It’s well worth reading Nagamine’s email exchange with Bennett. She has an exquisite sense of humor — with the law, no less.

I’m having trouble distinguishing the Catholic bishops’ position on every medical treatment involving lady parts from Mary Baker Eddy’s position on all medical “interventions.”

“‘Awoken,’” huh. Double quotes ’cause I’ll trust you — not checking it out myself. The simple past and perfect participle of the verbs (present) “wake [up]” and “awaken,’ in all their transitive and intransitive forms, are wonderful in their variety, but I don’t think I’ve ever come across “awoken” used like this. Leave it to our Shakespeare.

First, it’s not Shakira’s ass (just), despite what you and others here may seem to assert through your naming devices. It’s the flow of every part with focus on ass, yes, but also ass through waist through lower back. The lower back is of utmost interest to more than orthopedists and physical anthropologists. Just (as a post-menopausal heterosexual female) saying.

Second, this magnificent photograph of the boys violates all the layout rules I learned when editing my high school yearbook an era or two ago, at least for a picture worthy of Mrs. Tbogg’s office — unless they’re in the middle of the page, which, of course, they deserve to be.

Sorta coming out of left field here. As a serious eater and gardener and all, and as someone who grew up in the same environment. Also — here’s the left field — as someone who grew up in the 1950′s and 1960′s, when schools provided endless nutritional advice and, in junior and high school, cooking class. The much-maligned home-ec! Yet all this provided something valuable, really valuable. (Was in response to WWII rickets-limited enlistees — nutrition an old issue in the US, whether among poor WASPS and blacks or among poor immigrants who didn’t know how to adapt well to the foods/markets here).
Just saying that from Alice Waters to government buy-up-the-surplus policies, schools are the main place to go to teach people how to eat well — and cheaply! no reason good eating has to be expensive, even when agriculture gets reimbursed properly, from owner of fields to bean-picker. Go, Michele Obama.
I also favor shop and sewing classes (versions of the same thing: how things fit = measure twice, then again; and then ease, ease, ease). And jump-roping and lots of running around at recess. Sue me. (What can you do me?)

March Madness is as irritating to me as Sunday afternoon football was to my mother in the early 1960′s. The relatively new phenomenon of TV football complicated and often spoiled the special dinner she’d made. Difference between her and me: she never got caught up in the game(s) except to root mindlessly for the Packers only because all the rest of us were Giants’ fans. (When her calls to the table were being ignored, she would also sing college fight songs — for some reason, she knew them all. So, now I do, too. On Wisconsin, Minnesota, hats off to thee, and so on.) (“When I married your father, he had NO interest in football!”)
I, however, can get caught up in the real game (even though I am pre-Title IX. And, btw, my mother was very athletic for a girl born in 1918. No shrinking violet, she.)
Like tonight. Sort of a convoluted tale here.
First, I got pissed with my husband when he jumped up from dinner just as I was reaching the brilliant pinnacle of some particularly fascinating something or other story from my week — he “just wanted to check” the score of some first-round game I didn’t even know what, and on goes the TV. Boy, was I pissed. A little while later, as he cleans up from dinner and I recline on the living room couch with English springer (cool-off time), I turn on the sound to this same game that’s been going on in this other room the whole time. I’m quickly hooked. Nothing against those young players at Duke or even the tediously worshipped K-man, but I know whose side I’m on. My husband, he’s always strangely fascinated by and rooting for Duke, so when he joins me as I am riveted by this game, his interest in which I have just colorfully denounced…, we’ll see. By the half he’s completely with Lehigh. Or with me. Hard to say which, since he is a good man. Both.
A tale of an American marriage in March.

With Fenway’s ineffable, unluggable beauty burning in mind’s eye, I was looking forward to the link (despite your warning): yeah, a disappointment. Usually it’s fun to explore the fine points of dog distinctions that “mixes” expose – distinctions equally available if you look closely at the different “established breeds.” All of them: They run, they point, they sniff the air, they sniff the ground, they dig into the ground, they run ahead, they stay behind, they do they do they do, long legs, shorts legs, touch necks, long sleek necks, drooping ears, pointy ears, short coats, long coats, so on so on, in infinitely subtle variations (on the basis of so few, such small genetic differences).
I’m off to lure English springer from the couch — no, without my noticing, she’s taken herself near me here in the kitchen in that LLBean bed she loves. To the mudroom for the night, dog! A good run in the morning. (And wow — it’s like late April here — running so easy over damp grass rather than the ice-ridden snow we should have.)

In my googlie quest to discover who the hell Stranahan might me (I’m so poorly read!), I came across this:
http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2011/05/a-love-supreme
I also came across flickr and twitter links for him and all the usual suspects, except no Wikipedia page! I guess he’s too cool and subtle and Lennyish for that. Just what you’d expect of someone who (I’m drawing an inference here, from the collection of links google produced) hooked up with Breitbart via HuffPo.

Well, everyone is Spartacus now. Or rather, Bob Paulson.

On the fascinating colonial (and pre-colonial) era stats. A question, truly out of historical curiosity. Can we estimate how many of these marriages were truly “had to get married” and how many were the result of “properly engaged” couples being given leeway for a little pre-marital nookie (chaperones having been removed upon engagement) — nookie not formally approved but not thoroughly disapproved, either? (Maybe even approved, with a wink and a nod.) I’m thinking of the days when “engagement” referred to legally enforceable contracts, to “publishing the bans,” and all that.

Truly just curious. What strikes me in any case: earlier generations that didn’t enjoy the advantages of today’s birth control methods were often much more understanding and tolerant and, dare I say, celebratory of young people’s, especially young people’s (really young by today’s standards), sexual/sensual/erotic drives. Scared of them, too, but largely because of the babies that could result (as well as the disruption of families and all because of “infidelity” by married people — nobody ever said life is easy). But why did so many people get just plain scared, especially when means of allaying those fears became available?

In response to numerous above.
Just yesterday I (now above 60) was driving my nearly 30-year-old daughter to the train station after a wonderful weekend visit, when we worked on planning her impending wedding, lots of good stuff. (Life can be good.) So. Two-hour drive, and she asks me an innocent question about a cousin of mine, and then I start telling family stories (she’s driving, I’m leaning back, spouting forth), stories about my own friends, my grandmother, mother, cousins, various folks. And we both realize, wow: I’d recounted maybe ten stories of girls/women in my/our little world who’d gotten pregnant (“nice” middle-class girls in the 1920′s, 1930′s, through the 60′s and 70′s) and “had to get married.” (We didn’t get into the abortion stories — like my married and already-childrened grandmother who had two, in the 1920′s, for instance.) And my daughter, feminist-alert as she be, was dumbstruck. Wow. She knew, but she didn’t know. Let the world know, she said. It really hit her how different the world had been for people she’d heard about all her life in different contexts.
Hard-won. We owe it to our mothers and grandmothers, ourselves and our daughters. And to the good men in our lives. (And to ourselves as protection as the not-so-good ones, or the good ones who in weak moments aren’t so good.)

“The Only Way… She could possibly get to this figure is including the cost of a separate gynecological exam as part of the cost for prescription.
That is, she is claiming she’d need a full gynecological exam to secure the prescription in the first place.
I don’t know what PP charges for that kind of a quickie visit and routine prescription but I don’t think it’s very much.
That also presupposes that the gynecologists her insurance does pay for refuse to write birth control scripts, something else I doubt.”

Since a-hole devotes so much space to this argument, too bad he didn’t consult a woman. In fact, a gynecologist won’t prescribe bc pills (or implant an IUD or do stuff like that) with out conducting a full exam, at least annually or more often, if a woman has certain conditions or various issues/problems. Maybe he’s going by the practices of the kinds of doctor Limbaugh visits (excuse me — used to visit), who prescribe serious drugs just because the patient asks for them.

Let me add my thanks for the Bittman link. His kitchen set-up is identical to my daughter’s in her five-story walk-up in Brooklyn, down to the window size and position. I bet I could tell you where his fridge is (just to the right of the counter in the picture) and about the small, jury-rigged “counter” on the wall behind him (and also the door in the same wall, which goes into the living room). But the meals my daughter and her partner cook in that space — and on poor student funds! They, too, would like to have a food processor (on perpetual offer as a big present) but just don’t have room. (Instead, they’ve become whizzes with the knife, sharpened the old-fashioned way — good knife as big present, at least! — accompanied by a penny, of course).
Bittman may not, however, have the door into the public hallway my duo have (his photographer would have his back to this door, permanently locked now). When their building was built (my guess, some time in the late 19th c.), their kitchen space was designed to serve as a kitchen for the whole building (so they’ve been told by their, well, interesting landlord/building owner) — some kind of stove was there, I presume, and a proper kitchen sink. A communal space. Each apartment was lucky to have its own bathroom –tiny as those were (and are), they had (have) room for a bathtub. A step up from the bathtub in the “living room” (which my brother’s apt. on the lower East side still had, back in the 60′s — the toilet and only sink in that apt. were in a kind of “closet”).
Though come to think of it, are the bathroom spaces in all these buildings add-ons? At least the toilet part? My daughter’s window, unlike Bittman’s, looks out onto an interior courtyard (gloriously overgrown and wild). Maybe that’s where the outhouses once were. In Britain, blocks were still organized around outhouses in interior “courtyards,” in cities like Liverpool and Manchester, as late as the early 1950′s. At least in NYC, some kind of toilet plumbing may have been installed pretty early (I think it’s the same plumbing there today, unfortunately!).
Ah, my nostalgia for old NY! I’ll plug (not for the first time) Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York.
McMegan, scion of a real estate mogul (or something — oh, I forgot, of “real academics”), has no idea. About anything.

thanks for the link to Roy.

I must be getting old (well, yes, I am), but. All I can think about is Giants v. Pats. Ten years ago I’d have been ecstatic. Now (after 35 years in MA) I’m not.

so thanks for the link to Roy, a reminder of why maybe it’s okay the Giants won. (No one in boston writes like Roy, I assure you.) (But then, Tom v. Eli?) Ach, life is hard.

Make something necessary for old-fashioned survival. A car (to get to work, to the store for food to eat.) A refrigerator (to store food in a world where you can’t “to market” every morning, especially when you actually have a job). A range/stove (to cook said food). A cell phone (to communicate in this world, maybe even dispensing with “landline “). And so forth.

Then claim that, since 5 or 10 or 50 or 150 years ago a lot of these things didn’t even exist, these things are all luxuries! We don’t have poor people, or people struggling on the edge of poverty! Eat the concrete sidewalks! the clods of frozen earth!

Tbogg, a brilliant and, well, moving post. Thank you.

Well, I meant “discreet” — though in fact “discrete” makes for “discreet” here.

So, he’s always had that ridiculous extra set of eyes? The light brown ones that are there even when his other ones are closed? This picture (new to me) explains all!
And he’s beautiful (and I am confident Mrs. T is, too — I appreciate your discrete way of including her.)

“At which point you’re probably asking yourself, “Um. What kind of steak? Rib eye? New York strip?”. I know I was.”

Mr. Tbogg, this captures for me why your bassets, the boys, and the Mrs. T and L&T Casey mentions seem part of a complete life. Probably your actual complete life is as messy as anybody else’s, but health is a messy thing to maintain, or attain to. Thank you — and also, hang in there, courage, and all that.

Calminginfluence, I think that’s a lucid dream kind of thing, knowing you’re asleep but not waking up. Do dogs have lucid dreams? Is their whole life one big lucid dream?