"As the clerk started to give him cash from the cash register, the thief started to cry, explaining that he only wanted to feed his wife and family."

"After the clerk offered to give him pizza and chicken wings, the man waited for the food for about 10 minutes."

“I’d say the clerk was pretty astute,” [said Helena Police Chief Troy McGee.] “I mean, he knows how to talk to this person. Kind of commiserated with him a little. Talked to him about it and you know actually changed his mind about robbing the place. That was pretty good.”

But didn't he commit robbery by taking the pizza and chicken wings without paying? Apparently, the clerk gave him the food. This reminds me of the famous Calvin Coolidge story:

Coolidge gave him $32, calling it a loan so the intruder would not be a thief...

The use of children in politics — if you find it persuasive, you'd better sharpen up.

Drudge is doing propaganda here:



But it's very heavy-handed propaganda deployed to critique propaganda. You won't slip into falling for Drudge's propaganda, because it's so obvious. It's ridiculous to equate Obama to Hitler and Stalin, but Obama is using a form of propaganda that should be considered not merely ridiculous but repulsive. For us today to see Hitler and Stalin using children is to easily perceive the absurdity of promoting a political agenda juxtaposing it to a lovely, innocent child.

Who falls for that? No one should! The implicit argument the political leader makes, in all 3 of these pictures, is: I'm making the country good for the sake of the children. The child can't vouch for the policies. The child hasn't competently requested anything. The child is merely a prop representing goodness, innocence, and the future.

I've had a "using children in politics" tag for a while. I've made it part of my work here on the blog to notice this phenomenon, to help you see it, and to build widespread resistance to it. Remember the "children of the future" blaming us? The children taught to chant "Hey hey, ho ho, Scott Walker has got to go"? The children delighted by the "Voter Report Card"?

Drudge links to a collection of "Tyrants Who Have Used Children as Props." It's not hard to dig up these things. All politicians pose with children.



Baby-kissing is a campaign cliché.



It's a way of saying: I'm a real person. I'm normal and empathetic.

No reason to condemn that. It's too late to reject the kind of old-fashioned political kitsch that goes in the same category as eating regional food. You know, what Bob Dylan was singing about in "I Shall Be Free":

Now, the man on the stand he wants my vote
He’s a-runnin’ for office on the ballot note
He’s out there preachin’ in front of the steeple
Tellin’ me he loves all kinds-a people
(He’s eatin’ bagels
He’s eatin’ pizza
He’s eatin’ chitlins
He’s eatin’ bullshit!)

Don't you eat the bullshit!

Michelle Obama sends me email, saying "Ann, thank you."

That's the subject line. Inside, she continues this way:

Ann --

I know your life is full -- with work, or school, or family -- and yet you still find the time to help out when you can.

You may have a tight budget, but you give what you can afford.

A woman recently told the campaign her family skipped a pizza dinner at their favorite place so that they could make a difference in this election.

That is the commitment that drives this campaign.

If you can support Barack with a donation today, please know it makes a huge difference. If we win, it will be because of what you did at moments like this....

Thanks,

Michelle

P.S. -- It meant a lot to me to speak with you and everyone else last night. Thank you for everything you do.

Everything?

"A Kentucky man's family was able to satisfy his dying wish this week and give a local waitress an emotional surprise when they gave her a $500 tip on a pizza."

I loved this story — which includes a viral video of the delighted waitress — until I got to the part about the website using this video to collect donations which will purportedly be used to give more giant tips to unsuspecting waiters and waitresses. Yes, it's charming at first, including the dead guy's will:

“He left us a will full of his personality,” his brother Seth wrote in a July 9 post on a tribute website. “He asked that any debt he owed his parents be repaid should he have money in the bank at his death, but also had the following request: Third, leave an awesome tip (and I don’t mean 25%. I mean $500 on a f***ing pizza) for a waiter or waitress.”

I have no idea how sincere or trustworthy these people are, but they're getting massive publicity of the kind that can unleash torrents of donations. Remember all the pity in the form of money that flowed in to the bus monitor lady who had no idea how to monitor her bus? (Did you know she rejected the apologies the kids offered?)

Money sloshes around all over the internet. People get a kick out of tossing a few dollars into something that made their heart swell. The kick is real and probably better than the kick people get from buying a lottery ticket. Why raise suspicions when it's all about feelings? You might give money to a guy on the street who tells you a sob story or just asks for money in a way that amuses you. What's the difference? It's a free market.

Do you want more rationality in charity? Or is it all about feelings? 

"A goat? In this restaurant? Eating pizza? No!"

Well... yeah.

"There. You'd better take a picture of that one, so people don't think I just make ugly half-pancakes."

So said Meade, delivering this, and thinking about this.

And when I use the search-this-blog tool on "pancake," I get:

"Can't I just eat my waffle?" said Meade, channeling Obama.

Actually, he was eating a pancake. (Meade makes pancakes nearly every morning. When he gave me mine this morning, he said "Here's your circle of grain for the morning," because the evening circle of grain, Meade-made, is pizza.)

Ah! That was a year ago, when Meade was on a pizza kick. The pancake kick continues, but the pizza is long gone.

Also in the search results on "pancake": "Things I Can't Stand About the Presidential Campaign./(A new regular feature here.)" Hey! I should have done more of those, because there are so many things I can't stand. That was from the 2004 election. I should revive the not-so-regular "regular feature." What was bugging me 8 years ago that was pancake related?

Our wartime President, six months before the election, is riding around in a bus, going to small towns in Ohio. (Search term used to find the article I read in the paper NYT in the NYT on line: "pancake"--something I recount here because it's part of the problem. The President is flipping pancakes to justify his reelection?)

When Satan set his sights on America, the place were he was "most successful and first successful was in academia."

Said Rick Santorum in that 2008 speech at Ava Maria University. I've lived in that purported stronghold of Satan for the last quarter century, so that caught my attention.

He understood the pride of smart people. He attacked them at their weakest, that they were, in fact, smarter than everybody else and could come up with something new and different. Pursue new truths, deny the existence of truth, play with it because they're smart. And so academia, a long time ago, fell.

And you say "what could be the impact of academia falling?" Well, I would have the argument that the other structures that I'm going to talk about here had root of their destruction because of academia. Because what academia does is educate the elites in our society, educates the leaders in our society, particularly at the college level. And they were the first to fall.

And so what we saw this domino effect, once the colleges fell and those who were being educated in our institutions, the next was the church.

Interesting that he said "domino effect" while speaking at Ave Maria University and saying that Satan has reached into academia and the church. Ave Maria University was founded with the fortune that Tom Monaghan made selling Domino Pizza. Exactly how deep does this Satanic plot go? All the way back to Ypsilanti in 1960 when Tom and his brother bought that small pizza store. I have lived in Ypsilanti. I know Ypsilanti. I have seen the mark of the devil in Ypsilanti. The Domino's Pizza logo has 3 dots. They were going to add dots for each store that they opened, but they stopped at 3, the number of stores they had in 1969, when the logo was designed. The company headquarters is in Ann Arbor, the location of the University of Michigan, where I arrived in 1969. Was the Devil digging his hoofs into academia, beginning right there and then? I'm no expert at numerology, but I can't help noticing that if you take the 1 in 1969, grip it tightly, and knock the two 9s over, you get 666.

But here's where my blood ran cold. I said "Oh, Lord!" out loud. (Causing Meade to say: "Lord? The Dark Lord?!") I was reading on in the above-linked Wikipedia article on Domino's Pizza, and I came to this:

In 1998, after 38 years of ownership, Domino's Pizza founder Tom Monaghan announced his retirement and sold 93 percent of the company to Bain Capital, Inc. for about $1 billion and ceased being involved in day-to-day operations of the company.

Bain Capital! The bane of our existence!

To say that something or someone is "the bane of my existence" means that the person or thing is a constant irritant or source of misery. As a cliché, "bane of my existence" has lost its edge to a large degree over the years...

But "bane" was once a very serious word.  The Old English "bana" meant literally "slayer" in the sense we now use "killer" or "murderer."  Early on, the English "bane" was also used in the more general sense of "cause of death," and by the 14th century "bane" was used in the specialized sense of "poison," a sense which lives on in the names of various poisonous plants such as "henbane" and "wolfbane."

Connect the dots, people! The dots. Not just the 3 dots in the Domino's Pizza logo. There were many more dots, but they withheld them from the logo. They didn't want you to see that many dots. You must struggle to see the dots before you can even hope to connect them. Bain/Bane Capital is reaching everywhere, into our pizza, into our university. It was Bain's billion that built Ave Maria University where Santorum came to deliver his warning about Satan in academia. And now we have the 2 men left standing. Santorum, who is warning us, and Romney — r omney/r money/our money — who is the Bain/Bane of our existence. We've lost Cain — Cain ≠ Bain — a man — her man — who rose like Ave Maria, out of pizza. But it was Godfather Pizza. God the Father's pizza, not the Satanic 3-dots pizza.

Connect the dots! Find all the dots and connect them, lest Satan's already successful plot further succeed, perhaps vaulting the baneful Romney to the Presidency! But, oh, you say, Althouse is herself an academic. She is swollen with the pride of smart people, and therefore vulnerable to Satan's depredations, pleased to offer up something new and different, tantalizing us with new truths, denying the existence of truth, playing with truth because she's so smart.

Close the box — that 3-dot box — on the melted cheesy atrocity. Move along, smart people. There's nothing see here. Look, over there. It's Mitt, that terribly handsome man. Hail, President Romney!

"He added that the employee responsible for the receipt was a teen — who he believed was misguided by 'hip hop culture.'"

A Papa John's restaurant owner tries to explain why a receipt identified a customer as "lady chinky eyes."

And no one will ever accuse him of racism ever again. 

Justice Scalia defines "pizza."

"I do indeed like so-called 'deep dish pizza.' It's very tasty... But it should not be called pizza. It should be called a tomato pie. Real pizza is Neapolitan. It is thin. It is chewy and crispy, OK?"

Okay.* I know... words have meaning. And Justice Scalia is the man to tell us what that meaning is.

_________

* I know Justice Scalia spells "okay" "OK," okay? But I don't. Example:

Unlike a clear constitutional holding that racial preferences in state educational institutions are impermissible, or even a clear anticonstitutional holding that racial preferences in state educational institutions are OK, today’s Grutter-Gratz split double header seems perversely designed to prolong the controversy and the litigation.

Ah... notice the baseball. There's baseball in the above-linked article too. Asked by his Chicago audience "White Sox or Cubs?," Scalia said "Yankees."

"Amanda Knox sez, I may not like Italy..."

"... but I love City Market's take and bake pizza. I take it home and slice it myself."

The difference between Occupy Wall Street and the Wisconsin protests.

Andy Kroll at Mother Jones identifies 3 main differences

1. Different organizers: In Wisconsin, "the day after Republicans reclaimed the state Legislature and the governor's mansion, union leaders began plotting how to respond to the looming assault on organized labor.... From their command center in Madison's only unionized hotel, labor turned out more than a 100,000 supporters in a span of weeks." But the Occupy Wall Street protesters were responded to a prompt from Adbusters magazine and then grew "almost entirely without institutional support, an organic groundswell without leaders or executive boards or much structure at all."

2. Different goals: The Wisconsin protests, at their height, were focused on something quite specific: defeating Gov. Walker's budget reform bill. "Occupy Wall Street so far has had no clear set of demands—and intentionally so, it seems."

3. Different reaction from the police: Here in Madison, the police mostly accommodated the huge crowds that besieged the state Capitol. In NYC, the cops have cracked down.

Kroll also lists 2 similarities. Both sets of protesters: 1. used social media, and 2. ate pizza.

ADDED: As for that seemingly intentional lack of demands... I think of this:

"School garden organizers around Madison say running a garden is not without its challenges, and one of the biggest is getting teachers involved."

Should school teachers be doing the gardening?

"Teachers just don't have the time," [Mary Michaud, a parent who started the garden at Madison's Van Hise Elementary.] "And many don't have the training or the instructional support to do it."

Suddenly, they want you to be a farm worker!

As a result, many school gardens primarily are run by parent volunteers, who can be in short supply in schools with high poverty rates where parents don't usually have time for gardening.

Poverty? Do middle-class parents have more time?

But Max Lubarsky, who has worked as an Americorp volunteer at Glendale and this fall will be an educational assistant, and Joe Muellenberg, youth nutrition educator with UW-Extension, have in the last two years revived the school garden. They hope it will attract more parent and teacher interest.

The two moved the garden from the back of the school where it often flooded to the front and built 11 raised beds, including three in the shape of pizza slices growing basil, peppers, tomatoes, eggplant and cilantro.

Lubarsky said students participating in a Madison School & Community Recreation program do most of the work at the garden now, but incorporating it into curriculum is "definitely a goal for the future."

So... there's no teaching. Just farm work for the kids. But it's okay to compel this for them because... why? Because you think they're fat? But your garden is premised on pizza!

Teachers don't need to go out and dig in the garden; they can simply hold math class among the tomatoes to get students thinking about the environment and being outside, he said.

The old outdoor class. Does that ever work? I say teach in the classroom and then give the kids some time to go out and play, freely. Not work in the sun.

I'm not against gardens, by the way. I love gardens. And I think a school garden could be a great learning experience. I just have a problem with underdeveloped feel-good projects and compulsory menial work.

Does the NYT care about the carbon footprint of its wonderful pizza-cooking technique?

"Heat the oven and pizza stone at 500 degrees for one hour..."

Oh, hell! Shut up about my light bulbs. Just. Shut. The. Fuck. Up.

If you people really believed in global warming in the form that you would like to foist that belief on the common folk, that quoted line above would have sounded to you as something on the moral level of first, torture a small, cute kitten....

Telling the old "Can you make me one with everything?" joke to the Dalai Lama.

That extreme awkwardness defines the expression "losing something in the translation."

The clown is not amused.

I love the array of characters in this picture (by me, from yesterday's Tea Party/anti-Tea Party protest). Enlarge.

The girl in the Bucky Badger hat is holding a sign that says: "This Revolution is powered by: PIZZA & BEER/Not TEA and BULLSHIT." The clown's arms are folded across his chest — I know, it looks like he has no arms — so you can only read half of the button he's wearing: "I could be..." I could be... what?! The woman on the right with a red headband has a sign about Reince Priebus. Reince Priebus. It's about time somebody concentrated on the Reince Priebus threat. The man in the brown fedora looks like he's reading the newspaper, but it's another sign.

As for "I can see 1840 from here"... I just don't know, but the man seems awfully pleased about it. Does he mean to invoke "I can see Russia from my house" (because Sarah Palin's in town)? What happened in 1840? He's referring to the year, right? William Henry Harrison was elected President in 1840, and proceeded to die the following April, after going out without a coat on a cold stormy spring day and catching a cold.

It was a cold and stormy spring day in Madison yesterday, and I don't know if Sarah Palin wore a coat. Nor do I know if the man with the "I can see 1840 from here" meant to refer to Sarah Palin's health.

By the way, William Henry Harrison's last words were: "Sir, I wish you to understand the true principles of the government. I wish them carried out. I ask nothing more."

