"The surge of tiny clapping has led to an endless debate on TikTok about the proper way to do it."

"Some insist finger claps should be silent and bristle at people who say 'clock it' or 'tea' while clapping. Others take issue with influencers who clap with their index finger, when the middle finger is more commonly used in ballroom. (If this seems pedantic, imagine the reaction if you used your middle finger to give a thumbs-up.) And a notion has spread that the finger clap is supposed to resemble the American Sign Language sign for the number 8, because it means someone 'ate,' or performed extremely well. (Ballroom folks say that’s a reach.) As one commenter noted, 'Man the finger police is strict strict.'"

From "'Clock it.' We’re all finger-clapping wrong. As more people embrace finger claps, the queer ballroom scene is clapping back at those unaware of its origin and meaning" (WaPo).

Who cares? Yeah, I get it if that's your reaction, but this post earns some of my favorite tags. I like that.

JD Vance's elegant digital rhetoric.

JD Vance just threw up the MIDDLE FINGER live on national TV.

“In D.C., they have this thing where, I think it means we’re number one, all the pink-haired people throw up this sign…” proceeds to flip off the camera

You can’t make this up. The Vice President of the United… pic.twitter.com/PPqlLHHLrl

— Brian Allen (@allenanalysis) June 25, 2025

"C.E.O. Choked Man Who Danced Barefoot on Cruise Ship...."

A NYT headline speaks of the recent trend of throwing your life away for nothing.

The altercation began shortly after Mr. DeGiorgio’s wife had confronted the man about barefoot dancing, telling him, “Look, we are all grown-ups here — can you put your shoes on?” Mr. DeGiorgio’s wife told investigators that the man had made a crude remark to her, and the security video showed him giving her the middle finger, according to the F.B.I...

I looked it up. The "crude remark" was "Shut up, you fucking bitch." 

We're told DeGiorgio's pay package (at First American Financial) is $7.8 million.

What's so bad about taking your shoes off to dance? It can be a way to be quieter, more graceful, or to protect the dance floor — think sock hop. And I've heard the wistful longing: There will come a time when you can even take your clothes off when you dance.

"It happens all the time" — "in a rural town, in the west" — The signs say "F Biden" and little kids give him the finger.

Enjoy this video of Biden talking about how many ‘F*ck Joe Biden’ signs he sees and how many little kids flip him off 🤣

pic.twitter.com/n6LRFQshuC

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) April 19, 2024

"I wake up in the morning and sometimes I look at myself and I give myself the finger!"

Democrat NYC Mayor Eric Adams: "I wake up in the morning and sometimes I look at myself and I give myself the finger!" pic.twitter.com/qkh04jJfW0

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) December 21, 2023

That's tweeted by RNC Research, and I guess they think this hurts Adams, but I think it's charming and cool. The NYC mayor must make difficult choices, and there's no way to make everyone happy. Mayor Adams feels your pain. This story is a trifle, but Adams's antagonists are trying to use it against him. (Here's The Washington Examiner straining to make something of it.) It's nothing. Why blog it? Because I have a tag for "the finger."

The Ukrainian postal service issued stamps showing a Ukrainian fighter giving a Russian warship the finger.

The NYT reports. 

People lined up for hours to get these stamps — a million were printed — which quickly sold out.

The image related to an incident early in the conflict, when a warship demanded the surrender of a small group of fighters guarding a rocky island in the Black Sea. The gesture by the fighter was a visual representation of the profane phrase one of the island’s defenders used in a radio transmission, in which he told the warship where to go....

That's a wordy way to avoid quoting the phrase "Russian warship, go fuck yourself." But the stamp avoided displaying the words. It switched to the wordless finger. 

And then, the day after the stamps came out, the Ukrainians hit a Russian ship — the Moskva — and the ship later sank.

"An artist whose work was withdrawn from a gift shop at London’s Royal Academy of Arts after she was accused of transphobia has said she could pursue legal action if she is not given an apology."

"The academy said that it would no longer stock works by De Wahls and thanked campaigners for bringing to its attention 'an item in the RA shop by an artist representing transphobic views.' On the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, De Wahls said: 'They frantically tried to call me the day they realised that was a really bad PR decision. They contacted me the day after they posted it on social media. There was no point to that conversation... I don’t know what they were looking for..... I might [pursue a legal remedy]. But, to be honest with you, right now, I have the feeling that there is a hope within that institution, which is mind-boggling to me, that this just will go away... my inbox and the feedback I’ve been getting from the general public is quite the opposite. This isn’t going away. This is a conversation that needs to happen, it needs to happen in public. They will have to talk eventually."

