Pissed off prof...

... pissing.

"That last post wrecked my blog theme. I was working on a theme."

Meade: "What theme?"

Me: "My piss theme. I had a piss theme going. That's how I got to the dog that pissed off the Nazis. I Googled 'piss,' because I saw I had a theme going."

Meade: "What?"

Me: "There was the 'pee-o-meter' and... "

Meade: "Where was the piss in the first post, the Johnny Weir..."

Me (suddenly realizing I didn't use Johnny Weir's "pissed me off" and "heard worse in bathrooms" until the the second post): "Oh, yeah."

Meade: "Johnny Wee-er."

Me: "You're good with the homophones. The homophobe homophones."

Meade: "I'm afraid of homophones."

"Edmonton's Gold Medal Hockey Pee-O-Meter."

Things found in the sidebar of a Canadian website while looking for other things.

What I was looking for was that quote about poutine.

Eh. The whole quote isn't even there. It's here:

It was them criticizing me as a person, and that was something that frankly pissed me off. I’ve heard worse in bathrooms about me.... If I had the chance to sit down with them over a poutine, I think we'd all be, like, lovely people together.

Things you may have missed if you didn't hang out here over the weekend.

1. "Witch! Whore!... Nazi!" How evil is it for a candidate to play the role of a Nazi in war reenactments? How evil is it for a journalist to write about that and bury — in the 13th paragraph — the news that the same man — Rich Iott —  has also done reenactment as a Civil War Union infantryman, a World War I doughboy and a World War II American infantryman and paratrooper?

2. It's sexist to worry about calling Meg Whitman a whore. If women are going to join men in politics, they deserve to be called whores like the rest of them.  

3. Woeful/wilful metaphor deafness: Some people just don't/won't understand what it means to say "some people are just born to be slaves."

4. "Watch Russ Feingold confidently assert that he represents Tea Party values."

5. The story of a pregnant woman who had to pee invokes an old memory of the time I was persecuted by Episcopalians. 

Another classic case of hardass New Yorkitude.

From the comments section of the NY Post:

this story actually makes me furious. she peed her pants and she's suing a club. another classic case of an "entitlement cvnt".

last time i checked pregnancy was a personal choice. you aren't bestowed with any special powers, knowledge, or freedoms.

don't like being pregnant in big bad ny -- then leave, and go the burbs where you and giant stroller belong.

i have a country house in CT. they'll let you pee anywhere here. get out of ny, spoiled whining cow.

This story makes me furious too, by the way. I'm furious that a newspaper reports on a lawsuit without stating what the legal claim is. Is there a tort claim in New York for failing to give special treatment to pregnant women? "She blames Hammerstein management for the humiliation of wetting her pants"... but isn't this publicity, brought on by the lawsuit, humiliating? Or is she trying to "humiliate" the Hammerstein Ballroom into paying her off to undo the bad publicity she's giving them — with the help of a lawsuit and NY Post?

ADDED: I'm removing the "lawsuits I hope will fail" tag, because I don't understand what really happened here. My criticism is of the journalism, and my reason for writing the post was the hilariously unsympathetic comment. I'm not entirely unsympathetic myself. I remember being pregnant in New York City — twice — and wanting people to be spontaneously helpful to me — giving me a seat on the subway or offering me a place to nap at the law firm — and feeling sad about humanity because I didn't get that help. But I never asked for special concern.

Except once, actually. It was 1982, and I was going on a religious retreat with a group of individuals from a Manhattan church. It was about a 3-hour drive to the place, and a woman in the van lit up a cigarette. Would you please not smoke? I asked. She said she would continue to smoke, so I said that the reason I felt I had to ask is that I was pregnant. The woman and everyone else in the van rejected my request. I was told that smoking is only bad for the smoker — as if I were dumb to think otherwise. I said I couldn't go with them, and they stopped the van and gave me my luggage. As they left me there on the wrong side of the West Side Highway, which I would have to cross, at night, before hiking a couple of unfamiliar blocks to get to a place where I could begin to try to hail a cab, one young woman detained me for a little lecture: I was being selfish and not considerate of others, and therefore I was not a good Christian. I used to feel chastened by criticisms like that, and it wasn't until I was in the cab, crying, heading back toward Brooklyn, that it occurred to me that I might have said to her that I was concerned for others, because I was concerned about my unborn child.

CORRECTION: That was the NY Post, not The Daily News. Sorry.

Space toilet — bet you're not ready for that.

"Obama isn't a Muslim. But here are other things that 20 percent of Americans believe."

Says the Washington Post, a propos of the Pew poll. Well, can we have a poll about whether Americans believe that admitting to peeing in pools is a belief? I say it's not, but maybe that puts me in the 20% of Americans that WaPo would like us to be seen as marginal.

"... a capella (for those of you who don't speak Italian, that means singing with a mouthful of capers....)"

"(... It creates a kind of warbly tone while at the same time encouraging guests not to sit too close to the stage.)"

Ha. I hate getting hit by stray bits of food. I once sat in the front row of a play that had a small refrigerator right in front of where I was sitting. There was a lot of talk of food, and much opening and closing of the refrigerator, putting things in. As might have been predicted, the climax of the show involved stuff coming out of that refrigerator.

Dialogue that I've never forgotten from that play:

What's that smell in here?

Artichokes.

Artichokes, huh? Smells like stale piss. Never was big on vegetables myself. I'm a steak man. "Meat and blood," that's my motto. Keeps your bones hard as ivory.

Do artichokes roll when they hit the pitched floor of a stage? Yes, so don't sit in the front row.

"Why is there ice in the lobby men’s room urinals?" asks the NY Times.

In this (possibly useful) article about (relatively) cheap but (somehow) stylish hotels in New York City. I don't go — no pun intended — in the bathrooms where one finds urinals, but if I were writing that article, I would at the very least Google the phrase "ice in urinals" before leaving it in an article. I would know that some readers would Google "ice in urinals" and I wouldn't want to be embarrassed if the answer was something it would be embarrassing not to know. And once I'd done that, I'd know the answer, because "ice in urinals" gets "about 231,000 results" in Google, beginning with "Why Ice in the Urinals?" in AskMetafilter. You see this right away:

There's a discussion of this in The Straight Dope Tells All. The leading theories are:

• The melting ice acts as a slow, continuous flush
• Ice cools the air around the urinal. Cool air sinks, which serves to contain the smell
• Cold discourages drain flies
• Fun to melt, helps users aim better, compensates for poor male sanitary habits

New York Times, you seem to need a little help, so... let me Google that for you.

"Our reflexive response to 'Everybody Draw Mohammad Day'... was sympathetic. But Althouse prompted us to reconsider."

"Us" = Best of the Web (James Taranto):

"Piss Christ" is not an entirely apposite example, for it prompted no threats of violence or calls for suppression. It was an issue not of free speech but of subsidized speech; people objected to their tax dollars' bankrolling Serrano via the National Endowment for the Arts. But it isn't hard to think of other examples in which speech that is offensive to large numbers of people has occasioned censorship or violence or the threats thereof.

I'm glad to see Taranto do what I was challenging my commenters to do. (I said: "If you don't think the 'Piss Christ' or the American flag hypos are sufficiently on point, then make a better hypo. That's my challenge. Make a hypo that is the same but without the Muslim element, and seriously test your thinking on the subject.") Taranto:

Until 1989, it was a crime in some states to burn the American flag as a political statement. In Texas v. Johnson the U.S. Supreme Court held that this is protected symbolic speech. In ensuing years members of Congress repeatedly tried to propose a constitutional amendment permitting the criminalization of flag burning. It is the view of this column that flag burning is and should remain protected speech. We deplore it nonetheless, and we think holding an "Everybody Burn the Flag Day" would be stupid, obnoxious and counterproductive if one seeks to persuade others that flag burning should be tolerated.

In my comments, Jason (the commenter) had posed the flag hypo — sarcastically: "If burning an American flag were illegal and there was a 'Burning an American Flag' Day, you can bet I'd be out there burning an American flag, because I believe the right to burn an American flag is what America is all about." Back to Taranto:

"Hate speech"--for example, shouting racial slurs, positing theories of racial supremacy or denying the Holocaust--is illegal in Canada and many European countries. In the U.S. it is protected by the First Amendment--but it has been known to provoke a violent reaction....

This column is also of the opinion that hate-speech laws are pernicious and that the First Amendment does and should protect the expression of even ugly and false ideas. But we would not endorse or participate in an "Everybody Shout a Racial Slur Day" or an "Everybody Deny the Holocaust Day" to make the point.

"Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" seems different to people, Taranto says:

Because the taboo against depictions of Muhammad is not a part of America's common culture. The taboos against flag burning, racial slurs and Holocaust denial are. The problem with the "in-your-face message" of "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" is not just that it is inconsiderate of the sensibilities of others, but that it defines those others--Muslims--as being outside of our culture, unworthy of the courtesy we readily accord to insiders. It is an unwise message to send, assuming that one does not wish to make an enemy of the entire Muslim world.

Okay, all you readers who drove the comments up over 400 trying to push me back. I have Taranto! What say you now?!

***

I'm still searching for the perfect hypo that involves upsetting Christians. How about a proposal to protest the sexual abuse scandals of the Catholic church with "Everybody Suck on a Crucifix" day?

"RESURRECTION: NYT runs Obama 'cross' photo..."

Says Drudge, pointing to this "Illustration by Nola Lopez, photograph by Damon Winter." I'm not sure where the photograph ends and the illustration begins, but, either way it's quite a bizarre accompaniment to an article called "As Health Vote Awaits, Future of a Presidency Waits, Too." I don't think there's anything in the article even touching on religion... except to the extent that Obama is some kind of religion.

IN THE COMMENTS: Some of you think that the cross in this context should be understood as representing health care and not Christianity at all. (Sea Urchin said: "Well, it is a square cross, which I associate first with the picture on my first aid kit.") I hope that if you think that, you also agree — and many don't — with what Justice Scalia said at oral argument in Salazar v. Buono, the case about the cross that the Veterans of Foreign Wars built in the Mojave National Preserve, which is supposed to honor the soldiers who died in WWI:

"It's erected as a war memorial. I assume it is erected in honor of all of the war dead... What would you have them erect?...Some conglomerate of a cross, a Star of David, and you know, a Muslim half moon and star?"

Peter Eliasberg, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer arguing the case, explained that the cross is the predominant symbol of Christianity and commonly used at Christian grave sites, not that the devoutly Catholic Scalia needed to be told that.

"I have been in Jewish cemeteries," Eliasberg continued. "There is never a cross on a tombstone of a Jew."

There was mild laughter in the packed courtroom, but not from Scalia.

"I don't think you can leap from that to the conclusion that the only war dead that that cross honors are the Christian war dead. I think that's an outrageous conclusion," Scalia said, clearly irritated by the exchange.

IN THE COMMENTS: Palladian said:

There's a theory that the symbol of the red cross was painted on the baseboards of corridors in the great palaces and castles of England during the middle ages and Renaissance to deter people from urinating in those places, a common problem in those times. It was supposed that a person would not want to micturate upon the symbols of Albion and of his saviour Christ. These effluence-protected spots thereby became associated with cleanness, which led to the later use of the cross to connote sanitation and hygiene. This association eventually led to the use of the red cross as a symbol for medical practitioners, once the connection between hygiene and disease prevention was made, that is.

J.D. Salinger has died.

Link.

ADDED: "He was 91"... so a long detailed obituary was ready to go. You can read it at that link. Who here was not entranced by "Catcher in the Rye" at some point in their lives?

“Catcher” was published in 1951, and its very first sentence, distantly echoing Mark Twain, struck a brash new note in American literature: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”...

With its cynical, slangy vernacular voice (Holden’s two favorite expressions are “phony” and “goddam”), its sympathetic understanding of adolescence and its fierce if alienated sense of morality and distrust of the adult world, the novel struck a nerve in cold war America and quickly attained cult status, especially among the young. Reading “Catcher” used to be an essential rite of passage, almost as important as getting your learner’s permit.

And yes, yes, there are all those murderers who have that book in their back pocket. So don't get too entranced by it. Move on, read other things. But don't be a goddam phony.

MORE: A big question is, now that he's dead: Are there unpublished manuscripts that we'll get to see? Will we learn more about his retreat from the world?

In 1953 Mr. Salinger, who had been living on East 57th Street in Manhattan, fled the literary world altogether and moved to a 90-acre compound on a wooded hillside in Cornish, N.H. He seemed to be fulfilling Holden’s desire to build himself “a little cabin somewhere with the dough I made and live there for the rest of my life,” away from “any goddam stupid conversation with anybody.”

Or do we you really want to hear about it anymore, now that all these years have passed,  years of a hermit life almost as long as my whole life? (And I'm pretty old.)

Well, there will be no more goddam stupid conversation with anybody anymore for him, but I've got to say I hope he held up some kind of one-sided end of a conversation with us for the past quarter century and we'll get some more readings.

But was he writing? The question obsessed Salingerologists, and in the absence of any real evidence, theories multiplied. He hadn’t written a word for years. Or like the character in Stephen King’s novel “The Shining,” he wrote the same sentence over and over again. Or like Gogol at the end of his life, he wrote prolifically but then burned it all up. Ms. Maynard said she believed there were at least two novels locked away in a safe, although she had never seen them. Quote TK from Salinger’s agent about surviving manuscripts, if any, and plans for them.

Ha ha. That last sentence is now edited out of the NYT obit at the link. Come on, TK!

Mr. Salinger was controlling and sexually manipulative, [Joyce] Maynard wrote, and a health nut obsessed with homeopathic medicine and with his diet (frozen peas for breakfast, undercooked lamb burger for diner). [Margaret] Salinger said that her father was pathologically self-centered and abusive toward her mother, and to the homeopathy and food fads she added a long list of other exotic enthusiasms: Zen Buddhism, Vedanta Hinduism, Christian Science, Scientology and acupuncture. Mr. Salinger drank his own urine, she wrote, and sat for hours in an orgone box.

Ugh! Maybe I don't want to read anything more.

Expensive toilet.

An all-too-inviting corner of the atrocity that is Empire State Plaza.

"Astronaut urine spotted in skies above North America."

That glowing streak of light was just "a fortnight's worth of astronaut waste."

"Zambia's president evicts 'peeing monkeys' from State House."

Front page teaser for "Zambia's peeing monkeys evicted."

There were 200 monkeys in the state house, and presumably they were peeing all the time. But one peed on the president during a news conference. That's it for the state house monkeys.

ADDED: There are not enough animals running around in American press conferences. Maybe it would help those townhalls and tea parties: more monkeys.

"Everybody in Washington gets all wee-weed up."

What the President meant was that everybody's ... peeing.

What we watched off the TiVo last night.

1. "Death Camp of Tolerance." (And no, we're not going to using "Lemmiwinks" as a pet name for our dear commenter Lem.) ("Death Camp" ≈ "death panels," no?)

2. "The Colbert Report," #05108 with Barbara Boxer. (Haven't watched Colbert in a while. He's less funny pretending to hate Democrats than he was pretending to love Republicans.)

3. "Trapped Under a Boulder." (This one never gets old. Well, what would you do if you were out camping amongst the Australian boulders and you had to pee in the middle of the night? Watch for the crawfish cameo.)

"They also recommend us to only use national toilet."

"They told me: 'Yes, you can.' Then they said no," whines the cosmonaut.

"Don't worry, it won't smell like urine and will be tasty too."

Quaff some "gau jal" — "cow water" — the drink made from cow urine:

The drink is the latest attempt by [the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), India's biggest and oldest Hindu nationalist group] – to cleanse India of foreign influence and promote its ideology of Hindutva, or Hindu-ness.

Hindus revere cows and slaughtering them is illegal in most of India. Cow dung is traditionally used as a fuel and disinfectant in villages, while cow urine and dung are often consumed in rituals to "purify" those on the bottom rungs of the Hindu caste system.

In 2001, the RSS and its offshoots... began promoting cow urine as a cure for ailments ranging from liver disease to obesity and even cancer.

I don't mean to be culturally insensitive, but... ew. And to be a little bit positive, I do see how it might help with obesity.

IN THE COMMENTS: Apparently, if you must talk about the stimulus package, this thread is the appropriate place to gush forth.