Trump wore a lapel pin depicting himself.

Questioned about it, he said "Somebody gave me this. Do you know what that is? That's called a 'Happy Trump.' And considering the fact that I'm never happy—I'm never satisfied. I will never be satisfied until we make America great again. But we're getting pretty close, I'll tell you what. This is called a Happy Trump. Somebody gave it to me. I put it on."

 

And that's that. Somebody gave it to him and he put it on. Wore it on camera. I wonder what other things people could get him to pin onto himself just by giving it to him. He could be pranked so easily. But I suspect that he exercises some judgment about what to pin on himself. 

And who attaches an image of himself to himself/herself?

It happens, mostly entertainment celebrities in T-shirts.

"Priceless crown of Empress Eugénie with 1,354 diamonds and 56 emeralds found broken in Paris."

Imagine a theft so big that you drop a thing like this in the getaway:

I'm reading "Louvre Museum Robbery: Priceless crown of Empress Eugénie with 1,354 diamonds and 56 emeralds found broken in Paris" (Economic Times).

Here in America, on the same day, we were disparaging royalty at our "No Kings" rallies. Many of the home-made signs relied on crown iconography....

So how do we feel about royalty these days? If you accept your little daughter in a getup like this....

... is it like letting your little son sport a swastika armband?

"A man who entered an M.R.I. room during a scan in Westbury, N.Y., on Wednesday was pulled into the machine by his chain necklace..."

"... and was hospitalized in critical condition, the authorities said. The man, who is 61, was wearing a 'large metallic chain' around his neck... did not have authorization to enter the room, the authorities said...."

The NYT reports.

UPDATE: The man died the next day.

"The women’s hair is in Utah curls, long waves with straight ends, popularized by Mormon momfluencers. Their makeup is heavy..."

"... the content creator and comedian Suzanne Lambert called it 'Republican makeup,' which she explained to me is 'matte and flat': thick eyebrows and lashes, dark eyeliner on the top and bottom lids, a bold lip, lots of bronzer. 'Inappropriate unless you’re on a pageant stage. And in that case, I would still do it differently,' she said. Their clothes, whether casual or corporate, are form-fitting and often accessorized with giant crosses. They are always thin and almost always white. To each her own. But it is also undeniable that this hyperfeminine and overtly Christian look offers a stark contrast to the often blunt and even brutal language they employ. Another glaring example of this is the horrifying video of Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, at CECOT, the tropical gulag in El Salvador where the Trump administration has sent migrants. She stood there before a group of shirtless prisoners and declared, 'If you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you could face,' while wearing a $50,000 Rolex.'"

Writes Jessica Grose, in "MAGA Beauty Is Built to Go Viral" (NYT).

I resist even examining why I have a strong mental barrier that stops me from reading this article.

Large rock the size of a small rock.

A TikTok video:

"To be creative, you want to feel like you're getting away with something."

Also: "You spend all your life trying to save time, but when you get to the end of your life, there's no time left, and you'll go to heaven, and you go 'But wait, I had velcro sneakers, no-iron shirt, clip-on tie. What about all that time? It's gone.'"

And, though Seinfeld won't show you his Star of David necklace, he says "Yes, I wear a Star of David necklace, because it makes me feel closer to the people of Israel that I feel close to and that's why I wear it."

He reveals his favorite word: "quintessence." He discusses the meaning, but I wanted the OED meaning: "The most essential part or feature of some non-material thing; the purest or most perfect form or manifestation of some quality, idea, etc."

But that's the figurative meaning.

"It may very well be that 10 years from now people will pay $10,000 in cash to be castrated just in order to be affected by something."

Says Andre Gregory in "My Dinner With Andre" — page 59 of the screenplay — a 1981 movie. 

It's not 10 years later. It's more than 40 years later. But think of the things we're doing now just in order to be affected by something.

For example, there's Zoraya ter Beek, 28, who "expects to be euthanized in early May" (The Free Press):

She said she was hobbled by her depression and autism and borderline personality disorder. Now she was tired of living—despite, she said, being in love with her boyfriend, a 40-year-old IT programmer, and living in a nice house with their two cats.

"The diamond industry is going through an existential crisis... [now that] technology and the human imagination have been able to replicate nature perfectly."

Said Jean Dousset, a great-great-grandson of Louis Cartier who is pushing the luxury end of the "lab-grown" diamonds business.

Quoted in "Lab-grown diamonds go luxury — and rock the industry" (Axios).

