Sensory deprivation.

That last photograph makes me realize I'm suffering from sensory deprivation here in the depths of November in Madison, Wisconsin. I'm desperate for some visual stimulation around here. Maybe a thrilling blizzard or something.

It's the All New Mobile Footnote Check Station!

Here's something I've seen many times without laughing that suddenly amuses the hell out of me:



I don't know if it's the obvious oldness of the thing labeled "all new," or if it's the idea that putting books on a wheeled cart was ever exciting enough to warrant a painted label trumpeting it's newness and mobility. Or is it that I have a vague memory of a time when the expression "check station" would seem very strikingly modern? Or is it poignancy of the variations in the typeface, the way it begs us to really feel how new "new" is and how mobile "mobile" is? Is it the crazy redundancy of the little check in a box at the end? Is there something funny about the idea of law students feeling really, really urgent about getting footnotes checked? Or is it the way -- despite the label -- it's quite obviously not a footnote check station at all?

ADDED: Or was it always meant to be funny, in some lost 1970s hippie way?

"We'd be very surprised if Lieberman switched parties."

"In fact, his refusal to take the option off the table makes it even less likely he will exercise it."

Are you resisting the ego-strengthening exercise of indiscriminate submission?

Amba worries about what bloggers are losing.

"The sad fate of George Allen's A-list advisers."

From TNR. Poor Ed Gillespie:

[CHRIS MATTHEWS: Let me ask you this. The macaca thing, I think that's what started all this. ...

How do you explain that? Coming up with a word used as an anti-black term in North Africa years ago. ... He just made up a word that we know can be traced back to North Africa where his mother came from? Do you believe that, that he just made up the word macaca out of nowhere?

GILLESPIE: Well I know that he calls his finance director Jabba. I don't know why, and I don't know where that comes from.

MATTHEWS: Jabba the Hut.

Poor Mary Matalin:

TUCKER CARLSON: Wait a second, Mary. ... [T]he Allen campaign has beat Jim Webb over the head with this piece he wrote. ...

MATALIN: ... [W]hat was offensive about that was the language that was used. You know me, Tucker--I am no raving feminist here. But any man that ever says, in any context, or professes to know something about any woman's horny dreams, is not somebody that I want representing me or even in the same room with me.

Ouch.

"I like your clothings. Are nice! Please may I buying? I want have sex with it."

It's dangerous to just say things like that to people on the street, even if you're playing an evil-but-lovable fictional character. Some guys will beat you up. But we don't feel sorry for Sacha Baron Cohen. Not only is he making a fortune with his Borat persona, but he also got rescued by Hugh Laurie.

Two concert venues: The Fillmore East and Las Vegas.

I see Prince has set up his act in a permanent spot in Las Vegas. I approve! He doesn't have to come to us. We'll make our pilgrimmage to him. And it will justify that trip to Las Vegas that might otherwise seem too ridiculous but which is actually pretty fun.

And Neil Young is putting out the album "Live at the Fillmore East: March 6 & 7, 1970."

[His band, Crazy Horse,] featured the guitarist Danny Whitten, who died in 1972; the drummer Ralph Molina; the bassist Billy Talbot; and Jack Nitzsche on electric piano. The rhythm section (except for Mr. Nitzsche) had only basic skills. The band was constructed for open-ended songs with a boom-boom-prap beat at a slouchy medium tempo — does any popular rock band play this slowly anymore? — and acres of Mr. Young’s soloing. (He had just found his true sound through a combination of the right guitar and the right amplifier, his tremolo bar imitating his trembly voice, the low-end roar counterbalancing that vulnerability.) But despite the slobby phrasing, the obdurate needling quality of Mr. Young’s straight eighth notes and the weird effect of a casual delivery at high volume, this music has a serene and direct purpose.

More than half the tracks are concise tunes, less than four minutes, including “Winterlong,” “Wonderin’ ” and “Come On Baby Let’s Go Downtown.” But they’re just palate cleansers. The real action is in the long songs — a 12-minute “Down By the River,” in particular, and a 14-minute “Cowgirl in the Sand” — in which the band works within the dimensions of its gigantic, rolling, spacious sound. The record is a blast, but it’s also possibly the first stage in an entirely new way of understanding what Neil Young has done with his life.

Slobby phrasing, the obdurate needling quality... I love that! And please indulge this aging Baby Boomer's gloat: I was there!

"I like to attack Democrats. He likes to present a united front with Democrats."

Mickey Kaus says, referring to Robert Wright, in this New York Sun article about Bloggingheads.tv.

A great virtue of diavlogs, Mr. Kaus said, is that they are an antidote to the cocoons bloggers can get into when linking to friends and pointing out stories they agree with. Having to convince another person in real time, he said, forces bloggers to confront alternative opinions, and prevents them from lapsing into complete disjuncture from reality....

Mr. Kaus said an advantage of video dialogs is they give one an indication of the human mind behind the byline: "You can't hide behind the printed page. It may raise your overall opinion of the speakers as ‘nice guys,'" Mr. Kaus said, but they can lower your sense of their "intellectual worth," because it's harder to maintain the dignity of appearing on a page and weighing in on chosen issues. He said the viewers realize: "These are human beings like everyone else."

So it's your chance to study the bloggers, to get them out from behind the written word, to see them in raw action. I can't help but compare that to the law school class -- the law school class at its Socratic best, anyway.

Speaking of law school, here's something from the article:

A course at Princeton with essayist John McPhee gave Mr. Wright the confidence to be a writer; otherwise, "I was destined for law school," he said.

Does that hurt? There are so many interesting people who almost went to law school... or who went to law school and ventured out onto some path other than law practice. Being a lawprof doesn't really count as venturing out, though, does it? I tend to think that the lawprof is the least venturesome law school graduate.... the one who dared not even venture into the practice of law.

But don't get me wrong! Being a lawprof is a wonderful career -- I say in my role as the chair of the Appointments Committee here -- especially if they don't stop you from blogging... and being on the incredibly cool -- if supremely nerdy -- Bloggingheads.tv.

(And no extra credit for the first commenter to cite "White and Nerdy." I think Bob and Mickey know bloggingheads is "too white and nerdy.")

"Through the long, bloody summer and fall of 1864, the South had hung on only because of the belief that the North might tire of the conflict."

"But Lincoln did not tire. Instead, he doubled the bet--and won the war," writes William Stuntz (via Instapundit).

Of course, he's talking about Iraq:

Why do insurgent gangs, who have vastly smaller resources and manpower than the American soldiers they fight, continue to try to kill those soldiers? The answer is, because they believe they only have to kill a few more, and the soldiers will leave. They need not inflict a military defeat (which would be impossible, given the strength of the American military)--all they need to do is survive until American voters decide to throw in the towel, which might happen at any moment.

The proper response to that calculation is to make emphatically clear that the fight will not end until one side or the other wins, decisively

Much more at the link. Stuntz's main point is that people -- like Rumsfeld -- who apply the principles of business to war are making a profound mistake.

It's time for calm reflection about... "Snakes on a Plane."

Rob Walker is pretty smart in this analysis of the "Snakes on a Plane" phenomenon. (Note: the phenomenon ≠ the film.)

“I always feel kind of bad for them,” [Brian] Finkelstein says now of the film’s marketers. “They make this kind of action movie, and people get a hold of it” and create a tremendous amount of attention and awareness that “doesn’t actually match the movie,” he says. “You could see where they tried to make the movie a little more campy, to meet expectations.” But there was still a fundamental genre disconnect. “They were in kind of an awkward position,” he says.

The most obvious precedent for “snakes on a plane” as blockbuster phrase was not “Blair Witch Project” but “all your base are belong to us,” a badly translated phrase from a Japanese video game that a few years ago became the inspiration for many, many Internet-spread jokes, gags, Photoshop riffs, computer animations and T-shirts. The game was something called Zero Wing, but nobody mistook the “all your base” thing for “citizen marketing” or even an expression of fandom. In fact, most participants in the “snakes on a plane” phenomenon were not fans “collaborating” with New Line. Instead, they were a disparate ensemble collaborating with one another on a separate work. New Line didn’t get a free ride from these creators; if anything, the creators got a boost from New Line: The movie promoted the hype more than the hype promoted the movie.

The movie promoted the hype more than the hype promoted the movie. Is this the way things will be in the future, with "instant, mutable, unmoored" doings on the web taking the place of thought-out cultural productions like movies? I wonder.

There's something about getting absorbed into the web that changes the whole structure of your mind, I think. (And I acknowledge the theory out there -- I read it on the web! -- that, in my personal case, I'm simply crazy. So don't go by just me.) I have lost all taste for things that are planned out and long. I no longer want to sit through anything. Once there's a script that's going to be followed, I'm looking around for something to click to see what else is happening.

ADDED: And as soon as I'm halfway into expressing some theory, I get antsy and look for a "publish" button to hit before any more time passes.

More election night nostalgia.

Downloading my Veterans Day pictures yesterday, I saw I had some photos from the election night party that I'd never checked out. Here are two:





IN THE COMMENTS: "Surely you have another picture of Mary Katherine Ham you could post. Please?" Okay, how about this one?



That's MKH in the background. In front: Captain Ed and Nick Gillespie!

"I'm sure a campaign for president would have been a great adventure and helpful in advancing a progressive agenda."

Russ Feingold won't run! What's the story there?

UPDATE: Much more here:

"I began with the feeling I didn't really want to do this but was open to the possibility that getting around the country would make me want to do it. That never happened," he said.

"People have always portrayed me as ambitious. I'm not ashamed of that.

"But I have never had a craving to be president of the United States. I used to say it when I was 5 or 7 years old. But I haven't really been saying it as an adult," said Feingold, who said he didn't rule out running in the future.

Feingold's thinking about the race crystallized in the last few weeks, he said. The Democratic takeover of Congress on Tuesday was a final factor because it added to the appeal of focusing entirely on his position in the Senate, he said....

"This may sound immodest, but I thought, 'I can do this. I can be the candidate, that rational, effective, presentable candidate for Democrats that would not be threatening, yet very progressive,' " Feingold said.

Feingold said he was not concerned about the personal scrutiny that comes with a presidential candidacy.

"I've been through three U.S. Senate campaigns. The people I've run against have not been pansies," said Feingold, referring to the aggressiveness of his opponents. "I feel like my life is an open book."

(Pansies! Are we still talking like that? I thought, post-Macaca, no politician would ever use a slur word again.)

Anyway, I still want to hear the real story. Something to do with his position within the Senate?

Wearing street clothes on the beach, looking at women dressed in bathing suits.

Such are the crimes of the poor working men of Dubai.

Other Bob Dylan fiascos.

The awful failure of the Bob Dylan musical prompts Mark Caro to list other Dylan-related disasters:

1. "Tarantula."...

2. "Dylan."...

3. "Renaldo and Clara."...

4. "At Budokan."...

5. "Masked and Anonymous."...

Surely, this list could be lengthened.

"Your tax dollars are paying for the killing of American soldiers in Iraq. The CIA is paying for resistance in Iraq."

So said UW lecturer Kevin Barrett, ending his last lecture in the part of his course on Islam that deals with the 9/11 attacks:

The part-time teacher vowed to teach the official version of the attacks alongside the Sept. 11 theory to which he subscribes. He said he would neither tell his students what his view was nor penalize them for not buying the theory....

Andrea Bromley, a sophomore, came away saying Barrett had failed to be impartial.

"It's become much more opinionated now that we're doing 9-11," Bromley said, referring to the tone and progress of the course. "He's trying to explain both views, but he's biased. I don't feel like he's presented enough info on the other side."

Freshman Jesse Moya disagreed, saying Barrett had been "very objective."

Moya, who said his uncle died in the World Trade Center attacks, said he had entered the course believing the attacks were the work of Islamic terrorists. He now believes otherwise.

"It seems like a more logical explanation that it was the U.S. government," he said.

How interesting that the student who did not perceive bias is the one who became convinced of the truth of the conspiracy theory. It's not surprising. Trying not to show bias -- as Barrett was told he needed to do -- doesn't necessarily produce neutrality. It is more likely that it will package the message in a more palatable form.

Here's an earlier post on the subject of Barrett's class and the required neutrality pose, with much discussion of a Stanley Fish's op-ed about it.

Tadween.

= blogging, in Arabic.

Young women make up half the bloggers in [Saudi Arabia]... Lured by the possible anonymity of the medium, Saudi women have produced a string of blogs filled with feminist poetry, steamy romantic episodes and rants against their restricted lives and patriarchal society....

When the woman who blogs anonymously under the name Mystique finally shows up for an appointment at Starbucks on trendy Tahlia Street, she seems used to causing a stir....

She orders a Frappuccino, then sits down to talk. "I've been in touch with my sexuality ever since I was 13," she said. "Why shouldn't I write erotic fiction? It's one way of expressing myself."...

But Mystique has received the most scathing criticism for her feminist poetry and religious comments. A question posted on her blog -- "How imperfect can a perfect Creator be?" -- garnered dozens of angry missives calling her an apostate who is besmirching her country's reputation.

"Sometimes I push. I want to show that women are oppressed," she said. The situation "is not normal. I would like people to see that."