You decide:

I am duty-bound to report the talk of the New Orleans warehouse district last night: there was rejoicing (well, there would have been without the curfew, but the few people I saw on the streets were excited) when the power came back on for blocks on end. Kevin Tibbles was positively jubilant on the live update edition of Nightly News that we fed to the West Coast. The mini-mart, long ago cleaned out by looters, was nonetheless bathed in light, including the empty, roped-off gas pumps. The motorcade route through the district was partially lit no more than 30 minutes before POTUS drove through. And yet last night, no more than an hour after the President departed, the lights went out. The entire area was plunged into total darkness again, to audible groans. It’s enough to make some of the folks here who witnessed it… jump to certain conclusions.

If David Brooks keeps writing columns like this one, eventually we’ll all be forced to cough up our $50, even though we won’t admit it to anyone else. Really, this is home-run stuff:

John Roberts Jr. Aw, shucks. This has been a humbling experience, Mr. Chairman. To think that a boy from an exclusive prep school and Harvard Law could grow up and be nominated for the Supreme Court – it shows how in America it’s possible to rise from privilege to power! That’s the hallmark of our great nation. . . .

Jeff Sessions This may be a good moment to remind my colleagues on the other side of the aisle that in this country unelected judges don’t write the laws. We have unelected lobbyists to do that. Under our system, judges merely interpret the law and decide presidential elections. . . .

Edward Kennedy Starry De Cysis? Didn’t she do a fan dance down at that old burlesque house in Providence?

Ross Douthat has a macro post on the CDC sexual behavior data, in which he notes as an aside that female bisexuality has become

a significant phenomenon nonetheless – and I’m willing to bet that if you broke it out by age and class, bisexuality would be even more common (and increasingly common) among upper-middle-class young people. If the experience of human history shows anything, it’s that a large percentage of any given population will experiment with opportunistic homosexuality if the taboos against it are lifted – and at least in our country’s more exclusive circles, the lesbian-experimentation taboo is dead . . .

So this long profile of Jen Sincero, seems to be hitting at the right time: Sincero is the author of The Straight Girl’s Guide to Sleeping With Chicks–a book about being a heterosexual girl who likes to make it with other girls. As a publishing endeavor, this project has Can’t Miss written all over it.

I don’t have anything to add to serious discussions about human sexuality, although comments like this one make me wonder if the trend is liberation, or just another instance of women going out of their way to attract male attention by any means:

Ashley, 20, a student at Northern Arizona University, agrees. “It’s become this totally hot thing,” she says. “And the reason why is that it promises this sexual experimentation to guys. They think, ‘She’ll kiss another girl; she’s gotta be pretty wild.'”

Ashley hasn’t made out with that many girls: “I’ve only done it like a dozen times.” It’s been fun, she says, but mostly because of the titillation: “There’s people watching it, and that makes me feel good. The first time I did it at a party, I thought, ‘So this is what it takes to get the guys’ attention.'”

You decide if this is benign or a case of women desperate for male affection. (You know you’re old when you read Ashley’s quote and instead of thinking, Hot!, you worry that she didn’t have a capable, present father while she was growing up and hope that she’ll spend some time working on her sense of self-confidence and self-worth.)

In any case, what interests me most is the proximate causes of what destroyed the “taboo” against LUGiness in the first place.

While the LUG phenomenon has been around for a long time, it used to be kept quiet. At some point it became a sign of rebellion and then it morphed into a hallmark of elite chicness. And then it spread into the mainstream of popular culture as just another thing that people do.

I would suggest that the LUG phenomenon was in its quiet phase all through the ’40, ’50s, and ’60s and didn’t become marker of youthful rebellion until the ’70s (which, as David Frum reminds us, is when the ’60s really happened).

Sometime during the ’80s, LUGiness began to travel upwards through the social strata until it became the province of the very, very chic. By 1990, you had a daring, NC-17 art movie with Uma Thurman playing June Miller and Maria de Medeiros playing Anaïs Nin. But movies are lagging social indicators, so it’s hard to figure out exactly when this shift came.

But I would argue that it’s easy to pinpoint the death of the LUG taboo in mainstream popular culture: 1994, with the airing of Friends. Friends was one of the prime culture movers of the ’90s. It sparked dozens of spin-offs, helped popularize the coffee-house culture that Starbucks was trying sell America, revitalized the formula sit-com–it even ushered in the age of the nipple erection on network TV. (I’ve always believed that this last bit is what helped popularize the show in the first place. Tune in to NBC on Thursday nights and see a really funny show about nothing followed by three hot chicks with their headlights on!)

One of the enduring sub-plots lurking beneath the show’s patter was the undercurrent of Joey and Chandler wanting Monica and Rachel to hook up. This became a running joke as the show went on, culminating in an episode where the guys agree to give the girls back their apartment if they’ll make out in front of them for five minutes.

Because of Friends, lots of other LUGiness made its way into the culture in the ’90s, from popular movies such as Bound and Wild Things and Cruel Intentions to the girl-on-girl action in Ally McBeal, all of which was done on a totally commercial level–no NC-17 or obscure art-house stuff here.

If the taboo against casual female bisexuality is really dead, as Douthat suggests (and I think it is), I think we can credit (or blame) Friends for killing it.

Update, 2:38 p.m.: Kathy of Cake Eaters adds something very, very astute:

Jonathan ultimately places the blame on Friends with Monica and Rachel making out in front of Chandler and Joey to get their apartment back. I think Jonathan’s partially correct: Friends showed two women making out. What he misses, however, is that these two female characters were making out not because they were hot for one another but because they were trying to get what they wanted (their apartment) from men. That’s when the taboo died: when it became cool to use said bisexuality to lure men into handing over what women wanted. Female bisexuality became a tool to manipulate men. Everyone knows that hetero men adore it when women get busy with one another. There’s nothing new in that bit of information. What is interesting in all of this, however, is the lengths women feel they need to go to to get what they want. If making out with a woman will get them something, well, they’ll do that.

The Blog Crush has faltered with his ridiculous slag-off on Liv Tyler:

Liv Tyler is maybe the only “amazing Hollywood beauty” who, if she tried to kiss me, I would do that thing where I lean back a little and instead offer her a hearty handshake. And not just cause she got so heavy. Her features don’t really come off as attractive in real life. And also cause she got so heavy. I don’t want to call her fat, but if she and I ever work in an office that sends us on a retreat, and we’re partnered up to do trust falls, she’s going to have trust issues from now on.

I say, Hey, she-elf, keep the ears on.

Also, girl-Friday Jenny offers the following headline: ” Chesney is too phoney, Hewitt is too clothed and Moss is too high.” You know you spend too much time in the blogosphere when you read that and think, My God, what has Hugh done?

Mark it down. It’s the opening of Goblet of Fire. The new trailer makes it look as though Newell may have gotten the best book in the series right.

Mike Russell goes to Oktoberfest, and learns the facts behind the traditions.

Tom Maguire’s reaction strikes me as about right.

Update, 11:03 a.m.: Dean Barnett has another clear-eyed view of the president’s speech, but first, here’s a dash of the funny:

I don’t condemn the administration for taking a pass on the disaster pros. But if deposed FEMA honcho Mike Brown had any outsized talents, he has to date kept them carefully concealed. FEMA is not the place for cronyism; if it were, God never would have invented the Commerce Department.

Now onto the damning stuff:

President Bush last night gave what was perhaps the most disappointing speech of his political career. Last night’s effort made the 9/11 Awful Office address look downright Churchillian. He might as well have said, “Message – I care.”

And because he cares, he’s going to throw a lot of money at every conceivable problem caused and exacerbated by Hurricane Katrina. Scratch that – he’s going to allow our spendthrift congress to throw money at the putative problems which will no doubt be even worse. He practically declared a second “war on poverty.”

Don’t believe me? Then take this as a sign: Notorious race-relations and poverty pimp, the “Reverend” Jesse Jackson, actually scored a primetime gig on Fox last night. Jesse’s got a seat at the table again because Bush has brought this particular table out of the closet and set it. Bush’s speech has opened the door to rubbish like this, and closing it any time soon will be all but impossible.

What really bothered me about the speech is that it was a big and lasting response to a temporal political concern.

The Blog Crush’s hired hand points out this site, which has a collection of all of the SNL “Celebrity Jeopardy” sketches. That should amuse you for the rest of the day.