"The National Park Service is moving to prohibit hunters on some public lands in Alaska from baiting black bears with doughnuts and using spotlights..."

"... to shoot hibernating bears and cubs in their dens, techniques allowed by the Trump administration but considered inhumane by conservationists. A rule proposed by the National Park Service on Friday would essentially restore restrictions that existed during the Obama administration but were gutted under President Donald J. Trump. Under the new policy, hunters on Alaska wildlife preserves would also no longer be able to kill adult wolves and pups in their dens, or use motorboats to shoot swimming caribou.... Sara Amundson, president of the Humane Society Legislative Fund, issued a statement calling the new rule 'a victory for Alaska’s iconic wildlife species. Baiting bears just to blast them over a pile of doughnuts is just wrong'...."

From "Biden Moves to End Doughnut Lures and Other Bear Hunting Tactics in Alaska/A new rule proposed by the administration would also bar hunters from invading wolf dens to kill pups" (NYT).

A lunchtime TikTok break. I've got 8 selections. Let me know what you like.

1. Feeling really blessed and lucky to hear the northern bobwhite.

2.  Joe Biden explains sex.

3. The interior decoration style of various men, based on their clothing style.

4. A woman is mystified by the phenomenon that is pick-up basketball.

5. A cathedral of milk and other AI-generated images.

6. I don't usually select videos about dementia, however good they are, but this one is an exception — about remembering love.

7. The most steadfast sister comforts her brother.

8. Certified vibesmith teaches you how to vibe professionally.

"In Mississippi in 1947, two Black teenagers asked for fried chicken and watermelon before they went to the electric chair. Professor Green painted one ornate platter for each boy."

From "Julie Green, Artist Who Memorialized Inmates’ Last Suppers, Dies at 60/For more than two decades, she rendered death row prisoners’ requests for a last meal on a series of plates, bringing a human face to capital punishment" (NYT). 

She planned to paint the meals until capital punishment was abolished, or until she had made 1,000 plates, whichever came first. In September, she painted her 1,000th plate, an oval platter with a single familiar image: the bottle of Coca-Cola requested by a Texas man in 1997. She died a few weeks later....

The plates are white china with the image of the food done in cobalt blue glaze. She got the idea to do this project when she read about a man whose last meal choice was glazed doughnuts. The obituary writer does not note the glaze/glaze inspiration/coincidence. It's just put there for us to see.

Nor does the obituary discuss race, even though — out of all those 1,000 plates — one of the choices it highlights is the fried chicken and watermelon that 2 black teenagers wanted. For many years, it has seemed verboten to mention fried chicken or watermelon in connection with black people. What is it about this context that made it seem okay?

Is it just that Julie Green — who looks white in the photograph — has died? Is it that she meant to express empathy for the condemned? But she systematically commemorated any condemned person who was given a meal choice. The obituary chose which examples to isolate. I was surprised to see this breach of taboo.

The author of the obituary is the NYT style writer Penelope Green. No relation to Julie Green, I presume. I see I have a tag for Penelope Green, and I see that I have especially enjoyed her writing — about Marie Kondo (here), Cat Marnell (here), and new urban communal living, blogged here: "And another thing I like about Penelope Green is: She put 'social justice' in quotes." 

I wonder what Penelope Green really thought about Julie Green's art project. An obituary writer can't inject criticism. Or can she?

"A ban against luring mothers from their dens with doughnuts and other treats will be lifted."

"Trump administration makes it easier for hunters to kill bear cubs and wolf pups in Alaska" (WaPo).

With a final rule published Tuesday in the Federal Register, the Trump administration is ending a five-year-old ban on the practices, which also include shooting swimming caribou from a boat and targeting animals from airplanes and snowmobiles. It will take effect in 30 days. State officials primarily composed of hunters in Alaska argued that the October 2015 regulations ordered by the Obama administration infringed on traditional native hunting practices and were more restrictive than what is permitted on state land....

Native... doughnuts... I need more context here.

ADDED: Speaking of ethnicity and doughnuts:

Now, for something very nice pic.twitter.com/FWpz2as4bs

— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) June 9, 2020

"A man was found dead Monday morning after apparently falling through the roof vent of a women’s bathroom at the Colorado State Fairgrounds in Pueblo."

According to The Denver Post, the sheriff's office said: "No foul play is suspected."

Also in The Denver Post: "A 42-year-old man choked to death early Sunday at Voodoo Doughnut on East Colfax Avenue in Denver."

