I just wanted to get a look at the refilling of the newly blue Reflecting Pool.

But I couldn't avoid seeing this video, shared by Trump:

🚨 LMAO!! President Trump just dropped this absolute GEM: He's filling the newly improved Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool with leftist tears

Straight from the source 🤣🤣

📽️ @TheRicanMemes pic.twitter.com/NJrOdFR750

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) June 4, 2026

I guess that's an effort to visualize what has become the stock joke: The pool will be filled with "liberal tears."

ADDED: Actual footage, showing how the color will work out:

 

"So my brain was going, OK, here is one of the most outrageous, funny Black women in the world at that point, and I’m supposed to be roasting her."

"And I’m not a stand-up. I can’t run with the bulls.... Well, if I were Black, I could say all these outrageous things. I’m not. Then, my mind went, well, I will do it in blackface. That will be funny or not, but it’ll, like, be — oh, I have license to. I thought I could pull this off. There’s no one that’s been whiter than me in the world. Poor Whoopi Goldberg has had to defend me over the years, sweetly and gracefully...."

Said Ted Danson, on a podcast recently, quoted in "Ted Danson Apologizes for Blackface Roast of Whoopi Goldberg in 1993" (NYT).

How do you come up with the idea that because you're not a stand-up comedian, you can go even farther over the line? It's the stand-up who has the most reason to think he ought to seize the power of offensiveness.

If the answer to my question is he thought pull it off because "There’s no one that’s been whiter than me in the world," then he's openly embracing white privilege.

"I have to say, I’m pretty much on my own with this question, and I’m at a loss."

Said the director Wim Wenders, 80, asked about his movie "Wrong Move" (1975) which made the now easily perceptibly wrong move of gazing at the breasts of a 13 year old. But what to do about that now?

I'm reading, "Wim Wenders Pulls Film With Teenage Nudity After Actress’s Pleas/Nastassja Kinski was 13 years old when she was shown topless in the 1975 film 'Wrong Move.' 'I could already tell that wasn’t right,' she told a German newspaper" (NYT).

"On Wednesday, Wenders released a statement on his foundation’s website," the NYT says, linking to a German text. I used Grok to put it in English:

"I am the son of man. I just killed the man of sin."

Said the voice on the 911 call, quoted in "James Handy, Veteran Actor, Is Stabbed to Death/The 81-year-old actor had parts in films including 'Top Gun: Maverick' and 'Arachnophobia.' The son of his girlfriend was arrested and charged with murder" (NYT).

The suspect, Michael Gledhill, who lived at the home with his mother, flagged down police officers and told them he was the person they were looking for, the police said.

"The study, titled 'Law Professors Prefer AI Over Peer Answers'... was conducted with 16 law professors across U.S. law schools and tested..."

"... whether large language models could serve as effective tutors for contract law courses. In a blind evaluation of nearly 3,000 anonymized comparisons, professors rated AI responses significantly higher than answers written by other professors, with AI winning 75% of head-to-head matchups.... The study is particularly notable because previous AI evaluations have focused primarily on subjects with clear right-or-wrong answers. Legal reasoning, by contrast, demands careful analysis of competing arguments and defensible conclusions.... 'These weren’t just simple questions with obvious answers. Many of them required synthesizing complex material, applying it to new situations, and explaining legal concepts in ways that would help students develop their own analytical skills.' Participants created 40 representative contracts law questions that students might ask after class or during office hours, wrote their own answers, and then evaluated responses without knowing whether they came from AI or other participating professors. The AI systems performed comparably to the best human instructor in the study...."

I'm reading "AI Outperforms Law Professors in Stanford Law Study/In a rigorous blind study, law professors overwhelmingly preferred AI-generated answers to student legal questions over answers written by fellow law professors—and flagged the AI answers as potentially misleading or harmful far less often" (Stanford Law School News and Announcements).

"Many in the entertainment industry are creatives, they’re freethinkers, they’re out-of-the-box thinkers..."

