At the Sunrise Café...

... you can talk about anything you want.

I have 9 TikTok selections for your amusement tonight. I think they're all just exactly right, but you can tell me what you like best.

1. A strange device for popping popcorn.

2. A father's amazing skill at earthquake detection.

3. Hospice Nurse Julie went on a terrible date.

4. The self-dramatizing horse.

5. Son House sings "Death Letter Blues."

6. The first guy who comes up with the idea of going to the beach as an activity.

7. The cat on the Fancy Feast catfood can isn't fancy enough. (Later: Purina expresses thanks for the new design.)

8. Getting your hair braided in Ghana.

9. The rosy maple moth.

"Two blazes that grew into New Mexico's largest ever wildfire were both started by the U.S. Forest Service..."

"... the agency said on Friday.... Forest Service investigators determined the Calf Canyon Fire was caused by a 'burn pile' of branches that the agency thought was out but reignited.... That blaze on April 22 merged with the Hermits Peak Fire, which the USFS started with a controlled burn that went out of control on April 6, the agency previously reported.... Blazing a more than 40-mile-long... path up the Sangre de Cristo mountains, the fire has destroyed watersheds and forests used for centuries by Indo-Hispano farming villages and Native American communities."

Reuters reports. 

A disaster and a metaphor. What is presented by the government as "controlled" goes wildly out of control.

"The Daily Beast issued an apology to the laptop repairman who first obtained Hunter Biden's computer after the liberal blog erroneously alleged the device was ‘stolen.'..."

"The apology came as Mac Isaac launched a defamation lawsuit against the Daily Beast as well as CNN, Politico and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., over how they portrayed him while pushing the narrative during the 2020 presidential election that the content from Hunter Biden's laptop was the product of Russian disinformation... It is unclear if the apology is tied to any resolution to Mac Isaac's suit against the Daily Beast."

From "Daily Beast issues apology to laptop repairman amid lawsuit after claiming Hunter Biden's laptop was 'stolen'/John Paul Mac Isaac filed a defamation lawsuit against the Daily Beast, CNN, Politico, Adam Schiff" (Fox News).

Maybe it's just a coincidence. Maybe the Daily Beast just suddenly felt stricken by its conscience and wanted to atone, to square up with the truth, to commit anew to the grand tradition of journalistic professionalism.

"We stopped teaching values in so many of our schools. Now we’re teaching wokeness, we’re indoctrinating our children with things like CRT..."

"... telling some children they’re not equal to others, and they’re the cause of other people’s problems. I think CRT has been going on under the radar for quite some time as well. Wokeness has been. Liberal indoctrination has been. This is a much larger issue than what a simple new gun law is gonna – it’s not gonna solve it. It’s not gonna solve it."

Said Ron Johnson, quoted by Chris Cillizza, in "This Republican senator thinks ‘wokeness’ is the cause of mass shootings" (CNN).

I don't like the headline, because Johnson didn't say "wokeness is the cause of mass shootings." He said there's a failure to teach "values." Values have been supplanted by these other things. The word "values" is vague, but I think it at least conveys the desire to accentuate the positive. A problem with teaching the lessons of CRT is that you're inculcating children with negativity: It's a bad old world, kids — hatred larded into everything. That might explain why some of them hit the chaos of adolescence and veer into nihilism.

But Cillizza might not have written the headline. He riffs a few lines. Let's read:

"Despite the camp absurdity of her scenes, she is not a clown, and despite her nakedness, her work doesn’t straightforwardly concern..."

"... either masochism or self-love. Instead, fat stigma is toyed with, embodied, and satirized, sometimes through sexualized caricatures of gluttony. 'Good Morning' shows her—with her underpants pulled down and stuffed with a loaf (or more) of sliced white bread—holding a knife and a jar of Nutella.... A fat woman is by cultural default already an object of ridicule; inviting laughter by clenching a baguette between her legs, or ironing a pizza to her chest, could easily spin out of her control. Perhaps Susiraja’s blank affect is the key to her peculiar power to retain the upper hand. Indifference is one of the purest forms of defiance, but her disciplined impassivity, her refusal to cue the viewers’ reaction, is more than that. Her unwillingness to feed us meaning is more provocative, and disquieting, than an obvious dare, and it leaves a more lasting impression."

Writes Johanna Fateman, in "Iiu Susiraja’s Self-Portraits Are More Than a Dare/The photographer uses her own body without straightforward interest in either masochism or self-love" (The New Yorker). Lots of stunning/hilarious photos there. Perhaps a paywall will stop you, but here's her webpage. You can see the same photos there — and even more.

Wait. How do we know "she is not a clown"? It can't be the "blank affect." One of the prime ways of clowning is to do ridiculous things while maintaining a flat facial expression. There's a special and well-known word for it: deadpan.

The OED tips me off that "pan" was once American slang for "face" or "mouth." To quote "Great Comics" (1924): "Open yer pan afterwards about this and you'll be in stir for the next thousand years."

And I see that Nathanael West used "dead pan" in "Miss Lonelyhearts":

"There is such a bias toward glorifying hot weather and vilifying cold, though a lot of people strongly prefer winter to summer."

"I don't really get depressed in the summer, but I dread it because of the extreme discomfort & nothing to do for it but stay indoors. Winter, on the other hand, is completely manageable by dressing properly."

Says a commenter on "Seasonal Affective Disorder Isn’t Just for Winter/Feeling blue even though everyone seems to be basking in perfect summer weather? There might be a good reason for that" (NYT).  

That was originally published a year ago, but it's on the NYT home page today, presumably because it's great Memorial Day weekend topic: Some of us don't love summer. If you suffer in winter, you have lots of vocal company. And if you enjoy winter, other people are always interfering with the pleasure by openly complaining about it. But there's an excessive celebration of the greatness of summer. If you feel bad in the summer, you might feel harassed by the pressure to join in all this purported fun.

Here's another comment from over there:

Today, I encountered my favorite place at 5:39 a.m. and again at 5:15 p.m.

It's where we like to go. What can I say? 

Write about anything you want in the comments.

I've handpicked 7 TikToks. Let me know what you like best.

1. A scary tower (in Sri Lanka).

2. Nipa palm fruit.

3. Preschool Trump calls "fake news" on the teacher's announcement of "last day of school."

4. Life inside the Arctic Circle — sunlight in the middle of the night.

5. The street artist encounters a drain.

6. "you're breaking up with me but there's a squirrel outside eating at the squirrel table."

7. Hey, everybody, hi... it's the toast rack.

"Canada’s supreme court has ruled that life sentences without the chance of parole are both 'cruel' and unconstitutional..."

"The court unanimously determined on Friday that sentencing killers to lengthy prison terms with little hope of freedom risked bringing the “administration of justice into disrepute.'... Acknowledging the heinous crimes of those serving multiple life sentences, Chief Justice Richard Wagner wrote that the ruling 'must not be seen as devaluing the life' of innocent victims. 'This appeal is not about the value of each human life, but rather about the limits on the state’s power to punish offenders, which, in a society founded on the rule of law, must be exercised in a manner consistent with the Constitution.'"

The Guardian reports.

"How can we amend the law for those who sell their personality for the sake of benefits? Be responsible for your own life, Salmons!"

Said somebody quoted in "Taiwanese people stuck with the name ‘Salmon’ after sushi promotion Parliament debates law that bans people from changing their names more than three times after stunt leads to unforeseen consequences" (The Guardian).

In March 2021 restaurant chain Sushiro ran a promotion offering free all-you-can-eat sushi for a whole table to anyone with the Chinese characters for salmon, “gui yu”, in their name.... 

Once the two-day promotion ended, most returned to their normal names, but... the government only allows people to change their names three times....

“It’s a serialized, Dickensian way of looking at and distributing filmed media.”

From "Ways to Describe a Limited or Prestige Series Without Saying It’s 'Like a Six-Hour Movie'" (The New Yorker).

"When specially equipped federal immigration agents arrived at the elementary school in Uvalde, Texas on Tuesday, the local police at the scene would not allow them to go after the gunman..."

"... who had opened fire on students inside the school, according to two officials briefed on the situation."

The NYT reports.

Also: "[P]olice leaders struggled to answer questions about the horrific hour it took to halt a gunman who opened fire on students and teachers inside Robb Elementary School. No school police officer confronted the gunman before he went into the school, a state police spokesman said...."

ADDED: If the police don't arrive and save us from violence, how can this event support the argument for restricting guns? This is the very situation that makes the most responsible people want to own guns. It reminds me of the summer of 2020, when there were riots, and the police stood down.

AND: I've always remembered this passage from Justice Breyer's dissenting opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller:

Insofar as the Framers focused at all on the tiny fraction of the population living in large cities, they would have been aware that these city dwellers were subject to firearm restrictions that their rural counterparts were not. They are unlikely then to have thought of a right to keep loaded handguns in homes to confront intruders in urban settings as central. And the subsequent development of modern urban police departments, by diminishing the need to keep loaded guns nearby in case of intruders, would have moved any such right even further away from the heart of the amendment’s more basic protective ends.

"White House officials are currently planning to cancel $10,000 in student debt per borrower..."

"The White House’s latest plans called for limiting debt forgiveness to Americans who earned less than $150,000 in the previous year, or less than $300,000 for married couples filing jointly.... Wiping out $10,000 of debt per borrower could cost roughly $230 billion.... The White House has been looking for economic measures it can enact without congressional approval since the collapse of Biden’s Build Back Better economic agenda at the end of last year.... The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated that roughly 70 percent of the benefit will go to those in the top half of the income spectrum. Critics of debt forgiveness also say it does nothing to address college costs or the troubled lending system. It’s not clear whether people who need to borrow to start college this fall, for instance, would be eligible to have brand-new loans forgiven."

 WaPo reports.

"We’ve run plenty of stories about people who have been the target of mobs... What we’ve rarely heard—here or anywhere else—is what it’s like for the person who loves the mob’s target."

"What it’s like to watch someone you love being torn to pieces. Solveig Gold is one of those people." 

Writes Bari Weiss, at Common Sense, introducing "What Princeton Did to My Husband/My alma mater is not the school I once loved. But Joshua Katz is exactly the man I knew I married."

ADDED: Gold is now 27, or so I read recently in the NYT, and her essay says she entered Princeton as a student in 2013. So, it seems she met Katz when she was 18 and he was 44. There was a huge age and power difference between them. They began living together in 2019, when she was perhaps 24 and he was 50. She is currently a PhD candidate in Classics, his discipline. 

When Gold met Katz: "He was a balding nerd with a belly, and I adored him, but not like that. I adored him because he saw and brought out the best in me as a student and scholar.... Everyone at Princeton adored Joshua, male and female alike."

She continues:

Who's playing/not playing at the NRA convention?

Not sure if I'm more surprised that Lee Greenwood pulled out of the NRA convention or that Don McLean was playing there at all. https://t.co/3fn6gnpqYG

— Josh Shaffer (@joshshaffer08) May 27, 2022