"Why on earth would you want to do that?"

"Remember? I'm having the blog chicks over for pasta tomorrow night."

"Isn't it a bit cold on the balcony?" he asks.

"Aha!" I had him, there. "I told them to bring their coats, in case they wanted to smoke after dinner."

"How many of the blog chicks smoke cigars, Dear?"

"Well, let's see." I closed my eyes. "I smoke. And Justene smokes. And sometimes Justene's husband. So that makes three of us. Neither Caltech Girl nor her husband are into cigars."

"And how many smokes are in your humidor right now?" There's a smile playing around the edge of his lips.

"Well, there are nineteen full-size ones, and then five of those little minis—the Partagas from Cuba."

He steps on the brakes as we near the Chrysler service shop. "That might be enough, you know."

"Ah, but we might be able to talk Baldilocks into having one."

"Which could bring you down to only fifteen. I see."

"Wait, wait!" I burst out, and for a second A the H veers to the side of the road, thinking he's about to miss the driveway to the service department.

"What the hell?" he asks. He spots the driveway and makes the turn.

"Sometimes one of Justene's teenagers will have a drag on one of the cigars, or a sip of red wine from one of our glasses."

"Okay." He's gritting his teeth, now. "Let's say the two girls get completely carried away, and you're left with a baker's dozen."

"Would you pull over here, Honey?" I ask him, sweetly. "I've got to scoot. More cigars, and—more wine. Thanks for reminding me about the twins. See you at home!"

If I had to live with me I think I'd poison myself. But that onerous task falls to someone else. I mean, the living with, rather than the poisoning. So far.

Say Goodnight, Joy.

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1 Enjoy those cigars! I've moved inside the garage to smoke now as it has gotten a bit cold. A wireless connection, some good rum, a good cigar and it is all I need for my little blogging haven.

Posted by: Cigar Jack at November 30, 2007 09:44 PM (BW9Zv)

2 Reminds me of the time, about twenty years ago, when two guys in my shop became fathers in quick succession. This was before smoking was banned indoors through the military (I was in the AF), so we were lighting up the stogies in the shop, although Captain Callamaras told me that the cigar was not to pass through the doorway into area of the building where his office and admin section was. The brand we got included some King Edwards and the kind with the pink wrapper that say "It's a Girl" on them, which are probably the very worst cigars of all. The shop stunk for weeks after that.

Posted by: John at December 01, 2007 01:49 PM (3F9tM)

3 Goodnight, Joy

Posted by: Darrell at December 02, 2007 02:32 PM (eEcre)

4 Cute, D. I managed to air the dining room out pretty well last night. I usually have to wash whatever I'm wearing afterward, though.

Posted by: Attila Girl at December 02, 2007 04:43 PM (aywD+)

5 I couldn't take it anymore--can't people do what they're told? Cigars do have a way of keeping the memories stale. I'd suggest a patio heater, but I'm not that brave. People that lived by the stock yards never seemed to mind. Or notice. Febreze will help with all those other absorbent/adsorbent surfaces if you don't care to get used to it, though.

Posted by: Darrell at December 02, 2007 07:52 PM (xX5JM)

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has the face that brought back a thousand ships.

Okay, I'm sorry. I swore I'd never do that sort of humor, because it's sexist and offensive.

It's also unnecessary, since Dana Perino has already taken care of the situation. You go, girl!

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Over at Ace's digs:

. . . The correct answer to the Confederate Flag question is "Sir, I am not running for Governor of Georgia. Fly the flag, don't fly the flag, honestly, most Americans see this as a regional controversy best left to individuals and States. Fuck You, Next Question."

Leave it to Ace's crew to come up with the appropriate response to these "gotchas." FY, NQ.

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for "spending too much time on enterprises that don't reflect my core competencies."

Not so with some people.

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Iowahawk covers the disappointing earnings from Hollywood's latest wave of hard-hitting anti-Santa, anti-Christmas movies:

Star power was also unable to save Sundance Films' "Dialog On 34th Street," Writer/ Producer/ Director/ Star/ Costume Designer/ Makeup Artist Robert Redford's take on the Christmas quagmire. Just last month the film had a triumphant debut for Redford at Redford's prestigious Sundance Film Festival, where it brought home Best Picture and earned Redford the Golden Redford for his portrayal of a young, gauzily-lit rugged dissident intellectual cowboy filmmaker who exposes the lies told by a department store Santa Claus (Tom Cruise) to a cynical 7-year old girl (Meryl Streep). During its national weekend opening, however, it was only able to generate $7,425 in tickets sales, a figure which some industry analyst said would not cover the film's advertising budget, let alone the CGI and spackle cost for Mr. Redford's closeup scenes. The film may have also suffered from lukewarm reviews that faulted its overly cerebral tone, and 68-minute laptop dialog between Cruise and Streep.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert, who gave glowing, 5-star reviews to each of the films, said he was not surprised by their poor financial performance.

"It's sad, but hopefully these wonderful films will do much better in the overseas market," said Ebert. "No matter how much down inside they know how Christmas is wrong, and Santa is wrong, it's hard for Americans to see their elves portrayed in a balanced, realistic way, as tragically haunted sadistic pederasts. By contrast European filmgoers are much more sophisticated and educated, so they eat that shit right up."

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Protein Wisdom's Karl runs a small roundup, and concludes:

It seems that CNN spent about as much time researching the criticism of its televised trainwreck as it put into vetting the people they put at the controls of the train. It also appears that the network’s spokespeople have no idea that the content of the selected questions says every bit as much about their biases as the questioners they promoted — though CNN could have discovered it by canvassing the blogs discussing the “debate.”

Then again, it does appear that CNN does not have what the YouTube generation would call “mad Intartubes skillz.”

Update: It appears that Rush Limbaugh also thought a debate amongst Republican candidates leading up to Republican caucuses and primaries should feature questions about the issues which most concern Republicans, rather than reflecting CNNÂ’s stereotype of the GOP. So add radio to the list of technologies CNN has yet to master.

I'm actually pretty embarrassed for CNN. I'm not even sure that they're stonewalling: it could be that they just honestly don't get it. If the stakes weren't so high, their tiny minds would tug at my heartstrings. But selecting a President is kind of a serious matter; any chance CNN could hire some grownups to get them through the next year?

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Red State is drawing a line in the sand over the number of Democratic party activist questioners in last night's "Republican" debate on CNN:

This debate was not about Republicans asking the Republican candidates questions. This was about CNN abusing its position to push a Democratic agenda.

This has all the markings of a set up, and heads should roll at CNN.

In the meantime:

1) Republican candidates for President should boycott CNN.

2) Republican viewers should boycott CNN until they fire Sam Feist, their political director; and David Bohrman, Senior Vice President and Executive Producer of the debate.

3) One or more of the Republican candidates should demand a do-over, wherein we can have a substantive debate about substantive issues that exclude CNN's agenda, which is clearly out of touch with the Republican party, and the drivel we saw from YouTube.

Though it is rare we take this additional step from a "Directors" post, we the undersigned contributors want to make sure our names are attached hereto:

Erick Erickson
Thomas Crown
Ben Domenech
Jeff Emanuel
Dan Spencer, aka California Yankee
Mark I.
Kevin Holtsberry
Pejman Yousefzadeh
Moe Lane
streiff
Alexham
Dave Poff, aka haystack
Martin A. Knight
Robert A. Hahn
Leon H. Wolf

(The emphasis is mine.)

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Over at Protein Wisdom, Karl fillets CNN.

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I first wrote about a Rauch article on my old blog, when I praised his coining of the term apatheistim in The Atlantic as a philosophy of life—not merely for athiests and agnostics, but for hard-core believers (in any faith) as well. (The entry is here scroll down to "live and let live.") Rauch isn't an old-school church-and-state separatist, but rather someone who sees the danger in us becoming so preoccupied with our religions or lack thereof that we lose the benefits of living in a civil society.

My biggest online adversary (and high-school sweetheart, the best boyfriend I ever had) lauded that entry of mine—along with the Rauch philosophy it espoused—and posted about it, both on his blog and on our high-school email list. (Unfortunately, he's nuked his archives, so I can't find his public comments on the subject.)

Now I've had a chance to tap into the mother lode. Rauch's book Kindly Inquisitors lays the broad intellectual framework for why tolerance of minority opinions—even the ones we are tempted to label as "hate speech"—is the only way our society can flourish, and the only way scientific inquiry can go forward.

My copy of the book is so dog-eared, it would have saved time if I had simply marked the pages that didn't contain blazing insights or fun turns-of-phrase.

It's put together as cleverly as a Malcolm Gladwell book, with a sort of circular structure to it. Rauch takes us on a light intellectual romp through the playgrounds of Plato, Descartes, Hume, Popper and Mencken to preach his ultimate message: if we want to preserve scientific inquiry and Western Civilization, we need to develop thicker skins. If we are offended by mere words (those that do not threaten physical violence), he writes, we need to simply get over it.

And upon this, he argues—free speech—the whole house of cards we live in rests.

Read the book.

h/t: Virginia Postrel, of course. After I finished her second book, The Substance of Style, I was very sad that she had only written two. My solution was to scour her bibliographies and simply start reading the stuff she'd been reading. So far, so bitchin'. But, Virginia: more books, please. Stat.

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Why his popularity is a victory for libertarians, no matter how we feel about him as a man or a candidate:

He's just terrible, even when—which is often, once he's off the subject of the war—I agree with him. His voice is too high, he can't remember who the Kurds are, and he often comes off like a crazy old man in a bus station.

But that's good news, in a way. Paul's doing better than anyone expected. It's abundantly clear that he's not doing it on charisma and rhetorical skill. Which means that libertarian ideas are actually appealing, since Ron Paul isn't. Paul's flaws as a vessel for those ideas prove the ideas' appeal. If they sell with him as the pitchman, they must be really resonating. I suspect Paul himself would agree with this analysis. Er, except maybe the bus station part.

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"I'm not buying that CNN was an honest broker here."

Was Keith Kerr's question fair? Well, sure, the question was fair. The staging of a sympathetic Hillary plant to ask it live, and seemingly without end, was not. CNN will argue they didn't know he was a Hillary plant (despite the fact it was easy enough to find out; he was found on Google to be a plant within minutes of the debate's end). But so what if they didn't know his partisan affiliation? What the hell were they doing handing the show over to him for a solid five or seven minutes anyway?

It made for sharp questioning and good drama. But if that's the name of the game, let me suggest to CNN that they allow a paralyzed veteran with limbs missing due to an IED attack similarly grill the Democratic candidates on whether they support the Democratic Congress' determination to choke off all monies needed for the military's anti-IED program. Give him the mic, live, and let him harangue the Democrats on the viciousness of IEDs, and the viciousness of them putting soldiers' lives, and limbs, in jeopardy to appease their netroots base.

Would CNN ever do such a thing? Of course not. There would be no vetting of whether he was affiliated with any campaign because there would never even be a thought of letting him grill the Democrats at all.

So CNN can fuck itself sideways with their claims of "just allowing ordinary Americans to voice their concerns." They choose which "ordinary Americans" get to ask questions; they're nothing but sock-puppets for the political agenda of CNN. The moment they begin allowing sympathetic figures to embarrass Democrats, I'll call them fair. But they won't -- the Democrats get protected, the Republicans get embarrassed.

Even the right-wing (or supposedly right-wing) questioners in these debates are chosen for their scare value. I remember at the last CNN You Tube debate -- the Democratic one -- when their question about gun rights was posed by a frankly frightening character who demonstrated a nearly sexual fascination with his weapons, calling them his "babies" (presumably, the babies he molests at night). They could have chosen, I'm sure, a dozen gun-rights questions from a dozen more reputable and more reasonable folks... instead, they put the gun-rights question in the mouth of just the sort of character that gives gun rights a bad name.

Given that a guy you wouldn't trust with a butter knife was asking if he could have all the M-16s he could possibly want for his regularly-scheduled schoolyard killing spree, it was rather easy for Joe Biden to call this nutjob what he was and say something along the lines of "You're exactly the moron I'm thinking of when I'm voting for gun control laws." And of course most of America agreed; hell, even I agreed.

RTWT.

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It wasn't just the power steering, as I had thought. A couple of other things went wrong at the same time. (The brakeline, the engine mounts.)

So, all kidding aside, this would be a great time to renew your "subscription" to LMA; all the funds I'd allotted to the CPAC convention in February are pretty much gone, and I'll be fundraising for that trip from scratch.

Christmas will be simple this year: everyone will get chocolate-chip cookies, and a hearty handshake . . .

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So the "epidemic" has plateaued, some are suggesting.

Perhaps our immune systems are learning to fight the virus that creates obesity. That would really stop the disease from spreading.

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But if you did want to see a typical specimen behave in an irrational fashion, which topic would you bring up?—breasts, or lesbianism? I'm just askin'.

Total fan of men and all that . . . but, well. You know.

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make Mother Earth happy, and construct your Christmas trees from recycled [and recycleable] materials.

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. . . when they see it?

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stop at closing late-night eateries?

Shouldn't they also escort bar-hoppers home, help them into their jammies, and tuck them into bed? And no leaving without a bedtime story, either: hearing Many Moons is a human right, after all.

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The water's fine!

I'd go for revolver, first. Maybe a .357 that you only have to shoot .38s out of. The additional weight seems to help form a stabler platform, and it'll keep your shot groups tight.

My first revolver was actually a little Chief's special, because I wanted the option to carry. That worked fine, though a hammerless spur is actually better for concealed carry. That little snubby is the one my mother stole from me, which is good. Larger guns are a bit more intimidating, though: maybe I should trader her for the .357.

I've got to get to the range again, though: I don't want to get too rusty. Also, I haven't had a chance to play with my 20-gauge at all.

And people at most ranges and gun shops are so helpful: I actually did a couple of stories a few years ago in which I went "undercover" to some local establishments as a gun novice, to see whether the advice I got was sound, and whether I got patronized as a short woman. I was treated with complete respect, and no one tried to pull the "little woman, therefore a little gun" garbage with me. All the businesses passed with flying colors, and I was encouraged to start with a revolver—which is the advice I always give, too.

Via Glenn.

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I'd like to say I'll miss you, but . . .

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on the gun grabbers' folly in DC.

Via Insty.

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