"During lobster season — from June to December — Mrs. Oliver would wake up at 2:45 a.m., put on overalls and drive her four-wheel-drive pickup truck..."

"... to the dock. After loading her boat, the Virginia, with bait and gas, she would head to sea before sunrise, hauling lobster pots until lunchtime.'It’s not hard work for me,' she told The Boston Globe in 2021, when she was 101. 'It might be for somebody else, but not me.'"

From "Virginia Oliver, Maine’s ‘Lobster Lady’ and Folk Hero, Dies at 105/She fished off the New England coast for more than 80 years, and intended to continue until she died. '“It’s not hard work for me,' she said at 101" (NYT).

I wonder what she did January through May. That's a long off season. What's the secret to longevity, based on this one data point? It's not just hard work. It might be seasonal work with a long, predictable rest every year. I think there are other articles about her that she kept busy in the off-season with housework.

Pinching lobsters. Hmm. They're the ones with the pincers.

Just reading the headlines in the British paper:

Here's the story: "The FBI is investigating after a truck carrying lobsters worth $400,000 was hijacked by a thief posing as a legitimate driver." How does a stolen truck make the front page? I guess it seems amusing that the truck was loaded with lobsters. That "s" on "lobsters" indicates they were living lobsters, but it says they were on their way to Costco, so I'm picturing what I would call "lobster" — no "s" — boxes of frozen lobster. I'd hate to have keep $400,000 worth of lobsters alive. Too complicated!

In other news... too bad for Harry and Meghan. They keep losing publicists. This latest loss "comes after Meghan and Harry attended a birthday party hosted by Kris Jenner, 70, the night before the UK marked Remembrance Sunday." Quite the gaffe.

"Two smart, insecure, witty singles meet at a Manhattan tennis club, consciously couple, measure their lives in psychotherapy sessions, find lobster humor in the Hamptons and disagree about whether Los Angeles is beyond redemption."

A summary of "Annie Hall." 

From the obituary for Marshall Brickman, "Marshall Brickman, Woody Allen’s Co-Writer on Hit Films, Dies at 85/The duo won an Oscar for 'Annie Hall.' Mr. Brickman went on to write Broadway shows, including 'Jersey Boys,' and make movies of his own" (NYT).

Also, he was a UW alum: "Marshall...  attended the University of Wisconsin, a school he chose casually because a friend was going there and seemed to like it."

And: "In 1964, Mr. Brickman played banjo as a member of the New Journeymen, a trio with John Phillips and Michelle Phillips. When Mr. Brickman left the group, the couple took on two new partners and created the Mamas & the Papas. That may have seemed like bad timing, but a few years later he and a friend were invited to Sharon Tate’s house in Beverly Hills and decided at the last minute to go to Malibu instead. It was the night of the Manson family murders."

In the late 1960s, Brickman was a writer on "The Tonight Show," and he created Carnac the Magnificent!

"'The Crabfish' (known also as 'The Sea Crabb'), an English folk song dating back to the mid-1800s about a man who places a crab into a chamber pot..."

"... unbeknownst to his wife, who later uses the pot without looking, and is attacked by the crab. Over the years, sanitized versions of the song were released in which a lobster or crab grabs the wife by the nose instead of by the genitals or that imply the location of the wounds by censoring the rhyming word in the second couplet. For instance, 'Children, children, bring the looking glass / Come and see the crayfish that bit your mother's a-face' (arse)."

From the Wikipedia article "Expurgation," which I'm reading this morning because I'm listening to the new Chris Rock special (on Netflix) and, in an effort to blog it, relying on a sanitized WaPo article and using the word "expurgations/expurgation/expurgate" for the first time in the 19-year history of this blog.

Elsewhere in Wikipedia, there's a whole article on "The Crabfish," complete with full lyrics, which, first, I'm very happy to see after suffering through numerous YouTube renderings of the expurgated song:

"They’re surprisingly flexible animals, and they twist and turn and their flukes get entangled. The lobster lines can then tighten..."

"... around their caudal peduncle – the tail stock – causing it to necrotise... a horrible slow death...."

Says Philip Hoare, author of Leviathan," quoted in "Save whales or eat lobster? The battle reaches the White House/Fishing gear used by Maine lobstermen is killing right whales. Will boosting a $1bn industry trump protecting an endangered species?" (The Guardian)(The White House served lobster at a recent state dinner).

In his effort to stir up an appreciation for whales that outstrips our taste for lobster, Hoare stresses their "very long sessions of foreplay of three or four hours." 

Males possess the biggest testes of any animal on the planet, and the mating often involves several males and a single female – a “socially active group” in scientific terms. “You see them rolling around in shallow water in a very sensual way, stroking each other with their flippers. There are a lot of animals involved, and it’s clearly erotic. They seem so caught up in the moment.”

When you think about how far you would go sacrificing your own interests for the sake of saving an animal from suffering and needless death, how much are you counting their sexual performance? What counts more — the size of their testicles, the amount of time devoted to insuring that the female has an orgasm, or the extent to which they seem to be having what the humans call "fun"?

I've got 9 carefully curated TikToks for you this evening. That is, these are all things I liked.

1. Some have FOMO, but a lot of us have FOPU.

2. A lobster has been seen in real life.

3. Kayak camping and the coconut crab.

4. The L.A. conversation.

5. What does Dolly Parton think about prostitution? 

6. I remember when I lost my mind.

7. When David Bowie shouted out "It's great to be in Cincinnati..."

8. The different generations react to they/them pronouns.

9. Unclogging the drain.

Tonight, I am serving up 9 TikTok videos. Let me know what you like.

1. Your brain would just like to go over a few things.

2. Prompting the AI image generator with nonsense words like "plism sprute."

3. Ricky Gourmet reveals where he got his VibeSmith certification. 

4. A young woman finds it hard to believe the harsh reality of adult life: You have to register your car. Every year.

5. "I'm like: What has Leon the lobster got going on?"

6. She's tried to be normal, but will now be as weird as possible.

7. The TikTok algorithm — thinking this man is a woman — has revealed to him the secret knowledge of what women want.

8. How do you explain the Upper Peninsula? Did Wisconsin lose a war?

9. Russell Brand contemplates heroic sacrifice.

Ostracon and ostraconophobia.

Ostraconophobia:

Ostraconophobia is the fear of shellfish.[1]

NASCAR driver Denny Hamlin has this phobia. On July 16, 2017, after winning the Overton's 301 Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series race at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, he was given a 44-pound lobster by crew chief Mike Wheeler (a trophy that is traditionally given to winners at the track), and Hamlin attempted to leap away. "I have a lobster phobia. I don't know why. I just don't like them," Hamlin stated. "I cannot eat dinner if someone beside me is eating lobster. I can't look at it. So as far as I'm concerned, they need to put it back in the water and let it live."[2]

Ostracon:

An ostracon (Greek: ὄστρακον ostrakon, plural ὄστρακα ostraka) is a piece of pottery, usually broken off from a vase or other earthenware vessel. In an archaeological or epigraphical context, ostraca refer to sherds or even small pieces of stone that have writing scratched into them. Usually these are considered to have been broken off before the writing was added; ancient people used the cheap, plentiful and durable broken pieces of pottery around them as convenient places to place writing for a wide variety of purposes, mostly very short inscriptions, but in some cases very long....

In Classical Athens, when the decision at hand was to banish or exile a certain member of society, citizen peers would cast their vote by writing the name of the person on the shard of pottery; the vote was counted and, if unfavorable, the person was exiled for a period of ten years from the city, thus giving rise to the term ostracism....

What's going on here? The etymology of "ostracon" (from the OED) explains it: 

Etymology: < ancient Greek ὄστρακον earthen vessel, potsherd, hard shell < the same Indo-European base as the word for bone (see osteo- comb. form), with an -r- suffix (shown also by ancient Greek ὄστρειον oyster n.).

"For a long time I have defended ideas and convictions and become what we call an intellectual. In truth, the problem in France is..."

"... that if you are not of the left, you are never called an intellectual. So they call you a sloppy polemicist instead.... Young people are always the first fanatics: you know, young communists, young fascists, young anarchists. Young people are susceptible to these things. They are very permeable. Also, this is not humanism. It is pacifism. Pacifism is the fear of confronting the enemy, of recognising him and fighting to preserve our civilisation. Humanism does not mean accepting that another civilisation must replace us and our civilisation. That’s not hating anyone. I do not hate anyone.... I repeat that I do not consider it racist to defend one’s culture. I do not consider it misogynistic to consider that men are not women. These are not protected areas for discussion. It’s a matter of words. They call me a racist. A racist is the one who measures skulls and considers that skin colour influences intelligence. I believe the contrary. I am an assimilationist. I think that wherever a person comes from he can become French if he appropriates the history of France and its popular culture. This is the opposite of racism." 

From "Éric Zemmour: ‘Am I the French Trump? No, I’m more like Boris’ Éric Zemmour, 63, is a former journalist whose inflammatory statements about immigrants have made him a new voice of the far right, to rival Marine Le Pen. Last week, it was revealed that his 28-year-old aide is expecting his child. So, what are his chances in next year’s French presidential election?" (London Times).

The interviewer, Andrew Billen, says he asks Zenmour "about his bizarre theory... that France’s resolve has been emasculated by feminists and homosexuals over the past 50 years." Billen calls this theory "worthy of the Canadian lobster-man philosopher Jordan Peterson" — lobster-man! — and pushes Zemmour about his use of the word "virilité" and asks if he's "masculine" and whether he got in fights when he was young. Answer:

"Was I a brawler? Mean to women? Not at all. No, I don’t have the looks. I don’t have the physique. And I don’t have the mentality either. No, no, I’m very French. I like flirting, the culture of flirtatiousness. I like French courtesy. I just think... there has been a domination of what we call women’s values, that is to say that peace is preferred to war, consensus over choice. It is these values that push your daughter to say, ‘Ooh là là! We must absolutely respect the values of others.’ Your daughter must be careful to respect other values, which are more masculine, like taking responsibility. It is man’s nature to defend."

"Johnson aimed to teach his English students words like 'aberration' and 'lethargy' by including them in purposely outlandish sentences relying on gory imagery and absurdist humor..."

"In a further attempt to engage his pre-teen students, he’d insert their first names at random into the sentences. Sometimes he’d string sentences together, such as in the story of 'Crazy Lobster Boy' — a student who grabs two pairs of pruning shears, declares himself a lobster and runs around terrorizing his classmates while teaching them words like 'simulating' and 'alleviate.' Most students adored the vocab questions....  [But t]he parent who filed the complaint with the school felt that his son was being mocked for his speech impediment in a sentence describing 'his tendency to babble like an idiot and drool on his classmates.'... The parent was also furious that his Jewish son was made the protagonist of the 'lobster boy' story, arguing that a joke that the boy probably 'had a crab or crayfish somewhere back in his ancestry' was evidence of Johnson’s 'thinly veiled antisemitism' because the sentence connected the boy’s violent behavior to his crustacean DNA. 'Humiliating a young boy on the verge of puberty by calling him a crustacean and referring to his "lobster claws" at a time already complicated with fears and ambivalence about body image and sexuality is utterly shocking from any adult, let alone the Head of School and English teacher,' the parent wrote...."

 

From "‘Lobster claws’ test questions land Crowden School principal in hot water/Teachers are quitting and parents are pulling their kids from a private Berkeley music school after the principal was fired in connection with a fill-in-the-blank vocabulary test involving crustacean jokes" (Berkeleyside).

In Scranton, Trump stepped on Mr. Biden’s general-election rollout.

In "Joe Biden Accepts Democratic Nomination: ‘I Will Draw on the Best of Us’/Mr. Biden urged Americans to have faith that they could 'overcome this season of darkness,' and he pledged to bridge the country’s divisions in ways President Trump had not," the NYT observes that Trump — "[s]hedding the political tradition whereby each party defers to the other during the week of its nominating convention" — has been trying " to step on Mr. Biden’s general-election rollout" but "with little success."

What's the evidence of "little success"? Is it the way Rasmussen's "approval index" jumped 6 points overnight from Wednesday to Thursday? The Times is just making an assertion — essentially wishful thinking. Trump, deviating from tradition, is having "little success." Just report what you want to be be true! Meanwhile, you'd think Joe Biden was some sort of religious transfiguration — the embodiment of light! It's so stupid that I'm drawn to read the transcript of the speech Trump gave yesterday in Joe Biden's home town of Scranton.

