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Owens is the president of the American Distilling Institute, an organization devoted to educating people about the art and science of distilled spirits. His audience was a group of about 25 who'd come from as far away as Maine and Tennessee to spend a week learning the basics of making whiskey, from developing a mash and running a still to bottling the alcohol and testing its proof.

Whiskey, it's worth noting, is usually made from grain. But Owens, a natural showman, was taking advantage of the fact that you can create alcohol from any ingredient that contains or breaks down into sugar, from meal to fruit to, yes, doughnuts. After adding yeast -- which digests the sugar into ethanol and carbon dioxide -- you run the fermented mash through a still, which uses heat to separate and collect the ethanol. Owens was confident that the breakfast pastry mash would produce alcohol. The question was: What would it taste like? 

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But Friday's Time magazine featured an article about a study that took a very creative approach to figuring out how much discrimination might be at play. Researchers from the University of Chicago and New York University looked at the experiences of transgender people in the workforce -- that is, people who had either transitioned from male to female or female to male -- and analyzed how their gender switch affected their pay. The result, as Time puts it, "suggests that raw discrimination still remains potent in U.S. companies."

To be more specific, the study's authors found that even after controlling for factors like education levels, MTFs (male-to-female) made, on average, 32 percent less after they transitioned. FTMs (female-to-male), on the other hand, earned an average of 1.5 percent more than they'd been getting before they made the switch.

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Really? Six minutes? This makes "hockey mom" seem less like a descriptor of an actual person's life and more like something you could pick up accidentally at a sports bar. (Stop for buffalo wings at the wrong time and, whoops!) I mean, hell, I don't even have a television and I might still qualify for the hockey half of the term.

Another thing that's strange: This isn't even how Palin uses the term. Granted, Palin obviously didn't come up with the definition for Nielsen, but there's a big difference between a woman who catches six minutes of the Stanley Cup while channel surfing and a woman who spends three hours a day at the rink and drives around town with a trunk full of sweat-soaked equipment, balancing her life with her kids' sports schedules.

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Flirting with disaster: Remember how Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari got all touchy-feely with Palin at the United Nations last week? Turns out his googly eyes may be causing some trouble back home -- and not just from Pakistani feminists, who weren't too psyched about the fact that he basically drooled on a woman who might become America's second in command. The Christian Science Monitor reports that Zardari's flirtation earned him a fatwa (a religious order) from a radical Muslim prayer leader who disapproved of Zardari's "indecent gestures, filthy remarks and repeated praise of a non-Muslim lady wearing a short skirt."

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Biden claims that reporters are in a "time warp" if they think he'd prepare differently to debate a woman than he would a man -- but that doesn't appear to be entirely true. The Wall Street Journal reports that he has been preparing by sparring against Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, chosen not just because she "ran as an outsider and reformer" in 2002 and 2006 but because she's a sports mom and, yes, a former beauty queen. I'm going to bet Biden would have prepared a bit differently if McCain had chosen Joe Lieberman as his running mate.

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Putting aside the mixed metaphor (Are we playing hockey? Or hunting for caribou?), here is what really irritates me: Our incessant need to divide women into mom-based voting blocs. Hockey moms -- they're the new soccer moms. (And let's not forget the so-called security moms of the 2004 race.) Why couldn't we consider the idea that maybe, just maybe, women make political decisions based on more than the identification they feel with their children's sports teams? And if we're going to insist on doing so, why can't the fathers get involved as well? Where, I ask, are the cheerleader dads? The hockey pops?

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But unfortunately, being adorable can get you only so far. Today's War Room comments on the right's rising doubts about Palin, as does today's Washington Post, which links to a column by conservative writer Kathleen Parker that I think is worthy of Broadsheet attention.

In it, Parker -- who confesses to at first having been "delighted" with John McCain's choice -- now says that "it's increasingly clear that Palin is a problem."

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In a section of her book excerpted by AlterNet, Baumgardner tells the story of a 1993 discussion of feminism in which a teenage girl asked the panel whether it was possible to be pro-life and a feminist. "No," said Amy Richards, co-founder of the Third Wave Foundation, "next question."

Richards was apparently then incensed when another woman on the panel contradicted her, saying that she believed that being pro-life didn't make you ineligible to be a feminist. (Richards has since softened her stance and has collaborated with Baumgardner on this very question.) But as Baumgardner explains, it turned out that these women weren't necessarily asking if it was possible to be a feminist and bomb abortion clinics, or, in a less dramatic example, work to prevent other women from getting them. They wanted to know if you could call yourself a feminist while still believing abortion is the "taking of a life," and without making abortion -- or, rather, the fight to keep abortion legal and accessible -- one of your priorities. Baumgardner's response? Yes you can.

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According to Politico, a study released Tuesday by the Women's Campaign Forum Foundation found that donations by women of $200 or more (the minimum at which a donor's name has to be reported) are triple what they were in 2000. This year, women have donated $109 million in checks of $200 or more to political campaigns. Unsurprisingly, a bunch of this cash went to Hillary Clinton -- about $60 million in checks over $200, the study reports. (That amounts to about half of Clinton's total donations of more than $200 -- and doesn't take into account the donations under $200, many of which were probably made by women.) Barack Obama has done well with the ladies, too, with 47 percent of his total donors identified by his campaign as female, compared with 28 percent for John McCain (though since he is accepting public financing, that doesn't take into account Sarah Palin's effect).

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Yes, my friends. It is the yearly contest, held each September in Eugene, Ore., to crown a slug queen. According to the Wall Street Journal, which apparently also decided to devote some page space to something other than financial crises, the slug queen competition is a highlight of the blandly named Eugene Celebration. Men and women alike vie for the title, which features costumes with handmade fabric "slime trails," and adopt crazy names, like the 1993 winner, Queen Bananita Sluginsky. According to the Journal, "It began because some rebellious local politicians wanted to make a snide statement about other Oregon pageants -- Portland's Rose Queen, Lebanon's Strawberry Queen and the state's Miss Rodeo."

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I have several things to say about this:

1. I don't know about the state of your underpants, but I can't imagine that standing at a bar with a line of used panties dangling above my head would make me, at least, feel like having a beer.

2. I'm just making sure I'm reading this correctly: Women get $50 of free drinks after they have already voluntarily removed their undies?

3. I love this quote from the acting premier of the state of Victoria, Rob Hulls, who thinks that No Undie Sunday is a bad idea (?): "In this day and age, in 2008, to be promoting the drinking of alcohol along those lines, I just think is part of a bygone era," he told AFP, prompting the question of which era, exactly, was marked by women trading their underclothes in exchange for free alcohol. (The Age of the Gilded Panty?)

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So what the hell was it doing in food?

It turns out, unfortunately, that this "contamination" was probably deliberate: On nutritional tests, melamine makes foods appear to have more protein. And since China's two-tiered regulatory system gives what amounts to a free pass to companies (mostly state-run) that have "proven themselves" in the past, it's easy for little things like melamine to slip through the cracks. (The Washington Post found that at least nine of the 22 companies involved so far in this scandal were exempt from government inspections for their milk or dairy products.)

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-- Radosh.net on why we should care about "tanning-bed gate," or whatever the hell we're calling Sarah Palin's installation of a $35,000 tanning bed in the governor's mansion. (I prefer to refer to it by the title used by Radosh: "Baked Alaska.") While Palin's love of the fake tan doesn't say squat about her ability to be vice president, it is the Alaskan, female equivalent of John Edwards' $400 haircuts. In other words, it smacks of hypocrisy from a woman who claims to be nothing more than your average hockey mom.

This touches on one of my biggest political pet peeves: Why is America so fixated on electing an "average American" to be president? I like to think of my political leaders the same way as I like to think of my doctors: invincible and omniscient. (Would I want an "average American" to perform my appendectomy?) This reminds me of a conversation a friend of mine once had with his therapist. "It occurs to me that you don't really know much about who I am," said the therapist. "Are there any questions you'd like to ask me?" "No," my friend responded. "I'd rather not think of you as a real person." The same goes for me and the leader of the free world.

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But alas, it's true. Proposed Amendment 48 (PDF), which will indeed be on the ballot in November, is described as an amendment to change the definition of the term "person" to "include any human being from the moment of fertilization as 'person' is used in those provisions of the Colorado constitution relating to inalienable rights, equality of justice, and due process of law."

Yikes. I usually try to see both sides of things -- and while I do understand how people could consider abortion murder (even if I don't agree with them), I've got to say, this one crosses the line. I already enunciated a lot of my objections in my previous post, but this editorial by Gail Schoettler in the Denver Post lays down a few more.

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Inexplicable desires to sleep next to car parts might not qualify as nightmares per se, but I was reminded of my late-night requests by this article in the Daily Mail that claims that women have nightmares more frequently than men do -- and remember them better when they wake up.

In a study of 170 volunteers, British researchers found that when asked to report their most recent dream, 30 percent of the women reported having a nightmare, versus 19 percent of the men. Researchers also found that women's dreams were "more emotional" (whatever that means).

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The latest news is that Lynne Spears, not to be outdone by daughters Britney and Jamie Lynn, has just come out with an awkwardly titled memoir, "Through the Storm: A Real Story of Fame and Family in a Tabloid World." (It was supposed to be published last May but got pushed back after Jamie Lynn announced she was pregnant.) The book is being published, ironically enough, by Thomas Nelson, a Christian publisher of Bibles and inspirational books.

The Bible this is not. Instead, says Reuters, it "chronicles Spears' family during the phenomenal rise of Britney Spears in the late 1990s and her highly publicized meltdown."

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As anyone who pays attention to such things knows, there's a name for the long-standing debate about where these differences come from: Nature versus nurture. But now, the Times reports, new research is showing that both theories may be wrong -- or at least have different effects from what you might expect. An analysis of personality tests taken by men and women in more than 60 countries around the world shows that the size of the gender gap varies among cultures (bad for the "nature" adherents). And unfortunately for the "nurturers" who believe that if only societies were more equal, the differences between the sexes would disappear, it appears that the more traditional the culture (think India or Zimbabwe), the smaller the differences are, personality-wise, between men and women. As Tierney puts it, "The more Venus and Mars have equal rights and similar jobs, the more their personalities seem to diverge."

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Instead of greeting his running mate with a handshake, McCain welcomes Palin to their campaign events with a brief embrace. (And a chaste one at that -- perhaps he learned his lesson from that unfortunate picture of him nuzzling George W. Bush.) The New York Times, noting that he now makes sure to kiss his wife first (nobody puts Cindy in a corner), asked various social etiquette experts what to make of this on-the-trail affection.

"He's hugging her to show the world that he's all for her, and protecting her, but she doesn't need that," said Letitia Baldrige, former White House social secretary to Jacqueline Kennedy. (Baldrige later conceded that in an age when "we accept anything," the embrace was OK.)

"It's a form of professional endearment," Ann Marie Sabath, the founder of a business etiquette training firm, told the Times. "Getting closer than two arms' length when you know the other person says, 'I respect you, we have a comfort level, we have a professional bond.'"

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