You know, I have reason to believe that The Boy is the boy. And I think I know who it is...

Nope: Not the Boy. A more complicated, less interesting, explanation.

Mickey Kaus, uber-blogger, spends $50 to catch Rush Limbaugh making a false claim and manipulating a quote. Bonus Powerline complicity! Here; read down, then scroll up.

I do like being a regular at the take-out place down the street. I walk in, they start making my usual, everyone's happy. But they don't speak much English, and now I'm locked in. I tried to order something different: "Today I think I'll have the...." and they just laughed, and gave me the usual.

Headline:

In Unusual Agreement, 'Post-Dispatch' Will Remain Liberal Under Lee

Drudge's headline:

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, sold, must remain liberal--by contract!

Relevant portion of the contract:

the newspaper "will always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty."

Three flight-tracking sites, three different estimated arrival times: 9:49pm, 10:07pm, 10:26pm. I want my money back.

Eh: Least systematic mind ever? It just occurs to me that I can check to see which site will have had the most accurate report.

Bwhaha!: Phone just rang. Friend on the plane: they still haven't taken off.

I just read this sentence from a student paper: "The Holocaust is now seen as a huge moral mistake."

Yes, that seems right, as far as it goes.

1. I recognize that the fact that, in my experience, knowledge of the proper care of potato chips breaks down along gender lines does not mean that it breaks down everywhere and always in that way. But ladies, try to keep two things always in your minds: those chip crumbs in the bottom of the bag? They're still good. For the love of god, don't throw them out. But, the fact that they're still good does *not* mean that you can dump them into the freshly opened bag. Thank you.

2. The Ex and I are pretty different, by which, in this context, I mean that she's on top of shit and I'm not. Nevertheless, we both have a hell of a time actually booking airplane tickets online. We are happy to look for flights, we are happy to spend hours lining up the perfect itinerary. But some mysterious force keeps us from actually entering our credit card information and clicking "Purchase." We wait, and end up paying more, for no good reason at all. It can't be just us.

Mission accomplished.

In case you're wondering about my lighting, I just bought this. Awesome. Soon I will become a cyborg.

The always-interesting Yglesias finds some data on the popularity of displaying the Ten Commandments* in public places. Suggestion: here's an area of compromise that's more politically fruitful than abortion and more likely to work. I could be talked into the Yglesias line, since I'm much, much happier with some imperatives on the wall than I am with selling out access to abortion. On the other hand, there's something deeply creepy about this, not to mention dumb. I await your insights.

*A friend of mine once recorded an industrial-rap track with the lyrics "God is indeed guilty of abandonment/ I wipe my ass with your ten command-a-ments!" Awesome.

** there's a link at "data" to the, uhm, data, but for some reason it's appearing as regular text on my browser.

*** OK, now it's fixed.

Here's another, different, locker-room observation: Jewish guys are really good with their sons. They listen to them, reason with them, and generally treat them like human beings. The white guys tend to treat their kids like unruly robots, still in beta. (Of course, an abundance of bacon in the lives of white people makes up for a lot.)

Congratulations to Ezra Klein on his American Prospect fellowship. Extra props for having his celebratory gathering at a bar on Gaylee Avenue.

Profgrrrrl is off to visit The Boy. Funny, I don't remember agreeing to see other people. Forget McDonald's PG, it's Taco Bell drive-thru for you.

Hooray! Tim Burke is back, at a shiny new blog, with comments.

Is it really possible that I haven't done a dirty limerick post? I like to tell myself that Labs is the reason this is the cock joke blog but.... On some long boring road trip, occasional commenter Kitty Darfour and I did a little collaboratin'. Uh, probably not for the easily offended.

There once was a man from Phoenix

Who sported a 20-inch penis

He'd say to the lads, as they cried for their dads

"Let's just keep this between us."

There once was a man from China

With a taste for sweetsour vagina

Licking his chops, he said to the cops

"I no know she a mina'!"

John Emerson with another classic, this time wondering about a troll's motivation.

what does that loser asshole think he's doing? What are the alternative activities he has that are worse than trolling a philosophy website? Is his life over? Is there nothing to do where he lives?

I come here because it's often interesting, and I piss on trolls whenever necessary because of a promise I made to my late father ("Always piss on those moron loser shits", he said with his last breath), but what's that moron's excuse?

Did he make some kind of promise to his moron loser idiot troll father on HIS deathbed?

Here's a referring search that will please the sophisticates: Σοφια. Or does it need to be a less common word?

Hey, people who keep searching about it: yes, his prose is pellucid, and thus indicates a certain fastidiousness of character, but, by his own account, Malcolm Gladwell is not gay.

I like now, as then, dark-haired Jewish girls, spy novels, and thrillers.

The night before my cousin's wedding, a good friend and his wife came to a dinner party at my mom's. They both travel for work, so he'd flown in from Dublin a few hours before, and she from New York. They were tired, but still fully charming. They stayed a few hours, and early the next morning, she was having a medical test which required that she be put under. They showed up at the wedding that night, all alert, she beautiful. Dude. In either one's shoes, at any of those points, I would have either been dead out, or totally surly. There are some things you can tell yourself that you'd do, if you chose to, but there are other things that you just have to admit you can't manage.

I should know this by now, but what, other than making weight for a competition and the facilitation of hot gay sex, is the purpose of saunas and steamrooms?

Labs said,

What old men we are.

I agreed.

I think it's more a case of discovering what an old man I've always been.

But now I take it all back, because I just saw a real-live old man blow-drying his toes.

Part of growing up, I suppose, is giving up some youthful notions about oneself. As much as the next literary/philosophy type, I would have liked to be a wanton bohemian: keeping crazy hours, flouting rules, sticking it to the man.

So, in a happy way, it kinda sucks that I'm thrilled that my little vacation is over. It's time to admit that I'm a creature of habit and routine. I'm endlessly relieved to know when I'll be eating next, when I'll go home, when I'll go to sleep, etc. In my case, it's mostly about eating. If I'm hungry, I'm unbearable to myself and everyone around me. And the thing that reliably sets off my heart arrhythmia is a combination of upsetting my digestion and then either gorging myself or having a cold beverage (yes, this is absurd). But it doesn't really matter what the mechanism is, facts are facts. My name is Ogged, and I like my routine.

Kevin Drum quotes the Trib.

Your continual focus on, and reporting of, missing, young, attractive white women not only demeans your profession but is a televised slap in the face to minority mothers and parents the nation over who search for their own missing children with little or no assistance or notice from anyone.

Amen. I don't watch TV news, so I avoid most of this, but I'm always aware of headlines about the latest missing woman. I don't understand the fascination. Ideas?

(Also, I recently learned that the Hollywood term of art for "damsel in distress" is now "woman in jeopardy.")

Score!

Explained.

Home at last. I do like Top Secretville. I especially like that the cabbie scolded me in broken English for wasting money on a cab when I could have taken the train from the airport.

Starting in three days, I'm going to have one or more people staying with me through the end of the month. Better get my blogging in...

I had some strange dreams last night, some of which were amazing. The funny one was this: I dreamt that I ran into Courtney Love in a bathroom, and she wouldn't hook me up with any prescription downs. She was all "I'm not holding, blah, blah, blah", but clearly wasted. It pissed me off. (Tangential note: I have actually stood in line with Ms. Love to buy drugs, "back in the day". She was waiting with Evan Dando of the Lemonheads at "the Laundromat" on 7th St between Aves. B and C in NYC. Memories.)

The dream that was cool was a dream within a dream, and in the outer frame someone was trying to get me to do something, but I couldn't keep my eyes open, and such strange things began passing before them that I realized I was delirious with fever. Then I figured, well, just because things aren't real doesn't mean they're not fun to look at, so what the hell. I just closed my eyes and went along for the ride. The scenes were all of different landscapes speeding by, as if I were on a train, all so beautiful and indescribable and strange. One of them was a kind of ice forest. There was no snow on the ground, and the trees were deciduous, spare as in a park, with the ground carpeted with moss. But there was blue cold fog smoking up out of the ground, and anywhere the earth had fallen away into a little escarpment you could see that the trees sat on a base of blue ice, blue as some newly-calved glacier in the antarctic. The other one was just plain trippy: alternating veldt and forest, shading through every color of the rainbow, brilliant red, radioactive violet, and on and on. I say "trippy", but the truth is you never see anything that cool when you're tripping. This was like your childhood imagining of hallucination. Unearthly sharp, still as death, colors that you've never seen before.

Weiner stood us up [No, it was all Ben's fault]. The sad-sack three of us: me, Kotsko, W-lfs-n, stood outside the pub Weiner had chosen, but there was no Weiner. We gave him forty minutes, and there was no Weiner. We wandered off, glancing back every few steps, looking for a guy holding a cat up to his face...we strolled the wasteland that is the Loop on a Sunday night, narrowly avoided eating at Subway, and ate at Chipotle instead.

I've got no dish. They're good guys, Adam and Ben. Weiner, I'm sure, is unbearable.

Ah: I see the other two already blogged this. If ever an event was less deserving of three blog posts...

Aha, my friend comes through with a list. I present it to you unedited, though not undisputed.

1. Ran over my foot with your car - on purpose.

A slight mischaracterization. I did not intentionally back my car onto his foot. However, it is true that I did not immediately, or even quickly, remove my car from his foot when he said, "You're on my foot." Not on the original list because: his foot didn't explode. Seriously: because the original terrible sin really was unintentional.

2. Wouldn't let me sleep with your roomate (initially at least) - when you were cheating on your girlfriend with her.

Is this not the strangest complaint ever? Yes, I was cheating on my girlfriend (my first girlfriend, from hell) at the tail-less end of our relationship. I think my friend's thinking was, "If this roommate will fool around with Ogged, she'll fool around with anyone." (Out of pure Christian charity I won't relate what happened when he acted on this assumption.) I confess that it took me about 15 and maybe as many as 30 minutes to say that I didn't mind if he tried to make a move. Not on the original list because: Taking only 30 minutes to decide to share is downright saintly. What about the cheating? That was after my girlfriend had told this very friend, in my presence, that we were still living together because I helped pay the rent. Zero guilt. (Ok, even so, I wouldn't cheat now because it's dishonorable, so yes, it is a black mark, though not one I feel bad about.)

3. Tried punching me in high school - after someone else started to make fun of you.

This contains a kernel of truth. The other guy deserved it more. So, guilty. *But*, one background assumption is false: my friend was not smaller than the other guy. (Other guy's initials, o friend: A.S. You guys were both tiny freshman year.) As I tried to explain last night at the wedding, going after him was in truth an expression of friendship.

Quite enjoyed the wedding, especially the bride's dad consistently referring to Iranians as "you people" (in the sweetest possible way), mortifying his wife every time. Tomorrow, brunch! With all the same people! And maybe a dinner with W-lfs-n Weiner.