Moving to Australia (from the UK) "makes you more attractive. At least that’s what young expats who moved down under claim as 'the Australia effect.'"

I'm reading "Moving to Australia made my fiancé more attractive/Young adults find travelling down under does wonders for their self-esteem and sex appeal. It’s what happens when you live life without stress, one says" (London Times).

Among the scores of travellers showing off their “glow-ups” is Abigail Phillips, 29, who posted on Instagram her fiancé’s transformation from pale and formal to a surfer boy with a golden tan, mullet and trendy moustache. “I really do like the ’tache and the curly hair,” said Phillips

"Ms. Mekel, 82, has Alzheimer’s disease.... In the not-so-distant future, it will no longer be safe for her to stay at home alone...."

"She does not feel she can live with her children, who are busy with careers and children of their own. She is determined that she will never move to a nursing home, which she considers an intolerable loss of dignity. As a Dutch citizen, she is entitled by law to request that a doctor help her end her life when she reaches a point of unbearable suffering. And so she has applied for a medically assisted death.... Dr. Bert Keizer is alert for a very particular moment: It is known as 'five to 12' — five minutes to midnight... the last moment before a person loses that capacity to clearly state a rational wish to die. He will fulfill Ms. Mekel’s request to end her life only while she still is fully aware of what she is asking. They must act before dementia has tricked her, as it has so many of his other patients, into thinking her mind is just fine.... Whose assessment should carry more weight, she asks: current Irene Mekel, who sees loss of autonomy as unbearable, or future Irene, with advanced dementia, who is no longer unhappy, or can no longer convey that she’s unhappy, if someone must feed and dress her."

From "She’s Trying to Stay Ahead of Alzheimer’s, in a Race to the Death/In the Netherlands, doctors and dementia patients must negotiate a fine line: Assisted death for those without capacity is legal, but doctors won’t do it" (NYT).

We hear about another woman who had "dreaded the nursing home, but once she got there, she had some good years.... She was a voracious reader and devoured a book from the residence library each day. She had loved sunbathing all her life, and the staff made sure she could sit in the sun and read for hours."

Understand the problem: Mekel has to go early.

"There is a tradition in far-right propagandist literature... of a white male hero who rises up against a liberal, racially mixed, feminist, and/or otherwise degenerate society..."

"Jean Raspail’s 1978 dystopic anti-immigrant fantasy The Camp of the Saints is the story of the last surviving white man on Earth; it was a professed favorite of Trump’s immigration advisors. Today, this tradition is alive and well, living on Telegram, Discord, Reddit, Gab, and other online platforms. It’s a turbulent terrain of white male resentment, which found its footing in the 4chan and 8chan ethos of 'There are no girls on the internet' and 'Tits or GTFO' and the ensuing 2014 hate-fueled doxing of and attacks on female journalists known as Gamergate. Today, its center is held by a cluster of stars, whose celebrity has become increasingly mainstream.... [W]e find chauvinists like Mike Cernovich, whose testosterone-fueled Persicope rants garner millions of views, or Tim 'Baked Alaska' Gionet, who faces charges relating to his involvement in the January 6th Capitol Hill riot and previously livestreamed his trolling of 'fat' female pro-immigration activists with openly racist and smooth-chested attention whore Catboy Kami, whose real name is not quite pinned down, but who livestreams himself in anime costumes or blackface and says seriously effed up things to teenagers on Omegle and once went on a 'hilarious' hot date with podcaster Nick Fuentes, the bigot-king of the Groypers, who targets rightwing pundits and … okay, I’ll stop there.... It can all just seem like a big, stupid joke until, suddenly, it’s not."

 Writes Ian Allen, "a playwright and journalist," in The New Republic, in " We Are Sorry to Say That You Should Take Tucker Carlson’s Testicle-Tanning Stuff Seriously/The internet had a wild time mocking his recent segment on masculinity, but the Fox News host's obsessions come straight from the literary canon of the crypto-fascist right."

I wasn't familiar with the name Ian Allen. Is this a playwright I should know? Curious, I found "Toning down the sex and violence" (WaPo, October 20, 2015). Allen was the artistic director of Cherry Red Productions, known for its "raunchy" productions, which was reopening under the name the Klunch.

Orange man good?

Completely unretouched photo, straight out of my iPhone:

 

Did Trump forget to pack up all his makeup? 

There's something about orange. As I was searching my archive to figure out if my tag is "orange" or "orangeness," I ran across this post from the first year of my blog, from September 2004:

So John Kerry seems to have gotten one of those dark spray-on tans.... 'All the big Hollywood celebrities, especially the female celebrities, are getting an orange tan.'... Whenever presidential debate season comes around, the one thing you can count on pundits to talk about is the 1960 debate when Kennedy looked tanned and rested and Nixon looked pasty white. ... Why don't Kerry's people remember how Al Gore was ridiculed for looking way too orange in the first debate in 2000?... 'Gore looked positively repellent with his... garish orange makeup....'"

They all do orange. Orange is the happy vibrant color of love and warmth. It always was and it always will be, except for that little time when it wasn't — the time when it was Orange Man Bad in the Oval Office.  

Fake news comes around after going around.

I can't decide what's funnier: having the president sign a blank piece of paper with a giant Sharpie like a child, or sending the photos with the EXIF data that shows they were staged and taken 10 minutes apart: https://t.co/RROmRqBUZs

— Caitlin Murray (@caitlinmurr) October 4, 2020

AND:

The difference in Trump's complexion between Tuesday (left) and Saturday (right) is jarring pic.twitter.com/qNdKORSspt

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 3, 2020

Yes, now we — finally! — know the orange is makeup, not tanning or fake tan.

"President Trump claimed on Saturday that a viral photo of his tan lines, which prompted #OrangeFace to trend on Twitter, was photoshopped...."

The Daily Beast reports.

According to @photowhitehouse, the source of the photo, "This picture was never photoshopped, but used the Apple smartphone’s photo app to adjust the color of the picture":

⁦@realDonaldTrump⁩ returns to the White House from Charlotte, North Carolina. Photo by William Moon at the South Lawn of the White House on February 7, 2020 pic.twitter.com/n1a1Z93LrJ

— White House Photos (@photowhitehouse) February 7, 2020

ADDED: TMZ says:

DT was captured on camera by a guy named William Moon -- a self-described White House correspondent and photographer, who doesn't appear to be part of the official press corps. or White House staff, but clearly has access of some sort to snap shots like these....

In Moon's photo, the outer edge of Trump's mug seems to be in stark contrast to the rest of his face ... showing a color distinction between pale and what looks to be orange or tan. Getty Images has the same pic, though ... and it's not nearly as saturated as this.

Now, it's possible Moon caught the Prez at a different angle with different lighting than the Getty photog did ... perhaps the photo isn't edited at all. Doesn't seem likely, however.

This is the big controversy of the day, apparently, so things are looking rosy for Donald J. Trump.

"... I fear that Comey is damaging himself — and the credible case he makes against the president — by putting his obvious distaste for Trump into the service of selling his book."

"It allows Trump and his defenders to paint Comey as disgruntled and self-serving. If Trump is a pig, Comey’s a prig. I wonder who comes out looking better to most Americans in that particular contest."

Says Bret Stephens, quoted at the NYT in a conversation between him and Gail Collins that has the headline "When a Politician and a Lawman Try to Play the Hero, the Lawman Usually Wins." That's the headline because it's what Collins then says:

Gail: When there’s a choice about whether a politician or a lawman is going to get to play the hero, lawman usually wins. I suspect Comey will go down in history as the hero who stood up to a crazy president. Although in a fairer world he’d also be remembered as the guy whose overdramatic press conference got us said president in the first place.

1. I think "If Trump is a pig, Comey’s a prig" was a much spiffier and more obviously true line than "When there’s a choice about whether a politician or a lawman is going to get to play the hero, lawman usually wins," but I can see why the Collins quote was chosen to appeal to NYT readers.

2. As to "I suspect Comey will go down in history as the hero who stood up to a crazy president" — Comey himself explicitly rejected the notion that Trump is crazy. From the transcript of the ABC interview: "I don't buy this stuff about him being mentally incompetent or early stages of dementia."

3. Where did Collins get the notion that in a showdown between a politician and a "lawman," "the lawman usually wins"? I'm getting a Western movies vibe from this image, what with "lawman." I've been in the law field myself for 40 years and "lawman" doesn't feel idiomatic to me as a way to refer to present-day law-enforcement personnel. In Western movies, though, I agree that the lawman usually wins. But in modern American life, politics and law interact in complex ways, and the law often leaves the answer to political choice.

4. I'm searching the NYT archive for "lawman," and I found the next most recent use and think it's something that may have influenced Collins. From "Best of Late Night":

In an interview with ABC News over the weekend, [James Comey] went into detail with a critique of Trump’s tan. Trevor Noah wondered aloud whether Comey could be undermining his own credibility.

“You see, now that’s funny, but that doesn’t sound like an impartial lawman. That sounds like a guy who got fired from White Castle talking trash about his old boss — that’s what it sounds like. It’s like, ‘Man, that dude smelled like onions before he got to work!’” 

And just before that, in "James Comey’s Attacks on Trump May Hurt a Carefully Cultivated Image":

For decades, James B. Comey cultivated an image of purity as a lawman who stood above politics and politicians. Then came the book tour.

With the release of his memoir this week and a set of high-profile media interviews to publicize it, Mr. Comey... has veered onto risky terrain, shedding the trappings of a high-minded referee and looking instead like a combatant in the country’s partisan battles.

Mr. Comey’s description of the president as an unethical liar “morally unfit” for office; his call for voters to decide Mr. Trump’s fate at the ballot box in 2020; and even his observations about Mr. Trump’s appearance — his “orange” skin, his too-long ties, his hands — are stark departures from the law-enforcement mission of his old agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

If I go any further back in the NYT archive, I get the word in the Western sheriff context, so I'll just note that there seems to be a new tic, calling Comey the "lawman." Perhaps there's some ideation that the sheriff is in town or that Trump feels like the Wild West and needs taming.

5. There actually was a TV show "The Lawman" (1958-1962). I'm old enough to have an impression of that in my head. When I hear "lawman," I picture something like this:



And maybe that's what some people (including Comey?) would like to picture Comey doing to Trump.

"This Sexist Cartoon Everyone Is Freaking Out About..."

... isn't really what it appears to be.

Imagine carrying a child for 9 months & give birth & take care of them for years for them to grow up to be the person who created this? pic.twitter.com/CaTCVjMytL

— boqor riya. (@hausofriya) February 15, 2017

So... I can see how you might argue that it's not sexist because it's feminist: The woman begins as a dupe of society and, after reading about feminism, adopts a natural look. But those who are freaking out are seeing body shaming and even racism:

According to this picture, reading weakens muscle tone, and in addition to that it makes you look white and almost European and makes you cut your hair too. Just ignore that picture, one can read and remain black and dress as one wish.

But the real story behind that picture is way different from old feminism quandaries about getting dolled up:

[T]he artist behind the piece, who is known on DeviantArt as Sortimid, says the art is part of an erotic niche called “bimbo transformation.”... Sortimid says that the viral cartoon was a commissioned piece for someone who wanted to see this transformation in reverse. They did not expect the art to be seen outside of the transformation porn community.

Sortimid has apologized, adding:

“Perhaps it was naïve of me to assume it was ‘just another transformation.’ People don’t see it as ‘porn’ so they assume it must be a statement. Their criticism is valid. I apologize for advancing those stereotypes. I strive to create erotica that is both sexy and feminist. It seems, in this case, I have failed spectacularly and for that, I apologize. If there’s anything I can do to make up for it, please let me know.”

I don't want to further complicate the life of Sortimid, but I remember when porn was considered to be quite a statement, and seeing something as intended to be porn would not exclude feminist criticism. Doesn't anyone say "Pornography is the theory, and rape is the practice" anymore?

IN THE COMMENTS: David says: David said:

By there way, she does not change from black to white, racially at least. She just discards her obsession with tanning.

And I said:

Why aren't fair-skinned women criticized for cultural appropriation and even blackface when they go in for tanning like that?

A quick googling found this:

"I see kids being challenged and encouraged to do things that I have never seen kids encouraged to do in the U.S.... and a lot of equipment that would be considered risky."

Said an American who teaches in Japan, where the elementary schools provide unicycles for the kids to ride at recess.



