Says the robot voiceover at the end of "12 Must See Places Before Living [sic] This World!" — a TikTok that Meade shared with me... not because I was someone he'd "love to visit these incredible places with."
He knows and I know that neither of us would feel that we must see those places/"places" and both of us know that about the other and both knew that the other would find the idealized pictures absurd.
I enjoyed the first clip — a man cartwheeling into clear turquoise water — but scoffed aloud at the notion of going all the way to the Maldives because the water there might perhaps be clear and colorful.
But the second destination provoked my horror of traveling:
Somehow I don't think that will be my point of view.
"My local artist noticed i was in mental distress and told me that he would put semi permenant ink on my face of the tattoo i wanted. Wear it for a week without rubbing it off, then come back to him and decide if i still wanted it. I agreed and he stenciled it for me on my face. I came back shaking his hand a week later and decided to get a tattoo on my wrist instead. I will never forget what he did for me. Im 30 now, have a kid, wife, i work in IT for cybersecurity, and have no criminal history. I was setting myself up for failure. That artist saved me from a huge mistake i couldnt come back from"
Writes a commenter at r/shittytattoos, in a post with a photograph of someone's face tattoo (which seems to be what that person wanted to gift himself on the occasion of his 18th birthday).
"It’s a six-week healing process each time you get one removed. So each tattoo is 10 to 12 sessions. That’s 60 weeks of your life right there on just one tattoo."
"... accused of being gang members under the expansive powers of a rarely invoked wartime law. 'The government is directed not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this court,' the court said in a brief, unsigned order that gave no reasoning, as is typical in emergency cases. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. dissented.... More than 50 Venezuelans were scheduled to be flown out of the country...."
Meanwhile, with respect to a person already deported, Trump displays a picture and frames Democrats as admirers of the man (rather than as devotees of due process rights):
This is the hand of the man that the Democrats feel should be brought back to the United States, because he is such “a fine and innocent person.” They said he is not a member of MS-13, even though he’s got MS-13 tattooed onto his knuckles, and two Highly Respected Courts found… pic.twitter.com/31sNr2k1SK
"... a lapel pin representing the crest of the 187th Infantry Regiment, and a Killed in Action bracelet worn in honor of a soldier, Jorge M. Oliveira, who lost his life in Afghanistan — a series of accessories that served as a form of value signaling. His hair was gelled back without a strand out of place. During the occasional interruptions from the crowd, his jaw was heroically clenched. Hidden were almost all of his tattoos: a large Jerusalem Cross, a 'Join or Die' snake, and an American flag with a stripe replaced by an AR-15.... Just a hint of ink reaching from his right forearm to his wrist peeked out from a carefully buttoned shirtsleeve. (It seemed to be the tail end of his 'We the People' script.) Left behind was the stars ‘n’ stripes cowboy hat. Unseen was the Uncle Sam jacket linings that Mr. Hegseth [has] occasionally flashed.... Certainly he did not look like the hard-drinking, adulterous, budget-mismanaging person that critics of his nomination had described. He looked clean-cut, not politically correct but patriotically correct.... Amid all the theatrics and speechifying by the many committee members and Mr. Hegseth himself, his uniform offered an argument of its own...."
I like the topic of politics and fashion. And this is fine. Good to see it aimed at a man, as it should be maybe half the time (or a bit less, men's clothing lacking much variation). I like the reference to the "theatrics and speechifying" by committee members, but it should specify Democrats on the committee. Good lord, they were rude! I rarely watch Senate hearings because I can't tolerate the nastiness. But for some reason I sat in front of the TV for over an hour. I'll just offer Tim Kaine as one example of the undignified badgering:
I guess that yelling and pointing and smirking would have paid off if Hegseth had snapped and responded in kind. But he didn't. And why would he? He knows he only needs to put up with this, even as Kaine knows he needs to make something happen.
1. The woman in the video does not say anything about her politics or purport to explain herself in terms of politics.
2. It's a tragic case, and you shouldn't be cheaply triumphing or laughing.
3. If you think the old version of this woman shows a natural beauty she once possessed, then you don't know much about beauty filters and makeup.
4. She was trying to be pretty in the old days, and then she decided to try to be something more like what she felt inside and not like what she had to torment herself thinking society wanted from her. The new look, however, expresses that torment. So she remains, now permanently, in thrall to society’s expectations.
She said she was hobbled by her depression and autism and borderline personality disorder. Now she was tired of living—despite, she said, being in love with her boyfriend, a 40-year-old IT programmer, and living in a nice house with their two cats.
Notice that there's a copyright question about the tattoo itself and about the photograph posted on Instagram (showing the tattoo and a copy of the original photograph). I read the NYT article and I still don't understand why the photographer lost.
That's a huge milestone! Is there anything I can do to mark the occasion? There are more than 71 thousand posts on this blog, quite evenly spread out over the years and days. It's not as though I can make a top 20 best posts list.
Do I even have a favorite post from all these years? I used to say my favorite post — the post that exemplifies what I most hope will happen when I set out on a new post — was "Tattoos remind you of death." But that's from back in 2005. Surely, something in the succeeding years topped that.
I was just talking to my son John, and he urged me to include the post about "the Washington Post guy with the mustache." My post, from 2006, is here: "Of oversized things, MSM, and the internet."
So that gave me the idea to ask you, my dear readers, if you have some post — in there among the 71,000+ posts — that represents what you think is the best (or the essence) of this blog? I would like to learn something about what you think is the reason for doing this.
You don't have to like what you imagine is what I most want to do. Maybe you groan when I veer into tattoos-remind-you-of-death territory and wish I could give more clear answers about who should win the next election and how the Supreme Court should decide this or that case. That's okay. I'm just soliciting material for a blog post I feel I ought to write when we get to that milestone.
I think the problem with swimming and tattoos refers only to recent tattoos, in their healing phase. It would be quite something if getting tattooed represented a decision never to go swimming again.
Meanwhile, the woman who lost all her limbs merely encountered fish, and it's not enough to avoid eating raw or undercooked fish. You have to worry about handling raw fish. Wear gloves.
I have commemorated proto-bloggers before. For example, something John Keats did in 1816. And, in the first year of my own blogging, I told you about my grandfather, Pop. And though I can’t find where I've blogged about it, there's something I myself used to do in the 1990s. I'd read the paper NYT at the dining table in the morning and if I found something distinctly interesting, I'd tear it out and put it on the other side of the table, where my sons would see it when they eventually came into the room.
Anyway, the proto-blogger I discovered today was Rose Kennedy. As a consequence of reading that Rebecca Traister article about RFK Jr. — blogged here — I started reading his book "American Values/Lessons I Learned from My Family."
This is a story that originated in social media — Reddit and TikTok. Customers of a business, Ephemeral, are complaining about the product — disappearing ink, injected — and displaying pictures of tattoos that were always bad but at least "made to fade."
What sort of disclosure and consent form the tattooees signed? Paragraph 4 shows this is just another tattoo regret story:
The 10-year-old's tattoo was "a crude rendering of his name in large block letters on the inside of his forearm.”
And here's a quote from "a tattoo anthropologist" named Lars Krutak: "Maybe decolonizing the Western thought concept of ‘age-appropriate’
tattoos could be enlightening. But I am not saying
that children should be tattooed at 10 and 11 years old, because they
still have a lot to learn about the world."
What more do you want? Well, he has to want you to want his magazine. And he seems to want you to buy into masculinity, but doubts you'll buy that (or doubts you need him to inform you on the subject), so he came up with "new masculinity," so he must want you to believe that GQ is in the know about what is new.
When he made the quoted statement, it was 1976, and he was breaking the New York City law against tattooing. He did it publicly, in front of the Museum of Modern Art — "a bit of performance art as civil disobedience" (in the words of the NYT obituary).
He was — in the classic civil disobedience format — arrested. That gave him a chance to argue in court that there's a First Amendment right to tattoo. He lost, but tattooing continued, and ultimately, in 1997, the ban ended.
I became aware of this phenomenon yesterday, when I saw this and this at the subreddit r/shittytattoos.
Here's video of the "[c]reator of the famed Ignorant Style tattoo style, Fuzi... a street art legend."
And here's an Instagram collection of Ignorant Style tattoos.
I'm pretty amused by the concept and, especially, the name — though I think most examples of this sort of thing are a mistake. Many years ago, probably in the 1990s, I saw a young woman on campus that had a tattoo of a bathtub on her neck. Just a dark line drawing of an old-time claw-footed bathtub with the pipe extending upward for the shower head. I felt so bad about it. And I love bathtubs. But now I can see that it was an early example of the Ignorant Style!
ADDED: Back in 2009, I blogged about a tattoo artist that did things that he might characterize as Ignorant Style. It's at least adjacent to Ignorant Style. I said "I love these scribbly tattoos!" You can see a lot of his things at Instagram, here.
"... notoriously including those 'fiery but mostly peaceful protests' in Kenosha, Wis. Opportunities for thoughtful police and justice-system reform were squandered in the rush to defame, defund, diminish or abolish. It may be that serious urban leaders like incoming mayor Eric Adams of New York can reverse the trend.... But progressive misgovernance has now tattooed the words 'soft on crime' on Democratic necks, and the country has noticed. It will take years to erase. And who has been helped the most by all this, politically speaking? Donald Trump and his mini-mes. The country won’t be safe from them until a more serious Democratic Party can set itself free from ideas that embarrass it and endanger us all."
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