"White emerged as a sex symbol at a time when his country needed him...."

"With his tattooed, grungy intensity, he was the snack the people were craving after two years of slathering on hand sanitizer and stockpiling Clorox wipes. (As one fan put it to MEL Magazine, 'This is a dude who will eat you out in a porta-potty at Warped Tour.')..."

Writes Jennifer Wilson, in "The Shareable Feast of Jeremy Allen White’s Calvin Klein Ad/The frenzy surrounding the 'Bear' star’s beefcake ad harks back to the brand’s heyday in the eighties and nineties" (The New Yorker).

Some of the ads use still photography. And here's the live-action commercial, replete with Lesley Gore soundtrack denying someone the power to deprive another person of the right to "go with other boys":

"I'm gonna tick tick tickle him on the tummy."

I'm listening to "I'm Gonna Lasso Santa Claus" by Brenda Lee...



"Lee's second single featured two novelty Christmas tunes: 'I'm Gonna Lasso Santa Claus', and 'Christy Christmas'. Though she turned 12 on December 11, 1956, both of the first two Decca singles credit her as 'Little Brenda Lee (9 Years Old).'"

I don't think I've ever heard that song before, but I'm reading about Brenda Lee this morning a propos of blogging about Trump's "I am all alone" which got me thinking about (and embedding) the Brenda Lee song that I know very well, "All Alone Am I."

From the fascinating Wikipedia article:

Lee's father was a farmer's son in Georgia's red-clay belt. Standing 5 ft 7 inches [his daughter was 4'9"] he was an excellent left-handed pitcher and spent 11 years in the United States Army playing baseball.... Though her family did not have indoor plumbing until after her father's death, they had a battery-powered table radio that fascinated Brenda as a baby. Both her mother and sister remembered taking her repeatedly to a local candy store before she turned three. One of them would stand her on the counter and she would earn candy or coins for singing....

On the theory that it takes more characters to say something in English than in Japanese and Korean...

... and that those who tweet in English have a disadvantage on Twitter, Twitter is talking about expanding its character limit from 140 to 280.

Although we feel confident about our data and the positive impact this change will have, we want to try it out with a small group of people before we make a decision to launch to everyone. What matters most is that this works for our community – we will be collecting data and gathering feedback along the way. We’re hoping fewer Tweets run into the character limit, which should make it easier for everyone to Tweet.

How many of us who experience Twitter in English even noticed that people who tweeted in Korean and Japanese were able to cram more meaning into a single tweet? I can't believe this was the pressure Twitter felt from users about the character limit. I can believe that there were Twitter insiders who could see that Twitter functioned differently in Korean and Japanese and arrived at the opinion that English-speaking Twitter users would appreciate a similar freedom to write without feeling so much pressure from the character limit.

I know, as a writer, I prefer blogging to tweeting because I like having the power to decide how long or short to go, and I think that works out for me, as a writer, because I go for concision on my own. But as a reader, I prefer Twitter. I read it several times a day and follow over 200 tweeters, while I read woefully few blogs. Bloggers tend to relax, get blabby, and don't edit for concision.

Twitter is about brevity. It's what makes it such a great way to see what's happening. Tweets get right to the point with the information or thoughts that matter. That is something we will never change.

But it is going to change!

We understand since many of you have been Tweeting for years, there may be an emotional attachment to 140 characters – we felt it, too. 

Like it's just a fetish and not something that really makes the reading experience better. 

But we tried this, saw the power of what it will do, and fell in love with this new, still brief, constraint. 

280 is still a limit, and Twitter may very well be right that 280 characters (in English) is better because of what it's already seeing writers do in Japanese and Korean. I might tweet more at 280, because after writing a blog post on a subject, I don't like the distraction of figuring out the puzzle of figuring out what the core thought putting it in as few words as possible. I can see what is lost, and I'm doing more work to fit their limit. I'm all about living freely in writing, so why would I want this endless restraint?

Fortune writes:

Many Twitter users try to work around the 140-character limit by posting their more verbose thoughts in a series of tweets, called "threads" or "tweet storms," with each subsequent tweet a "reply" to the previous post. Earlier this month, Twitter started testing a feature that allows users to pre-write a series of tweets and then post them all at once as a thread.

All of these tests and new features are examples of Twitter trying to make its service more user-friendly, as the company tries to battle disappointing user growth that has weighed down the company's share price (TWTR, -2.30%). Twitter's latest character limit test also comes at a time when the company is facing criticism over its efforts to cut down on the amount of offensive content, including hate speech, that is posted on the service.

I think Twitter is thinking about writers, not readers. Twitter — the hungry business — needs more and more people joining the giant conversation. For that, it needs to be fun and easy. Challenging writers to keep it super-short must seem to limit the growth of the enterprise. But how will the reader experience change? Perhaps it will be great. 280 characters is still short, and over-compressed writing can be harder to read. Certainly, the thread and "tweet storm" work-around isn't fun for the reader.

And maybe freedom from excessive compression will help with some of the problems that are seen as "offensive content." A few more words might eliminate some of the brusqueness, ambiguities, and misinterpretations. There might be less advantage in getting off a sudden potshot. With more room to write, you might take more time and cool off a bit or be tempted into elegance or wry humor or perhaps even hear the call of higher values.

I pasted that last sentence into the Twitter compose window and the 140-character limit cut me off before I could say "of higher values."

"It's like: you and the Tyrannosaurus rex."

What I said when Meade read item #4 on "10 things not to buy in 2016": "Selfie sticks." I was all: "Yeah, if your arm's not long enough...."

Men in shorts, dogs with tongues, football teams with greatness.

Photo by Meade, from "It was a hot day at the dog park."

Am I wrong about greatness?

"Brevity is a big factor for me in a stand-alone joke. To get a laugh with the fewest number of words possible."

"Which is why 'Take my wife, please' is such a great joke. The closest I’ve ever come is probably 'The crows seemed to be calling his name, thought Caw.'"

Should the "digital project" replace dissertations in PhD programs?

Inside Higher Education examines the emerging trend:

Graduate students need to learn "what it means to write for the web, with the web," which is not the same thing, [said Rutgers English prof Richard E. Miller], "as making PDFs of your [print] articles."

Whether departments want it to happen or not, the form of scholarship is going to change, he said. Rather than avoiding that, scholars should consider the ramifications, he said, by redesigning dissertations. "Once you lose the monograph, what’s the future of the long argument?"

There's not much of a future for your English PhDs, monograph or no monograph, and you know it.  ← short argument.

"It seems to me that when you write a short story, you have to cut off both the beginning and the end."

"We writers do most of our lying in those spaces. You must write shorter, to make it as short as possible."

1-word response not understood by left-wing blog.

And they even see the historical reference. They just can't put it together.

(Sorry for 2 Allen West posts in a row. It just happened in the normal course of looking for the morning's bloggables.)

Michele Bachmann — "a freaking dwarf" — screamed "help!" when 2 women — women! — trapped her in a bathroom.

Listen the left-wing radio personality Randi Rhodes (from back in March 2010):



She's calling Michele Bachmann "a freaking dwarf." (Is it not politically incorrect to call a short person a "dwarf"? Isn't that like calling a person with a dark tan the n-word?) Anyway, I ran across that this morning because I was trying to find out how tall Michele Bachmann is. She's 5'2".

I wanted to know, because I've been looking at the accusations of homophobia that are being lobbed at Bachmann, and I noticed this story "Bachmann Feared Abduction by Lesbian, Ex-Nun":

Rep. Michele Bachmann, who is now seeking the Republication presidential nomination, had claimed in 2005 that she was almost abducted by two women in a bathroom, according to The Daily Beast.

The pair consisted of a lesbian and an ex-nun.

At the time of the alleged attempted kidnapping, Bachmann was a state senator from Minnesota and had already started to campaign against LGBT rights. She had previously been caught hiding in the bushes of a gay rights event.

Caught hiding in the bushes of a gay rights event? All right, this article — in The Advocate — makes no pretense of being unbiased. Let's switch over to the Daily Beast article whence these factoids were extracted. Oh! It's Michelle Goldberg. She doesn't provide a link to get us to the root of the "bushes" story, but let's not get distracted. Let's focus, for now, on the alleged kidnapping. Goldberg writes:

A few dozen people showed up at the town hall for the April 9 [2005] event, and Bachmann greeted them warmly. But when, during the question and answer session, the topic turned to gay marriage, Bachmann ended the meeting 20 minutes early and rushed to the bathroom. 

Causation or correlation? What do you think?

When a politician ends a meeting 20 minutes early and rushes to the bathroom, what do you think is more likely?
	She wanted to avoid the topic that had just come up.
	She really had to go to the bathroom.
	Both: stress over the topic brought on the bathroom urgency.
pollcode.com free polls

Back to Goldberg:

Hoping to speak to her, [Pamela] Arnold and another middle-aged woman, a former nun, followed her. As Bachmann washed her hands and Arnold looked on, the ex-nun tried to talk to her about theology. Suddenly, after less than a minute, Bachmann let out a shriek. "Help!" she screamed. "Help! I'm being held against my will!"

Arnold, who is just over 5 feet tall, was stunned, and hurried to open the door. Bachmann bolted out and fled, crying, to an SUV outside. Then she called the police, saying, according to the police report, that she was "absolutely terrified and has never been that terrorized before as she had no idea what those two women were going to do to her." The Washington County attorney, however, declined to press charges, writing in a memo, "It seems clear from the statements given by both women that they simply wanted to discuss certain issues further with Ms. Bachmann."

From the police report:

BACHMAN [sic] STATED THAT WHEN SHE WAS GETTING READY TO LEAVE SHE WENT TO THE RESTROOM. SENATOR BACHMAN STATED THAT WHEN SHE WAS TRYING TO LEAVE THE RESTROOM, 2 WOMEN BLOCKED IN AND TOLD HER THEY WANTED TO CONTINUE TALKING. SEN BACHMAN STATED SHE WAS AFRAID AND SCREAMED FOR HELP. THE 2 WOMEN LET HER LEAVE THE RESTROOM WHEN SHE SCREAMED. THE WOMEN ARE BELIEVED TO BE W/ THE GLBT GROUP.

(Bachmann was a state senator at that time.) Following a public figure into the bathroom and pressing her with questions in that environment is bad etiquette, even if you are calm and friendly, but hostile questions and blocking the exit are completely unacceptable and threatening. Trapping someone in a room is false imprisonment, traditionally, and here's the Minnesota criminal statute: "Whoever, knowingly lacking lawful authority to do so, intentionally confines or restrains... [a] person without the person's consent, is guilty of false imprisonment...." You can go to prison for 3 years for that. I don't know the details underlying the decision not to prosecute.

Do Goldberg and The Advocate think that women are inherently so weak that you're hysterical to get scared when they confine/restrain you without your consent? Are women, especially short women, given special immunity to exercise physical intimidation? We're told that Arnold is "is just over 5 feet tall," but not that Michele Bachmann herself is tiny. That fact is omitted when the aim is to portray Michele Bachmann as homophobic, even as it is used gratuitously to mock her as "a freaking dwarf." How tall was the "ex-nun"? I'm not seeing that information. But we do get to know that she was an ex-nun, as if that's supposed to make her sound benign.

There's a big effort right now to propagate the meme that Michele Bachmann is a raging homophobe. I'm going to monitor that effort for you. I'm not a Bachmann partisan, as regular readers know. I've supported gay rights since long before I started this blog in 2004, and I am not a social conservative. This issue falls right into my zone as a blogger because: 1. I'm observing the 2012 campaign with cruel neutrality as a political independent, 2. I care about consistency in the way women are perceived and described, 3. I think opposition to some gay rights issues should not be conflated with hating or wanting to hurt gay people, and 4. The "Bachmann homophobia" issue is rife with the kind of lying and unfair reporting that I am on a mission to expose.

"Small men feel... that the world belongs to big men. Seeing men you know to be small playing big on the silver screen is comforting...."

So says the small Fish — small fry — Stanley, who loves the short — under 5'9" — actors who play tough guys in the movies:

The pattern was set in the 1930s and ’40s by Edward G. Robinson (“Little Caesar”), James Cagney, George Raft, Humphrey Bogart and Paul Muni — all small men who usually played tough and cruel. Sometimes camera angles obscured the physical facts — Robinson looked absolutely huge as Wolf Larsen in “The Sea Wolf” in what can be called, without irony, a towering performance — and sometimes the camera just didn’t care as when, for example, Cagney regularly beat up men obviously twice his size.

Slightly later came John Garfield, and the smallest of them all, Alan Ladd who played big in “The Blue Dahlia,” “The Glass Key,” “The Badlanders” and who more than holds his own against Ben Johnson and a tree-like Van Heflin in “Shane.”...

Famously slight Paul Newman displayed his chest and pugilistic abilities in movies like “Somebody Up There Likes Me,” “Hud,” “The Long, Hot Summer” and “Cool Hand Luke.” James Dean would have made the list had he lived longer. Now aging tough guy-short guys (by short I mean under 5-foot-9) include Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, Robert DeNiro, Harvey Keitel, Al Pacino, Mel Gibson, Jean Claude Van Damme and Sylvester Stallone, who created not one but two iconic American males, Rocky and Rambo.

And these days we have a bumper crop of undersized super heroes — Tom Cruise, Tobey Maguire, Mark Wahlberg and Robert Downey Jr., along with the occasionally macho Johnny Depp and Sean Penn.

Is there something comparable for women? Maybe we could make a list of women who have fairly average looks who play beautiful women on screen. My favorite example of this is Bette Davis in "Mr. Skeffington," where the raving over Bette's beauty occasionally crosses the line into the laughable. No man could resist her:



Ah, yes! I remember laughing out loud in the theater when she comes down the stairs and a man exclaims "Fanny! You look beautiful!" And check out that death-bed dialogue: "A woman is beautiful only when she is loved." That's what the plain women in the audience — next to the hubbies they dragged to the chick flick — long to believe.

Excitement in Sierra Leone.

A short woman gets married.

"Vietnam has suspended a much-criticised plan to ban very short, thin and flat-chested people from driving."

"The proposal worried many in this nation of slender people and [spurred] jokes about traffic police with tape measures enthusiastically flagging down female motorcyclists, and predictions of a run on padded bras."

So! Mockery works, even on communists.