Photographs by my son John Althouse Cohen.
I love the variety of messages on the signs, from the things the mildest apolitico may embrace...
To the things the protesters antagonists could seize upon in an effort to undercut everybody at the protests.
February 13, 2017
"I’m struggling to think of something funny to say, as all comedians are. I hate liberals who say: 'I’m leaving the country.'"
"Oh, like it’s going to matter. You’re not that important, go ahead. But the only thing I can think that’s positive is that a new kind of anarchy is going to happen next."
Said John Waters.
He also talks about his famous old quote "If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them."
Said John Waters.
He also talks about his famous old quote "If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them."
“It did catch on!” he laughs. He says he’s seen it everywhere. “At the Strand bookshop in New York, there’s an entire display of it! I don’t mind that they did it. Sort of I did. They censored it! They don’t say fuck!” The key letters are starred out. “That’s what infuriated me!” He mentions that a friend of his, the drag queen Lady Bunny, called him out on its veracity. “She said: ‘I thought he [Waters] liked criminals?’ I believe in my own words, but maybe I don’t always practise what I preach.” He laughs again, and offers up a sequel. “Basically, if they’re cute enough, who’s looking at the library?”It's funny advice, but did anyone ever follow it? And just as the person with a rough exterior might have a kind heart, that person with no books on the shelf may very well have a Kindle.
"[I]t is increasingly clear that it is almost impossible to think about New York Fashion Week and what happens on the runway without thinking, to varying extents, about Mr. Trump."
"He — the world he has currently created — is the prism through which everything is seen, and evaluated. There’s just no getting away from it," writes Vanessa Friedman — humorously, I hope! — in the NYT.
AND: Don't miss the "Make America Great Again" dress at the Grammys.
And if that is a given, then the question we have to ask ourselves is not should fashion react to Trump, but rather: What is the role of fashion under Trump?...No pussy-grabbing either, whatever is "blar[ing] up the thigh." No time for fiddling, America is busy going mad.
At Public School, the designers Maxwell Osborne and Dao-Yi Chow... said... the show was about “constantly examining your beliefs, values and privileges and matching your intent to your action”....
Victoria Beckham summed it up when she said (during a preview before her show), “The world is so confused right now, I just want to make my customer feel secure.” In the end, the job of fashion should be to make a woman feel confident in her clothes — feel like a stronger version of herself — so she can proactively think about something else....
The most original part of the [Alexander Wang] collection was where he put the majority of his verbiage: on sheer tights that blared “No after-party” up the thigh. That at least echoed a certain truth. This is not a time for fiddling, after all....
AND: Don't miss the "Make America Great Again" dress at the Grammys.
I'm looking for the headline that makes it easiest to resist clicking to find out what political statements were made last night at the Grammys.
And the winner is: "Celebrities Voice Their Opinions About President Trump, Politics at the 2017 Grammys."
If you just want to know what pregnant-with-twins Beyoncé wore, go to Tom and Lorenzo:
If you just want to know what pregnant-with-twins Beyoncé wore, go to Tom and Lorenzo:
They’ll be talking about her empowering, dazzling, beautifying, defiantly fecund performance for years – and rightly so.... This is not the kind of sentiment that tends to win over many Bey fans, but we’re never not going to roll our eyes a little at any pop star or celebrity who elevates herself to godhood. We’ll credit her for having true artistic and cultural reasons for doing this, though. It’s not solely about her ego.... This costume is stunning precisely because it directly references goddess figures and mythical tropes about them. It’s not about Beyonce commenting on the iconography; it’s about her becoming the iconography....ADDED: I'd like to see a Venn diagram of people who adore Beyoncé's theatrical display of egoism and people who are appalled by Trump's theatrical display of egoism.
There are "maybe two tubes" of Maybelline cobalt blue mascara left in the world, so all the models in the show were made up from the one tube the makeup team possessed.
They called out "Blue mascara! Blue mascara!" and — using fresh wands for each model — applied "the inky formula... 'literally just on the outer ends.'"
What a gushy article (in the NYT) about a specific product from a particular manufacturer that is planning to bring back the discontinued color.
It's perfectly easy to buy L'Oreal cobalt blue mascara — here, at Amazon, for less than $6. Not really pushing it. I kind of hate mascara. I googled "I hate mascara" to get something to add to this post and the first couple things that came up were promoting eyelash extensions. I read that you could save time by going to a salon once a month and sitting there for an hour while somebody glues polyester threads (or mink hairs) one by one to individual eyelashes. Seriously, I went to a piece at Jezebel that I thought might channel my feelings on the subject of mascara because it was titled "Never Wear Mascara Again," and it turned out to be raving about how simple it was to live under such a regime. Even sleep — sleep with crap glued to your eyelashes — was better:
Sorry this post has nothing to do with Donald Trump. Or does it?
What a gushy article (in the NYT) about a specific product from a particular manufacturer that is planning to bring back the discontinued color.
It's perfectly easy to buy L'Oreal cobalt blue mascara — here, at Amazon, for less than $6. Not really pushing it. I kind of hate mascara. I googled "I hate mascara" to get something to add to this post and the first couple things that came up were promoting eyelash extensions. I read that you could save time by going to a salon once a month and sitting there for an hour while somebody glues polyester threads (or mink hairs) one by one to individual eyelashes. Seriously, I went to a piece at Jezebel that I thought might channel my feelings on the subject of mascara because it was titled "Never Wear Mascara Again," and it turned out to be raving about how simple it was to live under such a regime. Even sleep — sleep with crap glued to your eyelashes — was better:
[S]leep is so precious now that I'm not going to wake up an extra 45 minutes earlier just to do my makeup.... I'd rather carve out an hour one Saturday a month—in which I get to sleep while one person does my lashes and another gives me a complimentary foot massage—instead of spending tens of minutes in my bathroom working on my eyes every single day.People have very different ideas about what constitutes convenience.
Sorry this post has nothing to do with Donald Trump. Or does it?
"About 188,000 residents near Oroville, Calif., were ordered to evacuate Sunday after a hole in an emergency spillway in the Oroville Dam threatened to flood the surrounding area."
"Thousands clogged highways leading out of the area headed south, north and west, and arteries major and minor remained jammed as midnight approached on the West Coast...."
Lake Oroville is one of California’s largest man-made lakes, with 3.5 million acre-feet of water and 167 miles of shoreline, and the 770-foot-tall Oroville Dam is the nation’s tallest, about 44 feet higher than the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River. The lake is the linchpin of California’s government-run water delivery system, sending water from the Sierra Nevada for agriculture in the Central Valley and for residents and businesses in Southern California.
"I'm the only one who voted for that, because I have a different interpretation of 'order-seekers.'"
Said Meade, when I asked him how he voted in the poll I just put up
Ah, I see one person has joined him. I don't know what that voter's theory is, but Meade rejected the prompt in the text of my post: "The pro-Trump vote seems to embody the human desire for order."
A new poll:
You might try to reverse-engineer the answer from the media's chaos theme. If the mainstream media are left/liberal and are trying to wreck Trump, why did they choose the rhetoric of disorder instead of the rhetoric of excessive, oppressive order? One can infer — as Meade did — that it is the left that's in love with order.
Ah, I see one person has joined him. I don't know what that voter's theory is, but Meade rejected the prompt in the text of my post: "The pro-Trump vote seems to embody the human desire for order."
A new poll:
You might try to reverse-engineer the answer from the media's chaos theme. If the mainstream media are left/liberal and are trying to wreck Trump, why did they choose the rhetoric of disorder instead of the rhetoric of excessive, oppressive order? One can infer — as Meade did — that it is the left that's in love with order.
Turmoil is the new chaos.
"Turmoil at the National Security Council, From the Top Down."
ADDED: What's worse "turmoil" or "turbulence"?
OR: "Tumult."
It's interesting: The pro-Trump vote seems to embody the human desire for order. The news of what's going on in the Trump administration roils and seethes with the language of disorder: chaos, turmoil, turbulence, tumult. What does that do to the mind of the order-seeker?
ADDED: What's worse "turmoil" or "turbulence"?
OR: "Tumult."
It's interesting: The pro-Trump vote seems to embody the human desire for order. The news of what's going on in the Trump administration roils and seethes with the language of disorder: chaos, turmoil, turbulence, tumult. What does that do to the mind of the order-seeker?
"Elon Musk: Humans must merge with machines or become irrelevant in AI age."
I'm reading this and saying: "Didn't we already do that?" And Meade answered: "It started with the bicycle."
February 12, 2017
Trump is trying to figure out who's going to run against him in 2020.
It's really hard to figure out.*
______________________
* I'm steeling myself for all the born-lame jokes about how hard it is to see in 2020. The headline at the link is "Trump’s White House eyes potential foes in 2020 election." Did they write "eyes" because it will be 2020? No 20/20 jokes. I'm pre-banning them. It's bad enough to have to plunge back into another campaign season.
Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, asked consultants to scour the backgrounds of four outspoken Democrats — Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, two sources close to the administration said....She's 67.
The White House believes both Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren are “too old” to mount a serious campaign three years from now, sources said....
“Elizabeth Warren is 100 years old....” the second source said....
Trump’s political team is also counting out [NY Governor Andrew] Cuomo and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, because they’ve been tainted by corruption probes....So 67 is too old and 50 is too young. Noted.
[Kirsten] Gillibrand, 50, has been raising her profile thanks to a series of “no” votes on Trump’s Cabinet picks, but White House officials view her as “too young” and believe she lacks the network in the party to run a nationwide campaign, the sources said.
______________________
* I'm steeling myself for all the born-lame jokes about how hard it is to see in 2020. The headline at the link is "Trump’s White House eyes potential foes in 2020 election." Did they write "eyes" because it will be 2020? No 20/20 jokes. I'm pre-banning them. It's bad enough to have to plunge back into another campaign season.
"Donald Trump is to appoint a Sound of Music-obsessed concert pianist as the new ambassador to Austria."
"Really, I've seen it like 75 times," said Patrick Park. "I know every single word and song by heart. I've always wanted to live in the Von Trapp house."
'I'm flying to Vienna to check out the embassy, and then I'm going to Salzburg to see if the Von Trapp house is for rent,' he said. 'And then I'm going to learn to like schnitzel and sachertorte.'
Did Al Franken call Donald Trump a terrorist?
On "State of the Union" today, Al Franken said:
Here's the precise clip. Judge for yourself.
UPDATE: Poll results:
The whole point of terror is to make you afraid. I think that Trump and his group are trying to make Americans more afraid. I think that's part of how they got elected: Just make us more afraid.The host Jake Tapper immediately called him on that:
You're accusing the president -- president of terrorism by making -- by scaring people?That challenged Franken, but it also helped him, because it gave Franken a chance to deny the meaning that was pretty obviously there. He took advantage of the opportunity:
FRANKEN: Just because the purpose of terrorism is to make you afraid and the president has tried to make people afraid doesn't mean he's involved with...Notice how Franken didn't even have to stumble his way to a conclusion of that sentence. Tapper talked over him to accept that the implication had been disavowed even before Franken had completed his explanation. I wonder if some Trump supporter — say, Kellyanne Conway — had lobbed a similar insinuation, he would have let her out of the jam so easily. Then again, it was Tapper who translated the implication into clear speech in the first place. But as I said above, I think that translation helped Franken, because I had already scribbled a note to myself to blog about Franken's insinuation, and I think if Tapper had just let it go without examination, Franken would have been in a much more vulnerable position.
TAPPER: Right. OK. I just wanted to define the language. That's all.
Here's the precise clip. Judge for yourself.
UPDATE: Poll results:
Everybody out onto the ice...
... yesterday, on Lake Mendota. This looks hockey-related — though lots of kids were dancing. Later that day, our team lost a big game....
But UW had just one victory in its past 10 games against Penn State, an up-and-coming program that has found ways to push the Badgers’ buttons in recent seasons. The end result was anything but positive for the 17th-ranked Badgers....But that was later. I took this picture in happier times. It was nice to see the ice-related revelry, and I even enjoyed the music, when I recognized it, until it distorted itself into what the internet reveals to me is this (which is, I guess, what is liked today because, as we used to say in the old days, it's easy to dance to).
More Melissa McCarthy as Sean Spicer on "SNL" — nicely done.
I like the way the second go-round with this was good and not just overmilking something that was successful the first time. I also like this thing of the female cast members impersonating men. Not to take anything away from the male cast members who have impersonated females over the years — not that I can think of any (other than Dan Aykroyd doing Julia Child) — but it takes something special for a woman who's worked hard to get perceived as physically attractive to put on a balding-man wig and show her face without the "smoky eye" getup.
Not only did Melissa McCarthy play Sean Spicer, but — in the same clip above — Kate McKinnon plays Jeff Sessions. And later in the show Leslie Jones makes her bid to play Donald Trump:
AND: For those of you who are about to tell me "SNL" only goes after conservatives, it's not true. Look at this sketch, which went on early in last night's show:
I have a few different theories about this: 1. They realize comedy is better when nothing is sacred and you go after everybody, 2. They know "Portlandia" is better than "SNL" and they're trying to get some of that style of humor, 3. They really do just want to go after conservatives but they know it won't work if they only go after conservatives, so sometimes they bank an anti-liberal sketch to improve their credibility.
"More Women in Their 60s and 70s Are Having ‘Way Too Much Fun’ to Retire."
Headline at the NYT. The article begins:
This reminded of that article I blogged last night, "'It's the breaking of a taboo': the [mothers] who regret having children/It’s tiring, often boring...." I got the feeling that women believe what they do is supposed to be continually emotionally rewarding. It's great if you love what you're doing, but what about the people that don't love what they're doing and have a need or a duty to keep it up?
Most of the things we do with our time are not like sexual intercourse — where we talk about ongoing consent — "affirmative consent" — so that at every new moment in time, you're entitled to actively like what you're doing. Outside of the realm of sex, you take on commitments that you work through without continually asking: Am I having fun now? How about now? And now?
I doubt if believing in continual fun is even much fun, and frankly, I don't trust the women who work at challenging jobs and insist that they're having "way too much fun" to stop. This is self-reporting, and I'd like to read a study of: 1. the phenomenon of declaring that one is having fun, 2. the connection between assertions of fun-having and actual emotional fulfillment, 3. the effect of declarations of fun on other people (e.g., mothers who feel worse about what they are doing because they imagined motherhood would provide automatic elation), 4. gender difference in the frequency of declarations of fun having, 5. the correlation between perceived fun-having and professional success, 6. the dark side of fun (i.e., what are fun-dependent people really afraid of?)
Kay Abramowitz has been working, with a few breaks, since she was 14. Now 76, she is a partner in a law firm in Portland, Ore. — with no intention of stopping anytime soon. “Retirement or death is always on the horizon, but I have no plans,” she said. “I’m actually having way too much fun.”This work is fun meme.... It can lead to pain. Most people who work need to work for the money. Does it help to burden them with the idea that work is supposed to be fun? And is this something special about women, this idea that work isn't for the money but for some deep fulfillment or pleasure?
This reminded of that article I blogged last night, "'It's the breaking of a taboo': the [mothers] who regret having children/It’s tiring, often boring...." I got the feeling that women believe what they do is supposed to be continually emotionally rewarding. It's great if you love what you're doing, but what about the people that don't love what they're doing and have a need or a duty to keep it up?
Most of the things we do with our time are not like sexual intercourse — where we talk about ongoing consent — "affirmative consent" — so that at every new moment in time, you're entitled to actively like what you're doing. Outside of the realm of sex, you take on commitments that you work through without continually asking: Am I having fun now? How about now? And now?
I doubt if believing in continual fun is even much fun, and frankly, I don't trust the women who work at challenging jobs and insist that they're having "way too much fun" to stop. This is self-reporting, and I'd like to read a study of: 1. the phenomenon of declaring that one is having fun, 2. the connection between assertions of fun-having and actual emotional fulfillment, 3. the effect of declarations of fun on other people (e.g., mothers who feel worse about what they are doing because they imagined motherhood would provide automatic elation), 4. gender difference in the frequency of declarations of fun having, 5. the correlation between perceived fun-having and professional success, 6. the dark side of fun (i.e., what are fun-dependent people really afraid of?)
After all the hard-fought battles to win back a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court...
... the liberals of Wisconsin are letting a conservative Justice run unopposed.
This really has become a red state.
Or is it that the liberal candidates come across as more political and what people want — and think they are getting from a conservative — is a judge who dutifully follows the law?
This really has become a red state.
Or is it that the liberal candidates come across as more political and what people want — and think they are getting from a conservative — is a judge who dutifully follows the law?
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