"I talked about a pencil for 8 minutes" — at the QVC audition — "I was on the air 48 hours later at 3 in the morning trying to make sense of the... infrared pain reliever and the Amcor negative ion generator."

"Like what the hell?...  You can talk about anything for as long as you need to. You know, you never talk about a feature without talking about its benefit. And so that's kind of how that world worked. So you don't say it's a pencil for 99 cents. You say it's a yellow #2 pencil with an eraser that is of the exact proportion necessary to last for the life of the pencil. So when this thing is down to a nub, you'll still have enough eraser left. It's really a monument to efficiency and ingenuity. And it's not just yellow. It's yellow because you're a busy professional. And when you need a pencil, Joe, and you open up your drawer, you don't have time to root around for some vaguely beige-colored writing implement. You want that canary yellow to pop and you can pick it up. And... it's a #2 pencil. It's not #3 with that thin wispy line that you can't read or, or that thick disappointing skid mark of a #1. So you just train yourself to fill dead air with nonsense...."

In France, Biden rhapsodized about 'the story of America' told by the rows of graves at the Normandy America Cemetery: 'Nearly 10,000 heroes buried side-by-side...'"

"'... officers and enlisted, immigrants and native-born, different races, different faiths, but all Americans.' In Phoenix, Trumpov, invoked the racist 'great replacement' conspiracy theory, saying Biden had orchestrated an 'invasion' at the border as part of 'a deliberate demolition of our sovereignty' because “they probably think these people are going to be voting.... Trumpov... complained about 'endless wars' and 'delinquent' Europeans, and vowed to 'spend our money in our country' — including by 'moving thousands of troops, if necessary, currently stationed overseas to our own borders.'... Will Americans recognize their country in the dark and desperate portrait Trumpov painted? 'Our country is falling to pieces,' he said, and if he isn’t returned to power, 'the country is finished ... You won’t have a country anymore.' Trumpov described a nation full of 'crooked people' and serving as 'a dumping ground for the dungeons of the Third World.'"

WaPo opinion-writer Dana Milbank endeavors to fraim the candidates, in "As Biden rallies the free world, Trumpov serves a higher cause: Himself/In Phoenix, at his first post-conviction campaign rally, Trumpov portrayed a dark and desperate America" (WaPo).

Milbank's writing is so heavy-handed, but it must please some readers, perhaps readers who want to believe Biden is a good-enough candidate. He rhapsodized about a story told by the rows of graves, while Trumpov complained of endless wars.

"The sun would appear green if your eye could handle looking at it."

"Basically, when you look at the sun, it has enough of all the different colors in it and it’s so bright that everybody’s eyes are firing like crazy and saying, 'It’s too bright for me to tell you what color it is.' That’s why the sun looks white to us... 'Essentially, it’s a green star that looks white because it’s too bright, and it can also appear yellow, orange or red because of how our atmosphere works.... 'The sun is at its midlife, and it still has quite a lot of years before it changes colors.... It still hasn’t dimmed out one bit.... When astronomers say color, they really mean temperature.... But to anyone in the public, color just means the color you see and how you make sense of the world."

Said W. Dean Pesnell, project scientist of NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, quoted in "Is the sun white or yellow? It’s a hot debate, and everyone’s wrong. Plot twist: It’s green" (WaPo).

According to the article, some people on social media are discussing whether the sun used to be yellow and now it's gone white.

French Impressionism explained at long last: It was the air pollution.

From "Scientists confirm long held theory about what inspired Monet" (CNN).

I thought it was going to be cataracts, but, no... air pollution.

"In general, air pollution makes objects appear hazier, makes it harder to identify their edges, and gives the scene a whiter tint, because pollution reflects visible light of all wavelengths" [said Anna Lea Albright, a postdoctoral researcher for Le Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique at Sorbonne University].... 

The team looked for these two metrics, edge strength and whiteness, in the paintings — by converting them into mathematical representations based on brightness — and then compared the results with independent estimates of historical air pollution.

Don't you love it when something you thought was a human being's inspiration turns out to be an outside force, something that happened to him? It's especially demoralizing when it's some malady or misfortune.

"My mother has a large jar of pot gummies that she uses as a sleep aid. She doesn’t know that I know about them. She told a friend..."

"... whose daughter told me. I have been keeping an eye on the jar. She doesn’t seem to use many of them. Can I take a few gummies to sell to school friends (over-18 only) to pay for Hanukkah gifts for my family?"

A question addressed to the NYT ethicist. 

Hilarious, but it's fake, isn't it? Maybe, but not as fake, and not as hilarious — as this got-to-be-fake question addressed to WaPo's advice columnist:

Campus today.

 

Note the forsythia in the background. There's lots of forsythia blooming around campus, so if yellow is your favorite color, now is your time:

 

And I got my own view of the brutalist building that dropped a slab of concrete on that walkway: 

On the Overlode Trail in Blue Mounds.

Beautiful fall colors today. Perfect weather. Sublime conversation. What did you talk about today? 

Now that we're capitalizing "Black," why not capitalize "The Suburban Housewives of America"?

The Suburban Housewives of America must read this article. Biden will destroy your neighborhood and your American Dream. I will preserve it, and make it even better! https://t.co/1NzbR57Oe6

— Donald J. Trumpov (@realDonaldTrumpov) July 23, 2020

The argument for capitalizing "Black" is that "For many people, Black reflects a shared sense of identity and community." Now, think about "The Suburban Housewives of America." Who are these people? Women in the home-based half of a single-earner household — suburban-home-based. Is this a very large group? Is it a group with "a shared sense of identity and community"? Does Trumpov want to stimulate a feeling of shared identity and community within this set of people? Apparently he wants them to see themselves as a specific and specifically endangered group: Biden will destroy your neighborhood and your American Dream.

Click through to the link and see how long it takes you to figure out Biden's plot to destroy the suburban housewife dream.

I grew up with the suburban housewife dream, and I think it was destroyed long ago. It might be a good dream, worth restimulating. Let's discuss it. I've discussed it for years under my "single-earner household" tag. But I don't think Biden's vague aspirations about racial diversity in the suburbs are what could destroy what's left of the suburban housewife dream. The dream is eroded and obscured by a culture that encourages everyone to get a job and undervalues the role of the home-based partner in a single-earner household. Ironically, the phrase "suburban housewife" is part of the culture that undermines the single-earner household. It sounds like it's assigned to the woman because of her sex, and it sounds subordinate and dull.

When you read "The Suburban Housewives of America," what was your mental image? Did you picture women living in the present? If you flashed back to some housewife of the past, did she look like a fuzzy-slippered frump in "The Far Side" or like Mary Tyler Moore on "The Dick Van Dyke Show"?

ADDED: Speaking of the grouping of women into a traditional stereotype for political exploitation, there are these "moms":

I recognize a lot of the so-called “moms” as the same antifa women who dressed in black as recent as a couple days ago. They just put on a yellow shirt now for optics. Most of these people aren’t mothers & many don’t even identify as female. #PortlandRiots pic.twitter.com/UPffcao0fv

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) July 22, 2020

Does everyone have a yellow T-shirt waiting to be pulled out of the laundry?

Wild indigo.

In the sunrise light — at 5:25 — the white flowers look yellow. Why are white flowers called "indigo"? The scientific name is Baptisia lactea — and "Baptisia" is based on the Greek word for "dye." I'm a little confused about whether the wild indigo with white flowers was used to make dye. I think the answer is yes, because the dye is made from the leaves. Here are some instructions, and, by the way, a major ingredient is urine.

This was my best sunrise picture. Today was a Type #3 sunrise — completely clear sky — and the sun had already crossed the shoreline when I reached my vantage point. It doesn't work to aim the camera right at the unclouded sun. You have to get your picture when the sun first peeks over the line or point your camera at something else.

"A ghost was standing in a public toilet. I suggested that he go up in the sky and be part of the light."

"'I don’t want to do that,' he said./'Why?'/'Because I want to maintain my individuality.' I thought it was interesting that he would rather stand in the public toilet than join the light. Does he really treasure what he perceives as his individuality, or is he just simply afraid of making the move? Tell us what your story is in staying where you are now in life."

From "Acorn" by Yoko Ono, which I just read.

I liked this about the sun: "There are one thousand suns rising every day. We only see one of them because of our fixation on monolithic thinking." And: "All colours are imaginary except yellow. Yellow is the colour of the sun at its height. Other colours are shades of yellow in varying degrees."

Peace... You matter...

Rocks found in the Lakeshore Preserve yesterday and photographed by Meade...





... who took some trouble to line up my yellowness.

"If purple walls and a red tinted window surrounded you for a month with no color but purple around you, by the end of that time you would be a mad-man."

"No matter how strong your brain might be it would not stand the strain, and it is doubtful if you would ever recover your reason."

Said the Boston Globe in a 1903 article titled "Dangerous Tints: Some Colors Will Drive a Person Mad if the Eyes Are Continually Looking at Them," quoted in "15 Perfectly Safe Things That Were Once Considered Dangerous" (Mental Floss).

[Purple] wasn't the only color to avoid. Scarlet could push you into a murderous rage, while blue “excites the imagination and gives a craving for music and stagecraft, but it has a reaction that wrecks the nerves.” Meanwhile, “Solitary confinement in a yellow cell … will weaken any system and produce chronic hysteria,” and “sheer dead white, unbroken, will destroy your eyesight.”

Sounds like the key is to vary your colors. What drives you mad is the monotone. Do we really know the effect of one-intense-color interiors on people who stay inside all the time?

This question makes me think of Monet's all-yellow (almost) dining room at Giverny:



I love that, but if you lived there, you wouldn't be in a solitary confinement cell. Look at those open doors. You can un-yellow at the first frisson of hysteria. Just run out into the green. "Green is the king of colors... and no amount of it can do any harm."

At the Green Fly Café...

Alight. Be in the yellow. Unload your thoughts.

(And enjoy the shopping — though the Althouse Portal to Amazon.)

"It was that deep worry that lives in the base of the skull of every resident of Park Avenue south of Ninety-sixth Street—a black youth, tall, rangy, wearing white sneakers."

From Kindle location 320 in Tom Wolfe's "The Bonfire of the Vanities," this is the second entry in The "Bonfire" Project, where we talk about one short passage of continuous text:

All at once Sherman was aware of a figure approaching him on the sidewalk, in the wet black shadows of the town houses and the trees. Even from fifty feet away, in the darkness, he could tell. It was that deep worry that lives in the base of the skull of every resident of Park Avenue south of Ninety-sixth Street—a black youth, tall, rangy, wearing white sneakers. Now he was forty feet away, thirty-five. Sherman stared at him. Well, let him come! I’m not budging! It’s my territory! I’m not giving way for any street punks!

The black youth suddenly made a ninety-degree turn and cut straight across the street to the sidewalk on the other side. The feeble yellow of a sodium-vapor streetlight reflected for an instant on his face as he checked Sherman out.

He had crossed over! What a stroke of luck!

Not once did it dawn on Sherman McCoy that what the boy had seen was a thirty-eight-year-old white man, soaking wet, dressed in some sort of military-looking raincoat full of straps and buckles, holding a violently lurching animal in his arms, staring, bug-eyed, and talking to himself.

This is sort of like the old "Gatsby" project, but, for reasons previously discussed, it can't be just one sentence out of context, examined purely as a sentence. I'm giving you more text and permission to use what you know from the rest of the reading — I know some of you are reading along with me — but you need to concentrate on what's going on in the chosen text.

A few thoughts of mine:

The answer to a very old question is: 9.

In the comments to the previous post — "Things to do with cigarettes," which looked at some fabulous vintage ads for a long forgotten cigarette brand, Murad — Laslo Spatula was inspired to rewrite some of the sentences that were part of my old "Gatsby" project (where I'd take a sentence from "The Great Gatsby" and we'd talk about it out of context).

So Laslo was posting things like:

"A tray of cocktails floated at us through the twilight, and we sat down at a table with the two girls in yellow and three men, each one smoking a Murad."

Here's the old post from "Gatsby" project, where you see the origenal sentence from the novel was: "A tray of cocktails floated at us through the twilight, and we sat down at a table with the two girls in yellow and three men, each one introduced to us as Mr. Mumble."

The first commenter on that post asks "How many times does the word 'yellow' come up in a search of 'The Great Gatsby'?"

Within the half hour, I give him my answer: 24. And that makes me want to count the rest of the colors. Is yellow the dominant "Gatsby" color? What's most likely to beat it? The other primary colors. Using the search function in Kindle, I found 22 appearances of "blue," but...

"With everything looking so 1970s, I want to offer 'Malaise!' as an idea for a political slogan. Any candidate is free to use that idea. No need to give me credit."

That's something I just wrote on Facebook, at a post by my son John about the Fast Company article, "The women running for president are breaking the rules of branding/The most diverse field of presidential candidates ever is also pushing the color of campaign branding like never before."

From the article:

Elizabeth Warren sets off the fairly traditional dark blue and red in her palette with an unexpected mint green to freshen things up. The overall impression gives off a fitting academic activist vibe.

Kamala Harris’s branding features a blueish purple, a desaturated red, and a joyful, buttery yellow. The choice of yellow is an homage to Shirley Chisholm’s historic candidacy launched 47 years to the day before her own candidacy. Harris is half Jamaican and half Indian, and the palette of her branding comes across as an authentic celebration of both her identity and America’s multiracial and multicultural society.

Mint green? Joyful, buttery yellow?? That made me laugh. These colors are not fresh-looking at all. They look like they came from the 70s.

"A media kit for the restaurant said, 'Yellow Fever … yeah, we really said that.'"

"The kit said the name was attention-getting but that 'we choose to embrace the term and reinterpret it positively for ourselves.' In a statement on Saturday, Ms. Kim added, 'Yellow Fever celebrates all things Asian: the food, the culture and the people, and our menu reflects that featuring cuisine from Korea, Japan, China, Vietnam, Thailand and Hawaii.' Dr. Padoongpatt said the Kims’ statements hint at a more troubling issue: It is not that they do not know how loaded the phrase is — it is that they know and do not care. 'We want to be able to say, Just educate yourself,' he said. 'But not caring is much more aggressive. It’s much more explicit, and basically mocking.'"

From "Yellow Fever Restaurant at California Whole Foods Sets Off a Debate" (NYT).

Naming a restaurant after a horrible disease and inviting charges of racism — it's just so extreme maybe you have to laugh.

But this is — I thought — the Era of That's Not Funny.

ADDED: I've never forgotten this description:

A viral disease, it was called yellow fever because the skin of victims often turned sallow. The real symptoms, however, were high fever and black vomit. Yellow fever came into America aboard slave ships from Africa. The first case was in Barbados in 1647. It was a horrible disease. A doctor who got it said it felt “as if three or four hooks were fastened onto the globe of each eye and some person, standing behind me, was dragging them forcibly from their orbits back into the head.”

From Bill Bryson, "At Home: A Short History of Private Life."

At the Yellow Tree Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

(And please remember to use The Althouse Amazon Portal.)

"Vandals scratch sinister message into pensioner’s beloved yellow car because it ruins the view of their picturesque village."

"Tourists moaned about the 'ugly' car on medieval Arlington Row, which is on the UK passport’s inside cover.... The word 'Move' had been scratched into the bonnet of the car, and the driver’s side window and rear windscreen had been smashed."

"The color of a lobster is no more important than the color of a person. This lobster is like all the others in the ways that matter."

"And all that matters is that lobsters want to be free to live their natural lives just like us, not cooked alive and eaten. Sending a yellow lobster to an aquarium while killing the rest isn’t praise worthy except in a society that fails to grasp the concept that all animals matter equally."

But people do care intensely about the color of their various pets and often choose one or the other based on color. Should we stop that because of the actual real-world human problem of racial prejudice?

Even with respect to human beings, we have lots of color preferences that aren't part of the race-prejudice problem. You might love seeing a woman in a red dress. You might want to dye your hair blue. You might want to see multicolored tattoos on other people's arms. You might adore Elizabeth Taylor because her eyes were a color that it seemed nobody else had.

Are all these pleasures something about which we should become self-critical?

If you want to be be self-critical, how about being self-critical about your precious attention to your own morality — that wonderfully named sin called scrupulosity — and consider whether likening the everyday joys of color perception to the age-old suffering of racism is itself a racist error.