"The tears coursed down her cheeks — not freely, however..."

"... for when they came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they assumed an inky color, and pursued the rest of their way in slow black rivulets."

That's the sentence from "The Great Gatsby" today, in the "Gatsby" project.

Tears coursed. The subject and the predicate are right up there at the outset. No teasing about where the foundation of this sentence is. Course is a strange verb for ran. There are reasons to choose the odder word. Course, for example, is more woody, less tinny than ran. The tears coursed, but not freely, because they got stuck on the woman's mascaraed eyelashes. It's thickly applied black mascara. We know it's thickly applied, because it's the excess blobs of mascara that give the impression of beads, and inky means black. So the tears got stuck on the blobs and became a coagulated black liquid, slowed down, but still, on each cheek, a little river, a rivulet.

Is rivulet a strange word? Classical Latin had the word rīvulus and there's rivoletto in Italian. John Milton used rivulet, in 1667, in "Paradise Lost," one of the books my readers urge upon me as they imagine they see the light at the end of the "Gatsby" tunnel. "As my train emerged from the tunnel into sunlight...," I found the rivulet sentence in "Paradise Lost":

In Bowre and Field he sought, where any tuft
Of Grove or Garden-Plot more pleasant lay,
Thir tendance or Plantation for delight,
By Fountain or by shadie Rivulet
He sought them both, but wish'd his hap might find
EVE separate, he wish'd, but not with hope
Of what so seldom chanc'd, when to his wish,
Beyond his hope, EVE separate he spies,
Veild in a Cloud of Fragrance, where she stood,
Half spi'd, so thick the Roses bushing round
About her glowd, oft stooping to support
Each Flour of slender stalk, whose head though gay
Carnation, Purple, Azure, or spect with Gold,
Hung drooping unsustaind, them she upstaies
Gently with Mirtle band, mindless the while,
Her self, though fairest unsupported Flour,
From her best prop so farr, and storn so nigh.

Oh, come on now! That sentence is absurdly long! And the spelling is so perverse — Bowre and Flour for bower and flower. I like the Roses bushing round as the Snake finds EVE alone. The gay flowers — flours — drooping... interestingly vulnerable. But storn... what is it? Storn! I know it's woody.

No, no, no! I'm too smart to succumb to that temptation. I am not a stooping, drooping blogger. I'm shrinking back into my "Gatsby" tunnel. Tomorrow is Groundhog Day, but I've seen my shadie shadow this evening. I'm frightened, terrified. The unfree tears course down my cheeks, slowed by the speed bumps of inky mascara.

"I'm amused that right after 'potato, my penis droops' up pops Quayle."

I say, in the laughing-in-bed first-post-of-the-morning. 

Quayle is a regular commenter here, but — who knows, on the internet? — it might be Dan Quayle.



Quayle responds: "I carry the blood of polygamists in my veins. So one should expect that sort of thing, I guess." He adds: "I took the name from my great grandfather, pictured here surrounded by some new friends."



That's a photograph of taken at the Utah Penitentiary in 1889, showing men arrested under the Edmunds-Tucker Act, explained here. Included in the photo is John C. Bennett, who "taught a doctrine of 'spiritual wifery'":

He and associates sought to have illicit sexual relationships with women by telling them that they were married "spiritually," even if they had never been married formally, and that the Prophet approved the arrangement.

That wasn't the correct doctrine, and Bennett got excommunicated, and then he "toured the country speaking against the Latter-day Saints and published a bitter anti-Mormon exposé charging the Saints with licentiousness."

Here's John C. Bennett in happier days...



... posing like Napoleon:

"I was reckless writing about recklessness."

I say, noting that I got quoted over at Instapundit with a missing "it's" apostrophe: "he’s entirely reckless about what these laws would really mean to ordinary people, and its a recklessness that thrives in the mind of someone who...."

"Oh! It's blogging," says Meade. "It's the internet. Think how many times you've gotten it right."

"And it's more embarrassing to get the apostrophe wrong the other way," I soothe myself, referring to  putting the apostrophe in "its" when it's supposed to be out.

"It's embarrassing to be embarrassed," Meade asserts aphoristically.

"But I was criticizing recklessness at the very point when I was reckless," I brood nonetheless. "It's like the way whenever you mock a misspelling, you end up misspelling something."

I decide to write this post, which — speaking of blogging — is the antidote to embarrassment.

***

King Kong, little elves

On the rooftops they dance

Valentino-type tangos

While the makeup man’s hands

Shut the eyes of the dead

Not to embarrass anyone

Farewell Angelina

The sky is embarrassed

And I must be gone 

"SYMPATHY FOR THE NICE GUYS OF OKCUPID."

That all-caps at Instapundit comes across as a comic misspelling of "Occupied," but the nice guys in question are at OKCupid. I'm not sure which purportedly "nice guys" deserve more sympathy, if any.

Here's the underlying linked-to article by Rachel Hills in The Atlantic. It's a critique of the critique of guys who cite their niceness as a reason why they can't get girlfriends.

"Kim Kardashian: How do Armenians feel about her fame?"

BBC homes in on the question everyone is asking.

"Kim is an Armenian and famous in the world, so this is enough for every Armenian to be proud of Kim. But because of cultural and traditional issues, they do not want to accept that she is an Armenian," [says BBC monitoring journalist Armen Shahbazian].

Stories about Kardashian are frequently a topic for comedy programmes, he says.

"They always compare the Armenian French singer Charles Aznavour, who they are proud of, with Kim Kardashian, who is seen in a more negative light. They don't want her to present their country," he says.

Deep into this article we get to some comparative material about what the people of Gibraltar think about fashion designer John Galliano and what the people of the Isle of Man think of Dan Quayle, who — "was internationally ridiculed when it appeared he could not spell the word 'potato.'"

Pat Sajak condemned as a pronunciation Nazi.

When "seven swans a-swimmin'" for "seven swans a-swimming" costs Navy Intel Specialist Renee Durette $4,000.

The "a-" beginning makes it seem as though you should be doing Southern American dialect, but "The 12 Days of Christmas" is set in an English aristocratic milieu (with lords and ladies).

More importantly, "Wheel of Fortune" is all about letters, so obviously they've got to be pedantic about getting all the letters.

Anyway... one more reason to be sick of that song. Or do you like it? Here it is by Bela Fleck and the Flecktones.

"It's a free market, Dave. Plenty of schools don't have sports. Go to one of those schools."

Over at Isthmus, the Madison "alternative" newspaper, Meade takes on former mayor/current columnist Dave Cieslewicz who's fretting about all the money spent on college football and the unpaid athletes and their incipient brain damage.

As far as brain injuries, what else are you going to ban - riding in cars? bicycling? taking showers? drinking alcohol?

Pushing back is local politico Stu Levitan, misspelling Meade's first name and gratuitously insulting him:

Lawrence, are you really asserting that the number of brain injuries from showering equals the number of brain injuries from football? My, you are a silly little fellow!

Meade is all:

Stw, what I am asserting is that football is only one of many activities which can lead to traumatic brain injury. Your question reflects poor reading comprehension. Is it possible that you bumped your head while playing Chutes and Ladders when you were a child?

Or maybe you didn't play that game. Maybe you, Cowboy Stu, and your family played Go To The Head Of The Class. You probably should've worn a helmet.

Like Dave!

This is what it's like in a clash of who-knows-how-damaged male brains of Madison.

AND: If you've got a craving for any old-time kids' games, please use the Althouse portal to Amazon. And I recommend Candy Land. Because they don't want you to eat candy.

Torture in "Zero Dark Thirty": "It’s enough to make you wretch. It’s arguably the best and most important part of the movie."

Spencer Ackerman — whose wretched spelling may make you retch — struggles with the question that's plaguing movie fans today: Does the much-praised, Oscar-worthy Kathryn Bigelow film approve of torture?

One scene features a bloodied, disoriented and humiliated man strapped to a wall with his pants around his ankles. A second scene depicts the same man having liquid forcibly poured down his throat; later, he’s shoved into a box that could barely hold your stereo...

I'm no longer willing to view movies like this. (And I saw "3 Kings," which had a man getting liquid — crude oil — poured down his throat.) But this is what perhaps counts as serious film art these days. Crappy film entertainment is also full of torture (horror films).

Ackerman defends Bigelow: the film "presents a graphic depiction of what declassified CIA documents indicate the torture program really was" and "does not present torture as a silver bullet that led to bin Laden; it presents torture as the ignorant alternative to that silver bullet."

