I want a song parody that uses the phrases "Big Balls" and "plastic straws" — maybe to the tune of "Popsicles and Icicles."

Try to include a lot of the Trumpov-related items that are bouncing around the internet today. I can't blog all these things. There are too many. And it's too absurd. I've already asked A.I., but it just doesn't know how to make it interesting and funny. 

Here's the inspiration (and note the straws!):

Alexinomia.

"People who feel it most severely might avoid addressing anyone by their name under any circumstance. For others, alexinomia is strongest around those they are closest to. For example, I don’t have trouble with most names, but when my sister and I are alone together, saying her name can feel odd and embarrassing, as if I’m spilling a secret, even though I’ve been saying her name for nearly 25 years. Some people can’t bring themselves to say the name of their wife or boyfriend or best friend—it can feel too vulnerable, too formal, or too plain awkward."

From "Please Don’t Make Me Say My Boyfriend’s Name/Why calling loved ones by their name is strangely awkward" (The Atlantic).

I feel this, though not severely. I'm glad to know, speaking of names, that there's a name for it — alexinomia.

I think part of the problem here comes from having been exposed to those people who excessively say the name of the person they're talking with — e.g., parents, teachers, and readers of "How to Win Friends and Influence People."

Mount McKinley.

I'm reading "Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness," one of the executive orders Trumpov signed yesterday. Excerpt:

President William McKinley, the 25th President of the United States, heroically led our Nation to victory in the Spanish-American War. Under his leadership, the United States enjoyed rapid economic growth and prosperity, including an expansion of territorial gains for the Nation. President McKinley championed tariffs to protect U.S. manufacturing, boost domestic production, and drive U.S. industrialization and global reach to new heights. He was tragically assassinated in an attack on our Nation’s values and our success, and he should be honored for his steadfast commitment to American greatness.

In 1917, the country officially honored President McKinley through the naming of North America’s highest peak. Yet after nearly a century, President Obama’s administration, in 2015, stripped the McKinley name from federal nomenclature, an affront to President McKinley’s life, his achievements, and his sacrifice....

Obama changed the name to Denali, and Trumpov opposed the change at the time — "Great insult to Ohio. I will change back!" With this order, he's done what he said he would do — though now it's about recognizing a man as a hero and not about a particular state that supposedly cares a lot about that man. Note that "Denali" was not a person's name, so Trumpov isn't elevating one state's hero over another.

"Nicola Guess is a dietitian and researcher at the University of Oxford. She also runs a private clinic and has worked as a consultant for food companies, including Beyond Meat."

I'm reading the fine print at the bottom of the New York Times article, "Why Ultraprocessed Foods Aren’t Always Bad," by Nicola Guess. 

The problem is that the category of ultraprocessed foods, which makes up about 60 percent of the American diet by some estimates, is so broad that it borders on useless. It lumps store-bought whole-grain bread and hummus in with cookies, potato chips and soda. While many ultraprocessed foods are associated with poor health, others, like breakfast cereals and yogurt, aren’t.

Processing can also create products suitable for people with food intolerances or ones that have a lower environmental footprint. (Full disclosure: I have consulted for food companies that I feel make beneficial products, including Beyond Meat, which makes ultraprocessed meat alternatives that I believe are better for the planet.)...

So, there is also disclosure in the body of the text of the article.

I love the author's name, Nicola Guess. I have to guess about the usefulness of any of the assertions here.

People don't want to shout out their own name, but Kamala Harris seems to have thought it would be a cool way to demonstrate that "It's about all of us."

They were loudly chanting her name, and she instructed them to shout out their own name, the idea being, I think, to unleash a hilarious, heartwarming cacophony:

This might be the most awkward moment ever, the second-hand embarassment is real pic.twitter.com/ObaMKPR9c3

— TaraBull (@TaraBull808) October 29, 2024

But she got silence. She still pretended she'd received the desired response, and declared the conclusion to be derived from the demonstration that hadn't happened: "It's about all of us."

Apparently, individualism is not in vogue... or not something her people feel good about expressing loud and proud.

If I followed the method of the elite media and the Democratic Party, I would call it fascistic. The crowd showed that it only wanted to be unified behind the identity of the adored leader.

ADDED: I feel the strong need to republish a post I wrote in September 2018:

"Trumpov... took the stage to ominous instrumental music. He stood on stage for several minutes as it played out."

Writes Jake Traylor (of NBC News) on X, inviting the world to look upon Trumpov and wonder at his weirdness...

Trumpov (who was 3 hours late to his rally this evening) took the stage to ominous instrumental music.

He stood on stage for several minutes as it played out. pic.twitter.com/Ruwlyg1idG

— Jake Traylor (@jake__traylor) October 26, 2024

... which is going to feel different to different people, perhaps depending on whether the music has any context for you. Me, I know the music is called the "Undertaker" theme, and though I know what an undertaker is — and I don't think you want the leader of your country analogized to a professional who disposes of the dead — I don't know who "The Undertaker" is — some movie/TV/video game character? Just off-hand, I'm reading Trumpov's message there as a threat to his antagonists, the so-called "enemy within," to whom he's going to say "You're fired" when he wins, which he wants them to believe he will. It's some scary music for them, but it's delightful to his admirers.

"Usha and J.D. made a memorable pair. The legal writer David Lat remembers attending a poker night with the couple in 2011..."

"... at the neo-Gothic home of [Amy] Chua and her husband, fellow Yale law professor Jed Rubenfeld.... At the time, Chua was mainly known for her book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, a gaily provocative paean to achievement-oriented parenting. Chua was a kind of den mother to certain student protégés, known on campus as 'Chua pets,' and J.D. was central among them. According to another former friend of the pair, Chua was not a fan of Usha. 'Probably because she didn’t engage in her bullshit,' the former friend said. 'You have to gossip and drink. J.D. loved that shit.' Usha did not. Lat happened to ride the Metro-North up from New York for the poker game with the soon-to-be Vances. He told his husband later that night that they’d reminded him of another famous Yale Law couple, Bill and Hillary Clinton. 'They had a kind of energy to them,' Lat said. 'They seemed very confident and successful. One thing that struck me as Hillary-esque was that Usha seemed to have more polish than J.D.'"

From "What Is Usha Vance Thinking? The veep candidate’s wife is the child of immigrants, a former Democrat, a highly skilled lawyer — and a total mystery" (NY Magazine).

"Ms. Marshack’s self-written obituary disclosed some previously unreported details about her association with [Nelson] Rockefeller but did not mention a romance..."

"... although it ended suggestively, quoting from the 1975 musical 'A Chorus Line.' Ms. Marshack wrote that she 'won’t forget, can’t regret what I did for love.' The initial account [was]... that Mr. Rockefeller had died instantly... while he was in his office, alone with a bodyguard, 'having a wonderful time' working on an art book he was writing. The next day, The Times began deconstructing the official story.... A drip-drip of revelations ensued.... The circumstances of Mr. Rockefeller’s death remain mysterious. One account said that he was found dead wearing a suit and tie and surrounded by working papers; another said that he was nude, amid containers of Chinese food...." 

From "Megan Marshack Dies at 70; Was With Nelson Rockefeller at His Death/She was at the center of rumors about the former vice president’s last moments, but she remained silent about their association until she wrote her own obituary" (NYT)(noting that Marshack's brother said she'd signed a nondisclosure agreement).

"In interviews [for a] book, Rockefeller associates said it was an open secret that Mr. Rockefeller and Ms. Marshack were having an affair. He was married at the time to Margaretta Rockefeller, who was known as Happy...."

Who cares about Vice Presidents? The only thing interesting at this point is the irony of the nickname of the wife he cheated on. And the odd detail of the Chinese food containers. And the resurrection of the "Chorus Line" lyric...

I don't even have a tag for Nelson Rockefeller. I only started this blog in 2004, but there was a time — and I guess it was more than 20 years ago — when "Rockefeller Republican" was shorthand for... oh, who cares anymore? Kiss that day goodbye.

"Many are drawn to Steinberg for his claim to have a 92 per cent accuracy rate in predicting eye colour."

"'We are not making blue eyes,' he says. Rather, his clinicians implant the embryo that carries the DNA for blue eyes. 'But we are learning that there are five different shades of blue, because parents might call up with a five-year-old and say, "Well, this isn’t quite the blue we were thinking about."' IVF at his clinic — involving hormone treatment of the mother, egg extraction and fertilisation — costs about $30,000, then $10,000 for each test for genetic abnormalities. Two famous singers came to see him who wanted their child to be a singer too — which he could not facilitate...."

I'm reading "Want a girl with blue eyes? Inside California’s VIP IVF industry/In the state’s low-regulation fertility clinics the perfect child may soon be available — for a price. Megan Agnew meets the doctors, mums and surrogates" (London Times).

From the anecdote that begins the article: "The couple conceived their first daughter, Aspen, the old-fashioned (and free) way, and she was born four years ago — her hair fiery red like her father’s. Soon afterwards Hartley wanted a second daughter. 'I grew up in a family full of girls,' says the stay-at-home mother. 'It was, like, girl family vibes.'... 'I thought, we have one redhead, let’s have a blonde. But my doctor said you can’t do that — yet. So then we were, like, OK, we’ll just have the girl.'...The couple received one round of IVF treatment at the Southern California Reproductive Center... It worked. Bardot arrived very quickly one night in autumn and is now nearly two — and, by chance, strawberry blonde. 'It was perfect... Bardot has my features, so I have my mini-me and Neil has his. So I got what I wanted in the end.'"

Imagine naming your little girl Bardot, then going around enthusing about how she looks like you. Imagine going public about using IVF to sex-select and to try to get blue eyes.

Why is Trumpov suddenly calling Kamala "Kamabla"?

I had to look it up and found "Donald Trumpov Launches Two New Nicknames for Kamala Harris in 24 Hours" (Newsweek).

In a string of Monday evening posts on Truth Social, Trumpov intentionally misspelled the vice president's first name as "Kamabla" after a series of posts earlier in the day calling her "Kamala Crash" and accusing her of bringing about the "Great Depression of 2024."... Trumpov used the "Kamabla" nickname in a variety of contexts across four posts on Monday, first in relation to food prices, writing: "food is now at an all time high because of Kamabla/Biden INCOMPETENCE."He then used it in the context of debate scheduling "Kamabla Harris is afraid to Debate me on FoxNews," before using it too attack her record: "Kamabla is the WORST V.P." He also used it in a description of what he said were Harris' views on policing and fracking: "Kamabla has stated, over and over again, that she wants to DEFUND THE POLICE AND, WITHOUT QUESTION, BAN FRACKING. "NO MORE FOSSIL FUEL."

I still don't get it why he's saying "Kamabla." Is he being silly/nonsensical?

I asked Meade and he had an immediate guess that sounded good to me: "Kama-blah, like blah blah blah." If that's right, it's a reference to her much-mocked speech patterns.

Trumpov tries out different nicknames for people. I doubt if this one will last. He has a trial and error approach to nicknames. This one did get Newsweek to repeat a whole series of Truth Social mutterings (and yellings). So it's at least that successful. As for "Kamala Crash," that won't last if the stock market picks up, so I hope it fails.

ADDED: "Blah" can also mean boring and bland. Did you know that "blah" was a noun before it was an adjective? First recorded in 1918, it meant "Meaningless, insincere, or pretentious talk or writing; nonsense, bunkum." I'm quoting the OED, which has these historical examples:

KH picks Walz.

"Harris picks Tim Walz as VP ahead of multistate tour" (WaPo).

ADDED: This was expected, and what can we say about it? 

1. If it were a race for the presidency, Josh Shapiro would be the stronger candidate, but for that reason, I'm happy to see him left out of the position of subordination to the already subordinate person, Kamala Harris, the sitting Vice President, sitting in the shadow of the barely-there President Joe Biden. Better for Josh Shapiro to remain active and independent, accomplishing things in Pennsylvania, and to launch a presidential campaign in his own right in 2028 or 2032. He'll have a stronger position than Tim Walz, if Tim Walz is the sitting Vice President, hoping to run in 2032. A Vice President always looks inert, and he tends to have been chosen to strengthen someone else. Do you realize how rare it is that a sitting Vice President gets elected President? It's only happened twice in U.S. history — 4 times if you count the first 2 Vice Presidents (which you shouldn't, because they did not get there as the winner's running mate).

2. What does this say about Kamala Harris's position on Israel? Is she appeasing the pro-Palestinian forces within the Democratic Party? Was anti-Semitism involved or some kind of idea that Kamala Harris, being triply intersectional, needed a running mate completely composed of traditionally privileged elements?

3. I'm interested in watching the onslaught against Walz. In the last couple weeks, Democrats have unloaded on JD Vance, so it's time for the retaliation. What form will it take? How intense will it be?

4. Or is it better to yawn? From my morning textings:

5. Do I hear a Walz?

6. Is there something about "Tim"? Hillary picked a Tim too. Did you know that "tim" was "A term of personal abuse" in the 1600s (according to the OED). From Ben Jonson's "The Alchemist": "Then you are an Otter, and a Shad, a Whit, A very Tim." 

7. The name Hillary has been uttered, and she is summoned. Up she pops, and she is thrilled:

Was I too quick to accept the pushback against calling Kamala "Kamala"?

I thought the antagonism to "Kamala" was a bad idea, and I said so here.

But I switched to the "Harris" approach, as you can see in the previous post.

Then somebody asked me where I got the idea that to use the first name alone would make me look as though I were declaring my opposition to her. My aim is neutrality, cruel neutrality.

So I googled and found "'Harris' or 'Kamala'? Inside the debate over calling women by their first or last name/The vice president has enough support from delegates to assure her the Democratic nomination, but what name does Kamala Harris want to go by?" (Yahoo). Excerpt:

There's that "brat" crap again, with the fuzzy font and the intentionally repulsive green color.

And we're given this from a person who, we're told, is "an expert," Melissa Baese-Berk, a professor of linguistics:

"And we're going to have some fun with this, aren't we?"

Harris murmurs into the phone to Obama and Obama:

Earlier this week, Michelle and I called our friend @KamalaHarris. We told her we think she’ll make a fantastic President of the United States, and that she has our full support. At this critical moment for our country, we’re going to do everything we can to make sure she wins in… pic.twitter.com/0UIS0doIbA

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) July 26, 2024

I call her "Harris." I was going to call her "my girl Kamala" — because that's what Mrs. Obama calls her in that phone call — but the powers that be have warned us not to call her "Kamala" and of course you can't say "girl" — unless you can — and "my" is a terrible problem, perhaps insinuating a perverse sense of ownership. So I'll keep my distance. "Harris" is it. Don't harass me.

Now, about this concept of "fun." It might be the new word of the day, the word on the memo that everyone got. It came up in this new Ezra Klein podcast, "This Is How Democrats Win in Wisconsin":

I mean, Sunday, I was still hearing from Democrats worried about Harris... And now, I mean, watching the party not just converge around her, but feel a real thrill around her, like really, really become passionate Harris stans, like watching the whole party fall outta the coconut tree and live unburdened by what has been, and only in the imagining of what could be. It's fun to watch Democrats have fun. They have not had fun in a long time. And it's also a good reminder that people don't know how something is gonna feel until it actually happens....

People talking about fun... enthusing This is fun... that's not a good marker of fun... whatever fun is....

I think of Zippy the Pinhead: "Are we having fun yet?"

And "And she'll have fun fun fun/'Til her daddy takes the T-bird away...."

