"There should be a packaged microwavable snack for women called Hot Handbags."

I said in the comments to the post about the lady named Joy who collects expensive handbags and doesn't know what to say to her "good friend" who "wears" "fake" — i.e., knockoff — bags. I was responding to rhhardin who said "Pockets would be simpler."

To flesh out your understanding, here's Jim Gaffingan, explaining Hot Pockets:



Googling "hot pockets," I came up with a Hollywood report from 3 days ago: "Kate Upton and Snoop Dogg's New Hot Pockets Video Arrives Fully Baked (Video)." Who knew "hot pockets" was something new and trendy? Ever stumble into some weird accidental fashionableness like that?

Two premium meats — Kate Upton and Snoop Dogg —team up for this wildly ludicrous new music video for Hot Pockets, which humorously remixes Biz Markie's 1989 hit single "Just a Friend (You Got What I Need)" as "You Got What I Eat."

I have to spend way too much time reading that article trying to figure out if it's actually an ad for Hot Pockets....

Lines like "I need your hot buttery crust" and "It's my premium meats that make your lips sing a song" are mixed in with lots of marijuana references and psychedelic imagery to produce a crispy finished product that's both fake and flavorful — just like Hot Pockets.

So obviously it's not an ad. No major corporate product — this is Nestlé — wants all that sex-and-drugs crap on their product!

"I love working with the Hot Pockets sandwiches team," Snoop says in a statement. "They let me do what I do and bring the funk out with their message, you know?..."

Oh, okay. So it is an ad. An ad for a product pitched to folks who are... what?... on drugs and needing to use food as their sex substitute?

"I love the premium meats and the buttery seasoned crusts of the new Hot Pockets sandwiches," adds Upton. "I'm excited to hear which side the fans pick in this IRRESISTIBLY HOT™ battle!"

Wait a second. I don't believe Kate Upton up and said that. And did she yell "irresistibly hot"? Did "™" appear in a word balloon over her head?

This was the level of contempt that I brought to the project of watching the ad. So why am I embedding the damned thing here, contributing to virality?



Answer: It's a great ad! It might be the greatest ad ever. 

"I get mail twice a day, once from the mailman and once from the neighbors putting mail in the right boxes."

A wisecrack by rhhardin in such perfect one-liner-joke form that I had to Google to see if it was an old joke, even though it's not believable that rh would copy and paste some comedian's old joke.

But if it were some old comedian's old joke, which old comedian would it be?
	Lenny Bruce
	George Carlin
	Garrison Keillor
	George Burns
	Red Skelton
	Charley Weaver
pollcode.com free polls

"Sometimes they score 1. Sometimes they score 3. And they never explain!"

From rhhardin in yesterday's café: "Armstrong and Getty's sports report on the NBA finals game 1 mp3, by their guy who never watches sports."

"Heh, great stuff, Althouse. Cf. Derrida on Nietzsche's umbrella."

Says Yashu, in the comments on "The word 'umbrella' appears exactly once in Obama's 'Dreams From My Father.'" And that was after I'd read rhhardin, commenting on "Sigmund Freud on the meaning of the umbrella": "Derrida in Spurs on the umbrella that Nietzsche wrote he had forgotten."

I'm spurred to read "Spurs," but "Spurs" is not an ebook, so I'm off the hook. Still, here's some text visible in Google books. Derrida is playing with the the possible meaning(s) of "I have forgotten my umbrella," found (in quotation marks) in Nietzche's unpublished manuscripts. Excerpt:

The umbrella's symbolic figure is well-known, or supposedly so. Take, for example, the hermaphroditic spur of a phallus which is modestly enfolded in its veils, an organ which is at once aggressive and apotropaic, threatening and/or threatened. One doesn't just happen onto an unwonted object of this sort in a sewing-machine on a castration table. 

"Unwonted" is not a typo. Unlike "unwanted," it's not commonly heard/seen. It means: "not commonly heard, seen, practised." So says the OED, which tells us that Charlotte Brontë used "unwonted" in "Jane Eyre": "Difficulties in habituating myself to new rules and unwonted tasks." Are there umbrellas in "Jane Eyre"?

I jumped up, took my muff and umbrella, and hastened into the inn-passage: a man was standing by the open door, and in the lamp-lit street I dimly saw a one-horse conveyance....

The Freudian symbolism is too blatant to need pointing out. The umbrella, the man, and the horse. And the muff, the inn-passage, and the open door. That's more than dimly seen.

"Apotropaic" is also unusual. The OED says it's "Having or reputed to have the power of averting evil influence or ill luck" and gives this earliest example from the 1883 Encyclopedia Brittanica:

The sacrifice of the ‘October horse’ in the Campus Martius..had also a naturalistic and apotropaic character.

Wikipedia says the "October horse was an animal sacrifice to Mars carried out on October 15, coinciding with the end of the agricultural and military campaigning season." There were chariot races and "the right-hand horse of the winning team was transfixed by a spear, then sacrificed." So did the ancient Romans have umbrellas? Yes. They were used by women and "effeminate men." Used against the sun, of course. How much Latin do you need to see the "umbra" in "umbrella" and to know we're talking about shade.

We law folk know "umbra" from the "penumbras" in "specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights [that] have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance," a very glaring phrase written by Justice William O. Douglas, trying to explain how in the lamp-lit street he dimly saw the right of privacy.

But it was really Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. who got that word started in its U.S. law usage, the OED tells us: "The use of the penumbra metaphor in American jurisprudence appears to date from the late 19th cent. and is associated with Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841–1935), legal scholar and Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court."

1873   O. W. Holmes in Amer. Law. Rev. 7 654   It is better to have a line drawn somewhere in the penumbra between darkness and light, than to remain in uncertainty.

I suspect no one will ever Heh-great-stuff-Althouse-Cf. me again. Here I am, writing expectantly, hoping for the circle to finally close, as it did for young Obama, crying over his father's grave, when he realized that the masculine needed to be leavened with femininity and that who he was, what he cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words, and then it started to rain and suddenly his brother Bernard was squatting beside him, sheltering him with a bent-up old umbrella. 

"Are you ready for me to read it?" Meade asks, and I say, "It needs one more thing, and I don't know what it is."

At the Magnolia Café...

... we're getting someplace.

That line makes me remember something from the comments on today's "golden age of blogging" post. I'd said:

A blog should feel like a place. The commenters are in the place, having a conversation.

Twitter is more like a concourse, with everyone running through trying to get somewhere else, and no one is there to be with anyone else. That's what's so off-putting. But if you yourself have to run to make your connection, the concourse will seem like the right way to [go].

Twitter is a concourse. A blog is intercourse.

And rhhardin said:

Derrida's observation was that women don't have a place, they create places.

Feminism went wrong in copying men.

"If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution."

(Choreographies)

"There are not many groups of people that can get a meeting with any senator they want, whenever they want."

"These are smart, articulate people, who don’t have a scintilla of Washington about them... But they virtually cannot be denied a meeting."

Victimhood has its privileges.

IN THE COMMENTS: rhhardin writes: "Mitchell and Webb the victim's opinion story questioned." Great link!

The DC police are investigating the David Gregory incident "to determine if the magazine was in fact real."

Breitbart.com reports (and quotes the criminal statute).

What's to investigate? Here's the "Meet the Press" transcript. Gregory said:

Let's widen the argument out a little bit. So here is a magazine for ammunition that carries 30 bullets. Now isn't it possible that, if we got rid of these, if we replaced them in said, "Well, you could only have a magazine that carries five bullets or ten bullets," isn't it just possible that we can reduce the carnage in a situation like Newtown?

Either he violated the criminal law or he lied. He certainly expected us to believe he held in his hand what he said he held. What made him think he could do that (or appear to do that)? He must think the law doesn't apply to him, or he wouldn't even pretend to break it.

IN THE COMMENTS: rhhardin said:

It seems like a chickenshit complaint, and a chickenshit law.

But Gregory is advocating that, which reaches mostly into humor.

He has to pretend to take seriously what he doesn't take seriously.

"Concealed carry in a gun free zone really makes it safe."

"What are the odds that two people have a gun in a gun free zone? It's the old bombs on an airplane trick. Always pack a bomb in your luggage."

"Psy Makes $8.1 Million By Ignoring Copyright Infringements Of Gangnam Style."

Okay, but $8.1 million isn't that much considering the magnitude of the success of the thing. On the other hand, it's the kind of thing that becomes successful in a system of virality. But that's not the other hand. That's the same hand.

It's that kind of thing. How much more of that kind of thing do you want?

IN THE COMMENTS: rhhardin says: "I'm not tuned in to it all, but I imagined that gangnam style meant wearing dyed cotton fabric."

Since Psy's not policing the copyright, feel free to make a goofy "Gingham Style" parody video. And since the copyright ran out long ago, here's the delightful Eugene Field poem "The Duel" — which, if you remember it, you might think is titled "The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat":

The gingham dog and the calico cat
Side by side on the table sat;
'T was half-past twelve, and (what do you think!)
Nor one nor t' other had slept a wink!
The old Dutch clock and the Chinese plate
Appeared to know as sure as fate
There was going to be a terrible spat.
(I was n't there; I simply state
What was told to me by the Chinese plate!)

The gingham dog went "Bow-wow-wow!"
And the calico cat replied "Mee-ow!"
The air was littered, an hour or so,
With bits of gingham and calico,
While the old Dutch clock in the chimney-place
Up with its hands before its face,
For it always dreaded a family row!
(Now mind: I 'm only telling you
What the old Dutch clock declares is true!)

The Chinese plate looked very blue,
And wailed, "Oh, dear! what shall we do!"
But the gingham dog and the calico cat
Wallowed this way and tumbled that,
Employing every tooth and claw
In the awfullest way you ever saw---
And, oh! how the gingham and calico flew!
(Don't fancy I exaggerate---
I got my news from the Chinese plate!)

Next morning, where the two had sat
They found no trace of dog or cat;
And some folks think unto this day
That burglars stole that pair away!
But the truth about the cat and pup
Is this: they ate each other up!
Now what do you really think of that!
(The old Dutch clock it told me so,
And that is how I came to know.)

And here are many more of Field's "Poems of Childhood." (Try to find a copy with the Maxfield Parrish illustrations.) Did you memorize any of theses poems? I did! I had a beautiful Golden Book collection of children's poems when I was a child, and I memorized many of them, including this one. This was my favorite one. I often ended up reciting these poems around my parents. Even though they were the sort of people who didn't display how delighted they were by children's behavior, I realize now that they must have found these recitals adorable. I had no idea at the time. I just loved the poems and wanted others to hear them. That was virality, circa 1960.