Why did Jesse Jackson Jr. and his wife risk everything to buy such stupid stuff?

Spending $750,000 in campaign money on... what?! In with the Rolex watch and the furs, there's all this memorabilia: Michael Jackson memorabilia, Bruce Lee memorabilia, Martin Luther King Jr. memorabilia, Malcolm X memorabilia, Jimi Hendrix memorabilia, a football signed by American presidents. So embarrassing.

WaPo columnist  Michelle Singletary says:

Ironically, Jackson and his father in 1999 co-authored a book on personal finance, “It’s About the Money!: How You Can Get Out of Debt, Build Wealth, and Achieve Your Financial Dreams.” The Jacksons wrote: “Many of our churches breed material needs, as do many of our public schools, with peer pressure to buy expensive clothing.”

I was critical of the portions of the book in which the Jacksons found it necessary to chide blacks for what they characterize as shameless spending....

At least the Jacksons are showing remorse....

Before you pass judgment on the Jacksons, think about the mess you might have made of your finances or the financial follies of people you know. It might not be a crime to get what you want (not what you need), but acting as if you are rich without being able to afford it can ruin your life.

Hmm. Using debt to buy stuff is hugely different from diverting money that isn't yours to spend that way. But I guess we can look at Jackson's list of items and use it as an occasion to reflect on the idiotic crap we've felt tempted to buy. Get some distance. What if the newspapers published a list of the 100 stupidest things you've thrown your money away on over the course of a lifetime?

Look around. If you could snap your fingers and cause any item in your house to transform into the cash you spent on it (or even only half of what you spent), what percentage of your possessions would be left? The items suddenly turn into piles of dollar bills. Better gather them up quickly. How much have you got there? Now, bills disappear to eradicate your debts. What do you have left now in your hands and in your house? How do you feel?

And by the way, Singletary said she chided the Jesse Jacksons, Sr. and Jr., for chiding black people for spending too much money on stuff, but then she turned around and chided her readers for spending too much money on stuff. Isn't that a contradiction? Or is it a problem to speak specifically to black people? The Jacksons shouldn't write a book talking specifically to black people? What are the rules here?

"Sometimes a shadow moved against a dressing-room blind above, gave way to another shadow, an indefinite procession of shadows, that rouged and powdered in an invisible glass."

Earlier today, I made a "café" post out of a photograph of a tablescape that included my small toy robot, and betamax3000 used it as an occasion — a "café" post is an open thread — to speak for the robot, saying Althouse-blog-related things like: "Robot has no need for F. Scott Fitzgerald. Robot has no need for extraneous data." And "Robot would eradicate Gatsby of unnecessary organic units. Story now smaller."

The Althouse blog has an ongoing Gatsby project consisting of quoting and talking about one sentence from "The Great Gatsby" every day. No one remembers why. It's simply a tradition on the Althouse blog. There's talk of switching to "Lady Chatterly's Lover" or "The Little Prince," but these are rumors, borne in on the breeze that sweeps through the windows and makes the curtains swirl upward into the ceiling that seems like a wedding cake.)

So I've chosen a sentence for Robot/betamax3000 with all the organic units pre-eradicated. A shadow moves. That's the action. It moves and gives way to... guess what?!... another shadow. And more and more shadows. A procession of shadows. A shadow parade. Another inanimate thing is the dressing-room blind. And since we've got a dressing room, we can imagine an organic unit putting on makeup — rouge and powder — but our organic units are eradicated, so it's nothing but a shadow, the absence of a living person, and lest you think you see a person in that mirror in the dressing room, F. Scott Fitzgerald will have you know that even the looking-glass is invisible.

"I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife."

I wonder if "the latest thing" was a new expression back in 1922 when F. Scott Fitzgerald started writing "The Great Gatsby." Was "the latest thing" the latest thing, that is, new slang? If so, it's even funnier to see it used sarcastically like this. What a crazy trend it would be — a fashionable sex kink?

But then maybe there actually is such a trend these days. The "cuckold fetish" is a routine subject in Dan Savage's sex advice column, e.g., "Fuck My Wife, Please!"

Anyway, the sarcasm in today's "Gatsby" sentence is sublime. There's "the latest thing" and "sit back and let" and the marvelous "Mr. Nobody from Nowhere" — all of which only become funny — painfully funny — when you get to the tragically pedestrian phrase "make love to your wife."

It's also amusing that the problem is less that somebody is fucking his wife than that a nobody is fucking his wife. Mr. Nobody from Nowhere, who — if you violated the rules of the Gatsby project and go beyond the sentence — is the (supposedly) great Mr. Gatsby.

IN THE COMMENTS: Bill Harshaw uses The Great Google to show that "the latest thing" was, in fact, a well-established expression. The casual use of the word "thing" seems like modern slang. There are a lot of common phrases like "the thing to do," "a [fill in the blank] thing," "it's my thing," and "the real thing" that seem like things people would have said 100 years ago.

ALSO IN THE COMMENTS: Much discussion about how far Mr. Nobody really got: What did "make love" mean in the 1920s?

"Impractical Accessories."

There's some great stuff in this slideshow, but attention must be paid to the 10th image, shoes designed by Iris Schieferstein, with the toe portion made from real horse's hooves and the high heels little pistols.

At the Photo-Free Café...

... it's an open thread. Enjoy!

"9 Things I Couldn't Get Anyone to Write About."

"59 is the age we think women should start aging gracefully aka stop having fun... 5 Types Of People 'I will always have sex with'...."

Inappropriate cards.

1. "You’re 13 today! If you had a rich boyfriend he’d give you diamonds and rubies. Well, maybe next year you will — when you’ve bigger boobies!" (Hallmark's excuse is that it was printed in 1998.)

2. This child-drawn card that was topping Reddit yesterday. (I'm not convinced it was really drawn by a child. Are you any good at detecting faked childish writing? I'm looking at the "a" in "balls" and seeing fake.)

At the Remnants of Hard Rock Café...

... we're just trying to give it away.

"Mysterious Booms and Trembles Plague Wisconsin Town, Baffle Scientists."

The craziness never ends in this state.

“I think that right now the greatest possibility is that it is some sort of natural phenomenon. I think that it’s a possibility that there is some earth shifting going on underneath the ground that creates those popping sort of exploding popping or vibrating noises that people feel,” City Administrator Lisa Kuss said.

My guess: It's nothing. The town is called Clintonville, for what it's worth.

"Vast, unidentified, structures have been spotted by satellites in the barren Gobi desert..."

"... raising questions about what China might be building in a region it uses for its military, space and nuclear programmes."

In two images, available on Google Earth, reflective rectangles up to a mile long can be seen, a tangle of bright white intersecting lines that are clearly visible from space.

Other pictures show enormous concentric circles radiating on the ground, with three jets parked at their centre.

"This article is wrong. The 4 things you need are..."

"Flashlight, loaded gun, telephone and condoms."

What to wear to the Wisconsin protests...

... or wear it anywhere to flaunt your devotion to the Althouse blog... or just to annoy/perplex people. Click here to buy.

Japanese glass fishing net floats.

They broke free of their nets and floated all the way to America. I'd never heard of these things before, but people collect them. We'd been looking for the perfect gazing globes for the window box, and then we noticed these things in the window of a cool store here in Madison called Unearthed. The floats themselves are more unoceaned than unearthed, though, don't you think?

***

Here's a blog about Japanese fishing floats.

What we talked about over the weekend.

Testing why women are so unworthy of dating.

The obvious superiority of porn to dating.

I do my own polling on why Elena Kagan isn't more popular.

The possibility that Republicans don't need no stinking ideas.

Peering into the heart of the vegetable.

The hollowness of the hardworking comedian.

Narcissism and lying.

Mountain-biking in the presence of Evil.

A false accusation of Obama's hypocrisy.

A true accusation of Obama's hypocrisy.

A wild Black Panther notion.

Would Shakespeare write a play about John Edwards?

The citizenship tourism package.

Sweden's assault on cash.

Your parents talk funny.

Let's get small.

The letter Y.

***

I stole the idea for this post from Instapundit, who, like me, blogs all weekend and seems to think that weekend blog posts sink into oblivion more quickly then the Monday-Friday stuff.

Captcha of the Day.

IN THE COMMENTS: Lou Minatti says "Hey!"

Proposal for a new kind of slang following the pattern "metal fork" for "metaphor."

The idea is to replace boring abstract words with very specific concrete things that sound pretty close to the original word. I'd like to build on the single example of "metal fork" for "metaphor."

This idea is based on a recent mishearing. Did I hear "metaphor" and think I heard "metal fork" or was it the other way around? If you want the answer to that question, imagine the breakfast table conversations chez Meadhouse and cull through all the many things that have been discussed on this blog since last January.

Is it easier for the poor to up and move to a new place to take advantage of better opportunities?

Ilya Somin thinks that "contrary to conventional wisdom, 'voting with your feet' generally benefits the poor more than the relatively affluent."

It was easier for him when he was poor, anyway:

By contrast, my fiancee and I have recently moved into a new house a mere three miles away from my old condo. For me at least, this move has been more stressful than the previous five combined. Why? Because, due to my much higher pay since becoming a law professor, I now have many more possessions. The packing and unpacking have been a major pain, to put it mildly. Similarly, moving into a house required hiring contractors to do some work to get it ready, and dealing even with good contractors (like the ones recommended to us) is time-consuming and annoying, especially for people who are inexperienced with it. The process of selling the old home and purchasing a new one also requires an investment of time, effort, and money that people moving from one rental unit to another don't have to deal with.

Poverty has its privileges:



But you know, you can have money and not accumulate possessions. In fact, you'll have more money if you don't buy stuff. I'm sorry to point that out when I know we're in a recession in an economy that depends heavily on consumers enthusiastically purchasing things, but the truth is, you can live very simply, and it can be quite rewarding, emotionally and aesthetically. Keep it simple, and you will have more freedom: You can easily — as Ilya says — relocate; you have more of your money left to buy things if you ever do really want or need something; and you'll have less clutter to look at, worry about, maintain, and fuss over.

"Amazon, WTF."

"Oh my god there are 1,103 reviews of Tuscan Whole Milk, 1 gallon."

"Don't miss the customer image gallery for Tuscan Milk."

"Zubaz. Fuck yeah. Thank you."

[RELOCATED] The tepee.

What do you think?

"Although there are cool things and crappy things, they all vie for our attention with equal fervor."

Hey, watch this thing for me, will you? It might be wonderful, but I have some other things vying for my attention right now.

(Via Metafilter.)