And "Fun is the one thing that money can’t buy."

"Who knows if presidential candidate (and fellow South Asian) Kamala Harris was raised the same way I was..."

"... with everyone having a stupider, faker name than their real one. In the public consciousness, at least, Harris has had plenty of names: Laffin’ Kamala, Veep, Brat, Momala (my personal favorite).... But through it all is one clear constant, already a thorn in the sides of a lot of brown people across the world: Even when you think you’re saying Harris’ first name right, you’re still saying it wrong.... For once, I don’t blame white people for this. In 2016, while she was running for the Senate, Harris released a PSA to help people learn how to say her name. 'It’s not Cam-el-uh. It’s not Kuh-ma-la. It’s not Karmela,' say a rotation of cutie-pie kids. 'It’s Kamala.' For years, Harris has been telling people her name is pronounced 'comma-la, like the punctuation mark.' It’s common, for people with unique ethnic names, to find ways to explain the pronunciation approachably and easily. I’ve been doing this for years, so much so that in my mid-20s, I realized I had been saying my own name wrong for most of my life...."

Writes Scaachi Koul in "An Indian Person’s Guide to Saying Kamala Harris’ Name Correctly/Get outta here with 'Comma-la'" (Slate).

It seems to me that however a person pronounces their own name becomes the correct pronunciation, even if that name is also a word in another language in which it is pronounced differently.

"... Vance offers what right-wing politicians have always peddled to downwardly mobile Americans: the quasi-spiritual saga of family-bred individual uplift..."

"... which serves to neatly underwrite the broader political fable of great-leader salvation.... As 'our country was flooded with cheap Chinese goods, cheap foreign labor, and in years to come with cheap Chines fentanyl,' Vance announced with relief, 'I had a guardian angel'—his Ohio grandmother, immortalized as 'Meemaw' in Hillbilly Elegy. The rapt convention crowd took up the chant of 'MEEMAW' in jubilant recognition, and thrilled to Vance’s later parable of Meemaw’s cache of handguns. After she had died in 2005, he related in folksy relish, 'we went through her things [and] we found 19 loaded handguns,' strewn throughout various corners of her house. The convention crowd hooted and applauded in recognition, and then Vance delivered another redemptive moral: As Meemaw contended with the challenges of aging and illness, she made sure that 'she was within arm’s length of whatever she needed to protect her family.' Here the crowd plunged into a reflexive chant of 'USA!'.... What does the domestic arsenal of an aging relative have to do with the glories of our Republic?... A bellicose citizenry must rally to save and bolster its imperiled birthright by any means necessary—under a great leader’s tutelage, of course."

Writes Chris Lehmann, in "J.D. Vance’s Phony Populism Thrilled the RNC. The Rest of Us Shouldn’t Be Fooled. The vice presidential nominee pitched himself as an avatar of the working class. Don’t believe the hype" (The Nation).

Hey, at least cover your tracks if you're writing about a book you haven't read. It's not "Meemaw." Its Mamaw.

"Ms. Martin was in the crowd at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when Mr. Dylan first performed with electric instruments."

"She recalled two things from the appearance: the raucous boos and her conviction that he needed a polished backup band. Around the same time, Rick Danko, a friend, sent her a demo tape by the Hawks, in which he played bass. Ms. Martin thought the group would be a perfect match for Mr. Dylan. But the Hawks were a rock band and Mr. Dylan was still considered a folkie, and at first neither side was interested. 'Mary was a rather persevering soul,' Mr. Dylan said in a 1969 interview with Rolling Stone magazine. 'She kept pushing these guys the Hawks to me.' She persuaded Mr. Dylan to try out two of the band’s five members, the drummer Levon Helm and the guitarist Robbie Robertson. After Mr. Helm insisted that the Hawks were a package deal, Mr. Dylan relented, and the Hawks — soon to be known as the Band — went on tour with him, setting in motion one of the greatest collaborations in rock history...."

From "Mary Martin, Who Gave Many Music Stars Their Start, Dies at 85/Her loyalty to artists and her eye for talent made her a force in a male-dominated business. Among her accomplishments: introducing Bob Dylan to the Band" (NYT).

ALSO: "While climbing the ranks within [Albert] Grossman’s office, she became close friends with many of his clients. One weekend at Mr. Grossman’s home in upstate New York, she swam a race against Mr. Dylan. She lost, but as a consolation prize, Mr. Grossman gave her his cat, Lord Growing — the same cat Mr. Dylan holds on the cover of his 1965 album 'Bringing It All Back Home.'"

Hmm. Lord Growing.

Wake up and smell the instant coffee....

Yesterday, at 2:18 PM, 3 posts down, I was talking about "talking about instant coffee," and then, that evening, I was rewatching my old favorite movie "My Dinner with Andre" and that line jumped out: "we drank instant coffee out of the top of my shaving cream."

A big theme in this movie is whether, when things connect up, it's not just a coincidence but something mystical and important, such as when Andre — after feeling he's heard the voice of The Little Prince — runs across a copy of an old surrealist magazine with a page of handprints from 4 eminent men whose names begin with the letter A and 3 of them are Andres and the other one is Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

Wikipedia has this about Saint-Exupéry:

In The Little Prince, its narrator, the pilot, talks of being stranded in the desert beside his crashed aircraft. The account clearly drew on Saint-Exupéry's own experience.... On 30 December 1935, at 2.45am, after 19 hours and 44 minutes in the air, Saint-Exupéry, along with his copilot-navigator André Prévot, crashed in the Sahara desert....

See? A random Andre.

"The justice department found [Andrew] Cuomo 'repeatedly subjected' women in his office to non-consensual sexual contact, ogling and gender-based nicknames...."

From "DOJ says Andrew Cuomo sexually harassed 13 women/The former governor’s lawyer says he was never interviewed" (Politico).

I read the entire article because I wanted to see what "gender-based nicknames" were regarded as sexual harassment. Names are generally gender-based. When does a nickname go wrong for being gender-based?

But the article does not tell us any particular names that crossed the line.

ADDED: It occurs to me that my puzzlement is a consequence of the present-day penchant for saying "gender" when you mean "sex." If it said Cuomo subjected women to sexualizing nicknames, I would easily understand. My mother would call me "Miss Ann" or "Suzy Q" — both gendered, neither at all sexual. 

"Everyone who knew him before I did knows him as Bill, and everyone who met him after I did knows him as Michael. He looks like a Michael."

Wrote Nikki Haley, quoted in "Not Feeling Your Partner’s Name? Just Change It. When Nikki Haley decided that her future husband, Bill, looked more like a Michael, a Michael he became. How unusual are name-change proclamations in the world of love?" (NYT).

The quote is in her 2012 memoir, "Can’t Is Not an Option."

She says she didn't think the man who would become her husband looked "like a Bill," but Michael wasn't a name picked out of the blue. His name is William Michael Haley, and she decided to go with the middle name. If I'd done that with my first husband (which I might have done because his first name is the same name as my father's first name), then both my husbands would have the same name (albeit with different spellings), not that either of them looked like my idea of what a person with that name would look like.

What's the big deal about calling your loved one by his middle name (or last name or a nickname)? It's a really minor issue. And why was this story printed in the New York Times yesterday? I think they're seeing Nikki Haley about to drop out of the news and they're dumping the best of the stories they'd generated to be dispersed over a period of months if she'd continued as a candidate.

Read the old memoir and see what can be made into something... eh... don't bother.... But if she'd become the candidate, this could have been big. This arrogant monster — out of some frivolous delusion about how men named "Bill" are somehow supposed to look — deprived a man of his name. And he just took it. So emasculating! 

What's the more masculine name — Michael or Bill?

King Frederik Twitter.

I will continue referring to him as King Frederik Twitter of Denmark. https://t.co/2Y1ecI0xua

— Michael Ian Black (@michaelianblack) January 4, 2024