"Did anybody seem to be doing any better than anybody else to you?"/"No!"

Question by Althouse, answer by Meade, after Meade reads this headline out loud, "Booker and Castro Thrive, Warren Coasts, and Beto Crashes."

I think the press has to come out with these winners-and-losers pieces. It's the convention. The linked thing above is from National Review. I had already read this in WaPo: "Winners and losers from the Democratic presidential debate’s first night."

The news has to tell you what happened, but with a debate — if you watched it, you saw it. What did you think happened? There were some policy differences, notably that Warren and de Blasio are the only ones (in the first night group) who want to abolish all private health insurance, but I could see that much more easily by reading an article on the subject or looking at a good chart that compares their positions. What's the point of a debate? To see who's good at thinking on their feet and using a compelling form of expression. I did get to see who seems to be able and willing to speak Spanish and who's ballsy enough to speak out of turn, but other than that, it was a big group of boring.

"He wanted to be a neighborhood saint. He's a middle-class, white-privileged saint. He believes he's beloved."

Overheard at Meadhouse.

Can't tell you the context. You're on your own. 

"Where's my daily dose of dossiosity?"

Overheard at Meadhouse.

"You know the more Trump fails, the more we're just getting what we want: Not Hillary."

Overheard at Meadhouse.

"In Russia, you don't drain swamp. Swamp drains you."

Overheard at Meadhouse.

Overheard at Meadhouse.

"Why don't we all just switch to Gary?"

"Because he's a stupid stoner."

Overheard at Meadhouse.

"I see there's a libertarian theme in your blog today."

"Maybe that's what happens if I sleep until 8. I wake up libertarian."

"New post alert."/"I hope it's Scott Walker, unintimidated."/"I already rejected that. I am not intimidated by Scott Walker's unintimidated."

 Overheard at Meadhouse, just now.

What's that candy?

"The candy is mentioned in two episodes of the AMC series Mad Men and displayed in others. In 'Three Sundays,' we learn it was Archibald Whitman's favorite candy. In 'Far Away Places,' Peggy — who has an important presentation that day — anxiously searches in vain for her pack and explains to Abe that Donald Draper once gave it to her before a presentation. She dismisses Abe's suggestion to buy a replacement, because it 'wouldn't be the same.' When she finds it in her desk drawer at work, she tells her SCDP colleagues, 'Oh. Thank God. I couldn't take one more omen of doom.' In season six, we see that she continues to keep the candy in her desk drawer, even at CGC."

Overheard at Meadhouse.

"This is what I want. Except it's ugly as sin."

"Sin can be pretty ugly."

"The problem is sin is not ugly."

"If only sin were uglier."

"See? The bad things are good. Just add time."

Things overheard at Meadhouse, just now. I said that, in fact. I'll give the context later, but I thought you might find it interesting to think about — in relation to your own experience — out of context.

The statement corresponds to the old line "Some day we'll look back on this and laugh." I was looking back on something and laughing. I was also looking ahead to myself as a very old lady and having that thing as one of my few surviving memories and still laughing. And also, I laughed at the bad thing even when it happened, because it happened.

As they say, it's no use crying over spilt milk. But do you laugh over spilt milk... at the time? Later?

ADDED: So here's the thing. The first time Meade visited me here in Madison, which was exactly 5 years ago — here we are having breakfast in the morning — we were at the open refrigerator door, which has a couple of those removable egg racks, one of which contained a dozen eggs. Somehow, in the presence of Meade, my normal approach to the lifting out of the rack went wrong, and I executed a move seemingly designed to throw all 12 eggs onto the floor.

This morning, cooking the eggs, Meade dropped one egg on the floor, and I went into a reverie about how if I forget just about every other detail of things we did together, I'll still remember the time I threw all the eggs on the floor. I did an imitation of myself as a demented oldie still remembering the time all the eggs fell on the floor, and in that fantasy, I walked over to the kitchen, where the newly broken egg was still on the floor.

Meade said, "And you'll also remember the time you were remembering the time you dropped all the eggs on the floor and you got so excited you stepped in that other egg on the floor."

"I do appreciate your willingness to sound like an idiot in an effort to help me."

Things overheard at Meadhouse.

Context: Meade had just helped me proofread and edit the previous post by reading it out loud, which he does as if he were a generic reader who has no reason to apply his intelligence to making sense of hard-to-grasp locutions. It's annoying to hear your writing read out loud like that, and I need to control my instinctive reaction and remember why he's adopting the tone of a rather dumb reader.

"Come on, people. If you're going to be a drug addict, be a heroin addict. It has a proven reputation."

Things overheard at Meadhouse this morning.

The newspaper article under discussion was: "Heroin deaths rise in Dane County, drug's toll increasing."

"Just because it was a crappy movie doesn't mean it was a crappy idea."

Things overheard at Meadhouse.

So, you have this idea, and you think it's pretty good, possibly brilliant. But then it turns out that's what people did in this movie that was a monumentally bad movie. Must we reject the idea?

Try to guess the idea + movie we were talking about.

"Are you a conservative liberal or a liberal conservative?"

"I'm a conservative liberal."

"I'm a liberal conservative!"

(Things overheard at Meadhouse.)

"All right. I've read the entire Wikileaks dump. And there's nothing in it."

Overheard at Meadhouse.