"Millennial women," we're told, are interested in these diamonds — they're real diamonds! — that don't come from diamond mines. One is quoted saying "I want a pretty fat ring."

How about I want the best price? No, apparently, the idea is you pay the same price you'd pay for the diamond from a mine, but you get a bigger ring. Bigger, not cheaper. Or will bigger scream "lab grown"? But who will care? Maybe it's in bad taste to expect people to mine diamonds. If you get a small lab-grown diamond, people might think you're connected to exploitation. So you simply must get the big fat one. And who cares if things are fake these days? No one comments on fake nails, fake eyelashes, hair extensions, breast implants.

And yet, that's not the point with the lab-grown diamonds. They have been determined to be real diamonds. That's why there's an "existential crisis." 

"You don’t have to just be a stay-at-home mom, you can aspire to be a young child-free woman and not work."

"I spend my hours doing what I want and have time to look after my body, cook nice meals and spend quality time with friends."

Says Emily de Rean, 37, who "previously worked as a financial analyst, but now lives off her boyfriend’s money after realizing she was unhappy climbing the corporate ladder," quoted in "I quit my job to be a full-time girlfriend: Get fit, cook and you can too" (NY Post). 

She had already quit her finance job — and switched to being a nanny — when she met this rich boyfriend who "encouraged me to stop working and become a stay-at-home girlfriend, so I could have time to do something more productive."

"Their lives were dotted with the minor luxuries of the progressive and affluent. They’re the kind of people who know..."

"... the local lady who makes her own Thai barbecue sauce; they notice when Rachel Maddow changes her shade of lip gloss; Bloom once had a second refrigerator devoted solely to condiments. One sign Brian was changing: his taste started to falter. This was funny until it wasn’t. He began to buy Bloom jewelry, she writes, 'so far from my taste that, if he were a different man, I’d think he was keeping a Seventies-boho, broke-ass mistress in Westville and gave me the enameled copper earrings and bangle he bought for her, by mistake.'"

From "‘In Love,’ a Novelist’s Powerful Memoir About a Happy Marriage and an Assisted Suicide/In her new book, Amy Bloom writes about loving her husband and helping him to end his life after a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s" by Dwight Garner, in his NYT review of "In Love/A Memoir of Love and Loss" by Amy Bloom.

Meanwhile, in America, Joe Rogan recommends the Libs of TikTok — which presents "the most nonsensical, fucking cuckoo talk" for your delectation.

Hi @joerogan! Glad you’re enjoying my page! 🤩 pic.twitter.com/KOvblUkmEE

— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) August 15, 2021

 

"There was a girl on the Libs of TikTok who had beads — different color beads — to wear that indicated which gender she identified with and how she's feeling because her gender changed multiple times a day"/"It's like a mood ring!" 

Here's the video that was referred to. I need to stress that I strongly object to calling this "mental illness." Two big reasons: 1. It's disrespectful and discouraging to the many real people who struggle with mental disabilities, and 2. It's presuming the mental condition of a performer and impairing your ability to perceive critique and humor.

Mental illness in a nutshell pic.twitter.com/4SCq7xfOiq

— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) August 8, 2021

TikTok is full of young actors playing with characters. Maybe slow down and listen. Consider the possibilities. 

Maybe Joe Rogan needs a set of bracelets to wear — 

• yellow — I think everything's a big joke.

• red — I get the comedy done in the style of me and my friends and all the rest of you are our prey. 

• blue — not a damn thing is funny in this fucked-up world.

And I want to add purple — obviously the best one — I listen to everything, think from many perspectives, see humor and attempts at humor, and make fine-tuned individual decisions about who to attack in public, taking into account the age and experience of the performer and leaning toward punching up and not down.

"Tall, with short-cropped hair and distinctive glasses, Peretti was both mercurial (she allegedly threw a fur coat into a fire when arguing with Halston) and minimal."

"'Take away, take away,' is how she described her process to Vogue in 1986.... Peretti led an ascetic, unhurried, and happy existence in Catalonia (perhaps somewhat akin to that of Georgia O’Keeffe in Taos, New Mexico), that she found conducive to creation. 'Of course, I’m slow,' she told Vogue. 'I have to crystallize a form, find the essence. It’s a continual training to be essential in your work, and then you have to be essential in your life, too.'"

From "Jewelry Designer Elsa Peretti Has Died" (Vogue). 

I've loved Elsa Peretti since the 1970s, and she is the only jewelry designer I've ever cared about.

Here's all the Elsa Peretti jewelry at the Tiffany website.

About that neckace.

I went out running this morning to catch the dawn... 

 

... and as I was running, I was thinking about the post I'd just put up at 6:23. (The photograph was taken at 6:45.) 

The post talked about a WaPo columnist who had pasted together a ramshackle argument that rested absurdly heavily on a couple things Trump's nominee for ambassador to Germany had said about how women look — that Hillary Clinton was "starting to look like Madeleine Albright" and that Rachel Maddow ought to "take a breath and put on a necklace." 

I was thinking while running about how it's important to be able to talk about the way people look. Life is — in great part — visual, and we're going to think about looks, we live within looking, and looks are not entirely superficial, they speak of depths, and even what is superficial is crucial to the feeling of being alive. We're not morally obligated to blind ourselves. We want to see and to talk about what we see. 

But what did it mean to say that Rachel Maddow ought to "take a breath and put on a necklace"? The man who said it was Richard Grenell, who is himself gay and therefore at least presumptively nonhomophobic. But the old tweet is deleted, so I can't search for the context. I only see it used against him. Example:

According to the pro-LGBTQ Washington Blade, Grenell’s history of insulting women on sexist and homophobic grounds is long and toxic. He has written that Rachel Maddow, an MSNBC lesbian news anchor, “needs to take a breath and put on a necklace.”

Did he mean women should all adopt a feminine fashion style? I don't know. I'd object to that, even though I think we should be able to talk about how people look. But you ought to let them choose how they want to present themselves, so don't criticize them for failing to do something they're not trying to do. If a woman is going for a boyish look, talk about whether it's a nicely done boyish look. You're a jerk to talk about how it's not feminine. 

If that's what Grenell meant by "put on a necklace." Maybe it had something to do with Maddow's high school yearbook photo....

Let's say you're multitasking, reading the news on screen, eating strawberry yogurt, and sticking a gold earring into your pierced ear.

You drop the little gold piece that goes on in back — the push back. You don't hear it hit the desk, but maybe it fell on the carpeted floor. But it's most likely in the yogurt. You don't see it on top of the yogurt, but is it down in the yogurt? Do you get a flashlight and carefully search the desk and floor area first or do you proceed to eat the yogurt? If you eat the yogurt in the hope of finding the push back, carefully mashing the goo in your mouth to make sure that's not the mouthful with the little gold thing in it, do you think Surely, it's near the top? 

That's going to interfere with the enjoyment of the yogurt, you know. You could get up and find a sieve and run the bowlful of yogurt into a second bowl from which you could savor your breakfast, undistracted by intra-mouth straining. But you don't want the metallic, sieved version of strawberry yogurt. And you're lazy. Not lazy enough to have skipped the step of getting the flashlight and searching the floor and the desk. Just lazy enough not to sieve the yogurt.

As you eat mouthful after mouthful, do you maintain a uniform carefulness or do you get to thinking it's not in the yogurt? When you arrive at the last spoonful, do you have any hope that the little thingie sank all the way to the bottom? If you're trying to imagine the viscosity of the substance, this is not Greek yogurt — that pasty stuff — but old-time yogurt, and it had been spooned out into a bowl and stirred up. 

It was in the last spoonful! And I had become a bit lackadaisical. And yet, I did not swallow it. I reacted with alarm as if I'd come close to swallowing it, but I hadn't. I got it. How did it sink to the bottom of the yogurt in the bowl?

But I know gold is heavy. I've remembered that gold is heavier than lead ever since I read this passage almost 20 years ago:

 

That's from "Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood" by Oliver Sacks.

"Under China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, the Communist Party’s creeping interference on the smallest details of Chinese life is being felt more and more."

"Censors have blurred the bejeweled earlobes of young male pop stars on television and the internet so that, in their mind, the piercings and jewelry don’t set a bad example for boys. Women in costumes at a video game convention were told to raise their necklines. With soccer a national priority under Mr. Xi, the crackdown has spread to sports. Last year, members of the men’s national soccer team were forced to play in long sleeves in stifling heat at the Asian Cup in Abu Dhabi after the government banned the display of tattoos during matches...."

From "The Women Faced Off to Play Soccer. One Team Lost Because of Hair Dye/A Chinese university team argued that an opposing player’s hair was not 'black enough,' according to the rules, and her team forfeited the match" (NYT).

Love or hate Kayleigh — she is prepared as hell.

White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany flips through the topic headings in her binder during the daily press briefing at the White House in Washington, U.S. July 16, 2020. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst #Reuters pic.twitter.com/8QFTgBKa06

— Jonathan Ernst (@j_ernst_DC) July 17, 2020

Misspelled "Mueller" though.

