Michelle and Barack Obama look great in the Inauguration morning outfits.

Very nice. Love the blue. Love the matching clasped hands as — we're told — they approach the Episcopal Church. Michelle's checker-patterned coat is made of "silk jacquard based on a necktie fabric." Beautiful!

In church:

... Pastor Andy Stanley from North Point Community Church in Alpharetta, Ga., delivered the sermon. He spoke of Jesus washing his disciples' feet and saying "now that I, your Lord and teacher, have washed your feet, you should also watch each other's feet." The president, Pastor Stanley said, should follow that example and "leverage" his power for the benefit of others.

IN THE COMMENTS: Erika notes the typo in the blocked quote, which is from NPR.org:  You should also watch each other's feet. Maybe NPR misheard and didn't get what Jesus was supposedly doing. Some commenters thought Pastor Stanley didn't get what Jesus meant.

Palladian: "The washing of the feet was about humility and service, not about 'leveraging power.'"

Cheryl: "I'm pretty sure Jesus didn't need to leverage his power. Biblical teaching like this is why we don't attend Pastor Stanley's church, which is right down the road from us."

Bago20 reacted: "Nooooooooooooooooooooo! Please don't help anymore."

Maguro had a different problem: "I find it disturbing that even southern preachers are using 'leverage' as a verb these days."

MORE IN THE COMMENTS: I said: "The humble servant image is a little edgy when the President is black." And Palladian said: "The humble servant image is a little edgy when the President is a profligate, arrogant, narcissistic asshole."

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"Carpenters' union protests Madison businesses; refuses to back up claims."

"On two occasions, two people at two separate NCSRCC offices have sworn emphatically that a phone call would be returned that day or the next, but no calls ever materialized. Someone named 'Tony' from the union once left a voicemail, but then never answered a returned call."

I've seen the 3 guys holding up the sign out by Hilldale shopping center. Twice I tried to read the sign to figure out which place they had a beef with. I assumed it was the steakhouse, which was the place they were closest to, but I couldn't read the name of the place at the bottom of the sign, because the men were letting the sign droop. Now I see their target was Lululemon Athletica, a shop with some nice-looking athletic-wear. Makes me want to run over there and buy some toasty tech tights.

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"I was put off by all the breasts. The peekaboo-slit-neckline-breast-exposing dress. the breast-on-a-platter strapless dress."

Over at the WaPo slideshow of Golden Globes fashions, one commenter seems a tad breast-o-phobic.

But I'd just like to say that this approach to clothing breasts — inflicted on Jessica Chastain, chastising Chastain — is one of the worst fashion screw-ups I've ever seen. Why didn't anyone see the optical illusion and stop her from leaving the house in that thing?

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"The Best and Worst of the London Menswear Shows."

Not a joke. Or... tell me it's a joke....



I've complained a lot over the years about men in shorts, but this takes the cake:

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"Do youuuuuuuuuu have this in a sizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzze SIX?"

"Gingham is my jaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAmmmmmm."

Gingham style.

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"Through this twilight universe Daisy began to move again with the season..."

"... suddenly she was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men, and drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor beside her bed."

We're sticking to sentences, here in our "Gatsby" project. I won't pretend not to know that Daisy is the main female character in the book, but for the purposes of this project, I'm disregarding what we know about her and where she might be in the plot line when this sentence appears. I'd like to follow a rule that excludes all extrinsic evidence, but the phrase "this twilight universe" shows why that rule may be too severe. Nevertheless, I'm going to stick with the no-extrinsic-evidence rule, and accept "this twilight universe" as a mystery. Daisy has been up to something in what is now being referred to as "this twilight universe," and there's something poignant about encountering someone — a flower-named woman — in a mysterious place where she has moved before and is beginning to move again.
That Daisy's renewed movement comes with the season makes us think of the plants that come and go seasonally. One third of the way through the sentence, we are thinking about the annual cycle of the seasons as well as the daily cycle of light and dark that contains twilight. A flower that is a woman moves within the inexorable movements of the universe.

This lone female is suddenly joined by numerous men. Though the unnamed men never get definition as individuals, they presumably get one-on-one dates with her, since the numbers match up: half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men. This is the kind of "dating" one associates with a prostitute. The "twilight universe" feels more sinister, and the next thing we see is Daisy in bed: drowsing asleep at dawn. The daily sun cycle has turned from twilight to dawn, the 6 dates have somehow been cranked through and (suddenly) there is our wilted flower on her bed, but there is a string of words — like a string of men — that we must experience before we get to to "bed" (the last word of the sentence (she and we must get to bed)).

The words are the things on the floor beside her bed: "the beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids." Orchids! There is Daisy — the flower we associate with freshness and simplicity — and there, next to her, on the way to the bed, are the complicated flowers whose name, literally, means testicles. So the 6 men were unnamed, but there is a name that bespeaks male sexuality. And there are those testicles, dying (as Daisy is drowsing), dying and all tangled up the pretty tatters — beads and chiffon — of what once was a dress.

Note carefully that it is not a dress that is tangled up with the orchids, it is the beads and chiffon, suggesting that the delicate dress has lost all integrity. And yet our Daisy has disentangled herself from the spewings of sex that lie on the floor. And she's not passed out, dead drunk. She's drowsing, in her presumably pretty nakedness.

It's dawn, and she will emerge again, with the cycle of the new day, fresh and daisy-like again. Remember, she was only beginning to move through this twilight universe, and with the new day, the movement will continue, with 6 more men and another dress to move through. She's not caught in this twilight universe. She moves through it. She gets through the men and through the dresses, and sleeps lightly as the detritus dies on the floor.

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