"The book has also amplified debate about whether more blame should be placed on Democratic leaders, Mr. Biden’s staff and the press for not revealing more about the former president earlier...."

"Intentionally or not, by being an author of a major book on the subject, Mr. Tapper has allowed himself to become a symbol of the establishment press that conservatives have long accused of hiding the former president’s frailty from the public. [Megyn] Kelly, the former Fox News star, subjected Mr. Tapper to intense grilling on her popular podcast in an interview that went viral online. 'You covered the Biden presidency aggressively throughout the four years, and you didn’t cover mental acuity, hardly at all,' Ms. Kelly said at one point. 'I mean, time and time again when issues came up, you seem to be running cover for the president.' Mr. Tapper denied the charges. 'Conservative media absolutely has every right to say, "We were hip to this, and the legacy media was not,"' he said later in the interview. 'Now, I do not accept that I was part of a cover-up. I do not accept that I was just providing cover for Joe Biden.'"

From "Everyone Now Has an Opinion on Jake Tapper/A book the CNN host co-wrote has received positive reviews and appears to be a sales hit. But it has also generated intense scrutiny of him and his work" (NYT).

So... you weren't "hip to this."

Why not? And why would I read a book written by such an out-of-touch, unobservant, slow learner? Or should I ask why would I read a book written by such a liar?

I don't know what's up with Robert De Niro and X.

I saw:

"[Chef Thomas Keller] inspired the chef Rob Rubba to display a plaque — 'always be knolling' — near the pass at his award-winning restaurant, Oyster Oyster..."

"... in Washington, D.C. The phrase, popular in the world of art and design, refers to arranging objects so they are parallel or at 90-degree angles. At Oyster Oyster, it’s meant to encourage chefs to organize their work spaces, and, by extension, their minds, 'like an opening yoga sequence or tuning a guitar,' Mr. Rubba said. 'As people in hospitality, we look to things to keep us inspired, to motivate us,' said William Bradley, the chef and director of the Michelin-starred San Diego restaurant Addison. Especially for a restaurant staff that is 'performing at the highest level.' After Addison earned its second star in 2021, Mr. Bradley huddled with his staff and agreed to install an engraved plaque in the kitchen with the Navy SEAL call and response, 'All in, all the time.'"

From "Live, Laugh, Lowboy: Fine Dining’s Love Affair With Inspirational Quotes/Sayings from Navy SEALs, furniture designers and Steve Martin are just a few examples of how restaurants use signs to motivate their staffs" (NYT).

It's funny to see these word wall signs presented as cool when hung by men in restaurant kitchens. For years, people have been mocking women who put up these signs in their homes. I can see from the article — not from my own TV habits — that the coolness has something to do with the show "The Bear" (the restaurant in that show has a sign that says "Every Second Counts").

Reminds me of: "I should get one of those signs that says 'One of these days I'm gonna get organizized...."/"... like those little signs they have in offices that say 'Thimk'":

About that new (to me) word "knolling": I found this, from last year, in Dwell: "The Life-Changing Magic of 'Knolling'/Before purging your belongings to tidy up à la Marie Kondo, consider this organizational tactic championed by two artists with ties to the American furniture manufacturing company."

"I know that Tom Sachs is where it proliferated," says Amy Auscherman, director of archives and brand heritage at MillerKnoll..... "It’s a point of pride to be able to say the company name is also a verb." While the blue-chip artist laid out the rules for knolling and championed the concept into the creative world, sculptor Andrew Kromelow originally invented it. Both men worked in Frank Gehry’s Santa Monica studio during the late 1980s; Kromelow was in charge of keeping the workshop tidy as a janitor and would feverishly organize so that workers could quickly and clearly see all the tools at once. At the time, the Gehry studio was constructing a bent-plywood chair for Knoll. The name stuck.

From the internal link:

HOW TO KNOLL

1. Scan your environment for materials, tools, books, music, etc. which are not in use.
2. Put away everything not in use. If you aren't sure, leave it out.
3. Group all 'like' objects.
4. Align or square all objects to either the surface they rest on, or the studio itself....

