Arborists.

Do you see them? (Click to enlarge.)



There are some jobs you can tell are great fun for the people who do them, even though you wouldn't want to do it yourself. Maybe my job, law professor, is like that for you. For me, it's what these arborists do: climb four stories high in an ancient oak tree and drag along a chain saw to hack off dead branches, which they let crash to the ground.



Here's the photoset.

UPDATE: That's the tree in my backyard, and the arborists were working for me today. I asked one whether he gets scared. He said no and added: "It's the greatest job in the world!"

Blog theme drift.

It looks as though RLC (AKA my ex-husband) is moving toward a new format, not only is he cutting down on the zen koan-ish things, but he's changed the blog subtitle from something about koans to a Jack Kerouac quote:

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy. 2. Submissive to everything, open, listening. 5. Something that you feel will find its own form. --Jack Kerouac, from "Belief and Technique for Modern Prose"

Or is that koan-ish too? I think Kerouac seems like the blogging type. Graphomania.

Anyway, RLC has started to opine on current affairs too, so that's definitely a veer away from the zen. Today, he's got a little spoof of death-obsessed news media.

Summer driving.

Next month, I'm going to finally take my newish Audi TT Coupe for a long drive, going from Madison to Ithaca to pick up my son. I've already done that trip (with a touch of photoblogging here), but would like to drive through some photographable places on the way. The most conspicuous place is Niagara Falls, but I'm into more ordinary places that exemplify the local culture. Plus I'm interested in twisty, scenic highways. Any suggestions? Use the comments.

Later in the summer I want to drive out west. I'm interested in landscapes but also in being able to stop at night in the comfort of very high quality lodging. Twisty, scenic highways and photographable little towns are what I'm looking for.

Links not checked out.

Much as I hate the word "blawg," I'm awed by "Blawg Review #1" at Notes from the (Legal) Underground. I haven't begun to check out all the links. It's Monday morning, the beginning of the second-to-the-last full week of the semester, a week when both my classes -- Constitutional Law I and Federal Jurisdiction -- converge on the ultimate in dreaded law school topics: sovereign immunity. The tricky part for me is teaching the Conlaw students on a 1L level while teaching the Fedjur students on a 3L level. So I must be off, the links unclicked.

The Journal of Law & Liberty.

Have you noticed the new journal at NYU -- my old law school -- "NYU Journal of Law & Liberty"?

The NYU Journal of Law & Liberty provides a forum for the critical discussion of classical liberal legal scholarship, publishing essays and articles on the nature of rules & order, legal philosophy, theories of rights & liberty, constitutional law, jurisprudence, legal history, and historical & contemporary legislation.

Great idea for a new law journal. You can read it online too. Here's the first issue, with a collection of articles on "Hayek and the Law."

The President's iPod.

If Bush only has 250 songs in his iPod, he should get an iPod Shuffle. But maybe he wouldn't care about the fact that there's a much smaller iPod that weighs nothing, since he's focused on exerting himself to the point of burning 1300 calories at a time. The article quotes the observation that "it's interesting" that the President likes the music of artists who don't like him, but actually it's not interesting. It would be interesting if he paid any attention to what old rock stars thought about politics.

Feral cats await news.

Today's the big day, the Wisconsin State Journal reports:

Cat lovers and bird-loving hunters are girding for battle at tonight's Wisconsin Conservation Congress spring hearings, where citizens across the state will be asked to vote on whether stray cats should be hunted.

The proposal, known as Question 62, asks whether the state Department of Natural Resources should define free- roaming, feral domestic cats as an "unprotected species" that can be shot by anyone with a small-game hunting license. The proposal would affect any cat not under an owner's direct control or without a collar.

The proposal is the suggestion of Mark Smith, a La Crosse hunter who considers feral cats an invasive species. Smith received death threats last month after a Wisconsin State Journal story about his proposal spread across the nation, electrifying pet lovers.

His suggestion was quietly approved last year by the La Crosse County branch of the Conservation Congress. Subsequently, the full Congress, an elected body with the duty to advise the DNR and Legislature on natural resource issues, decided to put the issue before the general public at its spring hearings, which take place at 7 p.m. tonight in each of the state's 72 counties....

Joe Caputo, chairman of the Dane County Conservation Congress, said he hopes tonight's meeting at the Alliant Center is civil.

"It's a good forum to start a debate on this issue. As chair, I'm going to allow people to speak, as long as everybody can be constructive and civil," Caputo said. "But if it turns into a free-for-all, I'll call the question and we will vote on it and move on to the next question. Everybody will have 3 minutes to speak. We're all adults and able to listen...."

