"But you don’t think that the proof is in the pudding at all? It is such a brilliant film."

"Yeah, because you can see that we were really suffering. With the fight scene, it was horrible. She was hitting me so many times, and [the director] was screaming, 'Hit her! Hit her again!'"

"In America, we’d all be in jail.... She was really hitting me. And once she was hitting me, there were people there screaming, 'Hit her!' and she didn’t want to hit me, so she’d say sorry with her eyes and then hit me really hard."

IN THE COMMENTS: Dad said:

It's hard for me to get past "The proof is in the pudding."

No, it isn't.

Yes, I selected that quote for the headline — I had my reasons — despite the presence of a cliché — normally, I filter out clichés — and a particularly bad cliché, since it's a corruption. Like "You can't have your cake and eat it too," it's a cliché that has superseded an earlier cliché that made more sense. Here's a couple of NPR guys talking about it:

STEVE INSKEEP: The proof is in the pudding, he said. Tim Lowe wrote us all the way from Santiago de Cali, Colombia, and he writes the following: Frank, the proof is not in the pudding. It would be a messy, if not completely silly place to keep it. With that in mind, we called Ben Zimmer, language columnist at the Boston Globe.

BEN ZIMMER: Well, the proof is in the pudding is a new twist on a very old proverb. The original version is the proof of the pudding is in the eating. And what it meant was that you had to try out food in order to know whether it was good.

INSKEEP: Zimmer adds that the word pudding itself has changed. In Britain, dating back centuries, pudding meant more than a sweet dessert.

ZIMMER: Back then, pudding referred to a kind of sausage, filling the intestines of some animal with minced meat and other things - something you probably want to try out carefully since that kind of food could be rather treacherous.

And that gives new insight into the old saying "If you don't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding!"

ADDED: Cliché or not, the suggestion that test is whether the movie is good must be answered, clearly, NO. If we know that what looks like a great acting performance is, in fact, real human suffering, we should — out of morality — decline to see the film. And we shouldn't enjoy it, or if we do find it pleasurable to observe that suffering, we should recognize that this is either sadism or a creepy capacity to compartmentalize.

Further pursuit of this thought in a new post, here.

"I would like to take a moment to acknowledge your hurt, as well as the letter you sent to me via your attorneys."

"As a father myself, I cannot imagine the pain that your family has had to endure," writes Lil Wayne to the family of 1955 murder victim Emmett Till, whose attorneys corresponded with him over his lyric "Beat that p***y up like Emmett Till." The linked article stresses that Lil Wayne did not, technically, apologize. I'm drawn to the words "the letter you sent to me via your attorneys" and just guess that any standoffishness has to do with the use of lawyers as the way to start a conversation with somebody.

"I ask you for violence, in the nonsense, and you, you give me grace, your light and your warmth."

"I’d like to paint you, but there are no colors, because there are so many, in my confusion, the tangible form of my great love."

On the subject of "A Child Called 'It.'"

The previous post refers to "A Child Called 'It'" — a questionable book that I've only ever read about.

There are no people in [Dave] Pelzer's book, only demons (his mother and grandmother), angels (Pelzer and a few foster parents), and incompetents. Psychological motivation scarcely interests him. He makes only a halfhearted effort to explain his mother's lunacy. The point is the suffering. As the trilogy progresses, Pelzer is forced to increase the dosage of wickedness to top what came before. (Iron law of sequels: They must be bloodier than the original.) His mother becomes more cartoonish, more Cruella De Vil. In the first book, she's horrible but erratic. By the third she is the incarnation of pure, calculating evil, saying things like, "You gave me no pleasure, so you were disposed of."

I just wanted to show you the passages in 2 of my favorite books that allude to "A Child Called 'It.'"

Bill Bryson's "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir" begins this way:

My kid days were pretty good ones, on the whole. My parents were patient and kind and approximately normal. They didn’t chain me in the cellar. They didn’t call me “It.” I was born a boy and allowed to stay that way. My mother, as you’ll see, sent me to school once in Capri pants, but otherwise there was little trauma in my upbringing.

And David Rakoff's "Half Empty" has an essay called "Shrimp" that begins:

Nothing assails the writer’s credibility more than the pleasant childhood. I freely admit to having had one myself. A happy fact reflected sadly in my book sales. And yet I’d sooner do most anything short of putting needles in my eyes than willingly remember what it was like to have been a child. Things were not terrible. I was neither beaten nor abused. No dank cellars or chilly garrets for me. Neither my trust nor my body were violated by a clergyman or a beloved family friend. I was safe and sound.

"In Love With a Sex Addict" — oh, really?

I hadn't given much thought to the much-bruited Tiger Woods/Lindsey Vonn romance, but something about that magazine cover set off my bullshit detector. I think his PR people contacted her PR people and this couple was concocted for our consumption. I love the way they are in love... with the camera. Smiley eyes!

Here's the underlying story.

"They're a really happy couple -- not living together yet," a source explains to Us Weekly... "He confessed everything in his past to her and stuff - they're really into each other," the source tells Us.

Confessed? How do you confess — and stuff! — when everything was all already in the newspapers? And speaking of everything... did you see this new Nike ad that's been "criticized by some"?

Let's dance like it's 1958 in Idaho.

That's nice and slow. I think you can all learn that, and I think it would be nice if kids today learned that dance, maybe in gym class. I think it would help them in many ways. And feel free to dress like that, even unironically.

I found that because YouTube suggested it after I watched this 1965 clip from the TV show "Hollywood a Go-Go" with Del Shannon singing "Runaway" and the "Hollywood a Go-Go" go go dancers were dancing around him doing some dance that represented running away, even though their forward motion only took them in a circle so they never got away. It's faster and more frenetic dancing, but I think you might be able to figure out the moves, even though we never get to see the feet.

Seemingly bridging the time gap between the first and second video — and also suggested by YouTube — here's Little Eva singing about the brand-new dance "The Loco-Motion." I say "seemingly" because it looks early 60s and the "Runaway" dance looks later 60s, but in fact, both clips are from 1965. A lot of old and new intersected in 1965. Personally, I was 14 years old, and I was rooting for progress. I watched "Hollywood a Go-Go" and "Shindig" (the show Little Eva's on), and I tuned in hoping to see British invasion stuff like The Kinks or folk rock stuff like The Byrds. I would have regarded Del Shannon as an intrusion from the pre-Beatles era. "Runaway" was a hit in 1961. It was one of the singles we played at slumber parties when we were children.

"The Loco-Motion" was a hit in 1962. Little Eva — Eva Narcissus Boyd — was a maid who also worked as a babysitter for Carole King and Gerry Goffin: "It is often claimed that Goffin and King were amused by Boyd's individual dancing style, so they wrote 'The Loco-Motion' for her" — but maybe that's not true. Little Eva doesn't look too interested in dancing in that "Shindig" clip. The notorious song "He Hit Me (It Felt Like A Kiss)" was based on what Little Eva told Carole King about her relationship with her boyfriend. That song was originally recorded by The Crystals — produced by the not-yet-a-murderer Phil Spector — and in recent years, it's been covered by Courtney Love and Grizzly Bear — with some unknown degree of irony.

"Monsters: Planned Parenthood tells teens ‘look your best’ after being beaten with these make-up tips."

Twitchy is aghast... after not getting it.

Do I really need to explain? Maybe I do, because those people are so dumb... or maybe only playing dumb. Let me take an intelligence test over here. You've got to watch the video first: here. Now, here's the test:

Did Twitchy understand the video it condemns as shameful?
	No. They really are that dumb.
	Yes, but they're pretending not to so they can slam PP, their usual agenda.
	Yes, and the ad actually is monstrous.
pollcode.com free polls

"Jovan Belcher’s grieving teammates on the Kansas City Chiefs refused to blame guns for his horrifying murder-suicide."

So begins an article at The Daily News. Interesting construction "his... murder-suicide." Normally, when you say "his murder," the possessive pronoun refers to the murder victim, not the murder." "[H]is horrifying murder-suicide" seems to strain to hide Belcher's agency in killing 2 human beings. One senses that The Daily News would like to do the very thing the teammates aren't doing: blame the guns.

"If you have daughters, you should (have a gun),” Chiefs defensive lineman Shaun Smith said Monday. “You have to protect yourself. You work so hard to get to where you at, I'll be damned if I’ll just let someone take it from me.”

If you acquire wealth, you become a theft target!

Linebacker Brandon Siler, who had Thanksgiving dinner with Belcher, also had no problems with guns.

“Well, a majority of people own one, especially in the places where they're legal. Most of the time they're for self defense or sport,” he said.

Speaking of self-defense and looking at the picture at the link, showing the huge size difference between Belcher and the woman he killed, even if your concern is domestic violence, why would you blame guns? There are any number of ways he could have killed her. A gun would have been the one way she could have defended herself.

And, by the way, I'm not swallowing the story that Belcher traveled from the murder scene — his home — to the football facility for the purpose of thanking his employers for giving him "a chance" in life. That's management's story, and it works as PR. It essentially requests that we sympathize with the murderer. I invite you into a thought experiment: Why else might Belcher have relocated?

With a theory of my own, I asked Meade that question yesterday, and he said something that hadn't occurred to me. Belcher shot his Kasandra Perkins in front of his mother. He had an audience. And he sought out an audience —  head coach Romeo Crennel and general manager Scott Pioli — for the suicide. He chose spectators for his self-killing. Having horrified his mother, he went for new spectator-victims, individuals most likely to suffer to see him die. If he thanked them, he was saying you've invested your work and your trust in me and now watch me destroy that.

My theory was different. After the murder, Belcher thought: What do I do now? How can I get out of this? He went to management in the hope that they could bail him out somehow. He was in a terrible jam. Come on, enfold me, protect me. You've got all those ingenious defensive plays on the field, do something for me now. Protect your investment in me. You've done so much for me already. You've given me a chance in life, and a chance is what I really need now. You pulled me up out of nothing. If anyone can help me now it's you.

Football is by far Americas favorite spectator sport.

Rasmussen Reports that 53% say football.

Only 16% for baseball, 11% for basketball, and 6% for hockey. Nothing else gets as much as 5%.

And, despite all the liberal hand-wringing over the violence of football — with all that brain-damage and post-Super-Bowl wife-beating — the preference for football is greater in women than in men. (57% and 50%.)