"In the late 1800s, archeologists in the Sumerian city of Nippur (modern-day Iraq) uncovered a 4,000-year-old tablet with what appeared to be the world's oldest documented bar joke."

"Roughly translated, the joke reads: 'A dog walks into a bar and says, "I cannot see a thing. I’ll open this one."' The meaning of the joke — if it even is a joke — has been lost. But after a Reddit thread revived the debate, the public-radio podcast Endless Thread (which usually does stories focused on Reddit) decided to look into it, and they produced a two-part series. Part I is about the joke, and Part II goes into the origins of humor...."

A post at r/history.

The top comment over there is another ancient-times bar joke: "A Roman walks into a bar, holds up 2 fingers and says '5 Beers Please,'" which is responded to with another Roman joke: "Listen, barkeep, if I'd wanted to order two or more, I would have ordered two or more!! Now bring me my martinus!"

"In fact, Wallace [Idaho] is the self-declared 'Probable Center of the Universe,' and according to its citizens, for good reason."

"A proclamation given by then-mayor Ron Garitone on September 25, 2004, avowed, 'Our government-contracted scientists...have, after years of diligence, been unable to unearth one scintilla of [proof] that Wallace is NOT the center of the universe.' This year Wallace is celebrating the centennial births of two native Hollywood elite: Doris Houck, known for her roles in several Three Stooges films, and The Postman Always Rings Twice star Lana Turner, whose childhood home at 217 Bank Street still stands, and is in the midst of a renovation."

 From "THE 15 BEST SMALL TOWNS TO VISIT IN 2021/From Alabama’s music capital to the self-proclaimed ‘center of the universe,’ these American towns are calling your name" (Smithsonian).

Why not proclaim yourself the center of the universe? Everybody is a star. That's a song title. 

By the way, do you know that "Keeping Up With The Kardashians" has been on TV for 20 seasons? Here's a promo for the finale episode of their 20th season:

 

Despite years of diligence, scientists have been unable to unearth one scintilla of proof that the Kardashians are not the center of the universe.

FROM THE EMAIL: Wince writes:

Doris Houck may be best known as the girl who tried to mash Shemp Howard's head in a vice in BRIDELESS GROOM in an attempt to persuade him to marry her. 

Famous Stooges line: "Hold hands you lovebirds..."

Wow, these are some tough dames:

Cute and fun-loving but connected to Trump, so it must go to hell.

The food on Air Force One today, via the press pool pic.twitter.com/HrGJ2vdWk2

— Michelle Kosinski (@MichLKosinski) October 28, 2019

Seems mildly nice, but here's where it goes — reported by The Daily Mail — "Even Presidential plane food is bad! Photo of a deeply unappetizing-looking dish served on Donald Trump's Air Force One goes viral/A photo of a meal served to journalists travelling on Air Force One has gone viral/Snap shows an innocuous stuffed bell pepper with a Halloween face - but it is the unidentified object on a side-plate behind it that has caused a storm/Beige-looking dish has sparked jokes galore, with some suggesting the President himself would not eat it."

ADDED: I think the journalist who took the picture was experiencing it as cute and fun, but by tweeting it, she gave the tweetosphere something to shit on, so, of course, they did.

The item in the background is something to puzzle over. If you decide it's meat, it seems gross and it's the main course so if you don't eat it you're deprived. If you decide it's a glazed pastry, it's just at worst a caloric dessert that's easy to pass up and no loss at all.

IN THE COMMENTS: Big Mike said:

I ate worse-looking than that when I was in the army! You should see what chipped beef on toast looks like at 0 dark thirty!

I said:

My parents — who met in the Army in WW2 — often served us chipped beef on toast for dinner back in the 1950s and 60s. We loved it! If you know how to make white sauce properly and you can get that chipped beef that used to come in a little jar with a pry-off lid and you toast up just normal white bread, it's excellent!

AND: As long as we're talking about chipped beef on toast, here are the 3 Stooges in "Of Cash and Hash." Go to 4:26 to skip the set-up and focus on the food. Larry is serving a customer at a diner:

Is it true that "The term 'tomboy' has long sounded alarms among conservative parenting factions for its perceived association with lesbianism and departure from traditional femininity"?

I'm trying to read "'Tomboy' is anachronistic. But the concept still has something to teach us," by Lynne Stahl (a humanities librarian who teaches popular culture, gender theory, and critical information studies at at West Virginia University)(in WaPo).

I'm interested in the idea of a "tomboy," which I remember from my long-ago youth. There was a girl in our neighborhood who was the tomboy. It was what she was. What did she do? I remember only 2 elements: 1. She ran around with no shirt on in the summertime, and 2. She loved the 3 Stooges — especially Moe.

