"A short trip to New York City in 1961 established his lasting attraction to America, a place that to him felt less sexually repressive than England."

"Inspired by his stay, he made prints based on William Hogarth’s series of paintings 'A Rake’s Progress,' but he put that 18th-century morality tale — about a young man’s descent into perdition — in 20th-century terms. Mr. Hockney had the hero cruising runners in Central Park, drinking in gay bars and heading to jail. The episodes were depicted in a visually distinctive style: half-abstract but grounded in realistic details. By the time he finished the series, he was himself visually striking, with a high-color wardrobe of plaid suits, striped soccer jerseys and mismatched colored socks, owlish glasses and bleached blond hair. With a graduation gold medal awarded by the Royal Academy — received with the artist wearing a gold lamé jacket to the ceremony — and London gallery representation secured, Mr. Hockney was a British star on the rise...."

From "David Hockney, Who Restored the Human Form to Art, Dies at 88/His colorful figurative paintings were both conservative and iconoclastic, defying the dominant abstract schools of the mid-20th century" (NYT)(gift link, because there's much more to read and lots of great photos of Hockney and his much-loved paintings).

"Last summer, Tom Wong was working at the Chubby Crab... when a regular... ordered a combo.... and ate it at a table near the door, muttering to herself in between bites."

"Mr. Wong, 32, didn’t think anything of it. But a few days later, another customer came in and asked for a selfie. Then the asks kept coming. He had been recorded without his knowledge using a lentil-size camera embedded in a pair of Meta Ray-Ban glasses. The resulting video had been viewed more than two million times on TikTok, turning Mr. Wong and the restaurant into unwitting stars. 'At a certain point, I stopped working in the front of the restaurant,' he said. 'It was really uncomfortable.' To be in public is to risk being filmed. And these days, there’s a good chance it’s happening surreptitiously with smart glasses.... Servers, owners and customers can end up as captive participants...."

From "Dinner Is Being Recorded, Whether You Know It or Not/As Meta smart glasses capture scenes in restaurants for social media, service workers and customers are becoming captive participants" (NYT).

"Once people realized my glasses were full of tech, conversations often took a turn for the awkward — and they mostly unfolded the same way:"

"'Are you recording me?' (No, I’m not.) 'Where are the cameras?' (There aren’t any!) 'You’re really not recording me?' (No!)... Most of the time, people chose to take me at my word and the conversation continued (if a little icily.) Even in tech-heavy San Francisco, casual chats with people I have known for years sometimes turned tense after the glasses’ true nature were revealed. When asked, the most common reason people gave for why interactions took a turn for the awkward was a lingering concern that the glasses were listening anyway — even though they weren’t. The other big reason some people didn’t seem thrilled was a surprise: They thought I was ignoring them.... My wife still sometimes thinks I’m reading news headlines through the glasses even when I’m looking right at her.... [It's hard] to stay fully present with someone when a neon-green notification slides down in front of your eyes.... Some of these social issues may iron themselves out over time.... Until that happens, though, wearing smart glasses can make moving through the world feel a little socially graceless."

Writes Chris Velazco "I spent months living with smart glasses. People talk to me differently now. Eyeglasses are being augmented with screens, artificial intelligence and the power to unnerve people. We tested a pair to see how" (WaPo).

There's also this video. The most interesting part of that is Velazco's admission that his favorite use of the technology is to view inspirational messages that he has chosen for himself, such as: "You can do anything. You have what it takes. Just BELIEVE."

Imagine someone talking to you in person, looking in the direction of your eyes, but actually reading bullshit they've loaded into their glasses. May I suggest the inspirational message: Stay in the moment. Be spontaneous. The person in front of you might be a fully engaged HUMAN BEING!

"As profound as the abundance produced by AI may one day be, an even more meaningful impact on our lives will likely come from everyone having a personal superintelligence..."

"... that helps you achieve your goals, create what you want to see in the world, experience any adventure, be a better friend to those you care about, and grow to become the person you aspire to be. Meta's vision is to bring personal superintelligence to everyone.... This is distinct from others in the industry who believe superintelligence should be directed centrally towards automating all valuable work, and then humanity will live on a dole of its output. At Meta, we believe that people pursuing their individual aspirations is how we have always made progress expanding prosperity, science, health, and culture. This will be increasingly important in the future as well.... Personal devices like glasses that understand our context because they can see what we see, hear what we hear, and interact with us throughout the day will become our primary computing devices.... Meta believes strongly in building personal superintelligence that empowers everyone...."

