"If the Chief Justice is required, then what Leahy is about to do is not a duty. Taking on a role that is not yours under the Constitution is an abuse of power."

I wrote, in my post yesterday, "Did Chief Justice John Roberts decline to preside over the Senate trial of the Trump impeachment?" 

In the comments, Meade wrote: "Will Leahy be costumed in his horned animal skin shaman outfit?" 

I said, "Can someone do a photoshop of this? I'd like to put it on the front page." 

Asked. Received:

I'll credit the Photoshopper by name if he emails to say he wants to be named.

ADDED: We really ought to learn Photoshop here at Meadhouse. I can't do it at all, and Meade's effort was at a level that I call "South Park" (and find rather charming, especially coming from Meade):

I like that this image shows the Shaman/Leahy on the Senate dais, because that is where the Chief Justice belongs, if this is an impeachment trial that requires the Chief Justice.

ADDED: Laslo Spatula sends this:

And I do see that Senator Leahy was taken to the hospital after today's session. I wish him well. These jokes are just a way of saying if the Chief Justice should be presiding over this trial, then Leahy, like the QAnon Shaman, does not belong in that seat.

"But I guess being on an island with minimal food resources might cause someone... to get excited by a blue-hued adult beverage called the 'Shark Bowl' that features a floating gummy fish."

"... Or cause [someone else] to declare that Applebee’s is her favorite 'sit-down restaurant.' I mean, come on. Shrimp ‘n’ Parmesan Sirloin? Yuck. Spinach and artichoke dip with chips? No thanks. Chef Bulgarelli’s Stuffed Rigatoni and Tomato Meat Sauce? Not exactly the right food for a tropical paradise. I don’t know how host Jeff Probst managed to even spit out the words 'loaded, sizzling fajitas, smothered with hot queso' with a straight face. Oh, and don’t forget the blue-ribbon brownie, whatever that is. Is it worth slithering on the beach tied to another player and getting your face and body exfoliated by what amounts hot sandpaper? I would say no."

Writes Susan Wloszczyna (at Gold Derby), which I'm reading because I hated the embedded Applebee's ad in this week's episode of "Survivor."

And maybe this is a good time to remind you that I don't blog about things in the order that I think they're important or criticize things in order of their badness in the grand scheme of things. I went to great lengths to analyze Trump's use of the phrase "human scum" — here and here — but that doesn't mean I think "human scum" is the worst thing anybody is saying right now.

I blog things according to my personal standard of bloggability, which is something of a mystery, and I don't expect you to understand it completely, especially since it's one of those I-know-it-when-I-see-it standards, but I would like you to remember that when I'm talking about one thing, I'm not implying something about all the other things that I am not talking about.

I don't like making an example of a particular commenter, especially somebody who is one of the all-time greatest commenters on this blog, but Laslo Spatula wrote, in the comments to my second "human scum" post:

"A common theory is that [mayonnaise] is named for Port Mahon in Menorca, in honor of the 3rd Duke of Richelieu's victory over the British in 1756..."

"... and in fact the name 'mahonnaise' is used by some authors. But the name is only attested long after that event. One version of this theory says that it was originally known as salsa mahonesa in Spanish, but that spelling is only attested later. Grimod de La Reynière rejected the name 'mayonnaise' because the word 'is not French'; he rejected 'mahonnaise' because Port Mahon 'is not known for good food,' and thus he preferred 'bayonnaise,' after the city of Bayonne, which 'has many innovative gourmands and ... produces the best hams in Europe.' Carême preferred the spelling 'magnonnaise,' which he derived from the French verb manier 'to handle.'. Another suggestion is it derives from Charles de Lorraine, duke of Mayenne, because he took the time to finish his meal of chicken with cold sauce before being defeated in the Battle of Arques."

From Wikipedia, and I looked that up because yesterday we were talking about mayonnaise — as we began the "Bonfire" project, and I was motivated to start looking things up when Laslo Spatula quoted Richard Brautigan:

I have always wanted to write a book that ended with the word "mayonnaise."

What a quote! There's also a Tom Robbins quote about mayonnaise. (Remember when we all read Richard Brautigan and Tom Robbins?)

All Carolina folk are crazy for mayonnaise, mayonnaise is as ambrosia to them, the food of their tarheeled gods. Mayonnaise comforts them, causes the vowels to slide more musically along their slow tongues, appeasing their grease-conditioned taste buds while transporting those buds to a place higher than lard could ever hope to fly. Yellow as summer sunlight, soft as young thighs, smooth as a Baptist preacher's rant, falsely innocent as a magician's handkerchief, mayonnaise will cloak a lettuce leaf, some shreds of cabbage, a few hunks of cold potato in the simplest splendor, restyling their dull character, making them lively and attractive again, granting them the capacity to delight the gullet if not the heart. Fried oysters, leftover roast, peanut butter: rare are the rations that fail to become instantly more scintillating from contact with this inanimate seductress, this goopy glory-monger, this alchemist in a jar.

The mystery of mayonnaise — and others besides Dickie Goldwire have surely puzzled over this — is how egg yolks, vegetable oil, vinegar (wine's angry brother), salt, sugar (earth's primal grain-energy), lemon juice, water, and, naturally, a pinch of the ol' calcium disodium EDTA could be combined in such a way as to produce a condiment so versatile, satisfying, and outright majestic that mustard, ketchup, and their ilk must bow down before it (though, at two bucks a jar, mayonnaise certainly doesn't put on airs) or else slink away in disgrace. Who but the French could have wrought this gastronomic miracle? Mayonnaise is France's gift to the New World's muddled palate, a boon that combines humanity's ancient instinctive craving for the cellular warmth of pure fat with the modern, romantic fondness for complex flavors: mayo (as the lazy call it) may appear mild and prosaic, but behind its creamy veil it fairly seethes with tangy disposition. Cholesterol aside, it projects the luster that we astro-orphans have identified with well-being ever since we fell from the stars.

"Who in the name of God would bring a half-eaten eight-ounce jar of Hellmann’s mayonnaise to a public meeting?"

A few days ago, I was talking about a problem that Kamala Harris has as she runs for President:

She's too much of a prosecutor to win the love of a minority group Democrats need to turn out if they're going to beat Mr. Criminal Justice Reform Donald Trump.

Shouting Thomas started off a comment with...

The job of a prosecutor is to put black guys in jail, as noted in "Bonfire of the Vanities."...

I said:

Thanks for reminding me of that book, which I've been meaning to read.

The answer to a very old question is: 9.

In the comments to the previous post — "Things to do with cigarettes," which looked at some fabulous vintage ads for a long forgotten cigarette brand, Murad — Laslo Spatula was inspired to rewrite some of the sentences that were part of my old "Gatsby" project (where I'd take a sentence from "The Great Gatsby" and we'd talk about it out of context).

So Laslo was posting things like:

"A tray of cocktails floated at us through the twilight, and we sat down at a table with the two girls in yellow and three men, each one smoking a Murad."

Here's the old post from "Gatsby" project, where you see the original sentence from the novel was: "A tray of cocktails floated at us through the twilight, and we sat down at a table with the two girls in yellow and three men, each one introduced to us as Mr. Mumble."

The first commenter on that post asks "How many times does the word 'yellow' come up in a search of 'The Great Gatsby'?"

Within the half hour, I give him my answer: 24. And that makes me want to count the rest of the colors. Is yellow the dominant "Gatsby" color? What's most likely to beat it? The other primary colors. Using the search function in Kindle, I found 22 appearances of "blue," but...

Red can't be counted via Kindle, which includes the letters "red" within other words, like "declared," "considered," and "incredulously."

I proceeded to the rest of the colors:

Purple: 0
Orange: 4
Brown: 7
Black: only 13 (very surprising)
White: 50 (the book is racist!)
Green: 19
Pink: 6
Lavender: 6

Seeing that old post today, I wondered if the Kindle software had changed since then (January 2013). And yes, it had! I got my answer. 9!

Only 9 for "red." Surprisingly low considering 24 for "yellow" and 22 for blue. Was F. Scott Fitzgerald aversive to red for some reason? There are 19 "red"s in "The Last Tycoon" and 25 in "Tender Is the Night," so the avoidance of red seems to be "Gatsby" specific.

There are only 9, so I will quote them all for you, and let's think about how "red" was used and why it was used sparingly:

1. "I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Mæcenas knew."

2. "Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion, overlooking the bay."

3. "Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of wayside garages, where new red gas-pumps sat out in pools of light, and when I reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its shed and sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard."

4. "The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty, with a solid, sticky bob of red hair, and a complexion powdered milky white."

5. "One of the girls in yellow was playing the piano, and beside her stood a tall, red-haired young lady from a famous chorus, engaged in song."

6. "We passed Port Roosevelt, where there was a glimpse of red-belted ocean-going ships, and sped along a cobbled slum lined with the dark, undeserted saloons of the faded-gilt nineteen-hundreds."

7. "I had on a new plaid skirt also that blew a little in the wind, and whenever this happened the red, white, and blue banners in front of all the houses stretched out stiff and said tut-tut-tut-tut, in a disapproving way."

8. "She asked me if I was going to the Red Cross and make bandages."

9. "There was a faint, barely perceptible movement of the water as the fresh flow from one end urged its way toward the drain at the other. With little ripples that were hardly the shadows of waves, the laden mattress moved irregularly down the pool. A small gust of wind that scarcely corrugated the surface was enough to disturb its accidental course with its accidental burden. The touch of a cluster of leaves revolved it slowly, tracing, like the leg of transit, a thin red circle in the water."

We see red in various objects in ##1 (money), 2 (a mansion), 3 (gas pumps), 6 (ships), 7 (the American flag) and twice — ##4 and 5 — in women's hair. #8, as part of a proper name, might deserve little attention, but it is about blood and points to #9, the really important one, which really is blood, though the word "blood" doesn't appear.

Spoiler alert... it's Gatsby's blood. He's shot dead in the swimming pool. The "mattress" is the flotation device he's lying on, and we learn of his death in that 9th appearance of "red" — "a thin red circle in the water." It's just color and geometry. You figure out that it's blood.

That distancing contrasts with the one appearance of the word "blood" in "The Great Gatsby":

The other car, the one going toward New York, came to rest a hundred yards beyond, and its driver hurried back to where Myrtle Wilson, her life violently extinguished, knelt in the road and mingled her thick dark blood with the dust. 

No use of the tightly hoarded word "red" is expended on Myrtle. Her blood is "dark blood" — as it mixes not with water but with dust.

Such are the colors of "Gatsby," and a long-unfinished count is completed. The answer is: 9.

I imagine the first commenter cranking me up again and asking "How many times does the word 'nine' come up in a search of 'The Great Gatsby'?"

The answer is 6, and every single one is the time of day.

"In the post-Honey Badger era, it’s become increasingly common for large corporations to appropriate viral memes for their own marketing purposes."

"Critics argue that the creators of these memes, who are often teenagers and frequently people of color, rarely have the opportunity to monetize their work. 'Want to profit of[f] your meme? Good luck if you aren’t white,' read a 2017 headline in Wired magazine after Kayla Lewis, who goes by Peaches Monroee on social media and is credited with creating the phrase 'eyebrows on fleek,' launched a GoFundMe campaign asking for donations so that she could start her own cosmetics line. Before launching the campaign, the magazine noted, Lewis hadn’t made any money off the phrase, even after companies like IHOP, Taco Bell, and Forever 21 used it. And meme creators only have a small window of time to monetize their viral fame before the Internet moves on to something new, [argued the lawyer for Christopher Gordon AKA Randall]. 'My client is a creative genius,' he said. 'He had a bolt of lightning, 86 million views on YouTube, was basically a celebrity around the country for about three years and he had a brief window of time to strike while the iron was hot on that. He should be the one — not the defendants in this case — to capitalize on that.'"

From "Honey Badger may not care, but the ‘creative genius’ who took him viral just won a big victory" (WaPo). Gordon was sharp enough to have trademarked the lines "Honey Badger Don’t Care" and "Honey Badger Don’t Give a S—."

Note that Gordon's original viral video wasn't made by him at all. It was National Geographic video. He just provided the audio track.

ADDED: It's inherent in the nature of memes and virality that people repeat something. "Honey badger don't care" would be nothing if people hadn't passed it on and found it fun to repeat. I'd be very careful about letting people own catch phrases. How are the rest of us supposed to speak? All our words are stolen if you get too picky about what it means to steal.

IN THE COMMENTS: Laslo Spatula says:

There is a nascent post to be made in analyzing the Honey Badger video now in the context of The Era Of That's Not Funny.

The pseudo-gay voice is obviously problematic.

He is also appropriating the Honey Badger's culture for his own benefit, and mocking it in the process.

The celebration of an animal for its violent and selfish tendencies is also troublesome: indeed, the video could be seen as a Trojan Horse for celebrating the American Conservative White Male.

To begin.

“There is a girl who went against me. She was going to talk about something I did. I am going to tell you, and this is a promise, if she ever tells anybody..."

"... no matter how much time she thinks went by, I have people who will pull up in a car, kidnap her and throw her in the Hudson river with cement blocks on her feet. You understand what I’m talking about, right?”

Said the movie director James Toback, according to the actress Selma Blair, reported in The Guardian, "Selma Blair: James Toback threatened to kill me after sexual harassment/The Hellboy star claims the disgraced film-maker sexually harassed her and then suggested that he could have her killed if she told her story."

So movie directors talk like characters in bad movies.

There's something so sad about referring to Blair as "The Hellboy star." It's a boy's world.

IN THE COMMENTS: Laslo Spatula wrote:

From the article:

"When he asked her to have sex with him, Blair refused, but Toback insisted she let him pleasure himself in front of her and said: “You cannot leave until I have release.”

“You cannot leave until I have release.”

Say what you want, but that is a great line. Very Ming the Merciless.

"I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail."

Said the psychologist Abraham Maslow in 1966, and I'm thinking about it today, while still laughing at the viral video of Lawrence O'Donnell yelling "Stop the hammering!" I just embedded the O'Donnell video in the previous post and — because in the post before that we were talking about phallic symbols — the great commenter Laslo Spatula said "A Hammer is not quite a phallic symbol."

Is a hammer a phallic symbol? In Bob Dylan's song about nuclear war, "A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall," there's the line:

I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin’...

Blood coming out of their wherever (to paraphrase Trump).

And then there's the hammer Pete Seeger wrote about:



Surely, Mary Travers was not wishing for a penis. "It's the hammer of justice," the lyrics tell us. Is it the hammer in the hammer and sickle, the "Communist symbol that was conceived during the Russian Revolution.... the hammer stood for industrial laborers and the sickle for the peasantry; combined they stood for the worker-peasant alliance for socialism"?

The hammer and sickle is not to be confused with the arm and hammer, "a symbol consisting of a muscular arm holding a hammer."

Used in ancient times as a symbol of the god Vulcan, it came to be known as a symbol of industry, for example blacksmithing and gold-beating. It has been used a symbol by many different kinds of organizations, including banks, local government, Freemasons, and socialist political parties. It has been used in heraldry, appearing in the Coat of arms of Birmingham and Seal of Wisconsin....

Wisconsin! There's also the best baking soda in the world:



And there's the arm and hammer sticking out of Goldbeater's House in London, described by Charles Dickens in "A Tale of Two Cities."

Hammers are important in mythology:

Mjölnir, the magic hammer of Thor. It was invulnerable and when thrown it would return to the user's hand. (Norse mythology)
Ukonvasara (also Ukonkirves), the symbol and magical weapon of the Finnish thunder god Ukko, and was similar to Thor's Mjölnir. (Finnish mythology)
Uchide no kozuchi, a legendary Japanese "magic hammer" which can "tap out" anything wished for. In popular belief, magic wooden hammer is a standard item held in the hand of the iconic deity Daikoku-ten. (Japanese folklore)
Hammer of Hephaestus, the hammer of the Greek smith-god Hephaestus which was used to make the Greek gods weapons.... (Greek mythology)

But let's talk about the "law of the hammer" — AKA "the law of the instrument" — which is the cognitive bias Professor Maslow was talking about in the famous quote that is the post title. The Wikipedia article on the subject explores the topic and traces the concept back to an old English expression "a Birmingham screwdriver" — which is not a screwdriver but a hammer — a hammer that is used for everything (including getting screws to go in).

If we take up the challenge to see the hammer as a phallic symbol, the law of the hammer becomes the temptation, if all you have is a phallus to treat everything as if it were a vagina:

Trump: Look at you, you are a pussy....

Trump was talking to a man, Billy Bush.

Trump: You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.

Bush: Whatever you want.

Trump: Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.

Who barged where in the G20 photograph?

Clearly (and hilariously) it was Macron:



French President Emmanuel Macron goes way out of his way, jostling past numerous world leaders to get to stand next to Donald Trump. Angela Merkel, planted in the center front row, actively reaches out to him, but he's dead set on task and makes it to the extreme right, where Donald Trump had positioned himself.

But look how Newsweek presents the same photo op: "IN G20 PHOTO, TRUMP COULDN’T SHOVE HIS WAY TO THE FRONT AND CENTER OF WORLD LEADERS." The video there shows an earlier point in the assembling on the risers, but it's easy to see that Trump makes no attempt to get to the front and center position. He steps calmly to the end position and casually speaks to a few people. He does nothing that makes it seem as though he wants to be in the center, and he certain doesn't engage in any shoving. It's Macron that actively moves through the crowd (and "shove" would be the wrong word even for what Macron is doing).

I'm imagining how Newsweek would defend itself against the charge that this is fake news: Trump didn't shove his way to the front and center, because he couldn't. He would've if he could've. Since he didn't, that means he couldn't, so we reported that he couldn't.

That's not a logical defense, of course. It contains a glaring false premise. But it might work for hardcore Trump haters, who are deranged into thinking they are seeing the deranged mind of Donald Trump. Oh, man, he so needs to be in the center of everything, him with his narcissistic personality disorder. We need to move on him with the 25th Amendment before the world explodes.

IN THE COMMENTS: Laslo Spatula writes: "Doesn't matter where trump is standing. He can drink their milkshakes from any location in the room." (Milkshake meme discussed yesterday here.)

ADDED: According to this AP report, the positions were all predetermined by rules that put all the government leaders in the front row and, within that row, arranged them by senority.

Trump wound up on one of the outer edges, between Indonesian President Joko Widodo and French President Emmanuel Macron, who has even less seniority than Trump does after being elected in May. Trump took office in January.

There is a reference to an photo op in May (among NATO leaders) in which "Trump put his right hand on the right arm of Montenegro Prime Minister Dusko Markovic and thrust himself ahead as NATO leaders walked inside the alliance's new headquarters and prepared for a group photo." Newsweek didn't refer to that earlier incident, but it could have attempted to justify saying "Trump couldn't shove his way to the front." He "thrust" (shoved?) his way to the front in the past, but this time set rules eliminated the shoving option. Here's the Trump vs. Markovic video:



What do you think? Shoving? Thrusting?

Well? What did Trump do to Dusko Markovic?

He shoved.

He thrusted.

He did some firm but gentle repositioning.

He carefully and respectfully maintained a clear path for himself.

Dusko received a desirable, memorable, delicious clasp from the most powerful man in the world.

pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: Poll results:

Let's analyze the New Yorker's cartoon of the day.

                           “I drink up your country!”

I never saw the movie — meant to, just didn't — but I realize this plays on something in "There Will Be Blood." Know Your Meme gets me the details: 

I Drink Your Milkshake is a catchphrase originating from There Will Be Blood.... It tells the story of a silver-miner-turned-oil-man on a ruthless quest for wealth during Southern California’s oil boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In the film, the phrase was intentionally used as a metaphor: sucking milkshake from someone else to demonstrate not only oil drainage from prized land, but the harsh nature of how cruelty often trumps meekness. In its original context, the scene is meant to evoke contempt for the character of Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day Lewis) and pity for his adopted son H.W. (Russel Harvard).

Interesting happenstance, the appearance of the verb "trumps."

The video at Know Your Memes is not available, but I've found it. Here:



Okay. I had never seen that before. Very intense. I get it. Here's the text (which you won't fully appreciate without hearing the performance):

That land has been had. Nothing you can do about it. It's gone. It's had... You lose.... Drainage! Drainage, Eli, you boy. Drained dry. I'm so sorry. Here, if you have a milkshake, and I have a milkshake, and I have a straw. There it is, that's a straw, you see? Watch it. Now, my straw reaches acroooooooss the room and starts to drink your milkshake. I... drink... your... milkshake!

Back to the cartoon. Is the other man — the little man with his back to us — supposed to be Putin? I assumed so. It was the cartoon of the day when Trump first encountered Putin in the flesh. But the setting is the Oval Office, and that's not where Putin and Trump met. And I don't think a world leader in the Oval Office is ever seated on the other side of the President's desk. But maybe the cartoonist resorted to the simplest indication that this is the Oval Office. And yet, come on, cartoonist (Farley Katz), you don't even have Trump's hair swooping in the right direction.

And why the distracting extra-long tie? I know it's stock humor about Trump — he wears his ties very long. We can veer into phallic symbology. Or are we supposed to focus on the tie? Is it the equivalent of the straw that reaches across the room? Are we to picture the drinking of Putin's (or whoever's) country as accomplished with the tie?

I like the idea of Daniel Day-Lewis playing Trump. He played Abraham Lincoln in a movie — another movie I haven't seen. Maybe there's some reference to that movie that might make the cartoon click into place for me. But I'm a little confused. I do think the little guy in the movie looks a bit Putinish, and it's funny to think of Trump towering over him, yelling at him, humiliating him, and reducing him to a quivering mass of jelly. But that doesn't seem anti-Trump enough for New Yorker cartoon-of-the-day purposes. So... maybe back to the tie. It's long but limp....

IN THE COMMENTS: I'm prodded to see the little man in the chair as Obama. David Smith points to "the big ears... the half-tone shading on the face." Laslo Spatula observes the "Vaguely tight, smooth afro (no hair lines drawn to indicate wavy, straight, etc; Trump has line detail in his hair). Big ears. Skin tone darker than Trump."

I realize this idea did cross my mind, but I was so stuck on Putin when it was cartoon of the day on that day. To see the other man as Obama answers my problem of a world leader seated on the other side of the President's desk. And now I notice the door behind "Trump." When the President is seated at his desk in the Oval Office, there are windows behind him. The Trump character there is pre-presidency Trump, looming over President Obama and threatening him.

But why would he say "I drink up your country"? The United States is Trump's country too! In The New  Yorker's view, perhaps, there are 2 Americas. Red America and Blue America, like 2 milkshakes, and Blue America might have been happy with its own milkshake, ignoring Red America over there. But Red America is cruel and greedy. It will drink up Blue America.

AND: Yet it doesn't make sense — or it makes only horrible sense — for Americans to picture political power in terms of draining the country, with the Democratic Party having its share and the Republican Party the other share. It might make sense — but I don't think this would be The New Yorker's sense — for Trump to be talking about getting votes that Democrats think belong to them. A politician is doing a fine job if he wins votes that have traditionally gone to the opposing party. But when people cast votes, they aren't drained. They've simply participated in the most recent election and they fully retain their vote, to be cast in the next election. I guess there might be some kind of insinuation that these voters, duped into voting for Trump, will have their interests drained... or maybe that a Trump presidency will destroy democracy and their vote really will be lost.

Have I thought about this more than The New Yorker did? Maybe it simply hit the editors as surreal and bizarre, and — because of a solid assumption of Trump hate — it seemed to just work.

ALSO IN THE COMMENTS: I think pacwest sums up the New Yorker's thinking:

That is Obama behind the desk in the oval office. He created an America greater than any other. The evil fat monster Donald Trump has just been elected and is going to suck all the juices out of his divine creation. Bwaa ha ha! The horror!

"As a trader in this village it's hard enough to earn a living without a prat like this sticking his fat nose where it['s] not wanted."

"You know who you are, u prat."

That made me look up "prat." It's English slang, going back to the 1500s, meaning "a buttock." Later, it came to mean both buttocks, i.e., a "bottom." (Source: OED.)

"Why, she's getting groggy on her pins, and if you don't pipe rumbo, she'll go prat over nut." That's from 1846. 

By 1955, it was slang for "An idiot, a fool; an ineffectual or contemptible person." Joe Orton used it in 1964 in "Entertaining Mr Sloane": "Go on, you superannuated old prat!"

I must say that before looking it up, I pictured it as a fish. I was thinking: sprat.

ADDED: This planted it in my head that Brits insult each other with fish:



IN THE COMMENTS: Laslo Spatula said: "I'm surprised Althouse din't also link o this Monty Python fish skit:"



The answer (to quell your surprise (I'm always alarmed at what surprises people around here)) is that — although I've had the DVD on my shelf for years — I've never gotten very far into "Monty Python's The Meaning of Life." There's only so much of this sort of foolery I can take in one sitting. A half hour is best for comedy. In the early days of movies, that was well understood. For example, this half hour of Chaplin from 1918:



That's all you need and all you want.

"If less than twenty five people feel moved to comment on this alleged event, then it's the beginning of the end for Lena."

"If, on the other hand, more than one hundred people feel impelled to comment on Lena's unworthiness as a human being, then another season of Girls is in the bag."

Predicts William in the comments to "Maria Shriver way overreacts to Lena Dunham saying 'penis,'" a post that went up at 7:51 yesterday evening and has thus far racked up 32 comments.

Only 32. (But that's more than 25.) And that's with an excellent short short story by Laslo Spatula, in the persona of The Girl at Starbucks That Hates You. I'll put it here so you won't have to click back:

WaPo gets it badly, hilariously wrong.

The fine print on this cover to WaPo's free publication Express is about a "massive march" in support of women's rights:



What an embarrassment.

They tweeted an apology — "We made a mistake on our cover this morning and we’re very embarrassed. We erroneously used a male symbol instead of a female symbol" — and a visualization of how it should have looked.



That's not as good graphically. If they'd known they'd have to use that shape, I don't think they'd have gone with that idea at all. With the female symbol, you lose the centrality of the circle and the dynamism of the moving-onward arrow. You lose the symbolism of people gathering together in a circle and then marching out — shooting forward.

With the female symbol, the circle is shunted off center by the clunky cross, which absorbs too many of the little people, and they're not breaking out into a march, but fixed and planted, like a stay-at-home wife, no symbolism of progress at all. In fact, they're at cross-purposes and getting in each other's way at the jammed intersection.

No wonder WaPo got it wrong. The male symbol is a better symbol.

And quite aside from the mistake, there's the problem of constructing a circle out of lots of tiny beings. It looks like this:



IN THE COMMENTS: traditionalguy said:

Maybe the artists were still under the spell of Hillary's campaign signage posted all over the WaPo offices.

And Laslo Spatula said:

They got it right the first time.

A mass of women, drawn together by the force of One Man.

He gives them their Shape as a whole: the Shape to put in all their fears and narcissism and self-congratulation, all within the context of Him.

A herd, they have been corralled...

I am Laslo.

That called to mind the famous frontispiece for "Leviathan":



"This is the most famous picture in the history of political philosophy," writes polisci prof Larry Arnhardt.



"The king's body is composed of the human bodies of his subjects, who have their backs turned to the reader as they stare upward at the king's face.... These pictures convey visually Hobbes's teaching that a state of nature without government must become a state of war, in which human life must be 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.' Therefore, to escape such a condition, any government is better than no government. And a highly centralized government with absolutely sovereign power is best of all."

"Hipster" walks into cemetery monuments shop, orders a tombstone for Donald Trump with the epitaph "Made America Hate Again."

Carts the 420-pound object over to Central Park and surreptitiously installs it where it becomes the subject of numerous Instagram pics.

Police track the man down but don't arrest him. Stone is removed.

New York Times does an article about him, does an interview with a man "who declined to give his name" (though the police gave a name, Brian A. Whiteley).

He's quoted saying that he was "trying to remind Donald what type of legacy he’s leaving behind. And also leaving the date of the death open, alluding to the fact that there’s still time to change who he is."

That last part is, I take it, an effort to deflect any opprobrium that might attach if the tombstone is perceived as a wish to see Donald Trump dead or, worse, a threat to his life. Ironically — and hipsters love irony — the allusion to the fact there’s still time to change who he is is the "or else" that puts it in the form of a threat.

I don't think it's a "true threat" in the sense of First Amendment doctrine and I think the speech is fully protected under American law, but I can't believe New York law doesn't make it a crime to leave an unattended 420-pound object in Central Park. Let's imagine an equivalent stunt/art project aimed at Hillary Clinton. Why shouldn't political campaigns of all sorts take up the practice of setting up monuments in Central Park and sparking Instagram virality?

Earlier this morning I linked to a (possibly insanely lame) NYT column titled "Three Ways to Think About ‘Is It Worth It?’" in which the author spelled out his cogitation over whether to buy a $5,000 bike. $5,000 seems to be about the cost of getting a tombstone made and transported to Central Park. Is it worth it? According to the "Three Ways" column, it's a personal decision based on cost, enjoyment, and utility. If there's no legal consequence, I'd say it would be worth it to enough people to keep the Sheep Meadow looking like a graveyard.

IN THE COMMENTS: Laslo Spatula said...

He tried to get it written on a cake but the baker refused him.

Because bakers can do that.

Wait.

The tendency of men in groups, in bars, to take to singing...

IN THE COMMENTS: Laslo Spatula said, "Dear God your headline made me think of this":



I laughed a lot, and — can you believe it?! — I have never watched that scene. Never saw the movie "Top Gun" or even vaguely wanted to. Never saw "An Officer and A Gentleman" either, and I get the 2 movies mixed up.

Jurors reject the death penalty for James Holmes.

"Only one juror needed to dissent for the sentence to be life in prison."

Prosecutors, emphasizing the human toll and indiscriminate cruelty of opening fire on a happy crowd of moviegoers... argued that toll he exacted was so great, and the indiscriminate rampage so horrible, that death by lethal injection was the only just punishment.

But defense lawyers said it was not hatred or a desire for notoriety that propelled Mr. Holmes to plot and carry out the massacre, but a deepening form of schizophrenia that infected his mind with powerful delusions that killing people somehow increased his “human capital.”...

Would you have voted for the death penalty? I would not.

Would you have voted for the death penalty for Holmes?

Yes.

No.

Can't say without sitting through the trial.

pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: I've fixed the headline, which originally said "John Holmes," instead of "James Holmes," prompting Laslo Spatula to say "So we expect the death penalty if you have a famously long cock?" And Xmas said: "James! John Holmes has already been hung."

ALSO: Some commenters perceive a flaw in the poll, so here's a second poll, designed to eliminate that flaw:

Would you have voted for the death penalty for Holmes?

Yes.

I am always opposed to the death penalty, so no.

I accept the death penalty when it's justified, but I would vote no.

Can't say without sitting through the trial.

pollcode.com free polls

AND: Poll results:

"Let them eat crab-cake."

Punchline.

"The Indiana he knew as a kid was completely homophobic. Take my word for it."

Said Meade, upon hearing Letterman's "David Letterman's Top Ten Guys Indiana Governor Mike Pence Looks Like" routine, which begins: "This is not the Indiana I remember as a kid. I lived there for 27 years, and folks were folks, and that’s all there was to it. We all breathed the same air, we were all carbon-based life forms. We didn’t care."



Meade was born in Indiana in 1954 and lived there until 1971. "I don't remember anyone, ever, saying it's okay to be gay or that you should treat gay people the same as anyone else. The only thing I ever heard was disparaging or it was joked about and behind the joking was pretty thinly veiled fear. There were no 'out' gays." Meade called Letterman "delusional" and repeats something I said the other day: "Stop otherizing Indiana."

I'm going to defend Letterman a bit, even though I'm sure Meade is right about  Hoosiers and homosexuality in the 1950s. One thing is, Letterman makes no effort to understand what RFRA actually says and how it is likely to work in practice: "Honestly, I don't know what [Mike Pence] is talking about." He's operating at a higher level of abstraction, where Hoosiers are stereotypically friendly and nice to everybody. That's what he remembers, and that is the Hoosier brand. Ironically, Mike Pence — in his disastrous turn on ABC's "This Week" — relied on the same branding:

Hoosier -- come on. Hoosiers don't believe in discrimination. I mean the way I was raised, in a small town in Southern Indiana, is you're -- you're kind and caring and respectful to everyone. Anybody that's been in Indiana for five minutes knows that Hoosier hospitality is not a slogan, it's a reality. People tell me when I travel around the country, gosh, I went -- I went to your state and people are so nice....

Yeah, you're the nice people... unlike those people in other states. Well, I just have 2 things to say about that: 1. You're otherizing the people of the other states who have to be less nice for it to be noticeable that your people are so nice, 2. Niceness is a superficial quality, and it's a quality that makes it hard to tell whether the seemingly nice person thinks ill of you or not. Those stereotypical Hoosiers might hate your kind. How would you know?

By the way, has David Letterman ever said disparaging things about gay people on his show? All the jokes in there over the years, going back to the "Tonight" show appearances? I think it would be extraordinary if he didn't. Mocking gay people was, of course, absolutely the norm for Johnny Carson, who expected and got endless laughs over men who are — his words — "light in [their] loafers."

AND: The "Guys Indiana Governor Mike Pence Looks Like" routine isn't consistent with an ethic of friendly kindness and equality. You put up a picture of a man and then throw 10 shots at him for the way he looks. Letterman made a point of not even attempting to understand what Pence was talking about. Let's just make fun of how he looks. Letterman was teaching us that it's just fine to have a gut reaction to a person, to reject the stage in human relations where you see things from the other person's point of view, and to mock him for superficial reasons that have no substance at all.

IN THE COMMENTS: Laslo Spatula came up with 2 answers to my question "By the way, has David Letterman ever said disparaging things about gay people on his show?"

1. In 2011, Letterman joked about Rosie O'Donnell: "The woman she is marrying, her fiancée, was driving... and her car broke down. And guess what happened? Rosie pulls up right behind her in her tow truck." Rosie wondered what motivated him and added: "I don't remember making fun of you when you had sex with all your interns, Dave. I didn't do that. I didn't make fun of your rampant, throbbing heterosexuality, did I Dave?"

2. In 2008, Letterman had a Top 10 list of "things Jim Carrey will always say 'yes' to" including "A Fan Asking for a Hug, Unless He's a Dude" and then a shot Carrey taking a bath with Larry King and Letterman saying "Those guys are so gay!"