Columbine at Blue Mounds (yesterday).

"You said I always lie!"/"I just couldn’t believe it. It just didn’t sound real, until there was proof. It sounds like something you would see in the movies"/"Mom, stuff in the movies can and do happen in real life."

From "His mom got him a $3 slingshot. He used it to stop a kidnapper, police say" (WaPo).

Troopers said they found the 17-year-old suspect hiding at a nearby gas station.... 'He had obvious signs of an injury consistent with those that would have been sustained from the slingshot strikes to his head and chest,' police said.... Maggie said that, at first, she didn’t believe her son had sniped a stranger from some 200 feet away. She thought he was talking big. Then, police informed her of the 17-year-old’s telltale injuries. They said that, as investigators interviewed the suspect, the marble-induced goose egg on his head kept growing....

"Why there’s reason for optimism about girls, women and sports: A Q&A."

Headline for a Washington Post article that contains no mention of a topic that is the main topic in the comments.

"The female orca, whom scientists named White Gladis, appears to have taught the aggressive behavior to other adult orcas, whose children have begun imitating the behavior...."

"In most of the interactions, the orcas strike the rudder or hull, the underbody, of the boat.... Orcas are known to be extremely intelligent and capable of teaching one another certain behaviors, including actions that could be interpreted as violent....."

 
From "Revenge of the orcas? Killer whales have sunk 3 boats in unusual attacks" (WaPo).

This post gets the "dolphin" tag, not the "whale" tag.

"The desire to deafen and respond with noise reflects a kind of discredit of the political discourse."

"We are not being listened to, we are not being heard after weeks of protests. So now we are left with a single option, which is not to listen to you either."

Said the French essayist Christian Salmon, quoted in "France’s Latest Way to Sound Anger Over Pensions Law: Saucepans/Protesters have been harassing the French government in clanky demonstrations that have gone viral in a country with no shortage of kitchenware" (NYT).

The noisemaking — "casserolades" — is over raising the age of retirement from 62 to 64.

Pan beating dates back to the Middle Ages in a custom, called “charivari,” that was intended to shame ill-matched couples....

A website created by a union of tech workers now ranks French regions for casserolades based on the level of cacophony and the importance of the affected government official....

Wikipedia has an extensive article "Charivari." It begins:

"It’s not you telling your mom, 'Don’t take the torn recliner.' It’s someone else saying, 'Maybe another chair would work better."

Said Donna Surges Tatum, chair of the Certified Relocation & Transition Specialist Certification Board, quoted in "Moving Is a Monumental Task for Many Older Americans. These Organizers Can Help. Senior move managers may spend weeks or months helping seniors and their families sort through belongings, pack and move into a new home" (NYT).

One woman who hadn’t cooked for 20 years insisted that she needed to hold on to a particular roasting pan, Ms. Bjorkman recalled. The woman also argued that, as someone who remembered the Depression, a freestanding freezer was a crucial source of comfort — even if it was full of expired food. The roasting pan could be disassembled to fit under the bed in the new apartment, Ms. Bjorkman said. The freezer — still packed with food — served as a living room side table....

From the comments over there:

5 years ago the brilliant, compassionate move manager my family hired to move my elderly aunt from a big house to a small condo did what nobody in the family could do -- persuade my aunt to relinquish some of the seven -- seven == precious bundt cake pans that she insisted she needed in her new home. As someone else here said: Worth. Every. Penny.

Sunrise — 5:20... and — added the next morning — at 5:27.

"People who publish novels can be generally sorted into furtive daydreamers and pragmatic careerists. Comey goes in the second camp."

"This is not an aspiration he’s held close, or for long. He dismissed it when his agents initially pitched him on co-writing a book with James Patterson, and when the editor of 'Saving Justice' (his second memoir, after 'A Higher Loyalty') suggested he might be good at writing fiction.... But writing fiction was 'something that I think was tickling the back of his brain,' said Comey’s wife, Patrice. 'It would come up every once in a while, and at some point I realized that maybe he’s taking this seriously.'... Comey’s novels — plural; he’s already finished the draft of a sequel — are a family affair: The heroine of 'Central Park West,' Nora Carleton, includes aspects of all his daughters but owes a particular debt to his eldest, Maurene, who like Nora is tall, in her early-to-mid-30s and a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York. Comey first thought of the protagonist as a younger version of himself but found it more fun to write using someone else as his inspiration — though the method has its hazards: 'The kids are a little creeped out,' he said. 'Well, "creeped out" is a strong word — it’s just that they know that they’ll be asked about it.' (Asked about it, the Comey children declined to be interviewed.)"

Writes Sophia Nguyen in "James Comey is trying to master the twist ending. This time, on purpose. The former director of the FBI hopes his debut mystery novel, ‘Central Park West,’ will be the first of many" (WaPo).

The wife goes on record about what she thinks tickles the back of Comey's brain, but the daughters don't want to talk about whatever it is that made their dad say he'd creeped them out.

"Dylan Mulvaney is exemplary of the new queer order: a femme gay man who had to take female hormones to stay relevant."

"(Compare and contrast with disco icon Sylvester’s view of gay liberation: 'I could be the queen that I really was without having a sex change or being on hormones.' We are going backward, not forward.)... If a Christianist hospital was busy changing the sexes of overwhelmingly gay kids, so that they became straight, what do you think the gay rights establishment would say? But when a queer facility does exactly that, all the worriers are bigots.... So many potentially gay children were being sent down the pathway to change gender, two of the clinicians said there was a dark joke among staff that 'there would be no gay people left.' 'It feels like conversion therapy for gay children,' one male clinician said. 'I frequently had cases where people started identifying as trans after months of horrendous bullying for being gay.... Young lesbians considered at the bottom of the heap suddenly found they were really popular when they said they were trans.'..."

Writes Andrew Sullivan in "The Queers Versus The Homosexuals/We are in a new era. And the erasure of gay men and lesbians is intensifying" (Substack).

"If you’re faced with all these challenges, you have to remain calm. What’s the point of worrying about something..."

"... worrying is not going to make your problems disappear. I attribute this to my father and grandfather. They are very very stoic."

Said Daniel Penny, quoted in "Daniel Penny, charged in Jordan Neely death, breaks silence: 'I am not a white supremacist'" (NY Post).

Asked about something Al Sharpton said about him, Penny said he wasn't sure who Al Sharpton was: "I don’t really know celebrities that well."

Celebrities.

And he doesn't know what's going on in social media: "I don’t follow anyone, and I don’t have social media because I really don’t like the attention and I just think there are better ways to spend your time. I don’t like the limelight."

"Many poets make us smile; how many poets make us laugh – or, in that curious phrase, 'laugh out loud' (as if there’s any other way of doing it)?"

"Who else uses an essentially conversational idiom to achieve such a variety of emotional effects? Who else takes us, and takes us so often, from sunlit levity to mellifluous gloom? And let it be emphasised that Larkin is never 'depressing.' Achieved art is quite incapable of lowering the spirits. If this were not so, each performance of King Lear would end in a Jonestown."

Wrote Martin Amis, in the introduction to "Philip Larkin Poems: Selected by Martin Amis," which I've been reading lately.

I bought this book after listening to the Larkin episode of "Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast," but that Martin Amis introduction did not spring to mind when I was reading the Martin Amis obituaries this morning, though I was trying to remember what small part of his writings I may have read.

"In order to stay relevant, you have to make sure your skills are valuable. Everyone is going to need to learn how to use AI and to apply it to their role."

Said Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of modern work and business applications, quoted in "Many AI tools are a distraction, but you’d better pay attention/Google, Microsoft and a slew of other companies are touting AI features in their apps for work. Here’s what workers need to know" (WaPo).

AI is eventually going to change how everyone works, he says. In terms of time spent learning the new tech, Spataro compares it to the process of learning how to ride a bike: You may fall a lot, but once you get the hang of it, you’ll go farther faster.

"We had a guy pull in the other day towing a big boat. He asked us how to get to the launch ramp to the lake. I don’t think he realised he was looking at a lake of solar panels."

From "How solar farms took over the California desert: 'An oasis has become a dead sea'/ Residents feel trapped and choked by dust, while experts warn environmental damage is 'solving one problem by creating others'" (The Guardian).

What solution is not also a new problem? The question is whether the solution is worse than the problem.

These western deserts are vast and contain few residents. Isn't there plenty of space to go ahead and screw up with seas of solar panels?

"It’s a pity, it’s a tragedy, but for today Bakhmut is only in our hearts," said Volodymyr Zelensky, in a remark that a spokesman "later clarified."

Reported in "Russia-Ukraine War/Live Updates: Biden Pledges Commitment to Ukraine; Zelensky Denies Bakhmut Has Fallen At the G7 summit in Japan, President Biden said world powers 'will not waver' in supporting Ukraine. The Ukrainian leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, rejected Russia’s claim it captured Bakhmut and said Kyiv’s forces were still fighting for the eastern city" (NYT).

"Mr. Amis’s talent was undeniable: He was the most dazzling stylist in postwar British fiction."

"So were his swagger and Byronic good looks. He had well-chronicled involvements with some of the most watched young women of his era. He wore, according to media reports, velvet jackets, Cuban-heel boots, bespoke shirts. He stared balefully into paparazzi lenses. His raucous lunches with friends and fellow writers like Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie, Clive James, James Fenton and [Christopher] Hitchens were written up in the press and made other writers feel that they were on the outside looking in. He seemed to be having more fun than other people. His detractors considered him less a bad boy than a spoiled brat.... 'He was more blond than [Mick] Jagger and indeed rather shorter,' Mr. Hitchens wrote, 'but his sensuous lower lip was a crucial feature,' and 'you would always know when he had come into the room.' Mr. Amis wrote his first novel, 'The Rachel Papers,' published in England in 1973, on nights and weekends. He gave himself a year to complete it. If it hadn’t panned out, he said, he might have considered academia."

From "Martin Amis, Acclaimed Author of Bleakly Comic Novels, Dies at 73 In books like “Money” and “The Information,” he created “a high style to describe low things,” as he put it. He found more renown as a critic, and a measure of unease as his famous father’s son" (NYT).

ADDED: The Guardian collects a lot of quotes by Amis. I liked:

"I feel I’m only going to write short stories and novellas from now on. Chekhov said, toward the end of his life, 'Everything I read strikes me as not short enough.' And I agree."

"In the old days it came quicker, the prose. Now it’s a battle. It’s not about coming up with striking adverbs, it’s more about removing as many uglinesses as I can find."

"What makes you a writer? You develop an extra sense that partly excludes you from experience. When writers experience things, they’re not really experiencing them anything like a hundred percent. They’re always holding back and wondering what the significance of it is, or wondering how they’d do it on the page."

AND: From the London Times:

Some thought him misanthropic, but it would probably be truer to say that he was disappointed and depressed by traits in society that, in his opinion, more and more held sway. He could see beauty and virtue lurking jointly in the shadows. He could also appreciate the rich comedy of life and the poignancy of its pretences. Yet, in the end, his was a pessimistic outlook, holding that personal progress was necessarily finite and insignificant while the universe itself, unmoved by any guiding hand, moved ineluctably towards chaos and destruction.

President Loon.

BIDEN: "I've spoken at length with President Loon of South Korea."

South Korea's president is Yoon Suk Yeol. pic.twitter.com/v9xj1EdpBI

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) May 21, 2023