Justice McConnell?

Tony Mauro has a detailed piece in Law.com about Michael McConnell as a Supreme Court appointee. An excerpt:

[A]s scrutiny of his record intensifies, it's hard for many to decide exactly what McConnell is: conservative, liberal, or a perplexing blend of both.

Capitol Hill sources and other players in the increasingly frenzied Supreme Court sweepstakes place McConnell, a judge on the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, at or near the top of the short list of possible picks for the high court if a vacancy occurs later this month.

And while some liberals like McConnell, others are gearing up for a battle royal against him, especially over his sharp opposition to abortion rights and his deep support for school vouchers and for aid to parochial schools.

"He is very troubling, and very likely," says Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Yet if President George W. Bush appoints McConnell, 50, it appears he will have at least some support from liberal academics, as he did when more than 300 law professors supported him for the appeals court judgeship in 2002. "He has integrity, smarts, and is more open to a range of views than others we might get," says one liberal law school ally of McConnell who did not want his name revealed before a vacancy materializes.

UPDATE: Am I for Justice McConnell?, a commenter asked. I'm certainly one of the 300 lawprofs who signed the letter Mauro refers to. And I love the idea of a "perplexing blend" of liberal and conservative, and not just because that's what I consider myself. I'm sure my blend is different from his. But what I want is a real human being, a hardworking, serious scholar, who is not an ideologue, but someone we really can trust for the next thirty years. It will be a credit to President Bush if he picks Judge McConnell.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Gordon concurs.

He's remembered as "Explorer of Mars"...

But Norman H. Horowitz -- dead at age 90 -- opposed a manned mission to Mars:

In a 1988 interview with The New York Times, he voiced disapproval of proposals to send humans to Mars, saying: "It's just as wrong as can be. It's wrong because it guarantees there won't be any space science. We know how NASA treats science as a second-class citizen when it competes with man-in-space programs."

I'm inclined to believe that.

But I must say, when I saw the headline about a 90-year-old "Explorer of Mars," an idea that occurred to me was having a one-way mission, sending some quite old persons to Mars, with no way to bring them back. I was assuming he'd be in favor of sending a man to Mars and imagined him saying I'm 90, send me! I'm going to die pretty soon anyway. I'd like to have a shot at making it to Mars. And you can just leave me there!

Would it be wrong to have a mission like that? Why is it that young people take the most risks with their lives? Shouldn't the oldest people take the most daring risks, since they've lived the greater part of their lives and therefore risk less of it?

But Horowitz what not that kind of Mars explorer, not the physical adventurer, but a man who did his explorations intellectually.

Titan Arum!

Here's the UW website for tracking the progress on the blooming of our Titan Arum -- corpse flower.

Four of the five bracts (or scales) that enclose and protect the plant's spathe and spadix now have fallen. The largest bract was still in place this morning. When the last one has fallen, it will be a signal to the bud that it is time to move toward its bloom. The maroon color is developing on the inside of the spathe. There is just a hint of it visible today. Much of Titan IV's spadix is purple in color, just as it was in 2001. The bloom is expected within the next 4-8 days.

You can click on the live streaming video of the flower. It's currently 84". Two feet to go to set a world record.

UPDATE: The description above is from yesterday. Today:

As of this morning, the largest and last bract had fallen only partially. The top of the spathe is showing more maroon at the margin, and the upper part of the spadix is turning dark purple. The top one foot of it is a beautiful greenish cream color.

"Judith Christ."

The Anchoress, writing about the problem some feminists have with the use of male pronouns to refer to God, points to this book -- "Judith Christ Of Nazareth, The Gospels Of The Bible, Corrected To Reflect That Christ Was A Woman, Extracted From The Books Of Matthew, Mark, Luke, And John" -- which addresses the problem somebody somewhere apparently has with the idea that Jesus was male. Is it worth getting upset about that book? Maybe not. There are many versions of the Bible, some rewritten in slang or as comics. It's just another way to take in the material. It's not as if someone is messing up the only copy. If you're concerned about blasphemy or heresy, and you think this book is a problem, don't read it. I have much more of a problem with demands that shared rituals be rewritten to eliminate the masculine references to God -- even though the argument that God is not male is much stronger than the the argument that Jesus is not male.

The "Judith Christ" version of the Bible reminds me of Virginia Woolf's "Judith Shakespeare," in "A Room of One's Own." Except it's not like it at all. Woolf envisions a female equivalent of Shakespeare -- Shakespeare's sister -- and works out that she would never have achieved anything. But "Judith Christ" gets to do exactly the same things Jesus did, mostly because virtually no effort was put into the creation of the new book. Just a few "search and replace" commands would do the trick. It would take some imagination to come up with the Virginia Woolf-style treatment of "Judith Christ."

Sex and religion: the Christian gender gap.

In recent years feminists have criticized the Christian church for what they consider its patriarchy and sexism, but far more women than men go to church. Peter Steinfels writes in the NYT:

And the pattern is not limited to the contemporary United States. With a few possible exceptions in Eastern Europe and Asia, the gender gap holds for Catholics and Protestants worldwide, even for the rapidly growing Pentecostal churches in Africa and Latin America. It has long been the norm in Catholic Europe, perhaps since the Middle Ages. Certainly the rolls of New England churches in Puritan times recorded a majority of female members, and 19th-century church leaders reported a similar preponderance of women at services.

By contrast, [David Murrow, author of "Why Men Hate Going to Church"] claims, no such gender gap exists in Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism or Islam - an interesting point, although one he doesn't at all document. "Only Christianity," he writes, "has a consistent, nagging shortage of male practitioners."

So why do men hate going to church? Hormones, says Mr. Murrow. Brain structure. Prehistoric imprinting.

Men can't sit still, want to be outdoors, aren't very verbal and can't read and sing at the same time. Men crave adventure, risk, danger and heroic sacrifice. Men value boldness. They love action, tools, technology and competition.

Men are hunters and warriors. Women are gatherers and child-tenders.

Is all this true? Mr. Murrow clearly thinks so, even if he apologizes now and then for being politically incorrect, or allows for many female exceptions, or hedges about whether he thinks those traits are ingrained and relatively fixed or culturally created and relatively malleable.

And Christian churches, he maintains, have an antimale culture. Their "spiritual thermostats" are set for women - set for comfort instead of challenge. The emphasis is on relationships, security, sensitivity, nurturance, children and family. Guys don't get it.

Well, my spiritual thermostat is set for being disgusted by that sort of talk.

Steinfels is somewhat critical of Murrow, especially his self-help writing style. He notes (citing the European historian Hugh McLeod):

[F]or freethinkers in the last two centuries the problem was never that too few men went to church but that too many women did. Their common explanation was nearly the opposite of Mr. Murrow's, although by today's standards it was no less politically incorrect. It was not that men were driven away from church by their warrior hormones, their less flexible brains and the peer pressure of their drinking buddies, but rather that they stayed away because of their greater rationality and composure, while women remained pious because of their emotional susceptibility and their subservience to the clergy.

What a complicated problem! The most complicated part of it is that you can't talk about it at all without offending everyone. What is the message here? Women should stop complaining about patriarchy and sexism, because the church needs to be patriarchal and sexist to keep the men from avoiding it altogether?

UPDATE: The quoted material above suggests that men and women inherently require different religions, but to put it that way is to say that religions exist to serve people's emotional needs and not because they are true in the sense that they claim to be true. If they are only serving emotional needs, then there's nothing wrong with women attending and men opting out. The problem goes away except to the extent that the women who attend want male companionship. If a religion is true in the sense that it claims, it would make demands on people, not simply cater to their existing preferences. But in a free society, people can decide not to meet the demands. If so, is it anything more than a social problem if more men than women turn away? The religion that claims to be true shouldn't change its tenets in order to balance the sexes, but I would think it could change some things about the service, such as the music or the sermon topics or the poliitical advice.

"A grotesque use of church."

The WaPo reports:

Gov. Rick Perry (R) is going to church tomorrow, not necessarily for the obvious reason: He plans to sign two bills sought by conservatives and passed by the Republican-dominated Texas legislature. One requires parents to sign off on abortions for minors; the other calls for a November vote on a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

Actually, the signing will be held in the gymnasium of the private school that is next door to and under the auspices of Calvary Cathedral, one of the largest Christian churches in Fort Worth.

"This is way over the line," said Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. "This is a grotesque use of church by a political figure."

People who are religious Christians should find this as offensive as people who are not find it.

The spell is broken.

I watched the big National Spelling Bee the other day. Don't know why I didn't post about it. Maybe I didn't have the heart to say things about how the kids looked. (If a kid's going on TV and has even the shadow of a mustache, it's time to start shaving. Somebody needs to tell you that!) But looking back -- I was just reading this post over at Throwing Things -- I realize I do have something I wanted to say. I think the new success of the Spelling Bee, now that it's the subject of a movie and a Broadway show, has destroyed its beauty and innocence. Although some of the kids retained that classic nerdiness -- I loved the kid who turned to the side and talked into his fist for each syllable -- a lot of them had become smartasses, like the girl who asked "How do you spell that?" and the girl who heard a word and said "Whatever!" If you think you're cool, why am I watching you spell? The whole charm was that you were the completely uncool kids.

Why Brad Pitt is fun to watch half the time.

I agree with this theory. And don't forget "Fight Club," where Brad's good.

Number 1.

From the Daily News:

For the first time since WKTU (103.5 FM) started doing top-103 countdowns for each decade, Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive" is not No.1 for the '70s.

This shocking news came out when 'KTU did its latest countdown and the Bee Gees' "Stayin' Alive" bumped Gloria to No.2.

Prince's "1999" was No.1 for the '80s, while Madonna's "Vogue" was No.1 for the '90s.

So dance music ruled for thirty years? If you'd have told me in 1976 that was going to happen, I would have broken down and cried!

It seems to me they didn't even get the best Prince song from the '80s, but I think what happens with these things is that something becomes iconic, so that it's not the song so much anymore but everything it's come to symbolize. Like for example, the way life is just a party and you wouldn't even care if it was Judgment Day, people were running everywhere, and, of course, the sky was all purple. Somehow that sums up how, looking back, you feel about the 80s.

So what are we to make of "Stayin' Alive" upsetting "I Will Survive"? Our idea of the 70s, up until recently, entailed a woman summoning up her inner powers, and now the decade feels more like a man just struggling to get by. As with "1999," we've got destruction all around -- "Feel the city breakin' and ev'rybody shakin'" -- and the singer's way to deal with it is to party: "Got the wings of heaven on my shoes/I'm a dancin' man and I just can't lose."

And actually, "Vogue" tells the same story. There's "heartache" and "the pain of life" "everywhere," and the solution: "It's called a dance floor."

So there's your formula for popular music: acknowledge that the pain of the real world and present dancing -- to this very song -- as the solution. People love that.

UPDATE: Looking at the WKTU website now, I can see the lists were specifically of dance songs. The Daily News didn't specify that, but I guess if you're in NY you know the station's format. Side note: I can remember listening to top 100 lists on a NY station in the mid-70s. Number 1 was always "In the Still of the Night."

"We didn't know how people were so into a stinky plant, a monster, a beast."

The WaPo notices us:

The rare, big and extremely stinky flower that caused a sensation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison when it last bloomed in 2001 could become the world's largest flower when it blooms again next week.

The titan arum stood at 6 feet, 4 inches Thursday in a UW-Madison greenhouse, on pace to rival the world record for cultivated flowers when it blooms and releases its trademark roadkill scent in the coming days....

In 2001, Big Bucky's bloom drew some 20,000 visitors who waited in long lines to see the spectacle...

"We didn't know how people were so into a stinky plant, a monster, a beast," said Mohammad Fayyaz, director of UW-Madison's Botany Garden and Greenhouses....

"If we break the record," he said, "it's great for the country, the state and the city of Madison."

This is so exciting! Right next to the Law School, too. I can tell when it's about to bloom, because then line backs up right under my office window. What a privilege!

What's better, a group blog or an individual blog?

Gordon Smith has a lot of interesting things to say comparing group blogs and individual blogs. Is one sort of blog better than the other? It seems that there are a lot of variables that make some group blogs better and some individual blogs better. But what are all these variables? Gordon gets the subject going. Some pairs or sets of bloggers make each other better because they generate more posts, with more regularity, and because they play off each other or balance each other in some way. But sometimes a blogger you like adds a co-blogger to plump things up and only dilutes the quality of the blog. One blog I used to read every day added a co-blogger, and I found myself reading less and less over time, so that now I check in maybe twice a month.

Some blogs have so many people it's just irritating. HuffPo is the egregious example here. What a mess! Some political hacks churn out whole columns, some comedians jot down some notes that are kind of funny if you imagine the way they'd say it out loud, and some slightly well-known people repeat very conventional observations with no style at all. No one seems capable of keeping a solo blog, but if there were a few people in there who could, I wouldn't know, because I'm not going to slog through all the bad. And I find the environment there so un-charming that it doesn't put me in the mood to find the good.

I like running an individual blog, though I did temporarily group-blog last fall when Megan McArdle, Michael Totten, and I took over Instapundit (scroll down). When I did that, I still kept this blog going, and I was very aware of the different feelings I had writing in the two places. Over here, the whole blog is my self-expression. I don't have to stop and think about whether my saying something is good for the group. But operating within a group is good in different ways. It occurred to me as I wrote that that it's like the difference between living single and living in a family. There are benefits and limitations in both, but once you've made your choice, it's going to change what kind of a person you are.

Gordon wonders whether some individual bloggers -- he names me and two others -- could make some big, popular megablog, and he thinks it probably wouldn't work. The whole would be less than the sum of the parts. I guess that's a compliment! Are there people you want to read solo whom you'd like less if they were matched up with some appropriate co-bloggers? (And who would be appropriate for me?) And are there group blogs that you read that are written by individuals you'd shun if they set up a separate site?

A side note: the group blogs Gordon especially likes -- Marginal Revolution, Crooked Timber, and Volokh Conspiracy -- all put the blogger's name at the beginning of the post. I wish all group and partnership blogs would follow this pattern. Too many times have I read a post thinking it was one blogger only to realize it was one of the others, and on some blogs I only like one of the bloggers, and that little extra trouble of scrolling down to see the name and then back up to start reading is a disincentive to go over there at all. I know this is a default in the software, but changing it is important!

Cedar Point.

Last month, when I was planning my drive out to Ithaca and back, lots of readers advised me to take a quick detour from I-90 and go to the roller coaster paradise at Cedar Point. I didn't. But Rick Lee did and has the pictures to prove it.

Oscar teaches the Germans a lesson...

At the University of Boogie.

That was hips.

I love the way this BBC article about how fat hips protect women from heart attacks is headlined "Curvier women 'will live longer'" and illustrated by an above-the-waist photo of Catherine Zeta-Jones. (Via Memeorandum.)

UPDATE: And what's with the euphemism "curvy"? This is an article about fat hips. Really, even "hips" is a euphemism. You know where that fat is when the measurement at hip level is 40+ inches. But this whole thing is pseudo-science-y! The chemistry cited in the article has to do with the fat tissue, so there shouldn't be any magic to the inches. Picture a very short, small-boned women. I'm sure she'd have the relevant fat tissue at well under 40 inches. And why would it be all or nothing? Get it up to 40 or there's no point at all in maintaining that fat ass!

ANOTHER UPDATE: And check out this picture Jeremy took in Poland. I think that poster says "Americans are fat."

A new way to get famous.

Reading aloud by the side of the street in Beijing.

The shrine...

Of Hollywood Beauty.