AdamSmith

(I was resisting this, but the will crumbles:) Try, in all events, not to muse on the Sitwells!

1. ASPCA would object 2. That is to say, Bea Arthur pleasuring herself

My dear! One's earliest juvenilia bore the title 'Metempsychopathia Sexualis.' You can see what I was reading then. You think? On the other hand, easy to imagine the entirety of Alice B. fitting easily inside Gertrude.

He is channeling her! A Valentine for Sherwood Anderson Very fine is my valentine. Very fine and very mine. Very mine is my valentine very mine and very fine. Very fine is my valentine and mine, very fine very mine and mine is my valentine... http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Stein.html

Only that too much of what they served resembled grey pubes and shriveled balls. The food, that is. Not the patrons. Although come to think of it...

Superb. Having decried double-posting, I do more and more of it. Stu drives me to repost from the Beckham thread: ...The skin hangs in loose, plastic folds just there, and there is a little copper-colored circle like a quarter made out of pennies. There's a hole in the center and it is corroded green at the edges. This must be a kind of "naked suit" and whatever the sex organs may be, they are hidden behind this hot, pocked and pitted imitation skin... Carol Emshwiller, "Sex and/or Mr. Morrison"

Eeeww! (Memories of The Old Heidelberg, a restaurant in New Haven of long standing but low repute. Now, to absolutely no one's regret, finally defunct.)

I was thinking of the comparison between his and McCain's. Of whom I was mercifully unable to find a shirtless pic.

Maybe Obama should insist the debates be held in a Naked-News format... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/08/14/o...i_n_119070.html

OK, after Pastor Warren's forum last night, I suspend some of my previous sanguine remarks about Obama's good odds. The warning bell for me, besides the thing itself, was Gergen's comments on CNN, moments after it ended, on how lackluster Obama's performance was, and how previous expectations that Obama would easily mop up McCain in the debates are now blown away. Gergen's subdued, even funereal mien betrayed how shocked he was that O did not do better.

China, to take just one part of Asia, has a refreshing attitude toward commercial sex. Hotels often include a brothel, explictly run as such.

Someone has to! (Belated echo of all the examples of chiasmus -- 'crossing' -- that resound through English & American Romantic poetry. From just about everything in Wordsworth; to Crossing Brooklyn Ferry; to just about everything in Dickinson; ditto Emerson in verse & prose, Hart Crane, the Sage of Hartford, &tc, &tc. Hitchcock is just absolutely one of the divines. But I digress.)

Well, I see little evidence that the Europe trip "backfired." Nor can I agree that Americans of any stripe don't like electing rock stars -- quite the reverse. Nor, again, that Hillary has him dancing on any more strings than he does her. Most of all, I think he knows full well there is no cakewalk, and that he needs every overmastering advantage he can get -- foregoing public financing to increase his odds of gaining an outsize financial mismatch, just to take one example. We see the same phenomena; we draw opposite conclusions. Everyone's prerogative.

Viz. the recurrent images of things crossing that Hitchcock weaves throughout "Strangers on a Train"?

Same here, start of the campaign. But then came some reports to remind that, instead, he might actually be a more-than-competent practitioner of sharp-elbowed Cook County politics. Slick if not actually sleazy tactics of getting an opponent decertified and thus off the ballot even before the election, etc. Followed by his skilled, shrewd, decisive management of his primary campaign. In stark contrast to Herself (originally my rabid preference).

I take it he's no longer in the business? Otherwise, give! DTW is pretty much a waste land, far as I can tell.

Riveting article in The Atlantic detailing the mechanics of Hillary's loss. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200809/hill...linton-campaign

Well... He has been in NYC all this week. Leaves tomorrow for Boston. Make haste!

Reporting in. Mad scrabble for the dollar has been a time sink of late. But in the service of paying for play! E.g., as noted, this past week’s visit with Andre in NYC. Now prostrate, recovering from the radiation burns therefrom; and propelled back in mind to this from last summer… http://www.maleescortreview.com/forum/inde...c=1672&st=0 . . . but not in the elegiac strain this time. Instead, high summertime as trope of the ultimate fulfillment. . . . arrested peace, Joy of such permanence, right ignorance Of change still possible. Exile desire For what is not. This is the barrenness Of the fertile thing that can attain no more . . . . . . Not evocations but last choirs, last sounds With nothing else compounded, carried full, Pure rhetoric of a language without words. Things stop in that direction and since they stop The direction stops and we accept what is As good. The utmost must be good and is . . . The goal, sought with A, may be very nearly achieved.

That is, suspending print operations and going solely online. Following the revenue? You wouldn't? ...The skin hangs in loose, plastic folds just there, and there is a little copper-colored circle like a quarter made out of pennies. There's a hole in the center and it is corroded green at the edges. This must be a kind of "naked suit" and whatever the sex organs may be, they are hidden behind this hot, pocked and pitted imitation skin... Carol Emshwiller, "Sex and/or Mr. Morrison"

The article ends with this: "The state constitution prohibits referendum questions on subjects that relate to religion, judges, the courts, particular localities of the commonwealth, state appropriations and certain provisions of the constitution's Declaration of Rights. Attorney General Martha Coakley has 14 days to review the proposed question." In all that, Coakley is likely to find some way to sidetrack the thing. Sentiment among the MA electorate is now majority in favor of leaving gay marriage in place. Some conservative state pols may make some gestures toward repeal, but the status quo seems reasonably safe.

Double-posting again, but it bears repeating: "Victoria Beckham: 'Does this tampon make me look fat?'" – Joan Rivers

What they get up to this time of year... The 50 best jokes from the Edinburgh Fringe (AdamSmith's outtakes) "Victoria Beckham? Does this tampon make me look fat?" – Joan Rivers, on celebrities "Politicians are like God. No one believes in them, they haven't done anything for ages, and they give jobs to their immediate family" – Andy Zaltzman "I'm dating now, because I ran out of hooker money" – Rick Shapiro "The Scots invented hypnosis, chloroform and the hypodermic syringe. Wouldn't it just be easier to talk to a woman?" – Stephen Brown "'What's a couple?' I asked my mum. She said, 'Two or three'. Which probably explains why her marriage collapsed" – Josie Long "I like David Beckham. Most of us have skeletons in our closet. But he takes his out in public" – Andrew Lawrence "My boyfriend likes role play. He likes to pretend we're married. He waits until I go to bed, then he looks at porn and has a wank" – Joanna Neary "I used to go out with Christopher Reeve, but I just had to keep standing him up" – Steve Hall "I once buggered a man unconscious. I'm lying, he was already unconscious when I found him" – Tom Deacon "I never know the right thing to say, especially during sex. After my first time, I said to the girl, 'That's it, I'm afraid'" – Tom Deacon Still more at http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertai...nge-898042.html

Mike Gravel also. Kucinich and Gravel -- in the Logo TV debate/forum that also included Hillary, Barack and John Edwards -- were the only two to come out and, eloquently and straightforwardly, say gay marriage is a simple, self-evident matter of human and civil rights. It was Gravel's finest moment in the campaign that I saw.

Not to multiply entities needlessly, but the Hot Spots forum seems worth keeping on its own. Of course I just started using it for the first time, so not an impartial view here...