Sunrise — 6:21, 6:44, 6:47.

"I was just exhausted... the show was all filmed on a green screen.... I was in every take of every shot, every day..."

"... with no other actors or props or anything, just sort of standing in a void for years and years. My real job was listening. Most children’s television talks to the camera, right? That’s kind of an established convention. But what 'Blue’s Clues' did that I think was really a breakthrough is we listened. I worked really hard on making that as believable as possible. And that was becoming more and more challenging every day to do. The entire time I was on that show, I was struggling with undiagnosed, severe clinical depression and I didn’t know what was going on. That made my job extra hard."

Says Steve Burns, interviewed in "Steve from ‘Blue’s Clues’ Was Here for Us All Along/The former star of a beloved children’s show survived the rumors of his own demise and then found a new home on social media. He is still ready to listen" (NYT).

It was nice to see this article after running into him on TikTok... where he listens to all of us quite compellingly.

A well-attended sunrise this morning.

Talk about whatever you want in the comments.

"The racketeering conspiracy charge, which accuses [Sean Combs] of carrying out crimes as part of an 'enterprise,' carries up to life in prison."

"But defense lawyers... have argued that the federal laws are being deployed to charge less serious conduct than was envisioned when they were adopted.... In a bail hearing on Tuesday, Mr. Combs’s lead lawyer, Marc Agnifilo, objected to the government painting the encounters as sex trafficking, arguing that with Cassie... it was consensual — 'part of the way that these two adults wanted to be intimate together.'... Julie A. Dahlstrom, a legal scholar who has studied trends in American sex trafficking law, said she believed that the broader application of sex trafficking law by prosecutors had been driven, in part, by a more expansive use of the statute to bring civil claims during the #MeToo movement. 'We saw victims' rights attorneys try to use the tools that they had,' she said, citing as an example a lawsuit against Harvey Weinstein that led a judge to acknowledge that a promise of possible career advancement in exchange for sex could help bolster a sex trafficking claim...."

From "In the Sean Combs Case, Echoes of the Tack Taken Against Other Powerful Men/Federal authorities are prosecuting Mr. Combs under sex trafficking and racketeering laws, which were used to successfully prosecute R. Kelly and Keith Raniere in earlier abuse cases" (NYT).

"When you guys wrote this song — you know, 'we'll make good pets' — you were talking about if these aliens came and visited us and we suddenly became a planet of pets."

Said Howard Stern to Perry Farrell in 1997:

I found that because I've been reading about Perry Farrell this week and it intersected in my head with all the loose talk about newcomers eating the pets of the people who live there in Ohio.

Here's the NYT story if you need to catch up on Perry Farrell's problems: "Jane’s Addiction to Cancel Tour After Onstage Fight/In a social media post, the rock band said it was halting its reunion tour after the group’s singer, Perry Farrell, hit its guitarist at a Boston show" ("Farrell’s wife, Etty Lau Farrell, said on Instagram after the concert that her husband had been upset throughout the tour about the band’s sound levels drowning out his vocals. He was suffering from tinnitus and a sore throat.... 'He was screaming just to be heard,' she said.")

Lyrics from the song "Pets": "Will there be another race/To come along and take over for us?/Maybe Martians could do better than we've done/We'll make great pets!"

There's always the question whether Martians will eat their pets. I come from the "Twilight Zone"/"To Serve Man" era of thinking about the aliens....

"Harris Had Stronger Debate, Polls Find, but the Race Remains Deadlocked."

 The NYT reports, just now. Free-access link.

ADDED: 2 interesting highlights:

1. "The share of voters who said they still wanted to learn more about Ms. Harris was nearly identical, both before and after the debate, suggesting that she might have missed an opportunity to address doubts or provide more details to the public....:

2. "[F]ar more voters see [Harris] as too liberal than view Mr. Trump as too conservative.... Mr. Trump took the title as the more 'extreme' candidate, 74 percent versus 46 percent.Yet being extreme was not viewed negatively by many voters. In fact, Mr. Trump won the group of voters who said 'extreme' described him 'somewhat well' by more than 50 percentage points...."

AND: Those 2 points fit together. Do you see how? Harris is trying to look moderate, but that makes people feel they don't know enough. If she's extreme, we're not seeing it so much. Trump is more revealing, so he seems more extreme. People feel they know what he's saying, and a lot of them like it.

"I say, without evidence, that the media’s Trump qualifiers are backfiring."

A great headline — on a column by Matt Bai, in WaPo.

I know exactly what he's talking about —  even though "Trump qualifiers" is an awkward term — and I'm assuming he's going to articulate my position on the subject... but is he? The subheadline makes me wary:  "We in the news media are making him less accountable for his mendacity, rather than more so." I want you in the news media to be more accountable too. You're just throwing in "without evidence" all the time without establishing that you have honestly assessed whether there is evidence.

Now, I'll read it and make some excerpts and comments as I go:

First!

Presenting the 2024 NL Central Champions. 👑 #CLINCHED pic.twitter.com/JimZUtdG0A

— MLB (@MLB) September 19, 2024

Brewers are the first team to clinch.

"Powered by just a few ounces of an explosive compound concealed within the devices, the blasts sent grown men flying off motorcycles and slamming into walls..."

