At the Gray-Green Café...

... you can open up and talk about whatever you like.

What kind of state governor would say about a 17-year-old "He didn't have the courage to commit suicide"?

Texas Governor Greg Abbott.

Whatever outrage you feel fired up or politically motivated to express, do not put that idea out there for young people to consume: Suicide is an act of courage.

There was a lot of this sort of thing.

Did anyone count the number of times Harry touched his face?

Nice dress. Tom and Lorenzo opine:

No one should care what these two queens think about wedding gowns, but this style has always been our favorite. It never ages badly. It will always look chic in pictures. From a personal-statement standpoint, we think this is very much of a piece with Meghan’s style, which has shown itself, post-engagement, to be minimalist and cleanly chic in tone. She’s not a gal who goes for a lot of foofaraw....

I wish everyone well.

I was up on my own naturally at 4 a.m., so I watched enough of the show to experience all sorts of feelings — squishy, tender, lofty, queasy... and I don't want to be awful... but Harry kept touching and rubbing his face and I just couldn't help thinking about Harry's mother and what I know about the thoughts that rushed through her head on that day that the world watched her bogus "fairytale" wedding.

So I'll stop here and say good luck to all the newlyweds of this world. I myself got married on a May 19th (45 years ago, in a marriage that lasted 14 years). You can watch all sorts of couples get married — people congregate to witness weddings — but you can't know what the marrying minds are thinking. Is it wrong to look at the outward signs that there is a big disconnect between the spoken words and real person who is enduring the theatrical ritual?

At the Magenta Café...

... you can talk about whatever you like.

And please use my portal to Amazon.

Ditzy.

I wrote "ditsy" this morning (to describe an article titled "I’m Ready for the Female Takeover of the Democratic Party/The Venusification of the Democratic Party is on, and this man says it’s high time"), and Known Unknown wrote: "I prefer 'ditzy.' The z works better at communicating the thought."

I didn't think about the spelling, but now that I am thinking about it, I agree with Known Unknown. "Z" is a much more interesting letter than the ultra-common "S," so I don't want to miss any opportunities to use "z," but is "ditsy" even an acceptable spelling? Was I influenced by "itsy bitsy"? Clearly, there's a noun "ditz" and you'd never think of spelling it "dits."

I Googled "ditsy" and got some indication that it's an acceptable alternate spelling, and I even got the idea it might be the British spelling, but then I looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary, and it wasn't there at all.

So "ditzy" it is.

The etymology is unknown but it might be a corruption of "dicty." Do you know that word? It's African-American slang for "A black person regarded as snobbish, pretentious, self-important, or ‘stuck-up" or " Snobbish, pretentious, self-important, ‘stuck-up’; having or characterized by aspirations to gentility or elegance; flashy, showy" or "High-class, fancy; elegant, stylish." For example, here's something from 1932: "Harlem's reigning sheik is Cab Calloway... His dicty clothes in zebra patterns set the style pace for ebony swells along Lenox Avenue." And from 1945: "People with slight education, small incomes, and few of the social graces are always referring to the more affluent and successful as ‘dicties’, ‘stuck-ups’, ‘muckti-mucks’, ‘high-toned folks’, ‘tony people.'"

Back to "ditzy." It means "stupid, scatterbrained; ‘cute.'" Why is "cute" in quotations? Anyway, it's mostly said of women. Examples:

1981 Time 12 Jan. 45/1 Bob Newhart plays the President of the United States: Madeline Kahn is his dipso wife, Gilda Radner his ditsy daughter....
1985 N.Y. Times 31 Jan. a22/2 According to a wholly unscientific sample, this decade's terms [for ‘dumb’] so far include, besides airhead, retard, ditsy and wifty.

Ooh! Both examples spelled it "ditsy."

"Ditz" is a backformation. It only goes back to 1984.

1985 Guardian 22 June 12/4 Meryl Streep is serious, Suzanne Somers isn't... I've been both. I used to be a ditz. Now I'm talented.
2007 N. Barker Darkmans 614 ‘I'm a nutter, a ditz, a turd, a ding-bat..' she shrugged.

Something very 80s about "ditz" and "ditzy." What was going on there? Sexist retrogression after the 60s and 70s?

"Obama’s Legacy Has Already Been Destroyed."

It's the new Andrew Sullivan column.

In one respect, it seems to me, the presidency of Donald Trump has been remarkably successful. In 17 months, he has effectively erased Barack Obama’s two-term legacy....

If Trump has destroyed Obama’s substantive legacy at home and abroad, the left has gutted Obama’s post-racial cultural vision. And those of us who saw him as an integrative bridge to the future, who still cling to the bare bones of a gradually more inclusive liberal order, find ourselves on a fast-eroding peninsula, as cultural and political climate change erases the very environment we once called hope.

"Jordan Peterson, Custodian of the Patriarchy/He says there’s a crisis in masculinity. Why won’t women — all these wives and witches — just behave?"

Whoa! That's a pretty insulting title for a new NYT article about Jordan Peterson. The article is by Nellie Bowles who spent 2 days with him, with access to his home — check out the unflattering photograph of him in his home — and listening in to his phone calls and following him backstage at a lecture.

Wherever he goes, he speaks in sermons about the inevitability of who we must be. “You know you can say, ‘Well isn’t it unfortunate that chaos is represented by the feminine’ — well, it might be unfortunate, but it doesn’t matter because that is how it’s represented. It’s been represented like that forever. And there are reasons for it. You can’t change it. It’s not possible. This is underneath everything. If you change those basic categories, people wouldn’t be human anymore. They’d be something else. They’d be transhuman or something. We wouldn’t be able to talk to these new creatures.”...

Enforced monogamy is, to him, simply a rational solution. Otherwise women will all only go for the most high-status men, he explains, and that couldn’t make either gender happy in the end.

"China’s leading 'rage comics' brand, Baozou Manhua, has been silenced on multiple online platforms after one of its videos was accused of slandering revolutionary heroes and martyrs."

Sixth Tone reports.

The Heroes and Martyrs Protection Law, which came into effect on May 1, makes such conduct punishable....

In the clip, host Wang Nima dons a rage face mask and narrates: “Dong Cunrui stared at the enemy’s bunker, his eyes bursting with rays of hate. He said resolutely, ‘Commander, let me blow up the bunker. I am an eight-point youth, and this is my eight-point bunker.’” The script was a pun on a KFC sandwich available for a limited time in 2014.

Another part of the clip tampered with a line from Ye’s poem, changing “Climb out! Give you freedom!” to “Climb out! Painless induced abortion!” to mock rampant advertising for abortions....

Is there some kind of 8-point sandwich at KFC? Hard to understand the humor, but I oppose the government censorship and feel heartened to see efforts at free speech in China.

"The Madison Reunion will be a nostalgic homecoming for lefty activists who called Madison home in the 1960s. But it won’t be the only game in town."

Isthmus reports.

“We heard about the Madison Reunion being organized from people telling us, ‘I don’t see anything I’m interested in here, this isn’t the radical Madison I know.’ It’s organized as an academic conference,” says Sarah White, a member of the local Gray Panthers and an organizer of the Radical Perspectives teach-in....

[There will be] a dozen workshops planned for Saturday, June 16, ranging from “Women Unmasking Power & Building Movements” to “The New Left’s Radical Legacy For Today.” There’s also a kickoff event the night before, including Max Elbaum reading from his book Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che.

“I’d say there’s a Marxist throughline to what we’re doing that you haven’t heard in a few decades,” White says....

The approach at the teach-in will be hands-on, with an emphasis on connecting older radicals with young people who are active today. “It’s about passing the torch,” White says. “We’re old, we can’t march in the streets anymore, we have to pass the torch to other people. People are really eager to engage in dialogue with young activists.”

That’s why there are several panels on high school activism....

IN THE COMMENTS: Referring to the topic — from an earlier post — of ambiguous headlines ("crash blossoms"), rehajm writes:

Women Unmasking Power & Building Movements

There’s your crash blossom.

And I said:

Good observation.

And now I'm picturing a building that shits.

And I realize that I can picture a building that shits, because I've seen a lot of great anthropomorphized buildings drawn by one of my favorite artists Mark Beyer. Example:



From "Life and Times of Thomas House," by Mark Beyer.

"A man yelling about Donald Trump opened fire early Friday in the lobby of a Miami-area golf resort owned by the President...."

CNN reports.

Authorities received a call of an active shooter at the Trump National Doral Golf Club at 1:30 a.m., said Juan Perez, director of the Miami-Dade police.... Perez did not provide details on what the shooter was saying about Trump, who was at the White House at the time.

ADDED:

BREAKING: Shooter at Trump National hotel has been identified as Jonathan Oddi, 42, of Doral https://t.co/wcouKJE3S3 pic.twitter.com/1DRLZTWee5

— David Ovalle (@DavidOvalle305) May 18, 2018

"I’m Ready for the Female Takeover of the Democratic Party/The Venusification of the Democratic Party is on, and this man says it’s high time."

Headline at The Daily Beast for a ditsy column by Michael Tomasky.

"Clinics that provide abortions or refer patients to places that do would lose federal funding under a new Trump administration rule..."

The NYT reports.

The policy would be a return to one instituted in 1988 by President Ronald Reagan that required abortion services to have a “physical separation” and “separate personnel” from other family planning activities. That policy is often described as a domestic gag rule because it barred caregivers at facilities that received family planning funds from providing any information to patients about an abortion or where to receive one....

The policy could prompt legal challenges, as it did soon after the Reagan administration adopted it. Planned Parenthood and other groups filed lawsuits that blocked the rules, and while the Supreme Court decided in 1991 that they could move forward, they were never fully carried out. President Bill Clinton rescinded the policy in 1994.

Living in The North.

It's going all the way up to 75° today, so we've got all the windows open to maximize the chill and fortify us against the coming heat. Right now — and I'm typing in front of 2 big windows — it's 54°.

Of all places to search for food, why would you go to the desert?

Here's a headline I misread: "Empty stomachs drive Venezuela soldiers to desert in droves" (Yahoo).

This is what Language Log refers to as a "crash blossom." Here's a good NYT column explaining the term:

In their quest for concision, writers of newspaper headlines are... inveterate sweepers away of little words, and the dust they kick up can lead to some amusing ambiguities. Legendary headlines from years past (some of which verge on the mythical) include “Giant Waves Down Queen Mary’s Funnel,” “MacArthur Flies Back to Front” and “Eighth Army Push Bottles Up Germans.” The Columbia Journalism Review even published two anthologies of ambiguous headlinese in the 1980s, with the classic titles “Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim” and “Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge.”

For years, there was no good name for these double-take headlines. Last August, however, one emerged in the Testy Copy Editors online discussion forum. Mike O’Connell, an American editor based in Sapporo, Japan, spotted the headline “Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms” and wondered, “What’s a crash blossom?”... Another participant in the forum, Dan Bloom, suggested that “crash blossoms” could be used as a label for such infelicitous headlines that encourage alternate readings, and news of the neologism quickly spread....

One of my favorite crash blossoms is this gem from the Associated Press, first noted by the Yale linguistics professor Stephen R. Anderson last September: “McDonald’s Fries the Holy Grail for Potato Farmers.” If you take “fries” as a verb instead of a noun, you’re left wondering why a fast-food chain is cooking up sacred vessels. Or consider this headline, spotted earlier this month by Rick Rubenstein on the Total Telecom Web site: “Google Fans Phone Expectations by Scheduling Android Event.” Here, if you read “fans” as a plural noun, then you might think “phone” is a verb, and you’ve been led down a path where Google devotees are calling in their hopes.

Nouns that can be misconstrued as verbs and vice versa are, in fact, the hallmarks of the crash blossom. Take this headline, often attributed to The Guardian: “British Left Waffles on Falklands.”....

I wasn't going to participate in the Yanny/Laurel thing...

... although I have been reading about it. (Here's the NYT, "Laurel or Yanny? What We Heard From the Experts," and here's the original Reddit post.)

I mean I wasn't in a position to blog about it when it was relatively new and it so quickly got Harry-and-Meghan old that I didn't see any value to my chiming in. Does it help anyone to know that I hear "Yanny"?

But the White House response is truly funny:

#Laurel? #Yanny? Or... pic.twitter.com/5hth07SdGY

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) May 17, 2018

And — less funny and a bit arcane — I read the EW recap of the TV show "Survivor," and there's a contestant this season whose name happens to be Laurel. In this week's recap, there's this description of a puzzle-solving challenge in which Laurel narrowly edged out another contestant, Wendell, because, though he finished first, she yelled "Jeff!" first (Jeff being Jeff Probst, the show's host, who has to come over and check that the puzzle is in fact correctly solved). The recap goes like this:

The contestants were in the middle of an immunity challenge that ended in a slide puzzle, and the first person to finish it would win immunity — or so we thought.

Wendell went into this portion of the challenge with a huge lead. Yanny was the third person to start on the puzzle, but she had the advantage of having worked on it before at the opening marooning challenge. (By the way, not a fan of recycling the same puzzle twice in one season. Not sure the thinking behind that one.) After sliding back and forth like we wanted to cha-cha real smooth, Wendell appeared to have the puzzle solved. He paused, looked it over, and extended his arms to the side.

Then, out of nowhere, Yanny yelled “Jeff!” He came over, looked at her puzzle and called her the winner. But was she?

“I guess I had to scream your name,” protested Wendell mildly.

“What? Did you call me?” asked Probst.

“I didn’t call you,” admitted Wendell.

“Well, you gotta call it,” said Probst. “Wendell, you understand, right? Because a puzzle’s not done until you tell me.”

At this point, Yanny entered the fray, explaining that she also had it and could have called it earlier as well....

That is, the recapper, with no explanation, just started calling Laurel "Yanny."

If you're interested in the "Survivor" rules question, here's "Survivor: Jeff Probst addresses Wendell–Laurel challenge controversy":

Nothing like this has ever happened before. It was bizarre. I think Wendell was half-checking his puzzle and half-dazed. Truthfully, I didn’t even know he had it because there was no sign from him at all. It was only seeing it back in editing later that I could clearly see he had it finished before Laurel. But we are deep into this game, and cognitive function is in rare supply, and I honestly think Wendell just had a slight lapse. What impressed me most was how both Wendell and Laurel handled it. Laurel obviously took the necklace, but she was aware it was a tricky situation. And Wendell just handled it straight up. He didn’t complain at all. He was frustrated, but he owned it as his mistake.

The "typo" tag refers to the big punchline at the end of the White House video.

At the Bear/Badger Café...

... enjoy the warmth.

And consider using the Althouse Portal to Amazon. Me, I just used Amazon to buy a new clothes dryer. It took me about 5 minutes today to pick one and to click the buttons that set up the delivery and installation that will happen on Monday. What pleasant ease! So boring to go to an appliance store to buy something like that and to schedule and wait for the installation. The last clothes dryer I bought worked for more than 30 years. The Social Security Actuarial Table gives me a life expectancy of 19 more years, so presumably I'll never have to buy another clothes dryer.

The Bucky Badger sculpture is one of many in Madison this summer. That one, near Picnic Point, was painted by Angelica Contreras.