"When you inspect these paintings — and even feel them, through tactile replicas of four paintings with four different kinds of dotting — you may be surprised..."

"... by their nubbiness, and how thickly the pigment has been lashed through a punched aluminum screen. The dots are raised. They grow and shrink, chafe or splinter. The sun may be setting on humanity, but look up close: Every dot, and every pixel, means nothing without you and me."

Writes Jason Farago, in "Connecting the Dots Between Roy Lichtenstein and Today The Whitney’s retrospective is full of jokes, but it captures our image overload with surprising tenderness. Our critic calls it 'the most momentous exhibition of the season'" (NYT).

That "sun may be setting" line has resonance because: "A remake of [Lichtenstein's] 1967 'Super Sunset Billboard' stands in front of the Whitney’s western picture window, so if you come at day’s end you can see two sunsets in one."

Speaking of breaking images up into tiny components and the effect on humanity:

"Whimsymaxxers talk about bringing out the magic in the everyday, but increasingly that magic is seen as something to be measured and harnessed."

"It is no surprise, then, that whimsy slots so comfortably into the jargon of our wellness-saturated culture. One social media guru breaks whimsy down into a series of salutary 'microhabits'; another speaks of whimsy as a means of maximizing the return on investment of one’s 'inner child.' Whimsymaxxing is presented as part of a 'low-cortisol morning' routine.... Buy yourself a little treat. Invest in your inner child. Let your impulses drive. 'Fun is a medicinal bath,' as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno put it more than 80 years ago. 'The pleasure industry never fails to prescribe it.'"

From an "On Language" column by Mitch Therieau, "Has a Dash of ‘Whimsy' Become Less Whimsical?" (NYT).

Therieau informs us that in the 18th century "'whim' and 'whimsy' came also to mean... a rotating drum or capstan, attached to a rope, that could lower and raise materials into and out of a mine." He uses that old meaning to question what we're talking about today when we talk about "whimsy": "Isn’t life today a bit too mechanical? Aren’t we treating ourselves too much like machines?"

"What I do is nothing more than a shampoo away from being nothing."

Said Kenneth Battelle, "the first celebrity stylist" (known for doing the hair of, among many others, First Lady Jackie Kennedy).

The quote appears in the obituary of another celebrity hairdresser: "Brad Johns, Celebrity Colorist Known for His 'Buttery Chunks,' Dies at 70/He made blonde highlights a fashion sensation. But when he shared details about his relationship with Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, he ran into trouble" (NYT gift link).

"Buttery chunks" is good. Have a name for your something more than nothing. And why be modest like Kenneth? Why not be prideful?

"I’m really proud that I made hair buttery instead of ashy. I brought these words to hair color: butter, caramel, cinnamon. These words made people smile, and so they would come to me, asking for chunks, chunks, chunks. I made highlights that weren’t these teeny-weeny capellinis, but big golden chunks, like a child at the beach would have." 

When you think of hair, why not think of eating? Even though people hate hair in their food and food in their hair.

A word about his parents (he grew up poor):

"Two weeks before we meet, Margaret Atwood purchased her burial plot. 'You may think that’s a kind of dour thing to be doing'..."

"... she says beadily. I assure her I don’t, and perhaps detect mild disappointment in her gaze. 'Well, if you were 19 you probably would find it quite creepy.'"

Writes Decca Aitkenhead, in "Margaret Atwood: ‘God made the middle finger for a reason’/The Handmaid’s Tale author at 86 on gender wars, trade wars, assisted dying and the power of not playing nice" (London Times).

I've heard of "beady" eyes, which I've always assumed were eyes that looked like beads, but what does it mean to speak "beadily"?

"She says she has never scared people 'on purpose,' but the pleasure she takes in her own power is apparent and exhilarating to observe. When I ask whether I should call her Margaret or the name she grew up with, Peggy, she inquires, 'Well, who are you speaking to right at the moment?' Er, to you. 'Yes, but who is me?' Amusement teases in her eyes. 'You’re not talking to the writer, because I’m not writing at the moment. So Peggy.' When I later mention some people who used to behave very badly towards me, her eyes narrow. 'Are any of them dead?' Not yet. 'Oh well, it could be arranged.'"

