"People are hungry for real conversation about what’s happening in our democracy and what it will mean for their families.... There will be some discussion, some debate, and hopefully a lot of laughter."

Said Hillary Clinton, quoted in "Hillary Clinton and Kara Swisher to release weekly midterms podcast/The weekly podcast, 'High Stakes,' will aim to dissect the election and its aftermath, Vox Media said" (WaPo).

Weekly... on the topic of the midterms. Starting Wednesday. There are 2 Wednesdays left before election day. But they're covering the "aftermath" too. 

I can't imagine looking to Hillary Clinton to satisfy a hunger for real conversation. I will give this post my "Hillary goes away" tag. Somewhat perversely, but you know what I mean. I am so tired of these midterms! I've never seen midterms get so much attention. But I know they are all that saves me from being plunged into the 2028 presidential race, and I don't know how I will take what will be the 7th presidential race in the history of this blog. 

"A donor, Eric Deters, first told The Wall Street Journal that Ms. Guilfoyle asked him to wire her $100,000 to pay off her American Express card..."

"... just before her Senate confirmation hearing in July 2025. According to messages Mr. Deters provided to The New York Times, Ms. Guilfoyle promised to serve as his 'ride or die in Trump world' if he sent her the money...."

From "Kimberly Guilfoyle Resigns as Ambassador to Greece/Ms. Guilfoyle was asked to quit by the White House after a string of damaging reports, including that she had asked a Republican donor to pay off a credit card" (NYT).

"Julia Warhola was born Julia Zavacky on November 17, 1892, in Mikova, in the former Czechoslovakia."

"Initially, she didn't want to marry Andy's father, the first Andy -- Andrej, born November 28, 1889, also in Mikova. Her father beat her into accepting the proposal; she was further persuaded by candy that Andrej offered. When interviewed by Esquire in the late 1960s, she said, 'My Daddy beat me, beat me to marry him.... I cry. I no know. Andy visit again. He brings me candy. I no have candy. He brings me candy, wonderful candy. And for this candy, I marry him.' Candy, trauma: these were the alpha of Julia's marriage and the omega of her son's art. Julia loved candy, and so did little Andy.... In his fanciful The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again)... he recounts that his mother gave him candy bars as reward for every page completed in a coloring book.... Tom Wolfe reports Andy refusing food at society dinner parties and declaring, 'Oh, I only eat candy'...."

From "Andy Warhol" by Wayne Koestenbaum, a book excerpt published in the NYT on September 16, 2001. 

I ran across that this morning because, eating candy, I was researching the accuracy of a quote I'd long remembered, "I only eat candy."

The 911 calls in the aftermath of the failed execution of Christa Pike.

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See "Calls Show How Confusion Delayed Emergency Response for Christa Pike/The first 911 call from inside the prison was made at 8:40 p.m. It took about 30 minutes to verify its authenticity" (NYT).

"Confusion" is putting it euphemistically. How do I know the prison employees were not deliberately delaying in the hope that Pike would eventually expire?

"The initial 911 call did not come, as it might normally, from the central control at the Tennessee Department of Correction, and the caller did not have the right security verification." So who called? And why didn't someone with clear authority call? The NYT can't answer those questions because the state has secrecy laws that protect its employees who do the work of carrying out the death penalty. 

There was an execution protocol, it didn't kill Pike, and there was no protocol relating to what to do next. But that did not create the authority to kill her in some other — slower — way. 

No one should drink what they don't want to drink. It's not funny to watch someone — even a billionaire — enduring pressure to consume alcohol.

I’m not a huge fan of Guinness (basically liquified pumpernickel), so i get it. But I’d like to think one of the best parts of being worth a quarter trillion dollars is not having to drink stuff you don’t like to be accepted by the bros.

— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahDispatch) October 13, 2026

What was this coercive setup? It's this, the "Cheeky Pint" podcast:

The host of the podcast, John Collison, is Irish, and he seems to have arranged for his guests to join him in what the audience may enjoy believing is the Irishman's natural environment. 

In real life, does Zuckerberg drink at all? He seems like more of a health-focused guy. Look at this, fast year, on Theo Von's podcast:

"Down 0-2 in the National League Championship Series, the Los Angeles Dodgers are going to consider the unfathomable... benching superstar Shohei Ohtani."

"'Yeah, I mean, obviously it hasn’t been good,' manager Dave Roberts told The Athletic on Monday, after the Dodgers’ 7-4 loss to the Milwaukee Brewers in Game 2. 'He doesn’t feel great. I think for me, it’s having a conversation with him tomorrow, kind of try to figure out what’s best for him, what’s best for us'..... Ohtani’s at-bats have been unrecognizable. Throughout October, a clearly compromised Ohtani has been getting beat on fastballs, and he’s rarely pulling the ball or hitting it hard.... He has attempted to shorten his swing and slap balls the other way.... In Game 2, Ohtani went 0-for-4 with two strikeouts.... A clear sign of how uncomfortable Ohtani is at the plate? Leading off the sixth against Brewers left-handed reliever JoJo Romero, Ohtani showed bunt...."

From "As Shohei Ohtani struggles, Dodgers will discuss benching superstar in Game 3" (NYT).

Top comment at the NYT: "Whole country rooting for the Brewers right now."

Sunrise.

"Is 'changing careers in middle age' a completely different article or a sardonic way to say these children are halfway through with their lives?"

I comment, sarcastically, at a Facebook post put up by my son John:

Tweet found after prompting A.I. with "get me up to speed on the Talarico-had-a-nervous-breakdown craze."

I’ve never even been to Ohio 😂

— James Talarico (@jamestalarico) October 12, 2026

What?! Never been to Ohio? That's got to be disqualifying. How can we have a Senator who's never been to Ohio?

Parody opportunity:

My contribution to the parody contest:

"The color, I think, for many people maybe has been drained out of life..."

"... and when they were to point at it, maybe, if the reality is, yeah, dude, you're distracted all the time, and you scroll easily forgettable largely gray homogenous slop on a daily basis and your body is made out of everything you put in your mouth and your brain is made out of everything that you put into your eyes and ears you think about what that consumption pattern is like you are basically feeding yourself fast food for your amygdala on a daily basis...."

Said Chris Williamson on the new episode of the "Modern Wisdom" podcast, titled "Why Life Feels So Dull All The Time (and how to fix it)."

He's talking with Robert Greene, who has a new book called "The Law of the Sublime" (commission earned). Maybe he's got the answer to our problem of colorlessness. 

Williamson prompts:

"Federal agents search Rep. Ilhan Omar’s home as part of a criminal investigation, AP sources say."

AP reports.

The search was conducted by Homeland Security Investigations agents, said the people... More details about the investigation and its focus were not immediately clear, though Vice President JD Vance last May signaled that the Trump administration would investigate Omar for immigration fraud allegations, which she has denied...  The Justice Department said in a statement Monday that HSI agents executed a judicially authorized search warrant....

"Will you meet me in the middle? Will you meet me in the air?"

Sunrise.

Talk about whatever you like in the comments. For us, it's time to watch the Brewers game.

"I hate travel. Just the slog of it. I like sleeping in my own bed."

Said Grace Coddington, quoted in "At Home: Grace Coddington/Inside the fashion stylist and creative director's ‘very catty’ East Hampton retreat" (NYT).

That's a gift link — like all NYT links — so you can see the very bed where she prefers to sleep and lots of other rooms in the cozy, catty house. The cattiness is in the artworks, not a lot of real cats, though there is one real cat, seen in 2 of the photos. I really like this house, especially with its tiny guest cottage, used as an office.

Speaking of travel — I'm a connoisseur of travel critique — I wanted to show you...

Sunrise, this morning, we thought there was a folk group with a strumming guitar.

"What Cornell Teaches Its Students About Sex/From feminist porn awards to guides on group sex, Cornell has promoted sexual liberation as a virtue."

An article by Jared Lederman, a senior at Cornell, in The Free Press.

Lots of links to the University's sex guides, such as "Yes, No, Maybe So: A Sexual Inventory Stocklist"."

Lederman opines: "Cornell’s philosophy on sex is so striking because it is much more measured when it comes to other facets of students’ lives. The school regularly instructs my classmates and me to limit our drinking, protect our sleep, and develop healthier habits. Cornell hasn’t adopted a libertarian philosophy on degenerate college behavior in general; it has simply chosen to champion sexual liberation...."

Hmm. I think he's underestimating how daunting that Sexual Inventory Stocklist is. It's a long series of lists and you're supposed to react to each one. Do you want this or not? Just to excerpt one section of one list: 

"Are you f–king stupid? It’s not your lived experience, so just shut the f–k up!...How is it so difficult for you to see space made for women at a Sex Pistols gig?"

"If you are a man who gets offended by a band making room for a female only moshpit then you are PART OF THE PROBLEM... Stay home, read a book by Bell hooks, come back when kindness, compassion and empathy have landed with you."

Said Sex Pistols singer Frank Carter, quoted in "Sex Pistols singer Frank Carter clashes with male concertgoer for crashing women-only mosh pit: ‘Just f–king leave'" (NY Post).

I thought the women-only section was justified by the physical difference between male and female bodies, that it was the same issue we see in the effort to limit women's sports to biological women, but no: Carter also said: "When I say a ladies-only moshpit pit, I of course mean a trans-inclusionary space. The space is for people who don’t usually feel safe."

Was there any way for this "male concertgoer" to identify as one of the "people who don’t usually feel safe"?

"We’ve got the gulf. We’ve got a beautiful lake... We need a river. We need an ocean. We call it 'Trump Ocean' or, or, 'Ocean of the Americas.'"

"Something like that. Before I get out, I think we should have an ocean. And we need a great river."

Said You Know Who, quoted in "Trump suggests ‘Ocean of Americas’ as new name for Atlantic or Pacific/The president also floated the idea of naming an ocean after himself" (WaPo).

I see the use of "float" to humorously carry the water theme, but is there a verb for "suggests" that could also be about water?

Now, I think the President is just toying with us. One clue is that name "Ocean of the Americas." That's a New York City joke,  isn't it? "Of the Americas" is so awkward, it must be intended as a reference to the long-derided renaming of 6th Avenue as "Avenue of the Americas." WaPo left out the "the" in its headline, but Trump said "Ocean of the Americas." 

"You don't have to look at the facts and the law. All you have to do is study what they do."

Letitia James offers a gift to Saritha Komatireddy:

"If Hegseth were not a musclebound intellectual void, he would know this."

"He would know that the Fort Hood killer told the mental health panel that he wanted to die. He would know his standby lawyers told the judge he was not mounting a defence because he craved the death penalty. He would know that the Greek word for 'martyr' and the Arabic 'shahid' both mean 'witness.' Abdullah Azzam, the godfather of modern jihadism, wrote that nations were built by 'the martyr’s blood and scholar’s ink.' The late al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri — who converted to jihadism after the hanging of a martyr in Egypt in 1966 — wrote that 'more than half the battle is fought in the media.' The great anthropologist Joe Henrich has persuasively argued that martyrdom, and the publicity secured by it, was key to the spread of early religions...."

Writes London Times columnist Matthew Syed in "America’s livestreamed execution is the ultimate gift to jihadists/The Trump administration must meet the Fort Hood killer and all terror with muscular indifference, not this gruesome circus."

Sunrise.

"Language and Linguistics for Decolonization and Liberation and for Peace and Community Building — From the River to the Sea in Palestine and Israel to the Mountaintops of Haiti and Beyond."

That's the name of the class discussed in "The Controversial Class That M.I.T. Is Paying a Professor Not to Teach/Michel DeGraff, a vocal pro-Palestinian activist, can’t be easily fired because he has tenure. But he has been kicked out of his department" (NYT).

"An M.I.T. panel rejected the course over questions about whether Dr. DeGraff, a Haitian scholar and expert in the study of Creole languages, had the expertise to teach it. That was supposed to finish the matter.... He disagreed that he lacked the ability to teach the course.... 'M.I.T. should not be repressing my teaching in this way,' Dr. DeGraff said in an interview. He called the decision a 'violation of my professional rights.'..."

"Legal experts say that Mr. Hasan could challenge the government’s decision to livestream his execution, perhaps by asserting..."

"... that a public broadcast would violate prohibitions on cruel and unusual punishment in the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution. Courts have rejected requests from private companies that sought to broadcast executions to the public. In 2001, a federal judge refused to allow an internet company to carry a live feed of the execution of the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, citing Federal Bureau of Prisons rules that forbid recording or broadcasting executions.... But the Supreme Court has not weighed in directly on the question of whether public executions are legal, particularly when requested by the government, experts said. Public executions have been seen, including by United Nations officials, as a violation of international human rights protections under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights...."

From "Fort Hood Shooter’s Execution Could Face Challenge in Federal Courts/Legal experts say the former Army officer convicted in a 2009 mass shooting could face a narrow, rushed path to appeal a public execution by firing squad" (NYT).

No, I don't remember.

"Do you remember the 'fruity boyfriend' discourse a few years ago in which young women online confessed their desire for men with painted nails and emotional fluency?"

That's the question from the Washington Post advice columnist as she addresses the problem, "I’m a bisexual man. Why don’t women want to date me?"

Straight women in droves [were] saying they wanted to date a guy who was “a little gay,” something of a metrosexual. They called these men “fruity,” but actual bisexuality wasn’t material to the categorization. They never got that far. A recent YouGov poll of Brits showed that two-thirds of straight women wouldn’t date a bisexual man, and even among women who had a “very positive” view of the group, almost half were still unwilling to date bi men....

Wait. Half were. That's a lot!

Anyway, the columnist decides that the problem is geographical. He needs to relocate to a major city — a place "where the guys are acting fruity, the women are acting butch, and no one is so sure of anyone else’s sexuality."

So people are saying "fruity" in a positive way now... or a few years ago? Here's some poor lady in 2025 anguishing over her inability to make her boyfriend "fruity":

"When you inspect these paintings — and even feel them, through tactile replicas of four paintings with four different kinds of dotting — you may be surprised..."