From Mark Zuckerberg's manifesto at Meta. 

If you want the "personal" touch, here's the purported person, Mark Zuckerberg, interfacing with the camera to explain how personal the Meta approach to AI is going to be:

Today Mark shared Meta’s vision for the future of personal superintelligence for everyone.
Read his full letter here: https://t.co/2p68g36KMj pic.twitter.com/Hpzf77jAiG

— AI at Meta (@AIatMeta) July 30, 2025

AND: Speaking of eyeglasses that understand and facilitate your personal agenda... here's the ad that was served up to me in the very next thing that I read, "Virginia Giuffre’s Family Was Shocked That Trump Described Her as 'Stolen'/The siblings of one of Jeffrey Epstein’s most prominent accusers wonder what the president knows":

10 things I've asked Grok in the last 2 or 3 days.

1. Is it honest for me to say: I have no idea whether Trump has any idea whether Mitch McConnell had polio?

2. What poet had a beard, round glasses and wore a "poet’s hat"?

3. What is the origin of the phrase "take up the mantle"?

4. What have smart people had to say about the tendency to see images in words, including things that are not really relevant to the etymology of the word? For example, one might imagine that "ostracize" is connected to "ostrich" or "marginalize" relates to "margarine."

5. What is the argument that the crows in "Dumbo" are not a racist stereotype?

6. Does RFK Jr. speak of himself in terms of "Camelot"?

7. What is that famous saying about remaining silent because I was not X, Y, etc.?

8. Why do some people say you shouldn't use "impact" as a verb?

9. What is the episode of "Leave it to Beaver" where June and Ward Cleaver are turning over a mattress and Ward asks if it's mattress-turning day?

10. What if you had to argue that "The fog comes /on little cat feet" is actually very depressing and pessimistic?

"Calm down people, it is not raw/cold, it is a veggie burger patty underneath a slice of tofu."

Said Chuck Schumer [CORRECTION: No, just some random commenter], quoted in "Chuck Schumer deletes Father’s Day photo tweet in front of grill after critics slam his spatula skills" (NY Post).

Oh, Chuck! Stand up for yourself. 

Having created a new tag and added it to 7 posts in this blog's archive, I list the 7 posts in an order other than chronological.

The new tag is "Edmund Morris."

The list:

1. September 4, 2004 — Studying the recent spike in the phrase "barking mad," I quote Edmund Morris's reaction to Maureen Dowd's calling him "barking mad" — "Like all barking mad people, I feel perfectly normal."

2. November 28, 2010 — That time Edmund Morris reamed Bob Shieffer on "Face the Nation," and I compared him to Peter Finch in "Network" and Marisa Tomei in "My Cousin Vinny."

3. December 4, 2023 — President Theodore Roosevelt waded naked in Rock Creek in full view of onlookers, described by Edmund Morris.

4. November 16, 2023 — TR's smelling of arsenic, as described by Edmund Morris

5. June 24, 2004 — Edmund Morris has a theory about how Ronald Reagan came to think the way he did: "Not until he put on his mother’s spectacles, around the age of thirteen, did he perceive the world in all its sharp-edged intricacy."

6. December 1, 2023 — TR's "cyclonic" personality, as described by Edmund Morris.

7. April 25, 2004 — "Edmund Morris gives a pretty bad review to the brilliantly titled book about punctuation, 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves.'"

I've found 7 delightful/disturbing TikToks for you today. Let me know what worked for you.

1. His wife wants to go out to lunch dressed like that — like Edgar Allan Poe.

2. This man could not be more impressed than by the Thom Brown Pre-Fall 2023 fashion show. He shan't return to regular life after this.

3. An autistic person's insightful tip on how to bond with neurotypical people at work: Just tell them what day of the week it is. They love it. She's right! I hadn't really noticed it before, but it is true. People love to hear what day of the week it is.

4. A baby is truly amazed at the first experience of eyeglasses.

5. Jordan Peterson delivers some very specific advice about how husbands had better treat their wives or else — or else you will become isolated and lonely and if you don't fix it you'll end up divorced and fixing it for the rest of your life.

