"Once you've gazed upon and contemplated 150 million years of mostly Mesozoic-aged sedimentation, uplift, and subsequent erosion, it's hard to take seriously the self-important emotional expressions on the faces of Jake Tapper and guests."

Says Meade, commenting on my post "I think I've been cured of my interest in watching the Sunday morning talk shows/Was it just that after skipping them for 3 weeks — when I was off on a road trip — I'd lost the momentum of routine...."

You try it. Gaze. Stare into the face...

Obama had a "tendency... to micromanage issues better left to military commanders."

According to the NYT, which recognizes Trump's return to what is the better approach.

The change is at the heart of a re-engineering of the National Security Council’s role under its new leader, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, and reflects Mr. Trump’s belief that the N.S.C. should focus less on military operations and tactics and more on strategic issues. A guiding precept for the president and his team is that the balance of power in the world has shifted against American interests, and that General McMaster should focus on developing foreign and economic policy options in concert with the Pentagon, State Department and other agencies to respond to that challenge....

“In defense of the Obama administration, every single time we went to the president and asked for something more, we eventually got it, though we often had to jump through a lot of hoops,” said Andrew Exum, a former Army Ranger who held a senior position at the Defense Department under Mr. Obama. “The episode that took the cake was toward the end of the administration, when we literally had cabinet secretaries debating the movement of three helicopters from Iraq to Syria.”

Can we expect the Gorsuch hearings to be anything but bland blather?

I could link to things like "Want to Know Where Supreme Court Nominees Stand? Don’t Bother Asking" (in the NYT), but it's tiresome.

A rhetorical version of dodge ball is a favored tactic for nominees regardless of where they stand on the political spectrum. It has been employed successfully by a liberal like Ruth Bader Ginsburg and by a conservative like Clarence Thomas. John G. Roberts Jr., at the 2005 Senate hearing on his nomination as chief justice, famously likened his role to that of an umpire calling balls and strikes, a disinterested neutral force....

Maybe this is news to someone, but Supreme Court nominees have learned to say the same stock things and to reveal nothing. The only interest is whether the nominee looks the part, sounds intelligent (while saying basically nothing), seems earnest but relaxed, and shows a little humor or personality. But not too much!

And whatever you do, don't reveal that you'd enjoy yourself by saying "I think it would be an intellectual feast" or some such thing. Don't be Bork. Be like everyone since Bork. We went from Borking to boring, and now no one is fool enough to think it's worth it to be anything but boring.

I've set C-SPAN to record, but don't expect me to simulblog the thing. I remember being so excited to live-blog the Roberts hearings, but that was after going more than a decade without a new Justice. I've blogged 4 confirmations now — Roberts, Alito, Sotomayor, and Kagan. It has been 7 years since Kagan's confirmation. And yet, the Gorsuch hearings present a very dull prospect. (By design.)

I think I've been cured of my interest in watching the Sunday morning talk shows.

Was it just that after skipping them for 3 weeks — when I was off on a road trip — I'd lost the momentum of routine, there wasn't enough independent reason to watch, and I couldn't restart?

Or have the shows really gotten worse because they just haven't figured out a way to cover the Trump administration?

Or maybe I just don't want to hear analysis of what Trump is doing!

What's Althouse's problem with the Sunday shows?

1. It was an addiction and the 3-week break cured her.

2. Hostility to Trump has undermined the quality of the shows.

3. Trump is so awful, Althouse doesn't want to be made to look closely.

4. Althouse enjoys sort of liking Trump and doesn't want her fantasy punctured.

1, 2, and 3

1, 2, and 4

Somehow I feel I need another option. Althouse didn't give me enough. Yes, I could just explain my theory in the comments, but I'd have to criticize Althouse for failing to include MY idea. Well, Althouse is on to you. She doesn't want to hear about how her polls don't have every possible subtlety of whatever a person might think. But she knows you won't just skip the poll, no, that would be too easy....

 

pollcode.com free polls

At the Life-Goes-On Café...

... keep the conversation going.

The photo is just before dark at Zabriskie Point in Death Valley on March 6th.

And, remember to consider shopping at Amazon through The Althouse Portal.

