St. Félix published an article — in The New Yorker — about the Sydney Sweeney jeans/genes foofaraw. I'd skipped that article — I was Sweeneyed out by the time it appeared — but I see from the excerpt at Instapundit that it contained lines like "Interestingly, breasts, and the desire for them, are stereotyped as objects of white desire, as opposed to, say, the Black man’s hunger for ass." The desire is the object of desire? That's defective writing, and The New Yorker got its lofty reputation in part because of its punctilious word editing. But St. Félix is in The New Yorker, thus making her statements conspicuous and goofier than they would be somewhere else, like X (or a blog).
Hey! It says "Black man’s hunger for ass" in The New Yorker.
The screencappers of X plunged into St. Félix's X account, homing in on posts with the words "hate" and "white people." Go to the Instapundit link to see what they found.
What calls me is that new word: "tricknological." The adjective is, apparently, formed from the word "Tricknology," which is in the OED and traced back to 1938. It's marked "U.S. disparaging." It means:
Sydney Sweeney, a registered Republican, has the “HOTTEST” ad out there. It’s for American Eagle, and the jeans are “flying off the shelves.” Go get ‘em Sydney!
Well, she's selling perfectly ordinary denim. Maybe she'll make being Republican the new thing.
That's from 60 years ago, but it's a line I've never forgotten: "The new thing is to care passionately and be right-wing." In context, of course, he's laughably wrong, and everyone watching that movie knew it. Didn't we? Or did we think watch out, some day that will be true. It's all a matter of time.
Trump's post continues:
On the other side of the ledger, Jaguar did a stupid, and seriously WOKE advertisement, THAT IS A TOTAL DISASTER! The CEO just resigned in disgrace, and the company is in absolute turmoil. Who wants to buy a Jaguar after looking at that disgraceful ad. Shouldn’t they have learned a lesson from Bud Lite, which went Woke and essentially destroyed, in a short campaign, the Company. The market cap destruction has been unprecedented, with BILLIONS OF DOLLARS SO FOOLISHLY LOST. Or just look at Woke singer Taylor Swift. Ever since I alerted the world as to what she was by saying on TRUTH that I can’t stand her (HATE!). She was booed out of the Super Bowl and became, NO LONGER HOT. The tide has seriously turned — Being WOKE is for losers, being Republican is what you want to be. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
And speaking of Trump on Truth Social, there's also this, which caught my eye..... because I thought I saw Bucky Badger. But yes, happy birthday to the Coast Guard.
"The line about her having great jeans — several people are suggesting in the comments on Instagram and TikTok that this is a 'pro-eugenics ad.' Whether or not that’s the case, it is part of a wave of imagery of influencers, pop stars and musicians that feels tethered to the values of another time."
That's a gift link. My last of the month. In case you want to see the ads people are so worked up about. I've avoided talking about them because I don't want to help make them go viral. But they've obviously gone massively viral, so expect more of the same.
It's a pun: "good genes"/"good jeans." You'd think it would have been noticed, used, and groaned over decades ago and that it would be completely uncool to bring it up now. But what if it's cool precisely because people are sensitive and fearful about a perceived rise in enthusiasm for white supremacy. It's needling those poor souls. It's transgressive. Is that where we are?
By the way, Deepika Padukone used the pun 3 years ago, for Levi's jeans:
Millions = between $40 million and $50 million a year.
Are these losses because people just don't watch what's "on TV" anymore? We've lost the habit of winding down at the end of the evening with the talk shows the network runs in that time slot? Or is there a problem of Colbert's show leaning to one side politically and spurning the opportunity to appeal to half the people in the country?
RedBird’s Jeff Shell, the former head of NBCUniversal who will run the network once the [Skydance-Paramount] deal is done, has been crunching the numbers and finding that CBS is a “melting ice cube” with its losses and cost overruns, a source said. The plan is to enhance CBS Sports and invest in “truth-based” news at a network that conservatives have long ripped for its alleged liberal bias.
Are those the scare quotes around "truth-based"? Much as the quotes made me laugh and want to poke fun, I think they are more likely to signify that the Post is quoting Jeff Shell. Same thing with "melting ice cube." I don't think the Post was trying to help us idiots understand that that CBS is not literally a melting ice cube. They were just giving Jeff Shell credit for the turn of phrase. Now, the interesting question becomes what does Shell, who's about to be running the network, think "truth-based" means?
The Post has learned that Ellison is now telling people that with the [Trump's] lawsuit settled the Skydance-Paramount deal will get FCC approval by mid-August.
Ellison = Skydance CEO David Ellison, "the son of Donald Trump pal and tech billionaire Larry Ellison.
While Ellison is predicting imminent regulatory approval, it will come at a cost: FCC chairman Brendan Carr is likely to demand conditions to remedy what he believes is left-wing news bias in programming that violates agency “public interest” rules that govern local broadcasting as opposed to cable.
More quotation marks. I'm just going to guess that the highly abstract term "public interest" is something in the vicinity of "truth-based." Or... maybe it's something more like the word that got us started on Stephen Colbert — "truthiness."
And on this show, on this show your voice will be heard... in the form of my voice. 'Cause you're looking at a straight-shooter, America. I tell it like it is. I calls 'em like I sees 'em. I will speak to you in plain simple English.
And that brings us to tonight's word: truthiness.
Now I'm sure some of the Word Police, the wordanistas over at Webster's, are gonna say, "Hey, that's not a word." Well, anybody who knows me knows that I'm no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They're elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn't true, or what did or didn't happen. Who's Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I wanna say it happened in 1941, that's my right. I don't trust books. They're all fact, no heart.
ADDED: Here's Colbert, in July 2016, relocated to "The Late Show," talking about his old word "truthiness" and presented the new word "Trumpiness":
A handsome, tousle-haired man whose interests ranged from skiing and weightlifting to poetry and theoretical physics, he cited a personal motivation for his work on the device: His father, a physician, had died after open-heart surgery in 1976.
The first artificial heart, the Jarvik-7, was implanted in 1982. Perhaps, like me, you remember the name and occupation of the recipient: Barney Clark, a dentist. When he awakened from the surgery, he said to his wife, "I want to tell you, even though I have no heart, I still love you."
The artificial heart never became a replacement for a real heart. Didn't you think it would, if you were around, reading the news 43 years ago? Artificial hearts are only used as to keep people alive while they wait for a heart from a human donor.
Jarvik, the "handsome, tousle-haired man," also posed in Hathaway shirt ads — like this one, complete with the company's trademark eyepatch. He also posed in a Lipitor ad that got criticized as misleading because Jarvik was "not a cardiologist" and — though the ad depicted him rowing — "apparently, not a rower."
Jarvik was married to Marilyn vos Savant, the woman who's been famous for decades for supposedly having the highest IQ. (She scored 228 on the Stanford-Binet test when she was 10.)
Dolls came up in the previous post when a NYT author located Trump's "level of aesthetic consideration" to that which a child gives "her doll’s face before covering it in nail polish."
That's not me applauding Creatable World. I was quoting something. I can't think of a time when I applauded a toy, and, though I like the idea of children creating little imaginary worlds with their toys, I'm wary of Big Toy's packaging of a particular world to capture the creative energy of the child. Was Creatable World — i.e., gender-neutral world — offered as the antidote to the excessive genderizing of Barbie?
But what happened to Creatable World? I don't think Mattel ever announced that it was withdrawing the product. How much of a fiasco was it?
Did kids just not like it? Did the adults who liked that sort of thing simply fail to have children?
Who even remembers Creatable World? It surprised me to run across it this morning. Is it in the junkpile of things people like to forget ever happened? Have we created a world in which Creatable World never existed?
At the top of his Instagram account (quoting Publisher's Weekly):Thanks to Charlie Martin for pointing me at Comey's book: "So, now it turns out that Comey actually has a book coming out in a few days about a Mary Sue main character who investigates, arrests, and apparently convicts a conservative radio talker of inciting a murder by dog-whistling. Coincidentally."
I read Martin's post while I was still in bed this morning looking at my iPhone, and I quickly dictated this question into the ChatGPT app (I usually access A.I. by typing things into Grok):
"What is the argument that James Comey by showing a photograph of rocks in the shape of 8647 was really teasing a novel that he had written, which is about someone accused of inciting violence by giving out an obscure message and [Comey] will actually benefit from this new attention he’s getting from the right because people on his left will actually get excited about his otherwise incredibly boring book."
Yeah, that's the way I talk when I'm, essentially, talking to myself. Notice my lazy bias toward thinking everything is boring. Anyway, I had these follow-up questions:
1. "How smart is James Comey?"
2. "He would need to be smart in a marketing and media sense to have come up with the idea of posting that photograph as a way to gin up interest in his novel. He strikes me as someone who is too boring and staid to attempt such a flashy scheme, and he would have to be willing to do something different to expose himself to criminal accusations. It almost seems like something Trump would do ironically."
You can read all ChatGPT's responses here, but the bottom line is: "Your read—that he’s too boring and staid for such a risky, theatrical move—aligns far more closely with what we’ve seen of him than the idea of a QAnon-baiting media play."
"Dominated by a giant, futuristic, silver staircase at its centre — to symbolise movement — the Fenix museum is in the eye of a political storm and a populist backlash against mass immigration in Europe and across the Atlantic in the US. The museum is housed in what was once the world’s biggest warehouse next to the port’s famous 'Holland-Amerika' pier, where millions of European migrants left Europe for America in the 19th and 20th centuries.... 'These docks witness the departures of millions, including among them iconic figures like Albert Einstein, the actor Johnny Weissmuller and artists Willem de Kooning and Max Beckmann — and welcomed just as many arrivals, shaping the vibrant, multicultural city that is Rotterdam today,' [said Anne Kremers, the museum’s director]."
You can see some pictures of the architecture here (at Archipanic). It's ugly from some angles, kind of cool from others, but doesn't seem to relate to the desperation of mass migration. It's coldly abstract and design-y. You may like it if you're the sort of person who wishes Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum had been built out of stainless steel.
It's kind of funny to see Johnny Weissmuller extolled alongside Albert Einstein and Willem de Kooning, but I am not the arbiter of icons, and I wandered off into the Wikipedia article on Weissmuller:
"You see them in the kitchen together making meals from HelloFresh. He's wearing loafers, she's got tight braids. You're like: Where'd they meet, you know, what do they even talk about? It's insane."
Most of what is in that sketch has Trump signing orders with respect to things Trump has actually made an issue of his own, but I don't think he's ever seemed antagonistic toward interracial couples. I wonder how that made it into the sketch. And the line "He's wearing loafers, she's got tight braids" prompts us to picture the man as white and the woman is black, but the humor I've been hearing about these ads is that the man is always black and the woman is white. Anyway, the issue of interracial couples in TV commercials is a general topic for comedians these days. It's not connected to Trump, so it's rather scurrilous to throw this subject into the mix.
"For years, they’ve pushed drugs like candy, silenced critics, lobbied the Congress and the White House, and cashed in on manufactured fear. Big Pharma, through drug advertisements, are also a huge source of income for mainstream media, effectively controlling the media outlets. Soros and USAID aren't the only ones who use the mainstream media to perpetuate propaganda. ALL THESE WILL END NOW."
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.
I asked Grok: What has RFK Jr. said about prescription drug advertising on TV? Answer: "Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been vocal about his opposition to prescription drug advertising on television."
I'm sure he's been "vocal... on television," but Grok is clearly trying to say that he strongly opposes "prescription drug advertising on television." I'm not going to spend my time teaching Grok grammar.
Now, I'm thinking about this topic this morning because I heard Joe Rogan — here — talking about prescription drug advertising on television. It was very interesting. But the guest, Adam Curry falls prey to what I believe is a misreading of a statistic. Curry says:
Although we have stopped tobacco advertisements and there's all kinds of things that have been done throughout the years, but what happened with television is all the money. I mean, really 60, 70, maybe 80% of all the advertising income is from pharmaceutical companies. That's why there's also no reporting. Like, we're not gonna bite the hand that feeds us.
Would RFK's plan to ban this advertising wreck mainstream television news?
But going back and forth with Grok, I think I figured out how the numbers got twisted. I, not Grok. But Grok gave me what I needed to see the problem. There was a report from Statista that showed "the pharmaceutical industry spent 4.58 billion U.S. dollars on advertising on national TV in the United States, which accounted for 75% of the total ad spend for that year." But people in social media have been "suggesting that 75% of cable TV advertising revenue comes from the pharmaceutical industry."
I watched the Super Bowl last night because I fell prey to the rumor that Elon Musk had spent $40 million of his own money on several pro-DOGE commercials that would air. That didn't happen, and I spent the evening viewing the actual commercials, which, by the way, were terrible.
They weren't funny. And since any damned thing you can think of — such as the singer Seal as an actual seal — you can make look "real," there's no wow factor in showing anything. And how many times was the narrative arc simply: 1. Wonder what this is an ad for? 2. Oh, yeah, that.
Anyway, propaganda for DOGE, yeah, why not? Let the anti-DOGE folk propagandize back. I'm sure there's some clever way to express the old anti-transparency idea. Maybe a glossy CGI take on the old metaphor of government as a sausage factory. You like the sausage well enough, so don't be looking inside.
Chuck Schumer is attempting to lure Americans away from Trump by tempting us with the humble indulgences beer and guacamole — drinking and snacking — paired with watching television. But even if Americans were hopelessly addicted to these fattening pleasures, we could still, easily, choose a non-Mexican beer and serve those tortilla chips with melted cheese instead of that avocado paste. That might work out well for Wisconsin — home of beer and cheese — and quite badly for Mexico. What is it going to do with all those avocados if we say we'd rather push for Mexico to help us with the border problem than continue to mindlessly consume that that green goo... that sludge... that guck...
This is fresh fruit, farmed in vast quantity in Mexico, where it will rot if not sold. What am I missing? We will easily win this trade war. And I'm sure Schumer knows all this and is embarrassed to be smarmily plying us with a beer and an avocado.
"Improve the car? Persuade the men? Or, wait, try to sell it instead to anorexic, teenage, intersex manga fans of colour, because they might just be stupid enough to fall for it? Except the ad’s not for them, is it? Like most adverts now, this is a story of rich white heterosexuals selling stuff to other rich white heterosexuals, using images of multi-ethnic, pansexual, differently abled humans in order to appear progressive, without actually doing or changing anything.... The ads stand for NOTHING.... They are born of a contempt for the middle of society, which is conceived at the top with the imagined complicity of the bottom. It’s pure Kamala Harris. It’s 'joy.' It is the sort of thing that got Trump elected: a small number of ivory tower wokeists alienating the middle class and pushing nice people further and further to the right. It’s happening to me even as I write this column!... I need to go and shout expletives into a pillow for a bit and then dig out my Maga hat."
He's talking about this crazy commercial (that somehow I've avoided blogging about until now):
Why haven't I blogged about it? Not just because everyone was already talking about it. It's a bid for attention, so I don't want to give them what they want. But my depriving them of attention is, at this point, meaningless. Jaguar got the noise it wanted.
I'd never noticed it before, but I heard it twice, in rapid succession, in the new NYT "Daily" podcast that I was listening to on my sunrise run:
[This ad] employs this device of the disillusioned Trump voter as a stand-in for the viewer. It's a permission structure for the small sliver of undecided voters who might have voted for Trump before to say: It's okay, there are other people just like you, other people who don't think that Donald Trump is good anymore....
Here is a Harris supporting celebrity saying he is disillusioned with what she Harris has said. It's the same permission structure for Harris. You have a white lady saying: You know what? Maybe I can actually vote for Kamala Harris.
"Permission structure" was used as if it's a standard term, so I wanted to get up to speed.
"Can you imagine a wife not telling a husband who she's voting for? Did you ever hear anything like that? Even if you had a horrible -- if you had a bad relationship, you're gonna tell your husband."
That's Trump:
Trump: "Can you imagine a wife not telling a husband who she's voting for? Did you ever hear anything like that? Even if you had a horrible -- if you had a bad relationship, you're gonna tell your husband." pic.twitter.com/gd5of817VY
He's talking about that Julia Roberts ad I was laughing at 2 days ago, here. I said: "I don't believe many men are bullying their wives about voting the 'right' way. I think it's a lot more likely that a woman might see how important the election is to her husband and simply choose not to cast a vote that effectively cancels his vote."
I have to just try to imagine the people who get all jazzed up by music and montage like that. Here's something — also pro-Trump and heavy on the A.I. — that I saw yesterday and found more appealing:
"In that vision, productivity does not depend on labor, and a paycheck has little to do with talent or effort. For decades, students have been told that college is about career readiness and little else. And the task of puzzling out an author’s argument will not prepare students to thrive in an economy that seems to run on vibes. Recent ads for Apple Intelligence, an A.I. feature, make the vision plain. In one, the actor Bella Ramsey uses artificial intelligence to cover for the fact they haven’t read the pitch their agent emailed. It works, and the project seems like a go. Is the project actually any good? It doesn’t matter. The vibes will provide...."
I remember "vibes" as a hippie word, so I have trouble seeing how it functions these days in the speech of the young, and so, it annoys me. I wish I'd made a tag for it long ago, so I could could keep track of how it annoys me — at least in its usage by mainstream media. Do non-media young people go around saying it? I don't know. It just irks me when I see it in media.
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.. because I thought I saw Bucky Badger. But yes, happy birthday to the Coast Guard.
Thanks to 
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