It's basically bird lovers against cat lovers here, isn't it? Hunters are not the important factor.

UPDATE: Here's a report on those meetings.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I still haven't seen the results of the vote, but here are some comments from Sissy Willis.

Undergraduate forever.

You've heard of the "perpetual student," but it's usually a grad student, collecting degrees, isn't it? This UW-Whitewater student has more 100 more credits than he needs for a bachelor's degree and he's avoiding graduating. He's going to be on Letterman tonight.

The ecosystem awry?

Things haven't been updating normally over in the Truth Laid Bear ecosystem lately, but there's a reason. N.Z. Bear took some time off to get married. So best wishes to him and Mrs. Bear.

UPDATE: It may not just be Bear's temporary distraction. Poliblog speculates that the ecosystem is actually slowly dying, overburdened by profligate blogging.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Bear stops by the comments to this post. Look inside. And I do a separate post about it here.

Premium gas.

What's to stop the gas station owner from just bribing the delivery guy to fill up the premium tank with regular?

"Sideways," at last.

As you may remember, back in January, Tonya and I were driving in my car -- L'il Greenie -- on our way to pick up Nina and then to go to see the movie "Sideways." We never got there, however, because I wrecked my car. Now, the movie is out on DVD, so we're getting together tonight to watch it. I've kind of been -- like Camille Paglia -- on strike against Hollywood movies, finding them "absolutely boring," so we'll see how I like this one. I'll let you know, later.

Meanwhile, here's an article in the L.A. Times about how the movie "Sideways" has affected wine sales, hurting merlot and helping pinot noir.

Bill Maher, Camille Paglia.

I just noticed that Bill Maher's HBO show is back. We're watching the first new episode -- from a couple weeks ago -- on HBO On Demand right now. Maher seems to have moved to the right since last season, but the studio audience is still stubbornly all left. They keep applauding loudly for cranky lefty cracks by Richard Belzer and not responding at all to any of the other panelists.

Camille Paglia is on!

What do you think of teachers having sex with their students?

Paglia: The teachers of today are "psychically weak" because the abler women have taken different career paths.

You watch "The Bachelorette."

"I love 'The Bachelorette.' I'm actually on strike against Hollywood movies. I think they've become vapid and artificial. I find them absolutely boring. But 'The Bachelorette' -- I'm riveted by it. I think that show has done wonderfully. It's edited beautifully. It's great escapist fantasy. It's really a kind of primitive, in its own way."

People don't date anymore, they hook up. The cell phone has allowed women to get in touch with their inner slut. What do you think of that?

She's concerned about "the collapse of romance ... the stripping away of the ceremony of courtship." It's going to hurt women in the long run.

What do you think of what's happened to Michael Jackson?

It's "a tragedy." "He's as much a victim of fame as Norma Desmond... I blame the parents of these young boys, who, in effect, sold their children to him."

UPDATE: Watching the second episode of the new season, from a week ago, I see it begins with an announcement that they've filled half the audience with conservatives. Great!

Taxes.

I still haven't done my taxes. I've never done my taxes using a computer program, believe it or not, but I'm thinking of doing it this year. Can anyone tell me what the best software is to use with a Macintosh?

UPDATE: Every year, I think about efiling and I start looking at software and websites, as I've been doing today, and I have a very negative reaction. It's too complicated, I'm afraid of giving my info to a private company, I'm afraid the software won't work, and there seem to be complicated hidden costs. Then I decide I don't want to waste the time figuring out any more things possibly for nothing, and I switch to the paper forms. I this close to deciding in favor of paper again. I'm picturing myself getting started with the software and then encountering problems, and problems in the form of computer problems are irritating in a completely different way. The paper forms are: free, familiar, stable, and tangible.

ANOTHER UPDATE: My colleague Gordon Smith has gone back to the paper method! In the comments people are saying I can efile federal taxes free and only pay $50 to file my state tax. Well, I'm doing taxes for three individuals, so that's $150, which doesn't seem cheap at all. Plus, it seems that only some federal taxpayers fit within the IRS free file system, and I'm expecting to find out I'm not one of them. I don't want to get started and then encounter hidden costs. I already find it agitating to do my taxes. Really, as soon as I click on those links that take me away from the official IRS page, I start to feel really nervous! I think it's like the way my mother used to feel about using a computer at all. But I've been happy and comfortable using a computer for twenty years, and I feel threatened by the efiling sites. I also don't do any banking by computer. I guess I don't like computers getting their hands on my money (but I have been buying things on Amazon since it's earliest days).

Looking for alien life on Earth.

Here's a NYT op-ed (about why we should search Earth, not Mars, to find alien life forms) that brings up a question I've been meaning to look for answer to for a long time: why isn't it inconsistent to believe that all the life we know on Earth traces back to a single cell and that other planets that have Earth-like conditions would give rise to life? It seems to me, that if Earth-like conditions get some life-creating cell started, that there should have been many such cells on Earth, starting many different evolutionary lines. Even if in the end, one line became so successful that it rendered the other lines extinct, wouldn't there have been a period in which multiple lines coexisted?

From the op-ed (by astrobiologist Paul Davis):

Genetic sequencing is used to position unknown microbes on the tree of life, but this technique employs known biochemistry. It wouldn't work for organisms on a different tree using different biochemical machinery. If such organisms exist, they would be eliminated from the analysis and ignored. Our planet could be seething with alien bugs without anyone suspecting it.

How could we go about identifying "life as we don't know it"? One idea is to look in exotic environments. The range of conditions in which life can thrive has been enormously extended in recent years, with the discovery of microbes dwelling near scalding volcanic vents, in radioactive pools and in pitch darkness far underground. Yet there will be limits beyond which our form of life cannot survive; for example, temperatures above about 270 degrees Fahrenheit. If anything is found living in even harsher environments, we could scrutinize its innards to see whether what makes it tick is so novel that it cannot have evolved from known life.

10 best rock movies.

Here's the AFI list of the ten best rock movies ever made. (Do I have to say "via Blogdex"? I got the link via Blogdex, but I'm irked at Blogdex for not tracking my blog. I've tried reentering my blog address and even emailing them -- more than once! -- but they never pick up my links. They never answer the email either.)

[CORRECTION: It's not the AFI's list, but a really good list by a music critic. Sorry. The AFI is mentioned in the article, and they do have their lists. This isn't one of them.]

One thing about the list is that the only movie on it I haven't seen is the one they place first, "Almost Famous." I've never cared about seeing that. It's always looked to me to be mainly about how cute Kate Hudson is. But since I don't at all respond to the putative cuteness of Kate Hudson -- not positively anyway -- I've steered clear.

Of the remaining nine, I even have seven on DVD. I don't have "Hail, Hail Rock and Roll," because it's not available on DVD, and I don't have "The Rutles," because frankly, it's not very good. I remember when it first came out. It was just a TV movie. We loved both The Beatles (who were being spoofed) and Monty Python (who did the spoofing), but we could barely sit through it. It just wasn't very funny. The closest thing to funny is that the John character is named Nasty. "The Rutles" is nothing compared to "This Is Spinal Tap."

I looked over my DVDs to see what I'd suggest that wasn't on the list. I have "The Filth and the Fury," but it's not all that great, and "Sid and Nancy" is already on the list and much better. The one I'd suggest is "Nico Icon," and I thought to write that before it occurred to me how underrepresented women are on this list. Women are underrepresented in rock music, of course, but to have the only significant women characters on the list be groupies -- the Kate Hudson character and Nancy Spungen -- is a bit galling, especially considering that one of the greatest of all rock stars is Madonna and she really did make a great movie ("Truth or Dare").

UPDATE: Writing a lot and publishing instantaneously and without an editor, I still work hard at cutting verbosity. I regret missing the last two words of that phrase "the ten best rock movies ever made." How did that idiotic usage get started? There's no possibility of ranking movies that have not been made. I suppose it's an alternative to "of all time." Which is a stupid thing to say about movies generally and rock movies especially.

"Left of the Dial."

Last night, I watched that new HBO documentary about Air America called "Left of the Dial." That is, I watched a lot of it, fell asleep, and woke up during the closing credits. I don't think I fell asleep solely because it was boring, but it was awfully boring. The various radio characters who were the subject of the film never lost their awareness of the camera, so there were no revealing moments. I got really tired of seeing them rushing through hallways and essentially saying "ooh, I'm so nervous" over and over again. Maybe the end segment that I missed was better, and I'll finish watching the movie very soon and do an update. My favorite movies are documentaries -- check my profile -- but HBO does a lot of documentaries that are slapped together from scant footage, with no attention to artistic technique, as if what the movie is about is all that matters.

UPDATE: I tried to finish watching this, but couldn't. More rushing around. Is this going to work? I'm supposed to care because, what, these people are feisty underdogs? It seems to me that they are very successful comedians, yet they never say anything funny in the movie. People launching a business and hot to succeed are not fun to watch, unless there's something quirkily charming about them. I'd rather watch these guys.