"... by their nubbiness, and how thickly the pigment has been lashed through a punched aluminum screen. The dots are raised. They grow and shrink, chafe or splinter. The sun may be setting on humanity, but look up close: Every dot, and every pixel, means nothing without you and me."

Writes Jason Farago, in "Connecting the Dots Between Roy Lichtenstein and Today The Whitney’s retrospective is full of jokes, but it captures our image overload with surprising tenderness. Our critic calls it 'the most momentous exhibition of the season'" (NYT).

That "sun may be setting" line has resonance because: "A remake of [Lichtenstein's] 1967 'Super Sunset Billboard' stands in front of the Whitney’s western picture window, so if you come at day’s end you can see two sunsets in one."

Speaking of breaking images up into tiny components and the effect on humanity:

Sunrise.

"My dad saw Houdini once—did I ever tell you this? He said it was much like you’d expect."

"They tied him up this way and that way, ropes, cables, locked him in a jail cell, then before you knew it came the sound of bolts dropping to the ground and locks flying off, and the great Houdini emerged. He just came walking out three paces behind the sheriff—and it was nothing! Anticlimax! Where was this? Manistique, Michigan, the county jail. Poor Houdini, she said. You should write a poor Houdini sonnet, Vern said. I hate it when people tell me what I should write, she said. I bet, Vern said. But still."

Wrote Anne Carson, the new winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, in "Poor Houdini," published in 2024 in The New Yorker.

Manistique, Michigan is a real place. It sounds made up, though, don't you think? Like a portmanteau of "man" and "mystique." There's no [famous] book called "The Masculine Mystique."

"One of the things I am most proud of is introducing people to Bob through the building. Anytime I brought anyone there, they gasped..."

"... and had an immediate inhalation of what New York once was like, and who Bob Rauschenberg was. I thought the building felt like Bob in its elegance and eccentricities. He brought a lot of junk in."

Said Kathy Halbreich, former executive director of the Rauschenberg Foundation, quoted in "Should Robert Rauschenberg’s Art Studio Be Saved? The potential sale of the groundbreaking painter’s home in New York by his foundation, on the heels of the sale of his Florida studio, has alarmed many in the art community" (NYT).

A description of the endangered real estate: "Unlike more famous artists’ haunts, like Claude Monet’s water-lily garden at Giverny, the Rauschenberg manse, for which he paid $65,000, is grittily urban, a 9,200-square-foot townhouse set on a wide, truck-rumbling block just north of SoHo. For years gold letters were visible above the red door — Mission of the Immaculate Virgin — hinting at the building’s former life as a home for orphaned boys. Rauschenberg set up his studio on the ground floor, in a high-ceilinged room that was once the chapel."

Here's a short clip from a documentary, with Rauschenberg, in his deconsecrated chapel, speaking about his art (and, oddly, reminding me of George W. Bush):

"What we had in common was touch. I was never interested in their pessimism or editorializing. You have to have time to feel sorry for yourself if you're going to be a good Abstract Expressionist, and I think I always considered that a waste. What I did that looks like Abstract Expressionism is that with their grief and art passion and action painting... they let their brush strokes show."

"What do you love most about your human?"

@manwire68 #CapCut #dogsoftiktok #mypet #mansbestfriend🐶 ♬ original sound - Unfluencers AI

Julianne Moore wants you to see her interact charmingly with all the cool objects she has in her apartment.

Including a copy of "The Joy of Sex," which she keeps on the table by the bed because she's making a movie out of it. I guess it's like that time Woody Allen made a movie out of "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex/But Were Afraid to Ask." Oh, no, actually, per IMDB, it's the story of the the author, his wife, and his wife's best friend. Somehow they lived in a way that inspired the big best seller.

My favorite part of the Architectural Digest video? When she pulled the sleeve of her sweater over her hand and used it to polish the nickel light switch in the bathroom. The wealth + humility mix was ideal. 

The Nobel Peace Prize as a "grotesque weaponization of an award to legitimize anti-Israel hatred and prejudice."

I'm reading "Live Updates: Human Rights Lawyer Navi Pillay Is Awarded Nobel Peace Prize/Ms. Pillay has served as a judge in her native South Africa and on international courts investigating war crimes. She led a U.N. panel that determined that Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, a finding the Israeli government rejected" (NYT):

Last year, a United Nations commission led by Ms. Pillay determined that Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, a finding that the Israeli government rejected. The decision to honor her added to the growing global blowback against Israel’s actions in Gaza. The Israeli foreign ministry denounced the Nobel committee’s decision, calling it "the grotesque weaponization of an award to legitimize anti-Israel hatred and prejudice." Though the committee did not mention Gaza in its official statement honoring Ms. Pillay, its chairman, Jørgen Watne Frydnes, told reporters that her work on the U.N. commission was "an important part of the reasoning why she received the prize."

"Start in the middle."

@newyorker The newly minted Nobel Prize winner Anne Carson shared a book recommendation and some timeless writing advice at the 2024 National Book Awards. #annecarson #poetry #booktok #classics ♬ original sound - The New Yorker

"We'll make sure that people are able to watch it — that it's public — because people need to understand that there are serious consequences for these types of things."

Said Pete Hegseth, promising a public execution.

Holy shit…

SecWar Hegseth just confirmed the Fort Hood terrorist execution will be made public for The People to see.

Not just that, but he infers we are in times similar to WW2, and that this mindset of executing traitors is here to stay.

The noticing will continue. I am…

— Clandestine (@WarClandestine) October 8, 2026

So we are called to contemplate something that we have long believed to have been abandoned. There is some excitement — I see it in Hegseth's body language — over the return of the spectacle of imposing the death penalty.

There are serious writings to be read. I will begin with the letter Charles Dickens published in the London Times on November 13, 1849:

"Man, that Fanta tastes fantastic."

Don't think it gets better than #Brewers rookie Cooper Pratt celebrating with soda.

"They didn't have sparkling cider, so I got some Fanta... tastes special after that one, frick!"@lanceallan | @CBS58 pic.twitter.com/Nnw8UWTkq0

— Cameron Ezeir (@camezeir) October 8, 2026

That non-drinking is not because he's underage. He's young but not that young. 22. 

Pratt says he couldn't find "sparkling cider" — that's the classic Mormon substitute for champagne. 

"Times Square has always been the site of spectacle, but with FALL RISK, that spectacle is reoriented around the human body and its limits, resilience, and exposure."

Said Anna Starling, director of Times Square Arts, quoted in "Artist to be suspended 150 feet above Times Square in one-night performance" (PIX11).

I see: "The performance draws a connection to Harry Houdini, who suspended himself from a crane in Times Square nearly a century ago. But instead of focusing on escape, Kinlaw’s performance centers on endurance."

How far we've come! What other feats of the past will be recreated with the central element omitted?

Sunrise.

"The mayor, who is known for his broad, effervescent smile, seemed especially stung by the opposition to him expressed by the pro-Palestinian crowd in Union Square,

"... given his consistent support of their cause. During the vigil, he stared stone-faced, and at times looked crestfallen, as the activists chanted in support of Hamas, called for the deaths of Israeli soldiers and denounced him as a 'traitor,' many citing his meetings with President Trump or his efforts to build ties with Jewish leaders.... 'Zohran, you coward!' someone yelled from the crowd, which numbered in the hundreds. Others yelled, 'Zohran is a sellout!'"

I'm reading "For Mamdani, Oct. 7 Anniversary Sets Off Anger and Bitterness Hours after some Jewish leaders denounced Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s remarks about the attacks on Israel, activists interrupted a vigil to call him a traitor to the Palestinian cause" (NYT).

My son Chris happens to be in NYC this week, and he went to Union Square and got this photograph:

"The fraternity party at Cornell University where a woman alleges she was sexually assaulted in 2024 was officially registered under university rules that were supposed to promote safer partying."

"The rules required fraternities to designate 'trained event monitors' who would stay sober and wear distinctive clothing so that police officers, paramedics or other partygoers could quickly identify them in an emergency. One of the monitors listed by the Chi Phi fraternity in paperwork to register the 2024 party was Jonathan Newell, a man who would later be accused of sexually assaulting the woman known as Jane Doe — and the one who sent a Snapchat message inviting others into the room with her...."

From "Man Accused in Cornell Sex Assault Was Designated as a Party Monitor/The fraternity filed paperwork identifying Jonathan Newell as a 'trained event monitor' at a party where a woman said she was assaulted. He was accused of taking part" (NYT).

Alexithymia.

I'm reading "My Fiancé Won’t Touch Me. Should I Still Marry Him? Our Ask the Therapist columnist, Lori Gottlieb, advises a 65-year-old reader who loves her partner but is physically and emotionally unsatisfied" (NYT).

From the letter writer:

Our therapist and I suspect undiagnosed alexithymia (or difficulty in experiencing and describing emotions), while he defensively attributes it to mere “emotional reserve.” After a year of failed couples counseling, we are living in a completely platonic relationship.

For $25 million, you can by the 8,000-square-foot, 7-bedroom, 9-bathroom Tribeca loft with its huge Keith Haring mural...

... painted by Haring in 1979 when he was a student at the School of Visual Arts and the building was student gallery space.

Click through to the photographs of the fabulous place, at "Keith Haring Created a Mural in a TriBeCa Loft. Now, It’s for Sale. The renovated apartment featuring a once hidden early work by the New York artist is on the market for $25 million" (NYT).

The space was a restaurant for many years after the SVA moved out in the 1980s, and the mural was walled in by sheet rock. It was "uncovered it in 2007 and found to be in good shape, considering it was painted in the less than durable mix of shoe polish and alcohol."

The artwork is at one with the building:

"With striking dexterity and range, he explores how advocates reawakened Bach’s compositions and Vermeer’s paintings after one and two centuries of slumber..."

"... how technological advances rekindled theories of continental drift and black holes; how accidents resuscitated hand-washing and genetics; and how war renewed interest in the submarine and 'The Great Gatsby.'"

From "What if the Best Ideas Are Already Here, Waiting to Be Rediscovered? 'Sleeping Beauties,' by the musician David Byrne, explores artistic and scientific innovations that were overlooked before being embraced" (NYT).

The article is by Adam Grant, who is organizational psychologist at the Wharton School. Instead of embedding a David Byrne video, I'll show you this Adam Grant TED talk:

Upticks.

The word "upticks" appears in the previous post — "the CDC data showed big upticks" — and I had that Mad Magazine idea of depicting it literally. Being a tad lazy, I told Grok, "draw 3 ticks who are happy and dancing — cartoon style."

I was appalled to see:

That's so not my vision. I corrected with severe specificity: "black and white line drawing only. not aimed at children. not cute. more anatomical accuracy."

You can see what I mean, can't you? Grok gave me this:

See? This is why we can't trust A.I. It's trying to follow instructions. Isn't it?

By the way, ticks are arachnids. They have 8 legs — and no arms — and no antennae... and no bones!

"Young teenagers are less likely to identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual than they were a few years ago..."

"... according to a new analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. The decline is particularly striking among ninth-grade girls, according to Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University who published her analysis of the 2025 data on her Substack 'Generation Tech.' In 2021, 30 percent of ninth-grade girls identified as lesbian or bisexual. Last year, 17 percent did.... The rate of boys who identify as gay or bisexual has remained roughly the same over the past decade. But a few years ago, after the pandemic shutdowns, the CDC data showed big upticks in the percentage of high school girls identifying as lesbian or bisexual. Within a few years, those rates began to drop, but only by a few percentage points. Though the overall numbers have continued to decline, older teenagers’ sexual orientation has held relatively stable...."

From "Number of teens who identify themselves as gay or bisexual is in ‘free fall’/Conservatives have trumpeted the data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but researchers say the reasons for the decline are unclear" (WaPo)

Top-rated comment: "Oh for heavens sake - it was a teenage fad and now they have moved on to something else. Happens all the time. Doesn’t take a genius to figure that out."

"Carson, 76, is best known for her translations of ancient Greek texts and for remixing those in a modern, playful voice."

"'Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse,' from 1998, turned a fragment of Greek poetry into a tale of a moody teenager’s destructive love affair, and 'Red Doc >,' from 2013, a sequel of sorts to 'Autobiography of Red,' concerned a road trip. 'Many toil in the interstices of genre,' Daisy Fried wrote in a 2013 review of 'Red Doc >' for The New York Times. 'Carson’s palatable, popular, sophisticated and who-cares approach may have done the most and best work in the last two decades to stop people worrying so much about what’s poetry and what’s not.'"

From "Canadian Poet Anne Carson Is Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature" (NYT)

"Her book jackets rarely feature an author photo.... She has rarely discussed her private life in interviews, although in an August 2024 essay in The London Review of Books she said that she had Parkinson’s disease and that her handwriting had 'disintegrated' as a result. 'I used to take pleasure in writing in notebooks, shelves of them, day after day, year after year,' Carson wrote: 'Now the upright strokes bend or break or go in all directions, vowels shrink to blobs, slant loses its smooth smart angle, it all looks embarrassing. I scrub out whole paragraphs in shame.'"

Informed that she had won the Nobel Prize, "All the poet would say was she was 'in Iceland,' where she was 'listening to the wind.'"

AND: There are some nice photos of her in this 2021 Interview magazine piece. From the interview (with the British artist Tacita Dean):

Sunrise.

"What blossomed here in this place was the Western desire to uncover all that ignorance, darkness, and distance had kept hidden from the mind of man."

"The Greeks did not just shape history; the Greeks gave us history itself. Much... of what we know about many ancient civilizations comes almost entirely from the records of Greek explorers and historians, explorers and historians who didn’t just chronicle the histories of their own people, but ventured outwards to observe and record the sagas of foreign peoples and cultures all across the world. Where others looked inward, the Greeks were the first to direct their focus outward, to chase the thrill and glory of seeing all that was strange and new. It was this trait – it was this trait that would push the West to create and build things that others could not, marking us out from so many other cultures and civilizations where stability and subsistence were the highest ends of life. But it is not just the ambition to explore the unknown that we inherit from the Greeks; it is the conviction that the unknown can be known. The confidence that the world can be charted and measured and mapped and understood...."

