Mitt Romney and his running mate, Paul Ryan.

At the town hall meeting in Middleton, Wisconsin this evening, there was a big crowd:



With an overflow room:



I was surprised how short Romney is. On line, I see his height listed as 6'2". In person, he looked about 5'9".

Anyway... the team of Romney and Ryan was excellent. They answered questions from people as equal partners — some deference to Romney, but basically equals. Ryan is a terrific speaker, and he got more applause than Romney a couple times. Hearing them answer the same question, one after the other, I kept thinking Ryan is the stronger of the 2. And that's not to say Romney was unappealing, just less intense.

Surely, Romney will pick Ryan as his VP. Right?

I had the feeling there were 2 future Presidents in the room.

IN THE COMMENTS: chickenlittle says "Head size is an ongoing theme at Althouse" and links to this old post where I quote Tina Brown:

The heads of world-class celebrities literally seem to enlarge. Hillary Clinton's, for instance, has grown enormously since she was the mere wife of the governor of Arkansas. It nods when she talks to you like a balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. The years of limelight so inflated the circumference of Jackie O's cranium, it seemed her real face must be concealed by an oversized Halloween mask. If you looked into her eyes, you could see her in there somewhere, screaming.

"There is nobody in this country who got sex on their own. Nobody. You got elected president out there - good for you."

"But I want to be clear. You floated your rubber ducks in bathtubs the rest of us paid for. You hired interns the rest of us paid to indoctrinate. You were safe in a swimming pool that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that Jackie would return home suddenly, and ruin everything... Now look. You built Camelot and it turned into something terrific. Great idea - God bless! Be a hunk in it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a few of those Cuban cigars and leave them in the Oval Office for the next kid who comes along."

Meade, commenting on the post about JFK and his 19-year-old intern.

ADDED: In case you don't recognize the source for this satire, it's this.

"I think women should never be in politics. We're just not suited to it."

Said Jackie Kennedy.

"He came back over to the White House to his bedroom and he started to cry, just with me."

"He came back over to the White House to his bedroom and he started to cry, just with me. You know, just for one -- just put his head in his hands and sort of wept... It was so sad, because all his first 100 days and all his dreams, and then this awful thing to happen. And he cared so much."

JFK, the bookworm.

"He was a voracious reader who brought books with him into the bathtub, and even tried to read at meals and while doing his tie."

From the Jackie tapes. Also, he changed into his pajamas before taking a midday nap and, each evening, he knelt by the side of the bed to say his prayers. Went to confession too:

As president, he occasionally slipped into a confession booth in Palm Beach, Fla., "like anyone would," she said, with a Secret Service agent holding a place in line for him and the priest never knowing he'd just had the president in the confessional.

Can we get some fact-checking on this stuff?

"Violently liberal women in politics" preferred Adlai Stevenson to JFK because they "were scared of sex."

Oh my! The transcript of the Jackie Kennedy tapes has hit the NYT.

“Suddenly, everything that’d been a liability before — your hair, that you spoke French, that you didn’t just adore to campaign, and you didn’t bake bread with flour up to your arms — you know, everybody thought I was a snob and hated politics,” she tells Mr. Schlesinger. All of that changed. “I was so happy for Jack, especially now that it was only three years together that he could be proud of me then,” she says. “Because it made him so happy — it made me so happy. So those were our happiest years.”...

Describing the night of the inauguration, she recalled that she was both recovering from a Caesarean section and exhausted. She skips dinner and takes a nap. But she finds herself unable to get out of bed to attend the inaugural balls until Dr. Janet Travell, who would become the White House physician, materializes and hands her an orange pill.

“And then she told me it was Dexadrine,” Mrs. Kennedy says.

The Jackie Tapes: LBJ was behind the JFK assassination.

She spoke with historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. shortly after the assassination on tape recordings that Caroline Kennedy has decided to release early, supposedly "in exchange for ABC dropping its £10 million drama series about the family."

Also on the tapes: Jackie's belief that JFK was "having an affair with a 19-year-old White House intern," that she had affairs with movie star William Holden and Fiat founder Gianni Agnelli, and that "weeks before Mr Kennedy’s assassination, the couple had turned a corner in their relationship and were planning to have more children."

"I do think I’m in love with you when I’m with you."

"But it’s awfully hard for me to stay in love with someone when I only see them every three months and when the only contact I have with them is through letters."

An interesting, early — 1947 — use of "them" for "him," from Jacqueline Lee Bouvier, writing, when she was 16, to a beau who was not JFK.

During the last episode of "Sarah Palin's Alaska," TLC put up this teaser for its special "Kennedys' Home Movies."

Yes, they are both TLC shows, but why did TLC think the people watching a show about Sarah Palin and her family would be susceptible to a show about the Kennedys? (Meade raised this question in the comments to the post earlier today about "Sarah Palin's Alaska.")

Your first thought might be that it doesn't make much sense because liberals love the Kennedys and conservatives love the Palins. But let's assume TLC isn't run by idiots, that they know how to appeal to viewers. If you had to argue that a good chunk of the "Sarah Palin's Alaska" audience would like to watch "Kennedys' Home Movies," what would you argue?

I'd say: Not all American TV-watchers are strongly grounded in one political party or the other. These people are not cemented to abstract ideology. They may feel their way into politics through personalities. Or they may not care that much about politics at all and simply enjoy peering into the family lives of celebrities, and politicians are a special, elite breed of celebrity, like royalty. The Kennedys have been, for many people, America's royalty, and the Palins may be the new royal family that people who like that sort of thing like.

Obviously, there are differences. The Kennedys posed as European-style aristocracy, and the Palins present themselves as working-class Americans. But both are very much big, colorful families with a strong sense of geographical place — Massachusetts/Alaska — and a mesmerizingly beautiful and feminine woman to fascinate us. Both families have a lot of children who we get to see looking robust and active in outdoor settings — especially boats.

There's a romanticism of the family about it all. I'm not saying that's good. It's a point of entry by which political opinion seeps into a certain very common type of American brain. And it happens through television. Pay attention.

***

By the way, what do you think of the crazy culture clash that is Johnny Cash singing the Beatles ("In My Life") over home movies of the Kennedys?

"Disappointment for Katie Holmes over axed Jackie Kennedy series."

1. First, of all: "axed." Should we be saying "axed"? There hasn't be a high-profile ax murder in a while, and now if there is one, The Daily Mail will have to answer for it.

2. Katie Holmes looks a little like Jackie in that get-up, but something's missing — something in the legs and arms proportionality. And that expression! Why is Katie always so sad?!

3. "JFK's niece Maria Shriver, and his daughter, Caroline Kennedy, are reported to have lobbied hard for the History Channel to pull the plug on the series." Katie and Tom less powerful than Maria and Caroline? Noooo!

4. A History Channel spokesperson said: "While the film is produced and acted with the highest quality, after viewing the final product in its totality we have concluded this dramatic interpretation is not fit for the History brand... We recognise historical fiction is an important medium for storytelling and commend all the hard work and passion that has gone into the making of the series, but ultimately deem this as the right programming decision for our network." Find the lies in that statement. Why'd they approve of the production in the first place if that sort of thing isn't "right" for them?

5. Sorry about the "Schwarzenegger" tag. I don't feel like making a separate tag for Maria Shriver.

2 ways of looking at Michelle Obama.

1. She's "an incredibly graceful surrogate” for the President and inspires “warm and fuzzy” feelings.

2. "She's got this Stokely Carmichael-in-a-designer-dress thing going. If she starts talking... her instinct is to start with this blame America, you know, I'm the victim. If that stuff starts to coming out, people will go bananas and she'll go from being the new Jackie O. to being something of an albatross."

#1 is from Nina Totenberg, who still works for NPR. And #2 is from Juan Williams, who used to work for NPR. If statements like #1 are acceptable and statements like #2 get you fired, is that not viewpoint discrimination?

Do people become famous because their heads are large, or does celebrity actually cause the head to enlarge?

Over in last night's "American Idol" thread, Trooper York wrote:

The girl that sang "At Last" has an extremely big head. Which is very good since most popular actors have heads out of proportion to their bodies.

This reminds me of something that I read a while back in Tina Brown's excellent book "The Diana Chronicles":

What struck me at lunch was how much celebrity itself had transformed Diana's appearance. I have come to think that being looked at obsessively by people you don't know actually changes the way your face and body are assembled — not just in the obvious ways of enhanced fashion sense or tricks of charm and self-possession, but in the illusion of size. The heads of world-class celebrities literally seem to enlarge. Hillary Clinton's, for instance, has grown enormously since she was the mere wife of the governor of Arkansas. It nods when she talks to you like a balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. The years of limelight so inflated the circumference of Jackie O's cranium, it seemed her real face must be concealed by an oversized Halloween mask. If you looked into her eyes, you could see her in there somewhere, screaming.

"They reacted with casual glances when Jackie Kennedy came down the mountain to window-shop."

Life in Thurmont.

Robert Drew's great documentary "Primary" -- about JFK and Hubert Humphrey in the Wisconsin Primary -- free, tonight, at Cinematheque.

New students, old residents, you should know about Cinematheque. Drop by tonight at Vilas Hall at 7:30 for this fine 60 minute film.

And make note of the rest of the films in the "Vote Cinema: American Politics on Film" series. There are various different series and special events this fall, including "Deviants, Delinquients, and Do-Gooders: Hollywood Social Problem Films of the 1950s."

Here's the whole fall calendar.

Cinematheque is one of the coolest things about UW-Madison. And again: It is free.

ADDED: Here is an interview with Albert Maysles (the cinematographer) about the part of the film where we see Jackie Kennedy's gloved, fidgeting hands:



And here's a long clip from [another] film that gives background on Richard Nixon. I love the charming retro "Stick with Dick" sign. And Richard Nixon, turning on the charm for Nikita Krushchev, just hilarious. Lots more too.



ADDED: Sorry, I misread the label on the second video clip, which popped up in YouTube. It has a completely different documentary style, but some great historical clips. If I remember "Primary" correctly -- I've seen it but have loaned out my DVD -- it's entirely about Kennedy and Humphrey in Wisconsin. Here's some background on the style of "Primary":

[C]inema verite -- choosing moments where action might occur instead of creating it -- ... was the brainchild of Robert Drew, an editor at Life magazine. He believed the magazine enjoyed its success because it brought into the home pictures of action in the midst of happening -- four soldiers struggling to plant the flag at Iwo Jima, for instance -- and he wanted to extend that concept to documentaries. "I thought all we had to do was put a Life photographer who valued candid photography behind a motion picture camera, and we could make a new kind of film." But thanks to an eight-man crew that had to stop and set heavy equipment on tripods, action eluded capture.

Then Mr. Drew started to experiment with lightweight cameras and sound recorders. In 1959, under the banner of Drew Associates, he put together a film crew, all of whom went on to write their names on the pages of documentary history: Albert Maysles, Terence Filgate (a film maker well known in his native Canada), Richard Leacock ("Monterey Pop") and D. A. Pennebaker ("Don't Look Back," "The War Room").

The film makers set out in the dark: they were making documentaries with no directors, no scripts, no sets, no lights, little or no narration and no interviews. To be at the right place at the right moment was everything. They considered themselves neutral observers who merely recorded ongoing events and had, as much as possible, no point of view. Their first important work was "Primary," which tracked Senators John F. Kennedy and Hubert H. Humphrey through the cold 1960 Wisconsin Democratic Presidential primarily...

Their approach, says Mr. Filgate, offered an alternative to the Edward R. Murrow style of documentaries. "It was as if we were butterfly hunting. We knew there were butterflies in the woods, but we didn't know what kind, and we didn't know how we were going to catch them; whereas in the journalistic documentary, a reporter says, 'On my left, hidden in the bushes, are thousands of butterflies.' And then the camera cuts away to the bushes. Drew, with 'Primary,' broke that mold."

Waiting for the South Carolina results.

CNN has an on-screen countdown. 3:09 and counting down!

UPDATE: They plan to project the winner immediately. 22 seconds to go.

UPDATE 2: CNN projects "a strong victory for Barack Obama."

UPDATE 3: CNN shows Edwards and Clinton in a close fight for second, with Edwards getting more of the white vote than Clinton (39% to 36%).

UPDATE 4: There he is! Barack Obama! CNN has just told us that Caroline Kennedy endorses Obama and thinks he's like her father. And now we see Barack hand in hand with Michelle, who's wearing a Jackie Kennedy-invoking pink suit. "We are hungry for change, and we are ready to believe again." Chant: "We want change! We want change!" The huge banner in back of him says "CHANGE we can believe in." The lectern in front of him says "Change." People want to tell you that white people won't vote for the African-American, but "we are here tonight to tell you that is not the America we believe in."

"Kraft singles on white bread was one of this President's most requested lunch items."

Writes Walter Scheib, former White House Executive Chef, fired by Laura Bush in 2005. Don't mess with the chef. He knows those embarrassing facts about you, like the way you like processed cheese and white bread, and is not afraid to tell the world.

Scheib, a professionally trained cook with an outstanding CV even before he started work at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, tells me flatly that making lunch for Bush was "not very challenging and didn't really require any of my professional training".

But according to Scheib, this is not a making a partisan or political statement. During our conversation over coffee in a swish New York bar, he does refer to the burgers and 'dogs to which his first Presidential employer, Bill Clinton, was partial. Yet Scheib's book, White House Chef, part memoir, part cookbook, clearly shows who he preferred working for, and why, during his 11 years in the basement kitchen, even if his professionalism - and presumably his desire to work for the big guns again - rule out any the dishing of any serious dirt....

"The White House is a private home," says Scheib. "And the important thing is to achieve what residents want - whether that's a bowl of chicken soup when they're not well or a state dinner for 900 people. Each is important and I submit that the chicken soup may even be more critical to your long-term success."

Scheib, or "Cookie" as President Bush liked to call him, is frustratingly discreet when it comes to talking about his tête-à-têtes over toast with his employers.

Aw, Cookie. I guess he's not a rat. But now the book's no fun at all! Weren't you ready to go to the bookstore and check the index for all the Hillary stuff? Check out the acknowlegements:

"Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, for taking a chance on me - you literally changed my life and I'll be in your debt forever - and President William Jefferson Clinton, for your good humour and social grace - I actually believe it when you say you are happy to see me. President George W Bush and First Lady Laura Bush - it was my pleasure to serve you."

Miaow. But when I mention this to Scheib he mumbles and says only, "Well, the temperament of the two families is substantially different."

"Both first ladies had eclectic palates," Scheib reveals. "Both presidents on the other hand, if you'd opened a barbeque or rib joint in the basement, would have been happy as clams...."

And if you'd opened up a clam joint in the basement, they'd've been...

When Bill Clinton swept into the White House with his forceful wife at his side, it was Hillary who decided to bring a new type of cuisine to the White House and it's never ending stream of guests. Less than two years after moving in, she began searching for an experienced chef. "There was this idea that great cuisine should be driven not by complicated techniques but by tremendous, fresh, ripe, spectacular, seasonal ingredients. It should be a flavour-driven concept. She wanted someone who could modernise the White House menu by moving away from the traditional French style and towards modern American cuisine." Scheib says.

In other words, Hillary was up on what had been the most well-known food trend of the previous 20 years. She's so amazing!

Surprisingly neither Bill nor Hillary ever asked for any cooking tips.

So Hillary didn't want to make cookies, Cookie?

Bill liked smoked mozzarella and pepperoni calzones with spicy tomato sauce, Southern fried chicken and Porterhouse steak (24 ounces, no less) with béarnaise sauce, while Hillary requested dishes such as curried Cornish hen, tuna melt with no-fat cheese, and cabbage rolls with shredded turkey and mixed vegetables.

Which food preference suggests better aptitude for the Presidency?

While the Clintons had been an inclusive group, who made staff a part of their extended family, the situation was distinctly different with the Bushes - from day one.

"With Laura it was simply, You're in a domestic position. We respect your professionalism, we like what you've done, everything is fine, but you're not our friend,'" says Scheib. "And a lot of my classic training was suddenly no longer necessary."...

The new President was into simpler food than his predecessor. "He didn't like soup or salad, or anything green," says Scheib. "He really just wanted beef and anything that could be prepared in Tex-Mex style. There was little challenge in preparing the President's lunch."

He really just wanted beef and anything that could be prepared in Tex-Mex style. Actually, that food preference seems really presidential to me. I mean if you were a PR person and it was your job to make up a lie about what your candidate eats, wouldn't that be the best lie?

President Bush was also reluctant to dine with his wife if she had friends over for lunch or if she was having anything fancy'. "He wanted one of his go-to items such as a cheese sandwich or a peanut butter and honey sandwich on white toast with potato chips," says Scheib.

Sounds right to me. I remember reading that Jackie Kennedy liked to have just a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch. Suddenly, it seems completely elegant, doesn't it?

The book is "White House Chef."

Last Sunday's "Sopranos" episode: "Kennedy and Heidi."

I'm a little late to this, but I want to talk about the most recent episode of "The Sopranos." Of course, there are major spoilers below.

I watched this episode once, thought about it, slept on it, and then I woke up this morning -- as they say -- and had so many ideas about it that I came downstairs at 5 a.m. so I could watch it again on the "on demand" channel. I felt pretty sure that Tony had died in the episode, because of the way it ended with him standing in a landscape, staring at the sun and screaming "I get it!" But at what point does he die? When do we shift from life to afterlife? I'm drafting this post as I re-watch with lots of pausing and rewinding, but this isn't pure simulblogging. I go back and rewrite, as this sentence shows.

The episode is titled "Kennedy and Heidi." Heidi and Kennedy are, most conspicuously, the two girls in the car that Christopher swerves around as he loses control of his SUV. Kennedy, the passenger, asks if they should go back and help, but Heidi refuses because she's driving after dark on a learner's permit. Why do their names belong in the title to this episode where the central occurrence is Tony's murdering Christopher after the car crash?

Kennedy is an evocative name, and in earlier episodes Tony has shown an interest in President Kennedy. (He owns the dead President's hat.) Later in the episode, at Christopher's viewing in the funeral home, someone comments that his widow has adopted the Jackie Kennedy look. But why Heidi? If it's the character Heidi from the novel "Heidi," the reference is to a young girl who is so optimistic and good-hearted that she brings an isolated, mean old man back into the community. Our car-driving Heidi is all cold-hearted selfishness, so maybe it means that absolutely nobody is good in this damned world anymore, and nobody can ever save the horrible, nihilistic Tony.

Before the crash, Christopher is driving his SUV -- he's the driver, thus corresponding to Heidi -- and he's having a conversation with Tony -- who as the passenger, could be said to be the Kennedy. (Maybe he'll get shot in the head in the end.) They're having a conversation about a deal with Phil over the disposal of asbestos. This episode began -- and it will (almost) end with a garbage truck dumping asbestos waste. The conversation has a philosophical dimension. Tony doesn't want to cave to Phil's demand because life isn't worth living if you have to bend over for people. Chris thinks that in life you need to "smell the roses," and this moves Tony to concede that some battles aren't worth fighting. Then Chris mentions his daughter, and Tony reverts to bitterness and says that Phil would take those roses and stick them up your ass.

Chris puts the soundtrack from "The Departed" into the player, and the song is "Comfortably Numb" -- a song about using drugs as an escape. Tony glances over at Chris a few times as though he's trying to see if he may be using drugs again. He lets his suspicion show when he asks Chris how that party was the other day. The crash follows.

After the long, sickening roll downhill, Chris, pinned behind the steering wheel, confesses that he won't pass the drug test, so Tony now knows Chris is back to his drug problem. Tony gets out of the car and comes around and breaks the window to reach Christopher. He starts to call 911, then changes his mind and holds Chris's nose until he drowns in the blood that had been flowing out of his mouth. In the middle of the grim, silent killing -- couldn't Tony at least have said I'm sorry I have to do this? -- Tony looks up at the highway as a car goes by and its headlights pulse in the same mysteriously symbolic way that a light kept pulsing in the long coma-dream sequence in the second episode of Season 6. I think the pulse of light is the instant of Christopher's death.

Once Chris is dead, we get water imagery: It starts to rain, and Tony, calling 911, gives the locations as "Old Pumping Station Road, next to the Resevoir." Later in the episode, there will be more light and more water.

At the hospital, Tony's lying on a gurney in the hall, near Christopher's body bag -- we see the "Cleaver" hat next to it -- so this may suggest that Tony himself is dead. But I don't think so, because we also see Carmela at home, getting the phone call from him.

Now, there is a visit with Dr. Melfi and Tony is expressing happiness about Chris's death. "He was a tremendous drag on my future." But this turns out to be a dream. After checking with Carmela that he wasn't talking in his sleep, Tony goes downstairs, finds the "Cleaver" mug and hurls it across the swimming pool -- the central water symbol of the whole "Sopranos" series. The mug -- which represented Chris's hatred of Tony -- lands in the underbrush. We understand Tony's motivation for the murder fully at this point. Had Christopher lived, the drug test would caused the FBI to swoop in on him, and he would have betrayed Tony.

There is some question about whether and at what point Christopher wanted to die. Did he crash the car intentionally because he realized that Tony knew he was back on drugs and that Tony would want to kill him? Did he confess openly after the crash to offer himself up for the killing he knew Tony had in store for him? Why suffer the pain of his injuries and try to live only to die soon enough? His final words were "Call me a taxi." Is a taxi a symbol of death? There's "Death Cab for Cutie."

Bad girl Cutie, what have you done?
Baby, don't do it
Slipping, sliding down on Highway 31.
Baby, don't do it
The traffic lights change from green to red.
They tried to stop but they both wound up dead.
Death cab for Cutie
Death cab for Cutie

And there's Joni Mitchell:

Late last night
I heard the screen door slam
And a big yellow taxi
Took away my old man
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you’ve got
‘Til it’s gone?
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot

Presumably, that's Long Term Parking.

Carmela makes Tony a cup of coffee with that expensive expresso machine Paulie gave her in the April 22 episode. Tony says "It's good." At least something is good. They have a conversation that brings out the mother theme. (I note that Paulie's aunt/mother Nucci also dies in this episode, and there's a fair amount of childish whining by Paulie on the subject.) Carmela, crying over Christopher's death, says that when Tony was in the hospital -- back during that coma-dream -- "It was Christopher who held me." This mother-son image prompts Tony to bring up the baby seat in the SUV after the crash. It had a tree limb in it, so if the baby had been in the car, it would have been "mangled beyond recognition." Carmela stomps off, and Tony is left holding out his empty arms toward her in a way that says this boy has no mother.

The following scene is Tony's real session with Melfi, and he's talking about mothering. He's disgusted that Christopher's mother is showing up now and soaking up all the sympathy, when she didn't mother him well during his life. He says, "I hand carried him through the worse crisis he ever had." "Hand carried" is an odd expression, but it conveys the image of a mother carrying a baby. Of course, it's completely ridiculous for Tony to think he ought to be getting the sympathy when he's the murderer. Tony thinks Chris was ungrateful, that his hand carrying only inspired hate. Well, yeah. It consisted of offing Adriana.

This sequence of mother-themed scenes culminates in a gathering of various mothers in the Soprano living room. Tony wanders out of his bedroom and looks down on them from the upstairs railing. Christopher's baby is there. Christopher's mother says: "She doesn't know. Isn't God wonderful that way?" Christopher's wife pulls out her large breast and as the baby takes it, Tony snaps open the cell phone. He's calling some guy in Las Vegas. "I need a suite." The guy offers a plane too. Enough of the female. Bring on the phallic symbol. Escape from the family sphere into the realm of sin.

On the phallic plane, he looks out on the clouds. Is he dead now? I wonder. There's a quick but surreal-looking drive through a tunnel, which also gets me speculating. He arrives at Caesar's Palace. He plays roulette once, loses, gets up, and we see him eating in restaurant alone. It's all very quiet. Deathlike?

Cut to AJ's classroom. The lovely teacher's lesson is about Wordsworth. "'The world is too much with us.' Later, he invokes nature again. Why such strong words against the material world?" Cut to Tony in a lounge chair by the glitzy Roman-themed pool at Casear's. Water again. Water is death. The camera wheels around him, and we notice the incline of his head, propped up on a folded up towel. It mirrors Christopher's head angled up on the casket pillow. So is Tony dying now? Or is he still in the material world?

We see Tony driving past a sign for the Tropicana and the Folies Bergere. Then, he's in a hallway, where he transfers a wad of cash to his back pocket. He's going to see a woman who is never named -- except in the credits (as Sonya Aragon) -- and that money is the tip that she's a prostitute. But she did know Chris, and she's somewhat sad to hear he's dead. She asks how long Tony's going to be in town, and he says -- seeming to speak more generally of life itself -- that he doesn't know. He's playing it as it goes.

After a scene with Anthony and his friends beating up a young man, mainly because he's black, we see Tony driving through a tunnel again and then having sex with the woman who is never called Sonya. She offers him "paranoid free" marijuana. He takes it. She says, "Chris loved to party." Tony's all, "What's your point?" And she's says: "So much for paranoid free." Why is she comparing him to Chris? He wants to know. She tells him that Chris said sad things, but Tony seems really sad. He asks about peyote. Chris had talked about taking peyote with her. When he says "Why the f*ck am I here?" she thinks he means he wants to take peyote to get at the meaning of life, but he says "I mean Vegas."

AJ goes to his psychiatrist twice in this episode. The first time, he's doing well, even interested in school. That goes with the Wordsworth scene. In the second visit, after the attack on the black man, he's become completely nihilistic: "Everything is so f*cked up." Absurdly invoking Rodney King, he adds "Why can't we all just get along?"

Now, we see Tony taking the peyote with Sonya. Of course, he's got to vomit. Not only is peyote famous for causing vomiting, but "The Sopranos" is famous for vomiting scenes. Tony vomited in this one, and, in this one, Adriana performs "the best projectile vomiting scene in the history of television." After the peyote vomit, Tony collapses against an ugly patterned towel that clashes nauseatingly with his jagged patterned shirt. He stares up at the light fixture. There's the light! Is it death now?

Tony and Sonya are walking in the hotel lobby, across the shiny patterned floor. There's a slot machine with the word "Pompeii" on it to remind us of death and destruction. Then Tony is staring at a cartoon devil face on one of the machines. But, really, is he in hell finally? Now, he's staring at the roulette wheel and observing: "It's the same principle as the solar system." Does that make this the afterlife? He keeps winning. That's not the way real life goes. The croupier looks somewhat like Christopher. There's a strange white chip held in a vertical position on a glass cube. Are there really chips like this or is this more proof we are not looking at the real world? The chip seems to signify a communion wafer. Tony starts laughing a lot and says, "He's dead." He falls on the floor laughing. We're look down on him. Is he dead now?

Perhaps symbolizing the disposal of his evil body, the garbage truck full of asbestos waste backs up to the edge of the Jersey swampland and dumps. More water.

And now Tony and Sonya are hanging out peacefully, tripping on the sunrise in a beautiful -- unearthly? -- landscape. It was filmed in Red Rock Canyon, I see in the credits, so the place is really there, outside Las Vegas. Sonya is in a motionless trance. Tony is squinting toward the sun. As it rises above the canyon edge, it pulses in a burst of light that chimes with the headlight on the highway and all those lights in the coma-dream.

"I get it" he says quietly, standing, then once again, he stretches out his arms out. He yells -- and the canyon echoes -- "I get it." Surely, at this point, he is dead.

I see that over on Television Without Pity, there's talk that the entire episode was a dream. The episode begins and (almost) ends with a big truck dumping powdery contents, ostensibly asbestos, but also symbolizing the cocaine that caused Christopher's downfall, and perhaps representing the sleep of a dream.

The only part of the episode that is outside of the garbage truck brackets is Tony, at the canyon edge, getting it. Conceivably, Tony was asleep and dreaming throughout the episode, and the final dump of the toxic waste into the swamp was the point where he died in his bed like a good old godfather. The waste went down as the sun came up. He gets it as he passes into the infinite. The dream -- if that's what it was -- contained many indications of his death, but he was still alive and merely approaching his death. It is only when the sun bursts in the end and he shouts "I get it" that he dies.

We shall see this Sunday, if Carmela discovers his dead body in the bed.

ADDED: That powdery asbestos drifting off the garbage truck in the beginning and at the end represent the funereal line: "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust."

"You have to be Jackie Kennedy today."

That's what NJ Governor Jim McGreevey said to his wife Dina Matos McGreevey to prepare her to stand next to him as he went public about his gay relationship. I'm hearing her say this on "The Oprah Winfrey Show." (Dina is promoting her book "Silent Partner:A Memoir of My Marriage.") Oprah has been trying for 15 minutes to get her to explain what the hell she was smiling about as she stood next to her husband when he told the world that he'd been unfaithful to her. It's what every woman wants to know, says Oprah.

"No one ever said to me that he was gay," she said. "It's a cliche that the wife is always the last to know, and it's true."

Matos McGreevey said she was shocked by her husband's revelation, which she said came in "cowardly installments."

"I'm not in denial, but I don't think he's simply gay. I think he's bisexual," she said. "I mean, he was married twice. He has two children. And, you know, I never saw him checking out men, but I certainly saw him checking out women."

There's something creepy about this show. The McGreeveys are engaged in a big legal fight over the custody of their daughter, yet Oprah seems to want to present the show as saying something to all the many individuals who find out that their spouse lacks the sexual orientation that corresponds with the marriage. This is a serious issue, but Dina has a legal stake in portraying herself as having been utterly in the dark.

The creepiness swells when Oprah shows Dina a clip of Jim McGreevey when he appeared on her show. Oprah had asked him what it was like when he had sex with his wife. We see a split screen. He says "It was special." Dian smiles. Oprah pushes him: Was it real? He says, "I thought it was real," and so does Dina.

Dina talks about seeing a manuscript, where McGreevey wrote that he married her for political purposes. She says that if he'd been able to keep his secret he'd be running for President right now. And she says that in her hour of need she turned to Hillary Clinton. Hillary took the call, and Dina said "You're the only person that came to mind when this happened." This gets a big laugh from the Oprah audience. (Hillary told her to get her own advisors and to take care of herself and her daughter.)

We learn that Dina continued to live with McGreevey -- and share his bed -- for three months after she learned of his betrayal. Oprah expresses disbelief: Even if you had nowhere else to go, "It's the Governor's Mansion. You had lots of bedrooms. You could say, look, I'm gonna be down the hall, and I'll see you at breakfast." Dina said she thought he should have moved out.

In the end, Oprah asks Dina to say something to all the heterosexual people who discover they have married a gay person. Her message is: You've done absolutely nothing wrong. Don't blame yourself. Oprah asks her if she's dating again, and she says no. She blames McGreevey, who's destroyed her trust in people, "especially men."

Oprah crisply responds, "Yeah. Well, we contacted the former governor for a statement and here's what he said and wanted us to say" -- Oprah touches her cheek with her index finger, a gesture I've seen myself make on video and think means I'm not quite saying everything I'm thinking -- "'Congratulations, you're sitting on America's favorite couch. I wish you well in your journey. With the telling of this book, Dina has now had an opportunity to share her story, as I did with mine. Now, hopefully, is the time to look to the future, to raise our daughter, in a loving, nurturing environment.'"

Here's the look on poor Dina's face:



"It's a classic McGreevey performance," Dina says. I wonder if she realizes how much Oprah was on McGreevey's side through the interview. Based on that look on her face, I think she does.

Sophia and her older man.

Sophia Loren's husband Carlo Ponti just died -- at the age of 94.

Ponti was married to his first wife, Giuliana, when he met Loren, who was almost 25 years younger than he, in about 1950.

They tried to keep their relationship a secret in spite of huge media interest, while Ponti's lawyers went to Mexico to obtain a divorce.

Ponti and Loren were married by proxy in Mexico in 1957 -- two male attorneys took their place. The couple only found out about their marriage when the news was broken by a society columnist.

Well, this is an interesting story problem for math class, but I'm just going to look up Sophia Loren's birth date. It's September 20, 1934. She was 16 when they met in 1950. He was 38. She was 23 when she married the 45-year-old Ponti. Now, he is dead, and she is 72.

Remember this cover of Life Magazine?



That was from 1966. It was about a year before Twiggy entered our brains and made Sophia look fat. Click on the image to see a page of all the Life Magazine photos from that year. I remember them so well. Everyone read Life then. On the covers: Bobby Kennedy, Ian Fleming, Melina Mercouri, Jean-Paul Belmondo, "LSD Art," a White House wedding, "young black militants," Claudia Cardinale, "Mod male fashions," Julie Christie, Elizabeth Taylor, TV's Batman, Jackie Kennedy, Louis Armstrong, Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam. So long ago. So vivid....

Condolences to the beautiful Sophia.

And I love the image of two male lawyers getting married in 1957!

Courtney and the Pamela Anderson Roast.

I finally got around to watching the Pamela Anderson Roast I'd taken the trouble to TiVo. As you may remember, I wanted to watch it because of the fuss that was made over Courtney Love's behavior. Well, the show was excruciating, with second rate comics making one bad anatomical joke after another. It was supposedly a charity event for PETA – man, I remember when a politically correct operation like that would not sully itself with rank sexist material – and many, many of the jokes connected the kind of animals PETA cares about with the animal names that are used as slang for a woman's genitalia. So the show was utter crapola but somehow everyone wrote about Courtney, because apparently it's so fun to attack her. Interestingly enough, it turned out that Courtney had the best control over how to do a celebrity roast right. Everyone was holding a drink and badly faking high spirits, but she outdid them all, convincingly displaying a roasty attitude. When it was her turn to speak, she did her part perfectly. She played the rocker who deigned to stop by to give Pamela real rock cred because she loved her. She did her lines and her moves and then she kissed Anderson's high-heeled foot. Well played, Courtney! Chez Althouse, we love you!

UPDATE: Putting Pam and Courtney side-by-side made me want to spin out an analysis similar to the comparison between Jackie Kennedy and Liz Taylor in "Jackie Under My Skin" (by Wayne Koestenbaum). You have two icons and one is pure and idealized, the other is tainted and dirtied. In the Pam/Courtney comparison, both represent sexuality and self-indulgence, but Pam has some how made what was dirty into something utterly polished and glossy – essentially fulfilling the Playboy dream. Courtney is the real-life version of sexual indulgence: this is what trying to live that fantasy will really make you look like. Well, now I'm thinking of another book.