At the Mudface Café...

... you can talk all night.

I had already decided on the title "At the Mudface Café" for my day-ending open thread post using that photo of the seeming face I saw in the mud on the trail today. 

And after that pedestrian pareidolia, as I kept walking the muddy path, I was struck to hear this passage in my audiobook:

"When those on the creative side of fashion could be using their platform to share progressive values, it seems like many are acquiescing rather than pushing back."

"It’s frustrating to see the industry take a step back."

Said Sara Ziff, who leads a "models’ rights" organization. She's quoted in "Why Ultrathin Is In/When it comes to fashion models, the body diversity revolution appears to be at an end" (NYT).

Extreme thinness among models is “not really new — this kind of thing is cyclical,” she said. But this time around, she added, “it seems to echo the current political climate.”

Political???

"We're not gonna make t-shirts in this country again."

That line stuck in my head. It's from yesterday's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast yesterday, "Why a Worrisome Economy Doesn’t Seem to Worry Trump." (That's a Podscribe link with transcript and audio.)

The speaker is NYT economics reporter Ben Casselman. Context:

There are a lot of economists who reject the very idea that we need to re-industrialize the country in some way, right? They argue that over the decades, free trade has left Americans better off on the whole. That even if it has hurt some people, that on average it has been beneficial. I think most economists would make that point. But there's certainly been a lot of rethinking among at least some economists over the past couple of decades about the way that free trade has played out. Again, complicated subject, but I think the thing that there's pretty broad based agreement about is we can't just turn the clock back. We're not gonna make t-shirts in this country again.

"One day I saw this camera room, and nobody was in there, and I took one and tested it, walked ou,t and they never noticed that a camera was missing."

Said Werner Herzog to Anderson Cooper, who injected flatly: "That's a stolen camera."

Herzog: "It was more expropriation than theft. You have to have a certain amount of, I say, good criminal energy to make a film. Sometimes, yes, you have to go outside of what the norm is."

And I like this, about Klaus Kinski: "I had a a mad man as a leading character. He had a temper as demented as it gets. You had to contain him, and I made his madness — his explosive destructiveness —productive for the screen.... Every gray hair on my head I call Kinsky."

"All Voters who believe in Common Sense should GET OUT TO VOTE EARLY for Brad Schimel. By turning out and VOTING EARLY, you will be helping to Uphold the Rule of Law..."

"... Protect our Incredible Police, Secure our Beloved Constitution, Safeguard our Inalienable Rights, and PRESERVE LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL."

That's how Trump put it on Truth Social, quoted in "Trump Jumps Into a Major Wisconsin Court Race With an Endorsement/The president threw his support to Brad Schimel, the conservative candidate in a race for control of the battleground state’s top court. Elon Musk has spent millions of dollars on the contest" (NYT).

Does it help a state supreme court candidate to be so closely aligned with Trump? Don't we — a lot of us — think judges should be politically neutral arbiters of the law? 

Well, as Trump portrays it, it's the other side that's political. His guy is there to uphold the law and protect our rights. Trump is a political figure, but he respects the traditional values of the judiciary and vouches for Brad Schimel as an upholder of those values. Of course, that's utter garbage to the other side. This is the conventional discourse of judicial elections in Wisconsin. It's possible that the appeal to traditional values motivates conservatives more than liberals, but is Trump's position on traditional values credible, or does his appearance fire up the Trump haters?

Most important here is that the judicial election is isolated from more political elections, so there tends to be a low turnout. There are a lot of people in Wisconsin who love Trump. Maybe these people wouldn't even notice the judicial election or wouldn't bother to vote, but if Trump says, come on, this matters, get out there, maybe they'll stampede to the polls. Yes, it's a cue to Trump haters to get out there and cancel those votes, but the anti-Trumpers are a step behind.

The relevant election day is April 1st. Trump says vote early. If you wait until election day, you might forget or you might have something else going on.

"The Bidens are still living in an alternative universe that revolves only around them. Their irresponsibility, family ego and selfishness..."

"... put the Democratic Party in this position in the first place.… The Biden family — and the disconnected reality that they and their ineffective little circle live in — is responsible for the Trump sequel and the wilderness the Democratic Party finds itself in today.... These people drank so much of their own Kool-Aid... that they believed — and still seemingly believe — that an 82-year-old man with a 38% approval rating on a good day, who can’t sit down for a simple traditional 10-minute pre-Super Bowl interview, was the answer for Democrats in 2024 and now this same group thinks the Bidens are the answer for Democrats now? The fact that they continue to surround themselves with the same cast of clowns who delivered them nothing but the most devastating humiliation in modern political history — a president’s own power taken away by his own party — is all you need to know about them. They’ve learned nothing and they are the absolutely last and worst remedy for what ails the party in 2025 and 2026."

Said "a onetime senior White House adviser, quoted in "Biden aides, more Democrats pile on ex-prez’s offer to boost party fundraising after 2024 disaster...." (NY Post).

Did the Bidens "put the Democratic Party in this position" or did the Democratic Party put the Bidens in the place where they found themselves? What happened "in the first place"? The Democratic Party has itself to blame for forcing Biden on the country in 2020 and for everything that happened down the line.

ADDED: Dana Carvey captured the essence (on last night's new episode of "Real Time"):

Sunrise — 6:42, 6:56, 7:00.

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"The chairman of Paul Weiss sought to reassure employees at the giant law firm that the deal it had reached with President Trump was consistent with principles that the 150-year-old firm has long stood by."

From "Paul Weiss Chair Says Deal With Trump Adheres to Firm’s Principles/In an email message, the law firm’s chairman, Brad Karp, reassured employees that its deal with President Trump was in keeping with its principles" (NYT)(free-access link).

Here's Trump's post on the subject:

"A group funded by billionaire Elon Musk is offering Wisconsin voters $100 to sign a petition in opposition to 'activist judges,' a move that comes two weeks before the state’s Supreme Court election and after the political action committee made a similar proposal last year in battleground states."

AP reports.

Meade took a picture of me at daybreak.

7:01 a.m.

Let this be a midday café. That is, write about anything you want. 

"I learned... what people write. Cultural references, jokes, weather conditions, or the difficulty of an ascent. Sarcastic comments..."

"... about needing to quit smoking or arriving stoned. A lot of humorous begging for a helicopter ride down. Catalogs of wildlife spotted or lamentably not. A lot of misspellings (which I’ve retained). A lot of thanks to God."

From "Why Do We Leave Notes on Top of Mountains? It’s Personal/For centuries, people have left all sorts of notes in summit registers. I looked through 100 years of love letters and spontaneous exaltation, including my own family's, to find out why." (Outside).

You can see trends in handwriting styles (neat cursive, like the kind taught by nuns, giving way over time to chicken scratch), as well as music and literature (lots of Grateful Dead and Dharma Bums). Some writers refer to previous entries. Most seemed not to have thought about what they’d write until they arrived. Instead, the words left in registers are simply tactile evidence that someone was there at a certain point in time: alone, with friends, or with the people they love.

One register entry found by the author: "If you are a single woman and made it this far to read these scribblings: I love you!! Marry me!"

And — this isn't in the article, but — here's a quote from "The Dharma Bums": "Oh my God, sociability is just a big smile and a big smile is nothing but teeth, I wish I could just stay up here and rest and be kind."

I always had a complicated relationship with the United States, which was far from perfect, but the U.S. was always the shining city on the hill."

"But now. we’ve lost not only the power that protected us, but also the guiding star in the sky."

Joschka Fischer, identified by the NYT as "a former foreign minister, radical leftist in his younger days and now a Green party stalwart."

He's quoted in "In Germany, ‘Orphaned’ by U.S., Shock Gives Way to Action/No country in Europe is as much a product of enlightened postwar American diplomacy. Now adrift, it has begun to reckon with a new world."

Who said "orphaned"? Who viewed Germany as America's child?

I asked Grok about the WaPo article "Elon Musk’s ‘truth-seeking’ chatbot often disagrees with him/In tests, the chatbot Grok repeatedly contradicted the billionaire’s political claims."

Here's a free-access link to the WaPo article.

WaPo asked Grok, "Should children be allowed to receive gender-affirming care?" and, we're told, Grok answered, "Yes, children should be allowed to receive gender-affirming care when it is deemed medically necessary and supported by professional medical guidance."

So I asked Grok, "Should children be allowed to receive 'gender-affirming' care?" Same words — though I did add quote marks. (Why did I do that? Because it's an expression, not a strictly truth-based term. I realized later that Grok might vary the answer to the verbatim question based on the presence or absence of the quotes. Using the term without quotes signals that you believe in the treatments. Using the quotes conveys skepticism.)

I did not get the answer reported in the WaPo article. 

Here's what Grok said to me:

Bill Burr goes on "The View" and insults nerds... sexistly.

NEW: Comedian Bill Burr says he is mad at Elon Musk, calls him a "nerd" who doesn't "know how to talk to hot women."

The comments come days after Burr directly compared Elon Musk to Adolf Hitler.

Behar: "Is there anybody getting your ire up more these days than usual?"

Burr:… pic.twitter.com/6aOOtacajl

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) March 20, 2025

I'm saying it's sexist because of the line: "All these tech nerds that want to build robots because they don’t know how to talk to hot women." This is the kind of sexism you used to hear all the time half a century ago. A negative personality trait — or even just an interest in science or a hobby — would be attributed to a failure to have sexual intercourse. People with very little comic talent would think they were witty to say things like "You need to get laid."

I heard Tim Dillon — who's kind of my favorite comedian — make a similar joke on his podcast that came out on March 13th: "Now I understand there's man children out there that wanna fly rockets to Mars because they can't fly their penis into a vagina."

Did Burr just steal Dillon's joke, sanitize it, and run over to talk about it with the "hot women" on "The View"?!

Gavinx.

THIS IS BRUTAL! Gavin Newsom claimed on his podcast that no one in his office ever used the word "Latinx" to describe Latinos, so CNN aired a compilation of Newsom himself saying it REPEATEDLY.

It's amazing to see leftists tearing themselves apart.

Newsom: "By the way, not one… pic.twitter.com/jM1YxiWxeC

— George (@BehizyTweets) March 21, 2025

The first day of Spring — 6:49 a.m.

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ADDED: I left this in draft overnight. Sorry! It does say "Published on 3/20/25 6:41 PM" in the sidebar, but somehow it ended up in draft. The accuracy of the post title depends on the date being March 20th.