Trendlist: Althouse

Saturday, July 23, 2022

Althouse

Weeds of July.
Solfege?
"I feel like women have to be more careful and more selective now in who they have intercourse with."
Sunrise — 5:28, 5:35, 5:40.
Just 4 TikToks tonight. Let me know what you like.
"This Biennale, which runs through Sept. 18, is serious. Very serious. It verges on humorless...."
Bannon guilty!
Coneflower at dawn, with insect.
"Can I use 'It/It’s' as gender pronouns?"
"Gratefulness is where I live cuz my granny, gmama, momma, family modeled and instilled it in me. It isn’t a posture of less than or crumbs scraping..."
The car and the crane at 6 a.m.
"We both have the same interests, but our viewpoints are different: He has the scientific viewpoint, and I have the psychological and the spiritual."
"If a tech company operates in mainland China, the Communist Party can easily gain access to its data."
In its article about Dave Chappelle, The Washington Post changes "recent transphobic jokes" to "recent jokes about transgender people" and makes no note of the correction.
Sunrise...
Just 4 TikToks tonight. Let me know what you like.
"Comedian Dave Chappelle’s show at a Minneapolis venue on Wednesday was canceled hours before he was set to take the stage because of backlash from staff and the community over his recent transphobic [sic] jokes...."
"Biden tests positive for covid-19, White House says."
Know thyself?
Whatever happened to "defund the police"?
"Inside, the church was less than half full. There were plenty of Hermès bags but few boldfaced names from the gilt-covered slice of Manhattan society the couple had inhabited..."
"The worst line I ever wrote as a pundit... was... 'If by now you don’t find Donald Trump appalling, you’re appalling.'"
"Doing a set at Summerfest on July 21, 1972" — 50 years ago today — "[George] Carlin went through much of the material on his latest album, 'Class Clown,' including 'Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.'"
Sunrise — 5:18, 5:37, 5:40.
Tonight, I am serving up 9 TikTok videos. Let me know what you like.

Weeds of July.

Posted: 23 Jul 2022 08:27 AM PDT

Joe Pye weed:

Butterfly weed:

Feel free to write about anything you want in the comments. Raise your own topics. Myself, I've read a lot of news stories this morning and my rejection rate is unusually high.

Some headlines feel so stupid — "Finally, the dam is breaking against Trump" — that it puts me off all the surrounding headlines. It's like a disease.

Did you know monkeypox is an emergency? Did you know there's a movie called "Nope"? Did you know "Liz Holtzman Wants Another Crack at Congress, 50 Years Later"? Did you know "Joe Manchin Squanders an Opportunity and Ushers In Despair"? Are you interested in News of the Future: "Jan. 6 Panel After 8 Hearings: Where Will the Evidence Lead?"

I remember when the walls were closing in on Trump. That's gone on for so many years that it's impossible to picture the smallness of the room where Trump exists within constantly encroaching walls.

Did you think "the walls are closing in" was always a reference to "Star Wars"?

Actually, no. Franklin Roosevelt said it in 1944: "The walls are closing in remorselessly on our enemies."

But anyway, somebody seemed to think it might work to switch the metaphor to "the dam is breaking against Trump." What's the image? What does "against" refer to? Where are we to picture Trump in relation to this dam? If the evidence against him is the water pressure behind the dam, then Trump would need to be the dam? What does it mean to "break against"? Waves break against the shore, but what does a dam break against?

I'm still interested in analyzing stupid and trite metaphors, but I will not read articles that look from a distance like pornography for Trump haters.

Solfege?

Posted: 23 Jul 2022 06:41 AM PDT

Anyone else annoyed by "solfege"? That is, apparently, "solfège." Accent grave over the "e."

In music, solfège... or solfeggio... also called sol-fa, solfa, solfeo, among many names, is a music education method used to teach aural skills, pitch and sight-reading of Western music. Solfège is a form of solmization, though the two terms are sometimes used interchangeably.

Syllables are assigned to the notes of the scale and enable the musician to audiate, or mentally hear, the pitches of a piece of music being seen for the first time and then to sing them aloud. Through the Renaissance (and much later in some shapenote publications) various interlocking 4, 5 and 6-note systems were employed to cover the octave.

If you don't know why this is annoying me today, I have to begin with a spoiler alert:

Ridiculously hard segment of today's NYT crossword:

I love the Saturday puzzle, but normally when it comes together, you do know the words. "Solfège" was utterly alien to me, and I had SO-FE-E and the across words in those 2 blanks were also unknown to me. Wiley Post? I can write a wily post but I'd never heard of Wiley Post. The "g" was the last letter I got in "logic gate," which I was just guessing. I don't know about logic gates. The clue was "Circuit building block," and I just had to figure maybe, in circuitry, there's something called a "logic gate."

I was shocked when the "L" and the "G" triggered the "CONGRATULATIONS" pop up. Really? Solfege is a word?

Anyway:

Wiley Hardeman Post (November 22, 1898 – August 15, 1935) was a famed American aviator during the interwar period and the first pilot to fly solo around the world. Also known for his work in high-altitude flying, Post helped develop one of the first pressure suits and discovered the jet stream. On August 15, 1935, Post and American humorist Will Rogers were killed when Post's aircraft crashed on takeoff from a lagoon near Point Barrow in the Territory of Alaska.

Finally, "Accent grave over the 'e'" is a movie reference, you know.

"I feel like women have to be more careful and more selective now in who they have intercourse with."

Posted: 23 Jul 2022 05:26 AM PDT

"If something happens with your birth control or your condom breaks, this potentially could be a partner stuck in your life forever because now you have to raise a child together."

Said Sarah Molina, 25, a "newly single" "event planner in Phoenix" who had been eager "to get back on the dating scene" until the overturning of Roe v. Wade "changed" her attitude toward sex, even though "abortion is currently legal in Arizona."

That's from "Sorry, Summer/We all know what happened with summer 2020. Then 2021 was dampened by Delta. This year, any anticipated return to revelry has been hampered by … *waves hands at everything.* Is there hope for enjoying the once fun season?" (NYT).

I read that article, then clicked a link at the bottom of that page, and it took me to this wedding story: "His Better Banter Won Her Over/Daniel Ogorzalek and Blair Dawson met in 2016 at the Brooklyn bar where she was working. He was drawn to her 'quick wit,' while she appreciated his 'incredible repartee.'"

The last line of that, spoken by the bride, is: "At the end of the day, we both think life should be fun above all else. Laughter is an integral ever-presence and underscores every aspect of our relationship."

Fun above all else. Says a bride, binding her life to a partner forever. Once you have a partner who values fun above all else, you don't have to fret, like the "newly single" ladies, about sex leading to childbirth that could bind you forever to some random man, like back in the olden days.

From the wedding article: "Instead of being accompanied down the aisle, Ms. Dawson sauntered into the venue alone to the song 'SpottieOttieDopaliscious' by Outkast." So I started to listen to "SpottieOttieDopaliscious" on Spotify.

My personal, ethical rule is to turn off any recording if it contains the n-word. After the intro, which consisted of many repetitions of the words "damn" and "James," the verse began, and the 18th word was the word that requires me to turn it off. So you tell me, what is this life of "fun above all else" that begins with a beautiful blonde in a white dress "sauntering" to:

Dickie shorts, Lincoln's clean
Leanin', checking out the scene
Gangsta boys, Bigga's lit
Ridin' out, talkin' shit
N****, where you wanna go?

Sing along with that, white person, and your life of fun will instantly transmogrify into a life of crushing pain.

I'll just sign off by repeating the NYT question: "Is there hope for enjoying the once fun season?"

Sunrise — 5:28, 5:35, 5:40.

Posted: 22 Jul 2022 06:14 PM PDT

Talk about whatever you like in the comments.

Just 4 TikToks tonight. Let me know what you like.

Posted: 23 Jul 2022 10:38 AM PDT

1. Singing "Hey there, lonely girl" to a random woman in the supermarket.

4. Some nice young people harmonize singing "Landslide" quite sincerely.

2. The Drew Barrymore Effect. (If you watched #5 on the July 19th post, you'll get this.)

3. A man dresses for summer, Regency style.

(Just talk about these videos in the comments. If you want to rag on TikTok, there's a specific post about that: here. This post is purely for the enjoyment of videos, not discussion of the platform that happens to host them.)

"This Biennale, which runs through Sept. 18, is serious. Very serious. It verges on humorless...."

Posted: 22 Jul 2022 12:17 PM PDT

"[The curator's] statement notes that today's 'profusion of sprawling, monumental exhibitions' mirrors 'the material excesses' of global capitalism, and asks: 'So why add yet another exhibition to this?' The answer he reaches is that art — perhaps uniquely — can reclaim our attention from algorithmically enforced social control.... Mai Nguyen-Long's 'Vomit Girl' and 'Specimen' sculpture series... grapple with the aftermath of Agent Orange bombings in Vietnam.... Even blunter are Mayuri Chari's vulvas sculpted from cow dung... address the shaming of women's bodies in India amid conservative Hinduism's obsession with purity.... This Biennale is... all over the place — one must study the scatter in an attempt to understand the collision that produced it. Its contradictions, I suspect, reflect those of the 'decolonial'.... Whereas decolonization in the classic sense was a political, territorial project with no inherent grievance against modernity, today's 'decolonial practice' is about changing systems of knowledge — a woolier, potentially endless project. This Biennale is presented as a gathering of 'decolonial strategies.' The task... is tending 'all of the wounds accumulated throughout the history of Western modernity.'... This Berlin Biennale feels... overloaded by its own conceptual apparatus...."

From "Berlin Biennale Wrestles With Big Issues (and Itself)/A powerful and relentlessly political exhibition takes on all the world's crises — at the risk of conceptual overload" by Siddhartha Mitter (NYT).

Bannon guilty!

Posted: 22 Jul 2022 06:17 PM PDT

The NYT reports.

The jury deliberated for less than three hours. The guilty verdict came after weeks of heated speeches by Mr. Bannon outside the federal courthouse in Washington, a lengthy jury selection process and a speedy trial that a judge had vowed to keep from becoming "a political circus."...

Although Mr. Bannon was found guilty of what amounted to a low-level process crime, his conviction was the first of a close aide to Mr. Trump to result from one of the chief investigations into the Capitol attack....

ADDED: Bannon spoke to the press after the verdict:

Coneflower at dawn, with insect.

Posted: 22 Jul 2022 06:46 AM PDT

"Can I use 'It/It’s' as gender pronouns?"

Posted: 22 Jul 2022 06:19 AM PDT

A Quora question.

I see 2 extra problems — extra problems beyond the usual issues surrounding pronoun preferences.

First, you're requiring other people to use a word that is dehumanizing, that portrays you as a thing and not a person.

I noticed this problem in the context of attempting to answer the question, "What's with the weird, kinda ominous music on the Barron Trump video? Sounds like the music you'd hear on a true crime documentary about the hunt for the Sheep Ranch Killers or something."

I said, "I think it's trying to say: Look, there's a duplicate Trump, and it's bigger and stranger...." I used the word "it" to convey the thinking of someone who regarded Barron Trump as not human but a monstrous thing.

Second, you're going to force other people to get the punctuation wrong? It's? Not its?

"Gratefulness is where I live cuz my granny, gmama, momma, family modeled and instilled it in me. It isn’t a posture of less than or crumbs scraping..."

Posted: 22 Jul 2022 05:31 AM PDT

"... but one that acknowledges good things aren't a guarantee and when we encounter them thankfulness, gratefulness is the least we can express."

Said Shonka Dukureh, who played Big Mama Thornton in the Baz Luhrmann movie "Elvis," quoted, unfortunately, in a report that she has died at the age of 44 (NY Post).

Here's a slice of the trailer that I clipped to show Dukureh:

The car and the crane at 6 a.m.

Posted: 22 Jul 2022 05:13 AM PDT

Here's the action version — just 4 seconds:

"We both have the same interests, but our viewpoints are different: He has the scientific viewpoint, and I have the psychological and the spiritual."

Posted: 22 Jul 2022 04:46 AM PDT

Said Ann Shulgin, quoted in "Ann Shulgin, 91, Who Explored Psychedelics With Her Husband, Dies The couple advocated the use of hallucinogens in psychotherapy and documented their experiences with hundreds of drugs in two widely read books" (NYT).

["PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story" (1991)] is divided into two parts: first a thinly veiled autobiography, then a do-it-yourself guide to making some 170 drugs, a feature that made this self-published volume an underground hit in the United States and Europe....

"Inventing new psychoactive drugs," Ms. Shulgin told The Los Angeles Times in 1995, "is like composing new music."...

