Poor Ingmar Bergman. The BBC reports on a Swedish TV interview:

"I don't watch my own films very often. I become so jittery and ready to cry... and miserable. I think it's awful ... [I've] managed to push the medium to something beyond the normal boundaries, and also myself ... There hasn't been anyone with whom I can discuss my scripts ...Even when the film is done, there is no-one I can show it to who gives his sincere opinion. There is silence."

Is it spring yet? On the way to the café, spring seems to be an iffy proposition.



Here's the café, Dancing Grounds--four blocks from my house.



Walking home, duly caffeinated, I'm thinking it is Spring. Look, that tree is squirming with pleasure!

The right way to think about US News rankings? Gordon Smith discusses this forthcoming article, "What Law Schools Can Learn from Billy Beane and the Oakland Athletics," from two Cincinnati lawprofs, Paul L. Caron and Rafeal Gely. Caron and Gely pick up on Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler picking up on Michael Lewis ("Moneyball"):

In many ways, legal education is teeming with more inefficiencies than Beane uncovered in baseball. We argue that changes in the economic conditions of higher education and the legal profession, combined with increasing demands for accountability and transparency, created the market demand for measuring organizational success which U.S. News & World Report met with its annual law school rankings.

As Gordon notes, baseball teams have a pretty specific goal, winning games, and certainty in the knowledge of whether they've reached the goal: they either win or lose. But what is the goal of a law school? Yet claims that our goals are too subtle and amorphous to quantify seem less attractive than usual if we think in terms of accountability and transparency. But who is US News to set the terms of the account? Ah, thanks to Caron and Gely if they can advance the ball (sorry for the wrong sports metaphor ... and for a sports metaphor, period), but I can already hear all the old protestations being raised again. It does seem to me, though, that if there is a game to be played using the rankings, there is something to be said in favor of the upstart schools that find ways to challenge the old established institutions that were hoping to rest on the stability of longstanding reputation.

UPDATE: Paul Caron has a new blog, Tax Prof Blog.

Howard Stern ... Oprah. That picture of Frank Zappa reminds me of Howard Stern, which reminds me that I had to laugh out loud this morning when I heard a TV news report that Howard was saying he's no worse than Oprah. Jeff Jarvis, who is intensely covering the Stern controversy, has a good account of Howard making the comparison. The comparison is more apt than you might think. The difference is one of tone: Stern is having fun and being funny. Oprah is informational and cautionary. Doesn't that make distinguishing them viewpoint discrimination?

In which Althouse has a psychedelic flashback. I don't know about you, but sometimes I've tried to remember, what were the shows I saw at the Fillmore East? I remembered some of the bands, but who really were the others? So I was thrilled to find this site, which is trying to list every act and every show.

So who played with The Mothers of Invention in 1969? The date was Feb. 21/22, and the opening acts were Chicago and The Buddy Miles Express. And I went to see Neil Young & Crazy Horse one night in 1970 and the opening acts were The Steve Miller Band and Miles Davis! When did I see The New Riders of the Purple Sage play with The Grateful Dead? 1970? 1971? I can't tell from this, because there are several such shows. When I saw them there was a third act, which played in the middle, that was just Pig Pen and Jerry Garcia on acoustic guitars. It must have been May 15, 1970, because I remember hearing them make a big deal about the upcoming concert with Crosby, Stills & Nash, which caused us to scoff and shake our heads in dismay. Rock and Roll was over and people like them were destroying it! Or was it this night, when "Phil places two bass notes that are just perfect."

Remember when people were all excited about Delaney & Bonnie? And who were Mason & Elliot that they were headliners? (Oh.) Remember when people were crazy for Ten Years After? Remember The Hello People (they played at my high school once)("It's a Monday Kind of Tuesday"... or was it Wednesday?). Remember Elephant Memory? Or am I mixing them up with Crazy Elephants? And who were Cactus? How could they have topped Edgar Winter and Humble Pie some night in 1971? And there's Elton John, late of American Idol, already headlining in 1971 (with Wishbone Ash and Sea Train).

And there's T. Rex in 1971--was it already T. Rex or was it still Tyrannosaurus Rex? (We played their album Unicorn all the time in 1970.) In 1970, you could have seen The Incredible String Band (I knew people who worshipped them!) along with The Stone Monkey Mime Group (good lord! who were they?). And who were Soft White Underbelly, Grootna, and Blodwyn Pig?

Looking for some answers, I ran across Fuzz Acid & Flowers, which is an amazing compilation of info about "U.S. psych and garage music 1964 - 1972," with "band histories/musical analysis on over 5,400 US acts of the era." Great fun browsing just for the psychedelic names. We remember Strawberry Alarm Clock, but there was also Strawberry Tuesday and Strawberry Window. Was there Orange? Of course: Orange Colored Sky, The Orange Groove, and The Orange Wedge. How about "electric"--was that a popular psychedelic word? Here's the official list:

The Electrical Banana
The Electric Company
Electric Firebirds
The Electric Flag
Electric Hair
Electric Junkyard
Electric Love
Electric Piano Playground
The Electric Prunes
The Electric Screwdriver
Electric Toilet
Electric Tomorrow
Electric Train
Electrified People
The Electro Magnetic Flowerseed
The Electronic Concept Orchestra

And I love the places where the same psychedelic idea struck several groups independently:

Stix and Stoned
Stix and Stones
Stix & Stonz

Okay, enough of that. Go make your own discoveries. I've got admissions files and a law review edit and income tax forms ...

Oh, and that previous entry, which looks psychedelic next to this one--it's a Monday kind of Tuesday/It's a Thursday kind of Saturday--is just about the NYT crossword puzzle. ... In case you're inclined to worry about me! Did you finish the Saturday puzzle?

Cherty? Cherty?? I guess that's why this is a Saturday and not a Thursday.

Which side benefited from the insistence that Rice testify? Consider the ratings:

Citing figures from Nielsen Media Research, the networks said Fox News drew an average of 1.921 million total viewers in the period from 9 a.m. to noon ET on Thursday, ahead of CNN's 1.228 million and MSNBC's 470,000.

So Bush supporters, it's fair to say, were far more likely to watch than Bush opponents. Democrats Bob Kerrey and Richard Ben-Veniste grandstanded, using Rice's presence as a way to get attention for their own opinions. But I'm sure this made a terrible impression on most of the people who were actually paying attention. The Democratic partisans who would have enjoyed Kerrey and Ben-Veniste's behavior were apparently not interested in hearing what Rice had to say.

Madison, Good Friday. A street preacher in Library Mall. As I walk by I hear him say, "Boys, you need to control your sexuality. Girls, you too. And about alcohol..." The laundry list of sins to clean up. In the café, where I'm uploading the photograph, the man at the next table is explaining Descartes's proof of the existence of God.

UPDATE: On my way back from the café, I saw the preacher again and from a distance saw that he had drawn a crowd and that they were laughing, mockingly, which seemed to fit the crucifixion imagery. As I got close enough to hear what was being said, it turned out they were asking him serious theology questions: from the question of whether only Christians were saved, they were moving on to why there is evil in the world. So the age-old debates continued on this Good Friday at both ends of State Street.

The political and the nonpolitical blog. Nina is wondering why she doesn't feel like blogging about politics. Brayden King is commenting on a recent Time article about family blogs and weighing in on the big subject of "Domestic blogging and the separate spheres myth." Apt. 11D has a list of things currently excluded from her brain, and she's linking to This Woman's Work, a "mommy blog" that the Time article talks about. Here's a blog called The Mommy Blog. The subject of a blog gender gap is on the table. It's been noted that political blogs, which tend to be the most popular, are much more likely to be written by men, but I don't think it's necessarily a woman thing to turn away from the political right now. Gordon recently noted a lack of interest in writing about politics.

I think it makes a lot of sense, after the primary season, to ignore the Presidential campaign as much as possible. There's no reason for a moderate like me, who might end up voting for either candidate, to follow the campaigns right now. For one thing, it's not fair to Kerry, because I find him a boring speaker and I'm really going to get tired of him if I pay any attention to him. For another thing, I can't think about him seriously until I know what he plans to do in Iraq, and he hasn't said what he will do. (Will, meaning, in the future. How the past might have been different is not going to determine my vote. And don't try my patience by telling me that I can infer what he will do in the future from what he asserts he would have done in the past.) He has no motivation to take a position on Iraq until closer to the election: why should he pin himself down when events are in flux?

The Presidential campaign affects what too many people say about too many things, and that causes me to turn away from a lot of subjects that might otherwise be bloggable. Take yesterday for example. I couldn't bear to watch Bob Kerrey and Richard Ben-Veniste bully Condoleezza Rice. I couldn't watch The Daily Show, formerly my favorite TV show, because Jon Stewart has put partisanship over comedy and has sunk to a smirking hostility toward everyone in the Bush Administration. His take on Condi Rice's testimony last night was to assume everyone believed she couldn't have defended the Bush record and, for a joke, to have her responding to their questions by babbling in Spanish (??). I can also page through The New York Times a lot faster because every political story seems framed to undercut Bush.

One thing I like about blogging is that it lets you see a pattern emerging over time: the blog preserves a record of what has caught my eye from day to day over the months. Part of what I see is my aversion to politics and a search for the things about life that are not politics, but that does tend to bring me back to politics some of the time. Basically, I like miscellaneous commentary that is indirectly personally revealing, because it lets readers see that emerging pattern of things that caught your attention from day to day.

I do, however, avoid revealing personal facts about my family, so this would never be a "mommy blog." My sons are adults, anyway. It's easier to write about really young kids because they don't read what you say and get mad and demand that you quit invading their privacy and embarrassing them. Babies have no idea that pictures of them are being put up for all the world to see.

UPDATE: Whoops! No sooner do I write that than Prof. Yin puts up a picture of his new baby! Very cute! Congratulations!

Feminism, the Quentin Tarantino version. This is from a Q&A in Entertainment Weekly (you probably have to be a subscriber, like me, to read the whole thing):

After seeing ''Reservoir Dogs,'' I never would have pegged you for a feminist. But ''Jackie Brown'' and ''Kill Bill'' are female empowerment fests -- and Jackie and the Bride are certainly two of the most multidimensional women ever to be seen in genre films.

I definitely do have a feminist [sensibility]. I almost feel weird about categorizing it as ''feminist.'' Not because I am demonizing the word, but I think it's more of a femininity, an appreciation for women rather than a label. But I mean, it's not hard to figure it out if you think about it. I was raised by a single mom who came from white-trash beginnings. She created a very nice career for herself as an executive -- a legend in her own time in the HMO field. From the very beginning I never considered that there were boundaries, things a woman can and can't do. I had my mom as an example of someone who came from nothing and she was going out to eat in nice restaurants, paying her own way. She had nice s---, she drove a Cadillac Seville, and she was living the life.

The the. I noticed that when Gordon linked to my prediction for the Apprentice finale, he wrote "The Apprentice finale." I just had to say:

You know, I thought a lot about whether to capitalize the "t" in "the Apprentice finale." If you're capitalizing the "t," it should be "the The Apprentice finale." And now, I feel I have to blog this conversation, and if I blog this conversation, I will officially and conspicuously become a person who blogs too much.

A Person Who Blogs Too Much.

The plot of the Apprentice finale predicted. Here's my theory about why Omarosa was picked to be on Kwame's team and given the role (and I do mean role) of blatantly screwing everything up. As I noted yesterday, it didn't make any sense for Kwame to pick her, especially to also pick Heidi. So what was the set up? (It is all a set up, of course.) Did you notice Kwame saying things like, too bad I can't fire my employees? I was thinking, why can't he? Now, I realize, he couldn't last night because it wasn't the finale. Next week, things will escalate over the two hour period, with Bill's team doing reasonably well and Kwame's team falling to pieces as Omarosa screws up one thing after another and as she gets into amusing catfights with Heidi. The audience will be led, by skillful editing, to believe Kwame is going down and Bill is coasting toward victory. Then, at the last moment (where everything always happens in these competitions), Kwame will say to Omarosa, "You're fired!"--which will seems really exciting and cool. On the basis of that brilliant move, firing Omarosa (which in reality any fool would do), Kwame will be recognized as the true leader and will win the game. The show will tie up with some elegance, because Trump has been firing people all along and Kwame, as the only one who ever did the Trump-like thing and fired someone, will be deemed truly Trumpian enough to lead a Trump company. See? That plays out so neatly. That's got to be it. Time saved: 2 hours. Or now does the finale sound like fun? Well, enjoy it. I've taken a vow...

The deep chasm of extreme nothing. The Apprentice revealed its essential emptiness tonight, as Gordon's simulblogging documents. I don't really want to throw good time after bad by talking about it, but basically, the whole thing is bogus. First, I can't believe that when Bill and Kwame got to pick teams that Omarosa wasn't the last one picked. She wasn't even close to last. And Kwame got stuck with both Omarosa and her nemesis Heidi? How did that happen? I can't believe that was just Kwame picking. Then what was the competition? Interviewing?? Some damn golf course thing that seemed to only have to do with moving a lot of boxes (incomprehensible!) and then making sure Jessica Simpson got from the airport to the hotel (a flunky's job!)? And we're left with a "To be continued" cliffhanger about the "missing rock star"??? Cut back and forth to worried faces while playing the chiming music of doom all you want but that is just nothing! Nothing!!

So next week is the finale. The two hour finale. Let me make a public vow: I will not watch it!

UPDATE: Wow, Miss Alli at Television Without Pity totally disagrees with me. She gives the episode an A+ (seemingly largely because she agrees with Trump's choices--why should I care!?). I've never disagreed with TWoP more.

Do you crack jokes about antitrust law? If you can, you should give yourself a lot of credit, because The Daily Show got all geared up to do a segment on the Madison free-drinks antitrust problem (noted here) and they gave up. They didn't know how to make it funny. That's what I heard.

Condoleezza Rice. So I TiVoed Condi Rice's testimony and tried to watch some of it, but I find it impossible and irritating to try to look through the fog of the Presidential campaign, which surrounds everything. I know they can't help it, but I don't have to watch. Averting one's eyes from the Presidential campaign--my policy until after the conventions--is quite hard to do, because it's everywhere.

"Get Me a Table Without Flies, Harry." Speaking of sketchbook travels, this book, by Bill Griffith, had a big influence on me. Unfortunately, it's out of print and Amazon isn't even showing a picture of the cover of the book. Worse, there are only three reviews, all high praise, but two of them didn't figure out how to give a star rating and are counted as zeroes, leaving the book with one and a half stars. Too bad! Oh, forget Amazon--and curse the tendency to always start there--go here. Bill Griffith sells it from his own site--which has lots of great stuff--with the inscription of your choice. Get this book!