"I am so pro separating the art and the artist... The one I can't do is Cosby...."

"I loved his sitcom.... I always thought it was weird though that his job was a gynecologist who worked out of his basement.... In his home!... He would walk up and take gloves off in the living room.... And you'd be like, wait, were those gloves just inside a woman? You're supposed to take them off, I think, like, right away.... I get obsessed with people that hide in plain sight. You're like, yeah, his job was, I think, obstetrician, they give women anesthesia in a basement. That means when you walked up the stairs, she was still passed out. In his basement...."

Said Whitney Cummings, on Bill Maher's podcast.

I like this comment over at YouTube: "Bill has been beat at his own game. Whitney is the supreme lord of interrupting and not letting people talk."

I didn't watch the Cosby show. I know the Cosby character was a doctor but did he work out of his basement and take the gloves off in the living room? Where does the comic exaggeration begin and end? I ask Grok.

Last night at the Stoughton Opera House.

A pre-show picture:

We haven't gone out to a concert in years. What got us out — other than the beautiful opera house? Hot Tuna.

ADDED: The show was sold out, the audience was super-appreciative, there was no opening act, but 2 sets by Jorma and Jack. No additional musicians. Jorma is 82 now, and Jack 79. About their age, Jorma said the hardest part is standing back up at the end of the show. The encore was "Embryonic Journey."

Topic discussed on the ride home: Was Jack wearing a glove on his right hand? Is there some sort of hand-colored, guitar-playing glove?

"I remember...."

I remember something made me read this old blog post of mine, from 2013, when I had a little project going where I'd take one sentence from "The Great Gatsby" and present it for discussion, not in the context of the book as a whole, but purely as a sentence. I like to read on a sentence level, and this book has the best sentences.

The sentence of the day was "I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This-or-That’s and the chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances, and the matchings of invitations: 'Are you going to the Ordways'? the Herseys'? the Schultzes'?' and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands."

I believe what took me back to that post was the "gloved hands." They reached out to me from the past! What happened was that within the course of 2 days — November 18, 2021 to November 20, 2021 — I'd written 2 posts that had the tag "gloves." One was about Facebook's virtual reality device, a haptic glove, and the other was about a legal decision in India that meant groping while wearing surgical gloves was not a crime.

I love tags that are specific and concrete but that link up disparate things, and "gloves" is a great example. This is one of the true joys of blogging. Most things on that level of specificity do not get a tag. Excited about "gloves," the tag, I fell into a reading spree and ended up in that "Gatsby" post.

What I wrote back then about that sentence:

"If tomorrow, a person wears a pair of surgical gloves and feels the entire body of a woman, he won't be punished for sexual assault as per this judgment."

Said Attorney General of India KK Venugopal, arguing against a court order that limited the crime of sexual assault to situations where there is "skin-to-skin contact," quoted in "No skin-to-skin contact: 'Outrageous' India sexual assault order struck down" (BBC).

Feel Facebook/Touch Facebook... On Facebook, we'll see the glory/From Facebook, we'll get opinion/From Facebook, we'll get the story...

Did you know you'll be able to feel and touch the glory that is the Facebook Metaverse? They're inventing a glove. 

Vox reports:

On Tuesday afternoon, Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, made a supposedly exciting announcement: a glove... the prototype haptic glove uses principles from soft robotics and employs pneumatic and electroactive actuators to quickly inflate tiny air pockets on the fingers and palm of the glove. These actuators are essentially tiny motors that can create the sensation of pressure and, hence, touch. The idea here is that if Meta could fit thousands of these actuators onto a haptic glove and combine those sensations with the visual input of a VR headset or augmented reality glasses, which project digital images onto the real world, the wearer could reach out and feel virtual objects. With gloves like these, you might one day shake the hand of someone else’s avatar in the metaverse and feel the squeeze.

Okay, everyone just thought about sex. We're not going to all this trouble to shake hands (or are you one of those sick freaks who get pleasure from crushing a hand offered to you for an innocent shake?). 

Here's a vision of Metaverse, felt with a glove:

 

My go-to rock music reference was The Who, but I must acknowledge the obvious 2 runners-up: 

1. The Beatles — Glove! 

 

2. Spinal Tap — "Smell the Glove":

 

It's such a fine line between stupid and clever.

The Friday sunrise run.

1. In the car, waiting for Meade to join me for our morning outing, I listened to Bach's "Concerto for Flu"... you know, Bach's "Concerto for Flu"?



2. In the comments, Howard said, "What a Bum. Meade doesn't warm up the car for you? He better be fixing you bulletproof coffee or something." I had been up for 3 hours by that time (about 7 a.m.), and I had already had enough coffee. Meade was getting his first coffee of the day, and he probably would have preferred to have gotten to the car first, because he did not appreciate my style of driving, which he called "herky-jerky," because it splashed his coffee over the rim of the unlidded cup. Funnily, that happened at exactly the same place where his driving splashed my coffee out of its unlidded cup 2 weeks ago.

3. I've got other photographs to post here, but I took the time to put "Concerto for Flu" up over at Facebook, which — for its own reasons — quoted to me something I wrote exactly 3 years ago. It was interesting, because out on my sunrise run today, I was imagining someone asking me how I liked retirement, and my answer was simply I love the freedom and independence. Back then, I wrote: "I'm down to my last 3 classes. It's an interesting test of whether it's the right idea to retire. I could be thinking: Oh, no! I'll never do this again, I must savor the last few moments! But I'm not. I'm just in the usual mode of doing the same thing one more time. There are always new insights and unknowns and excitement about interacting with a group of students, but that I can see that I'd prefer to have my time free to read and talk about whatever I want at any given moment. And I prefer to have conversations with people who are talking to me because they're into doing exactly that — not as a means to an end or because it's required but because of its raw intrinsic value."

4. The northern view at 7:22 (actual sunrise time was 7:15):



5. If you got here a bit earlier, you'd have seen a different picture there at #4. I mixed up my pictures and mistakenly showed you the eastern — CORRECTION: WESTERN! — view at 7:32 (which was much more vivid!):



6. This eastern view is the classic sunrise orientation, and here's how it looked at 7:40 (with ducks and geese):



7. A glove ambiguously pointed the way:



8. The view of the Capitol at 7:24:



9. A view, looking north, at 7:26:

The Tuesday sunrise, photographed at 7:13.

1. The actual sunrise time was 7:12. The truth is that the best time for a photograph was about 7:00, when there were some vaguely rounded pink rectangles. If I'd delayed the start of the run, I could have captured that unusual sight, but I had it for my personal, private viewing as I ran the first half of my out-and-back. The half run took about 12 minutes, and that's where I stopped and got out my iPhone, and that's the best picture of the morning.

2. At 7:00, I didn't know it wasn't going to get better, so it was hard to decide whether to stop or or to try to get out to the best vantage point sooner. It was cold, so maybe getting out there later would have been better, because once I got out there I ended up waiting, thinking the light would become more dramatic. Post-run, Meade said: "I told you you should take picture at the beginning." I said: "Why didn't you take a picture?" He said: "That's not my thing." I said: "Who was it who was just saying 'That's not my thing'?" Meade, joking, said: "Zabriskie." Ah, yes! Zabriskie Point, site of some of my best sunrise photography (from back when I had no idea I'd be going out for all the sunrises):



3. It was Zelensky, the President of Ukraine. He said: "Look, I never talked to the president from the position of a quid pro quo. That’s not my thing." And I wondered aloud — as we drove back home — how it is that he used the colloquial expression "That's not my thing"? Meade said: "He speaks good English." Which naturally caused both of us to switch to our Bob Dylan voice: "He speaks good English as he invites you up into his room."

4. The Bob Dylan song is "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues": "Sweet Melinda/The peasants call her the goddess of gloom/She speaks good English/And she invites you up into her room/And you’re so kind/And careful not to go to her too soon/And she takes your voice/And leaves you howling at the moon." There was some confusion over the line "careful not to go to her too soon." Maybe it was "careful not to come to her too soon." There was a long involved discussion about whether the line referred to the male orgasm, which got tangled up with the subject of Trump's imitation of Peter Strzok's orgasm. Even if the word were "come," I think the idea is about accepting the invitation and coming up into the goddess of gloom's room, but you never know about poetry. A woman's room could be her womb, her womb-room. Who knows where Sweet Melinda was inviting Bob Dylan and why it was kind for him to delay? But anyway, she got whatever counts as his voice that somehow didn't render him silent. He could howl. Howl at the moon. Moon, room, gloom, soon.

