Madonna shows love/"shows love."

Madonna’s jealousy is adorable, she’s basically saying “I’m the queen of pop, but Kylie’s the queen of cute, and I’m just here for the fireworks.” pic.twitter.com/hb9hvRcDUG

— tino.la (@CakeChutikan) June 27, 2026

I'm reading "How a Family of 3 Lives on $500,000 on the Upper West Side" in The New York Times.

Excerpt:

Their household income is roughly $500,000 per year. While they make a good living, they try to be frugal and are saving money to buy an apartment. They moved into their roughly 800-square-foot rental eight years ago when it was just them and their dog, Peabody, a Maltese poodle. Now their son’s crib is steps away from their bed. They installed a curtain between the bed and the crib to keep the light out.... Since they share a room with their son, he often wakes them up around 5 a.m. 'In the sweetest and most adorable way,' Ms. Gossai said.

They make $500,000! $500,000 and they've got a makeshift curtain separating their baby from their bed and are resorting to framing the situation as adorable. 

I wonder how much thinking went into referring to the dog as a "Maltese poodle," rather than a "Maltipoo." Is this a sign of the great turn against the -oodle? Or is this run-of-the-mill resistance to cutesiness?

"I think the people wouldn't like that. It's too cute. It wouldn't be right."

Said Trump, accepting the theory that he could run for a 3rd term by winning as the vice presidential candidate under a presidential candidate who would resign after winning. "Yeah, I'd be allowed to do that."

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ADDED: I love the poker face on Marco Rubio. He must assume he'd be the winning presidential candidate in the "cute" scenario. Would I do it, if asked? Would I resign, if elected cutely?

"You know, I'm being a little cute — I don't think there's anything going to get me in heaven."

PETER DOOCY: "You talked about how you hoped to end the war in Ukraine because it might help you get into heaven. How does this help? Does this help?"

PRESIDENT TRUMP: "You know, I'm being a little cute — I don't think there's anything going to get me in heaven." pic.twitter.com/dcY0J1p4zt

— Fox News (@FoxNews) October 13, 2025

"There’s a strain of rabies where the animals get very, very friendly..."

"... [a] family saw a raccoon that kind of showed up on their front step and he was sick and he was so cute and wanted to be petted. And you know when raccoons aren’t barring their teeth they are pretty cute."

Said a health official quoted in "Outbreaks of rabies seem to be rising across the U.S., CDC surveillance shows/The CDC's rabies team says it's tracking 15 different likely outbreaks from New York to Oregon" (NBC News)(citing 6 deaths from rabies in the U.S. in the past 12 months).

"The family petted and fed the animal until it died. They called animal services to pick up the body 'and thank God they did, because when they sent the brain out to be tested, it was positive, and so the whole family had to get vaccinated.... Oh, my gosh, they never would have known if they hadn’t called animal services.'"

"A substantial portion of PETA’s suit focuses on the French bulldog, the most popular dog breed in the United States in 2024 for a third straight year...."

"The Frenchie’s squat body, wrinkly face and batlike ears have helped make it a must-have, Instagram-ready pet for pop stars, pro athletes, online influencers and others who are able to pay the $4,000 to $6,000 or more it can cost to buy one as a puppy.... In its suit, PETA, a self-described animal liberation organization, says the French bulldog standard endorsed by the kennel club requires several deformities, including a large, square head and 'heavy wrinkles forming a soft roll over the extremely short nose.' Such features, the group argues, result in nostrils that are too narrow to allow for normal breathing and several other abnormalities that can obstruct a dog’s airflow. Veterinarians have warned that the big heads, bulging eyes and recessed noses that make Frenchies appealing also create what Dan O’Neill, a dog expert at the University of London’s Royal Veterinary College, calls 'ultra-predispositions' to medical problems."

From "American Kennel Club Harms French Bulldogs’ Health, PETA Says in Suit/The animal rights group argues that the standards the kennel club promotes for several dog breeds, including America’s most popular one, cause physical deformities" (NYT).

What's the legal basis for a lawsuit and for standing to sue? Let's read the complaint, here. Go to paragraph 120 to read the cause of action. It has to do with requiring the AKC to follow its own bylaws (which include a primary objective to "advance canine health and well-being").

By the way, PETA doesn't need to win this lawsuit, only to convince people that it's socially unacceptable to acquire a French bulldog: To be part of the market for this breed is to be part of a system of deliberate cruelty. What the human perceives as cute, the dog experiences as suffering. Once you know that, the dog ceases to be cute. At the very least, you lose the ability to enjoy your public image as an adorable dog person. 

Is there any alternative interpretation I should consider?

pic.twitter.com/eYTt40ahVq

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 7, 2024

I'm assuming this clunky labeling is correct. But why would Musk want his effort to be represented by a dust storm and the bloated government to be represented by an orderly suburban neighborhood?

Musk seems to feel comfortable — and amused! — portraying his worldly efforts as divine retribution. 

I remember, "it is written, 'Vengeance is Mine, I will repay,' says the Lord."

The dog is cute, so that takes the edge off, but Satan would take the edge off. Ha ha. So amusing. Destruction! 

"Immediately I knew that’s not a wild rat... It had a shorter, rounder nose, its ears were on the side of its head and it was white. … If you know rats, you know rats."

Said Elm Dylan, quoted in "A waterfront park is overrun with rats. Rescuers are trying to find homes for them. A group of volunteers believes the rodents at Harbor View Memorial Park in Portland are domestic, not wild, and is working to rescue them and find foster homes" (Portland Press Herald).

The rats must be saved... because they are white? White rats, unlike brown rats, are perceived as pets.

"The only way [oak trees are] going to move with the shifting temperatures is with the animals... Will personality affect that? Will there be individuals who are more likely to help?"

Said biology student Ivy Yen, quoted in "Meet the Mice Who Make the Forest/Scientists are unearthing a quiet truth about the woods: Where trees grow, or don’t, depends in part on the quirky decisions of small mammals" (NYT).

Although researchers already studied the ways that animals move seeds across landscapes, the possible role of their personalities had gone largely unexamined.

"Mr. Gates and Ms. French Gates met at work. He was technically her boss. He ran Microsoft..."

"... and she began working there in 1987 as a product manager the year after she graduated from college. Throughout their relationship, the two have played up the cute aspects of their office romance. He flirted with her when they sat together at a conference, then asked her out when they ran into each other in a company parking lot, according to Ms. French Gates, who described their relationship’s beginnings during a public appearance in 2016. Long after they married in 1994, Mr. Gates would on occasion pursue women in the office.... Six current and former employees of Microsoft, the foundation and the firm that manages the Gates’s fortune said those incidents, and others more recently, at times created an uncomfortable workplace environment. Mr. Gates was known for making clumsy approaches to women in and out of the office.... Some of the employees said... he did not pressure the women to submit to his advances for the sake of their careers, and he seemed to feel that he was giving the women the space to refuse his advances. Even so, Mr. Gates’s actions ran counter to the agenda of female empowerment that Ms. French Gates was promoting on a global stage. On Oct. 2, 2019, for example, she said she would spend $1 billion promoting 'women’s power and influence in the United States.'"

From "Long Before Divorce, Bill Gates Had Reputation for Questionable Behavior/Melinda French Gates voiced concerns about her husband’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and a harassment claim against his money manager. He also had an affair with an employee" (NYT).

Imagine spending a billion dollars to promote a message — to bullshit the masses — while you are blithely violating that message within your personal business realm, where people are trying to make their own little living. What royal hypocrisy! 

I don't know the facts first hand, and maybe none of these allegations against Bill Gates are true, but it seems that Melinda Gates — Ms. French Gates — is wisely choosing to disengage her reputation from his. She wants a feminist message? She's got to lop him off.

AND: It's so interesting, these marriages that begin in a workplace setting. Do they not originate in interactions like the interactions that become the evidentiary basis for claims that there is a discriminatory hostile workplace? But the success of the relationship makes all the difference. This one interaction grew into a marriage. I think of all the professors who are married to former students. That seems so nice for the lovely couple — we participate in the playing up of the cute aspects — but what's in the larger picture? Was it just that one magic student who was perceived as wifely material? We gamely presume so, we with our enjoyment of cute aspects.

"Some fun fact about these little creatures: In Vietnam we eat them"/"How dare you come here and say that. Oh nonooooooo."

"those were delicacies in someplace in VN,some are just plain street food,some are expensive high class dishes, I’m sadly have to announce to you that." 

 From "A Little Vietnamese Mossy Frog" (Reddit).

ADD: There's a truly adorable photo at the link, which is the reason I'm blogging this. Please don't think I'm blogging this to attack the animal-eating choices of people in a foreign country. Unless we're vegetarians, we eat the animals we're used to eating, and we don't give a reprieve for cuteness. We eat lambs if we like lamb. 

Here's video of a lamb dreaming, presumably not of becoming a chop.

"I want a dog that doesn’t know it’s cute."

An overheard line, reported in the NYT's Metropolitan Diary.

I'm no dog expert, but this one is easy. The way a dog knows it's cute is that the people continually tell it it's cute. The same thing happens with children too. If you don't want to find yourself living with a dog/child that knows it's cute, you need to keep a straight face about the cuteness. That will preserve the cuteness of the cuteness.

"... a cute amount of sun damage..."

"In 2019, faking freckles is nothing new. It’s a great way to distract from pimples or make it look like you’ve been getting a cute amount of sun damage without actually putting your skin in harm’s way" (New York Magazine).

As a person of discontinuous color, I have special entitlement to opine on the "freckleface" trend. These wielders of eyebrow liner did not go through a childhood of teasing and know nothing of the burdens of passing through this cruel world with a natural freckled face. They show up belatedly and take only the part of it that's deemed "cute" — just the right amount of freckles and in the chosen places and only while it's trendy...



Am I supposed to say thanks for upgrading something I would never have chosen for myself?

"The actor who played Jar Jar Binks in the Star Wars franchise has revealed how the vicious backlash against the character left him close to suicide."

BBC reports.

At the time [Ahmed Best] was 25, and it was his first major film role.... Jar Jar Binks quickly became the most hated character in the Star Wars universe, and critics branded Best's cartoonish portrayal a dumbed-down exercise in child-pleasing - or worse, a racist stereotype with a misplaced Caribbean accent.

Best did not name the Star Wars films in his emotional post... "20 years next year I faced a media backlash that still affects my career today. This was the place I almost ended my life. It's still hard to talk about. I survived and now this little guy is my gift for survival. Would this be a good story for my solo show? Lemme know."...

Actor Frank Oz, a puppeteer who voiced the Jedi master Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983), declared that he "LOVED Jar Jar Binks", adding, "I just will never understand the harshness of people's dislike of him. I do character work. He is a GREAT character!"

I stopped watching "Star Wars" movies after "The Empire Strikes Back," but it's easy enough to find clips of this character who's obviously just supposed to be very cute:



Poor Mr. Best went all out with the cuteness assignment, and then (it seems) people got squicked out by their own racial stereotypes that were stimulated. That or they just got irritated by the overuse of cuteness.

But cuteness is a big part of the "Star Wars" formula. Here, Vulture ranks all of the non-human creatures one "Star Wars" movie ("The Last Jedi") in order of cuteness. There are 10 species on this list, so the straining for cuteness is very obvious. Vulptices are ranked #1, beating out Porgs, because "the Porgs are more conventionally cute, they lack the dreamlike majesty of the Vulptices." Whatever! Don't kill yourself over it.

"Dolly Dingle's Little Friend Joey."

This is an image I found while doing some research on the Campbell Soup mascots, the "Campbell Kids," which I talked about in the previous post. The creator of the Campbell Kids was Grace Drayton (1877-1936).

She is considered to be one of the first and most successful American female cartoonist.... In 1900 she created two series for The Philadelphia Press called Bobby Blake and Dolly Drake. From 1905–1909, she was a member of The Plastic Club, an arts organization in Philadelphia....

The Plastic Club! (Must go back and study more about that.)

The Campbell Soup Kids and Drayton's other children characters were drawn in a cute cherubic style often with round faces, plump bodies, and rosy cheeks.

In collaboration with her sister, Margaret G. Hays, Drayton published The Adventures of Dolly Drake, Bobby Blake in Storyland, and The Turr’ble Tales of Kaptin Kiddo. Drayton designed the popular Dolly Dingle Paper Dolls which appeared in the women's magazine Pictorial Review. She also created syndicated newspaper comic strips such as Toodles, Pussy Pumpkins, Dolly Dimples, and The Pussycat Princess....

I'm fascinated by these old cartoons and looking for images. Not all these search terms work, however. Notably "Pussy Pumpkins." ("I Put Pumpkin in my Vagina Because It’s Fall and Why Not.")

Strange to get randomly drawn into the work of Grace Drayton today after just running into Rose O'Neill (the creator of the Kewpie cartoon character). I'm reading about Drayton today because Frank Bruni was talking about Campbell's Soup ads in the NYT, and I was reading about O'Neill yesterday because "Kewpie" came up as an answer in an old acrostic puzzle I happened to do.

O'Neill (1874-1944) was Drayton's contemporary. I don't know the extent to which female cartoonists  were channeled into drawing cute children. (The great Windsor McKay was drawing Little Nemo in the same era, but Little Nemo didn't have the hyper-exaggerated cuteness of Kewpies and Campbell Kids.)

Here's Rose O'Neill:



And here's Grace Dayton:



And here's Little Nemo:

"I'm torn on how this video affects my view of Jeb Bush. On the one hand, he didn't remember the name of the Back to the Future trilogy..."

"... but on the other hand, at least he's apparently seen it (and has taken Doc's warnings seriously)."

Writes my son John, linking to the video where Jeb Bush picks out an email of his to answer, one where he's asked whether, if he could go back in time, would he kill baby Hitler, and Jeb says, "Hell, yeah, I would" and — "Even if he was cute?" — "Ya gotta step up."

"This shows that in China now we’ll try almost anything that we see on the Internet."

"Nobody knows what it means, but we do it anyway."

When the trend started a few months ago, it was usually just a humble bean sprout clipped to the hair and erect like a little green flagpole.... Now heads are bristling with clover, sunflowers, chrysanthemums, lavender, mushrooms, chilies, cherries, gourds and pine trees....

The most common explanation on the streets was that the floral fascinators just looked cute — “meng meng da,” in a cloying term made popular on the Internet.

IN THE COMMENTS: MadisonMan said: "Should I wear my deely-boppers in a show of support -- while playing with my klick-klacks?"

Oh, yeah, deely-boppers... That name always bothered me. I think of Dealey Plaza. But what were klick-klacks? Hmmm...

A warning about that "tidying up" book.

I recommended the book "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing," by Marie Kondo, and I see that 40 or more of my readers bought the book. How are you liking it? My recommendation was based on the nicely motivating advice in the first third of the book. And I liked the clear sharp writing. Now that I've finished the book, I do feel that it's necessary to alert you to the weirdness that becomes quite pronounced toward the end.

On page 159, 79% of the way through the book, the author reveals: "I once worked as a Shinto shrine maiden for five years." Interesting use of the word "once"! 5 years is a long time period, not a one-time instance. A page later she talks about the effectiveness of Shinto charms. (They expire after one year, we are told.) On page 188, 92% of the way through, she tells us that when she goes to a client's home she "greet[s]" it by "kneel[ing] formally on the floor in the center of the house and address[ing] the house in my mind." She says: "I began this custom quite naturally based on the etiquette of worshipping at Shinto shrines."

Now, this is fine, but I felt ambushed by this information so late in the book. I want to know when someone is luring me into New Age thinking. Shinto is not "new age" for her, if she is in fact from the Shinto tradition, but repackaging it for those outside the tradition is a New Age move. I don't particularly mind rituals like this, but I certainly don't believe them, and I didn't interpret the word "magic" in the title to promise something supernatural.

Those are the only mentions of Shinto in the book, but there is also quite a bit of animism, and this may be Shintoism as well. In any case, it is a kind of religion. I'll just note a few of the examples of animism that jumped out at me:

I pointed to the balled-up socks. “Look at them carefully. This should be a time for them to rest. Do you really think they can get any rest like that?”...

Clothes that have been shut up for half a year look wilted, as if they have been stifled. Instead, let in some light and air occasionally. Open the drawer and run your hands over the contents. Let them know you care and look forward to wearing them when they are next in season. This kind of “communication” helps your clothes stay vibrant and keeps your relationship with them alive longer....

Just like the gentle shake we use to wake someone up, we can stimulate our belongings by physically moving them, exposing them to fresh air and making them “conscious.”...

I put my wristwatch in a pink antique case in the same drawer and place my necklace and earrings on the accessory tray beside it. Before closing the drawer, I say, “Thanks for all you did for me today.”...

I promise you: whatever you let go will come back in exactly the same amount, but only when it feels the desire to return to you. For this reason, when you part with something, don’t sigh and say, “Oh, I never used this,” or “Sorry I never got around to using you.” Instead, send it off joyfully with words like, “Thank you for finding me,” or “Have a good journey. See you again soon!” Get rid of those things that no longer spark joy. Make your parting a ceremony to launch them on a new journey. Celebrate this occasion with them. I truly believe that our possessions are even happier and more vibrant when we let them go than when we first get them.

I find all of that quite charming. I don't know if the author believes it or if she thinks it's fun and helpful and energizing to attribute consciousness to inanimate objects. I still recommend the book, but I thought I owed you a warning. If you have no patience with this kind of cutesiness or want to avoid immersions in religionish things that you don't believe, you might want to say to this book "Sorry I cannot use you, but may you find joy with someone else."

When is it okay to think it's cute that your kid stands on the dog to reach the counter?

Sarah Palin thought it was worth posting on Facebook, but why?

1. As she presented it — it showed her child Trig overcoming an obstacle — "a lazy dog blocking his way" — turned the negative into a positive, using the dog as "his stepping stone." Pure sweet inspiration, a boost for all of us.

2. She predicted she'd get criticized, and like clockwork, PETA was there: "It's odd that anyone — let alone a mother — would find it appropriate to post such a thing, with no apparent sympathy for the dog in the photo." And Palin fans love the action when some lefty organization takes a shot at Sarah ... or, better, Sarah and Trig.

3. She had an ace in the hole. When the predictable criticism rolled in, Palin played this Ellen DeGeneres Facebook post from last summer:

Post by Sarah Palin.

The best of vocal fry.

Don't take the poll without watching the video!

Vocal fry — yes, no, maybe?

Yes! It's sexy and adorable.

It's sexy and adorable if you're sexy and adorable and don't overdo it.

Leave it to the experts. The chance that you'll hit the Drew Barrymore sweet spot are close to nil.

No! It's horrible! For anyone, including Drew.

 

pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: My original post on this subject came in 2007: "Voice lessons":

Lately, I've noticed a lot of young women speaking in a strangled voice that seems to be produced by a laborious effort to bypass the larynx altogether. They sound as if they are damaging their throats. Are you noticing this trend? Can you tell me how it got started? Is there some celebrity they are imitating? It sounds a little Winona Ryder to me, but there must be some stronger role models affecting young women. Also, is there some way to get them to stop? It is worse than Valley Girl intonation.

The first comment was: "This is a very strange observation. Do you have a link so that we can hear this strange vocal pattern?" And I said: "Sorry, I'm just overhearing it in public places. It's driving me crazy. I feel like walking up to strangers and telling them to cut it out." (Then there were some updates, with clips, and some expert opinion informing me that this was called "creaky voice... laryngealisation, pulse phonation or, in singing, vocal fry or glottal fry.")