"A small incident will shortly develop to your advantage." So says my fortune cookie (which is in no position to know). Time to leave the restaurant: the laptop battery is down at 16%. I did just want to post this one picture, which says at least one true thing about Madison food:

But what movie did you see? I saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the first movie I've gone out to see since House of Sand and Fog, which long time (or archive) readers of this blog know I saw back in January, in the first week of blogging. Fog ... Sunshine ... is there some kind of weather theme to your movie selections?

So was Eternal Sunshine "the best movie of the decade" as Slate would have it? That hardly seemed possible and of course it wasn't. It was bearable, but then I'm impatient. I prefer TV--including watching DVDs--because I don't like being stuck in the theater. Some things need to be seen on the big screen, but ES isn't one of them. It has a music video look that would do better on TV I think. There is a bluish pall over the whole thing, broken only by Kate Winslet's hair, orange sweatshirt, and a few other things. Okay, that's a color idea. I think color movies should have color ideas, but I think it is a video screen, not a movie screen idea.

Other random things I'll say about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind:

1. Mark Ruffalo seemed to have the Rick Moranis role.

2. Kirsten Dunst looks like my mother looked as a young woman--not counting the hair.

3. Kate Winslet modeled her American accent after a particular American actress--a la Nicole Kidman doing Meg Ryan in To Die For--but I couldn't figure out which one. Email me if you do.

4. This movie is a powerful date movie, because it teaches the lesson that for all its flaws, the relationship you are in is the great love of your life that you must cling to desperately no matter how intent you may have been to rid yourself of every last vestige of it. Don't leave: you'll be sorry!

5. Romantic movie clichés that were done reasonably well: running about in the lapping waves shows how in love people are, a kooky young woman can show a man who doesn't know what life is what life is, romping in snow is reaching one's human potential.

6. As far as mess-with-your-brain movies go, I can think of three I like better than Eternal Sunshine: Total Recall, Brazil, and Being John Malkovich. There are probably others, but I just can't think of them.

7. With Kate Winslet in the picture, I couldn't help thinking about Titanic a few times, like when Jim Carrey was desperately pulling her along through hallways and when she (in the Leonardo diCaprio position) was dragging Carrey out on the ice to show him how to let lose and start to live (it was like that arms-spread on the prow scene).

End of random observations about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Small pleasures. At the restaurant where I've stopped for an after-movie, mid-afternoon meal of the day, there's wifi. So, a little time to eat Sichuan beef and to check Sitemeter for the day-after effects of an Instapundit link. My Sitemeter graph for the month shows four spikes, all from Instapundit. Thanks, Glenn! There are days when I feel that I'm talking to only a few people or even only writing to myself, but accepting that people can read over my shoulder--that the whole world can read over my shoulder--even though maybe no one at all is. It was that no one's reading feeling I had yesterday when I went out to lunch. The wifi wasn't working right in my usual café (which you can see pictured below, with a big Corona truck parked outside), so I hadn't checked the old Sitemeter in a while. I came back from lunch to find that 2000 people had dropped by. That was pretty amusing!

At the Kubrick archive, the dog is not well. (Via Metafilter) Access to the Kubrick archive leads to strange discoveries:

… a large room painted blue and filled with books. … "Every book in this room is about Napoleon!"

"…just about every ghost book ever written..."

"…a box containing photographs of the exteriors of maybe every mountain hotel in the world."

...fan letters … perfectly preserved. They are not in the least bit dusty or crushed. … Each fan box contains perhaps 50 orange folders. ... inside each folder are all the fan letters that came from [a] particular place in any one year. Kubrick has handwritten "F-P" on the positive ones and "F-N" on the negative ones. The crazy ones have been marked "F-C".

… a box marked "Sniper head - scary". Inside, wrapped in newspaper, is an extremely lifelike and completely disgusting disembodied head of a young Vietnamese girl, the veins in her neck protruding horribly, her eyes staring out, her lips slightly open, her tongue just visible.

… two boxes that read Shadow On The Sun. … The boxes contain two volumes of what appears to be a cheesy sci-fi radio drama script. The story begins with a sick dog: "Can you run me over to Oxford with my dog?" says the dog's owner. "He's not very well. I'm a bit worried about him, John." This is typed. Kubrick has handwritten below it: "THE DOG IS NOT WELL."

The kinder, gentler Madison. It's not all divisive politics. There are spring flowers taking hold in the concrete:

Music in the offing:

And a pleasant café from which to blog and contemplate beer-drinking:

Local politics. Here's a new Madison character, perhaps exemplifying the level of public discourse:

Things I've averted my eyes from. This says it all. (Link via Wonkette.) What a shameful display it's been! Must the Presidential campaign infect everything and make everyone look self-serving?

And the best medicine is.... Okay, kids, go ahead!

Outliner 2.0. The Law School Bookmart is selling a product called Outliner 2.0. Could it possibly be that anyone could think that an automatic process could replace making your own outline? The process of making your own outline from your own class notes is the most useful step in studying for a law school exam. The idea that you want to jump ahead to the point where you are studying from an outline is quite mistaken. The best way to "study" the outline is to extract it from your notes yourself. Studying that final product is relatively easy then. Studying a commercial outline is really hard (and full of extraneous material that doesn't relate to the class). Studying a computer-made concoction is just weird. Does anyone do that? Email me if you have another side to this.

Players. Here's the leaderboard for the Players Championship, where my nephew Cliff Kresge is in the 32d spot, after 5 holes, in the second round. Good luck!

UPDATE: He misses the cut by 1. Alas!

Sex and The Apprentice. Prof. Yin aptly notes that the all-female team, Protege, has now become all-male: the rules of the game providing for elimination and selection of replacements made this sex change operation possible. Interesting how the women worked well as a large group, but one-on-one they hate each other, while the men become pals. That could just be the editing, or just these particular people, or some effect of the kind of competitions, but the show is hugely (yoogely) popular, and I can't help thinking it is going to shape American opinion about the difference between men and women as a general matter. Now Amy is the only woman. She has defeated all rivals. She may think all the boys love her, but even if they do, they still want to win more. It will be fun to see how that plays out.

Prof. Yin has some good questions:

How come Trump's assistant George is always off on important business trips, but Carolyn never is? Glass ceiling?

My theory: George goes "off on a business trip" the way government officials resign jobs to "spend more time with their families." He's not as good--or as pretty--of a character as Carolyn. That's George down there under the ceiling, not Carolyn.

What was with the super-mini skirts that Amy and Katrina wore to the final boardroom? Maybe it's just me, but I would think that if you fighting to stay in the game, you'd want to show Trump that you are professional. . . .

Well, the right thing in the right place, but Amy and Katrina weren't just in the boardroom, they were on a big TV show, so their judgment is appropriate. They also know there will be an opaque table in front of them for the meeting. If they didn't know where they'd be sitting, those skirts would have been an insane risk. It's one thing standing up and striding about in heels. Sitting down is another matter. Note that their upper bodies were quite conservatively covered. But generally, women watching the show shouldn't really be using it as a source of tips on how to look and act in the business world.

Madison photographs. So, you may be wondering (maybe one person is wondering), what happened to all the Madison photographs? Nothing since Monday. Fewer pictures all around, even (only that gorilla). I was locked in another idiotic tech struggle. My camera shut itself off while I was in the middle of an iPhoto operation and this caused iPhoto to go into perpetual "photos loading" mode. I read the helpful discussion boards at Mac.com--it's helpful just to see that other people have been stuck in perpetual loading hell--and eventually tried the right thing (although, as usual, I tried so many different things, that I'm not sure I could solve the same problem again if it turns up). Then, having gotten the computer to work, I found the camera kept shutting off and then I couldn't get it on at all. Seems obviously to be the battery then, right? But I'd charged it overnight....

It turned out to be a classic case of high tech problem is really a low tech problem: the charger was plugged into an outlet which is attached to a little-used wall switch, and the wall switch was off. Not as dumb as the typical not-plugged-in case, but ... Oh, well, I don't care, because I was so happy my new camera was okay. So, for fans of Madison pictures, I'll have some more today and over the weekend. This blog's description is "Art, law, politics, TV, and various random items from Madison, Wisconsin," and let me assure you that photos will be key random items from Madison, so do stop back.

Simulblogging The Apprentice. Gordon decided to join me and Prof. Yin by blogging The Apprentice, but he ups the ante--note clever gambling theme--by simulblogging it. Simulblogging is a good idea, I think, because shows usually aren't interesting enough to warrant full attention. Writing at the same time is one way to keep from losing interest. Like a lot of people, I sometimes play a video game (like Mah Jongg solitaire) while watching a show (like, say, Meet the Press or Road to the White House--how can you just look at that?). Knitting is ideal, but I can't knit. Knitting would let you keep your eyes on the screen. Oh, a treadmill or situps or something like that would be ideal, really. I recommend that to readers.

But anyway, for The Apprentice, I like to keep my eyes fixed on it, because I love the photography and the editing (as I've written before). It is really beautiful. It does go over the line and reveal who is going to be fired though, I believe. Watch and see who gets all the extra interviews edited in, interviews where the person talks about how other people are faltering and focuses on one other person. Oh, they will be wearing a distinctive item of clothing in the interview. Remember Omarosa leaning against the wall by the window? Remember her scarf? Last night it was Katrina in the hairy off-the-shoulder sweater--the hairy off-the-shoulder sweater of doom.

Gordon, watching for the first time, I think, is impressed by Bill and Amy. Amy said she thought Bill was her toughest competition. I don't get the Bill thing. What has he ever done? He seems to be just hanging around trying not to get into trouble. That hasn't been a good strategy. For some reason, I've always thought Troy was going to win. But he went into annoying huckster mode last night. Generally, they always seem too desperate at some point. That may be the editing, but I don't like when they just start accosting customers and begging them to come over. The casino milieu last night was particularly unpleasant. They were acting like circus showmen, and their targets were elderly Atlantic City gambling types. They can voice-over the term "high rollers" all they want to try to make Trump's Taj look glamorous, but the target customers on this show were the least glamorous on the show yet.

Conservative students at Wisconsin. At the UW Law School we have a coffee & doughnuts session about once a week with students. This week the subject was what it's like to be a conservative student at the Law School, and the session was led by my colleague Gordon Smith, who blogged about it beforehand here. Actually, the topic originally proposed was what it's like to be a conservative student here, and at one point there was a proposal to have a panel of some sort with every political perspective represented, and in the end the topic got narrowed to conservative students and Green Party students, which struck me as pretty weird. Do we see conservative and Green Party types as opposites? If so, that suggests that the middle is occupied by Democratic Party liberals.

Gordon began by passing around papers with large letters--either L or C--on them and everyone was supposed to take one. No Ms? I wouldn't take one. He asked one of the Ls to say what position Cs take on a long list of issues, as a way to demonstrate how un-nuanced we are about the other side. The L's view of the C was of a social conservative, opposed to abortion rights and gay marriage, which I didn't think expressed the position of many of the young people who are attracted to conservatism. He had a C do the same for the Ls and on every issue the position was the opposite (e.g., war on terror? opposed!).

So how did the students say they felt? They had almost no criticism of the way faculty teaches the material. There was a bit of criticism about side comments in class: the targets of little jokes seem to be the targets liberals enjoy seeing attacked (e.g., President Bush, Justice Scalia). The worst criticism of faculty seemed to be some sense of disrespect for some of the judges, which seemed to me to be only a problem if the disrespect isn't spread around or if the disrespect doesn't have an educative point. One student gave the impression that humor ought to be avoided, but I tend to think he didn't really mean that in such an extreme way. I dislike stock humor, especially when it's a shallow assertion that a judge is stupid or biased, but naturally one sees humor in all sorts of things when studying and talking about cases, and some of this humor is going involve showing some disrespect for the way something is written, for the bad choices litigants may have made, for the flimsiness of an argument. No reason not to have some fun along the way. But it shouldn't be at the expense of one side.

The real problem students confessed to seemed to be a self-imposed one. They had quite elaborately developed ideas about what the professors and other students must be thinking and how much they would need to constrain themselves in order not to meet with disapproval or even outright punishment (in the form of grading--even though we have blind grading). I understand this feeling. I remember some similar things as a student. Faculty didn't need to do much of anything at all to cause students to think they need to believe or appear to believe a particular ideology and that the teachers and the other students would think ill of them if they didn't say the right thing. Where do these self-imposed restrictions come from? I suppose it is human nature, and that it is also the mechanism that keeps us from doing all sorts of destructive things. But there is also the human capacity to get past this kind of "overthinking" and to begin to just enjoy taking part in debate, trying out different ideas, practicing advocacy, and listening to the things other people will say once the debate opens up. I hope the session had some effect in helping students see that the faculty overwhelmingly wants vigorous debate and a lively classroom experience--whatever our political views may be and whether or not we ever say what those views are.

"[T]his kind of very comprehensive supreme being, Seeger-type thing." That's a quote from Justice Breyer from the oral argument yesterday, his suggestion for how to think of the "God" referred to in the Pledge of Allegiance. I enjoy Breyeresque locutions. Here the whole context:

I mean, it's a pretty broad use of religion sometimes. I -- does it make you feel any better, and I think the answer's going to be no, but there is a case called Seeger, which referred to the Constitution -- to the statute that used the word, supreme being, and it said that those words, supreme being, included a set of beliefs, sincere beliefs, which in any ordinary person's life fills the same place as a belief in God fills in the life of an orthodox religionist. So it's reaching out to be inclusive, maybe to include you, I mean, to -- because many people who are not religious nonetheless have a set of beliefs which occupy the same place that religious beliefs occupy in the mind and woman of a religious -- of a religious mind in men and women.

So do you think God is so generic in this context that it could be that inclusive? ...

And if it is, then does your objection disappear? ...

But what I'm thinking there is that perhaps when you get that broad in your idea of what is religious, so it can encompass a set of religious-type beliefs in the minds of people who are not traditionally religious, when you are that broad and in a civic context, it really doesn't violate the Establishment Clause because it's meant to include virtually everybody, and the few whom it doesn't include don't have to take the pledge.

[NEWDOW: You're referring to the two words, under God?]

Yeah, under God is this kind of very comprehensive supreme being, Seeger-type thing.

There's something disarmingly roundabout in Breyer's form of expression. It actually reminds me of Ellen DeGeneres. I think it's an intentional backing off from strikingly clear statements that he is surely capable of making. The idea in the end is clear and comprehensible nonetheless, and there is something in the adopted inarticulateness that seems to invite the listener in or to avoid being too overwhelmingly brilliant. Or maybe it's just idiosyncratic or a sort of humor. Anyway, I find it charming.

Jabari was wronged. From The Life of Pi:

[Zoo] animals do not escape to somewhere but from something. Something within their territory has frightened them ... and set off a flight reaction. The animal flees, or tries to. I was surprised to read at the Toronto Zoo ... that leopards can jump up to eighteen feet straight up. Our leopard enclosure in Pondicherry was sixteen feet high at the back. I surmise that Rosie and Copycat never jumped out was not because of constitutional weekness but simply because they had no reason to. Animals that escape go from the known to the unknown--and if there is one thing an animal hates above all else, it is the unknown.

Consider then the 300-pound gorilla who escaped from his enclosure last week, "snatching up a toddler with his teeth and attacking three other people before being shot by officers," as CNN.com reports:

How the 13-year-old gorilla exactly broke out was unclear. Some youths had reportedly teased Jabari shortly before he escaped, but it was not known if that was a factor in the breakout.

Zoo director Rich Buickerood said the gorilla "had to have scaled" the enclosure's 15-foot concave wall. But some experts doubt that could have happened.

"Virtually anybody who's worked with great apes has not been able to compute anyway that a gorilla could get up a 15-foot wall," Wharton said....

Police ... are investigating, but they said officers were forced to shoot the charging gorilla after it came within 15 feet of them.

"We did not go out there looking to kill an animal," said Senior Cpl. Chris Gilliam, a Dallas police spokesman. "We went out there in response to a situation where three people had already been injured."

Would they have been forced to shoot to kill an unarmed 300-pound man who "charged" at them? Assume a man known to be incapable of understanding language and not morally responsible for the violence he had committed. Don't the police know how to wrestle down a man that size and handcuff him?

UPDATE: Several people have written to point out that it is harder to wrestle a gorilla down than a man of the same weight. I concede that is probably true with respect to most gorillas and most men. But if you reread what I wrote, I never said Jabari was wronged because they didn't use the identical method that would have been used on a man. I'm objecting to the extreme shoot-to-kill reaction and the way we instinctively think they were justified because the gorilla was only an animal. There is a middle range there, between what we think needs to be done when the charging entity is human and what we think is just fine when it is nonhuman. At the very least they could have shot him in the leg or the shoulder. I think, with a sufficient number of police, he could have been physically restrained without shooting him. Don't they have tranquilizer darts at the zoo? If we are going to have zoos to please ourselves, don't we owe something to the animals? Jabari was taunted, rocks were thrown at him (probably to get him to put on a show of ferocity). It seems to me that, under the circumstances, he deserved a lot better than he got.