"[D]espite many of us thinking we should cut down on caffeine, there’s a solid base of evidence that it’s healthy."

"'The benefits of coffee have long been debated, but we know that in moderation [about two cups a day] it’s a good source of polyphenols and fibre, which promotes gut health, which in turn has health-protective effects for the rest of the body.'... [I]t’s all about the tipping point, and while there has been some debate around what excessive coffee consumption is.... 'Of course coffee does contain caffeine, a stimulant, which may give some people a "heart-racing" feeling, which is not necessarily bad for you but it can be unpleasant.... Ultimately, you need to decide where your caffeine sweet spot is.' Which... is usually somewhere between the joy coffee gives you and the feeling of being awake and alert, and any negative physical reactions such as feeling wired or sleep issues."

From "Here’s how I stopped drinking coffee — like Adele/The singer says it was harder to give up her caffeine addiction than cigarettes" (London Times).

"On the one hand we have the blandest pap imaginable — superhero movies and Adele — and on the other we have Netflix and its mindless death porn...."

"It feels, actually, as if we’re going backwards. The playful cheesecake Marilyn of the 1950s — a confected blonde bimbo that this film clearly despises — seems infinitely preferable to the Marilyn of 70 years later: a haggard, weeping cipher and shivering perma-victim who is obsessed with the contents of her womb. In an attempt to 'explain' Marilyn, the makers have simply created another pathetic object: a woman who spends the entire film either naked or in tears, or both.... She can barely touch a drink without getting wasted; barely get in a car without crashing it.... Is this where victim culture has led us.... Schoolgirls are told that they ought to be crippled by their periods. Female celebrities scramble to be defined by menopause, the horrors of pregnancy or, even better, miscarriage. On podcasts, in interviews and in articles otherwise intelligent, capable women moan about their lives collapsing, or being unable to cope with even the tiniest sliver of adversity: they are all like Marilyn on a date with DiMaggio at a perfectly nice restaurant: 'I’m afraid of some of the people here.' Marilyn had more power when she was a plain sex object, giggling on the cover of Playboy." 

Writes Camilla Long, in "Every generation has its own Marilyn. Our one gets drugged and raped. Thanks, Netflix" (London Times).

"I understand why the name of this award has changed, but I really love being a woman and being a female artist. I do! I’m really, really proud of us. I really, really am."

Said Adele, accepting the Brit Award for Artist of the Year and referring to the change to gender neutrality, after years of awarding the best female and the best male, quoted in a NY Post column, "Good on Adele for celebrating female — not gender-neutral — achievement" by Maureen Callahan. 

Callahan writes that Adele is being "slandered a TERF — a trans-exclusionary radical feminist." I'd like to see the wording of that "slander," because I can't even understand it. How are trans people involved in gender neutrality? It seems to me they're at the opposite extreme. Adele says "I really love being a woman," but isn't that what a trans woman would say? Gender is especially important, not neutralized. 

What would be "trans-exclusionary" would be to keep the male and female categories but refuse to allow artists to compete for the award that goes with their declared gender. You could even say that switching to gender neutrality just as trans people are coming to the fore is trans-exclusionary — a bit like reacting to racial desegregation by closing the public swimming pool.

Quite aside from the TERF charge, there's the problem of excluding artists who declare themselves non-binary, notably Sam Smith. Here's an article from The Guardian from last March: "Sam Smith excluded from gendered categories at 2021 Brit awards/Solo male and solo female categories mean no room for chart-topping non-binary singer, who calls for awards to reflect society."

A Brit awards spokesperson later responded, saying: “Sam is an extraordinary British artist and we agree with what they have said today. The Brits are committed to evolving the show and the gendered categories are very much under review. But any changes made to be more inclusive need to be just that - if a change unintentionally leads to less inclusion then it risks being counterproductive to diversity and equality. We need to consult more widely before changes are made to make sure we get it right.”

There are winners and losers — in awards and in structuring and re-structuring awards — and maybe the best answer is screw awards. This is art, not sports.

"Adele described the pool as a 'baggy old pond' and refused, point blank, to stand in the middle of it. The intention was to fill it with water on the set as she was lifted up on a crane-type mechanism, creating the illusion she was floating on water."

From "ROLLING IN THE DEEP END/Adele cancelled her Las Vegas residency after furious rant over swimming pool stunt" (The Sun). 

"During the interview, Winfrey said she thinks women are going to feel 'liberated' by Adele choosing to leave a marriage that wasn’t working, rather than stick it out only for her child."

"'I’ve read where you said you weren’t miserable, but you also knew you weren’t happy,' Winfrey said. 'And so you wanted to bring a happy version of yourself to your son. Which I think is about the best gift anybody can give to their children.'"

 
From "The four most-personal revelations from Oprah’s interview with Adele, from her divorce to weight loss to new boyfriend" (WaPo).

Make yourself happy, because a happy version of yourself is about the best gift anybody can give to their children.

True

False

It's not that simple!

 

pollcode.com free polls

Inappropriate appropriation.

White people have NO RIGHT to culturally appropriate black hairstyles. 😡

Clearly defined racial boundaries MUST be policed.

(Unlike gender, which is totally fluid.) https://t.co/zKM83zhBCs

— Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) August 31, 2020

Bill Maher complains about being criticized as a "bad person" for saying that fat people need to take responsibility for the health problem they, in fact, have.

Here's the image from 1988 of Oprah, newly thin and openly leading a celebration of herself for the achievement. Maher and Rogan say you can't do that today. It would be socially unacceptable fat-shaming.

The singer Adele recently lost a lot of weight, and Maher and Rogan talk about how people are actually criticizing her for quitting serving as a role model for people who want to feel good about being fat.

Oprah Magazine instructs its readers on the proper reaction to Adele's weight loss: "On Adele’s Weight Loss: Let's Stop Criticizing Her Body, No Matter How She Looks/Why can't we focus on how happy she looks on the beach, instead of how she looks on the beach?"

At a time when body positivity is (finally) being more widely celebrated, some folks are apparently disappointed that she changed what many women saw as a valuable representation of their own plus-size figures.... The core of the [body positivity] movement stands behind the radical idea that your worth has nothing to do with the size of your body.... So who are we to criticize Adele’s frame...? Her body belongs to her—not us.

Maher was repeating a point he'd made a while back on his show — that 40,000 people a month die from fat-related illness and that it's not about how people look but the terrible health problem. He talks about the criticism he took from James Corden, and I found this background in Variety:

Maher, host of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” joked about obesity on his show last week, saying “Fat isn’t a birth defect” and “Nobody comes out of the womb needing to buy two seats on the airplane.” He advocated: “Fat-shaming doesn’t need to end, it needs to make a comeback.”...

In the podcast, Maher claims that he didn't make any jokes about fatness! Obviously, he did, even if he also has a serious purpose.

“There’s a common and insulting misconception that fat people are stupid and lazy, and we’re not,” Corden said. “We get it, we know. We know that being overweight isn’t good for us and I’ve struggled my entire life trying to manage my weight and I suck at it. I’ve had good days and bad months. I’ve basically been off and on diets since as long as I can remember and, well, this is how it’s going...".

Now that I'm reading this, I think Maher, in the podcast, is quite dishonest about his own statements and Corden's. Maher may have something of a good point about the costs of fat-related health problems in a system in which we're all more or less paying for each other's health care, but he's not doing straight health policy analysis. In fact, if you did hard-nosed, truth-telling policy analysis, you wouldn't stress the 40,000-a-month death toll. Early deaths save money.

ADDED: Here's the "Real Time" routine that I think Maher was dishonest about:

"I want to tell that lady as well, can you stop filming me with a video camera? Because I’m really here in real life..."

"... you can enjoy it in real life, rather than through your camera. Can you take your tripod down?... This isn’t a DVD, this is a real show, and I would really like you to enjoy my show because there’s lots of people outside that couldn’t come in."

Said Adele.

There are 2 aspects to her logic, compelling in radically different ways:

1. Life should be experienced directly, and not through an electronic device. Be here now!

2. You are the fortunate ones, who got into this place, and if there's video of the concert, the excluded ones will have something of the feeling of being in here. Preserve the exclusiveness: Don't let the masses see what is yours!

"How Adele makes middle-aged music cool for young people."

 A Slate article. I haven't read it yet but I think the answer is that "middle-aged music" is just something a lot of people want to be freed to like.

The author, Carl Wilson (not the dead Beach Boy, I presume)  is "concerned the younger generation may be suffering alarmingly low levels of acerbity."

Even teenagers and college students are capable of looking back gauzily on what they’ve recently grown out of or projecting themselves into the future and retroactively romanticizing where they are right now. The young are often the greatest sentimentalists, particularly in times of instability. (Do economic inequality, climate change, and maybe Snapchat help explain their eagerness for Adele, like YA novelist John Green, to make them weep over old, eternal clichés?)

 Enough of that. Here's the late Beach Boy Carl Wilson:



Best song ever. Does age mean anything at all?

Aretha Franklin talks — charmingly — to David Letterman.

