At the Monday Night Café…

 … you can talk about whatever you want.

Pinching lobsters. Hmm. They're the ones with the pincers.

Just reading the headlines in the British paper:

Here's the story: "The FBI is investigating after a truck carrying lobsters worth $400,000 was hijacked by a thief posing as a legitimate driver." How does a stolen truck make the front page? I guess it seems amusing that the truck was loaded with lobsters. That "s" on "lobsters" indicates they were living lobsters, but it says they were on their way to Costco, so I'm picturing what I would call "lobster" — no "s" — boxes of frozen lobster. I'd hate to have keep $400,000 worth of lobsters alive. Too complicated!

In other news... too bad for Harry and Meghan. They keep losing publicists. This latest loss "comes after Meghan and Harry attended a birthday party hosted by Kris Jenner, 70, the night before the UK marked Remembrance Sunday." Quite the gaffe.

"He is not the Word made flesh but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair."

It's obviously laughable to pay Ezra Klein $40-70k to hear his vapid, DNC-donor-pleasing, liberal clichés.

That said, I would pay him some substantial portion of that fee to come to a wedding or birthday party to perform a dramatic reading of this hilarious passage he wrote: https://t.co/q0fX4EL2S8 pic.twitter.com/isZtqbNkRs

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 28, 2025

I don't know what irritates me more — the capitalization of one "word" but not the other, or the italics for "over." So he's not the Messiah but his excellent speech conquers... well, everything... or something. 

ADDED: I think Klein deserves this fee. He's a well-known figure who embodies the idea of moderation and civility and he will have to set aside his regular work to travel to and from your event. That's going to cost you at least $40,000. There must be all these Democrats fretting about how to not look so awful and the calming stately presence of Ezra Klein might help them believe there will be an answer.

"I never liked the MAGA Mar-a-Lago sexualization. I believe how women in leadership present themselves sends a message to younger women."

"I have two daughters, and I’ve always been uncomfortable with how those women puff up their lips and enlarge their breasts. I’ve never spoken about it publicly, but I’ve been planning to."

Said Marjorie Taylor Greene, quoted in "'I Was Just So Naïve’: Inside Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Break With Trump/How the Georgia congresswoman went from the president’s loudest cheerleader to his loudest Republican critic" (NYT).

This is a very long article, by Robert Draper. Let me just pull out 3 more things:

"Unlike anything ever done or seen before!"

Link.

"Though Musk is unpredictable, he is also a formidable ally. With his nearly unlimited resources and unmatched digital megaphone..."

"... Musk could prove a powerful asset to the MAGA movement once Trump leaves the stage. Vance in particular stands to benefit. Though the falling out between Trump and Musk dominated the headlines, Vance’s role in the reunion highlights his own relationship with the billionaire. He talks regularly with Musk, who sees Vance as a viable 2028 candidate.... Musk and Vance, a former Silicon Valley investor, share not just a tech-infused worldview but a fondness for online performance — especially on Musk’s social media platform, X, where Vance has embraced a sharp, 'own-the-libs' style that can mirror Musk’s own taste for provocation. Their alliance could further entrench the influence of tech titans in the White House, extending the authority of private entrepreneurs."

From "How Vance brokered a truce between Trump and Musk/JD Vance played a key role brokering a reconciliation between the president and his wealthiest supporter. But as Trump’s first year in office comes to a close, both he and his allies have learned hard lessons about Musk’s unusual influence" (WaPo)(gift link).

That seems pretty important, and WaPo — fighting darkness for the sake of democracy — put it at the top of the front page, right alongside a dubious headline about the spread of "The epidemic of toxic flattery:

I can do without the disease metaphor — "epidemic," "spreading" — because I don't think the problem of flattery — whatever it is — is going to need anything analogous to masks, vaccinations, and staying at home. And what is "toxic" about flattery?

"The most new York couple is: very sweet man that everyone loves with a wife way out of his league that he’s obsessed with."

That's the top rated comment on this TikTok about Rama Duwaji, the wife of Zohran Mamdani:

"I think the museum staying in North Bay will help them from making foolish choices, like what they did to us, you know. It should never be repeated again."

Said Annette Dionne — born in North Bay, Ontario — quoted in "Annette Dionne, Last of the Celebrated Quintuplets, Dies at 91/She was the first to crawl, the first to cut a tooth, the first to recognize her name, and the last to die. And, like her sisters, she resented being exploited as part of a global sensation" (NYT).

Imagine being one of 5 babies and then also to be famous, all your life, for just that. It's a puzzle of distinction and indistinction.

