"Who wants to sit squeezed up to a big group of hairy men on a bachelor party?"

Said Jerelyn Taubert, 66, who moved to Budapest 20 years ago, when she would arrive at the beautiful historic bath house "at eight in the morning and there would be three people in the pool.... There were a lot of older Hungarian ladies and it felt private, in the women’s section."

She's quoted in "Tensions boil over as tourists swamp Budapest’s historic bath houses/Bathing culture is at the heart of the city but its popularity with foreigners is pricing out locals, and political rows are delaying desperately needed renovations" (London Times).

Maybe the older Hungarian ladies don't like squeezing up with a woman who only moved to town 20 years ago. I think it is important, when you are disgusted by some people, to remember that there are other people to whom you are disgusting.

AND: Speaking of pools and variable disgust, look at this question some guy sent in to the NYT "Ethicist": "I presume that most people pee in swimming pools and that everyone pees in the ocean. But suppose I’m at the beach. I need to defecate. It’s a 15 minute walk to the bathroom. It’s a Tuesday, and the beach is deserted. Is it OK to go in the ocean? I say yes! My wife disagrees." Just to ask is already to be too disgusting. Just the first sentence — the foundation for the question — is already too disgusting. 

I read that yesterday and didn't blog it, but I'm blogging it now because it lodged in my head. I know because it oozed up as I read about that Budapest bath house. I'm blogging it now to free myself of thinking about it again, because I won't blog it twice. 

We were just talking about the "microvacation."

Remember that guy who "flew to Athens for 8 hours, where he toured the Parthenon... then hopped on a flight to Egypt, saw the pyramids, rode a camel and visited the Grand Egyptian Museum, all before returning to San Francisco in time for Sunday dinner."

I thought there needed to be some decent proportion between the time on planes and the time used to good effect at the destination. But check out this guy, flying all the way from NYC to Tokyo and back with just a single day in Tokyo. No hotel, no packing, just dropping in, hitting a few sights and eateries, and getting the hell back out. He landed in Tokyo in the morning and flew back out that same night:

"One day, he is a man who loves his wife and has just bought a terrifically expensive mattress for their bed."

"The next he tells her, his eyes narrowing into a shape she had never seen before: 'I thought I was happy but I’m not. I thought I wanted our life but I don’t.' He tells her she can have everything, including custody of the children. 'I don’t want it,' he says. 'I don’t want any of it.'"

From "Her Life Was an Old-Money Dream. It Collapsed in a Moment. Born into exceptional privilege, Belle Burden had it all: love, money, family. Then her marriage fell apart" (NYT).

Now, I clicked on that link because the headline bugged me. I keep seeing these sudden-collapse headlines. Articles are always offering to pinpoint the moment when things changed. There's one on the front page of The London Times right now: "The moment Landman’s teenage blonde changed American TV." It's annoying me. They think we're manipulable by our belief in the magic moment.

But I'm blogging because of the mattress, the "terrifically expensive mattress." I think I've blogged about that mattress: "[T]he most preposterously priced mattress, a king-size Grande Vivius, costs $539,000...." I've made a new tag, "mattress," and added it retrospectively, which is a much bigger task than you might think. There are so many posts about someone known as "mattress girl" and I've repeatedly blogged about the line "it balances on your head just like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine."

But really, if you were the stay-at-home wife to a rich man, would the purchase of a terrifically expensive mattress make you think he is more likely to stay or less likely to stay? He might want to cushion your fall, to pacify and lull you. What is the meaning of a mattress?

AND: Maybe the mattress was the tipping point. That mattress was exactly what made him see that the life they'd formed together was her vision of the good, and he couldn't relate to it at all. She wanted grand material things and he didn't want any of it. You don't need me, you have the mattress. 

It's this blog's 22nd anniversary.

22 years of doing exactly this. Year 23 begins today. 

