Out for the sunrise (and looking at a bird).

Deploying the TR precedent to promote fighting at the White House.

UFC just dropped a killer AI promo for tomorrow’s White House event featuring Theodore Roosevelt boxing 🥊🔥pic.twitter.com/W8wu2yFP6b

— TaraBull (@TaraBull) June 14, 2026

The video, from UFC, quotes from Theodore Roosevelt's idea of "the man in the arena." I've put up the full text of it in the past — here — but it's worth having at your fingertips today, as Trump celebrates his 80th birthday. Does this describe Trump?

Lake Mendota sandcastle.

That was yesterday. Here's what Meade was capturing:

"Everything about 'the Claw' feels tawdry, especially when they turn on the lights, which send bolts of blue and white illumination down the 154-foot interlocking steel arches...."

I'm reading "Joe Rogan called the White House UFC event ‘so America.’ He’s right. The 'Claw' bursting out of the White House grounds is the perfect metaphor for the moment, injecting bloody spectacle into the country’s birthday celebration" in the Washington Post

I'm reading that because it's by the Post's architecture critic, Philip Kennicott. He writes:

[T]he UFC match isn’t about celebrating the foundational myths of American democracy. It inhabits a landscape of darker myths, like the perpetual struggle of the frontier, the faux chivalry and resentments of the Lost Cause, the Darwinian drama of survival in a world of hostile forces, enemies, chaos....

Trump takes pleasure in presiding over conflict. The world comes to him, where he, the perpetual winner, lords over contests, over victories and defeats. You’re fired. You don’t hold any winning cards. You’ve lost the match. For many Americans, there is nothing surreal about this delight in domination. It simply reflects the world they live in, where people are losing all the time, at the gas pump, at dead-end jobs, in marriages that founder on the shoals of stress and poverty....

"The really worst part about being 80 is that you find, at last, you’ve got an understanding of something that might have altered everything in the past, had it come at a time when something could still be altered."

"When you’re young you think that time moves forward. At 80 you know that it doesn’t, it stands still. We’re the ones that move."

Writes Bob Dylan, answering the NYT's question what are the best things and the worst things about being 80, in "Bob Dylan and Liza Minnelli Already Turned 80. They Have Thoughts for Trump." Yes, Bob Dylan responded to a journalistic query on the occasion of Donald Trump's birthday.

Time doesn't move, but the world moves. Bob also says: "The worst thing about being 80 is that you still want to say yes to everything, but the world moves without asking. The old fire in your heart still tells you to do this and that, but your body says we already did it...."

And was time moving in the past? Bob also says: "The best thing about being 80 is that you outlive the clocks that have been chasing you. It’s freedom from that lie that anything was ever under control. You don’t chase the parade anymore. You’re an old king from some vanished country.... You’re not rushing to become anything and you’re not haunted by things that you did. You’re haunted by how little of it really mattered in the way you thought it would."

ADDED: Based on what I quoted, you might find the headline confusing. Bob didn’t say anything about Trump and what’s Liza Minnelli doing there? But the article actually has a bunch of other celebrities — Robert De Niro, Art Garfunkel, Gloria Steinem, and Dionne Warwick. And all of them, including Liza, are shown answering the question “Any advice for the president as he turns 80?” I presume Bob was asked that question too, and he refused to answer. Nevertheless, Bob’s answering of the two questions he did answer – what’s the best thing and what’s the worst thing about turning 80 – is put at the top of the article. So The New York Times wanted to make it about Trump and all the other celebrities went along with that but whatever it is Bob happened to say about aging and time mattered more, and I’m glad The New York Times was able to see that. And thanks to Bob for seeing, once again, that you don’t have to answer the question asked by the one who walks into the room with a pencil in his hand, sees the President of the United States standing naked and asks, How would you advise that man?

"The marble front remained shrouded in white- and blue-striped tarps, with no clear answer on when they would be removed."

I'm reading "At the Kennedy Center, a Name Change Shrouded in Uncertainty/President Trump’s name was removed from the arts institution’s facade overnight on Saturday. Many questions remain, including whether or not it stays off" (NYT).

“I was hoping for a reveal, honestly,” said Katy Bigge, a student at Rutgers University who was visiting Washington with her parents. Her father, Philip Bigge, was squatting on the ground, peering through a crack between the tarp and the building’s front to try to make certain that Mr. Trump’s name was gone. He could not be sure, but he thought he had detected that the letters were missing.

It seems that Trump's name is gone, but now you can't see that it's gone. It's "shrouded." Maybe some day, long in the future, when Trump is worshipped for his grand triumphs, the shroud will be on display, like the Shroud of Turin.  

"[Melinda] French Gates has said she met Epstein once and found him so repugnant that she had nightmares afterwards."

"I ask what had so chilled her. Her demeanour changes rapidly. She looks as if she is about to cry. It is upsetting to witness a woman of such unusual self-possession suddenly lose her poise. She turns away, to look at the lake outside her window, and I can see her attempt to compose herself."

I'm reading "'Have you ever been around someone you just know is evil?' Melinda French Gates on meeting Jeffrey Epstein, giving away billions, and her post-divorce peace," by Sophie McBain in The Guardian and my incredulity is sky high.

You can see her attempt to compose herself? I'm not looking at her. I'm just reading your words. But what I see is some phony-baloney acting. And silly writing. Which continues:

“My heart is racing,” she says after a moment, fluttering her hand over her chest.

Fluttering her hand over her chest? Really? This sounds like a comical drag performance of femininity. I'd like to turn away and look at a lake, but I keep reading:

Sunrise.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

"Amazing young man, he really is. Forrest Gump-like, you know what I mean? He’s amazingly real, naive to a lot of things, and it’s beautiful. "

Said Brewers manager Pat Murphy, quoted in "A record 15 K's in a Maddux, one at 104.5 mph: Miz pitches the game of the year" (MLB).

I had to ask what's a "Maddux"? Answer: "A Maddux describes a start in which a pitcher tosses a complete-game shutout on fewer than 100 pitches. Named after Hall of Famer Greg Maddux, the term was coined by baseball writer Jason Lukehart."

"Barack Hussein Obama’s Deal with Iran... was an easy, beautiful, smooth road to a Nuclear Weapon, which Iran would have had six years ago..."

"... and would have used long before now. My Agreement with Iran is the exact opposite, A WALL TO NO NUCLEAR WEAPON! In fact, they no longer want a Nuclear Weapon, nor will they have one, either through purchase, development, or any other form of procurement. The Deal is scheduled to get signed tomorrow, and immediately after it is signed, the Hormuz Strait is OPEN TO ALL."

Writes Trump, at Truth Social.

We've heard so many times that the deal is about to be signed, so generally I resist blogging about it. I'll believe it when I see it. But "The Deal is scheduled to get signed tomorrow" sounds more definite, doesn't it? Weasel word: "scheduled."

Trump continues: "Our relationship with Iran is a much different and better one than previous Administrations have had.

"I think Platner is probably worse than Newsom but he reminds me more of Fetterman, who I originally liked. That may be why I have never liked Platner."

"I am intimately acquainted with the genre of New England failsons, being as I am a faildaughter of that sort of edge of aristocracy myself. He has no principles as far as I can tell and no real experience in much of anything but arrogance. He’s bad news through and through, and I suspect a Dino if you will. Even without the nazi tattoos and the extremely believable and coherent accusations of sexual wrongdoing and quite possibly assault, this is not someone we need in the Senate."

Writes someone called mygothlaundry in a Metafilter discussion based on a Liberal Currents article titled "Graham Platner and the Class Politics of Impunity/Solidarity with working class women never seems to enter into it."

"Failsons" and "faildaughters"... I'd never noticed those words before, but, poking around, I can see they've been around for a while.

"Tasteslop is slop made out of things considered tasteful. It comes in two flavours..."

"... either AI/algorithmically generated content that deploys recognisable taste markers — a brand mood board featuring a designer suitcase, a skinny-neck kettle, a Dieter Rams book — or tasteful things deployed in service of slop, like a curated influencer dinner for a tech company. The key is that the visible signs of taste have been extracted from their original social context and redeployed generically."

Said the trend forecaster Emily Segal, quoted in "The rise of social media ‘tasteslop’ — and how to avoid it/From clothes to interiors, the internet has created good taste as defined by the algorithm. The trend forecaster Emily Segal tells us how to step away" (London Times).

After Segal coined the term it went viral.... [S]he pinpointed a dinner party at a New York restaurant considered to be classy and slender-spouted kettles as slop, and explained why Jennifer Lawrence’s style is too (“she looks more like a shopper/demographic and less like an individual figure”, Segal wrote). Once you see it …

Dieter Rams? Here's Dieter Rams pointing at things he doesn't like:

Jimmy Kimmel finds it "unsettling" that "our first trillionaire, the richest man in the world, is also one of the weirdest people we've ever seen on this planet."

"This obscenely wealthy weirdo has the ability and means to blow up the moon if he chooses and also to put a lot of other people's money in his pockets. You know, SpaceX, it will enter the stock market so highly valued a lot of 401ks will get triggered to invest in it automatically.... Wasn't he supposed to be going to Mars? Can't we chip in to help speed that up? It's a trillion dollars. It's hard for our brains to conceptualize that. I mean, we know trillion is a number, but it's so large... we can't fathom it. The same way we know like Elon has a lot of kids, but we can't fathom him getting laid, right?"

Expressing contempt for Musk because you see him as weird — and unfuckable — reads as a careless cruelty against people who are on the autism spectrum.

Musk came out very openly — 5 years ago — as a person with Asperger's syndrome:

ADDED: Remember when the Democrats' chose their candidate for Vice President based on his use of "weird" as an insult against Trump? They seemed to really think that could win the election.

"The president's threatening to leave it permanently.... We'll just host weekly fights between people in politics, you know, and settle our scores that way...."

The comic stylings of Marco Rubio:

When did I first hear the joke that, instead of fighting wars, the individual world leaders ought to put on boxing gloves and fight it out one-on-one? I believe I heard it back in the 1960s and a few times since then, but I couldn't trace it to any particular comedian or commentator. It seems to be a longstanding folk joke.

It was basically the idea behind the MTV show "Celebrity Deathmatch." From 1999, here — at TikTok — are Bill Clinton and Ken Starr fighting it out in the ring.

And here's a serious look at that immense construction on the White House lawn. Maybe you don't think this is funny or cool at all. Maybe you are truly and righteously steamed:

"I had to wrestle with myself as a feminist to do it, and it was a lot of money. But I'm very happy with the result."

"No one noticed for like six months. And then I wrote the piece, and now everyone wants to talk about it. But that's okay too. But, yeah, my daughter, who's 13, has autism, said, 'I will never respect you if you do it.'... You know, everyone has to figure it out for themselves, but don't buy into the feminine beauty myth. You know, that you can do and be whoever you are in whatever way you want to treat your body and your face and it's up to you. You know, that's a personal personal thing... I just didn't want everyone to think I look sad when I feel in fact very happy...."

Goodbye to Gene Shalit.

I never watched the "Today" show — or any of the other morning news shows — but I knew he was over there, carrying on, sporting a giant mustache, summing up movies with terse wisecracks.

He made it to 100.