Doesn't AI stop you from making basic grammar errors like "grabbing he and his wife in their pajamas"?

CBS Evening News in its supposedly new, better form:

Here is the soft launch of the @CBSEveningNews with @TonyDokoupil, not official until Monday, but kicking off two days early in light of the U.S. military strikes in Venezuela and capture of Nicolas Maduro pic.twitter.com/gFlviKfkqh

— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) January 3, 2026

Give I a break!

You seem to think you can amuse us by painting a picture of a man and his wife caught in their pajamas, but I'm not amused. Their capture is serious matter, not a prank. It wasn't about humiliating them. And you humiliate yourself with that glaring, grating grammar mistake.

Get proper editing. How is this mainstream, professional journalism? I'd be embarrassed, on my little 1-person blog, to have written something as bad as "grabbing he and his wife in their pajamas." 

Naked as a clam.

I'm reading "Don’t sleep naked — the nine best tips on how to sleep in the heat/Struggling to drop off then waking at the crack of dawn? Boiling nights can be a challenge. Here’s what to do" (London Times).

9 tips are needed because air conditioning is not one of them. In first place is the one that begins the headline, "Don’t sleep naked." We're told "Wearing loose-fitting cotton PJs is a better option than sleeping in the nude, according to the sleep consultant Alison Jones, a spokeswoman for the sleep technology company Sealy. 'A light fabric helps to wick away moisture so that you are less likely to feel clammy,' Jones says."

I think the phrase "Don't sleep naked" is just click bait. If cotton were good for "wicking away moisture" then those who like the freedom of naked sleeping could just cover ourselves with a cotton sheet. But didn't cotton lose that reputation. Hikers these days are advised to avoid cotton. It may wick moisture, but it stays damp. And isn't that what we mean by feeling "clammy"?

By the way, were clams called "clams" because they were seen as clammy or did the word "clammy" postdate the use of "clam" as the name for the familiar mollusk, so that things were being called "clammy" because they seemed clamlike?

"I’ve gotten so lazy with my youngest one, because there’s so many, that at night I put him in his clothes for the next day..."

"So, he has dinner, he takes his bath, but then I’ll be like, 'Hey, dude. It will save an extra five minutes if we get dressed now and then you can sleep later,' and I can sleep later, wink wink."

Said the celebrity Tori Spelling, quoted in "Tori Spelling Gets Backlash for Dressing Her Son for School the Night Before—But Should She?"

That's in Parents, last September, and I'm seeing it because it's linked in a new article in New York Magazine, "On the Internet, Everyone’s a Bad Mom."

"Sean Combs was able to stay relevant for many years, in part because he used his power to intimidate people in the industry, particularly women, who might say no to him."

"In an article for The New York Times Magazine in July, Danyel Smith, who was the editor of Vibe Magazine in the late 1990s, wrote about the 'menacing encounters' she had with Diddy. He threatened he would see her 'dead in the trunk of a car' if she didn’t show him a cover before publication. Smith describes the ethos of the music industry at the time: 'To report sexual misconduct — whether it was to attorneys or law enforcement or even your supervisor — often meant losing your job. Being ostracized. Or being a girl that just didn’t "get it," or didn’t know how to fend for herself.'"

Writes Jessica Grose in "Sean Combs and the Limits of the 'Family Man' Defense" (NYT).

I didn't excerpt the references to the "family man" defense. I don't think that's necessary, but I would like to quote the last sentence of the column so you can click on the link it contains, which will get you to a high-impact photograph: "There are limits to the ‘family man’ defense no matter how many photos you take with your kids wearing matching pajamas."

I'm less interested in Combs's groping to defend himself now than I am in how so many people supported and protected him for so long.

"Back when Lyndon B. Johnson was president and the latest dance craze was the Frug, Washington high society was transfixed by..."

"... Barbara Howar, a sparkling socialite from North Carolina who helped the first lady do her hair, mingled with a visiting Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon and turned her Georgetown home into a center of Swinging Sixties entertainment.... Defiantly unorthodox, she wore pajamas to an embassy gala, drove an orange motorcycle through a Georgetown park and had a barbed wit that brought her a reputation as the enfant terrible of the capital’s social scene. Reflecting on the private life of Henry Kissinger, one of many diplomats and politicians who frequented her parties over the years, she quipped, 'Henry’s idea of sex is to slow the car down to 30 miles an hour when he drops you off at the door.'..."

From "Barbara Howar, whose hit memoir dished on D.C. society, dies at 89/Initially known as a Georgetown hostess, she became a best-selling author with her candid 1973 memoir, 'Laughing All the Way.' She later interviewed celebrities for 'Entertainment Tonight'" (WaPo)(free access link).

Howar launched her writing career with a 1968 Ladies’ Home Journal story called "Why LBJ Dropped Me." Looking (unsuccessfully) for a copy of "Why LBJ Dropped Me," I stumbled into this cool photograph, "Singer Bobby Darin sits with his girlfriend, Barbara Howar." I love her shoe. Grommets — so 60s! Ah, well, the 60s are long gone, and here I am, a creature of the 60s, entertained by obituaries, saying goodbye to everyone who was tormented by LBJ and danced the frug.

You don't see the phrase "enfant terrible" so much anymore. The OED says it's "A child who embarrasses his or her elders by untimely remarks; transferred a person who compromises his or her associates or his or her party by unorthodox or ill-considered speech or behaviour; loosely, one who acts unconventionally." We used to celebrate the enfants terribles. Didn't we? Do we still? Answer without saying "Trump" or you are too boring to wear pajamas to an embassy gala and drive an orange motorcycle through a Georgetown park.

"So we’re left with a two-bit case that has devolved into dirty bits, filled with salacious details...."

"Trump came across as a loser in her account — a narcissist, cheater, sad Hugh Hefner wannabe, trading his satin pajamas for a dress shirt and trousers (and, later, boxers) as soon as Stormy mocked him. The man who was the likely source of the 'Best Sex I Ever Had' tabloid headline, attributed to Marla Maples at the time, no doubt loathes Stormy for having described their batrachian grappling, as Aldous Huxley called sex, as 'textbook generic.' Like a legal dominatrix, Stormy continued to emasculate the former president after her testimony, tweeting: 'Real men respond to testimony by being sworn in and taking the stand in court. Oh … wait. Nevermind.' The compelling part of this case is not whether Trump did something wrong with business papers. The compelling part is how it shows, in a vivid way, that he’s the wrong man for the job."

Writes Maureen Dowd in her new column "Donnie After Dark" (NYT).

1. Dowd seems to approve of using the criminal process not for its proper purpose — to enforce specific written law — but to expose and humiliate one's political enemy. Let's look at him in his underwear and sneer at his sexual fumblings, as described by someone who openly hates him — please, emasculate him! — and let's laugh.

2. It's so exciting — sexually and politically — that she doesn't see the downside. The aggressive desire to humiliate and crush him makes him sympathetic and makes you look like a bully. 

3. I'm imagining the jurors talking about this testimony and trying to connect it to the elements of the crime — assuming they can get their mind around what this crime even is. In my vision, they say: What was that Stormy Daniels testimony even about? Why did we have to know what material his pajamas were made out of? Satin! A shiny fabric. Waved about... to distract us.

4. "Batrachian" — it means "Of or pertaining to the Batrachia, esp. frogs and toads" (OED). It wasn't Daniels's adjective. Dowd got it from and credited Aldous Huxley. I found the relevant passage, in his "Point Counterpoint":

‘But what has love to do with it?’ asked Slipe. ‘In Beatrice’s case.’

‘A great deal,’ Willie Weaver broke in. ‘Everything. These superannuated virgins—always the most passionate.’

‘But she’s never had a love affair in her life.’

‘Hence the violence,’ concluded Willie triumphantly. ‘Beatrice has a n*gger sitting on the safety valve. And my wife assures me that her underclothes are positively Phrynean. That’s most sinister.’

‘Perhaps she likes being well dressed,’ suggested Lucy.

Willie Weaver shook his head. The hypothesis was too simple.

‘That woman’s unconscious as a black hole.’ Willie hesitated a moment. ‘Full of batrachian grapplings in the dark,’ he concluded and modestly coughed to commemorate his achievement.

"Immediately I knew that’s not a wild rat... It had a shorter, rounder nose, its ears were on the side of its head and it was white. … If you know rats, you know rats."

Said Elm Dylan, quoted in "A waterfront park is overrun with rats. Rescuers are trying to find homes for them. A group of volunteers believes the rodents at Harbor View Memorial Park in Portland are domestic, not wild, and is working to rescue them and find foster homes" (Portland Press Herald).

The rats must be saved... because they are white? White rats, unlike brown rats, are perceived as pets.

"[O]ur mother shattered the protocols of stuffy Washington decorum. 'People were uptight and too concerned about how they appeared'..."

"... my mother remembers. To cure this contagion, she coaxed notables of different backgrounds into unfamiliar situations. A wizard at peer pressure, she compelled her guests to play charades, freeze tag, and capture the flag, and join in rope climbing and push-up competitions. She had Cabinet members fence with bamboo sticks on gangplanks spanning the pool....When Robert Frost visited Hickory Hill after Uncle Jack’s inauguration, she made him judge a poetry-writing contest among government officials and celebrity guests. At a party for Averell Harriman’s birthday the guests came dressed as the Harrimans during some episode of their eventful lives. My mother borrowed life-size wax figures from Madame Tussauds of Harriman, FDR, Churchill, and Stalin at Yalta, and placed them unobtrusively around the living room to mingle with the crowd...."

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

I have no idea what the problem is supposed to be, but I see a man in shorts.

Fans get worried for Post Malone after watching him perform like this🙏🏾😕🙇🏽‍♂️pic.twitter.com/d3NMe7dn1N

— Raphousetv (RHTV) (@raphousetv2) February 6, 2023

Current pop music is so uninteresting to me that I can't tell what's supposed to be bad from what's supposed to be good. But I do feel qualified to say this shorts look exemplifies the men-in-shorts problem. It is not the shorts per se. It is the grown man dressed as a little boy — the enlarged little boy. 

In other news, Post Malone arrives at the Sydney airport in green pajamas. What's that print? Teddy bears.

"When celebrities wear pajamas to an event, they are called fashionable. But when ordinary people wear pajamas to walk around on the streets, they are called uncivilized."

Someone wrote in Chinese social media, quoted in "Chinese City Uses Facial Recognition to Shame Pajama Wearers/Local officials apologized, but the crackdown on a common — and comfortable — practice has raised a rare outcry over privacy in a country accustomed to surveillance" (NYT).

When officials in an eastern Chinese city were told to root out “uncivilized behavior,” they were given a powerful tool to carry out their mission: facial recognition software.

Among their top targets? People wearing pajamas in public.... Public pajama wearing is common in China, particularly among older women, who tend toward bold colors and floral or cartoon patterns....

Public shaming is a common tactic. In theaters, laser pointers are used to shame audience members who play on their phones during shows. And in Shanghai, facial recognition systems have been installed at some crosswalks to single out jaywalkers.

After the online uproar on Monday, urban management officials in Suzhou quickly took down the original post and issued an apology....

The shamers were themselves shamed. Shame shaming works.

ADDED: If you look at the history of pajamas, you'll see that the original meaning is "leg clothing" and the reference is to loose, flowing pants worn in India, Pakistan, and Iran. When the style was first used by westerners, it "was associated with masquerade costume, actresses, and prostitution, not with respectable women" until feminists — in the mid-19th century — began wearing them under a knee-length skirt and calling them "bloomers." It was only later that pajamas became sleepwear too.

In the 20th century, various designers came up with "pajama" styles — for the beach and for evening wear ("palazzo pajamas"). The 70s designer Halston pushed glamorous "pajama" styles, and that caused women's magazines to suggest the economical alternative of simply buying things that are sold as lingerie.

Saturday morning, getting started.

That first post of the day — "The Deep Rot Exposed By the Biden Flap" — made me create a new tag — "Pajamas."

Then I was off into the archive, looking for old posts that could use the tag, a task bogged down by all the appearances of "Pajamas Media," which, of course, doesn't get the tag. It even has its own tag. So does Pajama Boy. Pajama Boy! I had a tag for Pajama Boy, but not pajamas.

"Pajamas" is a great tag, by the way. Some good miscellany collected there, including my infamous episode with the subliminal pajamas in Hillary Clinton's attack on Obama. John Lennon shows up. And Hugh Hefner. There's Trump in the Treaty Room. There's JFK (who put on pajamas to take his afternoon nap). There's Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-Tex.) — remember that pajama flap? There's Osama Bin Laden, shot to death because he wasn't naked. There's Rex Reed's reaction to the Manson murders. There's me in 1958. There's Marilyn Monroe.

Anyway... if you're wondering why this morning's blog session seemed to end with the gaze into deep rot, it was just me, scanning the archives for pajamas.

Now, out of pajamas, out of the past, onward to today and the relentless forward motion of the blog.

"The Deep Rot Exposed By the Biden Flap."

A funny headline in the Wall Street Journal. It makes me picture Joe Biden in drop-seat pajamas:

I hope you appreciate my stunningly non-creepy illustration of drop-seat pajamas (from Disney's "Peter Pan"). Now, just picture Joe Biden, with the flap open, and the deep rot exposed.

The opinion column in the WSJ is by its editor at large Gerard Baker.

What troubles me isn't simply this particular obsession with the former vice president's odd olfactory habits or what he does with his hands. It is what this baffling discussion says about the quality of what passes for debate now, the issues that seem to dominate that debate and the way that debate is conducted....

