"The United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee quietly changed its eligibility rules on Monday to bar transgender women from competing in Olympic women’s sports..."

"... and now will comply with President Trump’s executive order on the issue, according to a post on the organization’s website. The new policy, expressed in a short, vaguely worded paragraph, is tucked under the category of 'USOPC Athlete Safety Policy' on the site, and does not include details of how the ban will work. Nor does the new policy include the word 'transgender' or the title of Mr. Trump’s executive order, 'Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,' referring to it instead as 'Executive Order 14201.'"

From "U.S. Olympic Officials Bar Transgender Women From Women’s Competitions/The U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee changed its eligibility rules on Monday to comply with President Trump’s executive order, taking the decision away from national governing bodies for each sport" (NYT).

Interesting language, especially "tucked under." It seems to evoke the effort of a biological man to pass as a woman. Did the NYT want us to see an analogy there? The U.S. Olympic Committee wants to look like it is what it wants to be. In this analogy, following Trump’s executive order corresponds to the male genitalia that must be "tucked under" and the look of female genitalia is achieved with the words "USOPC Athlete Safety Policy."

If that's not intentional, the editing at the NYT is incompetent/nonexistent. If it is intentional, it's hilarious and very very wrong.

Redstarts and that Wobbling Rock.

Rain nixed the sunrise run today, but the weather was lovely when the time came for what I call The Second Walk, and I encountered 2 very tiny, very active birds along the woodland path. 

The "Visual Intelligence" button on my phone informed me that they were redstarts. Redstarts! Never heard of them. And I say "them" because they're both there, male and female. The female is hard to see, but as The Beatles observed long ago, that means she's good looking.

I got a second outing, to the front yard, which is heavily shaded now. I sat on the bench and read a book — read it 3 times. Almost understood it.

Write about anything you want in the comments. Did you get outside 2 or 3 times? Did you read any books cover to cover, multiple times? 

"I knew that he loved the song because he played it at his rallies.... But I didn’t know he knew my name."

"It left me really gobsmacked that my name actually resides in his consciousness.... My theory is that Trump, on a deeper level, wants to connect. He’s trying to be seen and to be loved. So for a while there, I felt this kind of glimmer of hope that wouldn’t it be great if he could allow us, as theater artists, to share with him that which we know in storytelling to assist him to see things a bit differently."

Said Betty Buckley, quoted in "'Is Betty Buckley Still Alive?' Trump Asked. She Certainly Is. 'What’s happening these days,” the singer said at the start of a Joe’s Pub residency, 'is weird, and not cool'" (NYT).

"I still have hope for an awakening of awareness of community, of humanity, of the importance of life, the importance of every one of us. I’m appalled at the tech bros who think empathy is a weakness. Art is really important, because it’s there that we express these feelings — you can feel that connection — and I feel sure that that’s why Trump is moved by that song.... I would wish for him that he could build on that feeling that he has for the song, and translate that to good feelings for all others...."

If you touch me, you'll understand what happiness is....

ADDED: I'm struck by Buckley's idea that Trump is "trying to be seen and to be loved." It made me think of my Mother's Day post about a question a NYT writer thought we might ask our mother: "Who made you feel seen when you were growing up?" I hope that Trump invites Buckley to sing — on some appropriate occasion — and that she allows herself to be seen by and to see this person she believes has a longing to be seen. But I would guess that, like most celebrities, she wouldn't be caught dead with him.

Ironically, some of us would have empathized with Biden if we'd been allowed to hear this at the time.

It's the coverup that really hurts.

The scandal is MUCH worse than the Biden WH not releasing the tape. The so-called “independent” Merrick Garland crooked Justice Dept was SUBPOENAED by Congress to release it, he defied that subpoena after jailing Steve Bannon for defying one, then DOJ refused to jail Garland. https://t.co/TLzzdrosZf

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) May 16, 2025

Do you picture the desk jobs of others like this?

I think this is, essentially, how Elon Musk pictures 90% of the federal workforce:

"A startup called Sperm Racing, run by four teenage entrepreneurs from the US, said it had raised $1.5 million to stage the event at the Hollywood Palladium..."

"... on April 25. Eric Zhu, the company’s 17-year-old co-founder, said the inaugural event would pit samples taken from two healthy young university students against each other on a racetrack 20cm (8in) long and modelled on the female reproductive system.... 'We want to turn health into competition,' Zhu said. 'Sperm is surprising as a biomarker. The healthier you are, the faster sperm moves.'... A live video feed, magnified 40 times to display the 0.05mm spermatozoa, will track the samples’ progress....The event will be run over three races in front of a crowd of 4,000 spectators, and feature play-by-play commentary, instant replays and leaderboards, according to Zhu.

I'm reading "What to expect from ‘world’s first competitive sperm race’/A fertility startup raised $1.5 million to stage the event at the Hollywood Palladium this month" (London Times).

With the sperm expected to swim at a speed of 5mm per minute, each race will take something like 40 minutes. There are 3 races... and room for 4,000 spectators. Interesting concept, and congratulations to the teenagers for getting $1.5 million and an article in the London Times, but I think success here depends on the quality of the play-by-play commentators.

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: "What is the key to doing good play-by-play commentary for a long race, say 40 minutes?"

"Even Mao Zedong displayed a mischievous, almost grandfatherly warmth in private. Richard M. Nixon and Henry A. Kissinger were both startled..."

"... during their historic 1972 visit to China: Mao joked with them, played with words and made them feel at ease — a deliberate mask concealing one of history’s most devastating authoritarian records. Private interactions, no matter how pleasant, should never influence how we weigh any leader’s record. Matthews softened his judgment of Castro after their personal encounter, helping shape American perceptions of the Cuban revolution — perceptions that soon collided with reality. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain trusted Adolf Hitler’s private assurances during their meetings, describing Hitler afterward as a man with whom he could 'do business' — just before Europe descended into war."

Writes León Krauze in "Bill Maher went to Washington. He got played. Authoritarians always smile in private — especially to journalists" (WaPo).

"Matthews" = Herbert Matthews, who interviewed Castro in 1957, and wrote in the NYT: "The personality of the man is overpowering. It was easy to see that his men adored him."

The sky at 3:22 a.m.

We were out at 3:22 a.m. in the hope of seeing the northern lights, but it was not to be. I know people saw the lights much earlier in the evening — around 8, which seems much easier to do. The 3 a.m. slot is the least used hour of the day — is it not? It is when it is most likely that night owls and early birds will both be in bed. But it's a lovely time. Giving up on the lights, we drove around town, just for fun, before heading home.

Another night approaches. Use it well! If you need a place to write, you can write about whatever you like in the comments.

"We know there are people who are going to take things that they see out of context to bolster or inform their own narrative..."

"... and that is part of the tension with being super transparent: It potentially leaves you vulnerable for misunderstanding in a moment when we know that absolutely any function in election administration can be weaponized."

Said Tammy Patrick, the chief executive officer for programs at the National Association of Election Officials, quoted in "Latest strategy in fighting election skepticism: Radical transparency" (WaPo)(free-access link).

The crafter of language, Margaret Atwood, proffers a "hints"/"details" distinction and now proclaims what she knew but did not know to be "horrifying."

From "'I knew this day was going to come': Alice Munro associates say they knew of abuse/A biographer of the Canadian writer says he was among those who knew that Munro’s daughter had been sexually abused by her stepfather" (WaPo)(free access link):

The story has shocked much of the literary world, which widely mourned [Alice] Munro with glowing tributes after her death in May at 92. 

"I did not learn the details of this until everyone else did, though I’d had hints not long before this past weekend. Horrifying," Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, a friend of Munro’s, said in an email to The Post.

If something horrifying might be true, but you only have "hints" and not "details," you have some responsibility. Not only was Atwood Munro's friend, but Atwood writes books that purport to nudge and instruct us about morality. "The Handmaid's Tale" seems to be taken as a perceptive observation of the evils inherent in our culture, a warning to see and to act before it is too late. 

The sun got eclipsed in the middle of the day yesterday, but it also rose and set. Did you see that?

We did. From the front seat of the F-150, in Covington, Indiana, at 7:27 a.m. Eastern Time:

From the back door of the camper in Farmer City, Illinois, at 7:29 p.m. Central Time:

There is the rare peak event but also the beauty of the everyday.

As I'm writing this, searching for the right way to frame the profundity that feels just out of reach, Meade suddenly bellows, comically, "Well, what's next on our bucket list?"

I ask his permission to quote him, and he says yes and "You know I said that ironically."

"Yes, I wrote 'comically.' Don't worry. I won't let them think you said that seriously."

We're anti-bucket-list people, but we put a lot effort into doing a bucket-list thing. It was the last chance for the experience of a lifetime, and we drove 6-and-a-half hours each way to grab it. The sunrise and the sunset were captured spontaneously. And I'm only seeing that bird just now, symbolizing all those things that we see and don't really see.

ADDED: I had a few typos in the original draft of this post. Talk about seen and unseen. Corrected. And now I'm seeing the ghostly, spontaneous bird in the sunset clouds.

Only because the eagle swooped over my head before landing up there did I see him at all and notice the second eagle.

"So, in Poor Things, Emma Stone’s character is basically a woman with a child’s brain. And in this particular scene, she’s encountering dance and music for... the first time."

"How did you start to develop this dance? It’s such an interesting concept."

Asks the Slate writer Nadira Goff, in "How Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo’s Delightfully Weird Dance in Poor Things Came Together/Choreographer Constanza Macras on the standout scene, working with Yorgos Lanthimos, and expanding the idea of what dance is."

The choreographer answers: "It’s described in the script as a dance that is really going off because she’s just finding out [about dance]. So, with that in mind, I tried to create. [The director] was not convinced about some things; it looked too much like acting. When we passed it to the actors, then it grew and took shape. Emma Stone also had really good suggestions about her character because she was working, already, on this way that she moves. She brought in locking the knees. That gave shape to this dance as well."

Stone's character is a Frankenstein creation, so we may well compare the dancing to the Frankenstein in "Young Frankenstein":

That Frankenstein monster is able to dance smoothly, but his singing is very rough. That's the joke, and that gets to the question I was googling when I found that Emma Stone dance: Why do dancers always try to look as though what they are doing is very easy (for them) and pure joy (for them) while singers often act as though it's quite difficult and even painful? That's a big difference between singing and dancing, and I don't think it's because singing is more arduous and hurtful. Perhaps it's because the opposite is true, and the dancer must hide his feelings lest the audience turn away. But we don't turn away when a singer displays a horrible struggle and deep pain. We like that. What's our problem?!

I formulated my question after watching Fred Astaire and George Murphy in the first part of "Broadway Melody of 1940" (now streaming on the Criterion Channel). The first musical number is "Don't Monkey With Broadway" (modeling, for future satirists, how 2 men dance together in formalwear while wielding canes):

The men are unhappy with their job. We see them complaining back stage before they stride out beaming with joy — joy that does not exist but that the audience demands.

"He told me that his whole philosophy was to make sure that nobody ever noticed you. Don’t stand out, don’t do anything, or anybody will be able to criticize you."

Said Alison Holt, the sister of Geoffrey Holt, the subject of "He lived a quiet life — then donated $3.8 million to his small N.H. town" (WaPo).

[Geoffrey] Holt worked as a social studies and driver’s education teacher and in a grain mill before retiring and moving to the trailer park, where [he worked] as a handyman and groundskeeper.... Holt was shy and took to others slowly.... Holt collected die-cast cars and model trains and spoke excitedly about automobile history. In his mobile home and a nearby shed, he... was content to spend most of his time at home tinkering with model cars.... He dressed plainly in clothes he rarely replaced. He owned an old car but never used it, opting instead to ride his mower to a nearby Walmart if he needed to shop....

