"Man Walking Down the Side of a Building."

Where's the line between art/dance and stuntwork? Don't let the fact that the building is an art museum muddle your thinking.

(Video.)

The reason to read fiction: to engage with the mind of someone who isn't trying to sell you anything.

Argues Lorrie Moore (who's not saluting but having trouble keeping the light out of her eyes):



I love the idea that what we want from reading is to intertwine our minds with the mind of another human being and I understand why Moore connects that to freedom from commerce and why she find that purity in fiction. The funny thing is to want to write when you don't want to sell anything — even any ideas. It's not always true of fiction and not only true of fiction, but it is what we really want to read, isn't it?

A dedicated teacher gets a "less effective" rating... and kills himself.

The LA Times reports:

[Rigoberto Ruelas] tutored his students after class, visited their homes and met their families, steered them away from gangs and toward college. He arrived early for work every morning at Miramonte Elementary, and had near perfect attendance for 14 years, right up until last week, when he disappeared.

Ruelas' body was discovered on Sunday in a ravine beneath a Big Tujunga Canyon bridge. He left no note, but the Los Angeles County coroner has ruled his death a suicide. Family members have said he had been upset over his score in a teacher-rating database our newspaper created and posted online, which ranked him slightly below average.

If most teachers are excellent, it's not bad to be below average, but it will feel terrible nonetheless. That's the trouble with grading on a curve. Your performance is judged relative to others.

ADDED: Of course, if everyone's pretty bad, you can get a false idea of how good you are when there is grading on a curve. I've been grading law school exams on a curve — it's required — for a quarter century, and I know it is much easier to make relative judgments.

"At the moment if you want to become au fait with what this department thinks on how to keep order in class you have to read the equivalent of War and Peace."

"There are about 500 pages of guidance on discipline and another 500 pages on bullying. We will clarify and shrink that."

Is it unfair for tennis players to grunt?

Supposedly, this scientific study lends support to those who say it is:

Hundreds of video clips were shown of a player hitting a ball to either the left or right. The students had to determine the direction quickly, but on some shots were subjected to noises simulating grunting.

..."The findings were unequivocal. Basically, when the video clips did have a grunt, the participants were not only slower to react but they had lower accuracy levels. So they were basically slower and could actually be wrong-footed, if you could extend that to a real-world tennis court."

Is distracting a video-watcher similar enough to annoying someone who's actively playing the game under pressure? It's different... but which way is it different? Is the real-life player less or more affected by the noise?

Why is being noisy and annoying okay in some sports but not others? (I'm thinking of golf.)

"He’ll be remembered as a uniter, bringing left and right together in shared amazement at his lunkheadedness."

That would be Rick Sanchez.

"To want to own a restaurant can be a strange and terrible affliction."

"What causes such a destructive urge in so many otherwise sensible people? Why would anyone who has worked hard, saved money and often been successful in other fields want to pump his hard-earned cash down a hole that statistically, at least, will almost purely prove dry? Why venture into an industry with enormous fixed expenses (rent, electricity, gas, water, linen, maintenance, insurance, license fees, trash removal, etc.), with a notoriously transient and unstable workforce and highly perishable inventory of assets? The chances of ever seeing a return on your investment are about one in five. What insidious spongiform bacterium so riddles the brains of men and women that they stand there on the tracks, watching the lights of the oncoming locomotive, knowing full well it will eventually run them over? After all these years in the business, I still don't know."

Wrote Anthony Bourdain years ago, offered up now for insight into the 2 suicides by a chefs who appeared on the TV show "Hell's Kitchen." Bourdain wasn't writing about chefs who try to make it via TV show, and back when he wrote that, Bourdain himself hadn't leveraged his cooking into TV celebrity. So what is it — cooking or reality TV — that's more dangerous to the will to live? I'd guess reality TV. I think there is more delusion there and less likelihood of getting what you want.

"[A]rchaeologists have unearthed the upper half of a double limestone statue of a powerful pharaoh who ruled nearly 3,400 years ago."

A news item that would be so much better with a photograph.

UPDATE: Pic.

Ladies: What's the right skirt length?

Don't you know by now?

Hint: Look in a mirror!

"According to Bob Woodward, National Security Adviser Jim Jones called Emanuel and his fellow political aides 'the water bugs.'"

Writes William Kristol:

“They flit around,” Jones said. “Rahm gets an idea at 10 a.m. and wants a briefing by 4 p.m., and I will say no,” because the work can’t be done that quickly. According to Woodward, Jones believed “the water bugs did not understand war or foreign relations .  .  . and were too interested in measuring the short-term political impact of the president’s decisions in these areas.”

But Emanuel turned out not to be particularly good at measuring the political impact of the president’s decisions. Or was his sage political counsel too often rejected by the president—as he has suggested on not-so-deep background to friendly journalists?

UPDATE: Jones goes.

"I was dabbling in witchcraft, I've dabbled in Buddhism."

"I would have become a Hare Krishna but I didn't want to become a vegetarian and that is honestly the reason why because I'm Italian, I love meatballs."

"I’ve decided not to publish any more books in the traditional way. 12 for 12 and I’m done."

"I like the people, but I can’t abide the long wait, the filters, the big push at launch, the nudging to get people to go to a store they don’t usually visit to buy something they don’t usually buy, to get them to pay for an idea in a form that’s hard to spread … I really don’t think the process is worth the effort that it now takes to make it work. I can reach 10 or 50 times as many people electronically."

The hiker's still life.

Late afternoon....

... shimmering lake.

"Pennsylvania judge arrested for handing out acorns filled with condoms."

A judge did this? Well, I'm sure he can explain it.

David Brooks thinks Indiana governor Mitch Daniels will win the GOP nomination for President in 2012.

And also that he's the party's "spiritual leader."