Last Monday:



She also sang "Rolling in the Deep," a cover of the Adele song, from her new album of cover songs. I think the performance wasn't good, which is why I'm embedding the interview, which is much better, but Aretha Franklin is 72 years old, and she's earned our indulgence, including our indulgence of her dramatically low cut gown, there in the Ed Sullivan Theater, where, back when she was 17, they told her that her dress was too low cut and then that they were overbooked and she wasn't going to go on at all. And don't you just want to say: "Forget 'toned arms'!"?

How did Jonathan Turley come up with 19 as the best number of Supreme Court Justices?

We're all wound up waiting for the Supreme Court to announce its new decisions this morning, so let me while away some of the remaining minutes brooding about that WaPo article we were talking about last night. Let's talk, specifically, about Turley's homing in on the number 19.

Wikipedia has an article on the number 19, which includes mathematical info like "19 is the aliquot sum of two odd discrete semiprimes, 65 and 77 and is the base of the 19-aliquot tree." And "19 is a centered triangular number, centered hexagonal number and a Heegner number" — which looks like this:



That red dot could be John Roberts.

There's also significance to the number 19 in the religions Islam and Baha'i:

The number of angels guarding Hell ("Hellfire") according to the Qur'an: "Over it is nineteen" (74:30).

The Number of Verse and Sura together in the Qur'an which announces Jesus son of Maryam's (Mary's) birth (Qur'an 19:19).

Some people have claimed that patterns of the number 19 are present an unusual number of times in the Qur'an.

In the Bábí and Bahá'í faiths, a group of 19 is called a Váhid, a Unity (Arabic: واحد wāhid, "one"). The numerical value of this word in the Abjad numeral system is 19.

The Bahá'í calendar is structured such that a year contains 19 months of 19 days each (along with the intercalary period of Ayyám-i-Há), as well as a 19-year cycle and a 361-year (19x19) supercycle.

The Báb and his disciples formed a group of 19.

There were 19 Apostles of Bahá'u'lláh.

Not at the Wikipedia, but dredged up out of my memory: At the Million Man March, back in 1995, when Louis Farrakhan gave his long speech that bizarrely drifted into numerology, the number that he found so important was 19. He observed that the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorial are both 19 feet high, then adds 3 and 16 together — because Thomas Jefferson was the 3d President and Lincoln was the 16th — gets 19 and asked "What is so deep about this number 19?" You can go to the link and read if you want to know why 19 represents a pregnant woman + a "secret that has to be unfolded."

I don't know what put the idea of 19 into Jonathan Turley's head. It could be something mystical and nutty. Maybe he loves Adele's first album.

But I assume there's nothing mystical or artistic about Turley. I think he likes the number 19 because it's the smallest odd number that's big enough to make individual Justices inconsequential — to dilute their power to the point where they don't loom large as personalities and seem like mere humans.

Turley's last sentence says it: With 19 Justices, "the power of individual judges is diluted."

"Appropriately, Adele’s ascension happened during one of the dullest Grammy ceremonies in recent memory..."

"... a tour de force of bumbling anti-imagination hampered even further by the death of Whitney Houston the day before the show, which left producers scrambling to fit in raw tribute with shimmering and gauche spectacle."

The NYT's Jon Caramanica, carps about the dead diva, hampering from a bathtub.

AND: In other Grammy news, how many people tweeted that they'd let Chris Brown beat them up?

Adele.

1. Delightful on "60 Minutes."

2. In depth analysis of why her songs make people cry.

I'm glad The Grammys...

...  weren't too much about Whitney Houston dying. It wouldn't make any sense to overshadow Adele, whose night it was, who seems like a sweet person, who said "snot," which seemed to amuse the crowd immensely. I liked The Band Perry. Paul McCartney was okay, still slim and spry. Good of Springsteen to play with him in the end, on "The End." I was happy to see Brian Wilson still sitting upright... and Glenn Campbell able to remember the words as he journeys into the sunset of his life. Most of the music I could barely put up with. Lots of flashy lights. Costumes. Hugely long eyelashes. I know: It's for the kids. But this was the first time I'd ever watched The Grammys. Oddly enough. Wanted to see what they'd do about Whitney.

ADDED: And then there was Lady Gaga, always only in the audience, with her head encased in thick black netting. She didn't win anything last night, but she got to see — through that net — all the elaborate stage acts that seemed to want to be like her — notably Nicki Manaj — caught in her net. But it was Adele everyone likes now. The one lady standing center stage, emoting in music. I guess we'll be getting more of that, as the followers-on look to catch the next wave.