Donald Trump...

... circus peanut.

"What Your Parents Really Think About the Places You Take Them When They Visit."

"Raise your hand if this has happened to you: your parents/siblings/friends are coming to visit you in Los Angeles and despite having a full and happy day-to-day life here, you’re not sure what to do with them when they arrive."

So that's about L.A., and maybe it's a problem that's especially trying in L.A., but it's a generic problem. And it's not just a problem about how a resident deals with (and hears from) his parents (or siblings/friends). It's a problem you have with yourself when you travel.

Figuring out how to provide an authentic experience that isn’t challenging for visitors who aren’t intimately familiar with this city’s quirks is a true local struggle.... For my parents' most recent stay, I wanted to switch things up, focus less on tourist attractions and more on the places I find most interesting in Los Angeles.

See what I mean? When you travel, you don't know enough to get to the authentic experience (a phrase I, absurdly, feel I should put in quotes but cannot, not without creating the wrong impression, that I'm snarking on the idea of authenticity). You may wish you could just mesh with the citizenry, but you can't. Even if you wanted to avoid the tourist attractions, you're aware that you've got limited time and you feel you ought to be using it, consuming something. You can't just stay in and read one day. Every part of the day, it seems, must be optimized for getting at this place you've gotten to. If you do fill that time or some of it with the famous attractions, you can feel that you're not truly in the place, that it might even be better looking at photographs of the place, because the photographs are framed to exclude the people thronging about, the people who are not even the people of the place you came to see. They are outsiders, outsiders like you. If you want less of you, stay home, where you are the only you there.

Now that you've made it through my Paragraph of Assorted Musings, let me assure you that there's a funny enough list of "What I told them"/"What they said" items at the link. One of the items is Intelligentsia — "It’s a very nice place with kind-of annoying people and great drinks" — which is one of the places my son took me when I visited him in L.A. back in 2008. I don't remember what he told me or what I said, but I do remember taking what I think of as one of my best photographs:

"I very much live in the now now... I mean, I have no real recollection of how I used to be..."

"... and no real interest in trying to preserve it or trying to go back there," says Richard Bandy, who woke up after surgery with no memory.

His wife has written a book about the experience of being married to a man who suddenly didn't remember their past together. She says: "His expression and experience in the hospital was nearly angelic. He was so neutral. He didn't appear like he was suffering pain at all, and he was able to write a few words, and he kind of kept writing the same questions over and over again to me."

So he became what looked to his wife like an angel and what feels to him, from the inside, like living in the now. Meanwhile, he's had to be informed of what he's done in the past:

I mean when I read it in the story — because I've read the story several times — it kind of always makes me cry, unfortunately. But — well I don't know if it's unfortunate or not. But when I read the stuff about myself and [my son] Joshua, I honestly could not believe that that had happened. I'm not sure that I actually remember, but I was physical with him. Pushed him down to the ground and pushed him out the door and that sort of thing, and, you know, was very intimidating to him, yelling at him, screaming at him, that sort of idea.

I guess he didn't have to be informed. She didn't have to write the book. If by chance, a devil becomes an angel, should the angel be told he wasn't always like this?

I'd say yes, if you want a high-quality angel. But perhaps no, if you want to protect a person who's suffered a great loss, knows it, and could be shown the mercy not adding the burden of the past, especially since he's disconnected from the past and disabled from connecting in the form of a true memory (as opposed to a memory of having heard about the thing that he doesn't directly remember).

But the son exists. Does it help the son for his father to learn what he did and (as the mother puts it) "make amends"?

Do these questions mean anything, considering that every time he learns about his past, he forgets it again, and can, at any point, opt out of the knowledge going forward? Another way of looking at it is that the wife has gone through a lot, and we shouldn't judge her for appropriating all this material to serve her interest in expression and to acquire money for the family.

Just because he woke up an angel, by chance, doesn't mean that she must herself choose to be an angel. But if she were to choose to be an angel, to match her accidentally angelic husband, should she not have written this book?

"Matt and Sweat weren’t very good criminals. They were blunt-instrument types."

"Unlike, say, Whitey Bulger, they weren’t the kind of criminal who gets away and lives for years off the fat of his crimes. They were the kind who gets caught and pays the price, and then gets caught and pays the price again."

Part of the reason for this is that people who have spent a substantial part of their life behind bars often don’t know how to function on the outside. Everyone knows the famous cases—Gary Gilmore, Jack Abbott—of parolees who commit terrible crimes for no understandable reason soon after getting out. They’re used to life in lockup, where there are rules for everything. Life without ubiquitous rules freaks them out....

It sounds glib to say that Sweat may have wanted to escape, but never really wanted to be free, at least if freedom means what it means to most of us: staying out of prison. But what would Matt and Sweat most likely have done if they had managed to get to Canada or Mexico or even Vermont?

Nelson Mandela, imprisoned, was told "Indians get trousers. Indians get socks. Boys get shorts."

He petitioned for long pants.

For the annals of Men in Shorts.

A woman sitting behind a couple at a baseball game photographs the wife's phone, which shows her texting to another man.

