"That's how you laughed in the middle of the night."

Said Meade, and I said: "Then Chip Ahoy must have been in my dream."

Because I was just reading his comment: "Melody and Rose broke up the Sweedish contractors and threw change in the tip jar and put on her warm magic apron."

And I laughed not because that is nonsense, but because it's a quite brilliant contribution to a conversation that was pretty far along at that point, including betamax3000's extended interpretation of "The White Album." Beta had said:

Like the White Album perhaps Althouse is telling us there are secret messages to be found, backwards.

"Sweetly up broke voice, her rose melody."

"Upon magic human warm her of little."

"Out tipped change."

It all began with a sentence from "The Great Gatsby," which was about — not a woman laughing — a woman singing. But women laugh all the time in "The Great Gatsby." For example: "She looked at me and laughed pointlessly."

"These 'Gatsby' posts are becoming the new café around here" — "café" posts are open threads  — I say as I drink my coffee and contemplate today's Gatsby sentence, which I'd said will be "I knew the other clerks and young bond-salesmen by their first names, and lunched with them in dark, crowded restaurants on little pig sausages and mashed potatoes and coffee."

I picked that sentence after searching my Kindle copy of "Gatsby" for "potato" after betamax3000 said:

Yesterday was "gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder," today is "tipped out a little of her warm human magic." Is it getting hot in here or is it just me?

And that was funny, because — before getting out of bed this morning — I'd been toying with the idea of saying: In that "Melody rose" sentence, Fitzgerald intended us to think of semen when we read about "warm human magic" that tipped out of the vessel that is the woman.
 
And betamax added:

My God: if we get to the sentence involving Daisy, the potato and the gardener I just don't know what is going to happen.

Which is what had me looking for "potato" in "Gatsby," not finding it, and suspecting that betamax was making a canny reference to "Lady Chatterly's Lover." I buy "Lady Chatterly's Lover" in Kindle just so I can search for "potato"! My literary pursuits are a tad — a tot — bizarre. I find:

"No; my heart's as numb as a potato, my penis droops and never lifts its head up, I dare rather cut him clean off than say 'shit!' in front of my mother or my aunt... they are real ladies, mind you; and I'm not really intelligent, I'm only a 'mental-lifer.'"

And:

"I don't want to fuck you at all. My heart's as cold as cold potatoes just now."

"Craigslist sperm donor forced to pay child support to lesbian couple - despite giving up parental rights to the baby BEFORE she was born."

How sympathetic are you to this man's argument?

Why should the father of a child ever be allowed to contract out of responsibility for it? If he is, why shouldn't the state control the extent to which this is permitted? Whatever you think of the mother, what about the child?

"And if you’ve been having trouble accessing your room with your key card, it means you’ve pissed off someone at the desk..."

"... and they’ll re-activate your key card when they see fit. (It’s called 'key-bombing.')"

A new book purports to be to hotels what Anthony Bourdain's "Kitchen Confidential" was to restaurants, but the author doesn't seem to have Bourdain's style and charm or the enthusiasm Bourdain had for his subject. This character sounds like a disgruntled employee, out to hurt the employer he hates, and he's no longer even in the business.

How many times do you want to hear that there's probably semen on the bedspreads? Wasn't that revealed in countless local TV news reports decades ago?

The guy worked for 10 years in a 3-star hotel in NYC. I'm sure that place was quite disgusting... or not. Who cares?

Biden: "As they say in my business, I'm going to give you the whole load today..."

Top Comments at YouTube:

Now he's plagiarizing from porno scripts??

And:

He learned that saying hanging around with Bill Clinton

Based on Urban Dictionary, the porn meaning is inescapeable. The only alternative that I can think of is load of crap, which might be a more apt metaphor, but could not have been intended.

Some fine Drudge juxtapositioning today — monkey + Sebelius and Lewinsky + some scary mysterious liquid.

Thanks to the reader who pointed me to Drudge right now. (Here it is, preserved in the archive.)

You have to scroll down to the middle of the page, where you find, in the center column, the striking face of the new monkey whose eyes direct our eyes over to the right-hand column and the face of Kathleen Sebelius, which — you tell me — either looks or doesn't look like the new monkey.



Scroll down further and there's Monica Lewinsky, who might write "a tell-all book," not that she hasn't already written a memoir. But that puts her in the news enough for Drudge to dredge up her picture, and who'd really care but — yikes! — what's that stuff in that picture next to her...



