"And here is where Uber and Lyft made their first mistake" that turned Austin against them.

"We are obsessed with our city’s identity and sense of community, and we are particularly wary of outsiders who come in promising to change us.... A collision of communitarian social activism with Ayn Rand-style technology disruption was probably inevitable. 'Wrong fight. Wrong time. Wrong town,' said Ron Marks, an alum of the old punk rock scene who had a role in 'Slacker.' To be clear: The city never told Uber and Lyft to leave. But it did insist that they play by our rules and have drivers be fingerprinted, just like cabbies — particularly after the police investigated at least seven alleged sexual assaults by ride-share drivers in 2015. Instead, the companies responded by helping to put Proposition 1 on the ballot: They would be absolutely exempt from fingerprinting by the city. Period. That was the second mistake. They arrogantly confused a convenience for a few as a necessity for the many.... Uber and Lyft have claimed they will reduce the nation’s traffic, but in Austin they just added to the aggravation...."

From "How Austin Beat Uber" by Richard Parker, who I thought was the tiger in "The Life of Pi," but who is actually the author of "Lone Star Nation: How Texas Will Transform America."

Well, not only is "The Life of Pi" one of my all-time favorite books, but "Slacker" is one of my all-time favorite movies. So my first question is, which one was Ron Marks? He played the role of the Bush Basher, who's just a guy we see in one little scene, ranting about Bush:



Anyway, obviously, Austin thinks it's special. It is special! And one thing about it is the traffic is horrible — not just way overcrowded, but aggressive as hell. The other drivers want you the hell out of there. I am not surprised these people voted against Uber drivers crowding them in their fiercely guarded car space. I know all about the highway version of the "sense of community" they have down there.

"'LIFE OF PI' tiger 'damn near drowned'... 27 animal deaths on 'THE HOBBIT'..."

"Dog punched repeatedly in popular DISNEY movie... Secret emails, documents exposed... Spielberg protected by cover-up of 'WAR HORSE' death... MORE..."

Drudge top-pages a set of headlines — including the main headline, "MOVIES, TV AWASH IN HIDDEN ANIMAL ABUSE"— aiming massive attention at a Hollywood Reporter article with a much subtler headline, "No Animals Were Harmed."

"The headteacher of a Cambridge sixth form has defended an exam question which gave teenagers a raunchy description of sexual intercourse."

"Cambridge exam board OCR asked AS-level Latin candidates about Ovid’s Amores, in which the poet tells his mistress she can sleep with other men."

The students are 16 or 17 years old. Here's the controversial passage, translated:

“...slip off your chemise without a blush and let him get his thigh well over yours. And let him thrust his tongue as far as it will go into your coral mouth and let passion prompt you to all manner of pretty devices. Talk lovingly. Say all sorts of naughty things, and let the bed creak and groan as you writhe with pleasure. But as soon as you have got your things on again, look the nice demure little lady you ought to be, and let your modesty belie your wantonness. Bamboozle society, bamboozle me; but don’t let me know it, that’s all; and let me go on living in my fool’s paradise.”

Bamboozle, eh? Where was this translated? India? I'm just remembering the "Author's Note" to the novel "The Life of Pi":

When I told a friend who knew the country well of my travel plans, he said casually, "They speak funny English in India. They like words like bamboozle." I remembered his words as my plane started its descent towards Delhi, so the word bamboozle was my one preparation for the rich, noisy, functioning madness of India. I used the word on occasion, and truth be told, it served me well. To a clerk at a train station, I said, "I didn't think the fare would be so expensive. You're not trying to bamboozle me, are you?" He smiled and chanted, "No sir! There is no bamboozlement here. I have quoted you the correct fare."

The (unlinkable) OED on the etymology of "bamboozle":

Appears about 1700; mentioned in the Tatler No. 230 (on ‘the continual Corruption of our English Tongue’) among other slang terms (banter, put, kidney, sham, mob, bubble, bully, etc.) recently invented or brought into vogue. Probably therefore of cant origin; the statement that it is a Gipsy word wants proof.

Baz Luhrmann's "Gatsby."

If you loved "Moulin Rouge," as I did, you may find the new trailer thrilling:



I was literally thrilled. And I'm very skeptical of all movies. I resist going to the movies. I see one comment over at YouTube whining about this not being in 3D. 3D is a curse. I've vowed never again to see a movie shot in 3D unless it's in a 3D theater. I saw that most recent "Planet of the Apes" movie, which was shot as a 3D movie, in a non-3D theater, and it was full of dumb shots — objects placed in the extreme foreground, actors framed in a way that you could tell was for an effect that you weren't able to see. I'd love to see "Life of Pi," but I put off going, because it's such an ordeal to engage with a 3D experience, and now it's only around here in non-3D, and I can't go, because of my vow. I'm delighted that Luhrmann didn't mess up the visuals to pander to the 3D dweebs.

Here, you can read "The Great Gatsby" on line, in a nice format. This is one of my favorite books. What I like is that each sentence is good, on its own. Seriously. Test it out. "As my train emerged from the tunnel into sunlight, only the hot whistles of the National Biscuit Company broke the simmering hush at noon." Every sentence is a writer's inspiration. I'll vouch for that.

ADDED: A trailer was put out last summer using many of the same visuals and a very different audio track, and I blogged at the time: "It looks awful, with horrible acting." I'd forgotten that! Here's the old trailer:



But I did say: "But then I think it's like 'Moulin Rouge,' which can seem bad if you look at it the wrong way, and this new 'Gatsby; is in fact directed by the same person, Baz Luhrmann." There's a fine line — in some quarters — between garbage and greatness. 

"My mother is a baptized Christian, so she made me go to church every Sunday, and I prayed four times a day until I was 14."

"And at lunchtime kids at school would giggle at my praying...I stopped praying. And two weeks later, nothing happened to me, so I didn't pick it up again."

Ang Lee, in an interview about his movie "Life of Pi," which is based on a novel with a strong religious theme. He does, he says (like so many others) like to think of himself as spiritual.

"Life of Pi."

The movie trailer.

ADDED: I adore the book. If you don't already know it, read it!

A zoo tiger leapt over a 16' fence and mauled a man to death.

It happened in Hanoi.

Are you surprised? Consider this:

[Zoo] animals do not escape to somewhere but from something. Something within their territory has frightened them ... and set off a flight reaction. The animal flees, or tries to. I was surprised to read at the Toronto Zoo ... that leopards can jump up to eighteen feet straight up. Our leopard enclosure in Pondicherry was sixteen feet high at the back. I surmise that Rosie and Copycat never jumped out was not because of constitutional weakness but simply because they had no reason to. Animals that escape go from the known to the unknown--and if there is one thing an animal hates above all else, it is the unknown.

That's a passage many will recognize, from "The Life of Pi." I copied it out once before, in a post called "Jabari was wronged," about a gorilla who managed to climb the 15' concave wall of his enclosure.

Jabari — who was shot to death — had been taunted. Who knows what moved the tiger?

Adrift in a lifeboat with a hyena, a zebra, an orangutan, and a tiger.

I love the novel "The Life of Pi," and I've always sort of wanted to see a movie of it and sort of dreaded seeing what that movie would have to be. Now, it seems that Ang Lee may be doing the movie. I hope it's good.

A tiger escaped from its enclosure and roamed around the San Francisco Zoo preying on human beings.

Astounding. Imagine going to the zoo — on Christmas — and encountering a free-ranging Siberian tiger. Three men were severely mauled, and one has died.

The zoo's director of animal care and conservation, Robert Jenkins, could not explain how Tatiana escaped. The tiger's enclosure is surrounded by a 15-foot-wide moat and 20-foot-high walls, and the approximately 300-pound female did not leave through an open door, he said.

"There was no way out through the door," Jenkins said. "The animal appears to have climbed or otherwise leaped out of the enclosure."

Let me quote — as I did when a 300-pound gorilla escaped from his enclosure — these lines from The Life of Pi:

[Zoo] animals do not escape to somewhere but from something. Something within their territory has frightened them ... and set off a flight reaction. The animal flees, or tries to. I was surprised to read at the Toronto Zoo ... that leopards can jump up to eighteen feet straight up. Our leopard enclosure in Pondicherry was sixteen feet high at the back. I surmise that Rosie and Copycat never jumped out was not because of constitutional weekness but simply because they had no reason to. Animals that escape go from the known to the unknown--and if there is one thing an animal hates above all else, it is the unknown.

This may be so, and then the question is not why Tatiani was able to escape, but why she wanted to and why so many other zoo animals do not.

When do you find yourself saying "here, kitty kitty" to a bobcat?

An encounter in California:

This past Saturday, I was mountain biking near the summit of Loma Alta, near Fairfax, when suddenly a big furry critter jumped off a berm crossing directly across the road in front of me. I got off my bike to get a closer look and there, staring me in the face about 20 feet in front of me, was a quite large bobcat. We kind of did a face-to-face stare down for a couple of minutes. Then it just laid down, and soon after, I sat down ... We sat there together for a good 20 minutes, perhaps even a half hour. Somewhat embarrassed to say, but 15 minutes into this viewing I actually uttered the words, "Here kitty-kitty!" What was I thinking! Eventually it stood up, gave a stretch and casually bounded down a stream-cut ravine.

How scary is a bobcat anyway? This isn't like saying "here, kitty kitty" to a tiger. (I'm thinking of the scene in "The Life of Pi" when Pi foolishly encourages the tiger to swim to the lifeboat.) A bobcat is double the size of a house cat. Me, I'm afraid of house cats roaming about outdoors. A double-size cat would scare me, but would it terrify me? Perhaps you've had a bobcat -- or other wild cat -- encounter you can tell us about.

Wild animals in the city: 3 things.

The Capital Times reports this discovery in Milwaukee:

More than 70 ducks in a basement pen were only part of the menagerie authorities found in [Jamie L. Verburgt's] Milwaukee area apartment after other residents complained of the stench coming from the unit.... Others among about 200 live creatures in the apartment included snakes, rats, turtles, a pair of alligators, toads and scorpions. ...

John Walters, Verburgt's boyfriend, was prosecuted in 2000 for mistreatment of exotic animals. At that time, police found a female cougar, female leopard, silver-tailed fox, monitor lizard, two caracals, a coatimundi, chinchilla and a reticulated python in Walter's apartment in Greenfield, another Milwaukee suburb. ...

(Ah, see: there's someone for everybody.) (Mmmm... "reticulated"!) That story reminded me of this passage from "The Life of Pi":

If you took the city of Tokyo and turned it upside down and shook it, you'd be amazed at all the animals that would fall out: badgers, wolves, boa constrictors, Komodo dragons, crocodiles, ostriches, baboons, capybaras, wild boars, leopards, manatees, ruminants in untold numbers. There is no doubt in my mind that feral giraffes and feral hippos have been living in Tokyo for generations without being seen by a soul.

And that reminds me of the movie "12 Monkeys," which has a great animals-in-the-city theme. (And to say that is to allow Brad Pitt to make a second appearance on my blog today. So I'll just add that I'm not really a Brad Pitt fan, but I do love a couple of his movies, "12 Monkeys" and "Fight Club.")

Jabari was wronged. From The Life of Pi:

[Zoo] animals do not escape to somewhere but from something. Something within their territory has frightened them ... and set off a flight reaction. The animal flees, or tries to. I was surprised to read at the Toronto Zoo ... that leopards can jump up to eighteen feet straight up. Our leopard enclosure in Pondicherry was sixteen feet high at the back. I surmise that Rosie and Copycat never jumped out was not because of constitutional weekness but simply because they had no reason to. Animals that escape go from the known to the unknown--and if there is one thing an animal hates above all else, it is the unknown.

Consider then the 300-pound gorilla who escaped from his enclosure last week, "snatching up a toddler with his teeth and attacking three other people before being shot by officers," as CNN.com reports:

How the 13-year-old gorilla exactly broke out was unclear. Some youths had reportedly teased Jabari shortly before he escaped, but it was not known if that was a factor in the breakout.

Zoo director Rich Buickerood said the gorilla "had to have scaled" the enclosure's 15-foot concave wall. But some experts doubt that could have happened.

"Virtually anybody who's worked with great apes has not been able to compute anyway that a gorilla could get up a 15-foot wall," Wharton said....

Police ... are investigating, but they said officers were forced to shoot the charging gorilla after it came within 15 feet of them.

"We did not go out there looking to kill an animal," said Senior Cpl. Chris Gilliam, a Dallas police spokesman. "We went out there in response to a situation where three people had already been injured."

Would they have been forced to shoot to kill an unarmed 300-pound man who "charged" at them? Assume a man known to be incapable of understanding language and not morally responsible for the violence he had committed. Don't the police know how to wrestle down a man that size and handcuff him?

UPDATE: Several people have written to point out that it is harder to wrestle a gorilla down than a man of the same weight. I concede that is probably true with respect to most gorillas and most men. But if you reread what I wrote, I never said Jabari was wronged because they didn't use the identical method that would have been used on a man. I'm objecting to the extreme shoot-to-kill reaction and the way we instinctively think they were justified because the gorilla was only an animal. There is a middle range there, between what we think needs to be done when the charging entity is human and what we think is just fine when it is nonhuman. At the very least they could have shot him in the leg or the shoulder. I think, with a sufficient number of police, he could have been physically restrained without shooting him. Don't they have tranquilizer darts at the zoo? If we are going to have zoos to please ourselves, don't we owe something to the animals? Jabari was taunted, rocks were thrown at him (probably to get him to put on a show of ferocity). It seems to me that, under the circumstances, he deserved a lot better than he got.

If it worked once .... Though only one crucifixion was needed to save all humanity, Hollywood seems to think if one crucifixion movie was hugely successful, there ought to be more of the same. Read "Hollywood Rethinking Faith Films After 'Passion'" in today's NYT. Gibson's film is a "faith film" in the most literal sense, because it was not concocted as a money-making venture. Hollywood would be continuing on its usual path of trying to make money by making more of whatever has worked in the past. One could say making money is the "faith" behind every Hollywood film, in which case there is nothing to "rethink"--all Hollywood films are "faith films."

The movie's box-office success has been chewed over in studio staff meetings and at pricey watering holes all over Hollywood, echoed in interviews with numerous executives in the last week. In marketing departments the film is regarded as pure genius; its director, Mel Gibson, is credited with stoking a controversy that yanked the film from the margins of the culture to center stage, presenting it as a must-see.

If only someone had filmed that. I would pay to see the edited footage of those meetings! "Chewing over" the popularity of the crucifixion! "Pure genius" to "stoke a controversy" about anti-semitism as a publicity stunt! What else could we do that would be like that??

Is Disney at least going to put the Christianity back into "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe," after they tried to take it out to make the movie more widely marketable? Disney is still saying "We are intent on not making this into a Christian movie ... But it will be seen by many loyal readers as a very Christian movie." What does that mean? If you know the book you'll get the Christian part, but if not, it's just a lion story?

What else do these Passion-inflamed producers have in store for us? Please no old-style Bible epics with Gladiator-style special effects. I'd like to see a literal depiction of the book of Revelation, an animation in the style of Spirited Away. (Spirited Away is a great example of a religious movie. I'd also like to see a Spirited Away-like animation of The Life of Pi, which has religious themes.)

According to the article, there's a TV series based on Revelation, done in an X-files way, that NBC has picked up. A nun and a scientist discover evidence of end times. Presumably, a very pretty nun and a hip scientist. TV can do some things much better than film. I'd watch a TV series about a teenaged Jesus, set in present-day America, and his relationship with his parents, played by Joe Mantegna and Mary Steenburgen.

Reactionary animals. From "The Life of Pi," from a passage defending zoos:

If a man, boldest and most intelligent of creatures, won't wander from place to place, a stranger to all, beholden to none, why would an animal, which is by temperament far more conservative? For that is what animals are, conservative, one might even say reactionary. The smallest changes can upset them.They want things to be just so, day after day, month after month.

From the old Simon & Garfunkel song "At the Zoo":

Ourang-outangs are skeptical
Of changes in their cages ...
Zebras are reactionaries ...

Sleep, lifeboat, buzzwords. Limping through the last days of my (horrors!) cold, I felt overwhelmed by fatigue at 7:30 pm last night. Knowing I'd never be able to sleep through the night, I went to bed anyway. I was listening to the final disc of "The Life of Pi," and fell asleep, only to wake, predictably, at 10 pm. I listened to the disc again, the fabulous ending to the story. I can't think of a novel I've enjoyed more, even though I know I've missed slices of it, by sleeping through the middle and ends of each of the nine discs, then haphazardly trying to skip ahead to the missed parts. I was captivated enough by the story to keep moving to the next disc, even though I knew I'd hadn't heard every word of its predecessor. What I need now is a nice car trip, so I can listen to all nine discs straight through. Anyway, that is surely a book to reread (to relisten to).

What could I do at 11 pm but get up and watch TV? I went downstairs, and one of my sons was in the middle of watching the big Democratic candidates debate, so I started watching, but not with my mind in the usual place where it would be if I had been awake all day, planning to watch the debate, and watching it from the beginning. Jumping in in the middle and fresh from sleeping and picturing tigers and lifeboats, I couldn't engage with the debate normally. I just noticed the buzzwords like "jobs" and "outsourcing" floating in a sea of verbiage. I couldn't help thinking, they don't really have any plans or solutions. Most of these words are just there to make a place to put the key words that are said not because the candidates really have anything they can do but because they think that these are the words that, implanted in the minds of voters, tend to make them feel like voting for a Democrat.

Feeling groggy not bloggy today. Sorry for not posting yet today, but I seem to be getting a cold, and I haven't had a cold in over ten years, so I am a complete baby about it. I must have woken up every hour last night. I'm up to disc 3 in The Life of Pi, and it's the part with the sinking ship and the scary lifeboat doings. That was all quite interesting, but not very sleepable-to.

I would prefer at this point to go home and spend the rest of the day alternating peacefully between reading admissions files and trying to finish going over the edit of my law review article, but I have agreed to help some students with their moot court problem at 1:30. I'd also like to go home for lunch, because I'm Atkins-ing again after an unfortunate run-in with an evil doctor's scale yesterday. I let my doctor know that her scale was weighing me 20 pounds higher than my home digital scale and she said she never gets on that scale and a lot of patients refuse to be weighed. I said I didn't know you could refuse, and she made a big point of blacking out the unfair weight statistic on my chart and saying she was definitely going have that scale checked. She said that about three times. That's the kind of obliging health service we get in Madison, Wisconsin.

Goat, Tiger, Abstention, Restraint. I don't have much to say today for some reason. I woke up far too early this morning--at 4--and listened to "Life of Pi," my sleep aid, for a while, until CD 1 ended. It didn't put me back to sleep, so I just got up too early. Too sad about the goat to sleep, perhaps! I've listened to the part about the sloths many times, and I know the tiger and goat part now, but what is in the middle? I could take all year to just have heard all the sentences on CD 1 (out of 9), and I'll be getting them all out of order. I guess I need to move to CD 2 for sleeping and put CD 1 in my car. The book seems great, by the way, from what I've heard!

So I spent the morning prepping my Federal Jurisdiction class--aka Fedjur--and now that it's over I can decompress. We talked a lot about sovereign immunity and a little about abstention. Abstention is my favorite Fedjur topic, which seems a bit absurd. What is so thrilling about not doing things (in this case, federal courts not exercising jurisdiction)? It's exciting to me because of the way themes about federalism and judicial restraint are presented, which might not work as an explanation to anyone outside of the field of federal jurisdiction as a basis for excitement.

Things I bought at Border’s today and why.

1. Decasia: The State of Decay. A film by Bill Morrison. Because I read this article by Herbert Muschamp in today’s NYT, I remembered reading about this film before, and now it’s out on DVD. Because it’s got a sticker on the front with a quote from Errol Morris saying “Haunting, Mysterious and Incredibly Beautiful. A definitive work of art” and I love Errol Morris and am a sucker for art as long as it doesn’t trigger any of my many objections. Even though Muschamp wrote:

Already a cult classic, the movie is a time capsule of the postmodern obsession with decrepitude. What a space saver! Just pop this disc in the player and you'll have all the putrefaction you could ask for. Watch the Master Narratives Crumble! Entropy Now! Pomo's Greatest Hits!

2. The Four Complete Historic Ed Sullivan Shows Featuring The Beatles and Other Artists Including The Original Cast from "Oliver!", Cab Calloway, Cilla Black, Frank Gorshin, Soupy Sales, Gordon & Sheila MacRae, Tessie O'Shea, Myron Cohen, Mitzi Gaynor, Allen & Rossi, and many more ..." Because I love a historic mishmash that is likely to give me all sorts of weird mixed feelings of delight, anxiety, regret, nausea, horror, and general sublime awareness. Because tomorrow is the 40th anniversary of the first of the four shows and the DVD empowers the consumer to mark the occasion. Because I want to rethink how I felt when I was thirteen and had to face the reality that not everyone was as much in love with The Four Seasons as I was. (Oh, how sadly they have fallen out of the culture! A search for "Four Seasons" in Amazon did not show them at all on the first page of a list that began with: The Most Relaxing Classical Album in the World...Ever!, Sex and the City - The Complete First Four Seasons, Four-Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long, and Montbell Ultralight #2 Sleeping Bag.)

3. The audio version of Yann Martel's "Life of Pi." Because years ago I learned how to solve my terrible insomnia problem by listening to spoken word. Audio books last years for me, because I can only hear a couple minutes a night. Because I think the elements of the story involving animals and floating in a lifeboat will harmonize well will sleeping and dreaming. Because I've listened to "A Short History of Nearly Everything" for the past year and some aspects of it are not harmonizing well with sleeping and dreaming (e.g., Yellowstone is a supervolcano due to erupt and destroy life as we know it, a large asteroid could suddenly kill us all something like a second after we became aware of it).

4. Sam Kashner's "When I Was Cool, My Life at the Jack Kerouac School." Because there's the adorable Sam Kashner on the cover wearing what William Burroughs called "suspenders of disbelief." Because I opened the book up at about twelve different places and read one sentence and every sentence passed my personal test of goodness (some combination of specific/surprising detail and an arrangement of words that charms me in some way ("I graduated 'in the Earth Horse Year,' whenever that was.")).