Tomorrow the new "Seinfeld" DVD collection comes out and Entertainment Weekly is recommending it because you'll get to see the full-length original show (the syndicated version shaves off a minute or so), there are commentary tracks (with Julia Louis-Dreyfus partaking of episode one for the first time), there are deleted scenes, additional stand-up material, and there's a 60-minute documentary.
EW also has some recommendations about what other TV shows ought to come out in disc form. But they don't seem remember any shows before 1965, so they fail to mention the show I really want: "Dobie Gillis"! Oh, how I love that show! Warren Beatty was even in it--a minor character, but it's fun to see him as a high school student. There are all these people who love "Gilligan's Island," so there must be a fan base for Bob Denver: he was unforgettably great as the beatnik high schooler Maynard G. Krebs ("You rang?"). And no one has ever been more beautiful and funny at the same time than the brilliant Tuesday Weld (who played Thalia Menninger).
UPDATE: I picked up the first "Seinfeld" collection on Tuesday. Couldn't resist.
Monday, November 22, 2004
Desperate moral values.
The NYT, in a front page article, searches for meaning: if a lot of the voters in the last election polled that they cared about "moral values," why is "Desperate Housewives" such a big hit? I didn't get much out of this article.
For one thing, there's no serious discussion of the numbers and what those numbers represent. The article doesn't even mention that only 22% of voters said they voted based on "moral values" and the many criticisms that have been made of that poll. And the television ratings numbers aren't translated into percentages of voters in particular areas, so why are we inferring that the same segment of the population that picked "moral values" is watching that popular TV show?
Secondly, the article assumes that people who would say "moral values" and watch "Desperate Housewives" must be hypocrites, showing one face to the world and doing something else at home in private. But someone watching a TV show about adultery is not necessarily secretly embracing the immorality of the characters. You might watch people involved in adultery because you are struggling with temptations yourself and want to experience the good and the bad vicariously. I haven't watched "Desperate Housewives," but I know the series began with the discovery that a housewife has committed suicide. Is the show promoting adultery or warning people about it? "Desperate" is a word with multiple meanings. It may suggest the "housewives" in question are just eager to have sex, but it also connotes anxiety and despair.
There are many interesting things that might be said about wanting both to watch "Desperate Housewives" and to reelect George Bush, but this article doesn't say them. It's just a ragged hash of speculation. Why not do a real survey and find some people who both watch "Desperate Housewives" and voted based on moral values (and really meant traditional sexual morality); then follow up with some questions designed to understand these people? To me, this article, featured on the front page, is just one more example of the way the New York Times has decided to process its disappointment in the election results into a tale inferior red staters and their bogus moral values.
For one thing, there's no serious discussion of the numbers and what those numbers represent. The article doesn't even mention that only 22% of voters said they voted based on "moral values" and the many criticisms that have been made of that poll. And the television ratings numbers aren't translated into percentages of voters in particular areas, so why are we inferring that the same segment of the population that picked "moral values" is watching that popular TV show?
Secondly, the article assumes that people who would say "moral values" and watch "Desperate Housewives" must be hypocrites, showing one face to the world and doing something else at home in private. But someone watching a TV show about adultery is not necessarily secretly embracing the immorality of the characters. You might watch people involved in adultery because you are struggling with temptations yourself and want to experience the good and the bad vicariously. I haven't watched "Desperate Housewives," but I know the series began with the discovery that a housewife has committed suicide. Is the show promoting adultery or warning people about it? "Desperate" is a word with multiple meanings. It may suggest the "housewives" in question are just eager to have sex, but it also connotes anxiety and despair.
There are many interesting things that might be said about wanting both to watch "Desperate Housewives" and to reelect George Bush, but this article doesn't say them. It's just a ragged hash of speculation. Why not do a real survey and find some people who both watch "Desperate Housewives" and voted based on moral values (and really meant traditional sexual morality); then follow up with some questions designed to understand these people? To me, this article, featured on the front page, is just one more example of the way the New York Times has decided to process its disappointment in the election results into a tale inferior red staters and their bogus moral values.
Those religion-oriented law schools.
The NYT reports on the new religion-oriented law schools.
But that's Jerry Falwell, the school's chancellor. What are the lawprofs really like? The Times makes the civpro teacher's class sound much weirder than perhaps it should:
Tuomala isn't a bad lawprof if he happens to think Swift was right and Erie was "disastrous." That's a perfectly sensible thing to think. What would be wrong would be to teach students that they ought to go out into the world as lawyers and attempt to do legal work without understanding that they have to function in a system that accepts Erie as settled precedent. Lawprofs at all law schools are likely to convey to the students their opinion that key cases were wrongly, even disastrously, decided. There is nothing abnormal about that. What is important is to equip your students to work within the existing legal system (which, of course, includes working to change things).
"The prevailing orthodoxy at the elite law schools is an extreme rationalism that draws a strong distinction between faith and reason," said Bruce W. Green, Liberty's dean.Hmmm.... that seems to equate "tilting to the left" with "extreme rationalism." What's needed are law schools that expose law students to the full range of professional debate. It doesn't make much sense to counter one law school with another law school: the poor student has to go one place or another!
The claim that professors at the leading law schools tilt to the left is supported by statistics. According to a forthcoming study of 21 top law schools from 1991 to 2002 by John McGinnis, a law professor at Northwestern University, approximately 80 percent of the professors at those schools who made campaign contributions primarily supported Democrats, while 15 percent primarily supported Republicans.
But where mainstream law professors tend to ask questions about judges' fidelity to precedent and the Constitution, Liberty professors often analyze decisions in terms of biblical principles.Try saying that at your confirmation hearing!
"If our graduates wind up in the government," Dr. Falwell said, "they'll be social and political conservatives. If they wind up as judges, they'll be presiding under the Bible."
But that's Jerry Falwell, the school's chancellor. What are the lawprofs really like? The Times makes the civpro teacher's class sound much weirder than perhaps it should:
In Professor [Jeffrey C.] Tuomala's civil procedure class, the topic on Wednesday morning was a law school warhorse: the Supreme Court's 1938 decision in Erie v. Tompkins, a case that has baffled generations of law students. Judging by the halting Socratic dialogue, Professor Tuomala's natural-law critique of the case did not immediately clarify matters.The "natural-law critique" of Erie is not just some quirky angle Tuomala cooked up! Erie overruled Swift v. Tyson, an 1842 case, written by the great Justice Story, which did in fact rely on principles of natural law. Any lawprof teaching Erie would need to talk about natural law. Erie is the one civpro case where you have to talk about natural law. And nearly any civpro lawprof (myself included) when attempting to teach Erie in the Socratic mode would seem "halting" and unclear much of the time. A good civpro lawprof would not polish Erie off as "uncontroversial," even though it must be seen as well-settled law, but would vividly present the different jurisprudence underlying Swift and the case that overruled it. It is the most interesting question to be found in Civil Procedure!
The Erie decision, which is viewed as uncontroversial in much of the legal academy, represented a disastrous wrong turn, Professor Tuomala said. In ruling that federal courts may not apply general principles in some cases but must follow state laws, he said, the Supreme Court denied the possibility of "a law that's fixed, that's uniform, that applies to everybody, everyplace, for all time."
Tuomala isn't a bad lawprof if he happens to think Swift was right and Erie was "disastrous." That's a perfectly sensible thing to think. What would be wrong would be to teach students that they ought to go out into the world as lawyers and attempt to do legal work without understanding that they have to function in a system that accepts Erie as settled precedent. Lawprofs at all law schools are likely to convey to the students their opinion that key cases were wrongly, even disastrously, decided. There is nothing abnormal about that. What is important is to equip your students to work within the existing legal system (which, of course, includes working to change things).
"We're the good guys."
The NYT directs us to the web posting of the cameraman who photographed the shooting of the wounded Iraqi in Fallujah last week. Here is the post at Kevin Sites Blog:
[O]bserving all of this as an experienced war reporter who always bore in mind the dark perils of this conflict, even knowing the possibilities of mitigating circumstances -- it appeared to me very plainly that something was not right. ... [T]he rules of engagement in Falluja required soldiers or Marines to determine hostile intent before using deadly force. I was not watching from a hundred feet away. I was in the same room. Aside from breathing, I did not observe any movement at all....Even if, in the end, it is determined that the act shown on the video was unjustified, the willingness of the military to include the reporters, to release the video, and to fully investigate the incident supports the belief Sites says he relied on that "We're the good guys."
I did not in any way feel like I had captured some kind of "prize" video. In fact, I was heartsick. Immediately after the mosque incident, I told the unit's commanding officer what had happened. I shared the video with him, and its impact rippled all the way up the chain of command. Marine commanders immediately pledged their cooperation....
