"why does the horse have three ears"/"So he likes 7 foot tall women? Or is he riding a pony?"

X users rain on Musk's boyish dream.

In a romantic pre-Raphaelite style, a tender moment unfolds between a handsome knight in gleaming silver armor and a beautiful woman in a flowing white gown adorned with flowers.

The knight, with a sword at his side, sits astride a brown horse with a red-gold draped saddle,… pic.twitter.com/0w32szTD9D

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 9, 2025

The President Benjamin Harrison Memorial Window.

Seen in the previous post, but I just wanted to close in on the image:



It's the Archangel Michael:



Harrison's widow commissioned Tiffany to make the window for the First Presbyterian Church, where Harrison had been an elder for 40 years.

Michael's medieval armor is — according to the wall card at the museum — intended to represent his "martial role in Heaven as a defender of God" and to refer to President Harrison's service in the Civil War.

[Harrison] commanded the brigade at the battles of Resaca, Cassville, New Hope Church, Lost Mountain, Kennesaw Mountain, Marietta, Peachtree Creek and Atlanta. When Sherman's main force began its March to the Sea, Harrison's brigade was transferred to the District of Etowah and participated in the Battle of Nashville.

Harrison was President from 1889 to 1893. He had the unique experience of defeating a President who was seeking re-election and having that man defeat him when he sought re-election. (The other President was Grover Cleveland, who is considered the 22nd and 24th President of the United States.) Harrison was also unique as the only President whose grandfather was President.

Another interesting thing about Benjamin Harrison is that 6 states joined the union in his 4 year term. That's the same number of states that joined the union in all of the years since then. 

Samurai armor.

From the exhibit at the Chazen Museum:





You can talk about whatever you want in the comments. I'm ending the morning session of blogging before the sharpness, humor, and insight fade.

(May I just add a reminder to consider shopping through The Althouse Amazon Portal?)

At the Armor-and Ambivalence Café...

... you can, in writing, appropriate anything you want.

(Photo taken on my iPhone yesterday at "Samurai: The Way of the Warrior" at the Chazen Museum ("a selection of more than ninety objects from one of the most important collections of Japanese arms and armor outside of Japan... armor, lacquered objects, helmets, swords, sword guards, saddles, stirrups, arrows, quivers, and bows from the Museo Stibbert in Florence, Italy").

"If anything seemed to unite the sartorial choices the first lady made, at least during the day, it was a certain rigidity of line, monochrome palette and militaristic mien."

"She favored sharp power shoulders, single-breasted jackets with wide cinched belts and big square buckles, straight skirts and a lot of buttons. Mostly buttoned up.... For what battle, exactly, is she preparing? Theories have been floated: her husband’s critics; the prying eyes of the outside world; even her own marriage. Maybe it’s the much vaunted revolution the president was fond of saying he led; maybe she, too, is fighting for his agenda. Or maybe it’s just a signal that she is prepared to take her place on the home front."

That's from "Melania Trump on Display, Dressed in Ambivalence and Armor," by Vanessa Friedman in the NYT, trying to understand why Melania Trump wore what she wore on the big foreign trip. (Nice 14-photo slide show at the link.)

By the way, was Trump fond of saying he led a "revolution"? I blogged the whole campaign, meticulously inspecting the rhetoric, and when I search my archive for Trump and revolution, all the references I see to revolution are connected to Bernie Sanders, except where I myself am saying but isn't what Trump is doing a revolution? And I see that when Trump won the New Hampshire primary, he walked out on stage to the tune of "Revolution."

Googling, I see that Trump used the word "revolution" right after the 2012 election. He tweeted: "He lost the popular vote by a lot and won the election. We should have a revolution in this country!" But I don't think "revolution" was his word in 2016.

Please correct me if I'm missing references to "revolution" by Trump in 2016, but I think "the much vaunted revolution the president was fond of saying he led" is off.

As for Friedman's opinion of Melania, it reminded me of Robin Givhan's piece the other day, saying that Melania was dressed for "control and containment." Givhan didn't say "armor," but I used the word in my reaction to Givhan:

I'm not sure where the "control and containment" is supposed to be — maybe in the constricting leather skirt or maybe it's something she's extracting from the President who scampers at her heel — but from the waist up, I'm seeing a more freewheeling style, an eschewing of a fully controlled structure. I'm not criticizing this choice, I'm just saying this isn't the Jackie Kennedy choice of clothing as armor, but a stretchy sweater over something less than the most rigid undergarments. I see an amusing combo of loose and tight.

I was talking about one particular outfit, which you can see at that last link. Friedman, as noted above, has 14 photos of things Melania wore. Some of them indeed have a squared-off look with tight cinching that could be called rigid and militaristic, but other things were loose and flowing, including and especially #5, which was worn during the day. I guess whatever isn't "armor" gets tossed into the "ambivalence" pile, especially that $51,000 flower-encrusted coat she's wearing over her shoulders in photo 14.

"Demanding that women smile is akin to suggesting that women are not entitled to be in charge of their own emotional life."

"But for women who live the greater part of their lives in the public eye, smiling is a kind of code for being not only engaged, but also being engaging. For a woman who was once a model, who ostensibly is practiced in the art of nonverbal communication, the willingness to forgo a grin seems less like an accident and more like the tiniest declaration of personal control and rebellion. She is here for you, but she is not going to perform for you."

Writes Robin Givhan, about Melania Trump, under a headline that struck me as comical juxtaposed with the photograph:



I'm not sure where the "control and containment" is supposed to be — maybe in the constricting leather skirt or maybe it's something she's extracting from the President who scampers at her heel — but from the waist up, I'm seeing a more freewheeling style, an eschewing of a fully controlled structure. I'm not criticizing this choice, I'm just saying this isn't the Jackie Kennedy choice of clothing as armor, but a stretchy sweater over something less than the most rigid undergarments. I see an amusing combo of loose and tight.

The headline is probably not written by Givhan. I'm just poking fun at WaPo there. I mainly wanted to show you that part about women smiling, which is a long-term feminist issue. It's sexist to tell women to smile,* so what do you do when you want to comment on Melania's unsmiling face? Givhan reads it as "the tiniest declaration of personal control and rebellion," which sounds as though she — in her own little way — is part of the female resistance against Trump.
____________________

* See "The Sexism of Telling Women to Smile: Your Stories," "Why you shouldn't tell a woman to smile," "Telling a woman to smile may seem like an innocent request, but there's a darker undertone," "It’s Important For Men to Understand That They Need To Stop Telling Women to Smile," "The Sexism Behind Telling Women to Smile," "Why We Should Stop Telling Women to Smile," "'Stop Telling Women To Smile' Goes National," "'Stop telling women to smile.'"

How Trump tromps into an otherwise promising intellectual discussion.

I was listening to the audio of this very nice New Yorker piece by Rebecca Mead about Margaret Atwood. Walking along by the lake, I was transported by this scene and so delighted by the time I got to the word "lubricious" that I ordered myself to remember that word so I could find it in the text and make a blog post when I got home. But then Trump barged in:

One evening in Toronto, Atwood invited me to her home, where we sat in its spacious kitchen on tall stools at a counter, overlooking her wintry, barren-looking garden. Graeme Gibson poured three glasses of whiskey while Atwood sorted through Christmas cards, dispensing with the chore as efficiently as if she were slicing rhubarb. I remarked on an aspect of “Oryx and Crake” that had moved me. The protagonist, Snowman, apparently left alone in the world, strives to remember unusual words he once knew. Atwood writes, “Valance. Norn. Serendipity. Pibroch. Lubricious. When they’ve gone out of his head, these words, they’ll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.” Reading this passage in recent months led me to think about the catastrophic devaluation of intellection that seems to have occurred in American society: the willful repudiation of rigorous thinking, and objective facts, that helped propel Trump to victory. I remarked to Atwood that it felt like a prescient metaphor.