He had no children, and the sister told him she didn't need the money, so he left it to the town, where people barely knew him. Why did he have so much money? It seems that's what happens if you're frugal, invest what you don't spend, and live to be 82.

"My Fetish for a Second Skin/As a gay Korean American, I yearned for the privilege of being heterosexual or white. So I began wearing latex, a new skin."

This is a "Modern Love" essay, by Preston Gyuwon So, in the NYT.

I was lucky that the sexuality gods, in minting a kinky Asian queer, anointed me with a fetish fun enough to give me an escape from the cruelty of this racist reality. Latex fetishism is a predilection for form-fitting rubber clothing that’s shiny, slippery, slithery, sultry.... 

"On a continuum of good vs. evil, Zuckerberg is probably less evil than Elon. I don't like Zuckerberg, but Elon is a disgusting bottom dweller. I hope this is the nail in Twitter's coffin."

This is the top rated comment at the WaPo article "What we love and hate about Threads, Meta’s new Twitter clone/Threads may be the first Twitter alternative that really matters because it’s built on top of Instagram’s existing base of billions of users."

And it's a better answer to the question of what to "love and hate about Threads" than anything in the article, which suggests we ought to love Threads because it's easy to get on it via your Instagram account (which millions did without realizing that they can't delete their Threads account without deleting their Instagram account). 

Anyway, for me, the key thing to like (or "love") would be good, readable writing (and part of readability is the absence of visual clutter). But Threads won't let me look at it as a web page, and I won't accept the app without seeing that it's something I want. It's what people used to call a pig in a poke. Or, in some countries, a cat in a bag. At least with Twitter, I can see the pig/cat. 

And didn't Thoreau say, "Beware of enterprises requiring new apps"?

But let's think about that comment (in the post title). It states the "lesser of 2 evils" principle. I understand that in an election, but is this a lesser-of-2-evils situation? We don't need to choose one or the other. We can reject both.

Now, I'm reading the Wikipedia article "Lesser of two evils principle":

In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle writes: "For the lesser evil can be seen in comparison with the greater evil as a good, since this lesser evil is preferable to the greater one, and whatever preferable is good". The modern formulation was popularized by Thomas à Kempis' devotional book The Imitation of Christ written in early 15th century.

In part IV of his Ethics, Spinoza states the following maxim: 

Proposition 65: "According to the guidance of reason, of two things which are good, we shall follow the greater good, and of two evils, follow the less."

I'm sure these wise men all realized that there are circumstances where you can choose neither. For example, I abstained in the last election, and I endorse abstention as an option and argue with those who say you're doing something wrong if you refuse to vote. 

I get diverted into the Wikipedia article "False dilemma." The best thing about that article is this cool poster from 1910:

ADDED: I'm just noticing that the scales held aloft by the Chief Justice embody the principle of the lesser of 2 evils. There are just 2 options, and the weightier one ought to win.

AND: At least the Justice is considering legal arguments as the 2 options and choosing between the entities who are the parties in the lawsuit. By contrast, in the WaPo commenter's formulation, the 2 options are 2 human beings — Zuckerberg and Musk. We're not expected to understand the substance of what we'd be getting if we chose Threads or Twitter. That's too hard and too sober for us, the social media people, who gravitate toward decisions that are personified and inflated with scary, emotive insinuations of evil.

"Addiction haunts the recesses of this ancient port city, as people with gaunt, clumsy hands lift crack pipes to lips, syringes to veins."

"Authorities are sealing off warren-like alleyways with iron bars and fencing in parks to halt the spread of encampments. A siege mentality is taking root in nearby enclaves of pricey condos and multimillion-euro homes.... On a recent afternoon, an emaciated man in striped pants sleeping in front of a state-funded drug-use center awoke to a patrol of four officers. He sat up, then defiantly began assembling his crack pipe. Officers walked on.... Over the last 18 months, a drug encampment sprung up below a school. More homes have been burgled. One neighbor said she found a person, naked from the waist down, shooting up outside her house gate. Another had her laundry stolen three times. Residents have launched U.S.-style neighborhood watches and hired private security guards — something exceedingly rare in Europe...."

So begins "Once hailed for decriminalizing drugs, Portugal is now having doubts" (WaPo).

The city is Porto, Portugal.

We're told Portugal's approach to drugs was "globally hailed."

At the Biocore Prairie...

... you can write about whatever you want.

No sunrise photo this morning, though I did get out for today's sunrise. I let my phone battery die, so I was left using only my eyes to experience what was, today, a slow realization that the sun had already fully risen and I was seeing a very pale orange disc. How visible was it before I knew I was seeing it? The sneaky circle quickly brightened to the kind of deep solid orange that no one could miss.

Without a sunrise photo, I'm giving you 2 photos I took yesterday afternoon at 10 to 5. This is a section of the UW Biocore where they did a prescribed burn in the early spring. It was charred black not long ago, and these are the native plants that grew in — very lush and healthy. That's our beloved Lake Mendota in the background.

"... and I continue my nightly ritual..."

Ludicrously disingenuous letter to the NYT "Social Q" advice columnist:

My husband was chatting with our new neighbor when the neighbor mentioned he could see me undressing at night through my bathroom window. Our homes are on three-quarter-acre lots, so we’re not that close. My husband was speechless, and I continue my nightly ritual, which does not include drawing the shades. Was our neighbor wrong to say something? Shouldn’t he not look?

How do you "not look" at something that you must first see to know it's there and not to be looked at?

ADDED: The use of the word "ritual" lays bare the performance element of this woman's behavior. But the real question is, why did the NYT publish this letter? I'll bet I could write a blog, posting daily, devoted entirely to exposing the gratuitous nudity in the NYT.

For example — from May 19th — "Naked Stand-Up Comedy: Everything You Imagine, but Oh So Much More/Do you wear shoes onstage? What’s it like to bomb while nude? And, ahem, where do you keep your notes? But the shows often sell out" ("... she is entirely naked...").

And, from yesterday — "Judge Dismisses Lawsuit Over Nudity in ‘Romeo and Juliet’/The actors in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 film sued Paramount Pictures last year over a scene in which the star-crossed title characters woke up together in the nude" ("The judge dismissed the lawsuit, writing that the claim concerned filmmaking, a protected activity under the First Amendment").

"'F*** the rich. F*** the police. F*** the state. F*** the colonial death camp we call 'Canada.'"

Wrote Gabriel Sims-Fewer, owner of pay-whatever-you-want café, The Anarchist, quoted in "Go woke, go broke: Toronto 'anti-capitalist' anarchist café where customers 'pay what you can' shutters after a year after failing to make enough money. Owner slammed cops as 'pigs' and late Queen as a 'parasite'/The Anarchist in Toronto, Canada has shuddered after a year in business/The cafe had a 'pay what you can' model and was 'anti-capitalist/Shop's owner cited 'lack of generational wealth/capital seed' as the reason" (Daily Mail).

I love the notion that the café had such depth of feeling that it "shuddered." When capitalist-pig owned places go out of business, they merely shutter.

That's the only reason I'm blogging that too-predictable news. Well, that and the fascinating phrase "the colonial death camp we call 'Canada.'" Canada normally flies under the radar, following the strategy of inconspicuousness that works all too well in this crazy world.

10 days ago on this blog, we looked at the question "Why wouldn't most people decide the best way to live is to be as inconspicuous as possible?" 

Do pay attention to inconspicuous things. And when you see them, don't be afraid to offset their inconspicuousness by using hyperbole. Phrases like "the colonial death camp we call 'Canada'" can help people think more deeply about things.

Or would you rather bray at obvious things like the way pay-whatever-you-want cafés go out of business?