"There are cultural norms... Takashima said. A thunderous sneeze is a learned behavior..."

"... and 'you hardly ever hear anybody sneezing boisterously in Japan,' where [otolaryngologist] Takashima was born. 'It’s frowned upon to create such a loud noise, to bother the public' Takashima said... 'There’s nothing wrong with a loud sneeze,' [some guy] said. 'People’s perception that I, or anyone else, is a loud sneezer is entirely subjective.' But Rob Blatt, 43, the co-owner of a bar in Peekskill, New York, said he would like to be able to control his sneeze when he’s driving because he knows someone who got in a fender bender after sneezing behind the wheel. Blatt said he sneezes 'like the Tasmanian devil.... It’s a full-body experience, for better or worse.... It’s like a gunshot going off.'"

"Sneeze smarter, not louder: The science of a quieter sneeze" (WaPo).

Maybe you enjoy the kind of freely expressive sneezing that's frowned on in Japan. You have to want to change, but if you do, the advice is:

"There’s almost nothing I like more than a laughing fit. It is a non-brain response, like an orgasm or a sneeze."

"I wish I could say that only the comedies of Aristophanes make me laugh, but then my pants would catch on fire. I have cracked up at bons mots, but also at dirty jokes, dumb pets, and all sorts of things I 'shouldn’t' laugh at. Someone recently told me a joke that involved the pun 'a frayed knot,' and I laughed like a lunatic. I don’t know why, and I don’t care. Laughing is laughing."

Writes Roz Chast in "Roz Chast on George Booth’s Cartoons/Every object is lovingly drawn, in a way that only Booth could draw them. Every detail enhances the scene" (The New Yorker).

That reminds me, I recently laughed hysterically — way way too much — at the tiniest little non-joke on the old TV show that Meade puts on sometimes, "Leave It to Beaver." Somehow, the father (Ward) saw fit to ask his wife (June), "What is it, mattress-turning day?" It is a non-brain response, like an orgasm....

I watch TikTok so you don't have to. I've got 5 selections for you today.

1. A man impersonates various celebrities by showing only how they sneeze.

2. A little girl dances with awe-inspiring grace.

3. Comic lip-synching to the sound of Nancy Pelosi praising Joe Biden.

4. Woman who has no idea what's going on keeps referring to everything that's going on right now.

5. A comedienne dedicates a performance "to all the wealthy brooklyn moms i've met before." ("It's like, what's the point of naming him Atticus if he's not gonna be....")

Ordinarily, I welcome the opportunity to sneeze. Like my father before me, I love a good, loud, free sneeze.

But these are not normal times. I'm having cataract surgery in 10 days, and the instructions say that, post-surgery, you're not supposed to sneeze. Having researched methods for preventing a sneeze, I understand why sneezing is to be avoided. The nerve structure around your nose also ropes in your eyeballs! You don't want that kind of pressure and vibration on the site of the surgery.

Yesterday I watched this video...



... and this morning — when the urge to sneeze happened — I did it and it worked. I have 10 more days to respond to sneeze urges and to test that method, but I'm very optimistic that this is it. And it's so well explained in that video!

"Mega-donor urged Bannon not to resign/Trump’s strategist threatened to leave the White House after clashing with Jared Kushner."

Politico reports:

Five people, including a senior administration official and several sources close to the president, tell POLITICO that Bannon, one of Trump’s closest advisers, has clashed with the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who’s taken on an increasingly prominent portfolio in the West Wing. Bannon has complained that Kushner and his allies are trying to undermine his populist approach, the sources said.

Republican mega-donor Rebekah Mercer, a longtime Bannon confidante who became a prominent Trump supporter during the campaign, urged Bannon not to resign. “Rebekah Mercer prevailed upon him to stay,” said one person familiar with the situation....

It's good to have 5 sources, but I can't tell what happened that justifies the verb "clashed." That could mean a lot of things, and I'm suspicious that journalists antagonistic to Trump are eager to impose a chaos template. (It seems to alternate with the evil template.)

Politico observes that Kushner's power has "ballooned":

He has helped to expand the authority of two senior West Wing officials who, like him, are less ideological in nature: former Goldman Sachs executives Gary Cohn, who is now chairman of the National Economic Council, and Dina Powell, the deputy national security adviser for strategy. The national security directive removing Bannon from the NSC explicitly authorized Powell to attend the National Security Council's Principals' and Deputies' Committee meetings.

I'm familiar with the name Gary Cohn only because I just read — in a NYT interview transcript —  Trump's reaction when Gary Cohn sneezed:

TRUMP: God bless you. You O.K., Gary? That was a pretty tough one. I’ve got to make sure my man is all right.

I don't know if Trump and Cohn have a sneeze-and-response routine to break the tension. It happened right when Maggie Haberman was bearing in, looking for specifics about which U.S. airports really deserve to be called — as Trump had put it — a "horror show." But I'll assume it was a random sneeze, and Trump loves to spontaneously switch topics. It's fun. It makes him look cute and smart (or so he may think). And it makes it hard for others to keep up even as he looks as if he's not racing ahead. He's manifesting distractability, and it makes them think he's less competent. But everyone laughed, and Trump got away with never saying exactly which airports are a horror show. 

Oh, yes — do I seem distractable? — there's all that chaos around Trump. Bannon and Jared are clashing. Cohn is sneezing.

And Rebekah Mercer is... holding people together? I know who Rebekah Mercer is, because I read Jane Mayer's piece in The New Yorker, "THE RECLUSIVE HEDGE-FUND TYCOON BEHIND THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY/How Robert Mercer exploited America’s populist insurgency":

[Robert Mercer] poured millions of dollars into Breitbart News.... By 2016, Breitbart News claims, it had the most shared political content on Facebook, giving the Mercers a platform that no other conservative donors could match. Rebekah Mercer is highly engaged with Breitbart’s content. An insider there said, “She reads every story, and calls when there are grammatical errors or typos.” Though she doesn’t dictate a political line to the editors, she often points out areas of coverage that she thinks require more attention. Her views about the Washington establishment, including the Republican leadership, are scathing. “She was at the avant-garde of shuttering both political parties,” the insider at Breitbart said. “She went a long way toward the redefinition of American politics.”

Much more about Robert and Rebekah Mercer at that New Yorker article. Back at the Politico piece, we see that Jared Kushner supposedly thinks that Rebekah and Robert Mercer "have taken too much credit" for Trump's victory and that he has "misgivings about their go-it-alone approach to outside spending boosting Trump’s agenda."

“If Bannon leaves the White House, Bekah’s access and influence shrinks dramatically,” said the GOP operative who talks to Mercer.

"One pair of [separated-at-birth] twins both suffered crippling migraines, owned dogs that they had named Toy, married women named Linda..."

"... and had sons named James Allan (although one spelled the middle name with a single 'l'). Another pair—one brought up Jewish, in Trinidad, and the other Catholic, in Nazi Germany, where he joined the Hitler Youth—wore blue shirts with epaulets and four pockets, and shared peculiar obsessive behaviors, such as flushing the toilet before using it. Both had invented fake sneezes to diffuse tense moments. Two sisters—separated long before the development of language—had invented the same word to describe the way they scrunched up their noses: 'squidging.' Another pair confessed that they had been haunted by nightmares of being suffocated by various metallic objects—doorknobs, fishhooks, and the like."

From "Same but Different/How epigenetics can blur the line between nature and nurture," by Siddhartha Mukerjee in The New Yorker.

"A List Of Recurring Fred Armisen, Bill Hader, And Jason Sudeikis Characters..."

"... Ranked In Descending Order Of How Much This Commentator Will Miss Them."

Via Throwing Things, where they're going to miss Fred Amisen's Prince:

"Physicist writes four-page math paper to beat $400 traffic ticket."

"The paper concludes that due to the officer's placement, the sneeze and the obstructing car, the cop's 'perception of reality did not properly reflect reality.'"

All that texting.

I sneezed downstairs. Got the text: "Gesundheit."

Some people sneeze when they think about sex.

Who knows why?



Sherman the Monkey. What is he thinking?

Anyway... sneezing and orgasms: compare and contrast.

1. Just thinking about sex might make you sneeze.

2. ...