Behold the painting above. It is not by Norman Rockwell. It is not good enough to be by Rockwell, but it is not bad enough to be by AI. In fact, technically speaking, it is masterful realism. It was drawn by a real human person.

Here’s another painting by the same human:

Aaand one more …

The guy who painted these was a contemporary of Norman Rockwell. Each man’s work became cover art for The Saturday Evening Post. Readers of the time confused the two.

Yet the other painter is largely forgotten today, and Rockwell is a national treasure. Both men unapologetically trafficked in sentimentality, but here is the difference that will separate them eternally: This guy’s technical skills approached Rockwell’s, but not his soul or wit. His work suffered from sterility.

So here is your question of the day, and the reason for this column. I promise you, one of these answers is correct.

I’ll give you the answer in a second. But first, I owe you an explanation. This column has no excuse for being, really, other than my adolescent delight in funny names, and my insistence on perpetrating art criticism I am unqualified to make.

I learned about the existence of this painter only last week in an email from my friend Trevor Stone Irvin, who happens to be America’s greatest living political caricaturist …

… but that is beside the point.

Trevor was reacting to my recent column about how Artificial Intelligence ineptly tries to imitate Rockwell. Trevor contended that Rockwell was both a great artist and a great illustrator; at the highest levels, he says, the two terms are interchangeable. I agree. Then he told me that the only artist he knew of who could approach Norman Rockwell’s technical skill set in 20th-century realism was … Douglass Crockwell.

So. That’s pretty much it for today! Thanks for coming!

—

Alas, I am required to deliver to you what passes for at least a semi-sophisticated column; this is a covenant between us. And I am a master of pretexts. So:

Ahem. What The Crockwell Paradigm illustrates is the principle of making a big hoo-ha over nothing at all, and it thus takes its place in intellectual history alongside the works of the great Brahmagupta, the 7th-century Indian mathematician who invented the number zero, and will forever be remembered and celebrated for that. The rest of his story is boring, but I believe I have rescued the dignity of this column.

Also, we can go into literature. I’ve mentioned this once before: Did you know there were TWO Ozymandiases? Two poems — the famous one and a less famous one?

In 1817, Percy Shelley and his poet-friend Horace Smith decided to challenge each other to see who could write a better sonnet about a mutually agreed-upon subject. The subject had to be human hubris, and the pitiless judgments of history, and it had to involve an invented conqueror named Ozymandias. Each man produced a poem. One, ironically, has lasted forever. The other disappeared into the sands of time. By any fair measure, they both were excellent poems. But only Shelley transcended. Why?

Shelley’s Ozymandias:

I met a traveler from an antique land,
Who said--”Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

This is Horace Smith’s Ozymandias:

In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows.
“I am great Ozymandias,” saith the stone,
“The King of Kings: this mighty City shows
The wonders of my hand.” The City’s gone!
Naught but the leg remaining to disclose
The sight of that forgotten Babylon.
We wonder, and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when through the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He met some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What wonderful, but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

–

Both writers make magnificent use of words and imagery. Why was Shelley’s poem great, and Smith’s not? Because Smith’s point was too obvious, too plainly articulated. Too sterile. Shelley left it to marinate in the reader’s mind. The difference between good and great.

Okay, whew. I feel I cannot go out without saying a word in defense of Mr. Crockwell. He was not entirely without a sense of adventure or enthusiasm or wit. Consider this:

And:

He was also not without courage and daring:

Toward the middle of his artistic career, as though to break free of the wholesome, sappy bonds that constrained him, Mr. Crockwell tried something new and very different. He dabbled in the avant-garde — abstract, experimental, surreal filmmaking.

It was highly ambitious!

And sometimes un-watchably bad!

—

—

Can you think of two things, or people, that SEEM almost the same but, when deconstructed, are of clearly unequal quality? Oreos and Hydrox, for example? Send your nominees, with explanations, here:

Mailbag

—

Imagine a terrible scenario: Your child is exhibiting disturbing medical symptoms. Your family doctor says you need to consult the best neurologist in the country, then helps you get an appointment. You go, with your child.

The doctor begins by outlining her diagnostic process: After lab work and physical examinations, she says, she will discuss your child’s case with her most experienced colleagues, then consult her medical library, which includes … Artificial Intelligence.

You recoil at this. The doctor nods sympathetically, then smiles. The computer, she reassures you, is sometimes laughably wrong, and she says she ignores those things. But sometimes, she says — more often than she’d expected — after surveying decades of research all over the world, AI suggests non-intuitive but plausible scenarios the doctor hadn’t thought of. These insights can be life-saving. Because of this potential benefit, she says she would consider it malpractice not to consult AI, as one of many sources, before settling on a patient’s treatment plan.

Okay, we got that over with. Now let’s talk about me.

Of late, I’ve gotten some critical comments from readers because I sometimes use an AI-generated illustration in my column. Usually, I use it as a weapon against itself, to ridicule how shoddy AI can be. I am one of its rudest detractors. I think the public needs to know how reckless and threadbare some of its applications are. But I have also used it to generate a quick, compelling image on deadline, on an unrelated subject altogether. When properly instructed, I have found, AI can produce professional-looking art in an instant. I use it for that purpose, as sparingly as I can.

This is one I ran the other day.

It accompanied my column urging New Yorkers to robustly boo Donald Trump at the NBA finals. It was my idea to turn The Round Orange Man into a basketball, and to have one fan pointing a “#2” finger at him. AI did a more than serviceable job at turning this into an illustration. For competitive reasons this column had to get out minutes after I wrote it, and I felt I had no reasonable alternative if I wanted exactly that image, which I very much did. It made the column more noticeable. More people read it than would have otherwise.

Still. A few readers did not like that I did this, at all. (And, no, not a one of them was offended on behalf of Trump.) Those readers were ungenerous in their assessments. The complainers were not stupid, and they were earnest and consistent in their position, but they did tend to be absolutists: AI is bad, I know it is bad, I use it sometimes, ergo, I am bad.

To state the obvious, this debate does not present the same risk-reward calculus as the potential life and death of a child. But the basic ethical conundrum is the same, and the charge of hypocrisy hangs heavy, whether stated or unstated (some were stated). So, at the peril of further infuriating the already furious, I’d like to take this on.

Imagine you are living in the 1890s. Electricity has just been harnessed. People are mighty suspicious of it! They think it a dangerous, unnatural, even supernatural force. They fear its power. Respected medical people opine that it might destroy our sleep cycles and rewire our nervous systems. President Benjamin Harrison is said to have refused to turn on the lights in the newly electrified White House because he is afraid of being sizzled to death if he touches the wall switch. There is a familiar corporate conspiracy element, too. People resent and deeply distrust the new titans of electricity, Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, who are broadly considered to be scheming, would-be mad-scientist monopolists.

(This is all true.)

Now, imagine you were a craftsman who made iceboxes back then. Let’s say you were Darius Eddy, of Boston. Darius was a stagehand-carpenter who dared to think big by branching out to manufacture the finest iceboxes in the world, mostly made out of sturdy pine. He called them “refrigerators,” but they were iceboxes. D. Eddy & Sons iceboxes became famous: Their factory looked like this:

Their products looked like this:

Gorgeous, no? Handcrafted. Elegant. Fine wood, brass and bronze fittings. They were lined with tin to house the giant blocks of ice for when the iceman cameth with his adorable tongs.

Then. electrification hit. Actual electric “refrigerators” came on the market.

Darius Eddy and his sons didn’t cotton to that modern gizmo one little bit. It was the devil’s work. The company declined to modernize. It went belly up. In its final years, there were a series of suspicious factory fires there. It looked like an attempt to liquidate for insurance. The iceman goeth.

These wonderfully crafted old ice boxes now sell on eBay for good money — useless but stately antiques. They’re a resting place for potted plants. A remnant of an overly gullible past.

Bear with me. The analogies will come together. They always do.

As you know, I mistrust AI. But I also know that its proliferation is inevitable. We cannot wish it away, or will it away, or boycott it away. To throw it away would be unwise — it’s an extraordinary, supple technology whose medical applications alone promise to be life-changing. Its creative applications are … complicated. Daunting.

What we should do, I think, is regulate the shit out of it — perhaps make it a publicly owned utility. And I think we need to personally adapt to it according to our own moral codes, and be judged in the human marketplace on how we choose to use it.

Here’s how I think of it. Ethically, we all dwell on a continuum. For example, I eat animal flesh. I feel guilty about eating animal flesh. If I were a more moral person, I probably wouldn’t eat animal flesh. I deal with this unsettling situation as best as I can: I don’t consume animals that have been cruelly farmed. I pay more for animals that have not. I won’t eat foie gras, because of cruelty. Or octopuses, because they are geniuses. (I will eat squid, because they are idiots.) I buy only cage-free eggs. There is a situational hypocrisy in all of this, but it is a human hypocrisy, and we all live with those to one degree or another. Perhaps you fudge a little on your taxes. I don’t.

Many writers robustly and unapologetically use AI. I do not. I don’t use it to help me come up with ideas, or even hone ideas I already had. I don’t use it to rewrite my work. I try not to judge people who do. We live in complicated times.

Some of the best-known Substack writers don’t use AI at all. Others use it all the time. I am okay with both choices. There’s a slope here, and I don’t know just how steep it is, yet. Or even where it begins.

I am writing this in part because of a particular letter I got. It was from a very smart guy. Very thoughtful. Very passionate Very judgmental. A bit naturally nitpicky. He has several times in the past complained in Comments about some typo I made. I don’t begrudge him that. I like engaging with him.

But it raises an interesting point. I am susceptible to occasional typos: Should I use AI to find them before publication? It’s really good and quick at that. It takes no cerebration, no theft of others’ work — it’s like a more sophisticated spellcheck. Is that okay, Mr. Letterwriter, so you will be less disappointed in me?

For that matter, is it okay to use an AI-generated piece of art that was already out there on The Web, first reproduced elsewhere? Is that bad, too, like buying old ivory wrenched from the jaws of long-dead elephants, or furs made from animals killed in the Roaring Twenties? Is it like secondhand smoke? Where do we stand on that?

A slope. How steep?

Okay — but what about what is happening to the careers of talented illustrators?

That weighs on me, too. I am in awe of good artists and have no idea how they do what they do so flawlessly. Some of my closest friends and colleagues are illustrators and cartoonists. When I was an editor, I regularly looted my corporation’s budgets to pay illustrators handsomely for what these people did. In the field, I was known as a lavish spender on original art.

We live in a different world now. Big-budget media is disappearing. Legacy media is selling its soul. Some of the most important truths are being told today by self-employed, lonely pamphleteers. Most of these people don’t make much money. They couldn’t pay for good human illustrators and stay afloat.

I can still pay creative people for their work. I just cut a check for a very talented woman who recorded a video for The Gene Pool. I just paid for an old photograph that perfectly illustrated one of my columns. I probably could have stolen it — it was on the Web, for sale but copy-able — but I’m not a thief. (I think.)

I do not believe I am sometimes using AI instead of hiring pros. I am using AI because it is logistically impossible to hire these people for the purposes I need. They are, generally, not an option.

Some critics suggest simple nostrums involving planning better, writing columns more in advance, to give illustrators the time they need to do what they do. I usually cannot do that. This is an unforgiving new battlefield that thrives on being instantly reactive. The more self-righteous critics suggest deliberately sacrificing the quality of your product for the purity of your process. I actually find myself making that decision frequently — but isn’t there a line? Isn’t there a noble compromise? Shouldn’t there be?

I do think there is a Darius Eddy point. I don’t want to become obsolete. I don’t want to have to burn my house down for the insurance money.

—

That’s it for today.

The Mailbag

Hello.

What’s today’s new contest? Terse Verse. We’ll get to it only after laughter. Presenting the results of our previous contest:

Shtick Figures: The triple plays of Week 178

In Invitational Week 178 we asked you to choose a phrase featuring a number or quantity, then vary that number — twice — and describe the results.

Third runner-up:
400 Blows: Important French film.
4,000 blows: What Trump’s Cabinet is on pace to give him.
47 blows: The verdict of most people not in Trump’s Cabinet.
(Duncan Stevens, Vienna, Va.)

Second runner-up:
23 and Me: If you ask what genetic testing service had the worst data breach, this is the answer.
#23 and Me: If you ask Michael Jordan or LeBron James to name the two greatest basketball players of all time, this is their answer.
23,000 and Me: If you ask 47 how many pardons he plans to issue before the end of his term, this is his answer. (Mark Raffman, Reston, Va.)

First runner-up:
Three Men and a Baby: A 1987 comedy film.
Four men and a baby: A set of CPR training mannequins.
Seventeen men, five women, and a baby: A Cabinet meeting. (Jesse Frankovich, Laingsburg, Mich.)

And the winner of the T-shirt with a creepy trompe l’oeil face:
13: A baker’s dozen.
12: A regular person’s dozen.
11: A lawyer’s dozen. (Jeff Contompasis, Ashburn, Va.)

And now it’s the Invitational Gene Pool Gene Poll:

As usual, if you think one or more of the honorable mentions below are better than these, shout out your favorites in the Comments.)

Leave a comment

Nos.: Honorable mentions

Around the world in 80 days: The speed of Phileas Fogg.
Around the world in 80 minutes: The speed of a Starlink satellite.
Around the world in 80 milliseconds: The speed of a lie on the Internet. (Gary Crockett, Chevy Chase, Md.)

A New York minute: The instant between the light turning green and the car honking behind you.
A New York hour: The time it takes to drive two blocks in Midtown on a Friday afternoon.
A New York quarter-century: The time it’s taken the Knicks to make it back to the NBA Finals. (Chris Doyle, Warminster, Pa.)

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers: Rollicking musical comedy set in backwoods Oregon.
Seven Brides for Seventy Brothers: Rollicking musical comedy set in backwoods Alaska.
Seven Brides for Two Brothers: Rollicking musical comedy set in backwoods Utah. (David Smith, Pleasanton, Calif.)

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: A novel by Jules Verne.
0.6857 leagues under the sea: The Titanic.
2 leagues under the sea: The XFL and USFL — three times each. (Michael Stein, Arlington, Va.)

68 mph: How fast you have to go if you’re being chased by a cheetah.
88 mph: How fast you have to go to get back to the future.
8 mph: How fast you have to go to get back to Fairfax. (Jesse Frankovich)

12 Angry Men: Good name for a tense courtroom drama.
11 Angry Men: Better name than “Washington Commanders.”
10 Angry Men: The best name for the 2028 GOP Rubio/Cruz/Vance/Paxton/Hegseth/
RFK Jr./Patel/Lindell/Tarrio/Fuentes presidential primary. (Duncan Stevens)

Forty winks: A nap.
Four winks: A new parent’s nap.
Forty-seven winks: A Cabinet meeting nap. (Jesse Frankovich)

36-24-36: Marilyn Monroe.
32–23–33: Keira Knightley.
63-63-63: Yo Mama. (Chris Doyle)

60 minutes: An hour.
50 minutes: A therapist’s hour.
Zero: Bari Weiss’s “60 Minutes.” (Art Grinath, Takoma Park, Md.)

A twosome: A date for a lucky guy.
A threesome: A date for a really lucky guy.
A onesome: A date for a typical guy. (Jon Ketzner, Cumberland, Md.)

On all twos: Standing.
On all fours: On your hands and knees.
On all sixes: Stormy Daniels on her hands and knees and … (Tom Witte, Montgomery Village, Md.)

Dressed to the nines: Wearing your best outfit, like a visitor to the White House.
Dressed to the ’90s: Wearing a neon windbreaker and a fanny pack, like a visitor to a D.C. museum.
Dressed to the 900s: Wearing face paint and a horned headdress, like a visitor to the Capitol. (Jesse Frankovich)

The seven-year itch: Your marriage has lost its allure.
The seven-month itch: That new job has become routine.
The seven-hour itch: Peace negotiations are boring. (Jonathan Jensen, Baltimore)

Se7en: A gripping thriller about the Seven Deadly Sins.
Ei8ht: A fairly interesting documentary about an octopus.
Ni9e: A total snoozer set at Nationals Park. (Jesse Frankovich)

6 7: Meaninglessness.
Sixes and sevens: Confusion.
86 47: Treason. (Gary Crockett)

Seven deadly sins: Gluttony, greed, sloth, lust, pride, wrath, envy.
Two diddly sins: You end a text with a period, and you wrote two numbers in seashells.
One dadly sin: “What’s brown and sticky? A stick!” (Duncan Stevens)

Fahrenheit 451: Temperature at which book paper spontaneously catches fire and burns.
Fahrenheit 212: Temperature at which our tears boil away into the heavens.
Fahrenheit 1763: Temperature at which a Trump Commemorative Gold Coin returns to a more useful molten form. (Stephen Dudzik, Olney, Md.)

2001: A Space Odyssey: A man tries to get to Jupiter.
76: A Space Odyssey: A man tries to find room for more Nathan’s hot dogs.
0: A Space Odyssey: A man tries to park in Manhattan. (Jesse Frankovich)

The 300: Spartans at Thermopylae.
The 200,000: Persians at Thermopylae.
The 100,000,000: Attendees at both Trump inaugurations. (Gary Crockett)

Philadelphia 76ers: Basketball team.
Philadelphia .76-ers: Basketball fans designated by their blood alcohol level.
Philadelphia 76%-ers: Basketball fans filling most of the seats at Wizards home games. (Duncan Stevens)

The whole nine yards: The entire thing.
The whole 90 yards: How much of the toilet paper my cat unraveled.
The whole 900 yards: Our Great President’s Best Tee Shot! (Jesse Frankovich)

Three-ring circus: Barnum & Bailey.
One-ring circus: Middle Earth.
Five-ring circus: The upcoming L.A. Olympics. (Jeff Contompasis)

On cloud nine: Elated.
On cloud ’49: Elated because you just struck gold.
On cloud 69: Elated because you are being fellated. (Tom Witte)

Million-dollar smile: An attractive smile.
Thousand-dollar smile: A salesman’s smile.
Five-cent smile: A gas-induced smile. (Tom Witte)

The headline “Shtick Figures” was submitted by both Kevin Dopart and Jesse Frankovich; Jesse also contributed the honorable-mentions subhead.

But first, this 500-pun salute:

With his parody of “Alouette” last week, Jonathan Paul of the D.C. suburb of Garrett Park, Md., scored his 500th blot of Invitational ink, thus becoming the latest member of the Invite Hall of Fame.

Among the more than 5,500 people who’ve gotten Invite ink over the years, the now-retired computery person for the Federal Reserve perhaps best personifies The Invitational’s signature mix of highbrow and lowbrow humor, the haughty and the potty, as you can see from this sampler of Jonathanian gems from the past 31 years — including some of his 26 contest winners and more than 100 inking foal names from our annual contest.

Hifalutin jokes:
What did Caesar say to spread confusion among the Gauls? “Enivay, idivay, icivay.”

Bad poetry:
My verse flies up on wings inspired,
And, hoo boy, are my metaphors tired.

Old and new concerns for Baby Boomers:
Then: You’re growing pot.
Now: Your growing pot.

Signs a presidential campaign might be in trouble:
Mothers start holding up their babies for the candidate to change.

Ruin a famous line by ending it with a thud:
I float like a butterfly and sting like a hemorrhoid.

Rewrite a well-known story as someone else would tell it:
“Hamlet and Ophelia were a good couple. Claudius and Gertrude were evil. Polonius was good and so was Horatio, but Laertes was evil. Clowns good, gravediggers evil. Then there was Fortinbras. We had a Fortinbras at Delta Kappa Epsilon. He was a major league bunghole.” — “Hamlet,” retold by George W. Bush

Change a word by one letter:
The Fundead: Corpses who walk around at night with lampshades on their heads.

Lines from a Trumpian Gettysburg Address:
“Fourscore — a number like no one’s seen before — not even Sloppy George McClellan or Useless S. Grant, Liddle Frederick Douglass, Horace Greedy, Harriet Tubman — NASTY WOMAN! —I call her Tubby . . .

And from our annual contests to “breed” the names of two Triple Crown-nominated racehorses and name the “foal”:
Professor Higgins x The Senate = Doolittle
Ready Shakespeare x Litigate = Exit, Sued by Bear
Domestic Product x Just a Touch = Frottage Industry
Empire Way x Ever So Lucky = Appian Carefree
Lonesome Boy x Candymaker = Incel and Gretel

New contest for Week 180: Riddles with rhyming punchlines

Q. What do the makers of Viagra guarantee? A: Never-fail-ya genitalia. (Sue Lin Chong)

Q. What’s the new appliance gadget designed to discourage nibbling between
meals? A. Black & Decker Snackin’ Wrecker. (Mae Scanlan)

Q. What is another name for Mad Sea Cow Disease? A: Manatee Insanity. (Tom Witte)

Q. What was the frightfully successful new line at the Big & Tall store? A. King Kong’s string thongs. (Kevin Dopart)

Here’s a contest we’ve done only two times before — and both were ages ago.

For Invitational Week 180: Ask a riddle-style question and answer it with rhyming words or phrases, as in the examples above from 2000 and 2014. You may rhyme more than two elements, but they all have to be the same rhyme. So the phrase “Black & Decker” above rhymes with the phrase “Snackin’ Wrecker,” but you can’t have two sets of different rhymes, like “the fat cat on the red bed.” (For further guidance, see the earlier results here and here.)

Formatting your entries: Please write your question and answer in the same line, as in the examples above (i.e., don’t press Enter until you’re beginning your next entry). Otherwise your Q is going to show up all by itself on our judging list and your A is going to show up somewhere else and your entry is toast.

Deadline is Saturday, June 20, 2026, at 9 p.m. ET. Results will run here in The Gene Pool on Thursday, June 25. As usual, you may submit up to 25 entries for this week’s contest, preferably all on the same form.

Click here for this week’s entry form, or go to tinyurl.com/inv-form-180.

Winner gets this comfy pair of socks — perfect for all those occasions where you really want your shins and feet to look like cartoon cow legs. Appropriately, they are calf high. They stretch but probably would be too tight for your larger-hoofed men.

Runners-up get autographed fake money featuring the Czar or Empress, in one of eight nifty designs. Honorable mentions get bupkis, except for a personal email from the E, plus the Fir Stink for First Ink for First Offenders.

Still running — deadline Saturday, June 13, at 9 p.m. ET: It’s our contest for funny poems featuring comically obscure words from this year’s National Spelling Bee. Click on “read full story” below for details.

Now we seamlessly segue into the Mailbag portion of The Gene Pool, in which Gene responds to your questions and observations. Please send your new Questions and Observations here, to Ye Olde Mailbagge:

Ye Olde Mailbagge

And last, if you have not already done so, please consider becoming a paying subscriber to The Gene Pool. It lets you enter the Invitational, rather than just reading the results every week and sourly deciding you would have done better and then kicking the family’s dog cat hamster bunny potbelly pig. weasel. sea monkey. giant squid. raccoon. humpbacked whale. Clydesdale. axolotl. naked mole rat.

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Q: You have been as critical and oppositional to Le Grand Orange as anyone. Why have you not yet been indicted? We understand that having committed a crime is not necessarily a prerequisite to this.

A: I keep trying to get indicted. Maybe this will do it!

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Q: Have you seen this? It is great.

A: It is, indeed, great. Alabama's ability to disenfranchise Black voters was at least momentarily stymied because of a holiday: The state was celebrating Jefferson Davis’s birthday.

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Q: A reader named Bob. S. wrote about his father’s habit of eating raw hamburger with chopped raw onions. I am wondering if his father is of German ancestry. This is a variation of an extremely common item in Germany, except that here they use raw pork, not beef, which would be a major no-no in the U.S.

Around Berlin it is called “Hackepeter,” or “Mett.

A: Good God, you are right. And I see from Wiki that it is often served adorably, looking like a hedgehog.

Here is the hedgehog!

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Q: Regarding your story about Arlo Guthrie and the draft.

Annoyingly, my dad and Donald Trump share a birthday (same year, too). My dad did not serve in Vietnam, and I grew up being vaguely aware that it was because he had a very high draft number (asking him will get me nowhere; I also grew up thinking the B in Lyndon B Johnson stood for Bastard). He’s still very angry about Vietnam and Johnson and I don’t know the full backstory for that.

One of your commenters helpfully shared this website the other day. And assuming it’s to be believed, the only draft my dad (and Orange Shithead) would have been in was 1969, which covered birth years 1944-1950. Their June 14 birthday gave them a draft number of 356.

Shithead famously escaped because of bone spurs, but why would deferments be needed with such a high draft number? I’m guessing that because the war was young, so to speak, people were seeking deferments proactively (preemptively?), in case their high-ish numbers came up?

Might you have insight?

A: A good question. I do have the answer. You are right, his draft number — and your dad’s — was 356. But Trump got his deferment in 1968, the year before his draft number was selected. As it happens, he wouldn’t have been drafted, but he didn’t know that at the time, of course. He dodged.

—

And that’s it for the day!

Mailbag!

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The story I reprint below was published this morning by The Baltimore Sun. It is intriguing, to say the least. My only teensy problem with it is summarized by the three-letter headline at the top of this column.

So, let’s unpack this one together and see what emerges. We’ll do this as a series of polls at the end of the newspaper story, which is — this is part of the puzzle — unbelievably ineptly written.

Buckle up. This will be quite a ride. I am cut-and-pasting the top 2/3 of the story, below:

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Maryland official denies receiving warning over alleged nude photos to deputies

A previously private dispute between Wicomico County’s two highest-ranking elected officials has reached a breaking point, sparking a potential public records battle over whether the sheriff ordered the county executive to stop sending his deputies sexually explicit images.

Wicomico County Executive Julie Giordano and Sheriff Mike Lewis are at odds over the existence of a document that sources allege is a demand for Giordano to cease sending semi-nude, nude or pornographic photographs of herself to sheriff’s deputies.

While Giordano flatly denied that such a document exists, describing the allegations as a “horrific rumor” and a product of political malice, Lewis confirmed the letter’s existence in an interview last week. However, he said he would not release it to the public without a court order.

The conflicting accounts have prompted Spotlight on Maryland to file a formal demand for records under the Maryland Public Information Act (MPIA). The county has thus far withheld key documents, citing exemptions for personal privacy and records being “investigatory.”

Conflicting narratives

The controversy stems from allegations that Giordano, both during her 2022 campaign and early into her tenure as county executive, sent nude or semi-nude photos to deputies in the sheriff’s office. Sources familiar with the matter allege that in October 2024, Lewis issued a letter to the county executive demanding an end to the behavior.

When asked about the situation last week, Giordano dismissed the claims as “false narratives.”

“There was never a letter sent to stop,” Giordano said. “So, basically what happened was, there was a horrific rumor that went around, and that’s just what happens in a campaign, and so, we’ve moved on from it.”

Giordano said she and Lewis had discussed the matter and worked through it.

“We have a campaign coming up, so I think we have handled it quite well, and Sheriff Lewis and I have had those conversations,” Giordano said. “He seems to be, ‘I don’t really know where this came from, I don’t know why this happened,’ and that sort of thing, so we’ve worked together on that and sort of got over it together.”

Asked whether deputies who claimed to have received the images were false or lying, Giordano said she knew of no deputies who had made such a claim.

“I don’t believe that there are any deputies who have claimed to have received any of them, at least not that I know of,” she said. “I know of none that have claimed to have received anything.”

“It’s not something that happened,” Giordano added. “Again, just the sad side of politics, and it’s just a shame that people, I think, go out of their way to hurt people and try to create these false narratives and false rumors.”

However, when pressed hours after Spotlight’s interview with Giordano in Salisbury, Lewis contradicted the county executive’s account. While declining to discuss the specific contents of the correspondence, the sheriff confirmed, “The letter does exist.”

Lewis declined to release the document voluntarily, saying, “I’m not going to give you a copy of that letter unless I’m ordered to by the court. And when I’m ordered by the court, you will get a copy of that letter.”

Meanwhile, the county’s legal response to Spotlight’s public records request proves the existence of the letter.

After the county initially failed to acknowledge a January request for communications involving terms such as “nudes” and “pornographic,” an attorney for Sinclair, Inc., the parent company of Spotlight on Maryland, issued a formal demand for documents.

The county attorney has withheld the contested records, arguing their release would constitute an “unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”

When pressed, Giordano said she was aware of the records request in January but disputed that a cease-and-desist letter existed.

“I never received a cease-and-desist letter,” she said. “I would go on the record and say that the reason that the document didn’t get released is because it doesn’t exist because I never received a cease-and-desist letter from them.”

While the document in question allegedly did not contain the headline “cease or desist,” sources claim the letter did tell the Wicomico County executive to stop.

—

Okay, now. To begin:

Good, now: Based on the facts, such as they are available in this story — what do you think happened here? Which of these is the most likely explanation?

A: She sent risque pictures to a deputy or deputies for some reason.

B: She didn’t send such pictures. The sheriff is lying for some reason.

C: She didn’t send such pictures, but the sheriff thought or had been told that she had.

Okay, that’s it. I anticipate a robust discussion for the mailbag.

Mailbag

—

And finally:

I recently mentioned (hint) a certain famous person in The Gene Pool and instantly got a communique from my good friend Christine Lavin, the folksinger. Chris reminded me about a song she once wrote about this same person, and sent me a link. It is a terrific song. In perfect harmony with the rest of this here column, the title of her song was “What the Hell Was That?”

Here is the link. There will be a poll afterwards.

Did you listen? Good.

—

The modifier most used in coverage of yesterday's fanhandling of Donald Trump at the NBA finals in New York was “thunderously.” It modified “booed.”

Trump himself chose other modifiers. He said his reception had been “very good.” He said it was “amazing.” He said it was “mostly cheers.”

He said that after passing this sign en route to the game:

Then he fell asleep at the game.

I’m just now back from my four days in the Berkshires. That’s really all I have for you today, except to report a line I’d never thought I’d hear from anyone.

“Sir, we’ve gotten an alert on your buttocks and groin.”

