"Very soon, [the Washington Redskins] will find out if they have lost a quarterback, Robert Griffin III..."

"... and, if so, to what new injury to his right knee and for how long. It could be not much. It could be a great deal. And so could the repercussions."

Hold your breath. But understand that, from Griffin’s first play to his last, this game epitomizes the emergency-room world of NFL mayhem that all players accept and that quarterbacks, as team leaders, must play by a carry-me-off-on-my-shield code.

Rising before dawn...

... to see this...



... before this:

Boehner: "At one point several weeks ago... the president said to me, 'We don't have a spending problem.' "

"They blame all of the fiscal woes on our health-care system."

Boehner's repeated response to that was: "Clearly we have a health-care problem, which is about to get worse with ObamaCare. But, Mr. President, we have a very serious spending problem."

[T]oward the end of the negotiations, the president became irritated and said: "I'm getting tired of hearing you say that."

And then there's Harry Reid:

"Those days after Christmas," [Boehner] explains, "I was in Ohio, and Harry's on the Senate floor calling me a dictator and all kinds of nasty things. You know, I don't lose my temper. I never do. But I was shocked at what Harry was saying about me. I came back to town. Saw Harry at the White House. And that was when that was said," he says, referring to a pointed "go [blank] yourself" addressed to Mr. Reid.

It's best, by the way, if you're going to say "Go fuck yourself" never to say it in anger.

There's lots more in that article (in the Wall Street Journal). I was interested in this little bit at the end:

[Boehner] sees debt as almost a moral failing, noting that when he grew up in a "little middle-class, blue-collar neighborhood" outside of Cincinnati, "nobody had debt. It was unheard of. I just don't do debt."

If he's not bullshitting, he's revealing a shocking lack of sophistication. Should families pay rent on apartments until they can put down the entire purchase price of a house? Should businesses expand only through the cash they have on hand? But it's the WSJ that inserts the phrase "almost a moral failing," so I shouldn't read too much into Boehner's simple-Cincinnati-guy posing. He didn't say debt is immoral. Only that he comes from a background where the norm was to follow a budget and pay your bills. How sophisticated is he now about the good use of debt as opposed to the bad? Who knows?

"Obama to nominate counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan for CIA director."

"Brennan was considered to be a contender for the job four years ago when Obama was first assembling his intelligence and national security team. But he ultimately withdrew his name amid questions on the left over his ties to controversial CIA programs. "

Looking back at my own posts, I see that I believed that Leon Panetta had been chosen to head the C.I.A. "to appease the people who bellyached about Brennan." I was reading this in the NYT (from January 5, 2009):

The choice of Mr. Panetta comes nearly two weeks after Mr. Obama had otherwise wrapped up his major personnel moves. It appears to reflect the difficulty Mr. Obama has encountered in finding a candidate who is capable of taking charge of the agency but is not tied to the interrogation and detention program run by the C.I.A. under President Bush.

Aides have said that Mr. Obama had originally hoped to select a C.I.A. director with extensive field experience, especially in combating terrorist networks. But his first choice for the job, John O. Brennan, had to withdraw his name amid criticism over his alleged role in the formation of the agency’s detention and interrogation program after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Later, in 2010, when Obama appointed Brennan as Director of National Intelligence, there was criticism from the right. Here's The Weekly Standard (on May 20, 2010):

First, in prepared remarks in Washington, Brennan referred to his love for “al-Quds,” which happens to be the Arab revanchist name for the city that the rest of us call “Jerusalem.”...

At a conference in Washington, he said that the Obama administration is exploring ways to strengthen the hand of “moderate elements” within Hezbollah....

Earlier this year Brennan said that the 20% recidivism rate of the Gitmo detainees released up to that point was “not that bad.” See, he explained, the rate for American criminals sometimes approaches 50%. Well, yes, but—terrorists are not criminals.  Terrorists are by definition a special kind of mass murderer....

These are only a few of John Brennan’s greatest hits. His record of insouciance, political correctness, misleading statements and naivety is long and rich.

"Is this a revolution and are these revolutionaries? By God, I say they are a bunch of criminals."

"They are the enemies of God, and they will go to hell."

Assad speaks.

At the Ski Trail Café...

... the paths are well worn.

"We have done everything possible to make the presidency less venerated."

Says José Mujica, the president of Uruguay, who lives "a run-down house on Montevideo’s outskirts with no servants at all... never wears a tie and donates about 90 percent of his salary, largely to a program for expanding housing for the poor." That leaves him with $800 a moth.

Quoting the Roman court-philosopher Seneca, Mr. Mujica said, “It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, who is poor.”...

Before Mr. Mujica became a gardener of chrysanthemums, he was a leader of the Tupamaros, the urban guerrilla group that drew inspiration from the Cuban revolution, carrying out armed bank robberies and kidnappings on Montevideo’s streets....

He spent 14 years in prison, including more than a decade in solitary confinement, often in a hole in the ground. During that time, he would go more than a year without bathing, and his companions, he said, were a tiny frog and rats with whom he shared crumbs of bread....

Mr. Mujica rarely speaks about his time in prison. Seated at a table in his garden, sipping his mate, he said it gave him time to reflect. “I learned that one can always start again,” he said.

"We knew the memorials can’t stand forever... And after being weathered... I mean, we had bad rain, we had a storm, we had wind, we had snow."

"So I knew the time was going to come where we really had to move the memorials. Not only because the tributes themselves start to look unkempt and start to communicate a message that wasn’t part of the honoring that the donor intended; it also signifies a moving on, a readiness for the community to go to that next step."

The age-old problem of roadside memorials, in the Newtown context.

What's the difference between Kwanzaa and Kwanza?

Kwanzaa is that religionish holiday we were just talking about. Kwanza is the unit of currency in Angola, our "History of" country today. Before getting to the history of Angola, I pause to think of the holidays we could invent by taking the names of the world currencies. Here's a list of the currencies currently circulating in the world. Following the Kwanzaa model, you could add a letter or change the word slightly as you take off on your flight of inspirational fancy. Now, what should we do for Dollaro? Worship the Almighty Dollar is a common enough phrase.



But let's get back to the history of Angola, as quickly scanned via the "History of Angola" Wikipedia page, in accordance with our 206-day project. The name Angola comes from "N'gola," the Kimbundu word for king.

Shouldn't the Freedom From Religion Foundation sue the Madison school district for the extensive celebration of a religious holiday?

From the Madison Metropolitan School District website:

Kwanzaa celebrated at two schools

Students and staff at Falk and Lowell Elementary Schools recently performed and displayed art projects that reflect the principles of Kwanzaa. The culmination of a semester’s work incorporating Culturally Relevant Practices, the celebration also featured the donations from the schools' service learning project to help build a school library in Ghana. Four MMSD elementary schools (also Hawthorne and Mendota) are working together to provide Culturally Relevant Practices and experiences for all their students.

Video of Madison teachers and children celebrating Kwanzaa at the link.

The school district will surely say that Kwanzaa is not a religious holiday, but what constitutes religion for Establishment Clause purposes? It's not an easy question. I say that as someone who has taught a law school class in Religion and the Constitution for many years.

I once gave an exam that challenged students to think about Establishment Clause problems inherent in an invented state program pushing environmentalism, defined by statute to mean "the belief in the importance of honoring and conserving the Earth’s resources, minimizing the impact of individual human beings on the Earth, and understanding one’s personal duty to inspire others to honor and conserve resources and to minimize human impact on Earth." In my hypothetical, schools were required to stage day-long Earth Day celebrations every year, praising nature and inspiring conservation, and teachers had to begin each school day with a "solemnification exercise" that included "a recitation enforcing the values of environmentalism along with a set of symbolic gestures," with this example, described in the state law:

On a small table, the teacher unfolds a green cloth to reveal a twig, a small stone, an egg, and a small box of good soil. The teacher opens the box, takes out a bit of soil and sprinkles it on the stone, egg, and twig, and says: "This is our Earth, which is given to us, to love and preserve, for all time." The students then repeat that phrase aloud, and the teacher carefully closes the box, rewraps the items, and puts them away.

My hypothetical environmentalism, like Kwanzaa, is at least a religion substitute, in that it attempts to capture the children's idealism and spiritual longings and to direct them into a particular ideology. It employs the devices of traditional religion: songs of celebration, symbolic gestures and rituals, incantations. In the case of Kwanzaa, based on what I've read, it was originally designed as an alternative to Christmas. And the 7th of the 7 principles of Kwanzaa is:

Imani (Faith): To believe with all our hearts in God, our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders, and the righteousness and victory of our struggle.

Presumably the God part is watered down for school purposes, but watering down religion is a problem in itself.

ADDED: I see that at something called "The Official Kwanzaa Web Site" — what makes it "official"? — the "Imani/Faith" principle has no "God." It is otherwise word-for-word the same as what I've quoted above. Without God, the statement of faith is puzzling: believe with all your heart in our people and the righteousness of our struggle. That sounds like the worst of what governments have done grabbing at the hearts of young people.

"After a little while Mr. Gatz opened the door and came out, his mouth ajar, his face flushed slightly, his eyes leaking isolated and unpunctual tears."

When is a door not a door?/When it's a jar. That was my favorite childhood riddle, evoked by today's Gatsby sentence. There's that door that Mr. Gatz opened, and yet it's his mouth, not the door, that's ajar.  

Gatz... it's a name like an expletive, an expletive seemingly concocted out the name Gatsby. Who is this debased alter ego of the main character? I can't say, because the Gatsby project is all about looking at one isolated sentence. Our sentence is isolated, like a tear leaking unpunctually from one of Gatz's eyes.

So here's Gatz, the man with a name like an expletive, not that anything's coming out of his open — ajar — mouth. We hear a lot about his face — it's flushed slightly — and that mouth is ajar, and then there are those crying eyes. But what a way to describe crying eyes: leaking isolated and unpunctual tears.

That the tears are isolated and unpunctual sheds — sheds! — light on the beginning of the sentence: After a little while. This sentence is all about delay. There's the little while before Gatz emerges, and there are the belated — unpunctual — tears. Gatz acts: He opens the door. But he doesn't do the action of crying. His eyes are the subject of the verb, but even his eyes don't cry. They leak. A strangely passive sort of crying. And those tears, they're not only failing to live up to the requirements of timeliness — being unpunctual — they are also isolated. Isolated... not merely minimal, but also lonely.

Isolated is a word that appears only one other time in "The Great Gatsby": "They were gone, without a word, snapped out, made accidental, isolated, like ghosts, even from our pity." Ah, but that's another sentence!

In discussing what makes a job the "least stressful"...

... consider that, in this context, the opposite of stress is control.

Is that true? For some, I would think, too much control would lead to stress. Let's say much was expected of you. You were supposed to be brilliant, high-achieving, and productive. But it was your responsibility to define your tasks, to figure out how to accomplish them, to set your own standards about what constitutes excellence, and to put time — any time, whenever you want, night or day, weekdays or weekends — into doing what you've decided is appropriate to do.

There is some reason to think that people feel best when they are in the psychological state called "flow," which is defined as having 8 components:

First, the experience usually occurs when we confront tasks we have a chance of completing. Second, we must be able to concentrate on what we are doing. Third and fourth, the concentration is usually possible because the task undertaken has clear goals and immediate feedback. Fifth, one acts with a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life. Sixth, enjoyable experiences allow people to exercise a sense of control over their actions. Seventh, concern for the self disappears, yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the flow experience is over. Finally, the sense of the duration of time is altered; hours pass by in minutes, and minutes can stretch out to seem like hours. The combination of all these elements causes a sense of deep enjoyment that is so rewarding people feel that expending a great deal of energy is worthwhile simply to be able to feel it.

Can you get there within the "least stressful" job, university professor? Of course. But you'd better be good at defining realistic tasks that will look accomplished when they are accomplished. You'd better be able to get into the zone where you feel a sense of effortless expertise.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book "Flow" identifies surgery and rock climbing as 2 activities that produce flow for the people who have the appropriate expertise. There, the tasks are specific, and the feedback about whether you are doing them right is clear. Compare a scholarly book project, which might take years, where you might wonder whether what you are writing is too dull or too controversial or unsupported by the data you're trying to use or who knows what your colleagues — your rivals? — will say about it at some unknown point in the future if you ever get this damned thing done?

The GOP needs "to be much more granular in our approach to partners in the community like African-Americans, Hispanics and Asians."

Says Reince Priebus, a man with a funny name, using a funny word.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines "granular" to mean:

Consisting of grains or granules; existing in the condition of grains or granules....

Mountains, which consist of lime stone or marble of a granular or scaly texture....

Having a granulated surface or structure....

On the [foot] pads or cushions of the cat, the cuticle is rough and granular.

Of the nature of a granule or granules....

Their [geckos'] skin is studded above with very small granular scales....

A "granule" is "A small grain; a small compact particle; a pellet."

1652   W. Charleton Darknes Atheism 45   Those Granules of sand, which suffice to make up the vast bulk of the World.

"A culture in which women are expected to remain virgins until marriage is a rape culture."

Asserts E.J. Graff in The American Prospect.

In that vision, women’s bodies are for use primarily for procreation or male pleasure. They must be kept pure. While cultural conservatives would disagree, this attitude gives men license to patrol — in some cases with violence — women's hopes for controlling their lives and bodies.

Fighting ideology with ideology.

"Health insurance companies across the country are seeking and winning double-digit increases in premiums for some customers..."

"... even though one of the biggest objectives of the Obama administration’s health care law was to stem the rapid rise in insurance costs for consumers."

One tuna fish, sold for $1,763,000.

It weighed 489 pounds, which is $3,603 a pound. Sliver it into nearly weightless sashimi, and presumably customers won't choke on the price.