"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: 

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.

"This reminds me of the time I got thrown out of my local swimming pool for urinating in the water. 'But everybody does it!,' said I."

"'That's as maybe,' said they, 'But you're the only one to do it standing on the high board!'"

Comments somebody who calls himself Stoobs, at "Spanish city of Vigo introduces £645 fine for urinating in the sea" (London Times).

"His gender dysphoria was manageable. He felt fine about his sex life. Though he had read about 'bottom surgery' online..."

"... the final outcomes did not seem good enough for him to justify the risks. People were comparing the results to soda cans, he recalls. 'They were saying they weren’t functional. You couldn’t pee out of them. You couldn’t feel anything.'... Though phalloplasty cannot yet produce a penis identical to the one most men are born with, it can provide for many of the classic penile pastimes: standing urination, penetrative sex, orgasm (without ejaculation), changing in a locker room.... In the United States, there are two common types of phalloplasty: radial forearm flap (or R.F.F., which uses the forearm as a skin-flap donor site) and anterolateral thigh (or ALT, which uses the thigh). These flaps form the shaft and can be combined with various other procedures in pursuit of four major post-op priorities: standing urination, aesthetics, erectile function and sensation. Most surgeons begin by asking patients to rank these priorities.... Ben’s primary goal was standing urination. He decided his next goals were penetrative sex and aesthetics.... At 4-foot-10 and 97 pounds, he felt he had certain disadvantages. 'Women don’t like short men,' he said. 'I kind of had to give myself all the edge up on the competition I could get.'... I wondered aloud if the point of surgery was to grant him the freedom to stop thinking about his penis. 'No,' Ben said, correcting me. 'I think about it all the time. Touch it all the time. Look at it all the time. It’s my favorite thing to do.'" 

From "How Ben Got His Penis/Phalloplasty — the surgery to make a penis — has grown more popular among trans men. But with a steep rate of complications, it remains a controversial procedure" (NYT).

"Women don’t like short men"... but do women like men who think about their penis all the time and touch it and look at it all the time?

"I feel that if someone looking at Piss Christ is affected by it in a negative way, or upset by it, they should think about what the photograph symbolizes..."

"... and that the crucifixion is a really ugly way to die. And all your fluids come out, your piss, your blood, and even your excrement." 

Said Andres Serrano, recently, quoted in a New York Magazine article titled "Medieval in Manhattan Artist Andres Serrano’s ecclesiastical Greenwich Village home is not a museum." 

“I realized that the things that made the most sense here were religious in nature. They were Christian paintings, Christian statues, even furniture that looks ecclesiastical, that sometimes. actually came from a church, but it made sense because the Renaissance and the medieval period were all about Christian objects and paintings.” 

Serrano was raised Catholic in Williamsburg and became one of the most famous artists in the world during the ’80s “culture wars,” after his 1987 photograph Piss Christ enraged Senator Jesse Helms.

Biden's mother hated the English and wrote "hundreds of poems describing how God must smite the English and rain blood on our heads."

From "Joe Biden’s mother so disliked England she refused to sleep in bed Queen had slept in/Veep writer Georgia Pritchett reveals US president’s Irish mother wrote poems calling for God to ‘rain blood’ on the English" (The Guardian).

[Biden] also recalled how his mother, Catherine Finnegan – known as Jean – visited the UK and spent a night in a hotel where, she was told, the Queen had once stayed. 

“She was so appalled that she slept on the floor all night, rather than risk sleeping on a bed that the Queen had slept on,” Pritchett wrote, adding she personally admired anyone who allowed their principles to take precedence over a comfortable bed.

What's with these stories about highly emotive reactions to beds in foreign countries that somebody once slept in? I'm thinking of the myth of Trump's procuring prostitutes to urinate on a bed in a Russian hotel that Barack and Michelle Obama slept in. If beds so absorbingly retain a spiritual residue of those who've slept there, how can anyone sleep in any hotel?

"And studios are loath to send out screening links because they... can see how we watch the movies via the links they send us."

"They can see where we pause, how many times we rewind, how often we start again altogether. Most tellingly, they know when a critic checks out completely: said critic lets the movie play all the way through the credits. No one watches a (non-Marvel) movie all the way through the credits.Watching at home just encourages bad habits. It introduces kids, laptops, pets, phones, doorbells, Twitter, bathroom breaks, endless distractions.... But studios and filmmakers are correct to counter writers’ desire for greater convenience with the fact that watching films at home is simply inferior to doing so safely in a theater."

From "No more home screeners. Critics should watch movies in theaters like everyone else" by Sonny Bunch (WaPo).

The most depressing part of that was "(non-Marvel)."

Top-rated comment: "Any movie worth a damn can withstand the slightly 'atomized' experience of a home theater. This is 'old man yells at cloud'-level nonsense." What about all the old men who can't sit through a whole movie without going to the bathroom? 

"Have wipes and a bottle handy if you need to go to the bathroom, Dr. Lipman said."

Advice from "How to Stay Safe if You’re Trapped in Your Car During a Snowstorm/Safety experts offer advice on how people can keep warm and collected if they are stranded for hours on the road. Their top tip? Be prepared" (NYT).

A bottle?!!

"The boars snooze in people’s paddling pools. They snuffle across the lawns. They kick residents’ soccer balls and play with their dogs.

"They saunter down the sidewalks and sleep in the streets. Some eat from the hands of humans, and they all eat from the trash.... 'It became like an everyday thing,' said Eugene Notkov, 35, a chef who lets his dog play with the boars that putter around the local parks. 'They’re a part of our city'.... Bumping into one is 'like seeing a squirrel.'...'I wish we could all in Israel learn to live like they live in Haifa,' said Edna Gorney, a poet, ecologist and lecturer at the University of Haifa. 'It’s an example of coexistence — not only between Arabs and Jews, but also between humans and wildlife.'... 'They are controlling the streets now,' said Assaf Schechter, 43, a port worker confronted recently by a boar on his porch. 'It’s a very crazy situation.'... 'At night, I would go out, after a drink, and recycle the beer,' Professor Malkinson said. 'It’s two for the price of one — you fertilize the trees and you try to deter the wild boars... Essentially the conflict is between those who oppose having wild boars in the city and those who don’t... It’s not an ecological problem... It’s a social problem.'"

From "Where Boars Hog the Streets Groups of boars have become an unavoidable presence in Haifa/Some human residents are charmed, but others are annoyed or frightened and now carry sticks on walks" (NYT) 

To comment, email me here.

FROM THE EMAIL: Temujin writes: 

"He was entranced by fire — with a real-estate agent recalling seeing an estimated 1,000 candles in Hsieh’s Park City, Utah, home..."

"'[He] explained to me that the candles were a symbol of what life was like in a simpler time'.... The quirky entrepreneur... also liked to use a heater in his girlfriend’s shed to decrease his oxygen level, sources told the media outlet. Hsieh also inhaled nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, a k a whippets, to try to decrease his oxygen use.... But playing with his oxygen intake was only one part of Hsieh’s manipulation of his body. Hsieh would go on a 26-day alphabet diet, in which he would only eat foods starting with a single letter each day, such as 'a' the first 24 hours, 'b' the second, and so on, nearly fasting by the letter 'z'.... He got down to 100 pounds at one point.... Hsieh also would see how long he could go without urinating.... A pal told the Journal that Hsieh was like 'the Giving Tree' — the selfless character in the Shel Silverstein kiddie classic that gives so much of itself that it is left with nothing."

From "Zappos founder Tony Hsieh spent last hours planning to enter rehab" (NY Post).

The Giving Tree was giving — sacrificing to provide the boy with benefits. Hsieh's sacrifices did not give anyone else anything but merely pared away from the person making the sacrifices. You'll have to imagine an alternative children's book called "The Giving Up Tree." 

Even in "The Giving Tree," we question whether the tree — that is, the person represented by the tree — should have given everything. Shouldn't the boy — at some point — have learned about giving from the tree and become a giver himself? Shouldn't he have given back? 

But "The Giving Up Tree" is not going to become a children's classic. Decreasing oxygen intake, resisting peeing, eating quince and quinoa on the 17th day of a highly conceptual diet. 

Well, I admit that alphabet books are popular with children. Maybe there already is a book that begins "On the first day, X ate applesauce and angel hair pasta...." and ends "On the 27th day, he was dead."

Oh! I know where I got that line. I was given "Struwwelpeter" when I was a child, and I remember "The Story of Augustus, Who Would Not Have Any Soup":

Augustus was a chubby lad; 

Fat ruddy cheeks Augustus had: 

And everybody saw with joy 

The plump and hearty, healthy boy. 

He ate and drank as he was told, 

And never let his soup get cold. 

But one day, one cold winter's day, 

He screamed out "Take the soup away! 

O take the nasty soup away! 

I won't have any soup today." 

Next day, now look, the picture shows 

How lank and lean Augustus grows! 

Yet, though he feels so weak and ill, 

The naughty fellow cries out still 

"Not any soup for me, I say: 

O take the nasty soup away! 

I won't have any soup today." 

The third day comes: Oh what a sin! 

To make himself so pale and thin. 

Yet, when the soup is put on table, 

He screams, as loud as he is able, 

"Not any soup for me, I say: 

O take the nasty soup away! 

I WON'T have any soup today."  

Look at him, now the fourth day's come! 

He scarcely weighs a sugar-plum; 

He's like a little bit of thread, 

And, on the fifth day, he was—dead! 

Go to the "Struwwelpeter" link to see the illustrations of the rapid weight loss that befalls anorexic Augustus. And look for the also-relevant "Dreadful Story of Harriet and the Matches":

...But Harriet would not take advice: 

She lit a match, it was so nice! 

It crackled so, it burned so clear— 

Exactly like the picture here. 

She jumped for joy and ran about 

And was too pleased to put it out....

"Struwwelpeter" is a powerfully memorable book. It was written — in German — in 1835 — by a psychiatrist.  

Would you give that to your sweet little child? Is it more or less dangerous than "The Giving Tree"? 

I wonder what books influenced Tony Hsieh. 

He, himself wrote a book, "Delivering Happiness." It was a best-seller in its time. Who will read it now? Here's a 1-star review at Amazon, written before Hsieh's untimely death:

For full transparency I only read the first third of this book before I took it to Goodwill. I just couldn't take anymore. It's written at a very low educational level which goes to show, you don't really need brains to be rich or even be a billionaire, what your really really must have is Luck and a lot of it....

Even when you have a lot of luck, you can run out. 

Wild indigo.

In the sunrise light — at 5:25 — the white flowers look yellow. Why are white flowers called "indigo"? The scientific name is Baptisia lactea — and "Baptisia" is based on the Greek word for "dye." I'm a little confused about whether the wild indigo with white flowers was used to make dye. I think the answer is yes, because the dye is made from the leaves. Here are some instructions, and, by the way, a major ingredient is urine.

This was my best sunrise picture. Today was a Type #3 sunrise — completely clear sky — and the sun had already crossed the shoreline when I reached my vantage point. It doesn't work to aim the camera right at the unclouded sun. You have to get your picture when the sun first peeks over the line or point your camera at something else.