"For years, Judge Eleanor Ross’s secret was passed down from law clerk to law clerk. They whispered about..."

"... the sultry jazz music that emanated from her chambers when a uniformed police commander, a man they called her 'visitor,' disappeared into her private office. The clerks could sometimes hear the unmistakable sounds of sex from behind the door.... While the clerks said they might have been willing to overlook isolated personal foibles, they were more broadly disturbed by the lack of attention Judge Ross paid to the civil disputes that came before her.... It was not unusual to go weeks without hearing much from her except for a brief email — 'Please docket.' — a few minutes after they sent her a draft order, three clerks told The Times. They estimated that she provided edits on roughly 5 percent of the civil orders that they drafted in her name, and even then mostly just for grammar or typos...."

From "Sex, Lies and Secrets: A Federal Judge’s Trysts Go Public Now, Judge Eleanor Ross’s career and caseload are under scrutiny. And her punishment, a private reprimand, has sparked backlash" (NYT).

The Times tells us that "the décor in her chambers" included a photo of Ruth Bader Ginsburg festooned with a quote from a Beyoncé and Drake song: "All them fives need to listen when a ten is talking."

I tried to find out exactly what "sultry jazz music" the judge played. I was unsuccessful, but here's a Spotify playlist titled "Sultry Jazz":

To what extent can a judge — or anyone else — use her/his private office for activities other than the job? I assume it's fine to take a nap or do calisthenics or read a novel or stare into space.

ADDED: "Was that wrong? Should I have not done that?... Because I've worked in a lot of offices and I tell you people do that all the time."

"To me, making music for girls is just the waviest thing you could do. Of all the things people could say about me..."

"I was never affected by the whole ‘This is soft, this is emotional’ or whatever. I guess I could just make music for dusty guys or whatever, but that’s not what inspires me."

Said Drake, in 2019, quoted in a new article, "Drake’s Era of Masculine Frustration/On his new album, 'For All the Dogs,' the star rapper wallows in his discontent" (The New Yorker).

I had to look up "wavy." Didn't know if it was good or bad. (It's good.) And "dusty" (it's bad. I remember when "dust" meant money (1970s)).

Anyway, about the new album, the New Yorker writer, Carrie Battan, says:

"There are many ways for a person to be questionable... and men found every single one this year. There were the men with an unbearable lack of self-awareness, screaming..."

"... 'cancel culture' to an audience of millions. There were the men whose long history of abuse allegations did nothing to dissuade people from coming to their defense or giving them MTV VMA cameos. Did you know Louis C.K. won a Grammy this year?... It was a particularly embarrassing year for men with too much money. Over the summer, Jeff Bezos reportedly wanted to pay to disassemble and reassemble a bridge in the Netherlands so his big stupid boat could pass through.... [F]or reasons unbeknownst to humankind, Musk tweeted a picture of his bedside table.... ... Drake decided his collaborative album with 21 Savage was a good time to claim that Megan Thee Stallion lied about being shot by Tory Lanez....  [There] were the cringey men — men who embodied 'the ick.'... There was the Try Guy cheating scandal that validated our cultural suspicion of Wife Guys.... [There were] Whiny Little Baby-Men. These are the men who had to overcome such adversity as omelets and pens.... [T]here are men who are still making hypermasculinity their whole thing. These range from supplement-scamming Liver Kings to men who proudly embrace the title 'King of Toxic Masculinity.'... Then there are the truly sinister men.... They have either been a guest on Alex Jones’s podcast or are Alex Jones himself..... [There are] Ricky Gervais, Matt Gaetz, Brad Pitt, Tom Brady...."

Writes Mia Mercado in "The Year Men Flopped" (The Cut).

I love the way she got through all that without naming Trump. We really have moved on! And now, 2022 is about to expire, and we can move on from all the scoundrels she did name. Let's move on once again, to the — hopefully — much better masculinity of 2023.

"[T]he most preposterously priced mattress, a king-size Grande Vivius, costs $539,000...."

"When Drake bought one, in 2020, it was merely $400,000. For non-Grammy winners, there’s a waiting list. Handcrafted by a team of artisans in Sweden, each mattress takes up to six hundred hours to assemble and stitch and is wrapped in checked cotton ticking....  Gwyneth Paltrow partnered with Avocado on the Goop x Avocado mattress... which starts at $24,000 and is available on demand.... While I waited for the couple chilling out on the Eco Organic model to move on, I asked a sales associate named Desi (long hair, leggings) if customers ever fall asleep. 'All the time,' she said. 'The longest was four and a half hours. He was so embarrassed that he bought the mattress.'... The Casper Nova Hybrid ($2,295) is awfully cozy, and I also like the Casper Original, both the all-foam ($1,295) and the hybrid foam with springs ($1,695). Staring at the ceiling in Bloomingdale’s, listening to the Four Seasons sing 'Oh, what a night' over the sound system, I wanted to answer 'Both' to the salesperson’s question: Which is more comfortable? Some of this confusion is deliberate....  Amid all the shadiness and hyped marketing, how to choose?"

 
From "How to Buy a New Mattress Without a Ph.D. in Chemistry/The disrupter economy has set its sights on your bedroom, offering gel capsules, ice fabric, green-tea memory foam, and copper-infused toppers. Will they help you get a better night’s sleep?" by Patricia Marx (The New Yorker).

"Hip-hop has a misogyny problem and Drake’s new bounce-infused ode to women is not going to fix it."

Writes Shannon Lee in WaPo:

Rap stars are notorious for releasing music that belies their claim of being feminist or pro-women. In March, rapper and producer Pharrell Williams presented an award during the iHeartRadio Music Awards wearing a jacket that read “Women’s Rights” in honor of Women’s History Month and then performed "Lemon" on a stage full of women covered in glitter and twerking in their underwear.

There are larger implications. Hip-hop has not had its #MeToo moment, but allegations made by and against some of its biggest players suggest its time is coming...

I'm adding the tags for this post, and the first one I think of is "hypocrisy" — hip-hopcrisy. But I do think it's important to see art as different from a political statement, especially when the political statement relates to sexuality. Art should be complex and not propaganda, and sexuality should and will survive independently from the various political messages that have something to do with sex. If you're going to attack the male hip-hop artists for their use of sexy women in their performance, you'd better also attack the female artists for their use of sexy women — especially if your theme is hypocrisy. Don't be a hypocrisy hypocrite. That's the worst kind.

Here's that Drake video:



Side question: What is bounce music?

Bounce music is an energetic style of New Orleans hip hop music which is said to have originated as early as the late 1980s.... Bounce is characterized by call-and-response-style party and Mardi Gras Indian chants and dance call-outs that are frequently hypersexual.... The sound of bounce has primarily been shaped by the recycling and imitation of the "Drag Rap" sample.... Typical of bounce music is the "shouting out" of or acknowledgment of geographical areas, neighborhoods and housing projects, particularly of the New Orleans area....

"Jordan Peterson, Canadian Archetype" — worth clicking to the NYT for the photograph alone.

The caption says that's him "at his Toronto home." His home! What a place! That is some nutty artwork and he's posing on the chair arm with an arm akimbo echoing a figure in the painting behind him. There are staring heads (in artwork) all around his staring head, and there are 2 major phallic symbols — a train (in a painting in the upper left) and a red-and-white-striped pole with a CCCP sign atop it (in the painting at the right).

But this is an op-ed (by a Canadian journalist named Jesse Brown), and I haven't read it yet, so I don't know if I can recommend it. Hang on a second. Let me live-blog my reading of this thing.

There is a certain image that Canada projects to the world.... It’s the image of Canada as a tolerant, progressive, kind and humanitarian nation, populated by mild-mannered and polite people. The idea of Canada the Good....

That's not what the Canadian thinks of his people. It's what he thinks we think. But we are wrong, Brown informs us:

Canada is home to many more Jordan Petersons than Justin Trudeaus. Mr. Peterson is... a dull but stern dad, who, under a facade of apparent normalcy and common sense, conceals a reserve of barely contained hostility toward anyone who might rock the boat..... This is a mind-set with deep historical roots in the Great White North....

If we knew Jordan Peterson the way Canadians know Jordon Peterson, we wouldn't enjoy his bracing pep talks. We'd be like, Oh, Dad, can I go now?

Canadians never rebelled and won independence from Britain, so as history unfolded, Brown says, they ended up with “peace, order and good government” where Americans got “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Our politics reflect our sense of unease with anything radical. Liberals who think of Canada as a lefty haven should look to [various boring things that have happened in Canadian history].... Even our pop culture reflects our national preference for stasis: Drake, the Torontonian rap superstar, is probably best known for introducing ennui to hip-hop.

So the Canadian left isn't really very lefty, and the Canadian conservatism is bland too, the message being, essentially...

Canadian conservatism is not brash. It not belligerent [sic], it is not loud. It is not Fox News. But our most popular columnists all deliver the same message: Things are the way they are for a reason. Those who agitate for change are stepping out of line.

So please see Peterson's "12 Rules for Life" book in that light. Like Rule 6: “Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.”

The message: Until you’ve cleaned your room and achieved perfect personal order, how dare you assume you have any business diagnosing the world’s problems, much less trying to fix them?

Ugh! It's so Canadian!

Americans are raised to believe that individuals, even flawed ones, can indeed change the world, and sometimes should. Canadians, for all that we’ve managed to construct a society that Americans sometimes envy, lack this ethic. The resulting mind-set, disdainful of idealism and suspicious of ego, is one we are now, evidently, exporting.

It must be so annoying to the Canadian — whose mentality Brown purports to channel to us — that Americans have snapped up so many copies of their boring dad's stifling lectures. Who are these Americans? They're the people all readers of the NYT can look down their noses at: "disaffected men."

