Couch recipe.

I was looking for an ice cream recipe that would fit the Atkins diet, and I found this:

1/2 cup heavy cream 1/3 cup water 2 packages artificial sweetener 1/2 teaspoon vanilla 1/2 teaspoon syrup of your choice(or extract) Place ingredients in a small ziploc and seal well. Place inside a gallon sized ziploc with ice and salt. Set bag on a towel beside you on the couch and flip and jiggle the bag around for about 15 minutes, until set.

This is the first time I've ever seen the word "couch" in a recipe! I love the way the assumption is that you will already be sitting on a couch. I'd make fun, but I note that 15 minutes of modest exercise is involved.

Purple Heart button.

I see the Blogads that are running at the top of this page at the moment assume I'm for Kerry. (As regular readers know, unless something quite unusual happens, I'm not picking a candidate until October.) I followed the link to "Kerry 2004 Buttons" because I saw it listed a "Purple Heart Button." Since it's hard to get a Purple Heart Medal, I thought it would be inappropriate to wear a Purple Heart button. Here's what it looks like. Yes, it's inappropriate.

UPDATE: In a classic example of Blogads dumbness, my current ads are promoting a Days Inn in Rosenberg, Texas. This is obviously a result of my recent post about an HBO documentary about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg!

American Rhetoric.

Looking for a link for the Howard Beale speech for the last post, I found the American Rhetoric website. Wow!

No drinking game yet, but ....

Why is Slate teasing us with the line "Play the Jeopardy drinking game!" when its TV writer Dana Stevens hasn't come up with the game yet? But I don't care so much because it made me click on the link to Stevens column and read his comments on the Emmy nominations, which are really clever! I never noticed Stevens before. I particularly loved this:

In an unintentionally comic juxtaposition, Larry David of Curb Your Enthusiasm finds himself up against a dead guy, John Ritter, who appeared in only 3 episodes of 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter before his untimely death last fall. When I read this, I could only think what a perfect plot it would make for a future Larry David episode: the hopeless plight of competing with a beloved dead actor, and Larry's increasingly difficult-to-conceal resentment that his moment in the sun was being overshadowed by awards-show piety. I wonder if he'll have the courage and/or bad taste to take this real-life gag on as material next season.

That really is Larry David. And as for that drinking game, I'll be looking for it. I've started TiVoing Jeopardy, which, I don't mind saying, I used to watch back in the 60s when it first started and Art Fleming was the host. We used to find the announcer, Don Pardo, especially amusing, long before he became the ironic version of himself that announced Saturday Night Live. By the way, are we hoping Ken Jennings keeps winning or do we root for anyone new who starts off halfway sharp, like that guy with the Marx Brothers tie last week? The main reason for wanting Jennings to keep prevailing, in my opinion, is to keep up the pressure on Alex Trebek to let it slip that he's irritated by Jennings and his mannerisms. I'd like to see Trebek go all Howard Beale.

UPDATE: Dana Stevens is female, contrary to the impression give by my use of pronouns above. Why did I assume a "Dana" would be male? Have I watched "Radio Days" one too many times? No, there was just a picture of what looked like a guy to me at the top of the page that seemed to illustrate the activity of "Handicapping the Emmys," which was the title of the piece "by Dana Stevens." Didn't the email address "surfergirl" in the body of the article make me think otherwise? No! I was perfectly ready to believe a guy would adopt the nickname surfergirl. A Beach Boys fan, presumably.

Change the federal marshals' dress code?

The dress code imposed on federal air marshals presents a bit of a problem, as described in this NYT article:

The marshals fear that their appearance makes it easier for terrorists to identify them, according to a professional group representing more than 1,300 air marshals. …

Federal air marshals must have neatly trimmed hair and men must be clean-shaven, the documents say. Some of the service's 21 field offices have mandated that male officers wear suits, ties and dress shoes while on duty, even in summer heat. Women are required to wear blouses and skirts or dress slacks. Jeans, athletic shoes and noncollared shirts are prohibited. …

Andrea Houck, 52, who was traveling through New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport this week, said that she thought federal air marshals should be "totally undercover."

"Look around you," Ms. Houck said as she pointed to other passengers waiting in the food court. "Most people are traveling in T-shirts, sweatshirts and khakis." She added: "If I was a terrorist and I spotted someone dressed like an air marshal in a suit, I wouldn't get on that flight. I would get on another one."

Clearly, there is a downside to this policy, but I see an opportunity. Why don't more ordinary passengers adopt the dress code? If wearing a sports jacket or a blouse along with nonsneaker shoes is itself a deterrent to terrorism, everyone going on a flight ought to want to dress this way. You know, people used to think they should dress well to go on an airline flight. It would be nice to see people looking less slovenly anyway.

The feds have a reason for their dress code: "In order to gain respect in a situation, you must be attired to gain respect." They don't need to change to blend in with us: we should change. Not only would we look better, but we would give the impression of alertness and readiness that might suggest to terrorists that ordinary passengers, like the heroic passengers on Flight 93, stand ready to stop them. Let's all "be attired to gain respect."

UPDATE: Here's another (Wisconsin) blogger who made the same proposal, way back on July 4th. I hadn't seen that (he emailed me). I tried Googling a little to see if I could find other bloggers who'd come up with the same idea independently, but without any luck. I also got an email from someone who asserted that Americans wouldn't sacrifice comfort. Talk about being unwilling to make any sacrifices!

Maxwell Street Days.

It's the third weekend in July and you know what that means: Maxwell Street Days on State Street. It's time for all the merchants to haul a lot of merchandise out on the street and sell it very cheap. There are numerous cluttered stalls:



There's plenty of stuff that seems to have been shipped in from retail limbo to be unloaded as a seeming bargain, like these hipster action figures, with 3 interchangeable heads--Hipster! Philosopher! Cynic!:



They're only 4 dollars. Is that a bargain or a rip-off? Maybe you could buy 25 of them for $100, stow them away for 10 years, then make a killing on eBay, when there's some kind of 90s nostalgia fad going on. (Or ... wait ... is that already going on?)

Part of the idea seems to be to present merchandise unappealingly. Just toss all the old junk in a cardboard box. Go ahead--buy those pink panties!



Or just have a nice Wisconsin brat, cooked outside.



Or buy a Popsicle from the Popsicle Girl:



And listen to the Cashbox Kings:



They're pretty good.

Web design insanity.

Maybe this is what happens when you're sleep deprived.

In love and litigious.

The AP reports from Bucharest:

Sandu Gurguiatu first sued for money. Then he sued for love.

The love-struck Romanian took his company to court four years ago for what he said was unfair dismissal. But after setting eyes on Judge Elena Lala, he sued his employers and others dozens of times - just to see her.

"I fell madly in love with her and when I found out she was married, I didn't know how I would manage to see her .... The only way was to see her in the courtroom, so I looked in the law book and came up with all kinds of excuses." ...

Gurguiatu lost his first suit. But he won some subsequent ones against other companies - including the right to have two towels and enough soap to wash up at work.

I kind of suspect this of being a made-up story, but it is amusing. Who knew you had a legal right to two towels in Rumania?

"Heir to an Execution."

The other documentary I watched yesterday (besides "Running Fence," discussed below), was "Heir to an Execution" (an HBO "America Undercover" feature). Ivy Meeropol, a granddaughter of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, has put together a rambling series of film clips aimed at showing the effects of the Rosenberg case on her family and several other persons who were close to the Rosenbergs. It relies too much on the "Roger and Me" device of following the filmmaker around as she tries to collect the interviews and other information. There simply wasn't enough of a personal journey here to justify that device (which is by now a very tired device anyway). Meeropol herself doesn't display much of a passion for getting at the truth or have any interesting reactions to the discoveries she does make. She is the nice, respectful family member who feels sad that her father had to grow up without parents and who goes to visit her grandparents' grave.

Why would you want to watch a film on this topic made by a family member? The best reason is that many people were willing to talk to her. (Although plenty weren't, and we're subjected to many minutes of watching her speaking into the phone to people whom we can't hear but can tell are declining to be interviewed.) Meeropol didn't use her access to obtain interviews that are in some way distinctive, so the full-length treatment seems quite self-indulgent. There were endless shots of people walking down hallways, remarking on the fact that this is a hallway that had been walked down at some time in the past, and many interviews of persons sitting on couches, reeling out memories, uninterrupted by questions any more searching than how did that make you feel. Considering all the couch interviews, it's humorous -- uncomfortably and unintentionally -- when Meeropol decides to make a 103-year-old man walk around outdoors for his interview.

Compare this film to "The Fog of War" to see how archival film footage and a talking-head interview can be made into something of genuine cinematic value.

"Running Fence" and the law.

I'm two-fifths of the way through "Five Films About Christo and Jean-Claude," and I'm not going to wait until I've finished the whole set to write about how much I love these films by the Maysles brothers ... and how much I love Christo ... and Jean-Claude! And I'd like to put in a special recommendation for law people who may shy away from high art documentaries to take a look at least at the second film "Running Fence," which shows the artists trying to deal with local democracy. The regular folks announce their opinion that they don't think a 27 mile-long fabric fence is art, but why does it even matter if building the fence will pour millions into the local economy and will be taken down in two weeks? A suntanned old rancher explains to the seemingly sophisticated artists that the people around here (Marin County, California) don't know him, and the artist undertakes to get to know the locals, some of whom come to really love the art of the fence and some of whom just manage to get over their initial who-the-hell-does-he-think-he-is attitude. The environmentalists show up and oppose the part of the fence that extends into the ocean, and they get a restraining order, which Christo has to figure out whether to respect. At some point, you get the feeling that the art project is not just or perhaps not even the fence itself, but the local culture encountering and engaging with the fence. The legal system is part of the local culture that gets tangled up in 27 miles of fabric. A nice "law in action" movie.

American Idol: tinkering with the rules.

Last season's American Idol led various commentators to propose various rule changes, and it turns out American Idol is going to change a rule. It's going to raise the age limit by 2 years (to 26). That's a modest change. Some people thought the voting method should be changed to guard against whatever injustices were perceived last season. One of the worst ideas was to change from voting for your favorite to voting against your least favorite. (Discussed here) A more sensible idea might be to raise the lower age to 18, or maybe to have two competitions, one with 16 to 24 year olds and another with 25 and up to whatever the age is when there has to be something wrong with you to be willing to put up with that sort of overhandling. But, really, why should they tinker too much with success?

"Mr. Osbourne's shrewd answer."

Ben Ratliff, writing about Ozzfest in the New York Times, ridiculously garbles the reference to Bush's "Coalition of the Wild-Eyed" commercial:

[G]oofy old Ozzy Osbourne, whose political views have been largely unknown up to this point, made the strongest political statement of the night, and the strongest music. ... "War Pigs," the opener, was the best song of the set and the entire day. To double the force of the music, the giant screens next to the stage showed pictures of President Bush juxtaposed with pictures of Hitler.

It may have been Mr. Osbourne's shrewd answer to the Bush campaign's recent Internet advertisement "Coalition of the Wild-Eyed," which sets film of various Democratic leaders fulminating against films of Hitler fulminating.

I can't believe the Times is still printing descriptions of the Bush commercial that don't reveal that it was a Moveon.org ad that originally edited Hitler images in with Bush. The Bush campaign's point was that it's crazy or irresponsible to use Hitler images to make an argument against Bush. It never likened the "fulminating Democrats" to Hitler! Ozzfest is back to doing the same thing that the Moveon.org ad did: likening Bush to Hitler. It's not coming up with anything new and certainly not anything "shrewd."

And I doubt very much that we can conclude that we now know what "goofy old Ozzy Osbourne" thinks about politics (or even if he thinks about politics). Anyone who's seen "The Osbournes" knows that the visual trappings of his concerts are inflicted on him. Remember the bubble machine?

Recognizing the Kerry speech pattern.

ME (reading): Okay, who said this: "The sea is important to me. I get a lot out of being close to it. It's my connection. It's where I've always been. It's where I get a peace of mind and creativity."

JOHN: John Kerry?

ME: How'd you get that?

JOHN: It sounds like him. That's the way he talks. It sounds like when he was talking to Larry King about his religion--his feeling of being centered. He's always talking in abstractions.

For the record, here's the Larry King interchange (my son) John remembered:

KING: OK, what part does your faith play in your governance?

KERRY: It guides you. It's your rock. It's the bedrock of your sense of place, of where it all fits.

"Keep your shirt on"/"Keep your pants on."

Which of those two expressions came first? I was thinking "pants" was first and then it was cleaned up to "shirt." Chris states confidently that "shirt" was first--the point was that a man would take off his shirt when he was preparing to fight. Wouldn't it have been "Keep your jacket on" first, then? And how did "pants" ever get started?

The internet says:

Before modern manufacturing techniques, shirts, and all clothes for that matter, required a lot of labor to make. They were more expensive than they are today. Someone thinking of starting a fight might take off his shirt to prevent damage. Telling someone to "keep his shirt on" was equivalent to telling him "I don't want to fight." ...

Hmmm... so then, it got dirtied up.

What McCain really said.

I wrote earlier today that I doubted that Senator McCain used the term "states rights" when he made a statement about the values of the Republican party. It is characteristic of the New York Times to overuse this term. (I particularly notice it in reports about the Supreme Court.) Here's what McCain actually said, as reported by the Chicago Tribune:

"The constitutional amendment we are debating today strikes me as antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans," said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). "It usurps from the states a fundamental authority they have always possessed, and imposes a federal remedy for a problem that most states do not believe confronts them."

"States rights"--should there be an apostrophe?

Looking for the full McCain quote I excerpted below, I got sidetracked by the question whether there should be an apostrophe in "states rights." My search for the full quote turned up this Andrew Sullivan post, and he (and others) put in the apostrophe. I think I would have used the apostrophe too, but I had been quoting the Times, and the Times left it out. So who's right? It might seem logical to put the apostrophe in, on the theory that the rights belong to the states, and the apostrophe makes "states" into a possessive adjective. But if a possessive form is called for, how do you explain the expression "individual rights"? No one thinks it should be "individual's rights" or "individuals' rights." I think the reason is that we perceive "individual rights" as a category of rights, like "free speech rights" or "abortion rights" or "gun rights," and not, in fact as a possessive. The same, then, would have to be true of "states rights." The Times is correct. I think that to put the apostrophe in is to hypercorrect--to deviate from what seems natural, think about a rule, and then apply the rule. I don't object to thinking about grammar rules, it's just that the mere awareness of a rule is no guarantee you're going to apply it correctly.

UPDATE: Jeremy disagrees. He notes that all the examples I've given that don't have apostrophes are singular:

The analogies Ann draws doesn't work, because they are all instances of de-possessiving a potential possessive by making it singular--if we would say "individuals' rights", there should be an apostrophe, but if we talk about the same thing by saying "individual right", we essentially imbue it with a higher degree of abstraction--I'm sure there must be a fancy name for it--such that it's no longer a possessive. You write "human rights" but if you wanted to write "humans' rights", the possessive belongs. To take two common examples, some people refer to "children's rights" and "prisoners' rights", both of which should have possessives, while other people nowadays refer to the same thing as "child rights" and "prisoner rights."

First, it should be "The analogies Ann draws don't work." And I'm just saying that because I want to be right about something.

Second, I'm going to exclude the example "human rights" because "human" is an adjective. "Human" is a noun and "humans" ought to be added to Jeremy's sidebar list of horrible words. They are clearly worse than "impact" as a verb! "Humans" is, at best, jocose. (Authority: Follett!) But I'll hedge on this opinion, because it seems open to the criticism that the rights are not human. They are the rights of the human being.

Third, "prisoners rights" just restates the problem whether the apostrophe is right or not: people hear the "s" and so they think about whether to add the apostrophe, and they may be making the wrong judgment.

Okay. "Children's rights" is the important example here, because we happen to have lucked into an irregular plural, so we know the "s" has to be there only as a possessive, and the apostrophe is required. What force prevented us from adopting the idiom "child rights"? In Jeremy's theory, it would have to be that for some reason we declined to perform the step of abstracting the notion of "the child," which is also what has happened with "states' rights." It might be the force of the irregular plural that kept it from declining into an abstract. But what prevented "states rights" from going singular, given that it's a pretty abstract thing? I think it may be the context of thinking about what belongs to the states as opposed to the national government. We always say things like, "This should be left to the states." It would be misunderstood if we changed that to "This should be left to the state," because "the state" is a generic term for government. Also "states rights" has a longstanding historical use: it's idiomatic. That does make me think that the apostrophe question might be resolved by referring to the historical texts: I do think that if you look at the pre-Civil War references to "states rights," you won't find the apostrophe. A more recent historical reference point is the "States' Rights Democrats" of the 1940s: I think they did use the apostrophe.

Anyway, I really want to the answer to be that the apostrophe does belong there, because I have a law review article with "States' Right" in the title ("Why Talking About 'States' Rights' Cannot Avoid the Need for Normative Federalism Analysis: A Response to Professors Baker and Young," 51 Duke L.J. 363 (2001)). I'm sure I've written the expression, with the apostrophe, many times in published articles. I'm also concerned that my argument for dropping the apostrophe is based largely on my assumption that the New York Times would get it right! That would be rather pathetic. And wait! I just did a LEXIS search of NYT articles written by Linda Greenhouse, who writes about the Supreme Court, and every one I saw had "states' rights" with the apostrophe. So all of this obeisance to the wisdom of the Times is in vain!

Vaguely related question I thought of while writing this update: Why don't we update the name of our country from United States of America to America's United States?