New term learned: "Sunday scaries."

I was surprised to see this childish locution as a serious answer — clued "Feeling of dread heading into a workweek." It would be a spoiler to say where, but it was in a highly respected puzzle and presented as an established phrase.

I googled and got over a million hits:

Dolls and Porsches.

1. "Dolls and Drinks for Likes and Clicks/The American Girl Cafe has become an unlikely party spot for influencers and their imitators" (NYT)("'Come with me to get absolutely obliterated at the American Girl Doll Cafe,' begins a TikTok video... The store comped their meal, as they sometimes do for influencers').

2. "Ship Carrying 1,100 Porsches and Other Luxury Cars Is Burning and Adrift" (NYT)("No rescuers or crew members were injured in the 'highly skilled and physically demanding' operation... that whisked the crew members to the nearby Portuguese island of Faial").

Are they gender-shaming Trump at The Atlantic? I'm reading "Donald Trump, the Most Unmanly President."

By Tom Nichols. Subtitle: "Why don’t the president’s supporters hold him to their own standard of masculinity?"

I haven't read this yet, but from the title and subtitle, I'm guessing that The Atlantic thinks it's okay to do this because it's not judging Trump by its own "standard of masculinity." It's fine with all sorts of gender expression and fluidity and all that complex stuff that elite folk believe or pretend to believe in.  But it conjures up an idea of the Trump supporters, attributes troglodyte gender attitudes toward them, and then tsks over their hypocrisy? Why aren't THEY living up to their own standards?

Okay, let's read:

Why do working-class white men—the most reliable component of Donald Trump’s base—support someone who is, by their own standards, the least masculine man ever to hold the modern presidency?...

Well, I was sort of right. The author, Tom Nichols, tells us he knows these people he is stereotyping because he grew up around men like that — "men whose fathers and grandfathers came from a culture that looks down upon lying, cheating, and bragging, especially about sex or courage." But it's not just those gender-neutral virtues:

The evidence that Trump suggested injecting disinfectant as a treatment for Covid19.

I watched the press briefing live yesterday, and — with no prompting from anti-Trump media — I thought I he'd said something sort of like that but not really.

Today, the fever is raging. It looks like this:



From the transcript:

Bill Bryan [head of the science and technology directorate at the Department of Homeland Security]: We’re... testing disinfectants readily available. We’ve tested bleach, we’ve tested isopropyl alcohol on the virus specifically in saliva or in respiratory fluids and I can tell you that bleach will kill the virus in five minutes. Isopropyl alcohol will kill the virus in 30 seconds and that’s with no manipulation, no rubbing....

Donald Trump: .... I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me. So, we’ll see....

He did say "something like that." Not: go ahead and put bleach or isopropyl alcohol into your bloodstream. I immediately thought of ethyl alcohol. People put that stuff into their bloodstream all the time. And there's a folk belief out there that alcohol is a treatment. I've seen that quite a few people in Iran have died trying to use alcohol this way.

Later in the briefing, a reporter said to Bryan: "The president mentioned the idea of a cleaner, bleach and isopropyl alcohol emerging. There’s no scenario where that could be injected into a person, is there?"

Bryan brushed off the question: "No, I’m here to talk about the finds that we had in the study. We don’t do that within that lab at our labs."

Trump stepped in: "It wouldn’t be through injections, [inaudible] almost a cleaning and sterilization of an area. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t work, but it certainly has a big effect if it’s on a stationary object."

I have the feeling Trump talks to his experts like this a lot. He gets ideas. He experiences what we call lateral thinking. And he just blurts out his idea. He doesn't self-censor, so he comes across like a child. And he gives his antagonists rich raw material to use against him.

ADDED: There has long been a theory out there in social media that drinking bleach is a defense against coronavirus. Here's a Politifact debunking from all the way back in January:

What does it mean that The New York Times and The Washington Post are digging up villains from the past for their front page?

The Washington Post gives us Susan Smith, for no reason other than we first heard about her exactly 25 years ago:



The New York Times gives us Michael Milken — the "swashbuckling financier" of the 1980s — apparently because Trump's "opportunity zones" — presented as a boon to distressed communities — can be disparaged as benefitting this ancient fiend:



Trump is a such colorful villain of today, but it can't just be Trump Trump Trump all the time. I hypothesize that the newspapers are looking to the past for a new infusion of colorful villains to excite readers.

We're so childishly into villains these days, and political partisans must worry that that we will satisfy our appetite by regarding anyone who makes it into the limelight as a villain. So bring back some old villains to feed our shameful hunger and leave, say, Adam Schiff, in the darkness of the basement.

Confusing headline of the day: "Nancy Pelosi Spanks the First Brat."

Hint: It's Maureen Dowd's new column.

It caught my eye because here in Wisconsin, a brat — rhymes with "squat" — is a very popular sausage. So what's "spanking the brat"? Seems like another one of the many euphemisms for masturbation.

But the NYT is not Wisconsin, so it must be brat — rhymes with "slat" — "a child, so called in contempt" (to quote Samuel Johnson's "Dictionary of the English Language").

What brat would Nancy Pelosi be spanking? I'm thinking Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or maybe Rashida Tlaib — one of the impish new House members.

But no! It's Trump! It's always Trump. Everywhere you look...

When Trump said he could “relate” to federal workers who are now going without pay, it may have been the most audacious lie he told all week....

As Pelosi told reporters: “He thinks maybe they could just ask their father for more money. But they can’t.” She also leveled the barb on Trump in person.

Pelosi deploys what she calls her “mother of five” voice on our tantrum-prone president, perhaps in an effort to reparent him. But how do you discipline the world’s brattiest 72-year-old?

The headline writer equates the use of a "mother of five" voice with spanking. I think Pelosi wants to pose as the adult and make Trump look like the child, but isn't the person resorting to physical violence the one who is immature?

And even if you think Trump can be childish, there wasn't anything childish about saying that he relates to the federal workers who are going without pay. That's the kind of routine presidential expression of calm empathy that people often complain about not getting enough of from President Trump. Dowd tells us that Trump is "tantrum-prone," but — whether that's true or not — his statement of empathy — whether that's bullshit or not — is not like a tantrum.

Dowd exults in Pelosi's patronizing (matronizing?) tone, used against the President of the United States. I'm wondering how this choice of attitude will work in the coming campaign season. Should the Trump opponents treat him as if he is "the world’s brattiest 72-year-old" and address him in a "mother of five" voice? It seems to me Hillary Clinton already tried that and it didn't work. It didn't work when he was not yet President and it was hard to picture him as President. But now he is President. I'm thinking the disrespect is dangerous. It can backfire, especially on those who really believe in and delight in their disrespect. Remember Hillary and "deplorables"!

***

By the way, "matronize" — as a humorous way to say that a woman is patronizing — is a usage that's been around since the 19th century. Among the examples in the OED:

a1854 E. Grant Mem. Highland Lady (1988) I. xvi. 349 An extraordinary woman, once a beauty and still a wit, who was now matronising two elderly young ladies.
1966 New Statesman 25 Nov. 786/3 She has the usual phrases about ‘the self-contained universe constituted by a work of art’, and Sartre is matronised for faltering in his ‘faith in the power of an artistic structure to stand up on its own’.

"Matronize" is a real word, with nonjocose meanings: "To act as a matron," "To chaperone" ("Lady Maclaughlan..will Matronize you to the play"), "to act as hostess to (a party, etc.)" ("The lady who was matronizing the tea recognized him"), and "to render matronly" ("Childbed matronizes the giddiest Spirits").

"In a way, it’s kept me probably more childlike. That’s what drugs do to people."

"They stop emotional growth. So when you come out of it, you’re kind of 17."

Said Anita Pallenberg, quoted in her obituary. Amazingly, she made it to the age of 73.

What an embodiment of the mod beauty we adored in the 1960s! Go to the link — it's to the NYT — to see the photographs of her that made us so envious — in the arms of Keith Richards in 1969 and drawing lipliner on Mick Jagger (in the movie "Performance") in 1970.

That movie "remains as hallucinogenically strange and disturbing as ever and Pallenberg will be for ever remembered as Pherber: sexually omnivorous, dangerous, sweetly amoral. The movie... captures the psychosis of the end of the 60s, where art, crime and sex open up the gates of social mobility but identity becomes fragmented."

Pallenberg spoke of drugs freezing her, so she did not grow emotionally. Faithfull has spoken of not being able to have sex without being semi-anaesthetised with drugs. Their stories remind us of what sexual liberation could mean for women in the 60s. These great beauties paid a huge price for being the “girlfriends” of rock stars. Both these clever, multilingual, arty women educated their boyfriends (Jagger and Richards) about culture and art and style. Pallenberg got the boys to wear her clothes. Everyone, Faithfull once told me, was in love with Keith, even Mick of course …

"I like a high-spirited woman. And with Anita, you knew you were taking on a Valkyrie — she who decides who dies in battle." — wrote Keith Richards.

"Adults — they wear shorts everywhere, and they have cereal for dinner, and they treat comic books like they're literature."

Said Bill Maher at the beginning of that famous interview he did Friday with Senator Ben Sasse. Maher began the interview by offering to "bond" with Sasse, whose book — "The Vanishing American Adult" — is, according to Maher, "so right about how we have lost the thread about what adults are anymore in this country." Then Maher, with his trademark sneering contempt, launched the line I put in the post title. I loved that he began his image of the problem with what is my trademark peeve, shorts.

The reason I only have 1 post up today (until this one) is that I stopped to watch Bill Maher's show (which I had recorded).

I'd seen that he was the latest target in the game of Destroy a Comedian, and I wasn't interested in playing the game. We need our comedians, and if they're any good, they're going to offend us now and then. Maher does his show live, and he's got to jump at jibes when he sees them, and often he's childish or edgy or low.

I needed to watch the whole thing, and that took a while, because I have a sort of real-live, in-the-room, blogger-and-commenter thing happening here, and it takes a long time to watch the whole show. There's pausing and conversation and rewinding and innumerable points to be made — and not just about Maher's "Work in the fields? Senator, I’m a house nigger" response to Ben Sasse's invitation to come out to Nebraska and "work in the fields with us."

Meade and I weren't just talking about that, but about the entire interview with Ben Sasse, who was there to talk about his book — "The Vanishing American Adult" (which I've blogged about before). Sasse was doing a great job holding his ground and seeming like a smart, attractive, independent politician, and it will be a shame if people only want to talk about Maher's zinger with the bad word, but that's what we do these days. Because Sasse is right, adulthood is eroding.

Ooh! Maher said a bad word, Mommy. Punish him! 

And then there was a panel discussion, a completely unbalanced panel with what seemed to be 3 hopped-up Trump haters: Eliot Spitzer — isn't he supposed to be in prison? — Rebecca Traister — author of that NY Magazine Hillary hype, "Hillary Clinton Is Furious. And Resigned. And Funny. And Worried." — and Jim VandeHei — a co-founder of that new media effort Axios, which aspires to fix what's wrong with media, but might be bad. These 3 jiggled and fidgeted and spluttered. The best part was when Traister, effusing, made a reference to Hillary Clinton redirecting her fundraising "hose." Maher — with almost nothing but facial expression — called attention to the pun, and Traister tsked at him. Meanwhile, sitting between Traister and Maher was Spitzer — Client 9 — but Maher resisted the edgy joke there. He didn't say "Eliot, you know about hos" or anything like that. The panel stumbled on.

In the middle of the panel, there was the most substantive, intelligent part of the show, a little interview with a man named Tristan Harris, whose bottom-of-the-screen identification read: "Former design ethicist, Google." He had a lot to say about the great power of manipulation possessed by Google and Facebook and Apple and the ethical problems of the attention-manufacturing business. But that set up a question Maher threw to Traister and Traister seized the opportunity to chatter manically and we never got back to Harris.

The morning was getting late and the cool breeze in real-life world wasn't going to last. I got out for a long walk. But now I'm back and I see that Maher has apologized:

"Friday nights are always my worst night of sleep because I’m up reflecting on the things I should or shouldn’t have said on my live show. Last night was a particularly long night as I regret the word I used in the banter of a live moment. The word was offensive and I regret saying it and am very sorry."

If it were up to me, I'd say fine. The word wasn't directed at anybody (other than at Maher himself). It was mostly just laughing at the idea of Bill Maher working in a field. Worse that the "n-word" itself, in my view — if you want to take racial matters seriously — is that he used slavery in a lighthearted way.

For a different perspective, here's what Malcolm X said about the "field Negro" and the "house Negro" (via "Five (Other) Times Bill Maher Was Racist, Islamophobic, or Sexist"):

"Cleansing" — basically, juice-drinking — with co-workers is a big trend in NYC.

Or so the NYT says in this big article, which seems a bit like an ad for a product called "Cooler Cleanse":

Eric Helms, who founded the four-year-old Cooler Cleanse company with the actress Salma Hayek, says office cleansers now make up 30 percent of his business, and in the last year he has hired three customer-service employees just to handle the details of them.

Salma Hayek! She has something to do with you working in an office. Buy this juice.

Last year Oprah Winfrey’s entire production staff in Chicago completed a three-day cleanse...

Recent six-juice-a-day-dieters include employees at Merrill Lynch and the Carlyle Group, she said. In May, Citigroup began offering BluePrintCleanse in some of its Manhattan cafeterias, a spokeswoman said. Restaurant Associates, which runs the cafeteria, declined to explain the decision.

The popularity of cleanses continues to rise, even as health experts seem dubious about the efficacy of some of these diets. “Your liver and kidneys can handle toxins just fine,” said Joan Salge Blake, a Boston University associate professor of nutrition, who has studied fad diets. “There’s no science to back up cleansing.”

Seem dubious?!

The thing about the "corporate cleanse" is that it reaches men. Without this new approach to marketing the dubious product, the customers would be mostly women.

Jina Wye, director of sales and marketing for BluePrintCleanse...  said: “These Type-A men have an all-or-none perspective. If they’re going to commit, they do it whole hog.” Most popular among male en masse cleansers: the Excavation cleanse, described on the Web site as “the most intense.”

Now, I'm thinking about the corporate bathrooms, and I'm a little scared.

Office cleanses are rarely corporate sponsored, subsidized or sanctioned. Several companies declined to allow employees to speak publicly about them because cleansing is a sensitive issue.

In March, @VeraWanggang tweeted: “Have been inspired by @glamour to try @coolercleanse. We are doing it as a team so none of us flake.” But the spokeswoman Priya Shukla said in an e-mail that she decided recently that the company won’t comment on diet or nutrition, which she noted are “personal choices.”

Ha ha. You can see why it's "sensitive." Management bullying everyone to participate in a completely unscientific pseudo-medical treatment? We are doing it as a team so none of us flake. "Flake" is the perfectly ironic word choice. You may not flake, but you are flakes. I'd rather get stuck with a boss who insisted that the underlings join his prayer groups.

“I felt like I kept hearing about juice cleanses, and I thought, ‘I’ll try anything, let me see what this is all about,’ ” said [Peter Alfano, a Citigroup vice president, 37]. Cleansing with colleagues appealed to him because of the moral support. “We would all hang out together at lunchtime, and we’d take our bottles to the park,” he said. “You can’t wait for it to end, but the feeling of accomplishment is amazing.”

You drank a bottle of juice in the park. Something a toddler does. Yet you have an amazing feeling of accomplishment. And you needed a support group to do it. And you wanted to do it because you kept hearing about it. Not because you looked up the research on the subject. Just: People are talking about this, so I'll try it and see what it's all about. Could people please start talking about science and behaving like an adult so maybe this corporate VP might try it? He says he's try anything.

Those who choose to drink the kale at other offices reported enjoying creating rituals around the cleanse, if not always the juices (and the endless trips to the bathroom). 

See? People lapse into religion mode. Your childish take-my-bottle-to-the-park and going-poopie is now a cult. Congratulations, morons!

At the Madison Avenue office of the fashion Web site Moda Operandi, every empty bottle was slammed triumphantly on the Ping-Pong table. 

Ooh! Macho. What big (ping pong) balls you have!

At the Brooklyn outpost of a Big Four accounting firm, there was a first tentative sip in unison of that hour’s concoction, followed by tasting notes — while cleanse dropouts were referred to as “doing the walk of shame” to the refrigerator....

Shaming. In the office. And what are "tasting notes"? Like that crap people write about wine?

Co-workers don’t let co-workers drink alone, suggests the BluePrintCleanse Web site, noting that “happy side effects include increased energy, productivity, focus and clarity (which come in handy at the office.)” Cleansers may dispute the promise of alertness (“I felt like I was jet-lagged,” said Cynthia Rooney, who drank with 10 Ralph Lauren colleagues), but many agreed they were more productive.

Many agreed. Who's going to volunteer that they are less productive?

And who's going to puncture all that happiness with an explanation of the placebo effect? Not the New York Times.

P.J. O'Rouke tells you guys to stop wearing shorts.

I've been saying it for years. (Click the "men in shorts" tag.) But here's P.J.:

Comfortable means “easy.” So: Nothing’s easier than matching a pair of pants and a jacket that look exactly alike. I’ve got a closet full of blue suits and black wing tips. Any tie goes with a white shirt. I can get dressed in the dark. And—what with blinding hangovers from drinking on airplanes to soften the shock of first-class seats filled with graying, jowly urchins—I often do.

The kid-who-stayed-40-years-too-long-on-the-playground look doesn’t inspire trust. If dressing up as a third grader is your idea of how to treat yourself, what’s your idea of how to treat me?

Creeping childishness hits the army.

I went to "Army Dietitian Touts Warning Labels for Desserts and Fried Foods at Mess Halls" from a Drudge link that said "Army Replaces Soda Machines With 'Hydration Stations'..." Said touting, by Lt. Col. Sonya Cable highlight, sounds like something on the "Sesame Street" level. The new program is called “Go for Green.” Cable explains:

"In the military we all kind of know red means, ‘uh oh, there’s problems’... Amber, middle of the road, we’re doing okay. And green is good to go, all is right. We took that same concept and we applied it to our menus.”

Uh oh, there's problems. Is that the way people talk to each other in the military now?