6. Sinister Pond Babe explores Sac City, Iowa.

7. Speaking of sinister... these birds!

"No one was better at stringing out a joke between its setup and its punch line. The purest instance of the skill might be his famous 'moth' routine..."

"... in which he took a lame stock joke ('A moth goes into a podiatrist’s office . . .') and, by delivery alone, built a three-minute meta-gag on top of it, working his audience all the way. We weren’t far into our interview when I realized I had made the rookie mistake of taking Macdonald’s deadbeat persona as his real world view. It was and wasn’t. Early on, he charmed me by noting, in an offhand way, that he’d needed glasses all his life but, after losing his first childhood pairs, stopped bothering. ('I guess if I put on glasses now everything would be high-def,' he said—the description of normal human vision as a decadent TV feature being the Macdonaldian turn.) But I was caught off guard by how sensitive he was to creative work generally: he was a serious and studious reader, especially of the Russians, keen to get into the weeds with me about Tolstoy....."

From "Norm Macdonald Was the Real Thing/His persona was droll, but he cared seriously, even ebulliently, about what comedy could be" by Nathan Heller (The New Yorker). 

Here's the moth thing (and notice the Tolstoy influence):

FROM THE COMMENTS: Sean Gleeson said:

The bit about "Macdonald’s deadbeat persona" feels like an error to me. Did he really pose as a man who refused to pay his debts? Does "deadbeat" have some other meaning? Did he mean to write "deadpan"?

He couldn't write "deadpan," because he'd just used the word 3 sentences ago — "his zonked-seeming deadpan," in a paragraph I didn't quote. I'm dismayed when The New Yorker gets any language usage wrong. I subscribe in part because for half a century I have looked to it as an exemplar of high-quality writing. 

And there's this aspirational stretching toward words that the reader might not even know yet. For example, the very next sentence after what I quoted is: "And he gave off lambent joy about his art." That's asking us to trust them and to get better at language and not to call bullshit. There's a part of me that wants to admire the writer's way with words and a part of me that's about to blurt — to paraphrase George W. Bush — What the fuck are you talking about, lambent?

If The New Yorker is going to make gaffes like "deadbeat," I'm going to have a lot more trouble going along with things like "lambent."

"Lambent," from the Latin word for "licking," evokes a licking flame. It's a word you can use instead of "radiant"... if you want to seem fancy or you'd like to make less learned readers feel as though they don't belong here. 

In context, I'd say Heller wanted to sound effusive praising Macdonald — to give him a tongue bath. But if you want me to give a sympathetic reading to your pretentious usages, don't make mistakes like "deadbeat."

ADDED: Nathan Heller responded in email that he's given me permission to publish:

Dear Ann, 

I am an intermittent reader and a big admirer of Althouse, and am always thrilled to see something I've written mentioned there. I'm also a huge fan of pedantic posts about language usage, so I read your criticism of the way "deadbeat" and "lambent" were used in a recent New Yorker remembrance of Norm Macdonald with an enjoyment verging on glee. Imagine my surprise to find that I was the author of the offending text. I was about to write myself a sternly worded note; then I looked in the dictionary. 

Merriam-Webster's first definition of a deadbeat is a "loafer." This is also, in slightly different terms, the first definition in the New Oxford American and the second definition in the American Heritage. The Oxford English Dictionary—which has the disadvantage of being British but the advantage of being pretty comprehensive—defines "deadbeat" as "a worthless idler who sponges on his friends; a sponger, loafer; also (originally Australian), a man down on his luck." 

Now, whether Norm Macdonald's comic persona was that of a loafer; a sponger and a loafer; a sponger, a loafer, and a worthless idler; or simply a man down on his luck is a matter I'll gladly turn over to the authorities. (On the sponging charge, I might note that Macdonald has insisted, at the mic, that he goes to parties solely for the cocktail sandwiches.) What seemed clear to me when I wrote that sentence, however, is the same thing clear to me now, which is that "deadbeat" is an exact term for the family of qualities in question. It is true that many people know, or think they know, the meaning of "deadbeat" from the phrase "deadbeat dad." But the dictionaries are clear that debt-related concerns are a narrow sub-case, not the meaning of the word. The O.E.D. gives "deadbeat dad" an entry of its own. 

After identifying the "gaffe" of "deadbeat," you go after my use of "lambent." You fret that this term reflects "aspirational stretching toward words that the reader might not even know yet." (To say that in a less high-flown way: the reader might—of all things—have to look it up.) "Lambent," as you note, comes from the Latin for licking, but dictionaries make clear that it's most often associated with certain qualities of light. Here's Merriam-Webster: "1) playing lightly on or over a surface: flickering; 2) softly bright or radiant; 3) marked by lightness or brilliance especially of expression." Here's the O.E.D.: "1a) Of a flame (fire, light): Playing lightly upon or gliding over a surface without burning it, like a ‘tongue of fire’; shining with a soft clear light and without fierce heat. . . . 1c) By extension, of eyes, the sky, etc.: Emitting, or suffused with, a soft clear light; softly radiant. . . . 1d) Figurative: Of wit, style, etc.: Playing lightly and brilliantly over its subjects; gracefully sportive. . . ." 

I used it in the phrase "lambent joy." Joy is a bright thing normally, but I was trying to describe the joy of Norm Macdonald. As anyone with any exposure to Norm Macdonald knows, his joy was not of the blazing, luminous variety. (He was, in fact, a comic with a small repertoire of suicide-related jokes.) If you had to describe the quality of joy in Norm Macdonald, you might call it dim but pure, playful, gentle, flickering in and out of view. I didn't call it "lambent" because the word seemed passable. I called it "lambent" because the word is precise. 

I, too, am dismayed when The New Yorker gets any language usage wrong. Fortunately, there are a lot of us—writers, editors, and copy editors—living our days on high alert to make sure it happens as rarely as possible. In any case, thanks very much for reading, and, as ever, for your post. 

Nathan 

-- 

NATHAN HELLER 

Staff writer 

The New Yorker Magazine

"Even by Trumpian standards, the jowly Barr, in his large round glasses, pinstripe suit and Trump-red tie, was strikingly sycophantic."

"'In his State of the Union, President Trump delivered a message of genuine optimism filled with an unapologetic faith in God and in American greatness and in the common virtues of the American people: altruism, industriousness, self-reliance and generosity,' he read, deadpan. Trump, he went on, 'loves this country,' and 'he especially loves you.' The boot-licking performance continued, about Trump’s wise leadership, his unbroken promises and even the just-impeached president’s passionate belief in the 'rule of law.' Then Barr turned to the enemy. He attacked 'rogue DA’s' and 'so-called social-justice reformers,' who are responsible for 'historic levels of homicide and other violent crime' in Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, Chicago and Baltimore. Politicians in sanctuary jurisdictions, he said, prefer 'to help criminal aliens evade the law.'"

From a Dana Milbank column in The Washington Post with the somewhat strange headline "Why Bill Barr’s DOJ replaced Catholic Charities with Hookers for Jesus." That headline focuses on something that appears at the top of the column, the news that a group called Hookers received a grant from the Justice Department for its work with victims of human trafficking. I know nothing about the group, but Milbank is simply expecting us to register instinctive contempt for prostitutes, but that's glaringly inconsistent with empathy for the victims of human trafficking.

The description of Milbank at the bottom of his column is: "He sketches the foolish, the fallacious and the felonious in politics." So, in this case, it's Barr — jowly Barr, in his large round glasses — who I think bears a strong resemblance to Elton John at the Oscars — looking like a true survivor, feeling like a little kid...



It's pretty easy to mock someone for being fat and wearing glasses. It's the cheapest shot of all, perhaps even foolish, fallacious, and felonious.

And what about those Hookers for Jesus? Milbank links to this Reuters article, which says:

Hookers for Jesus, which received $530,190 over three years, is run by a born-again Christian trafficking survivor who has lobbied against decriminalizing prostitution.... Hookers for Jesus operates a safe house for female adult trafficking victims that, in 2010 and in 2018....

Hookers for Jesus founder Annie Lobert denied that her organization requires safe house residents to attend services at her church. “We are not going to discriminate toward anyone,” she said. “But,” she added, “we are Christian. And there is an understanding before they come in here that we are Christian.”...

Here's the Wikipedia page for Annie Lobert:

Annie Lobert (born September 26, 1967) is an American former call girl and sex industry worker, who founded the international Christian ministry Hookers for Jesus.... Lobert worked as a prostitute in Las Vegas, Minneapolis, and Hawaii for 16 years. She left the sex industry with the support of Al Nakata, one of her regular customers, who had fallen in love with her....

