The sky was very angry this morning.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

"In the days before the sentence was carried out, she had tried to keep living as if nothing was about to happen... She showered and wore thick felt-like clothes..."

"... to absorb the blows as much as possible.... What surprised Roody most, she said, was the appearance of the female officer carrying out the flogging. She said: 'She was an older woman in a black chador, with a thick moustache. She was religious. It was strange. If you saw her somewhere else, you would never imagine this was her job. She looked ordinary.' She said the woman seemed to be trying to be gentle, but that did not lessen the violence. 'It did not stop me from hating them,' said Roody.... 'I hated her polite, ceremonial tone,' she said, adding: 'She spoke to me as if she were doing something normal. Before it started, she even joked and said: "Are you scared? Don’t worry, the whip is very thin and I won’t hit hard." Then she took out a Quran. She prayed and closed it. They try to cleanse their own dirty work.... She had made a few promises to herself before the punishment, one of which was that she would not make a sound. 'I came home with my head held high, the way I wanted,' she said. For Roody, the punishment was not only physical. It was designed to humiliate and was part of a longer history of violence against women...."

From "I danced until 2am… then it was off to my flogging/An Iranian rapper and critic of regime was determined to show no suffering as a woman in a black chador put down her Quran and picked up her whip" (London Times).

"Trump seemed very low-T in his East Room address."

Taunts Maureen Dowd, in "Low-T, High Chair" (NYT).

I’m surprised that Pete Hegseth, who says his “High-T Department of War” will start screening testosterone levels of “war fighters” age 30 and older, didn’t rush over to shoot up the flaccid 80-year-old commander in chief with the elixir of manhood needed, as he put it, to give America “the leading edge of lethality.”.... 

There was barely a peep from Republicans on Capitol Hill about the speech.... You could almost hear the fervent wish of Republican lawmakers watching the president: Please, Donald, move on! But he can’t. His father’s admonition that there are only "killers" and "losers" plays in a loop in his head, reducing him to jelly.... 

[H]e seemed impotent, raving about nonsense....

Tearing Trump down like that, Dowd adds to the mythology of male sexuality as the center of strength, courage, and reason. That's not feminism. 

"Many of these candidates claim to espouse progressive beliefs that are similar to Graham. The thing is, it was never about the bullet points..."

"... but rather the way he was willing to speak to any issue directly and honestly that made voters love and trust him."

Said Spencer Toth, who was Graham Platner’s organizing director, quoted in "Without Platner, Maine Democrats Scramble to Keep Grassroots Energy Alive/Graham Platner’s campaign for Senate imploded last week. The activists who backed him are seeking a candidate to carry his populist message in the race against Republican Susan Collins" (NYT).

***

"Have you seen this clip?" I was asked yesterday, by a family member who texted me a clip that you might be about to link to in the comments.

My answer: "Yeah. I didn’t blog about it because I thought people would just be mean to that person who obviously didn’t belong there...."

The NYT doesn't discuss this person, Ashley Webb, but I can see that she was included in that special Democratic U.S. Senate debate. Originally, the debate was going to be limited to 4 candidates who had won at least 20% of the vote in the Democratic primaries for governor or U.S. House. When people complained about that they opened it to everyone who had filed a formal "intent to run." That was one part of the massive screwup that is ruining the Democrats’ chance to unseat Susan Collins. Laughing at Webb is low and beside the point. 

"Theodore Roosevelt way more badass than you thought."

"Firstly, he had a fight club in the basement of the White House...."

"Very conservative messaging... once you violate the natural law, that has infectious effects. The idea that human beings are greedy and venal."

"You see that in the scene with Circe where the men are turned into pigs.... These men get addicted to eating and then she physically manipulates their bodies into the bodies of pigs.... thematically pretty interesting. And the idea is that he has to violate Zeus's law essentially one last time....  The thematic, I think, is kind of great...."

Says Ben Shapiro, strongly praising "The Odyssey," and not just because it has "very conservative messaging."

Midway through the long review, Ben turns to the supposed flaws conservatives have been talking about.

"You left them to pack their suitcase and they brought three pairs of pants.... 'Choose your battles...' Forgetting pants isn’t catastrophic."

"Tell your teens, 'It’s my holiday too, and the things that will make it feel like a holiday for me are not having to hassle you all the time, being able to read my book on the sun lounger, and not being the dogsbody doing all the work.'"

I'm reading The London Times — "How to have a holiday with your teenager — without arguments/Sun, sea… and sulking? Teens can test your patience when you go away. The psychologist Dr Beth Mosley gives her advice" — so I need to be on the lookout for Britishism. 

Sometimes they're not so obvious. I was all, what's wrong with 3 pairs of pants? Too many pants — right? — so maybe there aren't enough shirts? But, no, "forgetting pants isn’t catastrophic"? How has the kid forgotten pants if he brought 3 pairs of pants? How long is this vacation? Oh, I get it...  pants. When they say "pants," they mean underpants.

"Dogsbody" you can see is something they must say that we don't say, but "pants" flew under the radar.

"I'll have got used to being a dog's body," wrote T. E. Lawrence in 1922.

"Is that a fake fight? I find it hard to believe Tom Brady would just hit a guy."

I say, reacting to this, which X pushed at me this morning:

TOM BRADY AND LOGAN PAUL ALMOST THREW HANDS AT FANATICS FEST

👀🍿 pic.twitter.com/mks597nXn0

— FADE (@FadeAwayMedia) July 17, 2026

I was using the Grok fact check. I was told, "It's a genuine onstage slap" that might be "real emotion mixed with promotional flair, not a fully scripted WWE-style fake fight."

My next 3 prompts were: 1. "Arrest Brady," and 2. "If that doesn't deserve arrest then it's bullshit theater and we shouldn't be duped into paying attention," 3. "It was put in my X sidebar, like it's supposed to matter to me. I don't want to be used like that."

Grok told me: "X's algorithm surfaces high-engagement viral clips like this Brady-Paul moment to boost time-on-site, as fights, celebs, and drama reliably drive views, likes, and comments regardless of personal relevance." It advised me to mute keywords like "Fanatics Fest," which opened up a window on how awful entertainment is these days. "Fanatics" doesn't refer to the fans, but to a sports licensing company that stages events "to monetize collector hype and direct-to-consumer sales."

Why would X's algorithm prompt me to look at that, and more importantly, why does entertainment suck these days?

Another smoky sunrise.

That's a photo by Meade. I did not go out because the AQI was "very unhealthy." 

Talk about whatever you like in the comments.

ADDED: Trump at Truth Social: "We are holding Canada responsible... the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable!"

"The artist Edward Gorey (1925-2000) ornamented his correspondence with elaborate drawings."

"Each year, the Edward Gorey House on Cape Cod runs an all-ages envelope art contest. This year’s theme is 'The Utter Zoo.' You have until Dec. 1 to submit envelopes decorated accordingly. The website suggests 'a compilation of creatures, a bestiary, a compendium of the fictional, plausible, cranky, vengeful or just highly undomesticated.'... My favorite winners from last year are the ones from little children who seem deeply imaginative but not necessarily artistically gifted in the classic sense. A friend told me recently about taking a singing class with a guy who couldn’t hold a tune but who was so passionate that the teacher gave him a solo in the class’s final presentation. Of course his performance was the one the audience found the most stirring...."

Writes Melissa Kirsch, in "The Good List: 6 Things to Add Some Delight to Your Day" (NYT).

Click on that link for winners from last year. Lots of great stuff, mostly by the artistically gifted. As for singers who can't hold a tune but are powerfully passionate... reminds me of the early years of "American Idol." It's highly amusing... up to a point. And these days, what's the problem? All the singers are auto-tuned. 

"Where are the gods in all of this? They appear in the film the way they would appear to humans: through thunder and lightning, through the elation of triumph..."

"... and the experience of pain and longing. Among the major gods, only Athena is personified (by an ethereal Zendaya), but she is not the warrior goddess of the poem. She is more like a projection of Odysseus’s own conscience, materializing the way an angel might land on one’s shoulder. She represents his desire for goodness, home, and order. (In the scenes of Troy’s sacking, we return to a repeated image of Athena’s statue being beheaded, the ultimate violation.) This is all very far from the dominant film depiction of Greek mythology that I remember from my own childhood, 1981’s Clash of the Titans, in which the gods hang out together in togas on Mount Olympus, with Laurence Olivier as Zeus dictating much of the action."

Writes Gal Beckerman, in "The Odyssey Was Never About the Gods/Christopher Nolan’s largely deity-free blockbuster adaptation only highlights the humanity of the original" (The Atlantic)(gift link).

"All the water. No police. No help me. No help me."

At the L.A. water main break:

Kitties and puppies that have annoyed me this morning.

There's this at the top of the home page at Smithsonian Magazine: "15 Kitten Photos That Will Make You Feel as Warm and Fuzzy as the Tiny Felines Themselves/These moments from the Smithsonian Magazine Photo Contest highlight curious kittens from around the world." We're told these are "the most adorable creatures... the cutest fluffy kittens that are sure to warm your heart." No, that is false. My heart is not warmed. This magazine's asserted mission is: "Smithsonian Media exists for the sole purpose of increasing and diffusing knowledge." What's the knowledge here? Kittens are cute?

In the canine category of my annoyance, I know it serves me right for scrolling through TikTok in the morning, but TikTok somehow saw fit to serve up this thing that I know some people must love but it's exactly the sort of thing I loathe:

A rosy prediction: Unhealthy. Up from Very Unhealthy.

"What Trump did NOT do was even purport to show a single ineligible voter voted in the 2020 election, or..."

"... that any voting machines were actually compromised, voting machines or voter registration databases breached, or election results inaccurately reported. Overall, this was an underwhelming announcement delivered with low energy that changes nothing about how state and local election administrators should run elections. If his government had actual evidence of noncitizen voting, there would be indictments; Trump has been hounding US attorneys to bring such cases, and the fact that he hasn’t shows that these claims likely have no legs.... He also did not offer anything new by way of policy proposals...."

Writes Rick Hasen, in "Trump’s Underwhelming Announcement on Voting Does Not Even Purport to Show That Any Illegal Votes Were Cast in the 2020 Election or That Voting Machines Have Been Hacked or Vote Totals Inaccurate; He Also Made a Pitch to Pass the SAVE America Act But Offered No New Federal Mandates" (Election Law Blog).

See for yourself: 

He started off as if he really wanted to give a State of the Union speech:

"First introduced in 1962, the Peanut Butter Floor (Pindakaasvloer) is a conceptual artwork covered with a thick layer of peanut butter."

"The humorous, absurd nature of the work raises questions like 'is this art?' and 'am I allowed to find this beautiful?,' reflecting [the late Dutch artist and comedian Wim T.] Schippers’ belief that art does not necessarily have to be logical or useful, it may as well 'be absurd – just like life itself – and that is precisely what makes it worthwhile.' Rather than exhibiting the preserved floor from 1962, the installation is recreated each time according to the artist’s precise instructions.... 'it requires 15.6 kilos of smooth peanut butter (not chunky) per square meter, no one should stand or lie on the peanut butter floor, the peanut butter should be applied as smoothly and monotonously as possible, and the work should not be approached with any educational purpose.'..."

From "390kg of peanut butter cover rotterdam gallery floor, celebrating humor and absurdity" (designboom).

Here's the Wikipedia page for Wim T. Schippers, who died last month at the age of 83. Excerpt: " During the 1960s, he worked mostly as a visual artist, associated with the international Fluxus-movement. As a television writer, director, and actor he was responsible for some of the most notable and controversial shows on Dutch televisions from the 1960s to the 1990s, creating a number of lasting characters and creating terms and expressions which entered wide usage. In addition, he voiced the characters of Ernie and Kermit the Frog on Sesamstraat, the Dutch version of Sesame Street."

And: "Schippers' art work is praised for its sense of humor; when a dozen journalists stood pensively around the peanut butter platform, Schippers cried out, 'Isn't this fantastic! We're all watching peanut butter!'"

Sunrise in the smoke.

It was actively hazardous out there this morning, so we grabbed a few shots from the nearest vantage point, jumped in the car and went back to our sealed-up house where, we believe, the air is relatively smoke-free.

Write about whatever you like in the comments.

"Pete Hegseth wants a manly military. And he really, really wants you to know how badly he wants a manly military."

"In his 2024 book, The War on Warriors, Hegseth worried that the military risked becoming 'effeminate, and apologetic'; he insisted that what liberals really want is 'soft men, and a weak military,' and he scolded 'Pentagon pussies' who refuse to stand up for soldiers on the battlefield. As secretary of defense, Hegseth has blocked the promotion of female military officers, removed the first woman to lead the Navy, and ordered a review of women’s 'effectiveness' in ground-combat roles. He has also used the Defense Department’s social-media channels to post a steady stream of tougher-than-thou videos...."

So begins the Atlantic article, "Pete Hegseth Wants YOU to Test Your Testosterone/The secretary of defense has a questionable plan to monitor the hormone levels of every service member over 30" (gift link).

In the maroon zone.

ADDED: "Live Updates: Wildfire Smoke Pushes Air Quality to Dangerous Levels for Millions/Dense smoke from Canadian wildfires is choking a vast stretch of the Northeast and Upper Midwest. Officials encouraged residents, including in New York, to stay indoors" (NYT): "As wildfires rage in Ontario, driving a haze of smoke over New York and other parts of the United States, officials in the Canadian province are bracing for a potential escalation and widespread community evacuations. Roughly 135 active wildfires were burning across northwestern Ontario as of Wednesday night, with more than half a dozen new fires reported late that evening...."

"Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee are urging the nation’s top spy chiefs to stop President Donald Trump if he tries to declassify cherry-picked intelligence material that unfairly sows doubt about the 2020 election..."

“.... during his primetime address Thursday evening.... Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee fear the president’s true aim is to justify a federal power grab over America’s voting infrastructure ahead of the midterms.... The letter comes one day after Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, Jay Clayton, refused to say during his Senate confirmation hearing that Joe Biden fairly won the 2020 vote — alarming Democrats who thought highly of Clayton heading into the day. Last week, Trump also fired the two Democratic commissioners of the Election Assistance Commission.... In its after-action report on the 2020 election, the U.S. intelligence community concluded that China 'considered but did not deploy' any attempts [sic] to influence voter perceptions, but acknowledged that some intelligence community analysts disagreed. Vulnerabilities in U.S. voting machines have long been known to election officials, who argue they can be mitigated...."

Politico reports, in "House Dems warn of weaponized intel ahead of Trump’s speech/In a letter sent Thursday, Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee expressed concern Trump will selectively declassify spy material to 'relitigiate [sic] debunked 2020 election conspiracies.'"

Politico has a second article portraying Republicans as anxious about the speech: "'Scared s–tless': Republicans brace for Trump’s primetime speech/Rehashing grievances about the 2020 election could motivate the Republican base and press GOP lawmakers to pass the SAVE America Act": "'The people I talk to are scared shitless,' said a former Trump administration official, granted anonymity to speak candidly. 'It’s not scared shitless about the text of what he’s going to say, it’s, what does he add to the text?'"

"I do love revenge, I will say that,' adds Meeropol, 57, taking a sip from an iced Americano... 'I’d always loved revenge movies."

That's from "The woman behind E Jean Carroll: I do love revenge, I will say that/Ivy Meeropol has made a film starring one of Trump’s biggest foes. And she has her own beef with the president — dating back to her grandparents’ execution" (London Times).

Meeropol = Ivy Meeropol, the documentarian who made a movie about the man, Roy Cohn, who "helped to send her grandparents, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, to the electric chair, leaving her father orphaned at the age of ten." Now, Meeropol has a movie about E. Jean Carroll.

A few days ago, Carroll finally received the $5.6 million she won in her lawsuit against Trump, and Meeropol said: "This historic moment shows that our legal system — established almost 250 years ago to serve as a check against absolute power — still works. E Jean used to sign off from her television show in the mid-Nineties saying, 'Fate loves the fearless,' and it couldn’t be more appropriate today...."

Much has been made of the fact that Carroll is not a perfect MeToo victim.

"Whenever celebrities say that they're just getting nude as a form of self-expression... I have a question."

"How often are they just walking around their house nude, like by themselves, or are they just wearing PJs like a normal person? Like, as as a normal part of self-expression, do you just like walk around nude... do you walk nude to the grocery store as a form of self-expression? You know, just walking around in public nude... Would you be walking around as a form of, you know, just knowing yourself? Would you be walking around naked?"

Ben Shapiro — listening to Miley Cyrus talk to Monica Lewinsky — asks, rhetorically, because he's very sure the answer is no.

 

But maybe you yourself or somebody you've known does walk the face of the earth nude because that's who they really are.

I know I've said this before and maybe I was quoting someone else, but I just spent an absurd amount of time searching for that, unsuccessfully, so I'm just going to try to say it again, though I'm quite convinced I said it better that other time: Nudes have virtually no role in human history.

JD Vance on Joe Rogan.

I'm only an hour and a half into this, but it seems the 2 men are handling themselves well enough:

Sunrise.

Talk about whatever you want in the comments.

Get ready. It's coming. That thing you thought you wanted.

This will be such a nightmare. pic.twitter.com/qrD03wxEdl

— Julian Mille☈ (@ATLAreaWx) July 14, 2026

Children going to school in the dark. Dangerous. It will become obvious. A child's name will be on the repeal legislation.

