I just wrecked my car!

Well, dear readers, I am still among the living, thank God, but my car is gone, probably forever!



Maybe you'll be driving down a familar road one day and the light will be red, but you will behave as if the light is green, and afterwards, you will wonder, how was it possible for me to do that? After all of these years of driving, after all of the red lights and green lights that I have perceived and responded to correctly, why did I do that? And, if you do, maybe someone will be driving along the cross street, and you'll slam right into that car. Before you have any time to think about what is happening or even to feel afraid of what is about to happen, the airbag will be already deflated, and the car will be filled with the burning smell of the controlled explosion that deployed it.



What will your next thought be? I'm okay. I've been slammed in the face with the airbag, but I'm okay. Are you okay? -- you say to your passenger, and she's okay. Her leg hurts. And my leg hurts a little too. We're right on University Avenue in front of Borders, and there are people everywhere, coming over to help us, calling the police, telling me that the other driver is okay (thank God). You assume the car is totaled, even though you can't see what it looks like in front. You worry about your insurance. You start to think about the practicalities of replacing a car and getting to work tomorrow.



You think about how you're going to blog about this very soon.



The other driver turns out to be a nice young man, and I apologize to him and tell him it was entirely my fault, which it was. Tonya is sitting on the sidewalk looking dazed and waiting for the ambulance. The police are very nice to me, and I apologize to them. Fifteen minutes are spent writing down various reports, writing me out a $77 ticket. I'm told the ticket would be $50 more on the eastbound side of University Avenue, because that's Madison. This side of the street is Shorewood Hills. The police officer invites me to sit in the police car where it's warm, and I do, even though I don't like the idea of sitting in the back of a police car where everyone can see me and imagine I've been arrested and wonder what crime I must have committed. Hey, look! It's Professor Althouse! She's been arrested!



UPDATE: This dialogue just took place:

Ooh, Chris, look! It's a big bump… Should I take a picture of it and put it on my blog?



It would be better if it was more colorful.

Chris and I decide to watch a movie, and I say let's watch a nice comedy. I go over to the shelves to pick something out, and I suddenly remember the last thing I said before the crash: "Did you ever see that episode of Larry David..." Imagine if I'd died! My last words would have been "Larry David."

There is a place in this world for beautiful sentimentality.

Michael Totten links to this Middle East TV advertisement promoting Iraqi unity.

Goodbye to the great Johnny Carson.

Sad news. (Via CNN email.) Here's the NYT obituary.

Carson was born in Corning, Iowa, and raised in nearby Norfolk, Neb. He started his show business career at age 14 as the magician "The Great Carsoni."



After World War II service in the Navy, he took a series of jobs in local radio and TV in Nebraska before starting at KNXT-TV in Los Angeles in 1950.



There he started a sketch comedy show, "Carson's Cellar," which ran from 1951-53 and attracted attention from Hollywood. A staff writing job for "The Red Skelton Show" followed.



The program provided Carson with a lucky break: When Skelton was injured backstage, Carson took the comedian's place in front of the cameras.



Producers tried to find the right program for the up-and-coming comic, trying him out as host of the quiz show "Earn Your Vacation" (1954) and in the variety show "The Johnny Carson Show" (1955-56).



From 1957-62 he was host of the daytime game show "Who Do You Trust?" and, in 1958, was joined for the first time by McMahon, his durable "Tonight" buddy.



A few acting roles came Carson's way, including one on "Playhouse 90" in 1957, and he did a pilot in 1960 for a prime-time series, "Johnny Come Lately," that never made it onto a network schedule.



In 1958, Carson sat in for "Tonight Show" host Jack Paar. When Paar left the show four years later, Carson was NBC's choice as his replacement.

I remember watching "Who Do You Trust?" And I remember in his early years on the Tonight Show in the mid-60s, the adolescent boys would come into school in the morning and talk about "the monologue." He was truly adored.

Oscar hopefuls.

The Oscar nominations are coming up this Tuesday, and Newsweek has a nice long interview with a bunch of the actors that are supposed to get the nominations. It will be embarrassing if they don't all get nominated, but look who it is: Hilary Swank, Annette Bening, Paul Giamatti, Jamie Foxx, Kate Winslet, and Leonardo DiCaprio. They're all going to get nominated. It will be a terrific upset if they aren't. It's not the Newsweek piece that created the expectation.



Catty thing I feel like saying: Annette Bening looks like Clay Aiken in these pictures.



Funniest person in the room: Giamatti. Example:

Is there always a physical thing that unlocks a character for you all? If you figure out, say, the walk, does everything else fall into place?



BENING: For me, a lot of it is the clothes. Just like in real life, you feel different if you're wearing a tux or if you're in jeans. When you're acting, that feeling is magnified. And shoes! Shoes are huge!



SWANK: It's true. If you change shoes you sit differently, you walk differently.



WINSLET: I start with the bra. If the bra's right, everything falls into place.



GIAMATTI: Me too. [Laughter]

Embarrassing fact about Giamatti: he got fired from a small role on "Frasier." ("I wasn't funny. They kept tinkering with the script, and it sucked, and I was having a bad time.")



