At sunrise, 2 red orbs.

"Syria critic Lindsey Graham reverses stance, says Trump's policy could succeed."

Reuters reports.

“I am increasingly optimistic that we can have some historic solutions in Syria that have eluded us for years if we play our cards right,” Graham said.

Graham said Trump was prepared to use U.S. air power over a demilitarized zone occupied by international forces, adding that the use of air power could help ensure Islamic State fighters who had been held in the area did not “break out.”...

Graham also said he believed the United States and Kurdish forces long allied with Washington could establish a venture to modernize Syrian oil fields, with the revenue flowing to the Kurds. “President Trump is thinking outside the box,” Graham said of Trump’s thinking on oil. “The president appreciates what the Kurds have done,” Graham added. “He wants to make sure ISIS does not come back. I expect we will continue to partner with the Kurds in Eastern Syria to make sure ISIS does not re-emerge.”

Is it right to say that Bob Dylan was bad at charades because he couldn't — or wouldn't — do "how many syllables?" and "sounds like"?

From Elton John's autobiography, "Me":

Simon and Garfunkel had dinner one night, then played charades. At least, they tried to play charades. They were terrible at it. The best thing I can say about them is that they were better than Bob Dylan. He couldn’t get the hang of the ‘how many syllables?’ thing at all. He couldn’t do ‘sounds like’ either, come to think of it. One of the best lyricists in the world, the greatest man of letters in the history of rock music, and he can’t seem to tell you whether a word’s got one syllable or two syllables or what it rhymes with! He was so hopeless, I started throwing oranges at him. Or so I was informed the next morning, by a cackling Tony King. That’s not really a phone call you want to receive when you’re struggling with a hangover. ‘Morning, darling – do you remember throwing oranges at Bob Dylan last night?’ Oh God.

I don't know what really happened, but I'm stepping up to defend Bob Dylan. "How many syllables?" and "sounds like" are the dregs of charades. I'm going to say that Bob wanted to play the game at a higher level, where you had to get the real words across, not break them up into syllables and resort to other words that merely rhyme. They were mocking him, throwing oranges at him, because he wouldn't do it the easy way. But the easiest way is not to play charades at all. And I challenge you all to play charades the Bob Dylan way, with no "how many syllables?" and no "sounds like."

From Bob Dylan's "Tight Connection to My Heart":

I’ll go along with the charade
Until I can think my way out
I know it was all a big joke
Whatever it was about

Who knew Bob Dylan played charades?! That's what the rock stars do when they get together? Charades!

ADDED: Into the mix, let me throw the glorious "How many syllables, Mario?" sequence from "Putney Swope":

What's your reaction to the new approach to comment moderation we've been using on this blog over the last few weeks?

What's your reaction to the new approach to moderation over the last few weeks?

It's really troublesome to me.

It's a bit frustrating but I get that there are reasons for it.

It doesn't change anything for me/I didn't even notice.

It's improved the experience.

 

pollcode.com free polls

UPDATE: The results:

"To counter [global warming] apathy, Starr and others have turned to public art." Faux historical markers "imagine events like a boathouse destroyed in a storm surge from a Category 4 hurricane on Sept. 24, 2032 or a heat-inspired tick outbreak that forced a park to close on June 8, 2044."

From "Artist uses 'historic' markers to raise climate awareness" (ABC News).

News from the future.

Ticks was a nice touch.

I'd use my "insect politics" tag, but ticks are not insects.

Maybe if you thought about ticks more, you wouldn't be so apathetic. But are ticks an important aspect of global warming?

Here's a WaPo interview, from last May, with Matthias Leu, an ecologist and assistant professor at the College of William & Mary:

So far, we have not found an association with weather and tick populations. Many people think cold winters kill ticks. If that is true, why do ticks live in northern states, like Minnesota and Wisconsin? What does influence the tick population is the amount of deer and mice available to serve as hosts for the ticks.... 

"For the fourth week in a row, the White House and top House and Senate Republicans have refused to come on this newscast to answer our questions about all of these important developments."

"The invitation remains open. We hope they will come to explain all of this to the American people, because especially at a time when the White House has ended the practice of regular press briefings, they are shirking this important part of their duty to the American public to explain what they are doing with our money and in our name."

Jake Tapper said on his "State of the Union" show this morning.

I scampered right over to Twitter to see if Trump had responded. No. Not yet at least. I expect something about "fake news" and how "unfair" CNN always is to him.

"The sun rising into a cloudless sky is simple and nice enough, but the interesting, dramatic sunrises are the ones with clouds."

That's what I said yesterday, and I'd thought of adding something that would have explained this morning's sunrise:



If there are too many clouds, it will be so subtle you might not even consider it a sunrise.

That picture was taken at 7:12 AM, looking in the right spot. The sun rose at 7:18, and that means it was the very best time for capturing the most interesting, dramatic sunrise. So was it dull? It's a challenge to find interestingness. That's how I see it. Looking a bit toward the north, I decided this view was gloriously subtle:



Paint that. Take a month to paint it. It's like a thousand-mile pilgrimage.

"In the vacuous tumult of the Trump era, I was looking for something durable: a stiff shot of no-nonsense spirituality."

"I’m a skeptic by profession, an Irish Catholic by baptism, culture and upbringing — lapsed but listening, like half of all Americans of my family’s faith. But I was no longer comfortable in the squishy middle; it was too easy. I’d come to believe that an agnostic, as the Catholic comedian Stephen Colbert put it, 'is just an atheist without any balls.'"

Nugget extracted from "One Cure for Malnutrition of the Soul" (NYT) by searching the page for "Trump." The column, by Timothy Egan, is subtitled "We are spiritual beings. That’s why I joined the millions of people who make some form of religious pilgrimage." We're told Egan has a forthcoming book “A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith.”

I also searched the page for "global warming," "climate change," and "environment," because why does the cure for malnutrition of the soul have a big carbon footprint? Why not take your pilgrimage beginning at your own front door and walking to some American shrine?

Hey, I like my idea! What would your pilgrimage be? Egan's classic walk is 1,000 miles. Start at your door and walk a distance long enough to count as a "pilgrimage" that ends somewhere that you can conceptualize as a spiritual destination. Where do you go?

The most powerful woman.

"A face-to-face confrontation between Hillary Clinton and Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard set for next Friday was averted when Clinton backed out of the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in Washington, DC. Clinton aides cited a scheduling conflict when she announced her withdrawal from a speaking slot at the annual event...."

The NY Post reports.

Elton John and his movie alter ego Taron Egerton together, singing, in L.A. yesterday.

I'm interested in this because I actually watched the movie "Rocketman" last night. I rarely watch a movie — maybe once a month on TV and once a year in the theater — but I felt like seeing "Rocketman" because I'd blogged about Elton John's new autobiography yesterday and audiobooked 25% of it on a long walk. The book has much more depth about music and human relationships, and the movie has the visuals — all the expressive faces and, of course, the music itself, plus lots and lots of costumes. I know the movie got to me because:

1. It made me cry within the first 17 minutes. Later, I saw in the book that the very same thing made Elton John cry:

But I’d kept away from the set and tried to avoid looking at the rushes: the last thing you want is the person you’re playing gawping at you while you’re pretending to be him. But watching the film... I started sobbing during the scene set in my gran’s house in Pinner Hill Road, where my mum and dad and gran are singing ‘I Want Love’. That was a song Bernie had written about himself, a middle-aged man with a few failed marriages behind him, wondering if he’ll ever fall in love again. But it could have been written about the people who lived in that house....

What's so sad about that scene is that each character — his mum and dad and gran and he himself — are all in the same house, but each sings the song alone. They all want love, but they cannot give it to each other. Yes, that's corny and melodramatic, but there's a thorough and theatrical commitment to the melodrama, it does make some sense to say that even the cold, heartless bastards in your life, deep down, want love. You can know that and give them that and still understand that they're not going to give love to you and won't receive love from you.

2. That night, I had a dream — not the dream described below — that was something like a scene in the movie, which I won't describe because it's a bit of a spoiler. In my dream — and there's no movie spoiler here and no quote from the movie — I told some people off with the line: "You are no longer allowed to talk to me from inside my head." That seemed like an important idea to me in the dream and to me now that I'm awake. I'm not referring to the phenomenon of hearing voices in your head, which is a symptom of mental illness, but the very common experience of having your own thoughts and weaving in the imagined responses and interactions of another person. I don't think it would be possible or desirable to exclude everyone from your thoughts, but you might want to identify some individuals in your life who ought to be escorted out. You could still talk to them when they're actually there in real life talking to you. Just don't let them talk to you from inside your head. In the dream, the individuals I was talking to when I said "You are no longer allowed to talk to me from inside my head" were inside my head. That's what a dream is.

"Defense Secretary Mark Esper says that under current plans all U.S. troops leaving Syria will go to western Iraq and the military will continue to conduct operations against the Islamic State group to prevent its resurgence...."

"The developments made clear that one of President Donald Trump's rationales for withdrawing troops from Syria was not going to come to pass any time soon. 'It's time to bring our soldiers back home,' he said Wednesday. But they are not coming home.... While [Esper] acknowledged reports of intermittent fighting despite the cease-fire agreement, he said that overall it 'generally seems to be holding. We see a stability of the lines, if you will, on the ground.' He also said that, so far, the Syrian Democratic Forces that partnered with the U.S. to fight IS have maintained control of the prisons in Syria where they are still present. The Turks, he said, have indicated they have control of the IS prisons in their areas. 'I can't assess whether that's true or not without having people on the ground,' said Esper."

ABC News reports.

ADDED: Here's the full transcript of Esper's remarks.

DORALmost...

... but not quite.

I dreamed I had no idea who was President of the United States.

I was aware, in the dream, that "Who's the President of the United States?" is a question they ask you when they're trying to find out if you are brain damaged, so I was worried. Finally, someone informed me that the President of the United States is Killen. President Killen? It didn't even sound familiar. Killen. That should at least ring a bell. Thinking and thinking about it, I never arrived at the real answer, that the President of the United States is Trump.

I looked up "Killen" to see if it has any meaning. There's the near homophone — killing — that's obvious now but that didn't occur to me in the dream. Killen is a place name in Alabama and in Scotland and in Northern Ireland. It's also a surname, but no one on the list of Killens looks familar to me:

Chris Killen (born 1981), New Zealand professional footballer
Edgar Ray Killen (1925-2018), American criminal
Gerard Killen, British politician
James Killen (1925-2007), Australian politician
John Sidney Killen (1826-1903), American farmer and state legislator
Louisa Jo Killen, born Louis Killen (1934-2013), English folk singer
William Dool Killen (1806-1902), Irish Presbyterian minister and church historian
William M. Killen, (born 1938), American politician
William Wilson Killen (1860–1939), Australian politician

Clicking through on the American names, I see that the criminal, Edgar Ray Killen, is known to me through the crime:

Edgar Ray Killen (January 17, 1925 – January 11, 2018) was a Ku Klux Klan organizer who planned and directed the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, three civil rights activists participating in the Freedom Summer of 1964. He was found guilty in state court of three counts of manslaughter on June 21, 2005, the forty-first anniversary of the crime, and sentenced to 60 years in prison. He appealed the verdict, but the sentence was upheld on April 12, 2007, by the Supreme Court of Mississippi. He died in prison on January 11, 2018, six days before his 93rd birthday.

There was a substantial obituary in the NYT when he died last year, though I don't think I saw it, because I think I would have blogged it.

It's important but hard to remember the historical events that take place during your lifetime, and it should be very easy to remember who the President is. I'm sorry to have forgotten Edgar Ray Killen, but I'm quite happy to have had a dream in which I had no idea of President Trump. He's such a huge preoccupation these days. Every single thing he says or does. Every single day. It's a kind of madness.

So I'm reading my inability to answer the famous brain-damage question — "Who's the President of the United States?" — as a sign of mental health!

Vegetable theater.

EU leaders: united over Brexit, divided over much else https://t.co/wYyrYLgrFs pic.twitter.com/aBqDqDqtYb

— Reuters Top News (@Reuters) October 18, 2019

Another look at the dawn swamp.

Is the glass half full or half empty?