"To begin Aspiration Therapy, a specially designed tube, known as the A-Tube™, is placed in the stomach."

"The A-Tube is a thin silicone rubber tube that connects the inside of the stomach directly to a discreet, poker-chip sized Skin-Port on the outside of the abdomen. The Skin-Port has a valve that can be opened or closed to control the flow of stomach contents. The patient empties a portion of stomach contents into the toilet after each meal through this tube by connecting a small, handheld device to the Skin-Port. The emptying process is called 'aspiration.'"

If bulimia is somehow wrong, how can this be a legitimate medical treatment?

Via Metafilter, where somebody penned the slogan: "When one anus isn't enough."

"A drunk guy vomited over the railing onto about a dozen audience members seated in the orchestra..."

"... right in the middle of one of [Paul] Rudd’s big monologues on Wednesday... There was mass chaos for several minutes, but the cast played right on through, ignoring the disruption."

"Given the severity of the situation, and the number of people affected, it’s pretty amazing that the show was able to go on uninterrupted...."

I guess the show, called "Grace," wasn't much about what happens to other people. Carry on! Don't notice the troubles that fall upon your fellow human being. That tends to be the message of great art, I think. Or do I have it backwards?

"If they named their cat/dog/goldfish after Kierkegaard Imma puke!"

Said Amartel in the comments to yesterday's post, which was titled with a quote from a Chelsea Clinton tweet: "Marc, Soren and I are at home with candles, kindles and canned food!"

Hang onto your breakfast, Amartel. Here's a NYT article from last December:

[Marc] Mezvinsky, a former Goldman Sachs banker, will soon start a hedge fund with a friend. The couple’s apartment, shared with a miniature Yorkshire terrier named Soren, after the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, is said to be overflowing with books. On the phone from Arkansas, Ms. Clinton talked about her husband’s continuous support and their habit of talking “about everything, almost sometimes ad nauseam.”

How's your nauseam now, Amartel?

***

"I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations — one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it — you will regret both."

I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations — one can either name your dog after a Danish philosopher or after a generic southern guy. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do one or the other — people will needle you about both.

***

I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations — one can either vote for Barack Obama or not. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it — you will regret both.

Potential "upset" in the Wisconsin recall race.

From a Journal Sentinel column titled "John Doe probe looms over Walker's recall election":

Republican activists will be upset if Milwaukee prosecutors file complaints against additional Walker aides before [the recall election on] June 5, arguing that the Democratic district attorney would be trying to influence the election.

But Democrats will be equally upset if charges wait until after the election, especially if Walker wins. Likewise, Republicans would accuse [Milwaukee County District Attorney John] Chisholm of trying to use the courts to tar the governor coming out of the recall race.

"Upset" is a funny word. Did you know that it originally meant "Set up, erected, raised up" (OED)? How did it get... upset? I think the origin is in the stomach. The meaning "Physically disordered" is "said esp. of the stomach." It seems to be the same "up" we find in "throw up" and "upchuck"!

Rush Limbaugh — calling SCOTUSblog "a very, very left-wing blog" — explains "the left's" "full swing" "effort to intimidate" the Supreme Court.

That took me aback, because I'm so used to viewing SCOTUSblog — which I read all the time — as a very authoritative and relentlessly sober source of information about what's going on in the Supreme Court.

RUSH: There's a very, very left-wing blog called the SCOTUS blog, and the guy there is predicting 6-3 for the whole thing being found constitutional, 6-3. A lot of others have looked at his reasoning, "Yeah, you know what, I like that reasoning, it makes perfect sense to me. I think I'll sign on to that." If it happens, and if it happens the way the theory explains it, we don't have a court looking at the law anymore. We have a fully politicized third branch of government.... The chief justice, John Roberts, gets to decide who should write the opinion when he is in the majority. He assigns it. This theory holds that he'll write it himself....



The idea that this legislation is so important, so transformative that a 5-4 decision is not desirable by the chief and by a lot of people, that it would roil the country. A 5-4 decision is too narrow if they're gonna find the bill unconstitutional.... The theory is that Kennedy will go ahead and join the libs and make it 5-4 for total constitutionality, because he signaled that. Then Roberts, after having seen that, knows he can't stop it, so he joins the majority to make it 6-3 so that he gets to write the opinion. And in writing the opinion, Roberts will then limit the scope of the Obamacare bill to something like, yes, Congress can force us to buy health insurance, but nothing else....

Now, the theory that I just gave you comes from SCOTUS blog. It's run by a very left-leaning guy. A lot of people who are not liberals have run across this theory and it appeals to them. It's slowly but surely behind the scenes becoming conventional wisdom, and of course the left is glomming onto this, 'cause they love this possibility....

Now, don't worry too much about this theory, folks. The theory is becoming conventional wisdom and that means it's irrelevant and is wrong. It's advanced by the left. And, by the way, here's a quote from Senator Richard Blumenthal, former attorney general Connecticut, now Senator from Connecticut. The left is playing this "you will ruin your reputation" card. That's what this theory is about, the theory that justices will see it. They're trying to intimidate the court into ruling in favor of Obamacare....

So you guys on the court, you people on the court, you are going to destroy the court and your credibility and people won't obey if you do the right thing here and find this constitutional. So the effort to intimidate is under full swing.

Now, if Rush links to the SCOTUSblog item he's talking about, I can't find it over there. I went to SCOTUSblog to look for it myself, and I found something else that really shook my opinion that SCOTUSblog is a sober place that maintains a professional gloss:

The RNC shoots itself in the mouth

Shoots itself in the mouth?!!! I thought good people were supposed to eschew murderous metaphors after the Tucson shootings. Remember that? The "new civility" stuff Obama lectured us about. Click my "civility bullshit" tag to brush up on the topic.

(Yeah, I called it "civility bullshit" from Day 1, because I always thought it was a one-sided effort to quiet critical voices and because I don't accept instruction on form of expression and because I think the demand that everyone speak in a sober manner further empowers those who already hold more than their share of power. As they say in China: "Can I say a curse word? No? Then I've got nothing to say.")

But back to Tom Goldstein in SCOTUSblog:

Opponents of the Affordable Care Act and the Obama Administration... did a tremendous job framing their constitutional argument against the statute to the public, the lawyers on their side were brilliant, and it appears that they had a receptive Supreme Court majority. It was an eleven on a scale of one to ten.

Now this. The RNC released an advertisement... with audio from the halting beginning to Don Verrilli’s oral argument on the individual mandate to make the point that (as the ad’s title says) “ObamaCare: It’s a tough sell.”

Here's the quite hilarious and brilliant ad:



Goldstein, like the Bloomberg News article he links, professes outrage over the way the ad plays Verrilli's drinking of ice water and saying "excuse me" twice. You hear it and you hear it again. Duh. The repetition of the sound bite is obvious, but Goldstein and Bloomberg call it "doctored" audio, as if they've uncovered something nefarious, and do a high dudgeon routine:

I’ve been in practice for seventeen years, and the blog has existed for ten, and this is the single most classless and misleading thing I’ve ever seen related to the Court. It is as if the RNC decided to take an incredibly serious and successful argument that has the chance to produce a pathbreaking legal victory for a conservative interpretation of the Constitution, drag it through the mud, and vomit on it. I would be shocked if a serious conservative lawyer would stand by the ad.

Oh, for... Can I say a curse word? No? Then I've got nothing to say.

"I feel like throwing up when I hear it. No, I shouldn't say that. No, actually, I do feel like throwing up."

"I wish I could say, 'Oh listen, everybody! It's the Celine Dion song!' But I don't. I just have to sit there, you know, kind of straight-faced with a massive internal eye roll."

Kate Winslet experiences seasickness on the Titanic... song.

The Most Inappropriate Nausea of the Day.

A writer over at Pajamas Media whose name appears in an unreadable font — Jebuda? Jehuda? — assumes we readers will all want to puke when we see that Shepard Fairey — the artist behind the famous Obama "Hope" poster — is working on a new movie version of George Orwell’s 1984.

That’s right: we may soon see in screens big and small a movie that could very well be advertised as “From the Dishonest Propagandist Who Brought You the Obama ‘Hope’ Poster.”

There’s something very fitting about a dishonest propagandist pushing for a whole new 1984 movie, but coming from Obama booster Ron Howard and Shepard Fairey, this project might amount to – if it’s ever produced – a version of 1984 that would make George Orwell spin in his grave.

First, I think what would make Orwell "spin in his grave" is your use of the phrase "spin in his grave." Good lord, you purport to care about Orwell, yet you blithely violate one of the most memorable rules in his famous essay "Politics and the English Language": "Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print."

Second, Shepard Fairey is a brilliant graphic artist. Look at his cover for "The Medium Is the Massage." This is exactly the talent you want to create a visualization of a novel that is — in large part — about posters!

