So begins the song Spotify chooses for me after it comes to the end of the album I'd chosen and as I am emerging from the overgrown forest path and looking back to see the sun has finally emerged above the smoke on the lake.
That's a little too on the nose, Spotify. If you're really following me that doggedly you ought to act more nonchalant.
The album that was my choice — the soundtrack for my sunrise walk/run — was "New Morning." I'd picked it because as I drove up there was a "rabbit runnin’ down across the road" — as Bob sings in the title song. Yes, Bob, like Chuck Schumer, drops his G's.I got back home and assembled my coffee-and-peanut-butter breakfast and then got a late start blogging because I became quite involved testing whether Grok would replicate my hypothesis about the progression of songs on the "New Morning" album. Seriously, I'm not going to bother you, the blog reader, with the details of my hypothesis about the alternating 5 themes. I'll just say I was surprised that Grok found "One More Weekend" to be "possibly... sinister." Oh, really?! We — Grok and I — got fixated on the first line "Slippin' and slidin' like a weasel on the run." Grok:
Everyone's talking like Trump now. Just get rid of the weasel word "may" and you have Trump-style rhetoric: Booker's speech changed the course of political history.
And then there was Elon Musk the other day, saying that the Wisconsin Supreme Court election would affect the entire destiny of humanity. No, he wasn't that Trumpian. He had weasel words. He said "I feel like this is one of those things that may not seem that it’s going to affect the entire destiny of humanity, but I think it will."
Speaking of speaking bluntly, here's Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Bradley talking about that election:
On the new episode of Duncan Trussell's podcast — audio and transcript here.
The guys were not talking about Henry David Thoreau. They were talking about men struggling to live with women. Here's the context (which begins at 00:57:11):
ROGAN: I had a buddy of mine who was an actor and he got this part, I think it was in a movie. It was good, you know, good little, small part. He was real excited and his girlfriend started crying and she said, when is something gonna happen for me?... That was her response....
TRUSSELL: Jesus, dude. That's so dark.
ROGAN: I think about that guy sometimes. 'cause I was, I was on a, a show with him, one day, just bit part on a show. And I was like, this guy's gonna be a movie star.... But I remember him telling me, he's like, she started crying, man.... She was crying saying, when is it gonna happen to me? So [he says] I don't know what to do. And I was like Captain Fucking Jettison — I'm Captain Fucking Pull the Parachutes — that's me.... So I was like, dude, you gotta bail out.... You gotta bail now. This one, you can't fix that girl....
TRUSSELL: That's so fucked up.
ROGAN: But she's pretty hot....
TRUSSELL: Dude, I wouldn't have bailed.
ROGAN: She had the heavies... she had natural heavies.
"... at the heart of the 2024 Democratic campaign: Is the president’s mental state strong enough to beat Donald Trump and can he serve for four more years? The desperate Biden team is ready to go to war over every syllable."
The coronavirus evolves constantly and, to date, there is no evidence that any of the mutations pose an increased danger to people. But Danish authorities were not taking any chances.
“Instead of waiting for evidence, it is better to act quickly,” said Tyra Grove Krause, head department at Statens Serum Institut, a government agency that maps the spread of the coronavirus in Denmark....
Instead of waiting for evidence, it is better to act quickly. A scary adage, but probably the right attitude for this specific problem. You can't individually test 15 million Danish minks and wait for the results. By the way, there are 5.8 human beings in Denmark, so there are nearly 3 minks per person.
The pelts of the mink will be destroyed and Danish fur farmers have said the cull, which is estimated to cost up to 5 billion kroner ($785 million), may spell the end of the industry in the country.
Speaking of weasels, the NYT reports: "A nasal spray that blocks the absorption of the SARS-CoV-2 virus has completely protected ferrets it was tested on, according to a small study released on Thursday by an international team of scientists." It's the animals that might infect us that are useful for tests.
