"Up until that point in my life, in conformance with King Frederick II’s proscription against inebriation among falconers, I had resolved..."

"... never to use drugs or alcohol. In fact, I hadn’t even tasted coffee. However, I had recently gathered from my favorite comic book, Turok, Son of Stone, that hallucinogens might allow me to see dinosaurs, which I greatly desired. [The person offering it] assured me that this was a near certainty, so I swallowed the LSD, which more than delivered on his promise. Buildings melted like wax candles; trees bowed and swayed on a windless night; bright lights with long comet tails lent Hyannisport the cheery aura of Christmas in July.... Still tripping, I rode into Hyannis with two older kids and struggled in a Main Street diner with a plate of lively white noodles that squirmed and squeaked as I stabbed at them with my fork. I became suddenly appreciative of the impossibly complex choreography of minute movements required by my mouth and its various parts in order to chew and swallow food. Abandoning that endeavor, I looked up to see a picture hanging behind the counter of my father, Uncle Jack, and Jesus. All of them had their hands folded in prayer.... Two days later I flew to South America.... I worked during July and August as a ranch hand in the Colombian llanos, returning that fall to Millbrook.... My generation was developing its own counterculture. That summer’s Woodstock concert—just across the Hudson from Millbrook—was our constitutional convention.... I... read underground newspapers and Mr. Natural comics.... I thought of drugs as the fuel of the insurrection...."

Writes Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in  "American Values/Lessons I Learned From My Family." 

It was the summer of '69. Perhaps you remember it. RFK Jr. was 15. 

Millbrook was the private boarding school RFK Jr. attended, chosen by him because "it operated a certified zoo and several of the boys practiced falconry." The place was the alma mater of William F. and James Buckley. James would go on, in 1970, to win the Senate seat that had belonged to RFK Sr.

"I quirled an egg into my instant noodles and it turned gray."

Says someone at Reddit (with a photo of the gray noodle broth), and the discussion is less about why the egg turned things gray than about that unusual verb: quirl.

The OED says the word is a regionalism of the American south that somehow developed out of "curl" and "coil." I would think "twirl" and "swirl" and "whirl" also played a part. And why not "squirrel"? What's up with "-irl"? Why does it suggest a spiraling movement? There's also "furl" and "circle."

Sometimes the menu suggests a process of elimination.

Seen yesterday in Hell's Kitchen.

You know, in English, we use the word "noodle" for the body part that is the brain. But other body parts are more noodly!

Finally, I have more TikToks for you — 10 this time.

1. Dexter, the dog that walks.

2. I know what it's like to be driving along and suddenly a deer jumps into the path of your car.

3. Biden tells a joke.

4. Your mental focus after 2 years on TikTok.

5. Things one's college-freshman kid has texted.

6. Noodles, just noodles.

7. Aren't you worried?

8. WaPo thinks its video will be suppressed by TikTok, but it came up in my feed (and I wasn't already following them).

9. The context of that iconic migrant mother photograph.

10. The dog and the dumpling.

Male TikTok versus Female TikTok.

It pains me to stereotype, but compare this...



... to this...

"... feel the whole chicken carcasses of flavor..."

I'm a fan of imported Japanese ramen, including the roughly translated descriptions like this:

Cup noodles of "NichiShinrao" is, has been well received and enjoy the taste and eat meet preeminent thick slice pork, such as there was no instant noodles until now "like raw noodles". Tsurumi, waist and thick straight noodles Motchiri and the texture of the feature,. Deep flavor based on the pig bone plain hot water extract to feel the whole chicken carcasses of flavor, plus the taste, garlic aroma is rich pork bone soup of features.

ADDED: The link above goes to Amazon, but the ramen we ordered came from ZenPop. Here's what they sent us from Osaka for about $30:



I went to ZenPop after seeing a vlog that I can't remember well enough to link for you.

"Where Is Barack Obama?/The most popular American, whose legacy is the primary target of Donald Trump, has, for now, virtually disappeared from public life."

Gabriel Debenedetti (in New York Magazine) asks the question that perhaps you, like me, have been wondering about.

How did the most ubiquitous man in America for eight years virtually disappear?... He has mostly opted out of liberal America’s collective Trump-outrage cycle. Though he reads the Times and other newspapers, he doesn’t follow daily Trump developments on Twitter or watch television news. He is upset by the administration’s actions, and he’s confided to friends that what worries him most is the international order, the standing of the office of the presidency, the erosion of democratic norms, and the struggles of people who are suddenly unsure of their immigration status or the future of their health-care coverage. Still, in conversations with political allies, Obama insists that today’s domestic mess is a blip on the long arc of history and argues that his own work must be focused on progress over time — specifically on empowering a new generation of leaders. He says his legacy is not what concerns him. (“Michelle and I are fine,” he tells those who ask about it.) And while he often says he misses the day-to-day work of fixing people’s problems, he has even less patience for day-to-day politics than he did as president.

In fact, in private conversations, Obama rarely mentions Trump at all.... One of Obama’s friends repeatedly described the former president as newly “Zen-like,” a striking descriptor given that Obama’s impossible calm has been a hallmark of his entire time on the national stage. To those who’ve known him longest, his confidence in the decision not to wade back into the political muck is the product of the same hyper-self-aware posture he’s had since childhood, growing up straddling worlds and then writing a book about himself in his 30s....

He's aloof. That was always the case. That's kind of what we liked about him, those of us who liked the man who — in my observation — is considered the most likable person to become famous in our lifetime. We're just experiencing the full dimension of coolness. It's not always to your liking, even if you were one of those people who really liked it.



But I think Obama should be allowed to eat his waffle, go to restaurants and be left in peace, write his books, experience down time, and stay out of the fray. He may seem political useful, but that's because he's avoiding being used, and that's exactly what he should do.

ADDED: That waffle video won't work in the embedded form. You can click through and see it at YouTube, but for a workable embed, here's Obama eating noodles in Vietnam with Anthony Bourdain:

Eminent Os, tweeting today.

Obama:

“Low plastic stool, cheap but delicious noodles, cold Hanoi beer.” This is how I’ll remember Tony. He taught us about food — but more importantly, about its ability to bring us together. To make us a little less afraid of the unknown. We’ll miss him. pic.twitter.com/orEXIaEMZM

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) June 8, 2018

Ono:

Trees dream of you at night. They ask you to be kind and gentle to them.

— Yoko Ono (@yokoono) June 8, 2018

"As for the pasta, Lader admits to putting a colander in her roommate's bedsheets but insists it contained no noodles."

"Her act of protest, she maintains, was to draw attention to the fact that Brownstein wasn't pulling her fair share of the housework around the apartment."

From "Roommate drama lands Penn State sorority sisters in federal court."

I need a word that means: the feeling of annoyance and loss that comes from reading all the way to the end of a NYT article with one thought foremost in your head...

... I can't wait to see what people say in the comments and then seeing that this is one of those NYT articles without a comments section. The little comments icon — a cartoon-style speech bubble with a number on it — appears at the bottom of the page, increasing the risk that you'll keep reading and assuming that various problems with the article will already be articulated by NYT readers. Then you hit bottom and see, no, if you're going to blog that, you're going to have to do the reactions yourself, or just set it up so that comments on your blog might possibly do what readers at the NYT might have done, except that they won't, because my readers tend not even to like the NYT in the first place and to skew way more right wing.

The article that wracked me with that feeling this morning was "A Woman-Led Law Firm That Lets Partners Be Parents." Excerpt (buried deep in the long piece):

One reason Ms. Simon and Ms. Geller don’t feel they have to sneak out of the office is that there are no offices. The firm shuns a permanent home in favor of a shared work space managed by a company called Metro Offices, where it rents a conference room for an hour, an office for a day, as needed.... They did this partly to encourage their employees to work from home and on their own schedules....

The other advantage is to hold down expenses, of course, which allows the Geller Law Group to maintain reasonable profit margins while charging less than competitors with higher overhead.... To keep track of one another, the lawyers and a paralegal meticulously update their shared Google calendars and communicate constantly through Gchat.

Ms. Simon delights in the guerrilla-style logistics of a mostly virtual firm....

Delights? Guerrilla-style? This is unswallowable. They found 2 women who have been struggling to do something for a short time, show little sign of success, and are somehow celebrated in the NYT with head-slappingly unbelievable puffery. Now, I know my readers will attack this article, but that's not the same as comments at the NYT, which is serving up material like this because it thinks its readers will lap it up with pleasure. Did they? I bet they didn't! Show me the comments!

By the way, in case you're wondering if fathers appear in this article, the answer is yes. Once:

Ms. Geller wanted to spend part of her daytime hours around her children without giving up on a legal career. “I saw no role models who didn’t have a husband as a stay-at-home dad,” Ms. Geller said of the partners at the large firm she left before starting the Geller Law Group in 2011. Ms. Simon wanted to be home for dinner and attend school events without worrying about how it would affect her annual review.

There is one other cameo appearance by a man in this women-having-it-all puff piece:

The firm’s lone male associate, Michael Munson, told me he left the firm in February because he craved the camaraderie of colleagues.

Oh! It's the man who wants more real, flesh-and-blood relationships and the women who delight in the guerrilla logistics of living on line? Pay no attention to that problem, lady NYT readers! Ms. Simon gets lots of face time with one 4-year-old boy. She's able to leave meetings early and fight through an hour of "punishing rush-hour traffic" to get to that child whom she rewards with a smile when he says "Mommy, I have an idea... Why don’t we eat noodles and watch superheroes?"

Now, lady NYT readers, isn't that just a dream of the way the world should be? Silence!

UPDATE: 5 minutes after I put up this post, I saw that the NYT opened a comments section on the article. I am positive that it was not there before, because there isn't one comment on the article yet. (And I'd searched the page scrupulously for a comments icon before writing this.)

Word watch: pallid.

All of the following occurrences appeared within the last few days:

"The stakes are too high, the disappointment in some quarters — and some Supreme Court chambers — over the pallid outcome of the Supreme Court’s Fisher case too deep, the issue too mobilizing for it to fade away." Linda Greenhouse writing about affirmative action in the NYT.

"The potato farmers of Idaho are, I’m reasonably certain, distressingly pallid in appearance but no one is going around insisting that the French fry industry is going to collapse unless diversity increases there." From a discussion of the lack of racial diversity in Silicon Valley enterprises. 

"Jamie Dornan (the guy who's playing Christian Grey because they couldn't get Beyoncé) tries to give the pallid prose some weight by pausing significantly before informing us that his tastes are … singular, or telling Anastasia Steele that he'd like … to know more about her." A discussion of the "50 Shades of Grey" trailer in The Atlantic.

"And in the leading roles of Will Shakespeare and his muse and lover, Viola De Lesseps, Tom Bateman and Lucy Briggs-Owen are so vibrantly engaging that they make Joseph Fiennes and Gwyneth Paltrow in the movie look like a pair of pallid milksops." From a Chicago Tribune review of a stage version of "Shakespeare in Love."

"Pallid dudes surrounded by dorm-room décor rhapsodize over their first console and the discovery of game-playing soul mates." A NYT article about a movie about the history of video games. 

"The whole your eyes have known, your pallid cheeks have shown; for oh! the swelling tide no bravest heart could hide, when your dear mother died." Catholic News reports on a riddle poem published pseudonymously by Pope Leo XIII in the 19th century. 

"How I hate the man who talks about the 'brute creation', with an ugly emphasis on brute. Only Christians are capable of it. As for me, I am proud of my close kinship with other animals. I take a jealous pride in my Simian ancestry, I like to think that I was once a magnificent hairy fellow living in the trees and that my frame has come down through geological times via sea jelly and worms and Amphioxus, Fish, Dinosaurs and Apes. Who would exchange these for the pallid couple in the Garden of Eden?" The U.K. Independent published that item from the 1910 diary of the naturalist WNP Barbellion.

"'The long days do wear on you,' says a pallid man named Stephen McMurray who is researching the population dynamics of sponges. He dips a spoon into a cup of instant noodles and looks through a window to the sea floor below." Undersea science at GulfNews.com.

"Two Important Lessons From Crumbled Crumbs Bake Shop."

"1 – Don’t believe in the myth of passion when it comes to business..."

Rather than investing your resources into something that fulfills people’s needs, you are likely to invest in your passion until you burn through all your resources....

"2 – Trends really do matter..."

Cupcakes were a hot product for a while....

Remember Mrs. Field’s cookies? In the 1980s... It seemed nobody could get enough of those chocolate chip cookies....

Hey, I remember the Chipwich. It was the summer of 1982, and it seemed that the ultimate street-snack splurge had been discovered: an ice cream sandwich with chocolate chip cookies as the "bread." I went looking for a contemporaneous article displaying the enthusiasm of the era, and I found this intro paragraph to a July 1, 1982 NYT article informing us that "the akita is the New York dog of the moment, and to have one is to be exceptionally modish":

If fads are not always born in New York, it is indeed here that they fly and eventually fall, only to be replaced by new ones. Down coats and spinach salads, high-tech sofas and sauces nouvelles, Rubik's Cube and the Chipwich, cats and Donkey Kong, Izod shirts and sequined head antennae, sesame noodles and the resurgent miniskirt - all have burst upon us sporadically.

Sequined head antennae... Weren't those called...

"So cluttered was Holzberger's home that police did not find him when they searched the house Nov. 10."

"It wasn't until Retzlaff allegedly confessed to the killing three days later and told investigators exactly where to find him that police discovered the body."

Now, friends are left to contemplate a character who immersed himself in causes, survived mostly on ramen noodles, and rode around on his bicycle to mine treasures from other people's trash.

"He lived one of the most simplistic lives of anyone I've ever known," said a friend, Jim Carpenter.

"Simplistic" means — according to the (unlinkable) OED "Of the nature of, or characterized by, (extreme) simplicity. Now usu. with the connotation of excessive or misleading simplification." Carpenter's use of the word isn't wrong, just unusual. And it's unusual not merely because he meant it as a compliment, but because he looked at extreme clutter and saw admirable simplicity.

"I want to dust mop the floor."/"The front paw makes me want to eat ramen noodles."

"Nice view of the roof of her mouth."/"Getting that camera angle really low."/"The hair and the grass go together."/"Jeez, this is relaxing."/"There's grass on her tongue."

Things I said on first viewing Meade's video titled "Josie & Zeus":

"[T]all trees slip into a sinkhole hidden beneath metallic-sheened swamp water..."

"... like spaghetti noodles surrendering to a pot of boiling water."

The "simple Pope" narrative.

The new Pope, Francis, eats "[b]aked skinless chicken, salad, fruit and a glass of simple wine," and this is supposedly terribly different from Pope Benedict who ate "fettuccine with shrimp, zucchini and saffron," Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone who once "hosted an elaborate vegetarian dinner to celebrate Benedict’s 60th anniversary as a priest in 2011, featuring fresh-picked fare from the area near Venice, including chicory, white asparagus, peas and cherries," and NY's Cardinal Timothy Dolan who likes "fettuccine Bolognese, lamb cutlet, spinach and peppers, with Sicilian cannoli and homemade tiramisu."

Where is the stark contrast? Fettucine is just noodles. What's elaborate about putting some shrimp on it or some meat sauce (which is all "Bolognese" means)? Then there's lamb and a bunch of vegetables. Why is "chicory, white asparagus, peas and cherries" elaborate compared to "salad" and "fruit"? What's in the salad? Maybe chicory. What's the fruit? Maybe cherries. And cannoli and tiramisu are just routine desserts in Italy (and NYC). There's nothing fancy about eating cannoli!

I don't really mind if WaPo does a puff piece on the new Pope. But it's just such a dumb way to talk about food. They're mindlessly impressing the "simple Pope" narrative onto random facts.

"It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment."

That's today's sentence from "The Great Gatsby." What do you think? Talk about it, would you? I'll help you out, by cheating on the usual rules (which require us to look at one sentence in isolation). Here's the sentence just before that one:

Or perhaps I had merely grown used to it, grown to accept West Egg as a world complete in itself, with its own standards and its own great figures, second to nothing because it had no consciousness of being so, and now I was looking at it again, through Daisy’s eyes.

Perspectives! Keep shifting them!

What have you looked at in a new way today — forced, somehow, after having already expended your powers of adjustment? The Wisconsin Supreme Court? The holes in the macaroni noodles? The Belgians? Women's magazines? The slug's penis? Black food? A glass of frackingwater? Charred human remains? An 89-year-old Senator? A humanizing glass of water? The toilet?

"Trypophobia... is an irrational fear of holes, pods or cracks — specifically, clusters of them."

"On Instagram and Reddit, people share photographs of clusters that make them anxious, obsessed and even nauseated."

Many images show holey foods or clusters of seeds, like aerated chocolates, the innards of a red bell pepper, and bubbles rising up in pancakes while they cook.

"I don't like the holes in crumpets or sponges or Swiss cheese," @CourtneySGray said on Twitter. "They all make me shudder and panic."

The trypophobia Facebook page touts nearly 7,000 followers, who commiserate on their "condition" and triggers. "When macaroni noodles stand up straight when I'm boiling them, I wanna cry," Kelcey Piper remarked on Facebook. "Anyone else experienced this?"

The amazing thing is, the link goes to NPR, where there's no mention whatsoever of Sigmund Freud. How radically our culture has changed in the last 30 years!

Fashion predicts an economic upturn and a victory for Romney.

Interpret this shirt:



That's something new, selected to illustrate the latest email from Macy's. Macy's — and the shirtmaker, Ralph Lauren — are in the game for the money, so they've got to predict where the mind of the American shopper is going (and where they can make it go, with some prodding). Anyway, you read the tea leaves, I will read the fabric print.

First: Ann Romney! How many ways does that shirt say "Ann Romney"? 1. Horses, 2. Animals boldly emblazoned on on your chest, 3. Unapologetically rich.

Second: The 80s! This thing looks like it sprang right out of the 80s, the Reagan era. Put aside your sorry old sweaters, your poverty looks. We're going to strut proudly into the Morning in America.

Did you know that Time Magazine, just last January, ranked Jimmy Carter's cardigan one of the Top 10 Political Fashion Statements"?

In Feb. 2, 1977, just two weeks after being sworn in as the 39th President, Jimmy Carter delivered a fireside chat from his West Wing study. Carter, a peanut farmer from Plains, Ga., was using the power of network television to "keep in close touch with the people of our country, to let you know informally about our plans."

Your plans to depress the hell out of us. Thanks, old man.

What caught the attention of viewers that night wasn't necessarily what Carter said, but what he wore: Unlike today's era of hyper-stylized image consultancy, in which everything a politician wears is scrutinized, Carter simply wore for the taping what he had worn to dinner. 

Oh, really? What was for dinner? Ramen noodles?

He asked his TV adviser and adman what they thought, and they told him to look at the TV monitor to see for himself. While Carter would have myriad difficulties in the coming years, that early high point was purely authentic. "He was folks, and folks is in," a Republican insider told TIME. "I hate to say it, but from a purely analytical point of view, I loved it."

Folks was in. But not permanently. We got exuberance later.

The 2,500-year-old bowl of noodles.

Cold now, but awesome.