"Turns out they were watching 'The Death of a Unicorn'...."

Who knew Tesla vandals were into unicorns?

Man gets caught kicking a Cybertruck. It doesn't end well for him. pic.twitter.com/LD7hNtPDQM

— Thomas Sowell Quotes (@ThomasSowell) April 3, 2025

ADDED: Strangely enough, this is not my first post that has both my "Tesla" and my "unicorns" tags. The other one, back in 2018, was about settling a lawsuit about a drawing of a farting unicorn that Tesla used as an icon on its video screen and Musk put in a Christmas message to customers. 

WaPo begins its story about censorship in medias res, and I'll bet most WaPo readers don't notice that the story is incomprehensible.

I'm trying to read "An author was set to read his unicorn book to students. The school forbade it" by Jaclyn Peiser. 

How does it happen that an author gets into the position of being "set to read" his book to a captive audience of children? There are thousands of authors who might want access to children. They can't all be sitting there in a little chair reading their book to a bunch of kids who've been forced to sit quietly at their feet and receive the ideas they've put into a book. You can love books and hate censorship and still want to carefully control what books are read to the children in your care!

The article begins "Jason Tharp wants to write books for weird kids...." He's written a book and, we're told:

"A Colorado artist says he has reached a settlement with Elon Musk after challenging the Tesla tycoon’s use of a farting unicorn motif that he had drawn as an ironic tribute to electric cars."

"Musk used the cartoon image on Twitter, without attribution, to promote his Tesla electric car range, and ignored Tom Edwards’ attempts to come to a licensing arrangement, telling the artist’s daughter it would be 'kinda lame' to sue," The Guardian reports.

Sales of the mug spiked in February 2017 when Musk tweeted a photo of one, describing it as “maybe my favourite mug ever”. The following month, however, he tweeted an even more crudely drawn copy of the image to promote Tesla’s new “sketch pad” feature. It subsequently appeared as an icon on the vehicles’ operating system, and in a Christmas holiday message to his customers....

I guess Musk assumed he was helping the artist by promoting his work, but the continued use of the image should have been cleared with the artist.

I think it's funny that Tesla liked the image, because it seems to me like critique of electric cars. There are no unicorns, and even if they were, it would be hard to get them to fart directly into a car. It's already hard to find places along your route where you can charge your electric car, and the unicorn method — even if unicorns existed and had farts that could power a car — you'd have a hell of a time finding them when you needed them and getting them to fart in the general direction of your... well, wouldn't farts go in a gas tank?  I'm seeing critique of electric cars... on so many levels.

"The Digital Ruins of a Forgotten Future/Second Life was supposed to be the future of the internet..."

"... but then Facebook came along. Yet many people still spend hours each day inhabiting this virtual realm. Their stories—and the world they’ve built—illuminate the promise and limitations of online life."

By Leslie Jamison at The Atlantic. It's well worth clicking through if only to see the illustration, which pans over somebody's imaginary life, on a shaded deck overlooking the ocean and a flowery meadow where unicorns lounge.

[Second Life is] a landscape full of goth cities and preciously tattered beach shanties, vampire castles and tropical islands and rainforest temples and dinosaur stomping grounds, disco-ball-glittering nightclubs and trippy giant chess games. In 2013, in honor of Second Life’s tenth birthday, Linden Lab—the company that created it—released an infographic charting its progress: 36 million accounts had been created, and their users had spent 217,266 cumulative years online, inhabiting an ever-expanding territory that comprised almost 700 square miles. Many are tempted to call Second Life a game, but two years after its launch, Linden Lab circulated a memo to employees insisting that no one refer to it as that. It was a platform. This was meant to suggest something more holistic, more immersive, and more encompassing....

Its vast landscape consists entirely of user-generated content, which means that everything you see has been built by someone else.... These avatars build and buy homes, form friendships, hook up, get married, and make money.... At their cathedral on Epiphany Island, the Anglicans of Second Life summon rolling thunder on Good Friday, or a sudden sunrise at the moment in the Easter service when the pastor pronounces, “He is risen.” As one Second Life handbook puts it: “From your point of view, SL works as if you were a god.”....

Trump's tendency to say "There's something going on"...

... attracts the attention of Max Ehrenfreund at WaPo's Wonkblog.

That phrase, according to political scientists who study conspiracy theories, is characteristic of politicians who seek to exploit the psychology of suspicion and cynicism to win votes.

The idea that people in positions of power or influence are conspiring to conceal sinister truths from the public can be inherently appealing, because it helps make sense of tragedy and satisfies the human need for certainty and order. Yet politicians hoping to take advantage of these tendencies must rely on vague and suggestive statements, since any specific accusation could be easily disproved.

"He's leaving it to the audience to piece together what he's saying," said Joseph Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami, in a recent interview.... Uscinski noted that Trump has used the tactic throughout his campaign to gain support by appealing to voters' fears and cynicism. "The one thing that’s remained absolutely consistent is his penchant for conspiracy theorizing," Uscinski said.

Yeah, there's something going on there with Trump saying there's something going on there. I'm prompted to try to piece together what scary, sinister plans Trump may be conspiring to conceal. So many layers!

Meanwhile: "Trump revokes [Washington] Post press credentials, calling the paper ‘dishonest’ and ‘phony’" — writes Paul Farhi at — of all places — WaPo.

“Based on the incredibly inaccurate coverage and reporting of the record setting Trump campaign, we are hereby revoking the press credentials of the phony and dishonest Washington Post,” read a post on Trump’s Facebook page.

Another post said, “I am no fan of President Obama, but to show you how dishonest the phony Washington Post is, they wrote, ‘Donald Trump suggests President Obama was involved with Orlando shooting’ as their headline. Sad!”

Trump was referring to an article that posted online Monday morning that was headlined, “Donald Trump seems to connect President Obama to Orlando shooting.” The article was the most-read on The Post’s website at the time. Its original headline, which Trump accurately cited in his Facebook post, was changed about 90 minutes later. The newspaper changed it on its own, before Trump’s complaint.

What was the original headline?

ADDED: The original headline — included in the blocked quote — was "Donald Trump suggests President Obama was involved with Orlando shooting." Sorry for leaving that question at the end of this post. I had meant to delete it. What a crazy, embarrassing headline! But "The newspaper changed it on its own, before Trump’s complaint." There's some low-level self-praise!

IN THE COMMENTS: rhhardin — known for his gnomic comments — gets off a string of gems:

1. "What was the original headline?"/More Mush from the Wimp.

2. Something's happening here./Everybody look what's going down.

3. Suspicion is looking up, etymologically speaking. I don't know if a toga was involved.

4. Weasel words have a musky smell.

5. Terrorists don't hate. They're fine upstanding participants in a stable culture. Just keep the culture in their own country.

6. The unicorn ate it gravely./Finest line in Thurber.

Here's "The Unicorn in the Garden," for understanding #6.

In the perceptual entropy of the metamodernist, the Sanders revolution has already happened.

From an Atlantic article — "This Is How a Revolution Ends/The Democratic insurgent’s campaign is losing steam—but his supporters are not ready to give up" — by Molly Ball:

The Sanders movement has become impervious to reality. Some have even called into question the nature of reality itself: “Bernie Sanders’ ‘political revolution’ is political only inasmuch as thought is political,” a self-described “metamodernist creative writer” named Seth Abramson wrote in the Huffington Post a few days ago. “By the very nature of things—we might call it perceptual entropy—the impossible, once perceived, enters a chain of causation whose natural conclusion is realization.” By this logic, Abramson reasons, Sanders is actually winning. It’s, like, the Matrix, man, or something....

Clinton, for her part, has taken to pretending Sanders does not exist....

Just stop believing and he'll go away.

Sanders was introduced [in Anaheim] by a blind Filipino delegate and a gay actress who... compared Sanders to a unicorn, because “he seems too good to be true.”...

Ball is pushing the Hillary theory: It can't be true. A blind lady can see that he looks like a unicorn. Why won't everyone just stop?!!

But it's not that kind of year. And that unicorn is getting in position to win California.



IN THE COMMENTS: shiloh said:

ok, Althouse just wanted another excuse to use her Hillary's in trouble tag.

I said:

I made that tag to correspond to my tag for Obama: "Obama's in trouble."

That tag arose from a comic take we had at Meadhouse, which was, in longer form, "Obama's in trouble! We need to help!" I thought that was the tone of the news around Obama, and we were — I am not kidding — riffing on the old TV show "Lassie," where Lassie would bark about someone being in trouble and people would then know to spring into action and help.

But with Hillary, we don't have that instinct: If she's in trouble, then that means we need to help. She just doesn't inspire us that way. Few politicians do.

"Puyallup man undaunted after losing Beatles mural in fire."

Headline in The Herald Tribune, which also has "Cartoonist grew up in Gig Harbor, lives in Auburn and likes unicorns."

Miley Cyrus "stepped out in some comfy pajamas and unicorn slippers (and a Chanel handbag...)."

Good move (presumably by her stylist). Keep people guessing. Keep people looking. Keep people off balance wondering/worrying whether they are feeling sexual toward a child.

"I will not make you a slave, you will live in my 200 story castle where unicorn servants will feed you doughnuts off their horns."

You are "'more awesome than a monkey wearing a tuxedo made out of bacon riding a cyborg unicorn with a lightsaber for the horn on the tip of a space shuttle closing in on Mars, while engulfed in flames."

"I'm not a robot. I am a unicorn."

"But you said earlier that you were a robot."

We're here at the laundromat...

There's an old Reader's Digest large-print edition.



"Now, I can enjoy my bath again safely."

See that unicorn on the table? I got hit by it later. Accidentally. Don't think the unicorn-loving girl became enraged at me. Just a little careless unicorn-flinging at the laundromat. [ADDED: Vicious. You hit me with a unicorn.]

Jane Russell needs telescopic glasses:



I wonder how the world sees us.



(Enlarge.)

Naked Obama and the Unicorn.

The painting genre.

"I assume there are dragons and griffins and werewolves and homosexual Frankensteins throughout these novels..."

"...but I honestly don't give a shit if my assumption is true or false."

Chuck Klosterman is not reading the Harry Potter novels.

I find it astounding that the unifying cultural currency for modern teenagers are five-hundred-page literary works about a wizard. We are all collectively underestimating how unusual this is. Right now, there is no rock guitarist or film starlet as popular as J. K. Rowling. Over time, these novels (and whatever ideas lie within them) will come to represent the mainstream ethos of our future popular culture. Harry Potter will be the only triviality that most of that coming culture will unilaterally share.

And I have no interest in any of it.

And I wonder how much of a problem this is going to become.

If it's the only shared thing, that means, in the future you won't get any of the references.

... I will not grasp the fundamental lingua franca of the 2025 hipster. I will not only be old but old for my age. I will be the pterodactyl, and I will be slain. It is only a matter of time.

ADDED: The word "hipster" is vastly overused these days. Anyone with a tinge of youth and a shred of knowledge of fashion and pop culture trends seems to be a hipster — at least to people who notice they're aging and don't want to bother with the trends. Hipster — the category should be more elite. Or it seems completely absurd.

We could try to think deeply about the word "hip." For example, why aren't hipsters and hippies the same thing? What is the -ster relationship to "hip" that is different from the -ie relationship? To me, -ster seems to make you more of a knowledgeable proponent or an obsessive devotee, and -ie suggests you're having fun with it. Other -ster words that come to mind: mobster, roadster. Is a mobster's relationship to the mob and a roadster's relationship to the road the same as a hipster's relationship to hip?

Other -ie words I think of easily: foodie, groupie. See? More fun.

AND: A little musical accompaniment to this postscript: here. In the comments, Trooper York brought up The Orlons, but then he didn't quote "South Street." The first time I ever heard the word "hippie," it was in that great early 60s song. Let's check out the etymology:

During the jive era of the late 1930s and early 1940s, African-Americans began to use the term hip to mean "sophisticated, fashionable and fully up-to-date". The term hipster was coined by Harry Gibson in 1940, and was used during the 1940s and 1950s to describe jazz performers. The word evolved to describe Bohemian counterculture. Like the word hipster, the word hippie is jazz slang from the 1940s, and one of the first recorded usages of the word hippie was in a radio show on November 13, 1945, in which Stan Kenton called Harry Gibson "Hippie". This use was likely playing off Gibson's nickname, "Harry the Hipster."

In Greenwich Village, New York City, young counterculture advocates were named hips because they were considered "in the know" or "cool", as opposed to being square. Reminiscing about late 1940s Harlem in his 1964 autobiography, Malcolm X referred to the word hippy as a term African Americans used to describe a specific type of white man who "acted more Negro than Negroes."

In a 1961 essay, Kenneth Rexroth used the term to refer to young people participating in African American or Beatnik nightlife.

In 1963, the Orlons, an African-American singing group from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania released the soul dance song "South Street", which included the lyrics "Where do all the hippies meet? South Street, South Street...The hippest street in town".[9][10]....

The more contemporary sense of the word "hippie" first appeared in print on September 5, 1965. In an article entitled "A New Haven for Beatniks," San Francisco journalist Michael Fallon wrote about the Blue Unicorn coffeehouse, using the term hippie to refer to the new generation of beatniks who had moved from North Beach into the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. Fallon reportedly came up with the name by condensing Norman Mailer's use of the word hipster into hippie. Use of the term hippie did not catch on in the mass media until early 1967, after San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen began referring to hippies in his daily columns.