The woman passes a note to the husband: "Your wife is cheating on you. Look at the messages under Nancy! It's really a man named Mark Allen." They include a phone number for him to message if he wants the photograph of the wife's phone, and he does: "This is the guy you gave the message to at the ball game send me that pic please." He gets the photograph and the woman tweets a photograph of her holding her phone with his message asking for the photograph and her sending the photograph. Nice touch: Her iPhone has a classic cracked screen. And the tweet is drawing commentary:

"Yeah it sucks that she might have been cheating but it was really none of your business," @steelerfan1874 reacted. "You should have paid attention to the game instead of the people in front of you."

"No one safe out here any more," @PizzaPartyBen added.

One more day on Lake Wingra...

... possibly "the prettiest urban lake anywhere."

"A few weeks ago, in the country, far from the lights of the city, I saw the entire sky 'powdered with stars” (in Milton’s words)..."

"... such a sky, I imagined, could be seen only on high, dry plateaus like that of Atacama in Chile (where some of the world’s most powerful telescopes are). It was this celestial splendor that suddenly made me realize how little time, how little life, I had left. My sense of the heavens’ beauty, of eternity, was inseparably mixed for me with a sense of transience — and death. I told my friends Kate and Allen, 'I would like to see such a sky again when I am dying.' 'We’ll wheel you outside,' they said."

Writes Oliver Sacks, who is dying.

I almost certainly will not see my polonium (84th) birthday, nor would I want any polonium around, with its intense, murderous radioactivity. But then, at the other end of my table — my periodic table — I have a beautifully machined piece of beryllium (element 4) to remind me of my childhood, and of how long ago my soon-to-end life began.

Aerial photography of traffic interchanges.

Beautiful!

"Criminal Inquiry Is Sought in Clinton Email Account."

That's the NYT headline, which Politico notes got changed from the original "Criminal Inquiry Sought in Hillary Clinton’s Use of Email."

The relationship between football players and fans at Ohio State.

Screen-grabbed by TPM, which seems to be celebrating Cardale Jones (the potential starting QB):

"Federal court officers have recommended a sentence of life in prison for a peanut company executive convicted of selling salmonella-tainted food..."

"... a move that attorneys on both sides called 'unprecedented' for a food-poisoning case."

"That recommendation is truly absurd," said Ken Hodges, an attorney on [Stewart] Parnell's defense team. "We hope the judge will see that Stewart Parnell never meant to hurt anyone. He ate the peanut butter himself. He fed it to his children and to his grandchildren."...

Parnell and his co-defendants were never charged with sickening or killing anybody. Instead prosecutors used the seven-week trial to lay out a paper trail of emails, lab results and billing records to show Parnell's company defrauded customers by using falsified test results to cover up lab screenings that showed batches of peanut butter contained salmonella....

Senator Ron Johnson mars an otherwise apt statement with the unfortunate phrase "idiot inner city kids."

"It’s unbelievable to me that liberals, that President Obama, of course he sends his children to private school, as did Al Gore, and Bill Clinton and every other celebrated liberal... They just don’t want to let those idiot inner city kids that they purport to be so supportive of… they don’t want to give them the same opportunity their own kids have. It’s disgraceful."

How does "idiot" pop out? How does that happen?

"Tennessee Is the Capital of American Jihad/And it didn’t start last week."

A Politico headline.

Obama rambles, dredging up his old line "I don't get too high when it's high and I don't get too low when it's low."

From the full transcript of the BBC interview:

You know the - it's interesting - that one of my - every president, every leader has strengths and weaknesses. One of my strengths is I have a pretty even temperament. I don't get too high when it's high and I don't get too low when it's low. And what I found during the course of the presidency, and I suppose this is true in life, is that investments and work that you make back here sometimes take a little longer than the 24-hour news cycle to bear fruit. So some of this is just some serendipity and convergence of a lot of things that we had been working on for a very long time coming together. But some of it is I also believe a recognition that the kind of gridlock and obstruction that that Congress and the Republicans in Congress too often have engaged in is something that we just can't afford at a time when the world is moving so fast and there are so many challenges. And the robust exertion of executive authority within the the lawful constraints that we operate under is something that we've been spending a lot of time thinking about....

 Here's my blog post from April 2008, "I don't get too high when I'm high, and I don't get too low when I'm low."

That's Barack Obama, on "Fox News Sunday," responding to the prompt: "What have you learned about running for President? What have you learned about yourself?" He says: "I've learned that I have what I believe is the right temperament for the presidency."

The line has one odd change. Back then, he said "when I'm high" and "when I'm low," and now he's saying "when it's high" and "when it's low." A meaningful change? The conditions of highness/lowness are now externalized, an "it." Before, he was referring to the low-to-high range within himself. But we can see that through all these years, he's treasured — or wanted us to treasure — this quality of temperament. 

A group of Swiss researchers published a paper in The Journal of Sexual Medicine that addresses the question 'What is a good-looking penis?'"

"Here Are Your Penis Beauty Standards."