"I've been texting for a year with a couple of guys without ever going on a date with them."

"The other day I got a text from a boy, but it wasn't hot. I mean, if you're going to text me every day, you haven't seen me for months and you're trying to seduce me, you'd better spice up that text and make it more exciting than 'How was your day? I hope you're having a beautiful one.' Sadly, I haven't been doing a lot of kissing lately."

Chloe Sevingny.

George Bush, in a kiss at the moment of victory.

The Rangers have finally won a World Series game.

"Jumping off the gw bridge sorry."

Suicide, announced on Facebook, after live-streamed internet exposure via secret webcam.

"Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly's room and turned on my Web cam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay."

"... Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity's mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world's thirstiest gerbil."

A lengthy and ravenous kiss on a dark and stormy night.

Drudge digs in, and The Smoking Gun has the transcript depicting Gore as "a giggling 'crazed sex poodle.'"

Drudge. Smoking Gun:

In a bizarre statement to police, the Oregon woman who claims that Al Gore fondled and groped her during a massage session described the former Vice President as a giggling "crazed sex poodle" who gave a "come hither" look before pouncing on her in a Portland hotel suite. In a taped January 2009 interview with cops, the 54-year-old woman, a licensed masseuse... detailed her alleged October 2006 encounter with Gore at the Hotel Lucia.... It is unclear why, two years later, she approached Portland police and sought to memorialize her allegations against Gore, who she portrayed as a tipsy, handsy predator who forced her to drink Grand Marnier, pinned her to a bed, and forcibly French kissed her. The woman's statement--which could be mistaken for R-rated Vice Presidential fan fiction--describes Gore as a man with a "violent temper as well as extremely dictatorial commanding attitude besides his Mr. Smiley Global Warming concern persona." After fleeing Gore's suite, the woman returned home to discover, a la Lewinsky, "stains on the front of my black slacks." Suspecting that the stains were Gore bodily fluids, the woman made sure not to clean them.

Al and Tipper Gore separate.

"We are announcing today that after a great deal of thought and discussion, we have decided to separate. This is very much a mutual and mutually supportive decision that we have made together following a process of long and careful consideration. We ask for respect for our privacy and that of our family, and we do not intend to comment further."

They've been married for 41 years. What's happened?

In happier times:



ADDED: There may be global warming, but there's household cooling.

AND: Everyone's tweaking the same joke. Meade, in the comments, writes: "Gore-ball cooling."

It's the first day of spring.

Yesterday, the last day of winter, I was barefoot when I walked to the end of the driveway to kiss you goodbye. You slept on the bus, and I slept without you for the first time in our marriage and woke to a first day of spring that looked like this....



The table is set up for warm breakfasts for 2, but I'm cooking oatmeal for one, sitting elsewhere, and awaiting your missives from the Tea Party.

Real love... hyperreal...



Nuit Blanche from Spy Films on Vimeo.

"Nuit Blanche," by Arev Manoukian.

Chills.

The Kiss. El Kiss.

Elkis. Elvis.

Innocent kiss? Or kiss of death?

"A videotape of the Newark incident shows the man embracing a woman at the C-1 security checkpoint before she passes through passenger screening.... The man, who was not a passenger, walks past a spot where a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officer should have been stationed to move closer to the woman... The woman holds up a rope meant to keep unscreened people out of the secure area so that the man can pass underneath, and they walk hand-in-hand toward the boarding area before disappearing from view...."

The fact that these two individuals kissed and walked hand-in-hand does not and should not wash away suspicion. If it did, terrorists would know how to stage a security breach. Have male and female confederates. The woman passes through security and then lets in the man, who has whatever weapons/bombs on him that may be desired. The two act like lovers, and the TSA workers sit back and think ain't love grand. A few hours later, hundreds of human beings are blown to pieces.

The Daily News deftly juxtaposes pictures from the American Music Awards.

Check it out. It's like panels of a comic strip:

These pictures don't really relate to each other in the manner the sequence suggests, but the apparent story is hilarious.

In the first panel, Taylor Swift — the perfectly popular girl from whom a man once famously grabbed a phallic symbol — clutches her throat and looks with shock toward the second panel. In that second panel, American Idol also-ran Adam Lambert, clutching a phallic symbol, is angling back to get a look at the head going at his crotch. And, in panel 3, Jennifer Lopez, clutching a phallic symbol and looking quite angry, is falling backwards.

Juxtaposed, it looks like a story of sex and betrayal. In real life, the only intentional sex, simulated of course, came from Adam Lambert. He'd like you to believe he's fighting against discrimination:

"I do feel like there's a bit of a double standard in the entertainment community, on television, on radio... I feel like women performers have been pushing the envelope, especially, for the past 20 years. And all of the sudden a male does it and everybody goes 'Oh, we can't show that on TV.' For me, that's a form of discrimination and a double standard. And that's too bad."

The head in his crotch was female, by the way. Lambert subsequently canceled that discrimination by kissing a male.

Swift and Lopez weren't being sexual at all. Swift was expressing surprise — whether she felt it or not, we don't know — for beating out, as Artist of the Year, an artist whose big achievement this year was suddenly dying. And Jennifer Lopez was about to fall on what everyone feels compelled to refer to as her famous ass.

ADDED: The prime example of the womanly pushing of the envelope — in 2003 — reference by Lambert:

That journalistic encounter in Italy.

"[E]arlier in the week at the Venice festival, an Italian journalist stripped to his skivvies, declared himself gay and begged a clearly ticked-off [George] Clooney for a kiss. Ewan McGregor, who co-stars in Goats, told USA TODAY earlier in the day,'It was a waste of everyone's time, really. When you have these big press conferences ,the trouble is, that’s it. You get the half an hour, 45 minutes, and for a lot of journalists, that is it. I don’t know what his deal was. Later on, he was following him around in a boat. I saw him later." Perhaps he was inspired by Borat's stalking of Pam Anderson.'"

