Cute and fun-loving but connected to Trump, so it must go to hell.

The food on Air Force One today, via the press pool pic.twitter.com/HrGJ2vdWk2

— Michelle Kosinski (@MichLKosinski) October 28, 2019

Seems mildly nice, but here's where it goes — reported by The Daily Mail — "Even Presidential plane food is bad! Photo of a deeply unappetizing-looking dish served on Donald Trump's Air Force One goes viral/A photo of a meal served to journalists travelling on Air Force One has gone viral/Snap shows an innocuous stuffed bell pepper with a Halloween face - but it is the unidentified object on a side-plate behind it that has caused a storm/Beige-looking dish has sparked jokes galore, with some suggesting the President himself would not eat it."

ADDED: I think the journalist who took the picture was experiencing it as cute and fun, but by tweeting it, she gave the tweetosphere something to shit on, so, of course, they did.

The item in the background is something to puzzle over. If you decide it's meat, it seems gross and it's the main course so if you don't eat it you're deprived. If you decide it's a glazed pastry, it's just at worst a caloric dessert that's easy to pass up and no loss at all.

IN THE COMMENTS: Big Mike said:

I ate worse-looking than that when I was in the army! You should see what chipped beef on toast looks like at 0 dark thirty!

I said:

My parents — who met in the Army in WW2 — often served us chipped beef on toast for dinner back in the 1950s and 60s. We loved it! If you know how to make white sauce properly and you can get that chipped beef that used to come in a little jar with a pry-off lid and you toast up just normal white bread, it's excellent!

AND: As long as we're talking about chipped beef on toast, here are the 3 Stooges in "Of Cash and Hash." Go to 4:26 to skip the set-up and focus on the food. Larry is serving a customer at a diner:

"I am an independent woman. I've earned the right to think for myself and to vote for myself, and that's why I am a registered independent."

Said Oprah Winfrey, rallying for Stacey Abrams in Georgia.

I was wondering what size crowd Oprah drew. I'm seeing that all available tickets were claimed and that the event was Forbes Arena at Morehouse College, which has a capacity of 6,000. That doesn't mean there were 6,000 people there. In the video, there's a black curtain behind Oprah, so I'm thinking there were unused seats behind the curtain. The audience does sound very enthusiastic. Anyway, I'm interested in the way crowd size is reported/unreported, now that Trump has set such an insanely high standard for political rallies. I would think that if anyone on the Democratic (independent?) side could draw the same kind of crowd, it would be Oprah.

IN THE COMMENTS: Big Mike said:

Correction. She was born with the right to think for herself and to vote for herself as a citizen of the United States. One can thoughtlessly relinquish those rights, but they are our absolute birthright.

I am sure Oprah would agree that all Americans have this right, so to me, the interesting question is why Oprah said "earned." It seems wrong, because it suggests that less successful, accomplished Americans do not have this right. The trick is in the word "right." If she'd said "power," it would make sense.

I think it goes something like this: Oprah had to struggle to get to the place where she can think for herself and vote independently. She didn't mean to imply that other people are not entitled to think and to vote in their own independent way. It's that some of them haven't got in touch with their power to exercise their rights. You need to develop as a person — and it takes work — to get where you see, value, and use your rights.

Another way to look at it is that Americans should not be complacent about rights. Rights come and go and change over time. If we don't work to see, value, and use them, they can get lost. We're losing and gaining all the time, and if you haven't noticed, you're part of the problem. Don't get too comfortable. You may think you were born with an immense fortune in rights, but don't loll around like a pettish heiress.

I know. The cake. Must talk about the cake.

But you did such a great job talking about the cake in the comments on that post I put up as a place for you to talk about it:

Gretchen said...

Glad Masterpiece was reversed, pretty big decision 7-2 is pretty decisive these days.

Kate said...

So the next time you have to bake the cake they'll use nice words to describe your refusal.

Teller said...

If anything, it was a decision against open hostility to religious beliefs. The more subtle, smirky hostility will eventually carry the day.

Big Mike said...

Yes, the whole thing turns on how many of the justices who concurred will be okay if the anti-Christian attitude of the members of the Commission is better disguised next time. Two? Three?

Now, I'll go read the opinions and see if I have anything special to say. But first, I would like to point out my post from last December that looked closely at what Justice Kennedy (author of today's opinion) said during the oral argument. After a long post about everything he said, I extracted his 3 concerns in order of importance to him. I think the second of the 3 things is what produced today's narrowly framed decision that won 7 of the Court's 9 votes:

At the Tiny House Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

The photograph is one step back from last night's "Slap Dash Café."* Here's 2 steps back...



... reminding us all once again: Don't get too close to the genius.

_____________________

* Where Big Mike said: "Looks like a part of a Van Gogh, but the technique isn't right." Which just goes to show: You can't figure it out from the details. As they say: The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

"The professor was just offering up some red meat so the racists and phony hero's would crawl out of their caves and show their disgusting underbellies."

"This blog is one big troll and the commentariat are the unwitting subjects of a psychopathology experiment."

Said Howard in the post about the 5 teenagers who taunted and laughed and recorded video as a man drowned before their eyes.

I'll just say... The phony hero's what?

And let me give you an example of a commenter who used that thread as an occasion to tell a story of his own (phony?) heroism. Gahrie wrote:

I was a longterm substitute teacher at a middle school that took the entire 7th grade to the museums and beach in San Diego. The kids were allowed to go in the water, and at least half did. I was the only teacher in the water. Six kids, all of whom were chronic trouble makers I later discovered, got caught in a rip current and were trapped where the waves were breaking also. No one noticed but me, and I immediately swam out to them without thinking. All six grabbed on to me, and thank god I am a large man (buoyant), or I would not have been able to keep the seven of us up. The lifeguards eventually saw us and rescued all of us. They said I probably saved the life of at least a couple of the kids who were exhausted.