Maybe later I'll get to some of the convention speeches. I will confess to being seated in front of the TV at one point last night. It was just Chris Coons talking into the camera. I tried to watch for approximately 20 seconds, then said "Why do I have to listen to Chris Coons?" and got up and left. Oh! And I saw a triple-split screen of the [Dixie] Chicks singing the national anthem. Why them? Because long ago, in 2003, they outraged country music fans by openly opposing the war in Iraq? But Joe Biden voted for the war in Iraq. Because after all these years they dropped the word "Dixie" from their name, though they kept "Chicks"? The name Dixie Chicks was interesting because of the rhyme and the specificity. Now, they are generic, and why do these dames get to be all women?

I think it's that there's some idea that they have been irritating the deplorables since 2003. The Democrats wanted to pick that scab, remind people of the pain of that war their candidate supported?! "When the war was debated and then authorized by the US Congress in 2002, Democrats controlled the Senate and Biden was chair of the Senate committee on foreign relations. Biden himself had enormous influence as chair and argued strongly in favor of the 2002 resolution granting President Bush the authority to invade Iraq" (The Guardian).

Now, let's look at what Trump said in Scranton:

"In the weeks I spent listening to Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast, I learned that lobsters have serotonin, that Elvis Presley suffered from parapraxis and that Mr. Gladwell adheres to a firm life rule that he drink only five liquids: water, tea, red wine, espresso and milk."

That's a fine first sentence. The article is "With ‘Talking to Strangers,’ Malcolm Gladwell Goes Dark/Read by millions — but savaged by critics — the author has a new book on police violence, campus rape and other bleak terrain" by Amy Chozick (in the NYT).

Excerpt:

At 55, in clear-framed spectacles and a head of curls, Mr. Gladwell still has the spindly, featherweight look of someone who can break a five-minute mile on a casual weekend run. He lives in a two-story townhouse apartment in the West Village, brimming with books, vintage furniture and a set of eclectic paintings of the Ethiopian Army. We sat at a heavy wooden table as 90-degree August soup poured through the open windows....

Books take years to complete, but thanks to [podcasting], Mr. Gladwell’s typical reader — whom he has described as “a 45-year-old guy with three kids who’s an engineer at some company outside of Atlanta” — can partake in a virtuous cycle of Gladwell programming. The podcast teases interest in a souped-up “Talking to Strangers” audiobook, which builds an audience for more speeches, which stokes advertisers for the podcasts....

August souped-up?

It was a simple writing error to re-use the word "soup" there, and it amuses me, especially since neither use is about actual soup. "Soup" is conventionally used to refer to air that seems thick, mostly for fog, where the traditional expression is "pea soup fog." The OED traces that metaphor back to 1849, to an entry in a journal by Herman Melville: "Upon sallying out this morning encountered the oldfashioned pea soup London fog." That makes it sound as though people had been saying "pea soup fog" for a long time.

And what about the soup in "souped up"? The OED doesn't go into any detail here, but I think it's just an analogy to feeding human beings with the hearty, humble food provided to hungry poor people. The oldest uses are not about adding fuel, but tinkering with the mechanical works, readjusting the engines — of airplanes and cars... and jitneys:

Here come a flat-top, he was moving up with me
Then come waving goodbye in a little old souped-up jitney
I put my foot in my tank and I began to roll
Moaning siren, 'twas a state patrol
So I let out my wings and then I blew my horn
Bye-bye New Jersey, I've become airborne

No, that one wasn't in the OED. That's just what plays in my head. Chuck Berry. Wonder if he had parapraxis... or if I do... What is parapraxis?!

Parapraxis, the clinical terminology for “Freudian slips,” as the episode explains, means abnormal acts in speech, memory, or physicality....

Gladwell focuses on the parapraxis that seemed to occur during performances in the late 60s and early 70s of Elvis’s song “Are You Lonesome Tonight?,” which contains a minute-long spoken-word section aimed at a long-lost lover. Though Elvis performed the song many times, he consistently tripped over the interlude. His final sweat-soaked performance of the song is iconic for all the wrong reasons: the words are almost all gone . . . replaced instead by maniacal, uncontrollable laughter.

The spectacle is hard to explain....

Or easy to explain:



And so, as you sally out this morning, souped up on espresso or tea or milk, have some laughs, have some lobsters, and good luck with your parapraxis.

"In April of this year, a company called Coding Elite exposed an artificial intelligence (AI) program that took a substantial sample of my voice..."

"...which is easily accessible on the YouTube lectures and podcasts that I have posted over the last years. In consequence, they were able to duplicate my manner of speaking with exceptional precision, starting out by producing versions of me rapping Eminem songs such as Lose Yourself (which has now garnered 250,000 views) and Rap God (which has only garnered 17,000) as well as Rock Lobster (1,400 views). They have done something similar with Bernie Sanders (singing Dancing Queen), Donald Trump (Sweet Dreams) and Ben Shapiro, who also delivered Rap God. The company has a model, the address of which you can find on their YouTube channel, which allows the user to make Trump, Obama, Clinton or Sanders say anything whatsoever."

From "The deepfake artists must be stopped before we no longer know what's real/I can tell you from personal experience how disturbing it is to discover a website devoted to making fake audio clips of you — for comic or malevolent purposes" by Jordan Peterson (National Journal).

1. First, "garner." These videos don't just get views. They garner them.

2. How do I know this is really written by Jordan Peterson? It could just be the old-time, shallowfake of putting somebody's name on something that he didn't write.

3. Assuming it is Jordan Peterson, why should I accept what he's saying at face value? It could be the most common fake of all, an insincere opinion. I mean, look at the part I'm quoting above, with all the links to the fake version of him performing cool songs and prodding us to go listen and spend time within the wacky Jordan Peterson phenomenon. What's he really up to? What's it all about? He had that book where he went on about lobsters and now somebody got his voice performing "Rock Lobster." I've go to think this promotes his brand:



4. I can certainly understand wanting to stop deepfake versions of your voice and image (as well as the fraudulent use of your name), especially if it's done to trick people and to damage your reputation. Sometimes it's just having fun and no one is fooled (or is someone always fooled?... maybe you could think JP did "Rock Lobster," sort of like the way William Shatner did "Rocket Man").

5. What should we do about the deepfakes? Can they "be stopped before we no longer know what's real"? An effort to stop them could make the ones that are not stopped more convincing. We need to develop a better sense of what is real and can't count on the government to save us. The government is often the source of fakery. What about Facebook and YouTube and other social media? Should they take down all impersonations (or take down anything the impersonated person wants removed)? I don't know what the answer is here, only that I wouldn't want to stop satire and that there are negative consequences to purporting to protect people from fakery. We need to be the masters of our own mistrust.

"You flew? Aren't you going to blog the experience? Did you have to go thru Security? Did you take your shoes off? They search your laptop and purse/wallet."

Asks Nice in the comments to last night's "Hello From New York City."

1. I finally had a flight experience in which I was not chosen to be felt up by a TSA official. I believe this is because I changed how I dressed. Instead of a long flowing skirt, I wore non-baggy pants.

2. I did have to take off my shoes, and I had to stand in that plastic cylinder with my feet apart and my hands raised over my head which I presume allowed somebody somewhere to look through my clothes.

3. I paid an extra $100 per flight to get first class on the kind of plane that has 3 seats per row in first class and 4 seats per row in coach. I had the middle seat, with a completely non-annoying person right next to me. Across the aisle, there was a man in shorts with very hairy legs, and the socks that he wore with his sneakers had images of lobsters on them.

4. I did not commit the intrusion of snapping a photograph of these socks, even though I did, later on in the day, as you can see in "The Imp Café," snap a picture of a woman in a tie-dye t-shirt that had an image of Donald Trump with the word "impeach" stamped on his face. I liked how the green bottle hid part of the word revealing the little-noticed component "imp." Usually the included word "peach" gets your attention and keeps you from seeing the option of putting the "p" with the "im" to release the little devil inside the word.

5. Some people think Trump is a full-scale devil but an "imp" is (according to the OED) "A little devil" or "A mischievous child (having a little of ‘the devil’ in him); a young urchin: often used playfully." Jonathan Swift used the word in "Gulliver's Travels": "I once caught a young Male [Yahoo] of three Years old,..but the little Imp fell a squalling, and scratching, and biting."

6. "Yahoo" is "A name invented by Swift in Gulliver's Travels for an imaginary race of brutes having the form of men; hence transferred and allusively, a human being of a degraded or bestial type... Frequently in modern use, a person lacking cultivation or sensibility, a philistine; a lout, a hooligan." And that sounds like the way people think of Trump too.

7. I'm here in NYC on my own, staying in a hotel that has a name that's interesting for a reason that I'll reveal after I've checked out.

8. I took a cab from LaGuardia to Manhattan, and you might think that because it was Sunday, the traffic would be easy, but the Puerto Rican Day Parade was going on. The cabbie informed me that the Puerto Rican Day Parade was the worst parade of the year. Second worst was St. Patrick's Day. Wanting to soothe any incipient ethnic animosity — the cabbie was maybe Filipino — I said, "Maybe because of drinking?" He seemed to confirm that theory, then expressed approval of the 2 ethnic groups associated with those parades because unlike other drinkers, they don't vomit in the cab. He didn't use the word "vomit," but I did, to make sure I had the story straight. He spoke of "messing up" the cab.

9. Remember the old episode of "Seinfeld," "The Puerto Rican Day Parade"?

"Let me get this straight. You’re saying that we should organize our societies along the lines of the lobsters?"

From "Why Can't People Hear What Jordan Peterson Is Saying?/A British broadcaster doggedly tried to put words into the academic’s mouth" by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic.

The quote in the post headline is what Cathy Newman said after Peterson said:

There’s this idea that hierarchical structures are a sociological construct of the Western patriarchy. And that is so untrue that it’s almost unbelievable. I use the lobster as an example: We diverged from lobsters evolutionarily history about 350 million years ago. And lobsters exist in hierarchies. They have a nervous system attuned to the hierarchy. And that nervous system runs on serotonin just like ours. The nervous system of the lobster and the human being is so similar that anti-depressants work on lobsters. And it’s part of my attempt to demonstrate that the idea of hierarchy has absolutely nothing to do with sociocultural construction, which it doesn’t.

Lots more quotes from the interview and analysis of what's going on at the link. I just want to quote something from the movie "The Lobster":

HOTEL MANAGER — The fact that you'll turn into an animal if you don't manage to fall in love with another person during your stay here is not something that should upset you... Have you decided what animal you would like to be if you end up alone?

DAVID — A lobster.

HOTEL MANAGER — Why a lobster?

DAVID — Because a lobster lives to be over 100 years old, has blue blood just like an aristocrat and stays fertile all its life. And I like the sea very much. I water-ski and swim quite well, ever since I was a teenager.

HOTEL MANAGER — I must congratulate you. Usually the first thing people think of is a dog and that’s why the world is full of dogs.* Very few choose to become unusual animals, which is why they are endangered. Rarely does someone choose to be a tuna fish, due to the dangers it faces, or a polar bear, due to its adverse living conditions. A lobster is an excellent choice.

And here's the great David Foster Wallace essay "Consider the Lobster." Excerpt:

Still, after all the abstract intellection, there remain the facts of the frantically clanking lid, the pathetic clinging to the edge of the pot. Standing at the stove, it is hard to deny in any meaningful way that this is a living creature experiencing pain and wishing to avoid/escape the painful experience. To my lay mind, the lobster’s behavior in the kettle appears to be the expression of a preference; and it may well be that an ability to form preferences is the decisive criterion for real suffering. The logic of this (preference p suffering) relation may be easiest to see in the negative case. If you cut certain kinds of worms in half, the halves will often keep crawling around and going about their vermiform business as if nothing had happened. When we assert, based on their post-op behavior, that these worms appear not to be suffering, what we’re really saying is that there’s no sign that the worms know anything bad has happened or would prefer not to have gotten cut in half.

______________

* Notice that "the British broadcaster doggedly tried..."

What if a great-looking actor showed off his dedication to his craft by gaining a lot of weight for a role...

... but you were just watching the movie not particularly knowing who that was and wondering throughout what's the deal with his pot belly? I mean, we're watching this movie (on TV) last night, and the main character strips down to his underwear early on and we are getting closeups of his distended belly. It's an unpleasant sight. Why are they showing us this? Later, we see him walking around with that belly straining against his too-tight shirt. Much later, there he is, walking — on another long trek from the forest to the city — and I'm so mystified at the unexplained importance of this belly that I'm saying out loud: What's up with the pot belly? It's like it's a character in the movie that nobody talks about. And who is this actor anyway? Is that supposed to be Colin Farrell?

