"Taxidermy is a very homogeneous field. It’s very, very white and very, very straight."

Said Divya Anantharaman, who's "not either of those things," quoted in "How a Taxidermist Spends Sundays/For Divya Anantharaman, who runs a taxidermy business in Brooklyn, regular manicures are part of the job" (NYT).

Mx. Anantharaman sees the art form as a way to help people connect with nature, to experience “that moment of stillness, of vulnerability and enchantment” — even in an urban environment. 

Taxidermy “shows you that bodies are not fixed and finite — they’re very liminal,” they said. “Bodies can really be whatever you want them to be.” Mx. Anantharaman, 40, lives in Flatbush, Brooklyn, with their partner and four cats: Fugazi, Garfield, Mani and Junior.

Oh, that reminds me: The New York Times is disbanding its sports department:

"Hey, liberals... you're the NRA of mayonnaise!... Fat shaming doesn't need to end. It needs to make a comeback" — Bill Maher.

"It's not just about being able to see your doctor. It's also about being able to see your dick."

"A common theory is that [mayonnaise] is named for Port Mahon in Menorca, in honor of the 3rd Duke of Richelieu's victory over the British in 1756..."

"... and in fact the name 'mahonnaise' is used by some authors. But the name is only attested long after that event. One version of this theory says that it was originally known as salsa mahonesa in Spanish, but that spelling is only attested later. Grimod de La Reynière rejected the name 'mayonnaise' because the word 'is not French'; he rejected 'mahonnaise' because Port Mahon 'is not known for good food,' and thus he preferred 'bayonnaise,' after the city of Bayonne, which 'has many innovative gourmands and ... produces the best hams in Europe.' Carême preferred the spelling 'magnonnaise,' which he derived from the French verb manier 'to handle.'. Another suggestion is it derives from Charles de Lorraine, duke of Mayenne, because he took the time to finish his meal of chicken with cold sauce before being defeated in the Battle of Arques."

From Wikipedia, and I looked that up because yesterday we were talking about mayonnaise — as we began the "Bonfire" project, and I was motivated to start looking things up when Laslo Spatula quoted Richard Brautigan:

I have always wanted to write a book that ended with the word "mayonnaise."

What a quote! There's also a Tom Robbins quote about mayonnaise. (Remember when we all read Richard Brautigan and Tom Robbins?)

All Carolina folk are crazy for mayonnaise, mayonnaise is as ambrosia to them, the food of their tarheeled gods. Mayonnaise comforts them, causes the vowels to slide more musically along their slow tongues, appeasing their grease-conditioned taste buds while transporting those buds to a place higher than lard could ever hope to fly. Yellow as summer sunlight, soft as young thighs, smooth as a Baptist preacher's rant, falsely innocent as a magician's handkerchief, mayonnaise will cloak a lettuce leaf, some shreds of cabbage, a few hunks of cold potato in the simplest splendor, restyling their dull character, making them lively and attractive again, granting them the capacity to delight the gullet if not the heart. Fried oysters, leftover roast, peanut butter: rare are the rations that fail to become instantly more scintillating from contact with this inanimate seductress, this goopy glory-monger, this alchemist in a jar.

The mystery of mayonnaise — and others besides Dickie Goldwire have surely puzzled over this — is how egg yolks, vegetable oil, vinegar (wine's angry brother), salt, sugar (earth's primal grain-energy), lemon juice, water, and, naturally, a pinch of the ol' calcium disodium EDTA could be combined in such a way as to produce a condiment so versatile, satisfying, and outright majestic that mustard, ketchup, and their ilk must bow down before it (though, at two bucks a jar, mayonnaise certainly doesn't put on airs) or else slink away in disgrace. Who but the French could have wrought this gastronomic miracle? Mayonnaise is France's gift to the New World's muddled palate, a boon that combines humanity's ancient instinctive craving for the cellular warmth of pure fat with the modern, romantic fondness for complex flavors: mayo (as the lazy call it) may appear mild and prosaic, but behind its creamy veil it fairly seethes with tangy disposition. Cholesterol aside, it projects the luster that we astro-orphans have identified with well-being ever since we fell from the stars.

"Who in the name of God would bring a half-eaten eight-ounce jar of Hellmann’s mayonnaise to a public meeting?"

A few days ago, I was talking about a problem that Kamala Harris has as she runs for President:

She's too much of a prosecutor to win the love of a minority group Democrats need to turn out if they're going to beat Mr. Criminal Justice Reform Donald Trump.

Shouting Thomas started off a comment with...

The job of a prosecutor is to put black guys in jail, as noted in "Bonfire of the Vanities."...

I said:

Thanks for reminding me of that book, which I've been meaning to read.

“I think mayonnaise—actually, sorry, this is stupid, this is crazy"/"Not at all"/"I think mayonnaise has a complex kind of relation to the sublime."

"And I think emulsion does generally. It’s something about that intermediary—I don’t know—place, between being solid and being a liquid, that has a weird relation to the sublime, in the sense that the sublimity of it is in the indefinable nature of it"/"It’s liminal also"/"It’s liminal, and it connects to the body in a certain way"/"You have to shake it up. You have to put the energy into it to get it into that state"/"Anyway... mostly I just don’t fucking like it."

From "Fred Moten’s Radical Critique of the Present" in The New Yorker. Moten, the first speaker in the dialogue above, is a poet, critic, theorist, and NYU professor. He has a book of essays titled "Stolen Life." Here's a quote from it:

"Black studies is a dehiscence at the heart of the institution on its edge; its broken, coded documents sanction walking in another world while passing through this one, graphically disordering the administered scarcity from which black studies flows as wealth."

The New Yorker saves us the trouble of looking up "dehiscence" by telling us it's "a surgical complication in which a wound ruptures along a surgical incision." But I still feel compelled to look up "liminal." I mean, I kind of know the word, but why are these 2 men so easily agreeing on the liminality of mayonnaise?!

The OED gives this as the first meaning: "That has the lowest amount necessary to produce a particular effect; minimal; insignificant." Sample quote (from T.C. Boyle): "The liminal smile, the coy arch of the eyebrows."

Second meaning: "Characterized by being on a boundary or threshold, esp. by being transitional or intermediate between two states, situations, etc." Sample quote: "Airports are places of waiting and uncertainty—liminal, indeterminate spaces, caught between one world and another." Yeah, that's kind of like mayonnaise. I mean, if you're going through airport security and you've got mayonnaise, do you have to limit yourself 3 ounces and put it in the see-through, quart-size bag?

Third meaning: "Cultural Anthropol. Of or relating to a transitional or intermediate state between culturally defined stages of a person's life, esp. as marked by a ritual or rite of passage; characterized by liminality." That's limited to cultural anthropology, and while I'm prepared to riff on the cultural anthropology of mayonnaise...



... the definition does specify "stages of a person's life," and there's no personification of mayonnaise... is there?

"Those who fear being in closed or narrow spaces, with an emphasis on the inescapability of such, often point to a trigger event."

"Mine was on an insufferably hot day in August 1985, when I got stuck for three hours underground — in a packed subway car with no air-conditioning on the train from Eighth Street — while standing next to a large and equally hysterical man eating a mayonnaise sandwich..."

She did not become afraid of mayonnaise, just closed spaces, and yet, I think, the mayonnaise sealed it. The mayonnaise made it horrifying. Why was the man still eating his sandwich if he was hysterical? The sheer perversity of it is so perfectly embodied in the whole idea of mayonnaise.

Let's talk about this illustration of Trump that Rolling Stone used for "R.I.P., GOP: How Trump Is Killing the Republican Party."

Here's the article, by Matt Taibbi, which has the subtitle "Donald Trump crushed 16 GOP opponents in one of the most appalling, vicious campaigns in history. His next victim? The entire Republican Party." I don't really feel I need to read that. I clicked over there because I saw the illustration, in cropped form, over at Facebook, and I wondered what the hell it was supposed to be. You have to scroll down for the illustration, which is very nicely drawn by Victor Juhasz. Rolling Stone just plopped some video at the top of the page, but I've got to say that I love where the freeze frame just happens to be on my browser:



Speaking of DEATH!!! Hell, man. The party of Reagan is like a big, gooey sandwich, sliced down the middle by Donald Trump and sadistically eased apart by his famously tiny hands so that the gloppy cheese that is the establishment stretches with agonizing stringiness and the delectable ham remains securely ensconced within the thick slabs of the well-toasted bread of the people.

Now, step away from the sandwich — you've had enough, Miss Piggy — and feast your eyes on the fine Juhasz drawing of Trump as the Grim Reaper. The reference is to the chess game with death in the Ingmar Bergman movie "The Seventh Seal":



From the above-linked Wikipedia summary of the Bergman movie:

Disillusioned knight Antonius Block (Max von Sydow) and his nihilistic squire Jöns (Gunnar Björnstrand) return after fighting in the Crusades and find Sweden being ravaged by the plague. On the beach immediately after their arrival, the knight encounters Death (Bengt Ekerot), personified as a pale, black-cowled figure resembling a monk. The knight, in the middle of a chess game he has been playing alone, challenges Death to a chess match, believing that he can forestall his demise as long as the game continues. Death agrees, and they start a new game.

So the GOP invited Trump to play the game.

The knight and squire enter a church...  The knight goes to the confessional where he is joined by Death in the robe of a priest.... Upon revealing the chess strategy that will save his life, the knight discovers that the priest is Death, who promises to remember the tactics....

Trump learned how the GOP was playing the game.

After hearing Death state "No one escapes me" the knight knocks the chess pieces over, distracting Death while the family slips away. 

#NeverTrump!!!

Death places the pieces back on the board, then wins the game on the next move. 

Indiana!

He announces that when they meet again, the knight's time—and that of all those traveling with him—will be up....

Convention time. Here's the GOP on its way to Cleveland...



They go further away, away from the sunrise, in their stately dance to the dark country beyond the horizon while the rain gently washes their faces and cleanses the tears from their cheeks....

Best burglar ever: Michelle Phillips!

"Cass's house was the biggest mess I have ever seen a house be in my life. She never cleaned, never tidied up, never did the dishes, never made her bed. I remember going to her house in Stanley Hills before she moved to Woodrow Wilson. I got to her house and she wasn't home, so I decided to jimmy the window and get in. You know those huge, giant, industrial-size jars of mayonnaise? She had dropped one on the floor and just left it there. I cleaned up her entire kitchen, her entire house; it took me, like, three and a half hours. I just kept cleaning until it was spotless. Then I walked out the door, closed it, and never said a word to her."

Fried.

The previous post "The best of vocal fry" has a comment by Ron: "vocal fry...fried cheese curds...what's next jalapeno poppers?" He's noticing that the post before that is "At the Fried-Cheese-Curds-and-Naked-Ambition Café." Now, I have a tag for "this blog has a theme today," but the "At the Fried-Cheese-Curds-and-Naked-Ambition Café" is yesterday's last post, so the tag doesn't fit. What to do? Well, there are clearly 2 things to do: 1. Whip out the old "I'm not making a tag for this" tag, and 2. Go forward with the theme so that "the blog has a theme today" is apt. So:

1. "Fry-oil biofuel businesses suffer as gas prices fall. Plunging oil prices mean lean times for the owners of greasy spoons no longer able to cash in on their excess fats...."

2. "McDonald's to end fry rationing in Japan.... The company has airlifted more fries into Japan to help ease the shortage and added extra shipments from the U.S. East Coast. During the shortage, McDonald's suggested customers add an extra portion of chicken nuggets to their orders and sold them at a special price of 100 yen."

