"Tell the chef to ditch the extra oil and substitute an extra sprinkle of herbs."

I have a love-hate relationship with the writing in women's magazines. I've read a lot of them — mainly, because for 2 years (before I went to law school) I had a job that required me to read all the women's magazines, month after month. I try not to let them upset me. I try to laugh. And often I do laugh. In fact, when I had that job — it was a day job, back when I fancied myself an artist — we laughed a lot. Everything seemed absurd. The most absurd thing I ever read was the idea that you could knit the string that bakeries tie around cake boxes into dishrags.

That quote up there is from a recent issue of some health/fitness magazine for women. The concern is that Chinese restaurants might put a lot of oil in their dishes, and the advice is to ask the waiter to "tell the chef to ditch the extra oil and substitute an extra sprinkle of herbs." Now, what I want you to do is: Next time you go to a Chinese restaurant, say that to the waiter: "tell the chef to ditch the extra oil and substitute an extra sprinkle of herbs." You must say that verbatim. You must use the words "ditch" and "sprinkle." Then come back here and tell me all about it.

It's not as silly as knitting bakery string into dishrags, but it's something that I'd nonetheless like to refer to as a bakery-string dishrag. It's just crazy women's magazine talk. No one in the history of the world has ever knitted a bakery-string dishrag. And no sane person would ever say to a Chinese waiter to "ditch" oil or add "an extra sprinkle of herbs." Unless they were on a mission from the Althouse blog. Please! It's so much easier than knitting a dishrag from saved string.

"When a [bridge] partner starts to slip, you can’t trust them. That’s what it comes down to."

"It’s terrible to say it that way, and worse to watch it happen. But other players get very annoyed. You can’t help yourself."

Very old people play bridge and stave off dementia.

"High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s as educators prepared students to become 'knowledge workers.'"

"The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. This has not come to pass. To begin with, such work often feels more enervating than gliding. More fundamentally, now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses." 

I greatly enjoyed this essay by Matthew B. Crawford, which is adapted from his book "Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work." Crawford is highly educated and has worked in information economy jobs and the sort of jobs you learn to do in shop class. He's got a lot to say about what these different kinds of jobs have to offer. I do have 3 criticisms, however. 

1. Crawford's hands-on real-world job is working in his own business as a motorcycle mechanic and his reward-for-going-to-college job was cranking out abstracts of scholarly articles that he couldn't understand for $23,000 a year. So the "real world" job was particularly good and the "information" job was particularly bad. You've got to concede that there are plenty of good, bad, and middling jobs in both categories and to match up 2 good ones or 2 bad ones or 2 middling ones to make a fair comparison about what different sorts of work do to your soul. 

2. Crawford had a Ph.D. in political philosophy from the University of Chicago, so he is not just another guy that got shuffled into college on the theory that the whole economy is going to be about knowledge and you're going to have to fit into it. He had big hopes of an academic career, and ending up in that article-summarizing job must have hurt him in ways that have little to do with how average guys who could have learned trades feel when they end up slotted into Dilbert cubicles. Now, the plight of those average guys is tremendously important, but Crawford is not one of those guys. His experience was different. He belonged in a university, but the job market in academia is tough. 

3. Crawford has written a book about it all, and book-writing is an "information" job. So he can't really say that working with your hands is completely fulfilling. He had to think about and analyze his experience and make it into an intellectual project. That's fine, but this making it into a book is a proper part of the story about his soul that he wants to tell. It's not in the essay. Maybe it's in the book.

What does Obama mean by "some short-term investments in health care"?

He's talking about how we're "operating in deep deficits" and why it is therefore important to distinguish between short-term and long term spending:

So we've got a short-term problem, which is we had to spend a lot of money to salvage our financial system, we had to deal with the auto companies, a huge recession which drains tax revenue at the same time it's putting more pressure on governments to provide unemployment insurance or make sure that food stamps are available for people who have been laid off.

So we have a short-term problem and we also have a long-term problem. The short-term problem is dwarfed by the long-term problem. And the long-term problem is Medicaid and Medicare. If we don't reduce long-term health care inflation substantially, we can't get control of the deficit.

So, one option is just to do nothing. We say, well, it's too expensive for us to make some short-term investments in health care. We can't afford it. We've got this big deficit. Let's just keep the health care system that we've got now.

Along that trajectory, we will see health care cost as an overall share of our federal spending grow and grow and grow and grow until essentially it consumes everything...

Okay, but why is his health care proposal classified as a "short-term investment"? Isn't it long-term spending? I'm not talking about whether it's a good idea or not, but just whether he's bamboozling us by calling it both "short-term" and "investment."

At the Grass Closeup Café...

... you can relax and take it easy. And maybe wonder why I ever took a picture like this. There is a reason, of course. There's a reason for everything. You crazy fool!

Mystery video clip.

Context to be provided later.

ADDED: Here's the context. The clip is in the first few minutes.

I'm telling you for the last time.

If there is a troll here who talks too much, don't talk to him. That's what he wants and that makes him talk more. Don't post to bitch about it. If you do, you are the problem. Get it? You are the problem.

ADDED: If you want to interact with another commenter, go right ahead. But if your point is to make him stop, don't get him fired up by talking to him. And don't debate with him and also tell me I should do something to get rid of him. If you consider someone a troll, don't talk to him. On the other hand, if you are worried that you might be the troll, put that energy into writing better comments. Be concise and interesting. Be creative or funny or something. 

Women are unhappier than ever.

According to a new study.

That's what we get for being more in touch with how we feel — we notice it, we admit it to ourselves and others. And we get attention because of it. If men were/are sad, who would know? Who would care?

But the linked blog post, by Meghan O'Rourke, asks — assuming it's really true that women are less happy than men and less happy than they were 35 years ago — why would this be so?

[T]he drop in happiness is pegged to an anxiety caused by the plethora of choices available (Barry Schwarz's paradox of choice) and women's feeling that they have to perform well across more categories. This is not exactly the same as struggling to balance so-called work and life (i.e., children): The study's authors are quick to point out that the decline in happiness is consistent across many categories, irrespective of marital or employment status or whether you have young children....

Oh, how I loathe this liberal meme about choice and happiness! Though liberals believe fondly in "the right to choose," they also love to say that choice makes us sad — but they only seem to mean that choice in the economic sphere is bad. (Notice how it softens you up to accept the crappy car the government wants you to drive and the good-for-everybody health care system it would like to provide.)

Anyway, why are women so sad? I think it's because we think about our feelings so much and care so much about being happy.

What happened in the twilight down there in the bottoms.

Our resident animation master Chip Ahoy took my photo from the Twilight Café and played out its forboding mood:

It was worth losing "American Idol" to not have to sing that crappy "No Boundaries" song.

When Adam Lambert heard he'd lost, he hugged Kris Allen and said "You have to sing that song now."

Ha ha. The winner has to close the show with a rendition of the special finale song, which is always bad — always bad in the same damned way. One difference this year was that the song was written by Kara DioGuardi — who's also on the judge's panel. (A terribly irritating intrusion on the show, by the way.)

Kris said:

"I was like ‘Ohhhh gosh!' I was like ‘OK, just sing it!’ I thought it went OK.”

You just know the 2 of them talked before the big results show and decided it was a win-win situation: Either you get to be the American Idol or you get to avoid singing that damned song.

“I like the song. It’s tough to sing, I’m not gonna lie. It’s a rough song, but Kara's a great writer,” Kris said. “It was so much fun working with her in the studio. She’s a lot of fun to work with.”

Kara's a great writer... but even great writers write a lot of crap.

Here's Kris performing the onerous task.

(Also in the linked article: Kris won by a lot.)

Disney's animatronic Obama: "Young children watch this, and you want them to feel a sense of identification with the president."

Since when are American children expected to identify with the President?

Do you notice anything about the picture of Obama that's on Drudge right now?

I know the impression it made on me. I showed it to my tablemate and, without any prompting, he said exactly what I had thought.

IN THE COMMENTS: Roger von Oech said: "Louis Farrakhan — all the way. The teleprompter makes it look like a bow tie."

At the Twilight Café...

... talk to me about your fears. Last night, I was afraid of coyotes, skunks, poison ivy... scary trees....

"If fine speech-making, appeals to reason or pleas for compassion had the power to move them, the terrorists would long ago have abandoned the field."

"And when they see the American government caught up in arguments about interrogations, or whether foreign terrorists have constitutional rights, they don't stand back in awe of our legal system and wonder whether they had misjudged us all along. Instead the terrorists see just what they were hoping for — our unity gone, our resolve shaken, our leaders distracted. In short, they see weakness and opportunity."

Cheney responds to Obama. Read the full text.

The red-winged black coyote.

"The American people are not absolutist, and they don’t elect us to impose a rigid ideology on our problems."

"They know that we need not sacrifice our security for our values, nor sacrifice our values for our security, so long as we approach difficult questions with honesty, and care, and a dose of common sense. That, after all, is the unique genius of America. That is the challenge laid down by our Constitution. That has been the source of our strength through the ages. That is what makes the United States of America different as a nation.... I can stand here today, as President of the United States, and say without exception or equivocation that we do not torture, and that we will vigorously protect our people while forging a strong and durable framework that allows us to fight terrorism while abiding by the rule of law. Make no mistake: if we fail to turn the page on the approach that was taken over the past several years, then I will not be able to say that as President. And if we cannot stand for those core values, then we are not keeping faith with the documents that are enshrined in this hall."

Obama the moderate pragmatist. He's oh-so-different from Bush and also — let's not be rigid and ideological — really also exactly the same. He's going to do everything right and get everything done, and whatever it is he does, you can be sure that it's not torture and it's within the rule of law, because he's standing near these documents and Bush was terrible.