Christmas Eve.

Merry Christmas!

Jack Klugman has died.

At the age of 90. You probably think of "The Odd Couple" or, maybe "Quincy," but here he is in a 1960 episode of "The Twilight Zone," called "A Passage for Trumpet":

The dark-eyed junco.

I didn't have the presence of mind to grab the camera and take a picture of the globular gray bird with a white belly, perched on the deck railing just beyond the glass. Instead I scrambled for my glasses, and the bird flew away. But we remembered how it looked, and Meade figured out it was dark-eyed junco, and googling, I found lots of photos but what I liked best was this lovely illustration and story.

The junco was not so much flying in to the window as it was flying right up against it. It would fly up and down the window's length, using its claws to aid in climbing. All the while it peered at us. It did this repeatedly. Various hypotheses were tossed about as to why a junco was engaging in this risky, precious energy expending behavior....

Dark-eyed juncos are "the 'snowbirds' of the middle latitudes." Of the middle latitudes? That makes me look up "snowbird" in the OED. Snowbird... I just think of that cornball Anne Murray song. But the OED says a "snow-bird" is "One or other of various small European or American birds, esp. the snow-bunting (Plectrophanes nivalis), snow-finch (Montifringilla nivalis), or snow-sparrow (Junco hiemalis)":

1694  Philos. Trans. 1693 (Royal Soc.) 17 996   The Snow-bird which I take to be much the same with our Hedge Sparrow; this is so called because it seldom appears about Houses but against Snow or very cold Weather.

OED has this 3rd definition: "3. U.S. slang. One who sniffs cocaine (cf. snow n.1 5d); gen. a drug addict":

1923   J. F. Fishman Crucibles of Crime vi. 126   It was discovered that each of them [sc. handkerchiefs] has a small ink mark in one of the corners..these handkerchiefs had been dipped in cocaine... The mark in the corner notified the ‘snowbird’ that it was ‘loaded.’

There's a 4th definition, also U.S. slang:

1923   Nation 31 Oct. 487   In winter, when building is at a standstill in the North, northern workmen, ‘snow birds’ or ‘white doves’ in Negro parlance, flock south.

And a 5th definition: "A person who likes snow; a snow-sports enthusiast." And here we get a D.H. Lawrence quote from 1928: "I am no snow-bird, I hate the stark and shroudy whitemen, white and black." [ADDED: Is "whitemen" an error in the OED?!] That's from something called "Not I," which I can't seem to find on the web. But with some "snow-bird" searching, I did come up with this D.H. Lawrence poem, "Self-Pity":

I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.

You're not feeling sorry for yourself on Christmas Eve, are you?

"Certainly, if LaPierre had shown up with that magazine, there would be howls of gotcha, and widespread media demands for prosecution.

"Why should NBC News and its star be above the law?"

"This is what a several hundred person staff and a massive brand name can do, bitches!"

"This isn’t the future of journalism. It’s a legacy – and still troubled – brand like the New York Times taking off the gloves, no longer pretending it can compete with nimble blogs and throwing one hell of a punch at all of those lean newsrooms around the country."

"British paper sues Lance Armstrong for $1.5m over lost libel action."

"Sunday Times paid now-disgraced cyclist $485,000 in 2006 over claims that he had taken performance-enhancing drugs."

That reminds me of this news item from The Des Moines Register, June 18, 1959, reprinted in Bill Bryson's "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir" (p. 106):

A high court jury awarded entertainer Liberace 8,000 pounds ($22,400) damages Wednesday in a libel suit against the London Daily Mirror. The jurors decided after 3½ hours of deliberation that a story in 1956 by Mirror journalist William N. Connor implied that the pianist was a homosexual. Among the phrases Liberace cited in his suit was Connor’s description of him as “everything he, she or it can want.” He also described the entertainer as “fruit-flavored.”

How does Amazon know that author you're reviewing is a member of your family?

It's easy to see why Amazon would want to edit out biased reviews, but how can it know who is biased? And then there's that lady who has published an average of 7 reviews a day for over a decade, 99.9% of them 4- or 5-star — can anything be done about her?

ADDED: One thing Amazon can see easily is where you ship packages, presumably presents. It has names and addresses, so if it has the author's name and home address, that would match up. 

"Intimidation: NY Newspaper Publishes Names, Addresses of Gun Permit Holders."

"I guess nobody could object to people putting the newspaper staff’s addresses on the Web now, right?, says Instapundit, and as I click to get the URL for a link to the post, I see an update has gone up, adding what I was planning to say, which is that the newspaper has unwittingly hurt everyone who isn't listed, because burglars and home invaders can see which houses don't have guns... permitted guns anyway.

