The summer deskscape.

Sexual harassment in academia: It depends on what the distinction between "logical implication and conversational implicature" is.

"There was no propositioning," said the philosopher. "Remember that I am a philosopher trying to teach a budding philosopher important logical distinctions."

That sounds like something from a brilliant novel that I would love to read, but unfortunately, it's a real professor, who's had to resign. Colin McGinn, according to the above-linked NYT article, was "a star philosopher at the University of Miami," and he has "agreed to leave his tenured post after allegations of sexual harassment brought by a graduate student."

“People are thinking, ‘Wow, he had to resign, and we know about it,’ ” said Jennifer Saul, the chairwoman of the philosophy department at the University of Sheffield in England and the editor of the blog What Is It Like to Be a Woman in Philosophy?

Wow, he had to resign, and we know about it...  note the implication (implicature?!!) that things like this occur all the time, perhaps even to the point that some tenured professor is subtly ousted, but what's extraordinary is to hear about it. Another amazing thing is that the star prof is also a blogger, and he put serious effort into blog-bullshitting his way out of the jam he found himself in. He put "the cryptic language of analytic philosophy" out there to defend himself. He gave other bloggers text. That's a risk. But maybe that's what star philosophers do, take risks, verbal risks.

"He blamed his mother for chewing her food too loudly and his sister’s bad accent as part of a plan to drive him mad."

Said the teenager, who killed his parents and sister 46 years ago. He spent 6 years in a mental institution, then changed his last name, studied psychology, and became a professor.

The pony-tailed professor, Dr. James St. James — the head of Millikin University’s psychology department — was outed by a Texas reporter with the Georgetown Advocate, a newspaper based in the town where St. James fatally shot his parents and 17-year-old sister on Aug. 4, 1967.

One student said: "He really is a good guy. I have really fond memories, and I feel sorry for him, because now his life is all turned upside down."

ADDED: More here.

Bolus.

Some readers enjoyed my use of the word "bolus" 2 posts down. (A "feminist blog is committed to chewing things into a bolus of feminism....  When the evidence is flimsy, lubricate the bolus with the notion of the subtlety of the oppression. It might be swallowable.") That's not a word that would have come naturally to me if I hadn't read Mary Roach's cool book "Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal," so let me provide you with a reading:

The study of oral processing is... about the entire “oral device”: teeth, tongue, lips, cheeks, saliva, all working together toward a singular unpicturesque goal: bolus formation. The word bolus has many applications, but we are speaking of this one: a mass of chewed, saliva-moistened food particles. Food that is in— as one researcher put it, sounding like a license plate— "the swallowable state."

I don’t think the scientists are uninterested. I think they may be disgusted. This is a job where on any given day, you may find yourself documenting “intraoral bolus rolling” or shooting magnified close-ups of “retained custard” with the Wageningen University tongue-camera...

Humans, even physiologists, don’t like to think about food once they’ve begun to process it. The same chanterelle and Gorgonzola galette that had the guests swooning is, after two seconds in the mouth, an object of universal revulsion....

ADDED: From last April: Holus-bolus.

"With no notice, the man stepped forward, grabbed the headband off of Dexter's head and threw it to the bottom of our shopping cart."

"He then cuffed Dexter around the side of his head (not hard, but that is not the point) and said with a big laugh, 'You'll thank me later, little man!'"

At the same time as I stepped forward, Dexter grabbed his head where the man had smacked him and threw his other hand forward, stomping his foot and shouting, "NO!" I got between my son and this man and said very firmly, "If you touch my son again, I will cut your damn hands off."

The guy snarled at me, looked at Dexter with disgust and said, "Your son is a f*cking fa***t." He then started sauntering out, but not before he threw over his shoulder, "He'll get shot for it one day."

That spiraled out of control quickly!

The things that happen to HuffPo mombloggers when they happen to go to WalMart with their 2-year-old sons wearing mommy's pink lace flower headband.

Here's the blogger Katie Vyktoriah's description of the horrible homophobe who was, I take it, monitoring WalMart shoppers for insufficiently instilling gender norms in toddlers:

The man was overly large with a bushy beard and a camouflage shirt with the arms cut off. He had tattered shorts and lace-up work boots with no laces. I could smell the fug of cigarette smoke surrounding him, and there was a definite pong of beer on him.

Smoking and shorts. And overly large. When are men overly large? Don't they know when they are taking up too much space? A camouflage shirt with the arms cut off... talk about the right to "bare" arms. And the "pong of beer"... Pong?



Pong, meaning "A strong smell, usually unpleasant; a stink" is a Britishism. OED examples:

1925 E. Fraser & J. Gibbons Soldier & Sailor Words 226 Pong, a stink.
1936 F. Clune Roaming round Darling xxiv. 257 Avoid the smell of camel. They were complete with permanent, pyramid, and perfume, commonly called pong....
1991 D. Coupland Generation X i. i. 4 Smelling the cinnamon nighttime pong of snapdragons and efficient whiffs of swimming pool chlorine.

There's a blast from the past. Not the old Atari game (whoever forgot that?) but "Generation X." Remember when everyone was reading "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture"? I'd buy that right now and blog it for its poignant, pungent, pong-ent, obsolescences, but it's not available in Kindle? Not in Kindle! Oh! How the times pass! How the cutting edge dulls!

But, what say you? There's a lumbering, overly large man in shorts, a jack-booted thug with no shoelaces, and he's come to snatch the pink headband off your little boy. Threaten him with hand amputation, that might bridge the culture gap. Or, since he's a stinking smoker, a beer drinker, it might incite him to splutter out some warning about future bullying that will be so badly worded that in print it's good enough to make the HuffPo crowd gasp: Oh, noooooo! Homophobia rages... at WalMart. That's why I NEVER go there. That guy is always there, in his over-largeness, blocking the aisles, shuffling around, graceless... and laceless.

Feminist blogger suspects that the AP meant to say "this smoking slut totally had it coming."

You may remember this story from yesterday, which I blogged here, about the NYC ad executive who leaned against her balcony railing in a way that made her date say "You know, you shouldn't do that." She said "I do it all the time," and then the railing collapsed, and she fell 17 stories and died. When should a death make the news and why? I know why I chose to blog that one: It was such a striking reminder of the way death might come at any time, and one's confidence that death won't come because it hasn't come yet — I do it all the time — is a delusion we live by and might die by.

I'm not afraid to lie down at night and sleep — I actively seek the loss of consciousness on those occasions — because I always wake up in the morning. That's happened every time so far anyway. And yet, every day, there are — lying in beds all over the world — dead bodies of human beings who surrendered consciousness to sleep the night before, assuming it would work out the same way it did all those other times.

How many will get AP stories written? None, unless they happen to be famous. The railing giving way is dramatic, especially because it happened to someone we can see did not expect it, who had that youthful sense of invulnerability, and the fall came from a great height, the death was instant, and there was an onlooker to make the experience come alive for us vicariously.

Like any blog, a feminist blog must feed on the available news stories or die of starvation, but a feminist blog is committed to chewing things into a bolus of feminism. So here's the Slate's XXfactor blog, and the determination has been made that the falling woman story is bloggable, which has to mean that it's fodder for feminism. Extracting 4 facts from the opening 2 paragraphs of the AP story, L.V. Anderson writes that the "implication" is that "this smoking slut totally had it coming."

"Where we were. What we were doing."

4 years ago.

Details here and here about the smallest possible wedding, the opposite of spectacle. And, similarly, I'm not saying very much in this blog post, just noting the occasion. As I've said before, I prefer normal days, and this day is a great day mostly because it's another day, in 4 years of days, to be spent with my beautiful husband, Meade.

Sitting with Abby and Zeus.

(Abby is big, but a puppy. Zeus is 6 years old.)

"This legislation ensures that local communities have a say in the roundabout process..."

"... and ensures that Madison bureaucrats — many of whom will never use the roundabouts they design — cannot trample on the voice of those who will actually navigate these roadway projects."

Republican legislator, quoted in a Treehugger post titled "Roundabout Rage in Wisconsin," which insinuates that conservatives oppose roundabouts because they're French.

Here's the Wikipedia article on roundabouts. Excerpt:

Numerous circular junctions existed before the advent of roundabouts, including the Bath Circus world heritage site completed in 1768, the 1907 Place de l'Étoile around the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, the 1904 Columbus Circle in Manhattan, and several circles within Washington, D.C., however, the operating and entry characteristics of these circles differs considerably from modern roundabouts.... Contrary to modern roundabouts, its centre originally was intended partly as a traffic island for pedestrians....

And here's that Yes tune.

The Tea Party "is the same group we faced in the South with those white crackers and the dogs and the police."

"They didn’t care about how they looked. It was just fierce indifference to human life that caused America to say enough is enough. 'I don’t want to see it and I am not a part of it.' What the hell! If you have to bomb little kids and send dogs out against human beings, give me a break."

Said Charles Rangel (according to The Daily Beast).

"Did Althouse ask permission before taking this picture and, if so, what did the man behind the counter say?"

I polled this morning at 10, along with my photos of the Madison smoke shop. As of right now, these are the poll results:

"'You know, you shouldn't do that,' said her companion, who met Rosoff for the first time that night after talking online..."

"'I do it all the time,' she replied moments before the railing collapsed... sources said."

"Jake Tapper reveals classified information about CIA in Benghazi - should his sources go to prison? Should he?"

A tweet from Glenn Greenwald, part of a collection of tweets at Twitchy under the headline "Jake Tapper: Remember when Rand Paul asked Hillary about gun running in Libya?"

(I invite your comments, which must pass through moderation. Comments must relate to the linked article.)

"It's like Santa for your vagina."

A viral ad, demonstrating what NPR calls "a more honest approach" to tampon marketing.

Makes me nostalgic for "Modess... because":

I see that 4 readers bought "$64,000 Jazz"...

... the record I talked about in "Records From My Father, Part 6." I commend you! This was a great buy — 12 immensely enjoyable recordings, downloadable for a mere $7. It seems foolish not to buy it. I would pay $7 for Buck Clayton's "How Hi the Fi" alone. But thanks for buying it through the Althouse Amazon portal. And thanks to everyone who bought stuff using the Althouse Amazon portal. Even though it costs you nothing extra to buy things through that route, it works to give me the message that you like what I've been writing here, and that means a lot.

"A Unicornucopia of Crazy."

"Princess Snowflake Sustainicorn can’t get through an hour without constant hugging and encouragement from everyone around him, lest he collapse into a puddle of unicorn tears...."

We suppose we should examine the whole psycho-drama and declare who was at fault for what and who was the victim of bullying here, but frankly, we can’t be bothered. We wouldn’t want to take a 1-minute elevator ride with either of them. They honestly should never have been allowed on the show, so crazy and off-base were their actions last night.

And the dress they made wasn't just bad, it had the kind of mullet hem that Vogue is distressed about seeing on high street in anytown. In the case of Princess Snowflake Sustainicorn and Grumpy Diana Prince, that town is Milwaukee, and I was distressed to witness the wipeout of "Team Wisconsin."