Non-smoking gun.

The Smoking Gun website is often interesting, but how is this one a smoking gun sort of thing? Diane Lane wants fresh-squeezed juice twice a day? Maybe this is meant as some sort of refreshment after the more oppressive scandals and revelations of the past week. The actress's requests have to do with maintaining her physical health and appearance. I don't see anything "cool, confidential, quirky" about this. Lane is a terrific actress who deserves the accommodations she asks for. In fact, these are the sort of accommodations that ought to be routinely provided whenever movie producers have an investment in the beauty and physical stamina of an actor. You're lucky the star wants to keep in shape and is concentrating her drinking efforts on juice.

Once again the New York Times got the Quote of the Day wrong.

Obviously, it should have been:

"Kotex looked like Dr. Scholl's Wart Remover, Tampax looked like Lactaid and Playtex looked like Benadryl."

UPDATE: What's with my across-the-hall colleague blogging on the same NYT article four minutes after I did? There was no discussion of that article or any plan to synchronize in any way. Was it something like this phenomenon?

A picture we don't want you to have.

AFP reports this statement by Laura Bush:

"It is really, really sad, I mean, it is sad. I think we -- we agonize as each of those pictures come out and as we see them. It is a picture we don't want the rest of the world to have of us. ... Those photographs don't represent America. They don't represent our troops. And they don't represent the way people in the United States of America think or act ... It is not a fair picture of the United States military."

Photographs make such distinct pictures in the mind that it is difficult for all the other information to compete. We'd like to construct a picture in the minds of everyone who thinks about the United States, a picture of fairness and justice. But it takes a concerted effort over a broad range of activities to create the desired picture in the minds of thinking human beings who are right to be skeptical of self-serving representations. The concrete photographs are crushingly devastating to that other picture we tried to create.

Laura Bush didn't mean to make a statement with a double meaning, but clearly those photographs were pictures our government did not want people to have. I'm struck, when reading the news reports of the President's responses to the crisis, that he seems to have the conception that the main problem is the release of the photographs, rather than the abuse itself.

Congress and the photographs.

Alan Wizbicki has an excellent piece in TNR lambasting the Senate Armed Services Committee members who complained to Secretary Rumsfeld that they had not been adequately informed about the abuses of the Iraqi prisoners. Wizbicki's point is that they had plenty of information before the photographs came out. He nails Senator Warner, who last November was complaining that the Army had punished "Allen West, a lieutenant colonel ... who stag[ed] a mock execution of an Iraqi prisoner":

Warner knew, and in one case, approved, of American interrogation practices that skirted ethical lines. For him to now demand to know why members of Congress were "not properly and adequately informed" about prisoner abuses reeks of hypocrisy. They were informed. A more relevant, and humble, question might be why they waited until the Abu Ghraib scandal broke to do anything about it.

It seems to me that what upset the Senators was not the lack of information about the existence of abuse but the lack of information about the existence of photographs. It is dismaying to realize how much difference the photographs have made to so many people. What shameful human weakness lies in our willingness to tolerate abuse when we don't see it! Are we so bereft of imagination that without photographs we don't really understand what is happening? Are we such creatures of emotion that we feel compelled to take suffering into account when photographs have moved us, but committed to do what seems to need to be done as long as there are no photographs?

Clean your desk ... and reminisce about glue.

If you're thinking of cleaning your desk, maybe this guy will give you some inspiration. How did I find that website? I was drinking a Diet Pepsi, and just as I finished it called to mind an old flavor/smell? What was that mysterious call from the recesses of memory? It was ... it was ... mucilage! Remember those Lepage's Mucilage bottles, the ones with the red nipple-like tops? The were once everywhere, but now you never see them. Replaced by--what?--glue sticks? Computer graphics? I wanted a picture of the thing and found this desk-cleaning site, which had a picture here of a mucilage bottle, but a late-model, plastic version, not the classic one I was looking for. Ah, but here, here's what I wanted to find (thanks to a person who is way more interested in mucilage than I am):

Redbud.

Redbud trees with boy.



Redbud trees without boy.

Travails of a lawprof blogger.

Well, I don't know what to think about this, but I updated the post of mine he linked (the ping post) just to be on the safe side. But I see he's created a "Law Professor Blog Honor Roll," a bit of a spoof of my colleague Gordon Smith's "Law Student Blog Honor Roll," and since he put this blog on the list, any possible slurs will be overlooked. I've noticed that you get more links when people disapprove of what you're saying, so that if one is really focused on playing the game of blogging (as discussed in the ping post), then one ought to take swipes at people and say outrageous things that people feel compelled to post to disagree with. If you take a swipe at someone and link them, they can see on Technorati that you've linked, and then they might answer, linking you: link achieved! Actually, only one thing bugs me about Notes from the (Legal) Underground's post about my ping post. It's that all the other lawprofs (other than the nice-letter writing Ribstein) on his list all have more exciting distinctions. That and the fact that I still don't know how to ping ... or really even what pinging is.

Lawprofs blogging about grading exams.

I've blogged about proctoring exams (carefully!), but I'm not going to blog about grading exams (though I'm obviously blogging about not blogging about grading exams). Prof. Yin's experience served as a warning to me. Students are very sensitive about the grading process--with good reason. Law school grades have a huge effect on them. So it doesn't really work for a lawprof to make casual comments about how things are going with the grading or to engage in the usual complaints about workload. I won't report, for example, finishing grading, because there is a gap between when I hand them in and when the grades become available to the students, so knowing reporting that I've finished--and I'm not saying I have!--could only stir up anxieties. I hope that saying even this much does not stir up anxieties!

UPDATE: Sua Sponte is taking this a little hard. I'm not "self-censoring" because Prof. Yin got a slight nip over saying "unfortunately" in connection with the fact that he wasn't done grading. I think bloggers generally have to be careful about what they say. Clearly, I want to use my blogs to express myself and reveal something about myself, but I also keep many thoughts and personal facts to myself. One has to be selective. It might seem as though I'm willing to jot down anything that pops into my head, but that really wouldn't work very well! The subject of grading is not a good one. There's too much potential for causing anxiety and not really much of anything original to say.

ANOTHER UPDATE: You know, it's fine for Letters of Marque to say that students ought to be more thick-skinned, but I still don't think it's my role to churn out material to help them develop that thick skin. Partly, I'm concerned about the students--possibly a very small percentage--who have a lot of anxiety that would be stoked by casual comments made on a lawprof blog. You need to remember that there are students worried about surviving in law school, and signs that the lawprof is getting exasperated or inattentive are needlessly painful. But partly, I'm concerned about my own well-being. I'm not all that thick-skinned myself, and I think if I used this blog in a way that upset students, they'd soon be attacking me on their blogs and I wouldn't like if very much. On the other hand, I could get a lot of links that way. But then I'm getting my share of links just by taking this don't-blog-about-grading position.

Who is going to kill Tony Soprano?

I read last night's episode of The Sopranos as foreshadowing Tony Soprano's death at the end of this season, the last season. The real question is who will kill him, and several characters (and entities) have been set on a path that seems to lead to their being the killer.

I tried a poll here, but it behaved badly, causing a big, annoying space that I couldn't eradicate, so I'll just list the potential killers.

Johnny Sack
Janice
Carmela
Christopher
al Qaeda
the FBI

Sorry to end the polling fun ... but some people don't like blog polls anyway. There seems to be a glitch in the revamped Blogger, that is not handling polls well. Too bad. I like them.

This is not what Americans are.

I've been avoiding writing about the abuse of the Iraqi prisoners. It is hard for me to find a way to write about it, but we were talking about it a lot at my house yesterday, as we watched the Sunday news analysis shows. When I start to write something like "it's hard to take the accumulating weight of the photographs," it sounds quite idiotic, as if we are the ones being abused, as if having to look at the photographs is painful when the photographs depict pain of a sort that we are blessedly free of. I keep waiting to see how President Bush will deal with this crisis, which threatens to undermine every positive motive that has been asserted for the invasion. Surely, it isn't enough to say Saddam was much worse; we have to demonstrate a completely different nature altogether for what we are doing to make sense. It isn't enough to prosecute a few assorted evildoers (whether the prosecution is on TV or not), just as it wasn't enough to say after 9/11, as some people other than Bush did, "We need to arrest the people responsible for this and bring them to trial." Something much more comprehensive is needed to root out this abuse. If Bush doesn't find a way to do something comprehensive, he deserves to be replaced. Whatever deficiencies Kerry may have--and I have not been a Kerry supporter--I would like to see him moved into the Presidency to make clear statement of the thing that Bush himself keeps going around saying: this is not what Americans are.

The new Blogger.

Wow, Blogger just suddenly redid all sorts of things. Do I dare spring for one of its new templates, after all the effort I've put into tweaking the old Bluebird template into this thing I've got which might perhaps be called Yellowbird? I've long disfavored white letters on dark, but I can't help thinking the photographs would look nice on black. So okay, I think I'm going to spring for it. Don't think you've come to the wrong place. So this is the end of Yellow.

UPDATE: Well, that was a bit harrowing. Now, you can see, I haven't gone to black, I've gone to stark, raving white. And it's not one of the new templates, it's actually one of the old templates, though not the old one I had been using. I tried the exciting new black one, but the sidebar was too wide and just overlapped with my photographs. That had to go. Now, I don't really have a sidebar anymore. And I've lost my whole blogroll, unfortunately. I'll have to figure out how to redo a sidebar. If I could just figure out how to narrow the sidebar so it doesn't encroach on the photographs. I'll have to leave that until tomorrow (or later). Enough tech-y excitement for the night. What hurt the most was ousting the old Sitemeter, but I've restored at least that.

FURTHER UPDATE: In the end, I used one of the new templates, so it does have a sidebar and it doesn't overlap with the photographs. This very plain template is called Tekka, and the fanciest thing about it seems to be an interest in dotted lines. There's that big vertical dotted line over there, and when you point at a link it gets a cute red dotted line underneath.

YET MORE: As Sarah points out, Tekka is one of the old templates. Last night I made it all gray, and in an html feat I'm pretty proud of, because I'm always just feeling my way around and guessing, I narrowed the sidebar to make room for full-size photographs. I considered putting the picture back--note that the new Blogger is pushing people toward including photographs--but that would require doing it in black and white, and it looked too grim.

Mother's Day: walking home after dinner.

The tulips are past their prime:



And the week's rains have brought lushness to the residential sidestreets:

"Suddenly, liking Prince doesn't feel like such a chore."

A nice cover story in Rolling Stone about Prince. Here's a bit that struck me, just Prince talking about the saxophone player:

"I had an epiphany last night ... I was offstage, listening to Michael Phillips take his solo ... I was thinking, 'Wow, listen to those people responding, and all he's doing is playing a saxophone.' They can feel that what he's doing is real. So many shows now, they have pyrotechnics, pre-taped vocals and musical parts, and it's so dead. But here's one man breathing into an instrument, and the whole room feels alive. It made me want to rise up to that level when I came back onstage."

American Idol: why Diana will win.

For one thing, she's been number 1 in the voting for the past four weeks! So Kristin Veitch reports on E! Online, citing info from show insiders. For another thing, there's this:

Monday night's getting-to-know-you special showed the only candidate who can handle herself in interviews is Miss DDG. The others looked like terrified deer in headlights .... Diana seemed a bubbly, well-spoken, 16-year-old southern belle who wants nothing more than to be the next American Idol--while La Toya came across as a tired mother who wants nothing more than to see her children and take a nap. ("It's never going to stop" isn't the best way to garner votes.)

Interesting. The judges have wielded the you're-too-young theme quite a few times. Some of the promoting of Fantasia and La Toya has come in the form of praising their maturity. But in the end, maybe the show's fans really do want someone very fresh, even though it's hard for the youngest contestants to keep up with all the work and to engage with some of the themes that reach back many decades. The younger contestants face an additional burden of having to put in 15 hours a week of schooling. Diana clearly came across as the one with the most personality in those interviews--Veitch is right. She may seem a bit too pageant-y and robotic, but I'm sure the producers can find ways to turn that into an advantage. It will be interesting to see if they pick themes in the next couple weeks that help or hurt her.

Look, $17,000 flip-flops.

This is not some satirical piece about a gift Teresa Heinz Kerry could buy for her husband, it's an actual pair of diamond and gold flip-flops, pictured in a NYT article about how interested people are these days in really expensive luxury goods. 

  

But actually, the store that sells the flip-flops only has one pair like this, and the rest, of which there are only a few, are more in the $3,000 price range. And really, these shoes cost no more than the price of an ad in the NYT. So they don't even need to be sold: they worked to get a write-up in the Times--and they'll keep working, attracting people into the store to look at them. The store never needs to sell them--and it can even retrieve the gold and diamonds in the end. And if someone ever does buy them, it won't be because they are addled by dollar signs, it will be because they are entranced and amused by them sort of like the way people feel about this. 

 

But maybe you aren't amused by Meret Oppenheim's Fur-lined Teacup. And maybe you actually do want some expensive shoes. Surely, you don't want diamond and gold flip-flops! May I suggest the most beautiful shoe currently available:

[Image of a Gucci shoe no longer available and no longer remembered.]

The "neurodiversity" movement.

"The Disability Movement Turns to Brains," according to the NYT, which includes a link to the Autistic Adults Picture project.

The idea is to show normal-looking people, whose peculiarities stem from their brain wiring - and who deserve compassion rather than exasperation.

Overcoming the human suspicion of oddity will be hard, the more so because the biological basis of many brain disorders can't be easily verified. Usually, all anyone has to go on is behavior.

"It's a tough one," wrote one participant in an online discussion of Asperger's syndrome. "Was that woman," he asked, just "unwilling to think about others' feelings, not caring about whether she's boring me with the minute details of her breakfast wrap?" Or, he asked, was she "really truly incapable of adapting herself to social mores?"

The article includes some interesting debate about the tendency to medicalize too much of human variety by designating syndromes and "hand[ing] out a diagnosis to anyone who walks through the [clinic] door," the effort to control that tendency by including "impairment" as part of each syndrome, and the consequent importance and difficulty of defining "impairment." Medicalizing human difference has its defenders:

For patients, being given a name and a biological basis for their difficulties represents a shift from a "moral diagnosis" that centers on shame, to a medical one, said Dr. Ratey, who is the author of "Shadow Syndromes," which argues that virtually all people have brain differences they need to be aware of to help guide them through life.

The expression "neurologically tolerant society," used in article, is interesting. What are we to make--if we think we are moving toward a neurologically tolerant society--of the emergence of a website that makes fun of "neurotypicals"? (Nice diagnostic test.) "Tragically, as many as 9625 out of every 10,000 individuals may be neurotypical....There is no known cure for Neurotypical Syndrome," says this satiric site. Hmmm.... they need to check their statistics with Dr. Ratey. And I wonder where the neurological aspect of the disability movement goes if it science shows there is endless neurodiversity, with no real normal. I suppose it depends on what the movement seeks: If tolerance is the only goal, then the more pervasive and subtly varied neurodiversity is, the more successful the movement will be. If, however, special accommodations are sought, it is necessary both to define specific syndromes and to do so in a way that constrains the number of people that fall into the group to be favored. I hope that good science prevails over any preexisting goals of a movement.