"I got it because we got drunk and it was just a really funny idea and my friend said he’d do it for free."

"I sat on it for a couple days and was finally like, 'Man, I’m gonna get a butthole tattoo that says "Let It Be" with a bumblebee flying out!'"

She sat on it for a couple days and now she will sit on it for the rest of her life.

She's not even a Beatles fan. Well, no. If she were, she'd have a beetle crawling out.

Signs that people are tired of thinking about politics.

Here are the "most popular" stories in The Washington Post right now:



#1 is Michelle Obama's ass. #4 is a bird laid an egg. And both of these are stories that I blogged yesterday. The First Lady's ass attracted 197 commenters here on the blog. I blogged the bird story too. In the comments, Inga made fun of the WaPo headline saying that the bird had given birth, and I note this morning that the headline has been rewritten, and now it's producing a chick. But there we were, talking about whether it's silly to say a bird gave birth.

Give birth is an interesting expression, even as applied to mammals. Which is my point: What is interesting this morning? Something tells me it's not politics.

Meanwhile, even politicians seem to know we're tired of dreary politics. Apparently, Republicans want to win us over with "happy talk" — #3 on that list:

At a retreat for Republican leaders last month, former House speaker Newt Gingrich told them to “learn to be a happy party” and a “cheerful” one, and Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said they should be a party “that smiles.”...

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor took this don’t­worry-be-happy strategy seriously, and in a heavily promoted “major” speech to the American Enterprise Institute [that]... began with an uplifting anecdote about the Wright brothers and quoted the inspirational words of Emma Lazarus. He spoke from a lectern decorated with a foam board carrying the slogan “Making life work for more people”....

Decorated with a foam board... That's like a bird giving birth. The WaPo is bumping up the rhetoric inanely. Even when mocking the GOP for its strained cheeriness, they're goosing us with inappropriate but exciting words.

And then there's that coin. It's moving closer to reality.  Here I am over here in Reality. And there... somewhere out there.... a coin... it approaches!

Words, words, words... What kind of words do you have an appetite for this morning?

"Michelle Obama's posterior again the subject of a public rant."

That's an actual headline at The Washington Post. The article informs us of an incident involving something that was said by a previously unfamous high school football coach. The erstwhile nonentity, Bob Grisham, said:

"Fat butt Michelle Obama.... Look at her. She looks like she weighs 185 or 190. She’s overweight."

For his sins, Grisham was suspended from his job, but that's clearly not enough punishment. He must be further humiliated. As if this is enforcing good taste in talking about the First Lady! The Washington Post published an article about her ass! Halfway through it gets to the provocative question:

But what is it with Michelle Obama’s critics and the fixation with her derriere?

Does using words like "posterior" and "derriere" make this okay? The Washington Post asked the question — I'll put it in plain English: Why are so many people talking about Michelle Obama's ass?

Now, the obvious answer would seem to be that she's made childhood obesity her issue, so that's somehow asking for comment on the subject of whether she herself is at all fat. (I disagree with that sort of critique, by the way. She's made the subject obesity and how it affects health, not mere fatness and how it affects beauty. For her issue, it's fine that she doesn't come across as thin. She looks robust and not health-impaired. If she looked thin, people would say she's pushing vanity-based dieting and insufficiently concerned with the scourge of anorexia.)

The WaPo article ignores that obvious answer but does not eschew obviousness. It goes racial.

The first lady’s critics “are reacting to the culture in which they’ve grown up or they are using it as a code to racialize Michelle Obama and remind people that she’s black,” says Andra Gillespie, an associate professor of political science at Emory University.

"This is the most ass-o-centric painting I've ever seen."

Say I, viewing this NYT article "Thomas Hart Benton Masterwork Goes to Met."

The photo at the link is only one panel of said masterwork, which is called "America Today."

I've got nothing against it. It's pretty cool.

The 10 panels — most of them seven and a half feet high and of varying widths — depict a panoramic sweep of rural and urban life on the eve of the Great Depression....

Benton received no fee for the commission. “I did it for nothing, just expense money,” he said. “But it led to eight other murals which paid me very well, so it was a good thing for me.” Its critical success became the impetus for the Works Progress Administration mural programs of the later 1930s.

"A man... has been arrested after he was found to be carrying genitals in his wallet..."

In South Africa.

It reminds me of that line spoken by Jimmy Stewart in the movie "Vertigo": "You shouldn't keep souvenirs of a killing. You shouldn't have been that sentimental. "

Obama's speech is "coming from his loins."

Says Axelrod, apparently noticing how... odd that sounds and adding, jocosely, "I just wanted to say loins. I wanted to see if I could get loins in the story."

Loins. From what part of Axelrod's brain does that arise? I think of the first lines of Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita": "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta."

Oh. Bah. Mah.

Loins. You see that word in the Bible: "In Biblical translations, often used for 'that part of the body that should be covered and about which the clothes are bound.'"

The word is used conspicuously by God, speaking to Job "out of the whirlwind":

Who is this that darkeneth counsel
By words without knowledge?
Gird up now thy loins like a man;
For I will demand of thee, and declare thou unto me.
Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?

Indeed, where was Obama when Jehovah laid the foundations of the earth Axelrod laid the foundations of his presidency?

"The brain science of the vagina heralds a new sexual revolution."

Another headline. My second headline post today. Is this new one more absurd than "Illegal monkey living on Frosted Flakes bites woman"?

"That is the head of one who toyed with my honour."

Said the rape victim, arrested near the head she severed from her attacker.

Exactly what it says it is.

"A dramatic interpretation of Sir Mix-A-Lot's 'Baby Got Back' as if it were performed by actor Sir Ian McKellen."

Via Throwing Things.

"It’s hard to find pants"... size matters!

"Förstemann’s thighs, each comparable to a watermelon, measured 34 inches — wider than his waist."

"3D-printed sugar network to help grow artificial liver."

"Sugar is a very nice material that can be dissolved away in the presence of living tissue very friendly to biological tissue."

We then surrounded the network with the cells that we would like to be fed by the blood vessels when the tissue is implanted - and once we have this structure of pipes-to-be and tissue, we dissolve away the sugar using water...

"We showed that you can use a 3D printer to print an arbitrary network of vessels for any tissue shape or any network of blood vessels, and then surround them with cells that you would like to create the organ out of" said Prof Bhatia.

"The 'Today' co-host saga took an almost surreal turn Friday morning..."

"... with Savannah Guthrie slipping into Ann Curry’s old chair and everyone around her, including the network, acting as if nothing had changed."

Well, nothing changed for me. I've never watched any of those chirpy morning shows. But I do see something surreal at the link: a video of a "body language expert" purporting to "decode" the movements of the arms and legs of a tearful Ann Curry on her last "Today."

Utilikilts.

Instapundit brings up the topic this morning, pointing to Manolo, who says he gets the idea:

You are the unconventional, free-spirited, manly-dude, who wishes to show the world that you march to the beat of your own Iron John drum circle, even as you not-so-surreptitiously air your junk out in public.

However...

Real Scottish kilt, worn properly = The Sexy.
Utilikilt, worn by you = The Dorky....

I learned the word "Utilikilt" on October 18, 2010, when Meade and I were "very politely accosted" on State Street (Madison, Wisconsin) by a young man with a spiral notebook who was getting people to write the answer to his question "What is your American dream?" I didn't write in his book, but while Meade was writing — "To live in freedom" — I interviewed him about his project and his attire:

I said I was especially interested in the subject of men in skirts...

Because I saw the potential for getting men out of shorts (which really are The Dorky)...

.... and he agreed to be photographed...

Photographs at the link...

... and introduced me to the term Utilikilt. There was some talk about its usefulness to, for example, a carpenter.

I observed that it would be a useful defense against plumber's crack (since the back isn't attached to the front beneath the legs, so there's no downward pull when you crouch), and he made the less subtle point that it wasn't good if you had to use a ladder.  

We talked to him about his project, and he said he was hitchhiking all over the country — would you pick up a man in a Utilikilt? — getting answers to his question, and naturally he had a website, which I linked to. The website was americandreamorbust.com, but I guess it went bust, because it's not there anymore.

Now, you might say, well, that's part of the American Dream. No safety net. You can win or lose. Free markets! Capitalism! He just lost. And hitchhiker in a Utilikilt soliciting entries to a spiral notebook turned out to be a loser. But he took his shot, and had his day in the sun. There's nothing to cry about.

But here's the mistake I see: He shouldn't have bought his own domain. If he'd gone with americandreamorbust.blogspot.com that website would still be there, and whatever the project was, it would be preserved. He paid to get a more-ambitious-looking URL, but then, he didn't keep it up, and the links that he got now go nowhere.

This is why I stay on Blogger. It seems weaker, perhaps, not to have one's own domain. But I think it's stronger. It's stable. It's a floor of permanence under your project. It's not vulnerable to the winds of change.

Beware the winds of change.



Especially if you're wearing a skirt.

"Handless man throws volleyball-size rock through KFC window...:

"The 46-year-old also allegedly chucked a brick through KFC’s drive-through window..."

ADDED: An element of this mystery — why did he do it? why doesn't he have hands? — is that he was (allegedly) brought into this country by the United Nations. Could it be that in his home country, he had a penchant for throwing things through windows and he was punished by having his hands cut off?

"New Jersey man stabbed himself, threw skin and intestines at cops..."

Reports the Daily News, where comments in the "That took a lot of guts" vein are accumulating.

Don't tell me... bath salts... the new LSD....

"In France, they’d be unpacking their glorious foods and beverages. En famille! Not so here."

"We tend to like to plump down on a chair or a towel and feel the sun move from one point to the next. Or, in the inevitable quest for romance, we walk the shoreline, holding hands, thinking this is forever thoughts."

And by plump, she really means plump, based on the 7th photograph. Plump and well-oiled.

Reading between the lines, as I always do on Nina's posts — is there another way to read? — I'm sure I see that the people in France know how to live and we Americans do not.

Many people love to just stand in the water to cool off and that’s fun to watch too. Humankind, lusting for that refreshing moment when the waves gently tickle your legs or splash against your buttocks. Conversations in the water.

Plunge, why don't you, Americans? Get in over your ass, like the French!



Plump, the verb, has an "Ultimately imitative" etymology (according to the OED):

Compare Middle Dutch plumpen (Dutch plompen), Middle Low German plumpen (German regional (Low German) plumpen), all in sense ‘to fall or plunge into water with a plumping sound’, Middle High German plumpen to make a plumping noise ( < Middle Low German; German plumpen), plumpfen, pflumpfen to fall with a thud (German plumpfen (now rare)), Old Swedish plompa to plump, to fall with impact (Swedish plumpa), Danish plumpe to flop, plump, to let fall.

Compare other more or less imitative verbs with final -ump , e.g. bump v.1, dump v.1, stump v.1, thump v., etc.

Comparison has sometimes been made with Romance derivatives of classical Latin plumbāre to weight with lead (see plumb v.; compare plunge v.), but the similarity between the Romance and Germanic words seems no more than coincidental.

Let's plump and bump and stump and thump and dump. Up to our buttocks.

Plump, the adjective, originally meant "Rude, unrefined; intellectually dull, obtuse." (Full and rounded and fleshy and swollen — that's  a later meaning.) It goes back to the Middle Dutch plomp, meaning  "plump, squat, ponderous, rude, clumsy."

Buttock is a word formed from "butt" and "-ock," "ock" being a diminutive. The OED defines "buttock" as "One of the two protuberances of the rump (of men and beasts)." Ah! Another -ump word: rump.

Protuberance is "A thing which protrudes from something else; a rounded projection or swelling; a knob, a bump." Again we bump up against bump. Protuberance goes back to some Latin words having to do with swelling and pushing forth, which is interesting in connection with the American, reticent, barely bumped, unbare rumps Nina was writing about.

Me, I'm seeing the tuber in protuberance. A tuber is:

An underground structure consisting of a solid thickened portion or outgrowth of a stem or rhizome, of a more or less rounded form, and bearing ‘eyes’ or buds from which new plants may arise; a familiar example is the potato.

Oh, Americans, you potatoes, with eyes that do not see! Solid, thickened, underground! Arise! Awake! Consider... the French.

At this point, everyone at Meadhouse jumps up and sings "La Marseillaise." It looks like this.

Come on, children. To the beach!

"Keith Haring's Men's Room Mural Is As NSFW As You'd Imagine."

"Penises grow human heads with mouths that suck the toes of other human shapes that in turn contort into Mobius-strips of sucking, performing Escher-like convolutions as one body part morphs into another."

Excellent!

Angelina's leg...

... is everywhere.

At the Disembodied Café...

... are you still available?

"Back in the 1960s, who'd have imagined that a septuagenarian white sheriff from Arizona with a hostility to free speech would one day become a hero to the left?"

Let's talk about Clarence Dupnik.

Dupnik made multiple statements drawing connections between conservative "rhetoric" and Saturday's crime.... At a time when most politicians were behaving responsibly, why was Sheriff Dupnik speaking with a reckless disregard for the truth...?...

The Arizona Republic reported Wednesday that Dupnik's department was "refusing to release a wide range of public documents about the man charged in Saturday's shooting rampage that left six dead and more than a dozen wounded." Later that day, the Republic reported, the department relented and released "12 sets of incident reports" about police calls to the Loughner home or Jared Loughner's high school....

It's quite possible that Dupnik simply enjoys shooting off his mouth. 

More likely he enjoys covering his ass. Shame on all the journalists who scurried forward with their big old newsrags to help him cover said ass.'

IN THE COMMENTS: Irene (who knows such things) says:

A juvenile point: the surname "Dupnik" derives from "Dupa," a word used in Slavic- and Baltic-speaking languages. The word "dupa" means "ass."

"Dupnik" can translate as "assman." There is a bawdy dance — usually done at vodka-infused weddings — called the "dupnik," during which the partiers "fist bump" their cheeks.