In one hospital, over a period of 14 hours, 19 boys — and no girls — were born.

It's in the news as if it's amazing, but of course it's no more unusual than any other combination of boys and girls born anywhere else over any other period you might define. In fact, it's less unusual, since the choice to define the relevant period and end it when the last boy was born maximized the presence of boys in the group.

At the Sharing Café...

... thanks for sharing.

(Enlarge photo. It may enable you to comprehend this interior space, found yesterday in a building on the Capitol Square here in Madison, Wisconsin.)

"And if you’ve been having trouble accessing your room with your key card, it means you’ve pissed off someone at the desk..."

"... and they’ll re-activate your key card when they see fit. (It’s called 'key-bombing.')"

A new book purports to be to hotels what Anthony Bourdain's "Kitchen Confidential" was to restaurants, but the author doesn't seem to have Bourdain's style and charm or the enthusiasm Bourdain had for his subject. This character sounds like a disgruntled employee, out to hurt the employer he hates, and he's no longer even in the business.

How many times do you want to hear that there's probably semen on the bedspreads? Wasn't that revealed in countless local TV news reports decades ago?

The guy worked for 10 years in a 3-star hotel in NYC. I'm sure that place was quite disgusting... or not. Who cares?

Finally, could you stop saying "finally"...

I'm reading this Slate article that's tweaking the NYT for its "style" articles, an old — unstylish? — topic that was funny years ago in Stuff White People Like, and I see these side-by-side teasers in the sidebar:



A search turns up:

Finally, Some Details About Maxine Waters' Favorite Bank
Finally, Porn for Women?
Bill Clinton Has Finally Figured Out First Dudeship
Finally, a True Defense of Liberalism
Finally, "Mad Men" Takes on Race
Finally, a Challenge to Steele
Finally: 4th Amendment Underwear
Finally, A Way for Liberals to Sneer At People
The M-Bomb, Finally
Finally, Honest Spin
Finally! Economic Nirvana

Etc. etc. What's going on here? Stock sarcasm? Not so much. It comes across more as a desperate attempt to make you feel that this is something you really want to read... you've been waiting for it. You haven't, of course, but click this link right now. Please? Please?

Gender role reversal on a very old — and lame — scenario.

"A British woman is divorcing her hubby on grounds the erotic bestseller 'Fifty Shades of Grey' failed to get a rise out of his languishing libido."

Wait. Is this all Trump was talking about?

Or is there some other thing, withheld? This is completely stupid and amounts to nothing. (Trump offering to give $5 million to charity if Obama releases his birth certificate, college records, and passport application.) I can't believe this clown is given attention for that, and I wonder if this is all he had all along or if the rumored story about cocaine dealing or divorce were in the works and, when the rumor smoked out too much negativity, Trump cooked up this new nonsense.

Trump's teaser was "I have something very, very big concerning the President of the United States." "Have" suggested some item of evidence damaging to Obama, but if you look closely at the words now, you can see he might always only have meant what we're hearing now. He has something concerning the President. Not something on the President.

What idiocy! What a waste of time!

MEANWHILE: Gloria Allred is still at large.

Millionaire spends $65,000 on 6 matchmakers, goes on 250 dates over 12 years and doesn't find the wife he's looking for.

The NY Post displays Larry Greenfield's pathetic tale of woe:

“I thought he was attractive enough, nice enough. I don’t see why all of these things haven’t worked out,” [said one of the women he deemed inadequate]. “He’s looking for love at first sight, and everyone has imperfections. Talk to someone. Get to know them.

“To find a woman who wants to stay at home and lives in Manhattan, he might be looking in the wrong time period,” Gordon said....

Long Island matchmaker Maureen Tara Nelson — who Greenfield has said failed him — fired back yesterday that one woman she set him up with, and whom he dismissed as “terrible” looking, was too good for him.

“He thinks since he has money that he is entitled to a beautiful woman,” she said.

“He needs to realize beautiful women are beyond his reach.”

And now the Post is acting, essentially, as his new matchmaker, feeding him this self-described "beautiful" woman:

Greenfield has already given the thumbs up on [Kimberly] Brody’s looks and pedigree — though he said she’s at the edge of his age limit.

It doesn’t matter that he’s 47 — and has never had a girlfriend for more than three months.

And that was 12 years ago.

“The age is the thing that gets me,” said Greenfield, who wants a partner young enough to bear his children.

What are Brody's chances? Approximately zero. The man should only go out with women under 35. Either they are willing to go out with him or they are not. Why is he toying with these older ladies and why are they bothering with him? Oh, the answer is so obvious it's not worth the trouble of typing it out, and the Post is giving this man a platform... why? That's obvious too, but I'll bother to type that out: He's fun to kick around.

"Report: Penn State leaders, including ex-coach Joe Paterno, concealed Jerry Sandusky's activities to avoid bad publicity."

Email from CNN Breaking News.

Breaking news? It's some kind of weird mind game. You get breaking news and the news is that you didn't already know that.

CNN is using "Breaking News" the way the least-funny guy who thinks he's a comedian uses the phrase to try to make jokes.

ADDED: Here's a detailed story about the release of the independent report, which is the work of former FBI director Louis J. Freeh.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz offers to "make a deal on this email thing."

Email thing. That's the way this woman addresses me (in email received this morning). She's referring to the thing of her sending fundraising email on Saturdays.

But I'm doing it because the stakes this year are so incredibly high....

So let's make a deal:

You pitch in $3, or really whatever you can, before our critical FEC fundraising deadline tonight to help those Democrats out...

And I promise you, this will be the last email you get from me today.

Comedy. It's what's for breakfast.

"Doctors’ waiting rooms are absolutely brimming these days with women suffering from low libidos."

"I have talked to a lot of young women about this, and they just don’t seem to do it any more.... Honestly, I suppose it’s because we all have so many other demands on our time now."

Many young women also feel guilty or distressed over their low libido....

So... you're so stressed about work that you don't have sex, and then you're stressed about not having sex. Stress! Stress! Stress! What do you think about all this stress as the cause and the effect of not having sex? It strikes me as a shallow and lame explanation for things.

I tend to think that the reason people are doing whatever they are doing is because it's what they want to do. There's something irrational about saying I don't want to do what I don't want to do. Or, to turn it around, I want to want something. If you want it, you want it. If you don't, you don't. Start there. Too busy? Hopeless!

The "most popular" article in WaPo right now is "Romney's distortions about Obama do us a disservice."

But when you click on those words, you get to a column titled "Romney’s pants on fire."

The 2 different headlines go to such opposite extremes of phoney politesse and dopey childishness. Who writes that stuff... and what's the thinking about which attitude goes where?

I didn't read the attached column, though I did glance at the last sentence: "He seems to believe voters are too dumb to discover what the facts really are — or too jaded to care." I really identified with those last 4 words: too jaded to care.

"Barack Obama, the first female president."

A predictable headline — don't you feel you thought of it first? — after Newsweek's "The First Gay President," which played off Toni Morrison's famous declaration about Bill Clinton.

Do you regret referring to Bill Clinton as the first black President?...

People misunderstood that phrase. I was deploring the way in which President Clinton was being treated, vis-à-vis the sex scandal that was surrounding him. I said he was being treated like a black on the street, already guilty, already a perp. I have no idea what his real instincts are, in terms of race.

The "first female president" riff comes from WaPo's Dana Milbank. He doesn't mean it in the Toni Morrison way — that Obama's getting the kind of shabby/unfair treatment typically aimed at women — but in the way Morrison was misunderstood. Milbank's evidence for his proposition is that Obama has gone on “The View” 4 times and that he gave a commencement speech at Barnard. Obama is. speaking to women, boosting them, pleasing them, hoping to get something in return. Hello! He's not getting treated like a woman. He's not even acting like a woman. He's acting like a man, angling for the favor of women.

Milbank admits it:

His reelection campaign has been working for months to exploit the considerable gender gap, which puts him far ahead of likely GOP rival Mitt Romney among women. But Monday’s activities veered into pandering, as Obama brazenly flaunted his feminine mystique.

Pandering. Let's consult the OED:

1. trans. To act as a pander to; to minister to the gratification of (another's desire or lust)....

 2. intr. To act as a pander; to minister to the immoral urges or distasteful desires of another, or to gratify a person with such desires. Also in weakened use: to indulge the tastes, whims, or weaknesses of another. Now usu. with to.

Sorry. Pandering to women is not acting like a woman.  (Or being treated like a woman.)

And Milbank doesn't really know what "the feminine mystique" means. Betty Friedan defined her term clearly in her classic book, in the first paragraph of the first chapter, which was famously titled "The Problem With No Name":

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—“Is this all?”

The "mystique" — she says a few pages later — was the pervasive cultural belief in "feminine fulfillment" in the home...

... the American suburban housewife, kissing their husbands goodbye in front of the picture window, depositing their stationwagonsful of children at school, and smiling as they ran the new electric waxer over the spotless kitchen floor. They baked their own bread, sewed their own and their children’s clothes, kept their new washing machines and dryers running all day. They changed the sheets on the beds twice a week instead of once, took the rug-hooking class in adult education, and pitied their poor frustrated mothers, who had dreamed of having a career. Their only dream was to be perfect wives and mothers; their highest ambition to have five children and a beautiful house, their only fight to get and keep their husbands. They had no thought for the unfeminine problems of the world outside the home; they wanted the men to make the major decisions. They gloried in their role as women, and wrote proudly on the census blank: “Occupation: housewife.”

No way Obama was "flaunting" his feminine fulfillment in the house. Presumably, Dana Milbank (who is a man) thinks he can pontificate about female matters and use a feminist catchphrase and give it whatever meaning it seems to have to him. He's got a longstanding column in the Washington Post, so he feels he can do that. Ironically, that feeling is utterly the opposite of feminism. It's patriarchy. And this patriarch, Milbank, is himself pandering to women. It's funny that he's attempting to flatter and impress women by tagging alongside the man he thinks all the women love, Barack Obama.

