RIP Beth.

It’s a sad day at Grassley household…. For my 34 years and 15 yrs before that at my mother in law’s home Beth has worked dependably….

— Chuck Grassley (@ChuckGrassley) August 8, 2026

The London Times tells us: "Grassley is not the first member of Congress to develop a strong attachment to a piece of machinery. John Boehner, a former Speaker of the House, appears frequently with his lawn mower. The senator John Kennedy has a cross trainer in his garage that he has named Margaret, 'after Margaret Thatcher because both kick butt.' His wife, Becky, 'won’t let me bring Margaret in the house,' he said, in a video posted this year. So he uses Margaret in his garage and then lifts weights, watched over, metaphorically speaking, by his Iron Lady companion."

It's just by chance — and consistent blogging methodology — that Margaret Thatcher came up twice today. The earlier post is about her plan to send coca-eating moths to Peru. 

Things that embody Americanness.

This NYT writer "put together a collection of 25 objects that reveal something special about us" (gift link).

Just as the relics of ancient Mesopotamians provide insight into their way of life, who we are, as a culture, and as a nation, can be uncovered by sifting through our giant piles of stuff....

Speaking of 25 things, on the same day, the NYT has "The 25 Sculptures That Define the Modern Age/Four artists and a curator debate the most important works since the end of World War II" (also a gift link, lots of photographs).

The first list of 25 is definitely more fun. The second is likely to annoy you. Quite a lot. Especially if you think you'll be seeing Henry Moore and that kind of thing. No, you'll be seeing Lygia Clark"s  “Bichos” and Kara Walker’s “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby" and Melvin Edwards's "Lynch Fragments." That kind of thing.

Meanwhile, on the first list, you've got rotisserie chicken and bedazzled Crocs. That kind of thing.

"A country pursuit. Many of us do it around here in Hereford."

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AND: "Do you like clocks?"

"You’ve been in the folk tradition... I wonder how your attitude toward those types of songwriting have differed under President Trump..."

"... versus, at the time, under George W. Bush, when you wrote 'When The President Talks to God,' one of your best-known songs."

The NYT interviewer asks Conor Oberst, in "How Conor Oberst Survived Teenage Rock Stardom" (gift link).

Oberst answers: "You know, it’s really hard for me to even articulate the Trump era. Maybe at some point I’ll be able to do it. It’s like, you can’t satirize what’s already a parody. It’s already a disgusting, gross cartoon.... I’m sure it permeates everything I write, but to write directly toward, I found it almost impossible.... I mean, I’ve thought about it and I’ve had plenty of people be like, where’s the new 'When the President Talks to God'? I don’t know. It’s such an avalanche of insanity."

What is the origin and history of the idea that something/someone is beyond parody because what they already are is the parody?

"Unlike anything ever done or seen before!"

Link.

"He had thought about hiking the Appalachian Trail since a seventh-grade teacher discussed it in class — it had opened in full in 1937 — and he started planning it..."

"... in quiet moments at his first job, in sales training for a hardware company, which he didn’t like. He bought a used backpack from an Army surplus store, hiking shoes from L.L. Bean, a canvas tent and a rain poncho. He carried a Boy Scout knife, cooking utensils, a miner’s carbide lamp and two canteens, one for water and the other for gasoline to fuel his tiny stove. His meals included dehydrated mashed potatoes and boiled cornmeal with sugar, raisins and powdered milk.... Food and supplies for his hike cost Mr. Espy about $300. When his trek ended, he hitchhiked to Boston, where he spent $100 on new clothes and a bus ticket back to Georgia...."

From "Gene Espy, Pioneering Hiker of the Appalachian Trail, Dies at 98/In 1951, always an adventurer, he was the second person to walk the trail in a 'thru-hike,' from Georgia to Maine, in an arduous 123 days. He later met the first to do so" (NYT).

In preparation for Alberta's joining us as the 51st state, I'm listening to Millennial Moron explain the Canadian love for Kraft Dinner Language (AKA K.D. Lang).

And it's great that Bob Dylan went on to become a popular musician in his own right. Some commenter over there says "This is the single most Canadian bit of humor I think I might have ever seen." I don't know, but I want to find out. Join us, Alberta! 

We'll give you more gold/Than your apron can hold.

Now, maybe you think I'm getting ahead of myself, and I am. I lived through the arrival of the 49th state and the 50th state, and — I was a kid — I just thought new states would be joining us every year or so. Alaska and Hawaii clamored to join the coolest place on earth, and I thought everyone else would just be piling in. Why wouldn't they?! Why didn't they? Here it is, 66 years later and not one new entrant. So it would really warm my heart — I literally had tears in my eyes — if Alberta would come on in.

I was reading "Should Alberta Become the 51st State? The Case for Secession, Statehood, and a Freer Western Canada" by Rod D. Martin. Excerpt:

"Until now, arguments for limiting consumption have tended to come from the left rather than the right."

"They date back at least to the economist Thorstein Veblen, who, at the start of the twentieth century, wrote acidly about the 'conspicuous consumption' engaged in by grandees of the Gilded Age. More recently, a 'degrowth' movement has emerged, which aims to decrease consumption and to de-prioritize G.D.P. growth on the grounds that they are harmful to the environment and that, in any case, accumulating more 'stuff' doesn’t really increase the well-being of people.This argument depends on two concepts familiar to economists: the diminishing marginal utility of consumption, which is, roughly speaking, the notion that if you already own nineteen dolls, buying a twentieth won’t give you much pleasure, and competitive consumption, or the idea that many people are trapped in an endless cycle of trying to outshine their friends and neighbors with their purchases.... 'Trump, degrowther,' the leftist journalist Doug Henwood commented online last week.... 'What he is doing is fairly unprecedented: explicitly saying that he is willing to pay an economic price in terms of growth in order to protect something else that he thinks is valuable and important,' Daniel Susskind, an economics professor at King’s College London who is the author of the 2024 book 'Growth: A History and a Reckoning' told me...."

Writes John Cassidy, in "Donald Trump Versus Barbie/Can the Administration retain public support for a trade policy that could force Americans to buy less stuff?" (The New Yorker).

Why don't the anti-consumption lefties embrace Trump? 

My first reaction to Trump's "Maybe the children will have 2 dolls instead of 30" was: "This reminds me of what those on the left used to say to us

If your first thought is "Sheer Madness," your second thought should be is this for real.

If you just X about it, you're revealing something about yourself. Do you want this to be true?

***

I just found that in draft form. Couldn't remember what it was, and it seemed so strange. Now, I remember and I remember why I left it unfinished, and somehow I like it in its unfinished form. I don't want to call attention to the specific thing I was reacting to, and I like it in the abstract.

"I talked about a pencil for 8 minutes" — at the QVC audition — "I was on the air 48 hours later at 3 in the morning trying to make sense of the... infrared pain reliever and the Amcor negative ion generator."

"Like what the hell?...  You can talk about anything for as long as you need to. You know, you never talk about a feature without talking about its benefit. And so that's kind of how that world worked. So you don't say it's a pencil for 99 cents. You say it's a yellow #2 pencil with an eraser that is of the exact proportion necessary to last for the life of the pencil. So when this thing is down to a nub, you'll still have enough eraser left. It's really a monument to efficiency and ingenuity. And it's not just yellow. It's yellow because you're a busy professional. And when you need a pencil, Joe, and you open up your drawer, you don't have time to root around for some vaguely beige-colored writing implement. You want that canary yellow to pop and you can pick it up. And... it's a #2 pencil. It's not #3 with that thin wispy line that you can't read or, or that thick disappointing skid mark of a #1. So you just train yourself to fill dead air with nonsense...."

People have found some excellent sticks and want to tell you about them, quite sincerely.

Read Official Stick Reviews (at TikTok).

Just a random example so you'll get the idea and see how charming this is:

"To be creative, you want to feel like you're getting away with something."

Also: "You spend all your life trying to save time, but when you get to the end of your life, there's no time left, and you'll go to heaven, and you go 'But wait, I had velcro sneakers, no-iron shirt, clip-on tie. What about all that time? It's gone.'"

And, though Seinfeld won't show you his Star of David necklace, he says "Yes, I wear a Star of David necklace, because it makes me feel closer to the people of Israel that I feel close to and that's why I wear it."

He reveals his favorite word: "quintessence." He discusses the meaning, but I wanted the OED meaning: "The most essential part or feature of some non-material thing; the purest or most perfect form or manifestation of some quality, idea, etc."

But that's the figurative meaning.

"While it’s somewhat hard to believe Ohtani could know so little about the man he seemed to spend 20 hours a day with..."

"... folks around Ohtani — the ones who actually know him, not the P.R. folks — say they believe he’s a one-track ballplaying genius, a genius who’s oblivious to things off the field, including money. That’s the preferred storyline, at least for today. Ohtani certainly doesn’t seem very interested in money, which supports their contention that he didn’t know what was going on, that millions were removed from his account without his knowledge. If he cared about money, would he have played for pennies for years? Or more to the point, if he had a gambling issue, would he have deferred 97 percent of his contract — $680 million — for 10 years?"

Writes Jon Heyman, in "Shohei Ohtani’s camp wants you to believe he’s a baseball legend and a financial dimwit" (NY Post).

Found object: The Metal Bird.

Light pillars.

"Ever since the 1990s, when staying hydrated first became a popular health goal for the general population..."

"... certain reusable water bottles have become trends in their own right. The wide-mouthed, screw-top Nalgene — first popularized among campers and hikers in the 1970s — were everywhere in the late 2000s. ... In the following years, tall and heavy stainless-steel water carriers rose to prominence.... In 2018, Vanity Fair declared the Goop-approved water bottle with a whole natural crystal affixed to the inside it... the status symbol of the year.... In 2021, a $28 'motivational' gallon jug of water with encouragements for the drinker printed on it at each level ('12 p.m.: Keep drinking,' '2 p.m.: Halfway there!') briefly became a social-media sensation.... Around the same time... Sasha and Malia Obama... were noted as Hydro Flask users...."

From "The thirst for Stanley tumblers has reached a tipping point/Stylishly active fans have gone to great lengths to get ahold of the exclusive drinkware, one of many reusable water bottle obsessions in recent memory" (WaPo).

On this issue, I always go back to George Carlin:

"We love what we take care of, and we take care of what we love. Instead of groaning at the task of treating my cast-iron skillet..."

"... I now treat it as a fulfilling act of service; I know that my time seasoning it with salt and oil will affect its life span and the palate of future generations. I scrub away at the hand-me-down dinnerware from my father-in-law, and I’m connected to him. In an unexpected way, pride has seeped into my kitchen work. Cleanliness is a matter of principle.... Carl Jung once said, 'Modern man can’t see god because he doesn’t look low enough.' Will you find God in your kitchen sink?"

Writes Tyler Shane, in "You don’t need to meditate. Just wash your dishes by hand" (WaPo).

A sense of profundity attaches to one of my cast-iron pans — the one that I grew up hearing called the "spider." It is, I believe, older than I am. I use it all the time and can't imagine what one might do to it that would make it need any more seasoning. Is that low enough?

What an expensive screwup that turned out to be.

 

From the London Times.

"The graveyard of kitchen fads is wide and deep, littered with the domestic equivalent of white dwarf stars that blazed with astonishing luminosity for a moment..."

"... and then deteriorated into space junk. The allure of invention in the category is understandable, since preparing meals is a Sisyphean task and anything that promises to make it faster, or easier, or better, or healthier, or more fun, is irresistible—and often, for a while, anyway, profitable for the manufacturer. Some cooking 'tools' are so specific and inessential that they are hardly missed: cue the microwave s’mores maker, the pancake pen, the carrot sharpener, the hot-dog slicer, and the butter cutter. Many of these haven’t vanished completely; they have just transitioned from ubiquitous (or at least a fixture on Christmas-gift lists) to rarities, from being items you feel that you must have and will use to dust catchers that will end up front and center in your next Goodwill donation. Other kitchen devices, such as the fondue pot, are so culturally and stylistically time-stamped that they become shorthand for an entire era and method of entertaining, long after anyone makes regular use of them...."

Writes Susan Orlean in "The Instant Pot and the Miracle Kitchen Devices of Yesteryear/Preparing meals is a Sisyphean task, and anything that promises to make it faster, or easier, or better, or healthier, or more fun, is irresistible" (The New Yorker).

Is the soul analog?

I'm trying to read "6 analog trends that are good for the soul" (WaPo).

Choosing the less-efficient way of doing something, especially things we do for pleasure, can help us reassess our relationship with time and forgo the constant need for productivity....

Do you have a relationship with time? Would something analog help you restructure it? That's the idea here. Do your high-tech devices cause anxiety about how your life is slipping away as if it's nothing of any substance, and would holding a real book — smelling it, turning the pages and all that — help you reestablish yourself in reality?

Other analog things that might help: