Insurance company insider says Obama's IYLYPYCKYP fix "doesn’t change anything other than force insurers to be the political flack jackets for the administration."

As quoted by Evan McMorris-Santoro at BuzzFeed and repeated in the headline.

What the hell is a "flack jacket"? A jacket to keep flacks away?

Perhaps he meant "flak jacket," I don't know. The flacks really have been annoying lately.

"Have you saddled your child with a name that needs constant spelling-out?"

Asks Elizabeth Scalia, and I wonder what name does not need constant spelling out? My older son is named John, a very common name, and yet earnest educated people never assume it's not Jon, and some even expand the name to Jonathan, which feels like a rebuke — as if we should have chosen something fancier.

And you'd be surprised how often younger folks would spell John "Jhon." I assumed that was a combination of 3 things that they did know: 1. "John" contains an H, 2. There are very few English words with an HN combination, 3. Many common English words begin with a consonant followed by an H (e.g., the, she, child, ghost, phone, rhyme, who).

And, look, it's Jhonny Peralta, playing for the Detroit Tigers in the American League Championship Series. What's that Jh about? Is that the way to keep the Spanish last name from causing people to pronounce "John" as "Hone"?

"It's weird, I know," Peralta said. "My father spelled it that way in the Dominican (Republic). A lot of people actually spell the name that way in the Dominican. When I first came up to the Indians, fans would shout, 'Hey, JAY-honny!' It's not a problem. It's OK however people say it."

That's a relaxed attitude, and who's to say where that relaxed attitude came from? Perhaps having a name that needs constant spelling out causes a person to grow in patience and understanding over the years.

And I say that as a woman with the simplest common girl's name that must constantly be spelled out.

For the annals of religion and violence: Did Buddhism inspire Aaron Alexis, the Navy Yard shooter?

WaPo has an article with the headline "Buddist community ponders apparent link between their faith and Navy Yard shooter." (Ponder that egregious spelling error.)

“As Buddhism has spread in the West, it has put forth and maintained an image of being a peaceful religion,” Buddhist ethicist Justin Whitaker, author of the American Buddhist Perspective blog, wrote Tuesday. “This is a myth.”

Buddhism can seem particularly appealing to “mentally unbalanced people seeking to right the ship of their lives, to self-medicate, to curb their impulses, or to give them a firmer grip on reality,” Clark Strand, a contributing editor to the Buddhist publication Tricycle magazine and a former Zen monk, said in an interview....

Are there particular issues for people who delve deeply into meditation but may not have a strong or well-developed connection to Buddhism’s history and theology?

“Meditation alone may have no effect whatsoever on one’s morals and hence overall life,” Whitaker wrote in the blog post. “And it might also, as many people find out early in the process, actually open up deeper layers of pain, anger, and guilt that have been effectively repressed.”

What Whitaker and Strand are not saying is that meditation could exacerbate the problems of someone with mental illness. We're talking about sitting silently within one's own mind, cutting off interaction with others and connections to the concrete world. If that meditating mind is irrational and disordered, why would the result be "a firmer grip on reality"?

"In 2011, a team of scientific researchers concluded that the song was the catchiest song in the history of pop music."

"Dr. Daniel Mullensiefen said of the study, 'Every musical hit is reliant on maths, science, engineering and technology; from the physics and frequencies of sound that determine pitch and harmony, to the hi-tech digital processors and synthesisers which can add effects to make a song more catchy. We’ve discovered that there’s a science behind the sing-along and a special combination of neuroscience, maths and cognitive psychology can produce the elusive elixir of the perfect sing-along song.'"

Yeah, some Brit said it, with British spellings in his speech balloons, but nevertheless maybe he's right. Before clicking — here — guess what song he was talking about.

Speaking of speech balloons and things learned while clicking around in Wikipedia, here's an early precursor to the speech balloon:

Spelling...

... rage.

"The four spellers before you receive 'quandary,' 'ethanol,' 'brigadier' and 'chary.'"

"Then you're asked to spell ahn-uh-MASS-tuh-kon, 'a collection or listing of words especially in a specialized field.' Yeah, life's not fair sometimes."

A Madison, WI proposal to authorize community street painting projects to "bring people together."

We're not talking about water soluble paint, but permanent paint jobs, the equivalent of murals, but on the horizontal surface that cars drive on. The alderwoman who proposes the new ordinance — Marsha Rummel — got the idea from Portland, Oregon, "where community members paint an intersection to give it a sense of place and create a public square."

There would be a permit process, including a petition "indicating approval from at least 60 percent residents, businesses and non-residential properties within a 200-foot radius of the proposed location"  and "assurances for the city that hold the design's applicant responsible for maintenance of the painting and requires them to have insurance." (I'm quoting the Cap Times article, not the ordinance, so I don't know whom to blame for the irritating ambiguity.)

"You can't just say you want to come in and do this. It needs to be maintained over time. Paint fades. It needs to be repainted from time to time, just as we go and repaint traffic lines," said Arthur Ross, the city's pedestrian-bicycle coordinator.

Which is why it's obviously a terrible idea.

"What it really is is a community building activity. It gets people out of their houses and working on something together," Ross said.

And what about when it breaks them apart because it's ugly, it makes the neighborhood look trashy, and it's not properly maintained.  I loathe these government dreams of bringing people together. Leave us alone! I know it's Madison, but people have their own private ways of getting together.

Here's Wisconsin State Journal columnist Chris Rickert mocking the proposal by stressing the provision that forbids "text, numerals, symbols, overt messages or any images designed to convey a message of any kind." Obviously, this provision is needed to avoid making street painting a public forum incurring First Amendment protection from viewpoint discrimination. Rickert jokes that in his neighborhood pretty much everyone hates Governor Scott Walker: "In my ’hood, liberal politics are a building block of community, a distaste for Walker one of the glues that hold residents together," so the things his neighbors would get enthused about painting on the street will be rejected. What if Madison risked permitting messages and accepted the legal proscription on viewpoint discrimination?

Residents could get their Wisconsin-shaped fists and [Obama] “Hope” images, for example, but would have to accept the risk — albeit a small one — of getting portraits of the governor and Ronald Reagan, too.

No doubt the latter would play havoc with traffic in my neighborhood, where drivers would surely wonder just where they made a wrong turn and how they got so horribly lost.

Long-time Madison politico Stu Levitan — in a thread on the Isthmus forum titled "Why does Rickert even bother?" — acts like no one can tell what Rickert actually thinks and accuses Rickert of not even knowing what he thinks. Here's what I think: If you want to make fun of lefties and actually hurt their feelings, you have to use your sledgehammer!

***

Meade frequently comments over at the Isthmus, and I can't tell you how many times the cocooned lefties there simply cannot understand his gentle verbal comedy. For example, here's a blog post written by former Madison mayor Dave Cieslewicz, who's writing about bicycling without coming to a full stop at stop signs:

To be clear I wasn't promoting the flauting of the law. I was being honest about what most bikers do at a quiet intersection. Let those drivers who have never exceeded the speed limit cast the first stone.

Meade comments:

I see Dave has now become Jesus on a Bicycle.

Then, noticing the misuse of "flauting" for "flouting," adds:

Jesus on a Bicycle, tooting his legal flute. (Although he doesn't promote it.)

Dave, instead of laughing, gripes:

See, now this is why I usually don't read the comments.

This is the first time Dave responded to Meade in the comments. Indeed, just a few days ago, Dave was blogging about how he doesn't usually read comments on his blog (which he said was "not a blog") and how he has a special problem with Meade. (I blogged about that here, noting that Dave accused Meade of repeatedly calling him "a liberal idiot," which is not a fair description of Meade's comments.) Meade responds:

I'm trying to help you, Dave. With word usage, spelling, etc. (Do I need to use a sledgehammer? Compare flaut with flout.)

But your sense of humor could also use some tweaking, Dave. Why the thin-skinned Mom, Laurence is being mean to me! My advice: roll with it! Ride right through those stop signs if need be. Laugh at yourself more. Who knows? - it might even help you get your old job back.

By the way, you still owe me a correction, Dave: I've never called you "liberal", "idiot", or even "liberal idiot". Check - as President Obama might say - the transcripts. Although I will admit - some of what you say on your blog is amply dumb.

Hey, thanks for the reply!

Again, Dave responded:

I don't want my old job back, Laurence. I'm happy misspelling stuff and using poor grammar as a non-blogger.

And as for the liberal idiot stuff, while you may never have used the exact words, that's the gist of much of it. I'm not offended. I've never denied that I'm either liberal or an idiot. I am who I am.

And so it goes, in Madison, Wisconsin, where one can have a hell of a time looking for witty conversation. You may wonder why Meade puts his writing over there instead of hanging out in the comments here where people adore him. But that's Meade. You may similarly wonder why we live here in Madison, Wisconsin!

People have their own private ways of getting together.

In "In the Reign of the Gay Magical Elves," Bret Easton Ellis — author of "American Psycho" — complains of his victimhood, as a gay man...

... at the hands of "The Culturally Correct Gay Elite," who enforce a strict stereotype of gay men as victims, to be coddled like children and who punish any gay man who — like Ellis — "makes crude jokes about other gays in the media (as straight dudes do of each other constantly) or express their hopelessness in seeing Modern Family being rewarded for its depiction of gays, a show where a heterosexual plays the most simpering ka-ween on TV and Wins. Emmys. For. It."

Within the clenched world of the gay PC police there has been a tightening of the reigns. It’s as if in this historic moment for gay men we somehow still need to be babied and coddled and used as shining examples of humanity and objects of fascination—the gay baby panda—and this is a new kind of gay victimization. The fact that it is often being extolled by other gays in the Name of the Good Cause is doubly stifling.

Okay, Bret. Much as I agree with you about the problems of infantilization and political correctness, I've got to further victimize you. Not you, the gay man. You the writer.

1. A "tightening of the reigns"? Especially when writing under the title "In the Reign of...," you need to know your metaphors. There's a difference between what kings do in their domain and the leather straps a rider uses to control a horse.

2. If you're offering to be the cutting critic and what you're criticizing is putting gay men into the victim role, don't whine about your own victimhood. It's incoherent. Be cuttingly critical and take the consequences.

Factoid about Ellis: "Feminist activist Gloria Steinem was among those opposed to the release of Ellis' book ['American Psycho'] because of its portrayal of violence toward women. Steinem is also the stepmother of Christian Bale, who played Bateman in the film. This coincidence is mentioned in Ellis' mock memoir Lunar Park."

More recently, Ellis got in trouble with the "gay elite" for tweeting that "openly and famously gay Matt Bomer who is publicly married to his partner seemed a weird idea for the role of the very straight BDSM freako Christian Grey in the movie adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey." Ellis needs people to understand — and he's hurt that he was disinvited from the GLAAD awards —  that he "never said Gay Actors Can’t Play Straight Roles." Rather, he "thought this because of Matt’s easy openness with being gay... and with baggage that I believe would distract from the heavy sexual fantasy of that particular movie."

A key exchange in the first section of the book is Anastasia’s open questioning of Christian’s sexuality and his insulted denials—with Bomer in the role, it becomes a very META scene. Right now, in this moment, this particular casting would be a distraction—the public/private life of the actor mixed-up with playing a voracious het predator.

Interesting insight... from a gay man who wrote about the ultimate "het predator" in "American Psycho." 20 years ago, when Steinem registered her complaint, we didn't know that Ellis was gay. He sat back and let the feminists develop all our theories about the violence in the hearts of heterosexual men:

A designer serial killer, ["American Psycho"] Bateman knows from Tumi leather attache cases and wool-and-silk suits by Ermenegildo Zegna and wing tip shoes from Fratelli Rossetti....

But his true inner satisfaction comes when he has a woman in his clutches and can entertain her with a nail gun or a power drill or Mace, or can cut off her head or chop off her arms or bite off her breasts or dispatch a starving rat up her vagina.

Can we go very META on that?

At the Treillage Café...



... I was going to say get out of the grid, but you have to stay on the grid to jabber in The Treillage Café. Meade taught me the word treillage. I was going to say "trellis," but treillage sounds a little exotic. I did a Google image search on the word to make sure I wasn't getting it wrong, and the first couple things that came up made me worry for a moment that I'd stumbled into the name of some subdivision of bondage fetishism. The next step in my research was the Oxford English Dictionary (to which I cannot link). Meadhouse dialogue:

ALTHOUSE: Trellage is not even in the Oxford English Dictionary.

MEADE: French!

Trellis, however, is. My favorite historical OED quotes for trellis:

1861   Bp. S. Wilberforce Let. in Life (1881) II. xiii. 454   The earthly love becomes the trellice, up which the heavenly love creeps.
1894   H. Drummond Lowell Lect. Ascent Man 193   Language formed the trellis on which Mind climbed upward.

What metaphorical trellis — treillage — is supporting your upward aspirations? (The shadow the trellis makes on the grass — the focus of this photograph — is a also metaphor, though I don't have quotes for that easily at hand.)

IN THE COMMENTS: Rabel said: "OED may have it with an 'i' before the first l.'" Ah! You are right. Meade only said the word, so I take responsibility for misspelling. I've corrected the spelling in the post, except at the spot where I'm not finding it in the OED. In fact, treillage is in the OED:

1712   J. Addison Spectator No. 477. ¶1   There are as many kinds of Gardening as of Poetry:..Contrivers of Bowers and Grotto's, Treillages and Cascades, are Romance Writers.

Why wasn't Tamerlan Tsarnaev on the FBI's watch list when he returned after 6 months in Russia?

On Today's Fox News Sunday:

CHRIS WALLACE, host: What do you make of the fact, because of a Russian request, the FBI interrogated the older brother Tamerlan back in 2011 about his ties to radical Islam. They found out he was not a threat.... [W]hat do you make of the interrogation? And what about the fact that when he returned after six months in Russia, he apparently was not on an FBI watch list?

CONGRESSMAN PETER KING: ... [W]here the FBI is given information about someone as being potential terrorists, they look at them, and then they don't take action. And they go out and carry out murders after this. So, again, I'm wondering, again, is there something deficient here? What was wrong? Again, there was nothing they could find in 2011. He goes to Chechnya in 2012. He has statements up on his Web site. He's talking about radical imams. Why didn't the FBI go back and look at that?... [I]s far as getting information in advance and not seeming to take proper action, this is the fifth case I'm aware of where the FBI has failed to stop someone who ultimately became a terrorist murderer....

Later in the show, Wallace interviews Philip Mudd, a terrorist expert with experience in the CIA, the National Security Council, and the FBI.

WALLACE: Was there any kind of a breakdown here in our national security operation, and specifically with regard to the FBI? Are you troubled by the fact that they were alerted by the Russians to the older brother, they interviewed him, decided he was not a threat, he goes to Russia, he comes back, and they don't seem to have him on a watch list?

PHILIP MUDD: No, I'm not troubled by this for several reasons. First, people fail to consider the implications of false positives. You look at one guy we could have gotten, but you forget the other 10,000 that would have come into the net if we look at a person like this every day. So, I look at this and say, you know, these kinds of things happen, but I suspect it wasn't a dropped ball here.

10,000 caught in the net every day? Every year? Every decade? When the FBI goes as far as it did on Tamerlan Tsarnaev, shouldn't the case be tagged in a way that would cause it to reopen when something happens that is as significant as 6 months in Russia — even if there would be 10,000 files subject to reopening? If we have to worry about "sleeper cells," why don't we monitor these characters and do something  when they engage in behavior typical of planning or training? But I don't know that the FBI doesn't do these things. Mudd seems intent on deflecting our attention from past FBI failings.

Wallace presses him: "[D]o you see any way you could have prevented these two guys?"

MUDD: Well, I mean, we're going to have to see what kind of foreign connections they have, whether the travel to Russia last year actually meant something. But what I see so far says we've got two kids who are in a closed radical circle. Breaking that circle in a state like ours that is an open society is virtually impossible.

WALLACE: What is your sense -- and I understand this is speculation, but informed speculation -- were they acting alone, part of a group, and do you see any Al Qaeda fingerprints on this?

MUDD: The only fingerprint I've seen might possibly have been ideology, but not operations. Every step of the way was pretty rudimentary. For example, if you look at some of those initial photos, you've got a kid with a hoodie and a cap. If he wants to obscure himself, the hoodie goes on, and the cap goes forward. If he had operational training, I want to know who did it because they were amateurs.

Two kids who are in a closed radical circle... An open society....

Don't expect the government to protect you from everything in our free society. That's a talking point. I heard it from Senator Dick Durbin this morning on "Meet the Press":

GREGORY: Do you have questions about the FBI’s tracking of the older suspect here who is now dead and whether something was missed?

SEN. DURBIN: Of course I do. And I think we should ask those questions. That’s our responsibility. But I listened to [Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee] Mike Rogers and I thought he laid it out as a former FBI agent himself as to what we were faced with when we were asked these hard questions. We’ve got to make sure as well, let me add David, that we give to the intelligence and law enforcement agencies, federal, state, and local, the resources they need to keep America safe. We live in a dangerous world. We live also in a free and open society, which we value very much. In order to keep Americans safe at the marathon, at every other public event, we need to invest the resources that are necessary for law enforcement.

I laughed at this point, because it was such knee-jerk Democratic Party response: We need to invest the resources. Spend more money. No one on their side ever fails. They were always only deprived of enough money. The FBI has been well-funded over the years, though presumably they could always hire more people and so forth. But the question is whether they did enough here and are doing enough in similar cases.

GREGORY: Is that a call in fact for re-examination of whether additional resources are needed to-- to look at homegrown terror and the potential for smaller boar attacks that can only be deterred by the strength of law enforcement and engaged citizenry?

Smaller boar attacks! Gregory didn't transcribe his own question, but somebody at NBC doesn't know enough about guns.





Gregory is responsible, however, for the inanity of his question. Is this a call for more money? Durbin's answer — "It is" — is as short as he can possibly make it, and Gregory doesn't stop him from gratuitously plugging in his prepared remarks about immigration. This is really shameless:

SEN. DURBIN: It is. But let me add one other element. Let me bring it up to date with the agenda of the Senate. I’ll return tomorrow for the Senate Judiciary Committee’s second hearing on the new immigration reform bill. Let me put it in context. There are four specific provisions in this immigration reform bill that will make America safer. We are going to have a stronger border with Mexico. We are going to have 11 million people come forward and have an opportunity to register with our government, out of the shadows. We’re going to have verification of employment in the work place. And we’re finally going to have a system where we can track visa holders who visit the United States to make sure that they leave when they’re supposed to. So this is part of the ongoing conversation about a safer America and the immigration reform bill moves us closer.

Does that have anything to do with terrorist attacks? Gregory gets his next question right:

GREGORY: Do you fear an impact similar to what we saw after 9/11 that derailed immigration reform. Already, you’ve heard Senator Grassley talk about, you know, loopholes in the immigration system, whether, you know, leniencies of student visas. Are there going to be concerns here related to the Boston attacks that you think impact the immigration debate?

Of course, the immigration proposal, the next item on the legislative agenda, just happens to answer these questions Durbin would have us believe:

SEN. DURBIN: I’ll just put it on the line. I’ve been involved with the eight senators who have put this bill together, Democrats and Republicans. The worst thing we can do is nothing. If we do nothing, leaving 11 million people in the shadows, not making our border safer, not having the information that comes from employment and these visa holders, we will be less safe in America. Immigration reform will make us safer. And I hope that those who are critical of it will just come forward and say what their idea is. We’ve come up with a sound plan to keep this country safe.

The worst thing we can do is nothing. So the best you've got is the assertion that your plan is better than nothing — is it? — and the baseless insinuation that the 11 million people in the shadows are central to the fight against terror.

Now, as in real life, at the National Spelling Bee, it's not enough to know how to spell words...

... you need to know what they mean.

"How Roger Ebert Embraced Black Beauty" — another headline I misread.

I'd forgotten I had the page open to "The Root." An hour ago, I'd clicked from the front page of The Washington Post on a teaser that read "Time for Jay-Z to set down the mike?" and I'd opened a tab that had the more stolid headline "Jay-Z Is More Interesting as a Mogul Than as a Rapper," which I didn't feel like reading. So a person I'm not interested in is more interesting one way rather than another. The teaser made me think Jay-Z had said something that might be bloggable.

(By the way, I notice that on The Root page, the spelling "mic" is used, though on the main WaPo page, they use "mike." We've had this spelling discussion on the blog before — more than once. And I noticed a few days ago, Rush Limbaugh weighed in on the subject: "We in broadcasting spell the abbreviation for microphone 'mic,' m-i-c. We don't say m-i-k-e.")

Anyway, a tab was open — among many open tabs, things I hadn't clicked off and might get around to — and — without realizing I was at The Root, the WaPo offshoot that specializes in issues relating to black people — I glanced at that headline in the sidebar:  "How Roger Ebert Embraced Black Beauty."

I know that Roger Ebert was married to a black woman. Here's a nice Buzzfeed piece: "Roger And Chaz Ebert's Beautiful Marriage, In His Words."

But in my experience, "Black Beauty" is the title of the book that lined up next to "Heidi" on the bookcase in my sister's childhood bedroom, which made it seem to me like one of the 2 most famous and revered books of all time

I grew up thinking everyone idolized the girl Heidi and the horse Black Beauty. Whatever else I have learned over the years, that's how my brain is wired.

How Roger Ebert Embraced Black Beauty...

Wrong image!

From the "Black Beauty" link above:

Black Beauty is the prettiest young horse in the meadows, and spends many happy days under the apple trees with his friends Ginger and Merrylegs. But this easy life comes to an end when Beauty is sold and goes from farm to inn to cabhorse in London, enduring rough treatment from foolish and careless masters. Beauty remains faithful, hardworking, and full of spirit despite his trials, and through him we learn that all horses and humans alike deserve to be treated with kindness.

Oddly enough, Black Beauty sounds like the Uncle Tom of horses.

"When I talk to people about the bowl, it is always about something else."

"It’s a metaphorical conversation about ritual, like in the tea ceremony, or about the fabrication process. It’s very hard to just talk about the bowl itself. We talk around the bowl."

Please talk about the bowl. I knew somebody who had, amongst the cardboard boxes stacked up in his garage, a box marked "BOWELS."

Are you familiar with the typo/misspelling distinction? I make a big deal about it in the comments thread here, and ultimately assert: "Under that definition, I don't think I have ever misspelled writing this blog, other than (very rarely) the occasional proper name."

Put that in the bowel of your pipe and smoke it.

"The tears coursed down her cheeks — not freely, however..."

"... for when they came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they assumed an inky color, and pursued the rest of their way in slow black rivulets."

That's the sentence from "The Great Gatsby" today, in the "Gatsby" project.

Tears coursed. The subject and the predicate are right up there at the outset. No teasing about where the foundation of this sentence is. Course is a strange verb for ran. There are reasons to choose the odder word. Course, for example, is more woody, less tinny than ran. The tears coursed, but not freely, because they got stuck on the woman's mascaraed eyelashes. It's thickly applied black mascara. We know it's thickly applied, because it's the excess blobs of mascara that give the impression of beads, and inky means black. So the tears got stuck on the blobs and became a coagulated black liquid, slowed down, but still, on each cheek, a little river, a rivulet.

Is rivulet a strange word? Classical Latin had the word rīvulus and there's rivoletto in Italian. John Milton used rivulet, in 1667, in "Paradise Lost," one of the books my readers urge upon me as they imagine they see the light at the end of the "Gatsby" tunnel. "As my train emerged from the tunnel into sunlight...," I found the rivulet sentence in "Paradise Lost":

In Bowre and Field he sought, where any tuft
Of Grove or Garden-Plot more pleasant lay,
Thir tendance or Plantation for delight,
By Fountain or by shadie Rivulet
He sought them both, but wish'd his hap might find
EVE separate, he wish'd, but not with hope
Of what so seldom chanc'd, when to his wish,
Beyond his hope, EVE separate he spies,
Veild in a Cloud of Fragrance, where she stood,
Half spi'd, so thick the Roses bushing round
About her glowd, oft stooping to support
Each Flour of slender stalk, whose head though gay
Carnation, Purple, Azure, or spect with Gold,
Hung drooping unsustaind, them she upstaies
Gently with Mirtle band, mindless the while,
Her self, though fairest unsupported Flour,
From her best prop so farr, and storn so nigh.

Oh, come on now! That sentence is absurdly long! And the spelling is so perverse — Bowre and Flour for bower and flower. I like the Roses bushing round as the Snake finds EVE alone. The gay flowers — flours — drooping... interestingly vulnerable. But storn... what is it? Storn! I know it's woody.

No, no, no! I'm too smart to succumb to that temptation. I am not a stooping, drooping blogger. I'm shrinking back into my "Gatsby" tunnel. Tomorrow is Groundhog Day, but I've seen my shadie shadow this evening. I'm frightened, terrified. The unfree tears course down my cheeks, slowed by the speed bumps of inky mascara.

"I'm amused that right after 'potato, my penis droops' up pops Quayle."

I say, in the laughing-in-bed first-post-of-the-morning. 

Quayle is a regular commenter here, but — who knows, on the internet? — it might be Dan Quayle.



Quayle responds: "I carry the blood of polygamists in my veins. So one should expect that sort of thing, I guess." He adds: "I took the name from my great grandfather, pictured here surrounded by some new friends."



That's a photograph of taken at the Utah Penitentiary in 1889, showing men arrested under the Edmunds-Tucker Act, explained here. Included in the photo is John C. Bennett, who "taught a doctrine of 'spiritual wifery'":

He and associates sought to have illicit sexual relationships with women by telling them that they were married "spiritually," even if they had never been married formally, and that the Prophet approved the arrangement.

That wasn't the correct doctrine, and Bennett got excommunicated, and then he "toured the country speaking against the Latter-day Saints and published a bitter anti-Mormon exposé charging the Saints with licentiousness."

Here's John C. Bennett in happier days...



... posing like Napoleon:

"I was reckless writing about recklessness."

I say, noting that I got quoted over at Instapundit with a missing "it's" apostrophe: "he’s entirely reckless about what these laws would really mean to ordinary people, and its a recklessness that thrives in the mind of someone who...."

"Oh! It's blogging," says Meade. "It's the internet. Think how many times you've gotten it right."

"And it's more embarrassing to get the apostrophe wrong the other way," I soothe myself, referring to  putting the apostrophe in "its" when it's supposed to be out.

"It's embarrassing to be embarrassed," Meade asserts aphoristically.

"But I was criticizing recklessness at the very point when I was reckless," I brood nonetheless. "It's like the way whenever you mock a misspelling, you end up misspelling something."

I decide to write this post, which — speaking of blogging — is the antidote to embarrassment.

***

King Kong, little elves

On the rooftops they dance

Valentino-type tangos

While the makeup man’s hands

Shut the eyes of the dead

Not to embarrass anyone

Farewell Angelina

The sky is embarrassed

And I must be gone 

"SYMPATHY FOR THE NICE GUYS OF OKCUPID."

That all-caps at Instapundit comes across as a comic misspelling of "Occupied," but the nice guys in question are at OKCupid. I'm not sure which purportedly "nice guys" deserve more sympathy, if any.

Here's the underlying linked-to article by Rachel Hills in The Atlantic. It's a critique of the critique of guys who cite their niceness as a reason why they can't get girlfriends.

"Kim Kardashian: How do Armenians feel about her fame?"

BBC homes in on the question everyone is asking.

"Kim is an Armenian and famous in the world, so this is enough for every Armenian to be proud of Kim. But because of cultural and traditional issues, they do not want to accept that she is an Armenian," [says BBC monitoring journalist Armen Shahbazian].

Stories about Kardashian are frequently a topic for comedy programmes, he says.

"They always compare the Armenian French singer Charles Aznavour, who they are proud of, with Kim Kardashian, who is seen in a more negative light. They don't want her to present their country," he says.

Deep into this article we get to some comparative material about what the people of Gibraltar think about fashion designer John Galliano and what the people of the Isle of Man think of Dan Quayle, who — "was internationally ridiculed when it appeared he could not spell the word 'potato.'"

Pat Sajak condemned as a pronunciation Nazi.

When "seven swans a-swimmin'" for "seven swans a-swimming" costs Navy Intel Specialist Renee Durette $4,000.

The "a-" beginning makes it seem as though you should be doing Southern American dialect, but "The 12 Days of Christmas" is set in an English aristocratic milieu (with lords and ladies).

More importantly, "Wheel of Fortune" is all about letters, so obviously they've got to be pedantic about getting all the letters.

Anyway... one more reason to be sick of that song. Or do you like it? Here it is by Bela Fleck and the Flecktones.

"It's a free market, Dave. Plenty of schools don't have sports. Go to one of those schools."

Over at Isthmus, the Madison "alternative" newspaper, Meade takes on former mayor/current columnist Dave Cieslewicz who's fretting about all the money spent on college football and the unpaid athletes and their incipient brain damage.

As far as brain injuries, what else are you going to ban - riding in cars? bicycling? taking showers? drinking alcohol?

Pushing back is local politico Stu Levitan, misspelling Meade's first name and gratuitously insulting him:

Lawrence, are you really asserting that the number of brain injuries from showering equals the number of brain injuries from football? My, you are a silly little fellow!

Meade is all:

Stw, what I am asserting is that football is only one of many activities which can lead to traumatic brain injury. Your question reflects poor reading comprehension. Is it possible that you bumped your head while playing Chutes and Ladders when you were a child?

Or maybe you didn't play that game. Maybe you, Cowboy Stu, and your family played Go To The Head Of The Class. You probably should've worn a helmet.

Like Dave!

This is what it's like in a clash of who-knows-how-damaged male brains of Madison.

AND: If you've got a craving for any old-time kids' games, please use the Althouse portal to Amazon. And I recommend Candy Land. Because they don't want you to eat candy.