Does a hot young actress really want President Trump approving of her? Poor Sydney Sweeney!

Trump, this morning, at Truth Social:

Sydney Sweeney, a registered Republican, has the “HOTTEST” ad out there. It’s for American Eagle, and the jeans are “flying off the shelves.” Go get ‘em Sydney!

Well, she's selling perfectly ordinary denim. Maybe she'll make being Republican the new thing.

That's from 60 years ago, but it's a line I've never forgotten: "The new thing is to care passionately and be right-wing." In context, of course, he's laughably wrong, and everyone watching that movie knew it. Didn't we? Or did we think watch out, some day that will be true. It's all a matter of time.

Trump's post continues:

On the other side of the ledger, Jaguar did a stupid, and seriously WOKE advertisement, THAT IS A TOTAL DISASTER! The CEO just resigned in disgrace, and the company is in absolute turmoil. Who wants to buy a Jaguar after looking at that disgraceful ad. Shouldn’t they have learned a lesson from Bud Lite, which went Woke and essentially destroyed, in a short campaign, the Company. The market cap destruction has been unprecedented, with BILLIONS OF DOLLARS SO FOOLISHLY LOST. Or just look at Woke singer Taylor Swift. Ever since I alerted the world as to what she was by saying on TRUTH that I can’t stand her (HATE!). She was booed out of the Super Bowl and became, NO LONGER HOT. The tide has seriously turned — Being WOKE is for losers, being Republican is what you want to be. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

And speaking of Trump on Truth Social, there's also this, which caught my eye...

.. because I thought I saw Bucky Badger. But yes, happy birthday to the Coast Guard.

Kamala is back, and she's teaching the wisdom of the elephants.

"Who saw that video from a couple of weeks ago? The one of the elephants at the San Diego Zoo. Te earthquake.... Here those elephants were and as soon as they felt the earth shaking beneath their feet, they got in a circle and stood next to each other to protect the most vulnerable.... What a powerful metaphor! Because we know those who try to incite fear are most effective when they divide and conquer, when they separate the herd, when they try to make everyone think they are alone. But, in the face of crisis, the lesson is: Don't scatter. The instinct has to be to immediately find and connect with each other and to know that the circle will be strong."

Said Kamala Harris, in her re-emergence speech yesterday.

And here are those elephants:

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: "Why is the elephant the symbol of the Republican Party?"

"which piece of public art in Madison disturbs you most?"

A topic of discussion at r/madisonwi.

There are so many to choose from, but the biggest rivalry is between "Flayed Bucky by the Best Western on Highland by UW Hospital" and "The sculpture of the parents reaching out to their dead child in the cemetery on Speedway Road."

About that dead child sculpture, someone says:

I actually like that sculpture, although I'm probably not in the majority. If you ask me "how can I feel more alive?" I'd parrot Martin Heidegger, "spend more time in graveyards."

EDIT: Now that I know it's a "memorial" against abortion I don't like it anymore.

There's also "The turd on top of a pyramid on Regent Street" and the "crowning woman" and "The pale yellow man resting on the bike bridge at Jenifer Street." And "The plaques along Picnic Point that showcase monetary donations and ego over nature and historically sacred land." 

Way too many people bring up the "footballs penis" and need to be told that was excised.

It's pretty hilarious that there was such a wealth of bad public art around here to choose from. 

"Elon Musk... has lately been dreaming aloud about building his own version of an old-fashioned company town."

"And not just dreaming. In September, Bastrop County, Texas, outside Austin, approved the construction of Project Amazing, a subdivision of 110 modest homes on land owned by Mr. Musk that is to be called Snailbrook.... Snailbrook is named for Gary, the official snail of the Boring Company, a tunneling company that is one of Mr. Musk’s less successful ventures, which has a workshop nearby. Company towns are often named for their owners — Alcoa; Hershey, Pa.; Steinway Village, N.Y., in Queens...."

Writes Binyamin Applebaum in "Welcome to Muskville, Texas" (NYT).

But he didn't call it Muskville. He called it Snailbrook. It's a modest name, just as Boring is modest.

And there really is a terrible problem of unaffordable housing in Austin, so why does Applebaum want to kick him around for building homes for the workers he's bringing into the area? 

New frontiers of Russian influence.

I'm trying to read "Blackhawks will not wear Pride-themed jerseys due to a Russian law " (AP).

The Blackhawks are the Chicago NHL team, I'm just now learning. And the "Pride-themed jerseys"...

 

... seem objectionable for some American reasons — Native American mascot, political brand stamped on a Native American brand, LGBTQ support imposed on players — but the Russians got the NHL organization to silence the political speech. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law in December that significantly expands restrictions on activities seen as promoting LGBTQ rights in the country.

Which country?  I believe the law relates to Russia, not the U.S., but the extraterritorial reach occurs because people in the U.S. are choosing to impose Russia's repression here. The NHL characterizes its behavior as motivated by "security" concerns, presumably relating to persons who do live in Russia. We're told: "Chicago defenseman Nikita Zaitsev is a Moscow native, and there are other players with family in Russia or other connections to the country." 

"For days, television footage of helmeted officials peering and prodding at the sphere had led to comments about a possible unidentified floating object, or perhaps an egg produced by something large..."

"... lurking far below. One Japanese public figure of sorts, a cheeky mascot named Chiitan, went so far as to essentially say, 'C’est moi.' 'An iron ball about 1.5 meters in size, found in Shizuoka,' the mascot’s handlers wrote on Twitter. 'It could be me.'"

From "That Mystery Orb on a Japanese Beach? It Was Just a Buoy. (Sorry.) Experts said the sphere that washed ashore, leading to speculation about espionage, was nothing special. 'Maybe everybody is paranoid because of balloons,' one said" (NYT).

"St. Patrick’s Day turned into St. Peter’s Day."

A nice first line by the NYT sportswriter Adam Zagoria, in "N.C.A.A. Men’s Tournament: No. 2 Seed Kentucky Downed By St. Peter’s/St. Peter’s, a No. 15 seed from Jersey City, N.J., toppled one of the most popular national title picks in the Kentucky Wildcats."

The St. Peter's team is called the Peacocks. I like teams to be named after animals, and it's always fun to imagine the actual animals fighting — in this case, peacocks against wildcats. Ha ha. 

I liked this:

St. Peter’s guard Doug Edert hit a floater that rolled around the rim before dropping in to tie the game at 71 and send it to overtime.

[Peacocks Coach Shaheen] Holloway was asked after the game: “Did you ever get nervous?”

“Nah — for what?” he said. “It’s basketball.”

"The museum appeared at first to be a collection of capitalist artifacts. A large figure of the Jolly Green Giant flanked Poppin’ Fresh, of Pillsbury fame... shared space with... the Michelin Man."

"But Ms. Weis’s intent was to link our conceptions of these pop-culture figures to the human need to mythologize; she asserted that our Fates, Furies and giants were not left behind in Greece or Egypt, but rather transposed to our own culture.... One of her favorite pieces in the museum was a plastic model of Elsie the Cow, the character used to sell dairy products in advertisements for the Borden Dairy Company, which later branched out into chemical products, including glue. Elsie then acquired a husband, Elmer, who sold the well-known white glue named after him. Their domestic squabbles formed the background of 20th-century ad campaigns selling Borden products. Mr. Whiting compared their dynamic to that of Hera and Zeus in Greek mythology, the archetypical contentious marriage. 'We’re not saying they’re deities,' Ms. Weis said... 'But the same relationship holds. They will live beyond their generation because people revere their character by buying the product.'"

From "Ellen Havre Weis, Whose Museum Put Pop Into Mythology, Dies at 64/The Museum of Modern Mythology, in San Francisco, which she helped found, posited that advertising figures have emerged as the pre-eminent mythical figures of our time" (NYT).

As I mentioned on this blog in its first year, there's a member of my family who, when he was rather young, believed for quite a while that the image on the cans of Green Giant peas and corn in the cupboard was God. I had to ask him why did you think that was God? It's not as if anyone ever encouraged him to think the Jolly Green Giant was God, and he'd never questioned the adults about who this laughing green entity is supposed to be. The image itself conveyed the sense that this is God. 