For those who don't practice journalism as a profession, it may be difficult to understand why we must report stories like this at all -- especially if they seem to be aberrations, and not representative of the behavior or character of an organization as a whole....
Sunday, November 21, 2004
George Carlin.
George Carlin was on Tim Russert's CNBC show this weekend, promoting his book "When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops." The show ended with Russert asking Carlin "Do you vote?" Carlin answered:
I think Carlin's distance from mundane political choice makes him a better comedian, which is so much more valuable than his individual vote.
No, I don't. No. I voted up to McGovern. I feel, actually, a little purer, a little more detached emotionally from it. I really have no stake. If you dropped me from an airplane, I would come down left of center, because I believe more in humans than I do in property. But in terms of the minor machinations and the way they put these things together, I've no interest.
I think Carlin's distance from mundane political choice makes him a better comedian, which is so much more valuable than his individual vote.
"I loved Tang and I would sometimes eat it by the teaspoon, straight from the jar."
So writes Augusten Burroughs in the first true story in his new book "Magical Thinking." He's a school kid at the time, excited to be chosen to appear in a Tang commercial. One thing I love about Augusten Burroughs is, as soon as he brought up the subject of Tang, the first thing I thought of was eating it straight from the jar. And there he is, eating Tang out of the jar.
Reading about Burroughs and Tang brought back a flood of memories of a childhood spent eating sugary granules that were supposed to be mixed into some more conventional food substance. I was particularly fond of eating strawberry Jello mix straight out of the box. And of course there were always the lumps to be found in the brown sugar. Great, it got lumpy. And why not eat plain white sugar? We would eat spoonfuls of white sugar, but we preferred to sprinkle a thick layer of sugar on a slice of white bread, fold the white bread in half, and make a delicious and crunchy snack out of sugar sandwiches. We would also, routinely, sprinkle plenty of white sugar on tomatoes, iceberg lettuce, and cottage cheese. Much as we viewed mashed sweet potatoes as a way to eat marshmallows, we saw tomatoes, iceberg lettuce, and cottage cheese as a way to eat sugar. For a particularly thrilling, inappropriate sugary treat, we would eat Fizzies, undissolved.
UPDATE: A number of people have emailed me to say that they too ate sugar sandwiches but thought the bread ought to be buttered. We used butter too sometimes, but you need softened butter and butter would also melt the sugar a bit, making the sandwich less crunchy. Hardcore granule fans could do without butter. But butter is good too, and makes the concoction something more like cake--instant cake, you might say, or a homemade pseudo-Twinkie. One writer, from India, specified using two thick slices of white bread, slathering both with plenty of unsalted, softened butter, and sprinkling on either white or brown sugar. Well, as long as we're thinking of switching to brown sugar, I'm thinking, why not try sprinkling on some Tang, for a pseudo-orange-sponge-cake effect?
Reading about Burroughs and Tang brought back a flood of memories of a childhood spent eating sugary granules that were supposed to be mixed into some more conventional food substance. I was particularly fond of eating strawberry Jello mix straight out of the box. And of course there were always the lumps to be found in the brown sugar. Great, it got lumpy. And why not eat plain white sugar? We would eat spoonfuls of white sugar, but we preferred to sprinkle a thick layer of sugar on a slice of white bread, fold the white bread in half, and make a delicious and crunchy snack out of sugar sandwiches. We would also, routinely, sprinkle plenty of white sugar on tomatoes, iceberg lettuce, and cottage cheese. Much as we viewed mashed sweet potatoes as a way to eat marshmallows, we saw tomatoes, iceberg lettuce, and cottage cheese as a way to eat sugar. For a particularly thrilling, inappropriate sugary treat, we would eat Fizzies, undissolved.
UPDATE: A number of people have emailed me to say that they too ate sugar sandwiches but thought the bread ought to be buttered. We used butter too sometimes, but you need softened butter and butter would also melt the sugar a bit, making the sandwich less crunchy. Hardcore granule fans could do without butter. But butter is good too, and makes the concoction something more like cake--instant cake, you might say, or a homemade pseudo-Twinkie. One writer, from India, specified using two thick slices of white bread, slathering both with plenty of unsalted, softened butter, and sprinkling on either white or brown sugar. Well, as long as we're thinking of switching to brown sugar, I'm thinking, why not try sprinkling on some Tang, for a pseudo-orange-sponge-cake effect?
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