"First introduced in 1962, the Peanut Butter Floor (Pindakaasvloer) is a conceptual artwork covered with a thick layer of peanut butter."

"The humorous, absurd nature of the work raises questions like 'is this art?' and 'am I allowed to find this beautiful?,' reflecting [the late Dutch artist and comedian Wim T.] Schippers’ belief that art does not necessarily have to be logical or useful, it may as well 'be absurd – just like life itself – and that is precisely what makes it worthwhile.' Rather than exhibiting the preserved floor from 1962, the installation is recreated each time according to the artist’s precise instructions.... 'it requires 15.6 kilos of smooth peanut butter (not chunky) per square meter, no one should stand or lie on the peanut butter floor, the peanut butter should be applied as smoothly and monotonously as possible, and the work should not be approached with any educational purpose.'..."

From "390kg of peanut butter cover rotterdam gallery floor, celebrating humor and absurdity" (designboom).

Here's the Wikipedia page for Wim T. Schippers, who died last month at the age of 83. Excerpt: " During the 1960s, he worked mostly as a visual artist, associated with the international Fluxus-movement. As a television writer, director, and actor he was responsible for some of the most notable and controversial shows on Dutch televisions from the 1960s to the 1990s, creating a number of lasting characters and creating terms and expressions which entered wide usage. In addition, he voiced the characters of Ernie and Kermit the Frog on Sesamstraat, the Dutch version of Sesame Street."

And: "Schippers' art work is praised for its sense of humor; when a dozen journalists stood pensively around the peanut butter platform, Schippers cried out, 'Isn't this fantastic! We're all watching peanut butter!'"

Sunrise in the smoke.

It was actively hazardous out there this morning, so we grabbed a few shots from the nearest vantage point, jumped in the car and went back to our sealed-up house where, we believe, the air is relatively smoke-free.

Write about whatever you like in the comments.

"Pete Hegseth wants a manly military. And he really, really wants you to know how badly he wants a manly military."

"In his 2024 book, The War on Warriors, Hegseth worried that the military risked becoming 'effeminate, and apologetic'; he insisted that what liberals really want is 'soft men, and a weak military,' and he scolded 'Pentagon pussies' who refuse to stand up for soldiers on the battlefield. As secretary of defense, Hegseth has blocked the promotion of female military officers, removed the first woman to lead the Navy, and ordered a review of women’s 'effectiveness' in ground-combat roles. He has also used the Defense Department’s social-media channels to post a steady stream of tougher-than-thou videos...."

So begins the Atlantic article, "Pete Hegseth Wants YOU to Test Your Testosterone/The secretary of defense has a questionable plan to monitor the hormone levels of every service member over 30" (gift link).

In the maroon zone.

ADDED: "Live Updates: Wildfire Smoke Pushes Air Quality to Dangerous Levels for Millions/Dense smoke from Canadian wildfires is choking a vast stretch of the Northeast and Upper Midwest. Officials encouraged residents, including in New York, to stay indoors" (NYT): "As wildfires rage in Ontario, driving a haze of smoke over New York and other parts of the United States, officials in the Canadian province are bracing for a potential escalation and widespread community evacuations. Roughly 135 active wildfires were burning across northwestern Ontario as of Wednesday night, with more than half a dozen new fires reported late that evening...."

"Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee are urging the nation’s top spy chiefs to stop President Donald Trump if he tries to declassify cherry-picked intelligence material that unfairly sows doubt about the 2020 election..."

“.... during his primetime address Thursday evening.... Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee fear the president’s true aim is to justify a federal power grab over America’s voting infrastructure ahead of the midterms.... The letter comes one day after Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, Jay Clayton, refused to say during his Senate confirmation hearing that Joe Biden fairly won the 2020 vote — alarming Democrats who thought highly of Clayton heading into the day. Last week, Trump also fired the two Democratic commissioners of the Election Assistance Commission.... In its after-action report on the 2020 election, the U.S. intelligence community concluded that China 'considered but did not deploy' any attempts [sic] to influence voter perceptions, but acknowledged that some intelligence community analysts disagreed. Vulnerabilities in U.S. voting machines have long been known to election officials, who argue they can be mitigated...."

