How's that Whole Foods boycott working out?

The parking lot at Whole Foods was jammed once again today, but a car pulled out and we slipped right into a parking spot next to this car:



I've smudged out part of the license plate for the sake of privacy. You'll have to take my word for it that the missing word after the "no" would strongly reinforce the impression given by the "Free Palestine" bumper sticker and the fact that the car is a hybrid and that the store is in Madison, Wisconsin, which is that someone is shopping at Whole Foods who would be boycotting Whole Foods if the Whole Foods boycott was worth a damn.

"Hedgehogs. Why can't they just share the hedge?"

The funniest joke.

"Some folks weren't grasping how fierce the ocean can be."

Nature is not a theme park.

Relax, now.

(Devil's Lake. Enlarge.)

Take a deep breath.

"$9 trillion... it’s being treated as an inconceivable sum, far beyond anything that could possibly be handled. And it isn’t."

K. Thx.

Have you got a song that you use to eradicate another catchy song from your head?

I do. I've had it for years. It's "5D" by The Byrds. I've used it, effectively for 40 years. (And I'm still wondering how it is that I could come out to here and be still floating and never hit bottom but keep falling through, just relaxed and paying attention?)

And what's the last song you needed to eradicate? (I dislike the term "earworm" for some reason.)

Chez Althouse, the song in need of eradication is something you will hear if you play the clip that follows, which you will do at your own risk.




That's the comedian, JP Inc., who opened for Neil Hamburger, here in Madison last Thursday.

And here are photographs of President Barack Obama wearing what, if you were foolish enough to play that clip, you will now be calling — not "mom jeans" — Randy Normal jeans.

The typewriter is so romantic.

Last night I dreamed that I went to class — as a student — and found that at my place, there was a manual typewriter. What did that mean? Going back to school, to old things... my obsolescence... a desire to get my hands on writing...

Today, I see — via Boing Boing — Rick Poyner's "In Memoriam" to his manual typewriter:

... I'm struck by how powerfully its form and image embody and express the idea of writing, as does almost any typewriter. Like the telephone at an earlier phase in its development when it still had a distinct earpiece and mouthpiece at either end of a handle, the fully evolved typewriter is a 20th-century industrial archetype. It feels inevitable, almost elemental, like one of those object types, such as a chair or a fork, that simply had to exist in this universe of forms. Even now (but for how much longer?) a typewriter is the icon to show if you want to convey the idea of a dedicated literary life....

The point, of course, is that the computer has never been a dedicated writing tool — writing is the least of it — and everyone uses them....

Actually, I remember, in the early '80s, when secretaries had big computer-looking things on their desks that were called "word processors"... but I know what you mean....

They are somehow both more marvellous and more ordinary. That's why there isn't a shred of romance in the idea of a writer and his or her personal computer.

Not a shred of romance? I've seen an incredibly romantic photograph of a man with a laptop — a laptop called "Cupid’s bow" — under his arm.

So what are your typewriter memories? Romantic stuff, please. Anything equally romantic with computers? Obviously, you can use a computer to get to real, in-the-flesh human beings, and you can do it quickly... like: right now. With the typewriter, it will be you and the inanimate object for a long time, and that, perhaps, is why we see the romance in the thing. The typewriter is as romantic as a lonely room.

"Watch These Terrible People Yapping At Each Other."

A Wonkette headline that I tried to read out loud and said: "Watch These Terrible People Lapping At Each Other." Ah, remember the original Wonkette? Everything was sexy somehow. Now... I don't read it enough to know what the point is, other than to make everything sound funny, though in this case the headline has nothing to do with what is supposed to be so hilarious: Al Sharpton is really skinny now.

Rush Limbaugh is skinny now too. He looks like this:



Ironically, Al Franken is quite fat.

Isn't it sweet that Rush posed in front of a picture of his kitty cat's bowl? Does Al Franken have a cat? Google image search suggests no:

"The best writer in the world is probably not even published."

Wild assertion made for effect just now (by me). Do you think it's true? If it were true, what would be the circumstances?

"Last winter I began stirring peanut butter into oatmeal; weird, maybe, but good."

"I also put it in stewed lentils and vegetables (dal) with curry powder, which may not be traditional, but it felt as if it could be.... [Other ideas include] smearing peanut butter on a wedge of raw white cabbage or a pork burger, roasting peanut-butter-stuffed jalapeños, and whipping up a simple satay-like sauce of peanut butter, soy sauce, orange marmalade and red pepper flakes."

There don't seem to be enough things to do with peanut butter.

Rock faces.

Faces seen in the quartzite today at Devil's Lake, near Madison, Wisconsin.

What we ate.

Here:



Not here:

"Amazon, WTF."

"Oh my god there are 1,103 reviews of Tuscan Whole Milk, 1 gallon."

"Don't miss the customer image gallery for Tuscan Milk."

"Zubaz. Fuck yeah. Thank you."

The model insisted on outing the blogger who called her a "skank."

And look, it's a woman — a young woman — a pretty young woman.

Speaking out for the first time since a court order forced Google to reveal her identity, blogger Rosemary Port tells the Daily News that model Liskula Cohen should blame herself for the uproar.

"This has become a public spectacle and a circus that is not my doing," said Port, whose "Skanks in NYC" site branded the 37-year-old Cohen an "old hag."

"By going to the press, she defamed herself," Port said.

"Before her suit, there were probably two hits on my Web site: One from me looking at it, and one from her looking at it," Port said. "That was before it became a spectacle. I feel my right to privacy has been violated."

But before you celebrate Port's seemingly wise anti-litigation statement, take note that she's suing Google... for $15 million federal lawsuit against the Web giant.

"When I was being defended by attorneys for Google, I thought my right to privacy was being protected," Port said.

"But that right fell through the cracks. Without any warning, I was put on a silver platter for the press to attack me. I would think that a multi-billion dollar conglomerate would protect the rights of all its users."

In her suit, she'll charge Google "breached its fiduciary duty to protect her expectation of anonymity," said her high-powered attorney Salvatore Strazzullo.

"I'm ready to take this all the way to the Supreme Court," Strazzullo said. "Our Founding Fathers wrote 'The Federalist Papers' under pseudonyms. Inherent in the First Amendment is the right to speak anonymously. Shouldn't that right extend to the new public square of the Internet?"

How hard did Google fight? Surely, there's no absolute right to hide your identity. Why should someone who commits the tort of defamation escape a lawsuit by hiding behind a pseudonym? It's not fair to the people who have the guts to show their names when they libel people. They get stuck being defendants in defamation suits.

The key is for courts to have a high standard in determining whether there really is defamation before they order that the name be revealed. Otherwise, someone who has not actually suffered a legally remediable injury can use a lawsuit for the wrong purpose: to inflict the injury of making a pseudonymous writer's name public.

Note that Liskula Cohen is now dropping her defamation suit against Port. That's good for Port. It's bad to be sued for $3 million. But it suggests that the disclosure of the name was the point of the lawsuit. Courts should not allow themselves to be used for that purpose. And Google's lawyers should fight hard to make courts see it that way.

Ruth Wedgwood details the evidence, the trial, and the consequences of the supposedly humanitarian release of the Lockerbie bomber.

Excerpt:

When the prospect of the release of this convicted murderer became widely known this week, the president of the United States told a radio interviewer he had "objected" to the release. But he did not say how much body English had gone into this objection. President Obama warned that al-Megrahi should not be given a "hero's welcome" by Libya. But this thought too was, as diplomats like to say, "overtaken by events."

Meanwhile, British Foreign Minister David Miliband says it is a "slur" to speculate that the release of a mass murderer was influenced, even at the margin, by the bidding for oil extraction rights in Libya. One of England's princes has been to Libya three times recently to talk about oil.

"It is true, it is real, it is me, it is not me, it is horrible, and I love it."

The DVD set of "thirtysomething" has finally arrived. Do you dare relive the horror of your long-ago attachment to it?

And I do mean you, not we. I was one of the many people who rejected the show — and I was thirtysomething at the time. That show was certainly not me, though I suppose it actually was, and perhaps that what put off. I was married, then teetering on divorce. I had little children, a new career, and angst about unmet aspirations from the previous decade.

The author of the linked piece, Porochista Khakpour, was in grade school at the time, and she used the show to get a grip on what it meant to be an adult. (She had rejected her parents, Iranian immigrants — "fallen aristocrats" — as role models.) Now, of course, she actually is thirtysomething:

... I find myself torn between the decadent counterculture of my 20s and a desire for things “properly” adult. And this is the very no-man’s-land paralysis that “Thirtysomething” was obsessed with, that cold-sweat-panic moment when youthful rebellion runs headlong into the responsibilities, pains and joys of full-blown adulthood.

In this second-chance viewing as a thirtysomething, I am amazed and inspired by all the everything-in-between, all the nothing-happening, all the ambivalence and the stagnation.

***

Link to buy the DVD.