"While women from his own, white middle-class background, often saw him as an overawing presence, he was just another guy to African-American women and this was refreshing to him."

From a 2001 article about Bob Dylan's 6-month marriage to Carolyn Dennis, who bore him a child, his 6th child, named Desiree Gabrielle Dennis-Dylan. I got to that article after seeing this very unfairly titled Daily News article "Like a complete unknown — Unlikely that Bob Dylan will attend his daughter's wedding."

It's one of those same-sex marriages you've heard so much about. Desiree's partner is named Kayla Sampson.

How's that healthcare.gov website working out for you?

I heard it was hinky, but it looks great from here, not that I need to use it. I've had excellent health-care insurance for decades. (The relevant promise for me is: If you like what you have, you get to keep it.) But I went over to healthcare.gov to see if it's up and running, to click on various headings, and run a bunch of searches, and it looked great. The front page came up instantly, and every link I clicked and every search I ran went through instantly. There was nothing slow or unfinished-looking about it.

But Drudge's top headline right now is "OBAMACRASH":



That links to a Twitchy article with the headline "Surprise! Obamacare health insurance exchange websites don’t work; HealthCare.gov a total mess." At that top of that Twitchy page is this blackly comical banner:



The real nightmare for the anti-Obamacare crowd will be if Obamacare works well enough and people are reasonably satisfied. Myself, I'm tired of the drama.

ADDED: "In Debut, Affordable Care Web Site Baffles Many Users," according to the NYT.

"I have awakened to a shut-down government. Will I notice?"

A question from Big Mike this morning in last night's "café" post, which is still the top post on the blog as I drag myself in here muttering "Am I supposed to talk about the government shutdown?"

MadisonMan says he notices...

... because I work with noaa.gov people, and even have a noaa.gov email account. I'd check it to see if I have email, but that's apparently against the law today, or something.

I think the training I have scheduled for Thursday will likely be cancelled. I'm kinda curious how my big meeting next week will go if the shutdown is persistent.

I sense a shutdown vibe. They shutdown. We shutdown.

At the Dessert Café...

... dig in!

"49% of all people in the poll say that Obama is acting like a responsible adult in this budget battle, with 47% describing him as a spoiled child."

CNN did a poll and asked a question in this form: "Do you think Barack Obama has acted mostly like a responsible adult or mostly like a spoiled child during the recent debate over the federal budget?"

Responsible adult 49% Spoiled child 47% No opinion 5%

Same question, asked about Republicans in Congress:

Responsible adults 25% Spoiled children 69% No opinion 6%

Same question, asked about Democrats in Congress:

Responsible adults 35% Spoiled children 58% No opinion 7% 

Headline for the article reporting the poll: "CNN Poll: GOP would bear the brunt of shutdown blame."

What surprises me is how nearly everyone was willing to accept the push of the responsible adult/spoiled child dichotomy. And I wonder whether Democrats or Republicans were more likely to accept the invitation to think in those terms.

"Mrs. Hazan embraced simplicity, precision and balance in her cooking."

"She abhorred the overuse of garlic in much of what passed for Italian food in the United States, and would not suffer fools afraid of salt or the effort it took to find quality ingredients."

Her tomato sauce, enriched with only an onion, butter and salt, embodies her approach, but she has legions of devotees to other recipes, among them her classic Bolognese, pork braised in milk and her minestrone.

That sentence happens to name 4 of my favorite recipes in "The Classic Italian Cook Book," my favorite cookbook. Well-used since the 70s, that book lost its cover the 1990s, and in old age, it obligingly splays open to pages festively splattered with the sauces of suppers past.

Goodbye to Marcella Hazan. She was 89.

Charles Ferguson bails out of the planned documentary on on Hillary Clinton because "nobody, and I mean nobody, was interested in helping me make this film."

"Not Democrats, not Republicans -- and certainly nobody who works with the Clintons, wants access to the Clintons, or dreams of a position in a Hillary Clinton administration."

Not even journalists who want access, which can easily be taken away. I even sensed potential difficulty in licensing archival footage from CBN (Pat Robertson) and from Fox. After approaching well over a hundred people, only two persons who had ever dealt with Mrs. Clinton would agree to an on-camera interview, and I suspected that even they would back out.

The most stunning passage in Ferguson's essay is his description of a private conversation with Bill Clinton:

I asked him about the financial crisis. He paused and then became even more soulful, thoughtful, passionate, and articulate. And then he proceeded to tell me the most amazing lies I've heard in quite a while....

Read the whole thing, but let me summarize: Ferguson pegs the Clintons as wealthy folks protecting their financial interests and nostalgizes about the 1990s, when the Clintons "attempted courageous reforms: allowing gays to serve in the military, a carbon tax, health care reform."

I can see where Ferguson wanted to go with his documentary — Good Clintons/Bad Clintons — and it's clear why neither Republicans nor Democrats trusted him to lay down the storyline in the run-up to the 2016 election. The Republicans were averse to Hillary hagiography. The Democrats were afraid of framing Hillary as good when she's skews left and bad when she's supportive of business and finance.

Ferguson was pleased with the full control and final cut authority he had over his film. He must understand that the Clintons don't want to cede any of their control over Hillary's campaign.

"To Fix Education Look to the Past."

That's the headline at #1 on the Wall Street Journal's "Popular Now" list, and I guess those words are working better to win clicks than the actual title on the essay from last Saturday "Why Tough Teachers Get Good Results," which is framed around the story of a hardcore teacher from the 1960s, "a fierce Ukrainian immigrant named Jerry Kupchynsky."

Today, he'd be fired. But when he died a few years ago, he was celebrated...

The teaser on the sidebar "Popular" list got me to click, but my hopes are dashed. It's nice to look at the past for sighs and nostalgia and exclamations of "You can't do that today," but you can't look to this past and see how to fix education.

The essay writer, Joanne Lipman, does try to extract some lessons — "A little pain is good for you," rote learning works, etc., — but she begins with predictable disclaimers:

Now I'm not calling for abuse; I'd be the first to complain if a teacher called my kids names. But the latest evidence backs up my modest proposal. 

(We're using "modest proposal" unsarcastically now?)

Lipman assures us that "Studies have now shown" that something she calls "conventional wisdom" — nurturing self-esteem and a joy in discovery of knowledge — is wrong.

Kupchynsky was a music teacher, and I don't know what went on in Ukraine that led to his ferocity and his relocation to a northern New Jersey high school, but he was off the norm even then. (I happen to be an authority on high school in northern New Jersey in the 1960s. I had 4 years of direct personal experience.)

Anyway, Lipman has a book to sell, about Kupchynsky, and maybe it will fire up the same crowd that got excited about "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" a couple years ago. Remember that? It was also about drilling youngsters into proficiency playing classical music.

But most of what kids need to learn isn't music performance, and those who get carried away thinking about strict music education ought to demonstrate their love of strictness by being stricter with themselves as they contemplate the effectiveness of different approaches to educating children. Consider whether there's something self-indulgent, sentimental, and even perverse in your dreams of fixing education by getting tough with children.

Did you instinctively resist my suggestion? Ah, you just took my tough test of whether you are serious about toughness.

And you failed!

Joe Biden emails me with the subject line: "Ann."

Man, this gets my "Big Government sounds like a creepy stalker" tag:



He just emailed me yesterday. Back off, Government Man!

And don't make me the bogus subject of your communication. This is not about me, but you think I'm so doggedly self-interested that I get jazzed up by email purporting to be about me?

"If you've been watching what's been happening here in Washington over the past couple of weeks..."

Well, I haven't. I've been averting my eyes.

"... and you still think you need more reasons to support Democrats over Republicans, I'm not sure what to tell you."

Yesterday's email was about how Biden "can't understand" what Republicans are doing, and today's email is about how Biden doesn't know what to say to anyone who doesn't already agree with him.

I must be on the Democratic Party's special email list of Perpetually Puzzled People, and somehow it's been decided that the best name to slap on the "From" line in email to the PPP is Joe Biden.

"Mrs. Perry I want to be sure that you didn’t just inadvertently make news."

"Are you saying that you believe that abortion is a woman’s right — to make that choice?"

"Leather jogging pants are a legit fashion thing right now."

"Kanye is talking fashion world which is why it sounds strange to non-fashion people," says a commenter in this Metafilter discussion of the Kanye West/Jimmy Kimmel feud.

The commenter links to: "In Kanye's Defense: 11 Musicians Who Own Leather Jogging Pants: Jimmy Kimmel might not believe that leather jogging pants are a trend, but here are 15 photos of celebs who could vouch for Kanye on that one."

ADDED: "Jogging pants" is a just nicer way to say sweat pants.

And the issue isn't whether you're going to exercise in leather pants, it's whether you want your leather pants tight or loose. Everyone loves tight pants and everyone loves loose pants, but for different reasons. The question is which of your pant-loves are you going to be with today. Is it a loose pants day? If so, with leather jogging pants, you can still say yes to leather.

Joe Biden is emailing me, "Do you understand this?"

He addresses me — "Ann" — and informs me that "One senator is running the show in the Republican Party right now."

He's not my senator. And he's not your senator.

I guess Joe checked before emailing that I'm not from Texas. Regular readers of this blog know that if life begins at conception, I am from Texas, but that wouldn't make Ted Cruz my Senator.

Joe continues:

But for some reason I can't understand, the Republican Party is letting Ted Cruz lead their charge against Obamacare....

They're letting him? Seems to me the Party tried to rein him in but couldn't. Why try to "understand" things that aren't true? Why is the moon made of green cheese?

"Utterly unqualified partisan politicians will look at what utterly unqualified citizens have said..."

Begins a criticism of [guess what] that could work pretty much across the board as a criticism of representative democracy.

Comedy = tragedy + time.

Yesterday, this blog was devoted to the topic of comedy and tragedy, with particular emphasis on the aphorism "Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel," which might be the most famous + insightful thing ever said about comedy and tragedy. The competition is that Mel Brooks quote I was redoing the other day — "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die" — and the one you see above in the title to this post — "Comedy is tragedy plus time."

That aphorism invites criticism. One is that it should be phrased "tragedy plus time allows comedy" — because you still have to say something funny about the old tragedy. Another is that it may be that we feel free to make light of old-enough tragedies, but that's something pretty disgusting about us, as is extremely well explained by the comedian David Mitchell here:

"I am not in graduate school to learn how to encourage poor souls in their sexual experimentation..."

"... nor am I receiving generous stipends of taxpayer monies from the good people of the Great State of Wisconsin to play along with fantasies or accommodate public cross-dressing."

To all and sundry alike I explicate, as best I can, such things as the clash between the Taira and the Minamoto, the rise of the Kamakura shogunate, and the decline of the imperial house in twelfth-century Japan. Everyone is welcome in my classroom, but, whether directly or indirectly, I will not implicate myself in my students’ fetishes, whatever those might be. What they do on their own time is their business; I will not be a party to it. I am exercising my right here to say, “Enough is enough.” One grows used to being thought a snarling racist–after all, others’ opinions are not my affair–but one draws the line at assisting students in their private proclivities. That is a bridge too far, and one that I, at least, will not cross.

"How Edith Windsor fell in love, got married, and won a landmark case for gay marriage."

A great article by Ariel Levy. Worth subscribing to The New Yorker to get access. I had The New Yorker in audio podcast form, and this article inspired me to subscribe to the print edition. It begins:

"Fuck the Supreme Court!” Edith Windsor said, one hideously hot morning in June, when she’d had just about enough. Then she sighed and mumbled, “Oh, I don’t mean that.” What she really meant was that she was hot, she was tired of waiting, and, most of all, she was tired of being told what to do. “I’m feeling very manhandled!” she said.

It was Windsor’s eighty-fourth birthday, and she was spending it staring at a laptop screen as information from scotusblog.com flashed by in a typeface too small for her to read comfortably. Four years earlier, Windsor’s partner of more than forty years, Thea Spyer, died, leaving Windsor her sole heir. The two were legally married in Canada, in 2007, but, because of the Defense of Marriage Act, Windsor was not eligible for the exemption on estate tax that applies to husbands and wives. She had to pay $363,053 in taxes to the federal government, and $275,528 to New York State, and she did not think that was fair.

There's some excellent material about lawyering, including getting the right plaintiff as the face of the issue. One "experienced movement attorney" explains that "Women are better than men" and "post-sexual is better than young." Windsor was not just female and presumably "aged out of carnality," but, we're told, didn't "look gay."

Her pink lipstick and pearls would make it easier, [her lawyer Roberta] Kaplan knew, for people across the country to feel that they understood her, that she embodied values they could relate to.

Some movement lawyer types thought Windsor was the wrong plaintiff because she was too rich, and her legal problem was a problem of a rich person. Who owes $600,000 in taxes? What kind of civil rights movement forefronts suffering of that kind?

"There were these calls," Kaplan said. "These people from Lambda were like, 'We really think that bankruptcy is the perfect venue to challenge DOMA,' because they had a bankruptcy case they wanted to bring. Finally, I couldn't stand it. I said, 'Really?  I don't want to be disrespectful or classist, but do you really think that people who couldn't pay their personal debts are the best people to bring the claim?"...

Kaplan was convinced that Americans dislike taxes even more than they dislike the rich...