The cartoon editor of The New Yorker "invite[s] you to enjoy these delicious, butyraceous cartoons, which you all dug the most on Instagram in 2023."

I'm reading "Instagram’s Favorite New Yorker Cartoons in 2023/The gags that got the Internet laughing, and liking, the most in the past year."

Lots of cartoons at the link, apparently the ones Instagram users indicated they liked — or, as some people might say, "dug" (and "butyraceous" means like butter, by the way — but I'll just show you my favorite:

 

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I've found 7 delightful/disturbing TikToks for you today. Let me know what worked for you.

1. His wife wants to go out to lunch dressed like that — like Edgar Allan Poe.

2. This man could not be more impressed than by the Thom Brown Pre-Fall 2023 fashion show. He shan't return to regular life after this.

3. An autistic person's insightful tip on how to bond with neurotypical people at work: Just tell them what day of the week it is. They love it. She's right! I hadn't really noticed it before, but it is true. People love to hear what day of the week it is.

4. A baby is truly amazed at the first experience of eyeglasses.

5. Jordan Peterson delivers some very specific advice about how husbands had better treat their wives or else — or else you will become isolated and lonely and if you don't fix it you'll end up divorced and fixing it for the rest of your life.

6. Sinister Pond Babe explores Sac City, Iowa.

7. Speaking of sinister... these birds!

"On April 14 of this year, I was fired by Netflix for what they determined to be unacceptable behavior on set...."

"I was playing the leading role of Roderick Usher in Edgar Allan Poe’s classic The Fall of the House of Usher, modernized as an eight-episode series for Netflix. It is a glorious role, and I had come to regard it as, most likely, my last hurrah...  On March 25 of this year, I was performing a love scene with the actress playing my young wife. Both of us were fully clothed. I was sitting on a couch, she was standing in front of me. The director called 'cut.' 'He touched my leg,' said the actress. 'That was not in the blocking.' She then turned and walked off the set, followed by the director and the intimacy coordinator.... [Someone from Human Resources contacted him a week later and said] 'Before the love scene began on March 25... our intimacy coordinator suggested where you both should put your hands. It has been brought to our attention that you said, "This is absurd!"' 'Yes,' I said, 'I did. And I still think so.' It was a love scene on camera. Legislating the placement of hands, to my mind, is ludicrous. It undermines instinct and spontaneity. Toward the end of our conversation, she suggested that I not contact the young lady, the intimacy coordinator, or anyone else in the company. 'We don’t want to risk retaliation... Intention is not our concern. Netflix deals only with impact.'"

Writes Frank Langella in "Fired By Netflix, Frank Langella Refutes Allegations Of 'Unacceptable Behavior'" (Deadline). Langella is 84 years old.

"As with previous months, higher prices oozed into just about every sector of the economy, leaving households to feel the strain at the deli counter, shopping mall and just about everywhere else."

Oozed! 

It's getting nasty. WaPo is saying "oozed" in "Prices climbed 7.5% in January compared with last year, continuing inflation’s fastest pace in 40 years/High inflation is undermining a robust recovery, testing policymakers at the Federal Reserve and White House." 

The White House has been touting its actions to lower prices, including targeting corporate consolidation to help create product markets that are more competitive. But inflation has proved a blistering political handicap for Biden, and a litmus test for how many Americans judge the economy. Republicans largely blame Democrats’ $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan for overheating the economy, and the GOP is set to hammer on inflation going into the midterm elections this fall.

ADDED: The word "ooze" — according to the OED — comes from the same line as the Old Frisian word wāse, which means mud, the Old Icelandic word veisa (wetness, mud, marshy ground), the Norwegian veis (marshy soil), and the Danish regional vejs, which means something that is more fun to say in English: oozy bottom. As a noun meaning wet mud or slime, "ooze" goes back to early Old English. The verb "ooze" is more recent, and I can see that the earliest uses had to do with bodily fluids. Example: "Ulcers that lye deep, and ouze out their Matter thro'..winding Passages" (1737). 

Some of the greatest wordsmiths have deployed the verb "ooze":

Is this the most obscure Fellini movie?

Here's something I watched just because it was short — 43 minutes — and I was clicking idly about in my streaming service — Criterion — which said "Federico Fellini’s loose adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s 'Never Bet the Devil Your Head' stars Terence Stamp as an alcoholic actor who suffers from disturbing visions":

  

I'd never heard of this film or that Poe story. The film is so short because it was part of a set of 3 adaptations of Poe, packaged as "Spirits of the Dead," which Wikipedia says "received a mixed critical reception, with the Fellini segment widely regarded as the best of the three." 

