"On no account will a Commie ever drink water, and not without good reason."

Best answer to the question why Paul Ryan — and not Biden (or Obama or Romney) — drank water during the debate. I had 5 suggested answers in my poll:



But the commenters — both in my post here and over at the poll site — came up with some funny answers:

"Hey — you think you're the only one playing a drinking-game during that debate!?"

"Drinking water helped him keep his cool and avoid beating the shit out of that smug asshole Biden."

"Heat generated by combination of Biden's gusty pizza cheese-smelling sighs and the dazzling white-hot glare from Biden's fake chompers led to increased need for hydration."

"Possibly he had come across Enoch Powell's 'Full Bladder technique.' Powell was a British politician of fifty years ago, famous, inter alia, for being a brilliant public speaker. He always made his speeches on a full bladder, on the theory that it helped concentrate the mind."

"Actually, it was a specially devised clear liquid CHEAT SHEET full of rethuglican LIES!!!"

And thanks as well to those who said things like:

Thanks for posting this, Ann. I've long felt that Instapundit was a bit too heavy on links to relevant and/or interesting content.

Wow. That's some hard hitting insightful analysis there, Ann.

I say thanks because it's helpful to me to remember that there's a segment of the population that doesn't get fun. I assume my readers are fun-loving, but there are some people who are essentially fun deaf, and things like this are as annoying as Joe Biden guffawing while Paul Ryan is talking about nuclear war in the Middle East.

Perhaps for some people, the sorrows and travails of this world are so weighty that we ought to demand a somber demeanor at all times — not just from ourselves, but from others. I can imagine a religion that requires grim facial and verbal expression at all times and for everyone, forever. An eternal funeral. After all: People are dying, dying at the rate of one per second. Wipe that smile off your face. Permanently.

Okay. I just wanted to acknowledge that you of the Religion of Grim are out there. And now, why don't you just take it easy, and please make me a drink of grain alcohol and rainwater, and help yourself to whatever you'd like?

Goodbye to Chatsworth Osborne Jr.

The comically irritating rich kid on my all-time favorite sitcom "Dobie Gillis" was played by an actor named Steve Franken, who has died, at the age of 80. The original rich jerk on the show was Milton Armitage, played by Warren Beatty, but he left the show early and Chatsworth stepped in to be totally unlikeable and ridiculous.

I wish I could find a good clip of him as Chatsworth on YouTube. But here's Franken playing a drunken waiter in the 1968 movie "The Party" (with Peter Sellers). It's not a silent movie, but Franken's role is silent (and very funny).

"The other day I gave her mash and fishfingers for dinner — something quite boring — and her response was 'That’s impressive,' so she has a sense of humor, too."

An English dad describes the experience of living with a 4-year-old genius. 

ADDED: Confession: I had to Google to make sure "mash" referred to potatoes. The process of doing blog tags confronted me with the part of my brain — of whatever size IQ, I don't know — that has been dealing with English food. Long ago, "mash" got mushed with "mushy peas," and I'd never had the push to straighten that out until just now. But, thanks to Wikipedia, I've set my head straight. "Mash" is just mashed potatoes. And "bangers and mash" — which sounds dirty — is just sausages and mashed potatoes, which I think are "impressive."

The term "bangers" is attributed to the fact that sausages, particularly the kind made during World War II under rationing, were made with water so they were more likely to explode under high heat if not cooked carefully; modern sausages do not have this attribute.

Wikipedia kindly includes some pop culture references, including Peter Sellers singing to Sophia Loren, about how he's unsatisfied with her "macaroni" and would like her to "give us a bash at the bangers and mash me mother used to make," which you can listen to on one of those YouTube videos where all you look at is the record spinning. Sellers and Loren do their best to exclude any double entendre that those lyrics may seem to convey in writing.

There's also a Radiohead number called "Bangers + Mash," which has lyrics that begin "You bit me, bit me, bit me, ow," which is something Peter Sellers never sang to Sophia Loren.

Times change, which reminds me of my favorite "banger" song: "Lieutenant Custard & His Banger of Time," which involves a time-travel sausage. Please be careful with this!

"Fans aren't shy about approaching him in public, often assuming he and his crass 'Curb [Your Enthusiasm]' alter ego are the same person."

"'Oh, I get Leon all day long,' Mr. Smoove said. Passersby on the street often call out his character's lewd catchphrases."

Ha ha. Which lewd catchphrase do you think they're calling out to him? You won't find out reading this Wall Street Journal profile of JB Smoove (AKA Jerry Brooks), which has stuff like this...

He started studying comedy in earnest in high school. "I loved Peter Sellers," he recalled. "I thought he was the perfect mix of physical comedy with out-of-the-box humor. I loved his tone, I loved his physicality, I loved everything about what he was doing as a comedic actor."