"... according to witnesses and video footage. People out shopping fell to the ground, writhing in agony, smoke snaking from their pockets. Mohammed Awada, 52, and his son were driving by one man whose pager exploded, he said. 'My son went crazy and started to scream when he saw the man’s hand flying away from him,' he said."

From "How Israel Built a Modern-Day Trojan Horse: Exploding Pagers/The Israeli government did not tamper with the Hezbollah devices that exploded, defense and intelligence officials say. It manufactured them as part of an elaborate ruse" (NYT).

Sunrise — 6:43.

"As is the case for many people who grew up in the Deep South but have lived somewhere else for many years, the Southern accent I once had..."

"... has given way to the 'nowhere man' accent that I think of as generically American. But it comes roaring back when I visit my family in central Alabama, and even lingers for a few days after I have returned to Brooklyn. It’s also a little more pronounced after a martini (or two). No one gets offended when my Southern accent comes and goes. For Kamala Harris, it’s a different story. Figures on the political right, including JD Vance, Donald Trump and various conservative internet celebrities, have accused Ms. Harris of affecting a Southern accent on the campaign trail, and implied that it was a kind of deception. Ms. Harris, who is not from the South, wasn’t using a Southern accent, though. As John McWhorter has recently pointed out, what Ms. Harris was slipping into was Black English. There’s nothing unusual about her using Black English because to state the obvious (to everyone except Donald Trump, apparently) Ms. Harris is Black...."

Writes Elizabeth Spiers in "The Real Reason the Harris Twang Is Driving Republicans Crazy" (NYT)(free-access link, because she has a lot of other things to say and I'm not in the mood to summarize it).

And then there are the people who say she sounds drunk....

"The man who is not a husband, father, and soldier is not a man."

I took these photos of the movie "A Special Day," which is playing on The Criterion Channel (in its current tribute to Marcello Mastroianni). Begin around 53:23 to view just this segment, which has Mastroianni's character poking around inside the apartment of Sophia Loren's character and finding her fascism scrapbook. (It's 1938, in Rome.)

"So you can have people who attempt to gesticulate. Again, modern politicians, you’ll see this sometime where they feel like, 'I’m supposed to be making hand gestures'..."

"... and they’re terrible at it. And it undercuts it. Cicero and Quintilian give some very amusing examples from ancient Rome. He says, there was this one guy who when he spoke, looked like he was trying to swat away flies because there were just these awkward gestures. Or another who looked like he was trying balancing a boat in choppy seas. And my favorite is there was one orator who supposedly was prone to making, I guess, languid supple motions. They actually named a dance after this guy, and his name was Titius. And so Romans could do the Titius, which is this dance that was imitating this orator who had these comically bad gesticulation...."

From "Transcript for Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire – Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome | Lex Fridman Podcast #443"

The segment on gestures begins here. Or watch the video:

How does this go on for 16 years?

I'm reading "Charges against Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs allege 16 years of abuse and crimes/The music mogul was arrested on charges of racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking. He is being held without bail" (WaPo).

The crimes Combs and his associates are accused of committing and covering up include sex trafficking, narcotics distribution, arson and kidnapping. Many of these alleged crimes took place at illegal sex parties that Combs referred to as “freak offs.” During these parties, Combs allegedly threw objects at the victims and dragged them by their hair.

"Roy finds deculturation everywhere: in viral controversies over whether emotional-support animals belong on airplanes..."

"... in the recent, charged debate over whether Israeli or Lebanese people invented hummus; in Disney’s 'remixing' of traditional fairy tales into profitable mega-franchises; in the struggles of universities to attract humanities majors. What unifies these phenomena, he thinks, is that they unfold in a cultural vacuum. In the past, a society could rely on 'a shared system of language, signs, symbols, representations of the world, body language, behavioural codes, and so on' to govern all sorts of situations. Today, in the absence of that shared background, we must constantly renegotiate what’s normal, acceptable, and part of 'us.' ... [Roy writes] 'Here we are on a terrain in which culture has no positive aspect, since the old culture has been delegitimized and the new one does not meet the necessary condition of any culture, which is the presence of implicit, shared understandings'.... Around the world, cultures aren’t being replaced by other cultures; the idea of 'Westernization' is a red herring, he suggests, because, despite the worldwide popularity of pizza and 'Succession,' what’s actually ascendant are 'weak identities' constructed through that 'collection of tokens.' It’s a bit like moving from a place where your family has lived for generations to a faceless suburb. You could adopt your neighbors’ traditions, if they have any, but they don’t—they’re just a random collection of people who happen to live near one another. 'You do you,' they say...."

From "Is Culture Dying? The French sociologist Olivier Roy believes that 'deculturation' is sweeping the world, with troubling consequences." The article, by Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker, reviews Oliver Roy's book "The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms."

Rothman writes "I’m one of those people who is 'spiritual, but not religious'" — people who is?!! I'm one of those people who remember when The New Yorker had a noble tradition of meticulous editing. Has that degenerated into a nonculture of if it sounds good, write it? But we've already analyzed this grammar issue and come up with the answer. It's a rule. If you don't follow it, your venerable institution is crumbling. You're just a random collection of scribblers who happen to publish under the same cover.

Rothman's last paragraph gestures at the struggle over immigration that's roiled American politics:

Sunrise — 6:18, 6:41, 6:43, 6:46.