"Surfers ride foam-covered wave in NZ..." Of course, Drudge wants us to think of Clinton's semen. (Look! Lewinsky's wearing a blue dress!) There's no question about that. I click on the splooge-evoking link and get a much bigger shot of those "330ft of yellow froth"... those "overflowing flood-waters which whipped the murky-coloured waves into a frenzy, kicking up some eye-catching spray when they broke."

Whew! I don't know if I want a tell-all book.

In other news: "Monk Found Wandering Naked After Eating Hallucinogenic Berries..."

"A lone rooster sees a lot of all the hens in the flock, but the hen with the largest comb gets a bigger dose of sperm."

A discovery about chickens.

IN THE COMMENTS: Paddy O gets it:

There should be a Bulwer-Lytton type contest for the world's worst written aphorisms.

Is Paul Ryan a "scumbag" for lying about his marathon time?

That's the sort of thing lawprof Tung Yin is seeing on Facebook. 

He's assuming it's a lie, because how can you misremember something like that? On the other hand, why would you lie about something that's not going to be believed and therefore is only going to make you look bad?

But these people who are excoriating Ryan for lying about sports... what did they say about Bill Clinton back in the old lying-about-sex days? Yin has 3 reasons why Clinton's lie was worse, and I think it obviously was.

So does that mean people who excused Bill Clinton need to shut up about Paul Ryan's marathon time? I have 3 answers:

1. You're never going to get people to stop characterizing the evidence to help or hurt whomever they are inclined to help or hurt. Like a semen stain on a blue dress, it has permeated the fabric of our politics.

2. Bill Clinton was cornered and compelled to speak. His lie was self-defense under attack, and he was trying to keep his presidency from collapsing because of something only tangentially related to the presidential enterprise. Paul Ryan volunteered information, boasting about something that wasn't true in an effort to win our favor. Very different motivations, and we should judge them with particularity and with a subtlety beyond crude epithets like "scumbag."

3. Paul Ryan is currently running for Vice President, and we need to examine him from all angles. He'd better be great, regardless of whether somebody else is less great. Bill Clinton's Lewinsky debacle occurred long ago (though it retains currency to the extent that his party, especially at a convention where it will preen about its service to females, employs him as a mouthpiece*).
________________________________________

* Yes, I did intend to put that image in your head.

"The good thing is that this is so insipidly solipsistic that I think she's going to have ruined the Vagina book like Cutthroat Island destroyed the pirate film."

"Might be 15 years before someone gambles with Vaginas of the Caribbean."

Also at that link: "My Vagina is Large; It Contains Multitudes. Who knew the female sex-organ was so chatty?"

***

The passage...

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

... has 19 highlighters in my Kindle version of "Leaves of Grass."

Hey, remember the role of "Leaves of Grass" in the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal?

Feb. 28: After she attended the taping of Clinton's radio show, she had her picture taken with him. He told her to see his secretary Betty Currie because he had something for her. Currie accompanied Lewinsky into the study next to the Oval Office. Then Currie walked into the nearby pantry, where she waited for about 15 minutes while Lewinsky and the president had a sexual encounter -- their first in 11 months. Then he gave her a hat pin and Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass." Lewinsky later discovered that the blue dress she had worn that day was stained with his semen.

Speaking of containing multitudes!

Mike Kelley "never lost his interest in the cut-rate products of American culture, work that for one reason or another ended up discounted and ignored."

"His art tried to make failure into the highest form of achievement," writes Richard B. Woodward in the Wall Street Journal about the artist "who died last week at the age of 57, reportedly a suicide."

His most identifiable body of work (late 1980s to early '90s) are the thrift-store stuffed animals that he placed on blankets in the middle of gallery floors. Their air of soiled hopes and cheerful failure became central to the critical movement of "pathetic" or "abject" art. But how should the icky pungency of these pieces be balanced against his later wish to distance himself from their popularity? "I was viewed as an infantilist, possibly a pedophile, or victim of abuse myself," he complained in a 1996 essay.

"Abject" is a great word. If you Google it, the first substantial hit — i.e., the first thing that's not just a definition of the word — is
"Introduction to Julia Kristeva, Module on the Abject":

According to to Julia Kristeva... the abject refers to the human reaction (horror, vomit) to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or between self and other. The primary example for what causes such a reaction is the corpse (which traumatically reminds us of our own materiality); however, other items can elicit the same reaction: the open wound, shit, sewage, even the skin that forms on the surface of warm milk....

On the level of our individual psychosexual development, the abject marks the moment when we separated ourselves from the mother, when we began to recognize a boundary between "me" and other, between "me" and "(m)other."...The abject has to do with "what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules"... and, so, can also include crimes like Auschwitz. Such crimes are abject precisely because they draw attention to the "fragility of the law"...

A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. In the presence of signified death—a flat encephalograph, for instance—I would understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being....

The abject for Kristeva is... closely tied both to religion and to art, which she sees as two ways of purifying the abject: "The various means of purifying the abject—the various catharses—make up the history of religions, and end up with that catharsis par excellence called art, both on the far and near side of religion"....

Trent Arsenault — devoted sperm donor, virgin father — hounded by the FDA.

Here is a man who has — as I read this truly fascinating article — devoted himself to sperm donation for altruistic, religious reasons. He gives the sperm, only to couples, and he maintains a rigorous health regime designed to produce the best quality product.

And I use the word "product" to highlight the fact that the FDA has filed a "cease manufacture" order against him.

Although sperm is neither a food nor a drug, the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research regulates those who traffic in it, enforcing frequent and comprehensive tests designed to curb the spread of communicable diseases and genetic disorders. Historically the agency has focused only on traditional sperm banks, not private donors, but Trent was unprecedentedly public about what he was doing. When the FDA first contacted him, he had naïvely signed a piece of paper confirming that he was “an establishment.” In August 2010, using that as a pretext, the FDA sent three agents to his house, where for several days they interviewed him and copied his records. Trent had by then made 340 donations to some 46 different recipients. The scrutiny was time-consuming and stressful; he didn’t have a lawyer and worried than he might land in prison.

By November, the FDA determined that Trent wasn’t screening for diseases nearly often enough, and it issued its cease-­manufacture order. Trent replied that he wished to contest it. He wasn’t charging money, as he explained, and he was helping people. He knew that he was celibate, that he was disease-free, and that he took extraordinary measures to safeguard his DNA. He considered his relationship with his recipients to be “intimate.” Why should the government regulate what he was doing, when anyone, with who knew what health issues, could walk into a bar and have a one-night stand? A government-accountability public-interest group, Cause of Action, agreed, seeing the FDA action as a ringing example of regulatory overreach, and filed a brief on Trent’s behalf. “We questioned him as to the parameters of his relationship with recipients,” Amber Taylor, the chief counsel for Cause of Action, says. “We took away that he’s a very generous, helpful person who sees people in need who could not have children without some form of assistance, who are often lower income or underserved by the fertility-medicine industry.” Trent is currently awaiting a decision by the FDA on whether to grant him a hearing, and in the meantime, the cease-manufacture order has been suspended.

I'm sure that, after this high-profile article, the FDA will back off. But let's talk about the legal issues here. Does Arsenault have a right of privacy in his relationship with the couples he assists? "He describes himself as a 'donorsexual,' with all of his libidinal energy channeled in service of others." Consider that he has 15 — and counting — children through this activity, which had deep religious and emotional meaning to him:

Many of the recipients who have successfully become pregnant have maintained contact with Trent; the lack of anonymity has always been part of his appeal. They send him ultrasounds and arrange to have Trent meet the child. He has a bag ready to go containing his own old toys, which he gives away, and items he uses to observe childhood development....

Trent sits at his desk and pulls up Facebook, where he clicks through photographs of many of his biological children....

Even if he were to stop donating—which he would do immediately if, for instance, he learned that one of his children was autistic or had another genetic problem—Trent says he would stick with his extreme health regimen. “I want to be alive for the children. They will want to know about me. It may not be until they turn 18, or later in life, that they decide they want to meet me, so I want to be in a good capacity to meet them.”

Quite aside from whether he has a constitutional right of privacy with respect to these intimate relationships, why does the federal government have power over his activity? Because it regulates the sperm bank business and this is like the way it can regulate growing one marijuana plant even one that isn't intended for the commercial market? But marijuana is a commodity, and — as the Supreme Court said in Gonzales v. Raich — "the regulation is squarely within Congress’ commerce power because production of the commodity meant for home consumption, be it wheat or marijuana, has a substantial effect on supply and demand in the national market for that commodity."

Be it wheat or marijuana... or sperm?

Mud.

"Life is made up of marble and mud." — Nathaniel Hawthorne

"Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud... And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud. " — Shakespeare

"I made all my generals out of mud." — Napoleon Bonaparte

"We sit in the mud... and reach for the stars." — Ivan Turgenev

"I have tried to lift France out of the mud. But she will return to her errors and vomitings. I cannot prevent the French from being French." — Charles de Gaulle

"Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance..." — Thoreau

"My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring, diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?" — Virginia Woolf

"They teach anything in universities today. You can major in mud pies." — Orson Welles

"POLITICIAN, n. An eel in the fundamental mud upon which the superstructure of organized society is reared. When he wriggles he mistakes the agitation of his tail for the trembling of the edifice. As compared with the statesman, he suffers the disadvantage of being alive." — Ambrose Bierce (from "The Devil's Dictionary")

"'As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.' Having said these things, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva.' Then he anointed the man’s eyes with the mud and said to him, 'Go, wash in the pool of Siloam" (which means Sent). So he went and washed and came back seeing." — John 9:5-7

"The broad-backed hippopotamus/Rests on his belly in the mud..." — T.S. Eliot

Although he seems so firm to us
He is merely flesh and blood.

Flesh and blood is weak and frail,
Susceptible to nervous shock;
While the True Church can never fail
For it is based upon a rock.

The hippo’s feeble steps may err
In compassing material ends,
While the True Church need never stir
To gather in its dividends.

The ’potamus can never reach
The mango on the mango-tree;
But fruits of pomegranate and peach
Refresh the Church from over sea.

At mating time the hippo’s voice
Betrays inflexions hoarse and odd,
But every week we hear rejoice
The Church, at being one with God.

The hippopotamus’s day
Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts;
God works in a mysterious way—
The Church can sleep and feed at once.

I saw the ’potamus take wing
Ascending from the damp savannas,
And quiring angels round him sing
The praise of God, in loud hosannas.

Blood of the Lamb shall wash him clean
And him shall heavenly arms enfold,
Among the saints he shall be seen
Performing on a harp of gold.

He shall be washed as white as snow,
By all the martyr’d virgins kist,
While the True Church remains below
Wrapt in the old miasmal mist.

"[T]he center fielder felt a rumble at the end of the fourth. It arrived suddenly, and with great force."

"After Evans walked, and no batter appeared, home plate umpire Mike DiMuro strolled toward the bench. The crowd began to boo. The public address announcer waited. Where was Pagan?"

It's so embarrassing when you have to go to the bathroom and everyone's waiting for you...

"10 Artworks Made with the Artist’s Own Bodily Fluids."

Yes, yes, ho-hum. We've heard it all before. Yawn. That's where I was until I got to #9.

"You get drunk, you hook up, and you see if it sticks in the morning."

You see if what sticks?

Semen might be a mood enhancer for women.

But a doctor can get into a lot of trouble making light-hearted remarks about that.

Tiger Woods, expelling bodily fluids in the wrong place again.

This time, it's spit.

"I am working to make a delicious Wisconsin human cheddar."

"I purchased the milk from [a woman who] shipped it to me in ice, from Wisconsin... I found [her] on an online marketplace for breast milk – where women regularly arrange to sell and donate their milk. It’s pretty interesting, women set the price of their breast milk depending on if they provide blood work, and also the health of their diet."

Via Metafilter.

This remind me of Ricky Gervais and that rice pudding. From his Newsweek list of things that annoy him:

People who think they're "eccentric." What does that mean? You wear lots of different hats? You ride a funny-colored bike? That makes you eccentric? A friend of mine moved out to the country, and the woman next door came round; she was sort of hippie-ish, very long hair, back to nature, all that stuff. And she says, "I've made you a rice pudding, and I've made it with breast milk, because, you know, waste not, want not!" So my friend took it, threw it away, washed the dish and gave it back. He said to her, "Thanks, that was great!" I couldn't believe it. I told him that he should've said, "No, there is no way I'm eating that. Definitely not. Do not bring me any other bodily-function puddings."

That's the cleaned-up-for-Newsweek version. Get the podcast, Series 5 Episode 2. I don't have a complete transcript, but Wikipedia quotes:

Ricky: Surely you draw the line there, of a stranger’s breastmilk.

Steve: Oh yeah yeah, no absolutely… any kind of jizz flan....

Ricky: Here’s a cum sandwich. It doesn’t matter if it’s natural, it’s fucking disgusting.

ADDED: The A.V. Club says:

Of course, anyone looking to whip up some human cheese should definitely hit up the Dairy State for the breast milk, but that’s not the argument here. No, the real question is: Is cheese really the best place to start the “human milk” dairy product revolution?

"The False and 'Seedy' Claim That Obama Is Muslim."

Get it? "Seedy"? The Nation quotes Franklin Graham:

“I think the president's problem is that he was born a Muslim. His father was a Muslim. The seed of Islam is passed through the father like the seed of Judaism is passed through the mother. He was born a Muslim. His father gave him an Islamic name. Now it's obvious that the president has renounced the Prophet Muhammad and he has renounced Islam and he has accepted Jesus Christ. That's what he says he has done. I cannot say that he hasn't. So I just have to believe that the president is what he has said.”

When religionists talk about semen...

Personally, I’m stuck on the word seed. Graham meant it in the Biblical (or Koranical) sense, but when I hear about a “seed passing through” in the context of an American president, I can’t help but see Monica Lewinsky and her “semen-stained blue dress.”

Regardless of what the Muslim world may or may not believe, this whole seed fixation is profoundly un-American. It says that genealogy is destiny, that a man is Muslim regardless of what he espouses or believes. It’s all about descent—and nauseatingly close to the “one drop rule” of the post-Reconstruction South. That rule held that if a person had any African or Indian ancestry whatsoever, he or she was classified as “colored” and subject to anti-miscegenation laws, voter disenfranchisement, and segregation at large. At least eighteen states adopted some form of the rule; Virginia’s 1924 law, for instance, was called the Racial Integrity Act.

Is the author of this piece — Leslie Savan —paying enough attention the the way she is expressing contempt for Muslim beliefs? I didn't know you could do that in The Nation. I mean, I agree that religion originates within the mind of a human being (and not in some guy's testicles!). I agree with James Madison:

... "... religion or the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction..." The Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man...

This is one of several arguments for freedom of religion and the separation of church and state that were influential in the development of rights in America.  It isn't the way everyone in the world thinks about religion, but it is presented by Madison as "a fundamental and undeniable truth." Of course, under that truth, you are free to believe that religion arrived via semen. And we're also free to laugh at such a ridiculous belief.

***

Another point. Graham didn't "claim that Obama is a Muslim." So ironically, it's false to say that he did. If you want to write an article lambasting people for making false claims, be careful that you don't make any false claims. (Savan has a grievance against whoever wrote that headline.)

And I'm wondering who did say Obama's a Muslim? But no one has to say it for people to come to think it. So it's fair to say that statements like Graham's have a causal relation to what people will answer when a pollster asks them "What is Obama's religion?"

So... is anyone doing anything bad? I think so, but you talk now. I'll come back to this discussion later.

The Emily's List "Mama Grizzlies" ad — is it funny/good/accurate?

Ace hates it, but Ace is not in the category of people/bears the ad is trying to win over. I thought the ad was charming and well done. Ace does a "Top 10" list of problems the ad, and the #1 thing wrong with the ad is: "Wicket just emailed me to say only one was worth 'nutting on.'" Nutting on, i.e., ejaculating on. Yeah? That's how you criticize women? They aren't good enough for you to ejaculate on? Despicable.

ADDED: Ace participates in the comments and is very gracious about it:

I can't say the Wicket joke was *funny.* It was obligatory, and it had a funny set of elements behind it, but in the end it was... not a good joke. Best I could do. (I had to do the whole list in 10 minutes ....)

So I concede it wasn't a strong joke....

But despicable?

At some point I think the objection here is something that can't even be expressed without sounding lunatic -- the idea that men cannot take notice of women as sexually desirable, at least not publicly, even as a joke, even as an *Ewok* commenting upon another *Ewok's* sexual desirability.

And because that idea is so transparently absurd as to dissolve upon first contact with sunlight, it's hidden within the conclusory word "despicable."

Lots of commenters seemed to think I didn't get the Ewok joke, but did they get my Daffy Duck joke? I'm kidding, but really: Guys, when women don't get you and your explanation has "Star Wars" in it, you probably should think again about making wisecracks about women not being sexy enough.

Drudge digs in, and The Smoking Gun has the transcript depicting Gore as "a giggling 'crazed sex poodle.'"

Drudge. Smoking Gun:

In a bizarre statement to police, the Oregon woman who claims that Al Gore fondled and groped her during a massage session described the former Vice President as a giggling "crazed sex poodle" who gave a "come hither" look before pouncing on her in a Portland hotel suite. In a taped January 2009 interview with cops, the 54-year-old woman, a licensed masseuse... detailed her alleged October 2006 encounter with Gore at the Hotel Lucia.... It is unclear why, two years later, she approached Portland police and sought to memorialize her allegations against Gore, who she portrayed as a tipsy, handsy predator who forced her to drink Grand Marnier, pinned her to a bed, and forcibly French kissed her. The woman's statement--which could be mistaken for R-rated Vice Presidential fan fiction--describes Gore as a man with a "violent temper as well as extremely dictatorial commanding attitude besides his Mr. Smiley Global Warming concern persona." After fleeing Gore's suite, the woman returned home to discover, a la Lewinsky, "stains on the front of my black slacks." Suspecting that the stains were Gore bodily fluids, the woman made sure not to clean them.