"Why you should never walk barefoot on a hotel carpet."

Headline at WaPo (free link).

[H]otel carpets are often flecked with food debris, dead skin cells and dust that engender mites, bacteria, mold, allergens and other microorganisms.... Guests’ in-room habits, such as eating takeout, brushing their hair or scratching an itch, contribute to the carpet litter. Shoes also drag in an array of vile material, including fecal matter picked up from places where dogs and humans do their business, such as sidewalks, parks and public bathrooms. Guests will disperse the excrement and other organic bits on their journey from lobby to hallway to room....

A comment from over there: "Another WP fearmongering article afraid of imaginary hazards. Yes, the carpets are germy, but so is everything else. Has anyone ever been harmed?" 

That reminds me, I was just about to blog this other WaPo piece, "Why we should stop eating lettuce, cyclospora or not/Lettuce makes us sick, wastes resources and has minimal nutritional value. Why are we still consuming it?"

"Certain pro-meat influencers even treat plants as hostile combatants. 'Plants are trying to kill you'..."

"... the influencer Anthony Chaffee says, repeatedly. Chaffee, who received his bachelor’s degree in medicine, surgery and obstetrics at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin, has compared the long-term health risks of eating salad to smoking cigarettes. Kennedy hasn’t gone that far, though at the Annual Meat Conference, he denigrated vegetables. 'Most plants do not have the complete chain of amino acids that we need,' he said."

From "The Dogma of Meat/From Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s food pyramid to online influencers, beef has become more than just a source of protein" (NYT).

The Times doesn't elaborate the anti-plant argument, so it just sounds kooky, but what's the argument? Something about plants producing chemicals to ward off the creatures that would eat them? That was my guess, and, looking it up, I see that's the argument. To quote Grok: "Plants can’t run away or fight back, so they manufacture hundreds of different secondary metabolites (natural pesticides and toxins) as a defense strategy.

"Plenty of Jews Love Zohran Mamdani."

The headline for a Michelle Goldberg column. Excerpt:

“His campaign has attracted Jewish New Yorkers of all types,” wrote Jay Michaelson, a columnist at the Jewish newspaper The Forward. The rabbi who runs my son’s Hebrew school put Mamdani on his ballot, though he didn’t rank him first. And while Mamdani undoubtedly did best among left-leaning and largely secular Jews, he made a point of reaching out to others....

So it has been maddening to see people claim that Mamdani’s win was a victory for antisemitism.... Ultimately.... New York’s Democratic primary wasn’t about Israel.... 

The attacks on Mamdani during the primary were brutal, but now that he’s a national figure, those coming his way will be worse. His foes will try to leverage Jewish anxieties to smash the Democratic coalition.... But don’t forget that the vision of this city at the heart of Mamdani’s campaign — a city that embraces immigrants and hates autocrats, that’s at once earthy and cosmopolitan — is one that many Jews, myself included, find inspiring....

Earthy.  

I was moved to unearth every "earthy" in the 21-year archive of this blog. They're all quotes of other people. I've never once used the word (except for one instance, now corrected, where I clearly meant to type "earthly" ("I didn't think you would be terribly sad to see that Robert Blake has left the earthy scene")).

At the Tablescape Café...

... you can talk all night.

And you can support the Althouse blog by doing your Amazon shopping going in through the Althouse Amazon link.

"Late last year, Arthur Juliani, a 32-year-old research scientist at the Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies, was decidedly not taking ibogaine..."

"... but was ingesting something similar. He had obtained tabernanthalog, a research molecule designed to mimic ibogaine’s chemical structure and potential effects on neuroplasticity, but not cause any hallucinations. About 45 minutes after he swallowed his dose, Juliani started to feel a kind of 'spacious attention,' he told me. On a walk outside, he found that anywhere he looked appeared like a 'perfectly framed photograph, distinct and standing on its own.' When he went home for lunch, he ate a bell pepper 'in the slowest and most intentional manner I had ever eaten a vegetable in my life.'... If novel psychedelics and 'pseudo-delics' tickle brain receptors in a way that changes people’s subjective experience... can one confidently say that the people who take them aren’t tripping? As the pursuit of non-hallucinogenic psychedelics advances, the definition of a trip as something induced by a discrete set of substances is set to evolve alongside them. These days, the hottest new psychedelic drugs might be the ones that feel as close to nothing as possible...."

From "Tripping on Nothing New, non-hallucinogenic versions of psychedelics are blurring the boundaries of the drug trip" (The Atlantic).

My first reaction: We're just talking about paying attention. Why can't you find a way to pay attention on your own, using the natural resources of your magnificent human body? Why add drugs? Americans and their pills. Just stop!

My second reaction: This is the diet drug we've been waiting for! It will make you eat a vegetable — one vegetable! — slowly and with pleasure. This too, one might do without drugs — recall Fletcherism — but these are people who are already resorting to worse drugs, and — who knows? — at some point maybe you could internalize the capacity to call any vegetable and respond with cosmic joy.

My third reaction: This is how "they" turn us into the bleak, insignificant half-humans of the future: You will do nothing and you will be happy. (See "Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better")

"The habitat was constructed as future Mars dwellings will be constructed: by 3-D printer."

"For 'ink,' Martian colonies will use Martian regolith. Because NASA does not possess sufficient quantities of Martian rock, CHAPEA used a proprietary, airtight cement-based material called Lavacrete.... At one end of the rectangular habitat, four identical 6-by-11-foot cells serve as bedrooms. In the middle lies the 'lounge,' a small room with a television and four reclining chairs. The other end is occupied by several desks with computer monitors, a medical station and a crop garden. The vegetables are not intended for subsistence but for mental health: Growing plants... may 'provide psychological benefits for astronauts living in isolated, confined environments away from Earth.' Rooms have different ceiling heights, in order, according to its builder, to 'avoid spatial monotony and crew member fatigue.' A hatch opens to a Martian backyard: a tented sandbox of reddish sand and two treadmills, to be used for 'spacewalks' by virtual-reality-goggled crew members. The walls of the backyard are painted with a mural of Martian cliffs. There are no windows...."

From "Can Humans Endure the Psychological Torment of Mars? NASA is conducting tests on what might be the greatest challenge of a Mars mission: the trauma of isolation" (NYT)).

"Vegetables are a luxury product. They’re expensive to grow and incredibly resource-intensive."

"They get the highest level of fertilizer and pesticide applications, and they deliver nutrients without many calories. In an overweight society, that’s a plus, but if you widen the lens to the whole world, where we have to feed 8-plus billion, ideally without expanding agriculture’s footprint, crops that deliver nutrition and calories are ideal. Whole grains, legumes, tubers, tree fruits, nuts. Those are the backbone of a diet good for both people and planet."

That's #4 out of "10 things I know are true about food – that people don’t want to believe" (WaPo).

"Anything that you would put in a salad — romaine, spinach, kale, lemon, cucumber, an apple or a pear, sometimes fennel — I shove into my Vitamix..."

"... with a cup of water, lemon juice and a little bee pollen. You can drink it in about 30 seconds, but if I took everything out of that blender and put it in a bowl, it would take me an hour to eat it. That’s a lot of chewing."

Said Ann Patchett, quoted in "Ann Patchett Isn’t Parting With WordPerfect/The best-selling novelist refuses to yield when it comes to writing software, but she’s had a bit of a change of heart on Barnes & Noble" (NYT).

Is chewing too much trouble? Chewing vegetables is, maybe.

I just ran across that, but I'd already been thinking about vegetables. I was trying understand this sentence from the mid-1600s, a sentence that runs on so crazily that I didn't even try to ge to the end:

"Where was my mother? In the next room, making sure I was eating nine differently colored fruits and vegetables on the daily."

"She was attentive, nearly a helicopter parent, but I found online porn anyway. So did my friends. Today I’m 16, and my peers are suffering from an addiction to what many call 'the new drug.' Porn is the disastrous replacement for intimacy among my sexless, anxiety-ridden generation."

From "I Had a Helicopter Mom. I Found Pornhub Anyway. Porn is not content. It’s a substance. And it must be controlled like one, argues 16-year-old Isabel Hogben" (Free Press). 

This is one of 2 winners in what was an essay contest for high schoolers. The other winner is "Why I Traded My Smartphone for an Ax/At 15, Caleb Silverberg made the most important decision of his life. He ditched technology and headed to the forest."

You see the common theme: Kids challenged to break away from the screens that captured them at an early age. I note that the young woman, whose mother couldn't rescue her, expects the government to rescue her. The young man rescued himself. 

By the way, the observations Hogben makes about on-line porn have been around as long as on-line porn. There's nothing "new" about them. And the idea that porn isn't speech was very well developed by Catharine MacKinnon in the 1980s. I'm not surprised that a 16-year-old doesn't know much about that, but why would she know about what "intimacy" has consisted of in all the various generations? Of course, it's pretty standard to think your generation is different from those that came before and sound, to older ears, like the same thing all over again. 

I want to watch this whole Bill Maher interview with Vivek Ramaswamy, but I must stop 25 seconds in to share this screenshot.

I got distracted by Maher's high jinks with the zucchini (and I credit Ramaswamy with knowing Maher was choreographing to get this screen shot):

For all I know the 2 men planned this scene together, but I will not accept the alternative that Ramaswamy didn't see the joke and just got pranked. Watch it unfold (and watch the rest of the video) here:

When the manners expert is unaccountably snooty... and wrong.

