"The poodle community is particularly snappish about doodles. Doodle breeders help themselves to the poodle’s brain..."

"... and its low-shedding, hypoallergenic coat, temper the poodle’s supposedly high-strung personality with a mellower breed, and then sell their hybrids for twice as much as poodles go for.... Online, doodles stir darker emotions. 'I love all dogs and own the best dog in the world. But my god I hate those fuckers,' one Reddit commenter said of doodles. 'We have one in my close family and I’ve never met a more neurotic dog.' Many object to the prices that doodles command; Much Ado About Doodles, for example, a Virginia-based breeding business, sells pretrained goldendoodle puppies for some fifteen thousand dollars each.... 'My AKC registered dog was way cheaper and came from champion bloodlines.'... Groomers complain about owners who, instead of troubling themselves with the daily brushing and regular cuts that low-shedding coats require, allow their dog’s coat to develop painful mats that have to be shaved off, then yell at the groomer for denuding their fur baby. A common clarification in anti-doodle discourse is 'It’s not the doodles I hate, it’s the people who own them.' Wally Conron, the doodle dogfather, has apologized for his creation. '... I released a Frankenstein. So many people are just breeding for the money. So many of these dogs have physical problems, and a lot of them are just crazy....'"

From "How Doodles Became the Dog du Jour/Poodle crossbreeds have grown overwhelmingly popular, sparking controversy in dog parks and kennel clubs alike" (The New Yorker).

"Ben sold out to get richer... that's it, end of!"/"These two bozos have made their fortune from Cookie Dough Icecream. And they think they have the ethical high ground?"

"He sold the company to get very very rich but he still wants control...."/"Mr Cohen you sold out, move on, use the money to campaign for your beliefs in other ways"/"They are bores. If they wanted to keep their progressive policies above the need for maximum profitability they should have retained ownership and never sold their business...."

The commenters are pretty much unanimous on the London Times article titled "Ben & Jerry’s founder attacks Peltz fund influence over Magnum/Ben Cohen steps up his feud with the ice-cream brand’s owner as a partner from the Trian hedge fund joins the Magnum board."

The legal dispute is the opposite of ice cream: "Magnum... has been accused of ousting directors on Ben & Jerry’s independent board, which was established to control its social mission when Cohen and Greenfield sold the business to Unilever for $326 million in 2000.... Cohen.... described the recent Ben & Jerry’s board changes as 'a blatant violation of the legally binding agreement put in place over 25 years ago to ensure the brand’s values would always be protected.'"

"A lot of people have a misconception that the Boomers are drinking less... It’s not because the Boomers are drinking less, it’s because there are less Boomers."

Said Jon Phillips, a Sonoma County wine manufacturer, quoted in "California winery owner gives hottest take yet on why industry is dying" (NY Post).

Why wouldn't the next generation step up as consumers of wine?

“[Boomers] were the people that were really responsible for joining wine clubs and Gen X that came after Boomers just weren’t really into wine to the same level that the Boomers were into wine,” [Phillips] said.

Gen X never wants to do anything. Phillips is waiting for Millennials and Gen Zs to mature into the wine-drinking way of life. I guess I should hope he's disappointed. 

"I’ve never been able to trace a Wagner that has stayed in only one family since the day the card came out."

"The (Shieldses’) care and respect for their grandfather’s collection — carefully looked after behind closed doors for 116 years — has preserved one of the hobby’s true grails, and the importance of this cannot be overstated."

From "T206 Honus Wagner card sells for $5.1 million after 116 years with same family" (NYT).

I don't accept the expression "one of the.... true grails." Don't pluralize "grail." There's one holy grail...

.... and if "grail" applies to baseball card trading, everyone seems to have agreed that it's the Honus Wagner card. But it's not as though there's only one. There are 50 or 60s of these slips of cardboard floating about.

"For people who make and sell beef tallow, a golden age has dawned. Consumers spent $9.9 million on food-grade beef tallow in 2025...."

"Jars of it landed on the shelves of Costco this year, and big retailers like Walmart and Target sell it. Fat Brothers beef tallow sells for almost $20 for 14 ounces on Amazon, and business is brisk... Jenni Harris is a fifth-generation rancher whose father in the late 1990s transformed their small conventional cattle feeding operation in South Georgia to an organic one where cows are raised on pasture. She remembers a time when they had no market for the fat from the animals they slaughtered. 'We damn near gave it away' she said...."

From "Beef Tallow, Long a Health Pariah, Rises to the Top of the Food Pyramid/The new dietary guidelines give federal approval to a fat that has slowly caught on with consumers, even as doctors have warned against it" (NYT).

Have you made the transition from seed oils to beef tallow? Or do you think butter is tracking the new food pyramid well enough? Or do you think this new fat advice is just crazy?

I'm reading the comments over there, including: "The man is barefoot as he stands next to a vat of hot oil while removing a drippy bird. What can go wrong?" And: "Anyone that works over a vat of 400 degree oil barefoot shouldnt be in charge of anything safety-related be it food, drugs, or healthcare."

They're responding to this photo, which is taken from RFK Jr.'s own social media:

And I like the NYT's correction at the bottom: "An earlier version of this article misstated how much consumers spent on beef tallow in 2025. It was $9.9 million, not $900 million." That's kind of a never mind correction. They wrote this whole article about the hot new business that is beef tallow and then it turned out to be on 1.1% of what they thought it was!

What's worse, the Secretary of Health's risky approach to home cooking or The New York Times's embarrassing and extreme botching of the dollar amount as it conducts its supposedly professional journalism?

And by the way, while RFK's feet deserve some attention, a lot of us are noticing his torso. He's 71 years old, and look at him. And he's eating beef tallow.

"In northern Arizona my zinnias and cosmos are still flowering. My cannabis is half harvested (2 of 4 plants)..."

"... and it looks like I'll be yielding at least 6 lbs of dried flower. I don't even like the stuff, but decided to grow it for a lark this year. It is legal to grow 6 plants after all. I'm going to end up with vast quantities of the stuff, and it is apparently very strong. All my pot smoking friends and relatives are delighted with my new hobby. It's better than when I was making my own whiskey. That led to too much drinking for me. The funny thing is that this is entirely legal, and the whiskey was not."

Wrote the commenter who calls himself "Old and slow" in last night's sunrise post — the open thread.

I should reformat this post and give it the headline: How to win friends and put people under the influence.

I'm expressing no opinion on what's "entirely legal" in Arizona, but I was motivated to do a little fact check on ChatGPT. I had several questions. You can do your own research. I'll just quote my favorite sentence from the response I got: "The law doesn’t police casual social reciprocity ('hey thanks for dinner, here’s a little bud'), but if there’s a pattern that looks like payment-in-kind, it can cross into illegal distribution."

"Grease fraud is a problem, too. In some areas, used cooking oil sells for more than new cooking oil, prompting hucksters to sell..."

"... virgin oil — including palm oil, which is associated with deforestation in Southeast Asia — as if it were used. It’s hard to catch, since fresh oil spiked with a little restaurant grease is almost indistinguishable from the real thing."

Just a snippet of weirdness from the vat of weirdness that is "The used oil from your french fry order may be fueling your next flight" (WaPo)(gift link).

"Broadway is not a business anymore. The statistics are terrible. I am very worried. I look at the economics of this, and I just don’t see how it can sustain."

Said Andrew Lloyd Webber, quoted in "The Broadway Musical Is in Trouble/With the cost of staging song-and-dance spectacles skyrocketing and audiences drawn to older hits, none of the musicals that opened last season have made a profit. Fewer are planned this season" (NYT).

The new musicals “Tammy Faye,” “Boop!” and “Smash” each cost at least $20 million to bring to the stage, and each was gone less than four months after opening. All three lost their entire investments. Lavish revivals of much-loved classics are also fizzling. On Sunday, a revival of “Cabaret,” budgeted for up to $26 million and featuring a costly conversion of a Broadway theater into a nightclub-like setting, threw in the towel at a total loss. A $19.5 million revival of “Gypsy” that starred Audra McDonald and earned strong reviews closed last month without recouping its investment. Even a buzzy production of “Sunset Boulevard,” which won this year’s Tony for best musical revival, failed to make back the $15 million it cost to mount.

Is every new show about one nutty lady?!

"Smash" was about Marilyn Monroe. "Boop" was about Betty Boop as you can probably guess. The rest of the shows named there are all about one central strong weird woman — all from more than a half century ago. It's quite unfresh! Why were they expected to succeed? Maybe because they think their audience is a bunch of old ladies. Of course, they want to see Audra McDonald as Mama Rose. 

One Broadway investor, James L. Walker Jr. of Atlanta, is so frustrated by the current economics that he’s litigating. After putting $50,000 into the “Cabaret” revival, he filed suit against the producers, alleging fraud. In an interview, Walker pointed out that the show has grossed nearly $90 million in ticket sales, plus whatever it made in sales of liquor, food and merchandise, and that he can’t accept that the investors who raised up to $26 million to finance the show have gotten nothing back. “How is that a good business model?” he asked.

"Those who own land would be offered a digital token by the trust in exchange for rights to redevelop their property, to be used to finance a new life elsewhere..."

"... or eventually redeemed for an apartment in one of six to eight new 'AI-powered, smart cities' to be built in Gaza. Each Palestinian who chooses to leave would be given a $5,000 cash payment and subsidies to cover four years of rent elsewhere, as well as a year of food. The plan estimates that every individual departure from Gaza would save the trust $23,000, compared with the cost of temporary housing and what it calls 'life support' services in the secure zones for those who stay.... [T]he trust plan 'does not rely on donations,' the prospectus says. Instead, it would be financed by public and private-sector investment in what it calls 'mega-projects,' from electric vehicle plants and data centers to beach resorts and high-rise apartments. Calculations included in the plan envision a nearly fourfold return on a $100 billion investment after 10 years, with ongoing 'self-generating' revenue streams...."

From "Gaza postwar plan envisions ‘voluntary’ relocation of entire population/The Trump administration and international partners are discussing proposals to build a 'Riviera of the Middle East' on the rubble of Gaza. One would establish U.S. control and pay Palestinians to leave" (WaPo).

What is the token worth? The plan says when the rebuilding is done, the token may be exchanged for a new 1,800-square-foot apartments worth $75,000 — right in this alien, gleaming place, rebuilt in the style of your enemy. Will the returnees gratefully toil in the new restaurants and hotels or will they see an opportunity for a glorious new era of destruction?

"Following days of legal threats and accusations of antisemitism lobbed at the owners of Good Pierogi after last week’s incident when the vendor denied him service, Dershowitz showed back up..."

"... on Wednesday to once again purchase some potato-stuffed dumplings in 'an effort to try to restore community.'"

I'm reading "Alan Dershowitz once again denied pierogi as Martha’s Vineyard residents chant ‘time to go’/‘I am very surprised that you’re here because of the things that you’ve been saying about us and the business online,’ the pierogi vendor told Alan Dershowitz on Wednesday" (Independent).

We're told there was a "large crowd" that chanted "Time to go! Go home Alan!"

"As for Dershowitz’s antisemitism claims, [the pierogi vender Krem] Miskevich noted that they are Jewish and have immediate family members in Israel, noting that friends call them 'Rabbi Krem' and that they have personal relationships with other rabbis on the island. 'Finally, we don’t back down to bullies – no matter their size,' Miskevich concluded the Tuesday night post."

There are some photos of the encounter at the link, and what jumps out at me is that Miskevich and Dershowitz are smiling at each other. Pleasantly, I think. Not villainously. 

"Worldwide search traffic has fallen by 15 percent in the past year.... Now that AI-generated summaries are being integrated into search results..."

"... anyone looking for information has less reason to click through to the websites where that information originates. For media publishers whose business models rely on referral traffic to bring them advertising revenue, this shift feels nothing short of catastrophic. There’s no getting around the decline in traffic. Last week, the Pew Research Center released a report showing not only that people who see an AI-generated summary on Google search are significantly less likely to click on external links than users who don’t, but that people almost never click on the links included in the AI summary. (They do so just 1 percent of the time.).... One strategy is trying to demand compensation from AI companies for crawling their content. Media companies are also investing in their own channels that deliver content directly to readers. They are launching new subscriptions, newsletters, events, membership programs, and even platforms and apps. Wired’s Katie Drummond wrote recently that the... trick... is to 'connect our humans to all of you humans.'...."