I'm not sure that the film has much to do with Poe's "Never Bet the Devil Your Head," which seems to be all about the problem of taking statements literally. There are some points of connection, but the Poe story does not have a surreal awards ceremony — "The Golden She-Wolves" — or a 1964 Ferrari 330 LMB Fantuzzi. The point of Fellini's story seems to be... well, his is less of a story with a moral... I'll just say it's: Life is hell when you're a hopeless drunk.

Fisherman in Yemen haul in a dead sperm whale and discover, inside it, ambergris worth $1.5 million.

 

On the topic of ambergris, there is this from Herman Melville's "Moby Dick":

"We all need to think to keep things straight, but we mostly think by talking."

"We need to talk about the past, so we can distinguish the trivial, overblown concerns that otherwise plague our thoughts from the experiences that are truly important. We need to talk about the nature of the present and our plans for the future, so we know where we are, where we are going, and why we are going there. We must submit the strategies and tactics we formulate to the judgments of others, to ensure their efficiency and resilience. We need to listen to ourselves as we talk, as well, so that we may organize our otherwise inchoate bodily reactions, motivations, and emotions into something articulate and organized, and dispense with those concerns that are exaggerated and irrational.... An individual does not have to be that well put together if he or she can remain at least minimally acceptable in behavior to others.... We outsource the problem of sanity.... If you begin to deviate from the straight and narrow path—if you begin to act improperly—people will react to your errors before they become too great, and cajole, laugh, tap, and criticize you back into place. They will raise an eyebrow, or smile (or not), or pay attention (or not). If other people can tolerate having you around, in other words, they will constantly remind you not to misbehave, and just as constantly call on you to be at your best. All that is left for you to do is watch, listen, and respond appropriately to the cues.... [You need] to appreciate your immersion in the world of other people—friends, family members, and foes alike—despite the anxiety and frustration that social interactions so often produce."

From Jordan Peterson's new book, "Beyond Order/12 More Rules for Life" (p. 3). 

Do you "outsource the problem of sanity"? When other people "raise an eyebrow, or smile (or not), or pay attention (or not)," when they "cajole, laugh, tap, and criticize you back into place," it isn't always only to cue you that you've erred. It is also to control you and to fool you into thinking that there are limits that just don't exist. 

And why did he say "the problem of sanity"? He could have said — We outsource the process of understanding whether we are sane or We outsource the problem of detecting our own insanity. Isn't that what he meant? It would be funny to think that sanity is a problem. 

ADDED: I looked up the "sanity" quotes at Goodreads, and I did this because I expected to find what I found — the kind of sanity-skeptical attitude that's been popular in America for as long as I can remember.

2 of the top 6 are from Edgar Allan Poe:

“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.” 

And:

“Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence– whether much that is glorious– whether all that is profound– does not spring from disease of thought– from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.” 

There's also Mark Twain: “Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.”

Tim Burton: “One person's craziness is another person's reality.” "

J.K. Rowling: “Don't worry. You're just as sane as I am.” 

And George Santayana: “Sanity is a madness put to good uses.”

ALSO: Reading more deeply into the quotes, I find exactly the line I expected to see (attributed to Akira Kurosawa): "In a mad world, only the mad are sane."

"When I’m alone late at night on a deserted road, I like to walk on the double yellow lines. One time I decided to stop and lie down..."

"... right there in the middle of the road. I kept myself narrow, arms pinned, so cars could pass on either side. But I wasn’t invisible, and I alarmed a kind policeman who happened to drive by me. After determining that I was not dead, drunk or high, he concluded I was suicidal. We had a long talk. It didn’t help for me to explain that if I had wanted to be run over I would’ve moved several feet in one direction or the other. And picked a busier road. He wanted to know, why, if I didn’t want to be run over, was I lying in the middle of the road? There were so many reasons. I wanted to see the night sky from the perspective of the road; I wanted to be in this secret spot that always got passed by and never occupied..."

From "Unruliness" by Agnes Callard, a 2018 blog post, which is discussed in a new New Yorker article by Paul Bloom, "The Strange Appeal of Perverse Actions/Why do we enjoy doing things for no good reason?" Callard is a philosopher, Bloom a psychology professor.

Bloom writes:

Callard is careful to distinguish unruliness from rebellion. By lying down in the road, she wasn’t critiquing the status quo or sticking it to the Man. Unruly people might flatter themselves as rebels, but unruliness is nothing so determinate—it’s just an unwillingness to play by the rules. It’s a near-neighbor, therefore, to perversity, a topic long central to theology and philosophy...

