"Christa is a source of light in a dark place. For those of us who have found ourselves housed near Christa, she has offered hope when there should have only been despair."

Said one of Christa Pike's fellow inmates, who added that Pike "is a far cry from the one who walked through the doors [in] the beginning."

Quoted in "Tennessee to execute a woman for first time in over 200 years/Christa Pike was convicted in a brutal 1995 killing committed when she was 18. Advocates pushing for her life to be spared point to abuse she suffered as a child" (WaPo).

The death penalty requires that a jury find "aggravating factors." There were two: She tried to cover up the murder and it was "especially heinous, atrocious or cruel in that it involved torture or serious physical abuse beyond that necessary to produce death."

I couldn't get Grok to tell me the details of the murder. It said "I won’t describe the attack itself or the injuries in detail. That would mean laying out the methods of a murder, which I don’t do."

It is the 25th anniversary of the September 11th attacks.

That's my photograph, taken in the evening, in 2007, when a low cloud kept the memorial lights from projecting upward and the light spread horizontally.

The quarter-century mark feels important — I was 50 when it happened, I'm 75 now — but I will repeat what I said in 2022: "I don't like terrorists squatting on the calendar, forcing us into darkness every 365 days. We must honor the dead? But if we truly ordered our life around honoring the dead, every day of the year would be a somber day of commemoration. Instead, we have a scattering of death days on the American calendar. Why those and not others? What interests are served by keeping those horrendous events fresh in our mind and not others?"

There is always a low cloud keeping us from seeing the full picture. 

Get ready. It's coming. That thing you thought you wanted.

This will be such a nightmare. pic.twitter.com/qrD03wxEdl

— Julian Mille☈ (@ATLAreaWx) July 14, 2026

Children going to school in the dark. Dangerous. It will become obvious. A child's name will be on the repeal legislation.

ADDED: It’s important to note that morning light does not begin at sunrise. It’s already getting light an hour before sunrise, and half an hour before sunrise you’re free of the sense that you’re going out into the night. Using the sunrise as the time that matters is alarmist.

"The problem with putting in a reflecting pool? The darn thing reflects. When the light off the Reflecting Pool bounced up onto Lincoln's face, it looked as if a flashlight had been held up under his chin."

Wrote Sarah Vowell, back in 2005, in her very entertaining book "Assassination Vacation," which I recently reread. The link goes to an excerpt of the book at the NPR website. There's also audio of Vowell reading her text, which she does extremely well.

Here's more context:

"[Daniel Chester] French obsessed for years about how to sculpt Lincoln's peculiar face, fretting and reading and thinking before committing to the brooding, seated philosopher in the memorial. He received the commission in 1913. So by the time the memorial was finally dedicated nine years later, the sculptor was a little pent up worrying how his work would come off. Hoping to celebrate, French looked upon the final installation with horror. The problem with putting in a reflecting pool? The darn thing reflects.

"Luminous," a reminder.

The NYT has a piece called "Luminous New Historical Fiction," so let's review the history of "luminous" on this blog.

I've said it all before, and I've summed it up before. So I will simply republish this post of mine from September 27, 2022:

"Getting sun exposure within one hour of waking up can have a powerful effect on your sleep later that night..."

"The light suppresses hormones that make you sleepy and shifts your body into wake mode, setting you up to be tired again by bedtime.... Ideally, we’d all get out in the sun for an hour every morning.... 'Ten minutes is better than zero minutes'... even if it’s cloudy."

That's #1 out of "6 Daytime Habits for Better Sleep/Experts say a great night’s rest starts as soon as you wake up" (NYT).

#5 of the 6 habits is "Wake up at the same time every day." The article treats "time" as a number on the clock. You'd think right after the "leap forward" they'd be more attuned to the reality of the sunlight and say what I assume they intended to mean: Rise consistently with the sun.

Get up and get out and do your sun exposure with the sunrise. Make it a sunrise walk (or run) and you'll take care of #6 on this list: Exercise. 

I know I'm biased because this is what I do, but I don't know why everyone doesn't at least experiment with getting up and out to do a sunrise walk or run. Were you born a night owl — a permanent night owl?

What is excluded by that "almost"?

"Cinemark is going all out for National Popcorn Day in 2026 [January 18 and 19], offering moviegoers in Austin and around the country the chance to BYOBucket: bring almost any kind of container to the theater and fill it up for just $5 (plus tax)...."(culturemap).

MEANWHILE: Another Austin movie theater distinguishes itself in a wholly different way:

Pick your style of theater here in the Magnited States of America.

"Erika Kirk is walking a fine line...."

Here, that's a gift link to The Washington Post.

I was puzzling over that headline at 4 a.m., but I'm only getting to blogging it now, and I don't want to go on too long at this point. So I'll just give you a numbered list and leave it to you.

Ponderous performance.

A fake candlelight vigil for a made-up holy day. And then they sang...this is the modern Democrat party. pic.twitter.com/jvbzutnRqn

— Kira (@Kiradavis) January 7, 2026

"Then I just stopped listening to everybody, and everybody stopped talking to me. I was getting very little feedback."

"I began to perceive that my real interest was light. The reason for painting glass was to totally focus on light, and the glass held the light.... "

Said Janet Fish, quoted in "Janet Fish, Painter of Luminous Still Lifes, Dies at 87/From her student days, she stubbornly refused to follow popular artistic trends. Instead, she spent decades exploring the effects of light on glass" (NYT)(gift links, because there are some pretty cool photos of Fish's paintings).

"In the eyes of just about everyone at Yale, Ms. Fish later recalled, she was just 'this girl who’s painting flowers.' Upon arriving in New York in 1965, she continued to follow her own path. 'I just stuck to my work,' she said. 'And one thing led to another.'"

"A lecture from Pamela Anderson... about fascism and fireflies, that boomed around the uncompromisingly ugly black box..."

"... of a show venue, didn't add to the joy of the occasion. Nor did a finale that looked like a scene from Day of the Living Dead, with sad models drifting around the bleakly-lit space."

I'm perusing "Paris Fashion Week: Pamela Anderson sits front row at joyless Valentino show" (The Telegraph).

This model best exemplifies the mood. Look what fascism is doing to people!

Bones and silk, for that awkwardly bumpy look. 

Anyway, was the venue at the Valentino show "uncompromisingly ugly"? That's a judgment call. I really want to know the facts about what Pam said about "fascism and fireflies." I like alliteration. I envision an alphabet book — illustrated by A.I. — that has "fascism and fireflies" for F.

What can we do for the other letters? A is for anarchy and angel food cake....

But I end up using A.I. to figure out what Pam actually said, and — I'll cut the snark — it was quite eloquent.

"The world needs... young people pointed in the direction of truth and beauty."

Said Erika Kirk in her speech at the memorial to her husband yesterday.

And then Elon Musk, who was also there in the stadium, said something that to my ear is similar: "He was killed because... because he was showing people the light. And he was killed by the dark." And he immediately restated his point: "Charlie was murdered by the dark for showing people the light."

Truth and beauty/Light and dark — it is emphatically not nonbinary. There is a longing for clarity — an alternative to nihilism. It is offered now, especially to the young. It is not what they have been used to hearing, and it may be exactly what they want, especially after Dark showed its eagerness to murder Light. Dark could not prove Light wrong. 

Speaking of "breasts like genetically modified grapefruit and behemoth buttocks bursting from a leopard-print thong bikini"...

... see Tina Brown's description of Lauren Sánchez in the first post of the day... before I saw that, I came close to buying this crazy bathing suit...

Facebook thought I might be interested in that. What does Facebook know about my skin and my aversion to sunscreen and my life in the shade?

The solid color full-body swimsuits are paradoxically brazen — especially the white one — and I had easily decided on leopard skin, even before I went out running this morning and — at 5:18 — admired the subtle camouflaging of the toad:

Look how hard it is to see the outline of the little beast against the pebbles and dirt. And that's what I'd like you to think about me if I ever go to the beach in a bathing suit again.

 

Photo by Meade, August 14, 2023, Great Sand Bay.

***

Well I, see you got your brand new leopard-skin pill-box... bikini... full-body swimsuit....

