I am leaving and will presumably not have much time to post or comment in the coming week. I make the following predictions regarding my flight:

1. I will arrive very early and read but not purchase several magazines.

2. Even though I will bring a wealth of potential reading material with me, yea even in my carryon, 90% of the time I spend reading will be spent reading the SkyMall catalogue with scorn, amusement, and anger, even though I have no reason to believe that it's changed appreciably since the last time I was on a plane. I will also read the in-flight magazine cover to cover.

3. I will find something to dislike about the person or persons sitting next to me within five minutes of their sitting.

4. I will be suckered into eating overpriced and crappy food at the airport.

I give 2. lower odds than the rest because I got a Time Out today so I can read all about restaurants making their own sodas and obsessively read the listings of concerts I won't be able to attend (a band called White Bear is playing somewhere on Wednesday!).

Our most popular Google referrers for the last month:

* tina fey's scar

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* locker room etiquette

Other search terms that led people to this site:

* should i suck tomas' weiner? yes? no?

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* rimming, altoids.

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* tales of son in law fucking mother in law

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* good awkward questions to ask someone

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* defeat catholic terrorism worldwide

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* his and hers strapon

* loners who have no friends

Ben Domenech:

To my friends: thank you for your support. To my enemies: I take enormous solace in the fact that you spent this week bashing me, instead of America.

Yowsers. If he'd gone out with just a bit of class, it would've tugged the heartstrings. Now, not so much.

In one instance, I have been accused me of passing off P.J. O'Rourke's writing as my own in a column for the paper. But the truth is that I had met P.J. at a Republican event and asked his permission to do a college-specific version of his classic piece on partying. He granted permission, the piece was cleared with my editors at the paper, and it ran as inspired by O'Rourke's original.

It's painful to watch, but I can't look away.

UPDATE: reading the redstate comment section is amusing. Did Ben/Augustine post anything particularly interesting? So far I've just read the aborted (haha!) Red America blog and his non-explanation, and it got me wondering how anyone would think he'd be a good candidate for the WP gig. Next choice: Chuck Simmins!

....Ben Domenech's credibility is found floating in a lake, dead.

What a fiasco. No one who teaches ethics should be surprised that the plagiarist turns out to be the one who makes highminded claims about the importance of values and the evils of relativism. Domenech/Augustine, via Hilzoy's careful post:

Ethical rules are the rules for a reason, and the Republican Party is one that respects the rule of law – that means really respecting it, not dancing along the edge. Because when the Democrats play dirty, they should have to stretch the truth; they should have to lie and connive; and they should have to find people like Ronnie Earle to do it for them. If they don't have to do that, then something's wrong. (...)

Ethical relativists do not belong in a party founded on moral absolutes. And just because the "Do as you're told" Republicans get elected doesn't mean we should ever let them get power. We need to push them out, for the good of the country and the party, and 2006 is the year to do it.

UPDATE: I am genuinely uncertain if this is a joke:

"Red America" will be abandoned. Therefore signaling a defeat for the forces of truth in the media.

I'm not particularly sure what sort of obsessive losers the left has, because it sounds like they were putting every sentence he wrote into Google.

This will happen when the guns of George Soros and the left are turned on someone.

Either you fight, or you surrender.

And if you surrender, then the Soros-funded left will continue their reign of terror against the right.

So I didn't think Botticelli was as fun as Two Minute Mysteries. It wasn't challenging enough for the askers, athough I think My Alter Ego's variation has promise for making it harder, and we can try that in subsequent weeks. But even though I didn't know any more Two Minute Mysteries, I couldn't fall down on my responsibility to deliver the highest quality Friday entertainment, so I made one up! It's based on a true story, so no complaining it's too implausible. I do concede that this is a totally untested TMM, and I have no idea if I'm giving you enough information or if it will be fun or interesting to play; we'll just have to try it out.

Here are the facts: A man and his dog are found floating dead in a lake. What happened?

Those East Coast People shouldn't have all the fun. Hey Bay Area! Let's have a meetup!

I'm coming out to San Francisco in May. Anyone want to get together? I don't know how many of you there are anymore but I know Unfogged had a number of Bay Area readers at one point. The only caveat – due to my two nights of concert-going, my schedule isn't the most flexible. Is May 1 any good?

Also, do you know what the majority of people here in New York mention first when I say I'm going to San Francisco? Not the Golden Gate, not Alcatraz, not the ocean, not .coms, not hippies or Haight-Ashbury, not teh gays, not fog, not any of that stuff. Nope. It's Rice-A-Roni.

I'll be out of town at a wedding tomorrow and all weekend; probably won't be near a computer. I'll be back on Monday -- don't burn the place down, wouldja?

Reading an old comment thread in search of a joke about Godel* I came across baa's link to this review of Terry Eagleton's memoirs. Well worth a read if you've ever wanted to punch Eagleton.

It is strange that Eagleton, the cultural theorist, cannot see what is going on here. He has borrowed this style of formulaic zaniness from the humour of Monty Python and other Oxbridge products, who had themselves adapted it from a certain kind of donnish whimsical humour (professional philosophers framing their arguments in terms of pink flying rhinoceroses, and so on). Although Eagleton evidently thinks that his humour is vivid and original, and Tariq Ali (quoted on the dust-jacket) finds it "incredibly funny", what it really sounds like, therefore, is the labouring of a don imitating the students imitating the dons.

I think it was after reading the concluding chapter of Eagleton's Literary Theory: an introduction, which begins with a discussion of the number of nuclear warheads in the world, that I decided literature was not my field.

Also, I misread the praising blurb as from "Tariq Aziz," which gave me a moment of pause, then hilarity.

Did you know that the only previous mention of Eagleton on this blog came from baa, here?

*Could sort of be a Russell joke too, eh?

JM claims to know only one joke. Ben rightly points out that everyone should have at least a few. Here are some favorites. Leave more in the comments. Together we can solve the problem.

(a) A pirate walks into a bar with a steering wheel on his crotch. "What's that all about?" asks the bartender. "Arrrr-- it's drivin' me nuts!"

(b) [Darth Vader voice] "Luke, I know what you're getting for Christmas." "But Father, how could you know?" "Luke, I felt your presents."*

* hilariously, a friend of mine once botched this by saying "I unwrapped your presents."

UPDATE: bonus if they're funny.

CINEMA UPDATE: Can we have a meet-up to see Snakes on a Plane?

RYS* gets a plaintive cry, and I respond with ridicule and scorn.

I admit that I'm a lousy communicator in class. I get a little worked up. I wear sloppy clothes that are 15 years out of date. I have a bowl haircut straight out of my grade 3 photo. I don't understand the current students and their ways, their manner, their language, their work ethic, yada yada.

But I love Math and I do my best to teach it well. And every semester I get below average scores in my student evaluations, and in the narrative sections I read things like these (which arrived yesterday from our Dean's office): "Prof {X} needs a public speaking course." "Prof. {X} thinks he's being funny, but we're groaning because he's not." "He needs to lighten up. Math is not all we care about." "He wants mathletes, and I just want my B."

And there are others. I dress poorly, I speak poorly, yada yada.

I've tried to do a better job. I even [even!-- FL] meet with my students after class and in my office to help them work out their processes, solutions, and yada yada. But then I get an evaluation like this: "It's so weird in his office because there's chalk dust everywhere."

I envy those professors who get along so well with their students. I try to be "one of the fellas" and it comes out wrong. I believe I know what I need to know to be a fantastic professor, but I don't seem to be able to connect with students. What should I do? Read Rolling Stone? Get my clothes somewhere hip?

Several things bother me here. The first is that it's very, very easy to get a decent haircut and presentable clothes, and it's even easier to clean your office. If students find your sense of humor annoying, make better jokes, or, if this is beyond you, stop. Settle for clear and well-organized. If there are consistently comments about your speaking, maybe it is a problem.

But let's be honest: there's a bigger issue.

I believe I know what I need to know to be a fantastic professor

You so don't. If you did, you would understand that presentation is part of the job. Being fantastic (competent?) involves teaching in a way that students can understand, perhaps even enjoy. Yes, I know it's horribly unfair that you're evaluated partly by audience reaction, and it's sad about kids today, but that's the job you've got, and wishing that it were a slightly different job doesn't really help matters.

(To head off an obvious objection, I do realize that "I am a good teacher, though I get bad evaluations" is possibly true in a way that "this object is green, though it appears red to normal observers in normal conditions" is not-- but the sorts of evaluations prompted by good-but-apparently-bad teaching are along the lines of "too demanding" or "too critical.")

That's not really the point. The big issue, I think, is how graduate education-- which, as I've noted, is a professional training program designed to produce people qualified to do a highly specialized job-- often ignores teaching, which, for many people, will be the main part of the job. We're encouraged to spend almost all of our efforts thinking about the content of our fields while thinking very little about (a) what it's like to spend the greater part of one's professional life teaching undergraduates and (b) how to do this teaching effectively. This fosters the kind of attitude that seems, at least to me, to lurk behind the sad cries of our mathematician: why isn't it enough that I love my content? Short answer: because that's not what you were hired to do.

When I was in graduate school, I was pretty angry that my "teacher training" involved two days of sitting around talking about sexual harassment policies and whether race is a social construction, rather than talking about how to handle the day-to-day challenges of teaching. This sink-or-swim attitude is a serious problem at an institution where TAs do half the undergraduate instruction. I ended up swimming, but learning how was hard, and I would have appreciated someone talking to me about how to structure a discussion, or design a syllabus, or...

So, in short, I hear the sad mathematician's post as reflecting a deeper institutional problem, one about which, by extraordinary coincidence, I have longstanding crankiness. Huzzah!

*I know, I think it's a put-on too, but I'm pretending.

I got my first "Dear ________, are you Tia?" email. It was from a friend I made when I first came to New York; I met her on the Salon personals, which I believe were the topic that first incited me to start commenting here, but wait, this is going to be an even more intricate web of associations before the post is over. Even though I heard her mention her boarding school a hundred times, and even met another friend of hers from boarding school, I never thought to ask if my long lost friend Amy (I'm now going to redact that post slightly, since the purpose for which I included her last name has been served) had gone to her school as well. But it turns out she did! I'm quite certain it's her; the friend who wrote to me said that Amy was an "ardent drawer of horses," which would certainly describe my Amy, with whom I had a Drawing and Hypnotizing business in the fourth grade, to a T. Not only that, but apparently she went to a certain college that but was a shuttle bus ride away from my college! Aren't the internets amazing?

Update: I wrote this very late at night, and have now, in the cold light of morning, edited it to take out any instance of the phrase "in close proximity to" or the wrong-preposition variant that I used, before I get shit for it. I don't know why W-lfs-n cut me so much slack. Maybe he's just despaired of reforming me.

The President of the Ogala Sioux, Cecilia Fire Thunder has stated her intention to open a Planned Parenthood clinic on her own land, within the Pine Ridge Reservation. That is to say, outside the jurisdiction of South Dakota law.

They could use some money, though -- both to build the clinic, and for the tribe generally. The mailing address for donations is:

Oglala Sioux Tribe

ATTN: President Fire Thunder

P. O. Box 2070

Pine Ridge, SD 57770

or

ATTN: PRESIDENT FIRE THUNDER

PO BOX 990

Martin, SD 57751

For donations specifically for the Planned Parenthood clinic, make checks out to OST Planned Parenthood Cecelia Fire Thunder. General donations may be made out to the Oglala Sioux Tribe.

Even if you can't give anything, pass the address on, would you?

...webcams are hott.