But these men are delusional — Brown tells us — if they think Peterson is "walking in the tradition of rugged American individualism." He's not American. He's Canadian, and take it from the Canadian Jesse Brown, Jordan Peterson is "a line-toeing Canadian, preaching a philosophy not of American defiance but of Canadian deference."

"When Drake realized he had been caught on-camera pouring a delicious-looking can of pink-grapefruit Perrier into a cup at a Toronto Raptors game..."

".... did he panic because he realized he was, in that moment, inadvertently becoming a meme? Or did he panic in order to become a meme?"

I don't know, but... very charming, quite a talent:

When you get called to the principals office... @champagnepapi | #WeTheNorth

A post shared by Toronto Raptors (@raptors) on Nov 29, 2017 at 5:01pm PST

Jimmy as Bob as Drake.

Here's the Drake version, for reference...



.... but you shouldn't need it, because even if you don't follow current pop music, you must have gotten up to speed to appreciate the SNL parody that had Donald Trump (the real Donald Trump) dancing in it:

Donald Trump's "Saturday Night Live" stint.

1. This was the best part:



That's very funny even without knowing the original video that it spoofs, but you can watch that here. Spoofing that isn't original. It's already much spoofed.

2. For the commenter who asked at 11:05 PM last night, "Why aren't you live blogging SNL?" You have no idea how early I go to bed! I was up at 5, however, and I watched the DVR of the show over breakfast.

3. We loved seeing Ed Grimley! Too bad they had to put "Ed Grimley" in big letters on screen... presumably to help the kids out there whom they must have imagined all saying "Who's that guy?" Here at Meadhouse, Ed Grimley is imitated approximately every other day.

4. Trump did a nice job. He wasn't just a good sport about getting flanked by 2 Trump impersonators in the opening monologue. He seemed to enjoy it. And he accepted Larry David yelling "You're a racist!" at him. Laughing at the idea of being considered a racist. That's edgy. [ADDED: "A Hispanic advocacy group had offered anyone in the SNL audience a $5,000 reward if they called Trump a 'racist' during his opening monologue."]

5. I skipped over the musical act, but Sia stole my 1965 hairstyle.

6. Lots more Larry David in the cold open. David owns the Bernie Sanders impersonation. I wonder if that was the first time the line "It's Saturday Night!" was skipped. Cranky old Larry/Bernie says "Live from New York, eh, you get it."

7. Late in the show there's a fake ad for Donald Trump done by aging porn actresses. The punch line is Donald Trump walking on and saying "I'm Donald Trump and I in no way, shape, or form approve of this message," but the most interesting thing is the shot at Bill Clinton that comes at about 3:00. One of the messed-up ladies dreams of getting to visit the White House: "I haven't been there since the 90s," and the other says, "Oh, yeah, I hit my head on the desk." For a show that's seemed so in-the-tank for Hillary, that's some serious balance.

Did Madonna sexually assault Drake?

"Madonna pulled the singer back to plant a kiss on his lips, making out with him for at least three seconds.... when she was finished, the musician looked horrified, even wiping his mouth."

Later, sources were quick to tell TMZ that Drake liked the kiss, but that it was merely her lipstick that turned him off, therefore the foul look on his face. It was added by insiders that the smack on the mouth was not planned, but rather a last-minute decision by Madge. 

If it was not planned, then she did not have his consent, and it was a sexual assault. It's an easy question.

BUT: I tend to think that it was planned... planned in a way that still made it possible to say that Madonna made "a last-minute decision" to do the kiss exactly the way she chose and to provoke whatever reaction Drake came up with on the spur of the moment. The 2 were performing together, and I'm guessing that he knew there was a range of spontaneous-looking things she might do to him and that he chose to do a few spontaneous things himself — grabbing her as if he likes it, then wiping his face as if he doesn't. The song was "Human Nature," and presumably they were enacting the lyrics, which include things like "You held me down and tried to make me break/Express yourself, don't repress yourself...."

By the way, "Human Nature" is a great song and my personal favorite Madonna video.

Drake is "disgusted" that Rolling Stone "took my cover from me last minute and ran" with Philip Seymour Hoffman.

He tweets: "RIP to Philip Seymour Hoffman. All respect due. But the press is evil."

"I'm done doing interviews for magazines. I just want to give my music to the people. That's the only way my message gets across accurately."

I feel like siding with Drake here. I mean, he sounds self-absorbed and uncaring.  Philip Seymour Hoffman died! But Philip Seymour Hoffman killed himself with drugs. Why channel all honor to him? The man left 3 young children fatherless. Meanwhile, Drake is staying alive, giving music to the people. Where are our values? Why are we morbidly drawn in to Hoffman's self-waste? Show us somebody who's doing something good, offering new, positive things that make life worth living.

I haven't been keeping track of Drake, however, and perhaps he's awful for some reasons that haven't crossed my path, and I can't remember whether his music is any good, musically or message-wise. That's not my point here. I'm just taking him to be a living artist with new material who got eclipsed by our absorption with the way a dead artist would never give us anything new ever again.