"I think Justice Scalia would correct you and say it was a Saint Thomas More hat, rather than a Sir Thomas More hat."

Said Astro in the comments to the post about the hat Scalia wore to the inauguration.

I responded saying that "the truth is that the reason I used 'Sir' is that it was the caption on the Hans Holbein painting," but the comment got me researching what's the right way to refer to More, and Wikipedia's article begins: "Sir Thomas More... known to Catholics as Saint Thomas More...." So, it seems that the failure to say "Saint" is the shibboleth that reveals that I'm not Catholic. In which case, I don't think Scalia would correct me.

Notice my tendency to reinforce my original choice — which involved little thought — with additional reasons. That's the lawyer instinct. What happened happened, and now that I'm challenged, I furiously brainstorm reasons why it was correct. (What's not lawyer-like is to concede that and display it like this.)

Another reinforcement for my choice is, as I wrote in the comments at the first link:

It's a Sir Thomas More hat, that is, a hat that he wore in his role as a knight. There is no "saint hat," or if there is — maybe you get issued a hat in Heaven — it's not that hat.

It's like, say a cowboy died and was later beatified and we had a picture of him in his cowboy hat. Cowboy Bob. If I adopted his hat, it would be a Cowboy Bob hat, not a St. Bob hat.

I'd like to think Justice Scalia would be intrigued by this language usage question, whether the noun hat calls for the modifier Sir rather than Saint — even for those who revere him as a saint — because it's not a saint hat.

ADDED: Astro did a Google images search for "saint hat," with hilarious results. Before clicking on the link try to guess what 3 types of hats come up most often. It's not this:

Justice Scalia was wearing his Sir Thomas More hat.

Did you notice?

Pre-blizzard update.

Waiting for Draco.

Gift idea.

Slippers!

AND: Hat.

AND: The Official Althouse Gloves (for when it's not that cold).

"For those who insist they've located the least essential, or least sport-y Olympic discipline..."

"... may I present — via Kon Ichikawa's essential 1965 documentary Tokyo Olympiad — 50 kilometer Olympic race-walking?"



Wait! That was grueling. And in the rain? And wearing a straw fedora?

ADDED: Here's the Ichikawa movie. And here's a straw fedora.

Obama's "Choom Gang."

Everyone's reading this, so I thought you might like to talk about it.

Excerpts from David Maraniss' Barack Obama: The Story dealing with the elaborate drug culture surrounding the president when he attended Punahou School in Honolulu and Occidental College in Los Angeles. He inhaled. A lot.

(The Maraniss book doesn't come out until June 19th. You can buy it here.)

ADDED: Here's a long excerpt from the book, covering Obama's college years:

Most of Obama's classmates could not see how hard he was working to reconcile the contradictions that life threw at him. They thought he was cool, smart without being pedantic, and seemed to have his act together. To Mark Parsons, who came to know him mostly because they both smoked and spent a lot of time together huddling outside the student union, Obama seemed "almost Zen in walking through all the chaos in our dorm". He displayed one trait that showed he wanted to be a player though: he wore a lot of "stupid hats". He usually wore them cocked, to look cool. Obama also had a peculiar smoking style, a little affectation. He turned his wrist up and cupped the cigarette between thumb and index finger. He smoked a cigarette the same way he smoked a joint. "I have a sense that he smoked because he was addicted, as I was," Parsons said. But, Obama told Parsons, there was another reason. "I remember him telling me he would quit after he got married. He didn't want to quit smoking because he said he would gain weight, but after he got married it would be OK to gain weight. I think it was mostly a joke."

"McCain mistakenly refers to Romney as Obama."

Oops. Just slur your words and say "Obamney" and maybe people won't notice.

Hey, am I the only one who thinks Rick Santorum looks like Jerry Seinfeld... especially when he's brightly lit from above and standing in front of a wall so that his head casts a shadow that makes it look like he's got his hair in a mullet?

And was Meade the only one who looked at this picture the NYT chose to illustrate its article about that new book about Barack-and-Michelle and thought the shadows made it look — especially with that black bow tie — like he had an Abe Lincoln hat-and-beard?

And remember 3 years ago, when Obama took office and all these commentators were comparing him to Lincoln? What the hell was that about? Before he did anything, he was like Lincoln... and then he won the Nobel Prize.

But you know who's not all there? McCain. That old guy must be senile. He said Obama when he meant Romney.

"Sarah [Palin] quickly tossed the beloved hat in the trash, explaining to me that it was 'icky.'"

Frank Bailey tattles on Sarah. Apparently, she referred to some elderly male supporters as the "crazy old men's club." One of them gave her his old hat. It's not like she threw it in the trash in front of him. What would you do if an old man who loved you presented you with "his lucky fedora festooned with campaign buttons"?

You're Sarah Palin. An old man gives you his hat. You:
	Wear it proudly!
	Display it on a shelf in campaign headquarters.
	Box it, tissue-wrapped, for display in some future presidential library.
	Auction it on e-Bay.
	Toss it, Mary Tyler Moore-style, up in the air.
	Have someone else toss it in the air and shoot it.
	Throw it in the trash in front of other people.
	Discreetly slip it into the trash.
pollcode.com free polls

The solemnity of the Bucky Badger hat.

At Saturday's protest.

Partly visible sign appears to say: "I [heart] NPR/Actually Fair & Balanced."

We heard about the 4:30 rally at the top of State Street and got there in time to hear a couple speakers try to rile up the crowd...

... Should Wisconsin have to "worry about being an international human rights violation, having conditions where the U.N. should intervene"? The crowd looks forlorn, and the speaker calls for a march around the square.

Meade and I go clockwise as the march goes counter-clockwise so we catch the front as it streams by chanting "We're not going away." A woman near young children wears a sweatshirt that says, in large block letters "Fuck Walker." There are lots of "Integrity" signs, including in the hands of some young guys who stop to interrogate Meade.

The guy in the fedora says "I'm just a citizen admiring another citizen's ability to be out in public." A man walking by points to Meade and calls him "a right-wing agitator." I question the fedora guy about his "costume."

We catch up to a small demonstration that appears to be the unionized crew from "Legally Blonde" (the show playing at the Overture Center nearby). They've got a new chant: "The people, ripped off/Are gonna get pissed off." Sweeping in from the side are marchers chanting: "Hey hey ho ho/These right-wing tricks have got to go."

There's a shot of me photographing the Segway-riding protester, and then a dog comes along. Meade gets down to pet him, and the owner tells us he's a Basset-Beagle mix, his name is Joey, and "This is what dogmocracy looks like." There's a bit more, and then it's time to go.

(Video by Meade, edited by me.)

Anti-Walker guy with a bullhorn bullies and — alternatively — equivocates.

Recorded midday yesterday at the Wisconsin State Capitol. Most of the time, it's Meade following this man — who talks about his job as a public-employee nurse. Aiming the bullhorn at the Capitol, he taunts "Governor Goofy." At one point, he stops to bullhorn insults right into Meade's face. Meade's Bontrager hat proves perplexing.

Friends of Dorothy/Protest Pug/Dead Badger Hat.

Meade begins with a shot of that statue of Hans Christian Heg, as the march proceeds in the background. Then he finds me asking a guy with some "Wizard of Oz" signs if Scott Walker is a "friend of Dorothy." The guy laughs and says "no." Next comes an adorable pug in a tutu, and a protester — a union carpenter — wearing a fur hat complete with real (dead) badger head.



ADDED: The "Wizard of Oz" signs:

"Keep your eyes open for the Ann Althouse cameo appearance at 1:20."

Ha.

(You can have that hat if you like it. It's a classic man's fedora.)

"Ask me for a flower, and I will show you a Light."

At yesterday's protest, some people did their own thing. Here's a friendly gentleman in a "PEACE" hat, with a framed picture of John Lennon, a scattering of sayings, a small "Recall Gov. Scott Walker" sticker, and a lot of postage stamps. The stamps, he told me, were his contribution to the government.

Also in the photograph:

Right side: The man-in-tights blogged here.

Top left: Corrugated cardboard signs, readable in the super-enlargement. Why do people do signs on sorry-ass broken-open cardboard boxes?

Top right: The lined-up police who were keeping the pro- and anti-Scott Walker people apart. I suspected that there was an official police policy to keep the Tea Party crowd from getting big. We were forced to enter the Tea Party group at corner of the block and blocked from walking across the lawn. I expressed my theory to a woman standing next to me, and she said: What do you expect? Whose side do you think the police are on? Meaning: They're all public service employees too.

I said that I wanted to get over to the Tea Party group and complained about the difficulty of getting through the crowd to the entrance point at the corner. Her attitude toward me suddenly changed. She snapped: "You're a Republican?" Pussy that I am, I said: "I just want to get into the Tea Party group." Actually, I'm not a Republican, but I backed away from the challenge so reflexively — a habit of 25 years in Madison — that my conscious rational processes never crystallized into the lucidity that would have produced a simple "no." 

What we wore to the demonstrations.

I love this sign — "Today is about peace and and DEMOCRACY" — and attitude.



And don't you love her outfit? Taking this shot, I felt like the Wisconsin Sartorialist. As long as I'm doing vertical, fashion-oriented photos, let me add this one, from the Tea party side of yesterday's demonstrations:

I demonstrate ladylikeness with a Badger hat and Green Bay Packers cheese.

Don't you need some stuff?

If you're buying something anyway, please enter Amazon through this search box:



You'll be channeling a chunk of the purchase price to me, showing some appreciation for the writing I do here, which would warm my heart on this gray January afternoon in Wisconsin. You won't pay any more for the item you purchase.

Maybe you'd like a Curious George hat? Or a polar bear hat? We like these hats that transform you head into an animal head. I've seen some adorable 20-somethings wearing things like this around town. And we just bought 5 of the Bucky Badger heads, which you have to buy from the UW Book Store (which doesn't give me a cut of the price, unfortunately).

Barehanded snowball fighting, Althouse-style....

... in a scarf beautifully knitted by Irene. Wait a minute...



... in a hat spiffily hand-knitted by Martha.



Gotcha!

(Seriously, thanks, Irene and Martha, for the cool handmade birthday stuff.)

"People my age don’t want to put hats and scarves on in their homes..."

Old people in Britain are cold.

Ironically, I read that while wearing mittens. I've been trying to warm up my hands for the last hour. It's not really a big deal. I keep the thermostat at 62°. I could turn it up, but I don't. It may be true that as you get older, the cold gets to you, and I feel sorry for people who don't have the option to turn up the heat. I think that wears on you psychologically. But, really, it's healthy to keep the air you breathe cool. It's also good for the environment not to burn more fuel for heat. Shouldn't it be normal to warm up your extremities with sweaters, slippers, hats, scarves, and even mittens? Why is there some idea that if you are getting old, you shouldn't have to use clothing to warm yourself?

Robert Downey Jr. is Mr. Peanut.

Great! I've always loved Robert Downey Jr. and Mr. Peanut:



But why is the nutcracker named "Richard"?

Background on Mr. Peanut:"Mr. Peanut was created in 1916 after Planters Peanuts held a contest to create a logo and a 14-year-old boy drew a nut with human features." I'd really like to see the original drawing. According to Wikipedia, the boy (Antonio Gentile) just drew a some sort of man-peanut — and "an artist later added spats, a top hat, a monocle, and a cane." So... did the boy's drawing have the gloves? The unfailingly optimistic smile?