Purchase of the day.

From the February 16, 2013 Amazon Associates Earnings Report:

Mario Kart Racing Wheel for Wii (2pcs Bundle) (Bulk Packaging) by Ebest (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $0.97)

85704 Campus.org Poly Color Jackets - 6 Pack, Assorted Colors by Smead (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $0.45)

LifeStraw Personal Water Filter by Vestergaard-Frandsen (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $1.84)

ch ching:

T-fal Actifry Low-Fat Multi-Cooker (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $16.72 )

Microsoft Office Home and Business 2013 (1PC/1User) [Download] (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $17.60)

Hoover Linx Cordless Stick Vacuum Cleaner (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $11.92 )

... and 28 other items purchased — at no additional cost to the buyers. Or as Barack might say, "Nothing about using the Althouse Amazon portal tonight should increase your family budget deficit by a single dime."

Only I'm not even lying.

So suck it up, load it down, fry it deep, sip it slow. If you like it, you better put a jacket on it. And WEEE!!! Thank you.

At the Underfoot Café...

... everything's comfy-cozy.

"I was on board the chopper with the door off — our pilot flew in nice and close to the top of the spire and hovered there for about 5 seconds as I stepped OFF, yes, stepped off..."

"...and onto the top of the rock which is only about 2 sq ft. Our director was holding my arm from inside the chopper as I stepped out to the rock — where our safety guy (who had climbed to the top – that’s right – climbed) grabbed my other arm to make sure I didn’t fall off the 125 ft rock and down to the ocean below."

Jeff Probst describes how they got that shot that begins the opening sequence in the new season of "Survivor." It disturbed me to see him there, and the video — here — of how he got there is scary too.

And here's that book "Stranded" that Probst wrote with a co-author – a novel for kids about kids stranded on an island.

Tony Kushner thinks it's fine for a movie to "manipulate a small detail in the service of a greater historical truth."

"History doesn’t always organize itself according to the rules of drama. It’s ridiculous. It’s like saying that Lincoln didn’t have green socks, he had blue socks."

The green/blue sock equivalent ridiculousness in Kushner's screenplay was having Connecticut vote against the abolition of slavery when in fact it voted for.

"When vague desire is the fire in the eyes of chicks whose sickness is the games they play..."

"And when the morning of the warning's passed, the gassed and flaccid kids are flung across the stars."

Along Comes Mary... and then nothing more comes along.

“He used to tell me the music got better the longer he stayed awake,” said Thomas Bernath, a bass player who occasionally rehearsed with Mr. Almer and who is now cataloguing hundreds of tapes found in his apartment. “He didn’t feel like playing until he had been awake for two or three days.”

Mr. Almer often read books on science, and he began attending local meetings of Mensa — the high-IQ organization — in 1977. Several people said he had occasional long-term girlfriends, but he never married.

“He wasn’t shy at all,” Bernath said. “He was, unbelievably, a happy guy. There was never any complaining or gnashing of teeth about money. He was so sensitive — not in the way of having his feelings hurt. But I almost felt he could read my mind. I’ve never been around anybody who was that perceptive.”

Although he briefly drove a taxi and had a job building computer circuit boards, Mr. Almer lived almost entirely on intermittent royalty checks. 

Tandyn Almer died last month at the age of 70. Via Metafilter which also links here, where there are many interesting video clips related to Almer and "Along Comes Mary" and some nice detail about Leonard Bernstein's fascination with the song. ("Along Comes Mary, in the ancient and honorable Dorian mode — the same mode we just heard in Debussy and in the plain-chant. Now who’d have thunk it?")

(You can pre-order "Along Comes Tandyn.")

AND: You can buy a box set of Leonard Bernstein's "Young People's Concerts" — 9 DVDs, 1500 minutes, only $84. (This seems to be 25 of the 53 shows he did for TV.)

Ramzi Yousef, convicted after the 1993 WTC bombing, sues for relief from solitary confinement.

He'll never get out of prison, but — after 15 years — should he get out of solitary confinement? But that's not the question asked in a lawsuit. To win the lawsuit, a court has to deprive government of the choice to treat him like that.

Colin Dayan, a humanities professor at Vanderbilt University who has studied solitary confinement in Arizona, said many prison administrations use isolation without regard to psychological damage to inmates.

"You no longer know what's real," she said. "You can't speak to anyone; you can't touch anyone: your senses no longer have any outlet. You have delusions and become psychotic. Your mind deteriorates."

After his arrest, Yousef — who expected the death penalty — told FBI agents that he had intended "to topple one tower into the other, and cause a total of 250,000 civilian deaths."

"Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets..."

"... and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. "

This sentence — can you tell it's from "The Great Gatsby"? — is for betamax3000, the upstart genius of the Althouse commentariat, who's vocally jonesing for another "Gatsby" sentence (after a couple of Gatsbyless days on this blog).

On post #1 today — "How the police handled this — they were the judge, the jury and the executioner" — he was all: "Dang. I thought we had segued from Fitzgerald sentences to Mickey Spillane."

And on post #2 — "And down the street is a retro-chic bakery, where... the windows are decorated with bird silhouettes — the universal symbol for 'hipsters welcome'" — he was in full-on "Gatsby" project mode:

"There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind, and as we drove away Brad Pitt was feeling the hot antlers of panic."...

"She went out of the room calling 'Pitt!' and returned in a few minutes accompanied by an embarrassed, slightly worn young man, with shell-rimmed glasses and scanty blond goatee."...

"They knew that presently dinner would be over and a little later the antlers, too, would be over and casually put away."

Don't understand the references? Maybe this post is not for you.

"I never thought I would go to college. Never! I’m a voracious reader, but I hated school."

"I was waiting to get out of school so my life could start. I spent my childhood backstage and on movie sets, and knew I wanted to spend my life there. Any second longer I had to spend in a classroom — f--k that!"

From an interview with the actress Zosia Mamet (daughter of David Mamet, who is, by the way, "a great man and a very good dad"). A glimpse of opinion:

[My father] told me I needed to clean up my mouth or I’d never find a man. What’s very important to him is manners. Show up on time. Always send thank-you letters. He is one of the more thoughtful humans I’ve ever met.

A year ago you spoke about how you hated dating — that you’d rather read a good book.

There are some really damn good books out there, you know? I think feminism’s a bit misinterpreted. It was about casting off all gender roles. There’s nothing wrong with a man holding a door open for a girl. But we sort of threw away all the rules, so everybody’s confused. And dating becomes a sloppy, uncomfortable, unpleasant thing.

"And down the street is a retro-chic bakery, where... the windows are decorated with bird silhouettes — the universal symbol for 'hipsters welcome.'"

From the second paragraph of a NYT style article titled "Creating Hipsturbia" about NY suburb such as Hastings-on-Hudson. That bird business called to mind this segment from the TV show "Portlandia":



Anyway, the article is interesting and amusingly written, even if you don't worry about how suburbs can adapt to the tastes of "the type of alt-culture-allegiant urbanites who once considered themselves too cool to ever leave the city."

"Hipsturbia" is a good portmanteau word (if "good" includes making people who are trying to feel good about something feel bad).

To ward off the nagging sense that a move to the suburbs is tantamount to becoming like one’s parents, this urban-zen generation is seeking out palatable alternatives... and importing the trappings of a twee lifestyle like bearded mixologists, locavore restaurants and antler-laden boutiques.

How are they supposed to ward off nagging senses with the NYT dogging them like this? Don't these people know they are never ever ever supposed to leave the city — not for fresh air, not for adequate housing at a remotely decent price, not for good enough public schools, not for anything? If you leave you will be punished. You may try to get something that reminds you of the Real Life that can only be had in Brooklyn, but you will be pleasuring yourself with antlers.

"How the police handled this — they were the judge, the jury and the executioner."

"As an American citizen, you have the right to a trial and due process by law."

"I met him at the candy store./He turned around and smiled at me."

"You get the picture?/Yes, we see."

At the Black-and-White Café...

... opposites attract.

"Isn’t it odd that the true enemy of society turns out to be that guy in the office down the hall?"

John Hawks extracts a juicy bit from that NYT article about the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon.

Hawks (who's a paleoathropologist) also has nice closeup of a museum reconstruction of Homo erectus (who seems to be an unusually nice person with lovely skin).

And: A story about a monkey midwife:

I think this is cool not because it shows that monkeys need midwives (they don't) but because it shows that the behavioral flexibility that may have enabled midwifery in early humans is very extensive among primates. A delicious placental incentive may seem inventive, but humans are mystifyingly strange in being among the few mammals who don't regularly consume the placenta after birth.

Note: don't regularly. Not: don't ever. I have Googled it. I know what people do.

Purchase of the day.

From the February 15, 2013 Amazon Associates Earnings Report:

"Dog in Charge" [Hardcover] K. L. Going (Author), Dan Santat (Illustrator) (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $1.02)

... and 79 other items purchased — at no additional cost to the buyers. Commerce!

Somehow... the 4-year-old child of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie...

... looks like a miniature Meat Loaf.

"We might have welcomed him, except for one thing — his pants."

An old Levis ad I ran across by chance. I was playing "Adore," by Prince, intentionally, and when it ended, the next song in alphabetical order came on. It was "Adult Kindergarten," from this "Best of Word Jazz" album, and I went looking for it. The Levis ad, it turns out, is based on another track on that album called "Flibberty Jib." Which isn't about pants.