Got my iPad!

Down at the Apple Store in the West Towne Mall in Madison, Wisconsin. Things were hopping:



That's "Specialist" Chuck Sholdt handing over the goods. He recognized me and said he "felt like [he was] in the presence of royalty." He recognized Meade too — said he'd read all about him.

Back home now, in my favorite reading position...



UPDATE: I'm typing this on the keyboard. I do think I could use this to blog, something I can't do on the iPhone (without a great deal of trouble).

UPDATE2: I bought the iPad app Pages to do word processing and I just plain cannot get it to work. It seems that there should be a toolbar, but I can't get one to display, so I'm at a dead end. Any ideas? AND: I turned it upright, out of landscape mode, and that worked. AND: I wish I could figure out how to get iDisk documents into the Pages App. (And I really am trying to find the answer in various "help" pages. It's especially frustrating because "pages" isn't a distinctive word.)

UPDATE3: Apple confirms that you can't get your iDisk documents into Pages.

"Scozzafava writing election memoir."

I guess she hasn't had enough of being a butt of jokes.

"I have been kind of putting pieces together, yes, just, I think, more so for me, just to kind of go back and recall different moments, and I had jotted down certain occasions and I've got a whole calendar of events, and I'm kind of thinking about it again," said Scozzafava.

She doesn't yet have a title for the book.

Oh? Maybe we can help!

"On Good Friday, Dagwood makes the risen Christ weep with his horrifying rabbit fursuit."

"85 percent of the people in the 'furfans' and 'Blondie fans' Venn diagram overlap are now writing clarifying letters to King Features, emphasizing that Dagwood was not the character they wanted to see dressed in a sexy bunny outfit."

Bonus at the link: "Oh, your husband’s a terrible lout, is he? If you ever need a sympathetic ear, I’m here for you … listening … nodding thoughtfully … drinking your pain, your darkest emotional pain, like the sweet, sweet divine nectar that it is … oh, God, tell me, tell me, TELL ME…"

Obama bypasses the biracial option on the census form.

Even though "he could have checked white, checked both black and white, or checked the last category on the form, 'some other race,' which he would then have been asked to identify in writing." In the last census, in 2000, 6.8 million Americans opted to present themselves as bi- or multi-racial. Presumably, a lot more people will do that in 2010. Why didn't Obama?

The census form, we should see, extracts an opinion about race from us. And what do we think of the opinion of the President who, some of us thought, would move us into a new era of race?

My first thought was that he disrespected his mother and maternal grandparents, who contributed so much more to his upbringing than his father ever did. My second thought was that his experiences in society, including his rise into vast political power, had so much to do with being perceived as black (and not white). My third thought was that he wants to preserve his designation as The First Black President. He's into himself as a historical figure, and First Mixed Race President doesn't have the same cachet — and there'd be all those pesky arguments about whether he was the first. Out on the internet, I'm seeing claims that various former Presidents — Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge — had a mixed racial ancestry. I can see not wanting to get bogged down in that.

"Live Blogging the iPad’s Big Day."

From the long lines at the NYC store(s).

I expect to just drop by the West Towne Apple store and pick mine up easily. We'll see how different Madison is from New York.

UPDATE: Am I pathetic to have searched Twitter to find out about the line at West Towne Mall? And here. I found a picture. I'm not the type to wait outside before the store opens, and since others are, I allow a little time for the door-crasher bulge to process.

UPDATE 2: I got it! A manageable line:

There's a big epidemic, no, not of sex addiction...

... but of wives deciding their husbands are sex addicts who must get treatment.

I’ve been a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist and Certified Sex Therapist for 30 years.... But until about three years ago no one ever came in claiming to be a sex addict, or saying that his partner told him he was one....

I don’t treat sex addiction. The concept is superficial. It isn’t clearly defined or clinically validated, and it’s completely pathology-oriented. It presents no healthy model of non-monogamy, pornography use, or stuff like S/M. Some programs eliminate masturbation, which is inhumane, naïve, and crazy....

Oh, I observe people with obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and a few other exotic states. That accounts for some of what laypeople call “sex addiction.”

What I mostly see instead of “sex addicts” is people who are neurotic or narcissistic....

Thanks to regular commenter Julius Ray Hoffman, for sending me that link.

Read the whole post by Dr. Marty Klein. It's pretty funny, these men sent in by their wives to get treatment, after learning from their wives that "either I’m a sex addict and I couldn’t help it and I need treatment, or I’m just a selfish bastard and she wants a divorce."

How come so many women have gotten the idea they can diagnose this ailment? It's easy to figure out that wives grasp at the idea of addiction instead of facing the pain of rejection and betrayal, but why the big change in the last 3 years? There are people — not Dr. Klein — who make money in the addiction treatment racket, and they've managed to get their pitch out to the public, but how and why now? Some "Oprah" show?

I looked back into my blog archives to see what relevant things started 3 years ago. In 2007, there was the Larry Craig story. That got processed as "sex addiction" to some extent. In 2008, there was the Eliot Spitzer thing. Hmm. I wonder why something so inherently unbelievable gained traction when politicians were using it. It's testimony to the strong appeal of the sex addiction theory of marital infidelity that women bought it when they heard it from such low-credibility sources.

***

Is "sex addiction" one of these things that's going to be treated under the new health care regime, even as Medicare patients are given pain pills in lieu of hip replacements and heart valves?

ADDED: Why aren't wives more worried about treatment for sex addiction? You want the man to be "sexually addicted" to you. How would health workers remove the part of his sexuality that's goes toward other women and leave the part that goes to you? Even assuming this is a disease, the cure seems dangerous, unless you want a desexualized husband.

"Could Coach be more of a douchebag? Seriously."

"Voting for a third person when you know that two people are targeted is the same as voting out the person with whom you were allegedly allied. It doesn't help him at all because he knows he can't trust Russell, and therefore he had to, had to get rid of him here."

In the "Heroes and Villains" season of "Survivor," the contestants were out filming when the previous season was on TV, so they didn't know what Russell had done to distinguish himself as a villain. Boston Rob, in his exit interview, said: "... I realized that 20 seasons in, you have 10 people that are considered the most villainous to ever play the game, and here’s a guy from the most recent season, so he had to do something so outlandish to get picked over all those other contestants." The other contestants may not have done as well in figuring out whether to trust Russell over Rob.

Rob on Coach:

Coach really wants to play with honor and integrity, and at the end of the day, he has the opportunity to do that and chooses another path. But that’s on him.

Coach actually appeared to take the easiest path possible in not voting for you, yet casting a vote that he knew ensured you going home. That seems like he was almost trying to not own up to his decision.

I think he’s a guy that was conflicted and he didn’t have it in him to do the right thing in this situation. So, it’s bad for me because it makes me go home, but he’s the one who has to live with it.

And what does Jeff Probst have to say about it? He's been Coach's biggest fan:

I love Coach. Always loved Coach. I still want to develop a show centered around “Tales of The Dragon Slayer.” But right now The Dragon Slayer is depressed. He’s lost his way. As much as he wants to live by a code, he finds himself trapped in a corner on a game called Survivor and there appears no way out. If this were a movie, this would be the end of Act II when all seems lost. Is it? Or can he rise up from the ashes and be reborn yet again?

On Rob's saying to Coach, after the vote, "You’re a little man":

I love how Rob went out. He didn’t pretend it didn’t matter, he didn’t say “good luck”, he simply said what was on his mind, the subtext of which was clear: Coach, you suck.

Coach. Coach. Coach. I too am a bit dismayed. I will need time to sort through this emotionally. I will certainly need more therapy to help me understand and try to forgive.

The difference between women...

... and girls.

"You're as cute as me. You are. In some cultures, maybe cuter."

Socks — with skirts — are a big fashion trend... but we're told not to wear them if we're over 30:

First of all, don’t even try this at home if you’re over 30; this is very much a girl’s game - and a girl with great pins, at that.

Over 30!

Well, too bad, I'm nearly twice the limit, and I've been relying on socks for nearly the length of time it would take a newborn baby to reach the limit, and nothing can stop me. But I get the point: You can do what you want, but it's not the fashion trend unless you're young enough to be entitled to believe without derangement that you're really cute.

***

Does this — Helena Bonham Carter, age 43 — seem deranged?



Can I wear these...



... when I'm over 50 and I'm operating in my law professor capacity?

***

Bonus movie dialogue:

Romy: I can't believe how cute I look.

Michele: I know!

Romy: You know what? This is, like, the cutest we've ever looked.

Michele: Oh, it's definitely the cutest.

Romy: Don't you love how we can say that to each other... and know we're not being conceited?

Michele: Oh, I know. No, we're just being honest.

***

Michele: Yeah, I let you have the ideas... so you won't feel bad that I'm cuter.

Romy: You are not cuter, Michele.

Michele: I am so cuter. It's, like, common knowledge, Romy. Everybody thinks so. I'm the Mary and you're the Rhoda.

Romy: That's Ridiculous. You're the Rhoda. You're the Jewish one.

Michele: Oh, my God. I'm talking about cuteness-wise, okay? And cuteness-wise, I'm the Mary.

Romy: That's crazy! You have absolutely no proof that you're cuter!

***

Michele: I can't stand that we're mad at each other. Okay, I'm sorry I said all those things. You're as cute as me. You are. In some cultures, maybe cuter.

"They want 'blow jobs' first. Then you have to be on good behavior for a bit or be willing to deal, and then you get access."

A White House reporter grouses about what one has to do to get the kind of access to that will enable you to write the book about Obama that the White House reporters are all trying to write.

"The loser lettuces..."

"... romaine and — dare I suggest it — iceberg."

"[S]omething the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka."

"It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth... no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote."

Cory Doctorow parlays a William Gibson quote — defining the consumer — in service of his argument against buying an iPad. Me, I've reserved an iPad for pick-up tomorrow. But then "Apple's model customer is that same stupid stereotype of a technophobic, timid, scatterbrained mother as appears in a billion renditions of 'that's too complicated for my mom'...."

Now, now, you boys. Moms may not care about fiddling with the inner workings of technological devices, but that doesn't mean we're not mentally sharp. And — mom-o-phobia aside for a second —  in general, smart people are not interested in paying attention to computer stuff. We just want tools to get to and engage in the things we're interested in. Maybe, you're missing that because computers happen to be one of the things you're interested in.

Spitgate.

Cleaver retracts.

"Ten Most Cited Female Faculty 2005-2009."

A special list, because the "Ten Most Cited Faculty 2005-2009" is 100% male.

(Via Orin Kerr.)

A Congressman who doesn't know much about the Constitution.

Or YouTube.

"When you listen to Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck, it's pretty apparent, but keep in mind that there have been periods in American history where this kind of vitriol comes out."

"It happens often when you've got an economy that is making people more anxious, and people are feeling that there's a lot of change that needs to take place. But that's not the vast majority of Americans. But that's not the vast majority of Americans."

So said Obama today, being characteristically understanding in that patronizing way we've seen before. We all remember the "bitter clingers" remark:

"You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them... And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Obama understands why you feel those negative emotions. The actual ideas you express don't really matter. They are to be disregarded — they're the things you say when you get mad or depressed, because of all the problems — problems that he aims to solve, in his way, for your sake, because he knows better. Now, if you would please, quiet down, and let him get on with the work of giving you what you need.

ADDED:  Funny for Obama of all people to be musing about that "feeling that there's a lot of change that needs to take place." You know, a politician might come along and leverage a presidential campaign on an amorphous emotion like that.

Sign at a rest stop somewhere along I-80 in Nebraska.

I laughed the most I have ever laughed in Nebraska. And now Nebraska is on my Top 20 list of States Where I have Laughed the Most.

Who are the Mobys?

I think that lately the comments section of this blog has been attracting a lot Mobys. Yesterday, I called attention to a commenter who wrote something outrageous (and actually funny, if you recognize it as fake). A very high-traffic blog had exposed me to criticism for having that in my comments, and a commenter over there suggested it was a "false flag operation," and linked to a post by SEK over at Lawyers, Guns, & Money, that begins: "I went over to Althouse’s and wrote a number of insanely offensive comments, but everyone started agreeing with me before I could declare 'April Fools'!" Now, I already thought I was dealing with a Moby, and here was SEK, apparently, bragging about being a Moby. So I threw him a link and quoted him. He then showed up in my comments and said:

Dear Ann,

I didn't write any of those comments. You just got fooled twice over by your own racist and misogynist commenters. Please, feel free to check the IP addresses of the comments I claimed, all April-Foolsy, to have written.

I was in the middle of a 1000-mile drive, so I wasn't exactly anguishing over my failure to pick up whatever-the-hell SEK had layered into his blog post that was written in the form of a confession. My response to that — written at 11:23 at night from an I-80 rest stop in Iowa — was:

Someone was fooling, either you, per your confession, or someone else, if you're not fooling now. It makes no difference to me who did it. It wasn't one of our regulars and it wasn't a believable story.

The attempt to paint my commenters (or me!) as racist or whatever is inflammatory and ugly, and I've lost track of who wants that to stop.

Now, SEK has updated his post, with a not-too-attractive mix of hostile insults and whiny fears for his own fate:

You Althouse people really aren’t very bright.  To anyone who thinks that I actually wrote the comments paraphrased above, I suggest you click here and enter my last name into the “Instructor” field.  I’ll wait … so are you really ready to accuse me of writing that?  

Well, you'll have to wait a long time, because I don't know your last name, SEK. Is that me being not very bright? Or are you patently a fool?

I’m only asking because, unlike Althouse, who has tenure and can misbehave as she pleases, I’m a lowly lecturer who, if he steps out of line, will be fired on the spot.  

So why are you being so hostile and calling people names? It's interesting that you feel vulnerable, but what are you doing slugging people and then claiming vulnerability when you get a response.

Ann has the IP addresses of the people who left those comments and knows that it wasn’t me.  If she insists on lying, I can’t afford to prove her wrong in a court of law; however, I’m willing to put my name and career on the line and proclaim, in no uncertain terms, that I didn’t write the racist comments I mocked her for brooking on her blog.  She can’t be fired for besmirching her university in public like this, but if I’m lying, I can be dismissed with two snaps from an irate bureaucrat.  So in the interests of truth, I demand that should Althouse insist on claiming that I wrote those comments, she publish the IP addresses of the authors of the comments I linked to.  If they all resolve to Corona, California, I’ll exit the internet for life.

As noted above, I do not have a collection of IP addresses. I have no way to check who's behind the various pseudonyms, so you're on your own denying that you wrote what you previously said you wrote. I believed you then, and you ask me to believe you now, and the reason you're supposed to be believable now is that you have a strong self-interest in disassociating yourself from your own words. You made your own problem, and yet you are still being nasty to me, trying to smear me with racism for nothing but maintaining a free-speech forum. You accuse me of lying for quoting you. You threaten to sue me — for quoting you! — and at the same time whine that you can't afford to sue me. You stress that you would like to see me fired — for what?! — and yet you beg in the most pusillanimous fashion that I should pity you because you could be fired.

This is all so pathetic. Or is this another satire that I'm not bright enough to understand?

Anyway, to my commenters: Please understand that there are Mobys here. There are commenters who pretend to mean what they are saying, when what they are trying to do is to make us look bad somehow. Take that into account when you interact with people here.

"The child molester was also a brilliant, generous, talented man — the only person who ever read me a bedtime story."

"I will love him forever, for that, even when I wake up gasping and afraid."

A startling passage — in an essay by Elizabeth Scalia — AKA The Anchoress — that tries to explain — on this Good Friday — how she can be a Catholic after so many revelations about priests who sexually abuse children and the kindly protection they have received within the power structure of the Church.

***

It occurs to me that these priests — and Scalia's family pedophile — are the opposite of Boo Radley. Boo Radley — a character in "To Kill a Mockingbird" — was the reclusive neighbor who, failing to make a conventional show of friendliness, scared the children. But when the children are endangered, he saves them.

***

A Tom Toles cartoon:

Tea Party-haters see racism everywhere — except in themselves.

Yesterday, we were talking about the Flickr page set up to collect photographs of Tea Party signs with grammar and spelling errors. The page is called "Teabonics," a term intended to express how stupid Tea Partiers are. But the coinage "Teabonics" is a play on "Ebonics." The word "Ebonics" isn't supposed to make fun of mistakes made by black people. It embodies the claim that speech that may sound nonstandard is, in fact, a language with its own grammar, that may be studied and learned.

Working on this post, I saw that Language Log had written about "Teabonics," and I assumed I would get some good analysis about the misuse of "Ebonics" in coining the new word. But here's what I found:

Teabonics?

March 31, 2010 @ 6:38 pm · Filed by Mark Liberman under Humor

Pictures here.

Including some nice examples of Muphry's Law in action....

Muphry's Law? Muphry's Law? Ha! Hang on a second, I need to recover from deep pangs of irony. Mock spelling, and you'd better make sure you never ever ever ever ever make a typo.

It takes more than 2 hours before anyone shows up on the popular linguistics blog to take Liberman to task for failing to see the swipe at black people:

Elizabeth Herrington said,
March 31, 2010 @ 8:47 pm

This is funny, sure. But we need to remember Ebonics (inglorious word it be) is based on a grammar. Teabonics is just plain ignorance.

***

Lance said,
March 31, 2010 @ 9:07 pm

... I'm sort of sorry that LanguageLog is propagating this. The common tagline is that "linguists are calling [this] Teabonics"; except that, as Elizabeth Herrington says above, recognizing Ebonics is deeply rooted in linguistic concepts, whereas this is just making fun of misspelling. And while I'm in favor politically of making fun of tea-partiers, I'm professionally against calling it "Teabonics", which elevates this to actual academic study and debases Ebonics as being equivalently illiterate.

So, why the blindness to racism? I suspect that it is a combination of the conventional liberal self-love — the mind-dulling confidence that they are the good people — and the embarrassing secret that the study of Ebonics was never truly grounded in respect for black people.

CORRECTION: "Muphry's Law," spelled like that, is something that has been talked about in the past on Language Log. Liberman's writing "Muphry's Law" would be an example of Muphry's Law if the term "Muphry's Law" hadn't been coined to refer to things like that. Thanks to the commenter Dewb for pointing this out.