The cartoon editor of The New Yorker "invite[s] you to enjoy these delicious, butyraceous cartoons, which you all dug the most on Instagram in 2023."

I'm reading "Instagram’s Favorite New Yorker Cartoons in 2023/The gags that got the Internet laughing, and liking, the most in the past year."

Lots of cartoons at the link, apparently the ones Instagram users indicated they liked — or, as some people might say, "dug" (and "butyraceous" means like butter, by the way — but I'll just show you my favorite:

 

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"A fire that broke out a Wisconsin dairy plant on Monday night sent a river of melted butter flowing across the factory floor and into nearby storm drains..."

"... where it clogged a historic water artery.... 'The butter runoff and heavy smoke slowed access to the structure,' officials said... 'When we first tried to go up the stairs to that part that collapsed, this stuff, the butter, was running down like, three inches thick on the steps. So our guys were up to their knees trying to go up the steps to get to the top, and they’re trying to drag the hose line... The hose line got so full of butter they couldn’t hang on to it any more.'"

The Guardian reports.

For Saturday, take a journey through 12 TikToks, arranged meaningfully... or so some people think.

1. Maybe you'll say "I remember the old pole."

2. London women who don't like American women are not too likable themselves.

3. How you would love it if your candidate were this loved.

4. A vertiginous ride.

5. A vertiginous walk.

6. The workhouse museum.

7. The meaning of life in eating your toast.

8. The butter board?!

9. Oh, Wisconsin!

10. When Anne Bancroft met Mel Brooks.

11. Saving a seal.

12. A dog carps about the stuck traffic.

"The Dutch like to say, 'Acting normal is crazy enough.' And we think that rich people are not acting normal."

"Here in Holland, we don’t believe that everybody can be rich the way people do in America, where the sky is the limit. We think 'Be average.' That’s good enough...”

Said Ellen Verkoelen, "a City Council member and Rotterdam leader of the 50Plus Party, which works on behalf of pensioners," quoted in "The Country That Wants to ‘Be Average’ vs. Jeff Bezos and His $500 Million Yacht/Why did Rotterdam stand between one of the world’s richest men and his boat? The furious response is rooted in Dutch values" (NYT).

“When I was about 11 years old, we had an American boy stay with us for a week, an exchange student,” she recalled. “And my mother told him, just make your own sandwich like you do in America. Instead of putting one sausage on his bread, he put on five. My mother was too polite to say anything to him, but to me she said in Dutch, ‘We will never eat like that in this house.’” 

At school, Ms. Verkoelen learned from friends that the American children in their homes all ate the same way. They were stunned and a little jealous. At the time, it was said in the Netherlands that putting both butter and cheese on your bread was “the devil’s sandwich.”...

How shocking is "And they went in and it was like a knife cutting butter"?

Trump used that phrase yesterday at the Roundtable on Justice Disparities in America (transcript). Context:

In Minneapolis, they went through three nights of hell. And then I was insistent on having the National Guard go in and do their work. It was like a miracle. It’s just everything stopped. And I’ll never forget the scene. It’s not supposed to be a beautiful scene. But to me, it was after you watched policemen running out of a police precinct. And it wasn’t their fault. They wanted to do what they had to do, but they weren’t allowed to do anything.... I said, “I’m sorry. We have to have [the National Guard] go in.” And they went in and it was like a knife cutting butter, right through, boom. I’ll never forget. You saw the scene on that road wherever it may be in the city, Minneapolis. They were lined up. Boom. They just walked straight. And yes, there was some tear gas and probably some other things and the crowd dispersed. And they went through it by the end of that evening. And it was a short evening. Everything was fine.... So I just want to tell you that we’re working on a lot of different elements having to do with law, order, safety, comfort, control, but we want safety. We want compassion. We want everything.

As I drove home from my sunrise run this morning...



... I had "Morning Joe" on the satellite radio, and he was riffing emotively on that phrase "it was like a knife cutting butter." Joe acted as though the phrase connoted murderously cutting into human flesh, and Who talks like that?!! In Joe's vivid nightmare, Trump is unfathomably evil. Joe said it's as if Trump were "running for President of the Confederacy" and Trump has decided to speak only to "angry white men — angry old white men."

Joe is 57, by the way, so that's a bit old, and he is also white and angry, so maybe he knows whereof he speaks, and yet he does not mean that he hears the siren call of Donald Trump.

But let's look at this phrase "like a knife cutting butter." It's an idiomatic expression! It means it was easy. You see the context. It doesn't mean the National Guard was sadistically injuring people. It means all they had to do was show up and walk straight in and everything worked out just fine.

It wasn't even a hot knife....



The inability to understand metaphor is, of course, highly selective. A commentator like Joe has to use what Trump gives him. He must scan the transcripts every day, looking for something to pretend to be anguished about.

"My father had been interested in art since boyhood, when he drew images related to his Ojibwe culture."

"After leaving Pipestone boarding school in Minnesota in 1942, he joined the Navy and was assigned to San Diego, where he worked alongside animation artists from MGM and Walt Disney producing brochures and films for the war effort. In 1946, he established himself as one of the first modernists in American Indian fine art. After I was born in 1946, my family moved from Red Lake, Minn., to Minneapolis, where my father broke racial barriers by establishing himself as an American Indian commercial artist in an art world dominated by white executives and artists.... By often working with Native American imagery, he maintained a connection to his identity.... With the redesign [of the Land o' Lakes butter packaging], my father made Mia’s Native American connections more specific. He changed the beadwork designs on her dress by adding floral motifs that are common in Ojibwe art. He added two points of wooded shoreline to the lake that had often been depicted in the image’s background. It was a place any Red Lake tribal citizen would recognize as the Narrows, where Lower Red Lake and Upper Red Lake meet.... Mia simply didn’t fit the parameters of a stereotype...."

From "My Native American father drew the Land O’Lakes maiden. She was never a stereotype" (WaPo).

Film critic David Edelstein is fired from NPR's "Fresh Air" after he tweets a short butter joke on the occasion of the death of Bernardo Bertolucci.

The joke — accompanied by a photo of the famous scene in Bertolucci's "Last Tango in Paris" — was "Even grief is better with butter."

We're told, in the Hollywood Reporter, that there was "a backlash, which included actress Martha Plimpton." I can't see who other than Martha Plimpton wanted Edelstein fired for making a joke about the butter in that movie. That was such a common topic for humor when that movie came out. I still remember how one of my friends delivered her opinion of the movie: "It was excellent, albeit butter-covered." It was such a thing to connect Bertolucci with butter that if I'd written that modern "Dictionary of Received Ideas" I used to talk about, if I'd thought to put in an entry for Bertolucci, it would have been: Say something about butter.

So how did Edelstein go wrong? The movie has a man (Marlon Brando) and a woman (Maria Schneider) struggling through a sexual relationship, and in the "butter scene," the man tells the woman to get butter, which he uses as a lubricant for anal intercourse. I don't think any mainstream movie had ever had an explicit reference to anal intercourse, and here it was on screen, presumably simulated.

You might imagine that the problem with Edelstein's tweet was that it was too lighthearted, when a man had just died. But that wouldn't get you fired — Edelstein has done hundreds of film reviews on "Fresh Air" — and that probably wouldn't put a Hollywood actress into such a state of hostility.

But perhaps you remember what Maria Schneider said about what was done to her. As Hollywood Reporter puts it:

Schneider said in a 2007 interview that the simulated sex scene was unscripted and that she felt bullied by Bertolucci and unsupported by her co-star Marlon Brando. "I was crying real tears," said the actress, who died in 2011.

Edelstein says he didn't "didn't know the real-life story about Maria Schneider" and he didn't remember the scene as showing a rape. And he apologized:

"The line was callous and wrong even if it had been consensual, but given that it wasn't I'm sick at the thought of how it read and what people logically conclude about me. I have never and would never make light of rape, in fiction or in reality."

Is it believable that a big film critic like Edelstein missed the stories about Maria Schneider? I don't follow movies that closely, but I have 3 blog posts about Schneider's charges against Bertolucci, the third of which, from December 2016, has Bertolucci acknowledging the truth of what Schneider said:

"I wanted her to react humiliated. I think she hated me and also Marlon because we didn't tell her... to obtain something I think you have to be completely free. I didn't want Maria to act her humiliation, her rage, I wanted her to Maria to feel ... the rage and humiliation. Then she hated me for all of her life."

Bertolucci said he wanted "her reaction as a girl, not as an actress." Brando went along with this. He was 48. She was 19.

From the NYT obituary for Maria Schneider:

The role fixed Ms. Schneider in the public mind as a figurehead of the sexual revolution, and she spent years trying to move beyond the role, and the public fuss surrounding it.... “I wanted to be recognized as an actress, and the whole scandal and aftermath of the film turned me a little crazy and I had a breakdown. Now, though, I can look at the film and like my work in it.”

The famous butter scene, she said, was not in the script and made it into the film only at Brando’s insistence. “I felt humiliated and to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci,” she said. “After the scene, Marlon didn’t console me or apologize. Thankfully, there was just one take.”

How guilty is David Edelstein? He's at least guilty of not paying enough attention to the culture to have noticed and remembered this story. Why should people who listen to NPR receive his — rather than somebody else's — opinion of the various new movies that come out over the years? Why should we listen to any critic — or any radio show? I know why I'd listen to the radio show "Fresh Air" — because Terry Gross is a fantastic interviewer. Some movie critic gets to ride in her vehicle? That person is damned lucky. Should it be David Edelstein, a man who did not know of or remember what happened to Maria Schneider? Why didn't he notice? Why didn't it make an impression? Why is he so inattentive to the sexual abuse of actresses by powerful men — by Marlon Brando?!

ADDED: Here's the Martha Plimpton tweet:

*warning: rape JFC, David Edelstein. All day I’ve avoided noting this mans death precisely because of this moment in which a sexual assault of an actress was intentionally captured on film. And this asshole makes it into this joke. Fire him. Immediately. pic.twitter.com/NOITGeb7EY

— Martha Plimpton (@MarthaPlimpton) November 26, 2018

ALSO:Last year, Edelstein got feminist grief over his review of "Wonder Woman." Here's his self-defense (in New York Magazine):

"Though of course bread and butter are eaten all over, the buttered roll (or roll with butter, as it is known in parts of New Jersey) is a distinctly local phenomenon."

"Mention its name outside the New York metropolitan area and you would very likely be met with blank incomprehension."

From "Ode to the Buttered Roll, That New York Lifeline," by Sadie Stein (in the NYT).

I know this article is getting mocked — as if it's typical New York cluelessness about the people who don't live in New York, but I think the mockers are not really getting the way New Yorkers experience the buttered roll. My understanding is premised mostly on my experience working in midtown Manhattan offices in the 1970s, where a bell from the coffee wagon broke up the morning's work. Something about the small array of items got me tracked into eating the completely nondescript buttered Kaiser roll that came in a waxed paper sandwich bag. (Stein calls it "wax paper." I'm not that much of New Yorker. I say "waxed paper," since it's real paper with wax on it, not paper somehow composed of wax, but I'm not going to fight about it, because I'm not a native New Yorker. I don't like to fight for the sake of fighting. I'm just saying it's not "wax paper." I also don't say "piece fruit," for "piece of fruit," but I've lived around New Yorkers who did.) Anyway, in my experience, the buttered roll in New York is a specific thing and a weird thing, precisely because it is too ordinary to be considered a specific rather than a generic thing, but it really is. I think elsewhere people would look at this as an empty sandwich, a failure to add baloney or cheese or something. What is this?

And why is a Kaiser roll called a Kaiser roll?

"Justices utter the word 'certiorari' as often as New York police say 'perpetrator.'"

And strangely enough, almost every Justice has his own special pronunciation of the word. They all say the first syllable the same — "ser" — but after that, it's a free for all.

Justice Clarence Thomas has probably the most unique take...

Wouldn't you know?!

... pronouncing the first two syllables as "sertzee." Several justices pronounce the last syllable as "eye," while others say "ee." Justice Anthony Kennedy...  is the only justice to pronounce it “ser-shee-or-ARR-eye,” so that the end rhymes with "far cry." Befitting her upbringing in fast-talking New York, Justice Sonia Sotomayor drops an entire syllable, pronouncing the word as “ser-shee-ARR-ee.”

"They do live up to the hype. Get the corn, don't argue. Even when you're on a date."

"They give toothpicks to help with the stuck corn. Very helpful because that would have bothered me the rest of the evening."



We just got back from a road trip that took us to New York City, where seemingly the most ordinary thing is a thing. I was amused by the corn-on-the-cob chomping on the sidewalks of NoLita. We're back home now — in the Midwest, where festivals premised on corn-on-the-cob are a summer tradition.

The quote in this post's title comes from a Yelp! review of the restaurant in my photograph, and I see there is a Yelp! review for the Sun Prairie (Wisconsin) Sweet Corn Festival:

Butter in coffee?

Is that a thing? I read it was a thing. I mentioned it to Meade, and then next day I'm seeing...



Is that weird? Or is that insignificantly different from the flatly conventional practice of putting cream in your coffee?

Everything Mark Twain wanted to eat...

... when he arrived home in the United States of America after traveling around in France and Italy in 1870:

Radishes. Baked apples, with cream Fried oysters; stewed oysters. Frogs. American coffee, with real cream. American butter. Fried chicken, Southern style. Porter-house steak. Saratoga potatoes. Broiled chicken, American style. Hot biscuits, Southern style. Hot wheat-bread, Southern style. Hot buckwheat cakes. American toast. Clear maple syrup. Virginia bacon, broiled. Blue points, on the half shell. Cherry-stone clams. San Francisco mussels, steamed. Oyster soup. Clam Soup. Philadelphia Terapin soup. Oysters roasted in shell-Northern style. Soft-shell crabs. Connecticut shad. Baltimore perch. Brook trout, from Sierra Nevadas. Lake trout, from Tahoe. Sheep-head and croakers, from New Orleans. Black bass from the Mississippi. American roast beef. Roast turkey, Thanksgiving style. Cranberry sauce. Celery. Roast wild turkey. Woodcock. Canvas-back-duck, from Baltimore. Prairie hens, from Illinois. Missouri partridges, broiled. 'Possum. Coon. Boston bacon and beans. Bacon and greens, Southern style. Hominy. Boiled onions. Turnips. Pumpkin. Squash. Asparagus. Butter beans. Sweet potatoes. Lettuce. Succotash. String beans. Mashed potatoes. Catsup. Boiled potatoes, in their skins. New potatoes, minus the skins. Early rose potatoes, roasted in the ashes, Southern style, served hot. Sliced tomatoes, with sugar or vinegar. Stewed tomatoes. Green corn, cut from the ear and served with butter and pepper. Green corn, on the ear. Hot corn-pone, with chitlings, Southern style. Hot hoe-cake, Southern style. Hot egg-bread, Southern style. Hot light-bread, Southern style. Buttermilk. Iced sweet milk. Apple dumplings, with real cream. Apple pie. Apple fritters. Apple puffs, Southern style. Peach cobbler, Southern style Peach pie. American mince pie. Pumpkin pie. Squash pie. All sorts of American pastry.

Fresh American fruits of all sorts, including strawberries which are not to be doled out as if they were jewelry, but in a more liberal way. Ice-water--not prepared in the ineffectual goblet, but in the sincere and capable refrigerator.

Funny about the frogs! I thought that's what they ate in France that we think is yucky.

(Via Eve Tushnet.)

ADDED: I've redone the text so it looks the way it appears in my Kindle version of 300 works of Mark Twain. It's not written in list/poem form. It still, however, says "Prairie liens, from Illinois," which Nichevo, in the comments, surmises is a misscanned Prairie hens, from Illinois. Ah, yes, here's an article about "The 'Prairie Hens' of Illinois" with the subtitle "Mark Twain’s favorite birds ... to eat." I'm going to correct the text above.

Fried butter!

At the Wisconsin State Fair.

"Paula Deen's recipe for English peas. Read the recipe. Then read the comments."

Tell people to melt a whole panful of butter and dump 2 cans of peas into it and see what they say.

"This was outstanding! I did make a couple modifications. I eliminated the butter, and in place of the peas I substituted one can of Chef Boyardee spaghetti and meatballs."

Back in the days when boys ate butter like it was candy.

Here's my son Chris back around 1987 (with analysis, in the end, from my other son John):

3 Madison things.

1. We're having a blizzard. Classes canceled tomorrow. Meade's watching the basketball game on TV — the Badgers are playing downtown tonight. The announcer explains the cheer from the crowd: They just saw the news that classes are canceled tomorrow.

2. Eating in Madison A to Z put up its review of the new restaurant 43 North, and Meade and I went along with JM and Nichole for that one.

There were rolls served with butter and oil in three square glass dishes. The rolls were also squarish, with a very airy crumb and a shiny, leathery crust that was especially hard on the bottom. The butter was from Wolf Ridge (if we recall correctly) and came in two forms: slightly chilled and set, or powdered with tapioca flour. The oil was also served as a powder. Ann nailed it: the lipids were the Dippin' Dots of bread toppings.

3. Larry Kaufmann lambastes that play we were talking about the other day:
The dialogue between the lefty grad students and these conservative adversaries is also about as subtle as a flying mallet. These conversations are the heart of the play and lead to the murder of four of the five grotesque conservative thugs; only a seventeen-year old girl promoting abstinence is deemed too young to kill (kind of like not imposing the death penalty on minors, I suppose)....

"I just wanted a multigrain bagel. I refused to say 'without butter or cheese.'"

"When you go to Burger King, you don't have to list the six things you don't want. Linguistically, it's stupid, and I'm a stickler for correct English... I yelled, 'I want my multigrain bagel!' The barista said, 'You're not going to get anything unless you say butter or cheese!'"

Meet this week's mad-as-hell-and-not-going-to-take-it-anymore character, Lynne Rosenthal.

"I can't tell the difference between Whizzo Butter and a dead crab."

This came up...



... back here (where we talking about the contrived outrage over the "Whooper Virgins" taste test).

Of course, it was our wonderful Bissage again.

Surely, you can tell the difference between Bissage...

... and Quayle...

I hate [when people say something is just so wrong on so many levels that they can't even begin to explain why] because people that say that all the time always try to imply that they deal with multitudes of levels all the time.

But seriously – how many levels are there?

Two? Maybe three, tops?

I actually know a guy that commonly dealt with five levels, but he was from Bayonne, New Jersey.

But this idea that there are so many levels is pure post-modern, crit-studies rubbish.

It is all an urban myth that has its origins in a particular budget fight in the humanities department of an well-known Ivy League University.

... and Chip Ahoy...

The contrived outrage is ridiculous on so many levels I must put down my game of multi-dimensional chess and set aside my 3-D puzzle for the moment and stop multi-tasking this four-course luncheon while responding to this blog entry while doing laundry while simultaneously playing with my puppy to respond to this while keeping open ten other windows and holding three conversations through instant messaging and solving this crossword puzzle.

1) the contrived outrage is ridiculous on the psychological level

2) the contrived outrage is ridiculous on the political level

3) the contrived outrage is ridiculous on the sociological level

4) the contrived outrage is ridiculous on the economic level

4) the contrived outrage is ridiculous on the international level

5) the contrived outrage is ridiculous on the sexual level

6) the contrived outrage is ridiculous on the contrivance level

This seems completely appropriate to me.

Via Boing Boing,

"What do you think playground bullies grow up to be?" "Right-wing Republicans."

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich answers a question.

Actually, when I decided I was going to blog this little interview, I planned to feature this line about why our drilling for more oil isn't a good solution to high gas prices:

When you consider that the oil we pump goes into a global oil market, offshore drilling makes no sense. We take the environmental risk, but we’d have to share the negligible price gains with Chinese consumers and every other user around the world.

He's right about that, isn't he? I love the way lefties sometimes get bracingly chauvinistic. Suddenly, it's screw the rest of the world!

Oh, I know... the gains are only negligible anyway. But read the whole interview. Reich is obviously happy that the high gas prices are pushing people into mass transit at long last. If the environment is your primary concern, of course you don't want more domestic drilling, and, what's more, you welcome the high gas prices that make people consume less.

I'm calling Reich a lefty, but I note that he lives in Berkeley (where he's a professor of public policy) and he says "here I am on the right of most arguments."

And this is good. He's asked about whether he dated the college-age Hillary Clinton:

To call it a date is an exaggeration. She and I went out to see Antonioni’s “Blow-Up.” The only thing I remember is that she wanted what seemed to me to be an extraordinary amount of butter on her popcorn.

Yes, very tasty! Yes! I like it! I like it! Go on!



You know, if a woman indicates she wants extra butter, that means something:

Only an economist could go on a date and study trends in butter consumption. Isn’t that a kind of wonky thing to remember?

Yes, it is. I recall the extra butter costing more.

If the man balks at giving her extra butter on her popcorn, if he seems to calculate the expense, I think she can make some predictions about what any sexual relationship will be like. Later, when Bill took Hillary to the movies — maybe it was "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" — I bet Bill was all come on! Double extra butter! And Hillary fell in love. I wish I could find a clip of that scene where Julie Christie pigs out on eggs in front of Warren Beatty and he therefore knows she's quite the woman.

Now, Reich is also very short — 4-foot-10 1/2 — and he notes that he's "much more economically and environmentally sustainable."

I exhale less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. I use up less space. I have a little house.

In the future, you will have to buy carbon offsets if you want to be tall or fat.

Anyway, it's at the end of the interview that we get to the quote that I highlighted above. Reich says that because he was short, he was bullied a lot as a kid.

People frequently tell me in interviews that they were bullied as children. But no one ever steps forward and says, “I was the bully.” They don’t want to admit to being a bully.

This provokes the questions-and-answer used as the title of this post.

As for Reich's answer, isn't it more likely that kids who were bullied grow up to be bullies themselves? You're very short and/or weak, but you're smart and you study... then you figure out how to crush your erstwhile tormentors by winning in business or politics. Right?

As my ex-husband used to say — maybe he's still recycling this line — "Life is 'Revenge of the Nerds.'"