Said Marco Rubio, in Athens today. Full text and video here.

"Entertainment and the arts are undergoing what might be termed a Great Simplification."

"Take the Netflix film 'Irish Wish,' which ranked No. 1 on the streaming platform following its release in 2024. The film stars Lindsay Lohan as an American book editor named Maddie, who travels to Ireland dreaming of marriage to a hunky best-selling author (a genre of person more common in films than in life). As writer Will Tavlin observed, as you watch, you may notice that the characters are explaining what is going on, as if you are too slow to understand. In one scene, Maddie says to her lover, 'We spent a day together. I admit it was a beautiful day, filled with dramatic vistas and romantic rain, but that doesn’t give you the right to question my life choices. Tomorrow I’m marrying Paul Kennedy.' He replies, 'Fine. That will be the last you see of me because after this job is over, I’m off to Bolivia to photograph an endangered tree lizard.'"

Writes James Marriot, in "Is society growing stupider? The clues are simple and repeated. Shorter sentences and monotonous lyrics form a sign of something bigger" (WaPo)(gift link).

Speaking of shorter sentences, yesterday, I happened to run across this long sentence:

"I say fling but he only worked like a dog in parkinglots, the most fantastic parkinglot attendant in the world, he can back a car forty miles an hour into a tight squeeze and stop on a dime at the brickwall, and jump out, snake his way out of close fenders, leap into another car, circle it fifty miles an hour in a narrow space, shift, and back again into a tight spot with a few inches each side and come to a bouncing stop the same moment he’s jamming in the emergency brake; then run clear to the ticket shack like a track star, hand a ticket, leap into a newly arrived car before the owner is hardly out, leap literally under him as he steps out, start the car with the door flapping and roar off to the next available parking spot: working like that without pause eight hours a night, evening rush hours and after theater rush hours, in greasy wino pants with a frayed furlined jacket and beat shoes that flap."

Wrote Jack Kerouac, typing "On the Road: The Original Scroll." I'm fascinated by the readability of very long sentences, but that one struck me (at 40 mph) because I have a long-running debate with Meade about whether good drivers back into parking spaces. 

Surprise me.

 It's October.

"An early clip of the film... features the toddler character bending down to pick up a snail, before gently touching it, her face breaking into a smile."

"Such a performance would probably be beyond a child actor of the equivalent age, raising the question of whether it is easier for filmmakers to work with AI toddlers than human ones. Minkoff said that working with young children on 2002’s Stuart Little 2 'in some respects was horrible' because they would be crying while the film’s stars tried to console them. 'Geena Davis would be holding the baby, Hugh Laurie would be holding the baby, trying to calm the baby,' he said. Minkoff added that using an AI toddler was 'much more humane.'"

I'm reading "Lion King director: Why I’m embracing AI/Rob Minkoff touches on a source of tension in Hollywood as he tells The Times about Storm Dogs, his forthcoming film made with AI" (London Times).

Working with adults is also in some respects horrible. They're always crying and demanding consolation. It's not easy getting them to gently touch snails or whatever damned thing you'd like to tell them to do. And the problem isn't limited to moviemaking. In all fields of endeavor, human beings are difficult crybabies and A.I. will just get the job done. 

I like this quote from the director: "Obviously it’s not my goal or interest to put people out of work." Oh, the things you can do with an excuse like that! I wasn't my goal to hurt you. I was just achieving my goal and you were in the way. 

"For nearly 28 years Karl Bushby has been walking around the world with two rules: no transport and no going home to Hull unless he arrives on foot."

"On Monday afternoon, for the first time since 1998, the former paratrooper, now aged 57, stepped on to British soil after swimming the Channel. Bushby started his epic trek in Chile on November 1, 1998, shortly after leaving his mother Angela’s home in east Yorkshire. Since then, he has traversed the Darién Gap as fighting raged between the Colombian government and Marxist guerrillas; covered the frozen Bering Strait on foot; and become the first person known to have swum 184 miles across the Caspian Sea....He swam on his back the whole time as he is 'not a swimmer' and it is the 'most energy efficient way.'..."

From "Adventurer sets foot on British soil after 28-year walk home/Karl Bushby arrived in Kent after swimming the Channel for the final stage of a 30,000-mile journey from Chile back to Hull" (London Times).

How does he pay for this lengthy adventure? "Werner Herzog is directing a feature-length documentary about Bushby’s journey, titled Walk of Life, co-produced by Westward Productions, which has been supporting the adventurer for the past 16 years."

"Democratic congressional candidate from Long Island acknowledged on Monday that he had posed years ago in an explicit ad campaign modeling leather bondage gear..."

"... saying that it had no bearing on his campaign or ability to serve. The array of photos, which surfaced in The New York Post and a local news site, Messenger Papers, shows the candidate, Christopher Gallant, shirtless and variously wearing a leather collar attached to a chain and a leather face mask. In some of the photos, he is in intimate situations with another man. They appeared on the site of a bondage apparel company called Mr. S Leather; Mr. Gallant’s lawyer said they were taken around 2010...."

I'm reading "N.Y. Democratic House Candidate Admits to Bondage Photo Shoot" (NYT).

I clicked those internal links to see the photos. I laughed. A nice looking man modeled when he was young. Who cares!? I mean, who cares if he modeled? I think we do care that a person is good looking. It's part of nature. You might not vote for a man just because he's pretty, but my goodness, doesn't it help?

"Combine [bra as outerwear] with the rise of naked dressing, nostalgia among the next gen set for the ’90s and Y2K (the last years before social media)..."

"... and GLP-1-inspired urges to show off newly shrunken bodies; power it with celebrity buy-in, as on the recent VMAs red carpet; and you get brazilla. Bralapalooza. The ultimate late-stage capitalist conclusion to the second wave feminists’ call for bra burning. Bra-vo?"

Writes Vanessa Friedman, in "Fashion Says Wear Your Bra as a Top/At Miu Miu, Miuccia Prada puts on her trend-forecasting glasses, and calls it" (NYT).

That's a gift link, as all NYT links are now, so you can go in and see the photographs of models with newly (or oldly) shrunken bodies, shown off in outfits that feature bras worn as outerwear. See if you can find the one that made me say "Her chest looks like a faceless man wearing sunglasses."

"This whole thing was triggered by the fact that somebody brought a civil lawsuit, a lawyer who's working on contingency...."

"This is multi-million dollars at stake. And I hope it doesn't shock anybody, but oftentimes in civil litigation, people motivated by money do lie...." 

Glenn Greenwald takes a stand for procedural fairness and professional journalism.

NEW: Glenn Greenwald slams AOC and the press for branding the accused Cornell students "gang rapists" without a trial.

None of the seven has been charged, yet a sitting member of Congress described the allegations as fact.

GREENWALD: "This whole thing was triggered by the fact… pic.twitter.com/UUK7enNosJ

— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) October 6, 2026

Here's the whole segment:

"God damn it Merrill."

“God damnit Merrill”

An all-time in-game interview with Pat Murphy here: pic.twitter.com/cdaLvlK1D0

— Zach Sweet (@by_ZachSweet) October 7, 2026

"Just entering the month of October makes me freeze up. People think I came back from captivity and I look normal..."

"... but they have no idea what I’m going through. I might have come back physically but it’s not over. Only my body came back."

Said Mia Schem, quoted in "'I was taken hostage by Hamas on October 7. I feel as though I’m still there'/Mia Schem’s wounds have healed since the terrorist attacks on Israel three years ago. Her mind is still in pieces" (London Times).

Sunrise (with moon).

Goodbye to Eva Marie Saint — she was 102.

Here's the NYT obituary: "Eva Marie Saint, Oscar Winner for ‘On the Waterfront,’ Is Dead at 102/A luminous beauty with dramatic depth, she brought a layered intensity to harrowing roles and seduced Cary Grant in the romantic thriller 'North by Northwest.'"

"I voted against my party more than another other senator on either side of the aisle."

Asserted Senator Susan Collins, quoted in "Live Updates: Collins and Jackson Clash in First Debate of Crucial Maine Senate Race/Senator Susan Collins and her Democratic challenger, Troy Jackson, faced off on Supreme Court appointees, health care, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and their approach to governing" (NYT).

ADDED: I think the quote should be "I voted against my party more than any other other senator on either side of the aisle." Perhaps the Times will tweak the transcription.

BUT: If she said “other” twice, the Times probably has it right. Who knows how they talk in Maine?

"The painting was discovered in July when a man, nosing around at an estate sale in Kalamazoo, Mich., stumbled upon the enigmatic painting on the wall of a dimly lit corridor leading to the garage."

"The man, who wishes to remain anonymous, was familiar with Abercrombie’s work and was stunned to see the still life bearing the painter’s distinct signature. Zachary Wirsum, a senior vice president at Freeman’s [auction house], said the man told him he 'was shaking as he walked out to his car,' with his discovery. 'I think, objectively, had he not purchased it, this would have just ended up in the dumpster,' Mr. Wirsum added. 'So I think that he saved it from forever being lost in time.'"

From "Bought Months Ago for $30, This Painting Set Off a $1.35 Million Bidding War/'He saved it from forever being lost,' the auction house said of the person who found a Gertrude Abercrombie painting at an estate sale in Kalamazoo, Mich." (NYT).

"Ms. Pike’s medical condition is likely to determine whether Tennessee officials try to execute her again."

"The U.S. Supreme Court has forbidden the execution of someone who does not have a 'rational understanding' of why they’re being put to death."

From "Christa Pike Regains Consciousness After Her Failed Execution/The death row inmate in Tennessee received two doses of a lethal injection drug last week but lived. She was taken from the execution chamber in an ambulance" (NYT).

So if the drug that was intended to kill her happened to cause enough brain damage to deprive her of "rational understanding," she gets to avoid further efforts to take her life?

"I have learned how vicious the pig really is, and our comrades are teaching me to attack with even greater vicious­ness."

Said Patty Hearst — in her "Tania" incarnation — quoted in "One of Patty Hearst’s Kidnappers Has Died/Bill Harris was a disillusioned Vietnam veteran looking for purpose when he joined a revolutionary group known as the Symbionese Liberation Army."

In 2024, Harris reflected on what had happened in 1973: "There were many factors that influenced Patty’s decision to stay and fight. What we didn’t know when we kidnapped her was that she had rejected her mother, a gold digger and right-wing ideologue."

A view from the Sober Monitor.

@stasiakatherine intimidation goes further than you can imagine #cornell #alumni #greeklife ♬ original sound - stasiakatherine

"The traditional gender gap is losing ground as a key factor in politics to intragender gaps that have emerged among Republican and Democratic voters along the fault lines of masculinity and femininity."

Asserts Thomas Edsall, in "The Gender Gap Has Taken a Strange Twist" (NYT).

I'm not agreeing (or disagreeing) with this take. I just thought you should know:

Men — specifically white men — who see themselves as extremely masculine tend to support President Trump, while those who are weaker in their assessment of their masculinity — or in how they think about masculinity — are far less likely to support Trump. The gap between the two is just as significant if not more significant than the gender gap.

A similar, but more complex spread has emerged among women....

Are there men who think of themselves as "extremely masculine"? That made me think of this: 

Gloriously bad movie I'm watching because it's on The Criterion Channel.

From the Wikipedia plot summary: "In a room at a university campus, white and black students argue about an impending student strike. Mark leaves the meeting after saying he is 'willing to die, but not of boredom' for the cause...."

Also: "The film was listed in the 1978 book The Fifty Worst Films of All Time and has been described as 'the worst film ever made by a director of genius' but it "is still absolutely watchable because of the magic of Antonioni's eye.'"

The whole movie is up on YouTube in several places you can easily find. Watch from 2:00 to 8:25 to see that revolutionary student meeting. It resonates with today very nicely.

Playing at Meadhouse.

For hours he would ride. On the range far and wide. When the night wind blows up and slow....

For the first time since they've been counting, more American households have kittens than have puppies.

And it's because dog ownership is declining, WaPo reports.

The number of American households with dogs has dropped 5 percent since 2019, while cat ownership has held relatively steady. Dogs still dominate America — roughly 71 million households have dogs compared with 53 million that own cats — but that is changing quickly...

Why the change?  

The notion of the "death triad" is, I think, disrespectful, so I mostly refrain from pointing them out.

 But here we have a Death Triad of Disgrace, so disrespect is already in the cards:

1. Dennis Hastert, whose death was noted in this post yesterday morning. He rose to Speaker of the House and was ruined by his admission that, when he was a high school wrestling coach, he had sexually abused a young boy.

2. "Jim Bakker, Television Preacher Felled by Sex and Financial Scandals, Dies at 86" (NYT): "In the 1970s and ’80s, Mr. Bakker and his first wife, Tammy Faye Bakker, rode to fame and riches preaching the gospel of prosperity, the notion that those who embraced genuine Christian faith would reap material rewards....The Bakkers’ world came tumbling down in 1987 with a revelation that in 1980, when he was 40, he had sex with a 21-year-old secretary in his Assemblies of God ministry. The woman, Jessica Hahn, claimed she had been raped...."

3. "Jeffrey Archer, Novelist Whose Real Life Rivaled His Thrillers, Dies at 86/In a life of achievement and disgrace, he wrote best-selling novels with themes he knew intimately: ambition, self-promotion, misbehavior and scandal" (NYT): "A political Houdini, he survived many vicissitudes, including a perjury conviction in 2001, when he was found guilty of creating false diaries and concocting a story to win a trial over whether he had slept with a prostitute to whom he paid hush money."

"We have to understand... that these violent hierarchies, these systems, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, economic exploitation, have colonized our own minds."

"... especially for the white educators..."

