A dim view of the sunrise at 7:28 and a bright view of trailside foliage at 7:46.

And then there was the second lakeside walk, at 4:02, in almost nonexistent rain:

Write about anything you want in the comments.

How to stop fretting about the coming and going of Daylight Savings Time and live by the light not the clock.

I know you have appointments and work and social obligations and need to observe the time of the clock to some extent, but your waking and sleeping and much of the rest of what you do — eating, going out walking, chores, reading, napping, conversing, and generally being the human animal that you are — can and should be done according to the time of the sun, which doesn't leap forward and fall back in one hour chunks semiannually, but changes very slightly day by day.

The easiest adjustment you can make is to get up at dawn, which is about half an hour before the sunrise. I recommend getting out and about and really experiencing the early light. Lots of health benefits to that — circadian rhythms and so forth. There's nothing about your "o'clock" affairs that should stop you from doing that. Set your day by the sun. I've done that since 2019, and I didn't need to be retired to do it. 

Now, I've been designing an app in my head for a while. I wanted something that would display Sun Time next to clock time. It would know where I am located and display the clock time of dawn, sunrise, sunset, and dusk along with the passage of the sunlight over the course of the day. I pictured Sun Time as a percentage, with dawn at 0% and the end of dusk at 100%. So every day in Sun Time has an equal number of daylight gradations understood in terms of percentages even though the number of hours in clock time varies greatly over the course of the year and includes the brutal jumps when DST comes or goes. The Sun Time gradations are perfectly gentle — because they are tiny and because they put you in close touch with the natural world of sunlight.

I thought I could get A.I. to write the code for this app I had in mind, but I had the sense to ask first if there already was such an app. There are a few. I picked Sundial. It looks like this:

I would like to see the Sun Time percentages displayed on the dial, but you can see at the bottom right that I was 45.1% into today's daylight when I took the screenshot. I want to maximize my thinking in terms of that percentage, which, of course, ticks by faster in the winter than the summer. But that's good if you want to be adjusted to nature. You've got to hurry a bit to get out for a walk (or whatever) in the daylight, and it's cold, so you'll want to move fast. You've got a longer night in the winter, but confront it, full on, and make something of the dark.

I've had it with complaints about Daylight Savings Time. I have shown you the better way to live. Step into the Sun Time and don't go back.

"A decade ago, Republican voters, furious with their leaders... tossed out all conventional notions of presidential fitness to coalesce behind Donald Trump."

"Platner is still a contender because a similar alienation is building among Democrats, and party elites seem to have no idea what to do about it."

Writes Michelle Goldberg, in "I Thought Graham Platner Was Finished. What I Saw in Maine Changed My Mind" (NYT).

The headline doesn't say why Platner looks finished: He had a big Nazi tattoo on his chest. How does Goldberg get around that? She explains punk culture:

"If transgender identity were an innate trait, like left-handedness, we would expect identification rates to rise at first when it became socially acceptable..."

"... then plateau and remain stable at a fixed level. If the phenomenon were instead driven by social contagion, we might expect a boom-and-bust pattern: a spike followed by a rapid decline once the social forces driving it weaken. Recent data offer a mixed picture.... The overwhelming majority of those driving the trans craze fall into the 'nonbinary' category -- adopting identities which are said to be neither, both, or somewhere between male and female. These include labels such as 'demiboy,' 'genderfluid' or 'two-spirit.' These are social identities, not biological ones. Unlike left- or right-handedness, which describe objectively measurable traits, 'nonbinary' identities have no anatomical or physiological referent. They are conceptual, political and responsive to cultural trends.... The social-contagion hypothesis was never hateful. It was purely descriptive: a recognition that social and cultural factors shape human behavior...."

I'm reading "Evidence Backs the Transgender Social-Contagion Hypothesis" by Colin Wright, an evolutionary biologist, in The Wall Street Journal.

"Yes, Kim Kardashian, we’ve been to the moon before … Six times!"

Said Sean Duffy, the Secretary of Transportation and acting secretary and acting head of NASA, quoted in "Nasa tells Kim Kardashian: Yes, we’ve been to the moon before/The reality TV star had claimed that the 1969 moon landing was faked, repeating a popular conspiracy theory" (London Times).

Kardashian responded to Duffy’s critique on X, commenting under his post: “Wait … What’s the tea on 3I Atlas?!?!!!!!!!?????”

