"Would I rather watch the cast of 'Hamilton' at the White House than men pummeling each other into bloody pulps?"

"You bet. But there’s a chasmic difference between brilliant Broadway performers and hyped-up men kicking and punching for spectacle. I can’t bear to think what the rest of the world sees when it watches the most powerful country on Earth, the heart of democracy, descend from the hilltop into the primal muck where man-as-beast triumphs over the sublime. (That’s me being polite.)"

Writes Kathleen Parker, in "Trump’s big, beautiful brawl was the worst birthday present ever/A $60 million South Lawn cage match cheapened the People’s House" (WaPo).

"How can official orthodoxies persist for so long even when few people believe them?"

Megan McArdle asks, in "The transgender orthodoxy is cracking/Malpractice suit and shifting clinical guidelines show cracks in transgender orthodoxy" (WaPo)(referencing the book "Private Truths, Public Lies" by political scientist Timur Kuran).

Public orthodoxies that diverge from private opinion may be surprisingly stable, but they can also prove remarkably unstable, because they depend on private thoughts to stay private, giving doubters the illusion that they are lone deviants rather than members of a silent majority....

Why is this surprising? It's the familiar story of "The Emperor's New Clothes," which everyone has always easily understood.  

Starting around 2015, an orthodoxy on transgender issues crystallized, seemingly out of nowhere....

Once you've said "2015," you've got your answer staring you in the face! Why don't you see it? That was the year gay people won their great victory, a right to marry, in Obergefell v. Hodges. McArdle has "an orthodoxy... crystalliz[ing]" — as if a mysterious disembodied force emerged out of nothing — ex nihilo!

But real human beings were involved and their incentive to acquire a new cause is obvious. The activists had won, but they still needed to work, they still needed contributions, they still needed to push conventional people to move forward into challenging new territory. They couldn't just allow people to become decently accepting and empathetic to the gay people who, after all, are human beings who sometimes love each other and want a home and a family. Remember that moment?

That made too much sense. Ordinary people relaxed. Got comfortable.

By the time I went to the Ivy League swimming championships in 2022 to cover the controversy over a trans swimmer, people I talked to evinced a wariness that seemed more appropriate to a Cold War spy novel than to citizens of a free republic....

What happened?

"The musical was closely associated with Barack Obama’s administration: Lin-Manuel Miranda... took inspiration for musicalizing George Washington’s Farewell Address from a video..."

"... in which will.i.am set Mr. Obama’s 'Yes We Can' speech to a melody. But it didn’t appeal to liberal audiences alone. Lynne and Dick Cheney praised it as much as Hillary Clinton. In the 2016 documentary 'Hamilton’s America,' Paul Ryan and George W. Bush shared their appreciation alongside Elizabeth Warren and Mr. Obama.... It was seen to represent the promise and limitations of the Obama era, a celebration of America as the land of immigrant achievement, expanding and fulfilling the founders’ imperfectly realized plan. ... Ezekiel Kweku called it 'the Hamilton consensus': a vision of 'an America whole but unfinished, waves of progress bringing it closer and closer to its founding ideals' as 'a meritocracy wrung clean of bias, whose creed is both a promise and invitation to anyone talented and hardworking enough to lay claim to it.'... Ten years on, 'Hamilton' feels less like a fantasy than a warning: This is how quickly America’s promise could curdle...."

Writes Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, in "A Decade After It Opened, ‘Hamilton’ Feels Like a Warning" (NYT).

I've never seen "Hamilton," but I've always thought will.i.am's video, "Yes We Can," was fantastic. Perhaps it still calls to mind the feeling of 17 years ago, when it expressed a wan, sad hope. Now, looking back on the Obama administration, there's no hope about what is in the past, but the wan sadness remains. What that has to do with rapping in 18th century costumes and stomping about and pointing at the ceiling, I do not know. I've never seen "Hamilton," but I hear that it used to express hope and now it's supposed to be regarded as warning us about Trump. I'm still not going to watch it. Too pushy. I'm fine with whatever subtle feeling there is in "Yes We Can," as the Obama presidency fades into the distance.

"Ron Chernow’s new biography of Mark Twain is enormous, bland and remote — it squats over Twain’s career like a McMansion."

That's the crushing first sentence of Dwight Garner's book review, "A New Biography of Mark Twain Doesn’t Have Much of What Made Him Great/Ron Chernow traces the life of a profound, unpredictable and irascibly witty writer" (NYT).

[Chernow's] book is an endurance test, one that skimps on the things that formed Twain and made him the most lucid, profound, unpredictable and irascibly witty American of his time. Hardy will be the souls who tour this air-conditioned edifice all the way through and glimpse the exit sign.

Chernow is the author, most famously, of “Alexander Hamilton” (2004), which Lin-Manuel Miranda devoured while on a vacation

"From now on, there will be two genders... And we're done with LGBT. No more drag. No more guys and wigs. No more whatever these guys were wearing."

"What a weird way to dress, right? A little zesty darling. I'm off to start America. Hand me my wig and my tights and my big blousy shirts."

That was the cold open on "SNL" last night. Nice job, and I appreciate that the players — who had to freeze into a tableau at one point and remain frozen — quite professionally held the pose and resisted cracking up. James Austin Johnson, as Trump, had some funny lines — like the one I quoted above — and the players did not devolve into the old "Not Ready For Prime Time" raggedness — which was great in its day. 

Lin-Manuel Miranda showed up — to play Hamilton — and he froze into the tableau along with all the others and committed to holding the pose. I think it was planned that he — and he alone — would crack up at a specific point — but that point does not arrive until the players have held the pose for 4 whole minutes, with "Trump" cracking jokes the whole time.

Trumpers and anti-Trumpers — did anyone not like that?

"Michelle Obama said that it was 'the best piece of art in any form that I have ever seen,' an observation that put Michelangelo, Mozart and Miles Davis in their place."

"There have been a few detractors but most have been confined to isolated pockets of social media, like guerrilla fighters facing overwhelming odds. What is it that generates so much excitement?... [W]hatever [Hamilton]’s true merits, it has at least bridged the ever-growing gap between Broadway and popular song. Think of it, if you like, as Les Mis for the beatbox generation. Just as the Boublil and Schönberg celebration of life on the Parisian barricades goes overboard with the bombast, so Miranda’s narrative bludgeons you with facts. The one obvious problem is that the rap lyrics are at the same time mundane and relentlessly dense.... The effect is sometimes numbing: imagine if Cole Porter, who had a more nimble grasp of language, wrote nothing but list songs. We’d be bored."

From "Hamilton review — Facts aren’t music to everyone’s ears" by Clive Davis (London Times).

"Hamilton" is reopening in London after the lockdown, so this is a reassessment from Davis. If you want to get into the subject of how people in England respond to an American telling of the Revolution, you'll have to go back to reviews written in 2017. So don't wonder about why Davis isn't doing that. 

He's mostly bellyaching about rap, and I thought the complaint "rap lyrics are at the same time mundane and relentlessly dense" was worth thinking about. I don't listen to enough rap to have a valid opinion, but I do find it offputting because it demands a lot work out of the listener. You have to pay attention... though I always resort to looking up the lyrics and reading them if there are ever lyrics I want to be familiar with, as occasionally happens.

But what is this category of songs called "list songs" — "imagine if Cole Porter... wrote nothing but list songs"? I'd never heard of this, but there's a Wikipedia article:

"Can’t you just wait a while and leave it alone?" says Rita Moreno, defending Lin-Manuel Miranda who is criticized for not casting dark-skinned Hispanic people in his new movie.

So now Rita Moreno is trending on Twitter, with endless denouncements.

