Sunrise — 5:15.

Before blogging, there were proto-bloggers, and I have encountered another example: Rose Kennedy.

I have commemorated proto-bloggers before. For example, something John Keats did in 1816. And, in the first year of my own blogging, I told you about my grandfather, Pop. And though I can’t find where I've blogged about it, there's something I myself used to do in the 1990s. I'd read the paper NYT at the dining table in the morning and if I found something distinctly interesting, I'd tear it out and put it on the other side of the table, where my sons would see it when they eventually came into the room.

Anyway, the proto-blogger I discovered today was Rose Kennedy. As a consequence of reading that Rebecca Traister article about RFK Jr. — blogged here — I started reading his book "American Values/Lessons I Learned from My Family." 

Here's what I consider to be like blogging:

"Unlike a lot of self-help gurus, yogis and crackpot messiahs who rose to prominence in the early-1970s age of weird, Mr. Geller endured..."

"... and his cultural impact proved both singular and lasting. Ikea produced a Geller stool, which had bent, wavy legs. Nintendo made a spoon-wielding Pokémon character, Kadabra, who could cause clocks to run backward. References to Mr. Geller, or mangled silverware, have appeared in songs by R.E.M., Toad the Wet Sprocket and Incubus, and made a memorable cameo in 'The Matrix.' 'It’s not the spoon that bends,' a bald tyke in a robe tells Neo, Keanu Reeves’s character. 'It is only yourself.'..."

From "The End of the Magic World’s 50-Year Grudge/In 1973, Uri Geller claimed to bend metal with his mind on live television. Skeptics couldn’t beat him. Now they’ve joined him" (NYT).

"If Mr. Geller can’t actually bend metal with his brain — and civility and fairness demands this 'if' — he is the author of a benign charade, which is a pretty good definition of a magic trick. Small wonder that the anti-Geller brigade has laid down its arms and led a rapprochement with the working professionals of magic. He is a reminder that people thrill at the sense that they are either watching a miracle or getting bamboozled."

Behold the entertainment (from 1973):

"[W]atching the Geller haters now is like watching people run into nursery schools shouting that there is no Santa Claus."

"Zillow... does an analysis of paint colors. Its latest analysis said that a white kitchen, long de rigueur, could now hurt a house’s home price to the tune of $612..."

"... whereas a charcoal-gray kitchen allegedly increases the cost by an average of $2,512. (To get these very specific numbers, Zillow showed study participants homes and asked how much they’d offer for each. Then, the company’s behavioral scientists used statistical modeling to figure out how the relationship between list and offer price changed depending on the room color.) In a news release about the paint analysis, Zillow quoted Mehnaz Khan, a color psychology specialist and interior designer in Albany, N.Y.: 'Buyers have been exposed to dark gray spaces through home improvement TV shows and their social media feeds, but they’re likely drawn to charcoal on a psychological level.' Khan specializes in determining how colors and the built environment impact people’s moods and well-being. Yet when she and her husband built their first house... they fell into the same trap of prioritizing other people’s opinions over their own.... 'I never painted anything. I lived in those white walls and I was always thinking about the next homeowner. Everything was for the next homeowner.'"

 
From "HGTV is making our homes boring and us sad, one study says/A pair of professors found that home renovation media leads homeowners to decorate for the masses, not for their own happiness" (WaPo).

That's a big problem with having so much of your wealth in the form of the house you live in. You only want to benefit yourself, but you've got a conflict of interest — the tangible reality of your house or that money out there that you'd realize if you sold. And the thing is, what is good in that tangible reality? What do you actually like and what will you like going forward if you repaint and renovate? Are you really so independent about interior design or are you influenced by what (you think) other people prefer? We like to think we're creative and individualistic, but are we? And if we lean into some notion of our specialness, what horror might we make out of our home? Are you really so special that other people's opinions are not woven into all those personal preferences of yours? Really? Tell me a few things you've done to your house that support your opinion of yourself.

"I’ve worked with far lesser actors who would leave me to read with an assistant when they’re off-camera."

"But Tom does not play that way at all. At one point, his face was literally smashed against the [side] of the camera, to get in my eye line as much as possible, even if I could only see the corner of his eye. He was like, 'What do you need, what can I do, how can I help you?'" 

Said April Grace, about making the movie "Magnolia" with Tom Cruise, quoted in "Tom Cruise is here to help/For more than four decades, the actor has attained near-mythic status by giving us what we want — including seven ‘Mission: Impossible’ movies." (WaPo).

The article, written by Ann Hornaday, a film critic, continues:

It’s easy to be cynical about Cruise’s messianic energy, his zealotry on behalf of an art form that, when he practices it, looks less like a profession than a holy vocation (is it any coincidence that he once contemplated becoming a Franciscan priest?).

Why be "cynical" about "a holy vocation"?! 

"Addiction haunts the recesses of this ancient port city, as people with gaunt, clumsy hands lift crack pipes to lips, syringes to veins."

"Authorities are sealing off warren-like alleyways with iron bars and fencing in parks to halt the spread of encampments. A siege mentality is taking root in nearby enclaves of pricey condos and multimillion-euro homes.... On a recent afternoon, an emaciated man in striped pants sleeping in front of a state-funded drug-use center awoke to a patrol of four officers. He sat up, then defiantly began assembling his crack pipe. Officers walked on.... Over the last 18 months, a drug encampment sprung up below a school. More homes have been burgled. One neighbor said she found a person, naked from the waist down, shooting up outside her house gate. Another had her laundry stolen three times. Residents have launched U.S.-style neighborhood watches and hired private security guards — something exceedingly rare in Europe...."

So begins "Once hailed for decriminalizing drugs, Portugal is now having doubts" (WaPo).

The city is Porto, Portugal.

We're told Portugal's approach to drugs was "globally hailed."

"As a journalist who has been told for decades that my empathy for the female candidates I often cover is probably overemotional and built too strongly on personal identification..."

"... let me just tell you that you should never stand between a white male political journalist over the age of 40 and his feelings about the Kennedys...."

Writes Rebecca Traister, in "RFK Jr.’s Inside Job How a conspiracy-spewing literal Kennedy posing as a populist outsider jolted the Democratic Party" (NY Magazine).

Unlike his uncles and his father, RFK Jr. doesn't have a "brain trust" — doesn't have "protective support from the journalists and politically powerful friends who shined him up, in many cases literally editing his words." He used to, but...

Now his brain trust appears to be the hyperonline, hard-right masculinity influencers who give him the approval he craves and encourage him to do things like post videos of himself shirtless, his chest and arms improbably pumped, doing nine janky push-ups. 

Traister — who just revealed she knows her "empathy for the female candidates" is regarded by others as "probably overemotional and built too strongly on personal identification" — now openly displays her distaste for men who seem afflicted by overemotional attraction to the masculinity of a male candidate. 

At the Friday Night Café...

 ... you can talk about whatever you want.

"I think the way she referred to a fellow member was probably not the way we expect our members to refer to other fellow, especially female, members."

Said Freedom Caucus board member Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), quoted in "Marjorie Taylor Greene booted from House Freedom Caucus/The vote occurred nearly two weeks ago, shortly after the Georgia Republican had called then-fellow Freedom Caucus member Rep. Lauren Boebert a pejorative in a verbal fight on the House floor" (Politico).

Greene had called Boebert a "little bitch." 

Are female "fellow members" treated differently from male fellow members? I don't like the name-calling, but I assume members of Congress call each other names from time to time. I just want to know if the standard is different when the slur is gendered female, when the person slurred is female, and/or when the hurler of the epithet is female. Are the males coming to the aid of the female, paternalistically? Does it not matter when the group is right-wing and perhaps presumably comfy with old-time sex roles? 

"'There is a big secret about sex,' wrote Leo Bersani in 1987. 'Most people don’t like it.' The same might be said of translation..."

"... which many readers secretly consider a necessary evil. Even the very best produces a lingering frustration, an irritable awareness that we didn’t get what we came for. If translation is like sex, it often leaves us with a case of epididymal hypertension, or, in the vernacular, blue balls. One of the worst things about a bad translation is that it’s unforgettable. The Pre-Raphaelite artist, designer, and utopian socialist William Morris took a run at Homer in 1887 and hit the wall hard. 'Tell me, O Muse, of the Shifty,” his translation of the Odyssey begins, “the man who wandered afar,/After the Holy Burg, Troy-town, he had wasted with war.'"

 
So begins "The Republic of Translation/Two new translations of poetry travel from ancient Sardinia to modern Paris" by Anahid Nersessian in The New York Review of Books. 

The utopian socialist sounds like a beatnik.

Nice cover:

"Legacy students are just a tiny proportion of the pool of privileged kids who are rich in symbolic, social and cultural capital."

"Even without the extra boost legacies currently get, it would be almost impossible to offset the advantages of wealthy families who can pay for all the experiences and qualities that make their children seem miraculously, naturally, qualified."

Writes Shamus Khan — a Princeton sociology professor, author of "Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School" — in "Legacy Admissions Don’t Work the Way You Think They Do" (NYT).

Ron Johnson said that word that can get you in so much trouble: "purity."

I'm reading a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article that begins: "U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson has one main concern when it comes to the merger of the PGA Tour and the Saudi-backed LIV Golf series: maintaining what he calls the 'purity' of golf."

What? Is that racist?! That's the static I had in my head as I read through many paragraphs before I could see the actual quote that contained that word, "purity":

"Now that they took care of the garden, what are they going to do about that tower at the school’s main entrance?"

That's the top-rated comment at "Exclusive girls’ school called out after drone footage reveals phallic garden" (NY Post).

"Patrick Logue, master dog trainer... said it is a possibility that the animal acted out of fear of the holiday fireworks."

"'When dogs are in distress, when they’re adrenalized, that’s never a good combination... Then you add kids into the mix. Kids bring their own stress as any parent will tell you and their own sense of chaos. And it is just a bad situation, especially when kids are unsupervised with dogs.'...  [Michael Groleau of the Suncoast Humane Society said,] 'Things are happening in the environment that are stressing the dog out and the dog can’t tell you or show you what’s wrong, so the dog’s going to use its mouth and that’s the apex of the situation where something bad is going to happen'...."

From "Fla. boy, 6, fatally mauled by dog on Fourth of July, experts say fireworks may have spooked pet" (NY Post).

I have one big threshold question about Threads, Zuckerberg's alternative to Twitter.

Can I check it out through my browser or am I forced to download an app?

The question occurred to me as soon as I saw the headline of the NYT article, "Threads Becomes Most Rapidly Downloaded App, Raising Twitter’s Ire/Instagram’s new app was downloaded more than 30 million times in 16 hours."

I usually read Twitter as a website, along with most of my other on-line reading, including Facebook. I like to move around when I'm getting ideas for articles to read, not be trapped in the company's stifling, controlling environment.

It's not surprising for Threads to begin with massive downloading if there's no other way even to glance at it. I don't think the NYT article answers my question, but I bailed halfway in and just googled it.

Maybe the NYT suppressed the bad news. The Guardian has the answer, in "Threads: how do I sign up and is it any different to Twitter? Meta’s newest app can be accessed with an Instagram account and looks a lot like its rival":

Currently you can access Threads only via the iOS or Android apps. There is no desktop version at this stage, and Meta could not say when it might make one available.

Bad. Prohibitively bad.  

Sunrise — 5:31.