I've got a few questions:

1. Why is a government official calling out a private citizen who expresses interest in a conspiracy theory? We're Americans. We have our conspiracy theories. Keep your government nose out of our business. You're only giving more ammunition to the conspiracy theorists. Why stick your neck out to deny what isn't true? You're making it more fun to believe the theory!

2. Why did we go to the moon 6 times — 6 times, in rapid succession, and then no more? What was the sense of all those repeated trips and then to stop for half a century?!

3. What is the tea on 3I/Atlas? I just heard Joe Rogan and Elon Musk talking about it — "The thing about the 3-eye-Atlas"/"That's it's a hell of a name... sounds like third eye or something":

"I’m obsessed with being first, or unique, with something. I was trying to make sure that the consistency wasn’t familiar in the mouth...."

"It’s not thick like a milkshake and not thin like hot chocolate. It’s a richness. It’s a consistency that’s not super familiar... Like a cream-based soup. Like a soup in the winter that’s just like, ‘Oh, this just feels like Mama,’ kind of."

Said Tyra Banks, quoted in "Tyra Banks Says It’s ‘Hot Ice Cream.’ Everyone Else Just Says, ‘Huh?’/Even those who have tried it struggle to describe the model’s baffling concoction. That includes Ms. Banks herself" (NYT).

The product is sold at Banks's "ice cream" shop in Sydney, Australia. In the U.S., you can't sell something as "ice cream" that doesn't meet the USDA definition of ice cream. That's why I put quotes around "ice cream." This is an American blog.

AND: An American poem parody for the occasion:

Some say ice cream will end in heat, 

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of defeat

I hold with those who favor heat....

Sunrise — 7:04, 7:28, 7:43.

Write about whatever you want.

"I’m not going to be distracted by, ‘Oh, does the guy have a big f–king hammer!?’ What about those babies!?"

"This guy wants to create a ballroom for his rich friends while completely turning a blind eye to the fact that babies are going to starve when the SNAP benefits end in just hours from now. Come on."

Said Kamala Harris, quoted in "Kamala Harris loses it, goes on expletive-laden rant about Trump’s donation-funded ballroom" (NY Post).

Eh. I don't believe she "lost it." She just delivered a mundane talking point. She got the memo: It's bad for Trump to spend a lot of money, even donated money, on the ballroom when the shutdown is about to dry up SNAP payments. 

I don't think peppering your speech with "fucking" means anything anymore... although... what about the babies?!! 

By the way, what percentage of those fed by SNAP are babies? I looked it up and got the answer 4.4%. Children of all ages make up 38.9%.

The woods, 17 minutes before sunrise.

UPDATE: Early afternoon — 1:43:

"Ahead of the verdict... most of them pleaded that they had a right to humor, satire, and impertinence, while others outright evoked the 'Charlie Hebdo spirit.'"

I'm reading "10 French Trolls Are Tried for Cyberbullying Brigitte Macron—and They’re Mostly Not Sorry/'I don’t think I’m part of any harassment,' said one defendant, who had called the first lady a 'degenerate pedo-satanist slut' and a 'shitty tranny'" (Vanity Fair).

The defendants’ tweets compared [Brigitte] Macron to an “old tranny” and “a first lady boy” “who wears size 47 shoes.” Jérôme A., for his part, wrote: “An ultra minority of weirdos have taken power in Paris. Who doubts Brigitte’s cock?”

“I’m accused of nine tweets spaced over four months,” he pointed out, as if surprised to find himself in court for so little. Why, in the flood of vulgar, insulting comments on the internet, did the law take an interest in him? “I wonder what I’m doing here,” he complained. “Today, you can send people to police custody for a few harmless tweets, end up in cells that smell of piss, be summoned for several days in Paris. It’s frightening.”

Vanity Fair shows close to no concern about censorship and government abuse of power. Notice the language: "as if surprised to find himself in court for so little," "he complained."

The author, Hugo Wintrebert, appears to be French. But France has a brilliant tradition of satirizing government officials that goes back to the Middle Ages, and there's plenty of sexual imagery to be found.

"When people say it, they’re not just repeating a meme; they’re shouting a feeling. It’s one of the first words of the year that works as an interjection..."

"... a burst of energy that spreads and connects people long before anyone agrees on what it actually means."

Says Steve Johnson, "director of lexicography for the Dictionary Media Group," quoted in "'6 7' is Dictionary’s word of the year. What does it say about society? A phrase coined by the rapper Skrilla has swept social media, delighting teenagers and puzzling their parents" (London Times).

Perfect for our time, don't you think? A vocalization whose meaning is no meaning, shouted out repeatedly because it is shouted out repeatedly, that is, it's meme. But it is not just a meme — we're told — because it's a feeling, the feeling of repeating what has already been repeated.

I remember the old days, when words had meaning:

"It might seem strange that a gigantic, staggeringly good new Cecily Brown work has emerged in a former flophouse where Jack Kerouac hacked out his scrolls..."

"... on the same block as Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Lady Studios—though it’s been established that Hendrix is very much a Cecily Brown muse. The work usually comes to, say, Paula Cooper Gallery, where there’s a long line of buyers, collectors who otherwise have to shell out millions for her paintings at auction. And yet Brown herself could not be more pleased. She’s a scholar of the restaurant mural: paintings that enhance the space without completely overwhelming it, and seem like they’ve been there forever. Her favorites: the Maxfield Parrish at the St. Regis’s King Cole Bar, where Dalí and Duchamp used to carouse. The Howard Chandler Christy series in the restaurant at Hotel des Artistes, where Norman Rockwell lived. And, of course, the murals of Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle Hotel...."

From "Cecily Brown on the 'Unsexy' Art Market and Her New Restaurant Mural: “It Can’t be Moved. It’s Not for Sale'/Chez Nous at the Marlton Hotel has a new mural by one of the world’s great painters—whose works sell for millions at auction—and it’s already in a league with the famous wall paintings at Bemelmans Bar" (Vanity Fair)(click through to see the busy, cheerful mural).

The article has a link on Jack Kerouac that goes to another Vanity Fair article, one that begins with this Jack Kerouac quote: "As far as I’m concerned the only thing to do is sit in a room and get drunk."

Was Jack talking about rooms like that fancy-schmancy Chez Nous at the Marlton Hotel? And was he really an indoorsy guy? Challenged, I sought out the context of that quote, which appears on a lot of "famous quotes" page. But it's in something from 1960 called "The Vanishing American Hobo." No hobos Chez Nous, I suppose. Here's Jack:

"There’s just mutual headshaking. It’s like you lock eyes and you shake heads and you move on"/"It’s a sense of betrayal, like, who are you? Were you always like this? I don’t know you anymore!"

Said unnamed acquaintances of Cheryl Hines, quoted in "Cheryl Hines’s MAGA Makeover Has Her Hollywood Colleagues Scratching Their Heads: 'I Don’t Know You Anymore!'/'It’s a sense of betrayal, like, who are you?' says one industry insider, of the Curb Your Enthusiasm star and wife of RFK" (Vanity Fair).

“Whatever her reasons for staying with that weird, imbecilic husband and whether or not she subscribes to his inane positions is of no real consequence,” [an unnamed "Hollywood heavyweight"] says disdainfully. "It isn’t as though we’re talking about Zendaya, whom one would desperately want to get into their movie.'...

One of the few close pals to publicly speak up about Hines in the Trump 2.0 era is Tig Notaro, who once cohosted a podcast with Hines called Tig and Cheryl: True Story.... “My friendship with Cheryl predated her marriage to Bobby.... And then he endorsed Trump, and then it just got hard.... It’s really sad, because Cheryl did bring me so much joy.”.. 

Sometimes it seems like Hines is living out some dementedly cringed-out Curb episode, where ordinary events spiral out of control. As Notaro pointed out, it was one thing when RFK Jr. was a free-floating conspiracy theorist (“a gnat on the arm,” as she put it); it’s quite another now that he wields so much power over the health of the American populace.

Remember how sometimes the rule is you never — ever — liken a person to an insect? That rule comes and goes, but I will deal with my dismay by savoring the small pleasure of using the "insect politics" tag one more time.

Try this AI prompt (I did): Tell me about the idea that it is very wrong to compare a human being to an insect, that once you start saying people are gnats or flies or something in need of swatting, you're going down a slippery slope to Auschwitz... or something like that.

Sunrise — 7:07, 7:32, 7: 34.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

"During the boy’s screen test, the director asked him to strip to his swimsuit. 'When they asked me to take off my shirt, I wasn’t comfortable..."

"I wasn’t prepared for that. I remember when he posed me with one foot against the wall, I would never stand like that. 'When I watch it now,' he said, 'I see how that son of a bitch sexualized me.' He told The Guardian that Visconti was 'the sort of cultural predator who would sacrifice anything or anyone for the work.'"

From "Bjorn Andresen, Reluctant ‘Most Beautiful Boy,’ Dies at 70/At 15, he played the muse to an ailing composer in Luchino Visconti’s film 'Death in Venice.' He later said he’d felt sexualized by the director" (NYT).

"Lee Anderson, Reform’s chief whip, suggested the return of the 'Invacar' — or invalid carriage — a small single-seater microcar that was distributed by the NHS for decades..."

"... after the Second World War. Anderson told a press conference hosted by the party: 'I remember back in the day if you were on disability and you wanted a car from the state, it was a blue three-wheeler, anybody remember those? What’s wrong with that? Let’s go back to that.' The cars were banned from British roads in 2003 for being too dangerous, after reports of them overturning and catching fire, and ministers ordered that all remaining cars be crushed. Anderson made the comments as he criticised the Motability scheme, which allows disabled people to get cars through the benefits system. Labour ministers are considering removing BMWs, Mercedes and other luxury cars from the scheme, which provides such premium brands to more than 40,000 benefits claimants...."

From "Bring back three-wheeled cars for disabled drivers, Reform urges/The chief whip, Lee Anderson, suggests return of ‘Invacars’, which were withdrawn on safety grounds, as part of a replacement of the Motability scheme" (London Times).

"Bobby’s doing the eulogy and in the middle of it, his older brother—of which he only has one, Joe Kennedy, former congressman from Massachusetts—starts cursing him and throwing a scene."

"In his mother’s funeral. This happened?! You were there? You witnessed it.... Talk about the physiological response in your body when this was happening."

Billy Bush was pressing Cheryl Hines about something she wrote about in her forthcoming book "Unscripted" (commission earned).

I only know one thing about Billy Bush — his "grab them by the pussy" conversation with Trump — and I have to suspect him of seeking similar attention when he tries to elicit details of the "physiological response in [Hine's] body."

But that's a side track. We need to pay attention to the scene Hines is describing — RFK Jr. heckled viciously as he's in the middle of delivering a eulogy for his mother:

 

Cheryl Hines answers:

"Why does it sound so much better to me when I know it's Rufus Wainwright?"

Said I, just now, seeing this:

This is getting ridiculous.

"True patriot love, that only US command"

Rufus Wainwright just a few minutes ago.pic.twitter.com/nrzvutKQcu

— Martyupnorth®- Unacceptable Fact Checker (@Martyupnorth_2) October 30, 2025

I love Rufus Wainwright, but I wasn't paying attention to the introduction. Last night, to me, he was just some guy singing the Canadian national anthem. 

"So how did The [London] Times, a pillar of quality British journalism since the 18th century, blow the story so badly?"

The question is asked, in "How a London newspaper botched a New York political story" (Semafor).

The answer is: hilariously. 

As the New York mayor’s race approaches, The Times of London has accelerated its push for more, and largely hostile, coverage of Mamdani. That campaign has been driven internally by Margi Conklin [who]... reached out to an email address the reporter believed belonged to the former mayor of New York.... 

Semafor reached out to a Gmail address our sources believed to be the one used by The Times.

“You are correct. It was me. The real Bill DeBlasio,” the person who controls the email address responded. The person didn’t respond to further questions, and phone calls to two numbers associated with the email address went unanswered....

Apparently, there's someone else named Bill DeBlasio.

I got to this story from here:

Sunrise — 6:54, 7:32.

Write about anything you want in the comments.

(The second photo is by Meade. I forgot my phone this morning, borrowed his for the very early shot, then left it to him.)

The South Korean band plays "YMCA" for Trump.

Omg the South Korean band is greeting Trump at the airport with YMCA. 😭

The ultimate sign of respect. pic.twitter.com/Up1DvTcYUO

— johnny maga (@_johnnymaga) October 29, 2025

About that talus cone and the fossilized tooth plaque....

I'm reading "10,000 Tales From a 17th-Century Crypt/In Milan, bones that piled under a hospital over a half-century shed light on the health and habits of some of the Renaissance era’s most impoverished people" (NYT).

The burial vaults formed a sort of subterranean potter’s field. After a heavy granite lid was removed from one of the square holes in the church floor, bodies would be dropped into a vault of the brick-lined tombs. Over time, the corpses accumulated and formed a funnel-shaped pile, called a talus cone. These pyramids of remains grew over time, widening at the base and tapering to a point at the top. When a talus cone reached the ceiling and could not hold more bodies, a new underground vault would be used....

"It is especially amusing to hear progressives, the principal creators of the watery Caesarism of today’s presidency, sorrowfully describing Trump’s ballroom..."

"... as discordant with the White House’s proper modesty. They should worry less about the president’s residential immodesty and more about his anti-constitutional immodesty.

Writes George Will, in "The choreographed fakery of American politics: East Wing edition/Trump’s residential immodesty is nothing compared with his anti-constitutional immodesty" (WaPo).

I wondered if anyone had written "watery Caesarism" before. It sounds like a bad salad. A real salad, not a word salad. Don't put the dressing on until you're about to eat it. Anyway, "watery Caesarism" did turn up on a few old web pages, but — are you surprised? — they're all written by George Will!

1992: "Trouble is, most presidents are mediocre.

"Critics deride the most ambitious part of the program — flooding low Earth orbit with thousands of satellites to detect and take out adversaries’ missiles — as a fantasy..."

"... that will only destabilize the fragile international order that has prevented nuclear war for more than 70 years. 'Golden Dome could be the single most dangerous idea Trump has ever proposed, and that’s saying something,' Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Massachusetts), a member of the Armed Services Committee, said in an interview...."

I'm reading "Trump wants to build a trillion-dollar Golden Dome shield in space. Can it work?" (WaPo)(free-access link, because there are some good explanations and graphics)(That's the teaser headline from the front page because the headline on the main page is all caps).

Is Moulton saying we need to keep ourselves vulnerable so other countries will feel better about the balance of power? To install a highly effective defense "will only destabilize the fragile international order." Only?! Come on, Moulton, you can't mean what you are saying!

"I think the doom is coming primarily from women in their 20s and early 30s who would historically be looking to marry or to have children."

"And the exhaustion and the sense of pessimism is coming from not seeing a path forward to those things in the structures that have been presented as the traditional ways to approach both. And I don’t fault them for that."

Said Glynnis MacNicol, in "Why Is Marriage Less Attractive Than Ever? The era of relationship discontent" (NYT).

"I think with online dating — even in my experience of it — the gamification leaves you with this sense of, you know, I don’t like this one; I’ll move on to the next one.... Previously, there was no comparison. The only avenue to happiness and satisfaction was through marriage and motherhood. Anyone outside of that was the lonely spinster aunt in the attic.... And then you add to that, in a country that does not provide child care or much support for women who do want to be parents, you hear a lot of stories about that path in life and how punishing it is. And in comparison to the alternative, when the alternative for the first time in history is starting to look far more enjoyable, I think contributes to this sense of, well, what is the point of this?"

I'm giving this my old and seldom-used "paradox of choice" tag.

"His beefy tattooed arms and weathered face made him look like a live-action Popeye. He’s often styled in a dirty ball cap and ragged T-shirt...."

"... implying a sort of everyman machismo. It’s the kind of look that suggests (U.S. Senate candidate Graham) Platner could be the Democratic Party’s new great white hope — a working-class white man who can speak to class antagonism in an economically unequal electorate. There’s just one teensy-weensy problem. It turns out that friend-of-the-white-working-class had a Nazi tattoo. The tattoo resembles a Totenkopf, a well-known symbol of official Nazis, the Nazi-adjacent and people who just think that Nazi iconography is tough. The gist is that Platner got the tattoo in 2007 in Croatia when he was on leave with his fellow Marines. Platner has said that he didn’t know the symbol’s semiotics. He only knew that Marines get 'terrifying-looking' tattoos...."

Writes Tressie McMillan Cottom, in "A Nazi Tattoo Exposes Democrats’ Greatest Weakness" (NYT). I've made that a gift link so you can try to figure out what this "greatest weakness" is supposed to be. 

Sunrise — 7:04, 7:13, 7:18, 7:18, 7:30.

Write about anything you want in the comments.

Hurricane Melissa.

Hurricane Melissa continues to intensify right up to landfall, with some of the most prolific lightning bursts you’ll see in a hurricane’s core.

I’ve tracked every single Atlantic hurricane since 2015, and Melissa is easily the most insane one yet. pic.twitter.com/B07DrGpfpq

— Colin McCarthy (@US_Stormwatch) October 28, 2025

This footage from inside the eye of Category 5 Hurricane Melissa might be the most jaw-dropping video ever captured of a hurricane’s eye, showcasing the infamous “stadium effect." pic.twitter.com/AEhj2g2Ban

— Colin McCarthy (@US_Stormwatch) October 27, 2025

The Paisley Curse.

Brad Paisley has officially sung the national anthem for:

World Series Game 2 in 2017 (11 innings)
World Series Game 3 in 2018 (18 innings)
World Series Game 1 in 2024 (10 innings)
World Series Game 3 in 2025 (18 innings)

h/t @SarahWexler32 pic.twitter.com/cgaSEVcdSq

— MLB (@MLB) October 28, 2025

"There’s a silent minority of people out there who feel that Biden was taken advantage of, and most people don’t want to say it. Is that what you mean?"

The New Yorker's Isaac Chotiner asks Karine Jean-Pierre in an interview.

Jean-Pierre answers: "Let me just say, this is my experience that I’m speaking to, and what I saw. I just want to be very, very clear: on average. I just want to be clear: on average. Not from one interview, not from one debate. On average. I have heard from many, many people who were disappointed by the reaction of the Democratic Party. I have. I have. And these are citizens. These are people who vote."

Later in the interview, Chotiner says:

"Many of them say they can eat nothing but GariGarikun"/"If they can enjoy the last mouthful, it will be a special moment shared by them and their families."

I'm quoting a Japanese nurse and doctor who work in palliative care, quoted in "GariGarikun ice pop, a surprise hit among the terminally ill."

That's published in Asahi Shimbun, one of the largest newspapers in Japan, which I went to read this morning because I wanted to see how much Japanese people were enjoying the excellence of Shohei Ohtani in our World Series. But nothing about Ohtani is in the top 10 most-read stories over there. I had to scroll down the front page to find his name, and it was tucked away in the sports section, just the AP report, here.

Nearly dead people eating popsicles got more attention. It was the second-most-read article. Meanwhile, the top of the front page is dominated by Trump:

Which one of those things is not like the others? Abe, yes. But also "Bear roams central Morioka, fatal attacks elsewhere."

"Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder who has spent billions of his own money to raise the alarm about the dangers of climate change...

"... sought to tamp down the alarmism he said many people use to describe the effects of rising temperatures. Instead, he called for redirecting efforts toward improving lives in the developing world."

I'm reading "Bill Gates Says Climate Change ‘Will Not Lead to Humanity’s Demise’/In a memo, the Microsoft co-founder warned against climate alarmism and appears to have shifted some of his views about climate change" (NYT).

If only the "billions" he's spent alarming people had been spent directly "improving lives in the developing world." Is he now spending his billions advising the rest of us to putting our efforts into improving lives in the developing world? He's still investing in businesses premised on climate change. I can't unravel the complexities, but I don't like the way people have been manipulated into feeling immense anxiety about an imagined apocalypse. 

"Texas becomes the first state to allege that taking [Tylenol] while pregnant can cause autism, despite unsettled scientific evidence."

I'm reading "Texas AG Paxton files Tylenol lawsuit, taking cues from Trump, Kennedy" (WaPo)(free-access link).

Excerpt: "For decades, scientists have been studying whether acetaminophen is linked to autism and ADHD. But sorting out a connection has proved elusive, researchers say. For example, many pregnant individuals take acetaminophen to reduce a fever, which itself could affect a baby’s development, according to the FDA."

How mystifying is that? The rule should at least be against use when pregnant unless it is necessary to reduce fever that is high enough to affect the development of the unborn child — a rule to be applied by doctors.

By the way: "pregnant individuals."

Sunrise — 6:53, 7:12, 7:43.

Talk about whatever you like in the comments.

"I think the people wouldn't like that. It's too cute. It wouldn't be right."

Said Trump, accepting the theory that he could run for a 3rd term by winning as the vice presidential candidate under a presidential candidate who would resign after winning. "Yeah, I'd be allowed to do that."

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Fox News (@foxnews)

ADDED: I love the poker face on Marco Rubio. He must assume he'd be the winning presidential candidate in the "cute" scenario. Would I do it, if asked? Would I resign, if elected cutely?

"On a recent evening in the north of Iran’s capital of Tehran, a young woman with long hair fashioned into a high ponytail hopped onto a motorcycle behind a male companion."

Not far away, two other young women smoked cigarettes together on a sidewalk, one with her hair cascading down her back, the other wearing a loose T-shirt with elbow-length sleeves... . These urban scenes... illustrate how common it has recently become for Iranian women to flout the law, in place for over four decades, requiring they cover their hair and dress modestly in public."

From "Iranian women flout law on mandatory veiling as police curtail arrests/Defiance of hijab requirements has grown widespread across Iran. The government seems wary of cracking down, fearing unrest. But conservatives haven’t given up" (WaPo).

"Donald Trump Has Broken the Progressive Ratchet."

Writes Rich Lowrey at The National Review.

How does the ratchet work? It begins with small, unobjectionable, or perhaps even salutary steps, coupled with assurances that potential downsides or extreme outcomes will never come about. Then, over time, incremental moves are made in the same direction until the unreasonable policy that we’d been assured would never happen is entrenched reality.... Trump has yanked the other way so far on these ratchet issues that it’s not clear when or how the left can get them back to the status quo ante.

Don't his antagonists like to think everything he could do on his own with presidential power the next Democratic President can just undo? But not so long ago, they thought that what their Presidents had done could not be undone? That was the ratchet theory. 

"[President John Quincy] Adams had very little to do save work. He had decided to follow Monroe’s example of accepting no social invitations..."

"... lest he give offense to whomever he refused. Nor did he attend political events or even harmless functions. Declining an invitation by the Maryland Department of Agriculture to attend a cattle show, Adams reflected that he ought not 'set a precedent for being claimed as an article of exhibit for all the cattle-shows throughout the nation.' Occasionally he attended lectures, such as one on 'the organ of amativeness' —the penis—which he found 'more indelicate than philosophical.' But Adams’ life was confined almost entirely to the White House; his daily round was much more dull and routine than it had been when he was secretary of state."

I'm reading "John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit" by James Traub (page 320)(commission earned).

I see (with the help of Grok) that John Quincy Adams wrote this in his diary for June 8, 1825:

"Senate Democrats have now voted 12 times to not fund the food stamp program, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)."

"Bottom line, the well has run dry. At this time, there will be no benefits issued November 01. We are approaching an inflection point for Senate Democrats. They can continue to hold out for healthcare for illegal aliens and gender mutilation procedures or reopen the government so mothers, babies, and the most vulnerable among us can receive critical nutrition assistance."

So it says at the official USDA website, quoted in "USDA blames Democrats for potential SNAP benefits lapse in new message: 'The well has run dry'/The federal agency's website features a banner that says no benefits will be issued on Nov. 1" (NBC News).

Gender mutilation procedures! The Democrats say that what they are fighting for is to keep health insurance premiums from doubling. It's a shame the issues are so confusing. We're talking about millions of ordinary people — 43 million — facing loss of food stamps. That's so much raw anxiety. So elemental. How are they supposed to begin to think about complicated politics? By getting upset about transgender people and immigrants taking their money?!

Washington itself "dwarfs" the original White House — I think the solution is symmetry.

Link.

My symmetry solution: Build up the West Wing into the size of the new East Wing. 

The presidential complex really should be that large. Once there is symmetry in the wings, the iconic building in the center will be the focus of attention and the 2 hulks on either side will blend into the background that is all of Washington D.C. — a city full of hulkingly large buildings.

The West and East Wings will provide a transition from the brutal city. They will loom in our peripheral vision as we gaze at the Executive Residence —  the building that has always been the only building we see in our mind when we think of the White House.

I'll bet you think the Oval Office is in that building. It's not! It's in the West Wing. So take care with the demolition work when you undertake Project Symmetry. And by "you," I mean Mr. Donald Trump! Because the way to clinch the argument that the East Wing project is good is to use your building prowess in pursuit of proportionality. 

Sunrise — 7:00, 7:18, 7:27, 7:29.

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I only have 3 months left before I fall off a cliff.

Here's this character Dr. Peter Attia, "an innovator in longevity medicine," platformed on "60 Minutes," declaring:

"At 75, both men and women fall off a cliff.... At the population level, it's unmistakable what happens at the age of 75."

"If spun correctly, a dog’s difficult past can be a selling point. 'People want a dog that has an incredible story, that’s really been saved from something terrible'..."

"... [Heather Hall, the director of One Tail at a Time-West Texas] told me. 'Who wants an eighty-pound black pit bull? Well, we can make you want them, because that’s a really incredible dog that was tied up on an oil rig for four weeks and then fed by two different crews and then got bit by a rattlesnake and abandoned at the vet. Now he can be your heroic save story.' (She later told me that this example was not hypothetical and that the dog is now living happily in Portland.)"

From "The Airlift Operation That Has Transformed Pet Adoption/Euthanasia in an under-equipped shelter used to be the fate of many dogs in Texas. Then chartered planes started bringing them North" (The New Yorker).

"Trump joins a long list of presidents who have left their imprint on the White House. Theodore Roosevelt replaced greenhouses to construct the West Wing."

"William Howard Taft constructed the first Oval Office in 1909. Richard M. Nixon converted a swimming pool into the press briefing room in 1970. The modern East Wing wasn’t even built until World War II to cover up an underground bunker. Harry S. Truman gutted the White House interior and added the balcony that bears his name. Purists decried it. Now it’s a hallmark. The White House cannot simply be a museum to the past. Like America, it must evolve with the times to maintain its greatness. Strong leaders reject calcification. In that way, Trump’s undertaking is a shot across the bow at NIMBYs everywhere."

Writes The Editorial Board of The Washington Post, in "In defense of the White House ballroom Donald Trump vs. the NIMBYs."

And let me just put this here. Some members of the press would like a bigger White House briefing room:

Trump dances — Malaysian style.

🚨 EPIC! The moment President Trump notices the Malaysian dancers and JOINS IN!

It’s impossible NOT to love this.
pic.twitter.com/Rlbp4EqVCR

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) October 26, 2025

AND: Did Obama ever do anything comparable? There was this moment in Argentina in 2016. A very different mood:

"Reckless and intense: we are headed straight to the point of the matter, and there is no time."

"This urgency, this wildness, the seeming unruliness of his style, which is echoed in the many abrupt twists and turns in the action toward the end of the chapters—the reader must be kept in a state of suspense until the next installment—runs against something else, something heavier and slower, a patiently insistent question that is related to everything that is happening: What are we living for?"

Writes the great novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard, in "The Light of 'The Brothers Karamazov'/Although Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote with wildness and urgency, he patiently insisted on asking an essential question: What are we living for?" (The New Yorker).

Dostoyevsky was rushing because he was writing installments and needed the money. His wife observed

I'm surprised at the NYT headline "U.S. and Chinese Officials Reach Framework of a Trade Deal."

The front page teaser under the headline on the home page is "Negotiators announced they had preliminarily agreed on several issues ahead of an expected meeting between President Trump and Xi Jinping this week."

So they say they've done something. Have they? And it's only "preliminary" and "on several issues." Is the headline supported? It got me excited, but then I felt a little conned. 

Anyway... I hope things go well.

"If the White House must be remade, let there be a plan; let it be debated; let the financing be transparent and free of kickbacks and corruption."

"It isn’t complicated, and it’s the very principle at the heart of the American Revolution: following rules is not weakness.... Architecture embodies values; it is not merely a receptacle of them. Simple proportions and human-scale spaces don’t just suggest the spirit of a democratic nation. They are that spirit in three dimensions, with doors and windows. Reverence for the past, and reluctance to destroy until the risks of destruction are fully known, is not timidity but wisdom, in architecture as in life. To conserve, after all, is the essence of conservatism. The shock that images of the destruction provoke—the grief so many have felt—is not an overreaction to the loss of a beloved building. It is a recognition of something deeper: the central values of democracy being demolished before our eyes. Now we do not only sense it. We see it."

Writes Adam Gopnik, at the end of his New Yorker essay, "Why Trump Tore Down the East Wing/The act of destruction is precisely the point: a kind of performance piece meant to display Trump’s arbitrary power over the Presidency, including its physical seat."

Reverence for the past and reluctance to destroy until the risks of destruction are fully known — but is that your general principle? If it is, you are a committed conservative. 

***

As long as we're talking about rules... the traditional rules of punctuation would reject those those commas after "the past" and "fully known." It's easy to see if you put it this way: Reverence and reluctance is not timidity. Not: Reverence, and reluctance, is not timidity. And, obviously, "is" is wrong! I suspect that at one point the sentence was "Reverence for the past — along with reluctance to destroy until the risks of destruction are fully known — is not timidity but wisdom, in architecture as in life." 

Punctuation and grammar embody values; they are not merely a receptacle of them. I remember when the great tradition of The New Yorker was scrupulously tending to these matters. Is my grief an overreaction to the loss of a beloved publishing tradition?