A woman-boosting NYT headline gets paraphased to cause more pain in Time Magazine (or perhaps to boost a different set of women).

The NYT headline was "Wall Street Mothers, Stay-Home Fathers As Husbands Do Domestic Duty, These Women Are Free to Achieve." (We discussed that article on this blog here and here.)

The Time article (via Paul Caron) that bounces off that NYT piece has the arresting headline: "When Stay-at-Home Husbands Are Embarrassing to Their Wives/We simply haven't evolved to the point where a househusband is considered desirable." Whoa! I don't remember anything in the NYT article about these hard-charging female bankers getting embarrassed over their home-front husbands.

The author at Time is Vivia Chen, and — before reading what she has to say — I hypothesize that she's going to skew left of the New York Times and promote policies about flex-time and childcare for all women in the workplace, based on the premise that the role-reversed single-earner family is only available to the rich. So don't see those women profiled in the NYT as a model for women's equality.

I guarantee that I wrote all of the above without reading beyond the headline and the link to the NYT piece. Chen says she's not surprised at the "tenfold increase (since 1980) in the number of women in finance with stay-at-home spouses." The surprise is the new willingness to "admit" that couples were living like this. Chen's area of journalism has been law (not finance), and she's familiar with the stories of women in top law firms. The high achievers often have a husband whose contribution to the marital partnership is made outside of the income-producing workplace. But according to Chen, these women didn't talk about it.

I sensed that reluctance when I did a story on female partners at big Wall Street firms with househusbands a few years ago. Though three couples were happy to speak to me on the record about their arrangement, many more bowed out about going public. “My husband and I talked it over, and we’re not comfortable with the scrutiny,” said one partner.

That doesn't mean they were embarrassed! It's not necessarily shame that motivates a person to decline to submit the story of her private life to the template a journalist has in mind for an article. The fact that Chen would say it is shows the wisdom of declining to dish the quotes and anecdotes she wanted for her story.

Chen tells us that we have "entrenched ambivalence about changing gender roles" and:

Men in these situations often feel alienated, particularly if they are surrounded by stay-at-home moms. But the power moms with the stay-at-home husbands are just as uneasy, often more embarrassed than proud that they’ve upset the traditional order.

These are simply assertions, backed up mostly, it seems, by the data that women who earn the income in single-income families don't feel like being Chen's data. How convenient! Finally, in the last 2 paragraphs, Chen gets close to where I predicted she'd go:

[T]he publication of the New York Times article suggests that this atypical arrangement might be more palatable if the wife makes an outrageous amount of money. In one instance, the husband put the brakes on his architecture career when his banker wife started to make twice his earnings. At that point, “the solution seemed obvious.”

What remains to be seen is what happens when the economics are not so “obvious” — when women work at more pedestrian, less lucrative jobs. Given the unease about reversing gender roles when there is a superearner in the equation, I’m not sure we’re ready to have June Cleaver go to work and Ward Cleaver stay home with the boys after all.

Chen stops short of saying the single-earner household can't work anymore unless that single-earner makes a huge income (and she doesn't detour into the usual talk about what's really needed to support the parents who do (and must!) go to work). It's fair to ding the NYT for focusing on rich outliers and to cherry pick the phrases in that article that hint that the high-achieving women are not proud of husbands whose only activity is housework and childcare. Chen's last sentence is so tame that it's hard to fight with her: There's "unease," and she's "not sure," and maybe were just not "ready."

As you know if you've been following my single-earner household tagged posts — which go back to April 2012 — I am a proponent of clear thinking about household economics in light of taxes and the value of unpaid work within the family unit. I resist the endless propaganda that the single-income family is no longer possible for ordinary people — that it's some delusion haunted by the ghosts of the 1950s, who are almost always embodied in the characters June and Ward Cleaver. I think we are failing to see how much we lose when we accept the idea that all good adults must devote their work energy to the production of taxable income.

"Yes, Men Should Do More Housework."

Writes Derek Thompson in The Atlantic. Key paragraph:

So, yes, we could all do with slightly dirtier houses, and nobody ever died saying their only regret was they didn't buy enough ceramic tile cleaner. But maybe, now that women are out-earning us in bachelor's degrees and (often) in marriages as well, we could stand to do oh-just-slightly more than 35 percent of the dishes.

