"I love this style of clue, where even if you don't know the exact trivia (I've never heard of the band or the song) you can puzzle it out based on the context."

Writes Malika, at Rex Parker Does the NY Times Crossword Puzzle.

Here's the clue: "Girl in Jefferson Airplane's 'White Rabbit.'"

One day everything new will be old, and one day everything will be forgotten. 

A vogue word, rejected.

You don't need to care about the NYT crossword to be interested in what follows — it discusses a current buzzword — but it does reveal a couple answers. 

From Rex Parker's write-up of today's puzzle:

"[O]n Oct. 4, 1969, everything changed... 20-year old Diane Linkletter jumped to her death from the window of her Los Angeles apartment after allegedly trying acid."

"Her grieving father, TV and radio host Art Linkletter, told the press, 'She was murdered by the people who manufacture and sell LSD.' The newspapers ran wild with Linkletter’s take: 'LSD KILLED DIANE.' Later, when news of her clean toxicology report made the rounds, Linkletter blamed the jump on an '“acid flashback.' President Richard Nixon — in the midst of launching his War on Drugs — invited Linkletter to the White House. Nixon knew that a story like this could galvanize the anti-drug movement more than any fact or figure could.... It was the perfect moment for a book like 'Go Ask Alice.'... The fact that the author was anonymous only heightened the buzz. 'Alice' could be anyone, even your daughter. The media ran with it — everyone from The New York Times to the Library Journal presented the book as a verified teenager’s diary. A million copies sold nearly overnight. Avon Books published the paperback and two years later, in 1973, ABC aired a TV adaptation of the book. That, too, was a supersonic hit, with nearly a third of all US households viewing it...."

From "1971 druggie diary ‘Go Ask Alice’ was made up by a suburban housewife" (NY Post).

People believe what they want to believe. Too good to check! I wanted to see how embarrassing the NYT coverage of this ridiculous book was. Here, from 1973: "Diary of a Schoolgirl En Route to Death." It's a review of the ABC TV movie. 

"And I should have told him, 'No, you're not old.'/And I should have let him go on, smiling, babywide."

 

"Lather" came up in the "Rock Mix" that Spotify made especially for me today, as I was smiling — babywide? — on my morning run today, the day after my birthday, my 71st birthday, or as I like to put it, the first day of my 72nd year.

Lather's friends in the song — who've "stopped being boys" — are 33 and 27. I mean one (the banker) is 33 and the other (the commander of his "very own tank") is 27. They're not each 33 + 27. But I can see that those numbers add up to 60, and I am 11 years old than that. "Lather" is a song facing the confusion of becoming 30ish. Lather himself has just turned 30, and he seems to be clinging to outright babyhood, as the band suggests maybe that's just fine... or good enough for Lather anyway.

It's a whole other matter breaking into the decade that begins with a 7, which I like to come out and say is the 8th decade of life. Speak plainly! And look for what is good. Some people — the glass-half-empty folks — say that as you get older, with more of your days behind you, each day is a smaller percentage of the total time you have lived, and thus, the days seem insubstantial and short. But the other way to see it is that is that each day now is a bigger percentage of the time you have left. Today might be 1% of the rest of your life. It might be 100%! Are you giving today what it deserves? It is so much.

As I listened to the old rock songs that Spotify had strung together for me, I visualized myself — I was running through the woods — looking over at the me who existed at the time I first heard a particular song — it was "Too Many People" — and I waved at myself in the 70s and sent the message that everything will be fine when you are in your 70s. You'll be able to run — in the woods! — and you'll have this music in your ears because a computer — an "electronic brain," as you call it — will know you like it and will pump it directly into your head. 

And you won't care so much about your birthday, because 2 days after your birthday will be something called your "bloggiversary." There will be something you do for the first time on January 14, 2004, and you will proceed to do it every single day for 18 years and counting....

Althouse is productive, you know....

I've got to thank George Conway for his "There is no one to stop Trump now" WaPo column.

