"He was dressed as I remembered him — flannel shirt and jeans. Except the familiar wardrobe was draped over a man’s body now."

"The message of the clothes had changed from 'tomboy' to 'I.T. guy.' Seeing the man who used to be my wife reminded me of the feelings of loss I felt in the months following his quiet and dignified disclosure to me of his transition.... We had been together from our late teens to early 30s. My understanding of our divorce was that we started too young, and the differences that seemed small at the time widened, as our childhoods ended and our adulthoods began... I remember the day I worked up the nerve to talk about splitting up. Moments before I began my prepared speech, my spouse asked whether we should try separating. Stunned, I admitted I was about to say the same thing. I laughed and cried with relief. We hugged. The dogs came out of hiding. It was our best moment in months.... We were two kids once, a boy and a girl, making plans for the rest of our lives. Our paths diverged and now we came back together, two men in middle age, having a look at each other and talking about some good memories we still shared.... I thought I had just attended a private wake for my ex-wife, to look at the body, to say goodbye. But I hadn’t. Meeting him in person was a confirmation of life....."

From "Coffee With the Man Who Used to Be My Wife" by Dan Higgins (NYT).

A comment over there that got some highly rated replies: "The analogy of the transition as a death is problematic and a cis person's grief isn't one of the more important aspects of these transitions." Here's the highest rated response:

... I’d ask you to consider that the death analogy that you find “problematic” is not a new one, nor one that most trans people I know dismiss. If to call a trans person by their birth name is termed “dead naming” in the LGBTQ+ community, why should not a spouse (or former spouse) of a trans person be permitted to share their own experience of their partner’s figurative “death”... [W]hen anyone transitions, there is a constellation of loved ones that are impacted, in one way or another. I am the cis-het former wife of a trans woman, assigned male at birth. We are no longer married, but are very close and share two children. I am a staunch and vocal LGBTQ+ ally. However, please do not for one moment dismiss the pain of my OWN transition as my then husband pursued her own quest for self — after 12 years of marriage and two children. I too urge you to keep an open mind and consider that gender transitions/affirmations do not happen in a vacuum.

"Yes, dividing the triplets among three families, each carefully chosen by class and other factors (all three boys had older adopted sisters, presumably as controls), was underhanded and imperious."

"But aren’t all adoptions in some way manipulative? Children aren’t assigned by lottery. Agencies look for the right fit and routinely make matches based on a range of subjective criteria. The current practice among adoption agencies is to never split up twins. Was this the standard in 1961? The film should have told us one way or another. The film also cheats a bit on the central issue of the twins study itself: nature vs. nurture..... An ominous montage depicts the boys as anguished children and strongly implies that [SPOILER DELETED] was biologically determined. But the film later shifts gears and seems to place an inordinate amount of blame on Eddy’s adoptive father, a self-described strict disciplinarian who appears haunted by what he might have done differently as a father."

From "DOES ‘THREE IDENTICAL STRANGERS’ PLAY FAIR WITH ITS AUDIENCE?/The story of three triplets reunited as teenagers after having been separated at birth" (The Jerusalem Post).

We watched "Three Identical Strangers" last night. Have you seen it? It was very interesting but I have some problems with it!

There was a lot in the movie about the ethics of the adoption agency and the psychiatric researchers, but the movie had its own ethical problems, most notably in the way it used and accused Eddy's father.

"It died in my hands. If only I could explain to them, I was only trying to help. I just wave the stick around to shoo them off. Poor things, they believe I killed the chick."

Said Shiva Kewat, who tried to rescue a baby crow, quoted in "‘Revengeful’ crows target MP man in 3-year-old vengeance" (Times of India).

“The assaults are sudden and frightening,” he says. He has been injured several times in the head. “The crows attack him like they show fighter jets diving towards a target in movies,” say villagers. ...

Professor Ashok Kumar Munjal, who teaches genetics at Barkatullah University in Bhopal and researches bird and animal behaviour, believes that crows are more intelligent than most birds, and they do tend to show behavior similar to revenge. “It may not be as complex as in humans, but they do have a tendency of remembering individuals and targeting those who have wronged them,” he told TOI.

"How Reddit's Male Fashion Advice Became One of the Nicest Places on the Internet/The popular subreddit turned 10 this week, and it's still helping guys improve their style—sans trolls."

Esquire explains.

Part of what makes it weird is what makes it important: The Subreddit is not run by industry experts or stylists. There’s a hard stance on blocking spammers and marketers and brands. The advice comes from regular people who aren’t necessarily trying to look stylish but rather to just not look bad. That's what makes it so accessible.

Founder Jeremy Wagner-Kaiser started the Subreddit 10 years ago after going off on another thread with other users about fashion advice. “I had a huge inclination that I was dressing like a slob,” he says. “It was created explicitly to give advice to people who don't have any idea what they're doing. We want them to have clear, straightforward answers.” That means learning what outfits are considered business casual, how pants and shirts should fit, and what shoes are actually worth investing in....

Here's r/malefashionadvice/. There are 2.2 million members.

Just to pick an example (almost randomly), here's a guy whose "normal style for the past 13 or so years has roughly been a mixture of grunge-emo-metalhead-nerd.... Think Kurt Cobain meets a modern metalcore/hardcore kid meets a nerd that watches anime and cartoons and other 90s crap." He wants "to find a way to either mix my current style with a more sophisticated or I guess business casual look, or create a whole new look altogether to wear when I'm feeling myself."

The top-rated advice is: "do it incrementally. Focus on one aspect, e.g. Shoes, read up on it and improve your style within your own parameters. Then go to the next. Trying to do everything at once is a recipe for disaster. Good luck!"

A highly rated but more specific answer is:

Don't throw out all the tees you used to wear. You can keep things that interest you and still look good wearing them. For example, you could replace a loud-pattern flannel with a more simple* chambray or Oxford shirt and wear a t-shirt underneath. A well-fitting denim jacket or dark Harrington would also suit your style I feel. Vans are also fine, but I would suggest you clean them very often. Grey also tends to be less grungy and emo than black, while retaining the same aesthetic.

Notice how practical, on-topic, and completely nice it is.

I'm blogging this not just because I'm interested in fashion and in the physical appearance of males. I love Reddit.

At the Wildflower Café...

... you can talk all night.

"Everybody hated something. I hated the heights. Red Buttons hated the water. Stella [Stevens] hated the dirt and so did..."

"... Ernest Borgnine. Shelley Winters hated being fat and Jack Albertson hated Shelley Winters."

Said Carol Lynley, years ago, talking about "The Poseidon Adventure," quoted in "Carol Lynley, actress in 1972 blockbuster ‘The Poseidon Adventure,’ dies at 77" (WaPo).



It's not too late/We should be giving/Only with love can we climb/It's not too late/Not while we're living/Let's put our hands out in time...

"Toward the end of the book, Kantor and Twohey devote two chapters to Christine Blasey Ford and her decision to air her sexual-assault allegations against the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh."

"This, and the book’s finale, 'The Gathering,' seem appended, an anticlimactic climax. In 'The Gathering,' the reporters assemble 12 of the sexual abuse victims they interviewed (including a McDonald’s worker, Kim Lawson, who helped organize a nationwide strike over the fast-food franchise’s failure to address sexual harassment) at Gwyneth Paltrow’s Brentwood mansion to talk, over gourmet Japanese cuisine, about what they’ve endured since going public with their charges. The testimonials inevitably descend into platitudes about personal 'growth' and getting 'some sense of myself back.' At one point, Paltrow starts crying over the way Weinstein had invoked his support for her career to get women to submit to his advances, and Lawson’s friend (a McDonald’s labor organizer who came with her so she wouldn’t feel alone in a room full of movie stars) hands the actress a box of tissues. These therapeutic scenes paste a pat conclusion onto a book that otherwise keeps the focus not on individual behavior or personal feelings but on the apparatuses of politics and power."

From Susan Faludi's review of "SHE SAID/Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement" by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey. (Kantor and Twohey are NYT reporters, and the review is in the NYT.)

Interesting detail about Paltrow, the tissues, and the McDonald's workers.

Joe Rogan talks about how Rotten Tomatoes treated Dave Chapelle.

First, look at this:



Now, here's Joe:

"What I always find interesting is, 99 percent of the people that come over to say something negative and to attack [me] are women...."

"I am only the third woman and the first mom to ever be the White House press secretary, and yet women attack me relentlessly..."

Said Sarah Huckabee Sanders (quoted in a Mediaite article linked by my son at Facebook).

A love story.

View this post on Instagram

“We worked together at McDonalds. I was in a deep depression at the time. It felt like my mind was dying. Hours passed. Days passed. I just tried to keep to myself and make the fries. But she was different. She was friends with everybody. Always smiling. Always blushing. Always talking. One morning it was snowing outside, and she walked in the front door, covered in snow, and she started dancing and twisting on the floor mat, and the snow was falling off her, and the light was behind her, and she looked like an angel to me. But we never spoke. Her friends kept telling me that she had a crush on me, but I was too shy. Sometimes we’d be at the same post together, and both of us would just stare at the computer screen. If we accidentally looked at each other, we’d look away really fast. Then one night we both finished around 10 pm and we sat alone in the break room. We started talking a little bit. She couldn’t sit still. She kept getting up and walking around the room. I told her that people were saying she liked me. She didn’t respond. She just stared at the wall. Then after a long time she finally looked at me. I put my arm around her shoulder, and we kissed.” (London, England)

A post shared by Humans of New York (@humansofny) on Sep 8, 2019 at 10:17am PDT

"The Last of the Dunk Tank Clowns/Turns out Americans don’t really enjoy being insulted anymore."

A great title for what I hope is a great NYT article. It's by (great name) Jason Nark.

“They’re retiring left and right,” [said David Simmons, a dunk tank clown]. “They’re being run out of town.”...

At the Erie County Fair... [p]eople sat on the metal benches, trying to guess which person Mr. Simmons would pick on next, an open-air comedy show in the vein of Don Rickles or Richard Pryor.

“We just came to sit and listen,” said Zenaida Piotrowicz, 62, who was laughing along with her husband, Bob. “He mostly says the things you’re thinking in your head.”

“Ha, you know you’re trailer park trash if you wear a T-shirt with your cigarette brand on the chest,” Mr. Simmons, 33, yelled to one man, who kept on walking. “I’m probably paying child support for you, kid,” he barked to a teen jawing back at him....

[For] the Champlain Valley Fair in Essex Junction, Vt. Mr. Simmons thought that would be a good place to wear the red Make America Great Again hat he keeps in his cage.....

One place I go for modern-day insulting is the subreddit r/RoastMe. You have to volunteer to be insulted, so the enjoyment of the insultee is factored in. The same is (sort of) true with the old-time dunk tank clown. Don't go near him if you don't want to be insulted. He's not circulating. He's at a fixed point (and he's subject to the punishment of dunking). But some people go near because they like hearing him insult somebody else. With RoastMe, you can read it all you want, and the insults don't come to you unless you ask for it. There's also ToastMe, where people ask to be boosted and complimented. And I like this guy, who posted at RoastMe, "I posted on r/ToastMe and But balance is necessary so here I am. Give it your best shot 👏👏."

"Elizabeth Warren's team doesn't want to talk about Hillary Clinton, but that doesn't mean the 2020 presidential candidate isn't talking with her party's 2016 nominee."

Writes NBC News, with a big glorious photograph of Elizabeth Warren alongside Hillary Clinton. The photo is riveting, with Hillary Clinton at her most garish — oversmiling, dressed in tent-shaped turquoise, and caught at the "Hitler salute" instant of an exaggerated wave at an unseen crowd. And there's Elizabeth Warren, seemingly Hillary's doppelganger. Warren's haircut is ever so slightly raffish around the ear and her hand is flung higher, into a more natural wave. She's in red, not blue.

Warren is differentiated from Hillary, but not enough for her to want you looking at this picture today. The photo is from October 2016. The article, relying on unnamed sources, is about how the women are hiding the connection they (supposedly) have:

It’s hard to know exactly how many times they’ve reached out to each other — or precisely what they’ve discussed — in part because neither camp wants to reveal much of anything about their interaction and in part because they have each other's phone numbers, and there are many ways for two high-powered politicians to communicate that don’t involve their staffs....

It's so secretive, the way these people who have each other's phone numbers can just talk to each other without anyone else knowing.

But a person who is close to Clinton said the contact has been substantial enough to merit attention, describing a conversation between the two as seemingly recent because it was "front of mind" for her.

A person who is close to Clinton. Why are Clinton people trying to plant stories about Clinton's ongoing connection to Warren? Are they trying to help somebody who is not Warren?! Or can I assume that the Clinton person simply got caught off guard by the NBC reporter who seems to have asked if the contact was "substantial" and "recent" and only got that weird, vague "front of mind" answer.

"That has clearly not gone unnoticed, and I think she really appreciates that," the person close to Clinton said....

It sounds as though a somewhat out-of-it Clinton associate was thinking entirely from the point of view of Clinton — whose feelings may be hurting — and not from the point of view of Warren — who must want tight control of any connection to Hillary. Hillary can help Warren eventually, but this isn't the time — as the article goes on to explain. Tying Warren to Clinton is something you'd do now to help Bernie.

"President Trump said on Saturday that he had canceled a secret meeting at Camp David with Taliban leaders and the president of Afghanistan..."

The NYT reports.

“Unbeknownst to almost everyone,” Mr. Trump wrote in a series of tweets, Taliban leaders and the Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, were headed to the United States on Saturday for what would have been a politically fraught meeting at the president’s official Camp David retreat in Maryland.

But Mr. Trump said that “in order to build false leverage,” the Taliban had admitted to a suicide car bomb attack on Thursday that had killed an American soldier and 11 others in the capital of Kabul. “I immediately cancelled the meeting and called off peace negotiations,” he wrote. “If they cannot agree to a ceasefire during these very important peace talks, and would even kill 12 innocent people, then they probably don’t have the power to negotiate a meaningful agreement anyway,” Mr. Trump added. “How many more decades are they willing to fight?”...

From the often-apt subreddit r/TheRightCantMeme.

Oh, damn! Libs are DESTROYED!!! from r/TheRightCantMeme

Are you following Sharpiegate?

pic.twitter.com/QeUbwdsWfr

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 8, 2019

Fame.

Nice moment at the theatre in Innsbruck last night...

Just before I went on, I asked a stage manager " Will this audience know me better from Monty Python or Fawlty Towers ? "

He replied "I don't know. I've never heard of you "

— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) September 8, 2019