"They jaywalk across bike paths, swagger through crosswalks barefoot like the Beatles, preen in the parks and..."

"... sometimes strut between office buildings and cultural landmarks in the city center. In parks, the problem can be even worse, with the droppings matting the grass and squishing into the treads of shoes."

From "Finland’s Short, Precious Summers Are Plagued by Goose Poop/Finns trying to enjoy beaches and parks during their all-too-brief summers have been vexed by legions of geese — and their droppings. The smelly mess has resisted even the most innovative solutions" (NYT).

The "innovative solutions" are ineffective pooper scoopers in the litter box that is the sandy beach. Outside of Finland, "officials fight the problem at its source: the birds themselves."

"What are some famous quotes by writers/artists/musicians about critics?"

That's I question I had, a couple hours ago, as I was gathering my thoughts in preparation, I thought, for blogging this article by the New Yorker's movie critic, Richard Brody, "In Defense of the Traditional Review/Far from being a journalistic relic, as suggested by recent developments at the New York Times, arts criticism is inherently progressive, keeping art honest and pointing toward its future."

I got a bunch of great quotes out of Grok with my question, including the one that deserves to stand in for them all: "Most rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read" (Frank Zappa).

Then there was this, from Pablo Picasso: "The critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." And that got me tumbling down a side path with an issue I'd encountered yesterday, the idea that there are individuals who identify as eunuchs and the notion that castration is, for them, medically necessary. I was told: "The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) Standards of Care (Version 8) includes a chapter on 'eunuch' as a gender identity, suggesting that castration may be considered 'medically necessary gender-affirming care' for some who identify as eunuchs and experience distress from their genitals."

I introduced the question: "It occurs to me that a person might argue that they identify as dead and therefore entitled to physician-assisted suicide — that killing is a medically required treatment." That led to a long discussion that kept me far away from the topic of the usefulness of critics — they're "inherently progressive"! — and I'm not going to go into the details. I'm just going to list a few phrases that came up in the Grok discussion that's displaced blogging for me this morning:

"Conditions like Cotard’s syndrome, where individuals genuinely believe they are dead or non-existent, are rare and classified as a psychiatric delusion, treated through therapy or medication, not affirmation," "So you're saying that if only doctors had been killing people who 'identify as dead' for a longer period of time and managed to fight off those who think it's wrong, it would be analogous to transgender surgeries," "You’re correct that genital transgender surgeries, like vaginoplasty or phalloplasty, are... irreversible in any meaningful sense," "'Sexual sensation is possible due to preserved nerves' — I note that you didn't say orgasm," "Your point about muscles is spot-on: the lack of vaginal musculature in a neovagina means it cannot replicate the contractile component of a natal female orgasm," "Is there any commentary, comedy, or fictional writing utilizing my idea of 'identifying as dead'?," "Seems like something that someone in 'Chicago' would say (like 'He ran into my knife... 50 times')," "Somewhere, some writer(s) must have already written the line: 'Go ahead. Try to kill me. You can't. I'm already dead.'"

That went on and on, with the discussion of many movies, and it wasn't the only A.I. conversations that kept me away from the blog this morning. There was also, among many others, "Summarize this article... and explain why Brody thinks arts criticism is 'progressive.'" Which led to: "What is 'progressive' supposed to mean? It strikes me as utter bullshit." And: "Weave into this discussion what Tom Wolfe wrote in 'The Painted Word.'" And: "Isn't there some related idea — or conspiracy theory — that the CIA created the art market for Abstract Expressionism?"

All of that was more interesting to me than what I would have produced reading Brody's article and blogging it in my usual way. And my "usual way" is to follow whatever interests me, not to feel obligated, but to do what is intrinsically rewarding for me. You see the problem!

"Felix Baumgartner, the Austrian extreme adventurer who hurtled to earth from more than 24 miles high in 2012 and became the first human to break the sound barrier while free-falling..."