Nothing there about the more recent transition to "hipster," though there is a section about the pejorative use of the word "hippie." Basically, "hippie" ended up meaning not hip at all. That's certainly the way I use it (almost always in self-deprecation).

"Beatnik" is a cool word, but I think it's solidly anchored in the 1950s... or to refer to Maynard G. Krebs, the Bob Denver character in my all-time favorite TV show "Dobie Gillis." He also did his beatnik role in a cool movie called "Surf's Up," which came out the same year as "Hard Day's Night." What a contrast between those two movies. I must confess that I saw them in a double feature at the time... and much preferred "Surf's Up." I found this hilarious:



CORRECTION: The movie title is actually "For Those Who Think Young." I went through a long period of thinking it was pathetic of me to have liked this movie more than "Hard Day's Night," but now, much as I know "Hard Day's Night" is better, I think it's perfectly acceptable to enjoy an old surf movie. Look at the cast:

James Darren ... Gardner 'Ding' Pruitt III
Pamela Tiffin ... Sandy Palmer
Paul Lynde ... Uncle Sid
Tina Louise ... Topaz McQueen
Bob Denver ... Kelp
Robert Middleton ... Burford Sanford 'Nifty' Cronin
Nancy Sinatra ... Karen Cross

POSTSCRIPT: If we called monsters "monnies," would we be less afraid?

In which Althouse has a psychedelic flashback. I don't know about you, but sometimes I've tried to remember, what were the shows I saw at the Fillmore East? I remembered some of the bands, but who really were the others? So I was thrilled to find this site, which is trying to list every act and every show.

So who played with The Mothers of Invention in 1969? The date was Feb. 21/22, and the opening acts were Chicago and The Buddy Miles Express. And I went to see Neil Young & Crazy Horse one night in 1970 and the opening acts were The Steve Miller Band and Miles Davis! When did I see The New Riders of the Purple Sage play with The Grateful Dead? 1970? 1971? I can't tell from this, because there are several such shows. When I saw them there was a third act, which played in the middle, that was just Pig Pen and Jerry Garcia on acoustic guitars. It must have been May 15, 1970, because I remember hearing them make a big deal about the upcoming concert with Crosby, Stills & Nash, which caused us to scoff and shake our heads in dismay. Rock and Roll was over and people like them were destroying it! Or was it this night, when "Phil places two bass notes that are just perfect."

Remember when people were all excited about Delaney & Bonnie? And who were Mason & Elliot that they were headliners? (Oh.) Remember when people were crazy for Ten Years After? Remember The Hello People (they played at my high school once)("It's a Monday Kind of Tuesday"... or was it Wednesday?). Remember Elephant Memory? Or am I mixing them up with Crazy Elephants? And who were Cactus? How could they have topped Edgar Winter and Humble Pie some night in 1971? And there's Elton John, late of American Idol, already headlining in 1971 (with Wishbone Ash and Sea Train).

And there's T. Rex in 1971--was it already T. Rex or was it still Tyrannosaurus Rex? (We played their album Unicorn all the time in 1970.) In 1970, you could have seen The Incredible String Band (I knew people who worshipped them!) along with The Stone Monkey Mime Group (good lord! who were they?). And who were Soft White Underbelly, Grootna, and Blodwyn Pig?

Looking for some answers, I ran across Fuzz Acid & Flowers, which is an amazing compilation of info about "U.S. psych and garage music 1964 - 1972," with "band histories/musical analysis on over 5,400 US acts of the era." Great fun browsing just for the psychedelic names. We remember Strawberry Alarm Clock, but there was also Strawberry Tuesday and Strawberry Window. Was there Orange? Of course: Orange Colored Sky, The Orange Groove, and The Orange Wedge. How about "electric"--was that a popular psychedelic word? Here's the official list:

The Electrical Banana
The Electric Company
Electric Firebirds
The Electric Flag
Electric Hair
Electric Junkyard
Electric Love
Electric Piano Playground
The Electric Prunes
The Electric Screwdriver
Electric Toilet
Electric Tomorrow
Electric Train
Electrified People
The Electro Magnetic Flowerseed
The Electronic Concept Orchestra

And I love the places where the same psychedelic idea struck several groups independently:

Stix and Stoned
Stix and Stones
Stix & Stonz

Okay, enough of that. Go make your own discoveries. I've got admissions files and a law review edit and income tax forms ...

Oh, and that previous entry, which looks psychedelic next to this one--it's a Monday kind of Tuesday/It's a Thursday kind of Saturday--is just about the NYT crossword puzzle. ... In case you're inclined to worry about me! Did you finish the Saturday puzzle?