"Hopper had suffered body dysphoria since childhood and his feet were an 'unwelcome extra'.... Hopper did not regret the operations, but 'bitterly regrets' the 'dishonesty' about their cause...."

I'm reading "Surgeon jailed after amputation of own legs" (BBC).

An NHS vascular surgeon who had his own legs removed has been jailed for two years and eight months for insurance fraud and possessing extreme pornography. Neil Hopper, 49, of Truro, Cornwall, carried out hundreds of amputation operations before having his own legs removed in 2019.

"Am I the only one in the city being lectured on dates about Burning Man?..."

"... I hadn’t even finished chewing my first mouthful of pasta before his 37-minute tale began. (Yes, I timed it.) He fiddled excitedly with a loose dreadlock as I once again fell victim to an eternity of spiritual mansplaining. The formula was all too familiar. A compulsory mention of the 10 'core principles' of Burning Man, which, in more obnoxious settings, have also been referred to as 'the truths.' 'Inclusion is the core of our culture' he said. 'It’s written in the charter.'... [A]ttending Burning Man often costs a minimum of $5,000. And what kind of person my age, early career, has nine days to spend frolicking in a desert?..."

Writes Cate Twining-Ward, in "Men, Please Stop Talking About Burning Man/Am I the only woman meeting Burning Mansplainers on dates?" (NYT)(free-access link).

"Everyone... had a story about explaining basic etiquette to boorish colleagues. No, you can’t microwave fish at lunch."

"Stop cutting your toenails on your desk. Don’t bring a gun to the office.... H.R. knows that employees and managers are annoyed by its memos, by its processes, by just about anything that interrupts life as it was. When an email is sent nudging everyone to take that 45-minute online course in, say, data security, H.R. can almost hear the eye rolls."

From "So, Human Resources Is Making You Miserable?/Get in line behind the H.R. managers themselves, who say that since the pandemic, the job has become an exasperating ordeal. 'People hate us,' one said" (NYT).

RFK Jr. would give women full control over the decision to have an abortion — "even if it's full term."

Here is RFK Jr. affirming his commitment to China-style full-term abortion, without limits, nationwide:

RFK: "I believe we should leave it to the woman, we shouldn't have the government involved."

STEELE: "Even if it's full term?"

RFK: "Even if it's full term." pic.twitter.com/i6GrXkPrlK

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) May 9, 2024

I think his feet were supposed to be off camera. I don't like seeing his stocking feet in this context. It's too serious, too deadly. 

"Who cares. Didn't read it. This is not news. Do better"/"Why do I feel like these characters are being forced on us? Nobody cares."

"Who cares?"/"Congratulations - this might be the most vapid article the Washington Post has ever published"/"Thanks for explaining this, WaPo. Now I won't be tossing and turning tonight wondering"... etc. 

These are the comments on what is the second-most-read article at The Washington Post right now:

 

Sample text: "With the internet swirling with theories about Megan’s lyrics, Minaj took to X (formerly Twitter) to voice her displeasure with the song and announce her follow-up 'Big Foot,' which she released on Monday. The title appeared to be a reference to Megan’s 5-foot-10 height and the fact that she was shot in the foot...."

It took 2 reporters to write it... these 2...

I would watch a movie about those 2 reporters trying to collaborate to fulfill this writing assignment. A bit like another remake of "The Front Page," you know, that sort of thing.

"I am very self-conscious about the way that I look, in part because I am a woman who happens to be conscious."

"Since birth, every piece of media I have encountered has socialized me to hate all of my body parts.... I thought that I was ugly for a very long time and then, suddenly, I found myself on wikiFeet [a photo-sharing foot-fetish site dedicated to celebrities’ feet], against my will, in the form of a photo of me from college, on a Lake Michigan beach.... [A]mong five voters, one voted 'beautiful,' one voted 'nice,' two voted 'okay,' and one hater voted 'ugly.' I am not sure the wikiFeet community realizes that, by reducing women to just their foot scores, they are dehumanizing us.... I am more than ten toes and eerily flat arches. I also have a beautiful heart beneath two medium-sized breasts.... Please go to wikifeet.com, create a user account on this collaborative, celebrity-foot database, and vote for me like my self-confidence depends on it..... I care what people think about me. But the best lesson I ever internalized is that no one will love me, or my feet, like I love myself (and my feet).... Loving myself is a tough task, and requires constantly reminding myself that I deserve patience and generosity and warmth...."

Writes Ziwe, in "Best Foot Forward/How to feel about an 'okay' rating of your feet by strangers on the Internet" (The New Yorker).

"Here we have hot springs with really hot water; we have active volcanoes; we have sneaker waves on beaches..."

"... we have strong winds. We somehow think that we’re invincible when we’re on vacation, but we still have to use our common sense."

Said Eliza Reid, the first lady of Iceland, quoted in "Iceland Is a Magnet for Tourists. Its First Lady Has Some Advice for Them. Eliza Reid, a former U.N. tourism ambassador and the wife of President Gudni Johannesson, welcomes her country’s many visitors, and has a few suggestions on safety, respect and how to meet locals" (NYT).

She's trying, politely, to deal with Iceland's problem of too many tourists. They get 2 million a year, and they only have 388,000 actual residents.

But what's a "sneaker wave"? It made me think of the mystery of the sneakers containing severed feet that were washing up on the coast of the Salish Sea. Remember that news story from 2021? It started happening after 2007 because of a change in sneaker design that made them more buoyant. There have always been corpses in the sea — from misadventures and suicides and so forth — and the sea creatures have been feeding on them all along — with special attention to the tender, delectable ankles — so submerged severed feet inside shoes was nothing new. They just weren't floating up on shore in the pre-buoyancy days.

But that's not what going on in Iceland. "Sneaker waves" have nothing to do with footwear or severed feet. They're just sneaky waves: 

"Mr. DeRuvo initially decided to forgo shoes because of agonizing bunions, but he has stayed barefoot for reasons that transcend physical comfort."

"In that time, he has become a litmus test of people’s forbearance and their willingness to tolerate a stranger’s unconventional lifestyle and perhaps even try to understand it. There are questions he is asked frequently that he is always happy to answer. How does he manage snow and ice? Doesn’t he get sharp objects stuck in his thick calluses? But that’s the simple stuff. 'Navigating the terrain is easy,' Mr. DeRuvo said. 'Navigating people is tricky.; When asked to leave a shop or a restaurant, he normally does so without protest, said Mr. DeRuvo’s wife, Lini Ecker, a shoe-wearer who serves as a bridge between her husband and a world that generally asks for conformity. 'When someone has put on their "I’m in charge personae,"' she said, 'once they start, they can never change their minds.' On occasion, Mr. DeRuvo pushes back. 'If I’m feeling feisty,' he said...."

From "He Took His Shoes Off 20 Years Ago. He Hasn’t Put Them Back On. Joseph DeRuvo Jr. has lived a mostly barefooted life for nearly two decades. The experience has given him a thick skin" (NYT). 

He has a job that works with barefootedness: Pilates instructor.

We're told he has other quirks: He prefers to use chopsticks and "He needs reggae music to play in the background at almost all times."

"Everyone over here talking about eye liner and I just want to know why they're sitting in order of least to most foot coverings."

Please go enjoy the comments at the subreddit r/pics on "Taliban announces graduation of three new pilots." 

Don't miss the Bee Gees parodies.

"Along the walls of the little clinic sat disheveled-looking men, their feet in plastic buckets, while nurses bent over them, speaking softly...."

"[Dr. Jim] O’Connell recognized many of these homeless men.... [H]e’d seen them in the Mass General emergency room, sullen, angry, snarling, resisting all treatment. Here they seemed so docile that they might have been drugged, via foot soaking.... You filled a plastic tub halfway up with Betadine and put the patient’s feet in it.... [Y]ou always addressed the patient by his surname and an honorific — 'Mr. Jones.'... [O'Connell] spent three afternoons and evenings there each week, soaking feet and not doing much else for more than a month. Among the regulars was a very large elderly man usually dressed in three layers of coats, with wary eyes and a salt-and-pepper beard and a great wave of white-and-gray hair that seemed to be in flight.... He was classified as a paranoid schizophrenic, and his chart was thick... [and he] had always refused to take medications or to be admitted to the hospital.... [His feet] were so huge and swollen that O’Connell had to prepare a separate tub for each...."

Writes Tracy Kidder, in "'You Have to Learn to Listen': How a Doctor Cares for Boston’s Homeless/Lessons from Dr. Jim O’Connell’s long crusade to treat the city’s 'rough sleepers'" (NYT).

"[O]ne evening, as O’Connell knelt on the floor filling the tubs, he heard the old man say, 'Hey, I thought you were supposed to be a doctor.... So what the hell you doin’ soakin’ feet?'... About a week later, he put his feet in the buckets and said to O’Connell: 'Hey, Doc. Can you give me something to help me sleep?' He never slept for more than an hour, he said. Within about a month, O’Connell had him taking a variety of medicines for his many ailments. Foot-soaking in a homeless shelter — the biblical connotations were obvious. But for O’Connell, what counted most were the practical lessons...."

Are the "biblical connotations" not "practical"?

"During Tuesday’s testimony, [Megan Thee Stallion] described the rap game as a 'boy’s club' and said she knew she would be hated because she was 'telling on one y’all’s friend.'"

From "‘Going through torture’: Megan Thee Stallion testifies against Tory Lanez/Rapper takes stand in case against Canadian-born musician, emotionally recounting night when she was shot" (The Guardian).

The Texas-born rapper, whose real name is Megan Pete... described how the attack left her with constant pain in her feet and said the reliving the incident in the public eye had been “torture.”

“I don’t wanna be on this Earth,” Pete said at one point during a daylong testimony. “I wish he woulda shot and killed me if I knew I would go through this torture.”...

"At the point of 'Pump It Up,' he obviously had been listening to Springsteen too much. But he also had a heavy dose of 'Subterranean Homesick Blues.'"

"'Pump It Up' is a quasi-stop-time tune with powerful rhetoric, and with all this, Elvis [Costello] exuded nothing but high-level belligerence.... With tender hooks and dirty looks, heaven-sent propaganda and slander that you wouldn’t understand. Torture her and talk to her, bought for her, temperature, was a rhyming scheme long before Biggie Smalls or Jay Z. Submission and transmission, pressure pin and other sin, just rattled through this song. It’s relentless, as all of his songs from this period are. Trouble is, he exhausted people. Too much in his songs for anybody to actually land on. Too many thoughts, way too wordy. Too many ideas that just bang up against themselves. Here, however, it’s all compacted into one long song."

Writes Bob Dylan in "The Philosophy of Modern Song" (published today).

Here's the song — with a very cool video (I want to stand on my feet like that):

 

I was listening to the audiobook as I went on my sunrise run, and as soon as I heard the title of the song Bob was about to discuss, I called on Siri to play it for me. Listening, I thought, this is so much like "Subterranean Homesick Blues" — if Bob praises it, is he praising himself?

"[S]o nauseatingly into this project is Terence that he has got ahead of himself and started incorporating Thursday’s behaviours (give compliments) and Saturday’s (the non-sexual mini-touch) into his repertoire."

"Translation: a day spent with him insisting that I am a 'very special lady' while attempting foot frottage with his gnarled extremities. There are few things that repulse me more than a man playing footsie, not least a man whose toenails could be classed as offensive weapons. The dog howls, whipped into a green-eyed frenzy. I feel utterly claustrophobic, stalked in my own home by a life partner turned dodgy uncle. Unable to take any more, I flash forward to Friday and 'ask for what I need,' since, 'We all have valid desires. But we don’t say them. We drop hints. We suggest. We hope our partners will "just know."' 'Terence,' I announce, 'I need us to stop doing this anti-divorce course. It is destroying me, and thus, us.'"

From "I tried to reboot my relationship in 7 days. Here’s what happened/Marriage experts John and Julie Gottman say a couple can reset their relationship in just a week. Hannah Betts and her partner, Terence, try out the ‘love prescription’" (London Times).

Reading this column, I was able to figure out that John Gottman was the man in TikTok video #5 that I recommended in a post on October 15th. I titled it "When your partner makes a bid for your attention." 

A nice even 10 in the TikTok selection tonight. Some people love them.

1. A series of drawings with an invitation to visualize the artist.

2. Something called "manner leg" in Korea.

3. Living the barefoot life for 25 years.

4. When it's a woman's video at first, but then the edit switches to a man.

5. When white people speak to black people, they only seem to notice that you're black.

6. When you visit your parents, and it's 6 a.m.

7. When he called the little old lady "lovely." 

8. Queen Elizabeth and David Attenborough discuss a sundial.

9. What do you do with a big old baldface hornet's nest?

10. The old bun-in-the-oven metaphor.

Don't hike in the woods wearing sandals.

That's the central message in "Joyce Carol Oates’ foot photo is freaking everyone out."

“So important to wear proper hiking shoes,” the National Book Award winner tweeted, sharing a graphic close-up of her foot. “Never/ever walk in the woods in sandals. the instep of my left foot this morning--poison ivy? poison oak? must’ve stepped in something...”

Bonus JCO tweet at that link:

So barbaric that this should still be allowed... No conservation laws in effect wherever this is? https://t.co/hgavm9IBaM

— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) June 9, 2015

About those gecko feet.

I mean, look at them:

THERE IS A GECKO SITTING ON THE TOUCHSCREEN OF THE PHONE, MAKING CALLS WITH HIS TINY GECKO FEET!!! This gecko has called me 15 times, and everyone in our recent call list. *Actual photo of telemarketer* @TMMC @GEICO @HawaiianTel pic.twitter.com/USyKeOiDbE

— Dr. Claire Simeone (@Claire_Simeone) October 5, 2018

I got there via "A gecko, seriously, made dozens of mysterious phone calls from a Hawaii marine mammal hospital" (WaPo). And I found the closeup of the gecko foot on the Wikipedia article "Gecko feet" (there's an article just for the feet!).

The interactions between the gecko's feet and the climbing surface are stronger than simple surface area effects. On its feet, the gecko has many microscopic hairs, or setae... that increase the Van der Waals forces between its feet and the surface.

The Van der Waals forces!

The following equation can be used to quantitatively characterize the Van der Waals forces, by approximating the interaction as being between two flat surfaces:



where F is the force of interaction, AH is the Hamaker constant, and D is the distance between the two surfaces. Gecko setae are much more complicated than a flat surface, for each foot has roughly 14,000 setae that each have about 1,000 spatulae. These surface interactions help to smooth out the surface roughness of the wall, which helps improve the gecko to wall surface interaction.

And the gecko to touchscreen surface interaction!

A "Madison, Wisconsin man" crime makes it into the Washington Post.

"A man put a camera in his shoe for some ‘upskirting’ shots. It exploded on his foot."

It's the lamest sexual offense imaginable — looking for women in skirts and trying to get a glimpse at what's up under there, but only in the form of a photograph. The man never got a photograph before the battery malfunctioned, injuring his foot. In fact, he hadn't even left his home. So he wasn't caught, he turned himself in. He turned himself in because he'd sought counseling from "a clergyman" who told him that's what he should do.

Here's how the story appeared on the blog of the Madison Chief of Police, Mike Koval:

5) WEST: Information/Sex Offense – 5:24pm. Officers at the West Police District station were contacted by a subject (32-year-old HM) who wanted to turn himself in to police. The subject reported he had purchased a shoe camera that he intended to use to take "upskirt" videos of females, but the camera battery had exploded prior to obtaining any video, injuring the subject's foot. The subject was counseled on his actions and released from the scene as no illicit video had been taken. Investigation continuing.

I'm glad this man is not named. This is a real "go and sin no more" situation.

"I come to this blog for the hodology!"

Said kwenzel, in the first post of the day, which is about the meaning of "path."

Wikipedia knows...



... what the OED does not:



"Homology" is the quality of sameness.


"Podology" is the branch of medicine that deals with the feet — a less-familiar alternative to "podiatry."

"Chorology" is the study of the geographical extent or limit of something (for example, crayfish).

"Horology" is the science of measuring time. The "hor-" attached to "-ology" just means "hour."

"Codology" is a specifically Irish sort of hoaxing. The OED quotes James Joyce — "The why and the wherefore and all the codology of the business" — and the Daily Express (1928) — "There is in Ireland a science unknown to us in England called Codology... The English is ‘leg-pulling’... When I received an invitation to breakfast at the Dublin Zoo I thought that I could detect the hand of the chief codologist."

It's the "-ology" ending stuck on "cod," which is a slang term for a hoax or joke. Here's James Joyce again:

You went there when you wanted to do something... And behind the door of one of the closets there was a drawing in red pencil of a bearded man in a Roman dress with a brick in each hand and underneath was the name of the drawing:

Balbus was building a wall.

Some fellow had drawn it there for a cod. It had a funny face but it was very like a man with a beard.... Perhaps that was why they were there because it was a place where some fellows wrote things for cod....

But back to "hodology," which Wikipedia says is "the study of pathways." I click on the Wikipedia links to "Psychology," "Philosophy," "Geology," and "Neuroscience," and the word "hodology" appears on none of the pages. Is this a cod? I don't know. But I love the drawing on the page for neuroscience...



Drawing by Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1899) of neurons in the pigeon cerebellum. It takes me back to one of my favorite subjects, How to Draw Like Paul Klee.

"In Praise of Guided Tours/They’re tacky. They’re touristy. There’s no other way I’d rather sightsee."

Writes Jeffrey Bloomer in Slate.

... on a visit to the Frick Collection in New York, I browsed the galleries quietly on my own, but the former residence only really came to life when I overheard a tour already in progress. The guide described Henry Clay Frick’s preferences in his commissioned portraits of women, and I could hear a raised eyebrow in his voice. “He liked to have all of them in the frame. Head. Feet. All of them,” he said. “Feet?” an older woman asked. “Oh yes, feet.” The guide turned the stiff galleries into a site of early-century tea talk. I was riveted and a little aghast. Had my resistance to getting led around like a rube cost me riveting trivia and crucial gossip on every trip I’ve ever taken? Had I ever really been anywhere without a tour? Why did no one tell me?

"He told us his daughter had said his feet were smelly . . . But he didn’t want to know how bad the odor was because he would feel hurt."

"That’s why we developed this cute robot."