Stalking statues.

Here I am at the Albin Polasek Museum in Winter Park, Florida. No, I'm not there now. These pictures are two years old, but John just scanned and uploaded them.






MORE: Here's John's whole photoset from the Albin Polasek Museum photo. There's one that looks like a baby in a sonogram. And a nice Abe Lincoln/Virgin Mary combo.

The eco-friendly baby.

A 7 month old infant already out of diapers? Yes!

For many parents in the United States, the idea of potty training before a baby is able to walk, or even before age 2, is not just horrifying but reprehensible - a sure nightmare for parents and baby, not to mention a direct route from the crib to the psychiatrist's couch. But a growing number of parents are experimenting with infant potty training, seeing it as more sanitary, ecologically correct and likely to strengthen bonds between parent and child.

You better get your baby in line with the eco-virtues.

Reading about rubber bananas while really very hungry.

Oh, I've been sitting in this café for so long. The large capuccino glass has been empty for .... is it hours? That cookie -- a large cookie, admittedly -- is the only solid food I've eaten all day. I have every intention -- and have had every intention for an hour -- of relocating to a restaurant. I'm thinking sesame chicken. But somehow I keep finding one more thing to read. And so there's this, a little diary by Donovan, part of a promotion of his autobiography, "Hurdy Gurdy Man," and when we drove over to the café -- hours ago -- we were playing "Hurdy Gurdy Man" on the CD player and talking a lot about Donovan and how much we love the song "Hurdy Gurdy Man" (which, John argued, Prince ripped off in "Sign O' the Times").

An excerpt from the Donovan diary:

I went to Capital Radio, where I'd earlier sent around two dozen rubber bananas. You put your mobile phone in them, a cute idea taken from the Marx Brothers movie where they'd pick up a banana and say, "Hello?" My song Mellow Yellow means I am forever associated with bananas so I thought I'd give them away on air. That night I played the beautiful Café de Paris in front of 600 fans.

Must get food.

UPDATE: Eating sesame chicken now. Really feeling much better. Still love Donovan....

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here's a nice long piece about Donovan's book. Some excerpts:

His sexual libertarianism was also shaped by teenage reading of the Beats, particularly Jack Kerouac. “When I read On The Road it seemed like there were gals in the bohemian world who were willing to break the conditioning of their background, and refused to be pushing a pram, refused to marry in the normal way, and wished to be artists. These gals were not just sexual objects, they had freedom and an artistic bent. I was fascinated by those liberated females – not just because of the sexual freedom but because they had left society.”....

He also had the misfortune to appear on the national stage in the very year – 1965 – that Bob Dylan was abandoning folk and pushing forward the frontiers of pop and rock . They met when Dylan toured Britain that year, and Donovan appears in DA Pennebaker’s documentary, Don’t Look Back. Conventional thinking on the film is that Dylan is sneering at Donovan, who performs a song for him, but Donovan doesn’t see it that way. “Absolute bullshit,” he snaps. “If you actually look at the movie, Bob is honouring my work.”

The allegation clearly hurts. I hadn’t even asked about Don’t Look Back; he brought it up himself. I do want to know, however, what it’s like for Donovan, trying to celebrate his 40th anniversary when suddenly 2005 turns into the year of Bob Dylan. Surely it must be frustrating that even after all these years he can’t escape the man’s shadow? “I’m going to have a pee,” he says, “but I’ll be back, and we’ll address that.”...

There is a scene in the book where he has gone to bed with the American folk singer Joan Baez, but when she reminisces about sex with Bob Dylan his ardour is considerably dampened....

Hotel Fox!

Okay! Let's go to Denmark! (Via Drawn!)

"You know, once you start to think 'Bush is an idiot,' it becomes a pervasive organizing principle."

Did Althouse say that just now?

"Robert Bork 'Borks' Harriet Miers."

Great headline.

All the President's women.

Phyllis Schafly (casting aspersions on Harriet Miers):

"All the women around Bush are opposed to overturning Roe v. Wade – his wife, his mother, his Secretary of State, the [co-chair] of the Republican National Committee ... There is no woman around Bush who is in favor of overturning Roe v. Wade.”

Is the problem with the genuinely conservative women on the list that they are against Roe v. Wade? Was Miers Bush's only real choice because she could be portrayed as conservative but would uphold abortion rights, as all the women close to him demand?

UPDATE: William Saletan marshalls the evidence that insiders know Miers is anti-abortion. I'm not convinced. And again, lots of people are anti-abortion but not anti-abortion rights. And lots of people think Roe v. Wade was poorly reasoned or wrongly decided in its time but don't also think it should be overruled now.

Did "Real Time With Bill Maher" just get a lot funnier?

A side effect of my oppostion to the Miers nomination: It made "Real Time With Bill Maher" get a lot funnier. All those jokes premised on Bush's incompetence? Suddenly, I found myself laughing. Ann Coulter was laughing too. Well, I mean, she's always laughing -- that's her gimmick -- but she was laughing at Bush.

And I loved the ad in the beginning for the perfume "Harriet," with the tag line, "I can be anything you want me to be."

The panel last night was Andrew Sullivan, Ben Affleck, and Salman Rushdie. About midway through the discussion, everyone chez Althouse agreed that it was amazingly easy put those three men in order of their intelligence. I'll just say, in the order I wrote the names two sentences ago, no man is in the position he ended up on our in-order-of-intelligence list.

Andrew Sullivan got very impassioned -- by the subject he came to get impassioned about: torture. I can't remember how he got that to be the topic, because Maher tries hard to get the panel to subjects people can laugh about. Sullivan, like Coulter, laughs continually while speaking, but unlike Coulter, never seems to be at all fun-loving. In fact, he seems to lack a sense of humor, especially about religion, which Maher considers an immense humor target. I'm not really sure what function the Sullivan Laugh serves. It usually seems to convey a dismissive mockery, usually of the moral inadequacy of others.

"Luttig is getting huge free publicity."

A reader emails:

It seems to me that the big winner from the whole Miers brouhaha is Luttig. Before her nomination, he had practically no chance of being nominated, since he's not a woman or a minority. But now, every time someone says Miers is unqualified or mediocre, they add "unlike Luttig, who is a brilliant, supremely qualified conservative intellectual." Why people don't mention Karen Williams or Priscilla Owen or Janice Rogers Brown as the primary preferred alternative, I don't know. Luttig is getting huge free publicity. If the Miers nomination is withdrawn or if she is not confirmed by the Senate, there will be huge pressure for the President to nominate "Luttig or someone like Luttig."

Very interesting. And clearly, this ties to ideas about affirmative action. Some Miers supporters are even throwing the word "sexist" around. Don't say she's not qualified, or you're a sexist? That translates into: See, you wanted a woman hired, and this is what we had to do to find a woman, so please be discreet and don't mention her inferiority. Don't compare her to Roberts. If we could pick a man, we'd find someone lustrous, like Luttig. But everyone says we shouldn't. We tried picking Roberts for the O'Connor slot, and everyone complained. We're doing what you insisted upon, so you'll have to accept the consequences.

How insulting to women this is! And the implicit critique of affirmative action is quite cheap, because, as the emailer notes, there are impressive women the President could have chosen.

"He is the box."

Said by me in a discussion just now with a colleague. Topic: how Harriet Miers will behave if she gets to the Supreme Court. The "he" is Justice Scalia.

IN THE COMMENTS: Some very funny efforts at constructing the dialogue that led up to my punchline, which leads one reader to observe: "Hey! This is Ann's on-line, nerdy version of 'The Aristocrats'!"

"Please send help!"

My colleague Gordon Smith -- who, by the way is calling for the withdrawal of the Miers nomination -- blogs from the faculty meeting -- for help!

He was plugged into the ethernet. I was in another corner of the room, not plugged in and unable to pick up any WiFi. Had I been able to get on line, I would have blogged, but I wouldn't have blogged for help. I'd have been happy enough just to be able to get on line and to blog. As it was, I really needed help more than Gordon!

UPDATE: Professor Bainbridge is awed by the free-spirited ways of the Madisonians:

Do Gordon and Ann take laptops to the faculty meeting and just whip them out in plain sight? I've occasionally used my Treo to blog from a faculty meeting or, more often, to check email, but even that is pushing the outer limits of the group norms of my faculty. Blatantly working on a laptop while paying only partial attention, at most, to my colleagues' endless rambling thoughtful comments probably would be way over the line of what's acceptable here.

I've written about the role of group norms play in determining in how corporate boards make decisions and remain curious about the role of norms in governing behavior. So I pose a question: If your job requires endless meetings, do your workplace civility norms allow one to blog from the meeting?

I have another question: Does anyone work somewhere where prolonging meetings with superfluous, new issues and philosophical reflections is considered beyond "workplace civility norms"? If not, and if, at the same time, rapt attention must be paid to everyone who takes the floor, you've got a major dysfunction. I think you have to go one way or the other. If you want to require rapt attention, you've got to make the meeting very crisp and fast. To the extent that the speakers want to be tolerated as they luxuriate in extended discourse, they need to show mercy by allowing a lot of freedom to the rest of us folks. We have the mutual tolerance approach here in Madison ... at least as far as I can tell.

Is using a laptop worse than doing crosswords or reading -- the traditional methods of staving off madness? Maybe it is. There's that clicky keyboard sound, and the screen seems to be a barrier, walling you off from the communal spirit so many of the professorial types seem to believe they are generating with all the back-and-forth.

And then, the possibility of blogging... that must be especially disturbing. Many faculty do not understand blogging and imagine all sorts of odd or abusive things going on in this little 'sphere of ours. Is Althouse taking quotes out of context, satirizing us, holding us up to the mockery of her right-wing groupies?

"The Apprentice" -- enough cake for you?

Someone just asked what happened to my usual commentary on "The Apprentice." I did watch both the Donald and the Martha this week. Anything you feel like saying about them? Actually, the shows were pretty cool this week. Martha's had two big, ugly cakes (for brides) and Donald's had another even uglier cake (for old folks). But let's take the discussion to the comments, where spoilers can run free.

The lingering Justice O'Connor.

What is the effect of Justice O'Connor's continuing on the Court this term? What of all those lawyers who have shaped their arguments specifically to appeal to her way of thinking, whose briefs are already filed? And what of the lawyers who've considered or who are considering doing that, without knowing whether she'll be there to decide the case or not? Then there's the particular case of Jay Sekulow, director of the American Center for Law and Justice, who said, in a White House sponsored conference call pushing the Miers nomination:

"Let me tell you this from the perspective of someone who litigates cases regularly in the Supreme Court of the United States. I'm involved in three three cases at the Court this Term, and believe me: I want Harriet Meirs up there voting on these critical cases."

Eric Muller is very outraged at Sekulow and the White House. But Sekulow clearly states that he doesn't know for sure how Miers will vote. And I note his probable, though unspoken, preference to be free of O'Connor's vote.

Why lawyers blog.

The joy of blogging seems to be a theme here today. I just noticed -- via Instapundit -- that I'm quoted in today's NYT. It's fun to get quoted about blogging, and my quote is about the fun of blogging. The reporter, Jonathan D. Glater, is trying to find out why so many lawyers are bloggers.

"It's our natural environment, to read things on the Web, to read news stories, and to have something to say," said Ann Althouse, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin who posts her views at althouse.blogspot.com. Compared with spending a year writing a law review article, she said, blogging is fun.

I should add that parts of the process of writing an article are fun, but that there is something un-fun about the long delay between having your ideas and getting them published. I think blogging lawprofs tend to be the ones who enjoy freedom from the editing process. The law classroom itself is very spontaneous and expressive, and if you love talking in class but want a wider, more diverse audience, blogging feels great.

AMPLIFICATION: By "natural environment" I meant text, especially the sort of text that contains mysteries about bias and missing arguments and information. Lawyers can read such things and see what hasn't been said and pose necessary questions and reframe arguments and so forth. We're used to doing that in the ordinary course of our work as we read briefs and court opinions. We just naturally plunge into such things and find material to write about.

"Warren."

So you're nominated for that big Supreme Court position, and now you're courting the various Senators, including the very important Patrick Leahy, the senior Democratic Senator on the Judiciary Committee, and he asks you who's your favorite Supreme Court Justice of all time and you say "Warren."

Warren?

Uh.... whoops.... but you see an out: Yeah, Warren, you know, Warren Burger. Great save! Except who has Warren Burger as their favorite Justice? I mean, plenty of people adore and revere Earl Warren, who is widely considered one of the finest Justices in the Court's history. But Warren Burger? Come on. Well, ask her about that at the hearings. I think even the brilliant advocate John Roberts would have trouble piecing together a plausible answer if he were assigned the task of arguing that Burger was the greatest Supreme Court Justice of them all.

Really, do you have a clue why she said "Warren"? She must have meant Earl Warren when she said it, right? Because who would use the first name to identify a justice? The news report doesn't at all convey the sense that she might have been cracking a joke, and it's hard to picture her making a joke, particularly this joke, in this context. But why would she blurt out Earl Warren? Possibly because she knows he became a great justice after entering the Court with no judicial experience, and she is attempting to portray herself as capable of doing the same. But why would she name this immense liberal hero unless she didn't know the first thing about constitutional law? Even if she's secretly a liberal, this would not be the right time to roll out that information.

(Link via Bench Memos.)

UPDATE: Actually the Bench Memos post is an attempt to explain the blunder. This unsourced info is provided:

"Miers was asked about Justices she admired. She responded that she admired different Justices for different reasons, including Warren — interrupted by Senator Leahy — Burger for his administrative skills.

Reasonable people could ask whether Burger was a great administrator, but the comment is taken out of context by the Washington Post. Miers didn't express admiration for his jurisprudence."

So, maybe she was in the middle of saying the whole name and Leahy jumped in, and her point was that even Burger had some reasons why you could admire him. Except Burger is criticized for his administration skills: many of the recent Rehnquist obituaries emphasized what an improvement he made over Burger.

Fun is the one thing that institutionalization can't buy.

Victor Fleischer is somewhat optimistic about what he calls "institutional blogs." (A dreary name, no?) This would be a blog like the University of Chicago Law School faculty blog, which is called The University of Chicago Law School Faculty Blog. You can't get any more institutional than that.

Fleischer is responding to Matt Brodie, who speculates about the future of blogging, in a way makes the future sound dull. Here's Fleischer's point:

Unless blogs have an identifiable voice, they aren't much fun to read. Anyone who has been to a faculty meeting knows that cacophony trumps harmony. And blogging might start to feel more like work. And what do you do with law profs who just want to talk about personal stuff, not law?

Is the secret of blogging fun? Fun to read, fun to write. And not just fun, play. Joy.