In 2008, Hookers for Jesus established a safe house program in the Las Vegas area with one of The Church at South Las Vegas intern homes. The program, titled "Destiny House", is a safe haven for victims of sex trafficking and primarily serves prostitutes and local sex trade workers. Annie left CSLV (Church of South Las Vegas) and currently has a new Destiny House Estate.

What's wrong with giving this group a federal grant?

ADDED: From the comments over at WaPo:

Dana, once again, you've shown this President and his jackboots to be naked partisans, willing to sacrifice the good of our Nation for Trump's own personal gain....

That raises 2 questions: 1. Are you really naked if you're still wearing shoes/boots? and 2. If you read about victimized prostitutes and then you feel moved to talk in terms of nakedness, is your heart in the right place?

"I think I'm going to switch over to Hickenlooper."

I say out loud, as I'm reading "John Hickenlooper, Former Colorado Governor, Declares Candidacy for President" (NYT). Last December, as you may know, I suddenly said — also out loud — "Why aren't the Democratic candidates better? I'm just going to be for Amy Klobuchar."

But I've been worried about Amy. There was that comb-as-a-fork business, and just yesterday I was thinking there are too many Senators in the race, and I think we need a governor. There's Jay Inslee, but I'm thinking he's all about the Green New Deal. So I welcome Hickenlooper:

John Hickenlooper, the two-time Colorado governor and former brewpub owner who has overseen Colorado’s remarkable economic expansion, declared his candidacy for president on Monday.

Mr. Hickenlooper, 67, a socially progressive, pro-business Democrat who has called himself an “extreme moderate”...

Extreme moderate — I like!

Here's his video:



Best line: "As a skinny kid with Coke-bottle glasses and a funny last name, I’ve stood up to my fair share of bullies."

Hickenlooper was term-limited out of his governorship, but he seems to have been a very successful governor with what the NYT calls "a careful, consensus-building approach that won him praise from both sides of the aisle and helped him guide Colorado out of a recession and through a series of floods, wildfires and mass shootings...."

Gary Hart, the former Colorado senator and Democratic presidential candidate, predicted that Mr. Hickenlooper would appeal to primary voters because “he does not have a lot of pretensions.” But Mr. Hart noted that the candidate would have to harden his stances fast, in order to attract the most passionate party activists in the run-up to the primaries.

Eh. Too many Democratic candidates have hardened up stances. I'm for the radical moderate who wants to bring people together and to get things done. There needs to be someone for those of us who loathe "the most passionate party activists."

Mr. Hickenlooper moved to Colorado in 1981 to work as a geologist in the oil industry. After a layoff, he opened a downtown Denver brewpub, eventually expanding to 15 pubs and restaurants, mostly in the Midwest. Soon, he was helping to reshape Denver’s dilapidated core. By 2003 he was mayor; in 2007 he won re-election with 87 percent of the vote...

By 2011, he was governor. In that position, Mr. Hickenlooper pushed through Medicaid expansion under a divided legislature, and signed the gun control package, a major shift for the state. Colorado also gained national attention when Mr. Hickenlooper helped the state establish a national model for recreational marijuana regulation, despite his personal opposition to legalization....

But progressives in the state reserve much of their criticism for his environmental legacy, arguing that he has not gone far enough in regulating the state’s powerful oil and gas industry. In recent years, some residents have faulted him for failing to push well projects out of their neighborhoods. (Mr. Hickenlooper has been so eager to promote the industry that he once drank fracking fluid.)

I guess there's something disgusting about every candidate. Amy Klobuchar ate salad with a comb, and John Hickenlooper drank fracking fluid. I like his brand of disgusting. It's pro-business. And he's a geologist who worked in the oil industry. He must know something. What other Democratic Party candidate has any wide-ranging business experience and has worked at multiple levels of the executive side of government? Hickenlooper was mayor of the 19th biggest city (Denver) and governor of the 21st biggest state. That's a lot of executive experience, and he seems to have handled it well. He's worked as an employee in a scientific field, and he's been a successful entrepreneur making the beloved American product, beer.

The governor, a lanky, guitar-playing, twice-married father of a teenage boy, has long been considered the state’s geek in chief, often running gimmicky advertisements in which he makes himself the butt of a joke. As governor he showered in a business suit for a political ad in which he swore off dirty politics.

Geek in chief. That's what I want.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Hickenlooper, Lauren Hitt, said that the governor learned long ago how to make bullies feel uncertain, and she compared a potential Hickenlooper-Trump election to “a 'Revenge of the Nerds’-type situation.”

Excellent positioning!

What I did a year ago.

Facebook reminds me of what it calls my "memories," even though they aren't my memories, because I'd forgotten all this:

1. Wrote a lot. 2. Walked 2 miles to Hilldale and bought 2 pairs of glasses with Theo frames. 3. Met Chris and drank a pomegranate martini. 4. Walked 2 miles back home. 5. Watched the 1934 movie "Bright Eyes" on TV and Meade watched it just because it's what I was watching. That was sweet of him. And Shirley was sweet. We laughed at Jane Withers and I was delighted that the actor who played Uncle Ned was the same actor who played Mr. Muckle in "It's a Gift," one of my all time favorite movies. Also the dog that played Rags was the same dog who played Toto 5 years later in "The Wizard of Oz."

The actor is Charles Sellon:

"Now that I no longer live in fear of her rejection, I am free to share how she cultivated and brainwashed me."

Said Moses Farrow, quoted in a new biography of Woody Allen, reported by the NYT (which uses a photo of Woody Allen in which his glasses prescription magnifies one of his eyes ridiculously in comparison to the other).

Asked to comment, Ms. Farrow issued a statement: “Moses has cut off his entire family including his ex-wife who was pregnant when he left. It’s heartbreaking and bewildering that he would make this up, perhaps to please Woody. We all miss and love him very much.”

ADDED: The photo of Woody got me thinking about the word "cock-eyed," which means "topsy-turvy, absurd, ridiculous" (OED):

1960 M. Spark Ballad of Peckham Rye x. 201 He gathered together the scrap ends of his profligate experience..and turned them into a lot of cock-eyed books....

1942 Chicago Tribune 18 May 12/1 Communists are cockeyed... Today we shall dwell not upon their dangerousness, but upon their cockeyedness.

"But it's different with girls, don't you think?"

I intentionally wrote 2 posts about Salvador Dali today, and — surrealistically — he made a random appearance in a third post.

The 2 posts that are intentionally about him are "What could be more surrealistic than exhuming the surrealist?" and "His moustache is still intact, [like clock hands at] 10 past 10, just as he liked it. It’s a miracle."

Those 2 posts happened today as a result of a real-world event: The corpse of Salvador Dali was exhumed to cut out some body parts to test to determine whether he was the father of a woman who's seeking a chunk of his estate.

In between those 2 posts, there was a post that came into being solely because the word "instigator" popped up in conversation. (And it wasn't a conversation about Salvador Dali.) The word makes me want to hear the old song "Something in the Air," which begins with the line "Call out the instigators," which is the name of the post where I embedded the video. I had not watched the video all the way through, so I hadn't noticed what a commenter — Kassaar — pointed out: "Dali is in the Thunderclap Newman video... Coincidence?"

Let me clip out the precise point:



Either that's a coincidence or the awakened spirit of Salvador Dali is haunting me.

(Interesting lorgnette, by the way, with the handle in the center like a slingshot.)

This NYT health-advice article is getting a lot of attention...

... but I'd like to see an answer to the problem raised by the top-rated comment, which I'm not going to quote here.

The article is "Training Your Brain So That You Don’t Need Reading Glasses."

I thought I knew what #1 would be, but the actual #1 made me laugh.

So I was a sucker for a Forbes click-through list of "Ten Guaranteed Ways To Appear Smarter Than You Are" because I felt sure one of them would be: Listen to what other people say.

I think people are vain, and if you look like you understand and value what they are saying, they'll judge you to be smart.

I hate the multi-page format, but my desire — my vain desire — to see my answer in the set caused me to click all the way through to the end.

The advice includes stuff like wearing glasses and using a middle initial, but #1 is "Skip that drink." That surprised me. I had to laugh. Not drinking isn't a way to appear smarter than you are. It's a way to avoid actually becoming dumber.

You know, sometimes you might actually want to become dumber. But that's material for a different list: 10 Situations in Which You Would Be Better Off If You Weren't So Smart, 10 Reasons Why You Might Want to Take the Edge Off Your Intelligence, etc.

To be fair to Forbes, reading the fine print, I see that "Skip that drink" goes beyond advising you not to drink. It says that even holding a drink causes other people to lower their assessment of your intelligence.

"Kevin... placed his Burberry glasses on the floor beneath a placard describing the theme of the gallery."

"He said neither he nor TJ did anything to influence museum visitors, such as standing around and looking at the glasses. Within about three minutes, people appeared to be viewing their handiwork as bona fide art, though Kevin said that without his glasses, he could not see what was happening too well."

Art prank.

I say an art prank is art anyway, so what difference does it make?*

It's nice that some teenagers thought of doing this and pulled it off so quickly and elegantly, but we've seen things like this many times before, perhaps more commonly in the form of someone in a gallery staring at something that's not an artwork and causing others to regard the thing as art. I seem to remember reading about Salvador Dali doing something like that. And of course there are all the stories about some artwork being seen as trash and thrown out.

__________________

*The difference is, you're putting your art in someone else's gallery, without invitation. It's like hanging one of your own paintings on a museum wall. Or... that would damage the wall. It's like making a drawing on a Post-It note and sticking it up next to drawings in a museum.

ADDED: Back in 2011, Meade put his whole-body art in the Milwaukee Art Museum right next to the Duane Hanson sculpture, "Janitor":

"On May 10, 1884, midway through his 48th year, Samuel L. Clemens reluctantly 'confessed to age' by wearing glasses for the first time."

"That same day, the celebrated writer better known as Mark Twain sought to reclaim his youth by mounting a bicycle for the first time. Only one of these first tries succeeded. 'The spectacles,' Twain later recalled, 'stayed on.' Bodily contusions notwithstanding, Twain promoted the new sport of cycling with characteristic rhubarb tartness. 'Get a bicycle,' he urged readers. 'You will not regret it, if you live.'"

The beginning of a NYT article titled "The Bicycle and the Ride to Modern America," which became instantly bloggable to me when it was the first thing I looked at after doing an update to the previous post that by chance included Mark Twain. Mark Twain is in the air for some reason. That means something.

In other Mark Twain news:

1. "Mark Twain had positive view of Pittsburgh — except from atop the mount":

“With the moon soft and mellow … we sauntered about the mount and looked down on the lake of fire and flame... It looked like a miniature hell with the lid off."

2.  "Mark Twain Gave Good Advice About The Dangers Of Good Advice":

He had reached old age, Twain said, in the usual way: "By sticking strictly to a scheme of life which would kill anybody else.... My habits protect my life, but they would assassinate you."

3. "Big-walking small dog a perfect underdog":

Like Taran the Assistant Pig Keeper, Bingo is small in stature but super-sized in heart. Mark Twain probably said it best when he quipped, “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight; it’s the size of the fight in the dog.”

4. "Previously Unknown Mark Twain Descendant to Speak in Hannibal":

Mark Twain had one daughter who outlived him, Clara Clemens. Clara married concert pianist and symphony conductor Ossip Gabrilowitsch. Clara and Ossip had one child, Nina Gabrilowitsch (Mark Twain’s granddaughter). When Nina died in 1966 it was accepted that the Mark Twain line had ceased with no living descendants....

“Do you know how well your kids can see? Are you sure?"

"I’m a mother of three with access to top pediatricians and a network of neurotic moms, yet I was never advised to get my children’s eyes checked. Last summer I took my 4-year-old to an optometrist with an air of confidence that I was just being overprotective. Much to my sickening surprise, he could barely see, as it turns out. One of his eyes was giving up, a nonreversible condition if not caught early. My son’s eyes lit up when glasses were put on and he could see properly. (Insert mom guilt.) His whole demeanor changed; he would cry, scream and nap a lot until that point. We had taken him to many specialists, and no one had suggested that we get his eyes checked...."

A letter to the editor of the NYT in response to an op-ed titled "Kids Who Can’t See Can’t Learn." The op-ed, by an ophthalmologist, stressed the need for getting free vision screening and free glasses to less affluent children. The letter writer's point is that even where there is excellent access to health care, a child's vision may go uncorrected for too long. I wonder how many specific health problems in children go untreated because we expect random misbehavior and orneriness from them.