James Talarico telling White teachers on a zoom call that "white supremacy and hetero-patriarchy have colonized their minds"…

This guy is not a moderate.
He’s full woke 1.0 insanity. pic.twitter.com/FxSTb7opT2

— Geiger Capital (@Geiger_Capital) October 5, 2026

I'd like to see him asked why he used this jargon and if he was sincere at the time and would he stand by it now. Perhaps he can restate language like "violent hierarchies" and "colonized minds" in a way that mainstream Texan voters can relate to. Ask him!

I asked Grok to write Talarico's answer to my question and got this: "I taught in a poor school where the kids were mostly not white. A lot of us who grew up middle-class, including me, walked in with assumptions that didn’t match what those students were dealing with—family stress, neighborhood crime, schools funded by local property taxes that leave the poorest districts behind. If you’re going to help those kids, you have to notice your own blind spots instead of pretending the system is already fair. That’s all I was trying to say.”

Sunrise.

"Magical and electric."

Brewers react to Jackson Chourio’s Game 2 walk-off hit! Unforgettable. https://t.co/S8spy7KaL4

— Sophia Minnaert (@SophiaMinnaert) October 5, 2026

And here's what he — Sal Frelick — did, scoring the winning run:

"Indeed, there’s an active scientific debate over whether newborns possess consciousness."

"Resolving it could help solve one of science’s most stubborn mysteries: what consciousness is, how it emerges and how we can know if another being possesses it.... Amid all the uncertainty, there’s one fact that everyone can agree on. In each of our lives, there was a time when our brains were still too rudimentary to support consciousness, and there was a time when that changed. Even if we can’t say when babies gain consciousness, Dr. Austin said, “one thing we can be certain of is that they will become conscious.”

From "Are Babies Conscious?" (NYT).

From the comments over there: "My first memory is waking up in my crib when I was 3 years old. I recognized everything around me and it all felt familiar but I had no specific memory of anything. In reflecting upon this as I grew older I felt like this was the moment I became conscious."

Also there's this quote from Charles Darwin: "There is no trace of consciousness in very young children."

"The towering irony of Mr. Hastert’s fall was that his rise to high legislative office was cleared by his apparent moral rectitude amid a morass of sex scandals in late 1990s Washington."

From "Dennis Hastert, ex-House speaker whose sex abuse admission upended legacy, dies at 84/The Illinois Republican helped spearhead President George W. Bush’s legislative agenda before his career ended in disgrace" (WaPo)(gift link).

Small Boulder the size of a large Boulder.

On the NYT front page right now:

It's the first Monday in October, and the Supreme Court is back.

The front-page teaser goes here: "A Supreme Court Battle Over Climate Change Begins/The justices are about to hear a lawsuit that could determine whether the oil industry faces billions of dollars in liability for damages caused by global warming."

Nearly a decade ago, the outdoorsy, liberal enclave of Boulder, Colo., sued two oil companies over their role in climate change.... A win for Boulder would likely clear the way for dozens of similar lawsuits nationwide aiming to extract billions of dollars from the fossil fuel industry to fight global warming....

ADDED: The NYT quotes lawprof Todd J. Zywicki: "What this case is about is a bunch of one-percenter hippies in Boulder County who want to tell the rest of us how we have to live." 

"Recently, Liam and his wife accompanied the boys’ Little League team to a Major League Baseball game... and the team got rowdy and disruptive during the game."

"'Not violent, but that loud posturing, trying to assert dominance, that kids do,' Liam explains. 'The boys were in a group initiation to see how far they could push things. The coach wasn’t doing anything to stop it. Without boundaries, without anyone stepping up, it would have devolved.' Liam and his wife warned their sons that they needed to calm down, but they couldn’t control the whole group. 'On the way home, my wife asked the kids if they knew what hazing was,' says Liam. 'So we talked about that.'... [He] recalls that when he was applying to colleges, his parents had made a deal with him: They would pay his tuition in full on the condition that he not join a frat. 'My dad framed it as that whole culture was outside of the values I’d been raised with,' he says."

From an article in The Cut that has an unfortunate title: "What Are Fathers Telling Their Sons About Cornell?"

Are fathers supposed to talk about gang rape to little boys?! The photograph shows a man with 2 boys who look like they might be 3 and 4 years old. I'm seeing mockery on line.

But the article is making a good point that I think everyone basically agrees with: Parents should teach their children, from the earliest age, to respect others and not to be selfish monsters. The exact forms of monstrous behavior are not detailed. You don't tell the story of the Cornell orgy/rape. You read "Where the Wild Things Are" — things like that — and talk about what's going on there.

I prefer high-quality children's literature, but there are some really on-the-nose books that some people might choose: "C is for Consent," "Don’t Touch My Hair!," "Hands Off, Harry!" The list goes on and on:

Sunrise.

"Pandemonium in Milwaukee."

JACKSON CHOURIO WINS IT. PANDEMONIUM IN MILWAUKEE. https://t.co/WJ0muePo1D

— Milwaukee Brewers (@Brewers) October 4, 2026

"I don’t know about anyone else, but a table full of very distinguished people just told me that they HATE, immediately after a mandatory time change, going home at night – and it’s DARK."

"It’s depressing! One of the gentleman stated that, 'I just hate going home in darkness.'"

Writes Trump, who seems to believe Daylight Saving Time is a valuable political issue.

Who cares about the delicate feelings of the distinguished gentlemen arrayed around Trump's dining table?

Who were these guys? AI billionaires? I'm more concerned about children forced to get to school in the morning while it's still dark. Guys in their cars feeling melancholic... that's not a hot political concern.

And as long as I'm reacting to Trump's Truth Social account, there's this: "If Republicans win the House of Representatives and the Senate in the 2026 Midterm Elections, I’m going to give all Adult Citizens in the United States of America, $5,000. Thank you for your attention to this matter, and I look forward to signing those checks!"

Just awful.

"To understand the religious dynamics of the Texas race, it’s important to absorb the true depths of the 'God gap' in American politics."

Writes David French, in "The ‘God Gap’ Is Narrowing in Texas" (NYT).

That gap isn’t just about white evangelicals (although it certainly is partly about them), and it’s one of the Democrats’ chief obstacles to obtaining a durable political majority. Any discussion of the God gap does have to begin with white evangelicals. Their numbers are vast (far more than twice as large as Black Protestants, the most loyal religious Democratic voters), and they vote in lock step. In 2024, white evangelicals voted for Trump by a 65-point margin, 82 percent to 17 percent. Trump lost all other voters by 18 points, 58 percent to 40 percent....

"I never liked that term, 'guy's guy.'"

Said Meade, reading the previous post, the one about the man who shot the rooster named Nixon.

That sounds like one of those sentences that makes me think I'm experiencing another bout of transient alexia.

What's wrong with the phrase "guy's guy"? I'd ask Meade but he's watching that video I sent him, the one with a guy named Larry listing a lot of things he's not going to do anymore now that he's 72.

Left to my own devices I went looking for "guy's guy" in my blog archive. I believe I've only used the phrase once: "Now, if everyone would please dial down all the criticism and let Obama get on with his un-self-conscious guy's guy agenda, it will all work out just fine."

That was in an October 26, 2009 post called  "Obama's White House boy's club." And I was using the phrase jokingly echoing something the NYT had written: 

"The [rooster] was named Nixon, after the former president, 'basically because he was a jerk' said his owner, Bill Leimgruber...."

I'm reading "The Chickens Came Home. So Did the Roosters. In Vermont, a single bird set off a feud over what, exactly, constitutes farm country, mirroring a battle dividing communities across America" (NYT). 

Last fall in Merrimack, N.H., a former town councilor infuriated by one bird spent months pressing for an ordinance with fines that climbed to $500, prompting one 40-year resident to ask: “We’re an agricultural town. If people moved here and now, all of a sudden, don’t want to listen to the noises of the deer, and the roosters, and the raccoons and the loons, why did they move here?”...

Because of the covid lockdown and because of the rising price of eggs, a lot of people were buying chicks, and some of those chicks grew up to be roosters. 

Fluky quirk of baseball deemed heavenly intervention.

"Ueck decided to put his hand on it, swat it down, so Chourio could catch it. Thanks Ueck." 😂 - Pat Murphy https://t.co/nYnasQhATv

— MLB Network (@MLBNetwork) October 4, 2026

A more down-to-earth look:

So I'm sitting almost right on the line in the pressbox, my initial thought was that Ty France's ball was going to either hook foul or if it stayed in play it was gonna be caught near foul territory. Balls hit at 49 degrees or higher usually don't leave the yard. Trevor Megill said postgame he thought it was going foul, Jackson Chourio thought he had a shot at it off the bat.

— Russell Dorsey (@Russ_Dorsey1) October 4, 2026

Sunrise.

The ultimate process clusterfuck.

So embarrassing:

Reporter: "Attorney General, on your Facebook page three days ago, you wrote, ‘What this young woman has been forced to endure is horrific and unacceptable. I'm holding her in my heart and in my prayers. To her and to all survivors, you're not alone. We stand with you.’ Why did… pic.twitter.com/AtHcuaPumE

— RedWave Press (@RedWavePress) October 2, 2026

"Musk offered to donate his sperm to Zilis to conceive children through IVF in 2020, she testified, and the pair had twins in secret in 2021."

I'm reading "Elon Musk splits with longtime business confidante, co-parent 'with no warning'/Shivon Zilis, the mother of four children with Musk, said their breakup was sudden but wished him the best" (WaPo).

I don't understand what the "split" was from.

"The co-pilot who tried to hijack a flight bound for Israel... used a crash ax to attack the captain in the cockpit, UAE officials said."

"The co-pilot attempted to 'take control of the aircraft' and carry out a 'terrorist act,' UAE Attorney General Hamad Saif Al Shamsi said.... The UAE statement answers one of the questions over potential security lapses that emerged following the incident — how the co-pilot was able to access a weapon on board. A crash ax is normally used for emergency evacuations, Marco Chan, a former pilot, said in an interview. 'If none of the exit doors are available, the pilot can … use the ax to crack' designated parts of the plane’s structure which are designed to open more easily to create an exit route. In current Boeing 737 planes, the crash ax 'is usually located just behind the first officer or co-pilot' in the cockpit, said Chan...."

WaPo reports.

Great. There's an ax.

"Well, she’s still trying to proceed as normal, and she’s trying to tell herself that she can just go on with her life as if this didn’t happen."

"And she’s very excited about the Halloween party at Chi Phi at the fraternity. And you can tell from the text messages that she wants to go to the party. She’s getting ready for it. And then just before the party, there’s another moment that moves her thinking in this new direction. She gets a phone call from the president of the fraternity.... And he tells her, you can’t come to the party. You’re not invited. And he adds that it’s for her own good, because there are so many rumors swirling about what happened by both women and men. And there’s so much judgment about her. She shouldn’t come to the party. She sends a text message to one of the seven guys.... And she says to him, 'I knew this was going to happen. The women will always get the short end of the stick... You all... 'are not my friends....' This anger continues in the text messages... her telling of the events [has] now really changed...."

From yesterday's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast, "The Firestorm Over a Rape Allegation at Cornell/The New York Times has reviewed a trove of documents related to the case. Our reporter explains what we know."

I blogged about that podcast yesterday, but didn't have a transcript to excerpt. Today, I'm giving you the excerpt I wanted verbatim. 

Someone who styles himself ExHedgeFundGuy makes a TikTok clip out of a classic Camille Paglia interview and fails to include her name.

I'm not going to link to it because I don't want to reward this. TikTok is full of unidentified speakers taken out of context.

I'll link to this presentation at Real Clear Politics: "Camille Paglia on Frat Parties and Consent: 'He Is Right to Think You Have Consented.'" That went up on October 1st.

 

Camille Paglia, essentially, has the last word on the Cornell 7.

Don’t dive into the sea and act surprised when you get wet. pic.twitter.com/Poe3jpxvAZ

— Akhenaten 🇺🇦🏴‍☠️ (@SplendorEternal) September 30, 2026

RCP has the clip I'm seeing at TikTok plus the full interview, and we can see that it is from a BBC interview in 2017. But Paglia has made this point since the early 90s.

It's a good idea to talk about the Cornell case in light of the strong challenge presented by Paglia, and she deserves to be cited by name. There's a lot of material from 35 years ago, from various authors, that could enrich the present-day discussion. For example: "Fraternity Gang Rape: Sex, Brotherhood, and Privilege on Campus."

This is a very old topic! Let's not act as though people are just noticing this problem. 

"Books that get called weird girl lit tend to deal in uncanny or dreamlike circumstances."

"In Ottessa Moshfegh’s 'My Year of Rest and Relaxation,' a woman uses drugs to hibernate her way through a deep depression. In Mona Awad’s 'Bunny,' a cult of women M.F.A. students make rabbits explode with the power of their creative minds. In Kate Folk’s 'Sky Daddy,' a woman is erotically fixated on airplanes. In an interview, Moshfegh said she finds the weird girl label 'patronizing,' 'conservative' and 'misogynistic.' She maintained that the word 'weird' in this context perpetuates oppressive expectations about what a woman should be. 'There’s nothing weird about interesting stories about people,' she said. 'That’s what novels are. And I would challenge anyone who’s using that term to tell me what a normal girl is supposed to read or write.'"

From "What Is ‘Weird Girl Lit,’ Anyway? Romantic delusion. Social alienation. Body horror. Just a few of the elements celebrated online — if not always by the writers who earn the label" (NYT).

Yeah, what is a normal girl supposed to read or write?

From the comments over there: "A lot of fiction is about weird people. Many have been male. Holden Caulfield, most of Philip Roth, most of Thomas Pynchon, Ignatius in 'A Confederacy of Dunces,' Sherlock Holmes, the whole Karamazov family. You could argue that Elizabeth Bennett is a weird girl, considering Regency norms. Oh, Lady MacBeth, Medea, definitely weird. It's an advantage to an author to have a weird character or two. It's like Tolstoy said, 'All happy families are the same.'"

Sunrise.