This obsessive puritanism is merely one symptom of the malaise in our public discourse, which runs deep and wide. It also lies...

What also lies? Oh, the malaise!

... in the trivialization of serious political issues; the willful mischaracterization of one another's views; the seething mutual contempt for an opposing voice; the rancor that suffuses discussion of even the least consequential of topics; the wild conspiracy-theorizing on both left and right as they seek to characterize each other's positions in the most poisonous way imaginable....

Baker has a degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Corpus Christi College, Oxford University. That prose made me look up his background. Especially "the rancor that suffuses discussion." This is civility bullshit, but oh, what bullshit! Is it properly called passive when the abstractions that replace the human subject are so active? "Rancor" isn't just there, it's suffusing. "Contempt" is seething. "Malaise" is running and lying.

All of this speaks to the triumph today not of reason -- the defining characteristic of the Enlightenment values that made America great -- but of emotion.

The old reason/emotion distinction. A favorite of blog commenters everywhere, so get on it.

Pundits, media companies and politicians have discovered that it is emotion, not reason, that wins votes and pulls in eyeballs. It's fun and lucrative while it lasts, but the Greeks and Romans can tell you precisely what it does to a civilization in the long run.

Because this, in the end, is what undoes great civilizations.

Make America Great Again. This obsession with greatness is as emotional as everything else. There's a gesture at erudition with a mere mention of the Enlightenment, the Greeks, and the Romans. But what has that got to do with thinking Joe Biden, because of his ample displays of sexless physical affection, should not be President? The reason/emotion distinction isn't too helpful, since what we're trying to "reason" about is how voters will feel about the super-feely Biden. Oh! But Rome fell!!!

Defeat on the battlefield overseas or destructive revolution at home only comes when the rot within is so advanced that the seemingly robust institutional structures have been fatally undermined. The condition of public discourse today is absolutely the kind of rot with that sort of potential.

Those are the last 2 sentences — conclusory and absolutely unsupported. I used the word "absolutely" because he did. I think it's a very silly word. So is "rot." Baker never demonstrated that the effort to take down Biden is "rot." And he didn't show that it was "malaise" or "obsessive puritanism."

If you want to write about elevating the discourse, elevate the discourse.

For now, my tag remains, as ever, "civility bullshit."

Happiness is a warm gun.

"Sir Paul McCartney remembers Beatles icon John Lennon in New York march against gun violence."

"One of my best friends was killed in gun violence right around here," he said, "so it's important to me."

He added he was unsure if gun violence can be ended, adding: "But this is what we can do, so I'm here to do it."

ADDED: Perhaps you didn't know that the phrase "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" was based on a headline on a gun magazine. John talks about that in the clip I've embedded, and here's Rolling Stone's description of the song (which it ranked, in 2011, as #24 on its list of "100 Greatest Beatles Songs" (personally, I ranked it #1 for a long time (and don't have any current ranking))):

The title was inspired by a headline in a gun magazine George Martin had showed Lennon that read Happiness is a Warm Gun — a variation on Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schulz's 1962 bestseller Happiness Is a Warm Puppy. "I thought it was a fantastic, insane thing to say," Lennon said. "A warm gun means that you just shot something."

Remember "Happiness Is a Warm Puppy"? It's kind of the worst of "Peanuts":

There were very rare moments of soft cheese in Peanuts'piquancy. For example, Lucy hugging Snoopy and declaring "Happiness is a warm puppy." That moment turned into a pioneering "book," composed of "Happiness is … " messages with accompanying drawings by Schulz, that became the No. 1 "nonfiction" work of 1963, and a prime mover in the Peanuts merchandising empire...

In the strip, Schulz would mock both merchandising and himself. When Lucy tried a second time to snatch Snoopy's warmth for her own happiness, he growled back, "My mother didn't raise me to be a heating pad!" Schulz himself said it best: "Anybody who says Peanuts is cute is just crazy." But he also enabled the merchandising machine....

I associate that non-edgy commercialization of "Peanuts" with a lot of 1960s/1970s idiocy, especially that atrocious cartoon "Love Is..." Unless I'm mistaken, every page of "Happiness is a Warm Puppy" begins with "Happiness is..." and some other damned nice thing. I'm trying to look inside the book at Amazon, and I can't see enough pages to be sure, but I'm grossed out by the introduction: "Now more than ever, we need the simple exuberance that Charles Schulz and his gang of Peanut-sized philosophers so perfectly express."

Oh, that's a new introduction, written for the 2006 edition. I guess "Now more that ever" meant now that we've got the worst President ever, George Bush. Anyway, the original edition came out before the arrival of The Beatles and even before John F. Kennedy was — bang bang shoot shoot — shot.

When The Beatles did arrive, they sold the ultimate niceness: Love. And then we lapped up "Love is..."



Click to enlarge. Yes, adult partners are pictured as naked juveniles who have no genitalia but who are sexually attracted to each other and go to bed together, dressed, at long last, in pajamas. This one-panel comic has been running, in that mind-crushingly limited form, since 1970. I certainly haven't read even a small percentage of the panels that have run over the decades, but I'm just going to bet that neither the man nor the woman has ever said anything as rejecting as "My mother didn't raise me to be a heating pad!"

After 4 days of avoiding Facebook altogether — my habit had been to click many times a day — I decided to drop in and see how it felt.

1. I haven't clicked yet, so my 4-day record is still intact, and I could keep going, but the purpose of avoiding Facebook hasn't been to achieve purity, but to become conscious of what was a clicking instinct that did not correspond to genuine feeling of reward. Having broken the unconscious instinct, I want to take a look — a somewhat objective look — at what I missed. I presume I'll spend about 5 minutes scanning what would have taken up much more than 5 minutes if I'd done it in little pieces across 4 days.

2. Okay. I've been there, scrolled through all the way back to where I was reading last time. Presumably, if I'd been visiting frequently, Facebook would have served up more items, but they'd have been worse things, right?, not better. I don't really know. For who has known the mind of the Facebook? I started timing myself with my iPhone stopwatch, but the insane rushing by of hundredths of a second strangled up my mind. I'll say I spent 5 to 10 minutes catching up.

3. What have I missed: cats, goats, a sloth in pajamas, a nonthreatening medical procedure, some charming kid-talk, speculation about accidental suicide from an apparently nonsuicidal person, a link to an article about cheese and drugs and the brain (which I'd already seen pointed at by Instapundit), an analogy involving relationships, and 4 things that I was moved to open in tabs.

4. The 4 things were: 1. "Cops realize tiger is stuffed animal after 45-minute standoff," 2. "Everything you should know about happiness in one infographic," 3. Something I'd already read, pretty much knew I'd already read, that I didn't need to read even the other time, and wasted 10 seconds deciding not to read again, 4. "What Would You Look Like As The Opposite Sex?"

5. #1 didn't really need a click. What Facebook displayed — the headline and a photo — was already all that you needed. It was amusing enough, but I've seen other Facebook posts about stuffed animals mistaken for real ones. #2 was the opposite of what its headline promised. The one infographic was a simple but indecipherable mess. What's the brain supposed to represent that's different from the faceless lady with a paintbrush sticking out of her head (and is that supposed to be a pregnancy bulging out of one side of her?)? #3 I already bitched about at point 4. #4 was a thing you could do if you "Login with Facebook." I was assured "We will never post without your permission." You will never post what without my permission, and why should I believe you?, and just when I thought I was out of Facebook, they pull me back in!

6. Okay. I survived my dip back into Facebook, and I think I'm out.

ADDED: A poll:

When I'm on Facebook, I'm most like...

a sloth in pajamas

myself as a member of the opposite sex

a person staring at a stuffed tiger thinking it's a real tiger

what an infographic depicts as unhappy

a nonsuicidal person thinking about suicide

the worst character in Steven Spielberg's worst movie

a baby goat tap dancing adorably on somebody's hardwood floor

pollcode.com free polls

"I said, 'Jackie, I want to stay home and eat lemon meringue pie in my pajamas, in front of the T.V. at the Beverly Hills Hotel.'"

Jackie was Jacqueline Susann, and the "I" there is Rex Reed, describing how he turned down a dinner invitation to Sharon Tate’s house the night of the Manson murders.

Quoted in "Rex Reed Bangs a Gong on the Mediocrity of Modern Life" by Alex Williams in the NYT.

Lots of great pictures and stories at the link, including life in the Dakota building, where he bought a place for $30,000 in 1969 and where John Lennon was shot in 1980:

He once signed a petition supporting John Lennon when the government was trying to deport Mr. Lennon because of his drug use and political activism. Mr. Lennon thanked him with a one-year subscription to TV Guide, Mr. Reed said, adding, “That was his bible. All he did was lie around stoned watching television.”

How does the NYT know what Trump does in his bedroom when he wakes up in the morning?

I'm reading "INSIDE TRUMP’S HOUR-BY-HOUR BATTLE FOR SELF-PRESERVATION/With Twitter as his Excalibur, the president takes on his doubters, powered by long spells of cable news and a dozen Diet Cokes. But if Mr. Trump has yet to bend the presidency to his will, he is at least wrestling it to a draw."

