But you don't see how sad he is when you are away.

Any New Year's changes you've got planned for yourself?

Don't be boring!

ADDED: I found those painted bowling pins in the Cherrywood Coffeehouse in Austin, Texas. Maybe they gave you the idea to take up painting bowling pins in 2015. You can buy old bowling pins at eBay, unsurprisingly. They're only about a dollar or 2. Many of the listings anticipate that you will be using them for target practice. So there's that too. You might want to sharpen your shooting in 2015.

Recommend self-improvements for Althouse in 2015. (Check as many as you want.)

Paint (and photograph) various objects, like bowling pins.

Use eBay for the first time and more than once.

Sharpen your shooting... and blog about it.

Write more posts about current politics.

Write more posts that are not about politics.

Track your steps in the iPhone "Health" app and try to rack up higher and higher numbers.

Write longer, more elegant and thoughtful blog posts.

Write wilder, weirder, more cutting blog posts.

Stop blogging so much and get out in the real world. Report back.

Don't be boring!

 

pollcode.com free polls

"Mark was the stuff of dreams. Kind, caring, attentive. Enough to make all of my friends jealous. But today something horrible happened…"

(Via Metafilter.)

"After Her Fiancé Left Her At The Altar, This Bride Took The World's Best Photo Shoot/'The moment the first bit of paint hit my dress I was free.'"

ADDED: Not to be confused with "solo weddings."

The telling thing about the Japanese ceremonies is that they show that the single person would still like to marry someone, even if that someone is themselves. It makes their singledom look ludicrous. Marriage is a bond and a commitment—marrying yourself is ridiculous because you are already married to yourself....

Click for more »

"Ridiculous because we never studied anything..."

... we just loved our popular music: Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, etc. And it wasn't a case of 'studying' it. I think for us, we'd have felt it would have ruined it to study it. We wanted to make our own minds up just by listening to it. So our study was listening. But to be told – as I was years ago now – that The Beatles were in my kid's history books? That was like 'What?! Unbelievable, man!' Can you imagine when we were at school, finding yourself in a history book?!

So it's very flattering, and I think it's a kind of cool idea really, you know, like in LIPA. So yeah, it's very flattering. At the same time, I don't think that by studying popular music you can become a great popular musician; it may be that you use it to teach other people about the history, that's all valuable. But to think that you can go to a college and come out like Bob Dylan? Someone like Bob Dylan, you can't make. It was an early decision when we were thinking of our policies for LIPA, we said: 'We want to train people to be all rounders. Give them as much info as we can. But you can't tell them how to become a Bob Dylan or a John Lennon, because you know, nobody knows how that happens'."

I had to look up LIPA. From the Wikipedia disambiguation page, I cut right through the Liquid Isopropyl Alcohol, League for Independent Political Action, and the Long Island Power Authority, and saw that it's the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts.

"... then you're being kind of an asshole movie star, Shailene.  Put your big girl pants on. And a pair of shoes, you savage."

The commentary on the #1 of Tom & Lorenzo's Top 5 Worst Red Carpet Looks of 2014. #1 is bad in a different way from the rest of the top 4. And as for #4, "now we know that nipple white-out is a thing."

Reading that last post out loud with Meade, we were talking about how the Democratic Party is trying to create anxiety by letting you know that the Party knows how much money they've gotten out of you this year.

It reminded me of that mailer I received a couple years ago from the Greater Wisconsin Political Fund, showing my name and my home address and whether I'd voted in recent elections in a list with the same information about my close neighbors. That was really egregious guilt tripping, because neighbors were getting information about each other, so the organization was openly leveraging everyone's need to maintain esteem in the community.

But the new email from the Democratic Party relied on a similar psychological manipulation: My reputation is ay stake. People whom I want to think well of me know that I'm not quite good enough, and they are showing me what I can do to fix that. I'd better vote this time so I don't look bad on the next mailer OR I can hit the $3/$10/$50 donate button.

Meade said this what they call "nudge." You know about the nudge. Cass Sunstein wrote a book on the subject "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness."

I said there needed to be a different word, because "nudge" seems to be a positive poke in the right direction, not the creation of anxiety around the thing that they don't want you to do.

That word is: PRICK.

"Prick" is the ideal word — quite aside from any indelicate intention to refer to male genitalia — because it means (OED): "To cause mental pain or discomfort to; to sting (esp. the conscience) with sorrow or remorse; to grieve, pain, torment" and "To poke at something as if to pierce it; to make a thrust or stab at." That is, "prick" is precisely the negative version of "nudge."

By the way, the "coarse slang" use of "prick" to mean the penis goes back to c1555:

c1555   Manifest Detection Diceplay sig. Biiiv,   To turne his pricke vpward, and cast a weauers knot on both his thumbs behind him....

The other "coarse slang" usage, which I particularly like in connection with my recommendation of a nudge/prick distinction is "A stupid, contemptible, or annoying person (esp. a man or boy)." That goes back to 1598:

1598   J. Florio Worlde of Wordes at Pinchino,   A pillicock, a primcock, a prick, a prettie lad, a gull, a noddie.

More recently:

1934   H. Miller Tropic of Cancer 110   Jesus, what I'd like is to find some rich cunt—like that cute little prick, Carl.

Miller doesn't mean he wants to find a "rich cunt" who resembles "that cute little prick, Carl." He means he wants to find "rich cunt" like the "rich cunt" found by "that cute little prick, Carl." Is Miller a sloppy writer or did he find that ambiguity amusing?

In any case, the word of the day is "prick." Don't let those manipulators of the masses say "nudge" when the word should be "prick." Observe the nudge/prick distinction.

ADDED: I just realized: If you like this blog post, you might want to consider doing your on-line shopping through The Althouse Amazon Portal.

In the email yesterday, after many emails from the DP all week:



That's a freeze frame. In the original email, the clock ticks down second by second, New Year's Eve style. (I've blurred out the email address, which is my University of Wisconsin work email.)

I get so many emails from the Democratic Party throughout the year, always with that "donate" button, and always with a super-low option like $3. So there must be people who will have lost track of their "supporter record." Perhaps some of these people are susceptible to the worry that the Party has a number on them. They know. I'd better check. Is it enough? How can I not hit the button one last time this year and give them that less-than-a-latte $3?

As for me, I give nothing, ever, to any candidate, in any party, so I never lose track of my "supporter record."