I've never given a damn about George Conway and his predictable anti-Trumpism, and, in fact, I have yet to read "There is no one to stop Trump now." But I'm delighted with his column, because I read the title and said "What's that song? Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now?" And 2 seconds later, I had my memory refreshed: "Oh! It's Starship!" And I was mesmerized by this trip back to 1986 (replete with stuff from the romcom "Mannequin"):



It's a festival of 80s hair — wet and dry. The notion that nothing is going to stop women who are mannequins is... interesting. I've never seen the movie, but in the video, the love of a man brings mannequins to life. One of the women is Grace Slick and one is so good looking that I thought Grace Slick should have had the clout to demand that in her videos there can be no woman who is better looking than she is.

Researching the underlying movie, "Mannequin," I see that other woman is Kim Cattrall (familiar to me only as Samantha on "Sex and the City"). I guess the movie came first and Grace was going along with a package deal. I see: "At the time, [the song] made the 47 year old Grace Slick the oldest woman to have a number-one single in the United States, surpassed only by Cher, who was 52 when her song 'Believe' reached #1 in early 1999."

Imagine the thrill of achievement to be in a place where you are surpassed only by Cher.

Imagine the thrill of achievement to be George Conway.... Wait. Let me skim this thing so I can get out of this post quickly now that I've had my 80s-retrospective fun.

When the subject of Attorney General William P. Barr comes up these days, it’s hard not to think of John S. McCain. Not the late senator, mind you, but the USS John S. McCain, the naval destroyer named after his father and grandfather.

That's hilariously nonsensical. Of all the things I find hard not to think about when I think about Bill Barr, the USS John S. McCain is nowhere on the list. Anyway, that turns out to be about how the ship was once kept out of Trump's line of sight, not because Trump demanded it, but "[a]nticipating Trump’s narcissistic whims and desires." So, you get it, that's what Barr must be doing.

I thought this column was going to be about how the Democrats have no one who can stop Trump from getting reelected. I was surprised to think Conway would concede that. He didn't. Now, I will go back to my original position of never reading Conway columns.

"Fattened up with acorns and chestnuts to the size of a cricket ball and then stuffed, baked and perhaps seasoned with honey and poppy seeds, the dormouse..."

"... was one of ancient Rome’s most popular delicacies. The Romans also adored dishes such as rabbit stuffed with figs, cockerel in pomegranate sauce, and terrines and mousses moulded in to the shape of chickens. A wealthy family reclining, not sitting, to eat their meal might start with snail, egg or fish appetisers before a goat or pig main course and then finish with a dessert, mainly fruit such as apples, plums, grapes, cherries, dates and figs. All liberally seasoned with fish sauce. And accompanied by gargantuan quantities of wine."

From "Baked dormouse and other Roman delicacies come to Oxford/Ashmolean Museum’s Pompeii exhibition includes food carbonised by eruption in AD79" (The Guardian).

Remember what the Dormouse said: Feed your head...

I looked up the old Jefferson Airplane lyric. Here's the annotation of that line at Genius:

[Lewis Carroll’s "Alice in Wonderland,"] the Dormouse never actually says “Feed your head.” Jefferson Airplane is either putting words in his mouth or introducing this sentiment as a separate thought.

The direct reference here is to Alice, Chapter 11, when the Mad Hatter is questioned before the court:

‘But what did the Dormouse say?’ one of the jury asked.
‘That I can’t remember’, said the Hatter.
‘You MUST remember,’ remarked the King, ‘or I’ll have you executed.’

This context gives an ominous spin to “Remember what the Dormouse said.” If you don’t “feed your head” (take drugs to tune in? expand your mind in general?), it could seriously cost you.

Alternatively, this might be a commentary on the apathy and nonchalance of the drug scene. The Hatter does not remember, or care about, an important detail; drugs, too, can cause listlessness and memory loss.

But doesn't "Feed your head" mean take a lot of drugs? It's a conundrum, no?

Anyway, the Romans were not using the acorn-and-chestnut-stuffed dormouse to feed their head, only their belly, but the sidetrack was irresistible to me as I go about feeding your head this morning.

"I draw a lot, that’s really the beginning of it all. I draw in bed, usually watching a Charlie Chan movie."

"The drawings are very small. I’ll put them on a copier and blow them up to get a general picture of what they’ll look like at a certain scale. And then I start building the models at full scale, at six inches max. I can envision things, to a degree, three-dimensionally. I’m not saying I have visions, but some little idea will come popping into my head. It might be based on something I’ve seen, and subconsciously it finds its way onto paper."

From "An Artist Who Makes Irreverent, and Pocket-Size, Sculptures/Ron Nagle helped pave the way for clay artists to be taken seriously — but he still has a sense of humor. Ahead of a new solo show, he discusses his work, his dog and his TV habits" (NYT Style Magazine). Nagle's new exhibit is called "Getting to No." The NYT describes his sculptures as "otherworldly... pastel stucco planes... glossy half-moon shapes, suggesting animal tails, chewed-up wads of gum, bare tree limbs, erect genitalia or excrement...." We're also told "he’s credited for writing iconic songs on albums by Jefferson Airplane, Sammy Hagar and Barbra Streisand."

What Jefferson Airplane song is by Ron Nagle? I looked it up. It's "Please Come Back" (on the album "Flight Log"). I couldn't find "Please Come Back" on YouTube. Sorry. Not to be confused with "Coming Back to Me" (one of the very best Jefferson Airplane songs).

Anyway, it's funny for a man of today, in the warm spotlight of a NYT style piece, to freely and unnecessarily associate himself with Charlie Chan, the 1930s/40s fictional character who is "the subject of controversy," as Wikipedia puts it:

Writing about Gov. Northam this morning, I went looking for the old Ted Danson blackface routine (the one Whoopi Goldberg dared him to do)...

... and I found this parody by Howard Stern. How can Stern survive when that's on YouTube?

Man, he commits to the mocking racism with over-the-top racism. Interesting to see Sherman Hemsley (AKA George Jefferson) in the role of Whoopi Goldberg.

And what about Joni Mitchell? And Tom Hanks? And Sarah Silverman?

I couldn't find video of the old Ted Danson effort, but here's an article with a still photo.

ADDED: Further research suggests that there was never any videotape of Danson's performance — a Friar's Club roast of Whoopi Goldberg.  Roger Ebert was there and he wrote:

A blocklong dais featured more than 100 celebrities who sat stoneface through the monologue, including such prominent African Americans as New York Mayor David Dinkins, performers Halle Berry, Vanessa Williams, Anita Baker, RuPaul and Mr. T, and boxers Michael Spinks and Sugar Ray Leonard. A closed-circuit camera showed them looking embarrassed and uncomfortable....

Friar's roasts, which are never taped for telecast, are traditionally raucous and obscene. But the specter of a white man in blackface repeatedly using the [n-word] and other strongly coded words seemed to cross a line that was sensed by most of the people in the room. The event demonstrated that the painful history of black-white relations in America is still too sensitive to be joked about crudely. Goldberg, whose real name is Caren Johnson, has used her entire career to try to break down racial stereotyping, and in encouraging Danson's approach she may have thought it would play as satire. But, as stand-up comics say when their material isn't working, he was dying up there....

Goldberg, seated next to Danson, laughed and smiled at the material. Speaking last, she defended her friend: "Let's get these words all out in the open. It took a whole lot of courage to come out in blackface in front of 3,000 people. I don't care if you didn't like it. I did."...

Black model Beverly Johnson also defended Danson's performance: "If you can't see the humor at a place where there's supposed to be over-the-line jokes, then there's something really wrong."

AND: Here's the Wikipedia list of celebrities who've done blackface. Would those who want to exile Gov. Northam agree that all of these people should be shunned retrospectively (even the dead ones)? Fred Armisen, Fred Astaire, Dan Aykroyd, Jack Benny, Fanny Brice, George Burns, Johnny Carson, Joan Crawford, Billy Crystal, Robert Downey Jr., Judy Garland, Alec Guinness, Rex Harrison, Jimmy Kimmel, Dean Martin, The Marx Brothers, The Lone Ranger, Carroll O'Connor, Frank Sinatra, Red Skelton, Grace Slick, The Three Stooges, Elizabeth Taylor, Shirley Temple, John Wayne, Gene Wilder.



Soon, you'll attain the stability you strive for/In the only way that it's granted/In a place among the fossils of our time...



Life is change/How it differs from the rocks....

"Her neon mouth with the blinkers-off smile/Nothing but an electric sign/You could say she has an individual style/She's part of a colorful time..."

The colorful time was the 1960s and Marty Balin was a transcendent voice...



Marty Balin, dead at 76. Here's the the NYT obituary by Jon Pareles.

[Grace] Slick was often singled out for attention, and she sang lead on “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love,” the 1967 hits that made the band national headliners. “I always let everybody else take the credit,” Mr. Balin told High Times magazine in 2000. “Grace was the most beautiful girl in rock at the time, so they gave her credit for everything.” In the documentary film “Monterey Pop,” when Mr. Balin sings his ballad “Today,” the camera instead shows Ms. Slick, who was mouthing the words with him. Mr. Balin quit Jefferson Airplane in 1971....

"A lot of time with acid, you have to be in a good frame of mind and around things and people that you like, as I was fortunate to have, and I never had a freak out."

"Things got real strange [sometimes], and then it goes away in 12 hours or whatever. We had good acid, too — it wasn’t cut with anything and it was made well by chemists from the University of California Berkeley. We got lucky with it. And I got lucky in that it was a time in my life where I was not particularly hampered by any hideous mental existence."

Said Grace Slick, recently. She's 77 these days.

"Snappy Fishsuit; Acne Fountain; Sex Fruit; Loser; Fat Meat; Stud Duck; Ghoul Nipple; Number 16 Bus Shelter; Yeah Detroit; Tula Does The Hula In Hawaii; Captain Fantastic Faster Than Superman Spiderman Batman Wolverine The Hulk And The Flash Combined; and Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116."

Actual names cited by the lawyer for the Georgia Department of Health in a letter to the ACLU explaining that there is some power of the state to reject names that parents might want to impose on their babies. But the lawyer was also denying that the last name "Allah" was rejected because there was something substantively wrong with the name. The state says the problem is only that the last name on a birth certificate from the Office of Vital Records needs to be either the mother's last name, the father's last name, or some combination of the 2. If you want some other name, you should petition the court for a name change, and any problems with the name will be addressed at that point.

Here's the report in the NYT, which seems to be saying that the ACLU's argument is only based on a provision of the state statutory code that says birth certificates need a name "as designated by both parents." I'd like a link to the whole statutory provision. I guess the fight is over whether parents get to choose a last name as well as a first name at the birth certificate stage. An ACLU lawyer is quoted saying the parents "feel very strongly that they want all of their children to have the same last name." The parents — whose last names are Handy and Walk — already have 2 children with the last name Allah. (One of them is named Masterful Allah.)

Remember when Paul Kantner and Grace Slick named their baby God? False! Grace Slick just said the baby's name was "god" — "We spell it with a small g because we want her to be humble" — but that was just some fluffy blah blah of the time. The baby's name was China.

"Let's just stop boomersplaining politics to millennials."

Great word, boomersplaining. That's a piece in The Daily Kos (by CCBOhio). Excerpt:

Millennials’ choice of Bernie Sanders for president makes perfect sense, and boomer-age Democrats simply have to stop bashing them for it. Young people are also critical to the future of the Democratic Party. The party would be much better served if its leaders could figure out how to bring young Sanders supporters into the fold rather than ignoring them, silencing them, mocking them, or claiming their priorities will “never, ever” happen.

One point you make throughout your writing is that your generation of women has faced untold amounts of blatant sexism.  I get that.... But: Sexism is not the only issue that matters.  It is one of your main issues, and it is important.  But other issues are also important.  What bothers me so much about your ongoing defense of yourself through Hillary Clinton is that you do not seem to care about anyone or anything else. Please: Stop boomersplaining and start listening....

I found that as I was Googling to find my way back to something else I'd seen recently, the idea that Millennials — perhaps younger Millennials — have a newly emerging capacity to love Boomers — as we Boomers become what is to them the grandparent generation. The idea — developed as an explanation for the Bernie Sanders phenomenon — is that the loathing of Boomers happened as we were the parent generation. Each new generation must grow up and become independent of its parents, and some part of that necessary process of maturation is going to be experienced as rebellion and hostility. It's the age-old strife between children and parents. But grandparents are in a different position, at a greater distance. They intrude less into your life, but they are there, loving you, admiring you, wanting the best for you, inspiring you to rise to treasured, traditional ideals, not expecting too much for themselves, but truly hoping the world will live on with a new set of good people. The grandchildren can find their way into good feelings that the children withhold.

There's still plenty of hostility toward Boomers, and it's natural and understandable. But as one generation moves into later stages of life and a new generation comes on the scene... well, the aging Boomer in me writes that sentence and the song that distracts my train of thought is: One generation got old/One generation got soul/This generation got no destination to hold/Pick up the cry/Hey, now it's time for you and me/Got a revolution (got to revolution)/Hey, come on now we're marching to the sea...



Oh? See? That was a test... that worked as test. Do you hate the Boomers? I went full Boomer on you. Did you like that "revolution" theme? Everyone's saying "revolution" today, after the numbers Bernie (and Donald) racked up in New Hampshire. You know, Bernie Sanders is not a Boomer. He was born in 1941. He's in the grandfather generation and can attract the love of those who still feel the need to distance themselves from the Boomer-parent generation. We Boomers need maybe 5 more years to feel the kind of love that currently flows to Grandfather Bernie.

Okay, I've done enough boomersplaining. I'll stop now and get a little older.

Wow! This WaPo front-page squib for Paul Kantner irks me.

The Jefferson Airplane was one of the greatest manifestations of the 1960s. Why would you reference a 1980s song — a song many people loathe — from a later iteration of the band that didn't even include Paul Kantner?

I don't like being one of those people who make obituaries about their seemingly personal relationship with the deceased, so I'll just say, "Surrealistic Pillow," framed, has hung over my fireplace for many years....



The Jefferson Airplane... Love them. I'll read the NYT obit:

Paul Kantner, a founding member of Jefferson Airplane... died... of multiple organ failure and septic shock....

“Paul was the catalyst that brought the whole thing together,” [ lead guitarist Jorma] Kaukonen said in an interview on Thursday. “He had the transcendental vision and he hung onto it like a bulldog. The band would not have been what it was without him.”...

Mr. Kantner came to be seen as the intellectual spokesman for the group, with an ideology, reflected in his songs, that combined anarchic politics, an enthusiasm for mind-expansion through LSD and science-fiction utopianism. The song “Wooden Ships,” which he wrote with Stephen Stills and David Crosby, was emblematic, describing a group of people escaping a totalitarian society to create their own freedom in a place unknown....

“For us it was about new frontiers,” Mr. Kantner told the website Wales Online in 2009, speaking about the Airplane. “The whole world was going through these forward steps — beautiful, amazing stuff — much of it working, much of it not working. Revolution is not the right word for it, but it was progress.”

Horror grips us as we watch you die/All we can do is echo your anguished cry/And stare as all your human feelings die/We are leaving, you don't need us/Go and take a sister by her hand/Lead her far from this foreign land/Somewhere where we might laugh again/We are leaving, you don't need us...

"I think she was a bit of a hero," said Rihanna about Rachel Dolezal...

"... because she kind of flipped on society a little bit. Is it such a horrible thing that she pretended to be black? Black is a great thing, and I think she legit changed people’s perspective a bit and woke people up.”

IN THE COMMENTS: Marty Keller said: "Name one."

For some reason that caused this song to play in my head: "You're only pretty as you feel/Only pretty as you feel inside..."

"Tipping as an American practice stretches back centuries. 'There are records of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson giving tips to their slaves'..."

"... said Michael Lynn, a professor of consumer behavior at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration, who has studied changes in tipping habits. In the 1940s, he said, the average restaurant tip was about 10 percent. 'It’s very clear that tip sizes have increased over time,' he said, adding that he could not predict how high they would go."

From a NYT article titled "$3 Tip on a $4 Cup of Coffee? Gratuities Grow, Automatically."

So iPads are being used these days to prompt customers to give huge tips, but I was interested in the history of tipping and the tipping of slaves. I found "The Private Life of George Washington's Slaves":

"What should parents say when their little daughter asks, 'Am I pretty?'"

A question to a WaPo advice columnist. Guess which answer the concerned mother received:

1. Just say "yes."

2. Say: "How do you feel inside? That’s what I ask myself."

3. Here, play The Jefferson Airplane, "Pretty As You Feel" and insist that she listen to the whole thing with you. If she asks "Am I pretty?" again, start singing that song. Repeat until she stops the cycle.

4. You didn't tell us whether your daughter is pretty. If she is, give her the honest "yes." If she's not, say something that's honest but upbeat, like "I always think the prettiest girls are the ones who act like they don't care at all how they look."

5. Say: "Not when you ask that question."

6. Say: "You're quite hideous, like me!" and make that face where you pull the sides of your mouth apart and waggle your tongue.

Click here to see the actual answer.

"If you can keep your head when all about you/Are losing theirs and blaming it on you..."

The first 2 lines of Rudyard Kipling's "If—" sprang to mind this morning as the wind kicked up in the trees outside the window behind my iMac screen. The younger trees — silver maple and ash — were waving around furiously and the deep-rooted ancient oak tree barely moved.

The "IF" sentiment reminded Meade of "White Rabbit" and he sang:

And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen's "Off with her head!"

I was still reading "IF":

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

And I said — hold onto your hat, Madison liberals —  "This sounds like Scott Walker."

Meade, acting like he's still into "White Rabbit," sings "Go ask Alice, when she's 10 feet tall," then asks "Do you know who else is 10 feet tall?" The answer: Scott Walker!

Which  means it's time once again — you know all those other times — to sing "Stand with Governor Walker." Key line: "Now he's standing 10-feet tall from Ashland to Monroe."

"Now the moon is almost hidden/The stars are beginning to hide/The fortune-telling lady/Has even taken all her things inside."

Just an old Bob Dylan lyric that crossed my mind writing the previous post.

And here's the Jefferson Airplane song that I linked to in the second paragraph of the first post today, on the words: "You're only pretty as you feel." That link goes to a nice "extended outtake" of "Pretty As You Feel," which should remind old Baby Boomers of the pleasant languors of psychedelic rock concerts circa 1970.

By the way, it always bothered me when an artist that I liked to think of as hip and cool built a song around some old adage or platitude, especially when the saying was sung over and over and with apparent sincerity. Think of some other examples. Here's the one that hardened my hatred for this half-assed lyric-writing: "It's nature's way of telling you something's wrong."

Did Bob Dylan ever do that? I can't think of any examples, and I ask Meade — whose head is a bigger storehouse of Dylan lyrics than mine — and he can't either.

DOMA as "a bare congressional desire to harm a politically unpopular group."

In United States v. Windsor, the Supreme Court finds that DOMA "violates basic due process and equal protection principles applicable to the Federal Government." (The constitutional text is the 5th Amendment which only says "due process," but the Court has long viewed "equal protection," which is explicit in the 14th Amendment, as implicit in the 5th Amendment.) Justice Kennedy writes for the majority:

The Constitution’s guarantee of equality “must at the very least mean that a bare congressional desire to harm a politically unpopular group cannot” justify disparate treatment of that group. Department of Agriculture v. Moreno, 413 U. S. 528–535 (1973).

The unpopular group to be harmed in Moreno was hippies. To understand the scourge of hippies as it was seen at the time, I highly recommend this 1971 NYT  article: "Ripping Off, The New Life Style" (citing the Jefferson Airplane lyric "All your private property is target for your enemy/And your enemy is/We-e-e"). Congress was hoping to keep food stamps away from hippies, and that didn't cut it.

So is keeping marriage away from gay people no better than denying food stamps to hippies?

In determining whether a law is motived by an improper animus or purpose, “ ‘[d]iscriminations of an unusual character’ ” especially require careful consideration. Supra, at 19 (quoting Romer... at 633). 

How is excluding gay people from marriage unusual? It's an old tradition. What's unusual is Congress horning in on an area of traditional state regulation:

DOMA’s unusual deviation from the usual tradition of recognizing and accepting state definitions of marriage here operates to deprive same-sex couples of the benefits and responsibilities that come with the federal recognition of their marriages. 

And there's "strong evidence" that DOMA had "the purpose and effect of disapproval" of same-sex couples.

The avowed purpose and practical effect of the law here in question are to impose a disadvantage, a separate status, and so a stigma upon all who enter into same-sex marriages made lawful by the unquestioned authority of the States.

That language about "stigma" and "a separate status" should be useful in challenging state law that creates "civil unions" for gay people, though the problem in Windsor was only about the federal government's refusal to recognize marriages that the states had validated.

... DOMA undermines both the public and private significance of state-sanctioned same-sex marriages; for it tells those couples, and all the world, that their otherwise valid marriages are unworthy of federal recognition. This places same-sex couples in an unstable position of being in a second-tier marriage. The differentiation demeans the couple, whose moral and sexual choices the Constitution protects... and whose relationship the State has sought to dignify. And it humiliates tens of thousands of children now being raised by same-sex couples. The law in question makes it even more difficult for the children to understand the integrity and closeness of their own family and its concord with other families in their community and in their daily lives.

Under DOMA, same-sex married couples have their lives burdened, by reason of government decree, in visible and public ways. By its great reach, DOMA touches many aspects of married and family life, from the mundane to the profound. It prevents same-sex married couples from obtaining government healthcare benefits they would otherwise receive....

Ultimately, the Court finds "no legitimate purpose" —  only "the purpose and effect to disparage and to injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity." Again, it's hard to see why the states' willingness to dignify these relationships is essential, but that's the question before the Court today. I don't think, in the end, that this is really very much about federalism, except as a steppingstone. This is a case about rights. Even though there's no heightening of the level of scrutiny, the Court aggressively characterizes the government's purported legitimate interests from the rights claimants' point of view and sees nothing but disparagement, denigration, and stigma.

ADDED: I'm just getting to the Scalia dissent saying the Kennedy opinion may "initially fool[] many readers... into thinking that this is a federalism opinion" and seeing no "point" in the long discussion of state power to define marriage other than — he guesses — to make a "pretense" that this case is only about limiting the federal government and "leaving the second, state-law shoe to be dropped later, maybe next Term." I said "steppingstone." Hopping across a stream, taking off shoes... the point is the same. It's a case about rights.

"He will bring happiness in a pipe/He'll ride away on his silver bike/And apart from that he'll be so kind/In consenting to blow your mind..."

"Fat Angel," by Donovan (who wrote it) or The Jefferson Airplane (live, with oil-based light show) and even Orange Alabaster Mushroom (a rare find?).

Fly Translove Airways... Gets you there on time... a lyric that sprang to mind as I was reading The Lavender Café, where Michael K said:

I'm hoping to get Chicagoboyz back to posts about airplanes. Politics is a dead subject. The lefties have made their bed. Now, find a job.

And john said:

I think there is some early celebration of the med pot voting results.

He wasn't referring to Michael K, but to... well, if you go over there and scroll — which I don't recommend — you'll see a few things, which, as I said, I don't recommend. It was enough to make wyo sis say "This thread is either above my head or beneath my contempt. If I understood it I could tell which for sure." And john returns us to the aviation theme:

Does anyone else here read FlightLevel390? The best aviation blog around, and the site just got pulled off. I thought Tuesday was a bummer, but this is worse....

Flying stuff. Written by a pilot for a major airline (USAir I think). Beautiful poetic writing, gripping (really) tales of flying coast to coast, with regular dips into the technical aspects of flight and airplanes.

That's when Chip Ahoy — our fat angel, though I'm sure he's not fat — comes in with his pancakes made of "17 B-52's of milk," which doesn't stop LoafingOaf from calling him a "little fucking internet douchebag pussy," which makes it painfully obvious that we are not aviators. We are on the internet.

We are flying at an altitude of 39,000 feet/Captain High at your service...

We are all little fucking internet douchebag pussies now. What are you going to do about it? Go to Colorado/Washington, where pot has magically become legal... except to the extent it's a federal crime? You don't need that "med" modifier anymore. And you don't need a note from your little fucking internet douchebag pussy doctor.