Damn! Sugar's paper has brought back its paywall. It's too bad, because she wrote about a concert, and I am pretty sure that music is still the stuff of her soul - her true subject ... ... Looking at Pop's bumper in the bright morning light, I cannot help laughing. It may be a significant improvement, but you cannot say that it looks as good as new. But I guess they are honest workers pursuing faithfully the American dollar ... ... Sugar tweets about a hockey uniform: "Like, I'm not one to drool over branding, but those jerseys are more beautiful than a perfect orchid blooming in a pristine forest grove." ... ... Krugman hits one of my favorite notes: "The Trumpification of the G.O.P. didn’t come out of nowhere. On the contrary, it was the natural outcome of a cynical strategy: long ago, conservatives decided to harness racial resentment to sell right-wing economic policies to working-class whites, especially in the South. This strategy brought many electoral victories, but always at the risk that the racial resentment would run out of control, leaving the economic conservatives — whose ideas never had much popular support — stranded. And that is what has just happened." [NYT] I'm just afraid that, although some Republicans have been eschewing Trump,there are not really a whole lot of Republicans that are especially troubled by raising racism from a background note to the forefront and establishing it as a basis of actual discriminatory policy ... ... In writing about a Japanese man taking up diving in order to search for his wife's body in the sea, five years after the tsunami that struck Japan, Jennifer Percy says, "The world never looks as big as when someone is lost." [NYT] ... ... When asked who he might name to his cabinet if elected, Trump only offered his daughter Ivanka. This guy is a piece of cake.