Joyce Carol Oates casts aspersions on Donald Trump's visualization of his mother-in-law in Heaven.

beautiful sentiment, beautifully expressed. very like Tony Soprano's chosen resting-place for much-loved Richie: "....in a woods by a babbling brook." https://t.co/WQbFMVEWTN

— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) January 11, 2024

Here's the relevant "Sopranos" clip:

"Soooo... I assumed they were all killed and the blackout was just to spare us from seeing it."

"But over on Television Without Pity, everyone's all confused, saying what happened, curse you David Chase, and I thought my cable went out."

I wrote on June 7, 2007, and today I'm seeing what I thought was confirmation that I was right: "Sopranos writer David Chase originally had a 'death scene' in mind for the show's finale" (Daily Mail):

Chase [said] 'Yes, I think I had that death scene around two years before the end. I remember talking with [writer/ executive producer] Mitch Burgess about it. But it wasn’t - it was slightly different.... 'Tony was going to get called to a meeting with Johnny Sack in Manhattan, and he was going to go back through the Lincoln Tunnel for this meeting. It was going to go black there and you never saw him again as he was heading back, the theory being that something bad happens to him at the meeting. But we didn’t do that.'

After what the journalists described as a 'long pause,' Chase responded, 'F*** you guys.'

According to Uproxx, Chase told [the journalists] he 'didn’t want to do a straight death scene,' and that the idea behind the scene [in the end at the restaurant] was that 'he could have been whacked.' Chase remained coy when [they] asked him directly if viewers would have been mistaken to believe Tony would have been killed in the scene, saying, 'I’m not going to answer that question.'

Ah, well. We'll never know. I miss "The Sopranos." I miss Television Without Pity.

Trump's Christmas meme: "I am all alone."

As I see it in the press...



... it seems to mean that Trump is isolated, friendless, and self-pitying. His words are characterized as a "ranting" and "complaining." He stews, un-self-aware, in chaos of his own making.

Let's look at the tweet that set off this anti-Trump ideation:

I am all alone (poor me) in the White House waiting for the Democrats to come back and make a deal on desperately needed Border Security. At some point the Democrats not wanting to make a deal will cost our Country more money than the Border Wall we are all talking about. Crazy!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 24, 2018

First of all, he's not self-pitying, because the "(poor me)" — to anyone who hasn't descended into willfull humor-deafness — is a sarcastic way to say that he's not feeling sorry for himself. He has chosen to stay in Washington, and he's refraining from bragging and gloating (which his haters would have hated even more than self-pity). "I am all alone" stands in for the implicit boast: I stayed on the job, when nobody else did. They all skittered home, putting their self-interest first, and I put the country first. He's "waiting for the Democrats to come back and make a deal." His emotionalism is not about his personal needs but on the "desperate" need of the country's.



ADDED: "Poor me" has a bit of a "Sopranos" vibe:



IN THE COMMENTS: Meade rewrites the words to that Brenda Lee song:

All alone am I ever since the Dems’ goodbye
All alone with just the thought of my Wall
Congress not around; not a Democrat in town
Just the lonely vision of my Wall

No use holding GOP hands
For I'd be holding only emptiness
No use in kissing up to Mitch
Only Chuck Schumer can scratch this itch

My party gives me great support
If only Dem’s now would come around
Give up their open border dream
Their votes can end this vile Shutdown

All alone am I; Chuck and Nancy said goodbye
All alone (poor me) with no government
I just mope around, efforts fail to redound
Just a lonely pleading for my Wall

"If you need to watch a movie more than once to understand it, then you've lost me. That's the definition of a bad movie, in fact."

Writes MadisonMan in the comments to the post about the 20th anniversary of the movie "The Big Lebowski" and the critics who panned it. He agrees with the original reviews, but has only "watched it once, and I'm not rewatching. It's unwatchable to me...."

The subject of rewatching (and rereading) is a big one, I realized as I started to respond to MadisonMan in the thread. I got this far:

I always had to rewatch an episode of "The Sopranos" to understand it. There was too much going on to get it the first time and too much artful ellipsis.

But I'd also have to watch last night's episode of "Survivor" again to understand it, and I know that isn't worth doing.

And then I decided this needed to be on the front page. When do you say, I am not rewatching/rereading that — they had one chance to reach me and I'm not putting my time into unraveling what they failed to make clear? And when do you say, I'm going back in to open up the mysteries that passed me by the first time?

One reason I'm glad not to be a law professor anymore (and glad to be able to follow the precepts of a fine religion) is that I was forced and had to force others to read Supreme Court opinions, and we were required to understand them, and that meant a lot of rereading of aesthetically displeasing and intellectually unrewarding verbiage.

I was bound by the power of the Court to spend twice as much time (at least) trying to read something that they could have spent more time making readably clear. I suspected that the Court deliberately inflated its own power by imposing burdensome reading. Heh, that will keep them busy, and they'll never get to the point where they can criticize us in writing that anyone else will have the endurance to read to the point of understanding.

But I was the Court's taskmaster, insisting to students — over and over — that no matter how incomprehensible you think this is, you can understand if you reread. Read it a second time, and if you still don't understand, read it a third time and a fourth. Empower yourself by discovering the meaning that only rereading will reveal.

I don't do that anymore.

I want to read and watch things that are rereadable/rewatchable. I truly believe that the best movies and writing are better the second time (or third or fourth time). But you can't get to the second time without going through the first, and when do you say, after the first, there will be no second time? Maybe the secret is to walk out of movies and throw aside books when you realize you're just trying to get through this and would never want to see/read it again?

Maybe, with all your first times, if you're not thinking this is going to be better the second time around, you should bail out of the first time. Is this a one-night-stand? If yes, then don't "Cat Person" it, get out.

"Her heroines have been seen as ‘unlikeable’ – does anybody ever find a male hero ‘unlikeable’?"

"Never! Whether it’s Tony Soprano or Philip Roth’s Zuckerman, or even James Bond, male protagonists are never subjected to such criticism. But when it comes to women – every critic feels that he or she has the right to complain. I once read a 19th Century review in which a cranky male critic said of Jane Eyre, 'I would never hire her as a governess!' This may seem funny to you – it’s certainly absurd, but it happens all the time to women who write. I’ve often wondered how we can change this. In the US, Hillary Clinton was pilloried for being ‘unlikeable’ so we got Donald Trump who, not even three months into his presidency, has historically low approval ratings – yet was he somehow more ‘likable’?"

Erica Jong, riffing on likeability. (The "her" in the post title is Lena Dunham.)

It depends on what the meaning of "isn't" is.

I didn't have the patience to slog through that long article at Vox purporting to answer the question whether Tony Soprano died in the final episode of "The Sopranos," which ends with a cut to black as Tony and his wife and son are sitting around a restaurant table listening to "Don't Stop Believin'" as mysterious doings have been making us feel that we're about to see some carnage.

I blogged the end of the series at the time, in 2007, and I never got sucked into the confusion:

Soooo... I assumed they were all killed and the blackout was just to spare us from seeing it. But over on Television Without Pity, everyone's all confused, saying what happened, curse you David Chase, and I thought my cable went out.

Then, considering the "Don't Stop Believin'" lyric "It goes on and on and on and on," I added: "maybe they do go on and on and on. Or maybe there's going to be a 'Sopranos' movie."

And certainly — I'm adding this now — people would go on and on talking about it, even after James Gandofini died (in 2013), and there's not going to be a movie or some more episodes. It's not like we want more without Tony (though the show did find a way to get on without Livia, when the actress Nancy Marchand died after Season 1).

But I'm catching up on the Vox article this morning by reading Dave Itzkoff's short piece in The New York Times: "David Chase Says Remarks About ‘Sopranos’ Finale Were Misconstrued."

Speaking of cuts and Chase, Itzkoff cuts to the chase: The author of the Vox piece, "Martha P. Nochimson, an author, journalist and professor... when... she directly asked Mr. Chase if Tony was dead." Chase's answer was, in it's entirety, "No he isn’t."

"But as you sit there sipping wine and eating pork belly, watching a marathon of The Sopranos — which sounds like a very nice evening..."

"... keep in mind that the distance between you and some imagined figure pounding Mountain Dew and Quarter Pounders while watching hours of Pawn Stars is not so vast."

Willa Paskin, tweaking the snobbish consciences of Slate readers who may have lost touch with old-fashioned it-will-rot-your-brain snobbery about watching too much television.

Goodbye to James Gandolfini.

Dead at 51, of an apparent heart attack.

This is very sad. What a great actor! "The Sopranos" was — must I add perhaps? — the greatest television show of all time, largely because of him.

ADDED: Here's the NYT obituary.

James Joseph Gandolfini Jr. was born in Westwood, N.J., on Sept. 18, 1961. His father was an Italian immigrant who held a number of jobs, including janitor, bricklayer and cement mason. His mother, Santa, was a high school lunch lady....

He had an impressive list of character-acting credits but he was largely unknown to the general public when David Chase cast him in “The Sopranos” in 1999.

“I thought it was a wonderful script,” Mr. Gandolfini told Newsweek in 2001, recalling his audition. “I thought, ‘I can do this.’ But I thought they would hire someone a little more debonair, shall we say. A little more appealing to the eye.”

AND: The show's creator, David Chase, said: "He was a genius... Anyone who saw him even in the smallest of his performances knows that. He is one of the greatest actors of this or any time. A great deal of that genius resided in those sad eyes. I remember telling him many times, 'You don’t get it. You’re like Mozart.' There would be silence at the other end of the phone."

(I just watched the first episode again. So brilliant!)

"Sopranos! In the OED!"

Researching "midget," in the comments to this post, I find one of the illustrative quotes is from a 1998 "Sopranos" script":

Tony: I was thinkin maybe... you're depressed?
Christopher: Me? I'm no fuckin mental midget.

Surprising to find "fuckin" in the OED, just casually dropped in there to help us understand the second part of the third definition of "midget," which is "A person notably deficient in the quality or ability indicated by the preceding adjective."

(Sorry, I can't provide links that go into the OED, but you could buy it: here.)

ADDED: Fascinatingly, the word "fuckin" — according to the OED — predates "fuck" as an English word. It appears in 1528, written in a margin: "O d fuckin Abbot." ("O d" is presumed to mean "damned.") Now that I've looked up "fuck," I like some of these other quotes:

1598   J. Florio Worlde of Wordes,   Fottere, to iape, to sard, to fucke, to swive, to occupy.

Occupy!

c1650   in J. W. Hales & F. J. Furnivall Bishop Percy's Folio MS: Loose & Humorous Songs (1867) 90   Which made him to haue a mighty mind To clipp, kisse, & to ffuck.

Love the double ff. It's so exuberant.

a1749   A. Robertson Poems (?1751) 256   But she gave Proof that she could f—k....
1865   ‘Philocomus’ Love Feast ii. 17   That night I never shall forget; We fucked and fucked, and fucked and sweat....
1776   Frisky Songster (new ed.) 36   O, says the breeches, I shall be duck'd, Aye, says the petticoat, I shall be f—d.
1931   H. Miller Let. 16 June in Lett. to Emil (1989) 133   Tell her to go fuck a duck!
1955   M. Brando in T. Williams Five O'Clock Angel (1991) Epil. 122,   I feel like a bucket of stork shit for having fucked things around so.

Okay, enough of that for now.

"'I’m still in love with Edie,' says James Gandolfini of Edie Falco, the woman who played his television wife, Carmela..."