The bloggiversary arrives 2 days after my birthday, but I didn't blog about my birthday — though I appreciated the birthday wishes that popped up here and there in the comments section. And it was one of those big birthdays, the 3/4 of a century mark, 75.

Here on the blog, it's the bloggiversary that matters. This is the milestone I choose to highlight. I'm delighted to be here to blog another day, Day 8,037.

Thanks for reading!

2 words I didn't expect to read in a biography of John Quincy Adams.

It took me literally a year to read James Traub's "John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit" (commission earned), but I have finally come to the end. Speaking of the end, JQA's famous last words were "This is the end of earth."

JQA:MS is not the only book I read in the past year, but it is the one I spaced out the most.

Anyway, here are 2 passages each with a surprising word that I will render in boldface:

ChatGPT has been watching me, collecting what it can of my thoughts, and today, it serves it up to me — as if it's cool fun and compliments — as "Your Year With ChatGPT."

Here's what I saw at the bottom of the screen when I went to ChatGPT:

Admittedly, I clicked "Try it," so I suspect that there was no profile of me until I asked for it. That black oval is like the "Eat me" cookie in "Alice in Wonderland." I didn't have to click on it.

First, I got a poem supposedly about me, but skip that. The next screen was my "3 big themes." These are just for my use of ChatGPT in a browser on my desktop, mostly while I was involved in blogging. I got a different report on my iPhone ChatGPT app, where I never blog. I work through various off-blog problems and fancies. And even on the desktop, I use Grok more that ChatGPT. So there are other "me"s. Anyway, here's this thing purporting to know me:

I was given an award that reflects the me that I am when immersed in blogging:

"[I]t has become nearly impossible to attend a Democratic political event without encountering a 'creator hour,' an influencer briefing or a lineup of one-on-one interviews with Substackers and independent podcasters...."

"Are Democrats on par with Republicans in the digital media space? Not yet. The gap remains wide, according to audience numbers and interviews with creators and strategists. Republicans dismiss their efforts as phony. 'What they need to stop doing is trying to copy our homework and go invent something of their own,' said CJ Pearson, a conservative influencer and podcast host. 'If they do that, it’ll be a lot more authentic than whatever they’re doing right now.'... But even the friendly confines of liberal media can turn hostile. Creators who bring strong political opinions to interviews sometimes push Democrats harder than expected, said Kyle Tharp, author of a newsletter about politics and online influence.... Tharp predicted the creator class will wield even more power in the 2028 presidential campaign. 'Some of these campaigns are going to be handing them a bag of cash for an endorsement,' he said. 'People are really going to want some of these major Democratic talkers’ endorsements in the next campaign.'"

From "How Democrats are building their own digital media army/The 2024 election spurred Democrats to seek out podcasts and social media creators to spread their message and catch up with their Republican counterparts" (WaPo)(free link).

I'm suddenly remembering the "Authenticity" trend that seems to have peaked last August.

I think good social media emerges organically. Ask Joe Rogan. These top-down efforts are not going to produce the right influencer/influencee relationship. And I've been watching the Democratic Party try to do this since the 2004 campaign, when it coddled bloggers.

"Marjorie Taylor Greene Says She Plans to Resign in January."

The NYT reports: "Her announcement came days after President Trump branded her a 'traitor' for breaking with him and helping compel the Justice Department to release its files related to Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender. Ms. Greene, who was elected in 2020 and positioned herself as a die-hard Trump supporter until a series of recent ruptures with the president on a variety of issues, made the abrupt announcement in a video and statement she posted online, filmed from her home in Georgia, her Christmas tree on display behind her."

This is another one of the "certain topics" I was talking about yesterday in "I feel as though unseen readers are leaning on me to write about certain topics that I see out there." Today's news is easy to absorb, and now I don't have to react to what the NYT has been pushing at me for the last few days in things like "The Three G.O.P. Women Who Broke Trump’s Grip on Congress" and "Marjorie Taylor Greene Was Not on Our Bingo Card." 

In the "Bingo Card" conversation, Frank Bruni said to Bret Stephens:

I feel as though unseen readers are leaning on me to write about certain topics that I see out there.

That provokes me to resistance. I've been writing this blog for almost 22 years, and the reason it works for me is that I only do what motivates me. I realize that this feeling that you're leaning on me to write about [whatever] must necessarily come from within — It's coming from inside the Althouse — but please know that if it were coming from you, I would be asking you to cut it out.

"One night, on the way back from buying Betty Crocker brownie mix on Columbus, I actually found a beautiful young man, in front of our apartment, on the floor, passed out drunk."

"I dragged him inside, which was hard, because he was six feet tall. His name turned out to be Duncan, and soon we were living in weird hotels together and staying in all day, except for going down to the deli for bologna with green olives in it. Like me, he got some money from home— his came from North Carolina. Tennessee Williams called a couple of times, and then Duncan’s voice would get more Southern, would become a real drawl. I think I was jealous of Tennessee Williams. At night, we lived in bars until closing time (Sorabaja, on the Upper East Side; the White Horse; Chumley’s—watching Zoot Sims put dimes in the jukebox), and in the beginning I had little fantasies of marrying him. I pretty much gave up on that when I finally had to put him in Gracie Square Hospital because he thought God was talking to him in the Wellington Hotel. It seemed I was developing a sort of ruthless, practical side. I was sad when I had him committed; we had been like 'Les Enfants Terribles' together."

I'm still reading "How I Became a Single Woman" by Alison Rose. Remember? I blogged her obituary 2 days ago, here. 

I love the writing. Each paragraph is self-contained, like a blog post, that is... like a post on the greatest blog ever written. Quite condensed and spiffy!

You have to have these experiences to tell these stories... or I suppose you could write like that in fiction. You come home to find a drunk passed out in front of your apartment door and you drag him inside... because he's beautiful. And you're beautiful too, of course, so you live like Les Enfants Terribles until you need to drag him elsewhere, to the mental hospital. 

"Les Enfants Terribles" — Wikipedia says — "is a 1929 novel by Jean Cocteau [about]... two siblings... who isolate themselves from the world as they grow up, an isolation which is shattered by the stresses of their adolescence."

As for Zoot Sims....

Blogger's new "Google Search" tool is annoying me.

I'm glad to see Google paying some attention to Blogger and adding a new feature, but I can't believe they put the icon in the compose window where it actually covers up some of the text while I'm trying to write. I don't even know if I just wrote "trying to" correctly! It looks like this from my point of view!

See the turquoise circle with the pencil icon. Please, Google, let me move that or make it disappear or move it up into the tool bar. Some of us still want to see what we're writing. 

What clicking that icon does is insert links all over the post. Like this:

It's not as though the link on "turquoise circle" goes anywhere interesting. And it gives the insane impression that readers might need help understanding the word combo or feel intrigued about exploring the concept. Who would want links like this? It seems like the stuff of fake blogs — spam. 

"If I have 2086 blog posts in 2025 at the end of today, how many blog posts must I publish per day in the remaining days of this year to have a total of 3000 for the year?"

I asked ChatGPT. Answer: "You must publish about 9 blog posts per day for the rest of 2025 to reach 3000."

"And how many per day have I averaged so far?" Answer: "You’ve averaged about 7.9 posts per day so far in 2025."

Me: "I've had over 3,000 for many years, and I'm not blogging less, just writing longer posts. It would be easy to throw in 2 very short things a day or break a long thing up into 2 things if I got goal oriented, but I have been doing things naturally. Look how consistent my weekly output is" — I reprint the 2025 numbers that you can see in the sidebar.

ChatGPT offers to show me "what the year-end total would look like under a 'natural' pace vs. a 'goal-oriented' pace (say, 2 extra/day)?" I agree, read the answer, then say, "The natural pace is so bizarrely consistent that I think I should respect it as a secret and personal power that transcends the obvious value of the very round number, 3000. What is base 10 to me?"