KUSA-Channel 9 reported that witnesses say [Travis] Malouff was doing a doughnut challenge before he died — trying to eat a half-pound doughnut in 80 seconds or less.

At the Do-Nuts Café...

... you can get your fill.

(And if you've got to shop, please shop through The Althouse Amazon Portal.)

Germans take over our coffee and doughnuts.

JAB Holding Company — after buying up Peet’s Coffee & Tea, Stumptown Coffee Roasters, Caribou Coffee, and Keurig Green Mountain (not to mention Einstein Brothers Bagels) — takes over Krispy Kreme.

ADDED: Speaking of Germans and doughnuts:

There is a misconception that [President John F.] Kennedy made a risible error by saying Ich bin ein Berliner. By using the indefinite article "ein," he supposedly changed the meaning of the sentence from "I am a citizen of Berlin" to "I am a jelly doughnut."

The indefinite article is omitted in German when speaking of an individual's profession or residence but is still used when speaking in a figurative sense. Since the President was not literally from Berlin but declaring his solidarity with its citizens, "Ich bin ein Berliner" was the only way to express what he wanted to say.

"Man kicked out of Camp Randall pranks UW police with 240 coconut doughnuts."

"This was meant as a harmless way to both show general gratitude for the job you do (which is awesome) but slight disdain for my treatment Saturday (which was not so awesome)," said the anonymous man. "Donuts are awesome, but coconut donuts are not so awesome."

I was excited about another Democratic candidates debate, but then I saw it was just a "forum," that is, a series of individual interviews.

Why is that called a forum? Candidates sit for interviews all the time, so what's interesting about a sequence of interviews? That it was in an auditorium full of people rather than a closed up studio? Voices reverberated. Applause interrupted.

I sat through the whole thing, not that I wasn't reading or doing crosswords on my iPad most of the time. I figured there'd be a transcript in the morning, and I could cherry pick a few things I'd remembered. When I woke up this morning, before I went searching for the transcript — never to find one — I pushed myself to remember something from last night. Come on, Althouse, think. I thought of one thing: Bernie Sanders is annoyed by the sounds high-tech devices make. It's somewhere in here...



... along with "How many pair of underwear do I have?" and "Am I really Larry David?" (which is a reference to this, on SNL). Ah, yes, the noisy tech at 1:30. He also says "People think I'm grumpy."

Now, why did I watch all that? I do not know. I also remember that Martin O'Malley said he owns a kilt, but only because somebody gave it to him, and that Hillary Clinton regards "hush puppies" as both a food and a type of shoes. I can't believe I spent my Friday night on that, but I did go out for a late lunch...



... and I sometimes wonder if anything makes sense anymore. I can only hope that Bad Lip Reading doesn't pass up this "forum" because it's not a debate. I really do look there for meaning. Meade and I have watched the last debate on BLR dozens of times...



... Can I help you?!

"Ariana Grande Is Not Here for Your Sexist Interview Questions."

I'm only posting about this because I already have an Ariana Grande tag. That tag only has one other post and it's a post that contains the phrase "I'm only posting because...."

The other post is "Thanks for licking the doughnut, Ariana Grande." She's the celebrity who licked a doughnut that was on a tray left unsupervised in a doughnut shop where anyone could just come up and lick it.

I appreciated her calling our attention to unattended doughnuts, and now she's applying her celebrity power to the problem of radio show hosts asking female celebrities questions like "If you had to choose between your phone and makeup, which would you give up?"

As for the doughnuts tag, which this post also gets, it's not languishing so unused I wish I'd never created it. It's rolling along. This is its 33rd appearance.

I wanted to illustrate this post with an image of a rolling doughnut. (Yeah, here's a good one.) But searching for "rolling doughnut" turned up "15 Things Kurt Vonnegut Said Better Than Anyone Else Ever Has Or Will," and one of them is: "Why don't you take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut? Why don't you take a flying fuck at the mooooooooooooon?"

#1 on that list is "I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'" I read that out loud to Meade without identifying the context and he thought I was reading something I'd written. His reaction was: "I think it's below your normal writing."

And that's it for the second Ariana Grande blog post.

Thanks for licking the doughnut, Ariana Grande.

"Ariana Grande and her boyfriend walk into a California doughnut shop. While the employee walks away from the counter, they lick some doughnuts set out on the counter and laugh about it. When the employee comes back with a tray of doughnuts, Grande says disdainfully, 'What is the f— is that? I hate Americans. I hate America.'"

Now, most people are taking shots at Arianna. With good reason, of course. But I'm not going to pile on. I'm only posting because I see another angle, one that's not getting attention.

The doughnut shop put big trays full of doughnuts out, on top of the glass case, at mouth level, where they will tantalize and be accessible to all sorts of people, including those with low impulse control and children (in arms) and other childish individuals. It's easy to see — in the now-famous security footage — how the placement of the doughnuts leads to playful foolery that escalates from "Mmmm, I want" to "I could just bite that" to "Go ahead! Do it!" and "I dare you!" And then some naughty girl licks it and her boyfriend laughs and laughs. If that happened once — we caught Ariana — it happened more than once. I'm glad the weakness in doughnut shop sanitation has been exposed. Now, quit putting them out on top of the case. It should be a health code violation. Even without anyone licking, they're still breathing on them.

As for "I hate Americans. I hate America." Yes, you can trash her. But she said that as a joke, and just as I bet she's not the first person to lick doughnuts, I'll bet she's not the first person to use the line "I hate Americans, I hate America" as a comic expression of minor irritation. The "What the fuck is that?" preface indicates, I think, that she believed the latest tray of doughnuts was so inferior that it was funny to act like they weren't even doughnuts. The followup "I hate Americans, I hate America" is, in this view, over-the-top faux-drama, similar to saying "Everything has gone to hell in this country," just because the latest batch of doughnuts isn't the kind you like. It's a type of humor. You had to be there, in the setting, as the young lady or her boyfriend, having some fun goofing around.

It was almost Old Testament God day on the blog, but doughnuts edged Him out.

It's strange the way the blog plays out sometimes. When the first 2 posts by chance have a common element, you think a theme is striking. Old Testament God appeared in Post #1 today, and then, damned if the Old Testament didn't rear its head in Post #2. But a tiny frog rode into town on a beetle, and things were never the same. Next thing you know, Scott Walker was walkin' here, and we were ass-deep in doughnuts. And so doughnuts it was. I spent my afternoon pulling doughnuts out of the hot fat that is my Kindle collection. So here's the Krispy Kreme of my Kindle:

David Foster Wallace, "Up, Simba" (an essay about following the 2000 John McCain campaign, in "Consider the Lobster"):

About two-thirds of the way down the aisle is a little area that has the bus’s refrigerator and the liquor cabinets... and the bathroom.... There’s also a little counter area piled with Krispy Kreme doughnut boxes, and a sink whose water nobody ever uses.... Krispy Kremes are sort of the Deep South equivalent of Dunkin’ Donuts, ubiquitous and cheap and great in a sort of what-am-I-doing-eating-dessert-for-breakfast way, and are a cornerstone of what Jim C. calls the Campaign Diet.

Hunter S. Thompson, "The 'Hashbury' Is the Capital of the Hippies" (an essay in "The Great Shark Hunt"):

A 22-year-old student was recently sentenced to two years in prison for telling an undercover narcotics agent where to buy some marijuana. “Love” is the password in the Haight-Ashbury, but paranoia is the style. Nobody wants to go to jail.

At the same time, marijuana is everywhere. People smoke it on the sidewalks, in doughnut shops, sitting in parked cars or lounging on the grass in Golden Gate Park. Nearly everyone on the streets between 20 and 30 is a “head,” a user, either of marijuana, LSD, or both. To refuse a proffered “joint” is to risk being labeled a “nark”—narcotics agent— a threat and a menace to almost everybody. With a few loud exceptions, it is only the younger hippies who see themselves as a new breed. “A completely new thing in this world, man.” The ex-beatniks among them, many of whom are now making money off the new scene, incline to the view that hippies are, in fact, second-generation beatniks and that everything genuine in the Haight-Ashbury is about to be swallowed— like North Beach and the Village— in a wave of publicity and commercialism.

Mary Karr, "The Liars' Club: A Memoir":

The next day right after dawn, I pulled down my BB gun from the top bookshelf and went on a rampage that prefigured what Charles Whitman — the guy who shot and killed thirteen people from the tower at the University of Texas — would do a few years later. I stuck a can of hot tamales with a can opener in a paper bag and fixed myself a jelly jar of tea. While all the other kids were still sitting around in their pajamas eating their doughnuts with powdered sugar and watching cartoons, I was sneaking across the blackberry field behind our house . There was a lone chinaberry tree at the field’s center, and I shinnied up it, then pulled my BB gun after me to wait for the Carter kids. They’d planned to berrypick that morning so their mama could make a cobbler. I’d overheard talk about it.

Mary Roach, "Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal":

To experience taste, the molecules of the tastant— the thing one is tasting— need to dissolve in liquid. Liquid flows into the microscopic canyons of the tongue’s papillae, coming into contact with the “buds” of taste receptor cells that cover them. That’s one reason to be grateful for saliva. Additionally, it explains the appeal of dunking one’s doughnuts.

 J. Maarten Troost, "Headhunters on My Doorstep: A True Treasure Island Ghost Story":

I had always imagined your typical twelve-step meeting as occurring in some grim, darkened chamber full of cigarette smoke, bad coffee, and doughnuts, filled with fat, spiteful old men telling you to take the cotton out of your ears and stuff it into your mouth and listen for a change, why don’tcha, but these days, you’re more likely to find a meeting in a smoke-free hall serving herbal tea, filled with people discussing Bikram Yoga and their latest marathon time. This made sense to me, of course. Try as we might, the word moderation leaves many of us scratching our heads. Why run one mile when you can run ten? Why do half an hour of sun salutations when you can do ninety minutes of pretzel-like contortions in a 105 degree sauna? More is better. Always.

Mark Twain, "At the Appetite Cure":

"My system disguised—covert starvation.  Grape-cure, bath-cure, mud-cure—it is all the same. The grape and the bath and the mud make a show and do a trifle of the work— the real work is done by the surreptitious starvation. The patient accustomed to four meals and late hours—at both ends of the day—now consider what he has to do at a health resort. He gets up at 6 in the morning. Eats one egg. Tramps up and down a promenade two hours with the other fools. Eats a butterfly. Slowly drinks a glass of filtered sewage that smells like a buzzard's breath. Promenades another two hours, but alone; if you speak to him he says anxiously, "My water!—I am walking off my water!—please don't interrupt," and goes stumping along again. Eats a candied roseleaf. Lies at rest in the silence and solitude of his room for hours; mustn't read, mustn't smoke. The doctor comes and feels of his heart, now, and his pulse, and thumps his breast and his back and his stomach, and listens for results through a penny flageolet; then orders the man's bath—half a degree, Reaumur, cooler than yesterday. After the bath another egg. A glass of sewage at three or four in the afternoon, and promenade solemnly with the other freaks. Dinner at 6—half a doughnut and a cup of tea. Walk again. Half-past 8, supper—more butterfly; at 9, to bed. Six weeks of this regime—think of it. It starves a man out and puts him in splendid condition. It would have the same effect in London, New York, Jericho—anywhere."

Kurt Vonnegut, "Slaughterhouse Five":

“Go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut,” murmured Paul Lazzaro in his azure nest. “Go take a flying fuck at the moon.”

Lena Dunham, "Not That Kind of Girl":

Everything took on a hazy romance: having a pimple, eating a doughnut, being cold. Nothing was a tragedy, and everything was a joke. I had waited a long time to be a woman, a long time to venture away from my parents, and now I had sex, once with two guys in a week, and bragged about it like a divorcée who was getting back in the game.

Thomas Sowell, "The Thomas Sowell Reader":

At the heart of the affirmative action approach is the notion that statistical disparities show discrimination. No dogma has taken a deeper hold with less evidence—or in the face of more massive evidence to the contrary.

A recent story in the Wall Street Journal revealed that more than four-fifths of all the doughnut shops in California are owned by Cambodians. That is about the same proportion as blacks among basketball stars. Clearly, neither of these disparities is due to discrimination against whites.

Robert M. Gates,  "Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War":

When I walked in and saw coffee and doughnuts, I thought I would get along just fine with these folks. The traffic coming in from Midway Airport was awful, and Hillary Clinton was late. She had dispensed with a police escort complete with lights and sirens, clearly having an elected official’s sensitivity to ticking off everyone on the road. I did not have that sensitivity....

