"[Ryan] Gosling created a breakout role that engaged audiences and served as a refreshing reset button when the film became oversaturated with milquetoast feminism."

"Whether [Greta] Gerwig intended it or not, Gosling’s performance as Ken proved more memorable and entertaining than anything [Margot] Robbie could’ve produced with the material she had to work with. Compared to Barbie’s pretty standard character arc, Ken’s story made audiences ponder the complexities of the male experience in a world that penalizes their inherent maleness.... Compared to nominees Emma Stone, who portrayed Bella Baxter in 'Poor Things'... or Lily Gladstone as Mollie Burkhart in 'Killers of a Flower Moon'... Robbie’s heartfelt performance as Barbie proved not 'Kenough' for the Academy...."

Writes Elise McCue in "Don’t Blame The Patriarchy For Ryan Gosling’s ‘Barbie’ Oscar Nomination" (The Federalist)(Gosling got nominated, and the female director and lead actress did not).

I saw "Barbie" and blogged about it (here): "Last night, we actually watched 'Barbie,' which just started streaming on Max. 'Barbie' is one of those movies where I had one favorite line (and one favorite character)...." The line is in this Ken highlights reel:

"To be honest, when I found out the patriarchy wasn't about horses, I lost interest anyway."

"Biden has nothing to say about the future. The future is beyond his imagining...."

"If the Republicans are offering right-wing populism, the Democrats can’t just continue to offer grievance agendas, especially since most of those grievances have been dramatically meliorated. The dirty little secret of Diversity, Equity and Identity (DEI) programs is that they’re indicative of past-thinking, not the future. Indeed, when someone like former Harvard President Claudine Gay—a product of the DEI-industrial complex—blames her firing on racism, not lunkheaded Congressional testimony and plagiarism, the traditional Democrat identity-rhetoric begins to seem laughable.... At this point, the Dems need to offer an anti-identity agenda, an American unity agenda...."

Writes Joe Klein, in "It's Not Just Biden/The Democrats are Senescent, too" (Substack).

But Klein is 77 (the same age as Trump) so he says it's not for him to say what belongs in the Democrats' future-looking agenda. He wants "some fresh young genius" to tell us what to do, someone who understands... what? Video games and A.I.! 

"Why Trump isn’t on the GOP primary ballot in Nevada."

The Nevada Sun has a hard-to-read explanation, but I'm linking to it because what I saw elsewhere was even harder to read. I'd like a straightforward, clear account of what the hell happened.

"I gotta tell you guys, I went to a Donald Trump rally a couple of nights ago.... Met probably 50 Trump people waiting in line."

"Every single one of them: thoughtful, hospitable, friendly. All of them so frustrated that they feel nobody is listening to them, except Donald Trump. A diverse crowd, people that have never been to a Trump event before. My party is completely delusional right now!"

Said Dean Phillips, a Democratic Party candidate for President (who got 19.6% of the vote on the Democratic side of the New Hampshire primary). I love this. This is what Democrats need to do, not spend the next 9 months expressing contempt for what might be half of their fellow citizens.

I seriously cannot believe CNN actually aired this!!! 👀🔥

Rep. Dean Phillips on meeting MAGA for the first time.

“I gotta tell you guys, I went to a Donald Trump rally a couple of nights ago. I’ve never been to one. I had an event across the street. I saw the line of people… pic.twitter.com/y0GfCQnKRs

— Steve 🇺🇸 (@SteveLovesAmmo) January 23, 2024

Are you listening to the podcast "Climate Change on Trial"?

I am! Highly recommended. Here.

Prominent climate scientist Michael Mann is suing writer and broadcaster Mark Steyn alleging an article by Steyn defamed him and his research. Mann is perhaps best known for producing the Hockey Stick graph alleging that global temperatures were basically stable for 1500 years until human industrial activity led to an ongoing spike in temperatures. Steyn claims the graph is fraudulent. Climate Change on Trail is a verbatim podcast using re-enactments based on trial transcripts. Tune in every day to hear the clashes, the lies, and the truth.

I started with Episode 3, and that one is especially good, with reenactments of the opening statements (and Steyn is acting as his own lawyer, so his unique style is on display).

"The White House has its own pharmacy—and, boy, was it shady under Trump."

Headline at ArsTechnica.

Subheadline: "It wasted $750K during the Trump years and freely handed out Ambien and Provigil." The article links to a recent report from the Department of Defense’s Office of the Inspector General, which covered the years 2009 and 2018. 

Read the report to see what it has to say about whether things were worse during the Trump administration. It looks as though the main problem was the failure to substitute generic drugs for name brands, which seems to resonate with Trump's own business, so heavy on the name brand.

This story made me think about the JFK conspiracy scene in the movie "Slacker":

 

"But a Smiths song — 'Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want' — was played at a Trump rally in Rapid City, South Dakota on Tuesday..."

"... and at other Trump rallies recently, including in Laconia, New Hampshire on Monday. That’s angered one of the song’s authors, Johnny Marr.... 'Ahh…right…OK. I never in a million years would’ve thought this could come to pass. Consider this shit shut right down right now.... It’s not yet known what Morrissey — who co-founded The Smiths with Marr and who has veered sharply to the right since the end of the band — thinks about Trump using his music. Morrissey’s increasingly right-ward pronouncements have caused many a Smiths fan to recoil in horror...." (Politico).

You actually hear the Smiths more often than you'd think at 2024 Trump rallies

⬇️ 9/8/2023 SDGOP rally in Rapid City, South Dakota https://t.co/lNAzNNYMOk pic.twitter.com/891reN3MGR

— Soorin Kim (@SooRinKimm) January 23, 2024

Is it possible that the "increasingly right-ward" Morrissey might like Trump? Well, there's this from a year ago (in Page Six):

"She was a blank canvas, and we had a bucket of paint."

Said senior Trump adviser Chris LaCivita, quoted in "How Trump crushed Haley’s momentum — and came closer to clinching the nomination/The former president and his allies trained their attacks on the former U.N. ambassador in the week before the N.H. primary, which Trump won easily on Tuesday" (WaPo).

Behind closed doors, Trump’s team had long viewed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as the bigger threat.... They quietly agreed to allow Haley to surge.... But now it was time to train Trump’s full arsenal of attacks.... In what senior Trump adviser Chris LaCivita described as a “pincer” movement, Trump bombarded Haley from both ideological sides....

[Nikki Haley had been] a guarded candidate who was reluctant to fully engage with voters and the media, and whose tight, streamlined stump speech offered prescriptions for multiple problems — but without a clear sense of what her top priorities would be....

“She was a blank canvas, and we had a bucket of paint,” LaCivita said....

And here's something Governor John Sununu said Haley said to him, as she was (successfully) seeking his endorsement: 

"Man, this 'live free or die' thing is real — like you can feel it. I want to carry that to the White House."

How free are you if you're "guarded" and "reluctant" and reciting a "tight, streamlined stump speech"? You keep yourself free to be a blank canvas onto which others can project what they want.

Meanwhile, Trump isn't tight. He's very loose. I've been listening to his rally speeches. He's not guarded. He's freely expressive. But he's facing 91 felony charges, and his antagonists (some of them) picture him in prison. You can't "live free" there.

Ah, but you can, and he's already thought it through. He said this in Concord, New Hampshire last October:

"I don’t mind being Nelson Mandela because I’m doing it for a reason. We’ve got to save our country from these fascists, these lunatics that we’re dealing with. They’re horrible people and they’re destroying our country."

At the Tuesday Night Café...

 ... you can talk about the New Hampshire primary or anything else.

The Oscar nominations are in.

 Here's the full list (at Hollywood Reporter).

Notable: "Robbie Robertson Earns Posthumous Oscar Nomination for ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Score."

I don't see how "Steve Garvey became a punchline."

I'm reading "How Steve Garvey became a punchline at the first California Senate debate/The Republican and former Dodger was an easy target for House Democrats on Monday night" at Politico.

And I'm watching the full debate....

I don't see anything to laugh at. Start at 36:34 to see Adam Schiff pressure him to say whether he'll vote for Donald Trump. Garvey stays perfectly calm and speaks rationally, even as he deprives his opponents of a video clip of him saying that he'll vote for Trump. And notice how the moderator breaks in repeatedly as he's answering. He never loses his cool. He seems to have studied and adopted the demeanor of Ronald Reagan. 

By the way, Politico credits Katie Porter with delivering a "zinger," when she said "What they say is true: Once a Dodger, always a Dodger." But Dodger fans won't want to hear their team name used as an insult. Anyway, there were lots of references to baseball, including from Garvey. 

"It's totalitarian indoctrination, of course, and it's meant to be."

Writes Glenn Reynolds, about the mandatory DEI training for first-year law students at University of Wisconsin Law School (where I was a lawprof from 1984 to 2017).

Reynolds observes: "This sort of thing also creates a pervasively hostile educational environment on account of race, as courts are starting to notice."

He links to TaxProf Blog, which copies the text of Alan Rozenshtein at Volokh Conspiracy: "Mandatory DEI Trainings and Academic Freedom":

"... I’ve watched a trend on parenting TikTok and Instagram in which parents claim to be 'making core memories' for their kids."

"These captions typically accompany vacation or holiday content, or pictures and videos of kids playing in nature. The core-memories narrative is a roundabout way for parents to congratulate themselves for giving their children happy childhoods. This trend has held my attention because it strikes me as both openly corny and subtly malignant.... Today’s parents are famous for their instincts to control and engineer outcomes for their children, but it’s supremely hubristic to assume that you can stage-manage the content of your children’s memories.... Kids are mysterious, which is part of what makes them cool. What’s important to them is not what’s important to us. (I highly doubt either of my parents noticed the apple jelly that transfixed me in New Orleans.)..."

Writes Kathryn Jezer-Morton, in "Why Are Parents Fixated on Core Memories?" (NY Magazine).

"After six months or so in the womb of the cave, Flamini succumbed to its rhythms. She stopped trying to track time..."

"... because doing so had only added to her anxiety. She became neither hopeful nor despairing. 'In the cave, the line of time disappears, and everything floats around you,' she told me.  'A while ago I was born. A while ago I was going to visit Mongolia. There is no past, there is no future. Everything is present, everything is a while ago, and it’s all brutal and strange.' One temporal marker remained. After five defecations, she would carry her waste, in plastic pouches, up to the exchange point, and then hurry back down.... There came a moment, she told me, when she thought that she was dying. It felt like an act not of suicide but of release: 'There was no difference between what I was feeling then and what I understand as death.'"

From "The Woman Who Spent Five Hundred Days in a Cave/Beatriz Flamini liked to be alone so much that she decided to live underground—and pursue a world record. The experience was gruelling and surreal" (The New Yorker).

"To witness the show itself.... is to sit directly before a fire hose of frank postulation about sex..."

"... that’s as scholarly as it is X-rated, nimbly invoking the works of the Greek mythologists, of Philip Roth, of Sharon Olds and Tony Robbins and Nietzsche. She narrates an early episode of teenage experimentation in an unfinished basement as Nabokov would. The advice commonly given to young women to “take it slow” in a dating situation where there’s hope for a real relationship? Novak condemns it with a flourish: 'No. No! The hubris astonishes. Death is coming.'"

From "Jacqueline Novak’s Netflix special is a manifesto on sex and power/Her acclaimed show, 'Get on Your Knees,' thoughtfully and hilariously interrogates gender dynamics" (WaPo). 

Key line: "Oh, and: It’s a 90-minute show about blow jobs."

And I like "a fire hose of frank postulation about sex."

I didn't think I'd find an occasion to use that so soon. I'd stumbled across it as I was writing the first post of the day — "Trump defeated Ron DeSantis. We all know that. But how gendered was it?" — and quoting DeSantis saying "If Donald Trump can summon the balls to show up to the debate, I’ll wear a boot on my head."

I said: "I like 'summon the balls.' Oh, balls!"

But I wanted to convey a comic inflection in calling out "Oh, balls!" — as if you didn't have balls but needed to summon them into your presence. All I could think of was Olive Oyl summoning Popeye: "Oh, Popeye!" You know, how she calls out to him when he's far off. I never found that GIF, but I made a mental note of Popeye and the firehose. 

"Alabama, unless stopped by the courts, intends to strap inmate Kenneth Eugene Smith to a gurney and use a gas mask to replace breathable air with nitrogen..."

"... depriving him of oxygen needed to stay alive, on Thursday in the nation’s first execution attempt with the method. The Alabama attorney general's office told federal appeals court judges last week that nitrogen hypoxia is 'the most painless and humane method of execution known to man.'"

The Messenger reports.