He's wondering why the "respectable" right-of-center blogosphere isn't boycotting Andrew Sullivan, who is apparently peddling that silliness about how Sarah Palin is really her last baby's grandmother, not his mother, and how the child was really carried/born by her teenaged daughter.

It's silly stuff, and we all know it. Not just because Palin is on-record as looking pregnant in her third trimester, and not just because her colleagues noticed that she was pregnant toward the end, when her loose clothing just couldn't hide it any more, but because it's simply unheard-of for a teenaged girl to have a child with Down's. The odds of Down's start climbing at around 35, and steeply, too.

They spike when a woman reaches her 40s. And of course they do: we're using up the last of our eggs. The not-very-good ones.

Anyway, Ace says a bunch of stuff about Excitable Andy, which you may read if you care for that sort of thing.

And, as usual, I long for that brief time in history in which it was Off Limits to discuss the children of Presidents (and Presidential aspirants). For the wrong reasons, perhaps. After that infamous "Saturday Night Live" sketch, Hillary Clinton made some phone calls (or so the story goes—perhaps it was Magic Fairy Dust that descended, instead) and the word went down in nearly every studio in Los Angeles that Chelsea was not to be the subject of any parodies. Period.

And I felt that the whole thing was a bit heavy-handed, but I was hoping that it would set a precedent—that we might see some privacy for the offspring of politicians, even if their spouses are normally forced to share the spotlight to some degree.

Yeah, yeah—and I'll be looking for the Great Pumpkin, too, this Halloween. What's it to you? Aren't people basically good? Why is everyone staring at me like that? No, I am not an idiot. Just not terribly bright. There's a distinction to be made, there. I think.

But as for Ace's suggestions:

1) I haven't linked to Sullivan in years. I haven't read him in years, unless it was something in The Atlantic, in long form, that I'd already paid for. (As everyone knows, that is the one magazine I get on paper. At my mail drop. Unless you are going to count the subscription that my mother got me to Prevention, which magically renews itself every year.) I'm on-board with boycotting his blog, and anything he writes online.

I don't see any reason any respectable blogger would link to Sullivan, who has been off his rocker for at least four years now.

So I'm most certainly taking up that suggestion of His Aceship. It will involve zero change in my behavior.

2) But I have no intention of eschewing the other Atlantic bloggers: I love McArdle and Coates, and I'm not giving them up. Nope.

3) The paper edition of The Atlantic also publishes Mark Steyn, as well as Christopher Hitchens, who (despite his still being A Man of the Left) has gone through hell on earth with the literati for being as much of a free-thinker as he is. He's bucked the orthodoxy many times, and paid dearly for it.

The Atlantic publishes Sandra Tsing Loh, who is brilliant, non-doctrinaire in her thinking, and an acquaintance/friend of mine from high school.

And Barbara Wallraff! I couldn't give her up. That would hurt. Physically.

Therefore, my immodest proposals would be:

• Don't bother reading Sullivan—and most certainly not his blog;

• Send a letter to the editors of The Atlantic, expressing your concern over the potentially libelous, patently illogical and almost certainly false allegations he is making about the Governor of Alaska, and (more importantly, of course) her teenaged daughter—who, even if she had born a child out of wedlock, would be entitled to some privacy regarding same.

It hardly makes sense, after all, to get the government out of our bedrooms, only to invite the media into our delivery rooms.

No, no. I won't be boycotting the other Atlanto-bloggers, and you may pry my copy of the magazine (including Wallraff's "Word Court") from my cold, dead fingers.

But I do plan to get in touch with the editors, and tell them that it's time for Sullivan to go—as a blogger, and as a contributor to the magazine. I'll do it on paper, because that's my primary relationship with these folks, and because I own bitchin' stationery I rarely use. You might [a] simply want to go to the online version, and either lodge a "Letter to the Editor" there, or use their contact form.

Or, [b] use Joy's patented "fuddy-duddy" method:

The Atlantic
Editor: James Bennett
600 New Hampshire Ave., Northwest
Washington, D.C. 20037

or [c] try this: letters@theatlantic.com

Ace is right about one thing; Sullivan is out where the buses don't run. So the frustration with him has been building for a while.

I had thought that getting married would settle him down, but, you know: it doesn't work for every man, does it?

Do the right thing.

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Genghis at Ace of Spades has an interesting article up on humor—in which a handful of academics attempt to dissect what is funny, and what is not, and how people react to "inappropriate" jokes.

As my Argentine-Italian boyfriend Sefaro used to say, "analyzing humor is like trying to pick up a butterfly with firetongs."*

I think the people behind this study are rather missing the point: it takes a special blend of hostility and polish for someone to become truly funny. I'm not saying that all funny people are sick mo-fo's—only that there has to be a region of the brain that's twisted in order for someone to have even developed the neurons that make them "funny."

For instance, I'm not funny; I can be witty, but mostly I just cross that line into "insane," rather than sublimating my general hostility into "jokes." (Early in life, I tossed a coin, and it landed on "heads." So sue me.)

A close friend who does comedy writing tries her best to be mentally healthy, but is also fond of recounting The Parable of John Cleese: supposedly, after he went through years of psychotherapy, he said the experience had made him "happier, but less funny."

There are nice people who do standup. Successfully. Really, there are. But to make "academic analyses" of humor in which one purports to be objective about the most subjective subject in the world—what is funny, and what is not, in any given context—is the ultimate in . . . well, hubris.

And hilarious.

* As an entomologist, Sefaro should know about how one picks up butterflies. I asked him and the other field-biology nerds on our grouplist for help a few months ago in identifying the bugs that were all over our breezeway and balcony, and he responded that they were Rosalia funebris, Banded Alder Borers, and I was "lucky." He'd wanted a one of those in his collection for years.

"Well, I responded, "I've got five of 'em on my balcony right now, and seven or eight in my breezeway—I can't tell exactly how many, since they are humping like bunnies—or, maybe, like banded alder borers. Want me to snag one for you? And, if you'll excuse the expression, do you want it dead or alive?"

"Well, dead," he told me, right in front of all my high-school-era buddies. (Men are sensitive like that.) "But don't bother. There's a special protocol to collecting specimens, and I don't think you'd get it right."

Well, I've got almost a year to learn it. At which point I can send him one perfectly preserved banded borer every fucking day for a week. All of 'em pinned to pieces of polystyrene and fixed, for good measure, "in a formulated phrase."

Sefaro, by the way, turned me on to "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." And to Vivaldi. And to Borodin. He couldn't quite get me into chess, because one cannot reflect properly that game without learning notation. And somehow chess notation struck me as numeral-like. I couldn't surmount the hangup.

Also, to play a good game of chess requires that one stop drinking Canadian Club for hours at a time. Though I do remember that at one point in the 1980s, before Sefaro was married (much less a father) a bunch of us were, um, tripping, and he attempted to play a game of chess against the household Mac. He saved the history of that game in a file entitled "Hey, Man." I could have fallen in love with him all over again just for that, but it was just too late, then. We knew each other too well.

"All things must end."

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It's like a "what's hot" site that (1) has some actual diversity of interests within it, and (2) includes those activities that we do when there isn't a keyboard in front of us. (Yes: for some of you that means "stuff you do in your sleep.")

Anyway, I haven't tried it out yet, but it's called "Mindthrow."

I'll do the actual review this weekend.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 07:58 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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But I've been eating lotos flowers.

Why not?—I have a very long list of things to do tomorrow. *

Vaguely related: if we are going to legalize Romantic poetry, shouldn't we legalize Mary Jane?

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. . . displaying properly anywhere today? It seems to be half-blocked, everywhere I look for it.

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It's started up again!—

Shannon Elizabeth comments on John EdwardsÂ’ affair and its potential fallout for the Democratic convention and Dem delegates:

Elizabeth: “I met John-John when he was still as Senator, but to be honest, I was so high on X that all I remember about the evening was his inviting me over to ‘the other America,’ where, if I’m remembering correctly, he was going to dress me up like a naughty housekeeper . . . . "

Read the whole thing. Unless, you know—you want to respect yourself in the morning . . .

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Of course, I don't like to point that out too often, lest his enormous ego truly catch up to his staggering brainpower, and take over.

But it hasn't, yet. Jeff remains, despite repeated attacks from both the leftosphere and some genuine online kooks (but I repeat myself . . .) a wonderful, warm guy—who is, in person, terrily down-to-earth.

Stacy McCain sums the situation up nicely: Jeff's back on his own front page, and there's much rejoicing in the streets. A minor disagreement between him and one of his guest bloggers isn't of much consequence in the long run—though if it gets us more of Jeff's writing in the here-and-now, it's obviously going to make the blogosphere a better place.

Right now, Jeff's continuing the Protein Wisdom series on Jonah Goldberg's excellent Liberal Fascism, which I'm reading myself for the third time at this moment. Yup: it's really that good.

P.S. Regarding that little link over here by "the other McCain," I'll tell you a secret: there are bloggers who don't drink. But I shan't be blowing their respective covers any time soon.

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Is that close enough?

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I like to think that I'm contributing to the fucking cause all on my very own. No commenters (or readers, for that matter) required.

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Writing at The Next Right:

Elected officials cannot start movements on their own. They need a willing audience to activate. The audience was primed by John Culberson leading the revolt against the ridiculous House franking rules. (On the issue side, it was primed by Newt's "Drill Now" movement.) That solidified Culberson, and by extension minority Republicans, as the troublemakers storming the gates with technology, and Democrats as the lame defenders of an old order. That is the natural role of any political minority, but one House Republicans, accustomed to the majority, have been uncomfortable embracing. Until now.

I was around the blogosphere in 2002 and 2003. There were roughly equal numbers of conservative and liberal bloggers then. But liberals were using the blogosphere for the right things -- changing the political system rather than commenting on it. Because their project seemed more necessary and central to the Democratic coalition, they attraced most of the new growth in the blogosphere from 2003 to 2006.

Today, both Republicans and Democrats use Twitter and various social media tools. (The tech community, which skews heavily left, uses it a lot, but they are not as politically savvy.) But only Culberson was using it the right way. Back when he started, Democratic Rep. @TimRyan seemed to be using it effectively too, but his use has trailed off and he issued a lame defense of Pelosi on franking -- something no one can get excited about. Culberson now has 2,827 followers and Ryan has 521.

Could #dontgo usher in an era of Republican technological dominance in the post-blogging world? Should we cede the blogosphere to the left, and focus on leapfrogging them in the use of tools most necessary to real-time political action? The answer could be yes.

#dontgo is creating a perfect storm where the emergence of a new technology is married to a pressing need to do something. Republicans had the use of the tools down, but had no pressing to-dos in the early 2000s. As Matt Stoller reminded me in a joint radio appearance yesterday, Democrats had impeachment, the recount, and the Iraq War. We had to defend all these things. And online, it's a lot easier to be on offense than on defense.

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And I missed him by only half a day! Heartbreaking.

But how fun—to see some of my favorite L.A. landmarks through the eyes of a "tourist." (Even as experienced an Angeleno traveller as Dave, who is, after all, famous for . . . um . . . being widkedly funny and beyond cool. And famous.)

Just keep scrolling. As a bonus, hidden in the travelogue is a link to Hawk's daughter's MySpace-enabled music.

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According to Fausta.

A weaker-willed woman would feel some peer-group pressure, and become a productive member of society as well.

But me?—I got a backbone made of pure fucking platinum.

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The Presidents Bush and Governor Bush called Rush Limbaugh to congratulate him on his broadcasting anniversary.

I assume I'm the last human being on the planet to have heard it, but here it is.

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