I caught a glimpse of my own obituary.

In the email this morning, the Google alert I've had on my name for decades brings this:

I send that image to Meade (along with the link to the website the alert wants me to click), and this conversation follows:

"Crooked Joe’s MANDATE, 'NO PLASTIC STRAWS, ONLY PAPER,' IS DEAD! Enjoy your next drink without a straw that disgustingly dissolves in your mouth!!!"

As you can tell from the all-caps and the triple exclamation points, that's Trump, hating on the straws everyone hates.

I avoid straws myself, and so the now-defunct plastic straw ban had no effect on me, but I do remember paper straws from the 1950s, when I was growing up, and kids just chewed on the straws, and if they dissolved in our mouth, we just ate them, and we liked it.

These days, if a kid eats paper, it's "a concerning behavior that should not be ignored" ("Whether it’s due to sensory issues, stress, or anxiety, nutritional deficiencies, developmental disorders, or curiosity, it’s essential to seek professional help and guidance to ensure your child’s safety and well-being").

By the way, don't miss the song parodies in the comments to yesterday's "Big Balls and Plastic Straws" challenge.

I want a song parody that uses the phrases "Big Balls" and "plastic straws" — maybe to the tune of "Popsicles and Icicles."

Try to include a lot of the Trump-related items that are bouncing around the internet today. I can't blog all these things. There are too many. And it's too absurd. I've already asked A.I., but it just doesn't know how to make it interesting and funny. 

Here's the inspiration (and note the straws!):

"They'll rue the day they made fun of these bad boys. Woe to those who make fun of the cargo shorts and then suddenly need some snacks, a multitool, a first-aid kit, or a Johnny Cash CD. Yeah, I've got all that stuff in here and more."

Said Brent Barden, quoted in "Family Gonna Be Sorry When They Want Some Trail Mix From Dad's Cargo Shorts They Just Made Fun Of" (in The Babylon Bee, which apparently has heard of my disparagement of it and decided to try to appeal to me by using my well-known "men in shorts" issue).

ADDED: "Yeah, I've got all that stuff in here and more." Care to rewrite that, Babylon Bee? It's a father, humorously addressing children, and you've unwittingly got him sort of threatening them with his genitalia! And that's right after he's talking about them getting into his pants to find something to eat. So ham-handed!

OH? You've got ham hands? Can I have a ham-hand sandwich, Dad?

HEY: A guy once did make a ham-hand sandwich of sorts...



WELL: That video sure made me laugh a lot. I'm ready to watch all videos by I Did a Thing. You know, there's no arguing with taste, especially in humor... and in bread gloves.

ALSO: "Mad respect for a man willing to strap a laundry basket to his back, put flippers on his hands, and get in a bathtub just to reenact a sea turtle getting a straw stuck in his nose and then slowly dying."

"Ms. Gabbard comes across as shy or maybe tense. She is not the jovial politician cracking jokes with her staff or buttering people up."

"Doom is her main talking point. The only personal topics she speaks about easily are veganism and fitness. She says she is a big fan of mixed martial arts and drops in on classes while on the trail. As a child, she could not afford taekwondo classes, so she started doing capoeira, which was taught in the park for free, she said. Her husband is more chatty. At a snack break, Mr. Williams grabs a Capri Sun and sticks the straw in the opposite way, which he says is better. 'When we were first dating, one of my best friends said, "Dude, you’re gonna be in the White House one day,"' and I was just like, "Yeahhh."'"

From "Tulsi Gabbard Thinks We’re Doomed/Or we will be if America doesn’t leave the rest of the world alone. That’s why the 38-year-old congresswoman from Hawaii is running for president," a weird little article in the NYT.

I don't know what "sticks the straw in the opposite way" means!

The article doesn't have the word "doom" in a quote from Gabbard. It does have her saying, "There are thousands of nuclear missiles pointing right at us, and if we were to get an attack, we would have 30 minutes, 30 minutes, before we were hit," but that's a fact that's a component of any serious thinking about national security, so I don't see how citing it makes "Doom... her main talking point."

