Sunrise — 7:00, 7:20, 7:33.

Cloudless, but somber.

The man-made clouds were picking up some sprightly pinkness...

"Before Bird by Bird, most of the writing advice I read was about setting standards for smooth, stylish, publishable prose."

"I gravitated to my grandma’s shelf of old-school how-to-write books: Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, Robert Graves and Alan Hodge’s The Reader Over Your Shoulder, William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. These books taught me to be persnickety about punctuation, to cultivate a Jiminy Cricket–style internal critic, and/or to strive to write like a Yale man. I also read classic manifestos like George Orwell’s 'Politics and the English Language,' with its rousing premise that blurry prose is a political sin, and Mark Twain’s 'Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,' which advised me to 'avoid slovenliness of form' and 'eschew surplusage.'"

Writes Briallen Hopper, in "DOES IT HOLD UP?/Anne Lamott’s Battle Against Writer’s Block/Bird by Bird encouraged would-be writers to blast past their hang-ups and embrace 'shitty first drafts.' But there’s more to the creative process" (TNR).

ADDED: Here's the full text of "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses." Sample: "In his little box of stage-properties he kept six or eight cunning devices, tricks, artifices for his savages and woodsmen to deceive and circumvent each other with, and he was never so happy as when he was working these innocent things and seeing them go. A favorite one was to make a moccasined person tread in the tracks of a moccasined enemy, and thus hide his own trail. Cooper wore out barrels and barrels of moccasins in working that trick."

"So there I was, moving from apathy to disbelief, holding the same plant my great-grandfather Sigmund [Freud] had nurtured nearly 100 years ago."

"A cutting grows up to be a perfect clone of the original – no matter how many times you pass on cuttings of the cuttings of the cuttings, they’re all genetically identical to the original shrub. Sigmund died before I ever met him, but I now owned a tiny part of his story. A biological heirloom that had lived alongside him and brought oxygen into his pioneering study – growing alongside his evolving ideas, laying down roots as he laid down theories...."

From "The strange tale of Sigmund Freud’s begonia/How the gift of a plant helped Emma Freud finally get to know her great-grandfather" (The Observer).

"I have given already given nine different arguments for my immortality. I’m fallible..."

"... maybe there’s a clunker or two in there. But surely at least one is a good argument! Therefore I am immortal."

From "Why I am immortal," by Hilarius Bookbinder, at Substack.

"The last thing we need to do, again, is to make the same mistake when it comes to 'Defund the Police' rhetoric."

"That ended up not actually helping communicate what people wanted. People want a slimmed-down ICE that is truly focused on security."

Said Senator Ruben Gallego, Democrat of Arizona, quoted in "Abolish ICE? It’s a Slogan Some Democratic Critics of ICE Would Abolish/As Democrats grow more alarmed about the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration raids in American cities, some worry that calls to eliminate the agency will distract from efforts to rein it in" (NYT).

Third Way, a centrist Washington-based think tank, released a memo [saying]... “Every call to abolish ICE risks squandering one of the clearest opportunities in years to secure meaningful reform of immigration enforcement — while handing Republicans exactly the fight they want”.... 

“The radical ‘Abolish ICE’ crusade from far-left Democrats seemed like a relic of the past, but it’s the brand-new litmus test for Democrats who are barely hanging on and begging on their knees to get approval from their socialist base,” [said a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee].

"If the corrupt politicians of Minnesota don’t obey the law and stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of I.C.E., who are only trying to do their job..."

"I will institute the INSURRECTION ACT, which many Presidents have done before me, and quickly put an end to the travesty that is taking place in that once great State. Thank you for you attention to this matter!"

Writes "President DJT" at Truth Social.

Trump questions the Shah's support-garnering capacity.

The news as displayed at Memeorandum:

From the Reuters article, a quote from Trump: "He seems very nice, but I don't know how he'd play within his own country. And we really aren't up to that point yet. I don't know whether or not his country would accept his leadership, and certainly if they would, that would be fine with me."

I know he's not the Shah. Not yet. Just testing the concept on you after Meade called him the Shah. I said he's not the Shah, and Meade said it was like addressing a nun as "Sister" when you're not Catholic. I said: "You mean like using someone's preferred pronouns?" It doesn't matter what you think the person really is, you're showing respect. 

Is it wrong to call Reza Pahlavi the "Shah"? Does it help him garner support or not? He's not in power, not yet anyway, but is there good reason to refer to him as the Shah?

"Republican leaders were able to garner enough support for their procedural maneuver to kill the resolution after Senators Josh Hawley of Missouri and Todd Young of Indiana flipped their position..."

"... and joined the effort to stop it from coming up for a vote. The shift brought about a 50-50 tie, which was broken late Wednesday in favor of Republican leadership by Vice President JD Vance, in his role as president of the Senate."

From "Republicans Block Effort to Check Trump’s Power in Venezuela/G.O.P. leaders succeeded in pressuring fellow senators who initially supported the measure that would have limited President Trump’s military authority in Venezuela" (NYT).

That was close. Sufficient garnering occurred.

"[Rand] Paul, the sole Republican to cosponsor the resolution, said that he too had spoken with Mr. Trump but was unmoved. He criticized party leaders for 'playing games' and accused the administration of misleading lawmakers. 'Oh, it’s a drug bust. Oh, we’re going for drugs. Oh, it’s not really drugs, now it’s oil,' he said. 'So see, the bait and switch has already happened.'"

"Dolphins darted and leaped around the capsule as it bobbed in the Pacific Ocean, awaiting retrieval and transfer to a recovery ship."

I'm reading "Watch: Nasa astronauts return to Earth after evacuation from space/Crew 11 splashed down off California on Thursday morning after travelling around the Earth 2,672 times during their time onboard the International Space Station" (London Times).

Four crew members from the International Space Station have returned safely to Earth, completing the first medical evacuation in the 65-year history of human spaceflight....

The SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule... streaked across the night sky over California in a blazing ball of plasma as it re-entered Earth’s atmosphere, reaching exterior temperatures up to 1,900C (3,500F) before parachutes deployed to slow its descent.

Sunrise — or 1 hour after sunrise — 8:25.

That's Meade's photo. I did not go out. The wind was 30 mph. Meade said that 3 times he nearly got blown off his feet. He said it was as if some invisible person had shoved him.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

And here's some additional Meadeification:

"Students from both Madison East and West high schools have walked out to protest against ICE at the state Capitol...."

Students from both Madison East and West high schools have walked out to protest against ICE at the state Capitol.

I’d estimate there’s 200-300 students between the first floor rotunda and second floor bridges above pic.twitter.com/xnMjqEAsmo

— A.J. Bayatpour (@AJBayatpour) January 14, 2026

"But to me, a question lingers: Why?"

Writes Justice Gorsuch, concurring, alone, in William Trevor Case v. Montana, issued this morning, which held that "police officers generally do not violate a person’s Fourth Amendment rights when they enter his house without a warrant, but with an 'objectively reasonable basis' for believing someone inside is in physical danger and in need of immediate aid."

Does the Fourth Amendment tolerate this limited emergency aid exception to the warrant requirement just because five or more Justices of this Court happen to believe that such entries are “reasonable”? Or is this exception more directly “tied to the law”? Carpenter v. United States, 585 U. S. 296, 397 (2018) (GORSUCH, J., dissenting). The answer, I believe, is the latter. 

"I cannot join the Court’s creation of a bespoke standing rule for candidates. Elections are important, but so are many things in life."

Writes Amy Coney Barrett, joined by Elena Kagan, in Bost v. Illinois State Board of Elections, a case issued this morning.

Elections are important, but so are many things in life. We have always held candidates to the same standards as any other litigant.

"But local civil rights leaders decided not to make Ms. Colvin their symbol of discrimination."

"She was, she later said, too dark-skinned and too poor to win the crucial support of Montgomery’s Black middle class. (She was not, as some later claimed, pregnant at the time, though she did become pregnant later that year.) Instead, the leaders waited...."

From "Claudette Colvin, Who Refused to Give Her Bus Seat to a White Woman, Dies at 86/Her defiance of Jim Crow laws in 1955 made her a star witness in a landmark segregation suit, but her act was overshadowed months later when Rosa Parks made history with a similar stand" (NYT).

"For Nguyen, the point — and pleasure — of games is play, not efficiency; a person who simply wants to catch more fish would trade Nguyen’s feathery hand-tied flies..."

"... for a big net or a blast of dynamite.... Nguyen, whose day job is as a philosophy professor at the University of Utah, contrasts the delightful thrill of playing games like basketball, The Legend of Zelda and Dungeons & Dragons with the demoralizing pursuit of university rankings, page views and social media likes: 'Why is it that mechanical scoring systems are, in games, the site of so much joy and fluidity and play? And why, in the realm of public measures and institutional metrics, do they drain the life out of everything?'... Nguyen, 48... brought out various toys...yo-yos, spin tops, a Japanese ball-and-cup thingumajig known as a kendama.... 'All of my hobbies involve basically micro-dosing epiphanies,' Nguyen said at one point. 'Every time you’re yo-yoing, you’re like, If I change my angle this much, or if I pull a little bit here, or if I drop it, oh, then it works!' The fact that the stakes are so low is not a deficit of the yo-yo (or the kendama, or D&D, or fly-fishing); low stakes are part of the point, allowing us to move from one game to another. Nguyen argues that problems emerge when the stakes become all-consuming, taking over our sense of self and dictating what we should value...."

I'm reading "Why Keeping Score Isn’t Fun Anymore/In a new book, C. Thi Nguyen looks to his personal passions — from video games to yo-yoing — to illuminate the downside of our increasingly gamified world" by Jennifer Szalai (NYT)(gift link).

I see the connection to blogging. I'm going to read Nguyen's book, "The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game" (commission earned).

I thought the article was going to have something in it about how sports betting ruins the fun of spectator sports, but no. Is that in the book? I can tell you that the word "football" does not appear in the book and "baseball" only appears in the context of a baseball cap worn by Tsukasa Takatsu, "a minor saint, beloved of a very tiny sect of passionate yo-yo players."

ADDED: Nguyen sees low stakes as a positive force, but the most famous thing anyone ever said about low stakes is Sayre's law: Responding to "In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake," Sayre quipped: "That is why academic politics are so bitter." Usually restated as: "Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small." 

What is excluded by that "almost"?

"Cinemark is going all out for National Popcorn Day in 2026 [January 18 and 19], offering moviegoers in Austin and around the country the chance to BYOBucket: bring almost any kind of container to the theater and fill it up for just $5 (plus tax)...."(culturemap).

MEANWHILE: Another Austin movie theater distinguishes itself in a wholly different way:

Pick your style of theater here in the Magnited States of America.