From the second paragraph of the WaPo article:

The term “tomboy” has long sounded alarms among conservative parenting factions for its perceived association with lesbianism and departure from traditional femininity...

With my memories of childhood, I wondered if that's true. Do conservatives look askance at tomboys? I haven't consorted with many conservatives in the last 50 years, but, growing up, it seemed that people were pleased to see a tomboy. I heard pride. So I clicked that link on "conservative parenting factions" and got:

[IMAGE MISSING/LINK HAS GONE DEAD]

Did the link go to just one book (as evidence of "factions")?

Click the image to enlarge it and clarify and you'll be able to see the URL: "https://www.amazon.com/Parents-Guide-Preventing-Homosexuality/dp/0830823794." I wondered if there was a parents guide to preventing homosexuality and, if so, whether it represented real "conservative factions."

I tried searching Amazon for parents guide to preventing homosexuality and the top item — and the only even remotely apt item — was this:



That's not the Richard Cohen who was my husband in the 1970s and 80s (and it's not the Richard Cohen who's a Washington Post columnist). This person is presented as a "psychotherapist." The description of the book says: "Did you know that every day people change from 'gay' to straight? This is a must read for every parent, teacher, counselor, clergy, and all who wish to understand what drives homosexual feelings and how to respond in love." I don't know how much that has to do with feeling alarmed about manifestations of tomboyism.

Stahl (the author of the WaPo article) continues, saying that the term "tomboy" has...

... come under scrutiny in progressive circles, too, with some critics arguing that it upholds the essentialist notion that anatomy largely determines children’s behaviors and inclinations. The author of a 2017 New York Times essay who wrote that her daughter was more a tomboy than a transboy sparked debate around gender-nonconforming children, and the argument about this trope has also unfolded across Facebook communities and clinical studies.

Yes, I blogged about that 2017 article ("My Daughter Is Not Transgender. She’s a Tomboy," by Lisa Selin Davis). I said:

Davis is trying so hard to be politically correct, and everything she writes is so scrupulously polite. But in the process she's shedding light on an important problem: More pliable parents and children are being urged to interpret gender-role fluidity/nonconformity as a condition that needs treatment with medical interventions.

Stahl, in the WaPo column, is bringing up this topic because there's another Hollywood adaptation of "Little Women" in the works, and "Little Women" has a character, Jo, and she's explicitly called a tomboy. From Chapter 1:

"Jo does use such slang words!" observed Amy, with a reproving look at the long figure stretched on the rug.

Jo immediately sat up, put her hands in her pockets, and began to whistle.

"Don't, Jo. It's so boyish!"

"That's why I do it."

"I detest rude, unladylike girls!"

"I hate affected, niminy-piminy chits!"

"Birds in their little nests agree," sang Beth, the peacemaker, with such a funny face that both sharp voices softened to a laugh, and the "pecking" ended for that time.

"Really, girls, you are both to be blamed," said Meg, beginning to lecture in her elder-sisterly fashion. "You are old enough to leave off boyish tricks, and to behave better, Josephine. It didn't matter so much when you were a little girl, but now you are so tall, and turn up your hair, you should remember that you are a young lady."

"I'm not! And if turning up my hair makes me one, I'll wear it in two tails till I'm twenty," cried Jo, pulling off her net, and shaking down a chestnut mane. "I hate to think I've got to grow up, and be Miss March, and wear long gowns, and look as prim as a China Aster! It's bad enough to be a girl, anyway, when I like boy's games and work and manners! I can't get over my disappointment in not being a boy. And it's worse than ever now, for I'm dying to go and fight with Papa. And I can only stay home and knit, like a poky old woman!"

And Jo shook the blue army sock till the needles rattled like castanets, and her ball bounded across the room.

"Poor Jo! It's too bad, but it can't be helped. So you must try to be contented with making your name boyish, and playing brother to us girls," said Beth, stroking the rough head with a hand that all the dish washing and dusting in the world could not make ungentle in its touch.

"As for you, Amy," continued Meg, "you are altogether too particular and prim. Your airs are funny now, but you'll grow up an affected little goose, if you don't take care. I like your nice manners and refined ways of speaking, when you don't try to be elegant. But your absurd words are as bad as Jo's slang."

"If Jo is a tomboy and Amy a goose, what am I, please?" asked Beth, ready to share the lecture.

"You're a dear, and nothing else," answered Meg warmly, and no one contradicted her, for the 'Mouse' was the pet of the family.

These 4 female stereotypes, so crisply reeled out in Chapter 1, are seared into the American mind. I remember reading that, and I thought it was obvious that the one to be was Beth (who's so good it's — spoiler alert — the death of her). But then I thought it was obvious that the best Stooge was Curly, but our local tomboy loved Moe.

Anyway, what are we doing here? Does the WaPo writer, Stahl, have anything new today, anything beyond The Great Tomboy Foofaraw of 2017? She notes — remember, she's a librarian — that "fictional stories about tomboys... also feature plotlines that inevitably pair these characters off with boys, offering uncomplicatedly happy, tidy conclusions in which the tomboy drops her resistance and acquires a boyfriend." (Was tomboyishness "resistance" to love from a man?)

It’s a process that constricts their characteristic independence, and it can feel torturous for those of us who don’t identify with traditional femininity — and who see something of ourselves in fictional figures who reject it. Empathetic viewers might want to see a character embrace her singleness, even if an actual lesbian pairing is too much to hope for.

The attempt to fix the tomboy by marrying her off invites disturbing associations with real-life medical practices that “correct” high levels of hormones associated with masculine characteristics.

Isn't that inviting disturbing associations with real-life medical practices that 'correct' hormones in transgender youths? Speaking of correct, I'm assuming Stahl wants to be politically correct (and she does inject some pro-transgender material near the end, the maximum distance from this disapproval of hormone "correction").

And can't women "who don’t identify with traditional femininity" find happiness with a man? Is there something inherently independent about "an actual lesbian pairing." It seems to me, people who pair up — whether with a man or a woman — may sacrifice their individuality, but they shouldn't, and they don't need to. I'm sure there are plenty of women "who don’t identify with traditional femininity" who pair up with a man, maintain their identity, and have a great time with their man. And the man likes it too. I mean, the lady will go camping.

Stahl observes that writers of popular stories, including Louisa May Alcott, go for the predictable plotline of having the tomboy put on some feminine clothes and realize how much she wants a man. Stahl makes the solid point that readers can and will "ignore contrived endings" and find satisfaction in the meat of the story, where there is expression of tomboy individualism. She concludes:

If we want greater gender autonomy, we have to understand how traditional ideas about gender linger in the stories we tell and the endings we envision for ourselves. Beyond resisting gender norms, tomboys give us a way to see the complex dynamics that shape our expression and perception of identity. And even if the word “tomboy” is reaching its own ending, the tomboy’s refusal to conform keeps its power still.

I still don't see why "tomboy" must die. If you like this character type, why not keep it alive? Beth may have  — spoiler alert — died of her own overflowing dearness, but doesn't the tomboy have the wherewithal to survive?

Stahl purports to value "the complex dynamics that shape our expression and perception of identity," and once we fully understand that — helped, per Stahl, by the tomboy — the tomboy, a stereotype, has no environment that can support her continuing life.

But if we ever got there, all stereotypes would be anachronisms.

IN THE COMMENTS: Fernandistein says, "ngram of tomboy shows the popularity of the word almost linearly increasing since 1860":

"McDonald's has made the decision to stop selling milkshakes when there's a Brexit rally nearby... Burger King U.K. came under fire after tweeting, 'Dear people of Scotland. We're selling milkshakes all weekend. Have fun.'"

From "Throwing milkshakes as a political statement makes a splash in Britain" (CBS News).

Is the entire cup thrown at the person or just the contents? I'm not sure, but this "milkshaking" seems to be the same activity as pie-throwing (where, usually, it's shaving cream in a pie tin, smashed into a person's face). I guess for milkshaking you don't need to get as close, and it's easy to buy your loaded weapon in a fast-food joint. In the UK, there's debate about whether this should actually be called "violence," but obviously it is.

Wikipedia has an entry for "milkshaking":

Milkshaking is a term that refers to the use of milkshakes and other drinks as a means of political protest in a manner similar to egging.

Well, with egging, the hard shell is always part of the projectile, and you've got to hit hard enough to break the egg.

The target of a milkshaking is usually covered in a milkshake that is thrown from a cup or bottle.

Usually... so perhaps sometimes the cup is also thrown.

The trend gained popularity in the United Kingdom in May 2019 during the European Parliament election and was used primarily against right-wing and far-right politicians and activists, such as Tommy Robinson, Nigel Farage, Carl Benjamin, and members of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and Brexit Party.

Robinson was the first one to be milkshaked, and when he got milkshaked the next day, he punched the person who did it.

In American slang, "milkshake," used as a noun, refers to a woman's body "and the way she carries it." Urban Dictionary has various entries for "milkshake," the verb, going back to 2005, including the idea of throwing a milkshake at someone, from 2013. That doesn't have the political-theater angle, just a mindless prank, done from a moving car, aimed at a random pedestrian. The British activity is also there, entered 2 days ago.

