"They jaywalk across bike paths, swagger through crosswalks barefoot like the Beatles, preen in the parks and..."

"... sometimes strut between office buildings and cultural landmarks in the city center. In parks, the problem can be even worse, with the droppings matting the grass and squishing into the treads of shoes."

From "Finland’s Short, Precious Summers Are Plagued by Goose Poop/Finns trying to enjoy beaches and parks during their all-too-brief summers have been vexed by legions of geese — and their droppings. The smelly mess has resisted even the most innovative solutions" (NYT).

The "innovative solutions" are ineffective pooper scoopers in the litter box that is the sandy beach. Outside of Finland, "officials fight the problem at its source: the birds themselves."

"Even if the family occasionally finds evidence that mountain goats have been in the kitchen, being so connected to the land is worth it."

"'The intensity of the light, the smells of the plants, the noise of the cicadas — it’s like everything is turned up to 11,' he said. 'There’s something completely cathartic about being there.'"

From "He Built a House With No Doors and Windows You Can’t Close/Inspired by homes open to their natural settings, an architect designed a house on the Greek island of Corfu with minimal barriers from the 'wild landscape'" (NYT)(free-access link).

Makes me think of that Paul Mazursky movie "Tempest," with John Cassavetes as an architect who's fed up with New York City and relocates — with adolescent daughter Molly Ringwald in tow — to a Greek island....

The NYT is trying to heart-warm us with a story about saving Canada geese!

With dismay, I'm reading "A ‘Quixotic’ Fight to Protect a Bird That Can Be Hard to Love/Two New York men who bonded over bird-watching at the Central Park Reservoir are united in their efforts to save the nests of its resident Canada geese."

Edward Dorson, a wildlife photographer and regular visitor to the reservoir, learned in 2021 that federal workers were destroying the eggs of Canada geese there as part of a government safety program to decrease bird collisions with airplanes. He tried to stop it. He reached out to animal rights organizations and wrote letters to various government agencies. He got nowhere. Then in December, he met Larry Schnapf, a tough-talking environmental lawyer, who spotted Mr. Dorson admiring the birds and introduced himself....

When's the last time a tough-talking lawyer walked up to you and introduced himself? 

Mr. Schnapf, 72, is a fast-talking, fast-acting networker who is not afraid to make noise. “I told Ed,” he said, “you’ve got to rattle the bureaucracy. All we’re trying to do is get them to talk to us, so we can come up with a plan.... I don’t see too many people like me who are worried about the geese."

Because people don't want the lakeside festooned with excrement... or the planes crashing. The heroes of this story are the egg-destroying feds.

About that lovely "eco-friendly" "forest resort" with its supposed "enchanting luxury" and "soul-driven entrepreneurs"...

Link to The Guardian: here.

In the words of the head of building and environment for the county: "Voilà. Over 150 barrels of human shit."

"My concern is this is instrumentalizing the dog. This is not giving the dog any choice in the matter."

"If your dog wants to rub itself in coyote scat or fox scat, that’s the dog’s choice. But if it gets a spray of Dolce & Gabbana on it, that is not its choice. We need to be far more respectful of dogs and their wishes."

Said Daniel Mills, a professor of veterinary behavioral medicine, quoted in "Dolce & Gabbana Has New Dog Perfume. Veterinarians Turn Up Their Noses. An extravagant scent might seem like the height of pampering for your pup. But veterinarians are raising red flags: 'Overall, it’s a very bad idea'" (NYT).

"Do you think that someone who is a drug addict is absolutely incapable of -- that all people who are drug addicts are absolutely incapable of refraining from using drugs?..."

"All right. Then compare that with a person who absolutely has no place to sleep in a particular jurisdiction. Does that person have any alternative other than sleeping outside?... They have... none. They have absolutely none. There's not a single place where they can sleep.... So the point is that the connection between drug addiction and drug usage is more tenuous than the connection between absolute homelessness and sleeping outside."

Said Justice Alito, in yesterday's oral argument in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson. There's a precedent, Robinson v. California, that found it to be cruel and unusual punishment to make a crime of the "status" of drug addiction. The 9th Circuit said that the city — by prohibiting sleeping outdoors — had made a crime out of the status of homelessness.

For more detail, see the SCOTUSblog coverage: "Court divided over constitutionality of criminal penalties for homelessness."

Sitting within good information.

EXCLUSIVE: Katherine Maher doesn't just want to "stamp out bad information" on the internet. She wants to replace it with "good information"—i.e., left-wing narratives—and force the public to "sit within that good information" as "a collective."

Big Sister has arrived. pic.twitter.com/7kfq8VYHfj

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) April 18, 2024

I like the plants in the background, because she really is visualizing the people as plants. Watch for her snarky snicker when she knows she's characterizing NPR's news as manure for us to take root in and grow in the direction that pleases her.

"Cats and dogs have an outsize carbon footprint, mostly because of their carnivorous diet."

"If the pet food industry, which mainly feeds dogs and cats, were a country, it would rank as the 60th-highest greenhouse gas emitter, equivalent to the Philippines. Rabbits, by contrast, leave a minimal pawprint. They eat small amounts of hay and otherwise discarded vegetables. Their waste can be used as fertilizer in gardens...."

From "Why you should consider bunnies as your next pet/'It’s like having a vegan cat'" (WaPo).

From the comments, from someone who said she had a rabbit as a pet:

"An unscientific bias against 'feral' or 'invasive' animals threatens to undercut one of the great stabilizing trends making ecosystems healthier...."

"Introduced species such as feral pigs, horses, donkeys and camels represent a powerful force of 'rewilding' — the reintroduction of wild animals into ecosystems where humans had eradicated them — according to a study published Thursday in Science."

The Hill reports, in "Feral pigs and donkeys may be more salvation than scourge for ecosystems, study finds."

“One way to talk about this is: whether a visitor from outer space, who didn’t know the history, could tell what megafauna are native or introduced based solely on their effects,” said Erick Lundgren, a doctoral student in biology at Arizona State University.... In the case of big animals... if our alien visitor couldn’t tell the difference, Lundgren said, “then nativeness isn’t actually a helpful way to understand how ecosystems work.”...

"After six months or so in the womb of the cave, Flamini succumbed to its rhythms. She stopped trying to track time..."

"... because doing so had only added to her anxiety. She became neither hopeful nor despairing. 'In the cave, the line of time disappears, and everything floats around you,' she told me.  'A while ago I was born. A while ago I was going to visit Mongolia. There is no past, there is no future. Everything is present, everything is a while ago, and it’s all brutal and strange.' One temporal marker remained. After five defecations, she would carry her waste, in plastic pouches, up to the exchange point, and then hurry back down.... There came a moment, she told me, when she thought that she was dying. It felt like an act not of suicide but of release: 'There was no difference between what I was feeling then and what I understand as death.'"

From "The Woman Who Spent Five Hundred Days in a Cave/Beatriz Flamini liked to be alone so much that she decided to live underground—and pursue a world record. The experience was gruelling and surreal" (The New Yorker).

At the Newsom/DeSantis debate: feces thrown.

ADDED: #PoopMap is trending on X.

You can compliment Ivanka Trump as "the picture of gentle, pulled-together professionalism and good will" — but only after saying she "emerg[ed]" from "bowels."

I'm reading an article by the NYT fashion critic Vanessa Friedman, "Trump Family Trial Style/Ivanka Trump and her siblings dress for court — and the cameras" (dated November 9th):

She was the focus of this week’s final scene, flying up from her home in Florida, emerging from the bowels of a black town car to make her entrance in a navy wool coat and navy pantsuit, a black leather tote clutched in one hand, tiny pearl studs in her ears and with her blond hair falling in soft waves around her face, the picture of gentle, pulled-together professionalism and good will.

I've boldfaced the metaphor in which Ivanka Trump is likened to shit. 

It's not as though the car's resemblance to bowels was so precise and striking that the intestinal metaphor was simply irresistible. Ivanka Trump was apparently perfectly dressed for the occasion, and the fashion critic wanted to say so, but she couldn't just say that. She entertained us NYT readers with the giddy comfort of the absurd visualization of automotive defecation. 

"There is some stomach-turning stuff on the soles of your shoes, to be sure, likely including an array of fecal matter."

"But the grossness we track into our homes is not necessarily a health hazard for most of us.... 'Children need to be exposed to a variety of organisms.... The bulk of organisms we know are not pathogenic, and they go to help our immune response… You don’t want to live in a bubble."

From "The case for — and against — taking your shoes off in the house/Experts make strong arguments on both sides, but ultimately there can only be one verdict" (WaPo).

"I see it cropping up everywhere. In addition to 'HGTV-ification,' The Atlantic has covered the 'flu-ification of covid policy'...."

"Vox has lately published articles on the 'old man-ification' of television, the 'Easter egg-ification' of celebrity beefs, and the '"You’re doing it wrong"-ification'of TikTok influencers.... (The New Yorker has proved reticent on this particular kind of neologism, although, as far back as 2002, the magazine did refer to fears of 'le Big Mac-ification' of French life.) Pundits and politicos... [have] been indexing the 'Trump-ification' of just about everything since his candidacy in 2015. (Meanwhile, the rap dignitary Chuck D, of Public Enemy, attributed the groundswell of support for Trump to 'dumbass-ification.') During the past few years, the Washington Post has diagnosed the 'NRA-ification,' '"alternative facts’-ification,' 'hoax-ification,' and 'Hitler-ification' of the Trumpian right....Trump’s embattled rival Ron DeSantis likes to decry the 'woke-ification' of various institutions...."

Writes Lauren Michele Jackson in "The '-ification' of Everything/Novelty coinages are good at grabbing attention in the digital economy. What do they really have to say?" (The New Yorker).

"[D]ogs walking on the main streets must have their DNA on file with the local government. People must carry dog 'passports'..."

"... to prove they complied. If dog poop is found, the city will be authorized to test it to uncover which dog did it. And the owner will be forced to pay for the cleanup.... While [the mayor's] dog poop crackdown is a temporary test, set to last until July 2025, it is sure to raise some eyebrows in France, where individual liberty is cherished above all else — it’s the first of three values listed in the country’s national motto. While the country is known for its bureaucracy, or 'paperasserie,' and for the number of rules and regulations on its books, those rules are not always respected...."

From "This mayor, tired of poop on his streets, is making dogs get passports" (WaPo). The city is Béziers, in southern France, and it's been around since 575 BCE.

"Since my ship came in in 2008, when 'Iron Man' had that big weekend, I have been a self-described expert on the ways of the world of creativity and commerce."

"It’s not that the playing field changes — it’s that it morphs into something that you can’t even really call a playing field anymore. It’s a kind of mosaic of what it was moments before. If I am running a major streamer — which sounds like a big No. 1; how serious is it if the mind immediately goes to peepee? — anyway, you look at the budget, you look at the numbers and it comes down to a spreadsheet."

Says Robert Downey Jr., after the NYT interviewer asks if he's able to "make sense of the business right now."

Quoted in "Robert Downey Jr.’s Post-Marvel Balancing Act." 

His new movie is "Oppenheimer," directed by Christopher Nolan, 3-hour "thriller" about J. Robert Oppenheimer. I don't know how that can be thrilling, and I'm reflexively annoyed by the idea that some movie folk are proposing to "thrill" me about Oppenheimer. Find another word. "Thriller" is so off-putting. Do some people see it and think Great, I'll be thrilled?

I'm skeptical about the movie "Oppenheimer," but I do like that quote up there. Downey has a distinctive way of speaking. Even reduced to text, it's alive and funny and multifaceted. But it's close to nonsense. And he's mixing up No. 1 and No. 2! Or did the meanings transpose over the years? He's got a mixed metaphor there in that sentence the NYT saw fit to print. Maybe he did that on purpose intending a scatological joke in "you look at the numbers" and that's what he thinks of the movie business: It's gone to shit.

CORRECTION: All my analysis is affected and ruined by my failure to see the first "r" in "streamer." I apologize... and laugh at myself. Downey was only ever talking about urine. There was no excrement, no innumeracy, no mixed metaphor. 

"What the f—k happened to this place?"

Said Dave Chappelle, as quoted in "'What the f—k happened to this place?': Dave Chappelle rails on San Francisco at surprise show SFGATE culture editor Dan Gentile saw the controversial comedian's last-minute San Francisco set" (SFGate).

He told a story about eating at an Indian restaurant in the Tenderloin a few nights earlier, only to have someone defecate in front of the restaurant as he was walking in. San Francisco has become “half ‘Glee,’ half zombie movie,” he said, and he remarked that the whole city is the Tenderloin now. “Y’all [N-words] need a Batman!” he exclaimed. 

He wasn’t aware of the incident of a business owner hosing down a homeless person and had to have the crowd explain it. He pivoted quickly, saying he now remembered watching the video on YouTube … a hundred times. The misdirection was followed by a cruel snicker and a trademark slap of the mic against his thigh....

"An author might know nothing about writing, which is why he hired a ghost. But he may also have the literary self-confidence of Saul Bellow..."

"... and good luck telling Saul Bellow that he absolutely may not describe an interesting bowel movement he experienced years ago, as I once had to tell an author. So fight like crazy, I say, but always remember that if push comes to shove no one will have your back. Within the text and without, no one wants to hear from the dumb ghostwriter. I try not to sound didactic. A lot of what I’ve read about ghostwriting, much of it from accomplished ghostwriters, doesn’t square with my experience. Recording the author? Terrible idea—it makes many authors feel as if they’re being deposed. Dressing like the author? It’s a memoir, not a masquerade party. The ghostwriter for Julian Assange wrote twenty-five thousand words about his methodology, and it sounded to me like Elon Musk on mushrooms—on Mars. That same ghost, however, published a review of 'Spare' describing Harry as 'off his royal tits' and me as going 'all Sartre or Faulkner,' so what do I know? Who am I to offer rules?"

 
From "Notes from Prince Harry’s Ghostwriter Collaborating on his memoir, 'Spare,' meant spending hours together on Zoom, meeting his inner circle, and gaining a new perspective on the tabloids" by J. R. Moehringer (The New Yorker).

It occurs to me that another reason not to record "the author" is that you don't need verbatim quotes. You are also the author, and the whole idea is to put it in your words as if those were the author's words. So not remembering the author's words is an advantage. Those inadequate words are lost, but you have notes on the stories, and then, to write the memoir, you must reconstruct the account and you will, naturally, use your own superior form of expression.

Some like what hot?

I'm trying to read "Who Is the Broadway Pooper?" (NY Magazine).

Imagine: You buy tickets to a Broadway show... and what you actually wind up getting is a smelly, real-life mystery about human feces. This is apparently what happened to Hillary and Chelsea Clinton during a recent performance of Some Like It Hot at Shubert Theater... “Last week when Hillary and Chelsea Clinton were in the audience,” a source told [Page Six], “the lights came up for intermission and there were two human turds in the aisle just near the famous political duo.”...

One source said it was a "rather sad" occurrence involving "an elderly person." We're urged to think it had nothing to do with Hillary and Chelsea. Someone else is saying this is the 4th incident of its kind at that show. Maybe it's happening all the time at all sorts of shows and the only reason we're hearing about this one incident is that it happened near Hillary.

I thought the phrase "human turds" was funny. Is the turd human? Looking it up, I ran across an article from last year about fossilized excrement on display in a museum: "[T]he 20 cm long and five cm wide human turd dates back to the ninth century and is attributed to a Viking man in Jorvik which is now called York."

"Circular, and dark blue, with a Tupperware-style lid, it is precisely the kind of vessel you’d transport a soup or salad in."

"I’ve even sealed it inside a freezer bag, to contain any leaks. Or smells. I walk slowly and with care across Westminster Bridge, because any trip could prove disastrous. As I enter St Thomas’ Hospital and head for the infection department on the fifth floor, I realise the object I’m carrying is still warm, and, despite my preparations, I’m sure I can detect a faint whiff of something ripe, like camembert. It is, in a word, a turd. Freshly laid, and brimming with bacteria, the doctors I’m delivering it to believe such faeces could be the future of medicine. I’ve carried mine across London to be made into capsules – that someone else will ultimately eat...."

 
Writes Linda Geddes, in "Keep taking the crapsules: how I became a faecal transplant donor" (The Guardian).