"The Charmin corporate Twitter account got in on it with a surprisingly trenchant commentary on the disposability of American currency."

That's the way Slate — displaying the winners of its design-a-$1-trillion-coin contest — refers to the symbolism here:



"Surprisingly trenchant commentary." Come on! I like delicate toilet paper, but why the delicacy talking about toilet paper? What, exactly, is the commentary? I assumed it was: American currency is something you may as well wipe your ass with. But then I thought the idea was: Uh, oh, we just pooped ourselves.

Maybe you're wracking your brain for a way to use the old "Don't Squeeze the Charmin" slogan, but that was the 1960s. The current slogans — if I am to believe the Charmin Wikipedia page — are: "Enjoy the Charmin experience" and "Enjoy The Go." Enjoy the go?! Put that on the coin. Hell, make that the national motto. "In God We Trust" is getting old. It's divisive. And, frankly, it's unfair to God.

"Enjoy the Go"... I looked it up to see how they were playing this slogan in the commercials:



The relief. The calm. The clean. The comfort.

See? That's the way you'll feel after that $1-trillion is deposited in the toilet bank. This image evokes Sigmund Freud:

Freud suggested that children in the anal stage of development regard the release of their feces as a gift to the parent — a gift that can be given or withheld. Children will release the feces if given sufficient love and withhold them if not. In Freudian thought, fecal matter becomes a type of currency in the parent-child relationship, which can be withheld or dispensed, thus giving the child a sense of control. The word currency is appropriate in this context; Freud assumed that the human unconscious makes a symbolic equation between feces and money. In a 1911 paper on dreams in folklore, he noted that according to ancient Eastern mythology, “gold is the excrement of hell” (Freud & Oppenheim, 1911/1958, p. 157).

Hell!

(I'm riffing on the toilet paper topic topic Meade introduced late last night. That was Meade — did you notice? — not me.)

"Is this a revolution and are these revolutionaries? By God, I say they are a bunch of criminals."

"They are the enemies of God, and they will go to hell."

Assad speaks.

"Charles Darwin earned almost 4,000 write-in votes..."

"... against a Georgia congressman who denounced evolution and other scientific theories as 'lies straight from the pit of hell.'"

Bad science everywhere. The science freaks vote for a dead man. They get their minds around evolution, but not death. Darwin's dead. Also, he was never an inhabitant of Georgia or even a citizen of the United States. Can you criticize ignorance with ignorance? If 2 wrongs don't make a right, do 2 stupids make a smart?

When I voted on Tuesday, confronting many candidates running unopposed, I thought about writing a name in the write-in spot for a small fraction of a second, but I'd never make a joke out of my ballot.

I did make a joke to someone with in line, and then I felt bad about it. I was in the A-L line and Meade had to go to the M-Z line. The man ahead of me said something about alphabetical order, and I said "Just don't vote based on alphabetical order," and then I fretted that he might have interpreted my remark as a nonjoke, an imprecation to vote for Obama over Romney/Baldwin over Thompson, which would violate the posted rule against political discussions in the polling place.

Vote Republican or go to Hell.

"There's a special place in purgatory reserved for scientists who make bold claims based on tiny effects of uncertain origin..."

"... and an extra-long sentence is imposed on those who also keep their data secret, publishing only hard-to-interpret summaries of statistical modeling."

The flames that purify their scientific souls will rise from the lake of lava that eternally consumes the journalists who further exaggerate their dubious claims. Those fires, alas, await Drew P. Cingel and S. Shyam Sundar, the authors of "Texting, techspeak, and tweens: The relationship between text messaging and English grammar skills", New Media & Society 5/11/2012....

(Via Volokh.)

What the left blogosphere is saying about Andrew Breitbart, on the day of his death.

I'm not searching for nasty things in any kind of effort to make the left-o-sphere look bad. I've simply opened up the full set of bookmarks that I keep in my browser bar in a folder titled "left."

Balloon Juice sets up an open thread and reminds readers of the principle "If you don't have anything nice to say about the deceased" and "treat his death better than Andrew Breitbart treated Ted Kennedy's death, at least." The second comment is: "Fuck him. If there is a hell, I hope he isn't enjoying it."

Oh, hell. (Speaking of hell.) This project is going nowhere. Get up and get blogging, lefty bloggers.

ADDED: Here's the Twitter feed on Breitbart.

In honor of Andrew #Breitbart's passing, please RT ever tweet celebrating his death. He would have wanted it that way.

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) March 1, 2012

Rebecca Watson says she had "a weird time on Bloggingheads" with me.

I enjoyed the conversation and tried to keep it interesting and enjoyable, and I had the impression that she was enjoying talking too. We went 10 minutes over an hour, and afterwards we talked, and she said she enjoyed it. So it's weird for me to read this.

Things didn’t go as I planned, though. While Althouse agreed with me that Dawkins was out of line and my sentiments were fair, she kept saying things that required me to unpack a lot of stuff before moving on. 

Wow! That sounds like good conversation to me. I would love it if someone would talk to me in a way that invited me to go places where I hadn't planned.

For instance, she agreed that Dawkins was smug, but aren’t all atheists smug and that’s kind of the problem? 

Actually, the discussion of the smugness of atheists came long before there was anything about Dawkins. And I never said Dawkins was smug. I was interested in talking about the way Dawkins turned something relatively minor and light into an viral internet event. It was, in fact, Rebecca who introduced the idea that atheists are smug. It was in response to my question why atheists congregate:



See? I just laughed when she said it. A little later, when she's talking about wanting to teach the convention atheists about their sexism, I asked a somewhat elaborate question that includes a reference to the smugness she had mentioned. That was in the context of saying that maybe atheists feel particularly advanced intellectually and might imagine that they can be a little edgy on the subject of gender without deserving (like lesser folk) to be thought of as sexist:



Her response, as you can hear in that clip is to switch to attacking religious people as more smug. As she says at her blog post:

So I had to back up and explain that no, atheists are not all smug just because they think they know the truth. Religious people, I tried to explain, think they know the truth and further many think that others who don’t know the truth are going to burn in Hell when they die. I would have gone on to explain how these same people believe this entire Universe was created especially for them, and what’s more smug than that, but Althouse kept interrupting me.

Okay, I do cut in, but I think I do it gently, trying to bring her back to the question, which wasn't who's smugger, atheists or religious folk, but whether possibly atheists feel less constrained in talking about gender matters. I could have been much more forceful in pointing out that she changed the subject and ran away from looking deeply into the minds of the atheists, instead preferring to drag in a convenient punching bag: those terrible religionists who think other people are going to hell. But I thought I was serving up pretty rich opportunities for her to show her stuff as an excellent spontaneous thinker and speaker (which is what I'm always trying to find for Bloggingheads).

This reminds me. I forgot to ask her a question I wanted to ask about the atheist in the elevator — the man who asked her if she'd like to come to his room for coffee. I wanted to know what she said to him at the time. We know that later, she slammed him in a blog post. And now, here I am, slammed in a blog post of hers days after the encounter. So I'm kind of empathizing with the elevator guy.

Email me, elevator guy!

"Why the Hell Does Hell Still Matter?"

"Controversies over hell keep recurring because to its believers, hell stands for more than fire, brimstone, and worms that never die. Hell also represents a backstop on the slippery slope to social chaos in a nation founded not on ethnicity or religion, but on the premise of a virtuous citizenry."

What if people really believed in hell?  I mean really. Come on! The world would be completely different.

"He felt in a position to say he knew now that hell had nothing to do with fires or frozen troops."

"Lock a fellow in a windowless room to perform rote tasks just tricky enough to make him have to think, but still rote, tasks involving numbers that connected to nothing he’d ever see or care about, a stack of tasks that never went down, and nail a clock to the wall where he can see it, and just leave the man there to his mind’s own devices."

A vision of hell — quoted in the NYT review — found in "The Pale King," the book that was pieced together out of the unfinished pages and notes left by the self-murdered David Foster Wallace.

It’s impossible to know whether Wallace, had he finished the book, might have decided to pare away such passages, or whether he truly wanted to test the reader’s tolerance for tedium...

The big clash in the novel pits old-school I.R.S. employees, “driven by self-righteousness,” against newer ones with a corporate desire “to maximize revenue.” We have to slog through stultifying technical talk about “the distinctions between §162 and §212(2) deductions related to rental properties,” and inside-baseball accounts of obscure battles within the I.R.S. hierarchy. There is even one chapter that consists of little but a series of I.R.S. workers turning page after page after page.

What the reviewer, Michiko Kakutani, does not say is that, in addition to wondering whether this section would have been edited down or rewritten, the reader must wonder whether this is the expression — or the cause — of suicidal despair. Reading long tedious passages — deliberately tedious passages? — how can one escape from the nagging thought that the author himself escaped from this tedium?

"Somewhere in Hell, your hero, Richard M. Nixon, is laughing his ass off at you."

That's the subject line on email just sent to me and other bloggers to inform us of an article in a left-wing newspapers about the how right-wing bloggers dealt with the Hu Jintao visit to the White House.

"Her smash-mouthed assault on His deity, sovereignty and infallibility brought more GodSmacks upon her..."

If you're trying to fathom the twisted reasoning behind picketing Elizabeth Edwards' funeral (by the Westboro Baptist Church), the hateful text is here.

Crazy Daily News headline: "President Obama hits church with First Family in bid to altar 'Muslim' myth."

Quite aside from the (deliberate?) misspelling — "altar" for "alter" — and the repetition of the "myth" — which I'm putting in quotes only because it's their word — the newspaper purports to know why a man (and a woman and 2 little girls) go to church.

Let me give you a quiz. (The first response below is the one The Daily News ascribed to the President and his family.)

Excluding weddings and funerals and the like, what's the primary reason you'd attend a religious service?
	To enhance my reputation in my community.
	To accompany a family member or members and thus please or set a good example for them.
	To get together with friends and associates.
	For the beauty of the music, the literature, and the art and architecture.
	As insurance, in case there really is an afterlife.
	To worship God and pray.
pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: I'm glad at least a couple people admit to the afterlife insurance motivation. But here's the thing: What if doing religion as afterlife insurance is the one thing that pisses God off?

"Maybe there'll be window in heaven where he can watch Nixon slowly roasting on a spit."

The first comment on the Gawker post "Journalist Daniel Schorr Dies at 93."

"Haven't had a burger in a while. Lunch with Obama at Ray's Hell Burger."

Dmitry Medvedev tweeted.

Sarah Palin denies that she aimed any "ugly innuendo" against Joe McGinniss.

"How that equates me with the Nazis is quite beyond me."

But fortunately, there is Facebook to let her get her message out that she is not a Nazi and that the "'lamestream' media" should be ashamed of itself.

What McGinniss said was:

And I think it's probably a lesson for the American people of the power Palin has to incite hatred and her willingness and readiness to do it. She has pushed a button and unleashed the Hounds of Hell, and now that they're out there slavering and barking and growling. And that's the same kind of tactic and I'm not calling her a Nazi, but that's the same kind of tactic that the Nazi troopers used in Germany in the '30s. And I don't think there is any place for it in America.

So Palin has Facebook and a button to release the Hounds of Hell!

Man, McGinniss is getting a ton of publicity for his book project! I'm sure he's not one bit sorry he rented that house next door to Palin. There is no amount of shaming or "ugly innuendo" that will outbalance the immense benefit he's grabbed for himself.

Palin is milking this whole thing for publicity too, of course (even as she has every right to be royally pissed that the book-flogger moved in next door).

"Watch J.J. Abrams Say 'Lost' Is Not About That Thing It Turned Out to Sort of Be About."

"We're sure in the weeks to come, there will be lots of discussion about the distinctions between 'purgatory' and 'heaven,' and 'the afterlife' and 'being dead,' and 'misleading information' and 'flash sideways is not the island,' and 'when did the Lost creators actually know how the show was going to end' and 'why didn't Darlton care at all about the show's mythology?!' — but in the instant aftermath of the finale, it seems that something sort of like purgatory, insofar as purgatory is a place full of dead people, did in fact have something to do with this here series called Lost."

Hey, you know what would really be funny? After we really die, if we find ourselves somewhere and we're talking about the distinctions between "purgatory" and "heaven," and "the afterlife" and "being dead," and somebody says "Deja vu! This is like exactly the same conversation I had after the last episode of Lost."

Tea Party people.

The shirt says "And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torment. Luke 16:23. (Don't let it be you.)" I had trouble reading the numbers on the Biblical cite and at first saw that 16 as 18. I looked it up:

And a ruler asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. You know the commandments: ‘Do not commit adultery, Do not murder, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Honor your father and mother.’” And he said, “All these I have kept from my youth.” When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “One thing you still lack. Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” But when he heard these things, he became very sad, for he was extremely rich.

I thought, wow, that is not the right Biblical citation for the Tea Party!

"He doesn't have 150 years to live..."

"... but I hope his time in jail will be hell on Earth."

***

Extremely lengthy sentences are showy but in fact wildly disparate. And there's not a damned thing you can do about the shamefully light punishment of the old.

Where hell is a hotel room....

... and the other people are Steven Spielberg, Andy Warhol, and Bianca Jagger.

"We are a multicultural society, and people expect this American life to continue the same way in heaven."

Are Christians Christian? Is God multi-culti?