I don't see why one spouse making more money than the other should matter (the way one working longer or harder hours in a job should matter). But if the reason for the man to step up and do half of the housework is that the woman earns more, then that's implicitly saying the reason women have been doing more housework is subservience to her man because of the money he has brought to the relationship.

All couples are in some kind of an exchange — like the man in the earlier post who seems to have been buying a lady shoes as a way to earn his place in the relationship. We idealize relationships that are mostly or entirely love for love. And how lucky you are if you're in a 100% love-for-love relationship. It's highly rewarding to feel the love, and the feeling is much better if you're in a position to give it, and you never run out. And you get love too.

But there are all sorts of exchanges among couples, from the stark clarity of the money-for-sex exchange that is prostitution on up to the pure ideal of love-for-love.

Where are you on that continuum?

"The notion that your manhood depends on The Man giving you a job with a paycheck is some weird modern-day delusion."

"Those of you inside that delusion seem uncreative and impractical and, frankly, afraid of strong women."

Part of a comment of mine in the thread from yesterday about the NYT article "Wall Street Mothers, Stay-Home Fathers/As Husbands Do Domestic Duty, These Women Are Free to Achieve."

"Wall Street Mothers, Stay-Home Fathers/As Husbands Do Domestic Duty, These Women Are Free to Achieve."

"Along the way, the couples have come to question just what is male behavior and female behavior, noting how quickly their preconceived notions dissolve once they depart from assigned roles."

The men echo generations of housewives, voicing concern over a loss of earning power and car pool-induced torpor but also pride in their nurturing roles. The women describe themselves as competitive, tough and proud of every dollar they bring in....

A few women said that they resented the fact that their husbands did not cook or clean up, but that they had trouble telling them so, for fear that they would sound as if they were treating them like employees.

"Why I’m Happier in a Sexless Marriage."

A headline at Redbook. Excerpt.

I appreciate the idea of sex, but I feel about it like I feel about working out...

My husband’s the same way.... Not having sex be a regular part of our routine means we’ve had to work harder to fulfill each other’s emotional needs.

What would I do if my husband wanted more sex? Well, then, he wouldn’t be my husband...

"Though you haven't heard of it, there are some fundamentalist churches that encourage dating and marrying nonbelievers and trying to convert them."

"It's called 'missionary dating' and it's a real thing."

Is Scott Walker's "fixation" on Reagan "creepy"?

The Capital Times writer Paul Fanlund says so, as he identifies "3 Themes" in Scott Walker's just-published book "Unintimidated." The other 2 themes are "He throws even his allies under the bus" and "His egocentricity is just bizarre." This is the Cap Times, appealing its readership of Madison liberals who've been hating Walker for the last 3 years and have been hating Reagan even longer.

On the Reagan "fixation," there's Walker's annual Reagan birthday party (which is also the anniversary of his wedding to his wife Tonette). Here's how Walker describes the party in 2011, which was just before the big Wisconsin protests began.

[On] Saturday, February 12, Tonette and I hosted a dinner at the Executive Residence to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birthday. (I had been in Dallas to see the Packers win the Super Bowl on the sixth, his actual birthday, so we postponed the celebration by a week.) 

Meade and I were reading the book out loud together last night, and at that parenthetical, I said: "Oh, yeah, the protests blotted out all the great afterglow feeling we were having over winning the Super Bowl." That was sad!

Tonette and I host a dinner each year on Reagan’s birthday. We serve his favorite foods— macaroni and cheese casserole, and red, white, and blue Jelly Belly jelly beans— and have musicians perform patriotic songs and Irish music. 

Aw, come on. That's creepy?! That's incredibly sweet. Who gives a party and serves mac-and-cheese and jelly beans? It's beyond unpretentious, and it's just charming and nice. Why shouldn't Republicans celebrate Ronald Reagan, their modern-day icon? And I give Walker credit for putting the celebration on February 6th (or 12th) instead of March 30th (in the style of the Democrats, with their icon JFK (see Rule #8, here)).

