Michelle Obama does not know how to kiss up to people in Wisconsin.

Yesterday in Racine, she began with: "For the next 16 days, coming here to Racine is the closest thing I'm going to get to being at home in Chicago, so you know I'm happy."

People in Wisconsin tend to exhibit antagonism toward Illinois, and I don't think they enjoy hearing that what's nice about Wisconsin is that it's close to Chicago. There's a word for it: FIB.

By the way, what is Michelle wearing? It looks like something designed by Dmitry of "Project Runway."

IN THE COMMENTS: chickelit said:

She pronounced "Racine" as "RAY-seen." I grew up pronouncing it "RUH-seen"

I said:

Remember when John Kerry came to Wisconsin and mispronounced "brat."

From a Straight Dope forum on the topic of how to say "Racine":

Wisconsinite born and raised; I pronounce it "Ruh-seen." My Chicago-suburban born-and-raised husband, who spent a lot of time in Wisconsin, calls it "Ray-seen."

This guide to Wisconsin pronunciation has "Ruh-seen." on the audio but also: "Locals argue between RAY-seen and ruh-SEEN." Miscellaneous Racine information:

In 1887, malted milk was invented by William Horlick in Racine. The garbage disposal was invented in 1927 by architect John Hammes of Racine.

Also at the Straight Dope forum: "I thought this was the playwright Racine, so I voted the second..." The French influence! Well, Racine was, in fact, settled by the French:

On October 10, 1699, a fleet of eight canoes bearing a party of French explorers entered the mouth of Root River. These were the first Europeans known to visit what is now Racine County. Led by Jonathan Paradise, they founded a trading post in the area that eventually became a small settlement on Lake Michigan near where the Root River empties into Lake Michigan. "Racine" is French for "root."

Both of the argued-for pronunciations are wrong if you want to go with the French. The first syllable "a" should be more like the "a" in "cat" (and not "brat"!).

AND: Commenter Mr. D said:

She said "Ray-seen" because that's how Chicagoans pronounce the name of Racine Avenue in Chicago. They used to call the Chicago Cardinals football team the Ray-seen Cardinals because their field was on Racine Avenue.

Ah-ha!

Art heist in Rotterdam.

Stolen: Pablo Picasso’s 1971 “Harlequin Head”; Claude Monet’s 1901 “Waterloo Bridge, London” and “Charing Cross Bridge, London”; Henri Matisse’s 1919 “Reading Girl in White and Yellow”; Paul Gauguin’s 1898 “Girl in Front of Open Window”; Meyer de Haan’s “Self-Portrait,” around 1890, and Lucian Freud’s 2002 work “Woman with Eyes Closed.”

Marinello said the thieves have limited options available, such as seeking a ransom from the owners, the museum or the insurers. They could conceivably sell the paintings in the criminal market too, though any sale would likely be a small fraction of their potential auction value.

The problem selling these things is obviously not protection enough to keep thieves from bothering.



IN THE COMMENTS: chickelit said:

From the link: the idea that an unscrupulous private investor might have commissioned the works’ theft was far-fetched. 'That’s something that comes from Hollywood movies,' he said.

Should they blame a Hollywood video or lax security?

"I'd like to finish the week without Scott's dick in my ear, but until captain douche-nozzle is recalled..."

"I'll drink and stew and become more resolute in my hate directed at this prick."

A sample of the discourse over in the Isthmus forum, where Madisonians bemoan the newly signed Wisconsin law that repealed the 2009 Equal Pay Enforcement Act.

MEANWHILE: In the comments section of last night's post "The Democrats' War on Women," a couple commenters engage in sexist wordplay about Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch (who, like Walker, faces recall). A commenter referred to "Walker and his 'minions'" and chickenlittle quipped "What about all the filly minions like Kleefisch? Do you want to filet them too?" and leslyn said "How do you filet a filly??" This portrayal of a woman as meat called to mind the infamous Hustler magazine cover (showing a woman's body fed through a meat grinder). I said:

"How do you filet a filly??"

Said, about Rebecca Kleefisch, by a female commenter who probably regards herself as a feminist. That image is one of sexual violence.

You compare an adult woman to a juvenile animal. You refer to slicing into her dead (animal) body, prepping her for cooking.

But the woman you revile is conservative, so maybe you didn't notice.

If you think you are a feminist, you are a fake one, really a lefty or a Democrat, and your partisan politics comes first.

Go stand over there will Bill Clinton.

Leslyn defended herself this way:

Oh for goodness sake, Althouse, "how do you filet a filly" was A PLAY ON WORDS on CHICKENLITTLE'S comment. Which you'd have recognized were you not humorless.

And get off the "feminist" rant already. To use a METAPHOR, you jump both sides of the fence.

My response:

I saw the joke. That is was a joke is irrelevant to my point.

Would you like me to Google "sexist jokes" for you?

Try making racist jokes out in public and see how far "it was humor" gets you.

Picture a filleted young horse. Picture a woman in a similar condition. Picture a particular named woman in that condition.

Now, is that funny?

Remember when Rush Limbaugh portrayed Sandra Fluke as a prostitute and said we should have sex tapes of her on the internet?

How funny was that?

Now... go on with your explanations about why you are really not a hypocrite.

Alternatively, concede. It might be the better option.

Being a feminist is hard. You have to be consistent. Take the challenge.

Mitt Romney and his running mate, Paul Ryan.

At the town hall meeting in Middleton, Wisconsin this evening, there was a big crowd:



With an overflow room:



I was surprised how short Romney is. On line, I see his height listed as 6'2". In person, he looked about 5'9".

Anyway... the team of Romney and Ryan was excellent. They answered questions from people as equal partners — some deference to Romney, but basically equals. Ryan is a terrific speaker, and he got more applause than Romney a couple times. Hearing them answer the same question, one after the other, I kept thinking Ryan is the stronger of the 2. And that's not to say Romney was unappealing, just less intense.

Surely, Romney will pick Ryan as his VP. Right?

I had the feeling there were 2 future Presidents in the room.

IN THE COMMENTS: chickenlittle says "Head size is an ongoing theme at Althouse" and links to this old post where I quote Tina Brown:

The heads of world-class celebrities literally seem to enlarge. Hillary Clinton's, for instance, has grown enormously since she was the mere wife of the governor of Arkansas. It nods when she talks to you like a balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. The years of limelight so inflated the circumference of Jackie O's cranium, it seemed her real face must be concealed by an oversized Halloween mask. If you looked into her eyes, you could see her in there somewhere, screaming.

Absurd hyperventilating about Romney's not completely quick journey toward the GOP nomination.

I'm talking about stuff like this:

A Super Tuesday Nailbiter Puts Romney on His Heels

With a shockingly thin margin in Ohio, Mitt Romney has a shaky Super Tuesday and Rick Santorum claims a moral victory.

But then... that's the one I linked to. You can see why they do it. Sensationalism. It's embarrassing, but it's a way of life in the media.

IN THE COMMENTS: chickenlittle said:

I don't quite fathom the "put on his heels" idiom. Does it mean like making a dog heel? Does mean put on woman's heels? Or it is a "round heels" reference?

Romney said he wasn't going to set his hair on fire, and I don't think he's going to don stilettos. "Round heels" is an old-fashioned expression signifying women who are easy to tip over. Rush Limbaugh resurrected it in one of his Sandra Fluke rants last week. ("OK, so, she’s not a slut. She’s round-heeled.")

I don't think Romney is cooling his heels or taking to his heels or showing a clean pair of heels. He's certainly not hairy at the heel. ("The Colonel delivered himself of the opinion that Godfrey Burrows was slightly hairy at the heel, a pronouncement which baffled Poirot completely.")

And it's got nothing to do with that Marvin Gaye song "Sexual Heeling." (Arf!)

I think the relevant idiom the headline writer intended to approximate is: rock back on one's heels. I'm visualizing a comics version of Mitt Romney, dramatically angled backwards. Aw! In my mind's eye, he looks just like Dagwood. And Ann is Blondie. 

ADDED: For Dylan fans:

Take me on a trip upon your magic swirlin’ ship
My senses have been stripped, my hands can’t feel to grip
My toes too numb to step
Wait only for my boot heels to be wanderin’
 
Seen you turn the corner, seen your boot heels spark
Seen you in the daylight, and watched you in the dark

Well, the sword swallower, he comes up to you
And then he kneels
He crosses himself
And then he clicks his high heels

You have slayed me, you have made me
I got to laugh halfways off my heels
I got to know, babe, will you surround me?
So I can tell if I’m really real

WaPo's Carter Eskew says that last night Romney called Newt “an instrument of the left.”

He puts that in quotes, like Romney said those words. But we have listened and relistened to Romney's speech, and I have Googled and searched in the news of the last day, and the only place I can find that "instrument of the left" business is in Eskew's own blog post, which begins...

Pinch me. I think I’m having a rare and racy Democratic dream... The most beatable Republican has just made it a race.

Okay. You're having a wet dream, but you're writing in the Washington Post. Wake up and get your quotes straight.

This is Mitt Romney’s moment of truth... He will need to adapt and re-tool, and he will need to do better than tonight when he called Newt, “an instrument of the left.”

Maybe Eskew was taking notes during Romney's speech and paraphrased something that he later believed was a direct quote. But it's not even a good paraphrase of anything in the speech. It bears some resemblance to this from Romney:

"Our president has divided the nation, engaged in class warfare and attacked the free-enterprise system that has made America the economic envy of the world. We cannot defeat that president with a candidate who has joined in that very assault on free enterprise."

Romney doesn't name Gingrich there, but let's assume Gingrich is the "candidate." And you might say that the material about class warfare and the attack/assault on free enterprise equates with "the left." You still can't find anything that accuses Gingrich of becoming "an instrument of the left." Romney only says he's "joined" them in their assault, not that he's become their tool.

I don't know whether Romney should intensify his attack on Gingrich that way. (Should he?) But it irks me to see the Washington Post throwing out a bogus quote (assuming that's what it is). I hate the idea of crap like that going viral. Meade detected the first signs of viral infection over in the Isthmus forum. He pointed out the problem, and the response there was basically: Hey, it's in the Washington Post. If it were wrong, they'd correct it.

Would they?

ADDED: "Carter Eskew... was the chief strategist for the Gore 2000 presidential campaign...."

IN THE COMMENTS: chickenlittle said:

Eskew is askew. Eschew Eskew.

"It's not a protest without Ben."

Thinking about Ben Masel, the Madison activist who died yesterday, I looked back at his old comments on this blog. The first one, in July 2006, was on a post about the hallucinogenic drug psilocybin. Ben said:

Advice for the 1st time user of psilocybin or other psychedelics...

Go to the woods with one or more folks you like and trust. Ideally, deep enough into the National Forest that no-one will care if you take your clothes off.

At least one of the group should not consume. Only this individual should carry a cell phone.

Start with 1/4 of the suggested dose, wait to see your reaction, then, if favorable, take the rest.

Just because your first trip was wonderful, do not repeat the experience inmmediately. Space by at least a month.

I found another drug-related one. (Drug legalization was a big issue for Ben.) I'd blogged about accepting Ben's invitation to join the Facebook group "I'm proud to say that LSD-25 has contributed positively to my life," and he said:

Kudos on the courage to accept the invite. As yet, none of the "A list' lefty bloggers I simultaneously invited have signed on.

That's some high-level, drug-related kudos. Note, as I noted then, that you don't have to have taken LSD to have benefited from it. I loved the psychedelic music and art and many aspects of the hippie culture that had something to do with LSD.

Then there were the more clearly political things. In February 2007, I was saying what I thought about presidential candidates hiring bloggers, and Ben said: "I'm not hiring any house bloggers for my 2012 Senate campaign, as I prefer to be lambasted for my own scurillous posts." He really would have run too.

In August 2008, I put up a photograph of the Wisconsin Capitol rotunda and commented on its visual beauty. Ben commented:

Besides the look, there's the acoustics. The building went up just before electric amplification, and there's patterns on the floor directing speakers to the sweet spots.

I once heckled a Tommy speech, much louder than he was with amplification. Whoever placed the now permanently installed speakers had no idea.

Those acoustics played a huge part in the protests that took place in the rotunda this year. When I saw Ben a few weeks ago, he was extolling those magnificent acoustics, which make free speech in the rotunda uniquely valuable. It's not enough to say there's somewhere else where you can protest. This is the place. (Tommy, of course, is Tommy Thompson.)

March 19, 2007, I blogged a couple long, funny videos by Uncle Jimbo, who was covering some Madison anti-war rally, and Ben said: "I'll accept jimbo's piece as goodnatured fun, and appreciate he gave me the last word, but making the same wisecrack about me twice shows a deficiency of creativity."

Here: I've pinpointed the wisecrack:



Risking a deficiency of creativity, let me repeat that wisecrack, once more, with feeling: "It's not a protest without Ben."

***

Yesterday, we were talking about Ben, and chickelit said:

Masel was convicted in 1976, of assault, for spitting on U.S. Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson.

I think one had to live in Madison then to appreciate how outrageous that was even then.

And Harry Phartz said:

I did live in Madison then and pardon me for telling this great story one more time, but...

Masel got arrested for the famous spittle deposition on Scoop Jackson and managed to get released on bail fast enough that on primary Tuesday he was out and on the streets making noise. I was walking to class along Lake Street that morning, ready to turn up the Library Mall to the campus when I see on the NE corner of Lake and State, Ben Masel in a sandwich board sign urging people to write him in as candidate for President. He was right there in front of what was then Rennebohm's Drugstore as I passed and he exorted the passersby "A vote for me is a spit on all candidates!"

Layers of sweet potatoes...

... and of references to "The Graduate."

"This photo somehow belongs in a certain comment thread yesterday."

LOL. He's talking about the thread that goes with this:

What was Althouse drinking?

Here.

What was Althouse drinking?
	Vodka
	Water
	Vodka and water
pollcode.com free polls

IN THE COMMENTS: Bart Hall (Kansas, USA) said:

She was drinking a 'Sullenberger.'

Several shots of Grey Goose,
Shake hard, then
Set down gently ... with a splash.

Trooper York (who has met me in person) said:

Despite all the crap she takes from the liberal loons, Althouse is not much of a drinker. She is actually tiny and more than one or two drinks would be very noticeable. So this is all bullshit and make believe fun.

But hey, apple juice in the rocks glasses worked as a gimmick for Dean Martin, so go for it.

Chickenlittle said:

I think she should cultivate an image of a hard drinker, even though she isn't. It's a good foil to fool the left and drive them even crazier.

Meade (who has met me in person) said:

Wait. Chickenlittle, are you saying she's faking it? That she's not really a hard drinker?

But that would change everything. And how would you explain her expensive tastes in vodka and whatnot?

Chickenlittle:

I really thought she was, but she seems to be denying it here. How can I argue? Why would Althouse be messing with our minds?

Meade said:

Wow. If it was just water, I'm afraid I owe her a big apology.

Wow.

Ricpic said:

Blame It On Moskva

Tiny Annie took a sip
And tiny Eve turned red,
Mortified but hic to hip
Both tumbled into bed.

Meade said:

Then Eve said something seemly
And Ann said oh pshaw
You seem to some so dreamy
Your bash of Rush withdraw!

Your bash of Rush withdraw, Eve
Unfounded lies cause schism
Apologize for he's my guy
And learn apologism

Palladian (who has met me in person) said:

Althouse and I once got drunk by clandestinely drinking eau de cologne off the cosmetics bar at Bergdorf-Goodman.

What if I did a summer trip, going to U.S. cities where I could do meet-ups with readers...

What would be the top cities? Help me devise a travel route. I have this idea of a big summer road trip, made sociable with reader meet-ups. What cities should mark the way? I also want bloggable, photographable landscapes in between, but at this point, what I'm looking for are the rest spots, the nights, the local cafés and taverns. Throw some suggestions at me.

IN THE COMMENTS: chickenlittle said:

Althouse needs a US map with little pins stuck in it showing the locations of commenters. That might help her visualize her trip.

Aren't such maps easy to create in Google?

Thanks for the idea. Here's the map.


View Larger Map

Add a pin if you think you might be interested in meeting in a group of readers at a bar or café. I need to see places where there are clusters of readers. [ADDED: The way to add a pin is to get the left sidebar open, find the "edit," button, and then click on the button that looks like the pins that are already on the map. Thanks to Portly Pirate for helping me figure that out.]

Meade said:

Speaking of Cincinnati, just outside Cincinnati, to the east, by a river called the Little Miami, is a rest spot called Meade's Rest Spot. It's also where you will find Meade's Café and a tavern called Tavern Meade where you can order a plate of barbequed short ribs, a draft Guinness, quaff a fermented honey wine called "mead," and then, as they say, get a room.

All the smart road trippers, when traveling through the heartland, always stay at Meade's due to its reputation for a hospitality that darn near approaches a hoosier level of friendliness.

LOL. Yeah, I should quaff some mead.

An 8-mile-wide slab of ice broke away from mainland Ohio and floated off into Lake Erie.

100 people needed to be rescued — and one person died.

ADDED:



(I've replaced still photo from "Way Down East" with the clip I'd looked for and not found. Thanks to chickenlittle for finding it.)

"Hey, I just saw 'Gran Torino' — is there some place safe to talk about it without worrying about spoilage?"

Asks chickenlittle. The answer is yes, here.