At the Bookshelf Café...

... you can find the key.

"When somebody says, 'You should do something'..."

"... the subtext is: 'You're an idiot for not already doing it.' Nobody takes advice under those conditions."

Shopping.

If you're enjoying this blog, consider using the Althouse Portal into Amazon to do your shopping. It's a way to make a contribution to this blog (without playing more for whatever it is you need to buy).

If you're looking for suggestions, here's something I bought recently: hand warmers.

"The thing that's struck me about all the hype for the Sochi Games is that it seems to be completely centered around the host city and the spectacle of the Olympic Games..."

"... and not nearly as much as usual about the athletes competing. Is it because of the dearth of American medal hopes in figure skating, and that I don't care about any of the flippity-flip 'extreme' sports?"

We watched a little of the opening ceremony stuff last night. The intro historico-travelogue film montage — with a fleeting glimpse of a statue of Lenin — had me welling with involuntary and inexplicable feelings of love for Russia. I suspect a vast communist conspiracy. But then the athletes in matching parkas marching out behind flags seemed absurd. "How is this entertainment?" I cried out in pain. The announcer lady was burbling about the great degree of enthusiasm with which some athlete with few (if any) teammates was waving his country's flag and declaring that Great Britain's jackets were the best so far. "It might work all right for people who really love flags or who get into the fashion-show aspect of the jackets, like, oh, blue with red trim, excellent!" I said, but that was the next morning, after we shut off the TV and crashed for 8 hours.

ADDED: You can see the film montage here along with by Ed Driscoll's criticism of it as praising communism.  The text of the voiceover is:

The towering presence, the empire that ascended to affirm a colossal footprint. The revolution that birthed one of modern history’s pivotal experiments. 

I don't hear praise there, but the refraining from criticism, excusable as the etiquette of a guest. To call something a "pivotal experiment" is not to say that it was a good idea or that it produced a good result. It's certainly accurate to call it an experiment and pivotal. And look at the next line:

But if politics has long shaped our sense of who they are, it’s passion that endures. 

This asks use to turn away from the usual thoughts about politics and look at the people and their "passion."

As a more reliable right to their collective heart. 

I'm not sure the word there is "right," but if not, what is it? "Relic"? It's very emotive semi-gibberish, but this reinforces the idea that it is the Russian people we ought to think about now. Admittedly, "collective" sounds commie.

What they build in aspirations lifted by imagination. What they craft, through the wonder of every last detail. How magical the fusion of sound and movement can be. How much a glass of distilled perfection and an overflowing table can matter. 

This part bordered on capitalistic — all the great things Russians have made. (And all the vodka they drink.)

Discover the Russian people through these indelible signatures. Discover what we share with them through the games that open here tonight.

This is mostly a softly fuzzy invitation to think of the host country as its people, even as the Olympics invite us to think of the athletes from the different countries as the individuals they are. Let's concentrate on what we share, rather than where governments disagree. Feel the love. As noted in my original post, this minute-long click really worked on me at an emotional level, despite my intellectual perception of bullshit, inanity, sentimentality, and subliminal communist propaganda.

"Competitiveness about 'I know the Internet better than you do,' is really out of date."

"Nobody 'knows the Internet' well enough to count anymore. Maybe a decade ago, but even then there was more than anyone could digest."

Says Instapundit, linking to me, which he's been doing since a decade ago, and I know the internet well enough to know it's nice to get an Instapundit link, and it wasn't me that was getting competitive in the "I know the Internet better than you do" mode. I was quoting Susan Orlean, nattering inanely about keeping up with internet things like @Horse_ebooks and "This Is My Milwaukee."

ADDED: Even more so than in the nonvirtual world, we all go where we want, and I want to be here, after I've gone out following my whims and predelictions, showing you what I've found and nattering, possibly not always inanely, with the lucky consequence that you've chosen to browse here.

Out of 25 U.S. Presidents, I am most like... Barack Obama.

Compared to the general population, this test says I — like Barack Obama — am:

Above average on Extroversion, indicating that you are somewhere in between a pure extrovert and a pure introvert - an "ambivert."
Above average on Openness, indicating that you are very impatient with the way things are and always on the look for the new, the untested, and the untried.
Average on Agreeableness, indicating that you alternate between being tenderhearted in some situations and tough-minded in others.
High on Conscientiousness, indicating that you are focused when it comes to goals and deadlines and like to complete your goals and tasks before starting new ones.
Average on Neuroticism, indicating that you respond adequately to changes in your environment and feel some measure of stress under pressure without letting it get to you.

Professor Yin took it and ended up being most like Dwight Eisenhower.

ADDED: After Meade took the test and came up as Barack Obama too, I formed the belief that the point of this test was to promote Barack Obama, who's so very very normal. He's just like me and the same as you. ALSO: The overeagerness of this test to tell us that we're like Barack Obama is shown by the fact that Meade and I were not the same on 4 of the 5 elements. He was average on extroversion (where I was above average), below average on openness (where I was above average), average on conscientiousness (where I was high), and low on neuroticism (where I was average). The only thing were the same on was agreeableness, where we were both average. I call bullshit on the test (and palpable bitchery on myself).

AND: A funny line from Meade's results page: "Amazingly, your personality is simply too smooth and well-rounded for Dr. Neiman's study to be able to say anything about you." To which I add: Unamazingly, Dr. Neiman's study is simply too smoothed out and dumbed down to be able to say anything about about anybody. I know: More palpable bitchery from Althouse. Which, I'd say, makes me most like… oh… Andrew Jackson. Let's make shit up.

Rand Paul thinks anyone who raised money through Bill Clinton ought to give the money back.

Or they really shouldn't be pushing their bona fides on women’s rights. Because Bill Clinton is a "guy who was using his position of authority to take advantage of young women in the workplace.” Paul cites the figure $850,000 as the amount paid to Paula Jones to settle her sexual harassment complaint.

And Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri said "I don’t want my daughter near [Bill Clinton]." But that was back in 2006.

"'Hate' is too weak a word to describe the feelings that Hillary’s core loyalists still have for McCaskill," according to a new book, "HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton."

McCaskill supported Obama in '08, but she needs to get right with the Clintons. Here she is, stepping up to defend them now, against the righteous gender politics of Rand Paul. She says: "I think most women understand that they should not be held accountable for the behaviors of their husbands. And you know, frankly, it was a long time ago, and our country did very well under the leadership of Bill Clinton."

I don't get the applicability of the general proposition that "women... should not be held accountable for the behaviors of their husbands." When a woman allies with a man and remain allied with him as she seeks vast political power, how can she disaggregate herself from him? She actively facilitated him, and she did it in a way that was also about furthering her own career:



Surely, she's accountable for that! This isn't about some little woman who stayed home and baked cookies and had teas. This is Hillary Clinton, who was there actively fighting right alongside her husband, and who went on to leverage her experience in that role in a climb to immense power.

I think Republicans mostly get into trouble trying to play the gender politics game against the Democrats, but Rand Paul seems to have some special power and will to step up and play. It's quite helpful, healthy, and refreshing. I will take a front-row seat as an avid spectator on days when Rand Paul is playing.

An artsy-fartsy photo project lifts the lid on that "Death" box in your psyche, almost causes me to start another new blog, and gets us back to how John met Yoko.

"Philip Seymour Hoffman looks chillingly vacant in this tintype photo he posed for at the Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 19, just two weeks before his death Sunday from an apparent heroin overdose."

I had noticed that set of Sundance tintypes — here, at Esquire — but I'd passed on blogging it because it seemed artsy-fartsy. I like the one of Sam Shepard. That takes advantage of the effect nicely. (The movement of the subject causes the hair to resemble a white bird in flight.)

The Philip Seymour Hoffman one is among the best in the group, but how can you separate the old-timey artsy-fartsiness from all of your emotions in that box in your head labeled "Death" that this picture now opens?

But wasn't that the artsy-fartsy idea of doing tintypes in the first place — to take people alive today and position them in a past so long ago that they all look like people who must certainly now be dead and to plunge us into an angsty state of awareness that all of the pictures of ourselves and everyone we now love will some day be pictures of the dead?

"Not that I doubt Dylan hasn’t come to believe she’s been molested, but if from the age of 7 a vulnerable child is taught by a strong mother to hate her father because he is a monster who abused her..."

"... is it so inconceivable that after many years of this indoctrination the image of me Mia wanted to establish had taken root? Is it any wonder the experts at Yale had picked up the maternal coaching aspect 21 years ago? Even the venue where the fabricated molestation was supposed to have taken place was poorly chosen but interesting. Mia chose the attic of her country house, a place she should have realized I’d never go to because it is a tiny, cramped, enclosed spot where one can hardly stand up and I’m a major claustrophobe. The one or two times she asked me to come in there to look at something, I did, but quickly had to run out. Undoubtedly the attic idea came to her from the Dory Previn song, 'With My Daddy in the Attic.' It was on the same record as the song Dory Previn had written about Mia’s betraying their friendship by insidiously stealing her husband, André, 'Beware of Young Girls.' One must ask, did Dylan even write the letter or was it at least guided by her mother? Does the letter really benefit Dylan or does it simply advance her mother’s shabby agenda? That is to hurt me with a smear. There is even a lame attempt to do professional damage by trying to involve movie stars, which smells a lot more like Mia than Dylan."

One paragraph in the long "Woody Allen Speaks Out," published by the NYT last night. Read the whole thing. It's quite cohesive and devastating, these words of a man who lets loose after holding his tongue all these years while a woman who passionately hates him sent her words flying everywhere.

Woody Allen's argument builds in a series of paragraphs, and I'm not choosing the most persuasive one to highlight, just the one with a striking item of evidence that I'd never seen before, "With My Daddy in the Attic," right there on the album with the song Dory Previn wrote about Mia, "Beware of Young Girls."

The psychodrama of Woody and Mia is mind-bending. Both of them lavish pity on the children who got caught up in their vortex, each blaming the other for hurting the children, each claiming to be the one who has struggled all these years to save the children.

Woody must have known the structure of Mia's psychology very well. He used her tender fragility in so many of his movies. She was his muse during the height of his artistry. Then he did something — suddenly letting her see he'd transferred his sexual love for her to her daughter Soon-Yi — and there's no denying that part of the story and Woody's active role unleashing Mia's wrath. I could believe every word of Woody's story and still think: You knew her, you understood her so deeply, you connected to her through children, and you made her crazy and vengeful.

It's no great wonder that he kept quiet all these years and that he ends his speaking-out with a vow never to speak about it again. "Enough people have been hurt." Surely, that much is true.

And now back to the movies, the made-up stories, the actors and actresses pretending to wound each other deeply and to spiral into evil, vengeful rages. Have you seen "Blue Jasmine"? It's wonderful. Cate Blanchett in the lead role of the sensitive blonde who comes unhinged, the role that would always go to Mia, back in the days when she was Woody's muse and had a lock on every lead.

"Actually, the Althouse animagus scared the crap out of me this morning..."

"... with the rant on [Stephen] King and the intelligent bow to Tyler Cowen who rejects the push-button of good v. evil stories for his preferred superior push-button of having a higher IQ, superior to schmucks frozen in hell with lower IQ’s. The higher IQ test (the end-all criterion for the real hot smarties) juxtaposed against the raw animalistic gaia rant really scared me – until I saw what I felt (I may be wrong about this) was the point, er the two points, er the three points, (I can’t count higher than three, so I must stop here) – expressing palpable bitchery (that had to feel primally good) to provoke exactly the binary good v. evil reaction that Cowen criticizes – whether Cowen is right or wrong is not the issue, because simple rightness or wrongness is not the test – when it’s not the test."

That's just part of what Naked Surfer said in the ice cave a few hours ago. You can't surf naked on Lake Superior, even when you're feeling superior, especially when its frozen, but I appreciate Naked Surfer's effort to understand what was going on here on the Althouse blog at 4:52 in the morning, when I accepted Stephen King's apology and grabbed his abandoned but unforgettable phrase "Palpable Bitchery" for my very own.

After 23 years, we decided to replace the old cooktop.

 With this:



The old one was still working, but looking a bit beat up, and it was a little sad to see it go, because many fine food-centered experiences took place around it, notably the famous — I'm saying "famous" because it got reported in the NYT — "You cook breakfast. I'll blog it."



More prosaically, 5 years later, that is, last week, we were talking about the old cooktop here. People were prodding me about glass, but I like glass. It's like a iPhone. Especially the new one, which is black and has touch controls. It doesn't take photographs, but it's good in photographs, nice reflections.

When you use a Taser to steal a Stradivarius, it's the confetti that will get you arrested.

That's what Salah Salahady and Universal Knowledge Allah found out.

After the robbery, a customer at Allah's barbershop on N. King Drive [in Milwaukee] heard him and other customers talking on Feb. 1 about the violin robbery. The tipster said that after his haircut Allah asked him for a ride home. During the ride, Allah mentioned that Salahadyn had "used the electric, not the heat," referring to using the Taser during the robbery.

The next day, that person shared he information with a police officer he knew. Investigators, with the help of the FBI, had already traced the sale of the Taser to Allah through tiny, unique bits of confetti emitted by the weapon....

Pat Nixon "never stopped believing that the Kennedys had stolen the 1960 election..."

"... or that Watergate originated as a plot by her husband’s political enemies. She argued against his resigning even after she’d started packing."

From a NYT book review of "Pat and Dick/The Nixons, an Intimate Portrait of a Marriage," by Will Swift.

Swift succeeds in showing a young couple united by a degree of class resentment and a political understanding of how their apparent ordinariness could spark a sense of sympathetic identification in the mass of voters who would eventually form Nixon’s “silent majority.” More profoundly, the couple shared what the author calls “an underlying, no-nonsense melancholy” that derived from “the sadness of their difficult childhoods.”

The ice cave craze.

Droves of people going to the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore see the "gleaming columns of white and pastel earth tones, translucent stalactites of ice and windblown, feathery creations... the caves... of magic and wonder," so that what was once a mile-long hike out onto Lake Superior has gotten much longer because it's hard to snag parking at the Meyers Beach parking lot.

The eerie beauty will have a different feeling with such large crowds, but maybe it's a grand winter festival. We want to go. It's pretty cold up there right now, but actually less cold than here in Madison. I've been in those caves in the summertime, by kayak: see. But I'd love to see them with the ice.

Paul Ryan 48%, Hillary 43%; Rand Paul 47%, Hillary Clinton 43%; Ted Cruz 43%, Hillary 44%; Christie 42%, Hillary 43%.

The new Quinnipiac poll.

"If it'd been the sacrifice of Miley Cyrus or Justin Bieber, that we are invited to anticipate daily..."

"... we could delight in the Faustian justice of the righteous dispatch of a fast-living, sequin-spattered denizen of eMpTyV. We are tacitly instructed to await their demise with necrophilic sanctimony. When the end comes, they screech on Fox and TMZ, it will be deserved. The Mail provokes indignation, luridly baiting us with the sidebar that scrolls from the headline down to hell."

So goes the roiling prose of Russell Brand, who's feeling no sense of narrative completion from the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman. Brand, himself a recovering drug addict, wants to leverage the occasion of the Hoffman death into an argument for changing the drug laws.