Sunrise — 6:19, 6:20.

Talk about whatever you like in the comments.

It's Saturday night, I think we'll take it up to 11 TikToks. Some people love it!

1. Let's play "Is it problematic?"

2. The 87-year-old French grandfather makes lunch.

3. So many ways to react to the bike path shout "On your left."

4. So many ways to say/sing "Good Morning Starshine."

5. Finding and restoring mahogany in an old house. 

6. People talking about mountain properties.

7. Macdonalds is maybe getting a little too fancy.

8. One song, one singer — lots of different styles.

9. Three young ladies play "These Boots Are Made For Walking" on upright bass, cello, and acoustic guitar.

10. Three other young ladies respond to a request that they sing "Go to Sleep" (from "Brother, Where Art Thou"?).

11. Back when he used to get invited to parties, he'd answer the question "How are you doing?" with a short quote from an obscure poet.

Where I am, I hear the pre-game partying — it's Wisconsin vs. Illinois State at 6 — but, meanwhile, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania...

Spotted at PA Trump rally pic.twitter.com/O8dGnfFdxV

— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) September 3, 2022

"I don’t care if you like me, I am not raising you for YOU to like ME. I am raising YOU, for ME to like you."

Said Julio Sandoval, telling parents what he says to his own kids, quoted in "‘Literally kidnapping’: Teens taken against their will to boarding schools across US" (Kansas City Star).

Did you know we the People have a "civil religion" based on the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and various beliefs, symbols, and traditions?

That's a theory propounded by sociologist Robert Bellah in 1967 (Wikipedia). I've been thinking about  whether President Biden's recent speech — "from sacred ground in America, Independence Hall" — fits into this theory. 

There was a lot of talk about soul — one big soul— "The soul of America is defined by the sacred proposition that all are created equal in the image of God." And a "sacred flame" of liberty that "lit our way" and "still burns" and "will guide us forward." It took a Biblical tone against those who "live not in the light of truth but in the shadow of lies."

There's lots of material at that Wikipedia article, I'll just copy the 14 principle tenets identified by political sociologist Anthony Squiers:

"One night, [our housemate] and my boyfriend started bickering about which Lorde album is better..."

"... the first one or the second one. This kind of argument can be entertaining if the participants are making funny or interesting points, but they weren’t, and they wouldn’t drop it. The roommate was getting louder and louder; my boyfriend was repeating himself. It was Friday; I was tired. I snapped and said, loudly, 'This conversation is dumb, and I don’t want to keep having it.' I knew it was rude, but I thought it was expedient, eldest-sibling rude. So I was sort of shocked when the roommate got up without a word, went into his room, slammed the door, and never spoke to me again.... [One] time, I was on a Zoom call in the living room and heard, from behind his closed bedroom door, the Avril Lavigne song 'Girlfriend,' the chorus of which is a peppy 'Hey, hey, you, you, I don’t like your girlfriend,' playing at a pointed volume. Eventually, my boyfriend texted him to see if he would talk about the situation. He replied that there wasn’t much to say, except one thing: 'Your girlfriend is toxic,' he warned, followed by an emoji of a monkey covering its face."

Writes Kaitlyn Tiffany, in "That’s It. You’re Dead to Me. Suddenly everyone is 'toxic'" (The Atlantic).

In the aftermath of Biden's speech, I wanted to watch "The Architecture of Doom" once again.

This is an endlessly interesting documentary about Nazi aesthetics, free in entirety, at least for now, on YouTube: here.

Sorry, I can't embed it. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about the critical reception:

"I waited until morning to listen to Biden's nighttime speech... I went out for my sunrise run and thought about what I'd heard. I'll tell you some more about that later."

I wrote that yesterday in a post I published at 9:58 a.m. — a post that combed through the text of the speech. It's now a day later and I haven't followed through, and I could just forget about. Would anyone remember? Is anyone thinking, yeah, what did she think about, while running and viewing the sunrise, about a speech she'd listened to but not yet read? It's highly unlikely, and "I'll tell you some more about that later" isn't even a promise.

We're having a big thunderstorm here at that moment:

 

I'm thinking of keeping my non-promise. I made notes to myself — audio notes — as I was watching the sunrise yesterday, and I've listened to the notes and can see there is something I wanted to say that I haven't said yet. Let me get something to eat and settle in and see if I can find a way to put it in writing without it seeming too... internal.

ADDED: This is a rewriting and an expansion of my audio notes to myself. 

"the sluttification of timothée chalamet."

Your tweet was quoted in an article by Post https://t.co/Kre54FkNAN

— Recite Social (@ReciteSocial) September 2, 2022

The moment you realize that little genius of yours is a psychopath.

Some parent writes to the advice columnist at Slate:

Well, J likes to play with a train set, and after dinner, I was playing with J, and I thought to try out the trolley problem. We got some Lego figures, put them on the tracks, and I told J that the train was going to hit these five people, but J could switch tracks if J is willing to have the other person crushed. J looked at me, then at the tracks, and then very seriously picked up the lone figure and put it on the track with the other five. Then J took the train, ran over all six of them, turned to me, and said, very seriously, “it was a bad accident.”

I'm just kidding. I don't think the kid is a psychopath. I think he's taking his cue from Mother. She set up the carnage. It was a carnage-setting-up game. It's not like young people in a college philosophy class, where they've all be cued to step up to the highest level of morality or to choose between morality and pragmatism and then talk about why. You might just as well suspect your child of psychopathy because after he builds a tall building out of blocks he takes his toy airplane and crashes into it, like a 9/11 terrorists, though only you know about the 9/11 terrorists. He's never heard of such a thing. Unless you've cruelly burdened him with such knowledge. What is he, 3?

Sunrise — 6:24, 6:29, 6:31.

Talk about anything you like in the comments.

"Why weren’t we slowing down?... Then I saw it, the parachute. Red like a warning, it whipped before me in a tangled mess. It hadn’t opened."

"I screamed at the instructor, desperate as an indescribable wave of panic consumed me. He didn’t answer and I wondered if he was even attached to me any more. I couldn’t turn my head against the velocity of the wind, I could only watch as the Earth seemed to come forwards to meet me.... The gravity of the situation dawned on me as quickly as it was pulling me down – I was about to die. My desire to live pounded through my veins with increasing urgency and I felt fear beyond anything I had ever experienced before.... I imagined the sandwich I’d made earlier that morning waiting for me on the ground. The clothes in the washing machine that would never get a chance to dry.... I wondered what being dead would feel like; I wondered if I would know that I had died. And then I realised that the fear coursing through my body was the last thing I would ever feel. My death was so close I could almost touch it. 3, 2, 1. I hit the ground and the force was strong enough to alter an entire universe. I wasn’t dead.... How could I not be dead? I wasn’t even unconscious.... then suddenly I understood.... My body was ruined. My one body. I had to live in this body for the rest of my life and I had destroyed it...."

From "The woman who fell to Earth: ‘As we continued to plummet, a sudden terror ripped through me’/Emma Carey was 20 when, instead of floating on to a field in Switzerland, she came crashing down. It began a new chapter in her life and a long process of recovery from paraplegia" (The Guardian).

Here are 7 TikToks I've chosen to launch you into the long weekend. Let me know what you like best

 1. Alice in Wonderland and autism acceptance.

2. The crocheted pregnant doll.

3. Interior design for the solo woman.

4. Abbey (from "Love on the Spectrum") felt the allure of the SpaghettiOs can, but the actual SpaghettiOs are a different matter.

5. Now, what to wear to the beach?

6. Do celebrities like it when you impersonate them while standing right beside them?

7. Don't watch this one unless you have breasts and they are bothering you. Note: It's an ad! Some people love it. I'm seeing commenters who say it's the best ad they've ever seen.

“What makes this AI different is that it’s explicitly trained on current working artists. This thing wants our jobs, its actively anti-artist.”

Tweeted RJ Palmer, a digital artist, quoted in "An A.I.-Generated Picture Won an Art Prize. Artists Aren’t Happy. 'I won, and I didn’t break any rules,' the artwork’s creator says" (NYT).

Who cares about art contests? And really, who cares about the security of the careers of artists? What really matters is the quality of the viewers' experience. 

"Presidents rarely make speeches during prime TV viewing hours, and typically only do so to address a national crises or matter of exceptional urgency."

"The networks, in turn, typically carry presidential speeches when the White House requests the time and after previewing the president’s remarks. However, they have passed on speeches that were part of campaign rallies or events, or when the subject was deemed insufficiently important or newsworthy.... People involved in negotiations over Thursday’s address said the networks deemed Biden’s remarks as 'political' in nature and therefore decided not to televise it. These people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive discussions, cited the speech’s criticism of Trump — Biden’s possible political opponent in 2024 — and its timing two months before the midterm elections... The non-coverage stands in contrast to the three networks’ decision in June to preempt their entertainment programs to air the first hearing of the House select committee’s investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot...."

 
Writes Paul Farhi in "As Biden warned about democracy’s collapse, TV networks aired reruns/While broadcasters typically air a prime-time address by the president, they determined that this speech was more ‘political’ than newsworthy for live coverage" (Washington Post).

All 3 networks judged it too political to deserve live coverage in prime time? And yet the Marines were there, attesting to its nonpolitical nature!  

Farhi supplies this hilarious tweet from polisci prof Brendan Nyhan: "'The networks refusing to cover Biden’s speech (presumably because it was going to be critical of Trump and/or not newsworthy enough) is precisely the problem' confronting democracy." No, it's precisely the separation of government and journalism we need in a healthy democracy. 

Male singers, their microphones, and their gender.

The New Yorker is featuring an old article from 1997: "Sinatra’s Song/What is it about Frank Sinatra that no one else can touch? He could swing, break hearts, and behave badly, and he made his voice an instrument that kept reinventing American music" (by John Lahr). I found this quite interesting: