"ICE is planning to buy up to $20 million worth of electric gloves designed to allow agents to deliver painful shocks to detainees."

I'm reading "ICE’s new weapon: painful electric shock gloves/The glove is manufactured by a firm called Compliant Technologies" (London Times).

The Glove — Generated Low-Output Voltage Emitter — "is not effective through clothing or hair and can be degraded on individuals and animals that are extremely hairy."

So what body parts do you grab with your electrified hands? I was able to find what I think is Compliant's manual. My search for "face" only turned up a couple instance of "surface": "Periodic cleaning of the outside surface area of the G.L.O.V.E. SHALL only be done with 'My-Shield' wipes or surface cleaner in order to maintain the warranty on the G.L.O.V.E."

Also from the manual (at page 15):

"Supreme Court says Rastafarian can’t sue prison officials over shorn dreadlocks."

WaPo reports. 

This is a complicated case, written by Justice Gorsuch, for a 6-person majority, in Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections and Public Safety. It's about limits on Congress's power to impose conditions as it exercises its Spending Power. The statute is the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, and I assume most of us feel empathy for a Rastafarian prisoner who experiences a routine prison haircutting. The federal statute is designed to relieve prisoners of substantial burdens on their religion (unless the strict scrutiny standard is met). The problem is the scope of Congress's power.

Let's look at the Gorsuch opinion:

"Violence is necessary. Violence is a part of America’s culture. It is as American as cherry pie."

A quote from the subject of the NYT obituary "Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, Black Power Activist Known as H. Rap Brown, Dies at 82."

He died in prison, convicted of murder. But once: "With his trademark black beret and sunglasses, dexterous mind and imposing 6-foot-5 inch frame — 7 feet, with his Afro — he was a persuasive and charismatic figure to many, adept at rallying Black audiences to his cause while alarming many white listeners."

Other quotes in the article: "Black folk built America, and if it don’t come around, we’re gonna burn America down," "You’ve got to arm yourself. If you’re going to loot, loot yourself a gun store," and, referencing 5 days of rioting, “I don’t think you could articulate the sentiments of Black people any better than they just did in Detroit."

The NYT prints the full "n-word." Is it fit to print? I won't write it. But it is the second word of the 3-word title of the man's 1969 autobiography. The other 2 words are "Die."

"Morante is a genius, a being born to make beauty dream; a revolutionary, a complete artist, pure feeling, brave, master of a prodigious technique and a dazzling capacity for inspiration."

Wrote Antonio Lorca, a bullfighting critic, quoted in a London Times article about Morante's sudden retirement, "Spain’s top matador bids farewell — with a snip of his scissors/After a dramatic final fight, the torero retires as bullfighting faces growing scrutiny and declining support among younger Spaniards."

Spain’s leading matador has stunned the bullfighting world by staging an unexpected farewell, symbolically cutting off his ponytail in the ring after a “historic” performance.... His departure marks the end of a unique career whose “classicism” and “mysticism” often exhausted critics’ superlatives....

Is it surprising that there is still bullfighting in Spain?

"I think what you look like is a standard poodle and I love standard poodles."

A model for a perfect husband, revealed in "My cool cancer story/A year after losing my hair and self image to cancer, I put on my $5,000 prescription wig and look at myself and say, 'THERE she is.'" (WaPo video, free access).

"They found that human wounds took more than twice as long to heal as wounds of any of the other mammals."

"Our slow healing may be a result of an evolutionary trade-off we made long ago, when we shed fur in favor of naked, sweaty skin that keeps us cool.... Each hair grows from a hair follicle, which also houses stem cells.... 'When the epidermis is wounded, as in most kinds of scratches and scrapes, it’s really the hair-follicle stem cells that do the repair,' Dr. Fuchs said. Furry animals are covered in follicles, which help quickly close up wounds in mice or monkeys. By comparison, 'human skin has very puny hair follicles,' Dr. Fuchs said. And our ancestors lost many of those follicles, packing their skin with sweat glands instead.... Most furry mammals have them only in certain places, mainly the soles of their paws. But human ancestors went all-in on sweat — modern humans have millions of sweat glands all over our bodies, and they’re about 10 times denser than those of chimpanzees...."

From "Humans’ Wounds Heal Much More Slowly Than Other Mammals’/We naked apes need Band-Aids, but shedding the fur that speeds healing in other mammals may have helped us evolve other abilities" (NYT).

If you had to choose between the power to heal fast or to cool fast, would you not choose the cooling power? It's what evolution chose for us, but not for all those other animals. Why?

"He’s a good-looking guy. He looked really, very handsome last night. Some people look better in person? He looked great. He looked really nice, and I told him that."

Who said it? And who did he say it about?

Grok tries to help me analyze the "ethicality" of attaching a camera to your baby's head and deviously distracts me with the question of gluing hair onto the head of one's 3-year-old.

Here's my screen shot (and I'll tell you in a minute why I was asking this question):

 

I don't know why Jim Gaffigan had his question, but I had my question because I was reading the NYT article "From Baby Talk to Baby A.I./Could a better understanding of how infants acquire language help us build smarter A.I. models?" 

We read about a 20-month-old girl who wears "a soft pink hat" with a "lightweight GoPro-type camera... attached to the front." This particular child is only wearing the camera once a week for one month, but scientists are asking...

Things I talked about with Meade this morning.

1. How Tucker Carlson told Joe Rogan that Bari Weiss is a fraud and not honest at all. She called Tulsi Gabbard a "toady" and she didn't know what "toady" meant.

2. The similarities and differences between the Bob Dylan song "You Got to Serve Somebody" and the Band song "Unfaithful Servant."

3. The use of the tuba in popular music recorded in the last 60 years and why it matters if they had an actual tuba player in the studio as opposed to a digitalized tuba sound.

4. "Tuba players now rehearse around the flagpole."

5. Whether flags of foreign countries should be waved by members of Congress and how the use of the flag may mean different things to different people.

6. It was Richard Nixon who originated the wearing of a flag lapel pin and how everyone followed along and now they can't stop.

7. The way some people these days are calling their loved one "my person." I heard it in Salman Rushdie's new book "Knife" and I opened The New Yorker at random and saw it in a Roz Chast cartoon.

8. Some people call a dog's owner the dog's "person," and that seems related to the old joke "Are you walking him or is he walking you"?

9. Bill Maher asked why people want drag queens reading to children and said it would be better to have disabled people reading, but drag queens are entertainers and disabled people are not. 

10. How little children shouldn't be exposed to overly exciting entertainment and even peekaboo can be too intense for young minds.

11. How it's already too late to go south for warmer weather and we are better off here in the north, where there was frost on the grass this morning.

12. How fluent and funny Tucker Carlson was describing his boss at the New York Post who had a hairy back that he would rub against the door jamb while he talked to Tucker and the 5 or 6 ways that Tucker could have known that the man had a hairy back.

13. What a big part of life hairiness is — for the lower animals and for us, the humans. 

14. Was the hairy-backed man John Podhoretz? Carlson mutters the name.

15. The annoyingness of Carlson's laugh and how hard you have to commit to do a good enough imitation of it.

16. The energy Joe and Tucker had. Doesn't Tucker wear a hairpiece and Joe just shaved off all his hair.

17. Meeting for coffee and not an entire meal so you're free to leave whenever you want and how some people have trouble getting out of small-talk conversations and this one simple trick that's all you need.

18. The perception that a conversation can't end until both participants want it to end and the way some people keep adding new topics as if keeping a conversation going is a game.

19. The very low level of tennis playing that has you just trying to keep the ball in play as long as possible.

20. How all this talk is taking the place of writing on the blog, but I could just make a blog post out of all the topics that didn't make it onto the blog because I was talking about everything with Meade.

"The horse appears to be digitally composed because its front and hind legs do not represent any phase of natural movement at the walk, trot, canter, or gallop."

"Based on its leg position the horse appears to be trotting with his hind legs and cantering with his front!"

So says a commenter at the NYT Style piece, "Dissecting the ‘Cowboy Carter’ Cover: Beyoncé’s Yeehaw Agenda/On Tuesday, the pop star revealed her new album’s cover, a constellation of country signifiers reminding fans of her Texas roots."

The "Style Desk" writers are saying things like "I love how she and the horse have matching hair," "she’s clearly been trying to reinscribe images of Black women into the history of the cowboys and the West," and "Beyoncé is looking directly into the camera with her face forward and it really feels like a reclaiming" and "Beyoncé seems to believe she has to position herself as a cowgirl on a horse, wearing red, white and blue, holding the American flag on an album cover to drill it into people’s heads that her interest in country isn’t a fad."

Here's the photo/illustration under discussion:

"Unlike sheep, people feed themselves, wash their own hair and pay to be shorn at barbershops and salons."

"All Kollar has to do is collect it. But all the processing that comes afterward is expensive, especially because Human Material Loop is a start-up producing fabrics in small batches.... For the human-hair textile industry to take off, it would have to collect massive amounts of hair, which can be a logistical challenge.... 'If you look in the garbage can of a hair salon, it’s 95 percent hair,' said Lisa Gautier, who founded Matter of Trust in 1998. 'All we have to do is get that 5 percent of debris out of there. It’s really very doable.'... [A]rchaeologists have found mummies with human hair wigs that are thousands of years old. 'Imagine a sweater you can buy that will last 9,000 years,' she said. 'The products we will produce will outlast humanity.'"

From "Would you wear a sweater made from human hair? Entrepreneurs are looking for ways to recycle human hair, including weaving clippings swept off the floor of salons and barbershops into clothes" (WaPo).

My sweaters tend to wear out at the elbows. Mummies don't lean on their elbows. And mummies don't utilize laundry services. Cleaning takes a toll on one's sweaters. But a hair sweater — not to be confused with a hair shirt — might be nice. I have a yak hair sweater that I like a lot. Not counting on it lasting 9,000 years though.

"Her husband, whom she met when she was 21 and he was 81, dictated precisely what shade of nail polish she should wear (pink, pale and sheer, never matte)..."

"... and gently tapped her on the head when her roots were showing. When he was in residence, he issued a 6pm curfew ensuring his young wife was home to share his dinner (always chicken soup with cream cheese and crackers) and watch his favourite movies. Then, after dark, she was expected to participate in the group sex for which Hefner was famous. 'It was embarrassing. I don't know the most people there'd been in our bedroom at one time but – a lot. Pretty bad. We were like, "Oh, now it's your turn." Nobody really wanted to be there but I think in Hef's mind, he still thought he was in his 40s, and those nights, the people, the mansion, solidified that idea. He felt, "I've still got it."' There were also the famous 'Sunday Fundays' when 200 young women would descend on the Playboy mansion. Its octogenarian owner took so much Viagra that it made him lose his hearing on one side (a recognised side effect of the drug). 'Hef always said he'd rather be deaf and still able to have sex. Weird,' says Crystal...."

From "The hell of being married to Hugh Hefner by his Playboy Bunny third wife: Crystal Hefner, 37, describes how he took so much Viagra it made him deaf and imposed a 6pm curfew so she'd stay home and share his chicken soup" (Daily Mail).

Always chicken soup with cream cheese and crackers?

"When I was 16 years old, my hair started turning white.... he insecurity, anxiety, and ruminations about my slowly deteriorating hair lasted for over a decade."

"Every mirror became my own personal Picture of Dorian Gray. ... I was 16 and I was already fully immersed in a midlife crisis. And it was this preoccupation with my hair that made Tractate Nazir such a moving and deeply personal learning experience. A nazirite vow prohibits one from cutting their hair, drinking wine, and becoming contaminated by contact with the dead. But more so than any of the other prohibitions, the crowning definition of the nazir—a person who has taken this vow—is hair. The very word 'nazir,' explains Rashi, is a crown. And throughout Tractate Nazir, I discovered how to find sanctity in my own hair...."

Writes Dovid Bashevkin, in "By a Hair/In Tractate Nazir, the Talmud teaches us about beauty, transcendence, and other human frailties" (Tablet).

If Facebook is trying to tempt me away from TikTok with its "Reels" teasers, it's doing the opposite.

It seems to think my only interest is hair styling and isn't even remotely aware of what hair treatments might have something to do with me (as opposed to make me gag).

This came up in my Facebook feed this morning, and it is typical of what Facebook tries to feed me: 

 

In real life, I keep hair out of my feed.

"At least half of humanity combs their hair every day, and yet almost no one pauses to think deeply about it."

Said Harvard scientist L. Mahadevan, who studies mathematics, physics, and organismic and evolutionary biology, quoted in "Scientists Unravel Mysteries Of Brushing Tangled Hair --- Researchers at Harvard, MIT use math, lab work to develop pain-free techniques" (Wall Street Journal).

The knotty hair puzzle reached Prof. Mahadevan's lab three years ago, as he was thinking about how birds build nests. His research led to the question of tangles, which also occur at the microscopic level in DNA helixes and in magnetic flux lines crisscrossing the cosmos....

"The unlinking of the homochiral helixes during this process can be quantified in terms of the Calugareanu-Fuller-White (CFW) theorem which states that Lk=Tw+Wr, where Link (Lk) quantifies the oriented crossing number of the filaments averaged over all projection directions" and so on....

As you know, if you've combed tangled hair with any competence at all, it doesn't work to start at the top and comb down. You work up from the bottom. Mahadevan, despite being a genius, couldn't comb his 5-year-old daughter's hair. But it percolated in his head for 20 years, and he ultimately did some sophisticated research (as you can see) that explains why you're going to want to start from the bottom and work your way up. Most of us observe and guess and do trial and error, but there's a place in this world for the genius, even if he can't comb a little girl's hair intuitively. We're told he has also studied "why Cheerios clump in a bowl of milk."

Dave Chappelle attacked on stage.

#davechappelle attacked at #hollywoodbowl #netflixisajoke pic.twitter.com/oP04S0de90

— abazar 🦇🔊 (@abazar) May 4, 2022

Deadline reports: "Dave Chappelle Attacked Onstage While Performing During Netflix Is A Joke Festival At The Hollywood Bowl." 

In one posted clip, apparently after the incident, Chappelle is heard to quip, “It was a trans man,” a reference to his own transphobic comments in his Netflix special The Closer and the uproar, protests and anger that ensued....

Another person caught the end of the show on video where Chappelle and Jamie Foxx, who apparently rushed onstage to help apprehend the man going after Chappelle....“I thought that was part of the show,” Foxx is heard to respond.

“I grabbed the back of that N*****’s head,” said Chappelle. “His hair was spongey!”

There are also reports that "Chris Rock, who performed earlier, came on stage w/ him & joked: 'Was that Will Smith?'" 

After the Will Smith incident at the Oscars, there was a lot of talk about whether it would inspire other attacks on performers, whose vulnerability on stage had been so vividly exposed.

I watch TikTok for you — and here are my 9 new selections.

1. An accurate miniature of a heavily graffiti'd ice storage box.

2. The way someone talks when he wants to get you to volunteer to wall-mount his TV.

3. The charitable work of detangling someone's hair.

4. A cat sings the blues.

5. Reacting to the news that someone's tested positive for Covid — in 2020 and in 2022.

6. Seeing if the dog likes celery.

7. A quick animation of Joe Biden, telling about when he was a little boy.

8. Discovering just how introverted you are.

9. A famous fractal — the Sierpinski triangle.

"For many years, there was one kind of swim cap. It was ultratight, made of latex or silicone..."

"... and it was 'one size fits all.' But those swim caps left out large groups of swimmers, adding to structural inequities that often keep people of color out of the pool. Many swimmers have celebrated recent advances in swim cap technology. Several brands... have introduced options with more flexible material that vary in size, accommodating swimmers with hair that is larger and more textured than their White competitors’...  [T]he International Swimming Federation...  said the design does not fit 'the natural form of the head.' To the best of their knowledge, they added, 'the athletes competing at the international events never used, neither require … caps of such size and configuration.'"

From "Swim caps for natural hair are banned from the Olympics. Black women hear a clear message: ‘You don’t belong.’ The International Swimming Federation said the design does not fit ‘the natural form of the head’" (WaPo). 

I expect this decision to be reversed. It's not as though the enlarged crown of these hats gives the swimmer an advantage. It must be a disadvantage, increasing drag. 

"There are no rules about how to deal with the hair of people in prisons – it’s very difficult to supervise or place restrictions from above on how to deal with hair that has been forcibly removed."

"As a result, this has also created an environment in which [officials] are not going to turn down the economic benefits of hair that has been shaved off of people in government camps," said Chinese human rights lawyer and activist Teng Biao, quoted in "U.S. Border Control Seizes 13 Tons Of Hair Weaves Suspected To Be From Chinese Internment Camps" (Refinery29).

But the Chinese Ministry of Affairs denies the use of any forced labor or detention of ethnic minority groups. “We hope that certain people in the United States can take off their tinted glasses, correctly understand and objectively and rationally view normal economic and trade cooperation between Chinese and American enterprises,” reads a statement released by the ministry.