"On a recent afternoon at the Venice Biennale, I walked into a bright blue portable john and peed for art."

"Just outside the booth, a naked woman was submerged in a huge water tank, breathing through a scuba mouthpiece. My urine was about to pass along a tube from the toilet through several filtration systems, before topping up her glass chamber’s water level. The performer, who would stay in the tank for at least four hours, was essentially living in other people’s waste. And she had plenty of donors. The toilet is part of a presentation called 'Seaworld Venice' by the choreographer and theater-maker Florentina Holzinger that is undoubtedly the biggest talker of this year’s Biennale, which opens to the public on Saturday and runs through Nov. 22."

From "These Toilets in Venice Have the Art World Aflush/Undoubtedly the biggest talker at this year’s Venice Biennale is the Austrian pavilion, where visitors can make their own contributions to the work on show" (NYT).

I clicked on that link for "Seaworld Venice" and was confronted with big red letters saying "I live in your piss."

This is the kind of degradation of women that feminists used to rail against, but, here, the artist is female, so I guess we're not supposed to notice. The message is purportedly environmentalism. Also the artist puts herself out there: "Part of the performance at the pavilion involved Holzinger swinging her body from side to side inside a metal bell attached to a crane to make it ring out." Video at the link. Holzinger is naked. A commenter over there notes that she risks deafness, performing as a bell clapper.

ADDED: I don't remember ever seeing "talker" used to mean the thing being talked about: the show is "undoubtedly the biggest talker of this year's Biennale." I understand "talker" meaning a person doing that talking, but not This show is a big talker, meaning it's what everyone's talking about. I guess it's like the use of "-er" in "looker" used to refer to someone people look at and not the one doing the looking.

The OED defines "talker" only as the one doing the talking. An example from Jane Austen (from "Emma"): "I am rather a talker; and now and then I have let a thing escape me which I should not." 

And then there's that Shakespeare adage, from "Richard III": "Talkers are no good doers." I think we don't use that one too much. We're more likely to go with: "All talk and no action," "Actions speak louder than words," "Talk is cheap," and "Walk the walk, don't just talk the talk." 

"A love of dogs is somewhat of a tradition for French leaders: the past six presidents all owned at least one black Labrador."

"The two owned by Nicolas Sarkozy, and a chihuahua, reportedly caused damage totalling tens of thousands of euros at the Élysée Palace by chewing on 200-year-old furniture in the Silver Salon. President Macron’s dog, Nemo, was once filmed urinating on an ornamental fireplace in a presidential meeting, and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s was a gift from the late Queen and nicknamed Sandringham Samba...."

From "Can the French love of dogs be transformed into election success? Doggy food banks and shared human-dog drinking fountains are among the promises on offer as candidates for the local elections try to win over voters" (London Times).

Check the reaction that's closest to yours.

What good is culture if you can't piss on it?

Why black Labs? Is it racist? Samba... really?

I want political promises for America's dogs!

It's all about love. Love is the answer.

 

pollcode.com free polls

Milestones in Feminism: The question is not what did the woman do, but what did the woman wear.

The retrogression is not really Trump's. It's Breitbart's. Trump is just passing along the publicity received by his wife:

Breitbart's opinion on aesthetics is worthless. Look what an ugly mess it is:

That's my screenshot from the Breitbart article.

Readers are expected to look past the drink this/don't drink this/robot puppy/robot bunny advertising and read what looks like a press release: "Melania Trump chose a gray textured wool bar jacket from Dior for the historic occasion, pairing it with a matching gray textured wool skirt, as well as a thin black leather belt from Dior and patent leather stilettos from Christian Louboutin."

A "bar jacket," I was curious enough to learn, is the kind of jacket Christian Dior thought perfect for women drinking cocktails in the afternoon at the bar at the Plaza Athénée hotel in in 1947. Did they have "bladder issues"? Did they dream of electric rabbits?

How dare they put a stereotypically old woman sitting on a toilet right next to the news of the First Lady's appearance at the U.N. doing whatever it was she was doing while wearing some very specific items of clothing!

"Retirement Plan."

