Do you need anything?

If you can find it through this portal...



... you will effortlessly and costlessly make a contribution to this blog, and I am thanking you in advance.

"The only people for me are the mad ones..."

"... the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!'"

A sentence written by Jack Kerouac, submitted in a contest to pick the best sentences, chosen as one of the 3 best sentences, by Stanley Fish, who has written a book called "How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One," which I just bought, and you could buy too, using this link, causing Amazon to send 8% of the purchase price to me and making me go "Awww!"

Don't you need some stuff?

If you're buying something anyway, please enter Amazon through this search box:



You'll be channeling a chunk of the purchase price to me, showing some appreciation for the writing I do here, which would warm my heart on this gray January afternoon in Wisconsin. You won't pay any more for the item you purchase.

Maybe you'd like a Curious George hat? Or a polar bear hat? We like these hats that transform you head into an animal head. I've seen some adorable 20-somethings wearing things like this around town. And we just bought 5 of the Bucky Badger heads, which you have to buy from the UW Book Store (which doesn't give me a cut of the price, unfortunately).

Gift ideas — food category.

I was searching around in Amazon for gifts and, bereft of ideas, decided to search for "food." (Ah! What searching for food has meant over the ages of human history and pre-history!)

Well, the first 7 items on the list weren't even food. The top 30 was mostly things like the Melissa & Doug Wooden Sandwich-Making Set, the Melissa & Doug Slice and Bake Cookie Set, and various other Melissa & Doug wooden food stuff. Why wooden toy food? — you might ask. Whatever happened to plastic toy food? I figure, when it comes to play food, wooden is like organic. You want the kids to have healthy fake food.

If you don't count jars of baby food* — organic, of course — you don't get any food when you search for food until you get to.... well, the list goes up to 50 without any food. Okay. I'll search the Grocery & Gourmet Food category. Again, baby food is huge. Obvious why, actually. Diapers are popular too. You know what you need. You need a lot. And it's hard to get out of the house. Those single-cup coffee packets are popular. Pet food. Astronaut Ice Cream. Iffy gift baskets.

Back to that pet food:

Pack of twenty four, 5.5-ounces per can (total of 132 ounces)
With ingredients that are fit for human consumption
Made in a human food facility
Boneless, skinless, white breast meat chicken in a sumptuous gravy
Grain free product
All food ingredients are fit for human consumption

What are they trying to say?

I need to get back to my search. If you're searching too, please use this portal:



____________

* A deeper search reveals baby food — organic, of course — that comes in pouches. Do they out-green the glass jars? Eh! Who knows? Glass jars, you can recycle, but recycling uses fossil fuels. Pouches... must be plastic, but they roll up into nothing. My advice is: Buy what you like! The same goes for Christmas trees.

Thanks, once again...

... for showing your appreciation for my diligent bloggerly scribblings by starting your shopping here:



On most items, Amazon is sharing 7% of the purchase price with me, so it's really quite a big deal... costing you nothing more than you'd pay anyway. So, if you've been enjoying the daily nuggets of interestingness on this blog, make it the jumping-off point for whatever diverse consumerism is on your personal agenda.

A shopping reminder.

Remember, you can painlessly show some love for the Althouse blog if you do your shopping beginning here:



I really do appreciate it!

AND: Special thanks to whoever bought the Humminbird 898c SI Combo 7-Inch Waterproof Marine GPS and Chartplotter with Sounder. You gave me 51 dollars. And thanks too to whoever bought the cock soup. You gave me 51 cents... and a laugh.

AND: This is a pretty nice sweater somebody picked out for their guy.

Black Friday on the Althouse blog.

Okay, I can help you and you can help me. I write for you every day, and you don't have to give me anything. But if you're shopping anyway, a cut of the price you would pay anyway will go to me if you use the links below — which helpfully give you some Althouse-tested gift ideas. If you already know what you want to buy, you can use the Amazon search box in my sidebar and that too will work as a contribution to this blog — again, without raising the price to you. So show some cheap free love for Althouse and click through from here.

Althouse's favorite movie.

Meade's favorite movie.

The Meadhouse blender.

The Meadhouse way to make coffee.

The camera Althouse carries around all the time.

Althouse's favorite Nikon lens.

The chocolate Althouse eats every day.

A device Althouse uses for drawing with the computer.

The book Althouse most enjoyed reading this year.

Possibly the only movie we bothered to see in the theater this year.

The trekking poles we use all the time.

My small-but-nice hydrating backpack.

My too-much-information scale.

The Meadhouse trail stove.

The soil knife Meade planted over 1,000 bulbs with.

The newest old stuff from Meadhouse's favorite artist.

I love my iPad.

The iPhone I'm getting when my old iPhone dies.

Some memoirs I read and liked: Patti Smith, Keith Richards, Hitch, Bush, Franzen, Orwell ...

And one I will read: Mark Twain.

How we squish and heat our sandwiches.

4 new trucks Meade wants to put on AllenS's wish list.

A game for a young person.

A game I like to play.

The original version of the game they'll make me play, which I'm ordering right now, because the wood pieces will give me $22 worth of pleasure over the plastic pieces in the game we have in the house.

So let's get the vintage version of this game I loved as a kid.

The hiking shoes Althouse likes a lot.

The clogs Althouse keeps by the door to step into and then kick off as soon as she's in the car.

The Meadhouse salad spinner.

Althouse's noise-canceling headphones.

Althouse splurges on lip balm.

My all-time favorite TV-comedy.

The official Meadhouse chips.

The official Althouse crackers.

Where we sit.

The Althouse desk lamp.

Expensive, but this has helped me so much and made daily life so pleasurable.

It works for me: night and day creams.

What I picked out when I went perfume-shopping with Palladian.

What Palladian picked out for me based on my love of smoke-flavored things.

The fragrance I picked out long ago based initially on the shape of the bottle and which is actually really great if you like roses.

The Meadhouse drinking glasses.

The Althouse sketchbook.

Gift card!

Lotsa gift cards!

The Meadhouse coffee: espresso ground and whole bean.

Amazon now sells 180 e-books for every 100 hardcover books.

Hardcover books. Don't get over-exercised. There are still soft-covered books.

The Nation promotes the anti-choice liberal meme.

A couple weeks ago, I pointed to "that trendy liberal theme: Choice won't make you happy."  Here it is again in "The Trouble with Amazon":

Many would argue that the efflorescence of new publishing that Amazon has encouraged can only be a good thing, that it enriches cultural diversity and expands choice. But that picture is not so clear: a number of studies have shown that when people are offered a narrower range of options, their selections are likely to be more diverse than if they are presented with a number of choices so vast as to be overwhelming. In this situation people often respond by retreating into the security of what they already know.

As Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice, explains, "When the choice set is larger, people tend to make worse choices. They choose on the basis of what's easiest to evaluate, rather than what's important to evaluate...the safe, highly marketed option usually comes out on top."



This apparent anomaly of greater choice resulting in a narrower selection finds a corollary in Amazon's use of metrics to recommend titles based on previous purchases. The algorithms at work here are highly sophisticated and are widely credited with expanding consumer choice. Yet such metric-based systems can simultaneously increase the variety of books purchased by individual customers while decreasing the overall variety of books bought by everyone. This is because, as blogger Whimsley explains, "In Internet World the customers see further, but they are all looking out from the same tall hilltop. In Offline World individual customers are standing on different, lower hilltops. They may not see as far individually, but more of the ground is visible to someone."

The loss of serendipity that comes with not knowing exactly what one is looking for is lamented by ex-Amazon editor James Marcus: "Personalization strikes me as a mixed blessing. While it gives people what they want—or what they think they want—it also engineers spontaneity out of the picture. The happy accident, the freakish discovery, ceases to exist. And that's a problem."

Things watched just now.

There's this really cool Mickey Kaus ad:



I found that via Mickey's Twitter feed, where he thanked Instapundit for embedding it, so why didn't I see it on Instapundit too? Must have been that, scrolling, I got sidetracked by the monitor lizard. Anyway, I was over on Twitter to write:

Got M to watch the movie "Slacker," which made us look up "Growing Up Absurd" in Amazon, which recommended we buy the movie "Slacker."

We almost never watch movies. We're too fragmented. But "Slacker" is fragmented, and, thinking we could put up with that, we ended up watching the whole thing. In the end of the movie — and I realize I've watched the beginning many times and the end only a few — the camera flashes on the book "Growing Up Absurd." We were trying to remember the author's name, and Meade got it right. We were talking about what a verbal tic it used to be to call everything "absurd."
Thanks for coming over to the other side of the line? What did you think you'd find here? It turns out, it's a passage from an essay by the big old conservative Roger Kimball about Paul Goodman's "Growing Up Absurd":

Goodman said virtually nothing new in Growing Up Absurd. But somehow, his method of recycling received opinions about the problems of youth culture in what he liked to call the “Organized System” struck a chord. His success was due partly to the way he combined the radical clichés of the moment with a traditional language of virtue. “My purpose is a simple one,” Goodman wrote in his first chapter: “to show how it is desperately hard these days for an average child to grow up to be a man, for our present organized system of society does not want men.” (Girls and women do not figure much in Goodman’s scheme of things.)

In other words, Goodman cannily blended rhetoric appropriate to a Marine recruitment poster with portentous fantasies about America being an “unnatural system” that warps young souls. Given current conditions in America, Goodman wonders, “Is it possible, being a human being, to exist? Is it possible, having a human nature, to grow up?” But the pertinent question is whether it really was “desperately hard” for an average child to grow up in the United States in the 1950s—an era of tremendous prosperity, excellent public education, potent national self-confidence. Was it true, as Goodman insisted, that “the young men who conform to the dominant society become for the most part apathetic, disappointed, cynical, and wasted”?

Part of Goodman’s purpose was to sympathize with and exonerate those elements of youth culture that had chosen not to conform to “the dominant society”—the Beats and other fringe groups who believed that “a man is a fool to work to pay installments on a useless refrigerator for his wife.” (Not so useless if one wishes to keep food from spoiling, of course, but Goodman never acknowledges that side of things.) 

"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."