What do you say to the woman who consciously loathes Scott Walker, but has sexual dreams about him?

Well, the Isthmus advice columnist "Tell All" told her:

Clip out the sexiest Tom Barrett photos you can find in newspapers or campaign literature. Scatter them around your house, and save the best one for the bedroom. Look at it every night before you go to sleep. With any luck, your subconscious will do the rest by supplying you with a more suitable sexual partner in your dreams.

And then Meade stopped by the comments. Noting first her line "I should mention that I'm happily married, with an attractive husband," Meade said:

Man, talk about damning with faint praise! Dear Violated: First of all you have not been violated. You have been the violaTOR... of your marriage, of your husband's due respect, and of your own fantasies.



Photos of Tom Barrett? Tell All needs to turn in his newspaper-advice-columnist badge. And the last thing you need is to waste your time with a psychotherapist.

What you need to do is to practice sweet surrender to your husband so that, with any luck, he will discover his manhood and learn that what his wife and most heterosexual women want more than anything is to be sexually dominated by a man who will stand up and be strong, decisive, and confident.

Try this, Violated: Everyday, tell your husband that you approve of him, that you love everything about him, and that he has your open consent and carte blanche in your sexual relationship. Together, just the two of you, over and over again, watch scenes like this one from the movie Casablanca where Ilsa tells Rick that he will have to do the thinking for both of them.

Good luck, Violated. Try to give up thinking of yourself as a victim and remember, if things don't work out in your private love life, you will always have Scott Walker.

Background reading: a column from "Tell All" from April 4, 2009, titled "Should UW law prof Ann Althouse marry her commenter Meade?"

ADDED: Instapundit says: "MEH. CHICKS DIG THE BAD BOYS... In her measly little world, he’s the ultimate bad boy." Exactly.

Wikipedia Article of the Day: "Exploding Cigar."

"The customary intended purpose of exploding cigars is as a form of hostile practical joke, rather than to cause lasting physical harm to the butt of the joke."

Although far rarer than their prank cousins, exploding cigars used as a means to kill or attempt to kill targets in real life has been claimed, and is well represented as a fictional plot device. The most infamous case concerning the intentionally deadly variety was an alleged plot by the CIA of the US in the 1960s to assassinate Fidel Castro. Notable real life incidents involving the non-lethal ilk include an exploding cigar purportedly given by Ulysses S. Grant to an acquaintance and a dust-up between Turkish military officers and Ernest Hemingway after he pranked one of them with an exploding cigar....

A well known use of the exploding cigar in literature, for example, appears in Thomas Pynchon's 1973 novel, Gravity's Rainbow....  Other book examples include Robert Coover's 1977 novel, The Public Burning, where a fictionalized Richard Nixon hands an exploding cigar to Uncle Sam...

Film examples include... in The Beatles' 1968 animated feature film, Yellow Submarine, where an exploding cigar is used to rebuff a psychedelic boxing monster... Appearance of exploding cigars in the Warner Bros. cartoon franchises, Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes was fairly common, often coupled with the explosion resulting in the pranked character appearing in blackface. Some examples include: Bacall to Arms (1942), wherein an animated Humphrey Bogart gets zapped by an exploding cigar leaving him in blackface...

Let's look that up.... oh, my....



ADDED: I like this scientific demonstration:

"Small men feel... that the world belongs to big men. Seeing men you know to be small playing big on the silver screen is comforting...."

So says the small Fish — small fry — Stanley, who loves the short — under 5'9" — actors who play tough guys in the movies:

The pattern was set in the 1930s and ’40s by Edward G. Robinson (“Little Caesar”), James Cagney, George Raft, Humphrey Bogart and Paul Muni — all small men who usually played tough and cruel. Sometimes camera angles obscured the physical facts — Robinson looked absolutely huge as Wolf Larsen in “The Sea Wolf” in what can be called, without irony, a towering performance — and sometimes the camera just didn’t care as when, for example, Cagney regularly beat up men obviously twice his size.

Slightly later came John Garfield, and the smallest of them all, Alan Ladd who played big in “The Blue Dahlia,” “The Glass Key,” “The Badlanders” and who more than holds his own against Ben Johnson and a tree-like Van Heflin in “Shane.”...

Famously slight Paul Newman displayed his chest and pugilistic abilities in movies like “Somebody Up There Likes Me,” “Hud,” “The Long, Hot Summer” and “Cool Hand Luke.” James Dean would have made the list had he lived longer. Now aging tough guy-short guys (by short I mean under 5-foot-9) include Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, Robert DeNiro, Harvey Keitel, Al Pacino, Mel Gibson, Jean Claude Van Damme and Sylvester Stallone, who created not one but two iconic American males, Rocky and Rambo.

And these days we have a bumper crop of undersized super heroes — Tom Cruise, Tobey Maguire, Mark Wahlberg and Robert Downey Jr., along with the occasionally macho Johnny Depp and Sean Penn.

Is there something comparable for women? Maybe we could make a list of women who have fairly average looks who play beautiful women on screen. My favorite example of this is Bette Davis in "Mr. Skeffington," where the raving over Bette's beauty occasionally crosses the line into the laughable. No man could resist her:



Ah, yes! I remember laughing out loud in the theater when she comes down the stairs and a man exclaims "Fanny! You look beautiful!" And check out that death-bed dialogue: "A woman is beautiful only when she is loved." That's what the plain women in the audience — next to the hubbies they dragged to the chick flick — long to believe.

"This is why I've often said that legal ethics is to actual ethics as Madison, Wisconsin is to James Madison..."

"... the former is vaguely inspired by the idea of the latter."

Sasha Volokh disses Madison in the comments to a Volokh Conspiracy post by Judge Paul Cassell.

The post is about whether it's ethical for a judge to perform a marriage ceremony for the defendant he's just sentenced. Lawprof Stephen Gillers had said "It would show very poor judgment for the court to perform this ceremony or even to entertain the possibility. He should have shot this down as soon as they asked. He's not there to perform weddings; he's there to send a man to jail" and "I suspect that in 232 years of American history, it's never happened that a [federal] judge has performed a marriage ceremony for a defendant awaiting sentencing in a serious felony case in his own court."

But Cassell himself had performed such a marriage. He says: "I thought it was important to honor the request for the defendant for the service because I thought it would improve his prospects for rehabilitation if he knew he had lovely wife willing to wait for him." But he concedes that it might be a ploy for leniency or inadvisable for some other reason. (Gillers was commenting on a child pornography case where the 42-year-old defendant was marrying a 21-year-old.) In classic judicial fashion, Cassell thinks the matter can be trusted to the discretion of the trial judge.

So that's the post. It's interesting.

But what's with dissing Madison? If we could reanimate James Madison and show him this place, would he really have such a problem with us?

***

Several other commenters at VC bring up "The African Queen." I couldn't find a YouTube clip for the glorious scene they were referring to, but I did run across the trailer, which might make you want to rewatch the whole movie to get to the part the commenters were talking about. (Not sure what they meant to prove there, as the ethics are demonstrated by a Nazi.)



AND: Thanks to commenter Bearbee, here's that marriage scene (a big spoiler if you haven't seen the movie):



AND: Just watched the clip. "By the authority vested in me by Kaiser William II, I pronounce you man and wife. Proceed with the execution." So those weren't Nazis. The movie takes place in 1914, at the outset of WWI. Sorry for the vague memory. So Rosie's dress wasn't all that old-fashioned. Note too that it's the ship captain who performs the marriage (and gives the sentence), not a judge.

MORE: In the comments, Sasha denies that he dissed Madison, I argue with him, and he responds. Also, Sasha's analogy inspires a contest.

AND: Eugene enters the fray.

The Bastille Day post.

Over in the comments at Sheila Variations, they are discussing the ending of "Casablanca":

Sadly, I think if I was on that tarmac, I'd go with Rick Blaine. If his WORK is so important to Lazslo, then let Lazslo marry his work!! Let me have my grand passion and leave me alone!! Greater good, my ass. We only live once, and I want to gather ye rosebuds while ye may.

Then the discussion gets sidetracked to whatever anyone feels like saying about the movie or whatever (including a half-eaten grilled cheese sandwich), and someone writes:

One of my favorite moments in the movie is Bogie giving the subtle head-nod across the bar to the orchestra - for them to pick up Marseillese ... member that? Apparently, they did that shot before they knew how the scene would go - so in real life, Bogie had no idea what he was nodding to. Feckin' amazing - it is such a moving moment. Bogart, the "I stick my neck out for nobody" cynic - giving Lazslo and the orchestra permission to drown out the Nazis. But Bogart was just told "Okay, we need a shot of you nodding - So nod." Bogie, man. He blows me away.

And someone else says:

That whole scene - Henreid upping the ante on Strasser, paying the band, the bandleader looking at Rick, the nod, the whole crowd scene - is the most gloriously manipulative scene ever! I laugh and cry and sing along and wriggle with schmaltzfreude and watch it over and over...

And then:

that scene of the orchestra rising to the occasion - and the crying French woman (the one who was wasted in the first scene and had to be escorted out of the bar) - she KILLS ME!! Crying and singing along to that song with all her might.

And all this talk of the Marseillaise reminds me that it is Bastille Day and that I wanted to link to Nina's post exposing the alarming words of the French national anthem (which begins with an innocent enough call to children to come along):

The howling of these fearsome soldiers
They are coming into our midst
To cut the throats of your sons and consorts...

Let impure blood
Water our furrows

Reveling in cutting the throats of the impure? A bit like our modern terrorist enemies, isn't it? But a national anthem can be a call to arms, and it worked brilliantly as a call to arms in "Casablanca."