Sunrise — 7:07, 7:08, 7:21.

It looks a bit gray, but the clouds quickly dissipated, and today, the second day of spring, was brilliantly sunny and quite warm — over 70°. Is there anything left of last weekend's big blizzard? Yes. There were a few little piles of snow here and there — amusing mementos. Meade and I took 3 walks today — sunrise, midday, and early evening — totaling 6.4 miles.

Talk about whatever you want in the comments.

"Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!"

Writes Trump, at Truth Social.

That's not the way we've been taught to speak of the dead, but it is the way we have learned that Trump speaks.

And yet imagine what Trump's antagonists will say when he dies. Much worse, I predict.

"The Radical Left Democrats have hurt so many people with their vicious and uncaring ways."

"What they have done to the Department of Homeland Security, our fantastic TSA Officers, and, most importantly, the great people of our Country, is an absolute disgrace. If the Democrats do not allow for Just and Proper Security at our Airports, and elsewhere throughout our Country, ICE will do the job far better than ever done before! The Fascist Democrats will never protect America, but the Republicans will. Just like the Radical Left allowed millions of Criminals to pour into our Country through their ridiculous and dangerous Open Border Policy, the Republicans closed it all down, and we now have the Strongest Border in American History. Likewise, I look forward to moving ICE in on Monday, and have already told them to, 'GET READY.' NO MORE WAITING, NO MORE GAMES! President DONALD J. TRUMP"

Writes Trump, just now, at Truth Social.

He appends this image of himself:

"So, ever since the fight at Thanksgiving, my daughter doesn't speak to me."

Quoggy frounces.

I read a word I didn't remember ever reading before — quoggy. You can see the context in in the previous post: "that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere."

It's not a hard word if you think of its alternative spelling, "quaggy," and understand the "quag" to be like the "quag" in "quagmire."

Quoggy might prove useful in Scrabble... or I should say Crossplay, the NYT game app that plays like Scrabble except that it lets each player experiment with words and try any number of sequences of letters and won't let you enter a word it won't accept as a word. So there's no bluffing and challenging. You end up with some crazy words.

Yesterday, it let me play frounces.

"It is well known that at the coronation of kings and queens, even modern ones, a certain curious process of seasoning them for their functions is gone through."

"There is a saltcellar of state, so called, and there may be a castor of state. How they use the salt, precisely—who knows? Certain I am, however, that a king’s head is solemnly oiled at his coronation, even as a head of salad. Can it be, though, that they anoint it with a view of making its interior run well, as they anoint machinery? Much might be ruminated here, concerning the essential dignity of this regal process, because in common life we esteem but meanly and contemptibly a fellow who anoints his hair, and palpably smells of that anointing. In truth, a mature man who uses hair-oil, unless medicinally, that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere. As a general rule, he can’t amount to much in his totality."

Writes Herman Melville, in Chapter 25 of "Moby-Dick."

"In one particularly revealing passage from 'Good Energy,' she wrote: 'I felt myself as part of an infinite and unbroken series of cosmic nesting dolls of millions of mothers and babies before me from the beginning of life.'"

I'm reading "The danger of letting a mystic lead public health/A look at Casey Means shows the weakness of her nomination and the surgeon general position itself" (WaPo)(gift link).

The Means nomination exposes how unserious the role really is. In her book “Good Energy,” Means recounts hearing an “internal voice that whispered” to her that it was time to try psilocybin — commonly known as magic mushrooms — which she began using in 2021. She described the experience as offering “a doorway to a different reality.”...

"Internal voice that whispered"? — in other words, her thoughts. She thought it was time to try psilocybin, and presumably that worked out well for her. What is unscientific there? What about that makes her unreliable? 

"These nails are sported by nurses in hospitals who, because of these stupid encumbrances glued to the ends of their fingers, cannot properly perform one of the key hygienic routines..."

"... that has been a simple, essential part of infection prevention in medical practice for decades: thorough hand-washing. First line of defense, proven useful for generations. Hospital management has gutlessly acquiesced to this ridiculousness because these days, everyone has 'rights.'Except, apparently, patients who wish to not contract an infection during their hospital stay…."

From the comments section at the NYT article about those very long, overdecorated fake nails —  "Manicures Fit for the Met Gala/Whether at hospitals or on red carpets, people with manicures by Yulenny Garcia, a nail technician in the Bronx, turn heads."

Another comment: "I like the creativity but as a physician… I despair when I see these talons on fashion and entertainment industry folks. Not healthy at all. Just pull up any study on synthetic nails in pubmed. Just imagine HRs in hospitals have given up on young RNs to abide by the no long-nail rules… these nails can cut through gloves and in one case recently caused a rectal tear in a patient. Just think, everyone does them, so how are you going to stop this? Not happy, this is being highlighted...."

It's the first sunrise of spring!

6:58:

6:59:

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

And here's Meade's video interpretation, with me and Elvis:

Well, it ain't no fun with the sun around/I get going when the sun goes down...

"They cut off the internet. No blogs. No channels.... We don't want it. We don't want it. You won't find us on line."

