"I wait for him to misspell or mispronounce something, and then I wait for my Serial Brain to decode."

Said Michelle Sellati, who attended Trump's Cincinnati rally last night, quoted in "Fear and gloating in Cincinnati" (WaPo). She was one of the "noticeable contingent of rallygoers wearing the symbols of the QAnon conspiracy theory." WaPo explains that QAnon "helps explain the president’s foibles to those who see him as the author of living scripture" and that Serial Brain is "a YouTube channel that she says analyzes the missing letters in the president’s tweets — and the garbled words in the president’s mouth — for clues to what’s going to happen in the future." Asked to explain something that did take place after a coded clue from Trump, Sellati said, "The chemtrails are gone. Since July 4. Look at the sky. It’s beautiful." I'm just going to hope Sellati and Serial Brain are wily pranksters.

"Ocasio-Cortez somehow assumed Americans eat out three times a day."

Says Daily Wire, quoting this:

I can tell you a very personal story. As many people know, I was working in restaurants just a year ago, and when the president first assumed office with his racist and violent rhetoric, people started to send themselves home. And as we know, in restaurants, hospitality, every American eats if you can, if you’re lucky enough or we’re able to eat three times a day. And that means that we interact with the people who prepare our food three times a day. When those people start to go home, or rather go back to the countries which they originated from because many of them consider the United States their home, those places, they go into dysfunction.

"Notes found in one of the diaries hint that a strong belief that supernatural forces would intervene and save them could have motivated the family to hang themselves."

BBC reports, in "Were occult practices behind India's 'house of mass hangings'?"

The notes in the diaries laid out exactly how the family [of 11] needed to "hang themselves" before they were to be saved. Many of these "instructions" appear to have been carried out... The diaries also said the family needed to cover their eyes and mouths with a cloth during the "ritual". It also specified certain rituals to be performed for seven consecutive days before the "final day". The rituals, it said, would "invoke the spirit" which would ask them to "complete" the task the following day. The notes also said that his mother, Devi, should be "made to go to sleep" in the next room if she "can't stand". It mentioned the time of the "final act" - between midnight and 1am. It also said on that day the "earth would tremble and the sky would shake and it is then that I will come to rescue you".

Police said they are still trying to understand if or why the rest of the family went along with the plans. They believe it is possible that the Chundawat family was suffering from "shared psychotic disorder".... [B]ased on footage from CCTV cameras installed around the neighbourhood, police suspect that the "ritual" mentioned in the notes could have begun on 26 June when one member of the family met a temple priest.

"Temple priest" — what religion are we talking about here? Maybe I missed it, but I don't think any religion is specified. I can see wanting to protect religions from association with this horror, but I don't think facts this significant should be suppressed in a news report.

Here's another report, in The Hindi, with much more detail:

"It’s nearly time for Dalle to leave. Tell me about your religious faith, I say, nodding at her tattoo."

It's a tattoo of a cross, and the Guardian reporter is pushing the charming actress Béatrice Dalle to get material for this piece that ended up with a provocative title that made me click, "Interview/Betty Blue’s Béatrice Dalle: ‘I love Christ because he invented bondage." So try to understand the attitude and spirit of her answer:

“I was raised a Catholic and still go to church every week. In fact, it’s the one round the corner on the Rue de Turenne. Write this down,” she says. “I love you, Jesus Christ!” For a moment, I don’t understand what she’s saying. “Jesus!” she says incredulously, pointing upwards. “You know, the boss?” Why do you love him? “I love Christ because he invented bondage,” she says, laughing shamelessly. Is that what you tell your priest? She ignores the question and stands up to make her point. “Think of how he hangs on the cross with his hips swung out.” She imitates his pose. “He’s very sexy, no?” A final cackle, a quick selfie, two kisses and she’s gone.

Does anyone take the trouble to understand anything anymore?

"The full-beat face has become the ubiquitous face of the Internet, a strange mirror of Kim Kardashian’s visage but also somehow just like Internet influencer Huda Kattan’s and Kylie Jenner’s, too."

"Instagram is awash in full-beat glory.... Save for variations in skin color and precise shade of shimmering eye shadow, the women all look uncannily the same. It’s the 'Instagram look'... 'When you take a picture, you lose the dimension on your face. The light will wash it away.' Over time, savvy ’Grammers realized that with a small mountain of makeup...  you could replace the shadows and the light... [You need] 'an elongated eye, lashes, contouring, bronzing, highlighting, and sculpting'... A theatrical set of drawn-on brows. And finally... a matte lip so overdrawn that it can look like an allergic reaction.... [T]he goal is to give yourself features you don’t actually possess: brighter, bigger eyes, a narrower, daintier nose, eyes so fringed in false lashes that they look as if they can’t possibly bear the weight. 'We’re a walking painting'..."

From "Brows, contour, lips, lashes: How the ‘full-beat face’ took over the Internet" (WaPo).

These things go in cycles. I can't believe that young people won't come to associate heavy makeup with the older generation and to rediscover the special attraction of looking natural while you have the gift of youth. As for older women, I can't believe they don't see themselves as garish and clownlike in heavy makeup. Yet if people don't live in the real world but only in photographs and video, then maybe stage makeup is where we will end up. In that case, the argument shouldn't be give up the horridly heavy makeup but: Return to living in the natural world.

I have a vague hope that the new generation will acquire an aversion to photography.

Or... here's an idea for one of my unwritten books. It's science fiction: It turns out actually to be true — as some seemingly ill-informed people have long believed — that photography steals a person's soul. These poor people who have been doing those ever more exaggerated "full-beat" faces in fact lost their souls a while back, perhaps somewhere around the 1,000th selfie.

What did Noel Neill — the Lois Lane of the 1950s — mean to you?

The actress has died at the age of 95, and I hadn't noticed, but I got a text from RLC saying: "I assume you're going to blog about Noel Neill!!" I didn't even remember the name, and I looked it up and saw the obituary, and I wondered why my ex-husband had that assumption about me. Or was it just that he liked her?

Then I was looking at old pictures of Neill and I saw one that took me back to a childhood memory that perhaps, long ago, I conveyed to RLC. Here's the picture:



"Adventures of Superman" was on TV from 1952 — when I was 1 — to 1958 — when I was 7. That show made some kind of impression on my undefended, very young mind. When I thought about becoming an adult — turning into a woman — I pictured Noel Neill. Dressed like that, hair like that, demeanor like that.  I had my own particular look and ways about me as a girl, but I believed a finished condition, adulthood, stood at the end of childhood. My formative period — girlhood — would end, and I would, of necessity, at the age of 21, become an adult woman, and that woman I saw in my head for years and years, was — as I got closer to actual adulthood I recognized her — NOEL NEILL!!

"The annual Yulin Lychee and Dog Meat Festival... will open this week coinciding with the summer solstice...."

"According to traditional Chinese medicine, some foods... have warm energy... Both dog meat and lychees are seen as warming.... In parts of China, dog meat is typically consumed in the winter because it is seen as warming and restorative. But in the southern Chinese city of Yulin, some say eating dog meat and drinking lychee liquor on the summer solstice is an old tradition... [T]he concept of 'yire gongre,' or using heat to attack heat, is also prevalent."

"In the current flap over some things that Dr. Carson said, the biggest discrepancy has been between the furor in the media and the irrelevance of his statements to any political issue."

Writes Thomas Sowell, noting that "the Pyramids are not an issue in today’s American political campaign."

Well, yeah, but the soundness of the mental processes of the candidates is always a central issue and never irrelevant.

By contrast, the media showed no such zeal to expose Barack Obama’s associations and alliances with a whole series of people who expressed their hatred of America in words and/or deeds. Here was something relevant to his suitability to become president. But the media saw no evil, heard no evil and spoke no evil.

And that was wrong, not something to somehow balance by not looking into Ben Carson's suitability as President. Even if it is true that Obama's ties to radical left-wingers were more relevant than Carson's kooky pyramid theory, I want to hear about any strange notions Carson has propounded in his years as a public figure. Does he study the facts of the real world and process them accurately and make appropriate conclusions? If not, I don't want him making the decisions that will affect us all. I agree that Obama did not get fully tested and America took a leap of faith, but that doesn't establish that it should be leaps of faith from here on.

