The NYT mini-crossword today is all about the similarity between "Biden" and "bidet."

Is this in bad taste?

Now, that I'm staring at it, the words — all of them, taken together — seem to suggest a dossier-worthy tale about Joe Biden.

If you're wondering whether "Julia" was clued as "Fictional character in a much-mocked Obama slide-show," it wasn't. The clue was "Louis-Dreyfus of 'Veep.'"

Extra points for commenters who compose a story gliding through all 10 of those words in a lucid, tasty combination.

ADDED: My link on "Fictional character..." doesn't go to the slide-show itself but to an Atlantic article from 2012, "Obama's 'Life of Julia' Was Made to Be Mocked/It has easy-to-manipulate Web graphics, an oversimplified narrative, and hits a political hot spot: Barack Obama's new campaign tool The Life of Julia was apparently built specifically to be co-opted by right wing meme-makers." That article links (repeatedly) to the actual slide show with the URL barackobama.com/life-of-julia. But if you click on it, you get this:



The deadness of the "Life of Julia" link is something I commented on long ago, in October 2013, with "Is the old Obama campaign slideshow 'Life of Julia' anywhere to be found on the web?"

I have something I'd like to say about it, but I can't find it anywhere on the web. It's not at the link everyone linked to when everyone was talking about it, which was at the Obama campaign website. The campaign is over, so I guess there's no obligation to continue to host it, but this was an important historical document, and it shouldn't fall down the memory hole.

"The Life of Julia" has come to be cited — somewhat humorously — for the proposition that the government has lured women away from men, into a dependent relationship with the government, and this has had various ill effects. But I want to take a new look at why the graphic used a female character. Using a female screened out the reality that males rely on government programs too.

Surely, "The Life of Julia" is important enough to have its own Wikipedia page. This is the sort of thing Wikipedia is great at. But no. In fact, there's only one page in Wikipedia with both "Life of Julia" and "Obama" and "The Life of Julia"....



Campbell Brown??! Remember her?

In May 2012, Brown published a New York Times op-ed in which she criticized President Obama for sounding “paternalistic” when he speaks of women. Noting his repeated practice of describing women as “smarter than men,” she commented: “It’s all so tired, the kind of fake praise showered upon those one views as easy to impress.” Brown added that the women of her acquaintance “who are struggling in this economy couldn’t be further from the fictional character of Julia, presented in Mr. Obama’s Web ad, ‘The Life of Julia,’ a silly and embarrassing caricature based on the assumption that women look to government at every meaningful phase of their lives for help.” Brown outlined the lives of relatives of hers who have rescued from business failure by “Friends and family, not government.”

Hmm. That almost makes it look as though her conspicuous disparagement of "The Life of Julia" ruined her career! She was once important enough to have been impersonated by Kristen Wiig and Tracey Ullman. Couldn't find the KW one (it's not in this otherwise fantastic collection). Bit here's the TU:



IN THE COMMENTS: Mary Beth links to "Life of Julia" by putting the Obama URL into the Wayback Machine. I should have thought of that.

"I've had a lucky life, but there's something I really regret...."

"Is water racist?"

This is so on the money it hurts.#woke#microaggression pic.twitter.com/OMzBjKbfjA

— Tim Johns (@timoncheese) June 22, 2018

"That’s the mistake we all make, isn’t it? Believing that being a writer means being, you know, totally and utterly uninterrupted—it means silence, it means, you know, a room of one’s own."

"No, no. That’s bullshit. That’s what we perceive a male writer to have. And that can lead to horrible solipsism and disconnection from humanity. I’m not naming names, never naming names... Martin Amis, Woody Allen, Saul Bellow."

Lines delivered by Tracey Ullman (as a writer named Ode Montgomery) in the "Painful Evacuation" episode of "Girls." I wish I had video of this scene — a little vignette that precedes the credits. It's all we see of Ullman, but I kept pausing and rewinding and rewatching it bit by bit. I was exclaiming: "This is the best performance I have ever seen on television." The lines were good and Lena Dunham — interviewing Ullman's character — was doing a fine supporting role, but Ullman was so funny (and dramatic) and doing so much in such a short time that I was in total awe.

I cut and pasted the line from a piece in Tablet by Miranda Cooper "On ‘Girls,’ Narcissism and Jewish Writers/Hannah gets some unexpected news, Woody Allen and Saul Bellow get name dropped, and Ray confronts his own mortality."

Excerpt:

What more could a Jewish-American-literature obsessed recapper ask for? Casting aside Amis, a self-professed philosemite, the fact that Montgomery’s list of self-centered writers is all Jewish is like manna from the HBO heavens.

Interestingly, Allen and Bellow have also been often compared to Philip Roth, who held much of last week’s episode’s attention. Allen even had a not-so-subtle cameo in the form of a photo on the wall in fictional writer Chuck Palmer’s study: a brilliant sight gag in an episode about writers abusing their fame and privilege. As with Roth, these are more than casual name drops. Girls is setting up an old guard of male Jewish American writers with whom Hannah must contend. Is being a writer as a woman really as hard as it seems, Hannah asks? Harder, Montgomery confirms.

By the way, if you don't actually watch this show, don't assume you know what it is like. The first 2 episodes of the new season have been phenomenal, and last season was great. Please don't clutter the comments with things you've been repeating about Lena Dunham for years. To do that is to flaunt that you do not know what you are talking about. Anyone who thinks the show is doctrinaire feminism and female narcissism is making it obvious that he doesn't know what he is talking about.