"We don't sit. We don't sit on your internet. We don't want it. We don't want it. Don't sit. Don't sit there. I declare a whole year of everything turned upside down."

Russia's main TV channel is airing songs about how great life is without the internet. Getting even closer to North Korea. pic.twitter.com/KS2Hur0ioc

— WarTranslated (@wartranslated) March 20, 2026

"It makes me happy. When I hear those pile drivers — my wife doesn't love it — but I love it. I love the sound of concrete. I love the sound of pile drivers."

PETER DOOCY: "When they're doing the construction, does it ever wake you up?"

PRESIDENT TRUMP: “It makes me happy...my wife doesn't love it."

"I love the sound of concrete, I love the sound of pile drivers." || @pdoocy pic.twitter.com/4MDWmwdTCw

— Fox News (@FoxNews) March 20, 2026

"I can be brand new. Whatever."

Betsey Johnson's way of being 83:

"I don’t like introspection. There’s something not right, not in my life, not in my existence. I try to avoid it."

Said Werner Herzog, on the Freakonomics podcast, right after he denied that his childhood was traumatic, even though he went hungry in the post-WWII years. He continues:

This is why I believe that psychoanalysis is one of the great mistakes of the 20th century.... I think it is not good if you illuminate all the dark recesses of the human soul. It’s good that we can forget and that we forget traumas. We do not have to unearth them and articulate them in endless sessions with a psychiatrist. And the 20th century is full of very, very deep mistakes. Psychoanalysis is only one. But because of all these monstrous mistakes of this century, I do believe that the 20th century in its entirety was a mistake....

I was also interested in his opinion of art museums:

"On TikTok, there is an entire subgenre of 'millennial cringe' compilations featuring 30-somethings making goofy faces."

"If you sustain a cool, detached pout, you’ll never risk being lumped in with the googly, giggly millennials repeatedly dragged online."

I am reading "How the Gen Z pout became armor against millennial cringe/It looks like the 'duck face,' a durable look born in the aughts. But it’s not" (WaPo)(gift link).

This is not my culture battle. I'm a boomer. I don't have to worry about the hostility between Gen Z and the millennials. I wondered whether this was a made-up problem — "googly, giggly millennials"? 

But I went to the link on "millennial cringe" and, oh, no!

"The Shangri-Las were the best bad girl records ever...."

Says John Waters, shopping for records and talking about a lot of artists he loves:

That's my second Shangri-Las experience of the day. The first was Meade's walking-in-the-sand sunrise video:

I like how the blurred pink petal in the foreground reads subliminally as her naked ass.

 I say when Meade texts me this.

ADDED: It's video at the link, making it more subliminal. A freeze frame:

The anachronistic yoga mat.

Via Instapundit, I'm reading this X post by John Ziegler, who makes many good criticpoints, and I'm only extracting one:

The @nytimes is being lavished with praise by the virtue-signaling brigade, but there are very basic problems with their Cesar Chavez story… 

One of the VERY few details in the two claims of child sex abuse from the early 1970s includes the key use of a 'yoga mat,' but yoga mats were not even a thing until at least 10 years, and possibly 20 years, later

Is it true there weren't things called yoga mats in the 1970s in California? I asked Grok. Answer:

"One poor actress looked like a Diane Arbus character. She was on her phone looking at her pictures and shrieking at her publicist. I heard that she went home and cried herself to sleep. Nobody has heard from her since!"

Said one partygoer, quoted in "Vanity Fair’s Oscar Party Light-Mare Some stars are said to be fuming over the magazine’s red carpet photo fiasco. 'One actress looked like a Diane Arbus character!' snipes a VF insider. 'She went home and cried herself to sleep'" (Hollywood Reporter).

If I had to guess which picture that comment refers to, I'd say this photo of the actress Sarah Paulson.

Scroll here to see more of the Vanity Fair Oscar party photos. It's not just that the lighting brings out the worst, it's that the worst is there to be brought out.

More pics and complaints at "A-listers left fuming and in tears over ‘unforgiving’ Vanity Fair Oscar Party lighting" (NY Post). Monitor your thoughts as you scroll. It might be a miraculous cure for envy. That picture of Heidi Klum has the aura of an ordinary woman in a bleak dressing room realizing this dress is doing her no favors.

Here's the Diane Arbus photo "Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C., 1962." I thought of it when I saw this photo from the VF party.

Sunrise — 7:09, 7:17.

Write about whatever you like in the comments.

"I have this German mind, if something is too spicy, it should be warned — or at least labelled."

Said Faycal Manz, quoted in "A German tourist sued a restaurant because its sauce is too hot. So I tried it/A litigious visitor claimed the salsa at Los Tacos No. 1 in Times Square made his tongue burn. I wondered: How bad could it be?" (London Times).

“My tongue and mouth were burning immediately,” he claimed. “My Apple Watch registered at this time a higher pulse.”

His lawsuit, for $100,000, was dismissed.

According to the article, the salsa at Los Tacos No. 1 isn't even that spicy. 