"All I wanted was to grow up in peace, deal with my bodily changes and these pesky new zits without it being recorded. But my mother was omnipresent, her phone an extension of her arm … every little moment was mined for content."

Writes Shari Franke, "The House of My Mother," quoted in "Is It Abusive to Make Art About Your Children? It’s not quite #MeToo, but a spate of new memoirs is forcing a reckoning on what consent means when your parent is the artist" (NYT).

Shari Franke is the daughter of "mommy vlogger" Ruby Franke, who was ultimately convicted of child abuse. The article also discusses Sally Mann, the photographer we talked about a couple days ago, here.

Mann has her own memoir, in which she concedes, “I wanted attention for the work and the easiest way to get it was obviously to put forward the most attention-grabbing imagery.... To be an artist means you must declare a loyalty to your art form and your vision that runs deeper than almost any other, even sometimes deeper than blood kinship.... When I stepped behind the camera, and they stepped in front of it, I was a photographer, and they were actors and we were making a photograph."

There's this quote from Molly Jong-Fast: "In [my mother's] view, she did spend time with me — in her head, in her writing, in the world she inhabited. I was there. I may have felt that she was slightly allergic to me, but to her, she was spending time with the most important version of me."

By the way, did you know "Christopher Robin Milne resented his father’s use of his likeness in the Winnie the Pooh stories, and Peter Llewelyn Davies, the inspiration for 'Peter Pan,' seemed to live in a permanent state of rage at being associated with the character."

The article is by Parul Sehgal, who writes: "If the child’s perspective goes unacknowledged, and their compliance confused for collaboration, it might be because our focus has so often been elsewhere — on the needs and rights of the artist-parent, on the struggle to have domestic life and, specifically, motherhood, accepted as a subject worthy of study."

That feminist issue has overshadowed the childist perspective. Is "childist" even a word? Actually, yes, but this is the first time I'm thinking of it, and I had to check to see that I wasn't coining it.

"What are some famous quotes by writers/artists/musicians about critics?"

That's I question I had, a couple hours ago, as I was gathering my thoughts in preparation, I thought, for blogging this article by the New Yorker's movie critic, Richard Brody, "In Defense of the Traditional Review/Far from being a journalistic relic, as suggested by recent developments at the New York Times, arts criticism is inherently progressive, keeping art honest and pointing toward its future."

I got a bunch of great quotes out of Grok with my question, including the one that deserves to stand in for them all: "Most rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read" (Frank Zappa).

Then there was this, from Pablo Picasso: "The critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." And that got me tumbling down a side path with an issue I'd encountered yesterday, the idea that there are individuals who identify as eunuchs and the notion that castration is, for them, medically necessary. I was told: "The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) Standards of Care (Version 8) includes a chapter on 'eunuch' as a gender identity, suggesting that castration may be considered 'medically necessary gender-affirming care' for some who identify as eunuchs and experience distress from their genitals."

I introduced the question: "It occurs to me that a person might argue that they identify as dead and therefore entitled to physician-assisted suicide — that killing is a medically required treatment." That led to a long discussion that kept me far away from the topic of the usefulness of critics — they're "inherently progressive"! — and I'm not going to go into the details. I'm just going to list a few phrases that came up in the Grok discussion that's displaced blogging for me this morning:

"Conditions like Cotard’s syndrome, where individuals genuinely believe they are dead or non-existent, are rare and classified as a psychiatric delusion, treated through therapy or medication, not affirmation," "So you're saying that if only doctors had been killing people who 'identify as dead' for a longer period of time and managed to fight off those who think it's wrong, it would be analogous to transgender surgeries," "You’re correct that genital transgender surgeries, like vaginoplasty or phalloplasty, are... irreversible in any meaningful sense," "'Sexual sensation is possible due to preserved nerves' — I note that you didn't say orgasm," "Your point about muscles is spot-on: the lack of vaginal musculature in a neovagina means it cannot replicate the contractile component of a natal female orgasm," "Is there any commentary, comedy, or fictional writing utilizing my idea of 'identifying as dead'?," "Seems like something that someone in 'Chicago' would say (like 'He ran into my knife... 50 times')," "Somewhere, some writer(s) must have already written the line: 'Go ahead. Try to kill me. You can't. I'm already dead.'"

That went on and on, with the discussion of many movies, and it wasn't the only A.I. conversations that kept me away from the blog this morning. There was also, among many others, "Summarize this article... and explain why Brody thinks arts criticism is 'progressive.'" Which led to: "What is 'progressive' supposed to mean? It strikes me as utter bullshit." And: "Weave into this discussion what Tom Wolfe wrote in 'The Painted Word.'" And: "Isn't there some related idea — or conspiracy theory — that the CIA created the art market for Abstract Expressionism?"

All of that was more interesting to me than what I would have produced reading Brody's article and blogging it in my usual way. And my "usual way" is to follow whatever interests me, not to feel obligated, but to do what is intrinsically rewarding for me. You see the problem!

"Whether you are touching up the 'Mona Lisa,' 'reviewing' novels or doing logic puzzles" — using A.I. — "you are engaging in the very human drive to play."

"As I’ve watched people adopt these systems, what I’ve seen is mostly people playing with art and language. If you go through the history of these bots, you see poetry, fiction and all kinds of little genre experiments like this as a constantly recurring theme.... OpenAI also advertised one of its early models with an image produced by the prompt 'astronaut riding a horse.' The natural response to this image is to think, 'Cool!'...  We ought to think about A.I. as an entertainment-first system, before anything else. Would you replace all of primary education with 'Sesame Street'? Or decide government policy with SimCity? It’s not an insult to the beloved children’s program or computer game to say no. The lesson is simple: We might be taking A.I. too seriously."

Writes Leif Weatherby, director of the NYU Digital Theory Lab, in "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Have Fun With A.I" (NYT).

I like the name Leif Weatherby, and he probably didn't write his own headline, but its reference point — "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" — is a movie that ends with the destruction of all of humanity. So are we taking A.I. too seriously or not seriously enough?

One might interpret the movie title to mean the bomb is going to destroy us all before long so there's no use worrying. It's the world we're stuck in, so love the reality that exists. It's the old: Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you die.

Is that Dr. Weatherby's point?

***

Grok, what's the origin and history of the adage Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you die?

The phrase draws heavily from two passages in the Bible: 

Ecclesiastes 8:15 (Old Testament, c. 3rd–2nd century BCE): In the King James Version, it reads, "Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry." This verse, attributed to King Solomon, reflects on the futility of life and the value of enjoying simple pleasures amidst its uncertainties. 

Isaiah 22:13 (Old Testament, c. 8th century BCE): This passage states, "Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we shall die." It appears in a context of rebuke, where the people of Jerusalem are criticized for indulging in revelry instead of repenting during a time of crisis.

"Plenty of Jews Love Zohran Mamdani."

The headline for a Michelle Goldberg column. Excerpt:

“His campaign has attracted Jewish New Yorkers of all types,” wrote Jay Michaelson, a columnist at the Jewish newspaper The Forward. The rabbi who runs my son’s Hebrew school put Mamdani on his ballot, though he didn’t rank him first. And while Mamdani undoubtedly did best among left-leaning and largely secular Jews, he made a point of reaching out to others....

So it has been maddening to see people claim that Mamdani’s win was a victory for antisemitism.... Ultimately.... New York’s Democratic primary wasn’t about Israel.... 

The attacks on Mamdani during the primary were brutal, but now that he’s a national figure, those coming his way will be worse. His foes will try to leverage Jewish anxieties to smash the Democratic coalition.... But don’t forget that the vision of this city at the heart of Mamdani’s campaign — a city that embraces immigrants and hates autocrats, that’s at once earthy and cosmopolitan — is one that many Jews, myself included, find inspiring....

Earthy.  

I was moved to unearth every "earthy" in the 21-year archive of this blog. They're all quotes of other people. I've never once used the word (except for one instance, now corrected, where I clearly meant to type "earthly" ("I didn't think you would be terribly sad to see that Robert Blake has left the earthy scene")).

Found poetry. Place of finding: spam file.

If we take "obliterate" literally, it means to cause to disappear.

The media seem to be overeager to undercut Trump's accomplishment by saying that he said the word "obliteration" but there's actually — possibly — something left. 

From this morning's news: "Trump reveals Israel sent agents to Iran’s bombed nuclear sites to confirm their 'total obliteration.'"

He seems determined not to abandon his word of choice, "obliteration."

How literally do we take "obliteration"? Really hardcore literalism would require that the thing be wiped from human memory. "Ob-" means against and "littera" means letter. Strike out the text. It's what Orwell's "memory hole" did. 

So how have we been using the word "obliterate" in recent years? Here's what I've noticed in the past 2 decades, just 11 examples taken from this blog's archive.

1. Quoting Hillary Clinton: "If [Obama] does not have the gumption to put me in my place, when superdelegates are deserting me, money is drying up, he’s outspending me 2-to-1 on TV ads, my husband’s going crackers and party leaders are sick of me, how can he be trusted to totally obliterate Iran and stop Osama?"

2. Quoting Camille Paglia: "Democrats are doing this in collusion with the media obviously, because they just want to create chaos... They want to completely obliterate any sense that the Trump administration is making any progress on anything... I am appalled at the behavior of the media...."

3. Quoting Trump: "As I have stated strongly before, and just to reiterate, if Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!)."

"In a rambling, conspiratorial letter addressed to the FBI, alleged assassin Vance Boelter claimed Gov. Tim Walz instructed him to kill U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar so that Walz could run for the U.S. Senate..."

"... according to two people familiar with the contents of the letter. The letter... is incoherent, one and a half pages long, confusing and hard to read, according to two people familiar with the letter’s contents.... Federal prosecutors allege the letter was left behind in a Buick that Boelter deserted near his home in Green Isle, Minn. It also allegedly contained Boelter’s confession that he carried out the shootings that killed state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and injured Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette...."

From "Letter to FBI from shooting suspect made wild claims about Klobuchar and Walz, sources say/People with direct knowledge of a letter Vance Boelter addressed to the FBI say it is rambling and conspiratorial" (Minnesota Star Tribune).

Show us the letter. I'd like to form my own opinion and not just hear an assertion that it's "incoherent." The other day, I wasted time reading a prominent column with the headline stating that a new Supreme Court opinion was "incoherent." I almost blogged about it just to critique the deceptive use of the concept of incoherence.

"Slowly, he attracted followers, like-minded individuals interested in living sustainably, outside traditional supports, who were captivated by his thrifty ways and homesteading solution..."

"... and by the lovely short videos he posted: of desert cottontails eating off his mother’s Limoges plates; of dung beetles rolling a cow patty like a stone; of bees drinking from a pan of water. Within a few years, nearly a million people had visited his blog — more recently, the number was well over four million — and he had a core group of 1,000 or so regulars who followed his daily struggles and small triumphs...."

I'm reading "John Wells, 64, Who Fled New York for the Solitude of the Desert, Dies/A fashion photographer, he built a do-it-yourself life on 40 lonely acres in West Texas, living like a modern-day Thoreau and telling millions of his experience on a blog" (NYT).

Is it good to see the word "blog" in an obituary? Yes. 

It's also good to see someone memorialized for his frugality: "[H]e sold his house for $600,000 to a family of five, winnowed his possessions down to what he could fit in a rented truck and set off to build a new life. He paid $8,000 in cash for his 40-acre parcel. His property taxes that first year were $86.... He started with a tiny shack, where he could live, and equipped it with a bunk bed, a galley kitchen and a desk...."