I started watching The Apprentice again. I couldn't help it, kind of, because it was on the TiVo and I kept hearing how good the new episode was. Plus, Isaac Mizrahi was on. I love him. It was pretty hilarious when Jessie was talking to him like he was in kindergarten and especially that she wouldn't stop even after he joked that she was talking to him as if he didn't quite speak English (maybe she assumed that as a fashion designer, he must be European). She didn't even stop when he switched from laughing at her to scowling at her. He's such a thoroughly good-natured, affectionate person--watch his regular show and see!--that if he's reduced to scowling, it's got to be really bad.

So Jessie deserved to leave, based on the competition. What is interesting about the show is that your final performance in the boardroom counts as a separate competition, but the players don't seem to have caught on to that yet. They seem to be trying to preserve relationships for the next stage of the competition. Thus, Jessie went noncompetitive right when she had a chance to cause Omarosa to lose, because Omarosa slipped up at that stage. It was certainly better TV to fire Jessie and keep Omarosa around. The last shreds of comedy had already been wrung out of Jessie, but Omarosa has so much more to give.

Why couldn't Omarosa get Isaac Mizrahi's name straight? She kept calling him Isaac Mizarahi. I'm thinking the word "misery" got lodged in her head when she heard "Mizrahi," because she also refered to the Elizabeth Glazer Fund (the charity they were raising money for) as the Elizabeth Glacier Fund.

Prof. Yin is discussing the new episode too. He admits to not being the target audience for the celebrities in question: Russell Simmons is "some hip hop guy" to him. I'll admit to never having heard of Tiki Barber or "Third Watch." I don't care about hip hop stars, myself, except that I enjoy seeing various houses of the stars on "MTV Cribs"--and Russell Simmons was very appealing showing his house, which has a meditation room, on "Cribs."

Anyway, The Apprentice is amazingly well photographed and edited. It is almost worth watching solely for the views of New York City. Add the characters and their cross-sniping, and it really does demand to be watched.

A mystifying trick. Go to Jeremy Freese's Weblog and click on the "ok it's here."
That is truly uncanny. I don't even want to think about it now!

UPDATE: Oh, I get it now (because John explained it to me).

Hey, this blog is one month old today. Feel free to click on the archive and read some old posts to see what things were like around here in the old days.

"Municipal anarchy" in San Francisco. Stealing the gay marriage spotlight from Massachusetts, San Francisco is issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Dean E. Murphy writes in the NYT:

Most legal scholars agreed that the new licenses altered to replace "bride" and "groom" with "first applicant" and "second applicant" held only symbolic value because California law defines marriage as being between a man and a woman. Even city officials advised the newly married couples "to seek legal advice" about their status.

Should we worry about chaos and lawlessness? Or is this another example of how American federalism works, leaving some matters to be determined by local conditions and preferences? Yes, I know, we usually think of federalism in terms of states, but California is such a large state, much larger than the entire collection of states at the time the Constitution was founded. Is it wrong for a city to take the lead?

You may think it's wrong for a city to put its own policy above state law, but the question of what state law is remains in play.

Though city officials acknowledge that the state's family law does not allow for same-sex marriages, they assert that guarantees of equality in the state Constitution take precedence, which could set up a legal battle on lines similar to the one being waged in Massachusetts.

Surely, the spectacle of 500 people going through a ceremony in the beautiful rotunda of San Francisco's City Hall will affect how people think about the legal issues here. Judges are not immune to that. It is undeniable that the demonstrations of the Civil Rights Era affected the minds that thought about the rights at stake. There were people then who saw chaos breaking out, but that interpretation has been overwhelmed by the force of history.

Why all the prim clothes? Ruth La Ferla marvels in the NYT about all the fashion designers rejecting sexy, revealing clothing.

Have some brightest minds of American fashion, including Marc Jacobs, Oscar de la Renta, Peter Som and Patrick Robinson of Perry Ellis, failed to recognize that they dress a country addled by sex? It is a land where nudity enters the living room via cable television, where Super Bowl viewers are treated to glimpses of celebrities flashing bosoms and grabbing crotches … Janet Jackson [blah, blah] … Paris Hilton ….

La Ferla thinks it’s just the new way of being avant garde, of “thumbing one’s nose at the status quo.” Or possibly, the designers are just catching up to consumers who are already tired of the excessively sexy clothes of the last few years. One mother, whose daughter has taken up wearing vintage clothes, says:

"It used to be you stopped them at the door, screaming, 'You're not going to wear that to school, are you?' Now my daughters talk down about the girls who show too much."

But I'll bet they are just laying the groundwork for saying "All that prim swaddling looks so old now" next year. The trick in fashion is to get you not to notice how bad something is now so that in the future they can sell something else that looks pretty bad by contrasting it to that thing from the previous year. Ah, but that's all too negative! Have fun! It's just material, and you've got to wear something.

More Human Behavior on Amazon.com. So Amazon tries to control abuse by reviewers by having people rate the reviewers, but then it ranks the reviewers and the reviewers game the reviewer ranking system.

[T]he site's discussion boards are full of carping about how people are trying to play that system, too. Many prolific reviewers speculate that Harriet Klausner, 55, who has long reigned as No. 1, cannot possible read all the books she reviews.

(And the NYT "cannot possible" proofread all the text it sees fit to print.)

Klausner, according to the Times, accuses "the No. 2 reviewer of getting people to vote for him and against her in a 'desperate attempt to be No. 1.'"

How many of those anonymous Amazon.com reviews are authors praising their own books? The Canada Amazon site let the truth slip out.

But even with reviewer privacy restored, many people say Amazon's pages have turned into what one writer called "a rhetorical war," where friends and family members are regularly corralled to write glowing reviews and each negative one is scrutinized for the digital fingerprints of known enemies.

One well-known writer admitted privately — and gleefully — to anonymously criticizing a more prominent novelist who he felt had unfairly reaped critical praise for years. She regularly posts responses, or at least he thinks it is her, but the elegant rebuttals of his reviews are also written from behind a pseudonym.

Well, what did you expect? These people are writers.

"A Matronly Aesthetic With a Subversive Twist." That's the headline from a fashion article in the NYT written by Cathy Horyn. Here are some random phrases from the article:

a vision in crepey Wheatena lace with a lynx cape thrown over her shoulders and a red velvet ribbon sagging gloriously at her bosom

the revelation in Helmut Newton's memoir that even a woman of Margaret Thatcher's girth and rectitude could be a turn-on

no distinction, morally or philosophically, between Lady Thatcher and Pamela Anderson

a subversive treat lurking in the Iron Lady's silk blouses

the disarming simplicity of a wrap dress in mushroom-brown jersey with floppy mink hat and soft ringlet curls

Fashion is a bit insane.

Does your reputation have a reputation? I was at one of those endless bureaucratic meetings yesterday, and the topic of the U.S. News & World Report law school rankings came up. The usual things were said, including assertions about how relatively well the law school does on the "peer assessment score." Someone maintained that score doesn't show what your reputation really is, but only what people think of your reputation. I'm not sure whether I think:

1. That's intriguingly metaphysical!
2. Amazing that someone thought of something different to say about the U.S. News ranking!
3. I am really so very tired of hearing critiques and justifications about the U.S. News ranking.

"This is so grammatically correct that it's stylistically incorrect." That's a comment from my son John about this:

"One of the things that have most impressed me reading a file is..."

He adds:

It reminded me of an example that my linguistics prof showed the class. It was something like this: "The dog the girl the boy saw chased ran away." It's possible to logically explain that the sentence is grammatically impeccable. But it's still an obviously unacceptable sentence. This example was a minor revelation for me.

Eight posts before 8:30. Yikes, what's got into me? It's bad when Friday the 13th falls on Friday.

Speaking of Chekhov, I see he also said:

If you are afraid of loneliness, don't marry.

That would solve some problems.

Speaking of Mickey Kaus, have you been watching the Dennis Miller Show? I think Miller is really figuring out how to do that show right. Having Kaus as a regular panelist this week is just one of the good things about the show. John McWhorter has been a good panelist too.

Kerry, Chekhov, Crisis. Mickey Kaus writes:

It's not, I admit, a completely implausible theory [that Kerry's lack of achievement in the Senate reflects "the natural temperament of a leader, a loner in charge"]--although it's competing with the more powerful "good in a crisis, bad the rest of the time" explanation for Kerry's erratic leadership performance. Kerry could have become a leader in the U.S. Senate, after all. Nobody was stopping him, and he was there for 19 years...

That chimed for me with this quote from Anton Chekhov (which happened to be hidden in the NYT crossword puzzle just the other day):

Any idiot can face a crisis; it is this day-to-day living that wears you out.

I don't understand The White Stripes. What's with the red and white "Say Yes to Michigan" T-shirt? Don't you know school colors and rivalries?

I can do without seeing extra people wearing red and white. Why not black and pink? It's slightly interesting but also lame to try to get attention by being about a color... or two colors. I realize that's probably the point, but isn't it even tired to be making points about one's own lameness by now?

Why Norah Jones? I was sitting in the cafe at Border's yesterday, and not surprisingly, they were playing the new Norah Jones CD. It's excellent music to play while people are trying to read, because it just couldn't be less irritating. But, really, what's the big deal about her? Are people hypnotized somehow? This music is so soft and so slow that it makes me wonder what is happening to people.

There is a way that music can be fascinatingly slow. I'm thinking of that really slow Portishead song that was popular years ago and "Fake Plastic Trees" by Radiohead. But when I hear Norah Jones, knowing how incredibly popular she is, I worry a bit that the world is falling asleep. Yet, she's perfectly pleasant and I'm glad Border's is playing that and not something distractingly peppy, which is often the case.

Go Cliff. I don't know about you, but I'm following the Buick Invitational. My nephew, Cliff Kresge, is two under par after the first round.

Most unbelievable line in a recommendation letter. Puffing for a student who received a B, a prof writes, "C's are hard to come by in my class." He gives ordinary students D's?!

Chasing the Frontrunner in the Wisconsin Primary. So we watched a film last night about campaigning for the Democratic nomination in Wisconsin, John Kennedy chasing after Hubert Humphrey.

"Rolling hills and nice fields." That's HHH's description of Wisconsin as he travels the backroads by car. He's right!

Red meat and supermajorities. Nina goes on record disagreeing with my prediction that the U.S. Constitution will not be amended to restrict gay marriage and dismisses the prediction business as "astrology."

The reason my prediction isn't just your-guess-is-as-good-as-mine prediction is explained well here:

Sanford Levinson, a constitutional expert at the University of Texas Law School in Austin, said it is extremely hard to amend the Constitution. If the ban on gay marriage passes the House and Senate, he said, opponents could stop it by getting the support of one house of the legislature in just 13 states.

Levinson said Bush's support was "a free pass" because he probably knows how difficult it would be to get through Congress, let alone through 38 states.

"The idea is for Bush to throw red meat to the Republican right, secure in the knowledge that this is not going to go anywhere," he said. "If it did go anywhere, it would tear the Republican Party apart."

"[O]ne house of the legislature in just 13 states"--think about it. That's the 3/4 supermajority requirement of Article V of the Constitution. It's no mean feat to get through Congress with an amendment either: Article V imposes a 2/3 supermajority requirement on both Houses of Congress.

So even if a large majority of Americans love the idea of adding this blot to the Constitution--and I don't think they will--it still won't happen, because it is just too hard to amend the Constitution. Things might be done with statutes or state constitutions, but the U.S. Constitution is different. It just won't happen. So people on all sides of this debate need to think clearly about what they mean to achieve through this exercise. Personally, I think it is a shame that this hot debate is becoming so prominent during the Presidential election year, because it detracts attention from the issues that have much more to do with the Presidency, such as the war against terrorism.