Sachs’ studio mantra was instituted - ABK - ‘Always Be Knolling', a riff on the salesmen’s ‘ABC - Always Be Closing’ recited by Alex Baldwin in the screen adaptation of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross. It is an exquisite subversion of the capitalist creed into a sense of creativity in the display of the tools of craft. It is a riposte to the real estate snake-oil sales culture in the form of a celebration of making and order.  

"’The fact is whether he’s acquitted, whether it’s hung jury, whatever it is, he is guilty, and we all know it,' the actor said..."

"... after the news conference, as a rowdy group of Trump supporters confronted him and yelled insults before he left. 'I’ve never seen a guy get out of so many things, and we all know this. Everybody in the world knows this.' Asked if he thought Mr. Trump should be in jail, Mr. De Niro replied: 'I sure do. Absolutely.' The foray by a Biden surrogate into commentary about Mr. Trump’s guilt... was a stark departure from the president’s directive to avoid discussing his rival’s felony charges. Mr. Biden has said next to nothing on the subject, to avoid feeding the false Trump-inspired narrative that he ordered prosecutors to bring criminal charges against his predecessor. The moment illustrated how difficult it may be for the Biden campaign to navigate its response to a potential verdict, with outside allies far more willing than his disciplined operation in Wilmington, Del., to lob frontal attacks at Mr. Trump over his legal peril...."

From "Robert De Niro, as Biden Surrogate, Says Trump ‘Absolutely’ Should Go to Jail/Seeking to troll Donald Trump outside his Manhattan trial, the Biden campaign held a news conference with the actor and two former Capitol Police officers. Mr. De Niro veered off script" (NYT).

"It can’t be. It can not be! If he is, he wins the election. You won’t be on this show anymore. He’ll come looking for me. You know, there’ll be things that happen that none of us can imagine...."

Said Robert De Niro, quoted in "Robert De Niro Goes Off on ‘Total Monster’ Trump and His Fans In Epic Rant on Bill Maher — Calls Him Every Name In The Book" (Mediaite).

Ironically, De Niro's rhetoric is quite similar to Trump's — predicting a decline that no one can imagine. We won't have a country anymore! 

"Although [Graham Chase] Robinson won the case, she may find it hard to work in Hollywood again."

"'Personal assistants often handle sensitive information, making discretion paramount,' says [Stacy Jones, founder of Hollywood Branded, a marketing agency]. 'The media attention from the trial could be seen as contradictory to this need for privacy.' Or, as De Niro’s Goodfellas gangster Jimmy Conway famously put it: 'Never rat on your friends and always keep your mouth shut.'"

I'm reading "How much did Robert De Niro’s trial tell us about the man behind the movie tough-guys? The actor’s ex-assistant was awarded $1.3m for gender discrimination. Details from the trial suggest a blurring of boundaries between his tough-guy movie persona and his real character" (London Times).

She won. I see that. I have no idea what the terms of her job were, but it paid $300,000 a year. And: "A Hollywood assistant’s remit is tricky to define — it’s not a straightforward, 9-5 gig.... In the trial, claims emerged that the actor made crude jokes about his Viagra prescription; suggested Robinson use a male colleague as 'sperm donor'; called her a 'b****' and a 'f***ing spoilt brat'; would ring her while he was urinating; and asked her to 'imagine him on the toilet.'"

"One time, 'He asked her to literally scratch her back,' the lawyer said. When Robinson asked him why he didn’t just use the back-scratcher that was there..."

"... De Niro said, 'I like the way you do it,' [the lawyer] said. Robinson has said she was also on the receiving end of De Niro’s allegedly misogynistic comments — including suggesting she could get pregnant using the sperm of a married male colleague. 'He would joke with Ms. Robinson about his Viagra prescription.' De Niro smirked at Ms. Robinson about his young paramour, who was around Ms. Robinson’s age,' her suit said. But De Niro’s lawyer fired back that Robinson 'always played the victim' and painted her as a money-hungry ex-employee. 'It's nice to work for a movie star, but it can be mundane,' [De Niro's lawyer said]...."

From "Grumpy Robert De Niro testifies in sensational showdown with ex-assistant who claimed he’s boss from hell: ‘This is nonsense!’" (NY Post).

She's suing for $12 million. I can't figure out what the legal basis of the claim is supposed to be. Her job was personal assistant — to an 80-year-old movie star — and she received a $300,000-a-year salary. 

The "SNL" cold open on the Mueller report is mostly tedious, but they did a fantastic job...

... making Robert De Niro look like Robert Mueller:



De Niro only needed to read from the "report," but he didn't do that with any comic style or even basic articulation competence. He flubbed many lines and never looked at the paper he was supposed to be reading. He was reading the teleprompter, so that's where his eyes were locked.

Meanwhile, Aidy Bryant does William Barr, but Barr isn't a person we know well enough to know whether this is a funny impersonation. The comic idea — that Barr re-interprets Mueller to Trump's advantage — is quickly understood and so obvious that the repetitions are boring.

But Alec Baldwin is there, and his Trump is delightful, so high on himself, so devilish.

"What are we supposed to do? Speak calmly while he’s praising neo-Nazis? Wag our finger when he walls us in? Abide his ignorance and hate with good grace?"

"Tsk tsk when he embraces murderers and war criminals while berating honorable Democrats? We’re not going to win over the deplorable nincompoops who voted for this man. Do you honestly think that we will offend their delicate sensibilities? These are the people who witnessed the vilest displays of hate, including his encouragement of skinheads to beat up protesters. They heard him brag about groping unwilling starlets. They watched as he mocked a disabled reporter. And yet they went into voting booths all across America and pulled the lever for this narcissistic, unread, vulgar excuse for a human being. Robert De Niro expressed openly the disgust that I have been feeling in my den, sitting in front of the TV and pretty much yelling the same sorts of things when I encounter the daily outrages that ooze from this pustule of a president. Who’s to say that Democrats aren’t scoring victories because of the palpable feeling of disgust that attends this so-called president’s every utterance? This man body-surfed into the White House on a wave of resentment and hate. Maybe a bigger wave of righteous anger will flush him and his Republican enablers out, and down into the metaphorical swamp from which they came."

The top-rated comment — by far — on the Frank Bruni column in the NYT "How to Lose the Midterms and Re-elect Trump" (which begins "Dear Robert De Niro, Samantha Bee and other Trump haters: I get that you’re angry. I’m angry, too. But anger isn’t a strategy. Sometimes it’s a trap. When you find yourself spewing four-letter words, you’ve fallen into it. You’ve chosen cheap theatrics over the long game, catharsis over cunning").

This post gets my tag "civility bullshit," which has been used restrictively over the years to highlight my proposition that calls for civility are always bullshit. They're not seriously based on some idea that discourse should be civil across the board. It's always a means to an end. Often it's calling out the other side's incivility, trying to get them to tone it down, when the comparable incivility on one's own side would be cheered on as tough and well-deserved.

The commenter here openly stating the proposition that is usually kept hidden. What Frank Bruni is doing is a bit different, but it's also civility as a means to an end. He thinks his side is overdoing it, impulsively seeking relief in stupid outbursts like De Niro's "Fuck Trump" at the Tony Awards, and it's going to hurt them politically.

Yeah, it's funny how De Niro stepped up to the role of straight man for Trump, who tweeted:

Robert De Niro, a very Low IQ individual, has received too many shots to the head by real boxers in movies. I watched him last night and truly believe he may be “punch-drunk.” I guess he doesn’t...

...realize the economy is the best it’s ever been with employment being at an all time high, and many companies pouring back into our country. Wake up Punchy!

Wake up Punchy!

"Robert De Niro Says ‘F— Trump’ at Tony Awards, Gets Standing Ovation."

Variety reports.

“I’m going to say one thing, F— Trump,” De Niro said while pumping his fists in the air. “It’s no longer down with Trump. It’s f— Trump.”

"Roy Moore shows up to vote on horseback."

Reports the NY Post (with a photo).

ADDED: The first commenter and (I'm thinking) a million people on the internet responded with some variation of "Fuck you and the horse you rode in on."



Hey, whyntchya leave me alone, I'm tryna do my routine here.

"I'm trying really hard to understand how this kind of appropriation without attribution is *not* a form of plagiarism."

"When you take someone else's ideas, their original work, and pass it off as your own ... yeah, that's what plagiarism is. I'm just ... trying to find a way around this. 'It's just a crossword' is the only defense I can imagine, and as you can imagine, I find that defense fantastically pathetic."

Rages Rex Parker, about the Sunday NYT crossword, which, he finds, lifted a bunch of — SPOILER ALERT — writing rules that break themselves (like "No sentence fragments").

He points us to a William Safire column published in the NYT in 1979:

Not long ago, I advertised for perverse rules of grammar, along the lines of “Remember to never split an infinitive” and “The passive voice should never be used.”

The notion of making a mistake while laying down rules (“Thimk,” “We Never Make Misteaks”) is highly unoriginal, and it turns out that English teachers have been circulating lists of fumblerules for years.

As owner of the world's largest collection, and with thanks to scores of readers, let me pass along a bunch of these never‐say‐neverisms....

So... Safire admitted the idea wasn't at all original, and he didn't write the examples but collected them from readers and passed them on. It was a cornball old English-teacher joke when Safire padded his column with this stuff in 1979. It's silly to think that we need to honor William Safire because he's the one that had the NYT column that became the place where this dusty old junk remained visible after 40 years. In any case, it's all so infra-NYT that I can't feel much outrage, but then I pretty much loathe crossword themes, especially when humor is involved. And I do the NYT crossword every day. I like interesting and unusual words. Themes... bleh. But I can see why Rex gets mad. He's all about demanding that the NYT puzzle live up to its own claims of greatness. And this wasn't great. "Plagiarism" was the least of it. I thought I'd enjoy jumping back into the world of William Safire, but the best I can say about that is that he admitted he was writing a lazy, unoriginal column.

ADDED: It's the kind of dumb humor that easily signaled — in 1976 — that Travis Bickle's date was horribly awkward:



"Organizized — it's a joke!"

This NYT article — "How Conservative Sites Turn Celebrity Despair on Its Head" — seems as though it might be fun for Trump's non-haters.

This is by Amanda Hess. It's a promising topic. But let's dig into it. Here's the set-up:

While the angry tweets, therapeutic Instagram testimonials and fiery speeches may comfort their fans, these left-leaning celebrities are also inadvertently energizing the opposition. 

Energizing. There's that word. It came up in that big NYT interview with Donald Trump. The executive editor of the NYT, Dean Baquet, asserted that Trump had "energized" the people who attended that "alt-right convention in Washington this weekend" and asked Trump if he feels that he's "said things that energized them in particular." Trump accepted the word and simply said "I don’t want to energize the group.... and if they are energized I want to look into it and find out why."

But I'm thinking "energize" is a word that's having its day as an expression that works to create a sense that one person is responsible for what someone else does. A said X and B did Y. You couldn't say A caused Y, but you might say A energized B. It's vague, but it might feel incisive. And it's a way to tangle A up in demands to denounce B or explain why A didn't lead to Y. I'm going to keep my eye on this word. It might lull people into believing things are more connected and people are less autonomous than they really are.

Now, back to Amanda Hess, who took care to put "inadvertently" before her "energizing." The celebs are trying to reach people who, they assume, feel the way they do. But others can see it too, and they expose themselves to mockery. Rich, privileged folks can look pretty silly making a spectacle of their despair over the results of an election.

