"These nails are sported by nurses in hospitals who, because of these stupid encumbrances glued to the ends of their fingers, cannot properly perform one of the key hygienic routines..."

"... that has been a simple, essential part of infection prevention in medical practice for decades: thorough hand-washing. First line of defense, proven useful for generations. Hospital management has gutlessly acquiesced to this ridiculousness because these days, everyone has 'rights.'Except, apparently, patients who wish to not contract an infection during their hospital stay…."

From the comments section at the NYT article about those very long, overdecorated fake nails —  "Manicures Fit for the Met Gala/Whether at hospitals or on red carpets, people with manicures by Yulenny Garcia, a nail technician in the Bronx, turn heads."

Another comment: "I like the creativity but as a physician… I despair when I see these talons on fashion and entertainment industry folks. Not healthy at all. Just pull up any study on synthetic nails in pubmed. Just imagine HRs in hospitals have given up on young RNs to abide by the no long-nail rules… these nails can cut through gloves and in one case recently caused a rectal tear in a patient. Just think, everyone does them, so how are you going to stop this? Not happy, this is being highlighted...."

"If some people are beautiful because they are so fascinatingly ugly, there must be people who are ugly because they are so fastidiously beautiful..."

"... people who have achieved technical excellence at the expense of erotic charisma."

Writes Becca Rothfeld, in "The Captivating Derangement of the Looksmaxxing Movement/In their warped and wrongheaded way, the omnipresent influencer Clavicular and his compatriots are intent on demystifying the ideal of natural beauty" (The New Yorker).

I'm not up for reading another article about Clavicular (or "his compatriots"). I'm more concerned with those who are actually successful in Hollywood who are ruining their natural beauty with "looksmaxxing." I can't look at them anymore, except in horror.  

It reminds me of the time LBJ saw a portrait of himself and said "That's the ugliest thing I ever saw."

Trump on Truth Social: "Time Magazine wrote a relatively good story about me, but the picture may be the Worst of All Time. They 'disappeared' my hair, and then had something floating on top of my head that looked like a floating crown, but an extremely small one. Really weird! I never liked taking pictures from underneath angles, but this is a super bad picture, and deserves to be called out. What are they doing, and why?"

Quoted in "President Trump accuses Time magazine of deliberately using the worst photo ‘of all time’ on a cover praising his peace deal" (NY Post).

As for that LBJ portrait, you can see it at "The Presidential Portrait That Was the ‘Ugliest Thing’ L.B.J. Ever Saw" (Smithsonian).

As for Trump's question, "What are they doing, and why?" I think he answered it, they were going for an artistic effect — "a floating crown, but an extremely small one."

How ugly was he?

That's from my son Chris, who, as I told you before, is in the midst of a project of reading a biography of every American President. He reads his books in book form, so he texts photos of paragraphs when he's got something to share.

The paragraph above comes from Ron Chernow's "Grant" (commission earned).

How ugly was General Benjamin Butler? Pictures, here, at Wikipedia. He looks bad, but not as bad as those words make him sound. As Chris put it: "You have to really hate someone to describe them that way."

Here's Butler's General Order No. 28 (with rhetorical flourishes that may remind of a certain modern-day President):

Chris and I independently thought that seemed like a Trump tweet! The capitalization is so evocative. And that willingness to use strong interpretations of law to intimidate those who are affronting you....

Maybe Trump is tapping into a deep vein of American rhetoric.

"A picture of young successful happy people at a trendy cocktail party reads as right wing. A picture of a dad in flannel drinking a beer at Texas Roadhouse..."

"... also reads as right wing. Right wing is both cool, hip and metropolitan, and down to earth, older, mature, and working class. This is how you know that conservatism is culturally ascendant. We run the gamut. The only pictures that read as left wing are those of ugly, fat, mentally ill, dysfunctional, friend-less weirdos."

So says Matt Walsh, on X, looking at the "Cruel Kids" New York Magazine cover. 

 

That's one take. The other take is that the photo is cropped to make the event look all white. If you scroll down from that link above, you'll many tweets that should the wider view (and call attention to the text, "Have you noticed that the entire room is white?):

"The ugly shoe conversation reminds me of..."

"... the stylist Allison Bornstein’s 'wrong shoe' theory: the idea that you can really make an outfit sing — or make a boring outfit interesting — with a shoe that contradicts the rest of the look.... I think there’s also concern around being a 'fashion victim' not just by wearing an ugly shoe, but by wearing a shoe that will be everywhere. I like the non-ugly Bode Nike Astro Grabbers, for example — especially the cream style with colorful shoelace charms. But even if I’m able to nab a pair when they’re released on May 1, do I want to be wearing the same sneaker as every other joker on Orchard Street?"

Says Jessica Testa, in "The Ugly State of Shoe Collaborations/Blingy Crocs, punk Uggs and spangled sneakers, oh my" (NYT).

This gets my "paradox" tag: the wrongness is the rightness.

"That in the 19th century, men of the Nez Perce tribe of the Pacific Northwest who wore their hair long in the back faced pressure from Christian missionaries..."

"... to abandon the style in favor of something more 'civilized' tells us about the evils of cultural erasure, but also about conformity more broadly. In much of the Western world, mullets have largely been seen as a thwarting, whether one celebrated or feared, of convention. Take David Bowie, who wore chalky white makeup, psychedelic jumpsuits and a coiffed orange mullet to debut his otherworldly alter ego Ziggy Stardust in 1972. Not long after this glamorous alien emerged came a more working-class punk subculture for which rebellion was a raison d’être. And as much as torn clothes, safety pins, chains and piercings — the stuff of 'confrontation dressing,' as Vivienne Westwood called it — the mullet played a large part in the aesthetics of the movement. For one, the ragged style was purposefully ugly.... Perhaps, the mullet elicited such strong reactions because it refuses to be any one thing, sitting at the midpoint between long and short, masculine and feminine and tasteful and tacky. But if an inability to categorize causes discomfort in some, this sort of in-betweenness is just what some are looking for, especially at a time when gender and taste both feel, rightfully and crucially, so fluid. No wonder, then, that over the last five years the mullet has experienced a relative resurgence."

From "What the Mullet Means Now/The subversive hairstyle has found its way to runways and red carpets once again. But is there anyone left to shock?" by Megan Bradley (NYT).

Speaking of fluidity, the essay writer flowed from the concept of confrontational ugliness to the notion of "in-betweenness" and connecting the concept of being neither long nor short with the concept of being neither male nor female. I can see why in-betweenness can be unsettling to some people and why the refusal to commit to male or female can read as ugly — to some people — and feel confrontational.

It's almost possible to say, completely objectively, that a mullet is ugly. But it can look cool to wear something ugly if you can sell the idea that you're doing it on purpose and you love it. That it bothers fussy people is part of the energy you're absorbing and reflecting. That's another way of saying that if you don't like how other people are expressing themselves, you might want to deprive them of a reaction. Because — as my mother used to say — you'll only encourage them.

"Gucci sneakers usually retail for well over $500, but this week the luxury fashion giant has started selling a pair for $17.99... digital only."

"The Virtual 25 sneaker is a chunky slime green, bubble-gum pink and sky blue shoe that... can only be 'worn' via augmented and virtual reality," The Guardian reports.

An impressive idea for a product. People spend a lot of money on clothes to impress other people, and if they are doing their efforts to impress in virtual spaces, then why not buy these things? It's the next step. 

It's funny, though, to buy sneakers, shoes built around the concept of comfort and physical performance. These are precisely the factors that don't matter when you are in virtual space. Why not wear wild, weird shoes in virtual space, the kind that would be impractical and painful if you had them on your flesh-and-blood feet? 

I'll just guess that in virtual spaces, you want to look like you could run away. My second guess, though, is that the importance of sneakers — the fascination with luxury branded, high-priced sneakers — is firmly established within the set of people who do augmented and virtual reality, so that's the kind of fake shoes they want. 

I thought of the analogy to virtual sex: Do people want their nonexistent sexual partners to have qualities unrelated to sexual experience but that they'd want in a real-life partner? I mean seem to have — the equivalent of the comfort and practicality of virtual sneakers. I'm thinking of — for a woman — a virtual partner who seems to have an impressive job and a prestigious family. For a man — a virtual woman with a modestly successful artistic job and a family that lives far away. You know? Sexual sneakers! Or would you like someone more challenging, the virtual sex equivalent of highly impractical shoes?

I did not think I would end up there! I'm only writing about Gucci's virtual shoes — the article is from last month — because it popped up after a new article that caught my eye: "‘Short, fat, ugly’: Gucci family lashes out at cast appearance in new film/Ridley Scott biopic tells story of Patrizia Reggiani’s doomed marriage to Maurizio Gucci."

Ha ha. The ugly people are Adam Driver, Lady Gaga, Al Pacino, and — in a baldness cap — Jared Leto. Uglier than the actors — the actual story of the Gucci family: "The film, which is now in production and directed by Sir Ridley Scott, tells the story of Patrizia Reggiani and her doomed marriage to Maurizio Gucci. Reggiani was convicted of his assassination in 1998 after hiring a hitman to kill him.... When a reporter asked Reggiani why she had not shot her ex-husband herself, she said: 'My eyesight is not so good. I didn’t want to miss.'"

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Two great faces, gone.

Goodbye to Betty Friedan and Al Lewis:

They kind of look alike, don't they? I remember the first time we saw Officer Leo Schnauzer on "Car 54, Where Are You?" Al Lewis looked and sounded hilarious from that first second. He didn't have a big role on the show, and we always whooped with glee when he showed up in a scene. Later, he played Grandpa on "The Munsters." But that was so long ago. He was an old man back in the 60s, it seemed, but he was only 83 when he died, so he was only in his 40s then. Thanks for all the laughs, Al.

Betty Friedan, I must say, I didn't follow. I never read "The Feminine Mystique." It was a little before my time. I could have read it as a classic, of course, but it always seemed to me to be addressed to the women of the 1950s, and I was a child in the 1950s. The women my age all read Kate Millett's "Sexual Politics" and Germaine Greer's "The Female Eunuch." (Those were the first two books I bought in hardback.) For a feminist classic, it was "The Second Sex," by Simone de Beauvoir. And then women avoided Friedan's book, for reasons described in the obit that I won't belabor. I'll just call attention to this paragraph:

"That great head, the hooded eyes, the broad features of a woman the French might describe as une jolie-laide , which refers to a magnificent kind of ugliness that can be attractive, even beautiful," wrote Washington Post reporter Megan Rosenfeld in 1995. "The head, looking sometimes like a snapping turtle and at others like a lion with a white mane, sits atop a surprisingly short body, out of which comes the voice of a foghorn in heat. She is always carefully dressed in a New Yorky, nouveau-Bohemian style, with lots of interesting jewelry and spunky little shoes."

Yes, a truly "magnificent kind of ugliness." The world needs more grand faces like that.