"Let's just take Superbowl Sunday. Mmkay? It's gonna affect beer. Mmkay? Most of it — Corona, here — comes from Mexico. It's gonna affect your guac. Because what is guacamole made of? Avocados. Both from Mexico."

Chuck Schumer claims that President Trump's tariffs will raise the price of beer because "most of it comes from Mexico" while holding a can of corona.

This might be the most embarrassing thing I've ever seen a politician do lmfao. pic.twitter.com/z4Z0W22gUe

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) February 3, 2025

Chuck Schumer is attempting to lure Americans away from Trump by tempting us with the humble indulgences beer and guacamole — drinking and snacking — paired with watching television. But even if Americans were hopelessly addicted to these fattening pleasures, we could still, easily, choose a non-Mexican beer and serve those tortilla chips with melted cheese instead of that avocado paste. That might work out well for Wisconsin — home of beer and cheese — and quite badly for Mexico. What is it going to do with all those avocados if we say we'd rather push for Mexico to help us with the border problem than continue to mindlessly consume that that green goo... that sludge... that guck... 

This is fresh fruit, farmed in vast quantity in Mexico, where it will rot if not sold. What am I missing? We will easily win this trade war. And I'm sure Schumer knows all this and is embarrassed to be smarmily plying us with a beer and an avocado.

By the way, Americans didn't use to care about avocados at all. Here's an 2015 article in The Atlantic — "The Selling of the Avocado/How the 'alligator pear' went from obscure delicacy to America's favorite fruit":

"Trust me, my grandparents, all four of them Italian, never ate avocados, let alone smashed them on toast for breakfast."

"You guys are falling into the romantic Italy trap—breakfast here typically consists of a few cookies dipped in caffè latte, or a brioche or cornetto at the local bar on the way to work. Here in Central Italy, people are seriously into pork and pork products. And no self-respecting Greek would eat low-fat yogurt. The overall message is good, but those details make me smile."

Writes Anthony Paonita of Perugia, commenting on the NYT article "The Mediterranean Diet Really Is That Good for You. Here’s Why. It has become the bedrock of virtuous eating. Experts answer common questions about how it leads to better health."

"I understand perfectly why people who have treated the markets as an enormous casino for decades are terribly upset when people other than themselves treat the markets like an enormous casino."

That's the top-rated comment on "‘Dumb Money’ Is on GameStop, and It’s Beating Wall Street at Its Own Game/GameStop shares have soared 1,700 percent as millions of small investors, egged on by social media, employ a classic Wall Street tactic to put the squeeze — on Wall Street" (NYT). 

Finance is my least favorite subject, but I can't completely ignore something that feels expressive of my reasons for not engaging. I'm not even going to attempt to vaguely gesture at the briefest summary of what happened. Go read the article... or any article on the subject.

But I will quote the second highest-rated comment.

If the hedge fund managers are concerned, perhaps they should simply drink fewer cups of Starbucks. Eat less avocado toast. Do a better job at saving. Or, get a side hustle. Drive an Uber? Learn to code? Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps, fellas. 

The delicate new avocado tree in the morning sunlight.

The mission to save Arthur.

 I told you we drove back from Utah in 1 day because we were on a mission to save Arthur.

Here's Arthur (photographed last fall):



I explained the name Arthur back in 2015:

I was poking around Mad Magazine because — in the light of dawn — that last post from yesterday, "Meade IM's from the deck," makes it look like Meade is the large avocado plant in the pot, and that made me think of the old Mad Magazine meme from the 1960s, Arthur. Arthur is not well-documented on the web. I see a short reference in the "Running gags and recurring images" section of the Wikipedia article "Recurring features in Mad (magazine)":

Some of the magazine's visual elements are whimsical, frequently appearing in the artwork without context or explanation. Among these are a potted avocado plant named Arthur (reportedly based on art director John Putnam's personal marijuana plant); a domed trashcan wearing an overcoat; a pointing six-fingered hand; the Mad Zeppelin (which more closely resembles an early experimental non-rigid airship); and an emaciated long-beaked creature who went unidentified for decades before being dubbed "Flip the Bird."

Anyway, the mission was successful. Arthur had been left outside on the deck, and the temperature was going to drop into the 20s on Saturday night. We left Moab, Utah at 3 a.m. on Friday and got back into Madison at 4 a.m. on Saturday. Arthur came in, and he's back out now, but the mandevilla, gardenia, and Australian Kimberly Queen ferns we brought home yesterday to keep Arthur company and clutter up the deck had to be brought in for the night. But Arthur was not alone, the reed grass and star jasmine stayed out too. Anyway, all the plants are doing fine and ready — with a little heat — to turn the deck into a jungle. Is that the right word?, I ask Meade. "Tropical paradise, I would call it," he says.

