The Madison Lollipop sees its shadow on Holy Saturday.

Does this mean 4 more weeks of winter?

Angry Lefties, online.

WaPo has a big article on the web's lefty ranters, but it's mostly a cutesy profile of Maryscott O'Connor, of My Left Wing. Here's the most substantive passage:

What's notable about this isn't only the level of anger but the direction from which it is coming. Not that long ago, it was the right that was angry and the left that was, at least comparatively, polite. But after years of being the targets of inflammatory rhetoric, not only from fringe groups but also from such mainstream conservative politicians as Newt Gingrich, the left has gone on the attack. And with Republicans in control of Washington, they have much more to be angry about.

"Powerlessness" is O'Connor's explanation. "This is born of powerlessness."

To what, effect, though? Do the hundreds of thousands of daily visitors to Daily Kos, who sign their comments with phrases such as "Anger is energy," accomplish anything other than talking among themselves? The founder of Daily Kos, Markos Moulitsas, may have a wide enough reputation at this point to consult regularly with Democrats on Capitol Hill, but what about the heart and soul of Daily Kos, the other visitors, whose presence extends no further than what they read and write on the site?

Actually, I have to admit that I blog for self-expression, not with any expectation of affecting anything. In fact, I strongly favor blogging for the sake of blogging and mistrust bloggers who are tapping the medium because they have a goal that they want to accomplish. I have to think that the monumental talkfest that is blogdom has got to be having some effect. But I quite love the fact that the effect is far beyond the control of the individuals who take up blogging because they want to make something specific happen.

"Searching for the male equivalent of chick lit, but ... frightened when they actually saw what it looked like."

How "fratire" found success:

Many of the books in the fratire genre began online, either organically or out of necessity because mainstream publishers would have nothing to do with them. [Tucker] Max said that despite receiving approximately 60,000 visitors daily at TuckerMax.com, he got "zero interest" when he initially pitched his book.

"Bro, when I say 'zero interest,' I mean zero," he said, taking another slug of beer.

Frank Kelly Rich, the 42-year-old editor of Modern Drunkard magazine and the author of the book "The Modern Drunkard," said that it took the Web to help fratire get around the hang-ups of mainstream publishing houses that professed to be searching for the male equivalent of chick lit, but which were frightened when they actually saw what it looked like.

"The publishing houses filtered out anything politically incorrect or offensive," he said. "It took the Internet to show them what was popular and now they're going after it. Before that, they would just guess."

Well, isn't it that mainstream publishing houses reject pornography, even though it's extremely popular? I don't get this accusation that mainstream publishers are clueless about what men want to read. Everyone knows pornography is popular. Aren't these publishing houses just looking at the big picture for them and seeing that they have to preserve some overall standards?

By the way, Max went to law school (University of Chicago and Duke).

The Audi TT Coupe.

I love my Audi TT Coupe:



But look, they've redesigned it!



They've destroyed its charm. Look at those sharp ridges. Look at how they've tried to make it resemble the other cars that are around today -- all those ugly, ordinary, "angry" cars. There are so few cars that I like enough even to take a second look. Now, I have to cross the model I love off the list. It's hard for me to think of a car to be interested in now. I can only hope that styles change by the time the lease on my car expires.

A perception about time.

Seconds are short. Minutes are long. Hours are short. Days are long. Weeks are short. Months are long. Years are short. Decades are long. Life is short. Don't you agree?

Surviving 10 weeks in the Outback on leeches and frogs.

The BBC reports:

"The last thing I remember was driving up the road and getting a bit dazed and confused.

"The next thing was waking up, face down, in a hole. There was some plastic on me with some rocks and dirt thrown on top. What woke me was that there were four dingoes scratching the rocks to try to get at me."

After wandering for more than a week he stumbled upon a natural dam.

"I ate the leeches raw, straight out of the dam," he said. "Grasshoppers I just ate them. But the only thing I really sort of had to cook was the frogs.

"I slipped them onto a bit of wire and stuck the wire on top of my [shelter], let the sun dry them out a fair bit until they were a bit crispy and then just ate them."

Sun-crisped. I'm picturing fancy chefs adapting that technique for haute cuisine. Did you watch "Top Chef" this week? Harold made some bacon appetizer doing the cooking entirely with a blowtorch, and the judge was all I love blowtorched food. And what was with Stephen winning? That wasn't an appetizer, that was a painting.

But back to that amazing struggle in the Outback. There are lots of gruesome stories of folks who did not walk out alive like Ricky Megee. But we love the stories of the horrible struggles of people who do survive. Do you watch that TV show "I Shouldn't Be Alive"? I love that. Trapped under a boulder!

"While Islam promotes free speech, it is important to recognize that anything that is discriminatory does not qualify under this heading."

So reads a flyer from the USC Muslim Students Union, announcing a panel discussion titled "Islam and the Cartoons: the Responsibilities of Free Speech" (PDF), which Eugene Volokh is discussing here:

I take it that the implication is that criticism of Islam, or critical depictions of Mohammed (or is it any depictions of Mohammed at all?), is unprotected because it's "discriminatory." How about Muslim statements that other religions are misguided; are those "discriminatory," too?

Plus of course there's also the old chestnut about the supposed "differences between free speech and hate speech." Fortunately, modern U.S. First Amendment law does not treat the two as antonyms, just as it wouldn't discuss "the differences between free speech and blasphemy" or "the differences between free speech and sedition." It's a shame that the USC Muslim Student Union takes a different view.

Even though the flyer uses the phrase "free speech," it does not mention the U.S. Constitution or say that the discussion is about the constitutional law or the scope of constitutional protections. The cartoons controversy is not, after all, about government censorship, but about private individuals and groups trying to influence other private individuals and groups. No one writes and says and draws everything that constitutional law would permit, and most of us would be hard pressed to come up with things we could express that would be something the government could censor. There are plenty of hateful, ugly, and hurtful things we can easily think of that we would restrain ourselves from saying even though we have a constitutional right to say them. And I don't mean to appear to be lecturing Eugene Volokh about any of this, because it's an obvious given that, as a conlawprof, he knows this.

I just want to defend the Muslim Students Union here. There is nothing in that flyer that condones violence. I would prefer to see the Union openly condemn the threats of violence and distance their religion from the threats of violence that are plainly at issue in the cartoon controversy. But it is perfectly legitimate to have a private conception of "free speech" that is narrower than the legal definition. And it is is likewise perfectly legitimate to have a private conception of "discrimination" that is broader than the legal definition. Religions tend to have far higher standards for behavior and expression than the government would impose (which is one of the strongest reasons for having a separation of religion and state).

A private group that wants to hold a discussion can define the topic and impose some limitations, including demands that participants discuss the issue rationally and without shouting and deliberately provoking each other. Those who want to range into different issues and fling insults about are free to start their own discussion. Here, the Muslim Students Union may mean to say something like: We want to host a discussion, and we are going to try to keep the discussion civil. We want to talk with you, not provide an occasion for you to show up at our place and taunt us.

I'm thinking of a discussion I set up quite a while ago at the Law School. Some of the women students got the idea that the failure to use the Socratic Method discriminates against women. The male students, they had observed, were more likely to volunteer than female students, so a lawprof who relied on voluntary participation would have a classroom with a disproportionate amount of male speakers. I set up a discussion so that students and faculty could exchange ideas on the subject. Now, some of the students were really upset and even thought that there were teachers who deliberately used voluntary participation as a way to suppress women, a charge I thought was beyond the pale and distracting.

I wrote a flyer inviting students and faculty to the discussion and included a sentence framing the issue for discussion. I stated an expectation that we could have an intellectual discussion of the problem of whether the Socratic Method is needed in order to avoid a disparate impact on female students and that we ought to avoid emotional charges that anyone is deliberately discriminating against women.

One faculty member, a constitutional law professor, came to my office to express outrage that I had imposed that limitation on the discussion. The students should be free to vent emotionally and to air whatever accusations they wanted. Did free speech require that? I was setting up a discussion. I defined the ground rules in a way that I thought would be most fruitful and that would encourage more people to show up and contribute (something I do in the classroom constantly). My colleague could set up another discussion where students were allowed to talk about what bigots individual professors are, but I wouldn't even attend a discussion like that. Would you?

By the same token, I think it's fair for the Muslim students to try to set up a helpful discussion by signaling that the atmosphere is not going to be ugly. That can encourage attendance and a willingness to listen and exchange ideas on the topic chosen. If anyone thinks they've left something out, they can set up another discussion.

When a Broadway show and nature converge...

... to make a Biblical impression.

The sense that a person from the deep past sent something to you.

Have you ever had it?

Hail!

Scariest hailstorm I've ever witnessed, here in Madison tonight. Big ice marbles bouncing everywhere for about 5 minutes. I've heard of golf-ball-sized hail and even grapefruit-sized-hail. I can't imagine what that must be like.

The bubble artist.

Fan Yang.



He's just warming up in that picture. Later, he encapsulates 15 pairs of people inside 15 bubbles and then gets all 15 of those bubbles inside a mega-bubble.

"Something emotional in the relationship"...

... between a human being and her robot.

"God curse America. We will win. It's just a question of time."

Moussaoui takes the stand:

He noted many relatives of victims wept on the witness stand, then walked past him in the courtroom and looked his way without crying. "I find it disgusting that people come here to share their grief over the death of some other person," he said.

"I'm glad there was pain, and I wish there will be more pain," Moussaoui said. "The children in Palestine and in Chechnya will have pain. I want you to share their pain."...

In a lengthy explanation of why he hates Americans, Moussaoui said Islam requires Muslims to be the world's superpower as he flipped through a copy of the Quran searching for verses to support his assertion. He said one verse requires Muslims "to fight against all who believe not in Allah."

"We have an obligation to be the superpower. You have to be subdued," Moussaoui said. "America is a superpower and you want to eradicate Islam."

He criticized U.S. support for Israel. "Every child who has been killed in Palestine has been killed because of you," he said. Israel is "just a missing star in the American flag," he added.

Much more at the link.

"It was necessary, he suppos'd, to drink strong beer, that he might be strong to labor."

I've been listening to an audiobook of Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography. The narrator has a terribly unnatural way of speaking, but it's not driving me as crazy at it was when I was wracking my brain trying to figure out who it reminded me of. Somehow I hit upon the answer: it's the rabbi from this episode of "Seinfeld." ("Elaine, often times in life there are problems, and just as often there are solutions.")

Anyway, I liked Franklin's description of all the drinking that went on at a printing-house in London:

At my first admission into this printing-house I took to working at press, imagining I felt a want of the bodily exercise I had been us'd to in America, where presswork is mix'd with composing. I drank only water; the other workmen, near fifty in number, were great guzzlers of beer. On occasion, I carried up and down stairs a large form of types in each hand, when others carried but one in both hands. They wondered to see, from this and several instances, that the Water-American, as they called me, was stronger than themselves, who drank strong beer! We had an alehouse boy who attended always in the house to supply the workmen. My companion at the press drank every day a pint before breakfast, a pint at breakfast with his bread and cheese, a pint between breakfast and dinner, a pint at dinner, a pint in the afternoon about six o'clock, and another when he had done his day's work. I thought it a detestable custom; but it was necessary, he suppos'd, to drink strong beer, that he might be strong to labor. I endeavored to convince him that the bodily strength afforded by beer could only be in proportion to the grain or flour of the barley dissolved in the water of which it was made; that there was more flour in a pennyworth of bread; and therefore, if he would eat that with a pint of water, it would give him more strength than a quart of beer.

We hear lots of excuses for drinking nowadays, but never that one. Hilarious. How could people get anything done, drinking like that?

Nicknames.

Nicknames are big these days, we're told. (Did you know the word "nickname" is derived from "eke-name"?) It may not be that there are more nicknames, but that people are nicknaming themselves. I remember when George Costanza tried to do that. It wasn't cool at all.

Is there something about email and the internet that makes self-nicknaming different now?

[T]he process of acquiring a nickname was changed by the advent of e-mail in the 1980's, when users had to create their e-mail handles.

"Handles"? You're making it too easy to remember the CB-radio craze of the 70s. I think self-nicknaming goes back a little farther. But it you trace it back too far, it will seem less trendy. Possibly even hopelessly dorky.

GEORGE: Well, Jerry, I been thinkin'. I've gotten as far as I can go with George Costanza.

JERRY: Is this the suicide talk or the nickname talk?

GEORGE: The nickname. George. What is that? It's nothing. It's got no snap, no zip. I need a nickname that makes people light up.

JERRY: You mean like...Liza!

GEORGE: But I was thinking...T-bone.

JERRY: But there's no "t" in your name. What about G-bone?

GEORGE: There's no G-bone.

JERRY: There's a g-spot.

GEORGE: That's a myth.

George takes a bite of his sandwich and gets a piece stuck to his chin.

"Hey, that wasn't bad at all. They just showed Mohammed standing there, looking normal."

I haven't had the chance to watch the new "South Park," part 2 of a take on the Muhammad comics craziness. But Jim Lindgren and Captain Ed have posts about it, and I wanted to open up a comments thread in case you're dying to talk about it.

UPDATE: I've seen the episode now, and I see that Comedy Central censored it, blacking out the few seconds when Muhammad was just standing there, looking normal. Actually, the censored part could have been a joke. You have to read the newspaper to learn that it really was censorship. After the censored part, there's a gloriously uncensored animation, from al Qaeda, depicting Americans and Jesus amid a flurry of turds. Some folks are perturbed at this:

A frequent South Park critic, William Donohue of the anti-defamation group Catholic League, called on Parker and Stone to resign out of principle for being censored.

"The ultimate hypocrite is not Comedy Central — that's their decision not to show the image of Muhammad or not — it's Parker and Stone," he said. "Like little whores, they'll sit there and grab the bucks. They'll sit there and they'll whine and they'll take their shot at Jesus. That's their stock in trade."

Well, the point is that Comedy Central didn't censor the blatant desecration of Jesus, while it censored a depiction of Muhammad just standing there. So clearly, it is responsive to threats of violence, not to nonviolent religious sensitivities. This was the point being made throughout the show, as the character Kyle arged to the TV executive: "Either it's all OK, or none of it is. Do the right thing."

AND: You've got to love the manatees. All the idea balls must be in the tank, available to make into jokes, or they will not work at all. I note that Donohue is demanding that Parker and Stone follow the ethics of the manatee. I think it's enough to admire the manatee, and then continue to press onward and try to get some good work done. Donohue is really exhibiting the ethics of Cartman, who would say what he needed to achieve his real goal, getting the TV show he hates off the air.