Althouse

Sunrise.

noreply@blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 00:14:59 +0000

Tourists salvaging what they can of their Paris trip? Or are these locals? I'm guessing locals. They're smoking!

noreply@blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 15:25:47 +0000

A striking contrast on the streets of Paris: A couple sits sipping drinks at an outdoor café as flames burn just steps away. The moment was captured Saturday near the Arc de Triomphe, on the outskirts of rioting that erupted during demonstrations over rising prices, inequality and public spending. Video shows the pair continuing their conversation as a burning trash bin lights up the background.
— Fox News (@FoxNews) October 19, 2026

ADDED: For me, a longtime connoisseur of travel critique, this video shows us a stark version of what is nearly always the case. I'm guessing these are, in fact, local residents, because they're smoking, but if they are tourists, they are doing what I think tourists more or less always do. They have a fantasy of a place and they believe they can go to that fantasy and they perform the mental labor of believing they have entered into the place they imagined. They screen out or rationalize the contradictory material and they determinedly live out their dream.

Reminds me of that old Charlie Kaufman movie, "Synecdoche, New York," where a woman takes a real-estate tour of what is her dream house. The house is on fire, and she buys it and lives in in... dies in it:

ADDED: Protesters pop the bubble of tourist's fantasy of communing with the Mona Lisa:

Des étudiants de l'école du Louvre bloquent l'accès au Musée depuis le début de matinée. De nombreux touristes attendent sur le parvis. #Paris #Louvre #17octobre #24octobre https://t.co/bjFc0dh90W
— Luc Auffret (@LucAuffret) October 19, 2026

The museum itself aestheticizes the message:

🇫🇷 Chers visiteurs, en raison d’un mouvement social étudiant, le musée est fermé pour le moment. Nous vous prions de nous excuser de la gêne occasionnée. 🌍Dear visitors, due to student strikes the museum is currently closed. We apologise for the inconvenience. https://t.co/tNKFk3B9aj
— Musée du Louvre (@MuseeLouvre) October 19, 2026

"I did everything wrong 5 times."

noreply@blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 15:05:53 +0000

Pat Murphy did not get a real big league managing job until he was 65 years old He has won Manager of the Year twice since Here is his whole story He never played a day in the major leagues himself. He was a catcher who signed with the San Francisco Giants and spent four years in the minors without ever getting called up He was the head coach at Arizona State for fifteen seasons. He won 629 games there and took them to the College World Series four times. Before that he was at Notre Dame and won 318 more Then it ended. He resigned in the middle of an NCAA investigation, after being told to resign or be fired The NCAA found him innocent of the violations. What they actually reprimanded him for was his attitude toward their investigators. They called it cavalier Here is how he describes that stretch "I was a college coach forever, and then I had this huge injustice happen, and I thought, Why me?" And then this, about himself "My ego was involved a great deal more than it should have been." So at 51 years old he went to the minor leagues Eugene, Oregon. Tucson. El Paso. Nearly five years riding buses in the low minors after fifteen years running one of the best programs in the country San Diego gave him the interim job and he went 42 and 54 in 96 games. They did not keep him "I did everything wrong five times." So he took a job as somebody's bench coach in Milwaukee. He did that for eight years Then Craig Counsell left for Chicago, and the Brewers handed it to the 65 year old Here is what happened next. Manager of the Year. Then Manager of the Year again. 97 wins last season, 103 this one And a sweep of a Los Angeles roster built to never lose a series like this He was not some nobody they found in a parking lot. He was one of the best college coaches alive before any of this, and the Brewers handed him a roster Counsell had already built. But he was 51 when he had to start over in the low minors, and 65 before anybody gave him a team of his own for a full season. Christian Yelich said it takes a certain kind of player to play for him. It took a certain kind of man to still be waiting at 65 (Via @thesportsontap)
— Punchoutpitch (@Punchoutpitch) October 18, 2026

I was interested in that quote — "I did everything wrong 5 times" — not because I'm following the Brewers, though I am, but because — just 5 days ago — I was blogging about the positive side of wrongness.

After Anne Carson won the Nobel Prize, I started reading her book "Wrong Norma," and I wrote about her answer to the question, "Tell me about the 'wrongness' in the title of Wrong Norma." She said that in academia you always feel "that you’re wrong or on the verge of being wrong and you have to worry about that, because everything is so judgmental and hierarchical." And that's "kind of a mentality I was interested in disabling." It "loosens the mind" not to worry about being wrong: "you can go on to think other things or wider things or the things underneath where you were. It’s just suddenly a different landscape."

Apply that to baseball.

"The onslaught against [Jane] Doe and her supporters is taken directly from the playbook that established them: Gamergate."

noreply@blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 14:50:36 +0000

"In 2014, a mostly anonymous digital horde waged a full-scale assault on women working in the gaming industry in an effort to damage their reputations and drive them from their professions. They harassed and doxxed their victims and fabricated and disseminated conspiratorial rumors about them.... Gamergate is a formative origin point for the alt-right, whose members and ideas have been absorbed into what is now called the new right. Once a subset of the broader conservative movement, the intellectuals and policy wonks of the new right, who almost all share atavistic visions of a masculine-obsessed politics, helped pave the way for Mr. Trump’s rise to power.... As a political tactic, resorting to a decade-old strategy of harassment should be evidence that the right’s bag of tricks is painfully meager. It’s also a bit baffling. In the face of a midterm election that could knock Mr. Trump’s presidency down into a posture of feeble lameness, the right’s online surrogates are instead burning crucial bandwidth on a grotesque persecution of a sympathetic woman — all while pushing a scolding grievance message about sexual values that is more likely to scare away new voters than bring them into the tent...."

Writes Nathan Taylor Pemberton, in "I Have Never Seen the Online Right So Happy" (NYT).

"Fiedler... would have been delighted by the ability of some of our best writers to dance knowingly around the volcano..."

noreply@blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 14:11:59 +0000

"... the 'chuckles and whispers and much munching about the neck and shoulders' in Lorrie Moore’s 'Anagrams,' for example, or the 'tumblings and flexings and shudders' in John Barth’s 'The End of the Road,' or the 'stiffened giblets' in Tom Wolfe’s 'Hooking Up,' or the 'freaky rubs and naughty pinches' in Chuck Berry’s extraordinary autobiography."

Writes Dwight Garner, in "A Field Guide to the Dark, Sexy Swamp of American Literature With its bracing studies of fiction’s secrets, this 66-year-old work of literary criticism still surprises and delights" (NYT). The reissued book is "Love and Death in the American Novel" by Leslie A. Fiedler.

It's hard to write about sex! Apparently, the word "and" is helpful. Only the Tom Wolfe quote lacks an "and."

"Stiffened giblets." Wow, that's so offputting. Let's see, I've got "Hooking Up" here on Kindle.

Ha ha, I've got the passage highlighted:

If anything, “sexual revolution” was rather a prim term for the lurid carnival actually taking place in the mightiest country on earth in the year 2000. Every magazine stand was a riot of bare flesh, rouged areolae, moistened crevices, and stiffened giblets: boys with girls, girls with girls, boys with boys, bare-breasted female bodybuilders, so-called boys with breasts, riding backseat behind steroid-gorged bodybuilding bikers, naked except for cache-sexes and Panzer helmets, on huge chromed Honda or Harley-Davidson motorcycles.

That's on page 5. Replete with "and." You need these pairs and lists for sex.

I see Wolfe uses "stiffened giblets" again — with 2 "ands" — on page 142:

Up until 1985 pornographic movie theaters were as ubiquitous as the 7-Eleven, including outdoor drive-ins with screens six, seven, eight stories high, the better to beam all the moistened folds and glistening nodes and stiffened giblets to a panting American countryside. In 1985 the pornographic theater began to be replaced by the pornographic videocassette, which could be brought into any home. Up on the shelf in the den, next to the World Book Encyclopedia and the Modern Library Classics, one now finds the cassettes: Sally’s Alley; Young and Hung; Yo! Rambette!; Latin Teacher: She Sucks, She Has Sucked, She Will Have Sucked.

Ah! Tom Wolfe! I miss him. But what I want to know is how did Chuck Berry get on Garner's list of "some of our best writers"? Well, here's Garner's 2017 review of Berry's 1987 book: "Chuck Berry’s Memoir Grabs You Like a Song."

One of the things that made Mr. Berry’s songs jump out of the radio was his mischievous feel for words and his knack for alighting on details so fresh that they squeak. “They finished off an apartment with a two-room Roebuck sale,” he sang about the newlyweds in “You Never Can Tell.” “The Coolerator was crammed with TV dinners and ginger ale.”
This same instinctive feel for language flows into the autobiography. You’re not far into it before he describes a friend who is “as ugly as death eating a dirty doughnut.” A few pages before that, a girl is so pretty that the author “would have daily taken out her garbage just to be near her can.”

His sentences pop, as if he had a Coolerator crammed with them. He writes about the world like a man noticing everything for the first time....

Yeah, why didn't he win the Nobel Prize?

Here's my tribute to "the Coolerator was crammed with TV dinners and ginger ale" from last May.

Sunrise.

noreply@blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 00:05:40 +0000

"You just have a sense of... brotherhood."

noreply@blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 16:17:52 +0000

Said Robert Gasser, a Brewers pitcher:

To begin the season - Logan Henderson, Robert Gasser, and Shane Drohan shared an Airbnb at Triple-A.

In October, they started 3 straight games in the NLCS to help the Brewers win their first pennant in 44 years.

Before his NLCS start, Gasser talked about the tight-knit staff 👇 pic.twitter.com/t5DVbsHBCD
— Hunter Baumgardt (@hunterbonair) October 17, 2026

Texting that to Meade, I wrote "'brotherhood'/crystal blue persuasion/'There'll be peace and good — brotherhood.'"

He sent me this video of the song, and I said "I blogged that video in 2015." It was here: "The new Hillary catchphrase: 'Love trumps hate.'"

And I blogged about the song in 2006, describing what I'd just put in a podcast ("Audible Althouse #64," no longer on line):

I talk about reality and unreality, song lyrics that might be about drugs or religion (like "Crystal Blue Persuasion"), the life of the mind and conspiracy theorizing, how the 1960s transformed America and me, how my parents savored the adult life (it had something to do with Playboy), why the students today don't do anti-war demonstrations, how Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel killed themselves, the way you might know but not know that the food is tainted, and whether you'd rather hear a writer tell you what he's really like or have him cook up his loathsome characteristics into a tasty piece of fiction.

I texted Meade, "i’d like to hear that. must have it on one of the old laptops."

While I was firing up old laptops looking for the lost podcast #64 — and finding it — Meade was making this:

Look over yonder/What do you see?/The sun is a-rising/Most definitely...

Paris.

noreply@blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 15:14:30 +0000

Galeries Lafayette in Paris is being looted tonight. It’s the French equivalent of Harrods in London or Bergdorf Goodman in NYC https://t.co/F5jZU4bswZ
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 17, 2026

"The D.S.A.’s rise is at once a story of party-blobification and of a revolt against it. Like the conservatives of the 1970s..."

noreply@blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 14:58:08 +0000

"... the group frankly views the party it occupies as a host for an ideological movement rather than as a partner. It also practices an exaggerated form of the interest-group litmus-test politics that came to dominate Democratic politics in the post-1968 era, measuring its own strength less by general-election victories than by its ability to enforce candidate loyalty to left-maximalist positions.... It is a means of engaging seriously in Democratic Party politics while also casting a vote of no-confidence in the party itself...."

From "Is Anyone Actually in Charge of the Democratic Party? And Does It Matter? This year’s midterm elections are a test of whether a party can be a success and a failure at the same time" (NYT).

"If sexual misconduct prevents a victim from taking full advantage of her education, then the institution has to address it."

noreply@blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 14:46:48 +0000

"That responsibility is an awkward fit in some ways, but it reflects the reality that colleges are not just classrooms; they are a very particular kind of community in which all members have a duty of care toward one another. The Cornell case shows how hard it can be for universities to enforce Title IX well and also why they have to keep trying...."

Writes Emily Bazelon, in "This Is One of the Saddest Facts About the Cornell Rape Case" (NYT).

The sad fact in question is that Jane Doe dropped out, and she did not complete her degree elsewhere. Her education — her path to a career — was disrupted.

"I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down."

noreply@blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 14:30:35 +0000

A column at the NYT, written by Chris Marquis, a professor at University of Cambridge Judge Business School.

When the case method is used in medicine and law, it serves a different set of goals.... In both fields, students are confronted by the messiness of reality, and the goal is to foster disciplined skepticism: ask what’s missing, challenge assumptions and test how an analysis could be wrong.

Business school cases operate on another logic.... The point is to practice acting like the person in charge.... I wrote dozens of case studies during my decade at H.B.S., some of which are described as classics and best sellers. These are not products of independent research, but carefully packaged corporate narratives. The disclaimer printed in tiny type on every H.B.S. case concedes this point: Cases “are not intended to serve … as sources of primary data.” The data they include can be selective, biased or even fabricated.

For the many cases I wrote under the guidance of senior faculty members, events that reflected poorly on the company were softened or omitted and the roles of certain executives were burnished. The companies held final approval, with drafts reviewed by their lawyers and P.R. staff. Rather than being vehicles for disinterested learning, as one might expect at a university, the case studies end up as instruments of reputation management....

Furthermore, edits that push the case narratives away from reality are often meant to make it “work” in a classroom. Complexity is systematically shaved away, and dissenting voices often go unheard....

The result is a curriculum built around false narratives. Some of the most celebrated ideas in management have not been the ones that survived peer review or replication, but the ones that could be turned into TED Talks, consulting frameworks or airport best sellers....

Business schools have a divided mission: They seek to legitimize an economic system focused on private gain while also developing guardrails to tame it. They found a remarkable way to manage this tension: the “win-win” story in which the conflict between private gain and public good simply evaporates....

"Rioters attacked city halls from Lille in northern France to Marseille in the south, where masked infiltrators broke into the local government headquarters..."

noreply@blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 14:10:39 +0000

"... and tipped over a bust of Marianne, a symbol of the French Republic. Fires also destroyed a tourist office in Lyon.... Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu placed the blame for the chaos squarely on a far-left party, France Unbowed.... Protest organizers had hoped that the demonstrations on Saturday would lead to a convergence between the student demonstrations that have roiled France since September demanding better school conditions, and a broader social movement that addressed a wider array of concerns, including the rising cost of living. What emerged on Saturday seemed like a split-screen event, with marches occurring peacefully in one part of a city and groups of black-clad agitators sparring with police and causing damage in other areas. Then, as things unraveled, opportunist rioters joined in, exploiting the chaos, government officials said...."

From "France Reels After Largest Riots in Years/Centrist and leftist leaders blamed each other after anti-government protests devolved into chaos" (NYT).

"The age of AI will disrupt the workplace in all sorts of ways. But the work will continue..."

noreply@blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 13:54:16 +0000

"... as other kinds of work have continued through technological disruptions. People still run the 100-meter dash, even though a car or a cheetah could do it faster. We still cook elaborate dinners, even though the frozen food aisle is crammed with highly palatable substitutes. We still have dinner parties, even though we could stream wittier banter from Netflix — because we are humans, and we want to seek excellence, not just consume it. AI may make it harder for us to get paid for our work. But if so, it will also make it easier for us to focus on the reasons that work is worth doing."

So says Megan McArdle, in "Every novel might have to pass an AI test soon/Artificial intelligence threatens writers’ livelihoods. It may also remind them why they write" (WaPo)(gift link).

The frozen food aisle is crammed with highly palatable substitutes? I don't believe that for one minute. Strike the "highly" and maybe you've got the beginning of a good enough analogy.

Also: "a car or a cheetah could do it faster" — there's no antecedent for "it." Do what faster? Anyway, it's not that people run the 100-meter dash, it's that other people care about and watch them running. Speed is interesting to us because of whatever it is that is going fast. We also care about and watch cars and cheetahs going fast, but it's not the speed per se that matters. It's the thing that's managing to go that fast. I've been impressed by a fast-moving tortoise.

As for reading, there are different kinds of readers. I don't think I'm the kind of reader who reads the novels that AI is going to get away with writing — conventional, fast-moving narratives with heroes and villains. Does it bother me if readers of hackwork are not getting human hacks? Maybe it does!

Sunrise.

noreply@blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 22:47:34 +0000

"Edward Hopper's wife Jo Nivison... expected little in the way of material comforts.... [T]he couple lived frugally in Greenwich Village, in a top-floor walk-up..."

noreply@blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 17:09:54 +0000

"... on Washington Square whose only bathroom was in an outside hall. They had no children, just a cat named Arthur. Nivison devoted herself to her husband’s career. She served as his secretary, business manager and ever-willing model, posing in guises that ranged from a slender ingénue to a burlesque stripper and a melancholy movie usherette in a blue uniform.... She described her husband as a grump and a bully unwilling to acknowledge her artistic talents. In a diary entry from 1941, she confided that she would be delighted to have him 'choked or smothered or roasted until he had been forced to make some slight gesture of concern for my concerns.' At a time when the Metropolitan Museum’s joint exhibition of Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock is focusing attention on the plight of artists’ wives, it makes sense to think about Nivison.... Unlike Krasner, Nivison... did not have much left for her own artwork.... But it would be nice if someone published her diaries and pointed out that she was a brilliant and witty writer."

Writes Deborah Solomon, in "When Edward Hopper Painted Lonely People, He Was Channeling America A new biography argues that the artist famous for haunting canvases of solitary figures in late-night diners was deeply influenced by his times" (NYT).

I agree! Let's read the diaries of Jo Nivison. The wife of a famous artist put in writing the idea that he should be choked or smothered or roasted. Seems promising. You can read them on line here, and see her artwork — which Solomon bemoans as "tepid" — here. I click randomly and got this:

"The Puritans had scarlet letters, and now the content creators have scarlet posts: video apologies..."

noreply@blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 16:53:00 +0000

"... usually negotiated by lawyers for brands and public figures that have come under criticism from influencers pushing commentary not always rooted in facts. For the women who whittle their free time on New York lifestyle Instagram accounts, Gellis’s austere video was startling as it appeared amid a scroll of the standard imagery that generates likes, comments and commerce.... Chatter about the video spread across Instagram and around New York last weekend, revisiting F-Factor, a pre-Ozempic-era high fiber diet, as well as Gellis’s relentless campaign, which created a pandemic-days internet spectacle-cum-unscripted reality show....."

From "An Influencer’s Punishment Is a Pinned Instagram Post/A dispute over online misinformation about the F-Factor diet led to an unusual agreement: an apology video that must be pinned to the top of social feeds for three and a half years" (NYT).

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Emily Gellis Lande (@emilygellis)

"By a certain light, this is the first time that the British director’s vision will be seen properly."

noreply@blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 16:35:46 +0000

"The restoration contains censored moments once thought lost, like frenzied, naked nuns writhing sexually on a giant crucifix or a Mother Superior (Vanessa Redgrave) making love to a phallic bone fragment.... The uproar makes sense in context. 'When people saw the film, because Ken’s imagery is so visceral, they were shocked by it,' said the critic Mark Kermode, who befriended Russell in the 1990s and was instrumental in finding the lost footage and reintegrating it into the director’s cut.... Yet Russell, who died in 2011 at 84, was adapting a respected 1952 nonfiction book, 'The Devils of Loudun' by Aldous Huxley, and a stage version by John Whiting that followed in 1961. The plot centers on a Roman Catholic priest, Urbain Grandier (Reed), who unabashedly pursues sexual relationships with women, but also presides over the walled city of Loudun as a sort of secular stronghold where Catholics and Protestants live together peaceably."

From "In 1971, This Film Was a Scandal. In 2026, It’s a Respected Period Piece. 'Ken Russell’s The Devils' was deemed shocking for scenes with orgiastic nuns and a debauched priest. But its serious aims are clear in a new restoration" (NYT).

I can't remember how I was ever able to see this film, but I did see it, I believe in the 70s, and for many years I'd always include it on my very short list of favorite films — along with "Aguirre the Wrath of God" and "My Dinner With Andre." Clearly, I had a taste for a certain sort of male character! I have no idea how this film would strike me today. But I think it would resonate with present-day themes: a strong political man ruined over his sexual acting out and women who lose their rationality when overexcited by sex and politics.

As Kermode puts it: "It is really a brilliantly serious, heartfelt story about brainwashing, about the politicization of religion, about the use of hysteria."

Speaking of naked writhing and early 70s films the critics panned, I got through "Zabriskie Point" the other day. Not good. Seems to say if only you can be young, beautiful, and naked — and kick up a big cloud of white dust while having intercourse in a barren landscape — you can save the world. I was worried about the dust — borax?!— and the damage to the landscape — Death Valley and I couldn't even believe those 2 crazy lovers could enjoy their gritty play. We're supposed to think they do because the camera pulls back and shows the landscape full of naked couples simulating sex. Who are they? Where did they come from? Answer: This is art. They're an idea.

"So what was on the menu for the lost dog? It wasn’t especially appetizing."

noreply@blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 11:29:23 +0000

"'She probably was eating the forest feces from all the other animals in the forest.... That’s how they survive. And they can survive for months and years like that.'"

From "Luna, a Dog Who Was Lost in Yellowstone for a Month, Is Found Safe/A 10-year-old Jack Russell Terrier/Chihuahua mix, Luna lost half her weight but was otherwise healthy after several weeks in Yellowstone National Park" (NYT).

Like a kid in a candy store: a dog in the forest.

It wasn't easy trapping the tiny dog: "She’s a very typical Jack Russell terrier. She’s got opinions, and she’s got energy, and she’s tenacious, and she is not going to give up easily. And that is why she’s alive."

"It’s surreal. I’ve been dreaming about this moment for all this time, but often thinking I might not make it, financially, emotionally or physically."

noreply@blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 11:12:34 +0000

Said David Sabatini, after the verdict, quoted in "M.I.T. Scientist Wins $6 Million in Sexual Harassment Defamation Suit/David Sabatini, once a prominent scientist at M.I.T., sued a former colleague who accused him of inappropriate behavior. A jury found in his favor" (NYT).

[Santini] ran a research lab at the Whitehead Institute, in Cambridge, for 24 years. His lab studied cellular biology to better understand neurodegenerative diseases, cancer, diabetes, and aging. He was forced out of his lab in 2021 after an internal Whitehead investigation concluded he had a past sexual relationship with a younger and less experienced colleague, Kristin Knouse, over whom he had a career-influencing role. The investigation also found that his lab had maintained a sexualized atmosphere. Dr. Knouse said that the relationship was coerced. But Dr. Sabatini denied his lab had an improper atmosphere. He maintained that his relationship with Dr. Knouse had been consensual and that Dr. Knouse had schemed to get him fired and disgraced after he became interested in another woman....

"The woman later told her rescuers that she had jumped off the ship because she 'wanted to disembark'...."

noreply@blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 10:51:25 +0000

I'm reading "20 Hours After Falling Overboard, Cruise Passenger Is Rescued Near Greece" (NYT).

A cargo vessel found the woman conscious and holding onto a life preserver just before 3 a.m. on Saturday.... Royal Caribbean did not respond to... why rescue officials were not alerted until three hours after the incident. According to the company’s website, the Odyssey of the Seas is over 1,100 feet long and can hold nearly 4,200 guests.

1,100 feet long... 4,200 guests... I, too, would feel the urge to disembark. But floating — albeit with life preserver — for 20 hours, that's a lot of time to contemplate the solitude you thought you wanted in place of that cruise-ship crowd. I saw a movie once where a man and a woman were floating in a life preserver. What do you do? Wonder if help will arrive before you die of thirst... or sharks attack? Or do you slip out of the life preserver and become a life non-preserver?

Sunrise on a very windy day.

noreply@blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 00:17:36 +0000

"Thank God we had him. Otherwise, it would have been much worse. It's a terrible thing, but thank goodness for a man that had a gun and knew how to use it."

noreply@blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 21:34:12 +0000

Said President Trump, quoted in "Hero bystander who took down Oregon school shooter comes forward" (CBS News).

"For a minute I thought this was going to be another Anne Carson post."

noreply@blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 16:38:51 +0000

Wrote Smilin' Jack in the comments to the post that begins "His English mastiff was dying, so he hired her to read its mind. But when she met the man with the messy hair, he kept apologizing for his casual outfit."

And isn't this a lovely tribute to the literature Nobelist who's found her way into a few of my posts?

There are some writers who rearrange your vision so that other things look as though they are influenced by her mind. That may be what Carson did to Jack and it may be what Carson did to me. Maybe I am picking out different things to blog or finding excerpts in some new way, framing the post differently, and maybe Jack is reading these things differently.

Don't you want writers to shake up your world? Don't you want to live in the enchanted world where dogs send you messages that psychics step up to translate?

Carson says some things about dogs. Like this, from page 142 of the Kindle edition of "Wrong Norma" (commission earned): "I don’t know much about dogs. Big black-and-tan fellow and what a barker. You could hear that dog all over town. Short Pants and I staked out the property a few days to get the pattern. Generally the dog slept till 7 or 7.30 a.m. when the judge came out in his Nikes, whistled three times and called the dog’s name. The dog would explode from his sleep place and off they go down the street to the path by the lake. Short Pants had no trouble mastering the whistle and call. His talents go beyond mere mimicry — a firefly after all can mimic another firefly by some mindless reflexive chingchingching of cranial circuitry but to impersonate a ninth-circuit court judge so competently that his own dog can be induced to wake him with ecstatic cries at 4 a.m. nine days in a row required not only conscious and complex manipulation of all the musculature of Short Pants’ throat but a philosophical awareness of the aims of human speech. Weekdays I waited in the schoolyard till I heard the barking then went home to lay out toast on the railing. Nine days of this and then the weather turned. Rain of an extreme nature was predicted and hurricane-force winds."

Yeah, it's threatening to rain around here. And it is quite windy. Time to get some errands done. I hate errands. But when 3 errands pile up and you see a path to tick them off in a row, they're doable. Suddenly, it's sunny, threatening to divert us into a walk in the woods. But it's windy, and the trees have revealed their idea of murdering us some windy day. Not through psychics, however. They've revealed it by throwing down life-ending branches quite near us. And every one of those trees will fall in the end. And here we are, testing our luck by walking in the woods every day.

The blue heron flies at dawn.

noreply@blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 15:44:52 +0000

Video by Meade.

Post title inspired by vaguely familiar Hollywood spyspeak... or perhaps by that Jack Benny movie that only I remember.

"Like many of the earliest competitive eaters, Mr. Janus stumbled into the sport. He was working as a day trader in Manhattan..."

noreply@blogger.com (Ann Althouse) — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 14:58:08 +0000

"... hating the stress of his job. One day he went looking for a way to relieve the pressure and found it in a St. Patrick’s Day eating contest — corned beef and cabbage.... 'He brought this unique level of thoughtfulness and earnestness to competitive eating,' Jason Fagone, the author of 'Horsemen of the Esophagus: Competitive Eating and the Big Fat American Dream' (2006), said in an interview. 'He took this thing that a lot of people just throw off as a joke, and he took it seriously.'... After he took up competitive eating, he began working nights at a pizza parlor, and eventually quit day trading to make pies full time. He never earned enough money in the sport to live off it exclusively — at the time, no one did — but he also insisted that money didn’t interest him. 'It’s never been about the cash; it’s always about the adventure.... One of these contests recharges me more than a week at the beach ever would.'"

From "Tim Janus, One of the World’s Greatest Competitive Eaters, Has Died/He brought rigor and strategy to the sport, rising to No. 2 in the world and eating 141 pieces of nigiri in six minutes in the process" (NYT).

He died at age 49 — and not of overeating. Of lung cancer.

(If that makes you think about the Pope, here's a BBC article about the Pope's lung cancer. He seems to be doing well after the removal of the lower lobe of his right lung. There are photos of him celebrating mass at the hospital, after the surgery.)

I'm giving this post my "sports" tag, but is this a sport? I want to say that it is. Grok agreed with me, here.