AdamSmith

Novel! But a tad old-fashioned and inefficient, no? ...Inefficiency, of course, being one of the prime things the framers tried to embed ineradicably into the new government. George III and Parliament having been all too efficient.

Over this news anchor's shoulder, watch his colleague's computer screen, starting at about the 1:06 mark... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1m8a4Jl4ZI&feature=player_embedded ...where I found it: http://blog.trutv.com/dumb_as_a_blog/2010/02/a-few-tips-on-viewing-naked-pictures-at-work.html

Well, we disagree. I talk to a lot of escorts about the range of people & personality types they encounter. I think they tell me the truth, mostly. The specters you invoke are of course a danger. But rare. This like everything is balancing risk/return.

Killertut, you are right. Do not despair. You know who you are, and what you want to do with your life at this point. I believe in you, and I think others do too. Matrix, you are really too harsh. (P.S. It is "lurker", not "Luther".)

Guerilla politics? Borat tactics? Bizarre. ...Has all the dastardliness with none of the elegance of, say, Jefferson's sneaking around trashing John Adams pseudonymously & through third parties during their presidential campaign.

Funny how he is no different than ever, yet at the same time has become such the insufferable twit.

Peter de Vries was a tragicomic genius of a writer. Hardly ever spoken of nowadays. Pity. His novel The Tents of Wickedness is one of my five or six favorite pieces of literature, period, full stop. This article gets it: ...Let us now round out the De Vriesian world, for it is a richly appointed place, not unlike Westport in appearance, not unlike Cheever country in social mores, not unlike Nabokov in verbal fluency — but utterly unique in wit. De Vries wrote funny about drinking: “This Chablis is, how shall I say, Kafkaesque.” He wrote funny about sex: “ ‘Sometimes I think this leg is the most beautiful thing in the world, and sometimes the other,’ I said. ‘I suppose the truth lies somewhere in between.’ ” He wrote funny about disillusionment: “One dreams of the goddess Fame and winds up with the bitch publicity.” He even wrote funny about writing: “I love being a writer. What I can’t stand is the paperwork.” Mr. De Vries wielded similes like a circus knife thrower: “Released from their supports her breasts dropped like hanged men.” Often similes served as preludes to a greater sorcery, springboards for literary high-dives and arabesques. Here’s what he conjures with “a hat like a shot fowl”: It was tilted down one side of her face at an intendedly jaunty angle, but recalling rather something plunging to earth in the autumn weather, this image to be linked with that of men crouched in duck blinds or taking aim from rowboats in the pitiless weft of things: predators themselves predestined prey in the immemorial Necessity; kin together not only with the poor feathered thing plummeting earthward in the gray dawn, but with all sentient life locked forever in communal doom. That kind of hat... http://www.mofflymedia.com/Moffly-Publications/Westport-Magazine/April-2006/The-Return-of-Peter-DeVries/

Love R. Crumb, utterly compelled by his illustrated Book of Genesis. Great review: http://obit-mag.com/articles/r-crumbs-genesis

There is a complementary viewpoint that the justices ought not even attend this convocation of the political branches. The press reports that John Paul Stevens never does, viewing it as inappropriate. I loved another report today that Rehnquist once skipped a SOTU address because it conflicted with his watercolor class at the local YMCA! Having paid $25 for the series of classes, he was not going to waste any of them. Apart from his judicial philosophy, the more I read about Rehnquist, the more I like him. (Especially compared with his predecessor as Chief, Warren Burger. Another delightful bit about Rehnquist, from Woodward and Armstrong's The Brethren: When he was an associate justice under Burger, on nice days he and his clerks often took their bag lunches outside to eat, sitting on some benches in the Court's yard. One day they were doing this, and noticed a steward setting up a card table and folding chairs some distance away, then setting the table with a white tablecloth, china and silver. Then out came Burger and his clerks, who sat down to be served formally by the steward. Burger's pomposity and stuffed-shirtedness already being an item of some amusement to the other justices, this sight sent Rehnquist into such an uncontrollable laughing fit that he had to go inside.)

Whoops! Did not see Oz's post here until after I had posted in the Politics forum: http://www.maleescortreview.com/forum/index.php?/topic/4274-judicial-temperament/ I agree with what he said. And certainly the right is not meek in criticizing SCOTUS decisions they don't like. But I can't think of a past instance where the executive poked his finger in the court's eye right when they were sitting there before him.

Judicial temperament? Justice openly disagrees with Obama in speech Alito visibly responds negatively when president mentions recent decision WASHINGTON - Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito didn't like hearing President Barack Obama publicly criticize the high court's ruling removing corporate campaign spending limits — and he didn't try to hide it. Alito made a dismissive face, shook his head repeatedly and appeared to mouth the words "not true" or possibly "simply not true" when Obama assailed the decision Wednesday night in his State of the Union address... Senate Democratic leaders sitting immediately behind Alito and other members of the high court rose and clapped loudly in their direction, with Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., leaning slightly forward with the most enthusiastic applause. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35117174/ns/politics-white_house/

Yes, you are a twink. Certified. Next time I pass your way, we will have to make trouble together.

Whole disquisition is the most extraordinarily astute analysis I've seen in moons. Of which I see many. You should submit it to one of the journals.

Ahhh! The deep structure of this thread emerges. ...In college some chums in a rock band penned a song about this conundrum. Refrain: ...Just more derivative art Just more derivative art And everything we try to do The Beatles they have done it too Just more derivative art!

From the standpoint of shadenfreude in the public eye etc, I am right there with you. But, I fear, not into the domain of public sanction. If we apply their standards here, where will it end? Must, instead, never begin. Or be fought tooth/nail. So, again, as above. Twain, or Shaw? I think the latter, but cannot remember. Time is the enemy.

Well...really? One could counter that the small number of impeachments over our history is not such a bad record after all. And thus, per another thread here, credencing the argument that the framers did construct something that could be run, without ruin, from time to time by idiots.

Aww! When you and I differed over Spitzer's plight -- I saying I was encouraged by the resilience & irrepressibility of lust in the human species -- I still agreed that he was right to resign, given the blatant difference between his moral crusading and his personal actions. But in the SC case, is there really reason to invoke the ultimate sanction of impeachment? As the committee chairman Rep. Jim Harrison said, “We can’t impeach for hypocrisy. We can’t impeach for arrogance. We can’t impeach an officeholder for his lack of leadership skills.” I for one am relieved to see vigilante justice stop to consider that impeachment is the political version of capital punishment, and needs to be meted out with some care. P.S. De Tocqueville was characteristically eloquent on this point: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/de-tocqueville/democracy-america/ch07.htm

"Lip service"? Rimming is one of my favorite things. As for celebrating, I do my best not to hold back! (...One tries to be ever ready to bottom, should the occasion arise without notice.)

I know escorts who have canceled photo sessions because their pecs had fallen into the condition his are in. As for the 'Johnston' tattoo, regrettable that the typeface brings to mind the B.F. Goodrich logo.

Author of my personal credo (forgive me repeating myself from earlier posts here): The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. Thank you for the alert!

Sorry, about to suck up even more of it! -- How Kirk and Spock really feel about each other: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tef3IOB_lqg&feature=related ...and, possibly even better:

A Brief History of Toilets By Claire Suddath, Time Magazine In case you didn't know (and honestly, why would you?), Nov. 19 is World Toilet Day — an event hosted by the World Toilet Organization to raise awareness for the 2.5 billion people around the world who live without proper sanitation. But even for those of us with access to modern plumbing, how often do we really think about our toilets? From outhouses to water closets — even former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain's $35,000 "commode on legs" (technically a table, not a toilet) — humans have been devising creative ways to go to the bathroom since, well, since the first person crossed his legs with an urgent need to go. It's unclear who first invented the toilet: early contenders for the honor are the Scots and the Greeks. Skara Brae, a Neolithic settlement on the Scottish mainland dating back to 3,000 B.C., features stone huts equipped with drains extending from recesses in their walls — a feature which historians believe were for residents' bathroom needs. The Palace of Knossos on Crete, built around 1,700 B.C., features definite latrines: large, earthenware pans connected to a water supply that ran through terra-cotta pipes. Europeans had nothing of comparable sophistication until well into the 16th century. Ancient Rome is famous for its public bath houses — the Baths of Caracalla are six times larger than St. Paul's Cathedral and could serve 1,600 people at once — and the Roman commitment to hygiene didn't stop with just bathing. At one point Rome boasted 144 communal lavatories. The city's giant toilets, with their long, benchlike seats, were not used every day; for the most part, Romans just threw their waste into the street. Medieval England wins the gross-out award for its invention of the castle garderobe — a protruding room with a tiny opening out of which royalty would do their business. The garderobe was usually suspended over a moat which collected all manner of human discards and making for a particularly uninviting hurdle for an invading army. Peasants and serfs — forced to go without their own castles — relieved themselves in communal privies located at the end of their street or, in the case of those living along the London Bridge, right into the River Thames. Garderobes and public toilets were eventually replaced with something slightly more recognizable to the modern day defecator: a box with a lid. France's Louis XI hid his toilet behind curtains and used herbs to keep his bathroom scented; England's Elizabeth I covered her commode in crimson velvet bound with lace. In 1596, England lept into modern sanitation when Sir John Harrington, godson of Elizabeth I, published Metamorphosis of Ajax in which he described a new kind of water closet: a raised cistern with a small pipe down which water ran when released by a valve. The Queen installed Harrington's invention in her palace at Richmond, but it took another 200 years before a man named Alexander Cummings developed the S-shaped pipe underneath the basin to keep out foul odors. At the end of the 18th century, the flushable toilet went mainstream. In the 1880s, England's Prince Edward (later to become King Edward VII) hired a prominent London plumber named Thomas Crapper to construct lavatories in several Royal palaces. While Crapper patented a number of bathroom-related inventions, he did not — as is often believed — actually invent the modern toilet. He was, however, the first one to display his bathroom wares in a showroom so that when customers needed a new fixture they would immediately think of his name. Bathroom technology really took off, though, in the 20th century. Flushable valves, water tanks that rest on top of the bowl rather than above, toilet paper rolls (invented in 1890 but not heavily marketed until 1902) — these minor improvements seem like necessities now. And if you think the toilet hasn't changed recently, think again: in 1994 Congress passed the Energy Policy Act, requiring common flush toilets to use only 1.6 gallons of water, less than half of what they'd consumed before. The "low-flow" law left a lot of consumers dissatisfied (and a lot of toilets clogged) until companies developed better models, many of which — if we're lucky enough to be counted among the 60% of the world's population with access to proper sanitation — we use today. http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1940525,00.html

Only to prove I am the most worthless poster that ever wasted oxygen:

Like TY, I would be interested to know what this means. I don't understand it either as you first presented it, or as you elaborated. Not a criticism; rather a genuine query out of interest.

Damn! All that paperwork for nothing?