This is about parents complaining — or faux-complaining (with cute pictures) — about all the berries their children will eat. Like a whole $4 box in one sitting. I don't know where this story goes, but I'd tell these Instagram ladies to stop giving a little kid the whole box. And stop with the humblebragging.
I'm very far removed from having little kids to take care of, and I do remember the pride you can take in the way your child eats, but I did not have the temptation of social media as a place to display this screwy pride. So I don't care what Slate Plus has to say. I say: Control your child with portion control — e.g., 2 strawberries, 10 blueberries. And: Control yourself by never exposing your little kids — and your pride — to the creepy eyes of the internet.
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There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email.
ADDED: "Williamsburg" refers to the state of mind or the fashion or something — not the actual location of this popular photo-op.
AND: I thought of the song "I'm in a New York State of Mind." There's this idea that your mind could be in a particular place where your body is not. Actually, that song is about being in the mood to go to New York — physically — so it's not the right idea. Sure the idea was out there, I googled "i'm in a (blank) state of mind."
God, I love that song. And I love the idea that the place is in your mind, that the place is even more real if your mind is truly there that if your body could be there.
I believe there are many other examples of songs (or poems) about being in a place where you are not. I'm trying to think of more, and I welcome suggestions, but don't name near-miss examples, such as merely dreaming of home or wishing to be in this other place. It must be the idea that the place as it is in your mind is the true place, and the actual place falls away as a meaningful destination. You don't want to go there. You are there. In your mind.
"The Supreme Court has turned down countless Second Amendment appeals since it established an individual right to keep guns in the home for self-defense in 2008 in District of Columbia v. Heller.
Since then, lower courts have generally sustained gun control laws. But they are divided on the fundamental and open question posed by the new case: whether states can stop law-abiding citizens from carrying guns outside their homes for self-defense unless they can satisfy the authorities that they have a good reason for doing so....
The new case is a challenge to a New York law that requires people seeking a license to carry a gun outside their homes to show a 'proper cause.'"
There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email.
"... that nobody can share the article on its giant platform and, as a bonus, block you from sending it to anyone in Facebook Messenger.
I learned this rule from a cheerfully intense senior Facebook lawyer... who... was trying to explain why the service had expunged a meanspirited New York Post article about a Black Lives Matter activist’s real estate purchases....
The policy sounds crazy because it could apply to dozens, if not hundreds, of news articles every day — indeed, to a staple of reporting for generations that has included Michael Bloomberg’s expansion of his townhouse in 2009 and the comings and goings of the Hamptons elites. Alex Rodriguez doesn’t like a story that includes a photo of him and his former fiancée, Jennifer Lopez, smiling in front of his house? Delete it. Donald Trump is annoyed about a story that includes a photo of him outside his suite at Mar-a-Lago? Gone."
Smith is surprised that the journalists don't get special treatment on Facebook. The rules are the rules, and they apply to NY Post and NYT reporters just as much as they apply to a random private citizen. A good way to build respect for a system of rules is to have no exceptions — to make them neutral and generally applicable. That's something everyone instinctively understands... at least before they get distracted into thinking about how they or somebody they like really is special and deserves privilege.
Here's Smith:
A decision by The Post, or The New York Times, that someone’s personal wealth is newsworthy carries no weight in the company’s opaque enforcement mechanisms. Nor, Facebook’s lawyer said, does a more nebulous and reasonable human judgment that the country has felt on edge for the last year and that a Black activist’s concern for her own safety was justified.... The point of Facebook’s bureaucracy is to replace human judgment with a kind of strict corporate law....
Corporate! I think the big concept that rules are rules — no exceptions! — extends way beyond the corporate setting. Smith complains that Facebook is using "its own, made-up rules rather than exercising any form of actual judgment."
The judgment is in making a rule that you are willing to apply across the board. That's the test of a good rule! This is basic ethics. Yes, you get a "made-up rule," but you've made it up using sound ethics!
No wonder the Facebook lawyer was "cheerfully intense"! She understood exactly why her interpretation was admirable. I'd have been cheerfully intense explaining that too. I'm feeling cheerfully intense just writing this!
***
There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email.
The case is about a 14-year-old girl's Snapchat that said, "Fuck school, fuck softball, fuck everything." She got suspended from the cheerleading squad.
From the article:
The [school] district, supported in the Supreme Court by the Biden administration, poses a number of problems: the student who publishes answers to the test; the player who undermines the coach with an avalanche of tweets about his play-calling; the disruptive student across the street with a bullhorn.
More seriously: “The laws in the District of Columbia and at least 25 states require schools to address off-campus harassment or bullying that substantially disrupts the school environment or interferes with other students’ rights,” the brief states. “Students who encourage classmates to kill themselves, target black classmates with photos of lynchings, or text the whole class photos of fellow students in compromising positions, do not limit their invective to school hours.”
It sounds as though school officials feel a lot of pressure to reach way beyond the school. This is where a strong free-speech doctrine from the Court could really help. Make it clear when the schools can't act and deprive these officials of the power to yield to this pressure. Let the schools teach the kids when they're in school — including teaching good behavior and how to speak intelligently and respectfully — and take away their weapon of punishing children for their out-of-school speech.
***
There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email.
"He was making fun of that whole scene of being so serious about it and trying to imitate the worst of women — the most unliberated ones — where Divine was beyond. Divine was not trans. Divine never walked around dressed as a woman. He didn't want to be a woman.... It wasn't like Divine was trapped in the wrong body or anything. Divine was a feminine gay man. But he was proud to say he was a drag queen. He was an actor. And he played a man, woman, he would've played the dog in 'Pink Flamingos' if I'd let him."
Says John Waters, on the new episode of Marc Maron's podcast. Waters is a fantastic guest, one of the best conversationalists I've ever heard on a podcast, so listen to the whole thing. I chose this one piece to transcribe because it says so much... with direct detail and plenty of open-ended implication. Waters is so pro liberated women and pro feminine gay men that there's some hostility to drag and transgenderism. That takes nerve. And vivacity.
"... the late Chadwick Boseman would win Best Actor, the final award presented, and it would be moving and historic. Well, he didn’t. The night ended without a winner’s speech from Anthony Hopkins ('The Father'). Imbeciles."
I used to follow the Oscars very closely. Used to simul-blog the whole show. But now I just assume it will be 3+ unbearable hours and don't even try to watch. So that NY Post headline jumped out at me. Even though it's not exciting. It's what we expect from the Oscars. Maybe we shouldn't say "tortured" like that. Torture is a serious matter in this world, and no one in the "viewers" category was victimized in any way, other than by their own failure to snap off the screen or — for those truly sapped of vigor — move on to another channel.
Anyway, the Oscars felt so predictable that they switched up the usual order of things and gave the Best Picture award before the 2 main acting awards. But then the one unpredictable thing that happened was the last award going to Anthony Hopkins, the elderly British white man, instead of to Chadwick Boseman, the American black man who died at the age of 43.
And Hopkins wasn't there to accept the award. Not that Boseman could have been there, but the person accepting for Boseman would have been well-chosen and well-prepared to install the right thoughts and emotions in our head. No one was designated to accept for Hopkins on the off chance that he'd win, so the presenter of the award, just said thank you and winced an awkward smile:
That's Joaquin Phoenix. I guess that means he won Best Actor last year. What did he win for? Had to look it up: "The Joker." Remember when that was a big deal? Remember that other time an actor played the Joker and won an Oscar? Heath Ledger. He played the Joker, then died, then won the Oscar.
You know, it's very sad that Chadwick Boseman died, but it is better that those who make decisions stick squarely to merit. It's an award for acting, not for dying. The movies make us feel, and death makes us feel, but those who vote on awards shouldn't give an acting award for things a person did that made us feel.
Perhaps Boseman did deserve the Oscar. It's possible that the presumption — the presumption based on death (and race) — was so overplayed that Academy voters reacted and gave it to Hopkins.
Hopkins is a fine old actor, and here he is, getting around to thanking the Academy and giving a tribute to Boseman:
ADDED: Someone emailed to tell me it's "Joker," not "The Joker." I feel the faint echo of things that felt important in the fall of 2019. Part of me is just annoyed, on the verge of derisive, like when people insist that you not call Ohio State Ohio State but The Ohio State. Because my name is Ann — pronounced the same as "an" — I'm rather sensitive to this matter. Why am I "an" Althouse instead of The Althouse? I guess the Joker in "Joker" was not the definite article, the definitive Joker, but just one of the man jokers out there. Is that what it mean, the leaving off of the "the"?
Joker is a movie about jokes and loneliness and jokes about loneliness, but it’s also about the absence of a certain “the.” So Vulture has put together a handy photo-essay guide to the name of the movie’s main character. Call him by his name — Joker — and hope he doesn’t call you anything at all.
The idea seems to be that his name is Joker. You don't put an article — definite or indefinite — in front of a proper name. I thought I was going to find a more philosophical answer to my question.
"In partnership with laboratories in France and Switzerland, scientists monitored the 15 team members’ sleep patterns, social interactions and behavioural reactions via sensors. One sensor was a tiny thermometer inside a capsule that participants swallowed like a pill. It measured body temperature and transmitted data to a computer until it was expelled naturally.
The team members followed their biological clocks to know when to wake up, go to sleep and eat. They counted their days not in hours but in sleep cycles. 'It’s really interesting to observe how this group synchronises themselves,' [project director Christian] Clot said earlier in a recording from inside the cave....
Two-thirds of the participants expressed a desire to remain underground a little longer to finish group projects started during their stay.... "
I found this very interesting - the fact that so many wanted to stay in the cave. Like you, I don't do "real travel" - the kind that involves airports and exotic places. Prefer ordinary days as well. My ideal vacation is one in which I have a stretch of days where I do not have to look at the clock. I am constantly worried about time passing when I'm on the job; such is life in Big Law. Just listening to traveling types describe their plans, designed with near military precision to fit it all in, is annoying. Of course the Cave People want to stay in the cave - we are so linked to the passing of time it is such a nice change to be divorced from it. I totally get it.
You're reminding me how much I hated working "billable hours." It's something I only did for a couple years after law school, but I've never forgotten how much I appreciated moving into a job where my time wasn't connected to the money. The money flowed in over there, and nothing about the way I did my work made me feel that time equals money. I know some people prefer to feel the connection between work and money. It can be quite motivating! But I love the disconnect.
AND: SGT Ted emails:
The experiment of the cave dwellers is interesting but seems like contrived science to me, by removing normal activity that is required for survival, like finding food, raising the next generation and living in a natural diurnal environment. Maybe as an application towards living in outer space it has some merit. But they could just as easily have done that with a sealed building instead of underground caves.
That's from an excerpt from the Philip Roth biography we've been talking about, the one the publisher has been withholding because of allegations about the biographer. I've been reading about this book — have read several articles — and blogged it more than once. This morning, my readings brought me around to the subject of Claire Bloom, and I got to the point of blogging the quote above before I realized what I was reading was the writing of the accused man, the biographer — Blake Bailey. Strange!
Claire Bloom and Philip Roth sound like an awful pair. I don't know if I want to read about them. I considered buying Claire Bloom's memoir, "Leaving a Doll's House," but it's not available on Kindle. I'll keep her at a distance, as the star of one of my all-time favorite movies, "Limelight."
As for Philip Roth, it seems better to encounter him through his novels, and in fact, I'm reading one of his novels, "The Human Stain." When I blogged about the biography yesterday, I ran into a quote from that book, and it was fine enough to send me to Amazon to download the text and the audio.
Here, I highlighted one quote so far. It's all one sentence:
My point is that by moving here I had altered deliberately my relationship to the sexual caterwaul, and not because the exhortations or, for that matter, my erections had been effectively weakened by time, but because I couldn’t meet the costs of its clamoring anymore, could no longer marshal the wit, the strength, the patience, the illusion, the irony, the ardor, the egoism, the resilience—or the toughness, or the shrewdness, or the falseness, the dissembling, the dual being, the erotic professionalism—to deal with its array of misleading and contradictory meanings.
Sure, you can diagram it. I'll start: point | is....
ADDED: The OED defines "caterwaul" as "The cry of the cat at rutting time. Also transferred. Any similar sound." It could be modernized into "catwail," but it's an old word, first seen in English in this sentence: "If the cattes skyn be slyk and gay, forth she wil, er eny day be dawet, To schewe hir skyn, and goon a caterwrawet." That's Chaucer. Circa 1386.
FROM THE EMAIL: Nancy sends this, from a NYT article on Leaving a Dollhouse:
''He's tense; she's tense,'' Gore Vidal said from his home in Ravello, Italy. ''Each is neurotic. They were together 17 years; it couldn't have been all that bad.'' Like most of the couple's friends, Mr. Vidal is trying to distance himself from the memoir. ''It's always best to stay out of other people's divorces,'' he said. ''And their civil wars.''
"... he’s like, 'So?' And I’m like, 'So, what?' And then he goes, 'So, did you really write them?' And I’m like, 'Write what?' And he goes, 'Your plays.' And I’m like, 'What is this, some kind of Grant’s Tomb trick question? Of course I wrote my plays. Who did you think wrote them? Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford?' I say that as a joke because Edward de Vere is a moron — I once asked him to borrow a codpiece, and he gave me an actual piece of cod. But then Mondale is all, 'Yes, I actually heard Edward de Vere did write them.' Mondale then fills me in on this whole crazy theory that I didn’t write my own plays. You guys weren’t going to tell me this? How has nobody ever mentioned this to me? I look over, and Christopher Marlowe is giving Mondale that 'stop talking' throat slash gesture thingy, but it’s too late...."
"You hide in plain sight. Make yourself invisible. Internalize the idea that you’re unwelcome. Stay hypervigilant to avoid trouble. Apart from telling you to clear out, the police can harass you with fines and tickets or get your home-on-wheels towed away to an impound lot.... In the film ['Nomadland'], Fern, played by Frances McDormand, is startled by a knock that interrupts a quiet meal. She looks up with a start and swears. A face hovers at the window, and a fist pounds once, twice, three times on the door. Then comes a gruff voice. 'No overnight parking! You can’t sleep here.'
Watching the character’s panic at the sudden sound of a fist hitting her van gave me anxious flashbacks. Then it made me sad. Then I felt angry, because that scene was just too accurate, and I wished it didn’t reflect the reality of how people treat one another.... Bob Wells, 65, has a popular video, 'Avoiding the Knock,' and has been lecturing on the topic for ages.... In a better world, people wouldn’t have to go to such lengths to stay out of sight.... Some towns have created areas where vehicle dwellers can sleep undisturbed."
By the way, Meade and I saw the movie. It was the first time we'd been out to the movies in over a year. I was disappointed in the experience. The image on the screen looked dim and dull. I would have preferred to watch it on TV (but not enough to subscribe to Hulu, which is what you need to do).
I would have walked out if I had been alone. Meade, however, loved the movie. He said it was the best movie he'd seen since he saw "How the West Was Won" when he was a kid — and that movie was in Cinerama (true 3-lens Cinerama). "Nomadland" was my most extreme example of seeing a movie with someone whose opinion of it was the opposite of mine. I said, "I hated it."
FROM THE EMAIL: Kate writes:
It's not a home. It's a car.
In the effort to not shame the homeless, this author isn't helping. Be honest. It has no bathroom or kitchen. It's a car.
You want to help? Get serious. Build public parking lots with bathrooms. I've lived very rough, and these kind of euphemisms are silly. Shelter, the basic human need, includes a designated place to pee and cook. Any motor vehicle that provides these services is a camper.
(I haven't seen Nomadland yet. When it streams on a service I use, I'll gladly watch it.)
The vehicles shown in the movie have something like a kitchen and bathroom. That is, the toilet is a plastic bucket, and there's some device for heating food. Mostly the vehicles are old and quite ordinary vans.
As for the word "home," there's a very important line in the movie. Asked if she's "homeless," the main character says: "I'm not homeless. I'm just houseless." A similar examination of language occurs when she's asked, "Are you married?" She says, "I am, but my husband died." The issue is, what really matters? What is a home? What is a marriage? People with less may have more.
"Why would anyone endeavor to rebrand love into something like a start-up, complete with its own energized, abbreviated lingo? And how could Juhana encourage me to pursue other relationships? Did I truly inspire so little emotion he wouldn’t care if I dated someone else? 'I am willing to endure the discomfort,' he would reply, 'because you are worth it.'
But why couldn’t he be willing to endure the discomfort of depriving himself of someone else? Why, I wanted to know, was one pain fundamentally more acceptable than the other?"
When I was in college back in the '60s in Florida, a couple I knew decided that it was fine for the guy to have a girlfriend on the side, what with free love and all. It was so fine that the three of them moved into a three bedroom house together.
After about a month of this, the first girlfriend put the second girlfriend's clothes in an old bathtub in the back yard and set them on fire.
Then she--the first gf--jumped in her car and drove to Las Vegas, never to be seen again.
That's a polyamorous story.
That makes me think of this old David Crosby song (originally from the 60s):
He says that song was "not the reason they threw me out of The Byrds": "They threw me out of The Byrds because I was an asshole."
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