People who don't keep guns are free-riding on the gun owners, benefiting from the uncertainty that plagues burglars who know there's some risk that the person inside has a gun. Are gun owners happy to provide that aura of protection to the whole community, or would they prefer publicity that identifies the unprotected? Ironic that the anti-gun owners — seemingly scrambling for safety — are tossing aside the free protection.

Why don't they understand the value of the guns their neighbors own? Somehow it's easier to ideate about a gun owner going crazy. For some reason, they like thinking about gun owners as potential crazies. There are the dangers you love to obsess about, and the dangers you willfully ignore. But why? What rivets your attention to one problem and not to another?

At the Snow Dog Café...

... make a splash.

Galeazzo Frudua replicates the sound of the Beatles' singing with remarkable accuracy...

... except for that bit of Italian accent, which proves it really is him singing all the parts. And he explains what he's doing in that charming accent in a series of YouTube videos. Here he is with "Nowhere Man":



Frudua doesn't talk about the personalities of The Beatles, but his demonstration made me think about the way John was singing his song, and George (with the lower voice) harmonized by going more toward monotony, while Paul (with the higher voice) got fancier and more dramatic, making the backup into the show-off spot. George, you might say, was modest and self-effacing, while Paul was competitive, to the point where he almost seems to be daring John to slug him for taking over his song. And yet the sound is of 3 men blended perfectly.

It's fascinating to me that Frudua is so finely tuned to the details of sound, yet retains his accent. Maybe he's choosing that. If so, it's a nice touch.

What Obama said about mass murder after the Aurora massacre, at the second presidential debate.

This is interesting, considering what he's saying now, after the Newtown massacre, after reelection:

We’re a nation that believes in the Second Amendment, and I believe in the Second Amendment. We’ve got a long tradition of hunting and sportsmen and people who want to make sure they can protect themselves....

[M]y belief is that, (A), we have to enforce the laws we’ve already got, make sure that we’re keeping guns out of the hands of criminals, those who are mentally ill. We’ve done a much better job in terms of background checks, but we’ve got more to do when it comes to enforcement.

But I also share your belief that weapons that were designed for soldiers in war theaters don’t belong on our streets. And so what I’m trying to do is to get a broader conversation about how do we reduce the violence generally. Part of it is seeing if we can get an assault weapons ban reintroduced. But part of it is also looking at other sources of the violence. Because frankly, in my home town of Chicago, there’s an awful lot of violence and they’re not using AK-47s. They’re using cheap hand guns.

And so what can we do to intervene, to make sure that young people have opportunity; that our schools are working; that if there’s violence on the streets, that working with faith groups and law enforcement, we can catch it before it gets out of control.

And so what I want is a -- is a comprehensive strategy. Part of it is seeing if we can get automatic weapons that kill folks in amazing numbers out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill. But part of it is also going deeper and seeing if we can get into these communities and making sure we catch violent impulses before they occur.

If reelection gives special weight to Obama's policy preferences, we should hold him to what he said to the voters. Now, there's a little something for everyone in those remarks, as my boldfacing highlights. I know — because I live-blogged — that what jumped out at me was the idea of getting "into these communities and making sure we catch violent impulses before they occur." That seems spookily invasive, like the movie "Minority Report." But after Newtown, I'm drawn to ideas about identifying and stopping those who manifest dangerous mental illness. And yet, if you examine the words from the debate closely, he wasn't talking about finding people with violent impulses and doing something to control them. He was talking about the usual social welfare schemes that promise "opportunity" to "young people." If only they had enough wealth and education, violent impulses would not arise. And so mass murder becomes another reason for the economic policies he already supports anyway.

"He wanted to be president less than anyone I’ve met in my life. He had no desire to... run."

Tagg Romney tells on his dad, Mitt.

"If he could have found someone else to take his place...  he would have been ecstatic to step aside. He is a very private person who loves his family deeply and wants to be with them, but he has deep faith in God and he loves his country, but he doesn’t love the attention."

Imagine what it would have been like if Mitt Romney had broken open and expressed all of this, but maybe that was inherently impossible. A self-effacing modesty was baked in.

In this context, here's a Ross Douthat column from last August, prompting Romney to reveal his Mormon faith:

The broader Mormon experience... could help make the case for his philosophy as well as illuminate his human core.... Conservatism sometimes makes an idol of the rugged individual, but at its richest and deepest it valorizes local community instead — defending the family and the neighborhood, the civic association and the church. And there is no population in America that lives out this vision of the good society quite like the Latter-day Saints.

