Everyone smiles as you drift past the flowers that grow so incredibly high.

Oh, wow. Psychedelic:



I don't know if I like having kaleidoscope eyes. Maybe blank it all out with whiteness:



But don't look too long. Don't look too hard. Look out!



It's a vortex!

Picture yourself with a psychedelic record...

"Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" turns 40 this weekend. How strange this makes me feel! "It was 20 years ago today...," the opening line of the album, referred to desperately old-fashioned times, and now the album is twice that old, and yet... it seems to be all about youth and promise and newness.

At the time, I thought my parents were so hopelessly mired in the past to still be listening to the music they loved from the 1940s. I enjoyed mocking my father's ridiculous belief that the big bands would come back. The old man needed to face the fact that rock and roll had conquered everything. But they were in love with music that was only 20 years old. That would be like someone today loving U2's "With or Without You" and Prince's "Sign O' the Times" -- which seems utterly normal and not at all pathetic.

Funny how things within your own lifetime remain so alive. But step across the boundary into that infinity of time when you were not yet born, and it's so far away. When I was growing up, WWII seemed disconnected from anything that related to me -- though in truth, I owed my existence and everything about my way of life to it -- but it was no longer ago that the Clinton Era is now.

Enough about me. Back to "Sgt. Pepper." Let's see what Steven Van Zandt has to say:

After being obviously the "greatest album ever made" for years, it ran into a bit of revisionist history these past, oh, 30 years or so.

It probably began with one of the Beatles putting it down or shrugging it off or making the mistake of suggesting that it wasn't all it was cracked up to be....

So, with the only disclaimer that the appallingly awful stereo mastering is, tragically, the only available version right now, let me revise revisionist history and suggest that "Sgt. Pepper" was, and is, an incredible piece of work and absolutely the best representation of the Summer of Love and the very psychedelic 1967. (Blog: What are your "Pepper" memories?)

Are you asking me, Stevie? Right when I was going to stop talking about myself and listen to you. Okay.

Well, the day the album came out, I bought it. My friend was having her "Sweet 16" party that evening, which was bad timing, because all I wanted to do was to listen to that album over and over and get it thoroughly imprinted on my brain so I could listen to it on a deeper level, over and over. So I brought the album to the party, thinking everyone would freeze, stunned by the brilliance, and want to do nothing but listen and talk about how the entire world had changed today.

But it played too much in the background for us to hear it properly. Someone's mother said to me, in a disgusted tone, "What is this music?" I can't remember how much of my contempt I conveyed as I said this was the new Beatles album. I silently counted her as one more example that my parents' generation was the lamest. The entire environment of a suburban "Sweet Sixteen" party was giving me that she's leaving home after living alone for so many years feeling. How right George was about the space between us all. But this is not the way we're going to live from now on. Bring on the tangerine trees and marmalade skies.

It was universally mind-blowing at the time....

Interestingly, in direct contrast to the album's ultramodern sound, its lyrics and sensibility were wistful, nostalgic -- very much looking back when the world was looking forward (and made more obvious if you include "Strawberry Fields" and "Penny Lane," both meant to be on the album). It's full of depressed, dysfunctional, cynical, confused and, yes, lonely characters going through the motions of life, implicitly asking, "Is this all there is?" when the band's audience was never more full of hope, discovering love and becoming philosophically enlightened.

The world was unified in its praise of and inspiration from the album as it has never been for anything before or since.

Stevie says to get the album in mono -- I've had it right by me for 40 years -- and listen straight through:

I promise you will be transported to a place you've never been....

Oh, but I was.

ADDED: Excellent "Sgt. Pepper" website.

Warm fuzzies.

Aw, he's lonely!



That's better.

Am I the only one who has never seen Fred Thompson act?

I mean, set aside the acting one does as a politician. (I tend to refer to politicians as "political actors," but not because I think they are playing a role, just because they are taking action.) I have never seen Fred Thompson in any TV show or movie. Does this give me some useful perspective on the impending FT candidacy? Perhaps not. I may be the least reliable observer, because I don't understand how other people feel. I won't be seeing what they are seeing. You guys are prepped to receive what he will dish out, and he -- quite rightly -- will speak to the people who already have deep feelings about him that have nothing to with his capacity to be President -- except to the extent that your subliminal receptivity will help him do the job. I feel quite estranged from these new political doings. And all because I didn't watch enough TV.

Anyway, I see that Jeremy Sisto is going to join "Law and Order" -- not replacing Thompson though:

Jeremy Sisto, best known for his role on "Six Feet Under," will replace Milena Govich as a detective on NBC's "Law & Order" next season....

Sisto is currently in theaters with Adrienne Shelly's indie romantic comedy "Waitress." Shelly was murdered by a construction worker last year, an incident that inspired an episode of "Law & Order."

Yeah, don't let the expression "romantic comedy" fool you. Sisto plays a brutish husband who makes Stanley Kowalski seem like a comic character. It's terribly sad that the extremely talented Shelly was murdered, but her death seems to have caused reviewers to write uncritically about the movie. The men in "Waitress" are naturally evil. This is a movie where a man's only hope is to reshape his existence to cater to a woman's needs -- let's cuddle and talk! -- and where women whose men won't comply joyfully traipse off into the sunset without them. Poor Sisto puts his dramatic all into a role where the character is a monster for no reason other than that he's a man. But I adored him in "Six Feet Under," and I'm glad to see he's got this new role.

"I think that Rudy, as far as terrorism goes, is just entering his peak killing years. And that's why I'm for him."

In case you missed Dennis Miller on O'Reilly last night, here's the transcript.

Speaking of blog controversies...

I was happy to see that traffic on this blog hit a new high in May. The previous high was last September, when traffic was inflated by a huge influx of visitors who were extremely hostile to me! Mostly, I'm glad to get a lot of traffic, and it's fine that a lot of people are here looking for a fight, but it's not fun when it's all out of proportion, especially when there are all sorts of distorted comments which I don't like answering and also don't like leaving unanswered.

Anyway, May had its crazy little controversy -- noted in the previous post -- so there actually was a little of that sort of thing pushing traffic. Not that I planned it. You never know what little offhand wisecrack or thought experiment is going to set people off. I mean, sometimes you know you're taunting a particular person or type of person. I never do that as a means to the end of getting more traffic. Really, I want readers, not traffic.

My approach to blogging is to say whatever I want about whatever interests me, and nothing more. Sometimes a little less -- to protect my privacy and to respect people I interact with in off-blog life -- but never any more. I hope you can tell, and I hope you realize how much I appreciate the readers who come here because they like approach.

Radio alert.

I'll be on "Lake Effect," on WUWM, the Milwaukee public radio, some time between 10 and 11 Central Time today. Streamable here. The archive will be up here later. I've already recorded the interview, which is a fast moving ramble about blogging that mostly concentrates on my recent, controversial suggestion that it might be a good idea to use nonfiction books when teaching young children how to read.

UPDATE: You can listen to it here now. It's only about 5 minutes long.

The Spelling Bee.

Of course, I'm watching the Spelling Bee, and of course, I'm for Isabel Jacobson, the speller from Madison, Wisconsin. So many great spellers have gone down in this first prime time round, and suddenly we see that there is only one young woman left. It's our Isabel! She has three favorite words, we see in the bioclip, and one is "kakistocracy, which means government by the worst people possible." That's so Madison! She's written the word on a little slate, and she tosses it over her shoulder and gives a funny-disgusted look. She wears all the bracelets she own on one arm for good luck. There are 25 of them. She gets a crazy, Greek origin word that means wet and spongy. Helodes. And she gets it right!

UPDATE: Epaulement. She gets it! A barricade of earth. Go, Isabel!

UPDATE 2: Cyanophycean. A blue-green alga. Cyano- is easy, but -phycean? No! She's out. And it's down to two boys. One is Canadian. The other is an incredibly cool kid who loves math and music and math just enough more than music that he sees music as numbers.

UPDATE 3: The American kid is Evan O'Dorney. He gets pappardelle. Hey, that's easy! And Canadian boy, Nate Gartke, gets an easy word too. Now, Evan gets another food word, yosenabe. Too easy! How can kids at this level get the Japanese words wrong? Nate gets coryza wrong, so Evan needs to get one word right. Serrefine. "A small forceps for clamping a blood vessel." He spells it right away! He wins! Yay, Evan!

UPDATE 4: In the interview, Evan tells us why he likes math and music more than spelling. Math and music "fit together" -- they make sense! -- and spelling is "just memorization." The interviewer goads him: Don't you like spelling more now? He pauses a long time -- is he thinking of numbers or notes or is he getting the message he ought to make himself appealing to the spelling bee fans? -- and finally, he forces himself to say "a little." I love it! He's the reluctant speller. He does it well, but he doesn't love it, because he loves two other things so much, and those things really are so much better.

What feast did your kitty cat leave for the ant today?

Mmmm... Ant says: yummy.



But what is it? Hints lie elsewhere in antdom. Over here:



And here:



The ant has his bliss, and you too have yours, smooching with your kitty cat this evening.

UPDATE: Elsewhere, "I ate three lumps of it. But I spat two of them out, so I really ate one and a half of them."

Beyond the Sanjaya video.

I must confess that I've watched three other videos today that I thought were pretty cool. First is this Will Ferrell thing from the same website as "The Sanjaya Installation." [ADDED: Was it wrong to make the girl say those things? It will be funnier to you if you -- unlike me -- think it's just fine.]



Then there's this nice, morphing image of the history of women's faces in art (which someone emailed me after seeing it on BoingBoing). [ADDED: The first time I watched this video, I was struck by how similar all the women looked, but the second time, I had the opposite impression. How different they are.]



Then there's this long, but totally worth it video of an elaborate encounter of lions, water buffalo, and crocodiles, which Andrew Sullivan featured. [ADDED: How pathetic the lions and crocodiles are as they try in their way -- the only way they have -- to get some food. The human beings, heard on the audio track, are rather lame too. Now, the buffalo... the buffalo rule.]



These videos have absolutely nothing to do with each other. At least one is sure to be to your taste. I loved all three.

Purplosity...

... or is it purplitude? Or is it simply mauvelous?

Cross-examination reveals the defendant was that anonymous blogger who's been writing about the trial.

Boston Globe reports:

As Ivy League-educated pediatrician Robert P. Lindeman sat on the stand in Suffolk Superior Court this month, defending himself in a malpractice suit involving the death of a 12-year-old patient, the opposing counsel startled him with a question.

Was Lindeman Flea?

Flea, jurors in the case didn't know, was the screen name for a blogger who had written often and at length about a trial remarkably similar to the one that was going on in the courtroom that day.

In his blog, Flea had ridiculed the plaintiff's case and the plaintiff's lawyer. He had revealed the defense strategy. He had accused members of the jury of dozing.

With the jury looking on in puzzlement, Lindeman admitted that he was, in fact, Flea.

The next morning, on May 15, he agreed to pay what members of Boston's tight-knit legal community describe as a substantial settlement -- case closed.

Oh, there's always one more way that blogging can get you in trouble. Here's a tip. Don't blog anonymously unless you're ready to accept all the consequences that would come if everyone suddenly knew it was you. Congratulations to the lawyer who figured out that she should ask that question on cross. You know, I love to support bloggers, but this doctor totally deserved what he got.

In April, before the trial began, he wrote about meeting with an expert on juries who advised him how to act when he was cross- examined. Flea was instructed to angle his chair slightly toward the jury, keep his hands folded in his lap, and face the jury when answering questions, slowly. "Answers should be kept to no more than three sentences," he wrote.

The consultant told him juries in medical malpractice cases base verdicts almost entirely on their view of a doctor's character.

So when they hear you're a blogger...

"We've said it before, and we'll say it again: If the basis of this case is that Flea is an arrogant, uncaring jerk who maliciously neglected a patient, resulting in his death, the plaintiff will not win, period," he wrote. "As much of a cocky bastard that Flea may appear in the blogosphere, the readers who have a personal acquaintance with the real 3-D doctor understand how such an approach cannot succeed."

And all that cocky bastard Flea writing comes into the trial as evidence. Now, you might say, but can't a blogger adopt a persona and use a pseudonym to signify the disconnect between the writer taking a pose for literary effect and the real-world person?

I have a colleague who explains his use of a pseudonym this way:

I make no secret that I'm a law professor. It's right there in my profile. This means I have students, and a professor image to live up to with my students. Maybe maintaining my image as a law professor isn't as onerous as the image-burden borne by, say, a Supreme Court justice, or the pope. But it's not nothing. In front of my students, I have to be reasonably fair, dignified and mature. This doesn't mean being a phony; it's more a question of emphasizing certain aspects of one's personality and putting others in a closet for the day.

If you read my blog, you know that I use somewhat crude language from time to time. I say "f***" in several posts. Just the other day, in a single post, I used the terms "big butt" and "ass." Indeed, "big butt" was in the title of the post. I have (in my opinion) a somewhat wide-ranging sense of humor that isn't above occasional dips into puerility...

I don't tell my students that I'm always "the dignified professor" or that I never use crude language. That would be pompous and false, not to mention irrelevant. But I don't use crude language around students.... Maintaining an image means drawing a line between your professional persona and your personal life.

Most law-prof bloggers seem content to put their blogs largely or mostly on the professional side of that line. While they don't always blog about law, they seem to refrain from saying stuff that would be inappropriate in a conversation with a student in their offices. Folks like Professor Bainbridge, or the Volokh Conspiracy, or Althouse, or Conglomerate maintain an informal, yet not-unprofessional tone. To varying degrees they trade on their academic affiliations, and would have relatively little ground for complaint if, for example, their law schools posted something about their blogs on the law school web sites. And you don't catch them saying "big butt." Indeed, a Google search "'big butt' professor bainbridge" yields only a few hits, none of them from his blog.

Hmmm... I'm not so sure I belong in that Bainbridge, Volokh, Conglomerate set. I think I cross the professional line all the time. I'm always getting the "you, a law professor" chiding. I write things all the time that I wouldn't say to a student. But still, I understand Oscar's idea of using the persona to indicate: Now, I'm speaking in this other mode.

So, fine, maybe Dr. Flea was doing something like that. But that doesn't make the evidence inadmissible. It just means he'll be able to explain that in his testimony if the material comes in. It's not hearsay, because these are statements of an opposing party. If it's relevant to an issue in the case, and the judge doesn't think it's too unfair, it can come in. You should have thought of that before you laid your arrogance out on the web. I'm sure it's a great relief to a professional who has to hide a lot of his feelings to let out all his cocky bastardliness on the web, but others have their interests too -- the plaintiffs lost their 12-year-old child -- and a pseudonym is not immunity.

Is Justice Ginsburg reading dissents from the bench because she's passionate or because she's political?

Linda Greenhouse is highlighting Justice Ginsburg's decision to read two of her dissenting opinions from the bench this year. In both, Ginsburg spoke for herself and the other three liberal Justices (Stephens, Souter, and Breyer), and both dealt with issues of concern to women (Carhart, the "partial-birth" abortion case, and Ledbetter, this week's employment discrimination case).

Greenhouse portrays Ginsburg's actions on the emotional level. Not only were the dissents "forceful" -- aren't they all? -- but Ginsburg herself was "passionate and pointed."

To read a dissent aloud is an act of theater that justices use to convey their view that the majority is not only mistaken, but profoundly wrong. It happens just a handful of times a year. Justice Antonin Scalia has used the technique to powerful effect, as has Justice Stevens, in a decidedly more low-key manner.

The oral dissent has not been, until now, Justice Ginsburg’s style. She has gone years without delivering one, and never before in her 15 years on the court has she delivered two in one term. In her past dissents, both oral and written, she has been reluctant to breach the court’s collegial norms. “What she is saying is that this is not law, it’s politics,” Pamela S. Karlan, a Stanford law professor, said of Justice Ginsburg’s comment linking the outcome in the abortion case to the fact of the court’s changed membership. “She is accusing the other side of making political claims, not legal claims.”

The justice’s acquaintances have watched with great interest what some depict as a late-career transformation. “Her style has always been very ameliorative, very conscious of etiquette,” said Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, the sociologist and a longtime friend. “She has always been regarded as sort of a white-glove person, and she’s achieved a lot that way. Now she is seeing that basic issues she’s fought so hard for are in jeopardy, and she is less bound by what have been the conventions of the court.”

(White glove? Not "kid glove," meaning careful and gentle, but "white glove," which I think is generally used to refer to luxury services provided to the rich. Who wears the white gloves in a "white glove building"? The doorman, not the residents. [ADDED: There's a lot of discussion in the comments about the phrase "white glove."])

Some might say her dissents are an expression of sour grapes over being in the minority more often than not. But there may be strategic judgment, as well as frustration, behind Justice Ginsburg’s new style. She may have concluded that quiet collegiality has proved futile and that her new colleagues, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., are not open to persuasion on the issues that matter most to her.

In other words, it's not an expression of emotion, but a sophisticated political move, intended to get Americans excited and involved in the Court's work -- so they'll see what's at stake. Nothing wrong with that, and I don't mean to say it's not lofty and profound to care about who gets chosen to wield Supreme Court power. It is. Greenhouse's piece subtly conveys the impression that an extremely reserved woman has finally overcome her reticence and spoken up and that this means the majority has erred badly in its understanding of the law. That in itself is a political argument leading the readers to think that Ginsburg must be right and that the fact that she is in the minority on the Court is a problem that needs to be corrected.

ADDED: This post is getting a lot of action in the comments, and I feel as though I ought to spell out something maybe I'm being too subtle about. I think this piece unwittingly demeans Justice Ginsburg as a woman by portraying her as meek and emotional. The idea that she of all people would speak up is supposed to give dramatic weight to her opinion in the cases. The fact that her opinion supports the interests of women may -- for some people -- eclipse this other matter of concern to women, and I want to drag it back into the light.

Justice Ginsburg is a strong, accomplished jurist who is and has always been the equal of the other Justices. She's no purer or less political than the others and no more driven by emotion. If she chooses to read her dissenting opinions about women's issues aloud and provide material for Supreme Court journalists to stir up readers with bathetic pronouncements that she's "found her voice," what I see is a smart political move by an adept legal thinker who knows what the stakes are and wants to affect the game.

Here's Tom Smith who clerked on the D.C. Circuit when she was a judge there:

You had to admire Judge Ginsburg's obvious intelligence, and she seemed like a nice lady. But the idea that she was somehow less political than any other judge is just silly. She was very political. They all were. Some cared more about the law than others, and Ginsburg cared about the law. But there was no question that on a case involving sex discrimination or labor unions, you would be a fool to bet against a liberal outcome if she were the swing vote. She was a nice lady, but she also knew how to rip somebody a new one, if you will.... The idea that she is some kind of elegant, delicate flower who has been forced by the big, bad conservatives to descend into the hurly burly of the political rough and tumble is a complete fantasy of the New York Times and Linda Greenhouse. That is to say, utter rubbish.

Go over there and read the whole thing.

If you're seeking asylum, try to seek it in San Francisco.

Not Atlanta. Or at least New York. And avoid Detroit.

"The Sanjaya Installation."

"This is like an ad for Sundance. This is our dream. It's happening."

Exclaimed, not sarcastically, just now, by someone who works at Caffe 608 at the Sundance Cinemas in Madison, on seeing 5 of the 7 tables along the wall each occupied by one person working on a computer.

ADDED: So Robert Redford swooped in to check out his enterprise, but that was at 9 p.m. You can see from the time stamp here that I missed him by 6 hours. Various local media people were invited to meet him at the Bistro, but not Madison's most popular blogger, who keeps blogging about the place. Either they're not savvy about the power of blogging, or they are and know I might say just about anything about Redford if I got to see him close up.

MORE: Pics.