I'm going to warily give this post my "NYT pushes Kamala" tag. That's where I keep track of my suspicion that the Times (and MSM generally) predetermined that Kamala's the one. Here's the mention of Kamala Harris in the article:

After Ms. Gabbard tore into presidential candidate Kamala Harris for her prosecutorial record during the second Democratic debates on Wednesday, the California senator on CNN called Ms. Gabbard an “apologist for an individual, Assad, who has murdered the people of his country like cockroaches.”

The article doesn't have Gabbard responding specifically on Assad, but quotes her saying, "We should be coming to other leaders in other countries with respect, building a relationship based on cooperation rather than with, you know, a police baton."

Gabbard is also connected to some people Democrats will be wary of: Ron Paul ("Tulsi Gabbard by far is the very, very best"), Ann Coulter ("Go Tulsi!"), and Joe Rogan ("Tulsi Gabbard’s my girl, I’m voting for her I decided, I like her"), Twitter's Jack Dorsey (who's contributed), and David Duke (who "has tweeted approvingly").

I think what's going on is that Gabbard is dangerous to Democratic Party interests. The doom sensed is defeat in the presidential election.

In 1964, when I was 13, I went to the movies to see "A Hard Day's Night," and it was a double feature.

The other movie — the movie I've chosen for 1964 in my "imaginary movie project" — was "For Those Who Think Young."



That poster says it's "The swingin'est young people's picture of the year," and I saw it immediately after that other "young people's picture," "A Hard Day's Night." Two entirely different visions of "young."

Compare Pamela Tiffin (who was was 22 in 1964) with Pattie Boyd (who was 20):



I made both of those screen grabs, and I can tell you Tiffin was done up like that for a day at the beach. Tiffin oozed maturity. Movies like this were called "beach party" movies, but her character was a college student who was continually attending to her studies and she was insistent that her boyfriend, the rich kid (James Darren), treat her with complete respect. Boyd played a schoolgirl whose role was to gawp at the Beatles and say her one line, "Prisoners?!"

Why didn't I pick "A Hard Day's Night" for my project? It fits the requirement that I need to have seen it in the theater when it came out. But I'd already rewatched "A Hard Day's Night" a time or 2, and I want to compare my original response with what I feel now, so... too much static. And there's something specific I remember about seeing "For Those Who Think Young" when I was 13: I enjoyed it more than "A Hard Day's Night."

But why? That's a mystery to solve. First, I loved Bob Denver. The show "Gilligan's Island" debuted in the fall of that year, but I knew him from my favorite TV show, "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis," which was on from 1959 to 1963. I had a 8"x10" glossy photo — I'd sent in for it — of Denver as Maynard G. Krebs. I loved the beatnik character who questioned all of society's conventions — especially work.

Let me show you about 10 minutes of "For Those Who Think Young," beginning with the Bob Denver character. He's meditating, and this is 4 years before The Beatles took up Transcendental Meditation. This segment continues with some Tiffin/Darren interplay and reaches a peak with Bob Denver buried in the sand using his mouth in a way that I found gut-bustingly hilarious in 1964. And don't miss Nancy Sinatra:



Did you see that early #MeToo wokeness? Nancy hits Bob for kissing her in an entirely nonphysical way. The meditation is so strong.

The Bob Denver character, Kelp, is employed as Darren's assistant, and we see him running over to serve him and Tiffin some drinks in tall glasses. Before running off, Kelp then slips one of those glasses into his swimsuit pocket, where it bulges like an erection I didn't notice in '64.

I don't think I'd ever seen a commercial where a white person tells off a black person.

But in the world of straw-phobia, new things are happening....

Watching your front door security footage after your child has consumed the milkshake the DoorDash guy delivered.

You see the guy drinking the shake.

My question: Why would you accept delivery of a shake with an unwrapped, open straw sticking out of it? It's obviously unsanitary.