Who's Hogan? The Republican governor of Maryland. Here's CNN from last night (after McEnany's conference):

Hogan had earlier slammed Trump's early response to the coronavirus pandemic as "hopeless" in an article published Thursday in The Washington Post, elaborating on his efforts to secure testing kits and prevent the deaths of residents in his state. His account, excerpted from his forthcoming book, subsequently drew criticism from White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany.

Mediaite covers the mind-bending binder closeup:

During her tenure, McEnany has developed a reputation for flipping open her briefing book after a particularly confrontational question and reading verbatim from pre-written responses, which often included canned attacks on the press or praise from allies.

Aw, don't they hate that — when they trigger the canned response? Oh, no, not the binder! She has a tab for that!

Interestingly, one of the tabs is "Goya." Speaking of canned....

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by President Donald J. Trump (@realdonaldtrump) on Jul 15, 2020 at 11:02am PDT

Oddly enough, that photograph could be what wins him reelection. Think about it. People are emotional.

ADDED: Looks like Kayleigh has some magnificent rings, but they are not sized correctly.

Image there's no Trump/It isn't hard if you/Are a conservative WaPo columnist/With Biden pulling you through/Image Scranton, PA/Ooh Ooh Ooh Ooh...

Watching @HillaryClinton speak you cannot avoid imaging what might have been. Also her account of @JoeBiden pulling her through his boyhood home in Scranton, PA is priceless

— Jennifer Rubin (@JRubinBlogger) April 28, 2020

ADDED: I didn't watch Hillary's endorsement of Joe Biden, so I was challenged not merely to "image" her as President but also to "image" what was so "priceless" about whatever she said about getting "pulled" through Scranton. I found the transcript though. It's nearly an hour long, and my time is not priceless. I would watch it for $1,000 and let you know what I think. But I will scan the transcript... perhaps only for the word "Scranton"... I'll "scran" the transcript... okay:

So for me, this is a moment that we need a leader, a president like Joe Biden.... And we share a common experience and a love of Scranton, Pennsylvania. When my great grandparents came from England and Wales, they ended up in Scranton and my grandfather and then my father grew up in a house on Diamond Avenue and while the randoms were living on Diamond Avenue, the Bidens were over on North Washington Street. And I’ve had a lot of time to visit Scranton, talk about Scranton with Joe and one memorable occasion we were there together and he said, “Hey, let’s go see the house that I lived in when I was a little boy.” And if you know Joe Biden, you know the words were out of his mouth and we were racing to get there. And of course we got there and he talked his way in.

Ugh! Ever had former owners of your house show up one day and try to talk their way in? Ever gone to a house you used to live in and try to talk your way in? On question 1, my answer is sort of. They weren't very direct about it, and they did not get in. On question 2, I have gone to look at the 3 houses I grew up in and each time I considered how hard it would be to go inside and realized that there was no way I would even go up to the homeowner and let them know I lived there when the house was new and I was a little child. As for trying to get an invitation to go inside... hell, no!

It wasn’t hard because the woman who was at home immediately recognized him and knew him.

And when you're a star, they let you do it.

"A US woman has undergone surgery after removing and swallowing her engagement ring in her sleep."

"Jenna Evans, 29, said she and her fiancé Bobby had been on a speeding train and she was forced to swallow the ring to protect it from 'bad guys.' She woke at her home in California to realise the episode had been a dream, but saw her diamond ring was missing... An X-ray scan identified the 2.4-carat ring in her stomach, and doctors agreed it would be unwise 'to let nature take its course.' Ms Evans, a San Diego resident, later had a procedure to remove the ring but said she was asked to sign release forms in case of her death. 'Then I cried a lot because I would be so mad if I died,' she said. 'I waited a long time for that damn engagement ring and I will marry Bobby Howell.'"

BBC.

ADDED: Young love, death, and a ring — I got to thinking of "Teen Angel":

Pope Francis jerks his hand away from people trying to kiss his ring.

He seems to think it's funny, his withdrawal of consent to this old-time practice:



"John Allen, a veteran Vatican journalist and editor of the online Catholic news site Crux, concurred, saying Francis’s actions Monday are one further move in a trend that’s continued since Pope John XXIII to 'dial down the tradition of subservience,' which has traditionally marked the papacy over the centuries, Francis’s reaction, he believes, is one further step to demystify one of the world’s most secretive institutions, and after the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), popes have made gradual efforts to bring the office into the modern era," WaPo reports.