Milbank tells us that Obama told the college women that "'Congress would get a lot more done' if more women were there." And Obama gave the women the supposedly good news that "more and more women are out-earning their husbands. You’re more than half of our college graduates and master’s graduates and PhDs." (Presumably, he didn't tell them they're going to have a hell of a time finding a mate on their level.) Milbank goes on:

And they can look good doing it! “You can be stylish and powerful, too,” he said. “That’s Michelle’s advice.” 

And this makes him "a woman"... how? Oh, what's the point of looking for reason in Milbank's lame obeisance to the alpha male?

There were some ironies in the appearance. When the White House asked Barnard for the commencement speaking role, the college dumped its original speaker, Jill Abramson. In addition to being an actual woman, Abramson is the first of her sex to become executive editor of the New York Times.

Obama made no mention of Abramson, but he did mention that he knows the past three Barnard commencement speakers, including Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose presidential aspirations Obama dashed.

Ha ha. Step aside, ladies. The patriarch is here.

Isthmus ousts its conservative blogger, David Blaska.

Pathetic!

Blaska's a terrific blogger, but it was obvious that the lefty readers of our left-leaning newspaper's website couldn't handle a sharp point of view humorously challenging their pat opinions.

From the link, which goes to an Isthmus discussion forum: "Firing Blaska was a candy-assed move. Isthmus is [a] rag. Own it." Ha ha. Meade wrote that.

De-stressing law students by getting them to cuddle with the homeless...

... puppies.

“Fighting is what redneck people do.”

Police not swayed by excuse.

"It's like Christmas Eve, and everybody is opening their presents."

Guess what that refers to.

Getting to sign a Recall Scott Walker petition.

"At the dinner table, Phil sits between his wife and his girlfriend, across from the kids."

"He's a bus driver with an effusive personality and a stubbly goatee."

Polyamory hits Madison, Wisconsin.

During the course of conversation, he'll reach over and sweep a strand of hair behind Grace's ear or nuzzle his wife Katie after a joke. Their 9- and 11-year old boys babble cheerily about school. Their 17-year-old daughter Vionna comes home from work partway through the meal and pulls up a chair. She darts up to her room at one point and brings down a present for Grace, a pretty glass vial of perfume. Between all parties, there's a natural and easy vibe.

Oh, good Lord.

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.

"So, there's this petition going around asking that Bert and Ernie — yes, the yellow and orange dudes from Sesame Street — get gay married."

Notes Nicole Fabian-Weber:

Anyone who knows me... knows that I'm all for gay marriage and anything that will aid in tolerance; and am ardently against hatred, homophobia, and fear-mongering. But having Bert and Ernie marry one another is just plain stupid. They're puppets...

As if puppets don't have sexual feelings! That's pretty naive, Nicole. Haven't you seen "Team America"?

Getting Sesame Street to teach acceptance of different people is a fine concept -- one the show has already demonstrated, and for that, I applaud them. But there doesn't need to be a wedding between two characters in order to do this. Do kids watching the show even know what marriage is? Would they think twice if they saw two men hugging, as opposed to two women? My guess is no. Gay weddings are better served on more high brow shows, where the audience will actually understand the message.

Jeez, Nicole. You're just discussing this subject deadly seriously. That's really bizarre! Who uses the expression "get gay married" and then doesn't try to be funny?

"A Mendocino County woman who transformed her home into a bear bohemia with wading pools and specially prepared banquets..."

"... of corn meal and peanut butter sandwiches will not do jail time for doting on her hairy friends, but she will remain exiled from her property."

[Lynne Gravier, 77], known to almost everyone as the "Bear Woman," has been feeding bruins and other animals for decades, but nobody realized the extent of her devotion until neighbors began complaining. Last Aug. 24, seven fish and game wardens raided Gravier's home. They stumbled on what was essentially an animal hippie commune and shack-out pad.

In all 15 loafing black bears hung out with Gravier inside the house and on her deck, and lumbered around the compound like kings at a feast. Gravier named her oafish friends things like Smiley, Goofy, Connie, Biggie and Wombat. She admitted setting up a kiddie pool for wallowing. She fixed peanut butter sandwiches for her guests, sometimes mixing in glucosamine to ease the arthritis pain in older bears.

Some 6,000 pounds of rolled and cracked corn was delivered every month from a ranch supply house. Gravier stored the food in a 40-foot-long shipping container that she used as an ursine food dispensary.

Knight-errantry was not in evidence among the hulking chowhounds, who turned Gravier's home into a reeking outhouse. The cabin-style home was piled high with filth by the time of the raid and immediately condemned by county authorities.

Gravier also fed 18 cats, three dogs, 40 peacocks and a steady stream of visiting turkeys and deer.

And yet it took decades for the neighbors to begin complaining? And then, in the end, she gets no real punishment, after animal lovers protest the prosecution on behalf of the well-meaning lady. According to the neighbors, her loving ministrations were turning bears into problem bears that break into houses, chase sheep, and end up needing to get killed.

Bothersome bears are a particularly volatile issue in this cattle- and pot-growing town of 1,300 near the South Fork of the Eel River, in the heart of redwood country.

Pot-growing, eh? Seems like you can get away with breaking all kinds of laws these days... at least if your criminality has enough of a hippie vibe.