Even more embarrassing, for Swank: she was fired from "Beverly Hills, 90210." ("I thought, 'If I'm not even good enough for this, I'm never going to make it.' So I was coming off this one-hour show, and I was testing for another one-hour show with this very well- known executive ... And he said, 'I would hire you, but you're just too "half —hour."'")



Jamie Foxx coins a phrase: "fame face." It's something you want to avoid getting.



Trite question that is asked so often that the celebs think it's been asked when it hasn't, that they always answer the same way, and that they always answer as if they are imparting new information: How has having a child changed you? Just for once, I'd like somebody to say: I'm really exactly the same as I always was. Or, better: It's brought out the selfish bastard in me.



DiCaprio displays an adorable touch of grandiosity: "This art form is only 100 years old, and I am truly curious to see how the medium is going to change in the next couple hundred years."

Oblivious?

Here is a Sunday NYT Week in Review piece about Harvard President Larry Summers and his recent statements about sex difference and science aptitude. And here's an op-ed by American Enterprise Institute fellow Charles Murray on the subject. And here's another op-ed on the subject by the evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson. Judson describes sex differences in elephants, zebra finches, and spoon worms and asks "Is it ridiculous to suppose that the hypothesis [that males and females are alike] might not be true for humans either?" She answers her own question:

No. But it is not fashionable - as Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard University, discovered when he suggested this month that greater intrinsic ability might be one reason that men are overrepresented at the top levels of fields involving math, science and engineering.

If the word "discovered" is accurate here, Summers is unfit to be president of the university. He would be woefully oblivious if he hadn't noticed the ideology in the academic culture he's working in. Those who are committed to science ought to be scientific enough to observe and analyze their own surroundings. There is value in the scientific exploration of biological sex difference, but I think there is even more value -- especially if you're a university president -- in understanding how the people around you behave, why they do what they do, what good and harm is done by their acting upon the beliefs that they have, and how you might play an effective role in changing this culture of ideas for the better.

The coming fight over race-based student grants.

This looks like the beginning of a major battle:

The University of Wisconsin System's program to provide scholarships for minority students is drawing criticism from a national group opposed to racial preferences in higher education, but System officials are defending the program as legal and still necessary.



Created by the state Legislature in 1986, the program is coming under attack after a 2003 Supreme Court decision upheld affirmative action in college admissions but barred the use of race as the sole deciding factor. The ruling opened the door to increased challenges of all race- conscious university policies, critics say, including the System's Lawton Minority Undergraduate Retention Grant.



"We're looking into this Lawton program," said Roger Clegg, general counsel for the Virginia-based Center for Equal Opportunity, which has contacted more than 100 universities about race-exclusive programs in the past several months and filed complaints about some with the federal government's Office for Civil Rights and Justice Department.



"It seems to me that we should treat everyone equally," Hansen said. "It's simple fairness. You can do all the pirouettes you want to about it, but that's what it comes down to."



But university officials say targeted financial aid for minorities in college is legal and proper. Government rules have been more permissive about the use of race in financial aid for minority students already admitted, they said, and such programs are more necessary now than ever, after recent changes to the federal Pell grant program that will make fewer poor families of any race eligible for that assistance.



"(The Lawton grants) give some incentive for people to stay in school," said Stephanie Hilton, president of United Council of UW Students. "Everything we can do to increase retention is key. That program is not huge, but we're getting a good bang for the buck."...



Last year at UW-Madison, 292 minority students received Lawton grants totaling $736,141, while the tally for the program Systemwide was 2,715 recipients and $3.8 million. Individual grants are available to sophomores, juniors and seniors from Wisconsin and Minnesota who maintain a 2.0 grade point average and demonstrate financial need according to a federal formula....

"Have the courage to have your wisdom regarded as stupidity."

"Be fools for Christ. And have the courage to suffer the contempt of the sophisticated world." Justice Scalia exhorts Christians. (Via How Appealing.) The linked article tempts you to tie his religious ideas to his legal work:

He has described himself as an "originalist," following the Constitution as written by the Founding Fathers, rather than interpreting it to reflect the changing times.



In November, while speaking to an interfaith conference at a Manhattan synagogue, Scalia made headlines by saying that a religion-neutral government does not fit with an America that reflects belief in God in everything from its money to its military.



More than a year ago, he removed himself from the Supreme Court's review of whether "under God" should be in the Pledge of Allegiance after mentioning the case in a speech and complaining that courts are stripping God from public life.



Last year, Scalia cast one of two dissenting votes in a 7-2 Supreme Court ruling that states may deny taxpayer-funded scholarships to divinity students. And in 2000, he stood with a majority of the court in upholding the constitutionality of taxpayer funding for parochial school materials in a Jefferson Parish case.

What is sorely missing from that passage is the information that Justice Scalia would strongly bind the courts to a standard of neutrality. He wrote the key case about the meaning of the Free Exercise Clause of the Constitution, which deprived religious believers of the argument that government has to relieve them of burdens caused by neutral, generally applicable laws. (Congress attempted to overturn his interpretation with the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.) And in that scholarship case, referred to above, Scalia's dissenting position had to do with depriving the state of the power to define its program in a way that specifically discriminated against religion. He was adhering to a requirement of government neutrality, where the majority was authorizing the state to discriminate against religion in pursuit of its commitment to the separation of church and state.