And here's the rather extensive Wikipedia article on pie throwing. Excerpt:

The probable originator of pieing as a political act was Thomas King Forcade, the founder of High Times magazine. In 1970, Forcade pied Otto N. Larsen, the Chairman of the President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography; his action was called the first Yippie pieing[.] Aron Kay, also a Yippie, went on to take up Forcade's pieing tactics. Kay pied, among many others, William F. Buckley, Phyllis Schlafly, G. Gordon Liddy, E. Howard Hunt, and Andy Warhol....

Though pieing may not have been a political protest before 1970, pieing appeared — almost appeared — in the great 1964 film "Dr. Strangelove," and the context was distinctly political:

But for a last-minute change of Kubrick’s heart, the moment of reckoning was to be preceded with a riotous battle with pastries from the War Room buffet table. The fight, which was shot but cut out before the final print, begins with Soviet Ambassador de Sadeski (Peter Bull) responding to the threat of a strip search by hurling a custard pie at US general Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott), which misses and hits the American president.

“Gentlemen,” rallies Turgidson, holding his wounded leader (Peter Sellers) in his arms, “our beloved president has been infamously struck down by a pie in the prime of his life! Are we going to let that happen? Massive retaliation!” Chaos ensues in fast-motion, in a manner recalling the silent slapstick of Mack Sennett and the Keystone Cops....

"Eventually, Strangelove fires off a gun and shouts ‘Ve must stop zis childish game! Zere is Verk to do!’ The other characters sit around on the floor and play with custard cream like children building sandcastles. ‘I think their minds must have snepped from the strain,’ Strangelove announces."

Pie throwing goes way back — to stage shows and silent movies. The first is the 1909 film "Mr. Flip." There are many many pie-in-face bits in the movies but (judging from the Wikipedia article) the ultimate was this 2-minute sequence from "The Battle of the Century" (1927) with Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy:



Stop! Stop! This has gone far enough! Love thy neighbor!

"While it is not a crime to give someone a bad haircut, you will get arrested for intentionally snipping their ear with a scissors."

Said Madison police spokesman Joel DeSpain.

Stylist Khaled A. Shabani, 46, began to twist the customer’s ear after telling the man he was fidgeting and moving his head, DeSpain said....

With the shortest possible attachment, the clipper was run down the middle of the customer’s head by Shabani, “leaving him looking a bit like Larry from the ‘Three Stooges,’” DeSpain said.

The customer says he only wanted the sides shaved, with an inch left on top. Shabani says the snip was an accident. And the twist?



The charge is mayhem.

"As much as university administrators lament student-led intolerance and narrow ideas about free speech, they played a roll in their creation."

The editors at USA Today — which I got to via Instapundit — make a good point, while protecting their credibility within mainstream media with staunch anti-Trumpism, e.g., "Campus protesters are right that President Trump's America-first nationalism is a grave threat to many Americans. But unfettered First Amendment rights are the answer to the threat, not its cause."

But come on... "they played a roll..." If the editors of a newspaper are going to purport to instruct the plebes on what they ought to believe, they ought to take care at every moment that they are — in the most fundamental sense — editors.

Played a roll... I remember when Johnny Depp played a roll in "Benny and Joon"... played 2 rolls, actually, just got them out of the breadbasket, stuck forks in them, and made them do a little dance:



I've also seen actors play 2 roles, e.g., Patty Duke playing Patty and her cousin Cathy on the old "Patty Duke Show." I've even seen actors play 3 roles. Indeed, I've seen Peter Sellers play 3 roles twice. He was Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, President Merkin Muffley, and Dr. Strangelove in "Dr. Strangelove," and Grand Duchess Gloriana XII, Prime Minister Count Rupert Mountjoy, and Tully Bascombe in "The Mouse That Roared." He also played 3 roles in "The Prisoner of Zenda" — Rudolf IV, Rudolf V, and Syd Frewin — but I haven't seen that. And I've also not seen "Soft Beds, Hard Battles" (AKA "Undercovers Heroes"), which takes the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you've ever seen. In that one, he played 6 roles — Général Latour, Major Robinson, Herr Schroeder, Prince Kyoto, The President, and Adolf Hitler.



Speaking of cake and free speech, what about cake makers who won't write what customers want on their cake? I'm seeing this story — about ShopRite's refusal to put a 3-year-old child's name on a birthday cake. The father said: "There's a new president and he says it's time for a change; well, then it's time for a change. They need to accept a name. A name's a name." The year was 2008, the new President was Barack Obama, and the 3-year old was Adolf Hitler Campbell.

UPDATE: USA Today has corrected the roll/role mixup, and Instapundit has corrected it on his post as well. 

