"Ben sold out to get richer... that's it, end of!"/"These two bozos have made their fortune from Cookie Dough Icecream. And they think they have the ethical high ground?"

"He sold the company to get very very rich but he still wants control...."/"Mr Cohen you sold out, move on, use the money to campaign for your beliefs in other ways"/"They are bores. If they wanted to keep their progressive policies above the need for maximum profitability they should have retained ownership and never sold their business...."

The commenters are pretty much unanimous on the London Times article titled "Ben & Jerry’s founder attacks Peltz fund influence over Magnum/Ben Cohen steps up his feud with the ice-cream brand’s owner as a partner from the Trian hedge fund joins the Magnum board."

The legal dispute is the opposite of ice cream: "Magnum... has been accused of ousting directors on Ben & Jerry’s independent board, which was established to control its social mission when Cohen and Greenfield sold the business to Unilever for $326 million in 2000.... Cohen.... described the recent Ben & Jerry’s board changes as 'a blatant violation of the legally binding agreement put in place over 25 years ago to ensure the brand’s values would always be protected.'"

"It’s a little under four minutes long, all told, but you’ll watch it at least four times over, then wonder if it’s a joke, if Melania is a wind-up merchant playing a complex, hilarious long game..."

"... with an unknowable outcome, if AI has its grubby little robot mitts on it... or if it’s symptomatic of the damage social media has wrought more generally on words, on rhetoric, if a billion drivel-addled Instagram posts have rendered language so empty, so narcissistic, directionless, and light on pith, what more can you expect? Then you think: yeah, but she really did help get 19 kids back home to parents...."

Writes Polly Vernon, in "Is Melania Trump really a 'visionary'? She certainly thinks so!/Everything we learnt about the first lady from her recent White House speech" (London Times).

Vernon calls the speech "just mental." It's: "An elevated puking up of fundamentally unconnected words that do achieve a startling clarity a few times, just not in a good way — ie, when she declared herself 'a visionary,' which I’m not sure anyone should ever do (even if they are one)."

“Often alone, at the top, I follow my passion, listen to my instincts and always maintain a laser focus,” Melania continues.... “In solitude, my creative mind dances, feeding my imagination with originality. Attention to detail, demanding schedules and multi-tasking are everyday realities.”...

Listen for yourself:

The blizzard so far.

Meade is a snow sweeper:

Gwyneth Paltrow's dress was my favorite Oscars look when I saw it from the front in the NYT.

So well-fitted, elegant, and simple. But now, I'm seeing the side and the effect is entirely different. It's trending on X, and people aren't sure that it's not a complete accident or an accidentally-on-purpose "accident":

Gwyneth Paltrow is facing backlash after wearing this dress at the Oscars pic.twitter.com/8y7e7ynG0j

— USA NEWS 🇺🇸 (@usanewshq) March 16, 2026

My prompt to Grok: Do non-stupid people seriously think this might have been an accident? And: I think if an opening that extensive happened by accident, the dress would have fallen off (unless she'd quickly grabbed the whole thing, which she didn't).

I'm seeing some dummies using the cliché "wardrobe malfunction." Let's remember that the first use of that expression was in an accidentally-on-purpose nonaccident. 

MEANWHILE: Gwyneth is auctioning off a lot of her old clothes — clothes that are so normal and un-expensive you might want to just wear them.

"Your need for approval is like a sickness."

A gem of meaning at 3:14 in this video of the opening of the Oscars show last night.

Not having seen the movies, I experienced this noisy cluttered barrage of vignettes as ugly chaos. It reminded me — with jarring pokes and jabs — why I don't want to see new movies anymore. Why was Conan in overdone makeup that made him look like a very ugly woman? Why did animated Conan develop stars in his eyes for 3 adolescent girls? Why were children screaming and chasing him? He stops for a moment to speak Norwegian and examine whether his need for approval is like a sickness and then the children screaming chase him out of the psychoanalytic dark Norwegian room. It's back to the noisy cluttered barrage that is Hollywood as Conan runs into the theater. I don't know what movie those children were supposed to represent, so I was just thinking generically of Hollywood's exploitation of children. How did the children become the monsters? Or were they running from monsters and Conan running with them, not away from them? At least tell a clear story. But no, I think this years stories were about chaos and raw fear and uncomprehended monsters. 

"What about sex dolls?"

Chris Williamson asks Dr. Debra Soh (who's got the perfect demeanor and speech style for talking about sex research):

MAHAspital.

"I slept with the guy who created it!"

Jane Fonda on her “Block the Merger” pin, saying that she “slept with the guy” who created CNN and doesn’t want to see the network owned by Paramount.

Vanity Fair #Oscar Party pic.twitter.com/bNj93GuO8A

— Variety (@Variety) March 16, 2026

This is a rare opportunity to use my old tag "charming bad logic."

And I enjoyed the garbled articulation: "The murders are going to be bad for workers."

"But history shows that economists and researchers have been terrible at predicting the effects of new technologies on work and workers..."

"... so take forecasts like this one seriously but not literally. Even researchers cranking out studies of AI in workplaces caution that they’re making useful but fallible best guesses. 'All the important questions about AI’s effects on the labor market are still unanswered,' Jed Kolko, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, recently concluded. Economists at Anthropic, the AI start-up behind the Claude chatbot, stressed the need for 'humility' in their analysis of AI seeping into occupations. (Humility is uncommon in Silicon Valley.)

From "Jobs least and most vulnerable to AI" (WaPo)("See which jobs are most threatened by AI and who may be able to adapt"). 

I would have expended one of my 10 monthly gift links on this — so you could fiddle with the graphic depictions — but the graphics are so fussy and overwhelming that I couldn't find the gift-link button. Is that me being vulnerable, unadaptable, and replaceable or is that The Washington Post showing its decline?

Anyway, I like the idea that humility is coming into vogue in A.I. world. Or is that part of its plan to trick us into letting it take over everything?

At the Ice Shove Café...

... you can talk all night.

That's Meade's photo, taken at sunrise. I wasn't there today. I slept until almost 7. Very strange for me! And now there's a blizzard warning:

So I'm not picturing us getting out there tomorrow morning. We shall see. My side of the bet is there will be no more than 10" of snow. It's the wind that makes it a blizzard, and 40 to 45 mph is a lot of wind. Still, that scary-sounding warning has me winning the bet. It says 5 to 10 inches of snow. A few days ago, they were saying 3 feet of snow.

Are you watching the Oscars?

I'm not. I really couldn't care less. I haven't gone out to see a movie once this past year, and I don't think I've watched a single new movie on TV, even though we pay for multiple streaming services. What's the Best Picture nominee with Leonardo DiCaprio — something like "One Battle After Another" — that been on Netflix — or is it HBO — for months, and I've never even clicked the button to start it?

I did watch Ben Shapiro run through all the Best Picture nominees, and he didn't like any of them and made me feel that I'd like them even less than he did:

I watched a movie from 1928 the other day — "The Circus." And I've been watching the 2006 movie "Marie Antoinette":

"I just found out that our song 'Whip It' is trending on TikTok."

"That's pretty amazing.... It's incredible that a whole new generation is now interested in this song."

"Corinthian is the highest order, and that’s what our other two branches of government have."

"Why the White House didn’t originally use them, at least on the north front, which is considered the front door, is beyond me."

Said Rodney Mims Cook Jr., "the Trump appointee who chairs the Commission of Fine Arts, a federal panel charged with advising the president on design matters, said in an interview last week," quoted in "Appointee wants to replace White House columns with the ones Trump prefers/The head of a federal arts commission is proposing the more ornate Corinthian style for the nearly 200-year-old columns at the building’s front entrance" (WaPo)(gift link, so you can see the drawings showing the number and location of the longstanding Ionic columns and the Corinthian columns to be built in the new East Wing).

We're told that Trump prefers Corinthian columns but also that, according to a White House spokesperson, "there are no plans to change the existing Ionic columns outside the White House." It's just Cook spreading the alarm about redoing the scroll-y tops into those leafy tops.

Do you have any preference with regard to the tops of Greek columns? Do you care what it meant to the Greeks or even understand the notion of "the highest order"?

"Part of the silver lining is that we have a much better view now."

Life on a landslide:

"You're not bored, are you?"

I looked up that clip from my second-favorite TV series — "Joe Pera Talks With You" — after running across this wonderfully evocative examination of the question whatever happened to the wet set, a TikTok video that got the perfect comment: "I still have a weekly roller set lady 😁 she gets the whole thing teased. It’s the highlight of my week":

"One man who has already walked that perimeter in its entirety is the photographer Quintin Lake, who did so over 454 days in spells between 2015 and 2020..."

"... walking 12 to 24 miles each day. But in order to achieve his mission he had to frequently cut inland to walk along roads or trespass over private land. 'There was a lot of climbing over fences and having a series of unpleasant encounters with people saying: "What are you doing on my land?,"' said Lake, 50.... 'From a hiker’s point of view, when you have a well-maintained path and good waymarking it just makes it much more relaxing. I was super-impressed with the Welsh coast path. And in Scotland it is magnificent — as long as you respect the use of the land there you are treated as an adult with common sense.... [T]here’s something about long-distance walking in Britain that’s so peaceful and so varied. Every day is very, very different. That’s especially the thrill of coastal walking. You can walk through a city and then just a few hours later you’re on a wild cliff. It changes all the time.'"

From "King Charles coastal path to open all 2,700 miles for walking in England/Providing right of access to the entire coast for the first time, it will be the longest of its kind in the world" (London Times).