"I heard that you have a collection of fake food?"/"I do. I have it all over my house. I like the worst kind..."

"... like an old, dirty piece of carrot. Or I have a bowl of cereal next to my bed with a spoon. It looks like I just forgot to take it downstairs. I kind of live in a joke shop. I always loved joke shops when I was young. So I have a lot of spilled food or things that look like something bad happened just sitting around to delight me when I walk up the steps."

From "John Waters Is Ready for His Hollywood Closeup/The director reflects on getting a star on the Walk of Fame and a museum retrospective about his career as a cinematic provocateur" (The New Yorker).

There's lots of interesting stuff in that interview. I'll just highlight this:

What do you think of this idea that Gen Z is turned off by sex scenes in movies, especially gratuitous ones? There basically isn’t a scene in any of your movies that isn’t gratuitous.

"You know, Republicans are getting a lot of flack these days, as they should, for waging a war on women. But what's the excuse for the country's most progressive mayor?"

"How can this strain of puritanism endure in the same city that pioneered the kinky hollowed parade? It was bad enough with New York City went all Rick Santorum on Eliot Spitzer to begin with. He's only the guy who arguably did more to reform Wall Street than any other American. Yeah, his libido got the best of him and he paid dearly for it. A brilliant man was reduced to a punchline and banished from public life. But now, anybody he touches has to go?"

Said Bill Maher on his show last night, criticizing Bill de Blasio, "a man so liberal he married a black lesbian," for rejecting a woman seemingly because she was dating Eliot Spitzer — "Lis Smith who ran Mayor Bill de Blasio's communications department in last year's campaign was all set to take over the job that she earned as his top spokesman." How do you "earn" a job as someone else's spokesperson? De Blasio gets to pick the person who speaks for him. If he didn't want to get any Spitzer on him, he's entitled.

David Brooks smoked marijuana long ago — "It was fun" — but he moved on and so should you.

Using marijuana — he observed back then and again now — doesn't get you anywhere, unlike the "higher pleasures" in life that "involve a state of going somewhere, becoming better at something, learning more about something, overcoming difficulty and experiencing a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment." Your life should be a "process" of getting better and better — becoming a "more integrated, coherent and responsible" person, "using the powers of reason, temperance and self-control." Marijuana gums up that process.

"So everyone has pretty much agreed that I was right yesterday when I said the 'moderation' language about Obama’s alcohol consumption was just boilerplate."

Says Glenn Reynolds:

Still, to show my support for our President, I went out to the Downtown Grill & Brewery last night and hoisted a couple — moderately, of course — in his honor. Kinda like when some Obama fans changed their middle names to Hussein to show support, only more delicious . . . .

Ha ha. So, then, this is me, the other day at Brasserie V:



Ah, but look at the prudes — the killjoys — who freak out about drinking, who think that lifting one glass depicts degeneracy. These people call themselves "liberals," but they are not liberal at all. They despise your pleasure and revelry and want only to clamp down on any fun. Don't trust them with power, my friend!

The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy...

IN THE COMMENTS: Jim Treacher said:

Is there enough booze in the world to get those guys laid?

Sadly, no.

"The Tobacco Monologues."

The new Minnesota smoking ban has an exception for actors in theatrical performances, but who is an actor and what is a theatrical performance? Aren't we all really actors in some sense, and when you go to a bar, are you not playing some sort of role? Minnesotans are working the loophole and, along the way, saying something about the line between life and art.

At The Rock [a hard-rock and heavy-metal bar in suburban St. Paul] earlier this week, a black stage curtain covered part of the entrance, and a sign next to it with an arrow read, "Stage Entrance." Along the opposite wall, below a sign saying "Props Dept.," was a stack of the only props needed: black ashtrays.

At the door was a printed playbill for that night's program, with a list of names of the people portraying bartenders and security guards. Playing the owner: "Brian."

Courtney Conk paid $1 for a button that said "Act Now" and pinned it to her shirt. That made her an actor for the night, entitling her to smoke. She turned in an understated, minimalist performance, sitting with cigarette in hand and talking to a bass player with the band....

At Barnacles Resort and Campground along Lake Mille Lacs, a "traveling tobacco troupe" dressed in medieval costume on the first theater night. Mark Benjamin, a lawyer who pushed bars to exploit the loophole, wore tights, a feathered cap and black boots.

"Hey, I'm a child of the '60s. I can do a little improv," he said. His improv amounted to speaking in medieval character to other patrons....

One bar on northern Minnesota's Iron Range, the Queen City Sports Place, calls its nightly smokefest "The Tobacco Monologues."

"Her first creation... was a 'vaginal vault' made of a cardboard toilet-paper roll, Play-Doh and a badminton shuttlecock..."

"She has also constructed a scrotum using two wood balls linked by a rubber band (vas deferens) and suspended in an extra-large condom filled with oil and peanut butter."

It's not another art show. This is a serious medical project: Designing anatomical models to train doctors to get over their prudishness so they can examine body parts properly:

[Dr. Carla Pugh] often buys penises at adult “novelty” shops, though they are all erect and circumcised, and sometimes welds on rubber tubing used for synthetic intestines when a foreskin is needed....

“We need permission to fail in a safe environment,” [Dr. Richard M. Satava] said. “Aviation has used simulators since 1955 that are now almost indistinguishable from flying real airplanes and have achieved a remarkable safety record. It’s time that health care followed.”

The models need not be particularly high-tech. “A very sophisticated simulator would be too much for a student,” he said. “For simple tasks like a pelvic exam, a simple simulator like Carla’s is actually preferable. You don’t teach a teenager to drive in a million-dollar Ferrari.”

Oh, my goodness! Bill O'Reilly called somebody "low class."

I'd say it's "unhinged" to call this "unhinged." It's absolutely nothing of significance. I am so sick of the way any display of emotional intensity is characterized as a mental disorder. It shows: 1. a prudish concern for decorum and 2. a lack of compassion for those who actually do suffer from mental illness. I would think liberals would reject both things, but again and again — on the web, at least — I see that they don't.

ADDED: I watched O'Reilly's coverage of the incident (on his Monday show), and in it we see that he pushes the man a couple times. O'Reilly had two friendly female commentators on the show to talk to him about it, and one of them tells him the shoving was wrong. The other accepts it — under the circumstances. It seems to me that both the large man doing the deliberate blocking of the camera's shot and O'Reilly with his pushing were acting out in a rude, macho way, but it wasn't crazy. Both were pursuing their own interests and choosing their techniques. My post isn't about right and wrong, but about sane and crazy. They weren't crazy.

Now, there is a further question about whether these 2 sane men who pursued self-interest had good judgment about what they ought to do. Here, I think, clearly, O'Reilly won. It worked for him within the context of what he does. People working for the campaign should not be displaying hostility to the news media, and they should especially not discriminate against Fox News.

By the way, Barack Obama looks great in the final O'Reilly edit. He sees O'Reilly — when O'Reilly calls out to him from back in the crowd — and comes over and shakes hands, seems relaxed and warm, and agrees to meet with O'Reilly after the primary. He's setting a good example for everyone.

"Half the fun of working in the entrance area at the Mansion is that you got to play a character of your own devising."

"You could put a silly or sinister spin on the butler or the maid. It was all up to you. But now with this official script and the new blocking, that's all going to change. It won't be nearly as fun as it used to be to work at the [Haunted] Mansion."

Must everything get less fun?