to a song — by "Diane Butler" — that is machine-made out of a million real country songs.
So was he tricked? No, he says he knew it was A.I. He saw it in the middle of the night and wanted to preserve it. He forgets exactly why.
“I listened to it, and I was like, oh, my God, this is my anthem. I’m obsessed with the song,” said Ms. Stamatis, a 38-year-old mother of three in Denver. “I was sending it to all my friends.”
Eventually a message came back from one of those friends: “It’s an A.I. bot. Stop listening right now.” Another texted: “I can’t believe you guys got catfished by an A.I. bot.”
I read that yesterday, but I didn't blog it, because it didn't quite cross my bloggability line. But I'm blogging it now, because Meade just sent me this:
The NYT article is mostly about whether streaming services ought to have safeguards that exclude A.I. music or at least bonk you over the head with the fact that it is A.I. music. But I think what's really important is that we, the humans, remain engaged in search for truth. It's absurd to ask machines like Spotify to do the work of detecting the work of music-making machines. We end up with a world of machines interacting with machines, and what is left for use to do? Consume the music that one machine or the other has decided is good for us? Well, isn't it good that the bearded cowboy thinks we'd better call our mother before it's too late and we're the ones left crying?
BUT: On the other hand, the machines can make this music so fast and affect emotions so quickly that the streaming service is entirely overrun and we won't use it anymore or, worse, we'll become fools for everything artificial.
"We don't ride bicycles in Iowa."
Joe Mitchell: "Thank God you're building the ballroom. Thank God you're getting rid of those awful bike lanes. We don't ride bicycles in Iowa." https://t.co/pMkgvYZhv0
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 23, 2026
The Brewers profess their love for the national anthem.
What will be going through these #Brewers players heads during the National Anthem prior to game 1 of the World Series tomorrow?? https://t.co/jwaaMAl2jn
— Cameron Ezeir (@camezeir) October 22, 2026
October 22, 2026
"A mum of two died after she crashed her car en route to a hospital after being stabbed at a retirement village."
"Eleanor Barnfield sustained 'puncture wounds' after being attacked at work in Bridgend, South Wales. After being told by the ambulance service that there would be a long wait, the 47-year-old tried to drive herself to hospital, according to eyewitnesses."
ADDED: How different is it in America? See "Shot or stabbed? You may not want to call an ambulance/Analysis: Victims more likely to die if transported to the trauma center by EMS" (Philly voice)("For certain types of injury, it might be best to call the police, Uber or a cab – however you can get to the trauma center fastest").
From "Mum of two dies in crash while driving herself to hospital after being stabbed at retirement village" (GBNews).
"That was great. Man. Wow. Man. I love that. I watched that. I saw that. That was incredible."
Trump said “Man, I loved that,” after a man allegedly punched a protester during a midterm rally in South Carolina. https://t.co/A9efIOdxEG
— The Mirror (@DailyMirror) October 22, 2026
"Did Elon Musk decide by personal fiat to cut off Ukraine's access to vital communications?"
Paul Krugman:It's Time to Take Starlink Away from Elon Musk — Americans did not give him the right to make national security policy — Did Elon Musk decide by personal fiat to cut off Ukraine's access to vital communications? Although Musk claims that the decision was made by Trump …
RELATED:
The Hill:NEW!Rubio, Hegseth point finger at Musk in Starlink slowdown — Top Trump administration officials are starting to point fingers squarely at SpaceX founder Elon Musk for the decision to slow down his company's Starlink satellite internet services and its military counterpart Starshield for Ukraine …
Discussion: CNBC, Reuters, Ars Technica, The Daily Wire, Forbes, Stars & Stripes, Breitbart, Bloomberg, NewsMax.com, Mediaite and Mercury News
The future, as envisioned in the past.
I'm just stumbling into the idea of "Blog fiction" I had back in 2004:
Good fiction blogging would involve several fictional characters, each with their own blog, linking to each other, discussing various fictional events in their lives, perhaps along with interesting other commentary on real world events. It would have to go on for years, like a comic strip that you read daily, and would contain thousands of entries.Such tiny grandiosity, 22 years ago.
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