Thanks to all who came to the Althouse reader meetup last night.

We were ensconced amid big pillows in an alcove at The Abbey... a cool gay bar in West Hollywood.

ADDED: I didn't take pictures last night, but here's a picture I took of Chris there the other day.

3 arguments.... 1 logic error.

But can you explain the error?

Men in shorts.

The evidence.









Discuss.

(The photos are all from the Venice Beach "boardwalk." I'm from New Jersey, and I happen to think a boardwalk has to be made of boards. This is mainly a post about whether men should wear shorts, but you can also talk about whether "boardwalk" is a misnomer, when a potbelly on a man is charming, and — special to Trooper York — the glory of fleshy women.)

Above the Law Idol — and I'll be a judge.

Here's the explanation. And here's a comment I completely predicted when David asked me to be a judge:

Althouse = Paula Abdul.
No contest.
Drunk and batshit crazy.

Here's where you're wrong, oh, predictable "guest" commenter. Paula is on the "American Idol" panel to love and support the kids and cushion them from Simon's meannesss. I will not be performing that function. You need to think a lot harder— and identify yourself with a real name so I can come over there and kick your ass. You took a comment cliché and did nothing even to attempt to make it your own.

And Dahlia Lithwick wants to be the Paula, anyway.

How cool is Cuil?

I don't know. I checked it out by "Googling" my own name, and I love the way the results look ... except for that picture. Who is that guy?

More info on Cuil here.

ADDED: Partial screen grab to preserve the puzzling picture:



AND: This wasn't too encouraging:

We didn’t find any results for “university of wisconsin law school”

Some reasons might be...

• a typo. Please check your spelling.
• your search includes a term that is very rare. Try to find a more common substitute.
• too many search terms. Please try fewer terms.

Finally, try to think of different words to describe your search.

You're gonna miss the Walk sign!

You can't stop to photograph everything!

What is it? Where is it?

Full Throttle doggie.

I loved this dog, who had one light blue eye and one dark brown eye. Hated the Full Throttle, which they were passing out free at the Severe Tire Damage Not An Entrance to the parking lot at Venice Beach. The dialogue went something like this:

That stuff tastes evil!

I wouldn't say evil.

Evil! Why do they have to make it taste terrible? To make you think it's medicinal!

Maybe it tastes like that because of all the energy stuff they put in it.

They just want you to think that stuff does something, so they give it an evil taste so you'll think they put something significant in it. They made it taste bad on purpose.

Whatever....

You can feel like you're slipping off the end of the world out here.

Your efforts are futile:



Prone:

Blogging from the Pacific Time Zone.

It's hard! You can't catch the wave...



... of news and rumors and topics — it's always too late. I feel so out of it.

Not saying I don't love L.A.

I kind of do. You have to love the good and overcome the bad, but the time zone... I'm just saying the time zone is hell for blogging.

Hey! It's a new Bloggingheads — with me and Bella DePaulo.

The subject is the plight of the poor, terrible, discriminated against single.

At The Loft in Koreatown.

Distractions:



UPDATE: It's not "The Loft." It's just Loft. And who is that guy with the Treo? It's not, as some commenters have surmised, my ex-husband Richard Cohen.

Does reading on the internet count as reading?

Your mom thinks you should read a book.

[L]ike so many other teenagers, Nadia, 15, is addicted to the Internet. She regularly spends at least six hours a day in front of the computer...

Her mother, Deborah Konyk, would prefer that Nadia, who gets A’s and B’s at school, read books for a change. But at this point, Ms. Konyk said, “I’m just pleased that she reads something anymore.”

But I'm not your mom. I'm reading on line all the time too. If 6 hours counts as "addicted," then I'm so addicted. I spend a fair amount of time wondering if I read all the time or not reading much at all.

Children like Nadia lie at the heart of a passionate debate about just what it means to read in the digital age....

At least since the invention of television, critics have warned that electronic media would destroy reading. What is different now, some literacy experts say, is that spending time on the Web, whether it is looking up something on Google or even britneyspears.org, entails some engagement with text....

Thanks for reading my blog... I mean... having some engagement with my text.

Clearly, reading in print and on the Internet are different. On paper, text has a predetermined beginning, middle and end, where readers focus for a sustained period on one author’s vision.

Oh, really? You can't flip around in a book? Read part of one book, put it down, pick up another, run over to the dictionary, pick up a notebook and write a few sentences, check the index, go to another page, write some marginalia? What a lame-ass book-reader you are!

And, damn, I hate these book-proponents who think what is so superior about books is that they control you in a linear fashion. The fact is they don't. Only movies do that. If you want to train us to have sustained, linear attention, make us go to the movies. But why is it good for us to be controlled by an author like that? Let's be free and active.

On the Internet, readers skate through cyberspace at will and, in effect, compose their own beginnings, middles and ends.

Horrors! Freedom!

Young people “aren’t as troubled as some of us older folks are by reading that doesn’t go in a line,” said Rand J. Spiro, a professor of educational psychology at Michigan State University who is studying reading practices on the Internet. “That’s a good thing because the world doesn’t go in a line, and the world isn’t organized into separate compartments or chapters.”

Spiro's right. And I appreciate the attention to the detail in the phrase "some of us older folks."

“The question is, does it change your brain in some beneficial way?” said Guinevere F. Eden, director of the Center for the Study of Learning at Georgetown University. “The brain is malleable and adapts to its environment. Whatever the pressures are on us to succeed, our brain will try and deal with it.”

Some scientists worry that the fractured experience typical of the Internet could rob developing readers of crucial skills. “Reading a book, and taking the time to ruminate and make inferences and engage the imaginational processing, is more cognitively enriching, without doubt, than the short little bits that you might get if you’re into the 30-second digital mode,” said Ken Pugh, a cognitive neuroscientist at Yale who has studied brain scans of children reading.

I definitely think that reading on-line restructures your brain. That may be bad in some ways, but it's got to be good in others. In any case, it's where I am now. I still read books, but I read them differently, for example, I cut to the essence quickly and spring into alert when I detect bullshit. I'm offended by padding, pedantry, and humorlessness. This may cut off some paths to enlightenment for me, but it also saves me a lot of time, and I find some other path.

Web proponents believe that strong readers on the Web may eventually surpass those who rely on books. Reading five Web sites, an op-ed article and a blog post or two, experts say, can be more enriching than reading one book.

“It takes a long time to read a 400-page book,” said Mr. Spiro of Michigan State. “In a tenth of the time,” he said, the Internet allows a reader to “cover a lot more of the topic from different points of view.”

Indeed.

"Even for Sarkozy the American, who loves everything in our culture... it was a wild gush over a new Washington crush."

On to the Maureen Dowd column. Yeah, I know I could be more creative about where to go for a Sunday morning's blogging, but the Frank Rich/Maureen Dowd pairing is telling today.

“You must want a cigarette after that,” I teased the candidate after the amorous joint press conference, as he flew from Paris to London for the finale of his grand tour.

Okay, so Dowd has some sardonic distance on the love fest — and yet I feel that she's teasing us here, showing off that she got close to the world's boyfriend — and can even kind of talk about sex with him. It's an interview. (Is Frank jealous?) She's on the plane, having a personal conversation! I'm jealous.

“I think we could work well together,” he said of Sarko, smiling broadly.

He did not get to meet his fan, Carla Bruni. “She wasn’t there,” he said. “Which I think disappointed all my staff. That was the only thing they were really interested in.”

He admitted showing “extraordinarily poor judgment” in leaving Paris after only a few hours. Watching Paris recede from behind the frosted glass of his limo was “a pretty good metaphor” for how constricted his life has become, he said, compared with his student days tramping around Europe with “a feeling of complete freedom.”

Aw. The man in the bubble. Let's write a different movie scenario — one where the fabulously successful candidate realizes he doesn't want to live like this. He only wants to be free. He just runs off one night. Have him climb out a window. He melts into the crowd. No one ever hears from him again. Maybe he grows a big beard and starts wearing glasses. Spends the rest of his life giving free legal services to the poor and teaching night classes as a third tier law school somewhere in America....

But he can't climb out the window now. He's on an airplane. With Maureen Dowd:

“But the flip side is that I deeply enjoy the work,” he said, “so it’s a trade-off.”

It's all about enjoying your work. Wouldn't it be amusing if some day, a President resigned because he just wasn't enjoying the work — not deeply, anyway?

But that comment makes me feel a little wistful and sad for the world's boyfriend. He admitted he feels trapped in his new role — he's given up his freedom. Yet, because he's a candidate, he had to immediately say that he really does enjoy it. Deeply.

Assertions of depth ≈ shallowness.

Life must be hollow now. Oh! I shed a tear for our boyfriend.

“One of the values of this trip for me was to remind me of what this campaign should be about,” he said. “It’s so easy to get sucked into day-to-day, tit-for-tat thinking, finding some clever retort for whatever comment your opponent made. And then I think I’m not doing my job, which should be to raise up some big important issues.”

The sacrifices our boyfriend makes for us.

But he's going to be even better in the future. He's going to raise up some big important issues. He won't just raise issues. He will raise up issues. He will glorify issues. And not just issues. Big important issues.

I asked how his “Citizen of the World” tour will go down in Steubenville, Ohio.

“There will probably be some backlash,” he said. “I’m a big believer that if something’s good then there’s a bad to it, and vice versa. We had a good week. That always inspires the press to knock me down a peg....

“Even if you start believing your own hype, which I rarely do, things’ll turn on you pretty quick anyway,” he said. “I have a fairly steady temperament that has at times been interpreted as, ‘Oh, he’s sort of too cool.’ But it’s not real.”

This is a good theme for him. Even, balanced, seeing the good and bad in everything....

Sigh.

"A smooth-talking rookie senator with an exotic name passes himself off as the incumbent American president to credulous foreigners."

Barack Obama's overseas trip seems like the scenario for some Borat-style movie to Frank Rich.

He never would have been treated as a president-in-waiting by heads of state or network talking heads if all he offered were charisma, slick rhetoric and stunning visuals. What drew them instead was the raw power Mr. Obama has amassed: the power to start shaping events and the power to move markets, including TV ratings.

Don't forget the power to turn back the rising oceans!

You know, I just passed up one breakfast spot — here in Beverly Hills — because they had Chris Matthews — Chris Matthews! — effusing off the flat-screen TV on the wall. Now, I'm in a café that is mercifully free of television, awash in mellow music. There's no thrill-up-the-leg Matthewzing to get on my nerves as I try to inject the appropriate amount of caffeine into my veins.

But there is still Frank Rich. Oh! The Power! The Raw Power! Ah! Stunning! Slick! And oh-so-manly POWER!

Sorry, Frank. He's married.

Rich pads out the middle part of his column with the usual material about how he disagrees with Bush about the war. He's got a point he's supposedly proving: Bush is so bad that Obama has somehow become "acting President" — especially in Euro-eyes.

And McCain is therefore royally screwed.

Mr. McCain could also have stepped into the leadership gap left by Mr. Bush’s de facto abdication. His inability to even make a stab at doing so is troubling.

Troubling... or modest and proper.

[McCain's] grim-faced crusade to brand his opponent as a traitor who wants to “lose a war” isn’t even a competent impersonation of Joe McCarthy. Mr. McCain comes off instead like the ineffectual Mr. Wilson, the retired neighbor perpetually busting a gasket at the antics of pesky little Dennis the Menace.

Who helped Rich with his semi-up-to-date Borat reference in paragraph 1? I don't know, but his back to showing his age with pop culture references from the distant past.

When not plotting such stunts, the McCain campaign whines about its lack of press attention like a lover jilted for a younger guy.

Well, you are plainly in love with that guy.

So, anyway, McCain is such a screw-up. He can't catch a break. And the whole world has embraced Obama as the new President. This thing is all over. What a blow out! Obama is crushing McCain. He must be about 20 or 30 — even 40 — points ahead in the polls by now.

Fast-N-Easy.

(Enlarge.)