At the Happy Center Café...

... checking the rules of the game.

***

Here's the game: Hive Carbon. That's an Amazon link. And if you happen to have any other shopping you need to do, entering Amazon through this link will — at no extra cost to you — send me: 1. some money, and 2. the message that you appreciate what this blog gives to you. (That link is always at the top of the page, under the blog's title: click "Shop Amazon.")

"Tonight is the greatest night in the history of the gay rights movement."

"Gay marriage is being legalized in at least two, probably three states, the first time ever in the US it's been legalized by a popular vote rather than by courts or the legislature. Wisconsin elected the first openly gay Senator ever. And, maybe most importantly, the first pro-gay president ever has been re-elected. Because of Obama's re-election, the entire Democratic party will be openly pro-gay marriage, forever and without equivocation. Obama has proven that you can be truly pro-gay and win, and this will have a permanent effect on the entire Democratic party. This is a major turning point for gay rights, and a great contrast to 2008, when we had Obama but also Prop 8."

My son Chris wrote on Facebook last night.

"Ugh: really torn about which presidential ticket to vote for based on body fat percentage."

Ugh: really torn about which presidential ticket to vote for based on body fat percentage.
— Michael Ian Black (@michaelianblack) August 21, 2012

Ah! That takes me back! My first ever political post, on the second day of this blog, January 15, 2004:

Our local free tabloid, The Isthmus, has a nice set of columns comparing the Democratic candidates for President.

Hmmm.... "Little known fact: at 59, Wesley Clark has only 5% body fat."

Christopher asks, "Should it be Wesley Clark is 5% body fat?"

The link didn't go to the article in the Isthmus. I wasn't reading the article on line, but on newsprint. The link went to the entry in the Philosophical Dictionary to the "mind-body problem." Chris's question wasn't political, but philosophical (and linguistic). The Philosophical Dictionary link has died though, so I'm replacing it with the Wikipedia entry on the mind-body problem.

Now, I'm clicking back sequentially through those oldest posts: the first post about art, the first post about suicide, the first post about law, the first and second post about hair, the first post about language usage, and the first post (about blogging).

You could have been a YouTube star.

I see this 3-year-old girl is an international celebrity for climbing up the inside of a door frame... just like my son Chris used to do:

CNN puts blurry dots covering the breasts of a woman in a Matisse painting.

The clip is hilarious.

At 0:47, they cut to a voluptuous newswoman in a tight, low-cut shirt. It would have been cool if they'd put blurry dots over her breasts too.

(Thanks to my son Chris for IMing me about that. He says the effect was much more noticeable and ridiculous on HDTV, where he saw it.)

ADDED: Perhaps, like me, you thought of Attorney General John Ashcroft and the $8,000 drapery.

"If you order a Bloody Mary in Wisconsin, it comes with sausage, cheese, and beer!"

Chris, caught Facebooking at Graze.

Also on the skewer: an olive and a pickled brussels sprout.

Why are there 9 — not 5 and not 10 — Best Picture Oscar nominations and which are the real nominees...

... that is, the nominees that would be the nominees if, as in the old days, there were only 5 nominees. My 28-year old son Christopher Althouse Cohen does the analysis:

This year there are 9 nominees. There's a reason there are 9 instead of 10 (or 5). The category originally got expanded to 10 nominees after 2008, probably because a lot of mainstream moviegoers were upset that The Dark Knight was "snubbed" in favor of The Reader. The Academy figured that, if only there had been some more slots, The Dark Knight would have been nominated and the viewers would have been more happy.

The next year, there were 10 nominees, and it was a much more commercial lineup that included at least 5 box office hits (Avatar... District 9, Inglourious Basterds, Up, and The Blind Side). They probably liked seeing District 9 and Up nominated, but the critics largely didn't consider The Blind Side to be Oscar material. The next year, Inception and Toy Story 3 got nominated, probably because of the expanded category, but so did the not-particularly-good-for-ratings Winter's Bone and The Kids Are All Right.

The Academy probably thought the category was getting watered down, but they wanted to keep the category big enough so that some hit movies would keep getting in. So, they came up with some formula where there are at least five nominees, and other movies can get nominated (but no more than ten) if they meet a certain voting threshold. It happened to be 9 this year, but it could just as well have been 8, etc.

Here are the nominees:

The Artist
The Descendants
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
The Help
Hugo
Midnight In Paris
Moneyball
The Tree of Life
War Horse

So, let's figure out which of the 9 are the "real" nominees that would have made it into a normal, 5-nominee list, and which are the extra ones.
We just have to eliminate four of these movies. But first, there are two movies that are locks on the 5-nominee list, the ones that got by far the most nominations: The Artist and Hugo. Those have to be nominated, so really we just have 3 open slots and 7 movies to choose from.

The easiest to eliminate is Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which was such a surprise the journalists in the audience yelled out and gasped when they heard it announced. It only had one other nomination -- Supporting Actor -- and that too was considered a major surprise.

Now we're down to 6, and exactly half of these would have gotten nominated: The Descendants, The Help, Midnight In Paris, Moneyball, The Tree of Life, War Horse. That looks like a strong list, but since we can see what other Oscar nom's these movies got, it should be easier to whittle it down.

War Horse is the first of the remaining I'd remove from the list. It was considered a strong contender at one point, but Steven Spielberg didn't get a Director nomination, and even though it got six nominations, all of them other than Picture were in technical categories. It's never happened that a Spielberg movie got nominated for Best Picture without getting any other major-category nominations (though he did get snubbed in the Director category for The Color Purple).

I'd also get rid of The Help, because its other three nominations are all in acting categories. It didn't even get nominated for Adapted Screenplay.

So, finally, we have four movies left, one of which must be elimated: The Descendants, Midnight In Paris, Moneyball, and The Tree of Life.

Now the elimination is harder. The Descendants is probably the strongest of these. It just got 5 nominations, but they included Director, Actor, and Screenplay. Moneyball is the only one that wasn't nominated for Best Director. But almost every year when there were 5 Picture nom's, the Picture and Director categories didn't line up exactly. Moneyball did get a Screenplay nomination and two acting nom's, so it's fairly strong overall. What's most likely is that one of the remaining two -- Midnight In Paris or The Tree of Life -- would have been the movie nominated for Director but not Picture, and Moneyball would have been the Picture-but-not-Director movie.

Midnight In Paris is (from my count) the third Woody Allen movie to get a Best Picture nomination (after Annie Hall and Hannah and Her Sisters), but it's his sixth Director nom, so it's happened three times that his movie got the Director-but-not-Picture thing (Interiors, Broadway Danny Rose, Crimes and Misdemeanors, and Bullets Over Broadway). Midnight In Paris could have been the fourth one. But maybe not. Midnight In Paris was commercially successful in a way that those Picture-snubbed movies weren't. Annie Hall and Hannah and Her Sisters were hit movies with broad appeal when they came out. Midnight In Paris was kind of a hit, technically his highest grossing movie ever. With the expanded category, it was considered something of a lock. The Tree of Life, however, does not have broad appeal, is clearly an art movie, and feels like the sort of thing directors love but that gets fewer votes from other branches. Keep in mind, the nominations in each category are chosen by their respective branches, but everyone votes for the Best Picture nominees. Both of these movies got three nominations each this year. Midnight In Paris got Picture, Director, and Screenplay; The Tree of Life got Picture, Director, and Cinematography. I think it's close between the two, but I would go with The Tree of Life as the one that would have gotten left out.

So, with that, here are the real nominations for Best Picture today:

The Artist
The Descendants
Hugo
Midnight In Paris
Moneyball

or, perhaps:

The Artist
The Descendants
Hugo
Moneyball
The Tree of Life

I'd go with the former.

Purple angles.

A found spotlight.

Did you watch the TV coverage of the Iowa Caucuses all the way to the end?

I didn't, but Chris (my son) did. Here's our IM dialogue (with me in italics):

i went to bed early

was extremely long

were some amusing parts though

what?

like this http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/politics/2012/01/04/bts-iowa-caucus-edith-carolyn-highlights.cnn

I heard them say "It's too close to call" about 100 times, then I lost my mind, then I went to bed



some stuff on cnn... they sort of figured out the results before it was announced by talking to a precinct captain

there was a point where someone kept trying to "flick" a graphic back to the original tv and did it three or four times before it worked, and anderson cooper said something like "have we just given up?" (on reporting)

LOL [at the "Edith and Carolyn" video]

"whadya mean the numbers don't match"

yeah

what time of night was that?

i think around 1 am central

and it was after the point where they seemed like the news anchors couldn't take it anymore

anderson cooper in particular kept just insulting the graphics and stuff

LOL

there was a point when cooper said something like "if you miss any of this you can catch it all later on the daily show when he ruthlessly makes fun of you

if they had all the clips of everything that happened they could make it seem really funny but the problem is it was over the course of like 6-7 hours

Yeah, that's why I went to bed.

ADDED: You can watch the flickfail here.

Rick Perry's "oops."

How horrible is it?
	Utterly devastating.
	Horrible.
	Bad, but things like that can happen.
	Not such a huge deal. Relax, people.
	It's a trifle. Everyone blanks out sometimes, and he seemed good humored.
pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: My son John is live-blogging the debate, and here's how he covered the Perry gaffe:

9:17 - My brother Chris IMs (and gives me permission to quote):

Perry just had the worst moment of any candidate in a debate I think I've ever seen!

Perry started out by saying he was going to list 3 agencies that should be abolished. He said "Education, Commerce" — but then spent a very long time trying to think of the third one. Another candidate suggested: "EPA." Perry jokingly said, "Yeah, the EPA." The moderator asked Perry if he seriously meant the EPA, and he said no. Finally, he admitted he just couldn't think of the rest of his message. Perry ended his segment by actually saying out loud: "Oops!"

UPDATE: Perry comments:

"I'm glad I had my boots on tonight... I stepped in it out there.... I stepped in it, man. Yeah, it was embarrassing. Of course it was."

ADDED: I bet Rick Perry really hates the Energy Department now.

AND: Perry's Intrade stock crashed immediately. Click on "last day." It goes from around 9 to below 4 instantly.

"The Occupy Austin rally enjoys a calm, relaxing sunset."

"Presumably it's a little more active earlier in the day."



(Video by my son Chris.)

Siri on iPhone 4S.

My son Chris emailed to say he thinks it's creepy and...

If Steve Jobs were still in charge, would he have thought it was a good idea to put Hal the computer from 2001 on your iPhone as a primary feature?

... but I watched the video about it, and... wow! I love it!

And yes, I know, some article in the NYT said brain-imaging shows people literally love their iPhone.

I can tell you the point in the video when I fell in love: 0:50. A woman putting a cupcake batter in the oven tells the iPhone to set the timer.

On second viewing, I was struck by the low-key introduction of a blind woman: We see hands on Braille. She receives a spoken-word message and responds with speech. And that's the end of the video, the music comes up, and it's Ray Charles — he too was, of course, blind — singing "What'd I Say." Perfect!

Thanks for visiting!

Photo by Meade.

Attack on Althouse at the Wisconsin Capitol singalong.

As discussed in an earlier post, a man attacked me today at the Capitol. We captured the assault on 2 different cameras, and I'm not editing the material together (at least not at this point). First, here's what Meade got on the Flip camera. He wasn't deliberately filming me, so some of this is unframed or off camera.



The man doing all the talking about politics and religion is not the attacker. Please note how friendly and nonconfrontational I am. I don't put my camera in anyone's face. I'm just recording a guy who's basically performing for the camera. He's yelling at a friend who is a Christian minister (and a commenter here, as "caplight"). You can see my son Chris on the right, in dark sunglasses, at 3:00. The attacker is the man with the "solidarity" armband, visible clearly at 3:38.

In the middle of the screen, at 3:38, in the red "fist" T-shirt and holding a heart-shaped balloon, is the man who pointed me out in the rotunda yesterday and who (apparently) participated in the comments yesterday under the pseudonym "Dirty Hippie." He talks to the attacker just before the attacker yells "You're socially retarded" and attacks me. The attack is at 3:58, off camera. Meade yells "hey" a few times and gets the incident framed. At 4:00, you see Chris detaching that man's hands from me. At 4:04, I yell "police" and the 2 men mock me, yelling "police!" in their girlie voice. At 7:12, the talkative guy tells the police what "transpired." He clearly states that the other man grabbed my camera (and portrays himself as the peacemaker).

The second camera was held by me. I'm processing that now. It gives you a first-hand view of the attack and my discussion with the police.

ADDED: Here's my video, with explanatory text appearing as subtitles.

Thanks for dinner!

Nina makes dinner.

"Did you notice Obama kept using the words 'hope' and 'change' in the address on military action in Libya?"

That's an IM from my son Chris. Here's the text of the speech. 4 "hope"s. 9 "change"s.

What Meade noticed was the failure to talk about Congress. Searching the text, I see he said Congress once:

[N]ine days ago, after consulting the bipartisan leadership of Congress, I authorized military action to stop the killing and enforce UN Security Council Resolution 1973.

So... the leadership. Who, exactly? Boehner and Reid?

What I noticed was the implicit disrespect for George Bush:

In this effort, the United States has not acted alone....

When did we act alone? Is he trying to make us misremember what Bush did? 

Going forward, the lead in enforcing the No Fly Zone and protecting civilians on the ground will transition to our allies and partners, and I am fully confident that our coalition will keep the pressure on Gadhafi's remaining forces....

How clean and breezy, compared to what Bush did to Saddam.

And while the United States will do our part to help, it will be a task for the international community, and — more importantly — a task for the Libyan people themselves....

We .. had the ability to stop Gadhafi's forces in their tracks without putting American troops on the ground....

Of course, there is no question that Libya — and the world — will be better off with Gadhafi out of power. I, along with many other world leaders, have embraced that goal, and will actively pursue it through non-military means. But broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake....

If we tried to overthrow Gadhafi by force, our coalition would splinter. We would likely have to put U.S. troops on the ground, or risk killing many civilians from the air. The dangers faced by our men and women in uniform would be far greater. So would the costs, and our share of the responsibility for what comes next.

The implicit comparison is to what Bush did in Iraq.

To be blunt, we went down that road in Iraq. 

Now, it's explicit.

We have intervened to stop a massacre... We will... work with other nations to hasten the day when Gadhafi leaves power. It may not happen overnight, as a badly weakened Gadhafi tries desperately to hang on to power. But it should be clear to those around Gadaffi, and to every Libyan, that history is not on his side. With the time and space that we have provided for the Libyan people, they will be able to determine their own destiny, and that is how it should be.

Isn't that what the United States said to the Iraqi people after the Gulf War?

Back in the days when boys ate butter like it was candy.

Here's my son Chris back around 1987 (with analysis, in the end, from my other son John):

Oscars, anyone?

I haven't seen any of the movies, but I'm DVR-ing the show and will dip in from time to time. You can talk about it here and I might say something now and then.

For example, Jennifer Hudson has a smashing dress.

UPDATE: Man, this show sucks so bad.

UPDATE2: I'm IM-ing with my son Chris. I write: "is any celebrity saying anything pro-union or in support of the wisconsin protesters?" And he's all:

haven't heard anything

oh gwyneth paltrow mentioned you

in the middle of the song

she stopped and said you know ann althouse

needs to stop criticizing those protestors

LOL.

"Am I the only person left in the world who worries about spilling his coffee on his laptop?"

2 years ago.

ADDED: I ran across that after reading the colloquy between AllenS and Meade in the comments to the post about Brett's fuzzy penis:

AllenS: Jenn Sterger (the woman) was hired because of some sexy pictures of her in Sports Illustrated mag, that Brent Musberger thought would be a good matchup for the male dominated football sports sceen. Jenn and Brent are just as much at fault here. I'm thinking of sending the woman a picture of my penis also. Could I borrow the fish bowl lens?...

Meade: It's a fish eye lens. Fish eye. It's for taking shots of massive objects or scenes which a normal lens can't take all in. A fish bowl lens would be for taking shots of tiny things. Like Brett Favre's... ability to make good judgments.

AllenS: Ok, ok. Can I borrow the lens that makes stuff look bigger?

But, in fact, the fisheye works really well to make something look large if you get the camera lens right up at it. Lots of other stuff is including in the picture, arrayed all around and looking comparatively small. Frankly — and this is not an offer to AllenS — it would be really interesting to take pictures of naked men and get the extreme closeup on the genitalia with a well-composed and interesting background. I went looking through my old posts with the "fisheye" tag to find some that prove my point.

The second picture here of the fisheye dog makes this point very well. Get right up to the nose. The scenery in the background isn't as interesting as I'd want for my proposed compositions, but you can see how tiny Meade looks in the background (when in fact he was quite close by). Here's another photograph that illustrates the point, albeit with the female body:



That's from the Khmer Dynasty room at the Metropolitan Museum in NYC. Here's the effect of the lens looking at the room from the other side:



Here's some male and female nudity, to be fair:



That's the Museum of Natural History — not Brett and Jenn. You may recognize that couple from the movie "Election" — which is a great cautionary tale about the inadvisability of cheating on... many things (including your spouse).

And then — searching through the fisheye pictures — I found something that was extremely important to me: the purple tree, which had this.

"Do you guys TRY to not get laid?"

What did you get for Christmas?

I got ice skates...



... and the boys are in town.