What are these annoying insects that were swarming like mad by Lake Mendota at sunrise today?

Answer: Midges!

These things are annoying. They're messing up photographs and you might get one in your eye, mouth, or nose, but they don't bite, and they don't last long. It's just crazy time for midges.

"Midge" is a word that goes back to early Old English, where it was spelled "mygg." It just meant this tiny insect. By the 1700s, it was sometimes used, chiefly in Scotland, to refer to "A small or insignificant person, esp. a small child."

So "midge" already meant something small, yet the word "midget" came into being by adding the ending "-et" and that ending means small. I guess when something is small, something draws you toward repetition — often in the much more exaggerated style called "reduplication." You know what I mean? Teeny tiny, teeny weeny, itty bitty. I'm thinking it's because of the way we talk to babies: We're babbling and we're talking about the baby and the baby is small.

Midge is also a name. I think of Midge, the friend of Barbie, and Midge, the secondary female character in the movie "Vertigo."

Who wants to be a Midge?

No, you don't need 2 dolls. You don't need an extra doll — a homely one, with freckles — to be a friend to the beautiful doll you already have. You be Barbie's friend. No one wanted Midge. Obviously undesirable. She's just making me feel bad about my freckles.

We don't need no stinking midges!

IN THE COMMENTS: minnesota farm guy said, "I would be willing to bet that these are Mayflies. They are much too big to be midges which make fruit flies look big."

I'm saying midges because that's what Grok told me after I uploaded that photo. I enjoyed writing this post about midges — the insect, the word, the doll, the "Vertigo" character, so I don't want to be wrong. As some have noted, it's hard to judge the size of these insects from the photograph, of course, and I was there seeing them in "person." So here are 2 more photographs — one I took of them resting on my leg and the other Meade took of the ones in my hair:

"Think I'm going to be sitting on a waiting line, at United, waiting...?

Bernie Sanders: "You think I should wait on line at United? No apologies for my private jets."

Socialists are beyond parody pic.twitter.com/MF6dDHOiyE

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) May 8, 2025

I know. He sounds entitled. I see that being mocked at Instapundit — "FIGHTING THE OLIGARCHY LOOKS A LITTLE… OLIGARCHIC" — but I just want to join the pile on so I can comment on the language: "sitting on a waiting line, at United, waiting."

1. There's no sitting. One stands in line.

2. A line's a line.

They say it's the "season to be jolly" and Santa is praised as a "jolly old elf," but I've known a couple people who were jolly...

... and I think people found it annoying and wish they'd settle down.

I presented my musing to Grok and received this distinctly non-jolly response: 

The notion of "jolliness" during the holiday season, particularly around figures like Santa Claus, is indeed a cultural expectation that doesn't always align with personal experiences or preferences.... The idea of being "jolly" during the holiday season is deeply ingrained in many cultures, especially those influenced by Western Christmas traditions.... This image has been perpetuated through various media and commercial representations, setting a somewhat unrealistic standard for holiday cheer.... 

Your experience of knowing people whose jolliness was perceived as annoying might reflect a broader sentiment where excessive cheerfulness can seem forced or out of touch with one's actual mood or the realities others might be facing.

"The intentionally repulsive color won over the internet, and then the summer, and then, at a pivotal moment, an entire presidential campaign."

"In a few short days, supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, memed chartreuse into an unusually potent political symbol.... 'I will aspire to be Brat,' Jake Tapper said on CNN to one of his correspondents, who had been holding up a slime-green meme printed out on a sheet of paper."

From "You Can’t Escape This Color/'This is not millennial pink. The energy behind it is alive'" (NYT)(free-access link).

I used the last of this month's NYT gift link allowance on that article. Why? Because I knew it was hard to understand without more explanation, but I didn't want to do the explanation.

And you'll need to go over there anyway to see the particular green in question. It's a color that's connected to this word "brat," which reminds me of a word from many years ago when I was a teenager: "groovy." It was new and cool and precisely expressive of youth for a very short time before it got seized upon by everyone old and it became embarrassing. 

From the golden moment before the collapse of "groovy":

Once the TV talking heads and political candidates start using your word, they've stolen it from you. You have to move on or use it ironically or do whatever it is you kids do today when the adults are annoying you. 

As for you political candidates, be careful using the word "brat" in Wisconsin. I remember when John Kerry screwed up.

"[O]ur upstairs neighbors acquired an emotional support dog for their teenager. The dog runs back and forth for 30 minutes at a time."

"At least three nights a week, it scratches a bedroom rug, waking us up throughout the night. We have shared our concerns with the neighbors, asking them to crate the dog at night and walk him when he’s rambunctious. They seemed receptive, but the problem persists. How can we balance the rights of people to have emotional support animals with our right to live peacefully?"

A woman who had heretofore enjoyed 37 years of pleasant life in her condo sends a question to the NYT real estate adviser.

I won't quote any of the answer. It boils down to: NOTHING.

I should add that "boils down" was not intended as any sort of reference to the last lines of the previous post. You can do nothing, nothing, nothing about that dog that is scraping at the other side of your ceiling all night long. You should have thought of this possibility when you chose to take up condo life 4 decades ago. Dog people good. Dog haters bad. Bad bad bad haters. You deserve to lie awake all night for your failure to love.

"They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace. They’re like: 'Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am.'"

"Or in emails, I’ll tell them: this is all grammatically incorrect, did you not check your spelling? And they’re like: 'Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?'"

Said Jodie Foster, quoted in "Jodie Foster says generation Z can be ‘really annoying’ to work with" (The Guardian).

"Anyone else get a little bugged when people say Dylan has a bad voice?"

"I love what Leonard Cohen said about his voice: 'Most music criticism is in the nineteenth century. It’s so far behind, say, the criticism of painting. It’s still based on nineteenth century art–cows beside a stream and trees and ‘I know what I like.’ There’s no concession to the fact that Dylan might be a more sophisticated singer than Whitney Houston, that he’s probably the most sophisticated singer we’ve had in a generation. Nobody is identifying out popular singers like a Matisse or Picasso. Dylan’s a Picasso — that exuberance, range, and assimilation of the whole history of music.'..."

A discussion at the subreddit r/bobdylan.

The top-rated comment is so Reddit: "I find it the opposite of annoying. You’re telling me what your depth is as a music listener and what level of convo I should be expecting and how to respond accordingly. It gets rid of the guess work."

"Nutt dislikes drawing on canvas except with charcoal, which he also dislikes, but for a different reason."

"He primes his canvases with gesso, making it not unlike a heavyweight paper.... Nutt doesn’t work on drawings and paintings simultaneously, switching when he becomes fed up with one or the other. About 25 years ago, the paintings began taking longer; eventually a full year to complete. He has been working on this one for the last seven.... His fixation on a single image also is a kind of refusal: of the constant demand for novelty, the endless churn of commercial production, of faddishness. It says we already have everything we need. As the title of his show puts it: Shouldn’t we be more careful?"

 
From "Jim Nutt’s Art Remains a Mystery. Even to Him. In his first show of new work in over a decade, he has been occupied with a single subject: a portrait of a woman, in which he finds endless variation and human emotion" (NYT).

I've loved Jim Nutt for a long time. You can view a lot of his artwork here.

I really identify with the artist who feels annoyed by his own materials. He's also, we're told, "elliptical and impenetrable," "socially and conversationally hermetic," and "allergic to talking about himself."

"In January 2022, Dr. Kershnar appeared on a respected philosophy podcast, Brain in a Vat.... The guest presents a thought experiment..."

"... and the hosts spend the rest of the episode questioning the guest about it. Dr. Kershnar’s thought experiment was... 'Imagine that an adult male wants to have sex with a 12-year-old girl; imagine that she’s a willing participant... A very standard, a very widely held view is there’s something deeply wrong about this. And it’s wrong independent of it being criminalized. It’s not obvious to me that is, in fact, wrong....'... Dr. Kershnar is a 'Socratic gadfly' who goes around questioning fundamental assumptions, often quite annoyingly, to try to get at a clearer understanding of morality and why something is or is not wrong.... After LibsofTikTok posted clips of Dr. Kershnar’s podcast remarks on X..., the university was immediately deluged with demands for action.... Alumni threatened to stop giving money.... [T]he university received what officials described as threats of violence...."

From "A Professor’s Remarks on Sexual Consent Stir Controversy. Now He’s Banned From Campus. Stephen Kershnar, who teaches philosophy, is suing for the right to return to SUNY at Fredonia. The university defends its ban as necessary for safety" (NYT).

"Much has been made of Ramaswamy’s irrepressible annoyingness... But what I found striking about Ramaswamy..."

"... both in our conversations and on the debate stage, was not that he’s especially irritating (how many people who run for president aren’t?) but that he represents a distinct, very familiar flavor of irritation: He’s the epitome of millennial hustle culture, less a Tracy Flick know-it-all than a viral LinkedIn post come to life. The guy who’s always mining and nurturing new connections, always leveraging those connections into the next new thing, always selling and always, always closing. Seen this way, Ramaswamy’s otherwise quixotic-seeming presidential run makes perfect sense. Whether or not it wins him elected office, running for the White House is the ultimate rise and grind.... [H]is current comfort with [the word]  'woke' works for winning over a G.O.P. primary audience. When he needs to cultivate a broader base... I’m sure he won’t hesitate to reach out and tell me just what he thinks I want to hear."

Writes Farhad Manjoo in "Vivek Ramaswamy Is a LinkedIn Post Come to Life" (NYT)

"The screen, which has an incredible fidelity, allows me to see everything in the room around me. It’s not reality, but it’s close to it."

"I know I’m wearing a headset, but I can also see everything clearly, including my watch, my iPhone, furniture and of course people.... After some mundane stuff like looking at pictures, messing around with web surfing, viewing messages and taking a rather uncanny valley FaceTime call with a digital avatar, I get to experience some truly breathtaking — and at times dystopian — moments that almost brought a tear to my eye. Because where the Vision Pro really shines is handling 3D movies and interactive graphical experiences. One moment I’m at a child’s birthday party where I’m sure my 80-year-old self would be crying at having enjoyed a life well lived and the next I’m courtside at an NBA game, on the goal line at a football match, in Alicia Keys’s music studio and fending off cute baby rhinos who want to say hello all recorded in what Apple calls Apple Immersive Video. The pièce de resistance? A butterfly that gracefully flies around the room before landing on my outstretched hand.... By the end I’m almost lost for words, a rare moment, but also left with the burning question — what is this all for?"

 
From "I tried the Apple Vision Pro. I was lost for words/The VR headset takes users to 3D experiences that feel incredibly real" by Stuart Miles (London Times).

Here's my burning question: How does it work for people who use different prescription glasses for different distances?

I've got 8 carefully curated TikToks for you this evening. Let me know which ones you like.

1. Christine McVie's voice — isolated — from "Songbird."

2. If you know this story about the lady in waiting, Lady Susan Husse, you'll understand this brilliant turnabout.

3. One reason I don't want a dog is that it can't be guaranteed that I won't turn into a person like this.

4. The Chinese immigrant explains what's happening in China.

5. A trippy street view.

6. It's not easy dressing green.

7. In case you wonder how to speak when they tell you to act your age.

8. This funny little hedgehog.

Here are 5 TikToks to amuse or challenge you. Let me know what you think.

1. "Don't ever take sides with anyone else over your spouse."

2. That woman who orders the green juice is so annoying.

3. Let Broadway Barbara help you beat the summer heat.

4. How special is a north-flowing river?

5. The 120-year-old water wheel.

Today's list of TikTok selections goes up to 11. Let me know which ones — which I chose for delightfulness — are your favorite.

1. Ants methodically receive goldfish crackers.

2. Horses make it hard to deliver a political message.

3. Men who love sticks.

4. To annoy her brothers is this girl's career.

5. Did this dog go in the trash?

6. A college degree in theater is absolutely not absolutely useless.

7. A brilliant 3-D portrait of Nikola Tesla.

8. A comedian does impressions of iPhones.

9. Affirming brain differences.

10. Recoating the warehouse floor.

11. Waiting for the statue to throw the ball.

"I didn’t like Christmas in part because the steel mill where my father worked had closed.... The ads seemed to suggest that the more stuff you got, the better person you were."

"I learned through those commercials that good people got presents and that my family was trash.... Each year around this time, I find it more difficult to balance the awful things we see happening the rest of the year with the joy I’m supposed to drum up near the end of it.... There have even been years when I have skipped Christmas completely, taken advantage of the fact that the whole country is shut down and silent, and spent the day watching horror movies alone and eating Chinese take-away.... For those who hate the holidays, I stand with you. I understand and know what you’re going through. If you are like me, you are strapping in again, steeling yourself for the onslaught the way others might for a hurricane. I just try to ride it out."

Writes Brian Broome in "I hate Christmas. And you should be okay with that" (WaPo).

Of course, every year, there must also be essays like that one. Is it really such a struggle, skipping Christmas? I pretty much skip Christmas, but I don't make a thing out of that. I just continue as usual, living in the day, respecting all the days as equal. I don't like feeling that a particular day is special. It detracts from the dayness of the day. 

