Something In The Water (Does Not Compute).

That's a Prince song title.

It came to mind today in the context of the Chinese blogger, confessing his computer sins on government TV, including a blog post that wondered whether there were contraceptives in the water.

Meanwhile, in America, First Lady Michelle Obama has a new health campaign with the message "When you drink water, you Drink Up," encouraging people to drink "even just one more glass a day," even though there is no medical reason for pushing people to drink more water. (Drinking too much water could kill you, and normally, drinking in response to whatever thirst you have is all you're supposed to do, though the advice to drink water instead of other things is good for those who want to lose weight.)

And who can forget that the 2012 presidential campaign was — at least some of the time — seemingly all about getting free birth control coverage into Obamacare.

Must be something in the water they drink/It's been the same with every girl I've had/Must be something in the water they drink/Cuz why else would a woman wanna treat a man so bad?

If I were a blogger in China, this post would be a crime, but only if it were deemed a rumor and it was also viewed more than 5,000 or reposted more than 500 times. I could get a 3-year prison sentence, not because of what I wrote, but because of what other people did with it after I wrote it — reading it, retweeting it, and construing it.

One must take care either: 1. not to become too popular or viral, or 2. to write in a manner that deters the construction that this is a rumor.

I'll do anything 4 U, anything/Why don't U talk 2 me?/Tell me who U are/Don't do this 2 me....

Speaking of Prince...

... he just did something amazing.

"'The word Messiah is a title and it's a title that has only been earned by one person and that one person is Jesus Christ,' Judge Ballew said."

"The word Judge is a title that should not apply to anyone who would ever say that in a ruling."

Yes, and also "Judge" could be a name — Judge Reinhold — and other "titles" are used as names. I think of Prince Rogers Nelson and Sargent Shriver. And Earl Butz.

It is confusing and invites jokes. A bad idea. I don't recommend it. But not everything inadvisable is a legal issue, and the Jesus-is-the-one argument is blatantly wrong.

Interestingly, the Judge in the Messiah incident changed the baby's name to Martin. I was going to add "Dean" as another title that is used as a name and is therefore confusing. But isn't it more confusing to name the kid Martin, since if he ever acquires the title Dean, he'll be Dean Martin, which was the joke of a name used for the Dean in Rodney Dangerfield's "Back to School"?

"A List Of Recurring Fred Armisen, Bill Hader, And Jason Sudeikis Characters..."

"... Ranked In Descending Order Of How Much This Commentator Will Miss Them."

Via Throwing Things, where they're going to miss Fred Amisen's Prince:

"He's like a real-life Rupert Pupkin — he's gone from a cringe-maker who couldn't get noticed by the local Patch.com reporter..."

"... to an Interesting Person who'll surely be profiled by Esquire or the Awl someday in long form."

It's Paul Kevin Curtis, suspected of sending those ricin letters. This seems to be his YouTube channel. And here's his Prince imitation.



I don't know how he got into what appears to be a classroom or what those teenagers are thinking.

It's nice to be free to laugh at this one.

"38 Things Minnesotans Are Too Nice To Brag About."

#1 is Bob Dylan and #38 is Prince.

That reminds me, for some reason, as we were driving home today, I remembered the line: "Name me someone that’s not a parasite and I’ll go out and say a prayer for him."

"Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees..."

"... he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder."

This is some crazy surrealism, in our Gatsby sentence today. (In the Gatsby project, we look, each day, at a single isolated sentence from "The Great Gatsby.") But let's settle down and understand what we are looking at. It's Gatsby's visual perspective. "Out of the corner of his eye" cues us that it's subjective and distorted. He's looking at the sidewalk and the perception is that it looks like a ladder. We're told that it really is a ladder, but we know that's not true. It really is a sidewalk, but to Gatsby subjectively, it's a ladder. Gatsby imagines himself climbing somewhere. Mounting. It's a secret place.

"... he could climb to it, if he climbed alone..." — I want to say that the illusion only remains intact if Gatsby is alone. And the vision, if he can hold himself within it, is of climbing that ladder up through the trees and then finally coming alive.

It's a vision of being born, just by walking down that sidewalk. And then he could be alive. He'd suck on the maternal breast, the pap of life. He wants to gulp it down — that incomparable milk of wonder.

He's just a man on a sidewalk. There's no ladder. He's already born and living in real life. But somehow it seems that real life is out there, unreachable. But if only you could get there, above the trees, you would drink it down. Incomparable! Wonderful!

***

Everybody's looking 4 the ladder
Everybody wants salvation of the soul

ADDED: I can see in the comments that some readers really do have trouble mentally picturing a sidewalk looking like a ladder. I don't want to get too laborious and pedantic with these Gatsby posts, but the lines on the sidewalk correspond to the rungs of a ladder. The path stretched out ahead, even when it's flat, seems to go upward. Look at a photograph of a sidewalk. Further down the road is higher in the picture. If trees line the sidewalk, then the "ladder" appears to climb up into the trees as it disappears behind the foliage. I called the sentence "crazy surrealism," but Gatsby isn't hallucinating. He's seeing an optical illusion.