5. That conversation gets us all the way home. It's only a short drive. It's not as though we dragged out those musings. I had a big handful of mittens and gloves as I walked from the car back to the house. And then I thought I'd lost one of the gloves. (I wear iPhone-sensitive liner gloves — these, at Amazon — with fleece mittens over them when the weather is as cold as today (27°)). But I looked again through the handful of handwear and found it. When you're afraid you've lost something, it's usually best to check to make sure you've lost it before you go looking for it.

6. I wanted to express that principle of lost things in the style of Dorothy from "The Wizard of Oz." What is it? If you haven't something something something then you haven't really lost it at all? I try about 12 variations before I look up the text in the script:  "If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own backyard, because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with." That's not really apt when it comes to losing a glove. If it's not here in the house, I never really lost it? Makes no sense. I just wanted to say, it might be right here with me, and it's most efficient to look here first, before going outside.

7. But why did Dorothy's line ever make sense? Suddenly, I see the sense of it. She's not talking about searches for all sorts of things. She's only talking about the search for her "heart's desire," and the desire is always in the heart. The desire is not the thing that is desired. The desire is the desire. If the desire is not there in your heart, then you don't have the desire in the first place. There is the desire to desire. As soon as you think you need to look for your "heart's desire," you have the desire to desire. It's there and you have not lost it.

8. "The Desire to Desire" is the title of a book I had on my office shelf for many, many years. Something feminist. What was it? Ah, here: "The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s (Theories of Representation and Difference)." There was a time when I had the desire to desire to read "The Desire to Desire." That book has 2 reviews — useless, spammy reviews — "I'm very happy with this book. I was glad to purchase it. There is always wonder in the pages of it. Thank you seller!" and "Thank you for the great book, it was better than I thought it would be for my very first used book order online. Thank you so much."

9. There is always wonder in the pages of it...

"They'll rue the day they made fun of these bad boys. Woe to those who make fun of the cargo shorts and then suddenly need some snacks, a multitool, a first-aid kit, or a Johnny Cash CD. Yeah, I've got all that stuff in here and more."

Said Brent Barden, quoted in "Family Gonna Be Sorry When They Want Some Trail Mix From Dad's Cargo Shorts They Just Made Fun Of" (in The Babylon Bee, which apparently has heard of my disparagement of it and decided to try to appeal to me by using my well-known "men in shorts" issue).

ADDED: "Yeah, I've got all that stuff in here and more." Care to rewrite that, Babylon Bee? It's a father, humorously addressing children, and you've unwittingly got him sort of threatening them with his genitalia! And that's right after he's talking about them getting into his pants to find something to eat. So ham-handed!

OH? You've got ham hands? Can I have a ham-hand sandwich, Dad?

HEY: A guy once did make a ham-hand sandwich of sorts...



WELL: That video sure made me laugh a lot. I'm ready to watch all videos by I Did a Thing. You know, there's no arguing with taste, especially in humor... and in bread gloves.

ALSO: "Mad respect for a man willing to strap a laundry basket to his back, put flippers on his hands, and get in a bathtub just to reenact a sea turtle getting a straw stuck in his nose and then slowly dying."

Let's explore ADHD with owls.

David Sedaris has a book title, "Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls." The book has nothing to do with diabetes, but there is a chapter titled "Understanding Understanding Owls," which is about a book called "Understanding Owls," which he owns because his partner Hugh (a painter) needed reference photographs of owls. Sedaris and Hugh found the book title so funny that they had a routine, something like...

“You know,” I’ll say. “There’s something about nocturnal birds of prey that I just don’t get. If only there was somewhere I could turn for answers.”

“I wish I could help you,” Hugh will say, adding, a second or two later, “Hold on a minute…what about…Understanding Owls?”

But what if you really did think it was a good idea to use owls to understand some human disorder? I'm reading, "Scientists Study Barn Owls To Understand Why People With ADHD Struggle To Focus" (NPR).

So a team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore is studying... what goes wrong in the brains of people with attention problems, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Why not study what goes wrong in the brains of people who set up an "owl lab" where...

Shreesh Mysore, an assistant professor... has a distraught bird perched on his forearm. And as he talks, he tries to soothe the animal.

He just "has a distraught bird." Did the scientist cause the bird to become distraught? Why are we entering this story in medias res?

The owl screeches, flaps and digs its talons into the elbow-length leather glove that Mysore wears for protection. He covers the bird's eyes with his free hand and hugs the animal to his chest.

The owl, no longer able to focus on the movements of his human visitors, goes quiet.

So the "hugged" owl who stops fighting has gone quiet because he's no longer distracted?

When it comes to paying attention, barn owls have a lot in common with people, Mysore says.

"Essentially, a brain decides at any instant: What is the most important piece of information for behavior or survival?" he says. "And that is the piece of information that gets attended to, that drives behavior..... When we pay attention to something, we're not just focusing on the thing that we want to pay attention to," Mysore says. "We're also ignoring all the other information in the world. The question is, how," he says. "How does the brain actually help you ignore stuff that's not important for you?"

Some things that are important to me are whether the scientist is harassing the owl, whether the owl has any dignity interests worth respecting, and whether preconceived ideas about the human mind are being projected onto the owl? And what is the human interest in having an "owl lab" at Johns Hopkins and how does it affect the questions asked in the previous sentence?

There's no simple way to study it in a human brain, Mysore says, but owl brains offer a good substitute. The birds have a predator's ability to focus, as well as keen eyesight and hearing. They also have a brain organized in a way that's easy to study. Because owls have eyes that are fixed in their sockets, the birds must swivel their head to look around. That makes it straightforward for the researchers to tell what they're paying attention to.

So you can use an owl to study a human because you can see what they're paying attention to because they have to swivel their heads to look at things. There's not much description of how the owl is subjected to distractions. The main thing I see is "an owl might be listening to bursts of noise coming through special earphones while a computer monitor shows an object approaching quickly."

I'd be interested in understanding owls if the owl could speak — and if, also, somehow I could understand what he was saying* — and I could understand how he felt about confinement in an owl lab, and being made to wear earphones** and subjected to bursts of noise and video images of quickly approaching objects and having a man in elbow-length leather gloves disable all of the things that make him great — his eyes, his wings, his talons. Do owls hate?

There's no simple way to study it in a human brain, but why is it considered simple to treat an owl this way? And, by the way, we do experiment with children. We give them drugs and see if it works, and we judge how it works from the perspective of adults who find certain children very annoying and inconvenient.
______________________________

* In one of the famous books written in prison, Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, "If a lion could speak, we could not understand him." [Correction (via buster): "[T]he book Wittgenstein completed as a POW is Tractus Logico-Philosophicus. His remark about the lion appears in Philosophical Investigations, which he wrote while teaching at Cambridge."]

** A deliberate reference to "Ballad Of A Thin Man" ("You should be made/To wear earphones/Because something is happening here/But you don’t know what it is/u, Mister Jones?"). Maybe the owl, if the owl could write songs and screech them like Bob Dylan, he would sing something like that to the researchers in the Owl Lab... "You've been with the professors/And they've all liked your looks...."

"Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Monday made it all but impossible for asylum seekers to gain entry into the United States by citing fears of domestic abuse or gang violence..."

"... in a ruling that could have a broad effect on the flow of migrants from Central America. Mr. Sessions’s decision in a closely watched domestic violence case is the latest turn in a long-running debate over what constitutes a need for asylum. He reversed an immigration appeals court ruling that granted it to a Salvadoran woman who said she had been sexually, emotionally and physically abused by her husband.... Asylum claims have expanded too broadly to include victims of 'private violence,' like domestic violence or gangs, Mr. Sessions wrote.... 'The prototypical refugee flees her home country because the government has persecuted her,' Mr. Sessions wrote in his ruling... 'An alien may suffer threats and violence in a foreign country for any number of reasons relating to her social, economic, family or other personal circumstances... Yet the asylum statute does not provide redress for all misfortune.... Generally, claims by aliens pertaining to domestic violence or gang violence perpetrated by nongovernmental actors will not qualify for asylum.'"

The NYT reports.

I'm not sure what the NYT was trying to do by serving up this image in the middle of that article:



It was an ad for "luxury vehicles for older drivers" (which I didn't click into). But that image! Look at that hyper-privileged white woman! I guess she's older... older, blonder... more relaxed. More relaxed than the women who are sexually, emotionally, and physically abused by nongovernmental men in Central America. What is she watching so calmly on that TV that's large enough to annoy the driver but too small to be comfortable to watch at leg's length? It looks like an ad for a car, perhaps an ad with a lady like her watching an ad for a car like hers and ladies inside cars watching ladies inside cars ad infinitum. And who is that man, so staunchly serving, in white gloves with rigidly extended arms? He can't be assisting all the women of the world whose men happen to be brutes. He's got only this one languid woman to cosset and squire about — this woman named America.

I had 2 big problems with the Olympics opening ceremony.

1. Phony nationalities: There were way too many "Olympians" who were there because they marched under a flag that was not, in fact, their home country, and these people seemed to be mostly Americans. It was really irritating to watch these people soaking up screen time under false pretenses. There are so many countries that lack winter sports. So what?! It's the Winter Olympics. Let it be what it is.

2. All those references to "Asia" in the script: The NBC announcers had a script to read as the dance/theater extravaganza unfolded, and for some reason, instead of telling us about how the various costumes, symbols, movements, and projections said something about Korea, they kept saying things like "and Asia," "and all over Asia," and "and Asian people in general." Why?! Asia's a big place, with culture and history that didn't take place in one united whole group (even though at one point we were told that Asians really believe in the importance of the group, and we were told that dancers, dancing together, prove what people can do if they work as a group (the implication being that individualism is non-Asian)). Was that South Korea's idea, some subtle way to include North Korea without saying it outright, or was this some NBC idiocy cooked up for Americans?

I haven't read any reviews yet, but now I will. I just want to see how much the 2 things that annoyed me annoyed the professional critics.

The AP article "What NBC talked about at Olympics opening ceremony, and what it didn’t" doesn't talk about my 2 problems but raises this one, which I'd forgotten:

We get that Lindsey Vonn and Shaun White are two of the biggest stars heading into the games, but even [NBC announcer Mike] Tirico seemed to get sick of NBC flashing pictures of them. “There’s Lindsey one more time,” he said. “Getting some major camera time and not shy about it.” She doesn’t own the cameras, Mike.

And AP raises something else I just didn't know about because it's about something we didn't hear about:NBC didn't mention it: "Two-time Olympic speedskating champion Shani Davis’ anger at losing a coin toss to determine the flag bearer for the United States, and his decision not to attend the opening ceremony." That links to a more detailed article, here:

Davis and luger Erin Hamlin tied 4-4 in voting by fellow athletes to carry the flag. Hamlin won the honor in a coin toss, a process the 35-year-old speedskater said was executed “dishonorably” in a post on his Twitter account. His tweet included a hashtag mentioning Black History Month, which raised the question of whether the five-time Olympian was suggesting that race played a role in the decision. Davis is black, Hamlin is white....

Davis has trained separately from his U.S. teammates for years, including the last two summers in South Korea. In a Feb. 6 blog post he wrote for TeamUSA.org, Davis explained that he chose to complete his pre-Olympic preparations in Germany while the U.S. team had its camp in Milwaukee.

He should be honored, under the circumstance, to have received as many votes as he did. What was going on there? And then he complains about losing a coin toss. That's got to be the ultimate in poor sportsmanship.

Here's the NYT analysis, "Winter Olympics 2018 Opening Ceremony: Highlights and Analysis":

Vice President Mike Pence waved at the huge American contingent — at 242 it is the largest for any country at any Winter Games. The United States also got the chance to walk out to “Gangnam Style,” by far the most successful Korean pop song ever.

I enjoyed hearing "Gangnam Style," but thought it was politically incorrect to be playing the words "Hey, sexy lady" as athletes marched.

USA Today leans on social media with "What viewers thought of the 2018 Winter Olympics opening ceremony." This lamely collects mentions of "Tongan shirtless guy," which is almost a gesture at my problem #1. Now, I've got to give this post my "MSM reports what's in social media" tag.

Deadline Hollywood has "Olympics Opening Ceremony: Katie Couric & Mike Tirico Prove Gold For NBC," which gets a close to seeing my problem #2:

[NBC Olympics contributor Joshua Cooper] Ramo seemed intent on delivering the pummeling gravitas that characterized the worst aspects of Bob Costas’ long Olympic commentator reign. Dropping generic Otto von Bismarck and cul-de-sac explanations of Korean and Asian culture, Ramos seemed to be striving for purpose most of the night. Answering a question from Couric early on about the significance of the joint Koreas entrance at the Opening Ceremony, his response of “It’s going to be one of these unforgettable, electric, historical moments. But what we honestly don’t know yet is why it’s historic” was more pabulum than political insight.

Here's Variety, "The Opening Ceremony of the Pyeongchang Olympic Games Finds Poetry Amid the Politics." The critic here, Maureen Ryan, sees something of the "Asian" problem that bothered me:

As athletes excitedly entered the stadium, Tirico, Couric and analyst Joshua Cooper Ramo offered tidbits about the histories of individuals or nations, and not all of those factoids were upbeat. As they bantered, they didn’t step on each other and they shared a polite, calm liveliness, but I did get tired of the endless generalities from Ramo about what constituted “Asian” culture, which felt about as deep as a Wikipedia entry.

I didn't mention the costumes, but here's "Ranking every piece of Team USA’s Winter Olympics opening ceremony outfit," putting the bandana in 8th (last) place and the gloves in 7th. I loved the gloves, which I associated with cowboys, but this article says they were "very close to crossing the line between being 'inspired by' traditional Native American clothing and completely crossing over into cultural appropriation." And I see the jacket's self-heating technology is the kind they put in car seats. I could use that, but I don't think I'd like it in my jacket alone. If it weren't also in my shoes and mittens, I think I'd end up colder and, simultaneously, hotter.

Brilliant positioning by Kid Rock.

Dinner time at my house. What do you think Schumer is spoon-feeding Stabenow tonight? pic.twitter.com/gomKgqBV2l

— Kid Rock (@KidRock) July 21, 2017

I love everything about the photograph, including the salt and pepper shakers that are luring haters to say things like "Nice salt and pepper shakers, grandma."

Stroh's = Detroit, Michigan.

In August 2016, Pabst partnered with a brewery in Detroit's Corktown neighborhood called Brew Detroit to begin brewing batches of Stroh's Bohemian-Style Pilsner, a beer derived from an original 1850's Stroh's recipe. The first batch was shipped to area bars, restaurants, and liquor stores on August 22, with special events all across metropolitan Detroit on the 26th.

Here's more about Corktown. It's named after County Cork in Ireland, from which many immigrants came during the great potato famine in the 1840s. I didn't know the name Corktown, but I have been there, because it's where Tiger Stadium is was, and I've been there a couple times (back in the summer of 1976, when Mark "the Bird" Fidrych was the rage).

Here's a Google maps link to let you take a walk around Corktown in Street View.

I took a stroll on a Brooklyn Street...



... down past the glove factory...



"On Hand Since 1912."

ADDED: I'll bet Dan Rather regrets creating this showpiece:

"A glove, Ann. A glove."

Says robother in the comments to my post about Trump's tweet, which I paraphrased as saying "Comey didn't lay a hand on him."

If an attempted attack fails, what's the right idiomatic expression? 1. Didn't lay a hand on..., 2. Didn't lay a finger on..., or 3. Didn't lay a glove on?

Or are all these good but different slightly?

Does the "glove" one convey the image of a boxer or of an aristocrat?

Is the "hand" one sexual as in "My eyes adored you though I never laid a hand on you..."?

"Now [Hillary Clinton] can add 'fashion muse' and 'footwear model' to the list [of important titles], thanks to Katy Perry, who designed a pair of pumps in her honor, dubbing them The Hillary."

"And when Clinton got her hands on a pair of the baby pink pumps, she was more than happy to show them off to their best effect for Perry’s Instagram."

Effuses People Magazine's "Style" section.

Speaking of style, what atrocious writing style! When I hear "got her hands on a pair of baby pink pumps," I'm the kind of person who immediately wants to say: and got her feet on a pair of adult blue gloves. And when I hear "more than happy," I go looking for the George Carlin clip:



ADDED: I got to that link via Drudge, who follows it with what I think is a non-accidental line-up of links:



Thanks to Fernandinande (commenting in the café post below) for prompting me to acknowledge Drudge and to perceive intentional drudgtaposition. Notice how the word "pump" appears twice. Well, what do you think? Intentional comic juxtaposition? Here's another way to frame the screenshot. What do you think of this?



You've got the 2 images of something normally unseen. We peer in utero at unborn babies. (What are they doing?) And we gawk endlessly at a belly a man had dressed to cover. Bracketing these 2 images of human beings who did not choose self-exposure are 2 women who dearly want and demand our attention, who pose with forthright willingness for the camera: 1. Hillary Clinton, positioning herself like a cute-girl marionette, displays pop-star-branded candy-colored shoes, and 2. Ayn Rand stares at us in utterly serious black and white, imposing her imperious will that says we must see her as both distinctly beautiful and absolutely devoid of girlishness.

"Long White Gloves for Bicycling."

"I love the speed, strength, and vitally you see in these young, mobile woman."

I love the sense of danger, the way their vision is obstructed to some unknown degree and the flowing drapery seems about to get caught in the chain.

Everybody loves gloves.

May I recommend gloves? These are all the brand that I've repeatedly bought for myself (and all the links go to Amazon, which gives me a percentage of your purchase price, so your gift-buying is a way to express appreciation for this blog):

men's driving gloves
women's cashmere-lined gloves
women's driving gloves
men's rabbit-fur-lined gloves

I'm thinking of getting I just bought the driving gloves — in "dazzling blue" — not just (or even mostly) because they might be great/amusing to wear while driving, but because we like to keep the house at 62° (or less) in the wintertime and the backs of my hands get cold. So these would be "driving gloves" in the sense of driving the blog... driving people on the internet crazy... and, as noted above, if you appreciate my driving you around the internet and pointing out interesting sights and keeping up a conversation in what has been an 11-year ride, you can tip the driver by buying your gloves and other presents for yourself and others via those links and through The Althouse Amazon Portal.

IN THE COMMENTS: EDH said: "Some, ah, gloves... gloves... howdaya... Oh, little gloves."

At the Red Gloves Café...

... applaud!

Applaud for whatever you like, but, me, I'm applauding for getting a new computer going today. All the accounts and the passwords! I loathe the details of technology. I just want this to work the way the computer that died worked. And I'm almost there. This is the first blog post on the new computer.

And, by the way, if you are enjoying this blog, you might consider doing your shopping at Amazon going in through the Althouse portal. For example, if you'd like the kind of cashmere-lined leather gloves Althouse dropped in the forest when she had to tie her shoelace, you can go here. The color is "claret."

"Did you forget your glove?"

"I finded it!"



"Nooo! I was gonna find it!!!"

Comedy is when a white man falls into an open sewer and dies.

Jack Hamilton has a piece in Slate subtitled "Forget Walter White. Eastbound & Down is the most original, disturbing, wrenching show on television. (And it’s hilarious, too.)"

If we live in a golden age of great television shows, the vast majority of these shows have featured angst-ridden white male protagonists. This shift from heroes to anti-heroes has been frequently and rightly characterized as a broader interrogation of masculinity itself, one occasioned by crises of its creators, crises of culture, or both. But while current prestige-magnets like Mad Men and Breaking Bad might offer revisionist takes on white maleness, they also offer their audiences renewed fantasies of the same. Young men buy suits cut to look like Don Draper’s; aggrieved Internet communities close ranks in protection of Walter White’s right to be the One Who Knocks.

So what's great about Eastbound & Down is that it deprives the beleaguered white male of hope.

Eastbound & Down isn’t so much a show about white masculinity in transition or decline as it is a biting send-up of male fantasy itself. Powers fancies himself an alpha dog, gunslinging, rock ’n’ roll outlaw, a fiction he believes to be reality, and to which he believes himself to be entitled. Kenny Powers’ problem, in a sense, is that he’s watched too much TV. If Mad Men is a drama about the encroaching demise of a certain white male dominance, Eastbound & Down is a satire of its vacancy, and its bankruptcy. The latter is a whole lot funnier, and often more daring.

Because hopeless, pathetic decline is hilarious. To paraphrase Mel Brooks: Tragedy is when a woman or person of color feels disrespected or bullied. Comedy is when a white man falls into an open sewer and dies. (Here's the disemparaphrased Mel Brooks quote.)

I quoted the subtitle of the article above — because it made the content of the article clearer— but now I see enough additional meaning to make me want to quote the title. It's "Breaking Ball." That's not just a play on "Breaking Bad" and a reference to crushing testicles, it's an allusion to the show's milieu, baseball. Eastbound & Down shows baseball as "gross and debauched, a morass of juiced-up players, abusive fans, godforsaken locales, bored and boring spectacle."

Many of the actors on-screen... boast hilariously unathletic physiques, and seem to have last donned a glove back in the days when home plate came with a tee. It’s the ugliest depiction of the game in recent memory, a hilarious and welcome desecration of one of the old white America’s favorite civic religions.

Take that, white America.

Kitty Tongue, the Glove.

"Just like the surface of a cat's tongue: gentle, gradual and soothing grooming action."

That's something someone bought through my Amazon portal yesterday. Please consider giving me some gentle, gradual and soothing grooming action by doing whatever shopping you may have today through that link. Hear my loud purrs of gratitude for all who stroked me thusly Thursday.