She took her first psychedelic trip in the early 1960s, at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. "We stopped and looked around us at the earth, the sky and each other, then I saw something forming in the air, slightly above the level of my head," she recalled in "PiHKAL."

"It was a moving spiral opening, up there in the cool air, and I knew it was a doorway to the other side of existence."

"If a tech company operates in mainland China, the Communist Party can easily gain access to its data."

Posted: 22 Jul 2022 04:36 AM PDT

"One way is through China's Data Security Law, which allows the government to regulate private companies' practices for storing and managing information in China if they collect 'core data' -- a broad term that means anything Beijing sees as a national or security concern....There is a lot the Chinese government might find valuable in the data TikTok collects about American users. According to the company's privacy policy, it collects consumers' real-time location, search history and biometric data (e.g., fingerprints or facial imprints). Such information is invaluable to create identity profiles, which hackers sell to the highest bidder in Chinese black markets to commit identity fraud.... Worse, TikTok requires the use of your device's microphone to collect voiceprints. Without access to TikTok's source code, which only the company possesses, it's hard to know what the app does with the permissions it's given.... If TikTok's access is as expansive as that implies, the Chinese government could use a smartphone as a listening device.... This opens a terrifying gap in our nation's security by giving China the ability to listen to government officials' private conversations...."

From "On TikTok, It's All Fun and Games Until China Wants Your Info/The app could be stealing your fingerprints or turning your smartphone into a listening device" (in the Wall Street Journal).

In its article about Dave Chappelle, The Washington Post changes "recent transphobic jokes" to "recent jokes about transgender people" and makes no note of the correction.

Posted: 22 Jul 2022 02:59 AM PDT

I'm just noticing this now, as I review the comments on yesterday's post, which has a title that quotes the first paragraph of the WaPo article, "Comedian Dave Chappelle's show at a Minneapolis venue on Wednesday was canceled hours before he was set to take the stage because of backlash from staff and the community over his recent transphobic [sic] jokes...."

I added the "sic" and reinforced my criticism by quoting one of the comments at WaPo:

... backlash from staff and the community over his recent transphobic jokes.

You've just accepted the criticism of Chappelle at face value, I see. Personally, if I'd been editing this, I would have changed it to "jokes perceived by some as transphobic." Or maybe even "jokes involving transsexuals."

By stating it as you have, you've sided with his critics in, not an opinion column, but what is ostensibly an objective news story. Nice job, WAPO.

I wrote, "Do I need a '[sic]' after 'transsexual'?" because I think "transgender" is the preferred term, but other than that, I think that comment said it well.

WaPo has now changed "recent transphobic jokes" to "recent jokes about transgender people."

I've added an update to my original post, and I'll repeat my criticism that this was an important, substantive change correcting a shameful journalistic mistake. It should be acknowledged forthrightly, with assurance that the paper will pay attention and make an effort to avoid repeating this mistake.

I want to see a "CORRECTION" notice on this article!

Sunrise...

Posted: 21 Jul 2022 05:36 PM PDT

... with coneflower...

... and rattlesnake master....

Write about anything you want in the comments.

Just 4 TikToks tonight. Let me know what you like.

Posted: 21 Jul 2022 05:38 PM PDT

1. Barron has grown impossibly tall.

2. Kamala's reaction to Joe's getting covid.

3. All the things he had to apologize to his wife for.

4. How to drink wine in the rain.

"Comedian Dave Chappelle’s show at a Minneapolis venue on Wednesday was canceled hours before he was set to take the stage because of backlash from staff and the community over his recent transphobic [sic] jokes...."

Posted: 22 Jul 2022 02:44 AM PDT

"'To staff, artists, and our community, we hear you and we are sorry,' First Avenue said in a statement, which was posted to social media less than three hours before the show was scheduled to begin. 'We know we must hold ourselves to the highest standards, and we know we let you down. We are not just a black box with people in it, and we understand that First Ave is not just a room, but meaningful beyond our walls.' The storied venue, which is best known for its appearances in Prince's 1984 film 'Purple Rain,' added that while it believes in diverse voices and the freedom of artistic expression, 'we lost sight of the impact' booking Chappelle would have on the community.... ...First Avenue said Chappelle's show was moved to the Varsity Theater, where all tickets for the performance would be honored. Chappelle had already been scheduled to perform at the Varsity Theater on Thursday and Friday. "

WaPo reports.

I added "[sic]" before seeing this in the comments over there:

... backlash from staff and the community over his recent transphobic jokes.

You've just accepted the criticism of Chappelle at face value, I see. Personally, if I'd been editing this, I would have changed it to "jokes perceived by some as transphobic." Or maybe even "jokes involving transsexuals."

By stating it as you have, you've sided with his critics in, not an opinion column, but what is ostensibly an objective news story. Nice job, WAPO.

Do I need a "[sic]" after "transsexual"?

First Ave is not just another venue. It's mythic, and it's fine for it to withhold its aura from performers who don't express what it wants to express. But who decides what an inanimate place "wants"? How does a group — "... staff, artists, and our community, we..." — coalesce and make a judgment? It matters, and it affects the aura.

UPDATE: The first paragraph of the article — quoted in my post title — now reads: "Comedian Dave Chappelle's show at a Minneapolis venue on Wednesday was canceled hours before he was set to take the stage because of backlash from staff and the community over his recent jokes about transgender people."

That is "recent transphobic jokes" became "recent jokes about transgender people." This important, substantive change was made without noting the correction. It was a terrible journalistic mistake, and it should be addressed openly.

"Biden tests positive for covid-19, White House says."

Posted: 21 Jul 2022 07:55 AM PDT

WaPo reports.

Biden, 79, is fully vaccinated and boosted, and as president has access to some of the best medical care in the world. But elderly people often suffer more serious symptoms than younger individuals, and Biden's positive test is likely to send tremors through the political world and the international community until the course of his disease is clearer....

Despite covid-19 having increasingly seeped into Biden's inner circle — infecting everyone from his family members to many of his top advisers — the president had, until Thursday, managed to avoid the illness.

Know thyself?

Posted: 21 Jul 2022 07:19 AM PDT

That's a cute little BBC animation that I found after that Bret Stephens column — blogged here — made me think about the old aphorism "Know thyself." Stephens was talking about the "self-satisfied elite" who didn't understand the point of view of the non-elite. It made me think: How dare these people regard themselves as elite if they are self-satisfied? They are not educated if they haven't looked into the functioning of their own mind, especially if they satisfy themselves with contempt for others.

Here's Wikipedia on "Know thyself":

The Ancient Greek aphorism "know thyself" (Greek: γνῶθι σεαυτόν, transliterated: gnōthi seauton...) is the first of three Delphic maxims inscribed in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.... The two maxims that follow "know thyself" were "nothing to excess" and "certainty brings insanity." In Latin the phrase, "know thyself", is given as nosce te ipsum or temet nosce.

"Certainty brings insanity" is the least well-known of those aphorisms. It explains a lot!

Much more at that Wikipedia link, but — here — I'll just show you this cool painting from the 1600s, inscribed with the Latin phrase:

Whatever happened to "defund the police"?

Posted: 21 Jul 2022 06:48 AM PDT

I'm reading "Biden seeking $37B for fighting crime, hiring more police." (AP).

"Inside, the church was less than half full. There were plenty of Hermès bags but few boldfaced names from the gilt-covered slice of Manhattan society the couple had inhabited..."

Posted: 21 Jul 2022 06:02 AM PDT

"... in the 1980s and 1990s.... 'In the tumultuous times of the last few years, with all the attacks we faced,' [Donald Trump Jr.] said, 'she was the first person to call and see if I perhaps wanted, or maybe needed, to move back in with her. That call was simultaneously the sweetest and most emasculating thing ever. And she could do that with the best of them, and usually it was on purpose.' When he was a small child, Mr. Trump said, he went with his family to the Hamptons. While there, he acted at Gosman's (Montauk's best-known seafood spot) in a way that 'exceeded the limits' of everyone's patience. His mother, he said, took him to the bathroom and showed him 'what Eastern European discipline was really all about.' When it was over, he said, she told him, 'And if you cry, we're going to come back in here and do this again.'... [Eric Trump] told another story about his sister Ivanka destroying a very pricey chandelier while playing in the house with a beach ball. 'Ivanka managed to quickly convince my mother that it was me,' he said. That time, the 'remedy,' as he put it, was a 'wooden spoon,' and what made his mother even more irate as she spanked him was his fervent denial of having played any role in the misbehavior. 'Not only had I broken the chandelier, but now I was also lying to her,' he said. But by the time she realized he was telling the truth, Mr. Trump said, she was 'too tired to deal with Ivanka.'"

From "At Ivana Trump's Funeral, a Gold-Hued Coffin and the Secret Service" (NYT).

I'll just say it was mean of the Times to say "the church was less than half full" and tag this post with "mothers," "domestic violence," and "gender difference" and move on.

"The worst line I ever wrote as a pundit... was... 'If by now you don’t find Donald Trump appalling, you’re appalling.'"

Posted: 21 Jul 2022 05:39 AM PDT

Says Bret Stephens — in "I Was Wrong About Trump Voters" (NYT) — about the first thing he ever wrote about Trump. That was in August 2015, and he went on to write "dozens of columns denouncing Trump as a unique threat to American life, democratic ideals and the world itself."

He now regrets attacking the Trump voters. Because it wasn't effective?

Telling voters they are moral ignoramuses is a bad way of getting them to change their minds.What were they seeing that I wasn't?... What Trump's supporters saw was a candidate whose entire being was a proudly raised middle finger at a self-satisfied elite that had produced a failing status quo. I was blind to this....

He was part of that "self-satisfied elite." Does he genuinely take responsibility for his failure to see from the viewpoint of the non-elite? Or is this a repositioning in the hope of regaining power over the deplorables?

I belonged to a social class that my friend Peggy Noonan called "the protected." My family lived in a safe and pleasant neighborhood. Our kids went to an excellent public school. I was well paid, fully insured, insulated against life's harsh edges.

Trump's appeal, according to Noonan, was largely to people she called "the unprotected."... Their experience of America was often one of cultural and economic decline, sometimes felt in the most personal of ways. It was an experience compounded by the insult of being treated as losers and racists —clinging, in Obama's notorious 2008 phrase, to "guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them."

[T]hey had borne much of the brunt of the wars... the financial crisis... and then came the great American cultural revolution of the 2010s... It's one thing for social mores to evolve over time.... It's another for them to be abruptly imposed by one side on another, with little democratic input but a great deal of moral bullying....

I could have thought a little harder about the fact that, in my dripping condescension toward his supporters, I was also confirming their suspicions about people like me....

I'm not getting much more than regret for adopting a strategy that didn't work and isn't working. Will the "self-satisfied elite" ever get over its satisfaction with itself? How much losing will it take? And if they struggle to turn around only because they are losing, how can the turnaround work? The deplorables will still detect the bead of condescension dripping.

"Doing a set at Summerfest on July 21, 1972" — 50 years ago today — "[George] Carlin went through much of the material on his latest album, 'Class Clown,' including 'Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.'"

Posted: 21 Jul 2022 03:17 AM PDT

"... The [new HBO] documentary shows the comedian bantering about it with Johnny Carson on 'The Tonight Show' a couple of months later. 'What did they do to you in Milwaukee?' Carson asks Carlin. 'Well, what did they try to do to me … ?' Carlin replies, going into the old Blatz Beer jingle, 'I'm from Milwaukee, and I ought to know … The routine worked everywhere, really, very well … Except in Milwaukee, where they must really be bad words. One policeman took exception … apparently he hadn't been listening in the locker room.' Carlin was arrested by a Milwaukee police officer who happened to be at Summerfest with his family.... The promoter rushed over to [Carlin's wife] Brenda, telling her that the police were going to arrest the comedian.... 'My mom knows that my dad is carrying weed and coke in his pockets,' [Carlin's daughter] Kelly remembers.... 'She grabbed a glass of water and walked out on to the stage, whispering in his ear, "Cops are here, exit Stage Left."' Carlin left the stage, Kelly says, emptying his pocket as he went.... Tom Schneider, then a young assistant district attorney, had been at Carlin's show.... Schneider's boss, who knew he'd been at the show, asked him if Carlin had disturbed the peace; Schneider told him Carlin received a standing ovation. The charges were dismissed in December 1972."

From "George Carlin documentary shines a light on his breakthrough moments at Milwaukee's Summerfest and Lake Geneva's Playboy Club" (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel).

You might think "Exit stage left" was a potentially confusing way to aim Carlin toward an escape route, but "Exit stage left" was a catchphrase of the time. Popularized by this: