"I'm not the most famous person in the world, but let me tell you something — all the Trumpers know me from the head picture."

"They all know me. They all know my face. They all know my hair. So O'Donnell goes, "No, I'm Rosie O'Donnell, this is my best friend Kathy Griffin,' and I just looked at the guy and I went like this, and then he knew, oh he knew...."

It's long, but the lengthiness is the style. There's a party at Paris Hilton's house, Kathy runs into The Rock and says "Hi, The Rock," a conservative mistakes Rosie O'Donnell for Roseanne Barr. It's worth it every step of the way and it's worth it to watch until you get to "I went like this," which is, obviously, a visual. Very funny!

The Rock goes to Graceland.

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Grapes.

lol i drew this in high school pic.twitter.com/y4Vwmwptp4

— take the lane (@fex_urbis) September 27, 2020

"Antifa Broke My Camera."

That's the headline at The New Republic, where, if you click, you'll see a photo with the caption "The author's camera, moments before it was smashed on the ground. Photo courtesy of Thomas Hawk." Thomas Hawk is, obviously, not the author of the article, whose camera got flung by a masked guy wearing a hat that seem to say "Queremos El Rock" (We want the rock?*)

The author is Mike Kessler, who tells us:

Journalists, myself included, held our cameras high to capture the assault as the antifas circled, raising their shields, some decorated with the words “No Hate,” to block our view and push us away.

“Stop filming,” shouted a masked white woman in her twenties, pushing her shield at us. “You know what’s gonna happen anyway.”... Suddenly, from behind, someone knocked my camera out of my right hand.... another antifa picked up my camera, hurled it into the air, and got in my face. “No fucking pictures!”...

To be clear, there’s no equivalence between white supremacists and antifas. One has a message of hate, and one seeks to stop that hate.... Conflating the two groups is a way for whataboutist conservatives to play down the racist rot that is spreading on the right....

For what it’s worth, I’m a middle-aged white guy. The young man who snatched my camera was also white. I looked at him and shook my head. “Seriously, man!? Is that really necessary?” It was all a bit of a blur, but I think my next words were, “Dude, I’m on your side”—meaning the side that finds white supremacists repugnant....

Hey, journalist — you call yourself a "journalist" — how about not being on any side? Have you completely forgotten that idea? Sad about your camera, but what about your ethics? Did somebody grab them too and smash them on the pavement? Or is it still possible to scrounge back somewhere in your head and find them?**
_________________________

* I couldn't find "We Want the Rock," specifically, in English or Spanish, but I did find "We Want a Rock":



There's also "I Wanna Rock":



"Wanna" can be "want a" or "want to." The song title "I Wanna Rock" is, without more, ambiguous. "Rock" could be a noun or a verb. Spoiler alert: It's a verb. In the They Might Be Giants song, you can see from the title that "rock" is a noun, but it's nevertheless hard to guess what they want. They want "a rock to wind a string around."

What does that mean? "This sounds really abstract, but in order to begin wrapping a piece of string around itself, you need something to start with. Like a rock. I guess you can make a ball of string starting from nothing if you just make a tiny loop at the end of the string. But it seems theoretically impossible. It's a metaphor for getting started." In other words, you don't need a rock.

But you can be your own rock. And here's Paul Simon singing what Art Garfunkel told him was his "most neurotic" song, "I Am a Rock":



Speaking of being your own rock, there's The Rock, Dwayne Johnson...



... but don't think he's called "El Rock." In fact, I think "el rock," in Spanish, means rock music. (The little stone is feminine, "la roca.") So after all this, I'm going to nail it down: The camera-flinging masked man wants rock music. So it's pretty much the Twisted Sister video.

** Since I'm doing song lyrics in footnotes this morning, let me indulge myself with something from "Desolation Row":

Praise be to Nero’s Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
And everybody’s shouting
“Which Side Are You On?”...

"The 43 people who might run against Trump in 2020."

A piece at The Hill. I haven't read it yet, but there's just one name I do not want to see. There's a certain someone who needs to step back and let other candidacies develop.

Okay, now I'm looking.

With no clear leader, the 2020 field should be a change from 2016, when Democrats had a small field of candidates, including front-runner Hillary Clinton.

I nearly lost my mind before focusing and reading that correctly. No, Hillary is not one of the 43, and she is certainly not the "front-runner."

My pet theory these days is that the people want excitement and will vote for the more entertaining character and what it takes to excite us properly keeps amping up. First, Obama, then, Trump, so what's next in this series? I'll extract the possibilities from the 43 on the list. I was going to exclude all the elected officials, but I let one on. In the order that they appear in the linked article: