"In the two weeks since Kirk’s killing, pastors across the country have reported a spike in attendance usually reserved for Christmas or Easter."

"Social media has been filled with testimonies from young people turning to Christianity for the first time, with even atheists saying they are reconsidering their position on religion. Pastors have coined a term for the religious revival galvanised by Kirk’s death: the Charlie effect.... In Irvine, California, a 20-year-old student named Bryce Bohorquez filmed the overfilled parking lots outside Oceans Church, where he is a longstanding member. 'Charlie Kirk, look what you did. No parking. Everyone wants to come now. Amen,' Bohorquez said in the video, which has been viewed more than three million times...."

From "The Charlie effect: how a political murder sparked a religious awakening/The shooting of Charlie Kirk has led to a wave of Christian fervour across social media. Even atheists claim to have been converted" in the London Times.

By the way, look at this insane and distracting distracting ad the London Times had right in the center of the page, right after the words "God's way of reminding us to live for him":

Live for him... indeed.

"The world’s first modern art museum celebrating migration opens on Thursday in the Dutch port of Rotterdam...."

"Dominated by a giant, futuristic, silver staircase at its centre — to symbolise movement — the Fenix museum is in the eye of a political storm and a populist backlash against mass immigration in Europe and across the Atlantic in the US. The museum is housed in what was once the world’s biggest warehouse next to the port’s famous 'Holland-Amerika' pier, where millions of European migrants left Europe for America in the 19th and 20th centuries.... 'These docks witness the departures of millions, including among them iconic figures like Albert Einstein, the actor Johnny Weissmuller and artists Willem de Kooning and Max Beckmann — and welcomed just as many arrivals, shaping the vibrant, multicultural city that is Rotterdam today,' [said Anne Kremers, the museum’s director]."

From "Tornado-shaped museum invites political storm with art of migration/As Geert Wilders’ government clamps down on immigration, the Fenix museum in Rotterdam aims to show that the movement of people ‘has always been there’" (London Times).

You can see some pictures of the architecture here (at Archipanic). It's ugly from some angles, kind of cool from others, but doesn't seem to relate to the desperation of mass migration. It's coldly abstract and design-y. You may like it if you're the sort of person who wishes Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum had been built out of stainless steel.

It's kind of funny to see Johnny Weissmuller extolled alongside Albert Einstein and Willem de Kooning, but I am not the arbiter of icons, and I wandered off into the Wikipedia article on Weissmuller:

"George, who painted as a hobby, does a self-portrait in evening clothes and his older brother responds with one of himself wearing underclothes..."

"... dyed yellow in the bathtub, paunch visible: 'My Body.'... He was comically underactive, congratulating himself for what [his biographer] calls 'peregrinations,' and work-avoidant: 'Upstairs to get typewriter ribbon,' he’d say, jumping up from the piano. 'It’s the only way I get exercise.' He had a weakness for puns that some found fatal. 'Lust Horizon,' he proposed as an alternate title to Billy Wilder’s 'Kiss Me, Stupid,' his last Hollywood collaboration, and a bomb. After repeated falls he called himself a 'rhapsody in bruise.'..."

From "It’s Hard to Be the Brother of a Genius Who Died Young/In 'Ira Gershwin: A Life in Words,' Michael Owen offers a sympathetic portrait of the lyricist, overshadowed in a life that had him tending the legacy of his younger sibling George" (NYT).

"So we’re left with a two-bit case that has devolved into dirty bits, filled with salacious details...."

"Trump came across as a loser in her account — a narcissist, cheater, sad Hugh Hefner wannabe, trading his satin pajamas for a dress shirt and trousers (and, later, boxers) as soon as Stormy mocked him. The man who was the likely source of the 'Best Sex I Ever Had' tabloid headline, attributed to Marla Maples at the time, no doubt loathes Stormy for having described their batrachian grappling, as Aldous Huxley called sex, as 'textbook generic.' Like a legal dominatrix, Stormy continued to emasculate the former president after her testimony, tweeting: 'Real men respond to testimony by being sworn in and taking the stand in court. Oh … wait. Nevermind.' The compelling part of this case is not whether Trump did something wrong with business papers. The compelling part is how it shows, in a vivid way, that he’s the wrong man for the job."

Writes Maureen Dowd in her new column "Donnie After Dark" (NYT).

1. Dowd seems to approve of using the criminal process not for its proper purpose — to enforce specific written law — but to expose and humiliate one's political enemy. Let's look at him in his underwear and sneer at his sexual fumblings, as described by someone who openly hates him — please, emasculate him! — and let's laugh.

2. It's so exciting — sexually and politically — that she doesn't see the downside. The aggressive desire to humiliate and crush him makes him sympathetic and makes you look like a bully. 

3. I'm imagining the jurors talking about this testimony and trying to connect it to the elements of the crime — assuming they can get their mind around what this crime even is. In my vision, they say: What was that Stormy Daniels testimony even about? Why did we have to know what material his pajamas were made out of? Satin! A shiny fabric. Waved about... to distract us.

4. "Batrachian" — it means "Of or pertaining to the Batrachia, esp. frogs and toads" (OED). It wasn't Daniels's adjective. Dowd got it from and credited Aldous Huxley. I found the relevant passage, in his "Point Counterpoint":

‘But what has love to do with it?’ asked Slipe. ‘In Beatrice’s case.’

‘A great deal,’ Willie Weaver broke in. ‘Everything. These superannuated virgins—always the most passionate.’

‘But she’s never had a love affair in her life.’

‘Hence the violence,’ concluded Willie triumphantly. ‘Beatrice has a n*gger sitting on the safety valve. And my wife assures me that her underclothes are positively Phrynean. That’s most sinister.’

‘Perhaps she likes being well dressed,’ suggested Lucy.

Willie Weaver shook his head. The hypothesis was too simple.

‘That woman’s unconscious as a black hole.’ Willie hesitated a moment. ‘Full of batrachian grapplings in the dark,’ he concluded and modestly coughed to commemorate his achievement.

"The transparency of the pants..."

"... quickly became an online sensation.... 'Whenever I’m nervous public speaking I just pretend people in the audience are wearing Fanatics baseball pants,' another person joked. The problems with M.L.B.’s new uniforms extend beyond the lewd pants. The league signed a 10-year, $1 billion deal with Nike and Fanatics for the design and manufacture of its uniforms in 2020, but it was only this year that the uniforms underwent a considerable redesign, with... revamped fabric..... Daniel Bard, a relief pitcher for the Colorado Rockies, said in a telephone interview that when he first joined the league in 2009, the uniform he was given was the nicest one he had ever worn. 'You could literally get it perfectly tailored to your body.... They were pretty damn near perfect. Not anymore. It’s a different material. It’s not as soft.... They look funny — too small and too curved.... None of the players asked for this....'"

From "See-Through Baseball Pants Have Fans, and Brands, Pointing Fingers/A redesign of M.L.B.’s uniforms has put Fanatics and Nike at the center of a debate about performance versus quality in sportswear" (NYT).

"The male body is not a joke" — that was the joke, last night at the Oscars.

I understand the humor — I remember the streaking incident from 50 years ago — and I think John Cena played his part well, but I find the body very weird, so weird that I googled whether he was wearing some sort of nakedness body suit. Is that the male ideal these days? Swollen and devoid of hair? And he couldn't have side-stepped out barefoot? He needed Birkenstocks? 

Note: He was wearing panties.

"White emerged as a sex symbol at a time when his country needed him...."

"With his tattooed, grungy intensity, he was the snack the people were craving after two years of slathering on hand sanitizer and stockpiling Clorox wipes. (As one fan put it to MEL Magazine, 'This is a dude who will eat you out in a porta-potty at Warped Tour.')..."

Writes Jennifer Wilson, in "The Shareable Feast of Jeremy Allen White’s Calvin Klein Ad/The frenzy surrounding the 'Bear' star’s beefcake ad harks back to the brand’s heyday in the eighties and nineties" (The New Yorker).

Some of the ads use still photography. And here's the live-action commercial, replete with Lesley Gore soundtrack denying someone the power to deprive another person of the right to "go with other boys":

"I don’t always drink in my underwear, but when I do, I tell everyone it’s a Finnish tradition."

