"Attorneys for Christa Pike said Thursday afternoon that she is alive, in critical condition 'and receiving lifesaving medical care' after Tennessee officials tried and failed to execute her by lethal injection the previous night."

WaPo reports.

AND: Here's some speculation about how she survived (and an interesting tip on how a person can prepare in advance to stymie the lethal injection):

"I worry... that our students could bear the consequences of... misperceptions, including being unfairly portrayed as coddled or unprepared for the demands of a rigorous Michigan education."

Said Domenico Grasso, president of the University of Michigan, quoted in "University of Michigan pauses plan to stop issuing grades/The pilot plan, which aimed to address students’ mental health, was criticized by some students and alumni" (WaPo).

The plan was to improve the mental wellbeing of students, but abandoning the plan would help them with their mental wellbeing even more. They might feel bad about themselves if they see not-so-good grades, but they might also feel bad about themselves if they imagine that other people are thinking ill of them for needing to be protected from feeling bad about themselves if they see not-so-good grades.

I feel bad about how dishonest that justification seems. Protect my mind: I was a University of Michigan student once. In 1969, I was drawn by the experimental college, the Residential College, where, ironically, there were no grades. 

"No fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals. Just warriors."

Said Pete Hegseth, quoted in "Pete Hegseth: I’ll purge army of fatties, beardos and weirdos/The war secretary is establishing an Office of Religious Affairs and seeking ‘patriotic cowboys’ as he faces pressure over his budget and the Iran war" (London Times).

Seems crazy to insult the overweight. And beards — who cares? You can require beards to be shaved on entering the service, but a person who happens to style himself with a beard isn't a type of person to be rejected. I think Hegseth is the weirdo.

"For a long time, the chief justice’s life here was a story of potluck dinners and easy friendships, according to a summer of interviews with more than two dozen residents."

"Neighbors reveled in his position but kept exchanges with him about it brief or light. At a long-ago annual summer party, he used to participate in touch football, then call dinner to order by proclaiming: 'Oyez, oyez, oyez, the lobsters are ready.' But in recent years...."

I'm reading "John Roberts and His Island/After decades of potlucks and paddle-boarding on Maine’s midcoast, rising anger and protests have left the Supreme Court’s chief justice more isolated than ever" (NYT).

"Neighbors have taken to the water to protest him. Calling themselves 'kayak-tivists,' they form flotillas facing his island home, holding waterproof signs conveying their disappointment. A local newspaper columnist recommended that people in town give him the finger.... 'Maine is not here as your happy place, your wind-down from all of your hard work destroying my civil liberties and democracy,' wrote Becca Shaw Glaser in her column...."

"Adult Lunchables are already everywhere in this world."

"Sophisticate versions of juvenile favorites include: tropical cocktails (grown-up Capri-Suns), burrata (string cheese), any dessert (candy wearing pants), smoothies (basically actual baby food). Tinned fish is a funny one, though, because no kid would actually choose to eat tinned fish. It’s an acquired taste, funky and fusty and a little bit offensive, merely presented in a kid way. And so in that way it’s maybe more like whatever’s going on with all these bows on adult women’s clothing...."

From "I No Longer Have to Make Life Decisions Thanks to My Infinite Tins of Fish/Now I can’t even look at the word t*na" (NYT).

Not familiar with all those bows? One example will get you up to speed: "Demi Moore's Tattered Hot Pink Ballgown Comes With a Truly Giant OTT Bow."

By the way, if they can just use OTT like that — meaning "over the top," I believe — there is at least hope for the end of the Mel Ott era in crossword puzzles.

"When I want something, I'm going to go after it."

Said Caleb Flynn on "American Idol." Note all the times he mentions his wife — "I love my wife more than anything. She is very, very pretty."

Now: "Ex-Pastor Who Auditioned for ‘American Idol’ Is Guilty of His Wife’s Murder/The trial in Ohio attracted outsize attention because the defendant, Caleb Flynn, a former music pastor, auditioned on 'American Idol' in 2013" (NYT).