"Mirror," the tag.

That last post really needed the tag "mirror." How did I come so far without a tag for mirror? I made one, then had 22+ years of the blog to search to add the tag retrospectively. It was easy to search for the word "mirror," but hard to separate the posts that deserved the tag — the ones referring to the object, a mirror — from the ones that did not — the ones using "mirror" as a dying metaphor (ideas "mirror" other ideas and so forth). And then there's the drudgery of adding the tag and republishing. But in the end, there's the fun of clicking on the tag and peering into the kaleidoscope.

There was "Fun with Mirrors" in 2008:

There was, also in 2008, the convex mirror I loved and wanted to buy:

"It's expensive — over $1800 — but as I thought about possibly buying it, I realized what I wanted it for was to take pictures, and therefore what I really should buy is a fisheye lens for my Nikon D50." So I got that fisheye lens. If you're nostalgic for those days, click the tag "fisheye." 

There was this advice about dolphins, in 2014: "People, can you just leave the dolphins alone? They don't want to swim with you, despite the 'expression' you see on their faces. The love you think you are experiencing is nothing more than self-love. Stay home, save your money, and stare in a mirror until you get a deep, accurate assessment of how true your self-love is. Is there a fixed smile on your face? I hope not, but if there is, it's not because you share the spirit of the dolphin. The dolphin is 'smiling' because nature played a dirty trick on him, drawing idiot humans into his domain. Get out. Leave the dolphin alone."

There was the mystery of what a monkey sees in a mirror, back in 2005: "What's in the monkey's mind when he looks in a mirror? Higher minds -- human beings, great apes, dolphins -- figure out, when they are looking in a mirror, that they are seeing themselves. Other animals, it's long been thought, think they're seeing a stranger. But a new study shows that the monkey occupies a middle position, where it doesn't see itself, but it doesn't see a stranger either. The monkey sees a 'Puzzling Other.'"

In 2024, I had Grok outline a book for me. It was titled "Through the Glass/Exploring Mirrors as Portals to Other worlds."

I was surprised to see that, back in 2013, I'd contributed to my long-running men-in-shorts theme with this stark advice: "Take a good look at yourself in the mirror when you've got your shorts on. Ask yourself if I were a woman, would I fuck me?"

There was this good question, in 2013: "If someone holds up a mirror and you say 'I look like an idiot,' is the mirror-holder calling you an idiot?"

There was the sunset in my rear-view mirror as I drove 500 miles to see Meade in 2009:

"There’s something slightly feral about a wet look — it’s sexy, undone hair."

"I have folders of reference photos of River Phoenix and Johnny Depp in the ’90, along with old Hugo Boss and Calvin Klein campaigns."

From "Wet Hair Is Making Waves. Here’s How to Get the Look" (NYT gift link).

Here’s how to get the look... it would be funny if it's just get your hair wet. The headline is a little off. It says "wet hair," but the article isn't about wet hair. It's about the wet hair look. "The important thing is how you build products into the hair," we're told.

You want to look like something it would be easy to be, but without being that thing. This should be a metaphor, but for what?

"It was not clear how the flag got loose."

That's the third sentence in a NYT article titled, "Huge American Flag Flies Into Power Lines, Knocking Out Power for Thousands/The flag hit transmission lines on Saturday night, affecting 5,000 customers in Connecticut."

The power company called the flag "massive" — 40' x 76'.

The article doesn't have comments, so readers were deprived of the opportunity to spin metaphors. If it had, I'm sure Trump would have been mentioned prominently. 

"Arthur Miller described the voluptuous yet fragile woman he wed as 'a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes.'"

"When Miller left out his journal open to a page saying that she had embarrassed him in front of his intellectual peers and Marilyn read it, she wrote, 'I guess I have always been deeply terrified to really be someone’s wife since I know from life one cannot love another, ever, really.' Like everyone else, Miller was mesmerized by his wife’s power of enchantment. 'Glamour is a bird that for dark and largely unknowable reasons decides to light on this branch rather than another,' he once wrote...."

From Maureen Dowd's new column, "Norma Jeane’s Still Got It!" (NYT).

You know what's embarrassing? 1. Writing down that your wife is embarrassing — can't you just remember it and squirm silently in your dark and unknowable mind? — and leaving your journal open to the page where she'll see it, 2. Writing "Glamour is a bird that for dark and largely unknowable reasons decides to light on this branch rather than another." Birds don't have dark reasons.

IN THE COMMENTS: Bob Boyd provides this:

"A friggin' bird will swoop down from a bough and peck your eyes out as you lie helpless and half frozen in the snow without ever having felt sorry for you." 

— Thought to be an early, rough draft of 'Self-Pity' scribbled in the margin of A Field Guide to the Dark Thoughts of North American Birds found in D.H. Lawrence's library after his death.

BY THE WAY: When I was writing this post, I wanted an illustration and asked Grok to give me an image of "a bird that for dark and largely unknowable reasons decides to light on this branch." I didn't say Arthur Miller wrote those words.

Grok gave me an image that was too dull to use, but it also added this ridiculous caption: "A solitary bird, wings half-folded in that decisive instant of landing, perches on a gnarled, ancient branch silhouetted against a brooding twilight sky. The air feels heavy with unspoken intent—shadows pool beneath the feathers like secrets, and the bird’s eye catches a glint of something ancient and unknowable. Dark pines loom in the distance, mist curls low, and the branch itself seems to have been waiting for this exact, inscrutable visitor."

So I was all: "Yeah it's purple prose isn't it? I got it from Arthur Miller."

"Many in the entertainment industry are creatives, they’re freethinkers, they’re out-of-the-box thinkers..."

"... and so, the idea that someone isn’t conventional is kind of part and parcel of how they move through the world."

Said Dr. Erica Anderson, "a clinical psychologist who specializes in helping children with gender identity issues and who is transgender herself," quoted in "Why do so many Hollywood celebs have trans or non-binary kids?" (NY Post).

These entertainment people are "freethinkers," according to Anderson, who also says, contradictorily, that "the prevailing politics are extremely progressive," so "they don’t feel safe to question an asserted identity by one of their children."

So what is it? Do they feel compelled to go along with whatever the child says — politically compelled — or are they — because of their inherent creativity — celebrating and encouraging unusual expression?

I'm seeing a mysterious merger of freedom and compulsion.

IN THE COMMENTS: Bob Boyd: "I think she means outside-the-box thinkers. Out-of-the-box usually means you don't have to do anything yourself, no assembly required." 

That's closely observed and correct. This is the case of a dying metaphor. What is this box we're talking about when we say "outside of the box"? Grok tells me the expression originated with the 9 dots puzzle:

You're an outside-the-box thinker if you realize you can connect the 9 dots with 4 lines if you go beyond what is only an imaginary box. Apply that metaphor to thinking about how to parent a child who doesn't fit the gender stereotypes associated with its physical form. That's what an outside-the-box thinkers would do. Now, compare the out-of-the-box thinker. This would be someone who has pre-determined ideas built in and really doesn't think at all.

Disarm.

"The killer in me is the killer in you," sang The Smashing Pumpkins in "Disarm," and "disarm" is Pope Leo's key word in his new encyclical about A.I.

The Vatican News reports, in "Pope Leo’s ‘Magnifica humanitas’: AI must serve humanity not concentrate power":

Above all, Pope Leo calls for an ethical code subject to shared standards of social justice... AI must be “disarmed,” Pope Leo XIV continues, in order to free it from the mentality of military, economic, and cognitive competition. “To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern,” he says. 

“To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity.”

"Luminous," a reminder.

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

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

"If I do attend, I get killed. If I don't attend, I get killed. By the fake news, of course, I'm talking about."

Trump has his own way of talking.

Reporter: Are you attending your son’s wedding?

Trump: He’d like me to go. I’m going to try. I said, this is not good timing for me. I have a thing called Iran and other things. He’s a person I’ve known for a long time. pic.twitter.com/lGdjvU7oD0

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 21, 2026

You'd think that after 3 assassination attempts, he's eschew the murder metaphor, but no. He's not going to say "I'll be harshly criticized," like a typical high official. He's going to say "I get killed." Not even "I'll get killed." Present tense: "I get killed."

He also calls his son "a person I’ve known for a long time."

By the way, I've seen man bellies that look like pregnancies, but the protruding navel is really too much, especially right next to the President's head. Where's the dignity?!

For more of the video and an explanation of the event, see "WATCH: Trump, Zeldin announce looser rule on refrigerant greenhouse gases" (PBS). The belly is not Zeldin's.

"King Charles tames Maga but Britain’s still in the doghouse."

That's the headline at the London Times. Subheadline: "While the monarch has gone down a storm with President Trump’s VIPs, his US visit seems to have done nothing to help Sir Keir Starmer."

I guess "gone down a storm" is a British expression. I'm going to assume it means something like: was a big sensation. Yeah, that's right. I checked with A.I. The American expression that's equally mystifying to an outsider would be: brought the house down.

Speaking of house...  in the doghouse seems to work in both countries.

Now, let me find the meat of this article:

"In different cultures and historical eras, pitch polarity was not designated as 'high' vs. 'low' but rather..."

"... by 'light' vs. 'heavy' (Kpelle people in Liberia), 'sharp' vs. 'heavy' (ancient Greek music theory), 'small' vs. 'large,' used in Bali and Java, as well as among Kpelle and Jabo in Liberia...), 'young' vs. 'old' (Suyá people of the Amazon basin...) or 'weak' vs. 'strong' (the Bashi people of central Africa...). Often, pitch vocabulary seems to derive from specific cultural practices. For instance, pitch classification for the Shona mbira (Zimbabwe) includes the opposition of 'crocodile' (low pitch) with 'those who follow crocodiles' (high), and 'stable (person) who holds the piece together' (low) vs. 'mad person' (high), as well as 'old men’s voices' (low) vs. 'young men’s voices' (high), 'men’s voices' vs. 'women’s voices,' and 'thin' (low) vs. 'thick' (high).... In the Gbaya xylophone (Central African Republic), notes are arranged genealogically, and include (from low to high) grandmother, mother, father, son and daughter...."

From the delightfully named "Beethoven’s last piano sonata and those who follow crocodiles: Cross-domain mappings of auditory pitch in a musical context" (Academia) by Renee Timmers.

I got there via a discussion with Grok that began with my question "Why is it that the most emotional part of a melody is always (almost always?) a move to a higher note?" The answer shouldn't be because in real life heights are exciting/scary/magnificent.  

Imagine thinking about a melody in terms of crocodiles and those who follow crocodiles!

"[A]s Vice President JD Vance took a podium in Pakistan and said no deal had been reached had been reached to end the war in Iran... President Trump... was surrounded by people, but Mr. Trump was somehow an isolated figure...."

"People mostly circulated around him, checking in with updates and then leaving again. For the most part, Mr. Trump sat and impassively watched blood and saliva sprayed out from the fighters beating each other silly in front of him...."

Writes Katie Rogers, "Trump Was Watching a U.F.C. Fight in Miami While Iran Talks Collapsed On his way to Florida, President Trump said it did not matter to him if a deal with Iran was reached or not: 'We win, regardless,' he said" (NYT).

Blood and saliva — I've got tags for both of those.

Trump was "surrounded." People "circulated around him." When you're a star, you can't grab what orbits around you:

"But as the show gassed on, it also started to feel like zealotry porn: There were only so many fingers you could watch chopped off, only so many gouged-out eyes."

"After a while, the red robes started to look more like cringe cosplay than a pointed protest symbol. When the series finale aired last year, I didn’t bother watching, especially after reading that the titular handmaid, June, never reunites with the daughter she’s spent the entire series trying to rescue.And now we learn why: Because without that loose end, there could be no 'Testaments.' Our new protagonist is June’s teenage daughter, Agnes, who is being raised by a wealthy Gilead family and trained to become a perfect upper-class Gilead wife. Daily, she and the other 'plums' get on a big purple bus and go to the weirdest finishing school in suburban Maryland. Mostly they spend their days learning needlepoint and flower arranging, but sometimes they break up the monotony by ecstatically cheering while watching a petty criminal lose his hand to a buzz saw...."

From "A 'Handmaid’s Tale' sequel answers questions the original forgot to ask/'The Testaments' extends the authoritarian thought experiment that began with Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel by turning focus to the enforcers" (WaPo).

Yikes. Zealotry porn. Are there really so many people who feel drawn to observe bloody amputations? And then they think the show is criticizing other people, not them. Are they titillated... by the amputations and by seeing how terrible those other people are?

Anyway... Daily, she and the other 'plums' get on a big purple bus... sounds like something in a song by Prince. I racked my brain, but all I could think of was "The bus came by and I got on, that's when it all began..."

And, yeah, it's "racked my brain," not "wracked my brain." The rack is a torture device.

Why not eat 11 doughnuts?

This is so insane

“Crumbl Cookies is now selling a cookie with the amount of sugar you would get, not in 1, not in 5, BUT 11 of these Krispy Kreme donuts”

This one cookie has 69 ingredients including one that crosses the blood brain barrier

How is this legal?? pic.twitter.com/ygUcmxo6n2

— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) April 8, 2026

This made me think about the old expression "That's the way the cookie crumbles." The OED traces that expression to 1955, when a Cincinnati Enquirer columnist, Ollie M. James, wrote: "Well, as we say in the publishing business, sometimes that is the way the cookie crumbles." It was perceived at the time as a cute variation on "That's the way the ball bounces." I remember the late '50s excitement over "cookie crumbles" and other variations on the old "ball bounces." But the only other variation I can remember is "That's the way the grapefruit squirts."

Here's Tom Waits, "That's the Way." He remembers:

"It is well known that at the coronation of kings and queens, even modern ones, a certain curious process of seasoning them for their functions is gone through."

"There is a saltcellar of state, so called, and there may be a castor of state. How they use the salt, precisely—who knows? Certain I am, however, that a king’s head is solemnly oiled at his coronation, even as a head of salad. Can it be, though, that they anoint it with a view of making its interior run well, as they anoint machinery? Much might be ruminated here, concerning the essential dignity of this regal process, because in common life we esteem but meanly and contemptibly a fellow who anoints his hair, and palpably smells of that anointing. In truth, a mature man who uses hair-oil, unless medicinally, that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere. As a general rule, he can’t amount to much in his totality."

Writes Herman Melville, in Chapter 25 of "Moby-Dick."

"He's a total dork talking to these hypomasculine influencers... He makes them all look like idiots, and he's not even doing much...."

"There's something about 'the Louis touch' that makes it compelling. It's kind of how dorky John Wilson can make a documentary about scaffolding in New York City and I'm riveted...."

So said a TikTokker I love — Touré — and because I am John Wilson's biggest fan (I think), I watched the Netflix documentary "Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere":

With the comparison to John Wilson, I went into this Netflix experience with really high hopes, and these were not met. But it's not as if Theroux and Netflix had promised to be like John Wilson. Compared to John Wilson, Theroux is ferocious and macho. And Wilson doesn't go after people to take them down. He seems ready to love anybody and seems mostly to want to open up quirky new paths and to whimsically pursue them. By contrast, Theroux has locked onto some people he loathes and intends to take down. He's using a standard journalistic technique of seeming low-key and neutral. He's lying in wait. That's how you lie in wait. Now, that can be good, but I came away from the documentary disappointed.

So I went looking for some writing that would help me explore my disappointment. I chose "Louis Theroux’s Pointless Manosphere Documentary" by River Page in The Free Press.

Headline that I wish wasn't literal: "Needy Caterpillars Vibrate to Complex Rhythms to Communicate With Ants."

It's just a Smithsonian article about some damned thing actually caterpillars do to con ants:

They found that the caterpillars with the most significant myrmecophily, or relationship with ants, communicated signals with exceedingly regular timing and particularly intricate rhythms very similar to those that ants employ. On the other hand, the caterpillars with weak or zero myrmecophily had simpler and less regular rhythms....

Great. Good for the caterpillars and I hope the ants are digging the good vibrations.

I want the article — about human beings — that would fit that headline if only it were metaphorical. Clearly, we the People are the ants, and the needy caterpillars are politicians.