ADDED: This story made me remember this passage from Bill Bryson's "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir" — about being an American kid the 1950s:

In such a world, injuries and other physical setbacks were actually welcomed. If you got a splinter you could pass an afternoon, and attract a small devoted audience, seeing how far you could insert a needle under your skin—how close you could get to actual surgery. If you got sunburned you looked forward to the moment when you could peel off a sheet of translucent epidermis that was essentially the size of your body. Scabs in Kid World were cultivated the way older people cultivate orchids. I had knee scabs that I kept for up to four years, that were an inch and three-quarters thick and into which you could press thumbtacks without rousing my attention. Nosebleeds were much admired, needless to say, and anyone with a nosebleed was treated like a celebrity for as long as it ran.

Summer reading.

A slide show — open without a subscription — of many old New Yorker covers on the theme of summer reading.

1. Why is summer reading considered different from other reading? I remember when the idea was you finally had a lot of leisure time, so you'd read something big and long, like Doris in "Goodbye, Columbus":

2. Maybe it has to do with suntanning, that eminently passive outdoor activity. You're specifically not swimming, and you need something to do with your mind. Frankly, swimming can be boring — if you're doing lanes and racking up calories burned — and I would want a nice waterproof iPod with an audiobook.

3. I tend to walk on land as my main summer exercise, so I get by with my iPhone, and I like an audiobook of something long and historical. History goes with walking, because it's a progression in time and place, and I'm finally getting to the end of the fourth volume of Robert Caro's biography of LBJ and overlapping it with a history of ancient Rome. I still associate the path alongside Lake Mendota — after the summer of 2014 — with "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich."

4. The best of the New Yorker covers is, I think, “Summer Adventures,” by Joost Swarte, from 2015. Do you agree? But I'm also fond of the very simple Sempé, just a woman lying on the face of the earth, looking into the clouds, which highlights the aspect of reading that is the part where you're not reading but thinking about what you have read (or is she just failing to read or forgetting what she's read?).

5. I like the 2007 cover “Big City Thrills,” by Adrian Tomine, even though it relies on a stereotype of New York tourists — boring, dumpy people with belly bags and frumpy shorts — because you can tell — though you can't see any words — the book the alienated girl is reading is "Franny & Zooey." The sightseeing bus is passing Radio City Music Hall, but it's "Catcher in the Rye," not "Franny & Zooey," where the main character goes to (and hates) Radio City. ("The Rockettes were kicking their heads off....")

5. I like that a little white dog — not the same breed — appears on the oldest cover (1937) and the 2014 cover.

6. The 2007 and the 2009 cover present an aesthetic issue I've been thinking about. When art depicts buildings (and other objects), you are — to some extent — displeased when things appear structurally unsound or gravity defying. In real life, any structure that's standing has taken proper account of reality, but you might nevertheless find it aesthetically displeasing if it looks unstable or liable to fall. That same standard carries over to works of art. This is only a general rule, and sometimes the defiance of gravity is delightful. I'm on the line as to what I think of the man climbing a stairway of books in the 2007 cover. Seems anti-book, no? The 2009 cover has a hammock attached to nothing and palm trees set in tiny flowerpots. That could annoy me, but I interpret it to mean that the woman is reading an escapist fantasy of some kind, an interpretation reinforced by the line of foliage at the bottom, which evokes the bottom edge of the well-known Rousseau painting "The Dream" (which may also explain the unnatural position of the figure).

7. When did summer reading change from big projects like "War and Peace" to escapist fare (or whatever it is now)? I googled "What kind of reading is summer reading?" and what I got was a lot of stuff about the importance of keeping children reading over the summer so they don't lose whatever ground they've gained over the school year. Why don't adults worry that they'll forget how to read if they don't keep forcing themselves through printed verbiage?

8. And yet you've come this far.

9. Good for you!

10. Lists should be 10 — don't you think? — for stability and an aesthetically pleasing sense of structure....

"This is a slippery slope when the government starts telling parents whether or not their teenagers can get a sun tan."

"You are much, much more likely to sunburn at the pool or the beach. People feel good when they propose this stuff, but in reality it really doesn’t accomplish what they’re trying to accomplish."

"He was the only man I’ve ever seen who could wear plaid shorts and pull it off. Men shouldn’t wear shorts in the first place."

"The British lost their empire once they started letting colonial officers wear shorts. Who can take orders from a man in shorts?"

Said Tom Wolfe, quoted in the New York Magazine piece "Our Bodies, Ourselves/Running, Jumping, Dancing, Stretching, Smoking: New Yorkers Cough Up Their Fitness Secrets (And Lapses)." The bit about shorts came in the context of naming his favorite part of his own body:

“The gastrocnemius. It’s one of the larger muscles in your calves. It’s well-proportioned.” Body envy: "The one I’ve admired most was Ken Buchanan. He was the lightweight champion of the world from Scotland, and I watched him at Madison Square Garden."

Buchanan is the "he" in the quote in the post title.

[ADDED: What follows is based on my assumption that an article that New York Magazine promoted in its sidebar to me today was a new article. No date is displayed to ward off this assumption. However, the assumption is wrong.]

Also... note to New York Magazine: Fran Lebowitz is not 52. I don't care how much she exercises or how that ultimately makes her look, she's 64, just like me. I remember reading her books in the 1970s. I remember reading her columns in Mademoiselle before those books came out. If she's trying to "pass" as 12 years younger, it won't work on those of us who've done our time in the preceding decades... or did I miss a cultural leap and — like gender and race — you are what you say you are? Not that I think Lebowitz claims to be 52. I think NY Magazine screwed up. And also "you're as young as you feel" is an old old saying. Speaking of 64, 64 years ago there was a movie called "As Young As Your Feel":



That's Marilyn on the cover, but she only has a small role. Here's the whole movie at YouTube. Scroll to 17:00 to see the forever-young goddess. How did Marilyn Monroe keep in shape? I don't know but in 1952, Pageant magazine published an article titled "How I Stay in Shape, By Marilyn Monroe."
I don't know who wrote this, but I doubt if it was Marilyn Monroe, and hardly a word of it rings true, but the idea that there's a way to "feel blond all over" could key into today's obsession with transracialism:

"It was as if people secretly wished we could stow our child in cargo so that we would not disrupt their game of Candy Crush.'"

Writes the novelist Reif Larsen in a NYT op-ed about traveling with a little baby. That prompts what is most-favorited comment over there:

No, it is because everyone on that plane knows your child will be screaming for the next seven hours, because you decided that you must continue your pre-child life, at any expense to others. Small children like to be around familiar surroundings and get nothing whatsoever from their parents endless traveling.

Parents used to understand that having children came with sacrifices and did not entitle you to ruin the days of every person you came in contact with, whether in a confined space or at a pub or restaurant.

Just stop thinking you and your child are the center of the universe.

FYI: I say this as a mother of two.

The title of the op-ed is deceptive: "How Doing Nothing Became the Ultimate Family Vacation." Doing nothing would be staying at home and not working. Hang around. Take some walks. Read. Cook some food.

There is a bit about liking one trip to an all-inclusive hotel in Florida when the baby was 3 months old.

A part of me felt bad that he was coming into consciousness poolside, surrounded by overweight and sunburned Americans lightly drooling to Jimmy Buffett tunes, but hey — the world ain’t all pretty, kid.

I guess that's funny writing, but all I could think was: You can't expose a little baby to sun. What the hell were you doing?

I found myself desperate to feel like an adult again, even if only for an hour. Strange that adulthood equated to collecting about three towels too many from the towel boy, then elbowing my way to a prime spot on the deck so that I could slurp an overpriced piña colada and roast my pasty flesh while staring at the same page of a book for 20 minutes. And you know what? It was awesome.

You're drinking, avoiding the baby, avoiding your spouse, and getting sunburned. And this is presented as something that was done because of the baby, his usual preference being for the sort of vacation that enables you to claim to be "travelers and not tourists."

Yes, he rolls out that old trip tripe the first sentence. (For my extended discussion of the traveler/tourism cliché, see "What do you think the difference is between a tourist and a traveler?")

NYT correction: "David Gregory... displayed a gun magazine on the air, not a loaded gun."

An embarrassing "editing error" in the TV critic's review of Chuck Todd's debut as host of "Meet the Press." Imagine thinking Gregory had waved a loaded gun!

That review is linked at Drudge for the observation that "TODD TURNS ORANGE ON 'MEET'..."

