Oil wrestling shows up in the classic heist film Topkapi.

I haven’t got the stomach to watch the whole thing, but in the bits of it I’ve watched, he seems so much more alert, so much more present, so much, dare I say, smarter, than he’s been when speaking publicly recently. He makes jokes, he’s funny, he smiles. He completes some sentences. He doesn’t seem like the tongue-tied partially-senile Fox-News-grandpa he is when he talks to the public or the press.

He quips that somehow he’s a “king” but he can’t get his ballroom approved. He’s a piece of shit, he behaves like he’s here to destroy America as we know it, but that’s a legitimate by-God joke. I’ve never seen him make an actual joke before.

Am I imagining that? I don’t know what to make of it. Is the “flailing senile dumbass” just a character he’s playing? Is it a ruse? So many people who have had face time with him say he’s genuinely a moron.

Photo for Life magazine by Alfred Eisenstaedt, gallery here.

I had a visit with a PA who pantomimed the use of an inhaler she didn’t actually have on hand. The note-taking robot decided that was a “demonstration” with a billing code, and that it should be billed as $800.

You’d never really get those ducks in a row, but it would be entertaining to watch you try.

Patents are a (relatively speaking) newfangled trick to turn ideas into legal “capital.” In the same way that a corporation “is” a person.

The backbone of capitalism? I’m not following that.

Why does anyone everyone imagine New Zealand is magically immune to the social forces that are driving instability and unrest in the rest of the world? Why would anyone think that filling it up with zillionaires, turning wealth inequality up to 11, would enhance or promote its stability?

The president then proceeded to insult motherhood and apple pie

I don’t see a definition in the bill. I don’t know if there’s a standard legal definition for that or not.

Even a good-faith interpretation of “performer” could leave some gray areas, I’d think. A song-and-dance number for an audience gathered for the purpose is a performance with a performer, sure. What about an appearance on a talk show, an interview, a forum discussion, a podcast?

Unfortunately, “performance” is a bit of jargon for a specific, unrelated concept in contract law.

The reservations your question suggests are very reasonable. I don’t intend to dampen anyone’s alarm at this absurd effort to implement legal, systemic bullying over nothing. I just so happened to be reading about the Ohio bill shortly before I came across FreshParsnip’s comment.

The red ones taste like my favorite glue.

Things are bad; I’m not going to argue that things aren’t bad. I’m not a lawyer, I eat crayons.

That Ohio bill hasn’t been passed yet. I don’t know how likely it is to pass. Too likely, I guess.

It also doesn’t dictate a blanket ban on cross-dressing. What it does do is put “performers or entertainers who exhibit a gender identity that is different from the performer’s or entertainer’s biological sex” into the category of adult entertainments like stripping, meaning it’s restricted in the same ways. No kids allowed. That’s lines 153 to 165 here.

That’s very big, it’s very bad, it’s very stupid, it’s mean, it’s anti-freedom. Un-American, I’d say. It would seem to create problems with Bugs Bunny, Harpo Marx, Monty Python, etc. But the most obvious thing it’s targeting is “Drag Queen Story Hour.”

But it isn’t a ban on cross-dressing in general. Yet.

Edit: If you live in Ohio, you can find and contact your state Senator regarding House Bill 249, the “Indecent Exposure Modernization Act,” through this page.

they check for things like alcohol abuse, drug habits, sexual behavior, debt, gang affiliations, and any other dark secrets that could make you susceptible to bribery or blackmail

Yes. When I was interviewed by the FBI, because a friend of mine was seeking a clearance, this kind of thing was all they wanted to talk about. That was a couple decades ago, though.

It could be. The point of bringing a case like this probably isn’t to win it, necessarily, but to demonstrate loyalty to dear leader. Dear Leader wants the case in order to push the Overton window. Its a can’t-lose situation for the regime; they get some benefit from either judicial decision.

His “accusers” are his colleagues and underlings, people he apparently bragged about this to. He arranged government trips around opportunities to patronize prostitutes, allegedly. Even if the acts themselves were as consenting-adults as could be, he sounds like a bad choice to manage, well, anybody.

John Bistline, whose name appears on the bottom right, posted this chart to Twitter.

There’s a pretty similar data series charted at ourworldindata.

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top FEMA official defends his claim that he was teleported

21st centry headlines you never saw coming, part 2,756

The issue may be real. The article sucks, and it should be brushed aside. What are you contributing, here?

Rest assured that if the risk is worth it to you, even if they’re banned, you’ll be able to pick one up under the guise of some other use case.

I described a cheap, safe grill-cleaning system. You’re inviting me to go eat needles.

A wonderful series of photo-heavy blog posts about Ashgabat, Turkmenistan can go some way to answering this question.