"Musk and his goofily-named, wow-that-really-exists Department of Government Efficiency have been intent on the government budget slash-and-burn mission..."

"... since Donald Trump took office. They say that evil never sleeps, but apparently tech kajillionaires who have pretty bananapants power over federal infrastructure do, hence Musk’s alleged lil DOGE naps in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Stripping vulnerable and minority groups of their protections and advocates can really take it out of a guy, not to mention flipping science the fiscal bird! The EEOB is right across from the West Wing, and Musk is said to get comfy at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago when he’s down in Florida, so maybe it’s a matter of proximity and comfort. Ssshhh, he’s right there, he might whisper to himself, gazing out at the windows of Casa Trump, the TV’s soft blue light flickering in the night, his palm pressed to the glass of his own office. It’s okay."

I'm reading "Goodnight, Goon. Elon Musk Is Whispering 'Cuts,' Sleeping on the Floor Near the White House/He really is in the DOGEhouse, huh?" That's Kase Wickman, writing in Vanity Fair.

Does she hate Musk? Is she just in the company of people who can't openly love him? I don't know, but — whatever her condition — she's having fun with it. 

She's only calling him a "goon" to make a play on the going-to-sleep children's book "Goodnight, Moon."

Here's a history of the word "goon." In 1934, we get Alice the Goon, the character in E.C. Segar's "Thimble Theatre" comic strip:

"To witness the show itself.... is to sit directly before a fire hose of frank postulation about sex..."

"... that’s as scholarly as it is X-rated, nimbly invoking the works of the Greek mythologists, of Philip Roth, of Sharon Olds and Tony Robbins and Nietzsche. She narrates an early episode of teenage experimentation in an unfinished basement as Nabokov would. The advice commonly given to young women to “take it slow” in a dating situation where there’s hope for a real relationship? Novak condemns it with a flourish: 'No. No! The hubris astonishes. Death is coming.'"

From "Jacqueline Novak’s Netflix special is a manifesto on sex and power/Her acclaimed show, 'Get on Your Knees,' thoughtfully and hilariously interrogates gender dynamics" (WaPo). 

Key line: "Oh, and: It’s a 90-minute show about blow jobs."

And I like "a fire hose of frank postulation about sex."

I didn't think I'd find an occasion to use that so soon. I'd stumbled across it as I was writing the first post of the day — "Trump defeated Ron DeSantis. We all know that. But how gendered was it?" — and quoting DeSantis saying "If Donald Trump can summon the balls to show up to the debate, I’ll wear a boot on my head."

I said: "I like 'summon the balls.' Oh, balls!"

But I wanted to convey a comic inflection in calling out "Oh, balls!" — as if you didn't have balls but needed to summon them into your presence. All I could think of was Olive Oyl summoning Popeye: "Oh, Popeye!" You know, how she calls out to him when he's far off. I never found that GIF, but I made a mental note of Popeye and the firehose. 

"Wow. Not a word about Dilbert. I thought I could return to Althouse for the straight skinny on the bizarre Scott Adams meltdown. Guess there’s a lid on Dilbert."

Wrote jacksonjay, in last night's Sunrise Café.

It's more work to pick up an issue that is presented in audio. Am I supposed to transcribe and explain? It's not like blogging the written word, where I can cut and paste and edit down to what's important. When people speak in podcasts, they expand and repeat themselves, so even if I were willing to transcribe, I wouldn't get the kind of text I can get from the written word. So there's a big disincentive to blog.

As for this recent thing — which I take it is Adams's assertion the day after the debate that Trump just lost his vote by not denouncing white supremacy forcibly enough — I thought it was the audio equivalent of clickbait, so I had some resistance to it. I'm supposed to explain it and have a reaction to it? Why? Wait a day and everything changed. He explained that he didn't like that jerks of the left didn't welcome him into their fold, so he was back on Trump's side, because righties, being the unpopular kids, are happy to have anybody halfway like them.

Yeah, that's not a verbatim transcription. That's just my vague memory after listening to 2 or 3 podcasts. Podcasts are evanescent. The written word, now that's something. Just the other day on one of my podcasts — I forget which one — Meade and I were talking about how Trump has built real-world things that have to work and hold up, while the editors of the NYT could not even get from the beginning to the end of a single column without it collapsing into incoherence. The column metaphor was noted at the time. You see it when a physical thing like a building lacks structural integrity, but words are so strong, they stay there on the page exactly as written, no matter how irrational.

But in blogging, you can take that text and demonstrate what's wrong with it. You attack text with text. But if you're doing text — blogging — it's hard to get at anything other than text. It's a text-on-text endeavor, mostly. You could blog podcasts... but for the most part, that's a mug's game.

IN THE COMMENTS: Ralph L questioned jacksonjay's phrase "straight skinny":

Who's Bathroom Bill?

"Bathroom bill hits Senate floor."



Hurry before I bust in the door....

"What I’ve come to realize is that when it comes to The Bluebook, small changes are made for the sake of making small changes."

Writes Bryan Garner, commenting on the new edition — the 20th edition — of the "Uniform System of Citation" law students are supposed to obsess over.

New law students want their predecessors’ work to look obsolete. It’s the theory first elaborated by the social philosopher Thorstein Veblen: planned obsolescence. Veblen postulated that companies deliberately produce consumer goods that will become outdated after limited use so that consumers will have to buy new items more often.

You see the principle at work with smartphone chargers (your old ones won’t work on your new gear), iPod connections (ditto), lightbulbs and even coursebooks. Legal publishers like frequent editions so as to avoid the forgone profits represented by a secondhand market.

And so it is with The Bluebook. Things shift from edition to edition—every five years or so—in response to nothing but the itch of a new crop of law students to leave their mark on their venerated citation guide.

I'm not convinced that law students feel a desire to "leave their mark" with changes in citation form. Anyone who is meticulous about citation form ought to feel bad about changes that make older volumes of the journal different from the new. The most important thing about form is consistency. Pick a form and then stick to it. I have various things like that on this blog, certain punctuation, capitalization, and grammatical preferences that have been established. The interest in formal consistency now vastly outweighs all the various factors that went into the original decision. For example, I capitalize "Justice" but not "judge." And in a sentence like "The five men blew their nose," I am never going to change that "nose" to "noses," no matter how many times Meade says "Shouldn't that be 'noses'?" I just say, "That's that thing again," meaning that's that point of grammar I resolved long ago.

I wish Death Cab For Cutie had followed my grammatical preference in the lovely song "I Will Follow You Into The Dark," which has the great, but flawed, line: "If Heaven and Hell decide/That they both are satisfied/Illuminate the no's on their vacancy signs." If it were "Illuminate the no on their vacancy sign," listeners would be spared the no's/nose homophone. Each afterlife domain has only one sign, and each sign has only one no that can be illuminated when there is no vacancy, so the singular makes sense and avoids confusion. I learned that long ago from a teacher who knew it was better to say to us students "Use your head," not "Use your heads."



But back to "The Bluebook." I think Garner got closer to the truth when he said "Legal publishers like frequent editions so as to avoid the forgone profits represented by a secondhand market." When you're an editor, you have to resist stepping on the writer's stylistic choices. But I'd just like to say, I'd never have written the sentence like that. Garner is using that verbose, 19th century style of rhetoric that W.C. Fields made fun of in the early 20th century. And in doing so, he's making it easier to overlook the truth — what I think is the truth — that is lost in the musings about the psychology of cite-checking law students. I'd have written: The new editions of The Bluebook are a scheme to extract money from students, and students not only pay for new books, they pay in the time and effort it takes to learn the piddling new rules.

NPR cogitates lamely about football songs, and I have to wonder whatever happened to heroes and what was Olive Oyl's game?

An emailer wrote to NPR's Stephen Thompson ("the good listener") about the dearth of football songs: "While drafting our fantasy football teams last week, my friends and I were trying to brainstorm great songs about football — and mostly coming up empty." And Stephen Thompson experienced some emptiness of his own:

For some reason, most of the football-specific songs I've encountered have succumbed to at least one of three temptations: to pledge allegiance to a specific team, to mirror the speed and brutality of the game, or to use football as a mechanism for marketing a product. All three approaches stand in the way of a unifying anthem, especially now that the modified "All My Rowdy Friends" — with its immortal chorus of, "Are you ready for some football?!" — has been largely removed from popular circulation.

Why is "All My Rowdy Friends" out of circulation? According to Thompson: "ESPN pulled "All My Rowdy Friends" off its football telecasts back in 2011, due to some controversial statements [Hank Williams Jr.] had just made in an interview." What awful thing did Williams say? At the link, I see that he used hyperbole in a comic analogy: Obama playing golf with John Boehner would be "like Hitler playing golf with Netanyahu." We've forgotten it now, but at the time, we just couldn't let it go, apparently. And now football has no song.

In the old days, everyone knew the song that even without the lyrics meant football. It was the 1933 song "You Gotta Be a Football Hero." Here it is by Ben Bernie & All The Lads. And here it is in the Popeye cartoon:



The NPR writer, who has the sads about "the speed and brutality of the game" and can only gesture at The Terrible Hitler Analogy of 2011, lamely gravitates to football song to about watching football on television. He thinks he has a good idea: Replace "All My Rowdy Friends," with its TV-watching theme, with "It's Time To Party," but with new lyrics "It's Time for Football." In the old days, you were pressured to play football yourself:

You got to be a football hero
To get along with the beautiful girls
You got to be a touchdown-getter, you bet
If you want to get somebody to pet

You — and the "you" meant you young men — were told to play football, not watch it on TV, and it was assumed that you were eager to get to "pet" "beautiful girls." Apparently, these days, you're just excited that a football game is on television and you have some male friends who will watch TV with you. That's your "rowdy" "party," sitting around with men, and watching other men play the game is the end in itself. And you write letters to a man at NPR to help you think of a song and he can't even think of that song from the time when the men not only needed to play football, but playing football was not the end in itself — there was a further end, the petting of beautiful girls.

But I suppose these "rowdy" TV-watching males still get their beautiful girls, and these girls go far beyond petting. Yes, yes, I know some of the girls — we don't say "girls" anymore (except when referring to that TV show "Girls") — some of the young woman put earnest effort into decrying the way these young males today grasp after sex, the speed and brutality of the game.

What happened to all the heroes? What happened to the demand for a hero? Are we even capable anymore of understanding a Popeye cartoon? Who the hell was Olive Oyl and why was she able to command heroics? It is a mystery long forgotten.

"Sally Starr is an icon, and she will always be remembered as an icon. She was someone who was pure."

"Her persona was always Sally Starr. She understood the importance of being a personality on and off the air. She was always in costume. She represented the true style of what it was to be a personality."

Goodbye to Sally Starr, who died 2 days before her 90th birthday. When I think of days in the 1950s in front of the television, I think of "Popeye Theater" and Sally Starr, "your gal Sal," forever in our hearts!

The man who put the heads on the Pez dispenser.

Curtis Allina. A classic obituary, depicting a man you're only hearing about because he has died. He was 87. The heads went on the dispensers in 1955. I'm old enough to have had a pre-head type Pez dispenser, and though the obituary says "In 1955, at his urging, what had been an austerely packaged Austrian confection for adults took on vibrant new life as a children’s product," we kids thought the original dispenser was really cool. Did I get a Pez dispenser with a head when I already had a Pez dispenser? I think I did. I think I had Popeye. But this isn't the place to tell you how much I loved Popeye. This is a post about candy... and packaging... and writing about death.

Curtis Allina was born Aug. 15, 1922, in Prague, and raised in Vienna. Between 1941 and 1945, he and his family, Sephardic Jews, were forced into a series of concentration camps. Mr. Allina emerged at war’s end as his family’s sole survivor in Europe. Making his way to New York, he worked for a commercial meatpacker before joining Pez-Haas, as the company’s United States arm was then known, in 1953.

Pez was invented in 1927 by Eduard Haas III, a Viennese food-products mogul. Small, rectangular and mint-flavored (the name is a contraction of pfefferminz, the German word for peppermint), the candy was marketed to adults as an alternative to smoking. Originally sold in tins, Pez was repackaged in the late 1940s in plain, long-stemmed dispensers meant to suggest cigarette lighters.

And so, we Boomers were turned away from cigarette-oriented play and into the world of pop culture characters... by a man who emerged from the Holocaust.

Audible Althouse #51.

A fresh, new podcast. Stream it here. Subscribe:

I talk about comics, especially Popeye:



There's some stuff about the "Masters of American Comics" show at the Milwaukee Art Museum and Art Spiegelman writing about cartoons in Harper's Magazine. Then there's that list of conservative rock songs and Pete Townsend's reaction to "Won't Get Fooled Again" being on it. I talk a bit about Bob Dylan. (The Paul Simon song I can't quite remember is "Night Game.")

There's some exciting violence involving a spider that occurs early on in this podcast. And the whole thing ends with a discussion of cool. And Kookie.

"We're emenies on account of we both loves Olive Oyl."

Said Popeye, wondering why Curly wanted him to come over, in an old E.C. Segar comic I was reading today at the Milwaukee Art Museum, which has a big, cool exhibition called "Masters of American Comics."

I'd been looking at comics art for about half an hour, working my way through the Winsor McKay and Lyonel Feininger comics, and got to the Segar stuff, and that line of Popeye's made me laugh out loud. And then I was doubly amused to realize that was the first laughter I'd heard at this huge exhibition of comics. I stayed for another hour, and I think I laughed one or two other times, but I never heard anyone else laugh. It was like a church in there. Is this the effect of museums or did the curators choose the very comics that were least likely to make you laugh? Fantasy and surrealism loomed large. So did serious comics like "Maus." And a lot of the humor was the sort of thing that you appreciate intellectually and don't giggle over. Like:

And with insipid porcine vapidness he lapses into somniverous oblivion.

That's a caption in a "Krazy Kat" comic, as a pig goes to sleep.

"S'turbil" = It's terrible, in Krazy Kat dialect. She also says "Jee-Wizzil." I find all of that amusing, but you'd only laugh out loud at that sort of thing in a social situation, where you were interested in elevating the mood of the people you're with. In the museum setting, everyone's floating along in his own little reverie.



Hmmm.... I see there were no women artists in this exhibition, and there were 15 male artists. I'm surprised, not because I think there is a woman who deserved to be in this group. (Winsor McCay, George Herriman, Lyonel Feininger, E.C. Segar, Frank King, Chester Gould, Milton Caniff, Charles M. Schulz, Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Harvey Kurtzman, R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Gary Panter, and Chris Ware.) I'm surprised because I would have thought curators would feel uneasy about a show with that many artists that lacked even one woman. Thanks for not patronizing me.



Anyway, it's an excellent show, well worth the trip to Milwaukee if you're roughly in the area. It will be there until August 13th.

And, in case you don't know, the museum itself is quite the architectural marvel:

The new National Film Registry films, including "Duck and Cover."

The new 25 films for Congress's National Film Registry have been announced. These are films chosen for their "cultural, historical or aesthetic significance." The only ones I've seen are "Eraserhead" (1978), "The Nutty Professor" (1963), "Schindler's List" (1993), "Unforgiven" (1992), and -- I'm guessing now -- "Popeye the Sailor Meets Sinbad the Sailor" (1936) and "Pups is Pups (Our Gang)" (1930). And, like most people, I've seen part of "Jailhouse Rock" (1957). One I haven't seen but was curious enough to look up is "Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers" (1980). It really is a documentary about garlic.

Also on the list, and clearly a part of the American cultural heritage, is the 1951 civil defense film "Duck and Cover." I don't remember ever being shown this, maybe because I didn't reach elementary school age until the late 1950s. I do, however, remember air raid drills. These did not involve getting under the desks, as famously depicted in "Duck and Cover." We went out in the hall and curled up on our knees, with our heads against the wall and our hands clasped behind our necks. I can certainly remember having no idea what we were preparing for. I knew what "air" meant, and I knew what a "fire drill" referred to, even though the word "drill" didn't mean anything. "Raid" didn't mean anything either. So "air raid drill" was just one of those things we did, like "pledge allegiance." They told us to do it, and we did.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, when I was 11 and had some vague idea of what was happening, the school sent us home with a memo to give to our parents. The memo informed the parents that they needed to teach those of us who rode the bus how to make our way home on foot. Presumably, the school envisioned a nuclear war in which the children would be wandering about and ought to at least attempt to walk home. My parents did nothing in response to this memo, which puzzled me back then (when I also fretted about their failure to build a bomb shelter). I'm sure they wouldn't have thought much of our air raid drills either.

UPDATE: "Duck and Cover" is in the public domain. You can download or stream it here. Okay, I've watched it now. That's really quite disturbing. You begin with an animated turtle ("dum dum deedle dum dum") and before long you're being told over and over again that 'the flash may come at any time," so you must be instantly ready to jump onto the ground and cover yourself up, like these people on a picnic who go under the picnic cloth ("They know that even a thin cloth helps protect them"). Just before the peppy music ends the film, the kids are told: "Older people will help us, as they always do. But there might not be any grownups around when the bomb explodes. Then, you're on your own!"

Amish day at the Times--Rumpspringa! (Apparently, I think it is my job to detect repetitions.) First, there's this description of Johnny Depp in a movie review by Elvis Mitchell headlined, "Beware of Amish Hitmen and the Anxiety of Influence":

Dressed ominously in a big-brimmed black hat and a work shirt buttoned to the neck — he looks like an Amish hitman — Shooter drawls menacingly, "You stole my book."

(The movie is just some thriller, not about the Amish at all--and Mitchell manages to refer to Popeye and Danger Mouse too, and I will be waiting for random recurrences of these characters.)

The second is the pathetic story "Man Charged After Snack Cakes Stolen" (why report it at all?):

Robert Lee McKiernan, 35, of Cedar Rapids, was arrested Tuesday after an incident in which authorities say he stole a box of Hostess Ho Hos and a box of Cinnamon Crumb Cakes from a barn at an Amish farm near Hazleton, in northeast Iowa.

The third is this correction, surely the Correction of the Day:

An article in The Arts on March 4 about a planned UPN reality show tentatively called "Amish in the City" misspelled the Pennsylvania Dutch term for a rite of passage in which some teenagers experiment with the outside world. Authorities on Amish tradition use various renditions of the dialect, but the most common version is rumspringa, not Rumpspringa.