At the Off-Screen Café...

... what are you looking at?

We're looking at Mr. Pepper the Yorkie, who is off-screen, in this photo taken on December 12th in Austin, Texas, by John Cohen. We're in Madison now, and another dog is clamoring for attention.

"What is this, trickle-down gender rights?"

Reddit discussion of this post of mine.

She's Jaqueline Bisset and she's perfect. She's an actress.

Now, go to hell and don't come back.

"Catholics in high places of power have the most trouble, I've noticed, practicing the separation of church and state."

"The pugnacious Catholic Justice, Antonin Scalia, is the most aggressive offender on the Court, but not the only one. Of course, we can't know for sure what Sotomayor was thinking..."

From a U.S. News column titled "The Catholic Supreme Court’s War on Women," by Jamie Stiehm.

The first comment over there says: "I'm honestly shocked that someone with such extreme religious prejudice has a job in journalism. This is something straight out of an 1850's Know Nothing pamphlet."

Here's the Wikipedia article on the Know Nothings, which has this intriguing image from 1854 of "Uncle Sam's youngest son, Citizen Know Nothing."



Imagine conceiving of that guy as the idealized American (in contrast to those terrible immigrants). It makes me wonder about our notions of masculinity over the years. This man seems more like the "pajama boy" sort of guy that gets ridiculed by some folks today. Our notions of masculinity today reflect the infusion of vigor from the Catholic immigrants the Know Nothings were so worried about.

Meanwhile, in the gender wars, according to that U.S. News column, Catholics are portrayed as a threat to womanhood, with womanhood understood in terms of bodily autonomy, and pro-choice women hoping both to hold onto the political support they won for the subsidization of female bodily autonomy and to quash the political victories of those who would burden it.

"For the Smiths, like other members of public sector labor unions, working on the Wisconsin side has meant rising personal contributions..."

"... for health insurance and pensions and a union with drastically less negotiating power. For Mr. Fulton, like many business executives, running a company on the Minnesota side has meant bracing for new business taxes and higher income taxes."

Mr. Fulton, a third-generation foundryman, has worked in Minnesota long enough to recall the decision to open the Duluth operation in 1980, a period when life looked much the same on either side of the border, many say.

“Knowing then what we know now, would we even do it in the state of Minnesota anywhere?” said Mr. Fulton, the president of ME Global, which operates the foundry. “I doubt it. We would go to another location. It’s an expensive place to do business.”

From a NYT article titled "Twinned Cities Now Following Different Paths." Duluth is on the Minnesota side of the St. Louis River, and, on the Wisconsin side, the city is Superior.

The marijuana entrepreneurs are pioneers in a legal twilight zone.

"Banking is the most urgent issue facing the legal cannabis industry today. So much money floating around outside the banking system is not safe, and it is not in anyone’s interest. Federal law needs to be harmonized with state laws," says Aaron Smith, executive director of the National Cannabis Industry Association in Washington, D.C., quoted in a NYT article titled "Banks Say No to Marijuana Money, Legal or Not."

But marijuana is not legal, no matter what the states do with their own laws and no matter how many times the NYT says "legal marijuana" (7, in that one article). It's a crime under federal law, and federal law wins. Banks don't want to be accused of aiding and abetting a criminal enterprise, and until the federal law changes, there are going to be entrepreneurs in the marijuana business holding and moving around large packs of cash.

They pay employees with envelopes of cash. They haul Chipotle and Nordstrom bags containing thousands of dollars in $10 and $20 bills to supermarkets to buy money orders. When they are able to open bank accounts — often under false pretenses — many have taken to storing money in Tupperware containers filled with air fresheners to mask the smell of marijuana.

These people are a type of criminal that we're currently — some of us — pretending are not criminals, and they are also targets for the type criminal — robbers — that we easily see as criminals. (How would you like to be a humble sales clerk, walking to your car late at night?)

The marijuana entrepreneurs are pioneers in a legal twilight zone, and it will be interesting to see how they amass power through acquiring the money to lobby and the trappings of respectability by behaving like other businesspersons, operating in the open, paying taxes, complying with the regulations of the state law that we're encouraged to think has "legalized" what they are doing.

Like other business persons, in the effort to make a profit, they accept risk. But unlike other business persons, part of the risk they are taking is in violating the criminal law. This risk — since they are acting openly — creates pressure on the federal government to change the law. But until that risk pans out, they've got a bad problem with all that cash that the banks won't risk handling.

"The Maids Complaint For want of a Dil doul."

To be filed under: Things Meade Found for Me When He Was Searching For Something I Needed But Was Too Afraid of the Internet to Look.

Writing that last post, I had a need to spell the plural of "dildo."

Me: "Is it like in Spanish, -os, or is there an 'e' in there, like potatoes?"

Meade: "You know they have this thing called Google."

Me: "Yes, but I'm afraid of what might pop out at me."

Meade found me the answer to my spelling question, and took the iffy topic in a scholarly direction with a wonderful item from the Magdalene College Pepys collection. Click the image above to enlarge, or read the salacious 17th century text here.

At night when I do go to bed
thinking for to take my rest,
Strange fancies comes in my head
I pray for that which I love best:
For it is a comfort and pleasure doth bring
to women that hath such a pritty fine thing....

The (unlinkable) OED pronounces "dildo" "A word of obscure origin, used in the refrains of ballads," and the earliest example of the word — from 1598 — puts an "e" even in the singular. Shakespeare used the word in the plural in "Winter's Tale" and used the kind of apostrophe people make fun of today: "He has the prettiest Loue-songs for Maids..with such delicate burthens of Dildo's and Fadings."

ADDED: I was wondering about "fadings" and found this key to Shakespeare about that line:

dildo (n.) nonsense refrain in a ballad; also: artificial penis

fading (n.) nonsense refrain in a ballad [with allusion to sexual energy]

Note that in that "Maids Complaint," "Dil doul" is a nonsense refrain: "For a dill doul, dill doul, dill doul doul." And you can see this in the OED examples, as well:

c1650 in Roxburghe Ballads II. 455 She prov'd herself a Duke's daughter, and he but a Squire's son. Sing trang dildo lee.
1656 S. Holland Don Zara i. vi. 57 That Gods may view, With a Dildo-doe, What we bake, and what we brew.

I take it "dildo" rhymed with "view" and "brew."

"Tina Fey and [Amy] Poehler tried hard, and sometimes too hard... their jokes about prosthetic penises fell flat."

Writes Alessandra Stanley about the hosting of the Golden Globes last night. Oddly, Stanley attributes the jokes that fell flat to the actresses' effort "to be like the guys and go blue."

I say oddly, because I didn't watch and I don't know what all these supposedly "blue" jokes were, but the one she referred to — without quoting — was about a topic that doesn't seem particularly like a guy thing. Prosthetic penises? That made me think of some medical devices to assist persons who have undergone penile amputations, then wonder whether  "prosthetic penises" is the way you say "dildos" and "strap-ons" in the NYT.

See, this is the kind of question you're forced to ponder when you don't watch the awards shows and you try to figure out what happened the next morning by reading the NYT.

Googling, I figured out that it was a movie thing. Extra doodads the makeup artists stick on are called "prosthetics." So like Kenneth Branagh getting a rubbery attachment for his chin so he could play Laurence Olivier, Jonah Hill submitted to genital appendagement for "The Wolf of Wall Street." Ah! Here's the text of Amy and Tina's opening routine:

AP The Wolf of Wall Street is a big nominee tonight, and I really loved the film, but some of it was too graphic. If I wanted to see Jonah Hill masturbate at a pool party, I’d go to one of Jonah Hill’s pool parties

TF Jonah Hill actually used a prosthetic penis in The Wolf of Wall Street, so you have that to look forward to the next time you eat at Planet Hollywood.

I think I get that joke, the joke that the NYT TV writer says fell flat. Correct me if I'm wrong. The idea is that a "prosthetic" really is a  medical devices for someone who has had an amputation, so if Jonah Hill wore a prosthetic penis, his real penis must have been lopped off somehow, and also, it's the mystery meat in the food at a local Hollywood restaurant.

There's more:

AP A number of big movies used prosthetic genitals this year. Blue is the Warmest Colour, The Wolf of Wall Street, Saving Mr. Banks. A lot of people don’t know that, Tom Hanks was wearing one the whole time. He’s wearing one right now – he’s really enjoying it.

So were AP and TF being like the guys? It's inconceivable that a male host on an awards show would single out an actress in the audience and talk about her genitals. If he did, critics would savage him. They wouldn't merely opine that the joke "fell flat." AP and TF were not acting like guys, they were exercising female privilege.

Drinking alcohol does not — as you were told for your own good — kill brain cells.

Scientists "meticulously counted neurons in matched samples of non-alcoholics and alcoholics" and found "no real difference in the density or overall number of neurons between the two groups."

[E]ven alcoholics who are continually taking in unhealthy amounts of alcohol aren't going to see brain cells die because of their drinking problem.

Copious drinking obviously has some harmful effects, but moderate drinking has benefits — including preserving cognition as a person ages — so look at the actual facts and make your own decisions.

And shame on those who make stuff up or outright lie because they're so concerned that we can't enjoy life's pleasures in moderation that they think it's best to scare us into doing nothing at all.

What's good for women is what's good for men.

Meme alert!

1. In today's NYT, an opinion column by Stephanie Coontz: "How Can We Help Men? By Helping Women."

Social and economic policies constructed around the male breadwinner model have always disadvantaged women. But today they are dragging down millions of men as well. Paradoxically, putting gender equity issues at the center of social planning would now be in the interests of most men....

Putting women’s traditional needs at the center of social planning is not reverse sexism. It’s the best way to reverse the increasing economic vulnerability of men and women alike.

2. On "Meet the Press" today, David Gregory interviewing Maria Shriver about the current state of the war on poverty, which began in the Lyndon Johnson administration, with Shriver's father in charge. (At one point Shriver says: "Daddy ran the war on poverty.") Anyway, Shriver's done some new report, which Gregory calls "so interesting." There's much discussion of the centrality of the concerns of women, Gregory declares the "role of men" to be "interesting." Shriver says:

Men are totally a part of this conversation in terms of how they raise their daughters, in terms of how they support their wives and their partners. And what's good for women, at the center of the economy, is also good for men. Men need flexible hours. Men need sick days, because they're going to be caring for parents, as well. Men need all of the things that these women need. These are smart family policies that we're talking about in this report.

A bit later, Shriver again pairs the idea that women are "the center of the economy" with the assertion that what's good for women is good for men:

I think women are at the center of our country. They're at the center, as I said, in electing our political leaders. They're at the center of the economy. They're in the center of the family. And when women do well, men do well, and the nation does well. And when women do well, they don't just support other women doing well, but we support our sons and our daughters.

When the very thing you were just saying nobody talks about anymore turns up as the subject of the new Ross Douthat column.

I was going to do one of those blog posts about noticing something that was a big topic that's gone away, but I never got around to it. Douthat notices the topic because someone on some lesser website wrote an article dredging up what was one of the big blog topics of 2005: "Why Women Aren’t Welcome on the Internet."

Douthat calls that "a candidate for the most troubling magazine essay of 2014." In a world of scandals and suffering, women not feeling welcome on the internet is supposed to be the most troubling thing? But we troubled our asses off over the lack of women-welcoming on the internet a decade ago.

[Amanda] Hess takes a reality many people may be only dimly aware of — that female writers come in for an extraordinary amount of abuse online — and fleshes it out with detail, data and personal experience. The anecdotes, her own and others, range from the offensive to the terrifying, but there’s also a thudding, soul-crushing sameness to them: graphic threats of sexual violence, rape and murder, intertwining and repeating.

Douthat goes on about "how online forums should police abuse" and how "the Internet itself" is a "magnifer" of hate, etc. etc.

It's all been said before, but I think I was consistent back in the old days expressing the view that threats and stalking can be serious, whether they arrive by phone or by internet, and when they are, call the police. That's what I've had to do a couple times. But distinguish what we call in First Amendment law a true threat from other kinds of verbal aggression.

There's so much fighting over politics and ideology and whatever on the internet that it's absurd to hold back until you feel welcomed. The people who are already there have territorial feelings and would love to make you feel you can't enter. If you say you're holding back until people stop being so mean, you'll never get in.

In case you don't remember the old discussion that got discussed out, here's the classic "Women and Blogging" post by Kevin Drum that got everyone talking back in March 2005. I see that piece links to something I wrote, here, which linked to something Maureen Dowd wrote in a piece called "Dish It Out, Ladies." That was back before Ross Douthat was her office mate.

"hi i just thought of something/this is the last year you can sing 'when i'm 64.'"

Chris iChats me a birthday greeting.

My advice to Republicans: Don't defend Chris Christie.

Let him twist slowly in the wind — as you used to say in the Nixon era. Let him stew in his own juice — which seems like the appropriate metaphor to me. Here's my thinking:

1. Don't justify or qualify the wrongness he's balled up in, because it is wrong, and clarity about right and wrong is good, and it's a good that has been and still can be associated with conservatism.

2. The wrongness is similar to some wrongness you need to be able to criticize Obama about, notably the IRS scandal. Don't lose the footing you need for that fight.

3. Defending Christie prolongs the news story. The giant, globular body of Christie has eclipsed the Obamacare debacle and the revelations in the Gates memoir (which come just as Fallujah and Ramadi fall to al Qaeda). The stories of the failings of the Obama administration are not merely useful to the GOP, they are far more important to the American people.

4. Whoever created this Christie myth in the first place? Pollsters? Christie polled well because people knew about him. He has had name recognition because he's loud and memorable, and because the media promoted him because he walked with Obama during the Sandy storm and because he delivered the keynote address at the Republican Convention and — to the delight of liberals — without praising the GOP candidate, Mitt Romney.

5. Let Christie sunset and see who else rises. If the donors are making decisions about where the money will flow and therefore who will have a chance to become the GOP candidate in 2016, then let the oversized Christie move out of the way, so you can see who else can serve. Certainly, conservative principles can be better upheld by someone other than Christie. Don't slow the departure of the large loudmouth who — with the help of the liberal media — has made it hard to hear from more modest, more conservative voices. And I don't just mean Scott Walker, whom we need here in Wisconsin. I mean all the potential candidates of that type who are hard to see when there's one big celebrity swanning about.

Enough! Too much! Let him go. He was never good for you anyway.

Paying $350,000 at auction to hunt the endangered black rhino.

Sounds outrageous, but makes sense.

1. The money will be used in the effort to preserve the population of black rhinos from the depredations of poachers (who are strongly motivated by the extremely high market value of rhino horns).

2. There will be expert selection of the animal to be killed, which will be one of the old males "who no longer contribute to the growth of the population and are in a lot of ways detrimental to the growth of the population because black rhinos are very aggressive and territorial." These mean but useless geezers "will kill younger, non-breeding bulls and have been known to kill calves and cows."

But, of course, the auction was protested, because it just feels so wrong to be able to buy a privilege to shooting an endangered beast. Perversely, what the protesters are protecting is their own privilege to feel however they intuitively feel, without the bother of studying and understanding the facts of the natural world.

"Come on, people. If you're going to be a drug addict, be a heroin addict. It has a proven reputation."

Things overheard at Meadhouse this morning.

The newspaper article under discussion was: "Heroin deaths rise in Dane County, drug's toll increasing."

Describing what Chris Christie did to his deputy chief of staff Bridget Anne Kelly, Maureen Dowd adopts a "sly" sexual metaphor.

I did not think modern American columnists, especially females who want to be regarded as feminist, would repeat something like this without disapproval, but here's Dowd adopting and admiring it:

Calling his deputy chief of staff Bridget Anne Kelly “stupid” and “deceitful,” he threw her off the bridge, without talking to her himself or, as Niall O’Dowd slyly wrote in IrishCentral.com, even extending the courtesy of the old Irish wedding night admonition: “Brace yourself, Bridget.”

What O'Dowd wrote — and unlike the NYT, I'll give you the link — could have been ignored. I would have ignored him. But what's Dowd doing boosting the prominence of it? Obviously, she thinks it's delightful — delightful to invite us to picture firing as fucking and to laugh about the brutality of the way that fucking is delivered to a woman. Her name is Bridget, and there's some old joke about the poor sexual aptitude of the Irish man — I had to Google it — who, confronted with his virgin bride, prepares her for the experience with nothing more than the warning "Brace yourself, Bridget."

I thought the present-day convention was to be careful with humor that involves violent sex. To laugh at this joke — to admire its slyness — is to contribute to what has been called the "rape culture." Not only is the supposed sly humor rape-y, it's perpetuating the sexualization of women in the workplace. There's nothing sexual about the Kelly and Christie story, so why invite us to picture it in sexual terms? I thought we were being careful about things like this. So what explains Dowd's use of O'Dowd's crude humor? Why isn't she afraid of being denounced for sexism and misogyny?

I see 2 possible answers. One is to say that this humor demonstrates the equality of women, since if Christie had fired a man like this, we — at least some of us — would have felt free to engage in rape metaphors, saying "He fucked him" and so forth. If women want to play in big-time politics, they must be subjected to the same metaphors that we use against men.

But has Dowd been deploying metaphors of sexual violence against political males? I don't think so. So I'm going to presume that the second possible answer is the correct one. The thrill of excitement taking down the GOP presidential frontrunner has overcome normal judgment. There's real lust here. And the niceties of refraining from delighting in images of sexual violence don't seem to apply.