Andy Warhol, "The Andy Warhol Diaries":

I asked Reese how he started in crystals and he said that when he was little, “Mr. Morning” came to see him. When he was a baby. He saw “Mr. Morning,” but nobody else did. And then in the army he got interested in electricity and the body and all this stuff. Reese was talking about his trip where he went around sticking crystals all over the pyramids and the Wailing Wall. And he eats things like coffee and doughnuts. But he cures the coffee by passing the crystal over it ten times.... Reese is Episcopalian, so I feel better with him than with the Jewish crystal people, somehow, because knowing he believes in Christ I don’t have to worry that crystals might be somehow against Christ.

Tom Wolfe, "Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers":

Sixty strong, sixty loud, sixty wild, they come swinging into the great plush gold-and-marble lobby of the San Francisco City Hall with their hot dogs, tacos, Whammies, Frostees, Fudgsicles, french fries, Eskimo Pies, Awful-Awfuls, Sugar-Daddies, Sugar-Mommies, Sugar-Babies, chocolate-covered frozen bananas, malted milks, Yoo-Hoos, berry pies, bubble gums, cotton candy, Space Food sticks, Frescas, Baskin-Robbins boysenberry-cheesecake ice-cream cones, Milky Ways, M&Ms, Tootsie Pops, Slurpees, Drumsticks, jelly doughnuts, taffy apples, buttered Karamel Korn, root-beer floats, Hi-C punches, large Cokes, 7UPs, 3 Musketeer bars, frozen Kool-Aids—with the Dashiki Chief in the vanguard....

The young guy from the Mayor’s office retreats... Much consternation and concern in the lobby of City Hall... the hurricane could get worse. The little devils could start screaming, wailing, ululating, belching, moaning, giggling, making spook-show sounds... filling the very air with a hurricane of malted milk, an orange blizzard of crushed ice from the Slurpees, with acid red horrors like the red from the taffy apples and the jelly from the jelly doughnuts, with globs of ice cream in purple sheets of root beer, with plastic straws and huge bilious waxed cups and punch cans and sprinkles of Winkles, with mustard from off the hot dogs and little lettuce shreds from off the tacos, with things that splash and things that plop and things that ooze and stick, that filthy sugar moss from off the cotton candy, and the Karamel Korn and the butterscotch daddy figures from off the Sugar-Daddies and the butterscotch babies from off the Sugar-Babies, sugar, water, goo, fried fat, droplets, driplets, shreds, bits, lumps, gums, gobs, smears, from the most itchy molecular Winkle to the most warm moist emetic mass of 3 Musketeers bar and every gradation of solubility and liquidity known to syrup—filling the air, choking it, getting trapped gurgling and spluttering in every glottis— 

And it was here that Bill Jackson proved himself to be a brilliant man and a true artist, a rare artist, of the mau-mau....

 Barack Obama, "Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance":

“We’re interested in the best possible outcome for the residents,” Ms. Broadnax shouted over her shoulder. We followed her into a large room where several gloomy officials were already seated around a conference table. Ms. Broadnax remarked on how cute the children were and offered everyone coffee and doughnuts.

“We don’t need doughnuts,” Linda said. “We need answers.”

John Steinbeck, "The Red Pony":

“There’s two doughnuts in the kitchen for you,” she said. Jody slid to the kitchen, and returned with half of one of the doughnuts already eaten and his mouth full. His mother asked him what he had learned in school that day, but she didn’t listen to his doughnut-muffled answer. She interrupted, “Jody, tonight see you fill the wood-box clear full. Last night you crossed the sticks and it wasn’t only about half full. Lay the sticks flat tonight. And Jody , some of the hens are hiding eggs, or else the dogs are eating them. Look about in the grass and see if you can find any nests.”

James Thurber, "Writings & Drawings":

I got back to New York in early June, 1926, with ten dollars, borrowed enough to hold on until July in a rented room on West 13th Street, and began sending short pieces to the New Yorker, eating in doughnut shops, occasionally pilfering canapés at cocktail parties (anchovies, in case you don’t know, are not good for breakfast). My pieces came back so fast I began to believe the New Yorker must have a rejection machine.

Howard Zinn, "A People's History of the United States":

At Boston University, a thousand students kept vigil for five days and nights in the chapel, supporting an eighteen-year-old deserter, Ray Kroll....

On a Sunday morning, federal agents showed up at the Boston University chapel, stomped their way through aisles clogged with students, smashed down doors, and took Kroll away. From the stockade, he wrote back to friends: “I ain’t gonna kill; it’s against my will. . . .” A friend he had made at the chapel brought him books, and he noted a saying he had found in one of them: “What we have done will not be lost to all Eternity. Everything ripens at its time and becomes fruit at its hour.”

