"So many people here, people that I otherwise respect, have written so much cloaked or naked vituperation about gay people..."

"... and our effect on civilization, that what little sympathy I had for your 'feelings' has long evaporated."

At this point in my life I'm finished with the lot of you, the plantation master so-called "liberals" who are less distinguishable from Fascists every day, and the so-called small-government "conservatives", who have such little faith in their God and the eternal and sacred institution of marriage that they bray for the State to enshrine their doctrine in secular law, and scream "Apocalypse!" when it doesn't happen.

Writes Palladian, in last night's café, where the whimpers of the losers of the DOMA case continued, along with slurpy wound-licking over my calling them losers — which is what they were, having lost in that case — and advising them not to whine over the more-or-less false perception that they'd been called bigots.

Sometimes, I get discouraged about the way people can't or won't read. It's not just the skimming and leaping to assumptions that you know what is being said, it's normal-speed reading of concision, and the failure to stop and see humor and wordplay. The post that people continued to get outraged over — which explained the extent to which the Supreme Court called gay-marriage opponents "bigots" — ended:

You took the opportunity to oppress when it was there, and now that it's gone, you want to say you are oppressed. Man up, losers. You lost. And you deserved to lose. Now, stop acting like losers. If you can. (I bet you can't!)

The losing was the losing of the case. I gave advice not to cry about it. You're a former victor, since you won when DOMA was passed into law. Many years later, those oppressed by DOMA ousted the oppressor. You need to get some perspective on how laughable your sadness over your loss looks to those who were saddened by the oppression you enjoyed all those years. But I've interacted with you and communicated with you over this issue since 2004, when this blog started. I didn't intend to write a legal or a political blog at all, but this issue had intrigued me for a long time. I have been patient in these conversations — over 400 of them. And now, what is obviously to me the good side has won in Windsor. I refrained from gloating over this important victory. But I saw all this whining and crying about being called a "bigot," and I wanted to tell you that this did not look good, that you needed to find a way to a positive, productive future that would contain this right going forward.

I said "stop acting like losers." I didn't say that you were losers in every aspect of your being. "Man up, losers," referred to losing this case, and "man up" is a sarcastic allusion to homophobia — on the off chance that some of you might think gay men are unmanly — and to the fact that we are in a turnabout in which the former losers have become the victors. There were winners and losers in that case, and the losers need to decide how they want to deal with it. I said "stop acting like losers." That implies that there is a sort of person who is an all-around loser. I didn't say you were one of them. My locution was: Don't be like them.

That was good advice, and it was intended to be a slap in the face. Wake up!



I had a premonition as soon as I wrote that line that you wouldn't snap out of it, that you would continue the crying that I find laughable. That's why I said "If you can. (I bet you can't!)"

I was right.

And I anticipate another round of crying over how terribly mean I have been to you.

The funniest thing in the world: rubber bands.

(Via Metafilter.)

"Blue Is the Warmest Color" — that movie about lesbians that won the grand prize at Cannes — is hated by...

... the lesbian who wrote the graphic novel upon which the movie was based. And by "graphic novel," I don't mean that it has detailed descriptions of the sexual act. (The movie, however, has a 10-minute sex sequence that the author calls pornographic.) What I mean is what the NYT is referring to as a "comic book-novel" to avoid the ambiguity that appears in my first sentence.

Here's the Wikipedia article for "graphic novel":

The term "graphic novel" was first used in 1964; it was popularized within the comics community after the publication of Will Eisner's A Contract with God in 1978, and became familiar with the public in the late 1980s after the commercial successes of the first volume of Spiegelman's Maus, Moore and Gibbons's Watchmen, and Miller's The Dark Knight Returns. At the beginning of the 21st century, the Book Industry Study Group added "graphic novel" as a category in book stores.

Oh, but the author-artist of "Le Bleu Est une Couleur Chaude," Julie Maroh, will be stuck with the less respectful terminology as the topic under discussion is porn. Her book has sensitive images like this:



And the movie doesn't capture what she meant to convey.

Noting that the director and actresses are “all straight, unless proven otherwise,” she said that with few exceptions, the film struck her as “a brutal and surgical display, exuberant and cold, of so-called lesbian sex, which turned into porn.”

Even worse, she said, “everyone was giggling.”

Heterosexual viewers “laugh-ed because they don’t understand it and find the scene ridiculous.

“The gay and queer people laughed because it’s not convincing, and find it ridiculous,” she continued. “And among the only people we didn’t hear giggling were” the “guys too busy feasting their eyes on an incarnation of their fantasies on screen.”

But what do you expect when a commercial movie is made from a book? The story is much less about the inner thoughts and feelings of the characters, and what's on the screen are superficial images, particularly beautiful faces and bodies, and the audience is invited to gaze and feel whatever they feel. The movie director,  Abdellatif Kechiche, said:

“What I was trying to do when we were shooting these scenes was to film what I found beautiful,” he said. “So we shot them like paintings, like sculptures. We spent a lot of time lighting them to ensure they would look beautiful; after, the innate choreography of the loving bodies took care of the rest, very naturally.”

So, like many, many movies — perhaps nearly all movies — this movie is about how beautiful women are. Meanwhile, we learn that the actresses were not as naked as they look. "We were wearing prostheses," one says, mysteriously.

"I Love ‘The Big Bang Theory.’ And You Should, Too."

Okay, I tried to watch this show as a result of that article, but I couldn't put up with 10 minutes of it. Like a typical network comedy, the lines were delivered with a big nudge, followed by overdone audience laughter. The characters — we're told over and over — are supposed to be super-intelligent, but we are not credited with enough intelligence to discern the presence of a joke, even when it's in TV-script gag format. It's not that I feel personally insulted, just that everything feels bogged down, boring, and stupid.

Question asked at the link: "Why can Penny-the-waitress afford her own apartment, while physicists Sheldon and Leonard have to share? Why doesn’t fancy engineer Howard, with a bigshot JPL job, have any money?" I can answer that: Sheldon and Leonard have done the math, looking at all the factors, planning for future contingencies, including retirement. Penny spends down to her last penny (and beyond).

ADDED: The link goes to Instapundit, but the underlying article is in the NYT. I'm surprised that the NYT allowed this usage (boldface added): "In his dervishy nerdiness, he seemed to evoke any number of classic TV neurotics or fussbudgets: Paul Lynde, Tony Randall, Pee-wee Herman."

The (unlinkable) Oxford English Dictionary has only one meaning for "dervish": "A Muslim friar, who has taken vows of poverty and austere life. Of these there are various orders, some of whom are known from their fantastic practices as dancing or whirling, and as howling dervishes."

File under: Althouse, more politically correct than the NYT.

AND: I'm contemplating the possible conflation of dervishy with derpy. 

"Hitching a Ride With Larry David."

By Paul Samuel Dolman. Excerpt:

P.D.: What brings you the most satisfaction?
L.D.: That’s a tough one … I guess it’s when I discover a really great idea and start developing it.
P.D.: That’s number one?
L.D.: And making a woman laugh. What is that about? And the prettier the woman, the more satisfaction I get. It doesn’t make any sense, but I’m being honest.

"The mouth was wide open and ripped at the corners..."

"... as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long."

A garish image of death... in today's ripped-out-of-context sentence from "The Great Gatsby."

We picture the soul tearing out of the body. And the grisly, horrible corpse. Is it laughing at us?

"Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited, and voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted cigarettes outlined unintelligible gestures inside."

Today's "Gatsby" sentence. It almost feels as though we've seen this one already. I had to check to make sure it was new. It has that visual obscurity, that life slightly out of reach, that we feel we've seen so many times.

Forms leaned and voices sang. Laughter existed, disembodied from the laughers and disconnected from whatever the jokes were. And then there were cigarettes, little lights that made it possible to discern gestures. We couldn't really see the people — they were forms — and there was a bit of sound — but it was for jokes we never heard — and there were gestures, barely seen, marked by the glowing ends of cigarettes — and the gestures — unintelligible — could not be understood.

How distanced and left out we feel! Inside those taxis, there is real life, people going places, talking about things, leaving us behind.

"That's how you laughed in the middle of the night."

Said Meade, and I said: "Then Chip Ahoy must have been in my dream."

Because I was just reading his comment: "Melody and Rose broke up the Sweedish contractors and threw change in the tip jar and put on her warm magic apron."

And I laughed not because that is nonsense, but because it's a quite brilliant contribution to a conversation that was pretty far along at that point, including betamax3000's extended interpretation of "The White Album." Beta had said:

Like the White Album perhaps Althouse is telling us there are secret messages to be found, backwards.

"Sweetly up broke voice, her rose melody."

"Upon magic human warm her of little."

"Out tipped change."

It all began with a sentence from "The Great Gatsby," which was about — not a woman laughing — a woman singing. But women laugh all the time in "The Great Gatsby." For example: "She looked at me and laughed pointlessly."

"These 'Gatsby' posts are becoming the new café around here" — "café" posts are open threads  — I say as I drink my coffee and contemplate today's Gatsby sentence, which I'd said will be "I knew the other clerks and young bond-salesmen by their first names, and lunched with them in dark, crowded restaurants on little pig sausages and mashed potatoes and coffee."

I picked that sentence after searching my Kindle copy of "Gatsby" for "potato" after betamax3000 said:

Yesterday was "gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder," today is "tipped out a little of her warm human magic." Is it getting hot in here or is it just me?

And that was funny, because — before getting out of bed this morning — I'd been toying with the idea of saying: In that "Melody rose" sentence, Fitzgerald intended us to think of semen when we read about "warm human magic" that tipped out of the vessel that is the woman.
 
And betamax added:

My God: if we get to the sentence involving Daisy, the potato and the gardener I just don't know what is going to happen.

Which is what had me looking for "potato" in "Gatsby," not finding it, and suspecting that betamax was making a canny reference to "Lady Chatterly's Lover." I buy "Lady Chatterly's Lover" in Kindle just so I can search for "potato"! My literary pursuits are a tad — a tot — bizarre. I find:

"No; my heart's as numb as a potato, my penis droops and never lifts its head up, I dare rather cut him clean off than say 'shit!' in front of my mother or my aunt... they are real ladies, mind you; and I'm not really intelligent, I'm only a 'mental-lifer.'"

And:

"I don't want to fuck you at all. My heart's as cold as cold potatoes just now."

Drudge features huge, horrible Pelosi laughing skull-face.

This is expressive:



You have to click over to Drudge to get the real effect. The picture is huge. The link goes here.)