Seated next to a trash can, I continue my quixotic search for the double-fisheye effect.

Where are we? At Intelligentsia, in Silver Lake....



Where dogs are comfy fuzzy foot rests:



ADDED:

Yes, I've seen it. You can stop alerting me.

I know the NYT published an article today on one of my longtime topics: men in shorts. I am only posting about it to put an end to your worries that I somehow missed it. I consider it a very poorly thought out article — shocking proof that the NYT passively observes fashion and lacks critical faculties. Excerpt:

“The idea of being threatened by the objectified male body has gone, the process is complete,” explained Aaron Hicklin, the editor in chief of Out magazine. “Men are the same as women now.”

Per Out magazine!

... A question arises, though, of what respectability looks like when underwear is routinely worn as outerwear and people travel in get-ups that look like onesies and the combined effects of a cosmetic surgery boom and an epidemic of obesity have given us all an uncommon level of intimacy with the contours of one another’s bodies.

So grotesque flesh spillage legitimates further grotesque flesh spillage. You want to know "what respectability looks like"? Apply some standards! Don't just glimpse about getting ideas about how all the standards have gone to hell.

If you're not going to be an arbiter of taste, why are you writing fashion articles? Or is the truth that fashion criticism in the New York Times has devolved into pop culture reportage. Sad!

Judge... that reminds me...

I'm supposed to be judging that "ATL Idol" contest. (Part 1. Part 2.) What have I got myself into? What if I hate everything? Somebody will still win, become the new Above the Law blogger, and I'll never get traffic-building links from there again!

Damn, maybe I should be the Paula. But I was going to be the Simon! Why coddle bloggers? If there's anyone that shouldn't be coddled it's a blogger. Nothing more disgusting than a coddled blogger.

That fish smells almost done.

UPDATE: I got my act together and wrote my first comment:

The most important part of blogging is —— to use an American Idol expression —— song selection. You should be spending much more time looking for good things to blog than actually writing up the post. But you've had your stories imposed on you, and they are stories that don't interest me at all. I clicked on the links, took a look, and couldn't be bothered. And why are they all about black people getting into trouble? Is that supposed to be funny?

But that's not the contestants' responsibility. You got stuck with that. It's like Mariah Carey night. I hate the songs, so how can I care how you sing them? You'd better do something very smart and tricky or I'm gone in a second. This is blogging! You have less than a second to reel me in. One thing I hated about the original articles is that they are complicated and about people I don't know and have no motivation to learn about. Why should I figure out what damned thing happened? So the least you could do is make it very short and funny in some way that didn't require me to understand a lot of crap I don't care about. But you all went long. And putting it in list form or as a series of steps doesn't fool me. It's still long and boring. Blah. I hate everything. You did not amuse me. I would never buy this record.

Some specifics:

Part 1: Exley. That lap dance picture. I was trying to read this sitting in the middle seat on an airplane between two large Harley Davidson bikers from New Zealand. That was an element of entertainment I didn't need. Then, I scrolled down to Alex's post and got a picture of some law books. Yeesh! It's one extreme or the other. And everyone runs with the photo of the smiling black man in happier days. That made me sad. But speaking of things women don't like, Alex, it's not cool to snark "lovers' quarrel" if a man has punched a woman in the stomach. And you've got that right next to a breast-emphasizing photo of the woman. Ugh.

Part 2: Frolic and Detour, only one phrase stood out: "groups of bridesmaids bonding as they make babies' footprints into tiny butterfly wings." Would I read a blog that offered me insight and entertainment in that form? No. You're sneering at ordinary women. Why? Who are you? Sophist falls back on the old device of how-to steps. I never find that funny. Seems like you could program a computer to turn news stories into a list of how-to steps. Here's a phrase: "back-end of the Lee gene pool." 1. Pools don't have a "back-end." You mean "shallow end." 2. Racism alert. Marin —— my eyes glazed over but I did see the phrase "picked himself up, dusted himself off." That made me want to run off to YouTube and watch Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Now, that was entertaining, but surely not the effect you want.

Vibrating...

... mascara.

Why?

You be the judge.

"Hello. Today, I'm having a little get together. With my friends."

Another NY/LA comparison.

Here, at the architecturally amazing Prada store in SoHo, I had to sneak a photograph on my way down to the basement level space where you can root around for something you may like and no one puts in an effort to make you believe you could wear those clothes.



Upstairs, you'll find all the handbags, where I think they make all the money, and the salespeople there will massage your credulity. In fact, I did buy a handbag, but never any clothes in this store that I visited many times.

Here's the Giorgio Armani store on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, where a lovely saleswoman sees that I admire that jacket trimmed with fur and feathers and says something to me — "It's fox" — that prompts me to ask a question about sizes and the long-nurtured desire for the perfect pantsuit.



Before long, I am trying on a selection of jackets — they do have my size — and I'm buying that suit. Chris peruses a history of Giorgio Armani, and they serve us glasses of water as we complete the expensive transaction.

Compare New York graffiti.

These are all from SoHo, photographed last spring.







Let's talk about the difference between New York graffiti and the California graffiti in the previous post. Does it say a lot about the difference between New York City and Los Angeles? Or are we only comparing beach hucksters and art poseurs?

Venice Beach graffiti, Melrose Avenue graffiti supplies.

In Venice Beach, California, the graffiti is institutionalized on a set of concrete walls, layered with new paint daily:



I don't know if it's also considered legitimate to spray paint the palm trees, but why not? There are plenty of unpainted palm trees, and no one seems to mind.



Here's a dazzling display of graffiti supplies in a store on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles:



Can we have some deep analysis of the reprocessing of imagery that was once racist — and is perhaps not still racist when used by the right people in the right way? I'm talking about "Mr. Black":

Wisecracks that are too easy to make.

Look at that headline.

IMAGE PRESERVED:

"He's the biggest celebrity in the world... O-BA-MA... O-BA-MA..."

He's a big celebrity, like Britney Spears and Paris Hilton... and gas prices are terrible.... get it? Being really famous and popular often goes along with being an empty nitwit, so if Obama is famous and popular, he's probably an empty nitwit. And gas prices are terrible.

∴ McCain.

It's logic!

IN THE COMMENTS: Bissage sings:

O-Ba-Me
O-Ba-Ma
Life goes on, brah!
La la how the life goes on.

Barack Obama at the University of Chicago Law School.

Jodi Kantor tells the story of Barack Obama at the University of Chicago Law School.

Mr. Obama... was well liked at the law school, yet he was always slightly apart from it, leaving some colleagues feeling a little cheated that he did not fully engage....

“I don’t think anything that went on in these chambers affected him,” said Richard Epstein, a libertarian colleague who says he longed for Mr. Obama to venture beyond his ideological and topical comfort zones. “His entire life, as best I can tell, is one in which he’s always been a thoughtful listener and questioner, but he’s never stepped up to the plate and taken full swings.”

What are we seeing here? A shy man? A cipher? A man with a hidden agenda?

Mr. Obama had other business on his mind, embarking on five political races during his 12 years at the school. Teaching gave him satisfaction, along with a perch and a paycheck, but he was impatient with academic debates....

This seems very practical. A good hypothesis is: Obama is a politician, through and through.

Mr. Obama arrived at the law school in 1991 thanks to Michael W. McConnell, a conservative scholar who is now a federal appellate judge. As president of The Harvard Law Review, Mr. Obama had impressed Mr. McConnell with editing suggestions on an article; on little more than that, the law school gave him a fellowship, which amounted to an office and a computer, which he used to write his memoir, “Dreams From My Father.”

On little more than that... Come on. That was an easy decision. And we needn't be coy about what the "little more" was:

The school had almost no black faculty members, a special embarrassment given its location on the South Side....

His most original course, a historical and political seminar as much as a legal one, was on racism and law....

Clearly, the law school's interests were served as Obama used it to build his political career.

“Are there legal remedies that alleviate not just existing racism, but racism from the past?” Adam Gross, now a public interest lawyer in Chicago, wrote in his class notes in April 1994.

It's really rather funny to quote this long-ago law student for a point that is one of most common questions in the law of race discrimination. This is another example of presenting the ordinary as amazing.

For all the weighty material, Mr. Obama had a disarming touch. He did not belittle students; instead he drew them out, restating and polishing halting answers, students recall.

This describes nearly all law professors I've known (through a period that began in 1978).

In one class on race, he imitated the way clueless white people talked. “Why are your friends at the housing projects shooting each other?” he asked in a mock-innocent voice.

Well, this is a bit interesting. He had a "clueless white" person voice that he used it class for laughs?

As his reputation for frank, exciting discussion spread, enrollment in his classes swelled. Most scores on his teaching evaluations were positive to superlative. Some students started referring to themselves as his groupies. (Mr. Obama, in turn, could play the star. In what even some fans saw as self-absorption, Mr. Obama’s hypothetical cases occasionally featured himself. “Take Barack Obama, there’s a good-looking guy,” he would introduce a twisty legal case.)

I'm sure he was a popular teacher, but there are many popular law professors, and the locution "groupie" is not as uncommon as Kantor's prose leads you to think.

Liberals flocked to his classes...

But the liberal students did not necessarily find reassurance....

For one thing, Mr. Obama’s courses chronicled the failure of liberal policies and court-led efforts at social change...

Ahem! This is the conventional left critique of liberalism! It is a call to a stronger form of political consciousness.

... He was wary of noble theories, students say; instead, they call Mr. Obama a contextualist, willing to look past legal niceties to get results.

This was not at all special. This was absolutely standard lefty lawprof talk at the time.

For another, Mr. Obama liked to provoke. He wanted his charges to try arguing that life was better under segregation, that black people were better athletes than white ones.

“I remember thinking, ‘You’re offending my liberal instincts,’ ” Mary Ellen Callahan, now a privacy lawyer in Washington, recalled.

Offending liberal instincts was what lefty lawproffing was all about in those days. Anyone who reads this article and imagines that Obama has some conservative leanings is not getting the context.

While students appreciated Mr. Obama’s evenhandedness, colleagues sometimes wanted him to take a stand. When two fellow faculty members asked him to support a controversial antigang measure, allowing the Chicago police to disperse and eventually arrest loiterers who had no clear reason to gather, Mr. Obama discussed the issue with unusual thoughtfulness, they say, but gave little sign of who should prevail — the American Civil Liberties Union, which opposed the measure, or the community groups that supported it out of concern about crime.

“He just observed it with a kind of interest,” said Daniel Kahan, now a professor at Yale.

I would assume that colleagues strongly approved of "evenhandedness" in the classroom — which is the conventional pose, even among lawprofs who are politically engaged outside of class. The key piece of information here is that Obama either sought to avoid making a record of what he thought or he actually lacked opinions.

After his loss in the 2000 Congressional primary race to former Black Panther Bobby L. Rush, "colleagues noticed that he seemed exhausted and was smoking more than usual," and they offered him a tenured faculty position (with a job for his wife). Think about that! He never produced a word of legal scholarship, after all those years teaching, and now they would simply give him tenure — at the University of Chicago Law School, a top 5 school, where the faculty is known for voluminous scholarly publishing. The case for tenure in law school depends predominantly on scholarship. You don't get tenure for being a very popular teacher. The failure to publish anything should be fatal to the tenure case of a lawprof who was hired with a belief in his promise as a scholar, but here tenure is bundled into the original offer to someone who had demonstrated that he lacked that promise. So this is interesting. The University of Chicago Law School has some explaining to do.

It's also interesting that Obama turned down the sumptuous offer. He chose to run for the U.S. Senate. But is this hard to fathom? I don't think so. I think he'd figured something out. He had made himself into something and he knew what it was. He couldn't win the district that embraced a former Black Panther. That meant something bad, but also something really good. He was a black politician who could break out the old limitations. Running for the Senate seat was the most rational thing for him to do at that point. The run for President came soon after. He knew what he was and what he might do. And that — not anything he did as a lawprof — was amazing.

Obama is everywhere!

Look!



"It's like Che," said the voice at the other end of that arm on Melrose Avenue.

He's lurking behind the mechanical fortune teller and the magic-mushroom beaded curtain in Venice Beach:



"Down with Bush"...



Says the visual pun (in Silver Lake).

"Obama is the new black."



Obama is everywhere.

Did you feel that 5.4 earthquake?

I was saying I'd like to experience an L.A. earthquake... nothing destructive, but something. So there was this big earthquake today. And I felt nothing! I don't know why? Do you not feel it if you're driving in a car? Do you not feel it if you're eating lobster and truffles at The Four Seasons?

Me and Bella.

In the NYT.

The whole diavlog is here.

ADDED: Here's the clip the NYT is featuring:

Beverly Hills Althouse, sweet potato fries, and the discovery of the double fisheye effect.

That gorgeous, undulating facade.

Here are 2 more shots of that facade I already raved about:





It is the Harry Winston store on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. You may be reluctant to step inside if you are not in the market for expensive jewelry, but please, go in anyway. The interior is truly beautiful, especially the ceilings in the oval antechamber and the main, rectangular part of the store. I would have loved to take some pictures of it, and I even asked if I could, though, as expected, the answer was no. The reason given surprised me a little: "For security reasons."

It made me think of this:

Sebelius, Kaine, Bayh, Biden — take your pick of the apparent finalists.

Seems like Biden is really the best...

ADDED: Adam Nagourney on why it's probably not going to be Clinton.

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.)

I created a vortex on Melrose Avenue.

ADDED:



(Big thanks to commenter Chip Ahoy!)

If you wonder what this place is, well, you can see from the sign that it's on Melrose Avenue, so go find it.

Here's what we said at the time:

This looks like what they do on "Trading Spaces" and the people come back and hate it.

The hay-on-the-wall episode!

Yeah.

There was also the moss-on-the-wall episode. This is the twigs all over the outside of your building episode.

Some things I like about Beverly Hills.

The facade!



The diagonal crossing!



The torso!



The shame ....



Just kidding! There's no shame.

Listening to presidential talk — is Barack Obama what we want to hear now?

"And the truth is that we've got a bunch of smart people, I think, who know ten times more than we do about the specifics of the topics. And so if what you're trying to do is micromanage and solve everything then you end up being a dilettante but you have to have enough knowledge to make good judgments about the choices that are presented to you."

It's Barack Obama, sounding smart and sensible in a casual conversation with British Tory Leader David Cameron. Drudge says this conversation was "caught on mic" so I was hoping for something revealing, but the linked article says the 2 men were "[s]eemingly unaware of an enormous fuzzy boom," which of course, means they were completely aware of the PR they were generating together.

By the way, I'm reading David Foster Wallace's essay about following around the McCain campaign in 2000, and it includes a helpful glossary with this item:

Weasel = The weird gray fuzzy thing that sound techs put over their sticks' mikes at scrums to keep annoying wind-noise off the audio. It looks like a large floppy mouse-colored version of a certain popular kind of fuzzy bathroom slipper. (N.B.: Weasels, which are sometimes worn by sound techs as headgear during OTSs when it's really cold, are thus sometimes known as tech toupees.)

(Don't buy the linked essay if you already have "Consider the Lobster." It's the same thing as "Up, Simba.")

What's the correct spelling — "mic" or "mike"? It's mike, obviously! Do you know any guys named Michael who spell their nickname "Mic"? Imagine 2 Michaels, Mike and Mic: Which one do you want to have a beer with?

So, anyway, if you think Obama sounds clever in that quote, realize that he's mainly saying "I'm the decider" — Bush's completely pithy and oft-ridiculed summary of the presidency.

And maybe it's time for a President with more elaborate language. Maybe we've heard enough from Mike and Mic is starting to sound really refreshingly wonderful.

There's something I like about L.A.

ADDED: The commenters get the answer easily. The men are all wearing long pants. If you have trouble understanding my opposition to men in shorts, look at this photo and visualize all the males in shorts. If you don't see the problem, I hope you are not dressing yourself.

Can you see what it is?

Greetings from L.A.!

Yeah!

"End of the Affair: Barack Obama and the press break up."

Oh! Do tell!

Around midnight on July 16, New York Times chief political correspondent Adam Nagourney received a terse e-mail from Barack Obama's press office. The campaign was irked by the Times' latest poll and Nagourney and Megan Thee's accompanying front-page piece titled "Poll Finds Obama Isn't Closing Divide on Race," which was running in the morning's paper. Nagourney answered the query, the substance of which he says was minor, and went to bed, thinking the matter resolved.

What was the query? Why are you being mean to me?

Read the whole thing. I'd say more, but my delayed flight is finally boarding, so you'll have to run with it.

"And it came to pass, in the eighth year of the reign of the evil Bush the Younger (The Ignorant)..."

"... when the whole land from the Arabian desert to the shores of the Great Lakes had been laid barren, that a Child appeared in the wilderness. The Child was blessed in looks and intellect. Scion of a simple family, offspring of a miraculous union, grandson of a typical white person and an African peasant. And yea, as he grew, the Child walked in the path of righteousness, with only the occasional detour into the odd weed and a little blow...."

Read the whole thing — in the London TimesOnline — or... wait... is this humor theme played out? This is a good example of something that takes no new insight. It's got to play out. This isn't satire. There's no critique of Obama in this, just continuous ga-ga admiration. I'm getting a tummy ache from all this candy.

ADDED: Just a bit of a sledgehammer. I know this guy is making fun of the deification. I'm saying that even this as a humor theme is played out. This is candy too. "The Daily Show" runs with jokes like this every damned night. I started blogging this article because I thought the mockery of the deification tasted pretty good. But then in the middle of putting up the post, I realized it was making me sick too!

CNN's horrific Obamamania.

I'm sitting in an airport where I'm forced to listen to CNN TV constantly, and the endless enthusiasm over Barack Obama is appalling. There's no pretense of journalistic neutrality. Barack Obama is getting a rockstar welcome... blah blah blah... ugh!

Will Americans get sick of hearing "Barack Obama" cheerleading? Even if you like him — and I kind of like him — it's cloying. Too much candy.

There's a lilting cadence to CNN's pronunciation of the name: ba-ROCKO-ba-ma, with an arcing, hopeful inflection. It's most noticeable when they say "John McCain" soon after. The nonObama candidate's name is said in a leaden singsong, ending in a flat low note.

If I were at home, I'd imitate the way they say the two names, but as I said, I'm in an airport, and my little foray into YouTubing would be even more annoying than the relentless CNN feed.

UPDATE: "Barack Obama is still in Europe...." And Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.

IN THE COMMENTS: The Drill SGT said:

I thought you had a crush on him?

You know what it's like? To continue with the "rockstar" trope. If a rockstar you like gets too popular and everyone's squealing over him, including a lot of people who seem to be excited by the popularity itself, well, then, it's just not cool to like him anymore. He's now popular for his popularity, and it makes you want to discover something new.

Another coffeehouse.

Once again, I rely on you, my dear friends, to keep the conversation going.

I will join you later today... from the west coast.

Talk about anything you want.

Obama talks to Berlin "as a citizen — a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world."

Text.

... Tonight, I speak to you not as a candidate for President, but as a citizen -- a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world....

[O]n the twenty-fourth of June, 1948, the Communists chose to blockade the western part of the city. They cut off food and supplies to more than two million Germans in an effort to extinguish the last flame of freedom in Berlin.

The size of our forces was no match for the much larger Soviet Army. And yet retreat would have allowed Communism to march across Europe. Where the last war had ended, another World War could have easily begun. All that stood in the way was Berlin.

And that's when the airlift began -- when the largest and most unlikely rescue in history brought food and hope to the people of this city.

The odds were stacked against success. In the winter, a heavy fog filled the sky above, and many planes were forced to turn back without dropping off the needed supplies. The streets where we stand were filled with hungry families who had no comfort from the cold.

But in the darkest hours, the people of Berlin kept the flame of hope burning. The people of Berlin refused to give up.

I guess we're not supposed to think about how Obama wanted and still wants to give up on the Iraq war. Surely, if he'd been there in 1948, he would have said the Berlin airlift is hopeless. He thought the surge was hopeless.

I won't excerpt the rest of the speech. You can read it, but I'll summarize: Come on, people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together, try to love one another, right now.

"I'll probably... peel off until the cake."

Out of context Obama quote of the day.

Yesterday's was:

They want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives, something that will relieve a chronic loneliness or lift them above the exhausting, relentless toll of daily life. They need an assurance that somebody out there cares about them, is listening to them -- that they are not just destined to travel down a long highway toward nothingness.

(Contextualized by me, here.)

An L.A. meetup?

I'll be blogging from L.A. soon, and as discussed here — where you gave me so many good tips — I may do a meetup with blog readers. If you think you might come, email me at my gmail address (annalthouse) so I can see if the numbers are there and, if it's going to happen, give you the time and place.

"I do not enjoy the suggestion that you have a better ear or eye for how I want my words to read than I do."

It's Giles Coren, getting "mightily pissed off" about copy editing — over the deletion of the word "a" — and with good reason. (Via Metafilter.) I completely understand the sentiment, and I love the thoroughly British tone of the complaint letter.

There is no length issue. This is someone thinking "I'll just remove this indefinite article because Coren is an illiterate cunt and i know best".

Well, you fucking don't.

This was shit, shit sub-editing for three reasons....

2) I will now explain why your error is even more shit than it looks. You see, i was making a joke. I do that sometimes. I have set up the street as "sexually-charged". I have described the shenanigans across the road at G.A.Y.. I have used the word 'gaily' as a gentle nudge. And "looking for a nosh" has a secondary meaning of looking for a blowjob. Not specifically gay, for this is soho, and there are plenty of girls there who take money for noshing boys. "looking for nosh" does not have that ambiguity. the joke is gone. I only wrote that sodding paragraph to make that joke. And you've fucking stripped it out like a pissed Irish plasterer restoring a renaissance fresco and thinking jesus looks shit with a bear so plastering over it. You might as well have removed the whole paragraph. I mean, fucking christ, don't you read the copy?

Jesus with a bear? Some Christian iconography I haven't heard of? Or is that another one of his gay jokes, which it could be even if it is only a typo for "beard." I mean, I understand this Coren character is simultaneously fabulously subtle and crude.

3) And worst of all. Dumbest, deafest, shittest of all, you have removed the unstressed 'a' so that the stress that should have fallen on "nosh" is lost, and my piece ends on an unstressed syllable. When you're winding up a piece of prose, metre is crucial. Can't you hear? Can't you hear that it is wrong? It's not fucking rocket science. It's fucking pre-GCSE scansion. I have written 350 restaurant reviews for The Times and i have never ended on an unstressed syllable. Fuck. fuck, fuck, fuck.

Scansion. Railing about scansion in prose. Metre is crucial. I agree!

ADDED: I've searched the internet for Jesus with a bear and found this very cool painting from Jim Woodring.



(Click image to enlarge.)