"It just looks like a huge cup that's way too big...."

"People start to re-examine their lives. Let’s do something we can wrap our hands around."

"Knowing how to go into the woods and find a mushroom that you can take home and cook for dinner feels like something solid, or tangible."

Said Iso Rabins, who founded a company that teaches classes on how to forage for mushrooms (and other wild edibles), quoted in "Mushroom Boom: How to Plan a Foraging Adventure on the West Coast/Thanks to an unusually wet winter, mushroom hunters in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond will be greatly rewarded. Here’s a primer for first-timers" (NYT).

The NYT is stirring up travel ideas for East Coast people to go to the West Coast and compete with the locals looking for things growing in the wild. It's the opposite of locavorism... is that the word? I'd like to suggest locavoraciousness... a word I just coined.

"Twitter and Tesla chief Elon Musk defended Scott Adams... in a series of tweets Sunday, blasting media organizations for dropping his comic strip..."

I'm reading "Musk defends 'Dilbert' creator, says media is 'racist against whites'/The Tesla and Twitter chief blasted media outlets for dropping Scott Adams’s comic strip after the cartoonist’s rant against Black people" by Will Oremus (WaPo).

Replying to tweets about the controversy, Musk said it is actually the media that is “racist against whites & Asians.”... 

In further tweets Sunday, Musk agreed with a tweet that said “Adams’ comments weren’t good” but there’s “an element of truth” to them, and suggested in a reply that media organizations promote a “false narrative” by giving more coverage to unarmed Black victims of police violence than they do to unarmed White victims of police violence.... 

Here's the Musk tweet, responding to someone who tweeted that the MSM had concluded that Adams is racist:

"The goal is not to expose the 'slipups' of the masters but to understand the human brain."

I'm reading "The Art of the Shadow: How Painters Have Gotten It Wrong for Centuries" (The MIT Press Reader).

"[I]f we were able to more-or-less end teenage cigarette smoking over the last 20 years, it shouldn’t be out of the question to try to do the same with social-media use."

Says Bret Stephens, a NYT conservative columnist, in conversation with Gail Collins, a NYT liberaI columnist. 

Collins agrees and says she's "happy to insist" that Apple prevent the download of social-media apps to phones known to be used by teenagers.

Stephens asserts that "most teenagers" would "welcome" this exclusion from social media.

It’s hard enough being 14 or 15 without needing to panic about some embarrassing Instagram pic or discovering too late that something stupid or awful you wrote on Facebook or Twitter at 16 comes back to haunt you at 20.... We owe it to the kids to shield them from creating public records of their own indiscretions and idiocies. Life will come roaring at them soon enough. I say no social media till they’re old enough to vote, smoke and maybe even buy a drink. Full-frontal stupidity should be left to the grown-ups — like us!

You can see he thinks he's cute... just delightful. So blithely depriving teenagers of freedom of speech. Not even a word about freedom, just safety and protection, and no insight whatsoever into what you are teaching young people these days or awareness of what they will think of you and your repression of them and the values you crudely imposed.

Speaking of wearing blinders... in another part of this rambling but short conversation, they talk about the accomplishments of Jimmy Carter, and Stephens says, "Made air travel affordable to middle-class America for the first time," then barrels on to the next subject. I know this column is supposed to be jaunty, moving swiftly from one topic to the next, but it made me stop and think of the topic the good-thinkers always think about except when they don't: Global warming.

Isn't Jimmy Carter a major villain in the story of anthropogenic climate change? 

Sunrise — 6:30.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

"The E-Sports High School... was founded with the intention of feeding the growing global demand for professional gamers...."

"In truth, few of the students will become pro gamers. E-sports have never caught on in Japan, where people prefer single-player games. And careers are short anyway: Teenagers — with their fast-twitch reflexes — dominate. By their mid-20s, most players are no longer competitive." 

From "A Video-Gaming School Stumbles on a Way to Get Dropouts Back in Class/Japan’s first e-sports high school thought it would turn out pro gamers. Instead, it attracted an unexpected demographic" (NYT).

The "unexpected demographic" is the young people who are simply refusing to go to school, such as "Torahito Tsutsumi, 17, [who] had left school after bullying drove him into a deep depression. He spent all day in his room reading comics and playing video games. When his mother, Ai, confronted him about it, he told her that his life was 'meaningless.'"

"I have not worn a scarf for months — I don’t even carry it with me any more. Whether the government likes to admit it or not, the era of the forced hijab is over."

Said Kimia, 23, a graduate student in the Kurdish city of Sanandaj, quoted in "Their Hair Long and Flowing or in Ponytails, Women in Iran Flaunt Their Locks/Defiant resistance to Iran’s mandatory hijab law has exploded across the country after nationwide protests that erupted last year" (NYT).

"Profoundly embarrassed" is putting it outrageously lightly.

Welp. The behavior of a certain cadre of scientists who used every trick in the book to suppress discussion of this issue is something I'll never forget. A huge disservice to science and public health. They should be profoundly embarrassed.https://t.co/nZqzjrvo8F

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) February 26, 2023

ADDED: Here's the NYT article on the subject: "Lab Leak Most Likely Caused Pandemic, Energy Dept. Says, as Spy Agencies Remain Split/The conclusion, which was made with 'low confidence,' was based on new intelligence. The information didn’t lead other agencies to change their assessments on the origins of the coronavirus."

