"[S]ocks and sandals were fully associated with nerd-dom, meaning that soon it was time for fashion... to embrace the twosome again."

"And so it did, with multiple brands, including Fendi, Miu Miu and Dior Men all showing sandals and socks on recent runways.... That this has happened at the same time that Gen Z has become increasingly vocal about its general discomfort with visible toes — the subject of multiple 'who let the dogs out' memes and Reddit threads — is probably not a coincidence. (Gen Z, after all, is the consumer group most brands are most eager to attract.) Whether that reaction is due, as some have posited, to a fear of fetishization — there are accounts on OnlyFans devoted solely to feet — or some other generational quirk, it’s a real thing."

From "Are We All Supposed to Wear Socks With Sandals Now? A teacher wonders about the etiquette rules of contemporary footwear" (NYT).

Complicated! I'd like to say wear socks and sandals in whatever combination expresses the youness of you, but as between the people who have publicly overembraced a supposed rule against socks with sandals and the people who are squicked out by the sight of toes, I'd like to skew toward the toe-haters. But make a good sock choice. Wear socks that say: I know what I'm doing.

And for you Roman Empire buffs: "ROMAN SOCKS AND SANDALS: FASHION OR FAUX PAS? In this article Mark Griffin explores the history of this unlikely pairing." ("'Udones' were made either of pieced together cloth or woollen yarn using a type of knitting called 'nalbinding' or something that looks similar to netting called 'sprang.'")

Well, plenty of people think something filthy, dirty, and disgusting looking is representative of the country.

Imagine an art installation titled "America." It wouldn't have sparkling clear water bubbling cheerfully now, would it?

But I'm reading "Trump Says He’s Renovating ‘Filthy’ Reflecting Pool on the National Mall/The pool, which is more than 2,000 feet long, was the site of Martin Luther King Jr.’s 'I Have a Dream' speech and other events" (NYT)

“It’s filthy, dirty — the water’s disgusting looking,” Mr. Trump recalled a friend telling him. “It’s not representative of the country.”

Mr. Trump said he went to inspect the reflecting pool with members of the U.S. Secret Service and Doug Burgum, the interior secretary. He said one contractor proposed removing the pool’s granite and replacing it with stone as part of a three-year renovation that would cost $300 million.

“I said, ‘No, there’s a better way of doing it,’” Mr. Trump recalled. “I said, ‘What we’re going to do is I’m going to call all three of these people that have worked for me in the past doing swimming pools.” He said he told the contractors to “give me a good price,” and one agreed to do the job for $1.5 million to $2 million. 

He said the contractor began work two weeks ago and has “scrubbed” the surface of the pool.

“Now we have a nice, clean surface on which we’re putting an industrial grade swimming pool topping,” Mr. Trump said in a video on social media. “They said, ‘What color would you like, sir? It’s called American flag blue. I said, ‘That’s the color I want; I want American flag blue.’”

The huge discrepancy in cost comes, I assume, from using industrial grade swimming pool topping instead of replacing the existing granite with new granite (or other stone). That might strike some of us as trashy. It needs to be quite grand. It's not another swimming pool. And is that "American flag blue" going to be garish? Is it going to look quite different and consequently seem like an expression of Trump's personal taste. The pool has traditionally made people think about Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. Is that blue swimming-pool material going to force us all to think "Trump!"?

To be fair, the granite has always been a problem. It's not only expensive to re-do the pool with stone, it would probably begin a whole new century of the kind of leakage and settling that has plagued the pool since the 1920s.

"In contrast to the carved statues of monarchs and saints framing the entrance to the museum’s main building eight miles to the west, this towering sculpture depicts an anonymous young Black woman."

"She holds a phone in one hand as she turns, in a twist reminiscent of Bernini’s 'David,' to look over her right shoulder with an intent gaze. Her hair is in two neat braids and the folds of her T-shirt drape luxuriously where they tuck into her jeans. She wears colossal Nike Air Rift sneakers."

From "A Huge Statue of a Black Woman Opens a New Door to London’s V&A/Thomas J Price’s bronze figures present anonymous Black people at heroic scale. After an installation in Times Square sparked a furor, his latest work welcomes visitors to a new museum outpost" (NYT).

What was the Times Square sculpture that "sparked a furor"? It was a similar anonymous generic black woman. According to the artist, "the messages I would get from women who look like her [were] saying she was disgusting." He said: "A lot of people, they’re not used to seeing people who look like them. And I mean that not just in terms of race or gender, but people just being people."

I wonder if most people, confronted with a colossal sculpture of a person who looked exactly like them — other than the size and the monotone color of bronze — would find it disgusting. But those 2 changes — size and bronzeness — are what we usually think makes a statue "heroic."

Or perhaps the "heroic" quality requires something more: a proud pose, idealized beauty, nudity (or a military uniform, a toga, or at least a business suit), some connection to glorious achievement (certainly not just standing around casually). But when's the last time elite art came out in favor of the heroic? That's so right wing. Like something Trump would do. Or try to do.

Which CEO did the better job of humiliating himself in the theater of corporate enthusiasm?

🚨 BREAKING: Anthropic CEO just did a complete 180 in live interview

Do you regret saying ‘dictator-style praise’ about President Trump?

Anthropic CEO:
>“I want to completely apologize for this memo”
>“it was among the most disorienting times in Anthropic’s history”
>“i… pic.twitter.com/MTodBFhebU

— NIK (@ns123abc) March 6, 2026

"It’s a small amount, not too gory. But white people think it’s scary."

Said Ratthee Rueangpisansin, the events and marketing director of a Thai restaurant in NYC, speaking about pig blood as a soup ingredient. He's quoted in "Will Americans Get Over Their Fear of Eating Animal Blood? The ingredient — a staple of cuisines around the world — is increasingly showing up on restaurant menus and in cookbooks in the U.S."

I hate to purport to speak on behalf of all "white people," but I think it's not that we're afraid. We're disgusted.

People eat blood around the world in all kinds of ways: from France’s rich, gamy sauces and Spain’s morcilla to Swedish blood pancakes, British black pudding and the chocolate-laced blood sweets of Italy; in sausages and stews throughout Southeast Asia; in the wobbly slabs of blood tofu that are a key element in China’s hot pots and soups. Yet in the United States, most blood from slaughterhouses is processed into animal feed and fertilizer. In this era of nose-to-tail dining, when we pat ourselves on our sustainable backs for every ear, liver or trotter we dare to eat, why do we routinely pour the most vital part of the animal down the drain?

It's not down the drain. It's into animal feed and fertilizer. But maybe there is some wonderful stuff we the white people of America are missing out on.

"Who wants to sit squeezed up to a big group of hairy men on a bachelor party?"

Said Jerelyn Taubert, 66, who moved to Budapest 20 years ago, when she would arrive at the beautiful historic bath house "at eight in the morning and there would be three people in the pool.... There were a lot of older Hungarian ladies and it felt private, in the women’s section."

She's quoted in "Tensions boil over as tourists swamp Budapest’s historic bath houses/Bathing culture is at the heart of the city but its popularity with foreigners is pricing out locals, and political rows are delaying desperately needed renovations" (London Times).

Maybe the older Hungarian ladies don't like squeezing up with a woman who only moved to town 20 years ago. I think it is important, when you are disgusted by some people, to remember that there are other people to whom you are disgusting.

AND: Speaking of pools and variable disgust, look at this question some guy sent in to the NYT "Ethicist": "I presume that most people pee in swimming pools and that everyone pees in the ocean. But suppose I’m at the beach. I need to defecate. It’s a 15 minute walk to the bathroom. It’s a Tuesday, and the beach is deserted. Is it OK to go in the ocean? I say yes! My wife disagrees." Just to ask is already to be too disgusting. Just the first sentence — the foundation for the question — is already too disgusting. 

I read that yesterday and didn't blog it, but I'm blogging it now because it lodged in my head. I know because it oozed up as I read about that Budapest bath house. I'm blogging it now to free myself of thinking about it again, because I won't blog it twice. 

"Granny or alcoholic? No, these stars prove there’s more to being 60-plus."

Crazy headline at The London Times.

To be fair, the article is about what characters appear in movies and TV shows, which is never going to be the full range of humanity, because some aspects of life make more interesting stories.

But still: "The disgust that older women are presumed to engender is so great there’s even a horror genre built around it, dubbed 'hagsploitation' and starring the 'psycho-biddy.' The Hollywood star Bette Davis had aged out of being a dramatic lead and into being a scary old lady before she was even 60, with terrifying roles in films like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) and The Nanny (1965)...."

I think it's not so much that older women are disgusting as that it's hard to think of exciting things for gentle, sweet old ladies to do that could be the center of a story. Bette Davis understood that and was willing to set glamor aside and sink into a horror role. 

Anyway, we're told that these days there are lots of juicy roles for older actresses, and one 30-year-old actress said: “It’s a really good time for older women, which is amazing, and there’s a lot for these young men, but not a lot for the actresses that I know in my age bracket.”

"Crooked Joe’s MANDATE, 'NO PLASTIC STRAWS, ONLY PAPER,' IS DEAD! Enjoy your next drink without a straw that disgustingly dissolves in your mouth!!!"

As you can tell from the all-caps and the triple exclamation points, that's Trump, hating on the straws everyone hates.

I avoid straws myself, and so the now-defunct plastic straw ban had no effect on me, but I do remember paper straws from the 1950s, when I was growing up, and kids just chewed on the straws, and if they dissolved in our mouth, we just ate them, and we liked it.

These days, if a kid eats paper, it's "a concerning behavior that should not be ignored" ("Whether it’s due to sensory issues, stress, or anxiety, nutritional deficiencies, developmental disorders, or curiosity, it’s essential to seek professional help and guidance to ensure your child’s safety and well-being").

By the way, don't miss the song parodies in the comments to yesterday's "Big Balls and Plastic Straws" challenge.

"This is repulsive to me. I mean, that anyone would do this to an animal. And an animal’s like a child. I don’t know if you understand that or not."

Said the judge, quoted in "Disgusted judge puts away woman who ate cat in stomach-turning video: 'You’ve embarrassed this nation'" (NY Post).

"She ain’t going. Jill Biden’s husband authorized the FBI snooping through her underwear drawer."

"The Bidens are disgusting. Jill Biden isn’t someone Melania needs to meet."

Said a source, quoted in "Melania Trump declines to meet with Jill Biden at White House, citing Mar-a-Lago raid: source" (NY Post).

Meanwhile, "Melania’s husband, President-elect Donald Trump, will sit with President Biden in the Oval Office Wednesday for a traditional post-election meeting."

"Our ruling class is disgusting."

Hear Tucker narrate this ad. It captures the truth and emotion. Chills. 👇🏻🔊✊🏻

pic.twitter.com/qTAlLQcsRh

— Sheri™ (@FFT1776) November 4, 2024

"One celebrated offering is pigeon meat cured in a casing of beeswax and served suspended, like a ham, with the bird’s feathered head intact."

"Another is ice cream made from pig’s blood and filled with a ganache of juniper oil and deer-blood garum. ('Fatty, with a weird umami aftertaste,' in the judgment of a food blogger.) Not all diners appreciate being scolded during their meal. 'I care deeply about climate change, yet I don’t necessarily go to a restaurant to worry about it even more,' Jeff Gordinier wrote in Esquire. 'I go to a restaurant to get away from the awful news for a few hours.' One night, a guest threw the chicken cage across the domed room, declaring that he hadn’t signed up to be lectured by Greenpeace. But that was in itself a satisfying moment of theatre. On only three or four occasions has a diner walked out in disgust."

From "Can Your Stomach Handle a Meal at Alchemist? At the Copenhagen restaurant, diners are served raw jellyfish—and freeze-dried lamb brain served in a fake cranium—while videos about climate change swirl on the ceiling. Is it 'gastronomic opera,' or sensory overload?" (The New Yorker).

Ha ha. It's funny that the climate change propaganda is the most disgusting part.

I had to look up the word "garum," and I found "Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Garum/A culinary star in ancient Rome, this fermented fish sauce transforms everything it touches" (Eater)("it has been called the ketchup of the Roman world"). Are we still doing that thing of thinking about Rome all the time?

"I’ve said this from the beginning: I am not a church boy. I have so many skeletons in my closet that if they could all vote, I could run for king of the world."

Said RFK Jr., quoted in "Environmental group calls for RFK Jr. to be investigated for reportedly sawing off whale head/In a resurfaced 2012 interview, his daughter shared he had once used a chain saw to cut off a dead whale’s head to bring it home, reportedly to study" (WaPo).

According to Town & Country magazine, Kennedy once heard that a dead whale had washed up on Squaw Island in Hyannis Port and “ran down to the beach with a chainsaw, cut off the whale’s head, and then bungee-corded it to the roof of the family minivan for the five-hour haul back to Mount Kisco, New York.” 

“Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” Kick Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy’s daughter, told the magazine then. “We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”

Personally, I'd keep the car windows rolled up if it were raining whale juice. But that doesn't mean Kick — who calls their kid Kick? — was lying.

It's interestingly similar to the story of Mitt Romney's dog on the car roof, which also involved kids grossed out by animal liquid leaking onto the window.

By the way, how scrupulous are you about the laws about collecting animal parts? I'm the pusillanimous type who admonishes my companion "Don't touch it!" when there's a feather lying on the trail.

What is "disgusting" to J.D. Vance?

I only found one appearance of "disgusting" in "Hillbilly Elegy": "my urine turned a disgusting brown shade" (page 183).

Here's what motivated me to look, from "JD Vance Hits Back at Jennifer Aniston, Defending ‘Childless Cat Ladies’ Remarks/The 'Friends' actress, who has been open about her fertility struggles, recently criticized Mr. Vance’s 2021 comments on social media" (NYT):

In [an Instagram] post, which drew widespread attention, [Jennifer Aniston], who has been open about her fertility struggles, wrote, “Mr. Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day.”...

“Hollywood celebrities say, ‘Oh, well, JD Vance, what if your daughter suffered fertility problems?’” Mr. Vance said [on “The Megyn Kelly Show” on SiriusXM]. “Well, first of all, that’s disgusting because my daughter is 2 years old. And second of all, if she had fertility problems, as I said in that speech, I would try everything I could to try to help her because I believe families and babies are a good thing.”

Why did he say "that's disgusting"? Was it some kind of notion that Aniston was sexualizing the toddler?! Aniston was being very tactful and delicate, and he's saying it's disgusting? That's very strange. I'm getting a gynophobia vibe. 

Here's the Vance quote that provoked Aniston: "We are effectively run in this country… by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made."

By the way, I've seen Aniston's cat, and it is disgusting:

A Minion of the Anti-Christ!

"She said that her boss once asked her to wear something sexier to work, but that she had ignored his request."

"In addition, she has for the first time started to turn down work assignments she doesn’t want to do. After going through years of unpredictable lockdowns, quarantines and the fears of getting sick during the pandemic, Ms. Chen said all she wanted now was to live in the moment with a stable job and a peaceful life. She is not worried about promotions or getting ahead. 'Just be happy every day and don’t impose things on yourself,' she said."

From "Furry Slippers and Sweatpants: Young Chinese Embrace ‘Gross Outfits’ at Work/The social media movement is the latest sign that some of China’s young people are resisting the compulsion to strive" (NYT).

"Mr. Haidt has a metaphor... Our emotions are like a galumphing elephant, and our conscious reasoning..."

"... is the rider on top. We may think it’s the rider steering the elephant, but more often it’s the other way around. Our emotions land somewhere, and then we try to rationalize why. 'Almost every social thing I’ve ever tried to do, we had to speak to the elephant, change people’s minds, change their hearts,' Mr. Haidt said. 'This is the first time I haven’t had to do that. Almost everybody’s elephant is already leaning my way.'"

From "First He Came for Cancel Culture. Now He Wants to Cancel Smartphones/The N.Y.U. professor Jonathan Haidt became a favorite in Silicon Valley for his work on what he called the 'coddling' of young people. Now, he has an idea for fixing Gen Z" (NYT).

The "idea for fixing Gen Z" is "no smartphones before high school, no social media before age 16 and no phones in schools."

“When you have a system which everyone hates, and then you have a way to escape it, it can change within a year, and that’s what happened in 1989,” Mr. Haidt said. “It’s different from the fall of communism but I expect it to be about as fast as the fall of communism. Because it’s a regime that we all hate.”

We all hate smartphones... or, I guess, kids with smartphones? I went to look up whether Haidt's name is pronounced "hate," and I ended up running into his dissertation: "Moral Judgment, Affect, and Culture, or, Is it Wrong to Eat Your Dog?":

A family's dog was killed by a car in front of their house. They had heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog's body and cooked it and ate it for dinner.

"Unhappiness with air travel took a new turn when maggots rained down on passengers on a Delta flight from Amsterdam to Detroit...."

"A passenger reportedly brought rotten fish on to the plane in a carry-on bag, and placed it in an overhead bin, before the maggots broke free...."

The Guardian reports.

"Many nurses admit: They feel repulsed by our bodies and do not want to touch us. Doctors are..."

"... more likely to view us as a waste of their time and have less desire to help us. We are hence, unsurprisingly, far more likely to die with serious health conditions that have gone undiagnosed. We are people who live in larger bodies. And the discrimination we face is incredibly harmful....I have come to believe that we need to work on changing not our bodies but the world that unjustly down-ranks us.... The truth is, fat people aren’t failing. It’s the system that is failing fat patients."

Writes Kate Manne in "Doctors have fatphobia, too — which does serious harm to patients" (WaPo).

Taking stochastic terrorism seriously.

I'm reading "Trump Floats the Idea of Executing Joint Chiefs Chairman Milley The former president is inciting violence against the nation’s top general. America’s response is distracted and numb" (Brian Klass, in The Atlantic)(analyzing Trump's Truth Social post that said Milley’s call to China on l on January 6, 2021, was 'an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH'):

Trump loves to hide behind the thin veneer of plausible deniability, but he knows exactly what he’s doing.... The suggestion is clear, and it comes from a man who has one of America’s loudest megaphones—one that is directed squarely at millions of extremists who are well armed, who insist that the government is illegitimate, and who believe that people like Milley are part of a “deep state” plot against the country. 

Academics have a formal term for exactly this type of incitement: stochastic terrorism.

"[O]nline life today descends from where it started, as a safe harbor for the computer nerds who made it."

"They were socially awkward, concerned with machines instead of people, and devoted to the fantasy of converting their impotence into power. When that conversion was achieved, and the nerds took over the world, they adopted the bravado of the jocks they once despised.... But they didn’t stop being nerds. We, the public, never agreed to adopt their worldview as the basis for political, social, or aesthetic life. We got it nevertheless. Musk’s obsession with X as a brand... reminds us that the world’s richest man is a computer geek, but one with enormous power instead of none. It calls attention to the putrid smell that suffuses the history of the internet. I’m kind of tired of pretending that the stench does not exist, as if doing otherwise would be tantamount to expressing prejudice against neurodivergence. This is a bad culture, and it always has been. Foul nerddom is part of what invented, popularized, and profited from the internet’s commercial rise. Twitter did its part to hide all that, with its unoffending avian verbs, its adorable birds, even its charming fail whale...."

Writes Ian Bogost in "The Ugly Honesty of Elon Musk’s Twitter Rebrand/The platform’s new logo seems a little juvenile. So does the internet" (The Atlantic).

Where does this intense disgust come from? Is Ian Bogost the sort of man who felt naturally privileged to run the world before those horrible nerds broke out of their cage? Or is he being funny and he's one of the nerds? Wikipedia: