"We feel threatened by them. So it would’ve been a total disaster and a cold slap in the face if the pope had been full-on American."

Said Araceli Torres Hallal, 64, "a Catholic entrepreneur in Mexico City," quoted in "World Catholics See the First American Pope as Hardly American/Catholics around the world were skeptical at first about an American pope. But Pope Leo XIV’s multicultural and multilingual identity has put them at ease" (NYT).

We're also told:

Even calling Pope Leo “American” has bothered those Latin Americans who resent the use of the word to describe someone from the United States, because they see it as a form of imperialism. They think “American” should apply to anyone from the entire continent — that is, from North, Central or South America.

Isn't that 2 "continents" — North America and South America? Central America is not a continent. It's part of North America, though I've heard educated Americans deny it. And I mean to say Americans for United Statesians, because we don't say "United Statesians." There's the Esperanto "Usonians." There's "Yankees." These are never going to happen. We don't have another word for saying who we are. Show a little empathy for our plight. Read the Wikipedia article "Demonyms for the United States." It's been a problem all along.

But the NYT writes "the entire continent — that is, from North, Central or South America," and maybe that means it has adopted the theory that the whole landmass — south and north (and central) — is one continent. I don't think the NYT has adopted that nomenclature. And I wonder if Trump would like it. He looks at a map and insists that it's some kind of manifest destiny that Canada should be part of the U.S. And he came up with Gulf of America. And if you want to say it's one continent because we're all here on one tectonic system, remember who's on our plate: Greenland. The Trumpian dinner is served!

Governor Newsom's seesawing shoulders inject horror into the phrase "some ideas around some land use concerns... around speculators coming in."

NO FU*KING WAY.

"I was just talking to Josh Green, the governor down in Hawaii, who had some ideas around some land use concerns he has around speculators coming in, buying up properties.

So we're already working with our legal teams to to move those things forward and we'll… pic.twitter.com/ed1Msb8O0v

— HustleBitch (@HustleBitch_) January 13, 2025

Discussed at X, here.

How do you read that body language (and facial expression)? I'm seeing knowledge that speculators have already outrun him and cannot be stopped. What do you think?

That shoulder action seems to say: Everyone has always found me so cute, so I'll try being extra cute. It's all I've got.

ADDED: If Newsom had controlled his body language, I would have been inclined to think that he was getting ahead of the problem and that talking to the Governor of Hawaii — who dealt with the aftermath of the Maui fires — made a lot of sense.

"[T]he one class I hated was hula. It was mostly because the instructor was a flamboyant gay man and it scared me. That was my own internalized homophobia."

Said Patrick Makuakān, describing the "cultural exploration camp" he attended when he was 10.

He's quoted in "'Hula is my church': how Patrick Makuakāne is reinvigorating Hawaii’s traditional dance/Winner of the MacArthur ‘genius’ grant in 2023 has forged his own style in San Francisco while often subverting stereotypes of hula itself" (The Guardian).

"Hawaii’s governor announced on Friday that the list of people missing from the Lahaina fire had been whittled down to just 66 names..."

"... down from 385. The new number is a vast relief to officials who at one point feared that hundreds of people would never be accounted for. In the first days after the fire, the missing list swelled to close to 3,000.... The official death toll remains at 115, a figure that hasn’t budged in more than two weeks...."

 
The NYT reports.

"It has been one month since a wind-whipped wildfire engulfed the historic Hawaiian town of Lahaina, and the authorities are still trying to determine exactly how many people died..."

"... in the nation’s deadliest conflagration in more than a century. Nearly all of Lahaina has now been searched by teams of rescuers, cadaver dogs and anthropologists trained to detect fragments of human remains, yet the official death toll has stood at 115 people for more than two weeks. That has meant an agonizing wait for the families of more than 380 people whose names populate a list that the F.B.I. says it is still trying to reconcile.... The last time the death toll changed was on Aug. 21, the day that President Biden visited Lahaina.... The authorities will have to determine whether their investigative results are sufficient to declare those still missing as dead.... The heart of Lahaina is still closed to the public.... But...  the county had moved closer toward allowing people to return and inspect their properties before the Army Corps of Engineers begins bulldozing and clearing debris...."

From "Grim Reality in Maui: Hundreds Still on Missing List a Month After Inferno/The F.B.I. says more than 380 people remain unaccounted for. Many residents have begun to accept that their loved ones will not be coming back, and survivors wonder what comes next" (NYT).

"President Biden is set to break away from his summer vacation on Monday to fly to Hawaii to inspect damage wrought by wildfires...."

The NYT reports, in a presentation that is not supportive to Biden:

The asymmetrical photograph tips Biden into the lower corner. He looks small and weak. It's an unflattering view from the side, with his unround head bowed. He's headed into the weeds. But he's a man on vacation — hidden away at Lake Tahoe. 

Paragraph 3:

"Many children were left with grandparents and great aunts and uncles while parents... worked, making escape even more challenging. In many cases... the very young and the very old died together."

From "A couple prayed for their 14-year-old son, last seen at their Lahaina home. Then they found him [dead]. There was no pattern to who died and no single path to safety amid the nation’s deadliest wildfire in more than a century" (WaPo).

"The head of Maui’s emergency management agency... defended the decision not to activate the sirens, saying the outdoor alarms are used primarily for tsunamis..."

"... and would not have helped because people are trained to seek higher ground when they hear the siren.... None of the 80 warning sirens placed around Maui were activated in last week’s fires.... A county-run website on the siren describes it as an 'all-hazard siren system' to alert residents to natural disasters and other emergency situations, 'including tsunamis, hurricanes, dam breaches, flooding, wildfires, volcanic eruptions, terrorist threats, hazardous material incidents, and more.'"

From "Maui’s Emergency Management Chief Resigns After Questions About Fire Response/The chief, Herman Andaya, cited his health in stepping down. His agency’s decision not to sound emergency sirens as wildfires neared Lahaina had drawn scrutiny" (NYT).

"They had five kids. The dad gave me the two-year-old, and from that time that he gave him to me I had that son in my arms, clinging to my neck for about two hours. Two to three hours in the water. And it was crazy."

Said Jubee Bedoya, quoted in "California family of seven thanks local Lahaian hero who led them into the sea and floated for three hours together on plywood as firestorm killed at least 110 people/Jubee Bedoya from Lahaina was running towards the sea last week to escape the flames when he saw a family of seven from Fresno, California, who were lost/Bedoya told them to come with him and jump into the sea: the family's two-year-old son clung to Bedoya's neck for two to three hours as they floated on plywood/All eight were eventually rescued by the Coast Guard, and the Californian family returned home: Bedoya, who lost his home, says he is happy he could help" (Daily Mail).

"'It just started getting so black,' he told me. He knocked on his neighbor’s door, saying, 'We’ve got to go!'"

"But his neighbor had cats and didn’t want to leave. 'He just shut the door in my face,' [a herbalist called Spice Prince] recalled. Over the phone, I could hear him start to sob. 'I ran with my dog in my backpack, in my shorts and flip-flops,' Prince told me. The world was an inferno. 'It wasn’t like a flame—it was just, like, dragon-breath orange.' He walked up a mountain road in the night, leaving behind all of his herbs, plants, elixirs, surfboards, and a collection of vintage hunting bows. 'I’ve gathered medicines since I was six years old—I’ve lost it all,' he said. 'It’s like I’m coming out of the womb, starting my life over with nothing.'"

 

From "Living Through Maui’s Unimaginable Wildfires/Hawaiians who survived Lahaina’s deadly fires described an inferno that blackened the sky and laid waste to entire neighborhoods" (The New Yorker).

"You probably won’t get burned, but that’s not what’s going to kill you. It’s the smoke that’s going to kill you."

Said Carl Otsuka, fire inspector for the Honolulu Fire Department, quoted in "Why jumping into water to escape a wildfire should be a last resort/Seeking refuge in a pool or the ocean won’t always protect you from the heat or smoke, experts say" (WaPo).

Crystal Kolden, a professor of fire science at the University of California at Merced, said... if you seek refuge in the water, you may be stuck there for several hours “before the coast is clear,” Kolden said. “People don’t realize how long you’re going to be in the water... Hypothermia and risk of drowning due to not being able to swim or tread water for that long are very real possibilities.”

"Bali is part of a growing number of popular travel destinations fed up with overtourism."

"Hawaii is considering a bill to dissolve its government-sponsored tourism marketing agency. Amsterdam has been trying to reduce rowdy tourist behavior in its Red Light District, rolling out a ban on pot-smoking on the streets there, reducing hours for restaurants and brothels, and tightening some alcohol restrictions. Italian authorities have been fining tourists in Rome, Florence and Venice for littering, camping, vandalism and traffic violations.... 'We have a lot of tolerance here … but it’s this behavior of I am the more important person. Look at me,' said Fatmawati, an Indonesian personal assistant... 'It’s disgusting — people are tired of it. I’m tired of it.'"

From "'It’s disgusting': Bali locals are fed up with bad tourists/Many in Bali are sick of the disrespect, the illegal work and the indecent social media posts from foreigners" (WaPo).

I've assembled 10 TikToks to keep you occupied for the next 10 minutes. Let me know what you like best.

1. This is your pilot speaking.

2. The puppies are not yet ready to play.

3. She's scared to drop in.

4. If you baby-talk, will your friend baby-talk back?

5.  Drew Barrymore really wants you to go out in the rain.

6. Backstage with The Beach Boys.

7. When Sting had to endure the Jose Feliciano version of "I'll Be Watching You."

8. A "Moonstruck" visual.

9. When the Wisconsin man goes to Hawaii.

10. The deadline gave us purpose.

The tallest mountain in the world — most of which is underwater — has been ascended — bottom to top — for the first time.

SF Gate reports on the climbing of Maunakea, which is 33,500 feet tall, with 19,698 feet of that underwater.

Mountain climber and underwater explorer Victor Vescovo teamed up with Native Hawaiian scientist Cliff Kapono to scale Maunakea Volcano from its base at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean to its peak.... The historic voyage included descending to the bottom of the ocean, kayaking to shore, then biking and hiking to the peak.

Oh, this isn't what it sounded like from the headline. They didn't go up the mountain in some underwater trek. Then went straight down to the starting point but then came straight up and kayaked over to the starting point on land:

What have they done to my hula hoop?

I'm reading the "Ask a Cool Person" column at New York Magazine, and I see "100-Teen Poll: What Is Actually Cool to Buy in 2021? We surveyed high schoolers around the country. Here, 19 takeaways about how teens shop." After seeing the cool type of "top" is a corset and something about comfortable sweatpants and favorite "loungewear" brands I get to: 

4) The only workout item mentioned multiple times was the weighted Hula-Hoop. 

A respondent named Aida bought this Hula-Hoop after seeing it on TikTok. “I like it because it’s not an intense workout and instead it’s a more relaxed one you do for a long period of time,” she says. “I watch TV while I do it sometimes.” Just don’t expect to magically get a waist like the girl in the video, Aida says: “Definitely not the realistic outcome of hula-hooping for, like, 30 mins a day.” Plus, she added, TikToks like that one “are quite triggering,” and the platform is “very toxic when it comes to body positivity.”

The hula hoop is a workout item?! I was a kid in the late 1950s, when the hula hoop became a big fad in the United States. I had a hula hoop, and I was pretty good at it.* It was all for fun — fun and some thinking about Hawaii, which was about to come in as a state (and my young head envisioned "coming into the United States" as the islands floating steadily toward California and about to connect). 

No one talked about "working out" back then, and certainly no one — no one anywhere around me — regarded the hula hoop as an exercise device. It was play and a display of skill that was amusing to watch, because it was like doing the hula, which was not treated with politically correct cultural respect in those days, but seen as an entertaining dance, like the twist, that entailed hip wiggling with accompanying arm movements. 

And, of course, no one talked about "triggering" and being "toxic" or "body positivity" back then. Here's this toy that was perfectly fun for young people in the days when Baby Boomers were kids, and now it's part of a grim agglomeration of everything but fun, where you have to work on your body, worry about it, and also worry about worrying about it. Did you watch the linked TikTok video? It's all about tape-measuring your waist over and over and earnestly attempting to reduce the number by hula hooping.

I know I'm old, and I'm even giving this post my tag "these kids today," so I'm aware that I'm speaking like a stereotypical old person, but what are we doing to our culture? The NY Magazine column purports to represent coolness, but it's only finding out what teenagers are buying and assuming that things going on with teenagers are cool. I wish they were! 