Perverse actors—I won’t call them “perverts,” since that word evokes distracting connotations—can also be creative or funny.... The blogger Scott Alexander points out that four per cent of Americans tell pollsters that they think reptilian aliens rule the Earth....

Unruliness, perversity, pigheadedness—psychologists have long been interested in this bestiary of paradoxical thought and action. Perversity is a puzzle. It’s hard to explain, scientifically, what Edgar Allan Poe described as “the imp of the perverse.”...

A friend of mine tells how his family made him a pie on his birthday, as a surprise. His young niece was repeatedly instructed not to reveal the secret, and she solemnly agreed. But, when he came into the house, she suddenly screamed, “There is no pie!”...

Much more to this article — I'm skipping over a lot of good stuff — but it, perversely/harmoniously, ends with pie:

It’s said that a waitress once asked [the Columbia University philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser] what he wanted for dessert—apple pie or blueberry pie. He chose the apple pie. Then she returned with news: there was also cherry pie. “In that case,” Morgenbesser said, “I’ll have the blueberry.”

Late-breaking news.

"How Edgar Allan Poe Got Kicked Out of the U.S. Army" (The Daily Beast).

Something about the grit and lethal glamour of martial life must have appealed to him, and he excelled during his initial period of army service.... Poe’s promotion to artificer after only a year or so in service was a recognition of his competence, hard work, precision craftsmanship, and keenly applied scientific intellect....

The evidence indicates he toed the line as an enlisted man. The same cannot be said of his time at the service academy. He entered West Point in 1830 and was court-martialed and discharged the next year.... Records indicate he cut classes, drill, and chapel too often to make the grade. His drinking has been mythically exaggerated....

The idea of Cadet Poe, however, is fairly well known among West Point students and faculty... “There is a tradition of cadets who either were bad boys in the ranks or who turned out to be infamous more than famous, a counter-narrative to the legacy of heroes”...

"Trump has been the great doctor, stitching up our scars and healing us organically."

Said Washington Governor Jay Inslee, chairman of the Democratic Governors Association, quoted in "Democratic Party’s liberal insurgency hits a wall in Midwest primaries" by David Weigel in WaPo.

Such an absurd and colorful quote. Stitching up scars?! If your wounds are already scars, it would be freaky to stitch them up. Inslee's metaphor sent me looking for images in that genre of tattoo that includes things like this:

A post shared by Dr. Andrés Sosa (@hombroycodo) on Mar 18, 2017 at 4:52pm PDT

Also, "organically." He's not only crediting Trump as the "great doctor" but putting him in what sounds like some alternative medicine category of doctor.

By the way, when did David Weigel start looking like Edgar Allan Poe?



"You are young yet, my friend... but the time will arrive when you will learn to judge for yourself of what is going on in the world, without trusting to the gossip of others. Believe nothing you hear, and only one-half that you see" — a quote from my favorite Edgar Allan Poe story, "The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether."

Don't make personal remarks.

Were you ever taught, Don't make personal remarks? Not just don't make negative personal remarks, but don't make personal remarks. I seem to remember this as a widely shared social understanding, but perhaps it was something very localized — like to Delaware or my own family — or perhaps I am misremembering.

When I google the phrase, the first thing that comes up is a Wikipedia page titled "Wikipedia:Avoid personal remarks" about the civility policy for Wikipedia contributors: "If you have opinions about the contributions others have made, feel free to discuss those contributions on any relevant talk page. But if you have opinions about other contributors as people, they don't belong there – or frankly, anywhere on Wikipedia...."

The next thing of any value is from the Mad Tea Party scene in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland":

"Your hair wants cutting," said the Hatter. He had been looking at Alice for some time with great curiosity, and this was his first speech.

"You should learn not to make personal remarks," Alice said with some severity; "it's very rude."

Aha! Alice knows proper etiquette. Isn't that more or less the point of Alice in Wonderland? She brings her social conventions to a place where no one else follows them, and she sticks to them and gives voice to them, even as no one pays attention to what was so important on the other end of the rabbit hole.

The Hatter's response to "It's very rude" is (of course), "Why is a raven like a writing-desk?"

By the way, there are many answers to that riddle. I always assumed, reading that book, that there was no answer, that it was nonsense, but one very good answer is: "Poe wrote on both."

"Day had broken cold and grey, exceedingly cold and grey..."