But the critic, Alessandra Stanley, wasn't mean enough to say "orange." She said:

Even though he lost weight and gained a tan for his debut on Sunday, Mr. Todd doesn’t look like other anchors. For one thing, he has a goatee and speaks in a direct, conversational manner, without punchy diction or pomposity.

Stanley doesn't mention that Todd called attention to the new beardsiness of the show at one point, as he switched a second time from the Obama interview to a panel discussion:

... Joe and Nia are back. John Stanton of Buzzfeed is here, because we didn't have enough goatees on the desk for the first time as well....

At the Gridiron Dinner — a congregation of elite journalists and politicians — "Chris Cristie’s recent 'Bridge-gate' scandal got laughs."

WaPo reports:

Sung to the tune of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Feelin’ Groovy,” they lyrics, “Hello, Fort Lee/ How’s it flowing? /I’ve come to watch your gridlock growing,” were made particularly funny by use of sight gags — new Gridiron members Bret Baier of Fox News and NBC News Washington bureau chief Ken Strickland appeared onstage sporting an elaborate getup as the George Washington Bridge.

Also, John Kerry made the joke about Charlie Crist: "we Vietnam vets just call you ‘Agent Orange.’” Get it? It might be because he's from Florida, and oranges are one thing you associate with Florida, but WaPo informs us that orange must refer to his perennial tan. As for "Agent Orange" and the connection to Vietnam vets, WaPo says nothing, so here, I found this on Vietnam:

"I didn’t go to Thailand, but the summer that I took the bar I did all my studying by the pool."

Writes Instapundit:

I was set to clerk afterward at the Sixth Circut [sic] with a friend from law school who was black, and my goal was to be darker than her when I started. I succeeded — and that was the last really serious tan I had. Subsequent summers in law practice weren’t congenial to tanning; I couldn’t do all that work beside the pool...

He's commenting on a NYT article about the law school graduates who study for the bar and simultaneously vacation.

After all the money spent going to law school and all the pressure in the job market, who can take a vacation? I understand how grads who are going to clerk have a time slot when they can relocate, but where does the money come from? Instapundit frequently writes about "the law school bubble," but that's eclipsed here for a story about racial healing and premarital friendship. The NYT loves to urge its readers to angst over the struggles of the less-than-affluent, but that alternates with stories about privileged persons engaging in some activity that can be perceived as trendy or at least a trend.

About those picnic tabletops...

... and the young women of the Memorial Union Terrace....

Chip Ahoy has animated his commentary into my photograph.

Lakeside — at last a sunny day.

At the Memorial Terrace, on the shore of Lake Mendota, young women took to the tabletops for sunning and slumbering:



Meanwhile, in the neighborhood...



... Abby meets 2 adorable Shelties:

"On Tuesday, when Madison residents enjoyed temperatures that hit 78 degrees, a number of calls filtered into the state capital's 911 system with reports of dead people in the grass."

"Also known as, you know, sunbathers. It got so bad that the authorities had to take to Wisconsin Capital Newspapers's Madison.com to get the word out: 'Please tell cellphone users that people lying in the grass are not necessarily dead,' a dispatcher at the 911 center told Madison.com.'... Basically — and now tragically, if rather strangely — Madison residents were so unaccustomed to the good weather, and especially sunbathers, that they were very quick to assume the worst. They saw something, but maybe they said a little too much."

Says Alexander Abad-Santos at The Atlantic Wire, via Steve Elbow at the Cap Times, via Rob Thomas at the Cap Times.

Thomas's piece is extra amusing because it begins with something about — of all people — Meade.

Alexander Abad-Santos's was a little less amusing than it would be if it hadn't happened that, a year ago, a sunbather, lying on the grass in a Madison park, was run over by a city truck and killed.

ADDED: We were out on Picnic Point yesterday evening and saw this:



It turned out to be part of a medical school exercise. Groups of students would arrive and, led by an instructor, attempt to diagnose the medical problem, which was — I happen to know — a collapsed lung.

"A woman should always have fair skin... Otherwise people will think you’re a peasant."

Tanning is so disliked in China that some people wear a head and face covering — ski-mask-style — to go out swimming.

Meanwhile, in the United States, the infamous "tanning mom" has de-tanned somewhat.