From "'Cancelled' artist Jess De Wahls could sue unless Royal Academy apologises" (London Times).

Here's what she wrote that led to that campaign against her — from her blog, back in 2019 : "I have no issue with somebody who feels more comfortable expressing themselves as if they are the other sex (or in whatever way they please for that matter). However, I cannot accept people’s unsubstantiated assertions that they are in fact the opposite sex to when they were born and deserve to be extended the same rights as if they were born as such." 

Her art trades in feminism: She makes "textile pieces... involving women, ovaries and flowers." I see she had a show called "Big Swinging Ovaries." She came up with an image — embroidered — of fallopian tubes giving the finger. That info is in the London Times column, "Anatomy of a cancellation by the culture Stasi/The Royal Academy’s decision to ban an artist’s work over her views should be a test case for anti-discrimination laws." That column also has this: 

Mayor Jaime Rolando Urbina Torres of Tantará, Peru got into a coffin and played dead as the police came to arrest him for violating the law of curfew and social distancing.

"It is not clear exactly where he and his friends were drinking, or why there were open caskets close at hand," The Daily Mail reports.

In happier days:



I don't know what's going on in that picture. Is he giving us the finger? "Siempre contigo" means "always with you." But what is "CLODO"? Wikipedia has an entry for that sequence of letters, but it's got nothing to do with Peru... or corn. It's quite French, but we see that "clodo" is slang for "homeless":

Committee for Liquidation or Subversion of Computers (CLODO) (in French: Comité Liquidant ou Détournant les Ordinateurs; 'clodo' being a slang word for the homeless) was a neo-Luddite French anarchist organization, active during the 1980s, that targeted computer companies. In 1980, after a series of attacks in the Toulouse area, they released a statement to the French media in which they explained their motivations. It read, "We are workers in the field of data processing and consequently well placed to know the current and future dangers of data processing and telecommunications. The computer is the favorite tool of the dominant. It is used to exploit, to put on file, to control, and to repress."...

"The female cyclist who flipped off President Trump’s motorcade last year unseated the Republican incumbent in a local election in Northern Virginia on Tuesday."

"Juli Briskman, 51, ran against Suzanne M. Volpe, a Republican who represents the Algonkian District on the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors" (Fox News).

"For men who are allegedly so 'proud' of being straight, they seem to show real incompetence at attracting women to their event."

"Seems more like a 'I-Struggle-With-Masculinity' parade to me. Hope they grow enough over the next year to support / join LGBTQ fam next #Pride."

Tweeted Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez in what I judge to be apt, light-hearted pushback (reported at The Hill).

Here's the video that accompanied her gentle mockery:

The #StraightPrideParade now on its way to City Hall Plaza. #Boston25 pic.twitter.com/44RayYZVRU

— Kelly Sullivan (@ksullivannews) August 31, 2019

What's with "Make Normalcy Normal Again"? What a sad slogan! If you were genuinely proud of what you are, why would you need You, the Individual to also be the norm? And if you are genuinely needy, why would it be enough to be recognized as — of all things — normal?

Also, guys, when you're marching in a parade about your pride, don't be staring down into your cell phone. That's no way to express pride. It is a good way to express neediness. Has anyone "liked" me in the last few seconds?

And maybe refrain from giving the finger?



I mean, is that your plan for the return to normalcy?

By the way, "normalcy" is a word tightly connected to one President, the President most well known for being bad, Warren G. Harding. His famous quote:

"America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality."

From Wikipedia, "Return to normalcy":

Return to normalcy, a return to the way of life before World War I, was United States presidential candidate Warren G. Harding's campaign slogan for the election of 1920. Although detractors of the time tried to belittle the word "normalcy" as a neologism as well as a malapropism, saying that it was poorly coined by Harding (as opposed to the more accepted term normality), there was contemporaneous discussion and evidence that normalcy had been listed in dictionaries as far back as 1857.

I can't help thinking that whoever put the word "normalcy" in the straight-pridesters slogan intended to screw with the heteronormalists.

ADDED: In "A Hard Day's Night," Ringo, the original incel, is incited to go "parading," and seconds after he responds to the incitement to parade, Ringo gives the Hitler salute!

The mission to save Arthur.

 I told you we drove back from Utah in 1 day because we were on a mission to save Arthur.

Here's Arthur (photographed last fall):



I explained the name Arthur back in 2015:

I was poking around Mad Magazine because — in the light of dawn — that last post from yesterday, "Meade IM's from the deck," makes it look like Meade is the large avocado plant in the pot, and that made me think of the old Mad Magazine meme from the 1960s, Arthur. Arthur is not well-documented on the web. I see a short reference in the "Running gags and recurring images" section of the Wikipedia article "Recurring features in Mad (magazine)":

Some of the magazine's visual elements are whimsical, frequently appearing in the artwork without context or explanation. Among these are a potted avocado plant named Arthur (reportedly based on art director John Putnam's personal marijuana plant); a domed trashcan wearing an overcoat; a pointing six-fingered hand; the Mad Zeppelin (which more closely resembles an early experimental non-rigid airship); and an emaciated long-beaked creature who went unidentified for decades before being dubbed "Flip the Bird."

Anyway, the mission was successful. Arthur had been left outside on the deck, and the temperature was going to drop into the 20s on Saturday night. We left Moab, Utah at 3 a.m. on Friday and got back into Madison at 4 a.m. on Saturday. Arthur came in, and he's back out now, but the mandevilla, gardenia, and Australian Kimberly Queen ferns we brought home yesterday to keep Arthur company and clutter up the deck had to be brought in for the night. But Arthur was not alone, the reed grass and star jasmine stayed out too. Anyway, all the plants are doing fine and ready — with a little heat — to turn the deck into a jungle. Is that the right word?, I ask Meade. "Tropical paradise, I would call it," he says.

The most intense fight.

The most intense fight I’ve ever seen pic.twitter.com/TCXXO98ijp

— Guy (@apiecebyguy) December 4, 2018

The finger in the news.

1. "A Virginia cyclist who was photographed extending her middle finger at President Trump’s motorcade as it drove past her last month has lost her job because of the gesture, [Juli Briskman, 50,] said on Monday," reports the NYT. "'We have chosen to separate from you,' she quoted one of them as saying to her, citing the company’s social media policy ban on 'obscene content.' She said she was told that she was not meeting the company’s code of conduct and that the officials feared 'it could hurt business' because of their work related to government contracts."

2. "After former Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan and Mcebisi Jonas got the boot, Gubb began trading Gupta-owned Oakbay shares in order to create, in the price chart, a work of art depicting a middle finger. It all took off when Gordhan called on the country’s citizens to mobilise and join the dots. Gubb did his bit in the form of what is almost certainly first piece of protest art on a financial media platform in the world. To create his art, Gubb traded Gupta-owned Oakbay shares." Reports The South African, via Bloomberg, "This Artist Is Giving the Finger to the Stock Market/Should a man of the information age be punished for creating pure magic?"

Does Trump — in the middle of an interview about the National Anthem controversy — give the finger?

You decide:

President Trump: Kneeling during national anthem is “very disrespectful to our flag and to our country” https://t.co/1JP68WuPUM

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) September 24, 2017

I got that from Perez Hilton, who is sure it's intentional and says "That's so boldly, wildly absurd, it's actually… kind of funny?? But seriously, after all the bull shit stunts, outright bigotry, and unbelievable ignorance this President has showed off that should legitimately cause outrage, this is just… hilarious."

I don't think it was an intentional finger. He was just preening his eyebrow. Want to see a President give the finger? It looks like this?



Miss him yet?

Woman driving a minivan with the stickers “Hillary 2016,” “coexist,” “Not My President Or Yours Either,” and “stop bigotry” slams it into another car...

... after the driver of that car makes an "L" (for loser) sign at her, which she responds to by giving him the finger, and he responds to by pointing a Smith & Wesson .380-caliber handgun at her. She told the police she got "scared and jerked the steering wheel, which caused her to lose control of the vehicle," and he told the police he thought he “made a bad choice” but the bumper stickers were “stupid.”

This happened in Missouri. The man was arrested for unlawful use of a weapon. The woman was not arrested for hitting him with her car.

"Mr. Met has only 3 fingers and a thumb on each hand but the gesture was unmistakeable."

Ha. That happened last night as the Brewers crushed the Mets.

I'd just like to say that when you have only 3 fingers, it's easier to tell which is the middle finger.

The Women's March in Madison.

At the state capitol today:



The photos are all by my son Chris, not me.

Let's close in on the "Forward" statue — often seen in my old pictures of the Wisconsin protests of 2011. Today, it had on a "pussy hat":



I was critiquing a Women's March poster earlier today — one that was way too complicated — and I said: "Keep it simple. Pick one idea and present it clearly." So I was pleased to see this image:



The Fallopian tube is giving the finger. And it's saying "Boy, Bye," which obviously means about the same thing as giving someone the finger — brusque rejection. If you know the  Beyoncé song, "Sorry," it calls to mind the lyric:

Middle fingers up, put them hands high
Wave it in his face, tell him, boy, bye
Tell him, boy, bye, boy, bye, middle fingers up
I ain't thinking 'bout you

I'm reading the placard to mean: Get government out of my uterus. The "boy" is Trump and the sign is warning him away from any impingement on the female body. This is a good, straightforward message, and I agree with it.

I do see 2 problems:

1. One might read the "boy" as an unwanted child, waved "bye" through abortion. That's unfortunately mean and not helpful to the abortion rights cause. Abortion is better presented as the woman's choice about what do with her body, not any hatred toward the unborn.

2. The message Get government out of my uterus is a compelling libertarian message, but the Women's March may be seen as demanding more than the continued protection of reproductive freedom (which Trump does endanger, since he's said he wants a Supreme Court that will overturn Roe v. Wade). Here's a list of the Women's March "unity principles," and it is not a "boy, bye" to the government. It's demanding that the government get very involved in women's bodies:

We do not accept any federal, state or local rollbacks, cuts or restrictions on our ability to access quality reproductive healthcare services, birth control, HIV/AIDS care and prevention, or medically accurate sexuality education. This means open access to safe, legal, affordable abortion and birth control for all people, regardless of income, location or education.

It's more of a "hi" than a "bye" — more of a hi, get in here and never go away. If that's your message, that Fallopian tube ought to be waving furiously.

David Bowie, "America."

From the Concert for New York City (after the 9/11 attacks):


david bowie simon and garfunkel america concert...

I encountered that this morning by chance, just after writing about the Bernie Sanders "America" ad. I'm reading the NYT, and the Bernie Sanders ad was discussed in an article about the political ads of 2016. The David Bowie performance came up — via "The Most Read Styles Stories of 2016" — in "David Bowie: Invisible New Yorker." Bowie lived in NYC for a long time — in SOHO from 1999 until his death — and he was never recognized on the street.

He was always in a sharp suit or tux. Regularly at the Met Gala or the Council of Fashion Designers of America Awards to support his wife [the model, Iman]. Never caught stumbling out of the hot club at 4 a.m. He’d already been to a lifetime’s worth of parties.

Iman once described Mr. Bowie as a “homebody”; The Onion imagined him as a “pansexual alien” staying in to “do lasagna for dinner.” He led a pretty normal-seeming life. He shopped for groceries once a week at Dean & DeLuca. He loved the chicken sandwich with watercress and tomatoes at Olive’s on Prince Street. He liked to rise at 6 a.m. and get his “buzz” by walking the still-empty streets of Chinatown.

He read a lot. He collected art. He painted. He and Iman socialized with the parents of their daughter’s friends at school. He spent his remaining time meaningfully and productively, and largely here.

I wonder what he read. And he wasn't always in a sharp suit or tux. He was also like this...

Forever my favourite latter-day Bowie pic. pic.twitter.com/M8uM6eVExo

— frozen reeds (@frozenreeds) January 13, 2016

... another man in shorts. No wonder you wouldn't know it's him. If we know you as the man in a suit, you can attain invisibility, dressing in the most ordinary way possible.

Ah! And I did find out what books he read:

I don't think the White House Correspondents Dinner people enjoyed Larry Wilmore very much.

Everyone looks so uncomfortable. Which is a good thing, right? Why should he make these people comfortable? Here's the transcript. I'll try to excerpt what I think this crowd may have disliked the most:

And I have to admit it’s not easy to follow the president, man. You got some jokes. Mr. President. The president’s funny. Stay in your lane, man. You don’t seem me going around president-ing all the time, right? I don’t go around passing health care, and signing executive orders, pardoning turkeys … not closing Guantanamo. Oh wait, maybe I did do that.

But I have to say, it’s great, it looks like you’re really enjoying your last year of the presidency. Saw you hanging out with NBA players like Steph Curry, Golden State Warriors. That was cool. That was cool, yeah. You know it kinda makes sense, too, because both of you like raining down bombs on people from long distances, right? What? Am I wrong?

Speaking of drones, how is Wolf Blitzer still on television? Ask a follow-up question. Hey, Wolf, I’m ready to project tonight’s winner: Anyone that isn’t watching “The Situation Room.”...

But I have to say, about the first lady, it’s so nice to have dinner with you. She is the epitome of grace, class and poise, isn’t she? She really is. Not to be confused with future first gentleman Bill Clinton, whose three favorite strippers are named Grace, Class and Poise....

I’m impressed with the people in this room. There are so many rich, powerful people in this room. You know, it’s nice to finally match the names to the faces in the Panama Papers. It’s very nice....
MSNBC — MSNBC here tonight? No? Which actually now stands for “Missing a Significant Number of Black Correspondents.” Am I wrong? They like fired Melissa Harris-Perry, they canceled Joy Reid, they booted Touré. I heard they put Chris Hayes on probation because they thought he was related to Isaac Hayes.... MSNBC got rid of so many black people I thought Boko Haram was running that network. What was going on…?

You know, I should say some of America’s finest black journalists are here tonight. Don Lemon’s here, too. Hey, Don, how’s it going? Alleged journalist Don Lemon, everybody.

The camera shows Don Lemon giving him the finger.

I'll bet the audience was expecting more and harsher focus on Donald Trump. There was a reference to "his genitalia" — which took a shot at a Democrat (calling it "his President Johnson") —  to his "little baby hands" — the reason "everyone treats Donald Trump with kid gloves" — and an attack on "Morning Joe" for giving him so much favorable TV time — "Morning Joe: has their head so far up Trump’s ass they bumped into Chris Christie." But Wilmore delivered more pain to Democrats — politicians and the press.

There were also the transgressive racial words, from the beginning middle and end of the speech: 1. "negro" ("Well, welcome to 'Negro Night' here at the Washington Hilton, or as Fox News will report, 'Two thugs disrupt elegant dinner in D.C.'"), 2. "jigaboo" ("Ben Carson... praised Jackson... From the grave, Andrew Jackson replied, 'What did that jigaboo say?'"), and 3. "nigga" ("So, Mr. President, if I’m going to keep it 100: Yo, Barry, you did it, my nigga. You did it.").

Obama did a great job of laughing and looking like he had a sense of humor about everything. Why shouldn't he? He had his speech too, and it was already done and — probably most people would say — funnier and better delivered. Check it out:

If you had to remember one thing from the debate last night, what would it be?

I ask out loud. Meade answers: "He's an okay doctor." That was Ben Carson, repurposing something Trump had recently said about him and using it about Trump.

And then: "Trump was so handsy with everyone." Yeah, Trump kept reaching out and touching Ben Carson — who reconfigured a Trump attempt at a high 5 into something approaching a normal handshake. At a later point, Trump got the man on his other side — Jeb Bush — to give him an enthusiastic handslap.

Me, if I had to remember one thing, it would be how everyone was sweating profusely at the beginning. Everyone except Carly Fiorina, and I attributed her lack of sweat to the heavier layer of makeup that, as a woman, she was able to slather on to shield her from our nosy HDTV-enabled eyes.

ADDED: Typo corrected: I had written "a high 4." I've always been bad at touch-typing numbers. Or maybe it had to do with just having watched those clips of Jimmy Fallon interviewing Hillary Clinton on his show last night. Jimmy has that trademark white bandage taking one of his fingers out of the running, out of the fingering. Here's the part where she invites Jimmy to grab her hair (to prove that it, unlike Trump's is real):



She also does a Trump impersonation. Earlier on the show, as you've perhaps already seen, Fallon does his amusing Trump impersonation, in a sketch with "Trump" talking to Hillary on the phone:



They both did a pretty good job with that, and you've got to give the Hillary people some credit for coming up with a sure-fire way for her to drag media attention away from the big GOP debate.