Which image? It was the 1980s, so pick out 1980s Giant:

Yes, he's depicted with a scarf there. I'm going to presume that's the image for frozen vegetables. The "God" impression came from cans. I believe the giant stood spread-legged above a sunny farm field, wearing only his leafy tunic, crown of leaves, and elf shoes. Does that say "God" to you?

By the way, I fear for the human woman he took up with in 1945. The God Giant needs to stay in his heaven, presiding over the crops, and not consort with mortals. Those ears of corn and pea pods are far too large for the lady, whose head is the size of one of those peas.

And the 1970 giant is so 1970s, clearly influenced by the hippie movement. Imagine a God who follows transitory, regional human trends... and who's squirmily bashful about his achievements. A modest God!

"After years of protests from fans and Native American groups, the Cleveland Indians have decided to change their team name..."

"... moving away from a moniker that has long been criticized as racist, three people familiar with the decision said Sunday. The move follows a decision by the Washington Football Team of the N.F.L. in July to stop using a name long considered a racial slur, and is part of a larger national conversation about race that magnified this year amid protests of systemic racism and police violence.... One option that the team is considering, two of the people said, is moving forward without a replacement name — similar to how the Washington Football Team proceeded — then coming up with a new name in consultation with the public."... Other professional sports teams, including the Atlanta Braves, the Kansas City Chiefs and the Chicago Blackhawks, have said in recent months that they have no plans to change their names... The [Indians] club has said that the name was originally intended to honor a former player, Louis Sockalexis, who played for the Cleveland Spiders, a major league club, in the 19th century and was a member of the Penobscot Nation. Some have suggested that Cleveland adopt the name Spiders as a replacement."

The NYT reports.

Trump tweeted" "Oh no! What is going on? This is not good news, even for 'Indians.' Cancel culture at work!"

Personally, I think all baseball teams should be named after a type of animal, preferably one that you can picture holding a baseball bat or attempting to play baseball in a silly fanciful manner. But the only team that meets my standard is the Cubs. Maybe the Tigers. The best trend actually represented by the existing name is birds — Cardinals, Orioles, Blue Jays. So I recommend another bird. Maybe Crows — for the alliteration and because there are crows in Ohio. But Spiders is perfectly good. It's got some Cleveland tradition, it might scare the opposition, and it's an animal. It's a type of animal not currently represented among the major league team names, but it would provide company for the Diamondbacks, which are currently the only team that's named after a type of animal that isn't represented by any other team. Anyway, don't name a team after a type of human being. That was never a good idea. And don't name a team after items of clothing. That's just stupid.

The Washington Redskins announce, "Today, we are announcing we will be retiring the Redskins name and logo upon completion of this review."

They say they'll be doing a “thorough review” and the review has “begun in earnest.” But they've already decided they're retiring the name, so what's left to thoroughly review?

I'm reading "Washington’s NFL team is retiring the Redskins name; new name to come later" (WaPo).

It can't be that the review will somehow get them to the new name. A review looks at what already exists, and it's not as if there's a truer, better name buried in the past, awaiting discovery.

Anyway, I'm glad we don't have to argue about this anymore. I've heard the same arguments for so long. Maybe if they'd held out a little longer, the whole era of American football would have reached its natural ending. Between coronavirus and brain damage, it seems to be on its last legs.

I don't care what the new name is. I heard "Warriors" was in the offing, but it seems too evocative of Native Americans to escape a new attack. Here at Wisconsin, we just use "W" for our logo, so Washington could just skip the "Warrior" step and go with the letter, since it's the first letter in Washington. But I've got to say that I care so very little it's a wonder I've typed this far.

"In 1988, he stunned Joyce scholars... by revealing that he had destroyed about a thousand letters he had received from his Aunt Lucia, James Joyce’s daughter..."

"... who spent decades in mental institutions; even more, he said, he had discarded correspondence that she had received from the Irish expatriate playwright Samuel Beckett, Joyce’s onetime secretary, with whom Lucia had fallen in love. 'No one was going to set their eyes on them and re-psychoanalyze my poor aunt,” [Stephen] Joyce told The New York Times that year. 'She went through enough of that when she was alive.... I didn’t want to have greedy little eyes and greedy little fingers going over them. My aunt may have been many things, but to my knowledge she was not a writer.... Where do you draw the line? Do you have any right to privacy?... What are people going to do to stop me?'... His refusals to grant access to the Joyce archive could seem arbitrary. He rejected the request of one author whose work was being published by Purdue University because he deemed the nickname of Purdue’s sports teams, the Boilermakers, to be vulgar."

From "Stephen Joyce Dies at 87; Guarded Grandfather’s Literary Legacy/The last direct descendant of the author of 'Ulysses' and 'Finnegans Wake' was a fierce protector of James Joyce’s estate, to the frustration of scholars" (NYT).

"I just want to see badgers chew up ducks."

Overheard at Meadhouse.

Do you remember the New Year's Tick?

It was December 31, 2008, when I wrote, "I'm quite serious about replacing the depressing Father Time/Baby New Year with the New Year's Tick." I was inspired by a BBC headline, "New Year to arrive a tick later" (about a "leap second" that had to be added to the atomic clock). I said:

I think I'll try to draw a picture of the New Year's Tick. Or see if I can get people to send pictures of the New Year's Tick. And I'm going to push for the adoption of the New Year's Tick as the new New Year's mascot, replacing that stupid — and frankly depressing — Old Man and Baby mascot. Or the Ball. What the hell kind of symbol is a Ball?

It's just by chance that I got reminded of the New Year's Tick on the day of New Year's Eve. I was reading a Jennifer Rubin column in The Washington Post, "Resolutions for the media and politicians." One of her resolutions is:

Presidential candidates should promise to cut out their rhetorical ticks. Former vice president Joe Biden needs to stop saying “I’m serious” and “No joke.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) must not start sentences with “So … ” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) cannot say “billionaires” more than 10 times in a debate or speech.

Rhetorical ticks! I love the idea of ticks giving speeches! I'm tantalized by the prospect of using my favorite tag "insect politics" once again, but I've been down that road before across that grassy meadow before. A tick is not an insect!

The spelling should be "tic," but I'm thinking there's something perhaps a little politically incorrect about the figurative use of a word that denotes "severe facial neuralgia with twitching of the facial muscles" (OED).  I like this example in the OED:

1960 20th Cent. Apr. 361 This is an irritating tic of the British Left, this substitution of moral gestures for practical policies.

"Tic" is spelled like that because the medical condition is "tic douloureux" — French for "painful twitching." There is also a condition in horses, "The vice or morbid habit in horses called crib-biting or cribbing," and that has been spelled "tick" since the 18th century. Etymologically, it too comes from the French "tic," so it's easy to argue that "promise to cut out their rhetorical ticks" is just fine and nicely in English and un-French. The horse's crib-biting also has been used figuratively, and the meaning is the same as the figurative "tic": It means "whim."

I'm going to say that Rubin's "tick" is le mot juste if what you're picturing when you picture Elizabeth Warren saying "so" and Bernie Sanders saying "billionaire" looks something like this:

My usual Mendota lakeshore walk takes me into a Bucky Badger photoshoot.

Today at the Union Terrace:

"It turns out that a surprising number of Axios AM readers are sticklers that the wildfire-prevention icon is properly 'Smokey Bear' — not 'Smokey the Bear,' as I blasphemously posited..."

"... in a 75th birthday note yesterday. The U.S. Forest Service says you're right. Alexander Great and Attila Hun tip their broad-brimmed hats."

Writes Mike Allen at Axios.

Similarly, it's Teddy Bear, not Teddy the Bear. And it's Mickey Mouse, not Mickey the Mouse. It's Bugs Bunny, not Bugs the Bunny. It is, however, Kermit the Frog. And yet...



... it's Fozzie Bear. It's also Yogi Bear, not Yogi the Bear. You can count on it, with bears there is no "the"... unless the bear is a pooh. I mean the pooh. Or... I have to concede... a panda (yes, a panda is really a bear). I'm thinking of Peetie the Sexual Harassment Panda.

The mysteries of Japanese city mascots, explained by John Oliver...