An Oscar-nominated short, by John Kelly:

And here's David Sedaris brilliantly admiring it, in "The Dream of Finishing One’s To-Do List in 'Retirement Plan'/In John Kelly’s animated short film, narrated by Domhnall Gleeson, nothing’s off limits when it comes to thinking about the future—particularly when there’s so much left to do" (The New Yorker):

"During my second pregnancy, rats began clawing their way up our sewage pipes. For months, we found them in our toilet bowl."

"When I began peeing in the bathtub, my husband insisted it was time to move to Providence. He had grown up there — and he’d be able to run his family business. 'The kids will have more space,' he said. 'And if we don’t like it, we can always come back.'... As soon as we purchased the 'beautiful Dutch Colonial,' I was seized with panic. My husband already knew about, and barely tolerated, my penchant for returning things. The most Thoreauvian person I know, he purchased almost nothing in the first place. We were all burdened by our possessions; like Thoreau, he believed we had become 'the tools of our tools.'... [W]hat was it that made me want to reverse our decision...?... It was because the neighborhood wasn’t walkable and I, a New-Orleanian-turned-New-Yorker, didn’t know how to drive well.... [T]he nearest playground or coffee shop a mile away...."

Writes Jackie Delamatre, in "I Had Buyer’s Remorse. It Almost Ended My Marriage. When you can’t agree on the right city to live in, home can be more hell than haven" (NYT).

The way to avoid buyer's remorse is not to buy anything new. But you can't be peeing in the bathtub because of the rats in the toilet.

"Who wants to sit squeezed up to a big group of hairy men on a bachelor party?"

Said Jerelyn Taubert, 66, who moved to Budapest 20 years ago, when she would arrive at the beautiful historic bath house "at eight in the morning and there would be three people in the pool.... There were a lot of older Hungarian ladies and it felt private, in the women’s section."

She's quoted in "Tensions boil over as tourists swamp Budapest’s historic bath houses/Bathing culture is at the heart of the city but its popularity with foreigners is pricing out locals, and political rows are delaying desperately needed renovations" (London Times).

Maybe the older Hungarian ladies don't like squeezing up with a woman who only moved to town 20 years ago. I think it is important, when you are disgusted by some people, to remember that there are other people to whom you are disgusting.

AND: Speaking of pools and variable disgust, look at this question some guy sent in to the NYT "Ethicist": "I presume that most people pee in swimming pools and that everyone pees in the ocean. But suppose I’m at the beach. I need to defecate. It’s a 15 minute walk to the bathroom. It’s a Tuesday, and the beach is deserted. Is it OK to go in the ocean? I say yes! My wife disagrees." Just to ask is already to be too disgusting. Just the first sentence — the foundation for the question — is already too disgusting. 

I read that yesterday and didn't blog it, but I'm blogging it now because it lodged in my head. I know because it oozed up as I read about that Budapest bath house. I'm blogging it now to free myself of thinking about it again, because I won't blog it twice. 

Things happen so fast with Trump. He's always dropping one distracting thing or another.

It's hard to keep track of the things you really ought to worry about.

Chomping a wall off the East Wing of the White House? That's so distracting that it must be intended as the distraction. Why do it this week and not next month? Because there's something else that's harder to see, and I'm certainly not seeing it.

"Demanding that the Justice Department pay him about $230 million in compensation for the federal investigations into him" — that's something "people familiar with the matter" fed to the New York Times but it's not at the top of the front page anymore.

It's below the story about how dogs are peeing: 

It's down there on a level with Springsteen's "Nebraska," which came out in 1982 and is the focus of a new biopic that already been in the news for weeks.

The dog piss is fresher. 

The top story on the Times front page seems like another throwback: "Trump Empowers Election Deniers, Still Fixated on 2020 Grievances."

They're still fixated. We're still fixated. It's all about paying attention. Are we dangerously attached to our fixations? Or are we distracted by the latest thing? There's something that's neither of those 2 things and it's what I'm afraid we're not doing.

CORRECTION: There are 2 headlines about the $230 million and I see now that one of them is higher than Bruce and at the level of the second half of the bit about dogs peeing. Sorry. I should have paid better attention. But my point remains and is, perhaps, underscored: We're caught up in a game of paying attention.

If a man wanted to mythologically pee from Camp Pendleton, across I-5, into the Pacific Ocean, how far would he need to project his urine stream?

I'm reading "I-5 may be shut down due to concerns over live-fire military event at Camp Pendleton" (L.A. Times).

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office is weighing whether to close parts of Interstate 5 beginning Friday amid concerns over what it says is a White House-directed plan to use live ordnance "during a military anniversary celebration off Camp Pendleton’s coast in San Diego County — where Navy ships are expected to fire over the freeway onto the base. Newsom’s office has received, but not confirmed, reports that live ordnance will be fired from offshore vessels during the event commemorating the Marine Corps’ 250th anniversary. The event is titled "Sea to Shore — A Review of Amphibious Strength" and will feature Vice President JD Vance.... The military show of force coincides with No Kings rallies and marches across the state on Saturday.... The Times could not confirm whether live ordnance will be fired over the freeway....

Oh, great. The 2 men who are their party's presumptive nominee for President next time around are in a monumental pissing contest. Sea to Shore — A Review of Amphibious Strength indeed.

Calculations from Grok:

Physics of Projection: In reality, a human urine stream is limited by physiology and physics. Studies and anecdotal records (e.g., from urology or informal "contests") suggest a typical male urine stream might reach 1–2 meters (3–6 feet) horizontally under optimal conditions (e.g., high bladder pressure, no wind). A "mythological" stream implies superhuman ability, so we’ll ignore real-world limits but use the distance as the target.

Required Distance: To cross 2 miles (3,200 meters), the stream would need to be propelled with extraordinary force, akin to a fire hose or a superhero’s ability. For context:

"Neighbors soon grew frustrated with the constant hubbub at the house. They saw people coming and going carrying gun holsters..."

"... as the security team ballooned along with Mr. Musk’s safety concerns. Though Texas has permissive gun laws, the activity stood out. 'I call that place Fort Knox,' said Mr. Hemmer, a retired real estate agent who lives across the street and is president of the neighborhood homeowners association.... Mr. Hemmer, who has long owned a Tesla, grew so frustrated with his neighbor that he began flying a drone over the house to check for city violations, and he keeps a video camera trained on the property around the clock. Last year, he complained to West Lake Hills officials about Mr. Musk’s fence, the traffic and how he thought the owner was operating a security business from the property. Mr. Musk’s security team also contacted the West Lake Hills Police Department about Mr. Hemmer, according to city records. One security official accused Mr. Hemmer last year of standing naked in the street, according to the records. Mr. Hemmer denied that he was naked and said he was on his property wearing black underwear. On another night, he said, he was walking his dog fully clothed and stopped when he suddenly needed to urinate — which Mr. Musk’s camera captured. 'The cameras got me,' Mr. Hemmer said. 'It’s scary they have guys sitting and watching me pee.'"

I'm reading "Won’t You Be My Neighbor? No Thanks, Elon Musk. Residents of an upscale enclave outside Austin, Texas, learned the hard way what it’s like when a multibillionaire moves into the mansion next door. Some of them have started a ruckus over it" (NYT).

Some screwy details in that story — Texans bothered by holstered guns, flying a spy drone into your neighbor's airspace then complaining that he's got cameras aimed out at the street where you took the liberty to pee, that whole nakedness-or-black-underwear conundrum....

In any case, doesn't Elon have his own city now? I'm reading "Voters Approve Incorporation of SpaceX Hub as Starbase, Texas/A South Texas community, mostly made up of SpaceX employees, voted 212 to 6 in favor of establishing a new city called Starbase" (NYT).

"Cory Booker didn’t go to the bathroom for 25 hours. Is that … OK?"

Headline at The Guardian, where we're told..

[H]e seemingly didn’t pee once the whole time. (A rep for Booker confirmed to TMZ that he did not wear a diaper during his speech.)

I would have written: A rep for Booker confirmed to TMZ that Booker claimed he did not wear a diaper during his speech. Or, if the rep claimed personal knowledge of which unseen garments Booker wore: A rep for Booker corroborated Booker's claim that he did not wear a diaper during his speech.

Does anyone believe that? It seems reckless. Does Booker want to appear reckless? He may think that appearing reckless is better than being thought of as having worn a diaper. But the fear of being thought of as having worn a diaper is ableist and ageist. And yet, look at our Congress.

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: "At the State of the Union speech in 2025 — I know it wasn't officially a 'State of the Union' — what percentage of those in the audience were wearing diapers — in your estimation? Consider how long in advance they needed to get to and remain in their seats, the expected length of the speech, the length of time after the speech before access to facilities, and the age and frailty of the members of Congress."

Anyway, the Guardian's answer to its question — "Is that … OK?" — is no.

What is "disgusting" to J.D. Vance?

I only found one appearance of "disgusting" in "Hillbilly Elegy": "my urine turned a disgusting brown shade" (page 183).

Here's what motivated me to look, from "JD Vance Hits Back at Jennifer Aniston, Defending ‘Childless Cat Ladies’ Remarks/The 'Friends' actress, who has been open about her fertility struggles, recently criticized Mr. Vance’s 2021 comments on social media" (NYT):

In [an Instagram] post, which drew widespread attention, [Jennifer Aniston], who has been open about her fertility struggles, wrote, “Mr. Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day.”...

“Hollywood celebrities say, ‘Oh, well, JD Vance, what if your daughter suffered fertility problems?’” Mr. Vance said [on “The Megyn Kelly Show” on SiriusXM]. “Well, first of all, that’s disgusting because my daughter is 2 years old. And second of all, if she had fertility problems, as I said in that speech, I would try everything I could to try to help her because I believe families and babies are a good thing.”

Why did he say "that's disgusting"? Was it some kind of notion that Aniston was sexualizing the toddler?! Aniston was being very tactful and delicate, and he's saying it's disgusting? That's very strange. I'm getting a gynophobia vibe. 

Here's the Vance quote that provoked Aniston: "We are effectively run in this country… by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made."

By the way, I've seen Aniston's cat, and it is disgusting:

A Minion of the Anti-Christ!

"Do you think that someone who is a drug addict is absolutely incapable of -- that all people who are drug addicts are absolutely incapable of refraining from using drugs?..."

"All right. Then compare that with a person who absolutely has no place to sleep in a particular jurisdiction. Does that person have any alternative other than sleeping outside?... They have... none. They have absolutely none. There's not a single place where they can sleep.... So the point is that the connection between drug addiction and drug usage is more tenuous than the connection between absolute homelessness and sleeping outside."

Said Justice Alito, in yesterday's oral argument in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson. There's a precedent, Robinson v. California, that found it to be cruel and unusual punishment to make a crime of the "status" of drug addiction. The 9th Circuit said that the city — by prohibiting sleeping outdoors — had made a crime out of the status of homelessness.

For more detail, see the SCOTUSblog coverage: "Court divided over constitutionality of criminal penalties for homelessness."

"Furry is a fandom. We don’t think that we’re animals. I really like the idea of animals that walk and talk, so I’m going to dress up as one, as kind of a fun sort of cosplay thing."

Said a student named Strudel, quoted in "Students walk out of Utah middle school to protest ‘furries’" (abc4). Strudel explained that people who think they actually are a nonhuman animal are called "therians."

The student protesters object to the school's tolerance of the furries. There is a dress code banning things that "draw undue attention, distract, disrupt, or otherwise interfere with the learning atmosphere." You can see from the video of the protest, below, that signs say things like "Compelled speech is not free speech" and "I will not comply," so there seems to be more going on than a simple failure to enforce the dress code against the furries. I haven't watched much of the video, but I'm guessing the non-furry students are compelled to acknowledge the furries' professed identity in some prescribed way. And the article says the protesting students accuse the furries of "biting, scratching, spraying air freshener on, barking at and chasing other students." I'm guessing they are claiming a privilege to manifest behavior in line with their professed identity. How would that explain spraying air freshener? Perhaps that's a mellow substitute for a spray bottle of urine.

I'm not sure this isn't a hoax. There's plenty of video though:

"Since my ship came in in 2008, when 'Iron Man' had that big weekend, I have been a self-described expert on the ways of the world of creativity and commerce."

"It’s not that the playing field changes — it’s that it morphs into something that you can’t even really call a playing field anymore. It’s a kind of mosaic of what it was moments before. If I am running a major streamer — which sounds like a big No. 1; how serious is it if the mind immediately goes to peepee? — anyway, you look at the budget, you look at the numbers and it comes down to a spreadsheet."

Says Robert Downey Jr., after the NYT interviewer asks if he's able to "make sense of the business right now."

Quoted in "Robert Downey Jr.’s Post-Marvel Balancing Act." 

His new movie is "Oppenheimer," directed by Christopher Nolan, 3-hour "thriller" about J. Robert Oppenheimer. I don't know how that can be thrilling, and I'm reflexively annoyed by the idea that some movie folk are proposing to "thrill" me about Oppenheimer. Find another word. "Thriller" is so off-putting. Do some people see it and think Great, I'll be thrilled?

I'm skeptical about the movie "Oppenheimer," but I do like that quote up there. Downey has a distinctive way of speaking. Even reduced to text, it's alive and funny and multifaceted. But it's close to nonsense. And he's mixing up No. 1 and No. 2! Or did the meanings transpose over the years? He's got a mixed metaphor there in that sentence the NYT saw fit to print. Maybe he did that on purpose intending a scatological joke in "you look at the numbers" and that's what he thinks of the movie business: It's gone to shit.

CORRECTION: All my analysis is affected and ruined by my failure to see the first "r" in "streamer." I apologize... and laugh at myself. Downey was only ever talking about urine. There was no excrement, no innumeracy, no mixed metaphor. 

"Washington Post is embarrassing itself by reporting— at length— an utterly irrelevant PR stunt by two, white, self-absorbed multi-billionaires."

"Reminds me of Rupert Murdoch sensational, trash 'journalism.' Any further coverage of cr@p like this and I’m stopping my subscription."

Writes Eeyore Eeyore in the comments section of "The Elonization of Mark Zuckerberg: How the Meta CEO is playing it cool/Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has been trying to appear more relevant among the tech elite" (WaPo).

I looked up "Elonization" — just to see if WaPo coined it — and I found "Elonization Of The World — Is Elon Musk A Cultural Moment? The billionaire is creating the society of tomorrow" by Michel Kana.

But — wonderfully creepily ‚ there was also this:

"Are you now, or have you ever been a member of the Grateful Dead?"

That's the top-rated comment on this Reddit post:

 

I liked this comment, which reminds me I've got to get around to finishing "The Philosophy of Modern Song":

"Madison, Wis., led the way for U.S. cities, with 35 per 100,000."

From "Why Are Public Restrooms Still So Rare?/Cities in the U.S. and elsewhere have made strides, but challenges remain" (NYT). 

Interesting factoid: "The temperance movement to limit alcohol consumption led cities to build public restrooms in the late 1800s and early 1900s: The thinking went that men wouldn’t need to enter a bar to use the bathroom."

But these days, we don't think of public bathrooms as bulwarks against vice. Quite the opposite: We're picturing sex and drugs. 

Was Louisa May Alcott a trans man?

Peyton Thomas — host of "Jo’s Boys: A Little Women Podcast" — looks at the evidence in a NYT op-ed.

Alcott, we're told, "used the names Lou, Lu or Louy." And: 

"Litter boxes in schools" is a Wikipedia article — with an active discussion of whether it should be retitled "Litter boxes in schools hoax."

It begins:

 

I used a screenshot because I wanted you to experience the absurdity of the picture of an actual cat litter box. Surely, if there were a litter box for a human being it would need to be proportional, and I think a third grader is about 6 times as large as a cat. I don't know the urine output of a child versus a cat, but, seriously, you're going to need a bigger box. But if it is a hoax — and Wikipedia assures me it is a hoax — then there is no box and that's the whole point.

I was going to make a joke using the phrase "Schrödinger's cat box," but the Wikipedia entry "Schrödinger's cat" was a real rat hole.

I've curated 6 TikToks for you this afternoon. Some people love it!

1. Hydraulic press performance art.

2. The difference between your 97% and my 100% is bigger than you think.

3. Why so many toilet breaks?

4. How did women pee in the 18th century?

5. A peasant observes the execution of Anne Boleyn.

6. A heads-up if you're in Saskatchewan.