Can we get creative with the debate format?

A couple days back, my son John IM'd me -- from his bar review class -- a question he had about the presidential debates. Why do they keep the Democrats and the Republicans separated? After I gave my instant reaction -- because we're at the stage where people need to pick one from each group and because the top candidates wouldn't agree -- I made a post about it to see what people would say.

One of our regular commenters XWL said he'd written something along those lines a few weeks ago:

[I]nvite four candidates from each party to bi-weekly debates....

Have each candidate be the "host" for ten minutes at a time, asking questions to the four opposing party candidates. Have a moderator ensure that they don't use their time to ask 9 minute questions full of their own campaign talking points, but instead reward candidates for engaging the other side directly....

By forcing the two sides together as early as possible, that would change the tone of these debates from monologue to dialogue. It would be up to each candidate to decide whether that dialogue should be shrill, informative, cooperative, or combative. This would give the primary voters real information on how these folks would perform come general election time, and it would generate far more interest amongst that big group of independents who sit these things out till the last minute usually.

XWL has another post today, and he notes that Patrick Ruffini just wrote:

With candidates trying to shore up their general election creds, who will be the first to challenge a debate across party lines this year? ... It would be a risky move, and a gutsy one. Think of the huge earned media moment it would be, giving us the excitement of a general election slapdown a year early. It would be a make or break moment for a candidate a few points back looking to roll the dice. If you were looking to mess with the other party's frontrunner by elevating a top-tier challenger, this would do it. And it would teach the voters vastly more about those candidates than the current debates joint appearances can.

That seems to make it pretty obvious that frontrunners won't do it.

XWL has another idea: Have the candidates "send their 'policy experts' and 'advisers' out into the internet to have debates with each other."

When we pick a President we aren't just picking a single person, we are picking a team, and I want to know as soon as possible what the make up of that team will look like. A Bloggingheads type format would be perfect, with dingalinks, and a relatively unstructured time frame. Would Clinton have beaten Bush in 1992 if we had known it would have been a bunch of dweeby munchkins, a few crusty Carter leftovers, and heavily favoring academic over real world folks? Likewise, in 2000 if folks had known Bush was skipping past his father, and even Reagan to pick folks with experience in the Nixon and Ford years, would Gore have won more than the popular vote (although in this scenario I think he would have had a stable of far lefty policy wonks that would make Hillary look like Ayn Rand, so he probably would have lost resoundingly, even against the Bush/Ford/Nixon team).

Could any of the Republicans get Colin Powell to speak on their behalf? Would Clinton be crazy enough to dust off Albright? Does anyone know who Obama's people are or what his cabinet would look like? Does McCain have any friends (aside from a few in the media)? Would Rudy look past the five boroughs for advisers?

Any more creative ideas out there... and good arguments for getting the candidates to submit to them?

Contemplate — with a plate — the difference between a cockroach eye's view and a cockroach's eye view.

Commenter-blogger XWL tries to figure it all out.

And did you know we have a cockroach as one of our commenters here? Blogging Cockroach — right here — responds:

hi xwl

nice work
although the iphone field of view is too narrow
and it just doesnt have that fish- or bug-eye thing
that althouse paid a lot of money to do on her nikon slr
which would be closer to my way of seeing things

anyway its hard to test cockroach vision
i mean there arent too many cockroaches who are going to sit there
and tell the optometrist which way the letter e is pointing
and what they can read in 9 pt type in that little mirror

but us cockroaches do see in color
yes we do
just not the colors you see
our vision goes from what you call green
into the ultraviolet
so i can see at least three colors
of ultraviolet light
ha ha you cant see them
and what you call green looks pretty grey to me
thats your basic night vision perfect for kitchen floors at 2 in the morning
plus--and here is where it gets weird--
i can tell which way light is polarized too
thats so i can tell direct light from light reflected off water
extremely handy to keep from falling into a toilet bowl
or a sink full of water
when what im really looking for
are the crumbs on the cutting board
plus i would never be fooled by a mirage in the desert
i mean how many cockroaches in little foreign legion uniforms
have you seen in movies dragging themselves over the sand
going 'water water i see water...'
never has happened for good reason

anyway its all a matter of perspective
you think you see the world the way it is
let me tell you there are alternative views
but this comment is getting too long
and although i live near harvard u
im not getting paid to teach cockroach epistemology
not to mention metaphysics
which has been in a bad odor for a long time anyway
speaking of which
something tells me me
theres a piece of foil with camembert stuck to it
that slipped off the counter last night
which really deserves a little visit
adieu mes amis
je vais a la gloire

Insect philosophy! I've never thought about it. But I have thought about insect politics!

"Have you ever heard of insect politics? Neither have I! Insects don't have politics.... they're very brutal. No compassion.... no compromise. We can't trust the insect. I'd like to become the first insect politician. I'd like to, but.... I'm an insect.... who dreamed he was a man, and loved it. But now the dream is over, and the insect is awake."

Comments, comments, comments.

I'm surpassingly sick of this comments thread from yesterday, and I'm not even going to read all the commentary on other blogs. The immense tiresomeness is actually undermining my will to blog this morning.

I don't mind an intense, verbal fight about ideas, but this wasn't that. This was, every time you expressed a substantive idea, the answer was, essentially, "Stop looking at my breasts." (I'm picturing an SNL sketch based on that concept, and like the usual SNL sketch, it goes on way too long.)

So, yeah, well, just about the last thing on the face of the earth I'm interested in today is breasts. I'm sure some readers feel that nothing could ever get them to the point where boobs are boring. Me, I'm at the point where boobs are so boring that everything seems boring.

But I did want to put up a post before I get out of here and go try to reignite my interest in the world.

On the subject of blog comments, Dr. Helen has this post, about how people went too far in the comments after she wrote something on the subject of women, here. A woman had lashed out with sudden, physical violence against a man who'd been trying to pick her up in a bar. Her husband blogged about it, and the commenters there cheered. Dr. Helen said -- aptly -- that if the sexes had been reversed, we'd be vilifying the man. I can't help noting that when Helen's husband Glenn Reynolds linked to that post about the bar-fightin' woman -- with its photo of a woman wielding a baseball bat -- he also linked to me and said "This cluebat is actually even scarier than this one." Hey, use words, kids. It's scarier.

Ah, well, the commenters themselves are doing what they can with words, but they are just boring the hell out of me.

Not all the commenters, of course. There is a regular group of commenters here that's quite fabulous. They're in amongst the tedium in yesterday's thread. Try to find them. They're really clever. The prize goes to XWL for calling it "a tempest in a C-Cup."

ADDED: Glenn says: "[F]eminism has become nothing more than a subset of the Democratic Party's activist base.... It's all about supporting the right people politically, even if it turns you into a groper's support group. Which was, of course, the point of Althouse's post." Indeed.

Well, phony feminism, anyway. There is a real feminism to be revived, but it must put feminism first, and let the political chips fall where they may.

IN THE COMMENTS: XWL points out that I should have said he won the booby prize. Oh, it's so terrible to miss a perfect wisecrack opportunity like that! But a really nice thing is that the comments here have a much higher concentration of regulars compared to yesterday's slugfest.... Ah, hey, I can daydream again! I'm picturing a slugfest consisting not of brutish humans punching each other, but slugs having a nice party.



I'm doubtlessly influenced by my long, head-clearing walk, the last quarter mile of which took me through throngs of Wisconsin folk -- all in red T-shirts -- finishing up the tailgate parties, and slogging sluggishly over to the stadium. Stay tuned for pics.

UPDATE: Damn! I can't upload my pictures. Flickr is suddenly telling me I've used 100% of my bandwidth for the month, when just yesterday it had me at 12%. Has something gone haywire over there?

"If you're not a liberal at 20 you have no heart, if you're not a conservative at 40 you have no brain."

Said Winston Churchill, quoted by gadfly, commenting in a thread where my political orientation is under discussion.

I said: "I see you're counting by 20s. I'm 60. So... another category is needed."

