"Mirror," the tag.

That last post really needed the tag "mirror." How did I come so far without a tag for mirror? I made one, then had 22+ years of the blog to search to add the tag retrospectively. It was easy to search for the word "mirror," but hard to separate the posts that deserved the tag — the ones referring to the object, a mirror — from the ones that did not — the ones using "mirror" as a dying metaphor (ideas "mirror" other ideas and so forth). And then there's the drudgery of adding the tag and republishing. But in the end, there's the fun of clicking on the tag and peering into the kaleidoscope.

There was "Fun with Mirrors" in 2008:

There was, also in 2008, the convex mirror I loved and wanted to buy:

"It's expensive — over $1800 — but as I thought about possibly buying it, I realized what I wanted it for was to take pictures, and therefore what I really should buy is a fisheye lens for my Nikon D50." So I got that fisheye lens. If you're nostalgic for those days, click the tag "fisheye." 

There was this advice about dolphins, in 2014: "People, can you just leave the dolphins alone? They don't want to swim with you, despite the 'expression' you see on their faces. The love you think you are experiencing is nothing more than self-love. Stay home, save your money, and stare in a mirror until you get a deep, accurate assessment of how true your self-love is. Is there a fixed smile on your face? I hope not, but if there is, it's not because you share the spirit of the dolphin. The dolphin is 'smiling' because nature played a dirty trick on him, drawing idiot humans into his domain. Get out. Leave the dolphin alone."

There was the mystery of what a monkey sees in a mirror, back in 2005: "What's in the monkey's mind when he looks in a mirror? Higher minds -- human beings, great apes, dolphins -- figure out, when they are looking in a mirror, that they are seeing themselves. Other animals, it's long been thought, think they're seeing a stranger. But a new study shows that the monkey occupies a middle position, where it doesn't see itself, but it doesn't see a stranger either. The monkey sees a 'Puzzling Other.'"

In 2024, I had Grok outline a book for me. It was titled "Through the Glass/Exploring Mirrors as Portals to Other worlds."

I was surprised to see that, back in 2013, I'd contributed to my long-running men-in-shorts theme with this stark advice: "Take a good look at yourself in the mirror when you've got your shorts on. Ask yourself if I were a woman, would I fuck me?"

There was this good question, in 2013: "If someone holds up a mirror and you say 'I look like an idiot,' is the mirror-holder calling you an idiot?"

There was the sunset in my rear-view mirror as I drove 500 miles to see Meade in 2009:

"California hits the brakes on the drive-thru boom/The American institution faces bans designed to stop people eating in their cars so much."

A headline in The London Times.

“Hopefully this will help encourage people to just, you know, socialise more, too, because drive-thrus, you’re just like waiting,” Commissioner Beverly Shotwell told The San Francisco Chronicle. “There’s not a lot of human interaction.”

That's what we need, more lines snaking around indoors. People will get to know each other. We'll chit chat and flourish.

Or everyone will order and pay on their iPhone then park and some person or robot comes out and hands them a bag and they drive off. 

"We have reviewed video footage from the area which suggests that the cover was dislodged after a multi-axle truck turning onto 52nd Street from 5th Avenue drove over it.... manhole covers can get displaced by heavy vehicles...."

Said a representative from Con Ed, quoted in "Donike Gocaj, grandmother who ‘dropped’ into NYC manhole, hauntingly screamed ‘I’m dying’ — as witness claims there was nothing blocking it off" (NY Post).

A bystander: "She was just in the hole screaming that she was dying. Over and over she was like, 'I’m dying, I’m dying.'"

ADDED: Here's something I wrote in the comments to a post of mine that was about the only time Martin Heidegger laughed: 

Woody Allen famously said "If I got a paper cut, that’s a tragedy. If you fell down an open manhole and died, that's comedy."

There's a Woody Allen movie where he suddenly falls into an open manhole. Can't remember which one, but I saw it in the theater in London (for some reason), and the audience that hadn't been laughing at any of the numerous verbal jokes laughed heartily. Slapstick is a universal language. And yet some people reject slapstick. They think it's cheap or mean or something. Why would you laugh when someone falls?

Thanks to tcrosse for reminding me of that old quote.

ALSO: Was it Woody Allen who said that or Mel Brooks?

Entertaining... or a dire warning against high-speed chasing?

Footage released by authorities in Wisconsin shows a suspect's car go flying over another vehicle as they attempted to flee.

The suspect, who is being held on multiple charges, was eventually arrested after a short foot chase, officials said. https://t.co/k49wKvl3pK pic.twitter.com/vkphFcC8s2

— ABC News (@ABC) May 15, 2026

There are other ways to catch a fleeing person.

"Last week, the Department of Transportation released the first trailer for the Duffys’ odyssey, and boy does it look lavish."

