"Without any training or experience, this guy applied for the job, got the job and fooled people for years by just putting on an elaborate show.."

"The fact that he was standing on stage next to a lot of important people put him beyond question in the minds of most people. Those who really understood that what he was saying actually made no sense were ignored. And now we have this South African interpreter doing the same thing."

ADDED: Also about the interpreter, from the same commenter (Bob Boyd):

He wasn't perfect, but his intentions were the very best.
His signs, though meaningless, were nuanced and brilliantly delivered.
He's obviously super smart, he has a palpable emotional connection with the common people and a true understanding of their struggle.

And:

Certainly this man wasn't what we have come to expect, but perhaps its our expectations that we need to examine.
Rather than yield to the demands of convention, this unknown agent of wonder has jarred us out of our complacency and showed us possibilities that only yesterday did not exist. This is the hallmark of a truly great interpreter. We have only to recognize him for what he is.
Do we really need to see things done the way they have always been done? Can we really not move beyond the comfortable, the familiar?
We could ask ourselves.
"What the fuck?"
Or we could ask a question that may bring true understanding.
Let not our efforts on behalf of the deaf make us blind.

"After bitching about and resisting nudging to watch the show, especially in the week leading up to the finale, I started watching one episode at a time."

I blogged on October 22. Last night, we finished it, the entire series, 61 episodes of "Breaking Bad." We were on a tear. We've been immersed in that world for the last 7 weeks.

ADDED: In the comments some people are asking if we liked it. Obviously, we liked it, or we wouldn't have marathon-watched it like that. Now, I'm interested to go back and see what I'd written when I first tried to watch it. Someone had prodded me in the comments about why the main character, Walter White, a school teacher who must have had good health insurance benefits, needed to become a criminal to pay for cancer treatments. I said:

Well, I know the answer to that from watching the first 22 minutes of the first episode.

He's not about trying to get money to pay for treatments. He's an entirely listless, enervated man with nothing to live for, utterly empty and bland and beaten down with no love for anything (except maybe chemistry) and he finds out he's got inoperable lung cancer and at most 2 years to live.

He's so numb about all that the doctor wonders if he even understands. He tells the doctor there's a mustard stain on his jacket. He doesn't inform his wife about the diagnosis.

Then he's at his car wash (moonlighting) job and he's asked again to leave the cash register, which was supposed to be his job, and go out and put that sploogy stuff on the car tires, and he flips out.

He's had it with his bland old life which wasn't worth living even before he was dying. He's energized to go bad. He's finally alive.

This is a classic melodrama plot point: man who is about to die finally learns how to live.

He's been emasculated and suddenly he embraces manhood, which is saying "no" to all the crap he's had to eat, like vegetarian fake-bacon strips that taste like Band-Aids.

It's not about how hard it is to pay for health care. What a boring thing to think about the show!

Am I to believe that the people who love the show have less appreciation for its themes than I derived in 22 minutes before turning it off?

I'm about to scream NOOOOO at all this bullshit and pull the merchandise down off the wall and yell at my boss that I hate his mustache [ACTUALLY: eyebrows].

On which side of the screen is the storied vast wasteland?

And later, I finished the first episode and said:

It confirmed my understanding that Walt's breaking bad was the seizing of life that happened as he faced death.

At one point, he says "I'm alive."

It may be that in later episodes the story was changed to a desire to leave money to his family (or to get his own medical treatments), but I'm here to tell you that is NOT the story presented in the "Pilot."

I maintained that idea of the character throughout the series, and the correctness of my understanding of the first 22 minutes was made clear in the final episode, when Walt put it plainly, explaining himself to his wife: "I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And I was really… I was alive." I was alive… same as in the first episode: I'm alive. 

I can't believe people who liked the show thought they were sort of rooting for a guy to get money for his family. What's the point of watching a made-up story on that subject? "Breaking Bad" was about crazy desperation to find — at the point of dying — what it means to be alive. All that destruction and that wild action — it was a man screaming from the not-yet-closed-grave: I am alive!

From the 7-year-old girl's Christmas list: "A little thing that can turn into anything at anytime."

From "My Kid's Insane Christmas Wish List, Annotated." (Via Metafilter.)

Also on the list: and "A pet puppy. Border collie with a peacesign coller, and a leash" and "1,000 bucks."

The dad's annotations are not as enjoyable as they'd be if he'd resisted appealing to Deadspin readers by using the f-word repeatedly. Not that I don't use that word. Just that he's interacting with the innocent expression of his young daughter, and — even though she's not reading this (not yet, anyway) — it doesn't work to say things like "The fuck is this?" and "Great. Fucking great."

Too bad, because otherwise this is seems to be great material. And maybe I want to take a stronger position on appropriating the sweetness of children for cheap, adult yucks. I know that when I was a young girl, it hurt me to hear adults finding great amusement in what I only understood years later to be how adorable I had been long ago when the concept was quite unknown to me.

IN THE COMMENTS: MadisonMan said...

American Girl Dolls are the perfect Grandmother-to-Granddaughter gift, if you can afford it.

File this information away, Althouse, just in case :) Not sure if you can get them through the althouse portal.

Well, you sure can! Here's Saige, the American Girl Doll of 2013, and here's her border collie, Rembrandt, who comes with a leash. Don't know if it's a peace sign "coller." Seems to me that if the father did a little more poking around in Amazon, he'd have figured out that the child wasn't requesting a real border collie, just an accessory for the Saige doll she wants.

And thanks, again, to all who've been doing your shopping through The Althouse Amazon Portal.

"For Women, a New Look Down Under."

Having just completed a blog post about an article written by an Australian woman, I clicked on that title thinking it's one of those blog-has-a-theme-today days. But "down under" does not refer to a place on the globe. It refers to a place on the anatomy. And the "new look" is flocculent.

Even young porn stars are “bringing the ’80s back,” says Nina Hartley, a doyenne of the scene. Stoya, one of the highest-profile porn actresses of the moment, has also posed for the fashion photographer Steven Klein with grown-out pelvis and armpits. “I’ve had all sorts of pubic hair,” she says. “I’ve been completely bald, I’ve had my entire natural bush grown out, and I usually have an arrangement somewhere in between.”... [T]here’s something refreshingly retro, delightfully expressive and confidently grown-up in getting back to nature. And Courbet’s “L’Origine du Monde”? It now resides at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, where — judging by the sale of postcards — it is one of the most popular paintings of all.

The article — in the NYT — does not provide a link to the Courbet painting, perhaps because it's not fit to print "NSFW" in front of links. So let me point you toward this high-class piece of artwork: here.  The title means — I know it's obvious — "The Origin of the World."

Think Progress sees fit to disparage the statement: "Today we remember Rosa Parks’ bold stand and her role in ending racism."

Can you see why this is worth scoffing at, other than that it's a tweet from the Republican National Committee?

First, you have to be enough of a douchebag to act like you don't see that "ending racism" is a process and that a person might have a role in that process even though that role didn't go so far as to entirely complete the process.

And then you have to think, here on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, that it's worth exploiting Rosa Parks for one more opportunity to bray at Republicans. Over nothing!

Utterly pathetic. Show some respect. (Hey, remember "civility"?)

Let me explain what Richard Cohen, a person of conventional views, meant by "People with conventional views."

I gestured at the Richard Cohen vortex last evening, and I wasn't going to help silly people with their nonproblem, but I woke up feeling a little merciful, so, here, let me help.

As far as I can tell — and I'm guessing because I don't see the value of looking too long into chaos — the younger generation just doesn't read the word "conventional" the same way we oldies do. (I'm 62, and Cohen is 72.) The sentence that got him in trouble with the sensitive youths of America was:

People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children.

I suspect that Cohen thought he'd found a cute and clever way to kick conservatives and had zero reason to think that his readers would do anything other than assume that he was kicking conservatives, since that's what liberals always do. I have a hard time understanding why anyone would think that old Cohen would do anything other than state a... conventional view.

Okay. See what I did? I used "conventional" in the pejorative way that oldies do. I happen to like to kick liberals, mostly because they think so damned well of themselves and I find that tedious and cloying.

Richard Cohen — the one we're talking about here (i.e., not my ex-husband) — is the sort of liberal who says the usual things that liberals say. It's quite dull. Why would he suddenly be anything else? To me, he is conventional, a conventional liberal, and older folks think we're sticking in the dagger when we call people "conventional."

But when Cohen (complacently, predictably liberal) said "conventional views," he didn't mean liberals, even though liberals (including, notably, him) are quite conventional. He meant those other guys — the bad guys — and he had no idea that anyone could think of him as anything other than one of the good guys — the liberals — because that's how conventional he was!

Now, I will close the door on these boring people and let them fight amongst themselves. I hope they benefit from the exercise and emerge from it with more vigor and discernment.

"This is unbelievable, but the fruit fly G tridens has somehow evolved to have what looks like pictures of ants on its wings."

"Seriously, its transparent wings have an ant design on them complete with 'six legs, two antennae, a head, thorax and tapered abdomen.' It's nature's evolutionary art painted on a fly's wings."



Wow! Awesome! It was even in the New York Times! Evolution, baby! What can't it do?!

Well, it didn't do that, but it did produce a human mind capable of settling down after viewing something awesome and figuring out what we're really looking at:

Returning to the viral ant-winged photo, it would appear that the fly is supinating its wings (twisting the wing 90° and pressing forwards to display patterns), which can occur both when a species is pretending they’re a threatening spider as well as in species with courtship wing displays, which doesn’t help us decide what’s going on — is there a female just off camera that’s being courted, or is the fly threatened by the giant camera lens in its face? However, if you look closely at the photo you can see that the middle and hind legs are actually curled up under the body and the fore legs are not resting in a natural position at all — they look more like a ballerina en pointe, with the last leg segments curled and with the tops of the “feet” (the tarsomeres) resting on the surface of the substrate — which leads me to believe the fly in the photo may be dead, or at least heavily compromised, and not actively displaying its wings at all!

Putting everything together, it leads me to believe we may be choosing to see ants where they don’t actually exist.

So what's really awesome is the entomology grad student Morgan D. Jackson and not the fruit fly... or The New York Times.

Or would you have been happier if the story of a fruit fly with ant wings had really been true?

From "Change" to "Exchange" — the deflation of Obama elation and how can old enthusiasts find comfort.

Surely, it must be happening, an emergent Obama nostalgia, to take the edge off the dreariness of what the Obama administration has become. There must be those who, seeking solace, are looking back to old comforts like Obama Girl:



Let's close in on that 4th verse:

You’re into border security
Let’s break this border between you and me
Universal healthcare reform
It makes me warm
You tell the truth unlike the right
You can love but you can fight
You can Barack me tonight
I’ve got a crush on Obama

Oh, it's so hard to keep nostalgia pure. Can you watch — and by "you," I mean only those who have loved Obama — and not talk back? Universal healthcare reform/It makes me warm. Yeah, "warm" as in: overheated with anger. You tell the truth unlike the right... Yeah, that's true if you read it the right way. It could mean that all politicians talk at us in a manner that is intended to be received as "truth-telling," that contains elements of truth, exaggeration, and falsehood, and that there are different ways to perform this necessary political activity, and the politicians on the right do it one way, and the way Obama does it is a different way.

"Europeans are endlessly inventive when it comes to radiator design. Why are Americans lagging behind?"

Questions asked in a NYT article illustrated by 2 photographs: an atrocious, "creative" Euro design and a beautiful, classic American radiator.

A nice example of the misguided Europe-does-it-better meme.

And that atrocious Euro-radiators — "life-size animal sculptures... draped... in skins... a red deer, a ram and an arctic fox" — cost $7,700 to $11,600. And we're told they are electric, so it seems to me they correspond to what Americans would call a space heater. (If you're wondering about all that fur, I believe NYT is generally pro-fur, so this article may be an under-the-radar service to its fur advertisers.)

Also available from European designers are...

... dozens of conversation starters, radiators that resemble a forest grove, a paper clip, a garden hose that uncoils and snakes around a room, and even a wall-hung homage to an artistic masterpiece. Hotech, an Italian radiator company, has a collection with names like Chagall and Fabergé. Its David model is a beefy male torso.

Wall-hung. That's wall-hung. Don't let the the snaking hose and the beefy male torso cause you to misread. And we've all seen David naked, so form your own opinion.

Have I started a conversation yet? Well, do you have any "conversation starters" in the interior decoration of your house? What kind of conversations do they start? 

ADDED: There's also a slideshow, here, so you can see what the hose and the torso, etc. look like. I was using my imagination, and I'm sad to report that David has no discernible genitalia.

I'm having trouble reading Ana Marie Cox's "Dear Senate women: grow up and don't pass Hillary Clinton 'secret notes.'"

I don't know. Maybe it's because she's writing in The Guardian now. This could be some British way of writing that just can't make it into my American mind. Anyway, Cox — going on about a letter 17 female Senators wrote to Hillary Clinton urging her to run for President — is working with the premise that "male representatives are boys and women are the grown-ups." That premise is not the part I'm having trouble with. I understand it. I understand it as: Feminism-as-sexism is funny; come on, give us a little room to get in some harmless girly slaps after all the millennia of suffering.

But let's move on. Cox writes:

No one in the media has seen the letter, so I guess it's possible that it contains some kind of burn-book-level intel: Jeff Session (Alabama Republican senator) is a grotsy little byotch, Lindsay Graham (South Carolina Republican senator) made out with a hot dog, Ted Cruz (Tea Party Texan) is almost too conservative to be anything but a robot. 

"Grotsy" isn't even in Urban Dictionary, but I understand it. It's like "grotty," which was understandable as a variation of grotesque when the British comedian George Harrison said it in "Hard Day's Night." Grotsy is as understandable as ugsly.

(Maybe the "s" absconded from "Sessions," which she has as "Session.") [ADDED: Commenters say it should be "grotsky," and the phrase "grotsky little byotch" is from "Mean Girls."]

I understand the rest of those insults and why it's funny to just make up insults about Republicans to pad out a column and why — when you're talking about Republicans — it's okay to apply the mustard of homophobia. That's all well within the rules of American political humor.

Cox concedes that it's completely boring that a bunch of female Democrats support a Hillary candidacy. So what's to talk about? The fact that it was secret. A letter with nothing interesting to say was nevertheless written and revealed to have been written but we still can't see the text even though the text is presumably uninteresting. Well, there's your reason right there for not revealing the text. It's thuddingly dull. Cox says:

There's not much reason to make your support for something political private....

Which is why the existence of the letter and its gist was revealed. Cox concedes this as well: The secrecy label was "less about keeping the support in the note secret than making the support note-worthy." I won't get tripped up by that hyphen. That must be how they write "noteworthy" in the U.K.

So the letter functioned, dully, to give a teensy bounce to the Hillary for President beachball that no one feels like playing with right now. So what's to say? Here's where we get to the part of Cox's column that I found so hard to read:

Hillary... knows a thing or two about "inevitability", and what she knows is not likely to make her more excited to suffer through a fourth presidential campaign (I think we can safely say what she went through during Bill's campaigns counts as suffering). 

What? Hillary doesn't want to run? Excited to suffer? The meaning of suffering? There's just enough of a frisson of masochism in that to make me notice the absence of sex, which sets me off for this:

One of the maddening things about covering the Clintons is Bill's love of the dramatic reveal, the tension-filled lead-up...

Now you've got me thinking about the time "Bill Clinton Finally Just Show[ed] America His Penis."

Excuse the expression: back to Cox:

Bill Clinton is called the "The Big Dog", but he's really a tomcat (in more ways than one) – he likes to toy with his victims. He likes to play hard-to-get, though in the ends, he's almost always gotten. 

In the ends.... More Brit-talk? Does that mean the same as "in the end." The ends? Is that like the way there's an "s" on "buttocks"? (Is it the "s" that absconded from "Sessions"?)

I don't know what I'm supposed to think about here. Bill Clinton likes to play hard to get? That's not how Juanita Broaddrick describes it.

Based on that, journalists have determinedly disregarded any indication that Hillary's ambivalence is genuine. 

But Hillary is not Bill. Games are for boys; I don't think this is a game for her.

All right. I've settled down. I guess there was no call to think about sex. No sex, please, we're British. Cox was just trying to say that Bill Clinton is good at toying with us politically, so if he were to act ambivalent, it would be theater. Is Cox saying that because Hillary isn't good at that kind of theater, somehow she might actually be sincere in her ambivalence? Most of us are just ignoring the lady's coyness. We already know what she wants. If she can't do coyness as prettily as Bill, that's a reason not to look at the insipid show.

Maybe Cox is just saying the thing that is too boring to write about: We already know that Hillary is running for President. And: Just say it! Cox gets back to her feminism-as-sexism with that last line, which is trying so hard to be a zinger: "Games are for boys; I don't think this is a game for her." Games — plural — are for boys, and this particular game — the teasing roll-out of a candidacy — is not for her. If games are for boys and Hillary is not a boy, then no games are for her. To specify that one game is not for her is to imply that she is a boy. I'm just talking about logic here, not saying that's where Cox meant to go.

Cox apparently meant to end where she began: The premise that female politicians are the adults. But the evidence is that the females have acted like children, so what are you going to do? Cox tells them to stop acting like men, because men are childish. But they're all childish! They're all acting like politicians! Cox should only be able to say wouldn't it be nice if only the males behaved like children, and then you could say the males are children and the females are grown-ups?

