Purchase of the day.

From the February 13, 2013 Amazon Associates Earnings Report.

Pentalic Sketch Book, Hardbound, 8-1/2-Inch by 11-Inchby Pentalic (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $1.10)

 Honorable mentions:

BILT Tornado Waterproof Textile Motorcycle Gloves - 2XL, Blackby Bilt (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $1.20)

Nautica Cologne by Nautica (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $1.06)

"Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student in Every Class Every Day" [Paperback]Jonathan Bergmann (Author), Aaron Sams (Author) (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $1.09)

... and 62 other items purchased — at no additional cost to the buyer — that all just seem to keep Althouse... in the mood.

"Hand-drawn animation with ink, white-out and coffee."

Lotsa coffee.

"One on One" — the New Yorker cover by Barry Blitt.

"This image seemed like a proper response to the first Presidential debate... but I’m not sure I realized how hard it is to caricature furniture.”

Remember Blitt's famous cover from the 2008 campaign.

"In Romania, on moonlit nights, the peasant women used to look down into a well until they saw the reflection of the moon."

"Then they let down a pail, slowly drew up water with the moon in it and, with a spoon, drank its reflection. Looking down into the well at that moment, they could see the face of their future bridegroom."

(A quote at the end of an essay by Saul Steinberg, found in a fruitless search for a drawing I remember or misremember with "we" and "they" —or is it "Who are they?" — drawn to signify the emotion contained in those words — a search undertaken after writing "So we they are not chomping cheeseburgers simply for sensual pleasure....")

Drudge goes black-and-white with Rahm, Brad Pitt, Uncle Sam, and Obama.

Look. Only Pitt and Rahm are photographs. Obama — like Uncle Sam — is done with artwork. Pretty bad artwork. It looks like a bad drawing, and I'm guessing it was done by computer-processing of a photo. It's funny the way the photographiness of a photo shows through when a drawing is made. Something more timeless and grand is found when the artist draws from life. Of course, there's the usual risk that it won't look like the person. But that's why you need a good artist. Or stick with a regular photo-photo.

Unless you're looking for an odd effect. Perhaps Drudge is trying to say that Obama is drained of life. It might have something to do with the big drained-of-color idea, which does unify the 4 images. There's another processed photo further down on the page: Hugo Chavez. His image has been subjected to posterization — where all shades of gray have been eliminated.

Ah! I said it: shades of grey. Is Drudge hinting that these men have some kind of Christian Grey sadistic power over us? Speaking of photoprocessing, there was this article in the Daily Mail yesterday, imagining Christian Grey as a composite — depicted in shades of gray — of various famous guys, including Brad Pitt (but not Rahm, Uncle Sam, Obama, and Chavez).



Also on the Drudge page, in column 1, under Brad Pitt, is Vladimir Putin. Putin and Pitt are both wearing sunglasses. The Pitt image pushes "Brad Pitt's mom in fear after slamming Obama..." and the Putin image goes to "West is on decline." Chavez is positioned under Uncle Sam, and both of those images include hands — Sam pointing at us (over a warning about taxes and Obama) and Chavez with his hand to his forehead in the position Drudge showed Obama 3 days ago. Obama had his hand like that along with the headline "Barack and Bones: I've Been Eating," and today's Chavez image goes along with an assertion that Chavez is "totally free" of cancer (a likely lie).

The main story, about Rahm ("the Godfather") is about the murder rate spiking in Chicago.  Rahm's picture is centered over Uncle Sam and Hugo Chavez, and Rahm's hand is holding his chin in a manner that implies thinking and judgment especially given the intensity of his eyes, looking off to his right. Uncle Sam's eyes are also intense, staring right at us in that accusatory way. As noted above, Pitt and Putin have their eyes covered with sunglasses — shades (Shades of Grey?!). So what might we say about Obama's eyes? I'd say they look up slightly, conveying vague confusion or dreaminess.

Obama tops the third column, which has no other faces, but 2 other images: of solar flares ("getting stronger") and of NYC ("Bloomberg asks developers to test tiny apartments...").  The Obama image has "$0$" under it, which links to a story about how Romney raised much more money than Obama in June ($106 million, compared to $71 million).

What does it all mean?  The easy explanation is that black-and-white imposes unity over the diverse images, and the similarities and differences are mostly by chance, aided by a bit of conscious design (putting the sunglasses pictures in one column and the hands pictures in another). Black-and-white was a big move by Drudge, but it too is likely meaningless. Just another way to get attention. Maybe he thought going black-and-white with the Rahm picture made him look more like a gangster (even though the "Godfather" movies are in color), and that led to the idea of making the whole page black-and-white, just to get the webfolk thinking, making stuff up.

But the only interesting lead I thought of is "50 Shades of Grey." Maybe Drudge is trying to say that government and crime are whipping us into submission. Government and crime... and solar flares. Wear sunglasses!

The Madness of Madison.

State Street, today:



ME (reading aloud, to my companion): Walker is not above the law and will go to prison.

CHALKING MAN (to me): It's true! John Doe!

ME (to the chalking man): Live the fantasy. (To my companion:) The madness of Madison.

One hour earlier — about a block from there — we walked past a man who was lying supine on a low concrete wall. Eyes closed, he intoned repeatedly:

I am a good slave
Free to a good owner
I will obey my master

"Should We Hire Even More Teachers, Cops, and Firemen?"

"Not if we want the economy to recover any time soon," says Nick Gillespie at Reason.com.

Unless you believe that the primary function of the public sector is to be a jobs program, there is no reason to sweat recent cuts to public-sector jobs, whose numbers, as Mickey Kaus has pointed out, have "been bloating since around 1980."...

As it happens, Nobel-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and many others (let's call them stimulatarians), seem to believe that a key function of government is precisely to employ lots of people who otherwise would look for work elsewhere....

And check out the caricature of Obama at the first link. All swirly hallucinogenic shapes and psychedelic colors. I showed it to Meade and said "That's the way I was always drawing when I was in high school," and he said he did too. (I'm class of 1969, and he's '72.)

"If you are a child of the seventies and were raised on 'The Joy of Sex,' you are not likely to have forgotten the illustrations."

"The woman depicted in these drawings is lovely, and, even nearly forty years later, quite chic," writes Ariel Levy in The New Yorker. "Her gentleman friend, however, looks like a werewolf with a hangover. He is heavily bearded; his hair is long, and, it always seemed, a little greasy. His eyelids are usually at half-mast, adding to his feral appearance."

It isn’t easy watching beauty get pawed by the beast, and our narrator does not help matters. “At a certain level and for all men,” Comfort informs us, “girls, and parts of girls, are at this stimulus level unpeople.” In “The Joy of Sex,” a male is a man, a female is a girl, and a vagina is, to “males generally, slightly scarey: it looks like a castrating wound and bleeds regularly, it swallows the penis and regurgitates it limp, it can probably bite and so on.”... Under the heading “Women (by her for him),” Comfort writes of male genitalia, “It’s less the size than the personality, unpredictable movements, and moods which make up the turn-on (which is why rubber dummies are so sickening).”

"In the silly series 'Manhattan Penis Drawings' (1978), the World Trade Center appears as two phalluses."

You know, those were different times!

But I would love to go back to NYC and see the big Keith Haring show at the Brooklyn Museum. It's there until July 8.

Here's the drawing referenced in the post title.

Great beauties of Renaissance art, slimmed down, via Photoshopping.

By Italian artist Anna Utopia Giordano, supposedly demonstrating how tastes have changed.

Quite aside from the passage of time, taste in beauty has something to do with whether the model will be dressed or nude. As a former art-school student, I've done numerous "life drawing" classes, and good as thin models look in clothes, they make terrible nudes. As I blogged back in '05, if I wanted to draw landscapes, I'd go to the mountains, not the plains.

"Giraffes Drawn By People Who Should Not Be Drawing Giraffes."

A website. (Via Metafilter.)

"Bush would be regarded as a lefty today."

From Crack Skull Bob, documenting this morning's talking heads:



Brilliant, as always. I love the Jon Huntsman:



See and read the whole thing.

"The Republican ideology is one of FOOLS and CLOWNS."

Don't miss Crack Skull Bob's rendition of last Sunday's talk show heads.

"[T]he naked figure in the model’s limited repertoire of poses gets kind of repetitious after a while..."

"... while all the variously clothed forms of the drawers in all their natural attitudes are endlessly fascinating. And the opportunity to draw Doug’s hairy leg is worth it all."

Have you done enough figure drawing to know this feeling? I have!

By the way, I love the use of the word "drawers" when the topic is nakedness... and the use of the word "naked" instead of the formal "nude." (I've already discussed the nude/naked distinction at some length — "at some length" seem so wrong! — here.)

"Early example of crystal-meth-influenced chair construction."

A drawing... to accompany an essay on civility.

What image would the NYT use to illustrate the op-ed "Stop Coddling the Super-Rich" by Warren Buffet?

Try to guess before you look? Here at Meadhouse, we're still laughing at this silly black-and-white drawing. Laughing at. Not with. Use your first idea: What would represent coddling and what would represent the super-rich? Now, put those things together in one image.

Happy Father's Day!

A drawing of my father, Richard Althouse, dating back to the 1940s, signed by Henry Jacobs.

Diavlog notes and doodles.

From a Bloggingheads recorded this morning. I'll link to it when it's up, but meanwhile, I was amused by what ended up on the page in front of me.

(Enlarge.)

Doodling...

... large scale.

Tea Drawings.

"Tea bag + index card + ink."