The Other Side of the Ocean

I learned this from a blogger some days back (these stats are from the WallStJ, Jan.20.04):

Average Annual Real Increases in Domestic Discretionary Spending:

Lyndon Johnson (’65-’69) 4.3% (increase)
Richard Nixon (’70-’75) 6.8%
Gerald Ford (’76-’77) 8.0%
Jimmy Carter (’78-’81) 2.0%
Ronald Reagan (’82-’89) -1.3%
George H.W.Bush (’90-’93) 4.0%
Bill Clinton (’94-01) 2.5%
George W.Bush (02-04) 8.2%

It is amazing how much and how little these figures tell us about the political leaders themselves, or about the economic climate of the times. One could almost create an image of GWB as the benevolent president --were it not for the fact that so many social programs remain under-funded. Perhaps it’s time for the Democrats to put themselves forward as the fiscal conservatives? Something along the lines of “small spenders with a big heart”? Or maybe put up a billboard or two about the GOP throwing stones in glass houses?

Killing an hour with the Wine Spectator, I came across a photo of Portuguese men in the process of squeezing juice out of grapes with their feet. This is from the distinguished port house, Quinta do Crasto, which has now also taken on the production of a red table wine. At $100 a bottle, it kind of knocks my idea of what is defined as “table wine” (for me, table wine means cheap, indeterminate blends sold under the policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell”). I wish I had the capability of linking to it: the photo shows 8 guys in their underwear doing a sort of can can in a vat of purple grapes. They don’t look too happy about it. Is this a promo, or is it the real thing? If so, is there a disclaimer on the label (as in: wine may contain traces of fungus, epidermis, cuticle, toe-nail, etc)? The Spectator, of course, in its usual staid way says nothing on these burning (for me) issues. Instead it assures us that this is a “state of the art” winery. So this is the state of the art...

I have just received a call from someone selling me Croatia. No kidding. The terms of the sale were stated in a language not entirely familiar to me, but when I doubted that the caller had reached the proper number, she asked in broken English “Are you Nina Camic?” I said yes, she said “I have reached the right person and the right number” and then went back to her (foreign language, possibly Croatian) explanation as to why I should purchase Croatia, cheaply. I believe I also heard “Bosnia” somewhere in the midst of it all, but I am not sure that it was for sale. Perhaps she was denigrating the worth of Bosnia, in favor of Croatia.

Eventually I hung up, but I “star 69”-ed her and now I have a number for anyone to call if they want to purchase Croatia at a good price. I myself did not dial this number because of fears of an unidentifiable nature, but if you’re brave, or if you’re itching for a bargain, here it is: 866 312 7830.

If you were a personal injury lawyer, wouldn’t you, for the most part, take cases that had merit? Wouldn’t you prefer to use your time to litigate the ones that juries would find sympathetic? Isn’t it interesting that Edwards, the successful litigator-turned-candidate is now described by some as an over-zealous trial attorney, having pursued mostly cases that held the promise of high jury awards (based presumably on highly emotional, meaning tragic, fact patterns). I don’t typically write about other blogs here, but my colleague Ann has a very nice take (based on NYT stories of this morning) on both sides of the debate.

Since I have been teaching tort law, I have found myself increasingly bewildered as I listen to arguments levied against trial attorneys who prevail in the high-stakes tort cases. After all, the last decades have yielded new standards of strict liability for products causing injuries, they have created an unusually cautious medical establishment (possibly more Caesareans but fewer births with brain injury), they have pushed oil companies to pay for environmental damages (note this week’s punitive damage award in the Exxon Valdez oil spill case – not that Exxon will let it go without an appeal), and pharmaceutical companies to take responsibility for marketing drugs they had reason to believe were unsafe (classic instance: DES litigation). Tort damages have typically been limited to recovery of medical bills and economic losses, with a few high-profile awards for emotional distress. Our litigious society is, after all, an uninsured society. Edwards is described as the champion of obstetrics cases that had nothing short of nightmare birthing scenarios... A classic story of a guy with talent and passion, making a buck from successful litigation, finding a tort case where he could pile on the icing for his client (and therefore for himself)--this is a bad thing?

What if instead, Edwards had had these reactions:
“I’m in it for the losers: I only take cases that have little merit or likelihood of success.”
“Medical uncertainty? Oh, okay, I will not use expert evidence that I believe would be favorable to my client’s position, because 10 years hence, it may be proven inadequate.”
“I don’t want to manipulate juries: I will keep my skills at crafting persuasive arguments under control because I don’t want to get the jury thinking that my client should win big time.”

I haven’t taught Professional Responsibility for several years, but let me just say that I think I smell grounds here for attorney censure for unethical behavior.

I’d not heard of them (raw menus) before this week, but it just goes to show that if you stay to the margins of the restaurant scene for too long, you wont notice when it’ll have turned the corner. Charlie Trotter (the guy with the super innovative, super refined restaurant in Chicago) has paired up with Roxanne Klein (from California, where else) to create the perfect raw menu (it’s all laid out for you in the “Wine Spectator,” but it’s not yet online, so no link). The idea is to dice the food, soak it, freeze it, marinate it, dehydrate it –anything but cook it.

Well now, I’m sure this works well for vegetarians living in warm climates. But I don’t know about those of us living up north who like our pork sizzled and crisp (I’m not talking about me: I can’t remember the last time I ate sizzled and crisped pork). You take your great love out to dinner on a cold January night (tonight would qualify) and you say – “here, try this thinly sliced bleeding-heart radish accompanied by air-dried tomatoes”? Sounds very un-Atkins. And cold.

But maybe I’m being rigid and parochial. Trotter (who, BTW, is a home grown boy, having graduated in Poli Sci from UW) says that he gets at least 2 requests for a raw menu each night. So maybe we’re going to see this more and more? Dinner guests who will tell you: “I only eat raw.” Oh, I can’t wait. Cooking for others has become so much fun!

Apart from tastes, textures, and the usual pandering to the bored and restless palates of the privileged, the raw menu apparently has the added virtue that it is healthy. The morning after, you wake up feeling – healthy. Oh, did I mention that Roxanne Klein's cooking, excuse me, un-cooking of food excludes meat, poultry, fish, dairy products, and foods derived from wheat? I’m not even going to comment on that.

When I was a kid, I went to the UN International School in New York. There are many unique and interesting things about that school, but to me, what stood out then was the fact that we were the only school in the entire city that closed on October 24th (in observance of UN Day). This opened up a world of choices. Usually I would take my skates and go to Rockefeller Center. It was both sinful and heavenly to be skating in the middle of the day in a near-empty rink.

Super Bowl Sunday offers a similar chance to mull over this one: what to do when the world is busy doing the Super Bowl thing and you’re not? Hmmmm.. I could:
- go and finally see LOTR in an empty theater and then blog about how the movie is losing its appeal;
- take a party of like-minded friends to a bar and ask them to turn down the TV because the noise is interfering with our conversation;
- go ice-fishing on an empty lake Mendota [no pain, no gain];
- jay-walk on a red light at the intersection of Mineral Point and Gammon;
- go to New York and skate…
By the way, I like spectator sports alright. But in Poland there’s only one "football" (=soccer) and people don’t kill each other trying to get it. They kill each other AFTER the game, if they lost. Or won. Much more civilized.

I asked my Family Law class what policy reasons might there be to prohibit marriage between a woman and her adoptive dad (she was 15 when she was adopted, but 21 when she started a relationship with him, leading actually to her being pregnant by him when she was 22). Except for two or three, most thought such a marriage should be permitted (though through a legal maneuver of first vacating the adoption). Interestingly, they believed that parenting stops at 18 [really??] and therefore he was no longer fulfilling his parental duties.
I reminded them that when Woody Allen wanted to marry Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter (Woody and Mia had been in a pretty stable relationship for years), there was almost complete public condemnation. Someone said “hey, that’s a little weird,” but I wasn’t sure whether they were referring to Woody’s choice of bride or the public condemnation.

Who would even want to be an NYT book critic (see post below) if it means having to slog through this list (from the article today entitled “Best Sellers, on a Scale of Good Read to Good Grief”):

The books reviewed in Janet Maslin's Critic's Notebook article:
"THE LAST JUROR," by John Grisham. Doubleday. $27.95.
"THE PRESENT," by Spencer Johnson. Doubleday. $19.95.
"THE AUTOMATIC MILLIONAIRE," by David Bach. Broadway Books. $19.95.
"THE PROPER CARE AND FEEDING OF HUSBANDS," by Dr. Laura Schlessinger. HarperCollins. $24.95.
"EMMA'S SECRET," by Barbara Taylor Bradford. St. Martin's. $24.95.
"PS, I LOVE YOU," by Cecelia Ahern. Hyperion Press. $21.95.
"DIVIDED IN DEATH," by J. D Robb. G.P. Putnam's Sons. $21.95.
"FOR US, THE LIVING," by Robert A. Heinlein. Scribner. $25.
"MR. PARADISE," by Elmore Leonard. William Morrow. $25.95.
"THE SECRET SYMBOLS OF THE DOLLAR BILL," by David Ovason. HarperCollins. $18.95.

It appears the self-help books continue to bulldoze their way into the mass market. Advice-giving is cheap and easy, and we seem to enjoy getting it by the truckload. In the article, we read about the newest best seller written by Spencer Johnson:

In the wake of that land-office success [the author is referring to “Who Moved My Cheese,” about which she says: “written for readers who would find a "Fun With Dick and Jane" primer too demanding”] Mr. Johnson would barely have had to write anything to market more advice. So he hasn't quite written anything in cooking up "The Present." That title is a pun about how the ability to live in the moment is a gift. Present-related wisdom is such that the book's advice can be summed up on a one-page card. This is conveniently included.
Although Mr. Johnson's new book does not particularly acknowledge it, he published something very similar back in the early 1980's, his prepopular days. But that book was called "The Precious Present." Both begin with a sage old man telling a boy that the Present — capital P — is the best thing he can ever receive.
From "The Precious Present":
" `Wow!' the little boy exclaimed. `I hope someone gives me the precious present. Maybe I'll get it for Christmas.' "
From the labor-intensive rewrite:
" `Wow!' the little boy exclaimed, although not fully understanding. `I hope someone gives me The Present someday. Maybe I'll get it for my birthday.' "

Maybe we all just have one idea in us and we recycle it again and again, but I'm going to hope our packaging of it is a little less shabby.

…You’d think this would be near impossible. I mean, to publish a movie or a restaurant review there, you’d need a list of credentials a mile long, plus at least five personal connections with the top brass in the industry and the paper, correct? Wrong! It turns out you don’t even need to have anything clever to say. Consider this week’s reader review of LOTR:

ONE FILM TO RULE THEM ALL:MAGNIFICENT, January 28, 2004
The final installment of "The Lord of the Rings" is the BEST!!!! It is magnificent!The visual/special effects are unbelievable, the acting wonderful, the content magnificient!!!!You have to watch this movie, and it is soooooo good, you will want to see it 1,000 times over.This movie won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Orginal Score, and Best Original Song in The Golden Globes, and is now the most nominated motion picture of the year:with 11 Academy Award nominations, and probobly 11 Academy Award wins. SEE THIS MOVIE!!! You wont regret it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It seems that three out of four readers found this review “helpful.”

