"Joan Didion and her husband had, like, a safe word when they were at a party and they wanted to leave. It was 'White Christmas.'"

"This night is now magical because of that scarf. You look mean, but like, mean in the way where I want to know you...."/"Like we'd be close, but I'd still be kind of cruel..."

This is the best ad I've ever seen:



Love Zosia Mamet. As for Anna Kendrick... never noticed her before, so for me, this is her breakthrough role.

NPR interviews the rap artist who provided the rap for that Ben Carson ad that has come up for a certain amount of mockery.

NPR provides the text of the answers, but the questions are summarized. I recommend listening to the audio to get a sense of whether there's condescension toward the black Christian Republican (whose name is Robert Donaldson (stage name: Aspiring Mogul)). This was the best part, where he responds to the question whether it's condescending to use rap music to appeal to "a certain constituency":

When Obama ran for president and the whole music industry made a song — from Will.I.Am to Alicia Keys to Common Sense and everybody — "Yes, I can! Yes, I can!" That was definitely a rap song. And so for me, I see it as the exact same thing. So [Ben Carson] did a rap ad — he did a country ad, too! Is that a knockoff to people who like country music, because he has a country song that represents him? ...

What I'm basically saying is: What genre of music is sufficient to use for a presidential ad? Is it only classical music? Is it pop music? I never said that this is an ad to get the black vote. That was the way they marketed it; I wrote the song because Ben Carson inspired me. And if they're using it for that reason, I'm now talking to you and have this opportunity to have this conversation. So the song has done, to some degree, the goal that I initially intended to begin with.

Sitting in a booth in a diner, Ben Carson explains his campaign's new urban radio ad to Jorge Ramos.

You hear only the beginning of the ad in that video — as Ramos, after asking Carson about the ad, starts playing it on a mobile phone. You can play the whole ad here. And here's the discussion at Metafilter. Excerpt:

I was hoping for more of the "I'm Ben Carson and I'm here to say..." style rap popular among conservatives and corporate team-building consultants everywhere.

"...store your grain the Egyptian way."

"Donald Trump will protect Israel, and brutally and quickly cut the head off of ISIS."

From Donald Trump's new radio ad.

"Essena O'Neill was a social media celebrity, with over half a million followers on instagram and deals with brands to advertise their products. She was 16. Then she decided to stop."

"She is in the process of editing the captions on her old instagram posts to reflect the reality of what she was experiencing in the moment (like loneliness or insecurity) or to talk about the artifice behind them."

and yet another photo taken purely to promote my 16 year old body. This was my whole identity. That was so limiting. Made me incredibly insecure. You have no idea.

Just the first sentence of this comment contains so much. When you're an attractive young woman, it's easy to feel like you're playing the game and winning - only to realize much later you were never even considered a player, just the trophy. O'Neill is wise to realize this at such a young age.

Imagine! The "perfect jewel"!

That's an ad from page 67 of the September 18, 1960 issue of The New York Times — an issue I was reading yesterday, for my "Moscow Suspicious of Hillary" post.

I love paging through all the old ads. There's one in that issue for "Fantastic, magical: typewriter correction tape — "Type-Out" —  to "save hours of costly re-typing." And there's one for "Daylight Blue" TV that "Adds a Tint of Blue" to improve the clarity of black-and-white TV. The TV is "big... like a movie screen" when it's only 23". And I love that the elimination of glare is attributed to something called "Ultra-Vision Glarejector."

What got me thinking back the transistor radio I'd seen was this Tech Times article Meade just texted me:

Electrical engineers from the University of Wisconsin have developed a flexible silicon phototransistor, which to date is the fastest and most responsive ever created... Just like mammalian eyes, phototransistors collect light and then transform this into an electrical impulse. In mammals, this pulse is transported by the brain's nerves but in digital devices, the electrical charge becomes a binary code that software converts into a digital image. Many phototransistors are flat because they are fabricated on rigid surface but the new phototransistor is flexible so it can easily mimic the behavior of the eyes of mammals....

CNN uses the concept of "Vegas" to try to titillate us about the debate.

I found this inappropriately sexual:



Received, just now, in my email.

Now, I'll check my instincts by Googling "what does what happens in vegas stays in vegas mean," because I know the internet is quick with answers to questions like that. For example, earlier today, I found the answer to a question I had: What is happening to the weasel in "Pop Goes the Weasel" when the weasel pops? That question has a very interesting answer:

[T]here have been many suggestions for what... "Pop! goes the weasel" [means], including: that it is a tailor's flat iron, a dead weasel, a hatter's tool, a clock reel used for measuring in spinning, a piece of silver plate, or that 'weasel and stoat' is Cockney rhyming slang for "throat", as in "Get that down yer Weasel" meaning to eat or drink something. An alternative meaning involves pawning one's coat in order to buy food and drink, "weasel" is rhyming slang for "coat" "pop" is a slang word for "pawn.'

A clock reel is commonly called a spinner's weasel, and consists of a wheel which is revolved by the spinner in order to measure off thread or yarn after it has been produced on the spinning wheel. The weasel is usually built so that the circumference is six feet, so that 40 revolutions produces 80 yards of yarn, which is a skein. It has wooden gears inside and a cam, designed to cause a popping sound after the 40th revolution, telling the spinner that she has completed the skein.

As for "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas," it was originally a tourism marketing slogan — "What Happens Here, Stays Here" — that was designed connect Las Vegas to something other than just gambling. The idea was:

The emotional bond between Las Vegas and its customers was freedom. Freedom on two levels. Freedom to do things, see things, eat things, wear things, feel things. In short, the freedom to be someone we couldn't be at home. And freedom from whatever we wanted to leave behind in our daily lives. Just thinking about Vegas made the bad stuff go away. At that point the strategy became clear. Speak to that need. Make an indelible connection between Las Vegas and the freedom we all crave....

Hillary Clinton's new ad — exploiting Kevin McCarthy's deeply damaging line about Benghazi.

"The 30-second spot is the first one that the campaign is running nationally on cable television, underscoring the political gold mine that Clinton's team senses in McCarthy’s comments."

IBM gets me to embed its ad for IBM Watson.

I'm happy and thoroughly enthusiastic about propagating this:



Most viral video I've ever encountered on the internet. I'm susceptible to the virality of Bob Dylan, who does a subtle, lovely acting job. And I'm enjoying the closeup photography of his wrinkly face.

And let me give Apple equal time, and not because I've always been an Apple and not an IBM person. The Dylan ad reminds me — because of the nicely photographed closeup face and the pleasing music — of an ad that played during last night's football game: