"Many women start struggling with new facial hair growth later in life.... Some said they had made friends or relatives promise to pluck their hairs for them..."

"... if they ever ended up in a hospital or a care facility. 'We made a pact: When we were old and maybe unable to care for ourselves, each of us would make sure that hairy ugliness wasn’t noticeable on the other,' said Debbie Russell, 68. But there is the possibility of finding peace with age, too. 'To me, my facial hair feels like a part of my gender identity, and since menopause I have a little goatee now, which I shave,' said Mitzi Cowell, 60, 'but I dream of the day when I can just grow it out, braid it.'"

From "Is Facial Hair the Last Taboo in Women’s Beauty? Millions of women regularly remove it. Does it have to be that way?" (NYT).

Also: "Women with facial hair have been documented throughout history, often in ways that make current attitudes seem modest. (Take, for example, Annie Jones, P.T. Barnum’s bearded lady, who was billed in his circus as a 'freak' — a term Jones protested.)"

From that link about Annie Jones: "Annie Jones was born in Virginia in 1865, reportedly exiting her mother’s womb with her chin already covered in hair.... Jones was not even a year old when her parents first pushed her into P.T. Barnum’s exhibition in New York City. The tiny girl was billed as 'The Infant Esau'.... As time went on, the 'Infant Esau' grew into the 'Esau Lady' and, eventually, the 'Bearded Lady.'"

"Elephants learn crucial social and behavioral skills from their mothers and other relatives, with whom they share intense emotional bonds."

"Instead of experiencing all this in their natural homes, elephants used in circuses are exploited—made to do meaningless circus tricks on the road."

A statement from PETA, quoted in "Elephant escapes circus, roams streets of Montana" (WaPo).

People are finding this amusing...

... but it isn't, really.

"The circus as your grandparents or even their parents remember it, fell victim to changing times."

"Feld Entertainment, which owns the [Ringling Brothers] circus, discovered today’s audiences did not want to see animals performing. And today’s kids do not laugh at corny clown acts.... Now the plan is to up the game with human feats that dazzle, astonish, bewilder, while, at the same time, engaging audiences with interactive social media. At times, even during the show....The producers who are bringing the Ringling back to this stage is also the same group of producers who do Disney On Ice, Monster Jam, Sesame Street Live. So they kind of think that they’ve figured the audience out.... And it will not be our parent’s circus. It’ll very different, guys."

From "Ringling Brothers Eyes Comeback With Animal-Free Circus Show Transcript."

This sad transcript made me think of that famous Steve Jobs quote: 

Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.

"Express yourself with your body..."

"Bob? Bob? Where's Bob?"

The circus is over.

After 156 years, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus will end.

"It's been through world wars, and it's been through every kind of economic cycle and it's been through a lot of change," said Kenneth Feld, chairman and CEO of Feld Entertainment, owner of the Ringling Bros. "In the past decade there's been more change in the world than in the 50 or 75 years prior to that. And I think it isn't relevant to people in the same way."...

Movies, television, video games and the internet captured young minds. The circus didn't have savvy product merchandising tie-ins or Saturday morning cartoons to shore up its image. After 1956, the circus no longer performed under tents, moving to arenas....

Animal rights activists put pressure on cities where the circus toured.... In 2014, Feld Entertainment won $25.2 million in settlements from groups including the Humane Society of the United States, ending a 14-year legal battle over allegations that circus employees mistreated elephants.

The initial lawsuit was filed by a former Ringling barn helper who accepted at least $190,000 from animal-rights groups. The judge called him "essentially a paid plaintiff" who lacked credibility and standing to sue, and rejected the abuse claims.

Kenneth Feld testified about the elephants' importance to the show at that 2009 trial. "The symbol of the 'Greatest Show on Earth' is the elephant, and that's what we've been known for throughout the world for more than a hundred years," he said. Asked whether the show would be the same without elephants, Feld replied, "No, it wouldn't."

And, it wasn't. Feld Entertainment removed the elephants in 2016, sending all 40 of them to their Center for Elephant Conservation in Florida. Ticket sales plummeted. The circus, already an afterthought for many, receded further in the public mind....

So it wasn't all that complex. The end of the circus is explained in one word: elephants.

"'When your mama was a geek, my dreamlets,' Papa would say, “she made the nipping off of noggins...'"

"'... such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing. ‘Spread your lips, sweet Lil,’ they’d cluck, ‘and show us your choppers!’"

Goodbye to Katherine Dunn, the author of "Geek Love." What a novel! Above is the first line. I used to teach it in a seminar I did, long ago, titled "Women in Law and Literature." Each week we would read a literary work and a legal case. We read "Geek Love" the week we read a case about women who were prosecuted for using drugs while pregnant. In the book, the mother tries to produce children with extreme birth defects, so they'll be able to work in the family geek business. The women in the legal cases were just drug addicts, failing to muster the will to protect the child within. (Yes, she had a right to abortion, but she didn't exercise it, and she was generating a real human being and, perhaps, imposing burdens on him (and on us the People)). The woman in the novel was deliberately making badly disabled children. Much more happens in that novel, by the way. A craze develops for surgically transforming oneself into a "geek."

According to the linked Slate article (by Dan Kois), Dunn delivered a second novel to her publisher, who'd paid her $175,000 for the rights....

That was in 1989, and the book’s never been published. A wondrous excerpt appeared in the Paris Review six years ago, and I harbor hope that Dunn’s husband and son will, once their grief has lessened, consider revealing that long-gestating work to the world. No matter how unshapely or ungainly it may be, I know I’ll love it.

Here's the cover that's on my paperback copy of the book.



Kois talks of another original — "the cover [Chip] Kidd designed launched his career" — which you can see displayed at the link. It's just the title written in a font that's close to the old computer display fonts of the time. It's as if the author knew absolutely nothing about the book and just assumed the relevant geeks were those people who are really into computers.

Imagine all the ridiculous book covers we could have it the designer just ran with their own thought based on words in the title....



AND: Here's that book excerpt in The Paris Review:

Tweezer Painton was a burly ten-year-old with a glower built into his square mug. His name came from his hobby of grabbing individual hairs on his victims’ heads and yanking them out for fun. Mostly he did it with his thick, grubby fingers but sometimes he used tweezers stolen from his mother’s bathroom cabinet.

Whoever sat in front of him in class developed a reflexive shudder around the nape of the neck. On the playground he would throw another kid down, straddle their arms so they couldn’t fight back, and hold their screeching faces with one hand while he tweezed away at their eyebrows or head hair....

Where does that go that was too horrible for the people who sprang for "Geek Love"? [UPDATE: I'm unclear from Kois's text whether a full manuscript was ever delivered to the publisher or whether Dunn received the money.]

ALSO: "GEEK LOVE AT 25: HOW A FREAK FAMILY INSPIRED YOUR POP CULTURE HEROES."

Donald Trump kind of likes being compared to P.T. Barnum.

On "Meet the Press" today:

CHUCK TODD: As you know, people call you a lot of names. Some of it's positive, some of it's negative. I want to throw some by you. Let's see. Some people are calling you the Music Man of this race. Kim Kardashian. Biff, from Back to the Future. George Costanza. P.T. Barnum. What's - any of those do you consider a compliment? Or do you--

DONALD TRUMP: P.T. Barnum.

CHUCK TODD: You'll take the P.T. Barnum?

DONALD TRUMP: P.T. Barnum. Look, people call you names. We need P.T. Barnum, a little bit, because we have to build up the image of our country. We have to be a cheerleader for our country. We don't have a cheerleader. I thought Obama, when he got elected, would be a good cheerleader. That's the one thing I said. I said he'll be a - you know, he'll unify the country, whether it's African American and white and all. You know, he'll unify. He's not unifying. He's been a great divider.....

Phineas Taylor "P. T." Barnum...

(July 5, 1810 – April 7, 1891) was an American showman and businessman remembered for promoting celebrated hoaxes and for founding the Barnum & Bailey Circus. Although Barnum was also an author, publisher, philanthropist, and for some time a politician, he said of himself, "I am a showman by profession... and all the gilding shall make nothing else of me," and his personal aim was "to put money in his own coffers." Barnum is widely, but erroneously, credited with coining the phrase "There's a sucker born every minute"....

One of Barnum's more successful methods of self-promotion was mass publication of his autobiography.... Often referred to as the "Prince of Humbugs," Barnum saw nothing wrong in entertainers or vendors using hype (or "humbug," as he termed it) in promotional material, as long as the public was getting value for money..... Barnum was a producer and promoter of blackface minstrelsy....

While he claimed "politics were always distasteful to me," Barnum was elected to the Connecticut legislature in 1865 as Republican representative for Fairfield and served four terms. In the debate over slavery and African-American suffrage with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, Barnum spoke before the legislature and said, "A human soul, ‘that God has created and Christ died for,’ is not to be trifled with. It may tenant the body of a Chinaman, a Turk, an Arab or a Hottentot – it is still an immortal spirit." Barnum was notably the legislative sponsor of a law enacted by the Connecticut General Assembly in 1879 that prohibited the use of “any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception" that remained in effect in Connecticut until being overturned in 1965 by the U.S. Supreme Court Griswold v. Connecticut decision. 

"I wrote something very salient and important and probably not politically correct, but I don’t care."

Said Donald Trump.

I read that out loud and Meade — who really did not know I was reading a quote — said "Something has gotten into you."

I would never use "salient" in spontaneous speech.

ADDED: The oldest meaning of "salient" is leaping or jumping, notably said of animals that move by leaping, such as "Salient Mackrel." The second oldest meaning (this is all from the OED) refers to water jetting forth or "leaping upwards":

1669   R. Boyle Contin. New Exper. Physico-mech. iv. 17   We could take notice of the Lines describ'd by the Salient water, as the ejaculation of that Liquor grew still fainter and fainter.

So when you hear "salient," think: ejaculating. Of course, an ejaculation is a part of speech. Trump frequently ejaculates. It's true!

I was reading this aloud and Meade said: "More ejaculate from the non-wimp." The reference is to the notorious Carter era headline: "More Mush from the Wimp." (Side note: How good it is that Jimmy Carter is now cancer free.) I googled to get to a link for "More Mush from the Wimp," and it took me to an essay Roger Kimball published yesterday, "More Mush From the Wimp." I immediately assumed he was talking about Obama's Oval Office speech, but it was about Peter Salovey, the President of Yale. Here's one sentence written by Kimball, and it's the opposite of an ejaculation, which is a verbal expression of a word or 2 or 3, though it does contain an erection:

At Yale, the ursine circus culminated (as of this writing) in a late-night march to Salovey’s house where “traumatized” students presented a long list of demands, including abolition of the title “Master” for the heads of Yale’s residential colleges, the erection of a monument in a prominent public space acknowledging that Yale had been built on land “stolen” from “indigenous peoples,” renaming Calhoun College because its namesake, the Congressman, Senator, Vice President, and Secretary of War, had also been a strong advocate of slavery, a mandatory “ethnic studies” requirement for all students, and more attention, money, and privileges for Yale’s “students of color.” 

That's a very long sentence — 103 words — and I was going to ejaculate "Diagram that!" but it's actually pretty easy to diagram, the length mostly attributable to a long list. Did you enjoy "ursine circus"? I like the look and the sound, but I would never choose to ridicule students with an animal metaphor and, worse, the poor bears who are exploited in circus work don't deserve the comparison to Ivy League college students choosing to devote themselves to pushing for greater attention to racial matters. Perhaps someone could compose a fable about circus bears getting the idea of protesting their dismal condition and deciding that the crucial problem was race consciousness. Why is it always the black bear? You never see a polar bear forced to jump through a hoop of real fire!

The "Benghazi is a circus" meme.

Spotted today in this NYT editorial: "Center Ring at the Republican Circus."

Previously spotted...



... when Jane Harman delivered Benghazi talking points on "Fox News Sunday" and began with: "This is a circus."

Actually, the text of the NYT editorial doesn't use the "circus" metaphor, but it does begin "The hottest competition in Washington this week is among House Republicans vying for a seat on the Benghazi kangaroo court...." and "kangaroo court" does sound sort of circus-like — some spectacle involving animals.

Why did the noble kangaroo get connected to the idea of an improperly constituted, unfair tribunal?

There is some debate over the origin of the term kangaroo court, but some sources suggest that it may have been popularized during the California Gold Rush of 1848, as a description of the hastily carried-out proceedings used to deal with the issue of claim jumping miners. Other sources claim that the term comes from the notion of justice proceeding "by leaps," like a kangaroo. Some[who?] have suggested that the phrase could refer to the pouch of a kangaroo, meaning the court is in someone's pocket. 

The question hich animal would make the worst judge is an interesting one. It's easy to quip that the human animal makes the worst judge. Only the human animal ever gets the idea of conducting anything even resembling a judicial procedure.

That said, I would not like to be tried by a bird.


("Up Before the Beak" from Punch's Almanack For 1882 ("beak" was slang for "judge."))

Women hanging by their hair "like a human chandelier."

"Hairialists."

"It just went crashing down... Everyone was freaking out. We heard this huge clatter and then we just heard the girls scream."

"Animal activists have been attacking our family, our company, and our employees for decades because they oppose animals in circuses."

"These defendants attempted to destroy our family-owned business with a hired plaintiff who made statements that the court did not believe.... This settlement is a vindication not just for the company but also for the dedicated men and women who spend their lives working and caring for all the animals with Ringling Bros. in the face of such targeted, malicious rhetoric."

The ASPCA pays $9.3 million to get out of this case, which continues against the other defendants, the Humane Society of the United States, the Fund for Animals, Animal Welfare Institute, Animal Protection Institute United with Born Free USA, various lawyers, and a former Ringling employee named Tom Rider.

Why was Superman wearing underpants over his tights in the first place?

Rob Bricken pushes back against those who are outraged at Superman's redesigned outfit. The original outfit (from 1933) was based on what circus strongmen of the time wore. But no one gets that reference anymore. So:

No one is looking at Superman's redesigned outfit in DC's New 52 and saying, "Boy, now that Superman doesn't have underpants, he no longer looks like a circus strongman, which was a visual that had no value to me!" Maybe a few people are saying, "Boy, Superman's skin-tight unitard sure looks adult and manly now that he isn't wearing underwear!" …maybe. But most people are saying, "He looks weird without it."

Think about why old-time circus strongmen dressed like they did: They wanted to show off their muscles in a leotard and tights, but they needed to avoid all that precise definition around their genitalia. If it's just a drawing though, the artists can render the crotch any way they want. They don't need pants, but the lack of pants makes you think about it:

I have no idea why this is - maybe our brains instinctively know when a guy is effectively wearing a unitard, his junk should be visible. You don't have to want to see it, you don't even have to think about it for more than a second, but the lack of underpants forces us to acknowledge the super-crotch, while underpants allow us to ignore the region entirely.

And then there's movie Superman. (Photo of underpantsless Superman at the link.)

By taking away Superman's briefs in both the comics and the movies, DC is working against 80 years of tradition, a tradition that superheroes have completely claimed from their original inspiration. They aren't making Superman look any less "silly" - he's still wearing tights and a cape, for fuck's sake. They're simply making people think about Superman's penis now, and not everybody wants to. 

 (Via Metafilter.)

The Pope with a clown, Susan Rice caught between 2 power-heads, and a heavily tattoo'd quarterback.

I don't know what Matt Drudge is trying to slip into our subconscious today, but it's phantasmagoric. Felliniesque.


Click to enlarge.

The quarterback is Colin Kaepernick, who, not having murdered anybody, seems to be doing comparatively well, NFL-wise. His mother is "annoyed." The body scribblings are Bible verses (we're told). Across the chest it says "Against All Odds." Is that in the Bible? I don't know. Ask the Pope (if he's through clowning around). I've heard of the book of Philipians, so maybe there's a Philcollinsians.

Hillary and Rahm are swirling around Susan Rice. The story is Hillary prefers Kerry as her successor. Fine, but I can't see the Pope+Clown → Tattoo'd Quarterback transition. I hate to think there's no connection, that these are simply the stories that belonged at the top of their respective columns. Drudge means so much more. Tell me what the meaning is.

Here's the story about the Pope meeting 1000s of circus performers at the Vatican:

Benedict, a known cat lover, paid particular attention to a pair of lion cubs that were brought up to him, stroking them and chatting with their trainers. At one point Benedict even bent down to caress one — not an easy feat given the 85-year-old pope has trouble with his knees and occasionally uses a cane.

A gentle scene. Not the first thing that leaps to mind when you think about Christians and lions.