Remembering "The Sopranos":

“Of course, I love my wife, but I’m in love with Edie. I don’t know if I’m in love with Carmela or Edie or both. I’m in love with her.” Falco reveals a similar possessiveness over her HBO-wedded husband. “It was weird to sit down at a table read with the actresses playing Tony’s girlfriends. Occasionally I would get a sharp twinge at the back of my neck,” she recalls. “I’d have to kind of keep my bearings and remember, No, no, no, this is your job, and at home you have your life. Even years later, I remember when I saw Jim in God of Carnage on Broadway, and he was Marcia Gay Harden’s husband, and I had this ‘How come I have to be O.K. with this?’ kind of feeling.”

What are the 2 words the eyes are saying in that photo?

Ha ha. It was pointed out that I have 2 posts in a row that begin with "Ha ha." So now I have 3. Ha ha. And I'm only saying that to take the edge off the the idiocy of having 3 posts in a row about that Rush Limbaugh article in the NYT. But I was just listening to the podcast of the show today and wanted to start a new conversation about the fact that Rush loves that cover photograph of himself. He said:

That's a great picture. You know, I've had some people say, "How come you let them take a picture of you where you look mean?" Hey, this is how the libs see me. You know what that picture says? That picture says dark, sinister, confident, dangerous; and if you look at the eyes in that picture, it also says something else, two words. (No, not "Tony Soprano.")

It's just a great picture.

He doesn't say what the 2 words are, not because he never gets around to it, I think, but because one of the words is one of the words you can't say on the radio, and the famous 2-word phrase is what he was trying to express to those terrible leftist readers of the New York Times. I'd said I thought the picture expressed the Times' feeling of intimidation. They portray him as sinister because they feel threatened by him. But his version of it is that he — and not the photographer and the photo editor — was the one doing the expressing.

Matthew Yglesias might want to chide his commenters.

Matt writes: "Shocking news that Tim Russert has died of a heart attack at the young age of 58." And his commenters act like jackasses. The second post is by "Dick Cheney":

Damn. That was the one non-Fox show where I could control the message.

And it's downhill from there:

i say good riddance.
he was the best example of the worst of journalism today.
we should not forget his role in helping get this war started.
after all, cheney went on his show because he knew that he would be able to "control" the message.
he was a fraud and a hypocrite and the world will be better off with him gone.
the only people who will miss him will be the republican politicians who knew they could go on his show and lie with impunity.
Posted by frankie d | June 13, 2008 4:22 PM

So now people feel the need to say what a great guy he was? Now I hope we can get someone that will ask real questions and not just gotcha's.
Posted by rob | June 13, 2008 4:24 PM...

so all of a sudden we are supposed to forget about all of the outrageously harmful things people like russert do?
if he had practiced his craft of journalism, there is a very good chance that we would have never gotten involved in such a harmful war.
if people like condi rice and cheney did not feel that they could go on his show and lie through their teeth about matters of life and death, it is very possible that they would have never felt comfortable lying, continually to the american people.
if he had actually been the "tough questioner" he supposedly was, perhaps he would have actually torn cheney's smug assurances about the coming war to shreds and the administration would not have taken us to war and wasted thousands of american lives and hundreds of thousands of iraqi lives.
he'll have to deal with his complicity in his own terms, but i have no qualms about pointing out a bunch of inconvenient truths.
if pointing this out makes me a dick and less than a class act, i wear that proudly.
Posted by frankie d | June 13, 2008 4:40 PM

Good to know I'm not the only one Sam. Seemed like a decent enough guy. This really is going to ruin my R. Kelly, "not guilty" party tonight.
Posted by laborlibert | June 13, 2008 4:40 PM...

This push-back sort of restores my faith:

Might the D in Frankie D stand for dipshit? You sound like AJ on the last season of the Sopranos.
Posted by laborlibert | June 13, 2008 4:51 PM

Oh, those last 2 comments were by the same guy!

The horrible virulence is back:

... Russert loved life you say? What a sick thing to say when you have read the kind of qualms that have been raised about Russert's moral shortcomings on this thread.
What about those million dead Iraqis? I bet they loved their lives too until they were ended by unsought and unjustified violence -- as opposed to gluttony.
Posted by The Fool | June 13, 2008 6:34 PM

ADDED: I see that not long ago, Matt wrote a little article trashing Russert:

So Meet the Press thrives, delighting precisely the sort of person who doesn't realize that a hardball is a kind of ball whereas a curveball is a kind of pitch.

Actually, the balls Russert favors may be hard, but the pitches he throws aren't curveballs, which go someplace useful. They're sillyballs, which go somewhere pointless. Russert has created a strike zone of his own where toughness meets irrelevance....

Russert's goal isn't to inform his audience. He's there to "make news"—to get his guest to say something embarrassing that lands in the next day's papers or on the NBC Nightly News. The politicians, in turn, go on the show determined not to make news. And why do they bother? Because... it's a rite of passage, and any politician too chicken to play Russert's inane games would never garner the respect of the political class.

"You have a trifecta — gangsters, Italian-Americans, New Jersey — wedded in the popular American imagination."

Justice Samuel Alito opines about "The Sopranos" and the dynamics of prejudice.

"The late Gambino crime boss John Gotti was for ordering the hit [on Rudy Giuliani], and had the support of the leader of the Colombo crime family."

This was back in 1986, back when Giuliani was U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and had indicted the heads of the five families. The Gambino and Colombo families said yes, but the other 3 said no, and it did not happen.

I doubt if any blogger will consider it inapt for me at this point to note that Bill and Hillary Clinton once did a commercial where they play-acted roles associated with the fictional TV crime family "The Sopranos."

In this world, there is the real and the fake.

Did Al Gore violate his own pompous values...

... when he got his Hollywood pal to get him an advance copy of the final episode of "The Sopranos"?

"Bees have the only perfect society on earth... They have no crime, they have no drugs, they have no rape. A little rape, but it's not that bad."

Jerry Seinfeld tells a joke and has to apologize: "I don't find anything funny about rape. I was only referring to the insect world. I'm sorry if anyone got upset." You can't have any controversy interfering with your big, commercial movie. But is it possible that his movie about bees -- "Bee Movie" -- refers only to the bee community? Presumably, he's using bees to say funny thing about the human condition. But I do believe him when he says "sorry if anyone got upset."

Let's take a closer look at Bill's carrot and Hillary's onion ring.

Let's talk about the onion-ring shaped vortex I started yesterday. All I did was a little casual Freudian interpretation of a Hillary Clinton campaign video. It was a short film, premised on the much-interpreted final scene of "The Sopranos," with Bill and Hillary Clinton seated at a table in a diner, sitting in for Tony and Carmela Soprano. Acting!

Maybe you just sit there pleasantly and think: Isn't it clever for Hillary to use the "Sopranos" scene as a device for informing us about her new campaign song and to include some cute business where she alludes to her concern about health care by having a nice bowl of carrots instead of the onion rings they had on "The Sopranos"? If so, aren't you the good little voter, accepting the message Senator Clinton hoped to insert in your receptacle of a brain? The famously controlled former First Lady is pleased there are people like you.

Me, I'm not so obedient. Even though I voted for Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996 and may very well vote for Hillary, I don't accept these things at face value. What's more I love a ripe opportunity for interpretation, including comic interpretation with sexual, Freudian content. What are you going to say: "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar"? You simply cannot say that when Bill Clinton is in the picture. In the whole history of the world, if there is one person for whom a cigar was not just a cigar, it's Bill Clinton.

So here's the passage -- ooh, a passage! -- that got people so excited:

Bill says "No onion rings?" and Hillary responds "I'm looking out for ya." Now, the script says onion rings, because that's what the Sopranos were eating in that final scene, but I doubt if any blogger will disagree with my assertion that, coming from Bill Clinton, the "O" of an onion ring is a vagina symbol. Hillary says no to that, driving the symbolism home. She's "looking out" all right, vigilant over her husband, denying him the sustenance he craves. What does she have for him? Carrot sticks! The one closest to the camera has a rather disgusting greasy sheen to it. Here, Bill, in retaliation for all of your excessive "O" consumption, you may have a large bowl of phallic symbols! When we hear him say "No onion rings?," the camera is on her, and Bill is off-screen, but at the bottom of the screen we see the carrot/phallus he's holding toward her. Oh, yes, I know that Hillary supplying carrots is supposed to remind that Hillary will provide us with health care, that she's "looking out for" us, but come on, they're carrots! Everyone knows carrots are phallic symbols. But they're cut up into little carrot sticks, you say? Just listen to yourself! I'm not going to point out everything.

See that phrase "I doubt if any blogger will disagree with my assertion"? That's an awfully cheap trick, a way to prod bloggers to write about the post. But nobody with any decent readership is dumb enough to say Althouse is crazy to think everyone will agree with that. Right?

I'm saying outright: Come on, everybody, into the vortex. And in they hop. It's an anti-Althousiana fest. I love it!

According to Memeorandum, my onion-rings-are-vagina-symbols story ranks second only to Mayor Bloomberg's leaving the Republican Party. (I'll try to do a free-form Freudian riff on Bloomberg later, perhaps: The O in GOP traumatized him. Ever notice that GOP could be pronounced "go pee"? (I doubt if any blogger who reads that can continue to view me as a "wingnut."))

So let's survey the onion-ring subgenre of anti-Althousiana:

First, let's see what TRex has to say. Surely, a guy who named himself after the biggest, most ferocious dinosaur will have a useful perspective on sexual imagery in film. He begins with the least creative approach found in the anti-Althousianan literature: assertions that Professor Althouse is crazy. I think the poor man knows this is a cliché, because he desperately grasps for colorful ways to say it. He comes up with "a few balloon animals shy of a birthday party" and "on the short bus to Woof-Woof Land." This is mainly padding though. Let's get to the specifics. He quotes me, then says:

Uhhhhhh, hold up, wait a minute. This blogger strongly disagrees and I’m sure if you gave me a couple minutes, I could run out in the yard and round up a couple dozen more, at least.

Ah, ha ha ha ha ha! Good lord, is it really this easy? Now, I'm laughing, but starting to feel a little sad. I don't think TRex is the dumbest guy in the world, yet he wrote something that I had assumed no one was dumb enough to say.

His post is padded with comments from my blog, but his main substance is this:

Apparently in the Mind of Ann Althouse absolutely anything (even something as innocuous as a humble onion ring) gets larded down with layers of psycho-sexual significance when it’s submerged in the warm, sticky tide of sexual charisma that surrounds our former president like a fog.

No, when I saw the onion rings in the final scene of "The Sopranos," I, like many other people, thought they represented communion wafers. The context counts. Here the context was Bill Clinton and the wife he has notoriously cheated on for years. He's saying he wants onion rings, and she's imposing carrots on him. That cries out for psycho-sexual interpretation. It's not the intent of the film's auteur -- unless he's a traitor to Clinton -- but it's imagery that they should have noticed as they were writing the script. TRex seems to want to let them off the hook by acting like associating Bill Clinton with sex is a weird little problem of mine. I don't think so!

Hillary wants to take advantage of Bill in her campaign. Fine. I understand the motivation. But she's got to figure out how to overcome the negatives. Whenever we see them together, we think about their relationship and what he did to it. There is complexity there. She can't expect us to just put that aside. She may be able to compartmentalize as she pursues her goal, but why would we?

TRex brings up last year's biggest anti-Althousiana topic: my interpretion of a photograph of Bill Clinton with a group of bloggers who'd just had lunch with him. That lunch was, ostensibly, an effort to help the Hillary Clinton campaign by using Bill's clout to influence bloggers to think well of her. In the photograph, the woman posed in front of Bill had the effect -- I argued -- of reminding us of Monica Lewinsky. This illustrated the problem of Hillary attempting to use Bill in the campaign.

Here's what TRex says about that now:

Looks like we now have conclusive proof that the whole Unpleasantness from last fall was just a spasm of Althouse’s mania to compulsively eroticize anything and anyone (apparently up to and including innocent foodstuffs) that is unlucky enough to be photographed with Big Dog. I wonder if [the woman in the photograph] realizes now that she could have been wearing a blouse made of prepared vegetables and the reaction would have been exactly the same.

Of course, a "blouse made of prepared vegetables" (why "prepared"?) would have been outrageously suggestive. But what the hell? TRex is intent on denying that Bill Clinton's reputation has a big sexual dent in it. And, by the way, vegetables are not that innocent. Don't you know that they dream of responding to you? Why else are they covered with dew?

Second, let's look at Glenn Kenny, who's the Premiere film critic I got into a bit of a dispute with last week. He makes a show of refraining from attacking me and noting that he gets the song reference, then taking up the idea that it was elitist to use "The Sopranos," shows us what film references the Clintons might make if they were really elitist. Let's move on.

Third, we have Scott Lemieux, whose is probably the biggest hack in the anti-Althousiana genre. He writes about me frequently, even though he can't think of much beyond the usual clichés about how I'm crazy, stupid, drunk, and so forth. It's sad. This is his new effort:

I really hope that she wasn't kidding with the "no blogger will disagree" bit.

Why does he hope I wasn't kidding? I assume that's a mistake. He seems to be somewhat less dim than TRex, even though his writing is duller. But TRex only seems un-dull because he reaches for those phrases like "short bus to Woof-Woof Land" that are typical of second-rate comic writing. Back to Scott:

A consuming obsession with Bill Clinton's sex life is merely banal among American conservatives, and with Althouse more than well-established in any case, but the assumption that it's universal is special.

Oh, lord, that man is boring! This may be the first time I've ever linked to him, even though he writes about me all the time. Someone in his comments says:

It would seem that you have your own obsession with Ann Althouse. I have visited her blog and don't see the reciprocity. I suspect that you have the perfect relationship; you follow every move she makes and she simply isn't aware or doesn't care.

Yeah, well, poor little Scott -- who's actually a political science professor -- will have to satisfy himself alone again for a good long while, because I really don't care. He's too boring! Or should I say merely banal among anti-Althousian scribblers.

Fourth, Instaputz displays a picture of me and then says sexual things about me. If I were a Yale law student, I'd sue him, and I could even leverage my way into federal court with a copyright claim. (I have a Creative Commons license on my photographs in Flickr, but he omits the required attribution and, in any event, it's obvious that I didn't take this picture so the license isn't mine to give.) By the way a "putz" is a little penis, so he might want to order the fried calamari instead of the onion rings.

Fifth, Roy at Alicublog is in the vortex, even though, as usual, he's got nothing interesting to say. My post made him "think of Matt Taibbi, a progressive who is famously embarrassed by the 'silly' American Left." He goes on:

I say that for all the "guys on stilts wearing mime makeup and Cat-in-the-Hat striped top-hats" Taibbi notices on the left, I see an equal number, at least, of Althousean clowns on the right, as this blog documents.

Yeesh. He's got that Greenwaldian verbosity. Translation: My post is silly. Too bad that with all those words, he can't come up with a single substantive point. Another inconsequential contribution to anti-Althousiana. How embarrassing for little Roy.

Okay, I'll stop. For now.

ADDED: Okay, there's more now: here. Don't miss the added part at the bottom. Well, let me excerpt it:

I just want to emphasize that I stand by my original sexual interpretation. You've got a married couple talking about two foods, one of which is obviously a hole, and the other of which is so clearly phallic that this Google search gets over 70,000 hits.

The man wants the hole-shaped item, and the woman forbids it. She insists that he confine himself to the phallic item, which has been sliced down to puny, thin stick form. The man looks at it sadly, and the woman tells him it's for his own good. If you don't see sexual imagery there, you exist on a very narrow band of human imagination....

When Clinton sadly bites into the carrot stick of his own castration, it makes a crunch noise -- ouch! -- and it's that noise that causes the ominous looking man at the bar ("Johnny Sack") to turn and look at him. He then walks by and gives him a glare. What does that glare mean in the Clinton video? I think it means: "What kind of man are you?"

The "Sopranos" gender difference issue.

I'm seeing the same thing in two different places this morning, so let me bring it to your attention. (Only very mild spoilers ahead.) Here's Stephen Bainbridge:

I think the ending was absolutely in keeping with the tenor of a show that's about family and rarely offered closure (just like life itself).

In contrast, my good wife is seriously annoyed with the lack of closure. (Not unlike Dave's wife.) Is that a gender difference?

And James Wigderson says: "Jessica McBride is out to prove WISN-AM's Mark Belling wrong that women aren't analytical enough to truly appreciate the Sopranos."

So, various guys are reporting that it was the wives who were hoping for a big climax? Hmmmm... my thinking just got completely derailed! Staying with it all that time and not getting a climax in the end.... why does that especially piss off women?

Back on track: It surprises me that women are the ones who were watching for the bloody outbursts, and that men were the ones examining the complex details. Or, to put it slightly differently: Do women want a story arc and "closure," and do men feel satisfied swirling around in an open-textured narrative? Obviously, self-reporting from the marital sofa is not scientific, and even if we had a scientific study, it would generalize and there would be individual variation. But what if this gender difference is true? Would it not challenge the usual assumptions that men take to violence and linear thinking and that women are more multidimensional and interested in relationships?

The show is the creation of a man, David Chase. Alan Sepinwall has an interview with him, which has this:

I have no interest in explaining, defending, reinterpreting, or adding to what is there," he says of the final scene.

"No one was trying to be audacious, honest to God," he adds. "We did what we thought we had to do. No one was trying to blow people's minds, or thinking, 'Wow, this'll (tick) them off.' People get the impression that you're trying to (mess) with them and it's not true. You're trying to entertain them."...

Chase has had an ambivalent relationship with his fans, particularly the bloodthirsty whacking crowd who seemed to tune in only for the chance to see someone's head get blown off (or run over by an SUV)....

"... Like everyone else, I get off partly on the betrayals, the retributions, the swift justice. But what you come to realize when you do a series is you could be killing straw men all day long. Those murders only have any meaning when you've invested story in them. Otherwise, you might as well watch 'Cleaver.'"

Of course, whatever ending he decided on has got to seem right to him, so he's on the side of those who are not angry at the ending. Yet he's not saying you shouldn't expect your investment in the story to pay off in violence. But it seems to be the case that hating the ending means that you didn't get the show. And if you realize that you didn't get the show this late in the game, after watching the equivalent of 40 movies, you really do have reason to be angry... though perhaps you should be angry at yourself.

The 5 stages of mourning the end of "The Sopranos."

1. Denial. What the hell? The cable cuts out now? Now of all times?!

2. Anger. I watched 6 seasons for this? Damn you David Chase! I'm canceling my HBO!

3. Bargaining. Can we have a "Sopranos" movie now?

4. Depression. We have to watch "John From Cincinnati." This is terrible.

5. Acceptance. All right. I watched the repeat play on Monday night. Shorn of all the tension and expectation, I can see that this is what had to be. The family, together, on and on. The cat of guilt and memory, sprawled on the sidewalk in front of Satriale's forever. "Life goes on," Paulie said after the funeral. "In the midst of death we are in life... or is it the other way around?" It was never about the big, sudden blood baths. It was the little things, and they're all there, to keep going back to. Did you notice the first time around that when Meadow, announcing her plan to go to law school, said, "The state can crush the individual," Tony said "New Jersey?"? Come on. There are a million little things things like that strewn across the 6 seasons. We're just getting started. Here, now, put Season 1, episode 1 in the DVD player.

In a post-"Sopranos" mood.

What is it? It looks puffy and either delicious or deadly....



Ducks....



What did the ducks ever mean, anyway? Or what is it now.... what did the cat mean?