"Ben sold out to get richer... that's it, end of!"/"These two bozos have made their fortune from Cookie Dough Icecream. And they think they have the ethical high ground?"

"He sold the company to get very very rich but he still wants control...."/"Mr Cohen you sold out, move on, use the money to campaign for your beliefs in other ways"/"They are bores. If they wanted to keep their progressive policies above the need for maximum profitability they should have retained ownership and never sold their business...."

The commenters are pretty much unanimous on the London Times article titled "Ben & Jerry’s founder attacks Peltz fund influence over Magnum/Ben Cohen steps up his feud with the ice-cream brand’s owner as a partner from the Trian hedge fund joins the Magnum board."

The legal dispute is the opposite of ice cream: "Magnum... has been accused of ousting directors on Ben & Jerry’s independent board, which was established to control its social mission when Cohen and Greenfield sold the business to Unilever for $326 million in 2000.... Cohen.... described the recent Ben & Jerry’s board changes as 'a blatant violation of the legally binding agreement put in place over 25 years ago to ensure the brand’s values would always be protected.'"

"I’m obsessed with being first, or unique, with something. I was trying to make sure that the consistency wasn’t familiar in the mouth...."

"It’s not thick like a milkshake and not thin like hot chocolate. It’s a richness. It’s a consistency that’s not super familiar... Like a cream-based soup. Like a soup in the winter that’s just like, ‘Oh, this just feels like Mama,’ kind of."

Said Tyra Banks, quoted in "Tyra Banks Says It’s ‘Hot Ice Cream.’ Everyone Else Just Says, ‘Huh?’/Even those who have tried it struggle to describe the model’s baffling concoction. That includes Ms. Banks herself" (NYT).

The product is sold at Banks's "ice cream" shop in Sydney, Australia. In the U.S., you can't sell something as "ice cream" that doesn't meet the USDA definition of ice cream. That's why I put quotes around "ice cream." This is an American blog.

AND: An American poem parody for the occasion:

Some say ice cream will end in heat, 

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of defeat

I hold with those who favor heat....

"Many of them say they can eat nothing but GariGarikun"/"If they can enjoy the last mouthful, it will be a special moment shared by them and their families."

I'm quoting a Japanese nurse and doctor who work in palliative care, quoted in "GariGarikun ice pop, a surprise hit among the terminally ill."

That's published in Asahi Shimbun, one of the largest newspapers in Japan, which I went to read this morning because I wanted to see how much Japanese people were enjoying the excellence of Shohei Ohtani in our World Series. But nothing about Ohtani is in the top 10 most-read stories over there. I had to scroll down the front page to find his name, and it was tucked away in the sports section, just the AP report, here.

Nearly dead people eating popsicles got more attention. It was the second-most-read article. Meanwhile, the top of the front page is dominated by Trump:

Which one of those things is not like the others? Abe, yes. But also "Bear roams central Morioka, fatal attacks elsewhere."

I see "RFK Jr. gives opening statements, gets interrupted by protesters at Senate hearing," and one of the protesters is Ben Cohen, the ice cream mogul.

Why would Cohen think this is a good place to insert himself? I would think ice cream is one of the top reasons for the obesity crisis in America. Where does he come off thinking he can pose as an exemplar of virtue against RFK Jr.?

The disruption begins at 1:50. The momentary look of terror on Bobby's face made me think of his father, suddenly interrupted and shot dead. 

The chant you hear is "RFK kills people with hate."

"When Biden bit into an ice cream bar after the talk, the partially melted dessert fell to the floor."

Wrote The Harvard Crimson, quoted in "Joe Biden drops ice cream and calls Ukraine ‘Iraq’ on secret Harvard visit."A talk by the former president at the university in Donald Trump’s crosshairs was 'marked by gaffes,' a student newspaper said" (London Times).

The former president held a private seminar with 50 politics students that was kept secret until his arrival. When word got out, a group of pro-Palestinian students assembled to protest outside the building....

Biden is well-known for his fondness for ice cream and frequently stopped for a cone during campaigning or presidential visits. He remarked in 2023 that, “you know it’s pretty dull when you’ve been in public life as long as I have and you’re known for two things: chocolate chip ice cream and Ray-Ban sunglasses, but what the hell.”

Why did they give him an "ice cream bar"?

"People went around saying, 'He who dies with the most toys wins'.... People said it in a way that suggested they didn’t really believe it..."

"... but it wasn’t clear then what they really did believe. The culture didn’t seem to be offering many alternatives. You can dispose of discretionary dollars in various ways. If you were a yuppie, you spent them on yourself. You consumed conspicuously. That’s what the yuppie-haters hated most about the yuppies. You bought things you didn’t need and paid extra for the brand: Sasson jeans, Frette linens, Cross pens, Rolex watches, Perrier water, Aprica strollers. Faux high-end imports emerged—Grey Poupon mustard (then owned by RJR Nabisco), Häagen-Dazs ice cream (invented in the Bronx).... Food became a highly cathected consumable.... The more entrepreneurial yuppies colonized abandoned row houses and warehouse loft spaces, and used some of their leisure time to work out. Fitness and self-care were big.... The yuppie strode forth from the economic wreckage of the nineteen-seventies: two oil crises, mortgage rates at thirteen per cent, a huge loss of manufacturing jobs in major industries like steel and cars, a stock market in the doldrums. When the economy recovered, in the early nineteen-eighties, it was easy for people to feel rich without feeling guilty. They had seen what it was like to worry about money. Spending it felt liberating...."

From "When Yuppies Ruled/Defining a social type is a way of defining an era. What can the time of the young urban professional tell us about our own?" by Louis Menand (The New Yorker).

"Be safe out there!"

Page break for your protection from TikTok:

It's a death trap, it's a suicide rap....

"Inside the hall, the three presidents sat in matching white armchairs and took the stage to strains of 'Born to Run' by Bruce Springsteen, the unofficial bard of the Democratic Party...."

I'm reading "4 Presidents, 2 Events and a Preview of Campaign Clashes to Come/President Biden raised $25 million at a Radio City Music Hall event, adding to his huge cash edge, after Donald Trump pushed his law-and-order message at a wake for a police officer killed on duty" (NYT).

Three Presidents were sitting in white armchairs before people who'd paid up to $500,000 apiece to sit in the audience in the most beautiful theater in the country. The comments over there are mostly about the fourth President. That guy, Mr. Trump, steals focus from everything.

Also stealing attention were the protesters at the 3-Presidents event. They were shouting "blood on your hands." Obama chided them: "You can’t just talk and not listen. That’s what the other side does." Seems to me protesters on Obama's side have interrupted more speeches than those on the other side. But it's subjective, and the old adage is as true as ever: All the assholes are over on the other side.

At Tomorrow's Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

"We could go further and read the dominance of crunchy and creamy in American diners’ preferences as metaphor: a sly enactment of the dynamic of conquest and submission..."

"... historically a favored American mode of interacting with the other. But sometimes a potato chip is just a potato chip. You can enjoy a good crunch without channeling imperialism. And imperial ambitions have hardly been confined to America."

Writes Ligaya Mishan in "Why Do American Diners Have Such a Limited Palate for Textures? Complex taste sensations play a crucial role in food around the world — but have long been shunned stateside" (NYT).

"Then suddenly that bucket is not just cream and sugar, it’s something else."

Said Americus Reed, "a professor of marketing... who studies the intersection of social movements and consumer behavior," about Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, which has long maintained an image of hippies located in Burlington, Vermont.

Quoted in "Ad Flap Leaves Bitter Aftertaste for Bud Light and Warning for Big Business/Bud Light’s marketing effort with a transgender influencer has put it 'in the center of the culture wars in a way that no company could possibly want to be,' one observer said" (NYT).

“There’s an authenticity element to what Ben & Jerry’s does.... When you have these large corporations that have a historic brand identity, it just looks inauthentic when they’re all of a sudden getting involved in these social campaigns,” said Anson Frericks.

"My name is Joe Biden. I’m Dr. Jill Biden’s husband. And I eat Jeni’s ice cream — chocolate chip. I came down because I heard there was chocolate chip ice cream."

"By the way, I have a whole refrigerator full upstairs. You think I’m kidding? I’m not."

Said Joe Biden, quoted in "Biden makes ice cream joke in first statement since Nashville shooting" (NY Post).

Remarkably, Biden again returned to the subject of ice cream with another shout-out to a rep from Jeni’s....

Remarkably? 

"No one is a greater believer in artistic freedom than I, but this cannot go unchallenged."

"Despite this week stating publicly that The Crown has always been a ‘fictionalized drama,’ the program makers have resisted all calls for them to carry a disclaimer at the start of each episode.... Given some of the wounding suggestions apparently contained in the new series—that King Charles plotted for his mother to abdicate, for example, or once suggested his mother’s parenting was so deficient that she might have deserved a jail sentence—this is both cruelly unjust to the individuals and damaging to the institution they represent."

Said Judi Dench, quoted in "Dame Judi Dench Accuses The Crown of 'Crude Sensationalism'/The friend of Queen Consort Camilla and frequent royal portrayer says the Netflix series 'cannot go unchallenged'" (Vanity Fair).

Dame Judi Dench.

She has played the role of Elizabeth I once and Victoria twice — in movies that contained any amount of fictionalization — and she is personal friends with Queen Camilla — whose implication in the demise of Diana will come up in the new season of "The Crown."

Here are Judi and Camilla delighting themselves with the favorite dessert of oppressors and villains the world over:

 

Art — unlike ice cream — is not about making people comfortable.

All these complaints about "The Crown" are only reminding me that the new season is about to begin. Having recently watched every episode of "How to with John Wilson" and "Joe Pera Talks with You" twice (almost), I am ready to get back to this old favorite show.

"I think on its face, the ice cream that Walmart attempted to sell at best feels performative and exploitative..."

"... in part because Juneteenth is a holiday that signals celebration of liberation, and this feels like an empty symbol rather than a meaningful gesture that companies the size of Walmart could have made to the Black community across the United States in celebration of Juneteenth.... I think that it’s really in the spirit of Juneteenth to ensure that they are doing things that are meaningful for the advancement of both their Black employees and their Black consumers and also where there are avenues for that—even investments in small Black-owned businesses. Juneteenth was once an obscure holiday... As it’s getting renewed attention and visibility, I hope that companies will find ways to mark the historic significance of the holiday and not larger performative gestures like what we are seeing here with Walmart and other companies."

Said Timothy Welbeck, an assistant professor of instruction in the Department of Africology and African American Studies and acting director of the Center for Anti-racism Research at Temple University, quoted in "Learning from Walmart’s Juneteenth marketing mistake/Timothy Welbeck, acting director of the Center for Anti-racism Research, believes companies must develop more meaningful ways to observe the occasion rather than capitalizing off the holiday commercially" (Temple Now).

"If you’ll notice, my right hand is in my pocket, so I wasn’t participating in the festival of ice cream."

Said Johnny Depp, quoted in "Photos of Johnny Depp ‘passed out,’ cocaine shown in Amber Heard trial" (NY Post). 

Depp was testifying about photograph that showed him "'passed out' on a couch in Boston with his lap covered in ice cream. "He claimed Heard gave him the pint of ice cream because she 'knew' he would fall asleep with it.... 'That was a wonderful picture for her to take.'"

"People sometimes send us pieces that were deliberately made to be bad, and you can usually see right through that. It's fake bad art, and it shows."

Said Louise Sacco, the permanent acting interim director of the Museum of Bad Art, quoted in "Treasures from the Museum of Bad Art" (CBS).

The article is from 2015. Some readers will know why I'm thinking about it today.

Click through and scroll to see what sort of badness is museum-worthy. It must be "sincere and original, and something went wrong in a way that's interesting." 

I laughed a lot looking at these pictures — hardest at "President Kennedy Eating Ice Cream":

It's obvious what went wrong there. It's the same thing that went wrong with most of the examples at the link and that, once you think about it, causes the interestingness to fade. The painter was looking at a photograph of a person frozen in action. 

There's a particular way the camera captures gesture and expression: in a snap. But a painting develops over time. What is the artist observing — other than the painting itself — during this time? You could paint entirely from your mind, remembering or imagining. And you can have something you glance at now and then, without attempting to reproduce it. 

But if you are going to stare intently at this thing and make it into a painting, you have a special problem. You could become analytical and translate what you see into something that comes from your brain — like Cezanne painting a bowl of fruit. But let's assume you're just devoting your time to copying what you see. If it's a real person, that person is going to live and breathe, and they're not going to be in the middle of smiling or dancing or licking ice cream! 

You'll produce a portrait that might be good or bad, but we'll be able to tell that it was painted from a live model. If you paint from a photograph that's a portrait, you might get away with it. But if you paint from a photograph that captures expression and gestures and you do it with an intent simply to reproduce it, it will be bad. You are perverting your humanity with laborious copying of what only a camera can do, and we feel revulsion. We must laugh at your work product to escape despair. 

ADDED: Is that Kennedy photograph the reason for all of Biden's posing with ice cream cones?

I'll have a double scoop of the plagiarism swirl.

ALSO: Here's a Reddit thread from a couple years ago that displays and discusses the photograph of JFK. The photo is from August 1963. Somebody says "Probably the last ice cream he ever ate" and somebody else says "Brain freeze."

UPDATE:  I wrote: "Some readers will know why I'm thinking about it today." I didn't want to reveal an answer from the NYT crossword. One clue was "The 'BA' of the Boston museum MOBA." Answer: "bad art."

"So, for the new study, which was published in April in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, the Texas scientists recruited eight healthy young men and women and asked them to spend a full day at the lab seated..."

"... rising only to eat or visit the bathroom. The next morning, the volunteers returned to the lab for a high-fat breakfast of melted ice cream and half and half, while the scientists monitored their bodies’ metabolic response during the next six hours. Then, on a separate day, the volunteers sat again, except for a few seconds each hour, when they sprinted." 

