"I booked a lovely little apartment on Rue Jacob and pretended I was a heroine in a 2003 film starring Diane Lane."

"I had coffee alone. I lunched alone. I flâneured alone. Admittedly I was too scared to go for dinner alone, so I’d sit by my apartment window eating liquorice from Monoprix listening to the world muddle through its own dramas on the streets below. I have been to Paris with my husband many times.... But our days and nights are a compromise. Restaurants are deliberated over in accordance with our different tastes. Street directions are a tussle between scenic (him); haste (me). Breakfast in bed or at a café? Museum or shopping? Early to bed or a nightcap with the revellers? Everything must be negotiated when you are married. Not in a bad way, you are to understand. But individual desires must be ceded, the essential self gently led towards a middle ground."

Writes Farrah Storr in "I’m happily married — but I holiday alone" (London Times).

"Job centres in Belgium have started asking if out-of-work Belgian actors would like to try their hand at starring in pornographic films.

"Actiris, a public employment agency in Brussels, has been the subject of criticism from politicians, who are demanding that the question be struck from a list for jobseekers. Penalties can be imposed by Actiris on people refusing to work, which has only intensified the controversy.... "

The Express reports.

"Visiting our museums and galleries, you might believe there is no such thing as art, only appalling artists and their still more appalling subjects."

"In the last few years, we have witnessed museums in acts of mass self-flagellation. Collections must be decolonised, recontextualised, purged and sent for conservation in perpetuity. Naughty Gauguin, nasty Picasso, horrible, horrible Hogarth. There is a card on sale in the Royal Academy shop designed by the illustrator David Shrigley. It reads: 'It’s a complete disgrace I am deeply offended by everything.'"

Writes Laura Freeman in "Galleries should drop the cringing and tell our story" (London Times).

"The screen, which has an incredible fidelity, allows me to see everything in the room around me. It’s not reality, but it’s close to it."

"I know I’m wearing a headset, but I can also see everything clearly, including my watch, my iPhone, furniture and of course people.... After some mundane stuff like looking at pictures, messing around with web surfing, viewing messages and taking a rather uncanny valley FaceTime call with a digital avatar, I get to experience some truly breathtaking — and at times dystopian — moments that almost brought a tear to my eye. Because where the Vision Pro really shines is handling 3D movies and interactive graphical experiences. One moment I’m at a child’s birthday party where I’m sure my 80-year-old self would be crying at having enjoyed a life well lived and the next I’m courtside at an NBA game, on the goal line at a football match, in Alicia Keys’s music studio and fending off cute baby rhinos who want to say hello all recorded in what Apple calls Apple Immersive Video. The pièce de resistance? A butterfly that gracefully flies around the room before landing on my outstretched hand.... By the end I’m almost lost for words, a rare moment, but also left with the burning question — what is this all for?"

 
From "I tried the Apple Vision Pro. I was lost for words/The VR headset takes users to 3D experiences that feel incredibly real" by Stuart Miles (London Times).

Here's my burning question: How does it work for people who use different prescription glasses for different distances?

"A former intelligence official turned whistleblower has given Congress and the Intelligence Community Inspector General extensive classified information about deeply covert programs that he says possess retrieved intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin."

"The information, he says, has been illegally withheld from Congress, and he filed a complaint alleging that he suffered illegal retaliation for his confidential disclosures, reported here for the first time. Other intelligence officials, both active and retired, with knowledge of these programs through their work in various agencies, have independently provided similar, corroborating information, both on and off the record."

The Debrief reports.

Tucker Carlson begins his Twitter endeavor.

Ep. 1 pic.twitter.com/O7CdPjF830

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) June 6, 2023

This is a 10-minute show, launching straight into the top news story of the day — the Ukrainian dam.

I said out loud at 3:46: "Ew. Creepy."

Carlson went from talking about the news of the day from Ukraine to discussing many aspects of what he presents as propaganda coming from mainstream media. Some of this resonated with something I'd just said IRL this morning: The news has not been flowing in its usual way lately. 

Trying to think of what tags to put on this post, I rediscovered an old one that I wish I'd remembered to use over the years: "shut up and believe."

The puzzling obscurity of Kamala Harris.

@missmayim was not happy. Not a single person on #CelebrityJeopardy buzzed in on this answer, which told them it was a woman Vice President right in the question. HOLY SHIT good thing Hasan Minhaj quit twitter cus that was embarrassing #Jeopardy @Jeopardy pic.twitter.com/yAr1BhXxIl

— Dark Devon Panera (@JuicedWOW) June 7, 2023

"Ukraine has worked for years.... to contain a fringe far-right movement whose members proudly wear symbols steeped in Nazi history..."

"... and espouse views hostile to leftists, L.G.B.T.Q. movements and ethnic minorities. But some members of these groups have been fighting Russia since the Kremlin illegally annexed part of the Crimea region of Ukraine in 2014 and are now part of the broader military structure. Some are regarded as national heroes, even as the far-right remains marginalized politically. The iconography of these groups, including a skull-and-crossbones patch worn by concentration camp guards and a symbol known as the Black Sun, now appears with some regularity on the uniforms of soldiers fighting on the front line, including soldiers who say the imagery symbolizes Ukrainian sovereignty and pride, not Nazism. In the short term, that threatens to reinforce Mr. Putin’s propaganda and give fuel to his false claims that Ukraine must be 'de-Nazified'...." 

From "Nazi Symbols on Ukraine’s Front Lines Highlight Thorny Issues of History/Troops’ use of patches bearing Nazi emblems risks fueling Russian propaganda and spreading imagery that the West has spent a half-century trying to eliminate" (NYT).

Can kids bike to school on urban streets if they form a "slow-moving peloton" that achieves "kidical mass"?

That's the idea, described in "Make Way for the Bike Bus/For the school commute, families are taking to the streets with two wheels. Some have termed the movement 'kidical mass'" (NYT).

Bike bus participants hope that its growing popularity will convince local leaders to do more on issues like speeding and congestion. “We want to show people that you can’t have safe streets for kids unless you literally have people guiding the way,” said Chris Roberti, a father who helps organize the ride to P.S. 110.

Sunrise — 5:21.

"Ms. Gilberto’s whispery voice, though limited in range and power, had a genuine ache and mystery to it, as well as the ability to evoke images of summers imagined or lost."

"'Her languid, affectless voice floated as lazily as a leaf on the Carioca breeze,' the journalist and author James Gavin wrote in the liner notes for the 2001 collection 'Astrud Gilberto Gold.'... Mr. Getz understood her appeal immediately. 'When I first heard Astrud,' he told a British journalist in 1964, 'I thought there was something innocent and demure in her voice — such an opposite to these chesty-voiced girls singing rock ‘n’ roll.' Her breathy brand of singing influenced scores of later artists, among them Sade; Tracey Thorn, of the duo Everything but the Girl; and Basia, who acknowledged that influence by writing a song titled 'Astrud.'"

From "Astrud Gilberto, 83, Dies; Shot to Fame With ‘The Girl From Ipanema’ It was the first song she ever recorded. And it played a key role in making the Brazilian sound known as bossa nova a phenomenon in the United States" (NYT).

"You imagine people will be interested in you? They won’t ever, really, just for yourself."

"Even if you think people like you, it will only be a kind of curiosity they will have about a person whose life touched mine so intimately."

Said Picasso to Françoise Gilot, quoted in "Françoise Gilot, Artist in the Shadow of Picasso, Is Dead at 101/An accomplished painter (and memoirist) in her own right, she was long his lover until she did what no other mistress of his had ever done: She walked out."

Her fantastic memoir, "Life With Picasso," was published in 1964. I read it around 1974. 

We were just talking about Picasso on this blog 4 days ago. There's a show at the Brooklyn Museum dealing with his relationship to women. Because of that I looked up Gilot and was surprised to see that she was still alive and 101 years old.

From the obituary:

"I love electric vehicles – and was an early adopter. But increasingly I feel duped."

It's that Guardian column — by Rowan Atkinson — that's getting a big reaction.

Who cares what a comedian says? He does claim some credentials:

My first university degree was in electrical and electronic engineering, with a subsequent master’s in control systems. Combine this, perhaps surprising, academic pathway with a lifelong passion for the motorcar, and you can see why I was drawn into an early adoption of electric vehicles. I bought my first electric hybrid 18 years ago and my first pure electric car nine years ago and (notwithstanding our poor electric charging infrastructure) have enjoyed my time with both very much. Electric vehicles may be a bit soulless, but they’re wonderful mechanisms: fast, quiet and, until recently, very cheap to run. But increasingly, I feel a little duped. When you start to drill into the facts, electric motoring doesn’t seem to be quite the environmental panacea it is claimed to be....

Just to begin to Google the response:

"PGA Tour agrees to merge with Saudi-backed LIV Golf."

WaPo reports.

The stunning announcement came amid litigation between LIV and the PGA Tour, which both had filed lawsuits against the other. In August, LIV Golf filed an antitrust suit saying the tour — by banning players who had defected to LIV — was intentionally trying to curtail competition, but the PGA Tour countered with a lawsuit that claims LIV committed “tortious interference” by encouraging golfers to violate terms of their existing tour contracts.

15% of Maryland's license plates display the URL of a Philippines gambling site (instead of a War of 1812 site).

WaPo reports. 

These plates have been around since 2010 (and obviously the bicentennial of the war was in 2012), but we're just noticing now, as somebody at Reddit is calling attention to the typo.

Here's a screenshot of what you might see if you go to the URL on the license plate:

"Page doesn’t really delve into questions of masculinity, or what it means to be a man, but he brings to life the visceral sense of gender dysphoria..."

"... or at least one type of dysphoria: the sense that your body is betraying you. It’s an utterly alien sensation for those who haven’t experienced it: 'Imagine the most uncomfortable, mortifying thing you could wear. You squirm in your skin. It’s tight, you want to peel it from your body, tear it off, but you can’t. Day in and day out. And if people are to learn what is underneath, who you are without all that pain, the shame would come flooding out, too much to hold. The voice was right, you deserve the humiliation. You are an abomination. You are too emotional. You are not real."

From "Elliot Page, From Shame to Self-Acceptance, in Hollywood’s Glare/In the 'brutally honest' memoir 'Pageboy,' the actor recounts the fears and obstacles to gender transition, and the hard-won happiness that’s followed" (NYT).

ADDED: The book reviewer, Gina Chua, talks about her own experience as a transgender person. It made me wonder about her line "It’s an utterly alien sensation for those who haven’t experienced it." Frankly, I had trouble understanding that sentence. How can something be "an utterly alien sensation for those who haven’t experienced it"?  Either you experience it and find it alien — but why is it "alien" if it's what you feel? — or you don't experience it — in which case it is no feeling at all. Eventually, I understood the sentence by editing out "for those who haven’t experienced it." I was going to question the idea of "alienness." What is the point of reference? But the sense of not belonging is very common among human beings. Where does it come from?