I've got 9 TikTok videos this time — carefully culled and curated. Let me know which ones you like.

1. An Easter extravaganza from The Bradys.

2. A potato and egg recipe from China.

3. An eyeful.

4. Click this only if you love kittens... and motherhood.

5. Click this to see a working dog. 

6. And this one is for parrot lovers.

7. Dad asks "What did you say I looked like?"

8. Using crochet to make bicyclists more visible.

9. The old have taken over TikTok.

Reinflating Brady.

That courtroom artist gets another chance to capture the Brady visage.

About that "Brady Bunch" fanfic in The New Yorker and how I almost feel as though I am bullying The New Republic at this point.

The June 30 issue of The New Republic just popped up on its own in my iPad. I only noticed because I was in my magazine-reading app finishing reading a story called "Here's the Story," by David Gilbert in The New Yorker, which I'd been "reading" via podcast while out and about. This is a great story, by the way, and though you'll need a subscription to read it at that link, anyone can read this interview with Gilbert in which he explains something that's not necessary to liking the story: It's the story — here's the story... — of the first husband and the first wife who had to die to lay the groundwork for the merged family of Mike and Carol Brady.

With the Bradys, I think I understood the ridiculousness of the parents and the kids, the goody-two-shoes attitude... I spent a few weeks watching old episodes and reading a slew of Brady quotes to try to incorporate the language of Mike and Carol—like in the pilot, Carol asks a haggard Mike if he needs a tranquilizer. I also wanted Don Drysdale in the story, because of his appearance in the show. Longfellow, too. A vague Hawaii reference. The Sunflower Girls. All these little details that hopefully add to the heartbreak of Ted and Emma....

Since the world of the Bradys is such an artificial world, I wanted the world of Ted and Emma to be absolutely real. That was very important to me, for them to fly above the construct of the show, to take on the appearance of living, breathing souls and perhaps, for a moment, gain their humanity and transcend their non-origin origins...

Hitting the home button within that app doesn't get you back to the iPad home screen but to your whole collection of magazines, each one represented by the cover of the newest issue. That's the only reason I saw the hit piece on Scott Walker, attempting to smear him as somehow a racist — he "owes his success to a toxic strain of racial politics" — so I took a screen shot of the cover and blogged it, then came back a while later to let you know that the article — "The Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker/A Journey Through the Poisonous World That Produced a Republican Star," by Alec MacGillis — has nothing racial about Walker himself. (The racial material is about the demographics right-wing radio of Milwaukee.)

I noted — at 3:00 pm, yesterday — that the cover and article were not yet up on the TNR website, but I expected to see them momentarily, and even commented 2 hours later that I was surprised at the lag. It's now almost 8 a.m. the next day, and my attack on the article you can't read yet has been linked on Instapundit and Power Line. I almost feel like I'm bullying TNR... kicking it while it's snoozing. Come on, TNR.

You know, I subscribed to The New Republic because it seemed to be poised to leap forward in digital media. I wanted to witness the roll out of the new design and effect of the new editor-publisher Chris Hughes — the 30-year-old co-founder of Facebook.

How did I catch Chris Hughes, et al., flat-footed. Me, an old professor with a Blogspot blog, an iMac, and an iPad... me, reading a short story in The New Yorker about the year 1967, the year when I was 16.

UPDATE: TNR put the article up Sunday evening: here.

How do you manage the day's last spurt of energy?

"The way I do it, there are still 56 minutes left to watch two episodes of The Brady Bunch on TV Land and I [have] enough energy to go downstairs and make a ham and swiss with horseradish, tomato and lettuce on artisian bread during the first commercial break. If I watch The Brady Bunch first, and Marsha's in it a lot, then we're down to two minutes."

Do you need to call in a consultant to make your home "relationship ready"?

Some people do!

The place is also dimly lighted, which, once you examine the kitchen nook in daylight, is probably not such a bad thing. The cabinets hold nothing but a six-month supply of powdered milk for Mr. Podell’s cereal, so that he can keep his trips to the supermarket to a minimum; the Formica countertop is peeling; the stove has been disconnected from the gas feed. (Mr. Podell, who usually eats out, sees no reason to waste fuel.)

