Supreme Court prediction

The obvious thing to predict is that President Bush will whine incessantly about Senate Democrats not being fair to his nominee. This is his way of handling any and all criticism or question. You're either with him or against him.

But I'm willing to put good money on this: Bush will nominate someone relatively uncontroversial. He won't dare give anyone obviously good reasons to object, so the nominee will not be Alberto Gonzalez. Nor will it be Paul Wolfowitz, nor John Bolton. I don't think he'll play a shell game with the nominee either, because that backfired on his dad. It'll be someone the Bush people consider a safe bet.

Now, of course, they'll name Eichmann.

How can it be the end of June already?

I figure it's because June has 30 days, which in turn is because of that rhyme, you know the one, April showers bring May flowers, but what do May flowers bring? No, that's not the one. It's the one that goes "A, B, C, D, E,..." No, it's not that one, either.

I think it's the end of June already because I've spent the last three weeks with a hematoma, and haven't done as much hiking or otherwise moving about as I'd intended. Nor have I done as much reading and philosophizing. We've been reading together, just nothing in the philosophy genre.

I've been playing Maggie, my Seagull 12-string guitar, a great deal. Lauren continues on her home beautification quest, and is, as of present writing, organizing a closet. She has already hung a wall with drapes, and we've put up a couple shelves, one of which I regard as precariously lashed to the living room wall with anchor bolts. I don't trust those things.

In all, then, I'd characterize my state of being as in a holding pattern. This must be incredibly thrilling and insightful for the throngs who have begun now to - well, to throng, I suppose - to my blog from the Modesto Bee web site.

I don't subscribe to the Bee. I used to. I started every morning with the miserable habit of drinking my first cup of ridiculously strong coffee while reading the Bee and listening to music. The reason this was a miserable habit had a lot to do with my life in general at the time, but also had something to do with the Bee. Like many newspapers of the day, the Bee is a cut-and-paste job composed of wire service reports and press releases from various official sources. There is scarce little actual journalism going on in the US any more. Very few papers maintain a staff of reporters who go out and track down stories, content instead to let the news come to them, in the form of whatever official line someone wants the public to swallow. (By "line" here I mean, mainly, lies.)

On the few occasions something has actually happened on Stan State's campus, for instance, I've found the Bee's coverage profoundly lacking, often in facts, but always in substance. I don't blame the reporters covering the university specifically, because they've always simply done their jobs - and their jobs, like most in the newz industry, are not to investigate and report what's going on.

But the predominant reason I came to loathe the Bee so much is the editorial page, especially the letters to the editor. It's been a while, and I'm out of the habit, so I might as well tell this story, which some people have found amusing. I got so fed up with the Bee's habit of printing the worst-argued letters that I decided to send them a few gag letters. The first one I wrote under the name "Donald Anatidae." I forget what Donald was upset about - I think it was the right-wing slant of most of what gets printed in the editorial page (and that's true, by the way - the whole "liberal media bias" charge is in fact nonsense, carefully crafted and effective nonsense). They printed the letter despite the fact - or perhaps because of the fact - that it was poorly written, just one step above gibberish. Plus, anatidae is the scientific name for ducks.

So after they printed Donald Duck raving incoherently about right-wing media bias, I decided to get bolder. I wrote a letter complaining about the damage done throughout history, and in the present day, by Christians and Christianity. I signed the letter "Fred Nietzsche." This should probably have been a give-away: someone somewhere at the Bee should have noticed the name, connected the dots, and realized I was using the name of the notable anti-Christian German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

After that, I became more emboldened, but they never printed another letter from me, whether I was writing sensibly or not, under any name, even my own. And now, I'm on their list of bloggers in the area. I get the sneaking feeling they identified me without checking out what was in my blog, and now the first stuff anybody could read is all about my vasectomy, my hematoma, my guitar, my apartment, and my brief stint spoofing the Bee.

Haven't blogged in a while

The Modesto Bee emailed me today to ask permission to link from their site to my blog. I can't imagine why.

I've been out of commission to varying degrees for three weeks now, because I'm suffering complications from a vasectomy. I've got a hematoma. It hurts, it's uncomfortable, and it has put what is sometimes known as a cramp in my style, or a wrench in my works, or a kink in my armor, or some other such phrase (pick yer favorite, or collect the whole set!).

I did buy a 12-string guitar, a lovely pink-twany Seagull, who so far is called Maggie. I even brought it down to Harbor City this weekend, where we were for Lauren's mom Allison's party celebrating getting her teaching credential.


Life goes on, in short. And while I have a screed in the works, I think I'll wait, it being 6 o'clock, my loveliest Lauren about to sew, the evening crawling in. I'm working on a tune I'll probably call "As the Dust Settles" or "Once the Dust Settles," something like that.

Guitar and medical news

I've pretty much decided to buy a 12-string guitar. Today we went out briefly, looking for a game (failing at that), Augustine blacks for the Takamine (which we found), and to play a couple 12-strings at a local music shop, just for the sheer hell of it, and to relax and get my mind off my post-op condition (of which more below).

At the local music shop, where we did find my beloved Augustine blacks, there were a handful of 12-strings, including a battered, somewhat repaired Alvarez, a trio of Greg Bennett specials, and a Takamine. The Bennetts had a brassy, big sound, but not a warm and sweet sound, which I'm a sucker for, especially in 12-strings, ever since college, when I would swoon to my pal Jim ("The Most Optimistic 12-String Player in America") Williams' old Seagull. The Alvarez had that, and so, to an extent, had the Tak. But the Alvarez had been glued together after who-knows-what had befallen the poor thing. Lauren adored it. I played a couple of the songs I've written for her, and the one I wrote for Lance, and they just sounded lovely. They sounded plenty good, and a great deal crisper, on the Tak. But I didn't like the cut-away body or the pickup on the Tak, and the Alvarez... well, I just felt foolish about plunking down good money on a wreck of a machine. But I am now officially on the market.

I did get the strings home and restrung the old Tak. The key for the G-string tuning machine broke in my fingers as I tightened it. So I'm bereft of guitars at the moment, which is a shame. As has been unreported, playing music has become much more important to me again since Lauren has been in my life. I miss it when I can't play every day.

All this, really, by way of getting my mind off my pain. I had an outpatient procedure a week ago, and was not advised, I swear, that it would be over a week that walking, sitting, standing, bending, or in any way moving from one long-fought-for comfortable position would be so strongly contraindicated. (It's a common outpatient procedure. It causes discomfort.)

So who knows? Tomorrow night I may be reporting I've brought home an instrument. We should at least (if we remember) bring home strings for the violin.

The Bad Plus

Last night, we got a chance to hear the contemporary jazz trio The Bad Plus, on a double-bill with a classical pianist named Christopher O'Riley, whose claim to fame in the not-so-classical world is his transcriptions of Radiohead for solo piano. Whoever put the show together obviously thought that since The Bad Plus plays hot jazz versions of rock tunes (notably Iron Man, Heart of Glass, Smells Like Teen Spirit, and a song by the Pixies called Velouria - none of which did they perform), that it would work together on that basis. Eh. O'Riley is a classical pianist in style and performance, and never mind that he was playing Radiohead. It was transcribed for solo piano, and it wasn't, in that regard, anything like what The Bad Plus was up to. So the crowd was sparser than it might have been, and less hip than it might have been.

We had a blast, especially during The Bad Plus. Because of the light audience, we moved from our $20 nosebleed seats into gallery seats (I think they wanted $45 for them) right above the stage, above drummer Dave King. That was the right choice, because we got to see King toy (literally) with his drums all night. He used a penguin jangly toy, a cooking pot, and for their cover of Radiohead (from an upcoming Brit anthology of others doing Radiohead), E.T. dolls that made electronic whining sounds.

One thing had bothered me about The Bad Plus, which last night I decided was a reason to like them all the more. I was imagining jazz critics trying to write about them, and wondering if they're charlatans or serious. What I mean is that they choose music, and perform in a style, that is more like a rock band, and since jazz critics and audiences tend to be snooty (it's America's Classical Music [TM] after all), I wondered how they take to the raucous beat-down performances of Iverson, Anderson, and King. When King pets the side of his drums with a cooking pot, is he just screwing around, or is he doing something musically important? Last night, I decided, whether or not he's screwing around, he and the rest of the band are playing music they are enormously passionate about, and that's what counts. King attacks furiously, Iverson moves between what looks like deep self-critical introspection and effusion, and, as Lauren observed, Anderson looks like he's in love with his bass.

We got home before midnight from San Francisco, and today we've handled some basic work and school fiddly bits, before a planned trek to Yosemite tomorrow for a day trip, tromping around up there. The rest of the week promises - absolutely promises - lack of movement.

Difficulty relaxing

So this is Wednesday, June 1, 2005. I see; I get the picture.

I've been having the most bizarre difficulty getting out of the mindset and posture of the semester, specifically of the end of the semester, specifically of the stress and strain of the end of the semester. It reached a culmination point last night, I hope, when I scrubbed the living beejeezus out of the reflectors from the stove burners. This after spending the largest measure of the afternoon baking and cooking.

Meanwhile, Lauren was sewing. Her attempt to relax is being organized around taking up new projects, and to that end we've bought the stuff for her to make a dress and a shirt (both for herself), a duvet cover for both of us, and a scarf for me.

Why it should be hard to relax is easy to figure. It has been the longest, strangest, most delightful year of our lives. We're tired, and we're tired of the creeping feeling of being watched - that is, by people we haven't specifically invited to watch - and that means precisely what I mean it to mean, and nothing else, and put that right back where you found it, mister! Bad dog! Bad, bad dog! No no no!

In other news,

Every time I see him explain away the actions of the Admin with that stupid goddamned smirk on his face, it becomes more apparent that he is, at heart, a four-year-old who enjoys saying "poopy."

So says my pal Jim ("The Most Optimistic Man in America") Williams, and he's on to something. Occasionally, Imj (as I call him sometimes) can be quite eloquent, can give voice to the unspoken, can impose order in the chaos of contemporary social life.

My other friend (yes! I have at least 2 friends!) Bob has started a blog, which I haven't explored in depth as yet.

Evidence that I'm still grading, or something

It came up in the car on the drive up to Sacramento. It was one of those moments of kizmet that pop up in the non-sequitir stream of commentary on long drives, between curses directed at aggressive drivers and asides pointing out the beautiful, the strange, and the silly. I can't quite remember precisely how it came to this point, but it did: The terrorists may already have won.

I don't mean that in any political sense. I mean that when the new TV Guide sweepstakes comes out, it will inevitably be mailed to a Mr. Al Qaeda, in a big gawdy quasi-official envelope declaring in big red letters: "GRAND PRIZE WINNER!" Underneath, of course, it will bear the usual disclaimer, "If the code number on your official entry form is selected at random."

So yes, indeed, the terrorists may already have won.

All of which leads me to think that somebody in Homeland Security (Heimatssicherheit in the original German) should be identifying an address to begin a massive campaign to undermine funding for terrorist operations, by sending a constant barrage of unrequested magazine subscriptions and other junk mail offers to them. Imagine the time and energy it will take away from planning attacks, if they're constantly on the phone to Wine Spectator, or Hustler, or Field and Stream, trying to stop a subscription. ("No, no, you don't understand. We are not hunting and fishing enthusiasts! We do not want your decadent magazine!")

Rally

Lauren and I took time out of finals week to go up to Sacramento to join a few thousand of our closest friends to protest Governor Schwarzenegger's continuing campaign against education, nursing, and public safety. The news stories from papers across the state all resemble The San Francisco Chronicle story (a fact which holds its own lesson): all understate the crowd size considerably, all tell a story of conflict between the Governor and a group of vocal protestors. This discourse decontextualizes, for instance, by referring to competing claims about whether the Governor promised to fully fund schools according to Prop. 98, and competing claims about whether his budget does fully fund schools (he did make the promise, he did reneg on the promise).

Standing in the heat, yelling, chanting, hearing the speeches making our case, all felt very good, but it was also terribly exhausting. And today, back into the fray.

Resistance

Grading papers forces me to confront anew the difficulties of a semester. This term, I decided to push for open dialogue as much as possible, and did everything I could to make that happen. Of course, it didn't work all the time. When it did work, notably in Professional Ethics, the students took initiative, thought things through, brought their own ideas and experiences to bear, and respected differences of opinion and the dialogue itself. When it didn't work, I am fairly convinced, the students didn't find a way into the dialogue, or the spirit of the dialogue. I am at a loss why, because I do believe my approach didn't vary all that much between classes.

And I don't say this to single any class out or to assign blame to any group of students, nor to assume blame myself. bell hooks desribes a class that didn't work in Teaching to Transgress. She concludes that teachers can't create dialogue all by themselves, that it takes the response of students to make it work. Obviously true, but hooks seems to evade the issues of (a) whether that means it's the students' fault when a class doesn't become dialogical, and (b) to what extent a teacher can, after all, make it work. She also isn't terribly specific about how to make it work.

What I tried to do this semester is threefold. First, I tried to take as much grade-pursuing pressure and behavior out of the courses as possible, basically by making them easy to pass, and frankly, easy to ace. The goal there is to turn attention away from the need to produce a pleasing performance and toward the material under consideration itself. Second, I tried to show myself to be an interested dialogical partner pursuing knowledge along with them, rather than as a possessor of knowledge monologically presenting it to them. This is an attempt to be honest about the nature of philosophical inquiry, specifically its openness to revision, reflective reconsideration, etc. It was also an expression of my changing attitudes, beliefs, and understanding of life, the universe, and everything. It was also an attempt to invite students to be part of the dialogue, not to assume they will be fed the answer I'm expecting back from them, and to take responsibility for contributing to class discussion. Third, I tried to keep the tone light, which is something I usually have done anyway. Even when the course material gets into dark areas - issues of death and dying in Pro Ethics, for instance, or the existential dread of choosing in the Intro class - I attempt to inject levity of some sort. Mainly, this is because I am funny. But it's also a deliberate and conscious technique.

Anyway, these don't always work. Sometimes people don't get the jokes. Sometimes people don't get the point. Sometimes people seem to deliberately obstruct me, or others, or even themselves - which is mystifying. The most mystifying thing is when I'm taken absolutely wrongly: when I'm taken to be lording knowledge or power over my students, or something like that. This is deeply weird given my demeanor in class. I believe I make the classroom open to saying just about anything. The only limit I impose is that you should take philosophical points of view seriously, not be dismissive.

But that's what it appears to boil down to in many cases of abiding resistance to dialogue: an absolute refusal to consider that philosophy may be relevant, that something other than one's own point of view and habit of thought may be significant. That may be the point at which bell hooks' account is most pertinent.

Penumbra

Last night we went to the annual reading and celebration of the release of Penumbra, Stan State's literary and art mag. Lauren has two poems in this year's issue, and decided she would read.

She absolutely stole the show. It turned out that Lauren was the last one to read, luckily for everybody else. She read "A Letter to My Lover, while waiting for a Northbound to pass," complete with rhythm, complete with sway and swing, complete with line breaks that she used to give herself a backbeat. Hubba hubba. It was a very sexy reading of a very sexy poem. I think five people stopped her on our way to the parking lot, after two or three came up to her at our seats, all glowing with praise, richly deserved. I think that was the poem that my pal Jim ("The Most Optimistic Man in America, in a Miata") Williams responded to by asking me, basically, if I was going to be able to deal with Lauren being a poet, and a better one. Well, yeah!

On the way home, Lauren wondered how inspiring her performance might have been. She was hopeful that everyone went home in right randy states.

Judges and filibusters

Far be it from me to accuse Senate Republicans of being over-aggressive. I don't really need to accuse them of anything, because moves like banning filibusters in order to get 10 crazed judges appointed aptly demonstrate it. The news as reported lately (see, for instance, Heated senate showdown opens on judges) completely de-contextualizes the situation. For instance, it's not reported in this story, nor, I'll bet, in 90% of the stories on front pages of newspapers today, that while Senate Democrats are filibustering to stop 10 Bush appointments from being approved, Senate Republicans, controlling the Judiciary Committee, stopped numerous Clinton appointments to federal judgeships, simply by not considering the nominees. (See Senate Rules Meltdown for more context.) The stories also fail to point out that close to 170 of Bush's appointees have been approved, and that the federal bench has its lowest level of vacancy since 1990.

It almost sounds like Republicans are seeking absolute authority to do anything they want, in Congress, in the judiciary, in the executive branch. Checks and balances? Not for them, not when they hold the majority.

Impervious to irony

Courtesy of my pal Owen Kelly, who shared this at the Society for Phenomenology and Media conference (Owen teaches in Finland): America We Stand As One. Owen claims that this says something deeply meaningful about American social reality. And maybe it does.

How to go to conferences

I actually wrote this yesterday, but since getting in last night at 11:20, I let it wait.

Often the best things that happen at conferences don't happen at the conferences. I've only learned how to enjoy the setting of a conference over the last few years. I've learned that the way to get the most out of conferences is to do two main things: (1) find the right bar, go there, and stay there as long as everyone else does, and (2) spend some time with another conference-goer or two checking out the locale.

Obvious, I know now. But I had had such an angst-ridden posture, really a defensive one, that I didn't get into the right frame of mind.

One thing missing at the Helsinki conference was the right bar. For one thing, Helsinki was so incredibly expensive, but also a difficult city to be a tourist in, I'd say - at least, to be a typical American tourist, or at least me. But Oregon's coastal towns boast a generous helping of good pubs, and the one we found served local brew on tap, including a dynamite stout that the conference probably bought a keg of over the days. The wait staff were ridiculously nice, which threw me. (That became sort of a theme - everywhere we went, the clerks, cashiers, waitresses, etc. were all terribly, not to say suspiciously, nice. Dave finally asked at the Malt Shop in Manzanita, Oregon for an order of whatever medication the waitress was taking. Myself, I looked around the place, and thought, well, why wouldn't you be nice in a place like this?)

When SPM went to Helsinki in 2003, I ended up spending my last day wandering the city on foot with my friend Paul. Along the way we checked out an international fair at a park in the middle of town; found a store selling odd decorative and art items, mainly from Russia; and ran into Lars, who had hosted the conference, because we had blundered into his neighborhood. This year's conference ended Friday evening, and today I spent the afternoon on the Oregon coast with Dave and Owen, wandering along the beaches, checking out caves and such (at low tide, since they're inaccessible other times).

So now I'm in the Portland airport, waiting out my flight to Sacramento, to be followed by the long drive home. I'm exhausted, but mostly eager to be home.

Stuff going on

Busy.

Lauren and I went to see the university's production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead last Friday - one of my favorite plays. This was her first time seeing it, my second. It was well done, especially Roque Berlanga's Rosencrantz. I thought the last half of the second act and beginning of the third lagged a bit, but that can happen. As Lauren pointed out, it's gotta be hard to inject a lot of energy into dialogue about inevitable doom.

Saturday I tried writing more on the paper I'm presenting to the Society for Phenomenology and Media on Thursday of this week. I'm nowhere near satisfied with the paper. I leave tomorrow for the conference, up in Oregon, which I face largely with dread, to be perfectly honest.

After that, there's only one more week of classes, a disturbing number of papers to read, and then the school year will be over. I would like to spend a week going for walks every day, whenever we feel like it, to wherever we feel like going, for however long we like, alternating walking with cooking, playing games, reading, and a generous amount of blissing out (which is not a euphemism per se).

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy flick

Some context: I don't go to movies often. I don't enjoy the experience, and I tend to be hyper-critical of movies. I'm also a big fan of Douglas Adams, especially, as I suppose would go without saying, of the Hitchhhiker's trilogy.

Lauren and I had read the first four books in the trilogy together just recently. I hadn't read them in years, and it was wonderful to get back into them. At his best, Adams' writing tickles my brain in a very particular way that pleases me tremendously.

So we were sure to go see the movie when it came out, and yesterday, opening day, there we were, at the matinee. Lauren was guardedly optimistic; I was prepared for it to be bad. You see, we'd been reading reviews of the thing days before. The balance was on the negative side, but it was clear that some of the reviewers who panned it either didn't understand science fiction or didn't understand Adams. One actually criticized the film's plot for not making any sense - clearly this person hadn't read the book. Those who had were often upset that good lines were omitted or rewritten, with the effect of making them less funny. The positive reviews were often odd, too. Some of them were just enthused that it got made (there's a long history of failed attempts to get the project off the ground, beginning in the early 80s). Others seemed to be speaking in opposition to the harsh criticisms, offering that Mos Def wasn't too bad as Ford Prefect, for instance, or that the way they handled Zaphod Beeblebrox's having two heads could have been worse.

So we went to see it. It was pretty bad. Almost none of it retained Adams' sense of the strange, almost none of it retained his sense of humor. The best bits were the sections from the book and the visual effects of the Vogon constructor fleet and of Magrathea. The opening credit sequence, featuring a song-and-dance number that many critics decried vehemently, was actually kind of fun.

The two main problems are these. First, nothing that happens in the movie seems motivated by anything. Adams' stuff relies on exposition - provided humorously by the book's narration in the original radio series, by that and additional text in the books. His jokes are not generally one-offs. Adams' versions of the events sketched in the movie are driven in a particular direction, arbitrary or disjointed as that sometimes is. All that is missing. If you didn't know the book, you wouldn't understand what was going on, basically from the beginning. If you did know the book, you wouldn't understand why they did what they did with it.

But above all, the very worst thing about it, is that it just wasn't funny. There were bits that were amusing, but I think I laughed once, quietly.

Ain't nobody here but us chickens

I roasted a chicken tonight. Hot damn, I love roasting chickens. Tonight's was a free range hen courtesy of Trader Joe's, which came out splendid. I also made mashed potatoes, and put together a little salad replete with my first ever batch of croutons (an excuse/opportunity to use up a drying baguette).

It has been an intense, soul-searching weekend. We've both been under stress lately, the end of the semester looms, and on top of it all, up pop the occasional ghosts from lives past.

Mainly I remember being 20-21, driving around Charlotte in my 1978 Honda Accord with the paint sandblasted off ("The William F. Buckley, Jr." after the columnist), noting as I went by certain corners that person(s) with whom I had a past could be right there and I could happen to cross paths with them. I remember a sometimes overwhelming sense of the place being haunted. The one thing I liked about the experience was the exhilaration of potential danger or conflict.

Conflict never ensued. If it had, it would have run its course, as these things do. This may seem machismotically stoic, but I think it's true nonetheless: most things run their course. Even curses obey statutes of limitations. And what I still possess from those weird tense days is a set of memories, most of which are pleasant enough, and a few of which focus on the perfect freedom one can only experience at 20-21, in an old junker, driving in warm afternoon sun with all the windows down and good music on the stereo, with one's first tastes of Pyrrhic victory, craziness, politics, emancipation, and wine on one's lips.

I learned there aren't really any ghosts. There's just jerks in white sheets saying "boo."

The fine art of sneering

I've concluded, after some time spent studying the matter, that sneering is a subtle act, requiring a finely tuned sense of minute and evanescent social interactions. Most of the sneering I've been watching hasn't been terribly impressive, so for what it's worth, here are some dos and don'ts:

DO:

* sneer in concert with others
* face the target of the sneer
* combine the sneer with whispered snide comments to someone next to you

DON'T:

* sneer at someone further than 10 feet away
* sneer at someone who doesn't care what you think of him/her
* sneer at someone who is feeding you
* attempt to sneer and smile as if warmly at the same time in an effort to mask the sneer

I think that if you follow these simple guidelines, your sneering will improve vastly. You're welcome.

Meanwhile

It's been another ridiculously busy week. Lauren had a paper to write and a couple tests. I had appointments upon appointments, union stuff happening, etc. By last night we were quite well prepared to do nothing, which we utterly failed to do: we went to my colleague and our friend Val's birthday party. It was a potluck affair, and for it I made a gorgonzola, red onion, and asparagus tart (food porn forthcoming). She had originally planned a small gathering, but apparently kept expanding the guest list until, during the height of events last night, there were in fact 6.6 million people there.

I am now the duly elected and first lecturer rep to the CSU Stanislaus Academic Senate. So next fall, unlike the previous 4 falls when I was the rep from the philosophy department, I'll do something completely different with my Tuesday afternoons, and go to senate meetings again. Sometimes I enjoy listing the different things I've gotten myself into: Academic Senate rep, IRB member (I think I might be vice-chair), Campus Community Building Committee member, CFA lecturer rep from Stanislaus, lecturer subcommittee on evaluation member, lecturer rep to the Contract Development and Bargaining Strategies committee, chair of a new lecturer subcommittee on faculty governance.

So there.

CFA Assembly weekend

So, as of this morning, I am now a member of the California Faculty Association's Contract Development and Bargaining Strategies committee, or CDBS. I ran unopposed for a seat from the Lecturer's Council, so I wasn't permitted by union rules to give my speech, which would have mentioned that my chief qualification is that I can see de b.s. clearly.

The rest of the Assembly was a bit of a disappointment. For one thing, there was more than the usual amount of highfallutin' speechifying, and less than the usual strategizing. We heard two speeches in the Assembly about the political future of the public good in the state. They were fine, but I had a feeling of being preached to as a member of the choir. But there were some interesting notes I'll have to get back to later.

Mainly, I think these kinds of events are scheduled for odd year spring assemblies because that's when we elect officers, the board, and CDBS - the policymaking core of the union. The last time I was there for this, there were many more contested seats, and a lot of conflict and political wrangling. This year there was much less of that, at least surrounding voting.

Plus, I've been working long hours lately, and I've got more appointments, meetings, and so on than I'd really like coming up.

But tonight, we're getting some relaxing time. Lauren is cooking corned beef; we've watched the King of Iron Chef semi-final, and plan on more audiovisual entertainment, because we can. So there.

It could be worse... It could be raining.

The worst part of my job is grading papers. In a typical semester I have 4 classes of around 30 students each. If I have each class write a couple papers that I have to grade, that's 240. The worst part of grading is not, however, the quantity of work.

I get frustrated, eventually, when I hit a patch of papers written in order to complete an assignment and nothing else. When students think of writing papers as merely something to get done and over with, as a chore, they write pretty lousy papers. I would hope that the act of writing a paper could be something more than a hoop to jump through, but I haven't found a way yet to make that sufficiently clear, or to produce assignments that elicit a more interested response. I fantasize about grading papers that each take a unique and provocative position and make new and vivid sense of the student's ideas and experience.

It's not much to complain about, really, and I'm not really complaining much. It is a problem in my life, one for which I'd love to find a solution.

Compared to what could be happening to me, I don't have much to complain about in general. This realization came to me in full force while watching an episode of Farscape with Lauren last night, and considering that (so far as I know) there's nobody trying to take my planet hostage or destroy it, nobody torturing Lauren to find out where I am, and I don't have to travel into an alternative reality to try to find out where she is from alternative versions of my friends, meanwhile having to watch what might be an alternative version of her get killed by my nemesis,...

It's practically Stoic wisdom: there's nothing on Earth that can happen to you that can't be helped by doctors or lawyers.

Celebrity deaths, Bill Buckley

I've been out of the news loop for a while, having abandoned the Modesto Bee last summer, and having chosen not to subscribe to a paper since. Recently, however, I was rummaging through comics on the Yahoo news feed, realized they now allowed you to have comics on your main Yahoo page, and also noticed you could add columns as well. I added Bill Buckley's.

I've been reading Buckley since I was 14. The habit peaked in high school, when I would read his column three days a week while I was delivering newspapers.While I was in college, I became addicted to his PBS show, Firing Line. I even named my first car after him - the William F. Buckley, Junior. But along about then something happened to the Buck. His dad, WFB Sr., a spy, was killed. Buckley seemed to lose a bit of his stamina, then some of his cussedness, then some of his wits. Firing Line went from an hour to 30 minutes, and often the show drifted into chatter. He even hired Michael Kinsley, the weenie editor of New Republic, to ask questions. So, sadly, I lost interest.

No sooner did I add Buckley's column to my Yahoo feed, but this first item comes up: A Farewell. "Yikes!" I thought, "Buck's quitting!" But no, it was worse. Buckley, good Catholic boy that he's always been, was saying farewell to the Pope. But worse still. Buckley's account of the Pope seems only to say that he was charismatic. That flash of light in the Pope's eyes Buckley noticed in Havana that hot day, he doesn't ascribe to the divine, but to nothing grander than the Pope's being Pope.

Now, I would be among those who'd agree with Buckley's assertion that what makes people famous is fame, and his implicit argument from this premise that what makes someone Pope is being Pope, but I find myself disappointed. If I agree with Buckley's next column, I'll have to dump him. There's no point in there being an agreeable Bill Buckley.