ADDED: It’s important to note that morning light does not begin at sunrise. It’s already getting light an hour before sunrise, and half an hour before sunrise you’re free of the sense that you’re going out into the night. Using the sunrise as the time that matters is alarmist.

"If Julius Caesar had debuted this year, William Shakespeare might have been accused of writing it with AI."

"A certain suspicious rhetorical device appears again and again in the play. It’s in Act I, Scene ii: 'The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.' In Act III, Scene ii: 'Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more.' And later in that same scene: 'I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.' These famous lines include what has become perhaps the best-known tic of AI writing—a sentence that tells you what the subject isn’t as well as what it is: It’s not X; it’s Y. Once you start noticing the construction, you see it all over the place...."

Writes Will Oremus, in "The Most Famous AI Writing Tic Is Also the Most Mysterious/Why chatbots love 'it’s not X, it’s Y'" (The Atlantic)(gift link).

"Although chatbots have advanced dramatically in their research and reasoning capacities, they are still fundamentally text-prediction machines. They generate answers one “token”—or chunk of text—at a time, based on what has come before. Each successive word choice factors in both the statistical likelihood of that word coming next in a sequence, based on patterns in the original training data, and the likelihood that it will lead to a highly rated response overall. In other words, the models are always seeking a balance between the clever word choice and the obvious one. When a chatbot uses negative parallelism, according to this theory, it’s essentially hedging between the two...."

"Like many terrible things, we can blame therapyspeak on America’s stupidest decade: the 1970s."

"Back then, it was called psychobabble.... The concept survived the hedonistic ’80s, the grimy ’90s, and the low-rise aughts only to reemerge in the social media age with a new name and a more sinister purpose.... Isn’t it odd... that the most selfish people you know always seem to be the ones who are armchair diagnosing their friends and family with personality disorders? I’m reminded of the minor scandal that erupted a few years ago when an A-list actor allegedly wrote private messages to his then girlfriend telling her that if she needed to post photos of herself in a bathing suit, he was not the right partner for her. Elsewhere he wrote, 'I’d love to know before the premiere so I’m not put in the position of publicly flaunting our love if my boundaries are going to be continued to be disrespected. That would be hurtful and triggering for me.' The girlfriend was a professional surfer...."

From "You're Not a Therapist. Stop Talking Like One/Please respect everyone else's boundaries by keeping your psychobabble to yourself" (Vanity Fair).

This is an important general issue, but if you're interested in the A-list actor part of it, here's a Newsweek article from 2023: "Jonah Hill, Sarah Brady Text Messages—Full Transcript." It's really long and a massive invasion of privacy. Why did Newsweek publish all that? Or maybe the better question is why do people have their arguments via text? Why would anyone want to leave a cold record for the whole world to read? And this was a man concerned with "boundaries."

Sunrise.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

Upwelling.

The water around the Apostle Islands was 70°F yesterday afternoon and 46°F this morning — a 24° drop, so it says on the Apostle Islands page at Facebook.

The cause is something called upwelling. Steady southwest winds pushed the warm surface water away from shore, and to replace it, frigid water from deep in the lake rose up to take its place. Lake Superior is cold and deep, so there's always an icy reserve waiting just below the surface. Give the wind the right angle and it comes straight up to the top....  Upwelling usually reverses once the winds shift, so the warmth will likely creep back in a few days. But this is a classic reminder of what makes Superior, Superior.

"Many people have talked about how funny Senator Graham was...What I remember about that hearing was that somehow Senator Graham made me look funny..."

"... which is a harder thing entirely, by asking me what I had done on Christmas...many people said to me afterwards that exchange with Senator Graham was the moment my confirmation was sealed."

Said Justice Kagan, testifying today before a House Appropriations subcommittee about the Supreme Court's budget:

Justice Elena Kagan on her 2010 confirmation hearing: "Many people have talked about how funny Senator Graham was...What I remember about that hearing was that somehow Senator Graham made me look funny, which is a harder thing entirely, by asking me what I had done on… pic.twitter.com/U6IFdoGIwN

— CSPAN (@cspan) July 14, 2026

And here's the exchange with Graham at her confirmation hearing, back in 2010:

"And for an only-would-be-famous person — that is, a civilian who is active on social media — cigarettes are a playful, blasé-bad-girl prop."

"A scroll through TikTok and Reels will show plenty of seductive supercuts of smoking scenes in movies and on TV; cult-popular Instagram accounts like @Cigfluencers ('your favourite smoker’s favourite smokers') give fans a place to leave impassioned comments like 'MADE ME WANT A CIG SO BAD' (re: Ava’s Parisian cigarette in the Hacks finale) with only the occasional scold ('Wow, a page dedicated to people who will die early of lung cancer').... Ironically, the efficacy of turn-of-the-century laws banning cigarettes from public spaces... combined with early-aughts anti-smoking campaigns... which worked to keep millennials from being as cigarette-crazed as older generations, have, by the harsh light of 2026, given cigarette smoking the rosy glow of a bad habit from the good old days...."

From "Cigarettes are back in vogue. How did this happen? Celebrities like Dua Lipa and Gracie Abrams have been photographed with cigs, as have social media influencers who like the retro vibes" (WaPo).

"Well, I think the president has zoomed through the first 5 stages of grief and gone straight to #6: Fuck that guy."

"As a college instructor, I see lots of young people in class who clearly hate being there. They don't feel like they were 'made for school'..."

"... they have no idea what they'll do with their diploma once they graduate, they have no particular interest in the program they're in.... My own son was ... pretty lost, after struggling in studies to be a software developer (constantly at home, alone, in front of a computer), then working in customer support for an insurance company (constantly at home, alone, in front of a computer). It wasn't that he couldn't do the work, but he procrastinated, felt many tasks were pointless, and just wasn't happy. But his dad and I both have PhDs and his sister is an MD, and it seemed he felt he 'should' be in university. Then he found out about an opportunity to train as a baker. 8 months of classes and practice in a very good gov't run program (free), then a month as a trainee at a bakery. He lucked into a popular local artisanal place, very well known for their baguettes, croissants and sourdough. They hired him as soon as he was finished, and he's SO HAPPY there! He's interacting with others all day, he's always on the move and always learning, and can see the results of his work immediately (and eat it too!)...."

From a comment at the NYT, on the article "Mom, Dad, I Want to Be a Welder/Gen Z is increasingly turning to trade schools in hopes of future-proofing their careers against A.I. But getting their parents and peers on board can be a challenge."

The Republican never wins the governorship in Colorado, so what do Republican primary voters think they are doing?

I'm reading "He Says He Killed a Man. Republicans Nominated Him Anyway" by Michelle Goldberg in the NYT.

The right-wing preacher turned politician Victor Marx has said that he first killed a man when he was 7. He’s not sure how many deaths he’s been responsible for since. Marx has been arrested at least twice for disorderly conduct and has described terrorizing a psychiatrist with talk of murdering him. He told the Colorado journalist Kyle Clark that he can perform exorcisms by phone. On Thursday he was declared the winner of the Republican gubernatorial primary in Colorado....

The last time the Republican won the governorship, it was 2002.

Goldberg leaves out the details about that killing. Grok relays the story as told by Marx: "severe childhood abuse (physical, sexual, and emotional) by multiple figures, including being beaten, electrocuted, tortured, and nearly killed (e.g., left in a cooler).... stepfather placing a gun in his hands, guiding his finger to pull the trigger, and shooting a man in the back of the head...."

Here's Marx talking to Charlie Kirk 4 years ago:

Sunrise.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

"Up to 50 million tonnes of sugar may have rained down from space on to Earth about four billion years ago, potentially delivering the building blocks of life..."

"... a study has found. Scientists have discovered sugar molecules in clouds of interstellar gas, suggesting a key ingredient for DNA and RNA could have come to our planet from deep space...."

I'm reading "Sugar raining down from space may have helped create life on Earth/Cluster of sweet molecules in Milky Way gas cloud offers clue to possible origins of DNA, astronomers claim" (London Times).

"I recommended, to Governor Henry McMaster, Lindsey Graham’s wonderful sister, Darline, to serve as interim Senator from the Great State of South Carolina."

"This would be a fabulous tribute to Lindsey, who loved her dearly!"

Signed President DONALD J. TRUMP, at Truth Social.

UPDATE: At the time Trump posted, McMaster had already offered Darline Graham Nordone the position and she had accepted, according to the NYT:

Mr. McMaster said that he has asked Ms. Nordone to fill the seat after they spoke “in the wee hours of Sunday morning” following Mr. Graham’s death, and that she accepted, “through tears.” 

“I called the president afterwards, and he thought that it was a great idea,” Mr. McMaster said.

Trump's post went up at 9:43 a.m. today.

Also: "There is a long history in American politics of having the widowed wives of men who die in office finish out their terms. Mr. Graham, who never married, joked when he ran for president that, if he won, maybe his sister would take on the duties of first lady."

"In aiming for a vision of fitness that avoids overemphasis on masculinity, I gravitated away from influencers and biohackers toward strong artists..."

"... who had prioritized physical strength in their daily routines.... There is the cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who in her book 'The Secret to Superhuman Strength' could not talk about fitness without also talking about her private history of romantic relationships and the role exercise played in managing stress and quashing depression.... The novelist Laura van den Berg turned to boxing to combat destructive anxiety patterns.... And I spoke with the poet Hanif Abdurraqib about how running... was about stress relief and managing clinical depression... In a recent interview with Haruki Murakami, the singer Harry Styles credited Mr. Murakami’s book on running with freeing him 'from the idea that music had to be an unhealthy profession and I had to be this tortured soul.'... These artists weren’t going on about perfect blood panels or maximum efficiency or tracking immense protein intake. They cared about feeling alive in their bodies, sleeping well and having the stamina to do meaningful work.... Rather than follow the voice of one supposed strongman, rattling off advice, I learned to favor a chorus...."

Writes Sebastian Langdell, a professor of medieval literature, in "Men Need Better Fitness Role Models" (NYT).

Langdell is rejecting the "fitness bros." He names a few of them — Peter Attia, Tim Ferriss, Andrew Huberman — so aren't the bros, too, a "chorus"? The distinction is not between a "chorus" and "one supposed strongman" but between the practical rules you ought to follow to achieve better fitness and the psychological motivation to pursue it. I don't see why the "chorus" wouldn't include both voices. Even if you feel inspired by Harry and Haruki and Hanif to go running, you'd still want to know if running long or short and fast or slow is more beneficial to your body and your mind.

Am I the only one who remembers this movie?

Wikipedia: "Athanael (Jack Benny), the third trumpet player in the orchestra of a late night radio show sponsored by Paradise Coffee... falls asleep listening to the announcer, who is doing his best to prove it is 'the coffee that makes you sleep.' Athanael dreams he is an angel (junior grade) and a trumpeter in the orchestra of Heaven.... [H]e is given the mission of destroying planet 339001 (Earth) and its troublesome inhabitants by blowing the 'Last Trumpet' at exactly midnight, signaling the end of the world...."

It was released on April 20, 1945 — 8 days after the death of President Roosevelt — and was a box office failure. I watched it in 1964 when it played on "The Early Show" on TV, which means it played every night for a week, Monday through Friday. That gave you and your brother the chance to turn it into a family cult classic complete with commentary and shouted-out memorized lines. 

I love the poster, but that's not a trumpet.

Bellflower.

Video by Meade, at 5:53 a.m. this morning. The color really did pop like that, and Meade said he wanted flowers like these in our front yard.

These are the tall bellflowers — Campanula americana, AKA American bellflower — that are native here. Not to be confused with the creeping bellflower — Campanula rapunculoides AKA European bellflower — that we fight and that our government tells us to fight. Those things are short, 1 to 3 feet tall. The tall bellflower are 3-6 feet tall. Perhaps you can tell from the camera angle.

"[T]hree large blank sheets of paper had been affixed to a wall. On the floor was a basin filled with a viscous liquid, tempera paint mixed with animal blood...."

"Then Mendieta—an energetic and diminutive woman, just five feet tall, if that—walked in, to the accompaniment of a drumbeat, dressed in a baggy white ensemble. She drenched her hands and arms in the mixture, reached to the top of one piece of paper, then forcefully smeared her limbs down the surface to make two bloody tracks, ending up on her knees on the floor. Mendieta performed this action twice more before absenting herself, leaving the audience to contemplate the visceral imprints she left behind.... It’s impossible to view Mendieta’s output and not think about the physical stamina and cultural daring that she must have had—not only to make art from her exposed body but also to hide herself away and make work that might only ever please or satisfy herself...."

From "Ana Mendieta, the Body Artist/Decades after her death, her bold innovations are finally coming into focus" (The New Yorker).

A Monday morning juxtaposition. .

I see this at the top of the NYT right now:

Sterile wealth, romanticized poverty, and mindlessness about sleevelessness.

1. The family of 5: "'Money right now, there’s not enough. Literalmente,' said Ms. Torres, speaking Spanglish. 'Sometimes I feel bad, like I can’t do enough for my kids.'"

2. The Biebers: "The 2,792-square-foot apartment has two kitchens — an open-plan kitchen for entertaining, with marble counters and Scandinavian larch wood cabinetry, and a secondary chef’s kitchen with stainless steel and matte aluminum cabinetry. The primary suite looks out to the Hudson River..." The living room, I see, looks out onto a big TV screen and turns its back on the uninspiring skyline of New Jersey.

3. The presumed dearth of sleeves: "In all of the discussions about body positivity and loving the different parts of you, including the parts of you that decades of social conditioning have deemed potentially problematic, arms, especially the upper arms, are often overlooked...." The letter writer is urged to "rethink the issue" and "learn to love your arms."

Sunrise.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

"We don’t need presidents who have weird obsessions."

Said Kamala Harris, back in October 2020, blogged at the time, here.

I know that at the time I thought I bet all the Presidents have had a weird obsession. I know because I said that in a podcast at the time. 

That post and podcast predated access to Grok, so I didn't have the chance to use this prompt: Accept the hypothesis that every U.S. President had a weird obsession and to list all the Presidents with their weird obsession. I did use it today, though. Some of my favorites:

"Given all the lovemaking, it’s remarkable any of them had time for painting or poetry. But each activity reinforced the next, sex flowing into art..."

"... art turning into sex, all of it transforming what was ostensibly a holiday by the sea among friends into a frenzy of erotic and creative expression — an outpouring that, as Europe girded for war, acquired a rebellious political charge. 'It’s as if the group were thumbing their noses at fascism,' Thomasson writes, their lives and work serving as a 'manifesto for an alternative world to the one that was coming into being.'"

From "Sex and Surrealism on the French Riviera/A group of artists gathered at a hotel on the Côte d’Azur in 1937. A new book by Anna Thomasson captures the art and escapades the holiday inspired" (NYT).

I'm skeptical... but envious.

Is the book readable? Sample text: "We get a powerful sense of physicality. Of bodies, of limbs and breasts and bottoms and penises, alone or entwined, still or in action. We feel the warm sun and salt water on bare skin and sand between toes, intimacy and proximity and responsiveness and desire." It's really hard to write about sex! Actually, that writing reminds me of a podcast I like: "Boring History for Sleep." It goes on and on about how everything looks and feels and smells and sounds. 

Why is "Paint It Black" the most-played Rolling Stones song on Spotify?

Look, it has over 1.7 billion streams. The next most played Stones song — "Satisfaction" — has only 940 million.

I think it's the non-Boomers, discovering it through movies and TV and video games and TikTok. Here's a link to see the 180,000+ TikTok videos that use the recording. It seems quite popular with aviation (for males) and the wearing of black clothing (for females). And then there are tattoos:

"In those two minutes, you ask yourself existential questions about what time even is, what a body even is, what a feeling even is."

"It’s just a sensation, right? But knowing that pain — and there is pain — is just a sensation does not help you right now because that took three seconds to figure out and you still have a wild wagon-train trip to California to go. Did you mention that there’s a man with a ukulele there? He appears to work for this cold-plunge outfit, and he is wearing that dumb hat and quietly strumming — is that? — Leonard Cohen’s 'Hallelujah'? You love that song and have never enjoyed it less. Your hatred for this man only buys seven or eight more seconds, and as you cast your mind about, looking for something else to get you through, a strange thing happens...."

Writes Taffy Brodesser-Akner, in "I Survived a Cold Plunge and All I Got Was Everything I Ever Wanted/I resisted the trend until I couldn’t any longer" (NYT).

By the way, do you need a fancy cold plunge machine or a session at a cold plunge commercial establishment? Can't you just fill up your bathtub with water from the cold tap and maybe toss in the ice that's accumulated in the bin inside the refrigerator? That was a good question for Grok.

"We take what we do very seriously. We’re not making little goody bags — we’re really thinking out what it is people need the most."

Said Jeffrey Newman, quoted in "Jayson Conner, 48, and Jeffrey Newman, 58, Die; Gave Thousands of Backpacks to Those in Need/The couple, who died within a few days of each other, provided needed supplies, like socks and wet wipes, to people living on New York City’s streets" (NYT).

Goodbye to Lindsey Graham.

"Lindsey Graham, longtime senator from South Carolina, dies at 71/Graham, a staunch Trump ally and key GOP foreign policy voice, was running for reelection this year. He died of a 'brief and sudden illness,' his office said" (WaPo)(gift link).