Miss Manners, at WaPo — answering some question about how to eat haricot verts and informing us that haricots verts means string beans — adds a snarky parenthetical: "(Considering the number of people who think 'RSVP' is a noun, Miss Manners is not going to trust that everyone passed high school French.)"

First, passing a high school course doesn't signify much knowledge. What do you have to do to fail? Surely not enough to ensure you know the phrase underlying the initialism "RSVP." I'll bet you could pass without even knowing how to say "please."

But more importantly, is there anything about French that makes it wrong for a person speaking English to use "RSVP" as a noun? I find my answer in the Oxford English Dictionary:

The greatest vegetable.

A man who has sampled 1,000 vegetables has chosed the very best one. Below the fold, because it's TikTok.

"They’re unable to see properly, they’re confused, they’re having hallucinations. And we’re talking about scary hallucinations; it’s nothing that’s fun."

Said Darren Roberts, quoted in "How Can Tainted Spinach Cause Hallucinations? A food recall from Australia sheds light on an unusual aspect of brain chemistry" (NYT).

The belief is that there's some other plant in there with the spinach and that it's "'anticholinergic syndrome,' a type of poisoning mainly caused by plants in the Solanaceae family, which includes nightshade, jimson weed and mandrake root."

Oh, my! I've got 14 tonight! Let me know which TikTok videos won you over this time.

1. The mouse is going to eat your food, so why not embrace reality and construct a cheeseboard for the little darling.

2. Painting the one who says "I am too ugly to be painted."

3. So you say girls don't have hobbies?

4. The awesome high dive.

5. "Michigan is the Texas of the Midwest," etc.

6. How to deflect passive aggression.

7. The Jesus miracle nobody talks about.

8. The little girl has serious problems with the family dog and the family decor.

9. Sticker review suddenly becomes a phone-camera review.

10. The scar experiment.

11. Stand in awe of your ability to retain fat.

12. When you're in the mood to eat a wicker chair, what should you eat?

13. How exactly did kale become a thing?

14. Instant Karma Karen.

Why should any man becumber himself with a cucumber?

I wonder, reading...

 becumber  v.

Brit. Hear pronunciation/bᵻˈkʌmbə/

, 

U.S. Hear pronunciation/bəˈkəmbər/

, 

Hear pronunciation/biˈkəmbər/

1550    M. Coverdale tr. O. Werdmueller Spyrytuall & Precyouse Pearle xxi. sig. Hvjv   Why shulde any man..becomber hym selfe about that thing?

I'm reading the Oxford English Dictionary, specifically the entries under the second definition of the prefix "be-," which is used "Forming intensive verbs, with sense of 'thoroughly..., soundly, much, conspicuously, to excess, ridiculously,'" and which arose this morning — as these things do — in the context of "bepenised."

I had blogged a quote that referred to "the spectacle of bepenised straight heterosexual males." Quite aside from the context — go back to that post if you care about context — there was some clamor over the word "bepenised."

My dear husband Meade commented:

To bepenised or not to bepenised… 

Bespectacled. Bepenised. Bemused.

And now, I'm very proud and happy to present one of my newest and nicest friends:

"Inflation has the potential to drive welcome change for the planet if Americans think differently about the way they eat...."

"There is an inherent conflict in asking people to change their most personal habits because of climate change when government policy puts few restraints on polluting industries like oil, gas, coal and automobiles.... Rising prices for all kinds of consumer goods are exerting pressure on Americans, but our food spending can be modified more easily than what we pay at the gas pump. We do not have to become, overnight, a nation of vegetarians and vegans, but we could adjust what we eat to save both our pocketbooks and our planet.... The inflation of the period between the Gilded Age and World War I gave Americans a taste for peanut butter, pasta and stews and casseroles graced with but not dependent on meat. The 1970s brought us brown rice, granola, exciting vegetables like eggplant and zucchini, and every conceivable way to prepare a lentil. Freed from having meat in every meal and with a world of recipes at our fingertips, what will the delicious culinary legacy of this inflationary period be?"

Writes Annaliese Griffin, in "Inflation Should Make Us All Vegetarians" (NYT).

Poverty is such a lovely opportunity, if you think about it! And it's always nice to discover an opinion piece in the New York Times that nudges us to think about it. 

Did you know it could "free" us from having meat in every meal? Did you realize your excess money was enslaving you to eating meat 3 times a day?

Am I missing the tone? Could this be intentional humor? I mean... "exciting vegetables." As we used to say in the 70s... Call and they'll come to you/Covered with dew/Vegetables dream of responding to you...

"Mr. Trump’s economic populism (at least in rhetoric) blasted through the libertarianism that has tended to dominate the G.O.P., a libertarianism that has made the party’s alliance with pro-lifers..."

"... one of strange bedfellows indeed. If the G.O.P. wants to be of any relevance in a post-Roe world — after all, with Roe gone, those single-issue voters will be free to look elsewhere — it will have to offer the country the matrix of ethnic diversity and economic solidarity that Mr. Trump stumbled upon, but without the divisiveness of the man himself.... A post-Roe America will need to move beyond its wrongheaded obsession with autonomy.... We humans are not best understood as rights-bearing bundles of desires who progress through life by the sheer force of our autonomous wills. We are beings who are deeply dependent on one another...  A world without Roe is a world lived in the reality of this existential interdependence, since none are more dependent than unborn children on their mothers. And as this dependence rightly calls forth maternal duties of care, so too does the mother’s greater vulnerability in pregnancy, childbearing and, should she opt for it, child-rearing place demands on the child’s father and society at large. The reknitting of these interweaving obligations — these solidarities — is the next political and cultural frontier.... The Democrats were once a closer fit for the solidaristic vision, which is why before Roe, pro-lifers once happily made their home in the Democratic Party.... The abortion regime has been deeply complicit in preserving a modern economy built not around the needs of families but on the back of the unencumbered worker who is beholden to no one but her boss....  After all, easy access to abortion (not to mention egg freezing and other technopharmacological interventions) helps businesses ensure that women are readily available to meet the all-encompassing needs of the globalized marketplace, thereby delaying real accommodations for time-consuming (and sometimes unexpected) parenting, especially for those women at the lowest socioeconomic levels in our society."

Writes Erika Bachiochi in a NYT op-ed with a title that obscures most of what's interesting about it — "I Couldn’t Vote for Trump, but I’m Grateful for His Supreme Court Picks." 

I was impressed by the quality of this writing, so here's a link to her book, "The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision (Catholic Ideas for a Secular World)."

ADDED: I was impressed by the quality of the writing, but the 2 top-rated comments call it "word salad." Bachiochi took some surprising turns, and you had to follow along and think. Accept the challenge. But if you read to see what you already know, I guess you think What the hell is this mess?! The food metaphor — salad — is apt. These readers are babies, reacting with disgust to the unfamiliar. Here's a clue: Vegetables are good for you! 

Exotic harvest.

Beets and carrots, grown by Meade.

Edible oddities...

 

... from the Meadhouse garden.

***

I'm gonna be 'round my vegetables/I'm gonna chow down my vegetables/I love you most of all/My favorite vegetable...

"The restoration work not only reveals the rogue addition of an upturned smile, but also a jarring strip of dirty sky added to make the canvas square rather than rectangular."

From "Restoration work wipes smile off the face of Dutch vegetable seller/Painting reclaims former glory as English Heritage rights the wrongs of 19th-century additions" (The Guardian).

What I find so interesting here is not the outrage of painting changes onto a valuable work of art, but that the changes are so discordant. Assuming the changes were done at the same time — and there you see an easy off ramp from the conundrum — I wonder: Who would think both that a resting-bitch-face woman ought to give us a smile and that a luscious display of fresh food needs to be offset by a glum, grimy sky? 

I can see thinking the original painting was too cheerful...

... and needed a depressing sky to remind us that the pleasures of life are transitory and geographically limited, but then why not leave the woman's face alone, hinting of her awareness that all this food is about to rot?

I see the food display is also darker and sadder. Perhaps the darker aesthetic was thought to be more serious and elevated, but then why not leave the woman with her original expression. Why make her smile? 

Explanation #1: The original expression makes the woman seem like an ordinary worker, more suspicious of customers than aware of the beauty of the vegetables. A little smile, along with less beautiful vegetables, makes her seem — or so it was hoped — like a full human being aware of the meaning of life and able to convey her knowledge if you, the viewer, stop long enough and gaze into her face. You know, like with the Mona Lisa.

Explanation #2: The owner of the original painting found the expression unsettling. She looks uneasy and even hostile. An artist fixed the expression, but then the rest of the painting made the whole thing look too cheesy, like an ad — did they have ads then? — for a vegetable stand, and to pump up the high-art vibe, everything else was toned way the hell down.

Explanation #3: It all started with a big square frame that needed using. A strip of canvas was added, and somebody painted that gloomy sky and other dark stuff to fill the space. To integrate this material with the rest of it, shadows were painted down into the vegetables. The artist probably thought something like, I am really maximizing the chiaroscuro, like the big-shot artists do. When the owner of the painting saw what had been done, he just said one thing: Well, can the lady at least be smiling?

Explanation #4: The woman never looked right, never looked like a street vendor, and she was probably the daughter of the rich person who commissioned the painting. In the original painting, she looks like who she was, a wilful young girl, forced into stupid clothes and an awkward position. She hates the artist. All that work painting all those vegetables, and the main point of interest is still the human face, and it's a human face radiating ill will. When the painting was redone, toned down, and made more suitable to a posh, somber environment, the face was also toned down, softened into a gentle smile.