"... died on Thursday in a paragliding accident along the Adriatic coast in Italy. He was 56....Mr. Baumgartner crashed to the ground a few yards from a swimming pool in the town of Porto Sant’Elpidio, the mayor, Massimiliano Ciarpella, said on Friday. He said that Mr. Baumgartner had become ill during his flight and had lost consciousness by the time of impact in a part of town popular among tourists. An autopsy was to be performed, he said...."

From "Felix Baumgartner, 56, Professional Daredevil, Dies While Paragliding/Nicknamed 'Fearless Felix,' he jumped from the edge of space in 2012" (NYT).

The death-defying dive into a swimming pool — with tourists watching — called to mind the diving horses at the Steel Pier in Atlantic City:

 

"Ms. Green described Mr. McMichael as an experienced farmer who had worked with livestock since his teenage years."

"The land where Mr. McMichael was raising livestock, including cattle and lambs, had been in the family for three generations, Ms. Green said. Plans for the future of the farm remain uncertain, she said. 'Farming was Bradley’s dream,' Ms. Green said. 'He died doing something he loved, and he cared very much for his livestock.'"

From "Oklahoma Farmer Killed by Water Buffaloes He Had Just Bought, Police Say/The farm where Bradley McMichael, 47, died has been in his family for three generations. His fiancée described him as an experienced farmer who had worked with livestock since his teenage years" (NYT).

The expression "He died doing something he loved" has come up a few times on this blog. I'm not sure I've ever discussed it — though I've had long conversations about it in real life — but it comes up in the comments, for example, in the thread accompanying "Indian stuntman dies as he uses only his hair to cross Teesta River" and "Choking to death on pancakes in an amateur pancake eating contest and why the Heimlich maneuver and mechanical suction didn't work."

Looking for those examples, I came across this from a beloved but long-gone commenter:

Young and old... good luck and bad...

Screen grab from the sidebar at The Guardian. The stories are here — "Gus pulled the arrow out of his head by himself and immediately went to see his mother, who was vacuuming inside... He kept saying, 'Mom, am I dying? Am I going to leave you? I don’t want to leave you yet'" — and here — "It is with great sadness that we can confirm our icon of humanity and powerhouse of positivity Fauja Singh has passed away in India."

"'I thought it was a great photo opportunity.' But the shutter-worthy sight quickly turned tragic when one of the bison stepped into a small part of the basin..."

"... then tried hopping out. Within a matter of seconds, the beast began teetering at the edge of the Grand Prismatic Spring — the largest hot spring in the entire park — and then fell in."

From "Bison boils to death in Yellowstone hot spring in front of tourists" (NY Post).

Also in the NY. Post: "A 14-year-old California boy walked off a 120-foot cliff in front of his horrified father — telling him he saw 'snowmen and Kermit the frog' while hallucinating from altitude sickness."

"I think you would prefer the human race to endure, right?"/"Uh............"/"You’re hesitating"/"Well, I don’t know. I would....... I would....."

"There’s so many questions implicit in this"/"Should the human race survive?"/"Yes.... but I also would like us to radically solve these problems. And so it’s always, I don’t know, yeah — transhumanism. The ideal was this radical transformation where your human, natural body gets transformed into an immortal body. And there’s a critique of, let’s say, the trans people in a sexual context, or, I don’t know, a transvestite is someone who changes their clothes and cross-dresses, and a transsexual is someone where you change your, I don’t know, penis into a vagina. And we can then debate how well those surgeries work. But we want more transformation than that. The critique is not that it’s weird and unnatural, it’s: Man, it’s so pathetically little. And OK, we want more than cross-dressing or changing your sex organs. We want you to be able to change your heart and change your mind and change your whole body. And then Orthodox Christianity, by the way — the critique Orthodox Christianity has of this, is these things don’t go far enough. That transhumanism is just changing your body, but you also need to transform your soul and you need to transform your whole self. And so............................"

It's Peter Thiel, responding to what one might think were easy questions from Ross Douthat, on the new episode of Douthat's podcast, here, at Podscribe.

Go to 00:37:32 to experience Thiel's freakishly long hesitation when Douthat has just asked if he'd like humanity to survive. And I love how he takes the concept of "trans" and runs with it.

Even though Thiel's cogitations wander into Christianity, he doesn't mention The Transfiguration, in Matthew 17. There, Jesus is "transfigured":

I caught a glimpse of my own obituary.

In the email this morning, the Google alert I've had on my name for decades brings this:

I send that image to Meade (along with the link to the website the alert wants me to click), and this conversation follows:

"Florian Willet, a euthanasia advocate who was detained by Swiss authorities last year after being present when an American woman ended her life using a chamber-like device, has died."

"Mr. Willet’s death was reported in an obituary posted on the website of The Last Resort, his assisted dying group, written by Philip Nitschke, the inventor of the device, known as a Sarco capsule. Mr. Nitschke said in an email that Mr. Willet had died by assisted suicide, but further details about his death remained unclear.... Mr. Willet, who was 47, according to the obituary, was the only person with the American woman when she died using the Sarco device in a remote forest in Switzerland in September... Mr. Willet was released from pretrial detention in December, after which 'he was a changed man,' Mr. Nitschke wrote. 'Gone was his warm smile and self-confidence. In its place was a man who was deeply traumatized by the experience of incarceration and the wrongful accusation of strangulation.'..."

From "Euthanasia Advocate Who Assisted in Woman’s Suicide Dies in Germany/Dr. Florian Willet had been under investigation in Switzerland after being present when an American woman died using a so-called suicide pod" (NYT).

"Central to the questions around the woman’s death is the use of the Sarco capsule. The device, which can be transported to a location of a user’s choosing, is an airtight pod with a window. Inside is a button that initiates the process of replacing life-giving oxygen with nitrogen, killing the person inside within minutes.... 'In the final months of his life, Dr. Florian Willet shouldered more than any man should,' Mr. Nitschke wrote. 'He knew that he did nothing illegal or wrong, but his belief in the rule of law in Switzerland was in tatters.'"

Stay and fight, if you believe in your cause. And yet, what if the cause is the power to push the button on the escape pod when troubles abound? 

"Winter’s short days and long nights aided my first attempts at becoming nocturnal. My husband bundled up and came with me on night walks."

"Friends gathered for an evening snowshoe. As the globe turned toward spring, though, the sun’s rays became stronger and the days stretched on. I stayed in.... But I grew restless and started heading out for night hikes.... A few weeks in, I was running along Lake Ontario when I stopped to watch the sun dip below the horizon. I became obsessed with that transition, stopping to watch it whenever I could. It slowed me down enough that I began noticing how a day ends in stages... 'civil twilight'... 'nautical twilight'... '[a]stronomical twilight'.... The sun wasn’t setting.... I was the one rotating away, a fleck on the back of an enormous spinning globe. Once I sorted out my relationship with the universe, my perspective changed. The fading light made me feel small and out of control — which was exactly why I loved it...."

Writes Claire Cameron, in "Skin Cancer Made Me Nocturnal. It Was Illuminating. How the earth’s rotation taught me to find peace in the face of death" (NYT).

I like the way this essay never mentions sunblock, as if slathering enough lotion all over — and over and over — could give a sun-vulnerable person the power to cavort in blazing full sun like a model in a beach vacation ad. 

The writer — whose father died of melanoma when he was 42  — is doing what I do and avoiding the sun. She's doing sunsets. I do sunrises. It's the same idea. I also do a second walk most days. I simply find heavy shade. That doesn't work when the leaves are down, but that's when it's cold and there are layers of clothing.

The spiritual dimension of dusk and darkness is there for anyone to dip into, but it is different when you feel driven into it by a very real threat of death from skin cancer. 

"Exotic" mushrooms “just taste more interesting" — "They tasted good and I didn’t get sick."

Said Erin Patterson, the Australian woman accused of murdering three relatives by serving them lunch laced with deadly mushrooms, quoted in "Australia mushroom trial: Erin Patterson ‘drawn to exotic varieties’/Woman accused of murdering three relatives by serving them death cap mushrooms, says she is adept at foraging and can identify different species" (London Times).

I know not to eat them, and I don't have a decent sense of taste, so it's not for me to say... but just supposing you ate one, unwisely — don't do it! — answer this: Do death cap mushrooms taste good?

Nibbling around the edges of research, I think the answer is they taste like fairly ordinary mushrooms, which is why a fool might think they're edible.

Joni Ernst serves up death, apology, sarcasm, and Jesus.

Against all odds, Joni Ernst has made it worse pic.twitter.com/aElIudNmZG

— Keith Edwards (@keithedwards) May 31, 2025

I had to go back to this after reading about it because I had clicked it off in disgust thinking it was an genuine effort to make a "sincere" apology.

For background: "Joni Ernst posts sarcastic apology video following comments that 'we all are going to die'" (Des Moines Register): "The Iowa Republican's original comments came at a town hall in Parkersburg on Friday, May 30, while she was answering a question about cuts to Medicaid in President Donald Trump's tax package that the Senate is poised to consider. During Ernst's answer, someone in the audience interrupted her to shout, 'people will die!' Ernst replied by saying, 'People are not — well, we all are going to die. For heaven’s sakes, folks.'"

"Large or small cancer was still cancer. Once a cell has gone haywire in your body and learned how to replicate itself in a campaign against you..."

"... can you ever feel safe? I thought about the large mass in my breast and pictured the cells marching like fire ants on a raging tour of my interior. Five days later, while I was driving, the surgeon called to tell me I did not have cancer. I had a fibroid-like mass with a jagged surface resembling cancer’s starburst shape. He had two radiologists confirm this. 'I am so very sorry,' he said. 'This was a lesson for me. Always wait for the test results.' That moment at the wheel is still perfectly preserved in my mind, the flood of relief, the blinding joy. I will die someday of something, but it probably won’t be from this. The lesson for me was that Danny was a partner for the long haul, however long or short this life might be."

Writes Beth Apone Salamon in "We Had to Break Up. He Refused. 'I love you,' I told him, 'but this is over'" (NYT).

This is a "Modern Love" column. The headline refers to the part, when she thinks she has cancer and tells her husband, whose first wife died, slowly, of breast cancer, that they have to break up because he doesn't deserve to go through the same thing twice. That's interesting. An offer he can't not refuse.

But I was more interested in the ideation about cancer. Those metaphors: a cell gone "haywire" and "fire ants on a raging tour." 

"The fact that he was bitten by an alligator significantly and continued on his rampage was shocking...."

Said Grady Judd, sheriff of Polk County, Florida, quoted in "Bitten by Alligator, Man Is Killed After Charging at Deputies, Sheriff Says/The authorities say that Timothy Schulz, 42, of Mulberry, Fla., swam across an alligator-filled lake before a violent encounter with deputies in the neighborhood" (NYT).

"Sheriff Judd also said that Mr. Schulz had a lengthy criminal history, which he described as 'meth arrest, meth arrest, meth arrest, meth arrest, meth arrest.'... At 7:43 a.m., a resident in a Polk County neighborhood called the sheriff’s office to say that a man was in a lake known to have alligators in it, and that the man was treading water near one of the broad-snouted reptiles.... 'It’s a long swim,' Sheriff Judd said. 'And he was gator-bitten along the way.'"

I note the phrase "one of the broad-snouted reptiles," which I believe is an example of the "second mention" problem in writing. The writer feels a need to avoid repetition of a word — here, "alligator" — and comes up with a variation. The example I gave in the old post at that link was of a woman who'd written "small house" and, on second mention, wrote "petite edifice."

The writer of that alligator article — had it gone on longer and required further struggle to escape the terrible (word) "alligator" — could have told us more about how the drug-addled man — the substance-impaired individual — tangled with the jawsome beast, the toothy predator, the swamp monster.

Sadly, the man is dead, an individual fatally shot by officers, a person deceased in a police encounter, a male victim of law enforcement action, a citizen killed in officer-involved incident....

Man versus beast stories of the day.

