At the Mudface Café...

... you can talk all night.

I had already decided on the title "At the Mudface Café" for my day-ending open thread post using that photo of the seeming face I saw in the mud on the trail today. 

And after that pedestrian pareidolia, as I kept walking the muddy path, I was struck to hear this passage in my audiobook:

"Mr. Vance’s win will likely come as a disappointment to some Republicans who have been quietly hoping that Mr. Trump’s grip on the party is slipping."

"They see the midterms as an existential moment for the party. They are acutely aware that if the candidates he endorsed do well, the feeling of inevitability that he will be the party’s nominee in 2024 increases, annihilating any hope of reconstituting a political coalition around anything other than fealty to Mr. Trump.... He has remade the Republican Party in his image.... In his endorsements, Mr. Trump appears to be hedging against any narrative failures by placing his chips all over the table. So far, in 2022, he has endorsed over 150 candidates. Generally speaking, Mr. Trump has made two kinds of endorsements. Standard incumbent endorsements are the first... On the national level, some of Mr. Trump’s marquee endorsements seem risky. Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania.... [I]n Georgia... the former football star Herschel Walker... Many people in Georgia love Mr. Walker without reservation and will forgive him any indiscretion. When I raised the issue of Russian roulette, a Georgia man responded, 'He keeps winning.'... Whether Mr. Trump’s handpicked candidates win or not, the Republican field that will emerge from these primary battles will be overwhelmingly Trumpy.... [T]o blunt Mr. Trump’s wholesale takeover of the party... scores of candidates endorsed by Mr. Trump who win their primaries will need to lose in the general election...."

Writes Sarah Longwell, "the executive director of the Republican Accountability Project and the publisher of The Bulwark," in "J.D. Vance Is More Proof That Trump Is King of the Republican Party" (NYT).

I haven't been reading enough about Herschel Walker to have seen, until now, that he's talked about playing Russian roulette more than 6 times! Is that anything but crazy? 

The oldest use of the term "Russian roulette" — according to the OED — is a 1937 short story by George Surdez. Here's a passage from that story, quoted in the Wikipedia article "Russian roulette":

I bring you 8 TikTok selections in the hope that you'll say which one(s) you like and why.

1. A song about cooking salmon in your studio apartment.

2. Scary stories for horses.

3. Dolly Parton and Patti LaBelle use their acrylic fingernails for percussion.

4. A freaky optical illusion.

5. A Tasmanian devil yawns.

6. How to live with a boy and still have a cute apartment.

7. Thatched roof skills.

8. Ukrainians before the war and now.

The Perpetual Diamond.

The perptual diamond: The diamond remains fixed in one place but appears to move up, down, left, or, right. See how far away you can be from your screen before the effect goes away. From https://t.co/XRFKTtjOfm pic.twitter.com/af7BOUCvfC

— Arthur Shapiro (@agshapiro2) June 2, 2019

"The term 'blivet' for the impossible fork was popularized by Worm Runner's Digest magazine."

"In 1967 Harold Baldwin published there an article, 'Building better blivets,' in which he described the rules for the construction of drawings based on the impossible fork. In December 1968 American optical designer and artist Roger Hayward wrote a humorous submission 'Blivets: Research and Development' for The Worm Runner's Digest in which he presented various drawings based on the blivet. He 'explained' the term as follows: 'The blivet was first discovered in 1892 in Pfulingen, Germany, by a cross-eyed dwarf named Erasmus Wolfgang Blivet.'..."

From the Wikipedia article "Impossible trident," which I'm reading this morning because Bad Lieutenant — commenting in the post about Kim Kardashian's "body shapers" — said "Sausage casings come to mind. I was thinking more along the lines of 'blivet.'"

I was trying to remember how I'd heard that word defined, and I don't think it's what Bad L was thinking of (which comes up in the Urban Dictionary definition: "Ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag").

And I'm sure it wasn't The Impossible Trident, which is this familiar thing that exists only in drawings:

So what was my old, forgotten understanding of "blivet"? Hey! It's in the Oxford English Dictionary:

U.S. slang. (chiefly joc.).

A pseudo-term for something useless, unnecessary, annoying, etc.; hence, = thingamajig n.

The oldest published use is in a slang dictionary in 1967, looking back to WWII:

1967 H. Wentworth & S. B. Flexner Dict. Amer. Slang Suppl. 673/2 Blivit, n., anything unnecessary, confused, or annoying. Lit. defined as ‘10 pounds of shit in a 5-pound bag’. Orig. W.W. II Army use. The word is seldom heard except when the speaker uses it in order to define it; hence the word is actually a joke.

So Urban Dictionary is more right than Wikipedia, but Wikipedia seems to know it's getting it wrong, since it also has an article for "Worm Runner's Digest," which is identified as (partly) satire:

The W.R.D. published both satirical articles, such as "A Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown", and scientific papers, the most famous of which, "Memory transfer through cannibalism in planaria", was a result of McConnell's RNA memory transfer experiments with planarian worms and was later published in the Journal of Neuropsychiatry.

It's pure poetry that Kim Kardashian's body shapers led us to "A Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown":

Consider now an elemental strip of cloth isolated as a free body in the area of plane B of figure 1. The two tangible forces F1 and F2 are equal and opposite as before, but the force W(weight of dress) is not balanced by an upward force V because there is no cloth above plane B to supply this force. Thus, the algebraic summation of horizontal forces is zero, but the sum of the vertical forces is not zero. Therefore, this elemental strip is not in equilibrium; but it is imperative, for social reason, that this elemental strip be in equilibrium.....

Looking for the war protest. Part 2: The video.

Meade and I approach the Capitol, here in Madison, Wisconsin, on a Saturday morning, thinking if there's going to be action, it will be here. This is before Obama emerged to say that he was going to ask permission from Congress. This is a 10 minute video, but it's edited and moves quickly, I think. Look at the tags below to get an idea of what's in store:

The "flashed face" distortion effect.

Strange! Watch:

"But yeah, smart administrators understand that intellectual diversity on the faculty is a good thing, for purely self-interested reasons alone."

"Back in the 1990s when I was writing a lot of second amendment stuff, somebody tried to get my dean to fire me, saying that I was fomenting domestic terrorism. But my dean told me that he was glad to have me writing that stuff, because when alumni or legislators talked about ivory-tower liberal faculties, he could just send 'em a copy of my 'Critical Guide To The Second Amendment.'"

Heh. Yeah. Think about it. Let's say you have a state law school the legislators and alums imagine must be about 95% left-wing. Get one conservative lawprof out there in the public eye — maybe with a blog that's supposedly right-wing — and that vague mental percentage might readjust to 80% or so. That's value! Treasure your house conservative, oh lefty law school!

The Best Illusions of the Year.

These are fantastic optical illusions. Be sure to at least watch the full video of the winning illusion before proceeding to make jokes about Barack Obama or whatever.

A serene illusion.

Via ArtsJournal.

Optics.

This only worked for me the second time, when I got really close to the screen. It's really cool, so get close. You have to stare for a couple minutes, but it's fun afterwards:

Cool Optical Illusion @ Yahoo! Video

(Via Cartago Delenda Est.)