I think if a Fed Ex pick up box says “last pick up at 6:00p.m.,” it should mean that the Fed Ex picker upper should never ever come even a millisecond before six.

And if I was so good as to sacrifice proofreading my multi-page grant proposal so that I could have it ready to go by 5:54 p.m., just in case the Fed Ex clock did not jive with the rest of the world’s time sequence, then I should be rewarded with a prompt and efficient pick up at 6, just as the heavens intended.

But shoulds/woulds/coulds make little sense in a world that is out to get you.

Let me say, for those who do not have their computer homepage set to the weather in Wisconsin, today we had a high temp of 2 degrees F. That was in the mid-afternoon, when the sun was gunning its engines full blast. Who knows what level of Arctic misery was being inflicted upon us by 5:54 p.m..

But there I stood outside, me and my grant proposal, waiting, because being raised to be suspicious of anything associated with capitalism, I had to see if Fed Ex would really come at 6 [OR THEREAFTER!].

They didn’t come. Or, more likely, they came at 5:53p.m.

Thoughts that were going through my exposed (vanity=no hat) head during the 36 minute wait:

- a fur-coated animal has no chance right now..survival of the fittest means that if I spot one, it turns into a hat.
- Even if I succumb to hypothermia, I will not regret putting off writing the proposal in order to try to get three wins in a row in Spider Solitaire
- I don’t even want this grant, I have enough other work to do at the moment.
- Does anyone still believe that Michael Jackson is innocent?
- Why hasn’t Katie Couric ridden the subway in the last 10 years? If she did (to celebrate today’s 100th anniversary of the subway system in NYC, for instance), and it was rush hour, would everyone get up to give her a seat?
- My poor housebound dog: it's been almost 12 hours for him.
- Should Dean hang it up?

And so on.

In the end I had to drive to the airport Fed Ex station, which, of course, I could have done from the beginning, but one always thinks “if I wait just one more minute, surely they’ll come..”

I have, in my mind, the perfect grant proposal. It’s been nestling in my mind for a while. It should be nestling on paper, but for one reason or another it is still only in my mind. It almost made it to paper-form last night, but then my mother phoned and I realized I had yet again neglected to call her this past Sunday (see post, January 18) and therefore I owed her a bit of listening. So no proverbial ink hit the paper.

Today would have been a good day as well to let the words take shape, but in anticipation of the grant writing process, I had put off all student appointments until today, thinking I’d be done with the grant by now. I’m not done, and the students are lining up outside as we speak.

The deadline for the grant is February 1, 2004. Yep, February 1st. It does not take a great mind to figure out by now, as we are approaching the end of January, that February 1st falls on a Sunday. So I called the government office expecting a reprieve. Certainly I can POSTMARK it or FEDEX it by tomorrow, January 30, can’t I?

No, she tells me. The deadline is clearly stated on their fresh and fancy website: February 1, 2004. That means it has to be in their office by tomorrow (Friday, January 30, 2004) afternoon.

So why create the illusion? Why instill unrealistic hope? Can I sue for false advertising? If I fly our to D.C. and slip it under their steel governmental heartless door on Sunday, will they not accept it?

The topic for yesterday’s lecture in Family Law was same-sex marriage. I had only 1 hr. 20 min., and I barely managed to lay out the most recent developments that have taken place in the law, ones that may be crucial in setting the course for a legal acceptance or rejection of gay unions. Supreme Court decisions, state Supreme Court decisions, federal acts, state-level legislative efforts – there is a monstrously huge load of material out there these days.

Ten years ago, the same topic (legal context of same-sex unions) could have been be treated in 15 minutes.

Nonetheless, as we know, the bottom line hasn’t changed. For all the legislative and judicial activity, same-sex couples could not then and cannot now obtain a marriage license, never mind having it recognized in sister states. Massachusetts better do something before my next semester so that I can finally end with a better punch line. Otherwise I’ll have to spill over into another class period (each period is only 1 hr 20 min) and still conclude without any definitive answers.

A reader asked why I failed to write any significant commentary on the Oscar nominations announced yesterday. She insinuated that perhaps I was miffed at LOTR's sweep of 11 nominations. Of course the answer is no. One can't really get miffed at the Academy; after all, they are doing what they're doing to members of their own gang, and the rest of us, unscathed, watch for the sheer entertainment of it all.

I must also admit that I never saw LOTR. One could say that I have an aversion to battles that take place somewhere in "middle earth", and so I view no movies that promise long sequences of fictionalized but nonetheless realistic gore. True, one friend of a friend used the same excuse for avoiding the film "Monster." He said he refused to pay money to see movies where a serial killer takes out human life, one by one. Though I agree that the entertainment value of that is pretty low, at least in the case of serial killers, I feel a social responsibility to occasionally witness what we, as a society, have allowed to grow and fester. I do not believe that there is anything on middle earth that deserves my attention in the same way.

Still, I agree with another reader that doting on an obscure Czech film when the rest of the world is commenting on Diane Keaton is a bit pretentious, and so I will return to my rightful place and say my two words. And the two words are, in fact, about Diane Keaton (hereafter DK): her gloves. When I commented on the gloves she wore to the Globes, someone noted that it is rumored that she has a germ thing. Meaning the gloves are always there as a result of a compulsive aversion to germs. DK has recently denied this, but when you deny rumors of this nature, one suspects there to be a grain of possible truth wedged in there somewhere.

Being human and therefore cruel, the glove thing made me snicker, though in kind deference to DK's mental health issues, I did not immediately rush to post this piece of news on the blog. But today I read in the Times something that made me believe that DK may not be so off the track. It's one of those instances where the rest of us are mindlessly destroying ourselves while the object of our ridicule stands protected. The article is all about the prevalence of germs, and it blatantly states that THE CLEANER YOU ARE,THE MORE GERMS THERE'LL BE IN YOUR KITCHEN!! It goes on to stereotype somewhat, and throw out the possibility that bachelor-slobs actually have a better, germ-free environment with their stacked dishes in the sink and unwiped counter tops, than do we, the compulsive neurotic counter-cleaners.

So hats off to you, DK, for being so visionary, if not altogether my favorite acting personality. If you win an Oscar, wave the gloved hand with pride.

There is a story in the paper today about the relocation program underway in Siberia, where the Russian government pays residents of cities north of the Arctic Circle to pack their belongings and move south (apparently it’s too expensive to support cities where things basically stay frozen year-round). You’d think that with the constant agony of frost bite and the dreary months of severe light deprivation, most would catch the first plane out (there are no rail or road connections from there to the rest of Russia). But no: in one city (Norilsk), out of 20,000 eligible for the relocation program, only 48 have agreed to go.

This shouldn't come as a surprise. I suppose people don’t like giving up on their communities. Maybe they come to feel a sense of pride for managing life in a dump. And they sing songs and write poems about their squalid, colorless, polluted towns, so that people listening elsewhere begin to think that maybe they should go visit that special little piece of heaven. On a cross-country road trip in the 60s, I made my parents detour to Gary, Indiana because I had just seen the Music Man (“there is just one place, that can light my face..”).

Perhaps we, as a nation with the greatest mobility factor in the world (I just made that up, but I’m sure it’s true), cannot fully appreciate how people elsewhere might be rooted to their landscape. If they gave us money here, in the States --enough money to make it worth our while, most of us WOULD move. One could probably empty out all of Wisconsin within a year for the right price. North Dakota? Less than 6 months. True, in Norilsk the government is not dishing out enough cash to whet the appetite. But still, out of the targeted 20,000, I bet at least 15,000 kind of like the place.

Bloggers (me included) are too quick to link to stories in the New York Times. I mean, it’s a good paper for what it is, but let’s give some local coverage a chance. For instance, how can you not love a headline (Madison Capital Times) that reads today: “Washington Wimps! Four-inch Snow Panics D.C.; Wisconsinites shrug.” [Though given our own paltry 2.2 inches yesterday and the enormous headaches it produced, I think we should reserve our shrug for another time.]

Sometimes, though, our paper gets a little carried away. Take Doug Moe’s column today: the gist of it is that we should just not follow all that advice from newspapers and magazines on how to live our lives. Never mind that if we followed his advice not to follow advice, we’d be caught up in a logical fallacy nightmare where no matter what path you take you wind up in hell.
But say you did decide to get in step behind Doug. Just read this:

“Hey, you. Yeah, you. Reading the newspaper. You are fat, drunk and lazy, and what are you going to do about it?”

What I want to do is go back to the NYT, but let me persevere [words in square brackets belong to me]:

“There has in recent years been a slow but relentless effort to get everyone to live life as if it were one long, and do I mean long, self-improvement course. Straighten up! Eat your vegetables! [I knew Kucinich the vegan didn’t have a chance.] Make sure your fourth-grader speaks three languages! [“the world wants to communicate with us? Let them speak American!”] Don’t smoke! [Watch it, Moe] Save the whales and the rainforest and when you’re done, the ozone layer! [Maybe we should slash and burn and have whale sushi for desert.] Who’s behind this effort? Regulators, bureaucrats [bureaucrats??], various do-gooder groups and individuals.”

Okay, I can’t go any further. I know Doug Moe is well-intentioned and humor is REALLY hard to churn out on a daily basis, but today, I think I’ll just put this aside and pick up the NYT. Oh no. NYT. Maureen Dowd (see post, January 25). Never mind.

Predictable that the Oscar nominations may be, they still bring about surprises, sometimes of a pleasant sort. For instance, I was ENORMOUSLY gratified to read that the Czech film “Zelary" received a nomination for Best Foreign Film. Not because it is filmed in one of the most beautiful regions of Europe – the Beskidy Mountains (these are actually POLISH mountains that sort of spill over into regions of the former Czechoslovakia). Not because it is a sad love story set during World War II. Not because it has the simplicity of a slow-moving film (at least in the first half) that meanders through the daily life of Eliska, the resistance nurse that hides from the Nazis by marrying a villager whose life she saved. Not because the name of the main character is sort of the same as my sister’s.

Why then? Why cheer for this film? Because it is based on a story written by Kveta Legatova.

Don’t know Kveta? No surprise. She was a school teacher, living and working in the Czech countryside. And then she decided to write fiction. At the age of 80 (she is now 84), she published her first book of short stories (the collection is called “Zelary”). The publishing house had such great faith in her that they ran a first print of a meager 400 copies. I did not know you could print such small numbers and still expect to recover costs!

Her book took off, she wrote another (the movie is based on the second one), and she is regarded now among the Czechs as a meteoric success. The film was nominated for the Oscar category by the Czech Republic, but I don’t know that anyone expected it to be picked up for the final cut. Kveta Legatova already received the State Literary Prize (the country’s highest honor) for her book. It would be cool to see “Zelary” land an Oscar.

What do you think about when you get stuck for two hours in a parked car in the middle of a snowstorm, unable to move, because every attempt to do so will slide you within millimeters of the car next to you? In my case:
1. University of Arizona has a perfectly fine law school and sociology department. If they call, I say yes.
2. If dog sledding is such a cool hobby in Wisconsin, can't they harness a few mutts and bring them around to pull innocent drivers like me out of trouble?
3. If Wisconsin is so full of tall, Nordic, hulky men, why can’t they for once be in the right place at the right time?
4. If I survive, I will immediately rewrite the post doubting the validity of the study that excluded Madison from the list of congenial places to live in [perhaps the survival thing was an over-dramatization: the parking lot where I was stuck was a mere block away from State Street, our main drag].
5. If we needed brute force to pull vehicles forward, why didn’t we just stay with the horse and carriage thing instead of creating unnecessary dependence on foreign oil?
I have to admit that eventually two very nice (if not hulky nor Nordic) men did come to my rescue. They lifted the end of the car that was spinning out of control, tut-tuting at my imbecile attempts at traction (a handful of pebbles and the branches of a desecrated nearby taxus brevifolia shrub), and positioned me in the proper direction. I was so grateful I didn't even tell them who to vote for in the forthcoming election. Probably they'll pick the tall guy, like everyone else.

Yesterday I mentioned in the blog that Streep had stated that “steroids in baseball” is not a burning issue before the nation. She appears to wrong, and I, who agreed with her, must, therefore, be wrong as well. I stand corrected by a constituent from Cheshire CT (Is there something going on in Cheshire that maybe Streep and I don't quite have a pulse on?).

Another reader suggestion for the list of possibly trivial (meaning – what do these have to do with governing?) presidential imperatives (post, January 23): a candidate for presidential office must have religious faith. Well, okay, I’ll add it as point number 7, but only if we qualify it: a candidate must “profess” adherence to some religious beliefs. Because, in truth, what do we know about their beliefs? It’s not like height, i.e. objectively identifiable (though not so easy in the case of Berlusconi, but let’s not go there now). And historically, isn’t it the case that Lincoln actually did not profess an affiliation to any religious faith? And that Andrew Johnson not only did not claim a religious affiliation, but in fact, never espoused anything that sounded like religion?

As to our Democrats-on-the-run, well, we do know that Dean CLAIMS he had a religious wedding, but since his wife is Jewish (the children were raised in the Jewish faith) and he says he is Christian, it appears that they were actually married before a judge. He does state that he felt it to be a religious ceremony and that religion is an internal, private things and so he can dang well call it religious if he feels like it. Sounds like a stretch, but it does meet the criterion of “professes religious faith,” even though the New Republic called him “one of the most secular candidates to run for president in modern history.”

And the others? I’ve never seen such a mixed up patchwork of religious affiliations. Gen. Wesley Clark says his father was Jewish, though he himself is a Methodist turned Baptist turned Catholic who attends a Presbyterian church. The Star Telegram says of Edwards: “Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina turned to the Bible after his 16-year-old son, Wade, died in a car accident. But Edwards has been uncomfortable talking about this, saying it's a private family matter.” Lieberman is an Orthdox Jew, the Rev. Al Sharpton is a Pentecostal minister, though he does not have a fixed parish. As for Kerry? According to NPR-- Senator John Kerry is Catholic, though he recently discovered that his paternal grandparents were Jewish. Kerry's grandfather was born Fritz Kohn in Austria in 1873. He changed his name in 1902, converted to Catholicism, and moved to Boston, where he married a woman who had also converted from Judaism to Catholicism. And Kucinich? We needn't bother -- he's too short (see post below), he wont win.

These days, it appears that religion is a must to take the South, so okay, number 7 on my list goes to professing religious faith.

A reader from a small town (possibly a town of disenfranchised small people), commented that my list of presidential imperatives (post, January 23) is woefully incomplete. The following is missing: the candidate must also be tall. I have to confess that I have never paid much attention to the size of candidates for office, or of political leaders in general, maybe because I have never been invited to dinner at the White House (see same post) and so I view them from the perspective of the screen, where all people look like they are of average height.

My (perhaps inadequate) research, however, reveals that my reader is right. First, consider the height of the following successful people in general:

SHAQUILLE O'NEAL, NBA star: 7 feet, 1 inch 4
JIM GOODNIGHT, SAS founder: 6 feet, 5 inches
JOHN WAYNE, actor: 6 feet, 4 inches
TIGER WOODS, golf star: 6 feet, 2 inches
DAVID LETTERMAN, TV host: 6 feet, 2 inches
PRINCE WILLIAM, royal heir: 6 feet, 2 inches
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: between 5'11" and 6', depending on who's reporting
MAYA ANGELOU, poet: 6 feet
NICOLE KIDMAN, actress: 5 feet, 10 inches
DIANE SAWYER, newswoman: 5 feet, 9 inches

Now let's take it into the political domain. A UNC research study on the importance of height reaches the following conclusion:

"not since 1896 have U.S. citizens elected a president whose height was below average (William McKinley, who, at 5 feet 7 inches tall, was ridiculed in the press as 'little boy.')"

So, my astute reader is correct. "Must be tall" joins the list of vital (if trivial) imperatives. And, let me throw out another little piece of research: since the time of modern vote counting (flawed as it may be), only ONE candidate actually won the electoral college even though he was shorter than his opponent: Jimmy Carter took the seat from Ford, even though he was a piddly 5'9" and Ford was 6'1" . (I do understand that G.W. Bush at 5'11" was a tad shorter than Gore at 6'1", but the key word here is "won")

As for the Democratic hopefuls, if you're placing bets on who will carry it, here are the crucial numbers (and therein lies the answer as to how on earth Kerry leapfrogged over Dean in Iowa), straight from the Hill:

At the head of the pack is the gargantuan John Kerry, who stands in at about 6'4" (presumably including the hair). Going down the line is Dick Gephardt at 6'1", then John Edwards at about 6' even. Al Sharpton measures up at about 5'11", Wesley Clark 5'11", Howard Dean about 5'9", Joe Lieberman 5'8", Dennis Kucinich 5'7" and, finally, Carol Moseley Braun at, we'll say, 5'4".

Which story tugs at the heart more? The goat that paid for a girl’s education, or the lawyer who befriended a lonely, dying man? A small percentage in need who get a break, from good lawyers, good goats. From the point of view of political priorities, what do you concentrate your efforts on? Creating fewer in need or more who’ll help? The answer seems obvious, though the current political thinking appears to hold the opposite position.

Moments ago, Meryl Streep said on the Golden Globes (I am WIRED!) that the two biggest problems in America are NOT gay marriage and steroids in sports. It’s not the first time that she is right.

A good review is usually a good sign that a book has merit. Unless the review is in the NYT: This from a recent statement by Erlanger:

"To be honest, there's so much s---," the new leader of the daily arts section observes. "Most of the things we praise aren't very good."

Changes are about to take place at the NYT Book Review (see link). For one thing, we shouldn’t count on more reviews of fiction. There isn’t enough of a polemic in reviewing fiction. Making up good things to say about authors and their not-so-good books just isn’t very sexy.

Not a great threat, I know. But the trivialization game (post on January 23) continues on the op-ed page today:

..some reporters thought that thrust into her first national television interview, Judy Dean seemed as fragile as Laura in "The Glass Menagerie." At moments on ABC, the couple seemed so far from mainstream American life and so disconnected from each other's careers, they were like characters who had walked into the wrong play.
.. I found Judy Dean, gussied up with unfamiliar lipstick and blush, charming. She seemed as antithetical as possible to the notion of a first lady — and that ain't all bad. I'm not sure I believed her assertion that her high-spirited husband doesn't ever blow his top at home. And it still seems strange that she is so oblivious to the major moments of his campaign: She told Diane Sawyer that she had not seen The Scream the night it happened, which means [nc: here we go again…] she wasn't watching his big speech on election night in Iowa.

I’ll take trivial if it’s laugh-out-loud funny, or part of a blog or something. But in an NYT article that describes the new Dean as a pathetically “declawed, de-clenched, de-Deaned Dean,” Dowd’s jibe at the Deans, the couple, makes her appear to be sharpening her own fangs on yesterday’s pumpkin pie.

My grandmother (1901 – 1994) was the most apolitical person I know. My grandfather (1886 – 1973) was completely immersed in politics. She baked during the night shift and in retirement, made pierogi and nalesniki (blintzes). He organized labor groups, built community centers, and championed organic farming. Did they get along and find the middle ground? Hardly. Poor for the better part of their lives and certainly at the time of their courtship, they may well have qualified for Bush’s aid for marriage counseling. Not that they should have married to begin with. But they were destined to do so: he needed a wife, she needed a husband. They never divorced, but in later years sometimes they lived apart, sometimes together. Their lives defied compartmentalization or labeling. They lived in Poland, then in the US, then after the War, in Poland again. They were unique, as are other partnerships and marital units. Poverty sparked tension; later, a modestly comfortable retirement (it was a fluke, too complicated to explain here) eased the tension considerably. She continued to focus on feeding successive generations of the family, he on his community work. It worked. Sort of. Is there a lesson here?

Call it a liberal incarnation of trickle-down economics: self-sufficiency leads to healthier marriage/partnership, not the other way around. If the marriage mobile dispenses jobs with a decent living wage, I’ll jump on its bandwagon.

Our limited capacity to invent or imagine or absorb new words often leads us to describe newly emergent circumstances with borrowed words and phrases. Spam is a good example of this (first adopted for trashy emails because someone remembered the Monty Python skit about the real product , appearing in an irritating manner every few seconds and at every juncture).

Listening to NPR’s descriptions of problems with the Mars Rover yesterday gave me a few helpful terms to throw around when my computer isn’t cooperating. For instance, the Rover was described as hiccupping data – taking it in, spitting it out over and over again. Faced with a new kind of computer puzzler and inspired by this very apt description, I wrote a message to tech support about a weblog visitor whose Hungarian domain was hiccupping uncontrollably in and out this site. And today I heard, again on NPR, that the Rover was behaving like a stubborn adolescent. There have been many moments when I have wanted to send smart and sassy Eudora or temperamental Internet Explorer to their room and take away the car keys for the evening. You tell them to do something and they shut down on you and sulk.

Maybe these descriptors will catch on.

The essay on the half dozen recent books denouncing Bush’s foreign policy (NYT Sunday Book Review) is brutally honest. We live in a time and place where the new world order has been revolutionized by a cowboy with a mission and with little experience in world affairs and where a growing number of people look at the Bush America with revulsion and dread.

Consider this excerpt from the essay:

Bush's views, Daalder and Lindsay say, came to rest on two fundamental pillars. ''The first was that in a dangerous world the best -- if not the only -- way to ensure America's security was to shed the constraints imposed by friends, allies and international institutions.'' The second was that America ''should aggressively go abroad searching for monsters to destroy.'' Never mind whether Saddam Hussein -- or Yasir Arafat, Iran, Syria or North Korea -- had anything to do with the fall of the twin towers: they were the global evil America was ordained to destroy.

Schmemann (an editor at the IHT), the author of the essay, correctly, I think, perceives that liberals absolutely cannot stomach this zealot. He writes:

It is inevitable that a foreign policy couched in biblical symbols, eschewing subtleties and advanced by Texans, oil-men, neocons and industrialists would be insufferable to liberals, doves, internationalists and New Englanders (conversely, remember what Bill Clinton did to conservatives). One suspects that even the senior George Bush occasionally looks out from his crag at Kennebunkport on the policies of his firstborn with some misgiving. Still, it is difficult to explain the level of loathing that the junior Bush and his government have achieved among otherwise rational liberals. The assaults in these books range widely in theme and quality, and Bush's defenders are likely, with some justification, to dismiss the more strident writers as congenitally allergic to any manifestation of American power. But the urgency with which they sound the alarm requires attention. History is too clear on what unconstrained power can lead to.

In the last paragraph, Schmemann uses the words of one of the authors to deliver the final, devastating condemnation:

Though I have lived abroad for many years and regard myself as hardened to anti-Americanism, I confess I was taken aback to have my country depicted, page after page, book after book, as a dangerous empire in its last throes, as a failure of democracy, as militaristic, violent, hegemonic, evil, callous, arrogant, imperial and cruel. Daalder and Lindsay may be constrained by an American sense of respect for the White House, but they too proclaim Bush's foreign policy fundamentally wrong. It is not only Bush's ''imperious style,'' they write; ''The deeper problem was that the fundamental premise of the Bush revolution -- that America's security rested on an America unbound -- was mistaken.'' The more moving judgment comes from Soros, a Jew from Hungary who lived through both German and Soviet occupation: ''This is not the America I chose as my home.''

My impeccable technological acumen [a joke, for sure] allows me to find that I’ve had some visitors to this blog who needed to locate sites that made reference to the whereabouts of Prime Minister Berlusconi’s daughter. It is true that at least twice I’ve made reference to Berlusconi, and several times, in other posts, I’ve alluded to having daughters. But for the record: I did not even fully remember knowing that Berlusconi had a daughter, and I have no idea where she is. Questions that come to mind:

1. Is someone tracking her down for cruel reasons? Is it an internet stalker of the kind I wrote about on January 16?

2. Is an Italian elementary school English class, learning how to say mother father son daughter, perhaps writing English compositions on Berlusconi and his family? With little Marianna or Giuseppe cheating a little by pulling stuff off the internet?

3. Or, is it someone looking for very specific information, wading through a million Google sites to find what they need? Research can be a frustrating activity and I apologize for being one of those irrelevant sites. [Of course, this post alone will ensure that anyone searching for Berlusconi’s daughter in the future is going to come right back to the Other Side of the Ocean. Sorry once again.]

Relax, in the case of the Deans, the answer is yes. Just goes to show, Bush is on the ball with this one: save marriage counseling for the poor. The rich will find a way.

Why did I make light of Berlusconi (post January 16, see also NYT today) and the Italians’ obsession with their Prime Minister’s appearance? Surely they can tell us to examine our own back yard. In full remorse, I will now give my complete attention to creating a list of 5 imperatives for a Presidential candidate in the US. I am, unfortunately, almost completely serious. To gain sizable support, a candidate for highest office here must do the following:

1. He (at the outset I may as well say it – the candidate must be a he; therefore, any attempt at gender neutrality in this list would be pointless) must never ever do anything that Leno or Letterman will be able to imitate in a physically exaggerated way, leading the nation to be convulsed with laughter at night, and dead serious in disliking the candidate for it the next morning. [Just to make my own position clear: I do not understand why lack of enthusiasm or an over abundance of enthusiasm in a political speech of ANY candidate should be a defining moment in a race; I don’t get it, I’ll never get it, so please don’t try to explain it to me yet again; many have attempted to justify the plummeting support for Dean “after the scream”, all have failed. I saw the damning speech, it made no impression one way or another, call me politically stunted, I just don’t get it.]

2. He must be someone most Americans would enjoy having over for dinner. [Time after time I have this conversation: “why don’t you like him?” I ask. “I don’t know, he’s just not someone I would feel comfortable with; I wouldn’t enjoy having dinner with him” goes the answer. Is this an outgrowth of viewing this country as a land of opportunity? For the record, Americans please take note: 99.999999999999% of you will NEVER HAVE DINNER WITH THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. 99.98 % will never even see him eat on national television.]

3. He must not appear boring [take a look at the comment on why Gebhardt is out, just today in the NYT. It’s so common to hear this: “he’s boring” “he puts me to sleep” “I can’t stay awake when he talks” “I can’t get myself to listen.” Are these statements about the impact of policies promulgated by the future leader of the country or are they statements about a nation that’s sleep deprived? We've known this for years, “entertaining” trumps “political agenda.”]

4. He must have a spouse that we can all rally behind [grumblings about the inadequacies of Dr. Dean, the wife, drive me insane; see post January 15], and a personal life that rises above the collective sins of our own backyards [Clinton, naturally, will always come to mind here].

5. During debates, he must not sigh (Gore), look with piercing eyes (Clark), cry (remember Muskie?),use complicated words that will make Bush look dumb (many). [a legal blogger recently wrote that in the last elections, SNL made Bush out to be stupid but well-meaning, and Gore to be robotic. In fact, the blogger writes, neither are true, Bush having proven himself to be ruthless, vindictive, and cunning. But note how hard it has been to shed our preconceptions, shaped by so little information, and so much irrelevant ...hogwash (see bacon post, January 21).]

Move over, Italians, we’ve perfected the art of political trivialization.

I spent the afternoon listening to appeals of university nonresidency determinations. One such student missed being a resident (and therefore paying a fraction for the tuition) by just three weeks. Basically you need to live in the state for a full year prior to your studies to be regarded a resident for tuition purposes. This young man had been taking time out in New Zealand, and could not get a frequent flyer ticket back in time (so he says) to give himself the requisite year. How strictly does one follow the letter of the law? Ever? Sometimes, the law relaxes its boundaries to grant equitable relief to someone unfairly victimized by a strict interpretation of a rule. In this case, the student made such an impassioned plea that the appeals committee, me included, was almost in tears. Should that change anything? What if he had been dorky and inarticulate and not so personable?

On NPR, we hear/read the report on the Division of Youth and Family Services in NJ – an agency that made headlines when it was discovered last year that it had neglected to check on the welfare of foster children who had been severely malnourished in their foster home. It is also an agency with a stagnant budget and a 31% increase over the last decade in the number of abuse & neglect cases that it must handle. So that, instead of the optimal 15 – 20 cases per social service worker, the average now reaches somewhere around 100.

Imagine: 100 children to look after in the eight hours that you have in each day. One hundred potential crises that require your attention (for instance, a call indicating that a child is being mistreated in a foster home means that you drop everything and pull the kid out and keep her/him safe until miraculously a new home emerges – hence your 99 other cases are on hold until this crisis is resolved….. until the next crisis requiring, for instance, your appearance in court and a filing of a report on a placement that isn’t working because the foster parent wants out…).

One hundred placements that require periodic, vigilant oversight, one hundred children having you as the only person to ensure that they are not further harmed. That also means more than one hundred parents needing your help in directing them to court-ordered programs, or in providing supervision for visits, or in finding affordable housing… One hundred children for you to look after. Can't even think of it: one hundred, under your care.

After a second evening this month at another book club meeting…

[Webster’s definition of junkie: Main Entry: junk•ie
Variant(s): also junky /'j&[ng]-kE/
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural junk•ies
Date: 1923
1 slang a : a narcotics peddler or addict b : a person who derives inordinate pleasure from or who is dependent on something
2 : a junk dealer]

[definition of book club junkie – let’s pick 1.b]
[for feeding other passions, consider a browse through thejunkie]

…I’m reminded that book clubs have received similar levels of scrutiny to what bloggers now appear to be getting.

A comment from the sociologist, Elizabeth Long, on book clubs:

Far from just an excuse to get together once a month, book clubs are here revealed to be a vital arena for self-formation, one that has as much currency now as it did a century ago.

Interesting.

From the blog of a law student at HLS:

Fun with the State of the Union and a Word Frequency tool I found on the Internet:

1. The most common word used in the State of the Union was "the" -- 284 times.
2. The most common real word was "America" -- 37 times. "American" and "Americans" each 14 times as well.
3. Iraq was said 17 times.
4. Women = 8 Times. Men = 7 Times. A victory for feminism.
5. War = 12; Peace = 4.
6. Terrorists = 10; Friends = 5.
7. Love = 2; Hate = 0
8. Life = 4; Death = 2
9. Seniors = 8; Medicare = 8
10. God = 3; Science = 3
11. Abstinence = 2; Lonely = 2
12. Space = 0
13. Right = 9; Left = 4
14. Long = 4; Members = 5; Sexually = 2
15. Former = 1; Farmers = 1
16. Millons = 6; Billions = 1; Zillions = 0
17. Good = 8; Evil = 1
18. I = 34; You = 49
19. Finish = 1

Those of us living in Poland in the 50s, 60s, 70s remember broadcasts on TV where party officials convened and spoke to the public of recent successes and accomplishments. It went something like this:

Party chief (meaning First Secretary of the Polish Communist Party): ..production levels at the steel factories have never been so high [subtext: forced to raise production levels in one or two factories as a result of the frequent closures of antiquated mills and factories].

Room full of party officials and invited representatives from all sectors of society (note representatives from those efficient steel factories and other industrial units) TO MAKE THE POINT, with a few military types thrown in to lend aura of might; all stand and give a round of applause.

Party chief: Our country’s employment picture looks promising, unemployment remains low [subtext: no new jobs are being created, people are working at low wage jobs, contributing to economic inefficiencies and earning just enough to put a dinner on the table once a month]

Room full of party officials (see above) stands up and applause lasts for 9.5 seconds.

Party chief: Our friends abroad welcome the opportunity to increase trade with us [subtext: we wish German and American investors would high tail it over here, but in the mean time we have to be content with the fact that Russians seem to love our perfumes and colorless textiles]

Room full of party officials (see above) stands up and applause lasts for only 8 seconds, but an occasional hoot and cheer is heard as well. Camera pans to members of the military who look tough and in control.

And so on.

Is there a resemblance here, or what?
I have been recently told that my blog at time may make more sense to an American audience than to (the teeny tiny handful of) readers in Poland, and so I will oblige now with an explanation and a comparison.

Yesterday, of course, President Bush addressed the nation. He was dressed in red white and blue (just about) and looked very patriotic. In the audience we saw party officials and a few (color coordinated) members of the military. Bush spoke of accomplishments in a growing economy [unspoken subtext: his economy does not equal the economy of most Americans], encouraging employment statistics [unspoken subtext: at this rate of growth we may earn enough to put dinner on the table once a month], and the many friends America has abroad [unspoken subtext: we wish the French and the Germans would like us, but hey, we’ll make do with Poles and Bulgarians for now. Yes, Bulgarians stand proud: you were part of last night’s Presidential address, though in all honesty it sounded better than it was].

And in the background, '08 Candidate Hilary Clinton (you heard it here) smiled and clapped politely, and Senator Kennedy shook his head is sadness, realizing that George W is in it for FOUR MORE YEARS.

Now that's a deeply Midwestern title, isn't it?
In the alternative, I could say "Nueske's heads the heap!"

Today's Times gives nice credit to that wonderful slab of bacon, coming right from our back yard (Wittenberg, WI) and enjoyed the world over (New York = the world) in such posh places as Balthazar, Pastis, Le Bernardin, and the Harvard Club. As they say in the article, it's our cold weather that creates the best darn lard in the world (well, second best, but that's just the coastal anti-Wisconsin bias kicking in).