When I finally got the shakes and reacted, the scariest thing to me was that I didn't think about what I was doing, and instead just reacted.

And let's also see what the race-conscious analysis was like. (The drowning man was black, and people are assuming that the 5 teenagers are black.) First, here's Chuck:

I am going to give the [NY] Times a pass on their having not posted video. Although I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that if a black man had been drowning and the monstrous do-nothing onlookers had been white, that the Times would have posted all of it along with three [new] columns on the state of race relations.

And here's Clyde:

[T]o play devil's advocate: In Florida, any sizable body of water such as a pond has a very good chance of having an alligator in it. There's a very good chance that the black teens don't know how to swim. It's apparent from listening to the video that the victim drowned quickly and would have been dead long before help could arrive even if they had called 911. And since they were at the park smoking marijuana, calling 911 would just have gotten them involved with the police, which they obviously didn't want to happen, and you can't call 911 anonymously.

And, responding to Clyde, YoungHegelian:

Yes, all this is true.

I'd like to add, in my experience with teen-age boys, & especially the black teen-age boys in the DC area, that sort of goofy bravado is default behavior when caught in an unfamiliar situation. It's like you never, ever show fear or concern, for such would be seen as a sign of weakness.

You have no idea how many times I've been out driving & some young black man will just step out boldly to cross against traffic. And you know what? He'll never look up the entire time! It's almost as if when he makes eye contact with a driver, the jig will be up. Hell, I'd look up & around when jaywalking just to make sure I don't get splattered by some clown who's looking at his cell phone & not the road. Not these guys.

And, yes, it gets them killed. In my county in suburban DC (Montgomery County, MD), each year more pedestrians are struck & killed by cars then there are victims of murder.

And here's Big Mike:

I want to add that I'm very distressed to see the comments that raise a racial issue (or potential racial issue). I grew up in [a] small Midwestern quarry town, and the white teenagers among whom I grew up would have acted no differently. Well, except fifty-five years ago they wouldn't have had cellphones, they'd have been smoking cigarettes and not weed, and there was no 911, no Internet, no social media.

I miss Jill Abramson!

Is it just me, or has the NYT become boring since the departure of Jill Abramson?

No need to tell me that you've never liked the NYT. I'm trying to focus on the change since they ousted Abramson last May. Remember, just before she was fired last April, there was an incident, reported in Politico, in which she'd "called Dean Baquet into her office to complain" that the NYT "wasn’t 'buzzy' enough," she blamed Baquet, and "Baquet burst out of Abramson’s office, slammed his hand against a wall and stormed out of the newsroom."

In the ensuing power struggle, Baquet got Abramson's job as executive editor, and now we are seeing the results: Not buzzy enough!

I go to the NYT site every day, looking for things to read and, I hope, to blog. I'm finding myself skimming over the front page and then leaving. I can't pinpoint what was there before that pulled me in — perhaps it was overly skewed toward aging, affluent, white females like me — but I'm not going in and hanging around.

IN THE COMMENTS: Big Mike said:

BTW, if you keep owning up to 'aging' then we're gonna have to revoke your status as Baby Boomer. Keep this in mind: we never age!

Here's my take on that, from last year, when I was younger (and so were you):

"I have awakened to a shut-down government. Will I notice?"

A question from Big Mike this morning in last night's "café" post, which is still the top post on the blog as I drag myself in here muttering "Am I supposed to talk about the government shutdown?"

MadisonMan says he notices...

... because I work with noaa.gov people, and even have a noaa.gov email account. I'd check it to see if I have email, but that's apparently against the law today, or something.

I think the training I have scheduled for Thursday will likely be cancelled. I'm kinda curious how my big meeting next week will go if the shutdown is persistent.

I sense a shutdown vibe. They shutdown. We shutdown.

The 5-year-old boy who chose to be Daphne from "Scooby-Doo" for Halloween.

And the mother who chose to blog about it.

So now there's a viral photo on the internet of a boy dressed as a girl and endless speculation about what that all means.

1. Did the mother invade her son's privacy? By blogging about the issue of a very young boy who wants to pretend to be a girl? Or was it the photograph? Or was it wrong even to invade the child's fantasy world by speculating about his sexual orientation? The mother's blog post was titled "My Son Is Gay." Do we owe children restraint in thinking about what sexual behavior they will find compelling when they grow up, and if we do, don't we all violate that duty in one way or another?

2. Consider the notion that a costume of a perfectly nice girl was perceived as an unusually scary Halloween character. Kids dress as devils and monsters and dead people all the time, but to be a pretty girl — if you are a boy — is terrifying. As the blogger noted, a girl dressed as a male character would not stir the same anxiety in the grownups. What does this say about sexism? Is there a special aversion to females, that manifests itself when a male associates with female things? Or is it that people have a special aversion to male homosexuals and are really pretty much okay with lesbians?

IN THE COMMENTS: Big Mike said:

I'm glad I'm at home when I followed your "perfectly nice girl" link because some of those cartoons are definitely NSFW.

I've changed the link to the Wikipedia article on Daphne Blake. Previously, it went to the results of a Google image search on: Daphne Scooby Doo. I'll just add the "bestiality" tag to this post to indicate what you would have seen if you scanned the page too long.