"The family of 11 is shown riding in style in new model SUVs provided by Toyota — official vehicle partner of the show — lounging in bathrobes in hotels, snowmobiling, and even screaming down water slides on a Royal Caribbean cruise (another partner of the project). The trailer was met with widespread public backlash, with critics calling the seven-month production not only out of touch given the high costs currently hitting American travelers, but a potentially unethical misuse of federal resources. Duffy, who thinks people shouldn’t fly in comfy clothing because it’s uncivilized, is encouraging Americans to drive this summer, and get to know their country. 'We’re encouraging everyone to go take a road trip to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary,' he says in the trailer, adding later to Fox News that a road trip 'fits any budget.'"

That's from the Rolling Stone article "How Much Would It Cost to Fuel Sean Duffy’s Reality Show Road Trip?" which is updated "to reflect that the Duffys did not actually set sail on a cruise, and that they only enjoyed its amenities while it was docked."

With that correction, the price doesn't seem so astounding. I couldn't find the number, but then I only skimmed and then searched the page for a dollar sign. We're told the family — of 11 — drove 4,706 miles and maybe 2,458 miles more. Who would do that?! These people are taking care of 9 children. Why would you want to kick them around? Calling it "lavish" is nuts.

Here's that trailer that made Rolling Stone get all peevish:

Did that make you want to do a big road trip or did it make you want to wait until the 250th anniversary celebrants get back home? Or to never go anywhere again. I hear the bears are biting up in Glacier National Park.

"Being human-shaped allows their introduction without significant modifications to existing airport facilities or aircraft structures."

"By combining cutting-edge AI technology with the unique flexibility of humanoid forms, the project aims to realise a sustainable operational structure through labour savings and workload reduction."

Said Japan Airlines, quoted in "This could really take off: robots join staff at Tokyo airport/Japan Airlines, the national carrier, is testing humanoid workers to ease staffing pressures at Haneda, keeping luggage moving as passenger numbers rise" (London Times).

Would you prefer the infusion of robots to come in humanoid form? The human-shaped robots fit into the places that have been designed for human beings, so perhaps that makes the robotic takeover easier and don't you want futuristic things to subtly mix friendliness and creepiness?

Do you like those self-driving Waymos with an empty drivers seat or would you rather have a robot cab driver sitting there and talking to you, the way it was in those old movies about the future:

“When it came time for us to ask for a urinalysis test, he refused, and so he’s been charged with DUI, with property damage and refusal to submit to a lawful test in the crash."

Said Sheriff John Budensiek, quoted in "Tiger Woods’ mugshot released after his arrest/Golf player charged with driving under the influence after a crash near his home in Florida. Police said he appeared to be on 'some type of medication or drug'" (London Times).

That also shows Woods's mugshot from his 2017 arrest "after he was found asleep in his car blocking a stationary line of traffic with his engine running."

This time around, we're told, "Woods was not injured but was 'lethargic' on the scene and was alone in the car before he crawled out of the passenger door." And: "Under Florida law, he had to remain in jail for at least eight hours before being released on bond." That's harsh for such an eminent man. 8 hours!

Why does he go out driving alone? It must be very important to him to keep taking an obvious and known risk. Those who are failing to stop him share responsibility.

"The American Cornhole League said in 2023 that Webber was a 'shining example of our slogan — anyone can play, anyone can win.'"

That's the last line of a Fox10 article with the headline "Quadruple-amputee cornhole player accused of shooting man to death during argument."

Dayton James Webber, 27, is a professional cornhole player. He was 10 months old when he had a blood infection that cost him his limbs.

It's hard to picture a quadruple amputee shooting a gun, but we are told that he was also driving a car, he shot the front-seat passenger, and there were also backseat passengers, and when they got out of the car and declined to pull the victim out of the car for him, Webber drove off with the victim still in the front seat.

And so it goes for the shining example of the notion that anyone can do anything.

By the way, who knew there was a professional cornhole league?

"Perhaps you’ve noticed.... Amid all the cars that are parked headfirst, a seemingly increasing number have instead been backed in."

"These dissenters face out, like getaway drivers in a bank robbery ready to make a clean escape. Some people, myself included, find the move annoying. William Van Tassel, the manager of driver training programs for AAA... said that perhaps it was because they were following AAA’s updated guidelines.... My own theory is that reversing into a space is a response to the ambient anxiety in our society, akin to privately noting the exits in a movie theater. In a nation of rampant gun violence, backing in so you can quickly get out provides a sense of security.... [Van Tassel] cited a 2020 study from the journal Transportation Research that found, among other things, that the pull-in, back-out maneuver had a higher crash risk. Since pedestrians are most likely to be found walking in the major lanes, not in a parking space, it’s safer to back into the area with fewer people.... But I can’t bring myself to join in, and I don’t fully accept the safety argument. Since 2018, new vehicles sold in the United States have been federally mandated to have backup cameras, which can assist in reversing out of a spot without plowing into someone...."

I'm reading "Do You Back Into a Parking Spot or Back Out? An exploration of what’s driving a change in America’s parking lots" (NYT).

Those who do back up — is it for safety? Do other people believe it's for safety? As the male author of the NYT article says: "My wife suspects they’re mostly men showing off." Ha ha. That's what I think too. And by the way, I've always been quick to suspect that people are just showing off. I was much worse about that when I was much younger. I can honestly say that when NASA put a man on the moon in 1969, I thought they were showing off. I looked away! The moon landing was a very big thing; backing into a parking space is a very little thing. In things big and small, I am ready to disrespect the achievement as a matter of showing off. A lateral thinker will therefore ask: What's bad about showing off? Where would we be without it?

How to finally make that left turn.

A TikTok demonstration of excellent lateral thinking and deft execution:

"How about a map-a-loopy? Get a real paper road map. Pick some place to start and another place to end, and..."

"... take the most tertiary, wayward, roundabout farm roads, or tiniest neighborhood street to get there. You will be pretty surprised to spend a memorable hour or two admiring unknown, undiscovered corners, big trees, obscure roads, streets, byways and dirt lanes."

Writes Rabble in the comments at the NYT article, "Land Snorkeling? Townsizing? A User’s Guide to the Latest Travel Lingo. Here are eight terms, some brand-new, others recently resurfaced, that match today’s travel trends."

As you will suspect from Rabble's comment and even without it, the 8 terms the NYT has found are pretty dumb. "Townsizing" is going to a town instead of a big city. "Land snorkeling" is walking about looking at various things. I approve of these practices, and if a cute word encourages anybody, fine.

"Before, it was too much, there was honking of horns without reason. Now, it’s better for everybody."

Said Syed Ali, 49, who works at a halal food cart in midtown Manhattan, quoted in "Honking Complaints Plunge 69% Inside Congestion Pricing Zone/In the first two months of the Manhattan vehicle tolls that Trump wants to nix, gripes over blasting horns sunk when compared to 2024" (The City).

"The EV charging station tale marks what amounts to a 'Wizard of Oz' moment for progressives."

"They want to prevent abuse and use government to serve the greater good. But as its snail-like rollout demonstrates, government today is more like the man behind the curtain than the great and powerful Oz. Progressives need to figure out how they will address the overcorrections of the past several decades and, in so doing, make government work again."

Yeah, progressives: Figure it out!

I'm reading "Why the government built only 58 EV charging stations in three years/The EV fiasco should be a jolt to progressives’ senses" (WaPo)(free-access link). The article is by Marc J. Dunkelman, author of "Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress — and How to Bring It Back."

"Back when Lyndon B. Johnson was president and the latest dance craze was the Frug, Washington high society was transfixed by..."

"... Barbara Howar, a sparkling socialite from North Carolina who helped the first lady do her hair, mingled with a visiting Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon and turned her Georgetown home into a center of Swinging Sixties entertainment.... Defiantly unorthodox, she wore pajamas to an embassy gala, drove an orange motorcycle through a Georgetown park and had a barbed wit that brought her a reputation as the enfant terrible of the capital’s social scene. Reflecting on the private life of Henry Kissinger, one of many diplomats and politicians who frequented her parties over the years, she quipped, 'Henry’s idea of sex is to slow the car down to 30 miles an hour when he drops you off at the door.'..."

From "Barbara Howar, whose hit memoir dished on D.C. society, dies at 89/Initially known as a Georgetown hostess, she became a best-selling author with her candid 1973 memoir, 'Laughing All the Way.' She later interviewed celebrities for 'Entertainment Tonight'" (WaPo)(free access link).

Howar launched her writing career with a 1968 Ladies’ Home Journal story called "Why LBJ Dropped Me." Looking (unsuccessfully) for a copy of "Why LBJ Dropped Me," I stumbled into this cool photograph, "Singer Bobby Darin sits with his girlfriend, Barbara Howar." I love her shoe. Grommets — so 60s! Ah, well, the 60s are long gone, and here I am, a creature of the 60s, entertained by obituaries, saying goodbye to everyone who was tormented by LBJ and danced the frug.

You don't see the phrase "enfant terrible" so much anymore. The OED says it's "A child who embarrasses his or her elders by untimely remarks; transferred a person who compromises his or her associates or his or her party by unorthodox or ill-considered speech or behaviour; loosely, one who acts unconventionally." We used to celebrate the enfants terribles. Didn't we? Do we still? Answer without saying "Trump" or you are too boring to wear pajamas to an embassy gala and drive an orange motorcycle through a Georgetown park.

The sun got eclipsed in the middle of the day yesterday, but it also rose and set. Did you see that?

We did. From the front seat of the F-150, in Covington, Indiana, at 7:27 a.m. Eastern Time:

From the back door of the camper in Farmer City, Illinois, at 7:29 p.m. Central Time:

There is the rare peak event but also the beauty of the everyday.

As I'm writing this, searching for the right way to frame the profundity that feels just out of reach, Meade suddenly bellows, comically, "Well, what's next on our bucket list?"

I ask his permission to quote him, and he says yes and "You know I said that ironically."

"Yes, I wrote 'comically.' Don't worry. I won't let them think you said that seriously."

We're anti-bucket-list people, but we put a lot effort into doing a bucket-list thing. It was the last chance for the experience of a lifetime, and we drove 6-and-a-half hours each way to grab it. The sunrise and the sunset were captured spontaneously. And I'm only seeing that bird just now, symbolizing all those things that we see and don't really see.

ADDED: I had a few typos in the original draft of this post. Talk about seen and unseen. Corrected. And now I'm seeing the ghostly, spontaneous bird in the sunset clouds.

"The detour took Easler and her family onto a gravel road that eventually disappeared into a bumpy dirt trail."

"They quickly realized something was wrong as they looked at the line of cars in front of them. 'They’re all going directly into the desert,' Easler recalled. The Google Maps route created a day-long ordeal.... SFGate reported on the incident after Easler posted a TikTok video that garnered more than a million views.... Even as the route got bumpier as it proceeded off-road... they trusted that the large number of cars accompanying them meant they were still on the right track, Easler said. 'Nobody was turning around. So we figured that it led somewhere,' Easler said...."

From "Google apologizes after map led drivers down dirt path into the desert" (WaPo).

So did they "quickly realize[] something was wrong" or did they keep "trust[ing] that the large number of cars... meant they were still on the right track"? The article doesn't bother to make sense, even as it shows a vivid example of humans proceeding blindly into the unknown.

Here's the TikTok that garnered:

"A Washington Post analysis of federal data found that vehicles guided by Autopilot have been involved in more than 700 crashes, at least 19 of them fatal..."

"... since its introduction in 2014, including the Banner crash. In Banner’s case, the technology failed repeatedly, his family’s lawyers argue, from when it didn’t brake to when it didn’t issue a warning about the semi-truck in the car’s path."

From "The final 11 seconds of a fatal Tesla Autopilot crash A reconstruction of the wreck shows how human error and emerging technology can collide with deadly results" (WaPo).

The article quotes former National Transportation Safety Board administrator Steven Cliff: "Tesla has decided to take these much greater risks with the technology because they have this sense that it’s like, 'Well, you can figure it out. You can determine for yourself what’s safe' — without recognizing that other road users don’t have that same choice.... If you’re a pedestrian, [if] you’re another vehicle on the road.... do you know that you’re unwittingly an object of an experiment that’s happening?"

"I needed to come back to the city. A lot of it for me has to do with not having to drive."

"Because not driving when you live in the suburbs, or being a quasi driver — I have a lot of anxiety about it, and when I’m in the city I can go anywhere I want. I feel free. I feel like an actual grown-up. [What is it about driving?] Ugh! There’s the car itself: tires falling off, a blow out, a car exploding. One time I was driving and the front hood started rattling and the whole drive I pictured the hood of the car flying up and then my crashing and not only killing myself but killing tons of people. I hate it! I hate changing lanes. I hate merging. I hate trucks. Everything about it is hateful. Also, you’re going so [expletive] fast! A slight miscalculation and it’s disaster."

Said Roz Chast, quote in "Roz Chast Knows You’ll Always Regret Leaving the City for the Suburbs" (NYT).

That's an interview with David Marchese, published a few weeks ago, noticed today because it was linked at the bottom of the new David Marchese interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger, blogged in the previous post. 

Roz Chast has a new book: "I Must Be Dreaming."

Things that happened in Nebraska that got reported in The Guardian.

 

Link.

"Gasoline cars are among the last remnants in our daily lives of the pistoning industrial age — machines powered not by quietly streaming electrons..."

"... but by noisy, fiery explosion, by sequential gears and timing belts, by the primal growl of thermal expansion. America’s overreliance on cars has been ruinous, but... let’s remember, too, how the gas-powered car helped realize a quintessentially American idea of liberty: the freedom to roam just about anywhere you please. Yes, I’m romanticizing the automobile.... But as critical as I’ve been of cars, I can’t deny loving driving and loving it in a primal way — loving the thrum of a revving engine, loving slaloming in and out of turns on a windy country road, loving simply going very far, very fast, conveyed by fire. And here’s another confession: I’ve never felt anything approaching this sort of exhilaration in an electric car...."

Writes Farhad Manjoo in "Gas-Powered Cars Are an Environmental Catastrophe. I’ll Miss Them Anyway" (NYT).