Thanks...

... to everyone who's used this blog's Amazon portal in the last month. I haven't mentioned it in a long time, but it is the primary way the writing here earns income, and I do notice and appreciate the gesture readers make when they begin their Amazon shopping here.

"The latest attack on Walker is that he has 'up to' $50,000 in credit card debt to � wait for it � Sears."

"The Daily News does the hit on Walker, from the angle of it proving he�s not really a fiscal conservative.... Hello, it�s SEARS!... I don�t see how any of this hurts Walker."

Well, there's one thing that was proved a long time ago about Scott Walker: If you strike him down, he will become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.

I live in Madison, Wisconsin, surrounded by people who � I think � are thinking How the hell did this happen? We crushed him with 100,000 protesters. We destroyed him....

Do not attempt to destroy The Walker. 

I don't know what that man bought at Sears, but maybe you should be shopping at Sears. Maybe something in the appliance department... maybe the tools... I don't know. Be careful, people.

"In battle for authenticity, Scott Walker looks to Kohl's."

A CNN article about how Scott Walker has branded himself with a brand � the Wisconsin-based retailer Kohl's. CNN enumerates 4 reasons for Walker to use the Kohl's brand: 1. It signifies frugality, 2. He has a way to connect it to tax policy, 3. He can contrast himself to Hillary who probably shops at more expensive places, and 4. He can leverage easy jokes like saying "Is it from Kohl's?" when someone gives him something.

What I find weird is that CNN writes an entire article about how Walker has connected his name to Kohl's and seems to try to find everything possible to say about that but never got around to the fact that the name Kohl's has long been connected to a Democrat. Has everyone forgotten Herb Kohl already? It's his family's business and the source of all the money that allowed him to run as "Nobody's Senator But Yours":



Great slogan for a rich guy, no? It argued that he could care for us and connect with us precisely because he was wealthy, and he didn't need to get money from other people. And now, ironically, the always middle class Scott Walker is using Kohl's name to send the message that his lack of wealth connects him with us.

ADDED: WaPo has a similar article "Scott Walker stresses his discount attire and �regular guy� credentials," and it also misses the Herb Kohl connection.

In Madison, Wisconsin, the Farmers Market returned to the Capitol Square today.

The farmers were there...



And the deep-fried cheese curds...



And the proponents of peace...



And the Walker-haters...

"Think of it this way: if none of us wore any clothes, then it would be the male genitalia sticking out visibly..."

"... while women�s would remain largely hidden. Maybe the entire point of formal attire to invert this possibility, to say, 'Yes, in nature, it is women who have mysterious hidden powers of creation, but once we get all dressed and civilized, it�s precisely the other way around.'"

The last paragraph of "Dickheads/The paradox of the necktie resolved," a Baffler article by David Graeber (with an excellent illustration).

Via Metafilter, where there are many comments, including:

Couldn�t we say that a tie is really a symbolic displacementof the penis, only an intellectualized penis, dangling not from one�s crotch but from one�s head?

Is this a comp lit undergrad class in 1986?

I see I have a neckties tag. I'll have to publish this post so I can click on it to see what the hell I've said about neckties over the past decade. Beyond this past decade, for the past half century, the most common insight into the necktie has been that it's a phallic symbol. But what I liked about Graeber's take was the seen-and-unseen angle � and seen and unseen is one of my all-time favorite tags.

ADDED: From the necktie-tagged archive. This is from a 2004 post about shopping for a suit at Brooks Brothers:
Click for more �

Madison Easter.

We walked downtown and sat in the Peace Park...



Some shops were open and some were closed. A store with massive quantities of Wisconsin-themed clothes had racks of "Final Four" Badgers clothes but nothing representing tomorrow's game. "Final Four" is so yesterday, but the sales guy said the more up-to-date things are not printed yet. "It's Easter!" he said. Who wants to work on Easter? The skateboard shop was closed:



We pondered whether the skateboard people were religious, since they'd taken the trouble to make a special Easter-themed "closed" sign. There's no inconsistency between skateboarding and religion, but perhaps there's a slight disjuncture between religiosity and the use of the human-adult-sized rabbit character, as President Obama is learning if he's reading his Facebook commenters.

At the square, we sat on a bench near the statue of our Civil War hero Christian Heg, the site of some of our fondest protest-era memories � recorded here and here � and we conversed and people-watched until it seemed as though we were accelerating the process of becoming oldies...



... and we got a couple B-cycles out of the nearest kiosk and biked back home along Lake Mendota, which is exactly what we'd done the day before. But yesterday the lake was still maintaining its ice, in layered shards that looked like solid whitecaps. I should have taken a photo then, because today all that water had assumed the liquid form that gets to hog the name "water."