"... and so, the idea that someone isn’t conventional is kind of part and parcel of how they move through the world."

Said Dr. Erica Anderson, "a clinical psychologist who specializes in helping children with gender identity issues and who is transgender herself," quoted in "Why do so many Hollywood celebs have trans or non-binary kids?" (NY Post).

These entertainment people are "freethinkers," according to Anderson, who also says, contradictorily, that "the prevailing politics are extremely progressive," so "they don’t feel safe to question an asserted identity by one of their children."

So what is it? Do they feel compelled to go along with whatever the child says — politically compelled — or are they — because of their inherent creativity — celebrating and encouraging unusual expression?

I'm seeing a mysterious merger of freedom and compulsion.

IN THE COMMENTS: Bob Boyd: "I think she means outside-the-box thinkers. Out-of-the-box usually means you don't have to do anything yourself, no assembly required." 

That's closely observed and correct. This is the case of a dying metaphor. What is this box we're talking about when we say "outside of the box"? Grok tells me the expression originated with the 9 dots puzzle:

You're an outside-the-box thinker if you realize you can connect the 9 dots with 4 lines if you go beyond what is only an imaginary box. Apply that metaphor to thinking about how to parent a child who doesn't fit the gender stereotypes associated with its physical form. That's what an outside-the-box thinkers would do. Now, compare the out-of-the-box thinker. This would be someone who has pre-determined ideas built in and really doesn't think at all.

"That eyebrow pierce.... You’ll have trouble getting the barbell out and eventually someone will have to use tiny pliers to cut it out of your face."

Said Molly Jong-Fast, speaking at the Bennington graduation and, later, quoting herself in a NYT essay titled "It’s No Wonder Grads Are Booing Their Commencement Speakers."

The booing that's famously happening this year is in response to graduation speakers who attempt to say something encouraging about what A.I. is going to do to the career they may still hope to pull off.

Platner presents his weary face to the camera

Chris Hayes confronts Platner with the damaging accusations that the NYT published.

He was, he say, "not a good boyfriend." He was "self-medicating with alcohol." It was a "pretty dark period' of his life.

"The air is loud."

"What is that sound that that we hear irritating us so dreadfully?" Dick Cavett asks Jimi Hendrix, as some kind of background noise, emanating from the musical equipment, is interfering with our effort to hear the very soft-spoken guest.

Jimi Hendrix: "Well, it sounds it sounds something like the New York street. I don't know. It's like today the air is all static, so the amplifiers are static. Music is loud, the air is loud, and you know, we're trying to settle things down a little bit, but it's going to take it like a rest."

The idea of trying "to settle things down a little bit" gets the mind of Cavett going toward the idea of human beings settling down, and later he asks Jimi if he sees himself getting married. When Jimi says he hopes not, Cavett delivers a punchline: "But you'll never get a situation comedy on television." That's funny, because sitting on the other side of Hendrix is Robert Young, the father of "Father Knows Best."

Young looks like an funny throwback to an earlier time, but Hendrix died a year later, and Young lived for 3 more decades.

Sunrise.

Write about whatever you like in the comments... except Graham Platner. Go to the previous post for that. It just went up.

"Lyndsey Fifield, 40... recalled [Graham Platner] as 'cavalierly contemptuous of women’s emotions, of our "weakness."'"

"Ms. Fifield, who dated Mr. Platner from roughly 2013 to 2015, said that his offensive online posts 'reminded me of just how much he hated women.' Jenny Racicot, 41... who said she dated him casually off and on between 2019 and 2021, said the posts deepened her belief that he did not respect women. 'When I saw the old comments that he made online,' she said, 'I recognized a version of him that I had experiences with.'... Ms. Racicot also said that in 2021 he arrived at her house drunk, after she had asked him not to come over. She declined to elaborate, but said she cut off contact soon after that episode and found his behavior 'reckless' and 'unsettling.'"

From "Several Women Who Dated Graham Platner Recall ‘Unsettling’ Behavior/The Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine could be charming, women said in interviews, but some found his actions intimidating and disturbing" (NYT).

"A.I. also had a weird habit of making its characters fidget constantly, always running a finger along the edge of a table or adjusting a collar."

"The most reliable marker, though, was something more abstract, and, I suppose, upon reflection, even a little spooky. The scenes generated by A.I. had characters, but, apart from fidgeting, they mostly did nothing.... [After some new directives,] suddenly, every fake passage was filled with characters hopping on a horse, or delivering an important package, or running.... So I loosened the rules a bit... If Claude prefers to write these passages in which nothing seemingly happens and the hallways are always empty and the characters do nothing except idly touch nearby furniture, it’s because we do, too. Claude, I am sure, will soon be able to have one of these characters at least fire up a stove or drive a buggy to Norwich...."

Writes Jay Caspian Kang, in "Can A.I. Produce Writing That We Actually Want to Read?/I recently created a simple test, which convinced me that the answer is no" (The New Yorker).

"Living in the sunlight/Loving in the moonlight...."

"We get to a point where we see the fence. The fence is there, but we can't see over the fence. But the closer we get to the fence, the more curious we are..."

"... about what's on the other side of the fence. And there are some people who just decide that they're too curious — like Hunter — and jump over the fence, right? I'm not doing that. But I'm approaching the fence, and I've lived a terrific life, and only — once again — only in America.... Although I really did admire his note, the 'no more fun' note. It should be a classic."

Says Joe Eszterhas, who is 81 years old now, in this great conversation with Joe Rogan. 

The classic note he's talking about is Hunter S. Thompson's suicide note. I've quoted it before: "No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won’t hurt."

Eszterhas wrote a lot of movies. Is any of them a classic? Here's a list. I haven't seen any of them. Not my sort of thing. Maybe you've seen "Basic Instinct." But anyway, he talks about a lot in that interview. There's a long section about his dinner with Jimi Hendrix, who was, we're told, "the nicest guy... very nice... just laid back."

"Millions of readers bought the books, which became a popular school assignment and one of the widest-read works to explore the interior lives of modern Iranians."

"The series was adapted into a 2007 film that was nominated for the Academy Award for best animated feature. 'Persepolis,' the author Fernanda Eberstadt wrote in a New York Times review, 'dances with drama and insouciant wit,' its inky black-and-white drawings modeled on both contemporary comics and Persian miniatures.... Not quite two decades later, Ms. Satrapi set to work documenting another tumultuous moment in Iranian history: the unrest in 2022 that followed the death, in police custody, of a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, who had been detained and accused of violating a law requiring women to wear the hijab in public. In protest, women across Iran tore off their veils, in one of the most significant cultural and political moments in the country since the 1979 revolution...."

From "Marjane Satrapi, the Author of ‘Persepolis,’ Dies at 56/Her popular graphic novel series, published in the early 2000s, followed an Iranian girl through the Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War" (NYT).

The obituary quotes Satrapi: "Even basic human rights, they deny us. You don’t have the right to dance, you don’t have the right to sing, you don’t have the right to do this, you don’t have the right to do that."

The NYT obituary doesn't say how Satrapi died, but at Deadline, it says: "'Marjane Satrapi died of sadness a little over a year after the death of Mattias Ripa, her husband and the love of her life,' read a statement from close friends and family announcing her death on June 3...."

"The whole art gallery art system became too big, too commercial, too impersonal and too corporate. We all know it’s true."

Said Marc Glimcher, the chief executive of Pace, quoted in "A Mega Gallery Shrinks: Pace Cuts 50 Artists, 50 Staff/A challenging art market is forcing even an established player to contract" (NYT).

"We really are finding our soul. And that means having the number of artists that you can perform extraordinary things for. It means just the really core relationships," Glimcher explained. 

One of the artists who got cut is Glenn Kaino, who said: "It’s been clear to me for a while that their model was optimized for a vision of the art world that never materialized. The art I create is concerned with the world and our place in it.... I’m a romantic about good, meaningful art creating value, and not the other way around...."