"Participants in the study had completely lost their central sight, retaining only limited peripheral vision, making it 'like having two black discs in your eye....'"

"During the two-hour operation under local anaesthetic, patients had jelly-like substance removed from their eye to make space for the implant, which was inserted under the centre of their retina. About a month later, once the eye had settled, the chip was activated. Patients were given augmented-reality glasses containing a video camera connected wirelessly to a small computer, which was attached to their waistband. The video camera projected the scene to the chip, which converted it into an electrical signal, passing through the optical nerve cells into the brain, where it was interpreted as vision...."

From "Vision restored in blind patients with revolutionary microchip/A tiny retinal implant connected to smart glasses allows patients who had completely lost their central sight to see again" (London Times).

Box ticked.

I'm reading Julia Halperin's "Covering an Artist With Unconventional Materials: Strict Rules and Time/A culture reporter is always watching for art that challenges us to look at the world, and our lives, differently. An artist who lived in a cage for a year ticked that box" (NYT).

Hsieh’s retrospective brings together documentation of and objects from all of his one-year performances. In addition to “Cage Piece,” they include “One Year Performance 1980-1981 (Time Clock Piece),” for which he punched a timecard clock every hour on the hour, including at night; and “Art/Life One Year Performance 1983-1984 (Rope Piece),” for which he spent the year tied to the artist Linda Montano by an eight-foot rope. Hsieh made “One Year Performance 1985-1986 (No Art Piece),” when he refused to look at, think about, talk about or make art. That gallery is empty.... 

Why would someone do these outrageous things? Why are they considered art?... Hsieh resisted answering my questions.... “It’s not like I become Superman,” he told me.

"For the past decade, studies have shown that introducing allergenic foods in infancy, as the immune system is developing, can help the body recognize food proteins as harmless...."

From "Peanut Allergies Have Plummeted in Children, Study Shows/Doctors have long recommended that infants avoid peanuts. But in 2017, experts officially reversed that guidance, and food allergies decreased sharply" (NYT).

"She called The New Yorker 'School' and treated it as such. She studied hard, reading back issues and writing notes to her boyfriends, a trio of married writers..."

"... she nicknamed Europe, Mr. Normalcy and Personality Plus, who all wrote back to her. This made her a less-than-attentive receptionist... Inevitably, she was fired. At home in her apartment, she began to write. At first she played amanuensis to [George W. S. Trow, the acerbic cultural critic best known for his essay 'Within the Context of No-Context'] in a pairing encouraged by Charles McGrath, then an editor at The New Yorker.... 'Yield to it,' Mr. McGrath told her, referring to Mr. Trow’s mind. 'Let it wash over you.' Together, she and Mr. Trow produced Talk of the Town pieces, the short... slice-of-life stories that helped define the magazine. He told her, 'Glimpse genuine joy, in a way, in the middle of world horror.' (She was on her way to interview a dog groomer.)... It was Tina Brown... who encouraged Ms. Rose to write about her romantic life. 'How I Became a Single Woman,' an elliptical coming-of-age tale, appeared in April 1996. (One of its more memorable lines: 'The truth is, it can be a form of actual day-to-day social torture to pretend not to notice the little dishes of poison that married people offer you all the time.') The piece caused a minor ruckus at School. Despite their nicknames, the married men were easily identifiable...."

From "Alison Rose, The New Yorker’s Femme Fatale, Dies at 81/She started as the magazine’s glamorous receptionist and became one of its more singular writers. In one of her last articles, she memorialized her time (and lovers) there" (NYT).

ADDED: Now, I'm reading "How I Became a Single Woman." Excerpt:

"We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."

Wrote Henry James, quoted by retired book editor Gerald Howard, in "The Dogged, Irrational Persistence of Literary Fiction" (NYT).

Howard writes: "Substack essays and chin-pulling opinion articles galore agree that literature is not only in the doldrums, but even in danger of extinction from, take your pick, a declining attention span, a disappearing audience of people educated enough to understand and appreciate it, or a near-future technological onslaught (see: novels written by A.I. entities). The sense of a possible ending is palpable. But what the discourse leaves out are things like historical perspective and the blind faith and, from the purely practical and economic points of view, sheer illogic of the literary enterprise...."

"Wearing a shark costume while quoting [Cory Booker] seemed sweet and suburban. Maybe that was the point of the silly costumes."

"It was a small island of old norms within a national emergency. There were a small number of scowling dudes bullhorning loudly about their love of communism, as the First Amendment entitles them to do. But most of the other Chicagoans exercised their right to amble on by in, for example, inflatable corn costumes, without so much as a nod in the dudes’ direction. This humorous form of protest, known as tactical frivolity, shows the absurdity of the charge that all the protesters are armed militants...."

Writes Gary Shteyngart — one of my favorite novelists — in "The Rise of the Inflatable Chicken Resistance" (NYT)(free-access link, because of all the humorous details).

"Toward the end of the protest, around 2 p.m., I met two Jesus impersonators. 'He’s more classical, and I’m the more modern Jesus,' one of the Sons of God told me. He was wearing a crown of barbed wire instead of thorns, which is what made him more modern.... I left the parade full of the pleasure of being a part of a vast humanity. It’s a feeling that may soon be extinguished if we do not exercise our power of free assembly and free speech.... We must harness our best creative, humorous and frivolous selves in order to keep it from falling."

I'm reminded of Saul Alinsky's 6th rule in "Rules for Radicals": "A good tactic is one that your people enjoy. If your people are not having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic."

"Have you heard this idea that if 3.5% of a population protests nonviolently, social change is a slam dunk?..."

It's a "No King's Day reality check" from AntifascistDad:

"It is now a think tank-approved, purportedly evidence-based method, that guarantees movement success.... But do they really have the empirical data?

"Democrats say the use of silly inflatable costumes is a way to undercut Republican portrayals of such events as violent 'hate America rallies.'"

The Washington Post sets out to answer the question "Why protesters against Trump are wearing frog, chicken and T. rex costumes."

If you feel you need to put on a costume to disguise what you are, doesn't that suggest that you are the scary thing you're trying to cover up? I think of the wolf in sheep's clothing.

The image of wolf in sheep's clothing comes from in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus said: "Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves."

From the WaPo article:

We got rained out of the sunrise, but it brightened up and we got out into the lakeshore woods.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

NO thanKsgivINGS!

Video by Meade, near Lake Mendota.

Not sure why Meade sent me this, but I really appreciated 2:53 - 2:56.

Video here, at Truth Social.

Meade: "is that when we see bill clinton?"

Me: "No."

Meade: "Riding up the escalator"

Me: "I gave you the time stamp"

ADDED: It turns out Meade couldn't see the time stamp. You need to have the video displayed where the time counts from the beginning. If your display shows the time remaining, my time stamp won't get you to what amused me. This was supposed to be a cute lightweight post but ended up wasting over a half hour of my time in a technical mess, mostly because of another problem, the way Truth Social code leaves a big blank space after any embedded video. Now, I'm at the point of screaming at the sky. After numerous attempts to tweak the embedded video, I just switched to a link. This is the last time I try to have any kind of "fun" with Truth Social video.

"For the past two decades, the flamboyant right-wing leader has made the fight against immigration —and against Islam, in particular — the centrepiece of his political offer."

"His reward came in the last election in November 2023 when the PVV became the dominant force in a four-party coalition.... Wilders has maintained an unrelenting focus on immigration. One of his most discussed — and complained about — postings on X juxtaposed half the face of a blue-eyed young woman with long blonde hair labelled PVV with half of an older woman in a headscarf marked PvdA, the initials of the rival Labour party. Underneath it read: “The choice is yours on 10/29.”

From "Dutch towns rocked by anti-immigration protests ahead of election/With polls fast approaching, Geert Wilders has seized upon the recent violence to aid his anti-Islamic agenda" (London Times).

Here's that image:

That is much more intense than anti-immigrant material I've seen in the United States. I believe it is too crude to work as propaganda in the U.S.

"A boy in a sports jersey stands with smaller girls on a court and then is seen, shirtless, inside a bathroom with them. A girl in a towel shrieks in terror."

"'Abigail Spanberger is as extreme as it gets,' says the narrator of the television ad that recently began airing in Virginia. A year after Donald Trump’s presidential campaign unleashed $37 million in transgender-themed issue ads against Democratic rival Kamala Harris, Republicans are returning to the cultural flashpoint ahead of next month’s elections, including Virginia’s race for governor, and plan to highlight it again in the 2026 midterm contests. 'Where is our common sense?' Winsome Earle-Sears, Virginia’s Republican lieutenant governor, said in an interview when asked about transgender athletes competing in female sports. 'If I have to tell you that water is wet, we’ve got troubles.'"

From "Republicans Target Democrats Over Transgender Policies in This Year’s Races/Ahead of critical midterm elections, GOP revives culture war strategy used by Trump in 2024’s presidential campaign" (Wall Street Journal).

Here's that anti-Spanberger ad:

#VAGov: Dick Uihlein-funded group Restoration of America PAC is up on TV with this spot --

Female voiceover:

"Abigail Spanberger is as extreme as it gets..."

"She's apparently all in on a horrifying gender mutilation. An irreversible sterilization of children" pic.twitter.com/gD0ytXwUIn

— Medium Buying (@MediumBuying) October 14, 2025

What a terrible issue for Democrats! They can't seem to back away from it.

"Priceless crown of Empress Eugénie with 1,354 diamonds and 56 emeralds found broken in Paris."

Imagine a theft so big that you drop a thing like this in the getaway:

I'm reading "Louvre Museum Robbery: Priceless crown of Empress Eugénie with 1,354 diamonds and 56 emeralds found broken in Paris" (Economic Times).

Here in America, on the same day, we were disparaging royalty at our "No Kings" rallies. Many of the home-made signs relied on crown iconography....

So how do we feel about royalty these days? If you accept your little daughter in a getup like this....

... is it like letting your little son sport a swastika armband?