From "Traffic Apocalypse/Google’s AI Overviews are killing click-throughs to news sites" (Columbia Journalism Review).

"This is the product of a bunch of hacky bad millennial writers sitting around in a room trying to think of something quirky that two Gen X past their prime comedians can do to appeal to Zoomers on TikTok, even though their actual audience is baby boomers."

Said Matt Walsh, on his podcast yesterday, trashing a Jimmy Fallon "Tonight Show" sketch:

 

And I liked this — at 00:30:32 in the link above — about cancellation of Stephen Colbert's show: "There's a lot of speculation that Colbert got canned by CBS for criticizing Trump too much, which is, I mean, total nonsense.... If you're firing somebody because you don't like what they're saying... you're not gonna give them another year on the air... to, you know, with nothing to lose... to continue criticizing Trump. It doesn't make a lot of sense." 

Giving Colbert 10 more months to speak seems to mean that CBS is not trying to silence him and probably is cancelling him for the reason it's giving: money. I would add that it also seems to mean that it wants even more speech from Colbert — much harsher, more aggressive attacks on Trump. CBS lit a fire under Colbert and turned him loose to express himself without the need to preserve the show.

That prompted me to prompt Grok like this: What are some movies where a character finds out he has only a short time left to live and because of the awareness of his compressed life span, he finds far greater meaning tha[n] had been available to him when he was rolling along living life as if death was only vaguely hovering about in the fog of the seemingly distant future? Obviously, there's "Ikiru." There's "Dark Victory." But there must be a thousand. Help me expand this list. (Grok's answer.)

In short — in jort — I think CBS wants the opposite of silence from Colbert. It wants bigger, broader, more stabbingly painful satire... even as it also must stop hemorrhaging money.

I caught a glimpse of my own obituary.

In the email this morning, the Google alert I've had on my name for decades brings this:

I send that image to Meade (along with the link to the website the alert wants me to click), and this conversation follows:

"She sold antiques and handmade goods meant to conjure a slow, bucolic life: taper candles, spongeware vases, frill pillows mismatched to perfection."

"To Ms. Gelman, the store felt safe, like a 'cozy sort of womb,' she said. The entrepreneur whose brainchild had once attracted a $365 million valuation — who had named a conference room in San Francisco after Christine Blasey Ford and a phone booth in Washington after Shirley Chisholm — was now content collecting woven Longaberger baskets and dreaming up fictional English villagers to inspire the shop...."

I'm reading "First, a Feminist Utopia. Now, a Dollhouse in the Country./Audrey Gelman, the creator of the Wing, is taking another stab at shaping millennial tastes, this time with a pastoral inn — and more hotels on the way" (NYT).

The "Feminist Utopia" was the store that "felt safe, like a 'cozy sort of womb.'" Who knows what's feminist about dreamy nostalgia about English villages? 

The "Dollhouse" is an inn that the NYT describes as "a hallucinatory boardinghouse furnished by a flea market picker and haunted by Ichabod Crane" with rooms that are "almost entirely shoppable: scalloped rattan coffee tables from England ($2,250); mattresses from Massachusetts (starting at $1,349); hand-painted dinner plates ($59) from Italy; a thrifted pig-shaped cutting board ($55)."

"Winners at the April tasting... included melt​ed snow that had been filtered through Peruvian volcanic rock, and deep-sea water that had been pumped up 80 miles off the coast of South Korea."

"There was water gathered from nets hung in a misty Tasmanian pine forest, and a Texas brand laced with lithium called Crazy Water.... Hotels are adding precisely designed water bars. Home wine cellars have become water cellars, where children are encouraged to select bottles with their parents. Water sommelier programs continue to grow. And of course, water influencers gather more and more followers...."

From "You’ve Heard of Fine Wine. Now Meet Fine Water. Bottled waters from small, pristine sources are attracting a lot of buzz, with tastings, sommeliers and even water cellars" (NYT).

It sounds like comedy, but it's really happening. As for that water pumped up from the "deep sea," it sounds salty, and it had me wondering if it's possible for unsalty water to somehow exist below the salt water. The NYT article doesn't impinge on the fantasy of the specialness of the water, but I believe these waters are processed, are they not? That deep-sea water must be desalinated and then a chosen mix of minerals is added, right? And "water gathered from nets"? Does that sound ethereal to you... or unclean? Why not water gathered from towels hung in a steamy bathroom?

"These kids never learned the proper way to be a barfly."

Said an L.A. bartender, quoted in "Gen Z Doesn’t Want to Start a Bar Tab/To the chagrin of bartenders, many 20-something bargoers prefer to close out and pay after every single drink, no matter how many they might order during an outing" (NYT).

[B]artenders have tried gently nudging them to consider opening tabs.... Others opt for something more overt.... If a group of friends closes out separate tabs multiple times at Seattle’s Central Saloon, Tiarra Horn will call them out from behind the bar: "'You guys all know each other? You guys not friends? You can’t get this round?' They haven’t even thought about it.... Someone has to bully these people. Respectfully."

"It is impossible to avoid slop these days. Slop is what we now call the uncanny stream of words and photos and videos that artificial intelligence spits out...."

"'Slop bowl'  is the term many use for the nebulous mash of ingredients served up at fast-casual restaurants.... TikTok feeds, meanwhile, are overtaken by streams of 'fast fashion slop.' Thousands of users have embraced the genre of the 'Shein Haul' reveal.... Kyla Scanlon, an economic commentator who coined the term 'vibecession,' notes that across different kinds of consumption... people are choosing to minimize thought and maximize efficiency, even when the outcome is a little less expressive (your outfit is the same as everyone else’s), a little less satisfying (your lunch bowl tastes just like yesterday’s) or a little less human.... Some psychiatrists say it makes sense that being confronted with nonstop online slop comes with cognitive downside.... So now some posters and shoppers are trying to edge away from it...."

Writes Emma Goldberg, in "Living the Slop Life/Slop videos. Slop bowls. Slop clothing hauls. When did we get so submerged in the slop-ified muck?" (NYT).

Sometimes a word helps us perceive and understand and react to a problem. A word can shape or change the problem. Is "slop" accurate? Is it propaganda?

What are the words that have worked like that?

"And what's interesting here is that even people who are skeptical of Trump's tariffs might be in favor of reining in fast fashion for environmental reasons or because they're against overconsumption."

"And you can actually see that playing out online. 'We need to stop filling up our closets and fill up our banks. There's this whole buy less movement.' 'We're not rich enough to afford these tariffs. So let's embrace the idea of under consumption.' 'Maybe we need to start taking responsibility for how much textile waste is in landfills in other countries.' 'Our relationship with consumption is fundamentally unhealthy, and people cannot stop buying stuff.' On TikTok, alongside the massive Shein hauls, you can also see people having conversations about consuming less... and being more intentional about where they're buying things from...."

From today's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast, "The End of Fast Fashion?" (audio and transcript at Podscribe).

I'm happy to see the NYT devoting some attention to the progressive argument in favor of Trump's tariffs on China.

Big shot takes fat shot.

Trump: "A friend of mine who is a businessman. Very very very top guy. Most of you would've heard of him. Highly neurotic. Brilliant businessman. Seriously overweight. And he takes the fat shot drug." pic.twitter.com/pFFyXT6pHF

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 12, 2025

"The tariffs have made it impossible for Mr. Liu to continue selling on Amazon, where he previously made about $1 on every garment but now just 50 cents."

"And he felt he could not cut his employees’ pay, Mr. Liu said, as workers at a labor market crowded past his motorbike, which he had parked on the sidewalk with a dress sample draped over the handlebars. 'You can’t sell anything to the United States right now,' Mr. Liu said. 'The tariffs are too high.'"

From "China’s Garment Factories Face a Tipping Point After New Tariffs/As a U.S. tax loophole ends, the apparel makers that sell to America are forced to consider alternative markets or cheaper locations in and outside China" (NYT).