"If you're not a liberal at 20 you have no heart, if you're not a conservative at 40 you have no brain."

Said Winston Churchill, quoted by gadfly, commenting in a thread where my political orientation is under discussion.

I said: "I see you're counting by 20s. I'm 60. So... another category is needed."

XWL took up the challenge:

20s, liberal
40s, conservative
60s, (my stab at a quote)

If you aren't both thoroughly disgusted yet quietly bemused by politics at 60, then you haven't been paying attention.

Come on. Play the game of augmenting the Churchill quote!

ADDED: Well, I used to be disgusted, but now I try to be amused bemused....

ALSO: I have no idea if Churchill actually said that. That's really not the point here. The point is, people love that quote and I perceive a need for a 3d line in it.

A Drudgtaposition that didn't last very long — for good reason.

Earlier today, Drudge had this photo juxtaposition:



To become aware of the full — and, I would say, fully intended — subliminal effect, you might need to read the letters — in red — under Michelle Obama's picture: "REPORT: First lady 'likely' to meet 'commercial sex workers' in India!"

Now, expand the frame and see what else was there:



After a few hours, the picture of Michelle disappeared, and the top picture changed from the man-on-man clasp, to this:



There's a secret sex story for close observers of the Drudge Report. Playful, naughty innuendo. I'm not saying that Drudge is suggesting that Barack Obama is gay or that he wants to engage in fellatio with Harry Reid. But that's the funny image of the Drudgtaposition. Then, when Michelle and the phallic symbol were removed, Obama is in the embrace of a woman — a rather boyish-looking woman with mannish glasses — and lots of women are grabbing at him.

If we were to understand the sequence of pictures on Drudge the way we understand panels in a comic strip, we first see Obama approaching an an embrace with a man (who seems to be holding him off at arms' length), and then, in the next, "panel" he finds himself in the eager arms of a person who has some of that masculinity he thought he was about to receive, but who is in fact female.

It reminds me of the sequence in the Stanley Kubrick movie "The Shining," in which the character played by Jack Nicholson enters a bathroom and sees a beautiful, desirable woman in a bathtub. She gets out of the bath, naked, and approaches him for an embrace, and then, once he's holding her, it becomes apparent that she is a dead and rotting old woman.

Does any of this actually say anything about Obama, his sexuality, or his wife? Probably not. It's aimless horsing around, in all likelihood. But we do know Obama is out there this week, trying to woo the women.

The outreach to women — which came on the same day that the White House released a report that said Mr. Obama’s policies, including the health care and economic stimulus bills, have helped women over all — is part of a fevered push to cement a Democratic firewall that White House officials are hoping will stem losses in November.

Women are one of the most important pillars of that wall. “Make sure you’re as fired up and as excited now as you were two years ago,” Mr. Obama told a raucous rally...

Hmm... "fevered push"... "important pillars"... "fired up and... excited"... But that's not Drudge. That's the New York Times.

***

What's the better spelling of the portmanteau word that combines "Drudge" and "juxtaposition"? Drudgtaposition or Druxtaposition?

Choose one:
	Drudgtaposition
	Druxtaposition
pollcode.com free polls

IN THE COMMENTS: XWL said:

Instead of a Harry hand job, we have a Lewinsky hug

(and let's not forget, that's the photo that essentially launched Drudge's empire)

Click that link. The photo similarity is the amazing.

Free Carrie!

Let her live again.

Everyone's talking about Obama not wearing his wedding band at the big press conference today.

"A White House spokesman tells POLITICO that Obama's ring is being repaired, though it's unclear what needed to be fixed."

Aw. Come on. What could need fixing on a wedding band?

ADDED: You know, if they were just staying together for the sake of appearances, he'd be sure to wear the ring. In the comments, XWL thinks the repair might be a size change:

Maybe he's losing a lot of weight... He was skinny to begin with, trending towards bone thin for a man in his late 40s can't be a sign of improving health. Don't remember any shirt off pictures from his recent spate of vacations, might be that he's looking sickly. He certainly looks more haggard facially, of late.

Meanwhile Palladian says:

Maybe it was dropped in the fires of Mount Doom...

"Keep Your Surprisingly Capacious Bowls, I've Got a Freakin' Fruit-bearing Tree in My Backyard."

We laughed at his "brilliant detective work," but XWL got his revenge with suculento photographs and an "I blame Althouse" tag.

Deliberate eggcorns.

Hey, I got linked by Language Log! I wish I could produce what has been identified as a variation on an eggcorn to celebrate the occasion.

IN THE COMMENTS: XWL fulfilled my wish:

Congratulations, you got Lincoln Logged!

(an eggcorn for "linked on log")

(it's a stretch, but I used to like those things)

"Out of curiousity, checking to see where Althouse was blogwise last August 3rd."

Writes XWL in yesterday's comments:

Gender issues
Dowd on Obama
Pics from the SM Pier (and discussion of men in shorts)
A heartfelt plee to judiciously apply some strict originalism to the constitution of sandwiches
Melrose Ave pics (which reminds me, I guess I should take some snaps there myself)
Fred Segals, Fish-Eyed, and not Fish-Eyed

Althouse managed six posts this August 3rd as well as in 2008, even while getting hitched, impressive consistency, that.

Interesting set of posts, though, the Dowd thing is a reminder of how ridiculous the press was with regards to Obama before the election, and the sandwich manifesto is probably something that deserves revisiting.

Again, congratulations to you both, it's a wonderful and daring thing both of you have done.

Thanks for noticing. I was on vacation then too. It was especially funny to me to see that on August 3, 2008, I switched to the fisheye lens: "I realized I had the fisheye in my bag, and this is the first fisheye shot... L.A. crystalized for me in extravagantly bent form at that moment. It was all fisheye from there."

And yesterday, August 3, 2009, our wedding day, I got the old fisheye out after a long while. It was great for arm's-length shots of the 2 of us, including lots of scenery along with the full view of our heads, because the angle is so wide. Unfortunately, most of these shots are too intimate for blog use. You'll have to imagine those. You do have the hands with rings shot below, and I have another I'm going to put up in a separate post, coming soon.

I like looking back to a year ago too. If someone had told me at the time that I would get married a year later, I would have been astounded. I really did not think of myself as the marrying kind. I was very post-married then, very much into being on my own and not being judged or beholden to anybody. My motto — referring quite specifically to marriage — was "I will not serve."

A year passes. Who knows what will happen?

I started a meme...

... which started the whole world pinking.

***

I wish I could get my tag "pink" not to always want to auto-complete into "Code Pink," like an unwanted and lamely inarticulate protest.

"You can't tell me that all these free love hippie dippie types wouldn't embrace some sort of SOMA type narcotic in their later years."

"Just have them sign a waiver, after the age of 70, you're on your own, or the government will provide five years worth of SOMA, and maybe Viagra and prostitutes upon request, and I'm sure plenty of Boomers would willingly hit the death booths at the age of 75 after five solid years of drug-fueled orgiastic living (just don't open any boomer-orgy centers near me, like sewage treatment, it's something that has to be done, you just don't want to live by or downwind from it). The cost savings would be huge, no more retirees living 30 and 40 years on Social Security into their 90s and 100s. Who says Huxley's vision has to be a 'dystopia'?"

Said XWL today, in the nether regions of the comments thread to yesterday's ObamaCare post.

Palin to Letterman: Evolve! You damned dirty ape!

Letterman "apologized," so now Sarah Palin "accepts" the apology — like this:

"Of course it's accepted on behalf of young women, like my daughters, who hope men who 'joke' about public displays of sexual exploitation of girls will soon evolve....

"Letterman certainly has the right to 'joke' about whatever he wants to, and thankfully we have the right to express our reaction. And this is all thanks to our U.S. military women and men putting their lives on the line for us to secure America's right to free speech — in this case, may that right be used to promote equality and respect."

LOL. I love the way our U.S. military women and men horned in on the big foofaraw.

By the way, it's disrespect that needs to be protected by rights. If what you want is wall-to-wall respectful discourse, fuck rights.

(Photoshop request: Unevolved Letterman — merge a photo of the lecherous geezer talk-show host with the face of an ape or caveman.)

ADDED: XWL has pics.

What? Female narcissism?! It can't be!

XWL encounters a violation of the Althouse rule for gender research. (Note: He's reading an article that we discussed a while back when it appeared in the NYT Magazine.)

"My hollow shell gives you the finger."

That was Blake's response to Palladian's "The absence of real winter is deadening to the human spirit. I mean, look at southern California. Or Florida."

Just something in the comments to my "Unmade Noises" post that made me make a noise — laughter — in the dead of the night... in the dead of winter...

AND: "It was a brutal 78 degrees F today near the beach. I forced my hollow shell to take a hollow walk and record a bunch of hollow images to document the hollowness of a life lived bereft of seasons."

Renegade, Renaissance, Rosebud, Radiance.

Those are the Secret Service code names for the Obama family.

***

IN THE COMMENTS: XWL says:

I really don't think it's appropriate for the Secret Service to call one of Obama's daughters Marion Davies' clitoris.

I wonder if this means Michelle calls Barack's member "Renegade" and Barack call Michelle's lady parts "Renaissance"?

Those were my thoughts too, exactly. I mean, really, is the Secret Service illiterate in pop culture or is it relying on our pop culture illiteracy?