__________________________

* If you told me Wikipedia's photograph — by George Garrigues, at the top of its article "Hula hoop" — is in fact a photograph of me, I could not with 100% certainty say that it is not:

I guess that's floatie life — they don't seem too upset.

I'm looking at "Sharks circle women on a floatie at Florida beach" (NY Post).

"They tried to live as they had in Berkeley, in an improvisational community, their doors open to anyone."

"But things started to go missing, and it was unclear whether their neighbors also believed in communal sharing or if they were taking advantage of the Kingstons. Kahalu’u is on the island’s windward side, and Maxine, like many Chinese people who believe that wind disturbs one’s qi, or life-force equilibrium, found the constant gusts distressing. She couldn’t think.... In the seventies, publishers had begun responding to America’s social realities by offering challenging, textured depictions of what it meant to be part of a minority. 'The Woman Warrior,' which was marketed as a memoir based on Kingston’s upbringing, seemed to adhere to typical preconceptions—the cascading effects of patriarchal traditions, the stern and unaffectionate immigrant parents, the children caught between duty and dreaming. But, unlike most ethnic coming-of-age tales of the time, it seeded doubt about its own authenticity.... By the end, you don’t know which, if any, of these stories are true, or whether they constitute a reliable depiction of Chinese-American life.... I thought about what Kingston had said.... A writer is always alone.... These sketches of her life weren’t for anyone but her. They were not... 'a story to grow on'.... 'It’s really enjoying my present life... I am really enjoying going to buy that winter melon. I’m deeply into it..... I’m so sane in my work. That’s why it’s fiction.'"

From "Maxine Hong Kingston’s Genre-Defying Life and Work/The Asian-American literary pioneer, whose writing has paved the way for many immigrants’ stories, has one last big idea" (The New Yorker).

Troubled by Trump's use of the phrase "human scum," I decided to trace its usage, over the years...

... in the NYT archive. Not "scum" alone, but "human scum," the 2 words together, which struck me as particularly ugly. I searched, and I read every appearance of "human scum" in the NYT. I summarize everything below, but I'll give you the short answer here. The epithet rarely appeared until 2003, when it began coming up repeatedly in statements from the North Korean government. The first person called "human scum" by the North Koreans was John Bolton. Bolton — who was undersecretary of state for arms control in 2003— became Trump's national security adviser and was ousted last month.

But let's go back to the beginning. The oldest use of "human scum" in the NYT came in the July 23, 1897 issue:

"Put your money on someone who energizes and excites you rather than someone who appeals to a voter in a diner in rural Michigan who you invited in your head."

Said Adam Jentleson, "a Democratic strategist working for a group focused on suing Mr. Trump," quoted in the last line of a NYT article titled, "Why 2020 Democrats Won’t Stop Talking About Wisconsin."

Seems to me Jentleson stopped talking about Wisconsin. He talked about a guy in a diner in rural Michigan. It's just mythology, these flyover people. Once upon a time in a faraway land — Michigan, Wisconsin — what's the difference?

The point is, apparently, Democrats are sick of thinking about that guy, the "guy in a diner in rural" whatever. Once they were safely stowed in a basket — a basket of deplorables — and that worked out so disastrously that the reaction could be to obsess over these imaginary people. Are Democratic Party candidates expected to actually venture into the hinterlands? No, they'll just worry about those people, and then they come to Madison (where I live) or Milwaukee to try to score enough votes to outnumber those diner people. That's what Democrats do to win Wisconsin.

“We have created an electorate full of pundits and strategists, and the result is that we’re puzzling through not who we like but who we imagine someone else will like,” said Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii. “It’s a fool’s errand to imagine who will be appealing to someone else.”

Yeah, it's a fool’s errand to imagine... Stop imagining what other people are like inside, and just say what you want. Says the man from Hawaii, which is 4,000 miles away from Wisconsin. I can imagine — no, I can't — what people way out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean think of the opinions of people up there in that part of Wisconsin where at some point it turns into Michigan.



What is that stuff? Watersmeet? Iron Belt? It'll make you crazy if you think about who lives there and what they want.

“There’s something fundamental about the fact that Trump presented himself as a noxious human and still won that is disconcerting and unsettling about America,” said Adam Jentleson.... “But the why, we don’t know. It depends who you talk to.”

Who should be President of the Disconcerting and Unsettling States of American?

Lava.