Would you carry a sign that said that?

"Can't I just eat my waffle?" said Meade, channeling Obama.

Actually, he was eating a pancake. (Meade makes pancakes nearly every morning. When he gave me mine this morning, he said "Here's your circle of grain for the morning," because the evening circle of grain, Meade-made, is pizza.)

I'd just said: "There's a big civil disobedience event at the Capitol in 15 minutes."

Did Meade continue to eat his pancake or did Meade stop mid-'cake to answer the new media call?

"On Tuesday, several dozen protesters slept outside the Capitol in a camp they've dubbed 'Walkerville.'"

Ha. As if Walker has caused homelessness. (The coinage presumably alludes to "Hooverville.")

This protest is NOT about poor people. It's about people with good jobs, wanting to preserve the high quality of what they've been able to acquire for themselves. Now, I do think those who are sleeping on the floor of the Capitol rotunda and outside on the frozen ground are young people who don't themselves have good jobs. It's interesting what these kids are putting themselves through for others, who are, presumably, better off than they are. I took this picture, yesterday, of the outdoor sleeping setup:



It had gone down to 11° the night before. Note the underlayer of Ian's Pizza boxes. There is a lot of free food. Ian's, by the way, is doing some kickass branding (without losing any money):

On Monday afternoon, [store manager Staci] Fritz guesstimated that Ian's had delivered upwards of 35,000 slices of pizzas in the last week, all paid for by donations...

Fritz says that while Ian's is still making deliveries and taking donations, it has been very careful to cut off the amount of money it takes in one day. "What if somebody gives a load of money and then suddenly this whole thing is over and we can't deliver anymore? We can't let anyone pay for what we can't promise to deliver."

Keeping it honest... which is good for branding too, of course. They're not just raking in donations without accounting for it all with free pizza delivered to protesters.

Madison has a long tradition of its bars and restaurants being sucked into the fervent political activity of the times, such as the Nitty Gritty restaurant and bar's role as the meeting place for the activists who bombed the university's Sterling Hall in 1970.

Well, hell... why bring that up? Things have been really peaceful, by and large — to an amazing degree, considering the difficulty of keeping a large, diverse crowd energized enough to look like a good demonstration without tipping any individual over the edge into something ugly, even as the days wear on and on.

Somehow Scalia gets people talking about him again...

... by saying the same thing he always does.

HuffPo headlines: "Women Don't Have Constitutional Protection Against Discrimination." The writer, Amanda Terkel, quotes the 14th Amendment, and concludes, with unironic textualism: "That would seem to include protection against exactly the kind of discrimination to which Scalia referred." Thanks for the analysis, Amanda.

Terkel also called up Marcia Greenberger, founder and co-president of the National Women's Law Center, who professed to find Scalia's opinion "shocking" — even though he's been saying it for at least 15 years.

ADDED: Here's the interview with Scalia. From this lawprof's perspective, the most interesting thing he says is about pizza:

You more or less grew up in New York. Being a child of Sicilian immigrants, how do you think New York City pizza rates?

I think it is infinitely better than Washington pizza, and infinitely better than Chicago pizza. You know these deep-dish pizzas—it's not pizza. It's very good, but ... call it tomato pie or something. ... I'm a traditionalist, what can I tell you?

He's applying his legalistic language fussiness to food, but then what's with "infinitely"? What happened to verbal precision all of a sudden? He's gushing like... a girl.

At the Meadhouse Pizzaria...

... a robot dances for joy at the Nueske bacon topping.

Talk about whatever you want, but if you want more stuff for pizza, get some Bob's Red Mill Semolina, a good pizza stone, and a pizza peel. And here's the music we're playing.

Tablescape with pizza.

ADDED: The red thing is a Ball of Whacks.

IN THE COMMENTS: Palladian has his tablescape, which contains an image of this page:



And Roger von Oech, the designer of the Ball of Whacks stops in.