"Arguing with Judge Judy: Popular 'Logic' on TV Judge Shows."

A college course at Berkeley. From the official description:

TV "Judge" shows have become extremely popular in the last 3-5 years. A fascinating aspect of these shows from a rhetorical point of view is the number of arguments made by the litigants that are utterly illogical, or perversions of standard logic, and yet are used over and over again. For example, when asked "Did you hit the plaintiff?" respondents often say, "If I woulda hit him, he'd be dead!" This reply avoids answering "yes" or "no" by presenting a perverted form of the logical strategy called "a fortiori" argument ["from the stronger"] in Latin. The seminar will be concerned with identifying such apparently popular logical fallacies on "Judge Judy" and "The People's Court" and discussing why such strategies are so widespread. It is NOT a course about law or "legal reasoning." Students who are interested in logic, argument, TV, and American popular culture will probably be interested in this course. I emphasize that it is NOT about the application of law or the operations of the court system in general.

Cool. This is the kind of teaching that I liked to do at home with my kids when they were growing up. You know, when you're watching junk TV, there are many creative educational opportunities. Do you help your kids see logic fallacies when you're watching TV? Do you do it in a way that the kids respond to and love or do they think you're weird and annoying?

From "The 15 Strangest College Courses In America," via New Alert.

"Yes, I'm afraid one surefire sign that Pop has turned crackpot is that he starts to consider Charles Krauthammer [as] quite the cutting philosopher."

"A related symptom is when someone starts quoting Thomas Sowell as if he were de Tocqueville.... I consider myself blessed. My parents have not succumbed to the swine flu of Fox. Their TV addictions are Judge Judy, Judge Joe Brown, Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz (basically any show fronted by a judge or purported doctor), a few soap operas, the local Baltimore news, Jeopardy!, Wheel of Fortune, and, my father's personal favorite, Married...with Children reruns. This has kept them admirably sane and unsour, especially compared to the Simpsons grandpas shaking their canes at the sight of that radical red Harry Reid, and of course they have ME to beam the sweet light of reason from my command post in Manhattan should they ever find themselves trapped in a waiting room with that hectoring parrot Sean Hannity on the TV screen."

"ME" = James Wolcott, at Vanity Fair. 

1. I read that because, in search of blogging inspiration this morning, I impulsively opened all the bookmarks in my file labeled "left."

2. That was funny, funny of the palpable bitchery kind.

3. How irritated/amused are you by the crap your family members watch on television?

4. What exactly are they watching and why do you think it's any worse than the crap you are watching?

5. What do you think they think of the crap you watch?

6. How genuinely demented would your family members need to be before they'd stop serving as raw material for your humor writing?

7. Imagine them writing about you, with exactly the same form of humor you use about them. What do they write?

"Sarah Palin Signs Deal to Preside Judge Judy-Style Over Her Own Reality TV Courtroom."

"Unlike the two famous TV judges, Palin does not have a juris doctor degree. But the source notes that the bestselling author has a variety of other qualities that make her perfectly suited to the job...."

Sure. Why not make up new ways to be a judge? This aligns nicely with the suggestions I've seen lately that the President ought to put a nonlawyer on the Supreme Court. Who trusts lawyers to make decisions? Branch out!

Oh, yeah, here it is. Glenn Reynolds said it: "Maybe it’s time to name a non-lawyer to the Supreme Court. There’s nothing in the Constitution that requires Supreme Court justices to be lawyers, and there are some pretty decent arguments as to why non-lawyers should be represented.... [L]aw is supposed to govern everyone’s actions, and everyone is supposed to understand it.... [T[here are hundreds of millions of Americans who aren’t lawyers, and surely some of them are smart enough to decide important questions...  Shouldn’t we open the court up to a little diversity?"

"The problem with eating out in America today is that it’s making us fat."

"Studies done at my laboratory at Tufts University showed that the relationship between eating out and weight gain is very straightforward: The more frequently you eat out the more likely you are to carry excess pounds.... Our metabolism, hunger, and even the synthesis of addiction neurochemicals like dopamine are controlled by our environment.... When we see, smell, or taste something good, the sensory signals that get into our brain through our eyes, nose, and mouth activate what is known as the cephalic (preparatory) phase of digestion. Our saliva secretion increases; our blood glucose drops; our stomach muscles relax (so we have a larger stomach that needs more food in it to feel full); and our digestion accelerates (so we can put away that food more quickly to get ready for more)....."

From "Why Restaurants Make You Fat/Restaurant Syndrome: 1. Eat out. 2. Eat too much. 3. Feel bad. 4. Repeat" by Susan B. Roberts (The Daily Beast).

By chance, last night, I was watching a movie where there were characters who regarded a restaurant as a strange new form of business that was going to wreck the good thing that they had going (a saloon). 

Dialogue: 

"Have you ever seen a restaurant? They serve food. Next, the church will open up again...."

"The Judge is losing his grip. He's afraid of a place that sells vittles. Vittles and a pack of calf-faced girls...."

The "calf-faced girls" were the wholesome women who were coming to town to work in the restaurant — so different from the saloon women. 

"I like intelligent women. When you go out, it shouldn't be a staring contest."

Said Frank Sinatra. I found that quote because I was Googling to try to find out how intelligent Frank Sinatra was, a propos of yesterday's PR from the Farrow family that it's possible that Ronan Farrow came into existence because Mia Farrow continued — during her long relationship with Woody Allen — to have sex with the love of her life, her ex-husband, Frank Sinatra.

Ronan Farrow seems to be a young man of very high intelligence (since he started attending Yale Law School at age 15), so one naturally wonders about the relative intelligence of the 2 possible fathers.

What's Woody Allen's IQ? He once said "I've got a 150, 160 IQ," but that was as a character in a movie. "To Rome With Love." One might only guess that it's actually Woody Allen's IQ, but we know that he wrote the dialogue, and he was smart enough to write the dialogue, which had Judy Davis coming back with: "You're figuring it in Euros. In dollars, it's much less."

"[O]ur mother shattered the protocols of stuffy Washington decorum. 'People were uptight and too concerned about how they appeared'..."

"... my mother remembers. To cure this contagion, she coaxed notables of different backgrounds into unfamiliar situations. A wizard at peer pressure, she compelled her guests to play charades, freeze tag, and capture the flag, and join in rope climbing and push-up competitions. She had Cabinet members fence with bamboo sticks on gangplanks spanning the pool....When Robert Frost visited Hickory Hill after Uncle Jack’s inauguration, she made him judge a poetry-writing contest among government officials and celebrity guests. At a party for Averell Harriman’s birthday the guests came dressed as the Harrimans during some episode of their eventful lives. My mother borrowed life-size wax figures from Madame Tussauds of Harriman, FDR, Churchill, and Stalin at Yalta, and placed them unobtrusively around the living room to mingle with the crowd...."

Writes Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in "American Values/Lessons I Learned From My Family."

"Even Judy Garland's most iconic on-screen ballad performances seem small compared with..."

The critics go nuts for Jennifer Hudson in "Dreamgirls."

And let me just say that I was writing about her by name the morning after her first appearance on "American Idol" in February '04. Here's another early post. And this:

I've been a big Jennifer Hudson fan since her first appearance on an audition show--February 3rd. (The topic is American Idol, people.) She was by far the best performer last night, as everyone seemed to agree, so here's my theory about her insane dress, that hot pink rhumba thing that a friend supposedly made for her. I say supposedly because when asked his name, she could only come up with a first name, and even that sounded like she just made it up ("George"). Anyone could see that was a ridiculous dress, so why did she wear it? Her bad clothes have been a topic of merriment on previous shows, so what I'm thinking is, the producers knew she would get through, probably by the vote of the people but if not, as one of the judge's selections. Four people are going through, and there is no question that one of them will be her. With that in mind, the producers had an entirely absurd dress made and convinced her to wear it for the sheer comedy of it all. She would agree to do it for any of a number of reasons: 1. She wants to be agreeable, 2. She has a sense of humor, 3. She likes to wear comic clothing, and (this is the real one) 4. She knew, and they told her, that by calling as much attention to her ridiculous clothes as possible, she was setting the stage for the future occasion when she would redo her image and suddenly look fabulous and receive lavish praise for her brilliant transformation.

And here's my reaction to her getting voted off the show:

American Idol: The Outrage. What the hell happened? That was the worst thing ever on American Idol. See my post from this morning for how I read the show last night: I thought Jennifer was the best. I thought the three Divas would be the final three. They were the bottom three! How could that happen? Jennifer was my original favorite, from the first audition. I can only think that the strong praise for the Divas caused people to think they didn't need help, and people speed dialed for two hours for favorites they believed were in danger. I must say they really revealed the results dramatically, telling George to join the safe group, causing him to walk over to the Divas (forming a group that was my predicted final four: George and the Divas), then telling him he'd joined the wrong group. Oh, the outrage!

Anyway... are you excited about seeing "Dreamgirls"? About the new season of "American Idol," which must be coming up soon? Do you picture your humble (diva) blogger going out to see "Dreamgirls" on Christmas? Do you picture me watching and blogging "American Idol" again this year?

All those tags.

The other day, I was blogging about tags, and somebody asked what are all the tags. I considered adding a sidebar gadget that would show all the tags, but I saw that there were over 3,000 of them. For what its worth, I've copied and pasted the list of tags, which you can see after the jump.

The number in parens is the number of times I've used the tag. The list is in alphabetical order, with the top of the list being tags that were originally written with quotation marks. This is something the software no longer lets me do, so some of those tags reappear without quotation marks, and thus the numbers in parens for the tags with quotation marks are not accurate.

If you want to find the posts that have a particular tag, copy and paste the word(s) into the search box at the top left of this page, and when you find a post that has that tag, click on that tag. In other words, forgive me for not taking the time to make this list all hot links.