Why does crap like that keep happening?! It's like it's a... catastrophic devaluation of intellection.

It seems that these days all trains of thought lead to Trump. But perhaps the pibroch summoned him.

Pibroch? What does it mean? We know "lubricious," but "pibroch"? Here it is in Sir Walter Scott's  "Lady of the Lake":

No rude sound shall reach thine ear,
Armor's clang or war-steed champing
Trump nor pibroch summon here
Mustering clan or squadron tramping.

"Putin ally celebrates winning 98 percent of vote in a full suit of medieval armor."

Putin ally celebrates winning 98 percent of vote in a full suit of medieval armor https://t.co/8nFArPRozm

— Morgan Fairchild (@morgfair) September 20, 2016

ADDED: This post is over-puzzling. Does Althouse follow Morgan Fairchild on Twitter? No. Jake Tapper retweeted it. I follow Jake Tapper.

Sarah Palin's sweater — "a mini-black cardigan studded with what resembled needle-thin, glistening stalactites."

Yeah, endorsing Donald Trump, Sarah Palin did choose to wear what looked like a sweater full of needles!

Robin Givhan points — ouch — it out:

... the cardigan shimmered glamorously under the lights.... she picked at the wounds... The fashion industry may have long argued that spangles are not just for the cocktail hour and beyond, but that philosophy has made little headway in the world of campaign politics. So to see a politician — someone who is ostensibly not the star of the rally but a supporting player — dressed in such a bold manner, was to see someone who has come to steal the spotlight rather than share it.

Oh! The needles were out for Donald Trump? I would have thought they were armor against all her attackers. All the little pricks. The needle dicks.

Palin’s cardigan was not ugly — not exactly, not terribly — but it was distracting... Instead of listening to her, one tended to just look at her. 

That never happened to me, but I had YouTube playing on my iPhone which was lying on the counter as I did one thing and another, including taking a bath. Isn't that how you do video of political speeches? Also, I'm not a fashion critic, except when the spirit moves me.

The cardigan was flashy. It was proudly outside the realm of vetted political attire. It wasn’t safe and it wasn’t decorous. It was vaguely gaudy, with a hint of kitsch. And for a political affair it was inappropriate — which in the politically disruptive universe of Palin, made it perfect.

I agree! It was perfect. A sweater full of needles. What a message! Be the metaphor. But Givhan should have woven in Palin's use of clothing metaphor. In her million-pricks cardigan, she said:

[H]e’s got the guts to wear the issues that need to be spoken about and debate on his sleeve, where the rest of some of these establishment candidates, they just wanted to duck and hide. They didn’t want to talk about these issue until he brought ‘em up. In fact, they’ve been wearing a, this, political correctness kind of like a suicide vest. 

So get out of that suit of opinions that's killing you and slip into something softly knitted on your side with thousands of needles sticking out at everyone else. You can do it, and it will look way cuter than that political correctness outfit you'd thought was de rigueur these past 20 seasons.

ADDED: Clothes as armor was a Jackie Kennedy idea:

This was a woman who, upon learning that her husband had won the presidential election, confessed: "I feel as though I had just turned into a piece of public property. It's really frightening to lose your anonymity at 31." And who, a few weeks later, in a letter to Oleg Cassini, the designer charged with furnishing her official wardrobe, was pleading: "PROTECT ME, as I seem so mercilessly exposed and don't know how to cope with it."

The solution was a closet full of body armor... [T]he result was a tour de force of optical illusion: These were clothes that recognized Jackie's central position on the national stage without ceding an iota of her privacy. These clothes were Parisian in inspiration and unfailingly Modernist in cut, but their starchy fabrics and formless shapes were designed to guarantee not front-page coverage in WWD... but protection from the insatiable hordes.

"Hummingbird on the Left."

"Huitzilopochtli, Aztec God of Sun and War."

Huitzilopochtli's name is a combination of two Nahuatl (or Aztecan) words, huitzilin, meaning hummingbird, and opochtli, which means left — the god's name translates literally as "Hummingbird on the Left." This resulted in Huitzilopochtli often being depicted as a blue- or green-colored hummingbird or as a warrior whose armor and helmet were made of hummingbird features....

More here:

Huitzilopochtli's mother was Coatlicue, and his father was a ball of feathers....

His sister, Coyolxauhqui, tried to kill their mother because she became pregnant in a shameful way (by a ball of feathers). Her offspring, Huitzilopochtli, learned of this plan while still in the womb, and before it was put into action, sprang from his mother's womb fully grown and fully armed. He then killed his sister Coyolxauhqui and many of his 400 brothers. He tossed his sister's head into the sky, where it became the moon, so that his mother would be comforted in seeing her daughter in the sky every night. He threw his other brothers and sisters into the sky, where they became the stars.

"Mr. Blow may attempt to delete that Tweet..."

But Jim Geraghty has preserved the Mormon-bashing outburst of the NYT columnist.

One of your columnists responds to a comment he does not like, from a Mormon presidential candidate, and responds, “Stick that in your magic underwear.”...

We just witnessed ESPN firing an employee for using the phrase “chink in the armor” in a headline about the New York Knicks’ Jeremy Lin. While no one could prove a desire to mock Lin’s ethnic heritage, and the employee expressed great regret for what he insisted was an unthinking lapse, it was deemed unacceptable even as an honest mistake. Regardless of what one thinks of ESPN’s reaction, one is left to marvel at the contrast before us. Would the New York Times find it acceptable if one of their columnists chose to mock Muslim religious practices? Jewish faith practices?

You want the counter-argument? That we should mock religion?  Nobody does it better than The Crack Emcee.

"The ESPN editor fired Sunday for using 'chink in the armor' in a headline about Knicks phenom Jeremy Lin..."

"... said the racial slur never crossed his mind - and he was devastated when he realized his mistake."

[Anthony Federico] said he has used the phrase "at least 100 times" in headlines over the years and thought nothing of it when he slapped it on the Lin story.

Federico called Lin one of his heroes - not just because he's a big Knicks fan, but because he feels a kinship with a fellow "outspoken Christian."

Swift move, playing the Christian card. I'm sure the right-wing commentators will now be super-motivated to defend this poor man.

But let me say something cold-hearted: This is what happens when you use clichés. George Orwell told you long ago — in "Politics and the English Language": "Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print." Not only did you use one, your defense — other than that Christian business — is that you've used that same tired old figure of speech over and over and over again.

A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically "dead" (e.g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles' heel, swan song, hotbed...

... and chink in the armor.

Nobody even wears armor anymore, and the word "chink" is only used — other than in its moronic racial denotation — in that dying metaphor. Here's my rule: No one should ever use the expression "chink in the armor" again. Fire everyone who lets it go out in a final draft of anything.

Yves Saint Laurent.

RIP.

ADDED: The official YSL website is extremely impressive. You can view designs going all the way back to 1962 and avant.

MORE: Robin Givhan writes:

In the 1960s and '70s, when he was at the height of his influence, he brought popular culture, a mannish swagger, sexual power and ethnic awareness to fashion. He gave women a wardrobe that spoke of confidence and authority. He didn't give them armor for the boardroom as much as he gave them the sartorial equivalent of chutzpah, tough talk and bawdiness. He gave dames and broads their costumes.

AND: I've never had any YSL clothes, but I've worn this perfume for years:

"Democrats claim to be more community-minded but act like radical individualists..."

E.J. Dionne diagnoses Democrats. They can't get organized, unlike "Republicans, who defend individualism in theory, [but] act like communitarians where their party is concerned." He calls this "odd" but does he even attempt to explain why this should be? He calls it a "self-image problem," without saying what the wrong image is, and he blames them for only caring about isolated issues and not the party itself, which to me just suggests that people who vote Democratic aren't really Democrats at all but just people who get the feeling they're voting in a referendum on some highlighted issue. He cites the Democrats' dependence on "a handful of wealthy donors," which keeps them from needing to develop the support of a broad group of party loyalists. Really, talk about organization! Is this column organized at all? He even drags in Karl Rove and says he's "spooked Democrats about themselves."

And let me just mock the title of the column: "A Gap In Their Armor." First, if an old cliché contains a word that you think you can't use anymore, why not just retire the cliché? It is a cliché anyway! Why are you bending over backwards to preserve a cliché? And why wave it in our faces that you think we're too dumb to understand language? Second, the Democrats have armor?

One more thing, do Democrats really want to disown individualism? Openly?

Getting started.

It's the first real day of summer for me, now that I've written both exams and done that speech I was telling you about. I've still got the exam grading to do, but that will be a much less pressured activity -- assuming I pace myself well. There was a big thunderstorm in the middle of the night, though, and I lost a chunk of sleep, which I made up for by sleeping late. So I'm just starting to cook up some morning posts for you.

Meanwhile, you could read the Carnival of the Vanities. And here's the Christian Carnival, which is up to its LXIX edition. The contributors are blogging their way, verse by verse, through Ephesians 6. The verses look nice interlaced with blog references. Why, there's "Fathers, do not exasperate your children" -- we could all think up a little something for that. Other lines are much more intimidating: "Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes."

You can read that if you like. Me, I'm going to page my way through the paper New York Times, which I just dragged in out of the rain.

Shimmering shining shriek/scream.

I watched the last part of "What's Eating Gilbert Grape?" which was playing on cable last night. I noticed this exchange, between Gilbert (Johnny Depp) and his morbidly obese mother:

Momma: You're my knight in shimmering armor. Did you know that?

Gilbert: I think you mean shining.

Momma: No shimmering. You shimmer, and you glow.

Later, I watched the DVD of "After Hours" (a longtime favorite movie of mine). This exchange -- always good -- resonated poignantly with the "Gilbert Grape" quote:

Paul [looking at Kiki's papier maché sculpture]: It reminds me of that Edvard Munch painting. What is it? "The Shriek"?

Kiki: "The Scream."

Googling for a picture for "The Scream," to illustrate this post about how things go together, I hit a Reuters story from one hour ago, saying they've just today arrested a man for the theft of "The Scream." (The painting was stolen last August.) I love that feeling of things seeming to converge. I know it's only an illusion.

I also love the way in which the two movie quotes are dissimilar. The "After Hours" quote has the central character getting something a little wrong, and the character who does the correcting flatly and contemptuously sets him right. The mistake is part of a pattern of everything going wrong, part of being swallowed up in humiliation. The "Gilbert Grape" quote has the central figure in the family, the mother, getting an expression a little wrong, and when her son gently corrects her, she reaffirms her version and turns it into a renewed expression of love for the boy. The mistake becomes a new creation, something beautiful.

Phrases of the year.

A panel of linguists picked "red state, blue state, purple state" as the phrase of the year. I don't know how purple got in on that action. I heard very little of that and very much of the other two. Is Wisconsin a "purple state"? According to their standard, it supposedly is, but I've only heard it called a "blue state." But then, I'm here in the absolutely blue core of the place. There should be a word for something with a blue core surrounded by lots of red, which seems to be the usual situation in a supposedly "purple" state, but I can't think of any real life object like that. Maybe a fried egg, if only yolks were blue and whites were red, and yolks were a lot smaller.

What other phrases did the linguists consider? "Flip-flopper," "meet-up," "mash-up," "wardrobe malfunction." Hmmm... not terribly strong competition. No "Rathergate," but I'll bet after going through the phrase of the year ritual for 15 years, they are absolutely sick of "-gate."

Then there were the "most creative" phrases. "Pajamahadeen" won, but there were also "hillbilly armor," "nerdvana," and "lawn mullet." I've never seen the term "lawn mullet," but I see it's "a lawn that is neatly mowed in the front but unmowed in the back." Funny, but embarrassing for those of us who have it.