"Hello one percenters, I take walk in Moscow premium hood Patriarshy Ponds."

A photo essay at Quora — answering the question "What is the most expensive area to live in Moscow?" — by Misha Firer (whose profile says "Lives in Moscow/Brutalsky Son of Quora"). 

Here's the Wikipedia article for "Patriarch Ponds" — "Patriarch's Ponds (Russian: Патриаршие пруды, Patriarshiye prudy) is park, pond and an affluent residential area in downtown Presnensky District of Moscow, Russia. For the last 200 years, there has been only one pond, although, as the name of Tryokhprudny Pereulok (Трёхпрудный переулок, lit. Three-Pond Lane) suggests, there used to be more."

Firer encounters the pond: "And here is a pond. One. Not plural. Where plural I do not know. Tall building in front most expensive apartments in Moscow.... Clothes big difference vulgar and cheap you see office plankton, drivers and such plebs walk around pond inhale airs of wealth."

At the Sunrise Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

Here are 8 TikTok videos to amuse you this evening. Let me know what you like best.

1. Bob Dylan at Trader Joe's.

2. One more time... with just the best parts.

3. Kevin Bacon would like you to know he's 64 (as of yesterday).

4. When stoners call 911.

5. When Mother talks to the scam callers... sometimes they cry.

6. And that's going to make that pasta.

7. If you had a bowl of rice, what would you put on top? (In 5 different countries.)

8. When introverted dogs get together.

Expressions.

I find it disturbing that the trout have different expressions but Henry Winkler doesn't. pic.twitter.com/GQgUgqpZIH

— John Lurie (@lurie_john) July 9, 2022

"Unlike nouns and pronouns, verbs don’t have 'proverbs' to pick up the pace, although we cheat a little with sentences such as, 'Susan drank wine and Mary did, too.'"

"Verbs are grammatically more complex than nouns but have less to reveal. When you’re about to say a verb, you’re less likely to be saying something new, so your brain doesn’t have to slow down what it’s already doing to plan for it."

From "Why Nouns Slow Us Down, and Why Linguistics Might Be in a Bubble" (The New Yorker).

(The title refers to a study that found that in 9 different languages, "the speech immediately preceding a noun is three-and-a-half-per-cent slower than the speech preceding a verb. And in eight of nine languages, the speaker was about twice as likely to introduce a pause before a noun than before a verb....")

Of course, "proverb" is a word. It's just not a word that parallels "pronoun."

That article came out in 2018, before the current obsession with pronouns. These days we ask, What are your pronouns? But it would be more interesting to know: What are your proverbs?

Mine are: Nothing ventured nothing gained and Truth is stranger than fiction.

"What did I learn?... That mathematics is both real and not real. Like novelists and musicians, mathematicians produce thought objects..."

"... that have no presence in the physical world. (Anna Karenina is no more actual than a thought about Anna Karenina.) Like other artists, mathematicians also have the run of a world that others hardly or only rarely visit. For mathematicians, though, this territory has more rules than it does for others. Also, what is different for mathematicians is that all of them agree about the contents of that world, so far as they are acquainted with them, and all mathematicians see the same objects within it, even though the objects are notional. No one’s version, so long as it is accurate, is more correct than someone else’s. Parts of this world are densely inhabited, and parts are hardly settled. Parts have been visited by only a few people, and parts are unknown, like the dark places on a medieval map. The known parts are ephemeral, but also concrete for being true, and more reliable and everlasting than any object in the physical world.... An imaginary world’s being infallible is very strange. This spectral quality is bewildering, even to mathematicians. The mathematician John Conway once said, 'It’s quite astonishing, and I still don’t understand it, despite having been a mathematician all my life. How can things be there without actually being there?'"

From "Teaching Myself Calculus at Sixty-Five/I was never a good math student, but I was determined to penetrate the mysteries of mathematics" by Alec Wilkinson, who got a book out of this project — “A Divine Language: Learning Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus at the Edge of Old Age.”

"The bots thing, man, I don’t know. We have talked about this before. Back before the market crashed, back when he was pretending to want to buy Twitter, Musk was pretending..."

"... that he wanted to buy Twitter in order to clean up the bot problem. Now he is pretending to want to get out of the deal because of the bot problem. It is tiresome to pretend to take this seriously, so let’s not. Still, as a legal matter... Is this pretext good enough to get him out of the deal? Well, look. If Musk can prove that in fact Twitter has been running a years-long fraud on its shareholders and advertisers — that it has knowingly been massively understating the number of bot accounts in order to trick companies into buying Twitter ads and shareholders into buying Twitter stock — then, sure, maybe that will get him out of the deal.

"President Joe Biden and numerous mainstream media outlets have touted the story of an unidentified 10-year old girl who traveled to Indiana to obtain an abortion..."

"... that was illegal in her home state of Ohio. Dr. Caitlin Bernard, an Indianapolis obstetrician-gynecologist, claimed a child abuse doctor referred to her a 10-year-old patient who was pregnant and seeking an abortion a few days past Ohio’s six week limit. The story was originally published in the Cincinnati Enquirer then quickly picked up by national outlets including Politico, The Washington Post, CNN, Teen Vogue, The Hill and numerous other outlets, which did not claim to have independently verified the story and in several cases simply cited previous reports. Bernard’s account did not mention specifics such as the name of the young patient’s doctor, any of the towns where these events took place, whether charges were being pressed against the child’s alleged rapist and at what point, if at all, Bernard or the child abuse doctor contacted the authorities regarding the individual who had impregnated the 10-year-old."

The Daily Caller reports.

Yes, I have been waiting to hear the name of the rapist and news of his arrest or details about a rape by an unknown man who has eluded arrest. Of course, I care about a 10-year-old girl facing pregnancy and denied access to abortion in her home state. But rape is an even more serious problem! 

Russell Brand has fun with Kamala Harris's "passage of time" and Joe Biden's difficulty clapping.

"All the kids were screaming and yelling. I remember, I said to the kids, I go, 'Well, OK, well, what do you guys think I did wrong?'"

"And a line formed. These kids said everything about gender, and this and that and the other, but they didn’t say anything about art.... And this is my biggest gripe with this whole controversy with 'The Closer': That you cannot report on an artist’s work and remove artistic nuance from his words. It would be like if you were reading a newspaper and they say, 'Man Shot In The Face By a Six-Foot Rabbit Expected To Survive,' you’d be like, 'Oh my god,’ and they never tell you it’s a Bugs Bunny cartoon.... When I heard those talking points coming out of these children’s faces, that really, sincerely, hurt me. Because I know those kids didn’t come up with those words. I’ve heard those words before. The more you say I can’t say something, the more urgent it is for me to say it... And it has nothing to do with what you’re saying I can’t say. It has everything to do with my right, my freedom, of artistic expression. That is valuable to me. That is not severed from me. It’s worth protecting for me, and it’s worth protecting for everyone else who endeavors in our noble, noble professions.... And these kids didn’t understand that they were instruments of oppression. And I didn’t get mad at them.... They’re kids. They’re freshmen. They’re not ready yet. They don’t know."

Said Dave Chappelle, quoted in "Dave Chappelle special quietly released on Netflix, defends trans jokes" (NY Post). I need to watch this immediately.

UPDATE, 8:59 a.m.: I just watched it.

"I’ve been actively avoiding the news for years. It wasn’t always this way. I’ve been a journalist for two decades..."

"... and I used to spend hours consuming the news and calling it 'work.'... It felt like my duty to be informed, as a citizen and as a journalist — and also, I kind of loved it!.. I was too permeable.... So, like a lot of people, I started to dose the news. I cut out TV news altogether, because that’s just common sense, and I waited until late afternoon to read other news.... I went to a therapist. She told me (ready?) to stop consuming the news. That felt wrong.... Then one day a journalist friend confided that she was avoiding the news, too. Then I heard it from another journalist. And another. (Most were women, I noticed, though not all.) This news about disliking news was always whispered, a dirty little secret. It reminded me of the scene in 'The Social Dilemma,' when all those tech executives admitted that they didn’t let their kids use the products they had created."

Writes Amanda Ripley, in "I’m a journalist who stopped reading the news. Is the problem me — or our product?" (WaPo).

She decides that news needs to be rebuilt around human needs. It needs to give people: 1. hope, 2. a sense of agency, and 3. dignity. 

These kids today "are fluent in the thin-gruel cant (diversity, inclusion, equity, anti-racism, antipatriarchy, antiheteronormativity, etc.) of ostensibly political but actually just emotionally satisfying performative demands."

Says George Will, in "How millennials became aggressively illiberal, censorious young adults" (WaPo).

In a flattened world drained of greatness, today’s steep decline of humanities majors among undergraduates is a lagging indicator of lack of interest in humanity’s lessons learned on the path to the present. Given this nation’s unhappy present, it is remarkable to remember that the arrival of screen-soaked lives was cheerily announced as the next stage of the “information age.” LOL.

I wondered: How old is George Will? Answer: 81.

"Crimo attempted suicide in April 2019. Then, in September of the same year, he announced to his family that he wanted 'to kill everyone.'"

"Police visited the Highland Park home where Crimo lived with his father and uncle, and confiscated 16 knives, a dagger and a sword. Because no complaints were filed, there was no further investigation. Still, if these incidents didn’t raise red flags, then the world must be color blind. Three months later, Robert Crimo began buying guns with his father’s signed approval. The real quiet kid passed four federal background checks, purchasing five guns — including the one used at the parade.... Had Bob Crimo been nosier, he might have discovered that his quiet son was quite loquacious as his online persona named Awake The Rapper. Posting thousands of videos, songs, messages and photos, he was a young man clearly obsessed with violence.... He was also a dedicated contributor to an online forum where people share violent photos and videos of people dying. How could so many have missed what is now so obvious?"

 
From "How could so many have missed what is now so obvious?" by Kathleen Parker (WaPo).

"A pickup truck in front of her — driven by her husband, with her children aboard — took a powerful hit from a cloud-to-ground lightning bolt."

"He and the kids were fine, although the truck was reported to be 'completely fried.'... [T]he steel-framed vehicle acted as a 'faraday cage,' in which the current of the lightning bolt goes around the metal body and typically exits to the ground from the tires. The strike will avoid people as long as everyone is inside the vehicle and not touching the outside metal. This is also a reason aircraft are often struck by lightning without major damage. Concurrently with the first flash, a bright orange sheath surrounds the spot where it connects with the truck as sparks erupt in all directions. In less than a blink of an eye, two more rapid-fire flashes are seen, as is smoke rising from the impact location."

WaPo reports.

Here's the amazing video.

"Providers of sex education in schools are teaching children that prostitution is a 'rewarding job' and failed to advise a 14-year-old girl having sex with a 16-year-old boy that it was illegal."

"Outside organisations teaching children about sex also promote 'kinks' such as being locked in a cage, flogged, caned, beaten and slapped in the face, The Times has found.... Last night campaigners said that 'inclusiveness is overriding child safeguarding' and that the materials were 'bordering on illegal.' This week Rachel de Souza, the children’s commissioner, revealed that she would review sex education being taught in schools after Miriam Cates, an MP, was contacted by a parent whose nine-year-old child came home 'shaking' and 'white as a sheet because they’d been taught in detail about rape.'  Relationship and sex education (RSE) became compulsory in English secondary schools in 2020, with many contracting out the teaching. Since then an industry has sprung up of providers who produce resources and go into schools to teach sex education and gender issues... The Proud Trust produced a range of resources called Alien Nation that asked primary schoolchildren aged seven to 11 whether they felt closest to 'planet boy, planet girl, planet non-binary.' It also asks: 'Which planet were you sent to as a baby' and 'What would your ideal planet be like?'"

The London Times reports.

At the Sunrise Café...

... you can write about whatever you like in the comments.