The article — by Maggie Haberman, Glenn Thrush, and Peter Baker — says it's based "on interviews with 60 advisers, associates, friends and members of Congress." But that doesn't mean every stated fact has 60 sources. Who was in the bedroom? The most logical guess is that the report comes from Trump himself:

Around 5:30 each morning, President Trump wakes and tunes into the television in the White House’s master bedroom. He flips to CNN for news, moves to “Fox & Friends” for comfort and messaging ideas, and sometimes watches MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” because, friends suspect, it fires him up for the day.

Energized, infuriated — often a gumbo of both — Mr. Trump grabs his iPhone.

So first he turns on the TV, watches it until he gets excited, and then he grabs his iPhone? Personally, I begin by grabbing my iPhone — oh, sometimes I just pick it up — and I read the news, probably the NYT, until feel so inspired to blog that I jump out of bed. Just kidding. I don't jump out of bed. And, really, who "jumps" out of bed in real life? But it's what everyone does in writing, just like they "grab"* their iPhone.

Anyway, I believe that when Trump wakes up, he turns on the TV and uses it to orient himself to the morning. Is he looking for something precise, like "news" from CNN, "comfort" from Fox, and "fire" from MSNBC — and in that order? "Friends suspect"! Well, I suspect some poetic license is taken there, but the reporters have deniability: They're passing along the suspicions of "friends." How many friends — all 60? What could they know of the order Trump flips through the news channels, what he's seeking on each of the channels, the feelings that actually arise — a "gumbo" of energy and fury! — and whether those feelings impel his famous fingers to the small electronic device.

Sometimes he tweets while propped on his pillow, according to aides.

Does he really tweet from the iPhone? That takes dexterity... or willingness to use speech-to-text. I never do that. I have to leap out of bed — literally hurtle myself out — to get to a real computer with a good keyboard, not just to make typing easier, but to feel better grounded in the real world. But then, I am clinging to the edge of reality in my remote outpost in Madison, Wisconsin, and President Trump, even propped on his pillow, is in the White House, and when he turns on the TV, on multiple channels, people are talking about the fact that he's in the White House. I'm sure he feels grounded. Or insane. One or the other.

But that gumbo, I want to talk about the gumbo. I know HabermanThrushBaker are using "gumbo" to mean "stew," but "stew" is well established to mean "A state of excitement, esp. of great alarm or anxiety." The OED has that meaning for "stew" going back to 1806, whereas "gumbo" only means okra, the "soup thickened with the mucilaginous pods of this plant," something mud-related, and "A patois spoken by black people and Creoles in the French West Indies, Louisiana, Bourbon, and Mauritius." Yes, metaphor can take you beyond those meanings, but why express contempt for Trump by using a word associated with black people?

Other times he tweets from the den next door, watching another television. Less frequently, he makes his way up the hall to the ornate Treaty Room, sometimes dressed for the day, sometimes still in night clothes, where he begins his official and unofficial calls.

So the man walks down the hall, possibly in his pajamas. Or what are we talking about here — "night clothes"? "Quite undress'd, with only Night-cloaths on my Head, and a loose Morning Gown wrapt about me." I'm back to reading the OED. That quote is from the 1722 novel "Moll Flanders," by Daniel DeFoe. I'm just going to picture Trump in pajamas and a bathrobe. Maybe they didn't want to say "bathrobe" because there are too many bathrobes in the news lately. (I see a Slate article from last month, "Ban Men's Bathrobes.")

Back to the NYT article:

As he ends his first year in office, Mr. Trump is redefining what it means to be president. He sees the highest office in the land much as he did the night of his stunning victory over Hillary Clinton — as a prize he must fight to protect every waking moment, and Twitter is his Excalibur. Despite all his bluster, he views himself less as a titan dominating the world stage than a maligned outsider engaged in a struggle to be taken seriously, according to interviews with 60 advisers, associates, friends and members of Congress....

But that is the way they portray him in the news —  a maligned outsider engaged in a struggle to be taken seriously. I don't need 60 insiders to explain that to me. It's an accurate picture of the media. Now, you may say, he just shouldn't watch the TV, shouldn't pay attention to media, should let media do its thing and stick to what's conventionally presidential — ignore what's being said about him.

Before taking office, Mr. Trump told top aides to think of each presidential day as an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals. People close to him estimate that Mr. Trump spends at least four hours a day, and sometimes as much as twice that, in front of a television, sometimes with the volume muted, marinating in the no-holds-barred wars of cable news and eager to fire back.

Don't fight back. Be above it all. Remember how well that worked for George W. Bush? But that's not Trump. I can see why he uses Twitter. He's a master at Twitter, keeping the media honest (or at least looking as dishonest as it is (or might be)). Maybe you think he shouldn't stoop to things like this:

.@DaveWeigel @WashingtonPost put out a phony photo of an empty arena hours before I arrived @ the venue, w/ thousands of people outside, on their way in. Real photos now shown as I spoke. Packed house, many people unable to get in. Demand apology & retraction from FAKE NEWS WaPo! pic.twitter.com/XAblFGh1ob

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 9, 2017

But I don't believe that sort of thing takes much time, just like I don't believe that having a muted TV running in the background for 8 hours means he's spending 8 hours watching TV.  I read Trump's Twitter feed. Some days there's nothing. Some days there is one thing. Occasionally, he spreads out and drops 4 or 5 tweets. How much time does that really take? It might save time, because instead of feeling irritated and distracted by some stupid news report (e.g., Weigel's "phony photo") and involving somebody else in doing something about it, Trump spends probably one minute typing out a tweet. Efficient, effective. The media would, I'm sure, prefer to filter his message through their own template, replete with naysayers and qualifications. But Trump leaps over the media. He springs. He vaults.

Yes, yes. Excalibur. I haven't talked about Excalibur....

__________________

* "Grab" is an evocative word in anti-Trumpiana, because of "Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything."

"Hugh Hefner was the original Pajama Boy."

Said Meade just now in a conversation we were having about Hugh Hefner.

I'd been going on about how Hugh Hefner wasn't very masculine: The image he created for himself — for viewers of the magazine to identify with — was as a man who spent all his time hanging around the house, listening to jazz, wearing pajamas. He didn't engage in traditional masculine activities like sports or working on the car. He hosted parties. Did he do anything outdoorsy? Was he ever outdoors in the daylight? I can only picture him outdoors after dark at his swimming pool, which was itself designed to have an indoors, a "grotto." That was some outré interior decoration — a grotto.

"There are many pornographers, but what, within the realm of pornography, earns you a substantial obituary in The New York Times?"

"Some day we'll see how they treat Hugh Hefner, who made pornography clean, commercial and classy, but today we read about the death of Al Goldstein: '... The manifesto in Screw’s debut issue in 1968 was... 'We promise never to ink out a pubic hair or chalk out an organ...'... Apart from Screw, Mr. Goldstein’s most notorious creation was Al Goldstein himself, a cartoonishly vituperative amalgam of borscht belt comic, free-range social critic and sex-obsessed loser.... ' In later years, it became impossible to get famous for being a loud sleazy guy with a magazine, and the idea of anyone 'inking' out pubic hair seems mostly puzzling...."

So I wrote back in 2013, and now the day has come when I can read the substantial obituary for Hugh Hefner in the NYT. I've already written 2 posts, the first 2 of the day, on the death of the gargantuan cultural icon Hugh Hefner. Let me then, at long last, get to the NYT obituary:

Hefner the man and Playboy the brand were inseparable. Both advertised themselves as emblems of the sexual revolution, an escape from American priggishness and wider social intolerance. Both were derided over the years — as vulgar, as adolescent, as exploitative, and finally as anachronistic. But Mr. Hefner was a stunning success from his emergence in the early 1950s. His timing was perfect.

He was compared to Jay Gatsby, Citizen Kane and Walt Disney, but Mr. Hefner was his own production. He repeatedly likened his life to a romantic movie; it starred an ageless sophisticate in silk pajamas and smoking jacket, hosting a never-ending party for famous and fascinating people.

The first issue of Playboy was published in 1953, when Mr. Hefner was 27 years old, a new father married to, by his account, the first woman he had slept with.

He had only recently moved out of his parents’ house and left his job at Children’s Activities magazine. But in an editorial in Playboy’s inaugural issue, the young publisher purveyed another life:

“We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.”

A boy's fantasy of adulthood and sophistication.

Mr. Hefner began excoriating American puritanism at a time when doctors refused contraceptives to single women and the Hollywood production code dictated separate beds for married couples. As the cartoonist Jules Feiffer, an early Playboy contributor, saw the 1950s, “People wore tight little gray flannel suits and went to their tight little jobs. You couldn’t talk politically.... You couldn’t use obscenities. What Playboy represented was the beginning of a break from all that.”...

In “The Playboy Philosophy,” a mix of libertarian and libertine arguments that Mr. Hefner wrote in 25 installments starting in 1962, his message was simple: Society was to blame. His causes — abortion rights, decriminalization of marijuana and, most important, the repeal of 19th-century sex laws — were daring at the time. Ten years later, they would be unexceptional.

“Hefner won,” Mr. Gitlin said in a 2015 interview. “The prevailing values in the country now, for all the conservative backlash, are essentially libertarian, and that basically was what the Playboy Philosophy was. It’s laissez-faire. It’s anti-censorship. It’s consumerist: Let the buyer rule. It’s hedonistic. In the longer run, Hugh Hefner’s significance is as a salesman of the libertarian ideal.”

Born in 1926, he was raised "with a lot of repression" by Methodists, but he found his way through drawing comics, first as a child, in high school (where he "'I reinvented myself' as the suave, breezy 'Hef,"  and in college as the editor of the humor magazine. He came up with Playboy as "a vehicle for his slightly randy cartoons."

What did his cartoons like like? I found this (click to enlarge and read ("This is me, dreaming about women in general!"))

More here.

The NYT devotes the mid-section of the obituary to the feminist challenge. Gloria Steinem did undercover research as a "bunny" in the Playboy Club in 1963 and discovered that it's hard work, the outfits are uncomfortable, and the customers are (as the Times puts it) "vulgar."

Another feminist critic, Susan Brownmiller, debating Mr. Hefner on a television talk show, asserted, “The role that you have selected for women is degrading to women because you choose to see women as sex objects, not as full human beings.” She continued: “The day you’re willing to come out here with a cottontail attached to your rear end. …”

Mr. Hefner responded in 1970 by ordering an article on the activists then called “women’s libbers.” In an internal memo, he wrote: “These chicks are our natural enemy. What I want is a devastating piece that takes the militant feminists apart. They are unalterably opposed to the romantic boy-girl society that Playboy promotes.”

The commissioned article, by Morton Hunt, ran with the headline “Up Against the Wall, Male Chauvinist Pig.” (The same issue contained an interview with William F. Buckley Jr., fiction by Isaac Bashevis Singer and an article by a prominent critic of the Vietnam War, Senator Vance Hartke of Indiana.)

Mr. Hefner said later that he was perplexed by feminists’ apparent rejection of the message he had set forth in the Playboy Philosophy. “We are in the process of acquiring a new moral maturity and honesty,” he wrote in one installment, “in which man’s body, mind and soul are in harmony rather than in conflict.” Of Americans’ fright of anything “unsuitable for children,” he said, “Instead of raising children in an adult world, with adult tastes, interests and opinions prevailing, we prefer to live much of our lives in a make-believe children’s world.”

The 3 quoted sentences from that internal memo are fascinating. The first 2 talk tough, calling for a hard fight, but the third one makes an argument that belongs in a sweet, soft fight: The feminists want to say that we're alienating men and women — with domineering men and oppressed, insignificant women — but we're the ones who are for "the romantic boy-girl society." What do women want? A lot of us love the ideal of a romantic boy-girl society. It's interesting that Hef wrote "boy-girl" and yet later publicly talked about the "adult world" and rising above the "make-believe children’s world."

Marilyn Monroe appears twice in the obit, first as the nude model in the first issue of Playboy and second as the long dead body in a mausoleum next to which the newly dead body of Hugh Hefner will lie.

A 7-year-old girl — kidnapped, strangled, and thrown off a bridge — swims to shore and survives.

Fortunately, there's a lady in Worcester, Massachusetts who answers the door at 4 a.m., because a little girl in soaking wet pajamas was knocking.

"Well, he’s huge. And he — I don’t mean to be unkind, but he’s so unattractive it’s unbelievable.”

"Did you see the picture of him in his pajamas next to this Playboy bunny?"

Said Senator Susan Collins, caught on a hot microphone. (WaPo has the quote with the recording.)

She was talking about Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-Tex.), who deserved her ire for saying something that had me calling him "a loser" the other day.

Here's the photograph Senator Collins was talking about:

This is the photo Sen. Susan Collins was referring to when she commented on Rep. Blake Farenthold wearing pajamas in 2010. pic.twitter.com/jZYCPC4FYW

— Beatrice-Elizabeth (@MissBeaE) July 25, 2017

Let's be clear. Collins didn't call him "fat." She used the ambiguous euphemism "huge" — Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime was huge — and the generalization "unattractive." And she softened it with the silly denial "I don’t mean to be unkind." It's silly because it means the exact opposite: I do mean to be unkind. If you didn't mean to be unkind, you'd stop at the point where you're conscious of and confessing that what is about to come is unkind. Like this: