Althouse |
- "I have a Rolls-Royce, I have three homes, I have everything I could possibly want, but I was still depressed. The way I look at this is: This is my face, and it’s going everywhere I go."
- Sunrise at 5:43 and 6:01.
- "White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday on Twitter that President Biden abhors 'violence, threats, or vandalism,' and that judges 'must be able to do their jobs without concern for their personal safety.'"
- In which I curate TikTok so you don't have to scroll. Tell me which of today's 10 filmlets delight you.
- The NYT changed the word it had planned for today's Wordle, calling it "outdated," because it "seems closely connected to a major recent news event."
- Searching for a notebook I wrote in the early 1970s, I dragged 3 dusty cardboard boxes down from the attic and into the place we call "the orange room"...
- "New human remains were found at Lake Mead in Nevada over the weekend, days after a decomposed body was found in a metal barrel at the lake's shrinking shoreline...."
- "... Democrats, nationally and in Wisconsin, [are] divided over how much to emphasize their own police-friendly credentials and how much to stick to the racial justice movement..."
- What's the difference?
| Posted: 10 May 2022 05:46 AM PDT Words of semi-wisdom by Hilda Back, 63, quoted in "And Now, the $200,000 Face-Lift/Luxury cosmetic procedures reach next level prices" (NYT).
I agree with the doctor. Skill levels vary, and there is scarcity. Why isn't it millions of dollars to get the best plastic surgeon to rearrange your face? How many times more would you have to pay to get Ed Sheeran to sing at your party as opposed to some random local singer? As for rich people who are "still depressed"... who cares? Let them buy what they want. They're not purporting to tell you what you need to do to find happiness. One can easily infer that it's not to come up with $200,000 for a facelift, but maybe not to bother striving for the Rolls-Royce and three "homes." ADDED: What does all that striving do to your face? If only you could buy happiness — would you pay $200,000 — it would probably make your face look pretty good. In a pinch: Smile! BUT: Not a pinched smile: Research shows the lines that arch above our cheeks from the corners of our eyes are viewed as a more sincere indicator of happiness. They come out when we are laughing or overjoyed. It's called a Duchenne smile, after French anatomist Guillaume Duchenne, who studied emotional expression by stimulating various facial muscles. Those lines put people more at ease than a quick pinched smile that doesn't shift other parts of the face. |
| Posted: 09 May 2022 06:05 PM PDT
Talk about whatever like in the comments. And here's the picture Meade took of me at 5:43. It was very windy. I like the way a big strand of my hair seems to want to be part of the sunrise:  |
| Posted: 09 May 2022 07:01 PM PDT "This was a welcome clarification of the noncommittal statement Ms. Psaki made Friday. A Montgomery County ordinance permits protest marches in residential areas but bars stationary gatherings, arguably such as those in front of the Roberts and Kavanaugh residences. A federal law — 18 U.S.C. Section 1507 — prohibits 'pickets or parades' at any judge's residence, 'with the intent of influencing' a jurist 'in the discharge of his duty.' These are limited and justifiable restraints on where and how people exercise the right to assembly. Citizens should voluntarily abide by them, in letter and spirit. If not, the relevant governments should take appropriate action." Writes the Editorial Board of The Washington Post in "Leave the justices alone at home." One thing the editorial doesn't mention is that this physically threatening activism is detrimental to the abortion rights cause. Many, perhaps most, Americans are conflicted about abortion, and this violent or violence-adjacent behavior may make it harder for them — for us — to take refuge in the intellectualized principle of personal autonomy that makes it possible to understand abortion as an individual right. If abortion is just a cause for a battle of wills — if there is violence or the threat of violence — the fact that what is demanded is an entitlement to commit violence against the unborn might draw those who have been so conflicted to the anti-abortion side. |
| Posted: 09 May 2022 05:13 PM PDT 1. In the 90s, you had to wear a thong. 2. Asking Irish people to do an American accent. 3. Present day celebrities who look uncannily like somebody in a photo from the distant past. 4. Things he's apologized to his wife for. 5. An actor and scholar of acting explains what's so wrong about Amber Heard's testimony. 6. A clear aerial view of Rich Strike's impossible Derby win. 7. The alien welcomes you to space. 8. A man in his 20s with "the social life of a pensioner." 10. The insufferable vocal fry of indie films. |
| Posted: 09 May 2022 01:48 PM PDT And The Hill finds out what exactly that meant: The word was "fetus." According to the Times, the connection to the leaked Supreme Court opinion was "entirely unintentional and a coincidence." We're told "today's original answer was loaded into Wordle last year." And: "At New York Times Games, we take our role seriously as a place to entertain and escape, and we want Wordle to remain distinct from the news." That's a good policy! But I'd say, in that light, "fetus" should never have been chosen as the answer. It's never going to be good entertainment and escape. |
| Posted: 10 May 2022 04:52 AM PDT ... even though it's not orange anymore. Last month, I'd moved one big attic box into that room and spent a day searching for the notebook, then left the "orange room" looking like a stage set at the end of Act I. The character (me) has been rooting around for the notebook and flinging old manuscripts on the floor. After yesterday, as the curtain opens on Act II, the set looks like this:
Time has passed. The character is still looking. But the truth is, when I sat down in that chair to do a new session of rooting and flinging, I took the first item off the top of the pile on the table, and — lo and behold — it was the notebook! I was thrilled to find the notebook, which is 139 handwritten pages of the effort I made, when I was in my early 20s, to preserve my memories of childhood. I might tell you some more about that some time. The entries are numbered. There are 130 of them. Are they like blog posts? Yes and no. In blogging, I'm much more cagey about how much I let you see into my private life. As the orange room continues in that Act II condition, I'm at my table in the room we call "the big room" on what is the 6,690th day of writing this blog. The blue notebook is at my elbow, expecting to be read. Now that I've found it, I know where it is and don't need to wolf it down suddenly. I want to observe myself reading it. Are these the memories I remember? Is this an unremembered thing juxtaposed to an intact memory? Meade wasn't around when I dragged the boxes out of the attic and into the orange room, but this morning, he found a little scrap of newsprint that had flown free of one of the boxes and landed on the hallway floor. One can only guess how this snippet got to survive in our attic all these years, but I'm sure it never expected life would end so good:
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| Posted: 09 May 2022 06:50 AM PDT "The discovery comes nearly a week after remains were found in a barrel at Lake Mead on May 1, exposed by receding water levels. That victim was believed to have been killed between the mid-1970s and the early 1980s based on clothing and footwear the victim was found with, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said....." The shrinking water exposes decades-old murders, and the date is estimated based on a police assessment of whatever was left of the fashion. Was the skeleton wearing platform shoes? |
| Posted: 09 May 2022 06:05 AM PDT "... that erupted anew in 2020. [Governor Tony] Evers, for example, has unilaterally funneled more than $56 million in federal funds to law enforcement, a move that enables him to circumvent a legislative maze controlled by Republicans who some Democrats worry are hesitant to give Evers a win in an election year.... But Rep. David Bowen, a Democratic state legislator who represents Milwaukee and is running for lieutenant governor... worried that moving too quickly away from police accountability would sour voters on Democrats who promised change... The National Republican Senatorial Committee recently attacked Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes — one of the Democrats who hopes to challenge Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) in the fall — for refusing to say whether he still supports cash bail.... The ad said Barnes 'also refuses to oppose defunding the police.' Barnes's campaign declined to comment for this article. One of the earliest campaign ads for Rebecca Kleefisch, one of the Republicans trying to unseat the state's Democratic governor, begins with an image of Kenosha in flames. 'One year ago, Kenosha burned while Tony Evers failed to lead,' Kleefisch says in the ad, at one point walking past a boarded-up business. 'Lives were lost, and small businesses were burned because our governor sided with rioters over the people of this community.' Strategists for both sides say it is too early to predict for certain which issues will be salient in a midterm election six months from now and whether crime will still be a top concern." From "In Wisconsin, a complex debate on crime foreshadows a midterm fight" (WaPo). |
| Posted: 09 May 2022 05:50 AM PDT
It's interesting, the differences that matter to people, the endless quest to distinguish alligators from crocodiles and psychopaths from sociopaths, but what I wanted to know was the difference between vandalism and terrorism. I'm reading "Madison anti-abortion headquarters hit by apparent Molotov cocktail, vandalism, graffiti" in the Wisconsin State Journal: "Vandals set a fire inside the Madison headquarters of the anti-abortion group...." What is the word "vandalism" doing in that headline, which specifies 2 things — Molotov cocktail and graffiti? Is there some additional thing that was done that justifies putting "vandalism" in that sequence of words? A firebombing is more than vandalism, and the graffiti says "If abortions aren't safe then you aren't either," so there was a specific intent to terrorize people over their political beliefs and actions. I blogged that article last night — here — and I didn't say much, but I did shift to the word "terrorists" after quoting the newspaper's word "vandalism." (I wrote "The terrorists left graffiti....") To say "vandalism" is to minimize the seriousness of this crime. Ironically, it also elevates the target, since the older meanings of "vandalism" highlight the destruction of things that are "beautiful, venerable, or worthy of preservation" (OED). This morning, I'm seeing that The New York Times is using the word "vandalism" (the headline — "Anti-Abortion Group in Wisconsin Is Hit by Arson, Authorities Say" — uses the word "arson"):
Why call it "an act of vandalism"? That seems to ascribe a motivation to whoever did this — a motivation of either random destruction or irreverence. But, based on the graffiti, the motive was to terrorize. If you hesitate to say "terrorism," refrain from talking about the motive. Don't downgrade it by calling it "vandalism." And ask yourself, NYT, if a pro-abortion group were firebombed and graffiti'd with an equivalent threat, would you not easily and comfortably go to the strong word "terrorism"? |
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