Mormonism is a worldlier, more business-friendly religion than traditional Christianity, but it does not glorify wealth for wealth’s sake... Mormonism represents “our country’s longest experiment with communitarian idealism, promoting an ethic of frontier-era burden-sharing that has been lost in contemporary America.”

Imagine if all of that were opened out and shown to the American people. Well, you can't. I can't. Not in one modest man's campaign. Not with all the predictable pushback.

"See? You can be messy on the inside, and no one knows."

Step inside a 400-square-foot apartment space, transformed by elaborate built-ins:



The quote I've used for the post title appears about midway and marks the spot where my mood began to shift from delight to despair. What do we think of this man, who is promoting what seems to be a simplified, de-cluttered way of life, but who is, himself, in a business, promoting expensive merchandise, the machinery of compression. Do we want to be compressed thusly? It's one thing to live like this on board a cruise ship, but permanently? For a certain type of person — perhaps this man, or the man he pretends to be — it's a fine, joyful existence. Would he ever really have a dinner party for 10 in this space, as we see enacted at the end? It's not a real party, because it's an on-camera demonstration of the space. Watch closely and notice how the women are responding. There is something they do not love, and it is visible even in this crisply edited production. I felt empathy with these women and resistance to the man's sales pitch. And I remembered the gutted space shown at the beginning of the video, and thought that I could be happy, living in SoHo, in that 400-square-foot space as it looks right then. Just do the kitchen and the bathroom, nice and modern and constrained into a modest space, and let me put in some normal furniture — a good-sized table near the window for my work and eating space (that can be cleared off if anyone needs to come over for dinner) and I'll order a sleeper sofa from Design Within Reach. Spare me all those insane, ever-encroaching built-ins, and those crazy pop-up extra beds for guests. Guests to the city can get a hotel room or sleep on the floor or I'll add sleeper chair. By the end of the video, I felt paranoid that the government had a plan to shift us into smaller and smaller pods with evil corporations getting rich fitting them out with soul crushing storage bins. Mayor Bloomberg! Who fixed your ducts? Huh? Fixed your ducts, all right. I told you before - they fixed themselves. Oh, yeah? Then where did this come from, eh? Out of your nostril? Eh? Nostrils, eh? Central Services. They don't take kindly to sabotage. Sabotage, huh? Jesus, this place is in a terrible state. Just a minute! You're not gonna leave it like this, are you? Why not? All you gotta do is blow your nose and it's fixed, innit?

"Am I a bat? Some form of demon? Or perhaps some species of bee?"

"Come to Argentina, where our bat-bee-demon women will cater to your needs!"

"Come to Malaysia, or my dragon-riders will burn down your villages and a hundred years of darkness and winter will befall you all!"

"We’re all kinda depressed in Denmark at the moment."

"Middle seat gets both armrests. This way, everybody gets at least one armrest, and it best equalizes everybody's space."

"If you think that the shared armrests are for whoever first claims them — a rule that frequently would leave the middle-seater wedged between two elbowy people — you have entitlement issues."

#8 on a list of 12 rules for airports and airplanes.

And this post is following a rule for blogging that I just noticed: If you find something to blog about via a blog that deserves a "via" (or "hat tip") link, you can better fulfill your obligation by finding something else on the hat-tippable blog and doing a separate post about that. This post represents the something else, and the next post will be the thing I found via this blog, and I'm not going to put a "via" link on the next post.

The idea is that the blog I'm linking to here will get far more click-through readers from this post than from a "via" link that telegraphs its obligatory quality. I'm going to follow this rule in the future — and by the way, I think Instapundit follows it — but I'm not going to keep pointing out that I follow it. And I won't follow it unless I genuinely would have chosen to blog the something else, in accordance with the longstanding Althouse Principles of the Bloggable.

"The Ultimate Amenity: Grandparents."

A NYT article about highly affluent couples who are spending their copious money to purchase housing for their own parents, so that their immensely privileged children will have the ultimate amenity: grandparents in their daily life.

Published the very next day in the NYT is an article — charting at #1 on the NYT most-emailed list — "For Poor, Leap to College Often Ends in a Hard Fall." ("Melissa, an eighth-grade valedictorian, seethed over her mother’s boyfriends and drinking, and Bianca’s bubbly innocence hid the trauma of her father’s death.") Proposed alternate title: The Ultimate Privation: No parents.

David Gregory, neatly tweaked...

... by Drudge (in Christmas colors):



The links are: "Did David Gregory Violate DC Gun Law On National TV?" and "Mocks NRA Chief for Proposing Armed Guards; Sends Kids to High-Security School..."

And here's the transcript for the whole interview. We watched it. Gregory was all heated up, eager to extract his sound bites from LaPierre, in the typical style of recent gun control debates I've seen, like this one between Bob Wright and Jacob Sullum. The one who wants gun control cranks up the emotion, and the gun control opponent stolidly stands his ground.

It's like they intended to make an implicit argument, premised on the question: This is what a human being is like; do you want people to have guns? The gun control advocate models the answer "no" (because people run on emotion and might do unpredictable, regrettable things). The gun control opponent models the answer "yes" (because people are stable and rational).

It's all about control: Do you think people are self-controlled or is government control needed? And now, I see this post is about to bust loose into a much more general set of observations about politics, and I don't want to do that. This is a blog post, the first of the day, and it needs to come to an end. So let me leave you with 3 brief bonus observations:

1. David Gregory was not appearing on "Meet the Press" as a gun control advocate. He's the moderator... some sort of "journalist."

2. If a new federal gun control program includes a buy-back of some newly banned "assault" weapons, it will be like Cash for Clunkers. I hated Cash for Clunkers.

3. The post-Newtown gun control advocates have been emphasizing the gun, rather than the person, on the theory that a person may have murderous impulses but if he doesn't have a gun, he won't be able to do as much damage. But in real life, if you had someone in you midst who was bent on murder, you would not think: Well, at least he doesn't have a gun. If he goes off, what's the worst he can do, maybe 4 or 5 kids, max?

Skiing... today at Odana Hills...

Meade has a camera strapped to his head.

At the Snowfall Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

(And consider shopping through the Althouse portal.)

Are "lockdown" drills traumatizing schoolkids?

Catherine Crawford used to think so.

[R]epresentatives from the Department of Education unexpectedly showed up and announced that they would be conducting a special drill to prepare students in the event of a gunman in the building.... “All the kids were corralled in the block area out of sight, the classroom doors were locked, blinds drawn, and they all had to be quiet. They were so quiet. I couldn't believe it. Obviously they had done it before. Then, the DOE guys came and jiggled the door, kind of pretending to get in, and the kids had to stay quiet through that as well. You would have been really proud.”...

According to my 7-year old, it all felt like a game and was kind of “exhilarating” — her word.

Suzy Favor Hamilton — exposed as a call girl — had gotten in a couple other PR jams.

For one thing: "She became famous during the Sydney Olympics in 2000 for intentionally falling to the track in the 1500 meter final when it became clear she could not medal in honor of her late brother, Dan."

And:

But I recall her... as the young woman in one of the most horrid and controversial commercials ever shown on U.S. television. The Nike spot, a dozen years ago, showed her being chased out of her house in the dark woods — stripped to her bra — by a maniac with a chain saw. Running through the woods, she finally outdistances him thanks to her Nikes. Protests centered on exploitation of violence against women (especially one half-naked) and it was soon pulled.

American Girl dolls in stop-motion video.

A YouTube phenomenon.



Those American Girl dolls are expensive, but if a kid is interested in stop-motion animation, she (or he) doesn't need any particular kind of expensive doll. Here's "The Klutz Book of Animation: How to Make Your Own Stop Motion Movies." And here's "Stopmotion Explosion: Animate Anything and Make Movies - Epic Films for $20 or Less."

"FBI Investigated 'Occupy' As Possible 'Terrorism' Threat..."

According to documents obtained by a FOIA request by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund.

"Cannabis makes pain more bearable rather than actually reducing it..."

"Using brain imaging, researchers found that the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis reduced activity in a part of the brain linked to emotional aspects of pain."

"So Meade, in your marriage, which one of you is the whore?"

A question asked in the webpages of Isthmus by Madison politico Stu Levitan.

Non-Madisonians may not know the name, but: "Stu Levitan has been a mainstay of Madison media and government for thirty-five years, a leader in both politics and the press since 1975. In addition to Books and Beats, Stu hosts Access: City Hall on the Madison City Channel and serves as chair of the Madison Community Development Authority and on the Madison Landmarks Commission. Since 1987, he has been a mediator/arbitrator for the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission."

Scroll up at the first link for the context, which is a discussion, initiated by Levitan, about the discovery that Madison sports heroine Suzy Favor Hamilton has been working as a call girl.

Scenery chewing in the Theater of Outrage over Wayne LaPierre's unremarkable news conference.

Read the transcript of what LaPierre said, if you haven't already, so you know what the purveyors of outrage are characterizing for their readers.

Here's the NYT editorial, which is entitled "The N.R.A. Crawls From Its Hidey Hole."

[W]e were stunned by Mr. LaPierre’s mendacious, delusional, almost deranged rant.

Mr. LaPierre looked wild-eyed at times....

We cannot imagine trying to turn the principals and teachers who care for our children every day into an armed mob....

He proposed a mob? This is a failure (or pretended failure) of imagination. What if those who worked in schools were offered training in weapons and permission to carry in schools if they could qualify — entirely optional? Is that idea obviously mendacious, delusional, and almost deranged? The NYT is hot to exclude it as something any sane person would even begin to contemplate. They'd like an instant crazy image of teachers gone wild.

People like Mr. LaPierre want us to believe that civilians can be trained to use lethal force with cold precision in moments of fear and crisis. That requires a willful ignorance about the facts. 

If "civilians" can't be trained, how can noncivilians be trained? And quite aside from how well people hit targets, isn't the presence of an armed guard a deterrent from beginning an attack, and doesn't pointing a gun at the criminal sometimes end his attack?

Moving on from the NYT, here's Andrew Sullivan absorbing LaPierre into an all-out assault on the GOP titled "Enough!":

Between the humiliating and chaotic collapse of Speaker Boehner's already ludicrously extreme Plan B and Wayne La Pierre's deranged proposal to put government agents in schools with guns, the Republican slide into total epistemic closure and political marginalization has now become a free-fall. This party, not to mince words, is unfit for government.

If that kind of hysteria — sounding deranged in the condemnation of derangement — is what counts as unminced words these days, I'd like to put in an order for minced words. I'd like to aim a precise scoff at the phrase "government agents in schools." Agents! Sounds very scary, but the truth is, teachers are government agents.

Anyway, Sullivan's style of hysterical talk wins The Game of Internet, where the score is kept in traffic statistics. And Sullivan himself is boasting that his "Enough!" post "has just blown up on Facebook." Kablooey! He's so sensitive about those terrible guns, but his metaphor of choice is explosion.

Did President Obama violate the precepts of etiquette and display raging narcissism at the funeral of Daniel Inouye?

It's pretty much what everyone is saying, notably Emily Yoffe at Slate (where one ordinarily expects support for the Prez). When I encounter a controversy at this late stage of one-sidedness, my instinct is to develop the other side. Law school class is like that, you know. If there's a case that everyone just somehow knows is rightly decided, the way to have a discussion about it isn't to remark upon its obviousness, but to figure out how someone — someone intelligent, educated, and sane — could think it wasn't right. That's what I do.

Read Yoffe's description of Obama's eulogy, which dwells on Obama's own life, growing up in Hawaii, the state Inouye represented in the Senate. Obama talks about his family vacations, where they stayed in motels, and the motel rooms had TVs, and — "as the people must have been twitching in the pews wondering where this was all going" — the Watergate hearings were on TV, and so he saw Inouye, and because Inouye did not have that typical white person look, the young mixed-race Obama was inspired to imagine "what might be possible in my own life."

A funeral for a very old person — Inouye was 88 — is not an occasion for deep mourning or soothing profound shock. It can be an occasion to look back on the era, to indulge one's own personal connections to the time and the man who has passed on. And if the President of the United States speaks at the funeral, that in itself is a phenomenal honor for the deceased. The President should not read a typical eulogy, a conventional account of the dead man's achievements and wonderful personal traits. This is something different. And when the President is specifically noted for his oratory, something special is anticipated.

No one — I submit — was "twitching in the pews wondering where this was all going." They were rapt, experiencing the gift of a unique presentation, The Story of a Boy — that boy! — and how his individual history merged with The Story of America — A Story of Race. They knew, as they surrendered themselves into the hands of our storyteller-in-chief, that they would be cared for and rewarded. The threads would come together, the yarns would be knitted into a beautiful eulogy blanket, under which Daniel Inouye could be laid to rest and all would be comforted.

How dare you snatch that comfort away by counting the "I"s and "me"s in that speech?!

The end of a Christmas caroling tradition.

The NY Post reports:

The tradition began in the late 1970s when cabaret singer John Wallowitch would walk by Berlin’s [NYC] house and warble “White Christmas” while walking his dog, Winnie. Five years on, in 1983, he had added a group of fellow performers, and Berlin, then 95, famously welcomed the carolers inside for cocoa and cookies. They sang in his home’s beautiful ballroom from then on. After Berlin’s death, when the house became Luxembourg’s consulate and permanent mission to the UN, the tradition continued.

Berlin died 23 years ago, so that's a long time for Luxembourg to put up with this intrusion, but having done it for so long, you'd think the traditional would be so deeply internalized that they would never let it go. And how many other ways does Luxembourg have to inspire love here in America?

But Luxembourg Consul-General Jean-Claude Knebeler explains he was forced to stuff the ballroom with office equipment because his country was elected as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council, and so is housing more staff for two years.

Security Council?! That's the excuse?