Wigging out.

From bad chompers to bad hair. Watch out for the NSFW expletives.



I saw that the other day, half forgot it, then played it again today and laughed even more. I see some commenters over at YouTube think it's fake -- I disagree -- and others feel very sorry for the young woman -- and I disagree with that too. The line "you'll look back on this and laugh" is spoken in the clip, and it was never more true. But if it's not -- if the bride never looks back and laughs -- I feel very sorry for the groom.

UPDATE: Hoax! (Via Metafilter.)

Exploding head syndrome!

It's just one of a number of unusual things.

And what do "My Head is Spinning," "Now, Stand Back For Your Own Safety!,” "Okay I'll Admit That I Really Don't Understand," "Schizos (Are Never Alone)," "Television Rules the Nation," "That Tastes Horrible," "Egg Sandwich," "Thermonuclear War (Is Good For Your Complexion)," The “Batman” theme song, and "Pennsylvania 6-5000" have in common? (Answer here.)

Actually, I think I experienced exploding head syndrome once. If you don't know what it is, you may be saying, how could you possibly have it more than once, and, moreover, why are you still here?

The Self-Esteem Dentist v. A Creature Unlike Any Other.

Dentist Larry Rosenthal has had it with relationship guru author Ellen Fein:

"If she had a life, she wouldn't be harassing him," said David Jaroslawicz, the dentist's lawyer. "What kind of nut sets up something called LyingDentist.com?"

The tooth doc, dubbed the "mouth whisperer" for his New Age methods, says Fein tried to extort $100,000 from him for allegedly ruining her chompers a decade ago....

The blond author, who lives on Long Island, co-wrote a female-friendly series of dating books called "The Rules," that include nuggets of wisdom like "Be a Creature Unlike Any Other."

Rosenthal is a high-profile proponent of "self-esteem dentistry" and has sold a raft of celebrities on his smile-your-way-to-success theories....

Fein went to Rosenthal to have her teeth spiffed up in 1996. But she says he butchered a mouth realignment and gave her "gigantic" teeth.

The two will gnash it out in court.

Self-esteem dentistry? New-Age-y as it sounds, it looks like nothing more than unnecessary procedures done for the sake of beauty. The link is to Rosenthal's website, where we see pictures of him smiling toothily next to Donald Trump, Tommy Hilfiger, and Kathie Lee Gifford.

You can find the Lying Dentist website yourself. I'll link to the website for "The Rules," which were quite the thing a few years back. Check it out: the authors will consult with you by phone for $250 an hour. Or just read some Rules yourself:

Be a creature unlike any other

Being a creature unlike any other is really an attitude, a sense of confidence and radiance that permeates your being from head to toe. It's the way you smile (you light up the room), pause in between sentences (you don't babble on out of nervousness), listen (attentively), look (demurely, never stare), breathe (slowly), stand (straight) and walk (briskly, with your shoulders back). When a relationship doesn't work out, you brush away a tear so that it doesn't smudge your makeup and you move on!

It's the way you smile.... with gigantic chompers.

Why aren't we ashamed of fawning over Obama?

Slate's Tim Noah has introduced a new regular feature called "The Obama Messiah Watch," devoted to "gratuitously adoring biographical details" about Barack Obama. The first item, from the LA Times, quotes a former classmate of Obama's marveling over the conciseness of the notes he took in class ("the pithiest, tightest prose you'd ever see").

Slate has some distance from the fawning it will be serving up. We can tell that Noah is sniggering at the overenthusiasm. Yet these regular features mean something. This one invites us to partake in the adoration of a man. "Bushisms" offers endless examples of another man's supposed stupidity. But Slate is committing to the repeated presentation of Obama as godlike for accomplishing tasks that require skill within the range of mere mortals.

"The Obama Messiah Watch" is ostensibly a fun little feature, highlighting the foibles of people who just love Obama so much. But what Noah fails to talk about is the likelihood that he's picking up evidence of racism. What accounts for amazement to the point of adoration at the fact that a man possesses excellent skill at something like note taking? Is it not that he can do it and he's black? You can laugh at Noah's nuggets of gratuitous adoration, but you ought also to look at them critically and think about the implications.

IN THE COMMENTS: Working on the theory that there's racism everywhere, readers are questioning my use of the word "sniggering"!

MORE: La Shawn Barber had some similar thoughts a few months back.

"I fear that Judge Alito will ... roll over when confronted with an administration too willing to flaunt the rules...."

Yes, we need judges who dare to tell the administration to quit waving the rules about in a showy fashion.

I know it's awfully late to point out usage errors from the Alito confirmation battle, but I was just reading up on Senator Hillary Clinton. I recorded a Bloggingheads episode yesterday, and my co-head, Mark Schmitt, let loose with a remark about Clinton's great accomplishments as a Senator. I was incredulous and went looking to see if there was something I'd failed to notice. (The diavlog isn't up yet, but I'll update with a link when it is.)

These Senators. They're always running for President, and their main accomplishment is that they are Senators. And that they can get themselves reelected.

UPDATE: The episode is up. The moment referred to is at about 36:40.

"This duck has taken us all on an emotional rollercoaster."

Oh, for the love of Daffy! I hope it's only the British press -- in some incomprehensible British eccentricity -- that's covering the duck-in-the-refrigerator story:

"But once the surgeon started sewing her back up she stopped breathing again, this time for 15 seconds."

When a second thump failed to bring Perky round, veterinary surgeon David Hale tried manipulating the duck's beak, before using a needle to shock her into consciousness.

At one point the duck was given pure oxygen through a face mask, Ms May said.

"At that point the vet turned and said: 'I'm sorry, she's gone.'"

The room fell into shocked silence as those present took in the news, but then Perky raised her head and began flapping her wings.

The relief reduced everyone to tears, Ms May said, describing one of her colleagues as "extremely emotional" as she left the room.

"For the duck to have gone through all of this and then to die at that time was a real shock," Ms May said.

This is a duck shot by a hunter and put in the refrigerator, presumably, to be eaten soon enough. Manipulating the duck's beak? This should become an idiomatic expression along the lines of "pulling my leg."

We've talked about this story before, and as one commenter said, why is it at all surprising that a duck can live in a refrigerator? They live outside. The appalling thing is that the hunter put the duck in the refrigerator in a condition that was survivable. As Meade said: "what sort of slob duck hunter fails to field dress or breast out the game upon retrieval while it is still warm?"

"Women Feeling Freer to Suggest 'Vote for Mom.'"

This is a front-page "political memo" from Robin Toner.

Today, many political strategists say women no longer have to be so defensive. Voters have grown more accustomed to women in powerful positions....

What this means, strategists say, is that motherhood and a focus on children can become one more political asset to be showcased — a way of humanizing a candidate and connecting with voters, especially other women....

National security remains a threshold issue for voters but is no longer such an automatic advantage for the Republicans because they have lost so much support on the war in Iraq, the polls suggest. And neither Ms. Pelosi nor Mrs. Clinton is neglecting these issues. On the campaign trail in Iowa on Saturday, Mrs. Clinton argued that all of this — security, maternity, affordable health care — was part of her potential-first-woman-president package.

“I’m going to be asking people to vote for me based on my entire life and experience,” she said. “The fact that I’m a woman, the fact that I’m a mom, is part of who I am.”

Well, I've already said what I think about Hillary Clinton on this one. I think she's overdone the mommy stuff at this point. But managing our feelings about women and power is a complex task. We may be "more accustomed to women in powerful positions," but it's still very complicated. And raising motherhood as a qualification is a new move, and we're not accustomed to that at all. This new rhetoric will create its own swirl of complex feelings about women and power. It remains to be seen who will be helped and who will be hurt.

"Arthur Godfrey once said that 'I'm proud to pay taxes in America, but I could be just as proud for about half the money.'"

Arthur Godfrey! You're quoting Arthur Godfrey?! Well, Governor Huckabee wins the prize for least hip candidate in the '08 race. That is beyond square. Truly weird! It was incredibly square and old to like Arthur Godfrey 40 years ago... 50 years ago!

MR. RUSSERT: You said this to the Des Moines Register: “Let’s face it. In our lifetimes, we’ve seen our country go from ‘Leave it to Beaver’ to ‘Beavis and Butt-head,’ from Barney Fife to Barney Frank.” Why, why include Barney Frank, a gay congressman, in that reference?

GOV. HUCKABEE: I think it was a matter of a rhetorical device...

Ack! Static! I can't hear anything he's saying at this point. Even the "Beavis and Butt-head" reference is old, old, old. (Note: I'm older than Mike Huckabee.) And the gay-baiting? So tawdry, however much you like traditional values. And, anyway, was Barney Fife a positive masculine role model?

Back to The Bee:

I just completed a book in which I talk about the difference between horizontal politics, where everything is left or right, everything is liberal or conservative, everything is Democrat or Republican. I think the American people are hungry for vertical politics, where we have leaders who lift us up rather than those who tear us down.

Well, you're doing a huckava job.

"Women don't decide elections because they're not rational political actors... [T]hey vote on impulse, and on elusive factors such as personality."

Linda Hirshman editorializes in the Washington Post. She interviewed some woman about Hillary Clinton:

I had such mixed feelings listening to these women describe their political selves. They're clearly idealistic, want to be good citizens, make an effort to get the information they need. It was hard not to like them. Their delight in seeing a woman so close to real power was palpable. Yet I couldn't escape the fact that they took in little of politics, especially compared with their husbands, that their decision-making seemed impulsive and that their response to Clinton's candidacy was driven to an amazing extent by personality.

They unwittingly confirmed my theory about why women don't decide elections....

The point here is that Hillary Clinton shouldn't count on women to get her elected. If she thinks women will vote for a woman because she's a woman, she's wrong.

Hirshman portrays woman as lame political actors. I get the impression that she's just exasperated that they don't reliably support liberal causes. Which, of course, wouldn't make them lame. Quite the opposite.

She seems to find it rather pathetic that they don't lock onto the political news the way men do, but that may be a perfectly sensible way to live a competent life. By contrast, it's rather crazy to be fretting about November 2008 right now. It's not so much that men are rational and women are emotional. Men just have different emotions. Male emotion tends more in the political junkie direction. "Junkie" is not the image of rationality.

Hirshman offers Clinton some advice on how to take advantage of women voters:

First, when it comes to women who vote, the political is the personal.... If the polls continue to reflect male aversion to her beyond the baseline male Republican tilt, Clinton may have to go personal to bring the women home. Maybe she could get a couch on casters.

Hirshman's contempt for women is rather shocking. She goes on to suggest that Clinton open up her personal story:

[S]he has had the soap opera story of the century with that charismatic, faithless husband. This has made her suffer, something one of the Wednesday women specifically singled out as a reason to support a candidate. Will she be willing to open that old wound to convince potential female supporters that her policies, such as universal child health care, arise out of her concern for women like them, rather than being just the usual liberal agenda?

She can't make Bill look bad now! And anyway, why would some personal sob story, even if it did show you really cared about children in some special way, make you seem as though you deserve the presidency? So you found yourself in a personal fix? Therefore we should put you in charge of the country?

The second lesson is that elections that turn on the female electorate bear an unfortunate resemblance to a popularity contest. The Republicans have succeeded with women at the polls when they've made Democrats look not just mistaken, but clownish or geeky. Reagan in blue jeans beat Jimmy Carter in a cardigan. George H.W. Bush looked like John Wayne next to Dukakis peering over the edge of a tank in a helmet. And who knows what would have happened if Kerry hadn't donned a wetsuit to go wind-surfing? Even the devil wears Prada. And women know it.

Hirshman is well on the way to convincing us that women shouldn't have the vote! On the other hand, I'm totally planning to blog about what everyone's wearing and how they look in their photo ops. And isn't Mitt Romney dreamy?

Hey, Hirshman forgot to mention that in each of the cases she described, we picked the better boyfriend. And don't forget Bill Clinton. He's the best boyfriend. And Hillary's our rival. We're going to inspect her critically, because why does she have the best boyfriend? She's just using him! Oh, why doesn't he see that she's not that pretty and she's not that nice? In short, Hirshman fails to complete that "popularity contest" thought!

Audible Althouse #77.

Oh, you've waited so long, podcast fans... if I still have podcast fans. This is just a podcast about trying to revive the joy of podcasting. There's some substance too. But I'm just hoping you'll come along for the ride as I try to discover a way to live inside the podcast again. So stuff those earbuds into your earholes and take a chance.

You can stream it right through your computer here. But the hardcore fans subscribe on iTunes:

I saw "The Queen."

I start recording a vlog, just as a way to psyche myself up to do a podcast, and though I mean to talk about blogposts, in my podcast style, I get exasperated with that effort and end up talking about going to the movies today.



Podcast to follow... presumably....

Nutritionism, the ideology that has replaced food.

Michael Pollan writes about how we got so twisted up about nourishing ourselves (as opposed to eating). He pinpoints the start of the problem. In 1977, a Senate Select Committee on Nutrition -- led by George McGovern -- told people to cut down on red meat and dairy products, then, caving to pressure from the red meat and dairy industries, revised the advice to: "Choose meats, poultry and fish that will reduce saturated-fat intake."

A subtle change in emphasis, you might say, but a world of difference just the same. First, the stark message to "eat less" of a particular food has been deep-sixed; don’t look for it ever again in any official U.S. dietary pronouncement. Second, notice how distinctions between entities as different as fish and beef and chicken have collapsed; those three venerable foods, each representing an entirely different taxonomic class, are now lumped together as delivery systems for a single nutrient. Notice too how the new language exonerates the foods themselves; now the culprit is an obscure, invisible, tasteless — and politically unconnected — substance that may or may not lurk in them called "saturated fat."

Pollan adds that the head of the Committee, George McGovern lost his next Senate election:

[T]he beef lobby helped rusticate the three-term senator, sending an unmistakable warning to anyone who would challenge the American diet, and in particular the big chunk of animal protein sitting in the middle of its plate. Henceforth, government dietary guidelines would shun plain talk about whole foods, each of which has its trade association on Capitol Hill, and would instead arrive clothed in scientific euphemism and speaking of nutrients, entities that few Americans really understood but that lack powerful lobbies in Washington. This was precisely the tack taken by the National Academy of Sciences when it issued its landmark report on diet and cancer in 1982. Organized nutrient by nutrient in a way guaranteed to offend no food group, it codified the official new dietary language. Industry and media followed suit, and terms like polyunsaturated, cholesterol, monounsaturated, carbohydrate, fiber, polyphenols, amino acids and carotenes soon colonized much of the cultural space previously occupied by the tangible substance formerly known as food. The Age of Nutritionism had arrived.

Did you know the politics of why we're so fat and sickly? It's McGovern's fault! Everyone started scarfing down Snackwell’s and pasta. Later, reacting to that disaster, everyone freaked out about carbohydrates and went on the Atkins diet.

By framing dietary advice in terms of good and bad nutrients, and by burying the recommendation that we should eat less of any particular food, it was easy for the take-home message of the 1977 and 1982 dietary guidelines to be simplified as follows: Eat more low-fat foods. And that is what we did. We’re always happy to receive a dispensation to eat more of something (with the possible exception of oat bran), and one of the things nutritionism reliably gives us is some such dispensation: low-fat cookies then, low-carb beer now.

In the end, the advice is to eat real food and to eat less. Actually, he's got 9 points of advice at the end -- well worth reading -- but it's mainly eat real food and eat less.

***

Interesting idea: "the Okinawans practiced a principle they called 'Hara Hachi Bu': eat until you are 80 percent full." Funny! I don't think Americans could even grasp the concept of identifying the 80 percent point. It's hard enough for us to notice the point at which we are full. We don't even know how to be put off by the gross portions that are set down in front of us in restaurants.

When I go to steakhouses here in Madison, I always order the smallest size -- "petite" -- and it's 6 ounces. I never want to eat the whole thing, and then I feel silly bringing home a 3 ounce portion. But, you know, 3 ounces is considered -- by some official standard -- to be one portion of meat. So I go to a restaurant, order the dinky size, and it's a double portion. It's very hard to develop common sense about how much to eat under such conditions. If you pay $30 for a steak, you don't want to leave $15 worth of it! You push yourself to eat even though you aren't hungry, and it becomes second nature.

Hear Hillary sing "The Star-Spangled Banner."

Actually, I think it's pretty cute:



Yeah, she sings badly, but she never said she could sing well, and bad singing is an American (Idol) tradition. She's a little off on the words. You can ding her for that.

We will still have Kerry to kick around.

I thought he was withdrawing from the political fray, but apparently, he was redeploying. Here he is, botching up a storm. The long national nightmare continues.

Anticipated next scene: Kerry proffers some mind-bending explanation of how his use of the words "international pariah" didn't mean what Fox News manipulated unintelligent plebes into believing.

"He can enter your space and organize your thoughts without necessarily revealing his own concerns and conflicts."

Some superheroes leap tall buildings with a single bound. Barack Obana enters your space and organizes your thoughts without revealing anything about himself!

(Same link as the previous post. The amazing and cool quote is from Harvard lawprof Charles J. Ogletree Jr.)

What a fabulous superpower, so perfect for a political actor. But, you realize, of course, that if you were writing a novel and giving that trait to a character, he would be your villain. He might make a wonderful diplomat, bringing all sorts of people together, yet we'd be crazy to give him the power to work his will before we knew what he was really about. But this ability to enter our space and organize our thoughts may be just the thing to make us that crazy, with our thoughts organized into the belief that he is the great man who will save us.

"I was born in Oslo, Norway, the son of a Volvo factory worker and part-time ice fisherman."

"My mother was a backup singer for Abba. They were good folks.... [In Chicago,] I discovered I was black, and I have remained so ever since." So goes the satirical script, written by Barack Obama's Harvard Law School classmates.

He proved deft at navigating an institution scorched with ideological battles, many of which revolved around race. He developed a leadership style based more on furthering consensus than on imposing his own ideas. Surrounded by students who enjoyed the sound of their own voices, Mr. Obama cast himself as an eager listener, sometimes giving warring classmates the impression that he agreed with all of them at once.

Friends say he did not want anyone to assume they knew his mind — and because of that, even those close to him did not always know exactly where he stood....

Why did his fellow law review editors elect him to lead them, to serve as their "president" (most law journals say "editor-in-chief")?

The election was an all-day affair with the ego-crushing drama of a reality TV show. Inside Pound Hall, the editors picked apart the intellectual and social skills of the 19 contenders, eliminating them in batches. At the last moment, the conservative faction, its initial candidates defeated, threw its support to Mr. Obama. “Whatever his politics, we felt he would give us a fair shake,” said Bradford Berenson, a former associate White House counsel in the Bush administration.

Read the whole article. With all those lawyers to interview and all the jealousy Obama must have inspired with his success at Harvard, it's notable that nothing nasty comes up.

But then maybe this article -- in the NYT -- is a puff piece and some juicy quotes got clipped out.