Conservative news outlets — most notably Breitbart News Network, the right-wing populist enclave — are perfecting the art of sapping Democratic stars’ name recognition and repurposing their words and actions into pro-Trump material....

And it's not just Breitbart, it's also "nimble, often nameless online aggregators who quickly churn through popular culture and throw the most evocative stories to their readers, often without much commentary." Well, yeah, I know how that works. That's what much of the best of blogging does. But I say very short commentary can be great. Twitter is a testament to the fun of bouncing off of some news story.

Hess seems most interested in Breitbart (presumably because Breitbart connects to Steve Bannon and that gets us to Trump). Hess calls attention to a Breitbart piece — which seized upon a Dunham Instagram — "'Grieving' Lena Dunham Seeks Answers in Arizona Wilderness After Trump Win."

Hess endeavors to make this ridicule of Dunham seem ominous. Considering Bannon's closeness to Trump, "calling attention to Ms. Dunham’s Jewish faith feels like a bone thrown to the site’s white nationalist readers." Okay, let's go to the Breitbart article and see that bone in person:

In a separate post on Wednesday, Dunham said she had spent days “grieving” over the “loss of our country and the woman who inspired us,” comparing her experience to that of the “shivah,” a Jewish mourning ritual.

The NYT article doesn't give a link to the Breitbart article. I got that for you myself. I think it's a safe bet that the vast majority of NYT readers assumed that Breitbart gratuitously inserted a reminder that that Dunham is Jewish, but the article doesn't even say Dunham is Jewish. It just quotes an Instagram of hers describing her grieving over the election in terms of a Jewish ritual. You don't even have to be Jewish to decide to talk about 7 days as a good period of mourning after which you "emerge from darkness" and "create light." Making fun of Dunham's treating an election loss like a death in the family is pretty far from anti-Semitism, but see how it's close enough to energize an accusation of energizing?

Another Breitbart piece highlighted in Hess's article is “‘Depressed’ Robert De Niro: Trump Election Makes Me ‘Feel Like I Did After 9/11.’” Lefty celebrities are serving up darkly hilarious bilge that doesn't even need rewriting to be funny. If I'd noticed that one, I'd have just used the quote and identified the author. It wouldn't have needed any commentary at all. Just showing it to you would have been enough to carry the message that I thought it was terrible and terribly funny.

And Hess knows that:

The real ideological action is undertaken by the audience, whose members read between the lines of these culture pieces and then scribble in the margins. 

Scribble in the margins. That's you, dear commenters. So, say what you will. I'm energizing you. And believe me, I have been attacked repeatedly — even by some of my own colleagues — for the things you say in the forum I've created.

"Robin... was afraid Bobby [De Niro] was going to blow him off the screen."

"I said, ‘I won’t let that happen.’ So it was my job to keep Robin from being funny. We had a shorthand signal for when he got a little flamboyant, improvising," said Penny Marshall, the director of "Awakenings."

She curled her fingers tight and dropped the fist to her groin: “It meant ‘More balls.’ ”

What happened to Robert De Niro's iPhone?

Via HuffPo. I've got to put this below the fold because I don't like something that moves on its own on the front page. You've got to click the speaker icon for the sound. It's worth it. I watched it about 20 times, mesmerized.

How can Mitch Daniels announce that he's running for President when he's got 16 stitches in his big bulbous forehead?

"Indiana Republican governor Mitch Daniels was hit in the forehead by a swinging door after concluding a workout Friday afternoon, prompting an injury that required 16 stitches."

Prompting an injury. What the hell happened? Was another human being involved, did the inanimate object — the door — lose control, or did he do some crazy-ass slapstick with the door? Whatever... you can't run for President with a Frankenstein head.

When did Bruce Springsteen start looking like Robert De Niro?

Oh, strangely De Niro was there too. And Obama, of course. Obama said De Niro had "emotional audacity." I love when the Prez uses his own buzzwords to praise other people.

And why wasn't Robin Williams there? Because Springsteen appears to be wearing Mork from Orc suspenders.