From "The 4-Second Workout/Intense bursts of exercise throughout the day may have surprising metabolic benefits" (NYT).

1. That was mean, melting the ice cream.

2.  So... I guess you can give up your long wholesome outings running and hiking and just sit slumping over your computer all day, every day if — every time you need to go get some food or pee — you just run like hell. 

3. Clear the pathways to the kitchen and bathroom so you don't stumble and fall, undoing the health benefits.

Is Sandra Lee sending "peace and loving healing" to Andrew Cuomo?

I'm reading "Andrew Cuomo ex Sandra Lee wishes ‘peace, healing’ after 2nd accuser steps forward" (NY Post):

“Sending everyone peace and loving healing regards from Malibu! The best sunsets ever thank God for the Ocean!” Lee posted on Instagram Saturday night, alongside a photo of a beach. 

The post was made hours after The New York Times revealed [accusations from] Cuomo’s 25-year-old former aide, Charlotte Bennet, is accusing the 63-year-old governor of asking her inappropriate personal questions at work... days after another former aide, Lindsey Boylan, publicly accused the governor of attempting to kiss her on the mouth at his New York City office in 2018....

I'd say Sandra Lee is keeping her distance. This is a woman I had never paid any attention to until I was looking up Cuomo's Wikipedia page yesterday. I can't remember exactly why, but I suddenly needed to know where he went to law school. The answer is Albany Law School. Isn't that interesting? 

I got to reading the "Personal Life" section. There was that marriage to the 7th child of Robert F. Kennedy. And then there was an 8-year relationship with Food Network host Sandra Lee. I was curious enough to click through to Lee's Wikipedia page, and that led me to some of the biggest laughs I've had all year. Lee has an approach to cooking that she calls "semi-homemade." In practice, this involves using lots of processed foods and combining them in ways so ludicrous that it kind of has to be a spoof.

"'Defund the police' is the second stupidest campaign slogan any Democrat has uttered in the twenty first century."

"It is second in stupidity only to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 comment that half of Trump’s supporters belong in a 'basket of deplorables.'" 

Said University of California-Irvine polysci prof Bernard Grofman, quoted in "'The Far Left Is the Republicans’ Finest Asset’/An intense battle between moderates and progressives has already spilled into public view" by Thomas Edsall (NYT). 

Edsall also quotes from a report by 4 progressive groups — New Deal Strategies, Justice Democrats, Sunrise Movement and Data for Progress — "What went wrong for Congressional Democrats in 2020":

The latest choice for Democrats to locate our fear and blame is the slogan from many Black and young activists who marched the streets this summer: “Defund The Police.” Conservative Democrats may change the terms and people we blame and fear year-by-year, but Democrats must take on the Republican Party’s divide-and-conquer racism head-on and not demobilize our own base.... This election, the Black youth leading the Black Lives Matter movement have turned their power in the streets into votes.... When Democratic leaders make unforced errors like showing off two subzero freezers full of ice cream on national television or cozy up with Wall Street executives and corporate lobbyists while Trump tells voters we are the party of the swamp, it is not surprising that we lose.

Edsall links to this especially good Trump ad, which magnificently exploited Pelosi's posing with her refrigerators: 

Anyway, which side does Edsall take? (Do you care?) I'll just quote his last line:

Liberal advocacy groups have become more in-your-face, more intense, partly in reaction to the intransigence of the Trump regime, a development that is in turn irrevocably linked to the intensity of the conflicts across the country and within the Democratic Party itself.

Trump only gets credit when it seems like blame. Oh, he's intransigent! But what Edsall is admitting is that Trump suckered the Democratic Party into fighting itself. How did he do that? It was quite a bit more sophisticated than just being "intransigent" and thus causing other people to become "more intense." 

How The Washington Post is keeping up with the news about Joe Biden.

This — this!!! — is on the front page:

From the article — here — we learn that Jill Biden "prioritizes a nicely set table" and that requires candles, the Biden family likes pasta and chicken pot pie, and that dinner is — get this — "a tradition" in the Biden family. Moreover, to "splurge," Jill likes a martini and french fries, while Joe, "who doesn’t drink, famously devours ice cream cones." His "ice cream obsession" makes him "relatable."

Their "pantry" is "stocked with staples familiar to shoppers of suburban grocery stores... including peanut butter and grape jelly, sliced deli cheese, eggs and Haagen-Dazs ice cream." Mmm. You might want to put some of that stuff in the refrigerator. Ice cream in the freezer. I guess they weren't expecting anyone to actually read this bilge. Pantry, indeed. Oh, guess what? In the Biden family, they like apples and red grapes... and low-fat yogurt. Jill does all the cooking — "she enjoys it, especially with her family around, music on and a glass of wine by the stove."  

To be fair to The Washington Post, there are 2 other Biden-related items on the front page: