Sunrise — 6:16.

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I remember a blog post from December 6, 2021 titled "I remember...."

I remember it began: "I remember something made me read this old blog post of mine, from 2013, when I had a little project going where I'd take one sentence from 'The Great Gatsby' and present it for discussion.... The sentence of the day was 'I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This-or-That’s and the chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances, and the matchings of invitations: 'Are you going to the Ordways'? the Herseys'? the Schultzes'?' and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands.'"

I'm looking back at that post because I just did a search of my archive for "Brainard," because I'm reading a new article in The Atlantic, by Joshua Rothman, "What Do You Remember? The more you explore your own past, the more you find there" and it begins: "Last year, for my birthday, my wife gave me a copy of 'I Remember,' an unusual memoir by the artist Joe Brainard. It’s a tidy little book, less than two hundred pages long, made entirely from short, often single-sentence paragraphs beginning with the words 'I remember.'"

Writing about that "Gatsby" sentence, I'd said: "Things remembered: fur coats, chatter, hands waving, matchings of invitations, and long green tickets. These remembered things give the reader a sense of the incompletely delineated human beings.... This is a mass of faceless humanity, cluttered with hands, waving and clasping.... " And a commenter, gadfly, said: "Althouse is doing her Joe Brainard, 'I Remember' schtick - but she can't top the master." He quoted Brainard's book, and it was obviously my kind of thing — very sentence-y. I immediately read it. I'll read it again, now that I'm reminded of it.

But what is Joshua Rothman saying about it?

"The Trump administration has begun to scrutinize the real estate transactions of New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, in what could be the opening move..."

"... of President Trump’s first investigation into one of his foremost adversaries. The head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency sent a criminal referral letter to the Department of Justice this week, saying that Ms. James 'appeared to have falsified records' related to properties she owns in Virginia and New York in order to receive favorable loan terms.... When purchasing the Virginia residence, Ms. James signed notarized paperwork attesting that she would use it as a principal residence.... The referral letter also accused Ms. James of misrepresenting the number of units in a Brooklyn home she purchased in 2001, possibly in order to receive better interest rates.....The month before Ms. James’s lawsuit against Mr. Trump went to trial, anonymous complainants began to file documents with New York City’s Department of Buildings, several of them related to the number of units in the home.... One of the complaints, in October 2024, asked why Ms. James was 'NOT being prosecuted for fraud and filling false documents when other people have been persecuted for far less crimes,' then added a pointed question: 'a Double Standard???'"

From "Trump Official Scrutinizes N.Y.’s Attorney General Over Real Estate/The head of a U.S. housing agency told prosecutors that Letitia James appeared to have falsified real estate records, a move that could be the start of an investigation of a key Trump adversary" (NYT).

"The man accused of setting fire to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s residence Sunday indicated he was motivated by his views on the Israel-Gaza war and believed Shapiro needed to stop the killing of Palestinians..."

"... a newly unveiled search warrant says. Cody Balmer, 38, made the declarations in a 911 call after he left the property, in which he reported his own attack to dispatchers.... Balmer — who reportedly struggled with untreated mental illness — said the governor needed to stop having [Balmer's] friends killed and said 'our people have been put through too much by that monster,' according to the affidavit. He also said, 'All he has is a banquet hall to clean up.' Balmer allegedly identified himself by name and told the dispatcher he would “confess to everything that I had done.... Shapiro has expressed support for Israel, and last year pushed for the University of Pennsylvania to disband a pro-Palestinian encampment...."

From "Suspect who targeted Shapiro cited views on Palestinians, warrant says/Cody Balmer, 38, described his views in a call to 911 reporting the attack. His brother said that Balmer suffered from mental illness" (WaPo).

We're told that Cody Balmer's brother Dan says Cody "was diagnosed with bipolar disorder" and has expressed the belief that his sister-in-law is a witch. And: "Dan Balmer also said Cody Balmer was politically independent and had urged his family to vote for Donald Trump in November."

"August finally came in with a blast that shook my house and augured little augusticity. I made raspberry Jello the color of rubies in the setting sun."

"Mad raging sunsets poured in seafoams of cloud through unimaginable crags, with every rose tint of hope beyond, I felt just like it, brilliant and bleak beyond words. Everywhere awful ice fields and snow straws; one blade of grass jiggling in the winds of infinity, anchored to a rock. To the east, it was gray; to the north, awful; to the west, raging mad, hard iron fools wrestling in the groomian gloom; to the south, my father's mist...."

So begins the last chapter of "Dharma Bums," by Jack Kerouac. Full text at the link. Now, I've finished it. I read it because it came up in the context of notes that people leave at the top of mountains, blogged here.

No, I don't know what "groomian" means, but somehow the Jello made me feel grounded. The word "groom" does appear elsewhere in the book. Maybe that's a clue. It's in this description of colleges as "nothing but grooming schools for the middle-class non-identity

Magnolia.

"I'm reading about a tennis player who smelled so bad that her opponent was heard complaining, and I'm wondering..."

"... if a sports player might in some cases, perhaps this one, deliberately acquire a bad smell to gain a competitive edge? Are there known cases? Do the rules cover this behavior? It could be a way of cheating. Beyond sports, what other areas of human competition offer opportunities to gain an advantage through smelling bad?"

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok.

You can read Grok's answer here.

And here's the news story that prompted my question: "British tennis player Harriet Dart apologizes after asking opponent to wear deodorant during match/Dart told the umpire that her opponent, Lois Boisson, 'smells really bad'" (CBS Sports).

"After becoming pregnant with their son, St. Clair and Musk’s relationship progressed.... In November, Musk responded to a selfie she texted him saying: 'I want to knock you up again.'"

"While she was pregnant, Musk had urged her to deliver the baby via caesarean section and told her he didn’t want the child to be circumcised. (Musk has posted on X that vaginal births limit brain size and that C-sections allow for larger brains.) St. Clair is Jewish and circumcisions are an important ritual in the religion, and she decided against a C-section. He told her she should have 10 babies, and they debated the child’s middle name.... She complied with the request to not name Musk on the birth certificate. Not long after the birth, [Musk’s longtime fixer, Jared] Birchall pushed St. Clair to sign documents keeping the father of the baby and details regarding her relationship with Musk secret in return for financial support. The offer was a one-time fee of $15 million for a home and living expenses, plus an additional $100,000 a month until the baby turned 21. Musk told her by text it was dangerous to reveal his relationship to the baby, describing himself as the '#2 after Trump for assassination.' He added that 'only the paranoid survive.' But she didn’t sign...."

From "The Tactics Elon Musk Uses to Manage His ‘Legion’ of Babies—and Their Mothers/The world’s richest man juggles more than a dozen children and ‘harem drama’ along with running his companies and advising Trump. He recently took a paternity test in a battle with one woman over money and privacy" (Wall Street Journal).

The life of a one-man genius sperm bank is not easy.

An "SNL" sketch that surprisingly spoofs the idea that you're not allowed to ask where that baby came from.

"This is going to anger a lot of people.... People say they want change in the Democratic Party, but really they want change so long as it doesn’t potentially endanger their position of power."

"That’s not actually wanting change. That’s selfishness.... 'What we are not saying here is, ‘Oh, you’re old, you need to go.' What we’re saying is we need to make room for a new generation to step up and help make sure that we have the people that are most acutely impacted by a lot of the issues that we are legislating on — that are actually going to live to see the consequences of this."

Said David Hogg, who is a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee and also the president of Leaders We Deserve, which has a plan to back young challengers to Democratic incumbents in Democratic primaries.

Hogg is quoted in "A Top Democratic Official Plots to Take Down Party Incumbents/David Hogg, a young liberal activist and now a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, is leading an effort to unseat the party’s older lawmakers in primaries" (NYT).

At a private meeting last month, a “neutrality policy” was circulated asking the party’s top officers to refrain from any activity that would “call into question their impartiality and evenhandedness,” according to two people with knowledge of the pledge, which sought to cover officers “both in their D.N.C. capacity and in their personal capacity.” Everyone signed it — except Mr. Hogg.