I was a little surprised to see this story made the front page of the New York Daily News. It's so piddlingly small. And yet... it is one of the nagging fears of modern life. You're not supervising the preparation and service of your own food. You want other people doing this work, and that means that many hands (and mouths and other body parts) touch or could touch your food. What's going on?
And here's a case where you've got video of what you fear....

"This is the third year Louisiana crawfish have been seen in Berlin."

"City wildlife officer Derk Ehlert says when crawfish first appeared, the city released eels into the waterways, hoping they'd catch the crawfish and eat them. But then the next year, there were still 3,000 crawfish in the parks. This year there are 10 times as many and they seem to be spreading. At one point, hundreds of crawfish clambered out of the lake and ambled along the Tiergarten's shaded paths.... To the west of the Tiergarten, in the Spandau borough, Olaf Pelz cracked the shell of one of Hidde's red crawfish in his restaurant, called Fisch Frank... 'When we serve it here we make it with salad and bread and typical sauce,' he says. He puts dollops of mayonnaise and cocktail sauce on the plate, and tops the crawfish with a thin slice of lemon. Despite his efforts, customers are skeptical. Erika Klugert rises from her outdoor table to watch Pelz uncover the soft tail meat of the crawfish. 'This food requires too much work,' Klugert says."

From "For Berlin, Invasive Crustaceans Are A Tough Catch And A Tough Sell" (NPR).

I wanted to give this post a "crustaceans" tag, but I didn't want to create a new tag. So I started typing out the word in the place where I add my tags, and by the time I got to "crus-," there was only one tag the software was suggesting, and it wasn't "crustaceans," so that's it for the potential "crustaceans" tag.

I'm not creating a new tag, because I don't want to bother with adding it retroactively, searching for crustaceans in the 14-year archive. Sometimes I do create new tags and do that work. For example, I did it yesterday with Kathleen Turner. But that was a matter of doing a search for "Kathleen Turner."

"Crustaceans" would not be so easy. I'd have to look up which animals are crustaceans and search for them individually.

And I already have separate tags for some of them — lobsters (with 41 posts!) and crabs (with 17 posts!). But I don't have a "shrimp" tag. And I've mentioned shimp quite a few times.

Should I now create a "shrimp" tag and a "crawfish" tag? But today's post is only the second mention of crawfish in the history of the blog. The first was "Barack spent so much time by himself that it was like he was raised by wolves" (from 2010). Excerpt:

In the end the story of Barack Obama will make perfect sense. It will all fit together. The lonely man — raised by wolves — swept up into our American psychosis.

“Even though I’m president of the United States, my power is not limitless,” Obama, who has forced himself to ingest a load of gulf crab cakes, shrimp and crawfish tails, whinged to Grand Isle, La., residents on Friday. “So I can’t dive down there and plug the hole. I can’t suck it up with a straw.”

What's weird is that I included that 2009 photo of myself that I also reused 3 days ago. It's funny how things cycle around in blogging. Leaving tags along the way can help tie things together, but some of the tagging just leads to weirdness. So, when I was starting to write "crustaceans," and there was only one suggestion left when I got to "crus-," can you imagine what it was? It was "husbands crushing their wives' aspirations"! As noted above, that tag had only one post. It was: "Anthony Weiner says he 'crushed the aspirations' of Huma Abedin."

That was just last September. What was I thinking? That it was funny to do that as a one-time tag or that the tag would cause me to notice this phenomenon and amass evidence of it? If the latter, it couldn't work unless I remembered the tag, which I didn't. Maybe now I'll remember it, and the aspiration-crushing husbands will be noticed and collected as they clamber out of the lake and amble along the shaded paths.

ADDED: On rereading this post, the one tag I'd like to create is "straw." Obama "can’t suck it up with a straw," there's the recent straw-related environmentalism, and I know I've blogged about not liking how people look sucking on straws.

"List of school pranks."