The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.

That's paragraph 2 of the novel.

Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered everywhere. The black-moustachio'd face gazed down from every commanding corner.

That's paragraph 4. Later:

Down in the street the wind flapped the torn poster to and fro, and the word INGSOC fitfully appeared and vanished. Ingsoc. The sacred principles of Ingsoc. Newspeak, doublethink, the mutability of the past.... He took a twenty-five cent piece out of his pocket. There, too, in tiny clear lettering, the same slogans were inscribed, and on the other face of the coin the head of Big Brother. Even from the coin the eyes pursued you. On coins, on stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters and on the wrapping of a cigarette packet— everywhere. Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed— no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.

On and on. Government graphics are central to Orwell's work, and Shepard Fairey made that crazy Orwellian poster that made us love Big Brother Obama. It's utterly thrilling to think of Fairey applying himself to this project. Where's the danger that it will be noisome pro-Obama propaganda? The danger, if any, cuts in the opposite direction.

BONUS: More poster passages from "1984":

As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of the Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, soundtracks, cartoons, photographs — to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date....

'Did I ever tell you, old boy,' he said, chuckling round the stem of his pipe, 'about the time when those two nippers of mine set fire to the old market-woman's skirt because they saw her wrapping up sausages in a poster of B.B.? Sneaked up behind her and set fire to it with a box of matches....

Then he saw the girl standing at the base of the monument, reading or pretending to read a poster which ran spirally up the column....

Winston's evenings were fuller than ever. Squads of volunteers, organised by Parsons, were preparing the street for Hate Week, stitching banners, painting posters, erecting flagstaffs on the roofs and perilously slinging wires across the street for the reception of streamers....

A new poster had suddenly appeared all over London. It had no caption, and represented simply the monstrous figure of a Eurasian soldier, three or four metres high, striding forward with expressionless Mongolian face and enormous boots, a sub-machine-gun pointed from his hip. From whatever angle you looked at the poster, the muzzle of the gun, magnified by the foreshortening, seemed to be pointed straight at you. The thing had been plastered on every blank space on every wall, even outnumbering the portraits of Big Brother. The proles, normally apathetic about the war, were being lashed into one of their periodical frenzies of patriotism.... There were further angry demonstrations, Goldstein was burned in effigy, hundreds of copies of the poster of the Eurasian soldier were torn down and added to the flames, and a number of shops were looted in the turmoil....

Without words said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd. Oceania was at war with Eastasia! The next moment there was a tremendous commotion. The banners and posters with which the square was decorated were all wrong! Quite half of them had the wrong faces on them. It was sabotage! The agents of Goldstein had been at work! There was a riotous interlude while posters were ripped from the walls, banners torn to shreds and trampled underfoot....

What was the most horrible, sickening thing of all? He thought of Big Brother. The enormous face (because of constantly seeing it on posters he always thought of it as being a metre wide), with its heavy black moustache and the eyes that followed you to and fro, seemed to float into his mind of its own accord. What were his true feelings towards Big Brother?

"And is it really good policy for Santorum to fill young adults with suspicions about higher learning..."

"... which rightly exists to challenge — in a healthy sense — what parents and maybe pastors have poured into them?" asks Frank Bruni.

If their beliefs survive that, then those beliefs can be seen as genuinely earned and are probably all the stronger for it. Santorum’s did. He went not only to college but also to two graduate schools, getting an M.B.A. from one and a law degree from the other.

But to listen to him talk about universities is to get the sense that he doesn’t trust others to emerge from such an obstacle course of unsavory influences as uncorrupted as he did. For safety’s sake, he’ll bless a little ignorance.

He’ll also massage facts. In explaining his Kennedy-induced nausea, he claimed that the former president had said that people of faith had no place in public life. What Kennedy asserted was infinitely more nuanced than that. He said people of all faiths were welcomed, so long as they weren’t slaves to their creeds.

Apparently, Santorum used bulimia against those ideas that the academics attempted to pour into him. Others digest what they've been fed.

Speaking of pukeworthy: "infinitely more nuanced." What is it about nuance that liberals love so much? And infinitely more nuanced? Ironically, that's quite crude. Infinitely? Kennedy had oodles and oodles of nuance. Or is it that Santorum, in Bruni's book, has zero nuance, so anyone with any nuance at all has infinitely more than Santorum?

And I love the way Bruni modifies his idea of challenging family and religious values with the phrase "in a healthy sense." There's no assurance of healthfulness!

And if challenge is so good, college students who were raised in liberal families with liberal or nonexistent religions are being horribly deprived!

"Irish call for apology following 'Drunk Vomiting Shamrocks' clothing line."

"Urban Outfitters' St. Patrick's Day products, including a trucker’s cap illustrated with a drunk vomiting shamrocks and a 'Leprechaun P***' beer jug have, angered the Irish community in the United States and Ireland."

Mud.

"Life is made up of marble and mud." — Nathaniel Hawthorne

"Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud... And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud. " — Shakespeare

"I made all my generals out of mud." — Napoleon Bonaparte

"We sit in the mud... and reach for the stars." — Ivan Turgenev

"I have tried to lift France out of the mud. But she will return to her errors and vomitings. I cannot prevent the French from being French." — Charles de Gaulle

"Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance..." — Thoreau

"My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring, diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?" — Virginia Woolf

"They teach anything in universities today. You can major in mud pies." — Orson Welles

"POLITICIAN, n. An eel in the fundamental mud upon which the superstructure of organized society is reared. When he wriggles he mistakes the agitation of his tail for the trembling of the edifice. As compared with the statesman, he suffers the disadvantage of being alive." — Ambrose Bierce (from "The Devil's Dictionary")

"'As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.' Having said these things, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva.' Then he anointed the man’s eyes with the mud and said to him, 'Go, wash in the pool of Siloam" (which means Sent). So he went and washed and came back seeing." — John 9:5-7

"The broad-backed hippopotamus/Rests on his belly in the mud..." — T.S. Eliot

Although he seems so firm to us
He is merely flesh and blood.

Flesh and blood is weak and frail,
Susceptible to nervous shock;
While the True Church can never fail
For it is based upon a rock.

The hippo’s feeble steps may err
In compassing material ends,
While the True Church need never stir
To gather in its dividends.

The ’potamus can never reach
The mango on the mango-tree;
But fruits of pomegranate and peach
Refresh the Church from over sea.

At mating time the hippo’s voice
Betrays inflexions hoarse and odd,
But every week we hear rejoice
The Church, at being one with God.

The hippopotamus’s day
Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts;
God works in a mysterious way—
The Church can sleep and feed at once.

I saw the ’potamus take wing
Ascending from the damp savannas,
And quiring angels round him sing
The praise of God, in loud hosannas.

Blood of the Lamb shall wash him clean
And him shall heavenly arms enfold,
Among the saints he shall be seen
Performing on a harp of gold.

He shall be washed as white as snow,
By all the martyr’d virgins kist,
While the True Church remains below
Wrapt in the old miasmal mist.

The new Miss World is a United Statesian.

Alexandria Mills.

What's her favorite book? "'Guess how much I love you,'my mom used to read it with me." Don't laugh. I'll bet most of the people you know, if they were being honest, would name a children's book as their favorite book.

Tell us a little something about your Country?

The USA is a melting pot for all cultures. My home town is famous for the Kentucky Derby Horse Race.

Yeah, the USA, la la la... let me tell you about Louisville! Louisville, Kentucky:

"... Not London. Not even New York. This is a weird place. You're lucky that mental defective at the motel didn't jerk a pistol out of the cash register and blow a big hole in you.... Just pretend you're visiting a huge outdoor loony bin... If the inmates get out of control we'll soak them down with Mace."

That reminds me. The Rally to Restore Sanity is happening today. Are you there? Are you watching it on C-SPAN? Sanity. Are you up for sanity today? I've got the sanity rally recording on the DVR and I'm going to scroll through it — I say "scroll through" these days, not "fast-forward" — later. Meanwhile, remember when the smart reaction to politics was insanity, back when we read Hunter S. Thompson essays?

A radio news bulletin says the National Guard is massacring students at Kent State and Nixon is still bombing Cambodia. The journalist is driving, ignoring his passenger who is now nearly naked after taking off most of his clothing, which he holds out the window, trying to wind-wash the Mace out of it. His eyes are bright red and his face and chest are soaked with beer he's been using to rinse the awful chemical off his flesh. The front of his woolen trousers is soaked with vomit; his body is racked with fits of coughing and wild chocking sobs. The journalist rams the big car through traffic and into a spot in front of the terminal, then he reaches over to open the door on the passenger's side and shoves the Englishman out, snarling: "Bug off, you worthless [censored]! You twisted pigfucker! [Crazed laughter.] If I weren't sick I'd kick your ass all the way to Bowling Green--you scumsucking foreign geek. Mace is too good for you...We can do without your kind in Kentucky."

Isn't Apple about love? Where's the love Apple?

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Appholes
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

A great coinage: "Appholes."

CONFESSION: The video clip looked beautiful in full screen size on the 27" screen of the iMac I picked up at the Apple store 2 days ago. So crisp I exclaimed "He needs to get his knuckles waxed."

In the sweat lodge of doom: "There were people throwing up everywhere."

If you are crowded into a small space — about 24 feet wide and 4 1/2 feet tall— with 50 people and one person throws up — for any reason — if you have any sense at all, you will leave immediately. Imagine the space being very hot, and everyone feels bad, and multiple people are throwing up. Yet you stay. You are out of your mind in that very special way that involves ceding your responsibility to a guru, and he's urging you one, telling you the vomiting is "good for you," that it's "purging what your body doesn’t want, what it doesn’t need." You can't even struggle back to that dim light of consciousness that warns that "what your body doesn’t want" seems to be life itself. Get out of the sweat lodge! But you paid $9,695. Get out of the sweat lodge!

About 90 minutes into the ceremony, [orthodontist Dr. Beverley] Bunn said, someone yelled in the darkness that a woman had passed out just after [the guru James Arthur] Ray closed the tent door between rounds. Dr. Bunn said Mr. Ray replied, “We will deal with that after the next round.”...

Mr. Ray’s company, James Ray International, made $9.4 million in 2008 from events including weekend seminars with titles like “World Wealth Summit,” videos and books, including the 2008 best-seller “Harmonic Wealth: The Secret of Attracting the Life You Want.”...

“James Ray stood by the door of the tent and he controlled when those rounds began and ended,” [said Thomas J. McFeeley, a cousin of one woman who died]. “He called for more and hotter rocks that were brought into the tent between the rounds. He instructed people inside that you could not leave during the rounds. If you had to leave, you had to wait until the end of the round.”...

On a conference call Mr. Ray held last week for sweat lodge participants, Dr. Bunn was shocked to hear one recount the comments of a self-described “channeler” who visited Angel Valley after the retreat. Claiming to have communicated with the dead, the channeler said they had left their bodies in the sweat lodge and chosen not to come back because “they were having so much fun.”

Yes, read that again. A channeler is reporting that the people who died voluntarily crossed over into the next world during the ceremony, decided they liked it, and chose to stay. Dead.

Clearly there is a lawsuit in the works. And Ray has a good big pile of money. You can see the competing stories about whether his followers chose to stay or were blocked when they tried to leave. Whether they fell for his idiotic explanations or tried to prevent escape, he should have to pay. Still, how can people be so stupid. And 50 people can push one man out of the way. As they should have done, after the first hurl.

Michelle Obama takes Malia and Sasha out "for a hearty lunch of burgers, fries, onion rings and milkshakes."

They had cheeseburgers and the "President Obama burger" (with "horseradish mayo, red onion marmalade, crumbled blue cheese and bacon"). Among the milkshakes was one with "butterscotch, hot fudge, malt balls, custard and whipped cream."

I hope this means Michelle and Barack will lay off lecturing us about what foods we ought to eat. Or will the next photo op be in the setting of the White House vegetable garden?

What are we to think of all this burger eating? Those little girls are slim, certainly not obese, but what are other little girls supposed to think? They want cheeseburgers and malts too. What's the secret? Maybe the hamburgers are cut in quarters and each girl gets a 200-calorie little sandwich along with a a 100-calorie portion of the malt. Really, how do you do it? (Certainly not by throwing up!) The little girls of America need some health-care info from the family that has undertaken to oversee our health.

Now, one more thing. Why was the female component of the Obama family deployed yesterday? The linked NYT blog says "Someone in the White House obviously had a hankering for an Obama burger." Now, I'm going to throw up. This is political. Here's a clue:

"Eating in France..."

"... dying inside."

Mitt Romney gives some advice to the new President.

Damn, it's such good advice:

He should forget entirely about reelection and focus solely on helping the nation at a critical time. He should dismiss the people who helped him win the election and bring in people who are above politics and above party. He should surround himself with statesmen and economists, businesspeople and leaders. In some ways it would be beneficial if our presidency consisted of only one term. That way the President would think about his legacy and the future of the country rather than reelection and partisanship....

In his second term, President Clinton made an effort to govern more from the center than from the extreme wing of his party, and by doing so, found greater support and greater political success. Perhaps it's a paradox, the less political the agenda, the more political success one enjoys. But now is not the time for partisanship opportunism.

The unions have helped Barack Obama. They will hope to be paid back. I'm particularly concerned that organized labor would call on Barack Obama to pass the card check program. This removes from American workers the right to the secret ballot in deciding whether or not to accept a union. This legislation would do more to harm America's long-term competitiveness than almost anything I can imagine. It would be a partisan payback for organized labor but it would come with devastating consequences for the nation.

I ♥ Mitt Romney.

IN THE COMMENTS: Hdhouse said:

I just love this. It is so full of hypocracy that it makes me barf.

Palladian said...

"Hypocracy" must be the brand name of some sort of emetic.

I think “hypocracy” is the form of government we will have when Rare Pygmy Hippo becomes President.

The Givhan of HuffPo is pretty sure her Women's Studies professor vomits whenever she sees Sarah Palin.

Karin Tanabe, who seems to be the Givhan of HuffPo -- which is nothing like the Mull of Kintyre -- takes a 2-week old Robin Givhan column -- which she quotes but doesn't link to -- and trashes of Sarah Palin's style.

Because it wasn't enough for Givhan to credit Palin with showing that "a woman can step onto the national political stage without having to manipulate her wardrobe into some torturous costume calibrated to make her look authoritative but not threatening, feminine but not sexy, serious but not dour."

Palin must be mocked.

Tanabe writes:

The point is, Sarah Palin and her hockey mom's, grandpa's and second cousins, don't want her to be authoritative.

It's funny when the Givhan of HuffPo falls prey to the grocer's apostrophe, is it not? Modeling haughtiness, she takes a pratfall.

Her bad highlights and her layers of puffy bangs scream "don't mind me, I've been filing my nails in a log cabin for the last decade and didn't know the bouffant was now reserved for burlesque dancers and women who think Vogue is a devilish jig invented by Madonna (cue giggle)." I'm pretty sure my college feminist literature professor is vomiting every time she sees bouffant Barbie. Don't worry Professor Hart, I am too.

Is that that what Women's Studies teaches these days -- inane snobbery? And when did throwing up become the preferred form of elite expression?

Spewing.

"I thought the 'vomit' tag was a joke, but you actually have dozens of posts tagged 'vomit." Was 'bodily fluids' too generic?"

Asked Michiel, in the comments to this post. And indeed, the answer is yes. There's a limit to how many posts Blogger will show on the front page when you click a tag, so I've been working on subdividing some of the bigger tags, and "bodily fluids" was one of the oversized categories. The first subcategory I broke out was vomit, because I knew there was some good stuff in there, including the time when I went out of my way to vomit-blog.

And actually, there are too many in the "vomit" category now, so one of the best ones wasn't appearing: the vomit miracle. I need to subdivide "vomit"! That's disturbing.

Now, with Michiel's prodding I did 3 more subcategories.

1. Saliva... because I got my original mainstream-media recognition when I debate-blogged back in 2004 and noticed a little something.

2. Blood... because blood is the greatest bodily fluid. It's #1. I mean, if you were on "Family Feud" and the question was "Name a bodily fluid," you'd say "blood." Blood has murder, menstruation, art, rage, law ... everything. Go ahead, click.

3. Urine... because ... well, I knew it would amuse Trooper York. (And that's another thing about tags. I'm gradually making tags for my favorite commenters.)

IN THE EMAIL:

In case you'd like to see a 60-second clip titled "Vomit Tag!", here's a comedy video me and my friends made. It's the outdoor fun time activity that's taking America by storm.

I'm afraid to look! You look.

AND: Please, don't be making video clips for urine tag and sending them to me.

"You are going to be working with an enzyme that bonds protein. You are made of protein."

"Unless you want to glue your lungs together or glue your eyelids to your eyeballs, you absolutely must follow these safety rules."

Art project you don't even want to think about doing. Or, really, the art project is not the final bacon tiara -- is it? -- but the deeply disturbing webpage showing the directions. Just thinking about this picture or even this makes me want to vomit.

"I feel sick. I hope I don't vomit on this dress. I look so put together otherwise. Barf will ruin it."

"I will not look at you directly. Your shirt gives me vertigo. I told you that earlier. But I look sort of adorable, don't I?"