"Ms. Green described Mr. McMichael as an experienced farmer who had worked with livestock since his teenage years."

"The land where Mr. McMichael was raising livestock, including cattle and lambs, had been in the family for three generations, Ms. Green said. Plans for the future of the farm remain uncertain, she said. 'Farming was Bradley’s dream,' Ms. Green said. 'He died doing something he loved, and he cared very much for his livestock.'"

From "Oklahoma Farmer Killed by Water Buffaloes He Had Just Bought, Police Say/The farm where Bradley McMichael, 47, died has been in his family for three generations. His fiancée described him as an experienced farmer who had worked with livestock since his teenage years" (NYT).

The expression "He died doing something he loved" has come up a few times on this blog. I'm not sure I've ever discussed it — though I've had long conversations about it in real life — but it comes up in the comments, for example, in the thread accompanying "Indian stuntman dies as he uses only his hair to cross Teesta River" and "Choking to death on pancakes in an amateur pancake eating contest and why the Heimlich maneuver and mechanical suction didn't work."

Looking for those examples, I came across this from a beloved but long-gone commenter:

Goodbye to commenter Michael K.

Other commenters mark his passing in the comments to Tuesday night's sunrise post and in this earlier post that day.

This morning I'm seeing Neo's blog post, "RIP commenter 'Mike K'": "RIP Mike K, and all the commenters here who may have died but all we know is that they disappeared never to return."

Yes, I've mourned the unexplained loss of Bissage for 15 years.

Bissage was a dearly beloved commenter on this blog who disappeared one day, when the uncooperative dear became uncooperative. I've tried to call him back: "Come back, Bissage. We're counting oranges again. Remember? 42. 42. 42..." To no avail.

I appreciate hearing the specific news that a commenter has died, like when Gahrie's brother's dropped into a comments thread: "Hello.... This is my brother gahries account, and it appears this post was close to the last thing he read/saw before he passed away Sunday morning sometime after 130am...."

I miss Gahrie and Bissage and Michael K and many others who died or drifted away and even some of those who left in a huff. They, unlike the dead, can drop back in. Why don't they? It's not for me to figure out. The blog, like life itself, can only move forward, and the day will come when we will all be left behind. So thanks to all — except the actual trolls — who walked along this way as far as they did.

Suddenly, 10 things.

1. The blog has a theme today. This is something that happens sometimes, and at the point when I notice I use my "blog has a theme today" tag and — if I'm in the mood — I try to construct a 10-item list on that theme. As the post title indicates, the theme is: "sudden."

2. "Three gunmen, who have been hired to assassinate the President, hold a family hostage while waiting for their target. Interesting B film which focuses on psychopathic killer well-portrayed against type by Frank Sinatra." It's titled "Suddenly," and you can watch it in its hour-and-15-minute entirety here.

3. In the phrase "all of a sudden" (or "all of the sudden"), "sudden" is a noun. But we never use the noun in any other context. It's hard even to try to do that, even though it's obvious that the noun means something that is sudden. I challenge you! (By the way, I grew up around people who used the less common "all of the sudden," and it took me a long time to accept the dominance of "all of a sudden.")

4. Good writers should know that "suddenly" is a cheeseball word. One of Elmore Leonard's 10 rules of writing is "Never use the words 'suddenly' or 'all hell broke loose.'" I agree but would make an exception for intentional and delightful cheesiness, as in: "Why do birds suddenly appear/Every time you walk near?"



5. Hearing that, Meade suddenly says "Hey, don't forget, Bissage named his blog Suddenly Bissage." Bissage was a dearly beloved commenter on this blog who disappeared one day, when the uncooperative dear became uncooperative. I've tried to call him back: "Come back, Bissage. We're counting oranges again. Remember? 42. 42. 42..." To no avail.