3. "Kenya: Thieves Fry Kenya's Power Grid to Cook Fast Food... A vandal who is selling the toxic oil, drawn from the transformer, to chefs who use it for frying food in roadside stalls. Five liters of the viscous, PCB-laden liquid sells for $60. It looks like cooking oil, but lasts much longer, users say. Kenyans' appetite for fried food and cheap frying oil is stalling the country's urgent efforts to build a modern electrical grid, even as it sews [sic] the seeds of a public health crisis, experts say."

4. "Stephen Fry Shows Us How To Make (And Spill) a Temporary Lava Lamp.... Three parts vegetable oil, one part water, a little food coloring, some alka-seltzer and an empty tennis ball tube is all it takes...."

5. "An Eggless Egg You Can Fry.... An egg produced from plant proteins might gel, but if the gel doesn’t hold any water once it’s in the pan, the egg will evaporate the instant it touches the pan’s hot oils...."

6. "The Fry Up Police is the hilarious – and sweary – cult Facebook page that’s totally judging your attempts at the British brekkie classic. The idea’s pretty simple. You post a pic of your awesome fry up and then the page’s approx. 5000 members will let you know in no uncertain terms what they make of your efforts. It can get pretty brutal."

7. "Just hours after two New York City police officers were gunned down while sitting in their patrol car Saturday, police protesters took to the streets in St. Louis and were videotaped taunting officers there with a phrase the NYPD cop killer reportedly used on an Instagram post prior to the murders: 'I’m putting pigs in a blanket.' Specifically the small crowd chanted, 'Pigs in a blanket! Fry ‘em like bacon!' as officers stood in a line."

8. "Feminist activists in Belgium threw french fries and mayonnaise on the Belgian Prime Minister Monday in protest of what they believe is his chauvinism and promotion of the wrong economic values."

9. "Wisconsin DUI suspect blames beer-battered fish fry in 10th arrest."

10."fry (v.)... late 13c., from Old French frire 'to fry' (13c.), from Latin frigere 'to roast or fry,' from PIE *bher- (4) 'to cook, bake' (cognates: Sanskrit bhrjjati 'roasts,' bharjanah 'roasting;' Persian birishtan 'to roast;' Greek phrygein 'to roast, bake'). Meaning 'execute in the electric chair' is U.S. slang from 1929. To go out of the frying pan into the fire is first attested in Thomas More (1532)."

A fire destroyed one-and-a-half tons of potato salad...

... that was on its way to the Toledo area German American Festival.

How flammable are potatoes? And wouldn't the mayonnaise act as a fire retardant? Ah, but German potato salad is the kind without mayonnaise. It's full of bacon fat and vinegar... is that like lighter fluid on potatoes?

Anyway, don't feel sad about the festival. Volunteers stepped up to the task, and it all worked out nicely in the end.

Sweet Slices Of Bread Wedges With Warm Sugar....

Grilled Spoons Of Mayonnaise... Essence Of Vanilla Mini Roasties... Raisins A La Raisins....

Recipes from the Random Recipe Generator.

Via Neatorama, which I discovered -- though I'd probably noticed it before -- while searching for a perfect image of a rose tattoo to illustrate the first post of the day. I didn't find that rose tattoo, but I did find a photograph of a handless arm tattooed to look like a giant finger:



Do you think that's in bad taste? I like the young man's sense of humor about his misfortune. Presumably, he enjoys pointing.

"When this girl at the museum asked me whom I liked better, Monet or Manet, I said, 'I like mayonnaise.'"

"She just stared at me, so I said it again, louder. Then she left. I guess she went to try to find some mayonnaise for me."

-- Jack Handey. "Deepest Thoughts."

On picking up a big jar of mayonnaise.

Don't you hate it when some common object forces you to think about someone who has weirdly gotten their identity linked with it?