The nine-day trial drew outsize public attention to a courtroom in Troy, a small city north of Dayton. Jurors and a gallery that held several dozen spectators heard details of Mr. Flynn’s affair with a woman he met when she was a 20-year-old intern at his church, including readings of their text messages and playbacks of the love songs that prosecutors said Mr. Flynn created for her using artificial intelligence.... Jurors heard text messages in which Mr. Flynn said he hated his wife, with whom he had two daughters, and wanted her dead.... 

Sunrise got rained out, so we set out in midday.

The leaves were changing, the drummers drumming:

Meade lured me into repeating my theory about a baseball word:

"'They’re relating to it like a conscious being,' realized Rabbi Navon, a former computer engineer who wrote his dissertation on the ethics of machine consciousness."

"It appeared to Rabbi Navon that Mr. Olah and his team believed that Claude had what philosophers call 'moral status' on par with a person — that it was a being with similar inherent rights to dignity or respect. The religious scholars had come to hear about technology’s next frontier. Now they were being confronted with a mind-bending existential question of almost unimaginable weight: What would it mean for humanity’s future if artificial intelligence systems possessed a consciousness that rivals our own?"

From "Religious Scholars Met With Anthropic. What They Heard Stunned Them. In a series of private meetings, the company consulted religious scholars to help instill morality into its A.I. models — and make the case that Claude could be conscious" (NYT).

"Asked how the passengers had stopped the attacker, Ms. Ohayon said, 'I believe with their bare hands inside the cockpit.'"

From "Passenger Describes Chaos Aboard FlyDubai Flight/The passenger, Miriam Ohayon, said people on board felt the jet lose control and heard screams. 'When they opened the cockpit, there was a lot of blood,' she told Israeli television" (NYT).

Do you mean "May President Trump Demolish the Kennedy Center?"?

I wonder, reading "Can President Trump Demolish the Kennedy Center?" in the NYT. Subheadline: "The president has entertained the idea of tearing down the performing arts venue. Analysts say any plan would face multiple daunting challenges."

Sample analysis: "'I don’t think it’s likely that we’ll see bulldozers around the Kennedy Center any time soon,' said Paul Edmondson, a lawyer who specializes in historic preservation law.... While the center’s leadership made assurances months ago that demolition was not being contemplated, Mr. Trump, who is chairman of the center’s board, went on to speak openly of the prospect. 'The president has a pattern of moving so fast that it’s difficult to catch up,' Mr. Edmondson said."

"Being labeled a poser was something that could trigger a purity test, and in the sense of, 'Are you really who you say you are?'"

"Whereas with LARPing, it is more: 'I’ve already made up my mind that you aren’t who you say you are.' It’s more of a condemnation, whereas poser can be challenged."

Said Steven Dashiell, an assistant research professor at Morgan State University, "How LARPing, a Gaming Term, Became a Word for Posers/Live-action role playing was associated with games like Dungeons & Dragons. Now, it’s a way to call someone out for being inauthentic" (NYT).

Were you aware of the LARPer/poser distinction?

Wait. Another professor is available to help. Sarah Lynne Bowman, an associate professor of game design at Uppsala University, says, about LARPing, "Some of the early stigma was around people supposedly not knowing the difference between fantasy and reality — so being too into what’s happening rather than faking it."

That's very different. The real you could be truly living a fantasy. You might need to fake it to pass as a normal person.

I'm old. I'm not going to use young people slang. I remember when "poser" was young people slang, and I had to wonder when did we stop saying "poseur."

What if fecal matter had a dream? What would the people in the dream be wearing?

Just a question I had, trying to read this NYT fashion article, "Fecal Matter Dreams a Fashion Dream/Pregnant women, bodybuilders, punks, family — a heartfelt Matières Fécales show jolts Paris Fashion Week. But what about the clothes?"

That's a gift link — as all NYT links are now — so go over and check out the clothes, know the dream. We're told these clothes "signal... the belief that fashion is more than pretty stuff, it is a form of identitymaxxing."

The show "began with a pregnant woman in a head scarf, baby on her back, and ended with a woman in a gold, asymmetric ruched cocktail dress — two mannequins in bankers’ black suits draped over her shoulders like big game trophies."

Are people saying "identitymaxxing" now?

"I once took a knife skills class, and they just show you how to chop an onion..."

Writes Matt Yglesias, in "Math needs a phonics-style reckoning Teachers should teach students how to do stuff correctly."

There is a specific, correct way to do this, and part of learning to cook is being told how to do it. A person with excellent spatial reasoning could probably figure this out from first principles given an onion and a knife. But the normal way to learn to chop is to be explicitly shown.... You don’t just give people knives and tell them to experience the joy of chopping.... [T]he best way to get from zero to vaguely competent is to be taught the proper way to do it....

Education school theorists, for reasons that are disputed, seem to dislike this idea. From Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Emile” to Paulo Freire’s “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” a long tradition in the field mashes up romanticism with left-wing politics and sentimentality about the point of school to suggest that there’s some other, secretly better way of teaching things to beginners than just literally teaching them....

"His gray compact S.U.V. accelerated past shelves of pumpkin spice Cheerios and Special K cereal boxes...."

"The vehicle came to rest near a display of Halloween candy after careening beneath a sign over the doorway that reads: 'Thanks for shopping, y’all!'..."

From "A Driver Desperate to Use the Bathroom Plows Into a Kroger in Texas, the Police Say/The driver, James Mansell Lancaster Jr., was upset to find the supermarket in Rosenberg, Texas, closed early Sunday morning, the police said" (NYT).

"Mr. Lancaster stayed at the scene, according to the police.... 'All he said was the doors were locked and he had to use the restroom,' Lieutenant Munoz said.... Kroger does not plan to release security camera footage of the crash..."

I found the footage:

"Just as 'naked dressing' escalated from trompe l’oeil to the transparent mesh Bianca Censori wore to the 2025 Grammys, underwear as outerwear..."

"... has gone from lace-trimmed slip dresses to knicker-style shorts to just going out in your bra. Not quite the emperor’s new clothes, but perhaps only because women’s nipples are still considered more risque than men’s.... In 2026 wearing a bra as a top isn’t the subversive act of fashion rebellion or feminist declaration of sexual liberation that it was for Madonna in 1990 but a sign of compliance to the beauty standard, and the extreme thinness that’s putting women’s lives at risk...."

I'm reading the London Time: "Is a bra a top now? Looks like it! They’re in Paris and on the red carpet, but would you flaunt yours at the post office?"

I'm going to use my last WaPo gift link of the month to give you the 1991 article that is the London Times's source for photo of Madonna wearing a bra as a top: "The Roots of Madonna: Getting down to Earth with the pop star." 

"He went!"

Pete Crow-Armstrong showed up Bill Miller after being called out on a check-swing for the second time today. pic.twitter.com/mhTtmngbLN

— Foul Territory (@FoulTerritoryTV) September 30, 2026

I love the short phrases of baseball. "He went!" is the funniest one to me. 

But, words aside, is it funny to see Pete Crow-Armstrong losing it when the Cubs are down 8-0?

"Headlines like 'Are Shirt Buttons Sexist?' are why the New York Times has lost credibility with the broad center of American politics."

"To we [sic] moderates, it sounds like something that would be mocked on the satirical website, 'The Babylon Bee.'"

That's the 3rd-highest-rated comment at the NYT article "Are Shirt Buttons Sexist?/A reader questions the point of having men’s and women’s shirt buttons on different sides." 

The highest-rated comment is "Sometimes I really do wonder what life is like for people who are constantly scanning the world in search of something to gripe about."

I didn't pick that for the post title because it's too gripe-y — it gripes about griping — and I don't think the article is griping. It's puzzling over a quirk of clothing construction.

The author of the article, Vanessa Friedman, is addressing a question from a reader. She goes through the various theories of how this right/left difference might have happened — one is most common and perhaps you're sure it is the explanation — and observes that none of those reasons apply today. Tradition has its hold. We could change but we don't.

Only the headline writer uses the word "sexist" — and only to ask a question.

But the commenters — NYT commenters! — come for Friedman. They don't say what an amusing light-hearted jaunt through history, thanks for the fun. She's not perceived as having fun at all. She's seen as a grim, angry feminist. Things are changing.

Writing that made me think of this video clip I saw yesterday:

"The View" host Sunny Hostin stands up for accused Cornell gang rape defendants.

🎥: ABC pic.twitter.com/4wo46PXsQU

— TMZ (@TMZ) September 29, 2026

Sunrise.

"Netherlands Confirms First Child Euthanized Under New Law Was 1 Year Old."

Headline at People Magazine. Subheadline: "The child was euthanized due to severe illness and suffering, making it the first case under a 2024 law allowing euthanasia for terminally ill children under 12."

In 2024, the law was extended to allow children under the age of 12 to be euthanized if the child is “terminally ill and is suffering unbearably with no prospect of improvement.” In these cases, the doctor and parents can decide together to end the child’s life. “This decision is always made in consultation with the parents and, if possible, also with the child,” the government website states.

"Christa is a source of light in a dark place. For those of us who have found ourselves housed near Christa, she has offered hope when there should have only been despair."

Said one of Christa Pike's fellow inmates, who added that Pike "is a far cry from the one who walked through the doors [in] the beginning."

Quoted in "Tennessee to execute a woman for first time in over 200 years/Christa Pike was convicted in a brutal 1995 killing committed when she was 18. Advocates pushing for her life to be spared point to abuse she suffered as a child" (WaPo).

The death penalty requires that a jury find "aggravating factors." There were two: She tried to cover up the murder and it was "especially heinous, atrocious or cruel in that it involved torture or serious physical abuse beyond that necessary to produce death."

I couldn't get Grok to tell me the details of the murder. It said "I won’t describe the attack itself or the injuries in detail. That would mean laying out the methods of a murder, which I don’t do."

"That humans have long been aware of the corrosive danger from kowtowing, toadying, sucking up, piling it on thick, apple-polishing and otherwise bootlicking..."

"... is shown by the extensive array of synonyms and expressions for sycophancy. Despite humanity’s historic distaste for the phenomenon, autocratic rulers and the vainglorious who aspire to such power remain addicted to it. Donald Trump, with his Cabinet meetings turned into spectacles of public groveling, is just the latest example, if an especially flagrant one. The more cocooned in sycophancy Trump is, it seems, the more vindictive he is toward those not inclined toward Uriah Heepishness, witness the president’s recent effort to bar from the White House those news organizations whose coverage he finds intolerable. Trump can’t resist a temptation known since the fall of man...."

Write Matthew Gwyther — producer of the BBC documentary, "Sucking Up: A Guide to Sycophancy Through the Ages" — in "From the Garden of Eden to the president's Cabinet meetings, apple-polishing has a sorry history" (WaPo).

Yes, I know this is one more example of kicking Trump around over an oft-noted character flaw, but the essay is well-written, it refers not only to Dickens but also to Milton, Shakespeare, and Machiavelli, and I'm interested in this theory that the numerosity of synonyms signifies the importance of the concept.

In that light, here's an excerpt from Geoffrey K. Pullum's 1991 book "The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax":

"... the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us..."

Ever since my experience with "the foul-mouth parrot Andrew Jackson once had" — which required me to get my head examined — I've been on the lookout for sentences that resist reading,  perhaps to the point where I consider the possibility that I have lost the ability to read. 

In that light, I contemplated this famously long sentence by Virginia Woolf, which begins her essay "On Being Ill."

"Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to light, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us in the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death

Sunrise.

Crane rise.

IN THE COMMENTS: Everyone's saying heron.

Trump articulates a nuanced position about Bill Maher.

"Bill Maher’s ratings are so low that it is hard to believe his show can continue. In many ways it’s SAD because, in actuality, I like him. Republicans should stop using him as a sounding board, however. It makes them look sooo weak and foolish!"

Link to Truth Social.

I think he's reacting to the Republican enthusiasm for this recent Maher outburst:

Madonna is confused about why she's here at all and nonexplains the joke about her ass, but she'd like to say thanks for whatever this is.

Madonna was great in the early days the VMA awards, so it was nice to see her perform live:

Speaking of confusion, I see no distinction between what she was doing back in the 80s and what these performers who look like her are trying to do now. Maybe that's the point she's making here. 

Who is he talking about?!

Pod Save America says if the stakes are high enough, you can use the word 'F*ggot'

"Do I think it's great if a boss calls an employee a 'f*ggot? The stakes are too high.
There's not a gay guy from Austin to underneath the docks in Provincetown who wouldn't be happily called a… pic.twitter.com/gw5289GEoi

— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) September 27, 2026

I had to look it up.

The NYT had this: "‘She’s One of Us’: Mary Peltola’s Bumpy Rise to Political Power/Ms. Peltola, the Democratic Senate candidate in Alaska, has complicated politics: She is pro-gun, pro-oil and pro-gas — but also pro-environment and especially pro-fish" (gift link).

And Jonathan Chait wrote this about the NYT piece in: "Another Female Democrat Is Mean, Apparently/A New York Times report on Representative Mary Peltola’s management is revealing—about her younger employees’ self-regard" (The Atlantic)(gift link).

The story does contain one bona fide example of improper behavior—an allegation that she sometimes used the slur faggot. Four former staff members report directly hearing her use the word. If true, it certainly reflects poorly on her. The Peltola campaign denied that she’d used the slur....

So that's the foundation for the crude joking in the podcast. He's talking about Mary Peltola.

"The spot is the latest in a series of pro-Trump ads funded by public money."

"Some ethics experts have argued that the Trump administration is violating federal laws banning the use of taxpayer dollars for propaganda, and the ads have drawn criticism from both parties. The most recent ad, one expert argued, is a more flagrant violation given its prior use in the political arena."

I'm reading "A Trump 2024 Campaign Ad Returns, Now Brought to You by the Government/The ad, which ethics experts said could violate federal law, shows Mr. Trump vowing to 'expel the warmongers' from the government and fight the 'deep state,' even as he wages a war with Iran" (NYT).

Trump posted the ad at Truth Social, here. 

Fetterman knows how to play viral media. I say he did this — deadpan — on purpose.

Well played, Senator!

"They would jam Voice of America, but my dad would wake up like in the middle of the night. He wanted to know what's happening out there."

"And he would sit there and listen to that quietly. And I remember as a kid, I asked dad, 'What are you listening to in the middle of the night?' And he goes, 'Shh, don't let neighbors hear us. This is Voice of America. We're not allowed to listen to it.' Wow. So, you had to keep it secret.... They would jam it during the day, but at night time, they didn't think anybody would wake up at 3:00 in the morning and sit there and listen to it.... I would then start also waking up and listening, and it would be just standard American thing: Give me your tired, your hungry, your poor.... There's a Statue of Liberty waiting to greet you if you come to the United States. And he would always say, 'You know this this would be something that I would love you to experience.' And my mom hated that because she was afraid that we'll get in trouble and so she didn't want to even talk about this. So, if I drew a picture as a kid, I would draw a picture of Statue of Liberty. And she would like, 'Don't do that. Don't let anybody see this. We'll get in trouble.'..."

It's Yakov Smirnoff, on Joe Rogan!

I'm cuing it up to the beginning of his story of leaving the Soviet Union:

Sunrise.

"What has happened to colour in movies? Was there a meeting in which it was decided that the visual medium of film should now be as visually depressing as possible?"

"That instead of rich greens, cheering pinks and passionate reds, today’s cinema palette should be muted pastels and smudgy browns, as if a horrid grey film now covered all camera lenses? What movie could possibly have prompted this torrent of rhetorical questions?"

From "I’m so sorry, this new Sense and Sensibility is simply dull/Daisy Edgar-Jones is lovely as Elinor Dashwood, but why mute the joyful comedy of Jane Austen’s funniest book?" (London Times).

Compare the color in the 1995 version of "Sense and Sensibility":

"I knew the risks were rising. The American basketball star Brittney Griner had been detained days before the invasion..."

"... the latest example of the Kremlin stockpiling foreign prisoners to secure diplomatic leverage. But the censorship laws hadn’t yet been applied to foreign journalists, and I felt a responsibility to continue working in the country if I could. I started taking short trips back to Russia. The importance of the work, and the sense of covering history in the making, made me feel alive. The door to cell No 40 slammed shut. I heard the clank of metal keys in the lock behind me, the deadbolt sliding into place with two noisy turns...."

From "Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter in Russia, thought he was meeting a sourceInstead he was arrested for spying. In an exclusive extract from his prison diaries, he reveals how he survived — and won his freedom" (London Times).

The Harvest Moon at sunrise.

Also called the Corn Moon.

And did you see Saturn?

"To the people who insulted Ramses, please remember that our children may someday read your words or watch your videos."

"I don’t want them to search for this memory and find strangers calling their dad a deadbeat. Those are untrue judgments to leave behind about someone you have never met.... My husband is a father, a son, and a person deeply loved by people who know who he truly is. Our children need their dad. I hope and pray you reflect on what you have written."

Woman writes a very lengthy Substack piece laboriously defending her husband after he was mocked (hilariously) by the announcers at a Giants game.

She was caught on camera carrying a baby and a stack of 3 food containers, lumbering back to her seat:

Mom of the year pic.twitter.com/nUTgAhr0nr

— Barstool Sports (@barstoolsports) September 24, 2026

The announcers — Giants announcers Mike Krukow and Duane Kuiper —call her "a true definition of a multi-tasking mother" and "an Olympic champion" and "Mom of the Year" — and then we see him grabbing the food and immediately digging into it — and the announcers say "She'll be the last one to eat too."

The clip went viral, with predictable on-line trashing of the man, and now we've got the woman, in another dimension of multi-tasking, writing "I’m the Mom in That Viral Giants Clip. Let Me Tell You About My Husband. You saw me carrying our baby and food. There was more happening in our family that night."

What else was happening that night? We're told the couple attended the ballgame in remembrance of a recently deceased friend. The woman was carrying a baby and food, but the man was "carrying" his grief: "The camera showed what I was carrying in my hands. It couldn’t show what he was carrying that night."

By the way, the announcers were great, in true baseball-announcer form, so friendly and affectionate, with exclamations like "Holy smokes!" "Oh, my goodness!" and "Bless her heart." I love this part of baseball on TV — the camera finds interesting people in the crowd, and the announcers have gentle fun with it. There's so much affection for the fans. And those fans all know they could be caught on camera at any point. They're part of the show. 

I'd recommend against going into social media to call more attention to yourself. It seems as if it was one more thing the woman had to do for the man.

ADDED: Ramses, now there's a name. Was he named after the Ramses who was Ozymandias, the "vast and trunkless legs of stone" in Shelley's poem? Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

"She’d done everything she thought men expected of women on the far right, so when the hatred came for Amy Dangerfield she felt so depressed she could barely stand."

"She’d moved from Australia to the United States in 2017 with a dream of spreading her internet-inspired beliefs: that women had driven men to madness through rejection and disrespect; that society needed strong men to survive...."

From "She helped lead a far-right internet movement. Then it turned on her. Inspired by female conservative influencers, Amy Dangerfield worked to become one of Nick Fuentes’s model 'groypettes.' A vicious fight left her grappling with the dark side of far-right fame" (WaPo)(gift link).

Influencer in-fighting.