I wish this were a better story.

Because I love this guy's name.

AND: That story is just enough to cause me to link to this other story I'd already rejected: "For some mysterious reason, penises seem to be having a makeup moment." I found that (at Cosmopolitan) after failing to resist "9 Lazy-Girl Ways to Fake a Shower."

IN THE COMMENTS: EDH writes: "Yet just yesterday Althouse was blogging about Florence Henderson performing as the Cockeyed Optimist!" Ah! Serendipity! Nice to return this to such a wholesome place. I could say life is just a bowl of Jello/And appear more intelligent and smart....

"She was the 10th child of a tobacco sharecropper of Irish descent."

"Florence Agnes Henderson was born Feb. 14, 1934, in the small town of Dale in southern Indiana."

Goodbye to Florence Henderson.

Just the other day, I was listening to the Broadway channel on the satellite radio in my car, and they played "Cockeyed Optimist" from the 1967 revival of "South Pacific," and I was blown away by how great it was, even by comparison to the next song they played, the very famous and beautiful Shirley Jones performance of "Till There Was You" (from "The Music Man").

Maybe you know these 2 Broadway stars better from the way they came across on 1970s television  scaled down into the role of perfect mom. If I were 10 years younger, I'm sure I'd have a closer emotional connection to "The Brady Bunch" and "The Partridge Family." I'm more of a "My Three Sons" and "The Monkees" person (to name the first 60s counterparts to those two 70s shows that spring to mind). I didn't even have a TV in the early 70s. And not because I was snobbishly avoiding having one. We tightly conserved our money back then, and buying a TV did not make the cut. We substituted radio. I remember listening to the Watergate hearings and the 1973 World Series on the radio.

Anyway, I was so impressed by Henderson's singing of "Cockeyed Optimist." I wish I could find video of the performance, but you can listen to the audio at the link above, and you'll just have to picture her in character as the Navy nurse from Arkansas, in the South Pacific during WWII, who falls in love with a rich French widower and has to learn to accept his mixed-race children.



I have heard people rant and rave and bellow/That we're done and we might as well be dead/But I'm only a cockeyed optimist/And I can't get it into my head....

"Wisconsin GOP Advances Bills Controlling How People On Welfare Eat And Pee."

Headline at The Huffington Post.

I know. I should punish The Huffington Post for distorting things to such an absurd degree, but it is so absurd that it's self-undermining — the "pee" part is just about requiring drug tests — and, besides, HuffPo also has this headline: "Florence Henderson Describes How Former NYC Mayor John Lindsay Gave Her Crabs."

Look how handsome John Lindsay was:



If you're going to get crabs from a New York City mayor, he's the one. There have been 109 NYC mayors, going all the way back to Thomas Willett in 1665. I can't say I know what they all looked like — and did they have crabs? — but here's DeWitt Clinton, who's not that cute, but I love the painting:



DeWitt Clinton (March 2, 1769 – February 11, 1828) was also a U.S. Senator and, most notably, a governor of New York. His great achievement was the Erie Canal:

Many thought the project was impracticable, and opponents mocked it as "DeWitt's Ditch." But in 1817, he got the legislature to appropriate $7,000,000 for construction.... The cost of freight between Buffalo and Albany fell from $100 to $10 per ton, and the state was able to quickly recoup the funds it spent on the project through tolls along the canal... [T]he New Hampshire Sentinel [wrote:] "His exertions in favor of the great Canal have identified his name with that noble enterprise, and he will be remembered while its benefits are experienced... Yield credit to Clinton, and hail him by name."

Hail, Clinton!

By the way, "crabs" are pubic lice, pthirus pubis. From Amy Stewart's "Wicked Bugs: The Louse That Conquered Napoleon's Army & Other Diabolical Insects":

Body lice evolved from head lice about 107,000 years ago, around the time humans started wearing clothing. Pubic lice, however, are more closely related to gorilla lice— and were transferred to humans through some sort of intimate physical contact with gorillas, the precise details of which remain a mystery....

Pubic lice... lock their claws around a strand of hair and almost never let go. Their habit of feeding in one place for most of their life means that their feces accumulate around them, making for a truly unpleasant situation. They inhabit all parts of the body covered in coarse hair, including eyebrows, chest hair, mustaches, armpits, and, of course, pubic hair.... Because pubic lice can only survive a few hours off the host... [s]exual contact is really the most efficient means of transmission, which is why the French call pubic lice papillons d’amour, or butterflies of love.

Now, here's Florence, singing about the butterfly of love: