"The camera advances toward a finely dressed couple kissing in Central Park.... The man and woman start to look nervous...."

"The video was released Thursday. Within hours, internet sleuths figured out that the two are colleagues at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, a white-shoe law firm in Manhattan. The man, Nathaniel D. Cullerton, is 45 and a partner. The woman, Kelsey Borenzweig, is 29, and an associate. Cullerton is married. Everyone from the Daily Mail to Above the Law covered the scandal, and the video has since amassed more than 5 million views. 'Cheating in public, wife is a lawyer, got caught on camera? Triple homicide 😭,' read one comment, which has 224,000 likes, on TikTok under a repost of the video. 'People are way too comfortable cheating, make cheating illegal,' read another that got 43,000 likes...."

I'm reading "Welcome to Secular Sharia/Drunks, cheaters, and Karens beware: TikTok is the new home for public floggings" (The Free Press).

That article is summarized in video, here:

"I kissed Bryan, a gardener, on his red leather couch. I kissed Ray, a painter, in his lofted bed and smashed my head into his ceiling fan."

"Andrew 1 kissed me at the Met in front of a painting of hell. 'Sometimes I think this is hell,' he said, gesturing around us before putting his mouth on mine. Andrew 2 seemed confident over text but wary in person. He surprised me with a smooch on a street corner while we waited for the light to change.... Haden, a sommelier, met me to walk a friend’s dog. We kissed kneeling on the welcome mat while our hands fumbled to free the pug from her harness. Thomas, a surfer, walked me to the subway after playing pool at a dive bar. He planted one on me outside the C train.... When men asked why I was single, I told them it was because my partner of 20 years walked out on me with as much warning as one might get before an earthquake.... In return, the men were unexpectedly kind. I had heard so many horror stories about the emotional capacity of the male species, but these guys told me I didn’t deserve to be treated that way...."

Writes Erin Chack, in "From Kissing One Guy in 20 Years to 11 in a Month My husband leaving nearly broke me. I tried to put myself back together by dating for the first time in my life" (NYT)(gift link, because I think it's a well-written essay).

"At former president Jimmy Carter’s funeral... Melania Trump... opted... for... an extra-wide, pilgrim-esque collar printed with images of a Renaissance sculpture of a kissing couple...."

"Melania doesn’t usually bake big ideas into her fashion choices...  The one time Melania tried to send a message with her outfit — you know, when she wore that 'I Really Don’t Care, Do U?' jacket to visit a migrant children’s shelter — it backfired. In her 2024 memoir, she wrote that her jacket’s message was intended as a kiss-off to the media, not the migrant children.... Was this funeral ensemble a not-so-subtle statement about the importance of love and unity in a divided nation? Given her stilted body language as her husband giggled with Barack Obama, probably not. (No one gives off an air of 'I’d rather be anywhere else' like Melania.)..."

From "What’s Up With Melania’s Collar?" (New York Magazine).

What does it mean? Obviously, it's an expression of a desire for love. But NY Magazine doesn't want to give her that — not to credit her with desiring love for the world and certainly not to fulfill any desire she might have to receive love. She will get no love from New York Magazine, where she will always be seen as icy, even if she is wearing a photograph of kissing lovers around her neck. 

"Mondrian didn’t believe in ice cubes because cold food was bad for the health. He stood ramrod straight..."

"... and never had a hair out of place, refusing to take off his jacket in company even on hot nights. He was given to incomprehensible monologues and Garbo-like utterances such as 'You don’t seem to understand that I want to be alone.'... He once entered a room, wrinkled his nose, and commented to his host, 'It smells old in here.' Mondrian was known for planting bizarre, forceful and one-sided kisses, some lasting 30 minutes, on women. Yet he mostly felt women got in men’s way; the feminine was 'hostile to the spirit.' He once remarked, 'Every bit of semen expended is a masterpiece lost.'"

Writes Dwight Garner, in "Piet Mondrian: An Orderly Painter, a Deeply Eccentric Man/A new biography of one of the quintessential artists of the 20th century" (NYT).

"Sorry UCI for having damaged the image of sport. But I am willing to pay 200 (francs) every day and relive this moment."

Said Julien Bernard, quoted in "Tour de France cyclist fined for kissing wife and son, says penalty was worthwhile for 'dream moment'" (The Athletic).

For stopping his ride to kiss his family, Bernard was slapped with a fine of 200 Swiss francs ($223) by the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) for what the governing body deemed “unseemly or inappropriate behavior during the race and damage to the image of sport.”

Rules are rules. 

Amazing scenes for Julien Bernard with incredible fan support and stopping with his family during the time trial.#TDF2024 📺: Peacock pic.twitter.com/FjIhSOWtjx

— NBC Sports Cycling (@NBCSCycling) July 5, 2024

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...

Somehow the women's victory emanated from the men's balls.

I'm reading the stunning first 3 paragraphs of "The Kissing Scandal After Spain’s Women’s World Cup Win/The support for a player who endured an unwanted kiss during the trophy presentation shows how attitudes toward women’s soccer are changing, but not fast enough" (The New Yorker).

Great writing from Louisa Thomas:

"So much of loving dogs is learning to tolerate repulsion. You live knowing that this beloved muzzle is..."

"... at once devoted to licking you up with adoration, and at the same time shoving itself into as much urine, feces and fellow dog butt as it can find.... But is that truly less hygienic than plain old human-kissing?"

So says the NYT ethicist, John Hodgman, responding to a man whose wife "has taken to kissing the dogs" before she kisses him goodbye in the morning (including giving "one of the dogs 'raspberries' on his belly before expecting a goodbye kiss from me").

The ethicist is pretty unsympathetic to the man, though he doesn't get around to the obvious twist on "So much of loving dogs is learning to tolerate repulsion": So much of loving humans is learning to tolerate repulsion. 

I wonder if the man tried talking to the wife about his feelings. Maybe they had a funny conversation about it and composed the letter to the ethicist together. But if he's suffering from disgust on his own, then coming up with the idea of writing the ethicist as a solution, then he really is in a terribly beta position vis a vis his wife. And she's consciously or subconsciously openly expressing it with that order of kissing. Does he even get raspberries on his belly?

By the way, it's totally legit to feel repelled by dogs and to decline to "learn to tolerate" it. If that's you and you want community, I recommend the subreddits r/Dogfree and r/TalesfromtheDogHouse.

Oh, no. No no no no no. Can we not have one patch of sunshine in this world?

The Dalai Lama has apologized after a video emerged showing the spiritual leader kissing a child on the lips and then asking him to “suck my tongue” at an event. https://t.co/9PrrUzvl17 pic.twitter.com/sjI31w1O14

— CNN (@CNN) April 10, 2023

This is well-animated, but should be viewed as what not to do.

"The geometry of a throuple is complex. With a couple, there’s only a straight line connecting two dots. But introduce a third point..."

"... and so many more possibilities emerge — only one of which is an equilateral triangle. Although the Third slept between us in bed, sat across from us at dinner and walked between us holding both of our hands, the angles in our throuple kept shifting."

From a NYT "Modern Love" essay, "A Throuple’s Tricky Geometry" by Evan Sterrett.

I found this story hard to believe — 3 men and a chihuahua sleeping night after night in a queen-size bed?

One early July morning, I opened my eyes to my boyfriend making out with the guy who had been living with us for the past month. Not really a fan of sex before tooth-brushing, I smiled, mumbled “hot” and turned over....

I see I have a tag for "geometry." When did I ever blog about geometry before?

"There’s breaking protocol and then there’s giving the Queen Mother an unwanted kiss on the lips, which is something President Jimmy Carter inexplicably did..."

"... during his May 1977 visit to Buckingham Palace.... [T]he Queen Mother later described the incident, which she found mortifying. 'Nobody has done that since my husband died,' she said. 'I took a sharp step backwards – not quite far enough.'"

From "Queen Elizabeth’s Awkward Visits With U.S. Presidents, Ranked" (NY Magazine).

The Carter visit is ranked #12 out of 13 ranked visits. The only thing worse was the Jackie-and-Jack visit that we saw dramatized on "The Crown." We're told that Jackie said the queen was "pretty heavy going," and when Gore Vidal related Jackie's complaint to Princess Margaret, she said, "But that’s what she’s there for."

You might guess that Obama would come out at #1, but he's only #3. #1 is Eisenhower, and #2 was Harry Truman, in October 1951 and when Elizabeth was still a Princess (4 months later she would be queen):

"Rachal Dollard placed a balloon pellet filled with methamphetamine in her mouth and gave it to her inmate boyfriend by kissing him, the authorities said. He later died of an overdose."

"Mr. Dollard then swallowed the balloon, apparently planning to retrieve it from the toilet after using the bathroom, the department said. But the balloon later ruptured in his body, and Mr. Dollard died of an overdose.... The case came as prosecutors across the country increasingly treat overdose deaths as homicides, using laws devised to go after drug dealers to now charge friends and partners, and hold someone criminally accountable.... Ms. Dollard would face up to 60 years in prison and a fine of up to $50,000 if convicted."

The NYT reports.

I've got 7 TikToks for you tonight. Let me know what you like.

1. If "Seinfeld" were on today and George used the wrong pronouns.

2. The most disorienting thing about being alive today.

3. The best father-playing-guitar-for-baby video ever.

4. How to act when you see an attractive person.

5. How to kiss a girl.

5. Living conditions inside a truck.

6. "Oh, I'm so sorry. We're actually out of nothing."

7. What does she want?

ADDED: Looking at this at 6:22 the next morning, I see there are two 5s, for a total of 8. Too late to change all that now.

What was "deeply good" about Harry Reid?

"Few people have done more for this state and this country than this driven, brilliant, sometimes irascible, deeply good man from Searchlight, Nevada."

Said Barack Obama, quoted in the Washington Post account of yesterday's memorial service for Reid.

It's the "deeply" that gets you. It draws so much attention to "good." We might have let it go — was Harry Reid good? — if "deeply" hadn't forced us to stop and stare.

I haven't used my "deeply (the word!)" tag since last May.

Here's the original post — in 2014 — where I created the tag.

There are so many trite usages — deeply in love, deeply disappointed, deeply religious, thinking deeply, deeply troubled, deeply concerned, deeply offended, deeply regret — and "deeply" is deeply embedded in constitutional law doctrine with the phrase "deeply rooted in this nation's history and tradition."

I went back into my own archive to see how I had used it over the years and, funnily enough, the first thing on my list was about something Obama famously said about Kamala Harris:

1. "Beauty is a system of power, deeply rooted, preceding all others, richly rewarded," wrote Garace Franke-Ruta, explaining "Why Obama's 'Best-Looking Attorney General' Comment Was a Gaffe."...

Oh, what's not a gaffe these days? 

But back to the memorial service. Biden and Pelosi spoke too, and both of them told a joke premised on the reputation Reid had for being untalkative. 

Here's Biden joke : "Harry and I both liked to talk a lot... I’m just testing whether you’re asleep yet."

Here's Pelosi's: "He was a man of few words — and he wanted everyone else to be a person of few words."

They kept it light. There was an opportunity to go much lighter on the man-of-few-words theme — man of even fewer words now, ha ha — or to go much more deeply....

But I won't end with the end of Hamlet. I will lighten up and give Chuck Schumer the last word, because who doesn't love kissing and because I have a "saliva" tag that I get a kick out of using:

It was election night 2006, when Democrat Claire McCaskill won her race in Missouri, a victory that gave control of the Senate to Democrats, and Reid rushed over and kissed McCaskill through the television screen.

“His lips remained attached to the TV screen for a full 10 seconds,” Schumer said. “I had to get up and wipe the copious spittle off the TV screen.”

"Baby kissing is a practice in which politicians and candidates campaigning for office kiss babies in order to garner public support."

So begins the Wikipedia article "Baby kissing," which I'm reading this morning after getting this viral tweet:

Little girl slaps Biden’s creepy ghoul hand away. pic.twitter.com/oBfceo5iOM

— Suburban Black Man 🇺🇸 (@goodblackdude) November 21, 2021

Is Biden a "creepy ghoul" there? I see a responsive tweet that says "I blame the mother for putting her child in this situation. Why do these people always b[r]ing their children around this creep?" 

But mothers have been holding their babies up to politicians, expecting not just light petting, but outright kissing for as long as I can remember. It's been a synonym for campaigning. That's why there's a Wikipedia article "Baby kissing." 

Look how lovely our most charismatic President looked doing it (and he's even crotch-grabbing!):

Of course, some babies don't like it, and they don't know or care that the stranger handling them is the President. Some Presidents manage to make the baby's rejection work as a charming photo op:

From the Wikipedia article:

"Ladies, if a man invites you to his place — and it's just the 2 of you — for a beverage... he has asked you if you'd like to fuck, and you said, yes, probably..."

"You have told that man, I'd absolutely be interested in fucking you — pretty much tonight.... If you send the message I pretty much am up to fuck, and the guy leans in to kiss you, he may be operating on bad information. Our system doesn't put him off the hook. The man is still required to respond to the signals as soon as they are clarified.... I suppose there could be such a thing as a 24-year-old who can be in a meeting with a Senator and is still too dumb to know what an invitation to come up to his place really means.... The Senator didn't read the signals wrong. The Senator read the signals exactly as they were sent. They were the wrong signals. I think it was very generous of the Senator to say he read the signals wrong. He didn't read anything wrong. The signals were crystal clear. They were sent wrong." 

Scott Adams takes a strong position on the Huma Abedin accusation against an unnamed Senator.

 

1. I initially resisted taking this story to heart because Abedin did not come out strongly on the side of women but is continuing a pattern of protecting Democratic Party men, as I showed you here, yesterday.

2. I have personally lived my entire life, going back to adolescence, with the understanding that Scott Adams is putting very starkly, that one's actions are understood that way. In fact, I followed a personal credo: Don't give him any ideas. I'm sure I missed out on some lovely experiences because I was so cautious, and this was a caution that went way beyond avoiding sexual assault. I didn't want the other person to feel hurt or embarrassed. 

3. So I agree with part of what Scott Adams is saying, that by accepting the Senator's invitation, she gave him hope, and she ought to know that her action inspired hope.

4. But hope goes on only in his head (and the rest of his nervous system). He probably also had hope as soon as he saw her, as soon as she was friendly to him. He got ideas. Fine! The question is what can he do with that hope? 

5. Since I spent a lifetime operating under the credo Don't give him any ideas, I'm not in a great position to parody Scott's advice to ladies with a statement that begins, "Gentlemen, if a woman accepts your invitation," but there is one thing I'm sure of, so let me try.

6. Gentlemen, if a woman accepts your invitation into your place for a drink, you may be one step closer to fucking but you are also one step closer to humiliation and far worse things, and you'd better know what you are doing and not just plop down next her and kiss her, pushing your tongue into her mouth, pressing her back on the sofa.

7. Notice Adams's language: "the guy leans in to kiss you." That's like kissing in a romcom, where the man gradually and gently moves his lips closer to hers and observes her response, so that there's lots of nonverbal communication. That's not what happened (as far as we know from Abedin's description). The Senator suddenly advanced to French kissing (and whatever that "pressing" was). 

8. I would tend to think that Abedin had a lot of self-esteem and — rightly! — believed she could offer a man a wonderful relationship and intended to give this man a chance to enter into the highly valuable sphere that is her life. Let's keep talking about what actions mean. His action meant: You're not an important person in my life. 

"Rudy Giuliani says driving Cuomo out of office would be 'unjust, dangerous and entirely un-American.' People, do you think this is because..."

".... A) Giuliani just wants to see Cuomo suffer through a long, painful impeachment. B) Giuliani made the remark at a party after several tumblers of scotch. C) Giuliani thinks it’ll help his son Andrew’s chances to be governor. Yeah, yeah, it’s A. Well, very possibly all three. But short of Rudy, Cuomo does seem to need all the help he can get. He’s been trying to defend himself by showing pictures where he’s kissing and hugging lots of people who seem perfectly happy with the attention. Of course, some are elderly fans who were standing in line waiting for it. Others, like, say, Al Gore, seem … not transported."

Writes NYT columnist Gail Collins, in "What Makes Cuomo So Grabby?" 

A disgusting headline by the way. Are we supposed to care about the internal workings of his mind? Ah, I guess they did that with Trump, diagnosing him with narcissism and whatever, though that never seemed like an honest exploration of human psychology. It was always political attack and therefore a perversion of the field of psychology. Is it any different with Cuomo?