I love how the Japanese Prime Minister looks bored and looks at her watch just before Trump takes this one last question and surprises her with his bon mot about the element of surprise.

This is one for the ages:

Trump calls on a male reporter and disarms him with compliments: "Let me pick a beautiful looking person, a beautiful person from Japan.... Oh, he doesn't believe he's beautiful. Oh, he's just — he sounded shy."

The reporter asks: "Why didn't you tell US allies in Europe and Asia like Japan about the war before attacking Iran?"

Trump: "Well, one thing you don't want to signal too much, you know, when we go in, we went in very hard and we didn't tell anybody about it because we wanted surprise. Who knows better about surprise than Japan? Okay. Why didn't you tell me about Pearl Harbor? Okay. Right.... Don't you believe in surprise? I think much more so than us.... And because of that surprise, we knocked out the first two days, we probably knocked out 50% of what we and much more than we anticipated doing. So, if I go and tell everybody about it, there's no longer a surprise, right?"

There's a difference between surprising the enemy and surprising your allies. But the point seems to be that surprising the enemy will fail if too many allies and supposed allies are in on the plan. Also the specifics of the attack could be kept secret while the decision to go to war is shared. 

ADDED: Trump was actually complimenting Japan.

"Moses went walking with the staff of wood... Newton got beaned by the apple good...."

Egypt was troubled by the horrible asp....

"I do not want to authorize this level of violence and destruction...."

Trump assures us, at Truth Social.

Israel, out of anger for what has taken place in the Middle East, has violently lashed out at a major facility known as South Pars Gas Field in Iran. A relatively small section of the whole has been hit. The United States knew nothing about this particular attack, and the country of Qatar was in no way, shape, or form, involved with it, nor did it have any idea that it was going to happen. Unfortunately, Iran did not know this, or any of the pertinent facts pertaining to the South Pars attack, and unjustifiably and unfairly attacked a portion of Qatar’s LNG Gas facility. NO MORE ATTACKS WILL BE MADE BY ISRAEL pertaining to this extremely important and valuable South Pars Field unless Iran unwisely decides to attack a very innocent, in this case, Qatar - In which instance the United States of America, with or without the help or consent of Israel, will massively blow up the entirety of the South Pars Gas Field at an amount of strength and power that Iran has never seen or witnessed before. I do not want to authorize this level of violence and destruction because of the long term implications that it will have on the future of Iran, but if Qatar’s LNG is again attacked, I will not hesitate to do so. Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP

Afroman tells his own story: "My proof's on the internet."

For a quick read, go here: "Afroman found not liable in bizarre defamation case brought by Ohio cops who raided his home" (NY Post): "The hip hop star wrote the satirical song 'Lemon Pound Cake' and made a music video with real footage of the raid taken from his home surveillance cameras to raise money for property damage caused during the search, he has said. Seven cops with the sheriff’s office then sued him in March 2023, alleging the music video defamed them, invaded their constitutional privacy, and was an intentional infliction of emotional distress...."

Here's penguinz0 with clips from the trial and mockery of the plaintiffs for their Streisand effect problem:

Here's Afroman's impressive testimony.

Here's "Lemon Pound Cake," one of the songs that led to the lawsuit, with the security camera footage of the cop's cake double-take:

Sunrise — 7:09.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

"His family kept saying how important they thought the movie was and that Val really wanted to be a part of this."

"He really thought it was important story that he wanted his name on. It was that support that gave me the confidence to say, okay let’s do this. Despite the fact some people might call it controversial, this is what Val wanted. He was the actor I wanted to play this role.... Normally we would just recast an actor. I’m all about working with our actors.... But we can’t roll camera again. We don’t have the budget...."

Says Coerte Voorhees, the writer and director of "As Deep as the Grave," quoted in "Val Kilmer Resurrected by AI to Star in ‘As Deep as the Grave’ Movie — First Look" (Variety).

There’s still a heated debate surrounding AI, with some parts of the creative community concerned that the technology will lead to job losses and worries that actors’ likenesses will be used without their consent. The brothers know that their decision may draw criticism, but they hope that “As Deep as the Grave” will show how AI can be used ethically. They also note that the production relied on SAG guidelines and compensated Kilmer’s estate for his appearance.

I presume there will be outrage. 

David Sedaris at the Oscars, being very David Sedaris with his famous* tiny notebook and his modest interest in celebrity.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by The New Yorker (@newyorkermag)

_________________

* Famous to anyone who's read the published diaries of David Sedaris. He has a method to his writing, and it begins with carrying a little notebook everywhere and writing down observations to be expanded upon, the next day, as a diary entry.

"People worldwide were betting on the fall of Iran’s late supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on prediction markets long before he was killed..."

"... in an airstrike on his compound in Tehran late last month. But when his demise was confirmed on March 1, the platform Kalshi said it would not pay out millions of dollars in expected winnings, citing a prohibition on wagers involving death. The company outraged bettors and fueled a fierce cultural debate about the ethics and dangers of prediction markets. Such bets have also highlighted national security risks. Several times, betting patterns have suggested that anonymous users were using inside information to gamble on geopolitical developments, like the timing of attacks. There is often little governments can do about it. Prediction markets allow trades on 'event contracts,' bets on whether almost anything will occur — an Oscar win, a natural disaster, or the president garbling his words...."

From "Betting on Ayatollah’s Ouster Ignites Ire Over Prediction Markets/Bettors are angry that Kalshi, citing a policy against death bets, did not pay on wagers. And with signs of trading on government secrets, some lawmakers want to restrict prediction markets" (NYT).

"In one handwritten letter on girlish stationery imprinted with roses, Ms. Rojas wrote to [Cesar] Chavez in January 1974 at the age of 13, shifting between childlike school updates and swooning devotion."

"She said she wrote the letter more than a year after he first kissed and fondled her in his office in 1972, when she was a 12-year-old seventh-grader. 'I’m really glad I got to see you & spend time with you, well not like that, but just to know I was near you was enough,' she wrote, adding, 'I think of you all of the time. Do you think of me?'"

From "Cesar Chavez, a Civil Rights Icon, Is Accused of Abusing Girls for Years/An investigation by The New York Times found extensive evidence that the United Farm Workers co-founder groomed and sexually abused girls who worked in the movement" (NYT)(gift link).

"And I try to encourage all my friends who are not Trump supporters, I tell them, don't complain. It is a majority, it's not lottery..."

"... that brought Trump to the presidency. He won the popular vote by a very significant margin. Both houses, Senate and Congress, and the Supreme Court is to some degree shaped by him. So it's significant. It doesn't come because he's a lucky man. No, there's a clear world view, a clear cultural war that he wants to wage. And it's evident. He really says what he means. It's not that there's anything hidden. And I say to everyone, if you do not agree, take America — the heartland of America — take it seriously. That's where the heart beats.... And many of my friends who are working in Los Angeles, I say, don't you come from Kansas? Yes, I come from Kansas. And I say, when were you in Kansas last time? Ah, that was 20 years ago. No, you should be every year. When did you meet your high school buddies? Oh, no contact with them at all. You have to get in touch with them, ask them how they are doing, ask them about their visions, ask them about their grievances, keep them engaged. They are your buddies, your high school friends. Do something. Don't complain. I don't like the complaints...."

Says the wise film director, Werner Herzog, on the Freakonomics podcast.

"President Trump let a key filing deadline pass on Tuesday without endorsing a candidate in Texas’ Senate race, locking in a high-stakes Republican runoff..."

"... between the incumbent, John Cornyn, and the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton. Mr. Trump could still offer an endorsement at any time, but his decision not to before the deadline for candidates to formally drop out of the race means both Mr. Cornyn and Mr. Paxton will be on the next ballot even if one of them withdraws at a later date. It also means both will continue to duke it out in what has already been a highly personal, historically expensive Senate race...."

The NYT reports.

I'm not surprised. Paxton had said he wouldn't drop out if Trump endorsed Cornyn, so then how could Trump endorse Paxton? And what's the good of endorsing Cornyn? Maybe Cornyn also said he wouldn't drop out if Trump endorsed Paxton. Trump is keeping his distance.

"Men tend to seize on the largest size they ever were at any point. If a man wore a size 11 athletic cleat in high school..."

"... he’ll forever be convinced he’s an 11, not the 10 he truly needs in a dress shoe.' 'It’s a macho thing,' agreed... the owner...  a high-end shoe store in Chicago. 'It’s still based on that whole your-shoe-size-is-your-package-size thing.'" 

From "Why Do Men Buy Shoes That Are Too Big?/It’s an affliction — and not one relegated to the Trump administration" (NYT).

The Trump connection is not forced. It's the reason the issue is in the news. JD Vance has been telling the story of Trump asking men their shoe size and saying "You know you can tell a lot about a man by his shoe size":

Sunrise — 7:09.

Talk about whatever you like in the comments.

"I think you’ve got to begin by asking yourself, Do you believe that this war is necessary or not?"

"And I think you’ve got to begin by asking yourself, first, Do you believe it’s acceptable for the Iranian regime to have nuclear weapons and the capacity to deliver them? If you believe that, then the next question you have to ask yourself is: Could we have achieved that goal of eliminating the threat that Iran poses by some other means?... ... I start from the proposition that Iran cannot afford to have nuclear weapons and the capacity to deliver those weapons to American cities...."

Said David Boies, interviewed in "Why David Boies Thinks We Should Support Trump’s Iran War/The prominent lawyer says that Democrats should get behind the President, and make sure that he finishes the job" (The New Yorker).

"One of the things about democracies is that the person that you support doesn’t always get elected, but the person who gets elected is nevertheless your President. And, while I think that part of democracy is opposing things that you disapprove of, part of democracy is supporting our elected officials, regardless of whether they are the same party, regardless of whether you agree with them generally, when they are making decisions that you support. I think that we’ve got to find common ground. We have got to get back to the point where we can support people that we oppose.... I didn’t pick Donald Trump as my President, but he is my President."

