Welcome to The Cruelest Day: Tuesday, April 21, 2026, and National Chickpea Day, honoring one of the main ingredients of hummus. a delicious dish, and good for you, too. When I was in Israel I spent a lot of time trying to find the best place for hummus, which to me was Hummus Ben Sira in Jerusalem. I don’t have my photos of the place here, but here’s what hummus looks like: superb with lots of hot pita bread and raw onions and pickles:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 21 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*The WSJ says that Trump now has five options vis-à-vis Iran:
As the U.S. prepares for another round of peace talks with Iran in Pakistan this week, President Trump faces five broad options.
1. Stick to his guns: Trump has presented Iran with demands to freeze enrichment of uranium for at least 20 years and remove highly enriched uranium from its territory, as well as fully end its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. These are red lines for the president, senior administration officials said.
Weeks of U.S. and Israeli strikes devastated Iran’s military and the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports is ratcheting up pressure on an already weakened Iranian economy, administration officials said. But so far, the Iranian government has refused to ease its blockade of the strait and signaled it will not abandon its nuclear enrichment program.
If Trump refuses to budge on these demands, there’s a chance that Iran relents in negotiations—but also a risk Iran refuses and war breaks out again.
2. Buy some time: Both sides could walk away from the talks in Islamabad without a final deal, but at least a “memorandum of understanding” that outlines the broad parameters of what an understanding could entail in the future and an agreement to extend the 10-day cease-fire in the war again. This would buy time for more diplomacy.
3. Compromise: There are ample ways to hash out a compromise, officials and analysts said. One idea negotiators are floating: Iran agrees to a 20-year freeze on enriching uranium to higher levels, but after the first 10 years can conduct nuclear-related research or produce a modest amount of low-enriched uranium for at least another 10 years.
Other variations of compromise could include Iran agreeing to give up its stockpile of 60 percent or 20 percent enriched uranium, but keeping its stockpile of lower-enriched uranium.
It’s unclear if Trump would accept compromise proposals here. There’s no discounting the likelihood Iran secretly enriches to weapons-grade levels again in the future.
4. Restart war: Trump has warned that he isn’t inclined to extend the cease-fire again if talks in Pakistan fail. Renewing the war would open Iran to another round of devastating strikes, but it carries risks for the U.S., too.
The war is controversial at home, opening rifts within the Republican Party and driving up energy prices and inflation across the U.S. Defense officials have also raised fears of the U.S. running low on critical munitions in the Iran war that would be needed for the U.S. military in other parts of the world.
5. Walk away: Trump’s fifth option to just walk away from the whole endeavor is the most unlikely, U.S. officials and people close to the White House said, but it’s a fear that senior Arab and European officials have raised in private discussions among one another after the first round of talks failed.
Trump could claim victory and walk away from the war, leaving a status quo that amounts to a nightmare scenario for many close U.S. partners: A wounded but intact Iranian regime, with an ability to keep imposing tolls on the Strait of Hormuz and the know-how to rebuild a nuclear program.
What? No stipulations about either regime change or Iran stopping the export of terrorism? As for the above, I’m no pundit but I’m betting on #4. The unpopularity of the war largely reflects, in my view, the unpopularity of Trump combined with public ignorance of what’s happening in Iran.
*Carl Zimmer at the NYT reports on a new Current ‘Biology paper with a stunning result. A male kea (Nestor notabilis), the world’s only alpine parrot (From New Zealand) lost his upper beak, probably in a rat trap. That injury would normally prove deadly, but Bruce the Kea has learned to compensate for the loss in two ways. It was known previusly that Bruce, who lives in a wildlife reserve, was already famous for using a tool to groom himself: he put a pebble between his tongue and lower beak and groomed his feathers that way. Now he has a new behavior, one he’s used to become the dominant bird in the group:
Last year, Bruce delivered a second surprise.
Male keas fight for dominance. Those who lose fall to the bottom of the circus hierarchy, and they experience stress as a result. The alpha male ends up with the lowest stress levels.
To measure the stress among the nine male keas at the reserve, Dr. Taylor and his colleagues analyzed certain hormones in their blood. Much to their surprise, the male kea with the lowest levels was Bruce.
“We never expected him to be right at the top of the males,” said Alexander Grabham, a zoologist at the University of Canterbury and an author of the study.
The surprise prompted Dr. Grabham and his colleagues to look more closely. Reviewing videos, they discovered that Bruce had risen to the top with a new style of kea combat.
Male keas typically bite one another around the neck. Bruce can’t bite; instead, he has learned to joust. He rushes his opponents and slams his lower beak into their bodies.