Politico reports, in "House Dems warn of weaponized intel ahead of Trump’s speech/In a letter sent Thursday, Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee expressed concern Trump will selectively declassify spy material to 'relitigiate [sic] debunked 2020 election conspiracies.'"

Politico has a second article portraying Republicans as anxious about the speech: "'Scared s–tless': Republicans brace for Trump’s primetime speech/Rehashing grievances about the 2020 election could motivate the Republican base and press GOP lawmakers to pass the SAVE America Act": "'The people I talk to are scared shitless,' said a former Trump administration official, granted anonymity to speak candidly. 'It’s not scared shitless about the text of what he’s going to say, it’s, what does he add to the text?'"

"I do love revenge, I will say that,' adds Meeropol, 57, taking a sip from an iced Americano... 'I’d always loved revenge movies."

That's from "The woman behind E Jean Carroll: I do love revenge, I will say that/Ivy Meeropol has made a film starring one of Trump’s biggest foes. And she has her own beef with the president — dating back to her grandparents’ execution" (London Times).

Meeropol = Ivy Meeropol, the documentarian who made a movie about the man, Roy Cohn, who "helped to send her grandparents, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, to the electric chair, leaving her father orphaned at the age of ten." Now, Meeropol has a movie about E. Jean Carroll.

A few days ago, Carroll finally received the $5.6 million she won in her lawsuit against Trump, and Meeropol said: "This historic moment shows that our legal system — established almost 250 years ago to serve as a check against absolute power — still works. E Jean used to sign off from her television show in the mid-Nineties saying, 'Fate loves the fearless,' and it couldn’t be more appropriate today...."

Much has been made of the fact that Carroll is not a perfect MeToo victim.

"Whenever celebrities say that they're just getting nude as a form of self-expression... I have a question."

"How often are they just walking around their house nude, like by themselves, or are they just wearing PJs like a normal person? Like, as as a normal part of self-expression, do you just like walk around nude... do you walk nude to the grocery store as a form of self-expression? You know, just walking around in public nude... Would you be walking around as a form of, you know, just knowing yourself? Would you be walking around naked?"

Ben Shapiro — listening to Miley Cyrus talk to Monica Lewinsky — asks, rhetorically, because he's very sure the answer is no.

 

But maybe you yourself or somebody you've known does walk the face of the earth nude because that's who they really are.

I know I've said this before and maybe I was quoting someone else, but I just spent an absurd amount of time searching for that, unsuccessfully, so I'm just going to try to say it again, though I'm quite convinced I said it better that other time: Nudes have virtually no role in human history.

JD Vance on Joe Rogan.

I'm only an hour and a half into this, but it seems the 2 men are handling themselves well enough:

Sunrise.

Talk about whatever you want in the comments.

Get ready. It's coming. That thing you thought you wanted.

This will be such a nightmare. pic.twitter.com/qrD03wxEdl

— Julian Mille☈ (@ATLAreaWx) July 14, 2026

Children going to school in the dark. Dangerous. It will become obvious. A child's name will be on the repeal legislation.

ADDED: It’s important to note that morning light does not begin at sunrise. It’s already getting light an hour before sunrise, and half an hour before sunrise you’re free of the sense that you’re going out into the night. Using the sunrise as the time that matters is alarmist.

"If Julius Caesar had debuted this year, William Shakespeare might have been accused of writing it with AI."

"A certain suspicious rhetorical device appears again and again in the play. It’s in Act I, Scene ii: 'The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.' In Act III, Scene ii: 'Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more.' And later in that same scene: 'I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.' These famous lines include what has become perhaps the best-known tic of AI writing—a sentence that tells you what the subject isn’t as well as what it is: It’s not X; it’s Y. Once you start noticing the construction, you see it all over the place...."

Writes Will Oremus, in "The Most Famous AI Writing Tic Is Also the Most Mysterious/Why chatbots love 'it’s not X, it’s Y'" (The Atlantic)(gift link).

"Although chatbots have advanced dramatically in their research and reasoning capacities, they are still fundamentally text-prediction machines. They generate answers one “token”—or chunk of text—at a time, based on what has come before. Each successive word choice factors in both the statistical likelihood of that word coming next in a sequence, based on patterns in the original training data, and the likelihood that it will lead to a highly rated response overall. In other words, the models are always seeking a balance between the clever word choice and the obvious one. When a chatbot uses negative parallelism, according to this theory, it’s essentially hedging between the two...."

"Like many terrible things, we can blame therapyspeak on America’s stupidest decade: the 1970s."

"Back then, it was called psychobabble.... The concept survived the hedonistic ’80s, the grimy ’90s, and the low-rise aughts only to reemerge in the social media age with a new name and a more sinister purpose.... Isn’t it odd... that the most selfish people you know always seem to be the ones who are armchair diagnosing their friends and family with personality disorders? I’m reminded of the minor scandal that erupted a few years ago when an A-list actor allegedly wrote private messages to his then girlfriend telling her that if she needed to post photos of herself in a bathing suit, he was not the right partner for her. Elsewhere he wrote, 'I’d love to know before the premiere so I’m not put in the position of publicly flaunting our love if my boundaries are going to be continued to be disrespected. That would be hurtful and triggering for me.' The girlfriend was a professional surfer...."

From "You're Not a Therapist. Stop Talking Like One/Please respect everyone else's boundaries by keeping your psychobabble to yourself" (Vanity Fair).

This is an important general issue, but if you're interested in the A-list actor part of it, here's a Newsweek article from 2023: "Jonah Hill, Sarah Brady Text Messages—Full Transcript." It's really long and a massive invasion of privacy. Why did Newsweek publish all that? Or maybe the better question is why do people have their arguments via text? Why would anyone want to leave a cold record for the whole world to read? And this was a man concerned with "boundaries."

Sunrise.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

Upwelling.

The water around the Apostle Islands was 70°F yesterday afternoon and 46°F this morning — a 24° drop, so it says on the Apostle Islands page at Facebook.

The cause is something called upwelling. Steady southwest winds pushed the warm surface water away from shore, and to replace it, frigid water from deep in the lake rose up to take its place. Lake Superior is cold and deep, so there's always an icy reserve waiting just below the surface. Give the wind the right angle and it comes straight up to the top....  Upwelling usually reverses once the winds shift, so the warmth will likely creep back in a few days. But this is a classic reminder of what makes Superior, Superior.

"Many people have talked about how funny Senator Graham was...What I remember about that hearing was that somehow Senator Graham made me look funny..."

"... which is a harder thing entirely, by asking me what I had done on Christmas...many people said to me afterwards that exchange with Senator Graham was the moment my confirmation was sealed."

Said Justice Kagan, testifying today before a House Appropriations subcommittee about the Supreme Court's budget:

Justice Elena Kagan on her 2010 confirmation hearing: "Many people have talked about how funny Senator Graham was...What I remember about that hearing was that somehow Senator Graham made me look funny, which is a harder thing entirely, by asking me what I had done on… pic.twitter.com/U6IFdoGIwN

— CSPAN (@cspan) July 14, 2026

And here's the exchange with Graham at her confirmation hearing, back in 2010:

"And for an only-would-be-famous person — that is, a civilian who is active on social media — cigarettes are a playful, blasé-bad-girl prop."

"A scroll through TikTok and Reels will show plenty of seductive supercuts of smoking scenes in movies and on TV; cult-popular Instagram accounts like @Cigfluencers ('your favourite smoker’s favourite smokers') give fans a place to leave impassioned comments like 'MADE ME WANT A CIG SO BAD' (re: Ava’s Parisian cigarette in the Hacks finale) with only the occasional scold ('Wow, a page dedicated to people who will die early of lung cancer').... Ironically, the efficacy of turn-of-the-century laws banning cigarettes from public spaces... combined with early-aughts anti-smoking campaigns... which worked to keep millennials from being as cigarette-crazed as older generations, have, by the harsh light of 2026, given cigarette smoking the rosy glow of a bad habit from the good old days...."

From "Cigarettes are back in vogue. How did this happen? Celebrities like Dua Lipa and Gracie Abrams have been photographed with cigs, as have social media influencers who like the retro vibes" (WaPo).