"But the problem with thinking of Mars as a fallback planet (besides the lack of oxygen and air pressure and food and liquid water) is that it overlooks the obvious."

"Wherever we go, we’ll take ourselves with us. Either we’re capable of dealing with the challenges posed by our own intelligence or we’re not. Perhaps the reason we haven’t met any alien beings is that those which survive aren’t the type to go zipping around the galaxy. Maybe they’ve stayed quietly at home, tending their own gardens."

From "Project Exodus/What’s behind the dream of colonizing Mars?" by Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker (which I believe is available even to nonsubscribers).

I'm reading that because I read The New Yorker, but by coincidence, I'd just been rereading old Dan Quayle quotes. (Because yesterday, it became necessary to remind you: "What a waste it is to lose one's mind, or not to have a mind is being very wasteful, how true that is.") And I loved this one:

"Mars is essentially in the same orbit . . . Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe."

Remember the Mars canals?



Almost as entrancing at The Man in the Moon:



But to get back to the garden — and to The New Yorker — here's a March 2007 piece by Adam Gopnik titled "Voltaire's Garden":

Voltaire goes on to detail the hideous theatrics of the Inquisition: the yellow robes, the burnings and flogging set to Church music, the whole choreography of Christian cruelty. The point of “Candide” is that the rapes and disembowelments, the enslavement and the beatings are not part of some larger plan, not a fact of the fatality of life and the universe, but fiendish tortures thought up by fanatics....

By “garden” Voltaire meant... the better place we build by love. The force of that last great injunction, “We must cultivate our garden,” is that our responsibility is local, and concentrated on immediate action... The horror that Voltaire wanted crushed, cruelty in the name of God and civilization, was a specific and contingent thing... The villains are the villains: Jesuits and Inquisitors and English judges and Muslim clerics and fanatics of all kinds. If they went away, life would be much better. He knew that the flood would get your garden no matter what you did; but you could at least try to keep the priests and the policemen off the grass. It wasn’t enough, but it was something.

"When you desire to make any one 'love' you with whom you meet... you can very readily reach him..."

Says The Ladies' Book of Useful Information (1896):

Wherever or whenever you meet again, at the first opportunity grasp his hand in an earnest, sincere, and affectionate manner, observing at the same time the following important directions, viz.: As you take his bare hand in yours, press your thumb gently, though firmly, between the bones of the thumb and the forefinger of his hand, and at the very instant when you press thus on the blood vessels (which you can before ascertain to pulsate) look him earnestly and lovingly in the eyes, and send all your heart's, mind's, and soul's strength into his organization, and he will be your friend...

His organization, eh?

I was all about to find Meade and try that move, but I got distracted by "organization" and had to check out the (unlinkable) Oxford English Dictionary. Here are a couple quotes therefrom to help you grasp "organization" (until it pulsates):

1860 Dickens Uncommerc. Traveller in All Year Round 24 Mar. 513/1, I must stuff into my delicate organisation, a currant pincushion which I know will swell into immeasurable dimensions when it has got there.

1908 G. K. Chesterton Man who was Thursday 39 You, my poor fellow, are an anarchist deprived of the help of that law and organization which is so essential to anarchy.

"Self-esteem. This organ is situated at the vertex or top of the head..."

"... a little above the posterior or sagittal angle of the parietal bones."

In phrenology, self-esteem is: "One of the mental faculties with which an ‘organ’ or ‘bump’ in the cranium is associated; the ‘bump’ itself." That's from the (unlinkable) OED, where I was looking up "self-esteem," after blogging about Monica Lewinsky's 40th birthday and cherry-picking the old Barbara Walters prompt "Where was your self-esteem?"

Monica, had she known phrenology, might have said: Where? It's at the top of my head, of course, a little above the posterior or sagittal angle of the parietal bones.



Too bad I don't have comments or you could supply me with the jokes about Clinton's "organ" and the location of his self-esteem. I won't go there, other than to say that I see that one could. I've got lofty plans for the direction of this blog post.

"Ancient Egyptian statue at Manchester Museum moves on its own."

They haven't figured out why, but one clue is the hieroglyphics on the back. They say: "bread, beer and beef."

