"Early in this presidency, Trump’s staff tried to nudge him out into the city more often for dinners or to attend events, but the plans always fell apart, said one of the former senior administration officials who called Trump a 'homebody.'... Now he tends to go to the Oval Office and adjacent private dining room for five to six hours a day for formal meetings, lunches and ceremonial events, current and former administration officials say. But the bulk of his work in the mornings, late afternoons, evenings and weekends happens in his private quarters where Trump can call staff and advisers as early as 6 a.m. and up to midnight.... He also uses it during working hours as a place to watch TV freely, tweet and serve as own his one-man communications director and political strategist. The residence serves like a bunker for his impeachment response and his real-time reaction to testimony, witnesses and public hearings.... Trump also loves to open up parts of the private residence to special guests, personally taking them on tours of the Lincoln Bedroom where he’ll show off a copy of the Gettysburg Address. It’s a party trick he deployed in an attempt to wow German Chancellor Angela Merkel and a move he uses with a wide array of other White House visitors...."
From "Forget the Oval. The real Trump action is in the residence/Fixated on impeachment proceedings against him, Trump is increasingly taking his official business to the White House’s executive residence to escape perceived risks of his formal office space" (Politico).
What a lonely weirdo he is!
ADDED: The article suggests it would be better if he'd go out at night in Washington, go to restaurants, as if he could just go out to a place and it wouldn't shut everything down. He can't really get "out." He's in the bubble wherever he goes and cannot just go be a regular person somewhere. At most, he can try to put on a show of doing something a normal person would do, like go to 5 Guys for a cheeseburger....
২৪ নভেম্বর, ২০১৯
Facebook, doing its usual thing, oblivious to the substance of the objects of its algorithms, serves up the phantom of a "memory" about nothing but memory.
"See more memories"... indeed.
ADDED: I know it's only fake caring, but can't they figure out how to limit "my memories" to actual personal activities by me? Or... what am I saying?! It's better that they can't, that the fake looks plainly fake.
The power of prayer.
Here’s hoping Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is doing fine and will be released from the hospital this morning. Even if you don’t believe in the power of prayer 🙏🏼 it can’t hurt to try this once . . .
— Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) November 24, 2019
SNL did a great job with the Democratic debate.
I don't want to spoil the fun by singling anyone out (and it's all very good):
ADDED: One reason this is really good is that it's not about hating on Trump. It's finding what's funny in the actual details about the Democratic Party candidates.
ADDED: One reason this is really good is that it's not about hating on Trump. It's finding what's funny in the actual details about the Democratic Party candidates.
"Merkins — pubic hair wigs — date back to at least 1450 and seem to be largely related to lice and syphilis."
"Shaving pubic hair was a strategy to combat pubic lice before there were medical treatments available. However, the absence of pubic hair was a visible sign of a recent outbreak of lice, which was socially undesirable. In addition, without pubic hair, syphilitic ulcers were visible. Merkins offered camouflage for the ulcers and hid the fact that shaving had been needed in the first place. It’s also possible that for some, merkins were fashion."
Info from the NYT.
Info from the NYT.
Somebody signed Maureen Dowd up for A.Word.A.Day email and she noticed a pattern.
"Friday’s word was vulgarian, following close after bareknuckle. Others included rodomont (a vain boaster), grobian (a buffoonish person) and Sinon (one who misleads and betrays). Also chirocracy (a government that rules with a heavy hand) and froward (difficult to deal with or contrary)."
From "Trump’s White Whale/Trump will not stop until he brings down Trump" (NYT). Funny. But why is Dowd exposed to other people signing her up for email? I mean, I understand spam, but she says "someone signed me up." I'm amused by the language stuff, and I do think the implicit attack on Trump is intentional. And it's a big week for using circumstantial evidence to decide what in another person's head.
But on to the "Moby-Dick" business. There's this idea that Trump is really out to destroy himself, and I've got to wonder whether it's a genius defense move, making your opponents believe that you've got a death wish. He says he wants a trial, and what does that mean — that he does or he doesn't? Which is the best move for the House Democrats — to give him that trial or to deny it to him?
From "Trump’s White Whale/Trump will not stop until he brings down Trump" (NYT). Funny. But why is Dowd exposed to other people signing her up for email? I mean, I understand spam, but she says "someone signed me up." I'm amused by the language stuff, and I do think the implicit attack on Trump is intentional. And it's a big week for using circumstantial evidence to decide what in another person's head.
But on to the "Moby-Dick" business. There's this idea that Trump is really out to destroy himself, and I've got to wonder whether it's a genius defense move, making your opponents believe that you've got a death wish. He says he wants a trial, and what does that mean — that he does or he doesn't? Which is the best move for the House Democrats — to give him that trial or to deny it to him?
"He would say to me, 'I am taking the inner life very seriously.' And I think that's why it resonates so deeply to us. It wasn't an act. This was a devotional investigation into wherever he found himself."
