Dressing like Abe Lincoln and kissing a baby — it's Scott Walker's challenger for the Republican slot in the recall election.

It's Arthur Kohl-Riggs, whom we encountered at yesterday's Tax Day rally:



You may recognize him from many of the videos Meade and I made during last year's protests, though I didn't identify him by name back then. Here are 2. Here's an article about how he got on the primary ballot and why he's doing it:

Arthur Kohl-Riggs, a scruffy-haired 23-year-old political activist who used to serve pizza at the Children’s Museum in Madison until a few weeks ago, says he is not a "fake Republican."...

He describes himself as a “progressive Republican,” following the political lines of former Wisconsin Sen. Robert "Fighting Bob" La Follette and Abraham Lincoln....

And the reason Kohl-Riggs wants his name on the GOP ballot is because he wants to force Republicans to vote for Gov. Scott Walker in the primary instead of meddling in the Democratic primary, he said.

I find it hard to believe that Walker has to win a primary and become a party nominee. I would have thought he'd be on the recall election ballot as the incumbent. I can see in the state constitution (PDF) that the incumbent is "deemed to have filed for the recall election," and:

For any partisan office, a recall primary shall be held for each political party which is by law entitled to a separate ballot and from which more than one candidate competes for the party’s nomination in the recall election. The person receiving the highest number of votes in the recall primary for each political party shall be that party’s candidate in the recall election. Independent candidates and candidates representing political parties not entitled by law to a separate ballot shall be shown on the ballot for the recall election only.

Here's the relevant statute (PDF):

(e) For any partisan office, a recall primary shall be held for each political party which is entitled to a separate ballot under s. 5.62 (1) (b) or (2) and from which more than one candidate competes for the party’s nomination in the recall election. The primary ballot shall be prepared in accordance with s. 5.62, insofar as applicable. The person receiving the highest number of votes in the recall primary for each political party shall be that party’s candidate in the recall election. Independent candidates shall be shown on the ballot for the recall election only.

I think it's bizarre and maddening that the people of Wisconsin, having voted Walker into a 4-year term of office now must vote again, not just once, but twice. I understand the concern that Walker supporters might try to skew the Democratic primary — though it's not easy to see which way they'd want to skew it — but I think a lot of people are really sick of having to keep voting and revoting to keep what we've already voted for (and sick of having to pay for all of it).

"If you are a child of the seventies and were raised on 'The Joy of Sex,' you are not likely to have forgotten the illustrations."

"The woman depicted in these drawings is lovely, and, even nearly forty years later, quite chic," writes Ariel Levy in The New Yorker. "Her gentleman friend, however, looks like a werewolf with a hangover. He is heavily bearded; his hair is long, and, it always seemed, a little greasy. His eyelids are usually at half-mast, adding to his feral appearance."

It isn’t easy watching beauty get pawed by the beast, and our narrator does not help matters. “At a certain level and for all men,” Comfort informs us, “girls, and parts of girls, are at this stimulus level unpeople.” In “The Joy of Sex,” a male is a man, a female is a girl, and a vagina is, to “males generally, slightly scarey: it looks like a castrating wound and bleeds regularly, it swallows the penis and regurgitates it limp, it can probably bite and so on.”... Under the heading “Women (by her for him),” Comfort writes of male genitalia, “It’s less the size than the personality, unpredictable movements, and moods which make up the turn-on (which is why rubber dummies are so sickening).”

Boston University history professor Brendan McConville backs up Sarah Palin's account of Paul Revere...

... but said she got "lucky." 

Is there anyone else in American public life who is treated like Sarah Palin? Here's this historian, forced to say she wasn't wrong — after all the Sarah-haters have mocked her — and he instinctively grasps for a way to knock her down again. If she got something right, it must just have been an accident.

And here's Andrew Sullivan commenting on Palin's refusal to back down on here Revere story:

One of the most pernicious and dangerous features of Palin is her clinical refusal to understand reality, to accept error, to acknowledge when the facts she has cited are not actually facts, but delusions. And her vanity and pathologies are so deep she will insist that black is white until her minions actually find a source to prove it.

She's dangerous; she's shrewd; she's an exhibitionist. But she is also, we must keep reminding ourselves, a farce. What worries me about this political leader incapable of telling fantasy apart from fact is that, in a long and deep recession, someone who can lie that readily and manipulate religious and cultural resentment as well as she does is a danger. Not just to America, but to the world.

We must keep reminding ourselves... isn't that the attitude of someone with a clinical refusal to understand reality, to accept error, to acknowledge when the facts cited are not actually facts, but delusions. You have something you want to believe about Sarah Palin, and whatever new information you receive, you reflexively remind yourself that she is a farce. Applying your own standard, at what point would you be a farce?

In another post, Sullivan says "I fear I'm headed to crazy-land." But he's talking about his beard.

Monkeytail beards.

Hilarious and repellent. Via ALOTT5MA, which also made look at these pictures of Adam Lambert. Try to resist.

At the "Got Democracy?" Café...

... I'll have a Grande Democrappucino, please. Extra hair.

Wisconsin protesters this morning (with Jesse Jackson).

Where's Jackson? (Enlarge.)

A bearded man yells and a woman holds up a lefty Christianist sign:



The sign (in front of the flag) reads: "March 9, 18 Republicans gave up their ethics & morals for Lent").

"And that was when he discovered he had a special kinda way with animals."

"They just come right up to him like he was a natural part of the wilderness."



Have you been living free in harmony and majesty like we did back in the 1970s?

***

Charles Sellier Jr., the man who created "The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams,” has died at the age of 67.

Loosely based on an actual person who escaped into the wilderness in 1853 after being accused of a murder he didn’t commit, Grizzly Adams is a bearded, barrel-chested man (played by Dan Haggerty) who counts among his friends raccoons, skunks, ferrets, deer, coyotes, porcupines, an eagle and, of course, the abandoned grizzly bear cub who matures into a powerful companion named Ben.

ADDED: Did you have the same question I had?: Is Ben the same Ben as "Gentle Ben"? The answer is no: "there is no connection between the bears."



Wow! The 60s were so different from the 70s. The 60s had a lot of 50s in them, and the 70s had a lot of 60s, but not the part of the 60s that was leftover from the 50s. If you're not old like me, maybe those distinctions sound meaningless, but if you are, I bet you know exactly what I mean.

"I wanna, like, be the world's known terrorist."

"A lot of people need to get killed, bro, swear to God. My soul cannot rest until I shed blood.... Freaking Major Nidal, shaved-face-Palestinian-crazy-guy. He's not better than me. I'll do twice what he did... I'm going to get a gun. I'm the type of person to use it at any time.... I'll have more bodies on it than the hairs on my beard."

It's nice to be able to laugh at this idiocy.

Players in pajamas.

I hadn't watched baseball in quite a few years, but I got married a few months ago and one of the many consequences is that I've been watching a bit of the World Series. I realize a sports game is not a fashion show, but I'm appalled at what these men are wearing. I remember when baseball players wore skin-tight knickers. (I remember that time the Chicago White Sox wore shorts.) And now, I'm seeing men that look like children in their jammies. Yes, I realize that they are probably 6 feet tall or so, but they don't look much like athletes — not like those players of old in their skin-tight knickers. Some combination of tubby body and oversized shirts and slouchy pants changes the proportions and scales the guys down into children. And yes, I can see that many — many! — of these boy-men are wearing — "sporting" — beards. It's all too "My Very First Beard - from Kenner!" It's not helping. I'm sorry! Baseball is just not sexy enough. This was better. And I hate men in shorts. Not fond of the mustache either. Come on, baseball men, raise your game. I know you're still allowed to wear the knickers-and-socks. I root for the players that still wear the knickers. Look like an athlete, could you please? Women might like to watch.

Why Larry Charles shaved off his beard.

"'It was time. I think other people's reaction is much more radical than my own. They look at me like the Elephant Man now. They're like, "What happened to you?"... [I]t's ironic that I had to shave my beard to hide myself. I took those things off and people don't know who I am.'... On the other hand, he learned while collaborating with Sacha Baron Cohen on the wildly successful Borat movie how image and influence can go hand in hand. Before that he often looked like 'a dirty, hippy-like homeless person'... One day while directing an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, he went to grab some food and was accosted by a guard. 'He was like throwing me off the set,' he says, laughing. 'The AD (assistant director] had to come over and go, "Wait a minute, that's the director!"'"

"Either [Joaquin] Phoenix is perpetrating an elaborate Andy Kaufman-style hoax...or he's truly lost his marbles."

Either he's lost his marbles, or someone has spilled the marbles.

So, what's happening with Joachin (who looks ridiculous these days in a big beard and recently performed 3 rap songs in a Vegas nightclub and fell off the stage)?

And also, how did we ever get started using "marbles" to symbolize mental things: sanity and secrets. Everyone has his own personal marbles — "his marbles" — which we only mention when we think they may have been lost. It's always "lost," too. You don't spill your personal marbles. Even if someone has a sudden, public mental breakdown, we don't say: "Oh, no, he's spilling his marbles."

So there are those personal marbles — his marbles, your marbles — and then there are "the marbles." These are shared marbles, even though we never say "our marbles" — Don't spill our marbles — or "their marbles." They're just the marbles. These our secrets, and I suppose we like the image of secrets as something round and spillable that we carry around. And we never just lose these marbles. It's always spill — perhaps because a spill is there to be seen, making a mess. Whereas the lost marbles of sanity are nowhere to be seen. "He's lost his marbles." "Oh, really? Have you looked around for them?" They are really nowhere at all. They've ceased to exist.

Now, it must be said, that the #1 slang definition for "marbles" is "testicles." So, I've got to think that that the idea of losing your marbles or spilling your marbles traces back to testicles. "Spilling the marbles" — don't expose what should be kept covered. And your sanity? I know the etymology of the word "hysterical" is:

1615, from L. hystericus "of the womb," from Gk. hysterikos "of the womb, suffering in the womb," from hystera "womb" (see uterus). Originally defined as a neurotic condition peculiar to women and thought to be caused by a dysfunction of the uterus. Hysterics is 1727; hysteria, abstract noun, formed 1801.

So there is this notion that your sanity depends on your sexual parts. Don't lose your marbles!

Anyway, sorry to confront you with testicles so early in the morning. And I hope Joachin is okay... and that he would shave.

IN THE COMMENTS Graham Powell said:

I find it hard to believe that the #1 euphemism for "marbles" is "testicles"as I have heard people refer to nuts, balls, stones, cojones, huevos, etc. etc., but NEVER marbles.

My response:

I said "the #1 slang definition for 'marbles' is 'testicles,'" not "the #1 slang definition for 'testicles' is 'marbles.'" It doesn't work both ways!

Graham continues:

Interesting side note: The "testicles" tag brings up a truly shocking number of posts.

Apparently Graham is new around here. And easily shocked! Did you notice that I made a penis joke in the new Bloggingheads?

Questions that brought 1 visitor to my blog today.

From SiteMeter.

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IN THE COMMENTS: Original George said...

Love, peace, and compassion were surrounding me. They were almost palpable. It was incredible. I was in total bliss. Even the foosball players hesitated long enough to appreciate the elongated notes as he suspended them in midair until they were almost palpable. They were almost palpable. For three weeks we had felt it, touched it almost; it engulfed us; it was warm. We were completely infatuated. Brass and woodwind players were on stage, and in the balcony, swinging their instruments and playing chords so dense they were almost palpable. They were almost palpable, and it was very easy to feel sorry for her character because of the injustices she suffered from her husband. With the international community frowning heavily upon him and local expectations becoming so strong, they were almost palpable. I felt that the passion, ambition, revenge, tension, etc. were so descriptive that they were almost palpable. The narrator also did a stunning job of bringing memories materialized from the walls, so strong they were almost palpable. Grandpop bursting through the front door, the decibel level skyrocketing off the cries of outrage were so intense, they were almost palpable. How could the writers do this to us? Did they not know that Jane would never try out? For upon the eyeballs, affecting the sight as though they were almost palpable to the touch, the dews had not descended, but the leaves were still wet.

What happens when you Google the phrase "they were almost palpable."

He's right! And here I was reading that and trying to understand where the mind of OrigGeo was going with that story.

Meanwhile, Jennifer says...

Oh, I thought we were speaking of one curious surfer who kept ending up at Althouse no matter what new question they came up [with]. That was a funnier mental image.

... and I laugh out loud.

"I feel like I should grow a goatee, smoke an American Spirit and crank up some Smashing Pumpkins."

How Obama makes Jake Tapper feel.

Ron Howard does a really cool pro-Obama thing.

See more Ron Howard videos at Funny or Die

"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.

"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.)

"Richardson drops out. Grows a beard."

The whole story of the race for the Democratic nomination in 7 minutes of short sentences and sentence fragments. Funny! Spiffy graphics. Pretty fair and balanced too.



[Bad code fixed.]

BUT: The wrong code was for another Slate video that people liked. It's here.

AND: Wow! The still image on the embedded video is great. Slate deserves huge credit for raising the standards for web video. This is really beautiful and brilliant!

"Mr. Obama’s approach is like 'a surgical bomb,' he said, while 'the Clintons are more like a carpet bomb.'"

Can we judge the candidates by the way they woo Bill Richardson?

Isn't it clear that the one he's falling for is Barack Obama? And not just because it makes more sense to back the winner. The Clinton people keep calling, and one — an unnamed female — really pissed — he says "ticked" — him off by acting like he owed Hillary his endorsement — in a voice mail. Meanwhile, Barack calls personally at nicely spaced intervals and:

“Barack’s a little looser” in his conversations, Mr. Richardson said. The two men developed a back-of-the-classroom rapport during the presidential debates, exchanging winks or eye rolls when one of the other candidates “would get outrageous or something,” Mr. Richardson said.

And doesn't Richardson look much better in a beard? I'm not a big fan of beards, but Richardson is quite chubby, and the beard covers up his double chin and gives him a cuddly bear look. Too bad beards are verboten in a presidential campaign.

"Hence we shave our beards that we may seem purified by innocence and humility..."

"... and that we may be like the angels who remain always in the bloom of youth."

The history of shaving and religion.

It's Christmas Eve, and thus far the posts aren't looking too Christmasy."

So let's go back to the previously blogged Christmas Eves and republish the most Christmasy one from each year.

2004:

First Encounter with Santa Claus.

Here I am, the skeptical one in the center. I'm almost 3, and the year is 1953. My sister Dell is enjoying the moment, while I'm suspicious about that beard and the lack of convincing attachment around the mouth.

2005:

Blue Christmas.

The view from my window, tonight at nightfall:



It seems that every year, there's something that gets us started singing "Blue Christmas." Like last year, it was another photograph: here.

Now we're listening to various versions of "Blue Christmas" -- first Elvis (the best), then Ringo, then the Beach Boys (the second best), Jon Bon Jovi, Vince Gill, Willie Nelson (nicely zippy), Fats Domino, Low, Leon Redbone, the Platters, Chris Isaak, Dean Martin, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, Harry Connick Jr., Sheryl Crow (the worst!), Booker T. & the MGs, John Holt (reggae does not fit this song), Tammy Wynette... I note that most artists try to sing the song like Elvis -- it's pretty much homage to Elvis for Ringo, Bon Jovi, and many others. Too many people make a big point of slowing the song way down (which is, apparently, a way of life for Low). Ah, now we're back to Elvis, with a different version, from the 1968 TV special. The greatness of Elvis really came through in that little exercise.

You'll be doin' all right, with your Christmas of white/But I'll have a blue, blue Christmas.

2006:

Christmas Eve.

It's the third Christmas Eve for this blog, and I was just looking back to see what I did last year for the occasion, and I see that I looked back to the previous year and saw that I decided to repeat this photo I put up the first time I blogged Christmas Eve:



There, now, it's definitely a tradition.

Which child is me? The more skeptical one.

ADDED: And remember Palladian's version

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Now, my echo has acquired an echo.