I'm not a great bacon eater, but I love cooking the stuff -- the aromas create a bacon high that makes for a life-time of happy morning memories. Others agree. Linda Lee writes in the NYT piece:

…if you are reading nutritional labels, perhaps bacon is not right for you. Bacon belongs to the hedonist, the throw-caution-to-the-winds sort who would eat a bacon sandwich with a side of bacon.
When people arrived for my party, they said, "I could smell the bacon all the way down to the front door." And they meant it in a good way.
Rob Hurlbut, the president of Niman Ranch, said it best: "Bacon should be listed as an aphrodisiac."

BTW, if you're in Madison, you can pick up Nueske's at Steve's Liquor (for non-Madisonians I know that sounds odd, but our liquor store has undergone several mutations and it now does sell bacon and smoked salmon and who knows what other little surprise). Or at l'Etoile, wrapped around a scallop. Or from Nueske's web site. They say that every batch is individually tasted (employees are all Atkins freaks?), so look for the teeth marks when purchasing your pack.

Sometime in December I submitted an essay I had written, for review at a major publication. It was a long-shot, but sometimes one just feels spunky and bold in this way.

Today I got the letter from the editor. He wrote:

Dear Ms. Aiming-high [not the real name: I want to protect her anonymity; suffice it to say it was not my last name],

Our mutual friend, Merry Sherry [only one of those words is authentic and I wont disclose which one] has sent me your resume.

I have taken the liberty of passing it on to Bill Schmutsky [another attempt at a name disguise by me], our associate managing editor for news administration. Someone on his staff will be in touch to set up a meeting.

Sincerely,

XXX
[Big shot at major publication]

cc: Bill Schmutsky

Now, there are several things that are of interest here:
1. take heart: even the big time publications occasionally put the wrong letter in the wrong envelope.
2. when someone from Bill Schmutsky’s office calls Ms. Aiming-high to set up an appointment, she will be surprised.
3. Bill Schmutsky, of course, assumes that Ms. Aiming-high got the big okay. He was, after all, cc’d on the letter ostensibly sent to her.
4. The big shot publication guy who was the recipient of my humble query letter with manuscript has a habit of sending little private notes deflecting job inquiries from “friends of friends,” and our preoccupation with meritocracy notwithstanding, friends of connected friends give each other a nice leg up in this doggy dog world.
5. I wonder what Ms. Aiming-high thought when she got MY letter, most likely rejecting everything with a blanket “get lost and leave us alone” message?

The first day of class. 42 semi-attentive faces – half-dozen with lap tops opened, ready for (a game of spider solitaire) note-taking. I begin my introduction to family law. I get through the preliminary stuff: topics covered, reading assignments, etc. We’re on to the trivial now. Or so I thought. I talk about my office hours and 2 students stand up, pack their bags and leave. Is there something inherently offensive about 11 – 12 on Thursdays?

My Warsaw friend, Agnieszka, sent me a link to a Polish news weekly which, in addition to having interesting news of Poland, has a detailed story on what they’re saying about Bush in Hollywood and in the music industry. Now, granted, we may well guess what these guys are saying about him. But the quotes are news to me and so I thought I’d pass them on, straight from this week’s issue of Wprost (title of the article: “the coalition of the hating”):

[the article starts off with a bit of humor:
back in the old days of communist rule, Andropov spoke with Reagan. “In our country,” says Reagan, “we have free speech.” “In our country, we, too, have free speech” retorts Andropov. To which Reagan responds “Everyone in our country can criticize the president of the USA!” Andropov is triumphant. “So what, you think it’s different here? We, too, can criticize the president of the USA!”]

Jessica Lange: “nienawidze go” [“I hate him”]
Barbara Streisand: "Obawiam się przywódców, którzy biją w wojenne bębny, aby doprowadzić obywateli do patriotycznej gorączki" [“I’m terrified of leaders who beat war drums –NC:did I lose something in the translation here??—in order to lead citizens to feverish patriotism”; NC: this is like playing telephone, by the time it comes around again, Barbara will have said that she’s scared because Bush is insisting we play drums to show patriotism]
Woody Harrelson: "Jestem Amerykaninem, którego męczą amerykańskie kłamstwa. To jest rasistowska i imperialistyczna wojna" [“I’m an American—NC:temporarily fluent in Polish, but hey..—who is tortured by American lies. This is a racist and imperialist war.” ]
Raper Moby [the rapper, unfortunately comes out as “raper” when translated into Polish] "Ameryka, w którą wierzymy, nie przeżyje kolejnych czterech lat rządów George'a Busha" [“America, in which we believe, will not survive four more years of George Bush’s rule”]
Don Henley, lider [lead singer] The Eagles: "Muzycy są zobowiązani do zaangażowania się przeciw Bushowi. Jesteśmy przecież obywatelami tego kraju". [“Musicians have a responsibility to be engaged against Bush. We are, after all, citizens of this country.”]
Bruce Springsteen: "Krzyczcie głośniej, jeżeli pragniecie zmiany prezydenta" [during his NY concert “Shout louder if you want a change in presidents”]

Just so you know, great minds on this side of the ocean have been thinking of ways to get the younger generation hoppin’. We don’t want our children and grandchildren to have high glycemic loads like ours (see post January 14). So here’s the newest thinking: if you can make iridescent blobs move wildly on the TV screen, you can make kids exercise their way into a Wesley Clark 5% body-fat frame. Here I am, struggling against all odds, going to the gym every day, and instead, I could have flicked on the set and booobah’d my way into a state where my cells would have been begging for more glycemic work. That’s the positive spin on the new PBS series. The less optimistic: it’s a bunch of iridescent blobs wiggling and looking like the work-out isn’t doing them a bit of good, for pete’s sake. And do you understand the noise accompaniment? Nasty. Enough to make you want to reach for the Skittles.

(just no lawyer jokes, please)

I finished grading the last law exam today (one day ahead of the deadline  ).
Most of the first year students in my Torts class did respectable work. Some were quite outstanding. In my Family Law class, on the other hand, I had a handful of the worst exams that I’d ever seen (in my uninterrupted 10 years, i.e. 20 semesters, of teaching this class). The question was extremely straightforward: a long fact pattern detailing the life of a woman who had one too many marriages (even by Bush's standards), a few too many affairs, and a bunch of marital and nonmarital children. The point was to secure a financially stable future for her and for her children, and to keep the children together.
Here are some literal quotes from exam-takers (fyi, Barbie is the client, Bill is her latest husband of 3 years; a few of the comments are from the same student; square brackets are my own notes):

- “Bill may claim rights to 14 year old (from a previous marriage) as well, even though not the biological father, depending on his relationship with the 14 year old” [a regular Michael Jackson kind of guy!]
- “Courts seem to prefer some sort of joint custody so she’ll have to put up with it”
- “Courts look at domicile and where they have been living because they are concerned with state interest”
- “In Wisconsin, one needs to show declaration of intent before someone to get married.”
- “She could argue that it is not in the best interest of the child for Mona to visit and the trial court could grant her this presumption, however court may override it if they determine their own best interest.”
- “By looking at the specifics of his infidelities and comparing them to effects that they had on Barbie it may be possible to show that, for example Bill had so many affairs that he was reckless and outrageous in regards to Barbie because he put her at a risk of catching an STD and as a result of said behavior Barbie suffered emotional distress” [wait, is this an errant exam from the Torts class?]
- “States want to respect the Full Faith and Credit clause because it promotes comity between the states and discourages forum shopping so that people try to get what they want.”
- [maybe you have to be a lawyer to appreciate the absurdity of this one:] “Under the Uniform Family Support Act, a state has no jurisdiction to modify child support orders issued by another state that has lost its continuing exclusive jurisdiction.” [so once a state loses jurisdiction, man, it’s gone!]
- “And Barbie is still young, 36. She’s got the world ahead of her. And I am still young so I’m sure I’ll have plenty of legal bills for Barbie in her future.”

Hey, this law stuff isn't that tough! Can't wait to hang that shingle!

What do the following people have in common?

Janis Joplin
Paul Cezanne
Edgar Allan Poe
Dolly Parton
Michael Crawford
my daughter

yes, of course, great artists all, but also….

….happy birthday!

This week’s Polityka, Poland’s favored news weekly, presented some fascinating data on how the market economy has transformed the purchasing power of the average Pole’s salary.
The paper shows what could be purchased (with an average pay check) in 1990, i.e. at the beginning of the “great transformation,” compared with 1995, and 2003.

It appears that the average pay check can now cover many more kilo of sugar, meat, chocolate (the staples?!) but fewer hours of heat, fewer tickets to the movies, and fewer doctors’ visits than in 1990.

If you’re itching to travel, Poland’s prices remain comparatively lower than those in the States or Germany. Take a look at this table. Everything from apples to a Big Mac are just a fraction of what the cost would be in the US. Of course, the average salary (in Euro, gross, first line in the table) is also a fraction of that in the US, but just about four times that of a Russian.

My advice? Fill up on the Big Macs in Poland, but get sick when you return back home. Unless you’re one of the 40% under/uninsured in the States, in which case you should take a detour to France or England until you recover.

My mother left a message on the phone last night (she lives in Berkeley CA). She wanted to know how come we had moved away without leaving a forwarding number. A veiled reference to the absence of calls on my part, I have no doubt. I am making up for my inattentiveness by including a reference here to our subsequent conversation.

We talked books – a very safe topic, because she reads a lot, certainly more than I do, and she remembers names of journalists, speakers, authors, which, again, is a considerable improvement over me. She feels good that in spite of the fact that our ratio of academic degrees is me 3 to her 0, she does better in the reading department. Our conversation goes something like this:

She: “I went to hear Ben Chehatsky speak yesterday”
Me: silence
She: “You don’t know who Ben Chehatsky is, do you?”
Me: “No clue, Mom”
She: “You say you have a law degree and you don’t know?”
Me: “Really, no clue.”
She: “He was excellent. The room was packed. They couldn’t pack a room full of people in Madison to see him, could they?”
Me: “Maybe people here don’t know who Ben Chehatsky is.” [this is just handing her the bone, but what can I do..]
She: “Hard to believe, isn’t it? And I’m guessing it’s cold now, right?”
Me: [I certainly can’t argue that one] “It’s cold.” And then, to find common ground: “Have you read the new Tyler book yet, Mom?”
[the rest of the conversation is about her reflections on Tyler, and I need only listen since of course I have NOT read every single Tyler book out there, and she has.]

I should admit, however, that I am currently reading Tyler’s “Amateur Marriage” – which hits at all the Polishness hidden within me as it is loaded with character names like “Mrs. Pozniak” and “Mrs. Kowalski” and "Mr. Kostka". I’m catching up on you, Ma!

This week, the Isthmus ran a story on the Democratic presidential candidates. By now, the only surprises are to be found in the answers to the question “What little known fact can you tell us about this candidate?”

Here are some revealing tidbits:

John Kerry: he windsurfs.
Dick Gephardt: he loves baseball and at one time had hopes of becoming a professional baseball player. [how all-American!]
Howard Dean: he requested African American roommates while in college at Yale. [would that be so that he could say “some of my best friends are..” ?]
John Edwards: he was the first person in his family to go to college.
Dennis Kucinich: he’s a vegan. [he might as well just close the campaign door for good with that one]
Al Sharpton: he married a James Brown back-up singer.
Wesley Clark: At 59, he has only 5% body fat. [that’s a mean one to hurl at a nation that has most people at 95% body fat]
Joe Lieberman: as a college student, he took a month off to help blacks register to vote in Mississippi. [I think that came up as the little known fact last time he ran..]

I was buying a bone for my dog. He gets one plastic bone, and when he finishes with that one, I buy him the next. He doesn’t really like other toys. This is a blessing—you can’t overindulge a dog like that.

The store also serves as a short-term boarding place for pets. A couple brought in their huge monster dog (looked something like this); he was scheduled to board for ONE DAY next week, and they wanted to introduce him to the environment so that he wouldn’t be traumatized when he came to spend his day there. The owner had already been in to check the place out, but now they wanted their dog to see it.

I don’t think I showed that level of concern for my girls when they were going off to school for the first time. They never got a chance to visit before hand. It was more like: “Here’s the school. Have fun. See you later.” And my dog? “Here’s the kennel, Ollie. Have fun. See you next month.” It’s not as if I’m going to ask his opinion or anything.

I asked people to call in and tell me which dog breed made for the best all-around pet. The long-awaited winner? The American Water Spaniel. I’m waiting for CNN to call. I have a few sound-bites for them to write down: if an AWS were in the White House now, we wouldn't be having all these problems! Or: a deep cocoa in color, deliciously sweet in nature, the perfect dog for a chocoholic!

Enough. The point is the study was unscientific, the sample was biased, the results tainted. But it doesn’t matter—I covered my bases by calling it an informal survey, right?

So did Ms. Stewart when she once again took in letters about which American city is the most “well-mannered,” and then announced her “informal” results. Now, I can well believe that Charleston is indeed at the top of the heap no matter whose survey you’d employ (though if I were them, I'd rethink that slogan: "Charleston--where history lives!" since it wasn't always such a polite and well-mannered history). I’ll even acknowledge that I know nothing of second-place Peoria – it may be charming in the extreme. True, a subject of ridicule in literature and song, but possibly very well-mannered. But New York and Chicago – in the top ten of polite? No way. Ms. Stewart has just given “informal surveys” a bad name.

Most people, when they hear this title, think of Bill Murray in Japan. They tell me how the movie is much better than they had expected.

Sure, it’s the title of a movie. But the phrase has been used before. To me, it recalls Eva Hoffman’s book (title: Lost in Translation) about growing up in post-war Poland and eventually moving to the States. I can’t say that I loved it when I read it. It isn’t an easy narrative: her prose is ponderous, difficult at times. But I have to say that it was one of the more meaningful books for me, for predictable reasons: the parallels are in-your-face obvious. Except, Hoffman is Jewish, and her family’s war experiences were, therefore, somewhat different than those of my parents/grandparents.

Hoffman has published another book, just this month. A fragment of it can be read online (NYT Book Review). The book, “After Such Knowledge: Where Memory of the Holocaust Ends and History Begins,” will have to bump all other reading material for a while. There are some books that one has to get going on, ASAP.

Of course. The NYT article (see post, January 13) inadvertently (I have to believe it was inadvertent) denouncing Bulgarian plums and vacation spots has only fueled feelings of low self esteem among Bulgarians. Take a look at this site on Bulgarian cuisine: It starts off with a little quiz:

What do you associate Bulgaria with?
- The fourth place at the World Cup Soccer Finals
- Hristo Stoichkov
- Economical crisis
- Folk music
- Wine
- Nothing

Nothing?? A crisis in the economy?? That’s pretty depressing. And I noticed that plums and vacation spots were also conspicuously absent from the list, as if the authors knew better than to tantalize savvy American/English travelers with such loser options, acceptable only to the East Germans (okay, and the Poles), during the grim 50s.

Let's rally behind Bulgaria. Did you know that they make the best damn Lactobacterium Bulgaricum in the world? Still, it would sound better if they just called it what it is -- yogurt.

Today’s paper tells us that Prime Minister Berlusconi may be taking time off to tuck in the eye lids, firm up the waist line, and take out any of the pastiness in his skin tone. Of course, the Italians tell us that appearance is a strategic issue: Mr. Berlusconi needs to look good to succeed in the forthcoming European Parliamentary elections. The Italians would think that. And if you’re genetically predisposed to looking great, as they all seem to be, it doesn’t hurt to protect that, which nature bestowed upon you.

My father has always said that he wishes he were born to an Italian mother and a Norwegian father – he’d have the height of the Nordic men (it is no secret that he covets the missing height genes), and beauty of the Italian people. But hey, the comment in the paper suggests that Mr. Berlusconi takes great pains working on his skin tone, and as a result, his skin always looks orange.

I’m one ahead of him there: you don’t have to be Italian to know that eating carrots will add orange tones to your complexion. Being a carrot cruncher myself, I can see the changes over the years. I, too, appear orange these days. Really.

Everything takes time, including learning about blogs. I don’t know why, for instance, my archives currently sit empty. Communicating with tech support is like talking to Simon the computer activated voice at United Airlines. You need patience.

Yesterday at my monthly book group meeting the question came up if I can tell who logged in. The answer is yes and no: not individually, just numbers of server hits. So on my blog, your anonymity is protected, though do note that other bloggers may have purchased upgraded features that permit them to spy on their audience. I feel like writing letters of apology to those, whose sites I hit hundreds of times earlier this month as I was learning about blog options. No, I am not a stalker!

In this week’s New Yorker, there is an article about a woman who stalked her former lover on the net after they broke up – finding every bit of information on him and his new relationship. What she doesn’t say in the article is that he may know that she knows… But then, she may know that he knows that she knows. But of course, he may know that she knows that he knows that she knows. The psychological intrigue is tantalizing.

Since the current administration is probably going to ignore my recommended topics for marriage training (see January 14 post), I thought maybe I’d poke around and see what others think of as appropriate subjects in our quest to educate the poor, unhappy sods who cannot maintain successful marital relationships. I only had to go to today’s Op-Ed page of the NYT to find one opinion of what needs to be fixed.

In case you fail to link, let me cite the pertinent quote. In her snappy little editorial, Dowd states: “Before Mr. Bush ventures into the inner cities to practice his conjugal noblesse oblige, perhaps he should beeline to a more rural spot — a split-level ranch house with green shag carpeting and Grateful Dead albums in Burlington, Vt. The doctors Dean seem to be in need of some tips on togetherness and building a healthy political marriage, if that's not an oxymoron.” And what does Dowd think is so troubling about the Deans’ marital home? The fact that the missus hasn’t let go of her practice to follow the mister on his political trail.

I get the speculative idea thrown around considerably in recent weeks that this wifely absence may cost Dean female voter support. (Though Dowd seems to think that Ms Dean’s presence may not be an asset. She describes her thus: “In worn jeans and old sneakers, the shy and retiring Dr. Judith Steinberg Dean looked like a crunchy Vermont hippie, blithely uncoiffed, unadorned, unstyled and unconcerned about not being at her husband's side — the anti-Laura.”). But from this must we leap to the conclusion that the MARRIAGE IS IN TROUBLE?

Well then, to get in with the cool people, let me suggest a module that therefore should be included in the marital trainings:

5. (previous 4 – see yesterday’s blog) How to keep the missus glued to the hip of a husband who chooses a profession requiring her pasty smile and warm presence even though she has a career which she finds valuable and important and despises making public appearances and flashing pasty smiles and indeed is bad at both but appears to be excellent at being a doctor and raising a son and is willing to pull up her roots and move to a big city as opposed to continuing with her rural practice just on the off chance, the very very off chance that her hub will be elected.

Did I say this already? I’m just so PSYCHED about this idea of marriage training!

Did anyone else chuckle at Bush’s long pre-election arm, sweeping from appeasing those in need of cheap labor (through his proposal to partly legalize illegal aliens), to those in need of the “Mom ‘n Pop” model of family life? So the way I read it, soon we will have marital education programs for poor people, so that they wont let their strife get in the way of a happy marriage. I suggest the following topics for training modules:
1. How to manage the aggressive impulse that hits when you learn that your neighbor’s kid has invited his gang over to hatch plans to beat up your kid and terrorize the neighborhood
2. How to structure sharing sessions that openly, calmly explore the available strategies for dealing with the onset of the flu season given that neither parent has health benefits nor is permitted time off from work for illness – theirs or their kids’.
3. How to resist the temptation to spend money on superfluous items like organic multi-grain high-calcium low-fat raspberry bars, and concentrate laying away cash for long-term investments like Raid and light-bulbs.
4. How to make do with what’s in your kitchen and not fight about it (one class could, for instance, focus on using plastic wrap to seal everything from drafty windows and kids’ hands on cold days, to leaking toilets and porous walls that let in noise from fighting neighbors who haven’t yet signed up for the program.)

Anyway, it’s good to keep poor people busy, so I guess the programs are an inspired suggestion. As a sign-on bonus the government should give each family a palm pilot, so that there’s no confusion about scheduling in "marriage training" given that there are also "job-training," "alternatives to aggression" (for the fights that occurred prior to the start up of this program), "parenting classes" (for those who chanced to implicate their children into their quarrels and got caught doing so by social services), oh, and let’s not forget to tap in "church-going" – to keep the moral fiber strong. And they think the President’s day is long! (They don’t think that? Oh. I forgot that this President’s day isn’t too long).

According to the latest Newsweek article on Diet, we have been paying too much attention to the wrong components of our diet. Instead of looking at fat, or simply the carb content of food, we should be monitoring each item’s “glycemic load.” Forgive me, but until yesterday, I never even heard of glycemic loads. I quickly looked at the box of my favorite organic, low-fat, high-in-calcium-and-celenium raspberry tarts that I routinely eat for “lunch” and failed to see any glycemic figures, though I have, up to now, appreciated that each bar has 0 cholesterol, 1 gram of fiber, 25% dv (daily value) calcium, and 2 g of protein. But now I suspect it is loaded with glycemic loads, therefore overworking my insulin-making cells leaving me ultimately more susceptible to diabetes and eventually heart failure.

Well now, I want to give my insulin-making cells a piece of my mind: what happened to the boost you got from all those grains, fruits, vegetables, cooked tomatoes, olive oils, handfuls of nuts, salmon, legumes and yogurts that I’ve ingested to help keep you strong and able? That’s not enough? You’re still trampled down by the glycemic loads? You’re wimps! I refuse to spend another cent to bolster a new, possibly futile war on excess glucose. Enough is enough.

I don’t understand it! In today’s paper there is a suggestion that Bulgaria perhaps doesn’t quite measure up—in the foods it puts on grocery shelves, and in the vacation opportunities it provides. The article is about the former East Germany, but if you read it carefully, you’ll come across these two phrases:

1. (in reference to a museum of ubiquitous items found in the former East Germany) “About 10,000 people a year come to look at Mikki transistor radios, jars of Bulgarian plums, schoolbooks, plastic water glasses that never seemed to come in the right colors” – the implication being that Bulgarian plums are merely quaint relics of former life under Communist rule. As in, no one in their right mind would otherwise contemplate selling/buying/eating/enjoying Bulgarian plums. Ho hum. I’m sure they were fantastic (albeit sweet, but then try an English chocolate cake if you want a sugar overdose).

2. (there appears to be these days a) “post-mortem feeling that maybe the East had its good aspects after all, especially a certain economic security and stability, even if your best vacation option was Bulgaria.” This must have been put in by a spokesperson for the Greek Island Tourism Board. I’m sure Americans will now think twice about booking a week at a Bulgarian Black Sea resort. Yes, I’m defensive, and it has nothing to do with the fact that I myself spent my first holiday abroad in 1959 in...Bulgaria. I remember it as being a perfectly warm and… warm place. Really, if I were Bulgaria, I’d sue.

I neglected to do a persuasive pitch (yet again? --some might ask) for sustainable agriculture by linking to two, yes TWO stories in the NYT Sunday Magazine that open the door for a discussion of why organic/free range/regional food isn't gracing our collective tables yet. I’ve been accused of not liking simple American food (as opposed to high-end American cuisine which I do think is good). I would be a total disciple were it served as it is in the Farmers' Diner described in the second article.

One way to get quality food to appear more often, it seems, would be to ask grocers, restauranteurs, etc. where their food came from. I did that a couple of weeks ago at a local burger joint. They serve good burgers for those who like burgers, and though I’m not a crusader on this point, I do think that we should be especially inquisitive about the processing of meat in this country. I haven't trusted or eaten a burger of unknonw origins in years and thought that my dinner companions deserved to know about the beef they were about to order. I'm not sure they shared my enthusiasm for sourcing their food, but they let me fire away at the smiling (at this point) server.

So I asked, and the friendly waitress laughed and then I laughed, and to make her less uncomfortable (she clearly had no idea) I said that I’m sure it was meat from cows that grazed pastures, and this threw her even more and she laughed harder and scurried off, thinking that Mad Cow is nothing compared to this mad woman asking bizarre Qs on a Saturday night out.

Still, it would be good if many people routinely asked.

Tonight’s the night when a very important award will be posted. You can preview the contestants at the MoveOn.org site. It really is gratifying to know how many talented people are using their creativity in this way (note today’s news story on their effectiveness). Which finalist is the most powerful? Maybe “Imagine,” but they’re all pretty extraordinary.

A bright, warm day in Madison and the Midwest. A bright, cold day in Connecticut. A child (figuratively speaking) leaves the shelter of her little nest in Madison to travel to the mean and menacing Connecticut. Flights are cancelled. Others are delayed. Why? Who knows. It’s a conspiracy. No explanations. Eventually, many many hours later she arrives in Connecticut. But her suitcases do not. Reminiscent of last week, when her sister’s suitcases were distributed all over interesting ports of call, none of them, however, coinciding with the destination of said sister.

What’s a traveler to do? Nothing. You can do nothing but wait and kiss up to the endless people you will be talking to in order to find out where your belongings are at the moment. I teach about lawsuits and harms and damage awards for emotional distress, but I know that this is not the answer. The answer is this: we should quit flying with suitcases. We should don layers of clothing that we want to travel with and not pack anything. We should leave baggage handlers to twiddle their thumbs in boredom. We should get the bag inspectors to beg us for their business (I may allow one exception—I may give a bag to Joe, the guy who inspected Ca’s bags today at the airport. He was so nice. His kid goes to college too – studying to be a psychologist. I want to support him. The rest –I haven’t met and so I refuse to worry about).

Anyone who does not agree has not had the pleasure of speaking to Simon, the voice-activated robot that answers for United Airlines lost baggage claims. You should call Simon. He’s toll free. You’ll want to squash his little robotic brains out.

The NYT Magazine has an interesting, if a bit predictable story on teen blogging. It reminds me the fact that all tools or substances, when abused, misused, or simply overused, can create, especially among people (though certainly not only), obsessive compulsions. Consider the following: TV watching, alcohol consumption, driving cars, listening to music,…. playing the violin.

Excesses are a fantastic (if dangerous) flights of passion, aren’t they? The article makes me feel old. I often turn off the computer to pay the bills, cook dinner, grade exams. I would do it whether I were playing the violin or hiking the Himalayas. Thirty years ago, I would have explored all possibilities, tested limits. Today I cook dinner.

What I know is this: the League of Nations was formally established on this day 84 years ago. Also, this week Bush announced a new goal for the US space programs: a manned mission to Mars. And, Bush also came forth with a proposal that would legalize the status of illegal immigrants in the US.

The immigration thing has application to the many millions who are filling such exciting jobs as picking thornberries, scrubbing floors, and washing dishes. We all know why Bush is willing to pursue it. There’s the southern vote. And, his buddies who hire countless illegal aliens want to be able to run for office without being exposed for having a nanny who speaks no English. And, no American worker wants to pick thornberries. Nor, for that matter, to wash dishes, especially under the hostile stare of waiters who resent having to share tips with guys blasting hot water on pans freshly burnt by slivers of foie gras (this I know for sure from my moments at L’Etoile). And of course, there’s that other reason called administrative efficiency: currently, there is no easy way to deport millions of illegal aliens. INS tried to do it by developing a bureaucracy that would be so tangled that everyone would lose track of what was happening, but in the end it lost track of things as well and so now dazed agents stare mindlessly at meaningless documents while the nation waits. It is very embarrassing.

There are many positive things to be said for legalizing illegal aliens: amnesty in general makes one think of forgiveness and a willingness to admit to our mutual mistakes before we all tally forth and move on. Of course, there are troubling aspects as well, and I should link to those commentators who question everything from implementation, to the feasibility, the fairness, and the intangible nature of benefits, but I am too lazy, and it is Saturday, and Ca has begun the packing rituals (leaving tomorrow). So for now, let’s concentrate on the positives.

The thing is, I can understand that there would indeed be a back and forth on the complicated topic of immigration. What I cannot see is where we would have room for even a remote back and forth on Mars. Where is the "forth"?

Maybe it’s like when you take a course in college and in the middle of the semester you are so behind that you just cannot keep up, and you don’t get what the professor is saying, and you hate your classmates because they all seem to get it, and you just want to drop it and move on, and you do, and it is all such a relief then. Could it be that Bush, having been recently characterized as incapable of showing any intelligent signs of life during Cabinet meetings (possibly being tired from his morning run), having an economy on his hands that refuses to produce new jobs (yesterday’s story), not wishing to look forward to a debate with Dean or Clark or Lieberman nor any of the others whose names, BTW he probably cannot pronounce, could it be that he just wants to chuck it all and take on Mars? He’s never worried about the cost of personal travel before, why should he now?

I think it’ll add new excitement to the currently tired observation: “we can send a man to the moon, but we cannot cure the common cold!” Let’s give it a try: “we can send a man to Mars (ed. note: the press refers to the manned mission, so I assume we’re sending a guy), but we cannot ensure health care for all…”

About the League of Nations – I just wanted to put in a good word for an attempt at unity. And, I feel obliged to say something that everyone hasn’t already read elsewhere. I bet no one knew about the League of Nations anniversary.

Last night we had a person for dinner who possibly likes artisanal wines even more than I do. And so I opened my one great bottle, a 1990 Chablis Grand Cru, made from 70 year old vines. Old vines are like old people – they have the wisdom and capacity to produce something infinitely more complex than their young counterparts, but they do it at a dwindling pace, so that the yield becomes less each year. At some point you have to scrap the whole batch because you can’t afford to keep it going, even though the grapes can be phenomenal. I bought this wine from a winemaker (Sebastian Dauvissat) who was young enough to be in high school when it was bottled. His enthusiasm was magnificent. I almost wanted to devote myself to a life of viticulture from that moment onwards. I think I’d be good at pruning vines during the short winter days.

Opening the bottle was much less satisfying than knowing it was waiting, retaining perfection, wisdom, maturity. But it had to be done: at some point you have to let go of your stored savings, be they material (wine?) or otherwise, and live.

WHERE ARE THE TRUCKS??

If you google Poland and blogging or blogspot you’ll see that for the most part, Poland:
1. ..was hot in the blog world last year because of it’s oppositional stance toward the EU’s proposed changes in voting rights (predictable)
2. remains on people’s radar screen as the country invaded by Germany and then the Soviet Union (predictable)
3. ..is the last name of a number of people referred to in blogs (surprising)
4. appears on long lists of countries that seemingly have nothing in common (“coalition of the willing?”)
5. has many blogging American visitors who use words such as “dunno” and “gotta” (surprising)

I myself am waiting for the city of Madison to show up and trim the trees in front of our house. This seems like an idle exercise, I know, but I feel strongly about how they should be cut and I know I wont have another chance to express my opinion on this matter for some 5 – 6 years. Yesterday, the city forestry guys were working their way up the block, and I thought my wait was about to end, but the silent bell that tolled the end of the work day (2:45 pm) made them pack up their tools and leave JUST ONE TREE AWAY FROM OUR HOUSE!! Perverse luck. And today, at 10 a.m., they’re not here yet.

Surely this may be read as a very uninteresting story, and indeed, the wait is very uninteresting, forcing me to google Poland and blogspots and do all sorts of other existentially stupefying things (because I keep thinking it is only a question of minutes). On the other hand, one needs an occasional reminder about life’s randomness, and tree trimmers stopping just before your property as well as finding people with names such as David Poland (a film critic, with a very interesting take on the top 10 movies of 2003, very astute AND funny observations on the worst films, and a good column posted yesterday about the Oscars) are all surprising and random events, and so I mention both as quirky stand-ins for those trivial, unpredictable occurrences that shape the day more than we’d like to believe.

ICY THINGS

If you follow any Euro-blogs (and there are a number of them), you’ll know that much has been written lately about the fingerprinting of foreign visitors – at least those, who cannot travel to the States without a visa. I wonder if most here realize what an odd assortment of “potential trouble-makers” we are screening: from Poland, the Czech Republic – yes, fingerprinting has begun. And Germany, the UK, or France? No, not at all.

Interesting, isn’t it that the US visa requirement is like a layer of PERMAFROST: seemingly forever in place for countries once known as within “Eastern Europe,” though presumably for economic now rather than political reasons. But with COLD WAR overtones nonetheless.

Here are some conclusions I’ve drawn from a blog written by someone whom I gather is also a radio announcer in the Czech Republic:

1. If you refused entry to the Czech Republic for all Americans who could not spell Czechoslovakia, few Americans would ever get to see Prague.
2. Slovakia is much more religious than the Czech Republic (this is relevant as yesterday—Three Kings Day--was a national holiday in Slovakia, but not for the Czechs)
3. It was a FREEZING -14 C in Brno yesterday.

Just to let you know, the wind-chill gave us -30 F readings yesterday in Madison. Not to brag or anything, but it was really COLD.

WEDDING KIND OF BELLS

Fact, or fiction?
1. Britney Spears got an annulment because she is a crazed attention-getter
2. Captains can marry people, just not ones that have existing spouses
3. If you are married for a day and then annulled, your property, acquired on that one day, is divisible property
4. Britney and former husband are good friends.

Answer code:
1. An annulment is a valid legal instrument available in most jurisdictions for those who mistakenly enter in a union that proved to be erroneous, for any number of reasons. The problem here is not with Britney getting an annulment, but with the state of Nevada offering up walk-in weddings at 5:30 a.m. on Saturday mornings.
2. Lets put this to rest once and for all: captains haven’t the legal mandate to solemnize weddings, unless you are in a jurisdiction like Massachusetts which, to my knowledge, permits your buddy next door to preside over your union.
3. Oh come now. Were it that easy! Any state that transforms marital property into divisible property also permits judicial review of the circumstances. Plus it was an ANNULMENT, not a divorce.
4. They seem to be, but what do I know…

THIS HAPPENS ALL THE TIME!

Today our very excellent floor installer (I say very excellent because the floor looks great but for…) came to inspect his work from the summer, after I complained that the boards are separating. The separations are such that I can almost hide letters and manuscripts in the emergent cracks. I’m no contracts expert. I stick with torts. In fact, I proudly announce to my torts class that tort law triumphs over the law of contract again and again (i.e. no matter what you signed away on paper, you cannot exculpate yourself from liability just by your say-so). But I do know one thing: when we purchased the new floor, we bought ourselves a promise of beautiful wooden floor boards, neatly aligned, one next to the other. The gaps were not part of the deal.

Still, when I called the installer, he told me that separations are natural. They happen because we keep our houses warm in the winter and the absence of humidity creates the great desire for boards to huddle into themselves. Mine were just huddling, and would unhuddle come summertime. But he offered to come out and take a look in case it was more than just a predictable huddle.

I turned up the humidifier, sent the dog to another part of the house (diminishing the possibility that the installer would point an accusing finger at something other than his work) and waited. The installer came early, shook my hand in a convincing, assured way, and inspected his work. A big smile came to his face. He looked up and said “this happens all the time! We get calls daily in the winter from surprised customers! We tell them the boards are just shrinking (I prefer the term huddling) for the winter. It’s just so warm and dry now! No, this is nothing to worry about. We stand behind our work. Your boards are okay.”

It seems to me that these are attractive words that he used, and I would like to use them too. For instance, say the Dean calls me and asks why, by the beginning of Spring Semester my grades have not been turned in yet (in case I really get stalled with the grading). I answer “Don’t worry, Dean, this happens all the time! Law profs here are notorious about handing in late grades! Remember when one waited until Spring break to turn hers in? Hey, I’m sure you get calls all the time. It’s the same thing! I’m just late, that’s all. You’ll get them eventually”

Or, maybe I could call up the slogan when I fail to report income for tax purposes (say blogging suddenly turns profitable), or when I show up late for class, or when I take up too much space with my over-head luggage, or when I fail in whatever I routinely fail in, for all the reasons why we all fail repeatedly, all the time.

Anyway, I shook his hand and we parted, amidst my mumbling something about putting in yet another wooden floor in the living room in the future because we just love his work (and we do, but for the emergent cracks). It reminded me of a day when I was 16, in Poland, standing in a very long line at the post office with my boyfriend (that is perhaps an overly optimistic characterization of his status vis a vis me), and the teller decided to take a tea break just as it was my turn. I, being not one to argue, meekly went to the end of another line. My “boyfriend” looked at me and said “oferma zyciowa!” (you Warsaw types will appreciate this; in English it roughly translates to something like “life’s loser”). I took it to heart then, but today I guess I was in a more forgiving mood.

THE LONG GOOD-BYES AND BELLS

Madison made it into the national news twice today: for the pile-up of 60 cars on the interstate due to snow, and for the foot-ball game victory which was, apparently, against all odds. For me, the week-end was centered around SC’s departure: watching the rituals of packing on Saturday, the cancelled flights on Sunday, delays and reroutings on Monday. I can’t believe I have to go through this again in a few days. Ca, whose winter break is longer, is still home. That’s the good news. The bad side is the anticipation of standing around the airport AGAIN next week-end, trying to fain interest in the permanent 50% sale of giraffe bags at the gift shop-- anything to distract from an imminent departure. The giraffe bags, BTW, have to go. Anyone who has been at the Madison airport in the last three (possibly more) years will know what I’m talking about.

This week-end I read a sentence about the agricultural standards set by the European Community (yes, in one of the 4 books). Having just written something about Poland’s accession to the EU, I had a moment of panic. Does everyone now typically speak of the EC rather than the EU? Has the common vernacular switched, so that I am using passé terms belonging to another era? Resolution no 2: request several more news services with international updates to appear in my morning dose of emails.

So what was the best international story of the day? The Bells one of course. For those not yet clued in to the linking capabilities of the blue words, let me just say that it is about monks in Russia (the old Russia), ancient bells and Harvard. It struck me that the piece challenged a way of regarding principles of ownership. Now, I am fairly immersed in the laws governing property ownership, especially in my work on divorce and family dissolution. I am used to a world where ownership is set by legal standards which in turn are governed by principles of fairness, efficiency, and perhaps some antiquated value-ridden notions of rightful transfers. I get that. But the Bells issues set me spinning. What seems obviously fair (for Harvard to disgorge the blasted bells) has no legal basis whatsoever! It could only be grounded in the idea that in art (and elsewhere?) there is a “true” owner, which supercedes the “rightful legal” owner. If that idea shifts the bells into the hands of the monks, then should every item of art (or non-art) be placed in the hands of the “true” owner?

Yes, sure, you legal types are reminding me that there is nothing new in exploring what an object was intended for in setting rules of ownership. If, for example, a person receives an item as a “gift,” then it is kept out of the cartload of divisible goodies at the time of divorce: it was INTENDED for the individual, and there it shall stay. But the world of bells meant for religious observance somewhere in the mountains sheltering Russian monks – that’s something else altogether. Here (or rather there, in Russia), you are examining what an object was originally created for, and this premise then blasts away the legal rules that frustrated that original intent. Imagine how differently we would treat each object around us if we were to fashion theories of “true intent” for everything in sight.

Nonetheless, I say give it back to the monks. Harvard claims it has a wider audience for the bells. Come on, Harvard, asserting rights of ownership based on a populist appeal: “we want to share them with the masses!” they say. It just rings false to me.

MOVIES and BOOKS and POLISHNESS

We watched a DVD last night: a favorite around here—Shakespeare in Love. It’s cleverness charms, and it is a satisfying kind of charm, you don’t have to say things like “It’s dumb, but I liked it anyway” since it isn’t dumb, it’s quite clever.

But the reason we watched a DVD is that we have been having trouble finding a movie to go to. Having waded through the sugar of Something’s Gotta Give, Love Actually, Under the Tuscan Sun, and suffered through the darkness of the remaining shows (does anyone NOT agree that it’s been a somber movie season?), there wasn’t anything that grabbed.

I suppose NOT seeing a movie is an option, but SC was supposedly on her last night home (I say supposedly because the weather did make it impossible for her to make the connection today after all; all her flights got cancelled and so now we have her for one more day: more movie v. DVD dilemmas for tonight!), and it seemed the frivolous thing to do. And, there is, in January and February, a sense of urgency: let’s see as much as possible because of the imminent Academy Awards (showing off linking abilities again) – note early date this year! We’ve been tracking the Awards faithfully for 28 years (those here that are old enough to say that), and everyone except for me is extremely good at Academy trivia. To me, the Awards are sort of a periscope into the future: this is what dementia will feel like when I’m 95 (note the inherent optimism in that clause): I’ll look around and not remember the names of people in the room. Currently, I only don’t remember the names of people associated with the movie industry.

Anyway, “reading a book” is not a great option. I am in the middle of four. But I have issues with some aspects of all of them. There seems to be a randomness there, but in fact, each book does have its reasons for sitting with a Borders book mark stuck in the middle:
1. How To Be Good by Nick Hornby is one of my book club’s selections. It is darkly humorous. The dialogue (thus far) gives you a good taste at what it feels like to live in a querulous relationship. It must be an eye-opener to the few (do they even exist?) who manage not to be repeatedly nasty to their partners, friends, or family. Kind of depressing, on the other hand, if, by page 3, you think to yourself, for the tenth time no less, “sounds like something I would say…” [A NEW YEARS RESOLUTION to myself: use less of Hornby’s dialogue in daily life.]
2. From Here, You Can’t See Paris by Michael Sanders. This is one of those endless titles that I pick up just so I can brag that I have read EVERYTHING on the shelves about rural life and artisanal food production in France or Italy.
3. The Lady and the Monk by Pico Iyer—I’ve been on this forever! And also his newer book, The Global Soul, which I only just started. I actually do like The Lady etc, but every once in a while it has to go into a state of repose, because Iyer is so slow in his reflective meditations about Kyoto and Zen Buddhism, that my interest stagnates.
4. Listy Albo Opor Materii by Stanislaw Lem—ahhhh, the other side of the ocean wakes up. I picked this up in Krakow last month. It seemed like a great way to keep me focused on things Polish. The trouble is that when I am here, Polish things there are like faces in the Academy Awards – very very vaguely familiar, but I can’t seem to remember why I had this pressing need, while there, to keep them vibrantly alive. Anyway, Lem, for those on this side of the Atlantic, writes commentaries on politics, society, etc. This book is a collection of his letters—written in a sardonic tone to bureaucrats, to acquaintances, other writers. I don’t really admire sarcasm in writing, but I do admire Lem’s wit. It’s very Polish (whatever that means: note my latest story on this topic, forthcoming, as they all are, someday somewhere).

If blogging should entertain or inspire, then my post should have at least some elements of one or the other. However, absolutely nothing funny passed through my head the entire day. The inspirational theme is more subtle. You could think-- if she, who has no ideas, can do this, so can I! If I may allow a prediction: I foresee that blogging will eventually replace email as a form of personal communication. There is something more adventurous about sending out a blog. The risk, however small, warrants a greater care in what you write, which is a good thing.

One goal I have for right now (in addition to reading 8 exams, which is not going to happen) is to try out linking. The site that I've been in and out of all day has to do with snow --it's a visually pleasing rendition of regional weather patterns. According to the site (okay, CNN, NYT, etc as well), we are to have our first snow storm tomorrow. SC is wondering if that means a cancelled flight back to Connecticut.

Still, weather is neither inspiring nor funny. Better think great thoughts (law related?) before I blog again.

I first thought about blogging last week. I thought it would take me a year to decide to try it. I changed my mind. I have many who think this is a terrible idea. But I see real possibilities of profit: do this, or I'll write menacing truths. I'm hooked. If I can figure out how to make this work.

Reasons to blog:
1. I don't have to write long personal emails to friends who may or may not want to hear about why I haven't finished grading exams yet.
2. I can do this instead of grading exams
3. I can be added to my daughters' lists of "favorites" -- that just feels so good!
4. I can experiment.

Reasons not to blog:
1. Cs has grave reservations
2. I have mild reservations
3. I most certainly will regret at least 51% of my postings
4. I will feel compelled to write about legal things since this is what I am trained to do. But it will be tempting to write about non-legal things more.

Okay, let me try posting.