It's a beautiful day on The Terrace...

... and here you are crouched over your machine. But maybe your head is full of even more amazing things than the bright blue sky and water. You can write them down here, in this open thread. You can write other things too — the non-amazing, the quotidian, the utterly dull.

"These pressure cooker bombs are terrorism, and it does not matter whether it's home-grown terrorism or foreign terrorism. It's terrorism, Mr. De Blasio."

Says the top-voted comment at the NYT article on the explosion in NYC last night. The article says that "Mayor Bill de Blasio called the explosion... 'an intentional act' but initially said there was no connection to terrorism and no immediate claim of responsibility."

At the end of the article there's some material connected to the presidential election:

Donald J. Trump, in Colorado Springs, rushed to describe the explosion as a bomb well before the authorities had made any determinations about what had happened and while the situation was still in flux.

“I must tell you that just before I got off the plane, a bomb went off in New York and nobody knows exactly what’s going on,” he said. “But boy, we are living in a time — we better get very tough, folks.”

The Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, was informed of the episode after she gave a speech at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s annual awards dinner, her campaign said. She seemed to scold Mr. Trump for his quick assessment. “I think it’s always wiser to wait until you have information before making conclusions,” Mrs. Clinton said.

What "conclusions" did Trump rush to? There was a big explosion and he called it "a bomb." He didn't say it was "terrorism" or what terrorist group he thought it was. He only said "bomb," and, we're told, the authorities hadn't yet "made any determinations" and things were "still in flux." Was that a "conclusion"? He said "nobody knows exactly what’s going on," so where's the conclusion?

It seems as though the NYT and Hillary Clinton are just trying to find something to smack him around about. Who's really stooping here — Trump or the NYT and Hillary Clinton? Trump's remark didn't attack Clinton. It just addressed the immediate event and may have said "bomb" before other things that could cause an explosion were ruled out. Hillary Clinton and the NYT were the ones who rushed to find something to use in a direct attack on their opponent.

Notice how closely Trump's response relates to the way the NYT readers reacted, up-voting the comment I put in the post heading. And here's the second-most-up-voted comment:

NYC must follow what Boston did to capture the criminals and take the pubic into confidence, instead of being more concerned about shaping public opinion before the election like they did with Benghazi.

Meanwhile: "ISIS Supporters Rush To Celebrate NYC Explosion."

“The lions of the Caliphate roar in New York, we cause you pain inside your house, the carrier of the Cross,” wrote one Twitter user who went by the name “I am ISIS, come and block me.” The account was soon suspended. Another, called “The Lone Wolves,” tweeted with the Arabic hashtag #ExplosionManhattanNewYork “Oh God burn America, take revenge in the name of your oppressed slaves and believers’ blood.”

AND: Look at this! Hillary Clinton's remark — the one quoted in the NYT — came along with HER saying it was a bomb!

"I've been briefed about the bombings in New York and New Jersey," she told reporters. 

"Do you have any reaction to Donald Trump immediately ... referring to the explosion as a bomb?" a reporter asked.

"Well I think it's important to know the facts before responding to an incident like this," Clinton said. 

Shame on the NYT!

Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway holds her own in hostile territory on the Bill Maher show.

Kellyanne Conway has gone on Maher's show for 20 years and the 2 are friends, which puts Maher in a somewhat strange position. He confronts her — she's "enabling pure evil" — but he also respects her so much that he's enabling her, so by his lights, he too is "enabling pure evil." Conway smiles throughout and her statements are all clear and tough (that is, Trumpish). It's a great watch. Don't miss it!

Still agonizing over Jolene after 40+ years, Dolly Parton goes a cappella with Pentatonix.

"Had lots of fun putting a new spin on Jolene w/@PTXOfficial! Thx for the opportunity."



Lovely. If you're wondering, as I was, how Dolly Parton can still be so beautiful — she's only 70. And what does Jolene look like after all these years? Has she kept her more-beautiful-than-Dolly-Parton looks all this time?

In the real life of Dolly Parton, Jolene is a composite of 2 individuals — one an 8-year-old fan...

"One night, I was on stage, and there was this beautiful little girl — she was probably 8 years old at the time," Parton says. "And she had this beautiful red hair, this beautiful skin, these beautiful green eyes, and she was looking up at me, holding, you know, for an autograph. I said, 'Well, you're the prettiest little thing I ever saw. So what is your name?' And she said, 'Jolene.' And I said, 'Jolene. Jolene. Jolene. Jolene.' I said, 'That is pretty. That sounds like a song. I'm going to write a song about that.'"

... and the other a grown woman — a bank teller — who flirted with Dolly's husband:

"She got this terrible crush on my husband," Parton says. "And he just loved going to the bank because she paid him so much attention. It was kinda like a running joke between us — when I was saying, 'Hell, you're spending a lot of time at the bank. I don't believe we've got that kind of money.' So it's really an innocent song all around, but sounds like a dreadful one."

Hearing the song again just now, I got the feeling that "Jolene" is a sisterhood song. The problem is the man who has fallen in love with another woman, and he's hopeless, calling out to her in his sleep. The singer's recourse is to reach out to the woman, a show of belief that the women can work together and do what the man cannot do — the right thing.

As for the music of it:

"It's a great chord progression — people love that 'Jolene' lick," Parton says. "It's as much a part of the song almost as the song. And because it's just the same word over and over, even a first-grader or a baby can sing, 'Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene.' It's like, how hard can that be?"

"As blog fodder he is nearly optimized: always up to something, rarely apologizing, usually dressed in a mockable, on-brand way."

"He takes bait but slings truths; he has an ego but he has a point; he looks all wrong when he’s not wearing a hat."

Miley sings Dylan...

... and says something about Trump...

"There is nowhere I would rather be than in New York City playing this song with the Roots, and being on Jimmy Fallon with our host, who is always so much fun, except when you're Donald Trump. And then don't even think about messing with my hair, I'm serious."

... without taking a position on Trump.

Well played.

"Perhaps you know the incredible, change-making 9-year-old activist a bit better as 'Little Miss Flint.'"

Link. Which includes pictures of the girl hugging Obama and this which we're told is hilariously viral:

Poor Little Miss Flint. I don't think she knew that wearing the crown would subject her to this. pic.twitter.com/CpCwQyaTI6

— Tim Woody (@icybikes) September 16, 2016

If that child is frightened, it is because adults have made her frightened.

Stop using children in politics.

Is it sexist to tell a woman to smile?

Dem. Sen. Claire McCaskill says HRC should smile a lot during debate. When I said that, I was called a sexist. https://t.co/U9T5GnZJe1

— Brit Hume (@brithume) September 16, 2016

It depends on how you say it. And in this case, it depends on whether we think you're actually trying to help or just criticizing her — and whether criticizing you seems like a way to stir up energy in support of the woman.

But in general, it seems that people expect more sociability and openness from a woman and are more likely to feel uneasy it she keeps a stern or grim face. The relaxed female face gets the jocose description "resting bitch face." So serious women can have trouble being serious as people express what might only be a simple desire to overcome their own uneasiness but might also be a more virulent urge to exclude women from serious enterprises. So it's naive to become another one of those people who tell women to smile.

But smiling is still a great facial expression that most people ought to want to know how to use to their advantage, and some advice to smile is good and not always sexist. Other people are absurdly responsive to smiling.

Here's my experience. I do a lot of walking around town, an average of 4 miles a day (according to an app in my iPhone), and I'm nearly always listening to audiobooks, and I tend to listen to serious things. There was the summer I listened to "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" and all the many months it took to get through the 4 volumes of Robert A. Caro's biography of LBJ.

I don't look at my face when I'm walking, but I assume I look fairly grim when listening to that sort of thing. But sometimes I put iTunes with a shuffled playlist of songs I'm pretty sure I'm going to like to hear if they pop up — The Monkees "I Wanna Be Free," Herman's Hermits "Dandy," Elvis Costello "Watching the Detectives," Cher "All I Really Wanna Do," etc. etc. Again, I'm not looking at my face. But I know I must be smiling, because suddenly, on my usual walk, everyone I pass looks at me and smiles, like they're seeing an old friend.

Did the Prince estate censor "Jeopardy!"?

I saw this on Twitter yesterday:

We miss @Prince so much, we created an entire gameboard in his honor. Wear purple today and nail these clues on J! pic.twitter.com/XwCbLHtNcp

— Jeopardy! (@Jeopardy) September 16, 2016

And I have my DVR set up to watch the series "Jeopardy!" and it regularly records the day's episode. But when we went to watch the episode that recorded yesterday, it was a rerun of an old episode. Did the Prince estate threaten to sue?

"The people complaining about 'false balance' usually seem confident in having discovered the truth of things for themselves, despite the media's supposed incompetence."

"They're quite sure of whom to vote for and why. Their complaints are really about the impact that 'false balance' coverage might have on other, lesser humans, with weaker minds than theirs. Which is not just snobbish, but laughably snobbish. So, shut up."

From "Stop Whining About 'False Balance'/Everyone wants to blame reporters for the rise of Donald Trump. How about the media consumer?" by Matt Taibbi.

Via John Althouse Cohen.

ADDED: It's a variation on the old "free speech for me, but not for thee" — not about speaking but receiving speech. It's fine for me and the people I put in the elite group to hear everything, but what reaches the masses must be filtered through the elite, because the common people lack the capacity to tell good speech from bad and to arrive at the truth through the power of their own mind.

If you really believe that, then we shouldn't be having elections at all. In this election, the elite are seeing — more starkly than in any election I can think of in my lifetime — that the people are receiving information and thinking about it in a different way, not taking direction, and the elite shrink from the disgusting opinions of the people who were decent enough when they were doing the bidding of the elite. But now, thinking on their own, the electorate belongs in the Basket of Deplorables.

That's what makes the "Les Deplorables" image so powerful:



It's a revolution. To switch to a different French Revolution play:

Down with all of the ruling class!
Throw all the generals out on their ass!
Why do they have the gold?
Why do they have the power? Why, why, why, why?
Why do they have the friends at the top?
Why do they have the jobs at the top?

The Judy Collins version of that — "Marat/Sade" — gives me chills. Here's a video matching the song to images of the Occupy movement:



AND: I clicked on the embedded "Marat/Sade" video and the ad that came up was for Maserati!

"Edward Albee, widely considered the foremost American playwright of his generation, whose psychologically astute and piercing dramas explored the contentiousness of intimacy..."

"... the gap between self-delusion and truth and the roiling desperation beneath the facade of contemporary life, died Friday at his home in Montauk, N.Y. He was 88...."

He introduced himself suddenly and with a bang, in 1959, when his first produced play, “The Zoo Story,” opened in Berlin on a double bill with Samuel Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape.” A two-handed one-act that unfolds in real time, “The Zoo Story” zeroed in on the existential terror at the heart of Eisenhower-era complacency, presenting the increasingly menacing intrusion of a probing, querying stranger on a man reading on a Central Park bench....

“Albee is not a fan of mankind,” the critic John Lahr wrote in The New Yorker in 2012. “The friendships he stages are loose affiliations that serve mostly as a bulwark against meaninglessness.”

From a nice, long obituary in The New York Times.

I've only written the name Edward Albee once in the 12 years of this blog. It was in the context of an interview that Alec Baldwin did with Elaine Stritch. Stritch had "described having 'an orgasm for the first time in my life' on stage in a very emotional moment of Edward Albee's play 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' ("'You know, that big scene? "Our son," he yells in my face, "is dead." And I went "No!" At the height of my force, I said no to him.')" And Alec Baldwin said to her: "Honey, I just think it speaks volumes about you, about what a real creature of the theater you are that the only time that you ever had an orgasm was saying the words of a homosexual man. It was as far from a heterosexual orgasm as you could possibly get."

I guess I never wrote about it, but we did go out to see an Edward Albee play in 2014 at The American Players Theater. It was "Seascape," the one with talking lizards...



... a male-and-female couple of lizards encountering male-and-female married humans.

Washington Post "stance on display" in a triad of Trump-related headlines.

I don't know what's oddest here:



1. "Trump’s stance on display..." tripped me up. Is there some "display" in the news about which Trump has a position, a "stance," that I need to know about? No, Trump has a "stance" — on what? — and he's showing it to us. The stance isn't on anything. It's just his self-assurance, the attitude that  he's "never wrong." The "stance" is not that he's "never loved more by his supporters." The love from the supporters is just a consequence, supposedly, of observing the display of the "stance." It's hard to read, because there's a colon after an introductory clause, and only one of the things after the colon is what the phrase before the colon is pointing at. When you click through, the story is "Trump: Never wrong, never sorry, never responsible," by Karen Tumulty. Why is this the top Trump story of the day? I guess it's because Trump made Obama's birthplace the story-of-the-day yesterday, and it must be wrestled into an anti-Trump story. So Trump's stating clearly that Obama was born in Hawaii becomes a generality about his character, which — I keep reading — is so different and much more dangerous than the character of all the other politicians, but I've never noticed that other politicians call attention to their errors as outright errors and refrain from deflecting blame onto others.

2. The second headline is just plain funny. The media is "playing the stooge for Trump"?! And it's  time to stop. Subheading: "The Republican nominee said, 'Jump.' And TV news asked, 'How high?'" The media has been obviously trying to help Hillary, but I guess its efforts are so inept that Trump can figure out how to flip them into doing things to work in his favor. When I hear "stooge," I think of The 3 Stooges, and I guess if they ever formed a goal, they'd bumble into exactly achieving the opposite effect. Here's the full story — "It’s time for TV news to stop playing the stooge for Donald Trump" — by Margaret Sullivan, WaPo's media columnist. It's another piece that follows on from yesterday's story-of-the-day, Trump's wrangling the media to hear his announcement of Obama's birthplace and deflection of blame onto Hillary. Sullivan explains how the press got played, but not why. The why is, I think, eagerness to help Hillary: They've made themselves stupid —  stupid for Hillary. What's the cure? I would think: serious, professional journalism. But Sullivan just tells them to stop it.

3. Oh, my, it's Laura Bush! Maybe she can help. The story is "In a tense election year, Laura Bush picks an interesting ally: Michelle Obama," by Krissah Thompson. It's as if somebody at WaPo decided to make the left-hand column as female-oriented as possible. All the authors are female. Story #1 alarms us about Trump's "stance" — which calls to mind that bane of female existence, manspreading. Story #2 calls to mind The 3 Stooges, who enact a style of male behavior that women find so off-putting. We all know women hate The 3 Stooges. And finally, there's relief: 2 female lead characters. If we can't love Hillary Clinton, surely we can warm up to these 2 solid standby females, Laura and Michelle. Gotta love at least one of them. First Ladies! Hillary was a First Lady, so... let's love First Ladies. Maybe that will help. Help us with our tension in this "tense election year." Laura and Michelle are sitting together on a stage at some worthy, non-tense event burbling about their mutual love and respect. Yes, yes, this is the tone we need now. Something gentle and feminine, not blustering and manspreading, not slapstick stoogery. There, now — do you see it? — forming mistily, gauzily in your mind? The female face — soft, smiling...

... tension-releasing....

At the Palate Cleanser Café...

... life is beautiful on the south shore of Lake Mendota.

Playing with your food: Pimple cupcakes.

This is funny, but gross, so I've got to hide it below the fold.

Do businesspeople think discrimination against men is just some kind of joke?

In September 2013, Janet Malcolm had an article in The New Yorker about the clothing business founded by Eileen Fisher. I noticed this:

At one point, I asked a question: “Eileen said there was a ratio of eighty per cent women to twenty per cent men in the company. But I don’t see any men around here. Where is the twenty per cent?” “In Secaucus,” someone exclaimed, to hoots of laughter from the rest. There is a warehouse in Secaucus where the men apparently are kept.

In the current issue of The New Yorker, there's an article by Nick Paumgarten about the founder of Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard. This jumped out at me:

Chouinard may be the face of Patagonia, and its presiding saturnine spirit, but the mood around the place is distinctly upbeat, optimistic, and youthful—a distillation of his can-and-must-do side, minus the ain’t-no-use. The idea is to recruit activist outdoorspeople and teach them business. “I’m terrible at hiring,” Chouinard told me. “I only trust women to hire people here. In an interview I have no idea. They can bullshit me, and I believe them.”

These statements are so off-handed and unguarded — as if legal liability doesn't even exist. And forget moral responsibility. These people seem to love themselves for their out-and-proud preference for women. And they want us to know. They seem to feel confident that we will love them too.

"Women aren’t any meaner to women than men are to one another. Women are just expected to be nicer."

"We stereotype men as aggressive and women as kind. When women violate those stereotypes, we judge them harshly. 'A man has to be Joe McCarthy to be called ruthless,' Marlo Thomas once lamented. 'All a woman has to do is put you on hold.' In one experiment, researchers asked people to read about a workplace conflict between two women, two men, or a man and a woman. The conflict was identical, but when the case study was between two women, the participants saw it as more damaging to the relationship and expected them to be more likely to quit. When men argue, it’s a healthy debate. When women argue … meow! It’s a catfight."

Write Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant in "Sheryl Sandberg on the Myth of the Catty Woman."

And I'll just add: Women co-authors aren't any more credit-demanding than men co-authors. It just looks better to have their name as part of the title.