"After kissing my husband and dog good night and putting them to bed in a separate room, I put magnesium lotion on my feet, do my Duolingo lesson, pull up my meditation app and, of course, go to the bathroom one last time."

From "The Little Rituals That Prepare You for Sleep/Origami, cleaning countertops, talking to plants — here are some ways readers wind down for the evening" (NYT gift link).

Kitties and puppies that have annoyed me this morning.

There's this at the top of the home page at Smithsonian Magazine: "15 Kitten Photos That Will Make You Feel as Warm and Fuzzy as the Tiny Felines Themselves/These moments from the Smithsonian Magazine Photo Contest highlight curious kittens from around the world." We're told these are "the most adorable creatures... the cutest fluffy kittens that are sure to warm your heart." No, that is false. My heart is not warmed. This magazine's asserted mission is: "Smithsonian Media exists for the sole purpose of increasing and diffusing knowledge." What's the knowledge here? Kittens are cute?

In the canine category of my annoyance, I know it serves me right for scrolling through TikTok in the morning, but TikTok somehow saw fit to serve up this thing that I know some people must love but it's exactly the sort of thing I loathe:

"Fireworks release tiny particles that can irritate lungs and trigger asthma attacks, along with gases like carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide..."

"... and sulfur dioxide and metals including aluminum, manganese and cadmium, according to the American Lung Association. Even Freedom 250, the Trump-backed group that helped organize the event, acknowledged on its website that 'air quality will decline' and visibility 'may become compromised.' It advised children and older people to avoid extended time outdoors and advised residents to keep windows closed and to use air filters. 'It’s probably going to be incredibly hot and adding a firework show is just going to compound the air quality that’s already destined to be poor,' said Panagis Galiatsatos, a pulmonary physician.... He encouraged people with respiratory conditions like asthma to stay indoors and watch the spectacle on TV. 'Sometimes we need to just be mindful of safety versus grandiosity'.... Dogs tremble. They drool. They try to hide by cramming themselves into spaces that are too small. They have accidents indoors and tear up clothes or furniture...."

From "Bombs Bursting in Air Means Hours of Smoke and Confused Dogs in D.C./Organizers want the July 4 fireworks in the nation’s capital to break the world record. But the fun will also come with air pollution and possibly headaches for pet owners and zoo keepers" (NYT).

"The Supreme Court on Thursday allowed the Trump administration to end humanitarian protections that have permitted hundreds of thousands of people from Haiti and Syria..."

"... to live and work legally in the United States. President Trump has pushed to terminate the program, known as Temporary Protected Status, as part of his broader crack down on immigration. The program was created by Congress with bipartisan support in 1990 to provide temporary legal status to people whose home countries were deemed unsafe because of war, natural disasters or other crises."

The NYT reports in "Supreme Court Lets Trump End Deportation Protection for Haitians and Syrians/President Trump has pushed to rescind Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of people from countries convulsed by humanitarian crises."

Here's the full opinion: Mullin v. Doe. Excerpt from the majority opinion, written by Justice Alito:

None of the cited statements by either the President or the Secretary was overtly racial, and in substance all expressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications. For example, one may oppose TPS and favor tighter restrictions on immigration for economic or other reasons that have nothing to do with race. And a person without racial bias can provide a harshly unfavorable description of living conditions in some of the countries with TPS designations....Political discourse by prominent public figures is increasingly couched in terms that would have scandalized the public just a short time ago.... But whatever one may think of the cited statements, they are insufficient to show that the termination of Haiti’s TPS designation was based on the race of the Haitian people....

From the dissenting opinion by Justice Kagan:

The evidence [the Haiti plaintiffs] have offered includes statements by the President so repellent and racially inflected that the majority declines to put them in print....

"A possible referendum in Oregon on animal rights would end fishing, hunting, even pest control, just when Democrats are trying really hard not to be seen as 'weirdos again.'"

I'm reading "Protect Every Animal From Cruelty? Not in 2026, Oregon Democrats Say" (NYT).

The measure, known for now as Initiative Petition 28... would give all animals the same protections from cruelty that Oregon grants dogs and cats.... Hunting, trapping and fishing would be outlawed, along with scientific research on animals, lethal pest control and conventional livestock production.... 

The fight is in some ways very Oregon, long a proving ground for ideas that initially seemed politically impossible only to enter the mainstream, such as medical aid in dying, universal vote-by-mail and legalizing the hallucinogenic compound in magic mushrooms for therapy.

When people think of "animals" — as in "I love animals!" — they're not thinking about cockroaches and mosquitoes.

ADDED: According to Ballotopedia, the initiative "Applies to mammals (including vermin), birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish." So I think "lethal pest control" is meant to call to mind mice and rats, not the various troublesome insects. The NYT article says "all animals" and also, more than once, says "pest control." 

In the comments here, Tom T. said, "Then would come the court decisions defining pet ownership as cruelty and outlawing it." That got me looking into the argument that pet-keeping is a form of cruelty to animals. Here's an interesting Vox article from 3 years ago: "The case against pet ownership/Why we should aim for a world with fewer but happier pets." Excerpt: 

Chris sends pictures from Teotihuacán.

It's quite the climb, and you have to get back down again. Or hang out in the blazing sun:

Chris sends this snippet from a book:

Here's the book: "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" (commission earned). I'm going to read that. I can't see me climbing those steep stairs in full sunlight, but I do want to read that book.

"Dog owners love pretending dogs are these magical social connectors, but in reality they just attract endless unwanted interactions with random weirdos."

"Every walk becomes an open invitation for strangers to stop you for pointless conversations about dogs. Suddenly some bloke you’ve never seen before is standing there for 15 minutes talking about breeds, dog food, dog behaviour or telling you stories about his own mutt while you awkwardly stand there wanting to leave. Half the people that approach dog owners are bizarre as fuck too. I never once understood why I was expected to happily stand around talking to random strangers in the middle of nowhere just because they spotted a dog. And honestly, I’m convinced a lot of dog owners enjoy this because the dog gives them instant validation and attention from other people. The animal becomes a social prop."

From a rant at Reddit called "I dated a dog owner and this is what I found." I'm only quoting one point on what is a 5-point list. To get the full effect, read the whole thing.

The ranter has a very receptive audience, because it's on the Subreddit "Dogfree: We Don't Like Dogs." It's not really anti-dog so much as anti-dogpeople: "This is a subreddit for those who do not like or own dogs to discuss modern-day dog ownership and its effects on society. This is our corner of the world. Weigh-in from dog owners is off topic and disallowed. Thank you for respecting our space."

"The aura is lowkey sinister. The landscaping is busted...."

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"I kissed Bryan, a gardener, on his red leather couch. I kissed Ray, a painter, in his lofted bed and smashed my head into his ceiling fan."

"Andrew 1 kissed me at the Met in front of a painting of hell. 'Sometimes I think this is hell,' he said, gesturing around us before putting his mouth on mine. Andrew 2 seemed confident over text but wary in person. He surprised me with a smooch on a street corner while we waited for the light to change.... Haden, a sommelier, met me to walk a friend’s dog. We kissed kneeling on the welcome mat while our hands fumbled to free the pug from her harness. Thomas, a surfer, walked me to the subway after playing pool at a dive bar. He planted one on me outside the C train.... When men asked why I was single, I told them it was because my partner of 20 years walked out on me with as much warning as one might get before an earthquake.... In return, the men were unexpectedly kind. I had heard so many horror stories about the emotional capacity of the male species, but these guys told me I didn’t deserve to be treated that way...."

Writes Erin Chack, in "From Kissing One Guy in 20 Years to 11 in a Month My husband leaving nearly broke me. I tried to put myself back together by dating for the first time in my life" (NYT)(gift link, because I think it's a well-written essay).

"He likes to do whatever I want him to do.... He is always looking at me and smiling.... I wanted him to dig, and he just did exactly what I told him to do."

Said Barbara Collins, quoted in "Woman, 96, enlists 150-pound dog to plant spring flowers: She points, he digs/A video of Barbara Collins and Chewy gardening together has amassed millions of views on social media" (WaPo)(gift link, so you can see the pictures of the tiny old woman with the gigantic dogs).

This is another one of those mainstream media reports on what's in social media. Here's Chewy's TikTok,  account, with much better coverage of the old lady and what is her granddaughter's dog.

Sample video:

"Meta’s new gizmos are ordinary-looking Ray-Bans and Oakleys that have been juiced to the gills with hidden technology..."

"... Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, two tiny speakers, five microphones, a wide-angle camera.... [T]he real selling point is A.I. — an opportunity to chitchat with a disembodied superintelligence that can see and hear everything you do... So what do my miraculous sunglasses tell me? Many things. They inform me, in the voice of Princess Anna from 'Frozen,' that my dog is a golden retriever mix (he is not) and that a tree I am looking at is probably an oak (it is not). They tell me to walk north when I know I should be walking south. One afternoon, on a sunny stroll, I stop to admire a bright red cardinal singing its heart out in a tree. 'Hey, Meta,' I say. 'What kind of bird is that chirping in the tree?' My sunglasses make their little ding-dong noise, analyzing the world. Finally, they speak. 'I don’t see a bird in the tree or hear any chirping,' they say. I point directly at the bird, which is still chirping. 'I don’t see a bird in the tree where you’re pointing,' my sunglasses say, cheerfully. 'Just bare branches and sky.'..."

Writes Sam Anderson, in "I Feel So Sorry for My A.I. Sunglasses/Plenty of people hate Mark Zuckerberg’s superintelligent, supercharged spectacles. I was ready to hate them, too" (NYT).

There's your future — just bare branches and sky

"It seems like a kind of arms race. You have people becoming more and more assertive about including dogs everywhere and then..."

"... on the other side, people becoming more and more assertive about their resistance to having dogs everywhere."

Says Jessica Pierce, "a bioethicist studying human-dog relations," quoted in "Where Does a Dog Belong? In restaurants or grocery stores? Tensions between canine lovers and other New Yorkers are boiling over" (New York Magazine).

“If there wasn’t dog shit all over the sidewalks, then I don’t think dogs would necessarily be coming to a boiling point,” one Greenpoint dog owner in his early 40s reflected. It wasn’t as though he had never pushed the boundaries with his 50-pound supermutt. Yet if he didn’t always follow the letter of the law, he believed he observed the spirit, though he understood that not everyone agreed. Recently, he’d been in Transmitter Park with his dog — who, yes, was off-leash, but people do that there — when a guy in the playground area with his kid leaned over the fence. “He was not even in the vicinity of where my dog was,” he says. “He said, ‘Excuse me, you see the sign? It says NO DOGS.’ And I kind of looked at him like, Hey, you must be new here.” Why did he feel so entitled, the guy wanted to know. “And so I told him, ‘Hey, man, you’re here with your family, and I’m here with my family.” In seemingly every argument, someone brings up children. “Well, my dog,” someone inevitably says, “is better behaved and less disruptive and more pleasant than your disgusting child.”...

AND: From the comments over there:

If your dog could talk.

And here's Billy Collins in a similar vein:

With the Corgis taking the lead....

"It seems that the seven dogs stolen from their owners escaped from an illegal transport truck and made their way back home. They say that [with the Corgis taking the lead], they crossed highways and fields together, traveling about 17 km to return to their respective homes" (translated from the Japanese).

所有者から盗まれた7匹の犬が、違法な輸送トラックから脱走して家にかえったらしい。
彼らは【コーギーがリーダーとなり】高速道路や野原を横断して約17kmを一緒に旅してそれぞれの家に帰宅したんだって

もう一度言う･･
【コーギーがリーダー】pic.twitter.com/qeUMTeVpbh

— コーギーつむぎ🧂🍞 (@corgi_tumugi) March 24, 2026

More here.

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?

"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).

"My client’s magazine is a parody that features humorous pictures of dogs, while Vogue is a fashion magazine that features serious photographs of human models."

"I don’t think anyone would have difficulty recognizing the difference."

Said the lawyer for Dogue, quoted in "Vogue Says There’s Only Room for One Top Dogue/The creator of Dogue, a small canine fashion magazine (circulation: under 100), is being sued by Condé Nast, the publisher of Vogue, for trademark infringement" (NYT).

And here's a quote from Olga Portnaya, the creator and editor in chief of Dogue: "Art and culture have always evolved through reinterpretation and dialogue. For me, this is a larger fight: I’m not just fighting for my own work and our community, but for other independent creators."

Well, there is Teen Vogue, so you might think there'd also be a Dog Vogue — some people buy expensive clothes and accessories for their dogs — if Vogue had a dog magazine, it might very well be called Dogue, so I do think there's some potential for confusion.

Which tag should I give this post?

Lawsuits I hope will fail

Lawsuits I hope will succeed

Neither

 

pollcode.com free polls

"But a recent tragedy-exploiting television series about John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette features a character using my name and presents her as me."

Writes Daryl Hannah, in the NYT.

The choice to portray her as irritating, self-absorbed, whiny and inappropriate was no accident. In discussing the show, “Love Story,” one of its producers explained: “Given how much we’re rooting for John and Carolyn, Daryl Hannah occupies a space where she’s an adversary to what you want narratively in the story.” Storytelling requires tension. It often requires an obstacle. But a real, living person is not a narrative device. 

There is also a gendered dimension to this thinking. Popular culture has long elevated certain women by portraying others as rivals, obstacles or villains. Isn’t it textbook misogyny to tear down one woman in order to build up another?... 

I have never used cocaine.... I have never desecrated any family heirloom.... I never compared Jacqueline Onassis’ death to a dog’s....

"A love of dogs is somewhat of a tradition for French leaders: the past six presidents all owned at least one black Labrador."

"The two owned by Nicolas Sarkozy, and a chihuahua, reportedly caused damage totalling tens of thousands of euros at the Élysée Palace by chewing on 200-year-old furniture in the Silver Salon. President Macron’s dog, Nemo, was once filmed urinating on an ornamental fireplace in a presidential meeting, and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s was a gift from the late Queen and nicknamed Sandringham Samba...."

From "Can the French love of dogs be transformed into election success? Doggy food banks and shared human-dog drinking fountains are among the promises on offer as candidates for the local elections try to win over voters" (London Times).

Check the reaction that's closest to yours.

What good is culture if you can't piss on it?

Why black Labs? Is it racist? Samba... really?

I want political promises for America's dogs!

It's all about love. Love is the answer.

 

pollcode.com free polls

"Cow Licking."

I've been a huge admirer of Georgia O'Keeffe since I first saw the Life Magazine article "Georgia O'Keeffe, on the Ghost Ranch." That was 1968, and I was 17. I've looked at so many of her pictures, in person and in books, but I had never seen "Cow Licking" until this morning. 

I love it. Don't you? But let me tell you how I happened to run across it this morning. It was 5:43 a.m., and I'd been downstairs in breakfast-and-blog mode for a while when I got this text from upstairs:

Well, the Book of Leviticus and Deuteronomy
The law of the jungle and the sea are your only teachers
In the smoke of the twilight on a milk-white steed
Michelangelo indeed could've carved out your features
Resting in the fields, far from the turbulent space
Half asleep near the stars with a small dog licking your face

I know what that is. It's Meade, sending me a Bob Dylan lyric and boldfacing the part about a small dog licking the face of whoever "you" is. Who is this person whose only teachers — law professors — are Leviticus, Deuteronomy, the jungle, and the sea? He rode in on a white horse, he's buff and handsome, and now he's lolling about in a field with a small dog licking his face. Maybe you remember being told that this song, "Jokerman," is about Jesus.

I don't know about that. I see that Dylan said it was something "mystical" that came upon him down there in the Caribbean — something "inspired by these spirits they call jumbis."

I didn't get far into that because Meade texted "What is that famous painting?" And he didn't mean that Dürer painting that is the first image in the "Jokerman" video, that image that just about everyone thinks is Jesus but is the artist himself, Albrecht Dürer:

Meade was thinking about something else: "Black man, lying supine on desert sand with stars above and a small dog."

I immediately thought of Henri Rousseau's "Sleeping Gypsy":

Yes, that's not a dog. It made me think of this scene in a Chaplin movie I'd watched upstairs last night while Meade was watching basketball downstairs:

Texting this morning from upstairs, Meade thought it might be a different Rousseau painting. I found "La Noce," which has a "comically oversized and awkward" dog that, we're told, takes "the eye deep into the composition" and asserts the artist's "position as the master of spatial paradox."

I text-typo'd "that’s the only rousseau with a god that i found."

I asked Grok, "What's that famous painting with a dog licking a person's face." And then "Is there ANY famous painting showing any kind of tongue-licking?" and "Dog or person or other animal — now I'm just looking for licking. I'm thinking licking isn't seen as something worth painting — too in-the-moment and active to be frozen into a still image. But maybe somebody did it. All I can think of is that Rolling Stones logo."

And that's how I found "Cow Licking."

UNANSWERED QUESTION: Why did Meade send me that Dylan lyric and boldface "with a small dog licking your face"? I think it had something to do with the rumor that Mayor Mamdani has a secret plan to run all the dogs out of New York City.

Juiciest dog rumor since "They're eating the dogs."