Said Miles Teller, an actor, quoted in "Getting Tipsy at Home in Your Underwear/A Finnish tradition known as 'pantsdrunk' is gaining favor with Americans stuck at home" (NYT)("there is a word for it, “kalsarikännit,” as well as two emojis: a man in gray underwear with pint of beer, and a woman in a polka-dot slip with a glass of red wine").

This article is from 2020 — as you may have guessed from that "stuck at home." I don't know how I missed this the first time around, but I'm seeing it this morning because it's suggested to me on the page I found by myself, "How to Drink Alone." Not that I was looking for instructions on how to do something that is perfectly easy to do, at least if you're already alone.

"Historically, men’s underwear was completely out of view until sagging arrived in the 1990s. Women’s underwear, on the other hand..."

"... hasn’t been; hip-hugging pants have caused panic in the past when they exposed thongs or G-strings (sometimes called the 'whale tail' style). A boxer short can seem discreet by comparison. 'There might not be as much anxiety because it’s not as sexualized'.... In recent years, as more and more Americans abandon the idea of genitalia as an automatic marker of gender, the rigid norms around 'men’s' and 'women’s' underwear have started to blur. In response, start-ups and existing underwear brands have increased the availability of boxers designed specifically for female anatomy. (That is, without an open fly or support pouch.)...  As Emma McClendon, a professor of fashion studies at St. John’s University in Queens, noted to The Post in 2022: 'What we’re seeing are clothes that typically we would consider hyper-gendered, but they’re being played with in a way to eschew gender.'"

Writes Ashley Fetters Maloy in "The triumphant return of sagging pants — on women/Low-slung baggy pants with a visible boxer waistband were popular on men in the ’90s. On women in the 2020s, they’re comfy chic" (WaPo).

"Triumphant" means celebrating victory. It's funny to think of triumphant pants. Especially in this story that turns out to be mostly about underpants.

"Hey, look! It's my giant underpants!"

Previously blogged, here, in August 2008.

Funnily, the first commenter is Meade, whom I did not know at the time but would be married to a year later, in a real-life instantiation of the oft-repeated Pee Wee question, "Why don't you marry him?" 

Meade's comment: "Ah. Now I can die."

"I’ve warned my publishers that if they later on so much as change a single comma in one of my books, they will never see another word from me. Never! Ever!"

"When I am gone, if that happens, then I’ll wish mighty Thor knocks hard on their heads with his Mjolnir. Or I will send the ‘enormous crocodile’ to gobble them up." 

Said Roald Dahl, quoted in "Roald Dahl promised to set a crocodile on anyone who changed his words" (London Times).

 

This is from a recorded conversation he had with the artist Francis Bacon in 1982.

Here are 7 TikTok videos I've selected as right for just now. Let me know what you like best.

1. The "squirrel" is crazy about the trampoline.

2. Yeah, I'll back you up on that.

3. Joni Mitchell, in 1970, telling the audience they're "really a drag."

4. Orson Welles saying he puts loyalty to friends above art.

5. He just happened to find everything he was looking for at World Market.

6. The rigors of Chinese womanhood.

7. How to write about characters who are not autistic.

I find myself in The Wall Street Journal.

Here's the entire blog post.

I'm not blogging this because it give me a second chance in one morning to blog about underpants (AKA "pants" in England).

I'm blogging this because it was retweeted by Second Mentions, and — as I told you last April — I am fascinated by the silly avoidance of using the same word or phrase you've already used to refer to something you're still talking about (such that the "small house" of paragraph 1 must be a "petite edifice" in paragraph 2):

https://t.co/EqBBsKEO0B@secondmentions
'The Angels crooner'

— niall mcdonald (@niall_mcdonald) August 10, 2022

"We have full access to everything. We can go everywhere."

That was the repeated statement of the 3 DOJ lawyers — who were described as displaying an "arrogant" demeanor — who were present during the Mar-a-Lago raid, according to an eyewitness quoted in "FBI searched Melania’s wardrobe, spent hours in Trump’s private office during Mar-a-Lago raid" (NY Post).

I'm not surprised that a search extends into a woman's most intimate space — how could searches be effective if the woman's closet were off limits? — but I recognize that this is something that hits onlookers hard. It makes the government seem more brutal if you picture its agents rooting around in the lady's underwear drawer. 

Jane Goodall is in an underwear commercial.

 

I noticed that through "G-strings in the mist: ‘You wouldn’t expect Jane Goodall to be fronting a campaign for underwear’/Renowned primatologist ‘had a laugh’ at the idea she’d be surrounded by models wearing Australian bamboo fabric brand Boody" (The Guardian).

“It’s interesting,” says Associate Prof Michal Carrington, a researcher in ethical consumption at Melbourne University. “Because you wouldn’t expect Dame Jane Goodall to be fronting a campaign for underwear.... This ad campaign doesn’t really give that sense of moral shock, or that sense of why … The sense that people in their own actions are implicated.... While it’s great to see companies taking responsibility themselves and developing [more sustainable] products… how much responsibility do we want to place on the consumer? From a cynical perspective you could say 'Well why isn’t there legislation out there to stop the harmful effects of clothing?'"

In which I curate TikTok so you don't have to scroll. Tell me which of today's 10 filmlets delight you.

1. In the 90s, you had to wear a thong.

2. Asking Irish people to do an American accent.

3. Present day celebrities who look uncannily like somebody in a photo from the distant past.

4. Things he's apologized to his wife for.

5. An actor and scholar of acting explains what's so wrong about Amber Heard's testimony.

6. A clear aerial view of Rich Strike's impossible Derby win.

7. The alien welcomes you to space.

8. A man in his 20s with "the social life of a pensioner."

9. Trainspotting in Miami.

10. The insufferable vocal fry of indie films.

"We’re entering a new age where male-presenting bodies are feeling comfortable wearing effeminate shapes, effeminate fabrics that did not exist when I was growing up."

"It feels like a very brave new world. We’re really trying to explore and push and question the binary that has limited us for so long.... This was born on the dance floor.... Everything was so curated and wonderful and beautiful.... I needed to step up what I needed to wear, whether it was a soft harness instead of all the leather, or the metal on the market, or a body-con bodysuit that would accentuate my features as a male-presenting person."

Said Louis Dorantes, 30, who founded the men's lingerie company Leak NYC, quoted in "Sexy Lingerie for Men Is Here/Lacy thongs and sheer undergarments designed for men’s bodies are shaking up the traditional lingerie market" (NYT).

I note the term "male-presenting person." It appears the NYT for the first and only time in that article:

 

Keep an eye on that. It may become the new standard term.

"There is this post-apocalyptic, beige, baggy style that people think of when they hear genderless, which is limiting."

"We want to create an equal shopping experience for everyone, however you express yourself. All of our bottoms have either a flat front design or a pouch front design, and all of our tops are essentially unisex. Whether you’re extra small or 5X, it’s always the same price, and every style is available equally across prints and colors....”

Says E Leifer, answering the question "What’s the difference between gender-equal and gender-neutral clothing?" in "His, Hers, Everyone’s: Gender-Equal Underwear Goes (Slightly More) Mainstream/For years underwear has been strictly gendered. The co-founders of Play Out Apparel are reimagining it for all gender identities" (NYT).

Another question is: "Is gender-equal clothing the future for all apparel brands?" Answer:

Yes. The larger cultural conversation is just starting to meet us where we’re at, which is great, because it’s hard to fight alone.... So I don’t see equality being attainable in fashion or beyond without the demolition of the gender binary. That doesn’t mean everyone needs to be nonbinary. Everybody can be as femme or as masc as they want. Younger generations already get that. They don’t want to be told how to shop or how to express themselves. They want to be marketed to in a completely different way. And to me, that speaks to progress." 

ADDED: Here's the top-rated comment over there:  "So now instead of identifying as male (M) or female (F), we will identify as flat front (FF) or pouch front (PF)." Somehow this makes me think of Star-Bellied Sneetches.

AND: It’s a bit like “You can have your cake and eat it too”: You can have your gender binary and demolish it too.

"Why does it matter if other people can see that we have panties on? Why does it matter if our panty line is visible?"

"It does not matter. You should be happy that I am wearing panties, and my kitty-cat juice is not all over the place. I don't understand why we need this contraption... This is not innovative. We are human. We all wear the panties...."

Pinky reacts — on TikTok — to a strapless stick-on thong.