From the Wikipedia article for North Bay: "The Dionne Quintuplets... had a tremendous impact on tourism in the area. For a province struggling against economic strangulation they were as valuable a resource as gold, nickel, pulpwood or hydro power. They saved an entire region from bankruptcy. They launched Northern Ontario's flourishing tourist industry. At their peak they represented a $500 million asset. North Bay and the surrounding area lived off this legacy well into the 1960s. Many visitors to the area discovered lakes and summer retreats that were easily accessible, and the businesses thrived on the tourist dollars."

Shopping completely alone.

It is possible —  apparently — but you will need to be in China and, presumably, sacrifice your privacy for safety and convenience? And wouldn't most Americans sacrifice privacy for safety and convenience? I'll say, no, we won't, because we wouldn't believe that we'd get the promised safety and convenience. We'd just be giving up our privacy for not much of anything.

At the Sunday Night Café…

 … you can talk all night.

"Joey Ramone once said that the Ramones 'started off just wanting to be a bubblegum group.'"

"The band covered 'Little Bit O’ Soul' on its 1983 album 'Subterranean Jungle.' The ever-arty Talking Heads gave their own disjointed spin to '1,2,3, Red Light' while performing in their early years at CBGB, the Bowery club that was a cradle of punk rock. No less a rock purist than Lester Bangs, the storied gonzo critic, eventually gave bubblegum its due in the 1992 book 'The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll.' 'The basic bubblegum sound could be described as the basic sound of rock ’n’ roll,' he wrote, 'minus the rage, fear, violence and anomie that runs from Johnny Burnette to Sid Vicious.'"

So ends the obituary "Jerry Kasenetz, a King of Bubblegum Pop Music, Dies at 82/With his producing partner, Jeffry Katz, he made lightweight ditties like 'Yummy Yummy Yummy' that soared up the charts in the late 1960s" (NYT).

The links in the text go to the Ramones and Talking Heads covers, but here's a Spotify playlist I made of the original version of those 2 songs along with all the other Kasenetz and Katz songs named in the obituary. It's all great stuff — 9 songs, 22 minutes:

"The first major turning point in Goldstein’s poker career came in 2008, when he put up the $10,000 fee to enter the World Series of Poker..."

"... a multiday extravaganza in Las Vegas. On the first night, after the tournament had ended for the day, Goldstein sat down at a table at the Bellagio. 'I end up playing without looking at my cards,' Goldstein said. That, to put it mildly, was an unconventional strategy. He bet wildly and recklessly, but his opponents were flummoxed by his blind aggression. Goldstein told me he ultimately played that way for 18 hours and won some $400,000...."

Writes Jeffrey Toobin in "He Was a Supreme Court Lawyer. Then His Double Life Caught Up With Him. Thomas Goldstein was a superstar in the legal world. He was also a secret high-stakes gambler, whose wild 10-year run may now land him in prison" (NYT).

"I’ve been saying for a while that the gender-neutral 'they/them' was going to become even more widespread. As a linguist..."

"... who studies the ways language changes, I noted the rise in people resisting the gender binary and got caught up in — and perhaps even biased toward — what I processed as a pronominal revolution. But surveys show that the number of young people identifying as nonbinary has decreased considerably over the past two years. Binary genders are on the rise again, and therefore so are the pronouns most closely associated with them...."

Writes John McWhorter, designating "He and she" as item #7 of the "Words and Phrases" list in his section of "The Year in Lists."

And that happens to be my last gift link of the year from The New York Times, so enjoy reading all the items on all the lists.

Jennifer Weiner has "9 Retrograde Moments for Women." I guess there were only 9, because if you'd had a 10th, wouldn't you go for the cliché of a 10 item list? And yet Weiner made a single item out of Erika Kirk and Usha Vance. Was it "retrograde" to put them together? Yes, but it wasn't Weiner's doing. Some people on the internet did it: they talked about JD Vance divorcing Usha and marrying Erika Kirk. Was that important enough to repeat? Weiner only purports to give us "moments"....

"Are we still producing anthemic songs that everyone can know and sing anymore? Songs like 'We Will Rock You,' 'Living on a Prayer' and 'Sweet Caroline'?"

"... The difference is, back in those songs’ eras, people across demographics still seemed to know and enjoy them. Whether from performances on Johnny Carson’s 'Tonight Show,' spins on Casey Kasem’s 'American Top 40' or others, that was a time of cultural commonalities regardless of personal taste or ideology.... When I perform older songs such as 'Take Me Home, Country Roads' everyone sings the chorus.... Yet for their modern-day equivalents, that’s far less likely. By not singing communally, we lose the emotional experience to feel bonded with those from other groups or ideologies. This lack of kinship plays out across multiple domains throughout our society with more serious impact. Studies and surveys find Americans in the 2010s and 2020s are increasingly unlikely to have cross-ideology friendships, to live near neighbors who disagree politically, or to date across party lines."

Writes piano-bar musician Jesse Rifkin, in "I perform at a piano bar. The most requested song might surprise you. So long 'Piano Man.' Chappell Roan’s ode to a gay bar now draws the most requests" (WaPo).

One thing Rifkin seems blind to is TikTok. At least for "Take Me Home Country Roads," one reason the old song is known today is through extreme repetition on TikTok.

For an extra-charming example, look at this:

"The Islamic State’s history shows that when the group establishes a stable presence, it’s only a matter of time before it looks to wreak havoc around the world."

"It’s tempting to want to pretend that the chaos in West Africa isn’t an American problem, but the world isn’t that simple...."

Writes the Washington Post Editorial Board, in "Why West Africa is worth worrying about/Strikes on ISIS targets in Nigeria are welcome but insufficient" (gift link).

Goodbye to Brigitte Bardot.

"Brigitte Bardot, the pouty, tousle-haired French actress who redefined mid-20th-century movie sex symbolism in films beginning with 'And God Created Woman,' then gave up acting at 39 to devote her life to the welfare of animals, has died. She was 91."

The NYT reports.

President Macron writes: "Her films, her voice, her dazzling glory, her initials, her sorrows, her generous passion for animals, her face that became Marianne, Brigitte Bardot embodied a life of freedom. French existence, universal brilliance. She touched us. We mourn a legend of the century."

Much as I've admired Brigitte Bardot for her great beauty, I have never seen a Brigitte Bardot movie, not even "Contempt."

"We must rebel when we're trapped by circumstances, conventions."

Here's her filmography, full of titles I'm sad not to recognize.

"At best, Ms. Bardot was considered eccentric in her later years, prompting observations that this former sex kitten, as she was often called, had turned into a “crazy cat lady,'" it says in the NYT obituary. 

At best? That's because of this:

"Althouse takes boxing day pretty seriously."

Said Old and slow in last night's open thread, "Sunrise — 7:13." It was only the second post of the day. The first, "Tea with Larry," at 9:29 a.m., was also an open thread. It consisted of 2 photographs and the single sentence, "It's a no-news Saturday, the day after the day after Christmas."

It was the day after the day after Christmas. But it was not Boxing Day. Boxing Day is the day after Christmas, and there were 5 posts on Boxing Day. So what was this day after the day after Christmas? Do we call it nothing but the day after the day after Christmas (or, if we say Boxing Day, the day after Boxing Day)?

It is the Feast of St. John the Apostle and Evangelist. Those who have grown weary of the Christmas holiday might turn to the Feast of St. John the Apostle and Evangelist for fresh inspiration.

But now it is December 28th. Is it a back to normal day? Will scanning the headlines in the usual way yield blog posts with the natural flow that is my long custom? If not, is it a day with a name — like Christmas, Boxing Day, and the Feast of St. John the Apostle and Evangelist — a day we might observe with special activities?

It is a special day, but it's a day I wouldn't want to focus on: It is the Feast of the Holy Innocents:

The Feast of the Holy Innocents was one of a series of days known as the Feast of Fools, and the last day of authority for boy bishops. Parents temporarily abdicated authority. In convents and monasteries the youngest nuns and monks were allowed to act as abbess and abbot for the day. These customs, which were thought to mock religion, were condemned by the Council of Basel (1431). In medieval England children were reminded of the mournfulness of the day by being whipped in bed in the morning; this custom survived into the 17th century....

"Perhaps because they have so many kids, they said they aren’t the types to hover over their children and check their homework."

"And as it is physically impossible to shuttle their children to extracurriculars all over town, they are often free to do what they want within a two-mile radius. In short, because they are not capable of meeting the expectations of parenthood in the modern age, they do not try to. 'We have these childless friends come over and they’re like, "You always seem so calm,"' Mrs Korczynski said. 'They say, "You ignore most things, but if something’s going on then you can hop on that."'  There are, of course, downsides. Every morning the children struggle to get into the one bathroom they share with each one banging on the door, yelling for the shower (the parents have their own). Dinners are like battles royale — 'they know if they’re late there might not be any food left,' said Mr Korczynski."

From "Why we decided to have seven children Americans are having fewer kids, worried about the high cost and uncertainty of the world. But for John and Sasha Korczynski, raising a large brood has been a leap of faith." That's in the London Times, but the family lives in the U.S. — in Florida.

How will they pay for college? "I think this is where having a big family comes in handy for college, because they do give you better financial aid packages."