"I got my one foot stuck because I was trying to get my electronics out of my pocket. I knew not to panic."

"I have to be a macho man. You can’t ask for help when you’re trying to impress the girl you’re with."

Said Mitchell O’Brien, quoted in "Man Sinks in Quicksand and Emerges With a Girlfriend/A Michigan man who ended up waist-deep on an unstable beach was rescued, and found himself in a relationship" (NYT).

A comforting thought: "As it happens, drowning in quicksand in real life is nearly impossible, scientists say. Sand is denser than the human body, so even if one’s legs sink, the air in the lungs keeps the body too buoyant to go all the way under."

And here's that John Mulaney bit about quicksand: "I always thought that quicksand was going to be a much bigger problem than it turned out to be. Because if you watch cartoons, quicksand is like the third biggest thing you have to worry about in adult life — behind real sticks of dynamite and giant anvils falling on you from the sky. I used to sit around and think about what to do about quicksand. I never thought about how to handle real problems in adult life, I was never like 'Oh, what's it gonna be like when relatives ask to borrow money?' Now that I've gotten older, not only have I never stepped in quicksand—I've never even heard about it! No one's ever been like, 'Hey if you're coming to visit, take I-90 'cause I-95 has a little quicksand in the middle. Looks like regular sand, but then you're gonna start to sink into it.'"

The nothing that happened.

The most surprising part about this is that you uploaded it. Nothing happened. Nobody even reacted. Your provocation failed. This demonstrates that you are not unsafe among supporters of Palestinian liberation.

— Daniel Baryon (@AnarkYouTube) April 22, 2024

ADDED: I suspect that the person who posted the video actually wanted to show that the protesters were not accosting those they identified as Jews. In that light, here's a NYT article: "A Night Different From Others as Campus Protests Break for Seder/Pro-Palestinian protesters, many of whom are Jewish, prepared Seder dinners at college protest encampments, even as other Jewish students sought community in more traditional settings":

"George Santos Says He’s Making Over $80,000 a Day on Cameo."

Vanity Fair reports.

Less than two weeks after being expelled from Congress, the former New York representative is now making money hand over fist recording personalized videos on Cameo, for which he is now charging an astonishing $500 a pop, a 566.67% increase from his original asking price of $75.... 

"Okay, I can deal with that."

TikTok video (after the jump to protect the TikTok averse):

"People should try to learn to live with them. If they‘re literally in your way, I can see taking a web down and moving them to the side, but they're just going to be back next year."

Said Andy Davis, University of Georgia research scientist, quoted in "Millions of Palm-Sized, Flying Spiders Could Invade the East Coast/A huge invasive spider that invaded Georgia from East Asia could soon take over most of the U.S. East Coast, a new study has revealed" (Scientific American).

It says that the "palm-sized Joro spider" is a "3-inch" spider, which is an annoying discrepancy, but must have to do with whether you're including the legs.

Still, that's pretty big. But with all that's going on in the world, hordes of big, flying spiders may be a welcome diversion. You can worry and express anxiety, but the thing is right here in front of you — "jet-black body... with bright yellow stripes, and... intense red markings" — and, though a classic fear (spiders!), quite harmless. The opposite of the unseen and deadly covid.

It's an antidote of an anxiety, perhaps just what we need to reset our brain.

ADDED: From the "big and small" archive here at Althouse: "Large boulder the size of a small boulder." I'm just helping any of you commenters who happen to be here at 5 in the morning and working on a comment sort of like "Large spider the size of a small spider." Do you even know what I'm talking about? As I said at the time — January 2020 — "If you ever want to get me to laugh at your jokes, just remember 'Large boulder the size of a small boulder.'"

Ah! January 2020 — just before the descent of the Great Unfunniness.

ALSO: I'm pushed back in the comments about whether palms in fact do tend to be 3 inches. I'll just post a photo of a Joro spider on a palm, where you can see the the spider body without including the legs is quite a bit smaller than the palm, but including the legs, the spider is larger:

"There are so many areas of our recreational life that have been segregated, and downhill skiing is one of them."

"This sport took off in our country after World War II. It was created for affluent white soldiers who experienced it in France and Europe."

Said Daniel Krymkowski, "a sociology professor at the University of Vermont who published a book last year about African American underrepresentation in fine arts and outdoor recreation," quoted in "Who Gets to Ski? The mountains are too crowded. The sport is too expensive. Several resorts are trying to fix a number of problems. How are they doing?" (NYT). 

Only 1.5% of skiers are black, so they're not the reason why the resorts are crowded, but according to Anthony Kwame Harrison, a professor of sociology and Africana studies at Virginia Tech, "if longtime skiers become frustrated because they are seeing ski areas being crowded, when you look at that crowd, who do you immediately identify as being most out of place?" It's not that skiers are racist, just that they're stressed by the crowds and in an exclusionary mood.

Meanwhile, there are efforts to bring in new skiers — beginning skiers — who are "Black and brown and Indigenous." I feel nudged to think that racial problems have arisen, but I'm not seeing anything specific in the article. There seem to be 2 different issues — crowded slopes and lack of racial diversity in the sport — and they're jammed together like an idea for a movie plot.

"After weeks of hype, white supremacists managed to muster just a couple of dozen supporters on Sunday in the nation’s capital..."

"... for the first anniversary of their deadly rally in Charlottesville, Va., finding themselves greatly outnumbered by counterprotesters, police officers and representatives of the news media.... [T]he streets of downtown Washington were charged on Sunday with tension, emotion and noise, particularly in the afternoon, as the right-wing agitator Jason Kessler and perhaps 20 fellow members of the far right... marched under heavy police escort from the Metro station in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood to their barricaded and heavily protected rally area near the White House. They were surrounded by a vast, rolling plume of counterprotesters, who hurled insults, waved middle fingers and chanted 'Shame!'... [I]n Charlottesville... few if any far-right demonstrators could be found, and...  the most palpable tensions developed between left-wing protesters and the police, whose presence in the city was heavy and, some argued, heavy-handed."

From "Rally by White Nationalists Was Over Almost Before It Began" (NYT).

"That trail is so intimate. You’re almost touching people if not hugging them because you haven’t seen them in ages. I look at the trail with so much gratitude."

"I’ll be sort of sorry to see the bridge go back up. We’re all hiking that trail all the time, but next year how many will still do it?"

From "'Every crisis has a silver lining': why Big Sur's isolation is making people fitter/Winter storms battered this stretch of coastal California, blocking the sole road – but residents forced to leave their cars at home have been feeling the benefit" (in The Guardian).

"For a great white shark, a seal is a big juicy steak with a slice of chocolate cake. A person is an old piece of celery that’s been sitting on the counter all day."

Said the nature writer, quoted at the end of the WaPo article "‘You are paddleboarding next to approximately 15 great white sharks,’ chopper tells Calif. beachgoers."


All right then. This gets my "things that could have been worse" tag.

"Half of academic papers are never read by anyone other than their authors, peer reviewers, and journal editors."

"So what’s the reason for this madness? Why does the world continue to be subjected to just under 2 million academic journal articles each year?"

Asks Daniel Lattier in "Academics Write Rubbish Nobody Reads." I believe him that few academic articles are read and that they are written for the sake of the writer's resume. But that doesn't make them "rubbish." The process of writing develops the mind, and any given academic with his mind duly developed has a shot at benefiting colleagues and students who never read a word of it. And more importantly, there's something else, something that's the flip side of a negative point Lattier makes.

Ideally, the great academic minds of a society should be put to work for the sake of building up that society and addressing its problems. Instead, most Western academics today are using their intellectual capital to answer questions that nobody’s asking on pages that nobody’s reading.

What a waste.

Oh, I don't think we really want to put academics to work building up society and addressing its problems. It might be a very good thing to contain these academic types in a place where they won't do too much damage. It may be that we have marginalized these very intelligent people who live deeply in their own minds and conjure up new ideas because it's best to keep them separated and deactivated.

No one forces anyone to go into academics, and the people who go there may know — on some level — that they don't belong in the world of business and politics, that they shouldn't have their hands directly on any levers of power. The academy is a structural safeguard. We don't lock these people up. We give them a place they can choose to go, where they will be comfortable. Don't worry too much about the waste in not using them more... not until you've calculated the waste they would cause if set free to solve our problems.

For Dave and for Bob, it's "The Late Show," and the hour is getting late.

A sincere delivery of "The Night We Called It a Day," and a nice intro by Dave.

I doubt if much of the audience understood what Bob Dylan was trying to do here. Letterman's intro included the statement that Bob is the greatest songwriter, but the song performed was written by someone else — from Bob's new album of cover songs, Frank-Sinatra-related cover songs. Bob looked a tad tormented, and I wondered if he might be thinking that people wouldn't understand why he was doing this and I retreated to the position that the mind of Bob Dylan is simply an unknowable phantasmagoria. When Dave came over to thank Bob, after the song was over, Bob accepted the handshake and then wandered off as if... well, I really don't know. Like there was too much confusion and he was looking for some way out of here.

For Dave and for Bob, it's "The Late Show," and the hour is getting late.

Neil Patrick Harris, "licking Samuel L. Jackson’s eyeglasses and giving a lap dance to Sting."

Things you missed — and I missed — by not watching the Tony awards show last night.

"Now that we know the basic probabilities of individual tags... how often do a deciduous tree and a coniferous tree appear in the same painting?"

"We know that 57 percent of paintings contain a deciduous tree and 53 percent of paintings contain a coniferous tree. According to our data set, 20 percent of paintings contain at least one of each.... We know that 44 percent of Ross’s paintings contain clouds, 9 percent contain the beach and 7 percent contain both the clouds and the beach. We can use this information to figure out two things..."

So here's FiveThirtyEight endeavoring, as promised, to help us understand things through statistical analysis, and I can use this "A Statistical Analysis of the Work of Bob Ross" to figure out 2 things: 1. Calmly coasting cozily with expertise applied where it doesn't really matter can provide observers with relaxing comfortable lightweight pleasure, and 2. It doesn't really matter whether I'm talking, as I blog comfortably, cozily, floatingly, about Bob Ross or FiveThirtyEight.

How's that healthcare.gov website working out for you?

I heard it was hinky, but it looks great from here, not that I need to use it. I've had excellent health-care insurance for decades. (The relevant promise for me is: If you like what you have, you get to keep it.) But I went over to healthcare.gov to see if it's up and running, to click on various headings, and run a bunch of searches, and it looked great. The front page came up instantly, and every link I clicked and every search I ran went through instantly. There was nothing slow or unfinished-looking about it.

But Drudge's top headline right now is "OBAMACRASH":



That links to a Twitchy article with the headline "Surprise! Obamacare health insurance exchange websites don’t work; HealthCare.gov a total mess." At that top of that Twitchy page is this blackly comical banner:



The real nightmare for the anti-Obamacare crowd will be if Obamacare works well enough and people are reasonably satisfied. Myself, I'm tired of the drama.

ADDED: "In Debut, Affordable Care Web Site Baffles Many Users," according to the NYT.

"About 500 locks on cell doors simultaneously opened inside Montgomery County’s main jail early Saturday morning..."

"No inmates tried to escape...."

"What else will these thousands of students who have been discouraged from attending law school do?"

"Where will they find a more fulfilling career? They’re not all going to be doctors or investment bankers, nor should they. Looking purely at the economics, in 2011, the median starting salary for practicing lawyers was $61,500; the mean salary for all practicing lawyers was $130,490, compared with $176,550 for corporate chief executives, $189,210 for internists and $79,300 for architects. This average includes many lawyers who graduated into really bad job markets. And the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics reports projected growth in lawyers’ jobs from 2010 to 2020 at 10 percent, 'about as fast as the average for all occupations.'"

A law dean — Lawrence E. Mitchell of Case Western — argues that "Law School Is Worth the Money"... because what else are you going to do with the money you don't have your life?

"We're so used to seeing people act under a system of government rules that it's easy to assume that without the rules..."

"... everything would descend into chaos. But perhaps free people are generally capable of acting decently on their own. Of course, that's never going to be universal; but then, people break the law too. In fact, a dense set of rules tempts people to see how close to (or how far across) the borderline of legality they can go without being penalized. In the absence of governmental laws, people might focus more on other kinds of laws: social norms and ethics."

Writes my son John, one of the many people who live south of 25th Street in Manhattan.

"Old Mr. Brown, a man I knew in Oakland, Calif., never ate anything but sandwiches."

"Ask him to a meal, pass the breadbasket. He put everything, from soup to nuts, between two slices. Evidently it was a lifelong obsession."

May I recommend a panini press? I ordered this one after Meade knocked the old one off the counter and down the staircase to concrete-floored studio. After using the new one, I said, "Thanks for breaking the old panini grill."

If a burglar breaks into your house and even enters your sleeping child's room...

... I suppose you should be relieved that all he does is give the boy four quarters and a dollar to "go buy some soda"... and then steal your car, your Christmas presents, and your daughter's wheelchair.