"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: 

This video is an on-theme placeholder so I can put something after the jump.

Look at this:

The Lincoln Project to Ron DeSantis: "[Y]ou’re going to get absolutely destroyed.... We’re sure going to love watching you crash and burn."

"Your awkwardness, disdain for people, and general disgust with the process, won’t help while you’re shaking countless hands in distant diners or standing in the middle of a fair posing for pictures with a butter cow. You think you are owed a win, but you’ve never been attacked like Trump will wreck you. Your height, your recent and sudden weight loss, your terrible political judgment, the bad advice from domineering advisors, will all be fair game to Trump. He’s going to go through you like fingers through pudding. You’re too weak and afraid of Trump and his MAGA cult members to fight him to win. It was a brilliant move to announce on Twitter so you don’t have to talk to real people or answer real questions. It’s just you and Elon Musk – a South African who believes that the radical right deserves their own space to scream racist tropes, promote political violence, and push a bizarre culture war.... "

From an open letter to Ron DeSantis from The Lincoln Project.

What the phrase "will all be fair game to Trump" really means is that it's completely fair game to The Lincoln Project. They're the ones saying these things, but they'd like us to imagine that the bad orange man will be saying them and they're only predicting it. They got me looking up DeSantis's height, which they clearly think is an issue, but they'd like us to believe it's not them, it's Trump who has contempt for men of less than above-average height. 

"'The Wrath of Becky'/Rated R for disgusting dialogue and dripping brain matter."

I'm reading a movie review in the NYT. I haven't been paying much attention to descriptions of new movies, but this one caught my eye because of its violently angry young female protagonist. It made me think of school shootings. I sometimes wonder what the entertainment business is trying to upload into the mind of Gen Z. 

"A perfumier designed the aroma to contain hints of 'pus, blood, faecal matter and sweat' so [Jude] Law could imagine himself as [Henry VIII]...."

"At the start of filming Law said he made sure 'very subtly' to use a dab or two of the stomach-turning scent. However, when he found that the smell aided his performance, 'it became a spray-fest.' "When Jude walked in on set,” the director, Karim Aïnouz, said, 'it was just horrible.' [Alicia] Vikander, who performed sex scenes with Law, gave a look of disgust as the actor [said] 'Even the camera operators were gagging. My memory is that we were laughing a lot.... [I'd] read several interesting accounts that you could smell Henry three rooms away. His leg was rotting so badly. He hid it with rose oil. I thought it would have a great impact if I smelt awful.'"

From "Jude Law has more than a whiff of Henry VIII in Firebrand/The film received an eight-minute standing ovation after its premiere at the Cannes film festival on Sunday" (London Times).

Watch Ms. Vikander approach the putrid actor:

I asked ChatGPT, "Can you tell me about other actors who have used smelliness to enhance their performance?" In classic ChatGPT form, I got a list of 5 items:

"We could go further and read the dominance of crunchy and creamy in American diners’ preferences as metaphor: a sly enactment of the dynamic of conquest and submission..."

"... historically a favored American mode of interacting with the other. But sometimes a potato chip is just a potato chip. You can enjoy a good crunch without channeling imperialism. And imperial ambitions have hardly been confined to America."

Writes Ligaya Mishan in "Why Do American Diners Have Such a Limited Palate for Textures? Complex taste sensations play a crucial role in food around the world — but have long been shunned stateside" (NYT).

"I talked with Nader about his role much later, and he basically said the outcome was Gore’s fault for being a bad candidate."

"This conversation took place when the country was bearing down on the 2016 election, and Nader vowed not to vote for either Trump or Clinton. 'They’re not alike,' he acknowledged, but added, 'they’re both terrible.' Think that was the last time I ever consulted Ralph Nader."

Writes Gail Collins in "Repulsed by Biden vs. Trump? Tough" (NYT).

I said it a week ago: All I can think of is rooting for Bobby and Vivek.

And:

It was bad enough to go through the 2020 campaign once and it's bad to go through any presidential campaign twice, but to go through the 2020 campaign twice is just such an outrage. Why aren't people kicking and screaming as we're dragged into this?!

Gail Collins belabors what, of course, I already knew was the answer to my question. Just put up with the disgusting reality that we've got 2 parties, they do their thing, and you obediently vote for the better of the 2, even though Ralph was right and they're both terrible. 

CORRECTION: This post originally had Ruth Marcus for Gail Collins. I need to think about why I'd merged these 2 writers!