The movie came out last year. I remember that it got a good review in The New Yorker, so I'd put it on my Amazon Prime playlist, but I'd forgotten what it was I was supposed to be watching and why it was said to be good and even how good it was said to be. This morning I see that it had a 90% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, that was indeed Colin Farrell, and he'd deliberately packed on 43 pounds to do that role:

Yeah, I ate like my life depended on it. I put on quite a pile in eight weeks. About 43 pounds.

What was the motivation behind that?

Well, he [the character in "The Lobster"] wasn’t written that way. He wasn’t written with any physical definition at all. But myself and [director] Yorgos [Lanthimos] had spoken about it and because this world was so unusual I wanted to have some physical separation from what I was used to. I’ve messed around with my body for roles, whether it was losing a load of weight or bulking up for action films. And so Yorgos and I talked about me dropping a bunch of weight and looking quite famished. But then I said, “I bet this guy was something of a comfort eater.” He’s probably not someone who ever realized that there was such a term as “let yourself go,” because there really is no consideration of the self. But he might’ve liked his grub.

Well, I had never seen a Colin Farrell movie before, but I understand he's a very nice looking man. But I don't have any particular feeling about him, and I certainly wasn't watching the movie thinking that's the famous actor Colin Farrell who was so dedicated to his craft that he discerned that a character written without "any physical definition at all" was a man who "might’ve liked his grub" and undertook the drastic (yet common) stunt of getting fat for a movie role.

I've asked this question before: If a movie calls for a fat actor, why don't they just hire a fat actor? Is it some kind of anti-fat statement, that the audience needs to know this person is not really fat? There's a great-looking guy in there. Well, I didn't know. The stunt was lost on me. I didn't have the psychological boost of "seeing" the unseen handsome guy inside the artificially pot-bellied man. I was just distracted wondering why the filmmaker insisted on all the hey-look-at-his-belly shots.

And it could have been a plot point. Because this movie was about the formation of male-female relationships based on a single corresponding trait — a "defining characteristic." Much is made of a woman who gets nose-bleeds and a man who bashes his head on things so he'll have nosebleeds and thus be able to couple with her. But our main character does not attempt to couple by matching his pot belly to some woman's pot belly. His defining characteristic is that he needs glasses — he's "short-sighted." And the woman he finds is also short-sighted* and has no discernible potbelly whatsoever.


___________________

* SPOILER ALERT: And ultimately, she is beyond short-sighted — blind — and the man must decide whether to blind himself too so he can maintain the paired defining characteristic. See? "The Lobster" is a big old claw-snapping allegory.

Trump and Macron will dine "at Le Jules Verne, the elite, blue-lobster-serving restaurant... something of a surprise, considering Mr. Trump’s fondness for ketchup-doused steak and cheeseburgers rather than gourmet foods."

Sniffs the NYT.

Let's look into the future and read Macron's diary entry:

Recently I took a United States President to dinner. Insensitively, I led him into a gourmet restaurant. Suddenly I saw his face freeze up as he was confronted with dishes like homard bleu and ingredients like tomate and olives noires. I quickly asked him if he wanted to go somewhere else and he anxiously nodded yes and we ate at McDonald's.

Thank you NYT for setting up the opportunity to find something to say about that paragraph so many people have already made fun of — that David Brooks thing:

Recently I took a friend with only a high school degree to lunch. Insensitively, I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop. Suddenly I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named “Padrino” and “Pomodoro” and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate Mexican.

As I said yesterday:

I've been meaning to write about that sandwich.

As Warren Zevon famously said: "Enjoy every sandwich."

The trick is to figure out how to enjoy it when a lot of other people have already written about it.

I need an angle.

So thanks, NYT. Thanks for the lob. Thanks for the lobster.

I like the way the NYT is asking the basketball questions I ask.

"Why Are Basketball Games So Squeaky?"

I also like that the answer involves lobsters, because that's the way I am, thinking of something to say about basketball only to get leverage into something — anything — that could hold my interest... in its cold hard claw....

To scare away predators, [spiny lobsters] rub a smooth, rubbery protrusion at the base of each antenna against the smooth, hard part of their heads.

The result is an audible squawk. The spiny lobster became the first known example among animals of the stick-slip phenomenon, a deeply studied principle of science and engineering. It is when two relatively smooth or flat surfaces become repeatedly stuck and unstuck by the forces of friction, creating a vibration that becomes a noise....

“The herringbone structures of the [basketball] shoe outsole are induced to vibrate at their low-order natural frequencies by stick-slip contact with the surface,” Shorten and his research partner Xia Xi concluded.

They can make non-squeaky shoes, but basketball players don't like them. They want the squeak — "They listen for it. It gives them that audio sense of reassurance that they’re sticking."

Wisconsin players especially like the squeak. It gives them that reassuring feeling of cheese curds.

"Donald Trump, Sex Pistol/The punk-rock appeal of the GOP nominee."

A clickbait title good enough to get me — a staunch clickbait resister — to click through to The Atlantic, and I'm going to encourage you to click through because the illustration — by Diego Patiño — is really good.

The article is by James Parker, who regularly writes about music, so the Sex Pistols talk is more than just shallow goofiness. Parker begins by talking about the impression Stravinsky’s "Sacre du Printemps" made in Paris in 1913, then shifts to 1976, when The Sex Pistols went on British daytime TV live:

The beery drawl of Pistols guitarist Steve Jones filters louchely from the TV set: “You dirty fucker,” he says to the host, Bill Grundy. Then he reconsiders: “What a fucking rotter.”...

Wait. You don't need to rely on Parker's literary stylings — louchely, whatever —  to visualize the occasion. It's on YouTube:



But what's Parker's point here? Is Donald Trump like The Sex Pistols because he goes on TV and talks to his interviewers in a way they're not used to and that busts up their game? Well, sort of. Parker says he's that and simultaneously the guy watching at home getting pissed off at the Pistols, because he's using a "transgressive, volatile, carnivalesque" style with respect to conservative things like "chaos in our communities" and "barbarians at the border."

It’s as if the Sex Pistols were singing about law and order instead of anarchy, as if their chart-busting (banned) single, “God Save the Queen,” were not a foamingly sarcastic diatribe but a sincere pledge of fealty to the monarch. Electrifying!

An amusing paradox, but Parker fails to acknowledge that it's a paradox made possible by the stodgy, humorless repression of the liberal side of American political culture. Parker continues with his good if purplish descriptions: Trump has a "big marmalade face and that dainty mobster thing he does with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand." Mobster? Or was that supposed to be "lobster"? Who knows? I know what he means about that hand gesture. (And did you know that Trump said his hand gestures count as a form of exercise?)

Parker says (among many other things): "Trump’s speaking style is from the future, from a time to come when human consciousness has broken down into little floating atavistic splinters of subjectivity and superstition and jokes that aren’t really jokes." Of course, Parker loathes Trump, but that reminded me of something I said about Trump as an exemplar of a new way of speaking:



I'm seeing something more positive about the speaking style of the future (and not just because I do cruel neutrality but because I think I'm speaking in the style of the future too).

"The color of a lobster is no more important than the color of a person. This lobster is like all the others in the ways that matter."

"And all that matters is that lobsters want to be free to live their natural lives just like us, not cooked alive and eaten. Sending a yellow lobster to an aquarium while killing the rest isn’t praise worthy except in a society that fails to grasp the concept that all animals matter equally."

But people do care intensely about the color of their various pets and often choose one or the other based on color. Should we stop that because of the actual real-world human problem of racial prejudice?

Even with respect to human beings, we have lots of color preferences that aren't part of the race-prejudice problem. You might love seeing a woman in a red dress. You might want to dye your hair blue. You might want to see multicolored tattoos on other people's arms. You might adore Elizabeth Taylor because her eyes were a color that it seemed nobody else had.

Are all these pleasures something about which we should become self-critical?

If you want to be be self-critical, how about being self-critical about your precious attention to your own morality — that wonderfully named sin called scrupulosity — and consider whether likening the everyday joys of color perception to the age-old suffering of racism is itself a racist error.