Some people don't quite get the polls I put up around here.

Here's recent, typical criticism, aimed at the poll called "Althouse without comments." The aggrieved emailer writes:

I wanted to point out that you chose the options for the attitudes we might have towards your new policy. Exactly two of those choices implied that the new policy was detrimental, and both of those choices were framed in terms of emotionally negative or dismissive attitudes. You did not, for example, provide a choice like "I loved reading and writing comments, I will miss them, and I don't see how the blog can be the same without them." You gave us "I am aggrieved and grudging" and "the blog is nothing to me." You then pointed out that the only people who objected to the change were negative soreheads, and good riddance. OK, have it your way.

The sentence that begins "You then pointed out" is (badly) paraphrasing what I wrote here.

I wrote back:

The polls are a form of expression for me. No one has to take them, and I make no claim that they are anything but a kind of poem that I've written that you're allowed to play with.

Do you see how Althouse thinks of her polls?
	Yes, like everything at Althouse, they're dishonest and all about her.
	Yes, the individual lines, like this one, are as lines in a poem.
	Yes, she thinks she's an artist and has no insight into whether her work is crap.
	No, because there's really no "thinking" to speak of.
	No, because I'm preoccupied with what I think and Althouse won't talk about that.
	No, because if the lines don't rhyme, I haven't got time.
pollcode.com free polls

Looking downwards at the dog.

My point of view, right now:



You can find peace with your downward dog, and I with mine.

AND: The cinematic version:

"Chock Full o’Nuts is that heavenly coffee".. and the lady who sang that tune now drinks her coffee in heaven.

Page Morton Black was 97.

Mrs. Black, the widow of William Black, the founder of the Chock Full o’Nuts company, curtailed her singing career after their marriage. But her voice lived on in the jingle, which was broadcast for more than 20 years....

The jingle’s original last line, “Better coffee Rockefeller’s money can’t buy,” was changed in 1957, after John D. Rockefeller Jr. and his family complained.

The line became "Better coffee a millionaire’s money can’t buy." Today, they've changed the word to "billionaires."

I wish I could find my favorite old Chock Full o'Nuts commercial — the one with the line "many times, in many suitcases," which became an all-purpose catchphrase for years with me and RLC (who emailed me the link above). Instead, I'll have to give you this a dreadful old commercial, in which Page Morton Black appears dressed up, atrociously, as Snow White.

ADDED: RLC emails to say thanks, "But for the life of me I can't see why you didn't use" the joke he'd suggested: "The Chock Full o'Nuts girl has gone to meet her coffee-maker!"

Why are those German home-schooling parents seeking asylum in the United States?

Germany is in the European Union, which has a right to free movement, and Ireland, for example, offers a right to home-schooling. Here's email I received after yesterday's post about the case:

While not normally the type to comment on your blog posts (or anyone else's for that matter), I am somewhat confused by the attention and rallying point that the homeschooling-Germans-seeking-asylum story seems to have become for that community. While in theory there could be — somewhere in the world — a non-US citizen whose desire to meet perceived religious obligations by homeschooling could rise to the current US standard for granting asylum, the facts of this particular case don't seem to meet that standard. I currently live in Ireland, where the right of parents to homeschool their children is enshrined in the Constitution (Art. 42(2)). If the German parents' sole goal is to raise and educate their children in a homeschool friendly environment, they could easily emigrate to Ireland under the EU's right to free movement of persons and avoid the Congressional / Supreme Court challenge in the US entirely. I would assume that the Home School Legal Defense Association wants a poster case to publicize its views, but in light of the available facts, this just doesn't seem to be the most compelling case for that.

Great point. The 6th Circuit said they hadn't met the asylum standard because Germany wasn't targeting religious believers, just applying the same standard to everyone. In the United States, you don't have a constitutional right to special treatment because your desire to do something otherwise forbidden is based on religion. It's a simple equality principle.

What about all the Muslims in France who are forbidden to wear the veil in public? Would they all have a claim to asylum in the United States?

American law also includes some substantive due process ("privacy") rights about child-rearing, and these might get you to some right to home-school if you were already in the United States. It's very hard, however, to see this as a basis for asylum. If we're going to think in these terms, we might as well open the doors to everyone who wants to immigrate. We have rights that other people around the world would like to have too. Why stop anybody? I suspect that those who are championing the German home-schoolers are embracing them because they like the home-schooling cause, but it can't work like that, picking and choosing your issues.

ADDED: Why does Germany forbid home-schooling? Is it seen as important to assimilation, creating a common culture, and safeguarding against inculcating racism/anti-Semitism?

MORE: Another emailer writes, answering the question in the post title:

Perhaps because they don't want to have to flee twice.

Ireland allows home schooling with "reasonable regulation" which is inherently a matter for disagreement and can be quite unreasonable in practice.

Also, the homeschool community there is tiny and has a hard time agitating against further regulation.

Ireland has or will adopt the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) which has been used in other countries to tightly regulate the content of education (most recently in the Vatican).

The US has the freest education system on earth and is unlikely to adopt things like the CRC which treat children as permanent wards of the state.

Homeschooling in Europe is tiny and under constant attack and there are few genuinely private schools.

That's why those seeking freedom to educate might flee here.

AND: Yet another emailer says:

Because they seek ideological control over their subject populations.

The current excuse is that the "Rights of the Child" include the right to be taught the political, religious, and social views that the government wants taught.  Unsurprisingly the generic progressive world view.

He links to this speech by the HSLDA President. Excerpt:

Kimberly A. Yuracko, a professor from the prestigious Northwestern University School of Law, wrote an article for the California Law Review claiming that there are legal and constitutional limits on the ability of homeschooling parents “to teach their children idiosyncratic and illiberal beliefs and values.”...

In the May 2010 edition of the William and Mary Bill of Rights Journal, Catherine Ross, a law professor from George Washington Law School, published a broadside aimed at the hundreds of thousands of families homeschooling represents....

Professor Martha Albertson Fineman, from the Emory University School of Law, wrote in 2009 of her fear of parents with “oppressive, hierarchical belief systems.” She says,

Indeed, the long-term consequences for the child being home schooled
or sent to a private school cannot be overstated. The total absence of
regulation over what and how children are taught leaves the child
vulnerable to gaining a sub-par or non-existent education from which
they may never recover. Moreover, the risk that parents or private
schools unfairly impose hierarchical or oppressive beliefs on their
children is magnified by the absence of state oversight or the
application of any particular educational standards.

So what does she recommend should be done about all of us?
Private education should be banned. All of it. Private schools, religious
schools, homeschools.

Note: In the United States, the right to send your children to private schools, including private religious schools, is extremely well-established. 

"Feeling nostalgic? Can’t get enough body hair? Want to experience the celluloid life pre-Stonewall?"

"Here’s our guide to some of the most notable (and gayest) old-school flicks from before the millennium."

These films may not be perfect. In fact, some are downright offensive by today’s standards. But they are all in some way groundbreaking for their time period and considered in sequence they provide a record of mainstream culture’s changing attitudes towards gay men.

It's nice to be in a place where these movies can be seen from a distance and even enjoyed. I was living in Greenwich Village where they were filming movie "Cruising" (circa 1980) and remember the protests. By then, the pushback was already strong, and it was embarrassing for Al Pacino to be involved in the project. Now, this weird old artifact of unhappier times can be watched for fun, apparently. I guess it depends on who you are and where you are on the that's-not-funny spectrum of human psychology, which might be gender-linked.

The Pope's people took a wrong turn in Rio, plunging him into a frenzied, ecstatic throng?

This happened "in his first minutes back in South America since becoming pontiff."

I smell publicity stunt.

Francis' driver had turned into the wrong side of a boulevard at one point, missing lanes that had been cleared. Other parts of the pope's route to the city center weren't lined with fencing, giving the throngs more chances to get close, with uniformed police nowhere in sight to act as crowd control.

My skepticism alarm is clanging.

The three dozen visible Vatican and Brazilian plainclothes security officials struggled to keep the crowds at bay. Francis, however, not only looked calm but got even closer to the people. He rolled down his back-seat window, waved to the crowd and touched those who reached inside. He kissed a baby a woman handed to him.

Fabulous theater. Nicely Jesus-y.

A reading from Matthew 19:

13 Then people brought little children to Jesus for him to place his hands on them and pray for them. But the disciples rebuked them.

14 Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.”

ADDED: "He rolled down his back-seat window...." The Pope's car doesn't have electric windows?

Instapundit opens up comments in a "grand experiment."

He writes:

I’ve opened ‘em up before — and, for that matter, Ann Althouse did it once when I was away, to much excitement — but this new system should be much better. 

The system is part of "the new rollout of tech at PJ Media will allow one sign-in to work across the whole site," so you've got to join their system to be able to comment. And they will be able to manage you in ways that I was not able to manage my commenters (some of whom really were trying to destroy my blog and waste all our time).

Someone at Instapundit named Stoutcat says:

Where Althouse closes a door, Reynolds opens a window! This is an excellent idea, and I'm anticipating much enjoyment and eddification from reading your commenters, who are, no doubt, as far above Althouse's commenters, as hers were above the general horde.

Instapundit responds:

Yeah, Althouse's apparent joy at being comment-free gives me pause. But there' s no connection -- this has been in the works for months as part of PJ's single sign-on thing.

As for "Althouse's apparent joy at being comment-free," if that's what he's seeing, that is in fact only appearance. The loss has been very painful, because I believed the comments gave the place a lot of energy. But some unknown proportion of the commenters were people with ill will, who wanted destruction, and deleting even the ones we knew about had become literally a full-time job. But I wasn't in some big old system with lots of tech people. I've kept independent, with the simplicity of the people's platform, Blogger, which won't let me exclude people. I could only delete, which was a technique that my most aggressive antagonists used against me (and against all the other commenters who'd contributed so much over the years).

That really hurt, but I'm an optimist, and — like a blog — I live in the present and move forward, so I find the good in whatever the situation is, continually making choices about how to keep things as good as possible, and the day came when the balance of good and bad in the comments experience tipped so severely that I couldn't maintain the sunny denial needed to put up with everything. Since then, I've felt the loss, and part of the loss is seeing exiled commenters talking about me elsewhere on the web, forgetting/ignoring the problem that made me close the comments — as if I would shut off the comments because people attacked my writings! — and saying such nasty things about me that I could get depressed brooding about the real proportion of good faith to bad faith commenters.

But I've got to resist traipsing down that detour as I continue on the road of blogging, where I've found so much joy in the past and hope to find more, doing things in this newly simplified style. Meanwhile, Instapundit gets fancier, as PJ Media makes its play to become a social media enterprise. That's the road I've diverged from. I can't be your social media website.

I've redefined my task as something I can do alone, not that I'm alone. I've got Meade — the commenter I married — walking with me every step of the way. I've got all the joy I can handle, and maybe it is joy at being comment-free. I'm a less is more kind of person. My own version of that slogan is: Better than nothing is a high standard. I do notice and take joy in the negatives that I'm free of. That's called freedom, and comment-free is a kind of freedom.

ADDED: I said it back in 2004:

Why do you blog? > To live freely in writing.

Sacha Baron Cohen will not play the role of Freddie Mercury...

... in the Queen biopic.

The reason is that the band wanted to make more of a PG movie about Queen while Cohen was counting on a gritty R-rated tell-all centered around the gifted gay singer. Given the astonishing physical resemblance, it’s hard to imagine anyone else playing Freddie but Sacha.

I'd be interested in a tell-all movie about this dispute. How gritty did Cohen want it? How bland were the Queen guys? (And how hard is it really to make an actor look like Freddie Mercury with a wig, a  mustache, and fake buck teeth?)

What Van Dyke Parks found "so oxygenating about the Beat era."

"When I walked into a coffeehouse, eclecticism was not a big word. It was good to be interested in a whole bunch of stuff."

Audiences embraced it. Audiences were jolted by it. They did not resent it. They didn’t need to be told what to think. I’m not prepared to tell people what to think. I may leave more questions than answers. I believe that anything worth its salt in the arts must create a wobble. We are not polestars We are here struggling in the dynamics of justice, between the absolutism of faith and reasonable doubt.

Parks, who worked years ago with The Mothers of Invention and The Beach Boys,  has a new album called "Songs Cycled." 

ADDED: I'm not sure that quote says anything. I just liked the idea of finding beatniks oxygenating. I started a beatnik tag and went back and added it to old posts, so click for all my beatnik-related postings.

"Attorneys for Christian parents who fled Germany in order to home school their children but have been denied U.S. asylum..."

"... said they are preparing to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case and were working with Congress to try to change asylum law."

In May, the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals said the family did not meet the criteria for asylum, finding that Germany does not single out religious minorities for persecution. The court found that Germany treats all truants the same regardless of the reason, religious or not. Earlier this month, the court declined to revisit the issue.

ADDED: Why do they need to come to the United States? Germany is in the European Union, so they have a legal right to relocate to other EU countries, including Ireland, which has a right to home-school. 

Records From My Father, Part 2: "Velvet Carpet."

For the second effort in this series, I chose "Velvet Carpet," by The George Shearing Quintet with String Choir. I wasn't sure whether to capitalize "string choir," because it sounds generic, but what's a string choir? There are no vocals on this album, but perhaps there's an idea that the strings are singing. The strings are definitely in the background, with Shearing's quintet out in front. I take it the strings are more the plush, lush carpet...



... and the lady is the quintet. The lady is also perhaps the woman to be seduced by this lovely, charming music, over which a man and a woman can converse, wittily, and if there are any gaps in the conversation, they can snuggle and listen and feel elegant and sophisticated. And doesn't this woman look like a present day starlet?

The liner notes tell you how sophisticated you are:

To the sophisticates, [Shearing's] urbane piano seems to emanate from a penthouse high against an awesome city skyline.

There's a high-low ethic here too. In contrast to "the sophisticates," there are "those who like jazz." What Shearing offers them is "a beat as basic and danceable as any that rolled out of the open windows of Basin Street on a sweltering summer night."



I was surprised how much I enjoyed this music, even as I remember feeling perfectly annoyed at my father for listening to something that seemed so inanely smooth and pleasant. Here, listen to "'Round Midnight." What must he have thought of my finding these things manifestly bad? Now, I realize that I'm thinking about how I felt about his records when I was a teenager, but this album came out in 1956, when I was only 5, and I'm sure none of this annoyed me back then. In fact, I think I know that I loved it when the strings played pizzicato. And I thought everyone loved it. Everyone anticipated the switch to pizzicato and experienced delight. Listening to this record, I believe that George Shearing believed that sophisticates and jazz lovers alike would thrill when the strings went pizzicato.

Let's take a closer look at that little drawing of George Shearing:



Do you think George is giving you a sly look? If so, you are wrong. George Shearing was born blind. 

Born in Battersea, London, Shearing was the youngest of nine children. He was born blind to working class parents: his father delivered coal and his mother cleaned trains in the evening. He started to learn piano at the age of three and began formal training at Linden Lodge School for the Blind, where he spent four years.

Though he was offered several scholarships, Shearing opted to perform at a local pub, the Mason's Arms in Lambeth, for "25 bob a week" playing piano and accordion. He even joined an all-blind band during that time and was influenced by the records of Teddy Wilson and Fats Waller....

In 1947, Shearing emigrated to the United States, where his harmonically complex style mixing swing, bop and modern classical influences gained popularity.... In 1949, he formed the first 'George Shearing Quintet'... Shearing credited the Glenn Miller Orchestra's reed section of the late 1930s and early 1940s as an important influence.

Shearing's interest in classical music resulted in some performances with concert orchestras in the 1950s and 1960s, and his solos frequently drew upon the music of Satie, Delius and Debussy for inspiration. He became known for a piano technique known as "Shearing's voicing," a type of double melody block chord, with an additional fifth part that doubles the melody an octave lower....

I expected this album to be Muzak — schmaltzy, embarrassing junk. But it was detailed and crisp, and I asked the spirit of my father to forgive me for my deafness to the things that he loved.

"I wonder every day how we have reached this point where it's compoolsoorie to shave..."

"As I have acknowledged in the past, I am not perfect. I realize now that I have made some mistakes."

Said Ryan Braun.

Milwaukee Brewers outfielder Ryan Braun has been suspended without pay for the rest of the season, a 65-game ban announced Monday by Major League Baseball in what appears to be the first salvo in the league's fight against players allegedly tied to the Biogenesis lab.

It's relatively easy to accept this at this point in the season, when the Brewers are essentially hopeless. Get it done.

It appears Braun and MLB negotiated the terms of his suspension....

"Scalia opened his talk with a reference to the Holocaust, which happened to occur in a society that was, at the time, 'the most advanced country in the world.'"

"One of the many mistakes that Germany made in the 1930s was that judges began to interpret the law in ways that reflected 'the spirit of the age.' When judges accept this sort of moral authority, as Scalia claims they’re doing now in the U.S., they get themselves and society into trouble."

The Aspen Times reports. That's linked in the NYT, by Juliet Lapidos, who says "Justice Scalia brought Godwin’s Law to Snowmass, suggesting in an address to the Utah State Bar Association that activist judges helped bring about the Holocaust."

Was Scalia within Godwin's Law? At The Atlantic, Abby Ohlheiser says he "approaches Godwin's Law," and takes the trouble to explain the law: "Eventually, as Godwin's law scholars are well aware, any online discussion will produce a comparison to Hitler or the Nazis."

Here's the Wikipedia article on Godwin's law. Excerpt:

Godwin's law applies especially to inappropriate, inordinate, or hyperbolic comparisons of other situations (or one's opponent) with Nazis – often referred to as "playing the Hitler card."...

While falling afoul of Godwin's law tends to cause the individual making the comparison to lose his argument or credibility, Godwin's law itself can be abused as a distraction, diversion or even as censorship, fallaciously miscasting an opponent's argument as hyperbole when the comparisons made by the argument are actually appropriate.

So: Was Scalia's reference an exaggerated playing of the Hitler card or are his critics guilty of abusively invoking Godwin? I wouldn't answer without the full transcript of the speech. It would also be interesting to know whether these Godwin-invoking critics, who also don't have the transcript, just don't like Scalia anyway.

ADDED: An emailer who attended the Scalia event puts the remarks into context and makes the NYT and others look quite foolish for handling this matter the way they did:

I heard the entirety of Justice Scalia’s talk.  The Nazi discussion consisted of some unprepared remarks that he made at the beginning of his speech.  The context is vital. Here is the Utah State Bar Summer Convention agenda.

As you can see Justice Scalia was the principal speaker on Saturday morning—Day 3 of programming.  On Friday morning (Day 2 of the meeting), the principal speaker was Dr. William F. Meinecke of the Holocaust Memorial Museum giving his presentation “Law, Justice, and the Holocaust:  How the Courts Failed Germany.”  It is a fascinating presentation of how the Nazi party co-opted the Courts and lawyers to further its agenda against the Jews and used the judiciary to “legalize” its conduct.

Justice Scalia opened his remarks by noting that, at the previous evening’s Utah State Bar’s Past Presidents Dinner, there had been a great deal of discussion about Dr. Meinecke’s talk. Justice Scalia then indicated that, prior to beginning his prepared remarks, he had some observations about Nazi Germany and the law.  He observed that Germany in those times was “the most advanced country in the world” citing its sciences, philosophy, music, and theater (and probably some other examples).  He commented that the Nazi agenda was assisted by judges who read laws that facially would have outlawed certain abuses not as written but “in the spirit of the times.”   He did not call any judge “Hitler” or a “Nazi.” 

While the Nazi discussion did weave into his prepared remarks of about judicial “mullahs," he offered a single conclusion that is unreported by the press account before he commenced his planned speech.  He stated that educating to improve intelligence or advance culture was not education’s highest calling.  Rather, he contended that pinnacles of intellectualism, culture, and learning were meaningless unless education also instilled “virtue.”  His position was that the lack of virtue in the German elite (who were as cultured and educated as any group in the world) was their failing when confronted with the evil of the Nazis.

ADDED: The emailer is Drew Cloutier.

Globe...

... thistle.

"The baby boy was born at 4:24 p.m., weighing 8 pounds, 6 ounces."

Pretty big, considering the incredibly narrow body of the Duchess, but the kid — as yet nameless — escaped into the world that — he had no way of knowing — so eagerly longed for him.

"Harassment with a Dead Squirrel."

"A Priem Road resident complained July 15 about an ongoing dispute with her neighbor that escalated into dead squirrel-throwing. The woman said she saw a dead squirrel -- decomposing and covered in maggots -- in the neighbor's yard. The next day, she found in under her kids' swingset. She flung it back over into the neighbor's yard, then called police to document the situation."

Police news, from Strongsville (Ohio).

ADDED: I forgot to check the "no comments" button, and a bunch of comments flowed into the moderation bag. Who knew so many people, so quickly, would want to talk about a dead squirrel? Yes, it's a very exciting dead squirrel, what with all the maggots and the irate neighborliness. The longtime high-quality good-faith commenter Madison Man said:

The soon-to-be-famous Dead Squirrel Exception to the no-comment policy? Non-human animals are known to carry carcasses. The only person in this story known to have moved the corpse is the complainant.

"A Norwegian woman who was sentenced to prison in Dubai after reporting that she was raped..."

"... has been given a pardon and will be heading home soon, she said Monday."

When I clicked on the front-page teaser — "Woman pardoned for rape report" — I thought I was going to a story about a false report of rape, and I was curious about the sympathy for women who do such harmful things. But that is not what happened here. Marte Deborah Dalelv reported a rape, and she was then "charged with having unlawful sex, making a false statement and illegal consumption of alcohol" and given a 16-month prison sentence.

While Dubai has a reputation as a cosmopolitan city that boasts Western influences, where visitors can drink at bars and restaurants and unmarried couples can share hotel rooms, the country adheres to Islamic laws and traditions. Having sex outside of marriage and public consumption of alcohol are both violations of the law in the United Arab Emirates....

In December 2012, a British woman reported being raped by three men in Dubai. She was found guilty of drinking alcohol without a license and fined. In January 2010, a British woman told authorities she was raped by an employee at a Dubai hotel. She was charged with public intoxication and having sex outside of marriage. An Australian woman reported in 2008 that she was drugged and gang-raped. She was convicted of having sex outside marriage and drinking alcohol, and she was sentenced to 11 months in prison.

The NYT public editor: "I don’t think Nate Silver ever really fit into the Times culture..."

"... and I think he was aware of that. He was, in a word, disruptive."

Much like the Brad Pitt character in the movie “Moneyball” disrupted the old model of how to scout baseball players, Nate disrupted the traditional model of how to cover politics.

His entire probability-based way of looking at politics ran against the kind of political journalism that The Times specializes in: polling, the horse race, campaign coverage, analysis based on campaign-trail observation, and opinion writing, or “punditry,” as he put it, famously describing it as “fundamentally useless.”

That's a lot more than awareness to not fitting in. It's hard to fit in with people you are attacking.

Zimmerman haters can say: The man has a hero complex.

They're going to struggle to process today's news:

Zimmerman was one of two men who came to the aid of a family of four -- two parents and two children -- trapped inside a blue Ford Explorer SUV that had rolled over after traveling off the highway in Sanford, Fla. at approximately 5:45 p.m. Thursday, the Seminole County Sheriff's Office said in a statement....

It's the first known sighting of Zimmerman since he left the courtroom following his acquittal last week....

This is going to be so difficult for the Zimmerman haters, and I want to help. Remember, the FBI document said:

In an April interview with two FBI agents, Christopher Serino, the Sanford Police Department’s lead investigator on the Martin killing... “described Zimmerman as overzealous and as having a ‘little hero complex,’ but not as a racist.”

So he's out there, roaming around Sanford — not running as far out of town as he can — looking for people in trouble so he can play this demented "protector" role to his community. It's just pathetic. Here he is, prowling the streets, looking for signs of trouble and leaping into action. Wasn't he told to stay in his car?

So feel free to go ahead and use that, Zimmerman haters. I know this is tough for you. Another idea: Change the subject to the terrible problem of SUVs rolling over. That's a great old issue that could be recycled.

The "eternity" of slow-motion falling in a car plunging 40 feet off the Chesapeake Bay Bridge.

What it felt like for the 22-year-old woman, Morgan Lake (whose name is nicely aquatic.) Her car was struck twice, and the second hit "propelled it upward 3½ feet to the top of the concrete Jersey wall."

The car straddled the wall for a time... then...  it tipped over, and she was falling for what “felt like eternity.” It seemed almost to be happening in slow motion, Lake said. The drop was estimated to have been 40 feet or more. Then the car hit the water, its windshield and the driver’s side window shattered.

The car filled with water, Lake said, and she “felt I was going to die.” She said she actually “started to drown.” But then, she said in a telephone interview late Sunday, “I got myself together,” and refused to drown. She told herself that she could save her own life, and she did.

It took an "eternity" to fall, and then this drowning process was also time-consuming. I'm picturing her sitting there, thinking okay, here I am drowning, I have to accept this. Then: This is getting dull, waiting for the end. What else is there to do here?

“I went from panic to calm,” she said. She proceeded in steps, first unbuckling her seat belt, then grabbing the window and getting out of the car.

She said it seemed to take a long time to reach the surface. 

Again: The long time line.

She gasped for air as many as five times. She looked around and...

There is time to observe and collect your thoughts.

... began to swim.

There is always more time. You might as well see it that way, like Morgan Lake, who survived. At some point, it won't be true, and you will disappear along with all the rules for living you've kept in your head.

"With this kind of work it is not push, push, push; you need to relax... you have to massage the stone rather than push it."

Said Jacob Arndt, one of 2 men doing the stone carving restoration work on the University Club building here in Madison. Arndt has been working alongside Gayal Oglesbay since last fall.

“I really rarely find someone who carves stone,” Oglesbay said. “A lot of people will putz around or use machinery, but people who carve it originally with hammers and chisels and use math and come up with the exact product are hard to find.”

There are 50 to 90 stone carvers in the United States, according to Walter Arnold, treasurer and past president of the national Stone Carvers Guild, who says the number depends on what standard you apply: "if you limit to those good enough by 1913 standards to have held down a job in a good shop back then, the current numbers are significantly lower."

***

I'm making a new tag for this, artisans. I almost went with one of my old tags: art, sculpture, architecture, careers. Those are all almost there, but they are off in a way that amplifies the very problem the article is talking about. I also have a tag I'm not making a tag for this, but I could make a second new tag I am making a new tag for this. Having made the new tag, I wish I could go back and add it to all the old posts where it could have been used. I'd like to be able to see what has come up over the years, discussing the highly skilled work of those who produce beautiful things but do not think of themselves as artists. Or perhaps some of these people do think of themselves as artists (and maybe some painters and sculptors don't like to think of themselves as artists). I'd be interested in pulling together all that old material. If only I'd had better blogging craftsmanship.

"How come it's always the guy who doesn't take his suit jacket off, eats too much red meat, and refuses to use a personal desk fan who controls the AC for the whole office?"

That's a comment under this NYT piece by Ginia Bellafante about how air conditioners ought to be set at 78°.

The title of the piece is "What’s Cooler Than Cool? 78 Degrees on the A.C.," because they'd like you to think that somehow fancying yourself as a hipster, following a trend, will feel better than actual physical comfort. Setting the thermostat high — in this view — is like wearing stilettos. You look marvelous. You should suffer for fashion.

Meanwhile, the male who seeks banal, normal comfort is presumed to be the culprit. The imagined demon man — who's always controlling everything — is just wearing the ordinary professional garb that has been worn with little fuss for over 100 years and eating the food that people who don't think too much about food enjoy eating.

But is it really men who feel the need to set the thermostat low? What does it matter? If at any point you feel uncomfortable, focus on the notion that men, manifesting their male characteristics, are doing this to you. That seems to be an acceptable form of amusement. But if you don't find it funny, you might get heated up... beyond the power of your personal desk fan to deliver relief.

"Why Men Need Women" — the headline to an article about "Why Women Are Good At Getting Men To Give Away Their Stuff."

Instapundit finds a choice example of "the Althouse rule." Here's the underlying article, "Why Men Need Women," which reports a study that finds that "The mere presence of female family members — even infants — can be enough to nudge men in the generous direction."

Instapundit notes that this is the kind of finding that could rankle feminists, who should resist the idea that society's purpose for women is to tame men and structure their otherwise destructive energy for the good of the group.

Fortunately, though, this political incorrectness is offset, as the piece by Adam Grant adheres slavishly to the Althouse Rule on writing about gender, which is that you can report anything so long as you do so in a way that portrays women as superior.

Here's my post from 2005 stating the rule and demonstrating its application in the context of a study about the response to cartoons, which was reported under the headline, "Women May Enjoy Humor More, if It's Funny." "That's not funny" is a punchline for jokes about humorless women, but somehow the reporter of the study transformed the old deficiency into an asset.

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ADDED: The poll is radically unscientific. Those who have stopped reading because the comments are gone should not be here to take the poll. Everyone choosing the last option — "Without the comments, this blog means nothing to me" — is confessing to lying. Those 265 voters (out of 2,071 total) might be expressing anger or lobbying for the return of the comments. Telling me what I write doesn't matter except as a jumping off platform for commenters doesn't work as an argument, directed at me, to bring back comments.

I needed help dealing with the overwhelming proliferation of commenters who intended to ruin the blog — that is, commenters who thought of my work as nothing, or, really, worse than nothing, and hoped to achieve their goal of getting me to nothing.

The 345 people who voted to say that they "feel aggrieved" and see what I did as "wrong" also fail to speak appealingly to me. They are perhaps wrapped up in their own experience and unwilling to see what I went through. They might like the endless party restarted, but their lack of interest in what it's been like for me shows why the party had to end, abruptly on one terrible night, and why I've got to go forward solo.

Those who voted in the bottom 2 categories — more than the ones who voted in the top categories, the supportive answers — reinforce me in my decision to go it alone here.

"Rahm Emanuel Dancing to Blurred Lines..."

"... at the Taste of Chicago."

Via Throwing Things, who says "How powerful is 'Blurred Lines?'  Powerful enough that it can get even Rahm Emanuel to dance." I don't get the "even." The man is a dancer.

Records From My Father, Part 1: "Make Love to Me."

I told you here that I was about to start a new project. I'm going to call it "Records From My Father." I inherited a big stack of record albums that my father bought in the 1950s and 60s and that were part of the home I grew up in. I didn't really understand what I was hearing and what these things meant to my father, who has been gone a long time.

I decided to listen to one album at a time — not that I'll endure all of them — and see what I think. I don't expect to recall my childhood memories or to reconstruct the inner life of the man who existed in ways that couldn't be understood by me at the time. I don't expect anything, really. The idea is simply to encounter these albums, because I have them, because he bought them, and because I know they have meaning, even though I don't think it is possible to find that meaning.

The first selection is "Make Love to Me," a 1957 collection of "standards" and "new pieces," sung by Julie London.



I pulled this one out of the stack because Julie London was my father's favorite singer. As a child, I had reason to believe that she was the most compellingly beautiful woman in the world. As I heard her singing, she was whispering. That was the gimmick: Whispering. Listening to it now, I hear how sexy it is intended to be to a man. I'm not sure whether it's completely subtle or a sledgehammer of sex. It's trying to be both in a way that would seem ridiculous or naive today, unless you could convince yourself that it's ironic. But it's not ironic.

The liner notes invite the listener — the male listener — to imagine Julie as an idealized young woman available for sex. Each song is connected to a city, even though the song lyrics are not about any particular place. The dreamy man — if he reads the liner notes — can picture himself in one city after another with the beautiful, love-seeking woman: "So steady your hand, pour the martinis — let your imagination go...."



My favorite song on the album was "Lover Man" — listen to it here — which the liner notes tells us is "Switzerland at sunset." I see little inked checks next to some of the songs — not including "Lover Man." I think I recognize my father's handwriting, and I assume he made cassette tapes and checked off the songs he wanted to copy. My second favorite is "Body and Soul," which did get a check.

How would I rate this listening experience? It did not take me back into the past. I don't remember hearing it or having childish ideas about what these songs meant. There's something wistful about thinking of my father feeling deeply attached to this kind of singing, which seems to be about teaching a young man how to "make love" to a woman. Key song: "Go Slow." (Not checked.) "Go Slow" supposedly takes place in Casablanca, according to the liner notes. "When love is slow, oooooh honey, what a tonic for my nerves." What a bad song! And when Julie does that "ooooh," she sounds a bit grossed out, like maybe it should be spelled "ew."

Biking in Madison.

I walked downtown to meet Meade at Graze for brunch, where I had what I'd had yesterday as well, the corned beef hash. Outside the restaurant, some dumb/inconsiderate bikers U-locked their bikes to a struggling sapling. How hard would it be for a thief to saw through that tree (or even to break it off)?



Meade had his mountain bike from a long morning ride, and I got a B-Cycle for the ride along the lake path and back home



Meade stowed his bike, then rode the B-Cycle back to the nearest kiosk — at the Natatorium —  and I got in the car and drove over to pick him up, so we could go to Whole Foods and load up on supplies so we could get back to making breakfast at home.

"High-End Stores Use Facial Recognition Tools To Spot VIPs."

Surely, this is the moment when we find ourselves on the cusp between the old and the new.

The Old: There was etiquette and common courtesy, and you felt called upon to regard everyone as a very important person. Sly and the Family Stone sang it best: "Everybody Is a Star." And Jesus said: "Truly, I say to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me."

The New: Everyone will have Google Glass with facial recognition and everyone, high-end or not, will know the identity of everyone, celebrity or not. Everyone will know that you know who they are, and your ability to recognize anyone will say absolutely nothing about your character and discernment.

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	Comments or no comments, I read the posts, which were always the main thing here.
	I used to spend a lot of time in the comments, but it's fine without comments.
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ADDED: How is it possible that anyone can pick the last option? A conundrum!

Freddy Mercuryovich and The Floating Vulva Box.

You know what I'm talking about?

AND: Much as I love Tom and Lorenzo's on the armpit-sniffing unicorn boy from Milwaukee...

You signed up for reality TV and then proceeded to act like a ridiculously obnoxious attention whore. Now cranky queens are making it their life’s mission to make you cry before this is all over.

... the guy knows he won't win, and he's going all out making himself a character who's got a shot at getting cast in some other reality shows. You can only blame the producers for spiking the show with comic noncontenders like this. Timothy must go big and comic, and so must Tom and Lorenzo. It simply must be done. For sustainability.

Sunday rest.

Enjoy the day.

And if you've got any shopping to do, please consider supporting my work on this blog by using this link to shop at Amazon. You won't pay anything extra for your selections, and I'll notice your vote of support.

"I don't like being described as 'sniffing'?"

Says Meade, reading the last post. I'm going for vivid verbs, but I'm still attentive to image control. Meade's not a big language pedant, but he says: "I do object to the suffix '-wise,' like 'weatherwise.'"

"But when I said 'weatherwise,'" I say, referring to the time I said 'weatherwise' the other day, "I was making an allusion to that Frank Sinatra song. Weatherwise, it's such a lovely day... Come fly with me...."



When that album came out, in 1958, my father looked exactly like that. It's funny, when you're a kid — I was 7 — you can get the feeling that if someone looks just like someone else, that they kind of are that person. And not just in that jokey separated-at-birth way. (You never see them in the same place at the same time, ever notice?) But in some mystic way. Even when you know it's not true. It's still kind of true.

Did anyone ever come up to you and accuse you of being a celebrity and when you said that you were not, they insisted that you were? Meade had that experience. Here's Meade's 70s-era doppelganger. ("But you didn't have that hairy mole," I protest, questioning the story.)

Do you pop the bubble of fantasy or not? Would Frank Sinatra admit to being Frank Sinatra? If he were my father, he'd sign the autograph — Frank Sinatra — and get rid of the crumb.

The above-pictured album is somewhere in this pile of records that I inherited from my father, who was a terrible singer, but loved music:



I have a planned blog project related to these records, which I might roll out soon.

The verb "opt."

I like it... and used it in the previous post. ("[O]bviously if you have a single-parent household, you'll need some kind of income stream to opt to say at home." I liked the "obv... opt" combo.) But Meade sniffed at this usage. Is it as off as using "impact" as a verb? (Which I don't do.)

The (unlinkable) OED has the earliest usage of "opt" as a verb coming in 1853 — which is relatively recent — and written by Frederick Douglass:

1853   Frederick Douglass Paper (Rochester, N.Y.) (Electronic text) 16 Sept.,   This course will not suit a discriminating public. They must opt for something more than long winded and rapid declamations.

There are 3 other 19th century examples, and both put "opt" in quotes. ("1899... The two boys 'opted'  for the Navy.") By contrast, the word "option" goes back to the 1500s. So I guess it's like "enthuse," which the OED comes right out and calls "an ignorant back-formation" (from "enthusiasm"). But why isn't "opt" called "an ignorant back-formation"? What makes a new usage "ignorant"? Or does it make more sense to say: There's one thing that makes it not ignorant: when the first use appears in the writings of the revered former slave Frederick Douglass.
Speaking of earlier posts and things Meade has said about my writing, he recently chided me for aiming the word "ignorant" at a black person. He maintained that there is great sensitivity about that word. WaPo columnist Eugene Robinson had made an assumption about the George Zimmerman case that I called "either ignorant or shamefully deceptive." At the time, I said I had thought carefully about word choice, and I thought "ignorant" was the right word because it focuses on the lack of information, not intelligence, and anyway, in my 2 alternatives — ignorant/deceptive — the hurtful accusation is deceit, and ignorance was a gracious offer of an out. And why should I coddle Eugene Robinson? He's one of the elite. It would be patronizing.

So, now, googling, I did find this: "Is the word 'ignorant' a racial slur?" I think the answer is no, but I do see some evidence of sensitivity around the word, depending on the way you attach it to a noun, notably when you call someone "an ignorant [blank]," especially when the blank is a nasty word, as in "Jane, you ignorant slut."

"I can food."

Did that look like something a LOLcat would say? If so, I guess you haven't arrived at "The New Domesticity."

I knit. I can food. I garden. I cook, and when I’m not actively cooking, I’m thinking about what I’m going to cook next... I didn’t grow up doing these things.... So you can see why Emily Matchar’s new book, “Homeward Bound,” sounded as if it could be a mirror into my soul.

This is the pithiest part of the review (at WaPo, by Becky Krystal):

Some of the new domestics think feminism isn’t just about being in the workplace; it’s also being able to choose to not be in it. 

Feminists have been saying that all along, but kind of only because they have to, and there always seems to be this qualification that if you choose the home life option, you've got to do it the right way, which is not because of tradition and not in subordination to a husband. By contrast, if you choose the moneymaker option, the conventional and/or servile aspects of what you're doing are more likely to go unnoticed (or so it may seem to the go-along-to-get-along subordinates to feminism in its most banal form).

Back to Krystal:

Or, Matchar says, it’s about reclaiming for the hipster set what used to be symbols of drudgery, such as the apron. 

Circa 1970, hippies did this. I remember seeing the women's movement of that time as a dreary and very square challenge to the hippie philosophy, which aimed at transcending commerce. But the women's movement soundly trounced hippies. Can hipsters succeed where hippies failed?

Others rebuff [feminism] entirely, blaming feminism for eating away at family life and demeaning the home arts and those who stay home to practice them....

It's appealing to stay home, but women do feel guilty and in need of justifications when they do it. (And how about men? It's even more challenging, even as one might imagine feminists smiling upon the male homemaker.)

Matchar’s dissection of new domesticity raises other, larger issues of race, class and gender. White women who stay home are praised more often than their black counterparts, who risk being called “welfare queens.”

Doesn't that more depend on whether you're collecting welfare? Who can expect praise for that? And I see no trend in America to praise white women but not black women who are doing the same thing. (The racial problem I see in the Disparate Praise category is patronizing black people with praise when they do things that are otherwise viewed as ordinary.)

Impoverished women with less disposable income and time can’t cook every meal from scratch or stay home with their children....

I'll resist saying things I've said before about the economics of the single-earner family, but obviously if you have a single-parent household, you'll need some kind of income stream to opt to say at home.

Also jarring is the notion, articulated by some of Matchar’s subjects, that it’s only “natural” for women to be in the home, that they are biologically suited for nurturing. That belief is unsettlingly close to the perverse use of “nature” that justifies discrimination, and not just against women.

I love the way the "nature" theme comes and goes in the discourse of discrimination. Nature makes a great argument — e.g., homosexuality is inborn — until it doesn't. But Krystal doesn't really try to figure out what's happening with the nature "notion." She merely calls it "jarring" and "unsettling."

Hell, yeah, nature is jarring. It will jar you one way or the other in the end.

Strange flowers...

... I found these rather odd. Water lilies, presumably. Fuzzy and bright yellow-green.

"Air-conditioning has reversed the polarity of summer..."

"... it has us fleeing inside during hot weather, while we used to flee outside, which might have been more fun, and was certainly more social."

"Ultra-violent, demented, plotless, creepy, meat-headed and boring, this is nothing more than a depraved travesty of abstract expression..."

"... that wastes the film it’s printed on. Get to the point, you say. What is it about? Absolutely nothing, really."

Ryan Gosling, looking dangerously anaesthetized, is an American thug who runs a brutal boxing club that doubles as a drug den in the slums of Bangkok. When his sub-mental brother rapes and slaughters a teenage whore, her father slices his head off.... 

I'll slice off the rest of the plot line and go right to:

What on earth is going on here? Was Drive a fluke, or is [Nicolas Winding] Refn just another no-talent from the Lars von Trier school of Something Rotten in Denmark flummery?

Years ago, it used to seem necessary to take in these Danish movies. Life is so much easier now.

At the Trayvon "rallies" — "Hundreds gathered in Los Angeles, San Francisco and other California cities Saturday morning."

"Civil rights leader and MSNBC host Al Sharpton organized the 'Justice for Trayvon' rallies and vigils outside federal buildings in at least 101 cities: from New York and Los Angeles to Wichita, Kan., and Atlanta...."

In addition to pushing the Justice Department to investigate civil rights charges against Zimmerman, Sharpton told supporters he wants to see a rollback of stand-your-ground self-defense laws now in place in more than 20 states.

"We are trying to change laws so that this never, ever happens again," the Rev. Sharpton said.

Zimmerman shot when he was pinned down and getting his head bashed into concrete. Stand-your-ground has to do with retreating when you can. Even aside from the fact laws can't ensure that bad things never, ever happen again — or else why is there murder? — stand-your-ground made no difference in Zimmerman's situation.

Meanwhile, in Chicago, the reported number is 8,000, with Jesse Jackson as the big speaker, saying: "We must boycott Florida and stop 'stand your ground.'" Boycott Florida?

Rosaline Wilson, 62, said she came to the rally remembering her 14-year old brother who she said was killed by a police officer several decades ago while he was riding home from school. Because of the experience, she said, Wilson was not surprised by the Zimmerman verdict, but thinks there is hope for the future.

"We need solutions; we need something concrete; we need change," she said. 

We need something concrete... Speaking of concrete, does anyone at these rallies mention that Martin bashed Zimmerman's head on the concrete?

ADDED: At the Miami rally, Trayvon Martin's father spoke, and the NYT describes the crowd as "dozens of people."

"A woman swam to safety in the Chesapeake Bay Friday night after her car plunged 40 feet off the Bay Bridge...."

"The 22-year-old woman... swam from her car to a bridge piling."

At the Garden Swirl Semi-Café...

... you can comment about anything... with moderation.

The 5 believers and the 5 "cons" — the background to Obama's spontaneous remarks about race.

Talk about context — and he did — look where we find ourselves. After the verdict in the George Zimmerman case — otherwise known as the Trayvon Martin case — Obama may have wanted not to speak, but our nation casts its weary eyes toward the face that we (once) imagined would emanate rays of racial healing. Come on, Obama, you've got to do it. He got profiled all the way into office, and now we expect him to perform in accordance with our stereotype.

He resisted for a number of days. Who knows what he was thinking? Was he waiting to see if there would be riots? To hear what others might say (so he could enter the conversation late and seem, perhaps without really saying anything, like the voice of reason)?

Then, on Friday, he made his way out to the lectern in the White House briefing room — "no advance warning and little of the orchestration that usually accompanies presidential speeches" — and spoke without a teleprompter, extemporaneously. As the NYT has it:

After days of angry protests and mounting public pressure, President Obama summoned five of his closest advisers to the Oval Office on Thursday evening. It was time, he told them, for him to speak to the nation about the Trayvon Martin verdict, and he had a pretty good idea what he wanted to say.

Summoned! So commanding. He talked to 5 advisers. We're not told who, but one of them talked to summoned the NYT — I'm sure that was okay with Obama — and painted this picture:

For the next 15 minutes, according to a senior aide, Mr. Obama spoke without interruption, laying out his message of why the not-guilty ruling had caused such pain among African-Americans, particularly young black men....

So the man is capable of speaking spontaneously for 15 minutes straight, and his 5 companions — obviously 5 believers — refrained from interrupting him. It's not really that amazing to go on for 15 minutes, and we sayw him do that at the lectern on Friday, presumably because he convinced himself — with the support of the 5 — that talking, just like that, would take us to that higher level that was promised by those Hope posters.



We don't know what he said Thursday night, but we do have the full video and transcript of what that became on Friday.  Listening to the remarks again, I imagine what talking points he had in his head, and my guess is 5 "CONs": CONDOLE, CONTEXT, CONVENE, CONVERSE, CONFIDENCE. Let me show you this in the transcript:

[CONDOLE]  ... First of all... I send my thoughts and prayers... to the family of Trayvon Martin....

[CONTEXT] The second thing... a lot of arguments about the legal issues... But I did want to just talk a little bit about context and how people have responded to it and how people are feeling... in the African American community... a lot of pain... recognize that the African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away.... those sets of experiences inform how the African American community interprets what happened one night in Florida.... black folks do interpret the reasons... in a historical context.... So folks understand the challenges that exist for African American boys.... they get frustrated, I think, if they feel that there’s no context for it and that context is being denied....

[CONVENE] Now... How do we learn some lessons from this and move in a positive direction?.. I'm not naïve about the prospects of some grand, new federal program.  I'm not sure that that’s what we're talking about here. But I do recognize that as President, I've got some convening power, and there are a lot of good programs that are being done across the country on this front.  And for us to be able to gather together business leaders and local elected officials and clergy and celebrities and athletes, and figure out how are we doing a better job helping young African American men feel that they're a full part of this society and that they've got pathways and avenues to succeed....

[CONVERSE] And then, finally... There has been talk about should we convene a conversation on race. I haven't seen that be particularly productive when politicians try to organize conversations.  They end up being stilted and politicized, and folks are locked into the positions they already have.  On the other hand...  That would, I think, be an appropriate exercise...

[CONFIDENCE] And let me just leave you with a final thought... Each successive generation seems to be making progress...  we should... have confidence that kids these days... have more sense...

That's it: the 5 "cons." Don't even have to write it on your hand. Maybe in his head, he pictured one "con" superimposed on the face of each of the 5 believers he practiced with. Michelle was "confidence," all about the children and the hope, and so forth. That's just my sense of how he got through the 15 minutes, and he did it pretty well if you think about everything he had to pull together, all the people he needed to appease and inspire, and the theater of seeming to speak from the heart and the mind.

Helen Thomas, dead at 92.

"Thomas was the the first woman to join the White House Correspondents' Association, and the first woman to serve as its president. She was also the first female member of the Gridiron Club, Washington's historic press group."

ADDED: Clicking on my "Helen Thomas" tag, I can see things in a form not to be found in the obituaries:

1."'Everyone knows she is a nasty piece of work and has been a nasty piece of work for decades.'Jonah Goldberg tells us how he really feels about Helen Thomas..."

2. James Taranto calls "metaphor alert" on Helen Thomas, while using the "crazy old aunt in the attic" metaphor against her.

3. Helen, still on fire at 89: "Nixon didn’t try to do that. They couldn’t control [the media]. They didn’t try. What the hell do they think we are, puppets? They’re supposed to stay out of our business. They are our public servants. We pay them.... When you call the reporter the night before you know damn well what they are going to ask to control you. I’m not saying there has never been managed news before, but this is carried to fare-thee-well — for the town halls, for the press conferences. It’s blatant. They don’t give a damn if you know it or not. They ought to be hanging their heads in shame."

4. "Longtime White House scribe Helen Thomas caused more than a few eyebrows to perk up when video surfaced on Friday of her declaring that Jews should 'get the hell out of Palestine' and go back to Germany and Poland.'"

5. "At the Helengoyle Café" had this photoshop by Palladian (done after what you see at #4):

"There are also large numbers of people with pseudodementia."

"These people may seem to be demented, but the brain is normal."

Noted.

And: Just as I'd thought.

"One moment you’re sitting at home watching CNN, and the next you’re a basket case..."

"... because your television is locked on a steady stream of Chinese Communist Party propaganda."

It’s entirely possible that the Global Times -- hardly a paragon of journalistic integrity -- got the story wrong, and the Gaoxin VII isn’t designed to induce nervous collapse. It's also possible, probable in fact, that Chinese Communist propaganda can't induce such a fit.

Here's what the Global times wrote:

“When carrying out a mission, the airplane [the Gaoxin VII] will use its own ‘programs’ to forcefully overpower enemy television stations, radio stations and wireless communication networks, interfere with the enemy's propaganda dissemination programs, affect the enemy's military-civilian morale, and create rumors and confusion, thus causing the enemy, from government to everyday citizens, to have ‘nervous breakdowns’ and achieving their goal of rendering them helpless and unable to fight.”

That's hilarious... until it's not.

Can we just get this as a movie?

"State law says that no school’s nonwhite enrollment can deviate from the districtwide average for schools with the same grade levels by more than 25 percentage points."

Race-balancing in Connecticut.

In addition to New Lebanon and Hamilton Avenue Elementary, the two schools on the western edge of town with too few white students, two schools on the far eastern and northern sides of town are flirting with imbalance of an opposite kind: having too few minority children... The imbalance was created by a steady increase in black and Hispanic residents on the western side of [Greenwich]...

Susie Ponce, whose parents are from Colombia, moved to western Greenwich from Queens in 2007. She thinks Hamilton Avenue Elementary, which her two children attend, could have more white children, she said, but it has an array of nationalities.

“If I had a choice, I would keep my kids where they are right now,” said Ms. Ponce, who until recently was the school’s parent coordinator. “Because not only are they getting a great education, they are getting the social-emotional intelligence that I grew up with, just being exposed to other children from different cultures.”

Once the state law is in place, complying with it takes precedence. Who knows what choices would be made without it? But the situation that Ponce likes, that is threatened with change to comply with state law, came into being while that state law was in force. We never get to see what would have happened without that law, which (in some form at least) dates back to the 1960s.

It's easy to think: Why must we talk about "too few" white/nonwhite children? And: If "too few" has important meaning, what is the chance that meaning is well-expressed by a law that defines "too few" in terms of the racial balance happens to be in other places rather than any idea of the classroom benefits of diversity? The Connecticut statute attempts to control the effects of choices about where different people live — choices based in part on affluence and, in some unknown part, on race. It dictates a concept of "too few," and it does so intentionally to block people from thinking about "too few" in a deeper, more substantive way.

By the way, after following the George Zimmerman trial, it's interesting to see the NYT repeatedly and confidently write "Hispanic" as if everyone knows it's a race. The Hispanic woman Susie Ponce speaks of the need for "more white children," and we're not supposed to get confused and think: Aren't her children white? White Hispanic?

"I didn’t go to Thailand, but the summer that I took the bar I did all my studying by the pool."

Writes Instapundit:

I was set to clerk afterward at the Sixth Circut [sic] with a friend from law school who was black, and my goal was to be darker than her when I started. I succeeded — and that was the last really serious tan I had. Subsequent summers in law practice weren’t congenial to tanning; I couldn’t do all that work beside the pool...

He's commenting on a NYT article about the law school graduates who study for the bar and simultaneously vacation.

After all the money spent going to law school and all the pressure in the job market, who can take a vacation? I understand how grads who are going to clerk have a time slot when they can relocate, but where does the money come from? Instapundit frequently writes about "the law school bubble," but that's eclipsed here for a story about racial healing and premarital friendship. The NYT loves to urge its readers to angst over the struggles of the less-than-affluent, but that alternates with stories about privileged persons engaging in some activity that can be perceived as trendy or at least a trend.

I've had far too many free summers to feel envious of those who managed to combine summer vacationing and studying for the bar, but I do vividly remember my time studying in the summer of 1981. I wouldn't have wanted to read those bar review outline books out in the sun. Even if the sunblock available at the time were as good as it is today — and it was not — I've never liked reading in the glaring sunlight, perhaps precisely because getting a tan was never something I could possibly do, unless you count the broken-up tan called freckles.

And quite beyond that, I'd had a baby, my first, in March of that year, and the bodily imperative was not tanning/freckling, but breastfeeding. I enjoyed the post-law-school calm of memorizing the black-letter law that was confidently outlined in those bar-review books. It was so refreshingly different from the complexities of the law-school classroom, and everything was different with a baby. It was nice to get away from the apartment — we lived here — for a few hours to attend the lectures — which were shown in videotape in some big classroom somewhere on the NYU campus. There was no swimming pool, but I self-drenched with milk. There was always that pressure — do you know how it feels? — to get back home, to my baby and to my husband, who had the baby but not the breasts.

Oh! The strange rigors of the summer of 1981.

Bankrupt Detroit has $2 billion worth of art in its museum.

"Unlike most art museums around the country, which are owned by nonprofit corporations that hold a collection in trust for citizens, the institute is owned by Detroit, as is much of its collection — which is not particularly deep but includes gems by artists like Bruegel, Caravaggio, Rembrandt and van Gogh. It is considered among the top 10 encyclopedic museums in the country...."

Bankruptcy lawyers say the issue of the value of such cultural assets goes beyond philosophical or moral arguments. For a bankruptcy judge, the questions could include whether the sale of a city’s artworks would have long-term economic implications — depressing tourism, harming real-estate values and the value of other cultural institutions, for example — in a way that sets a city up for financial failure again down the road.

The museum's director says: "If you could sell off Detroit’s hospitals and its universities, would you do that, too? If you do things like this, you’re basically spelling the end of the city as an ongoing entity."

A place to sit.

Extremo the Clown.

One photo in an amusing set of photographs of the people of Portland. Watch out. There's one nude, and it's a naked man.

Via Metafilter, where somebody says:

I may be biased since I live here (and have talked to a few of those portrait subjects and am familiar with most of the others), but I don't really see hardly any of them as being "deeply invested in being unusual." The weird-for-the-sake-of-being-weird folks certainly exist, but they're far outnumbered by some genuinely odd ducks that have flourished in a pond that for whatever reasons accepts quirkiness more than your typical medium size city.

"By the President comparing himself to Martin 35 years ago, is he saying he would have responded as Martin did, and physically attacked someone for following him?"

Asks TalkLeft.

I hope not because our laws do not allow such conduct. It is not illegal for a private citizen to follow someone. It is illegal to physically assault another person who has not threatened him with the imminent use of force.

I am very disappointed that the President has chosen to endorse those who have turned a case of assault and self-defense into a referendum on race and civil rights. And that he is using it to support those with an agenda of restricting gun rights.

"Do congressmen think presidents call people like me and say, 'Don't forget to harass my enemies'?"

"Are congressmen that stupid?"

Peggy Noonan imagines the thought bubble over the head of Elizabeth Hofacre, as she answered questions about her processing of tea-party applications for the IRS.

Noonan's column is titled "A Bombshell in the IRS Scandal: No, it wasn't confined to a few rogue workers in Cincinnati." Meanwhile, Steve Benen writes: "When a 'bombshell' is a dud."

Nate Silver to switch his statistics work from politics to sports.

He's leaving the NYT for ESPN.

Before creating statistical models for elections, Mr. Silver was a baseball sabermetrician who built a highly effective system for projecting how players would perform in the future. For a time he was a managing partner of Baseball Prospectus. At public events recently, he has expressed interest in covering sports more frequently, so the ESPN deal is a logical next step.

I take it ESPN has lots of money and the Times does not.

I had to look up the word "sabermetrician." Wikipedia says: "Sabermetrics is the specialized analysis of baseball through objective evidence, especially baseball statistics that measure in-game activity. The term is derived from the acronym SABR, which stands for the Society for American Baseball Research. It was coined by Bill James, who is one of its pioneers and is often considered its most prominent advocate and public face."

Obama tries so hard to say something and nothing at the same time — about Trayvon Martin.

This halting, awkward performance had to have been carefully thought out, but you're supposed to absorb the anguish and agonizing as he walks back any expectation that the federal government will do anything:



From the NYT write-up:

“You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son... Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.”

These are memorable but empty statements. Fill them with whatever you want. This isn't a critique of the legal system and how it handled the case. It's a vague claim of authority to empathize.

“I don’t want to exaggerate this, but..."

But! Have it both ways. I don't want to exaggerate, but I've just got to say it anyway.

"... those sets of experiences inform how the African-American community interprets what happened one night in Florida. And it’s inescapable for people to bring those experiences to bear.”

That's utterly banal: People understand things within the context of their own experiences.

“I think it would be useful for us to examine some state and local laws to see if it — if they are designed in such a way that they may encourage the kinds of altercations and confrontations and tragedies that we saw in the Florida case, rather than diffuse potential altercations”...

Useful to examine the laws... okay.... He's really not saying anything, and yet the New York Times must sum up by giving him credit:

Mr. Obama spoke in deeply personal terms — an extraordinary moment for a president who seemed, at least during first term, often to shy away from the issue of race.

What is deep and extraordinary? The case was already racialized, and he resonated with a bit of that without saying too much.

"While the line looks simple on TV, the technology behind it is very complex."

The line, and how they got it.

Sensors were placed on the three main game cameras (at midfield and the two 20 yard lines), capturing the pan, tilt and zoom movements of those cameras 30 times a second. A three-dimensional, virtual model of each field had to be constructed, with the exact measurements of the crown of the field (the center of the field is always higher, for drainage, than the sides and ends, but the precise levels vary in each venue). An exhaustive color palette had to be produced on the fly as the game progressed, so that the green pixels of grass the yellow line replaced would be exactly the "right greens" even as shadows crossed the field and changed the grass hues — an essential feature to assure replacing only the green blades of grass and not the green threads of a Packers or Eagles jersey.

Closeup.

Up on the roof.

1. Male on female.

2. Female on male.

Police photographer leaks pictures of bloodied, cornered Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to counter the cute-boy pic on the cover of Rolling Stone.

The photographer (Sergeant Sean Murphy) deserves to be fired for that (and he might be; he's currently on suspension). 

These efforts to punish Rolling Stone for glamorizing the terrorist are playing Rolling Stone's game, promoting the magazine and boosting its image of edginess.

William Faulkner is never dead. He just needs to get the hell out of court.

So the estate of William Faulkner sued Sony Pictures Classics over the line "The past is not dead. Actually, it's not even past," spoken by the Owen Wilson character in the Woody Allen movie "Midnight in Paris." The line is a paraphrase of a famous Faulkner quote "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

The judge said: "The copyrighted work is a serious piece of literature lifted for use in a speaking part in a movie comedy, as opposed to a printed portion of a novel printed in a newspaper, or a song's melody sampled in another song. This transmogrification in medium tips this factor in favour of transformative, and thus, fair use."

Oh, good lord. I'm sure we're allowed to quote that quote whenever we want, in newspapers and songs, even pretending we just thought it up, without getting permission from the Faulkner people and without crediting Faulkner.
Anyone can Google who said the past is never dead it's not even past (or the Woody Allen paraphrase) will get to the details about Faulkner. And now, they'll also get to the news of the heirs' disgusting effort to cash in on a cliché that had long ago run free into the common speech.

Hey, I said that first, moaned the undead William Faulkner in his grave.

If zombie Faulkner is that petty, I don't want to read him. And if the descendants of Faulkner want us to think that he is, they should sue themselves for defaming him.

ADDED: The Woody Allen line did give Faulker credit, in the script itself (if not in the closing credits):

"The past is not dead. Actually, it’s not even past. You know who said that? Faulkner. And he was right. And I met him, too. I ran into him at a dinner party."

And here's (PDF) the opinion itself, which does not spell "favor" "favour," despite the way it's quoted at the first link, which goes to The Guardian.

Contributions.

Thank you. And by you, I mean you who know who you are. We appreciate it.

"Let's see how the puppies are doing."

Puppycam.

Me: "Aw. The mother's there."

Meade: "It's fun when the mother's there. It's fun to watch them breathe. Makes me want to go over and get Zeusy."

"These Pictures Might Tempt You To Eat Bugs."

Headline at NPR that sets up derisive laughter upon sight of the first photo.

Oh, NPR, why so seemingly earnest at yet so ridiculous?

"Somehow or another we have to make it, 'You’re not with it if you’re not air drying your clothes!'"

Oh! Look at the colorful T-shirts and dresses pinned to the long clotheslines strung up in Berkeley’s Civic Center Park. It's "Air Dry For the Environment." California Youth Energy Services will also come to your house — if you're in Berkeley, Antioch, Dublin, Emeryville, Fremond, Hayward, Oakland, Pleasanton, Richmond, Union City, or Marin County — and install a retractable clothesline. Free!

These young people seem nice and positive, and I like the specific, practical approach. I remember the old days when people didn't have dryers and it was the norm to hang everything outside. It didn't have a feeling attached to it. You didn't feel hip or virtuous. But to get people to go back to something that seems labor-intensive and possibly an invasion of your own privacy — I note there are no underpants or bras in that Civic Center Park display — you've got to work with people's feelings.

They'd like to make it feel hip to hang out your clothes, but the stronger argument is that it is virtuous. Do hipness and virtuousness go together? In the old days, the hip scorned traditional values, but they (we?) might have embraced some selected virtues — maybe stark truthtelling. But I don't think that environmentalism — which used to be called "conservation" — seems hip at all. Trying to make it feel hip to people seems like the exact opposite of hipness. Perhaps you'd like to see the end of hipness. This wholesomeness could be fatal. But it's more likely that new hipsters will emerge, and they'll have to scoff at the virtues that were promoted in a way that feels shallow and dishonest.

It's not hip to hang laundry.