IN THE COMMENTS: I get very involved in the question whether Chaplin — in the scene Depp paid homage to — used rolls or potatoes. I would have used the Chaplin clip if I'd thought Chaplin used rolls, but I'd always seen them as potatoes. This is me in the comments:

1. "'Depp's "roll" playing is a rip from (or homage to) Chaplin's doing the same thing in THE GOLD RUSH' [wrote Robert Cook]"/Yes, I know, but I couldn't use Chaplin here, because Chaplin used potatoes."

2. "Here's Chaplin with the potatoes. Of course, it's better than what Depp did, but Depp was good as a guy who tried to be like Chaplin. Or am I wrong? Is Chaplin using dinner rolls? Now, I have to look it up. I think Depp's use of rolls has caused people to see Chaplin as using rolls. I think it was potatoes!"

3. "Watch Curly do it at 15:48 in 'Pardon My Scotch.'"

4. "In the Chaplin scene, the woman on the right clearly has a potato on her plate. Is that causing me to perceive Chaplin as spearing potatoes on his forks when in fact he's got dinner rolls? But why would they pose the potato on the woman's plate like that if not to orient the viewer to understand what the relevant items are?"

5. "Or am I wrong about that being a potato on the woman's plate. It looks like a split-open baked potato, but on further viewing, I'm willing to believe it's one of those dinner rolls that are baked after cutting a slit across the top."

6. "Okay, this convinces me that those were rolls, not potatoes. Also, Chaplin wasn't first. He got it from Fatty Arbuckle. (Video at the link.)"

"The puzzle that is currently frustrating the pundit minds of America is this: why is Hillary Clinton not simply clobbering Donald Trump?"

"How is this ranting, seething buffoon still competitive with her? Trump has now stumbled through a series of the kind of blunders that break ordinary political campaigns – the sort of deadly hypocrisies that always kill the demagogue in old movies – and yet this particular demagogue keeps on trucking. Why? Let us answer that burning pundit question of today by jumping to what will undoubtedly be the next great object of pundit ardor: the legacy of President Barack Obama.... As a president who has accomplished little since 2011... Obama has pretty much undermined Clinton’s ability to sell us on another centrist Democratic presidency. His legacy has diluted her promise.... Thanks to Obama’s flagrant hope-dealing in the dark days of 2008 – followed up by his failure to reverse the disintegration of the middle class – this favorite Democratic cliché has finally become just that: an empty phrase."

Says Thomas Frank.

ADDED: Frank does not say that Trump himself is a source of hope, only that the Democratic Party candidate can't sell hope this time around. But having given the post my "hope" tag, I see that I've only used it twice before in the last 2 years, and both posts are about Donald Trump. How did he earn the rarely awarded "hope" tag?

Most recently, on August 8th, offering his economic plan, he said: "I want to jump-start America and it can be done and it won't even be that hard."

And here, on January 31, 2016, there's a post with an embedded 3 Stooges video (which hardly seems expressive of hope):

"Donald Trump has muscled ahead in Iowa, regaining his lead on the brink of the first votes being cast in the 2016 presidential race."

The Des Moines Register selects a very masculine verb as it reports its last poll before the caucus that will finally release us from the clutches of Iowa.

Trump stands at 28 percent, while rival Ted Cruz has slid to 23 percent. But there’s still a strong case for Cruz in this race — he’s more popular and respected than Trump, the final Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics Iowa Poll shows.

“The drill-down shows, if anything, stronger alignment with Cruz than Trump, except for the horse race,” said J. Ann Selzer, the pollster for the Iowa Poll.

And that's the wan encouragement for anti-Trumpions from J. Ann Selzer...

Oh! That was just the hope that someone other than Trump might win. That's the kind of hope Hillary can still sell... the kind that Cruz flogged last winter.

This tastes flat.

Washington Post "stance on display" in a triad of Trump-related headlines.

I don't know what's oddest here:



1. "Trump’s stance on display..." tripped me up. Is there some "display" in the news about which Trump has a position, a "stance," that I need to know about? No, Trump has a "stance" — on what? — and he's showing it to us. The stance isn't on anything. It's just his self-assurance, the attitude that  he's "never wrong." The "stance" is not that he's "never loved more by his supporters." The love from the supporters is just a consequence, supposedly, of observing the display of the "stance." It's hard to read, because there's a colon after an introductory clause, and only one of the things after the colon is what the phrase before the colon is pointing at. When you click through, the story is "Trump: Never wrong, never sorry, never responsible," by Karen Tumulty. Why is this the top Trump story of the day? I guess it's because Trump made Obama's birthplace the story-of-the-day yesterday, and it must be wrestled into an anti-Trump story. So Trump's stating clearly that Obama was born in Hawaii becomes a generality about his character, which — I keep reading — is so different and much more dangerous than the character of all the other politicians, but I've never noticed that other politicians call attention to their errors as outright errors and refrain from deflecting blame onto others.

2. The second headline is just plain funny. The media is "playing the stooge for Trump"?! And it's  time to stop. Subheading: "The Republican nominee said, 'Jump.' And TV news asked, 'How high?'" The media has been obviously trying to help Hillary, but I guess its efforts are so inept that Trump can figure out how to flip them into doing things to work in his favor. When I hear "stooge," I think of The 3 Stooges, and I guess if they ever formed a goal, they'd bumble into exactly achieving the opposite effect. Here's the full story — "It’s time for TV news to stop playing the stooge for Donald Trump" — by Margaret Sullivan, WaPo's media columnist. It's another piece that follows on from yesterday's story-of-the-day, Trump's wrangling the media to hear his announcement of Obama's birthplace and deflection of blame onto Hillary. Sullivan explains how the press got played, but not why. The why is, I think, eagerness to help Hillary: They've made themselves stupid —  stupid for Hillary. What's the cure? I would think: serious, professional journalism. But Sullivan just tells them to stop it.

3. Oh, my, it's Laura Bush! Maybe she can help. The story is "In a tense election year, Laura Bush picks an interesting ally: Michelle Obama," by Krissah Thompson. It's as if somebody at WaPo decided to make the left-hand column as female-oriented as possible. All the authors are female. Story #1 alarms us about Trump's "stance" — which calls to mind that bane of female existence, manspreading. Story #2 calls to mind The 3 Stooges, who enact a style of male behavior that women find so off-putting. We all know women hate The 3 Stooges. And finally, there's relief: 2 female lead characters. If we can't love Hillary Clinton, surely we can warm up to these 2 solid standby females, Laura and Michelle. Gotta love at least one of them. First Ladies! Hillary was a First Lady, so... let's love First Ladies. Maybe that will help. Help us with our tension in this "tense election year." Laura and Michelle are sitting together on a stage at some worthy, non-tense event burbling about their mutual love and respect. Yes, yes, this is the tone we need now. Something gentle and feminine, not blustering and manspreading, not slapstick stoogery. There, now — do you see it? — forming mistily, gauzily in your mind? The female face — soft, smiling...

... tension-releasing....

"Donald Trump has muscled ahead in Iowa, regaining his lead on the brink of the first votes being cast in the 2016 presidential race."

The Des Moines Register selects a very masculine verb as it reports its last poll before the caucus that will finally release us from the clutches of Iowa.

Trump stands at 28 percent, while rival Ted Cruz has slid to 23 percent. But there’s still a strong case for Cruz in this race — he’s more popular and respected than Trump, the final Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics Iowa Poll shows.

“The drill-down shows, if anything, stronger alignment with Cruz than Trump, except for the horse race,” said J. Ann Selzer, the pollster for the Iowa Poll.

And that's the wan encouragement for anti-Trumpions from J. Ann Selzer...

Everybody loves gloves.

May I recommend gloves? These are all the brand that I've repeatedly bought for myself (and all the links go to Amazon, which gives me a percentage of your purchase price, so your gift-buying is a way to express appreciation for this blog):

men's driving gloves
women's cashmere-lined gloves
women's driving gloves
men's rabbit-fur-lined gloves

I'm thinking of getting I just bought the driving gloves — in "dazzling blue" — not just (or even mostly) because they might be great/amusing to wear while driving, but because we like to keep the house at 62° (or less) in the wintertime and the backs of my hands get cold. So these would be "driving gloves" in the sense of driving the blog... driving people on the internet crazy... and, as noted above, if you appreciate my driving you around the internet and pointing out interesting sights and keeping up a conversation in what has been an 11-year ride, you can tip the driver by buying your gloves and other presents for yourself and others via those links and through The Althouse Amazon Portal.

IN THE COMMENTS: EDH said: "Some, ah, gloves... gloves... howdaya... Oh, little gloves."

Gendered violence... The 3 Stooges.

In the course of discussing the gendered violence of the imagery deployed by Debbie Wasserman Shultz and trying to picture the kind of hitting implied by the phrase giving the back of one's hand, some of my mental images seemed like the sort of thing done by The 3 Stooges. This, of course, is nearly always man-on-man violence. (Occasionally, a woman is hit when a man moves out of the way.) What's gendered about 3 Stooges violence is that men typically —famously — find The 3 Stooges much funnier than women do.

I wanted a link for that last statement, googled "why don't women like the 3 stooges," and the top hit was a 2005 post of mine: "Why women don't like The Three Stooges." Ah, but I didn't say women dislike the violence. I said the Stooges weren't physically attractive enough. Further googling is frustrating because Google being what it is, material about the recent 3 Stooges movie dominates the returns. So I'll just say I've heard a lot of talk over the years about how men are far more amused by the Stooges because men and women experience violence differently. Women feel vulnerable and empathize with the victim, while men identify with the attacker. So they say.

