"In the chapter Charlie Bucket – accompanied by his mother, not his sprightly grandfather – and the other children are led into the Vanilla Fudge Room, where they face the sinister prospect of the Pounding and Cutting Room."

"In the centre of the room there was an actual mountain, a colossal jagged mountain as high as a five-storey building, and the whole thing was made of pale-brown, creamy, vanilla fudge," the chapter reads. "All the way up the sides of the mountain, hundreds of men were working away with picks and drills, hacking great hunks of fudge out of the mountainside...  As the huge hunks of fudge were pried loose, they went tumbling and bouncing down the mountain and when they reached the bottom they were picked up by cranes with grab-buckets, and the cranes dumped the fudge into open wagons."...

Timmy Troutbeck and "a rather bumptious little boy called Wilbur Rice," backed by their vile parents, shout abuse at Willy Wonka's warnings, scramble into the wagons, and are carried off through a hole in the wall.

"That hole," said Mr Wonka, "leads directly to what we call the Pounding and Cutting Room. In there the rough fudge gets tipped out of the wagons into the mouth of a huge machine. The machine then pounds it against the floor until it is all nice and smooth and thin. After that, a whole lot of knives come down and go chop chop chop, cutting it up into neat little squares, ready for the shops."

Was it really "deemed too wild, subversive and insufficiently moral," or was it deemed less fanciful and funny than the other child killings? And how many kids do we need to see die? Cut the least interesting scene.

Alternatively, it was too obviously susceptible to the Freudian interpretation about symbolic excrement and sodomy. Pale-brown, creamy... great hunks of fudge. "That hole." And then men with "picks and drills"! Maybe that's what The Guardian means by "too wild, subversive and insufficiently moral," but that's a studiously euphemistic way to say it. They want us to be excited to get to read this wonderful new material that the prudes couldn't accept 50 years ago. But if you understood what they didn't accept, you wouldn't accept it either.

Here's the whole chapter, with a Quentin Blake illustration.

"Benghazi, Robin Williams, Islam, Twitter, and a convicted bomber from the 1970s came together in a court case against right-wing bloggers."

Thanks to David Weigel for presenting this story, which I've avoided blogging because of its complexity and moral ambiguity. Where do you start? I've only copied the Daily Beast's headline and subheadline here, and it's an odd list of things. Robin Williams and Taylor Swift aren't actually important, but passing references. "Islam" is much more generic than "Everyone Draw Mohammad Day" (which I always said was a bad idea, but, of course: free speech). And the word "pedophilia" doesn't even appear on the list, but it's at the core of this defamation case.

Excerpt:

When he called McCain to the stand, Kimberlin handed McCain a print-out of a 2009 blog post about how to get traffic, and asked him to read tip number four: "Make some enemies." Kimberlin, having made his point—this guy was starting a fight to make money—tried to take back the document. McCain snatched it and kept reading.

"At the same time, however, don't confuse cyber-venom with real-world hate," said McCain, giving a drawled, dramatic reading of one of his favorite posts. "Maybe Ace of Spades really would like to go upside Andrew Sullivan's head with a baseball bat, I don't know. But at some point you understand it's just blogging about politics, and you start wondering if maybe it shares a certain spectator-friendly quality with pro wrestling. For all we know, Ace is spending weekends at Sully's beach shack in Provincetown."

McCain plunked the document back on the witness stand. "A sense of humor is not a crime in this country," he said.

The right-wing bloggers win in the end, and when they win, they look like this.

And you may find yourself in a beautiful Oval Office... pic.twitter.com/m7N8DDQrZe
— Doktor Zoom (@DoktorZoom) August 28, 2014

From "Twitter Nation distracted by president's suit."

I'm not distracted by the tan suit. I'm distracted by the distraction over the suit.

They say Obama said he had no strategy, but the suit was a strategy.

It's always showtime/Here at the edge of the stage....



Stop making sense, stop making sense, stop making sense, making sense/We've got a boyfriend that's better than that/And nothing is better that this....

"... of his pledge to act on his own to reshape the nation's immigration system by summer's end, and could instead delay some or all of his most controversial proposals until after the midterm elections in November, according to people familiar with White House deliberations."

The NYT reports.

I wonder who the "people familiar with White House deliberations" are and what they are trying to achieve. Something principled? Is anyone familiar with White House deliberations principled?