"There are people that come, and they’ve been on it for three years, and they’re just so tired of feeling nauseous and constipated."

"They have come to Mountain Trek to get off of it. To learn accumulated lifestyle habits, so that they don’t then gain all the weight back."

Said Kirkland Shave, co-owner of the wellness retreat Mountain Trek, quoted in "The Ozempic era is forcing wellness retreats for the elite to change/Attendees might be looking to wean off weight-loss drugs or mitigate side effects such as digestive discomfort and muscle loss" (WaPo)(free-access link).

I've never gone on a wellness retreat — though I have watched Season 3 of "The White Lotus" — but I was interested enough to click through to the Mountain Trek website and to momentarily bask in the idea of the place. But as with all travel, you have to do the hard creative work of imagining what it's really like there.

Elon Musk drug endorsement.

"Musk, 53, noted that he prefers Mounjaro to Ozempic because taking 'high doses' of the latter drug made him 'fart & burp like Barney from the Simpson’s.'"

From "Lean-looking Elon Musk reveals he’s taking Mounjaro for weight loss in festive ‘Ozempic Santa’ post" (NY Post).

Why I didn't watch the State of the Union address live last night and why I probably will never watch the recording of it.

I didn't watch it live for the same reason I didn't watch "Dragnet" when it was on at 9 p.m. on Thursdays in 1954. It was past my bedtime. I was 3. 

I'm 73 — 8 years younger than Biden — and I'm in the Central Time Zone. He gave that speech at age 81 at 10 p.m. at night and went on until midnight, and I see he was feisty....

I wasn't feisty. I was lying down in my sleep position — a complicated arrangement involving 4 down pillows — and planning to more or less listen, listen until I entered the world of dreams — a place not necessarily more pleasant that the House chamber (last night I woke up screaming at nonexistent crocodiles) — but a place where I sojourn for 7 hours rebuilding the strength of a body that naturally rises at 4 a.m., maybe 3.

As I say, I am 73. I am not feisty at 9 at night and certainly not at midnight. If something were important enough though — stand here in front of millions and read this teleprompter in a dramatic, masterful style — I'd do it properly. I wouldn't yell irascibly. You wouldn't have to shoot me with drugs. In fact, that would be dangerously risky. I might behave erratically. I might yell irascibly. Yell irascibly for 2 hours? What would people think? Is the press on my side? Give me the drugs then! The press is on my side! They'll say I was "feisty."

Calling an old person "feisty" is like calling an African American person "articulate"....

We know what you mean. You're revealing that you have a stereotype and you're giving this person credit for setting himself apart from it.

But I was embracing the old-person stereotype, embracing my pillows, drifting off to sleep, and not really appreciating the irascible tone of voice. But I got to sleep. I've slept through the night. I did not wake up screaming. I'm well rested and perfectly lucid — I think! — composing these remarks before setting out to commune with the sunrise. 

I knew I would have the video of the full speech. What's so special about watching it live? Looking up what was on TV on Thursday at 9 in 1954 — so I could write "Dragnet" in the first sentence of this post — I happened upon this:

Despite hit filmed programs such as I Love Lucy, both William S. Paley of CBS and David Sarnoff of NBC were said to be determined to keep most programming on their networks live. Filmed programs were said to be inferior to the spontaneous nature of live television.

Take away the magic of live television, and what is the State of the Union address? We are perfectly free to watch the entire thing on YouTube the next day. Or never. Or in sliced out snippets — a highlight reel or a collection of verbal slips or biggest applause lines. Or we can just read about it. Did anything happen? Did some grieving mother hear her daughter's name said aloud? Was the name precisely correctly pronounced? Did the President hold up a button? Did he recharge his campaign?

Was he feisty? 

***

"Feisty," the OED tells us, is based on the familiar word "fist." It's a punch-in-the-nose concept. Fisty. Definition: "Aggressive, excitable, touchy." We're told it's American slang, originally dialect, and the OED has the quotes to prove it:

1913 Feisty means when a feller's allers wigglin' about, wantin' ever'body to see him, like a kid when the preacher comes. H. Kephart, Our Southern Highlanders 94

1926 That-there feisty bay mare jumped straight upwards and broke the tongue outen the plow. E. M. Roberts, Time of Man 152 

1965 Luther gets a little feisty after a few drinks, and he began to argue with him. ‘D. Shannon’, Death-bringers (1966) xiii. 162

1968 He couldn't shake her loose—she hung on to his arm, feisty as a terrier. J. Potts, Trash Stealer xiii. 148

***

Post-sunrise opinion: The morning after, it is possible to see that the SOTU was a campaign speech. Every morning, there was a campaign speech yesterday.

In the comments: I'm getting a lot of pushback on the etymology of "feisty." It's not the fist that is the hand in an aggressive clench? It's a dog, you say? Well, let's go back to the OED. I see I made an assumption. What I was seeing at the OED entry "feisty" was:

I had not clicked on the boldface "fist." But if I had, I would not have gone to the entry for the kind of "fist" that is the clenched hand. I'd have gone to a separate entry, with 3 things together: a fart, a puffball fungus, and a dog:

1. A breaking wind, a foul smell, stink. Obsolete....

2. The fungus usually known as puff-ball.... Obsolete....

3. U.S. dialect. A small dog....

The etymology pointed us to #3, so — no matter how much we might enjoy thinking "feisty" means farty — we must accept that the comparison is to a small dog. Yappy, hopping around, over-excited. Still farty though. You see the connection. It's always the dog.

"RFK Jr. meanwhile, a prospective president of the United States, watched calmly on."

I'm highlighting that amusingly elevated sentence that appears in the comic chaos of "Robert F. Kennedy Jr. press dinner explodes in war of words and farting" by Mara Siegler in the NY Post. 

[A] guest asked Kennedy... about the environment. And it seems that the mere inquiry was enough to set off apparently drunk gossip-columnist-turned-flak Doug Dechert, the host of the event, who became enraged and screamed at the top of his lungs: “The climate hoax!” 

"'The View' Adds Coasters Under Mugs To Prevent Co-Hosts From Being Accused Of Farting."

 Decider reports.

A recent incident had Sara Haines explaining, “It’s my glass. Every time I turn it like this.”

Joy Behar: “OK, let’s put that rumor to rest …. See that sound that you hear? That’s a cup, OK?” 

Whoopi Goldberg: “Yes, because we get blamed for dropping gas when in fact it is a cup.”

6 TikToks for you tonight. Let me know what you like best.

1. People in 5 different countries show what they would make with an orange.

2. How well could you do if you had to adapt to walking on all fours?

3. Hiking from one coast of Scotland to the other.

4. A West Coast Trail hike.

5. What it's like being one of the infinite monkeys who will eventually type the complete works of Shakespeare.

6. The history of Roland the Farter.

"[F]amilies of means tend to choose play-based preschool programs with art, movement, music and nature. Children are asked open-ended questions, and they are listened to."

"This is not what [the researcher Dale Farron] is seeing in classrooms full of kids in poverty, where 'teachers talk a lot, but they seldom listen to children.'... Private preschools, even home-based day cares, tend to be laid out with little bodies in mind. There are bathrooms just off the classrooms. Children eat in, or very near, the classroom, too. And there is outdoor play space nearby with equipment suitable for short people. Putting these same programs in public schools can make the whole day more inconvenient. 'So if you're in an older elementary school, the bathroom is going to be down the hall. You've got to take your children out, line them up and then they wait,' Farran says. "And then, if you have to use the cafeteria, it's the same thing. You have to walk through the halls, you know: 'Don't touch your neighbor, don't touch the wall, put a bubble in your mouth because you have to be quiet.'... 'Whoever thought that you could provide a 4-year-old from an impoverished family with 5 1/2 hours a day, nine months a year of preschool, and close the achievement gap, and send them to college at a higher rate?' she asks. 'I mean, why? Why do we put so much pressure on our pre-K programs?' We might actually get better results, she says, from simply letting little children play."

From "A top researcher says it's time to rethink our entire approach to preschool" (NPR).

I'd never before noticed that phrase "put a bubble in your mouth." Here's an article about it. Excerpt:

"[W]intertime beach outings are a quintessential example of uitwaaien (OUT-vwy-ehn), a Dutch word that translates literally as 'out blowing' but is perhaps better understood as 'to walk in the wind.'"

"Typically used as a noun, it describes the act of undertaking some sort of outdoor physical activity in windy conditions. Wind, as local wisdom goes, refreshes and recalibrates you.... The Dutch have harnessed the wind as a power source for centuries; windmills have long been so intrinsic to society there that they’re practically a national symbol..... Like all lifestyles, uitwaaien has its casual partakers and more extreme devotees. Wim Hof, the Dutch health expert... says: 'We have a physical body, but it is like a radio: It receives and sends signals. And the carrier is the wind. The wind is able to change our biochemistry in the depth of our bodies for the better.... The wind offers the gas exchange between the outside and the inside of our selves. How do we regulate that? By doing the breathing, by letting the wind come into our bodies. That is a foundation of health."

From "Forget hygge, it’s time for uitwaaien" (WaPo).

Last night, Spotify suggested that I listen to a track that was 8 hours of the sound of wind — supposedly good white noise for sleeping. So this Dutch concept intrigues me. But I've been avoiding going out when the wind is high, especially in the winter, when it's not just about getting clobbered by detached tree parts, but it's driving the "feels like" temperature down below zero. 

I wrote about Wim Hof once before — in a 2019 post that ended, "Like the unfortunate couple who ate raw marmot organs and died of the plague and Willie Nelson inhaling/scarfing down marijuana, there's a thing that can be done and a human mind to imagine that it could work. It could work and it could cause a lot of damage, so... do it!" Read that whole post to see what sorts of things Hof does. 

I guess Hof formulates his ideas in Dutch. The English translation — "The wind offers the gas exchange between the outside and the inside of our selves... letting the wind come into our bodies" — sounds rather... farty.

ADDED: In France, you can walk in the wind indoors:

"As a rule of thumb, I’d say that if the leader of a nation farts in front of you at a climate-change summit, please try to resist telling everyone about it, no matter how long or loud it is."

Writes Danielle Cohen in "Do Not Fart Near Camilla Parker Bowles" (NY Magazine).

"Meltdown May refers to an unofficial annual observance that celebrities and popular Twitter accounts seem to attract controversy as a result of their tweets and comments in the month of May and draw further attention to themselves as they argue with their critics."

"... In May of 2021, multiple commenters agreed that Eve Barlow was the main character of Meltdown May for her consistent Zionist posting, culminating in her writing a piece in which she bemoaned mass replies of 'Eve Fartlow' to her posts as a 'social media pogrom.'"

 Know Your Meme explains.

ADDED: Click on those internal links for more. As for "main character":

"The effort by Ms. Harris to address the root causes of migration, which can take years, is..."

".... unlikely to quickly produce the swift action demanded by Republicans and some Democrats to reduce the overcrowding at the border."

From "Biden Names Harris to Work With Central America on Migration/The president gave the vice president a prominent role in the politically charged issue at a time when thousands of children are being detained in facilities along the border" (NYT).

The "root causes" language is a reference to something Harris said: "While we are clear that people should not come to the border now, we also understand that we will enforce the law. We also — because we can chew gum and walk at the same time — must address the root causes that cause people to make the trek."

Walking and chewing gum at the same time is a metaphor,* initially designed to insult someone who can't do these 2 relatively easy-to-do things simultaneously. It doesn't work too much as a brag, unless you're saying that the 2 things are easy to do at the same time. 

What are the 2 things? There's a huge difference between wanting people not to come + caring about root causes and effectively enforcing all of the law restricting the border + changing the conditions that are causing people to come to the border. 

The first set of things is easy to do, damned near effortless. The second set is nearly impossible, done together or done one at a time. Might as well laugh about doing them together because you know you're not going to make much progress at all on either.

_________________________

* "The term is recorded in a Texas newspaper in [1964]. President Lyndon Johnson allegedly said that then-Congressman (and later president) Gerald Ford couldn’t 'fart and chew gum at the same time.' As early as the 1900s, it was observed that women talk a lot and chew gum a lot, but don’t 'talk and chew gum at the same time.' Entertainer and cowboy philosopher Will Rogers was described in 1926 as 'the only man in the world who can chew gum and talk sense at the same time.' It’s probable that the saying 'walk and chew gum at the same time' developed from the earlier 'talk and chew gum at the same time.'" That's at Quora. To speculate more coherently: People said women can't "talk and chew gum at the same time," then some crude fellows thought it was funner to say "walk and fart at the same time" — because walking and farting is a very funny subject. (I've seen George Carlin demonstrate the hilarity.) Then it got turned around for fun to LBJ's "fart and chew gum at the same time." Then it got cleaned up into the present-day corruption, "walk and chew gum at the same time."

Oh, the things you have to do to be popular!

I'm reading "Universal Tries to Escape Disaster by Patching Up ‘Dolittle’/Script rewrites, adding animal characters delayed release of the costly family film" (WSJ):

In a pivotal scene in Universal Pictures’ “Dolittle,” hitting theaters Friday, the title character—a doctor, played by Robert Downey Jr., who can converse with animals—relieves an ornery beast’s indigestion by removing debris from its rectum. Flatulence jokes ensue. The scene was added late in the filmmaking process, one of several efforts Comcast Corp. ’s Universal made to try to ensure a return on the $175 million it invested in the family-friendly movie, according to a person close to the production.

Robert Downey Jr. recently submitted to the Joe Rogan Experience:



I'm only 26 minutes into it, so I can't tell you if they get to any frank talk about the disaster that is Dr. Dolittle. Joe normally takes a long time warming up his guests, and things often get really good in the second or third hour, but Downey is a big star, and he only sits there for 53 minutes. In the first half, he's shown a great propensity for self-seriousness, so I'm not expecting much.

A juxtaposition in the New York Post inspires me to think that we will survive.

(Click to enlarge and clarify.)

Links:

"Reporter spotted chugging her coffee is hero of impeachment hearings"

"120-year-old photo sparks Greta Thunberg conspiracy theories"

"Goodwin: Why Dems are so worried after latest round of impeachment hearings"

"Surgeons cut pounds of petroleum jelly out of ‘Popeye’ bodybuilder’s biceps"

ADDED: From the Goodman column:

Vindman was a strong witness, but a strange one, too. He presented himself as an Alexander Haig-like “I’m in charge here” figure, when he was actually far down the pecking order.

His inflated sense of self-importance seemed to be key to his alarm over the phone call. As he put it, he believed “that if Ukraine pursued an investigation in the 2016 elections, the Bidens and Burisma, it would be interpreted as a partisan play” and Ukraine would lose bipartisan support...

Adding to the surreal quality of the hearings is a crucial fact that gets too little attention: Trump’s policy toward Ukraine has been far stronger than President Barack Obama’s. Providing Ukraine with antitank weapons to counter Russian invasions is a direct slap at Vladimir Putin, a move Obama rejected because he feared it would provoke Putin.

IN THE COMMENTS: tim maguire asked (about the coffee drinker):

Why is that a thing? He testified for a long time. The people behind him are going to do stuff. I could see if she picked her nose or let loose a particularly large yawn, but drinking coffee? That’s pretty normal.

It's "a thing" because people get so bored and dull during long formal proceedings that something spontaneous gives joy. This is what I'm talking about when I say I am inspired. It means that we seemingly inert Americans are not sitting still and inertly receiving the program. We are thirsting for humanity — and when we feel we are down to the last drop, we invert the big cup onto our face with jaunty enthusiasm.

Speaking of "if she picked her nose or let loose a particularly large yawn"... just look at all the attention paid yesterday to the possibility that Eric Swalwell farted during a TV interview. The fart heard 'round the world means: We want to feel alive! We are human!!

"Nowhere is the left more nuts than on climate. Biden, the 'reasonable' person on stage, says 'no more fossil fuels'..."

"...in his presidency. Think about this, folks. No oil, gas, coal. No diesel trucks, airplanes, fighter jets, chainsaws."

Tweets Kimberley Strassel.

I couldn't believe it when I heard it last night:

BIDEN: We will end any subsidies for coal or any other fossil fuel. But we have to also engage the world while we're doing it. We have to walk and chew gum at the same time.

BASH: Thank you, Mr. Vice President. Just to clarify, would there be any place for fossil fuels, including coal and fracking, in a Biden administration?

BIDEN: No, we would -- we would work it out. We would make sure it's eliminated and no more subsidies for either one of those, either -- any fossil fuel.

I said out loud at the time: "So, no more airplanes?"

To be fair, I think it's likely that Biden understood the question to mean is there any place for government subsidies and that's all he's thinking of eliminating. Alternatively, he means to eliminate coal and he uses the term "fossil fuel" without realizing it includes oil and gas.

***

Here's the etymology of the word "fossil":

1610s, "any thing dug up;" 1650s (adj.) "obtained by digging" (of coal, salt, etc.), from French fossile (16c.), from Latin fossilis "dug up," from fossus, past participle of fodere "to dig," from PIE root *bhedh- "to dig, pierce."

Restricted noun sense of "geological remains of a plant or animal" is from 1736 (the adjective in the sense "pertaining to fossils" is from 1660s); slang meaning "old person" first recorded 1859. Fossil fuel (1833) preserves the earlier, broader sense.

That slang usage — meaning "old person" — could be used on Biden. Maybe he's the fossil that should be rejected.

Anyway, the first usage of "fossil" in the figurative sense referred to the government. It was Ralph Waldo Emerson (in 1844): "Government has been a fossil; it should be a plant."

The first use to refer to a person came from Charlotte Brontë (in 1857): "When a man endures patiently what ought to be unendurable, he is a fossil."

***

What Biden was said was dumb, and while he was saying it, he evoked an old expression about dumbness. He said, "We have to walk and chew gum at the same time." The original line was "He's so dumb that he can't walk and chew gum at the same time." That was a President talking about a man who later became President. LBJ said it about Gerald Ford. Or so the fit-to-print newspapers reported. It's necessary to add that he really said "He's so dumb that he can't fart and chew gum at the same time."

Senator Whitehouse, just now: "I don't believe 'boof' is flatulence. I don't believe 'the devil's triangle' is a drinking game."

"And I don't believe calling yourself a girl's 'alumnius' is being her friend. And I think drinking 'til you 'ralph' or 'fall out of the bus' or 'don't remember the game' or need to piece together your memory the next day is more consistent with Dr. Ford's and other's testimony than his own. If Dr. Ford's testimony is true, I hope we can all agree that Kavanaugh has no business on the Court. And I for one believed her."

On the front page of Urban Dictionary right now:

Devils Triangle
A threesome with 1 woman and 2 men. It is important to remember that straight men do not make eye contact while in the act. Doing so will question their sexuality....

by W_J May 11, 2008

boofed
to have taken it in the butt; had anal sex.

Nick boofed Mal last night.
by Andrea M. October 11, 2004

These definitions go back to the early 00s, so they're not concocted to hurt Kavanaugh, but they don't go back to the early 80s, so they're somewhat weak as definitions used by teenaged Kavanaugh in his yearbook.

Also on the front page at Urban Dictionary because of (I presume) the Kavanaugh hearings (WaPo transcript):

7 f's
Find them
French them
Feel them
Finger them
Fuck them
Forget them
Forever

I did the big 7 f's last night
#find#french#feel#finger#fuck#forget#forever#them#7#f#f's#club#big
by * * February 21, 2007

The 7 f's relates to this part of Whitehouse's questioning of Kavanaugh yesterday:

WHITEHOUSE: And there are, like, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven F’s in front of the Fourth of July [on Kavanaugh's high school yearbook page]. What does that signify, if anything?

KAVANAUGH: One of our friends, Squi, when he said the F word starting at a young age, had kind of a wind-up to the F word. Kind of a “ffff.” (LAUGHTER) And then the word would come out. And when we were 15, we thought that was funny. And it became an inside joke for the — how he would say, “Ffff” — and I won’t repeat it here. For the F word. 

In the same questioning session, Whitehouse had asked Kavanaugh about "Devil’s triangle," and Kavanaugh had said, "Drinking game."

WHITEHOUSE: How’s it played?

KAVANAUGH: Three glasses in a triangle.

WHITEHOUSE: And?

KAVANAUGH: You ever played quarters?

WHITEHOUSE: No (ph).

KAVANAUGH: OK. It’s a quarters game.

Asked about "boofed," Kavanaugh had said "That refers to flatulence. We were 16."

WHITEHOUSE: OK. And so when your friend Mark Judge said the same — put the same thing in his yearbook page back to you, he had the same meaning? It was flatulence?

KAVANAUGH: I don’t know what he did, but that’s my recollection. We want to talk about flatulence at age 16 on a yearbook page, I’m — I’m game.

ADDED: Do I agree with what Whitehouse said "I hope we can all agree" about? I think many people, when they are young, drink and say crude things about sex, including things like that 7 fs business and voicing enthusiasm for anal sex and threesomes, and I don't think any of that junk is even relevant to the question whether a person with a long professional career has the character needed to serve on the Supreme Court.

But Whitehouse only asked us to agree that if Ford's allegations are true, he should not serve on the Court, and I will agree to that. The question remains whether Ford's allegations are true, and Whitehouse is using Kavanaugh's testimony about the meaning of "boofed" and "Devil's triangle" to attack his credibility. If we think he lied under oath about that, then it's more likely that he lied about other things, including his denial of Ford's allegations.

"It’s happened thrice, so it can’t be a coincidence: There’s some guy who I believe is playing a fart sound as he passes people as some sort of social experiment."

"I think it’s always the same... fart... Every time... while I was talking to a friend.... we just get interrupted by this fart that leaves us silent and staring. He plays it as he passes and never looks back, acts like nothing happened. Guy is white, college age, very straight-laced looking."

From "There’s a ‘serial farter’ on the loose in the West Village" (Page Six).

More and more the news makes me think about Harpo Marx...



Just yesterday, writing about the Manafort trial, I came very close to adding this:

"A Colorado artist says he has reached a settlement with Elon Musk after challenging the Tesla tycoon’s use of a farting unicorn motif that he had drawn as an ironic tribute to electric cars."

"Musk used the cartoon image on Twitter, without attribution, to promote his Tesla electric car range, and ignored Tom Edwards’ attempts to come to a licensing arrangement, telling the artist’s daughter it would be 'kinda lame' to sue," The Guardian reports.

Sales of the mug spiked in February 2017 when Musk tweeted a photo of one, describing it as “maybe my favourite mug ever”. The following month, however, he tweeted an even more crudely drawn copy of the image to promote Tesla’s new “sketch pad” feature. It subsequently appeared as an icon on the vehicles’ operating system, and in a Christmas holiday message to his customers....

I guess Musk assumed he was helping the artist by promoting his work, but the continued use of the image should have been cleared with the artist.

I think it's funny that Tesla liked the image, because it seems to me like critique of electric cars. There are no unicorns, and even if they were, it would be hard to get them to fart directly into a car. It's already hard to find places along your route where you can charge your electric car, and the unicorn method — even if unicorns existed and had farts that could power a car — you'd have a hell of a time finding them when you needed them and getting them to fart in the general direction of your... well, wouldn't farts go in a gas tank?  I'm seeing critique of electric cars... on so many levels.

"I don’t feel beholden to finding the next Benchley or a Benchley knockoff. I like things that are witty."

"I also like dumb fart jokes. The high-low spread is much more interesting than trying to mummify a thing and keep presenting it all over and over again."

Says Emma Allen, who is the new cartoon editor at The New Yorker, quoted in the NYT.

When asked about how her tastes differ from her predecessor’s, she said, “I think I have a slightly weirder sense of humor.” She added later, “As much as I like observational gags, I also like things that are more surreal.”...

The Trump administration has ushered in more political comedy at The New Yorker... and Ms. Allen said she worried that “an exhaustion” could set in....

An exhaustion, yeah, and it could also just not be funny. I find Trump very funny, but I realize my perception depends on my not feeling afraid of him. I don't know exactly why I'm trusting him not to destroy everything, but it's a necessary inference from my enjoyment of his funniness. For those who are afraid and want to use humor to attack him, you'd better believe that's exhausting and also not funny. 

Good luck to the new humor editor finding some things that really are funny. I don't at all expect that The New Yorker will discover how to enjoy Trump's humor, but I'm thoroughly tired of New Yorker cartoons that impose the perspective that we hate Trump. I know humor can be based on anxiety, and I appreciate that many people are really afraid of Trump. But don't pander to them. Don't soothe them. Challenge them.

What the South Carolina Democratic Chairman meant when he said "send Nikki Haley back to wherever the hell she came from."

Dick Harpootlian — great name! — says he just meant send her back to Lexington County. No reference to her ethnicity. (Her parents immigrated from India, and her religious heritage is Sikh.)

He has to say that, of course, but the "wherever the hell" locution makes the excuse utterly unbelievable. In a situation like this — where you've got a shred, but only a shred of deniability — is it better to deny or better to apologize?

Speaking of shreds... a Republican would be shredded if he said anything close to that about an opponent's ethnicity.

The Republican's fart is the Democrat's poot.

"When not shouting profanities at the chefs, bursting into noisy and prolonged bouts of flatulence during the traditional tea ceremony..."

"... insulting and belligerently interfering with my crew by petulantly flashing his cell phone camera directly into their eyes while they were working ('I’m a journalist! I’m allowed!'), this guy was drinking himself stupid. It was only through their infinite mercy—and perhaps no small amount of pity for this elderly and shambolic creature, that my crew did not punch his face in. They were sorely tempted. Anyone who attended the event will surely recognize which particular steaming dribble of ordure I’m talking about."

Who is Anthony Bourdain talking about?  Guesses are accumulating here.

By the way, what's with the word "shambolic"? I just realized I've been coasting complacently on the meaning of that word for years, conflating it with the song "Shambala" by Three Dog Night. But Bourdain can't be saying anything about washing away our troubles, washing away our pain, and everyone being lucky and everyone being kind.

The Oxford English Dictionary says that "shambolic" grew out of the word "shamble," perhaps influenced by "symbolic," and it means "Chaotic, disorderly, undisciplined." It was "Reported to be ‘in common use’ in 1958," but the first quote provided is from 1970:

1970   Times 18 June 9   His office in Printing House Square is so impeccably tidy that it is‥a standing reproach to the standard image of shambolic newspaper offices.

For a second there, I grasp at the theory that Three Dog Night really is behind "shambolic," but the song only goes back to 1973.