"A woman reported receiving several texts with sexual content from an unknown person. She sent the person a text asking him to stop..."

"... but the person did not immediately stop, only ceasing later in the day. It was determined that the suspect was a friend of the woman’s friend. The suspect reported he thought he was texting his friend and agreed not to continue texting the woman."

That happened, in Montana. Also: "A man was caught urinating in a First Avenue East parking lot."

Is it wrong to tweet from the audience at the State of the Union?

Tennessee House Democrat Steve Cohen was only trying to send a private message, but — like your ordinary-citizen reckless idiot — he released it into his public Twitter feed.

Embarrassing.

But in the modern world, how can people today be expected to sit through a 1-hour speech and not fiddle with their electronic devices? Personally, I would lose my mind.

And by the way, how can all these people — some of them quite old — sit still for 1+ hours? They have to be in their seats in advance and remain there for a while afterwards, so the President can make his big entrance and exit. What percentage of them worried about having to go to the bathroom? How many of them took the precaution of wearing adult diapers? How many of them employed the convenience and relieved themselves?

I don't mean to be rude. I just think it's important to recognize our shared humanity. As Marco Rubio said the other day: "I needed water, what am I going to do? God has a funny way of reminding us we’re human." What about the other end of our hydration-related humanity?

Bob Dylan sang: "Even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked." And I say: Even the members of the United States Congress sometimes must have to pee.

And tweet.

Matt Damon pledges not to go to the bathroom...

... until there is a toilet for everyone in the world:

"Of all the constraints imposed on us that restrict our freedom — constraints of morality and decorum, constraints of class and finance..."

"... one of the earliest that is forced upon us is the constraint of a language that we are forced to learn so that others can talk to us and tell us things we do not wish to know...."

The greatest escape route is not only humor, but poetry, or art in general. Art does not, of course, liberate us completely from meaning, but it gives a certain measure of freedom, provides elbow room. Schiller claimed in the Letters on Aesthetic Education that art makes you free; he understood that the conventions of language and of society are in principle arbitrary—that is, imposed by will. They prevent the natural development of the individual. ...

ADDED: Putting the tags on this post, including "poetry," made me remember a poem I read the other day that I'd been meaning to show you. It's in this "Good Poems" collection. The poet is Guy W. Longchamps:

O what a luxury it be
how exquisite, what perfect bliss
so ordinary and yet chic
to pee to piss to take a leak

To feel your bladder just go free
and open like the Mighty Miss
and all your cares go down the creek
to pee to piss to take a leak

Read the whole thing at the link. Just search inside the book for "piss," or if you're shy, just search for "bliss."

EBay thwarts Glenn Beck's satirical artwork.

"Obama in Pee Pee" violated a viewpoint-neutral policy:

Your listing contain [sic] the bodily fluid of urine. We do not allow bodily fluids to be listed on our site. Even if the liquid in the jar is not urine, you are describing it as such. We do not allow this type of listing and we ask that you do not relist this in any way....

Too bad Beck didn't do a more accurate satire of Andres Serrano's notorious "Piss Christ," which was a photograph. EBay's policy wouldn't have covered a photograph of urine (or of liquid described as urine).

"Orally urinating turtle boffin in nominative-determinism classic case/Shit Fun Chew probes mouth-excreting chelonian."

Actual headline — not a joke — about actual scientific research.

What's nominative-determinism?, you may ask. Possibly not your first question, but you may get to it. You might have asked, before that, what Google alert does Althouse maintain that gets her there? (Answer: "boffin"!) Anyway:

The theory of nominative determinism suggests that a person’s name can help form their choices in life, influencing the character they develop or profession they adopt.

Examples: "Poet William Wordsworth, caricaturist and Disney animator Mr T Hee, and sprinter Usain Bolt..."

Which reminds me, chez Meadhouse, we're supporting the Detroit Tigers in the ALCS, because of Prince Fielder, whom we like not because of nominative determinism, but because he's an ex-Brewer.

Why did Paul Ryan drink so much water?

People are asking. Did you not notice that he frequently sipped water? I never noticed Biden drinking water, and at the first debate, I never noticed Romney or Obama drinking water.

What's the best explanation?
	Ryan was nervous, and his throat dried out and needed moisturizing.
	Less experienced with debates, Ryan hasn't learned to resist the normal instinct to drink water.
	Biden, Obama, and Romney have lost normal human instincts.
	Ryan is an athlete and the athlete's body requires consistent hydration.
	The older men restrict water intake to stave off the urge to urinate.
pollcode.com free polls

"[Angel] Ortiz and a generation of urban latchkey kids who spray-painted their initials all over Manhattan in the 1970s and '80s and landed in the city's street art scene" are getting old.

"Fortunately, there's no forced retirement in graffiti," and life goes on:

For decades, Ortiz, 45, has been known on Manhattan's Lower East Side as LA II. A traumatic loss of a girlfriend brought him out of a 14-year hiatus from graffiti writing. He has since been caught three times spraying his tag on property, each time while walking a friend's dog.

"Everywhere that dog stopped to pee I would write my name," Ortiz says. "The streets were like my canvases. I just started writing my name everywhere."

"I enjoy your ideas and content, but mostly avoid your blog because of the juvenile vulgarity that appears all over it."

Email from a guy who signs his name with Ph.D. after it, quoting somebody somewhere who wrote "Sorry, I have to call BS on this" and adding "This is how an adult with class handles this phrase in a blog." In other words, this is somebody objecting to my use of the word "bullshit" when calling bullshit.

Adult with class.

Actually, I don't think it's classy to say "BS." Either say bullshit or don't. It's like telling someone who announces "I've got to take a piss" that he should have said "I've got to go pee pee." Either say "bullshit" or don't, but I'm calling bullshit on the candyass substitute "BS."

Once again, I will recommend the serious philosophical book "On Bullshit," by Harry G. Frankfurt. Frankfurt identifies "humbug" as the closest polite alternative to "bullshit." Also: balderdash, claptrap, hokum, drivel, buncombe, imposture, and quackery.

He doesn't mention "BS," which I think is embarrassingly prissy and unnatural. I've never been around people who say "BS." Maybe somewhere, there are the "adults with class" who say "BS." If you find them and like them, go ahead and read their blogs. I'm sure they're fucking scintillating.

Apple considers pee a "biohazard" and it will not accept a peed-on MacBook for repair.

Nor will it accept for repair the 30 MacBooks — valued at $36,000 — that one 11-year-old boy peed on at Upper Allen Township Elementary School in Pennsylvania.

"I've been saying that for years. Also, the author of that article once called me a peeing intellectual nobility."

My response to email from someone who sent me a link to this article.

(Here's the above-referenced urinary link.)

At the Wisconsin protests today — one year after protesters stormed the Capitol.

As the Wisconsin State Journal puts it: "Union members rallied outside the Wisconsin Capitol on Saturday to mark the anniversary of the Republican-led Legislature's passage of a hotly-disputed measure that stripped most public union workers of collective bargaining rights."



How do they know who's a union member? There was a huge crowd, including lots of children (and dogs!) on this sunny warm Saturday:



They couldn't have all been union members. But I saw lots of generic printed signs and flags, and there were massive trucks painted with "Teamsters" and "Boilermakers" imagery.

Speaking of imagery, here's a woman holding a sign depicting Governor Scott Walker's head emerging from a hairy asshole. The sign reads "Buttholes for Billionaire$:



Another sign depicts Scott Walker peeing on the words "Public Employees." Walker has a Hitler mustache and the words read "Gov. Dick Tater":



(Is this sexist, an insult to all men, to call one man a "dick"?)

The socialists were there:



They want to tax the rich.

There were puppeteers... who had trouble wrangling the papier maché Scott Walker in the March wind:



There was this young woman aligning Governor Walker with murderers Ed Gein and Jeffrey Dahmer:



"Wisconsin regrets Ed Gein, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Scott Walker." Oh, there's always so much to regret. Grisly mass murders... balancing the state budget...

... spending a beautiful Saturday photographing the deeply aggrieved.

Abstract Expressionism meets concrete expressionism.

"A Colorado woman dropped her pants at a museum and rubbed her rear end all over a painting valued at $30 million..."

Clyfford Still's "1957-J no.2"... was spared additional damage when the woman tried to urinate on it but apparently missed.

She was drunk, but still... one wonders what it was about that painting that brought out such hostility.

"Zuccotti Park Day 54: No Smell of Urine or Feces."

Occupy [Your City] Headline of the Day.

The sleek modernity of train travel in Europe — now, with pee bags.

"Dutch National Railways is introducing emergency plastic bags for passengers to urinate in as part of its first-aid provision on some commuter trains.

"When you have to wait three or four hours on a train, then it is quite logical you have some people aboard who need to go to a restroom...."

"Mother always peed with the door open."

"I remember saying, 'You know, now I have friends over! You can't do that anymore! It's gotta stop!'"

You know, sometimes writing a memoir is a lot like peeing with the door open. And having everybody in the world over.

11 thoughts about hammering "Piss Christ" into destruction.

1. Here's the news article everyone's linking to, which says that the famously controversial photograph "was attacked with hammers and destroyed after an 'anti-blasphemy' campaign by French Catholic fundamentalists in the southern city of Avignon." The use of "after" is a weirdly hedged insinuation of cause-and-effect. "After" is the "post" in the phrase "Post hoc ergo propter hoc" ("after this, therefore because of this"), which identifies a logical fallacy.

2. Quite aside from that "after" problem, I can't tell what happened "the southern city of Avignon." Was it the anti-blasphemy campaign or the hammering? (More details in the linked article. I know what happened. )

3. Andres Serrano sure made a splash with that urine of his! He's been famous and provocative since 1987 for what really ought to have been shaken off at the time as a mere droplet of bad art.

4. A hammer was used to destroy a picture of the crucifixion and a hammer was used to nail Jesus to the cross.

5. The destruction itself could be viewed as a work of art — like "Erased De Kooning."

6. Indeed, the museum — the Collection Lambert — will reopen "with the damaged works shown as they are." And many will come to view and talk about the already over-talked-about photograph.

7. "Piss Christ" is a photograph — a print from a negative — so the destroyed work is not the only "Piss Christ." "Serrano made 10 Cibachrome prints of 'Piss Christ." Presumably, the negative still exists as well, though the value of the prints must depend on the small size of the edition of prints.

8. The value of the prints also depends on the controversy! In 2008, a print of "Piss Christ" sold for $277,000. You figure out the cause-and-effect.

9. The destruction of one print enhances the value of the other 9 prints in 2 ways: It cut the edition of undestroyed prints down to 9 and it bumped up the controversy. And the bonus is the 10th print exists in destroyed — "Erased De Kooning" — form. It is now unique, and it embodies the controversy in a new way. Question: It is now more or less valuable than the undestroyed prints?

10. How do you know the destruction of the "Piss Christ" was not an inside job? Here's another Latin phrase: Cui bono?

11. The first linked article, from a UK website (The Guardian), has a correction appended: "The original [article] referred to the Senator Jesse Helms as Jesse James." Ha. The Brits can't keep their American outlaws straight.

Peeing like Penelope.

"I had to keep going into the water every 15 minutes."

"No one was cleaning the street, and there were large pools of urine accumulating and festering."

"It was extraordinarily bad — bad enough that people would avoid the corner walking by... It seems like a small thing until you realize how prolific horses can be. We’re talking gallons."

But...

"Horses are not like automobiles. You just don’t put ’em in neutral. You have to hold on to the horse with one hand with passengers in the back of the carriage and spray this stuff down. Maybe one time out of a hundred with passengers in the cab, the horse might get scared, run off and hurt passengers and things. This will be a disaster.” And they say horse urine "doesn’t have much of an odor, since horses are vegetarians and 'don’t drink Coke or beer.'"

Please don't get sidetracked into the general topic of the smell of the urine of a vegetarian. Spare us your asparagus anecdotes. This is about horse piss and city traffic.

"Get Up, Stand Up," stand up to go to the bathroom.

Hey, that's sexist! Don't give up the fight, indeed!