Donald Trump presents — without a word of commentary — Joe Biden, saying "colored kids."

pic.twitter.com/Y6OFeGKS4l

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 16, 2025

What do we think of Joe here? It can't be that he's racist for saying "colored kids." It's not as though Biden is attempting to revive the old expression. It's not like what the other Joe — Joe Rogan — has been doing with the word "retarded." Biden is painting a picture of the past, when he was boy: "I remember seeing kids going by — at the time, called 'colored kids' — on a bus going by." Part of the memory is the memory of what the black children were called. It was the completely common speech of that time and, I believe, the preferred term. Not racist. To cling to it, after the 1950s, became problematic, but Biden isn't clinging to it. He's recreating his boyhood experience, sensing and learning. I think Trump knows all that, and by merely showing the speech and saying nothing, he avoids criticism. He just hangs it out there for people to react to, as if Biden's mere voicing of the now-disfavored words is the same as his actually using the word as his go-to way to refer to black people today. Many will take the bait.

The UK supreme court has ruled that the terms 'woman' and 'sex' in the Equality Act refer to a biological woman and biological sex....

"Five judges from the UK supreme court ruled unanimously that the legal definition of a woman in the Equality Act 2010 did not include transgender women who hold gender recognition certificates (GRCs). In a significant defeat for the Scottish government, the court decision will mean that transgender women can no longer sit on public boards in places set aside for women. It could have far wider ramifications by leading to much greater restrictions on the rights of transgender women to use services and spaces reserved for women, and prompt calls for the UK’s laws on gender recognition to be rewritten. The UK government said the ruling 'brings clarity and confidence' for women and those who run hospitals, sports clubs and women’s refuges. A spokesperson said: 'We have always supported the protection of single sex spaces based on biological sex. Single-sex spaces are protected in law and will always be protected by this government...."

The Guardian reports.

"The gender critical campaign group For Women Scotland, which is backed financially by JK Rowling, said the Equality Act’s definition of a woman was limited to people born biologically female...." So, let's check out what Rowling is saying on X:

"Would [Harvard] recognize the Ku Klux Klan? For me, the National Lawyers Guild and the Ku Klux Klan are indistinguishable in terms of ideology...."

"If [Harvard] wouldn't recognize Klansmen or if it wouldn't recognize a group of sexists who called for the end of equality for women, then it shouldn't recognize the pro-Hamas National Lawyers Guild.... If this were the 1950s and there was a university say the University of Mississippi — Old Miss — that was forcibly integrated and it was allowing... some of the Klansmen who were students to harass black students, and the federal government came in and said 'Unless you stop Klansmen from harassing black students we're going to cut off federal funding,' people would be applauding that.'..."

Said Alan Dershowitz, in his latest "Dershow":

"A startup called Sperm Racing, run by four teenage entrepreneurs from the US, said it had raised $1.5 million to stage the event at the Hollywood Palladium..."

"... on April 25. Eric Zhu, the company’s 17-year-old co-founder, said the inaugural event would pit samples taken from two healthy young university students against each other on a racetrack 20cm (8in) long and modelled on the female reproductive system.... 'We want to turn health into competition,' Zhu said. 'Sperm is surprising as a biomarker. The healthier you are, the faster sperm moves.'... A live video feed, magnified 40 times to display the 0.05mm spermatozoa, will track the samples’ progress....The event will be run over three races in front of a crowd of 4,000 spectators, and feature play-by-play commentary, instant replays and leaderboards, according to Zhu.

I'm reading "What to expect from ‘world’s first competitive sperm race’/A fertility startup raised $1.5 million to stage the event at the Hollywood Palladium this month" (London Times).

With the sperm expected to swim at a speed of 5mm per minute, each race will take something like 40 minutes. There are 3 races... and room for 4,000 spectators. Interesting concept, and congratulations to the teenagers for getting $1.5 million and an article in the London Times, but I think success here depends on the quality of the play-by-play commentators.

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: "What is the key to doing good play-by-play commentary for a long race, say 40 minutes?"

At the Tuesday Night Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

About those shorts.

Link.