It does seem to me passing strange that an episode making such heavy eyebrows over treating women as ogling specimens should engage in its own pandering. I'm speaking of that very peculiar scene in which Megan's actress friend, left in the male bullpen of Sterling Cooper while Megan gives Don's lap a ride, should start crawling on all fours down the conference table and flashing her claws as the camera shoots her from behind, giving us a front-row view of her bottom in black panties choo-chooing away. She was putting on a show for the guys but the primary show was for us, turning the actress into a pastry display for a crude, cheap frisson.

But the chief crime of the episode was that we got so little of the divine Trudy, who shot down Pete's desire to have a Manhattan apartment because of his wearying commute (a flimsy excuse for the nogoodnik to set up a pad for his assignations and enjoy the perks of a "summer bachelor"--see The Seven Year Itch) (no fool she) with a wifely No that brooked no debate. Trudy may be the only mother on this show who isn't a monster (Joan's is truly awful), which may be why Mad Men has so little interest in her.

She begins with the founding father of modern birding, Roger Tory Peterson, hallowed be his name.

One must remember that, up until 1916, when the Migratory Bird Treaty made it illegal to shoot all but game birds, most serious birding was done with a gun. A bird in the hand reveals details and colorations that the best optics cannot find. In the 19th century, the primal pleasure of the hunt was behind much of birding; even the great Audubon killed tens of thousands of birds he did not need. Wealthy men, young and old, built museum-quality collections of taxidermy that proclaimed their sovereignty in the world. The terrible imbalance of a 5-inch female warbler up against a loaded shotgun was masked in euphemisms of ravishment: "I took her," the hunter said, never "I killed her."

The modern language of birding still reflects the possessive trajectory of bird-beauty-bullet, with birders saying of a particular sighting, "I got it" or "I had it." But with "A Field Guide to the Birds," Peterson substituted paper arrows for a double barrel, helping to channel the hunger for the hunt into something more challenging and pure-hearted. Birding, while still a sport, could also be contemplation, meditation, constitutional and never-ending study.

"A Field Guide to the Birds" came out five years before World War II—a war that saw Peterson working with the Army Air Corps. So impressed were the generals with the layout of his new field guide that they employed him to do something similar for the identification of airplanes. When birders went back into the field after the war, the air was literally full of innovation. The pilots who flew bombing missions were the same men who would pilot postwar domestic and international air travel, and the chemicals that had been developed to kill the enemy would find new use as pesticides, insecticides and herbicides. The flavor of the postwar atmosphere is expressed in Alfred Hitchcock's 1959 film, "North by Northwest," in the famous crop-dusting scene—a perfect nexus of flight, death and mistaken identity. ("I am but mad north-northwest," says Hamlet, "when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw.")

If Peterson's guide was a kind of passport, ushering citizens into nature and helping them put names to what they saw, Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," published in 1962, was a coroner's report. As the baby boomers hit their teens, it wasn't handsaws that were dying of DDT but hawks, falcons, ospreys and eagles. And it wasn't just mosquitoes that were killed by summertime spraying but America's beloved backyard Robins—"the one bird," Peterson wrote in his 1934 guide, "that everybody knows."

From Peterson's "Guide" and Carson's "Silent Spring" a movement was born: environmentalism. It grew out of a new set of relationships between Homo sapiens and nature. Peterson invited the public to care enough about birds to identify them and, by extension, to identify with them. Carson showed that in caring about the fate of another species we were implicitly protecting our own fate as a species. The "Life List" that is kept by most birders acquired a double meaning: It names every live species seen in a person's lifetime.

Last month, while I monitored events from the back porch, Laura and her teammates in the Seaside Sparrows competed in the World Series of Birding in Cape May, where even the alpha aces were baffled by one ambiguous visitor.

Just this month, at the World Series of Birding in New Jersey—an annual fundraising competition in which teams of birders attempt to see or hear the largest number of species in a 24-hour period—a questionable bird was located at Higbee's Beach. At first glance: a great crested flycatcher. At second glance . . . a western kingbird, rare for the East Coast! But so brown in places where it should be gray. And the tail notched, not squared, and without white edges—which, according to the guides, would make it an even rarer Couch's or tropical kingbird up from Mexico.

The teams that saw the bird took photos, compared the guides and chose. The verdict from the pros? A western kingbird in a wonky molt. Missing and worn tail feathers explained the lack of white edges. None of the guides shows this. It is the kind of knowledge that comes only with experience...

Birding is a continuing tutorial in the art of seeing, where a wonky molt can make all the diff.

It is always a pleasure and privilege (but mostly a pleasure) watching Marcelo and Veronika in sublime partnership, and seeing Veronika in a bare-midriff outfit as a temple dancer doing the erotic-mystico hoochie koo is worth the price of any admission, even YOUR SOUL.

And if you've never seen the stately, spectral procession of the Kingdom of the Shades in and from La Bayadere, prepare for transcendence. If for some reason the Kingdom doesn't quite "come off" and a shade or two is out of sync, the yelling you hear will probably be Natalia Makarova's, but don't say I said anything.

Here is our rough and tumble comrade Haglund extolling Tuesday night's performance (far more perceptively and knowledgeably than a certain priss from the NY Times):

Veronika's Nikiya was heavenly.  It seems like this could be another transformative and ascending season for her, judging from the results of her off season training.  Some of her gorgeous curves have been replaced by crystalline lines of diamond brilliance.  Every line is longer.  Every step is more secure.  Her passion is deeply embedded within the technical architecture of this ballet.

Among the many highlights from last night were Veronika's Act II series of pirouettes that opened to arabesque.  She made the swift pirouettes look like a preparation for the huge ending arabesques.  It all made such beautiful sense.  Her Act I solo around the fire was as sensual and passionate as legally allowed.  Then Marcelo's Solor entered the picture and all laws were broken.  The two of them together always seem bigger than life.  When Veronika flew to Marcelo's shoulder in the PdD, it was one of the purest statements of passion on the stage.   Marcelo was in top form last night as well, and at the end of his variations, he delivered the expected deep backbends when his head nearly touched the back foot.  His solo at the beginning of Act II was filled with emotion, nearly desperate at times.  All of his movement was geared toward reaching for Nikiya.

If they renamed the ballet Le Femme Nikiya, it might give it some "Pop appeal" and perhaps a box office boost. I may suggest this to some of the higher-ups at ABT, if they're not hiding during intermission.

Hapless receptionist: He said he knew you. He said it was a surprise.

Joan: A surprise? Well, thank you for that. Here's a surprise. [SMASH!] "Surprise! There's an airplane here to see you!"

It was a kick not only seeing Joan lose her regal, battleship composure, but seeing her fully upright and operational at all. For much of this season Joan has been a half-person, figuratively; ever since she returned to the office after maternity leave, she has been parked behind her desk, only her top half visible, no longer the serene Red Queen who once cruised the halls and corridors, the organizing principle of the agency in hourglass shape on invisibile rollers, but a stationary fixture. So anything that got her out of that chair was to the good. What was interesting about the scene in the bar between Don and Joan afterwards was that not only how cute and comfortable they were with each other (with Megan, Don always seems somewhat guarded vulnerable to her sharp knees and elbows) but how it seemed to teleport them back in time. The Arthur Getz-like Christmas tree in the background, the womby browns and reds of the bar's varnished, intimate interior, seemed to belong to the Fifties and Sixties that the two of them feel more at home in, the pre-psychedelic, pre-Beatles, pre-social revolution era, where their roaming pheronomes felt free. Don then leaves the upholstered comfort of the midtown spa and Joan's velvet-cushioned presence only to get impaled on Megan's rotisserie rage, as she sits fuming at the dinner table awaiting her wandering husband's return like a ninja version of Laura Petrie. She makes Don sit down and eat his dinner like a reprimanded truant, a temporary victory that may prove pyrrhic.

This was an episode that made me feel even more strongly that Mad Men has lost touch with the unconscious sense of dreamflow and teleological purpose of its characters and has started cooking up complications and conflicts to keep the multicharacter machinery going: Lane's expat tax problems and check forgery, that whole, strained Hare Krishna/Star Trek spec script sidebar, Betty's Weight Watchers vale of humility. With its bold, iconic frontal positioning of the actors and the streamlined designed backdrops, Mad Men has always been something of a graphic novel in motion, flirting with cartoon caricature, and this season the flirting has been consummated: Pete Campbell has become almost completely a swollen, lollipop-head parody of a Sammy Glickster, his melancholy commuter romance with the former Gilmore Girl a capsule version of a classic Updike-Cheever pressed-leaf story of fading youth and futile longings without any original touches or twists of its own. And doesn't Pete seem awfully young and prosperous to be bitterly, self-pityingly declaring "I have nothing," especially when he has the divine Trudy waiting for him at home, unaware that her ad-man husband has been dicking about with other men's unhappy wives and canny prostitutes who know how to prop up his petulant ego. At least Pete began as somebody more raw, needy, and complicated--Ginsberg was pure caricature the moment they sprung him out of the jack-in-the-box. And Peggy, the show doesn't seem to know what to do with Peggy anymore--she's hit her own glass ceiling.

That Mad Men has less hold on me this season may be due more to the enveloping pull of The Killing, which precedes MM on AMC and is drawing nearer to the solving of the murder mystery that has outdone any procedural in the history of the genre in accumulated rainfall amounts. No wonder everyone and everything on the show looks mossy and moist, raised in a green-tinted hothouse inspired by Blade Runner. No actor or character has been more compelling this season than Joel Kinnaman's Holder, a ravaged lone wolf in a hoodie with a wicked, mordant sense of humor ("Sayonara, Hiawatha"), and whatever one might say about that half-pint defective detective Sarah Linden (Mireiille Enos), she is nothing if not indomitable--pure locked-in forward motion, like a WWII half-track. She and Holder have made a kind of prose poetry out of staring through rainy windshields, clocking long dead hours waiting for a human inkblot to show itself beyond the fogged glass, the wet, distorted reflections of the traffic lights turning their stakeout car into a tiny chapel.

This year...our blogathon is raising money for the NFPF's efforts to stream online three reels of the once-lost, now-found 1923 silent movie, The White Shadow. This U.K. melodrama was directed by one Graham Cutts, but it has another hook: It is the first film we have that featured a major contribution from one Alfred Hitchcock. The young Hitchcock, according to his biographers, was assistant director, wrote the title cards, edited, designed the sets, decorated the sets, and just generally worked like crazy learning everything he could about how to make a film. And this training-to-make-films wheeze worked out pretty well, as you know.

The White Shadow has already been preserved and restored, and was screened by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles last fall. The Siren wasn't there, and most of you probably weren't, either. Given the level of historic interest (and artistic interest, too--the good folks at the NFPF say this one's an eyeful), that's a shame. We are in a position to do something about it, though. Our goal: to raise $15,000 so the NFPF can put The White Shadow online for three months, with a recorded score by Michael Mortilla, a man with a long history of composing splendid music for silent films.

The donation button for the blogathon is the iconic drawn profile of Alfred Hitchcock, and the blogathon offers Hitchcock around the clock in an ensemble celebration of the portly maestro of murder most foul, with essays and video tributes covering everything from early silent Hitchcock to his TV series (I'm addicted to the Alfred Hitchcock Hour, which I DVR each night from Encore Suspense) to his final film, Family Plot, which my feminist date hissed at, precipating a small skirmish in the theater in the untamed Seventies. The Siren herself pays homage to one of Hitchcock's more formal exercises in constriction, Lifeboat, a film I've yet to see from beginning to end because, well, William Bendix. But next time, as God is my waitress, I vow to cross the finish line.

As for the blogathon itself, I donated today and hope you will do so too, by first clicking on this link.

The incident of hair assault revealed this week that led colleague Bruce Handy to dub Romney "the Demon Barber of Cranbrook" shows the mark of a bully, part of a pattern that goes from strapping his dog to a car roof to "I like to fire people." But I think that Romney as bully misses something larger about the political, public man: He's a coward. He's never gone against the grain, stood up for an underdog or advanced an unpopular cause before it became popular, risked a single gleaming hair off his head, shone any backbone apart from the determination to win, tapped into anything larger than himself, risen to the moment. His selfishness is such that you think conservatives would appreciate him more, since that's their driving ethos. He may have to show some of that old nasty Cranbrook spirit if he truly wants to win their love.

    --Charles Simic, The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks

The episode was another installment in the Sentimental Education and Psychological Deflowering of Sally Draper, perhaps Mad Men's most compelling sub-sector, unlike anything ever depicted on TV before, where consciousness begins at adolescence and everything that happens before is takes place at the candy counter of cute and precocious. (No praise seems sufficient for how powerfully contained and delicately measured Kiernan Shipka is in the role, playing a girl who has grown up emotionally unprotected, mimicking what grownups expect from her by methodically going through the good-girl motions, so much turmoil brewing behind that placid brow.) When Sally makes her proud, self-conscious, approval-seeking entrance in the outfit she and Megan had chosen for the grand occasion, a glittery, sparkly number with pleated skirt and white go-go boots that wittily evoked the astro chic of Angela Cartwright's outfits in Lost in Space (the series debuted in 1965), the moment is spoiled, stained, when Megan's father--the most overdrawn caricature of a French intellectual snob since the Empathicalists in Funny Face--muses, "Don, there's nothing you can do. No matter what you do, some day your little girl will spread her legs and fly away." De-Lolita-izing her, Don insists Sally lose the boots and the makeup before they go out, which she does because whatever her rebellious streak she wants to please daddy and be a part of his world--that's what makes her so plaintive a presence, her place so precarious. She has the poise and misses-nothing gaze of an adult child but one who is scolded, humored, excluded when inconvenient, shamed for touching herself in the forbidden zone, always auditioning for acceptance. When Sally excuses herself to go to the ladies room, walking like a little grownup with the purse meant to hold the business cards Roger collected at the event, she turns the knob on the wrong door and discovers her dinner date seated on a piano stool with Megan's mother's head in his lap, apple-bobbing. (The generous donor was played by Julia Ormond, always a welcome sight with her worldy glamour and allure, even when she's crudely used, as she was here, playing Pepe Le Pew's mother.) Sally grew up in a house haunted by infidelity and now she has eyewitnessed the tacky, sordid infidelity of her stepmother's mother, another secret she'll have to keep, another divot in the ability to trust. Later that night she places a phone call to just about the only person she can trust, her former confederate "Creepy" Glen (Marten Weiner), and when he asks how the city is, she gives a one word answer: "Dirty." And with this  short sharp sum-up we can hear in her voice the disgust and disapproval of Betty (January Jones, where for art thou?) speaking through her. Sally may be a daddy's girl but she is also her mother's daughter, and she has had the first bitter taste of disillusionment that was Betty's daily diet when Don cheated on her and wallpapered their marriage with lies.

So: a sleek, airborne episode, despite numerous, niggling implausibilities, and now that we know how fucked up Megan's parents' marriage is, her composed facade is revealing some twitchy-lipped, eye-averting sub-drama that may bring Betty back from the bat rafters, who knows.

Question for the debate club: Who's a bigger gorgon, Peggy's mother or Sally's babysitter (Henry's mother Pauline), the one who did a header tripping over the telephone cord?

From a report on Draper's revelation by Ewen MacAskill in the Guardian UK (the bolding is mine):

During a lengthy discussion, the senior GOP members worked out a plan to repeatedly block Obama over the coming four years to try to ensure he would not be re-elected.

In his book, Draper opens with the heady atmosphere in Washington on the days running up to the inauguration and the day itself, which attracted 1.8 million to the mall to witness Obama being sworn in as America's first black president.

Those numbers contributed to a growing sense of unease among Republicans as much the defeat in the White House race the previous November. The 15 Republicans were in a sombre mood as they gathered at the Caucus Room in Washington, an upscale restaurant where a New York strip steak costs $51.

Attending the dinner were House members Eric Cantor, Jeb Hensarling, Pete Hoekstra, Dan Lungren, Kevin McCarthy, Paul Ryan and Pete Sessions. From the Senate were Tom Coburn, Bob Corker, Jim DeMint, John Ensign and Jon Kyl. Others present were former House Speaker and future – and failed – presidential candidate Newt Gingrich and the Republican strategist Frank Luntz, who organised the dinner and sent out the invitations.

The dinner table was set in a square at Luntz's request so everyone could see one another and talk freely. The session lasted four hours and by the end the sombre mood had lifted: they had conceived a plan. They would take back the House in November 2010, which they did, and use it as a spear to mortally wound Obama in 2011 and take back the Senate and White House in 2012, Draper writes.

"If you act like you're the minority, you're going to stay in the minority," said Keven McCarthy, quoted by Draper. "We've gotta challenge them on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign."

The Republicans have done that, bringing Washington to a near standstill several times during Obama's first term over debt and other issues.

Their locked-shut buttocks will unclench of course should Mitt Romney be elected, at which point they'll be passing legislation like street hawkers handing out strip-club flyers. Every bill will be named after Reagan or some other sentimental favorite.

I still hear Frank Luntz ID'd on cable news as a "pollster," as if all he does is gather and interpret data, so let's stop with that wormy pretense, and could we get a moratorium on the "both sides do it" refrain from cognitive impaired columnists, talkshow hosts, pundits, and editorial writers? Oh, who am I kidding? Broderism lives on in the Beltway and beyond, even if David Broder himself is no longer among us.

Part of Lovelace's afterlife is the continuing tug of war her post-porn career and revelations of subjugation and degradation provoked between pro-porn and anti-porn feminists. Quan writes,

You people in New York really do just sit there watching television.

Such a damning, shaming insight, all the more piercing for being delivered in such a cool, appraising tone. New Yorkers used to pride themselves on their wideranging sophistication and intellectual independence; now the NY natterati are just a fancier crop of couch spud, staring at one screen while tapping words onto another. I, too, stand condemned, while remaining seated.

Sunday night has become the snuggle in and snark it up weekend bingefest payfoff for bloggers, tweeters, tumblrs, and Facebookies who park in front of the screen and feast on the best bloc of television since the birth of the cathode tube: HBO's Game of Thrones and rookie sensations Girls and Veep; AMC's The Killing; CBS's The Good Wife; Showtime's Nurse Jackie; for more exotic tastes, VH1's Mob Wives and Animal Planet's River Monsters; and, of course, the delinquent daddy of them all, AMC's Mad Men. Each Sunday night a Niagra of tweets, blog posts, Facebook entries, and other rapid textings waterfalls into the internet, feeding into the even more prolix Monday morning quarterbacking of the recappers, who go over each episode of their particular favorite show with obsessive scrutiny and monkish devotion, as if trying to dissolve themselves into the amniotic fluids of creation.

Last night's Mad Men--here comes the segue--was about the dissolution of self through the melting of ego defenses, identity, and boundaries, the kaleidoscoping of time, and the mystic crystal revelations that leave a dreggy residue of bitter truth through that portal into other dimensions known as LSD. The more prosaic message, however, was, Don't do anything too out of the ordinary with your wife--it'll only end in rupture. 

Peggy doesn't need to drop acid to dreamwalk her way through sex with the improper stranger, letting her fingers do the walking into the lap of the guy next to her during a showing of Born Free, a quite unlikely choice of matinee fare for a pair of young singles arriving separately and meeting cute with shared puffs of pot while the story of Elsa the Lioness unfolds. Born Free, after all, was a family film, a children's favorite, not something a hipster dude would attend even in the hope of receiving a handjob from someone who just happens to be sitting alone. Since Peggy's semi-regular fella--saddled in the script with a real clanger after servicing her earlier, "Your mind is always elsewhere! I'm your boyfriend, not a focus group!"--had suggested they go see The Naked Prey, where Cornel Wilde is pursued down by tribal hunters, perhaps this Mad Men was simply sticking to an African theme in its film allusions. I don't pretend to know, nor do I know what gives with Peggy, who has gotten less professional and more petulant this season, perhaps her loosening tie within the firm to Don leaving her somewhat untethered, an edge of resentment cutting along her self-confidence. And what to make of Ginsberg's sketchy claim of having been born in a concentration camp, or rather his father's sketchy claim, other than that even one's personal history can take on the horror of a hallucination, a hallucination all the more horrible for being real. No wonder Ginsberg jokes without jocularity about being from Mars; he can't help but feel his place on this earth is so provisional, estranged. (I wince when his father says in the office, "[You] don't want I should see you?" because such inversions sound like stage dialogue drawn from the cupboards of fifties kitchen-sink dramas)

The big bracket on Mad Men was of course the outer and inner excursions of Don and Megan/Roger and Jane, the first couple taking a scenic rear-projective drive to an upstate Howard Johnson's, the second taking an inner voyage into the vortex of the synaesthesic beyond with an after-dinner tab of acid. Neither jaunt ended up a joyride. Megan, though dressed in an orange outfit that chimed happily with the Howard Johnson decor (if you've never read it, try to locate Max Apple's quintessentially Seventies fiction collection, The Oranging of America, the title story telling the tale of Howard Johnson being driven around the country in a Cadillac, scouting locations for possible future Hojos--sort of On the Road of the entrepreneurial explorer), quickly gets peeved at Don's bossy presumptions and behaves like a spoiled teenager, wolfing down her orange ice cream with mocking gusto; a quarrel follows in the parking lot and when Megan low-blows Don with a question about his mother, he steams up and drives off in a huff, stranding her there. When the dickburn of Don's pride has cooled, he circles back, only no Megan: she may have gotten a ride back but Don stays at the Hojo, wanting to be there if she returns, the signature color of Howard Johnson's taking on the sad orange of John Boehner in a maudlin mood as dusk descends and midnight beckons.

Once Don decides Megan is probably back in the city and drives back home, where, finding the doorlock chained and Megan inside telling him to go away, he cavemans the door open with his foot, like a policeman busting into a drug den, and yes I'm aware cavemen didn't men didn't have doors on their caves. 

He then angrily chases her around the apartment in what I thought might turn into another outtake from Norman Mailer's An American Dream (the first being Don's choking of his succubus, which turned out to be a fever dream), the preliminary to a round of rough sex, but instead it ended with the two of them lying on the floor, like fighters who had knocked themselves out, staring dazed at the ceiling.

An overhead shot that mirrored Roger and Jane's morning after, which found them lying kaput on the floor with their heads turbanned in towels after taking a bath together, a bath that I kept expecting to be interrupted by the tiny people running out of the paper bag last seen in David Lynch's Mulholland Drive. Roger was the reluctant guest at a dinner party of Jane's pretentious friends, who, after an impromptu symposium on the nature of reality that had Roger reverting to droll stalagmite mode, adjourned to the living room for a ceremonial dropping of acid. It was nice to see Bess Armstrong again, best remembered by me in her white bikini in The Four Seasons, still looking fab and playing the role of hostess with comic aplomb, all the more comic once the LSD hit and one of her guests started crawling on all fours like a baby locomotive. The staging and shooting of this communion offering, though standard-equipped with optical illusions and aural hallucinations, spared us the freaky superimpositions, zoomy lensing, and ragdoll frugging of classic psychedelics such as Riot on Sunset Trip and Psych-Out, but it also seemed somewhat assembled from a kit on How to Do a Sixties LSD Scene rather than freshly conceived. But it fulfilled its narrative mission, the LSD acting as a truth serum and compelling Roger and Jane to voice what they both knew--that their marriage is a loveless pantomime between two people with zippo in common and an age gap that seems to be widening with Roger's every sip and sarcasm. So he calls it quits, acting as if he's doing the noble thing as he gently breaks the news to Jane (Peyton List has never looked more luscious than she does here, sitting up in bed with her eyelashes having weathered the storm), while Roger's inner swinger hears the bell tolling freedom. He looks awfully chipper in the office the next day even with the prospect of making the bitter acquaintance of Mr. Al I. Mony.

The twinship of those overhead shots indicates that the clock is ticking down on the Don-Megan marriage, now that the honeymoon's over and their lack of affinity--the mismatch of their needs and trajectories--is threatened by the thunderclouds of his dark moods. The problem for Mad Men itself is that their relationship isn't interesting whether they're acting like honeymoon lovebirds or tearing at each other like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton having a rumbustious row. Their problems are spottable from across the room, revealing no new dimensions of their characters, but maybe there are no new dimensions to reveal. Mad Men seems somewhat rundown this season, but maybe it's me (and, possibly, you) who's rundown, having placed too many expectations on the show and overexamining its surface and entrails to the point of mild blah.

I've been more engrossed in season two of The Killing, which, despite its improbabilities and inclement monotony and malaise (near nonstop poundings of dank rain that make everyone involved look furtive, mossy), has a prime directive--solve the murder of Rosie Larsen--while Mad Men seems like an aquarium where each week the pretty fishes are fed.

...here’s the translated version [of the original news report]:  “Partying g-men hired hookers, but one refused to pay what he owed for extra time and got in an argument over it.  Then several busybodies who are more discreet when hiring their hookers freaked out.”  Period.  End of story.  C’mon, y’all, this isn’t news, much less a “scandal” unless you consider buyer’s remorse scandalous.  I’ve been hired by a number of agents from the CIA, FBI, Secret Service, Homeland Security, the TSA and probably half a dozen other alphabet-soup agencies, not to mention their managers and the congressmen who supervise them.  I’m sure every one of my escort readers can say the same thing.  Agents also drink liquor, order room service, watch movies, buy souvenirs, and use hotel toilets.  Whoopie.  Prostitution isn’t even illegal in Colombia, so if not for these asinine rules requiring virile, high-testosterone grown men to behave like nuns nobody would even have heard of this story because the dude wouldn’t have panicked and called attention to himself; he’d have just paid her and she would’ve left.  The end...

As McNeill notes, quoting from an article in Reason, the reporter driving this story--Ron Kessler--is racing around with his hair on fire over the national security implications of this and similar extracurricular episodes: possible blackmail, access to secret protocols, political assassination, the whole Tom Clancy apocalyptic clatter of pots and pans. On talk radio I've heard it theorized, i.e., pulled fact-free out of the caller's butt, that the escorts in Cartagena might have worked for a drug cartel or terrorist front, and then what a fine kettle of fish we'd be in, and it'd all be Obama's fault, because everything is.

As John Grant argues in Counterpunch, the press play for this scandal--though perfectly understandable, especially now that the NY Daily News has published bikini-babe photos of the prostitute at the heat of the story--is also an idiot diversion from the real thrust (if you'll pardon the expression) of the summit meeting in Colombia.

It’s quite revealing that while profound historical discussions during the summit focused on reforming the Drug War, lifting the outmoded Cold War embargo of Cuba and violent abuses of trade unionists, that the really big story to come out of Cartagena is that US Secret Service agents and military security officers purchased sex.

And who is thumping the scandal? None other than Rep. Peter King, chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security and the greatest War On Terror whore in America.

The heavy breathing soon began. Could any of the ladies contracted from the Pley Club brothel have been al Qaeda agents? How was the President’s safety affected? How much of a black mark was it on the honor of the United States? Whose heads would have to roll?

Meanwhile, back in Reality-land, Latin America was in the midst of a major, future-oriented economic correction with the dynamic Brazil on the leading edge. The requests for the US to reform its Drug War and to lift the embargo on Cuba were in fact part of that greater dialogue, a dialogue that includes questions about energizing the middle and lower classes into a consumer engine that can lift all economic boats across the continent.

This is a deadly theme in 2012 in America. So it’s not surprising to see a ridiculous scandal pop up to distract Americans from the real issues. As was accomplished following World War Two, the US economy needs to rebuild its working and middle classes, and the only way to do that is to break the cycle of entrenched, right-leaning wealth. It’s a major epochal struggle in Latin America, as it should be in the United States. It was one of the big stories that should have come out of the summit, and instead we get distractions about agents and whores.

America militantly insists on holding on to its immaturity, trying to fob it off on the rest of the world as Upholding Our Ideals, and the whole thing has become a tired farce.

In England in the sixties and seventies I was often out and about leading the literary life, and I met a surprising number of my heroes without really seeking to. The real surprise, each time, was that they were all in character. One night in Hull I was performing a cabaret act in the student bar and it turned out that the dour adult figure sitting at the back was Philip Larkin. Later on he told me that he was so deaf he hadn’t heard a word, and I was too dense to ask him why, in that case, he had come. In London I saw a lot of Kingsley Amis and he was almost never not irascible. He could talk enchantingly for hours about abuses to the language but if he caught you abusing it he would always give you what for on the spot. Robert Lowell was in London for a while and I had several opportunities for observing just what a handful he could be. I thought he was a nitwit, but strictly in the sense that he was normally something else, and turned dippy only when the wind changed.

William Empson was well-known to have been wildly eccentric from the beginning. It would have been a tough reputation to live up to at a first meeting, but when I finally did bump into him in Cambridge one night he effortlessly soared off the scale of weirdness into a realm I had not previously encountered. He was giving a reading in the Cambridge Union and I—still a graduate student, so it was a great honor—was one of the support readers. A few lines into his first poem he started explaining it, and his explanation became so abstruse that he shifted from side to side. He was on the point of walking in circles when I offered to help. As I remember things now, I would read a stanza of the poem and then he would start explaining again. It all took forever and gave the audience plenty of opportunity to study his beard, which was at that time in a phase when it all occurred below the level of the chin, as if he had stuck his head through a rug. We support readers were cut down to about five minutes each but he was very kind about a poem of mine, and started explaining it to me.

Since I thought the world of his work, I took this as a high compliment. But he wasn’t yet through with his largesse. From a side pocket of his jacket he produced a crumpled plastic sack which had obviously been in there for some time. The contents were well crushed, but with typical precision he identified them. “Would you like a crisp?” I took a few fragments and chewed. They tasted very old, like flakes from the wall of an ancient Egyptian tomb. I was beginning to get the idea that the verbal titans might not necessarily be models of sanity...

James himself is a model of sanity--he wouldn't be the wit he is otherwise--and although I'm not much of a toaster, I'll raise a glass tonight to his health and the hope that it stages a fourth-quarter rally.

Paul Tudor Jones, worth about 10 billion dollars, was doing a headstand about ten feet away from me in yoga class and I was jealous of him. When you can’t do a headstand you do the yoga pose where your arms are straight in front of you, your forehead is on the ground and you are resting on your knees. It’s called “child’s pose”. I was in child’s pose.

When Jones walks into a room you can tell it’s him. You know why? Because he actually looks cleaner than everyone else. He looks like every pore on his body has been scrubbed of all the oils and microbes and itches and little pieces of dirt that build up over time on the human body (err…well, my human body).

I want to look clean. I’m torn because I know it doesn’t take money to be happy. But I can’t help it. I’m jealous. He’s a few mats down from me. He’s doing pretty good at yoga. In fact, he’s probably better than me!  And cleaner!  So now I’m jealous. I can’t deny it.

Why? No reason. He’s worth 10 billion. And no matter how I philosophize about money and minimalism and mommy – 10 billion dollars is mommy and I’m even in Child’s Pose.

It's such a Curb Your Enthusiasm scenario, except that there it would be Ted Danson doing a perfect pristine headstand while Larry David keeps futzing with his mat, unable to keep its front corners from turning up. And the woman next to him refuses to take responsibility for her stealth farts, which everyone thinks are coming from Larry. 

Altucher and his wife Claudia (an adept yogini) drive around Greenwich, Connecticut trying to get a gander at the billionaire hedge-fund mansions, only to be met with one barring gate after another.

I said to Claudia, “Most of the guys in these houses go for really expensive call girls.”

Why did I say that? I don’t know if they are or they aren’t. Then I said, “90% of these guys go for girls that are like $14,000 a night.” Where did I even get a number like $14,000. Why not an even $10,000? Where did I pull 90% from? Did I read a study?

She asked, “do you think Paul Tudor Jones likes the spiritual side of yoga?” And I said, “no.”

Why would I even say that? I don’t know anything about the man. He seems very nice.  Then I saw a video later where he did say he liked the spiritual side of yoga. Damnit!

You'll want to check out the photo of the pose that Tudor's wife Sonja Jones performs, which Arizona legislators will probably attempt to ban, given the way things are going.