Proud to be a badger

My seminar ended late (we actually finished early, but it felt late – one has to be precise in one’s words), everything about this day ended late, but I did manage to stop at Border’s on the way home to pick up a book for the week-end trip that I have ahead of me (more on that later). In the end I got two books, and it is the second, the unintended purchase that I am now remembering. Why? Because amongst all those front page reviews (that I read with great diligence and that I always way over-analyze) I found, snuggled between the NYT and the Library Journal, a review from the Madison Capital Times! It says:

His taut narrative language is direct, strong and original with a restraint lyricism full of trenchant observations. Particularly outstanding are the descriptions of Berlin crumbling from war and the oppressive ordinariness that accompanies apocalypse.

Aren’t you proud of our little Madison paper? That’s pretty heady language! [though in reality, I bought the book because of its really terrific smell. If you don’t believe me, go to Border’s and pick up a copy of “The Pieces of Berlin” by Michael Pye. You’ll see.]

A post scriptum to the entire “Fed Ex was late” saga

On January 29, I posted a blog about not trusting Fed Ex to pick up my grant application in a timely way (is anyone except me sick of this story yet?). A few weeks later I posted a related (according to me) story about Fed Ex not picking up 30 UC Berkeley applications for Fulbrights on time, thereby causing the Department of Education to summarily reject all 30 applicants because their applications came in a day late. Okay. That’s just a quick summary.

Today I read that Berkeley has been negotiating with the Department of Education so that they would reconsider their position in rejecting the late applicants. After all, Fed Ex has claimed responsibility for the pick-up and delivery error.

The resolution: the 30 applicants will get their grant proposals reviewed. Successful applicants (predicted at around 50%) will be able to call themselves “Fulbright Scholars.” But they will not be under the Fulbright program administered by the Dept of Ed. – they will be under a separate special program for them administered by the Dept of State. And the government will not pay for their scholarships. Berkeley (which will obviously milk Fed Ex for this) will have to come up with the funds. Truly the work of legal minds. This isn’t about adhering to principles of fairness, it is entirely about living within the “letter of the law.”

BTW (a term I seem to have used three times in my posts and 5 times in emails just today… the mind is getting tired), I remember that when university applicants are attempting to meet deadlines, they are given language that specifically states that the apps have to be in by January 1, and nothing, not an act of God (or Goddess, or secular entity), or war, or a late Fed Ex delivery will excuse tardiness. Maybe the Dept of Ed should look to academia for guidance in setting its application guidelines to avoid ambiguity. Dept. of Education -- academia, you’d think the two would keep in touch.

Astrology

Okay. The time is now. I have been asked in class, I have been asked in the hallways (of life), I have been asked repeatedly: do I think the constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman will pass? I have avoided giving my opinion – possibly to make it seem like I have an inside track, or at the very least infinite wisdom on the matter. I have neither, but I will give my answer nonetheless (prompted in part by Ann’s blog, which gives the completely opposite answer): yes, if the amendment were to require a vote today, I think it would pass.
I don’t want to get into a detailed and terribly serious analysis as to why. Let me just keep it short and simple:

1. Ann (who speaks with a great deal of credibility here because she is, after all, a Constitutional scholar, and so I realize I am tip-toeing over terrain that is near and dear to her heart, whereas the Constitution is virtually silent on family matters, and the number of important Supreme Court cases addressing the family can easily be counted on the fingers of both hands, and that is only a slight, journalistic exaggeration) concludes that Americans treat the Constitution as an instrument that confers, and rarely (if ever) removes rights.

Answer: Maybe. But there are no words in the Constitution articulating a right to marriage (let alone gay marriage) and so we can’t really say that the amendment is “removing” a right. Only in 1967 did the Supreme Court even attempt to link marriage to a fundamental rights discourse. And, in subsequent decisions, it became clear that even though marriage is considered a fundamental right, the state may regulate it if it can demonstrate a compelling state interest. No one wanted to permit under-age kids, or fathers and daughters to marry with the state’s blessing. So, from day one, limits on who can marry have been acceptable. This train of thought is obviously not what the MA court chose to develop (in a split decision), but we are talking about the national read on the Constitution.

2. Many (including Ann) say that Americans are not that mean-spirited and they will not indulge this type of bigotry.

Answer: Americans are not inherently any more mean-spirited than anyone on the planet (except for a small contingency from some political... okay—off topic). But the reality is, I think, that Americans are made to feel that they are already giving in to things that run against their belief systems: they will feel themselves to be generous in granting same-sex couples access to some benefits. There are, after all, some 70 million Evangelical Christians in this country. Not to say that they ALL have uniformly strong feelings about gay marriage, but they certainly are under the influence of religious leaders who will not say kind things about this type of union. (n.b., did anyone read the story today about the woman in Texas who was arrested for having sex-toy Tupperware parties? The so-called "Christian" groups are a powerful force.) Can those that align themselves with the groups that repeatedly condemn same-sex marriage withstand the (almost certain to escalate) pressure to support the amendment?

3. One last point for now: there is the ever burning fear of the slippery slope. The perception is that the amendment is necessary so that other forms of marriage that are repugnant to our values wont also be pushed down our throats. Today = same-sex, tomorrow = bigamy. And why not (the argument goes)? The law is suddenly unstable here. Bigamous marriages based on religious beliefs have been rejected by the Court because of our adherence to a traditional belief system that favors monogamy. Oh-oh. That’s it? Gulp.

So, as of today, February 11, 2004, I am predicting that an amendment will pass. And, having said that, let me also say that many things can happen to change the mood of the country or to change my mind. Astrology is a tricky thing.

Now wait a minute...

Yesterday we got a really friendly call from a Clark supporter asking for our vote this coming Tuesday. Now what if that one call (and the fellow emphasized that he was NOT a recording, though our phone recorder recorded his call and so this then became an untruth, because he turned out to BE a recording – but I don’t think the misstatement is what caused Clark to withdraw), okay, sorry for the digression, what if that call had directed me to make up my mind once and for all, so that I was ready to throw away all literature on anyone else and plunge ahead in support of Clark? Where would I be now? It reminded me of the campaign requests you get from candidates AFTER the race, so they can better address their accumulated debt (and who is going to address MY accumulated debt?), though it is even more eerie to ask for my vote where there is no longer a "candidate" behind the name on the ballot.

Right on the heels of this I get in the mail a nice flashy card from Dean, all about how he and no one else is willing to stand up to George Bush. I liked the quality of the card, and indeed, in the photo, Dean appears to be standing, but I am thinking that my presidential choice wont have to stand up to Bush after next November because there will no longer be a Bush in DC. Instead he’ll need to be president. So I take the card to be a statement about what Dean can do in the next few months, that’s all. Interesting, but not persuasive as to ultimate leadership capability. But I will keep it in mind. I did like the fact that Wisconsin was the direct target for the card – the name of the state appears right there on the glossy front. State pride and all that. Also not dispositive, but very attractive.

Speed your way to bankruptcy

This, very buried in the paper today (buried, I suppose, because if you have stocks or caches of gold, you don’t want to give anyone on this side of the ocean legislative ideas):

Jussi Salonoja, the 27-year-old heir to a large sausage business, has been fined $216,000 for driving 50 miles an hour in a 25-mile-an-hour zone in Helsinki, the police said. The fine is believed to be the largest ever given for speeding in Finland, where traffic offenders are penalized according to their ability to pay. Mr. Salonoja's 2002 income was $8.9 million, Reuters said. The Finnish Internet millionaire Jaako Rytsola held the previous record for a speeding fine: $101,700. Walter Gibbs (NYT)

I’m really all for this: I mean, imagine the wealth we could tap into. And the headlines this would generate. And the smug satisfaction all of us would get from seeing rich people zapped by radar guns and being made to pay, pay, pay. [BTW, how does a traffic cop know if s/he’s cornered a wealthy person?]

I can’t keep to my own schedule

Though in a previous blog I suggested (to myself) that I review readers’ comments on Sunday (that was because it was a particularly slow moving Sunday and I predicted many more such Sundays this winter given my work load this semester), I am now departing from my rule. Actually it never became a rule, because there hasn’t been a Sunday since I wrote that. Anyway, ANY day is reader-comment day.

To the reader who asked if I knew about the drug trade that went on at night on the hill where she found out I went sledding – the answer is yes, I remembered and left shortly thereafter. However, sledding at the local hill near the high-school is/was perfectly safe and so I took a handful of runs there. You see a lot of sky – it’s open and quite beautiful at night.

To the reader who had gone back to a blog from the early days of January and read about my warped floors, let me give you an update: the floor boards now are so separated that I could store enough winter provisions in the cracks and keep us going for a whole month. I will call my floor person for another conversation on this come Spring. Update will follow.

