The picture depicting the former president apparently lounging on a chair in the Oval Office, wearing red heels and posing suggestively in a blue dress redolent of Monica Lewinsky was in a room off the stairway of the Upper East Side townhouse. The dress is also strikingly similar to one worn by Hillary Clinton at the 2009 Kennedy Center Honors....
What's the downside of the frozen-sperm-vasectomy plan? When do you reveal to your girlfriends that this is what you have done? Do you tell them what you did and why? Do you reveal your mistrust of women? Do you use the word "spurglar" in your explanation? This will affect her opinion of you. If she's thinking she wants children, maybe she's picturing a real sexual encounter, not a medical procedure. Where's the romance? Where's the profound love? What kind of father are you? And you've chosen to disconnect your sexual activity from fertility? Won't that affect your mind, your sense of power and connection to creative forces? And all because of your suspicion of women. What have you done to yourself?! Wouldn't it be ironic if the women — all the women you imagined yourself getting — didn't want you because of what you'd done and you're left with your sex-doll robot who was never going to get pregnant anyway?
"Among the bones broken in Epstein’s neck was the hyoid bone, which in men is near the Adam’s apple. Such breaks can occur in those who hang themselves, particularly if they are older, according to forensics experts and studies on the subject. But they are more common in victims of homicide by strangulation, the experts said.... The office of New York City’s chief medical examiner, Barbara Sampson, completed an autopsy of Epstein’s body Sunday.... The hyoid bone played a central role in a heated dispute last year over another high-profile death in New York, that of Eric Garner. A New York police officer was accused of using an improper chokehold while trying to arrest Garner and of causing his death. A police officers’ association claimed that an autopsy from Sampson’s office found there was no break of Garner’s hyoid bone, and that this proved that the officer could not have strangled Garner and caused his death. This 'demonstrates conclusively that Mr. Garner did not die of strangulation of the neck from a chokehold,' the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association said. But Sampson rejected that claim, saying she stood by her conclusion that Garner died of 'compression of neck (chokehold), compression of chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by police.' Sampson’s office said Garner’s bronchial asthma, obesity and high blood pressure were contributing factors. In a widely circulated video of the 2014 incident, the officer was seen grabbing Garner around the neck, pushing him and his face into the pavement. Garner is overheard pleading several times: 'I can’t breathe.' Two weeks later, Sampson’s office concluded the officer’s actions were the primary cause of his death."
I saw Franco Zeffirelli's version of the Shakespeare play when I was 17. Olivia Hussey (Juliet) was born in 1951, like me. She was 16 when the movie was made. Leonard Whiting (Romeo) was only one year older. We're told quite clearly in the text of the play that Juliet is 13. These are young kids indeed. They fall madly in love one night, get married the very next day, everything suddenly goes to hell, and on the fourth day, they're both dead.
The sense of of teenagers in love is incredibly strong and real...
Oh! How I cried when Romeo kills himself and Juliet immediately awakens from her fake death and finds him freshly dead...
So emotional! But what was it like watching it again half a century later? Beautifully fresh and alive. The story is so fast moving and the teenagers get so overheated — with lots of love and crazy streetfighting — but that's the story and I got caught up in the wildness and the extremely painful sadness in the end — in 1968 and in 2019.
Look, here are Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting talking about the movie in 2018. They are old, and I am just as old:
They are people who wake up early—naturally. Not just “early” in the sense of a perky-at-8-a.m. spouse. These are the people whose bodies rouse them at 5:30 a.m. or earlier—some even at hours others are just going to sleep....
[Louis J. Ptáček, a professor of neurology at the University of California at San Francisco School] says his study is unique because it shows that advanced sleep phase “isn’t rare, and it’s only a problem if the person finds it undesirable.”... Extreme larks... might even be healthier than people who are night owls: Late bedtimes are associated with some negative health consequences, such as Type 2 diabetes and heart disease.
Also in their favor, larks are more likely to benefit from the societal impression that people who wake up early are go-getters and people who wake up late are lazy. That’s not actually true; plenty of night owls wake at noon and work until 2 a.m., right as larks are getting up and brewing coffee. Nevertheless, the stereotype persists.
"He claims that words spoken in anger are the moral equivalent of murder. But by chapter 23, he’s pretty angry at the religious leaders. 'You blind fools!' he shouts during a chapter-long rant (Matthew 23:17). He calls them hypocrites, snakes and vipers, everything — as the saying goes — but a child of God. We all know that insulting people is incompatible with Christian teaching. But Jesus actually did it quite a bit. Here are some of Jesus’ best insults...."
From "Jesus' best insults" by Dave Barnhart (in Ministry Matters), which I'm reading this morning because we've been discussing the insult "Fredo," which I compared to "Uncle Tom," which is an insult even though the fictional character Uncle Tom was originally conceived of as a Jesus. I got to wondering Did Jesus insult people?
"'Max Boot Fans the Flames of Racial Hatred' was the headline of an article by John Hirschauer. This was a response to a Post column I had written last week taking aim at the 55 percent of whites who in a 2018 poll said that discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minority groups.... In reply, Hirschauer labeled me one of 'the self-loathing whites' who has adopted 'the politics of self-hatred.' He accused me of 'speaking in … totalizing racial language' that 'is stoking the flames of race hatred.' So telling whites not to be racists is an incitement to race hatred? How Orwellian.... I have no idea what 'totalizing racial language' means; it’s the kind of cant that [National Review founder William F.] Buckley, a stickler for precise language, would have mocked. What I do know is that this article employed the language of 'race treason' against me. Yes, Hirschauer attacked white supremacists in passing but he also engaged in moral equivalency and implied that, by denouncing racism, I was driving whites into their arms. ('Boot sets up a Faustian choice for ‘white’ readers: Side with the white supremacists and their detestable program, or sell your political soul to Max Boot and become one of the self-loathing whites.') This is part of a rhetorical strategy also employed by Trump, who occasionally denounces white supremacists but more often promotes racism while insisting his critics are the real racists."
"But Fredo is more of a complex, tragic figure than political mudslinging would allow.... In 'The Godfather,' [John] Cazale gave Fredo that sense of well-meaning haplessness.... The second 'Godfather' film brought Fredo into the foreground (not his natural place in the family portrait) and deepened him. Fredo’s involvement in a bungled attempt on Michael’s life ('I know it was you'), which leads Michael to succumb to his darkest instincts and commit fratricide, is at the movie’s tragic core, and it gives Cazale the most beautifully acted scenes of his career. The most iconic is the brothers’ conversation in the boathouse, when Fredo pitifully pleads for respect: 'Send Fredo off to do this. Send Fredo off to do that. Let Fredo take care of some Mickey Mouse night club somewhere. . . . I can handle things! I’m smart! Not like everybody says!' Cazale delivers this feckless rant with wide-eyed rage and self-pity, flopping up and down in his lounge chair like a beached guppy."
"But my favorite moment comes just before he’s whacked, as he sits with his young nephew Anthony by the lake with their fishing gear...."
"It’s probably the only time Fredo ever outshone his brothers.... Fredo’s death is as wrenching as it is only because we care so deeply about him—he’s pathetic, sure, but he has reserves of humanity that he never got to express, holding himself to an impossible yardstick of power and violence when all he wanted to do was go fishing.... More than four decades later, Fredo’s still not getting any respect, but at least he’s getting noticed."
Lots of people have been asking whether it's true — as Chris Cuomo asserted — that "Fredo" is the equivalent of the n-word. I think a big difference is that Fredo is a specific character. To call an Italian "Fredo" is more like calling a black person "Uncle Tom." With that kind of insult, we could go back to the origin of the character, as Schulman is doing with Fredo. But that's not what we usually do. The character takes on a meaning of his own within the insult. You won't be able to get away with calling someone "Uncle Tom" by detailing what's in "Uncle Tom's Cabin."
The Wikipedia article, "Uncle Tom," is broken into sections, with "Original characterization" ("a rejection of the existing stereotypes of minstrel shows... a Jesus-like figure") separate from "Epithet" ("an excessively subservient person, particularly when that person perceives their own lower-class status based on race... [or] who betrays their own group by participating in its oppression, whether or not they do so willingly").
It's interesting to go back to the original meaning of a term, but it won't and shouldn't get you off the hook when you use an epithet here and now.
"... the one who’s rage-tweeting, fulminating, running the world—is 'Donald Trump,' the brazen character he workshopped for decades in the New York City tabloids, on talk shows, in sitcom cameos. And, most influentially, on The Apprentice. Trump was reality TV before the genre had a name. He knew it was more important to seem like a thing than to be that thing. People would become invested in you—banks, TV producers, voters—and do the work of maintaining your illusion themselves. The Apprentice didn’t need a businessman. It needed the idea of a businessman. That was the entire point of Donald Trump. He brought his own props. He opened the first episode in his helicopter, his name plastered on the side. He showed off his jet and his model girlfriend and his Trump Tower triplex.... The Apprentice needed Trump to be credible so the show would be credible. It built him a “boardroom” based on Ned Beatty’s corporate lair in Network. It imposed logic on his capricious firing decisions in the editing room. It punched up the rough draft he created, with better production values. TV’s Mr. Trump—it was always 'Mr. Trump'—was decisive. He was feared, his approval craved. He was saucy and shrewd and glamorous and generous. He was a serious businessman. But he was fun! 'Where else do you get a good time like with Trump?' he asked a female lawyer whom he’d just introduced to America with 'There’s Miss Universe, right there!' He was shot gliding imperiously down gleaming escalators, the same way he would one day announce his campaign at Trump Tower."
That's my own photograph of mushrooms, noticed on a walk in 2010 in the Apostle Islands National Seashore. It's good to see the small things within the big.
"Besides that one viral debate moment, which, as Ed said, briefly sent her into the stratosphere, she has been quite shaky on policy (her answers on health care are all over the place) and vision (seems to be synthesis of everyone else’s). If she had been more consistent, isn’t it plausible that she’d be in more direction [sic] competition with Biden by now?"/"Maybe, though Cory Booker has been more consistent and has some authentic appeal to African-Americans, and he’s in much worse shape than Harris."/"The best thing Harris had going for her was being inspiring and historic. This just doesn’t seem to be an election where majorities of voters, black voters included, are especially invested in being inspired or making history."
These articles about the election must be cranked out, and I'm only blogging this one because it is so absurd. Kamala Harris was "briefly sent... into the stratosphere"?! She briefly polled in the teens, and then slipped back into the single digits. Instead of an article asking why she's not more popular, ask yourselves how you ever got caught up into assuming that she was supposed to be so popular. You assume something should be true, then you proceed to inquire why it isn't. How about speaking honestly about your own assumption?
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