Really, all you can say is that they're all politicians, acting like politicians, and some are better at playing politics than others, and — clearly! — Bill is better than Hillary. Therefore: Hillary should keep it simple. Noted. In my note-book of things that are just barely note-worthy.

"Why is your logo a pair of Y Fronts?"

"I had never heard of Y-Fronts, so I wrote it off and scrolled right past. But they kept coming…"

I got there from here: "A data company turns an unusual branding issue into a case study: does its logo looks like a pair of men’s underpants?"

ADDED: What's worse making your logo accidentally look like men's underpants? Making it accidentally look like the contents of men's underpants. I first blogged that link back in 2005, when we laughed until we cried.

Ted Cruz reading "Green Eggs and Ham" in its entirety and "Atlas Shrugged" — just parts — from the Senate floor.

Here he is, reading "Green Eggs and Ham" last night at 8 — to us and to his 2 daughters, whose bedtime it was:



I play it, and we talk about how Obama could use that: Try it, try it, try Obamacare and you may see. You may like it. And then when we try it — if we're like the character in the Dr. Seuss book — when we finally try it, we actually do like it. Ah, but in the book, it's not saying try green eggs and ham and once you do, the only thing that you'll ever be able to eat is green eggs and ham from here on in and whether you like it or not.

No, no, that's not the proper comparison. Yes, Obamacare will go into effect, but it can be changed. It can be tweaked. We can drizzle some food dye over the eggs or take away the eggs altogether and just have ham. The ham's not green. Or is it? The text is ambiguous: green eggs and ham.

Let's see those illustrations again. Cruz did not hold up the book and let us see the pictures. No, no, you can't see whether the ham is green until you've tried it and it becomes the only thing on the menu from here on in. We have to pass the bill to find out what's in it. You have to eat the eggs and ham to find out if they're any good, and yes, you know that the eggs are green, but is the ham green too?

I hope you understand that paragraph. That's me, riffing, after a good night's sleep. I activate the live feed and there's Cruz, fully chipper, structured, and lucid, after more than 17 hours. He's not logy and ranting like Jimmy Stewart in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," which — hello? — was a movie, so the struggle of the filibustering Senator needed to feel expansively dramatic. The actor had to demonstrate his range, show his chops, have an opportunity to go big and even — if he's good enough, and Stewart was — give us a taste of the ham. But the acting required of Cruz is to act like he's exactly the same as he was at the point when he started. There's no narrative arc. This is real life. This is not fiction. This is the truth.

And Cruz is talking about truth, I hear, as I activate the live feed on my iPhone (and I'm still in bed, having slept more than 8 hours). Cruz is talking about Ayn Rand, I figure out after a few lazy moments of assuming his references to "Rand" were about Rand Paul.

Cruz is reading and doing commentary on passages from "Atlas Shrugged." One is this:

There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromise is the transmitting rubber tube. 

It's nearly 8 o'clock, and I need to get going. I resist the rejection of moderation. I myself am a moderate. A moderate with a good night's sleep. I'm aroused by Ayn Rand's condemnation of "the man in the middle." I need to do some blogging. That's my part, and I've been doing it, in an unbroken string of days for nearly 10 years — unbroken in the sense of each and every day, but I haven't been typing nonstop as Ted Cruz has been talking nonstop. "Man in the middle" is a phrase that feels like a call to action, because it's a phrase Meade and I have used when we talk about a man we saw as a hero for sitting down in the middle of the Wisconsin Capitol rotunda, in a crowd of sign-carrying, noisy partisan protesters, inviting them to speak, one-on-one, with someone who was not in agreement with the crowd. It looked like this:



At the time — it was March 2011 — I said:

I started to imagine Wisconsinites coming back to the building every day, talking about everything, on and on, indefinitely into the future. That man who decided to hold dialogues in the center of the rotunda is a courageous man. But it isn't that hard to be as courageous as he was. In the long run, it's easier to do that than to spend your life intimidated and repressed. That man was showing us how to be free. He was there today, but you — and you and you! — could be there tomorrow, standing your ground, inviting people to talk to you, listening and going back and forth, for the sheer demonstration of the power of human dialogue and the preservation of freedom.

Talking, indefinitely into the future... in the middle of a government building. That's what Ted Cruz is doing, but not in the moderate, surely-we-all-can-get-along mode. He's on one side, and he's reviling anyone in the middle. He's reading from Ayn Rand, saying that the moderate is evil, because the moderate is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist.

***

In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. Oh? But would you like it it in a box? Would you like it with a fox? Would you like it in a house? Would you like it with a mouse?

"Without the sign, without the context, I definitely look like someone who is a bit insane."

"That’s how I thought of it, before I clicked to look at the hundreds of replies; I figured people were probably wondering why I would bring my typewriter to a park."

And when I started reading the comments, I saw most people had already decided that I would bring my typewriter to the park because I'm a “fucking hipster.” Someone with the user handle “S2011” summed up the thoughts of the hive mind in 7 words: “Get the fuck out of my city.”...

There were hundreds more. A few people were my staunch defenders, asking the more trenchant commenters why they cared so much. Others started to wax nostalgic about their own typewriters. But the overwhelming negativity towards me, and the “hipster scum” I represented, was enough to make me get up from my computer, my heart racing, my hands shaking with adrenaline....

"Optimism: trend alert?"

NY Daily News caption from its Fashion Week coverage under a photograph of a Kate Spade bag that — I am not kidding — looks like this:



That may represent a trend, but it is not optimism. It's painful sarcasm and hopelessness about a lost past that wasn't even any good anyway.

That bag, with the burlap fabric and "homemade" childish embroidery, references the early 1960s. (I remember those idiotically cheerful bags ladies carried on the boardwalk.) Perhaps the Kate Spade operation is alluding to the 50-year retrospective on the ultimate crushing of hope that is descending upon us this fall, the Kennedy assassination.

If you're medicated, you might look at that bag and see optimism. Do you complete the sentence to make lemonade? Those words don't appear on the bag (not on that side anyway). Face it: This burlap monstrosity is intended to make you feel bad. Life sucks. Suck a lemon.

Perseverating about shoes before 7 a.m.

Woken by a phone call from the demonic "Blocked," I make coffee at 6 a.m. and sit down to approve the comments that collected in my "awaiting moderation" folder overnight. Somehow that sets me off to writing 5 comments in the thread about shoes. The coffee kicked in spiked by the false sunrise and the poetry it inspired and I got myself retracked onto the front page, where, looking back now, I feel like the blog has a theme today. It's something like: We're always only seeing things from our own point of view. (Dylan lyric: "We always did feel the same/We just saw it from a different point of view.")

So what did I say — about shoes?? — before sanity kicked in at 7? Highlights from the comments:

... there are things you feel you need to do in NYC that you look almost foolish doing around here. I see some young women around campus mincing about on heels when no one else is. There isn't one man around who is dressed to go with that. It's as if she's on her way to a party that exists only in her mind....

Take a good look at yourself in the mirror when you've got your shorts on. Ask yourself if I were a woman, would I fuck me? (The question, put that way, assumes you are not a gay man. If you are a gay man, you don't need advice from me on how you look to other men.)....

I'm vulnerable to the criticism that I've promoted women's shoes that are like little girl shoes and that's inconsistent with saying shorts infantilize men. I'm treading -- in Mary Janes -- on dangerous ground!

Those shoe comments reveal that...
	Althouse should be permitted to wake up naturally.
	The comments section is a good place to hide the crazy.
	Early morning Althouse belongs on the front page and should happen more often.
	Althouse needs to resist defending her posts from whatever the hell gets dropped in the comments.
	There really are some serious issues about sex and shoes that demand exploration.
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In search of war protest.

Today at the Wisconsin Capitol Square. The protest singers are there, doing their version of "O Mary, don't you weep, don't you mourn/O Mary, don't you weep, don't you mourn/Pharaoh's army got drowned/O Mary, don't you weep...."

Bill de Blasio — with the help of Maureen Dowd and her untrustworthy tape recorder — hands Christine Quinn the gay card and she plays it...

... for all it's worth:

“I have a family. In my apartment, my wife and I, we’re a family,” she said, her voice cracking slightly. “Our 10 nieces and nephews and grand nieces and nephews, we’re a family. My father and I, Kim’s dad. we’re a family. When I took care of my mother when she was dying, that’s a family. Kim and I lost our mothers. People make personal decision, for medical reasons, all kinds of reasons, that go into why people do and don’t have children. And no one should comment about that and make it a political issue.”

Here's the background, in case you haven't been keeping up. Quinn and de Blasio are running for Mayor of NYC. Quinn is a childless lesbian. De Blasio's wife, Chirlane McCray, said something to Maureen Dowd that Dowd transcribed as a statement that Quinn is "not the kind of person I feel I can go up to and talk to about issues like taking care of children at a young age and paid sick leave."

Quinn jumped on that, de Blasio said his wife was misquoted, and Dowd's column was corrected, and the NYT revealed McCray's full quote, which came in response to Dowd's question why Quinn "was not rallying women." McCray said:

"Well, I’m a woman, and she’s not speaking to the issues that I care about, and I think a lot of women feel the same way. I don’t see her speaking to the concerns of women who have to take care of children at a young age or send them to school and after school, paid sick days, issues in the workplace — she’s not speaking to any of those issues. What can I say? And she’s not accessible, she’s not the kind of person that I feel that I can go up and talk to and have a conversation with about those things, and I suspect that other women feel the same thing that I’m feeling."

So McCray's point was that Quinn isn't speaking the right way, not that her being lesbian makes her not the kind of person who can relate to women with children. Maybe McCray was cleverly creating an occasion for people to think that, but she didn't say it.

And now, wait. I'm just now seeing Dowd's next paragraph, and it shatters the mental image I'd had of McCray:

Last spring, McCray did an interview with Essence magazine about her feelings about being a black lesbian who fell in love with a white heterosexual, back in 1991, when she worked for the New York Commission on Human Rights and wore African clothing and a nose ring and he was an aide to then-Mayor David Dinkins. With her husband, she was also interviewed by the press in December and was asked if she was no longer a lesbian, and she answered ambiguously: “I am married. I have two children. Sexuality is a fluid thing, and it’s personal. I don’t even understand the question, quite frankly.”

Whoa! Why isn't this the part of Dowd's column that's getting more attention?

Dowd goes on to talk about how Quinn has been "unable to get traction, even with women, despite talking more freely about the historical nature of her bid to become the first woman and lesbian to be mayor." Good. People shouldn't vote just to rack up another first.

NYC had a gay mayor in Ed Koch — right? He won in 1977, when his sexuality was known well enough that there were posters reading "Vote for Cuomo, Not the Homo." He said in a 1989 interview: "I happen to believe that there's nothing wrong with homosexuality. It's whatever God made you. It happens that I'm a heterosexual."

So it's great if people find Quinn boring despite her firstiness. Dowd — either craftily or bumbling — found a way to make her interesting, and Quinn is displaying some political skill, exploiting what is exploitable.

Young Cory Booker — groping women or appeasing women?

The Daily Caller, apparently hungry to make Cory Booker look bad, has an article with the headline "In college column, Cory Booker revealed time he groped friend, and she resisted." I think we're supposed to find it significant that when he was 15 and making out with a willing partner, on a bed, he put his hand on her breast and she rejected the move. This is nothing, of course, but it's something not because he "groped" a girl, but because he used the incident, years later, to score with women.

He was at Stanford, in peak feminist times — post-Anita Hill, pre-Monica Lewinsky — and the column was titled "So Much for Stealing Second." In the manner of the time, he told his "own personal story" to "make a point" and "make people think":

“When grandiose statements entrenched in politically correct terminology are made, many may listen but few will hear,” Booker continued. “When I hesitated in writing this column, I realized I was basking in hypocrisy. So instead I chose to write and risk.”

Booker the 15-year-old may have been awkward, but Booker the college student is slick, speaking to his female peers the way they wanted. Eschew abstractions and grandiosity. Confess your male transgressions. Within the 1992 feminist environment, getting personal — "risking" — was the inroad to favor. He expresses regret about his susceptibility to "messages that sex was a game, a competition," and he'd seen getting the hand onto the breast as reaching "second base." Ironically, he was still trying to score with women, this time the college women, and admitting that he thought of sex as a game was a way to compete in the new game.

The Daily Caller writer, Charles C. Johnson, was probably a child when Booker wrote that column. Johnson doesn't seem to understand the context at all. Or maybe he understands and he's just shamelessly appropriating this material to launch the rumor that Booker is a sex offender. Is Johnson dumb or malicious? The result is malicious, but I suspect Johnson is dumb, because look at this:

"After having my hand pushed away once, I reached my ‘mark,’” Booker wrote.

Booker didn’t elaborate on what his “mark” was, but whatever happened, it was enough to haunt him for years to come.

His "mark" was obviously the breast. The column is titled "So Much for Stealing Second." I know these kids today have relabeled the bases, but how can you not understand what "mark" means in that context? Or does Johnson understand but maliciously intend to insinuate that Booker reached some other part of the woman? Clue to Johnson: Third base was fondling the genitals, and to get the penis into the vagina was to reach home.

I got to Johnson's nonsense via Instapundit who teased it with "Reverse the sexes and there's no story here." But there is no story here! Instapundit quotes 2 sentences of Johnson's and repeats the words "groped" and "grabbed" to refer to what the 15-year-old did to the girl's breast. But Booker writes of a very slow and gentle move of a hand toward the breast of a female who had intruded on him with "an overwhelming kiss" when he'd offered her a hug at midnight on New Year's Eve. So actually, the sexes were reversed, and Instapundit — in the midst of his sarcasm about how we overlook female sexual aggression — overlooked female sexual aggression.

If anyone was assaulted, it was Booker: "As the ball dropped, I leaned over to hug a friend and she met me instead with an overwhelming kiss." Then: "As we fumbled upon the bed, I remember debating my next 'move' as if it were a chess game." He was 15, fumbling, and thinking about chess. How old was she? How did they get to that bed? Booker was using what he had to make his feminist points to Stanford women in 1992. He had nothing, but he made something out of nothing for rhetorical purposes to lecture college men about how they ought to behave toward women.

If he did anything wrong, it's that he sought so earnestly to please women, adapting to the preferences they seemed to express, first, by trying to perform appropriately for the woman who imposed "an overwhelming kiss" on him and, then, by trying to talk the talk of the college feminists.

"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.

Rachel Jeantel made it sound like Travon Martin profiled George Zimmerman... or... what is a "creepy ass cracker"?

TalkLeft describes "a train wreck" witness:

She said (on direct exam no less by the prosecutor) that shortly after first spotting Zimmerman, Martin described Zimmerman to her as a "Creepy-a*s Cracker" and later, described Zimmerman a few times as "this ni*ga" (as in this ni*ga following him.) The two minute clip above is of Rachel and the prosecutor repeating creepy a*s cracker over and over as the court reporter struggles to make out what she's saying, Rachel explaining that creepy as* cracker means a white person, then and expressing concern the creepy guy might be a rapist.

So "cracker" is a way of saying white guy, but "ni*ga" is apparently just a way to say guy? I can understand that, but I'd like to ask a few questions — out of curiosity. I'm not saying the defense lawyer should ask this on cross-examination. (Which should make for some interesting TV today.) I'd like to know whether perhaps Trayvon Martin perceived Zimmerman as a person of color and not a white man at all. You assume that there's no way he'd say "cracker" if he didn't see him as white? But he didn't say "cracker." He said "creepy ass cracker." I understand the use of "ass" as an intensifier connected to the adjective "creepy." Creepy-ass cracker, as in very creepy cracker.

But "ass" could go with "cracker" — "ass-cracker." The conversation continued, according to Jeantel: "So... he told me the man was looking at him, so I had to think it might have been a rapist."

Why rapist? A man raping a man? How common is that as a fear? But it was the first thing Jeantel thought to say after he said creepy-ass cracker/creepy ass-cracker. The term "ass cracker" could easily mean a man who rapes a man, especially one who goes after a teenaged boy.

Urban Dictionary has some definitions of "ass cracker" that predate this trial:

1. ass cracker...
One who not knowing the code or combination to a particular slice of ass is nonetheless able to get inside the ass...

2. Ass Cracker...
One who engages in anal sex.
That wanker is an ass cracker.

3. Ass Cracker...
A term used to describe a man with a large enough penis, to brake the anus of the woman or man he is having anal intercourse with.
"Damn, his's cock is so big, he is definatly an ass cracker!"

The word "creepy" makes special sense if you reinterpret the "ass" to go with "cracker." Martin said a man was following him, looking at him. He might have thought Zimmerman was a man out looking for sex and was watching him for that reason. What conversations had Martin had in the past with Jeantel about worries of this kind. She "had to think it might have been a rapist."

TalkLeft says:

She describes how Martin was "right by his father's house" after he lost Zimmerman, and refused to run home. I think he had plenty of time to go home, he obviously chose not to....

Why didn't Martin take Jeantel's advice and run home? The rapist/ass-cracker theory makes sense of Martin's decision to go after Zimmerman. If he saw Zimmerman as a sexual predator, he might think confrontation was a good idea or even an important step: These creeps in the neighborhood need to know that I'm not their prey. It's not enough to run inside daddy's house. My manhood must be established here and now or I can't walk free around here anymore.