The "gaffe" wasn't; it was deliberate and at the queen's expense, designed to diminish her. She's no dummy; she recognized it for exactly what it was.

He isn't a *sad* little man; he's a *mean* little man.

...but I always find it uncomfortable to watch someone being publicly embarrassed, by whatever means.

But as Rebecca Traister aptly put it in her Broadsheet column, Colbert, while "discombobulated," handled it well. He didn't seem to mind looking a bit foolish, perhaps--showman that he is--recognizing the role reversal at his expense made for great television.

In other words, he gave us permission to enjoy his discomfiture. And after my initial impulse to look away, that's just what I did.

I also imposed my own fantasy on the scene, imagining that Fonda was, in effect, giving him a sort of thank-you from all of us, expressing our passionate appreciation for who he is and what he's doing. If I had the opportunity, I'd kiss him too.

I have no idea whether Fonda had anything like this in mind, but that interpretation suited me just fine and completely neutralized the cringe factor.

...watch that video and not realize the dog has some kind of serious problem? How could you possibly see this as "charming antics"??

...reminds me of the ascetic poet Bunthorne's solo in Gilbert and Sullivan's "Patience":

And ev'ryone will say,

As you walk your mystic way,

"If that's not good enough for him

Which is good enough for me,

Why, what a very cultivated kind of youth

This kind of youth must be!"

Seems to me this is a great big Life Lesson for Almost Homeless, but unlike Cary, I think it's about learning to stand up for oneself. Given how he tells the story, at least (there may be another side to it), I can't think of anybody I know who would not advise him to tell his "friends" to cut bait, and I'm kind of appalled anybody would suggest otherwise.

Maybe if these people had rent their garments, rubbed ash into their hair, and got down on bended knee to *beg* him to let them have the apartment because they would be absolutely stuck otherwise, and promised to make it up to him when they were able...but it doesn't seem as though that's been their attitude, and that alone makes them totally unworthy of his consideration. They've fouled out.

The one real sticking point is the damn baby, who isn't responsible for any of this, although you have to wonder what kind of life it's going to have with monsters for parents. Perhaps it would make some kind of sense for Almost Homeless to do whatever he can to help them find another suitable place, for the baby's sake.

(And Cary, BTW, sleeping on the couch is not something that a "person who is moving out" does. That's just off the wall; you made it up out of whole cloth, and it was designed to be emotionally manipulative. Just what Almost Homeless needs to learn to resist.)

Swift Loris

...a pretty good selection of classical music, if anyone's interested.

...that the reason this situation is so fraught is because of the divorce; the daughter may be projecting her anxieties about it onto the religious issue because she feels well supported in that area, but for whatever reason doesn't feel supported in her feelings about the divorce, so she's repressing them.

Good psychological counseling is called for, but the mother is unlikely to go for that. It's not impossible the church the daughter goes to has or knows of a pastoral counselor who might be acceptable to the mother and who might be able to help the daughter sort out her feelings in the context of her religion.

I completely agree with Michael Huggins: Cary hasn't a clue what he's talking about here; he's apparently had little or no experience with devout evangelicals. Playing games of the kind he recommends would almost certainly be terribly destructive.

..I've ever read. Five solid belly laughs.

Well done!

You write that Boylan has an "idiosyncratic grammatical style that is quite recognizable though difficult to replicate, and the e-mail I received this morning -- from start to finish -- is written in exactly that style."

I went back and read the previous emails he sent you, and I have to disagree: the punctuation and spelling aren't perfect, but the grammar and syntax are much better than in the current missive; there aren't any really major errors of that kind.

The earlier emails look to me like what a literate person who was writing fast and carelessly, without spellchecking, might produce; the current one appears to have been written by someone who simply lacks a command of English syntax. But it has no spelling errors.

This is purely subjective, but there seem to me to be very distinctly different personaliities behind the two sets of emails, as well as different levels of English skills.

The responses to your queries about the authorship of the current email are beyond strange. There's unquestionably something fishy about the whole thing.

"If you do a search on the web, you will also see that I have been a victim of identity theft of late in Vermont..."

FWIW, I did a search on the terms--

Boylan +"identity theft" +iraq +vermont

--and came up empty.

Precisely. It's not as if she didn't know she was going to be attacked; it was widely predicted that she would be.

And as others have noted, you'd have to stand on your head to make the statement gender-neutral.

Further, it's an understatement--it wasn't six guys against her, it was eight. Williams and Russert focused their tough questions on her (Obama was asked only about air travel, life on other planets, and his Halloween costume), and Russert was openly, disgracefully antagonistic.

..but that has to be one of the very best-made videos I've ever seen, campaign or otherwise.