Layers of Life.

We're here for a reason.

Why aren't more people going to the beach?

This NYT article attributes the phenomenon to the reverse-global warming we're having. Nah, just kidding. It's a cool summer, and that's the reason given for the low beach attendance, but, of course, there's the predictable denial of the denial of global warming:

William D. Solecki, a geography professor at Hunter College of the City University of New York and co-chairman of a mayoral panel on climate change, warned that this summer’s unusually mild temperatures should not buoy global warming skeptics.

“Ask them to visit Seattle,” he said, where a record temperature of 103 was recorded on Wednesday.

“On average, going back decades, we would only have a few days above 90 in any given summer,” he said, “and while we haven’t hit that mark yet, there’s still a lot of summer left.”

I love that we are "warned" not to feel optimistic. How twisted we've become! It's like people are rooting for disaster. I also love the way we're instructed not to take any cool weather as evidence of what the climate is becoming, but any hot weather will be used to "buoy" our belief that disaster looms ahead. (You're going to need a buoy when those oceans rise up.)

But I want to raise the question whether it's the low temperatures that are keeping so many people away from the beach. There are plenty of other reasons not to go to the beach: it's a hassle, we've got air conditioning, we love indoor activities like movies and computer games, we're concerned about skin cancer, we've gotten fat and don't want to be seen in a bathing suit, etc. etc. It's really quite silly to think that — in the modern world — going to the beach is the natural and automatic response to hot weather. Most of us can get some cool at home, and if we can't, it's much simpler to go to the movies or a restaurant.

As the generation that grew up without air conditioning ages and dies off, maybe beach-going will become an old-fashioned, occasional activity, not the main idea of summertime.

Cur Knee.

A respelling of the place where I am, right now, having a coffee and WiFi break.

We spent last night on the largest inland island in the world — or rather, a town named for its location on the largest inland island in the world. (The town was subsequently moved, but the name was kept.)

What are we up to? Some readers have a clue.

ADDED: Actually, I should have titled this post "Car Knee," not because I'm cramped from all the driving, but because that's proper pronunciation. We did hear someone say "Cur Knee" though.

Sports headlines toy with the brains of nonfans.

I've long been annoyed by the NYT blog called "Bats." I was bitten by a bat once and had to get rabies shots. And I've had other run-ins with the leathery-winged fiends. Actually, I love them when they are outside, eating mosquitoes and so forth. I might like reading a blog about bats. But Bats is not about bats. It's about baseball. (Maybe if I cared about baseball, I'd still hate the blog title "Bats," either because it disrespects pitchers or because I would still think it was about bats.)

Now, today, The Washington Post has a front-page teaser: "Do Juicers Belong in the Hall of Fame?" And I'm thinking, so there's an Appliances Hall of Fame? Where is it? What was the first inductee? Refrigerator! I'll bet it's refrigerator! But I click to the article —which is (obscurely) re-titled "Do Juicers Belong in Canton?" — and see that it's about drug users and the Baseball Football Hall of Fame. Oh, I don't know. But if there's an Appliances Hall of Fame, it's scraping to low too let in the juicers.

I swear that was an accident.

I did not mean to create that Theme of the Day!

The new Robin Givhan column is not, as you might expect, about what Gates, Crowley, Obama and Biden wore to the beer fest.

It's about a man's naked ass!

... his beautifully muscled shoulders -- light glinting off his sturdy tush -- poised to break through the water like an elegant and potent torpedo. The rip in his skintight black suit runs from the middle of his back all the way down to the bottom of his bottom. The tear exposes a significant portion of [Ricky] Berens's backside anatomy. Suffice it to say that the rear end of a championship swimmer is a magnificent example of how glorious the human body can be. In an era when so many of this country's backsides have gone wide, flat and flabby from too much couch-sitting and cupcake-eating, the Berens buttocks were a visual rebuke of Americans' deep-fried bad habits.

His ass is rebuking us!

It's not enough to say that his ass is sturdy, poised, elegant, potent, and glorious. Givhan must also say that our ass is not.

Let's cut Obama some slack about this photograph.

Thomas Lifson says:

Sergeant Crowley, the sole class act in this trio, helps the handicapped Professor Gates down the stairs, while Barack Obama, heedless of the infirmities of his friend and fellow victim of self-defined racial profiling, strides ahead on his own. So who is compassionate? And who is so self-involved and arrogant that he is oblivious?

But here's the thing. Remember this? Obama had to worry that if he turned around to help Gates, somebody was going to be able to take a photograph of him looking at Crowley's ass.

Gates's daughter gets catty about Crowley's daughter: "she was wearing an appropriately heavy and charmingly untrained amount of green eyeliner."

Elizabeth Gates poses as empathetic as she swipes a paw at the policeman's daughter:

As our family rounded the corner to the White House library and I first caught sight of Sgt. Crowley’s lovely daughter; she was wearing an appropriately heavy and charmingly untrained amount of green eyeliner on her lower lashes, and I saw my former self in her.

Now, can the 2 girls get a picnic-table summit with — hmmm — Michelle Obama? Let's begin a great national conversation about how women judge and maybe even hate other women. In the fourth chair — the Biden seat — Hillary! Instead of beer, various girlie drinks — maybe Focus Vitamin Water or something. Cosmos for the older ladies.

At the Red Martini Tavern...

... carry on!

(Picture taken with my camera by Agent 95 in Asheville.)

"Astronaut Koichi Wakata didn't change underwear for a month."

"Wakata’s special clothing range was designed ... by the Japanese space agency, JAXA, and is known as J-Wear. Made of cotton and polyester with a silver coating that gives it its special properties, it also includes socks, T-shirts, trousers and leggings."

I don't know what your days-old underpants are coated with, but Wakata's are coated with silver!

At the Eat-a-Flower Café...

... come on! It's delicious! And after the flower is gone....



.... let's dance the beetle dance!

"He would have sex with as many as 10 or 15 men in the course of a normal day, while still logging a full day's work at the typewriter."

"He puts his lifetime total at something on the order of 50,000 partners. 'I don't know whether it resolves any particular conflicts,' he says. 'You learn a lot about different people, different groups — and it's a lot of fun.' Although he does not practice safe sex, he has remained HIV-negative, in part because he engages only in nonpenetrative sex."

"What other kind of too-narrow focus provides, for one and all, a diagnostic name for itself?"

"If you're ethnocentric, does your culture include a folk dance acknowledging the limitations of your outlook? Is there a beeper that goes off when you get too technocentric? If you're iconocentric, where's the visual image that's going to tell you that you are?"

I'll tell you who's saying that and what he's talking about after you bandy the question around a while.

ADDED: The quote is from "Alphabet Juice," by Roy Blount Jr., and he's talking about the word "logocentric."

"'It was one of those things where they put you up against the wall and hold you down by your elbows.'"

"I assume she’s talking about being manhandled by the cops, but no — chiropractic."

"Urbane New Jersey."

A funny expression I didn't expect to see in mainstream media:

President Barack Obama’s Justice Department has quietly agreed to move a pornography prosecution out of socially conservative Montana to more urbane New Jersey – fueling perceptions by some attorneys that the new administration is stepping back from the aggressive approach the Bush administration took to prosecuting obscenity.

"Urbane New Jersey" was deemed apt — apparently — in the enterprise of contrasting the much-maligned mid-Atlantic state with Montana — that state full of — oh, the unsophistication of it all! — social conservatives.

Actually, the dictionary definition of "urbane" is "notably polite or polished in manner."

What's as polite and polished as porn? Or is it that polite, polished people quietly tolerate things?

“This is a substantial change of position,” said Louis Sirkin, an attorney who has represented many in the pornography industry, including Hustler publisher Larry Flynt.

Isn't that's what you want in porn — a substantial change of position?

“The new administration has come in there and made a new determination….It certainly is different than what we have seen in the past.”

“I think it has a lot to do with the change in administration,” said a former federal prosecutor, Laurie Levenson of Loyola Law School. “It makes you wonder how far they were pushing the envelope before…..These cases are fraught with problems and are not a high priority.”

Blah blah blah... why are they not dropping this prosecution altogether?

Since Obama’s inauguration, prosecutors have pressed on with pending obscenity cases and accepted guilty pleas in one high-profile prosecution brought in Pittsburgh. However, there have been no announcements of new adult obscenity indictments, a trend that Justice Department officials declined to discuss....

Presumably, they want to end it all quietly, so shhhh....

Obscenity cases are politically sensitive for the Obama Justice Department because the deputy attorney general, David Ogden, was criticized by Republicans during his confirmation for his past legal work for Playboy and other purveyors of sexually explicit material.

Shhhh....

The Clunker Clunker.

"Cash for Clunkers" got a lot of folks jazzed up, but it flamed out in 1 week.

Is this just some oddball quirk of a program, or should we see it as a sign that all those other programs loaded with money and big ideas are fatally ill-designed?

AND: Ha ha. Instapundit drives a clunker.

AND: "House seeks $2B more in cash-for-clunker aid." Rule of thumb: After a program goes into operation, the estimate of its cost will increase by >200%. Not fair? Why? Because it's too high or because it's too low?