Hillary Clinton, chin in palm, puts up with Rand Paul's tirade.

Rand begins with a feint: "I'm glad to see your health is improving." Note: he's a doctor. In fact, he's an ophthalmologist, but he didn't add, "And by the way, I love your new glasses." No, he proceeded to flay her.

This she was prepared for. All she had to do was endure. His time would run out, and it would be a Democrat's turn, which is to say it would be rest and relaxation time again. Mission accomplished.

Your assessment.
	Rand Paul destroyed Hillary.
	Rand Paul grandstanded and Hillary waited him out.
	Rand Paul was a clown and Hillary enjoyed seeing the drama spew from someone other than her.
	Rand Paul is a despicable little man and Hillary is a great lady.
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Prof "assaulted by employees of a McDonald’s in Paris who objected to his wearing a cyborg-style eyepiece while eating dinner with his family."

McDonald's claims its people were respectful but concerned that he was secretly filming customers and invading their privacy (under French law). So he shows up looking like this:



What do you think? Should the restaurant be required to leave him alone, though his looks upset the other customers? Should we get used to the future with its “computerized vision systems"? Or should we preserve our instincts about dangers?

This — from the man's blog — may seem irrelevant, but it affected me:

On the evening of 2012 July 1st, my wife and children and I went to McDonalds at 140, Avenue Champs Elysees, Paris, France, after a day of sightseeing (8 museums and other landmark sights, as part of a boat cruise package)....

We ordered two Ranch Wraps, one burger, and one mango McFlurry....

Is this the right way to be in Paris? Obviously not, but freedom matters, and I'd like the French to care about freedom.

"ok lets see if that thing with glasses chicks suddenly becoming super weird feminine when they whip off their glasses works."

Oh, my! It does!!!

(Via Metafilter.)

At the Negativity Café...

... it's not all bad.

"I just wanted to let you guys know that the more replies you people post, the more business and the more hits and sales I get. My goal is NEGATIVE advertisement."

Cheating and enraging customers so they denounce you on the web... as a business model, thanks to Google.

Online chatter about DecorMyEyes, even furious online chatter, pushed the site higher in Google search results, which led to greater sales....

[T]he owner of DecorMyEyes might be more than just a combustible bully with a mean streak and a potty mouth. He might also be a pioneer of a new brand of anti-salesmanship — utterly noxious retail — that is facilitated by the quirks and shortcomings of Internet commerce and that tramples long-cherished traditions of customer service, like deference and charm.

The linked NYT article begins with a story about a businessman who sounds like has crossed the line into making frauds and threats. The scheme fails if you get arrested! So strain out the vivid example that bulks up the article and imagine a business that just has crappy products and nasty customer service. Would that play Google so well? Should Google be saving these eyeglass customers from their own failure to check out the business before they order? They'd easily find the complaints.

Now, one reason the eyeglass business is playing this negative game so well is that people are Googling the brand names of eyeglass frames, and the negative comments against the company talk about how they believe they didn't get the brand they ordered. They say they got fakes. Let's think about what's going on here. Who buys expensive brand-name eyeglasses without trying them on? I bet most of these customers have tried them on — in local eyeglass stores. Then, instead of paying the price the shopkeeper wants, they go to the web to find a better deal. At that point, they are doing a search for a particular brand name. They see the price and jump at the notion that the local shopkeeper is cheating them. Aha! They think they're being smart when they are being very dumb.

If you read far enough into the (long) article, you get to the part where the reporter — David Segal — interviews the businessman — a guy named Vitaly Borker:

“Look,” he says, grabbing an iPad off a small table. He types “Christian Audigier,” the name of a French designer, and “glasses” into Google. DecorMyEyes pops up high on the first page.

“Why am I there?” he asks, sounding both peeved and amazed. “I don’t belong there. I actually outrank the designer’s own Web site.”...

Despite the fear he has inspired, Mr. Borker doesn’t regard himself as a terror. He prefers to think of himself as the Howard Stern of online commerce — an outsize character prone to shocking utterances....

“People overreact,” he pshaws, often because they’re unaccustomed to plain speaking, New York-style. Anyway, he adds, if somebody messes with you, and you mess back, “how is that a threat?”...

“The customer is always right — not here, you understand?” he says, raising his voice. “I hate that phrase — the customer is always right. Why is the merchant always wrong? Can the customer ever be wrong? Is that not possible?”

Robert Downey Jr. is Mr. Peanut.

Great! I've always loved Robert Downey Jr. and Mr. Peanut:



But why is the nutcracker named "Richard"?

Background on Mr. Peanut:"Mr. Peanut was created in 1916 after Planters Peanuts held a contest to create a logo and a 14-year-old boy drew a nut with human features." I'd really like to see the original drawing. According to Wikipedia, the boy (Antonio Gentile) just drew a some sort of man-peanut — and "an artist later added spats, a top hat, a monocle, and a cane." So... did the boy's drawing have the gloves? The unfailingly optimistic smile?

"A man was arrested after stealing author Jonathan Franzen's glasses from the writer and demanding a ransom of £100,000 ($158,808) at a book launch."

"Police said a helicopter was called to chase the culprit, who jumped into the Serpentine lake in London. The 27-year-old has since been released with no further action being taken and the glasses have been recovered."

A helicopter? I mean, I know Franzen's book — "Freedom" — is considered tremendously important, but... it was a pair of glasses. Why chase the guy with a helicopter?

Is it because those glasses are part of his signature look? Quick! Which one is Franzen?



Without the glasses... he could be... just anybody.

Some book journal editor who was at the scene of the crime, said: "It was frankly quite bizarre. Considering the seriousness of Franzen's work, this is the last thing anyone expected at his book launch."

Considering the seriousness of Franzen's work! I don't understand literary-journalist logic. It's exactly seriousness that inspires absurd prankish tweaking. (If you don't understand my logic, you need to watch a few Marx Brothers movies.)

Ted Olson...

... "softened"? By his new wife? I find it hard to believe. But if he gets a new haircut and new glasses, then I might believe.

"Goes to show you that a pretty girl can wear just about anything and look cute."

Is that the explanation? A mystery!

We're here at the laundromat...

There's an old Reader's Digest large-print edition.



"Now, I can enjoy my bath again safely."

See that unicorn on the table? I got hit by it later. Accidentally. Don't think the unicorn-loving girl became enraged at me. Just a little careless unicorn-flinging at the laundromat. [ADDED: Vicious. You hit me with a unicorn.]

Jane Russell needs telescopic glasses:



I wonder how the world sees us.



(Enlarge.)

Matt Welch vs. Tom Daschle's glasses.

"He meets a deaf woman who loves music. Her hearing aid has broken. But she has good eyes and can read to him, but she slurs the words."

"It turns out that he plays the guitar, and she can hear it, a bit. Then in a final shocking twist, we learn that his middle name is 'Adam,' and her name is 'Eve.' Sadly, however, she is a robot."

That's Original George's entry in the "Time Enough At Last" challenge. The idea was to write a sequel to the famous "Twilight Zone" episode in which a man, Henry Bemis, who only wants to be left alone to read, is the sole survivor of a nuclear attack and then, with time enough at last to do all his reading, he breaks his glasses, without which he cannot read. So, what next?

Christy's entry is more "The Remake" than "The Sequel":

He is on the steps to the paperless Library circa 2020, picks up a Kindle and discovers the electromagnetic pulse has wiped all digital media clean.

Actually, the comments thread veered away from the challenge and into the philosophical inquiry: If there were no longer any possibility of interaction with human beings in real life, what books would be worth reading?

Anyway, I wrote the original post saying I'd reveal my sequel idea later, so here goes:

We see Henry agonizing over his broken glasses and suffering. He has to grope about in his near blindness, etc. etc. Eventually, he gropes his way into an eyeglass store. But all the glasses are melted from the nuclear blast. And the frames in an eyeglass store don't have prescription lenses anyway, Henry, you idiot. But there, under the counter there's a safe, blasted half open. Inside, there is a pair of glasses — thick glasses, like his old ones. We see through his eyes as he tries them on: The vision is clear. Henry is jubilant. He runs through the town back to his old stack of books on the library steps. He sits down, and, no sooner does he open up a book to read than the glasses fall off, hit the step, and break.

"Time Enough at Last" — the sequel.

Remember that great episode of "Twilight Zone" with Burgess Meredith as Henry Bemis, the guy who only wanted to be left alone to read and gets his wish? Embedded below are the last 8 minutes to refresh your recollection (and you can watch the beginning and middle here and here if you want.)(And here's the Wikipedia entry to get up to speed more quickly.)



What I've been contemplating is "Time Enough at Last: The Sequel." I have my idea, but you go first.

ADDED: Here's better video, all in one piece, with a commercial.

Deskscape.

"Lots of folks are wearing those 2009 glasses, and I suddenly realize that this is the last year for the 00 glasses."

"You'll have to wait until the year 3000 to wear glasses like that. Will we even have eyes in 3000?"

I wrote that at 10:08 in the New Year's Eve live-blog.

In the comments, just an hour ago, Peter Hoh wrote: "Someone else noticed the 200X glasses issue." He links here. Ha ha.

That reminds me, Chris explained why I was wrong. Let me illustrate:

At the Sepia Café...

... you can talk about your faded dreams.

"Yes, he can see you fine through his solid-gold eyeglasses, he simply doesn’t have time to dally with the likes of you."

Modern Drunkard picks the 10 greatest alcohol icons of all time, beginning with "The Striding Man," who embodies Johnnie Walker. (Via Throwing Things.)

A man in shorts.

Reading Tom Wolfe's "I Am Charlotte Simmons," I was amused to run across this description of a man wearing shorts. (At page 99.)

All that elegance was what made the personage of Dr. Lewin seem so curious. Last week, when the class first met, he had worn a plaid cotton shirt and pants -- nothing remarkable about that. The shirt had had long sleeves, and the pants had been long pants. But this morning he had on a short-sleeved shirt that showed too much of his skinny, hairy arms, and denim shorts that showed too much of this gnarly, hairy legs. He looked for all the world like a seven-year-old who at the touch of a wand had become old, tall, bald on top, and hairy everywhere else, an ossified seven-year-old, a pair of eyeglasses with lenses thick as ice pushed up to the summit of his forehead -- unaccountably addressing thirty college students, at Dupont, no less.

"Why is [Scalia] blogging his concurrence....?"

Read Dahlia Lithwick's write-up of yesterday's death penalty case, Kansas v. Marsh, in which the court upholds a state law that requires the death penalty when the jury weighs the aggravating and mitigating factors and finds them in equipoise. In Lithwick's words "the tie goes to the hangman."

Let's concentrate on what she has to say about Scalia:

[T]he real wackiness today comes with Justice Antonin Scalia's concurrence, which is nominally about the case but is actually a full-bore global assault on any claim ever made anywhere about the execution or exoneration of an innocent defendant. Nobody is immune to Scalia's nail-spitting this morning: He attacks the 1987 study cited by Souter whose "obsolescence began at the moment of publication"; the "exonerees" who are "paraded by various professors" (from whom else could the word professors be a slur?); and the dissent, which merely "parrots articles or reports that support its attack on the American criminal justice system."...

Why is he blogging his concurrence, rather than taking a step back and actually writing it with some reasoned regard for the arguments on the other side?...

[Scalia] ... paint[s] the law as this dispassionate machine, into which you enter the legal facts and then download the correct answers. This is not a "moral" process, they say. This is a coolly rational process that works best when meddlesome supreme court judges leave it alone. But then the force of his argument rests wholly on his increasingly hysterical cataloging of the crimes of the so-called "innocent" exonerees. He isn't dispassionate here; he's hardly even rational at points. How can he assert that death isn't different, when it clearly drives him to the brink of insanity?

I don't agree that the originalist approach to interpretation is inconsistent with forceful, vivid writing. Lithwick disapproves of the interpretive methodology and that motivates her to portray it as mechanical and inhuman -- the judge as a big computer. Then, she demands consistency within her image and criticizes Scalia for inconsistency. He's not allowed to seem human, because he claimed to be a machine!

But I must say that I do love the notion that to show one's human feeling is to sound like a blogger.

Anyway, what's this about "various professors" with their "parade" of "exonorees"? Let's go to the Scaliatext. He's responding to the dissent, which relies at one point on "a handful of studies that bemoan the alleged prevalence of wrongful death sentences."

One study (by Lanier and Acker) is quoted by the dissent as claiming that “ ‘more than 110’ death row prisoners have been released since 1973 upon findings that they were innocent of the crimes charged, and ‘hundreds of additional wrongful convictions in potentially capital cases have been documented over the past century.’ ” Post, at 8 (opinion of Souter, J.). For the first point, Lanier and Acker cite the work of the Death Penalty Information Center (more about that below) and an article in a law review jointly authored by Radelet, Lofquist, and Bedau (two professors of sociology and a professor of philosophy). For the second point, they cite only a 1987 article by Bedau and Radelet. See Miscarriages of Justice in Potentially Capital Cases, 40 Stan. L. Rev. 21. In the very same paragraph which the dissent quotes, Lanier and Acker also refer to that 1987 article as “hav[ing] identified 23 individuals who, in their judgment, were convicted and executed in this country during the 20th century notwithstanding their innocence.” Lanier & Acker, Capital Punishment, the Moratorium Movement, and Empirical Questions, 10 Psychology, Public Policy & Law 577, 593 (2004). This 1987 article has been highly influential in the abolitionist world. Hundreds of academic articles, including those relied on by today’s dissent, have cited it. It also makes its appearance in judicial decisions—cited recently in a six-judge dissent in House v. Bell, 386 F. 3d 668, 708 (CA6 2004) (en banc) (Merritt, J., dissenting), for the proposition that “the system is allowing some innocent defendants to be executed.” The article therefore warrants some further observations.

The 1987 article’s obsolescence began at the moment of publication. The most recent executions it considered were in 1984, 1964, and 1951; the rest predate the Allied victory in World War II. (Two of the supposed innocents are Sacco and Vanzetti.) Bedau & Radelet, supra, at 73. Even if the innocence claims made in this study were true, all except (perhaps) the 1984 example would cast no light upon the functioning of our current system of capital adjudication. The legal community’s general attitude toward criminal defendants, the legal protections States afford, the constitutional guarantees this Court enforces, and the scope of federal habeas review, are all vastly different from what they were in 1961. So are the scientific means of establishing guilt, and hence innocence—which are now so striking in their operation and effect that they are the subject of more than one popular TV series. (One of these new means, of course, is DNA testing—which the dissent seems to think is primarily a way to identify defendants erroneously convicted, rather than a highly effective way to avoid conviction of the innocent.)

But their current relevance aside, this study’s conclusions are unverified. And if the support for its most significant conclusion—the execution of 23 innocents in the 20th century—is any indication of its accuracy, neither it, nor any study so careless as to rely upon it, is worthy of credence. The only execution of an innocent man it alleges to have occurred after the restoration of the death penalty in 1976—the Florida execution of James Adams in 1984—is the easiest case to verify. As evidence of Adams’ innocence, it describes a hair that could not have been his as being “clutched in the victim’s hand,” Bedau & Radelet, supra, at 91. The hair was not in the victim’s hand; “[i]t was a remnant of a sweeping of the ambulance and so could have come from another source.” Markman & Cassell, Protecting the Innocent: A Response to the Bedau-Radelet Study, 41 Stan. L. Rev. 121, 131 (1988). The study also claims that a witness who “heard a voice inside the victim’s home at the time of the crime” testified that the “voice was a woman’s,” Bedau & Radelet, supra, at 91. The witness’s actual testimony was that the voice, which said “ ‘ “In the name of God, don’t do it” ’ ” (and was hence unlikely to have been the voice of anyone but the male victim), “ ‘sounded “kind of like a woman’s voice, kind of like strangling or something U .” ’ ” Markman & Cassell, Protecting the Innocent, at 130. Bedau and Radelet failed to mention that upon arrest on the afternoon of the murder Adams was found with some $200 in his pocket—one bill of which “was stained with type O blood. When Adams was asked about the blood on the money, he said that it came from a cut on his finger. His blood was type AB, however, while the victim’s was type O.” Id., at 132. Among the other unmentioned, incriminating details: that the victim’s eyeglasses were found in Adams’ car, along with jewelry belonging to the victim, and clothing of Adams’ stained with type O blood. Ibid. This is just a sample of the evidence arrayed against this “innocent.” See id., at 128–133, 148–150.

Critics have questioned the study’s findings with regard to all its other cases of execution of alleged innocents for which “appellate opinions U set forth the facts proved at trial in detail sufficient to permit a neutral observer to assess the validity of the authors’ conclusions.” Id., at 134. (For the rest, there was not “a reasonably complete account of the facts U [sic] readily available,” id., at 145.) As to those cases, the only readily verifiable ones, the authors of the 1987 study later acknowledged, “We agree with our critics that we have not ‘proved’ these executed defendants to be innocent; we never claimed that we had.” Bedau & Radelet, The Myth of Infallibility: A Reply to Markman and Cassell, 41 Stan. L. Rev. 161, 164 (1988). One would have hoped that this disclaimer of the study’s most striking conclusion, if not the study’s dubious methodology, would have prevented it from being cited as authority in the pages of the United States Reports. But alas, it is too late for that. Although today’s dissent relies on the study only indirectly, the two dissenters who were on the Court in January 1993 have already embraced it. “One impressive study,” they noted (referring to the 1987 study), “has concluded that 23 innocent people have been executed in the United States in this century, including one as recently as 1984.” Herrera v. Collins, 506 U. S. 390, 430, n. 1 (1993) (Blackmun, J., joined by Stevens and Souter, JJ., dissenting).

Remarkably avoiding any claim of erroneous executions, the dissent focuses on the large numbers of non-executed “exonerees” paraded by various professors. It speaks as though exoneration came about through the operation of some outside force to correct the mistakes of our legal system, rather than as a consequence of the functioning of our legal system. Reversal of an erroneous conviction on appeal or on habeas, or the pardoning of an innocent condemnee through executive clemency, demonstrates not the failure of the system but its success. Those devices are part and parcel of the multiple assurances that are applied before a death sentence is carried out.

Sorry to print such a long passage, but this is what Lithwick decried as his "increasingly hysterical cataloging of the crimes of the so-called 'innocent' exonerees." Remember, she said "He isn't dispassionate here; he's hardly even rational at points" and that the death penalty "clearly drives him to the brink of insanity." Does Scalia deserve that?

I could ask why is Lithwick blogging her criticism, but the question answers itself: She's writing for Slate, and Slate readers are sure to love a "Scalia's ca-ray-zee" rant. Are they going to check the Scaliatext or go about their busy lives feeling one notch more certain that Scalia's a wacko?

I'm glad to see that Robin Givhan won a Pulitzer Prize.

Here's the report in her newspaper, The Washington Post. The category is Criticism. Criticize all you want, but she's my favorite bloggable columnist. There was that column on Condoleezza Rice's stiletto boots:

As Rice walked out to greet the troops, the coat blew open in a rather swashbuckling way to reveal the top of a pair of knee-high boots. The boots had a high, slender heel that is not particularly practical. But it is a popular silhouette because it tends to elongate and flatter the leg. In short, the boots are sexy.

Blogged here:

Robin Givhan... heavy-breathes about the sexuality of Rice's clothes, even though all we're really talking about here is that the outfit was all black ("The darkness lends an air of mystery and foreboding"), that the boots had high heels ("Heels … alter her posture in myriad enticing ways, all of which are politically incorrect to discuss"), and that women often dress much less attractively ("She was not wearing a bland suit with a loose-fitting skirt and short boxy jacket with a pair of sensible pumps").

Women with power easily unleash ideation about sex -- and sex and power. If the woman can't be contained by the thought that her powerfulness has removed her sexuality altogether, then the thought becomes that her sexuality has merged with her power. In the case of Condoleezza Rice, who has a high position of power and is distinctly attractive, she seems to become a strange new being -- a superhero – like Neo in "The Matrix"!

Is it wrong to talk about powerful women this way? I say no. Image, fashion, and beauty are all important. And we certainly didn't refrain from talking about how the male candidates for President looked in 2004. We obsessed over their ties, their hair and their makeup, and the bulges under their clothes. So go ahead and spout your theories about the meaning of Condoleezza Rice's high-heeled boots.

Mine is: these boots are made for running for President.

There was the one about John Bolton:

The fulsome silhouette of the mustache makes for a particularly dreary distraction and seems to pull his whole face downward. It makes Bolton, who is only 56, look hoary and dour. For a man who has shown little evidence of a capacity to charm -- an ability that can come in handy for an ambassador -- the mustache makes him appear unwelcoming. For all of the testimony about his spiteful dealings with both colleagues and underlings, and his denials of such behavior, he managed to look mean.

Blogged here:

Well, that goes along with my longtime opinion of mustaches: they make men look mean. Charlie Chaplin might be the only exception. Please men! Let us see your philtrum! Nothing makes a man more adorable than a well-shaped philtrum. And nothing uglifies like a mustache!

There was the one about what Judith Miller and Li'l Kim wore for their sentencing walks:

The women seemed acutely aware that the sentencing walk -- like its predecessor, the perp walk -- defines them in the public's mind. In its execution, it is not enough to stand straight and hold one's head high. This is a powerful visual image capable of conveying subtleties and broad strokes. Both women were playing to their fans.

Blogged here:

Givhan goes on to describe the effect serving time will have on the two women's careers. Since Li'l Kim is a rap artist, according to Givhan, it can only help. For rap fans: "The prison term seems less an ordeal than a right of passage." Well, you can argue about whether that's politically incorrect, but it sure is a usage error. Where are the WaPo proofreaders?

(Whoops.)

There was the one blogged here:

"Why dress in 'ho gear' and risk being treated like a hooker?"

Oh, come on. You're not going to blog every single essay Robin Givhan writes, are you?

Well, I don't know, maybe I should. You know she does ask some pretty tantalizing questions:

If clothes function as semiotics, where does the power lie -- with the sender or the receiver? And what happens when the sender is purposefully offering up misinformation?

Yeah, you find those questions tantalizing?

Uh, no, I guess not. Now that you mention it.

There was the one about Lisa Kudrow as Valerie Cherish:

All of ["The Comeback"]'s nuances are reflected in Cherish's most distinctive physical characteristic, her long red hair with its painstakingly organized curls that have been flipped back and away from her face. That hair is gloriously thick and the waves fall with an unnatural precision. The hair appears Breck Girl clean, devoid of the styling products now used to give hair an informal, slightly messy appearance. Hers is hair meant to be tossed in slow motion during the opening montage of "Baywatch."

In constructing the character, Kudrow has said that Cherish's hair color was a calculated decision. In Cherish's mind, "blond is dumb comedy, red hair is smart, sexy comedy." And, presumably, brunette isn't funny at all.

Blogged here:

Givhan doesn't mention it, but red hair and comedy are indelibly associated with Lucille Ball. But of course, Cherish is wrong about a lot of things, so Kudrow's analysis of how Cherish thinks must be understood in that light. But I have a feeling Lisa loves Lucy....

Why is red hair so meaningful?

There was the one blogged here:

"Standing alone, Mrs. Bush looked lovely."

"But next to Camilla, whose Robinson Valentino blazer and skirt made her look like a large rectangle, the first lady reminded one of a radiant bride shining brightly next to a dutifully bland bridesmaid." That's the description from WaPo's Robin Givhan, who also takes note of the President: "The president looked handsome in his tuxedo. For once he didn't have the body language of a kid with a bad sunburn forced to wear a wool suit."

The one blogged here:

Saddam on trial -- in a Western suit with a pocket square but no tie!

Robin Givhan wonders what that means:

The pocket square was a particularly distracting flourish. Paired with a tie, a pocket square tends to make a man look more formally attired. But without that accompaniment, it can look almost jaunty and rakish -- like Sinatra or Dino in Vegas.

Hussein's style choice throws the viewer off balance. Is his modest paean to the Flamingo a simple reflection of his hair-dyeing, gold-leaf-loving, frightful vanity? Or has he decided to beat the "occupiers" from within their own system? Take it over, or mock it?

There was the infamous slam at the Alitos, as blogged here:

"They often looked as though they had coordinated their ensembles in the manner of a family heading off to the Sears photo studio."

WaPo's Robin Givhan analyzes the Alitos from the fashion standpoint:

He and his wife of almost 21 years wore similar wire-rimmed glasses. His were only slightly more angular than hers. They both have short-cropped brown hair....On the first day of hearings, her red suit with its contrasting piping matched his red tie. On the second day, she echoed his pale blue shirt with her blue sweater, which fell discreetly to mid-thigh. On the fourth day, her white jacket over a red dress mirrored his white shirt and red tie.

Givhan skirts very close to sneering, but in the end, she seems rather admiring. Or is that patronizing?

Earlier she'd written about the more perfectly dressed John Roberts family, in a column called "An Image a Little Too Carefully Coordinated":

Dressing appropriately is a somewhat selfless act. It's not about catering to personal comfort. One can't give in fully to private aesthetic preferences. Instead, one asks what would make other people feel respected? What would mark the occasion as noteworthy? What signifies that the moment is bigger than the individual?

But the Roberts family went too far. In announcing John Roberts as his Supreme Court nominee, the president inextricably linked the individual -- and his family -- to the sweep of tradition. In their attire, there was nothing too informal; there was nothing immodest. There was only the feeling that, in the desire to be appropriate and respectful of history, the children had been costumed in it.

Reading about the Pulitzer Prize reminded me first of that column, which I was suprised to see I didn't blog about. Didn't everyone blog about that one? Looking back at my blog from that time, I can see why I didn't get to it. I was incredibly busy dealing with the nomination itself.

Givhan put down Hillary Clinton too:

After eight years as first lady wearing innumerable skirt suits that did little to flatter her physique, she now wears pants almost exclusively. As a matter of personal style, this is a good thing. The senator looks more streamlined and elegant.

Oh, don't say that's not a putdown. No woman wants to hear a compliment like that! Blogged here (getting to the subject of men in skirts).

Most recently, she caught my eye with this one about the way they dress on "American Idol," blogged here.

So congratulations to Robin Givhan! Keep up the richly bloggable work.