ADDED: More here. The inscription is: "An offering which the king gives to Osiris, Lord of Life, that he may give a voice offering, consisting of bread, beer, oxen and fowl for the Ka-spirit of."

The mysterious orange goo found in Alaska is... eggs!

But what creature's eggs, we don't know.

The eggs were found on at least one roof and in buckets set all over the village to collect rain water. City Councilwoman Frances Douglas said the gooey, slimy substance was widely spread in streaks along the Wulik River and the lagoon, which is a half mile wide and six miles long. Orangey water was reported from as far away as the village of Buckland, 150 miles southeast of Kivalina....

Even village elders don't recall anything like it, said Douglas, who has lived all her 44 years in Kivalina. She remembers temperatures were colder in her childhood, gradually rising over the years. She wonders if that has anything to do with the invasion of the eggs.

"With climate change, anything can happen, I guess," she said.

No, I think it sounds more like aliens. Come on. You're the one that said invasion. Unless! Unless! Aliens are causing climate change!

"Protesters Destroy Recall Petitions Against Wisconsin Democrat."

More strange ideas of — to use the Wisconsin protester's catchphrase — "what democracy looks like."

New horoscopes by Anna...

... hmmm. It seems I'm Bag.

"Heathers," etc.

1. The Daily News has a where-are-they-now photo essay on the various actors from the great 1989 movie "Heathers."

2. I didn't know Jennifer Connelly turned down the Winona Ryder role, though I did know that Ryder has done nothing of note since her 2001 arrest for shoplifting. That poor woman paid such a heavy price for her crime. Come on, everyone. Forgive Winona.

3. I didn't know Kim Walker/Heather Chandler died of a brain tumor in 2001. (Classic "chainsaw" video clip — language alert.) ("Please send Heather to Heaven.")

4. I was happy to see that Glenn Shadix/Father Ripper is still a busily working actor. ("I love my dead gay son.")

5. And look what became of the nerdy boy.

6. "Betty Finn" was a real Estevez.

7. They're working on the Broadway musical version of "Heathers." The new Veronica Sawyer might be Kristen Bell. What do you think of the idea of "Heathers," the musical? Is the movie popular with Broadway fans? Sort of like "Hairspray"? I loved the movie and I loved the original movie "Hairspray," but I had no interest in seeing the show "Hairspray" or the movie made from the show. But that's just me. I guess I don't want to see any Broadway shows made from movies, though I did see "Nine" many years ago... when Raul Julia played Guido.

8. I miss Raul Julia! But what the hell was going on here?

"I have a crush on Jimmy Carter. I admit it. He has an extraordinary mind. He's an exceptional human being."

"And he writes poetry, for crying out loud. He's all good things."

A paean to the inauguration: "Hallelujah... for being smart again. And sexy again. And optimistic again."

This is one of those Maira Kalman illustrated essays in the NYT. I don't want this much sugar in my morning coffee. So let me just say... "sexy"? Is it the government that is sexy now or the people who are enthusiastic about the government who are sexy? Or are you saying you feel sexually attracted to Barack Obama? Or do you just think all the sexy people are liberals or — no one could possibly be this silly — all the liberals are sexy people?

So those are some questions for you. Now, I will answer one question that you raise:

And a woman named Renata asked: "Why [take the oath] on the Bible? Why not on the Constitution?" And I think that is a Very Good Question.

It's a very easy question. The President must swear to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." There would be no safeguard against lying if you swore on the document you were swearing to uphold. If he doesn't intend to respect the document, he has his hand on a document he doesn't respect.

"Is Barack Obama.... deliberately using the techniques of neurolinguistic programming (NLP), a covert form of hypnosis...?"

"A fundamental tool of 'conversational hypnosis' is pacing and leading—a way for the hypnotist to bypass the listener’s critical faculty by associating repeated statements that are unquestionably accurate with the message he wants to convey."

That assertion is failing to bypass my critical faculty.

UPDATE: LOL! Rush Limbaugh is talking about this theory in the first segment of his show today.

What are some irrational things that's intelligent, educated people believe in?

For example, I know law professors who believe in astrology.