Crosshairs!

I see Matt Taibbi has a piece titled "Barack Obama Now Squarely in Russiagate Crosshairs/New disclosures from a Tulsi Gabbard-led working group point directly to the top, as the legacy of 'Hope and Change' begins a plunge to the ocean floor."

I do not like the overheated metaphor, especially the evocation of assassination.

And the use of "begins" before "plunge to the ocean floor" shows how silly it is. What is the beginning of "a plunge to the ocean floor"? Breaking the surface? It calls to mind a tumble from a paddleboard. How far down is "the ocean floor"? 8 feet?

Man eats a whole Carolina Reaper pepper and gets "thunderclap headaches."

The NYT reports:

Dr. Lawrence C. Newman, a neurologist and director of the headache division at NYU Langone Health, said, “On a one to ten scale, it’s off the charts.”....

The new study does suggest that capsaicin, being investigated for its role in alleviating pain and lowering blood pressure, can have unexpected effects on certain people....

The Reaper was bred to reach record levels of heat. Reached by phone at the PuckerButt Pepper Company in Fort Mill, S.C., the Reaper’s creator, Ed Currie, offered mixed advice on pepper consumption.

On the one hand, he said, “People who eat whole Reapers are just being stupid.” But Smokin’ Ed, as he calls himself, also gave the impression that wasn’t such a bad thing. “We eat them all the time,” he said, with no ill consequences beyond pain.

"Caucasians are able to jump around, and it’s not a big deal for them to be blond, a redhead or brunet, whereas those same rules don’t apply to us"

"It would be so empowering to be able to just try anything the way the rest of the world seems to be able to without any problems.... Maybe this is one part of unlocking the standards we’ve been imprisoned by... It may seem like a silly, frivolous act, an act of vanity, but Asians and Asian-Americans have a history of being marginalized and ignored, so whatever the political statement is, maybe by having blond hair, it’s a very simple declaration: 'Here I am. Pay attention to me. See me.'"

Said Greta Lee, an actress, quoted in "Why So Many Asian-American Women Are Bleaching Their Hair Blond" (NYT).

Why is blond hair so important? I googled that and ended up in the obvious place, Wikipedia, which has a really long article on the subject. Excerpt, under the heading "Sexuality":

In contemporary popular culture, blonde women are stereotyped as being more sexually attractive to men than women with other hair colors.... Some women have reported they feel other people expect them to be more fun-loving after having lightened their hair. The American novelist and screenwriter Raymond Chandler offers an appraisal of the blonde as social criticism in his novel The Long Goodbye (1953):

"Franken fell asleep at 2 a.m. on the night of the election and woke up with a migraine."

"For days, it was hard to think about anything besides Trump in the White House. 'There was a week or so when sleeping literally was a great thing,' Franken said. 'You go through a process of internalizing it.' In addition to the political shock, there was a broader despair over the cultural disconnect that the election laid bare. I kept thinking of an Onion headline that ran a few weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks: 'A Shattered Nation Longs to Care About Stupid [Expletive] Again.' How long does it take a culture to forge a new sensibility, whether comedic or political? Franken seemed to be struggling with this a bit. There was similar confusion in the various liberal bubbles of Washington, New York and Hollywood, whose inhabitants were the supposed keepers of the American zeitgeist — the geniuses who so spectacularly dismissed the zeitgeist that elected Donald Trump."

From the NYT article "Al Franken Faces Donald Trump and the Next Four Years/The two-term Democratic senator, who once made a living satirizing politicians, envisions an unfunny future," by Mark Leibovich. I picked that quote out of the center of the long article, but you should know that the article begins with Al Franken's observation that Trump never laughs.

I was looking to see what else Mark Leibovich has written. He inserted himself into that Al Franken article — I kept thinking of an Onion headline — right into the paragraph about Franken's headache. That seemed unusually egoistic for a NYT writer.

I looked back at my own Mark Leibovich tag and found 2 things:

Let's judge Michele Bachmann by how she deals with her migraine headaches.

Says Judith Warner (who, herself, gets migraines):

While there is much about migraines that will forever elude her control — weather changes, for example, can trigger terrible headaches — managing migraines involves a lot of meaningful decision-making. 

So... like... being President involves a lot of meaningful decisision-making, so... how you deal with headaches is a test of what kind of President you'll be.

Warner observes that the Bachmann campaign has only disclosed that she takes medicine to prevent migraines and medicine to relieve migraines. But what medicine? And how much?

I’m not a doctor, but reports that Mrs. Bachmann’s condition had her admitted to an urgent care facility three times in six months suggest that she is perhaps suffering more than she has to. It’s fair to ask: Is she getting the best possible care from doctors who practice mainstream science? Does she fully acknowledge the reality of having a chronic disability by regulating her diet, sleep, exercise and stress levels, as frequent migraine sufferers must? Or does she refuse to acknowledge her limitations?

In the absence of information about the preventive steps she is taking to, as she puts it, control her migraines, we are left with the impression that it’s the migraines that control her.

Are we left with that impression? Or do we just think she has a common affliction and — her achievements reveal — she deals with it well.

Warner seems to be applying a liberal political template to Bachmann's headache issue: She shouldn't just rely on pills (like a right-winger dealing with problems through military force and tough prison sentences). She should regulate all aspects of her life: diet, sleep, exercise and stress levels (like a left-winger with endless regulations and social programs).