At the Iowa State Capitol...

... in Des Moines:



Looking up into the dome:



The Civil War looms large:

Scenes from the drive from Lincoln, Nebraska to Madison, Wisconsin.

1. On 2 overpasses to I-80, there were groups of protesters with signs calling attention to the Obama scandals: Benghazi, IRS, Fast & Furious. I saw at least one Gadsden flag.

2. "The corn and soybean crops looked really good. I didn't see any poor crops at all." So says Meade when I ask him about the highlights of the drive. Some people driving from Nebraska to Madison might say "Ugh, corn. Too much corn. When will we get past all this corn?" But Meade is not one of those people. His father was in the popcorn seed business.

3. Mostly looking for coffee, we got off the interstate in Williamsburg, Iowa, where there's a big outlet store shopping center. Meade wanted to go into Lids to get some baseball hats, so I went into the Coach store and was checking out with a book bag and at the next cash register, there was a woman who was quickly replaced by a man who said she didn't speak English. The older woman behind the counter plied him with cheerful questions including "Where are you from?" He said "Iraq," but he said it in his Iraqi accent, which is nothing like eye-RACK or even eee-ROCK. It was more eee-RAHqqq. The woman said she wasn't familiar with that country, and the man repeated the name, perhaps wondering whether this woman had not heard of the events of the last 10 years. I didn't want to intrude. I cast a glance at her and then at him, as they kept going back and forth, and it was obvious she was never going to hear the word he was saying as "Iraq." Finally, I said to her, "He's saying  eee-ROCK," and of course, she knew Iraq. To him, I said, sympathetically, "It was the way you said it."

4. Meade's team the Cincinnati Reds were playing the Milwaukee Brewers, so Meade listened to the whole game on the satellite radio as he drove, and Meade didn't see that I'd put in the earbuds and was listening to an audiobook (which happened to be "Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim"). I laughed and he said "I wonder if they cooked up sushi?" because he thought I'd laughed at the baseball announcer who'd just said that the people coming to the Miller Park were tailgating and "cooking up every kind of food imaginable." Apparently, my laugh was perfectly synchronized. Meade's reference to sushi harked back to lunch, wherein I ate this:

Where we were when we were not in Madison.

We were in Lincoln, Nebraska.



For the National Amputee Golf Open Championship, cheering on the Meade family member who comments on this blog as "The Elder" (previously highlighted in this 2010 post).



Lincoln is a fine American city, like Madison, a capital city, and though we are big fans of the state capitol buildings, we skipped that building this time, because we were there in January 2012. Remember those pictures? Instead we got our fix of state capitolosity as we drove home today, via I-80, stopping in Des Moines, Iowa. I have some nice Iowa Capitol pictures, but I'm going to put them in a separate post.

"Excommunicated from the clown community."

"'Excommunicated' is our word, but there really is a 'clown community,'" writes James Taranto, who's apparently a community unto himself, judging by his use of the first person plural.

Judy Quest, author of a CNN.com op-ed titled "A Real Clown Wouldn't Mock Obama"... informs us of the existence of "international clown organizations," a "strict code of ethics" governing "the craft" of clowning, and "clown journals," for which Quest, who's been a clown for 32 years, "writes regularly."

But does the Clown Code of Ethics forbid dressing up as a particular President of the United States and appearing to have your life threatened? Taranto says:

[N]one of the Clown Commandments forbid political humor, so that it would appear to be permissible to pantomime truth to power. 

Yes, but do clown ethics forbid making comedy out of a physical threat to the President? What truth is spoken by saying Wouldn't it be funny if the President's life were in danger?

If you've wondered why I hadn't previously blogged about the rodeo clown, these questions reflect my reasons for avoiding what might seem like such a tempting story. I favor free speech, and I'm sorry this guy lost his job. He shouldn't have received so much attention, which is why I'd refrained from giving him more. But an employer is justified controlling the speech of employees. The speech expressed by the rodeo is the speech of the business that is the rodeo. It's not the individual speech of any particular performer. But I suspect the guy got scapegoated. Did the employer approve of this kind of performance before the nation's spotlight fell on this one clown?

"I’ve wanted to be in porn since middle school, when I understood that performers made each other and audiences feel good for money."

"It seemed like an honest use of time; plus, all the popular kids thought it was cool."

When I was old enough to do it, I waited for over a decade, thinking about my reasons for wanting to participate before I actually decided I was ready.

All the women in porn I know have similar stories. More representative than Lovelace are contemporary and prolific performers like Sovereign Syre. “Every step of the way was a conscious transition,” she told me. Her “erotic journey” began when, after leaving grad school to write a novel, she started appearing on an online modeling site and progressed to porn slowly and thoughtfully from there.

From an article in Slate titled "Linda Lovelace Is Not a Porn Star/The real world of porn has nothing to do with her experience in Deep Throat."

Crooked numbers and frozen rope.

Terms from the glossary of baseball. I found this (huge) list fun to quiz Meade on during a long car trip the other day.

"It is almost impossible to find an establishment Republican in town who’s not downright morose about the 2013 that has been and is about to be."

"Most dance around it in public, but they see this year as a disaster in the making, even if most elected Republicans don’t know it or admit it."

Who are these morose, ineffectual, in-town, establishment characters?

Has John Oliver been better than Jon Stewart...

... on "The Daily Show"?

("Daily Show" haters need not respond. )

The problem of big babies.

Literal big babies.

It's a serious medical issue.