Said Adam Cohen, quoted in "Posthumous Leonard Cohen album offers apt final waltz" (Yahoo).
Also let me recommend this episode of "Fresh Air" from Friday, with Adam Cohen talking to Terry Gross about the new album. Adam is interesting in himself — modest and withholding. Terry, meanwhile, was effusively in love with Leonard, so it was an unusual encounter. Funny, actually.
ALSO:
[Leonard Cohen's son Adam] assembled a number of star musicians including Spanish guitarist Javier Mas, Daniel Lanois and Jennifer Warnes -- one of Cohen's collaborators and many flames -- to compose sparse but warm instrumentals to accompany Cohen's rich baritone timbre. The likes of artists Beck, Feist and Damien Rice also lent their talents to the new album....
"It was nothing, it was business / But it left an ugly mark / So I've come here to revisit / What happens to the heart," Cohen intones on the opening track "Happens to the Heart."...The album title is "Thanks for the Dance."
Also let me recommend this episode of "Fresh Air" from Friday, with Adam Cohen talking to Terry Gross about the new album. Adam is interesting in himself — modest and withholding. Terry, meanwhile, was effusively in love with Leonard, so it was an unusual encounter. Funny, actually.
ALSO:
২৩ নভেম্বর, ২০১৯
13 minutes after sunrise...
16 minutes after sunrise...
Actual sunrise time today: 7:01.
Feel free to talk about anything in the comments.
"What to say to one of the masters of the macabre?... [Gahan] Wilson was a star in three places: The New Yorker, Playboy, and National Lampoon..."
"... delivering covers, multi-panel series, and single-panel gags to those majestic peaks of the cartoon-publishing landscape. The title of a 2013 documentary about him, 'Born Dead, Still Weird,' tells us a lot about the man and his work. Weird was his specialty—he thought that way, and he drew that way. Wilson was part of a select group of cartoonists who own their style, who deliver on paper what seems to be a good piece of themselves. It is a distinction shared by, to name just a few, Edward Koren, George Booth, and Roz Chast. The work is somehow inseparable from who they are, and that’s part of what makes it so memorable.... Although he habitually delved into that dark funny corner that we associate with Charles Addams, his style was singular. He liked to depict ordinary folks encountering some kind of anxious terror, or experiencing the unthinkable in mundane places. It’s a man at a pizza counter hovering over an entire pizza—the man’s mouth the same oval shape, the same size, as the whole pie. It’s fishermen on a calm lake, with one about to be murdered by the other, who is removing a human mask to reveal his true monster self."
From the New Yorker tribute to Gahan Wilson, who died on Thursday at the age of 89.
More cartoons at the link. And here's that documentary:
Gahan Wilson-Born Dead, Still Weird from Mindy Elliott on Vimeo.
From the New Yorker tribute to Gahan Wilson, who died on Thursday at the age of 89.
"Well, that was a total waste of time."
More cartoons at the link. And here's that documentary:
Gahan Wilson-Born Dead, Still Weird from Mindy Elliott on Vimeo.
"TV’s impeachment drama is drawing big ratings, but a Democratic debate on MSNBC sank to a viewership low."
The NYT reports.
After five full days of hearings across two weeks, the average live TV viewership for impeachment has been roughly 12 million people, according to Nielsen. Ratings have dipped slightly from a peak on Day 1, Nov. 13, which drew an audience of 13.1 million, but the drop-off is less than what many sitcoms see after a season premiere.But the Democratic candidates' debate on Wednesday night only got "6.6 million tuning in to MSNBC." Maybe the Democrats are better off if we don't see too much of their candidates, but do the ratings for the impeachment hearings suggest that the American voters are eager to get rid of Trump? Obviously not. It's Fox News that's getting the most viewers, and I'm going to presume that choosing to watch the hearings (and analysis) on Fox means that you're hoping to see Trump exonerated. Plenty of people watched on MSNBC too, and I presume they were looking to see guilt, guilt, guilt.
And the numbers for cable news are superlative: Last week, Fox News notched its highest-rated week of the year in terms of total viewership. MSNBC enjoyed the best week in its 23-year history for total viewers....
Partisan talk shows are doing particularly well. On Fox News, Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson earned close to their biggest audiences of the year, with Mr. Hannity at one point zooming past 4.4 million viewers. On MSNBC, Rachel Maddow’s average viewership during impeachment has put her on track for one of her best-ever ratings months....
"Social media has enabled the Great Control Swap.... The first baby step toward the Great Swap was the shift from phone calls to texts."
"A phone interaction requires participants to be 'on the same time,' which entails negotiations over entrance into and exit from the conversation. Consider all the time we spend first on, 'Is this a bad time to call? Can you talk?' And then later on, 'O.K., gotta go, talk to you soon, see you later, good talking to you … '... [If you tweet about your children, they] can’t control whether you laugh at it, or what tone you use when you do.... But we live in a world that is starting to allow us to satisfy [the desire for human connection] without feeling the common-sense moral strictures that have traditionally governed human relationships. We can engage without obligation, without boredom and, most importantly, without subjecting our attention to the command of another.... The immense appeal of this free-form socializing lies in the way it makes one a master of one’s own time — but it cannot happen without a place. All that data has to sit somewhere so that people can freely access it whenever they wish.... When we alienate our identities as text data, and put that data 'out there' to be read by anyone who wanders by, we are putting ourselves into the interpretive hands of those who have no bonds or obligations or agreements with us.... People we cannot trust. The Great Control Swap buys us control over the logistics of our interactions at the cost of interpretive control over the content of those interactions. Our words have lost their wings, and fallen to the ground as data."
From "The Real Cost of Tweeting About My Kids/When I’ve told you what my son said, it’s not 'his data' anymore" by Agnes Callard (NYT). Callard is a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago.
As is even more clear if you read the entire column, Callard mixes 2 topics:
1. Creating permanent text that is stored beyond your control where it can be used by others for their purposes. There's the businesslike monetization done by whatever social media platform you use. And there is the infinite human potential to use whatever has been written down for whatever new purposes arise at any point in the future. There's too much evidence in written form, lying there, discoverable, to be used against you, out of context, by anybody, any time for the rest of you life.
2. The escape from the time constraints involved in conversations — whether in person or by telephone. There is freedom in not having to get and stay in the same time frame with another person, but you miss the ongoing feedback about how the other person is responding, and there's more distance, room for interpretation, and exposure to people whose emotions and intentions are far beyond your knowledge and control.
This essay would work better if the subject of websites monetizing data were left out. The topic of control in personal relationships is enough and even too much. The headline writer teased us with an even smaller topic, mothers writing about their children and appropriating their lives for their transitory narcissistic pleasure. We do (ironically) hear some details about her sons, but Callard is writing about human relationships more generally, and she doesn't have the space to really get into that topic.
Callard doesn't go back into the history of adopting the telephone and whatever havoc that caused. Before that, people spoke in person or wrote letters. What about "The Great Control Swap" that happened when we all got telephones? Fewer letters and less knowledge about what people who were speaking to you were actually doing and feeling and where they were and who they were with.
I'm not buying "Our words have lost their wings, and fallen to the ground as data." Yes, there's data in the sense of our manufacturing a product that some business can sell, but the words still have wings in the sense that they are read by real human beings who understand and interpret and do things of their own with those words. Are the words more dangerous to the person who creates them because they are written down? If they're dangerous, it's not because they've "fallen to the ground" but because they are still in action and the writer has lost control. But the words you speak also escape your control, and because there is no text record, you're at the mercy of the the person who heard or misheard and remembered or misremembers and repeats or misrepeats whatever you said.
From "The Real Cost of Tweeting About My Kids/When I’ve told you what my son said, it’s not 'his data' anymore" by Agnes Callard (NYT). Callard is a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago.
As is even more clear if you read the entire column, Callard mixes 2 topics:
1. Creating permanent text that is stored beyond your control where it can be used by others for their purposes. There's the businesslike monetization done by whatever social media platform you use. And there is the infinite human potential to use whatever has been written down for whatever new purposes arise at any point in the future. There's too much evidence in written form, lying there, discoverable, to be used against you, out of context, by anybody, any time for the rest of you life.
2. The escape from the time constraints involved in conversations — whether in person or by telephone. There is freedom in not having to get and stay in the same time frame with another person, but you miss the ongoing feedback about how the other person is responding, and there's more distance, room for interpretation, and exposure to people whose emotions and intentions are far beyond your knowledge and control.
This essay would work better if the subject of websites monetizing data were left out. The topic of control in personal relationships is enough and even too much. The headline writer teased us with an even smaller topic, mothers writing about their children and appropriating their lives for their transitory narcissistic pleasure. We do (ironically) hear some details about her sons, but Callard is writing about human relationships more generally, and she doesn't have the space to really get into that topic.
Callard doesn't go back into the history of adopting the telephone and whatever havoc that caused. Before that, people spoke in person or wrote letters. What about "The Great Control Swap" that happened when we all got telephones? Fewer letters and less knowledge about what people who were speaking to you were actually doing and feeling and where they were and who they were with.
I'm not buying "Our words have lost their wings, and fallen to the ground as data." Yes, there's data in the sense of our manufacturing a product that some business can sell, but the words still have wings in the sense that they are read by real human beings who understand and interpret and do things of their own with those words. Are the words more dangerous to the person who creates them because they are written down? If they're dangerous, it's not because they've "fallen to the ground" but because they are still in action and the writer has lost control. But the words you speak also escape your control, and because there is no text record, you're at the mercy of the the person who heard or misheard and remembered or misremembers and repeats or misrepeats whatever you said.
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