"You might think such a scene — lines of strangers ogling an exposed female body lying in the middle of the street — would feel unsettling or prurient...."

"Instead, the atmosphere felt mildly jovial, as people exchanged amused glances, shrugged, and snapped photos. Nothing untoward was happening here, because Balloon Kim seemed protected from any personal transgression. Naturally, being 60 feet long helped.... But Balloon Kim seemed impervious to transgression [because] Balloon Kim did not so much depict a person as it did a commodity, an abandoned outer shell.... By covering her famous face, Balloon Kim refused to return the onlookers’ gaze. She depicted no personal expression, and blocked even the depiction of any access to her interiority. This structure was not a portrait or a sculpture of Ms. Kardashian, but rather a very faithful recreation of the workings of Ms. Kardashian’s empire, which is built on the meticulously crafted project she has made of her body — a collection of highly public, highly exposed curves and spheres, sculpted and polished to perfection, displayed according to Ms. Kardashian’s diktats, and offered up as a series of ideals to be aspired to and emulated via the purchase of products."

Writes Rhonda Garelick, in "About That Giant Kim Kardashian in Times Square/The seamless, poreless, sanitized effigy of a capitalist titan was a startling piece of marketing for Skims" (NYT).

1. That last sentence — "This structure was not... " — is a doozy. Have I ever written "doozy" on this blog? Yes! And I've written it in the context of a long sentence that needed diagramming. So now, here's another item for the annals of Things I Asked Grok: "Diagram this sentence...."

2. "Interiority" — You might remember just last month I was asking "What kind of people use the word 'interiority'?" Encountering the word in a NYT article (about Dylan Mulvaney), I searched my blog archive and extracted the history of the word "interiority" on this blog. There were 5 earlier appearances, all of them in quotes, never used by me. One day I'll use it!

3. This post gets my "big and small" tag — which is, regular readers may know, my favorite tag. I  am amused by absurd and radical size variations. 

4. The NYT writer is doing something I've seen a lot of over the years — crediting a woman for doing something other than what you might think she's doing: selling her sexuality. 

"North Korea has released more than 3,000 of the trash balloons since May, many of which have reached the South after floating across the Demilitarized Zone...."

"They have landed on trees, farms and urban side streets, their payloads bursting and spilling out waste paper, used cloth, cigarette butts and compost​. On Wednesday, for the first time, some of them landed inside the sprawling compound in central Seoul that includes the office of President Yoon Suk Yeol... one of the most tightly guarded places in South Korea. Officials said they waited for the balloons to land before sending a chemical, biological and radiological response team to inspect their payloads, rather than blast them ​— and scatter their​ suspicious payloads ​— from the sky. The team found 'nothing dangerous or contaminating'...."

From "North Korean Trash Balloons Hit South Korean President’s Compound/Officials found nothing hazardous in the balloons’ payloads, as the North’s slow barrage of airborne garbage showed few signs of letting up" (NYT).

Why?

"Florida is at the forefront of a dizzying and contentious array of statewide bans..."

"... outlawing lab grown meat, certain books from school libraries and classrooms, and most abortions after six weeks. But the balloon ban is rare for garnering widespread bipartisan support.... The new legislation makes it clear that balloons can pose an environmental hazard, supporters say. It equates intentionally releasing a balloon filled with a gas lighter than air with littering...."

"Balloons Harm Wildlife. Florida Is Set to Ban Their Release/In an effort to curb microplastics and marine pollution, lawmakers in the Sunshine State voted overwhelmingly to make it illegal to intentionally let a balloon fly away" (NYT).

Of course, releasing a balloon is littering! How did people ever convince themselves that it wasn't? Well, they just didn't think about it, did they?

Side note: Did you spot the free-range "garnering" released into the wild?

"I’m going to have to say it, and I’m sorry because I know UFO people roll their eyes at the word balloons."

"But they need to get over it because balloons of various kinds — high-altitude weather balloons, cosmic-ray research balloons, sound-detecting balloons, thunderstorm-study balloons, aerial-reconnaissance balloons, 'rockoons' that shoot missiles, propaganda balloons, toy balloons, and, most secret, crop-warfare balloons — are at the heart of this high-altitude adventure we’ve been on as a culture. None of it is paranormal, but it’s still strange.... The effect on the U.S. of all this Cold War balloonery is pretty obvious. The Air Force, the Navy, and the CIA seeded the sky with helium ghosts and made us crazy. The country was, and is, suffering from a paranormalization of the plastic bag."

I'm reading "No, Aliens Haven’t Visited the Earth/Why are so many smart people insisting otherwise?" by Nicholson Baker (the novelist/essayist), in New York Magazine.

"Make Love Great Again."

Photographed yesterday in the East Village.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

Why was this thing in a position to be knocked into and shattered? Seems like a publicity stunt and it's working.

I'm reading "Art Fair Visitor Breaks a Jeff Koons Balloon Dog Sculpture/A woman accidentally knocked over a bright blue dog sculpture at Art Wynwood in Miami, causing the $42,000 artwork to shatter, witnesses said" (NYT).

The small, $42,000 version of the famous dog art isn't unique, is it? Aren't there as many of these as the artist chooses to authorize? Placing the damn thing unsecured on a pedestal in a gallery where people walk all around it answers those questions. The only unanswered question is whether they actively sought this publicity.

The NYT article doesn't ask my questions. It's padded with cute crap about sweeping up the shards and selling them as if the destruction is more art — unique art, publicized in the NYT.

The Koons balloon sculptures look like they're made of balloons, but, as the breakage attests, they're not. Nevertheless, I'm giving this post my "balloon" tag, because balloons have been in the news lately, and there's a frisson of delight in the variation on a theme. 

ADDED: "Erased de Kooning" was interesting — 70 years ago. Shattered Koons is bullshit.

"The United States is going to need a lot of missiles if its fighter jets are to shoot down every stray balloon that sets off a radar warning in American airspace."

"'At any given moment, thousands of balloons' are above the Earth, including many used in the United States by government agencies, military forces, independent researchers and hobbyists.... [F]ederal officials have sought to enhance radars and atmospheric trackers so they can more closely scrutinize the nation’s airspace. Balloon experts say the upgrade might generate a paralyzing wave of false alarms.... Each year, around 60,000 high-flying balloons are launched just by the National Weather Service... The Weather Service’s balloons gather data that keeps passenger jets out of harm’s way and lets experts predict the likely onset of violent storms...."

From "A Rising Awareness That Balloons Are Everywhere in Our Skies/As more unidentified objects were shot down by the U.S. Air Force in recent days, experts warned that there were an 'endless' array of potential targets" (NYT).

ADDED: Grammar error in headline. It should be “there was an ‘endless’ array.”

The really serious threat: Republican questioning President Joe Biden’s leadership.

I'm reading "A trio of new intrusions leaves America’s leaders grasping for explanations" by Stephen Collinson (CNN). 

The flurry of attacks on the unknown crafts came a week after the highly public tracking and ultimate downing of a Chinese balloon suspected of carrying out surveillance. Now, the thin details trickling out of the Pentagon and Capitol Hill about are making an already highly unusual international episode even more bizarre and confusing. No one – not the White House, the Pentagon or the government of Canada, whose airspace has also been infringed – seems able to say exactly what is going on with these latest downed crafts. This raises questions for top military brass and US spy agencies as well as for the potential safety of civilian aviation. And it creates an information vacuum that Republicans are again using to question President Joe Biden’s leadership.

It was a UFO... so... aliens?

When CIA mouthpiece @NatashaBertrand starts pushing UFO's, that's when you know: it's a totally false story. https://t.co/dUqVXHZmX1

— Emerald Robinson ✝️ (@EmeraldRobinson) February 12, 2023

"The Pentagon said it shot down an unidentified object over frozen waters around Alaska on Friday at the order of President Biden...."

"U.S. officials said they could not immediately confirm whether the object was a balloon, but it was traveling at an altitude that made it a potential threat to civilian aircraft.... The Friday shootdown showed Mr. Biden taking direct and forceful action far more quickly than he did last week, when some Republican lawmakers criticized him for letting the spy balloon linger over the United States for several days before destroying it. But that period of observation last week allowed American officials to collect intelligence about the spy balloon, while in the episode on Friday, officials seemed unsure about what exactly they shot down."

 The NYT reports.

The explanation about Balloon #1 — the "period of observation... allowed American officials to collect intelligence about the spy balloon" — is undercut by the action on Balloon/"Balloon" #2. The only difference seems to be the experience of getting criticized by "some Republican lawmakers." That shouldn't make any difference (unless the question isn't national security).

"The Chinese spy balloon shot down by the U.S. military over the Atlantic Ocean... was part of a fleet of surveillance balloons directed by the Chinese military that had flown over more than 40 countries..."

"... across five continents, the State Department said Thursday. The United States used high resolution imagery from U-2 flybys to determine the balloon’s capabilities, the department said in a written announcement, adding that the balloon’s equipment 'was clearly for intelligence surveillance and inconsistent with the equipment onboard weather balloons.' The agency said the balloon had multiple antennas in an array that was 'likely capable of collecting and geo-locating communications.' Solar panels on the machine were large enough to produce power to operate '“multiple active intelligence collection sensors,' the department said. The agency also said the U.S. government was 'confident' that the company that made the balloon had direct commercial ties with the People’s Liberation Army, the Chinese military, citing an official procurement portal for the army. The department did not name the company...."

From "Chinese Balloon Had Tools to Collect Communications Signals, U.S. Says/China’s surveillance balloons have flown over more than 40 countries and are directed by the Chinese military, the State Department said" (NYT).

"As NORAD commander, it’s my responsibility to detect threats to North America, I will tell you that we did not detect those threats."

"And that’s a domain awareness gap that we have to figure out."

Said Gen. Glen D. VanHerck, head of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, quoted in "U.S. military failed to detect prior Chinese incursions, general says/The Pentagon’s disclosure that previous balloon flights over the U.S. occurred during Trump’s time in office was met with surprise by the former president and his advisers" (WaPo).

Does that mean Trump could not have known? 

John Kirby, the National Security Council strategic communications coordinator, said, "I can’t speak to what awareness there was in the previous administration. I can tell you that we discovered these flights after we came into office." He said those other flights were "brief" and "nothing like we saw last week."

If VanHerck and Kirby are telling the truth, then any discussion of what Trump did should be about why his administration did not do a better job of threat detection and not about how he dealt with the balloon and only Biden is on the hook for how he handled the balloon after it was detected.

Have all the Trump-did-the-same-thing and only-Biden-shot-it-down tweets been deleted?

"I can't believe I'm Joe's Osama," says the shot-down Chinese balloon.

"How would you like it if someone measured your width in buses?"

"The US military has shot down the suspected Chinese surveillance balloon over the Atlantic Ocean off the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, a US official said Saturday."

CNN reports.

"Top military officials had advised against shooting down the balloon while over the continental US because of the risk the debris could pose to civilians and property on the ground...."

ADDED: "Spy balloons have been around since the late 1700s, but why are militaries around the world still flying them in 2023?" (Politico).

From Wikipedia:

"By 1960, the United States had been flying U-2 spy planes into Soviet airspace since the mid-1950s."

"Both sides knew it was happening, but as the CIA’s Richard Bissell said, the plane was so light there was only 'one chance in a million' that it would survive a hit. So when Air Force Capt. Francis Gary Powers was shot down on May 1, everyone assumed that the plane was gone and the pilot dead. NASA put out a statement saying it was a weather plane that had gone off course. Only when the Soviets triumphantly paraded Powers and bits of the wreckage in Moscow did Washington realize the game was up...."

From "What a Cold War spy-plane crisis teaches us about China’s balloon antics" by Richard Aldous, "Macmillan, Eisenhower and the Cold War."

"I should've worked in a pie factory. I knew I missed my calling."

 

It's only just now that I found a way to fit it on this blog — a goodbye to Gilbert Gottfried.

***

"I'm here to supervise balloons!" 

***

"Thank you, mein Führer"/"Only Gilbert can get away with that."

***

"You know, I can't fire you for being inappropriate, because I'm inappropriate. I do many things that are totally inappropriate."

"Giant Balloon Face Floats Over Tokyo/The eerie aerial piece was created by the artist collective 目 ("Mé") and features an anonymous face chosen from over 1,000 submissions...."

"The work has been met with a mixed reception, ranging from humor to more subversive interpretations. Some have likened Mé’s piece to The Hanging Balloons, a story by the Japanese horror mangaka Junji Ito in which floating heads with metal nooses set out to kill their human doppelgangers."

Hypoallergenic reports.

Random objects.

A collection of me turning into random objects. pic.twitter.com/ValPdPNJIj

— Kevin Parry (@kevinbparry) July 13, 2021

“Some liberals tried to come to my hometown and start some trouble. That ain’t happening. I did get arrested. I got charged. That’s all right. I’d do it again given the opportunity.”

Said Hoyt Hutchinson of Tuscaloosa, arrested for slashing the baby Trump balloon, which was on display near the stadium where President Trump attended a football game, WaPo reports. The charge is first degree criminal mischief.

ADDED: Flashback to July 2011! There was an attack on a balloon during the Wisconsin protests. Blogged here:

"The incident allegedly involved a citizen, a state worker and a balloon..."

Protesters have been releasing red heart balloons throughout the months of demonstrations...  The protester involved in Monday's incident told a Capitol police officer that the worker came at her with a knife. She did not appear to be injured, but was holding a blood-smeared paper bag and what looked like popped red heart balloon....

Blue Cheddar has some more detail:

Jenna says that she was standing with Leslie when Ron [Blair, the assistant facilities director,] approached “out of nowhere”... Jenna says Ron rushed at the balloon and popped it and then darted down a back stairway. In the course of the action Jenna says he did not say anything she could clearly hear, though he may have been mumbling.

I'm so tired of the anti-Trump things in my Facebook feed.

I know I should have resisted and all my "friends" will see me as jerk, but I couldn't stop myself from responding to 2 things on Facebook just now. I won't reveal who put up these items, just my own response:

1. "Trump Told Russia To Get Clinton’s Emails. The Same Day, They Obeyed./A new indictment from Robert Mueller reveals that Russia appeared to be listening to what Trump wanted" in The Huffington Post. My response:

If Trump were colluding, why would he flaunt his involvement? The more apt inference is that the Russians wanted to make it look like they were taking orders from him and chose this moment, because it would be so weird it would agitate media like HuffPo to generate this theory.

2. A photojournalist's image of the Trump-as-a-diapered-baby balloon framed alongside a bronze statue of Winston Churchill. My response:

To get a fair comparison, show me how Trump is depicted 75 years in the future. Or recreate Churchill today, have him begin to enter politics, and show me how he would be regarded.

I include a link to an article in the UK Independent, "Winston Churchill 'would not become Prime Minister today because his speaking style would be mocked'/Romola Garai, who stars in new ITV drama about the politician, says his eccentricities would rule him out in the modern era." From that article, quoting Garai (who played Churchill's nurse):

“Churchill would not get elected today. His speech was very peculiar, quite mumbled in some ways.... Churchill was very idiosyncratic in the way he spoke. Today public speaking has become so monotone and peculiarity is something that rolling news is very afraid of... It’s easy to pinpoint anybody’s idiosyncracies now, which I think is a terrible shame. Because some of the great orators were very individual in the way they spoke."

The article was from February 2016, when — here in the United States — "SNL" hadn't yet brought in Alec Baldwin to do the Trump impersonation. They relied on — do you even remember? — Taram Killam (and Daryl Hammond) and — Trump's victory was so impossible — even let the real Donald Trump host the show and goof around with Killam and Hammond:



Ha ha ha. What a joke. Trump is President now, and I'm just going to guess he'll be a bronze statue in 75 years.