It is a wonderful evening, and serves as a reminder for me each year to be hopeful and optimistic just like Ronald Reagan. It happens to be a dual celebration because President Reagan’s birthday is also our wedding anniversary. Tonette jokes that I never forget our wedding anniversary because it is Reagan’s birthday.

Well, isn't that a really low-key and generous way to make your anniversary something that's fun for other people you know? But for Fanlund, that's part of a creepiness profile.

Hey, Fanlund, ever consider whether you're creepy? Maybe Walker seems creepy to you because deep down you know the way you look at him is creepy.

"In the days when success in life had depended on marriage, and marriage had depended on money, novelists had a subject to write about."

"The great epics sang of war, the novel of marriage. Sexual equality, good for women, had been bad for the novel. And divorce had undone it completely. What would it matter whom Emma [Bovary] married if she could file for separation later?"

Says a character in the Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel "The Marriage Plot," reviewed here.

Eugenides, speaking for himself, made a virtually identical argument in Slate several years ago, substituting “Anna Karenina” for “Madame Bovary”: “You can’t have your heroine throw herself under a train because she left her husband and ruined her life. Now your heroine would just have a custody battle and remarry.”

Oh, yeah? And what about cell phones? They're wreaking havoc on hack plots. Of course, the answer is to throw in some bit about how there's no signal or the battery is dead.

There must be a stock list of reasons why a modern-day woman cannot divorce. 1. Make her religious, 2. Inheritance, 3. Children, 4. Husband gives access to some needed social or business network, 5. Hey, I'm not a writer of plots! You figure it out, writer man.

"'Don’t Get Screwed By Obamacare, Find A Sugar Daddy!' Says Dating Website."

Okay, I agree that's pretty sleazy.

But I'm not sure I'm allowed to complain, because back in the summer of 2008, I said this:



And that was picked up right here by Meade — I talk back to him here — whom I married just about exactly one year later.

ADDED: Still waiting on the sonata!

"Yet women are... 'fickle, quarrelsome, suspicious, weak, and fearful'... 'tirelessly lustful.'"

"Strong men may imperil their health by trying to fulfill their sexual demands. So, in order for life to proceed calmly, women must submit to men and, above all, be chaste... Those who do not obey their husbands should be beaten," writes Joan Acocella in The New Yorker, paraphrasing something a female character says in  Boccaccio's "Decameron."

In support of that view, Boccaccio ends his book with what has become the famous story of “patient Griselda.” Gualtieri, the Marquis of Saluzzo, has no wish to marry, but his subjects pressure him. So he takes, as a wife, a peasant girl, Griselda. In time, Griselda gives birth to a daughter and a son. Both babies are taken away from her, with the strong suggestion that they will be put to death. Griselda makes no protest. So Gualtieri tightens the screw. He declares that he needs a noble wife, not a peasant. Stoically, Griselda returns to her father’s house, leaving even her dresses behind, since she feels that they belong to her husband. Soon Gualtieri calls her back, saying that he needs her to oversee the preparations for the wedding. “Gualtieri’s words pierced Griselda’s heart like so many knives,” but she agrees. On the wedding day, a boy and a girl appear whom Griselda does not know. Gualtieri introduces the girl as his bride-to-be. Griselda praises her. Finally, Gualtieri can go on no longer. He tells Griselda that the boy and the girl are her children (he had them brought up by kinfolk in Bologna), and that he is taking Griselda back, more beloved now: “I wanted to teach you how to be a wife”—that is, submissive.

Much more at the link as Acocella reviews a new translation and compares it to other translations.

Also at the top link: much feistier women and much sexier stories. Read the one about the barrel.

Judge reads the local newspaper, gets second thoughts.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports:

A Milwaukee County judge had permitted the rare use of Wisconsin's "Delayed Registration of Marriage" in allowing the man, George Poniewaz, to avoid a charge that he had committed benefits fraud by getting years of health insurance for someone who wasn't his wife. The judge's ruling was issued after the woman died.

But after he read Poniewaz's convoluted back story in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Circuit Judge Kevin Martens, who signed the registration, expressed serious second thoughts....

"Are Unmarried People Bad for the Economy?"

A Gallup-poll-instigated question.

What if young people stopped having sex?

Case study: Japan.

The term is sekkusu shinai shokogun — "celibacy syndrome."

Think it won't happen here or that if it did, it would be good?

Japan's under-40s appear to be losing interest in conventional relationships. Millions aren't even dating, and increasing numbers can't be bothered with sex. For their government, "celibacy syndrome" is part of a looming national catastrophe. Japan already has one of the world's lowest birth rates. Its population of 126 million, which has been shrinking for the past decade, is projected to plunge a further one-third by 2060....

[A relationships counselor has clients] who have taken social withdrawal to a pathological extreme. They are recovering hikikomori ("shut-ins" or recluses) taking the first steps to rejoining the outside world, otaku (geeks), and long-term parasaito shingurus (parasite singles) who have reached their mid-30s without managing to move out of home. (Of the estimated 13 million unmarried people in Japan who currently live with their parents, around three million are over the age of 35.) "A few people can't relate to the opposite sex physically or in any other way. They flinch if I touch them," she says. "Most are men, but I'm starting to see more women."

And these are the people who are seeking counseling. There must be far more who are not going to admit they have a problem.

Well, in fact, is it a problem to live the solitary life? The government — and society — may want you to pair up and form a family unit for the sake of the whole, but for the individual? Perhaps many people are discovering a great truth in living the life of solitude and simplicity.

(Consider: "Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I do.")

Those who portray solitude as a problem may say the individual isn't having a fully dimensional, deeply satisfying life. But that might be the propaganda, and the truth could be that we need to exploit the individual to generate wealth and new human beings so that the group can thrive. If it is not actually a problem for the individual, then those who see and fear the disastrous dysfunction of the group are tasked not only to cure a nonproblem but also to convince individuals to perceive a nonproblem as a problem and to submit to the cure.

Alice Munro wins the Nobel Prize in Literature.

"Alice Munro, the renowned Canadian short-story writer whose visceral work explores the tangled relationships between men and women, small-town existence and the fallibility of memory, won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday. Ms. Munro, 82, is the 13th woman to win the prize."

Is that interesting or exciting? I can't remember if I've ever read anything of hers. Were there stories in The New Yorker back in the 1970s, when it seemed important to read delicately honed observations of what men and women were doing in their relationships? I can't remember if there were or even why it seemed important back then, when it quite obviously isn't doesn't anymore.

Let's see what The New Yorker is saying about this. They're highlighting an interview from 2012:

In your stories, there is often a stigma attached to any girl who attracts attention to herself—individualism, for women, is seen as a shameful impulse....

I was brought up to believe that the worst thing you could do was “call attention to yourself,” or “think you were smart.”...

You’ve written so much about young women who feel trapped in marriage and motherhood and cast around for something more to life....

It wasn’t the housework or the children that dragged me down. I’d done housework all my life. It was the sort of open rule that women who tried to do anything so weird as writing were unseemly and possibly neglectful....

I’m sure this is an irritating question, but do you consider yourself a feminist writer?

I never think about being a feminist writer, but of course I wouldn’t know. I don’t see things all put together in that way. I do think it’s plenty hard to be a man. Think if I’d had to support a family, in those early years of failure?

So I tried to watch the pilot episode of "Breaking Bad."

There's much talk about the final episode of "Breaking Bad," and I've got a houseguest arriving on Sunday who importuned me to set the DVR to record that episode but told me I can't just watch the final episode with him. I've got to watch the whole series from the beginning, which is to say I've got to watch 61 hours of the thing before I can hang out with my newly arrived houseguest watching the show he's so excited about and (not that I care much) everyone in the media seems unable to shut up about.

Attending to the assigned recording task, I see that the network (AMC) is running a marathon of all the old episodes leading up to the big finale, so I set the DVR to lay in the requisite 61 hours. Last night, settling in to watch the new episode of "Project Runway," I see that I accidentally bumped it, what with all the incoming "Breaking Bad" and baseball games. (The DVR can record 3 things at once, but not more.) So I call up the "Pilot" episode of "Breaking Bad."

I turn it off after 22 minutes. Interestingly, 22 minutes is the classic length of a sitcom. Have I got Sitcom Mind? Reading the summary of the "Pilot" episode, I see that some exciting stuff was about to happen. When I turned off the show at 22 minutes, Meade and I had a conversation of untimed length about how perhaps there's a Hollywood plot to disparage ordinary American life through the depiction of the bored, boring, declining, dying white man. It started long ago with "The Honeymooners" — notice the shift to sitcoms — but the man we're invited to look down on has become more and more dull and meaningless until he's fully dehumanized and about to fall off the face of the earth anyway. (The "Breaking Bad" guy learns he's dying of lung cancer.)

If we'd hung on past the sitcom length of time, we'd have seen the police bust a meth lab, and other scenes of cooking up drugs, accidental fires, deadly fumes, sirens, a misfired gun, and a reactivated cock. I'm reading the plot summary out loud to Meade as I try to write this. We get into another conversation about television over the years and what it's done to our notions of masculinity. We're talking about Ralph Kramden and Ricky Ricardo as I dump sesame seeds into the stove-top seed roaster. (I like darkly toasted sesame seeds on cottage cheese for lunch, and Meade has been chiding me about over-toasting them, like sesame seeds are going to cause cancer.) The conversation continues as I follow Meade out to the front door, and it's on and on about "Bewitched" and "Leave It to Beaver" and Red Skelton.

"Remember how Red Skelton used to say 'Thank you for inviting me into your living room'?" I ask, and Meade — picking up the dog leash — remembers and entertains my elaborate theory about TV needing to be different from theater and movies because it comes into your home and how in sitcoms you're mostly sitting in your living room looking into some fictional family's living room, and there's this interchange between the sitcom family and the viewers' family. I bring up the transfusion metaphor from "Atlas Shrugged" that we were talking about a couple days ago. How has the poison — is it poison? — been administered all these years? Why have we kept the channel open? Because it only takes 22 minutes? What subversion of our values has taken place? I go on about Archie Bunker in his chair, which faces the TV....



... and we are on the other side of the TV, in our chairs, looking through at them, as if we are on their TV. What are we doing? Are the women nudged to look over at their men and see them as Edith, above, sees Archie? What has been happening in these 22-minute treatments we've volunteered for all these years?

Meade inquires about the 22 minutes — the time for the show in a 30-minute slot with commercial — and he seems to notice for the first time that the premium cable channels don't have commercials, and I tease him that he's like these sitcom husbands who are never fully clued in. He's off to get Zeus (the dog) to take him for a walk, and I make some wisecrack — like I think I'm in a sitcom — about how he should do well with the dog, since dogs don't even know the difference between the show and the commercial.

Ha ha. Back in the kitchen of my sitcom life, I see — through billows of smoke — that the sesame seeds are on fire.

The mutable sexuality of an internet celebrity.

Antoine Dodson, the hide-you-kids-hide-your-wife viral-video celebrity, has been tweeting about causing a pregnancy in a woman:

"I just became the happiest man alive!! My beautiful Queen and I are having a baby!!" he tweeted. "Wait what?" one user wrote. "Aren't you gay?" another added.

Last May, Dodson claimed he wanted "a wife and family" and "to multiply and raise and love my family that I create." Dodson explained in a series of tweets that he had become a "True Hebrew Israelite descendant of Judah" and referred to his former lifestyle as "foolish."

"I have to renounce myself, I'm no longer into homosexuality," he concluded.

ADDED: He doesn't seem to be denying his homosexual orientation, just rejecting the behavior urged by the orientation, which is exactly what many religions teach. He isn't claiming to be sexually attracted to the woman that he's gotten pregnant. You'd think if he were devoted to following traditional religious teachings he would refrain from pregnancy-causing behavior outside of marriage. Who knows what the whole story is?

There are several moral/religious issues that we can't disentangle in this particular case without knowing more. And I don't really need to know more about Antoine Dodson to go on with the issues raised in a more general fashion:

1. A man's desire to produce offspring is separate from his desire to have sexual intercourse with a particular human being, and many men of homosexual orientation have produced children with women who don't interest them sexually. One reason it's helpful to be honest and not repressed about homosexuality is so that people don't deceive themselves into entering sexually unsatisfying marriages.

2. A homosexual man who wants a family with children might attract a woman into a marriage (or other child-bearing relationship). He could be deceiving himself and her — which is very sad. He could be only deceiving her — which is just plain wrong. Or the 2 of them could be eyes-wide-open about what they are doing, which is, if they really understand what they are doing, a matter of individual choice.

3. It's a separate issue whether that man and woman, having formed a family like that, give each other permission to find sexual satisfaction with other partners. That's not traditional morality, but it is a matter of individual choice.

4. And it's a separate issue whether a man and a woman, having come together to bring a child into the world, must stay together to raise that child. This is the most serious moral issue, because the child isn't given any choice.

"Married cancer patients live longer than single people who have the disease..."

"The study, published in The Journal of Clinical Oncology, found that single patients were 53 percent less likely to receive appropriate therapy than married patients."

The finding suggests that maintaining grueling chemotherapy and radiation schedules and taking medication as prescribed is easier for people who have help from a spouse compared with single people who must manage the logistics of cancer treatment on their own....

Notably, men with cancer showed a greater benefit from marriage than did women. That doesn’t mean husbands are not supportive of wives....

"I haven’t had a cigarette in probably 6 years. That’s because I’m scared of my wife.”

Said Barack Obama, caught in a seemingly candid moment.

I don't believe in the truth of either statement — that he hasn't had a cigarette in about 6 years and that he's scared of his wife — but I don't hear an intent that these remarks be taken as true. I hear an off-the-record interaction with one individual that's about making a friendly connection. There's camaraderie in displaying that he knows something personal about the other man and — since what he knows is that the man has a substance addiction problem — referring to his own parallel weakness.

He doesn't scold or put down the other man, but expresses hope — hope! — that the man has quit smoking and makes the possibly untrue assertion that he hasn't smoked one cigarette in "probably 6 years." This is an encouraging remark, and I think that it was offered in the spirit of encouragement but that Obama also realized that it might sound braggadocious, so he toned it down with the self-deprecating humor about being scared of his wife.

That gives an explanation for not smoking and works as posing that he's an ordinary guy tending to the demands of his wife, even though he is the most powerful man in the world. This is humanizing and a bit silly, and it's a male-bonding moment, containing the implication that wives are demanding and require appeasement.

If you want to mock or criticize Obama here, I think the more sophisticated speculation not that he's revealed he's subservient and pusillanimous, but that this is misogyny or male chauvinism. Obama is using his wife — both as a stereotypical woman and as the caricature of her that we see in the media — to make points with another man. Michelle Obama is not there. It's a remark about her behind her back. She's not named, but called "my wife." And she's scary. He's not actually scared, just tapping an old sexist mindset that makes it possible to laugh at stupid cartoons like this:



And Obama is simultaneously appropriating the anti-Michelle propaganda of his political opponents. He's casually gesturing at the huge pile of mean-spirited scribblings about how she's always nagging everybody about health, all the miscellaneous things scribbled on web pages and illustrated with photos like this:



Feminists and traditionalists alike can chide the man who engages in loose, humorous talk about his wife behind her back.

***

"Honor your marriage; keep it pure by remaining true to your wife in every way."

"Kuwaiti preacher Mubarak al-Bathali ruled recently that marriage depicted on television is considered valid and real."

"His ruling was based on a Muslim hadith, a saying by the Prophet Muhammad."

In this hadith, Muhammad defined three issues as pivotal and serious even if used jokingly: Marriage, divorce, and freeing a slave. "This hadith shows intent has no central part in these three matters," said the preacher, who also ruled that a woman who is married cannot depict a character getting married on television.

"Hail, Hail to Old Purdue!/All hail to our old gold and black!"

"Hail, Hail to Old Purdue!/Our friendship may she never lack/Ever grateful, ever true...."

On a beautiful fall Saturday morning, here in Madison, Wisconsin, the UW marching band can be heard practicing, which includes practicing the opposing team's fight song, and Meade — who grew up in West Lafayette — provides the lyrics, about gold and black and friendship and gratefulness.

I ask Meade if it's okay for me to blog that and he says, "I think you've already done it," which makes me think I'm being accused of posting first and asking permission later, but he really means I've already blogged — in some past year — about his singing along with the UW marching band playing the Purdue song. I go looking into the archives, and find, first, a post from April 2008, which can't be right, because I didn't meet Meade until January 2009, and the post in question shows New York City, where I was living at the time. The post, called "Morning fog update," shows what was my view of Manhattan. Meade arrives in the comments:

Simon said: "How much are you going to miss this view when your year's up?"

Meade said: "Yes, and how much we will miss these morning fog... updates!"

Ann Althouse said: "Great trees in NYC right now, and I'm about to get a new lens, so look out. Also remember that dead rat on the sidewalk in NY?"

There's a gap in the conversation where a commenter expunged her own comments, but apparently she said something that referred (possibly disparagingly) to things that could be photographed in Madison. And Meade says:

Yes! A marching band playing "Hail Purdue!"

And a dead rodent.

With fantasy fog...

...Where the Wabash spreads its valley,
Filled with joy our voices raise...

I find the old dead rat post — "Things that exploded in Brooklyn Heights recently" — where there's a discussion of how to buy a light bulb in NYC and a couple of commenters who never comment here anymore are advising me about shops in town, and there's Meade:

I hate to risk spoiling a New York hardware store bonding moment for you good folks but back where I come from we have universities, seats of great learning -- where women (and a few unnecessary men) go to become great thinkers. And when they come out, they think deep thoughts -- and with no more brains than you have.... But! They have one thing you might not have! A Google!

I resist my future husband:

Thanks, Meade, but I actually have this other really odd halogen bulb to replace. I don't want to mail order it. I want to show it to some hardware store guy who will give me the right bulb.

Meanwhile, Meade responds to a commenter who said "Yes but do you have swarthy olive skinned counterm[e]n to flirt with attractive visiting professors. Telling her how she would light up when the proper bulb is inserted in her socket. So to speak." With the metaphor in play now, Meade writes:

"Yes but do you have..."

Even better. We have links. Lots of links. Links pointing to pages and pages of swarthy olive-skinned counter[people], if that's what you're into.

Disease-free links. Unambiguously gendered links.

("Unambiguously gendered links" refere to another commenter's wisecrack that some NY hardware store employee is "AC/DC.")

Organic free-range links. Links that would never even THINK of stalking fair-haired Professoras and trying to put their bulbs into sockets in which they don't belong. And links that, frankly, just don't have the nerve to ask, "'ey, YOU! Are you clickin' on me?"

Shy unassuming links just busy doing their jobs and quiet[l]y living their linky lives.

The other commenter says: "Yeah, but [can] you get a link drunk and walk her home and talk your way into her main frame?" And Meade says:

No, but if you give a link a nice slow neck rub, draw the link a sudsy warm bath, and serve up some browned baby-back ribs with a glass of Merlot, she just might let you take a look at what's on her laptop.

So to speak.

And here's a post from August 2009, the month we got married, noticing Meade's comments in a July 2008 thread:

Gee, I'm single now, happily single, and thought I'd just remain that way.

But considering all the benefits, I guess I'd really be a fool not to take a close look if Althouse were to, just out of niceness, propose to pity-marry me.

What could I offer in return? Let's see - I could prune those redbuds, take out the garbage, trap squirrels....

I could fetch her newspaper, scrape snow and ice off her car, shovel the front walk. Draw her bath. Pick her up at the airport. Rinse and dry her wine glasses. Form a circle-of-safety to protect her from Hillary Clinton-type madwomen who randomly come up to innocent people on urban sidewalks and punch them in the back. I make excellent salads, grill superb steaks and vegetables. Play a piano sonata. Pick up dry cleaning. Wait patiently while she shops for shoes....

Fry up some bacon... provide the vocal track when the UW marching band plays the Purdue fight song....

ADDED: Meade reads this post and admires his selection — back in April 2008 — of the Purdue song lyric "Where the Wabash spreads its valley/Filled with joy our voices raise." Subtly erotic, he observes now. Less than a year later, I would meet him in that Wabash valley....