Oh! Now I've read the column, and I don't think it answers or even asks that question in the headline! Looking for what could possibly justify the headline, I'm at a loss. "His private life seems to be a little — wanting" — that is, he's divorced and his girlfriend left town. Albany is "a somewhat isolated world." And there's a gender imbalance "in the power structure." It's almost like saying boys will be boys. What the hell? Who wrote that headline?

But, yeah, forget that. Let's all kick Giuliani. That's how you pad this column. But what I'd like to know is not why Cuomo would commit so many acts of sexual harassment for so long, but who knew and who protected him? Presumably, there are a lot of New York Democrats who've protected Cuomo over the years, probably people who made sanctimonious pro-woman statements in the heyday of the "Me Too" movement. Tell me about them. Instead you wheel out a convenient Republican.

And by the way, the phrase "so grabby" — in "What Makes Cuomo So Grabby?" — trivializes sexual harassment in the workplace. It makes it sound like Cuomo is just childishly uncontrolled in the hands. But sexual harassment is a mechanism of power, structuring the workplace for the benefit of men and relegating women to a separate track, where success and failure depend on things other than work. Start taking it seriously.

"... I was sensitive to the way my body had not been allowed its own autonomy, growing up as a girl. I began to realize that even [for] a boy, it doesn't mean all is open and everything is game."

"So when we used to play this lovely game called 'the mama clinch,"' where I would hold on to him and he was supposed to kiss me in order to free himself. And I used to love that, and he loved it as a child. And then when he was about 8 or 9, he started to not really enjoy that game and he would not jump into it. And I realized, 'Oh, he's growing up and he wants his own autonomy' and picking up on those cues. And I talk in another chapter about how important it is for us to pick up on those cues from our kids, and then that way they learn to pick up those cues from others."

Says Sonora Jha, quoted in "Memoir Offers Advice On 'How To Raise A Feminist Son'" (NPR). 

The feminist son rightly resists forced kissing. Interesting that the feminist mother had to learn her feminist lesson, and fascinating to face up to the strange reality of how much kissing is forced on babies and children. 

Is it right, this soppy smooching? Dr. Spock's classic childcare book, from 1946, famously reacted to this advice from 1930: 

"Never, never hug and kiss them, never let them sit in your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say goodnight. Shake hands with them in the morning.... Try it out. In a week’s time you will find how easy it is to be perfectly objective with your child and at the same time kind. You will be utterly ashamed of the mawkish, sentimental way you have been handling it."

That fell so far out of favor. But maybe we should reconsider being perfectly objective — and kind — to our children. Oh, but no one believes perfect objectivity is even possible. You'd just be fooling yourself. Still, I don't like that "mama clinch" game. I'm a bit surprised Jha talks about that openly.

***

There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email.

"Ollie says one of the 'rules' of the experiment is that he and Zoe, both bisexual, will only hook up with same-sex partners."

"But whoops, Zoe replies, she already broke that rule by sleeping with a man. Later, Ollie is dating and sleeping with a woman. We don’t see them discussing their rules, why they exist, why they might change, how they talk about the ones they’ve broken. Ollie’s narration adds no clarity.... While Ollie and Zoe are just kind of irritating—we’re treated to long sequences of them frolicking naked in fields; Ollie waxes poetic about how he loves Zoe for being such an 'adult,' because she soaks her oats overnight—what’s hardest to watch is how they’re hurting each other because they don’t communicate with specificity or empathy, or even agree why they’re doing this in the first place.... Zoe, Tom, and the other non-Ollie characters are played by actors, and the film is a re-creation of Ollie’s experience with the real Zoe.... Ollie and Real Zoe did try an open relationship and were documenting it, and Real Zoe really did end their relationship to be with another man, but what we see on screen here is not a documentary of an experiment in real time so much as Ollie’s on-screen memoir, starring himself...."

From "What HBO’s New Documentary Gets Wrong About Open Relationships/I’ve been in a nonmonogamous relationship for six years, and I’m tired of movies like There’s No 'I' in Threesome" (Slate).

I'm almost tempted to watch this just to see how terrible it is. It  might be funny.... oh, no.... I just looked at the trailer, here. I was thinking of embedding it. But watching it, I had to force myself, and by 0:34, I had to turn it off. The visuals are very unappealing.