... but you might hear some of those catchphrases here:

"If Brett Favre's penis could talk, what would it say?"... well, Bill Maher made it say something about Sarah Palin.

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Putting the last 2 posts together makes me think about a Beatles song.

It's one of my least favorite Beatles songs, but Ringo's a good guy, and it's one that he managed to write. He says:

I wrote Octopus's Garden in Sardinia.

(And he wrote "Sardine's Garden" in Octopussia.)

Peter Sellers had lent us his yacht and we went out for the day... I stayed out on deck with [the captain] and we talked about octopuses. He told me that they hang out in their caves and they go around the seabed finding shiny stones and tin cans and bottles to put in front of their cave like a garden. I thought this was fabulous, because at the time I just wanted to be under the sea too. A couple of tokes later with the guitar - and we had Octopus's Garden!

Ah! Peter Sellers. I was just watching a Peter Seller's movie last night: "The World of Henry Orient." Recommended. Do a triple feature of movies in which 2 girls get together and things get crazy and show it along with "Ghost World" and "Heavenly Creatures." Or make a double feature with another Peter Seller's movie from the same era, "I Love You, Alice B. Toklas" (especially if you disapprove of Ringo's toking):

"Barack spent so much time by himself that it was like he was raised by wolves."

Said Michelle Obama, as quoted by a friend, as quoted by Maureen Dowd, who is writing about how, when voting for Obama, we had the feeling that we were (finally) getting a President who's very normal. How does that work? Raised-by-wolfishness leads to (a semblance of) normality? Solitude fosters a deep longing to be with others and one overachieves in the appearance of normal department?

Maureen doesn't answer those questions. She merely murmurs "he seemed to have come through exceptionally well adjusted. " She quotes an Obama hagiographer's dubious quotation:

“His aides from the Senate, the presidential campaign, and the White House routinely described him with the same words: ‘psychologically healthy,’ ” writes Jonathan Alter in “The Promise”...

Isn't it funny that Alter put "psychologically healthy" in quotes when referring to the words of what appears to be a large crowd of individuals? If anything, that large crowd of individuals sounds a bit deranged, if they were really all mouthing the same mantra about their leader.

So it’s unnerving now to have yet another president elevating personal quirks into a management style.

We thought he was so normal that now we're unnerved — we're so unstable! — to find out that, like all those nutty other Presidents — Dowd cites Bush, Clinton, LBJ, and Nixon — Obama's got his quirks too.

Hey, Maureen, how about peering into the complexities of the appearance of normal? Whenever I hear the word "normal" used to gloss over things, I think of one of my favorite scenes in one of my favorite movies, Kubrick's "Lolita." It's the one where Peter Sellers, as Clare Quilty, is pretending to be a cop and inquiring into what Professor Humbert is doing at a hotel with that "pretty, tall, lovely little girl":

I said to myself when I saw you... there's a guy with the most normal-looking face I ever saw in my life... It's great to see a normal face, 'cause I'm a normal guy. Be great for two normal guys to get together and talk about world events, in a normal way....

What was the matter with your wife?... She had an accident! That's terrible! Fancy a normal guy's wife having an accident like that! What happened to her?... I get sort of carried away, being so normal and all....

I could easily have a word with George Swine. He's a really normal, nice sort of guy and I've only got to have a normal word in his ear and you'd be surprised what things could happen.... It's his job to fix you up with something nice. He gets paid for doing that and when he sees a guy like you, all normal... I think you're really normal.... Before you go, I was wondering whether maybe in the morning, you know... me being lonely and normal....

I'm sorry. The word "normal" has had extra texture to me since I saw that movie about 40 years ago.

But Dowd says "normal" and moves on. She describes the emergent quirkiness of the man whose normality supposedly impressed us so much we made him President. (Here's another Peter Sellers movie you need to see, by the way, if you want to fully experience the political chatter around Barack Obama.) Dowd, then:

How can a man who was a dazzling enough politician to become the first black president at age 47 suddenly become so obdurately self-destructive about politics?

President Obama’s bloodless quality about people and events, the emotional detachment that his aides said allowed him to see things more clearly, has instead obscured his vision. 

Oh, but isn't it so much more likely that we were the ones whose vision was obscured? We need to take responsibility. In the end the story of Barack Obama will make perfect sense. It will all fit together. The lonely man — raised by wolves — swept up into our American psychosis.

“Even though I’m president of the United States, my power is not limitless,” Obama, who has forced himself to ingest a load of gulf crab cakes, shrimp and crawfish tails, whinged to Grand Isle, La., residents on Friday. “So I can’t dive down there and plug the hole. I can’t suck it up with a straw.”

We need to suck it up. We need to see what we've done. We've elected a man, and we need to cast aside our silly illusions and see what we've done. He's not the essence of magical "normal." He's a particular man with skills and limitations, and he is our President for the next few years. Now, shape up, see clearly, and deal with it.

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