But living in the middle of a short run — and the quote is from a James Comey tweet yesterday — we have to always wonder: Who among us are the weasels? And: Am I really one of the good people? Do the good people know they are the good people or is thinking you're a good person one of the characteristics of a weasel?
The tweet is reported here in the NYT, which also says:
Comey has also used language about "weasels" before, most notably in a September 2016 congressional hearing when he defended the FBI's handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation.
"You can call us wrong, but don't call us weasels," Comey said. "We're not weasels."
Don't call us weasels. We're not weasels had a Trumpian ring to it. I was moved to search Donald Trump's twitter feed for the word and look what I found (note the date):
Keep an eye on Anthony Weiner. Weasels are hard to get rid of.
MEANWHILE: Here's Trump's new tweet, showing 2 can play who's-the-weasel:
The top Leadership and Investigators of the FBI and the Justice Department have politicized the sacred investigative process in favor of Democrats and against Republicans - something which would have been unthinkable just a short time ago. Rank & File are great people!
That's Leslie Jones as Viola Davis, Cecily Strong as Marion Cotillard, and Kate McKinnon as the fictional character Debette Goldry.
It's too late and I'd also say: too little.
They lined up some chairs, plunked female cast members and had them say there's a lot of sexual harassment in Hollywood and Harvey Weinstein is ugly.
Harvey Weinstein's ugliness was joked about in terms of how he looks, not what he has done and is accused of doing, which really is ugly.
The cheap joke, which could be used against any man, was that he was hanging upside down naked and he looked pretty much the same as if he were not upside down. A man's face is as ugly as genitalia. Notice all the problems:
1. Judging people by the way they look.
2. The baseline assumption that male genitalia is ugly (which undercuts the complaint about sexual harassment by trading on the notion that the male body is inherently repulsive and nothing a woman would want).
3. The lack of anything specific about Harvey Weinstein. (He is said to have done many things, but I don't think hanging upside down naked is one of them).
4. If the idea is that Harvey Weinstein is ugly, so no one would want to have sex with him, that actually sounds like a form of humiliation that has often been directed at women. It's like the terrible old rape jokes that responds to a rape accusation by talking about how unattractive the woman is, so who would rape her? (And some of that "Debette Goldry" material was supposed to be funny because she's physically unattractive — she's old (get it??) — and yet even she had experienced sexual harassment.)
Michael Che, the other co-anchor of “Weekend Update,” noted that the Weinstein scandal put comedians in a “tough spot” because it was hard to make jokes about sexual assault. Then, with a photo of Mr. Weinstein on the screen, Mr. Che added:
“But it’s so easy to make jokes about a guy that looks like this. I mean, he looks like chewed bubble gum rolled in cat hair.”
It's hard to make jokes that are actually on the subject of what Weinstein did wrong, so let's make jokes that could be made against him if he were a great guy. I wish Che had entered into the realm of self-deprecation and said something more like:
We know we have to make some jokes about Harvey Weinstein. We know because we got scorched in social media last week for weaseling out of it. Lorne Michaels said "It's a New York thing." What's a New York thing? Running away from humor that too hard to do? So we are scampering this week. The weasels are scampering, trying to come up with something we can say to make you laugh about sexual harassment, and I've got to admit, 99.9% of the ideas we came up with boiled down to the fact that Harvey Weinstein is ugly. We were coming up with material like "he looks like chewed bubble gum rolled in cat hair." It's like we were liberated to do jokes about physical ugliness because a guy who did horrible things is, fortunately, ugly. It was funny because half the people pitching the jokes to Lorne were also physically ugly. Maybe they knew so many jokes because they've been hearing them all their lives. Probably a lot you out there, staying home watching TV on Saturday night, are ugly too. And just saying that, I feel ugly... on the inside.
So, we've established that "naked" is funnier than "nude," and now I feel like this is a subject comics have riffed on hundreds of times. I'm trying to find some good examples of this. Oh! Wikipedia has it -- don't you love Wikipedia? -- under the heading: "Inherently funny words" (a somewhat broader topic).
