Sunrise — 5:49.

Everybody wants to rule the... Dane County Farmers Market.

That's live marimba being played as the crowd parades with its usual and unavoidable slowness. I make a mental note to arrive much earlier if I'm ever going to try to do this again.

Speaking of notes, here's my "Overheard at the Farmers Market" collection:

"It was important that the design honored the legacy of all First Ladies and the strength of American women."

"Delicate floral details included in the redesigning of the rug in the Yellow Oval Room is an example of how that idea was incorporated into the interiors.We were also very focused on creating interiors that conveyed a feminine strength, incorporating softer colors such as muted pinks, creams and soft blues with Classical structure to highlight this. It was important that the design honored the legacy of all First Ladies and the strength of American women."

Said Betty Monkman, who worked with First Lady Melania Trump, quoted in "A first look at how Melania Trump decorated White House’s private rooms" (WaPo).

That's a lot of femininity for the White House family quarters. 

Just 5 TikToks for you today. Let me know what you like.

1. How to take a picture of your potato.

2. Lonely and depressed, he thinks of what Winston Churchill once said.

3. She bought more clothes at the thrift store that turned out to be unwearable.

4. It's not enough to just tell this boy he's not going to like unsweetened cocoa straight from the container.

5. The girl who survives on 3 iced lattes a day.

"My bodily autonomy is not up for debate."

Today, at the Dane County Farmers Market, a very crowded place on a Saturday at 10:49 a.m.

It's seemingly a great place for attracting attention, but it's also a place where virtually everybody can and will avert their eyes.

Sunrise — 5:24.

"I have many kind friends with wonderful attributes, but one horrible thing they all have in common is a compulsion to come up and talk to me when they see me arrive on my bike."

"There, they find me at my worst, both physically and emotionally. I am damp from the ride and must now take off my helmet and redo my oddly compressed hair. It is possible that the breeze, once a source of my power, blew something gross — an insect, the torn corner of a Snapple label — onto my face. Using only the two hands that the Lord gave me, I must rearrange myself, smooth my rough edges, and prepare to rejoin society. All while also securing my bike to one of the city’s O-racks, or, more likely, a street-sign post with another bike already chained to it. This takes time and focus; I am essentially completing a physical equivalent of a Kumon worksheet. Inevitably, something drops to the ground. This is both embarrassing and part of my process."

From "Never Look at Someone While They’re Locking Their Bike" by Clio Chang (NY Magazine).

Things I spent time doing this morning: 

"Bronze statues of mythical methamphetamine cookers Walter White and Jesse Pinkman were installed at a convention center in Albuquerque on Friday..."

"... to celebrate the 'Breaking Bad' TV series.... Local politicians including Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller mixed with 'Breaking Bad' stars Bryan Cranston, Aaron Paul and director Vince Gilligan to help unveil the artwork, donated by Gilligan and Sony Pictures.... Gilligan said he recognized that the statues of 'two fictional, infamous meth dealers' won’t be universally cherished in New Mexico. 'In all seriousness, no doubt some folks are going to say, "Wow, just what our city needed." And I get that,' Gillian said. 'I see two of the finest actors America has ever produced. I see them, in character, as two larger-than-life tragic figures, cautionary tales.'... Republican state Rep. Rod Montoya of Farmington said... 'I’m glad New Mexico got the business, but really?... We’re going down the road of literally glorifying meth makers?' He also questioned the logic of the tribute after Albuquerque in June 2020 removed a statue of Spanish conqueror Juan de Oñate. Demonstrators tried to topple that bronze artwork in denunciation of Oñate’s brutal treatment of Native Americans roughly 500 years ago. A fight that broke out at the protest resulted in gunfire that injured one man."

From "'Breaking Bad' statues shine light on actors, Albuquerque" (AP).

It's questionable to put up a sculpture showing fictional characters who were not virtuous. I'm trying to think of other public monuments to fictional characters. There's the Rocky statue at the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Various Paul Bunyan statues. There's Eleanor Rigby somewhere in Liverpool. They've got Don Quixote at the Kennedy Center in Washington. These are more or less good guys. Nothing like meth dealers. 

How different is a real historical figure? What Oñate did actually happened (way back in 1599):

"For most of the 21st century, the feminism that has been in fashion has leaned heavily on the idea of women’s empowerment."

"Glossy, celebrity-driven rhetoric, peppered with slogans like 'nevertheless, she persisted' and reassurances that 'girl, you got this,' suggests that if women display competence and strength — or even just 'the confidence of a mediocre white man' — we will eventually earn equality. This type of feminism has taken several forms — Lean In, the Women’s March, the girlboss and hashtag feminism, just to name a few iterations. But the ultimate promise has remained the same: If we work within the system, the system will reward us.... Rather than seeking the approval and validation of an unjust system, what if we rejected the system’s legitimacy and worked from there? What strengths might we be able to tap in to if we recognized that the game is rigged and gave up on trying to 'win' it?... Colonized people around the globe have only been able to expel their oppressors by refusing to recognize the legitimacy of the systems that subjugated them....Vigilante groups such as India’s pink-sari-clad Gulabi Gang, for example, wield sticks against abusers and rapists. Abortion-rights advocates have also turned to these kinds of guerrilla tactics: In the years before the right to legal abortion was established in Roe v. Wade, a group of women known as the Jane Collective provided safe abortions, performing an estimated 11,000 procedures in the pre-Roe era.... It is always better when we’re able to secure our wins through established channels, when our rights are recognized through all levels of society — and certainly, voting remains a crucial tool in our toolbox. But the feminism of disempowerment is a reminder that even when the system is rigged against us, no one can take away our truth, our personhood, our autonomy."

From "Women, the Game Is Rigged. It’s Time We Stop Playing by the Rules" by Lux Alptraum (NYT).

This essay started out well, but then got awfully confusing. It's one thing to see the limits of "empowerment" feminism, with its celebrities and slogans, but quite something else to decide you're completely disempowered and ought to adopt the mindset — and strategies — of truly oppressed people. And is she calling for violence and vigilantism? I couldn't tell. But, you know, the system is rigged against writers who won't speak clearly and who float miscellaneous ideas without following through. 

Unsurprisingly, there's no comments section over there at the Times.

"The Dutch like to say, 'Acting normal is crazy enough.' And we think that rich people are not acting normal."

"Here in Holland, we don’t believe that everybody can be rich the way people do in America, where the sky is the limit. We think 'Be average.' That’s good enough...”

Said Ellen Verkoelen, "a City Council member and Rotterdam leader of the 50Plus Party, which works on behalf of pensioners," quoted in "The Country That Wants to ‘Be Average’ vs. Jeff Bezos and His $500 Million Yacht/Why did Rotterdam stand between one of the world’s richest men and his boat? The furious response is rooted in Dutch values" (NYT).

“When I was about 11 years old, we had an American boy stay with us for a week, an exchange student,” she recalled. “And my mother told him, just make your own sandwich like you do in America. Instead of putting one sausage on his bread, he put on five. My mother was too polite to say anything to him, but to me she said in Dutch, ‘We will never eat like that in this house.’” 

At school, Ms. Verkoelen learned from friends that the American children in their homes all ate the same way. They were stunned and a little jealous. At the time, it was said in the Netherlands that putting both butter and cheese on your bread was “the devil’s sandwich.”...

At the Sunrise Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

Here are 8 TikToks to amuse you for a few minutes. Let me know what you like.

1. An odd roller coaster.

2. Can't you understand Gen-Z?

3. What do emo people do for a living?

4. Her mind is a vast chaotic wilderness.

5. Looks from the 1971 Sears catalog.

6. Noises that you can please choose not to make.

7. Cool geography facts about Montana.

8. How to feed the dog.

"The effectiveness of the TikTok experience is found in what it doesn’t require. Unlike Twitter..."

"... TikTok doesn’t need a critical mass of famous or influential people to use it for its content to prove engaging. The short-video format grabs the user’s attention at a more primal level, relying on visual novelty, or a clever interplay of music and action, or direct emotional expression, to generate its appeal. And, unlike Facebook, TikTok doesn’t require that your friends already use the service for you to find it useful. Though there are some social features built into TikTok, they’re not the main draw of the app. TikTok also doesn’t rely on its users to manually share content with friends or followers to surface compelling offerings. It assigns this responsibility to its scary-good recommendation algorithm.... [T]he app can target a user’s interests with uncanny accuracy in as little as forty minutes of observation. This rejection of the social-graph model has allowed TikTok to circumvent the barriers to entry that so effectively protected early social-media platforms like Facebook and Twitter...."

 
From "TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants Facebook is trying to copy TikTok, but this strategy may well signal the end of these legacy platforms" (The New Yorker).

Not one word about China in that article, by the way, so don't use the comments to worry about China. The issue here is that TikTok has caused Facebook to move away from its "social graph" model, which requires users to build a network of friends. 

Are drag queens not dangerous?

I'm reading "I’m a drag queen. Here’s what my art really is" by Sasha Velour.

Drag is about self-expression without shame, and free thinking about others — about showing respect and care for everyone and for all the ways we present ourselves. It’s at once illuminating and not particularly serious; in drag, we playfully reject our assumptions about how a man or a woman “should” act so we can find our own ways of being. And drag, certainly, is nothing dangerous.... 

"If you can’t understand or name what the battle is that you’re in, then it’s hard to show up to do battle."

"But for parents of color, Black parents in particular, they practice Critical Race Theory all the time. You sit your kids down for ‘the talk,’ you’re talking about Critical Race Theory. It means you’re aware of the legacies of racism. We continue to shape our lives based on it and you’d be crazy to act as though we don’t. If you didn’t, you’d be totally ill-prepared to navigate life in this country as a Black or brown person. So our objective is to allow people to see that Critical Race Theory isn’t some alien abstraction; it’s the sum total of our experiences. Critical Race Theory came out of us coming into these institutions and saying the problem isn’t just racist people. The problem is in the law and the problem is in sociology and education. It’s all of these institutions that were created when we were not part of them and they justified us not being a part of them. So now, we’re going after the structures of justification."

Says Kimberlé Crenshaw, quoted in "Why is Critical Race Theory so threatening to white people?/OPINION: Kimberlé Crenshaw, one of the founders of Critical Race Theory talks about what it means for it to become so controversial" (theGrio).

"After a year of high-profile scandals, Yale Law School is retiring an all-student listserv that became a breeding ground for progressive activism and online pile-ons..."

"If students want to 'debate important questions,' the dean of Yale Law School Heather Gerken announced in an email on Wednesday, they can post on a physical bulletin board in the law school’s hallway. 'Debate and dialogue are the touchstones of an academic institution,' Gerken said. The new forum will force students to 'take time to reflect before posting, a habit that lawyers and members of a scholarly community must practice.'"

From "Yale Law School Axes Student Listserv That Energized Protests and Scandals/Ivy League law school will force students to write physical messages on a bulletin board after the listserv turned toxic" (Washington Free Beacon).

It's mind-boggling that Yale law students can't be left to their own devices writing on an email list. 

In the days before email, students and faculty would post their views on a bulletin board, nicknamed the "Wall," in the law school’s main hallway. That system, which Yale Law School is bringing back, "provided a healthy reminder that human beings are on the receiving end of the messages people send," Gerken said. "Indeed, sometimes students would run into the very people with whom they were debating and speak face-to-face."

Yale law students can't keep track of the humanity of the people on the receiving end of the email they write? What a concession!