Sunrise — 6:51, 7:15.

Why not spend Saturday evening commenting right here in the blog café, where you can talk 'til dawn.

"He’s almost autistic-like because he doesn’t understand a lot of stuff. He’s not a terrorist. He’s very naïve. He would not hurt a fly. He’s just not that kind of person."

Said Brian Cole Jr.’s grandmother Loretta, quoted in "How Chihuahua-walking, ‘autistic-like’ pipe-bomb suspect Brian Cole Jr. stumped Biden’s FBI for years" (NY Post).

"Chihuahau-walking" doesn't mean Cole walks like a chihuahua. It means he takes a chihuahua dog for walks.

"All told, the company has lost more than $70 billion... as Zuckerberg has failed to convince the public of the high-fidelity virtual spaces he long insisted we’d be choosing to spend most of our time in."

"Now, as Bloomberg reports, the company’s executives are eying gigantic budget cuts, as high as 30 percent, for the teams responsible for its Meta Horizon Worlds product and Quest VR headset — another nail in the coffin for Zuckerberg’s obsession that has been a major thorn in the sides of investors for years now.... Besides, Meta and Zuckerberg have now found their next obsession: artificial intelligence. The company has committed to spending an astronomical $72 billion on AI this year — roughly as much as the company’s lost on the metaverse, coincidentally...."

From "Zuckerberg Basically Giving Up on Metaverse After Renaming Entire Company 'Meta'" (Futurism).

Here's my reaction to Meta when it began in 2021: "Eh. I'm not making a new tag for this." 

"They’re trying to turn it into something scary, something sinister. But folks, it’s not really about anything that’s all that complicated."

"At its core, it’s about giving every American an opportunity to be treated with the basic decency, dignity and respect they all deserve."

Said ex-President Joe Biden, about transgender rights, quoted in "Biden Slams Republicans for Using L.G.B.T.Q. Identity as ‘Political Football’/The former president defended his support for transgender rights, a stance that has provoked second-guessing among some Democrats" (NYT).

So it's all very simple and anyone who says otherwise is sinister, and to boil it down to that isn't politicizing anything. It's the other side that's doing the politicizing, those bad people over there. 

I remember when Democrats liked to portray themselves as sophisticated, seeing all the complexity and nuance. Now, they're pushing the idea it's all quite simple. It's black and white. So... binary.

The top-rated comment over there is interesting. Jose writes:

"I thought the audiobook was the move, but hearing this in her own voice is so much worse than reading it. I couldn’t even make it through the intro."

Said Instapundit's friend, who bought the Olivia Nuzzi book.

Ha ha. I was going to listen to the audiobook (commission earned), but I clicked the "Audible sample" button and as soon as Nuzzi's voice began, I clicked it off and exclaimed "Oh, no!"

She was able to get out exactly 6 words: "For the women who have mothered me...."

I was reacting to the voice alone, but the meaning lingered — For the women who have mothered me.... No no no no! I don't know who she's talking about or what they did that constituted "mothering" in her world view and I don't want to know. 

CORRECTION: 7 words.

"In making a case for approval, Netflix may argue that the market in which it operates is not limited to premium film and television but rather encompasses the entire universe of human amusement..."

"... TikTok, YouTube, sports, games, books and even taking a walk. This is a standard tactic: Define the market so broadly that dominance becomes mathematically impossible.... A Netflix merger with Warner Bros. would create a monopsony problem: too few buyers with too much bargaining power. Writers, directors, actors, showrunners, puppeteers, visual effects artists — all are suppliers. The fewer buyers competing to hire them, the lower their compensation and the narrower their opportunities.... "

Writes Roy Price, chief executive of an entertainment studio and former head of Amazon Studios, in "If Netflix Eats Warner Bros., It Will Be the End of Hollywood" (NYT).

From "Monopsony" (Wikipedia): "The term 'monopsony' (from Greek μόνος (mónos) "single" and ὀψωνεῖν (opsōneîn) "'to purchase fish") was first introduced by the British economist Joan Robinson in her influential book, The Economics of Imperfect Competition (1933)...."

Fish, eh? It has been noted that the word was miscoined. But is the coinage really fishy? The OED describes the etymology this way: "< mono- comb. form + ancient Greek ὀψωνία purchase of provisions (< ὀψωνεῖν to buy provisions (see opsonation n.) + ‑ία ‑y suffix), after monopoly n."

"Opsonation" is a new one for me. It's archaic. It's supposedly a feast, a catering, or a buying of provisions, according to the OED, which does not mention fish.

But back to the big merger — perhaps we will get more fish movies. Like this Warner Brothers classic:

"'Inflammation' captures the visceral sense that something in our body isn’t working as well as it should."

"It’s the perfect scapegoat for that creeping feeling so many of us have that our modern world — with our phone addictions and plastic-filled kitchens and pantries stocked with ultraprocessed foods — is slowly poisoning us. For as much as influencers love to talk about inflammation, I had no idea how to picture it. When I ate bread, I imagined my gut swollen and angry. I wondered if a sudden rash on my chin was really a sign that my entire immune system was out of whack. I considered how bad things would have to get for me to give up tomatoes.... One dietitian I spoke to pointed out that, technically, the act of eating anything is inflammatory. In fact, even exercise causes inflammation. When you lift weights, you cause little tears to the muscle that have to be repaired; that process is what grows the muscle. In other words, the inflammation is kind of the point.... Perhaps the only thing that became clear to me was that inflammation is an inevitable part of being alive...."

From "How Inflammation Took Over the Internet/Influencers constantly talk about how to avoid it. But no one quite seems to agree on what it is" (New York Magazine).

"The President kind of holds up his hand and says, 'No, no, no, hold on a second. There's something much more important. Shoes.'"

"He peers over the Resolute Desk and he says, 'Marco, JD, you guys have shitty shoes.' He goes out and grabs a catalog... And he actually runs us through this incredible shoe catalog. The President is gifting us with four pairs of shoes.... He says, 'Marco, what's your shoe size?' And Marco's apparently an 11 and a half. He says, JD, what's your shoe size? My shoe size is 13. And he asked this [other] politician... what his shoe size is, and he says 7. The President leans back in his chair and says, 'You know you can tell a lot about a man by his shoe size.'"

Vice President JD Vance just dropped a hilarious Oval Office story leaving the entire room cracking up.

President Trump glanced over the Resolute Desk at VP Vance and Secretary Marco Rubio and said, “You guys have shitty shoes.”

Right then and there, Trump pulled out a shoe… pic.twitter.com/3Z2xyh9MZK

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) December 6, 2025

You can't lie about your shoe size if the shoes are going to be ordered by the other person and he's expecting you to wear them, and besides, if a man's shoe size is 7, his feet are going to look pretty small. So there was no escaping the penis-size innuendo. Or maybe Trump wasn't promising to buy that other guy new shoes. It was only Marco and JD who got called out for having "shitty shoes."

"I saw people who were downcast, who can take no more, who are at the end of their tether. Even a revolt is beyond them."

Said Joël Boueilh, chairman of the winemaking co-operative federation, commenting on protesters who want the French government to help the wine industry.

Quoted in "French wine industry is withering on the vine as drinkers go dry/A collapse in demand — particularly for the heavy reds produced across southern France — coupled with climate change means the end of a way of life for many" (London Times).

Boueilh adds: "France was the land of the good life where people spent a lot of time drinking and eating. But today society is changing. People may have a drink in a bar but they don’t open a bottle of wine when they sit down to eat at the table."

Is it necessarily a loss in devotion to "the good life" or did people change their conception of the good? But he didn't say "good," did he? He would have said "douceur": "« La France était le pays de la douceur de vivre, celui où l’on prenait son temps pour manger et boire ensemble autour d’une table. »

There might be other ways of being "good," but are there other ways of being "sweet"? And more important, there is a tradition of experiencing the sweetness in a particular way, with a bottle of wine on the table at meals. 

Ah! That's for France to decide! Boueilh represents the wine industry. Of course, he's going to dramatize the centrality of wine. If I buy into that, I'm just an American accepting the most easily available stereotype.

That is, it's the stuff that belongs in the new Dictionary of Received Ideas: The French: They think the good life is sitting around drinking wine all day. 

ADDED: I wanted more depth of meaning for the word "douceur," and got excellent help from Grok. 

Sunrise — 7:07, 7:15, 7:23.

Write about whatever you want.

"Trump Might Have a Case on Birthright Citizenship."

That was the title of a post last February.

You might want to revisit that today, because "Supreme Court agrees to hear Trump’s challenge to birthright citizenship" (SCOTUSblog).

"Once a week, his maternal grandmother would come home from the market with a live carp... 'We’d put it in the bathtub... and I’d play with this fish for a day until she killed it and made gefilte fish.'"

From "Frank O. Gehry, Titan of Architecture, Is Dead at 96/He burst onto the scene with an attention-getting renovation of his Southern California home before going on to design some of the world’s most recognizable buildings" (NYT).

Like many Angelenos, he was drawn to the laid-back, anything-goes atmosphere of the city, whose mix of garish mansions, flimsy bungalows, vacant lots, Googie coffee shops and colorful billboards was the antithesis of East Coast architectural academicism. And he became close to a generation of Los Angeles artists... whose surfboard-inspired aesthetic and raw work spaces suggested an alternative to the chilly austerity of late Modernism and the reactionary tendencies of postmodernism.... “I was trying to use the dumb, normal materials of the neighborhood,” Mr. Gehry said years later. “There must have been half a dozen cars in various states of deconstruction sitting around on the lawns; there was chain link in people’s backyards. They thought that was normal.”

For more about the fish, see "Frank Gehry, Fish Lamps/Paul Goldberger traces the history of the fish form throughout Frank Gehry’s career" (Gagosian.com).

Icing up.

Video by Meade.

ADDED: More swans from Meade:

"In his satirical 'Dictionary of Received Ideas'... Flaubert offered up a range of definitions embodying the stupid notions that silly people too readily accept."

"...  'Art': 'Leads to poorhouse. What use is it, since machines can do things better and quicker?' ... 'Bird': 'Wish you were one, saying with a sigh: "Oh, for a pair of wings!" This shows you have a poetic soul.'... By mocking these thoughts, we push ourselves past them. From this perspective, our sense that we’re getting stupider may simply reflect our determination to be smart."

Writes Joshua Rothman, in "Are We Getting Stupider? Stupidity is eternal—and more complex than we think" (The New Yorker).

"Dictionary of Received Ideas' — link goes to full text — is one of the few books that has its own tag on this blog: here. It's long been one of my favorite books, and you may have noticed my various proposals for entries in a new Dictionary of Received Ideas. If you get Flaubert's idea, maybe you can help me write this volume for my shelf of Unwritten Books. 

Actually I don't think Rothman conveys Flaubert's idea accurately. Here's a new New Yorker piece from 2013 (by Teju Cole), which explains the "Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues" like this:  "What galls Flaubert most is the inevitability, given an action, of a certain standard reaction. We could learn from his impatience: there are too many standard formulations in our language. They stand in place of thought, but we proclaim them each time—due to laziness, prejudice, or hypocrisy—as though they were fresh insight."

Anyway, what's Rothman's point about our possibly becoming stupider? He writes: 

"I grew up on a commune in Northern California where I was raised by hippies, drank well water and ate wild Miner’s lettuce from our field."

"The only medicine allowed was herbs, homeopathy and marijuana. During the stress of my divorce, my mother suggested that I micro-dose mushrooms to regulate my moods. But I knew I needed more than meditations and adaptogens during this ongoing, post-pandemic punch in the face.... It wasn’t until my friend explained how ChatGPT offered her better advice than her expensive psychotherapist that I asked her to come over and walk me through it....  ... I wasn’t feeling better after seven years of work with [my therapist].... I worked for days with Chat to process my feelings and notes and to compose an email....  The therapist responded with a single sentence: 'I appreciate your sentiments.' Her cold reply provided clarity, but it also revealed to me how my relationship with her had mirrored the pattern in my marriage. 'You poured your heart, clarity and depth into that message,' Chat wrote. 'Her reply confirms the very dynamic you’ve been working to free yourself from, where your vulnerability and honesty are met with detachment, minimalism and emotional withholding.'..."

Writes Adele Uddo, in "My Rebound Relationship With a Robot/Raised on a commune, I resisted technology at every step. Until it saved me" (NYT)(gift link).

Spotify Wrapped is telling everyone their "listening age."

I am old, so I don't care if my listening age is old — a few years older (78) than my actual age (74). It's because I still listen to the music I loved when I was a teenager in the 1960s, when I lucked into what still seems to me to be the best popular music. I would have thought most Americans get fixated on whatever was popular when they were a teenager, but I'm seeing that a lot of people are getting a  "listening age" of 70-something.

I'm reading "Spotify Just Called You Old" (NY Magazine), which especially likes this tune "Why did everyone I know have a listening age of an old-age home on Spotify Wrapped?":