The Columnist Manifesto

From the same page of the New York Times as the Enron trial:

Exxon Mobil sets a profit record, with $36 billion. Hmmm... oil refineries destroyed by hurricaine Katrina, an ongoing war in Iraq, and oil company profits are going up? Enron executives on trial for manipulating energy prices? There seems to be some sort of connection, but somehow it keeps eluding me...

I love the sub-headling to the story about the $36 billion dollar profits:


How exactly does one "play down" $36 billion in profits? With fonts: $36 billion? Or adjectives: "a mere $36 billion"?

Remember Enron?

The criminal trial of top Enron executives, former Chairman Kenneth Lay and CEO Jeffrey Skilling, began yesterday in Houston. They're being charged with several counts of fraud and conspiracy for their wild run in what turned out to be a sham money-losing company that fraudulently booked profits for several years, making Wall Street look very stupid and ruining lives of thousands of employees who lost their retirement savings. Oh, yeah, and Lay and Skilling sold their own stock just before Enron's collapse to the tune of $500 million.

I just watched The Smartest Guys in the Room, a feature-length documentary on the Enron collapse. While I was disappointed insofar as the film didn't help me understand the intricacies of how Enron's business worked and what the fraud was, the film did a good job of putting across atmospherics of the case.

Three things are clear to me, having seen the film:

1. The Enron collapse, and the hundreds of millions of dollars made in essentially a stock swindle by Enron executives while its company was losing money, is the corporate crime of the century.

2. Enron basically "raped" (the word used by a commentator in the film) California. (See here and here, for background.) In 2001, Enron traders made manipulative trades of power resources to move electric power out of California, and they pressured power companies to shut down plants on phony excuses. The resulting artificial power shortage caused the price of energy to skyrocket, at which point Enron traders sold the power back into the state of California at huge profits. (The one time the company actually made money.) In the film, you get to hear these Enron traders with Texas accents joking about stealing $1 million a day from customers like "Grandma Millie" and saying charming things like:

"Just cut 'em off. They're so f----d. They should just bring back f-----g horses and carriages, f-----g lamps, f-----g kerosene lamps."

3. Enron and Ken Lay were thick as theives with both George H.W. and George "w" Bush. Both as governor and as the boy President, younger Bush received huge campaign contributions from Ken Lay and pushed Enron's agenda to deregulate the power markets so they could do things like manipulate energy prices in California.

If 9/11 hadn't basically pushed all domestic news and policy issues to the back burner, I think Enron would have been more of a continuously powerful story that would have seriously tarnished the Bush administration. Just another way in which the Bush presidency has perversely benefitted from the fact that our country was victimized by a terrorist attack early in his term of office.

Jetsons Towers from the House of Blues.






My favorite clock.

Is Blog of the Week back?

I've known several Canadians living in the U.S., and my impression has always been that they were not particularly into the expatriate thing, talking a lot about Canada and how much they missed it, or just showing how much they were staying in touch with current events. They invariably would seem to pass for Americans, and I'd only be reminded of their Canadianism when every few years I'd have this conversation:

Oscar: Who did you vote for for President/senator/governor,
etc.?
Canadian: I can't vote here. I'm Canadian!

This week's Blog of the Week, Apples Over America, is written by a Canadian expat living in Massachusetts, but is full of expatriate consciousness. It's full of Canadian current events and perhaps some nostalgia for "he old country." (Can Canada ever be properly referred to as "the old country"?) But more importantly, Apples is very funny in a weird way, weird in a good way, extremely sardonic, and well worth a visit.

Our Lake, less than two blocks from our house, offers many disappointments. Polluted by lawn runoff and a nearby power plant, the lake is no longer safe for swimming. In the summer, it is crowded with weeds and green scummy algae blooms.

Yet it fights bravely on, finding ways to display its beauty. Every winter, it seems to give us something different. A couple of years, when it froze solid before the first snow, it became a vast, glassy skating rink on which you could skate for over a mile from one shore to the other. Little trapped snow bubbles in the ice gave the effect of a black-and-white lava lamp.

Years when lots of snow has fallen as the lake was freezing, we could get an open plain for cross country skiing, with houses and trees so far off you could pretend you were trekking across the Russian step in Doctor Zhivago.

This year it froze without snow, and then last weekend a soft blanket of three inches fell on it. You could brush the snow aside with your foot.





Winter has been mostly disappointingly warm this year, but for one glorious day, I had the experience of ice skating through fresh powder. I'll never forget that.

You've heard of "the French paradox" -- the magical way in which the French can eat metric buttloads of cheese, gallons of cream sauces, cartloads of jiggling bulbs of fat (foie gras), rich pastries and other exceedingly rich and yummy foods without getting obese and having arteries and cholesterol levels that look like they've ordered everything off the "heart healthy" menu.

Explanations include the suggestion that properties of olive oil and red wine, which the French consume in significant quantities, somehow break down these fats.

My just-released cholesterol numbers were "great!" in the words of my doctor, and I promptly celebrated by making myself a fried-egg-with-cheese-bacon-and-ham sandwich.

I'm not saying that I eat like Homer Simpson, but perhaps you're asking "what's his secret"? Current knowledge on the subject says that there is a triad of factors -- heredity, exercise and diet. Maybe I have good cholesterol genes and that dominates the other factors. Or maybe it's hockey.

But maybe -- just maybe -- it's my version of the French paradox. I don't like red wine that much -- it gives me a headache, and I'm such a lightweight that I start getting a buzz after one glass. But, I thought, maybe it's the red grape tannins, and maybe you can get that from Concord grape juice. I drink 12 to 16 ounces of Concord grape juice every day. Not medicinally -- I just love the stuff, and don't get tired of it for some reason.

If you decide to experiment with the Oscar paradox, may I suggest: don't get the sweetened stuff. Grape juice is naturally very sweet. Stay away from the corn syrup!

How many of you, like me, whined your way out of piano lessons as a 7-year old only to get all regretful as a grownup about how neat it would be to know how to play the piano?

Feel free to substitute lessons in any sort of skill for "piano" in the above question. The key point is that one of the primary ways that "youth is wasted on the young" is kids' resistance to acquiring skills that might give them joy or satisfaction as adults.

What could be more paradoxical? Kids are ideally situated for lessons, having not only the time, but also the forming, growing brain that allows them to soak up skills training. Yet don't they resist lessons, fail to practice? Aren't they constitutionally, developmentally unable to comprehend the trade-off of present wants and feelings for the promise of long-term beneifts?

And when the lessons seem to stick, how often is it that kids decide, as they reach their teens or 20s and gain autonomy and become able to distinguish their own desires from their parents' desires for them, that they really don't like doing that thing any more-- playing soccer or violin or whatever -- and let it drop?

Then there's the other piece of the paradox: now that I'm older, and I know what I like, and I have the discipline to practice, my ability to learn and soak up skills and knowledge is all stiff and shrunken compared to the supple and expansive learning capability of kids. What the f*ck!

Here's what I would do for lessons if I could:

1. Sports: ice hockey, hitting a baseball
2. Languages: French, Spanish, German and modern Hebrew. Oh, heck, and Yiddish.
3. Music: electric guitar and voice.
4. Hobbies: sailing, photography, desktop publishing and graphic design, web design, drawing, ballroom dancing
5. Work related: cool classroom technology
6. Other: self defense, screenwriting

And here's the kicker: Part of me believes that I can still take lessons and gain proficiency in many or most of these things. Oh, yeah, and I also "plan" to write a novel.

I have a very flexible job, good health and no kids. And yet if I can make serious inroads toward basic proficiency in even one or two of those things, I'd be doing pretty well. You can say that the desire to learn new skills, and the optimism to believe that you can do that, is proof that you're still alive. On the other hand, doesn't Buddha say that desire is the source of all unhappiness?

Are you taking lessons, or planning to? In what? If you have kids, do you channel your own desire to learn into lessons for your kids? How bittersweet is that? At the risk of saying "Harry Potter," I have to say that my theory about why so many adults like Harry Potter is because it resonates with that unfulfilled desire for lessons. Skills are a sort of wizardry, aren't they?

High profile criminal lawyers supposedly coach their clients on their appearance, to help them win the battle in the "court of public opinion" and then, eventually, in the actual court.

Who the hell is representing Jack Abramoff?


Have you ever seen a defendant who was better dressed for the role of "guilty as charged"? Was this getup a requirement of his plea deal? If not, then counselor, for God's sake, get that man a beige overcoat, lose the fedora, and get him in front of the cameras so the media can make a new file photo!

I may have mentioned that, after more than a year without TV reception (cancelled cable service, and nothing through the old antenna), my household re-subscribed to cable service so that I could watch my favorite football team, the Redskins, lose their playoff game in agonizing fashion.

But now, of course, having a couple of hundred cable channels is itself an inexorable magnet to sit in front of the TV and surf through one menu guide screen after another in a neverending quest to find something decent to watch. Even for just a half hour -- just something decent.

And, of course, I'm once again astonished at the marvel of TV programming -- a couple of hundred channels, and not one thing I'm the list bit interested in watching.

There literally have been times when the best available program was "Classic Bowling" on ESPN Classic. This is a re-broadcast of a 1970s series called "Pro Bowlers Tour," something I used to watch as a kid. It's just pro bowlers in a sequence of four head-to-head games. And since they're pro bowlers, virtually everything they throw is a strike. It was boring then, but at least it was more or less live.

Yes, I realize there are good things on TV. But the notion that, at 9:30 on a weeknight, the best thing could well be "Classic Bowling" -- it's an incredible achievement, really.

Or is my astonishment the most astonishing thing here?

Comments are down, hits are up... what's that about?

In my never-ending quest to be popular, but not unreasonably popular, I wonder why there seems to be a dropoff in comments on this blog. Is it my new comment policy, in which I politely ask anonymous commenters to use a consistent handle or moniker? That doesn't seem too much to ask, nor was it ever intended to discourage comments from people who don't want to use their real names.

Or is it that I enabled the "word verification" feature? I suppose that could be annoying enough to discourage some comments. I have to say, I'm not wedded to it, ever since "Wendy" pointed out that comment spam may be more likely to come from live persons incentivized to post their spam-links than from "spam bots." I could be persuaded to disable that feature again...

In other news, the traffic to this blog has increased from about 150 to 200 hits per weekday, and 100 to 150 per weekend day. But I don't let this go to my head, because it seems like that difference in traffic is made up almost entirely by Google and other search engine searches, primarily image searches. Perhaps I've posted a critical mass of photos that creates that effect.

Looking at my "entry pages" on Sitemeter reveals that only about half my traffic, give or take, comes from direct hits to my home blog page or to recently linked posts. 10-15% of my traffic at any given time is attributable to my posts Big Butt TV, which probably picks up a lot of porn searchers, and "Do I look fat?" The latter, which is my most popular post of all time, is like a substantial investment that keeps throwing off dividends.

If you're reading this, you're probably not a porn, image or relationship advice searcher. Good for you. Except that now that the words "porn" and "big butt" appear in this post, maybe you are.

Ford's elimination of 14 factories and 30,000, as reported in today's NYT, is bad news. Auto industry jobs have for decades been the archetype of secure, unionized manufacturing jobs whose salary and benefits could keep working-class households within the American middle class.

Yet the problem of a sustainable blue-collar middle class in this country is much larger than the auto industry, and it's hard to feel sympathy for the industry side of the American auto industry. First of all, it seems that, since the 1970s, they have relentlessly pursued one short term strategy after another while careening inexorably toward long term extinction. The recent return to marketing gas-guzzling beast SUVs is a prime example.

More puzzling to me is the automakers' fatal embrace with the oil companies, the other great 20th century dinosaur of capitalism, which is the only way to explain their massive resistance to developing fuel efficient and more environmentally friendly vehicles. It's not like they're owned by the same holding companies...

What was the most powerful industry was in 19th century America? The one that had the largest impact on the way the country grew and on the lives of ordinary people? The one that employed the largest workforce? The one that caused the most injuries and was involved in the most litigation? The one that had the most political clout?

Yup, it was the railroads. And look at them now.

In the 20th century, the railroads were eclipsed by the oil-automotive complex. In the 20th century, what was good for General Motors was good for the country; but in the 19th, what was good for the Union Pacific Railroad Co. was good for the country.

I think you get the point -- industries die, people suffer, the country moves on. It's that "creative destruction" of the capitalist system. I have a hard time imagining that the automotive and oil companies will still occupy their dominant positions in economic life 100 years from now.

I have to say, one thing that bothers me about the "creative destruction" concept is the way it so easily morphs into the myth of progress: "creative destruction is good; one set of corporate institutions is replaced by a newer, better one once it has outlived its usefulness." Creative destruction leads to different institutions, but better ones? Or even good ones?

Have the automotive and oil industries been good for the country? It's hard for me to say. Having a car is handy. I believe that winning World War II was close to an absolute good, and that was won on the strength of United States industrial power, which was built primarily on the internal combustion engine. On the other hand, we've got greenhouse gases and an economy that depends on unending suburban sprawl which, too, was built on the automobile. Ever since the oil-and-auto industry helped us win WWII, we've been fighting wars for them.

The first war was metaphorical. The oil-and-auto industries didn't drive railroads into obscurity because cars and trucks were a "better" product or more efficient, but because, unlike railroads, they got the roads for their vehicles for free: massive public subsidies were pumped into road-building after World War II, in something close to a conscious effort to transform the U.S. into a car-based suburban society.Capitalism is like that. Industries reach and maintain dominance, not by playing "free market" better than their competitors, but by playing political power better.

But there have been real wars too. Nations have always fought wars to promote their leading industries. One of the reasons the Iraq war is so stupid is that the oil-and-auto industry is so 20th century. If the Middle East had no oil, our government would be about as interested in that region as it now is in Africa. In 50 years, look for our wars to be fought on behalf of Microsoft and the pharmaceutical industry -- probably in third world countries that give sanctuary to intellectual property "pirates."

It snowed this past weekend. People make a big harrumph about clearing snow off their cars.



But what about their bikes? Are these going to get taken out for a spin any time soon?

Yesterday around dusk, we heard squawking overhead.



Flight after flight of Canadian Geese swooped overhead, veering downward, in the direction of Our Lake.



We ran the block and a half from our house to Our Lake, and saw them landing on a large, glassy patch -- perhaps a mix of open water and wet, thin ice.





More flights kept landing.





The weather has been wishy washy, getting up over freezing enough to make us nervous about going on the lakes. But that's the function of the ice fishermen, or, here, just a group of kids (making a fire!) -- they're like the canary in the mine, letting us know it's safe, more or less.



A neighbor cleared away some snow, probably with a snow-blower, to make a small skating rink.



B checked it out.

Much ink has been spilled on advice about how to keep long-term relationships fresh, often featuring "dating" tips. Wear sexy clothes, wrap yourself in plastic wrap, goop each other up with massage oils. Light candles, make quality time to stare into each other's eyes with the kids stashed away at grandma's house.

I don't have advice about this. My sense is that most of this stuff doesn't work that well. B and I, for example, have tried meeting each other at a bar and pretending we just met, but I found it too difficult to stay in role. It seems to me that the hot, chocolatey endorphin-rush of dating and falling for a new person is difficult-to-impossible to recreate in a long term relationship, and that couples substitute for that by setting up shared experiences that are inherently stimulating or exciting, like travel, hiking, theatre-going, or the high-tension world of competitive bridge.

Yet every now and then something just works. Last night we had a fabulous date. Generically speaking, it was dinner and dancing. But that doesn't really do it justice.

First of all, we did dancing before dinner. I find it much better to dance on an empty stomach, and I don't understand how anyone can do it the other way around.

And it was ballroom dancing -- mostly foxtrot to Glen Miller. We had something of a breakthrough in the boy-has-to-"lead" thing, which I've always found to be the most challenging aspect of ballroom dancing. We were so in synch that we deftly glided around a dance floor that was shaped like this:



The fact is that we were dancing at home, and had to navigate around furniture and walls.

This may sound weird, but I think I discovered the sexy in Glen Miller's big band sound. There's this throbbing beat, and then those trombones come in with their languid "whaah, whaah, w-o-w-w." Hot stuff!

Then we went to dinner. B likes walking places, and we walked a mile in the snow to (and from) the restaurant. A mile in the snow! Kind of a cross between a sophisticated urban setting and a country barn dance from a hundred years ago.

The restaurant was the Unbelievably Good French Place. Small plates of one delicacy after another. The home-made, thinly sliced deli meats looked like dark little communion wafers that allowed you to commune with the food gods as they dissolved on your tongue. And the foie gras -- which I can only describe visually as a jiggling bulb of fat -- seemed to have the capacity to transport you into another dimension of time and space, even as it quietly assaulted your arteries.

I said to B: "This is food is so good that -- if we had it in France, we'd say, 'isn't it great that we came to France so we could get food like this?' "

Okay, so I'd had some wine, but we were in the zone. The 20 minute walk back through the snow seemed like no time at all.

I don't want to become one of those law professors who complains about how hard I work. Law professors have little cause for complaint in terms of work-life quality.

But I have to say that this recent Onion headline really resonated with me:

Plan To Straighten Out Entire Life During Weeklong Vacation Yields Mixed Results

I do this every winter and summer break. I plan to straighten out my life. I come up with a reasonable to do list to get right on as soon as classes end:

1. Grade papers and exams.

2. Write a law review article.

3. Catch up on the last few months of Supreme Court decisions.

4. Plan my courses for next semester. I mean really plan the hell out of them. To the point where the course is brilliantly innovative and so carefully choreographed that I can walk in the classroom and it will teach itself.

5. Clean office. I mean really clean the hell out of it. To the point where every piece of paper in a file drawer and every book on the shelf is in a logical, easy-to-find place and, more importantly, has a good reason for being in my office at all.

6. Clean the home office. I mean really clean it -- like the office at school.

7. Read a book a week for pleasure.

8. Make a good start on learning a new foreign language.

9. Learn electric guitar.

10. Travel somewhere exciting.

11. Reconnect in person with most friends and family members who live in other places, so this means travel, not phone calls or emails.

12. Catch up on blogging and blog reading.

Well, since classes started this week, I can report on my accomplishments vis-a-vis this list:

#1: check!

B has taken to growing flower bulbs in cereal bowls inside our house. I can't say I didn't warn her.

The flowers started out cute and pretty, and all.



But then things got out of control. We came home one evening to find this scene.



With the doors and windows locked, no sign of forced entry, and no pets in the house, the evidence pointed to a single suspect.

... or just in case you thought bankruptcy experts lacked a good sense of humor

Maybe you didn't find it so funny, but my satirical post about a "bankruptcy gag rule" was linked by a subscription web-based clipping service called Daily Bankruptcy News, "The Source for Business Bankruptcy Information on the Internet." They put it under their "bankruptcy reform" category:

Bush Administration, Credit Card Lobby Push Bankruptcy Gag Rule (satire)

Good thing they knew I was kidding. Actually, wouldn't it have been so much cooler if they didn't?

Icicles on a corrugated roof!

I watched the first 20 minutes of the 3-hour Lincoln biography Monday night on the History channel. According to B it had received some accolades by pre-screening TV critics. Though when I pressed her as we were turning off the show in bored distaste, she could only say, "It was reviewed in the Times!"

U.S. history is such a well-trodden path for academics and historical non-fiction writers, that the quest for something new to say tends to create fads in historical interpretation. For example, a current fad in "founding fathers" history-writing is to bash the revisionist historians who had made a fad of bashing earlier historians (and the founders themselves) for being insufficiently progressive on race and gender issues.

The Lincoln biography was basically a showcase for some current fad in Lincoln historiography, one emphasizing Lincoln's lifelong struggle with serious depression. One after another, talking-head history-writers -- many identified with lines like "author of Lincoln: the Melancholy President" -- got onscreen and talked about how miserable Lincoln was.

What lousy history! In its own way, this portrait of Lincoln was as one dimensional as the hagiographic ones that imply that Lincoln had no personality. Only it's far less interesting, because the historical context, the trajectory of Lincoln's life, the outline of his achievements in the face of this depression, were presented with maddening sketchiness. It might have been titled, "Lincoln: The Morbidly Depressed Man (Who, As It Happens, Led the Country Through It's Greatest Crisis)."

Even as a pyschological profile it sucked. The deepest insight was that "someone who's mother dies when he's a child is likely to suffer from depression unless his surviving parent is particularly loving. Lincoln's father wasn't." At times, some of the historians seemed almost stupid. Rather than listen to some droning congressional speech, Lincoln said "I'd rather go hang myself." This was presented as evidence of Lincoln's "frequent suicidal ideation."

If you want some insight into Abraham Lincoln the mortal human being, I strongly recommend Richard Slotkin's brilliant novel, Abe: a novel of the young Lincoln.

WASHINGTON -- The Bush Administration has endorsed the banking industry's latest attempt to scale back bankruptcy protection for debtors by trying to eliminate use of the "B- word" -- bankruptcy -- in financial counseling sessions.

Patterned after the abortion "gag rule," which denies U.S. funding to overseas family planning clinics that advise clients about abortion, the bankruptcy gag rule would impose stiff monetary penalties on credit and financial counselors who advise debtor clients about the option of filing for personal bankruptcy.

"People should pay back what they owe," said Ronald Stillborn, a banking industry spokesman. "But letting people know about bankruptcy procedure sends a wrong message that we condone bankruptcy filings."

Bankruptcy laws were formerly viewed as a humanitarian "last resort" to enable individuals to get a fresh start rather than trying to survive under crushing debt. But the banking industry, whose profits have skyrocketed due to the explosion of credit card debt in the U.S., have succeeded in making it harder for individuals to file for bankruptcy.

Under a recent bankruptcy restriction that went into effect last October, debtors were required to obtain "credit counseling" before they would be permitted to file for personal bankruptcy. But early experience under the rule showed that credit counseling was not having its intended effect of deterring bankruptcy filings and steering debtors into voluntary debt-management plans.

"With the gag rule, our hope is that debtors will eschew bankruptcy because they don't know about it," says Stillborn. Banking industry leaders see the gag rule as a viable stop-gap measure until they can convince Congress to re-establish workhouses and debtors' prison.

Cap doff: Tom Bozzo

Inspired by Nina, Phantom Scribbler and Paper Napkin, and uninspired by the "e-nnoyance" law, I hereby announce my new comment policy.

Henceforth, please do not comment anonymously. I respect your right to withhold your true identity, but if that is your goal, please comment pseudonymously.

In discussions of blogs and, more recently, the "e-nnoyance" law, I find a surprisingly common tendency to confuse these different concepts. "Anonymous" means withholding any and all names of the author; "pseudonymous" means providing a fictional name -- a "handle" to you email/ chatroom/ blog types.

So rather than posting as "anonymous," please use a pseudonym or "handle" if not your real name, and use the same pseudonym or handle each time you comment. This is really for the enjoyment of me and other readers -- consistent use of a pseudonym allows us to associate a personality with the comment. It's just nicer and more fun.

But there is a quid pro quo. I resolve from now on to be more interactive with you commenters -- comments on comments!

How many of you noticed the following irony?

Last week was "National Delurking Week" in the blogosphere, meaning that "lurkers" -- people who read blogs without posting comments -- were encouraged to come out and post comments.

Just the week before, on Thursday, January 5, "w" the Boy President signed the "Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act of 2005" into law. This law contains an extremely overbroad "e-nnoyance" provision, making it a crime to annoy someone over the internet without disclosing your true identity:

Whoever...utilizes any device or software that can be used to originate telecommunications or other types of communications that are transmitted, in whole or in part, by the Internet... without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass any person...who receives the communications...shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.

Clearly, the intent of the law is to prevent cyberstalking, but it's written so broadly and vaguely as to make any annoying utterance over the internet illegal if it's anonymous or pseudonymous. So, for instance, if President Bush were annoyed by my reference to him as "the boy President," ....

Sure, you can say that the law is plainly unconstitutional as applied to most anonymous or pseudonymous comments, and that the Supreme Court has recently reaffirmed the First Amendment right to engage in anonymous or pseudonymous satire, but still -- who wants to have to raise the constitutional defense to a criminal prosecution by some overzealous prosecutor?

Makes you think about that Alito guy, doesn't it?

Do you get many "spam bots" in your blog comments? I seem to get one every couple of weeks, usually in older posts -- where they're piling up, slowly but surely.

This one, which turned up in my December 29, 2005 post, struck me as kind of funny:

I read over your blog, and i found it inquisitive, you may find My Blog interesting. My blog is just about my day to day life, as a park ranger. So please Click Here To Read My Blog

"Inquisitive"?! I am strangely drawn to that use of that word. Inquiring minds want to know!

And what about the horrible chat-room grammar? Is that supposed to pass for folksy charm on the information superhighway?

Anyway, this is why I've decided to take corrective measures. It sounds like a command from the captain's chair of a starship in a sci-fi satire: "Mr. Sulu, activate word verification!"

What's a better way to troll for blog traffic: posting a picture of cute dogs?

Or a picture of a little boy in a snow suit?

I'm glad to have the company of Angry Pregnant Lawyer in my deep disappointment over the Redskins' playoff loss.

I may have disappointed APL further by throwing cold water on her celebration of the new Maryland law

that required companies with more than 10,000 employees (in other words, Wal-Mart) to spend 8 percent of the company's payroll on health care benefits or give that money over to the state's health care program for the poor.

What a great law! Unfortunately, it strikes me that there's a good chance it will be ruled null and void in light of ERISA (the Employment Retirement Income Security Act of 1974), the increasingly outdated employee-benefits law whose main effect may be to prevent states like Maryland from trying innovative solutions to eroding health care and pension protections.

How many of you have stopped reading? "ERISA preemption" is one of those subjects that makes lawyers' and law students' eyes glaze over. If there were a top ten list (what is that game show where contestants have to guess the top ten things based on an audience poll -- is it Family Feud??) for eye-glazing legal subjects the, top four would be:

1. Bankruptcy
2. Federal Income Taxation
3. ERISA
4. Trusts and Estates

or, the secret lives of law professors

I'm not one for making an effort to "put myself together" on weekends. Today, for instance, I'm sporting a 3-days' growth of beard and wearing a thermal undershirt under a V-neck sweater. More importantly, the thermal undershirt is the same one I wore yesterday and then slept in last night.

But as contradictory as it may seem, this morning I put gel in my hair. It's a brand I picked up at the organic grocery co-op, and I haven't tried it before.

The thing is, spring semester classes begin Tuesday. Getting the syllabus together is all well and good, but I need to learn the ways of this new hair gel before my first class of the semester.

B and I signed up for cable TV after more than a year without it. It's not like we never plopped ourselves in front of the television set -- just that we watched DVDs. But we did not have access to cable or network programming.

All this came to a screeching halt this Thursday with the arrival of the cable guy.

Why did I capitulate? Because the Washington Redskins are in the playoffs for the first time since 1999 and only the second time since they won the Super Bowl after the 1991 season.

Last Saturday, as the Redskins eked out a win over Tampa Bay, I watch from my neighborhood bar. I was quite lucky, actually, that the bar was nearly empty, and I was able to plop myself right in front of the big screen TV.



I put away two beers, two baskets of pub chips and a bratwurst -- no so much because I really wanted these things, but so that I would feel some entitlement to occupy the table for three and a half hours.



Frankly, I pined for the comfort of watching in my own living room. Control of the sound environment, a more judicious selection of snacks, the opportunity to cuddle under a blanket, being able to multi-task, or go to the bathroom without worrying about my stuff getting stolen.

The fact that I'll have all this for this afternoon's Redskins-Seahawks game strikes me as pure luxury. It's funny how by the simple expedient of depriving yourself of something most people take for granted, you can turn it into a special treat.

UPDATE: The Redskins lose 20-10 to the Seahawks. It's one of those games where it seems like my team is never in it, yet they could and perhaps should even win -- the sports fan's equivalent of a slow, agonizing death. But at least I had good snacks!

Don't tell my old favorite coffee house, Grandma Moses, but I'm having an illicit affair with Coffee Trader. The new place is young, hip, sleek. It has cold brewed iced coffee, regular and decaf (Grandma Moses drops its decaf iced coffee in the cold weather). It has attractive new furniture, in contrast to Grandma's comfy-but-ratty second-hand stuff.



It has sexy architecture, both interior and exterior, including a cozy balcony section. It has free wifi. It has real baked goods, as opposed to Grandma's inedible vegan bakery. It even has an ATM.



Coffee Trader is like the trophy wife of coffee places. It's way too young and attractive for me, but I'm infatuated with it. I want it. But not enough to marry it. I'm too attached to Grandma Moses.

What would Pat Robertson say about my week?

We took our Christmas tree down today. It was a really nice-looking tree, all cute and friendly. You know how adventure novels where the hero has to sleep out in the woods will sometimes refer to a "soft bed of pine needles"? Well, that is not this tree. This tree was a porcupine. A cactus. The needles were needles. They poked through clothes and gloves, and really hurt.

Pat Robertson would say that this is divine retribution for my putting a Christmas tree in my home without accepting Jesus Christ into my heart as my personal savior.

And what about my haircut on Tuesday -- which turned out so bad that I wore a knit cap all day yesterday, even though that's not my style and it got really hot when I was meeting my friend for coffee?

Pat Robertson would call it divine retribution for thinking bad thoughts during the haircut -- bad thoughts about Judge Alito, who only wants to save all those unborn babies from being killed.

Am I violating some blogging law by moving a comment thread from the comments into an actual post? Well, here goes.

[Question] Are you really a lawyer? Pardon the sarcasm, but do you really think Sen. Teddy's usual array of straw men could offer a primer on anything, other than being a demonstration of the Senator's excessive love for Chivas Regal?

I'm 46, and within my lifetime the "politics" of supreme Court nominees didn't matter. Only qualifications did. The idea that this has always been a "political" process is laughable.

What lefties, again and again, do is act as if fairly new practices are long-standing traditions; sometimes even people who are law profs do this.

[Answer] Are you really 46? You seem so much younger.

Name me one Supreme Court nomination process that was not political. Let's go back to your early years (1968-69): Warren Burger? He was one of the least qualified justices in the last 75 years, but Nixon knew he would make good on Nixon's "law and order" campaign promise. How about Lyndon Johnson's nomination of the highly liberal and super-qualified Associate Justice Abe Fortas to become Chief? The Republicans blocked the nomination with a filibuster. They went on and threatened to impeach him (and, after Fortas resigned, the liberal Justice Douglas), with Republican floor leader Gerald Ford saying that "high crimes and misdemeanors" (impeachable offenses) are "whatever Congress says they are."

How about Roosevelt's court-packing plan? Didn't the "politics" of the Justices matter then? How about the pro-slavery "politics" of justices between, say the1830s and the 1860s -- do you think Presidents and the Senate didn't think about that?

The only occasions when Supreme Court nominations don't seem "political" is when the nominees are too middle of the road to bother -- but then, the politics occurred behind the scenes, when the President was selecting the nominee precisely to avoid a political battle. Gee whiz, you can even pick that up from The West Wing.

Okay, so maybe I get a bit grandiose and too "in my head" when I play hockey. The Wednesday a.m. scrimmage is getting somewhat out of hand. There are no hockey moms playing, and even the younger kick-ass women skaters have mostly drifted away, to the point where it has become very playground. And I mean "playground" in the pejorative sense: a bunch of guys (only three women) one-upping each other and acting like the lesser players (e.g., me) aren't even there.

Example: Moe sees me wide open for a pass, looks around, passes in the other direction, where -- instant karma -- it is picked off by an opponent.

Example: racing for a loose puck, Jack skates up from behind and attempts to skate through me. I get tripped and slide on my backside into the boards.

But the worst of it is that these guys are very, very good players. I'd like to be that good, but for the last few weeks it seems as if they're pulling away from me rather than me catching up.

My finest moment today came as Jack and I both swatted at a loose puck that had dribbled in between us. It was one of those plays where whoever gets more force on his stick will win the momentary battle for the puck. Our sticks came together in a mighty crash, mingled with the sound of wood shattering. A blade from one of the sticks had snapped off!

I looked at my stick -- intact! -- and at Jack's jagged stump. He had to pick up his blade and skate off the ice to get another stick. Vengeance!

It was like an Arthurian legend -- a ringing clash of swords, one shatters, it was the bad guy's! We have to take our little triumphs where we can find them.

I don’t have TV reception, and I hadn’t made any provision to watch any of the Alito confirmation hearings. But I caught some of it today while waiting for a haircut – a real throwback to the days when barbershops were hangouts for talking community gossip and public affairs.

Two haircuts' worth of the hearings – one for the patron I had to wait behind, and mine – was about enough. First, I saw Senator Kennedy’s segment: There was very little question-asking, and the test for Alito seemed to be whether he could keep a composed face while the liberal Senator pontificated. As a short primer for viewers about how a really conservative justice could screw up the law pretty badly given the constitutional issues in the news these days, it wasn’t a total loss as public affairs viewing.

I can’t say the same thing about Senator Grassley’s litany of softball questions, which was more “constitutional law for dummies.” He gave Alito one chance after another to say things like, “No Senator, I agree that the constitution does not give judges the power to rule the entire nation by themselves.” Alito dully parroted judicial-nominee slogans -- like “judges don’t make law, legislatures make law” -- that are so oversimplified as to distort matters. But the hearings are not a job interview – they’re just a chance for the candidate to avoid imploding publicly.

Alito is not imploding at the hearings, so the real question is whether the Democrats can mount filibuster purely on the basis that this nominee would push the Court too far to the right. Whether he will vote to overturn Roe v. Wade or not – and it’s really impossible to predict that with any certainty – I think it’s clear that he’s more of a conservative hard-liner than O’Connor and so will push the Court to the right.

Alito is clearly well qualified, but that’s not the point. If qualifications were all that mattered, then the constitution would perhaps have provide for Senate “advice” only. But the constitution requires Senate “consent,” and that means the appointment process is supposed to be political. Bush has played this game the same way he has played everything else in his presidency: as though the Democratic opposition did not exist. If the Democrats can prove they exist with a filibuster, that would be great – and well justified.

You might hear some liberals lament that my argument would also justify a minority Republican Senate blocking a very liberal nominee if the Democrats someday controlled the White House and the Senate. Giving up that fantasy strikes me as a small and reasonable price to pay for blocking a judicial nominee who would uphold, among other things, the President’s power to create secret military courts to try people with illegally obtained wiretap evidence.

I spent the week between Xmas and New Year in the upper midwest. Here is a medly post from that trip, not in chronological order.

Silent Snow, Secret Snow

We drove to our lakeside vacation condo in a snowstorm. The tough driving was reward with beautiful snowscapes.



I would like to say that with our footfalls muffled by the thick white, B and I found ourselves in a contemplative world of snow-softened sound.



Yeah, right. We happened to be staying in the self-proclaimed "snowmobile capital of the world." The snowmobilers whiz by in random swarms, belching blue smoke. The last snow-mobile engine cuts off around 2 a.m. each night.



They look like huge mechanical cockroaches. I'd like to squash them.



Mall World

Is it just us, or should Minnesota's state motto be "the land of 10,000 malls"? I'm a guy who goes to an indoor shopping mall maybe once every six months. In our first two days in the state, we somehow hit two shopping malls. And it wasn't even to shop -- one was for a bathroom break and coffee; the other was for lunch. It just seems that, in suburban Minnesota, that's where you go.

I suppose the same point could be made about suburban anywhere. But as the home of Mall of America, the world's most visited shopping mall, Minnesota is certainly a national leader.

I really liked the twin cities. St. Paul has some beautiful old neighborhoods, and Minneaopolis has a cool downtown: an attractive mix of interesting new architecture and cool early 20th century commercial and industrial buildings. But there is a strange absence of street-level business in the downtown. Where are the coffee shops, the lunch counters, the small retail storefronts?



Why, they're all on the second floor in the Skyway. To deal with the cold winter months, they moved all that indoors, and blocks and blocks of buildings are connected by second-story skyways crossing the street.



You can walk for miles through Minneapolis's retail and commercial district without going outside. The overall effect, of course, is a great... indoor shopping mall.

Regional differences

New Years Eve day, at the grocery store. I buy a pecan Danish Kringle for Sunday morning. And for Saturday night -- New Year's Eve -- the shopping list includes pickled herring, a traditional New Year's Eve delicacy in this region. I manage to buy the last jar on the shelf. Where else does an American grocery store run out of pickled herring, ever?

Major League Baseball has organized an international baseball tournament called "the World Baseball Classic," to be played from March 3-20 by 16 teams representing countries from east Asia, Latin America, Europe, and North America. Even the Aussies are fielding a club.

I guess it allows for more Major Leaguers to play than the Summer Olympics, which conflicts with the heart of the MLB season. The World Baseball Classic conflicts only with spring training, and teams will probably agree to allow some of their veteran players to tune up for the MLB season by playing in the tournament rather than in spring training games.

It always seemed funny -- and grandiose -- that the championship of a game played, first in one, then only in a small handful of countries would be called "the World Series." But once you accept that premise, it becomes equally strange to the ear for an innovation like the March international tournament to be called the World BaseballClassic -- which may be "world," but is far from "classic."

No matter. The real action here, of course, is to expand the Major League Baseball empire -- and it is a true empire, with the U.S. as its capital -- by tapping into new international markets. Maybe a few talented players will be combed out of Europe, and more out of east Asia. (Latin American is already being pretty heavily mined for talent.)

But this is just gravy for what really boils down to a vast marketing enterprise. You can see the underlying goal in the upper right hand corner of the World Baseball Classic web page.

The very clever slogan for the Classic -- "baseball spoken here" -- suggests that baseball will become an international language.

But it's really about the hats. Undoubtedly made in sweatshops in China (which has a team in the tournament.) "Baseball spoken here" is in the same box as "your country's cap" and a link to "shop here."

When B and I read the morning newspaper together, B likes to do a kind of news broadcast. She gives out-loud excerpts, summaries, and news analysis -- complete with expletives, gasps and outcries.

This morning, it was the fact that average personal credit card debt in the U.S. has reached $9,000 per person. It is pretty horrific, I agree.

The overall effect is something like this:

I am second to no one in admiration of Bill Murray as an actor. Well, okay, I'm probably second to a lot of people in admiration of Bill Murray as an actor. But I like him as an actor. I loved him in Groundhog Day and Rushmore. I thought he was terrific as Polonius in the Ethan Hawke Hamlet.

But who told Murray that a good career move for him would be to drop the comedic edge and play nothing but morbidly depressed, flat- affect guys? Broken Flowers, which I just saw, is his third in a row in this role after the wildly overrated Lost in Translation and the watchable but disappointing Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (where, as in Broken Flowers, the story revolves around the abrupt appearance of the grown up son from a long-ago fling).

One of my first thoughts when Murray first appears on screen in was "boy, I hope I don't look that crappy when I'm sixty... he doesn't look a day under 65." (And see here and here for some more looks.) Only -- you can look this up -- Murray is only 55! Wow, either he's been sick, or else it's been some hard living.

I found Broken Flowers to be quite watchable -- mostly because I was curious to see how aging former A-list hotties like Jessica Lange and Sharon Stone were looking as well as to see how the mystery of the unknown son turned out.

But the movie is extremely thin, fake-profound and film-schoolish. Long, languid shots of stuff that you or I could get by stepping outside with a videocam. There must be 10-15 minutes of footage of driving or sitting in airplanes or airports.

That this is what Jim Jarmush has "matured" into as a film-maker reflects not so well on what has come before. I have only seen half a dozen of his dozen or so movies, but really I only liked Stranger than Paradise. Down by Law, Mystery Train and Night on Earth were like bad rip-offs of Stranger.

Broken Flowers is the same schtick, mellowed, in color, and with a plot. That's the only difference. His directing and pacing reminded of nothing so much as computer games like The 3D Adventures of Nancy Drew or Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. These are the ones where you get stuck moving languidly around an empty set with evocative backgrounds and mood music punctuated by moments when you stumble upon another character and engage in brief stilted dialogue.

I consider Jarmush as positive evidence of my hunch that the best movie-making talents tend to follow the money into more mainstream movies, and that some acclaimed indie film-makers are poseurs.

Finally, whatever else you might say about commercial movies, they tend to be pros when it comes to editing. Jarmush, making a movie for his indie audience whom he assumes will eat whatever he puts in front of them, treats us to a scene where Murray stares blankly from his sofa while Jarmush's latest mood music obsession plays in the background -- for three minutes.

The demands of commercialism seem to put a premium on editing skill. I'm consistently struck at how virtually all of the deleted scenes you get as DVD special features (and most of the added material in "directors' cut versions -- Apocalypse Now... my god!) really do belong on the cutting room floor.

My friend L just lost her mom, at around the 2-year anniversary of my mom's death. What do you say to a friend who has just lost a parent? The search for "the right words" is so hard that many of us outsource the problem to Hallmark cards.

In December 2003, I moved into my parents' house to take care of my mom for her last 2 1/2 weeks. To allow her to die in her own bedroom required an exhausting logistical case-management effort on the part of both me and my sister.

One of the nicest condolence notes I received was sent by a friend, D, whose mother had died several years before. D said that she was sure that my mom was grateful that I was there to help her with "that important transition." I don't believe in an afterlife, yet the notion that death was an "important transition" in a person's life struck me as true and somehow very comforting.

So the other day I wrote to my friend L that "when my mom died, I had the feeling that in exchange for this incredible sadness, I was given a token redeemable for a small glimmering of insight. The world was darker but more vivid, and for the first time I could talk as an equal to people who had experienced that loss."

Maybe the Hallmark card is better, I don't know. I wonder whether Hallmark requires its condolence card writers to have had firsthand experience with grief. I doubt it.

... submitted to the Microsoft Monopoly?



Bill and Melinda Gates are pictured on the cover of Time Magazine sandwiching Bono in a three-way of "Good Samaritanism." Apparently Gates has been engaging in philanthropic activities in the third world.



I have a problem with the idea of naming Gates as a Person of the Year for any sort of goodness -- as opposed to say naming him person of the year for beating the U.S. Justice Department Antitrust Division into submission. You don't have to be a "good" person to win that Time Magazine honor, just -- like Hitler, who was "Man of the Year" for 1938 -- influential. But there's that phrase "good samaritan" right there on the cover. I just don't see Bill Gates as any sort of a good person.

For starters, Bill Gates is literally the richest man in the world, according to Forbes Magazine, with a net worth of 40.7 billion dollars. A man with that much money would have to give away an awful lot just to avoid being named "World's Biggest Selfish Asshole." I'm not sure what I'd do with that much money, but I'm pretty sure that I'd feel like I had a comfortable nest egg at around $1 billion. That would give me, if I were Gates, around $39.7 billion to play with philanthropically. Or else maybe buy one of the Virgin Islands.

Don't be fooled by the geeky sweaters and wire-rimmed glasses. Gates is a robber baron in the worst American, John D. Rockefeller, anti-competitive tradition. Microsoft has risen to dominance, not with superior products, but superior skills at playing the game of capitalism. It has consistently gobbled up, or destroyed, superior products in its rise to its mind-boggling market share.

Microsoft controls the operating systems of, what, 85% of the world's personal computers? That strikes me as kind of like a political leader who controls 85% of the media outlets. (Imagine Rupert Murdock 10 times more powerful in his media field while serving as President of the United States.) Any small software maker who doesn't do what Microsoft wants might find its product suddenly incompatible with Windows.

Ten years ago, the word processor Word Perfect had the lion's share of the legal professional market. I happen to find Word Perfect to be a much better and more user friendly program than Microsoft Word. Now I'm pretty sure that Word has the majority business and in another 10 years, we'll all be using it.

How? Simple. Not by head to head competition for the better product, or even the better marketing in a fair economic fight. Instead Microsoft has for years gotten away with bundling its software, including Word, with new personal computer sales. When college students or law students buy their first computer, what do you think they're gonna do -- shell out $300 for a new edition of Word Perfect, or just take the copy of Word that comes with the computer apparently free or heavily discounted (its sales price buried into the sticker price for the computer)? In this diabolically clever way, Microsoft has taken over the student market, and is biding its time until those students take over the purchasing decisions for their professions.

And it gets even worse. One of my neices is taking a class in her public high school, which provides training in office software -- spreadsheet, word processing, etc. The course is called "Microsoft" for short, because the software used in the course is the Microsoft Office package.

Did Microsoft discount or even donate the software to my neice's public school? What good samaritans!

This stuff should all be illegal under the antitrust laws, of course, but even if it were not under the control of the Bush administration, I doubt whether the Antitrust Division has the stomach for a new opportunity to be spanked in litigation with Microsoft.

So to me, celebrating Bill Gates's charitable work is just another instance of our democratic society's dark secret love of the benevolent tyrant.

Yesterday, in a moment of road-trip desperation, B and I stopped at the town of Middle Nowhere for lunch. While I'd like to say I have an unerring instinct for finding the equivalent of The Chatterbox Cafe (in Garrison Keillor's fictional Lake Wobegone) in every small town where I stop for lunch, the truth is that (a) many small towns no longer have a Chatterbox Cafe, and (b) the Chatterbox Cafe can actually really suck.

Anyway, we stopped at the equivalent of Subway -- so equivalent, in fact, that it was Subway. It was one of those occupying one end of a truck stop convenience store. After watching the food preparation employees languidly apply an assortment of vegetables, I looked around for the tip jar. Fast food places generally don't allow them: I suppose they think tip jars would be off-putting to their customers, whom they assume are looking for rock-bottom prices and would view tip jars as a tad less unappetizing than having a homeless panhandler standing next to the cash register.

I am very ambivalent about tip jars and tipping in general. More on this in a separate post, but what's the idea of places like Starbucks asking their customers to supplement their employees low wages with spare change?

Anyway, this Subway did have a tip jar -- of sorts. It was actually a donation box for a worker at the Subway in a neighboring town, who was incurring heavy medical expenses for her young child who has a congenital heart problem.

Lovely -- now they're asking customers to supplement benefits! How about a decent health care package for your workers? I guess not.

This is Republican health care policy at work. No national health care, of course, and health care through the employer -- mmmm, not so much. Instead, health care through charity. Remember the "thousand points of light"?

Here's an idea: low-wage employers like Subway, McDonalds, Walmart, etc., can run charity promotions. "For every purchase of $10 or more, we will add 25 cents to our employee benefit fund to provide health insurance for our workers!"

To ring in the new year, The Columnist Manifesto is pleased to announce the First Annual Best Photograph Taken From a Moving Car Competition.




Prizes

• Personalized congratulations from me!
• The satisfaction of knowing that you've received personalized congratulations from me!
• Publication on my massive publicity-machine-of-a-blog of your prize- winning photo!
• And more! (Maybe)

Deadline:

March 1, 2006

Rules:

1. You may enter as many photos as you like. Send entries to me by email (see my email link in the side bar) with the subject line: BPTFMCC. You can attach the photo to the email or send me a URL link to the photo.
2. The photo must be taken from a motor vehicle traveling at a minimum of 45 miles per hour.
3. The photographer cannot be the driver of the vehicle.
4. The vehicle and its occupants must be obeying all traffic laws while the photo is taken.
5. Preference will be given to photos which somehow convey that they were taken from a moving car.
6. By entering a photograph in the BPTFMCC, you give me a limited license to publish that photograph on The Columnist Manifesto, with a photo credit to you. You contest entry email should indicate how you would like your photo credit to appear (e.g., real name, pseudonym, name of your blog, etc.).