SPOKEN WORD. I love the way they talk. People, I mean. Here a lovely random find of a message board ca. 1999 on colloquial speech, mostly British but with American contributors:

At the start of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" by George Harrison, you'll hear him say "hey up." Northern England style "let's go."

Fuck me! I never knew that.

In the piney woods down here (relatives of the georgia penal colony recruits) they say "he showed his ass" when someone gets mad or acts rude...

A dialect word I learned from a climbing mate from Nottingham was "nesh" = to complain overly about being cold. My mum was stationed in the potteries during the war and remembers people there being "starved with cold." Then of course there's the ubiquitous "it's brass monkies," "Brass monkey weather" etc. And finally "A lazy wind" = one that can't be bothered to blow round you...

My father, the collar [minister], would refer to a smidge, a dolp, and a wham for any small amount of anything. My crooked cousins was a "Slick as spit." My mother's cooking was piling (in that she cooked a lot)...

I was always amused by a Liverpool expression. "I'll gerroff at Edge 'ill" Edge Hill station was the penultimate station on the RR line from London to Liverpool Lime Street. There also being a large number of catholics in the town, to get off at Edge Hill meant you intended to use Coitus Interruptus...

we called necking on the riverbank "watching the submarine races" and "getting mud for my turtle" when I went to Michigan State in the 60s...

Glasgie farewell = the action of applying ones forehead forcefully to anothers nose. Birmingham/Irish screwdriver = hammer...

That contributor also tells us, "Loose your bottle = It is the ultimate insult in the services, but is actually quite hard to define."

Lancaster, Pennsylvania is LANN-KASTER.

No, no, brother, I've been: it's "Lang'c'ster." And some entries are poems all by themselves:

My dad, to this day, calls the Pope, the "Holy Pappy in Rome"

Yonder is a loving word, LeeJ, some old songs make good use of it.

Somewhere Sean O'Casey is smiling.

These things stick in the mind, hopefully like cloves that flavor our own speech. I had a North Carolina girlfriend once, and her mother had no end of lovely expressions. She once referred to spoiled fish as smelling "right boo-booey." Could that be from the French "boue," somehow? In any case I consider myself improved by having heard it. Also by hearing my old Italian landlady say of meeting her husband, "He look at me anna I fell like a pear." And, Texican this, "he got a wild hare," variously "wild hair up his ass" -- or "wild hare" up same -- never have got that straight.

This post is in tribute somewhat to Editor Martin's Rusticor, which has here been too long neglected, and which contains a spiffing analysis of an old engraving captioned with a 19th-Century British slang poem:

Spree at Melton Mowbray: or doing the Thing in a Sporting-like manner (Quick work without a Contract, by Tip-Top Sawyers)

Coming it strong with a Spree and a spread,
Milling the day-lights, or cracking the head;
Go it ye cripples! come tip us your mauleys,
Up with the lanterns, and down with the Charleys:
If lagg'd we should get, we can gammon the Beak,
Tip the slavies a Billy to stifle their squeak.
Come the bounce with the snobs, and a [?] for their betters,
And prove all the Statutes so many dead letters.

Marty and I used to read together from Partridge's A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, and retain from it as a catchphrase, "the female pudend: low."

Really, though, this post is a tribute to the English language as it has been lathed by common speech. I am strong for the dictionary and good English grammar; as a teacher of remedial English and as a writer, I cannot endorse and could not abide a lawless verbal state, and admire the architecture of a proper sentence. But even the soundest structure should be filled and faced so that a person can live in it comfortably; otherwise, it's just a hangar or a prison. Our Information Society does not require human comfort -- it only requires the achievement of talking points -- but the human spirit does, so the genius of language is more likely to come from the bottom up than vice-versa. The miracle is that, even in this age of spin, the air remains full of raw material -- patois, argot, Spanglish, rap, etc. Well before it's printed, it's spoken. All you have to do is listen.

STAY IN THE PINK WITH CIGGIES AND DRINK. I'm sure there are all sorts of thing wrong with this study, but still it gladdens my heart:

Health-conscious Americans may want to reach for a plate of fish and chips or a pint of ale after digesting the results of a new study.

Older British citizens are far healthier than their U.S. counterparts -- even though twice as much is spent on health care per person in the United States annually. That's according to a study published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The study mentions that "The Americans tended to be overweight and the Brits too fond of alcohol," says National Geographic, which includes a lovely photo of Prince Charles hoisting a pint.

The subjects are older even than me, and must certainly recall a time when health-hectoring was nothing like what it is today, when bangers and mash and toad in the hole were considered nourishment, when men drank Guinness For Strength. It also must include '60s people, so them what wasn't poisoning themselves with Bleeding Watney's Red Barrel might have spent a long run in some early, environmental production of Withnail & I.

I am not one to disdain medical science, Lord knows, nor do I reflexively reject the obvious data on behaviors and physical condition. But I have spent several weeks in England, usually among the sort of people who subsist on fried foods, strong drink, and Players cigarettes. They were not always the most appealing specimens, by American standards, and their skin often had the color and consistency of trifle, but they were cheerful despite the lousy weather, cold flats, and allegedly oppressive Welfare State. And very few of them belonged to a health club, or ate organic foods.

We are speaking anecdotally, which is to say out our ass. It may be that the better-educated component of English study group, less likely to spend their evenings in the boozer eating crisps, or some other statistical outlier affected the results. But I will say that my own narrow experience suggests that the Brits did well to give the Puritans reason to come over here to work out their program of self-denial.

ARTOTROGUSES AND GLORIOSUSES. Deflection of a popular joke about oneself by owning to it -- as John McLaughlin once did by appearing in Saturday Night Live's parody of his own show -- is an honorable tradition, and carries benefits for both the mockers and the mockee.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work if your sense of humor is so underdeveloped that you have to explain, at length, that you possess one -- especially when this is among the evidence offered.

I think Captain Ed misses the chickenhawk point. It isn't that non-combatants should be disqualified from commenting on military matters. It's that a non-combatant who engages in chest-thumping, star-spangled, locked-and-loaded bellicosity and cute military affectations (like calling blog buddies "deployed" and forming a "Northern Alliance" of warbloggers) is like an Air Raid Warden who thinks he's George Patton -- or a suburban nerd who acts like a rap star -- or anyone whose presumption is out of key with his circumstances: that is, an inviting target for ridicule.

Plautus knew all about it, but try telling that to the Everything Has Changed crowd.

UPDATE. But I would think that, being WaPo's Internet clown of the moment. I will enjoy this while it lasts (nine hours, thirty-five minutes), and pretend that when local mothers pull back their children at my approach, it is because they fear the lash of my tongue, and not because of the posters on the telephone poles.

SPLIT PERSONALITY. The Ol' Perfesser seems to be saying that conquering tyrannies for their petroleum resources is a good idea. Do you think it strange that a guy who is constantly mocking "No Blood for Oil" types approves, indeed recommends, blood for oil?

The Perfesser has never been a stickler for consistency, but this is rich even for him. A clue to the cause may be seen by a scan of the Instapundit page at this writing. That exercise usually reveals a vast plain of right-wing boilerplate interrupted only by the odd gay-rights token and an "Indeed" or two for filigree. But look at the Instaday so far:

• Bush is soft on Mexicans
• In rape trials, chicks get all the breaks
• Bloggerz rool, MSM drool
• 2006 version of "Whip Inflation Now"
• Stephen Colbert is the new Michael Moore

I perceive drift. God knows a steady job of recycling Republican talking points while insisting he's not-a-conservative would wear on any man with a conscience, but I always assumed Reynolds has none, and suspected that his Janus act meant he'd already been nanotechnologically engineered into a robot lawyer incapable of cracking under the strain of self-division.

But the strain is telling now, and I can guess why. All American conservatism is in a weird, feeble state these days. Its operatives run nearly all American government, yet the American people are not content. The big thinkers of the movement are having a hard time figuring what went wrong; some blame Bush, but it comes not easily to them. They are growing fractious and divided against themselves, too -- sometimes, as with the Perfesser, in the schizophrenic sense, but also schismatically.Look at the imbecilic Crunchy Con and South Park Con sects. Look at Arnold Kling, who thinks the fucking American Enterprise Institute is too far off the reservation ("Maybe the AEI is getting ready to play a role in the Hillary Clinton administration"). These are surely portents of end times.

The canaries in the coalmine, of course, are those conservative spokesmau-maus already halfway to Bellevue. Take Eleven-Star-General Ralph "Blood and Guts" Peters, always excitable to the verge of incoherence but now, alas, over the edge. He begins his latest screed against Mescans with expected froth against "the intellectual porn of left-wing fantasies" that "nationality was an artificial construct" -- but ends with a rant against the global economy! "There's a worrisome divide between the multinational executive who retires with a $400 million farewell smooch (and who naturally supports globalizing trade)," muses the General, "and the worker maxing out a credit card to pay for a tank of gas." Well, yes. But who's the enemy, General? Them there dirty hippies, or Larry Kudlow? Maybe it's both -- a new Buchananite synthesis, pitched to veterans who have run out of Lithium! Time for a new National Review blog!

Maybe I'm just sensitive today, but I really think they're cracking up. Keep your eyes peeled for outbreaks of Dancing Mania.

NO END OF HISTORY. Just finished A Distant Mirror, Barbara Tuchman’s history of Western Europe in the 14th Century. Tuchman wrote beautifully and can make any half-attentive reader feel like a history buff for a couple of days at least. I still found parts of it slow going. To supply human detail to her great, turbulent tapestry, Tuchman takes time to explicate several particular intrigues and power struggles. Many of these are rich, as when Jean de Montfort, Duke of Brittany, kidnaps his houseguest, the Constable of France, over a ridiculously small matter:

…Laval cried, "What are you doing? Do not harm my brother-in-law, the Constable!"

"Mount your horse and go from hence, Monfort answered him. "I know what I have to do"… At that moment another of Clisson’s party, Jean de Beaumanoir, hurried up in anxiety. Monfort, who hated him too, pulled his dagger and, rushing upon him as if possessed, cried, "Beaumanoir, do you wish to be like your master?" Beaumanoir said that he would honor him. "Do you wish, do you wish to be just like him?" the Duke cried in a fury, and when Beaumanoir said yes, Montfort screamed, "Well, then, I will put out your eye!"…

The resolution of the case takes months and scuttles a planned invasion of England. I do get a kick out of it, but these clowns were pulling this sort of shit all the time, and after a while it’s just depressing.

Of course, all Europe seems to have been treading the same muddy, bloody circles throughout: ginned-up wars are prosecuted by companies of knights who freely pillage every town in their way, including those in their own country; popular uprisings, driven to the last extremity by this disastrous mismanagement, go berserk and are suppressed mercilessly; the Church flits the papacy from Rome to Avignon and back, taxing the hell out of the people to funds its follies, causing more knightly expeditions and a general dissipation of the Faith. And of course there was the Plague.

It is a blessed relief to get to the epilogue, and the first stirrings of something more like what we recognize as civilization. (I don’t think I realized before what a boon to society was the formation of standing armies.)

Survey-course history, of the sort some of us got in school, is mostly reassuring, in that we are led along thick lines (albeit smudged in places) from the primordial muck to the relatively enlightened present. Americans have a further advantage in that we’ve compressed a lot of action into the last few pages of history, which gives it vigor and a sense of propulsion; even in the Howard Zinn version, we can imagine that another growth-spurt of enlightenment might be up around the corner. But I get a chill whenever I am forced to consider that humankind can slog weary decades through muck before recovering its instinct for higher ground, and that such instincts, under duress and disuse, may be bred out of both animals and men.

THE WONDER IS, HE HATH ENDURED SO LONG: HE BUT USURP’D HIS LIFE. I am in some sympathy with James Wolcott, who has tired of "The Sopranos":

…Sunday the Sopranos temporarily abandoned Vito to his antiquing and fobbed off an episode partially involving Christopher and associate flying to LA to pitch a film idea to Ben Kingsley poolside at what looked like the Bev Hills Four Seasons… Having The Sopranos slop over into Entourage and Ricky Gervais's Extras starfuckiness made a show already afflicted with acute self-consciousness go even more meta on us.. When Hollywood stars played themselves on I Love Lucy, they weren't catering to cynicism about celebrity and autographing it with their own smirk; they presented genial versions of themselves. I prefer those antics to the hip jadedness that's become de rigueur today and winks at the audience as it winks back. All that winking has degenerated into a spastic tic.

I understand Wolcott’s unease with the current Soprano malaise, but (perhaps because I am not a Vanity Fair type of scribe, to say the least) I have a different interpretation of events.

From the beginning "The Sopranos" has had two major streams. On the one hand, there is the grotesque crudity – the source of many cheap laughs, which is what I think bothers Wolcott about the Kingsley/Bacall storyline, and which also gains most of the water-cooler talking points and tabloid ooh-aahs. Hacked-off heads, surprise deaths, etc.

In opposition to this baseness, there is something larger and more dramatic -- operatic conflicts, behaviors, and emotions. The crude stuff is also outsized, in a grand guignol sort of way, but the latter is the meat of the dramatic interest, because even in this debased age we are still more interested in characters than in splatters, if only slightly so.

True, these characters will go far beyond what most of us would ever dream of doing in the course of business. We expect that from Mafiosa, and if Tony’s crew just killed for fun and profit, it would be a very different show. But often it’s not about business, but about septic souls crying out for vengeance, recognition, or what passes in their peculiar lives for closure.

The Cifaretto/Pie-o-my story line is a great example of this: because Tony lives in a world where sudden violence is common, it’s no big deal when he kills Cifaretto for, essentially, making Tony face who he really is. The filmmakers go out of their way (even availing a dreamlike insert) to equate the stripper girlfriend Ralph murders with Meadow Soprano; and Pie-O-My is, in the show’s terms, a larger version of the baby ducks that kicked this whole thing off. One might say that Ralph Cifaretto dies for Tony’s sins. The quoditian violence is fun, but vengeance against self-knowledge is "The Sopranos"’ aglio e olio.

This is still the case in Season Finito. But, as Wolcott observed, things have gone a bit more sour. As the gears of the show wind down, and we lose dramatic velocity, we are being led – purposefully, I think – toward the natural result, not of the cartoonish violence –- that can and will go on forever, as it has – but of the pathetic disposition of the human cases to which our attention had been previously directed.

Take, for example, Paulie Walnuts’ recent crisis over the identity of his mother -- which leads, as it always does with these people, to a senseless act of violence. In this case the act is linked (by use of bridging shots of foliage) to Tony’s momentary feeling of well-being after he gets home from the hospital.

That is, I think, a very instructive segment. We’ve been watching Tony in therapy for years now. It has been amusing to watch him reduce his alleged therapeutic insights to things his narrow mind can understand – the Art of War, the "circle jerk of life." But I think the show’s creator, David Chase, has from the beginning been after bigger game than the comic juxtaposition of gangster ethics with movie stars, writers, academics, rappers, doctors, politicians, etc.

That particular fish-out-of-water gag was old when Billy Wilder used it in Ball of Fire -- but back then, Wilder’s time being what it was, the gangsters were the butt of the jokes. A lot has happened since then, and in "The Sopranos," the gangsters have usually had the edge. Nowadays there’s always a reason to think the straights have it coming. But eventually any viewer will come to think, at some point, that the hoods have gone too far. The Hollywood freebie schtick in the Kingsley episode chafes Wolcott, maybe because he is familiar with that scene and feels that Betty Bacall getting socked in the jaw isn’t funny.

It is and it isn’t. Chase has gone out of his way to link the Mob to just about every aspect of modern society, in an obvious social critque. ("Niggers!" the family man cries when his vehicle is jacked, followed by Tony admiring a Polaroid of his latest hot car.) But I don’t think that means Chase is shrugging to us that the Mob run things and whattaya gonna do –- because big-S Society is not really what the show is about.

Chase dropped a fat clue in the episode involving Charles S. Dutton as a traffic cop reduced by Tony’s pique. Tony tried to buy his psychic way out of the consequences of that cruelty; Dutton refused. That was the same episode (I believe) in which Tony wound up belt-whipping Peter Riegert’s corrupt politician, who had been Tony’s cats-paw in the affair.

By his own lights Tony is justified, and because we’ve been living with him so long, we sort of take his point of view (the politician was fucking Tony's old girlfriend, after all). That’s the power of character identification.

But even as we sympathize, we have to know that Tony's point of view is insane. How long can we keep in sympathy with him? When, as he once predicted for himself, Tony’s "dead or in the can," what will we feel?

Do you remember the episode in which Dr. Melfi sends Carmela to a shrink, who turns out to be an Old Testament Jew who swiftly advises her to take the children and get away from Tony, and refuses to treat her further? I thought of that moment during the current season opener, in which Carmela is childishly delighted with a new car Tony has bought her. It is astonishing to see such a strong character so reduced in the home stretch of a story.

Consider also last week’s agon of Artie Bucco – sort of a fool, but a fool out of Lear, whose privileged position as a noncombatant feeder of the troops and childhood friend to Tony allows him surprising latitude for truth. When Artie mourns in front of Tony the folly of his father’s simple idealism, and then cooks his maliciously-killed rabbit – "Some people don’t like rabbit!" – from a recipe out of his father’s old notebook, clearly we are not being led toward just another fun permutation of the life of a funny mobster-hanger-on. Even the joke of Nuovo Vesuvio turning into a coupon joint is not cheering. Against the impression the show’s previous success has given us, we are led toward an emotion that must (if we are still human) have been present under our laughter and even our sympathy all this time.

That emotion is disgust. The Sopranos and all their works are disgusting. You know it, I know it. Chase probably knew it all along, but now he is hustling whatever chickens have not yet come to roost into the death-coop at last. So now is the perfect time for Tony Jr. to implode, for Vito’s absurd gay-mobster story line, for Christopher to wear out what was left of his welcome -- and, I suspect, a lot more unsettlingly tawdry business to come, which will only seem out of key because the key has suddenly been changed.

This is the blight these mooks were born for. It is not a tragic fall, but an appropriately pathetic collapse. I am put in mind of the end of the ill-received Don Giovanni in Amadeus, when the demon clumsily tears down that upstage drape. It is not pretty and the house may not react favorably, but it is exactly right.

NICE WORK IF YOU CAN GET IT. John J. Miller talks about a Neil Young song he hasn't heard (and "Rockin' In The Free World," which he says he heard, but obviously doesn't understand). Then he talks (and talks) about a movie he hasn't seen.

Warren Bell may be parodying all those previous "a mean liberal was mean to me" stories. But how would one tell?

Over in the logical fallacy department, Tim Graham tells us that the Washington Post is proved "thoroughly liberal" because its theatre critic detected anti-Reagan sentiments in a Tony Kushner play, and that Paul Weitz is the voice of Hollywood.

I understand that National Review pays these guys money.

SEMI-REGULAR "I MAKE FUN OF LILEKS BECAUSE I AM AN AWFUL, AWFUL MAN" SEGMENT. Ladies and gentlemen, our Top Ten Thousand Laker:

She ate all her apples and declined the fries. I studied the bag, which reminded how McDonald’s always gets the graphics wrong. Maybe they connect with someone, but nearly every single example of McDonald’s graphics leaves me dead. Example from today:

(Thoroughly unremarkable marketing graphic)

Welcome back, 1977! The big quotes, the horrible roundy-edge coffee logo with the unnaturally conjoined U-M – it all shrieks Carter-era design.

Helpful hint, miss: see that thing on top of your portfolio? It’s called “a handle.” Give it a try.

That bastard Carter sans'd our serifs! And, whore -- no online portfolio for you! Is reserved for matchbooks!

(Steps forward, removes Elvis wig, addresses the audience)

I am actually a big fan of Ancillary Lileks: the celebrations of silly detritus, the found objects from dead popcult plus commentary, and so forth. This sketch was inspired by The Left and his uncivil speech. I don't approve of it, and I don't approve of what I just did.

(writhes; second, large and inhuman head emerges from first)

Fuck that cracker asshole! Fuck Lileks! Blood, blood and death to you!

(hissing, spitting, cloud of smoke, finis)

CHRIST NOT MAN IS KING

TELLING A HAWK FROM A HANDSAW. Crazy Jesus Lady is tugging sleeves again, offering unsolicited advice to the Bush Administration. As usual, her monologue includes ripe, flavorful Noonanisms that gladden my wicked heart:

Mr. Snow's White House press briefings are going to be nice to watch. The press does not want to appear to be ungracious and oppositional. They have an investment in demonstrating that the tensions each day in Scott McClellan's press briefings, with David Gregory's rants and Helen Thomas's free-form animosities, were the fault of Mr. McClellan, not the press.

I have no idea what she means. That the press will exalt Snow to slur McClennan? The idea is not to get a story, or even to make Bush look bad, but to lay obloquy at the doorstep of Scotty McClellan? "McClellan delenda est!" snarls the sleeping White House reporter in his pinstriped pajamas, clutching fiercely his saluting John Kerry doll...

But more striking than the mental hiccups is the reasoning. Three foci proposes Noonan for her unwitting freelance clients, and two of them involve getting the President to better explain the actions of his Administration -- the idea being that everything's great but the rabble aren't getting the message.

Point one is "Renew attention to Afghanistan. The American invasion of that country had the support of the world... Talk about what's being done, and how, and why." So hey, how's it going over there?

The Army's chief of staff said Wednesday that he was frustrated by security lapses at Bagram air base in Afghanistan that led to the loss of potentially sensitive data, and that the military must learn how to be more careful with new technology.

Weeks after revelations that flash drives carrying sensitive and classified information have turned up for sale in a bazaar outside Bagram, Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker said the Army was trying to improve how soldiers used and secured flash drives.

annnnnd...

Mariam Rawi, a member of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), has told the forum that despite Afghanistan receiving billions of dollars in aid, little has been done to address the country's lack of health services.

"(Afghanistan) is a land that is facing (a) health disaster worse than (the) tsunami," Ms Rawi told a lecture at the Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre in Adelaide.

"Seven hundred children and 50 to 70 women die on (a) daily basis due to the lack of health services...."

annnnd...

Australia warned Thursday of a high threat of terrorist attacks in the Afghan capital during celebrations marking the overthrow of communist rule by mujahedeen fighters...

The U.S. Embassy in Kabul posted a warning Thursday advising Americans to limit their travel in the next two days due to the holiday and two bombings Tuesday on the road leading to Kabul's airport, which wounded two people...

annnnd... scene. Though you can go back to the well and get corkers like this just about anytime. Curse that Em Ess Em!

Item number two is our wonderful economy, about which The People are not sufficiently sanguine. CJL tries a couple of angles of explanation: first, "Americans, a deeply savvy lot, never want to tell a politician he's doing well on the economy because their applause may lead him to feel he can shift focus to, say, colonizing Mars." (Pffft, yeah, like that'll stop him!)

Then -- and with this passage, the buzzing of a fly or a distant car horn may have suddenly shifted the Crazy Jesus Lady back to our temporal sphere -- "The biggest complaint I hear now from people who email me from all parts of the country is that they're being worked to death, longer hours at the office, can't see the kids. Gas prices are up and up, etc..."

Well, yeah. While even the hated MSM laud our "hot" economy, the punters are none too pleased with how things are going financially. As I've said before, higher productivity numbers mean that people who have jobs are working harder than before, and my uneducated guess is that most of those accelerating rat-racers aren't just laying up extra scratch for a Cayman Islands vacation or a summer home. We're a hardworking people, but in the face of wages and job security that are each going in the wrong direction, who wouldn't wonder why he has to run faster just to stay in place, and suspect that profits benefit from his sweat more than wages?

(Forgive my belaboring the point a moment, but this really is the hardest thing for conservatives to understand. They say things like this: "Pointing out the market's marvels will not console the worker who lost his job to a machine or a foreign worker. To him the process remains vicious and absurd. 'Why cut my job to save a few bucks?'" -- and then console the poor stiff by pointing out that "Job security no longer means fighting to keep the same job for 30 years, it means keeping ourselves marketable." Oh, well, great! I'm different from a 14th Century peasant, because I also have to go to night school! Get a further reality check here.)

The third CJL talking point shows that she is but mad north-by-northwest: when the wind is southerly, she can racebait like a champ. Americans are skeptical about Mexicans working on American soil. The results of the poll are inconclusive -- respondents seem to be responding more to drift in U.S. policy than to xenophobic impulses -- but a less generous reading warms the cockles of Buchananite hearts.

CJL recalls what a split between the Bush family and Pat's pitchfork brigade did in 1992, and hopes that, if she flings herself hard enough against the White House barricades, the Great Man will miraculously walk out and lift her lips to his ear, and take the populist bait. It may be, then, that she buried her lede. She may imagine that she is communicating in a code based upon the Rule of Three, with the first two ridiculous ideas as mere cover. Maybe such a code has been prearranged, and the boys and girls in the West Wing are now reducing it to simple words that the Commander in Chief can understand. We'll see soon enough.

GREETINGS FROM OUR NATION'S CAPITAL II. Thanks for all the well-wishes, folks. No horrible news to report from NIH. I'm still clinically interesting, though, so I'll be back.

Someone mentioned the Dada show at the other wing of the National Gallery -- I got that one in, too. The Dada movement was so successful, as PR and as a polestar for its initiates, that to this day it impedes my view of the actual work. For example, if I had only seen his work here, and hadn't also seen his great retrospective at the Met last year, I might not think much of Max Ernst -- interesting, talented, I might judge, but too much of a clown. Maybe this works against conceptual art more than other kinds, but for dummies like me the Dada brand has the same blinding power as Prada or Versace. (Interestingly, the ones who most easily override this effect, like Grosz and Arp and the unnamed genius layout artists of the Dada publications, are more graphic artists than fine artists. In a visually cheapened environment, good illustration always cuts through.)

The curators were very clever to break the exhibition into sections pertaining to each big Dada scene (Paris, Zurich, etc.), which emphasizes the Dada phenomenon over the art, and to provide lots and lots of signage. This sort of justifies its presence in a DC Mall museum: as soon as you enter the first gallery of grim World War I footage, you can tell this is teaching exhibit suitable to the Smithsonian (I know NGA isn't part of it, but close enough), and at least as these kids feast their eyes on all the weird images they'll be made to know it means something; later, when they're older and if they're interested, they can go a little deeper in.

In this spirit, it was a real pleasure to watch the performance of Antheil's Ballet Mechanique -- now, that's one guy I seriously doubt gets any more substantive -- with a gaggle of Catholic high-school kids, who were visibly amused by the goofy sound effects and dynamic shifts, and visibly bored by those passages unpunctuated by same. Nothing fades faster than last century's wisecracks.

UPDATE. Let me clarify a little. I am neither pro- nor anti-Dada; I love some of the artists, and I may like the rest better when I see more of them. (On the strength of his showing at the National Gallery, for example, I'd certainly like to see more Rudolf Schlichter.) But as the Gallery does a service, I guess, to the historical memory of Dada, I think it does few favors to the artists themselves, encouraging us to read their offerings as artifacts rather than as artworks.

I had a similar problem with last year's East Village USA show at the New Museum. Live artistic movements provide energy and community to artists; dead ones are just millstones round their necks. Who wants a Dada study? It reminds me of a kid I saw once at the Tate, copying in his sketchbook some ridiculous squiggle by Tracey Emin. (Maybe he was just making a statement; a few days earlier, a couple of guys had come to the Tate, stripped to their skivvies, and bounced on Emin's Bed yelling "I am Art!" until someone carried them away.)

Maybe part of the issue is the rejection of aesthetics built into the Dada manifesto. I've always looked at it as a brilliant McGuffin that gave some talented people, who'd been stultified by the standards of their time, license to break free. Enlightenment is always in front of us, but some of us need a guy to sell us a mantra. The fuse that lit the Soy Bomb is burnt out, and it is left for each of us to find (to paraphrase the poet Lee Hazlewood) his own brand new box of matches.

GREETINGS FROM OUR NATION'S CAPITAL. Sorry for the delay in posting, but for this year's edition of Edroso Faces Mortality, budget considerations have forced me to take lodging at a Days Inn in Arlington, VA, which does not have computers available for use by guests. I'm entering this from a clinic waiting room at the National Institutes of Health, Building 10, where I am about to have something called a Dopamine Test. I'm not sure what it is but it sounds bad. Of course, one time they pumped me full of glucagon to make my heart race, then pumped me full of clonidine to slow it down, so this could hardly be worse, unless it involves a catheter. I hate those things. (Last time one of the doctors wanted to give me a test in which a camera -- a very small one, I was assured -- would be sent up my urethra. They couldn't get an anaesthesiologist, so this guy wanted to just do a local and go on ahead. Though a mere layman, I surmised that cramming a camera up my cock with nothing but a little Campho-Phenique to dull the pain was something to be avoided at all costs, and promised to get it done by my own doctors as soon as I got back home. (I still haven't, though. You rush to schedule such a procedure for yourself!)

I have so far had the usual revolting solutions, injections, and scans, but also a bit of liberty. Some of it I have spent traipsing the Mall. The high point so far, not likely to be topped, is the "Cezanne in Provence" show at the National Gallery. I'm not only ignorant but pig-ignorant of Cezanne, but I think this show, despite the absence of didactic signage, taught me a lot about him. The show is mostly landscapes, ranging from youthful effulgences like the Chestnut Tree and Basin at the Jas de Bouffan (in which a stunning lake of peach signifies the sunlit portion of a dirt path) to the severe abstractions of his old age. (A quote by Cezanne implies that deterioration of his eyesight enforced this approach -- he seems to have been resigned about it. Has someone written about the effect of optical disorders on great artists? I still remember an old medical ad that asked whether El Greco painted as he did because he was a genius or because he had astigmatism.) It was wonderful to see how many ways he could make foliage -- dabs, diagonal streaks, little impasto'd chips. Maybe because I'm simple-minded, it never ceases to amaze me that some little dark-green line in a pale-lime cloud of oil can make such an obvious mass of leaves, or that the table in The Cardplayers, which I took completely at face value for two minutes, is just a mass of burnt umber. This is mastery as observed by the children it makes of us.

Nuclear Medicine has paged me. More later.

THIS IS WHY I TRY TO SLEEP IN ON SUNDAYS. On "Meet the Press" I saw a clip of President Bush delivering an oration with that fervency and straight-forwardness that his supporters love and which we have not seen in a while. He was defending Donald Rumsfeld. No wonder Bush is polling so low. When he defends the Iraq experiment he sounds like he's reading boilerplate, but he gets all hot talking about Donald Rumsfeld.

Then Mike Leavitt from Health & Human Services came on "The McLaughlin Group" to tell us that the problem with U.S. health care is that too many people are getting sick.

Speaking of health care, posting may be light over the next week as I am off to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD to submit myself for examination pertaining to my mutant tumor-suppressor gene. Ah, well, it could be worse.

AND DON'T GET ME STARTED ON LITTLE DOT. I love the internet! How else would I have learned this breaking news about my dear old childhood friend Baby Huey:

Plans are now afoot to bring Huey back a la "Barney and Friends" in a live-action children's program. He recently appeared in a direct-to-video feature "Baby Huey's Great Easter Adventure" and also appears on Fox Family Channel's "The Harveytoon Show" and in "The Harvey Magazine."

When I was a child I took Baby Huey in stride, but now I realize that I was taking pleasure in the antics of a giant, retarded cartoon duck. With his primitive speech ("Duh-uh, he play good!"), his sudden, tearful rages, and his troubled family relations ("Huey's impatient and ill-tempered Papa usually finds himself at the receiving end of Baby's well-intended gestures," spins the Harvey website), Huey could keep a clinician occupied for years. And he wore a diaper! What could be more politically incorrect? Suck Harvey Comic dick, South Parkers!

Bonus points: the Baby Huey movie was directed by Stephen "Flounder" Furst, stars Maureen McCormick, Joseph Bologna, and Tiffany Taubman as Li'l Audrey, and draws this lovely IMDB comment:

Quite admittedly, this isn't the best movie in the world. But the fact that it's so camp-ish makes it better than if it had seemed terribly serious in nature. Then again, the only reason I have seen this movie so many times is that I am such a huge fan of David L. Lander (who is positively adorable here), and the inclusion of other classic TV stars is fun (if not a little sad that this is the best material some of them can get). My sister said of this movie after watching it, "It's bad, but in a good way." Very true. I love most of the music in here (but try not to laugh at a giant baby duck singing a heart-felt song about not belonging anywhere)...

Now I know what to pair with They Call Me Bruce at my next big double-feature party, assuming Netflix gets on the fucking ball.

Plus which, if there's any market for this at all, I'm sure Harvey will go for my proposed Cursin' Curtis, the Mongoose with Tourette's Syndrome™:



It's little more than a concept now, but with the help of David Mamet I think we might just have something.

'E KNEW ALL THE TRICKS... DRAMATIC IRONY, METAPHOR, BATHOS... Who can take Taranto (who can take Taranto!) and semioticize (semioticize!) until the room is piled with bullshit right up to your eyes... here's Jeff Goldstein on traitors (that's you, me, and us):

Which is to say, in the absense of some provable metaphysical Truth, many in the media or on the anti-war left (and right) have come to believe that there is a relativity to truth that justifies the use of rhetoric and persuasion in any way necessary to reach the desired end of convincing the public of the rectitude of their particular narrative.

In other words, liberals stick up for themselves because they're depraved. Rhetoric and persuasion -- the last refuge of a scoundrel!

(We often use mockery, too. Not that Goldstein would notice.)

SHORTER JIM LILEKS: Dance critics don't know as much about dance as right-wing radio hosts do. What, you think I'm some kind of puritan? I went to a museum today!

AND I SWEAR THAT I DON'T HAVE A GUN. As a qualified fan of the Second Amendment, I'm always surprised when gun nuts turn to New York as an arena for their obsessions. It's about the crappiest 2A argument imaginable: Our City's famous crime drop was largely based on confiscation of guns. And isn't social utility -- "an armed society is a polite society" -- the strongest, or at least the most popular, argument those guys have?

Thus I am pleased to hear of the great gun giveback in New Orleans, mandated by an NRA lawsuit, and some of the humorous details pertaining thereunto:

Some gun owners found the weapons were evidence in a crime and not eligible for release. Others did not have the proper paperwork...

Police Superintendent Warren Riley said police had legitimate reasons for confiscating weapons.

"We took guns that were stolen that were stashed in alleyways. If we went into an abandoned house and a gun was there, absolutely we took the weapons," he said. "Obviously there were looters out there. We didn't want some burglar or looter to have an opportunity to arm themselves."

All due respect to those who reflexively question police motives in witholding firearms, but I applaud the officers' reticence. In civil society, where you and I presumably live, a gun is usually not diddy's shootin' arn mounted over the fireplace, nor an exact equivalent of speech, but a portable deadly weapon obtained with a view toward use. Lord knows that in a semi-lawless jurisdiction, good people may wish to have them, and I would like to see them better able to do so, but I also see no earthly reason why they should not be required to own up to their possession.

So I'm not a purist. At least I'm not as anti-gun as Ronald Reagan.

FIRST AMENDMENT "USE IT AND LOSE IT" ARGUMENT OF THE WEEK: Christopher "Glug Glug" Hitchens, talking about the Plame case at Hugh Hewitt:

There's been a terrible collapse of, and surrender of, the 1st Amendment in the last few years, and it's very largely the fault of a press that's lost all sense of proportion in its determination to get Karl Rove.

There is no zeal like that of a convert, but I'm amazed that anyone as proud of his intellect as Hitchens would be willing to mouth stark absurdities such as this on the radio. I guess he figured that, on Hewitt's show, no one would notice.

CHINA SYNDROME. Chinese President Hu Jintao has come to see President Bush. He stopped off in Seattle first:

Mr Hu was all business at the start of his tour. Dinner at Bill Gates' house in Seattle, followed by a cafe latte with Howard Schultz, chairman of the Starbucks chain of coffee shops, then on to the Boeing plant, before moving to the east coast, with an itinerary that includes a speech at Mr Bush's alma mater, Yale.

This is not surprising. China is our valued business partner. Per this interesting story in China's People's Daily,

In 2005, bilateral trade between China and the United States rose to 211.63 billion U.S. dollars, an increase of more than 86 times over 1979, when the two countries established diplomatic relations.

China has become the third largest trading partner and the fourth largest export market for the United States, which in turn, is now China's second largest trading partner, with bilateral trade rising 27.4 percent annually between 2001 and 2005.

"Bilateral trade" is a polite term. "...in 2005, China's surplus with the United States surged more than 43 percent, to a record $114.7 billion, compared with $80 billion the prior year and $28 billion in 2001," reports the New York Times via CFO magazine. China sends us goods and services, made cheap by their gigantic and modestly-paid workforce, and we send them lots and lots of dollars.

This is not the sort of thing that roils conservatives much anymore, though a few get a little more exercised about Google, which a few days ago pathetically excused the censored version of its product it has exported for use in China. "It is not an option for us to broadly make information available that is illegal, inappropriate or immoral or what have you," said Google's Eric Schmidt.

One almost wishes he'd said, "Murdoch did it first." (And still does.) But Murdoch and Schmidt are not the only ones who cross a rather muddy culture gap to grab market share in China; while clothing wholesalers do not generally deal with censorship issues, they do benefit from the Chinese approach to labor relations.

As, one may say, we all do. We perhaps fear what might happen to our economy if we applied to our trading partners the sort of rigorous behavioral standards we occasionally, and selectively, apply to Arab dictatorships. Of course, it may be that we have reasons to fear in any case. But we ease our consciences a bit with the thought that it is not our decision in any case, but that of our business classes and their political enablers, who long ago won an argument about the primacy of the free market, and so have been allowed to work their will in he world unobstructed by noisome regulations, or even a second thought.

UPDATE. They seem to come up every time the President meets with folks like Hu: fantasies that our government will send a "message" to the tyrants -- a pro-democracy one, that is, rather than "Keep them cheap shirts and blouses a-comin'!" Are these fantasists trying to fool other people, or themselves? I could spend a lot of time wondering, if I had time to spend.

WHAT I WAS DOING 17 YEARS AGO. Found on YouTube:

Clearly things went downhill after that.

I don't know the etiquette of these things, but I have to thank EuckyCheese for getting this out in the open.

MULTIPLE PULITZER-PRIZE LOSERS SPEAK! This year's Pulitzer Prize winners are traitors, complain many conservatives in no danger of ever winning one (some of whom take time to graphically demonstrate why.)

Others complain that Pulitzer laureates are insufficiently respectful of powerful Republicans. "We'll have more to say about this year's Pulitzers as time goes by," darkly mutter the guys from Power Line, whose Time Blog of 2004 award must be looking awful lonely on the mantlepiece these days.

You hear it every year. It is a mystery. They brag constantly on the superiority of that alternate universe they call the blogosphere, yet piss and moan about the Pulitzers as if Joseph P. personally broke their prom date.

As usual here at this hardcore libertarian blog, my solution is market-based: Why don't these whiners just set up their own journamalism awards? They could call them the Coughlins.