It is, indeed, a Googlenope —at least until the moment this newsletter gets published and archived.

It was uttered to me by a TSA agent at the Hartford, Conn., airport after I failed a full-body scan. She was telling me I had to be taken to the side and manually frisked. It turns out I had failed to remove a pill bottle from my front side pocket, which evidently had shown up front and rear on my scan.

—

By the way, here is an excellent newsletter today by Lucian Truscott IV, about the origins of Donald Trump’s reflexive lying and cheating and stealing and criming. (Spoiler alert: Roy Cohn.)

—

Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll:

You fans at Madison Square Garden tonight are unlikely to be rowdies by nature. You are respectable people, the sort of people who can afford to pay a king’s ransom to attend Game Three of the NBA Finals between your Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs.

My plea: Think of it as a No Kings Ransom. Boo the shit out of Donald Trump.

With his usual disregard for the common people — believe me, he thinks of even you as common people — Trump has announced he will park his commodious behind at the game, despite the inconvenience this will cause. He knows it will mean you will have to go through two hours of TSA-intensive security checks before finding your seats. He’s gonna harsh your mellow. He’s a buzzkill. He’s happy to be a buzzkill. He likes it. It asserts his dominance. It’s like a dog pissing on a hydrant.

Trump’s planned presence tonight has already cost the people of New York a joyful watch party for the event, scuttled by New York police because of potential incendiary reactions to the man.

In short, your city is looking to you, now, to set the tone. Don’t let them down. Drown his arrival in boozy baritone. Give him a lusty, sustained Bronx cheer.

I am from the Bronx, but now live in D.C. D.C. is a feisty progressive town, and it hates Trump. And yet at public events here, there lingers a grudging, polite institutional respect not for the man but for the office. When he makes an appearance it engenders a lot of boos, but also some cheers and applause. It’s …. awful, frankly.

New York is not like that, right?

Damn right it’s not. Just Do It.

Enjoy the game despite his fetid presence. But please do this one thing first. It’s both your duty and your privilege. Just this once, don’t fugeddaboudit.

Thanks.

—

Go Knicks.

—

Mailbag

You could say many true things about the artwork above. For example, if you wished to be kind, you could say that it is heartwarming or wholesome. If you did not wish to be kind, you could say it is cloying or twee. Hallmarkian. What you could not truthfully say is that it is like a Norman Rockwell painting.

ChatGPT thinks it is. It was created in two and a half seconds by the Artificial Intelligence chatbot in response to this prompt by me: “Can you draw me a painting that Norman Rockwell might draw in 2026? You can choose the subject.” And there it be.

Lately, I have been noticing a lot of online commentary comparing AI-generated art — sometimes disparagingly but more often admiringly — to Rockwell art. The comparison is asinine. I am telling you this from inside the commodious Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Curiously, coincidentally, I am here on June 6, the anniversary of the invasion of Normandy, a cultural battlefield of a different magnitude.

You would have to be more knowledgeable about art and art history than I am to venture a valid opinion as to whether Norman Rockwell was a great artist or merely a great illustrator. I lean toward the first, but what do I know? I think Dr. Seuss was a great poet.

But what Norman Rockwell was not was cloying. Nor shallow. Yes, he tended to look for uplifting themes. That was his job, particularly in Depression-era America and World War II and the era of McCarthyism. But when you are immersed in this most affectionate oeuvre, you are aware that each of his works had … bite. Subtle things were going on just under the surface, or just on the periphery, just out of immediate view , which is the place where genius so often lurks.

Think about this painting from 1953, one of my favorite Rockwells. He called it “The Young Lady With the Shiner.”

Rockwell didn’t really consider himself a fine artist. He thought of himself as a fine storyteller. Consider the story he is telling here. The little girl, a rapscallion of 10, had evidently been brought before the principal for punishment. Her crime was that of unladylike behavior. She is unashamed and unrepentant, to say the least. In the background, worried school authorities gravely consult each other. Documents on the wall attest to their pedigrees and power. What to do with this hellion, a threat to their authority and decorum, an obviously recidivist troublemaker? One of the options under discussion is probably not congratulating her for her defense of her principles, and her defiance of restrictive societal norms. One is also probably not encouragement to explore whatever her gender identity might be.

Now look at the art at the top of the column.

Actually, no you do not have to. I can spare you the bother. It is goo.

Now, check out this one:

It is of a young draftee from a hardscrabble inner-city family, returning from World War II. Note the unbridled joy of his kin. Note also a sign of the continuation of life, shyly hiding in the shadows to the left … foreshadowing the beginning of the postwar boomer age.

See what I mean?

Rockwell had a strong social conscience that operated within his outwardly happy world. He became famous for his covers in the staid and stodgy Saturday Evening Post — it was at that point the pinnacle career for the magazine illustrator. But Rockwell quit the magazine after they made it clear there were limits: Not wishing to discommode their readers and their advertisers, they instructed him to draw black people only in positions of subservience.

So Rockwell started drawing for more progressive magazines. Consider this, also one of my favorite Rockwells. It is of little Ruby Bridges, also age 10. It was in Look magazine in 1964. Note the poison in the background, the dignity of the girl and the implacable facelessness of the men chosen to guard her into an elementary school, an unspeakably necessary duty in a place consumed by hatred. Why are their faces out of the frame? Because the perspective, for the reader, is at the level of a bewildered child.

To be fair to ChatGPT, after it produced the treacle at the top of the page, I asked it to draw me a second painting that Rockwell might have drawn in 2026: My revised prompt said:

“Can you do one more Rockwell that has a degree of sexual tension? Nothing dirty, but a little risque and symptomatic of awkwardness in romantic relationships, conveyed mostly through expressions and body language?”

This is what it drew

I rest my case. Of course, its rendering is ridiculous, held side by side with Rockwell. It is mush and dull. It resorts to ham-fisted sloganeering — telling, not showing. And worst of all, its soul seems to be that of The Saturday Evening Post, circa 1935.

—

I’ll go out here with a curious fact. For those of you who read my first dispatch from Stockbridge, on Friday, about Alice’s Restaurant and Stockbridge:

Rockwell lived his final years in Stockbridge from 1953 to 1978. For much of that time, his studio was in a garret right above what was, then, Alice’s Restaurant.

Today, Arlo might write, “Step right in, it’s around the back / Not below a room with an AI hack… “

Okay, good.

—

Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll:

—

The Mailbag

—

And finally:

“Is it around the back?’ Rachel asked. “I want it to be around the back.”

We walked. It was, indeed, around the back.

And it was about a half a mile from the railroad track. That also checked out.

Things were looking up.

—

Rachel and I are visiting friends in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, the yellow-tape crime scene for the 1965 littering arrest that created “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree.” That was Arlo Guthrie’s archetypal 18-minute antiwar hippie anthem about Thanksgiving dinner, the Vietnam draft, blind justice, creating a public nuisance, and dubious camaraderie with father-rapers.

We are Arlo Guthrie fans. Between us, Rachel and I have attended six Arlo concerts; I account for five of those, including one at a small coffeehouse in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. in 1975 at which Guthrie launched into “Alice,” which he almost never played in concert. On that day, he sang it for maybe 50 people. Rachel and I still have, and listen to, the original vinyl “Alice’s Restaurant” album, the one shown in the jacket above.

This is a travelogue of our visit to Alice’s restaurant, and it includes an incredible update on my weight loss under a GLP-1 drug based on an experience I had with a robot doctor in an airport, and a picture of the fattest cat you will ever see. We’ll do this chronologically, starting with the cat.

Because this is a four-day trip, we had to leave our four cats in our house for that time, and they’d only be looked on intermittently. So just to be sure, we left an enormous tub of cat food on the kitchen floor. Here is a picture of Grandpa, our fat tub of a cat, delightedly confronting the kibble when we placed it down.

Rachel immediately sent this photo to my daughter, Molly, a veterinarian, who dryly opined that Grandpa would polish this off “by 9 a.m.”

We flew to Hartford, Conn., where we rented a car for the drive to Stockbridge. Hartford, as you know, is “The Insurance Capital of the World,” which is the worst city slogan ever. (The best city slogan ever belongs to Fruita, Colorado, which is “The Home of the Headless Chicken.” But I digress.)

The airport at the Insurance Capital of the World is the only place I have ever seen a vending machine that cleans and disinfects your eyeglasses, which is apparently a good thing for preventing car accidents, something of which insurance companies approve.

There was also a glass-enclosed kiosk — disinfected after every use — that does a basic medical check on you. Weight, blood oxygen level, blood pressure, etc.. It is a free service, though it also has a scanner to read your insurance card, should they need to make a “referral.” This kiosk told me I weighed 155 pounds, which surprised and delighted me because just that very morning I had weighed 186. This drug apparently just strips those pounds off.

—

On the road to Stockbridge we encountered the following sign: '

We resisted the loaves. We did not break bread with Jesus.

Alas, Alice’s Restaurant — which was just off Main Street — does not exist anymore, technically. It has been replaced by a place called Theresa’s Cafe, which I approached here,,,

… But which was closed and, apparently, not in the greatest shape. Here’s another door to it:

Still, that is not the point. The point is Alice’s restaurant was around the back, and was about a half mile from the railroad track. These are important things because of something bad I once did to Arlo, something for which I felt I had to atone.

Many years ago, when I was re-listening to Alice’s Restaurant, I heard something dissonant. Not musically dissonant — Arlo’s voice was, and is, at 78, still great — but dissonant in veracity. This was a song that spoke Truth to Power, a resonant antiwar anthem of its era. But something seemed … wrong. So I called Arlo up for a column, and this is what transpired.

Me: So, you were arrested for illegally dumping a half-ton of garbage that you scooped up from the floor of Alice’s home, and took away to dispose of as a favor, right?

Arlo: Right.

Me: And you were nailed by the fuzz because Officer Obie found your name on an envelope in that half-ton pile of garbage and phoned you. And in the funniest line of the song, you solemnly admitted to Officer Obie that you had put that envelope under that half-ton of garbage, right?

Arlo: Right.

Me: Why was your name in the garbage from Alice’s restaurant? Wasn’t that all Alice’s garbage?

Arlo: In 40 years, no one ever asked me that.

Me: Well, someone is asking now.

Arlo: Bravo. I will hate you forever for this.

Me:

Arlo: Okay, we have to attribute that line to creative license. Obie actually found a paper with Ray’s name -- Ray was Alice’s husband -- and Ray directed them to me. But it worked better in the song the other way.

Me: So, no biggie? A misstatement is okay because it “worked better”?

Arlo:

Me: I don’t want to overstate my disillusionment here. But this is like hearing Jesus say, “Okay, I didn’t turn the water into wine, exactly. Actually, I just added some Kool-Aid powder and turned it into a nice, refreshing beverage.”

Arlo: I don’t know what to say, man.

Me: Are there any other untruths in the song?

Arlo: There’s one. The twenty-seven 8-by-10 color glossy photographs with the circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was? They were not in color, they were actually black and white.

Me: Did you learn your ethics from your dad? Might it be that this land was really made for just him and a few of his cronies?

Arlo: You know, it’s possible!

—

I feel bad about this! Arlo knew this was satire, a parody of a gotcha interview, and he had been a real sport about it. He played along. But still, there were … implications. My column carried the headline “The Trashing of a Legend.” The headline in The Tampa Bay Times, which also published it, was even harsher: “So, Arlo, Was Her Name Even Alice?”)

—

So, we’re back to the present now. I’m re-evaluating the song at a time in America when actual truth is a rare commodity.

I’m here to tell you that, yes, her name was Alice, and virtually everything else in song was dead on. There’s the original news clipping about his arrest, right there on the outside wall of what was once Alice’s restaurant but is now faded in time and place. Yes, there was an officer Obie. His name was William J. Obanhein. He was the chief of police in Stockbridge. He died in 1994.

This is him:

And there’s something else.

There was another line in Alice’s Restaurant that didn’t ring true to me. It was too perfect. When Arlo went to trial, he said in the song, the judge was sitting there in court next to his seeing eye dog. It gave Arlo the perfect metaphor — the fine line that he was facing “blind justice.”

I’d never asked Arlo about this.

Well, it was true. The judge was James E. Hannon. His dog was Susie. And here they are:

We’re square now, Arlo — right?

—

Good. Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll:

Mailbag

Hello.

A few short hours after we posted Week 179 of The Invitational this morning — a contest for funny poems using words from this year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee — we were presented with a list of all the words, pronunciations, and definitions that will make doing the contest much easier.
Please click here to see the updated version of the Inv…

Read more

All the way from New Zealand, Bowie superfan Andy Bassett channels “Starman” on a decidedly less glam orange-headed icon. See more winning videos and lyrics below in today’s Invitational results.

—

Hello. Come sit and join us for a spell. That’ll be this year’s spelling bee poetry contest, using words from the just-concluded Scripps National Spelling Bee. But first, the results of our contest from two weeks ago.

Song Sung News: The parodies of Week 177

As always in our song lyric contests, we were flooded in Invitational Week 177 with inkworthy parodies about current events, both videos and just-the-words, and even an original song or two. This past Tuesday the Trump Personal Law Firm Justice Department announced that that $1.776 billion slush fund for January 6 rioters was being 86’d after all — which was happy news to every Gene Pool reader except those who’d sent us songs like the Beach Boys parody “Funds Funds Funds.”

Over the next few days, we’ll share some of the best non-inking parodies in the Style Invitational Devotees group on Facebook. We’ll surely be singing some of this week’s entries on Saturday afternoon, June 27, at the Flushies, the annual awards potluck/singalong. If you love the Invite, you’re invited (it’s our name!). Sign up here.

To hear the tunes of the original songs, click on the links in the titles below.

Third runner-up:
(To “The Cover of the Rolling Stone” by Shel Silverstein)

(^ Written and performed by Michael Stein, Arlington, Va.) [Lyrics to this and today’s other videos are printed here]

Second runner-up:
(To “Sunrise, Sunset”)
Is this the little war I started?
Somehow it isn’t going great.
Give me a minute while I try to get … this … strait.
Is it uranium or oil?
Are we at war for God or man?
Hey! let me tell you ’bout my ball … room … plan!

War’s on, war’s off, war’s on, war’s off.
Swiftly flow the tweets.
Whose trades anticipate the markets?
Maybe they’re Rubio’s or Pete’s.
War’s on, war’s off, war’s on, war’s off.
Swiftly fly the memes.
What is it keeping off the headlines?
Is this incompetence or schemes?

Pete said, “The populace will hail ya,
Give you a liberator’s cheer.”
It went so well in Venezuel-ya, why not here?
We thought we’d start a revolution,
Make them our buddies with a bomb...
Just like Afghanistan and Vietnam…
[Chorus, fadeout on mournful violin solo]
(David Smith, Pleasanton, Calif.)

First runner-up:
Annual Survey Finds That a Large Fraction of Americans Don’t Wash Their Hands in the Bathroom

(^ Written and performed by Ali Ruth, Silver Spring, Md., a First Offender — and a public health scientist)

And the winner of the googly-eye eye mask:
Sleazy Todd Blanche
(To “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd”)
Attend the tale of Sleazy Todd:
His heart was cold and his oath a fraud.
He took the cases of evil men
Who richly deserved to be sent to the pen.
He trod a path that few have trod,
Did Sleazy Todd,
The schemin’ lawyer off C Street.

]Bring your charges false, Sleazy! Work for every con,
Terrorize the lives of those who anger Don.

]Attend the tale of Sleazy Todd.
He serves an orange and vengeful god.
What happens next, well, I can’t say,
But I surely hope that one day he will pay,
Will Sleazy, will Sleazy Todd,
The schemin’ lawyer off C Street!”
(Michael Stein)

And it’s the weekly Invitational Gene Pool Gene Poll:

As usual, if you think one or more of the honorable mentions below are better than these, shout out your favorites in the Comments.)

Leave a comment

Rhythm & Boos: Honorable mentions

Trump Derangement Syndrome
(To “Be Our Guest,” The Invitational’s most often parodied song)

(^ Written and performed by Jonathan Jensen, Baltimore, in his first BOG parody ever)

Virginia Supreme Court Overrides Voters’ Choice to Redraw Voting Districts
(To “Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat” from “Guys and Dolls”)
I dreamed I voted in a referendum
That would decide how the district lines are drawn,
Our Congress reps, and how folks would get to send ’em —
Ah, but suddenly all that was gone:

The Virginia Court said “Sit down, sit down, we’re blocking your vote!
That decision we’re striking down! Sit down, we’re blocking your vote.
We don’t care if a fair election is a prospect increasingly remote,
Sit down, sit down, sit down, sit down, sit down, we’re blocking your vote.”

I watched the schemes hatched in Florida and Texas,
Adopting maps to entrench the GOP,
And smack democracy in the solar plexus —
Thought we’d balance that, to a degree,

But the justices said, “Sit down, sit down, we’re blocking your vote,
The red states can go to town, but sit down, we’re blocking your vote.
A majority chose this option? That is something of which we take no note.
Sit down, sit down, sit down, sit down, sit down, we’re blocking your vote.”
(Duncan Stevens, Vienna, Va.)

The Washington Wizards’ Historically Bad Season
(To “Pink Pony Club” by Chappell Roan)
My team is in the NBA;
They call themselves the Wizards, but that’s not the way they play.
Defense? Like pylons on the court!
And every single shot clangs off the rim or falls way short.
From my arena seat, I watched the dismal scene,
No heart and no compete — they won just seventeen!
They said, “Be patient, please, while we rebuild the team,”
While playing on their knees — it makes me wanna scream,
God! What have they done!
They torched a whole season, for Pick Number One (can’t trust them),
I’m not having fun!
They’re certain to blow it, continue their run.
And still they’ll be a bricks-only club!
Never make a bucket,
They’re a bricks-only club,
Not gonna spend a ducat
On that bricks-only club,
Finally saying “fuck it”
To the bricks-only club, bricks-only club.
(Mark Raffman, Reston, Va.)
—

To “Adelaide’s Lament” from “Guys and Dolls”:

(^ Lyrics by Judy Freed, Philadelphia; performed by Valerie Holt)

A Painful Blockage
“To “Alouette”:
Fertilizer, where’s the fertilizer?
In a tanker on the Persian Gulf
Blockheads there are stopping freight
Passing through the Hormuz Strait
Stopping freight, stopping freight
Hormuz Strait, Hormuz Strait
Ohhhhh …
There are fewer hands to spread manure
All the help was grabbed by I-C-E
Now the crops will wilt away
From a lack of NPK
Wilt away, wilt away
NPK, NPK
Stopping freight, stopping freight
Hormuz Strait, Hormuz Strait
Ohhhhh …

This blockade means no more corn or soybeans
Or potatoes, peanuts, oats, or squash
You don’t need a PhD to know the cause is DJT
PhD, PhD, DJT, DJT, wilt away, wilt away, NPK, NPK
Stopping freight, stopping freight
Hormuz Strait, Hormuz Strait
Ohhhhh …

Old MacDonald quit and sold the farm.
(Jonathan Paul, Garrett Park, Md.)

Why Not Give It a Shot?
(To “Jolene”)
Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine
I’m begging of you: please don’t skip the shot
Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine
Herd immunity is all we’ve got
You listen to the online quacks
Who misinterpret basic facts
So measles, mumps, and more are back on scene
A fellow whose brain coexists
With worms knows more than scientists?
Dust off the iron lungs, they’ll be routine.
(Hildy Zampella, Sarasota, Fla.)

To “Stuck in the Middle With You”:

(^ Written and performed by Ray Keaney, Arlington, Va.)

Ode to Prediction Markets
(to “9 to 5”)
Tumble out of bed and I turn on Polymarket
Look at all my money, think of where to park it
What will I be betting on today?
Which World Cup team is gonna be the best?
Who’s gonna win the AL West?
And are the Knicks gonna win the NBA?

Will they win by five? What a way to make a living!
Will he take a dive? Winning bets feels like Thanksgiving.
I’m awake all night, but I always have to tiptoe.
My wife can’t find out that I’m gambling with crypto.

A senior official told me a secret
And even before I ran to leak it
I logged in so I could place my bet.
If the U.S. starts a war
At sunrise on September 4,
I’m gonna make my biggest fortune yet.

If we all survive, then I’m gonna make a killing.
This is how I thrive, and it’s absolutely thrilling.
In the White House SCIF, the top guys are gunslinging.
When they leave the room, you hear their phones all pinging….
(Barbara Sarshik, Vienna, Va.)

Trump Endorses Paxton
(To “I’m Just Ken” from “Barbie”)
Doesn’t really matter what he’d do,
Or if he smells like number two,
I don’t care how much he’s lied, oh-oh, he,
He has dealings that he can’t explain
With barely half a brain,
But he’s kissed my sweet behind,
So now I’ve made up my mind,

And I’ll back Ken!
Hopin’ he stays out of the pen,
Letting all Texans see who lives or dies in politics is up to me.
I’ll back Ken!
When I speak up, he says, “Amen!”
Make no mistake that all his sleaze will be a reason he’s my nominee.
(Mark Raffman)

D.C. Drivers Frustrated With Confusing Parking Signs
(To “Signs”)

(^Written and performed by Ali Ruth)

Coward’s Party
(To “I Went to a Marvellous Party,” by Noel Coward, 1938)
My political faction prefers taking action to meaningless quarrels.
It’s a game and we’re winning — no use in beginning to think about “morals.”
How lovely it feels to lash out at one’s leisure!
Violence by proxy is life’s greatest pleasure.

I belong to a marvelous party;
We’re looting the ship while it sinks,
Just filling our pockets with contracts for rockets like bullion from Brink’s.
We promised to curb the inflation,
But we aren’t tightening our belts.
You may think that we’ve lost our political passion
Or fallen in line now that fascism’s in fashion,
But don’t be so dramatic, it’s all just a cash-in.
To hell with everyone else.

“The good of the country” we flout with effront’ry and reckless insouciance.
The common electorate on which I expectorate, I regard as a nuisance.
It feels very much like the Fall of Rome,
And that makes me feel right at home.
I won’t waste my breath justifying each death
That my policies cause while cucks cry, “But the laws!”

I belong to a marvelous party;
If you dare show a glimmer of guts
We’ll call you a RINO (which means damned-if-I-know)
If you think for yourself, you’re a putz!
I belong to a marvelous party!
I’d outlaw the rest if I could.
But for now I suppose it will have to suffice
To rig the elections and load up the dice
And to murder the few who fight back against ICE
And as long as we do it, it’s good.
(Daniel Galef, Cincinnati)

Mifepristone
(To “Interjections” from “Schoolhouse Rock”)
Abortion pills aren’t hard to get, uh-huh,
And red states got a mite upset,
Their boo-and-a-hiss tone, we-take-that-amiss tone:
Apparent when they sued to ban mifepristone.

“FDA, kill this drug! Yow, that’s not fair, lettin’ ’em mail the pill down there!”

Mifepristone (“Hey!”) causes outrage (“Stop!”) and commotion (“Grrr!”),
Your pharmacy in Wichita Falls is not allowed to stock the stuff;
Telehealth outfits need not go along.

“Safety from those pills, a myth, uh-huh,” they said, and so did Circuit Fifth;
The Supreme Court took this tone: “Nope, no blood in this stone,”
Preserving women’s access to mifepristone.

(“Ban on hold for now. Pill-source companies can proceed pending review. Red states must chill out.”)

Mifepristone (“What?”) leads to rulings (“Huh?”) from the High Court (“Hey!”)
Which means a ban in Louisiana’s not effective nationwide.
Don’t get complacent — this might not last long ... (Duncan Stevens)

—

(^Original song on a blues riff, written and performed by Jon Gearhart, Des Moines)

Trump’s Plan B for 2029
(To “If I Only Had a Brain”)
I could fly to Abu Dhabi with Pete, JD, and Bobby
On Inauguration Day;
Then the Dems who now deride us can’t arrest or extradite us
Once they run the DOJ.

Or perhaps I’ll troll Obama from Riffa or Manama
While livin’ in Bahrain.
I could live the life of Riley, just enjoying how sheiks highly
Praise the way I entertain.

Oh, I could tell you more
’Bout deals I could score.
Cheatin’ chumps and tools I never fooled before,
Or just start, then end another war!

I could chill and want for nuffin’, pretendin’ to be tough ’n’
Impervious to pain.
But let’s face it, I’m a scammer
Who is headed to the slammer
’Cause I have no working brain.
(Chris Doyle, Warminster, Pa.)

Empire State of Mine
(To “Empire State of Mind”)
Yeah, I’m in the White House, now at Mar-a-Lago,
While my people eat cake, see me dine at Spago.
I am the new Nero, MAGA-coded hero,
Watch me stashing millions while your wallet goes to zero.
I bullied Venezuela, straight up snatched their leader,
Then I bombed Iran, caused their government to teeter.

Now I’m eyeing Cuba, targeting Havana,
I’ll force-feed them Donny-style as if I’m doling manna.
Can’t forget Greenland, my other weird obsession,
When they become my subjects, I know that we’ll be meshin’.
I said America First, but that was just me lyin’.
Fulfill my promises? I’m not even tryin’.

I’m building an empire with me at the top,
With supplicant Republicans, I’m never gonna stop.
Raised in hell, now I’m raisin’ it back
Yeah, you can tell I’m an evil dork because I carry a…

Pitchfork — hellish bungle where dreams are dying.
There’s no use in prying.
My pitchfork — my schemes will make you go, “What? Ew.”
They will disgust you.
Let’s hear it for my pitchfork …
(Leif Picoult, Rockville, Md.)

The headline “Song Sung News” was submitted separately by John SanFilipo, a First Offender; Kevin Dopart; and Jon Gearhart; Chris Doyle wrote the honorable-mentions subhead.

New for Week 179: Poems and jokes using spelling bee words

Ecanda, a plant that is harvested for rubber:
With some cotton plants
You can make a few pants.
But it’ll take some ecandas
To make tires for Hondas.

Cara sposa, a dear wife:
In the past, I’ve been shown a
Good time in Barcelona
But I met my cara sposa
Last year in Zaragoza.

The phenomenal seventh-grader Kushi Gottimukkala of Charlotte, N.C., who attends the unfortunately named Carnage G&T Magnet Middle School, aced “ecanda” to sail through Round 14 of last month’s National Spelling Bee, but finally tripped up in Round 15 with “cara sposa” — landing her in fourth place among the 247 super-spellers. (We think the first three kids should have had to spell “Kushi Gottimukkala.”)

Anyway, you get to (i.e., have to) look up the spellings for our yearlyish contest:
For Invitational Week 179: Write a humorous poem or tell a short joke (e.g., a riddle) using any word from Round 7 or later — except for Rounds 8 and 11, the vocabulary tests — in the 2026 Scripps National Spelling Bee (spellingbee.com).
SUPER-GREAT UPDATE! Just a few hours after we posted this contest on Thursday morning, June 4, Invite Obsessive Jeff Contompasis presented us with a full list of all the eligible words — including pronunciations and meanings! It even includes 35 extra words from the spell-off between the final two contestants. SEE THE LIST HERE, and also read the caveat above the list. A few guidelines:

— A. You may use a slightly different form of the word (e.g., plural, past tense).
— B. If you’re looking at the Bee website, be sure to use the correct spelling of the word, which appears on the list to the left of however the kid spelled it in competition, correctly or not.
— C. You have to use the word in its real meaning; you can’t pretend it means something else. (We have another contest for that.) Unless your poem acknowledges that the word made you think of another meaning. The real meaning of the word should be clear, from context alone or by brief definition, as in the Czar’s examples above.
— D. For Guidance ’n’ Inspiration,® here’s what got ink last June, in Week 127.

Formatting your entries: As with all our poetry contests, we dispense with our one-line-per-entry rule: Just type the poem as you’d like to see it in print. (Remember to include the number of the round when the word was read.)

Deadline is Saturday, June 13, 2026, at 9 p.m. ET. Results will run here in The Gene Pool on Thursday, June 18. As usual, you may submit up to 25 entries for this week’s contest, preferably all on the same form.

Click here for this week’s entry form, or go to tinyurl.com/inv-form-179.

Winner gets these handsome crocodile socks, which should be worn with alligator shoes, but any dressy footwear is correct, as illustrated. For obvious reasons, these are de rigueur in your more transparent law offices.

Runners-up get autographed fake money featuring the Czar or Empress, in one of eight nifty designs. Honorable mentions get bupkis, except for a personal email from the E, plus the Fir Stink for First Ink for First Offenders.

Still running — deadline Sunday, June 7, at 9 p.m. ET: It’s our contest to choose an expression that includes a number, then change the quantity in two ways and describe the result. Click on “read full story” below for details.

Now we seamlessly segue into the Mailbag portion of The Gene Pool, in which Gene responds to your questions and observations. Please send your new Questions and Observations here, to Ye Olde Mailbagge:

Ye Olde Mailbagge

And last, if you have not already done so, please consider becoming a paying subscriber to The Gene Pool. It lets you enter the Invitational, rather than just reading the results every week and sourly deciding you would have done better and then kicking the family’s dog cat hamster bunny potbelly pig. weasel. sea monkey. giant squid. raccoon. humpbacked whale. Clydesdale. axolotl.

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Q: Regarding your draft card: I was in the first draft lottery in 1969. Number 210, did the trick. But I had a bunch of plan B’s. I was a draft counselor at Cornell so I had a fair amount of knowledge. Best dodge I ever heard of was from another draft counselor, also a ROTC cadet. He practiced putting his feet in a really cold brine solution until he could lower his blood pressure at will. He taught a bunch of people how to do it. Best, maybe apocryphal tale I heard was of someone who got drafted, went to boot camp and every day imitated being a car, with lots of car noises. He finally got dismissed, and in his final meeting with an officer he reached into his pocket, grabbed a set of keys, tossed them on the officer's desk and said, “It's all yours, I don't need it anymore.”— Tom Kenworthy

A: Superior!

Q: I got this text message on my phone. Do you think it’s legit?

“Hi, Thomas. We are assisting with the U.S. Border Patrol’s effort to identify highly qualified and highly motivated individuals to apply for their Border Patrol agent divisions. If you are interested, please reply YES. If no, reply NO or STOP to opt out of future Border Patrol job opportunities.”

— Tom L.

A: Of course I think it is legit! You don’t suspect these people of ICE phishing, do you? Hahaha.

Q: Amazing aptonym. It’s from an article in the New York Times:
“Among those involved in the study was Jaime Culebras, a herpetologist and photographer at Fundación Condor Andino …”

“Culebras” means “snakes” in Spanish! How can the author of the article not have noted this? — Josh Durant

A: Because the author of the article was not me, and probably thought it too undignified to mention. It’s an amazing aptonym, almost too simple.

Q: You asked about favorite unusual food choice. Mine I can only eat in private because it mostly grosses people out, is raw hamburger meat with chopped raw onions and a little salt and pepper. My dad taught me that one. As a kid I thought this was a normal thing to eat because, well my dad did it at home, right in front of my mom. I only did it once in public as a teen and based on the reaction, learned never to do that again. I can’t even do it at home if my wife is around. — Bob S.

A: Well, good. I always make fun of food phobics, who overcook their meat out of a morbid fear of bug-borne illness. But my memory is that raw hamburger is kinda chancy. Major exposure to bacteria in ground meat. Doesn’t need to be charred to death — “rare” is fine if cooked through — but I don’t think I’d eat raw.

Q: I was a freshman at Case Institute of Technology (mostly male, at that time) and we were all gathered in the big common room, where usually we’d be watching Star Trek reruns. It was a live broadcast of the 1971 numbers, for those of us who were born in 1952. Everybody wanted to be the last one called. They call out the first number, and one classmate says, “I’ve never won anything before.” — David Chrislip

A: Had a great sense of humor. I hope he is alive today.

Okay, that’s it for the day.

That’s the big question, above.

I am a clock expert. I have applied my diagnostic skills to this, and have detected a flaw in the mechanism: There is a weakness deep within the power train. A gear is loose.

The public has been trying to analyze Trump for ten years. A diagnosis favored by the psychiatric profession is that he is a “malignant narcissist.” Another one, sometimes cited by the spiritually inclined, is that he is the Antichrist. A third, popularized by the Trump Blimp, is that he is a great big fat baby.

It turns out that that last one is right, but it needs elaboration.

Like a good clockmaker faced with an intractable problem, I have consulted available literature. In this case, I have plumbed the work of experts in diagnosing mental disorder in infants.

We begin by focusing on the term “spiteful behavior,” which seems to define, in one word, the centerpiece of Trump’s disordered mental state. It is considered a principal symptom within a group of broader behavioral disorders categorized as Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD). These symptoms dovetail perfectly with the actions of the adult Trump.

• Deliberately damaging another child’s possessions after an argument. (Iran)

• Seeking revenge after being disciplined. (January 6)

• Intentionally creating problems for someone who has angered the child. (throwing his political support to the opponents of lawmakers who criticized him)

• Holding grudges and retaliating later. (Going after James Comey, Letitia James, E. Jean Carroll…)

The real gold to be mined is in the following dropdown companion to all of the above. It’s in a lot of the literature:

Deliberately doing the opposite of what is desired or requested or considered appropriate given the circumstances.

I am going to repeat that for emphasis.

Deliberately doing the opposite of what is desired or requested or considered appropriate given the circumstances.

In short, it’s the “Fuck ME? Fuck YOU” reflex. A very New York thing, but, in Trump’s case, solidly sequestered in the infant years.

Consider the events of just yesterday. Trump had been having a terrible week. He’d taken one deftly administered humiliating nutshot after another, a sign of his tailspinning political influence:

• Under withering political pressure, he had to withdraw his request for a $1.8 billion slush fund to grease his political loyalists who felt they’d been persecuted by the Biden administration.

• He was ordered to stop harassing a group of protesters flying an 8647 flag across from a federal courthouse, on the grounds that the government’s contention that this constituted an assassination threat was absurd and insupportable.

• He was told by a federal appeals court not to proceed with a plan to fire transgender service members. The judges called it a naked scheme to “harm a politically unpopular group.”

• In a phone call, he ordered Benjamin Netanyahu to stop bombing Lebanon. Not long after, Netanyahu took to social media to report that his Lebanon bombing campaign would continue apace. Once again, it became clear Netanyahu had been playing Trump like a shofar.

After all this humiliation, what did Trump do? Did he assess his vulnerabilities and come up with something conciliatory, something giving the appearance of compromise, concession, even something resembling … contrition? Something wise and prudent considering his position? Something that was not arrogant? Something that reassured people he was sane?

Or did he deliberately do something opposite of what is desired or requested or considered appropriate given the circumstances?

Indeed.

What he did was appoint a staggeringly unqualified, morally suspect incompetent lickspittle hatchet man to be his new acting director of national intelligence, a cabinet-level position that, among other things, controls the CIA. His choice for this position — one requiring the most exalted security clearance, was Bill Pulte, a heel-clicking Trump loyalist with no national security or intelligence experience.

Pulte, the heir to a construction fortune, had been a businessman and investor in private life. As Trump’s director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Pulte became known for going after many of Trump’s biggest perceived political enemies — among them, Letitia James — via criminal referrals he made alleging mortgage fraud. They all went piffle in the courts because they all were baseless, vindictive nonsense.

It was the “fuck ME, fuck YOU?” response, writ large, by a very small man.

—

Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll:

—

Thanks. Make sure to stop by tomorrow for the spectacular results of the Invitational song parody contest.

—

The Mailbag

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At a CBS staff meeting yesterday, 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley lost his shit. He broke all the customary rules for decorous workplace behavior. He failed to act in a collegial manner. He raised his voice. He was rude and abusive and intemperate and thunderously insubordinate.

My point is, we need more of this. More insubordination. More thunder. Less collegiality. We need more public people like Scott Pelley beginning to act like this:

And fewer acting like this:

I have a plan. It starts with Congress. We’ll get there in a minute.

—

The “60 Minutes” meeting was to introduce the staff of the venerable news program to its new boss, Nick Bilton, the documentary filmmaker and tech journalist who has no experience in running a news feature operation. The meeting came after the network’s new, abrasively anti-woke editor in chief, Bari Weiss, fired the previous head of the program and two respected correspondents in what was a seismic shakeup of the historically progressive-leaning “60 Minutes.” Staffers are calling it “Black Thursday.”

It all seemed harshly political, part of a right-wing corporate shift under CBS’s uber-boss David Ellison, a billionaire buddy of Donald Trump.

Pelley had had enough.

According to The New York Times, which had obtained an audiotape of the meeting, Pelley informed Bilton that his qualifications for the job were “slender,” and asked why he had taken a position “knowing that you will never be welcome here.” He said Weiss is a corporate hatchet wielder who “is murdering 60 Minutes.”

“She does not love this place,” he said. “She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that.”

Pelley said, mock generously, that in contrast to Bilton’s slender credentials, Weiss had no credentials at all, that she was utterly unqualified for, and inept at, the job: “The changes that she’s made at the ‘Evening News’ have been catastrophic, so why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?”

As Bilton left the room after just 15 minutes of absorbing this, he sullenly told the staff to “enjoy the bagels,” and they did, after giving Pelley a round of applause.

Isn’t it time for public people to have had enough? The president has put us in indecorous times. Isn’t it time to be indecorous in return?

Pelley’s rant was not impromptu, obviously; it was shrewdly rude. He was speaking truth to power in a way that made an inarguable point. It stated out loud the plainly obvious, with not even a soupçon of diplomacy. And it was startlingly effective. Just hours later, former “60 Minutes” executive editor Bill Owens supported his former correspondent at a New York Press Club event, saying Pelley “can smell fraud a mile away.”

Fraud. That’s a fighting word. I think this might be the beginning of something cleansing, at “60 Minutes.”

Democrats in Congress can start something cleansing, too. I think they need to take to the floor — or at least try to — and simply read compilations of Donald Trump’s more recent deeply unhinged, pathetic nighttime toilet tweets. His hapless, impotent, incoherent, incontinent rants against enemies perceived and imagined and invented. His ludicrous braggadocio. The tweets that show him to be a toddler in mid-tantrum. The blame-shifting tweets ascribing his own incompetencies to others. The playground saber-rattling that reveal a man with no remaining personal agency, and no way to vent the panic he feels about this except through empty threats and infantile taunts. The grotesque AI images of himself as a Roman conqueror and his enemies as garbage-swilling rodents. The sullen, sophomoric “I don’t care abouts” to explain away the fights he has waged and lost. The self-serving, obvious lies that even his most gullible followers must now see as threadbare.

And every once in a while, while reading these things, the senators and congresspeople should turn to their colleagues across the aisle and ask them how they plan to explain to their constituencies their continued enabling of this damaged, dangerous paranoiac. What is their strategy — political and moral — for dealing with the consequences of their own cowardice?

It would be a shot across the furrowed brows of the men and women of power who are trying to sit this presidential crisis out, out of timidity or misplaced loyalty or what they have convinced themselves is forgivable, prudent politics.

The rules of the Senate and House give the majority leadership extraordinary discretion to control speech on the floor of their chamber. These sorts of speeches can be prevented by fiat, but it would come at a political cost. The senators and congressmen who are so rebuffed would simply take their litanies into the corridors and give impromptu press conferences. The can use audio-visual devices. They can emote to maximum satiric effect.

And they can ask, reasonably, why they were silenced. When they are told their speeches cannot be delivered on the floor, the deadpan answer should be obvious: “You are telling us we cannot quote the president of the United States in Congress? That is all we propose to do — share the thoughts of the president of the United States, in his own words, with the people of the United States.”

Anyway, it’s just an idea. A rude idea.

—

Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll:

— And, from the Mailbag:

Q: I loved your story yesterday about Pittsburgh, the missing cat. How did you determine where and how he had hidden?

A: Two things, neither of which I had disclosed in the piece, for tactical reasons. The first is that Rachel had seen Pittsburgh emerge from behind the couch, even though she thought it was Toothpaste. This itself was not dispositive evidence. All the cats frequently prowl under and behind the couch, and Toothpaste had been roaming the house freely for hours.

The main reason is that about 15 minutes before Pittsburgh appeared I thought I had heard a sound from the direction of the couch. It was a scratching sound, repeated only once. I called Rachel down from upstairs, and together we lifted and shimmied the couch five feet away from the wall. No cat was there. Then we returned the couch. We remained in the room for the next 15 minutes. No other cat approached the couch.

Thanks for asking.

—

The Mailbag

On Saturday morning, Pittsburgh vanished off the face of the Earth.

This column is the story of what happened. Buckle up.

As most of you know, Pittsburgh is one of three pitch-black kittens born to Grandpa The Cat in our basement late last summer. Grandpa is the stray tabby Rachel found in a cat carrier on the street in 90 degree heat, and who we assumed was male until the day Pittsburgh and his siblings made their squeaky, squirmy presence known.

Saturday was a day for work around the house, much of which, these days, involves repairing or concealing cat damage. In this case, it was gluing some highly dense fabric to fine old leather armchairs, the arms of which the kittens had shredded as with a cheese grater. The new fabric was a very tight weave, guaranteed clawproof. Attaching fabric to leather involves the application of an industrial-strength adhesive that smells like a mixture of airplane glue, gasoline, and ass. It can be toxic to animals when inhaled in close quarters.

So we locked the dog upstairs and then tried to herd the cats into the basement. It was an exasperating experience, exactly like trying to herd cats. We got Grandpa and two kittens down there. Pittsburgh escaped and was nowhere to be seen. So we decided to open all the windows, turn on the ceiling fans, crack open the front door, and proceed. Pittsburgh is a scaredy cat; he is an escape artist and is as skillful at hiding — at blending into a background — as a cephalopod.

Pittsburgh is the kitten who purrs loudly, like an idling one-piston lawnmower. His sibs are tentative at this basic feline task, as if they’re not sure it’s allowed. None of the kits ever got purring lessons from their ma, who as you may recall, is a horrible hissing, scratching, biting vindictive asshole, a splendid mother but a terrible role model. Pittsburgh figured out the whole purring thing on his own, somehow.

Rachel and I never talk about our favorite, even just to each other, because that would be bad parenting. But it’s Pittsburgh. We still don’t talk about it, but Rachel will read and edit this column before I publish it, so if the previous short sentence is still in it, we’ll both be acknowledging it’s true.

My point is, what followed was particularly dreadful.

Two of the three kittens have different names now from the ones we initially gave them, because it turns out a cat will tell you its real name if you are patient enough to wait. “Canarsie” became “Fancy” because that is what she is, a coy temptress overdressed in furs who mews demurely and bats her overlong eyelashes and preens and lets you admire her, but please do not touch so much, thank you. She dances away from contact. She has a bushy tail, like a squirrel. Fancy is beautiful, but a ditz. Here she is:

Her two brothers are almost identical, almost indistinguishable — they are basic black cats — but one is skinnier than the other. That one was first named Francine, then became Francois when we learned his gender, and then Frankfurter. Now he is Toothpaste, because, like a hot dog he is skinny and tubular but he also prefers it if you squeeze him in the middle, even if that is not the recommended way. He does give little licks and little nibbles, just to show he’s there. Here is Toothpaste, on his favorite trashcan:

And then there’s Pittsburgh, whose photo is at the top of this column. We kept his original name because it fits. Pittsburgh is blue-collar, and feisty. He’s the one who enjoys impeding your motion down a flight of stairs by zig-zagging in front of you, then settling in front of you, sideways across a step, and refusing to move unless you deliver a caress with a hand or a toe. But underneath he’s vulnerable. He’s also the one who is the most afraid when something unexpected happens or someone unexpected arrives — say, a plumber or house cleaner. He hides, and often stays hid for far longer than the existential threat exists.

So, on Saturday morning, we glued the fabric to the chairs. When the house was breathable again, we released the three cats from the basement, and the dog from upstairs, and waited for Pittsburgh to show up. Eventually, he would find us. He always does.

Pittsburgh did not find us. He did not show up. We waited five hours, and it was at that point that it dawned on us that, yes, we’d left the front door ajar, and Pittsburgh had likely been freaked out of his mind by the smell. Still, we’d thought it would be safe. Pittsburgh had never, in his life, been outside. He was petrified of outside. When a door to the outside would open, he would run from it, as though this was the world of Beetlejuice and the sand snakes were out there.

Still, could he have … run for safety? For once, the existential horror he faced had not been from an interloper, an intruder, but from … us. The people he was supposed to trust. We had tried to corner him and drive him downstairs, to trap him. Then we gassed him. Just how scared and betrayed might he have felt?

That is when we began frantically looking for him. We went room by room. We plumbed all cabinets and closets. We marched the living room couch away from the wall to check behind and beneath it. We dug through clothes in the hamper. We looked in a crawl space under the bathtub that plumbers use to get at the pipes.

And after two more hours, we concluded, miserably, that Pittsburgh had escaped the house in blind terror. We checked the bushes. We peered under cars for hiding cats. We looked in the streets for dead cats. We walked the neighborhood shaking his favorite toy, something with dangling bells and feathers. We forlornly called his name, though we’re not sure he knows it. No Pittsburgh.

It was getting dark. We put the porch light on. We brought a bowl of food outside, and his favorite scratching post.

It was time for bed. We’d decided to take sentry shifts outside, all night, so one of us was always on the porch. At that point we were in a deep, guilt-drenched funk when Toothpaste walked into the room. He was asking for food. Rachel sighed and got up to give him some, and stopped and said, “I don’t think that’s Toothpaste.”

I picked him up. Squeezed his middle. It was meaty. This was not Toothpaste.

Good chaos ensued.

—

Clearly, Pittsburgh had been in the house the whole time. The question was … where had he been? You’re going to be given a chance to guess, in a poll, in just a minute. But first, this:

This is a two-minute video of the three jet-black kittens play-fighting on a window-mounted cat hammock that looks out into the backyard. It is essentially shadow puppetry. If you have time, watch it, and see if you can identify which kit is which. Hint: You won’t. That is the nature of silhouette art.

(Just for the record, we’re pretty sure the cat on the right, the mostly supine one, is Toothpaste, and the one on the left is Pittsburgh. We know that’s Fancy who makes a late cameo.)

And now for today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll:

The question is: Where had Pittsburgh been hiding? (From multiple clues, we figured it out.)

Here are your choices:

A: Pittsburgh had jumped into this red metal kitchen garbage can, pushing himself through the flapper that says “Push,” and remained there for nine hours, without making a sound, even when we blindly tossed stuff on top of him.

B: Pittsburgh had jumped on top of this old clock in the dining room, high on the wall, where he lay on the flat top, flattened out, watching our search, soundless and motionless for nine hours.

C: Pittsburgh had burrowed through the bottom of this crummy old couch into the stuffing, and remained there, silent and still even when we moved the thing.

D: Pittsburgh had climbed into this air-exhaust duct in the basement and lay there for nine hours, including times when the hot clothes dryer exhaust was blowing through it.

E: Pittsburgh had climbed into the commodious pocket of my bathrobe hanging on a hook on the door of the upstairs bathroom, coiled into a tight ball and stayed there hiding for nine hours, even after we’d used the bathroom and hunted on all fours, calling for him in the catacomb underneath the bathtub.

Good. The answer will be given below, but first, obviously, you need a current photo of Grandpa. Same cat hammock.

Now, some might say that Grandpa has developed a weight problem. We prefer to think that she has been misidentified from the start and actually is a raccoon. Raccoons are naturally stout. Yes, we are working on this issue of avoirdupois, but first things first, and the first thing is the glacial but steady civilizing of Grandpa.

Yesterday, after the reappearance of Pittsburgh, Grandpa confronted her bete noire, Rachel — the woman who saved her from death and who had been repaid with scowls and growls and scratches and gouges. Grandpa was a Momster.

Yesterday, Grandpa lay in front of Rachel and delivered a message she had never delivered before. It was a single grudging lick to the palm of Rachel’s hand. A kiss. In our house, the zeitgeist shifted. The Earth moved.

Then, Grandpa growled.

Baby steps.

—

Do you like the continuing saga of Grandpa and her kittens? No? Then ignore the following.

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—

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The Mailbag

The answer to the poll: It was C. Pittsburgh had somehow burrowed into the body of the couch, the very place we were sitting when weepily confronting his disappearance and likely death.

—

Do you have any number that scares you? Say, “6,” as in “six-putting” a hole? Or “103,” as in a fever? Or “11," as in Chapter?

My number has always been 200. It was a weight I feared I’d someday hit, and it would tell me that I needed to do a drastic thing or accept something about myself I vowed never to accept. I never wanted to be a fat man. I’ve been able to handle being an overweight man. That designation leaves you some wiggle jiggle room.

My father, a terrific dad, was my height —5 foot 10 — and topped out at 240 pounds. Once, when I was eight or nine, I drew a cartoon of him that looked like Porky Pig. I meant it as an affectionate tease, but I could see the hurt in his eyes. I never did anything like that again.

So, one evening two months ago, I consulted my bathroom scale with a sidelong squint — some things must be approached obliquely — and gulped.

Glp. I am now on a GLP regimen, shooting myself up, just like I used to do when I was draft age, if for a very different reason. That’s my draft card, above. I’m using it mostly to establish my weight at the age of 18. I cannot remember ever being that wraithlike.

I have lost 13 pounds so far, and — I apologize to all indomitable dieters — it is not much of an ordeal, other than the cost, which I figure is at least partially defrayed by fewer nights at restaurants, and less on my plate. The struggle for me is mostly one of ethics and entitlement. This diet is usually uninsurable, so you can’t afford it if you are living paycheck to paycheck, as many worthy and deserving people do.

It also offends my work ethic. I have always found, and have come to believe, that the most important things you do are the ones requiring the most effort and the greatest sacrifice. The best thing I’ve ever written was supposed to take two years, but took six, and left me waking with night sweats.

This drug — Zepbound — simply makes you always feel kind of full. You don’t want to eat, but you also don’t lose your appreciation for good food. You savor it more.

So, I’ll be briefly reporting back on this from time to time. But at the moment, there’s an interesting spinoff to examine.

See that draft card? There’s a story behind it. I was the second class of young male adults to be subject to a “draft lottery.” It was 1970, toward the end of the Vietnam War.

The draft was terrifying. A drawing was held to assign a number to each of 366 possible birthdays. The first number drawn became number one, and that person was a certainty to be drafted into the Army. So were numbers two through about 195, at least according to the previous year’s cutoff. Could go higher or lower that year, depending on the Army’s needs. In 1970, those needs were insatiable. If your number was, say, 300, you knew you were safe. If your number was, say, 86, you knew you were meat, and could begin eyeing Canada, or trying to find a malleable doctor, if you were so inclined. Bone spurs.

My birthday — October 2 — became number 191. Smack dab in the danger zone.

I was both terrified of, and furious about, this draft. I had been to Woodstock the year before. I detested the war. I was also in my sophomore year of college, which meant I had a student deferment until my graduation or flunk-out. But after that, my draft number would kick in.

Then, a startling story appeared in The New York Times. It identified an odd loophole for that year’s draft. Because of a backup in processing, if anyone voluntarily ended his deferment right away, it was highly unlikely that the Army could draft him before the end of the year. And, because of another hiccup in the system, if they hadn’t been called up by the end of the year, the Army would erase them from the waiting list. Whatever your number, if you hadn’t been drafted by January 1, you wouldn’t be drafted.

But… what if that was wrong?

I trusted the New York Times way more than I trusted the U.S. Army. If I waited until I was out of college, I’d be subject to the next draft. With unpredictable consequences.

I wrote in to end my deferment. And sweated bullets for the next few months. I was like this guy, in the old cartoons, in a weight-loss machine.

By January 1, my number hadn’t been called, and, lo, I was free of the draft.

The draft wound up recruiting only up to number 125 for that year, so I would have been free anyway, but I didn’t know it at the time I made the decision. As with my GLP experience 55 years later, I felt a sense of unease, and for similar reasons: Class and wealth inequalities — the non-affluent could not afford college deferments — and self-doubts about courage. And the unfair randomness of life and death. I had a sense of survivor’s guilt.

—

This being the Weekend Gene Pool, you now have to put out for me. Send in your thoughts or questions or personal stories about GLPs, or Vietnam, or weight loss, or personal numbers that scare you — numbers of any sort. Please send them here. I will respond to them next week.

The Mailbag

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And here, as a special treat, is a video of Ernie Els six-putting from ten feet on the first hole of the first round of the 2016 Masters.

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Today’s Gene Pool Gene Polls:

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And finally,

I’m not going to ask for money to help pay for my weight loss. That would be tacky AND dreadfully tactically unwise. So I’m asking for a friend, instead.

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I hope all you A.I. phobics and tskers and naysayers noticed that Open AI just resolved the 80-year-old Erdős unit-distance conjecture in combinatorial geometry, a goal that had eluded the greatest human mathematical minds of the past three generations.

Well, I have another slap in the face for you. I myself consulted ChatGPT just this week to solve a problem I’ve been challenged by for 20 years, and it found me an answer in two and a half seconds, an answer that will give you a hell of a column to read.

For nearly 50 years, I have wondered whatever became of Billy Rothstein, one of my closest friends at Junior High School 82 in the Bronx, back in 1964 and 1965. Billy was the only kid around who I secretly felt was funnier than I was.

Billy’s humor was situational, deeply cynical and fatalistic and subversive and sly. Jewish humor, but of a wicked, slightly bent bent. As if Lenny Bruce and Sarah Silverman had a kid. Billy could crack me up with reliable regularity. Once, we went into his family’s apartment, and he told me in advance that his parents’ cleaning lady would be there, and solemnly begged me not to laugh because she was Olive-Oyl skinny. I thanked him for the heads-up. Then we walked in. She was about 400 pounds. I had to wheel around and leave the place to compose myself before re-entry.

Billy wore goofy black horn-rimmed glasses, like Buddy Holly or Malcolm X.

At lunchtime he and I and other kids would play a schoolyard game called “break,” that was basically ragtag three-man football, played on asphalt, with Calvinball rules. The ball was rolled-up socks. It was fast and furious and could result in bloody noses.

Billy lived in a grittier area of the Bronx than I did. A couple of times I went to his neighborhood to meet his street friends — scrappy truants and roustabouts all. One of them was a dwarf whom the others pushed around wildly in traffic, in a stolen supermarket cart. Billy and his friends pre-jackassed the Jackass guys by 30 years.

Billy and I wound up going to different high schools, and though they were just two blocks apart, we fell out of touch. My high school was for brainy nerds. His was for brainy delinquents. I got into drugs. He got into fights. I envied him.

Then I was gone from New York, and never saw him again, never heard from him again, never heard of him again. To find him, every few years I’d use my developing reporting skills, and my industry’s increasingly sophisticated technology. I once even enlisted the help of a top librarian at The Post. No luck.

But now…. I mean, AI solved the Erdos Unit Distance Conjecture!

I use AI as sparingly as I can. I believe it is inevitable and unavoidable, but I also believe it is an industry built on intellectual piracy, and a potentially catastrophic threat to the environment, and a dehumanizing threat to the creative arts. Where there is a serviceable alternative tool, I go there first. I sometimes settle for less.

Still … Billy.

So I told ChatGPT everything I knew about him. His full name — first, middle, and last. That he had been born in 1951, and grew up in the Bronx. That he had gone to DeWitt Clinton High School. And that his father was a jeweler who owned a jewelry store. (Billy was proud of that. Once, when I mentioned my father’s “boss,” Billy scoffed that his father didn’t have no boss.)

Two and a half seconds after I had asked my question, ChatGPT told me that Billy was dead. It said he had succumbed to lymphoma in 2004. Also, that he had been implicated as the mastermind of a daring 2003 bank robbery near Erie, Pennsylvania that had killed a man with a boobytrap bomb. All the facts about him aligned, AI assured me: His first, last and middle name. Born in 1951 in the Bronx. DeWitt Clinton High School. A jeweler for a father. It said he died before he could be charged with the crime, or for another murder of which he was suspected.

Ho.

Lee.

Shit.

I even knew of the crime. You might, too. It was famous — the Pizza Bomber Case. Some people had ordered pizza, locked an explosive device around the delivery guy’s neck, and sent him to pull off a bank heist. They’d warned him he’d explode if he failed.

He got the money, but the plotters killed him anyway, apparently to prevent their exposure. It all played out in front of live TV, including the money shot.

Having a jeweler for a father, ChatGPT had told me, “directly explains where William acquired his precision mechanical skills. Investigators noted that he grew up helping his father fix watches and jewelry, a background that gave him the exact technical know-how required to build the highly intricate, custom-engineered collar bomb used in the 2003 crime.”

Man.

Billy. Billy The Kid.

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Now, I know what you are thinking. You are thinking I must have been devastated to learn what had become of my old friend.

Clearly, you know nothing of my work.

I set out to confirm this incredible story. From news stories at the time, I found the pizza bomber’s photo.

The Buddy Holly glasses!

The rest of him in the photo seemed fully plausible after 55 years.

According to the stories, Billy Rothstein indeed had built the bomb and timing mechanism with skills he learned from his father.

His father, the jeweler?

No, his father, the owner of a bottling plant, with all that machinery that needed servicing.

Uh.

Also this William Rothstein seemed to have been born around 1944, not 1951. Also, he grew up entirely in the Erie area. Also, he was said to be fluent in French and Hebrew. Billy Rothstein, to my memory, was fluent only in Bronx and talked like dis.

So.

I next queried Gemini, Google’s AI, informing them of my query to ChatGPT and reporting what they had told me. Two and a half seconds later Gemini informed me that ChatGPT had been full of shit, and had gotten everything wrong, conflating my inquiry with a big, other totally unrelated story on the Web about a similarly named person, and commingling the facts. So then I went back to ChatGPT, which said, yeah, Gemini was right, that they — ChatGPT — had been full of shit. ChatGPT said it was sorry.

Oh.

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Interestingly, I later checked back with Gemini into the Billy the Kid story, as though I’d never asked before. By now their database had apparently been polluted by my previous question. Without directly informing me that my Billy was that Billy, it incorporated into its new analysis that the pizza bomber had grown up in the Bronx and gone to high school there.

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Sorry about all this, Billy. If you’re still out there, you can find me here.

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Today’s Gene Pool Gene Polls:

And:

To tie matters up neatly, in checking into the provenance of the anagram, I asked Gemini specifically whether Jeff Tiedrich, the other funny, foul-mouthed substack Trump hater, had ever made that observation. It informed me that he had, on May 6, 2026. I checked. He hadn’t.

Then I asked it again, and it admitted that Tiedrich hadn’t used the expression. But added this, all on its own:

“Interestingly, while the letters heavily overlap, “Triumphal Arch” is not a perfect anagram for “Hail Trump Arch.” A quick letter count reveals the mismatch:

• Triumphal Arch: Contains one letter “R” and one letter “M”.

• Hail Trump Arch: Requires two letter “R”s and one letter “M”.

“Because “Hail Trump Arch” introduces an extra “R” that does not exist in the original phrase, the anagram doesn’t quite work mathematically.”

This, of course, is dead wrong, too. It’s a perfect anagram.

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That’s it for the day. Please, if you can, consider becoming a paying subscriber. It’s not easy being this kind of jackass every day.

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Hello. Today we inaugurate a brand-new contest that (1) involves numbers; (2) makes make a point that will teach us all a thing or (3). But first, the results of the contest we offered two weeks ago.

Merrymandering: Portmanteau names from Week 176

In Invitational Week 176 we asked you to coin a new term that combined a real person’s name with something else. We were inspired by the now-ubiquitous “gerrymander,” which was named for Elbridge Gerry, who as governor of Massachusetts in 1812 authorized a cunningly redrawn state Senate district resembling a salamander. Of course, now the term is no longer about Gerry himself — it doesn’t even use the hard-G pronunciation of his name — but refers to any crafty redistricting for one side’s political gain. We like that universality in a neologism.

The “real person” part of the instruction meant that Loser Ann Martin couldn’t use Bambivalence: “Do I show my 7-year-old a movie in which Mommy gets shot?” Otherwise, Ann would have gotten ink below.

Third runner-up:
Frappacino: Overcaffeinated acting. (Jonathan Paul, Garrett Park, Md.)

Second runner-up:
Springsteenage: Describing the years between 50 and 90. (Lee Graham, Columbia, S.C.)

First runner-up:
Putinkerbell: “You’d better clap or you’ll be able to fly — briefly.” (Gary Crockett, Chevy Chase, Md.)

And the winner of the tea infuser that looks like an upside-down dabbling duck:
Xip: Those who blindly follow the leader of China. (Jesse Frankovich, Laingsburg, Mich.)

And now it’s the weekly Invitational Gene Pool Gene Poll:

(As usual, if you think one or more of the honorable mentions below are better than these, shout out your favorites in the Comments.)

Leave a comment

Near Mixes: Honorable mentions

Belichicanery: Blatant cheating in sports, such as deflating footballs, spying on other teams’ practices, using rocket-propelled sneakers . . . (Kevin Dopart, Naxos, Greece)

KinZingers: Bons mots from an acid-tongued never-Trumper, like “He smells like armpits, ketchup, makeup, and a little butt…” (Mark Raffman, Reston, Va.)

Goldwaterboarding: The torture of watching endless election night coverage when your candidate has lost really, really badly. (Jon Gearhart, Des Moines)

Trumpire: One of those referees known for exploding at players and managers, ejecting them for disagreeing with him, etc. (Gregory Koch, Falls Church, Va.)

Patellall: A book written by a government insider disclosing how much of an absolute jackass the boss was. (Gary Crockett)

Bidenial: Blindness to the obvious senescence of a politician you support. (Mark Raffman)

Warhallmark: Cutting-edge art that’s been turned warm and fuzzy. (Kevin Dopart)

ABBAttoir: The type of bad dance-pop group that makes you want to disembowel yourself. (Stephen Dudzik, Olney, Md.)

Ovechkindergarten: Junior-junior hockey school: “Hey, kids, let’s get rid of those two front teeth NOW! They’re just baby teeth, you wimps!” (Karen Lambert, Chevy Chase, Md.)

Snyderriere: A huge ass. (Tom Witte, Montgomery Village, Md.)

Amadeus ex machina: A dramatic device like the three little angels who suddenly pop up to save the day in The Magic Flute. (Jon Gearhart)

Gabbardine: Whole cloth. (Michael Stein, Arlington, Va.)

Picasshole: A would-be art critic who drones on about the Rose Period’s clear superiority to the Blue Period. (Stu Segal, Southeast U.S.)

Kafkamamie: Surreally nonsensical. (Jonathan Jensen, Baltimore)

Grahamma: An oldster who finds a biblical rationalization for everything. (Sam Mertens, Silver Spring, Md.)

Hegsethics: The guiding principles of a strong misleader. (Jesse Frankovich)

Rubiocon: The line you cross from calling Trump “reckless and dangerous” to “I enjoy working for this president.” (Chris Doyle, Warminster, Pa.)

Netanyahubris: A quality that didn’t work on Obama or Biden, but did work on Trump. (William Kennard, Arlington, Va.)

Dorothy Parker Bros.:
Landlords drain your
Cash apace
When you’ve landed
On Park Place.
Hotels cost you
Quite a bit.
Got no railroads?
You might as well quit.
(Duncan Stevens, Vienna, Va.)

The headline “Merrymandering” is by Jeff Contompasis; Jesse Frankovich wrote the honorable-mentions subhead.

New contest for Week 178: Change a number in a phrase — and do it again

Five-second rule: Food dropped on the floor is safe to eat if you pick it up and eat it within five seconds.
Five-minute rule: Your dog will regurgitate any gross food scrap it just ate.
Five-hour rule: Trump will change his mind about his Iran war deadlines.

1.6 candles: In lumens, the light output of a refrigerator bulb.
16 candles: As in the song, the light output on a debutante’s cake.
1,600,000 candles: The light output at a Phish concert.

For Invitational Week 178: Offer a well-known phrase that contains a number or quantity, then change that number or quantity two or more times and define each altered phrase, as in the examples above. The first is by Stephen Dudzik, a Loser Every Freaking Year But One Since 1993 who suggested this contest. Bonus points, most likely, if the phrases echo one another in some way. The order of the elements is up to you.

Formatting your entries — IMPORTANT! While we’ll publish the series of phrases one on top of another as in the examples above, you need to put both (or all) your phrases for each entry on the same line (i.e., don’t push Enter until you’re ready to write your next entry). Otherwise they’ll show up on Our Big Judging List with one line here, one line there, and they will not seem funny to us. So do it just like this, in one long line (also by Steve):
The $64,000 question: The essence of the unknown about an issue. The $64,000,000 question: Mike Lindell thinks he’s entitled to how much from Trump’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund”? The $64 question: For a quarter tank of gas?

Deadline is Saturday, June 6, 2026, at 9 p.m. ET. Results will run here in The Gene Pool on Thursday, June 11. As usual, you may submit up to 25 entries for this week’s contest, preferably all on the same form.

Click here for this week’s entry form, or go to tinyurl.com/inv-form-178a.

Winner gets this ultra-creepy trompe l’oeil T-shirt. It’s in transit right now and it likely won’t trompe your oeil quite as much as in this photo (especially if you’re not a fairly large man), but some similar shirts we’ve gotten from the same place were pretty amazing. (Arm tattoos not included. Get your own.)

Runners-up get autographed fake money featuring the Czar or Empress, in one of eight nifty designs. Honorable mentions get bupkis, except for a personal email from the E, plus the Fir Stink for First Ink for First Offenders.

Still running — deadline Sunday, May 31, at 9 p.m. ET: It’s our biannualish song contest for parodies (or originals) about current events — either just the lyrics or a video performance. Click on “read full story” below for details.

Now we seamlessly segue into the Mailbag portion of The Gene Pool, in which Gene responds to your questions and observations. Please send your new Questions and Observations here, to Ye Olde Mailbagge:

Ye Olde Mailbagge

And last, if you have not already done so, please consider becoming a paying subscriber to The Gene Pool. It lets you enter the Invitational, rather than just reading the results every week and sourly deciding you would have done better and then kicking the family’s dog cat hamster bunny potbelly pig. weasel. sea monkey. giant squid. raccoon. humpbacked whale. Clydesdale.

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Q: Hi Gene and Pat.... I have a confession to make, and a strange thing to note. Sometimes, before the new contest drops, since the URL for the new form is always the same, I will go there to see if I can find out what the new contest is a short time ahead of everyone else. It sometimes works, Except that, imagine my surprise, a few hours before this new Invitational dropped, I went to the site and found a Google page entitled “Gene Weingarten’s last meal”. Are you about to be executed? For what? Why? And what was your last meal?

A: To my shock and awe, I checked that site, and that is indeed what it has on it. To answer your question, my last -- as in most recent -- meal was leftover home-made duck soup with potatoes, leeks and parsnips, accompanied by baby bok choy seasoned with sesame oil. And yes, I survived that.

Neither Pat nor I knows why that link was out there. Pat had not yet made the link for today’s contest, though that would likely have been its URL.

The most astonishing part of this is that the site also links to several food-related columns I have written, and one I did not write. That one is better than any of mine. It concerns a report that a Texas man awaiting execution by lethal injection had requested a child for his last meal.

The man is said to have demanded that the child be no older than eight.

This is the story, which also indicates that Snopes has determined the initial story was a hoax. In linking to the Snopes story, I discovered this:

In fact, the state of Texas ended the provision of last meal requests to inmates back in 2011, when a condemned man ridiculously asked for “two chicken fried steaks, a triple-meat bacon cheeseburger, fried okra, a pound of barbecue, three fajitas, a meat lover’s pizza, a pint of ice cream and a slab of peanut butter fudge with crushed peanuts,” then didn’t eat any of that bounty.

To the Invitational saboteur who created that bogus link, much obliged. Do it again, and you’re dead to The Invite.

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Q: Your shimmering zipper lightning bolts in one eye! Years and years ago, I too started having that occasional thing, lasting about a half-hour, coming on as slowly as they would later depart. Deeply freaky. I was deeply freaked. So I made an appointment to see the doctor.

To save explanation, I told him that I could easily draw on paper what I was seeing, and did so. He took my paper and disappeared to another room for a few minutes. When he returned, he was carrying an open textbook and looked excited. “It’s what we call an optical migraine,” he said, in a tone of voice suggesting that he was happy that all that med school training had finally paid off. He thrust the book at me triumphantly, and indeed there was a diagram looking almost exactly like my drawing.

A: As of this writing, I have received 20 emails from people who experience the same alarming, but benign, phenomenon. It is evidently far more common than I knew. And it seems to be something people seldom talk about, because it always goes away and makes you seem like a feeb if you whine about it.

Several people asked me to detail the self-administered “test” I took to determine what kind it was.

Here:

There are basically two forms of this scary, but not serious condition. The current name for it is a “scintillating scotoma,” which sounds, you know, witty and stimulating. It isn’t, except in the sense that you are stimulated to be scared out of your wits, like a person who suddenly realizes he is going blind and faces a lifetime in the dark. Both forms are a type of migraine, yet neither usually is accompanied by a headache, nausea, or other migraine symptoms. — just temporary visual impairment. Both forms tend to present in one eye only.

Form one is what I have, which originates from some brief short in the part of the brain controlling the optic nerve.

Form two occurs in the eyeball itself, a kind of hiccup in the retinal capillaries.

Which form do you have? Here is the test: While the visual disruption is going on, and you see the shimmering zipper, close the eye in which it seems to be located. If you still see the scotoma, against the darkness of the closed eye, you have form one. If the scotoma disappears when you close that eye, you have form two. That is because the existence of the shimmer when the eye is closed means, despite how it looks to you, the migraine is actually affecting your whole field of vision, meaning it originates in the brain. If you have form two, the thing is actually concentrated in that one eyeball.

Form two is considered a little more worrisome — just a little — because it might indicate an incipient weakness in the retina.

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Q: Regarding your views on bumper-tapping while parallel parking: If you accidentally tap my car while parallel parking, I really don’t care. If you deliberately hit it, you’re paying for damages. If you deliberately and repeatedly strike my car, I’m calling the cops and you’re going straight to jail. Totally inappropriate and illegal.

A: WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

Do people repeatedly strike your car to inflict damage, like at a demolition derby? Are you involved in some sort of ongoing bitter domestic dispute? I think you have to calm down. See next post.

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Q: I live in Silver Spring. I was rear-ended about ten years ago, just barely, by a young woman who was in total hysterics over it (she was clearly at fault). I had an old sedan at the time and said, “don’t worry about it. That’s what bumpers are for.” We drove off and nothing more happened. Now this was a risk! She coulda been an actress who pinned it on me. But it worked fine and I drove that car for 25 years and never fixed the scratches. People, you gotta calm down.

A: Amen.

That’s it for today.

Nothing is quite so valuable to a writer as an apt metaphor. Finding an apt metaphor is the smart person’s version of finding the perfect emoji.

Today, in searching through world history, I found the most apt metaphor for the Trump regime and its ongoing global malfeasance. It dates back to the events of July 26, 1184, the day that things, as they say in the movies, got medieval.

On that day, a group 80 or 90 noblemen met in the German city of Erfurt to resolve a local political dispute between rival landowners. The meeting was presided over by King Henry VI of Germany, under the direction of his father, Barbarossa, the Holy Roman Emperor. Henry was then a lad of 18. He was said to be ruthless, though he looked like this, according to a tapestry:

The noblemen convened, along with clergy, in a large meeting chamber on the top floor of an old stone monastery. There were a LOT of guys in that room, and as it happens, the floor was undergirded by rotting weight-bearing joists. The floor collapsed, and through the vast, gaping hole plummeted as many as 70 people. They thudded onto the floor below, which also caved in, flinging all of these people into the commodious, juicy latrine pit in the basement.

Yes, the official name of this event is the “Erfurt Latrine Disaster.” Plumbing was primitive, back in feudal days. You pooped and peed into a chamber pot which you emptied into a hole in the floor, which emptied into a stone-lined pit that had likely not been serviced for years, on the very medieval scientific theory that if something is underground, it goes away.

The luckiest people who fell through the floorboards were the ones whose heads were instantly crushed against stone. The unluckiest were those who remained alive to drown or suffocate in the stench of that loathsome place. Theories are that the stuff in the cesspool was too high for the grievously injured to climb out of.

Some sixty people died. Henry survived. He and an archbishop had been engaged in conversation while perching on a stone window alcove. They clung to it for an hour, until the ladders arrived.

Okay, now for Donald Trump.

The latrine disaster was, literally and figuratively, a systems failure produced by a toxic political culture. In that case, the culture was the flagrantly lawless and elitist medieval European world — a world of nested hierarchies of personality cults. Literally, kings were said to have been endowed with their power by God. Lords were empowered by kings. The whole system was corrupt to its core: inherited status, fealty tests, tributes paid by the wealthy to their leaders. The system’s political infrastructure was not sound — it was rotted from within, and one day it took all those people of illegitimate, unearned, noble status and drowned them in shit.

All the grandees had assumed the institution underneath them was sturdier than it was. But it had no structural integrity.

Sound familiar? In well-functioning democratic governments of today, cults of personality theoretically do not exist. Institutions should matter more than individuals. The rule of law should transcends personalities. Not so with the Trump regime, an enormous, corrupt, toxic cult of personality. In this cult, competence is almost immaterial, secondary to pliability. Ideological consistency is almost immaterial, secondary to obedience. Donald Trump has surrounded himself with unqualified spineless kooks and crooks and weasels who do what they are told. Fealty tests abound. The corruption is so institutionalized, we are numb to it.

Plainly, no one in Donald Trump’s orbit dares to counsel this man, let alone stop him. When he went to war with Iran, he did it because he wanted to, period.

And that’s why we’re in deep shit.

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Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll:

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Happy Memorial Day, or as I call it, The Holy Day of Sanctimony. It is the one day of the year that politicians who show no respect for war veterans in their votes and policies, pretend they do. I was going to write about this at length, but then read today’s updated column by the always excellent Jeff Tiedrich, and decided, nope. I can’t do it that well and with such magnificently funny bitterness.

What I can do very well is be an annoying, petty provocateur, so I want to briefly dip back into a subject that was highly controversial among readers a few weeks ago. It involves the etiquette of parallel parking. Readers were sharply divided on this issue. How sharply divided were they? As sharply divided as, say, Marie Antoinette.

So I want to further explore this issue as a means of getting readers fighting amongst themselves thinking constructively.

To recapitulate, the issue is whether it is okay to lightly tap the bumper of another car when parallel parking into a tight space. Roughly a quarter of my readers thought this was definitely not okay because it represented an unacceptable violation of another person’s property. The others thought it was fine, even unavoidable.

I have since conducted highly sophisticated demographic analysis involving Googling, and discovered something interesting. Roughly three-quarters of the readers of The Gene Pool live in cities, or have a cultural history, and affinity for, cities … and roughly one quarter don’t. That last group are committed suburbanites, or the rurally inclined. (We are going to test this with a poll in due course.)

One of the anti-tapping group in the poll was a close friend of mine, a genteel man of philosophical bent, who resides in a far suburb, and who explained his vote thus: He would be enraged at a tap, he said, “because you’ve fucked with my property without permission. So fuck you.”

In short, there is a fight out there. I am going to take the side you might expect, but urge robust debate on this. I am happy to be informed I am a beast.

I contend the quarter of you who find a bumper tap obnoxious are people who live in homes with garages and driveways. People who seldom have to fight for limited parking in tight quarters. People who are seldom confronted with the infuriating prospect of having to pay some urban parking baron $15 an hour to store your car in his hideous asphalt eyesore.

I contend you are the sort of person who recycles assiduously and considers yourself an avid conservationist but doesn’t give a crap if legit parking spots go unused, wasting urban resources and lining the pockets of pirates who visually pollute us with their buildings. I contend you have a “get off my lawn” mentality.

And I ask you this: Do you obsess over the soles of your shoes getting scuffed? Do you consider that an affront? Do you wash your car’s tires after every trip to clean off the dust and grime?

Isn’t there a reason it is called a . . .bumper?

Amirite?

I am just asking. Now, I am going to show you the bumper of my car.

Here is another bumper shot.

These are not self-inflicted, for the most part. And I don’t care about them. They do not embarrass me.

I live with a like-minded woman. Here is a photo of her rear bumper:

And that is her front bumper, at the top of this column. For what it is worth, she doesn’t consider that a dent worth mentioning. She has no idea who gave it to her, and doesn’t care. Another urban dweller. She understands.

And yes, we are aware that most modern cars are made with super-sensitive and expensive-to-replace electronically-loaded bumpers that scratch and ding easily. That is the fault of modern car manufacturers. They have chosen to make their bumpers out of Limoges. I consider them spiritually aligned with the makers of the 1971-1975 Ford Pintos, which tended to explode when hit. Ford got taken to court. So should these guys. Lobbying campaigns work, too. Cars now have trunk releases inside trunks. Why not bumpers that can be bumped?

I say soak the car manufacturers. Make them fix the problem. Take it out on them, not your fellow victims.

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Today’s Gene Pool Gene Polls:

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And finally, another reader-related matter.

A few days ago, we linked to a video supplied by a reader, April Musser, who reported she could do something quite remarkable with her eyebrows. This was it:

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In other reader-interactive news:

April’s video prompted another video from a reader, who also has something remarkable he can do with his eyes. It is … very weird. I present to you the spooky, talented eyeballs of Mr. Dean Lamborn:

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It instantly reminded Rachel of this, from Monty Python:

Okay, that’s it!

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Sometimes, before you get a blinding, terrifying insight, you have to feel the sopping wet toilet paper. If you know what I mean.

Okay, you don’t know what I mean. Consider:

It was a full, unused roll, and it lay in the bottom of a closet in the basement. Why was it wet? Come to think of it, why was the towel beside it wet, too?

I called a plumber. The plumber came. Turns out there was a leak from a water pipe behind the closet wall. The plumber had to bust down the drywall to get to the wet pipe. But to bust down the drywall, he first had to bust down the heavy shelving that the drywall was holding up. These things he did. Then he repaired the pipe and left. That left me with drywall to be replaced and shelving to be re-installed. I am about as handy around the house as a mosquito. But the plumber gave me the name of a handyman. It was his Uncle Charlie.

Still with me? The blinding scary insight is coming.

Uncle Charlie arrived the next day. He’s 60 years old but looks 40. He’s got a work-hardened build. He runs his business out of his truck.

We bonded as soon as he looked out my back door and saw my tomato plants. “I have 22,” he said. “I have 28,” I said. He whipped out his phone to show me pictures — not of his kids, of his tomato plants. We both are committed urbanites with small cement backyards. Urban gardeners are tough. We share a fierce bunker mentality.

Uncle Charlie got to work. He was great. Took him about two and a half hours to rebuild the closet. Then he asked about any other jobs I might need done, so he replaced and repainted some rotted wood at the base of a doorway, patched an old water-leak hole in a ceiling, and gave me four light bulbs, because I needed them. Then he threw in some advice on what type of fan to get for the attic. Charlie’s bill was $450. I wrote him a check for $500. He was that good.

After he left, my left eye went nuts. I saw a weird flashing light — it looked like an evil neon zipper, and it interfered with the vision out of that eye. It seemed like a retina is detaching, which can cause blindness. Fortunately, I already knew what it was, and it wasn’t that.

It happens about once a year to me, and has been happening about once a year for a quarter century. After many visits to many doctors, it was diagnosed as an odd, painless, mostly harmless condition called an “optical migraine” that lasts about a half an hour and then goes away. It’s caused by a hiccup in a retinal capillary.

Anyway, this gave me an idea. I am fascinated with, and terrified of, Artificial Intelligence. I know it is supposedly adept at medical diagnosis. So I decided to test it. I told it about my electrical zipper, and asked what it meant. I did not tell it that I already knew.

In two and a half seconds it diagnosed the thing perfectly. But it also told me something no doctor had: There are two versions of this condition, one of which is a bit more dangerous than the other. It suggested a simple test to identify which version I have. As it turned out, I had already instinctively done this test on myself, but without understanding the meaning of the results. AI informed me I have the less dangerous kind.

(The blinding insight, as it were, is just a few short paragraphs down.)

I was grateful to AI, but kind of freaked out. I just like it better when humans solve human problems, you know? And then I thought of something to make me feel more secure.

This was my next question to ChatGPT. I identified myself as an amateur expert in mechanical clocks, which I am:

“Make up a joke about Galileo discovering pendular motion. It would be best if it is slightly dirty. Risque, not filthy.”

As always — always, however complex the challenge — ChatGPT answered in two and a half seconds.

In 1583, Galileo Galilei famously noticed the regular swing of a chandelier inside the Cathedral of Pisa.

That evening, he rushed home to his mistress, Marina Gamba, bursting with scientific excitement. He grabbed her hands and exclaimed, "Marina! I have made a monumental discovery today in the house of God! I watched a heavy mass swinging back and forth, and I realized that no matter how wide the arc, the time it takes to complete one full stroke remains absolutely constant!"

Marina looked him up and down, sighed deeply, and said:

"Well, Galileo, that certainly explains why you always finish in exactly two minutes... but I really wish you wouldn't use physics to justify a lack of acceleration."

This was no worse — and maybe better — than I could have done, and it would have taken me a lot longer than two seconds. Maybe I never would have gotten there at all. And that is when I got blinded.

I think the future of humankind might belong not to people like me, but to people like Uncle Charlie. There is no shame in this, no great unfairness. He does excellent, precise work for which he charges fairly. And it is work that cannot possibly be replicated by a machine, at least not any time soon. A machine might eventually be able to out-diagnose the greatest doctor, or even absorb enough of the complexity of the human condition to be able to be better than Shakespeare, or, say, to somehow commingle The Bard with Dylan and Sappho to produce the deepest, most versatile literary works ever “written.” Or be funnier than Richard Pryor or, um, me. With that last tick, it might already be there.

But in this new world inhabited by humans but run by machines, Uncle Charlie will be safe, and more power to him. To all of them. To child-care workers. To police officers.

It will be a fundamental restructuring of human worth. There will be vast amounts of elitist whining, and the pretentious arts will suffer enormously. But exactly how much worse will things be than they are now, really?

—

Hey, my pal and former journo colleague Richard Leiby was offered $240k a year to work for AI, and turned it down. He writes about it here, in his Substack. I, Robot? No Thanks. It is fascinating.

Today’s Gene Pool Gene Pool:

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And finally, since this is The Weekend Gene Pool, please send in your thoughts / experiences about the subject of this column, and of the poll above. Send, as always, to the Mailbag.

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Also, please save me and other human writers from starving. You will like your new overlords even less.

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“The Post needs to be a profitable enterprise that stands on its own two feet, because that’s a measure of its relevance. If people won't pay for our product, it's not a good enough product. It would be, like, doing poetry without rhyming. It's too easy.”

— Jeffrey Bezos, explaining why he didn’t personally subsidize his newspaper to keep it strong.

—

It turns out the world’s fourth richest man is a dope!

Also, a weasel, a tightwad and a buck-passer. Who knew?

Have you seen Jeff Bezos’s full interview this week with CNBC, conducted on two folding chairs in the vast Blue Origin rocket factory? I’ll summarize and annotate below, specifically the parts about The Post. We’ll start with the lowest hanging fruit: The poetry thing.

No, Jeff, good free-verse isn’t “too easy.” It is incredibly hard because it involves distilling a complex truth into its most elemental form, without the comforting scaffolding of rhyme and meter. It takes artistry. Dopes tend not to understand this. Here’s an actual rhyming poem about just that sort of dope:

To many people artists seem
undisciplined and lawless.
Such laziness, with such great gifts,
seems little short of crime.
One mystery is how they make
the things they make so flawless;
another, what they're doing with
their energy and time.

— Piet Hein

See, Jeff?

No, I didn’t think so. But let’s move on.

—

When you bought The Post in 2013, you famously told the newsroom staff that they were not the problem. The problem, you said, was on the business side. The writing and editing staff, you said, was doing brilliant work that didn’t need fixing.

That statement is apparently no longer operational. I say that because after a few healthy and productive years, you started to see some financial vulnerabilities, squishy spots in the business model. And so, despite your previous assurances to staff, you proceeded to seize the newsroom and fix it to death.

After months of misery and more threatened misery, last February you fired the coup de grace by firing more than a third of the staff, eliminating entire departments, including virtually all cultural coverage and sports coverage and visual arts, all of which were sweet spots for the paper’s engagement with readers.

Why did you do this? Your interview suggests a reason: Now, you’re blaming the staff. That’s what you meant by this, in the interview:

‘The Post is going to continue to be an important institution. And in fact, it’s going to be a more important institution because of this financial discipline. It needs to be relevant to readers. It needs to stand on its own two feet. I don’t want it to be a charity. It doesn’t need to be and it shouldn’t be.”

Let’s parse this, Jeff. Let’s try to prudently assess the real blame. Or in your words, apply some financial metrics. You are big on metrics, letting machines decide your trajectories. Let’s see where that leaves us, trajectory-wise, okay?

When you charted a new course for the paper, you reacted not like a man who had been given a sacred public trust — you didn’t have, and still do not have, any idea what journalism is about— but like a bean counter, you approached it as though it were Five Guys, or Jiffy Lube.

So what went wrong?

“What went wrong,” you told CNN, “is that we did not adapt.” You were talking about writing. You were passing the buck, scapegoating. Because as you now know, the problem was you. The problem was business foresight, and you didn’t have it.

It turns out you were right the first time. The Post’s written word (you and your minions soullessly call it “content”) was not broken. What was broken was, indeed, the business plan, because the incompetent management you hired totally failed to understand the dynamics in its industry. The New York Times figured it out, and has been wolfing your lunch ever since, stealing your staff, winning over your disappointed subscribers in gargantuan numbers.

The Times invested heavily in things their metrics told them — only they found the right metrics, and your managers did not. The Times, not The Post, diversified intelligently while preserving the core newsroom.

The Times realized that people need newspapers to help them be more informed citizens. They love newspapers because it feels good and smart to read them. But they buy newspapers for happy things they can use. So The Times spent $30 million on Wirecutter, which reviews retail products. They bought Wordle for about $2 million. They didn’t fire their sports staff, they beefed it up, purchasing The Athletic — the huge, vibrant sports operation — for just over $500 million.

You also spent just over $500 million for something, Jeff. A yacht and its suckerfish escort ship to house the support staff of 50.

Under you, The Post invested its money phenomenally unwisely, the most outrageous expenditure of all being your hiring of Will Lewis. Lewis was the ethically compromised and catastrophically ineffective guy you anointed publisher at a $3 million salary, and later fired overnight because he physically hid from his staff rather than personally tell more than a third of them that were out of a job. (And then attended a big, fancy Super Bowl party to hobnob with celebs.)

You said that firing hundreds of people was necessary to make the product leaner, tougher — producing more with vastly fewer resources. You know, working harder. In the end, you ran the paper like you run Amazon. Basically, you expected your employees to pee in bottles. You expected your employees to keep on working when their colleagues died.

Leaner and tougher. Your cluelessness about this is mind-boggling.

You say, in the interview, that you want to keep emphasizing and supporting investigative journalism. Do you really? This is from a recent story in the Columbia Journalism Review:

“Newsroom leaders have sought to reverse a trend that came into practice in the days of Martin Baron, the former executive editor: allowing reporters to chase multiple angles on the big stories of the day. This let-chaos-reign approach led to high output, albeit at the expense of editorial focus. Now the Post will look to more tightly control coverage plans for marquee stories, disincentivizing reporters from running down threads deemed less essential.”

Good God.

“Running down threads” is the essence of investigative journalism.

What exactly do you think the Post’s expose of Watergate was? It was two schmoes from the metro desk spending oodles of time chasing down ghosts, running down loose ends, doing seemingly unproductive weeks of work and eventually helping topple a corrupt presidency. You probably don’t know anything about this, so watch this short clip.

Your arrogance has been breathtaking. You created disaster with your edict that the newspaper’s Opinions section be limited to your icy libertarian opinions alone. You achieved that, and the results have been repugnant to a core readership that had been accustomed to far more versatility of thought.

Anyway, Jeff, I want to end with a free-verse poem, one of my favorites. It was written by Ezra Pound, a great poet who happened also to be a Nazi propagandist. He was complicated, okay? So were his unrhymed poems. Try this one:

In A Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

Petals on a wet, black bough.

—

That’s it, Jeff. The whole poem.

Do you know what it means? Didn’t think so. I will explain it — at least, what it means to me.

The poet is in a metro station. It is raining. A train has just unloaded. Faces stream past him — only instantly visible and then departing — people, beset by modernity, hurrying to wherever they are going. It is a sea of transience, of dehumanizing anonymity.

But the poet realizes something heartening; in of the darkness of that station, emptying out of the bowels of the earth, are individuals, all with their own personalities, their own stories. He sees a loneliness but also a loveliness in this, and finds an elegant comparison. Perhaps he notices a tree in the rain, or perhaps that image is all in his mind, but in that moment it’s just as real to him: Fresh, glistening pastel petals on a wet, cold black branch.

What he’s treasuring is both the beauty of life, and its fragility.

Do you feel it now, Jeff?

I didn’t think so.

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Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll:

In the past, I have questioned whether unrhymed poetry can actually be considered poetry, as opposed to just evocative prose. Also, that the danger in unrhymed poetry is that unless it is very, very good, it is pretentious and threatens to become the provenance of bad would-be poets.

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That’s it for today, except for my plea. The Gene Pool survives due to your generosity. I am grateful for your help.

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