1. "Man 'jumped' by coyote saves himself by strangling it for 10 minutes: 'Either him or me'" ("He jumped on me and I caught him in the air, he was biting me, and so when I threw him down and I’m trying to slide out of the way, he just kept coming.... I had to rip my left hand out of his mouth, and when I got my left hand out, I just choked him all the way till the police got there....")

2. "Man dies in bee attack despite frantic escape attempt that had him drive through neighbor’s yard" ("Stephen Daniel... frantically jumped into his vehicle to get away, but the bees followed him inside and continued to sting him until he crashed into Chrishae Cooper’s property...").

"I have the same cancer that Joe Biden has... that has also spread to my bones.... My life expectancy is: maybe this summer...."

Coffee With Scott Adams 5/19/25 https://t.co/miG4jySdsD

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) May 19, 2025

"Weirdly, since it's old news for me, I've just sort of processed it.... And I have to say, you know, everybody has to die... and it's kind of civilized that you know about how long you have...."

"[Guy Edward] Bartkus was said to have identified with 'pro-mortalism,' a philosophy that claims death is preferable to being born in the first place."

"His extremist beliefs, which he recorded in manifestos, included being against bringing babies into the world without their consent to spare them from future suffering. The suspect attempted to live-stream the explosion, although authorities said the video failed to upload.... Bilal Essayli, the US attorney for Los Angeles, wrote on social media that Bartkus appeared to be 'anti pro-life.'"

From "Terrorist bombed fertility clinic ‘to spare babies suffering’/Guy Edward Bartkus was the only fatality in the explosion at a facility in Palm Springs, California" (London Times).

I don't think there is an organized "anti pro-life" movement (to be distinguished from the pro-choice opponents of the pro-life movement). Here's the L.A. Times article about Bartkus's manifesto:

"I knew that he loved the song because he played it at his rallies.... But I didn’t know he knew my name."

"It left me really gobsmacked that my name actually resides in his consciousness.... My theory is that Trump, on a deeper level, wants to connect. He’s trying to be seen and to be loved. So for a while there, I felt this kind of glimmer of hope that wouldn’t it be great if he could allow us, as theater artists, to share with him that which we know in storytelling to assist him to see things a bit differently."

Said Betty Buckley, quoted in "'Is Betty Buckley Still Alive?' Trump Asked. She Certainly Is. 'What’s happening these days,” the singer said at the start of a Joe’s Pub residency, 'is weird, and not cool'" (NYT).

"I still have hope for an awakening of awareness of community, of humanity, of the importance of life, the importance of every one of us. I’m appalled at the tech bros who think empathy is a weakness. Art is really important, because it’s there that we express these feelings — you can feel that connection — and I feel sure that that’s why Trump is moved by that song.... I would wish for him that he could build on that feeling that he has for the song, and translate that to good feelings for all others...."

If you touch me, you'll understand what happiness is....

ADDED: I'm struck by Buckley's idea that Trump is "trying to be seen and to be loved." It made me think of my Mother's Day post about a question a NYT writer thought we might ask our mother: "Who made you feel seen when you were growing up?" I hope that Trump invites Buckley to sing — on some appropriate occasion — and that she allows herself to be seen by and to see this person she believes has a longing to be seen. But I would guess that, like most celebrities, she wouldn't be caught dead with him.

"Gator grabbed her out of the canoe. He tried to fight the gator off. We're at the last place he saw her. He left the paddle here where he last saw her at."

Said the cop quoted in "Alligator attacks, kills woman canoeing with her husband on lake in Florida: 'He tried to fight the gator off'" (CBS News).

"Totally Drunk Guy Is A Famous American Novelist Who Viewed Hippies With Disgust On National TV."

An incredibly stupid YouTube title for what is a fantastic episode of "Firing Line," from 1968, with William F. Buckley interacting with Jack Kerouac (and a sociology professor and Ed Sanders of The Fugs):

Kerouac died 7 months later. He may be drunk but every word he says has more value than anything that comes from the sociology professor. And nobody on the stage has much of a good word to say about hippies.

Speaking of death, Buckley opens the show with: "The topic tonight is the hippies an understanding of whom we must I guess acquire or die painfully...."