"Now Ann has baited me into promiscuously spiking my anxiety stew with carnalized onions..."

Ha ha ha. My favorite kind of comment — taking an ingredient from an old post and adding it to the material in the post under discussion. It's fusion commenting, like fusion cooking... and the metaphor in the comment is cooking.

And I love that I've got a tag for "onions," though I see various posts with onions that did not get the tag, including posts with the tag "onion rings," onion rings being a special, niche topic here on the blog. Remember these carnalized onion rings? And of course, these ("I doubt if any blogger will disagree with my assertion that, coming from Bill Clinton, the 'O' of an onion ring is a vagina symbol").

Speaking of comments, I can see some of you are saying I'm not giving you the kind of post you like anymore. There are at least 4 reasons for that:

1. The world is locked down, so things don't just happen anymore, not the kind of things that delight and intrigue. The usual places still have their articles, but they're filling space. They're doing what they have to do, and I can smell the fakeness, the ennui. I have my standard, and I'll read until something crosses the line for me. 

2. The standard on this blog is not big over small. I'm not here to repeat headlines about what the President just did. In fact, if the headline is big, I'd rather go small.

3. I'm not interested in throwing my weight onto one side or the other, and if I have nothing to add, there's no reason to write about these things. With Trump, I have distanced myself from the relentless haters, but I'm in no mood to encourage him either. I'm waiting for the next few weeks to pass, hunkering down. I could spring out and denounce him, but I don't join mobs. 

4. It's Christmas Eve. Talk about keeping a distance. What can you see from a distance? "When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and fell on his knees in front of him. He shouted at the top of his voice, 'What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?'"

Onion rings have been a long-time focus of this blog, so I must show you this:

Well, she's just incredibly cool and charming, and her attention to onion rings is delightful. I am glad to cede my onion ring crown to her, but for the record, these are my top 8 onion ring posts:

1. "The new Hillary Clinton video is a take on the last scene of 'The Sopranos.'"

Bill says "No onion rings?" and Hillary responds "I'm looking out for ya." Now, the script says onion rings, because that's what the Sopranos were eating in that final scene, but I doubt if any blogger will disagree with my assertion that, coming from Bill Clinton, the "O" of an onion ring is a vagina symbol. Hillary says no to that, driving the symbolism home. She's "looking out" all right, vigilant over her husband, denying him the sustenance he craves. What does she have for him? Carrot sticks! The one closest to the camera has a rather disgusting greasy sheen to it. Here, Bill, in retaliation for all of your excessive "O" consumption, you may have a large bowl of phallic symbols! When we hear him say "No onion rings?," the camera is on her, and Bill is off-screen, but at the bottom of the screen we see the carrot/phallus he's holding toward her. Oh, yes, I know that Hillary supplying carrots is supposed to remind that Hillary will provide us with health care, that she's "looking out for" us, but come on, they're carrots! Everyone knows carrots are phallic symbols. But they're cut up into little carrot sticks, you say? Just listen to yourself! I'm not going to point out everything.

2. "Let's take a closer look at Bill's carrot and Hillary's onion ring." ("Let's talk about the onion-ring shaped vortex I started yesterday. All I did was a little casual Freudian interpretation of a Hillary Clinton campaign video....")

3. "What is Althouse doing lunching in this sleazy dive?" (This enigmatic post marks the beginning of the Althouse + Meade love affair.)



4. "I've mostly stopped reading Ann Althouse, really."

5. "Meat is no longer murder.... meat is strategy. To attract men -- it's all about attracting men!..."

6. "We drove out into the Driftless Area of Wisconsin...."



7. The one with this picture:



8. The one with this picture:

We drove out into the Driftless Area of Wisconsin....

... where a bit of sun caught a green patch....



We got out and walked the Table Bluff segment of the Ice Age Trail...



... then back into the car, to drive home, with a stop at Culver's....

Let's everybody talk about Trump's "schlong."

1. He's making us do this. He's brilliant at causing the media to revolve around him, and this is a big one. He tossed off a funny word as if he just suddenly thought of it, off-handedly, and now all of us, new and old media, are going to talk about it all day. I woke up this morning, saw the story, and regarded it as my serious duty and amusing pastime to go on about all aspects of the statement that Hillary "got schlonged" by Obama.

2. Is "schlong" a verb? The linguists are activated. Give Trump's schlong some lingual action. Now, Trump knows something about taking a noun and making it into a verb — "verbing" it. People love to take Trump's name — names are nouns — and use them as verbs — as in the Hillary campaign catchphrase "Love trumps hate." She wants to be "love" and to call him "hate"? Does she think love, love is the answer with Putin? Speaking of verbing names, Putin works as a verb — put in — who hasn't thought that sounds like a good schlonging?

3. Trump is making us look at his penis — his use of the word for penis — so he's kind of the flasher here. But it's Obama's penis in the image: Obama schlonged Hillary. Are you tempted to call that racist? Good luck, you fool. You'll have to explain why. Go ahead. Go down that path, you idiot. Trump wants you to fall into that rathole.

4. You know who else's penis we had to talk about — a big fat politician made us talk about that time? Has there ever been a more talked about penis than the penis of the man Hillary Clinton is still married to? Speaking of Hillary getting schlonged. We've had a mental image of it so long that this worked as an Onion headline:

5. The left meme pushed by Think Progress is: "Trump's Astonishingly Sexist Attack On Hillary." But now you've got to explain why it's sexist. As the WaPo piece linked at #2 showed us, Trump used "schlong" as a verb once before and it was to refer to something a woman did to a woman: "I watched a popular Republican woman [Jane Corwin] not only lose but get schlonged by a Democrat [Kathy Hochul] nobody ever heard of for the congressional seat...." As Trump uses the word, if Hillary had trounced Obama, he would have said "Hillary schlonged Obama," just as many of us will say: She fucked him. Women can schlong men, whether they have a schlong or not, and if a woman wants to be President, she'd better have the capacity to (figuratively) schlong men. Trump is surely in the position to explain his use of the word that way. And if you keep up with the "astonishingly sexist" bullshit, he's going to schlong you.

6. A Meadhouse dialogue ensues:

MEADE: "Maybe Hillary has a huge vagina."
ME: "She can store several heads of state in there."
MEADE finds that very funny.
ME: "I don't know if I should put that on the blog."
MEADE: "HA HA HA! OH NO NO NO! When it's men's genitals we're talking about, it's okay, but when it's women..."
ME: "I'm just afraid people don't know the whole 'huge vagina' meme. They haven't seen the 'Curb Your Enthusiasm'..."
MEADE: "You have to protect people from the idea of a woman's genitalia being huge, holding heads of state. 'Oh, what are we doing in here?' 'We're in President Hillary's vagina. She envaginated us.'"
ME: "Wait. What heads are you picturing? Who's in that dialogue?"
MEADE: "Putin. Angela Merkel. And I'm picturing the head of the new Trudeau, because he's so dreamy."

7. Meade wants me to show you this:



Meadhouse dialogue:

ME: "I like 'absolutely everyone can come inside' and taking care of you 'if you're ever frightened.'"
MEADE: "A safe space."

8. As Trump antagonists struggle to portray "schlonged" as sexist, they cause us to think more and more about the question of whether a woman is tough and strong and dominant enough to be President. Yes, most of us think that in theory a woman can be President, but like nearly all men, any given woman is unlikely to have what it takes. We know there's one thing she doesn't have, and that's not literally needed. But all the ideation about what it figuratively means is stirred up as we talk about the subject, which is what Trump is making us do, all by saying one little word and standing back and letting us do all the churning through of meaning. He never needed to say Hillary couldn't be President, but he made other people say things, things that they think will hurt Trump, and what they are saying is affecting the minds of millions of people, massaging our doubts, our resistance, shaping opinions that we don't want to have to talk about, that we know we shouldn't say out loud. Trump's one out-loud word did it all. That one word schlonged us.

9. And isn't it very funny that — in the same speech — Trump posed as the prudish man who thought it wasn't proper to mention that Hillary went to the bathroom:"Where did Hillary go? They had to start the debate without her. Phase two. Why? I know where she went. It’s disgusting. I don’t want to talk about it. It’s too disgusting. Don’t say it, it’s disgusting. We want to be very, very straight up." He won't even say "go to the bathroom." That's the kind of straight-up man he is. Straight up. What erectitude! Rectitude. Oh, you disgusting people. Get you head out of the toilet.

10. A list can't end at 9, and I do have one more thing to say. It's a nostalgic look back to simpler times, back before Hillary got schlonged by Obama, when Hillary had full hopes of winning. It was June 2007, and the Hillary campaign had just put out a slick ad. My response, a list of 5 items, had a point, point #4 about Hillary's deployment of phallic symbols:

Bill says "No onion rings?" and Hillary responds "I'm looking out for ya." Now, the script says onion rings, because that's what the Sopranos were eating in that final scene, but I doubt if any blogger will disagree with my assertion that, coming from Bill Clinton, the "O" of an onion ring is a vagina symbol. Hillary says no to that, driving the symbolism home. She's "looking out" all right, vigilant over her husband, denying him the sustenance he craves. What does she have for him? Carrot sticks! The one closest to the camera has a rather disgusting greasy sheen to it. Here, Bill, in retaliation for all of your excessive "O" consumption, you may have a large bowl of phallic symbols! When we hear him say "No onion rings?," the camera is on her, and Bill is off-screen, but at the bottom of the screen we see the carrot/phallus he's holding toward her. Oh, yes, I know that Hillary supplying carrots is supposed to remind that Hillary will provide us with health care, that she's "looking out for" us, but come on, they're carrots! Everyone knows carrots are phallic symbols. But they're cut up into little carrot sticks, you say? Just listen to yourself! I'm not going to point out everything.

"Unlike Barack Obama, who will leave the White House with more or less the same handful of friends he came in with..."

"... the Clintons occupy their own unique and formidable and often exhausting place in American politics. Over the decades, they’ve operated like an Arkansas tumbleweed, collecting friends and devotees from Bill Clinton’s kindergarten class to Yale Law School to Little Rock to the White House to the Senate and beyond."

From the NYT Magazine article "Planet Hillary." The point about the Obamas' not making friends is also in that New Yorker article:

Obama’s favorite company is a small ensemble of Chicago friends—Valerie Jarrett, Marty Nesbitt and his wife, Anita Blanchard, an obstetrician, and Eric and Cheryl Whitaker, prominent doctors on the South Side. During the first Presidential campaign, the Obamas took a vow of “no new friends.”

Something else that caught my eye in the "Planet Hillary" article is the onion metaphor. (No, not onion rings. For that, go here.)

James Carville has compared the Clinton world, perhaps not so originally, to an onion (it’s safest, he has said, to exist in the third or fourth layer)....

Hillary Clinton’s truest challenge, it would seem, is not to make the country glimpse who she was 40 years ago; it’s to recognize that for all the layers that have been added to the onion, there’s still something at the center that’s aching for the rest to be peeled away.

I thought the whole point of the layers of the onion metaphor was that there is nothing inside. It's only layers. Layers aren't added to an onion. Layers are the onion. There is no core. And onions don't ache. And if they did, they wouldn't ache for all the layers to be peeled away. There'd be nothing left.

Whiteout at Culver's.

In Rochelle, Illinois. Less than 100 miles from home. Restored by cheeseburgers and onion rings, we soldier on.

UPDATE: We're safe at home in Madison.

Madison settles for $10,000 to the men who openly wore guns in at a Culver's.

The incident — in which the "Culver's Five" were arrested — occurred back in 2010 when concealed carry was still illegal, but open carry was not. The charges for "obstructing justice" were dropped and the men filed a lawsuit, which is now dropped.

Culver's, in case you don't know, is this:

"Fatwa banning Muslim women from touching bananas and other penis-shaped foods makes Internet rounds."

"Unconfirmed religious order says the phallic foods may spark sexy thoughts."

Hmmm. Emphasis on "unconfirmed." I don't believe it, and I've passed up on writing about this story because I think propagating rumors about a religion is a very bad practice.

"If women wish to eat these food items, a third party, preferably a male related to them such as their a father or husband, should cut the items into small pieces and serve," the cleric supposedly dictated.

Carrots and zucchinis pose a similar threat, according to the Muslim decree.

I'm writing about this now, not because I want to amuse you — though, admittedly, it's amusing — but because I'm acknowledging that this is now a meme. Memes about religion penetrate deeply. Use protection.

But... why am I resisting this? Phallic symbols are a long — really long — -term topic on this blog. And if the Muslim cleric thinks women ought to refrain from touching carrots, I'd like to caution the men about fingering onion rings. Remember? Old times on the Althouse blog: "Let's take a closer look at Bill's carrot and Hillary's onion ring."

And, by the way, I say that cleric — if he really exists — is bragging: Even a vague reminder of the shape — and size! — of our turgid man-parts sends our women swooning with desire.

ADDED: Literary reference:

He turns, advances to edge of stage, halts, strokes banana, peels it, drops skin at his feet, puts end of banana in his mouth and remains motionless, staring vacuously before him. Finally he bites off the end, turns aside and begins pacing to and fro at edge of stage, in the light, i.e. not more than four or five paces either way, meditatively eating banana. He treads on skin, slips, nearly falls, recovers himself, stoops and peers at skin and finally pushes it, still stooping, with his foot over the edge of the stage into pit. He resumes his pacing, finishes banana, returns to table, sits down, remains a moment motionless, heaves a great sigh, takes keys from his pockets, raises them to his eyes, chooses key, gets up and moves to front of table, unlocks second drawer, takes out a second large banana, peers at it, locks drawer, puts back his keys in his pocket, turns, advances to the edge of stage, halts, strokes banana, peels it, tosses skin into pit, puts an end of banana in his mouth and remains motionless, staring vacuously before him. Finally he has an idea, puts banana in his waistcoat pocket, the end emerging, and goes with all the speed he can muster backstage into darkness. Ten seconds. Loud pop of cork. Fifteen seconds. He comes back into light carrying an old ledger and sits down at table. He lays ledger on table, wipes his mouth, wipes his hands on the front of his waistcoat, brings them smartly together and rubs them....

Good to be back in my den in my old rags. Have just eaten I regret to say three bananas and only with difficulty restrained a fourth. Fatal things for a man with my condition.

At the Deep Fried Café...

... keep it crispy.

Charging with fists raised at Althouse: from the right, it's Robert Stacy McCain, from the left, it's Thers.

I'm thinking of ducking down the alleyway and letting the 2 men collide with each other. I'll find a high vantage point and watch the fracas. First one to unball his fists and put his palms up defensively loses... unless the other one, sensing a touch to the chokepoint on his neck, backs off and shrieks "You choked me."

Robert Stacy McCain should be pleased that Thers decided to attack me on the same day, because I wouldn't have rewarded his attack with a link if it wasn't funny to find myself in the "Clowns to the left of me/Jokers to the right" position.

McCain's post is titled "Ann Althouse: Rube." The word "rube" denotes a dumb rural character, but McCain uses it not for it's actual meaning, but because he's noticed there's a way that Glenn Reynolds uses it, and he seems to imagine that using Glenn's word will bring Glenn in on his team. Which is fine with me, because I've ducked down the alleyway, and Stacy is going to be fighting Thers, who might have "Eli" with him. I doubt if Glenn answers to the dogwhistle "rube," but I do think the fracas will be more amusing with Glenn there. (By the way, the expression "hey, rube" is traditionally "a rallying call, or a cry for help, used by carnies in a fight with outsiders." It's not a way of saying "I think you are a dummy from country.")

Anyway, Stacy's in a dither because, last Friday — predicting Obama's 2012 campaign strategy and referring to the emotionalism of the 2008 Obama campaign — I dropped a footnote to say that even though I voted for Obama, I wasn't caught up in the emotionalism. I observed it and critiqued it. I was in my high vantage point. I was sober and rational, but — confronted with the 2 major party candidates — I picked Obama. I have never apologized for that choice, because I still think McCain — John McCain — would have been worse, and the Republican Party would be in a far weaker spot right now if McCain were President. You can disagree with me, but don't portray me as another "Yes We Can" dreamer. My 2008 posts are all there in the archive. You can see how distanced I was from the Obama love cult.

But Robert Stacy McCain doesn't seem too familiar with the Althouse blog... or even the one post he purports to write about. He's bouncing off of some other blogger's post about me (in the style of Emily Mills who attacked me using material she got not from my blog but from some other blogger who purported to know what I'd written). (Stacy also nicks a photograph from my Flickr stream and uses it without complying with the Creative Commons license I was nice enough to provide.) Anyway, Stacy's point seems to be that I was wrong to vote for Obama. But my post wasn't even saying I made the correct choice, only that I chose based on sober reasoning, not emotionalism.

In any case, R.S. McCain doesn't say I should have voted for John McCain or that every rational person choosing between McCain and Obama would have picked McCain. In fact, sounding damned emotional, he says: "If you put a gun to my head and told me to vote for John McCain, I’d tell you to go ahead and pull the trigger." He calls McCain "a treacherous bastard." Okay, then, why wasn't it rational to vote for Obama? At the point of voting, either McCain or Obama was going to be President. Pick one. No, R.S. McCain voted for Bob Barr. Like that was rational!

At least McCain's commenters are critical. Donald Douglas is the first commenter, linking to his own post: "Ann Althouse a Rube? Nah, Robert Stacy McCain's Just Trolling for Traffic." He accuses McCain of liking to post my picture, and Douglas posts another picture of me. (Douglas does make that picture link back to the Flickr site, but he too fails to follow the Creative Commons license, because he doesn't include the photographer's name. Douglas chose a picture taken 30 years ago by my first husband. McCain chose a picture taken last year by my present-day husband.)

Now, let's swivel leftward and see what's going on with Thers. Thers has been attacking my blog for many years, and usually I ignore him. I don't know why he's so fixated on me. He didn't post a picture of me, so take that for what it's worth. He illustrates his post with a video clip called "Detachable Penis" from a band called King Missile, so apparently he's trying to waggle his wiener in my direction. Thers is writing to defend his confrere Eli, whom I took a shot at yesterday, because he said something stupid that everyone was attacking yesterday because it was on Memeorandum. I don't know who, exactly, detached Eli's penis, but I got my cut in, and I understand that it caused Thers sympathetic pain.

Thers quotes me saying something that exemplifies the way I speak when I'm observing the fray from a high vantage point: "People who are immersed in politics ought to take a good look at their own minds." His idea for a comeback is pretty prosaic. Do you even have to go over there and read it? You can guess: I don't follow my own advice. It's the "I know you are but what am I?" Pee-Wee Herman-type riposte that's supposed to answer a personal attack, which that quote of mine isn't. And Thers, of course, doesn't follow my advice either. He's not self-reflective. He attacks me:

All the evidence shows that Althouse has been long separated from her mind; if she originally removed it in order to give it a proper gawking, that is a perfectly laudable motive. 

A grisly image. A man who's musing about his detachable penis pictures a woman with her brain removed from her skull.

And let us be charitable! 

A reflexive line, by a man whose conscience perhaps nagged him. He knows that after the Tucson massacre, we weren't supposed to be using graphic metaphors like that. He could have edited that out, but writhing over Eli's detached penis, he had to lash out.

Perhaps there is a perfectly sound reason that as soon as her mind departed her skull it promptly escaped, never to be heard from again; and very likely all she had on hand to fill the resultant cranial void was Franzia and guano.

He's straining so hard for comedy, and he can't decide whether to call me a drunk or a shithead. And what's with the Franzia? Didn't he get the memo about Paul Ryan? Yesterday was the day to attack right-wingers for drinking expensive wine.

Then he gets to my little joke on Eli: "I have no interest in these hysterical little men who obsess about whether their 'base' is getting served or stiffed." He rolls his eyes and says:

Althouse is watching consonants whirling through onion rings, yet once more. 

See? Go to those links. He's been reading my blog for a long time, and he remembers my old comic riffs about genitalia. Unlike Stacy McCain, he's familiar with the archive here, and he's been trying to to get the better of me in the genitalia humor department for years. But he can't. He says:

She’s got a dirty mind, don’t she, Yossarian? The dirtiest. 

So... a reference to "Catch-22"... disembodied. The book is funny. The detached reference? The sad waggling of a man who would be erudite, who's trying to show that he's smart and the woman is dumb. A literary reference. I typo'd "litterary" a Freudian slip, indicating that I think his writing is trash. He ought to pick that thing up.

I've got a "dirty mind"? Oh, okay. Thanks. I suppose Freud had a "dirty mind" too. Isn't it funny the way lefties are, at bottom, puritanical about sex? Sex is dirty? As Woody Allen famously said: "Only if it's done right." And if it's done left, it's done with a detachable penis. Put some ice on it.  Maybe you can get somebody to sew it back on.

Quick, because here comes Robert "Stacy" McCain, fists a-flying!

At the Cheese Curd and Onion Ring Café...

... let's get fried.

Meanwhile, outside....



... there were throngs of people at the Capitol... and they weren't protesting. (They were downtown for the Concerts on the Square.)

"A 62-year-old woman visiting a local Culver's sees several restaurant patrons with guns on holsters in plain view."

She thought it was an appropriate time to call the police. She didn't understand Wisconsin. It was time to calmly scarf your butter burger.

At the Special Touch Café...

... you can get tattoos, fireworks, and more. We didn't get any fireworks or tattoos. Not today, anyway. We did get some dinner at Culvers, though.

On the road. (Yesterday.)

Blogging from the road:



Yes, I always wash my hands, but I also always look everywhere for a fish-eye effect, and I have my camera ready to bring it back to you:



I even did a re-take of this post to... change the focal point.

At the next stop... hey, what do you want? Onion rings? French toast?

More Cincinnati food: Mongomery Inn and Arnold's Bar and Grill.

1. Lunch, yesterday, at Montgomery Inn. The side dish chosen with the ribs was "onion straws." These were thin sliced onion rings, which were not anywhere near as good as the ribs but which I enjoyed well enough:



2. Dinner was the blogger-commenter meet-up downtown at Arnold's Bar and Grill. I've already shown you the hot brown. And I won't post the group photo because not everyone wants his photo on the blog. But here's a photograph of the room:

What is Althouse doing lunching in this sleazy dive?

I have my reasons.

The Obama salute.

Why is anyone paying any attention to this self-promotion by some lame Los Angeles "creative agency"? If this design came from the Obama campaign it would deserve the kind of vociferous ridicule we saw in response to the Obama seal. If the design was excellent it would deserve the admiration we saw for the independently produced "Progress" poster. But the Obama salute — which looks like a hand gesture for "fuck me" — is just stupid and bad and not from the Obama campaign, so it's nothing at all.

IN THE COMMENTS: AllenS said:

It's the universal sign for the onion ring.

That's a reference to my old onion rings post — more here — where I said "the 'O' of an onion ring is a vagina symbol." Which is why I'm saying now that the salute looks like it means "fuck me." It's a way to say "here's my vagina," just like the upraised middle finger means "here's my penis."

Bleeper said:

When rotated 90 degrees forward and oscillated, The Big Jerk Off.

Paging Chip Ahoy. Remember when he did that thing to my vortex on Melrose?

"I've mostly stopped reading Ann Althouse, really."

TRex cannot stay out of the vortex... especially when it's baited with food.

And apparently, I give him "all-over creepy shivers, like someone just dumped a bag of live spiders over my naked thighs." I'm picturing chubby, pasty white thighs. No wonder he sympathizes with Bill Clinton so.

He riffs on what eggs mean to him. It's kind of wistful and sweet really. It sounds like the boy loves his mommy. Ooh, but not that way, no! He dips a little into homophobia territory... probably thinks it doesn't count when he does it. Oh, but it does! It does, T.

Oh, what the hell? Why not have a full-on flamewar? Ellen Goodman thinks we female bloggers aren't sufficiently warlike. And, anyway, I'm not afraid of the doughy little nerd. I faced him down in person. Check it out:



He's afraid to look. Compare how nice his co-blogger was.

Here, T! Here's some candy!



Come on. Take some of my candy!!



Don't be a baby! Fall into the vortex!



IN THE COMMENTS: Joan writes:

The comments section over there is bizarre.

What an odd post. Why the excessive use of exclamation points and question marks? The speculation that Ann is a repressed lesbian is just bizarre, and also, obviously wrong. Ann is grossed out by eating egg salad, you moron! The idea of consuming the "female" symbol (as you've identified it) is abhorrent to her. If anything, that should prove that she's as hetero as they come.

As for the egg being a symbol for the female, I don't know where he got that one. I've always heard that eggs symbolize life, rebirth, springtime. I've never heard before that eggs are the symbol for the female, as if the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth is strictly feminine, or under the control of females.

Wait -- did TRex make this association because they're sort of round, like onion rings, completely ignoring centuries of tradition as to what eggs really symbolize? Sheesh.

Teach that boy some Spanish, starting with huevos.

MORE FROM THE COMMENTS: Christy writes, quite aptly:

I thought his posting was funny. Even funnier is realizing he gets Althouse, but doesn't recognize it. He thinks the Fellini reference an insult? Am I wrong that part of the appeal here is blog-as-performance-art?

Boring comments, though. Althouse wins as a blog salon. The mantle of Madame de Stael rests lightly on her shoulders.

ADDED: The new vlog is -- once you get into it a ways -- about the TRex attack.

UPDATE: TRex falls into the vortex, and I respond here.

"Meat is no longer murder.... meat is strategy."

To attract men -- it's all about attracting men! -- women now eat -- look out, it's a NYT Style piece! -- steak!

Ms. Wilkie was a vegetarian in her teens, and even wore a “Meat Is Murder” T-shirt. But by her 30s, she had started eating cow. By the time she placed the personal ad, she had come to realize that ordering steak on a first date had the potential to sate appetites not only of the stomach but of the heart.

Red meat sent a message that she was “unpretentious and down to earth and unneurotic,” she said, “that I’m not obsessed with my weight even though I’m thin, and I don’t have any food issues.” She added, “In terms of the burgers, it said I’m a cheap date, low maintenance.”

Salad, it seems, is out. Gusto, medium rare, is in.

Restaurateurs and veterans of the dating scene say that for many women, meat is no longer murder. Instead, meat is strategy. “I’ve been shocked at the number of women actually ordering steak,” said Michael Stillman, vice president of concept development for the Smith & Wollensky Restaurant Group, which opened the restaurant Quality Meats in April 2006 on West 58th Street. He said Quality Meats’ contemporary design and menu, including extensive seafood offerings, were designed to attract more women than a traditional steakhouse. “But the meat is appealing to them, much more than what I saw two or three years ago at our other restaurants,” Mr. Stillman said. “They are going for our bone-in sirloin and our cowboy-cut rib steak.”

Let me number my thoughts:

1. Is one of the "concepts" Mr. Stillman has "developed" getting newspapers to run articles that promote steak restaurants to women? He's already got the steak restaurant designed for women, based on what looks like the longstanding problem of women shunning steak restaurants and thinking men who pick them as the site for a date aren't very considerate.

2. I can attest to the fact that editors have been telling women for decades that men will find them appealing if they eat with "gusto." I'm sure I read this dating advice in Glamour and Mademoiselle back in the 1960s. Don't pick at your food. Demonstrate your joie de vivre and your sexual prowess with enthusiastic cheeseburger gnawing.

3. "Bone-in sirloin and our cowboy-cut rib steak" -- don't forget the bone. Symbolic messaging via steak works best with the bone in.

4. Order the onion rings too. They will drive him mad with passion. That's not in the article. That's just my advice, girls. Women who stress heathy veggies... they're not as womanly as you.

4. Is Stillman related to Dr. Irwin Stillman, author of "The Doctor's Quick Weight Loss Diet," the 1967 book that was all about dieting by eating only protein. You couldn't even eat any starches, any fruits or vegetables -- not even lettuce -- and the only cheese permitted was cottage cheese or farmer's cheese, but you could eat all the fish and meat you wanted. So if you want to go out for a nice dinner, you know where you have to go: a steakhouse.

5. "I’m not obsessed with my weight even though I’m thin" -- I'm sure that's true of Ms. Wilkie, but I'm also sure that's what all the anorexics say.

Back to the article:

In an earlier era, conventional dating wisdom for women was to eat something at home alone before a date, and then in company order a light dinner to portray oneself as dainty and ladylike. For some women, that is still the practice. “It’s better not to have a jalapeño fajita plate, especially on the first date,” said Andrea Bey, 28, who sells video surveillance equipment in Irving, Tex., and describes herself as “curvy.” “You don’t want to be labeled as ‘princess gassy’ on the first date.”

But others, especially those who are thin, say ordering a salad displays an unappealing mousiness.

Yeah, the fat girls -- you can find them in Texas -- are only worried about farting. The thin girls -- who are not equipment salespersons but editors -- have higher level strategic thinking:

“It seems wimpy, insipid, childish,” said Michelle Heller, 34, a copy editor at TV Guide. “I don’t want to be considered vapid and uninteresting.”

Ordering meat, on the other hand, is a declarative statement, something along the lines of “I am woman, hear me chew.”

You have to be thin but disguise all the traits that keep you thin. Chomp into that meat -- it's a great way to say you're interesting.

In fact, red meat on a date has become such an effective statement of self-acceptance that even a vegetarian like Sloane Crosley, a publicist at Random House, sometimes longs to order a burger.

“Being a vegetarian puts you at a disadvantage,” Ms. Crosley said. “You’re in the most basic category of finicky. Even women who order chicken, it isn’t enough.” She said she has thought of ordering shots of Jägermeister, famous for its frat boy associations, to prove that she is “a guy’s girl.”

"I am woman," indeed.

“Everyone wants to be the girl who drinks the beer and eats the steak and looks like Kate Hudson,” Ms. Crosley, 28, said.

The NYT can't recommend bulimia, but you must be living in some obscure town named Irving if you can't read between the lines there.

Not all red meat, apparently, is equal in the dating world. The mediums of steak and hamburger each send a different message. Dropping into conversation the fact that steaks of Kobe beef come from Wagyu cattle, but that not all steaks sold as Wagyu are Kobe beef, demonstrates one’s worldliness, said Gabriella Gershenson, a dining editor at Time Out New York. It holds the same currency today that being able to name Hemingway’s four wives held in an earlier era.

Wagyu. The boys love it when you say Wagyu. Wagyu.

Hamburgers, she added, say you are down-to-earth, which is why women rarely order those deluxe hamburgers priced as high as a porterhouse.

“They’re created for men who want to impress women, so they order the $60 burger, then they let the woman taste it,” Ms. Gershenson said. “The man gets to show off his expertise and show that he can afford it.”

The symbolism is complex, no? So the man has something the woman lacks, and there's something about it that will make her want to taste it, and he'll let her. But come on, where's the "expertise" here? The restaurant has hamburgers for men who want hamburgers, but you can't go to this place and not pay full price for the meal, so it's $60. The man is an "expert" at spending money. Now, the "concept development vice president" who gets the editors to repeat this theory, he's got some expertise.

The end of the article gets around to the subject of what women think of a man who wants to eat steak and quotes one woman saying, "It crosses my mind they’ll probably die early." The suggestion is that this is a bad thing: "Gentlemen, be careful. Real men, it seems, must eat kale." Like there aren't women who date rich old guys and think, good, he'll go quickly.

"Bong Hits 4 Lawyers."

That's the name of the name of the new Bloggingheads episode with me and David Lat. Topics:

How David became a muckraking law-blogger (13:04)

Virtual crossdresser exposed! (11:12)

Money-grubbing lawyers exposed! (15:17)

The AutoAdmit scandal: Can you sue an emoticon? (21:17)

Ann on Hillary's onion rings, Bill's carrots (12:47)

Judicial puffery in the "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" case (08:29)