All over the world, women are self-comforting...

... grasping their skirt hems and rolling, rolling them upward, absent-mindedly.

Meanwhile, women eat cupcakes, cupcakes, which were ranked among the 10 most overrated things in the world, which made me say:

The only reason cupcakes are popular is because people have forgotten actual cake, which is moist and tender. Cupcakes have way too much edge... and that fluting doubles the already-too-much edge. But if you never eat real cake, you don't notice. It's like how good crackers are if you never have bread or how good a popsicle is if you never get a nice big dish of ice cream.

But people won't go back to cake, because you can't get a slice of cake and carry it around with you on the street. How would it be presented? It can't be sliced and left out on the shelves like cupcakes. You'd need some saran wrap or something to keep it from getting dried out.

So here, lonely ladies of America, here's your pre-dried-out cake: cupcake.

It sounds like something an old-fashioned guy would call you if he thinks you're pretty, so maybe you're thinking about him as you walk down the street licking icing and choking down dry cake... and tears.

What was really going on in Lochner, that Supreme Court case the conventional wisdom tells us to revile?

Glenn Reynolds reviews David Bernstein's book "Rehabilitating Lochner: Defending Individual Rights against Progressive Reform ":

As is often the case with regulation, large bakeries didn’t mind the law governing maximum hours because they could hire multiple shifts. Small bakeries, with their smaller workforces, found compliance far more difficult. The statute also set limits on ceiling heights designed to put cellar bakeries out of business....

New York’s law, the Court held, wasn’t about health at all. Numerous exceptions and loopholes in the statute undercut that rationale, as did the absence of any evidence that baking was a particularly hazardous profession or that limiting the hours bakers worked had anything to do with the wholesomeness of bread. The majority weighed the state’s claims against scientific evidence, found them wanting, and concluded that the statute lacked sufficient justification when weighed against the freedom of contract protected by the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause. It was, said Justice Peckham, “a mere meddlesome interference with the rights of the individual.”

That was back when legislation had to meet the test of science — as assessed by courts. Do you want that back? Whether you do or not, it's certainly important to know what was really going on with the regulation that the Court struck down and how the understanding of a judicial opinion takes on a life of its own:

[A]n opinion that stopped a joint effort by large corporate interests and big unions to squash small businesses was somehow turned into the centerpiece of a narrative about the Supreme Court upholding big business at the expense of the little guy....

Judicial opinions are spun by interested parties. If you think you know which ones you're supposed to love/loathe, be suspicious!

"Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, recovering from shooting, regains ability to speak — asks for toast..."

Toast!

("Breaking news" email from CNN. Story here.)

"This looks good," I said...

... and iChatted Meade this link... and it's for dinner tonight!

ADDED:



AND:

Althouse's needs are met!

We're happy to find a place that might be okay, open for lunch in New Richmond, Wisconsin. Bellarietta. I misread it as Bellateria and joke that it's deleterious.



I'm cheered by the colored pencils and paper-topped table. (You know how I feel about drawing on table-paper. ("1 part Homer + 1 part Moai + a dash of Redon + sprinkle with love = Meade.") Ha. Those links go to last summer, in the early days of the Meadhouse marriage.) And there's a book too, in case we run out of amusing things to say: "The Little Book of After Dinner Speeches."



(Enlarge to read the text of the open book... and the messages we've penciled on the table.)

After extensive consultation with our excellent server Tanya, I trusted them with a Philly steak sandwich and Meade, oddly enough, went for a black bean burger. It looked like this and tasted as good as you'd hope upon seeing it, and it's hard for bread to meet my high standard:



Computer on the table? Damned right: There was WiFi! Yay! The wifie got her WiFi, and her hubby is happy with that. So marriage can work. It was possible to find a husband who suited my eccentric needs.



And it was possible to find a great place to eat in this little town in the middle of Wisconsin.

Life is good!

"The baguette scene could not have been simpler, but Carla wanted to make it a big one."

French First Lady Carla Bruni, doing a Woody Allen movie.

How do you manage the day's last spurt of energy?

"The way I do it, there are still 56 minutes left to watch two episodes of The Brady Bunch on TV Land and I [have] enough energy to go downstairs and make a ham and swiss with horseradish, tomato and lettuce on artisian bread during the first commercial break. If I watch The Brady Bunch first, and Marsha's in it a lot, then we're down to two minutes."

A Meadhouse mountain range...

... of bread.



Meade advocates keeping bread in this position. You don't need to wrap it up. Just put the cut side of the loaf down on the cutting board and it will stay fresh just as long. This assumes you've got "artisanal" bread. I don't argue about such things. But I do photograph them sometimes when so many artisanal loaves have lined up on the cutting board.

"This is no time to be FRAIL!"

Eat bread.

At the Checkout Café...

... choose carefully.

"Are You an Eco-Douchebag?"

Your reaction to this sign will answer the question:



(Via Boing Boing.)

Breadscape.

***

Now, I could have called this "At the Breadscape Café..." with "... you can talk about anything" — or "anything you knead to" as one wag suggested — but then somebody — I'm not naming names — would have felt compelled to say that I'm relying too much on open threads, as if I hadn't done the photographs at all. The open threadiness ought to be appreciated as an extra dimension to the photography posts, to give you something to talk about other than whether it is or is not a nice photograph. But I've got other mountains to climb. So I'm calling this "Breadscape."