To the super nice reader (I’m not suggesting that other readers aren’t super nice, it’s just that this one lives far away and doesn’t know me and still took a moment to be super nice) with the preference for rats over mice, just a note of reassurance: though you may feel bad about neglecting and not challenging your favorite rat in the past and worry that this made her (him?) unhappy – actually you don’t KNOW that the rat was less happy being left alone. Maybe s/he liked retiring from cerebral maze games: maybe s/he had burnt out and wanted a hiatus from all that intellectual stardom. Maybe s/he had been faking enthusiasm all along. What do we know about rat feelings anyway. I mean, it’s not the same level of guilt as, say, I would have over not filling the bird feeder (update: it is now filled and I have attracted wood-peckers to it and so now we are in the next stage of the vicious orbit of neglect-entice-expunge-entice etc..)

Winter dreams, part 2

Later...(see post below)

If I wrote about sledding now, it would be as if I sledded just to write. It was, though, a perfect night to work the plastic on the snow. Not pink bird plastic, but a sleek blue strip, with the terrifying speed of someone who doesn’t really know what she’s doing and can hardly see where she’s going. Sublime.

Winter dreams

A colleague in Madison once told me not to make any important decisions in February. It’s like your car, which, at this time of the year, makes all sorts of odd noises that have little to do with real maintenance issues and more to do with the abysmal state of the weather. Don’t take your car to the repair shop in February. It may not need a fix. It may just need a new month. Winter at this point is never ending, the short day never appears longer, the groundhog deserves to be impeached for his inaccurate prognosis, etc.

At the same time, February takes up 28 – 29 days out of each year. That’s a lot of days to avoid making decisions just because they may be tainted by the cold.

So, Mr. colleague, I’m about to respectfully decline your suggestion and go forth with my decision, inspired by a reader who found my rhapsodizing about flamingos on a snow hill sweet but misguided: I’m taking a piece of plastic (they call this thing a sled?? What kind of cheap garbage do we give our kids anyway? When I was young…) and going out to look for a hill. Sledding in the moonlight sounds, at this moment, sublime.

How much power in cheese?

A lot. Jonathan Alter writes in this week’s Newsweek:

Kerry is Brie and crackers on a rugged picnic. Edwards is a slice of American on a hamburger at Wendy’s [no! take that back!]. Even beyond Wisconsin, politics is still about how you say “Cheese!”

Battles brewing on the home front

Does Wisconsin need this much attention? As of today, we have a proposed constitutional amendment in Wisconsin proclaiming marriage to be a union between a man and woman only (thanks, Rep. Gundrum, we really needed that), at the same time that we will have this week same-sex couples applying for marital licenses to underscore the state’s current discriminatory practices that preclude this form of marriage. On Thursday (February 11, just 5 days before the Sheboygan showdown – see earlier post today) there will be rallies and town hall meetings scheduled, just to add support for same-sex unions, and (simultaneously) a hearing will be taking place before the Assembly Judiciary Committee on the resolution to support the constitutional amendment.

It is, I think, rather sad but predictable that this has become a partisan issue. In Wisconsin, the constitutional amendment has 46 sponsors: 45 of them Republicans. A family law question hasn’t been in the media to this extent since the story of Elian Gonzalez from Cuba hit the press. One hopes that the public is looking carefully at the likely consequences of each legal step taken. A few words on paper can have far-reaching implications for the many different families affected by them.

So this is Henry…

A reader directed me to a review of Barfly, the 1987 movie referred to by Roger Ebert as “one of the year’s best films.” Thank you. I did not know about the screenplay. For those too young or too out of it (like me) to remember, Barfly was about a guy named Henry, described by Ebert in this way: “a drunk who is sometimes also a poet. The day bartender hates him, probably for the same reason all bartenders in gutter saloons hate their customers: It's bad enough that they have to serve these losers, without taking a lot of lip from them, too.” One day Henry hooks up with Wanda (Faye Dunaway), another time he hangs (well, rests in a reclining position) with a publisher. The two women meet each other in the bar. They don’t like each other. That’s basically it. The movie is not heavy on plot. But Ebert writes:

“The result is a truly original American movie, a film like no other, a period of time spent in the company of the kinds of characters Saroyan and O'Neill would have understood, the kinds of people we try not to see, and yet might enjoy more than some of our more visible friends.”

Yes well, in case I haven’t been all too obvious about it, Henry is really “Hank,” and “Hank” wrote the screenplay. About this, Ebert says:

“Louis Armstrong was trying to explain jazz one day, and he finally gave up and said, "There are some folks that, if they don't know, you can't tell 'em." The world of Charles Bukowski could be addressed in the same way. Bukowski is the poet of Skid Row, the Los Angeles drifter who spent his life until age 50 in an endless round of saloons and women, all of them cheap, expensive, bad or good in various degrees. "Barfly," based on his original screenplay, is a grimy comedy about what it might be like to spend a couple of days in his skin - a couple of the better and funnier days, although they aren't exactly a lark.”

BTW, Barfly did NOT come up on the list of movies I would most like to see (earlier blog today). You’d think the survey would have asked “is there any person you’ve come across recently whose work you find intriguing?” Instead, it asked about sleep. That’s too subtle. No point in beating around the bush. Might as well ask outright – what kind of movie do you have in mind for tonight? A brooding flick about a poet on skid row, or something set in Salzburg with a lot of music, tons of longueurs and costumes made of drape fabric?

Showdown in Sheboygan

Story titles ought not have unifying letter themes, but this indeed is what we are hearing about the forthcoming Wisconsin primary (contrasted with Dean’s Downfall in Des Moines, from same news source). CNN writes:

Much like you, we're nostalgic for the heady days of January, when this race was still a race, before the Kerry Comeback became the Kerry Coronation. So, like you, we look forward to the Showdown in Sheboygan, what Howard Dean vows will be the mother of all comebacks in Wisconsin.

I did think that we were no longer important, but CNN reassures Wisconsinites:

If Kerry does clobber Dean next week and the '04 Dem race unofficially ends (Dean says he'll keep running, but then so do Dennis Kucinich and Al Sharpton).

Letting the story fly a little into the terrain of lofty hopes and dramatic suspense, CNN continues thus:

Undaunted, we cast our gaze today upon Wisconsin, whose presidential primaries have served up high drama and sparked comeback dreams.

This is the challenge part. Again, from CNN:

Dean's Wisconsin press secretary, Mike Spahn, said their uphill campaign boiled down to a dare, issued to Wisconsin's traditionally independent voters: You're not going to let the rest of the country tell you what to do, are you? Are you .... ?

Hmmmmm. Sometimes, I would very much like to be told what to do. Not to trivialize this (oh no, I wouldn’t do that), but isn’t it sort of like playing Spider Solitaire? You know, where you have the feature that allows you to bring up the menu and undo your last move? So that when you are indeed stuck, with no possible move leading to a win, you can undo yourself to the point where your choice lead to this dim-witted impasse. And then you can actually pick another card, and eventually win. So if someone could please scroll forward and tell me what would happen were I to pick candidate number 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 (are there still 6?), I would be a better voter come Tuesday. [For some of my options, this is just a rhetorical question; I know what will happen if I vote for Kucinich; nothing will happen. People will reflect how Wisconsin had this weird Kucinich contingency.]

Winners all

My colleagues,Tonya and Ann,have posted results of their own DVD rental survey (see post, February 9). Tonya states that the following picks were selected as matching her personality, taste, disposition, imagination, etc:

1.All About My Mother
2.One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
3.Y Tu Mama Tambien
4.Secretary
5.Igby Goes Down
6.The Man Who Wasn't There

For Ann, the survey came up with these selections:

1.Being John Malkovich
2.Punch Drunk Love
3.Raging Bull
4.Magnolia
5.The Man Who Wasn't There
6.What's Eating Gilbert Grape
7.Cradle Will Rock

The pressure is on for me to state my own results. After all, I did admit to taking the survey… Okay, here’s the list:

1. Titanic
2. Artificial Intelligence
3. Pearl Harbor
4. Vanilla Sky
5. The Blair Witch Project
6. Batman & Robin
7. The Avengers
8. Battlefield Earth
9. Eyes Wide Shut
10. Highlander II—The Quickening.

And the sad thing is that, as you were reading it, so many of you actually believed this, indeed, to be the list that best matched my personality, tastes, disposition, etc. Even those who didn’t know me, just based on these blogs, I'm sure you thought – well that’s fitting.

Let me just say that any survey that seeks to determine my viewing preferences based on an answer (among others) to the question “how long does it take you to fall asleep?” is suspect. If I say 5 hours (and this has been known to happen, though not too often), does that make me sensitive, anxious, brooding, neurotic, prone to picking films from the “film noir” genre? If I say 0 minutes does it mean I need action, thrill, violence, because otherwise I’m likely to zonk out?

As I said, I did find the questionnaire to be a fun assessment of movie tastes and preferences. But as for “outing” my list here.. Naaahhh.. Or at least not this time around. I blog a lot, but there has to be some mystery left in life, some curiosity.

So where did the above list of ten come from? It’s the BBC’s top ten worst films ever. The comments are ones I have no problem agreeing with:

1.Titanic: It sank. There. I've saved you three hours of your life.
2. A.I.: Completely artificial but devoid of intelligence.
3. Pearl Harbor: It battered my intelligence with such ferocity I could barely find my way out of the cinema.
4. Vanilla Sky: The lowest point of my life so far.
5. Blair Witch Project: Two hours that would have been more profitably spent trying to staple my tongue to my forehead.
6. Batman & Robin: [my favorite comment] I wanted to sandpaper my retinas.
7. Avengers: As the film went silent before the closing credits I said aloud: 'That was ****!' and got a round of applause.
8. Battlefield Earth: A totally miserable experience shared with six other sad and bemused people and 120 empty seats.
9. Eyes Wide Shut: What the hell was that all about?
10. Highlander II: Breathtakingly stupid.

Ivan the Terrible (husband)

This week-end’s international headlines offered intriguing and – come on, let’s admit it –tantalizing material about the imminent (March 14) Russian elections. Putin is a front-runner, but there is a list of five challengers, and one person on the list, Ivan Rybkin (a vocal critic of Putin), disappeared last Thursday. Just like that. Gone. Albina, his wife, filed a missing persons report, convinced that her husband was at the very least kidnapped, or even worse, brutally murdered.

I want to know how many of us were thinking “boy, once a KGB-kind of nation, always a KGB-kind of nation” or “now, there’s a country with really vicious pre-election politicking!”

Albina now must feel quite mortified. Her “missing” husband had simply gone to Kiev (note story in the Times) for a “break” to visit “friends.” Didn’t want to be bothered, didn’t look at the press (he was having a “busy” week-end) until today, when he learned that there was a huge man-hunt going on (apparently their intelligence isn’t any better than that in “other” countries, though I dare say that one Russian man is even harder to find than WMD).

Or, maybe Albina is one smart woman: she probably knew all along and wanted to make a media show of her husband’s “disappearance.” And to think that our press made a big deal of Judith Dean being “unsupportive.”

Update on the pink birds:

Thirty hours later, and that errant flamingo is still resting upside down in the snow hill across the street (see first post today). There are 4 kids living in the house, along with two parents. They’re newcomers: they bought the house just this year. The moldy shingled roof didn’t make them back off and look elsewhere. He’s always around --they say he does film (?); the mother is an inside sort of person and so I don’t see her much.

Interestingly, neither adult has felt compelled to right the pink bird. It’s as if it offers a different perspective on things. An upside-down perspective. [We haven’t gone through an election season with them yet and so I can’t comment on their past or current leanings. I don’t know if a dozen flamingos in the front yard tells you much of anything about party affiliation. Now, if there had been green flamingos, that might be a hint.]

Today, while walking the dog, I almost said “say, that’s a cool upside-down bird..” A veiled question, if I ever saw one; comparable to “is anyone worried about the bird’s ability to breathe?” or “those pink toes look like they’re in for frost-bite, don’t they?” Just what they need – a neighbor on the prowl, posing nonsensical questions about plastic birds.

Working at home is not always such a great idea.

If you spend hours picking DVDs that then turn out to be duds..

My colleague Ann has posted a questionnaire, designed to help you select a movie to rent. This is great news if you’re like me and will actually ask the random Blockbuster clerk what’s good these days. As if they can figure this out for you. However incompetent the questionnaire is – it’s better than asking the clerk.

I, of course, filled out all the info on the site just to see if it was at all credible. The conclusion: Ann and I should avoid renting videos together. It’s not finessed to such an extent that it can really zero in on your taste, but it gives you a good stack to at least consider before you toss them all aside and pick out the usual dud.

Still on the Beatles..

It was on this day, then, that we listened, cried, screamed and went nuts. But I have to admit now, in retrospect, that I really didn’t get it. All the while that I worshiped the Beatles, I was a good 10 years behind them in age, and so their meaning was probably not my meaning. And I’m not even talking about the regular transcription mistakes. How long til I realized that they were NOT singing: “Trying to rule the days that are ohhhhhhh” (Across the Universe) or “Darling he sobs in the night when there’s nobody there” (Eleanor Rigby)?

“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” was probably obvious to anyone hearing it on the side of the ocean, but in Poland (I was back in Poland from ’66 onwards), it was just pretty and somewhat sexy. Good to dance to. With Bulgarian wine on the side rather than LSD. Or “Strawberry Fields” – tell us the words, tell us the words! --my Polish girlfriends would ask. And so I’d talk about how dreamy it was, you know, all that “living is easy with eyes closed …” And my absolute favorite “Fool on the Hill” (round and round and round and round and rooooound….) – I knew the words perfectly, but I had only a hazy understanding of what they meant.

I grew up with the Beatles. There is no question that they were the single most important, sustained musical force in my life. In my own quirky adolescent way, I imagined I was deeply immersed in their message. “I read the news today, oh boy…..” That is the power of song.

My vote seems to have been cast without my knowing it

Moments ago I got a call from a serious sounding John Kerry. He asked for my support in the primaries. Then he asked to please press “1” if I would vote for him. Multi-tasking is useful when you’re listening to calls from parents and politicians and so I leaned on the receiver and picked up my laptop. I heard a “beep,” and then an exalted Kerry telling me “great! I am so glad we can count on your support….. bla.. bla..” Oh no! That was a mistake! Please don’t count that in your score logs – I didn’t mean it! I mean, I’m not saying I’m NOT going to lend my support – anything can happen, we’re still a week away, bribes could start pouring in (see earlier post).

There’s no going back. I’m sure I’ll get all the letters, the calls, the solicitations; tomorrow I expect a Kerry sign in the front yard, and my name will probably appear on some massive ad taken out in the NYT. A technological snafu with a dose of human error has taken away my right to cast an educated vote.

Let them eat contracts..

GWBush has taken an idle comment heard on a plane ride and turned it into a political tool. Apparently he still wants the moderate vote badly enough to offer an alternative for gay couples: make a contract and then you can have all those nifty little rights like hospital visits, insurance, inheritance --that come with marriage.

But it's not that simple, even forgetting the intended slap in the face for the couples occupying this lesser status of "cohabitants." For one, those nifty little rights like social security or federal benefits cannot be passed on to even those occupying the Vermont category of ‘civil unions,’ thanks to the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which, as we know now, is routinely being passed also by state legislatures (not Wisconsin: one vote short of a veto override).

And perhaps GWB should read a case or two coming from Illinois, or from a number of other states where courts have been extremely unhappy about enforcing cohabitation agreements (CAs), even between heteroseual partners, let alone between same-sex partners. Why? What else: for policy reasons. Because enforcing CAs is like giving a nod of approval to the unions. And because there are problems with CAs in general: when do they click into being? Commitment ceremonies. Okay. But when do they terminate? If there is no “divorce” does that mean that they are in place until the sexual relationship ends? And so are they really sort of like in exchange for sex? Meaning – when the sexual relations end, so do a partner's rights to shared property? Tricky tricky. You can write one, and many do. Then hope you’ll find a sympathetic court if there is a challenge. Not a family court – family courts have no jurisdiction over these private contracts. A regular court. Good luck!

Do your homework, GWB. Or at least call a family law prof. Wait til you get the bill!

Who IS the fat lady and why must we wait til she sings?

With respect to this question, posed in my Sunday blog on letting Wisconsin seal the fate of Dean, I can now some clarifications:

Thanks to the reader who, in answer to who she is, pointed me to viable contenders. In the first, I see the clear indication that girth may add oomph to a crescendo in a Wagnerian opera. In the second, I see that Brunhilde's girth may actually overwhelm anything and anyone who threatens to come close. I understand that both would indeed give finality to a crucial moment – be it in opera or politics.

Thanks also to the reader who suggested that I look to baseball for answers. Apparently the phrase itself is attributed to the great Yankee baseball catcher Yogi Berra, who likened a baseball game to an opera, noting, "It ain't over 'til the fat lady sings..."

All very helpful. I did vaguely recall that the phrase got to be associated somehow with baseball, but I couldn't imagine why the game would be over at the end of the singing of the National Anthem, nor why the person singing it had to be of a large frame.