Jousting proved a clever strategy. Bruce consistently won his fights, and the other males deferred to him. One perk of becoming the alpha male: Bruce got to visit the bird feeders first.
“Nobody ever tried to jump him or displace him,” Dr. Grabham said.
After enjoying a meal, Bruce permits lower-ranked males to preen his feathers and clean his bottom beak. “And when Bruce is done, he’ll give a kick or a little joust to say, ‘Right, that’s it, I’m done,’” said Dr. Grabham. “That to me is a sign of dominance.”
Here’s a video of Bruce jousting:
. . . and Bruce using a pebble to clean himself:
*The NYT Style Magzine‘s pretentiously named “How to be cultured” segment gives the opinions of actors Marcia ‘Gay Harden, Stephen Root, and Wendell Pierce about “11 unforgettabls film performances.” (Article archived here.) How many have you seen?
- The supporting cast of “The Wizard of Oz.” (1939)
- Jimmy Stewart in “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946_
- Bette Davis in “All About Eve” (1950)
- Paul Newman and Robert Redford in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1950)
- Faye Dunaway in “Chinatown” (1974)
- Al Pacino in “Dog Day Afternoon” (1975)
- Meryl Streep in “Sophie’s Choice” (1982)
- James Earl Jones in “Fences” (1987)
- Cynthia Erivo in “Wicked” (2024)
- Eva Victor in “Sorry Baby” (2025)
- Michael B. Jordan in “Sinners” (2025)
I’ve seen all but #9 and #10, but this list is for punters, containing as it does three movies from the last year. And, for crying out loud, how about Marlon Brando in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” Robert DeNiro in “Raging Bull,” Jack Nicholson in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Humphrey Bogart in “Casablanca,” or, if you want to go modern, Jessie Buckley in “Hamnet”. Oh, and of course Peter O’Toole in “Lawrence of Arabia.” Don’t take your lessons on “How to be cultured” from the NYT!
*I’m getting stiff in my old age, so of course I clicked on a WaPo article called, “Just 2 minutes a day of this type of exercise may help you live longer.” The key, or so DOCTORS SAY *the same ones who told us not to drink wine, perhaps) is to up the intensity of your exercise for brief periods. (The article is archived for free here.)
A recent study in the European Heart Journal looked at people who didn’t engage in formal exercise and found that just one to two minutes a day of vigorous activity, accumulated in short bursts, was associated with a significantly lower risk of chronic disease and death.
Not a workout class. Not a training plan. Just everyday life, done with a bit more intensity.
Exercise physiologists call this vigorous physical activity, or VPA. Sometimes referred to as vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity (VILPA), it includes things most people don’t think of as exercise: climbing stairs quickly, carrying heavy groceries, walking uphill with purpose or hurrying to catch a train.
These moments are brief, but they matter. Huffing and puffing, even for short periods, can shape long-term health.
This is not the same as high-intensity interval training, or HIIT. HIIT is structured and deliberate, performed in an exercise setting. VPA is opportunistic. One builds fitness and the other reinforces it throughout the day.
Two minutes can sound almost too simple. But physiologically, it makes sense. When you push your body harder, even briefly, you activate systems that don’t get challenged during lower-intensity movement. Your heart rate climbs, your muscles recruit more fibers, your mitochondria (which are like the battery packs to your cells) proliferate and your metabolism shifts. These adaptations drive improvements in cardiovascular fitness, strength and resilience.
The good news is that you don’t need long workouts or extreme training to tap into these benefits. Even small, manageable doses of intense movement can help counter the effects of aging. That could mean burpees at the gym, if that’s your thing. But even if it’s not, short bursts of effort in everyday life still make a difference.
For Joan [a walker], we made a simple adjustment. She kept her daily walks but added short intervals. Every few minutes, she picked up the pace for 20 to 30 seconds — not a sprint, but a brisk effort that made it harder to speak in full sentences. Then she recovered and repeated.
At first, it felt uncomfortable. That’s the point. Intensity should feel like work. But within a few weeks, she noticed a difference. She felt stronger. Her energy improved. Even her regular walking pace became easier.
As I tell my patients, “Pushing yourself means getting comfortable being uncomfortable. It’s the only way to grow. Mentally, physically and physiologically.”
I already do this; I’m gonna live forever!
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is and Andrzej differ about Nature, with Andrzej touting its advantages of “love, beauty, and passion.”
Hili: Nature is cruel.
Andrzej: Yes, but it also has certain advantages.
In Polish:
Hili: Natura jest okrutna.
Ja: Tak, ale ma również pewne zalety.
*******************
From CinEmma:
From Things With Faces:
From The Language Nerds:
Masih disses the Democrats, save the renegade Senator John Fetterman (whom she calls “the Big Man with Hoodie”), for their attitude towards Iran:
ONE OF THE ONLY DEMOCRATS TALKING ABOUT TRUTH
WATCH: Iranian Activist and Journalist @AlinejadMasih says ‘thank you’ to Dem @SenFettermanPA for exposing Iran’s evils, supporting military action to prevent nuclear threat pic.twitter.com/G2VkF9VfxS
— The Story (@TheStoryFNC) April 20, 2026
From Luana, who says, “Chicago is screwed.” Indeed. This is an arrant violation of institutional neutrality in Chicago’s schools (read the article):
Chicago Public Schools declare May 1 a ‘day of civil action’ for students https://t.co/aqe70IeALr pic.twitter.com/fuBGuKZRiG
— New York Post (@nypost) April 20, 2026
From Malcolm: one minute of introverted cats:
Introvert car pic.twitter.com/pJm3COUpbd
— We don’t deserve cats 😺 (@catsareblessing) April 1, 2026
Two from my feed. This first one is of course AI, but well done–and creepy:
Which bed are you picking?pic.twitter.com/zblmiFVcG2
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) April 20, 2026
A lovely murmuration:
Incredible starling murmuration gracing the Italian skies over Sassari, Sardinia. 🇮🇹 pic.twitter.com/Myz1femvfQ
— James Melville 🚜 (@JamesMelville) April 20, 2026
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This French Jewish boy was gassed as soon as he arrived in Auschwitz. He was twelve years old. https://t.co/pQIU4y5K3a
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) April 21, 2026
From Matthew, the first post on a thread about ‘Able Seacat Simon. Below that is an audio version:
The Dickin Medal is the highest award that can be issued to animals in British military service. Bearing the words "We Also Serve" it has been awarded 75 times since its creation in 1943.Only one cat has ever received the award. This is the story of Able Seacat Simon, of HMS Amethyst. 🧵 1/25
Just to note that if you'd prefer an audio version of the story of Able Seacat Simon, the only feline recipient of the Dickin Medal (animal Victoria Cross) then I did one on Youtube a while back.That's here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2v5N…
I think the unpopularity of the war owes a lot to pessimism (both informed an uninformed) about likely outcomes, not just ignorance or anti-Trump sentiment.
The case for the war looks like
1) The Iranian regime is evil
2) Without war it is unlikely to improve in the near future.
I think those are both true, but that also
3) With war it is unlikely to improve in the near future.
Conventional wisdom, which I am not sure is right but give the benefit of the doubt, is that regime change would take a massive, bloody land invasion, not just a bombing campaign.
The sentence seems to be grammatical and I certainly would not pick bed number 9 with the elephants
At first I could not see it as grammatical, then ChatGTP explained that it is, and it was like suddenly seeing the trick behind an optical illusion.
I don’t see a bed #9. Mine only goes to #8 (moths), and I know a person who would be most freaked out by that one.
I only saw through moths as well. I would pick the possums; the first few are really, really creepy.
But if there was a bed number 9 with elephants, I certainly would not chose that one!
“The old man the boat”.
My first thought was it was missing a verb, but then looked again:
“The” definite article
“old” collective/adjectival noun (subject)
“man” finite verb (3rd person singular)
“the boat” article + noun (object).
As Mark says, once you see it, it makes grammatical sense. Weird semantics, though.
3rd person plural, not singular
Not sure about that.
The rule is (apparently) it depends whether the individuals are acting collectively or as individuals.
Here’s a style guide:
https://style.mla.org/verbs-with-collective-nouns/
It depends whether you think that “the old” refers to a team. So I suppose you might rephrase it as “The old are manning the boat”. So maybe you’re right.
Sorry, overthinking it. Of course “man” is 3rd parsonal plural, 3p singular is “mans.”
And you and I wonder why we have no friends.
🙂
There is this other bit of news about a spate of scientists with connections to sensitive US information have either been murdered or have gone missing:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/fbi-will-look-connections-deaths-disappearances-scientists-rcna332397.
It could be a random nothing, but I don’t know.
Click-bait i think, mark.
If Alan J. Pakula, were alive, he might have made this into a film. But he died on the Long Island Expressway when a metal pipe crashed through his windscreen and hit him on the head. Accident, they said.
“The old man the boat” is an example of a so-called “garden path” sentence. It leads you in one direction culminating in a dead-end, and so you have to retrace your steps and assign it a different syntactic structure. The prototypical example is “the horse raced past the barn fell.”
Reminds me of the old favorite:
Time flies like an arrow.
Fruit flies like bananas.
That one used to be a favorite of mine for testing machine translations.
Sometimes attributed to Groucho Marx, but not so according to Wikipedia (referring to the Yale Dictionary of Quotations).
Gotta love the rat bed. So warm and cozy!
I don’t like most of the WSJ options. While all of them afford some benefits—even walking away from the war, which did cost the regime a great deal of money and treasure and from which it will take considerable time to recover—the only thing that will move the needle permanently is to stay the course until the regime collapses. This may mean that the U.S., Israel, and the Gulf States need explicitly to adopt regime change as a joint strategy and to change tactics as appropriate.
Only regime change has a chance of ending the theocracy’s aspirations of developing nuclear weapons, restoring its ballistic missiles, amassing regional power, terrorizing neighbors, blackmailing the global economy (via strait of Hormuz or, soon, a nuclear weapon), destroying Israel, destroying the West, and spreading radical Islam to every corner of the world. It would seem that the downsides of giving up now are considerable, no?
President Trump seems too eager to make a deal; his latest statements suggest that he is desperate to get out of the morass and to allow the economy to recover. I’m very worried that his eagerness to make some sort of deal will lead him to make a bad deal. The Iranians are watching. They, too, know that Trump is vulnerable to making a bad deal.
What’s going to happen? Is there a pundit in the house?
If Iran really would be a threat to the US it would have been beaten by now because nothing tops the US military power. Given the reluctance of Trump to fire on all cilinders makes it clear he doesn’t think Iran is worth it, he doesnot consider the country a threat to the US.
And as far as regime change goes, as long as the new regime acts like Trump (and Netanyahu) want(s) he could not care less about how that regime treats its own population.
Aspirations mean little if you lack the means to achieve them. If we can get the uranium out of the country, Iran can be largely contained for a few years and your other conventional military concerns ameliorated. It will take follow-up missions, but it can be done. That said, I fear it’s an intellectual exercise. If the current regime releases its known uranium stockpile to the U.S. or a third party, you can be sure they have a backup plan to further development.
Despite U.S. military might, we also live in the land of frustrated aspirations: we simply haven’t the means to force regime change given the nature of the regime, the size and terrain of the country, the scale of the problem, and the desire to minimize pain on the Iranians who want change. That is not a new realization for planners. I think the approach from the start, at least as I saw it, was the correct one. Significantly degrade capacity, both nuclear and conventional. Accept that we might have to “mow the lawn” much like we did in Iraq for the decade preceding the 2003 war, the difference being that continuing strikes in Iran would encompass leadership as well as military forces.
But even that approach might leave Israel to mow alone. While Donald Trump’s commitment in the short term is a wild card, the longer-term threat to effective action against Iran is the reality of unrealities that the Democratic Party has become. Indeed, it is their full-throated opposition and the upcoming midterms that have Trump apparently anxious to make a deal.
And it’s because of Trump that Iran discovered they could use the strait of Hormuz as a global economic blackmail tactic. Do they even need nukes now for global leverage? I’m sure they knew hijacking the strait was a possibility, but Trump forced them to do it. I doubt they knew how effective and easy it was to achieve even with most of their military assets neutralized. It’s one of the reasons previous administrations didn’t risk it. Bolton spoke about that as he was an Iran hawk during his W. escapades, but even W. didn’t want to risk it. But Trump is the dupe who utilizes his “gut” and decided to “go for it” like a QB throwing a hail Mary pass.
We have as POTUS a megalomaniac narcissist surrounded by moronic sycophants- what could go wrong? Oh wait, we’re living it.
I am sure he will claim any deal he makes is the best deal that anyone has ever made.
I lived in Jerusalem for many years. One time, the local rag did a survey of hummus joints, especially the ones frequented by working folks. It ended in a tie: Raymond and Ta’ami. (Ben Sira Hummus did not exist at that time.) Both were famous for not letting customers sit for a single minute after they had finished—you dad to leave for the next customer. And reading while eating? Fuggeddabouddit.
The results of that survey were compared to the results of a survey bacterial levels of the hummus in various places tested by the Health Ministry. There was a very high positive correlation between bacterial levels and customer approval. (None of the restaurants had levels that were considered dangerous.) Of course, in those days the idea of food workers wearing gloves was unknown.
Today is Independence Day in Israel, which immediately follows Memorial Day. Many people want to separate the two by a few days, but I think that it is exactly like it should be.We are reminded that the sacrifice of the soldiers and their families has a purpose, and, on the other had, that independence comes at a heavy cost.