Redstarts and that Wobbling Rock.

Rain nixed the sunrise run today, but the weather was lovely when the time came for what I call The Second Walk, and I encountered 2 very tiny, very active birds along the woodland path. 

The "Visual Intelligence" button on my phone informed me that they were redstarts. Redstarts! Never heard of them. And I say "them" because they're both there, male and female. The female is hard to see, but as The Beatles observed long ago, that means she's good looking.

I got a second outing, to the front yard, which is heavily shaded now. I sat on the bench and read a book — read it 3 times. Almost understood it.

Write about anything you want in the comments. Did you get outside 2 or 3 times? Did you read any books cover to cover, multiple times? 

"Winter’s short days and long nights aided my first attempts at becoming nocturnal. My husband bundled up and came with me on night walks."

"Friends gathered for an evening snowshoe. As the globe turned toward spring, though, the sun’s rays became stronger and the days stretched on. I stayed in.... But I grew restless and started heading out for night hikes.... A few weeks in, I was running along Lake Ontario when I stopped to watch the sun dip below the horizon. I became obsessed with that transition, stopping to watch it whenever I could. It slowed me down enough that I began noticing how a day ends in stages... 'civil twilight'... 'nautical twilight'... '[a]stronomical twilight'.... The sun wasn’t setting.... I was the one rotating away, a fleck on the back of an enormous spinning globe. Once I sorted out my relationship with the universe, my perspective changed. The fading light made me feel small and out of control — which was exactly why I loved it...."

Writes Claire Cameron, in "Skin Cancer Made Me Nocturnal. It Was Illuminating. How the earth’s rotation taught me to find peace in the face of death" (NYT).

I like the way this essay never mentions sunblock, as if slathering enough lotion all over — and over and over — could give a sun-vulnerable person the power to cavort in blazing full sun like a model in a beach vacation ad. 

The writer — whose father died of melanoma when he was 42  — is doing what I do and avoiding the sun. She's doing sunsets. I do sunrises. It's the same idea. I also do a second walk most days. I simply find heavy shade. That doesn't work when the leaves are down, but that's when it's cold and there are layers of clothing.

The spiritual dimension of dusk and darkness is there for anyone to dip into, but it is different when you feel driven into it by a very real threat of death from skin cancer. 

"It’s a chatbot that encourages people to tap, tap, tap on hand-held small screens as they watch films on a big one."

"Users gain access to exclusive trivia and witticisms in real time (synced with what’s happening in the movie). Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has positioned Movie Mate as a way 'to get audiences back in theaters.' Nearly 20 percent of moviegoers ages 6 to 17 already send text messages during movies even though it’s against the rules.... Why not try to channel that instinct, Blumhouse argues, toward what is happening on the theater screen?"

I'm reading "Chatting in Movie Theaters Is a No-No. But What About Chatbots? Blumhouse, the horror movie studio, has teamed up with Meta on a chatbot that encourages people to use their phones while watching a movie" (NYT).

In the last moments of the film "Sunset Boulevard," the delusional actress says, "There's nothing else — just us — and the cameras — and those wonderful people out there in the dark." But the phones have taken away the dark. The "wonderful people" are interposing lighted screens between each others' eyes and that screen that used to control the flow of light.

The delusion is over.

Early color, rushing toward the vantage point.

Meade got some pictures of me. I made it to the vantage point. I'll save my pics for later.

The sunrise is so early at this time of year. And with the sun moving north and the leaves coming out, my alternative vantage points are far more limited than in winter, when the sun is all the way to the south. We're not yet where we need to leave the house before 4 a.m. to catch the sunrise, but that time is approaching. The warmer weather is nice, but eventually it's too hot, and the longer periods of light are good, but it becomes impossible to get a full night's sleep unless — like a little kid — you begin sleeping before twilight ends. To catch the sunrise, we need to leave the house about when civil twilight begins. Today, that was 5:16. Civil twilight ends at 8:32 p.m. today. So you can see how nature is crunching in on this sunrise ritual!

On the up side, we were back at the car at 6:10 and in a great position to head downtown and park, free, just off the square as the Farmer's Market was opening up. Start time: 6:15. We bought morels, sweet potatoes, and Italian sausage and flew the coop before the crowds materialized. It was funny driving home. We'd had a very active day, but it wasn't yet 7 a.m.

To what extent does Trump's new official portrait look like his mugshot?

 Surely, the resemblance is intentional... but so are the differences:

The similarities include the framing of the picture. Notice how the side of the collar and lapel line up under the ear (the famous ear!) and how much of the top of the head is showing, with the chin down. There's a lack of symmetry in the eyes, and a distinctive arced wrinkle over his left eye.

But the mugshot face has garish color and harsh light and shade and a deep frown line on the left side of the mouth. The official portrait lighting puts the shadow where it is flattering and where it reveals the individuality and humanity of the face. By comparison, mugshot Trump seems cartoonish. It's almost as if the light were adjusted to create the look of a Hitler mustache. 

In both pictures Trump's right eye seems more active. It's more narrowly pinched than his left eye. It's the eye that's looking right into you. The portrait eye is gentler, wiser, and it influences my interpretation of the mugshot eye. Mugshot Trump is angry. And, oh!, those mugshot eyebrows. They overhang the eyes ominously. He's saying he will fight, fight, fight. Portrait Trump is more complex.

What do you see in him? Whatever it is, it includes his intent to make you think about the mugshot and all that it represents. His adversaries threw everything they could at him, and he fought back and triumphed. But he's not smiling. He's not the Trump in the 2017 portrait:

But who is he? Who is he, now that he's Trump 47?

"President-elect Donald J. Trump delivered a sprawling address on Sunday that he called a 'small preview of the common-sense revolution' his administration will bring..."

"... pledging to slam shut the nation’s borders, end federal regulations, lower taxes, prosecute his rivals, 'stop woke' and 'end the transgender lunacy.' In a 90-minute speech at a conservative conference in Phoenix, Mr. Trump offered a triumphant view of his election victory in which he described his liberal adversaries as 'befuddled' and promised that a new 'golden age in America' had begun. 'We will end the occupation, and Jan. 20 will truly be liberation day in America, Mr. Trump told thousands of people at AmericaFest...."

The NYT reports, in "Trump Previews Second Term in Sprawling Speech to Conservative Conference/President-elect Donald J. Trump repeated false claims about immigration and the border, slammed diversity initiatives and discussed the Panama Canal in the 90-minute address."

You can watch it for yourself and form your own opinion. If you have the stamina... of this endlessly energetic 78-year-old man:

I listened to part of it. I thought it was a lot like a rally speech — but with the topic of winning the election deleted and with the mood a lot sunnier. And I'd just been thinking about the coming inaugural speech and saying — here in the Meadhouse real world — I hope it's very upbeat and optimistic, that "Morning in America" kind of thing. His antagonists will be looking for every opportunity to characterize whatever he says as "dark." He shouldn't let that brush him back too much, but I prefer happy, loving Trump. And of course, it is theater....

Moments ago, @CharlieKirk11 introduces President @realDonaldTrump @TPAction_ #AMFEST2024 in beautiful Phoenix, Arizona… pic.twitter.com/KRfGHszhoo

— Dan Scavino Jr.🇺🇸🦅 (@DanScavino) December 22, 2024

"Playgrounds aren’t shadeless by accident: Many public playgrounds were designed to be treeless."

"In the 1980s, lawsuits over playground injuries made city planners start to see trees not as shade providers but as temptation for tree climbers who could end up with broken arms. Clearing trees in play areas was encouraged... The kids in her class 'wanted to go outside so badly,' [one teacher] told me. But 'after five minutes, their little faces were just beet red,' and they’d huddle, lethargic, under the one tree on the edge of the schoolyard.... If kids do spend August and September recesses indoors, they’ll probably stay in the classroom.... 'They do things like watch movies' during indoor recess...."

From "How to Save Outdoor Recess/Build more shade" (The Atlantic).

I find it hard to believe trees were cut down out of fear that children would climb them. Why not just cut off the lower limbs so kids can't climb them?