As noted in the previous post, President Trump signed an executive order that "directs the Vice President, who is a member of the Smithsonian Board of Regents, to work to eliminate improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology from the Smithsonian and its museums, education and research centers, and the National Zoo."
Now, maybe the zoo is thrown in there because it's run by the Smithsonian. But I had to wonder what the zoo might be doing and what it could do if it wanted to lean into the kind of ideology that the Trumpian vision sees as improper, divisive, and anti-American.
So I asked Grok to assume the job of infusing the zoo with Critical Race Theory, radical feminism, and LGBTQ+ instruction and insight. I told it to write some placards to be posted in front of particular animals and displays. If you're one of those people who won't read things written by A.I., you'd better bail out now, because what follows is 100% Grok:
"Burmese pythons have eaten their way through the Everglades; Indo-Pacific lionfish have swum roughshod over Caribbean reefs; silver carp have taken over Midwestern rivers. Most non-native species spill into novel habitats incidentally, as in the case of quagga mussels that likely poured into the Great Lakes from the ballast water of container ships. But ecosystems have also been distorted on purpose. John Muir argued that stocking trout in the fishless lakes of the Sierra Nevada would make angling 'the means of drawing thousands of visitors into the mountains.'... Reginald Mungomery, an Australian entomologist... imported toxic South American cane toads to eat beetles that were devastating the country’s sugar crop. The toads didn’t control the beetles but poisoned native mammals and snakes.... Jon Sperling... theorized that because New York has few native lizards to displace, Italian wall lizards would harmlessly fill an unoccupied niche. He even claimed that predators would benefit from a new food source.... 'My first instinct is, Who are you to play God like that?' Earyn McGee, a herpetologist... said...."
8. "I want to be the Bob Woodward of 'Family Feud' clips. I want to lead a ragtag group of journalists into the Steve Harvey reaction underworld, like that movie 'Spotlight.'"
"... right there in the middle of the road. I kept myself narrow, arms pinned, so cars could pass on either side. But I wasn’t invisible, and I alarmed a kind policeman who happened to drive by me. After determining that I was not dead, drunk or high, he concluded I was suicidal. We had a long talk. It didn’t help for me to explain that if I had wanted to be run over I would’ve moved several feet in one direction or the other. And picked a busier road. He wanted to know, why, if I didn’t want to be run over, was I lying in the middle of the road? There were so many reasons. I wanted to see the night sky from the perspective of the road; I wanted to be in this secret spot that always got passed by and never occupied..."
Callard is careful to distinguish unruliness from rebellion. By lying down in the road, she wasn’t critiquing the status quo or sticking it to the Man. Unruly people might flatter themselves as rebels, but unruliness is nothing so determinate—it’s just an unwillingness to play by the rules. It’s a near-neighbor, therefore, to perversity, a topic long central to theology and philosophy...
Perverse actors—I won’t call them “perverts,” since that word evokes distracting connotations—can also be creative or funny.... The blogger Scott Alexander points out that four per cent of Americans tell pollsters that they think reptilian aliens rule the Earth....
Unruliness, perversity, pigheadedness—psychologists have long been interested in this bestiary of paradoxical thought and action. Perversity is a puzzle. It’s hard to explain, scientifically, what Edgar Allan Poe described as “the imp of the perverse.”...
A friend of mine tells how his family made him a pie on his birthday, as a surprise. His young niece was repeatedly instructed not to reveal the secret, and she solemnly agreed. But, when he came into the house, she suddenly screamed, “There is no pie!”...
Much more to this article — I'm skipping over a lot of good stuff — but it, perversely/harmoniously, ends with pie:
It’s said that a waitress once asked [the Columbia University philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser] what he wanted for dessert—apple pie or blueberry pie. He chose the apple pie. Then she returned with news: there was also cherry pie. “In that case,” Morgenbesser said, “I’ll have the blueberry.”
Howard: Then when this song becomes a hit, they send you out on tour, and that’s where you freak. You hated it.
Sia: Well, there were parts that I loved.
Howard: What’s the worst part of it? Is it just being in a hotel? Not being around your stuff?
Sia: It’s lonely. You have this family with you, this traveling family of wolverines that you create, and that’s not lonely. But if you’ve developed relationships outside of that, when you leave them it’s really hard to nourish them. I couldn’t ever maintain a love relationship. I don’t know. The traveling, the air conditioning is so weird. You become like a lizard.
The song mentioned above is "Breathe Me," which became a hit after it was used in the brilliant ending to the great finale episode of the TV show "Six Feet Under." Here's the official video for the song:
And here's that fantastic final sequence for "Six Feet Under":
When you travel, you're not 6 feet under, but the air conditioning is so weird and you do become like a lizard.
According to the office of the Architect of the Capitol, which preserves and maintains the buildings and grounds of the Capitol, no jail or detention area has existed on the campus since 1877. That’s when, according to a description in the Congressional Record, two Louisiana election officials were jailed in “a little room in the basement of the Capitol, with but two windows, opening upon no sunlight, but upon a narrow confined court into which no gleam of sunshine can ever enter.” (Not even a gleam!) It gets worse. The room was so dark and foul that, according to the Congressional Record, the room smelled “like the den of some foul reptile, a room where thieves arrested around the Capitol are kept.”
The second-highest-rated comment:
"The room was so dark and foul that, according to the Congressional Record, the room smelled “like the den of some foul reptile, a room where thieves arrested around the Capitol are kept."
Sounds like a perfect place to put Barr and Mnuchin.
"People noticed it by canals or in backyards or under streetlights at night — familiar places that had become unfamiliarly empty. The feeling was so common that entomologists developed a shorthand for it, named for the way many people first began to notice that they weren’t seeing as many bugs. They called it the windshield phenomenon.... But the crux of the windshield phenomenon, the reason that the creeping suspicion of change is so creepy, is that insects wouldn’t have to disappear altogether for us to find ourselves missing them for reasons far beyond nostalgia.... [T]he losses were already moving through the ecosystem, with serious declines in the numbers of lizards, birds and frogs. The paper reported 'a bottom-up trophic cascade and consequent collapse of the forest food web.' Lister’s inbox quickly filled with messages from other scientists, especially people who study soil invertebrates, telling him they were seeing similarly frightening declines. Even after his dire findings, Lister found the losses shocking: 'I didn’t even know about the earthworm crisis!'"
THERE IS A GECKO SITTING ON THE TOUCHSCREEN OF THE PHONE, MAKING CALLS WITH HIS TINY GECKO FEET!!! This gecko has called me 15 times, and everyone in our recent call list. *Actual photo of telemarketer* @TMMC@GEICO@HawaiianTelpic.twitter.com/USyKeOiDbE
The interactions between the gecko's feet and the climbing surface are stronger than simple surface area effects. On its feet, the gecko has many microscopic hairs, or setae... that increase the Van der Waals forces between its feet and the surface.
The Van der Waals forces!
The following equation can be used to quantitatively characterize the Van der Waals forces, by approximating the interaction as being between two flat surfaces:
where F is the force of interaction, AH is the Hamaker constant, and D is the distance between the two surfaces. Gecko setae are much more complicated than a flat surface, for each foot has roughly 14,000 setae that each have about 1,000 spatulae. These surface interactions help to smooth out the surface roughness of the wall, which helps improve the gecko to wall surface interaction.
I don't really know what Drudge is trying to say, but the women — Ivanka and Elizabeth Warren — both have bands around their heads (I know Ivanka's is an entire hat) and the men's heads are more differentiated:
1. Musk's head is enclosed within a space helmet, 2. Bezo displays baldness glossily, 3. Eminem, like a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, has his noggin inside a baseball cap wrapped in a hoodie.
I was going to discuss Elizabeth Warren's crudely photoshopped "Indian" headband (and arrows), but I took a moment to click to see what Jeff Bezos has on that tray, and it's the entire body of a cooked iguana and he's posing seemingly eating a chunk of it!
The Amazon chief executive officer wasn’t the only billionaire at the glitzy event at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. West Coast industrial real estate tycoon Ed Roski and Frederik Paulsen, a Swedish pharmaceutical titan and pole explorer, perused the tarantula, cockroach and roasted iguana appetizers amid 1,200 guests including James Lovell, the first person to journey twice to the moon, on Apollo 8 and Apollo 13.
"The worse regular civilization does and the less you trust, the better crypto does... It’s almost like the ultimate short trade.... When I meet people in the normal world now, I get bored. It’s just a different level of consciousness."
His room is simple: a bed, a futon, a TV on a mostly empty media console, three keyboard cleaning sprays and a half dozen canisters of Lysol wipes. His T-shirt read, ‘The Lizard of Wall Street,’ with a picture of a lizard in a suit, dollar-sign necklaces around its neck. He carries with him a coin that reads, “memento mori,” to remind himself he can die any day. He sees the [cryptocurrency] boom as part of a global apocalypse.
I'll bet huge numbers of Americans identify with this question, and a lot of them won't even admit it because even to ask is to risk appearing ill-informed or complacent (or, if I may add a concept, unempathetic).
I believe that most people who have this question find that the answer is to be a chameleon. Just reflect whatever the people around you are saying so you'll be seen as a good person and you won't be prolonging the experience.
Hax's answer is about restricting your intake of news. She assumes the questioner's issues are about the inside of her head and not in her social relationships. And, in fact, the questioner does say "I don’t want to be ill-informed — or worse, complacent." I'm hearing "I don’t want to appear to be ill-informed — or worse, complacent."
I think this is why so many showbiz people and college students seem to be on the left.
ADDED: If the questioner really is concerned about the inside of her own head, my advice is: Only read the news. Don't watch it on television. Television news controls your time. It's designed to operate on your emotions and to make you feel that you are monitoring what's going on in the world and caring people in real time. You could watch all day and not become more informed than if you spent 10 minutes scanning the headlines and dipping into the opening paragraphs of the articles in the top newspapers.
On an advanced level: Read the news to develop your powers of critical thinking. Don't let it buffet you with one thing or another. When you read a news article, stop and ask yourself: What do I really think about this? If you can write one sentence in answer to that question, you can have a blog. But keep it private, unless you're not afraid of showing your true colors.
And better than that: If you really care about people, instead of keeping vigil in front of the tube, do something for somebody in your own town (or house!).
"The sister is doing her homework, being a Goody 2 Shoes all day long, getting pats on the head over and over again, getting away with stuff on the sly, and the brother thinks it's all bullshit and he's not going to be your good little boy."
That's something I wrote on the fly, over at Facebook, on seeing this:
The linked piece is written by a Catholic priest, Dwight Longenecker, which I'm reading only after dashing off my comment. Longenecker says Trump is tapping into the “reptilian brain”:
This is why all Hillary’s prim preparation, plans and programs don’t matter. Donald’s digging deeper. This is also why Hillary’s attack on Donald’s misogyny and male chauvinism don’t matter....
Feminism has brought with it the organized Mother. Here is the prim and tidy housekeeper. Everything in its place. Everything spic and span. You need to clean your room, wash your hands and turn up in time for supper... If you don’t obey you will be punished. Don’t you know this is for the best? If you don’t comply you will be fined. If you don’t take your medication Nurse Ratched will make sure you get electric shock treatment....
Where does Donald Trump fit in? I think he’s the figurehead of a pushback... Should he be a good boy and do his homework and prepare for the debate then drink his milk and cookies and go to bed on time so he’ll be bright eyed and bushy tailed for the morning? “Fuhgeddaboudit. That preparation and doing your homework stuff is for sissies.” He’s going to stay out with the boys and wing it. He’ll do ok. He always has....
Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, represents exactly what Donald Trump is reacting against. She is Nurse Ratched. She is the organized, cunning, planning, smiling Mommy who expects everyone to behave so that the home will be neat and tidy and together so everyone will be happy.
She is the sort of woman who “lives for others” and you can tell the others by their hunted look.
Donald, on the other hand, is the bad boy who sticks out his tongue, comes in late and runs roughshod over the whole household.
If it were a movie, you'd be rooting for the boy. No one roots for Nurse Ratched — mentioned twice in the priest's meditation (which ends with the observation that we are all sinners and may God have mercy on our souls). I've been aware as I watch the election unfold that I am rooting for Donald Trump. I don't intellectually embrace him or much of what he is saying, but I know — it's so clear — that I'm rooting for him. That's an observable phenomenon, and it's undeniable.
He introduced himself suddenly and with a bang, in 1959, when his first produced play, “The Zoo Story,” opened in Berlin on a double bill with Samuel Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape.” A two-handed one-act that unfolds in real time, “The Zoo Story” zeroed in on the existential terror at the heart of Eisenhower-era complacency, presenting the increasingly menacing intrusion of a probing, querying stranger on a man reading on a Central Park bench....
“Albee is not a fan of mankind,” the critic John Lahr wrote in The New Yorker in 2012. “The friendships he stages are loose affiliations that serve mostly as a bulwark against meaninglessness.”
From a nice, long obituary in The New York Times.
I've only written the name Edward Albee once in the 12 years of this blog. It was in the context of an interview that Alec Baldwin did with Elaine Stritch. Stritch had "described having 'an orgasm for the first time in my life' on stage in a very emotional moment of Edward Albee's play 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' ("'You know, that big scene? "Our son," he yells in my face, "is dead." And I went "No!" At the height of my force, I said no to him.')" And Alec Baldwin said to her: "Honey, I just think it speaks volumes about you, about what a real creature of the theater you are that the only time that you ever had an orgasm was saying the words of a homosexual man. It was as far from a heterosexual orgasm as you could possibly get."
I guess I never wrote about it, but we did go out to see an Edward Albee play in 2014 at The American Players Theater. It was "Seascape," the one with talking lizards...
... a male-and-female couple of lizards encountering male-and-female married humans.
"They're anoles, actually. I love 'em. They're our buddies. They eat insects and all that, and whenever I see Allie with one I dart in there and I grab the little thing and I take it outside. The cat gets mad at me, but I'm sorry, that's the way it is. I still run the house."
When the sex-reversed females mated with “normal” male lizards, the sex of the offspring was entirely determined by egg incubation temperature, rather than chromosomes....
“If you’re a he-she animal – with male sex chromosomes, but reproducing as a female – you actually laid nearly twice as many eggs as a regular female”... [said] Clare Holleley, of Canberra University... worr[ying] about how creatures will adapt to rapid global climate change....
According to the authors of the study, the lizards who exhibited sex reversal were better mothers than the genetic females.... The climate changes caused by global warming affects the entire lizard population in such a way that the sex of the lizards may no longer be determined by the genetic signals of chromosomes, but by the temperature.
The first 5 items on the list are all collected at this link, sent to me by a reader who suggests that I use my longstanding, much-loved tag "insect politics." But a spider is not an insect, so I'm stuck with my arachnids tag. I have tags for insects and insect politics, but no specialized arachnid politics tag, because have you ever heard of arachnid politics? Neither have I! Arachnids don't have politics. They're very brutal. No compassion. No compromise. We can't trust the arachnid.
"He still had his hunting rifle, but... he didn't have the strength to hunt a deer... Instead, [Gene] Penaflor focused on small game, foraged for algae in a stream and drank water from a creek. To stay dry, he crouched under a fallen tree, and to keep warm, he made a fire and packed dry leaves and grass around his body."
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