"In 1959 Fred Astaire hired renowned makeup artist John Chambers to work on his television special, Another Evening with Fred Astaire."

"The assignment? Turn Fred Astaire into Alfred E. Neuman. The results were predictably strange."



As they say... The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

I can't imagine such a long dance routine on network TV, even with a visual gag. I can't imagine a visual gag going on and on like that. People must have been so much more patient back then. Or much more in love with the idea of themselves as appreciating elevated culture. And yet it was not so elevated, what with the Alfred E. Neuman gag.

And that deadly modern dance. The woman swanning around while men in tuxedos behaved as if they were a single entity and that entity was a pulsating sexual organ. And all in such exquisite taste! Then Neuman/Astaire performs alone, lasts longer than all the rest of them, but in the end, he too loses his erection.

Moral: The ugliest guy might be the best performer.

Did I get that right?

"Buy yourself a shotgun"... maybe not a real shotgun, maybe something metaphorical.

So, yeah, there's Jimi Hendrix, on TV in 1965. Can you even hear him? I want to concentrate on Buddy & Stacy. I'm surprised they got away with dancing like that on television:



Those were different times.

I was so tired when I wrote last night's "Gatsby" post.

It was a real struggle with that sentence:

There was dancing now on the canvas in the garden; old men pushing young girls backward in eternal graceless circles, superior couples holding each other tortuously, fashionably, and keeping in the corners — and a great number of single girls dancing individualistically or relieving the orchestra for a moment of the burden of the banjo or the traps.

You might say I wrestled with that sentence. The commenters — whom I read this morning, after I conked out and slept for 10 hours — helped me make the connection to wrestling. Terry said: "The key phrase, I think, is 'on the canvas.'" That affects how you think of the men pushing the young girls, the gracelessness, and the tortuously. Dancing is like wrestling here. In the "Gatsby" project, we look into one sentence, in isolation, but I just looked back into the text to get a better picture of that canvas, which I took to be a way to transform lawn into dance floor. I get to this sentence:

At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several hundred feet of canvas and enough colored lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby’s enormous garden.

So let that be today's sentence. Lots of Cs: corps, caterers came, canvas, colored, Christmas. Christmas replacing the garden evokes the New Testament supplanting the Old. From the Garden of Eden to the salvation of Christ. By the way, that is the sentence just before the "crowded hams" sentence that made me angry 3 days ago.

I'll leave you to untangle the strands of colored lights that festoon the Christmas tree sentence, because I need to get back to what people said about yesterday's sentence. I must say I laughed out loud when McTriumph said:

Professor Ann, your first thought was musicians using the girls as instruments? You should write a novel, "Fifty Shades of Banjo."

And then betamax3000 introduced Naked Andy Kaufman Robot. Betamax has done this "naked robot" routine before, but the Andy Kaufman iteration blew my mind, because I was still admiring Terry's wrestling insight, with men wrestling/dancing with woman, and then to bring up Andy Kaufman — when Kaufman not only had a comic act that was about wrestling with women, but he had a routine that consisted of taking the stage and reading, in its entirety, "The Great Gatsby." But it's not as if betamax3000 just said, "Hey, this is so Andy Kaufman — the wrestling and 'The Great Gatsby.'" No, betamax did a series of comments that twisted the "Gatsby" text into things that would be said by the Naked Andy Kaufman Robot:

I have pushed many women gracelessly backwards on canvas. It has been both tortuous and fashionable, leaping high from the corners of the ring onto the contestant below: in that moment there is Truth, Sweat and Cheers. Many people assume the urge to wrestle women is sexual. As a wrestler of women I can definitively say that this is untrue. Mostly. In the main it is about the defining moment of being Superior, of recognition of the Pinner and the Pinnee.

A few moments on Etiquette.

A sportsman never uses the Banjo or the Traps on a female wrestler. While he is allowed to use the Piledriver it is not to be done from a height greater than a women's modest skirt: below the knees only, gentlemen.

Danny DeVito did not understand. He would ask "Andy, why don't you stop wrestling women?" and I would reply "Danny, why don't you stop being so short and disheveled?"

Shirt tucked or not, in the ring Danny would've been able to stand as tall as his Courage would allow him to be, but -- sadly --he did not understand.

Tony Danza would argue "I'm a boxer. What would be so different if I boxed women?"

I could only shake my head. He did not comprehend the difference between wrestling and fighting. A punch is anger, but only through grappling do we experience the common ground between the sexes: the canvas ring is where the true colors are painted, like a woman's red nails or a man's 1969 orange Camaro.

I once wrestled a woman who smelled of avocado. In the midst of our grappling a moment was frozen as that scent overpowered my senses, psychically and spiritually. Was the avocado Fear or Power? How could I pin this woman down, this woman who smelled of avocado? How could I keep her soul and buttocks confined beneath me when the Avocado was everywhere? In the end I won the match, but the avocado defeated me on a far grander level.

Every woman has the Avocado inside her -- this, a true wrestler knows -- knows and respects...

And:

The first time I wrestled a woman was practically a religious experience. At the end I laid on the canvas pinned, defeated and euphoric: through my bell-rung eyes I saw God through the rafters wink at me. I do not remember her name but I remember the look of Victory in her eyes and how I peed a little.

And:

Women have soft elbows. When you are elbowed in the solar plexus by a woman it is different than a man's elbow: there is Understanding. There is Forgiveness.

And:

When pinned between a woman's headstrong knees a man has no choice but to understand: it is the Silent Conversation, and the chafing will heal.

And:

To repeat: wrestling a woman is not sexual. Excitement is for the Soul and the Arms and the Thighs, not the Loins. To have an erection in the ring is to give the Devil a Handle.

There's more, but enough of the quoting of the Naked Andy Kaufman Robot. Let's turn to the wonderful commenter Chip Ahoy, crisply quipping:

Later, following the death of Gatz, the same canvas was turned over to modern dance.



But that didn't last. The dancers, bored of dancing set off in pairs to the beach, to break up and pair off again and break up and pair off.

I remember that modern dance GIF. It was back in 2009, when I wrote about "Lawrence Halprin... 'the tribal elder of American landscape architecture'" whose wife was a dancer who, he said, "could not be contained by a rectangle," so he built her a dance deck that was the "odd, improvised shape" you see in the photo. Back then Chip Ahoy said:

I too knew that my wife could not be contained on a rectangular deck for she is uncontainable, so I improvised with an deck area that could be danced on several levels. The outer levels tilt so that anything placed on them slide off toward the center, and built with portals that promise escape but all lead circuitously back to the main dance area, rather like a hamster habitat. I rounded the edges and varied the angles for nature has few straight lines and fewer right angles and my wife is nature personified, and that made the whole deck railing more difficult, you see, which I then electrified because I knew she would make several attempts at an over-the-rail vault. The deck areas are also surrounded by a moat that I populated with piranhas that I feed regularly by dropping in a steak so they're veritably trained to converge en mass, along with back up electric eels and those really gross blood-sucking slugs, all to discourage wandering beyond the safety of boundaries I set forth with my architecture. The deck itself is fitted with sprinklers at its farthermost points that spray a mist with power hose force to warn the little sylph-like dancing scamp whenever her dance gives the appearance of breaking loose or she nears the end of her retractible chain.

And then Chip proceeded to animate a dancer for the odd, improvised dance deck.

And now, it's your turn to dance. Dance all night in the comments, backward in eternal graceless circles, tortuously, fashionably, individualistically.

Let's dance like it's 1958 in Idaho.

That's nice and slow. I think you can all learn that, and I think it would be nice if kids today learned that dance, maybe in gym class. I think it would help them in many ways. And feel free to dress like that, even unironically.

I found that because YouTube suggested it after I watched this 1965 clip from the TV show "Hollywood a Go-Go" with Del Shannon singing "Runaway" and the "Hollywood a Go-Go" go go dancers were dancing around him doing some dance that represented running away, even though their forward motion only took them in a circle so they never got away. It's faster and more frenetic dancing, but I think you might be able to figure out the moves, even though we never get to see the feet.

Seemingly bridging the time gap between the first and second video — and also suggested by YouTube — here's Little Eva singing about the brand-new dance "The Loco-Motion." I say "seemingly" because it looks early 60s and the "Runaway" dance looks later 60s, but in fact, both clips are from 1965. A lot of old and new intersected in 1965. Personally, I was 14 years old, and I was rooting for progress. I watched "Hollywood a Go-Go" and "Shindig" (the show Little Eva's on), and I tuned in hoping to see British invasion stuff like The Kinks or folk rock stuff like The Byrds. I would have regarded Del Shannon as an intrusion from the pre-Beatles era. "Runaway" was a hit in 1961. It was one of the singles we played at slumber parties when we were children.

"The Loco-Motion" was a hit in 1962. Little Eva — Eva Narcissus Boyd — was a maid who also worked as a babysitter for Carole King and Gerry Goffin: "It is often claimed that Goffin and King were amused by Boyd's individual dancing style, so they wrote 'The Loco-Motion' for her" — but maybe that's not true. Little Eva doesn't look too interested in dancing in that "Shindig" clip. The notorious song "He Hit Me (It Felt Like A Kiss)" was based on what Little Eva told Carole King about her relationship with her boyfriend. That song was originally recorded by The Crystals — produced by the not-yet-a-murderer Phil Spector — and in recent years, it's been covered by Courtney Love and Grizzly Bear — with some unknown degree of irony.

Dancing with the Devil... for Christmas...

... in simpler times:



"I'm not completely convinced that your intentions are honorable."

"President Barack Obama and Psy shared the stage in Washington on Sunday but didn’t dance 'Gangnam Style' together."

"Obama has said he thinks he can do 'Gangnam Style' — Psy’s signature dance — but hasn’t proven it yet."

The 2 mega pop stars just shook hands, and nothing (apparently) was said about that inconvenient lyric of his that goes:

Kill those fucking Yankees who have been torturing Iraqi captives
Kill those fucking Yankees who ordered them to torture
Kill their daughters, mothers, daughters-in-law, and fathers
Kill them all slowly and painfully

The "all-star" iteration of "Dancing with the Stars" ends up with a no star finale.

Have you heard of Shawn Johnson, Kelly Monaco, and Melissa Rycroft?

"I'm free and I love to be free/To live my life the way I want/To say and do whatever I please..."

Consider the use of the old Lesley Gore song — "You Don't Own Me" — for political, pro-Obama purposes:



Now, I love old Lesley and her classic song. And it's fine with me if the Democratic Party is her party — and she'll cry if Obama loses, cry if Obama loses, you would cry too if it happened to you. "You Don't Own Me" dates back to 1963 — pre-Women's Liberation, pre-Beatles. But let's consider the lyrics and the extent to which they express the values of the present-day Democratic Party.

By the way, Ms. Gore did not write "You Don't Own Me." It was written by 2 men, John Madara (who also wrote "At the Hop") and David White (who co-wrote "At the Hop" and was a member of the doo-wop group Danny & the Juniors who recorded "At the Hop"). Madera and White also co-wrote "The Fly," which was a dance that you could do at the hop, and here's Chubby Checker showing you how:



That was 1961, 2 years before Lesley sang Madera and White's declaration to female autonomy, which is no kind of dance song at all, though Diane Keaton, Bette Midler, and Goldie Hawn manage to turn it into a dance for the purpose of bringing a close to the execrable 1996 movie "First Wives Club":



That movie is best described by David Rakoff in "Half Empty": "A gynocentric comedy predicated on the scenario where men are cheating bastards and middle-aged women the goddesses who best them while cementing their sisterhood with Motown-scored makeover montages, vengeful shopping sprees, warmed-over Lucy-and-Ethel hijinks, and random humiliations visited upon women who are younger and therefore by definition stupid whores."

Anyway, look at the lyrics to "You Don't Own Me," words which a couple youngish guys put in the female singer's mouth, as repurposed for the 2012 election "war on women" theme:

I'm young and I love to be young
I'm free and I love to be free
To live my life the way I want
To say and do whatever I please

Sounds libertarian to me. But it's the Obama side using this, so presumably we're supposed to hear something like:

I'm free and I want my birth control to be free
To live my life the way I want
To say and do whatever I please and have the government pay for it

"Mindset of this dance is: Dress classy and dance cheesy."

Psy teaches Britney to dance Gangnam Style — because Britney tweeted that's what she wanted.

Michelle Obama's DNC speech made us think about her speech pleading for the 2016 Olympics in Chicago.

As in her speech last night, there's a misplaced emotionality that's too much about her family's personal need for gratification:



Here's the transcript, in the event that you can't put up with 6 minutes of slow sentimentality. This was an argument that we know the IOC rejected, so listening to it now, we hear the inappropriateness (to the decisionmakers' ears) of arguments like this:

Some of my best memories are sitting on my dad's lap, cheering on Olga and Nadia, Carl Lewis, and others for their brilliance and perfection.

As the first comment at the video notes, Michelle was 20 when Carl Lewis first participated in the Olympics, so that dad's lap business is easily detected bullshit.

Like so many young people, I was inspired. I found myself dreaming that maybe, just maybe, if I worked hard enough, I, too, could achieve something great.

But I never dreamed that the Olympic flame might one day light up lives in my neighborhood.

Dream, of course, was a key word in her husband's presidential campaign. His presidency dream was a dream fulfilled, but she's acting — and I do meaning acting! — as if her family now has a special privilege to identify dreams that they have and expect the world to fulfill them. But why would these IOC bigwigs subordinate themselves within Obama dreams?

But today, I can dream, and I am dreaming of an Olympic and Paralympic Games in Chicago that will light up lives in neighborhoods all across America and all across the world; that will expose all our neighborhoods to new sports and new role models; that will show every child that regardless of wealth, or gender, or race, or physical ability, there is a sport and a place for them, too.

That's why I'm here today. I'm asking you to choose Chicago. I'm asking you to choose America.

She wants them to "light up" her life (along with the lives of all those little people out there in her old neighborhood).  

Choose America? As if America is some sad, tragic little place where poor people await a ray of hope. And she's speaking with kindergarten-teacher earnestness. It didn't work. We know that.

And the speech last night? Why should that work? What was relevant to our decision who should be the head of the Executive Branch of the federal government? Like a skeptical IOC member, I am utterly callous to plaintive pleas about what gratifies the personal desires of the lady and her family. Live-blogging last night, I said "What's the point of all this?" And then, a quarter hour later, "I don't really see the point of it." Whatever she was talking about, it had nothing to do with the decision to be made.

***

Speaking of things I didn't see the point of last night, I wrote, at the end of her speech: "And then the music comes up: 'Move your body... move your little hips....' What?!" I thought the lyrics — like the lyrics to "I'm Every Woman" (played earlier in the evening and live-mocked by me) — were too sexual to punctuate the convention message. I'd taken the time to Google the "I'm Every Woman" lyrics to flesh out my intuition. But it was nearly 10:30 (my time) when Michelle finished, and I was too tired to Google what move your body... move your little hips.... was supposed to be about.

It turns out to be a Beyoncé song written in support of Michelle's "Let's Move" program that's supposed to get kids to quit being so inert. Beyoncé is talking to children — hence the "little hips."

I ain't worried, doing me tonight
A little sweat ain't never hurt nobody
Don't just stand there on the wall
Everybody, just move your body

Doing me? Sorry I have such a dirty mind! This is for the children. You know: those little fatties standing on the wall.

"Taliban insurgents beheaded 17 Afghans... two of them women..."

"[T]hey were attending a party that featured music and mixed-gender dancing...."

The Horse Dance.

From Korea.

"If only [racial] change were as swift and simple as a child’s dance recital."

Here's a second article about race giving central, front-page attention on the NYT website this morning. (The previous post discusses the first.)

Reaching out longingly to female readers, this article features a picture of adorable kindergarten girls in pink tutus and white tutus... and — mostly — nonwhite skin. It's a performing arts magnet school, and the serious topic of the article is the federal grant program, dating back to the 1980s, that supposedly helps with racial integration.

The idea was to create a themed curriculum that attracted children from outside a school’s immediate neighborhood to reduce the isolation of one minority group....

About 58 percent of the students in District 14 public schools are Hispanic, 26 percent are black, 12 percent are white and 3 percent are Asian, according to the Education Department. At each of these four elementary magnet schools, Hispanic students represent more than 70 percent of the population.

These are the wrong percentages, for some reason that is supposed to be obvious to you, and the promise of putting their little girls in tutus is intended to lure white parents into doing what the government deems valuable, diluting the minority population. We are assured that "decades of research studies show that children perform better in integrated schools," and then there's much talk about the magnet schools hitting academic targets. But the tutu school in the photo is under investigation for cheating
(because kids did so well on the tests at the school, but badly when they moved on to middle school).

Complicating desegregation even further: a 2007 United States Supreme Court ruling that restricted schools in selecting students. The court, in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, ruled 5 to 4 that schools could not explicitly take race into account when selecting students.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who voted with the majority, nevertheless kept alive the importance of school integration: in a separate opinion, he wrote that school districts could be creative, perhaps reconfiguring attendance zones to spur socioeconomic diversity....

Historically for magnet schools, white middle-class students have been the prize. Despite the odds, one of the Williamsburg schools has been able to attract them in droves.....

Education officials placed Brooklyn Arbor [Public School 414] in a prime location to draw families from the Northside neighborhood: just south of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, near the trendier parts of Williamsburg. The new principal, Eva Irizarry, did the rest. Her aggressive recruiting and her commitment to progressive, hands-on learning helped persuade white middle-class families to try the new school.... [The school's theme is] global and ethical studies. Ms. Irizarry plans to build eco-friendly classrooms and a greenhouse on the roof...

When it came to recruiting, Ms. Irizarry said, she got no response when she went to Head Start nursery schools in the surrounding Dominican neighborhoods.

She had more success pitching a new concept to Northside parents. At Mommy and Me yoga classes, she left brochures that featured the school’s carefully designed green tree logo and 13 children of all ethnicities photographed in green T-shirts....

Ms. Irizarry... was concerned that Hispanic parents might feel they were being pushed out of the school.

White middle-class students have been the prize.... the trendier parts of Williamsburg... commitment to progressive... learning.... So the success of the project is measured in terms of how many white kids enroll, and the theme is designed to appeal to white people... But it's the presence of white people that "decades of research studies show" is what's really best for the nonwhite kids.

Here's the Parents Involved case, in the event that you'd like to brush up on the constitutional law. The Supreme Court has been clear that racial balancing is not an acceptable basis for classifying individuals by race. Diversity — which is — has a different meaning, and, to keep this post from getting much longer, I'll just say the Court has struggled to define diversity and what may be done to achieve it.

Whatever the law says, there are still policy decisions to be made, and here, I'm puzzling over the paradoxical high valuation of white children and their use for dilution purposes.

The Green Bay Packers win...

... "Dancing with the Stars."

In the Wisconsin rotunda, high school students chant "We're with Walker" and drown out the anti-Walker "Solidarity Singers."

I missed this one. It happened last Thursday. I guess I'm not covering the "Wisconsin protests" story with sufficient vigilance! Blah! It never ends. Anyway, tons of teenagers were in Madison for the big high school basketball tournament. They came from all over the state, drastically tipping the political balance. As Wisconsin Citizens Media Co-op reports it (and I'm getting to this belatedly, via Prof. Jacobson, via Instapundit):

On Thursday March 15, 2012 the afternoon Solidarity Sing Along was taken over by a large group of supporters from Lutheran High School in Sheboygan...

Shouts of “LHS” and “Stand with Walker” thundered through the rotunda and was met with wide approval from the LHS supporters. One student entered the circle to mock and taunt the singers with dance moves.

Taunting with dance moves! There's video, but it doesn't include the dance-taunt, which I can only imagine. What would it be, some basketball-madness-Walker-loving hula?



Ha ha. I love the way Wisconsin Citizens Media Co-op — with its ability to detect dance mockery — fails to notice the students singing along with "Solidarity Forever" and making it horribly off key. Maybe the Co-op thinks the Solidarity Singers are always that badly out of tune. That's so sad for the folks who so diligently gather day after day to sing with their clenched fists thrust aloft.

The Solidarity Sing Along remained calm and peaceful throughout the ordeal and eventually moved outside to continue singing while the rotunda erupted in approval.

That's written as if the singers have a prior claim on the public space. It's speaking as if the singers were giving a planned performance to an assembled audience that wants to listen. For example, when Sarah Palin spoke at the Capitol last April, there was an assembled crowd eager to hear her, and the anti-Walker protesters did everything they could to boo and shout and frustrate everybody who wanted to hear:



At 4:40, my edited video, shows, among those who are actively booing, John Nichols — of The Nation and author of "Uprising: How Wisconsin Renewed the Politics of Protest, from Madison to Wall Street" — and John “Sly” Sylvester. (Sly is the radio host who has "outrageously accused GOP lieutenant governor Rebecca Kleefisch of performing 'fellatio on all the talk-show hosts in Milwaukee' and sneered that she had 'pulled a train.'")

Andrew Breitbart was there that day too:

As I took to the stage, the shouting from those trying to disrupt the Tea Party intensified. Inarticulate shouting becomes their last weapon as their policies crumble.

Also shouted down that day — a 14-year-old girl: "One of the chants during her speech is 'Go home! Go home! Go home!'"

At the Wisconsin Citizens Media Co-op blog post, there's some good discussion in the comments. Someone called Sam says:

Why do you think it’s alright for the protesters to give their opinion, but not alright for any other opinion to be given? I didn’t hear any mocking or taunting, only the two chants.

Tyler says:

It is SUCH a crime to celebrate a victory from the first time LHS has ever been at state. We had a right to be there just as much as the singers were. How do you think some of us feel when we try to live our lives and are being pestered by “Recall Walker” activists? You can’t walk down the block in Madison without being talked to by someone. We weren’t there to be political or anything, we were there to celebrate our team. The singers just happened to be there at the same time.

Josh says:

We were taunting and harrassing? I was called a facist, told my savior was a homosexual, and called ignorant and stupid, all within like, 15 minutes. And we were harrassing and taunting? By saying LHS, and showing our support for our governor? Really?

RanDomino replies:

Who put them up to it?

Also, Jesus was gay, and fuck Scott Walker.

Kay says:

Let me just tell you that the people from LHS were invited there and indeed got a permit to be there. They never said anything wrong. They just said “stand with walker” and “LHS” to celebrate their basketball team on their state victory. I never heard ANYTHING bad thing come out of one of their mouths. They also did nothing to harass any of the protesters. It’s funny because Scott Walker did more for everyone than the protesters are nagging about. Please get some jobs. It’s not going to do anything for you guys if you stand in the middle of the Capitol building singing songs. And also, if you aren’t happy about our governor or the way we run our state, please leave. We don’t need any more hate in this world.

God bless you all!

And God bless Sheboygan Lutheran High School, which won the state championship, with a brilliant 3-pointer by Sam Dekker, who's coming to the University of Wisconsin, where he is already one of our very favorite individuals!

Back to the Co-op comments. James says:

I love how these protesters flatter themselves by thinking that the students were there to cheer or taunt them, when really the students and LHS crowd had no idea the solidarity singers were going to be there. And if these singers can sing their opinion, it is certainly fair that other people can come to the capitol and voice their support for our governor as well.

Tell me about it. Last time I ventured among the protesters, I was taunted and harassed, as I walked, ostensibly alone. I was asked where my husband was and "Who's going to save you when you get attacked?" And a year ago, of course, I received notice that the city of Madison was "OCCUPIED" by people who "have the numbers" and have "revoked" my "city of Madison privileges":

Did you really think this could go on forever? That you could sit on the steps of our house, walk the streets of our city, lie about us to strangers, tell gun-toting rednecks from out of state and the Northwoods how depraved and deserving of punishment we are all while maintaining plausible deniability for any of the consequences that your actions might cause?

I was told "WE WILL FUCK YOU UP" by people who were going to come to my home to harass me, and given a list of shops and restaurants where these people supposedly worked, and I was no longer permitted to go:

We will Walker you straight out of the place whenever you show up. We are at every coffee shop on State, open to close, all the time. We will hang up wanted posters of you everywhere you like to go. We will picket on public property as close to your house as we can every day. We will harrass the ever loving shit out of you all the time. Campus is OCCUPIED. State street is OCCUPIED. The Square is OCCUPIED. Vilas, Schenk's Corners, Atwood, Willy Street – Occupied, Occupied, Occupied, Occupied. Did you really think it was all about the Capitol? Fuck the Capitol, we are the CITY.

But folks from the Northwoods and elsewhere in the state were in town last week. It was all about basketball and wholesome fun in the capital city, where everyone in the state belongs. Especially Sam Dekker — whatever his politics. From what I've seen, the University of Wisconsin is a huge place, full of people who care more about sports than politics. So don't hesitate to come here, sports fans, Walker fans, and everybody else. We need you! We need more air in this musty old cocoon.

680,000-pound boulder goes on a 106-mile journey... for art.

It will ride a "294-foot-long centipede-like transporter between 10 and 11 p.m. and travel at the painstakingly slow speed of about 5 mph."

[W]ork crews from about 100 utility districts will have to take down traffic signs, overhead wires and other obstacles to let the rock pass and then reinstall them later.

A signal expert will have to move and rebuild traffic signals that would otherwise be mowed down like blades of grass by the transporter — nearly as wide as three freeway traffic lanes....

During the day, the rock... will have to park in "the middle of the road, the only place big enough"...

The total cost of the project, including the rock, the transportation and construction of the sculpture site, will be up to $10 million, which was raised from private donors....

Of course, the rock is tweeting:

I don't understand how I was NOT asked to be a part of the new season of @DancingABC. I may not move fast, but I'm graceful!

— LACMA Rock (@LACMARock) February 28, 2012

Hey, that reminds me: There's a Green Bay Packer on the new "Dancing With the Stars" — Donald Driver, along with Urkel, Gladys Knight, and Martina Navratilova.

Soccer moms, the Macarena, Bob Dole, and Rules Girls.

You know why they're together? Right, they are the "four strange phenomena, inextricably linked, that will forever be associated with 1996."

Somehow, we're still talking about soccer moms, which is the title of the Wikipedia article I was reading when I came across that link.

The term came into widespread use near the time of the 1996 Republican National Convention. The first use of the term in a news article about that election appeared in the July 21, 1996 edition of The Washington Post. E. J. Dionne, the article's author, quoted Alex Castellanos (at the time a senior media advisor to Bob Dole) suggesting that Bill Clinton was targeting a voting demographic whom Castellanos called the "soccer mom." The soccer mom was described in the article as "the overburdened middle income working mother who ferries her kids from soccer practice to scouts to school." The article suggested that the term soccer mom was a creation of political consultants. Castellanos was later quoted in The Wall Street Journal as saying "She's the key swing consumer in the marketplace, and the key swing voter who will decide the election."

Clinton, of course, won the election, perhaps because he wrapped those "soccer moms" around his little, crooked... finger.

And ever since, political consultants and candidates, have tried to milk the emotions of the voters they call "moms." This has always irritated me. Though I have 2 sons and have spent a good portion of my life's energy caring for them in all sorts of ways, I have never decided how to vote by thinking of myself as a mom. I don't think I have ever said "I'm a mom" or "as a mother" in framing a question about politics. If a politician addressed me as a mother — and especially as a soccer mom — as if my political thinking revolved around conventional housewifely activities, I would regard him or her as sexist. Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings.

What got me searching the term "soccer mom" this morning was a blog post — I could see in Site Meter that it linked to me — insulting me over what I'd written the other day about the newly coined term "birth control moms." You may remember that I'd noted that the term is "distractingly oxymoronic: if you use birth control, it's to avoid motherhood." I went on to criticize politicos who patronize women by calling them "moms" and treating them as if they "emote and intuit their way through elections."

Since the blogger is a lefty blogger, and lefty bloggers stereotype me as a righty blogger, the blogger could not perceive any feminist critique in what I was saying. His idea was that I'd just said the "stupidest thing [he'd] ever seen Ann Althouse say." He proceeded to make a huge deal out of the mundane fact that a woman who'd had children — and thus was a "mom" — would still use birth control to stave off unwanted additional pregnancies. At that point, she couldn't "avoid motherhood" — my phrase — because she would already be a mother. Crushingly obvious fact noted. "Birth control moms" is still an awkward term, containing a distracting contradiction. You're distracted even if you stop and think about the way some women with children use birth control not to avoid acquiring the status of mom, but to avoid additional mothering responsibilities.

Said lefty blogger goes on to state the true definition of the recently coined term: a "birth control mom" is "a woman who demands her birth control medication paid for according to the terms of her employment as regards insurance, even if she works for the Catholic Church. As well she fucking should."

First, birth control mom is "a woman..."? But some of these women don't have children. (If I had the instincts of a lefty blogger, I would call him a fucking idiot.) Second, "paid for according to the terms of her employment as regards insurance" — what? Could you write in English, please? Apparently, we're talking about women who are not merely going to be manipulated by scaring them that the government might ban birth control, but who are adamant about their entitlement to have their insurance fully cover birth control pills and who hate the idea of giving exemptions to the religious organizations that are portraying the proposed insurance requirement as a violation of their religious freedom rights.

The blogger — who is a married man whose wife is "on birth control" — ends:

And they are fucking with my intimate relationships?

Who the fuck are they coming after next? Rich people?

Bitch about stupid Politico phrasing, sure, but don't pretend that makes obnoxious, sexist insurance coverage decisions inoffensive.

Apparently, after the notion of fucking with his fucking crossed his mind, this man lost his mind. My post said nothing about insurance. It was only about the "stupid Politico phrasing." It was language analysis, from a feminist perspective.

And if I may continue in a feminist mode... this is the most egregious example of phallocratic writing I've seen in a long time.

If you can copyright choreography, can you copyright a sequence of yoga poses?

Apparently not.

Raquel Welch singing "Bang Bang" in 1967.

Hilarious. Painful to watch, but worth it. The singing gives real depth to the lyric "that awful sound."

The dancing... well, if you can't hang around for the mercifully singing-free James-Bond inspired segment that begins at 2:43, at least check out the action at 1:28. I think it's where Prince got the idea for his Super Bowl performance.

Now, to get that out of your head, here's the Nancy Sinatra rendition. Unlike Raquel, she does not go all boots-were-made-for-walking. She's wearing boots, but she never gets up off her ass. In fact, when the song ends, she rolls off the stage.

For simultaneous singing and walking in boots, here's the 80s Cher version.

"Be amazing."

Suggested by YouTube after watching this...



Which was suggested by Metafilter and really is similar amazingness... of the goatish kind.