"Where are the great tags that if clicked on would produce a store of raw material that would enable me to write a book?"

I say, when asked "And how does Mrs Secord qualify as 'women in the military'?"

Women in the military is a long-standing tag on this blog, and, I say, "I didn't want to create a new tag. It's just broad interpretation of existing tags to avoid creating new tags."

There are various theories of tagging. When I first started doing tags on this blog, I tried to keep them as general as possible. I had a politics tag! Sometimes, I leaned — overleaned — toward specificity, making a new tag every time I named a person — or a plant or animal or city or food or body part or item of clothing —  but tag proliferation seems mostly wrong.

I say mostly, because I regret all the names of human individuals that end up only appearing once. I'll call that the Ashley Dupre problem. But I do not regret having a parrot tag. And I do not regret having breasts and nipples. I do regret not having a tag for commenter thinks he's making the joke that I already made.

My personal history of tagging — generally, then specifically — explains why there's only one tag for George W. Bush — Bush — and over 70 tags for Barack Obama. There are 10 tags that are in the form "Obama is like X" (not counting the "Obama is not like X" tag). Example: Obama is like Bush (which is on 61 posts!) There are 7 tags in the "Obama the X" form. Example: Obama the boyfriend (which is on 47 posts!).

Ultimately, I arrived at the idea that the best tags are the ones that pull up a set of posts, going back over a nice stretch of time, that I could imagine mining for material to write a book. Women in the military has some potential to be a tag like that.

What are the best tags, in my view, using that standard? Maybe that's a trade secret. If I told you, you could do your research in my archive, but — to give some obvious examples — here are some: racial politics, gender politics, gender difference, lightweight religion, religion substitutes, single-earner household, etiquette, apologies, suicide, prostitution. To suggest some of the weird potential: There are 30 posts with the tag bathtub, 94 with excrement, 67 with snakes, 40 with phallic symbol.

Then there are the tags that might have been. Only 1 post has female appetite diseases. That should have gone on many posts, but I forgot I started it. Only 1 has personal innovation lifestyle. What even is that? Some trend that never trended?

Of all the missed opportunities, as I complete this post, I see I don't have a tag for tags. I'll have to go with the old school tag blogging, which dates back to my days of over-generalization and resistance to specificity. I need a tag for I'm resistant or something. Ah, the stubbornness tag. And the ultimate perfect tag — previously used 3 times — I'm not making a tag for this.

Jorn Utzon, architect of the Sydney Opera House, never saw his creation.

And now, at age 90, he has died, and the question whether he will ever return to Australia and see it has been answered for good.

From Bill Bryson's book "In a Sunburned Country":

Nothing so daringly inclined and top-heavy had ever been built before and no one was sure that it could be. In retrospect, the haste with which the project was begun was probably its salvation. One of the lead engineers later noted that if anyone had realized at the outset how nearly impossible a challenge it would be, it would never have gotten the go-ahead. Just working out the principles necessary to build the roof took five years -- the whole project had been intended to last no more than six -- and construction in the end dragged on for almost a decade and a half. The final cost came in at a weighty A$102 million, fourteen times the original estimate.

Utzon, interestingly, has never seen his prized creation. He left the project in 1966 in a dispute over rising costs and has never been back. He also never designed anything remotely as celebrated.

Obama calls Hillary "Bush-Cheney lite."

One more thing that tips me toward Clinton! Bush-Cheney lite sounds like just about what we need. Clinton declares the epithet "silly," but I think that secretly she knows the comparison helps her in some quarters.

And Obama came out with that in the context of trying to justify what was in fact a major gaffe at the debate:

In South Carolina and during a visit to New Hampshire earlier in the day, Obama compared Clinton to Bush because, he said, she has said she will not have unconditional meetings with foreign enemies.

He told the College Democrats that her approach showed "stubbornness" and in New Hampshire he referred to her as "Bush-Cheney lite."

"Stubbornness"? As opposed to what? Giddy impetuousness?

Clinton's retort:

"I've been called a lot of things in my life but I've never been called George Bush or Dick Cheney certainly," she said. "We have to ask what's ever happened to the politics of hope?"

Oh, come on. He's overflowing with hope! Hope that Venezuela, Cuba, Syria and Iran will play nice. Hope that saying Clinton is like Bush will cause voters to recoil in horror...