"They had food; they just chose not to give it to their kids because they were too busy playing video games."

"As we become more technologically advanced, there's more distractions. It's easy for someone to get addicted to something and neglect their children. Whether it's video games or meth, it's a serious issue, and (we) need to become more aware of it."

Please. Take some responsibility. This is an old, old problem. That the details are new is irrelevant. You're not special because your selfish indulgence is high tech.

So, what do you want to know?

Ask me some questions and I'll vlog a response. Isn't that what Rosie O'Donnell does? I'd like to try that.

The connection between Louis CK's stupid dog and the one time in my life that I broke a bone.

You know Louis CK, the comedian? This is just a little film clip of his dog, doing something that he found amusing enough to post on YouTube:



Wow! I saw a dog doing that one time. It was 1970. I thought it was hilarious. I was so entertained I kept watching it, not looking where I was going, and I walked into a bicycle and broke my toe.

"This is not a case that should occupy the mind of a person who has anything consequential to do."

Writes Dennis Jacobs, the Chief Judge of the 2d Circuit Court of Appeals. (Via Eugene Volokh.)

I concede that this short opinion of mine does not consider or take into account the majority opinion. So I should disclose at the outset that I have not read it. I suppose this is unusual, so I explain why.

Well, at least he feels a need to explain. I'm waiting for a federal judge to do the full Bartleby the Scrivener routine and say "I would prefer not to."

"He did not want to resemble a refrigerator or Jabba the Hutt, he said, but Sophia Loren with a couple of hundred extra pounds."

John Travolta reenvisions Edna Turnblad:

His Edna, unlike the greasy Gorgon created by Divine in the 1988 John Waters original or the Kabuki hausfrau rendered so memorably by Harvey Fierstein in the 2002 Broadway musical adaptation, has cleavage and a waist and a kind of geologic sex appeal....

“Playing a woman attracted me,” Mr. Travolta said. “Playing a drag queen did not. The vaudeville idea of a man in a dress is a joke that works better onstage than it does on film, and I didn’t want any winking or camping...."...

There was no film precedent for this approach to Edna. Though Dustin Hoffman in “Tootsie” and Robin Williams in “Mrs. Doubtfire” did well donning drag, they were playing explicitly male characters who for plot reasons needed to dress as women....

"[H]ow do I convince you I’m a woman doing that and make you want to watch her for an hour and a half?”

Having grown up the youngest of six children in a bohemian working-class family in Englewood, N.J., he modeled his idea of a watchable woman on his “very sexy mother” (Helen Travolta was a high school drama teacher and sometime actress) and on the bombshells in the European movies they enjoyed: Ms. Loren, Anna Magnani, Anita Ekberg. “I’m not as beautiful as any of those people,” he said, “but I’m not unpleasant to look at, and I thought: ‘This is my library. Not grandmas or Aunt Bee from Mayberry, but the kind of person a blue-collar woman would aspire to be if she had money. What if that kind of woman had gone to flesh?’ ”

Impressive. But what of the argument that the those who care about gay rights should boycott "Hairspray"?

In a blog entry posted in May on the Web site of The Washington Blade (washblade.com), a gay newspaper, Kevin Naff, its editor, called for a boycott of “Hairspray” because of Mr. Travolta’s membership in the Church of Scientology, which he described as a cult that “rejects gays and lesbians as members and even operates reparative therapy clinics to ‘cure’ homosexuality.” In a subsequent editorial Mr. Naff added that Mr. Travolta’s appearance in the “iconic gay role” is “even more galling given all the gay rumors that have followed him for years.”

There would be an awful lot of boycotting if we avoided movies starring any actor who belonged to a religion that held a belief we found abhorrent. But maybe a special case should be made if the role is somehow "iconic" for you. Travolta makes the point that Edna is not a gay role. Edna is a heterosexual female, traditionally played by a male. As the article points out, this is like the stage play "Peter Pan," where there is nothing gay about the character, but an actor of the opposite sex is always cast in the role.

Let's look at how Naff put it -- in writing and in this fair-and-balanced fight with Bill O'Reilly:



My thought on watching that was that people should go to the movie if they want to see it, but Naff did a great job of picking an issue that would get him some publicity and he handles his argument well even if he persuades no one.

What are you going to do with the subject of whether religions offer people fraudulent treatments? It's one thing if a psychologist purports to be able to cure homosexuality, but religions purport to solve all sorts of problems, including mortality. I can see why gay rights activists think it makes sense to single out one issue to make a big deal about, but boycotting the work of one religion's adherents seems wrong. Many religions are negative toward gay people. The only thing that makes Scientology stand out is that its approach resembles what therapists do. But it's a religion!

"The whole purpose of science for some Islamists is using it to reinforce faith; it really has nothing to do with science itself."

The conundrum of the terrorist doctors:

Muslim scientists are among the most politicized groups in the region, and the Muslim approach to the scientific method, in the most extreme cases, can squelch the freewheeling curiosity at the heart of scientific discovery.

“Fundamentalist-type attitudes are relatively common among people in applied science in the Muslim world,” [said Taner Edis, author of “An Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in Islam.”' “The conception has been that modern science is developed outside, and we need to bring it into our societies without it corrupting our culture.”...

For Islamists like Zaghloul el-Naggar in Cairo, the host of a popular television show about the Koran’s scientific teachings, all science can be discovered within the Muslim holy text, from the cause of earthquakes to genetics. Such direct links between science and religion ultimately hamper the scientific method by making some questions taboo, analysts say.

“You have the emergence of a new kind of religious figure who is not a cleric, and all of his authority is as a scientist,” said Todd Pitock, who profiles Mr. Naggar in an article about Islam and science in the July issue of the magazine Discover. “The whole purpose of science for some Islamists is using it to reinforce faith; it really has nothing to do with science itself.”

Medicine and engineering have long been the most prestigious professions in the Arab world, and many of its most illustrious writers, thinkers and politicians have risen through engineering and medical schools....

“Wherever you go in the Muslim world, those who are most violent and most extremist are the ones who have the most scientific tendencies,” Mr. Abu Hanieh said. “One could even argue that sciences might contribute to increasing one’s radical thinking if the radical finds justifications to his philosophy through science.”

Key phrase: "applied science." The dedication is not to pure science but to using science to do things. Many individuals become doctors to gain prestige and power. They don't love science; they love what they can get by knowing it. It's not surprising, then, that some of those who learn medicine in a severely religious culture are drawn into meshing their science with religion.

Approving of men's shorts.

Not me. You know what I think. But here's some expert opinion, approving, but setting stern limits:

I am so tired of the enormous, giant, and baggy cargo shorts from seemingly every American mall brand...

I'm still trying to find a shorter short that seems right for me.

Check the pictures. Do you look like these guys? They're all slim and tan. But the second picture? The one in the Converse sneakers? That exemplifies the biggest problem with a man in shorts: He looks like a large child. And not in cute, boyish way. In a "I'm standing around waiting for my mommy" way.

"We have been created diseased, by a capricious despot, and then abruptly commanded to be whole and well, on pain of terror and torture."

The horror of creationism, as phrased by Christopher Hitchens, responding to the statement by Michael Gerson that "In a world without God, this desire for love and purpose is a cruel joke of nature -- imprinted by evolution but designed for disappointment."

Usually, it's a large cappucino and a laptop.

Sometimes, it's a small espresso and a book

"That night, when I was insulted and disrupted, I lost my heart; I lost my sense of humor."

Says Michael Richards, referring to his disastrous n-word rant. "I've retired from that. I'm taking time off to feel myself out, get to know myself and appreciate other people." Like so many Westerners before him, he pictures Asia as the place to search for wisdom:

Richards, 57, and actress Beth Skipp traveled to remote temples before visiting Angkor Wat on a tour sponsored by the Los Angeles-based Nithyananda Foundation. The sect adheres to the teachings of 29-year-old Hindu monk Nithyananda — an avowed "enlightened Master and modern mystic" who's referred to by his followers as "swamiji."...

"I'm not a part of the group. I'm not a devotee. Like I said, I don't wear club jackets, but I honor all the clubs," Richards said. "Life is not always about us or making people laugh. I'm trying to understand the humanity that I am, that I belong to. So, in that sense, I'm part of a group: humanity."...

"What constitutes spirituality is heart," Richards said. "Making people laugh is something else — I did 'Seinfeld' for 10 years — it lightens things up, helps people enjoy the world they live in more. I've had people call me from hospital beds and tell me, 'That Kramer character got me through it. Thanks.' It's pretty simple, you know, the feeling of opening yourself up to others.

"You go through a country like this and see the people close to the land. I see the heart they put into their homes and their lives. I see their children: open-eyed and cheery. You're in the middle of the country and they're waving at you from a motorcycle. When you're right there at that living connection, that's spiritual."

It seems to me that Richards has some pretty scattered thought patterns. He's sort of a tourist and he's picking up a little religious vibe -- either by seeing a bit of swamiji or motorcycling past some little kids.

He was best -- and at least he knows it -- when he was on a script, a good script. He's a comic actor. He doesn't really have much to say. Spirituality. Okay. Fine. It's just too bad he went on the stage off script and said things that make it hard for people to accept him as an actor inside a role -- even retrospectively, as Kramer.

"I asked Breyer why Roberts had failed in his efforts to achieve consensus and whether he might ever come closer to achieving these goals."

Writes Jeffrey Rosen in a New Republic article (with subscribers-only access):

"Will he do better in the future? He can join my dissents!" Breyer replied with a chuckle.....

Breyer self-consciously embraced the mantle of restraint. "To a very large measure, judges have to be careful about intruding in the legislative process," he said. "[R]uth and I have been among the ones less likely to strike down laws passed by the legislature, and, by that measure, we're not very activist." Far from being a cautious or defensive posture, bipartisan restraint has always been rooted in liberal self-confidence--confidence that, given a fair opportunity, liberals can fight and win in the political arena. The fact that conservatives now rely on the Court to win their battles for them--striking down democratically adopted campaign finance laws and integration programs--is a sign of their weakness.

Breyer and his liberal colleagues were not unwavering in their restraint this term: They dissented from the partial-birth abortion decision, despite the fact that bans on the procedure are supported by bipartisan majorities in Congress and in most states. When I asked Breyer how he reconciled this dissent with his commitment to judicial deference, he demurred. "The only question for me was, am I suddenly going to overrule a whole lot of precedent? No. That's a strong basis." Liberals, in fact, could have reconciled their commitment to precedent and judicial restraint by upholding the partial-birth law while insisting it include a health exception. But no one is consistent in every case; and the activism of liberals here was an exception, not the rule.

Judged by their willingness to defer to legislatures, liberals are now the party of judicial restraint. Conservatives have responded to this embarrassing turnabout by trying to rob the term of any neutral meaning. In a series of unintentionally hilarious editorials, The Wall Street Journal praised the Roberts Court for "restoring business confidence in the rule of law and setting limits on the tort bar and activist judges." Spare us the twistifications. For more than 50 years, conservatives have insisted that judges should defer to legislatures and let citizens resolve their disputes politically. But, at the very moment they consolidated their Supreme Court majority, they have abandoned this principle and embraced the activism they once deplored. I hope that Chief Justice Roberts, over time, will achieve his welcome goal of transcending the Court's divisions and helping conservatives rediscover the virtues of modesty and deference. But, for now, the party of judicial restraint has a convincing spokesman in Justice Breyer.

I like judicial restraint myself, and I think Breyer actually does deserve the mantle of restraint as much as any of them. Of course, he doesn't keep it on all the time. Rosen conveniently -- and unintentionally hilariously -- declines to mention abortion rights and all sorts of other cases where Breyer votes on the side of individual and minorities and against the choice of the majoritarian political process. It wouldn't be much of a Constitution if the political choice always won. But it's good to have someone on the Court who will openly express the philosophy of restraint.

ADDED: Wait! Rosen does mention the abortion case in the middle paragraph there. Well, then he contradicts himself in his final paragraph. So Rosen conveniently -- and unintentionally hilariously - forgets his previous paragraph.

"Born in the early 1960s in Berkeley, California, to beatnik parents..."

That's pretty cool. Describes Dr. Helen, who's got this week's Normblog profile. And I'm not just flagging this because she listed this blog as one of her 3 favorites.

And if you like Normblog profiles, the whole archive of Normblog profiles appears here -- in an order I consider absurdly arbitrary, but like nonetheless: alphabetical order.

IN THE COMMENTS: Oddly enough, the subject is what life in Heaven is like.

Waiting for the blogger conference call with John McCain.

The song playing on hold: "Foolish Heart." I love this song, actually. Steve Perry. Don't know if "Foolish Heart" is the right message for a candidate, but I do like it.

MORE: He concedes the campaign has "financial problems." "The responsibility is mine and mine alone." He's sorry he had to "part company" with "some dear friends."

YET MORE: First two questions are about the war, with the expected answers. Third question is about the campaign's money. The fourth question begins, "Hello, Senator, how're you doing?" He gives a genuine laugh and says "In the words of Chairman Mao, it's always darkest before it's totally black."

AND: He says people keep asking him -- about Iraq -- "What's your Plan B?" He wants to know "what's their Plan B?" That is, those who want the war to end refuse to face up to the chaos that would ensue. They have no plan for how to deal with it. He's asked if he cares enough about Iraq to cut back on campaigning and "exert some leadership" in Congress. He says he will do "whatever is necessary," and he'd "rather lose a campaign than lose a war." He'd find it "difficult to shave in the morning" if he thought his campaigning were in any way burdening those who are sacrificing in Iraq.

On another topic: The Republican "base" became "dispirited" because of overspending. The "bridge to nowhere" was a "tipping point."

AND: What will he do about the war if his campaign fails and none of the candidates who are left have the strong position that he had? The idea of preferring to lose a campaign to losing a war doesn't really add up if he's forced out of the campaign because people don't like his position on the war, does it? You can say you want to move back to the Senate and fight for the war there, but how will that work if the remaining candidates seem to express the idea that people want a weaker stance on the war? His answer is mainly about the enthusiasm he encounters when he appears at a campaign stop and the standard campaign concept that he needs to "get our message out."

There is time for another question, but there are no more questions. He says "Oh, no!" in a humorous way.

NOTE: Since there was room for more questions, why didn't I ask one? Am I so apathetic about McCain? The fact is, I'm writing this in a café, with loud music playing, and I did not have the option of going off the listen-only mode.

State legislator who thinks there are "too many attorneys" convinces state assembly to cut all funding to my law school!

Here's the news from Madison:

"We don't need more ambulance chasers. We don't need frivolous lawsuits. And we don't need attorneys making people's lives miserable when they go to family court for divorces," said Rep. Frank Lasee, R-Green Bay. "And I think that having too many attorneys leads to all those bad results."

Oh, yeah... people have legal problems because of the lawyers. All those divorced people? Divorce lawyers are to blame. What utter lameness! What an embarrassment to the state!

I agree that there shouldn't be frivolous lawsuits, but how do you get a court to dismiss a frivolous lawsuit? You need a lawyer. And how do you get lawyers not to file frivolous lawsuits? You train them well so they know what is frivolous and what isn't and so they have the professional ethics not to use the legal system to harass people.

Good lord, it's one thing for one legislator to think so poorly, but quite another to convince the assembly to vote along with him.
But it's not that bad:

The plan appears to have little chance at surviving negotiations between the Assembly and Democratic-controlled Senate and being included in the Legislature's final budget.

Even if it did, Gov. Jim Doyle would likely veto it. Doyle, whose late mother was a beloved administrator at the law school, said Thursday that the plan was "a really bizarre thing that came out of nowhere."

What weird emotionalism in government! The governor's dead mother will help to get to the right result? She has no more place in the story than Lasee's fervid thoughts about too many lawyers.

Analyze it rationally, and you'll see that if the funding is cut the law school won't shut down. It will only raise tuition:

[Law School Dean Ken] Davis said ... [t]he school receives only $2.5 million per year in state funding, or 10 percent of its $20 million budget. Still, it would have to increase its $12,600 annual tuition, which is the lowest in the Big 10 Conference and enables many low-income students to attend.

"That would be a very bitter pill to swallow for us," Davis said. "We have a national reputation for access to legal education."

There's an easy emotional argument within reach here: Republicans only care about the rich.

Lasee said he would welcome a significant tuition increase for prospective lawyers or a cut in the school's 810-student enrollment.

"When we have an overabundance of attorneys already, there's no point in subsidizing the education of more attorneys," Lasee said.

Yes, the profession will be improved once you've limited access to the people who have the most money to spend on education. Brilliant.

The proposal, made public the day before the vote, prompted wide speculation. Was a lawmaker angry the school rejected him? Were the cuts retaliation against professors who called a sex offender tracking law unconstitutional? Were they punishing the Innocence Project for freeing a man who later killed a 25-year-old woman?

Yes, legislators, why do you hate us? Well, everyone instinctively hates lawyers and lawsuits, and this is essentially a healthy gut reaction. But you need to think a little harder and see why we need a legal system, why we should deeply value the rule of law and the role lawyers play in preserving it, and why legal education is part of that.

Sigh.

ADDED: A post with amusing comments over at Above the Law.

MORE: My colleague Marc Galanter provides some information relevant to the question whether there are too many lawyers in Wisconsin:

Wisconsin, with about 2.% of the U.S. population, has about 1.2% of the country's lawyers.

The ratio of population to lawyers in the U.S. in 2000 was 264/1. In Wisconsin it was 401/1.

Among the 51 jurisdictions (50 states and D.C.), the Wisconsin's population to lawyer ratio was 38th in 2000.

Wisconsin's lawyer population is slightly older (median 50 vs. 47) and significantly less female (22% vs. 27%) than the nation as a whole. This suggests that it has not been growing at as high a rate as the nation as a whole.

In short, Wisconsin seems to have about one third fewer lawyers per capita than the rest of the country and it's not catching up.

Is this a lawyer deficit? Research has shown a correlation between economic growth and lawyer population. Causality may run in either or both directions. But it is clear that lawyer population does not have an inhibiting effect on economic growth.

The lawyer population also seem to be associated with such non-market goods as civil liberties and political democracy.

(Marc's comment is based on research done done by the American Bar Foundation, Frank Cross, and Charles Epp. It dates back to 2000, but Marc says "there is no reason to suspect that any of this has changed more than marginally.")

Charter Communications is annoying me.

So, I finally got a post up this morning. The time stamp is 7:45, but it went up at 11:39. For about the 7th time in the last 4 days, my internet connection cut out. It's constantly on and off.

Last night, it was on, then off, and I called Charter Communications and went through the familiar layers of the automated program until I got to the part where I was told that all the human beings were busy, so why not just get started with the help of the pleasant-voiced robot lady? Okay. Actually, I liked working with the robot lady. She didn't bug me with preliminary questions like what are the last 4 digits of my "social."

But then she misunderstood one of my answers and got onto a path of questions that were all wrong. Exclamations like "stop" and "you've misunderstood me" and "you're wrong, wrong, wrong, shut up, stop" all failed to get her attention. The connection restarted for some reason, so I just hung up. But an hour later, it was off again, and I was back on the phone. We got it fixed again, but an hour later it was off again. I shut the computer down and went to bed.

This morning it was working, and I wrote the long post about the Hindu priest, but then the connection cut out just as I needed to leave the house and go to an eye doctor appointment. No time to stop at a café and publish the post. After a morning spent answering questions like "Is it better this way or this way?" -- which in another context could be exciting questions -- I dropped back at home to see how things were. Still out. I relocated to a café so I could get on line without layers of robotic questions... and get some coffee.

I'm so annoyed with my Charter Communications service right now. They help you when you call, but I'm sick of calling only to lose the connection later. Maybe I'll just cancel all my service. I'll have to leave the house to get a high-speed connection and I'll just dial up at home. It would inject some moderation into my internet habit. But what would it do to my coffee habit? But it's all temporary, since I'm moving to Brooklyn in a few weeks. That's why I'm not in the mood to spend any time fixing problems. Perhaps I will think of that as liberating.

On a different level: life itself is temporary. Maybe you shouldn't consume too much of your time trying to fix your problems. Live while you can.

And yet a different level: Do you think when eye doctors have sex, they're all "which is better #1 or #2, #3 or #4"?

The tallest man in the world...

... and the shortest. Together. What difficulties in both conditions! I wonder which way is harder. But if you must be extremely and inconveniently tall or short, you may as well be the shortest or the tallest and have the glory of setting the record. The two men -- Bao Xishun and He Pingping -- look happy enough, and let's hope they are.

I note that the tall man -- Bao -- is 59 years old and has just married a 29 year old woman. Here they are in their magnificent Mongolian wedding costumes. I love the clothes.

Do they look strange together? The woman is two thirds his height... but only half his age. The height disparity is less than the age disparity. Whatever. She loves him:

You need to have feelings for someone to be in love. Even if he is a big shot, you can't love him without feelings.

Good point! You shouldn't marry someone just because he's tall.

"If we can have children, we'll have children," Bao said before the wedding. "If not, then not. If we have a child, I hope he or she can be about 2 metres tall. Then he or she can play basketball."