"He was drinking straight from a bottle of Grey Goose..."

"... and when the deejay started playing M.I.A.'s 'Paper Planes,' he got up, started dancing like a loon and kept on yelling, 'Shots!'"

Aw, leave Michael Phelps alone! What's wrong with drinking in a club? If you go out dancing, why not dance like "a loon"? Let him drink from a bottle of Grey Loon and dance like a goose if he wants. What business is it of yours?

[T]he athlete skeeved out onlookers when he persisted in PDA-ing with his girlfriend, cocktail waitress Caroline (Caz) Pal.

"They wouldn't stop making out! They were literally sucking face, and not caring that anyone was watching," says our snitch, who added that Phelps danced up such a storm that he briefly went shirtless, changing out of his T-shirt in the club and putting on a zip-up hoodie with nothing underneath.

Literally sucking face, eh? Who are these people who go to clubs and are nevertheless susceptible to the skeeves?

You know my position on public display of affection:



So just yell — good-naturedly — "Get a room!" and go find a love of your own. Or sublimate usefully.

IN THE COMMENTS: Mr. Forward has a poem:

Swims like a fish
Dances like a loon
Drinks Grey Goose
Sings off tune
Affection in Public
Isn't so wrong
At least he wasn't
Kissing his bong.

Beauty... love... kisses...

More Cloris... much more... shall I blot my lipstick first?

"She is hot in the way she is not detached, shows her emotions, seems often to say whatever comes into her mind..."

"...gets publicly and quickly agitated, yet at the same time in the midst of this hotness, keeps cooly her private self to herself, reveals only what she wants to reveal, does not make a complete exhibition of herself, and is, I believe, both calculated and spontaneous, if that’s possible, about her outbursts and her feuds. An example of that is her going teasingly public about her pending marriage yet being selectively guarded about her fiancée. That hot cold tension is consistent with her apparent openness to getting *married* on this site, where a fairly meaningless (to her) ceremony and a site on the blogosphere beget each other, and she can maintain her commitment to a certain measured trashing of public/private distinctions, such as in vouching for increased public kissing."

From an interesting comment on that Bloggingheads called "Love in the Time of Commenters." Written by one Itzik Basman, who — for good or ill — has partaken of the media philosophy of Marshall McLuhan.

"Love in the Time of Commenters."

On Bloggingheads, Bob Wright wants to know all about what's been going on. Topics:

Ann gets engaged to one of her blog’s commenters
Is the internet full of shy, lonely men?
Are women always in it for the man’s money?
Ann accuses Obama of excessive frivolity
Should we be more freaked out about the economy?
Reviving the Althouse vs. BhTV commenter rivalry

I'll update with some juicy clips soon.

ADDED: The first clip, in which Bob speculates that Meade might be my sockpuppet. The clip ends with a surprising offer.



AND: I shock Bob with a very personal revelation:



AND: "All your commenters woo you, Ann."



AND: The test for how much you need to kiss in public:



IN THE COMMENTS: Mortimer Brezny said:

See? This is why Mortimer Brezny stopped blogging. He came on this damn blog to woo Ann into marrying him and all it got him was mockery from Trooper York and into flame wars with Simon Dodd. (For which I apologize, Simon.) Then some other commenter steals Mr. Brezny's idea and succeeds. I mean, all the defending I did of Ann was totally just a vain and pitiable attempt to get in the knickerbockers! Who cares about what Ron Bailey thinks! And it's Meade! Oh man, I could have put in so much less blogging effort! Gaaah! I mean, I threw Jessica Valenti through a plate glass window for Ann! And I broke her leg with a pipe! I mean, talk about full frontal feminism!

But at least this bloggingheads diavlog clears some things up. Ann is not dominant in her personal relationships. I guess that kills it, Simon. It kills it for me. I mean, I had fantasies, man. Mortimer had dirty, filthy fantasies. Mortimer came to the meetups to score, man! It hurts! The wooing I did here! The hardcore woo action that I put out here! I was devoting it up in here. I am fulminating with rage! Rage and fulmination and fire and brimstone! I mean, if I can't have Ann, no one else should! That is the cosmic rule, doesn't everyone KNOW that?

Anyway, I'm not a shy guy. I don't have any problems meeting women. I just use e-harmony. That's where the real sluts are. But, truly heartbroken. I am. Truly.

So: congratulations and stuff. To the happy couple. This post has all been performance art. Now I must go weep. And, I better get frontpaged for this crap.

"I look up, waiting for my friend, the one infused with love. There she is. See the tip of her blond head?"

"Oh, but wait, there’s another couple in love. Wow. It’s everywhere."

***

I love kissing in public. Come on, everyone! Do it today! Do it until somebody yells "Get a room!"

Adventures in kissing.

Kissing is so important.

Tracy Davies, 40, bit off a third of Mark Coghill's tongue after telling him "you never give me smoochy kisses any more."...

Davies was convicted of grievous bodily harm but cleared of the same charge with intent at Newcastle Crown Court....

They kissed and she bit down hard on his tongue, causing him to scream, and he tapped her on the head, hoping she would let go.

He said: "Then when she did stop, she opened her mouth and looked at me in such a way that I have never seen anyone do before."

Mr Coghill said he could see part of his tongue inside her mouth.

He said: "She let out a satisfaction sound, like if you have a cup of tea when you haven't had one for a few days.

"A 'mmmm' sound."

She then spat it on the floor, he said.

Would you rather kiss Bill Clinton or Barack Obama? Hillary picks Barack!

(Thanks, Chris.)