Sunrise — 7:04, 7:06.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

I've got 10 TikToks for you on this profound evening.

1. Close out Yom Kippur with Mandy Patinkin.

2. Gordon Lightfoot, an icon of old age.

3. The handsome dog.

4. Man in shorts.

5. Survival.

6. Shopping at Erewhon is the essence of anxiety.

7. Husband loves separate bedrooms.

8. Rethink "I'm only human."

9. An especially crazy Rube Goldberg Machine.

10. The holiday film written by bots.

"Another easy prediction to make about Mr. Musk’s takeover is that it will generate enormous backlash among Twitter’s rank-and-file employees...."

"Twitter, more so than other social media platforms, has a vocally progressive work force and many employees who are deeply invested in the company’s mission of promoting 'healthy conversation.' Those employees may believe — for good reason! — that under Mr. Musk’s leadership, Twitter will abandon many of the projects they care about in areas like trust and safety.... It’s worth noting that in his texts with Mr. Musk, [Twitter CEO Parag] Agrawal claimed that a 'large silent majority' of Twitter employees supported Mr. Musk’s vision. But virtually every Twitter employee I’ve spoken to in the last six months has told me that he or she plans to leave if Mr. Musk takes over. It’s also worth noting that Mr. Musk may not mind if thousands of Twitter employees show themselves the door. He has implied that the company’s staff is bloated, and now that he needs to justify a $44 billion price tag, an exodus of unhappy employees might be the kind of savings he’s looking for."

Writes Kevin Roose in "Elon Musk’s Twitter Will Be a Wild Ride/His deal to buy the company is back on. Here are six predictions about Twitter under Musk’s control, if it happens" (NYT).

"Experts say the steady patter of bellicose talk has helped normalize the expectation of political violence."

"In late August, a poll of 1,500 adults by YouGov and The Economist found that 54 percent of respondents who identified as 'strong Republicans' believed a civil war was at least somewhat likely in the next decade. Only about a third of all respondents felt such an event was unlikely.... [The Chicago Project on Security and Threats] researchers tracked tweets mentioning civil war before and after Mr. Trump announced the search on Mar-a-Lago."

I'm reading "Talk of ‘Civil War,’ Ignited by Mar-a-Lago Search, Is Flaring Online" (NYT).

"There’s someone shining a blue light over there. We want that light taken right off. Please take it off…it gets in our face."

Bob Dylan politely scolding the audience during “Every Grain of Sand” a few nights ago. “There’s someone shining a blue light over there. We want that light taken right off. Please take it off…it gets in our face.” pic.twitter.com/qnzFqACrhU

— Ray Padgett (@rayfp) October 4, 2022

"To younger Americans, 23-year-old Christian Walker is likely more famous than his father. He’s a Generation Z social media phenomenon..."

"... whose own-the-libs stylings as a “Gays for Trump” conservative and Ron DeSantis fan have made him an online influencer, with hundreds of thousands of followers," writes Ed Kilgore at Intelligencer. "His right-wing street cred has given his sudden explosion of fury at his father after the abortion story came out a lot of play. It began with this tweet:"

Sunrise on the water at 7:01 and 6:56 this morning.

 

That one is purely about the light on the water. 

The earlier one has some human excitement — sculling sweeping: 

"Do you think that Donald Trump made everybody go crazy?"

The interviewer Meghan Daum asks the therapist Dea Bridge in "What a Conservative Therapist Thinks About Politics and Mental Health" (NYT).

Daum: Do you think that Donald Trump made everybody go crazy? 

Bridge: What do you mean by “made everybody go crazy”?

"Calling presidents liars, even when they’re honest, is a great American tradition."

"Trump, the greatest liar in American political history, stands no chance of upending it."

That's the last paragraph of "Opinion Trump sued CNN for defamation. Here’s where his case falls apart" by Eric Wemple, in WaPo.

I can imagine Trump suing Wemple for calling him "the greatest liar in American political history." Lawsuits like that must fail in America, and Trump should be ashamed of himself for his impingement on freedom of speech. But of course he's the most shameless of all the ex-Presidents.

Fortunately, I'm too small to be harassed in court by Donald Trump or I would have restrained myself from making a fact-like statement about him that might not be precisely true. Maybe Bill Clinton is the most shameless of all the ex-Presidents. Should we have a court case on that topic?

Sunrise — 6:51, 5:54.

What a big color shift in 3 minutes! And I wish I'd reached my vantage point 3 minutes earlier, when it was brilliantly red. (No need to warn the sailors of a storm. There's almost a 0% chance of rain today.)

"In summer 2020, leftists used bricks, water bottles, flagpoles, fireworks, Molotov cocktails, anything but a gun as a weapon to destroy cities but the media didn’t cover them as ‘violent’ or ‘armed.’"

"When protesters during January 6 used a flagpole, all of a sudden the types of objects they’d been using all summer were now considered part of an ‘armed’ insurrection. He is in no way condoning this action. He’s commenting on the hypocrisy of the situation."

Said a spokesperson for Ron Johnson, quoted in "Ron Johnson again says Jan. 6 was not an ‘armed insurrection,’ adds ‘protesters did teach us’ how to use flagpoles as weapons" (CNN).

That was a clarication of something Johnson said in a Rotary Club Q&A yesterday:

“To call what happened on Jan. 6 an ‘armed insurrection,” I just think is inaccurate,” Sen. Ron Johnson says at Milwaukee Rotary Club just now.

Johnson argued few weapons were confiscated but protesters “did teach us how you can use a flag pole” pic.twitter.com/28E3W7G3eg

— Natasha Korecki (@natashakorecki) October 4, 2022

"Chess Investigation Finds That U.S. Grandmaster ‘Likely Cheated’ More Than 100 Times."

"An internal report reviewed by The Wall Street Journal alleges a previously unknown pattern of likely widespread cheating by Hans Moke Niemann, the player whose September victory over Magnus Carlsen has rocked the chess world."

The Wall Street Journal reports. 

"In the first episode of Archetypes released since the Queen’s death, Meghan recalled her 'adolescent embarrassment' at being naked at a Korean spa with her mother as a teenager."

I'm reading "Meghan podcast hits out at films’ ‘toxic’ Asian stereotypes" (London Times).

She may have suffered "adolescent embarrassment" long ago, but she's far beyond embarrassment now. She's got a very popular podcast, and now, championing Asian women, she's citing her experience on "a trip to a Korean spa with her mother where swimwear was not allowed.

Half Human.

I love that poster. It's for a 1955 Japanese film about the Abominable Snowman.

I ran across that just now researching the phrase "half human" as I was writing the previous post. 

Interesting things about the poster: woman in shorts in a snowy mountain environment, man more suitably dressed in a Tyrolean hat, vaguely indicated male genitalia on the Snowman.

ADDED: Joe Dante explains "Half Human":

 

What the whole thing if you dare: here.

"I thought these migrants were DREAMers that were going to go to college to become doctors. Now, Nancy just wants them to work in the fields...."

"The illegals are viewed as servants by the Democrats. They’re opening the border for the help. These aren’t asylum seekers. These are just waiters and field hands for a party that fought a civil war to keep their slaves."

Said Jesse Watters, quoted in "Jesse Watters Says Democrats Leaving Border Open for Post-Civil War ‘Servants’, Migrants are ‘Waiters and Field Hands’Jesse Watters Says Democrats Leaving Border Open for Post-Civil War ‘Servants’, Migrants are ‘Waiters and Field Hands’" (Mediaite).

Watters was riffing on something Nancy Pelosi said the other day — which we talked about here — "We have a shortage of workers in our country, and you see even in Florida, some of the farmers and the growers saying, ‘Why are you shipping these immigrants up north? We need them to pick the crops down here.'"

Watters's rhetoric would have more power if he weren't stuck with calling the border-crossers "the illegals" —  "The illegals are viewed as servants by the Democrats."

I'm waiting for a Democrat to make the equivalently awkward remark "The servants are viewed as illegals by the Democrats."

Either humanize them or don't. But don't expect me to believe you really care about people who are human only when it suits your needs. Ironically, that's exactly Watters's point about Nancy and the Democrats.

At the Sunrise Café...

... you can write about whatever you want.