An annoying thing about Christmas is that it's more than a day — it's a season. It reaches out and catches up many other days. And that's just greedy. 

If you're genuinely religious about Christmas, I'm not talking about your Christmas. But I will just note that there are many Christians who don't celebrate Christmas.

"This makes it postable!"

I got email this morning from Bob Boyd, aiming at commenting on last night's post about MSNBC angsting about J.D. Vance: 

Media attacks of this kind will only help Vance with voters and increase his name recognition. 

Here is a twitter thread by a guy who has a very good grasp on the evolution of the thinking of Trump's voters over the course of the last few years and he explains it concisely. For anyone interested in understanding their point of view, this is very much worth reading. 

I didn't click on that link because other emailers had already called it to my attention. I just said:

yes, i saw that it's so annoying to read in the form of a twitter thread though 

Actually, Boyd sent me a link to a "Twitter reader" version of the thread, so it actually wasn't as annoying as what I'd seen, which was a long series of tweets on Twitter. Instead of pointing that out, Boyd responded...

No matter how annoying something is, it can always be worse. 

... and sent me this:

Tucker Carlson Reading @martyrmade's Viral Thread On Why So Many Trump Supporters Have Questions About The 2020 Election & Their Distrust Of The Mainstream Media pic.twitter.com/HY6MECgd3s

— The Columbia Bugle 🇺🇸 (@ColumbiaBugle) July 10, 2021

I responded:

thanks... this makes it postable!

"You are … irritating and unbearable, and I consider it most difficult to live with you. No one can tolerate being reproved by you, who also still show so many weaknesses yourself..."

"... least of all in your adverse manner, which in oracular tones, proclaims this is so and so, without ever supposing an objection. If you were less like you, you would only be ridiculous, but thus as you are, you are highly annoying."

Wrote Arthur Schopenhauer's mother to her 19-year-old son. Quoted at the beginning of "How Adult Children Affect Their Mother’s Happiness/Plenty of moms feel something less than unmitigated joy around their grown-up kids. Make sure yours feels that she’s getting as much out of her relationship with you as she gives" by Arthur C. Brooks (The Atlantic). 

The two-century-old letter amazes not just for its mix of archaic diction and sick burns, but also because it violates some of humanity’s most basic assumptions about how mothers feel about their children.... Research suggests that plenty of mothers, while perhaps not as up-front as Johanna, feel some resentment toward their adult progeny, especially when the relationship feels unequal....

Researchers studying mothers have also found that almost 54 percent said their relationship with their adult child or children was ‘‘intimate but also restrictive,” that they had “mixed feelings” about the relationship, or some other ambivalent statement.... [T]he biggest predictor of interpersonal stress between adult child and mother was her affirmative answer to the question ‘‘Do you feel that you give more than you receive in this relationship?’’...

The next time you call your mother... ask her about something going on in her life that doesn’t involve you at all but that you know is important to her. Ask for details, listen, and then offer your thoughts.... Don’t take her for granted, and treat her with the attentive love she deserves.

"I wish I could make it so that people were more thoughtful and kind toward each other. It’s something that I think about a lot as I move through life."

"In Japan, for example, we have priority seating on train carriages, for people who are elderly or people with a disability. If the train is relatively empty, sometimes you’ll see young people sit in these seats. If I were to say something, they’d probably tell me: 'But the train is empty, what’s the issue?' But if I were a person with a disability and I saw people sitting there, I might not want to ask them to move. I wouldn’t want to be annoying. I wish we were all a little more compassionate in these small ways. If there was a way to design the world that discouraged selfishness, that would be a change I would make." 

 From "Shigeru Miyamoto Wants to Create a Kinder World/The legendary designer on rejecting violence in games, trying to be a good boss, and building Nintendo’s Disneyland" (The New Yorker)("In 1977, Shigeru Miyamoto joined Nintendo, a company then known for selling toys, playing cards, and trivial novelties. Miyamoto was twenty-four, fresh out of art school. His employer, inspired by the success of a California company named Atari, was hoping to expand into video games. Miyamoto began tinkering with a story about a carpenter, a damsel in distress, and a giant ape...").

"[James] Charles and [Tati] Westbrook, two stars of the YouTube beauty and makeup community, had long been friends, with Charles referring to her as 'like a mother.'"

"Then, in May 2019, Westbrook released a 43-minute video in which she accused him of using his fame to 'manipulate someone’s sexuality,' referring to straight men. Charles vehemently denied this charge in a video of his own, and for a while, the two continued releasing videos about each other, centered on their fraying friendship."

I'm trying to read a damned near incomprehensible WaPo article about YouTube withdrawing advertising from some popular vloggers. You might not know the name Tati Westbrook, but her video that came out yesterday already has nearly 6 million views. Here, try to watch it — I tried but clicked it off at the 3-second mark because that stare and series of mouth noises utterly grossed me out:



I know I wrote about this controversy — whatever the hell it is — back when it was in the news last year. Ah, here it is, May 17, 2019: "I'm reading 'James Charles, Tati Westbrook, and the feud that’s ripping apart YouTube’s beauty community...' and I cannot understand it...."

Yeah, I still can't — and won't — understand it. The reason I'm blogging it today is because I was interested in the phrase "manipulate someone’s sexuality" — in "she accused him of using his fame to 'manipulate someone’s sexuality,' referring to straight men." Is it wrong to "manipulate someone’s sexuality"? Isn't that what people do when they have sex with another person — manipulate each other's sexuality?

If it's wrong to "manipulate someone’s sexuality," then it would seem that the only ethical form of sex is masturbation. A good theory to propound on the internet!

But I don't know what Tati Westbrook is really talking about. Something special against gay men? I don't know, and I'm not going to put up with Westbrook's grotesque mouth smacking to find out. Presumably, she fascinates other people with that strange, slow-talky facial action... manipulating their sexuality.

"A one-way trip to Mars will take about nine months, which is a long time to spend inside a hermetically sealed tube hurtling through a cold, dark void."

"Like all animals, humans require stimulation; without something to break the monotony, most of us end up like a tiger pacing its cage—stressed, depressed, and prone to problematic behaviors. Indeed, many scientists believe that boredom is one of the most serious challenges facing future spacefarers. Until now, design for space has focused on survival. But [Ariel Ekblaw, founder of the MIT Media Lab's Space Exploration Initiative] thinks it's possible, even essential, to imagine an entirely new microgravitational culture, one that doesn't simply adapt Earth products and technologies but instead conceives them anew. Cady Coleman amused herself by playing her flute on the International Space Station—another astronaut brought his bagpipes—but future travelers might instead pick up a Telemetron. They might wear clothes spun of special zero-g silk, or sculpt delicate forms that couldn't exist on Earth, or choreograph new forms of dance, assisted by their robot tails. They might, in other words, stop seeing themselves as homesick earthlings and begin to feel like stimulated, satisfied spacelings."

From "Algae Caviar, Anyone? What We'll Eat on the Journey to Mars/Humans are headed for the cosmos, and we’re taking our appetites with us. What will fill the void when we leave Earth behind?" (Wired).

The article goes on to talk about food, but I came screeching to a halt at "Cady Coleman amused herself by playing her flute on the International Space Station" and was appalled at what I heard next: "another astronaut brought his bagpipes."

You're stuck for months in "a hermetically sealed tube," with other people, and you're allowed to tootle on some acoustic musical instrument? Put that on the list of things that make me "end up like a tiger pacing its cage." Maybe "monotony" is on the list, but if the list is in order of how quickly and how far it will drive somebody nuts, a fellow passenger playing the bagpipes (or flute) is a lot higher on the list. Who wants this "amused herself" sort of approach to shared, close-quarters living?

Anyway... I say "when I heard" because I'm listening to magazine articles on the app Audm. It love it! I'd resisted it, because you have to pay about $60 a year, but now that I've got it, I strongly recommend it. The selection of articles is excellent, and the audio format gets me through substantial things that I would only skim if left to my eyes alone.

ADDED: A tidbit from the discussion of food:

Like generations of chefs before her, [industrial designer Maggie] Coblentz began by taking advantage of the local environment. Liquids are known to behave peculiarly in microgravity, forming wobbly blobs rather than streams or droplets. This made her think of molecular gastronomy, in particular the technique of using calcium chloride and sodium alginate to turn liquids into squishy, caviar-like spheres that burst delightfully on the tongue. Coblentz got to work on a special spherification station to test in zero g—basically a plexiglass glove box equipped with preloaded syringes. She would inject a bead of ginger extract into a lemon-flavored bubble, or blood orange into a beet juice globule, creating spheres within spheres that would deliver a unique multipop sensation unattainable on Earth.

General Foods saw it long ago with Cosmic Candy AKA Space Dust (in the Pop Rocks tradition).