 

I love Rita Moreno but this is the opposite of it. We have had a century of movie roles being reserved for the lightest skinned Latino, Black & Asian ppl. This is not breaking new ground & there is nothing for dark skinned ppl to be waiting for https://t.co/fAw9w1qn9g

— DEFUND & ABOLISH POLICE, REFUND OUR COMMUNITIES (@BreeNewsome) June 16, 2021

A sampling of anti-Moreno tweets: "'Can’t you just wait a while…' EXCUSE ME?? Rita Moreno really just told dark skin Latinos to sit there and wait. Let the light skin ones go first. IM SICK"/"Rita Moreno opened her mouth and my abuelita spoke through her. Disappointed, but not actually surprised. Because having HER, of all people, dismiss the colorism problem in the latine community basically shows how deep it runs"/"I love Rita Moreno. Yes, Lin-Manuel has done whole lot. It doesn’t mean he couldn’t do better with representation for Afro Latinos. Why does the fair skinned always say wait your turn to darker skinned people?"/"Rita Moreno *this* close to changing her name to Rita Blanquita"/"Rita Moreno inadvertently giving 'West Side Story' (2021) bad PR for its bad casting months before its release."

"I can hear the hurt and frustration over colorism, of feeling still unseen in the feedback. I hear that without sufficient dark-skinned Afro-Latino representation, the work feels extractive..."

".... of the community we wanted so much to represent with pride and joy. In trying to paint a mosaic of this community, we fell short. I’m truly sorry. I’m learning from the feedback, I thank you for raising it, and I’m listening.” 

Tweets Lin-Manuel Miranda, quoted in "Lin-Manuel Miranda Addresses Lack of Afro-Latino Representation in ‘In the Heights’: ‘We Fell Short’" (Variety). 

Here's the criticism that caused him to go straight to apology mode:

DAMN DAMN DAMN THIS IS PAINFUL pic.twitter.com/A4TOwYwHlb

— numa perrier (@missnuma) June 13, 2021

By the way, that's an interesting use of the word "extractive" — "without sufficient dark-skinned Afro-Latino representation, the work feels extractive." Is that a new usage? The OED has the adjective "extractive," but in the sense of "extractive industries" — like the coal industry, where a resource is extracted. 

Miranda does not want to have merely extracted material from the community — Washington Heights in NYC. He wants to represent it. To extract is to treat the people like an inanimate resource — like, say, coal. He wants to treat people like people, not things. But you may question whether matching the colors of the actors to the colors of the people in the neighborhood is the way to treat people like people.

"Why Your Boomer Parents Are Obsessed With Sarah Cooper/More than anything, older Democrats and #Resistance types want to ‘trigger’ the president."

An article in Mel Magazine... whatever that is. I ended up there because that NY Magazine article I blogged in the previous post linked to another Mel article, "LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA’S LIP BITE IS A WARNING FOR EVERY STRAIGHT DUDE SELFIE/THIS IS AN INTERVENTION" ("While you may think it’s wry... [l]ip-biting is not cute. It is not going to get you laid. And it’s not what the country was founded on. If anyone should know that by now, it’s Lin-Manuel Miranda." No mention of Bill Clinton! His lip-biting worked... 30 years ago.)

So... on to Sarah Cooper, the TikTok comedian who lip syncs to snippets of Trump speaking. She doesn't try to imitate Trump, just to demonstrate that something he said is weird and dumb, mostly by facial expressions. The author at Mel, Miles Klee, says Boomers think this is the funniest thing ever and keep pushing Cooper on younger people who are not equivalently amused. Why?

Klee says Cooper is a centrist Democrat, and "nothing in her routine is too edgy or niche to upset or confuse an older audience," and older folk enjoy feeling hip enough to have something from TikTok to share — especially something from a black woman. But younger people may feel the humor is too gentle. It's just repeating Trump's own words, not attacking him for his "cruelties."

And then there's the theory that this kind of comedy is really getting to Trump:

... Cooper’s fans have developed a baseless theory that Trump’s promises to ban TikTok in the U.S. stem from his fury over her videos on the app. This ties back to their delight whenever the president rage-tweeted at Alec Baldwin. What’s funny to them in those SNL cold opens isn’t necessarily the scripted comedy but an anticipation of Trump’s “meltdown” response. This is their version of the conservative obsession with “triggering the libs,” where political humor is measured by how much it pisses off your opponent. The libs love imagining Trump in a tantrum after the Axios interview, and they’re much too eager to believe that in his vendetta against TikTok, he’s merely lashing out at a woman who “owned” him there.

I'm a Boomer, but I've never believed this idea that Trump would "melt down" and become crazy or enraged by these imitations of him. He's already more or less of an imitation of himself. He created this character Trump, and he plays him on TV and the internet. It's already comic. If other comics copy his comedy, that's a tribute to his comic creation. I do see other people buying that theory, but am I to believe they're buying it because they are older? Maybe it's mostly that age correlates to centrism, and they're just not as eager to see harsher attacks on Trump, and therefore they have a greater stake in believing that these gentle spoofs are effective.

As for me, I started sharing Sarah Cooper back in mid-May. Here was my take at the time:

I think she's great and also that it's complicated, trying to understand why [the video clips] are so great. It's not merely a matter of hating Trump. I think there's also love — illicit love! — for Trump — illicit because you're supposed to hate him — not necessarily you, you, but some of you — and by having his speech flow through an attractive woman, you become liberated to feel that transgressive love.

If I was right, then that's the reason serious Trump haters are resisting Sarah Cooper. And it should be some kind of alert about what love for Cooper's Trump really means!

Teens are mocking Lin-Manuel Miranda on TikTok.

Yeah, I know, Trump is making noise about ending TikTok, so maybe the Trump hating Broadway rapper will be saved by a man he loathes, but it's interesting that the new generation — Generation Z — has a new point of view, and, for them Lin-Manuel Miranda is not a brilliant and completely hip visionary. He's a figure of fun.

New York Magazine explains:

And it’s not just one meme but a variety of them: The most prevalent is the lip-biting meme, which involves mocking the endless stream of selfies Miranda has taken wherein he gazes foppishly at the camera while chewing his lip. There’s also a bit of audio floating around of Miranda reading an erotic excerpt from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao which has become fodder for endless derision — one teen superimposed themself cringing over a series of lip-biting selfies, nearly vomiting when Miranda accentuates the word “clit.” Another popular video is just a clip of Miranda, tousle-haired and lying in bed, telling the viewer “I’m clutching my balls because they’re warm” — no commentary needed. And, of course, there are the endless parodies of him rapping.

The last 3 links in that paragraph all go to TikTok — so click them while they still work. They're all very funny.

The New York Magazine article relies heavily on this Rolling Stone article, "Why Gen Z Turned on Lin-Manuel Miranda/Teens on TikTok have begun mercilessly mocking the Pulitzer Prize-winning Hamilton playwright."

Both articles try to figure out if the Gen Z kids are targeting Miranda because "Hamilton" is insufficiently woke, in that it doesn't deal with slavery and Native Americans and the female characters are all about wanting to have sex with the character Miranda played on stage, Alexander Hamilton. The TikTok stuff is silly, though. Laughing at “I’m clutching my balls because they’re warm” has nothing to do with a desire for more wokeness. That video is, fittingly, about going to sleep and, perhaps, a man's vanity in thinking people want to watch him get into his sleeping position.

Lin-Manuel Miranda jumps into the Goya boycott.

We learned to bake bread in this pandemic, we can learn to make our own adobo con pimienta. Bye. https://t.co/qKHNYfkqCq

— Lin-Manuel Miranda (@Lin_Manuel) July 10, 2020

SNL spoofs the CNN Equality Town Hall — with Kate McKinnon excellent as Elizabeth Warren and Lin-Manuel Miranda pretty good as Julian Castro.

There's also Woody Harrelson as Joe Biden:



I'm glad to see SNL making fun of the Democrats, but it's obviously much gentler fun than what they've been doing with Trump for years. I'd say just be really funny. Gentle or cruel, I don't really care. Just do it well. That is: funny.

Today's oral argument in Trump v. Hawaii — the "Muslim ban" case we now (pretty much) know Trump will win.

Here's Mark Walsh at SCOTUSblog reporting on the big oral argument on the last day of the 2017 Term — Trump v. Hawaii. I haven't read this yet, but from the short article I have read (at the NYT), I think everyone knows Trump is going to win.  I'll live-blog my reading, giving you snippets and comments.

Walsh begins with the weather — "warm but drizzly day" — and observations of who's in the gallery — Orrin Hatch and "a touch of true celebrity and talent when Lin-Manuel Miranda, the author (and original player of the title role) of the Broadway hit 'Hamilton'" and Josh Blackman (who tweets a photo of the autograph he got from Miranda on his pocket copy of the U.S. Constitution) — so this is chronological and grandiosely whimsical.

Walsh calls the argument a "fast-moving, hard-hitting hour" and clues me in that there's another post at SCOTUSblog that's the "main account" of the substance of the argument. I'll get to that. I continue with Walsh.

"Earlier today, Lin-Manuel Miranda fulfilled his ultimate childhood fantasy by releasing 'Weird Al' Yankovic's 'The Hamilton Polka.'"

"The hysterical tune, which manages to cram all of Hamilton into a frenetic five-minute polka, is the latest installment in Miranda's ongoing Hamildrop series, where artists like the Decemberists, Nas, Dave East and Aloe Blacc put their own spin on songs from his Broadway musical," Rolling Stone reports, with an interview of Al and Miranda:

Let's go through the history here. Lin, tell me your first memory of hearing "Weird Al" music when you were younger.

Miranda: Oh, God. My first memory was hearing "Fat," which is a spoof of "Bad," and like most "Weird Al" fans you discover that there is a catalog and this isn't a one-off. "Oh, my God. There's tons of these." I remember asking my parents for "Weird Al" albums for Christmas and I remember the Christmas morning. There were all these cassettes, Dare to Be Stupid, Polka Party, In 3-D. I kinda got the mother lode all at once. And that's the rest of my childhood right here.

At that point, did you know the songs he was spoofing?

Miranda: To this day, I've never heard "Lola" by the Kinks. To this day I've never heard it!

Yankovic: Wow!

Yeah, wow. I agree with Al. How can you never have heard "Lola"? Never listened to the radio? Anyway, here's "The Hamilton Polka":

"It’s unprecedented language from me, but it’s unprecedented to have the president of the United States attack the victims of a natural disaster."

"I’ve never seen that before, so those were the only words I had to express my feelings on that. When have we ever seen that?... That was not an impulsive tweet. Those were the only words I had left, and I’m a guy who puts words together for a living. They’re all I had available to me to express my reaction to his attack on the people of Puerto Rico."

"Hamilton" playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda gives an explanation for why he tweeted "You're going straight to hell, @realDonaldTrump. No long lines for you. Someone will say, 'Right this way, sir.' They'll clear a path."

Is Miranda religious? I tend to think that if you really believe there's a hell and some people are going there you would not purport to speak for God and say who's going there. You would not risk offending God. Miranda's "You're going straight to hell" is particularly high-handed, even purporting to know the bureaucracy of Hell, that there are long lines for some and an express lane for others. That makes it comedy, and it's a kind of comedy made possible, I think, by the belief that there is no hell, and that's why we've got to give the evildoers hell in the here and now.

Speaking of comedy and hell, I was just reading David Grossman's "A Horse Walks into a Bar," which is a novel set in a stand-up comedy show. At one point, the comedian, the main character, says:

"Have you heard the one about the guys who die and get to the induction center in the sky, and they sort them into heaven or... hell? No, seriously, isn’t that the greatest fear—that in the end it’ll turn out the rabbis were right? That hell is a for-real place?... Listen, guys, I’m talking all-inclusive hell, the whole shebang, with fire, and devils with horns, and those little rakes, the pitchforks, and the wheel of torture and boiling tar and all those gadgets Satan gets to use…I haven’t slept a wink just thinking about it these past few months, I swear, and at night it’s the worst, the thoughts just eat me up and I totally get what you’re thinking now: Son of a bitch, why did I have to go and eat those shrimp on that trip to Paris? And the pitas from Abu Gosh on Passover? And why didn’t we all vote for Torah Judaism?” He lowers his voice and booms: “Too late, scumbags—to the tar!”

And the #1 quote of the year is: "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters."

It's the 11th annual "Yale Book of Quotations" list, compiled by Yale Law School librarian Fred Shapiro. Here's the whole list.

I blogged the "shoot somebody" quote back in January. I said it wasn't crazy, but: "a colorful way of referring to polls that say people have definitely decided to vote for him and they're not going to change their mind. It's some comic hyperbole."

Here's the rest of the Yale list, with links to posts of mine blogging those quotes. You can see that I didn't blog them all:

2. "When they go low, we go high." — Michelle Obama, commencement speech at Jackson State University, Jackson, Mississippi, April 23.

3. "You could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the 'basket of deplorables.'" — Hillary Clinton, remarks at a fundraiser, New York, Sept. 9.

4. "And love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love cannot be killed or swept aside." — Lin-Manuel Miranda, poem about Orlando massacre read at Tony Awards ceremony, New York, June 12. [Poem blogged here, but with different quotes.]

5. "(In politics) you need both a public and a private position." — Hillary Clinton, speech to National Multi-Housing Council released by WikiLeaks, Oct. 7.

6. "I alone can fix it." — Donald Trump, speech at Republican National Convention, Cleveland, July 21.

7. "Have you even read the United States Constitution? ... You have sacrificed nothing and no one." — Khizr Khan, addressing Donald Trump in speech at Democratic National Convention, Philadelphia, July 28.

8. "Lucifer in the flesh. ... I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life." — Former Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner, describing Ted Cruz during talk at Stanford University, April 27.

9. "His life will never be the one that he dreamed about and worked so hard to achieve. That is a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20 plus years of life." — Dan Turner, letter to judge prior to sentencing of his son, Brock Turner, after Brock's conviction for sexual assault of an unconscious woman, June [sic — it must be the date written incompletely, not the name of the unconscious woman].

10. "I'm not the next Usain Bolt or Michael Phelps. I'm the first Simone Biles." — Olympic gymnast Simone Biles, interview, Rio de Janeiro, Aug. 11.

I didn't blog #2, which is a reprise of an old Obama campaign quote, referred to as "our motto" by Michelle Obama at the Democratic National Convention. Who said it first? I don't know, but I've always associated it with a very similar and very different quote that came from Barack Obama in 2008: "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun." The 2 quotes can be harmonized if you think a knife is low and a gun is high.

I don't know why I didn't blog ##3, 9, and 10. They're all good quotes that would have prompted me to blog if I'd seen them at a time when I was looking for bloggables and if I'd found them before too many other people were talking about them.

I wonder how Shapiro went about deciding what to put at #1 and whether I'd have picked that rather than the competition, which I consider to be ##3 and 6. ##1 and 3 are beautifully equivalent: The candidate says something with some weird words that's outrageous and damagingly revealing. You might say, but Hillary's quote actually damaged her to death. It was perhaps the most momentous quote we've ever heard from a candidate. But you might say Trump deserved the #1 spot because he won, and that bore out the truth of his statement — bigly. In fact, I'm just noticing what's not on Shapiro's list — "... Grab them by the pussy...." Perhaps the 5th Avenue shooting stands in for the not-fit-for-the-Yale-Library "pussy" remark.

You know, I used to have a blog tradition of picking out my favorite quotes from what I'd blogged over the course of the year. I've got a Michelle Obama quote on my 2007 list: "He still didn't put the butter up... I was like, 'You're just asking for it, you know I'm giving a speech. Why don't you just put the butter up?'"

That has one from Barack Obama too: "Sen. Clinton is claiming basically the entire eight years of the Clinton presidency as her own, except for the stuff that didn't work out, in which case she says she has nothing to do with it."

And here's one from Hillary Clinton: "I wallowed in a morass of general and specific dislike and pity for most people but me especially...."

Here's my list from 2008. That was a year! Full of Barack Obama: "Because I'm an ordinary person, I thought that they meant, 'What's your biggest weakness?' If I had gone last I would have known what the game was. And then I could have said, 'Well, ya know, I like to help old ladies across the street. Sometimes they don't want to be helped. It's terrible'"/"I don't get too high when I'm high, and I don't get too low when I'm low"/"I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother"/"It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation. Yes we can. It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail toward freedom through the darkest of nights. Yes we can...."/"This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal."

Oh, good lord, that was only Part 1 of my 2008 list! That post ends with: "And this is the moment when I hit the wall. This gets us through the first half of the year. You'll have to wait for Part 2." The first half! Ha! No wonder I abandoned the tradition. The tradition was overpowering me. And then, there in the comments, the third one done is Meade, quoting my "And this is the moment when I hit the wall" and saying: "Know your limit; stay within it. Breath. Rehydrate. Have a bite of energy bar. You'll be fine. You went a little anaerobic there, that's all."

The new year came. In the first half of that year, I met Meade. In the second half, I married him. That changed some traditions around here.

ADDED: Meade reads this post and says: "You need a tag 'Meade the personal trainer.'" He restates it: "Meade the personal trainer who sometimes gets a little too personal."

"I’m not freestyling, I’m too old. I wrote you a sonnet instead."

Said Lin-Manuel Miranda, on winning the first of many awards for "Hamilton" at the Tonys last night.

In the ensuing poem he discussed his love for his wife, the Orlando shootings, and theater as a haven of tolerance and inclusivity — all in perfect iambic pentameter, through sobs. "The show is proof that history remembers," he said. "We live in times when hate and fear seem stronger. We rise and fall in light from dying embers, remembrances that hope and love last longer."

I was watching (and he made me cry):



What a lovely man. Never leave that wife. He must know.

(It's just by chance that this post on a man named Miranda follows my post on the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court case named Miranda.)

Here's a bit about Lin-Manuel Miranda's wife, Vanessa Nadal:

1. She is an Attorney Who Graduated From Fordham... 2. Before Going to Law School, She Was a Working Scientist... 3. She and Miranda Went to High School Together, But They Didn’t Connect Until Later...

Two months later, at a big crowded party, he didn’t exactly say, “I love you” but almost. “At some point, we met up for a kiss and he said, ‘You love me,’ ” she recalled. “I was like: ‘How presumptuous!’ I was a little angry but I couldn’t deny it.”...

4. They Got Married in 2010... 5. She Gave Birth to Their First Child, Sebastian, in 2014....

"So I guess the biggest takeaway is, yes, this election cycle is bizarre. But it's no more bizarre than the election in 1800..."

"... wherein Jefferson accused Adams of being a hermaphrodite and Adams responded by [spreading rumors] that Jefferson died, so Adams would be the only viable candidate. He was counting on news to travel slow! That, weirdly, gives me hope."

Said Lin-Manuel Miranda (creator of the very popular musical "Hamilton") in his Rolling Stone interview, which is also prominently quoted in Maureen Dowd's new column, "John Adams Was a Hermaphrodite?"

Dowd's column is mostly about Hillary's unlikability and Trump's wily fighting style. I'll just quote this, because it made me laugh (and it's arguably genitalia-related):

Trump speculated at his rally that Hillary might share sensitive information with her aide Huma Abedin who might share it with her husband, saying: “I know Anthony Weiner. I don’t want him knowing anything. And I never, ever want him to tweet me.”

So, of course, Weiner tweated [sic] immediately and incoherently: “Wait, is he talking to me. I’ll hit that guy with so many rights, he’ll be begging for a left.”

Anyway... did Jefferson say Adams was a hermaphrodite? I found this:

Jefferson's camp accused President Adams of having a "hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman."

In return, Adams' men called Vice President Jefferson "a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father."

The Broadway musical "Hamilton" seems to have saved the image of Hamilton on the $10 bill.

"Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator and star of the hit Broadway musical 'Hamilton,' said on Wednesday that he had received assurances from Jacob J. Lew, secretary of the Treasury, that admirers of Alexander Hamilton would not be disappointed by a forthcoming redesign of the $10 bill. Mr. Lew has said that he wanted to add a woman’s image to that bill...."

Art works.