... if you can take John Oliver at all (he says "fuck" frequently), don't miss this long quirky segment:

The Turtle House.

That's The Turtle house by Kurt Völtzke at El Gouna (Red Sea, Egypt), which I'm seeing this morning at the Wikipedia article "Cultural depictions of turtles." I got there because, after blogging about the Green Reaper, I went looking for other government-designed mascots. I'd thought of Smokey the Bear on my own, but that's the one that seems to make us think that the government should be in the mascot-designing business. I found a WaPo article from 2014, "It’s (almost) Smokey Bear’s birthday. Here are some other decidedly less iconic government mascots." There I discovered a Federal Trade Commission atrocity called Dewie the E-Turtle, which was supposed to teach us about protecting our privacy on the internet. That got my attention because I believed the green thing in this photograph was Dewey:



I was wrong about that. The green thing is actually BAC, a creation of the Department of Agriculture. He's a bacterium, which explains the other mascot, which is Thermy, who's there to bully you into overcooking your meat. But I'm only figuring that out now, after I've become entranced by "The Cultural Depiction of Turtles." I love Wikipedia.

The Green Reaper mascot the Department of Energy created is not merely ludicrous, it's evil, because the idea was to scare children.

From Hit & Run:

Thanks to a FOIA request from journalist Emma Best... we now know... the Green Reaper... was designed in 2012, was intended to be used in "community outreach presentations to local elementary school children" and in internal memos reminding government workers to conserve energy and carpool when possible....

The Green Reaper costume cost about $5,000 to manufacture, but the documents... don't give a full accounting of how much time public employees spent brainstorming and designing it. Regardless, the government liked the design so much that Dawn Starett, the program manager who invented the Green Reaper, won a 2013 Environmental Stewardship Award from the NNSA for it.... [S]queezing that much existential terror out of a mere $5,000 is pretty damn efficient for government work.

I found that through my son John's Facebook post, and here's what I wrote there:

Wow! It was designed to scare children! I remember being scared through my entire childhood by the threat of nuclear bombs. And for thousands of years people have scared children about Hell. The fact that you're sure a threat is real doesn't justify scaring children. I laughed at this mascot at first, but it really shows how evil people are toward children.

I'm giving this post my "using children in politics" tag, because I am inferring that the Department of Energy wanted to enlist children in amping up political pressure on adults and to shape future adults at an undefended emotional level.

And, yes, this is from the Obama Era.

This also needs the "religion substitutes" tag.

ADDED: Would this propaganda work? The Grim Reaper is Death. He's scary. You don't want him coming for you. You try to avoid Death as long as you can. The Green Reaper is an environmentalist. He's scary. You don't want him coming for you. Isn't this teaching the kids to avoid environmentalists?

"Dear Fellow Alumni, I write to you to address the recent controversy over our college’s long-standing mascot, Sir Racist Von Genocide."

"Clad in his flowing white robes and hood, he has been a traditional fixture on our campus. To my utter astonishment, after this year’s homecoming, many current students have called him 'culturally insensitive' and demanded we replace him. Yes, during Homecoming, he did erect a Confederate statue on the field while shouting a full-throated defense of eugenics into the loudspeaker. But what are we supposed to do? Buy entirely new sweatshirts?..."

The funniest part of this satire at McSweeney's is how over-the-top they thought they needed to be to mock the traditionalists.

"Sir Racist Von Genocide" reminds me of "Boaty McBoatface" — a name so repetitiously and heavy-handedly literal that it opens a door to devilishness.

Subtler humor, please. I'm afraid of "Sir Racist Von Genocide." I'm afraid people will love him.

"It's The Freeze!"

Said Meade, watching this:

No idea who that cop is but if a NFL team doesn’t sign him this week they’re idiots pic.twitter.com/DqquziInup

— Denlesks (@Denlesks) August 19, 2018

If you don't know who The Freeze is: "Big chill: The Freeze blazes path to stardom/Braves' in-game attraction is hit with MLB fans, players." Great video here:

ICYMI: It ain’t over till it’s … OVER. pic.twitter.com/45fyiVQ2Vx

— MLB (@MLB) June 10, 2017