Figurative big babies are another matter. A cultural issue.

Questions, questions.

I was amused to find myself amongst the miscellaneous items at the end of "The Best of the Web" today. That stuff at the end is definitely not the best of the web. It's more of a grab bag of things that can be made funny by putting it under a funny heading.

Questions Nobody Is Asking

" 'Why Don't You Ask Me Next Time Before Writing That I'm Either Malicious or Dumb?'" --headline, Althouse.blogspot.com, Aug. 14

"Why Is Samantha Power Speaking to Invisible Children?"--headline, NationalInterest.org, Aug. 14

Answers to Questions Nobody Is Asking

"Michelle Obama: 'No,' I Will Never Run for President"--headline, WeeklyStandard.com, Aug. 15

"What are these new ways of wearing lipstick?"

"According to many makeup artists, the key is to layer, layer, layer. (First rule of lipstick: any two colors mixed together look snazzier than one alone.) And then, after all that varnishing, strategically undo what you’ve done: engage in some artful blotting. It’s this final step that renders the lips stained, not shellacked."

Blotting. In the 1950s and early 60s, lipstick application always ended with putting a tissue between your lips and pressing them together, leaving a lip-shaped lipstick mark. You'd put it on, then take some of it off. Was that an unnecessary ritual or something you needed to do because lipstick wasn't as good back then as it is today? It was dry and it looked darker on than in the tube. It got darker over the course of the day too. In the 60s, things changed as young women wore frosted, light colors, including white, and then we switched to completely clear "lip gloss." Everything else looked old. It's funny to read an elaborate article today about how to make lipstick "new" again, especially seeing something that is, to me, the epitome of old: blotting.

ADDED: "Blot" is a funny word, which can mean to add spots of staining material like ink (which leads to the figurative use when we speak of dirtying a reputation ("Theres a good mother, boy, that blots thy father!" wrote Shakespeare)). It also refers to erasing and wiping away. The OED has these very old examples:

1611   Bible (A.V.) Acts iii. 19   Repent yee therefore..that your sins may be blotted out.
1667   Milton Paradise Lost xi. 891   Not to blot out mankind.
1593   Shakespeare Venus & Adonis sig. Biiijv,   Like mistie vapors when they blot the skie.

"Russell Simmons apologizes for Harriet Tubman 'sex tape.'"

"The clip features an actress portraying Tubman having sex with her white slave master as someone films it so the abolitionist can bribe her boss.... The 55-year-old Simmons, founder of Def Jam Records, writes Thursday that he 'can now understand why so many people are upset.' He said he removed the video after a call from the NAACP."

Video at the link.

That book about celibacy is "slim, chic and humorless, that is, a sophisticated bagatelle of a volume..."

"... filled with detours to exotic locales: the Sahara, Goa in India, the Greek island of Hydra. It’s also gauzy and episodic and not particularly well written, yet it drifts along on a kind of existential bearnaise of its own secreting."

From the NYT review of "The Art of Sleeping Alone," which we were just talking about here.  The review makes the author's celibacy seem like a reaction to negative sexual experiences, not a positive pursuit (which is the aspect of celibacy that interests me).

"The Passive House: Sealed for Freshness."

Quite aside from the environmentalism and the long-term cost savings, I love the promise of quiet:

Look out the living room windows and you can see a gardener wielding one of those ear-piercing leaf blowers in the yard, but you would never know it inside.

There is no furnace or air-conditioner clicking on or off, no whir of forced air, and yet the climate is a perfect 72 degrees, despite the chilly air outside....In one of the most humid cities in the country, you aren’t sticky or irritable....

"For any non-Clinton Democrat, exploring the 2016 election is something of an exercise in perceived futility, at least for the moment."

"She looms larger over the primary landscape than any undeclared candidate since perhaps Dwight Eisenhower, and the drop-off in prominence between her and the next tier of Democrats makes it all but impossible for any less famous politician to win consideration as a credible alternative."

Writes Politico under the headline "Non-Clinton Dems ask: Why not me?"

Isn't this the key to answering that question everyone was asking yesterday about why the NYT published that exposé "Unease at Clinton Foundation Over Finances and Ambitions"? No one else has a shot at positioning himself/herself for the Democratic nomination as long as the behemoth Clinton stands. Now's the time to be lining up support, and if Hillary is going to topple, she needs to topple at the right point on the time line for the Democratic Party.

"The stories of young men sexually assaulting young women seem never to stop... and there are times when I find myself darkly wondering if there’s some ineradicable predatory streak in the male subset of our species."

Writes Frank Bruni, beginning his NYT column, which proceeds to tell us about a psychology professor who blames the culture and is in the business of fixing the culture. The military uses him to teach and advise on the prevention of sexual violence, so it's in his economic interest to promote the theory that it's the culture and not the innate biology. On the other hand, even if a tendency toward violence is inborn, we demand that people overcome destructive urges and channel their energy in a positive way.

Reading the line quoted above, what I found myself wondering — darkly wondering? — is whether Bruni should have noted that he is gay and thus not susceptible to the "ineradicable predatory streak" that he imagines leads to the sexual assault of young women. Is it wrong to write something like that about men and not address his own exclusion from the category he's derogating? Maybe. There's added authority in running down one's own kind.

A more serious omission here, however, is that sexual assault in the military happens to men even more than to women. If homosexual encounters are a big part of the problem, then Bruni is protecting his own kind, and the eclipsing of his exclusion from the heterosexual group he insults becomes much more problematic.