"They're tired. Dog-tired. The stallion makes heart-stopping speeches. And the beaver just beavers along."

Erica Jong — her mind addled by animal imagery — tries to write about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

[T]he stallion is drunk on his own rhetoric. Why not? It's great rhetoric.

We need beavers and we need stallions. Beavers get the work done. Stallions inspire us. And they both have limitations. Stallions have fragile legs (think Barbaro). And beavers are nothing without their teeth....

So let's stop talking about race and gender and let the beaver and the stallion both serve our country — in their own inimitable ways.

Fabulous metaphors, Erica. I understood right away about talking horse that gets drunk and breaks its leg. I couldn't find that episode of "Mr. Ed," but here he is in his home state of Hawaii:



(Thanks to reader_iam for pointing me to this goofy HuffPo rant.)

Happy Easter.

Enough with all the singlism and matrimania.

Writes Bella DePaulo:

What may be less obvious is that if reports [of the supposed health benefits of marriage] were more accurate and less caricatured, that would also be good for anyone who is, or wants to be, coupled. When singles are stigmatized, there is a risk that some people will be tempted to couple and marry for the wrong reasons — to escape the cultural muck that comes with being single. When singles are no longer marginalized or demeaned, then people who want to couple can do so from a position of strength. Rather than running away from singlehood to escape the stigma, they can move toward marriage or coupling as something they want to embrace.

Ah, but what if they don't? 

The pleasures of singlehood must be kept hush-hush. It's not a legitimate life style, you hear?

"Haven't drawn a jedi in awhile."

The last blog post from Justin Wright, a promising young animator who just died of a heart attack at age 27. From his college profile:

Justin’s journey to Pixar has another plot twist. He got introduced to the famous studio because of a heart transplant. When Justin was born, his heart had all sorts of complications: cardiomyopathy, a complete block, a hole between the upper two chambers, a hole in the mitral valve —the list goes on. Finally, when Justin was 12, his heart had been through too many surgeries and procedures to be of much use, not to mention that it was the size of a deflated soccer ball inside his slight 70-pound body. It was time for a transplant.

With a lot of time spent in hospital beds recovering, Justin drew pictures (a hobby he says he started as a kid when he got bored in church). His doctor at Stanford’s Lucile Packard Children's Hospital noticed Justin’s interest, and one day, after Justin was fully recovered, took him on a tour at Pixar, where he had some connections. Justin was enthralled—this was what he wanted to do....

He credits his heart transplant with giving him the courage to make risky decisions... “I knew I’d been allowed to stay on this earth, and that I was lucky.....”

Want something, do what you want, take some risks, and know that you are lucky to be alive.

I'm only linking to this ripe piece of anti-Althousiana...

... here ... because something moved me to participate in the comments and I think you may enjoy my remarks over there.

I say "'A Man for All Seasons' is an old-fashioned, stagy movie that is not an interesting piece of film art and does not become so because an old man dies" and tangle with a few readers whose display of dumbness ought to make Roy think again about what level he thinks he's writing on.

Here's a piece in today's NYT explaining the "Man for All Seasons" phenomenon of the 1960s:

“A Man for All Seasons,” which came out in 1966, is a movie of a sort they don’t make anymore: smart, literate and, by today’s standards, a little earnest. Schools organized field trips so that students could be bused to see it, and it earned a huge popular following as well. It won Academy Awards for best director and best picture, and Mr. Scofield picked up the Oscar for best actor. There were also Oscars for best adapted screenplay, best costumes and best cinematography.

“A Man for All Seasons” was so evocative and so good-looking — and such a draw at the box office — that it spawned dozens of imitations. For a while you could hardly go to the movies or turn on highbrow television without seeing people in doublets, hose and ruffs, writing with quills.

Highbrow? "Highbrow" has been defined downward. "A Man for All Seasons" and the anglophilic stuff like it was exactly what "middlebrow" originally meant.

Also middlebrow (and pathetically nerdy): insulting people with a quote from a Nathaniel Hawthorne story you read for high school English class.

AND: Thanks to everyone who criticized me for disrespecting a movie I've never seen. I've heard this criticism many times — like back in 2005, when I was taken to task for knowing not to waste my time seeing "King Kong." But this time, thanks to this new wave of criticism, I had the revelation that had evaded me for years. I finally realized what's really going on. How do you know you won't like it if you haven't tried it? It's guys who flip out when they hear that from a woman. It strikes to the very core, doesn't it? How do you know you won't enjoy sleeping with me?

"Mr. Richardson’s endorsement came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out for 30 pieces of silver..."

James Carville says "the timing is appropriate, if ironic." Ironic.... It's like rain on your crucifixion day.

"How do you rate Obama’s speech? Excellent, good, fair, or poor?"

A Rasmussen poll asked "How do you rate Obama’s speech? Excellent, good, fair, or poor?"

30% Excellent
21% Good
26% Fair
21% Poor
1% Not sure

Rasmussen's own analysis of the poll compresses the "excellent" and "good" responses and highlights the 51% figure, but given the quality of the writing and delivery, the press response to the speech, and the question itself, the answer should be "excellent."

Even people who are deeply disturbed by Obama's connection to Wright and think he should have simply and clearly denounced the man should still think it was an "excellent." "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" is a excellent speech: We study it 300+ years after it was delivered, but we're not buying the message. I think Americans will study Barack Obama's speech 100 years from now, maybe even 300 years from now, whether he becomes President or not. At the very least it was a good speech, yet 49% would not even concede that.

The important break in the numbers is between "excellent" and the rest, and 70% said the speech fell short of "excellent." This is, I think, disastrous for Obama.

Asked how "concerned" they are "about Obama’s relationship with his former Pastor, Jeremiah Wright," only 21% said they were "not at all concerned." 42% were "very concerned." Asked whether the speech was "racially divisive, unifying, or neither," only 30% — 30% again — thought the speech was "unifying," which is what Obama intended it and his entire campaign to be.

Obama's popularity has been built on unifying us and transcending race. If only 30% of us heard unification in that speech, then the speech and the connection to Wright have been massively destructive to what is the chief substance of his reputation.

ADDED: Obama told white people to feel guilty about race just when they'd been so happy thinking that loving him, just him, was the answer to racial problems. When we saw him consorting with someone who seemed to hate us, we needed reassurance that Obama loves us, and loving Obama was enough. But he didn't say that, and now we're confused. Our boyfriend was telling us he needs to see other people, and we don't understand the relationship anymore.