"By 1979, he was managing the lots, a job that came with the keys to an inconspicuous entry and an empty concession stand in left field..."

"Mr. Garvey estimated that the space, whose ceiling sloped down with the 300-level seats above it, was about 60 feet long and 30 feet wide. He created a hallway of cardboard boxes to disguise the apartment from the door. 'I open the door and it looks like a storeroom,' said Mr. Bradley, the former Eagle. 'But if you walk down between the boxes, it opened up into one of the neatest apartments I think I’d ever seen.' There was AstroTurf carpet, a bed, some seating, a coffee table and lamps. Devices included a toaster oven, coffee maker, space heaters and a stereo.... Mr. Garvey called it 'cozy,' with 'everything a guy would want.' Bathrooms were across the hall, employee showers downstairs.... In his book, Mr. Garvey describes 'an off-the-wall South Philly version of "The Phantom of the Opera,"' including encounters with the Eagles coach Dick Vermeil, the Sixers legend Julius Erving and the Phillies pitcher Tug McGraw.... 'It was euphoric.... It was like a form of meditation for me. It just — it helped me a lot.' He hid in plain sight: Everyone knew him, he said, and his job gave him a reason to be around at any hour, every day of the week. 'It was right in front of their eyes, they just couldn’t believe it... I wouldn’t believe it myself. The disbelief is the key to how I got away with it.'"

From "Man Says He Lived in Philadelphia’s Veterans Stadium for Years/Several people corroborated parts of the account of Tom Garvey, a Vietnam veteran and former stadium employee who described his 'secret apartment' in a recent book" (NYT).

Here's Garvey's memoir, "The Secret Apartment: Vet Stadium, a surreal memoir."

ADDED: Here's The Philadelphia Inquirer article on the subject. It has some additional details:

"Had they seen that same issue in a woman who was not a woman of color, they would not have felt empowered to take me off the plane."

"In pop culture, especially black women with a body like mine, they’re often portrayed as video vixens. So I’ve had to deal with those stereotypes my whole life"/"We are policed for being black... I’ve seen white women with much shorter shorts board a plane without a blink of an eye. I guess if it’s a ‘nice ass’ vs. a Serena Booty it’s O.K."

Wrote Tisha Rowe — on Twitter and Facebook — quoted in "Woman Required to Cover Up on American Airlines Flight Says Race Was a Factor/Dr. Tisha Rowe was about to fly from Jamaica to Miami when a flight attendant briefly removed her from the plane because of her romper, she said" (NYT).

Dr. Rowe said she was walking to her seat when a male flight attendant, whom she described as black, asked her to return to the front of the plane. Another flight attendant, who was also black, then spoke to her about her appearance while she stood on the jet bridge, Dr. Rowe said.

“She poses the question to me, ‘Do you have a jacket?’” Dr. Rowe said. “I said, ‘No, I do not.’ I’ve been given no explanation as to why I was taken off the plane. So finally she says, ‘You’re not boarding the plane dressed like that.’ Then they started to give me a lecture about how when I got on the plane, I better not make a scene or be loud.”

The airline’s conditions of carriage, which are posted on its website, make a brief reference to a dress code: “Dress appropriately; bare feet or offensive clothing aren’t allowed.”

So... the airline has a dress code with improper grammar. How's a person to know what's "appropriate" in this world? The airline is specific about one thing: bare feet. I take that to mean it's okay to wear flip flops. Or does it depend on whether the feet you expose are hairy and gnarly?

That's the trouble with the "offensiveness" standard! It doesn't address the clothing, but the way other people react to YOU in the clothing. But the airline doesn't want to get specific and say no bared shoulders or clothing must cover your legs at least to mid-thigh — even though your seatmates have an obvious interest in not having to be in contact with your bare flesh.

With that subjective standard, any enforcement is going to feel personal, and inevitably that will mean that people will feel that race and gender and age and level of attractiveness are going to be part of the judgment — whether they are or not. I doubt if the employees enforcing the rule can even know whether they're using inappropriate factors in applying their standard of appropriateness. It's a paradox of propriety.

"That is to say, the creative force who lands at the top of a heritage brand and reinvents it by identifying its sartorial semiology and then wresting it into the present with a healthy dose of disrespect and a dollop of pop culture."

"Not that he put it that way exactly. What he said was: 'Chanel is an institution, and you have to treat an institution like a whore — and then you get something out of her.' This approach has become almost quotidian in the industry, but before Mr. Lagerfeld was hired at Chanel, when the brand was fading into staid irrelevance kept aloft on a raft of perfume and cosmetics, it was a new and startling idea. That he dared act on it, and then kept doing so with varying degrees of success for decades, transformed not only the fortunes of Chanel (now said to have revenues of over $4 billion a year) but also his own profile.... But he rejected the idea of fashion-as-art, and the designer-as-tortured genius. His goal was more opportunistic...  His personal proclivities were a constantly mutating collection of decades, people and disciplines. His one great fear was of being bored. His conversations (or monologues) could, in almost one breath, bounce from Anita Ekberg romping in the Trevi fountain, to how rich women in the 1920s slept under ermine sheets, and then to the Danish fairy tale illustrator Kay Nielsen. His one blind spot was his own mortality, which he refused to acknowledge. As he said... 'I don’t want to be real in other people’s lives. I want to be an apparition.'"

The NYT was ready to go big on the death of Karl Lagerfeld, which has finally arrived. The long obit is by Vanessa Friedman.



ADDED: From a 2015 post of mine, quoting "A Comprehensive List Of Everything Karl Lagerfeld Hates":

"I hate intellectual conversation with intellectuals because I only care about my opinion, but I like to read very abstract constructions of the mind.... I hate rich people when they try to be communists or socialists. I think it’s obscene.... I hate sloppy footwear. What I hate most is flip-flops. I am physically allergic to flip-flops.... And I hate to wear suspenders. I have the feeling I'm wearing a bra...."

Oh, how I wish more people would say interesting things!

Quite the line-up of faces on Drudge right now.

We talked about the Pope's horrible scandal yesterday, so I'm not restarting that.

I refuse to talk about the latest murderer (on the right)... other than to just say he looks mentally ill.

The story about Glenn Greenwald is something I was already in the middle of reading. It's in The New Yorker: "Glenn Greenwald, the Bane of Their Resistance/A leftist journalist’s bruising crusade against establishment Democrats—and their Russia obsession." Excerpt:

Greenwald...has lived largely in Rio for thirteen years. For most of that time, he and Miranda, a city-council member, rented a home on a hillside above the city, surrounded by forest and monkeys. Last year, they moved to a... house... in a baronial-modernist style, and built around a forty-foot-tall boulder that feels like the work of a sculptor tackling Freudian themes: it exists partly indoors and partly out....

He seemed happy. He was wearing shorts and flip-flops; he has a soft handshake and an easy, teasing manner that he knows will likely confound people who expect the sustained contentiousness that he employs online and on TV....  Greenwald, though untroubled about being thought relentless, told me that he was “actually trying to become less acerbic, less gratuitously combative” in public debates. He recently became attached to the idea of mindfulness, and he keeps a Buddha and a metal infinity loop on a shelf behind the sofa; a room upstairs is used only for meditation. He has turned to religious and mystical reading, and has reflected that, in middle age, one’s mood “is more about integrating with the world.”

That all strikes me as hilarious, so I give it to you now, but there's much more to the article, which I haven't read yet, because I was reading it while waiting to have blood drawn and the buzzer went off calling me into the lab. It was just a routine test, but I had to fast for 12 hours, including no coffee, so that threw off my morning routine. If you want to know the difference between Morning Coffee Althouse and No-Coffee Althouse, read this post and then all the posts that preceded it this morning. Anyway, I will finish the Greenwald thing, and I'll have more to say about it. I love when left-wing people go after left-wing people. It's just boring when right-wing people go after left-wing people and left-wing people really do need to be gone after.

If you scroll up at Drudge, you'll see...



... link goes to CNBC: "Dow jumps more than 250 points, Nasdaq hits 8,000 as US and Mexico strike trade deal."

ADDED: Maybe, like me, you wondered, what's an infinity loop. Here:

"Prince is seated at a microphone behind a keyboard, which he keeps playing. This is quite disconcerting..."

"... if he doesn’t like a question, he strikes up with the theme from The Twilight Zone and shakes his head. At one point, he presses a button on the keyboard and the intro to his legendary 1988 hit Sign o’ the Times booms out of the PA. He looks at me. 'You wanna do this?' he says."

Prince does an interview and has his fun with the interviewers, one of whom writes for The Guardian, which — I don't know, maybe it's a British thing — doesn't edit out what to my eye is the run-on sentence of the year: "As skinny as a teenager, sporting an afro and almost unnecessarily handsome at 57 years old, Prince looks flatly amazing, exuding ineffable cool and panache while wearing clothes that would make anyone else look like a ninny is just one among his panoply of talents."

I diagrammed that in my head and determined that there needs to be a period after "amazing." But what is the subject of that second sentence, the one with the verb "is"? Answer: "exuding."

And what were the clothes that would make anyone else look like a ninny? Mainly the white platform flip-flops with white socks.

"I am not a traveler. I hate it.... Also I cannot go on airlines because people stare at me, you have to be touched by people. I hate that...I hate bespoke because I hate to be touched by strangers."

From "A Comprehensive List Of Everything Karl Lagerfeld Hates."

"I hate intellectual conversation with intellectuals because I only care about my opinion, but I like to read very abstract constructions of the mind.... I hate rich people when they try to be communists or socialists. I think it’s obscene.... I hate sloppy footwear. What I hate most is flip-flops. I am physically allergic to flip-flops.... And I hate to wear suspenders. I have the feeling I'm wearing a bra...."

To me, the list makes the argument for allowing yourself to use that terrible word "hate." Did your mom teach you not to say "hate"? Do you have friends/relatives in your life who stand ready to meet your deployment of the word with some fussy chiding like "Oh, 'hate' is a very strong word" or "Hate?! Do you really mean hate?"? I hate that.

Flip-flop...

... flop.

Stepping out...

... with Howie and Ollie (at The Puparazzo). And more with just Ollie (the Labradoodle) here. Ollie's a Labradoodle, but what is Howie? He reminds me of the cats in Betty Boop cartoons.

Before the performance...

... of "Travesties" at the American Players Theater the other night. This play was so good — as a text and as a performance — that the next day I bought tickets to see it again. And I also bought tickets to see "The Importance of Being Earnest" a couple days before the second viewing of "Travesties." The 2 plays are related, and some of the actors play corresponding roles in the 2 plays. I'd seen "The Importance of Being Earnest" (in movie form) long ago, so I got the hang of the references, but not all the particularity. "Earnest" is playing in the outdoor theater at APT, "Travesties" indoors.

I was so taken with "Travesties" that I even bought the text. It's one of these plays about art, and I love art about art. What is art? I'm entranced by all sorts of blabbing on this subject, especially wrangling with the problem of art and politics — propaganda and all that — and "Travesties" has Vladimir Lenin as one of the characters. Lenin says things like:

Today, literature must become party literature. Down with non-partisan literature! Down with literary supermen! Literature must become a part of the common cause of the proletariat, a cog in the Social democratic mechanism. Publishing and distributing centres, bookshops and reading rooms, libraries and similar establishments must all be under party control. We want to establish and we shall establish a free press, free not simply from the police, but also from capital, from careerism, and what is more, free from bourgeois anarchist individualism!

Lenin actually wrote that. The playwright (Tom Stoppard) worked it into the script, which isn't all horrific blowharding like that, there's a lot of absurd banter and mistaken identity and various hijinks of a theatrical kind. Lenin is a minor character. James Joyce is more important, and the Dadaist Tristan Tzara.

Speaking of evil dictators — who never wear shorts and flip-flops, by the way — I got around to watching that 2004 movie "Downfall," you know, the raw material for all those Hitler parodies. It's heavy going, 156 minutes, mostly in the bunker. The familiar scene isn't the ending. It's quite close to the beginning.

"If I see a guy in the city wearing khaki cargo shorts and flip-flops, I'm inclined to kick him in the nuts..."

"... grab him by the ear, and drag him into the nearest store where he can buy pants and shoes, and dress like a real man."

You might think I'm blogging that because of my long-term mission to save men from the childish look that is shorts, but I'm not. The link — sent to me by a reader — goes to a 2011 piece in The Stir that links to some pronouncement fashion designer Tom Ford made back then. But I blogged the Tom Ford pronouncement at the time.

I'm linking to that piece in The Stir because of the casual reference to gender-motivated violence — like it's cute or always only a joke when a woman physically, brutally attacks a man.

And that's especially timely right now, as the world on the web watches viral video of a woman pummeling and kicking a man who is trapped with her in the small space of an elevator. Solange physically, brutally attacks Jay-Z and — what? — are people laughing? Are you getting ready to make a joke observing the correspondence between the length of Jay-Z's pants and the justness of the wrath of Solange?

Is anyone even talking about whether Solange should be arrested? I Googled "arrest solange" and found a Yahoo Answers discussion of the question: "Why hasnt Solange been arrested for her attack on Jay Z?" That link goes to a very low-level discussion, with the questioner advocating that the lack of arrests for female-on-male violence means that men should "always retaliate against women and beat the living daylights out of them."

The other hits on my search were mostly just the happenstance of editors putting the Jay-Z story on the same page with the news that Alec Baldwin got arrested for bicycling the wrong way on a 1-way street. Huffpo was having fun with Jay-Z's victimization with "8 Elevator Rides That Were Way Crazier Than Solange And Jay Z's." That includes the word "arrest" because one time a man got arrested for biting an elevator door.

What do you think of when you hear this phrase: "institutional flip-flops"?

I ask Meade, as I'm reading this op-ed by Cass Sunstein, that begins:

What are the legitimate powers of the president? Of Congress? Some people’s answers to these enduring questions seem to shift dramatically depending on a single (and seemingly irrelevant) fact: whether the current president is a Democrat or a Republican. These shifts amount to “institutional flip-flops,” a defining feature of modern political life.

In recent weeks, the filibuster has been the most prominent example...

Meade says:

I'm picturing the characters in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," shuffling about in paper slippers...

He demonstrates the drugged mental-patient walk.

Sunstein recommends the "veil of ignorance" as a solution to "institutional flip-flops." He's actually saying something smart, so smart it feels obvious and mundane at the point when you understand. You're all: Everybody already knows that. I'm distracted by the accidental metaphor "institutional flip-flops" — I know he didn't mean to make us think about footwear — which is intensified by the old intentional metaphor "veil of ignorance."

The veil goes over your face and puts a barrier between your eyes and the world you'd otherwise see, and the flip-flops go up between your toes and put a barrier between the soles of your feet and the ground they would otherwise come into contact with, not that the filth of wherever it is your walking doesn't rage up and contaminate the insole.



I'm distracted by the concrete.

Emma Watson has a problem with English guys and American guys.

"English guys are very well put together.... They dress really well and they are very well mannered. But they are also very restrained. Usually in the whole courting situation, I‘m used to being first of all, ignored for the first two months of the ritual. And then maybe they'll acknowledge my presence."

American guys are "like, 'I like you. You're great. Let's go on a date. Let's do it.' I'm like, 'I'm sorry, what just happened?' This is like a huge culture shock for me. They're very like open and very straight-forward—but they wear flip-flops and I don't know if I like that."

And I'm like, wow, poor Emma Watson. 

"But suddenly, the lawyer became so uncomfortably hot that he leaped up to move."

"He tried to put on his flip-flop sandals but, inexplicably, they were too hot to touch. So he ran barefoot to the shade."

The Las Vegas Death Ray targets a lawyer.

(Via Gizmodo.)

Views of the great Saturday melt.

There were great pools of water at the base of every driveway:



Nothing's going to stop the ice fisherman from fishing:



And the boys see the chance to break out the shorts:



When these teenagers passed me on the trail, we had dialogue:

Boy: Taking photographs?

Me: Wearing shorts?

Shortly — yeah, shortly — thereafter, I went to a café to download my photographs. Sitting next to me: a girl wearing flip-flops. February flip-flops.

"Granted he's in Chicago now, he's cut his teeth in politics in Chicago. But when I saw him walking around town in rubber slippers..."

"... I said, OK, that's who he is. That's the local boy that grew up here. How many other people go away, come back, and slip right back into rubber slippers?"

He also "flashes the 'shaka' or hang loose sign," he seems to love "shave ice," and "he's got the nice form" in body surfing, this Prez-E of ours.

"God came to earth and saw people sticking it wherever and doing it with whatever, and he just cleared it all out. He was, like, 'Enough.'"

Said Prince, as told by Claire Hoffman in The New Yorker:

Prince padded into the kitchen, a small fifty-year-old man in yoga pants and a big sweater, wearing platform flip-flops over white socks, like a geisha....

Limping slightly, Prince set off on a walk around his new bachelor pad. Glass doors opened onto acres of back yard, and a hot tub bubbled in the sunlight. “I have a lot of parties,” he explained....

Seven years ago, he became a Jehovah’s Witness. He said that he had moved to L.A. so that he could understand the hearts and minds of the music moguls. “I wanted to be around people, connected to people, for work,” he said. “You know, it’s all about religion. That’s what unites people here. They all have the same religion, so I wanted to sit down with them, to understand the way they see things, how they read Scripture.”

Prince had his change of faith, he said, after a two-year-long debate with a musician friend, Larry Graham. “I don’t see it really as a conversion,” he said. “More, you know, it’s a realization. It’s like Morpheus and Neo in ‘The Matrix.’ ” He attends meetings at a local Kingdom Hall, and, like his fellow-witnesses, he leaves his gated community from time to time to knock on doors and proselytize. “Sometimes people act surprised, but mostly they’re really cool about it,” he said....

When asked about his perspective on social issues—gay marriage, abortion—Prince tapped his Bible and said, “God came to earth and saw people sticking it wherever and doing it with whatever, and he just cleared it all out. He was, like, ‘Enough.’ ”

Back when Prince was much more popular, his music powerfully enticed us into what he now considers sin. If God is keeping score, Prince should be worried. I think he'd need to go door to door for millions of years to undo all that damage (if damage it is).

Via Gawker, which notes:

If Prince wants to get attention for his views, airing them amid nationwide demonstrations against the passage of a California anti-gay-marriage initiative will probably do the trick. What that does for the "celibate" musician's sales and popularity is another matter.

Celibate, eh?

Tonight, that mood of isolation permeates Prince's luxurious 30,000-square-foot Tuscan-style villa, perched high in a gated Beverly Hills enclave. The royal one, clad in a filmy white sweater over a black shirt and slacks with (shocker!) flip-flops, lives solo in the nine-bedroom home, where a cook is upstairs preparing food for a post-midnight gathering with friends and bandmates.

"I'm single, celibate and sexy," he says with a laugh. "I feel free."

No one promoted sex more than Prince, and now he's celibate. That's rich.

There's lots to talk about here, but don't overlook the assertion that the music moguls of L.A. "all have the same religion." I hope that means that commerce is a religion for business folk.

UPDATE: Prince retracts!

Drive-by photography — L.A.

It wasn't all fisheye photography in L.A. I don't always have my big SLR camera at hand, but I do always have my Sony DSC-T9 at hand and often in hand — where it fits as easily as a deck of cards. It was fun to use the T9 from the passenger seat. Yes, on my trip to L.A., I had the benefit of never driving. So I was always looking at the scenery — fascinating, because we avoided the freeway — and seeing things to snap. Here are my 4 favorite drive-by shots:

1. (Enlarge.) A chance collage that seems to have everything: Marilyn, Elvis, the Beatles, a dog, an ATM machine, a traffic light, Thai food, Mexican food, a smiling guy waiting for the Metro, graffiti, "sop," "flo," "order now," a manly arm receiving a California tan. Yes, of course, it's cropped. (Uncropped.)



2. (Enlarge.) Like Madison, Wisconsin, and unlike NYC, L.A. has signs telling you the names of the neighborhoods. Here you see a sign for Thai Town. Under the sign are 2 women. Neither appears to be Thai. They look like hardworking individuals — do they have jobs that require white shirts and long blue pants? — waiting for the bus. The apt words "Working World" appear on a newspaper vending box. There's also the L.A. Times, and 2 women in shorts and flip-flops who don't seem to have to go to work. I love the colorful buildings — ocher and pink on one side and white-orange-blue Mondrian-inspired on the other. I love the checked sidewalk in pink, white, and 2 shades of gray. Fruit, palm trees, street lights, quintuple traffic lights. A very blue sky resonates with a blue sign that says "Western." There's a smaller sign that says "Hollywood/Western" and I know those are the intersecting streets, but it makes me think of a Hollywood western, and then I notice the black and white photographs of actressy models in the windows in the lower left corner and return to the rock-solid women waiting for the bus.



3. (Enlarge.) I only wanted to drive by Grauman's Chinese Theater, so my feelings vibrated with the pink-haired girl who was just trying to slurp up some caffeine and get home with her groceries. I love her squinty sneer as she slump walks past the Jack Sparrow impersonator and toward the hands (like mine) pointing a tiny camera at the scene. In a differently pink shirt, to the right of the shot, we see a woman who's happy to play the tourist and take a shot of her friend who's about to attempt a movie-star pose while standing on a sidewalk star. (And it would have been a better picture if we could see the friend posing, as we can in the next shot.)



4. (Enlarge!) On our way to LAX, we pass a famous icon, the giant doughnut at Randy's Donuts, that Wikipedia informs me — in a ludicrously somber tone — "dates back to a period during the mid-20th Century that saw a proliferation of programmatic architecturely designed buildings throughout Southern California that were made in the shape of the products they sold." And I'm not going to perseverate —or proliferate any programmatic perorations — about the proper spelling of "doughnut." It's "doughnut." I established that rock-solidly — architecturely? — here.

Krauthammer frets about Obama's flipflops.

Here. Every single one of those flipflops has been an improvement, in my opinion, so am I supposed to reject Obama for flipflopping? I voted for Obama in the Wisconsin primary in part because I predicted he'd turn out to be flexible and pragmatic. I do agree with Krauthammer that it's funny the way the people who fell for the Obama of the primaries — who, unlike me, actually liked those positions he was taking — are letting him get away with the flipflop. I suppose, just as I convinced myself that the real Obama was not the one I was seeing back then, they are convincing themselves that the real Obama is not the one they are seeing now. And this is funny (from Best of the Web):

Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com and Keith Olbermann of MSNBC are in the midst of a bitter feud.... At issue is Barack Obama's flip-flop on legislation currently pending that would update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.... In January, Greenwald reports, Olbermann delivered an unhinged rant in which he called the immunity provision a "shameless, breathless, literally textbook example of fascism"--and in case you thought he meant the nongenocidal Italian kind, he also likened proponents of immunity to "the bureaucrats of the Third Reich."... Olbermann... rails against "fascism," then yields to it in the name of political expediency. Obama does the same thing in a more soothing manner.

Greenwald, on the other hand, is consistent (-ly wrong).

The food carts of Madison.

I'm back in New York City, after arriving in the wee small hours of the morning. But I'm still dragging Madison photographs out of the camera. Look, there's a new food cart:



It's for men, apparently. Men who identify with Frank Sinatra, John Belushi, and Bozo, it seems. Fine Italian. (Enlarge.)

A cart that looks like it's made of brick. Why not?

Nevertheless, the old food carts are much more popular, at least for now:





Good luck to Fib's and to everyone trying to get a sandwich or a bowl of stew and to everyone breaking out the flip-flops and shorts.

IN THE COMMENTS: I'm told it must be written: FIB's.

Some questions about the right image for a law professor.

I'm making an ongoing project out of collecting questions about what people think is the right image for a law professor. It's not that I'm aspiring to fit this image or trying to convince anyone else to, but mostly that I'm interested in how people think a law professor — and maybe, more generally, a teacher — ought to dress and act and so forth. This project got started yesterday when I asked a colleague whether a law professor can wear sandals in class. No, she said instantly and emphatically. Not even really nice sandals — expensive, beautiful sandals with low heels? No. Even if you have a excellent pedicure? No.

Why? Is there something about seeing my toes that makes it hard to get your mind around minimum scrutiny? Is there something about the absence of hosiery that makes you worry that I've skimped on preparation? I understand the value of professional appearance and demeanor. The issue here is not whether you should do all you can to tap that value. I'm interested in the specific elements of professional appearance and demeanor in the law school classroom. You're teaching people to be lawyers, but you aren't in a courtroom or law office. Should you nevertheless model the look and tone appropriate to the setting your students will enter? Or is a classroom a much more casual place, where you can — and should — not only adopt a different look, you can speak and act in a different way.

You understand my project. Let me begin my list of questionable things for a law professor:

1. Sandals. Consider the variations. Would you say yes to dressy sandals on a woman but no to Birkenstocks on a man and flip-flops on anyone? Does your rule vary depending on whether there's a fresh pedicure? Does hairiness or gnarliness change the rule?

2. Other footwear. Can a lawprof wear sneakers? Fluffy slippers? (I once saw a pro se plaintiff in federal court try a case wearing fluffy slippers!) Mary janes? Mary janes with oddly colored socks (fuschia, chartreuse, etc.)? Are bare feet ever allowed — perhaps in a small class in the summer session? Don't we all know of at least one lawprof who taught barefoot? Actually, I often walk around the hallways around my office in bare feet or purple socks, but I think I've always kept shoes on in class.

3. Exposed limbs. If we're not wearing jackets, should we at least have long sleeves? Are women but not men allowed to reveal their arms? As for legs, surely it is unacceptable to wear shorts. On the other hand — hand? — skirts for women are obviously dressier than pants. There can't be some emerging rule — I'm looking at Hillary Clinton — that a woman must wear pants to look professional, but there might be some ideas about whether the legs exposed by a skirt can be bare and how short a skirt can be. And what about a really long skirt? I've often found it comfortable and amusing to wear a below-calf length skirt.

4. Bralessness. I've always assumed the rule here is that you can go braless in class if no one can tell. There are many other breast-related questions, but perhaps you would think it unprofessional of me to ask them. These questions would have to do with the tightness and low cut of upper body clothing and the visibility of nipples and so forth. (Seriously, if you want students to know that you're really excited about the rule against perpetuities or some such thing, you want them to get the message from your face, your tone of voice, and your flailing hands.)

5. Slang. I've always assumed it's not just acceptable but highly desirable to speak in a casual, conversational way in class, but where is the line? Let's say you are examining a foolish Supreme Court decision in a conlaw class. Which if any of these phrases should be avoided: a. What the heck did Rehnquist mean by that? b. What the hell is that that supposed to mean? c. Did the Court screw up? d. What the fuck?

6. Getting into strange positions. I think a good professor ought to move around a bit. It's especially good to get away from the lectern and write on the blackboard — to relieve tedium if nothing else. But should the lawprof remain on the podium — in the teacher's space — or is it okay or even good to walk out into the classroom and maybe lean against the wall over there? Is it wrong — or perhaps good — to sit on the table or ledge in the front of the classroom? Some lawprofs will sit in a strange way. I remember my Conflict of Laws professor sitting sideways on a narrow ledge with his hands coyly clasped around his one upraised knee. I remember this 30 years later! Yet I myself have often sat on the desk in a cross-legged position (with both feet up).

7. Stalling. Do the first few seconds of class not count, so that you can toss off a few lines about something that was just on TV or in the news? Examples: a. How could Archuleta think he could do a Stevie Wonder imitation on Beatles night? b. Exactly why is prostitution illegal? But we can't talk about prostitution. We're here to talk about the independent and adequate state ground doctrine. I tend to think motive matters. If you're off-topic and casual to begin because you're trying to create a good mood and get everyone to settle in and start paying attention, it's good. But if you're stealing time from students to impose your political views, it's bad. But that part isn't about one's professional image, is it?

8. Digressing. Once class has started, when is digressing acceptable? I'd say the shorter the digression, the less justification it needs. There are funny, pointless things you can say that take two seconds, and there are anecdotes that consume whole minutes. And content matters. There are those tales of the days when you were a lawyer, which may seem professional but are really the most outrageous waste of time. And then there are the wordplay and little cultural references that leaven speech. I like a lot of that, but I realize it may be distracting or annoying. And then there are some students who are so earnest and diligent that they take everything seriously and could mistake your little joke as part of the doctrine. If you have a dry, deadpan, or subtle sense of humor, your students may simply perceive you as bizarre and unreliable.

I'll stop now, but you get the point. To be continued. I haven't mentioned blogging yet, but obviously, there are some big questions there.