All these things have proved detriments to love, but none so effectively as his sheets. Mr. Podell likes the ones from the ’60s and ’70s that tell a story: sheets with intergalactic battles or pink hippopotami or the Beatles. Since these are no longer available in adult-bed sizes, Mr. Podell’s sheets are now 30 to 40 years old.

Note: Podell is very rich!

Then there is Bob Strauss, 46, who writes dating advice for match.com and has a real stuffed baby seal in his apartment. He didn’t whack the seal on its silky little head, it’s a family piece inherited from a rich aunt and uncle in Miami.

It is displayed along with Mr. Strauss’s South Park and Sonic the Hedgehog figurines and Lego collection.

“It’s provocative,” he adds. “I like going out with tough, smart, aggressive, challenging type people. It’s fine with me if they want to argue about it; I don’t want to blandify my apartment to make myself generically acceptable.”

Just the fact that he'd say that tells you a lot. Everything you might not like is part of his individuality, and everyone else is bland and generic.

I think it all depends on how much you like the person. If it's not that much, it probably takes one little thing to seal off the flow of good will, like the guy in the article who rejected a woman because she had a Klimt poster. You're just looking for an out. And if you like them a lot, some of the most ridiculous crap becomes endearing.

As he entered her apartment, a free-flying parrot relieved itself on his head. Then a large rabbit darted out from somewhere and licked his feet. A baby gate separated a second rabbit from the first — there had been a nasty penis-biting episode, his date explained. Also, the kitchen wall was covered with antique egg beaters, which looked to Mr. Heindl like weird tools.

Yet, he married her! I think the weirdest part of that is specifying the bitten rabbit part. Why not just say one rabbit bit the other?

Anyway, look around your house right now and take the point of view of someone who's feeling wary about having a relationship with you. You've got some horrifying stuff there now, don't you? I know I do! Every damned room has something in it that would scare off someone who was already in an aversive mode.

Here's my advice -- which can take the place of consulting an expert about making your place relationship ready. Get someone to make a video recording of you as you go through your house or apartment looking at all your things. You take the role someone who's just met you and is trying to decide whether to reject you. Be honest. Be merciless!

ADDED: The comments over at the NYT are full of hilarious descriptions of horrible housekeeping/decorating.

The wall above this guy’s bed looked like the opening montage from the Brady Bunch, except all nine of the pictures were of his face — and, no, he didn’t intend them ironically.

And:

I dated this guy whose apartment was always a mess when I visited. However, occasionally it was clean. I finally figured out the pattern. He only cleaned the apartment when he had other woman visiting.

And:

There was the guy with a big red and white barber’s chair and a telescope in the center of his living room.... And then there was the guy whose vast loft apartment was filled with cats and dozens of huge statues of mournful angels and bleeding eyeless, handless saints . . . first one of the cats ran over and bit me, and then the guy, after weeks of dating, announced that what he really wanted to do in life was become a Catholic priest.

Can you be a good couple and desire separate housing?

The NYT reports a trend of couples -- real couples -- who like living apart.

"My last husband would lie around like Al Bundy and expect me to be waiting on him all the time," Ms. Toohey said. "Evelio helps with the dishes and he's grateful for what I do. When we see each other, he takes me out to dinner and doesn't expect me to cook every night or do his laundry. And when I do cook, he appreciates it."

She can take her time putting her 5-year-old daughter to bed, she said, without worrying that there's a husband in a nearby room "competing for attention."

Hmmm... So the idea is that living with a woman ruins the man? How do we know the Al Bundy guy would have been any good if kept at a distance? Or are you going to say it's only possible to be Al Bundy if you've got a woman putting up with it?

[Researchers] have even identified a new demographic category to describe such arrangements: the "living apart together," or L.A.T., relationship. These couples are committed to sharing their lives, but only to a point.

I like the idea, but I'm also skeptical. There are different reasons to want to live like this. Some couples probably just don't like each other that much, or they love autonomy more -- including the freedom not to have to show respect and concern for other person all the time and not to have the other person seeing everything that you do. As the article notes, in many cases, there are children who are not the natural children of the two adults in the current couple. Wanting a love relationship with someone doesn't necessarily mean you want him as a parent for your children or that you want to parent his children. And if both sides of the couple have children, those children don't necessarily see themselves as the Brady Bunch.

"Although social pressures encourage stepfamilies blending, only one out of three stepfamilies survive," [Jeannette Lofas, a clinical social worker, said.] "I always say to people, would you go on a plane to San Francisco with your child if you had a two-thirds chance of not surviving it?"

A strange comparison. Forming a family and then failing produces a breakup, a visible failure. Not forming a family can hurt too, but life goes on continuously, with no perceptible failure point.

[T]he rise in L.A.T. relationships may be due to a growing unwillingness to compromise, particularly among members of a generation known for their self-involvement.

"In many cases Baby Boomers want to have the freedom to live on their own terms," said the author Gail Sheehy, whose latest book is "Sex and the Seasoned Woman" (Random House). "As you age, you have more commitments and possessions in your life that you are attached to that the other person may not want to share."

Oh, it must be a trend. Gail Sheehy has written a book about it. So, yeah, Baby Boomers are selfish bastards. And old folks get set in their ways and don't like anybody messing with them.

Carolyne Roehm, the New York socialite and author, is similarly unwilling to sacrifice control of her space. Ms. Roehm, 54, said she is perfectly happy with her extreme version of the L.A.T. relationship, with Simon Pinniger, 53, a businessman who lives 1,700 miles away in Aspen, Colo.

Uh, yeah. Let's have a guy with a nice place in Aspen. But wouldn't it be better to have several guys, with housing in various quality vacation spots? But it's only a trendy L.A.T. if they are both devoted to each other. Well, that ought to keep her/him from cheating on you. What! You slept with someone else? But I thought we were a L.A.T.!

Ms. Roehm said she is not interested in making compromises to move in together, even if that makes her sound selfish.

"I have my own life, my own identity and want to keep it," she said. "I like having the things I love around me."

Let's hope Pinniger doesn't read that the wrong way.

But the relationship doesn't suffer from the distance between them, she said; after all, she was willing to fly out on a moment's notice when Mr. Pinniger voiced concern about the color of his fireplace stones.

What about the color of his moods -- the ever-changing, delicate human manifestations that only a live-in partner can know? Oh, please, I care about his damned fireplace stones! Did you know my boyfriend has a stone fireplace in Aspen?

The TV houses of your mind.

With the five-year series nearly over, someone at Television Without Pity came up with an idea for a new forum thread about "Six Feet Under." The subject: the house. Why is it so depressing? One topic being discussed is something that just began to puzzle me as I watched the newest episode: Are the kitchen and sunroom upstairs? Another puzzle: Why is Ruth's place so much shabbier than Nate and Brenda's and David and Keith's? Is the business supposed to be doing well or not? Or have they just decided to make the living quarters of the funeral home depressingly dowdy as an expression of Ruth's character?

It's interesting to try to understand the layout of the house of a familiar show and to question whether the house fits the economic situation of the characters. Do we really understand where those doors lead? Do the exterior shots match the interiors? Does the second floor really fit on the first floor?

I remember a book from a few years back that had diagrams for the houses of 60s sitcoms like "Bewitched" and "The Dick Van Dyke Show." Someone had really tried to figure out where all the closets and bathrooms and so on would need to be – a strange little obsession that produced a pretty cool book. I also remember reading an article about how the characters on various TV shows set in NYC did not have jobs that would pay them enough to afford living in the nice places they had. (Jerry Seinfeld was the exception.)

Then there's the whole subject of TV houses that have been important to you. I think there are a lot of people who deeply bonded with the house on "The Brady Bunch." I'm not one of them. That was never one of my shows. But wasn't there some house you really wanted to live in? Can't you still picture it and take a mental walk through those rooms today? Is there some particular thing in that house that appeals to you: Laura Petrie's kitchen island? The louvered shutters that opened Lucy Ricardo's kitchen to the living area? The spiral stairway in Mork and Mindy's apartment? Samantha Stephens' retro wallpaper?

How many details from old shows are still part of the furniture of your mind?