"Sleeping at Starbucks. That takes some will power, huh?"

Says Crackskull Bob, thinking about all that caffeine, drawing furiously.

In fact, every time I go to Starbucks -- almost never in Madison, but frequently in less well café'd cities -- there's a guy sleeping in one of the chairs. I've seen men sleeping in those upholstered chairs for hours -- undisturbed. Seriously, it's as if that Starbucks logo is a hobo symbol for "nice place to sleep."


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It was hot...

.. but not unbearable. I walked 3 miles to my destination, and I had a plan to take a cab back. But then I ended up just walking the whole way. I should have worn sunscreen. I shouldn't have worn sandals. And since it didn't rain after all, I was sorry I brought that umbrella, and that it was a really heavy golf umbrella. And I was almost sorry that I'd stopped at a store on Grand Street and bought 5 items of clothing. Buying the clothes was like a decision to take the cab. But then I didn't take the cab. Most of the way I had the shopping bag hooked on the end of the umbrella... in the style of those hobos in cartoons.

Ah, it was so much easier walking in than walking back...

Halloween costumes for females...

... none of whom seem to want to indulge in the freedom to be ugly and horrifying anymore. Every single damned costume is about looking even sexier than ever:

A theme was emerging. And it wasn’t Halloween. Since when did Halloween costumes become marital aids? The hobo has turned into the Hillbilly Honey. The traditional vampire is now the Mistress of Darkness. I have nothing against playing erotic dress-up, or even mass-market fetishism. I’d just prefer it didn’t converge with a family holiday (and wasn’t sold next to the dryer sheets). If you want to play cheerleader at home, go team. But trick-or-treating with your children in anything featuring latex and cleavage seems like a little too much trick....

I noticed that on the outside of every package was a photo of a woman modeling not only the costume, but teetering heels and bras of the push-up variety. The First Lady costume was not, as one might expect, a red business suit, but a pink crepe mini-dress. At least it had the matching pillbox hat. The angel was dubbed “heaven’s hottie.” Even the witch had a slit up her tattered skirt.

My girls were confused. “Where are the monsters?” they asked. “Where are the superheroes?” I pointed weakly to Wonder Woman and her thigh-high boots. “She’s pretty,” said my 4-year-old. Before adding, “You can see her breasts.

It's pretty lame that young women feel they must use Halloween as another day in the endless pursuit of male love, but why are the guys free to amuse themselves in more manifold ways? Perhaps because women think that it's sexy for a guy to be funny. But I wonder what the men would wear if they -- like the women -- thought overwhelmingly about looking sexually appealing to women?

Badger Down Under.

It's a blog by UW political science professor Ken Mayer, who's visiting at Australian National University this fall. He's sent the kids off to school -- in uniforms -- and here are some questions the Australian kids asked them:

Where is Madison? (Don't laugh. Do you know where Toowoomba is?)

Have you ever been robbed at gunpoint?

Are there hobos on every street corner?

What about New York? There must be hobos there.

Have you ever been shot? (this was the same person who asked about being robbed, who has apparently learned that the entire country was actually the set for Scarface)

Do you like Vegemite? (apologies to our Australian friends, but it is, um, an acquired taste)

"Hobos" is an evocative word, not used by Americans -- that I know -- to refer to anyone in the present in the United States.

"Crap Cars" and the figures of speech they inspire.

Roy Blount Jr. reviews Richard Porter's book "Crap Cars":

The DeLorean DMC-12 of 1981-83, he writes, had an engine "so weak it would struggle to pull a hobo off your sister." Not since Raymond Chandler have I met a metaphor so much more powerful than would do.

Which is not to say that Porter slings figures of speech around indiscriminately. The body of the G.M. EV1 (1996-99), he tells us, resembles "a snake trapped under a rock," and so it does. With regard to performance, Porter turns phrases the way sports cars should take corners. The Chrysler K-Car (l981-89) may have "pulled Chrysler from the depths of financial trouble," he concedes, "but did it have to be such a weedy little griefbox?" The handling of the 1974-78 Datsun B210 was "like trying to steer a wheelbarrow full of logs."

Do you like the outlandishly-overstated-metaphor style of humor? Overused, isn't it? I tend to think people who feel a lot of pressure to be funny use it when they don't really have a humorous observation to make.

Things to write in an obituary for a Hobo King:

• "For every mile of beautiful scenery and warm sunshine, there are hundreds of miles of cold, dark nights, no food and no one to care whether I live or die," he wrote in his 1988 book, "Hobo King."

• He learned to drink coffee from rusty lard cans and did jobs from picking fruit to "pearl-diving," the hobos' term for washing dishes.

• In his later life, he passed out cards defining a hobo as a man who travels to work; a tramp as a man who travels and won't work, and a bum as a man who won't work.

• "He once told me that he went to the bank in Shawneetown and told the banker he needed $4,000 to pay off wife No. 3, divorce wife No. 4 and marry wife No. 5," his son said.

• "It was a great life ... I'd do it all over again."

Rambling Rudy Phillips, who was 92 when he caught "the westbound to heaven," appears in the documentary "Riding the Rails." It's worth buying: the story of hundreds of thousands of teenagers who left home--some thrown out by families who couldn't feed them--during the Depression. Filmed in the 1990s, the old men remember how they felt. I wonder which one was Rudy? Was he the man who cried remembering receiving a mailed birthday cake and eating it alone on a cold night?