That's from the first text that I ran across looking for evidence to support my theory — stated in the comments to "A Gray Walk" — that "grey" is a better spelling than "gray":

I like the spelling "grey" because it expresses the meaning better. The letter "a" looks happier to me — maybe just because of my name — and "e" looks dreary. 

As the commenter who raised the subject observed, "grey" tends to be preferred in the U.K. and "gray" is the American preference. The important thing, for blogging purposes, is to pick one and stay with it. The key is consistency within a single work, and I picked "gray" early on in this 12-years-and-counting project — probably under the influence of Crayola. And looking for a photo of "gray" on a crayon label, I see that I've blogged about this before, in a post with the evocative title "50 Shades of Gary."

Anyway, the quote in the post title is the beginning of "To Build a Fire." Wouldn't it seem less foreboding if Jack London had written "Day had broken cold and gray, exceedingly cold and gray..."?

And test this one, from "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" by Edgar Allan Poe (whose middle name should have been Allen).

"On a chair lay a razor, besmeared with blood. On the hearth were two or three long and thick tresses of grey human hair, also dabbled in blood, and seeming to have been pulled out by the roots."

or

"On a chair lay a razor, besmeared with blood. On the hearth were two or three long and thick tresses of gray human hair, also dabbled in blood, and seeming to have been pulled out by the roots."

"Cherish some flower, be it ever so lowly/Labor! All labor is noble and holy!"

From the recipe for macaroni pie — which contains "wild duck, birds, or squirrels" — in "Mrs. Elliott's Housewife: Containing Practical Receipts in Cookery" from 1870:



I traced the poem fragment to "Labor" by Frances Sargent Osgood. Osgood (1811-1850) was pals with Edgar Allan Poe:

Oddly, Poe's wife Virginia approved of the relationship and often invited Osgood to visit their home. Virginia believed their friendship had a "restraining" effect on her husband. Poe had given up alcohol to impress Osgood, for example. Virginia may also have been aware of her own impending death and was looking for someone who would take care of Poe. Osgood's husband Samuel also did not object, apparently used to his wife's impetuous behavior; he himself had a reputation as a philanderer. 

170 years ago, this evening (dreary)... "while I pondered, weak and weary/Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore..."

Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Raven" is first published — January 29, 1845 — in the New York Evening Mirror.

Poe claimed to have written the poem very logically and methodically, intending to create a poem that would appeal to both critical and popular tastes, as he explained in his 1846 follow-up essay "The Philosophy of Composition.".... Poe chose a raven as the central symbol in the story because he wanted a "non-reasoning" creature capable of speech....

The poem inspired illustrators. I chose the one by John Tenniel (whose "Alice in Wonderland" illustrations are so familiar) to begin the post, but the Gustave Doré approach seems to fit the tone better.



That goes with the last lines about the Raven forever sitting above the door, as "the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor/And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor/Shall be lifted—nevermore!"  which — as I read it tonight, 170 years later — feels like the inspiration for Neil Young's "Big birds flying across the sky/Throwing shadows on our eyes... The chains are locked and tied across the door... Helpless, helpless, helpless."

I guess Mary Burke will enjoy her service on the school board now.

"It makes me want to fight ever more on a local level."

AND: Is "ever more" a typo for "even more"? I don't know...

And Scott Walker, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Walker, Governor — ever more!

"But global warming is occurring. That is absolutely unequivocal. Since the 1950s, the climate system has warmed."

"That is an absolute fact. And we are now 95% sure that that warming is due to human activities. If I was 95% sure that my house was on fire, would I get out? Obviously I would. It is straightforward."

Said University of Miami atmosphere expert Professor Ben Kirtman, quoted in an article in The Guardian titled "Miami, the great world city, is drowning while the powers that be look away" ("Low-lying south Florida, at the front line of climate change in the US, will be swallowed as sea levels rise. Astonishingly, the population is growing, house prices are rising and building goes on. The problem is the city is run by climate change deniers").

That house-on-fire business is an interesting analogy. I heard a similar analogy yesterday, also on the topic of global warming, using the same percentage: If you were 95% sure your plane was going to crash, would you get on that plane?

Chez Althouse, we have a running joke called "Bad Analogy Man." It consists of singing the line "He's Bad Analogy Man," as if it were the theme song of a TV sitcom about a comic character who was always trying to explain things with exasperatingly inaccurate analogies.

I didn't taunt my plane-crash interlocutor with the "Bad Analogy Man" theme song. I took the more pedestrian route of challenging the correspondence of the plane crash and the predicted horrors of global warming. And who are these plane-crash experts with knowledge of a particular plane about to crash? Why would that plane be taking off at all? Similarly, with the professor's house-on-fire analogy, when would you be 95% sure your house was on fire and run out based on that percentage? I think I'd start looking around for the fire, while ensuring that I had an easy exit I could get to before becoming engulfed in flames or overcome by smoke. I'd look for something I might be able to put out and try to determine if I should call the fire department for help. If it was a dire emergency, and I really did need to exit immediately, I would be 100% sure the house was on fire or 100% sure there was a smoke problem that required me to leave regardless of whether the house was on fire.

What a distraction! The question about climate changes is whether we should believe what are predictions of what will happen in the future that are based not on a percentage of certainty about the prediction — we're not "95% sure" that it will happen — but on the percentage of experts who ascribe to the prediction. And I have no idea how sure the individual scientists are. They just agree with the other scientists. Who knows what motivations to agree lurk within their big brains? And who decided what is the set that counts as 100%? If believing what must be believed is what gets you into the set of experts, I'm surprised the number of experts who agree isn't 100%. And obviously, if it were 100%, it wouldn't mean that the prediction is 100% certain to occur.

Anyway, everyone ought to educate himself about the logical fallacies. I like this book "76 Fallacies," where there's an entry titled "Weak Analogy." And — from a website called The Fallacy Files — here's the "Weak Analogy" page, which rejects the alternate term "False Analogy," on the theory that there's always something similar about any 2 things, as illustrated by answers given to the question Lewis Carroll wrote — apparently intending as nonsense — "How is a raven like a writing desk?"

ADDED: The Fallacy Files and I missed the discovery that Lewis Carroll actually did have an answer to the riddle some have waggishly "solved" (e.g., "Poe wrote on both") and I always assumed was intended as nonsense:

In 1976, over a century after the book was first published, Denis Crutch from the Lewis Carroll Society of North America discovered that the real answer was in a long forgotten typo. Crutch found out that in 1896, Carroll originally wrote: "Because it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is nevar put with the wrong end in front." Later editions corrected the word "nevar" -- not realizing that Carroll clearly meant to write "raven" backward. As in, "It is raven put with the wrong end in front."

"I offer you this missive..."

"... not only because it links to a tempting NYT article on kindergarten classroom decor... but because the article — nay, the very circumstances themselves! — allude, perhaps unconsciously, to the title — and by no means not the substance! — of a pardonably obscure, and deliberately hilarious, Edgar Allan Poe satire on permissiveness."

... writes my ex-husband RLC, linking to "Rethinking the Colorful Kindergarten Classroom" and to Edgar Allan Poe's "The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether."

"Tap-tap-tapping at your chamber door (only this and nothing more)."

Just one of 60 literary expressions signifying masturbation.

(Via Metafilter, where the list is immensely extended.)

"There is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient, as that of him who, shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a plunge."

Acting on impulse... maybe you won't, but if you will, you will have first had the impulse.

A life made out of reading.

From an early obituary for Susan Sontag, who has just died of leukemia:

Sontag was reading by 3. In her teens, her passions were Gerard Manley Hopkins and Djuna Barnes. The first book that thrilled her was "Madame Curie," which she read when she was 6. She was stirred by the travel books of Richard Halliburton and the Classic Comics rendition of Shakespeare’s "Hamlet." The first novel that affected her was Victor Hugo’s "Les Miserables."

"I sobbed and wailed and thought [books] were the greatest things," she recalled. "I discovered a lot of writers in the Modern Library editions, which were sold in a Hallmark card store, and I used up my allowance and would buy them all."

She remembered as a girl of 8 or 9 lying in bed looking at her bookcase against the wall. "It was like looking at my 50 friends. A book was like stepping through a mirror. I could go somewhere else. Each one was a door to a whole kingdom."

Edgar Allan Poe’s stories enthralled her with their "mixture of speculativeness, fantasy and gloominess." Upon reading Jack London’s "Martin Eden," she determined she would become a writer. "I got through my childhood," she told the Paris Review, "in a delirium of literary exaltations."

At 14, Sontag read Thomas Mann’s masterpiece, "The Magic Mountain." "I read it through almost at a run. After finishing the last page, I was so reluctant to be separated from the book that I started back at the beginning and, to hold myself to the pace the book merited, reread it aloud, a chapter each night."

Sontag began to frequent the Pickwick bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard, where she went "every few days after school to read on my feet through some more of world literature — buying when I could, stealing when I dared."

I have never heard of anyone loving reading that much. Say what you will about Sontag and her various political ravings, the woman did truly love reading.