March 21, 2026

Sunrise — 7:07, 7:08, 7:21.

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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...."

March 20, 2026

It's the first sunrise of spring!

6:58:

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6:59:

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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."

"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."

"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."


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: