Sean Delonas, who penned the hysterical cartoon likening Obama to the chimp that attacked the woman in Connecticut, has a rich history of seeing the humor inherent in lots of situations, like being gay, or Muslim, or disabled. Gawker has a list of some of his greatest hits.

Via itfoaq

M. Leblanc has a post up on Bitchphd about a ghastly relationship she was once in. Go read it -- my summary isn't going to do it justice -- but the gist is that the guy she was living with was sexually rejecting; wouldn't initiate sex, and would reject her when she initiated, and she found this very difficult because she was in love with him, and very actively wanted him sexually. Every so often, however, he'd initiate sex with her in her sleep, when she wasn't expecting it, wasn't aroused, and hadn't consented, and would finish before she'd had a chance to become aroused enough to enjoy it. She describes this as rape; despite the fact that she generally powerfully desired this guy, he managed to structure their sexual encounters so that she couldn't consent and couldn't enjoy them. When she finally explicitly called a halt to this practice, he refused to have any sexual or affectionate contact with her for months. (This is all well in the past, she ended the relationship and is feeling much better now.)

The obvious intial reaction is just "Man, some people suck." But you have to wonder what's going on in someone's head who acts this way. Speculating blindly, he sounds like someone who had internalized the idea that women don't desire or enjoy sex so strongly that when he found himself in a relationship with someone who did desire him and did enjoy sex with him, he couldn't perceive it as sex. Women don't desire sex; so if a woman desires it, it's not really 'sex'. And so he stagemanaged a situation where he could have 'real sex', sex that qualified as real precisely because his sex partner didn't desire it.

In any case, freaky. The unsettling thing about stories like this is that while it's obvious that very few men are as fucked up as Leblanc's boyfriend was, hearing about someone that grossly fucked up makes you wonder how common a milder version of the same pathology is.

"Not with this cleavage-showing dress."

This is very adorable:

Via Jammies, via.

My handle and my spout are one in number, but differ in account.

Brad DeLong has written to the Chancellor of Berkeley asking that John Yoo be fired for having written the torture memos, on the immediate basis of the recent findings of the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility.

This sort of thing is so important; it's tempting to say that they're out of power now, and there's no need to hound them, but it's just not true. There's no way to establish a norm that you may not pervert your professional skills in the service of allowing an administration to break the law and torture people, unless doing exactly that is at the very least profoundly damaging to your future career. The worst possible outcome in the case of someone like Yoo would be open public recognition of what he'd done, with no consequences; that turns enabling torture into the sort of thing over which reasonable people can disagree.

Writing letters like this is one step toward making sure that thirty years from now, our children aren't bemoaning Yoo's wrongdoing, and being vaguely surprised that he got his start back in the Bush administration, just like Rumsfeld and Chaney got started under Nixon.

I just read my first Jonah Goldberg column. It might be telling that my first reaction regards its terrible writing.

The image that comes to my mind is different. I see Michael Scott, the hyper-vapid boss from NBC's "The Office," hectoring Stanley and Darryl -- the show's two black characters -- to make race an issue when it shouldn't be.

Teofilo has embarked on a trip that sounds like great fun:

Tomorrow morning I'll be leaving Albuquerque and taking a couple of weeks to gradually make my way to Santa Cruz, California, where I'll be visiting a friend of mine. I'll be going a very roundabout way and making frequent stops to sightsee.

I, for one, am fully envious. I have a vague goal of, at some point, visiting every national park in the country. Teo's going at it just the way I think might work. I recommend following his ongoing updates.

I wish I could get 600 grand to be a shit.

The really egregious thing, of course, is that one of the characters is introduced as "Rochelle" and later called "Ro". It is always—always—the case that if a didactic exercise introduces someone with one name, and later refers to her (or him) by a diminutive nickname, that exercise is up to no good.

Whenever some bad sign wafts forth from the administration, a lot of people fall all over themselves in their haste to furnish an interpretation whereby it's not so bad, it's all part of the (good) plan, or is even part of some double-secret scheme to create a socialist utopia without anyone noticing until it's too late, or something. This seems strange to me. Anyway this post which oudemia brought to our attention as a possible salve for our worries doesn't seem all that impressive to me:

Orszag's long-running project -- something that has made [him?] the Left's favorite Cabinet member -- has been replacing talk of an "entitlement crisis" with his argument that Social Security requires only modest tax hikes and benefit cuts, while Medicare and Medicaid have much more dramatic fiscal woes.

Changing the frame of the debate is no doubt all to the good, but cuts is cuts.

It finally hit me the other day: my car is old.

It has really low mileage for its age (10 years, 45K miles) but, much like people, a day comes when time just is inescapable. I've never had an old car before or driven one as much as I have this year (~15K miles). It's a solid car, a Toyota, and I think it still has a lot of life in it but I don't really know how to take care of it. All I've done until now is change the oil every 3000 miles and occasionally change a filter (well, have it changed). Are there things I should be doing now to prolong its life down the road?

Now, I know nothing about cars. I've driven far less than most people my age, thanks to living in cities with great public transportation, so I haven't really had to deal with them. To give you an idea of what you're dealing with here, Matt F had to check my tire pressure the other day and help me inflate my tires. We're talking total auto novice here.

The way these kids today act, you'd think they invented blogging.

I had never really believed it before. The really notable thing, though, is how much Nancy Pelosi appears to be modelling for a jeweler making cameos. And that Huckabee looks like a tool.

Illustrating the difference between two common species of denialism, Ryan Avent writes,

Birds, for instance, won't start evolving faster and faster until it's frighteningly clear that evolution is real and all those deniers were, in fact, cranks.

Of all the gauntlets to throw down. Honestly, this is the sort of thing that lands you in an impossibly large gizzard.

Normally I wouldn't stomp all over my own post, but Jammies just sent me this, and I nearly fell out of my chair with delight. So here, enjoy:

Via

Once, in third grade, I found a baggie of cocaine on the city bus, which I turned in to the front office when I arrived at school. I'd been rooting my hand around in the crease between seat and seatback and stumbled upon it.

The part that I think is amusing is that I marched self-importantly into the front office to give them my find, but I didn't really think I'd actually found drugs. I assumed that I was tattling on something ultimately innocent, but that I'd be applauded for my dutiful application of the rules. The adults all contributed to this worldview by commending me in bright, sunshiny big-girl voices, but not belying if they felt any actual surprise or apprehension.

So I assumed I hadn't actually found drugs, but perhaps a baggie of flour. Then years later I went back and realized, no, it's most likely it was drugs.

I love stories where you only infer what must have happened years later. My dad tells the story of how he had mono as a kid. Then he grew up and went to med school and realized, "That wasn't anything like mono." He then put together that the muscles on one side of his body are smaller than the other, and realized he'd actually had polio, but that the doctor probably had lied so as not to scare his mother, since there was nothing anyone could do and it was a fairly mild case.

Stuff like this crap is unfortunate:

A pilot alerted airport police when he saw a bike with a sticker that read "this bike is a pipe bomb" parked near the passenger ramps of Terminal C at Memphis International Airport, according to the Memphis-Shelby County Airport Authority.

If I were going wicked evil, I'd pick that sort of name.

"Terminal C ticketing and baggage claim at the airport were cleared out," said airport spokesman John Greaud. "A K-9 unit responded and found no explosive materials at the scene."

"This Bike is a Pipe Bomb" is the name of a band based in Pensacola, Florida, and this is not the first time in the band's 12-year history the name has caused a commotion.

Hmph. While it's helpful to know that our national security personnel have now begun to successfully identify things identified as pipe bombs, based on their labeling as pipe bombs, despite not actually being pipe bombs, I think we can help. The bad guys are wise to our tactics and we must act now.

What band—or other organization—names are so mesmerizingly innocuous that we're missing them on our screenings?

I request starting with the "Freedom Freedom Apple Pie Club" and the "Tomorrow Growth Forever America Society". Those would be great names for groups we should look into. And I'm at least half-serious about the idea.

I like my workouts to be 3-5 minutes feeling easy, then 10-15 minutes feeling miserable, and then on the far side of feeling miserable, I usually hit that sweet spot where you feel great and full of energy and like you can go until your joints give out. Where I try to stay for 10-45 minutes, depending on how long I've got to exercise. (If I don't hit the sweet spot, I have a deal with myself that I can quit, but I rarely exercise that option.)

Obviously there's exercising to train, and exercising to maintain health, and I generally put myself in the former category because I want to improve my soccer game.

Anyway, my question is: how miserable do you make yourself when you exercise?

(I've gone to cheer at a few of my teams' games recently, and I'm incredible neurotic and anxious and over-analytical about how hard it will be to get back into my game. Just sharing; not part of the question per se.)

("Where's Ellay? I never heard of Ellay.)

Heebie - I'm just trying to get our LA meet-up accorded its own post, so we can get the info out there. We're meeting at Versailles restaurant, 1415 La Cienega Blvd [just south of Pico], at 6pm on Saturday. Cuban food.

- DominEditrix

Done and done.

Update:

Pretty please could you edit the Ellay meet-up post to reflect Sunday at noon, rather than Saturday at 6pm? Tnx!

No problem, Domino!