At the Sunrise Café, you can talk about whatever you like.

It was a clear, bright sunrise:

I liked this hot-and-cold look — sunrise light on red and orange branches and — in the foreground — dead things with powdered-sugar snow.

 

The scilla that invaded long ago is a pleasant enough guest, good enough to bloom earlier than anything else in our garden:

"There was a particularly difficult day and all these people I knew were like, 'Oh God, I lost Wordle today. I’m devastated.' I was just like, 'Oh, that’s very normal for me.'"

Said Doug Dodson, a 39-year-old classical singer in Atlanta, quoted in "LOSER/When you fail at Wordle for the first time, it may affect you more than you think" (Slate)

Dodson said he even finds it amusing to occasionally post his losing grids on social media: “If I didn’t get it in some spectacularly embarrassing way, I will share it.” 

“There was one where I got the first, third, and fourth letters correct on the first try and then never was able to fill in either of the other two letters,” Dodson said.  When that happened, a friend was so baffled at how he still managed to lose that she reached out to him. “She was like, ‘I would love to know what words you guessed,’ ” he said. 

Eric Allix Rogers, a 36-year-old who works at a nonprofit in Chicago and is a multiple-time Wordle loser, said he believes in sharing his losses online for almost philosophical reasons: “It violates that expectation of curating an image of success and perfection on social media, the posting your Ls.”

"Some imagine that they should spend their final years doing as much world travel as possible. They want to see new places and smell new things, and taste new fish..."

"... and I can’t see the point because all you’re doing is creating memories you’ll never be able to savour. There’s a similar problem with reading. You’re filling your head with new things that will never be of any use. Because while you’ll have the facts to hand, you won’t have the mental agility to use them to form worthwhile opinions. And even if you do, who’ll listen?...  I started going for walks in the pandemic, mainly because if I was far from the house I was far from the fridge. This is something I hated as a young man. I couldn’t see the point of 'going for a walk' if I was simply going to end up back where I started. But I love it now because I can see the hedgerows changing with the seasons.... [W]hen you are old, you no longer need to make the best use of your time. You need to waste it. You need to fill the hours and that’s why gardening now holds some appeal. I bought some secateurs the other day and find them mildly arousing.... All the stuff I used to think was boring is now a 'lovely' way of passing the time. I haven’t fallen into the jigsaw wormhole yet and I haven’t taken up bridge or golf. Nor have I felt compelled yet to spend any time sitting in the Volvo in a 'viewing area' at a beauty spot drinking tea from a Thermos. But I will."

From "Jeremy Clarkson on growing old and his fear of death/On the brink of turning 62 — and outliving his father and several of his closest friends — Clarkson takes a long, hard look in the mirror" (London Times).

This made me want to link once again to "10 reasons to live like a grandma" (TikTok).  And "Let's talk about grandmacore."

"[O]n a patch of grass lay part of a Tochka-U ballistic missile, about 6ft long, twisted and broken at one end. On the side, someone had daubed 'For the children' in white paint..."

"... a perverse inversion of reality that seemed to paint the attack as revenge for the imagined deaths of children at Ukrainian hands. Ukraine’s defence ministry said the missile had carried cluster sub-munitions, which are designed to kill and maim indiscriminately over a large area and whose use has been widely condemned.... As the warhead detonated, spraying shrapnel across the concourse, it took a horrific toll. Thirty-nine people were killed at the station, another 13 died in hospital.... Stanislav Zagursky, the local police chief, showed me a photograph, taken moments after the blast, of a boy in jeans and a blue coat lying on his back on one of the green-painted benches dotted around the station, his feet tucked up next to him. His head had been blown off. 'The boy was eight years old'... Moments after the attack, a pro-Russia separatist channel claimed Russian forces had launched a strike on what they said were Ukrainian military targets at the train station in Kramatorsk. The post was deleted after the extent of the civilian casualties became clear. Then the Russian defence ministry claimed that Russia did not possess Tochka-U rockets, despite the fact they had been paraded in training exercises in the months before the war...."

From "Civilians from Ukraine went to Kramatorsk station to escape Russia’s attacks. It turned into a killing zone/Putin’s troops targeted a busy railway station with cluster munitions, killing women and children fleeing the violence in Donbas" (London Times).

"Since his inauguration, Biden has spent only 12 weekends in the capital... In the same period, he’s spent 31 weekends back home in Delaware and 16 at Camp David."

"He’s hosted no state dinners. Sightings around town are few, and often involve a quiet trip to church.... Nowhere was Biden’s implicit promise of dullness more popular than inside the Beltway, a place traumatized by Donald Trump. But it turns out that what the city wanted was less back-to-sleep than back-to-normal.... 'The president could be a Cardboard Box and I think Washington wouldn’t be boring,' says Jamie Weinstein, known for putting together soirees with high-profile guests. '... If you depend on who occupies the Oval Office to define whether D.C. has a great social scene, you are doing something wrong.'... [T]he real impact of having an elderly, not-here-on-weekends president during a pandemic may be to hustle up other trends that were already happening, a move away from big events and formal dinners to socializing that’s more low-key.... 'I get invited to these embassy events and I sometimes forget to go,' is how one of my pals, a longtime local partygoer, puts it. 'And then I’ll look on social media to see who was there and it’s like, "Eeew."'"

I'm impressed that Michael Schaffer got a whole long article out of this material: "Joe Biden’s ‘Cardboard Box’ Presidency/The president promised to be boring. He’s over-delivered" (Politico).

"Since this time last year, New York City rents have risen 33 percent, nearly double the national average...."

"In affluent neighborhoods, it’s worse: at the height of the pandemic, in Williamsburg in Brooklyn and on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, for example, the median asking rent fell about 20 percent. Since January 2021 it has charged upward by about 40 percent in both places, according to StreetEasy. In SoHo the median rent jumped 58 percent in the fourth quarter — from $3,800 to $6,002... Behind the extreme hikes in rent is a rental market crunch driven in part by Covid expats flooding back, attracted once again to a revitalized city or recalled by office jobs." 

From "The New York Dream of Cheap Rent and No Roommates? It’s Over. The city is thriving, but many who scored a deal now face rent-renewal sticker shock. Rents rose 33 percent between January of 2021 and January this year, according to an online listing site" (NYT).

I found the first sentence of this article really alienating: "The hallmarks of feeling like you’ve made it in New York City are often as follows: navigating the subway sans map, a maitre d’ who knows you by name and living alone, at last, in your own apartment." 

I lived in NYC from 1973 to 1984 (and in the Fall 2007/Spring 2008 academic year) and I can say with certainty that I never gave a damn about a maitre d’ knowing me — by name or otherwise. And I've also never thought in terms of whether I'd "made it." Are young people not young anymore? I'm old now, and I can't identify with the oldness of the purported youngness expressed in that sentence. What an incredible drag! 

ADDED: I was inspired to research "make it" in the OED. The original meaning of this phrase is nautical. To "make it" is to cover the intended distance. Then it got figurative:

 

I'd have to check the text, but I think when "They went to a parking lot in broad daylight..and there, he claims, he made it with her in nothing flat," she was not the maitre d’.

"Some years ago I evolved what I called the Small Ball Theory to assess the quality of literature about sports."

"This stated that there seems to be a correlation between the standard of writing about a particular sport and the ball it utilizes -- that the smaller the ball, the more formidable the literature. There are superb books about golf, very good books about baseball, not many good books about football or soccer, very few good books about basketball and no good books at all about beach balls...."

Wrote George Plimpton — in 1992 — in "The Smaller the Ball, the Better the Book: A Game Theory of Literature" (NYT). I'm reading that not because this weekend is The Masters, but because I stumbled across a 1996 piece "Bad Sports," by Michiko Kakutani (NYT), about the "hippie psychobabble" that had taken over golf writing:

Consider the ur-text of New Age golf writing, ''Golf in the Kingdom'' (1972), by Michael Murphy, a founder of Esalen. In the course of the book, the reader is introduced to a guru-like golf teacher named Shivas Irons, who spouts aphorisms like ''let the nothingness into yer shots,'' and is pelted with a boggling array of metaphors: golf as ''the new yoga of the supermind,'' golf as a recapitulation of evolution and golf as a Rorschach test of character....

Two recent novels -- ''The Legend of Bagger Vance,'' by Steven Pressfield, and ''Follow the Wind,'' by Bo Links -- give us Shivas wannabes, who tell their disciples to find their ''troo self.''... Perhaps sappiest of all is Jeff Wallach's ''Beyond the Fairway,'' a series of essays that purports to be a golf version of ''Zen in the Art of Archery'' when in fact it's closer to one of those business manuals that try to adapt the principles of Sun Tzu's classic ''Art of War'' to corporate back-stabbing....

I'm reading Kakutani's old essay because I was looking up "The Art of War" in the NYT. And I wasn't doing that out of any sort of thought that the Russians are botching the art of war in Ukraine, but because I wanted to do a post in honor of the 50th anniversary (tomorrow) of the discovery of the Yinqueshan Han Tombs, which contained "a nearly complete Western Han Dynasty (206 BC - 220 AD) copy of The Art of War, known as the Yinqueshan Han Slips, which is almost completely identical to modern editions." 

Back to Kakutani (whose name is misspelled in the NYT scan of her ancient article):

Zen golf, [Wallach] writes, is ''a way of transporting yourself to a new dimension, gaining access to new perspectives, and maybe racking up a few birdies along the way.'' The problem with such passages isn't just the bad writing (which pretty much negates George Plimpton's famous ''Small Ball Theory'' that the smaller the ball the better the writing), the sanctimoniousness or even its startling trivialization of Zen. The problem is that such writing takes sport out of the lovely pure realm of the physical, where talent and strength and discipline are measured in unforgiving inches and lifetime stats, and plunges it into the warm recovery movement realm of subjectivity and self-esteem.

Little did Kakutani know, the very year she wrote, 1996, a new phenomenon would take over golf. Tiger Woods went professional that year, and just about ever since, the main thing about golf has been how is Tiger doing? An in-the-flesh icon overwhelmed the old hippie psychobabble of "The Legend of Bagger Vance." 

But they did make a movie out of "The Legend of Bagger Vance" — "Time [Magazine] called it one of the most 'embarrassing' films of recent years for its treatment of African Americans and the use of a 'Magical African-American Friend.'" 

Matt Damon's magical friend was, of course, Will Smith: 

Who recruited you? Holiday Inn?

Ace Ventura, obviously. Oh, and this Holiday Inn Express commercial https://t.co/7e2Fyn3qyQ

— Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) April 8, 2022

That Holiday Inn ad is real: "Holiday Inn drops transsexual ad that premiered at Super Bowl" (AP, January 28, 1997).

""[T]he Russian forces tramped about the [Chernobyl Exclusion Zone] with bulldozers and tanks, digging trenches and bunkers — and exposing themselves to potentially harmful doses of radiation ..."

"At just one site of extensive trenching a few hundred yards outside the town of Chernobyl, the Russian army had dug an elaborate maze of sunken walkways and bunkers.... The soldiers had apparently camped out for weeks in the radioactive forest.... At one dug-in position, Russian troops had burrowed a bunker from the sandy side of a road embankment and left heaps of trash — food wrappings, discarded boots, a blackened cooking pot — suggesting they had lived in the underground space for an extended time. Nearby, a bulldozer had scraped away the topsoil to build berms for artillery emplacements and a half-dozen foxholes. The forest around had recently burned, suggesting a fire had swept over the area during the Russian occupation, adding radioactive smoke to the exposure of the Russian soldiers, along with dust from disturbed ground." 

From "Russian Blunders in Chernobyl: ‘They Came and Did Whatever They Wanted’/Tank treads ripped up the toxic soil, bulldozers carved trenches and bunkers, and soldiers spent a month camped in — and dug into — a radioactive forest" (NYT).

Also, we're told, the Russian solders left "appliances and electronic goods on roads in the Chernobyl zone" — including a washing machine — "apparently looted from towns deeper inside Ukraine and cast off for unclear reasons in the final retreat."

The shocking and absurd ineptitude made me think of something I read last night in "Nine ways Russia botched its invasion of Ukraine" (WaPo). Item #2, "Not preparing their troops": 

Testimonies of captured Russian soldiers suggest many troops had not been told they would be invading Ukraine. Some said they were told they were participating in a military exercise... That meant they were psychologically unprepared to be shot at and blown up, as happened almost instantly, which took an immediate toll on troops’ morale....

At the Snowdrop Café...

 

... you can talk all night.

"I do not tolerate people who hold views that can be harmful to others.... I am tolerant of other people’s views, but only if those views are not offensive...."

Here are the actual questions on that free-speech survey we were talking about yesterday — the one the University of Wisconsin system decided to delay until next fall. 

 Please go to the link and view all the questions — it's quite long! — then answer my survey:

Is this poll distorted to get a particular result?

No. It's impressively well-balanced and neutral.

A little. It helps students perceive the value of free speech, which is good.

Yes! They want to undermine concern about an inclusive environment for women and minorities.

I don't know, but I can see why they need more time to figure this out.

 

pollcode.com free polls

"A federal jury acquitted two men of conspiring to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and deadlocked on the case against two others, apparently agreeing to some degree with defense claims that FBI agents entrapped the men..."

"... in a violent plot shortly before the 2020 election. The trial in Grand Rapids, Mich. has been closely watched as a test of the U.S. government’s ramped-up efforts to combat domestic terrorism, and the verdict is a partial defeat for the Justice Department. The men’s arrest in October 2020 raised alarms about the possibility of politically-motivated violence as the nation was increasingly divided over a bitterly contested presidential race.... A mistrial was declared for Fox and Croft, and federal authorities said they plan to go to trial a second time. The case marks one of the rare instances in which an entrapment defense was even partly successful in a terrorism case."

WaPo reports.

Top-rated comments over there: "Jury nullification, just like Kyle Rittenhouse. When even governors aren't safe, our nation has a cancer"/"Hoo boy this country is in trouble"/"If your peers are also sympathetic to domestic terrorism, then there is a problem. Obviously there is a problem in many parts of the US."

"While walking along the edge of the embankment, it appears that the ground beneath her collapsed, bringing her down the bank along with clay and rocks... Clay banks are always unstable..."

"... and can be undermined in areas not visible from above. When hiking, please stay on marked trails and observation areas. If you choose to hike alone, always make sure someone knows your route of travel and when you plan to return." 

Said the Iron County Sheriff's Department, quoted in "Wisconsin doctor fell to her death on solo hiking trip when clay bank collapsed underneath her: sheriff/Kelsey Musgrove was a cardiothoracic surgery fellow at the University of Wisconsin" (Fox News).

From WaPo's Fact Checker: "Unraveling the tale of Hunter Biden and $3.5 million from Russia."

 Glenn Kessler writes: 

We interviewed people familiar with the transactions, reviewed property and real estate documents and probed for leads in the emails contained on a hard drive copy of the laptop Hunter Biden supposedly left behind for repair in a Delaware shop in April 2019. None of our sources would speak on the record because of continuing investigations of Hunter Biden and his business practices, but we sought confirmation from corporate filings and other records.

The flimsiness of the allegation was apparent from the start merely by carefully reading the Senate GOP report itself.... It’s a complicated story, involving a web of corporate entities, that eventually leads to the purchase of millions of dollars worth of real estate in Brooklyn by the Russian billionaire. We found no evidence that Hunter Biden was part of those transactions....

My commenters jumped when I quoted the word "Caucasity," but my question is whether the proper spelling isn't "Caucacity."

Here's the context of my quotation. NY Magazine writer Choire Sicha wrote "For obvious reasons (Caucasity), most of these reporters are on the joyless, scold-y White Twitter...."

In the comments, Lucien said: "'Caucasity'? Is that like 'whiteness'?"  And Clyde said: "'Caucasity'?! What bilge!" 

To answer Lucien's question, "Caucasity" clearly means "whiteness." Why use an odd word when there's a more common word? I'd say it's just for humorous effect. It actually takes race less seriously. "Caucasian" used to have a somewhat elevated quality, when race was palmed off as a biological science. To seize upon the big word and to further enlarge it with an ending is a standard humor move. It's actually quite old fashioned.

But I just want to question the choice of ending — "-sity," rather than "-city." I've googled Caucasity" and got thrown into the Urban Dictionary entry "Caucacity" — with the "c," not the "s":

"Yesterday afternoon, President Joe Biden hosted a good old-fashioned bill-signing ceremony at the White House.... None of [the politicians crowding around him] wore a mask, although House Speaker Nancy Pelosi carried one around her wrist like a handbag..."

I'm reading "A Push for Normalcy Tests the Gerontocracy/As those around the president fall ill, the White House—and the nation—must adjust expectations" by Russell Berman (The Atlantic). Pelosi, as you probably know, just tested positive for Covid. As have a bunch of other Washington politicians.

This afternoon [Biden] watched alongside his Supreme Court nominee, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, as the Senate confirmed her to the bench. The two embraced, and neither wore a mask. Biden’s current relaxed posture toward the virus may represent a political imperative for the president heading into an election season that is already expected to be difficult for his party; the public, Biden acknowledged last month, is “tired, frustrated, and exhausted” after more than two years of pandemic life....

Most recent infections among public officials, even those in Biden’s age bracket, have been mild.... [G]iven how close the virus is coming to Biden, and how little alarm the White House is (publicly) expressing, a positive test result wouldn’t be surprising; it might even be, well, normal.