That interview followed Boies's column in the WSJ, "Partisanship on Iran Is Dangerous for America/Trump is doing the right thing for the U.S., and we Democrats should judge the war on the merits."

"The poodle community is particularly snappish about doodles. Doodle breeders help themselves to the poodle’s brain..."

"... and its low-shedding, hypoallergenic coat, temper the poodle’s supposedly high-strung personality with a mellower breed, and then sell their hybrids for twice as much as poodles go for.... Online, doodles stir darker emotions. 'I love all dogs and own the best dog in the world. But my god I hate those fuckers,' one Reddit commenter said of doodles. 'We have one in my close family and I’ve never met a more neurotic dog.' Many object to the prices that doodles command; Much Ado About Doodles, for example, a Virginia-based breeding business, sells pretrained goldendoodle puppies for some fifteen thousand dollars each.... 'My AKC registered dog was way cheaper and came from champion bloodlines.'... Groomers complain about owners who, instead of troubling themselves with the daily brushing and regular cuts that low-shedding coats require, allow their dog’s coat to develop painful mats that have to be shaved off, then yell at the groomer for denuding their fur baby. A common clarification in anti-doodle discourse is 'It’s not the doodles I hate, it’s the people who own them.' Wally Conron, the doodle dogfather, has apologized for his creation. '... I released a Frankenstein. So many people are just breeding for the money. So many of these dogs have physical problems, and a lot of them are just crazy....'"

From "How Doodles Became the Dog du Jour/Poodle crossbreeds have grown overwhelmingly popular, sparking controversy in dog parks and kennel clubs alike" (The New Yorker).

"My client’s magazine is a parody that features humorous pictures of dogs, while Vogue is a fashion magazine that features serious photographs of human models."

"I don’t think anyone would have difficulty recognizing the difference."

Said the lawyer for Dogue, quoted in "Vogue Says There’s Only Room for One Top Dogue/The creator of Dogue, a small canine fashion magazine (circulation: under 100), is being sued by Condé Nast, the publisher of Vogue, for trademark infringement" (NYT).

And here's a quote from Olga Portnaya, the creator and editor in chief of Dogue: "Art and culture have always evolved through reinterpretation and dialogue. For me, this is a larger fight: I’m not just fighting for my own work and our community, but for other independent creators."

Well, there is Teen Vogue, so you might think there'd also be a Dog Vogue — some people buy expensive clothes and accessories for their dogs — if Vogue had a dog magazine, it might very well be called Dogue, so I do think there's some potential for confusion.

Which tag should I give this post?

Lawsuits I hope will fail

Lawsuits I hope will succeed

Neither

 

pollcode.com free polls

Nick Shirley is back, and this time he's gone to California.

🚨 Here is the full 40 minutes of my crew and I exposing California fraud, Minnesota was big but California is even bigger... We uncovered over $170,000,000 in fraud as these fraudsters live in luxury with no consequences. Like it and share it, the fraud must STOP.

We ALL work… pic.twitter.com/7nWX9jL6NI

— Nick shirley (@nickshirleyy) March 17, 2026

Did Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, or Joe Biden tell Trump, about Iran, "I wish I did what you did"?

I'm reading "Trump Claims an Ex-President Confided His Regrets on Iran. But Who? The New York Times reached out to people close to President Trump’s predecessors. They disputed Mr. Trump’s claims."

Trump made it a guessing game:

“He said, ‘I wish I did what you did,’” Mr. Trump said. “I don’t want to get into ‘who,’ I don’t want to get him into trouble.”

But he did get into who, because, when asked, he said it was not George W. Bush. He also said it was "'a member of a party' that detests him" and someone who “happens to like me, and I like that person, who is a smart person.” Then it's not Biden, right? And probably not Obama. Does Obama even talk to Trump? My guess is Clinton. Or Trump is lying. 

Who said "I wish I did what you did" to Trump?

Biden

Obama

Bill Clinton

Trump is just lying.

 

pollcode.com free polls

"Mr. Larijani’s killing on Tuesday showed that Israel was not slowing down in its effort to eliminate top leaders of a regime it considers an existential threat."

"'We are undermining this regime in the hope of giving the Iranian people an opportunity to remove it,' Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said, although he conceded that would 'not happen easily.' The death of Mr. Larijani also renews serious questions about President Trump’s endgame for the war: he has not clearly articulated his goals or how the assault on Iran might end, and he has acknowledged that many of the Iranian officials that the United States might have negotiated with have been killed. 'We don’t even know their leaders,' Mr. Trump said on Monday. 'We have people wanting to negotiate,' he added. 'We have no idea who they are.'"

From "Iran War Live Updates: Israel Says It Has Killed Iran’s De Facto Leader/Ali Larijani, Iran’s top security official, was killed in an overnight strike, the Israeli military said. His death would deal another severe blow to Iran’s power structure" (NYT).

An angel gets his wings.

Me and Meade, after the blizzard:

AND: Here's Meade's video of this morning's sunrise:

I love the music he chose — "Wichita Lineman." The lush instrumentation prevented me from really liking it at the time, but it's great now. I enjoy the subtle evocation of telegraph noise, which made me think of another old song with a representation of telegraph noise. It's much noisier:

That's "Western Union," by The Five Americans. I played it out loud for Meade, and then I played another Five Americans song with a title that had caught my eye.

Meade liked it and asked me what it was called. I told him and he sent me another video:

 

"This new kind of city is a sharp break with the past. For most of human history, people lived and worked in the same place..."

"... and cities grew up around that basic fact. They transform, rebuild after fires and disasters and become richer and sometimes poorer, but they draw their resilience from their rootedness, the fact that people feel they belong there. To say 'I am a New Yorker' or a Londoner or 'I am from Pittsburgh' or Detroit or Rome or Barcelona — that is not just a map. It conveys a deep sense of history, belonging and meaning, a personal identity, not just a transaction. Those identities are messy and unequal, but they are substantial. They are one of the primary ways people answer the basic questions of who they are and where they belong. And they are part of what brings people back to hang on and rebuild, no matter what.... Place, kinship and a shared way of life were the basic materials of human identity...."

Writes Richard Florida, in "Could This Be the End of Dubai? (NYT).

"The war is a reminder that no city, no matter how go-go and glamorous, can buy its way out of the forces of history and geography.... For many, [Dubai is] not a real home. And so when the going gets rough, why would they stick around?"

The man in the video stammers: "Oh my, they's over the beach club. It's fucking mental. Look at that. Literally literally directly above us. That is insane. They were so loud. That is fucking mental. That is that is that is that is oh my god. I have no words. In the safest country — uh, city — in the world. Wow."

AND: What I get from Florida's presentation of the problem is that it's a mistake to want to live in "this new kind of city" like Dubai. It lacks meaning and humanity. It's "not a real home." But some people do relocate to places like this, and then if war spills over into it, they're surprised that something real happens. They thought they were in a disembodied paradise, so the intrusion of reality seemed "fucking mental." But it's the disembodied paradise that's insane. You're a human being. Live somewhere human or be flummoxed when humanity arrives. 

At the Snow Blow Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

***

Some of you would like to know if I lost my snow bet. I win if there was no more than 10 inches of snow. I'm seeing 10.9 inches in one place. That may be right, so I probably lost. Let me know if you have a more accurate reading. The stakes are zero.

"The move would topple a key figurehead but leave in place the repressive Communist government that has ruled Cuba for more than 65 years."

"The Americans have signaled to Cuban negotiators that the president must go, but are leaving the next steps up to the Cubans, the people said. The United States so far is not pushing for any action against Castro family members, who remain the country’s top power brokers, two of the people said. That is consistent with the general desire of Mr. Trump and his aides to force regime compliancerather than regime change in their foreign policy...."

From "Trump Administration Said to Tell Cuba That Its President Has to Go/The United States has told Cuba that for meaningful progress to be made in negotiations, President Miguel Díaz-Canel must step down, said people familiar with the talks" (NYT).

The article at the link on "force regime compliance" is especially interesting: "Trump and Rubio’s Vision of War: The Art of Destroy and Deal/Unleashing his inner hawk, Secretary of State Marco Rubio plans President Trump’s military interventions. So far, they favor regime compliance, not change":

Dr. Paul Erlich, author of "The Population Bomb," has died, so let's go back to 1970 and watch him on "The Tonight Show."

Johnny Carson has had Erlich as a guest before, and this time he has him on in a debate with Ben Wattenburg, author of "The Nonsense Explosion." I've cued the video to start at that point, but if you like Buddy Hackett, there's an hour of Buddy before the Erlich/Wattenberg debate begins.

Here's the NYT obituary: "Paul R. Ehrlich, Who Alarmed the World With ‘The Population Bomb,’ Dies at 93/His best-selling 1968 book, which forecast global famines, made him a leader of the environmental movement. But he faced criticism when his predictions proved premature."

Premature? You mean wrong? How wrong was he? He was so wrong that [insert Johnny Carson joke]...

And you can read Wattenberg's original 1970 essay here, at the American Enterprise Institute website: "The Nonsense Explosion." Excerpt:

The strong position on population control ultimately comes around to some form of government permission, or licensing, for babies....

"Ben sold out to get richer... that's it, end of!"/"These two bozos have made their fortune from Cookie Dough Icecream. And they think they have the ethical high ground?"

"He sold the company to get very very rich but he still wants control...."/"Mr Cohen you sold out, move on, use the money to campaign for your beliefs in other ways"/"They are bores. If they wanted to keep their progressive policies above the need for maximum profitability they should have retained ownership and never sold their business...."

The commenters are pretty much unanimous on the London Times article titled "Ben & Jerry’s founder attacks Peltz fund influence over Magnum/Ben Cohen steps up his feud with the ice-cream brand’s owner as a partner from the Trian hedge fund joins the Magnum board."

The legal dispute is the opposite of ice cream: "Magnum... has been accused of ousting directors on Ben & Jerry’s independent board, which was established to control its social mission when Cohen and Greenfield sold the business to Unilever for $326 million in 2000.... Cohen.... described the recent Ben & Jerry’s board changes as 'a blatant violation of the legally binding agreement put in place over 25 years ago to ensure the brand’s values would always be protected.'"

"It’s a little under four minutes long, all told, but you’ll watch it at least four times over, then wonder if it’s a joke, if Melania is a wind-up merchant playing a complex, hilarious long game..."

"... with an unknowable outcome, if AI has its grubby little robot mitts on it... or if it’s symptomatic of the damage social media has wrought more generally on words, on rhetoric, if a billion drivel-addled Instagram posts have rendered language so empty, so narcissistic, directionless, and light on pith, what more can you expect? Then you think: yeah, but she really did help get 19 kids back home to parents...."

Writes Polly Vernon, in "Is Melania Trump really a 'visionary'? She certainly thinks so!/Everything we learnt about the first lady from her recent White House speech" (London Times).

Vernon calls the speech "just mental." It's: "An elevated puking up of fundamentally unconnected words that do achieve a startling clarity a few times, just not in a good way — ie, when she declared herself 'a visionary,' which I’m not sure anyone should ever do (even if they are one)."

“Often alone, at the top, I follow my passion, listen to my instincts and always maintain a laser focus,” Melania continues.... “In solitude, my creative mind dances, feeding my imagination with originality. Attention to detail, demanding schedules and multi-tasking are everyday realities.”...

Listen for yourself:

The blizzard so far.

Meade is a snow sweeper:

Gwyneth Paltrow's dress was my favorite Oscars look when I saw it from the front in the NYT.

So well-fitted, elegant, and simple. But now, I'm seeing the side and the effect is entirely different. It's trending on X, and people aren't sure that it's not a complete accident or an accidentally-on-purpose "accident":

Gwyneth Paltrow is facing backlash after wearing this dress at the Oscars pic.twitter.com/8y7e7ynG0j

— USA NEWS 🇺🇸 (@usanewshq) March 16, 2026

My prompt to Grok: Do non-stupid people seriously think this might have been an accident? And: I think if an opening that extensive happened by accident, the dress would have fallen off (unless she'd quickly grabbed the whole thing, which she didn't).

I'm seeing some dummies using the cliché "wardrobe malfunction." Let's remember that the first use of that expression was in an accidentally-on-purpose nonaccident. 

MEANWHILE: Gwyneth is auctioning off a lot of her old clothes — clothes that are so normal and un-expensive you might want to just wear them.

"Your need for approval is like a sickness."

A gem of meaning at 3:14 in this video of the opening of the Oscars show last night.

Not having seen the movies, I experienced this noisy cluttered barrage of vignettes as ugly chaos. It reminded me — with jarring pokes and jabs — why I don't want to see new movies anymore. Why was Conan in overdone makeup that made him look like a very ugly woman? Why did animated Conan develop stars in his eyes for 3 adolescent girls? Why were children screaming and chasing him? He stops for a moment to speak Norwegian and examine whether his need for approval is like a sickness and then the children screaming chase him out of the psychoanalytic dark Norwegian room. It's back to the noisy cluttered barrage that is Hollywood as Conan runs into the theater. I don't know what movie those children were supposed to represent, so I was just thinking generically of Hollywood's exploitation of children. How did the children become the monsters? Or were they running from monsters and Conan running with them, not away from them? At least tell a clear story. But no, I think this years stories were about chaos and raw fear and uncomprehended monsters. 

"What about sex dolls?"

Chris Williamson asks Dr. Debra Soh (who's got the perfect demeanor and speech style for talking about sex research):

MAHAspital.

"I slept with the guy who created it!"

Jane Fonda on her “Block the Merger” pin, saying that she “slept with the guy” who created CNN and doesn’t want to see the network owned by Paramount.

Vanity Fair #Oscar Party pic.twitter.com/bNj93GuO8A

— Variety (@Variety) March 16, 2026

This is a rare opportunity to use my old tag "charming bad logic."

And I enjoyed the garbled articulation: "The murders are going to be bad for workers."

"But history shows that economists and researchers have been terrible at predicting the effects of new technologies on work and workers..."

"... so take forecasts like this one seriously but not literally. Even researchers cranking out studies of AI in workplaces caution that they’re making useful but fallible best guesses. 'All the important questions about AI’s effects on the labor market are still unanswered,' Jed Kolko, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, recently concluded. Economists at Anthropic, the AI start-up behind the Claude chatbot, stressed the need for 'humility' in their analysis of AI seeping into occupations. (Humility is uncommon in Silicon Valley.)

From "Jobs least and most vulnerable to AI" (WaPo)("See which jobs are most threatened by AI and who may be able to adapt"). 

I would have expended one of my 10 monthly gift links on this — so you could fiddle with the graphic depictions — but the graphics are so fussy and overwhelming that I couldn't find the gift-link button. Is that me being vulnerable, unadaptable, and replaceable or is that The Washington Post showing its decline?

Anyway, I like the idea that humility is coming into vogue in A.I. world. Or is that part of its plan to trick us into letting it take over everything?

At the Ice Shove Café...

... you can talk all night.

That's Meade's photo, taken at sunrise. I wasn't there today. I slept until almost 7. Very strange for me! And now there's a blizzard warning:

So I'm not picturing us getting out there tomorrow morning. We shall see. My side of the bet is there will be no more than 10" of snow. It's the wind that makes it a blizzard, and 40 to 45 mph is a lot of wind. Still, that scary-sounding warning has me winning the bet. It says 5 to 10 inches of snow. A few days ago, they were saying 3 feet of snow.

Are you watching the Oscars?

I'm not. I really couldn't care less. I haven't gone out to see a movie once this past year, and I don't think I've watched a single new movie on TV, even though we pay for multiple streaming services. What's the Best Picture nominee with Leonardo DiCaprio — something like "One Battle After Another" — that been on Netflix — or is it HBO — for months, and I've never even clicked the button to start it?

I did watch Ben Shapiro run through all the Best Picture nominees, and he didn't like any of them and made me feel that I'd like them even less than he did:

I watched a movie from 1928 the other day — "The Circus." And I've been watching the 2006 movie "Marie Antoinette":

"I just found out that our song 'Whip It' is trending on TikTok."

"That's pretty amazing.... It's incredible that a whole new generation is now interested in this song."

"Corinthian is the highest order, and that’s what our other two branches of government have."

"Why the White House didn’t originally use them, at least on the north front, which is considered the front door, is beyond me."

Said Rodney Mims Cook Jr., "the Trump appointee who chairs the Commission of Fine Arts, a federal panel charged with advising the president on design matters, said in an interview last week," quoted in "Appointee wants to replace White House columns with the ones Trump prefers/The head of a federal arts commission is proposing the more ornate Corinthian style for the nearly 200-year-old columns at the building’s front entrance" (WaPo)(gift link, so you can see the drawings showing the number and location of the longstanding Ionic columns and the Corinthian columns to be built in the new East Wing).

We're told that Trump prefers Corinthian columns but also that, according to a White House spokesperson, "there are no plans to change the existing Ionic columns outside the White House." It's just Cook spreading the alarm about redoing the scroll-y tops into those leafy tops.

Do you have any preference with regard to the tops of Greek columns? Do you care what it meant to the Greeks or even understand the notion of "the highest order"?

"Part of the silver lining is that we have a much better view now."

Life on a landslide:

"You're not bored, are you?"

I looked up that clip from my second-favorite TV series — "Joe Pera Talks With You" — after running across this wonderfully evocative examination of the question whatever happened to the wet set, a TikTok video that got the perfect comment: "I still have a weekly roller set lady 😁 she gets the whole thing teased. It’s the highlight of my week":

"One man who has already walked that perimeter in its entirety is the photographer Quintin Lake, who did so over 454 days in spells between 2015 and 2020..."

"... walking 12 to 24 miles each day. But in order to achieve his mission he had to frequently cut inland to walk along roads or trespass over private land. 'There was a lot of climbing over fences and having a series of unpleasant encounters with people saying: "What are you doing on my land?,"' said Lake, 50.... 'From a hiker’s point of view, when you have a well-maintained path and good waymarking it just makes it much more relaxing. I was super-impressed with the Welsh coast path. And in Scotland it is magnificent — as long as you respect the use of the land there you are treated as an adult with common sense.... [T]here’s something about long-distance walking in Britain that’s so peaceful and so varied. Every day is very, very different. That’s especially the thrill of coastal walking. You can walk through a city and then just a few hours later you’re on a wild cliff. It changes all the time.'"

From "King Charles coastal path to open all 2,700 miles for walking in England/Providing right of access to the entire coast for the first time, it will be the longest of its kind in the world" (London Times).

"He's a total dork talking to these hypomasculine influencers... He makes them all look like idiots, and he's not even doing much...."

"There's something about 'the Louis touch' that makes it compelling. It's kind of how dorky John Wilson can make a documentary about scaffolding in New York City and I'm riveted...."

So said a TikTokker I love — Touré — and because I am John Wilson's biggest fan (I think), I watched the Netflix documentary "Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere":

With the comparison to John Wilson, I went into this Netflix experience with really high hopes, and these were not met. But it's not as if Theroux and Netflix had promised to be like John Wilson. Compared to John Wilson, Theroux is ferocious and macho. And Wilson doesn't go after people to take them down. He seems ready to love anybody and seems mostly to want to open up quirky new paths and to whimsically pursue them. By contrast, Theroux has locked onto some people he loathes and intends to take down. He's using a standard journalistic technique of seeming low-key and neutral. He's lying in wait. That's how you lie in wait. Now, that can be good, but I came away from the documentary disappointed.

So I went looking for some writing that would help me explore my disappointment. I chose "Louis Theroux’s Pointless Manosphere Documentary" by River Page in The Free Press.