The GI antiwar movement became more organized. Near Fort Jackson, South Carolina, the first “GI coffeehouse” was set up, a place where soldiers could get coffee and doughnuts, find antiwar literature, and talk freely with others....

David Sedaris, "Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls":

I find a half-empty box of doughnuts and imagine it flung from the dimpled hand of a dieter, wailing, “Get this away from me.” Perhaps the jumbo beer cans and empty bottles of booze are tossed for a similar reason. It’s about denial, I tell myself, or, no, it’s about anger, for isn’t every piece of litter a way of saying “fuck you”?

Cass Sunstein, "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness":

Self-control issues are most likely to arise when choices and their consequences are separated in time. At one extreme are what might be called investment goods, such as exercise, flossing, and dieting....

At the other extreme are what might be called sinful goods: smoking, alcohol, and jumbo chocolate doughnuts are in this category. We get the pleasure now and suffer the consequences later. Again we can use the New Year’s resolution test: how many people vow to smoke more cigarettes, drink more martinis, or have more chocolate donuts in the morning next year? Both investment goods and sinful goods are prime candidates for nudges. Most (nonanorexic) people do not need any special encouragement to eat another brownie, but they could use some help exercising more.

And then there's the choice of how to spell doughnut/donut. Isn’t the failure to pick one spelling and stick to it a way of saying "fuck you"? That question is me nudging Cass Sunstein. We'll see if he does better in the future.

And that's all the Krispy Kindle Kremes for now, so — as they say in the azure nest — Go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut.

A link to an article titled "How to Stay Married to an Attorney" seems to be the best answer to the question...

... whether a doughnut is dessert if you eat it for breakfast and it's all you eat. 

ADDED: Commenters say they can't get to the Facebook post I'm linking, so I'll copy a few things. First, David Lat writes:

My latest debate with Zach Shemtob: is a doughnut a dessert? Zach's position: a doughnut is always and inherently a dessert. My position: a doughnut eaten in the morning is breakfast; a doughnut eaten later in the day is a dessert. (This issue is the subject of heated debate on Yahoo! Answers and elsewhere on the web.)

There are many answers, including my "It depends on whether you spell it 'donut' or 'doughnut'" — linking to my old post "Such proper ideas of doughnuts" —  and the one I thought most apt was just a link to a Wikihow piece titled "How to Stay Married to an Attorney."

Out-olding the nouveau old.

Buzzfeed has a listicle titled "20 Things New Yorkers Older Than 40 Did/And will never do again. It was a great time to be a New Yorker," and there's some pushback in the comments from the older than old:

May I humbly request that this be retitled to 20 Things New Yorkers Older Than 30 Have Experienced? Most of these are from the late 90's or close by and as a 33 year old New Yorker I've experienced...

There was this lovely camaderie between 81-year-olds:

My heart aches to know so many things about New York City are gone forever. My father was born in Yorkville and my mother on Wooster Street in the Village, which is now part of NYU dorms. Saw my first play, The King and I, at the St. James and realized, at 18, that Yul Brenner's baldness could be very sexy. Worked five years in the Woolworth Building downtown, which once was the tallest building in the U.S. For seafood you couldn't beat The Captain's Table in the Village, and for chicken pot pie, The Waverly Inn, also in the Village. Pork chops on an open grille? Peter's Backyard on Tenth Street. Ice skating in Rockefeller Plaza on Saturday mornings and then on to the Automat for those little brown pots of baked beans. I stayed at the Barbizon Hotel when it was still "women only." I have traveled around the world, working for four airlines, and New York City thrills me to this day when I fly over it (not sure if you can still do this after 9/11). Anyone care to guess my age? It is 81! Oh, and I was born, of all places, in Brooklyn!

And:

I'm also 81. Lived in Yorkville, the Village, East Village, finally Soho. Left in 1970. My favorite at the Waverly Inn was the veal ala marsala, $2.

Hey, they are contemporaries of Holden Caulfield! It was the mention of ice skating in Rockefeller Plaza that made me think of this. Caulfield is a fictional character, but we may say that he was "born," nonetheless, and calculate the year as 1933, which would make him 81 today, if he stayed alive. In "Catcher in the Rye," we see his New York City, presumably the city of those Buzzfeed commenters.

Would Holden Caulfield have read Buzzfeed... and commented?

Did Holden Caulfield ever eat the veal ala marsala at the Waverly Inn? What did Holden Caulfield eat in "Catcher in the Rye"? There's breakfast:

I had quite a large breakfast, for me — orange juice, bacon and eggs, toast and coffee. Usually I just drink some orange juice. I’m a very light eater. I really am. That’s why I’m so damn skinny. I was supposed to be on this diet where you eat a lot of starches and crap, to gain weight and all, but I didn’t ever do it. When I’m out somewhere, I generally just eat a Swiss cheese sandwich and a malted milk. It isn’t much, but you get quite a lot of vitamins in the malted milk. H. V. Caulfield. Holden Vitamin Caulfield.

Now, there's a thing New Yorkers did and will never do again: worry about being too skinny. And if you're worried about getting fat, consider the Holden Caulfield diet, just a Swiss cheese sandwich and a malted. In fact, after that skating at Rockefeller Plaza, Holden Caulfield does eat a Swiss cheese sandwich and a malted. Another Holden Caulfield diet idea is be depressed:

So I went in this very cheap-looking restaurant and had doughnuts and coffee. Only, I didn't eat the doughnuts. I couldn't swallow them too well. The thing is, if you get very depressed about something, it's hard as hell to swallow.

Potato doughnuts dipped in chocolate.

Delicious!

"The Cronut – the US pastry sensation that must cross the Atlantic."

Big American trends that I'm only hearing about because of a foreign news report.

Wait 'til they hear about deep-fried Twinkies.

UPDATE: Kringle.

"This means he’s running for president. He’s showing people he can get his weight in control. It was the one thing holding him back."

Chris Christie got stomach surgery to lose weight. This happened last February, and he went to some effort to keep it secret up until now.

If Christie runs, will a big weight loss after surgery help him be successful?
	Yes, because people will empathize with his struggle and admire his accomplishment.
	Yes, because being fat would have been held against him.
	No, because he's denying others the comfort of thinking it's okay to be fat.
	No, because the use of surgery instead of willpower fails to demonstrate character.
pollcode.com free polls

IN THE COMMENTS: CEO-MMP said:

I only skimmed the article (cuz I detest Christie), but it sounded like he did it directly after he went on Letterman and did donut shots and said his weight was fine.

Which suggests he might be less than honest. Of course, his conduct in the last year or so also suggests that.

He also did an interview with Barbara Walters in December which engaged with the issue whether a very fat person can be President. I think those 2 performances were done to test public opinion and the surgery is evidence of the results of that test. There was the idea that perhaps people would think that being fat was endearing, humanizing, and part of his overall delightful personality. He went on 2 prominent shows, reaching different demographics, and — in so many words — made the argument for fat acceptance.

I assume internal polling was done, and he was forced to see that the "fat man" image wasn't going to work. He took action. Note that in March, the month after the surgery, he rolled out the saying "Fix it!" At the time, I made fun of him for using that slogan when he's the walking embodiment of the inability to fix something. In fact, when he was emoting for the Barbara Walters demographic, she asked him why he's fat, and he said: "If I could figure it out, I'd fix it."

"I will not make you a slave, you will live in my 200 story castle where unicorn servants will feed you doughnuts off their horns."

You are "'more awesome than a monkey wearing a tuxedo made out of bacon riding a cyborg unicorn with a lightsaber for the horn on the tip of a space shuttle closing in on Mars, while engulfed in flames."

"Hey! Barack Obama emailed me that he's running for President!"

"Good thing you got that post up yesterday."

"Oh, he can still back out. Of course, he has to say he's running. Then later... some beautiful elaborate I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes.... that sort of thing. Hmmm... I should reply to this email."

"Can you reply to that email?"

"Yeah. They want you to reply. In fact there's a big old donate button."

"How about a doughnut button? He ought to have a doughnut button."

"A lot of people think the whole Obama presidency is a big old doughnut button."

"Yep."

"The average person thinks... this body is made of cigarettes and coffees and cakes and pies and doughnuts and french fries."

Jack LaLanne. The Good Lord Above has taken his wonderful body back, after 96 years of trying to talk us into get in shape.

“People thought I was a charlatan and a nut,” he remembered. “The doctors were against me — they said that working out with weights would give people heart attacks and they would lose their sex drive.”

Lots more Jack LaLanne video here. Here's one you probably don't need. And here he is with his dog Happy ("Right in the mouth with the foot he's putting"):