"The most new York couple is: very sweet man that everyone loves with a wife way out of his league that he’s obsessed with."

That's the top rated comment on this TikTok about Rama Duwaji, the wife of Zohran Mamdani:

"There is a lot of sex in 'Fear of Flying,' but the novel is rarely sexy. Intercourse, relentlessly anatomized..."

"... fails to delight Isadora, much less the reader. 'I longed to have orgasms like Lady Chatterley’s,' she sighs. 'Why didn’t the moon turn pale and tidal waves sweep over the surface of the earth?'... Jong [fought in] the struggle for women’s pleasure... during that fleeting moment when sex struck some feminists as the thing that would set us once and forever free. The decades have proved them wrong.... Today every woman is Isadora. Or maybe none is. Americans are lonely — marrying less, partnering less, even having less intercourse than ever.... The marriage plot, the abortion plot, the screw-me-sideways-without-a-zipper plot: Each has run its course without effecting the longed-for revolution. Many of today’s feminist narratives wallow in pain more than pleasure...."

Writes Jane Kamensky, in "'Fear of Flying' Is 50. What Happened to Its Dream of Freedom Through Sex? With its feminist take on sexual pleasure, Erica Jong’s novel caused a sensation in 1973. But the revolution Jong promoted never came to pass" (NYT).

I'll just quote Bob Dylan:

Then she says, “You don’t read women authors, do you?”
Least that’s what I think I hear her say
“Well,” I say, “how would you know and what would it matter anyway?”
“Well,” she says, “you just don’t seem like you do!”
I said, “You’re way wrong”
She says, “Which ones have you read then?” I say, “I read Erica Jong!”

"Locke makes the very good point that 'most children’s constitutions are either spoiled, or at least harmed, by cockering and tenderness.'"

"That lovely seventeenth century word ‘cockering’ means ‘to indulge or spoil.' Locke goes on to recommend that children are not too warmly wrapped up in winter, in order that they learn to endure the cold, in the manner of the Spartans. He also reckons that the shoes of children should be made deliberately leaky in order to toughen up the feet. Certainly my third son Henry, more ignored than the other two, has tough feet, and spent whole summers shoeless. Henry maintained when nine years old that ‘shoes were prisons for the feet.'... Our youngest, Henry, was born in the house with two lovely midwives, and he has grown into a solid, healthy lad. He spent his first eight years roaming the fields and rocky coves, and even from an early age he was a fast runner and a confident climber.... Henry would disappear for hours with his friend Gilbert doing God knows what in the fields. The key here was lack of parental supervision. When parents supervise, they are at some level imposing their own ideology or fantasy of country life or wild life on to their children. That’s why I have always recoiled from those adventure holidays and back-to-nature holidays for children. children. There is some damn theory or other underpinning the whole thing, like a Steineresque philosophy. They remind me of the Hitler Youth. This is what D. H. Lawrence is getting at when he says that children should be left with a lazy woman who can’t be bothered with them. Leave them alone!"

From "Why Ignoring Your Children Will Make Everyone Happier: Or, What to Neglect When You're Neglecting," Tom Hodgkinson.

Locke is the philosopher John Locke. The quote is from "Some Thoughts Concerning Education" (1690).

"Cockering" — do you like that word? Can you use it? Maybe not. The OED calls it "Now English regional."  The historical examples include this from the King James version of the Bible (1611): "Cocker thy childe, and hee shall make thee afraid." And let me give you this quote too:

1682 T. Shadwell Lancashire-witches i. 7 Dost thou think, because thy foolish Mother has Cocker d thee with morning Cawdles and afternoons Luncheons, thou art fit to make Love?

I presumed that "cawdle" was an old spelling of "cuddle," but no, it's an alternative spelling of "caudle," which is "A warm drink consisting of thin gruel, mixed with wine or ale, sweetened and spiced, given chiefly to sick people."

As for "Steineresque philosophy," there's nothing else in the book about it. I googled and guess it refers to this person — Rudolf Steiner — whose ideas are listed as "Anthroposophy, anthroposophical medicine, biodynamic agriculture, eurythmy, spiritual science, Waldorf education, holism in science."  He died in 1925 and wasn't connected to the Hitler Youth. Indeed: "In 1921, Adolf Hitler attacked Steiner on many fronts, including accusations that he was a tool of the Jews... In 1922 a lecture Steiner was giving in Munich was disrupted when stink bombs were let off and the lights switched out, while people rushed the stage apparently attempting to attack Steiner, who exited safely through a back door.... The 1923 Beer Hall Putsch in Munich led Steiner to give up his residence in Berlin..."

"Most countries have a serious news show first thing in the morning. This has the effect of stimulating such emotions as anger and anxiety in the listener."

"But a certain type of person feels it is their duty to listen to it, as if the act of merely listening is somehow going to improve the world. Duty, oh, what a burden you are! Isn’t there room for a news-free radio station? When I listen to classical music on the radio, for example when driving, there is nothing worse than having my reverie and dream-flow interrupted by the tedious reality of news headlines."

From "How to Be Idle: A Loafer's Manifesto." I mentioned this book the other day and even gave a part of that quote, but now I've gone and bought it and have access to the entire quote, so I wanted to share that. I'm also reading the whole thing, in my idle moments.

The author, Tom Hodgkinson, has written a number of books, and they all seem thematically related. The busiest one is "Business for Bohemians: Live Well, Make Money." Then there's "The Freedom Manifesto: How to Free Yourself from Anxiety, Fear, Mortgages, Money, Guilt, Debt, Government, Boredom, Supermarkets, Bills, Melancholy, Pain, Depression, Work, and Waste" and "How to Be Free." A couple great parenting titles, "The Idle Parent: Why Laid-Back Parents Raise Happier and Healthier Kids" and "Why Ignoring Your Children Will Make Everyone Happier: Or, What to Neglect When You're Neglecting." That subtitle — "What to Neglect When You're Neglecting" — is a riff on the famous old pregnancy classic, "What to Expect When You're Expecting."

I'm avoiding the headlines today.... maintaining the dream-flow.

Anyway, I just bought "Why Ignoring Your Children Will Make Everyone Happier: Or, What to Neglect When You're Neglecting." I feel like my parents had the idea for that book. I read the first 2 pages and see that it takes this D.H. Lawrence quote seriously:

"How to begin to educate a child. First rule: leave him alone. Second rule: leave him alone. Third rule: leave him alone. That is the whole beginning."

ADDED: The quote at the top of this post makes me wonder whatever happened to Erik Hagerman, "The Man Who Knew Too Little"? Blogged here in March 2018.

Hey, guys...

Why is everyone missing the best line of this video?

Where she talks about feminism’s great task: “the general reprogramming of most people’s minds?” https://t.co/IFjv8P98r9

— Caitlin Flanagan (@CaitlinPacific) September 11, 2019

I like the part about the etymology of "guy." I didn't know it's from the name Guy and the specific Guy, Guy Fawkes. I checked in the OED and this is the official origin of the common noun "guy."

It began with the effigy of Guy Fawkes, burnt on Guy Fawkes day. The effigy was called "a guy": "Once on a fifth of November I found a ‘Guy’ trusted to take care of himself there, while his proprietors had gone to dinner" (Charles Dickens, 1863).

From there it became "A person of grotesque appearance" — especially with respect to clothing, as in "We have far too many sculptured ‘Guys’ in the metropolis" (1880 Daily Tel.).

Finally, it was just "A man, fellow. originally U.S." Early examples:

1898 Milwaukee (Wisconsin) Sentinel 22 Jan. 4/7 I s'pose you got a Bible you'll let a guy look into.
1904 Cincinnati Commercial Tribune 29 June 4 Mr. Bryan is a hefty guy when it comes to Democratic conventions and the platforms thereof.
1928 D. H. Lawrence in T.P.'s Weekly 7 July 333/3 I say to Mother: Show me somebody happy, then! And she shows me some guy, or some bright young thing, and gets mad when I say: See the pretty monkey!

The OED has a "Draft addition" from October 2011 accepting the word "As a form of address to a man" and "Also in plural as a form of address to a group of people, in later use sometimes a mixed or all-female group."

1930 J. Dos Passos 42nd Parallel i. 102 Say, yous guys, this is fellowworker McCreary....
1993 M. Crichton Disclosure i. 22 Fuck 'em all. This reorg sucks. I'm with you on this one, guy....

I love that the OED has a completely gratuitous, random "fuck."

Anyway, should you address groups that are not all men as "guys"? You should know that some people will (in some situations) regard you as casually noninclusive.

What if the people you're addressing are are male? I know of a woman whose husband fell into a fury and berated her publicly for referring to him and his male friends as "guys." He heard it as a putdown. I wasn't there, so I can't tell how wrong he may have been. I could imagine a woman saying "guys" in a negative way. In which case, it's not the word. It's the inflection.

How about addressing just one man as "guy"? Reminds me of this old Right Guard commercial:

"A young woman, well known to the New York City-based chattering class, has finally let loose with what she really thinks. 'The white race is the cancer of human history,' she says..."

"'... it is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.' Has this author discovered some new tweet from Sarah Jeong, the now-notorious new hire at the New York Times? Nope. The quote above dates back to 1967. It’s from Susan Sontag, the chic literary critic. Her words were mostly in response to the Vietnam War, but as we can see, her critique extended far further. We might also add that Sontag later said she regretted her quote—because it was insensitive to cancer victims...."

So begins James Pinkerton in "Social Justice Warriors Are the Democrats’ Electoral Poison/Those who don't denounce the politics of Sarah Jeong will crash and burn just as George McGovern did" (The American Conservative).

ADDED: From Sontag's book "Illness as Metaphor":

The cancer metaphor seems hard to resist for those who wish to register indignation....  D.H. Lawrence called masturbation “the deepest and most dangerous cancer of our civilization”; and I once wrote, in the heat of despair over America’s war on Vietnam, that “the white race is the cancer of human history.”

But how to be morally severe in the late twentieth century? How, when there is so much to be severe about; how, when we have a sense of evil but no longer the religious or philosophical language to talk intelligently about evil? Trying to comprehend “radical” or “absolute” evil, we search for adequate metaphors. But the modern disease metaphors are all cheap shots. The people who have the real disease are also hardly helped by hearing their disease’s name constantly being dropped as the epitome of evil. Only in the most limited sense is any historical event or problem like an illness. And the cancer metaphor is particularly crass. It is invariably an encouragement to simplify what is complex and an invitation to self-righteousness, if not to fanaticism.

"The sun went bang, with smithereens of birds bursting in all directions."

Wrote D.H. Lawrence in "Mornings in Mexico" (1927).

Whence this word "smithereens"? It's smithers, with an Irish diminutive ending, but the OED can't figure out where "smithers" came from.

I had never noticed the word "smithers" before, but Charles Dickens used it in "Our Mutual Friend" (1865): "The old lady nearly blowed us into shivers and smithers, many times."

"Smithers" does work as a last name. There's Mr. Smithers on "The Simpsons," and Dickens has a Miss Smithers in "The Pickwick Papers," but why would you throw an Irish diminutive ending on that name and use it to mean small fragments? The OED doesn't make the obvious move of connecting it to "smith" and I don't know enough about smithing to have any idea if small fragments are created (other than that I'm seeing photos of blacksmiths who are not wearing eye protections).

"Smithereens" was the name of a 1982 movie about a young woman from New Jersey getting into the NYC punk rock scene. It was the first film by Susan Seidelman, who went on to make "Desperately Seeking Susan."

Also in the early 80s were The Smithereens, a rock band from New Jersey. What was it about New Jersey and smithereens back then?



I'm thinking (remembering?) that feeling fragmented was arty and cool in that time and place.

According to Wikipedia, "The band's name comes from a Yosemite Sam catchphrase, 'Varmint, I'm a-gonna blow you to smithereens!'"

There's a town in British Columbia called Smithers, named after some railroad guy was named Smithers, and it seems to be the case that townsfolk prefer to be called Smithereens, rather than the less snazzy Smitherite.

"Tractor giant John Deere just spent $305 million to acquire a startup that makes robots capable of identifying unwanted plants..."

"... and shooting them with deadly, high-precision squirts of herbicide... Pesticides and other chemicals are traditionally applied blindly across a whole field or crop. Blue River’s systems are agricultural sharp shooters that direct chemicals only where they are needed. The startup’s robots are towed behind a regular tractor like conventional spraying equipment. But they have cameras on board that use machine-learning software to distinguish between crops and weeds, and automated sprayers to target unwanted plants." (Wired).

I think technology like this is great, but I don't know why the word "robot" is used... other than to try to make us like it more. It's just a machine. When is a machine a robot?

Here's an answer to that question at Quora:

• Machine can be defined as an apparatus used to perform a particular task.
• Most machines are not autonomous. Meaning they can't take decisions or they can't be left without inspecting or assisting them.
• A Machine can be termed as a Robot, if it is autonomous and if it agrees with the three laws stated by Isaac Asimov - Father of Robotics
• Isaac Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics"
• Some machines are Robots.

For example an electric screw driver is a machine, it is not autonomous. If collaborated with a robotic arm, it may be autonomous and hence can be termed as a Robot.

Is the Blue River autonomous? It's an attachment that must dragged behind a tractor. But it does seem to be making decisions on its own.

I'd like to think that "robot" was limited to a machine that resembles a human being. Wikipedia briefly acknowledges my romanticism:

A robot is a machine—especially one programmable by a computer— capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically. Robots can be guided by an external control device or the control may be embedded within. Robots may be constructed to take on human form but most robots are machines designed to perform a task with no regard to how they look.

The Oxford English Dictionary separates the meanings, with one being "An intelligent artificial being typically made of metal and resembling in some way a human or other animal" (and restricted with "Chiefly Science Fiction") and the other "A machine capable of automatically carrying out a complex series of movements, esp. one which is programmable." Both meanings go back to the 1920s. There's also the figurative meaning, "A person who acts mechanically or without emotion," and that too goes back to the 20s, e.g., "Mr. G. Bernard Shaw defined Robots as persons all of whose activities were imposed on them" (1923).

It's interesting that today I think of the word "robot" as working to give us a friendly attitude toward a machine, but back then, the word was used to express negativity toward human beings.

Here's a line from a poem by D.H. Lawrence: "The mechanical impulse for money and motor-cars which rules the robot-classes and the robot-masses, now."

"Holding homemade signs reading 'God Hates Renoir' and 'Treacle Harms Society,' the protesters... chanted: 'Put some fingers on those hands! Give us work by Paul Gauguin!'..."

"... and 'Other art is worth your while! Renoir paints a steaming pile!'... The [Museum of Fine Arts] hasn’t commented on the fledgling movement..."

I'm glad finally somebody cares enough to do something about this longstanding travesty. Catch up with Max Geller's Renoir Sucks at Painting, which has entries like this:

This #Renoir painting is in a museum. It is Not Beautiful. It is offensive and hurts my eyes. A nefarious act of #aestheticterrorism. I had to turn the brightness down on my phone. Then I could start noticing shit. Like, 1. the three (3!) uncircumcised fingers with which she's touching herself. 2. Instead of the usual #sharpie_eyes, she has ball-less sockets. (Please join in my #renoirsucksatpainting brethren.)

A photo posted by Renoir Sucks At Painting (@renoir_sucks_at_painting) on Sep 14, 2015 at 3:45pm PDT

ADDED: This post made me click my "Renoir" tag, and that got me to a quote from "Lady Chatterley's Lover": "Renoir said he painted his pictures with his penis... he did too, lovely pictures! I wish I did something with mine."

"What is the case for Hillary...? It boils down... She has experience, she’s a woman, and it’s her turn."

Writes Doug Henwood in a Harper's article titled "Stop Hillary!/Vote no to a Clinton dynasty." You're going to need a subscription to read all that, which is stupid, because the imperative — "Stop Hillary!" — seems ludicrous if you hide the argument. But the truth is, I have a subscription, so let me pull out the parts that seem significant to me:

Today we desperately need a new political economy — one that features a more equal distribution of income, investment in our rotting social and physical infrastructure, and a more humane ethic. We also need a judicious foreign policy, and a commander-in-chief who will resist the instant gratification of air strikes and rhetorical bluster.

So, she's not left-wing enough? That counts in her favor in my book.

Hillary absorbed the conservatism of her father and her surroundings. In junior high, she fell under the influence of a history teacher, Paul Carlson, a frothing McCarthyite. As Carlson [said], the young Hillary was “a hawk.”

Soon after, though, she found another guru, one she would stick with for years — a young minister at the First Methodist Church of Park Ridge named Don Jones. Jones was a dashing intellectual who helped open Hillary’s mind. He got the church youth reading D. H. Lawrence, listening to Bob Dylan, and talking about Picasso....

Uh oh! Reading D. H. Lawrence, listening to Bob Dylan, and talking about Picasso... Man, that is the story of my life!

"We are, all of us, exploring a world that none of us even understands and attempting to create within that uncertainty. But there are some things we feel, feelings that our prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate life, including tragically the universities, is not the way of life for us. We’re searching for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living."

That's Hillary, at her college graduation, and that's pretty much what we were all saying back then.

By Yale Law standards, Hillary was a conservative, which meant that she opposed the Vietnam War but still basically believed in American institutions. Despite looking like a hippie in her tinted glasses and candy-striped slacks, she had no patience for the utopianism of the time.

Good for her! It's like Harper's's Henwood thinks we need a hippie President!

Putting the hard in Harding: "The Letters That Warren G. Harding’s Family Didn’t Want You to See."

"Honestly, I hurt with the insatiate longing, until I feel that there will never be any relief untilI take a long, deep, wild draught on your lips and then bury my face on your pillowing breasts."

Oh, Carrie! I want the solace you only can give. It is awful to hunger so and be so wholly denied. . . . Wouldn’t you like to hear me ask if we only dared and answer, 'We dare,' while souls rejoicing sang the sweetest of choruses in the music room? Wouldn’t you like to get sopping wet out on Superior — not the lake — for the joy of fevered fondling and melting kisses? Wouldn’t you like to make the suspected occupant of the next room jealous of the joys he could not know, as we did in morning communion at Richmond?

ADDED: What do you make of "sopping wet out on Superior — not the lake"? I was entertaining the theory that "Superior" was his name for his penis (like John Thomas in "Lady Chatterley's Lover").

"By using a common four-letter term for sexual intercourse... Lawrence was trying to remove the stain of profanity from plain English words."

Writes the NYT in an obituary for Richard H. Hoggart, the cultural historian who was the star witness in a case about the censorship of "Lady Chatterley's Lover." Hoggart testified in 1960 about why D.H. Lawrence wrote the word "fuck" in 1928, and the NYT still won't print the word in 2014.

But the NYT did print the word "fuck" 4 days ago — as I noted here — in the sentence "Fuck Brooklyn!" which is just some dumb thing a basketball team's general manager yelled:

With A list celebrities, including rappers Drake, Jay-Z and Beyonce, occupying courtside seats, an embarrassing technical malfunction and a jaw-dropping expletive delivered by Raptors general manager Masai Ujiri to thousands of frenzied supporters at a pre-game pep rally, the first game of the NBA postseason offered a little bit over everything.

Why print "fuck" the hurtful, intentionally brutal slam, and not "fuck" the nonmetaphor, used descriptively, with love and artistic force? Have a rule and stick to it. Your rule could be only sometimes, but what rule would justify "fuck" the sports arena epithet over "fuck" a great author's word choice for which free speech advocates fought governments? Perhaps: "Fuck" is fit to print to vividly convey how wrong it is to yell fuck in front of a lady like Beyonce.

As for the other lady, Chatterley, she asked "But what do you believe in?" and he said:

"Yes, I do believe in something. I believe in being warmhearted. I believe especially in being warm-hearted in love, in fucking with a warm heart. I believe if men could fuck with warm hearts, and the women take it warm-heartedly, everything would come all right. It's all this cold-hearted fucking that is death and idiocy."

"But you don't fuck me cold-heartedly," she protested.

"I don't want to fuck you at all. My heart's as cold as cold potatoes just now.... It's a fact!... Anything for a bit of warm-heartedness. But the women don't like it. Even you don't really like it. You like good, sharp, piercing cold-hearted fucking, and then pretending it's all sugar. Where's your tenderness for me? You're as suspicious of me as a cat is of a dog. I tell you it takes two even to be tender and warm-hearted. You love fucking all right: but you want it to be called something grand and mysterious, just to flatter your own self-importance. Your own self-importance is more to you, fifty times more, than any man, or being together with a man.... I'd rather die than do any more cold-hearted fucking."

"If I live to be 100, I’m never going to be a fan of the flowers-in-the-pubic-hair episode."

"But Lawrence’s attempts at describing the transcendent possibilities of 'warmhearted' sex no longer seemed quite so ludicrous. Next to the 'yuk' I had scribbled as a 20-year-old, there now stands a new note: 'Not so bad after all.'"

Distinguishing the words "blabber," "babble," and "blather."

I used "blabber" and "blather" in a single post today, and proofreading, Meade wanted to correct the "blabber" to "blather." I'd written, first, that "the columnists will blather about" who should replace David Letterman, and, later, I criticized a columnist for "stumbl[ing] into blabber like 'something ineffable and increasingly impossible to describe.'"

I had to question whether I'd used "blabber" mainly to avoid repeating "blather." These words may seem so close in sound and meaning that they are interchangeable, so this is the post that delves into the "blabber"/"blather" distinction.

"When a marital therapy book looks promising, Mr. and Mrs. Dash buy two copies, one for each of them."

"When they’re both finished, they exchange copies to see what their partner has underlined. They never underline the same passages. It’s like a pair of photos by two different photographers, where you can’t tell that they’re of the same landscape. Two soothsayers reading the same entrails and foreseeing two entirely different fates."

A super-short fiction by RLC, written a few years ago, but long after the time when I was married to him. These days, books are bought as ebooks, so you don't have to buy 2 copies of everything, you just have to authorize 2 Kindles/iPads on the same account — which is what Meade and I do — and the husband and wife can simultaneously read the same book or — as in our case — the same 300 books that we wander around in endlessly, perhaps eventually encountering a passage that we'd underline electronically if the other hadn't already done the underlining. Are there any marital therapy books? Not unless "Lady Blue Eyes: My Life with Frank" counts. Or "Lady Chatterley's Lover." Or "The Obamas." Or — this has a self-helpish title — "How to Be Alone."

"Rules for Radicals"? Rule 13: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." There's marriage for you!

Why was I reading that old post? Because when I read that wonderful garden club politics article out loud, I said it was like a compressed novel and Meade said it was like one of RLC's super-short fictions which you can read the best of in book form or read at his blog. The one about married couples reading marriage therapy books simultaneously is just what's at the top when you click the "fiction" tag.

I was also considering blogging "If We Could Only Understand a Pink Sock" — a propos of the fuzzy pink socks that played a central role in the news story of the week, how North Korea is about to drop a nuclear bomb somewhere Mitch McConnell's people considered quoting things Ashley Judd wrote about herself.

"Sometimes a shadow moved against a dressing-room blind above, gave way to another shadow, an indefinite procession of shadows, that rouged and powdered in an invisible glass."

Earlier today, I made a "café" post out of a photograph of a tablescape that included my small toy robot, and betamax3000 used it as an occasion — a "café" post is an open thread — to speak for the robot, saying Althouse-blog-related things like: "Robot has no need for F. Scott Fitzgerald. Robot has no need for extraneous data." And "Robot would eradicate Gatsby of unnecessary organic units. Story now smaller."

The Althouse blog has an ongoing Gatsby project consisting of quoting and talking about one sentence from "The Great Gatsby" every day. No one remembers why. It's simply a tradition on the Althouse blog. There's talk of switching to "Lady Chatterly's Lover" or "The Little Prince," but these are rumors, borne in on the breeze that sweeps through the windows and makes the curtains swirl upward into the ceiling that seems like a wedding cake.)

So I've chosen a sentence for Robot/betamax3000 with all the organic units pre-eradicated. A shadow moves. That's the action. It moves and gives way to... guess what?!... another shadow. And more and more shadows. A procession of shadows. A shadow parade. Another inanimate thing is the dressing-room blind. And since we've got a dressing room, we can imagine an organic unit putting on makeup — rouge and powder — but our organic units are eradicated, so it's nothing but a shadow, the absence of a living person, and lest you think you see a person in that mirror in the dressing room, F. Scott Fitzgerald will have you know that even the looking-glass is invisible.

"That's how you laughed in the middle of the night."

Said Meade, and I said: "Then Chip Ahoy must have been in my dream."

Because I was just reading his comment: "Melody and Rose broke up the Sweedish contractors and threw change in the tip jar and put on her warm magic apron."

And I laughed not because that is nonsense, but because it's a quite brilliant contribution to a conversation that was pretty far along at that point, including betamax3000's extended interpretation of "The White Album." Beta had said:

Like the White Album perhaps Althouse is telling us there are secret messages to be found, backwards.

"Sweetly up broke voice, her rose melody."

"Upon magic human warm her of little."

"Out tipped change."

It all began with a sentence from "The Great Gatsby," which was about — not a woman laughing — a woman singing. But women laugh all the time in "The Great Gatsby." For example: "She looked at me and laughed pointlessly."

"These 'Gatsby' posts are becoming the new café around here" — "café" posts are open threads  — I say as I drink my coffee and contemplate today's Gatsby sentence, which I'd said will be "I knew the other clerks and young bond-salesmen by their first names, and lunched with them in dark, crowded restaurants on little pig sausages and mashed potatoes and coffee."

The dark-eyed junco.

I didn't have the presence of mind to grab the camera and take a picture of the globular gray bird with a white belly, perched on the deck railing just beyond the glass. Instead I scrambled for my glasses, and the bird flew away. But we remembered how it looked, and Meade figured out it was dark-eyed junco, and googling, I found lots of photos but what I liked best was this lovely illustration and story.

The junco was not so much flying in to the window as it was flying right up against it. It would fly up and down the window's length, using its claws to aid in climbing. All the while it peered at us. It did this repeatedly. Various hypotheses were tossed about as to why a junco was engaging in this risky, precious energy expending behavior....

Dark-eyed juncos are "the 'snowbirds' of the middle latitudes." Of the middle latitudes? That makes me look up "snowbird" in the OED. Snowbird... I just think of that cornball Anne Murray song. But the OED says a "snow-bird" is "One or other of various small European or American birds, esp. the snow-bunting (Plectrophanes nivalis), snow-finch (Montifringilla nivalis), or snow-sparrow (Junco hiemalis)":

1694  Philos. Trans. 1693 (Royal Soc.) 17 996   The Snow-bird which I take to be much the same with our Hedge Sparrow; this is so called because it seldom appears about Houses but against Snow or very cold Weather.

OED has this 3rd definition: "3. U.S. slang. One who sniffs cocaine (cf. snow n.1 5d); gen. a drug addict":

1923   J. F. Fishman Crucibles of Crime vi. 126   It was discovered that each of them [sc. handkerchiefs] has a small ink mark in one of the corners..these handkerchiefs had been dipped in cocaine... The mark in the corner notified the ‘snowbird’ that it was ‘loaded.’

There's a 4th definition, also U.S. slang:

1923   Nation 31 Oct. 487   In winter, when building is at a standstill in the North, northern workmen, ‘snow birds’ or ‘white doves’ in Negro parlance, flock south.

And a 5th definition: "A person who likes snow; a snow-sports enthusiast." And here we get a D.H. Lawrence quote from 1928: "I am no snow-bird, I hate the stark and shroudy whitemen, white and black." [ADDED: Is "whitemen" an error in the OED?!] That's from something called "Not I," which I can't seem to find on the web. But with some "snow-bird" searching, I did come up with this D.H. Lawrence poem, "Self-Pity":

I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.

You're not feeling sorry for yourself on Christmas Eve, are you?

Romney, the man who says "marvelous."

Obama mocked Romney this way: "He said that he's 'very supportive' of this new budget, and he even called it 'marvelous' — which is a word you don't often hear when it comes to describing a budget." Comic pause. "It's a word you don't often hear generally."

This Reuters article takes the position that Obama meant us to think that a man who says "marvelous" is "out of touch" because "marvelous" is "a seemingly out of date" word. Reuters also quotes a polisci prof saying, "It's a word you kind of associate with the upper class, and I think that the intention was to tweak Romney for being wealthy and, you know, sort of brought up in the kinds of circles where they would say ‘marvelous.'"

Wealthy? Old fashioned? My first association, on hearing one man mock another for saying "marvelous," was: Gay. It's an I'm-more-manly move. I heard a smidgeon of homophobia. Perhaps I heard it because, a few days ago, on winning the Wisconsin primary, Romney introduced Ryan, saying: "Congressman Ryan, he's a great leader, wonderful speaker, but he's not gonna take Ann's place." (Ann being, of course, Mitt's wife.) At the time, I quipped: "Combatting the 'bromance' rumors!"

This is just a meme watch. Note that the budget Romney was talking about was Paul Ryan's budget. The alliance of Romney and Ryan is so good that I suspect the Obama campaign will toy with mockery that has a homophobic edge. Let's make their "marriage" seem unseemly. Not so blatantly that they can't deny it. Any homophobia can be disguised within a socially acceptable distaste for the rich. The word "effete" was practically created for this purpose. Do you remember when Vice President Spiro Agnew derided antiwar protesters as "an effete corps of impudent snobs"?

The word "marvelous" — which means "Such as to excite wonder or astonishment (chiefly in a positive sense); wonderful, astonishing, surprising; worthy of admiration" (OED) — is a very old word, going back to c1330: "Þe fift ledde Andalas, A kniȝt of meruailus los he was." (Arthour & Merlin.) The first use with modern spelling — the double L remains current — is from Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan ii. xxvi:  "Miracles are Marvellous workes: but that which is marvellous to one, may not be so to another." And I like the  D. H. Lawrence:  "Their loving grew more mechanical, without the marvellous glamour." (Sons & Lovers xiii. 365.)

By the way, there's also an archaic and regional use of "marvelous," but that is as an adverb. You get things like:  "Nancy Clemens... quoted a farmer who had been hurt in a motor accident: ‘No bones broke,’ said he, ‘but I sure was scratched up marvellous.’" (V. Randolph & G. P. Wilson Down in Holler 161.) That seems quite the opposite of effete. It's folksy. I could imagine some politician using that, probably quoting somebody... some farmer.

But Romney uttered "marvelous," the adjective. He was talking about Paul Ryan's budget, and Obama snickered. Am I wrong to hear a tone of homophobia? I Googled "gay men say marvelous." Sorry, to be so crude, but research can be so easy and I got the most marvelous return. It's Noël Coward's "I've Been To A Marvellous Party," in which male homosexuality and excessive wealth are merged marvelously. Listen to the whole thing, but here's the penultimate verse:

I went to a marvellous party we didn't sit down til ten
Y'know young Bobby Carr did a stunt at the bar with a lot of extraordinary men
And then Freda arrived with a turtle which shattered us all to the core
And then the Duchess passed out at a quarter to three
And suddenly Cyril cried 'fiddle-de-de'
And he ripped off his trousers and jumped in the sea
I couldn't have liked it more...

I'm just waiting for young Paul Ryan to do a stunt at the bar with a lot of extraordinary men and then for Mitt Romney to suddenly cry "fiddle-de-de" and rip off his trousers and jump in the sea. And then Obama arrives with a turtle...



Who doesn't like the turtle? And the Leviathan?

"hate audio books where women speak man's part."

This is a Google search that brought a couple readers to my blog — to a post that wasn't about being annoyed when female audiobook readers do the dialogue of male characters. But it's a good topic for discussion! I too hate the way female readers — especially the really dramatic ones — do male voices. They macho it up ridiculously. I have an audiobook of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" — read by Emilia Fox — and the male characters all sound so brutish. Some of that is in the text, but I'd like the text to speak for itself.

"No; my heart's as numb as a potato, my penis droops and never lifts its head up, I dare rather cut him clean off than say 'shit!' in front of my mother or my aunt... they are real ladies, mind you; and I'm not really intelligent, I'm only a 'mental-lifer'. It would be wonderful to be intelligent: then one would be alive in all the parts mentioned and unmentionable. The penis rouses his head and says: How do you do? -- to any really intelligent person. Renoir said he painted his pictures with his penis... he did too, lovely pictures! I wish I did something with mine. God! when one can only talk! Another torture added to Hades! And Socrates started it."

I'd rather try to figure that out without a woman trying to sound like the man who would say that.