Anyway, looking for examples of Stooge violence that could be called giving the back of one's hand, I watched the this montage of 3 Stooges. I was having that typical female response of not laughing at anything, but then one thing — and only one thing — made me laugh out loud. So I propose that you watch this well-edited set of acts of Stooge violence and take note of what, if anything, made you laugh. Then we can try to analyze the nature of the humor response. If it's the one thing that made me laugh and you are female, it will mean a lot to me.

"Chelsea Clinton is pregnant. Do you ponder how this will impact Hillary’s 2016 plans?"

"Then you’re stupid or sexist or both."

IN THE COMMENTS: Meade writes:

I notice, when I go to the link, that the next item down is about sexually harassing interns.

Oh! Indeed:

* Sexually harassing unpaid interns with the full protection of the law was fun while it lasted in New York. [Slate]

My original link goes to an Above the Law feature titled "Non-Sequiturs"... which suggests the sequence means nothing. I guess it's a bit like saying "no pun intended" to nudge people to see you've made a pun or "Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental" to get a laugh, as The 3 Stooges did in "You Nazty Spy" ("Any resemblance between the characters in this picture and any persons, living or dead, is a miracle") and "I'll Never Heil Again" ("The characters in this picture are fictitious. Anyone resembling them is better off dead").

"April Fool!" says Joe Besser at 9:59 in "Quiz Whizz."

It's just by chance that Episode 1 of Season 25 of The 3 Stooges has a reference to the special day that is today:



I ran across "Quiz Whizz" when I was writing the post I published at 7:11 this morning: "Andrew Breitbart's ghost said it, I didn't. don't blame the messenger." I said the 3 Stooges helped me with that post, and: "Bonus points to the reader who can guess what question I had, writing the text above, that led me to Google and resolved my question with help from The 3 Stooges."

No one stepped up to this challenge. The question was how to spell "whizz" in the line "Jennings is more of a quiz-show whizz than a comedy writer." Some might say "wiz," short for "wizard," but there's also "whizz" and "whiz," which seem to refer to the sound of speed. The rhyme with "quiz" is so obvious that you know it's been used, but how is it spelled? It's the title of the 3 Stooges short, so I say that nails it.

If you're reluctant to watch a 3 Stooges short with one of the Joes, perhaps it will interest you to know that at 3:09 the Stooges are confronted by an IRS agent, J.J. Figby. When the Stooges try to evade taxes by joking, Figby says, "No levity please."

"Andrew Breitbart's ghost said it, I didn't. don't blame the messenger."

Ken Jennings stands his ground, humor-wise, against the attack of the dreaded Twitchy.

When can it work to select an actual well-known dead person as a character in your joking about dying young? Jennings is more of a quiz-show whizz than a comedy writer, and Twitter boxes everyone in with the short format and wide dissemination, so it's hard to judge from this one example, but this is a case of selecting a dead-young person by his political position to demonstrate the truth of the opposite political position, and if the joke-teller isn't someone who has and wants the comic persona of asshole, this is a bad idea.

But I do like the standing of his ground, after he made the decision to joke about the dead man Breitbart. That takes nerve, and that can be funny. Commit to comedy and don't let the first critics scare you into taking it back and apologizing. It's at this point, when the critics step up, that you have a big opportunity to say something especially funny. Prudes will always be pushing you back. They'll always want everyone to stop laughing. A man died! No one should laugh.

But laughing at death is a good move. If you can't laugh at death, life will be nothing but crying, and that would be true idiocy.

Speaking of true idiocy and commitment to comedy, I got an assist in this post from The 3 Stooges! Bonus points to the reader who can guess what question I had, writing the text above, that led me to Google and resolved my question with help from The 3 Stooges....

... who are all dead!



Oh! No!!!

UPDATE: No one wins the bonus. Answer here. 

"RAT is an anagram of ART. Do you think that inspired them, perhaps subconsciously?"

Asks Dr Weevil.

"A weevil is any beetle from the Curculionoidea superfamily. They are usually small, less than 6 millimetres... and herbivorous." Sounds delicious!

Dr Weevil. A nice portmanteau pseudonym. Combines Dr. Evil with our theme-of-the-day: pests.

Let's listen to Tex Ritter and Mantan Moreland:



10 things I judge to be interesting:

1. The term "portmanteau" originated in "Through the Looking-Glass," as Humpty Dumpty explains "Jabberwocky," within which, for example, "slithy" combines "lithe and slimy" and "mimsy" combines "flimsy and miserable." "You see it's like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word." (The word "portmanteau" already meant suitcase.)

2. "Portmanteau" comes from French — combining words for "carry" and "coat" — but the French don't say "portmanteau" to refer to "suitcase words." They say mot-valise — which they came up with by making a literal translation of the English term "suitcase word." That makes "portmanteau" something that's called a "false friend" (a term I did not know).

3. Tex Ritter's real name was Woodward Maurice Ritter. You'd think if he needed a nickname, Woody would have popped up. Think of all the Woodys that that had to stretch to get to "Woody." Woody Allen, for example, was named Allan Stewart Konigsberg. I can't discern how he got to Woody from his Wikipedia entry, which says: "It the age of 17, he legally changed his name to Heywood Allen." That sounds like he was setting up a knock-knock joke: "Heywood who?"

4. Now Woody Guthrie got to Woody quite directly. He was named Woodrow Wilson Guthrie. Born in 1912. You might say: Woodrow Wilson! Woodrow Wilson didn't even become President of the United States until 1913. Yes, but he was Governor of New Jersey. No matter that Woody Guthrie was born in Okemah, Oklahoma. It would be like somebody today living in some state that's not New Jersey naming their new baby Chris Christie Smith or Chris Christie Jones or whatever.

5. Back to Mantan Moreland, the other guy in the Tex Ritter "Boll Weevil" video. Looking at his Wikipedia page, I see he was in a surprising number of movies, including many movies I'd never heard of like "Freckles Comes Home" (1942) and "King of the Zombies" (1941). "He is perhaps best known for his role as chauffeur Birmingham Brown in Monogram's Charlie Chan series. (The lyrics of The Coasters' 1963 song 'Bad Detective' are sung from the first-person perspective of Birmingham Brown, Mantan Moreland's character in the Charlie Chan movie series.)" There's some very heavy racial context here. Spike Lee's movie "Bamboozled" appropriates some things about Moreland. And the Beastie Boys sampled something of his about mashed potatoes, and you can listen to the original (NSFW) here.

6. Moreland "was briefly considered as a possible addition to the Three Stooges when Shemp Howard died in 1955." And he was in the 1957 Broadway stage production of "Waiting For Godot." He played Estragon, the role played by Bert Lahr in the original production of the play.



7. In the "Waiting for Godot" with Moreland, Geoffrey Holder played the character Lucky.



8. You may remember Geoffrey Holder from 1970s-era 7-Up commercials.

9. The New York Dolls recorded "Bad Detective" — replete with the opening notes that you may well recognize as the music that was always used in the past to signify: This is Chinese.

10. Mantan Moreland was known for his "Incomplete Sentences" comic routines. They went like this (from some Charlie Chan movies):

"I am just about to go crazy today. I just can't seem to escape the 'gay caveman' story."

Oh! The tribulations of paleoanthropology blogging. UW professor John Hawks must hit the ground running when news breaks from the Stone Bronze Age. The news folk are after him for an academic opinion and he says: "Dudes! I could be wrong, but I think that to have a 'gay caveman', you need a skeleton that is both gay and a caveman. And this ain't either!"

IN THE COMMENTS: Maguro said:

So it's probably not a gay caveman after all, merely a Bronze Age Bea Arthur.

What a letdown.

EDH said:

We have rare prehistoric video!

More scenes from the Tea Party...

... today in Madison:







ADDED: Welcome Instapundit readers. There are many Tea Party posts from today. Click here and scroll.

"This is how we know he is not a a New Yorker or a Jew."

David Brooks said that about Senator Jeff Sessions, "who puts on a plain old boy front but is deep down extremely sophisticated and intelligent." (Sessions is important because he's now the ranking Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and there are hearings on a new Supreme Court nominee coming up.)

So what is Brooks saying about New Yorkers and Jews?

In the long history of my people, there has never been one who was willing to appear less smart than he or she really is. We tend to go the other way.

(Why "tend to" if there has "never been one"?) That's some serious stereotyping, but presumably Brooks thinks it's perfectly fine, because he's got "my people" immunity.

ADDED: The double "a" — "a a New Yorker" — is in the original NYT text.

AND: Hey, Brooks, did you know The 3 Stooges were Jewish?

The 3 Stooges movie will have the perfect Larry.

Sean Penn! (Jim Carrey is Curly and Benicio Del Toro is Moe.) 

IN THE COMMENTS: Balfegor said:

Why would someone even think a 3 Stooges remake would be a good idea? It would be like remaking something by Buster Keaton, or Charlie Chaplin -- the pleasure isn't in the concept or the plot or witty dialogue, it's in who's doing it, and their skill at slapstick and physical comedy, no?

Well, now, wait. What about this? 

 

The original: