"[D]oubling down on the bland, middle-aged white guy quotient on the Republican ticket could be a major mistake."

Writes Chris Cilizza, giving 3 reasons why Rob Portman is the wrong VP choice for Romney. One of the reasons is "Boring":

Portman is not exactly Mr. Exciting. (When your calling card for charisma is a chicken impersonation, it’s pretty slim pickings in the personality department.)

Must everything be about chicken? I would invite everyone to read "15 Genuinely Interesting Things About Rob Portman." The "great impression of a chicken" is in there, and in fact, there's another one with chickens:

He assembled a chicken coop for his wife's Christmas present this year and he gave her four chickens that live in their backyard. They lay four eggs a day.

To be fair to Cilizza, he also wrote a column about why Portman would be a great pick. In that analysis, boringness was a plus:

The rap on Portman is that he’s a boring guy who no one knows. That fact virtually ensures that if Portman is the pick the narrative that will emerge will be along the lines of “he’s more interesting that you might think!”. It’s just how these things tend to work.

I see that column links to the "15 Genuinely Interesting Things" that I remembered.

By the way, will it ever become politically incorrect to say white men are boring? People assume that it's safe to be racist and sexist when you're insulting traditionally privileged groups, but if you are one of those people who's felt the comfort of that insulation, I'd like to invite you to consider the way those insults always contain an implicit stereotype insulting the traditionally disadvantaged groups. If you say white men are boring, you're also saying something about women and about black people.

Oh, but it's a compliment — you say — to call someone interesting.

Is it? And there's a big difference between saying that a specific person is interesting and asserting that a particular group is "interesting." Black people are interesting — Is that something you think is acceptable to say?

ADDED: Remember those pathetic people who ate rats in an art gallery and imagined that they were adding to their interestingness? In the linked post, the commenter t-man said:

The sad man who lives in fear of seeming to be uninteresting brought to mind the classic Bugs Bunny lines:

My, I'll bet you monsters lead in-teresting lives. I said to my girl friend just the other day, 'Gee, I'll bet monsters are in-teresting.' I said. The places you must go and the things you must see -- my stars! I bet you meet lots of in-teresting people too. I'm always in-terested in meeting in-teresting people. Now let's dip our patties in the water!

 Now let's dip our patties in the water!

"[T]he only thing preventing these giant swamp rats from destroying all of Louisiana are our very own Rat B*stards and their crafty hunting tricks...."

It's the new reality show — "Rat Bastards" — with "larger-than-life characters in extreme situations, facing down these rodents with everything from hunting weapons to dynamite."

Nutria are considered such a problem in Louisiana that the state offers a $6 bounty on each tail. Ray said the money is nice, but he calls that program it waste of good meat.

"I catch'em, kill'em and put them in the pot. They are darn good eating," Ray said.

 Here's Ray:



Can we get a reality show where Ray barges into that NYC art show "Tomorrow We Will Feast Again on What We Catch" and takes over the cooking and serving? Let it be one of the competitive shows where we eliminate contestants one by one. Each week the least interesting human being goes home. We could have a Heidi Klum-like arbiter of interestingness who, along with 2 other judges, would assemble the 3 least interesting contestants each week, critique them, and ultimately select one to be told "I'm sorry — you bore me — goodbye."

But who could be the judges of interestingness? Who specializes in that? I mean other than bloggers....

Gallery-goers eat rats at the art show "Tomorrow We Will Feast Again on What We Catch."

And the NYT gives the show 2-pages of glowing description (and warnings that — ooh! — you may be disgusted).

Twenty people, mostly friends of [the artist Laura] Ginn or the gallery owner, [Allegra] LaViola, nibbled on goat cheese bruschetta topped with rat leg tenderloin, and rat-pork terrine encircled with beef fat, prepared by a chef after much trial and error with his proteins. The rats were shipped from a United States Department of Agriculture-approved West Coast processor that supplies pet owners with humanely killed, individually flash-frozen rodents, in classifications ranging from “jumbo” to “fuzzy.” Seventy five rats were skinned and cooked — and broiled and smoked and grilled — for the dinner, and most guests paid $100 each to attend, signing a liability waiver, some not entirely willingly.

“If I see an entire carcass, I might throw up,” said Clifford Owens, a performance artist. Mr. Owens, who had an exhibition at MoMA PS1 this spring, invoked the daredevil spirit of the performance artist Marina Abramovic, to get himself through the evening. “This is about risk,” he said.

It's like a Tony Robbins fire-walking event... for the sophisticated, arty crowd.

“I don’t care about it as art,” [said "artist and video editor" Timothy Hutchings.] “I care about it as something that makes me a more interesting human being.”

So another artist doesn't care about it as art. He cares about it as something that makes him a more interesting human being.

But isn't that what art is all about? Being the artist who is the most interesting human being? I can just imagine what was reeling through the brains of the artists who submitted to Ginn's art performance — and what's still reeling now that there's this drooling write-up in the New York Times. Why her?! Why not me! Look how interesting I am. This is all about me displaying myself as a more interesting human being. It can't be that she played me into her getting the recognition as more interesting.

I don’t care about it as art.

Laughing rats.

Via James Taranto, who tweaks the scientists as having "lonely lives" (since they are resorting to tickling rats). But I think it means something, if animals laugh — if they play and have fun — and it's not all survival instinct.

Note that the rats don't just laugh, they latch on to The Hand as a playmate and chase it around, eager to engage it in more fun times.

Perhaps you'd like to try the diet of the first celebrity dieter.

It's the Lord Byron diet:

... a thin slice of bread and a cup of tea for breakfast and a light vegetable dinner with a bottle or two of seltzer water tinged with Vin de Grave.

Other 19th century dieters:

Nietzsche tried a traditional restricted calorie diet and [Henry] James went in for Fletcherism, an elaborate system of chewing each morsel of food several hundred times.

Fletcherism, eh? Horace Fletcher, "The Great Masticator" said we should only eat when "Good and Hungry" and never while angry or sad.

Seeing — at the linked Wikipedia article — that Mark Twain visited Fletcher, I decided to find some searchable text and happened upon this collection of 300+ Mark Twain works in the Kindle format for $1.99. I was hoping to find something about Fletcher. I didn't. But that's a side issue. I'm absolutely delighted to have a single searchable text of 300+ Mark Twain works. For 2 dollars. What a world we live in! What would Mark Twain have thought of it? Anyway, nothing about Fletcher, but what about chewing? Any morbid fascination with chewing? There's this dialogue:

"Do you love rats?"

"I hate them!"

"Well, I do, too--LIVE ones. But I mean dead ones, to swing round your head with a string."

"No, I don't care for rats much, anyway. What I like is chewing-gum."

"Oh, I should say so! I wish I had some now."

"Do you? I've got some. I'll let you chew it awhile, but you must give it back to me."

That was agreeable, so they chewed it turn about, and dangled their legs against the bench in excess of contentment.

ADDED: The 1919 NYT obituary for Fletcher:

The theory is, in brief, that everybody eats too much and that the cure is to be found in thorough mastication of food....

During [WWI] Dr. Fletcher... was given the full opportunity... to demonstrate the worth of "Fletcherism" though which he taught the 8,000,000 starving Belgians to get the full nourishment from their food. Early in 1912 he had himself subsisted on a diet of potatoes for fifty-eight days.

AND: There's also the first scene in Tennessee Williams's "Glass Menagerie," where our first glimpse of Tom's problems with his mother play out in the context of her admonitions about chewing:

AMANDA [to her son]: Honey, don't push with your fingers. If you have to push with something, the thing to push with is a crust of bread. And chew! Chew! Animals have sections in their stomachs which enable them to digest flood without mastication, but human beings are supposed to chew their food before they swallow it down. Eat food leisurely, son, and really enjoy it. A well-cooked meal has lots of delicate flavours that have to be held in the mouth for appreciation. So chew your food and give your salivary glands a chance to function !

[TOM deliberately lays his imaginary fork down and his chair back from the table.]

TOM: I haven't enjoyed one bite of this dinner because of your constant directions on how to eat it. It's you that makes me rush through meals with your hawk-like attention to every bite I take. Sickening - spoils my appetite - all this discussion of - animals' secretion - salivary glands - mastication!

AMANDA [lightly]: Temperament like a Metropolitan star! [He rises and crosses downstage.] You're not excused from the table.

More signs attacking Gov. Scott Walker — from today's demonstration at the Wisconsin State Capitol.

(Enlarge.)


(Enlarge.)

The male daycare center worker who is not allowed to change diapers and "has been asked to leave the classroom when diapering was happening."

From an article about how it's bad to be too suspicious about the possibility that a man is a pedophile. 

But excluding the man from the task of diapering... Seems to me the female employees are getting the worse end — excuse the expression — of this particular discrimination.

Anyway, read the whole article. It's called "Eek! A Male!" I got interrupted in the middle of writing about it by a prompting to look at the thing everyone on the internet is supposed to look at right now that could be called "Eek! A Rat!"

Madison needs to deal with its vermin - the geese.

At the Isthmus, Bill Lueders — remember him from last week? — seems disturbed by the proposal to kill the geese that are ruining our beautiful public lands.

Parks Division spokeswoman Laura Whitmore notes that the city is soliciting public input on goose management, after the brouhaha at Warner. (The eradication plan there is on hold pending further review.) One public hearing has already been held, on geese and golf courses, and another is planned, on goose management in general parklands.

"We want everyone's opinion," she says, "not just a few."

I'm sure the people who want to spare the geese will honk loudest, so I hope those of you who, like me, think the geese should be treated the way we treat rats will speak up too.

A 55 square foot apartment. £43,000.

"In Rome, people now live like rats."

Ah! But it's the Piazza di Sant' Ignazio. Look! You'll be such a lucky rat.

"Brooklyn is now overrun with rats and opossums."

"A few years ago, officials in Brooklyn, New York came up with a seemingly brilliant idea to deal with the rat-infestation problem in their borough: release opossums into the neighborhood to eat the rats...."

Ha. Of course, like rats, they prefer garbage. No shortage of that.

"The critters have a mouth full of 50 sharp teeth, tend to exude a foul odor, and can occasionally contract rabies... They are nocturnal, and some Brooklynites have become terrified to go into their yards at night."

Oh, Brooklynites! I thought youse guys were tough.

Time to bring in some wolves, I think. They eat rats.

"In his battle with the titans of Wall Street, President Barack Obama almost got upstaged by a rat."

"But he didn't even seem to notice. Assuming that's what it was, scurrying in front of his podium Thursday in a sun-drenched Rose Garden."

1. It wasn't a rat. It was a vole.

2. Our own animal nature is revealed by the way we are distracted by animals. We are critters too, and we have a sharp eye for prey, even when it's something we don't eat anymore.

3. I bet Obama was thinking about the time a fly tried to upstage him at the White House:



Can't do that with a vole, can you? Poor Obama! Things don't go his way as easily as they did a year ago when he "got the sucker" (the fly).

4. The "sucker" symbolizes his opponents. Last year, it was a slow-moving fly, handily squelched. This year, the vole skitters unscathed. By next summer, the White House is going to look like this:



UPDATE: Hours later, scientists determine that it was in fact a vole. Told ya. Thanks to Meade, a man who can tell one rodent from another.

"A pretty little pharmaceutical sales rep walking barefoot thru the jungle, in a bikini, whacking a rat until it’s dead. That’s not normal behavior."

"Therein lies one of the most beautiful things about Survivor. If forces people to confront truths about themselves they might otherwise never have to face."

"Top 10 Highlights of Sarah Palin's Trip to New York."

According to Drudge — "developing" — Palin has responded by calling Letterman "pathetic."

I thought it was good-natured fun, and the audience was surprisingly sympathetic to Palin. (Am I reading the "oohs" accurately? They might have been sympathetic to rats... and slutty stewardesses.)

"Court upholds free speech of activist rat."

Interesting headline. Not that far from literally true.

As Andrew Wyeth slips away into the next life, the blogging cockroach waves a poetic antenna.

Yesterday's post marking the death of the popular painter lured the little insect — who's very popular around here — out of the woodwork and onto the keyboard:

you know i have this human soul
and i can still remember last time
before i was reborn as a cockroach
i was a 12 tone composer and music professor
at a 3rd rate state u but now i live near harvard u
which is probably comeuppance for my last life
anyway when i was in a human body
and believe me i was in as many female
grad students human bodies as i could be
which may be one reason i m a cockroach now
i remember that only abstract expressionism
would do over at the art dept
just like only 12 tone or serial music was
if you were a composer and no matter what
you had to like it if you were a serious modern
person at all but i don t think that applied to
cockroaches which is one benefit of my current status
yes abstract expressionism and serial music went
hand in hand at the college of arts and god
help you if you had any other ideas i know i sure didn t
so if you were a studio art student and painted
an actual picture of something you might as well
have composed a piece of music in g major
oh the shame

abstract expressionism and 12 tone music also
had a lot of trendy leftish ideas stuck to them
like mold on an overripe fruit ready to drop into
somebody s hands except if you were
an old fashioned communist you had a problem
cause stalin liked mickey mouse and minuet in g
and zhadinov would send you to siberia for
bourgeois formalist tendencies if you thought
jackson pollock or anton webern were cool
ah the rat maze of politics and art
except most of the rats i know these days
are smarter than that which is another problem

bourgeois was the catch all epithet
used against art like andrew wyeth s
i bet you thought i d never get to the point
and i ve got to tell you i still get a little queasy
at christina s world because it was part of the air
i breathed that stuff like that was stupid
and sentimental bourgeois illustration
dark and humorless as it is
i remember this visiting french art professor
and several of us going to a wyeth exhibit
in town for a good laugh
except he was a little dark and humorless himself
and used to puff his cigarette between his thumb
and forefinger with his hand turned toward his face
and say ah you amerwicains you are so bourgeois
you theenk a fire burning in ze fireplace is expressif
what is expressif is a fire burning ze house down
i think he was a structuralist
he would sit in his cafe on the rue de bac thinking
and then amble over to the universite and teach
for which the republique francais paid him enough
to sit in a cafe on the rue de bac in paris thinking
i was luckier because the state u where i taught
paid me enough to not have to think at all

no tenure for poor wyeth and no cafe sitting either
he had to paint pictures and gasp sell them
so the non trendy ignorant bourgeoisie
could gape at them not understanding
the slightest thing about art
except you can see the grass blades
oh the shame

Question: What's going on at the University of Wisconsin?

Answer: Tickling girl rats' tummies for hours on end and making their brains more like boy rats' brains.

Question: Why can't a woman be more like a man?

Answer: She can, if only you would rub her belly much, much longer.

***

(Q: How did I find this story? A: Hazy Dave.)

"The hospital now desperately needs volunteers to help with some of the orphans."

After Tropical Storm Fay, here is a plea for volunteers to care for hundreds of rescued baby... squirrels!

You'll have to provide them with "quiet space in your home" and feed them every three to four hours, thenrelease them into the wild when they are 12 weeks old. Is this really the best outlet for people's charitable urges? I'm sure there are some youthful rats somewhere that need cuddling.

Going to the dump to shoot rats.

= Megan McArdle's "weirdest date."

Happy St. Pat's from Clan O'Harra.

The St. Pat rat?

If you're an O'Harra, maybe you can explain.

Things that exploded in Brooklyn Heights recently.

A halogen bulb:



A rat:



Now, calm down an have some coffee.




The rat did not disturb me. I can only think somebody's kitty cat was having a nice meal and had enough. This is no more troubling than the rest of nature. But please don't take it back to your dorm room for cooking in the popcorn popper.

The bulb on the other hand... do you see that hole in the glass? I was 5 feet away from it when it exploded behind my head. It sounded like a gun shot, lit up the room like a lightning bolt, and I had no idea what was going on for a terrifying fraction of a second until I turned around and saw the light fixture smoking.