A Wikipedia article I'm reading as a consequence of the discussion of the idea of banning plastic straws, here, earlier this morning. The conversation turned to the disgustingness of paper straws, old memories of chewing on paper straws welled up, and I said "And that's how spitballing was invented!" If you got the paper to chew from a straw, the means to jet-propel it is right in your hand.

But oh! All those other pranks! Did you know all these? Example:

Kancho is a prank played in Japan; it is performed by clasping the hands together so the index fingers are pointing out and attempting to insert them sharply into someone's anal region when the victim is not looking. It is similar to the wedgie or a goosing. Kancho means "enema". In South Korea it is known as "ddong-chim" This prank is also played in Scotland, in this case known as a 'fishy' or 'jobbie jab'. In Brazil is known as Pula Pirata (literally, Jump Pirate), named after the name which the game Pop-up Pirate is known there.

The article ends with a link to "List of hazing deaths in the United States." That list goes back only to the 1800s. Here's something that happened at Yale in 1892:

A pledge was led blindfolded through the street during his fraternity initiation towards Moriarty's Cafe, a popular student hang-out. He was told to run and did so at top speed. He ran into a sharp carriage pole, injuring himself. He was rendered unconscious, but the injury was not thought to be serious at the time. He suffered an intestine rupture and died five days later of peritonitis.

Here's something that happened at the Loyal Order of Moose in Birmingham, Alabama in 1913:

Kenny and Gustin... were made to look upon a red hot emblem of the Order, then blindfolded, disrobed and had a chilled rubber version of the emblem applied to their chests, while a magneto was attached to their legs and an electric current was applied to them by a wire to their shoulders. The aim was evidently to make them believe that they were being branded. Both men fainted, but, as it was thought that they were feigning, the lodge officers did not stop the initiation until it was evident that the two were dying and the lodge physician was unable to revive them.

What those stories about the environmental impact of plastic straws aren't telling you.

I'm reading "Plastic straws aren’t just bad for the environment — they can be bad for your body" (WaPo).

An estimated 7.5 percent of plastic in the environment comes from straws and stirrers, according to an analysis by a group of pollution research nonprofits called Better Alternatives Now, which based its results on trash collected by volunteers around the world.

I'm dubious about the reliability of that count. How the hell do you collect trash "around the world," sift it down to just the plastic, and weigh/measure the percentage of "straws and stirrers"? Since the push is to ban straws in the United States, I really only care about the total volume of straws in the U.S. trash, not the weight of the straws relative to other things in the trash in Sri Lanka, Bolivia, etc.

A recent report by the World Economic Forum projects that by the year 2050, the plastic in our oceans will outweigh the fish.

Mm. Yeah. I guess I really only care about the U.S. straws that go out to sea and become part of this massive plastic enterprise of outweighing the fish. Who puts garbage out in the ocean? I don't think we do that, and if we do, we should stop, and that would solve the problem of straws in the ocean.

But, before logic sets it, WaPo wants to warn us that there are other problems with straws: swallowing air (leading to burping and farting), directing sugar at a too-specific part of your teeth, exposing you to polypropylene (which is food-safe, but you never know!), causing wrinkles around the month, and possibly inciting you to drink more than if you had to put the rim of the cup to your lips.

Did you notice what is not mentioned? Hint: It's something WaPo would normally go out of its way to notice and yell about. SEX DISCRIMINATION!

Straws are FOR WOMEN. The ban HURTS WOMEN. I happened to say back in 2016 "I absolutely loathe straws. The only reason for them is to pierce those plastic lids on take out cups. I especially hate seeing a man drinking from a straw." And I did some research:

Is this some weird quirk of mine or do I have support? I have support:

1. "After ordering a drink, do you take the straw out?"

I'd get a good chuckle out of seeing a man drinking his hard liquor through a tiny mixing straw.

2. "Real Men Don't Use Straws," by Malcolm Freberg:

I want you to think about the most macho movie characters imaginable. The ones who define hero, the ones your dad hero worships. James Bond. Indiana Jones. John McLane. Now think about any scene in which they drink anything, be it water or alcohol or exotic space poison. I bet your Luminosity-trained brain couldn't insert a straw into that scene if it tried.

Harry Stamper does not suck Sprite through a bendy straw. Bruce Wayne does not drink pina coladas with a crazy straw. Real men don't use straws.... Hollywood and society had a meeting in our collective subconscious and decided that straws are for sissies. Obviously no one's going to see you sipping a gin and tonic through a cocktail straw and yell, "Hey Sally, that guy looks like he's sucking a tiny dick!" You may not have even considered that straws look like penises until you read that. I'm sorry -- but knowing is better than not knowing.

3. "Why Men Hate Straws":

Now, let's examine whether it's true that the ban on straws HURTS WOMEN. To argue yes, you'd have to say, it is primarily women who use straws and benefit by looking cute using straws. Men either don't use straws or don't realize how bad they look using straws, so they are either unaffected or (without realizing it) helped by the straw ban. But I can see the no side of this argument. Women are helped because they are freed from the burden of having to see men drinking from straws. And let's be honest, a lot of us are annoyed by the looking-cute straw antics of other women (e.g., the woman in the video embedded above and the woman in the photograph at the top of the WaPo article).

To be clear: I would not ban straws. I would stress disposing of straws (and all trash) properly. I think straws are utilitarian in to-go cups with lids, though I'd like to see less on-the-go drinking. And I wish restaurants wouldn't put straws in drinks served in glasses. I've been getting fat plastic straws in ice water lately. I take it out and put it on the table. And by the way, when did straws get so fat? It used to be that those fat straws were only for thick drinks — shakes and malteds. Soda came with a very thin paper straw — usually with a red spiral stripe — and it was considered special to get a Coke with 2 straws. I dreamed of bending the straws in 2 directions and sharing that drink with a cute boyfriend. But that was only imagination. In real life, he'd be a male drinking from a straw, and that would not look right, though — on reflection, many decades later — I might have looked cute.

And that's the question: Do you care more about how you look or about how your love object looks? The stereotype for males and females — that women care about how they look and heterosexual men care about how women look — argues against banning the straws (unless you factor in the mouth wrinkles). But reinforcing the stereotypes is SEXIST, so I'll give that argument to the straw-banners. I'm not one of them — as noted above. My position on straws is: 1. I advise you to shun them unless you're in a situation where you need a lidded cup, 2. Remember that you probably look stupid drinking from a straw, especially if you're a man, 3. Dispose of straws and all the rest of your trash properly.

"I especially hate seeing a man drinking from a straw."

I said, responding to Brando, in the Coca-Cola post, who said "[Coca-Cola] is an intellectual beverage, if you sip it in a tall glass with a bit of ice and a straw, and wear a monocle. It's all in the presentation." My reaction was: "I absolutely loathe straws. The only reason for them is to pierce those plastic lids on take out cups. I especially hate seeing a man drinking from a straw."

Is this some weird quirk of mine or do I have support? I have support:

1. "After ordering a drink, do you take the straw out?"

I'd get a good chuckle out of seeing a man drinking his hard liquor through a tiny mixing straw.

2. "Real Men Don't Use Straws," by Malcolm Freberg:

I want you to think about the most macho movie characters imaginable. The ones who define hero, the ones your dad hero worships. James Bond. Indiana Jones. John McLane. Now think about any scene in which they drink anything, be it water or alcohol or exotic space poison. I bet your Luminosity-trained brain couldn't insert a straw into that scene if it tried.

Harry Stamper does not suck Sprite through a bendy straw. Bruce Wayne does not drink pina coladas with a crazy straw. Real men don't use straws.... Hollywood and society had a meeting in our collective subconscious and decided that straws are for sissies. Obviously no one's going to see you sipping a gin and tonic through a cocktail straw and yell, "Hey Sally, that guy looks like he's sucking a tiny dick!" You may not have even considered that straws look like penises until you read that. I'm sorry -- but knowing is better than not knowing.

3. "Why Men Hate Straws":