XWL took up the challenge:

20s, liberal
40s, conservative
60s, (my stab at a quote)

If you aren't both thoroughly disgusted yet quietly bemused by politics at 60, then you haven't been paying attention.

Come on. Play the game of augmenting the Churchill quote!

ADDED: Well, I used to be disgusted, but now I try to be amused bemused....

ALSO: I have no idea if Churchill actually said that. That's really not the point here. The point is, people love that quote and I perceive a need for a 3d line in it.

Everyone's talking about Obama not wearing his wedding band at the big press conference today.

"A White House spokesman tells POLITICO that Obama's ring is being repaired, though it's unclear what needed to be fixed."

Aw. Come on. What could need fixing on a wedding band?

ADDED: You know, if they were just staying together for the sake of appearances, he'd be sure to wear the ring. In the comments, XWL thinks the repair might be a size change:

Maybe he's losing a lot of weight... He was skinny to begin with, trending towards bone thin for a man in his late 40s can't be a sign of improving health. Don't remember any shirt off pictures from his recent spate of vacations, might be that he's looking sickly. He certainly looks more haggard facially, of late.

Meanwhile Palladian says:

Maybe it was dropped in the fires of Mount Doom...

"'My name is such a vanilla, white-girl American name,' said Ashley Holmes of Indianapolis..."

"... who changed her name online 'to show how little meaning "Hussein" really has.'"

She's one of those young Obama supporters who've adopted "Hussein" as their middle name.

I assume they see themselves as good-hearted and idealistic, but:

1. How did you become estranged from your own name, to regard it — as opposed to yourself — as vanilla, white, female, and American, and to think of that combination in a negative way?

2. Why do you think the name "Hussein" has little meaning and that people who have that name appreciate your demonstration that is has little meaning? You're propagating the idea that "Hussein" is a dirty word — associated only with Saddam Hussein — that ought to be deactivated by repetition, as opposed to an honorable name within a respected tradition.

IN THE COMMENTS: Pelkabo said:

Hilarious. The photo, and the entire story, are right out of "Stuff White People Like".

Don't these kids realize that what they're doing makes them appear even whiter?

So true. I added the link to SWPL.

MORE IN THE COMMENTS: XWL said:

My first thought at the photo atop the NYT article, 'That's totally Obambacrombie & Fitch'...

Did Justice Breyer actually say anything about the right to burn the Koran?

Here's the colloquy from today's "Good Morning America":

STEPHANOPOULOS: You know, when we spoke several years ago, you talked about how the process of globalization was changing our understanding of the law. When you think about the internet and when you think about the possibility that, you know, a pastor in Florida with a flock of 30, can threaten to burn the Koran and that leads to riots and killings in Afghanistan, does that pose a challenge to the First Amendment, to how you interpret it? Does it change the nature of what we can allow and protect?

BREYER: Well, in a sense, yes. In a sense, no. People can express their views in debate. No matter how awful those views are. In debate. A conversation. People exchanging ideas. That's the model. So that, in fact, we are better informed when we cast that ballot. Those core values remain. How they apply can-

STEPHANOPOULOS: The conversation is now global.

BREYER: Indeed. And you can say, with the internet, you can say this. Holmes said, it doesn't mean you can shout fire in a crowded theater. Well, what is it? Why? Well people will be trampled to death. What is the crowded theater today? What is-

STEPHANOPOULOS: That's exactly my question.

BREYER: Yes. Well, perhaps that will be answered by- if it's answered, by our court. It will be answered over time, in a series of cases, which force people to think carefully. That's the virtue of cases.

To me, Breyer is doing nothing more than smearing around the usual platitudes about how judges interpret law and decide cases in the context of ever-changing real world facts and let's have a fine day in the classroom cogitating about the elaborateness of all that.

But maybe you think he's revealing that he thinks that ill-behaved hot-heads in other countries are changing the scope of our First Amendment freedoms, now that the internet transmits every local free speaker's performance art around the world.

IN THE COMMENTS: XWL said:

Unsaid, but implicit, Breyer:

'What fun we could have re-interpreting the Constitution if only Scalia and Thomas would drop dead while we still have Obama as President and a Democratic majority in the Senate'

Seems like he knows there isn't a plurality of justices that agree with his implied stance that freedom of speech should be limited based on the global sensitivities, so he dances around saying what he really wants to say.

If Scalia, Thomas, Roberts or Alito were to leave, and we had the likes of Breyer in the majority in the Supreme Court, all sorts of new 'rights' would be established, and all sorts of old rights would be curtailed.

I think you're right. By the way, "he dances around saying what he really wants to say" has a second meaning, which I know you didn't intend.

What? Female narcissism?! It can't be!

XWL encounters a violation of the Althouse rule for gender research. (Note: He's reading an article that we discussed a while back when it appeared in the NYT Magazine.)

I return to the old question of laptops in the classroom. Or: Why do law professors hate freedom?

In the comments here, XWL wondered why I hadn't blogged about this Ian Ayres' Freakonomics post about laptops, then quickly added, "Oops, see you've already posted about the 'phony laptops-in-the-classroom' issue a few years ago."

Yes, I was already sick of this issue in 2006. But what the hell? If Ian Ayres is talking about it on Freakonomics, I'll have another go at it.

Ayres's piece is called "Surfing the Class," and you may have noticed that my post from 2 years ago has a little aside saying nobody says "surfing" about the internet anymore. Oh, the things that you think have gone away that keep coming back!

Anyway. Ayres:

I wanted schools to announce that laptops, by default, should be used during class only for class-related activities unless the professor says otherwise.

What kind of attitude is that? Why do you need a rule that a prof has to override? Just have no rule and let the prof impose a rule if he wants! Are you such a candyass that you can't impose the rule on your own, that you need your preference to be the default because you don't want to take responsibility for it? Ha!

Let the default be freedom. Let the students take responsibility for their own behavior, and let the prof take responsibility for withdrawing freedom if that's what he wants to do.

I’m happy to report that Saul Levmore, the dean at the University of Chicago Law School has recently announced an end to classroom surfing...

In praising Levmore, I should be clear that there is no good a priori argument against multitasking....

Let's check to see if there is any reason not to limit what other people are allowed to do. What an attitude! Talk about default rules!

Law students are adults who generally can decide for themselves what is in their best interest — but...

But... let's control them anyway.

Ayres does at least notice at this point that he's being illiberal, so he shifts into blather about "negative externalities."

The laptop screen is a billboard that is very visible to other students sitting behind the gamer. Surfing and game playing in particular can be very distracting — both visually and in the signal they send to others that you don’t care about class.

You know, when I was a law student, birds tweeting outside the window would distract me. Students leaning their heads from one side to the other distracted me. The spittle in the corner of the teacher's lips distracted me. The prospect of lunch distracted me. But the world failed to adopt rules to clear away all these distractions. I figured out solutions on my own, like sitting in the first or second row and drawing elaborate doodles to stare at so I could listen better. I suppose my doodles were imposing negative externalities, very visible billboards that they were.

Back to Ayres:

Multitasking also makes students less present as participants in class discussion. Surfing doesn’t stop students from taking notes, but it degrades the quality of their attention.

Is that supposed to be a negative externality too? Good lord. Just ask some good questions, teacher. Be interesting. Say: "And that's exactly the sort of question I intend to put on the exam. In fact, I might put that very question on the exam."

In recent years, I’ve tried to balance student liberty with my negative externality concern by allowing surfing, but only in the back row of class. In the back row, at least, it isn’t a visual distraction.

In other words, there is a complete solution to the only real negative externality you've identified, the very visible billboard problem.

Ayres nevertheless continues:

I am tempted to ask students to collect data on how much surfing is actually going on (even when it is banned). I bet some readers will be upset with the idea of such monitoring. There is a growing sense of entitlement not just to surf but to keep your professor in the dark about whether you are surfing or not.

Yeah. And these readers are right. Mind your own business, lawprof. You don't come by at night to see if they are doing their homework. Do your own job, professors, and make it so that paying attention in class matters by making it affect the exam and the grades.

If the admission application simply asked students to check a box if they were willing to forgo classroom surfing, I imagine virtually all applicants would forgo their God-given right to play solitaire.

Ayres is a lawprof at Yale. If the application simply asked students to check a box if they were willing to allow their professor stop by their house and flog them for no good reason, I imagine virtually all Yale applicants would forgo their God-given right to be free of floggings.

"Out of curiousity, checking to see where Althouse was blogwise last August 3rd."

Writes XWL in yesterday's comments:

Gender issues
Dowd on Obama
Pics from the SM Pier (and discussion of men in shorts)
A heartfelt plee to judiciously apply some strict originalism to the constitution of sandwiches
Melrose Ave pics (which reminds me, I guess I should take some snaps there myself)
Fred Segals, Fish-Eyed, and not Fish-Eyed

Althouse managed six posts this August 3rd as well as in 2008, even while getting hitched, impressive consistency, that.

Interesting set of posts, though, the Dowd thing is a reminder of how ridiculous the press was with regards to Obama before the election, and the sandwich manifesto is probably something that deserves revisiting.

Again, congratulations to you both, it's a wonderful and daring thing both of you have done.

Thanks for noticing. I was on vacation then too. It was especially funny to me to see that on August 3, 2008, I switched to the fisheye lens: "I realized I had the fisheye in my bag, and this is the first fisheye shot... L.A. crystalized for me in extravagantly bent form at that moment. It was all fisheye from there."

And yesterday, August 3, 2009, our wedding day, I got the old fisheye out after a long while. It was great for arm's-length shots of the 2 of us, including lots of scenery along with the full view of our heads, because the angle is so wide. Unfortunately, most of these shots are too intimate for blog use. You'll have to imagine those. You do have the hands with rings shot below, and I have another I'm going to put up in a separate post, coming soon.

I like looking back to a year ago too. If someone had told me at the time that I would get married a year later, I would have been astounded. I really did not think of myself as the marrying kind. I was very post-married then, very much into being on my own and not being judged or beholden to anybody. My motto — referring quite specifically to marriage — was "I will not serve."

A year passes. Who knows what will happen?

"We see it every time in our store. Women head straight for the fiction section and men head for nonfiction."

Pesonally, I prefer nonfiction, but here's an article about how it's women who read fiction, men who read nonfiction. Take a wild guess whether the article -- from NPR -- makes women sound superior. There's an absurd assumption that what women do is best, which creates the bogus problem of how to get men to do what women do. Why don't we worry that women aren't informing themselves about history, politics, and science? Supposedly women naturally get absorbed in empathizing with fictional characters. Something about our "mirror neurons" being more "sensitive." Sounds sketchy, but anyway, what's the problem? Male or female, if fiction turns you on, read fiction, if not, don't. We've stopped trying to cure people of their sexual orientation. Why should we look for cures for intellectual orientation?

IN THE COMMENTS: XWL writes:

For me, it boils down to, women read their porn, while men watch theirs.

If men got their 'jollies' (I mean erotic escapist fantasies) from books the way some women do, I'd bet those fiction/non-fiction gender differences numbers would level out.

According to this 2004 AP story, 40% of fiction book sales in the USA are romance novels.

Same article claims a remarkable leap of male readership from 7% in 2002 to 22% in 2004, citing Navy Seals as being big fans of a particular series of romance novels featuring Seals as one example of the changing type of romance fiction and the audiences they are attracting.

That jump in sales to men happens to correspond to a lot of young men being deployed overseas to places where the military prohibits possession of pornography (and alcohol, too, our troops are ordered to behave like better muslims than the people in the countries they're rebuilding). Real porn is prohibited and punishment meted out if found on base in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait (though keeping young men from their porn seems ill advised and impossible in the internet and digital media age), those troops are forced to get their porn (at least their non-illicit porn) the way many women do, through novels.

"TV is starting to feel waaay too slooooow."

Michael Parsons writes:

The complex fractal circular time-shifted way in which my media habits now play out – hear about Tina Fey doing a Saturday Night Live impression of Sara Palin on an RSS feed, watch the clip at work on YouTube, then go home to watch the same clip being shown on The Daily Show, and then read online about what happened on the daily show via an RSS feed – means that my experience of the election had a multithreaded, always-on quality I’ve simply never experienced before. ... [M]y home network went on the fritz at 2am on election night, leaving me with only my handheld Twitter and the TV. I felt positively unplugged....

The advantages of web technology here are clearly to do with intimacy, connection, and immediacy. Twitter is a great way to consume huge amounts of information when you’re trying to understand a complex real-time process.... However, I was also struck by a much bigger, tonal difference. The BBC ‘s snooze-making election coverage was shamefully poor, and seemed to consist of a sleeping Dimbleby and a bobbing Vine, along with a few other B-grade pundits who gave the evening all the drama and insight of a minor English by-election. Broadcast TV, with its narrow tone, its low-brow certainties, just felt hopelessly out of date....

Yeah, well, that was England. We had holograms. And Parsons knows that -- perhaps because the flashy high-tech junk on American TV was mocked on the first segment of "The Daily Show" the day after the election. (Watch it here, starting at 2:48.)

You can tell TV has a sort of blurry panicked fear that the web is eating its lunch. Something Must Be Done. This is why TV presenters used daft gizmos – swingometers, touch-screen displays, even in CNN’s case, holograms, to try and stay down with the tech kids. This is like trying to be an opera singer by putting on weight, mistaking an unrelated symptom for a fundamental cause.

IN THE COMMENTS: Meade says:

"This is like trying to be an opera singer by putting on weight..."

TV: Wait! It's not over until the fat lady sings.

Us: But she can't sing, she's just fat...

It's over.

AND: XWL says the holograms were a lie:

[T]he so-called holograms were simply 2D images superimposed onto the TV broadcast.

The images were in fact tomograms, or images captured from all sides - in this case by 35 high-definition cameras set in a ring inside a special tent - reconstructed by computers and displayed on the screen.

Tomograms!

He said "three times that he has a Shih Tzu, nine times that his late wife named the dog Trouble, and three times that he prefers to call it Baby."

It's very strange how much attention the pet food contamination story has gotten in the press, as I said that in the last podcast, where I asked if I was just imagining that I saw a Senate hearing on the subject on C-Span. In the comments to the podcast post, XWL says that not only were there hearings, but that they're "the best thing you'll ever watch on the web. Sen. Byrd is amazing. It's indescribable."

The quote in the title up there is from the Dana Milbank column, which goes on:

"She sleeps on my bed," said Byrd, in his 90th year and prone to meandering. "She goes with me to the Senate, rides in the car with me. She stays in my office. When somebody comes into the office, she rises and comes over and greets them, goes on about her business and gets back on the couch."

You have to hear the whole thing to get the effect. You can find it on this C-Span page (from April 12). Fast forward to 39:07. This is the most ridiculous 10 minutes of congressional hearing I've ever seen.

Laugh at Byrd all you want -- and you will want -- but it's not just him. People are absurdly emotional about their pets. I would have thought it would be embarrassing to dwell on tainted pet food for so long. There are so many problems in the world, so many human beings suffering. How can the media go on and on about a few dogs dying? I know, I know: I'm always blogging about all sorts of foolish things that capture my attention for whatever idiosyncratic reason. But mainstream media and Congress ought to have some priorities -- some proportion.

"Keep Your Surprisingly Capacious Bowls, I've Got a Freakin' Fruit-bearing Tree in My Backyard."

We laughed at his "brilliant detective work," but XWL got his revenge with suculento photographs and an "I blame Althouse" tag.

Palin to Letterman: Evolve! You damned dirty ape!

Letterman "apologized," so now Sarah Palin "accepts" the apology — like this:

"Of course it's accepted on behalf of young women, like my daughters, who hope men who 'joke' about public displays of sexual exploitation of girls will soon evolve....

"Letterman certainly has the right to 'joke' about whatever he wants to, and thankfully we have the right to express our reaction. And this is all thanks to our U.S. military women and men putting their lives on the line for us to secure America's right to free speech — in this case, may that right be used to promote equality and respect."

LOL. I love the way our U.S. military women and men horned in on the big foofaraw.

By the way, it's disrespect that needs to be protected by rights. If what you want is wall-to-wall respectful discourse, fuck rights.

(Photoshop request: Unevolved Letterman — merge a photo of the lecherous geezer talk-show host with the face of an ape or caveman.)

ADDED: XWL has pics.

"You can't tell me that all these free love hippie dippie types wouldn't embrace some sort of SOMA type narcotic in their later years."

"Just have them sign a waiver, after the age of 70, you're on your own, or the government will provide five years worth of SOMA, and maybe Viagra and prostitutes upon request, and I'm sure plenty of Boomers would willingly hit the death booths at the age of 75 after five solid years of drug-fueled orgiastic living (just don't open any boomer-orgy centers near me, like sewage treatment, it's something that has to be done, you just don't want to live by or downwind from it). The cost savings would be huge, no more retirees living 30 and 40 years on Social Security into their 90s and 100s. Who says Huxley's vision has to be a 'dystopia'?"

Said XWL today, in the nether regions of the comments thread to yesterday's ObamaCare post.

Renegade, Renaissance, Rosebud, Radiance.

Those are the Secret Service code names for the Obama family.

***

IN THE COMMENTS: XWL says:

I really don't think it's appropriate for the Secret Service to call one of Obama's daughters Marion Davies' clitoris.

I wonder if this means Michelle calls Barack's member "Renegade" and Barack call Michelle's lady parts "Renaissance"?

Those were my thoughts too, exactly. I mean, really, is the Secret Service illiterate in pop culture or is it relying on our pop culture illiteracy?

Deliberate eggcorns.

Hey, I got linked by Language Log! I wish I could produce what has been identified as a variation on an eggcorn to celebrate the occasion.

IN THE COMMENTS: XWL fulfilled my wish:

Congratulations, you got Lincoln Logged!

(an eggcorn for "linked on log")

(it's a stretch, but I used to like those things)

Convention, Convertible, Contrex, Chardonnay, Condom.

Stumbling into the BlogHer conference, completely late for Day 1, I go first for the test drive. There's a bunch of cars, including a line of Saturn Sky Roadsters, but I know the one I want to drive. This red one:



No, not because it's red. Because it's the only one with a manual transmission. I wonder if they got it right about the proportion of women who are interested in sports cars and have the taste and skill to want a stick shift.

How does the Sky compare to the Audi TT Coupe I just drove 2400 miles? The seat doesn't adjust, so I couldn't get myself into the ideal position. That's my biggest criticism. But it was fun to drive, and it looks really cool -- all curvy. My TT isn't a convertible, but maybe when I buy my next car -- probably another TT -- I'll think about getting the convertible. It was awfully hot and bright, but the wind-in-the-hair effect is sublime. (When I was in high school, I drove a 1961 Chevy Impala convertible. Sea Foam Green.)

I went to the writing workshop, already in session. In the part I heard, they were talking about how to title your posts to best attract the kind of traffic you want. Am I following any rules about titles? I wonder. I do whatever amuses me at the moment, but maybe I could extract a set of rules from my behavior. I sort of hate to hear the "official" rules, because now I have to think about whether I'm following them, whether I should, whether I ought to want to break them on purpose, and whether I want such thoughts in my head. As opposed to tripping along on instinct, my usual approach.



All these bloggers are overloading the Hyatt's WiFi and even their Ethernet connection. (I did remember to bring an Ethernet cord.) Connection is spotty. I'm a little frustrated. I'm drinking from a freebie bottle of Contrex. Did you know there was special water for women? It tastes awful, and within the hour, I start to feel sick to my stomach. Possibly a coincidence.... I remember I have an over-the-counter remedy stashed in an obscure pocket of my computer case. I swallow it... without water.

I light out early, taking the light rail back into town, where I nestle into a banquette at my posh hotel.



The remedy has restored me. Along with that big glass of Chardonnay...



And that lovely tuna roll...

I'm getting good WiFi, so I download my photos, and work on this blog post. I pause to browse through the goodies in the Six Apart tote bag I got earlier in the day. What companies got in on the BlogHer action? Trojan! What condom was selected for the lady bloggers? Elexa! I see it's a condom with "a woman's perspective."

What else have I got here in this bag?

IN THE COMMENTS: I throw down the gauntlet:

I want a fancy-schmancy post modernist to deconstruct this post!

Sippican pens an awesome entry. Is there thermite? Of course. Elizabeth says one perfect thing. And XWL flings himself into the exercise -- over here on his blog -- and writes a whole essay on the title alone -- and don't forget this post has a passage about titles -- before declaring deconstruction crap. But he said such cool things that I can't believe it. Like this:

Convention: intentionally ambiguous meaning here, both in the sense of a 'convention' as meeting, and 'convention' as accepted method of doing things, this double meaning (with a third less obvious, but nevertheless informative meaning of 'convent'ion, given the 'sister'ly nature of the BlogHer conference, this particular 'convention' could be seen as a modern descendent of a 'convent' and therefore 'convent'ional in a secular imitation of the religious 'convent') serves to inform every aspect of the rest of the post. Next the concept space suggested by the term 'convertible', a (no doubt) intentional mimicking of the c-o-n-v-e- of the first word in the title, but with the changed ending a change in inference.

"'Convent'ion" ... that rules. If only the Saturn had been an Ion my head would have exploded.

A Drudgtaposition that didn't last very long — for good reason.

Earlier today, Drudge had this photo juxtaposition:



To become aware of the full — and, I would say, fully intended — subliminal effect, you might need to read the letters — in red — under Michelle Obama's picture: "REPORT: First lady 'likely' to meet 'commercial sex workers' in India!"

Now, expand the frame and see what else was there:



After a few hours, the picture of Michelle disappeared, and the top picture changed from the man-on-man clasp, to this:



There's a secret sex story for close observers of the Drudge Report. Playful, naughty innuendo. I'm not saying that Drudge is suggesting that Barack Obama is gay or that he wants to engage in fellatio with Harry Reid. But that's the funny image of the Drudgtaposition. Then, when Michelle and the phallic symbol were removed, Obama is in the embrace of a woman — a rather boyish-looking woman with mannish glasses — and lots of women are grabbing at him.

If we were to understand the sequence of pictures on Drudge the way we understand panels in a comic strip, we first see Obama approaching an an embrace with a man (who seems to be holding him off at arms' length), and then, in the next, "panel" he finds himself in the eager arms of a person who has some of that masculinity he thought he was about to receive, but who is in fact female.

It reminds me of the sequence in the Stanley Kubrick movie "The Shining," in which the character played by Jack Nicholson enters a bathroom and sees a beautiful, desirable woman in a bathtub. She gets out of the bath, naked, and approaches him for an embrace, and then, once he's holding her, it becomes apparent that she is a dead and rotting old woman.

Does any of this actually say anything about Obama, his sexuality, or his wife? Probably not. It's aimless horsing around, in all likelihood. But we do know Obama is out there this week, trying to woo the women.

The outreach to women — which came on the same day that the White House released a report that said Mr. Obama’s policies, including the health care and economic stimulus bills, have helped women over all — is part of a fevered push to cement a Democratic firewall that White House officials are hoping will stem losses in November.

Women are one of the most important pillars of that wall. “Make sure you’re as fired up and as excited now as you were two years ago,” Mr. Obama told a raucous rally...

Hmm... "fevered push"... "important pillars"... "fired up and... excited"... But that's not Drudge. That's the New York Times.

***

What's the better spelling of the portmanteau word that combines "Drudge" and "juxtaposition"? Drudgtaposition or Druxtaposition?

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	Druxtaposition
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IN THE COMMENTS: XWL said:

Instead of a Harry hand job, we have a Lewinsky hug

(and let's not forget, that's the photo that essentially launched Drudge's empire)

Click that link. The photo similarity is the amazing.