"The procedure, or the appointment — none of us seem to want to say the word death — has been moved from Thursday morning to the early afternoon."

"Another lifetime of waiting. By 9 a.m., the clouds have broken, and my mother is already dressed, her hair in curlers. She is sitting on the bed, looking at her computer. My sister and I suggest a walk. My mother declines: 'I’m doing emails. Just unsubscribing from Politico.' 'Mom!' We splutter. 'We can do that! It’s your last day on earth!' Which it is, and so we desist. Around noon, we go down to the hotel bar. My mother orders a whiskey-soda, ice cream, and a glass of Barolo. She enjoys the wine so much that I suggest she could just not go through with it and stay in this exact hotel and drink herself into oblivion for the rest of her life. Like Bartleby, she’d prefer not to."

From "The Last Thing My Mother Wanted/Healthy at age 74, she decided there was nothing on earth still keeping her here, not even us" (NY Magazine)(the mother opts for assisted suicide, available in Switzerland)("She had a three-pronged rationale... The world was going to hell, and she did not want to see more; she did not get joy out of the everyday pleasures of life or her relationships; and she did not want to face the degradations of aging").

I don't think I'd ever seen Bartleby used in the context of suicide, but here's a 2011 New Yorker column by Ian Crouch, "Bartleby and Social Media: I Would Prefer Not To":

"Commit great poems to heart, starting with those by Gerard Manley Hopkins and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Recite them aloud on solitary walks."

"Recite them aloud on solitary walks. Compose dirty limericks in your head. Read more for pleasure, less for purpose. Read, immediately, Marguerite Yourcenar’s 'Memoirs of Hadrian.' Imitate the writers or artists you most admire; you’ll find your own voice and style in all the ways your imitation falls short. Don’t post self-indulgent glam shots of yourself on Instagram, and please stop photographing your damn meals... Make only enough money so that you don’t have to think about it much.... Never join a cause if you aren’t fully familiar with the argument against it. Heed the words of Rabbi Hillel: 'Where there are no men, be thou a man.' Or woman...."

Says Bret Stephens, recounting what he said in a commencement address, in a conversation with Gail Collins, in the NYT.

Collins reacts: "That’s pretty damn good.... But I’m not going to go so far as to suggest student protesting is a bad or silly idea." Yeah, I guess students are never fully familiar with the argument against their cause.

"[T]he voyeuristic new 'Portal' street exhibit in the Flatiron District connecting New York City and Dublin with a 24/7 live video feed has already caused chaos..."

"... with mischief-makers on Ireland’s side flashing everything from their bare bums to swastikas and a photo of the Twin Towers in flames on 9/11.... [The] earnest utopian vision proved no match for the pub-lined Dublin thoroughfare, whose Guinness-glugging patrons were quickly drawn to the futuristic-looking exhibit like moths to a flame in videos circulating online. Within hours of the Dublin portal going live, a 'very drunk' woman in her 40s was led away by cops and arrested after 'grinding' her backside against the screen... Adam Nunan, a cruise ship audio engineer originally from Dublin and in New York while the ship is docked here, said, 'That doesn’t represent Ireland very well when you do that. That was everyone’s thoughts back home, there was a lot of people who didn’t want the portal to be built for that reason, that Americans might look at Irish people in the portal doing weird stuff....'"

From "NYC-Dublin live video art installation already bringing out the worst in people with lewd displays" (NY Post).

Earnest utopian vision? Why was this invitation to exhibitionism able to be promoted as utopian? And on what basis does the NY Post present the "utopian vision" as earnest? And why does the headline say "bringing out the worst in people" when the article is all about what's happening on the Irish end of the portal? 

Large rock the size of a small rock.

A TikTok video:

"While [Michael] Cohen is not under a gag order like Trump, it’s generally not beneficial for the prosecution to have a chatty witness publicly discussing ongoing proceedings."

"'Trump 2024? More like Trump 20 to 24 years,' Cohen said on a recent stream.... While it’s not disclosed how much money Cohen earns on these streams, the longer and more frequently he goes live, the more potential earning opportunity he has. It’s possible that Cohen sees his platform as an opportunity for character redemption. Once a Trump confidant, he now tells his audience to 'vote blue down-ballot.'"

From "The weird world of Michael Cohen’s live TikTok streaming/The former Trump fixer, now a critic, is expected to take the stand this week in Donald Trump’s hush money criminal trial. Meanwhile, he is live wearing cowboy hat filters, receiving calls from Rosie O’Donnell and sharing his feelings on TikTok" (WaPo)(free access link, so you can view a bunch of clips without going to TikTok looking for Cohen's account).

Cohen is the prosecution's star witness, and he's taking the stand today. 

"Mr. Trump fares especially well among those who believe that the political and economic systems ought to be torn down, a group that represents about 15 percent..."

"... of registered voters. He leads among these anti-system voters by 32 points, and the tear-it-down voters are especially likely to have defected from the president. In contrast, Mr. Biden retains nearly all of his 2020 supporters who believe only minor changes are necessary. These change voters are not necessarily demanding a more ideologically progressive agenda.... Instead, Mr. Biden’s losses are concentrated among moderate and conservative Democratic-leaning voters, who nonetheless think that the system needs major changes or to be torn down altogether."

From "Trump Leads in 5 Key States, as Young and Nonwhite Voters Express Discontent With Biden/A new set of Times/Siena polls, including one with The Philadelphia Inquirer, reveal an erosion of support for the president among young and nonwhite voters upset about the economy and Gaza" (NYT)(free access link/useful charts and details).

Also: "Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden are essentially tied among 18-to-29-year-olds and Hispanic voters, even though each group gave Mr. Biden more than 60 percent of their vote in 2020. Mr. Trump also wins more than 20 percent of Black voters — a tally that would be the highest level of Black support for any Republican presidential candidate since the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The polls suggest that Mr. Trump’s strength among young and nonwhite voters has at least temporarily upended the electoral map, with Mr. Trump surging to a significant lead in Arizona, Georgia and Nevada — relatively diverse Sun Belt states where Black and Hispanic voters propelled Mr. Biden to signature victories in the 2020 election."

"The phrase cold lava is a translation of the term 'lahar' in Indonesian and Tagalog. Temperatures range between 0°C and 100°C..."

"... according to how they are formed, but are typically below 50°C [122°F], according to several academic reports on the phenomenon. A moving lahar resembles a 'roiling slurry of wet concrete' that can grow in volume as it incorporates other debris in its path, said the US Geological Survey."

From "'Cold lava' sweeps villages near volcano, killing 41" (BBC)("I heard the thunder and the sound similar to boiling water. It was the sound of big rocks falling from Mount Marapi").

Sunrise 5:34, 5:40.

"So we embarked on a new era — no longer Papa and Daddy but now Mommy and Daddy."

Writes Richard Just, in "Our daughter wanted a mommy, so she picked one of her dads/Are women really the only people who can be maternal?" (WaPo).

At first, I thought it might turn out to be a quickly forgotten phase, but our daughter... made it clear she was digging in: Any time I slipped up and referred to him as Papa, she swiftly corrected me. Pretty soon, she began to police my husband’s pronouns as well. Initially, I had tried to pair his new Mommy title with the male pronouns that he uses — a small concession to reality, I guess — but it wasn’t long before our daughter began to insist that he be referred to as she and her....  “She!” she would gruffly instruct me, as I unthinkingly mis-mis-gendered the man I had been married to for 10 years. “Why do you say ‘he’?”...

The daughter is 3 1/2. 

In the end, I’ve come to believe our daughter has been telling us something beautiful and profound: that she has everything she needs — including those attributes that society has normally treated as the provenance of mothers — right here in her two-dad family....

"He returned to Stanford when the war ended, graduating in 1947 with a degree in industrial engineering. But after working for just four days..."

"... as an electrical engineer, he quit engineering forever. He was hired as a messenger at 20th Century Fox for $32.50 a week and eventually rose to story reader. But, he wrote in his memoir, 'I knew I was going to be a writer, producer or director of motion pictures, and I needed more background in the arts of the 20th century.' He enrolled at the University of Oxford on the G.I. Bill to study the work of T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence. After six months at Oxford and six months in Paris, he came home and sold a chase-across-the-desert script to Allied Artists for $3,500. He was so unhappy with the finished film, 'Highway Dragnet'... that he decided to become his own producer. With the $3,500, a borrowed one-man submarine and $6,500 raised from a dozen friends, he was almost ready to film 'Monster From the Ocean Floor'..."

From "Roger Corman, 98, Dies; Prolific Master of Low-Budget Cinema/He had hundreds of horror, science fiction and crime films to his credit. He also helped start the careers of Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and many others" (NYT)(free access link — read the whole amazing story).

I love monster movies, and the cheaper they are, the better they are.... I wanted to embed this but Blogger won't let me, so here: Frank Zappa — Cheepnis (Original Roxy Footage).

"I travel to see nursing homes to meet people, go to schools, I do my show and tell, this is a horse. You know, a lot of people have never seen a horse."

Said Lee Crafton, quoted in "Montana man, 63, who has no family spends his life traveling back and forth across US on horse-drawn carriage at 3mph and has just started his fifth trip" (Daily Mail).

The baseball turtle.

We've seen cats. We've seen birds... but a turtle?? 🐢

🎥 @The_Marauderspic.twitter.com/8VAWZbvw88

— The Athletic (@TheAthletic) May 12, 2024

ADDED: That's a fast turtle. Now, where was it that I saw a fast turtle? Ah! I remember:

Ethan Hawke and his daughter Maya pick out movies together.

And here's the trailer for the movie they made together, about Flannery O'Connor:

I want to see that. Here's the NYT piece about it, "What Ethan Hawke’s ‘Wildcat’ Gets Right About Flannery O’Connor/Those familiar with her menagerie of grotesques, her views of Southern society, her tortured faith and inner contradictions will get what his film is doing," by Alissa Wilkinson. I like the second paragraph:

"We're all fat," said Trump, last night, in his big — really big — big fat rally in Wildwood, New Jersey.

New Jersey! He came to New Jersey. They capture him in the courtroom 4 days out of the week, and they seem to be hoping he'll barely be able to campaign, but there he was, expanding his scope beyond the battleground states and into one of Biden's supposedly safe states, New Jersey.

I see how the mainstream media has been covering the rally. WaPo has "Trump insults prosecutor at Jersey Shore rally filled with vulgar jabs/The presumptive Republican nominee spoke at a large rally where there were plenty of personal attacks and vulgar expressions from Trump and his supporters." Large? How large? WaPo says "thousands," but Trump was saying 80,000. 

Anyway, I watched the whole thing, and I heard the "vulgar jabs." I just wanted to quote this:

You look at the Afghanistan disaster. You look at the border. You look at the real economy, not the fake economy. Everything they touch turns to what?

The thousands cry out "Shit!" He teasingly chides:

You shouldn't use that kind of language. Look, you can't use the word "shit," okay? 

"'Ultimately, no coherent case could be made that apostrophes help with clarity,' said [John] McWhorter..."

"They are merely 'a kind of decoration,' he added. Dr. McWhorter said apostrophes were the 'fish forks' of punctuation. 'They sit there, you’re not quite sure how to use them; you’re almost sure to use them wrong.' Apostrophes crept into written English for arbitrary reasons, Dr. McWhorter said. 'It’s one more way to look down on people who never quite mastered "its" and "it’s" when really we should be thinking about how effectively they get their message across.' Debates about grammar usage elicit strong feelings because language is an important part of identity, said Ellie Rye, an English lecturer at the University of York in England. Still, in the history of the English language, apostrophes are 'quite modern,' she said. They were not used to mark possession until the 16th century...."

From "An English Town Drops Apostrophes From Street Signs. Some Aren’t Happy. The move has prompted some resistance, with someone writing an apostrophe on a sign for St. Mary’s Walk. 'What’s next?' one North Yorkshire resident asked. 'Commas?'"

"Debates about grammar usage elicit strong feelings...." Okay, then, let me express a strong feeling about that phrase "grammar usage." First, apostrophes are punctuation, and punctuation is not grammar. Second, usage is something else too. It is to be distinguished from grammar. Grammar, punctuation, and usage are separate topics. To say "grammar usage" when you're talking about punctuation is an annoying error — an annoying usage error.

"I never used to talk to myself. Now I do it constantly."

"When I asked my middle-aged friends if they did it, too, the confessions flooded in. One said that when she texts people, she says the message out loud when she’s typing, even in public. 'I just looked in my cabinet and said aloud, "Please, god, let there be vanilla extract,"' said another. Do middle-aged people talk to themselves all day, every day? And is this a problem? I consulted some experts."

Writes Jancee Dunn, in "I’m Middle-Aged, and I Talk to Myself All Day/There, I said it" (NYT).

Unfortunately, the experts — there are experts on what's "called private speech or external self-talk" — hadn't studied the phenomenon of talking to yourself more as you age. So the author didn't get the reassurance she seems to have sought: It's a very common development in middle age.

I see that more than one commenter over there says I talk to myself, but I'm not really talking to myself, I'm talking to my cat/dog. Now, this is one reason I don't want a dog. I'm pretty sure it would cause me to talk to it all the time, and I think that would change my pattern of thoughts into things one says to a dog. 

Actually, I think the practice of speaking aloud would change what I'm thinking. Even if there is no listener to make me ask is this intelligible? is this boring?, putting things into speakable words absorbs my attention. I would imagine a listener. 

But the external self-talk discussed in the article sounds like speaking you would limit to yourself because it would annoy another person: expressing anxiety, encouraging yourself, asking where you put various items, narrating squirrel antics. And it's no wonder such spoken-aloud thoughts make you worry you're slipping into an unwholesome version of old age. You're fussing endlessly over trifles. That's something you can do silently, but when you do it out loud, you get a bit of distance on yourself: you hear that person and you think she's turning into that stereotype of an old person I've always worried I'd become.