(no subject)

To pass the time between meetings, Mr. Trump gives quick tours to visitors, highlighting little tweaks he has made after initially expecting he would have to pay for them himself.

Flanking his desk are portraits of Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. He will linger on the opulence of the newly hung golden drapes, which he told a recent visitor were once used by Franklin D. Roosevelt but in fact were patterned for Bill Clinton. For a man who sometimes has trouble concentrating on policy memos, Mr. Trump was delighted to page through a book that offered him 17 window covering options.

LOL. If you only can read 10 articles at the NY Times this month, this should be one of them. Simultaneously hilarious and horrifying, even if only a tiny portion of it is true.

Also: Equating bad polls with fake news, Trump further inflates his surrealistic bubble

I have really a large vocabulary.

This isn't boasting. It's just the truth. Inchoate aside, it really is unusual for me to come across a word I really don't know at all.

So I subscribed to the Word a Day email, which is 50% bizarre words you'd never use ever... and 50% words I really thought everybody knew, and maybe they do.

Here is today's email:

bovarism

PRONUNCIATION:
(BO-vuh-riz-em)

MEANING:
noun: A romanticized, unrealistic view of oneself.

ETYMOLOGY:
From Emma Bovary, the title character in Gustave Flaubert’s 1857 novel Madame Bovary. Earliest documented use: 1902.

And just to drive the point home, the concluding thought of the day runs thus:

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else. -Theodore Roosevelt, 26th US President (1858-1919)

Oh, man. I'm going to print out posters of that, and pin it up all around the outside of the Natural History Museum this weekend. (Because I'm pretty sure the cops won't let me get close enough to Trump Tower to post it there.)