Funky-looking and tentacular.

I'm fascinated by the mysteries of sportswriting, and these 2 sentences jumped out at me:

Even the way he plays, all funky-looking forehands and tentacular court coverage, is far from conventional, and at times polarizing. Away from forehands and backhands, he has always been a master of the dark arts, knowing how and when to work a crowd to his advantage, and being more than willing to turn a match into a circus if he thinks it will give him an edge.

That's written by Charlie Eccleshare, at the NYT, in "Daniil Medvedev, tennis’ walking Rorschach test, asks the U.S. Open what it sees."

"Tentacular" — a word I'd never noticed before. I see that H.G. Wells used it in "The War of the Worlds" (1898), to refer to the Martians with “long, tentacular appendages.” The use to describe the tennis player is close enough to the literal meaning. Apparently Medvedev was octopuslike.

But the word has appeared with a more attenuated connection to creatures with tentacles. Grok tells me that the philosopher Donna Haraway writes about "tentacular thinking" in the book "Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene" (2016). There's some notion of "multispecies, interconnected, and responsive" thought to be distinguished from "human-centered, linear, or hierarchical" thought. I'm told there's something called "tentacular empathy" and "tentacular relatings of kinship." Strangulating, and yet I get the sense we're supposed to love it.

Of course, the octopus is a mainstay of political cartoons. Here's one from 1877 that has some present-day resonance:

Lots more here, at "The Octopus in Political Cartoons/Russia, Germany and the United States have all been depicted as octopuses by their nemeses.

"My children do not have phones; they are not allowed on social media. It does not matter. There was an afternoon, a few weeks back..."

"... when the six-year-old came home and sketched all these characters on a piece of paper: the ballerina with a coffee cup for a head, the shark in trainers, the bomber-jet crocodile. I thought he had a tremendous imagination. But he was just like a caveman after a hunt, drawing what he had seen. It is as Bob Dylan said to mothers and fathers across the land: 'Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command.' You don’t even know what they are saying. There was a moment, a year ago, when all they wanted to hear was the Eighties anthem Everybody Wants to Rule the World. 'Why are our children into Tears for Fears?' I asked at the time...."

Writes Will Pavia, in "Do not read this article if you are over six. You won’t get it/Meet Ballerina Cappucina, Bombardino Crocodilo and Tung Tung Tung Sahur — the little monsters of TikTok whose express purpose is to rot your child’s brain" (London Times).

Kamala is back, and she's teaching the wisdom of the elephants.

"Who saw that video from a couple of weeks ago? The one of the elephants at the San Diego Zoo. Te earthquake.... Here those elephants were and as soon as they felt the earth shaking beneath their feet, they got in a circle and stood next to each other to protect the most vulnerable.... What a powerful metaphor! Because we know those who try to incite fear are most effective when they divide and conquer, when they separate the herd, when they try to make everyone think they are alone. But, in the face of crisis, the lesson is: Don't scatter. The instinct has to be to immediately find and connect with each other and to know that the circle will be strong."

Said Kamala Harris, in her re-emergence speech yesterday.

And here are those elephants:

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: "Why is the elephant the symbol of the Republican Party?"

"Since I was born with no legs, it wasn’t long before news crews, national telethons and even the talk show host Maury Povich arrived to capture me in action..."

"... always portraying my simplest activities as inspirational. The short film... 'View From the Floor,' captures my journey navigating tropes, exploitation and the question of whether I’m talented or typecast, superstar or supercrip (a person with a disability who is seen as a superhero for doing everyday things)."

Writes Mindie Lind, about an excellent 5-minute animation, which you can watch at this free-access link to the NYT. 

If you got to that link, the headline is "Applaud My Talent, Not My Disability," but the teaser on the front page is "I’m an Artist, Not 'Inspiration Porn.'" I was interested in the term "Inspiration Porn," but it doesn't even appear on the article page, where the text is by the person who has the disability. Oddly enough, she uses the term "supercrip."

I clicked the link on "supercrip," and, helpfully, I got to an article that used the term "inspiration porn." It's a 2022 article Ben Mattlin, "I Am Not Your Supercrip": "Supercrip stories are a subset of 'inspiration porn.' That term, coined by the late Australian comedian and journalist Stella Young, a wheelchair-user with dwarfism, refers to portrayals of disabled people that treat them as inspirations (rather than as individuals) in ways that effectively say disabled people only exist, or are only worth photographing and writing about, to inspire or motivate nondisabled people."

The President as King.

A cartoon from 1832:

 

AND: There's also this, from 1904:

"There’s almost nothing I like more than a laughing fit. It is a non-brain response, like an orgasm or a sneeze."

"I wish I could say that only the comedies of Aristophanes make me laugh, but then my pants would catch on fire. I have cracked up at bons mots, but also at dirty jokes, dumb pets, and all sorts of things I 'shouldn’t' laugh at. Someone recently told me a joke that involved the pun 'a frayed knot,' and I laughed like a lunatic. I don’t know why, and I don’t care. Laughing is laughing."

Writes Roz Chast in "Roz Chast on George Booth’s Cartoons/Every object is lovingly drawn, in a way that only Booth could draw them. Every detail enhances the scene" (The New Yorker).

That reminds me, I recently laughed hysterically — way way too much — at the tiniest little non-joke on the old TV show that Meade puts on sometimes, "Leave It to Beaver." Somehow, the father (Ward) saw fit to ask his wife (June), "What is it, mattress-turning day?" It is a non-brain response, like an orgasm....

"Whereas the prince you married could not be forgiven for his traditionalist entitlement/The man on the rock in the fog might be kind."

I'm reading a long cartoon in the NYT by Liana Finck, "I Quit the Patriarchy and Rescued My Marriage."

Today's the first day of the month, so I got a new infusion of gift links to hand out. That's the first one, an interesting read with charming drawings. You probably already know the things Finck seems to have realized, but she's under 40 and you're old, aren't you?

"In October 1956, Mr. Feiffer strolled into the office of The Village Voice, which had been founded the previous year, and offered to draw a regular strip for nothing."

"First titled 'Sick, Sick, Sick,' it eventually became 'Feiffer.' (He was not paid, he later wrote, until 1964.) With his signature sketchy, scribbly lines, Mr. Feiffer sought to bring to a six- or nine-panel format a level of visual simplicity and intellectual sophistication akin to what William Steig and Saul Steinberg had done with their cartoons in The New Yorker. Often devoid of backgrounds and panel borders, Mr. Feiffer’s strip focused almost exclusively on dialogue, gestures and facial expressions.... He would present a couple bickering with each other in profile, or someone in therapy, often with the speaker facing the reader.... Complacent, self-satisfied white liberals were a frequent target, and he upbraided them mercilessly.... The leotard-clad Dancer, who first appeared in 1957, was inspired by a girlfriend. She was... Mr. Feiffer wrote, 'abused and exploited by men.... but where [her male counterpart, based on himself] grew defensive and angry over the years, the Dancer retained her faith. She danced, fell, got to her feet, tripped, sailed aloft, came crashing to earth, rose stubbornly and kept dancing.'"

From "Jules Feiffer, Acerbic Cartoonist, Writer and Much Else, Dies at 95/In his long-running Village Voice comic strip and in his many plays and screenplays, he took delight in skewering politics, relationships and human nature" (NYT).

Feiffer also wrote the screenplay for "Carnal Knowledge" and the Robert Altman version of "Popeye," and his play "Little Murders" became one of my favorite movies from 1971:

Cement.

I'm slogging through the NYT material about these last days of the Biden presidency. The word "cement" keeps appearing:

1. "Biden Races to Cement His Legacy Through a Series of Actions" — "In the final days of his term, President Biden has issued a series of policy decisions intended to cement his agenda and, in some cases, make it harder for President-elect Donald J. Trump to put in place his own. The 11th-hour decisions, many of them executive actions, include measures on environmental justice, prison reform, immigration and foreign relations. Some are intended to preserve Mr. Biden’s legacy, while others are last-ditch efforts to expand his approach. Many are likely to be undone after Mr. Trump takes office next week. The actions have gotten the attention of Mr. Trump, who said on social media earlier this month that Mr. Biden was 'doing everything possible' to make the transition process 'as difficult as possible.' 'Fear not, these "orders" will be terminated shortly,' Mr. Trump added."

2. "Biden to Deliver Farewell Address, Capping a 5-Decade Political Career/The president has sought to portray his administration as transformative, but his speech on Wednesday night comes amid a backdrop in which he is not leaving on his own terms" — "The White House would not disclose what Mr. Biden plans to say in his speech, set for 8 p.m. Eastern. But in his final months he has been seeking to cement a legacy as a transformative president that stabilized domestic politics while bolstering America’s leadership abroad, one who ushered the nation out of a pandemic, made historic investments in infrastructure and clean energy, and worked to strengthen democratic institutions both nationally and globally."

If you were really transformative, you would have a legacy because the people saw what you did and lived through your era and were genuinely changed. You wouldn't need to cement anything. You wouldn't need to set up obstacles to try to slow down your successor.

Now, here's an appearance of cement in something from last week about Jimmy Carter: "A Legacy From Carter That Democrats Would Prefer to Escape/For decades, Republicans have reveled in invoking Jimmy Carter’s name to deride Democrats as weak — mockery that has influenced the way Democrats present themselves to voters":

"Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force. My decision was guided by the fact that we had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon..."

"... and had already scheduled another column — this one a satire — for publication. The only bias was against repetition."

Said David Shipley, The Washington Post opinions editor, quoted in "Washington Post Cartoonist Quits After Jeff Bezos Cartoon Is Killed/The cartoon, by Ann Telnaes, depicted the owner of The Post, Jeff Bezos, and other billionaires genuflecting toward a statue of President-elect Donald Trump" (NYT).

Here's the cartoon:

Vote:

What do you think — was it too edgy for them or simply too boring?

WaPo censored the anti-Bezos message

I believe Shipley — it was rejected as redundant of 2 recent columns

Not every cartoon is selected for publication and this one is just obvious and not good enough

Who can know the mind of WaPo?

 

pollcode.com free polls

Out of all of "Instagram’s Favorite New Yorker Cartoons in 2024," one stands out as not funny in the way it was thought to be funny back when it was shared.

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That's from August 21. 

You can check out all of The New Yorker's most shared cartoons here.

There's also this, from July 22, the day after Biden dropped out:

"If some nonprofit needed a T-shirt design, Ed would always draw it. So we wrapped him up..."

"... in a quilt that a friend made of old T-shirts with Ed's drawings on them and gave him a green burial."

From "A Visit to Planet Koren/A new exhibition celebrates the work of the late cartoonist Edward Koren" (The New Yorker).

This is the best disposal of a human body I have ever seen.

"The crab warned her. The goldfish warned her."

"The benefits of face-to-face interactions may be related to smell. When our noses pick..."

"... up the body odor of other people, for example, we tend to pick up their emotions, too: from anxiety and fear to happiness. In one experiment, researchers applied electrodes to the faces of volunteers and asked them to sniff samples of sweat of people who had previously watched either happy video ('The Jungle Book') or neutral videos (the weather forecast.) After inhaling the body odor of cheerful people, the volunteers’ facial muscles twitched in a way that suggested they felt happier, too.... This role of scents in feeling the emotions of others, he says, may help explain why people with more sensitive noses tend to have larger circles of friends and suffer less loneliness — both important predictors of health and longevity.... Smelling the body odor of a loved one can help reduce stress. When European researchers submitted a group of volunteers to weak electric shocks, those who could sniff T-shirts previously worn by their romantic partners stayed calmer...."

From "Why in-person friendships are better for health than virtual pals/Simply having good friends isn’t enough. Research suggests that to truly thrive, we need to physically meet with our friends on a regular basis" (WaPo).

1. I have almost complete anosmia so does that make other people less useful to me? I guess I would have more friends if the potential to smell them was part of the allure. 

2. Apparently, you have to go to Europe to find people who volunteer to take electric shocks and attempt to succor themselves with smelly T-shirts.

3. We're not hearing about experiments that made people smell the sweat of unhappy people, but wouldn't that change the inferences? If you can smell and you go out and about where you can smell people in person, then, presumably, the smell affects you, but the effect could be negative or positive, depending whether the smellees are happy or unhappy.

4. On the internet, nobody knows you're a smelly dog....

"We’ve seen many people through the end of life. It’s never dramatic, like Snagglepuss..."

"... staggering around onstage clutching his throat. It can be rough, and then one slips over gently to whatever awaits. My old pastor told me it is like going to bed on the living room floor and waking up in your own bed."

Writes Anne Lamott, in "Age is giving me the two best gifts: Softness and illumination" (WaPo).

The pastor's remark calls to mind Percy Shelley's "Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats":

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep,
He hath awaken'd from the dream of life;
'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife....

As for Snagglepuss... I'm old enough to get the reference, and I thought it would be easy to find a YouTube clip of the ham-actor lion on stage overdoing a death scene. I began to suspect that YouTube was censoring death. I don't know. I did find this collection of bad actors dying:

ADDED: Maybe Snagglepuss is an up-to-date reference. I see that he was reenvisioned in 2018 by DC Comics as a gay playwright in "The Snagglepuss Chronicles: The Need to Enter Stage Right":

"So much of our culture today, with young people, is centered around their feelings... Feelings are indicators, they’re not facts...."

