"He came to our door and tried the handle. He couldn’t get it in because we were pushing up against it."

"He tried to force his way in and got the door to open up about six inches and then we just lunged at it and closed it back up. That’s when he backed up and shot twice into the middle of the door, thinking we were up against it trying to get him out."

More news of the horror at Virginia Tech.

Apparently, the murderer was a student, Seung-Hui Cho, who lived in the dorm.

“He was just a normal looking kid, Asian, but he had on a Boy Scout type outfit,” one student in the class, Erin Sheehan, told [The Collegiate Times]. “He wore a tan button-up vest and this black vest — maybe it was for ammo or something.”

Ms. Sheehan added: “I saw bullets hit people’s bodies. There was blood everywhere. People in the class were passed out, I don’t know maybe from shock from the pain. But I was one of only four that made it out of that classroom. The rest were dead or injured.”

This is such a sad story. I don't have much to say about it, and I apologize for mixing it in with other blog posts that lack solemnity. The young man, it would seem, went crazy. There will be endless debates about what the University should have done and whether more gun control or less would have helped. But the stark fact remains: many people died. It's terribly sad.

"Bodily fluids."

A new label for this blog. Click on it. You know you can't resist.

"Tommy Thompson told Jewish activists Monday that making money is 'part of the Jewish tradition."

Oops!

(Thanks to Eric Muller for pointing this one out to me.)

Well, now, how bad is this one? It's not "nappy-headed hos" bad. It's not "macaca" bad. Of course, there's always the old "it's a compliment" excuse (which Don Imus could have used too). Thompson tries it, and earns the predictable mockery.

Eugene Volokh is likely to have the right take on this, I decide before reading what he has to say:

Actually, while earning money in the private sector is part of the tradition of most religions and ethnicities that have survived and thrived, valuing the earning of money in the private sector is, to my knowledge, more an aspect of "Jewish tradition" than of at least some other traditions.

Judaism, for instance, lacks the sense that poverty is virtuous, long ostensibly (and sometimes actually) present in Christianity. Jewish culture has also historically lacked the condemnation of mere commerce -- as opposed to military success, political power, or land ownership -- as dirty and grubby, perhaps partly because Jews were so often excluded from the military, politics, and land ownership....

Recent Jewish culture has included some other ideological forces that have devalued commercial success, chiefly Socialism, even non-Socialist social-welfarism, and, in some measure, the exaltation of intellectual pursuits over commercial ones. Today in America, it may actually be that Protestants on average endorse commerce as a worthy way of life more than Jews do....

So it's hard to see Thompson's comments as reflective either of actual anti-Semitism -- which is especially unlikely given that he was wooing a Jewish group -- or of the unreflective acceptance of pejorative or inaccurate anti-Semitic stereotypes. Thompson could have spoken more artfully....

Hmmm.... He's running for President. Isn't the ability to speak artfully part of the job description? (And I'm not saying you can't get the job without. Clearly you can.)

"Last week, the city commemorated 'Queuing Day,' an event held on the 11th of every month because the date symbolizes an orderly line."

The city in question: Beijing.

Volunteers wearing satin Queuing Day sashes shooed rush-hour commuters into lines at busy subway stations, while hospital administrators and a few city officials handed out long-stemmed roses to patients who stood in line to pay their bills or pick up medicines. Local news media swarmed the event.

They're getting ready for the Olympics, and there's a real concern about China's image:

[S]ome Communist Party officials have publicly fretted that Beijing may not measure up. One delegate at the country’s annual political meetings in March recommended heavy fines and a public education campaign to curb spitting, cutting ahead in line, smoking and foul language....

In fact, Beijing had already announced that people caught spitting in public before the Olympics could face fines up to 50 yuan, or about $6.50, hardly small change in China. Mr. Wang, the anti-spitting activist, said the Olympic spirit inspired him to begin his campaign. “I felt I must do something to contribute,” he said.

He chose a very dirty task. Public spitting is a frequent practice in Beijing and even more common elsewhere in China. (The sinus-clearing, phlegmy pre-spit hawking sound is so common that one foreigner wryly dubbed it “the national anthem of China.”)

Oh, no!

There's also the signage problem:

English translations on signs are considered fashionable and good advertising, as well as a gracious gesture to foreigners baffled by Chinese characters. But until recently, the attention paid to the accuracy of the translation was, at best, uneven. Consider that a local theme park about China’s ethnic minorities was initially promoted in English as “Racist Park.”...

[David Tool, an American who has been been enlisted by the city to fix bad translations,] said he spent his weekends visiting different businesses as if he were a detective in a linguistic vice squad. “I go in and I say the Olympics are coming and this sign is wrong,” Mr. Tool said. He then sends an e-mail message with a correct translation or has a printout delivered.

He is writing a book on the subject, and no wonder: regular blunders include typos on menus in which the ‘b’ in crab becomes a ‘p.’ Some translations are trickier, like describing pullet, which is a hen less than a year old but appears on some menus as Sexually Inexperienced Chicken. Mr. Tool said one prominent sign had become a regular photo op for foreigners: the Dongda Anus Hospital.

Mr. Tool intervened. It is now the Dongda Proctology Hospital.

"At a music hall, I'll get upset if someone coughs or if someone's cellphone goes off. But here, my expectations quickly diminished."

"I started to appreciate any acknowledgment, even a slight glance up. I was oddly grateful when someone threw in a dollar instead of change."

I wish I'd linked to this article when it was published 8 days ago. A perverse thing about blogging is that you feel that if something is even a day old, it's too late. And you feel that if something is today, you must talk about it today. Why does blogging feel like a commitment to tie one's thoughts to a chronology set by the news and the news media?

So let's go back to this story of the brilliant musician Joshua Bell who takes his violin into the subway station and plays for the passing crowd as if he were just another street musician:

In the three-quarters of an hour that Joshua Bell played, seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run -- for a total of $32 and change. That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few even turning to look.

If this happens, what else must happen? We must all scurry by everything, constantly. If we can't notice this, what hope do we have of noticing all the subtle beauty that flows around us all the time.

Bell -- stimulated by knowing he was doing something unusual -- experienced heightened awareness:

"At a music hall, I'll get upset if someone coughs or if someone's cellphone goes off. But here, my expectations quickly diminished. I started to appreciate any acknowledgment, even a slight glance up. I was oddly grateful when someone threw in a dollar instead of change." This is from a man whose talents can command $1,000 a minute.

He found delight in observing himself in a life that wasn't his.

For the others, they believed they were walking through their ordinary lives and -- with a few fine exceptions, described in the article -- perceived nothing special. Yet even on the ordinary day, there is beauty, if we would only perceive it.

"I was for it before I was against it."

Did you see John Kerry on "The Colbert Report"? I thought he was decently amusing when Stephen Colbert asked him about his position on the environment. Sure, it was scripted -- "I was for it before I was against it" -- but self-deprecation is good. Especially for Kerry.

"Songs with a secret."

Rolling Stone picks the top 25. After all these years, the #1 mystery is still what the hell were the Kingsmen saying in "Louie, Louie."

He said "three times that he has a Shih Tzu, nine times that his late wife named the dog Trouble, and three times that he prefers to call it Baby."

It's very strange how much attention the pet food contamination story has gotten in the press, as I said that in the last podcast, where I asked if I was just imagining that I saw a Senate hearing on the subject on C-Span. In the comments to the podcast post, XWL says that not only were there hearings, but that they're "the best thing you'll ever watch on the web. Sen. Byrd is amazing. It's indescribable."

The quote in the title up there is from the Dana Milbank column, which goes on:

"She sleeps on my bed," said Byrd, in his 90th year and prone to meandering. "She goes with me to the Senate, rides in the car with me. She stays in my office. When somebody comes into the office, she rises and comes over and greets them, goes on about her business and gets back on the couch."

You have to hear the whole thing to get the effect. You can find it on this C-Span page (from April 12). Fast forward to 39:07. This is the most ridiculous 10 minutes of congressional hearing I've ever seen.

Laugh at Byrd all you want -- and you will want -- but it's not just him. People are absurdly emotional about their pets. I would have thought it would be embarrassing to dwell on tainted pet food for so long. There are so many problems in the world, so many human beings suffering. How can the media go on and on about a few dogs dying? I know, I know: I'm always blogging about all sorts of foolish things that capture my attention for whatever idiosyncratic reason. But mainstream media and Congress ought to have some priorities -- some proportion.

"The deadliest shooting rampage in American history."

The NYT reports:

At least 31 people were killed today on the campus of Virginia Tech in what appears to be the deadliest shooting rampage in American history, according to federal law-enforcement officials. Many of the victims were students shot in a dorm and a classroom building....

Up until today, the deadliest campus shooting in United States history was in 1966 at the University of Texas, where Charles Whitman climbed to the 28th-floor observation deck of a clock tower and opened fire, killing 16 people before he was gunned down by police. In the Columbine High attack in 1999, two teenagers killed 12 fellow students and a teacher before killing themselves.

The 50-foot Michael Jackson robot...

It roams around the desert and shoots laser beams. Shouldn't there be a Colossus of Las Vegas? We need more wonders of the modern world. The eastern United States has its Statue of Liberty. Why not something to express the spirit of the West?

For a depiction of a colossal Michael Jackson, go to 3:54 in this old video. Perhaps the Las Vegas project will have our robo-Michael busting out of a roller coaster cage. I love the way that video represents Jackson as the victim of our crazy ideas about him, with the poor man breaking free of the amusement park we made out of him.

Around Madison.

Yesterday, I was out, walking around the Capitol (see it?):



Today, I'm dug in at Espresso Royale, drinking one of those outrageously caffeinated large cappucinos (the very thing I was sipping in that Bloggingheads episode where I got mad at Garance):



Let's try to focus this energy constructively.

Another Monday.

Just another manic Monday....

... as the Spring semester crashes in toward a close. Time for cutting pages out of the syllabus and thinking up efficient strategies for presenting the doctrines left for the end. Habeas corpus! Separation of powers! It's harrowing.

But this week is a short teaching week, as I'm off to a conference at Dartmouth -- as noted here. The conference is on Thursday, so that leaves me on my own in Hanover, New Hampshire for the weekend. What to do?

(That linked video is sublime, by the way. Makes you want to do your Susannah Hoffs imitation, doesn't it? It's the easiest imitation in the world, you know.)

"The doctrines of so-called ‘animal rights’ ... violently interfere with the rights of an art work to be freely exhibited in an art museum."

So says the artist. "They completely ignored the concept and ideology behind this particular art work." But that art exhibit put the toads, tarantulas, lizards, crickets and scorpions in an environment designed to provoke them into violence. "It’s pretty clear that the intention is that the observer is intended to witness potential conflict between the animals which frankly I think is kind of sick," said the Humane Society spokesman.

That terrarium was "a microcosm of global conflict and power dynamics" that "functions as a metaphor for the conflicts among different peoples and culture — in short, human existence itself." That is to say the toads, tarantulas, lizards, crickets and scorpions were supposed to do vicious things to each other to express the artist's ideology. The SPCA people wanted to add water bowls and hiding places and transform the gallery into something more like a pet shop -- which would destroy the whole concept of Huang Yong Ping's "Theatre of the World."

So: Artist's expression versus the welfare of toads, tarantulas, lizards, crickets and scorpions.

In the end, the animals were removed from the exhibit, which I think was the right choice. They were being mistreated, and to stop mistreating them would wreck the artist's message. The animals won, yet so did the artist. His show -- in Vancouver -- has received immense publicity. 5,000 people have already seen it with all that toad/tarantula/lizard/cricket/scorpion strife, and now everyone's talking about it.

Isn't the interaction with the animal welfare crowd part of the artwork, the larger performance -- in the theatre of the world? I think that statement from the artist, quoted above, shows him intentionally stoking the conflict in the world beyond the terrarium. The idea that his rights were "violently" interfered with -- surely, he meant to set you off. How can violence to an abstraction compare to the violence of the toads, tarantulas, lizards, crickets and scorpions attacking each other? He made you think that. He made you subordinate art to insignificant creatures. A powerful performance.

"Could that change? It might. It may change over years. It may change over months. I can't tell you, but I've said very clearly...."

Do you recognize the inimitable rhetorical style? Do you miss it? If yes, good, because he -- it's John Kerry, obviously -- is threatening to run for President.

Audible Althouse #82.

It's a podcast. About Austin, Texas. Omakase. Driving 1235 miles in one day. Don Imus. Torturing a man by telling him he looks like Mr. Bean. Etc.

You don't need an iPod. You can stream it right through your computer here.

But all the passionate people subscribe on iTunes:

"Tattoos remind you of death."

That's the title of what I consider the best blog post I've ever written. It was only possible because I had the perfect news story to riff on. Now, here are some photos of the pigs tattooed for the sake of art and the finished artwork, courtesy of this Metafilter post.

"What do the Canadian Rockies and Sad Liberals have in common?"

Answer here.

Is abstinence education a complete waste of money?

This new report seems to say so. Supporters of abstinence education are going to try to push back:

“This report confirms that these interventions are not like vaccines,” said Harry Wilson, associate commissioner of the Family and Youth Services Bureau at the federal Administration for Children and Families. “You can’t expect one dose in middle school, or a small dose, to be protective all throughout the youth’s high school career.”

Yeah, but the federal government has been spending $176 million a year on this!

Damn it! That reminds me I still need to finish my taxes. Was the report released this week for maximum effect?

But why is the federal government spending any money on propaganda aimed at American kids? Well, obviously, it's a sop to social conservatives. But can we stop now?

Wilson's idea is that the lack of results shows why we ought to be spending even more money and absorbing even more of kids' time telling them what to do with their lives. Why not spend the money on teaching them how to read, research independently, analyze, and critique? That would be real education, that would justify taking up their time, and that would put them in a position to think for themselves about what is the right way to live. And maybe, just maybe, it actually is to be abstinent until marriage.

If you really believed in the good of your own philosophy/religion, you'd want them to think for themselves.

"There was the risqué, sexually offensive, sometimes racially offensive, satire, and then there was this political salon about politics and books."

NBC chief White House correspondent David Gregory has good insight into Imus (in this really well-done Newsweek piece by Weston Kosova):

"Imus was living in two worlds. There was the risqué, sexually offensive, sometimes racially offensive, satire, and then there was this political salon about politics and books. Some of us tuned in to one part and tuned out the other ... Whether I was numb to the humor that offended people or in denial, I don't know."

This article seems to be the beginning of the rehabilitation of Don Imus. Consider this, which shows the special power he had to skewer politicians and mainstream journalists, including the ones who couldn't pass up the air time:

Between insults, he gave politicians and journalists... lots of air time to discuss serious issues and plug their books. He asked real questions and then listened to the answers. The show became an influential salon for the politically connected. Powerful people tuned in to hear what other powerful people would say. For a certain segment of status-obsessed journalists, being called names by Imus was better than not being called at all. Imus had a talent for coaxing his guests into saying what they really thought, often in salty language they'd never use on more "respectable" shows....

Imus may have come off as your deranged, half-addled uncle (he kicked booze and drugs years ago), but he also came to the microphone each morning carefully prepared for battle. He read more books and newspapers than most of his guests and was a formidable interrogator who could cut the powerful down to size. On a recent show, Imus badgered Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer, a frequent guest, about the deplorable conditions at Walter Reed hospital. Schumer tried to go for the high-and-mighty approach, castigating Republicans for failing the troops. Imus pounced. When was the last time Schumer visited the troops at Walter Reed? Deflated, Schumer haltingly admitted he hadn't been there in years.

We need to think about why people were so hot to bring him down. Kosova provides the time line:

[U]nknown to Imus, one of his most loyal listeners in Washington, D.C., was watching, and taping, the show every day.... 26-year-old Ryan Chiachiere wasn't a fan, and he wasn't tuning in to be entertained. Chiachiere is one of a handful of young activists who spend their days wading through hours of radio and cable shows for Media Matters for America, a liberal group whose sole purpose is rooting out and "correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media." Wired on coffee, Chiachiere was watching a recording of Imus's show when he noticed the "hos" remark.

It was a big hit at the group's morning meeting....

The group posted a video clip of the exchange on its Web site and put it up on YouTube. It sent e-mails to journalists and civil-rights and women's groups.

The word, and the outrage, spread quickly. A week later, Imus was gone, banished from his multimillion-dollar television and radio show even before he had the chance to complete the all-too-familiar cycle of public penance that high-profile sinners are usually granted.

That is, Media Matters had been lying in wait for a long time, and finally they got exactly the sound bite they needed, and they played it masterfully. Think about why things fell into place so well and why so many people fell in line and took down this idiosyncratic character, who had been talking on the radio four hours a day, five days a week for so long. Who knows what havoc he might have wreaked in the 2008 campaign? Isn't it convenient to have him out of the way?

Or do you support the rehabilitation of Imus?

In an e-mail to NEWSWEEK, Imus said, "I could go to work tomorrow. Bigger deal. More money. TV simulcast ... I've got a summer of kids to cowboy with and then we'll see." He knows what he said was wrong, and that there is much to do. Asked whether his recovery from addiction had given him the strength to cope with the current crisis, he sounded like, well, Imus: "I'm a good and decent person who made a mistake in the context of comedy," he wrote in the e-mail. "My strength comes from not being full of sh— and a coward."

Our political world is full cowards and folks who are full of shit. Is Imus really the one you want gone?

Ho.

Don.

Died.

Can anyone get the seemingly obvious joke just right? Apparently, not.

A man died, people. Show some respect. Or don't. But if you can't come up with a good joke at least, go with the respect for the dead angle. That's my recommendation.