Without forebears to teach them, Mr. Kopua — a tohunga whakairo, or a master woodcarver — learned tā moko from the patterns he used in carving and weaving. They studied moko kanohi patterns on decapitated heads that were under the care of New Zealand’s national museum.
Māori warriors believed that decapitation severed their enemies’ connection to the gods. In the 19th century, British settlers collected the heads as curiosities and trophies and offered guns and gold in exchange — prompting some Māori people to hunt down those who wore mataora and moko kauae.
Look, it has over 1.7 billion streams. The next most played Stones song — "Satisfaction" — has only 940 million.
I think it's the non-Boomers, discovering it through movies and TV and video games and TikTok. Here's a link to see the 180,000+ TikTok videos that use the recording. It seems quite popular with aviation (for males) and the wearing of black clothing (for females). And then there are tattoos:
That's the headline at the London Times, a question that assumes a proposition I don't accept as true. Democrats didn't ignore red flags. They saw them and went forward anyway.
The question should be why did they do that, and we know why. It's not hard to figure out. I don't for one minute believe that Democrats are deeply contemplating why they backed Platner despite what they knew. They wanted to win the Senate seat, and they imagined he was their best hope. Now, they are trying to act as though they were blindsided by this rape accusation, and it suddenly disqualifies Platner in a new way.
By the way, what's Platner's motivation to withdraw? He won the primary. It's his nomination. What's good is there for him in withdrawing? If he hangs on for a few more days, past the July 13th deadline for replacing him as the candidate, won't the heat die down? He will have weathered the storm, and he can present himself as a rebellious survivor.
Yes, he may lose, and that loss may be the one Senate seat that denies Democrats the majority they covet, but so what? I mean: "So what?" from his point of view. Should he shrink back into oyster-ridden obscurity because of a rape he says he did not commit? Because of a tattoo everyone knew about when he won the primary?
"... I went to Maine to write about him. I tried to convey what I saw: a campaign that was electrifying angry Maine voters. But I deeply regret that, impressed by Platner’s political charisma, I wrote that he was 'nothing like the edgelord caricature I encountered online.' If anything, he seems to be significantly worse...."
That article she wrote and links to came out last October. It sets out to prop him up as he was falling long before the primary: "Platner is the oyster farmer and former Marine with a baritone voice and a Bernie Sanders endorsement who this fall came seemingly out of nowhere to capture progressive hearts nationwide. Recently, a barrage of ugly revelations made it look like perhaps all the hope invested in him had been misplaced...."
Hearts. Hope.
Here's Goldberg, back in October, explaining that Nazi tattoo:
That's long, so let's jump to the place where the word "dirtbag" is thrown into the mix:
Michelle Cottle: And honestly, is it even fair to compare Platner to somebody like Paxton or Trump?
Jamelle Bouie: You know, I don’t think it’s fair. And I say that because, so far, what we’ve learned about Platner is that, for lack of a better term, he’s kind of a dirtbag. Just a dirtbaggy kind of guy.... That’s versus Trump, who isn’t just a reprehensible person, but is actively engaged in harming other people in his private life, right? And I’d say the same for Paxton: not just a slimy guy, but a guy whose modus operandi, as a human being, is to try to dominate the people around him in really ugly ways. And so, I think Platner is more on the John Fetterman continuum than he is on the Trump continuum, which is just, eh, kind of dirtbaggy.
Cottle: OK, so I want to drill down just a little bit more....
The drilling down does not explore the concept of dirtbagism. Cottle was swooping in to take the conversation away from that, even though the headline writer saw the click-bait value of the word. In the conversation, "dirtbag" never reappears.
"Mills argued that Republicans would make 'mincemeat' out of Graham in a general election, given his Reddit comments, and that a tattoo resembling a Nazi symbol, which he got covered up, will likely provide fodder for attacks."
In the comments over there, somebody says "You can tell she's a Dem because she did the right thing" and somebody else says "How is quitting because you don’t have the money the 'right thing.' She did the 'only thing' she could have done."
The headline doesn't say why Platner looks finished: He had a big Nazi tattoo on his chest. How does Goldberg get around that? She explains punk culture:
"... implying a sort of everyman machismo. It’s the kind of look that suggests (U.S. Senate candidate Graham) Platner could be the Democratic Party’s new great white hope — a working-class white man who can speak to class antagonism in an economically unequal electorate. There’s just one teensy-weensy problem. It turns out that friend-of-the-white-working-class had a Nazi tattoo. The tattoo resembles a Totenkopf, a well-known symbol of official Nazis, the Nazi-adjacent and people who just think that Nazi iconography is tough. The gist is that Platner got the tattoo in 2007 in Croatia when he was on leave with his fellow Marines. Platner has said that he didn’t know the symbol’s semiotics. He only knew that Marines get 'terrifying-looking' tattoos...."
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.
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