"Would I like to be the next president? Oh, that sounds like fun."

Sarcasm, from George Clooney, who once said "Who would ever want to live like that?"

Lavender.

"Ken Burns sees a connection between his father’s distress and his own productivity."

"He meets deadlines and keeps to budgets. There are only a few examples of failed ideas, and in these cases Burns was not at fault. A biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., was defeated, Burns said, by the King family: 'They wrote me a letter saying, "We think you are the person to do the biography," and I said, "You are right." And I went to visit them in Atlanta, and I realized they weren’t going to let go.' He added, 'This was a husband and a father they could not control in life, and so desperately tried to control in death.'"

From "Ken Burns’s American Canon/Even in a fractious era, the filmmaker still believes that his documentaries can bring every viewer in," by Ian Parker in The New Yorker.

Burns grew up with "a dying mother and a mentally ill father," as he put it. His mother died of cancer in 1965 when he was 11, and his father was in a mental institution for 4 months in 1958. After the mother died, Ken and his brother Ric "were running the show—we were more parents than my father." And:

When Ric was in tenth grade, and Ken in eleventh, their father took a research trip to Morocco and the French Alps for several months. He left a checkbook; Ken paid the bills. This upbringing created unusual freedoms, Ric said, but was still a “Bergmanesque, dark thing, which Ken is determined to save himself from, and determined, in some sense, to save the world from, too.”

"In the tenth century… the Grand Vizier of Persia, Abdul Kassem Ismael, in order not to part with his collection of 117,000 volumes when traveling..."

"... had them carried by a caravan of four hundred camels trained to walk in alphabetical order."

Fall color.

Today, near the boathouse on Lake Mendota.

At the Chocolate Café...

... drink up.

Write what you want, shop through The Althouse Amazon Portal.

The chocolate set — photographed by me at The Indianapolis Museum of Art — is from 1896, designed by Konrad Hentschel for the Meissen Porcelain Manufactory.

Here's "A Brief History of the Chocolate Pot" (Smithsonian).

"Emergency personnel gather in a huddle after giving up their pursuit of a participant who ran into the flames at the Man burn."

Burning Man (Daily Mail).

Approximately 70,000 people from all over the world have gathered for the annual Burning Man festival, which is taking place in the Black Rock Desert. But crowds were horrified when one reveller made a beeline for the giant wooden effigy and was engulfed by the flames....

It's not surprising, really. Isn't the whole thing designed to produce a mental break from reality and weird ideation around spectacular fire?

"There are now more than 16 million shared bicycles on the road in China’s traffic-clogged cities, thanks to a fierce battle for market share..."

"... among 70-plus companies backed by a total of more than $1 billion in financing. These start-ups have reshaped the urban landscape, putting bikes equipped with GPS and digital locks on almost every street corner in a way that Silicon Valley can only dream of.... Because the start-ups do not use fixed docking stations, riders abandon bicycles haphazardly along streets and public squares, snarling traffic and cluttering sidewalks. Thieves have taken them by the tens of thousands, for personal use or selling them for parts. Angry and mischievous vandals hang them in trees, bury them in construction sites and throw them into lakes and rivers...."

From "As Bike-Sharing Brings Out Bad Manners, China Asks, What’s Wrong With Us?" (NYT).

"While Mr. Kelly has quickly brought some order to a disorganized and demoralized staff, he is fully aware of the president’s volcanic resentment about being managed..."

"... according to a dozen people close to Mr. Trump, and has treaded gingerly through the minefield of Mr. Trump’s psyche. But the president has still bridled at what he perceives as being told what to do. Like every other new sheriff in town Mr. Trump has hired to turn things around at the White House or in his presidential campaign, Mr. Kelly has gradually diminished in his appeal to his restless boss. What is different this time is that Mr. Trump, mired in self-destructive controversies and record-low approval ratings, needs Mr. Kelly more than Mr. Kelly needs him. Unlike many of the men and women eager to work for Mr. Trump over the years, the new chief of staff signed on reluctantly, more out of a sense of duty than a need for affirmation, personal enrichment or fame."

From "Forceful Chief of Staff Grates on Trump, and the Feeling Is Mutual" by Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman in the NYT.

A dozen people close to Trump talked to the NYT reporters. That alone is interesting.

"Rappers love to rap about how cool they are, how much money they have, how nice their women look, and that’s cool."

"I get that if you don’t have shit, you can pop in that song and feel like you do. We rap about how little we have, how shitty our car is. How … nasty our women are. It’s easy to be a clown. It doesn’t matter if you stink. It doesn’t matter if you dropped out of school or are on food stamps. It doesn’t matter if you got anything. It’s just relieving for a lot of people. I’m so tired of trying to fit my square peg into that round hole. I’m proud to be a square... That’s a Juggalo."

That's J, quoted in "MARCH OF THE CLOWNS/Nudity. Debauchery. Eating a live scorpion. Insane Clown Posse fans are definitely outrageous. But are they a criminal gang?" (WaPo). The is-it-a-gang question is significant, "because in 2011, the FBI took the extraordinary and unprecedented step of labeling the entire fan base of ICP a gang, placing them alongside the Bloods, Crips and MS-13, after a string of crimes carried out by people identified as Juggalos."

"It’s gotten ridiculous. Everybody believes they can be the person who will stack up great against Trump."

"I tell them all that it’s way too early, and that they need a clearer message about what they want to do, not just about opposing Trump."

Said Marc Lasr, a Wall Street billionaire who is used to contributing to Democratic Party candidates who start hitting him up 2 years before a presidential election, quoted in "Long List of Top Democrats Have 2020, and Money, on Their Minds" in the NYT. I don't know if he's right — that a 2020 candidate should craft a clear message this early — but I can understand resisting giving money to people if all they're really saying is that they will beat Trump. That's something that's dangerously easy to believe, but you saw what happened in 2016.

I'm trying to read between the lines and figure out what's going on with fundraising for 2020. There's no mention of Zuckerberg, who doesn't need to raise money to compete. And look at this:

Mrs. Clinton’s successor in the Senate, Kirsten E. Gillibrand, has paid more than $1 million this year through her political committees to a top online fund-raising firm, which has helped her reap $2.3 million this year in small donations for a 2018 re-election race in which she is the heavy favorite....

"Reap" suggests a bountiful harvest, but is that a good return? You give up $1 million that you took all the trouble to raise and you hire a "top... fund-raising firm" and all you net is $1.3 million? Do you then take $1 million of that to pay for the next round of fund-raising?! Are people just fund-raising to pay for fund-raising?

Why doesn't this article have a darker or more frantic tone? The first sentence is: "Aides to Senator Kamala Harris of California say that her fund-raisers in Martha’s Vineyard and the Hamptons this summer have been all about helping Democrats in 2018." I feel as though they're trying to distract us with amusement at the coyness of someone who's not yet openly declared her candidacy, but what jumps out at me is here we go again with Martha’s Vineyard and the Hamptons.

North Korea says it had "complete success" testing a hydrogen bomb.

Trump tweets:

1. "North Korea has conducted a major Nuclear Test. Their words and actions continue to be very hostile and dangerous to the United States....."

2. "..North Korea is a rogue nation which has become a great threat and embarrassment to China, which is trying to help but with little success."

3. "South Korea is finding, as I have told them, that their talk of appeasement with North Korea will not work, they only understand one thing!"

"Not much on Earth can beat the American road trip in travel for a sense of freedom -- no pat-down, no passport, no airport muddle, just revving an engine and leaving at will...."

"The American road trip rekindled my interest in travel and, most of all, reminded me how lucky we are in our country's spaciousness and modernity.... So over the course of 2012-14, in four seasons, I drove tens of thousands of miles, meandering through the back roads of the deep South, listening to the blues on the radio, visiting churches and gun shows and family farms, and writing down people's stories -- of hardship and striving, raising families, struggling in adversity and remembering the past.... In my car, driving slowly, stopping often, the word that occurred to me was overlooked. Later, during the turmoil of last year's election, I began to think of them as the people no one listens to.... What made the experience a continuing pleasure was that, in my car, I never knew the finality of a flight, or the ordeal of being wrangled and ordered about at an airport, the stomach-turning gulp of liftoff or the jolt of a train, but only the hum of tires, of telephone poles or trees whipping past, the easy escape, the gradual release of the long road unrolling like a river through America. It is in many respects a Zen experience, scattered with road candy, unavailable to motorists in any other country on Earth."

From "The Romance of the American Road Trip/No other travel experience, especially today, can beat the sense of freedom it brings," by Paul Theroux — in The Wall Street Journal (behind a paywall).

Video: "A drunk driver was spotted standing on top of his car as it rolled down a street in China."

"According to reports, the man had been celebrating a business deal that had gone well earlier in the day."

Chuck Berry on Belgian television in 1965.

I enjoyed watching this:



Then YouTube fed me this: Chuck Berry (and Little Richard) at the Bill Clinton inauguration (in 1993). Shots of Clinton and Gore in the audience are hilarious:

Lunchtime at the Compost Café...

... enjoy!

(And enjoy shopping through The Althouse Amazon Portal, where you can get your composting supplies, like this for the kitchen and this for the yard.)