Goodbye to Jimmy Breslin.

"Jimmy Breslin, Legendary New York City Newspaper Columnist, Dies at 88," the NYT reports.

With prose that was savagely funny, deceptively simple and poorly imitated, Mr. Breslin created his own distinct rhythm in the hurly-burly music of newspapers. Here, for example, is how he described Clifton Pollard, the man who dug President John F. Kennedy’s grave, in a celebrated Herald Tribune column from 1963 that sent legions of journalists to find their “gravedigger”:

“Pollard is forty-two. He is a slim man with a mustache who was born in Pittsburgh and served as a private in the 352nd Engineers battalion in Burma in World War II. He is an equipment operator, grade 10, which means he gets $3.01 an hour. One of the last to serve John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who was the thirty-fifth President of this country, was a working man who earns $3.01 an hour and said it was an honor to dig the grave.”

And here is how he described what motivated Breslin the writer: “Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers.”

This is me, in 1970, sitting under a Mailer/Breslin poster:


PHOTO CREDIT: Stephen Cohen.

The NYT obit makes no mention of the political frolic with Mailer, but here's an earlier article, from when Mailer died (2007), "Mailer’s Nonfiction Legacy: His 1969 Race for Mayor":

His running mate for City Council president was the columnist Jimmy Breslin, who suspected the worst from the very beginning: that Mr. Mailer was serious....

Mr. Breslin recently recalled Mr. Mailer’s arguing brilliantly at Brooklyn College that the minds of white and black children would grow best if they were together in the same classrooms. One student interrupted: “We had a lot of snow in Queens last year and it didn’t get removed,” he said. “What would you do about it?” To which Mr. Mailer, abruptly dislodged from his lofty oratorical perch, replied that he would melt the snow by urinating on it.

Mr. Mailer’s political nadir was a campaign rally at the Village Gate nightclub where he vilified his own supporters as “spoiled pigs.” Mr. Breslin left the rally early. He later told a friend, “I found out I was running with Ezra Pound.” Mr. Breslin was referring not to Pound’s poetry, but to his insanity.

Mr. Mailer’s “left-conservative” platform called for a monorail, a ban on private cars in Manhattan and a monthly “Sweet Sunday” on which vehicles would be barred from city streets, rails or airspace altogether. He championed self-determination — the city itself would secede and become the 51st state. Individual neighborhoods would be empowered to govern according to their own prerogatives, which could range from compulsory free love to mandatory church attendance. 

I love the random resonances of blogging: Ezra Pound just came up 2 days ago. Poets. Poetry. I love it all. Even the "lofty oratorical perch." Reminds me of that famous Samuel Johnson line: "Sir, a fish's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."

And I love that poster.



New York City — the 51st State. Makes me think of that old song:

As easy it was to tell black from white
It was all that easy to tell wrong from right....
How many a year has passed and gone
And many a gamble has been lost and won
And many a road taken by many a friend
And each one I’ve never seen again
I wish, I wish, I wish in vain
That we could sit simply in that room again....

But it's all lost to the distant past. I'm not 19 anymore. Norman's gone. Jimmy's gone. The is-he-insane blustery assemblage of masculinity isn't a satirical mayoral candidate but President of the United States. And there's no newspaper columnist to give a damn about.

The blue landscape.

Zabriskie Point, March 6th.

Let's talk about Chuck Berry lyrics — they were really good...

... and they were really good in a rock way. Someone on Facebook prompted me to think about Chuck Berry specifically in terms of the lyrics, and the first song I always think of is "Maybellene," the first song of his I knew, which came out in 1955 when I was 4. Wikipedia says:

Rolling Stone magazine wrote, "Rock & roll guitar starts here." The record is an early instance of the complete rock-and-roll package: youthful subject matter; a small, guitar-driven combo; clear diction; and an atmosphere of unrelenting excitement. The lyrics describe a man driving a V8 Ford chasing his unfaithful girlfriend in her Cadillac Coupe DeVille. 

What's more rock-and-roll than clear diction? I think if you have great lyrics, you'll do clear diction. That's something about Bob Dylan too: You could always understand the words (maybe not what they really meant, but you could hear the words). If you have lyrics like "On the ship, I dream she there/I smell the rose that's in her hair," you might prefer to mush them into unintelligibility.

I'll offer "Maybellene" for the lyrics: "As I was motivatin' over the hill/I saw Mabellene in a Coupe de Ville/A Cadillac a-rollin' on the open road/Nothin' will outrun my V8 Ford." And Chuck Berry's V8 Ford does in fact overtake that other guy's Cadillac. We never hear about the scene at the top of the hill when Chuck gets to Maybellene, but it doesn't matter. There were 2 cars — representing 2 men — and one was richer but the other was stronger and lasted longer, so we don't need to hear anything more.

Now, you talk about some Chuck Berry lyrics. I will just list a few of the news reports that stress lyrics:

1. Rolling Stone: "Chuck Berry: 20 Essential Songs." This transcribes the Maybellene line as "I was motorvatin' over the hill" and informs us that the woman's name was chosen because of the Maybelline mascara that was lying around in the studio.

2. KL.Fm: "Tributes as 'father of rock and roll' Chuck Berry dies." Quoting Mick Jagger: "His lyrics shone above others & threw a strange light on the American dream."

3. City Pages: "RIP Chuck Berry, inventor of the rock lyric, interpreter of teenage dreams."

“Nadine (Is That You?)” is the Technicolor remake of “Maybelline,” another chase after another woman, but with a cawing saxophone and super-charged language. “I was campaign shouting like a Southern diplomat”? You have the rest of your life -- write one phrase that damn good. There’s probably no better musical advertisement for marriage than the footloose “You Never Can Tell,” about two dumb, wedded New Orleans kids who live happily ever after, shimming and canoodling and subsisting on “TV dinners and ginger ale” (kept in their “coolerator,” Berry will have you know). But best of all, there’s “Promised Land,” in which Chuck skedaddles from Norfolk to L.A. in 2:24 and along the way seems to address every promise of American life and how to get by after it’s broken.

 4. NYT: "15 Essential Chuck Berry Songs." Spotify playlist. One song is “Too Much Monkey Business” (1956):

No one before Mr. Berry thought to write a pop song about the headaches of paying bills or losing your change in a pay phone. In his 1987 autobiography, he wrote that the lyrics were “meant to describe most of the kinds of hassles a person encounters in everyday life.” The chugging, rapid-fire vocal delivery would inspire Mr. Dylan’s breakthrough word salad “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” and when Mr. Berry won the first PEN New England Song Lyrics of Literary Excellence Award in 2012, Mr. Dylan sent a congratulatory note saying, “That’s what too much monkey business will get ya.”

5. Heavy: "Chuck Berry Top Hits: Best Songs to Remember Him By."

In 1963’s “Memphis, Tennessee,” the lyrics describe a man speaking to an operator trying to get in contact with a girl, Marie, who lives in “Memphis, Tennessee.”

It tells a surprisingly complex tale, with the audience being lead to believe that Marie is the man’s girlfriend, only for it to be revealed that she is actually his daughter, with it being implied that the man’s ex-wife took Marie away.

6. Billboard: "Chuck Berry Didn't Invent Rock n' Roll, But He Turned It Into an Attitude That Changed the World."

As for his songwriting, Berry eschewed generic emotional confessions and instead focused on crafting short stories with his lyrics. His songwriting style -- economical, vivid and enveloping -- influenced everyone from Paul McCartney to Ray Davies to Brian Wilson and set the course for rock to favor the short and sweet instead of the poetic and verbose. That's just not something his contemporaries were pioneering -- Little Richard's lyrics were brilliant nonsense, Bo Diddley's were stream of consciousness poetry, and Elvis Presley didn't write his own material. So Berry's introduction of storytelling into rock can't be overstated, particularly since that's what helped the genre stand out from straight pop in its first few decades.

7. Campus News: "Giants of pop owe it all to Chuck Berry."

John Lennon once said, “In the’50s, when people were just singing virtually about nothing, he was writing social-comment songs; he was writing all kinds of songs with incredible meter to the lyrics, which influenced Dylan and me and many other people.”...

Berry... sued Lennon for pilfering his lyrics for The Beatles’ “Come Together”… and won that case, too. (It was settled out of court.)

"Don’t you all push your strollers through airports in stiletto heels, Gucci, and the possibility of a nip-slip?"

"No? Clearly, you’re doing it wrong."

"Going to law school was one of my biggest regrets, ranking right up there with the time I accidentally bought low-fat Brie."

Writes Akilah Green ("a writer for Netflix’s 'Chelsea'") in a NYT op-ed I read mostly because I was tempted by the desire to understand the illustration of a piece of cheese trying to tempt a graduation-gowned woman. Green's thesis is that it's bad that some law schools are now accepting applicants who haven't taken the LSAT but have a GRE score instead.

Accepting the proposition that many people go to law school who won't, in the end, enjoy being a lawyer, I don't see the connection to the recent policy change. We've had unhappy lawyers for a long time, when the LSAT was required. Why assume reaching out to the GRE-takers will bring in people who are even less likely to be happy?

I myself was not happy to be a lawyer, but my law degree got me to a great non-lawyer job — law professor. So there's that. I don't know if Green got her Netflix writing job in part because of her law degree, but I just want to nail down the point that law school is not just for those who picture themselves as transmogrifying into Atticus Finch or whatever. But the main thing I want to say about my having been a law professor is that over the years as I witnessed young people struggling to understand law, I often thought that the wrong people are going to law school. Many people have an inaccurate idea of what law will be and that they will learn specific rules and doctrines and gain authority in a system of order. But the law is a much more complex struggle with language and policy. Maybe it would be more suitable for the very people who are thinking it's not their sort of thing.

So why not open admissions up to the smart, industrious career-seekers who have opted to take the GRE? Green — a TV comedy writer — may only be trying to get funny words into print but she says:

See, the LSAT is a speed bump.... The LSAT was rough. The logic games that make up its most infamous section are real killers... Studying was grueling, repetitive and at times mind-numbingly boring, adjectives that happen to have quite a bit of overlap with the way some lawyers would describe their jobs.

As if law schools should set up a barrier so that only the grinds get in! That's not the diverse and exciting classroom experience we're looking for. And if being a lawyer is so terrible, what does it matter what kind of a barrier to entry we set up?

And remember, studying for the LSAT creates a lot of angst — but so will being a lawyer, if being a lawyer isn’t for you.

But that's the question: Who is it for? Green seems to be saying that being a lawyer is for people who put up with a lot of grueling, boring angst and that taking the LSAT is evidence that you do. But Green is talking about studying for the LSAT, not merely taking it — studying and studying hard. That may be something that boring, grind-y strivers do, but it's not necessary. I don't remember studying hard for the LSAT, and I scored in the top percentile. I know other people who can say that too. So the LSAT doesn't really measure for this quality Green assumes is key to being a happy lawyer. And I'm sure that many people who concentrated on taking the GRE are also capable of knuckling down to some hard work.

Why exclude them? Let them throw applications at law schools if they like. At least with law school, you are done in 3 years, and there are lots of well-paying jobs in the end. Compare that to the grad schools that are reaching out to the GRE-takers. What's the happiness percentage coming out of PhD programs?

"I thought I was doing something right. It wasn’t to hurt somebody, or the state, or the government... I voted like a U.S. citizen. The only thing is, I didn’t know I couldn’t vote."

Said Rosa Maria Ortega, a green-card holder who was convicted of voting illegally in 2012 and 2014 and sentenced to 8 years in prison. She's quoted in a NYT article "A Texas Woman ‘Voted Like a U.S. Citizen.’ Only She Wasn’t."

Is it really true that she didn't know she couldn't vote? Wouldn't everyone caught and facing that punishment make that assertion? Aren't people who get a green card told very clearly that they cannot vote? How did she register to vote without being forced to assert that she was a citizen, which she knew was not true? Ah, yes:

While living in neighboring Dallas County, she registered to vote before the 2012 election, checking a box on the registration form that certified that she was a United States citizen. After voting in 2012 and 2014, she moved to Fort Worth’s Tarrant County in 2015, where she registered to vote again — this time, ticking the box that indicated she was not a citizen.

When she told the truth, she was not able to register. 

When her registration was rejected, she called elections officials, telling them that she had voted in Dallas. Told that people who checked the noncitizen box were ineligible to vote, she reapplied, this time indicating that she was a citizen. 

Finally, the authorities took notice and she was prosecuted. It took all those steps for her to trigger a consequence. That is, if she'd just checked the "citizen" box all along, she'd have gotten away with it. (Like so many others?) And we're invited to feel sorry for her because she's facing punishment:

Her punishment may be unprecedented for an offense that often draws a minimal sentence or probation.... The case resonates in a polarized political environment where some are convinced that immigrants threaten to upend the nation’s shared values more than they continue its long history of accepting and assimilating outsiders. Ms. Ortega’s lawyers say they believe the severity of the sentence stems from the furor over immigration and false claims about voter fraud raised by Donald J. Trump’s nationalistic presidential campaign.....

Ms. Ortega’s lawyers are casting her as a scapegoat. The case, they say, was manufactured to prop up Mr. Trump’s baseless voter-fraud claims....

Baseless? If you believe that, you'd have to think that all noncitizens should just be told to go ahead and vote by simply checking the "citizen" box when they register. How is Ortega a scapegoat? She made herself conspicuous. Her only argument is that she'd have gotten away with it if she'd kept a lower profile.

Goodbye to the greatest rock and roller of them all: Chuck Berry.

He was 90. Here's the NYT obituary. Here's WaPo.

"This is our bright, shining moment."

Says Meade.

The Badgers knock out Villanova.

Late afternoon on Zabriskie Point.

I loved the stark lighting on March 6th in Death Valley:

Why did some but not all of the photographs I uploaded to my laptop automatically appear in my desktop?

I have a Macbook Pro laptop and an iMac desktop. The software is Apple's Photos.

When I got back from our trip, I was pleased to see photographs already in the desktop, but then I noticed that whatever was happening, it stopped midway through the trip. Hundreds of photos traveled from one computer to the other without my doing anything. Then whatever was happening stopped.

Any ideas?

UPDATE: I figured out the problem. It's "Photo Stream." Photos automatically became available to all my computers but the memory maxed out. I found the photos under the tab "Albums" in Photos, and I was going to delete them so that newer photos would move from the laptop to the desktop, but it said that deleting them in Photo Stream would delete them in all my computers! That might be good for some people, but it's not what I want.

"I haven’t spoken to him. Maybe just to say hello. It feels trite. I feel ridiculous bothering him."

Said Donald Trump Jr. about his father, the President. That's quoted in a big NYT "style" piece called "Donald Trump Jr. Is His Own Kind of Trump." I'm copying that quote for the post title because it distracted me. What I'd originally intended to make this post about was:

On Feb. 10, opening day for the erotic thriller “Fifty Shades Darker,” Mr. Trump tweeted, “@MrsVanessaTrump took/dragged me to see the new 50 shades movie and I am the only guy in an otherwise packed theater.”

“It’s two hours of my life I’ll never get back,” he said.

First, can't people think of some variations on "two hours of my life I’ll never get back"? It should be embarrassing to roll out that old line again. If you're so boring that you'd say that, I have no confidence that you'd have done anything of value with that 2 hours you lost, so the phrase collapses in upon itself.

Second, let's count the ways in which the man has insulted his wife by saying "@MrsVanessaTrump took/dragged me to see the new 50 shades movie and I am the only guy in an otherwise packed theater":

1. VT dragged her husband to a movie.

2. VT is interested in a movie about a man sexually dominating a woman.

3. VT loves sexual domination by a man but needs to dominate her own man to get to a cinematic vicarious experience of a man sexually dominating a woman.

4. VT unlike every other woman in the movie theater needs a man to get to the movie.

5. VT gazed at the sexually dominating man in the movie while her put-upon real-life man sat next to her not being the kind of man she's making such a show of fantasizing about wanting, which was a terribly unkind thing to do to him and something that no other woman in the theater stooped to doing.