"In truth, I am so very close to the place where Ann’s favorite post-dinner beverage is made."

Good lord, Nina's back in France again. Investigating cognac, apparently. Me, I'm in the U.S.A., in Madison's southern counterpart, Austin. Where I did have a cognac last night. But first:



On the other side of the table:



(My younger son is older than Ezra Klein. Ezra doesn't like me because I'm "superficial and Maureen Dowd-ish" and because I committed the unforgivable sin of mocking a photograph that one time. I like the way, at that linked post, Fenrisulven shows up and gives the anti-Althouse crowd a lesson on the interpretation of my old satirical post and the meaning of sexual harassment before and after Bill Clinton befogged the minds of partisan Democrats. Meanwhile, Ezra compares me to "conservative bloggers" he likes, never picking up the reality that I'm pretty much a liberal, a liberal who attacks the Democratic Party. Or maybe he does get that, and that's what he hates. He should! I'm dangerous. I might say anything, because I really don't care about your party.)

Isn't it funny that Nina's caught the new blog meme: Althouse drinks? And I'm drinking right now. A huge coffee, lovingly made at The Hideout:



I swivel my head 56 degrees. Man, that building seems to exist to tempt me into the graffiti life.

Oh, you states, don't you know we judge you by your rest stops?

Oklahoma, I'm looking at you!







(If you can't read the text on that first picture, click here.)

Greetings!

From Austin, Texas. Photos, video... coming soon. Not of Austin yet... but from the road.

"All of us are routing 'American Idol.' It’s so great. The No. 1 show in television and it's getting ruined."

Says Howard Stern, promoting the "vote for the worst" idea, which this year is supporting a sweet 17-year-old guy, Sanjaya Malakar. Stern gloats as Sanjaya stays on, but how do you interpret a big collection of votes?

A number of those voting for Mr. Malakar may be genuine fans, many of them in the pre- and early-teenage brackets, to judge from posts on a number of Internet bulletin boards dedicated to the show.

But the fans also include older women and Indian-Americans, and Mr. Malakar’s progress is being tracked voraciously by Indian newspapers in both the United States and India.

I'm one of those older women who support Sanjaya. I gave my reasons here. And I've got a sore spot -- (watch out!) -- about the interpretation of a vote. I've heard Nancy Pelosi, et al., assert way too many times that "the American people" -- (you know them) -- in voting in hundreds of congressional races, were specifically saying that Congress should end the war in Iraq.

And it's a bit irksome to take a sweet, young guy who is doing well and put a massive effort into trying to create the evidence that all his accomplishments signify badness. (You're like those teenagers who thought it would be great fun to elect Carrie the prom queen.)

Sanjaya has to work extremely hard and go out there and perform for millions of people, and you want him to be burdened by thinking everyone is just laughing at him.

They're all gonna laugh at you.

And here his is, the first Asian American to do really well. I'm surprised that Americans are gearing up to be so mean to someone from a minority group.

So, yeah, Glenn, I am pissed.

And you know how I get when I'm pissed. But you'll have to wait for my next "American Idol" vlog to witness the crazy Althousian fury.

The Wichita Eagle.

Don't you love when your hotel delivers a newspaper, and it's not USA Today, it's the local paper? For me, today, that means The Wichita Eagle.

Front page article: "What do you love about the Sunflower State?"

Some of Kansas' top draws are casinos, the Kansas Speedway, theme parks, lakes and state parks. But officials hope this contest also will expose Kansans to the state's quirkiness -- Big Brutus in Cherokee County, the giant ball of twine in Cawker City or the Garden of Eden in Lucas.

"The best places you can find are in those small towns, in some of those family-owned restaurants that fix fried chicken and fresh-baked pies," Asher said. "Those hidden treasures are something we are lucky to have."

May I recommend the website Roadside America if you like those quirky things. Here's the list for Kansas, which has Big Brutus, the giant ball of twine, and the Garden of Eden.

The Twine Ball story began in 1953, when farmer Frank Stoeber, like thousands of his rural brethren, found it tidy and efficient to roll spare bits of sisal twine into a small ball in his barn. But over the years, instead of re-using or disposing of the twine, Frank kept rolling. By 1957, his twine ball weighed 2 1/2 tons and stood 8-ft. tall. By 1961, when he turned it over to the town, Stoeber had over 1,600,000 feet of twine rolled into a sphere 11 feet in diameter.

A few states away in Darwin, Minnesota, Francis A. Johnson had been rolling his own twine since 1950. He kept it up, four hours a day, until he died in 1989. Though twine ball battle statistics from the critical early years are hard to come by, we believe Stoeber, starting later than Johnson, matched and surpassed his achievement in the late 1950s. But when Stoeber stopped rolling and eventually died in 1974, Johnson surged back, broke the 11-ft. diameter "Twine Barrier" and continued until his own death in 1989. Darwin's 12-ft. diameter ball continues as a celebrated town shrine, and not an inch of twine has been added that wasn't wrapped by Johnson's own hands.

Cawker City faced a dilemma. They wanted to preserve Stoeber's accomplishment as a single-minded Dreamer. But his twine ball would remain for all time an also-ran, a fading and forlorn claim to fame; if more contenders came along it might drop entirely from the Great List of Obsessions.

Did they preserve Stoeber's accomplishment, or did they intrude on its purity for the sake of competition? They went for the competition. They have Twine-a-Thons to add to the ball, and they have to worry that people will using string or yarn and not just twine, and the ball's gotten un-ball-shaped. Please visit them. They're twining for you to visit.

The Garden of Eden is more my kind of thing. I don't have time to go that far out of my way today, but maybe I will schedule the ride home so I can see it.

A concrete Adam and Eve greet you; Eve offers an Apple of Friendship. Above them on tall concrete pillars are the Devil, frolicking concrete children, and two love storks. To the left, high in the air, an all-seeing concrete eye watches over the Garden.

Biblical scenes mingle with political messages. In the back yard, Labor is crucified while a banker, lawyer, preacher and doctor nod approvingly. On one pillar, an octopus representing monopolies and trusts grabs at the world. A soldier and a child are trapped in two of its tentacles. Fear not. On the "Goddess of Liberty" tree, Ms. Liberty drives a spear through the head of another trust octopus, as free citizens cut off the limb that it rests upon.

This is the work of one Samuel Dinsmoor, who was "[g]ripped by severe dementia concretia at age 64."

So for me, Dinsmoor over Stoeber. I prefer the religious, artistic obsessive vision over the practical one. Still, I appreciate the charm of the practical endeavor that becomes absurdly impractical. And maybe that makes it the greater art.

And what of Big Brutus? He's not a man at all, but a big machine. Who knows what his obsessions are?

"I know I need a small vacation but it don't look like rain..."

Oh, but it do look like rain here in Wichita, where I'm finally on line. It's almost 700 miles from Madison to Wichita, the obvious place to stop on this drive to Austin. And as I reached the final 100 miles, just past Kansas City, crazy rain started, the kind that's such solid water that the windshield wipers make no difference and you struggle just to see the painted lines.

Some cars are pulled over on the shoulder, but I keep going, creeping along at 30 miles an hour, listening to a BBC radio program about lungfish. I start thinking: Kansas!

I have a feeling I am in Kansas. Tornados! How will I know where they are in the dark? If one hits and I'm thrown around in the car, will the airbags save me? I've heard you're supposed to get out of your car and cower somewhere. Where? What's to stop the tornado from picking up the car and slamming it down right on top of me? I'll take my chances driving, slowly, following the red lights on the truck in front of me, keeping my distance, thinking about ten car pile ups, hoping to drive to the end of this crazy rain.

And I'm here now, at a hotel nice enough to have room service until midnight. Ah, there's the knock on the door. A Caesar salad. A glass of wine....

UPDATE: Wine drunk, I Googled for some advice about how to survive a tornado while driving and hit upon this amusing information: "If a tornado seems to be standing still then it is either travelling away from you or heading right for you." All right, then!

Prophetic!

This was.

When the rest stop has WiFi...

I can say hi from the parking lot.



Somewhere in Iowa. Trying to get to Wichita. Just a stopover for the night.

"Three women in white dresses and hiking boots want to carry a pack on their back into a wilderness area. How harmful can that be?"

Can you scatter cremated remains on public lands? Does it make a difference if you want to make a business out of it. The "Ladies in White" charge $390 for the service. Does it matter if at first the state officials told you it was fine, but then they changed their mind when they heard from constituents who didn't like the idea? Do you change your position when you hear that the opposition came from Indian tribes?

The Forest Service has a version of a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy for private individuals who want to scatter the ashes of a loved one.

“We don’t prohibit it, but we don’t authorize it,” Mr. Schofield said. “People should do what they think is right.” But an allowed commercial enterprises require a permit, he said.

Wilderness Watch, a conservation group, opposes dissemination of human remains in wilderness areas.

“I understand wilderness is sacred ground and many people feel closer to the Creator there than they do in church,” said George Nickas, the group’s executive director. “But it’s also a place where commercial enterprise is not allowed. I think the prohibition on Ladies in White is the right thing.”

I can't tell from the article whether the Indian tribes oppose the activity because of their own ideas about the sacred quality of the land. It would be a particularly interesting question if it's one of competing religious beliefs, with the Ladies in White wanting to use the land for spiritual reasons and the tribes asserting a superior interest in preserving a religion that inheres in the land.

Frenchness.

And the French presidential election.

[The conservative candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy,] has criticized immigrants and their offspring who resist the French model of integration, saying it is unacceptable to want to live in France without respecting and loving the country or learning French.

He touched off the current debate in a television appearance on March 8 when he announced a plan to create a “ministry of immigration and national identity” if elected.

[The Socialist candidate, Ségolène Royal] called the plan “disgraceful,” adding, “Foreign workers have never threatened French identity.”...

Mr. Sarkozy’s proposal has revived memories of the Vichy era. The idea of a national identity ministry has been compared to the General Commissariat of Jewish Affairs, which was created with ministerial rank under the Vichy administration. “Only Vichy developed administrative structures in their efficient way to defend a certain concept of ‘national identity,’ ” the columnist Philippe Bernard wrote in Le Monde last week. He said that the Commissariat, “even before being a tool in the service of the policy of extermination, responded to the objective of purification of the French nation.”...

Despite Ms. Royal’s criticism of Mr. Sarkozy, she followed his lead by wrapping herself tightly in her own mantle of nationalism....

She said all French citizens should have the French flag at home, adding, “In other countries, they put the flag in the windows on their national holiday.” And she promised that if elected, she would “ensure that the French know ‘La Marseillaise.’"

Those prissy, puritanical lefty bloggers.

There's been a lot of talk about me lately in the left-o-sphere. And, sorry, but I'm not going to link to it. You know how to find things. Anyway, for the most part, I don't answer back. As my mother used to say: You'll only encourage them. But I just want to comment on a new meme that's emerged in the anti-Althousiana.

(Oh, I'll do one other thing -- with a link. Check out the way the sublimely wonky Harry Farrell and Dan Drezner devote the first 11 minutes of their new Bloggingheads episode to talking about me... and the furious comments section that spirals out of it that's nearly all about me and not all that global politics stuff about the EU and so forth that they go on to chew over for the next 50 minutes. When anti-Althousiana goes viral, even the wonkiest academics lose their immunity. My favorite detail: Both Drezner and Farrell go on record as not particularly liking my blog. For context: I was pretty mean to Drezner here. Drezner attributes to me the notion that I don't accept disagreement on my blog -- an idea he seems to read into something I do say, which is that some people get what I'm trying to do here and some don't. See the quote from Jack Balkin in the masthead, above.)

Anyway, back to my point: the new meme about me in the left-o-sphere. Based on my "American Idol" vlog, where I hold up a glass of wine -- look, it's Jordin Sparks, reflected right here! -- and eventually take two sips of it, they are all: Althouse is a drunk, Althouse's drunken videoblogging, etc. This is the way these people see having a glass of wine? How very prissy and puritanical!

Take your spouse to work day... for the next four years.

So Rudy Giuliani says to Barbara Walters:

Former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani told ABC News's Barbara Walters that he would welcome his wife, Judith, at White House Cabinet meetings and other policy discussions if he were elected president next year.

"If she wanted to," Giuliani said in the "20/20" interview to be broadcast tonight. "If they were relevant to something that she was interested in. I mean that would be something that I'd be very, very comfortable with."

Giuliani, who is leading the Republican field in early polling, called his wife an important adviser to him. His wife, a nurse, said that she would probably play an important role in developing health-care policy in a Giuliani administration.

[ADDED: Richard Perez-Pena has more in the NYT.]

Why is it that behavior that would be embarrassing or insane in the private workplace -- bringing your spouse along -- is considered not just acceptable but laudable in a President?

You want Judith Giuliani doing national health care policy? She was a nurse, you know.

Let's all vote for the most uxorious man to be President. Absurd!

And, yeah, I know there's a woman in the race. That's a whole other issue. And not because it will be weird to have a "First Man."

("First Man" sounds like a cave man, doesn't it? Or, for religion fans, Adam.)

It will be overwhelmingly strange to have a former President back in the White House in the spousal capacity. Can we talk about that a little? I think it's quite odd that we're talking about how Judith Giuliani will be contributing to national policy, but we're not talking about what Bill Clinton will be doing. Why the big silence?

If I did sock puppets...

... as part of this little blogging-as-performance art project of mine, do you know which commenter here is most like the character I'd do?

Ohio.

O-H-I-O.

Sad...

Kermit.

(Via Throwing Things.)

"Malakar is the rare male performer who relies so utterly on styling."

Robin Givhan on Sanjaya Malakar. (She's the WaPo fashion writer. He's the "American Idol" guy with the smile and the hair and the voice that was good back before the competition narrowed.)

[His hair] has been pin-curled into a thick mop of ringlets, slicked straight as if it had been fried by a Japanese perm and, most recently, scooped into a single row of upswept ponytails to create a faux mohawk....

As America's ears bleed, it sounds as though Malakar no longer is attempting to sing -- that is, to enunciate lyrics while simultaneously carrying a tune. How can he compete with Lakisha Jones, whose lusty voice could blow out woofers, tweeters and everything in between?

So Malakar has given himself over to style. Substance, what little of it there is on "American Idol," be damned....

At 17, Malakar does not ooze testosterone. He has a slight build that never fills out his studiously hipster clothes -- such as his graffiti blazer from Lulu last week. He typically looks as though he has been borrowing his wardrobe from a grown-up. When he is onstage, he gives no indication that he can dance. And when he races into the audience, one worries that at any moment he will trip over his shoelaces. Historically, he can be compared to Shaun Cassidy or Leif Garrett -- Tiger Beat regulars with bland voices but splendidly tousled hair....

And what's so bad about that? Young girls feel their affection for boys, not men. It's not easy to hit exactly the right zone. You could say that what's bad about Sanjaya's success on "American Idol" is that there are other competitors who are doing something more deserving of the win? Simon likes to say: "It's a singing contest." But it's an idol contest. And it's harder to be the boy young girls love -- to be David Cassidy or Peter Noone -- than it is to sing beautifully like Melinda Doolittle and LaKisha Jones.

You know, I love the show "Survivor," and the reason I love it is that it's a contest without rules. The contestants are trying to survive a sequence of votes and be the last person standing. Although there are various challenges along the way with specific rules, you can only win immunity. To actually win the show, you have to do something -- who knows what will work this time? -- that will leave you as the last one standing. You have to invent a way to win. Often the "survivors" have to remind themselves that "this is a game." It's a game, but what is the game? Just: to win.

"American Idol" can be like that too. You can have a strategy of being the best singer, but there are many other possible strategies. The least creative one is to simply sing well. That's not much fun. I like a contestant who comes up with an unusual strategy. I loved Jonny Fairplay, who devised a villain persona, and got to the final 3 in the Pearl Islands season of "Survivor." He came up with some cool strategies.

So give Sanjaya his due. It takes real nerve and style and charm to do what he's doing. He could try just a little harder with the singing, but since it drives folks mad that he's playing the game the way he is, it's part of a strategy. It gets Vote for the Worst votes. Why not snag those votes too?

ADDED: Andrew Sullivan endorses voting for Sanjaya on the vote for the worst concept because he wants to "subvert" the "far too self-important show." But I invite him to think more deeply about the positive side of Sanjaya, and the show's long-term homophobic edge. Not only do Ryan Seacrest and Simon Cowell continually taunt each other with references to homosexuality, but also Simon has for years acted squeamish about the less-than-fully-masculine male contestants. His hostility toward Clay Aiken was monumental. I think there is a similar issue here, where Sanjaya is setting off the old aversions. I think any young guy who would fit the David Cassidy niche so loved by young girls would tend to evoke homophobia in some people. Call them on it by supporting Sanjaya. And this is not meant to imply that I have any opinion about whether Sanjaya is gay. I don't. I'm not good at detecting whether people are actually gay, but I think I'm pretty good at raising questions about whether people are homophobic.