"Extremely pale people tend to have visible veins. No foundation is going to be able to cover a bruise effectively while allowing those blue-tinged lines to show through..."

"... which leaves the pasty among us kind of screwed unless we’re going to go get serious special effects makeup training. Try having your husband bite the nape of your neck in or just on your hairline.... Ask your doctor about arnica. It’s an herb that can be applied topically, and some circus people, BDSM aficionados, and sex workers swear by it for speeding up the healing of bruises...."

Advice from Slate's sex columnist, How to Do It, responding to a question that begins "I love being bitten. I especially love being bitten at the joint between my shoulder and neck during sex."

As an extremely pale person, I was interested in the makeup advice. I think she's saying that the EPP needs to use foundation that's translucent enough to let your little veins show through, that the purple is part of your natural-looking skin tone — sort of like pointillism....



As for the bruises... well, that's what's in Slate today. I wonder how hard they had to try to make sure nobody thought they were giving advice to women who are actually abused and wanting to hide it.

At the White Hat Café...

... talk all you like.

And consider using the Althouse Portal to Amazon.

At the Dog-and-Monkey Café...

... could you please get to your point(ilism)?

Open thread. Plus: remember the Althouse Portal to Amazon. Can you find a leash that attaches around the waist for your monkey? I tried but only found a dog leash with a belt at the human end, for hands-free dog-walking, and stuffed-toy monkey that a toddler wears as a backpack and that has a tail that is really the leash to be held by the adult keeping the child from straying too far.

At the Summer Afternoon Café...

... put that in your pipe and smoke it.

At the Post-Impressionist Museum...

... you can pay attention to anything you want...



... including the Althouse Portal to Amazon.

"Callista Gingrich’s hair is a fabulous shout-out to a mythic Washington."

WaPo headline for a Robin Givhan essay.

Ms. Gingrich was appearing at her confirmation hearing — she's nominated for ambassador to the Vatican — and her hair was "a perfectly styled chin-length bob with a side swoosh... controlled and proper and smooth."

Yes, but what is "mythic Washington" that has anything to do with Callista's surrealistic hair?

[H]er hair is being discussed because it manages to be both utterly unique and a marker of the kind of place that Washington... once believed itself to be but certainly is no longer.... a mythic Washington: a place of order and comportment, stuffy but reliable, self-conscious, mannered, impervious. And most of all, studiously dignified.

Is it so stuffy and sober? It's got that insouciant, elongated, extra curve...

Who has done that before while saying take me seriously? If Callista Gingrich were a liberal, wouldn't Robin Givhan be enthusing about how modern and impudently playful it was?

Oh, but it's hard, it "does not move or swing a la Anna Wintour’s timeless golden bob."

It's a stiff hard prong, like a horn, for the lady who's going to represent us in the Vatican. If you wanted to say it poked at convention in a delightful new way, you could.

That side swoosh made me think of all the talk of the significance of upward curves in Seurat paintings like "Le Cirque" and "Le Chahut":

What does it mean, the upward curve? I remember reading (long ago) that Seurat thought it meant happiness and joy, but I can't confirm that. Rereading this post, I'm tempted — by the horned devil? — to make the Freudian leap and say it signifies the erect penis. And that's not inconsistent with happiness and joy. And perhaps that's why it's disconcerting — to Givhan and others — that it's so stiff and hard.

Today's Drudgetapostion: Qaddafi looking up, Obama looking down (and Irene coming up).

I love the kinetic energy here:



Qaddafi's unbowed head aims up and to the right, in the position associated with optimism and progress. Obama's head points in the opposite direction, down and to the left. Qaddafi is wrapped up in his own thoughts in this image, and Obama is all about ice cream. Meanwhile, as we read from right to left and top to bottom, the next image is the path of Hurricane Irene and the lines sweep us back up to the image of Qaddafi.

No one who has laughed at the Michele Bachmann corndog photo can deny that the ice cream functions as a phallic symbol. In this light, one notes that the ice cream is soft-serve. See the swirls? The ice cream swirls harmonize with the swirling pattern of a hurricane and the swirling thoughts in the mind of the Libyan monster.

Does Obama care? — the brilliant Matt Drudge subliminally prods us to ask. Is he childishly preoccupied with a swirly dessert (as he vacations and vacations and vacations)? Look up, Mr. President! Qaddafi is still standing! The hurricane is coming!

The headlines under Obama increase our feelings that he is allowing everything to collapse:

NATIONAL DEBT RISES BY $3 MILLION EACH MINUTE...

Obama sets record: $4,247,000,000,000 debt in just 945 days...

(Both links go to the same story.) Above him, we see "Man busted near Nat'l Mall with fireworks-packed car 'fitted with turret, multiple tubes'..." (Scary! But it wasn't — go to the link — a terrorist.) (Addition phallic imagery implied by these explosive tubes.)

And speaking of the "Nat'l Mall," glance down and to the left a notch, and you'll see the image of the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial, newly unveiled on the National Mall. Martin Luther King marched on Washington, and now he's there permanently. We sent Barack Obama to Washington and — the Drudge images say — he won't stay there, he keeps leaving, and he's not paying attention to the business of Washington. Meanwhile, in Tripoli, Qaddafi is intent on staying put, a strong man 'til the end. Obama is the soft center to a ice-cream manwich, with the hard men on either side — Qaddafi and King... and the violently disruptive woman Irene coming up behind him.

This has been another edition in the ongoing Althouse opus: The Art and Genius of Matt Drudge.

ADDED: Some art theory about lines and directions, from the artist Georges Seurat:

Post-impressions.

Today was an incredibly busy day, beginning with that 8 a.m. "Week in Review." Around 1, I went in to the law school to record an episode of BloggingheadsTV, and I had a nice encounter with an individual who was turning a humble whiteboard into a work of art:



My questions -- are you a pointillist? and do you like Seurat? -- did not get much of an answer, but nonetheless... who will dare erase the whiteboard?

So... on to the Bloggingheads. It's not up yet. But I'll just tantalize you with my notes, which I drew on during the hour+ that we recorded:



(Enlarge.)

How is Jayson Blair's girlfriend like Presidential candidate John Kerry? They both spontaneously launch into quoting "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

The info on the girlfriend comes from the great public service feature, "Slate reads the prevaricator's book so you don't have to." The info on John Kerry comes from last Sunday's Maureen Dowd swoon, my aversion to which appears here. Here's the Prufrock part:

But there was Mr. Kerry flying from Boston to New Orleans on Friday, sipping tea for his hoarse throat and reeling off T. S. Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

"There are so many great lines in it," he said. " `Do I dare to eat a peach?' `Should I wear my trousers rolled?' `Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets/The muttering retreats/Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels/And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells."

Well, why not have a big Prufrock revival?

Here's a nice website with the text of the poem tricked up with links (quite a few of them dead though), to miscellaneous things, like the Seurat painting below, for "Arms that are braceleted and white and bare."

Feel free to pick through the Prufrock quotes and find phrases from which to construct wisecracks about Jayson Blair and John Kerry. There are plenty of juicy ones, though you won't find "Should I wear my trousers rolled?"--one of the "great lines" Kerry "reeled off." It's:

I grow old . . . I grow old . . .
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.