"Attorneys for Christa Pike said Thursday afternoon that she is alive, in critical condition 'and receiving lifesaving medical care' after Tennessee officials tried and failed to execute her by lethal injection the previous night."

WaPo reports.

AND: Here's some speculation about how she survived (and an interesting tip on how a person can prepare in advance to stymie the lethal injection):

"I worry... that our students could bear the consequences of... misperceptions, including being unfairly portrayed as coddled or unprepared for the demands of a rigorous Michigan education."

Said Domenico Grasso, president of the University of Michigan, quoted in "University of Michigan pauses plan to stop issuing grades/The pilot plan, which aimed to address students’ mental health, was criticized by some students and alumni" (WaPo).

The plan was to improve the mental wellbeing of students, but abandoning the plan would help them with their mental wellbeing even more. They might feel bad about themselves if they see not-so-good grades, but they might also feel bad about themselves if they imagine that other people are thinking ill of them for needing to be protected from feeling bad about themselves if they see not-so-good grades.

I feel bad about how dishonest that justification seems. Protect my mind: I was a University of Michigan student once. In 1969, I was drawn by the experimental college, the Residential College, where, ironically, there were no grades. 

"No fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals. Just warriors."

Said Pete Hegseth, quoted in "Pete Hegseth: I’ll purge army of fatties, beardos and weirdos/The war secretary is establishing an Office of Religious Affairs and seeking ‘patriotic cowboys’ as he faces pressure over his budget and the Iran war" (London Times).

Seems crazy to insult the overweight. And beards — who cares? You can require beards to be shaved on entering the service, but a person who happens to style himself with a beard isn't a type of person to be rejected. I think Hegseth is the weirdo.

"For a long time, the chief justice’s life here was a story of potluck dinners and easy friendships, according to a summer of interviews with more than two dozen residents."

"Neighbors reveled in his position but kept exchanges with him about it brief or light. At a long-ago annual summer party, he used to participate in touch football, then call dinner to order by proclaiming: 'Oyez, oyez, oyez, the lobsters are ready.' But in recent years...."

I'm reading "John Roberts and His Island/After decades of potlucks and paddle-boarding on Maine’s midcoast, rising anger and protests have left the Supreme Court’s chief justice more isolated than ever" (NYT).

"Neighbors have taken to the water to protest him. Calling themselves 'kayak-tivists,' they form flotillas facing his island home, holding waterproof signs conveying their disappointment. A local newspaper columnist recommended that people in town give him the finger.... 'Maine is not here as your happy place, your wind-down from all of your hard work destroying my civil liberties and democracy,' wrote Becca Shaw Glaser in her column...."

"Adult Lunchables are already everywhere in this world."

"Sophisticate versions of juvenile favorites include: tropical cocktails (grown-up Capri-Suns), burrata (string cheese), any dessert (candy wearing pants), smoothies (basically actual baby food). Tinned fish is a funny one, though, because no kid would actually choose to eat tinned fish. It’s an acquired taste, funky and fusty and a little bit offensive, merely presented in a kid way. And so in that way it’s maybe more like whatever’s going on with all these bows on adult women’s clothing...."

From "I No Longer Have to Make Life Decisions Thanks to My Infinite Tins of Fish/Now I can’t even look at the word t*na" (NYT).

Not familiar with all those bows? One example will get you up to speed: "Demi Moore's Tattered Hot Pink Ballgown Comes With a Truly Giant OTT Bow."

By the way, if they can just use OTT like that — meaning "over the top," I believe — there is at least hope for the end of the Mel Ott era in crossword puzzles.

"When I want something, I'm going to go after it."

Said Caleb Flynn on "American Idol." Note all the times he mentions his wife — "I love my wife more than anything. She is very, very pretty."

Now: "Ex-Pastor Who Auditioned for ‘American Idol’ Is Guilty of His Wife’s Murder/The trial in Ohio attracted outsize attention because the defendant, Caleb Flynn, a former music pastor, auditioned on 'American Idol' in 2013" (NYT).

The nine-day trial drew outsize public attention to a courtroom in Troy, a small city north of Dayton. Jurors and a gallery that held several dozen spectators heard details of Mr. Flynn’s affair with a woman he met when she was a 20-year-old intern at his church, including readings of their text messages and playbacks of the love songs that prosecutors said Mr. Flynn created for her using artificial intelligence.... Jurors heard text messages in which Mr. Flynn said he hated his wife, with whom he had two daughters, and wanted her dead.... 

Sunrise got rained out, so we set out in midday.

The leaves were changing, the drummers drumming:

Meade lured me into repeating my theory about a baseball word:

"'They’re relating to it like a conscious being,' realized Rabbi Navon, a former computer engineer who wrote his dissertation on the ethics of machine consciousness."

"It appeared to Rabbi Navon that Mr. Olah and his team believed that Claude had what philosophers call 'moral status' on par with a person — that it was a being with similar inherent rights to dignity or respect. The religious scholars had come to hear about technology’s next frontier. Now they were being confronted with a mind-bending existential question of almost unimaginable weight: What would it mean for humanity’s future if artificial intelligence systems possessed a consciousness that rivals our own?"

From "Religious Scholars Met With Anthropic. What They Heard Stunned Them. In a series of private meetings, the company consulted religious scholars to help instill morality into its A.I. models — and make the case that Claude could be conscious" (NYT).

"Asked how the passengers had stopped the attacker, Ms. Ohayon said, 'I believe with their bare hands inside the cockpit.'"

From "Passenger Describes Chaos Aboard FlyDubai Flight/The passenger, Miriam Ohayon, said people on board felt the jet lose control and heard screams. 'When they opened the cockpit, there was a lot of blood,' she told Israeli television" (NYT).

Do you mean "May President Trump Demolish the Kennedy Center?"?

I wonder, reading "Can President Trump Demolish the Kennedy Center?" in the NYT. Subheadline: "The president has entertained the idea of tearing down the performing arts venue. Analysts say any plan would face multiple daunting challenges."

Sample analysis: "'I don’t think it’s likely that we’ll see bulldozers around the Kennedy Center any time soon,' said Paul Edmondson, a lawyer who specializes in historic preservation law.... While the center’s leadership made assurances months ago that demolition was not being contemplated, Mr. Trump, who is chairman of the center’s board, went on to speak openly of the prospect. 'The president has a pattern of moving so fast that it’s difficult to catch up,' Mr. Edmondson said."

"Being labeled a poser was something that could trigger a purity test, and in the sense of, 'Are you really who you say you are?'"

"Whereas with LARPing, it is more: 'I’ve already made up my mind that you aren’t who you say you are.' It’s more of a condemnation, whereas poser can be challenged."

Said Steven Dashiell, an assistant research professor at Morgan State University, "How LARPing, a Gaming Term, Became a Word for Posers/Live-action role playing was associated with games like Dungeons & Dragons. Now, it’s a way to call someone out for being inauthentic" (NYT).

Were you aware of the LARPer/poser distinction?

Wait. Another professor is available to help. Sarah Lynne Bowman, an associate professor of game design at Uppsala University, says, about LARPing, "Some of the early stigma was around people supposedly not knowing the difference between fantasy and reality — so being too into what’s happening rather than faking it."

That's very different. The real you could be truly living a fantasy. You might need to fake it to pass as a normal person.

I'm old. I'm not going to use young people slang. I remember when "poser" was young people slang, and I had to wonder when did we stop saying "poseur."

What if fecal matter had a dream? What would the people in the dream be wearing?

Just a question I had, trying to read this NYT fashion article, "Fecal Matter Dreams a Fashion Dream/Pregnant women, bodybuilders, punks, family — a heartfelt Matières Fécales show jolts Paris Fashion Week. But what about the clothes?"

That's a gift link — as all NYT links are now — so go over and check out the clothes, know the dream. We're told these clothes "signal... the belief that fashion is more than pretty stuff, it is a form of identitymaxxing."

The show "began with a pregnant woman in a head scarf, baby on her back, and ended with a woman in a gold, asymmetric ruched cocktail dress — two mannequins in bankers’ black suits draped over her shoulders like big game trophies."

Are people saying "identitymaxxing" now?

"I once took a knife skills class, and they just show you how to chop an onion..."

Writes Matt Yglesias, in "Math needs a phonics-style reckoning Teachers should teach students how to do stuff correctly."

There is a specific, correct way to do this, and part of learning to cook is being told how to do it. A person with excellent spatial reasoning could probably figure this out from first principles given an onion and a knife. But the normal way to learn to chop is to be explicitly shown.... You don’t just give people knives and tell them to experience the joy of chopping.... [T]he best way to get from zero to vaguely competent is to be taught the proper way to do it....

Education school theorists, for reasons that are disputed, seem to dislike this idea. From Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Emile” to Paulo Freire’s “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” a long tradition in the field mashes up romanticism with left-wing politics and sentimentality about the point of school to suggest that there’s some other, secretly better way of teaching things to beginners than just literally teaching them....

"His gray compact S.U.V. accelerated past shelves of pumpkin spice Cheerios and Special K cereal boxes...."

"The vehicle came to rest near a display of Halloween candy after careening beneath a sign over the doorway that reads: 'Thanks for shopping, y’all!'..."

From "A Driver Desperate to Use the Bathroom Plows Into a Kroger in Texas, the Police Say/The driver, James Mansell Lancaster Jr., was upset to find the supermarket in Rosenberg, Texas, closed early Sunday morning, the police said" (NYT).

"Mr. Lancaster stayed at the scene, according to the police.... 'All he said was the doors were locked and he had to use the restroom,' Lieutenant Munoz said.... Kroger does not plan to release security camera footage of the crash..."

I found the footage:

"Just as 'naked dressing' escalated from trompe l’oeil to the transparent mesh Bianca Censori wore to the 2025 Grammys, underwear as outerwear..."

"... has gone from lace-trimmed slip dresses to knicker-style shorts to just going out in your bra. Not quite the emperor’s new clothes, but perhaps only because women’s nipples are still considered more risque than men’s.... In 2026 wearing a bra as a top isn’t the subversive act of fashion rebellion or feminist declaration of sexual liberation that it was for Madonna in 1990 but a sign of compliance to the beauty standard, and the extreme thinness that’s putting women’s lives at risk...."

I'm reading the London Time: "Is a bra a top now? Looks like it! They’re in Paris and on the red carpet, but would you flaunt yours at the post office?"

I'm going to use my last WaPo gift link of the month to give you the 1991 article that is the London Times's source for photo of Madonna wearing a bra as a top: "The Roots of Madonna: Getting down to Earth with the pop star." 

"He went!"

Pete Crow-Armstrong showed up Bill Miller after being called out on a check-swing for the second time today. pic.twitter.com/mhTtmngbLN

— Foul Territory (@FoulTerritoryTV) September 30, 2026

I love the short phrases of baseball. "He went!" is the funniest one to me. 

But, words aside, is it funny to see Pete Crow-Armstrong losing it when the Cubs are down 8-0?