"Efforts by the ruling Communist Party to raise fertility rates — by permitting all couples to have two children in 2016, then three in 2021..."

"... have struggled to gain traction. The new policy in Sichuan drew widespread attention because it essentially disregards birth limits altogether.... In most parts of China, single mothers are denied the government benefits offered to married couples. Until recently, some provinces had even imposed fines on unmarried women who gave birth. But the baby shortage has prompted provinces like Sichuan to start legally recognizing children born to single mothers, part of a Communist Party push toward more 'inclusive' population policies.... But the obstacles for women... go far beyond compensation.... 'What many women, especially single mothers, lack is not money, but the protection of their rights and the respect of society'...."

From "Desperate for Babies, China Races to Undo an Era of Birth Limits. Is It Too Late? A number of new incentives encouraging people to have children highlight the challenges China faces in trying to boost its declining birthrate" (NYT).

"If you’re a fan – as I am – of Skinner’s standup, you’ll enjoy tracing how his poetry appreciation now dovetails with, and now diverges from, comedy."

"Transpose on to standup his reading of Gregory Corso’s Man Entering the Sea, which concentrates all of evolution into the spectacle of a bather going for a dip, and you get – bit of a clash, this – Michael McIntyre’s routine about swimming pools. ('It’s all right once you’re in!') That brand of comedy, you might think, can only seem superficial by comparison with poetry. Then you listen to Skinner’s account of what poets do: 'They see an ordinary thing that we all see, and then they illuminate it. They do something with that everyday thing that makes it sacred, if you like.' Remind you of anyone else? Another profession that takes the mundane and fashions it into something intensely, transcendentally alive? Skinner’s podcast is all about the poetry, of course. But you can’t listen without the thought occurring that comedians, himself included, are poets of a sort, too."

Writes Brian Logan, in "From standup to stanzas: Frank Skinner's terrific guide to poetry/The comedian’s new podcast is bursting with enthusiasm for poems. If standup forces him to be funny, here he forces himself to be true" (The Guardian).

The article is from 2020. I dug it up because I've been bingeing on "Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast" for the past week or so.

"Mrs. Space, 68… weighs just over 80 pounds, making it difficult for her to get warm."

"She and her husband, Thomas, watched as the thermometer in their home dipped into the low 60s. When Ms. Space started having headaches and shortness of breath, the two decided it was time to leave.... The Spaces tried to call hotels in the area, but many were sold out and available rooms were too expensive. Mr. Space found the American Red Cross shelter in Kalamazoo, so the couple packed what they needed from their home and spent the night there on Friday evening. 'It was almost a blessing, just to be able to walk in here and be given a cot,' she said."

From "'Frustrating and Upsetting': Residents in Michigan Endure Fourth Day Without Power/After an ice storm caused power failures across the state, 400,000 customers were still without electricity on Saturday. For some, it’s the second blackout in months" (NYT).

"Woody Harrelson hosted Saturday Night Live and used his opening monologue to criticize Big Pharma's response to COVID-19."

Woody Harrelson hosted Saturday Night Live and used his opening monologue to criticize Big Pharma's response to COVID-19:

"The biggest drug cartels in the world get together and buy up all the media and all the politicians and force all the people in the world to stay locked in… https://t.co/3elrFv53GW pic.twitter.com/i0PfNrlcGd

— kanekoa.substack.com (@KanekoaTheGreat) February 26, 2023

I do the NYT crossword every day, and often it contains humor, but I had never, not once, until yesterday, laughed out loud.

It was just a small outburst. A "ha." But it was huge, because I've gotten so many clues over the years that went for humor and not one thing had burst through my steely exterior until yesterday. 

I don't want to spoil the puzzle for you, and frankly, I don't want to have to explain the theme, which is a tad complicated. I'll just say: 88 Across. Finally, a crossword answer that made me laugh. 

Do the puzzle yourself, or read Rex Parker's write up, here. 

A little music to puzzle over:

"Kiwi Farms harvests anguish. It thrives on pain and revels in death. Users of the innocuously named forum prey on the vulnerable and marginalized..."

"... with persistent and twisted harassment campaigns. Despite its penchant for destroying lives, Kiwi Farms has been mostly overlooked by the media for much of the site’s existence. That is partly because of who it attacks, but also because reporters are wary of becoming targets themselves. The users call their victims 'lolcows' because their pain can be milked for laughs. The group made its purpose clear on its Twitter page before it was taken down: 'Gossip and exploitation of mentally handicapped for amusement purposes.'..."

From "The Website That Wants You to Kill Yourself—and Won’t Die/How the trolls on Kiwi Farms hounded people to commit suicide and created the online culture we have today" (Mother Jones).

That the "Day of Hate" did not happen is a news story that must be reported.

It's not nothing, because of the warnings. When I google "Day of Hate," I see no news of the actual day, when, apparently, nothing happened, but the warnings about it:

 

I want to see not merely the news of what, if anything, happened but also the investigation of how these warnings came into being. Did the authorities get conned by some internet trolls? Are the Russians afoot? Does our own government seek to control us with racial paranoia?