"Parents teaching their kids about safe spaces, and 'I feel uncomfortable'... It’s, like, You know what? The world is not a safe space. You have to find the comfort. It’s mostly uncomfortable.... I don’t like kids."

Said RuPaul, quoted by Ronan Farrow, in "RuPaul Doesn’t See How That’s Any of Your Business/The drag star brought the form mainstream, and made an empire out of queer expression. Now he fears 'the absolute worst'" (The New Yorker).

Later, RuPaul seemed to want to revise that "I don't like kids" remark. He's quoted as saying that he'd "be a great parent" and that he "fucking love[s]" the "white noise of joy" of kids playing outside in the schoolyard near his cottage.

Farrow tells us RuPaul is "a proponent of psychedelics": 

"... Harvard interim president Alan M. Garber... said the cartoon depicted a hand labeled with a Star of David with a dollar sign in the middle holding nooses that were tied around the necks of an Arab man and a Black man."

"Screenshots of the cartoon appeared to show that the men were boxer and antiwar activist Muhammad Ali and former Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. [The Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee and the African American Resistance Organization] have since taken down the image and apologized...."

From "Harvard condemns ‘flagrantly antisemitic’ cartoon posted by student groups" (WaPo).

Trump's secret: hats... always hats.

I'm reading "Trump invested in a muscular turnout operation, and it paid off" by Michael Gold in the NYT.

Much of the Trump campaign’s focus was on enlisting 'caucus captains,' devoted supporters who agreed to recruit 10 friends and neighbors to caucus for Mr. Trump. To incentivize them, the campaign offered signed hats and chances to meet the former president. The campaign held trainings for caucus captains at its headquarters, where it taught them the ins and outs of caucusing so the captains could pass their knowledge on to new caucusgoers.... At his rallies, caucus captains and volunteers collected information from attendees, and the campaign followed up with emails, phone calls and text messages.... The campaign... deployed educational videos — one with a cartoon blob named Marlon, the other with Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law — that offered step-by-step instructions to first-time caucusgoers.

Hats and simple cartoons — here's that Marlon thing — maybe politics is far simpler than anybody but Trump understands.

ADDED: Political hats are a big topic. There are metaphorical hats — the hat that you throw into the ring, the white hat that designates the hero. And there are literal hats, like the shockingly powerful MAGA hat. And remember pussy hats? To go back in history, there's the liberty cap.

And look, here's a liberty cap, atop the flagpole, in The Great Seal of the State of Iowa:

The cartoon editor of The New Yorker "invite[s] you to enjoy these delicious, butyraceous cartoons, which you all dug the most on Instagram in 2023."

I'm reading "Instagram’s Favorite New Yorker Cartoons in 2023/The gags that got the Internet laughing, and liking, the most in the past year."

Lots of cartoons at the link, apparently the ones Instagram users indicated they liked — or, as some people might say, "dug" (and "butyraceous" means like butter, by the way — but I'll just show you my favorite:

 

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"The man who wrote 'Glengarry Glen Ross' knows a thing or two about salesmanship. But what he’s selling comes delivered in rhetoric so broad-brush..."

"... it’s hard to determine the line between truth-telling and hot air. Hollywood is 'flogging nonsense,' populated by 'criminal dolts' in a 'lickspittle racket' policed by 'Diversity Capos' Sometimes the complaint is delivered in the form of tortured metaphors... Sometimes it arrives in the twitterpated grievance patter of the anti-PC crowd: 'We knew [a movie villain] of old by his Black Mustache, or his Black Hat; and today by his white skin.' Often it is laced with very Mamet-ian profanity. Sometimes, alas, it comes in cartoon form.... A depiction of Disney’s 'early attempts at animation' shows a hand lowering a mouse into a film projector. One drawing likens an Oscar statuette to a vibrator. The less said about the ones featuring Cookie Monster, 'Shoah' and Harvey Weinstein, the better...."

Writes Mark Athitakis, in "David Mamet is mad at Hollywood. His new book yells why. In an essay collection, ‘Everywhere an Oink Oink,’ the writer and director spews insults at Tinsel Town, especially at the filmmakers who rejected him" (WaPo).

And here's the book — "Everywhere an Oink Oink/An Embittered, Dyspeptic, and Accurate Report of Forty Years in Hollywood" (commission earned).

I bought it.