Sunrise — 5:37, 5:38.

"One reason that may be behind the shrinking — if it is not just anecdotal evidence from a really small sample size — is that westernisation/modernisation/feminism encourages us to seek out and approve of 'safer' men."

Said Peter Karl Jonason, of the University of Padua, who has studied "the relationship between height and traits of narcissism and psychopathy," quoted in "Rise of the ‘short kings’: Can you guess how our leaders measure up? Size is being overlooked by voters as the idea of the ‘alpha male’ loses resonance, say experts" (London Times).

Googling the term "short king," I found this Vice article from last year: "I Asked Short Kings How 'Short King Spring' Is Going/I wanted to get a sense of what men like me are making of our time in the spotlight." I didn't notice that trend last year. Is it still going on? Is there still a trend of naming trends after a particular season? I remember "Hot Girl Summer." 

"During a live audio event on the social media platform, Musk’s team of all-male math, AI and engineering experts spoke about how they wanted to create an AI..."

"... that was smarter than humans with the goal of benefiting society. Musk said the fundamental goal of the company is to understand 'what the hell is really going on.' The event showcased how Musk seems to initially be more focused on answering deep scientific questions, rather than competing head to head with OpenAI, Google and Microsoft to create consumer AI products. Musk did say he saw his venture as an alternative to bigger AI companies but said xAI was still 'embryonic,' and that it would take time for it to catch up with OpenAI and Google...."

I'm reading "Musk’s new AI company, xAI, will aim to solve scientific mysteries The billionaire and his team of artificial intelligence researchers gave details of the company’s goals during a live Twitter event Friday" (WaPo).

If it's true that xAI is really about answering deep scientific questions — AKA understanding what the hell is going on — then this is a nice contrast to Mark Zuckerberg's Threads, which was created (it seems) to compete head to head with Twitter.

I went into the comments over there, mainly to see if they were saying what I expected them to say — essentially: We hate Musk. And, yes, there it is, right on top of the "most liked" pile of comments: "Just what we need, AI that is explicitly fascist and white supremacist."

IN THE COMMENTS: Leland writes:  

WaPo commenters are why ChatGPT does so well. Their comments seem like coherent sentences, but the words used don't create a coherent thought. What is explicitly fascist? Was Musk proposing having his AI collude with the government to control the population? That's fascism, and while it exists quite a bit these days; I don't think that is what Musk is proposing. Musk is proposing quite the opposite.

Instapundit quotes that comment in full and adds: "Nowadays anti-fascism is called 'fascism,' just as explicit racism is called 'anti-racism.'"

"I discovered right away that I really like living alone. I like experiencing the world through my own eyes..."

"... with no thought of a partner. I like myself better single than in a relationship."

Said a woman whose husband of 20 years died a few months ago. She writing to the WaPo advice columnist because she's worried that it's "wrong" that she hasn't "grieved." She gets permission to live life her own way. No need to enact a stereotype.

"Research has shown that a lonely brain is transformed. Neurotransmitters important for bonding and social connection go haywire."

"The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, responsible for modulating stress, is hyperactive. The amygdala, which triggers our fight-or-flight response and helps process emotional reactions, is in overdrive: In previous studies, Dr. Cacioppo found that lonely people detect negative or threatening pictures and words in under 400 milliseconds. This might explain not only the sadness that accompanies loneliness but also the palpable sense of danger. Such changes in the brain may help to explain why lonely individuals perceive their social environment as threatening.... For some people, loneliness becomes a self-perpetuating feedback loop and turns chronic. The neuroplastic nature of the brain, its ability to create different structural pathways, can reinforce these changes.... Though the goal is not to pathologize loneliness or to add it to the D.S.M., health care workers will need clear guidelines for identifying loneliness and triaging care. Even if a pill for loneliness were to become widely available, the goal should not be to get rid of these emotions that make up loneliness.... Medicine will play an important role in recovery, and social reform is essential to prevent future generations from succumbing to chronic loneliness...."

From "If Loneliness Is an Epidemic, How Do We Treat It?" (NYT).

Look out for the medicalization of everything. Medicine wants you.

At the Friday Night Café...

 ... you can talk about whatever you want.

"Give A.I. my job right now!"

"I'm a stupid human...."

"My Fetish for a Second Skin/As a gay Korean American, I yearned for the privilege of being heterosexual or white. So I began wearing latex, a new skin."

This is a "Modern Love" essay, by Preston Gyuwon So, in the NYT.

I was lucky that the sexuality gods, in minting a kinky Asian queer, anointed me with a fetish fun enough to give me an escape from the cruelty of this racist reality. Latex fetishism is a predilection for form-fitting rubber clothing that’s shiny, slippery, slithery, sultry.... 

"Why are the actors and writers striking?"

"Pay is often at the center of work stoppages, and that is the case here. But the rise of streaming and the challenges created by the pandemic have stressed the studios, many of which are facing financial challenges, as well as actors and writers, who are seeking better pay and new protections in a rapidly changing workplace. Both actors and screenwriters have demanded increased residual payments (a type of royalty) from streaming services. Streaming series typically have far fewer episodes than television series typically did. And it used to be that if a television series was a hit, actors and writers could count on a long stream of regular residual checks; streaming has changed the system in a way that they say has hurt them...."

From "What to Know About the Actors’ Strike/Here’s why Hollywood is facing its first industrywide shutdown in more than 60 years, and what it could mean for your favorite shows" (NYT).

"On one hand, Luke Combs is an amazing artist, and it’s great to see that someone in country music is influenced by a Black queer woman — that’s really exciting."

"But at the same time, it’s hard to really lean into that excitement knowing that Tracy Chapman would not be celebrated in the industry without that kind of middleman being a White man."

 
Said Holly G, "founder of the Black Opry, an organization for Black country music singers and fans," quoted in in "Tracy Chapman, Luke Combs and the complicated response to ‘Fast Car’/Combs’s remake of Chapman’s 1988 hit now dominates the country charts, renewing difficult conversations about diversity in Nashville" (WaPo). 

[According to] Tanner Davenport, a Nashville native and co-director of the Black Opry: White country singers struck gold this past decade releasing songs heavily influenced by R&B and hip-hop, but few Black artists are even signed to major Nashville labels.... 

The immediate success of Combs’s “Fast Car,” Davenport said, “kind of just proves that when you put a White face on Black art, it seems to be consumed a lot easier.... This genre needs to expand their boardrooms and let marginalized people be in these rooms and make a bigger bet on these artists.”...

There are 2 very different issues here. 1. How is the country music genre defined and enforced (and to what extent does it exclude black artists who want to present themselves as within the country genre)? and 2. Should white artists cover songs that were originally written by/for black singers? 

[T]he song has always had a particular significance in the Black and LGBTQ+ communities, Davenport said; the Black Opry performed a group singalong of “Fast Car” when it closed out its first show. (Chapman does not discuss her personal life, but writer Alice Walker has disclosed their relationship, which occurred in the 1990s.) “I think the song in general is pretty reflective for a lot of people who do identify as queer, and also for a person of color — the song almost seems like an anthem for us,” Davenport said. “It’s been pretty monumental in our lives, and I think it made us feel like we weren’t alone.”

So, actually, there are 4 issues here. Take the 2 spelled out above and replace "black" with "LGBTQ+."

Another issue is that there's a big difference between covering a new hit by a black/LGBTQ+ artist and covering an old song like "Fast Car." Tracy Chapman had her big hit 35 years ago. It is vastly in her interest for another artist to have a big hit covering it today. To convince straight white people not to cover the songs of songwriters who are not straight and white is to restrict the income of black/LGBTQ+ songwriters.

The author of the article, Emily Yahr, quotes an English professor who declares that "Fast Car," with its dream of driving a car away from painful circumstances, appeals to a wide audience:

Francesca Royster, author of “Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions” and an English professor at DePaul University, said the song’s story of the narrator feeling trapped and trying to escape is “a really American iconography” about cars holding the promise of freedom. “This is something country music is very invested in, too: invested in, too: the American dream of reinvention and finding happiness after a life of struggle,” Royster said....

And yet: 

... as someone who lived in Oakland, Calif., when “Fast Car” came out and saw how it connected to the queer community, she said, it’s difficult to see the success of Combs’s cover knowing that country music, with its historic emphasis on “tradition,” has generally shied away from highlighting LGBTQ+ artists and their stories — which is all part of the complexity of the current life of the song.

But there's nothing LGBTQ+ about the lyrics of that song. That's why the article has to say "part of the complexity of the current life of the song." Some people who like the original recording have a personal bond with it that connects it to things that drop out of the picture when it's sung by a straight white man. But the song stands apart from the original recording and from the artist most closely associated with it. A great song deserves multiple versions and it would be horribly unfair if black/LGBTQ+ songwriters were put in a separate category and protected from covers. 

CORRECTION: In the first draft of this post, I wrote that the song is "clearly about a woman dissatisfied with a no-good man, just like so many country songs." It was only listening to the Combs version that I realized that "my old man" refers to the singer's father. I noticed that Combs hadn't changed the lyrics to fit the heterosexual man's point of view and wondered whether he was just, as some singers do, adopting the voice of the opposite sex. That seemed interesting, and I paid more attention to the lyrics of Verse 3:

See, my old man's got a problem
He lives with a bottle, that's the way it is
He says his body's too old for working
His body's too young to look like his

At this point, I'm convinced I'm hearing about a sexual relationship. The singer, originally a woman, is unhappy with the man who won't work and doesn't even look good anymore. But then there's this: 

When mama went off and left him
She wanted more from life than he could give
I said, "Somebody's gotta take care of him"
So I quit school and that's what I did

Oh, it's dad. Deadbeat dad. Bleh. Sure. Leave him. I always thought she was leaving an inadequate sex partner. "My old man"... in my head, those words resonate with Joni Mitchell: 

That's not about daddy. 

Among the sunburn cases in Phoenix that have required hospitalization: fentanyl users who have collapsed and spent "minutes or hours splayed on the pavement."

I'm reading "Burning pavement, scalding water hoses: Perils of a Phoenix heat wave/Amid record-breaking temperatures, risks to public health from burns and other exposure soars" (WaPo).

Homeless people are particularly vulnerable. But other cases involve freakish missteps — people burned by their seat belts or mailboxes. Swimmers attempting to walk across not-so-cool cool decks. The hospital has seen truckers who drive barefoot, step down onto a parking lot surface and end up badly blistered. On the hottest days, patients have been scalded by the water coming out of their garden hoses. “That first burst of water out of there, it’s practically boiling,” said Kevin Foster, a physician and the director of the burn center. One current patient was celebrating his day off with a cocktail, fell and burned 20 percent of his body, requiring surgery and skin grafting, Foster said. “He was not a drinker. It was just enough. He went down and couldn’t get up,” he said. “All it took was that one little thing.”

The top-rated comment over there is: 

Jeezuz Christ getting burned from lying on the goddam ground?! From opening your mailbox?! From your garden hose?! And climate change deniers expect us to believe this is "just summer"? 

Lisa Marie Presley died of "'a small bowel obstruction' caused by scar tissue that developed after bariatric surgery years ago."

It says in "Lisa Marie Presley Died From Bowel Obstruction, Officials Say/The singer-songwriter and only child of Elvis Presley died in January after she was found unresponsive, the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s office said" (NYT).

Juan M. Carrillo, a deputy medical examiner in Los Angeles County, described Ms. Presley’s health problems after the bariatric surgery as a “known long-term complication of this type of surgery.”... 

For months, she complained of abdominal pain, fevers, vomiting and nausea but did not seek medical attention, according to the report. 

We're told "[t]he report stated that although Ms. Presley had a previous history of drug use, she was sober 'for the past few years'" but also that she "was prescribed opiates after her surgery" and then "another type of medication so that she could be taken off the opiates" and "toxicology results showed 'therapeutic levels of oxycodone' in her blood." Maybe I don't know the meaning of the word "sober."

Sunrise — 5:28.

Why aren't there so many songs about rainbows?

I see "Wisconsin teacher fired after criticizing district’s ‘Rainbowland’ ban/Administrators in Waukesha, Wis., had banned Melissa Tempel’s first-graders from singing the song by Dolly Parton and Miley Cyrus" (WaPo).

At Wednesday’s hearing, Tempel and her attorney, Summer Murshid... argued, the teacher’s tweets after school hours fall outside the scope of her employment and constitute "the type of speech that falls squarely within the protection afforded by the First Amendment," Murshid said. 

"I thought that the fact that the tweet that I made, that 'Rainbowland' wasn’t going to be allowed, was something that the public would be really concerned about and that they would be interested in knowing about it," said Tempel, whose supervisor deemed her a “master teacher” who was “magical with children” in her last employment review. 

"During that phone call from the White House, my father told us that if there was a nuclear war, none of us would want to be alive anyhow."

Writes RFK Jr. in "American Values/Lessons I Learned From My Family." 

While I idolized my dad, I just couldn’t go along with him on that one. What about all that planning and practicing for the apocalypse at Our Lady of Victory? What was the point of all those drills?...

I, for one, intended to be among the survivors.

"... especially useful for young women, teenagers and those who have difficulty dealing with the time, costs or logistical hurdles involved in visiting a doctor to obtain a prescription."

From "F.D.A. Approves First U.S. Over-the-Counter Birth Control Pill/The move could significantly expand access to contraception. The pill is expected to be available in early 2024" (NYT).

From the comments over there: "It should have been made available 50 years ago and should be as cheap as a bottle of generic aspirin. Let's get on with it and make it affordable."