When "The Late Show" mocks millennials...

... it's pretty weak.

But at least they tried, and points for not getting distracted into Trump hating.

"Americans would run out of avocados in three weeks if imports from Mexico were stopped..."

"... according to Steve Barnard, president and chief executive of Mission Produce, the largest distributor and grower of avocados in the world. 'You couldn't pick a worse time of year because Mexico supplies virtually 100 percent of the avocados in the US right now,' Barnard said. 'California is just starting and they have a very small crop, but they're not relevant right now and won't be for another month or so.' Trump said on Friday that there was a 'very good likelihood' he would close the border this week if Mexico did not stop immigrants from reaching the United States."

I'm reading "America would run out of avocados in three weeks if Trump shuts the US-Mexico border" in The Daily Mail.

You couldn't pick a worse time of year? It seems to me this is the best time of year for Trump's move. It puts the pressure on Mexico, with its immense glut of perishable food. What's it to us if we go without one particular food, eat something else, and then get back to that food as California warms up? That's how we used to eat. That's closer to the locavore ideal. Restaurants and home foodsters will adjust easily. No one needs to eat avocados. But people who have grown avocados need to sell them. And why shouldn't Mexico help us with the illegal immigration problem?

I'm guessing it is a big problem for Barnard's company, Mission Produce. I see Mission Produce is one of the case studies presented at Harvard Business School:

As the leading distributor of fresh avocados in the U.S., Mission Produce was at a crossroads in late 2013. Avocado consumption was booming and CEO Steve Barnard wanted to acquire additional land in Peru and develop new avocado farms to help fill a projected supply gap. Mission could also buy avocado farms in other countries, expand its international marketing efforts, invest in brand building in Asia, and/or add processed avocado products. This strategy case describes Mission's growth, entrepreneurial leadership, future opportunities, and financing alternatives.

ADDED: Nudging hipsters to whine about their avocado toast is kind of a genius move.

Oh, come on, don't go crazy. If you love "normal," as you say, you'd better observe the "served"/"fed" distinction.

I'm reading "Why are 2020 Democrats so weird?" by Michael Walther (in The Week). There's this:

Meanwhile, there is Beto. I don't particularly care that in 1988 the young Robert Francis O'Rourke posted some erotic verses about cows ("Oh, Milky wonder, sing for us once more, / Live your life, everlusting [sic] joy" is one of the only bits I can quote on this family website) online. I didn't even know until yesterday that there was such a thing as "online" in 1988. Nor am I going to get all worked up about his weird murder spree fantasy story, which is the kind of thing stupid teenagers write every day. But what I do want to know is whether he actually took a handful of green feces, put it in a bowl, and served it to his wife once, telling her that it was avocado. Asked by a journalist recently to confirm the anecdote, which had been reported by a supposed friend of the candidate, he responded that while he didn't remember this happening it "sounds like the kind of thing I would do." Come again? If you fed excrement to the mother of your children, I feel like you would recall. I almost certainly think she would. If there was ever something to lie about as a politician, this is it....

I can't be the only person who sometimes thinks there's something to be said for, you know, normal people in politics. It is certainly difficult to imagine poor Jeb Bush ever inviting his late beloved mother to view a smut film with at the local cinema in Kennebunkport. It is even harder to imagine President Obama feeding the former first lady the contents of one of Sasha or Malia's diapers.

"Served" means he put the bowl of green shit on the table in front of his wife and declared it to be avocado. Very funny. "Fed" means he got it on a spoon and aimed it at her mouth and even got it in. Tricking her. That's horrible. Big difference. I like normal people, and in my book, normal people get the difference between those 2 images and don't smear them together to try to make the world seem weirder than it is. It's weird enough. Let's be precise and honest about just how weird it is, because it could be a LOT weirder, and we need to hang onto the last remaining lumps of normal.

"A Texas fraternity brother who was arrested on hazing charges fell to his death on campus in an apparent suicide..."

The NY Post reports on the death of Andrew Walker, 19, who was arrested after an incident at the Kappa Sigma fraternity house at Texas Christian University:

Walker and another fraternity brother, Christopher Barker, allegedly plied freshman pledges with vodka shots and forced them to eat expired guacamole. The alleged hazing resulted in one of the freshmen landing in the hospital for alcohol poisoning. Authorities said his blood alcohol level was determined to be so high that he could’ve died.

IN THE COMMENTS: Eric the Fruit Bat said...

So it turns out that four stories is enough to do it? Good to know.

I said:

I lived across from a one-story building that was the jump-off for a suicide. I don't want to suggest how the man did that in a way that he must have known would work, because I don't want to given anyone any ideas. Don't kill yourselves.

Here was a 19-year-old boy who imagined his life had been destroyed by one bad thing, and I could list some recent news stories that send the message that's how the world works now. Somehow, the celebrities never kill themselves. They just keep fighting, but the young don't have the perspective of success. Only hopelessness. Please hang on, children.

The moving of the tree.

I don't know where the tree Trump and Macron ritualistically planted has gone, but one thing that's known here at Meadhouse is that there's a spring ritual of moving the avocado tree out onto the deck.



This tree — which looked like this in 2015 — was grown by Meade from avocado pits and now is cramped by the 9-foot ceiling in the room. And even though I think there's no use encouraging it to get any taller and the task of getting it through the 6-and-a-half-foot door requires some difficult horizontalization...



... and I kind of think it belongs indoors because it really ties the room together, Meade powered the beast over the threshold...



... and got those wheels over the deck cracks to where it would pull the indoor eye outdoors. And Meade even posed the dog...



... while all I did was take these photographs and celebrate the ritual on the internet.

Postscript: The mystery of the disappearing Macron tree has been solved: It has been moved temporarily into quarantine. The roots were always enclosed in plastic, and the quarantine was mandatory and planned all along.

"Clog life is not lived off the grid but grid-adjacent. It’s a fuzzy, fancy realm, littered with alpaca sweaters, Rachel Cusk novels, and trees that grow indoors, in charmingly primitive ceramic pots."

That's a little too close to where I live, except that I have no idea who Rachel Cusk is. I do have 5 10-foot tall avocado trees charmingly growing indoors, planted and tended to by the charmingly primitive ex-potter who shares my fuzzy realm. I wear sweaters. I've got enough clogs that I'd have to go count them to tell you the actual number, and I've been collecting them since right about when Dansko was founded (1990) and I first saw them in a CP Shades store, which... don't get me started on CP Shades.

The quote in the post headline is from "The Life-Changing Magic of Clogs" by Lauren Mechling (from January, in The New Yorker), which I'm reading because it's linked in "What’s the Next Status Clog?" (at NY Magazine)("Writer Lauren Mechling deserves credit for both coining the term clogerati, and confirming No. 6 as the current clog that confers status on its owner").

Okay, I looked up Rachel Cusk. I see there is a New Yorker article about her from last year, proving that though I subscribe to The New Yorker — it's the only! magazine I subscribe to — I don't even notice some of the articles:

In Rachel Cusk’s most recent novels, “Outline” and “Transit,” a British writer named Faye encounters a series of friends and strangers as she goes about her daily life. She is recently divorced, and while her new flat is being renovated her two sons are living with their father. There is something catlike about Faye—an elusiveness that makes people want to detain her, and a curiosity about their pungent secrets....

Don't you always feel like detaining a cat and telling it your pungent secrets?

“Consider the pizza,” [Cusk] writes. “It is like a smiling face: it assuages the fear of complexity by showing everything on its surface.”...

On certain birthdays, she told me, “I would get a call from my mom reminding me of the torment she had gone through on that date.” Cusk’s birth, in an understaffed hospital during a blizzard, was long and difficult. Cusk suggested that her father blamed her for the trauma his wife had suffered, because he always seemed angry with her. When she reached puberty, she began to feel that her developing body was “disgusting.” “I always felt repellent,” Cusk said. “That has come out in my work, unfortunately, as disgust for the repellent qualities of other people.”...

Her mother’s prudishness and conformity were, by Cusk’s account, stifling not only to the young Rachel. On the morning after she and Scamell-Katz were married—in “a fantastic party on the beach,” she said—“I met my father in the kitchen. ‘I didn’t realize there were men like that,’ he said of Siemon and his friends, who had been dancing wildly around a bonfire in knee-high boots. And he wished he could have been like them, boots and all. Because his own wildness had been domesticated by my mother.”

Men in boots and women in clogs. Get to know them. Eat smiling pizza, and tell secrets to cats.

The day in disgust.

What's been disgusting people in the last 24 hours? I wondered, after blogging something that disgusted Meade and me and noticing the the new post went on top of yesterday's post about Comey being "just completely disgusted" when Trump subjected him to a handshake.

Here's what I've come up with:

1. The avolatte. "Yes, this is a latte served inside of an avocado. Look at it. It’s sickening."

2. What's that white thing that seems to be growing out of your child's gums? It's not some weird new disease, just some fingernail bitings. One woman — who ultimately tweezed out 27 shreds — made video of her adventure in her son's mouth and posted it on Facebook. The son's name — if this is relevant to analyzing her level of vigilance about health matters — is Kale.

3. "If Trump took a dump on his desk, you would defend it," said Anderson Cooper last night to his guest Jeffrey Lord.

4. In Japan, promoting the movie "Tokyo Ghoul," there's a Tokyo Ghoul café. Here's the website for the café with some pictures from the comic book and the dishes intended to evoke them. (Here's a trailer for the new movie.)

5. I avoided the hoo-ha over the men's romper, but maybe I can catch the wave on the jeado. "Real men wear speedos, but it takes a confident man to wear a jeado."

6. "It's not that Trump isn't or shouldn't be frightening. But it's conspicuous that our media landscape is now a perfect Ailes-ian dystopia, cleaved into camps of captive audiences geeked up on terror and disgust. The more scared and hate-filled we are, the more advertising dollars come pouring in, on both sides."

7. From "'Alien' Is Sci-Fi Horror's Most Feminist Movie Franchise," by Tom Seymour: "The Alien movies visualize the two things so many men look upon with disgust and horror—getting penetrated themselves, and watching a woman giving birth... In the Alien films... moments of rape are always moments of impregnation. They provide a dual, intensified horror."

8. From "As Indians, we take our cotton heritage too lightly": "Remember the outrage last year in the US when an Indian supplier of 'Egyptian cotton' bedsheets to major department stores was found to have used other cotton? The disgust and horror was akin to sturgeon caviar being found to have been diluted with dyed salmon roe or horsemeat being detected in so-called beef products in UK. But how many know that India also produces... an equally wonderful ESL cotton variety, albeit rather unimaginatively named Suvin, the result of a 'marriage' of a local cotton gal 'Sujatha' with a Caribbean cotton lad called St Vincent in the mid-1970s?"

9. "Where do we draw the line on sledging?" I don't know. I had to figure out what "sledging" even is. Fortunately, there's an entire Wikipedia article on this cricket-specific issue: "Sledging is a term used in cricket to describe the practice whereby some players seek to gain an advantage by insulting or verbally intimidating the opposing player.... There is debate in the cricketing world as to whether this constitutes poor sportsmanship or good-humoured banter."

10. "Found this while doing yard work. My brother asked why women would buy baseball themed pads."

Time to bring the avocado plant indoors.

That's 5 pits, planted 2 years ago, after 2 summers outdoors and lots of indoor time.

Mad Magazine pre-apologizes...

... for this...



I didn't go looking for Hillary-Clinton-related trouble. I was poking around Mad Magazine because — in the light of dawn — that last post from yesterday, "Meade IM's from the deck," makes it look like Meade is the large avocado plant in the pot, and that made me think of the old Mad Magazine meme from the 1960s, Arthur. Arthur is not well-documented on the web. I see a short reference in the "Running gags and recurring images" section of the Wikipedia article "Recurring features in Mad (magazine)":

Some of the magazine's visual elements are whimsical, frequently appearing in the artwork without context or explanation. Among these are a potted avocado plant named Arthur (reportedly based on art director John Putnam's personal marijuana plant); a domed trashcan wearing an overcoat; a pointing six-fingered hand; the Mad Zeppelin (which more closely resembles an early experimental non-rigid airship; and an emaciated long-beaked creature who went unidentified for decades before being dubbed "Flip the Bird."

The avocado may have represented a marijuana plant back then, but nothing — nothing at all — represented a penis. Ah! The lost innocence!

ADDED: By the way, Hillary's new logo really is terrible. If this were a design class, and the assignment were to make a logo for Hillary, I would think the teacher would get mad at a student who handed in that one. What, did you spend one minute on the assignment? You just did the most obvious thing, the letter H, the colors blue and red, and an arrow, the most cliché logo element possible?! An arrow to signify moving forward! That's what you came up with?

"I high-mindedly declined the Chardonnay-Clay Body Wrap: it savored too much of yet another method of taking in booze, through the pores."

Christopher Hitchens reports on his luxury spa experience. With gruesome pictures of the man who admits that, naked, he looks, from the front, like "a condom hastily stuffed with an old sock" and, from the side, like "an avocado pear and, on certain mornings, an avocado pear that retains nothing of nutritious value but its tinge of alligator green."

He reflects on "self-improvement" in the cliff-hanger ending of what is part 1 of his spa saga:

I ... had to admit what I have long secretly known, which is that I positively like stress, arrange to inflict it on myself, and sheer awkwardly away from anybody who tries to promise me a more soothed or relaxed existence. Bad habits have brought me this far: why change such a tried-and-true formula?

I also take the view that it's a mistake to try to look younger than one is, and that the face in particular ought to be the register of a properly lived life.