Okay, not really, but this is a pretty stunning performance, given his age. You can amaze your friends and coworkers by having them listen and asking them to visualize the performer, and then showing them. I just did. This is the aria that converted me to opera when I was a bairn of 19. I was housesitting all by myself in a house where the only vocal music was opera, and I was trying to generate the illusion of human companionship, so I started putting them on, but I hadn't yet grasped the importance (for me at least) of RTFL (that's Read the Fucking Libretto), so they didn't engage me, until I was playing Minesweeper and the Queen of the Night aria came on. So exhilarated I didn't care I was beating my best time on expert level, I leapt up, danced around the house, and realized I had to start paying more attention. Then later I discovered La Boheme and The Marriage of Figaro and it was all over for me.

via A White Bear, who got it from W-lfs-n.

In the same post AWB describes a childhood dynamic I'm sure not a few of us here will be familiar with: substituting excellence in performance for joy in relationships. I know I've written here in comments about moving from the San Francisco Bay Area to the San Joaquin Valley when I was ten. Being female, smart, and non-Christian didn't sit well with my peers. (Heck, my sixth grade teacher got so mad she threw a pen when I suggested there was evidence for evolution, and she was one of the tolerant ones). I adopted an "I'm smarter than you; I don't need you" posture as a defense against all manner of injuries, and it was the best strategy I could come up with under the circumstances, but I retained aspects of it for years after it stopped making any sense, and it created barriers to reintegrating into societies that would have naturally been much more accepting of me. Only extensive self-examination and critique has created the pinnacle of warmth and humility you see today. But still I cringe when I remember some of my attitudes from those days: when my mom asked me in the sixth grade why I didn't make more effort to keep in touch with Amy, the closest and realest friend I ever had before I met Clementine in high school, I said, "Friends are only useful as a social buffer from the stigma of being a loner. There's no point if they're not around and no one can see you with them."

(By the way, Amy [redacted] was my friend's real name, and I'd love to talk to her again, so if anyone knows an Amy [redacted] who spent elementary school in a wealthy suburb of San Fransisco, and later moved to Southern California, let me know.)

I wish I had the .wav to post now, but maybe I'll be able to dig it up later. In the meantime, here are the lyrics to my favorite song, "Anyone Can Whistle":

Anyone can whistle,

That's what they say-

Easy.

Anyone can whistle

Any old day-

Easy.

It's all so simple:

Relax, let go, let fly.

So someone tell me why

Can't I?

I can dance a tango,

I can read Greek-

Easy.

I can slay a dragon

Any old week-

Easy.

What's hard is simple.

What's natural comes hard.

Maybe you could show me

How to let go,

Lower my guard,

Learn to be free.

Maybe if you whistle,

Whistle for me.

I can slay a dragon

Any old week-

Easy.

What's hard is simple.

What's natural comes hard.

Maybe you could show me

How to let go,

Lower my guard,

Learn to be free.

Maybe if you whistle,

Whistle for me.

I didn't need to read this.

The Man shut us down again for using too high a proportion of system resources. If this page disappears again, that's why. Not enough enterprise, that's my verdict.

We are, theoretically, working on a solution.

Sheesh, you all are awfully quiet today. Fine, here's some red meat:

In the continued tradition of Unfogged bloggers admitting to the misguided ways in which they spent their adolescence, I'll confess that I spent half of high school and the early part of college as a goth. Those of you who have met me or who frequent my pink-bedecked blog may find this hysterical but, really, it was almost inevitable. It would be a waste not to spend your teens in black lipstick if you had skin as pale as mine. I'll try to justify this by reminding you all that part of this time was spent in the goth scene in New Orleans, which is far less pathetic than being goth in small-town Ohio. OK, slightly less pathetic. But, anyway – what reminded me of this was an article in the Guardian UK today that said that former goths are going to take over their country.

Here's one more post on abortion, trying to lay out how those of us in favor of abortion rights need to construct our arguments to build support for a tolerable scheme of regulations on abortion. (‘Tolerable' being defined here as something pretty close to the Roe framework – abortion available at the woman's discretion throughout the first two trimesters; in the third trimester only to preserve the life or health of the mother, or in the case of severe fetal abnormality.)

First: Committed, consistent pro-lifers, who believe either that abortion at any time after conception is infanticide, or at least that any conceptus, even if not morally equivalent to a child, has an absolute moral right to survival sufficient to override a woman's right to bodily autonomy, are not a useful target for pro-choice arguments. They have a coherent position, although one I vehemently disagree with, but it simply isn't amenable to argument, because it rests on a foundational premise about the moral status of any conceptus that isn't derived from reason. (This isn't meant to be a slam – my position on the moral status of, say, a two-week embryo, that it is not an entity capable of having rights or interests, doesn't have any different status. All I mean to say is that you can't argue your way from one position to the other, and there's not much sense in trying to.)

Luckily for the pro-choice position, committed, consistent pro-lifers are not a majority. The people we need to talk to are moderate pro-lifers – people who identify as pro-life, or who think of themselves as having strong moral concerns about or repulsion toward abortion. Moderate pro-lifers aren't necessarily in favor of a complete, categorical South Dakota-style ban on abortion, but they're often sympathetic to regulations like mandatory counseling, waiting periods, spousal notification (parental notification and consent is a slightly different issue), and the host of crazy ‘safety' regulations that are imposed on abortion providers. The following arguments are aimed at that category of moderate pro-lifers.

(1) Regulations of this sort don't discourage abortion in any targeted way. If you believe that abortion is always a wrong decision, regardless of the woman's individual circumstances, I'm not talking to you right now – go over and sit with the committed, consistent pro-lifers. If you think that there are circumstances where a woman should be able to decide for herself whether to have an abortion, whatever you think those circumstances are, you have to recognize that these regulations aren't going to preferentially discourage the abortions you disapprove of. Regulations requiring waiting periods are going to discourage poor women, who can't get consecutive days off from work or can't afford an overnight stay near the provider. Spousal notification regulations are going to discourage women with bad or fearful relationships with their husbands. Nutty ‘safety' regulations (such as those requiring an abortion clinic to have a written transfer agreement with a hospital to accept emergency patients -- what, the hospital would otherwise refuse to accept emergency patients because they came from an abortion clinic?) raise the costs, travel and otherwise, of abortions, and so discourage poor women. None of them are going to preferentially discourage women who don't take abortion seriously, women who use abortion as birth control, or any other category of women whose abortion decisions you disagree with.

If you think that abortion is always a difficult moral decision, but is sometimes the least of the available evils, regulations like this don't bear any relationship to discouraging abortion when it's the wrong decision and allowing it when it's the right decision. All they do is serve as obstacles, making abortion available for affluent women in comfortable circumstances, and closing it off for poor women or women in difficult family situations. This isn't right, and it isn't just.

(2) Taking these regulations at face value, people who favor them don't trust women. If we take mandatory counseling, waiting periods, and spousal notification regulations at face value as regulations intended to address the concerns of moderate pro-lifers (rather than assuming that they are cynically favored by pro-life absolutists who know that they can't pass absolute abortion bans, and so favor any regulation, however irrational, making abortion more difficult to obtain) they reflect a mistrust of women as moral decision-makers.

The nominal goal of such regulations is to make the woman concerned consider additional information and opinions or spend additional time thinking about whether she should or should not have an abortion. Isn't it clear that this reflects an opinion that women, if unregulated, will make abortion decisions flippantly or thoughtlessly? It's not a simple case of saying that the woman involved has interests that are opposed to those of the fetus, and that she therefore, as an interested party, can't be permitted to make the decision. These regulations still leave the decision in the woman's hands – they just assume that women, as a class, can't be trusted to inform themselves of the relevant facts and make abortion decisions thoughtfully and after moral deliberation. That assumption, made by someone who has considered it explicitly, reflects a profound contempt for women as moral decision makers.

(While I oppose parental consent and notification rules as well, the issues are somewhat different – not trusting minors to make important decisions is pretty standard -- and will be saved for a later post sometime.)

We, as people who support abortion rights, need to shape the public discourse to make the moderate pro-lifers out there who nonetheless think that abortion is sometimes the least worst decision, recognize that the type of abortion regulations I've been talking about: don't do a thing to differentiate acceptable from unacceptable abortions; burden precisely the sort of poor and otherwise badly-off women for whom bearing an unwanted child will be a truly oppressive burden; and rest on an assumption that women are untrustworthy and unserious decision makers. To agree that abortion is a decision that must be left in the woman's hands, you don't have to believe that it is always the right decision, only that there is no one else available who has a better capacity to make it.

I am a little bitch. It's true. Not a grammar bitch but a formatting bitch. I'm reviewing a document right now and the margins keep changing by about 1/32nd of an inch from paragraph to paragraph and it's bothering me so much I can barely read it. Also, some of the numbered lists are single spaced and others are double spaced. Some lists are outline-numbered using numbers, then letters, then Roman numerals and some use a N.N.N format and, worse, the hanging indentation amount varies by amounts small enough that I can't ask someone to fix them without looking insane but enough that I know it's there and Oh My God I'm going to snap any minute.

On Thursday, March 30, New York City's great and near great will be gathering at some bar called Winnie's on Bayard Street (details at the link) to raise money for Team Newyorkistan's entry in the 2006 Mongol Rally (previously mentioned in this space.) There will be karaoke. There may be Mongolian barbecue. There'll be an auction allowing you to sponsor specified car parts. I'll be there. And the cover charge is only $10, which goes straight to a worthy charity (now Mercy Corps Scotland. Apparently enough Cows were Sent.)

Anyone reading this, lurker or otherwise, is heartily entreated to show up and sing karaoke. If you're feeling wrecked because you won't be able to make it, try consoling yourself by helping Team Newyorkistan meet their fundraising goals. Every dollar (pound, whatever) helps. Remember, if this comes off, it'll produce funny blogging in July and August -- generally a terribly dull time of year.

John Hinderaker, 2003:

Events between now and next November will matter, of course, but I'm afraid they won't matter much. By then, it will be firmly established "fact" that the Iraq war has been a failure. It simply makes no difference how well the situation there goes over the next year. The goalposts will be moved to whatever extent necessary. The truth is that the Iraq venture has gone astonishingly well so far, but that doesn't prevent the media from portraying it as a failure, and nothing that happens in the next year will change that.

John Hinderaker, 2006:

In truth, we likely won't know whether the Iraq war was a success or a failure, a good idea or a bad idea, for another twenty or thirty years, when the consequences of the effort not only in Iraq, but throughout the region, become clear. For now, we can only guess.

As Norbizness, the authentic face of the Left, commented over at my site, "I'm not sure, but I think that the goalposts have been torn down, broken into individual parts, shredded, buried, dug up again, and thrown into the ocean."

A White Bear has a good post up about the custom of kissing people hello and goodbye in New York. Actually, she calls it an East Coast phenomenon but if I did my usual NYC cheek-kiss goodbye to someone in D.C. (especially a guy), I think he would recoil in shock.

One thing missing from AWB's post, in my experience, at least: along with the right to feel Scarlett Johansson's breasts, gay men may choose between the usual male NYC greeting of a hug plus cheek-kiss or may go for a hug plus chaste mouth-kiss.

Getting off the abortion kick for a moment (I'm coming back to it, don't worry) let's talk about adoption. There's an article in today's Times on unwed fathers who have lost the right to contest having their children adopted, because they failed to register on some unwed fathers' registry that I, for one, have never heard of before.

Now, this seems crazy to me. Adoption is great, but the idea of allowing a child to be adopted while its father is standing there saying "Please, let me take care of it," but hasn't touched some bureaucratic third-base entitling him to veto the adoption is just wrong. I can see some reasons to be cautious about allowing a paternal veto on adoption – primarily the possibility of a spite veto, in which a father contests an adoption and then promptly disappears – but in the case of a father prepared to take custody of the child, with child support from the mother, what on earth is the excuse for depriving him of his parental rights? It seems wildly unjust to me that an adoption can go forward irrevocably without notification to and consent by the father, if he's known and can be located. (And of course, if he really can't be, he's not likely to show up and cause trouble later.)