Bigelow's critics, linked in Ackerman's article, are worried that the film may convince people that torture is effective and worthwhile. This all sounds too rational. What does sitting quietly in a dark room with a crowd of comfortable strangers, watching huge, bright, clear moving pictures of actors pretending to be tortured do to our souls? I know the stock answer is: It's worse to live comfortably and complacently with a head free of any such picture. But the stock answer assumes that our souls are already dead.

"Axelrod said all the 'empty binder' talk from the GOP didn’t prompt creation of the new brochure..."

Talking Points Memo gives the glossy pamphlet a glossy presentation. (Though not glossy enough to spell "brochure" correctly every time they used it. I corrected a misspelling in the quote I used for my headline.)

On a conference call with reporters Tuesday, top Obama adviser David Axelrod said the brochure is a version of the plan Obama has been “running on and talking about for months in written form.”

Read the whole document here.

But you can't read the whole document there. You can only flip through the pages and see the pictures and headlines. There's no click-to-enlarge to let you get to the text — minimal as it is — explaining how Obama will do things like "BUILDING THE ECONOMY FROM THE MIDDLE CLASS OUT." There's blurry fine print, but okay, I will stare it into some semblance of focus.

On page 2, "BUILDING THE ECONOMY FROM THE MIDDLE CLASS OUT" is the big headline and there are 7 subheadings, some of which become headlines on their own page of the brochure. The one that caught my eye was "Cutting the deficit by more than $4 trillion." There are 9 more pages to the brochure, but there's no separate page for that one.

Maybe if they'd bother to tell us how they planned to cut the deficit, they would have noticed that when they referred to it on the page-2 bullet-point list, they used the wrong number. The deficit under Obama is only — only! — something like $1.1 trillion. That's bad enough, and Obama had promised, at the beginning of his presidency to cut it in half. Cut it $4 trillion! I know it's just another dimwitted use of "deficit" for "debt," but — good lord — it's a bullet-point in your glossy brochure. Get it right! It looks like you don't care. It looks like you think trillions are absurdities that can be thrown around or cut in half magically.

Paging through the brochure, finding every other bullet point has its own page, I see there is a page, with a different headline that corresponds to "Cutting the deficit by more than $4 trillion." The redone headline is: "A TAX PLAN THAT CUTS THE DEFICIT AND CREATES JOBS."



It's possible to read that text. With effort, I did it. That was very annoying, and I didn't find a plan, so let's talk about that photograph.

First, if you suddenly feel like you need to buy Dockers, please use my Amazon link: here. When you put on your pants, one leg at a time, check the rear view mirror. Is your ass is as appealing to 3 generations of women as Obama's plan for the middle class?

Now, let's look at these women. There's a boy there too, carrying on the family's horizontal stripes theme, but the picture's framed to exclude him, because... well... women.

This election is about women. There's grandma in thick peppermint stripes, clapping her wizened, insufficiently health-cared hands together with delight. There's the little girl in thin peppermint stripes, curling her palms around an invisible ball of light that symbolizes her future, empty but all aglow. There's mom, in her red dress and and squinty, flinty rictus, her right-breast gently clasped for comfort by the one female who is not moved to ecstasy by our President.

Who is this American traitor, this devil child? Whence the expression of dubiety that clouds her young visage? A red flower — inserted in her tawny locks by her hopeful red-clad mother — casts a fateful shadow over the brooding child's brow. Petulant pessimist! How did you find your way into Obama's glossy brochure!

"Now that Obama isn’t more 'likeable' than Romney any more, likeability doesn’t matter!"

Says Instapundit — spelling "likeable" the way I do and linking to Jennifer Rubin, who spells it the other way.

And here's that post of mine from last month, before the first debate, about the verb "to like":

It occurred to me that that liberals have quite effectively insinuated the message into our brains that they are likeable, and, in particular, Barack Obama is likeable. And that doesn't just mean that any given individual likes him, subjectively. He is likeable, objectively. If you don't like him, what's wrong with you? You don't seem likeable. You'd better like him or no one will like you. All the likeable people are liberal, so you'd better be liberal or no one will like you.

Staking too much on being liked can get you into trouble.

Rouged individualism.

With all this talk of rugged individualism and emphasis on women at the conventions, I offer my coinage: rouged individualism.

My Google search indicates that prior uses of the word combo "rouged individualism" were all typos from people who were badly misspelling "rugged," e.g.:

The Pacific Northwest has the group identity of "Rouged Individualism". There are plenty of positive aspects of this perspective, but as is obvious, plenty of pitfalls as well. So now I'm independent and capable but by using my strengths, not trying to be something I'm not.

Plenty of pitfalls... and pitbulls wearing lipstick... and rouge....

ADDED: This post was inspired by wyo sis's riffing in the comments about a different misspelling of "rugged" — "rugid":

rugid individualism
I like that!
I think I'll start using it.
It has a refudiated ring to it.

(Sarah is everywhere!)

AND: Meade makes a visual pun for "rugged individualism," using my photo of the "Pioneer Family" sculpture and his photoshopping (anti)skill:

At last. Romney gets revenge for all that mockery over spelling "America" "Amercia."

Obama spells "Ohio" "Oiho."

50 Shades of Gary.

Typo I just made, observed the comic potential of, and, after Googling, discovered had already been deployed.

Speaking of typos and "Shades of Grey," there was some discussion of the 2 spellings of "grey/gray" in the first "Shades of Grey" post of the day. (This is the 3d.) I said I meant to do that:

"Gray" is the long-term spelling on this blog and the normal spelling used by Americans.

"Grey" is the title of the book, the name of the character -- Christian Grey -- the British spelling, and the spelling used by Americans who have been over influenced by the British and that damned book.

You know how you know "gray" is the right spelling for Americans? You look at your Crayolas!

"A coin collector and Sherlock Holmes fan, Snigdha aced the word 'guetapens'..."

"...  French-derived word that means an ambush or a trap, to outlast eight other finalists and claim the trophy along with more than $40,000 in cash and prizes."

"I knew it. I'd seen it before," Snigdha, a semifinalist last year, said of the winning word. "I just wanted to ask everything I could before I started spelling."

There was no jumping for joy, at least not right away. The announcer didn't proclaim Snigdha the champion, so she stood awkwardly near the microphone for a few seconds before confetti started to fly. [Video here.]

I had Snigda picked out as the most likely winner by the beginning of the finals. She seemed to know the words (and the word components) and wasn't just making very educated guesses.

IN THE COMMENTS: Chuck said: "Ann...You misspelled 'Snigdha.'" Oh, yeah? Maybe I meant to do that.

Spelling time again.

The best blog coverage, year after year, is at Throwing Things.

ADDED: "doo buh TAHN tay: The attitude of the Montana Supreme Court towards Citizens United."

ALSO: Here's some detail about that Montana case, from George Will.

Three Montana corporations sued to bring the state into conformity with Citizens United by overturning a 100-year-old state law, passed when copper and other corporations supposedly held sway, that bans all corporate political spending. The state’s Supreme Court refused to do this, citing Montana’s supposedly unique susceptibility to corporate domination — an idea amusingly discordant with the three corporations’ failure even to persuade the state court to acknowledge the supremacy of the U.S. Supreme Court.

"In an embarrassing blunder, Romney's campaign misspelled the word 'America' on its new 'With Mitt' iPhone app, launched Tuesday."

Ouch.

"Sandra Day O'Connell (Retired Justice, U.S. Supreme Court)."

How quickly we forget...

From a list of 2012 Law School Commencement Speakers.

IN THE COMMENTS: Mitchell said:

That spelling was chosen after a multifactor balancing test.

"For my own part I always spell so with lots of f’s and g’s and such like tailey, twirley, loopey things, when my heart is in the tender vein."

Wrote H.G. Wells, who wondered why people "do not grumble more at having to spell correctly" — quoted in this review of "The Language Wars: A History of Proper English." (Which I just bought.)

Car vandal caught because he can't spell "slut."

Someone carved "sult" on a lady's car, and she had an ex-boyfriend who — twice! — had texted "sult."

When they tracked the man down, police asked him to write "You are a slut," and he wrote "You are a sult."

"I meant coke! And fizz! Screw this auto cucumber!"

The Top 50 Fan Favorite entries in Damn You Autocorrect's first year.

I just made a nuisance of myself laughing way too much. Meade thinks most of them are fake. They're not that funny it you think they're fake. So, if you want to laugh, you've gotta believe. But if you do that, don't read them near a nonbeliever, because you will be very annoying.

Via Metafilter.