How to read a book a day for a year.

Choose short/easy/audio books.

Actually, I read a book a day and have for years — but it's an audiobook, and most of this reading is done while asleep.

Do you have an reading-related New Year's resolutions? Let's think up some reading projects for the new year. We don't necessarily have to do them. Let's just contemplate them. I've already thought of 2, one of which I plan to do. First:

Maybe a good project would be those "History of..." pages, not just for their most common words — WAR! — but to have had it run through your head, at least once, what happened in all of those places. Do you know how many pages we are talking about? The number of members in the United Nations is not the right answer, but do you know that number? It's 193. Wikipedia lists 206 sovereign states (including those with disputed sovereignty).

Let's make a New Year's resolution: Each day, read one Wikipedia "History of..." page. Will you join me? We'll go in alphabetical order, and I'll prompt you with blog posts.

That will start on New Year's day. Don't worry, I'll make it amusing. Second:

What I like [about "The Great Gatsby"] is that each sentence is good, on its own. Seriously. Test it out. "As my train emerged from the tunnel into sunlight, only the hot whistles of the National Biscuit Company broke the simmering hush at noon." Every sentence is a writer's inspiration....

I feel like starting a blog devoted to individual sentences in "The Great Gatsby," chosen randomly, and continuing until all the sentences have been used up.

With commentary, of course. For example, here's my commentary on the hot-whistle-simmering-hush sentence (responding to a commenter who complained that "trains do not 'emerge' from tunnels. They blast, speed, rip, explode, hurtle. E.B. White and Orwell would have hated the verb 'emerge'):

Now, one reason the train can't "blast" or "explode" from the tunnel — and by the way, oh, you men, with your cocks — is that the "only" sound was the "hot whistle." Otherwise, there was a "hush." That's all very surreal, no? Why didn't the train make any noise? It emerged, because it wasn't a screaming cock blasting through a vagina tunnel, as happens in your (presumably) E.B. White-approved works of fiction. Why was the train silent, why were the whistles hot, why was the hush simmering, why was it noon, why were the whistles biscuit whistles, and why wasn't it the biscuit, rather than the whistle, that was hot?

I finally figured out what David Gregory displaying that prop reminds me of.

Yesterday, I was asking: Why was that prop so important to David Gregory? If possession of that high-capacity magazine was a crime, and the NBC folk knew it and had even contacted the police and thus even knew they'd created rock-hard evidence that they knew it, why did they go ahead and have Gregory flaunt that illegal possession on television? They had to have thought it was a devastatingly powerful prop. My first guess was that they imagined that viewers — some viewers, at least — would find the object itself scary.

Now, I've got to show you another one of Chip Ahoy's little riffs, because it's what jogged my thinking on the subject for some reason. Here's Chip in the comments thread to that other post, the one where I showed those David Gregory masks (designed by Chip). This is a little dialogue:

"No. It doesn't look that threatening to me. If that's what you were thinking. No. It just doesn't."

"What do you mean? Are you insane? This magazine holds thirty rounds."

"So."

"So? So? So? Is that all you got? It holds thirty!"

"So. It's small. Looks like a PEZ dispenser to me."

"WHAT? So, this is amusing to you? You find this amusing."

Caption: "It holds 30." I'm not sure exactly why that jogged my thinking, but suddenly I understand the drama Gregory (and his people) were trying to enact. It's a deep psychic memory of childhood. Gregory sought dominance over his interlocutor, NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre, and the idea — in the act of picking up that magazine and beginning an interrogation about it — was that Gregory would become (subliminally) a parent figure who would push LaPierre into the subordinate role of the little boy, the cowering child confronted with undeniable evidence of his wrongdoing. What's THIS I found in your room?

The plan was for LaPierre to babble lamely, scrambling to explain it away, like the kid trying to concoct some cockamamie reason why that (whatever) got into his room. He'd look foolish and guilty, as Dad continues to hold up the item which the kid knows will be the defeat of every idea that flashes through his stupid, stupid brain.

The scenario didn't play out as scripted. LaPierre is a stolid veteran of many a confrontational interview. He's not going to let the interviewer get the upper hand that easily. Somebody needs to tell Gregory: We all want the hand. Hand is tough to get.

Clinton holds up a finger and says "You will feel it" — in this Drudge juxtaposition.

Here's the whole page frozen in time right now, but let me close in on these 4 photos:



"You will feel it" is — of course — a line from Clinton's convention speech, but illustrated with the finger pointed up, it takes us back to the Lewinsky days, when we heard about finger-shaped things inserted into vaginas and a finger was famously wagged at us for imagining that he had sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.

Right underneath Bill Clinton — double meaning right there — is Hillary Clinton, and she's getting "snubbed." The snub is by the Chinese VP, but we imagine other snubs. Additional lines under Hillary's picture have her "dubbed" a "sneaky troublemaker."

And, speaking of troublemakers, we're reminded that Hillary is "half a world away" "[a]s Bill speaks." In case that's not a sharp enough nudge to get you to think about things Bill might do while his wife is away, your eyes are drawn quickly to the swelling bosom of Scarlett Johansson, who is one of "Barack's Angels," who will be on the convention stage tonight. (Scarlett's golden hair rolls and flows all down her breasts, while Hillary's hair, in that other pic, is dull, lank, and flat.) And what else are these beautiful young women up to in Charlotte where Hillary is half a world away? In Drudge tease, the trio of beauties "makes push."

And that push? You will feel it.

IN THE COMMENTS: Paul Zrimsek said:

And here I thought the true caption for the Scarlett Johanssen photo was the line above it, not the line below.

He's referring to: "Advisers lower expectations for convention bounce..."

Subliminality.

Here's something the Obama campaign did in an ad — displaying the word "felons" for 6 seconds on a graph labeled "Romney."

More locally, a candidate named Mark Pocan, running for Congress in my district, had an ad displaying the word "assassination" over a photograph of his opponent — Kelda Helen Roys — looking oddly like Lee Harvey Oswald!

The average rent in Manhattan is $3,778, up 9% in a year.

And for a studio, it's $2,569 — up 18.8% in the past year.

Real-estate agent Josh Lichy, 27, appreciated the rental crunch first-hand when he and his girlfriend were hit with a $300 increase, from $3,000 to $3,300 for their 750-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment at 160 Riverside Drive. “It’s too much. We want to have money to spend so we’re not rent-poor,” he said.

Rent-poor. That's derived from house poor, but quite different. If you're house poor, you're building wealth in the form of equity (unless prices fall). But a rented apartment isn't a repository of money set aside for the future. It's as gone as if you'd blown it on a European vacation.

As for small apartments in NYC, we've been talking about Mayor Bloomberg's competition for designing tiny apartments called "micro-units." Well, here's a NYT article about furnishing your micro-unit. It's bizarrely — mockingly — unhelpful, suggesting a chewable toothbrush, a very small dog, and growing plants on your wall in some doodad that hangs over the fireplace. Hello? Get a normal toothbrush. Don't keep any pets. And you won't even have a fireplace. But I love the idea — in the photo at the NYT link — of putting your handgun right there next to your objets on one of the étagères that flank the fireplace that you won't have in your micro-unit.

But if you have a micro-unit, you may want to compensate by getting a gun.

Drudge goes black-and-white with Rahm, Brad Pitt, Uncle Sam, and Obama.

Look. Only Pitt and Rahm are photographs. Obama — like Uncle Sam — is done with artwork. Pretty bad artwork. It looks like a bad drawing, and I'm guessing it was done by computer-processing of a photo. It's funny the way the photographiness of a photo shows through when a drawing is made. Something more timeless and grand is found when the artist draws from life. Of course, there's the usual risk that it won't look like the person. But that's why you need a good artist. Or stick with a regular photo-photo.

Unless you're looking for an odd effect. Perhaps Drudge is trying to say that Obama is drained of life. It might have something to do with the big drained-of-color idea, which does unify the 4 images. There's another processed photo further down on the page: Hugo Chavez. His image has been subjected to posterization — where all shades of gray have been eliminated.

Ah! I said it: shades of grey. Is Drudge hinting that these men have some kind of Christian Grey sadistic power over us? Speaking of photoprocessing, there was this article in the Daily Mail yesterday, imagining Christian Grey as a composite — depicted in shades of gray — of various famous guys, including Brad Pitt (but not Rahm, Uncle Sam, Obama, and Chavez).



Also on the Drudge page, in column 1, under Brad Pitt, is Vladimir Putin. Putin and Pitt are both wearing sunglasses. The Pitt image pushes "Brad Pitt's mom in fear after slamming Obama..." and the Putin image goes to "West is on decline." Chavez is positioned under Uncle Sam, and both of those images include hands — Sam pointing at us (over a warning about taxes and Obama) and Chavez with his hand to his forehead in the position Drudge showed Obama 3 days ago. Obama had his hand like that along with the headline "Barack and Bones: I've Been Eating," and today's Chavez image goes along with an assertion that Chavez is "totally free" of cancer (a likely lie).

The main story, about Rahm ("the Godfather") is about the murder rate spiking in Chicago.  Rahm's picture is centered over Uncle Sam and Hugo Chavez, and Rahm's hand is holding his chin in a manner that implies thinking and judgment especially given the intensity of his eyes, looking off to his right. Uncle Sam's eyes are also intense, staring right at us in that accusatory way. As noted above, Pitt and Putin have their eyes covered with sunglasses — shades (Shades of Grey?!). So what might we say about Obama's eyes? I'd say they look up slightly, conveying vague confusion or dreaminess.

Obama tops the third column, which has no other faces, but 2 other images: of solar flares ("getting stronger") and of NYC ("Bloomberg asks developers to test tiny apartments...").  The Obama image has "$0$" under it, which links to a story about how Romney raised much more money than Obama in June ($106 million, compared to $71 million).

What does it all mean?  The easy explanation is that black-and-white imposes unity over the diverse images, and the similarities and differences are mostly by chance, aided by a bit of conscious design (putting the sunglasses pictures in one column and the hands pictures in another). Black-and-white was a big move by Drudge, but it too is likely meaningless. Just another way to get attention. Maybe he thought going black-and-white with the Rahm picture made him look more like a gangster (even though the "Godfather" movies are in color), and that led to the idea of making the whole page black-and-white, just to get the webfolk thinking, making stuff up.

But the only interesting lead I thought of is "50 Shades of Grey." Maybe Drudge is trying to say that government and crime are whipping us into submission. Government and crime... and solar flares. Wear sunglasses!

Hands and heads, positioned by Drudge.

Let's analyze this. (Click to enlarge.)



In the first column, we see Barack Obama holding his head, as if he's got a headache.

The middle column shows 2 politicians, both governors, gesturing outward, not holding anything.

The third column shows a bear holding a slice of watermelon and George Bush holding a little African orphan, grasping his/her head.

That is to say, the outer columns feature hands (or paws) holding something, and in 2 of the 3 pictures, what is held is a black person's head, and in the other what is held is watermelon.

Analyze the Drudgetaposition.
	Drudge was intentionally joking about race, though of course it's deniable.
	Drudge should have noticed this accidental allusion and avoided it.
	Althouse is seeing something that isn't there and should have refrained from talking about race.
pollcode.com free polls

ADDED:

.@annalthouse You forgot to mention that the governors are pointing up, which is code for "uppity." althouse.blogspot.com/2012/07/hands-…
— James Taranto (@jamestaranto) July 7, 2012

"A still life once thought to be by Vincent van Gogh but later downgraded to being the work of an anonymous artist..."

"... is indeed by the tormented Dutch impressionist himself," writes AP reporter Mike Corder, presumably with some accuracy, though obviously not full accuracy, since Van Gogh was not an impressionist. He was a Post Impressionist.

Maybe we should call the Associated Press "post journalism."

By the way, it's not the greatest Van Gogh painting in the world, so you can see why it got "downgraded." But then X-ray technology somehow got to the truth. It had Van Gogh insides:

A detailed X-ray of an underlying painting of two wrestlers and knowledge of the painter's period at a Belgian art academy led a team of researchers to conclude that the painting really is by Van Gogh.

Nothing says "Van Gogh" like wrestlers! No, wait. Googling "Van Gogh wrestlers," I got to this much better written news story from The Independent, explaining the reasoning so it doesn't sound ridiculous:

The wrestlers’ existence was known only from a reference in one of the Dutch master’s letters, written aged 33, just four years before his tragic death. On 22 January 1886, he wrote: “This week I painted a large thing with two nude torsos – two wrestlers.”

There is no other painting of wrestlers. It is this painting that now confirms the still life’s authenticity. They are both on the same canvas. Van Gogh painted the still life over his wrestlers which could not be seen until now.

Maybe Van Gogh wouldn't have been so "tortured" if he hadn't felt the urge to paint stodgy flowers over top of his nude male torsos!

Professor Joris Dik of Delft University spoke of the excitement: “What makes it very tangible is this letter which refers to a painting that was thought to have been lost or had not survived.” He said that it was in Paris that Van Gogh became “obsessed” with flower painting, leaving behind his Dutch period, “where he used mostly dark colours”.

What happened in Paris? What was he really saying with flowers? Was there an underlying nude male torso message?

"You have commented on violence against men in advertising..."

"... and recently about Holdren's ad nuttiness," emails a reader. "I thought you might like the McDonald's Shamrock shake ad."



"As near as I can tell the overriding message is buy your crazy wife a Shamrock Shake and she will blow you."

You... or a leprechaun.

Why did Rick Santorum deliver a yank-your-arm-out-of-its-shoulder-socket handshake to Ron Paul?

At the end of the debate on Wednesday. Video at the link, where the headline reads "Ron Paul Fans Outraged At Hearty Post-Debate Handshake." I watched the video, and you don't have to be a Ron Paul fan to be outraged. I had to wonder about Santorum's sanity. That wasn't just a hearty handshake. That was... evil. There is evil in the world. Could it be... Satan?

Hey, Rick. Take a lesson from a master:



IN THE COMMENTS: Chip Ahoy said:

Ron Paul was ready for Santorum at the fifty-seventh debate and wore a prop rubber arm. At the end of the debate when Santorum vigorously shook Ron Paul's prop arm it warbled and stretched right out of the jacket sleeve. Ron Paul yelled "Ow! WTF, you freak?!" The rubber arm snapped back and 2% of Santorum's vote flowed over to Ron Paul in repulsion to the aggression but in a twist 1% of Ron Paul's votes and 3% of Gingrich's votes, and 2% of Romney's votes flowed to Santorum because those voters thought the sight of pulling out Ron Paul's arm was awesome.

By the time the fifty-eighth debate rolled around Ron Paul's supporters had fashioned an electrified arm to use on Santorum at the end of the debate but that was detected at the debate entrance and viewers were denied the chance of seeing Santorum electrified by his own aggressive handshake.

And perhaps for the 59th debate, the prop arm might pull out altogether, creating an image something like the animation Chip made for us yesterday, when we were trying to understand not Satan, but Mammon (one of the 7 princes of Hell), and a painting by Evelyn De Morgan called "The Worship of Mammon" had a strangely meaningful extended arm. The illuminating animation:



And the lesson we learn, at long last? The man who gives an extremely vigorous, super-macho handshake — what is it, really, that he is afraid of?

Chip unlocks a dirty visual secret.

"That painting is subversively pornographic. It's shocking my eyeballs."

Later:

See what I mean.

I was going to make her head bob and then I thought, no, you must consider the children. And then I thought, if I would make the head bob then I might learn where it is that Photobucket is drawing the line about taking down my stuff. Since they never tell me.

Wow! I haven't seen such a convincing animation since Ra^thergate.

IN THE COMMENTS: t-man corrects:

That's a dude, Chip, not a woman.

Why does Gingrich keep calling Mitt Romney "timid"?

He even uses the word "timid" as a noun.

It seems like the creators of the ad decided to play around with the name "Mitt," so they flipped it over to get "tiM," flopped it back so it's "Mitt" again, then put them side by side to get "tiM-Mitt," which sounds like "timid."

It some kind of palindrome!

And then what would happen if Mitt picked Tim Pawlenty as his VP? The brains of poets will explode. But what kind of an ear for poetry do we average Americans have? Perhaps it doesn't matter whether you notice. It's harder to defend against the subliminal effects. The words seep directly into your emotions. You get these uneasy feelings about the candidate, and you don't know why.

And then again, we do hear poetry in the language of politics: I like Ike... tricky Dick.... Even when you hear it and you can defend against it, you're hooked. You do like Ike. And Dick Nixon is tricky.

"This election will not be as sexy as the first one.... We’ve got to grind it out a little bit. We’ve got to grind it out."

He's making it sound sexy!

"I’m going to keep on pushing."

"Keep On Pushing," by The Impressions was the song that played as Obama took the stage at the 2004 Democratic Convention to give the keynote address. Listen:

Why do people have so much trouble understanding Herman Cain's smoking guy ad?

Back in 2007, we were able to get Mike Gravel's throwing-a-rock-in-the-water ad:



Maybe some day Mark Block — the smoking guy — will explain his ad the way Mike Gravel explained his ad here:



All right, now... try again. Here's the smoking guy ad:



Do you understand now? It is a little different, but there are similarities, and I don't just mean that both ads are weird and went viral as a result. Both have an old white guy, who seems pretty boring and rather surly, with his face right up in the camera. In both ads, you endure that face. How long must I look at this old guy?

Finally, something happens. In the Gravel ad, the old guy throws a rock in the water. Ah! In the Herman Cain ad, what happens is... the music comes on — "I am America!" — and the old guy starts smoking. It's absurd and still about oldness. This old man is doing that old thing from the past — smoking! What the hell? Then suddenly... Cain! He looks so fresh-faced, and he's not surly at all. He's got this slow-breaking smile. It takes 5 seconds for the smile to broaden to the point where the teeth begin to show. And those are not smoker's teeth. They are sparkling white teeth. We see that smile for 10 whole seconds.

And then you go on to talk about — not the 10-second long smile — but the smoker guy. Why was that man smoking?! You watch it again and get other people to watch it as your conscious mind dithers over the puzzle of the smoking man. And all along, you're falling — unwittingly — in love with the man with the beautiful smile.

Watch it again. See the smile. Sly!

"Mother Of All Negative Ads Dropped On WI Judicial Race."

"Progressives in Wisconsin are up with a TV ad that puts the negative in negative campaigning: sitting state Supreme Court Justice David Prosser defends child molesters instead of their victims, the groups say."

So is this the kind of negative ad that people say they're sick of but insinuates itself deep into the brain cells?

Is it fair for Bush (and Bush, elder) to be on camera in such a glowing light, for hours on end?

We're watching the World Series, and I'm wondering if the Bushes are making a profound subliminal impression on American minds, drawing us toward the stability of the past. Bush and baseball — is that a political argument against which the mind cannot defend?

A Drudgtaposition that didn't last very long — for good reason.

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Subliminal sex on Drudge.

Clipped from the screen of Drudge, just now. The link goes to news of Obama's press conference:

... Obama said the gulf is the first thing on his mind in the morning and the last thing as he goes to bed, and that even his young daughters ask him about it. 

"When I woke up this morning and I'm shaving," he said, "Malia knocks on my bathroom door and she peeks in her head and she says, 'Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?'"

Why did Newsweek put the face of Karl Marx on Michelle Obama's apple?

Look!

Here's a closeup of the apple with some iPhoto'd sharpening (no lines redrawn or retouching, just contrast, sharpening, and increasing the "highlights" and "shadows):

For comparison, here's the standard image of Karl Marx:

Now, the Anchoress — first link, above — has become "convinced that it’s simply a matter of the apples’ shading and the lighting." Absurd! It can't be just the lighting and the pattern of the apple peel. A magazine cover is carefully constructed and attention would have to be paid to any accidental imagery. The apple was chosen to be exactly the intended apple and subject to Photoshop tweaking and strategic placement of the lights to attain just the right level of perception and deniability. A good subliminal image must be seen and not seen. It must slide past the average person's conscious defenses and make anyone who insists it is there seem delusional. The Anchoress has retreated.

And so I say: To Newsweek! A toast!

IN THE COMMENTS: Irene says the image that might or might not be there was intentionally put there as "Tea Party bait":

I hear Chris Matthews now. "Marx? They see Marx? Wow, see how crazy they are?? They see socialists EVERYWHERE."

"The American way of eating has become the elephant in the room in the debate over health care."

Ha ha. Get it? The elephant? That's you, reader. You're fat, says Michael Pollan. And you are a big — a huuuuge — part of the problem the government needs to solve. Pollan links to a study that supposedly shows that the reason we spend twice as much on health care as Europeans is because we are so grotesquely tubby. How can the government come between you and your food?

Cheap food is going to be popular as long as the social and environmental costs of that food are charged to the future. There’s lots of money to be made selling fast food and then treating the diseases that fast food causes. One of the leading products of the American food industry has become patients for the American health care industry.

Greedy corporations are making you fat and costing the health care system money. They are so greedy that — how awful! — they are selling food cheap. Expensive food also makes you fat, of course, but it's less obvious who's making money selling expensive food and thus harder to blame the evil corporations. 

The market for prescription drugs and medical devices to manage Type 2 diabetes, which the Centers for Disease Control estimates will afflict one in three Americans born after 2000, is one of the brighter spots in the American economy. As things stand, the health care industry finds it more profitable to treat chronic diseases than to prevent them. There’s more money in amputating the limbs of diabetics than in counseling them on diet and exercise.

Oh, here are the money-mad limb-hackers Obama was warning us about. Now, what I want to know is what is so terrible about the fact that most of the health-care money is spent treating diseases? Why should healthy people be consuming a bigger portion of the money? It's a good thing that people are left alone to take care of themselves and that health care professionals are used to do the things we can't do for ourselves. Of course, it would be nice if people didn't get diseases, and maybe a lot more of us could have long, disease-free lives, with little consumption of health-care resources if only we did more prevention. But would it change anything to give people ample free sessions with professionals who tell us to do what we already know we ought to do? The doctors actually don't have a clue how to get us to stop overeating (or — as if it would help — push us into a vigorous exercise program).

Pollan gets an economic theory going. He says health insurance companies drop customers after they get diseases, but if new law prevents this and requires them to charge all customers the same rates, then, they will have a strong new interest in preserving health and, allied with government, will stimulate the creation of government programs, policies, and laws aimed at stopping us from eating so damned much.

When health insurers can no longer evade much of the cost of treating the collateral damage of the American diet, the movement to reform the food system — everything from farm policy to food marketing and school lunches — will acquire a powerful and wealthy ally, something it hasn’t really ever had before....

In the same way much of the health insurance industry threw its weight behind the campaign against smoking, we can expect it to support, and perhaps even help pay for, public education efforts like New York City’s bold new ad campaign against drinking soda. At the moment, a federal campaign to discourage the consumption of sweetened soft drinks is a political nonstarter, but few things could do more to slow the rise of Type 2 diabetes among adolescents than to reduce their soda consumption, which represents 15 percent of their caloric intake.

"Bold new ad campaign"? Nicely, the NYT includes a link. Here's the ad:

It's a run-of-the-mill public service ad? What is bold about it? Picking on one product? Using tax money to pay for it? Oh, I see, it "graphically depicts globs of human fat gushing from a sideways drink bottle." I couldn't tell by looking at it. So shoving disgusting images in our face is bold. How admirably edgy of New York City. What's next? Pictures of ugly fat people slobbering over hamburgers? Something like this?



Throw all the taxpayer money you want into preventive care and raise the price on our too-cheap food. Blare nauseating ads at us. But we will still eat. We already care and we already don't want to be fat. We're not fat because corporations are greedy or because you can't get a free appointment with a nutritionist. We're fat because of the deep, innate appetite that saved our ancestors from famine and motivated them to eat whatever they could find to survive. We are here thanks to those profound desires, and life is all too easy these days. The unfortunate consequence of the beautiful amplitude of modern life is that we grow too big.

IN THE COMMENTS: Bissage said:

It’s funny that some people look at that ad and see “globs of human fat gushing from a sideways drink bottle.”

Not me.

I see a dog’s head with a dagger in it, a penis, and the word “sex."

Makes me want to consume alcohol, but I don’t know why.