6. Analyzing sentences in "The Great Gatsby" — the old "Gatsby project" — there was a day, a couple years ago, when we lit upon: "Through this twilight universe Daisy began to move again with the season, suddenly she was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men, and drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor beside her bed." About that "suddenly," I said: "This lone female is suddenly joined by numerous men. Though the unnamed men never get definition as individuals, they presumably get one-on-one dates with her, since the numbers match up: half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men. This is the kind of 'dating' one associates with a prostitute." What would Elmore say about that? I'm inclined to justify anything in "The Great Gatsby" as exactly what it has to be, so I want to say that the "suddenly" is hilarious, but why? Perhaps because it's absurd — 6 men popping up in a sequence on each day within a season of days. Presumably, those men and more are always there, seeking dates with Daisy. It's her whimsical option — exercised suddenly — to accept the dates and put them in sequence, 6 per day, day after day. It's an endless flow, not sudden at all. The suddenness is in Daisy's waking up again in this twilight universe.

7. "Sudden death" — to refer to a method of tie-breaking — goes back to 1834, according to the OED, which found the quote: "‘Which’, said he, ‘is it to be—two out of three, as at Newmarket, or the first toss to decide?’ ‘Sudden death’, said I, ‘and there will soon be an end of it.’" Wikipedia has a page on the topic, with specific details on 16 different sports/games and: "Sudden death may instead be called sudden victory to avoid the mention of death, particularly in sports with a high risk of physical injury. This variant became one of announcer Curt Gowdy's idiosyncrasies in 1971 when the AFC divisional championship game between the Kansas City Chiefs and Miami Dolphins went into overtime." Ha. That didn't catch on. If you're that anxious about someone getting hurt, why are you watching?

8. Meade laughs at something he wrote in the comments to "We vomit on all these people who suddenly say they are our friends": "I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes/And just for that one moment I could be you/Yes, I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes/You'd know what a drag it is to have vomit in your shoes." And my response to that — because I'm working on this list here — is to do a word search for "suddenly" at bobdylan.com. One of the great ones comes up — "It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding":

You lose yourself, you reappear
You suddenly find you got nothing to fear
Alone you stand with nobody near
When a trembling distant voice, unclear
Startles your sleeping ears to hear
That somebody thinks they really found you

9. Sudden infant death syndrome. To be distinguished — we hope! — from infanticide. "The misdiagnosis of infanticide as SIDS 'happens all over... A lot of doctors and police don't know how to handle it. They don't take it as seriously as they should.'" Said Jamie Talan, co-author of "The Death of Innocents: A True Story of Murder, Medicine and High-Stakes Science." That book is from 1997. That's a controversy that seems to have melted away.

10. This is a 10-point list so we must stop here. Did I miss something you were hoping for? "Suddenly Susan"? "Suddenly Seymour"? "Suddenly, Last Summer"?

Robot says hi to tea.

A photo from yesterday. This morning, I'm saying hi to new snow on all that beyond-the-window scenery.

IN THE COMMENTS: EDH says, referring to my idea for a new product:

Robot thought bubble: Whew! I'm so glad you "have a mug of hot liquid [to] hold onto it as needed" instead of "smooth metal devices that fit comfortably into various bodily orifices."

And I say:

Actually, that double-wall glass is bad for hand-warming. I recommend a nice ceramic mug.

Maybe the devices for orifice warming should be ceramic...

And then I think about Meade's handiwork. You saw it here in May 2009, on one of those beautiful days before we were married, when I visited him in his little house in Ohio, the one with what Bissage called the "nicely scrubbed stove top." It looked like this:



Reminisced about here.

To live freely in writing.

That's my longtime motto here on the blog. (Not that I have some other motto that I use somewhere else, though I do, off-blog, frequently deploy my aphorism "Better than nothing is a high standard.")

Writing that last post, marking the 10-year anniversary of this blog, I worked in the old motto. It's the only link in that post [or was, until I added a link to this post], and it goes to a normblog profile of me from November 2004, where the first question is "Why do you blog?" and my answer was what was already my motto: "To live freely in writing." Scrolling down over there, I also see: "What is your favourite proverb? > I'm from the 60s, so: 'Do your own thing.'" My own thing is to live freely in writing.

But I started looking for other occurrences of "to live freely in writing." For a long time — I can't remember when or how long — I kept the motto in the blog banner under my name. That was before that space became the place to stow links to other important stuff, not that anything's more important to me.

Anyway, here's what I found in my search for other occurrences of the motto (which I've boldfaced):

Instapundit: "Bras make boobs saggier, study finds."

Posted this evening, but please note that in June 2009, I wrote — on Instapundit:

DO BRAS PREVENT SAGGY BREASTS? “There is, so far as [The Straight Dope] can discover, zero evidence that bras prevent saggy breasts.” I recommend bralessness. At least don’t let fear of drooping breasts stop you.."

I had a corresponding post on Althouse, so there was a comments thread here. The first commenter was Bissage (the dearly missed Bissage):

I’ve always worn briefs instead of boxers, just in case.

Then somebody else said: "For older women, the bra offers one benefit. It holds the sagging organ away from the skin beneath it." And I said: "Go braless so you don't develop a place called 'under your breasts.'"

I also have a September 2005 post on this subject (which is close to my heart).  It started out talking about the old Maidenform bra ads, and I was criticizing the ones that featured a woman staying home with her kids:

Oh, Bissage, et al., you have made Althouse so very much better than I am.

I'm just reading the comments on yesterday's carrot post. ("Shed a tear for the orange and its desperate problems.")

Campy started us off at a high level by referencing one of this blog's most controversial posts:

Carrot sticks! Where are the onion rings?

So, yes, we know what the carrots are.

Mr. Forward introduced a classic "orange" subject:

Nothing rhymes with orange.

Hector Owen responded:

I suppose, if one were to make a ceramic porringer, and glaze it the color of those carrots, and set it on the table with other things that did not include carrots, or yams, or (of course) oranges, that one could then proudly say, "Nothing is oranger than my porringer!"

Still, nothing rhymes with "orange." Now, if that porringer had a flange … no, the "a" would still be different.

I thought the right answer was "door hinge."

Lucid sledgehammers the meaning of the post:

This is clearly a very penetrating (???!!!!) photographic comment: While women (pink) are to be carefully considered, the photographer also feels concern for the tribulations of men and their special appendages.

Freeman Hunt provides an amazing list of things that an orange ribbon is supposed to reflect/create awareness of — according to this creepy awareness site:

Agent OrangeCultural Diversity
Feral Cats
Hunger
Leukemia
Lupus
Melanoma
Motorcycle Safety
Racial Tolerance
Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy Syndrome
Self Injury

Not prostate cancer, though. Prostate cancer gets light blue. Get it?

Freeman Hunt had an afterthought:

Why is there a ribbon for feral cats but not feral dogs?

I think it's more important to be aware of feral dogs because they could kill you.

Feral cats, not so much. You could probably throw a crazy cat away from you if it attacked you. Man > cat.

Ironrailsironweights said:

Self Injury...

Somehow I never thought of that as a "cause" requiring the ribbon treatment.

Maybe these people crave (carve) attention.

Michaele said:

There's some sad orange wearers right this minute 'cause University of TN just missed knocking off #1 Alabama...the score was 12 to 10 and UT had a chance at making a field goal in the last couple of seconds.

Knox(ville) — who "just ordered myself a black 'Amish Support' ribbon car magnet!" — said:

Yeah, yeah, keep it to yourself.

Oh, who am I kidding, I don't give a sh*t about football.

You are talking about football, right?

Leland said...

Texas A&M, in the[ir] hatred for University of Texas and all things orange, learned how to grow maroon carrots.

 Libhom said:

This post is as senseless as everything else on this blog.

Chip Ahoy said:

This post has no meaning!

Just like everything else on this blog -- meaningless.

Just like my life has no meaning. Except for the meaning I give it by spending time here noting your abject absence of meaning and returning regularly and reaffirming that observation and then setting aside my other meaninglessness to take the time and effort to remark on your meaninglessness, even so far as to bother with a CAPTCHA to do it. Yes, that's right, my remark on your meaningless blog does have meaning although I assert your blog that I make the remark on does not.

But then I wouldn't recognize meaning if it jumped up and bit my penis. I do not understand photography or art or getting out and seeing my city or recording it with my own unique eye and through my own lens, or forests or farmers market or flower boxes, animals or odd things in nature or within human constructions. They're meaningless to me! Now, start being meaningful Goddamnit! And give me something meaningful to foul.

Then my other self says,

I once had a careless carrot patch. There was loose tilled dirt directly under an air conditioner that dripped steadily throughout the hot summer directly onto that patch of dirt, so watering was automatic. I had a packet of carrot seeds that I broadcast into the soil and, being an ordinary kid, didn't pay much attention to them thereafter, just checked back occasionally. The plants are beautiful at every stage of development, more so because they were not arranged in tight farmerly rows. At first the foliage looks like delicate little green feathers, then lacy ferns, then they expand, fill in, and strengthen to proper deep dark green carrot tops. The bright orange carrot roots were delicious.

LoafingOaf said:

These are gross looking carrots. They look like fucked up fingers or pathetic penises or something. Ick.

Uh, yeah. Have you no pity! Why are cancerous breasts a big warm fuzzy cause, but a pathetic penis is just something against which to hurl contempt? Sexist. You must wear a light blue ribbon for penance. Penis penance.

And yet the Oaf continues:

I have a question. Why is everything that Obama says or does horribly wrong to Althouse and her commenters, yet Dick Cheney is such a hero the Althouse world wants to build him a statue in Madison? Is Obama really that awful and Cheney really that righteous? Or is this blog getting carried away by the right wing?

(Link added.)

Bissage said:

I find myself disappointed that Loafing Oaf didn’t post a link to his blog where we’d all find his twelve point plan specifying what each and every one of us should do to make Althouse so very much better than it is.

Oh, Bissage, et al., you have made Althouse so very much better than I am.

Emotional...

... Bissage.

"The American way of eating has become the elephant in the room in the debate over health care."

Ha ha. Get it? The elephant? That's you, reader. You're fat, says Michael Pollan. And you are a big — a huuuuge — part of the problem the government needs to solve. Pollan links to a study that supposedly shows that the reason we spend twice as much on health care as Europeans is because we are so grotesquely tubby. How can the government come between you and your food?

Cheap food is going to be popular as long as the social and environmental costs of that food are charged to the future. There’s lots of money to be made selling fast food and then treating the diseases that fast food causes. One of the leading products of the American food industry has become patients for the American health care industry.

Greedy corporations are making you fat and costing the health care system money. They are so greedy that — how awful! — they are selling food cheap. Expensive food also makes you fat, of course, but it's less obvious who's making money selling expensive food and thus harder to blame the evil corporations. 

The market for prescription drugs and medical devices to manage Type 2 diabetes, which the Centers for Disease Control estimates will afflict one in three Americans born after 2000, is one of the brighter spots in the American economy. As things stand, the health care industry finds it more profitable to treat chronic diseases than to prevent them. There’s more money in amputating the limbs of diabetics than in counseling them on diet and exercise.

Oh, here are the money-mad limb-hackers Obama was warning us about. Now, what I want to know is what is so terrible about the fact that most of the health-care money is spent treating diseases? Why should healthy people be consuming a bigger portion of the money? It's a good thing that people are left alone to take care of themselves and that health care professionals are used to do the things we can't do for ourselves. Of course, it would be nice if people didn't get diseases, and maybe a lot more of us could have long, disease-free lives, with little consumption of health-care resources if only we did more prevention. But would it change anything to give people ample free sessions with professionals who tell us to do what we already know we ought to do? The doctors actually don't have a clue how to get us to stop overeating (or — as if it would help — push us into a vigorous exercise program).

Pollan gets an economic theory going. He says health insurance companies drop customers after they get diseases, but if new law prevents this and requires them to charge all customers the same rates, then, they will have a strong new interest in preserving health and, allied with government, will stimulate the creation of government programs, policies, and laws aimed at stopping us from eating so damned much.

When health insurers can no longer evade much of the cost of treating the collateral damage of the American diet, the movement to reform the food system — everything from farm policy to food marketing and school lunches — will acquire a powerful and wealthy ally, something it hasn’t really ever had before....

In the same way much of the health insurance industry threw its weight behind the campaign against smoking, we can expect it to support, and perhaps even help pay for, public education efforts like New York City’s bold new ad campaign against drinking soda. At the moment, a federal campaign to discourage the consumption of sweetened soft drinks is a political nonstarter, but few things could do more to slow the rise of Type 2 diabetes among adolescents than to reduce their soda consumption, which represents 15 percent of their caloric intake.

"Bold new ad campaign"? Nicely, the NYT includes a link. Here's the ad:

It's a run-of-the-mill public service ad? What is bold about it? Picking on one product? Using tax money to pay for it? Oh, I see, it "graphically depicts globs of human fat gushing from a sideways drink bottle." I couldn't tell by looking at it. So shoving disgusting images in our face is bold. How admirably edgy of New York City. What's next? Pictures of ugly fat people slobbering over hamburgers? Something like this?



Throw all the taxpayer money you want into preventive care and raise the price on our too-cheap food. Blare nauseating ads at us. But we will still eat. We already care and we already don't want to be fat. We're not fat because corporations are greedy or because you can't get a free appointment with a nutritionist. We're fat because of the deep, innate appetite that saved our ancestors from famine and motivated them to eat whatever they could find to survive. We are here thanks to those profound desires, and life is all too easy these days. The unfortunate consequence of the beautiful amplitude of modern life is that we grow too big.

IN THE COMMENTS: Bissage said:

It’s funny that some people look at that ad and see “globs of human fat gushing from a sideways drink bottle.”

Not me.

I see a dog’s head with a dagger in it, a penis, and the word “sex."

Makes me want to consume alcohol, but I don’t know why.

Faking the hate.

Meet Maurice Schwenkler, the new Ashley Todd.

IN THE COMMENTS: Bissage:

Our young Mr. Schwenkler, a/k/a the Gangster of Love, would have done better to have spent his spare time watching reruns of "thirtysomething," learning how to be an adult.

Let's speak of the pompatous of politics.

"But seriously, in this movie there is no sex. No violence. No eye candy. No action, really, except what’s in your imagination."

"But there are ideas. Oh, how there are ideas! And there is a kind of benevolent godliness to it. And there is a way to live your life."

All I can say is just: Be sure to drink your Ovaltine®.

"THE THEATER IS ALIVE!!1!!!!!!1!!!"

The wonderful Bissage comments on the old post titled "'My Dinner with Andre,' my favorite movie, is now available as a Criterion Collection DVD":

Mrs. Bissage and I watched the Criterion release last night. We were both spellbound.

Unfortunately, houseguests arrived just as Andre started his grand surrebuttal. Crap!

Oh well. We agreed this morning we’ll watch it again later this week.

One remark, on the merits, I will hazard to make. As I’m sure you are sick of hearing, Professor, I was involved (half-assedly) in the theater back in the late-seventies/early-eighties. Well, what of it? The thing is, I watched the movie and I was astounded by how much the dialogue reminded me of actual conversations from back in the day.

“Authenticity” is not the be-all and end-all, of course, but that movie is absolutely brimming with theater-culture authenticity, at least according to my experience.

Yep. We really used to wear blindfolds and sit in a circle and listen to each other breathe and stuff like that.

THE THEATER IS ALIVE!!1!!!!!!1!!!

Ha!

And, once again, here's the link to buy the DVD.

"Recently inspired by the great Althouse, I resolved to do more with this blog."

"And I found myself wanting to see if I could post a photograph I took all by my little old self...."

"We await the President’s evidence that the nation's pediatricians are striking it rich with unnecessary tonsillectomies."

"'You come in and you’ve got a bad sore throat, or your child has a bad sore throat or has repeated sore throats,' President Obama explained at Wednesday’s press conference. 'The doctor may look at the reimbursement system and say to himself, 'You know what? I make a lot more money if I take this kid’s tonsils out.' If that’s what he really thinks is wrong with U.S. health care — and with the medical profession — then ObamaCare is going to be even worse than we thought."

***

Is the government's approach to medical care going to be more solidly based on science and less focused on dollar amounts than the system we have now? Or is it the other way around? Obama impugns doctors, because, supposedly they care about money more than science, but, without evidence — and considering the rarity of tonsillectomies — he doesn't seem too well grounded in science.

And he's been presenting his program mainly as a way to save money, so he's openly admitting he's about the money, in which case, why bash doctors for being about the money (if that's what they are)? Obama talks as though he'll only deny us expensive treatments that are less effective than cheaper ones, but I'm trusting that far less than I trust my doctor.

IN THE COMMENTS: Bissage writes:

At this very moment, presidential aides are lining up pediatricians to invite to the White House for a beer.

Donald's Designated Driver says:

Personally, I'm glad that our President has the balls to take on Big Tonsil.

"Cool it, Fellas! When I'm done let's all get high on the ammonia fumes!!!"

I love the comments thread over at YouTube — the source of the post title.

Cripes! Like they've never seen a white funnel cloud come out of a hot blonde's house!

looks like a 70's porn movie, lol.

:-D Just love that tornado music.

Heh, that one surfer kinda looks like Nicolas Cage! I can remember that tornado (& trippy musical accompaniment) somewhat freaking me out as a child.

I never knew there was a time where a strong ammonia smell was a good thing...

Ha ha. I never knew there would be a time when the stupid things I tried to avoid would be things I would go out of my way to make everyone look at. Or — for insiders only — the things I eschewed would be things I espewed.

***

This post is inspired by the poem wonderful Bissage wrote about the sink rainbow.

"Obscene, but absolutely hilarious."

According to Right Wing News.

Okay, now I know what's right-wing hilarious. And I'm a little scared.

Especially the part that got me thinking about egg salad.

IN THE COMMENTS: The wonderful Bissage:

I can’t watch the video right now. I’m probably not the only one, so let’s see if something else might suffice:

Bill Bennett walks into an upscale D.C. nightspot and is surprised to see Pat Buchanan sitting at the bar eating an entire chicken. He watches in amazement as Mr. Buchanan tears into the hapless bird and doesn’t stop until all that remains is one chicken wing.

Mr. Bennett says, “You know, Pat, I can’t help but notice you ate that entire bird except for the right wing.”

Mr. Buchanan wipes the slobber and chicken bits from his face and says, “Well, there’s a reason for that but it has nothing to do with my right-wing political inclinations.”

And with that, the ghost of William F. Buckley appears out of thin air and kicks them both in the balls. They double over in agony and fall to the floor. Mr. Buckley sits down at the bar and orders an egg salad sandwich.

The End.

"The Althouse delinquents, unable to grasp more than one thing at a time, are convinced this has solved the question of racist language."

Lean Left thinks you're not getting it.

IN THE COMMENTS: Bissage says:

I managed to get about one-third of the way through.

That’s exactly the kind of sophomoric and prolix crap that tempts a survey course grader to take the stack of bluebooks and simply toss them down the stairs.

Ha ha. Now, I've got to link to Daniel Solove's great old post demonstrating the down-the-stairs method of grading.

AND: Oh, look, Glenn Kenney is reacting to us:

[T]here seems to be some theory afoot that the oft-played-for-laughs deployment of racial epithets in the picture, when considered in tandem with a years-old video of England's Prince Harry, now makes it okay for one to refer to, say, one's Jewish friend as a "kike" to his face....

We've been talking about whether the film may make some people think it's okay, not that it actually makes it okay. (And, Glenn, the character's name is Thao, not Bee. Bee is the actor's first name.)

When Bill Cosby voted: "Well, I took my father's picture, I took my mother's picture and I took my brother James, he died when he was 7, I was 8..."

"And I took the three of them into the voting booth in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, and I pulled the curtain and I took their pictures out and I said, 'And now we're going to vote.' And I — we only, I only voted once. But — and I did that and their pictures were out, and then I put them back into my pocket and I opened the curtain. And it, and it was wonderful."

IN THE COMMENTS: Chip Ahoy said:

When I voted I stepped into the booth and closed the curtain. Then I took out of my overcoat photos of my mother and father and my four brothers and sisters and my dog that I have in little frames and taped them to the voting machine. I came prepared with Scotch tape because I remembered last time they didn't have any shelves in that voting booth. Then I took out a couple of candles and taped them to the sides of the voting booth. Then, from another pocket of my overcoat, I took out a bento box that I stuffed with sushi and sashimi and mixed the soy sauce into the wasabi, and using chopsticks, had a little snack. Then I took out a flask of saki and took a few long swigs. Then I gazed at the pictures for a long time. I thought heavily about each member of my family as I went down the row of election choices and made my selection. Then when I was finished with my little ritual I looked at the pictures again, individually, and said to them as if they were in there with me, "You're wrong about nearly everything and although I have only an idea how you all voted I have but one vote to counteract yours, so here goes." Then I pulled the lever. Put the pictures back into my pocket, snuffed the candles, put those away too, then the flask. Then closed the bento box and left.

Bissage said:

When I voted I brought my menagerie of Star Wars figurines and wrote in Jedi Master Mace Windu.

And it, and it was wonderful.

Richard Batista, who donated a kidney and saved his wife's life and is now using that kidney as a bargaining chip in the divorce case.

The Long Island doctor would like you to know — with the help of The Daily News — what a saint he is...

He fondly recalls a visit to her room on the day after surgery.

"There was no greater feeling on this planet. As God is my witness, I felt as if I could put my arm around Jesus Christ. I was walking on a cloud."

... and what a slut she was:

"There's no deeper pain you can ever express than to be betrayed by the person you devoted your life to," Batista told reporters...

"I saved her life. But the pain is unbearable."

Batista charged his wife, Dawnell, repaid his gesture by first sleeping with her physical therapist - and then denying him access to their three kids in an increasingly bitter divorce.

This is all about money. Money and the desire to humiliate.

IN THE COMMENTS: There's some good discussion of the dynamics of marriage, and I defend my position vigorously, by I just want to highlight this silliness from Bissage:

I gave Mrs. Bissage a kidney and it came with a string attached.

No wait. That was a ureter.

ALSO IN THE COMMENTS: There's quite a lot of talk about a photograph of Dawnell that causes bamboobzlement.

UPDATE: Dawnell says Batista cheated on her.

"Why did I do that and write the story with the girl and the apple, because I wanted to bring happiness to people..."

"... to remind them not to hate, but to love and tolerate all people. I brought good feelings to a lot of people and I brought hope to many. My motivation was to make good in this world."

A world-class bullshit artist, keeping up the bullshit.

Another memoir hoax, and once again, Oprah fell for it:

["Angel at the Fence"] was the tale of Herman Rosenblat, who said he first met his wife while he was a child imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp and she, disguised as a Christian farm girl, tossed apples over the camp’s fence to him....

Ms. Winfrey, who hosted Mr. Rosenblat and his wife, Roma Radzicki Rosenblat, on her show twice, called their romance “the single greatest love story” she had encountered in her 22 years on the show....

Here's the New Republic article by Gabriel Sherman that exposed the hoax:

"It's a lie. It's one big lie," says Henry Golde, 79, who was liberated with Herman from Theresienstadt, in 1945. Rosenblat "was normal," Golde adds. "I don't know what happened. Something went haywire, to tell a lie like that on national TV. It's terrible." Golde, a former New York City cab driver who now lives in Appleton, Wisconsin, says he was angry when he first read about Herman's story in the 1990s. "What the hell? I said. What the hell is he writing about?" Golde remembers....

"A love story set in a concentration camp as a way of teaching about the Holocaust actually inverts the reality of the Holocaust, denies it in its own way," [Michigan State University professor Kenneth] Waltzer wrote me in an e-mail. "The reality of being in a concentration camp was that ... [n]ormal impulses like those of young lovers were disrupted, collapsed. The idea that two people in the circumstances described--a prisoner in a camp, in a group of brothers, the primary source of loyalty, and a girl in hiding under false identity with a family group, her primary source of loyalty--would put all up for grabs by meeting daily in the open at a guarded electrified fence means that the writer didn't really understand, and the publishers and moviemaker didn't really understand either. And this is why all this is so important. There is denial of the Holocaust, this isn't that, but there is also denial of the substance or reality of the Holocaust--and this is definitely that."

IN THE COMMENTS: A little pity, from Bissage:

Mr. Rosenblat is a world-class bullshit artist?

Gee . . . I don’t know . . . that sounds kind of harsh. Anyway, he’s certainly not the only guilty party in this false-memoir scheme.

Go to the link and look at the cover of the bound proof. Was the fence really a single strand of barbed wire? Is a white dove the same thing as an angel? Was there ever a white dove at all? Is that an illustration of an apple tree that actually existed near Buchenwald?

These are stupid questions, of course.

But so too is it stupid to ask whether Santa Claus lives at the North Pole and has a reindeer with a red nose that lights his way. Stupid for anyone except children, that is.

There are those who make it their purpose in life to jealously guard the memory of the Holocaust and that’s a good thing, for the most part.

Still, a little poetic license can be a good thing too.

Does it really change the horribleness of the Holocaust to say a little girl tossed an apple over a fence?

In early drafts of "Angel at the Fence" the little girl tossed over a hot pastrami on rye and an egg cream.

The editors thought that was going too far and they were right!

And William:

Let us come together in the sunlit, upland pastures and gather cow patties. Let us pile these patties one upon another and build such a towering edifice that God in his heaven looks down upon us and says "What a pile of bullshit"...The idea that the Holocaust is the one atrocity of the past century that should be immune from evasions and myths and denial is itself a cow patty that can be used as the keystone for the arch of a lofty cathedral of bullshit.....Some addled old man packed his wounds with a poultice of bullshit. I can relate to that. We all try to invent a usable past. He tried and failed, but the attempt was not evil.

AND: Glenn Reynolds links like this:

HEH: “Another memoir hoax, and once again, Oprah fell for it.” She’s a sucker for a good life story, true or not.

The Obama angle. You know, Oprah's gullibility is no joke. She's hugely influential. Skeptoid put her first on his list of "Ten Most Wanted: Celebrities Who Promote Harmful Pseudoscience."

To her estimated total audience of 100 million, many of whom uncritically accept every word the world's wealthiest woman says, she promotes the paranormal, psychic powers, new age spiritualism, conspiracy theories, quack celebrity diets, past life regression, angels, ghosts, alternative therapies like acupuncture and homeopathy, anti-vaccination, detoxification, vitamin megadosing, and virtually everything that will distract a human being from making useful progress and informed decisions in life. Although much of what she promotes is not directly harmful, she offers no distinction between the two, leaving the gullible public increasingly and incrementally injured with virtually every episode.

When you have a giant audience, you have a giant responsibility. Maybe you don't want such a responsibility, in which case, fine, keep your mouth shut; or limit your performance to jokes or acting or whatever it is you do.

At some point, the real hoax is Oprah herself.