At the 9 Putts Café...

... sometimes everything falls into place.

World's cutest frog.

The desert rain frog.

"Welcome to Atlanta, where the players play/And I hope you can make my Bar Mitzvah day..."

(Via Metafilter, where the post just went up, so you can't tell yet whether people are going to trash this kid or love him.)

"Columbia professor strips down to underwear in bizarre lesson to help baffled students learn quantum mechanics."

"'In order to learn quantum mechanics, you have to strip to your raw, erase all the garbage from your brain, and start over again,' Prof. Emlyn Hughes said. Against a backdrop of 9/11 and Holocaust images, he remained in a fetal position as two people dressed as ninjas blindfolded stuffed animals."

"Um, nothing you’ve learned in your life up til now is in any way going to help prepare you for this.... I’ve been tasked with the impossible challenge of teaching you quantum mechanics in one hour."

"I needed water, what am I going to do? God has a funny way of reminding us we’re human."

"My mouth got dry, and I had to get some water... You know, when you give a speech on a podium and the water is right there — but when you don’t, you start looking around thinking, ‘Where am I going to get the water?’ I figured I was better off just taking that water and taking the hit for it then being unable to pronounce my words. It’d been a long day at work, we’d already done an 18-minute recording in Spanish — and you know, my mouth got dry, what can I say? But I was happy overall with what we were able to deliver."

Rubio had an opportunity last night, responding to the SOTU, and he's got a new opportunity this morning. The most interesting thing — and this is our humanity showing through too — is that he needed water. That was more interesting than his speech and even more interesting than Obama's big, long speech we'd just endured. Something real happened! Spontaneity! We all identify. I love the look on his face as he glances at the camera while drinking:



I read the look to say: Oh, no! Is this going to ruin my political career?! This! A little sip of water?! Meanwhile, it's a big win for Poland Spring in the tiny bottle form. That was a hell of a product endorsement. You can't buy product placement like that.

Rubio and Rubio supporters can make taking a drink from a little water bottle into a thing. It's such an innocent and pure foible, needing a drink of water. It's a nice meme for him. Humanizing. Wholesome. Downside is: Too much plastic waste. So recycle. The best way to deal with the bottles is to refill them with tap water. And the best way to deal with a goof like that is to refill it with humor (and branding).

ADDED: You know, it was pre-recorded. They could have done another recording if they'd wanted to.

What's the most likely reason why they didn't do another recording?
	They assumed no one would notice or make a big deal out of it.
	Rubio was too tired, too unfresh, to do it another time.
	They did try again, but he was worse.
	They thought the water move was funny, humanizing, and a good meme.
pollcode.com free polls

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

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

"An orange peanut? For me? I accept you."

"Psy Makes $8.1 Million By Ignoring Copyright Infringements Of Gangnam Style."

Okay, but $8.1 million isn't that much considering the magnitude of the success of the thing. On the other hand, it's the kind of thing that becomes successful in a system of virality. But that's not the other hand. That's the same hand.

It's that kind of thing. How much more of that kind of thing do you want?

IN THE COMMENTS: rhhardin says: "I'm not tuned in to it all, but I imagined that gangnam style meant wearing dyed cotton fabric."

Since Psy's not policing the copyright, feel free to make a goofy "Gingham Style" parody video. And since the copyright ran out long ago, here's the delightful Eugene Field poem "The Duel" — which, if you remember it, you might think is titled "The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat":

The gingham dog and the calico cat
Side by side on the table sat;
'T was half-past twelve, and (what do you think!)
Nor one nor t' other had slept a wink!
The old Dutch clock and the Chinese plate
Appeared to know as sure as fate
There was going to be a terrible spat.
(I was n't there; I simply state
What was told to me by the Chinese plate!)

The gingham dog went "Bow-wow-wow!"
And the calico cat replied "Mee-ow!"
The air was littered, an hour or so,
With bits of gingham and calico,
While the old Dutch clock in the chimney-place
Up with its hands before its face,
For it always dreaded a family row!
(Now mind: I 'm only telling you
What the old Dutch clock declares is true!)

The Chinese plate looked very blue,
And wailed, "Oh, dear! what shall we do!"
But the gingham dog and the calico cat
Wallowed this way and tumbled that,
Employing every tooth and claw
In the awfullest way you ever saw---
And, oh! how the gingham and calico flew!
(Don't fancy I exaggerate---
I got my news from the Chinese plate!)

Next morning, where the two had sat
They found no trace of dog or cat;
And some folks think unto this day
That burglars stole that pair away!
But the truth about the cat and pup
Is this: they ate each other up!
Now what do you really think of that!
(The old Dutch clock it told me so,
And that is how I came to know.)

And here are many more of Field's "Poems of Childhood." (Try to find a copy with the Maxfield Parrish illustrations.) Did you memorize any of theses poems? I did! I had a beautiful Golden Book collection of children's poems when I was a child, and I memorized many of them, including this one. This was my favorite one. I often ended up reciting these poems around my parents. Even though they were the sort of people who didn't display how delighted they were by children's behavior, I realize now that they must have found these recitals adorable. I had no idea at the time. I just loved the poems and wanted others to hear them. That was virality, circa 1960. 

A "concerned sister" gets press petitioning Hasbro to put boys in commercials for Easy-Bake ovens.

"The toy has long been marketed to girls and made in gender specific colors like pink and purple. The calls for Easy-Bake to take on a more gender-neutral stance has been made numerous times in the past."

Funny that it's still okay to call some colors "gender specific." But progress comes incrementally. The day will come when we get our viral video pleading for the end of stereotyping pink and purple as girl colors.

Meanwhile, in Sweden:

Sweden's top advertising watchdog—known as Reklamombudsmannen, or RO—has taken [Toys "R" Us] to task in recent years for catalogs and ads that showcase girls playing with dolls, scrapbooks, and kitchen and beauty toys and boys with guns, cars, trains and tech gadgets....

The Swedish government has been on the front line of efforts to engineer equality between men and women....

"I think it's amazing that they've actually listened to the consumers," [said a female shopper]. "I didn't used to shop here as much before they changed, because I didn't like the way they separated between girls and boys, pink and blue."

Here's what you get with government pressure (and maybe with You-Tube and Change.org):



Somehow, I don't see that photo bringing in any boys that wouldn't have felt drawn to the activity anyway, but perhaps it's intended to make parents feel and act better when their son tells them that's what he wants.

As for the 13-year-old girl's video:



Was that little boy scripted? Leave him alone, and don't put him on YouTube. It seems to me he's already saying he likes to cook and wants a toy oven and the lack of boys in the ads wasn't perceived as a problem. Hold off on the indoctrination and let him discover his own happiness.

"I do want you to support me and be my man."

I never embedded this back when it came out about a month ago — just after the first debate. Everyone, it seemed, had already linked to it immediately — with good reason! — and I felt it was instantly too late to be pointing to it. But I must say, it's my favorite thing from the campaign season, Meade and I play it every day and sing lines from it when we're not playing it. We know all the words — within reason/unreason — and allude to them in daily casual conversation. The deep, truthy absurdity gets better and better and serves more and more fundamental needs as the electoral season crawls to its desperate end. Now, first, I want you two to turn and look at each other....



It's party time, chumps!

Why are you crying?

Oh, it will be over soon.

David Weigel debunks a video that has never been bunked in the first place.

Is there anyone who has ever thought that this was anything but a joke?

Crooks and Liars is laughing at the "morons" who believe they're looking at "actual footage of Barack Obama's birth taking place in a hospital in Kenya." But as far as I can tell, they are morons for believing they are looking at actual morons who believe they are looking at actual footage....

He who laughs at morons should look to it that he himself does not become a moron. And when you gaze long into the idiocracy the idiocracy also gazes into you.

Email from the Obama campaign: "Ann -- Have you seen the 'Gangnam Style' music video? (So great.)"

"Well, here's another video you can't miss."

Last night, President Obama went on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He talked about the debates, his plans for a second term, and Joe Biden's swimwear.

... Seriously.

Seriously? Why do you people want to seem like such lightweights? Like it's all a big joke? Because you think that's what young people respond to? 1. I'm not young, and you sent this to me, and 2. It's actually possible that young people are struggling and suffering and worried about the future, and they are looking to the government to solve some real problems, and they're disgusted by concept of government as silly entertainment.

What if men sang about longing for life in the larger world the way the Little Mermaid did?

Via Metafilter, where I think people are experiencing this as really sweet, because these are — presumably — fathers and the fathers are warm and fuzzy and must love their daughters. We see the man at the end singing with a little girl. That's why these men know the song, and that's why they work diligently at jobs during the day. And they really are "part of [the daughter's] world," so the longing expressed in the song has nothing to do with leaving this place, which is what the lyrics are talking about: "I wanna be where the people are... When's it my turn? Wouldn't I love, love to explore that world up above?"

That song, as presented in the movie, is a female's longing for a deeply satisfying life achieved by getting out there into the wider world. There's a very similar song in "Beauty and the Beast," another Disney movie of the same period, in which the central female character sets up her narrative arc by singing about her need to get away from all the tedious people in her "provincial town." This is an American pop culture template that applies to women. These cartoon females supposedly inspire the female dream to have it all. The Little Mermaid's song begins with the observation that she pretty much looks like "the girl who has everything." But she wants more, more, more. (Song cue.)

But men? Our culture doesn't want you saying such things anymore. There was a time when Marlon Brando and James Dean were icons, and they seemed to be all about rejection of this humdrum life in your sad little town. But they have been swallowed up into the past. In the American pop culture of today, the admirable man cannot seriously express such longings and expect love and admiration. It can only be a joke, comic dissonance with the reality of the good man's life, scrambling eggs at the kitchen table with his adorable little girl (who is, herself, permitted to internalize the female dream of getting out of this dreary, constricting place to get what she deserves — the bigger, brighter, better life).

What goes on in McCain/Obama's brain? "Be aggressive, be-ee aggressive."

What goes on in McCain's brain... What goes on in Obama's brain? That's gonna be Obama's brain tonight, don't you think?

"Be aggressive, be-ee aggressive."

Voter fraud: "Oh, my God. This is so funny. It’s cool though."

Quote from the regional field director for Obama’s Organizing For America, caught on video helping a woman who was obviously trying to vote twice.

Caballero... offers the videographer an excuse to get out of trouble is she gets caught committing voter fraud: “Come up with like if anyone checks say ‘I don’t know.’”

This is James O’Keefe/Project Veritas material, and he says he's got more like that.

ADDED: The link goes to The Daily Caller where the headline — "Obama campaign staffer caught helping activist vote twice" — has an ambiguity that undercuts the power of the story. Maybe it was just a really helpful staffer who helped a woman who needed help and then needed help again.

Let's judge Paul Ryan.

Buzzfeed's Andrew Kaczynski put this up yesterday with the title: "Paul Ryan Gets Testy and Walks Out of Interview."



Buzzfeed has now changed the title to "Paul Ryan Gets Testy And Ends Interview," because he obviously doesn't walk out, and they've also put this up now:

The reporter knew he was already well over the allotted time for the interview when he decided to ask a weird question relating gun violence to tax cuts. Ryan responded as anyone would in such a strange situation. When you do nearly 200 interviews in a couple months, eventually you’re going to see a local reporter embarrass himself.

So... not only doesn't he walk out, he doesn't end the interview.

Maybe Kaczynski is straining to win back lefty friends after he called "handkerchief" on the Romney "cheat sheet" conspiracy theory.

Anyway, let's focus on "testy." Did Ryan get testy? Ryan speaks eloquently about guns and crime and a need to restore "civil society" to the inner cities, which prompts the reporter to ask "And you can do all that by cutting taxes? By — with a big tax cut?" It's not a terrible question, really, but it does reveal the reporter's liberal mentality. Ryan's civil society — the basis for individual "discipline" and "good character" — is "what charities and civic groups and churches do." That's standard conservative ideology, but the reporter, presumably thinking in terms of government finding ways to rebuild individual good character, leaps to the issue of tax cuts. He can't envision the private groups — charities and civic groups and churches — building civil society. He's got the "you didn't build that" attitude.

So he asks a tax question and Ryan responds as if the reporter had made the assertion implied in the question and says "Those are your words, not mine." That's abrupt. He could have said your question shows that you don't understand what civil society is and explained the deep ideological difference between conservatives and liberals, but the reporter isn't his ideological opponent. He's a reporter, supposedly asking neutral questions, and the implied argument about the role of government would need to be spelled out before it could be refuted.

It's late in the interview, and the off-camera voice says, "Thank you very much." Ryan, yanking out his microphone, says "That was kind of strange," as if the question were a complete non sequitur. And then: "Trying to stuff words in my mouth," as if it were not a question. I read this as a dominating tactic, and the reporter goes beta: "I don't know if it's strange." Ryan mellows slightly: "No, but it sounds as though you're trying to answer my question for me. That's a little odd." And the reporter meekly agrees.

Ryan could have been a bit nicer, but I liked this display of dominance in managing the reporters who are looking to get their sound bites out of him. I'm sure this reporter would have loved to show Ryan stymied by contradictory aspirations about fixing the inner cities and cutting taxes. The reporter tried to get on top and got schooled. I'm okay with that.

Viral advertising gets very psychedelic... and feline...

Via Metafilter, via somebody who posted before understanding that it's an ad.

(If you want the cat-poop-related product, here it is.)

"Reading that Althouse thing about the 'fear' of black people, I mean, who 'fears' black people because of that phone clip?"

"Who 'fears' black folks, period? Or gays? Everything you hear these days is about fears and phobia and hate. I usually dismiss it as rhetoric, but I am starting to wonder if that isn’t what is motivating a great deal of the citizens of this country. Maybe they really are afraid of their own shadow and hate the things that scare them."

So says commenter B Moe over in the comments to an open thread at Protein Wisdom — which I noticed because I saw traffic coming from there because, unlike the Freepers, at least they open up the pathway so readers can see the object of their criticism for themselves.

And then McGehee says:

Althouse typifies a new hyphenation: the Hormonal-American. If only we could bring a bunch of state legislators up to today from 1920 or slightly before, to see what these Hormonal-Americans have done to the country, maybe they’d return to their own time and just repeal Prohibition a decade early.

The old joke — women shouldn't have been given the right to vote because they're emotional. I was making that joke myself, making that joke as a joke, as I was out biking and conversing with Meade about the very material that would later take the form of the post that's made all the wingers cringe, "'Just How Racist Is the "Obama Phone" Video?'" Well, you men have only yourselves to blame. We didn't have the power to vote for the right to vote. You men gave it to us.

And then some commenter named Car, whose icon is a baby — McGhee is an old cowboy and B Moe looks like the Disney Br'er Bear — Car says:

Can we all stop reading Althouse now? Can we get Glenn to give her up?

This is a classic theme in anti-Althousiana: jealousy that I have readers and, especially, that I get Instapundit links. (Hey, I'm a guestblogger on Instapundit right now. If I wanted, I could go over there myself and write a post lambasting Rush Limbaugh for playing and replaying that racial-fear-stimulating video over and over. But I'm keeping it here, in this cozier place, where I let  commenters in. And there are 600+ shots at me in the "How Racist?" comments thread.)

Car says:

And, please, when was the last time Althouse was IN a city? Women like the one Rush played, over and over, you SHOULD fear them- or the segment of society who they represent. She’s not there for the upwardly mobile, educated black. She was there shouting her membership as one of the failures of black society- the takers.

Well, thank you, Car. You're proving my point. You do have a highly emotive mental picture of those terrible black people, the very brain zone Rush was stimulating.

Our cities, and it’s [sic] denizens, are going down like the mutherfocking bootleg fireworks. A cop came into our shop and said whole areas are basically lawless, and that people need to protect themselves. And Ann just wants to turn the other cheek and pretends it’s not happening, because it’s not happening in her line of sight.

See?

And it’s not a function of color. The cities just HAPPEN to be populated by folks that could look like Obama’s son. 

I think "it’s not a function of color" is intended sarcastically. He's saying I should look at the reality he knows, and it's full of terrible black people.

And they also just happen to be represented by race pimps who don’t care what happens to “their people” as long as they get their own filthy lucre as they pretend to fight the power.

But, you know, I’d like Ann to head to Detroit, get our of her car on the East side – you know, near Kelly and Gratiot, and use her rational mind to get to know those folks. Don’t fear those folks, Ann. VOTE for Obama.

Put your head back in the sand, Ann. Rush probably made that woman up.

So he's reinforcing my point! That video stands for a large group of people who really are the problem and voters ought to wake up and get scared!

Why the criticism and mockery of Clint Eastwood will backfire.

Obama supporters are straining to nullify Clint Eastwood's GOP convention performance, but it's not going to work. Take, for example, Michael Moore, writing in The Daily Beast, which embeds the full-length video of what it labels "Clint's Crazy Speech." Moore — who everyone knows is a left-wing propagandist — says:

The footage of Eastwood rambling and mumbling to his "Harvey"—President Obama—will be played to audiences a hundred years from now as the Most Bizarre Convention Moment Ever. The people of the future will know nothing about Dirty Harry or Josey Wales or Million Dollar Baby. They will know about the night a crazy old man hijacked a national party's most important gathering so he could literally tell the president to go do something to himself (i.e. fuck  himself). In those few moments (and these days, it only takes a few moments—see Anthony Weiner), he completely upended and redefined how he'll be remembered by younger and future generations....

Who won't watch the video now? Most people didn't watch the convention and therefore didn't see the speech in its context, within which it was anomalous. Eastwood wasn't speechifying to the huge crowd from a teleprompted script. He was seemingly speaking straight from his head — you know, the illusion actors know how to create. It had an intimacy and riskiness that you just don't expect from a convention stage. That's what made it so much fun for people who are rooting for Romney, but it also the invited ridicule from those who want Obama to win.

Accepting that invitation is taking the bait. And look what is happening. Millions of folks who didn't bother watching the convention are watching Eastwood's performance out of the context within which it was anomalous. They're watching viral video.

You expect viral video to be surprising and weird in some way. And the intimacy and riskiness of the performance is cool in the context of a little window on your computer. You listen to exactly what Clint says as you hang in there waiting for it to be as crazy as the Obama promoters are claiming. And you have whatever love for Clint Eastwood you happen to bring to this little project of watching a viral video. And there is a lot of love out there. These people are throwing hate at a guy you have loved, so, okay, let's see what's so terrible.

Should Obama supporters be spreading this viral video? Should they want the moderate undecideds of the country sitting at their computers attending to lines like:

But — you know about — I remember three and a half years ago, when Mr. Obama won the election. And though I was not a big supporter, I was watching that night when he was having that thing and they were talking about hope and change and they were talking about, yes we can, and it was dark outdoors, and it was nice, and people were lighting candles.

They were saying, I just thought, this was great. Everybody is trying, Oprah was crying.

I was even crying. And then finally — and I haven’t cried that hard since I found out that there is 23 million unemployed people in this country.

Now that is something to cry for because that is a disgrace, a national disgrace, and we haven’t done enough, obviously — this administration hasn’t done enough to cure that. Whatever interest they have is not strong enough, and I think possibly now it may be time for somebody else to come along and solve the problem.

Imagine some uncommitted voter clicks on the embedded video, predisposed to laugh at the crazy old man, and then — alone at the computer — encounters the beloved elder talking about things that have made him cry. They might not laugh. They might be drawn in by Eastwood's performance. They might not take direction from people like Moore who've instructed them to mock. That uncommitted voter might prefer the direction of the far greater director, Clint Eastwood.

***

I thought of a new slogan: Putting the Mitt in uncommitted.