In Neil Simon's play The Sunshine Boys, a character says: "Words with a k in it are funny. Alka-Seltzer is funny. Chicken is funny. Pickle is funny. All with a k. Ls are not funny. Ms are not funny."
"I’m not the sort of person who feels comfortable winning when it means the other side loses something of equal or greater value. I’d feel even worse if I were to win a victory for my client that was ill deserved and accomplished only through my weasel-tastic skills. I had been raised to decline offers of candy from family friends under the theory that I had done nothing to deserve it. I was the kind of person who needed a job that made other people happy, ideally with a side benefit of making me rich and famous too."
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!
“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.
Now, I'll check my instincts by Googling "what does what happens in vegas stays in vegas mean," because I know the internet is quick with answers to questions like that. For example, earlier today, I found the answer to a question I had: What is happening to the weasel in "Pop Goes the Weasel" when the weasel pops? That question has a very interesting answer:
[T]here have been many suggestions for what... "Pop! goes the weasel" [means], including: that it is a tailor's flat iron, a dead weasel, a hatter's tool, a clock reel used for measuring in spinning, a piece of silver plate, or that 'weasel and stoat' is Cockney rhyming slang for "throat", as in "Get that down yer Weasel" meaning to eat or drink something. An alternative meaning involves pawning one's coat in order to buy food and drink, "weasel" is rhyming slang for "coat" "pop" is a slang word for "pawn.'
A clock reel is commonly called a spinner's weasel, and consists of a wheel which is revolved by the spinner in order to measure off thread or yarn after it has been produced on the spinning wheel. The weasel is usually built so that the circumference is six feet, so that 40 revolutions produces 80 yards of yarn, which is a skein. It has wooden gears inside and a cam, designed to cause a popping sound after the 40th revolution, telling the spinner that she has completed the skein.
As for "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas," it was originally a tourism marketing slogan — "What Happens Here, Stays Here" — that was designed connect Las Vegas to something other than just gambling. The idea was:
The emotional bond between Las Vegas and its customers was freedom. Freedom on two levels. Freedom to do things, see things, eat things, wear things, feel things. In short, the freedom to be someone we couldn't be at home. And freedom from whatever we wanted to leave behind in our daily lives. Just thinking about Vegas made the bad stuff go away. At that point the strategy became clear. Speak to that need. Make an indelible connection between Las Vegas and the freedom we all crave....
"... while women’s would remain largely hidden. Maybe the entire point of formal attire to invert this possibility, to say, 'Yes, in nature, it is women who have mysterious hidden powers of creation, but once we get all dressed and civilized, it’s precisely the other way around.'"
Via Metafilter, where there are many comments, including:
Couldn’t we say that a tie is really a symbolic displacementof the penis, only an intellectualized penis, dangling not from one’s crotch but from one’s head?
Is this a comp lit undergrad class in 1986?
I see I have a neckties tag. I'll have to publish this post so I can click on it to see what the hell I've said about neckties over the past decade. Beyond this past decade, for the past half century, the most common insight into the necktie has been that it's a phallic symbol. But what I liked about Graeber's take was the seen-and-unseen angle — and seen and unseen is one of my all-time favorite tags.
ADDED: From the necktie-tagged archive. This is from a 2004 post about shopping for a suit at Brooks Brothers:
And if you don't get the "fleebag" joke, pedal up to speed here. (The state senators fled to Illinois during the great uprising over Gov. Scott Walker's budget reforms.)
The mobster's wife says "They’re treating him like a dog." A dog. Not a ferret.
A neighbor said that if Gentile had buried a half-billion-dollar’s worth of art in his backyard, “there would have been scuttlebutt... Things get around, no matter how tight lipped you are.”
Here's some background on that art heist (which happened in 1990):
Investigators believe the first nabbed was Rembrandt's iconic "Storm on the Sea of Galilee," measuring about 5-by-4 feet and dating to 1633. The frame was laid on the floor where one of the thieves neatly sliced it from its frame.
Next was "Landscape with an Obelisk" by Govaert Flinck. Other stolen masterpieces included a second Rembrandt also cut from its frame, "A Lady and Gentleman in Black" from 1633.
The most valuable piece was Vermeer's "The Concert," an oil painting measuring about 2 1/2-by-2 feet from 1660 - one of only 36 known works by the Dutch master and valued at more than $250 million...
A Rembrandt self-portrait from 1629 - one of the museum's most valuable paintings - was removed from the wall, but then left untouched while one of the crooks patiently unscrewed and removed from its frame a tiny Rembrandt etching slightly larger than a postage stamp....
After the heavier works of art were removed from the walls, the thief in charge - possibly the older of the two - might have let the other thief take what he wanted.
Amore believes the second thief found his way to a nearby gallery, lifting smaller Degas drawings of horses while passing up more valuable works of art including one by the Italian painter Botticelli.
The thieves also tried to remove a flag of Napoleon's First Regiment from its frame before giving up and making off with a bronze finial in the shape of an eagle from atop the flag - ignoring more valuable letters with Napoleon's signature.
Then came a final puzzle.
The thieves found their way to a gallery on the first floor, again passing more valuable works of arts, to seize a "Chez Tortoni," a Manet painting of a man in a top hat and a departure from the Dutch paintings - all without triggering a motion detector.
"If we ever speak to the thieves, which is secondary, I would like to say, 'Why did you take that? Why did you pass by the Raphael?'" Amore said.
This picture — over at Sartorialist — of a young woman reading a book in an outdoor café reminds me of something that happened yesterday. See? She's casually slouching in a big fuzzy coat. I assume that's fake fur. So... I was traipsing about on State Street yesterday, looking for something red to wear. (I'm going to the football game tomorrow. I've never gone to a football game!) And I wandered into a shop I like, where I often try things on and, in fact, I often buy things. Many times, over the years, I've dropped $300, $400, even $700 at a time on skirts/tops/jackets/whatever. I check out what's new, and there's a nice fuzzy coat, the sort of thing that seems as though it might be fun to wear slouching about in a café. It might amuse the students and my colleagues if I walked the law school hallways in that. I glance at the price tag. $395. It fits. It looks cute. It could be "me." La la la. Kind of retro hippie. I'm getting a Janis Joplin vibe. I overhear a salesperson say the words "four thousand dollars." Holy fuck. There's another digit on that price tag! I pretend I didn't just realize the coat cost 10x what I thought as I maneuver myself to the point where I can return that pelt to the hanger. Would I ever pay $4,000 for a coat? Maybe. I did buy an Armani suit that one time. But yesterday wasn't one of those times. Yesterday was the day I bought a red scarf — in "cashmink" — which is not something that entailed the participation of any goats or weasels.
"A BAT who fell upon the ground and was caught by a Weasel pleaded to be spared his life. The Weasel refused, saying that he was by nature the enemy of all birds. The Bat assured him that he was not a bird, but a mouse, and thus was set free. Shortly afterwards the Bat again fell to the ground and was caught by another Weasel, whom he likewise entreated not to eat him. The Weasel said that he had a special hostility to mice. The Bat assured him that he was not a mouse, but a bird, and thus a second time escaped."
That's an Aesop fable. The official moral is: "It is wise to turn circumstances to good account."
Meade begins with a shot of that statue of Hans Christian Heg, as the march proceeds in the background. Then he finds me asking a guy with some "Wizard of Oz" signs if Scott Walker is a "friend of Dorothy." The guy laughs and says "no." Next comes an adorable pug in a tutu, and a protester — a union carpenter — wearing a fur hat complete with real (dead) badger head.
I am a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for me to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.
Encourage Althouse by making a donation:
Make a 1-time donation or set up a monthly donation of any amount you choose:
Posts
