No photos or art will accompany this post

Did anyone catch the Cap Times review of the 3-day show opening this week-end at the Barrymore? It’s titled ‘Puppetry,’ and it is about, about… an art form of sorts, depicted with humor and, I should think, great physical skill. Certain body parts of two actors are formed into, among other things, a pelican, a hamburger, the Loch Ness monster and the Eiffel Tower.

How original and apparently exceptionally funny and asexual. Still, tickets are at $35. I’ll wait for reports from others. Write me if you venture out to see it.

How can you keep ‘em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree..

Ollie, my canine, was well trained (emphasis on ‘was’). I believe I have bragged ad nauseam about his independent quick run in the unfenced yard each day, all on a brief verbal command from me.

Today, Ollie went out as usual as I waited, bored, inside. And waited. And waited. Ollie had obviously flown the coop. Spring had gone to his head, poor guy, and he was off to see the world. For the first time in his four and a half years of life, he experienced FREEDOM! Oh, he was shy enough to come back when I went out on the street, sat down (how odd-seeming was that?) and stretched out my arms (he can never resist the lap and arms). But I’m not fooled. He’s seen bigger oceans and grassier fields now. He’ll fly again. Who wouldn’t?

No, no, no, of course not!

A reader (referring to blog posts below) asked today how is it that I got all my plants to bloom this early in the season. This reader, obviously an urban and urbane fellow, assumed that the photos in my “Spring Update” series depicted flowers that were now in their best form in my yard. He was exceedingly in awe of my horticultural skills since he’d only seen crocuses in other Madison yards.

It is painful to stick a pin in the balloon that stands for one’s over-inflated-worth-in-the-eyes-of-another, but I fear I must: no, my flowers are not yet in bloom. Far from it, no such luck, couldn’t be, no way. April, that most wonderful, revitalizing month, just started YESTERDAY! The plants identified below have all emerged from the ground, but the photos simply portend showy summer weeks ahead. We’re not there yet. As I sit here typing in my wooly socks and big burly oversized sweater I am reminded, brilliant sunshine today notwithstanding, we’re not there yet.

Spring Update

I apologize – these updates are now loading here fast and furious, but my plants are rapidly breaking ground and it is a joyous experience, one that deserves notation. Today, it’s all about daylilies. There are hemerocallis nuts out there – people who study, breed and cultivate the hundreds of varieties of this genus of plant. I’m not quite there, but I am charmed by daylily designs and colors. Plus it remains one of nature’s most prolific flowers—a regular fertile myrtle: a bud opens each morning, is spent by the end of the day, a new one opens the next day, and so on. It is a remarkable thing to observe.

I can’t find all the varieties I have in the front and back of the house, but they include some of the ones pictured here.

Maybe I should reconsider spectator sports

Yesterday, in our discussion of custody and physical placement (in the Family Law class) I gave examples of cases I had worked on that had, in my opinion, an incorrect result despite the fact that a text-book reading of the fact patterns would have lead you to predict a decent outcome. I had wondered if the students could really understand this peculiarity about family law – it can be unpredictable because so many factors can confound and confuse the proceedings. I was gratified, therefore, to get the following email from a reader this morning. She was reflecting on the class discussion and thought of it in this way:

Here's a basketball metaphor I think applies here: anybody can learn to dribble the ball down the court to the basket, and make a stylistically brilliant shot from different points on the perimeter, with enough practice and diligence, if you're playing alone with no other players. However, in the real game, even just a one-on-one, there is another person always covering you, trying to stick their hand into your dribble and get the ball, and block where you can move on the court, block your shot once it leaves your hands, etc., which severely limits what parts of your game you can play depending on the opponent. Like in family or custody law: any book could summarize how the custody decisions are made on paper, or you could read the statute and think that's easy enough, but your real-world explanations today were kind of like the defense checking the ball handler.

I’m impressed. Sports metaphors typically elude me (is that ever obvious – see posts below), but this one hit home. This semester I have a renewed respect for the playing field, and an exponentially growing admiration for the students in my classes.

Suspicious minds

My friends and readers have let me down. One after another, they question the authenticity of blog posts today JUST BECAUSE IT’S APRIL 1st! The last message on this was the final straw. My reader writes:

“Now I'm just trying to figure out if the Smigus Dyngus post is for real, or an April Fools post in itself. The photo, with realistic looking costume, has me being less suspicious, but one never knows... Very mysterious you can be!!”

Now really, would I make up something like that? Check out the site here (scroll down to the bottom for an analysis of Smigus Dyngus). Or, if you aren’t the checker type, let me quote the relevant passage for you:

Smigus-dyngus, czyli pomyślność na mokro: Oblewanie się nawzajem wodą w poniedziałek wielkanocny (nazywany z tej okazji Świętym Lejkiem) to również zwyczaj stary i wywodzący się najprawdopodobniej z obrzędów związanych z wiarą w dobroczynne właściwości wody. Był przy tym i jest doskonalą zabawą dla całej rodziny, a także okazją dla psotników, by płatać figle... w zgodzie z ludową tradycją. Polewano się różnie, na dworach paroma kropelkami wody perfumowanej, na wsiach wiadrami i konewkami. Niejedna panna została nawet wepchnięta do rzeki czy koryta z wodą.

Is says it right there, doesn’t it?

The essence of fox

A reader asks where I am able to procure 100% fox urine (see Spring Update posts below). Well, naturally, I don’t chase down the animals myself with jar in hand. But someone does, and what a job that must be! I suppose I could also find it on the Net, but for me, it’s just as easy to locate it in select stores that sell farming or gardening essentials. And btw, it seems not to “spoil:” if you buy too much to use in one season, let me assure you, the stuff is even more foul smelling the next year.

The fools of April

A reader and a friend sent me the following email message late last night:

“It is now April Fool's day. meaning I refuse to talk to you for the next 22 hours (until the day is over, your time). what will happen this year? I don't know, but I know it will be something, and I know I'll fall for it, whatever it is, so see you April 2.”

That’s harsh! I’ll have you know that this year, I am much more into Smigus Dyngus – a traditional Polish celebration that falls on Easter Monday. YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT SMIGUS DYNGUS IS???? Wait ‘til Monday, will you ever be surprised!!

[For those far away, and therefore not within a bucket’s reach that day, let me explain: traditionally, on Smigus Dyngus, boys drenched girls with squirt guns, buckets of water, anything that caused great wetness. The thought was that the more a girl was sprayed with water, the higher were her chances of getting married—though I see some pagan ritual elements here, as in cleansing the body and soul, etc... The holiday is observed especially by young people: boys will literally wait out on the road, near markets, in village squares and as soon as a girl would pass – she’d get the bucket. Older men, on the other hand, sprayed their wives with cologne water, though I’m not sure what the purpose of that was – unless he secretly wanted her to leave and marry someone else, a.s.a.p.!? The revenge comes the next day: the girls dump water on guys on Tuesday. In my time, we were way too impatient and so everyone, male and female, dumped water on each other, all Monday long.]

A lesson from the past: my lack of talent may be a virtue

A guest lecturer from Taiwan came to my class yesterday to address issues of Family Law in the context of changing norms and values. His own view was that Taiwan had rushed to embrace Western standards too fast and without enough discussion of what was sacrificed along the way. Individual rights are all fine and well, but the relinquishment of family-centered values comes at a very personal cost to the many people who once had a rich network of family and now feel themselves to be isolated.

The Taiwanese professor gave two examples of old Chinese proverbs that no longer have the force they once did, and I must say, even though I do not live in Taiwan, I am intrigued by them and think they could have interesting applications even on this side of the ocean. Consider each one:

1. “For a woman to be without talent is a virtue.” Sure, I know that sounds harsh, but think how much pressure would be off our shoulders if this was honored today. Awards would be meted out for mediocrity and lack of accomplishment. Working long hours to perfect something would be pointless and indeed, may cause you to appear virtue-less.

2. “Marry a chicken, follow a chicken, marry a dog, follow a dog.” This one, too, is superb! You want marriage? Great – here it is: you got yourself a dog. Now are you happy?? Much could be learned from these words.

One of the most telling moments, however, came at the beginning of class. As students were trickling into the room, I handed them outlines of the paper to be presented by the visiting scholar. He watched in fascination, then asked: “Do you always hand out papers like that to students?” I hesitated, wondering if I had committed some International Gaffe of Great Magnitude and Consequence. He explained: “You are the respected one here, no? Why don’t you have THEM come and pick up the paper themselves?” It had never even occurred to me that I had just put myself down, meeting the students at their own low-status level rather than asking them for proper respect. No wonder they throw spitballs in class and play spider solitaire on their computers. Resolved: today, they come to ME to pick up the statute that I am now copying for them (wait: why am I even making copies for them??).

Liking the news again

Missing UW student found, minimum wage bill passes in Madison (one of just a handful of cities in the country now with a minimum wage that’s higher than the federal level), can we please just continue with the roll of good news?

Spring Update

The weather leaves much to be desired, BUT the white campanula is really shooting up, and the geranium is forming a thick mat. The veronica leaves are also quite large, and the dianthus is getting ready for the rabbit assault (their favorite).

The scientific revolution

A finding that is worth sitting up for: according to a UC San Diego study (published in Psychological Science), people pick pure-bread dogs that resemble them. I don’t really go for knocking studies that affirm the obvious. I’m surrounded by social scientists and have come to appreciate that there’s a big step from positing an “obvious” conclusion at a cocktail party (do people still go to cocktail parties?) to documenting it and drawing wider implications from it.

Still, this one seems so very basic that it, at the very least, does not deserve to be included in CNN.com’s top stories (here) for the morning.

On the other hand, it made ME click and read, just in case there was something to be learned from my own choice of an American Water Spaniel for a pet. The terribly frustrating thing about the cited study is that it seems not to specify (at least in the CNN synopsis of it) the criteria used for matching owners with their pets. It appears that different judges used different criteria, which, to me, is perhaps the most revealing aspect of the study: that you can use different criteria and arrive at the same place (similarly, when we admit students to law school, we use our own individually crafted set of markers, yet we wind up choosing pretty much the same students).

In dog selection, the conclusions presented are rather basic: Frenchies for trendy people, collies for gregarious folks.

They don’t say anything about American Water Spaniels, and I don’t think it would have application to my “selection process” anyway. I picked this particular dog because I was riding the bus from the Milwaukee airport and noticed this peculiar sight: a gorgeous, rather large animal, making his way up to the lap of its owner. I asked if he was feeling stressed after the plane ride. The owner said no, not especially, he just sort of fancied himself as lap dog – all 45 pounds of him. Ollie, our rather shy animal and offspring of this dog has the same (must therefore be genetic?) habit. If you sit down, he’ll make every effort to get into your lap. Yet his appearance is such that you’d think he’d be the perfect hunting companion to Dick Cheney. An incongruous mixture of traits. Does this say something about my predisposition?

[Btw, the American Water Spaniel also happens to be the state dog of Wisconsin, though absolutely NO ONE living here knows this, so I doubt it would steer a selection process.]

Students are so helpful

A few weeks ago, I wrote here that a concerned, well-meaning student come up after class to tell me that calling something a “slam dunker” violated every athletic principle known to man, woman, or child. Gratefully, I made a note that henceforth it shall be simply a “slam dunk.”

A reader then informed me that he had problems with my blog because I alluded there to being dense about slam dunks due to my limited knowledge of the baseball field. He told me that it is not the habit for athletes to achieve slam dunks in baseball.

Today, the same concerned “slam dunk” student told me that I might expand my sports education even further: rather than mentioning the “hometown” advantage of filing a court petition where you reside, I might try incorporating such terms as “homecourt” or “homefield,” even though he assured me that the athletes in the class would be comfortable if I decided to stay with “hometowning.”

Oh, I think I can spot a set-up here: I’ll bravely throw out “homecourt” next time, and mention playing tennis, even though I should be back in basketball land. And what’s “homefield?” Is that baseball or have we now switched to football? Or maybe it’s hockey? So many mistakes to be made with using this terminology… so many…

Good will and cheer

This is one of those days where I had reason to cross the mile-long State Street that links our campus with the State Capitol (and the court buildings). I was going to attend a law firm baby shower for a former student, an event that brought forth great feelings of nostalgia as no fewer than three of the firm’s six attorneys are former students of mine, and I’ve worked on family law cases in the past with all but one of the partners.
Half way up State Street it struck me that my baby gift would benefit greatly from a little rubber duckie stuck to the outside and so I went into a soap store (the Soap Opera, pictured here) to purchase one. This is the way Madison works: one favor leads to another and before you know it you’re all over-favoring each other until there are no more favors to bestow. I paid $1.50 for my duckie; the sales clerk loved the duckie-on-top-of-box idea and offered to add ribbon for effect (the store has always been keen on elaborate ribbonning of gifts); of course that meant that I had time to browse and pick up a number of astronomically expensive soaps –gift ideas for imminent occasions requiring little things of this nature; it was determined then that I was also deserving of many free samples, including one that I thought would actually best be purchased, in large quantities.

A cynic may comment that I was a sitting duckie myself: a target for salesclerk largess that would inevitably lead me to deplete my bank account in that store. But that cynic would be wrong. True, I left with a beautifully ribbonned-duckie-adorned box plus many other items, with the final bill reaching outrageously high levels if you think of it as a duckie bill, but on the other hand, the bill was not so high if you think of all the stored-up presents, the good will, the exchange of kind words of praise and admiration and promises of life-long friendship.

Division of assets

Pausing in my review of notes for today’s Family Law class, I take a quick look at CNN.com (to make sure the world hasn’t yet destroyed itself; as Friedman of the NYT wrote yesterday, one has such low expectations of news stories these days), where I find an article about another couple’s relationship woes (story here).

Demba and Chaka (Demba’s the female) seem not in the mood for procreation. After five years of inhabiting the same space, they seem hardly to have glanced at each other and Philadelphia zookeepers now believe that they may have never even had a sexual encounter (this in spite of the fact that Chaka is one fertile guy, having fathered many babies in his previous surroundings).

She gets to keep the house (she’ll stay in their ‘home’), but he gets to move in (at another zoo) with a couple of promising females. Her biological clock has ticked away, while he can just keep going and going. Have we really evolved from ape-dom all that much?

[CNN photo is of Chaka--beloved by females, though not by Demba. I'm with Demba on this one]

Star gazing

A friend-reader reminded me that I should be looking at the sky at dusk because it will be many decades before I will be able to see again the line up of five planets without the aid of a telescope. I have only until the end of the month to do this.

Wanting to spread the wealth, let me post the map of planets so that you, too, can tell your children and grandchildren that you were fortunate enough to have read a webblog in 2004 that showed you what to look for:

You are so wrong, pal!

A Polish friend (referencing posts from earlier this month) wrote to ask if indeed Madison’s Odana Road, or for that matter, the Humanities Building on the U of Wisconsin campus can even compare with the pukey-pea-green square of concrete that houses Poland’s Supreme Court, or the Linguistics Department of Warsaw University? The suggestion is that those two structures require more immediate intervention (a date with the bulldozer comes to mind) than do our own urban crown jewels of hideosity.

No, no, you are wrong. Compare, please:


The Polish Supreme Court (Warsaw Uprising Monument stands in front)

U of Warsaw Department of Applied Linguistics

Humanities Building at the U of Wisconsin







No brainer, right? I don't even need to bother with Odana Road. Everyone knows about the singular ugliness of Odana Road.

Spring Update

They say chance of snow by mid-week, but it can hardly matter. The honeysuckle has sprouted big leaves, the bleeding heart bushes are at least 4 inches tall already. The forty million double bloom tulips I have scattered in forgotten places are never going to be as multifarious as their cousins in Holland, but they, too, are up and running (I plant early varieties just to get this early burst of pleasure) and the evening primrose has multiplied beautifully. So far so good…

China’s response to bad driving: shrug your shoulders and look to the gods

Earlier (last month?) I had blogged about the inherent dangers in crossing a street in China (to say nothing of navigating it by car). The seeming lawlessness of drivers, the diverse nature of motorized and pedaled vehicles, the crowds, the trucks and carts tilting with heaped, unbalanced cargo –all this produces a state of anarchy and chaos and a feeling of complete panic for anyone who finds herself in the middle of it.

Perhaps, then, I should not have been surprised that somewhere on a rural road in China a traffic death occurred (read about it here) when a wealthy woman, Su Xiuwen, ran over a peasant woman last October. The Times describes the incident thus: “Mrs. Su was driving her BMW when a farmer transporting his onion cart to market bumped the luxury sedan. Mrs. Su became enraged, hit the farmer, then revved her car and plunged into the crowd. The farmer's wife, Liu Zhongxia, was killed.”

The case sparked great controversy precisely because Mrs. Su was both wealthy and well connected (it’s commonly referred to as the BMW case). When the local judge ruled that the death was a traffic accident based on negligence and gave Mrs. Su a two-year suspended sentence, the public reacted instantly by alleging corruption and bribery. In an unprecedented move to quell these rumors, a special judicial panel was called to review the lower court ruling.

Today the panel came down with a verdict. It upheld the lower court’s finding of no corruption and stated that Mrs. Su did not intend to kill Mrs. Liu: she was simply a bad driver.

It is, possibly, the correct result. After all, this could have been an instance of reverse prejudice: her wealth lead people to think that of course it couldn’t have been JUST an accident (in the same way that people have speculated whether Laura Bush’s youthful driving ‘mishap,’ also resulting in a traffic death, was treated differently because of her family’s prominence in the community).

To me, what was notable in the case was the court’s tolerance for “bad driving,” as it indeed seems to excuse virtually anything that can occur on the road (short of intentional homicide through use of a vehicle). Couldn’t you say that every instance of crazy disregard for road rules is simply “bad driving?” The whole nation suffers from a case of bad driving. Perhaps the reaction of “wadda ya gonna do about it..” is not a good way to get the country to focus on road safety.

Local news

I often complain that our local paper has no inherent value to it. In fact, I don’t only complain, I ACT (I cancelled a subscription to the Wisconsin State Journal some time ago). I think my friends believe that I sometimes overreact to things, because some have been faithfully keeping me informed of what I have been missing.

For instance, tonight, a reader sent me the following clipping from out local paper (it is, bizarrely, about Kenya):

"After 10 years, he gets a bath.

A Kenyan villager who had not bathed in 10 years was stripped and scrubbed clean by neighbors sickened by the stench, local media reported on Saturday.
Four neighbors swooped on the 52-year-old-man in rural western Kenya, tying him up with a rope before washing him in public, the daily Kenya Times said.
It took four hours to clean the man, whose body was also scoured with sand to remove a thick layer of filth.
The man, a bachelor, has promised to wash once a day, and now hopes to find a wife, the newspaper said."

It is quite possible that absolutely no hint was intended with the transmission of the article. On the other hand, I saw the person who sent me this on Saturday, and she may be reacting to our particular encounter, though I don’t think so. Under normal circumstances, I may postpone a shower until after going to the gym (or for a run, or for another form of exercise), but on that particular Saturday, I distinctly remember showering very early in the morning, in anticipation of a very long day with many people-encounters.