A legal prediction: In the next few years, the Supreme Court will expand First Amendment free exercise of religion rights and essentially ignore that Amendment’s establishment of religion clause.  Religious organizations will more easily get state moneys, and less state money will be available for non-religious organizations. And people and organizations claiming religious rights will be able to discriminate more readily.

“Conventionality is not morality.” Charlotte Bronte, Preface to the Second Edition of Jane Eyre.

We who park a car on New York City streets become followers of religion. New York rules prevent us from parking on streets at particular times so that street sweepers can clean to the curb. Thus, in front of my house, on one side the street I cannot park from 11:30 A.M. to 1 P.M. on Mondays and I can’t park during those hours on the other side of the street on Tuesdays. However, there are many planned suspensions of these alternate side parking restrictions—38 this year. (Emergencies such as storms can also bring suspensions.) Many of the suspension are for secular holidays—Memorial Day, Thanksgiving, etc.—but the majority are for religious holidays, and as some religions gain more adherents in New York, and hence more political power, alternate-side suspensions may increase to recognize another religious festival. (Politics gets played out in all sorts of ways in New York City.) I believe that some Hindu and Islam holy days were added not too long ago, increasing the number of my days on which I do not have to worry if I am illegally park. It may sound odd, but I don’t believe that I am the only car parker who says, “Thank God for religion!”

This year, however, religion has not cooperated as well as in years past. There are a lot of suspensions bunched together now because of Easter and Passover. Alternate-side parking is suspended for the first two days and the last two days of Passover and for Holy Thursday and Good Friday. And they are this year, too, of course, but in most years Orthodox Easter comes a week or more after what someone like me thinks is Easter, and the parking restrictions get suspended for Orthodox Holy Thursday and Friday. But not this year. In a rarity, western and eastern Easter come on the same day. And I lose out on some hassle-free parking days. Religion can disappoint in so many different ways.

My left-handed sister got upset when our jokester father told her that he had bought her a right-handed tennis racket. Then she thought about it.

A legal prediction: In the next few years, the Supreme Court will expand First Amendment free speech rights. The overwhelming beneficiaries of these decisions will be corporations and conservative entities.

All those TV sports shows ought to interview college athletes about their favorite professors and then produce clips of those teachers in the classrooms and interacting with the athletes outside of classes.

When you see security personnel, do you always feel more secure?

The guy who painted our dining room is also a standup comedian. Are you surprised that his act has no jokes about his painting job?

How did a woman in a hoop skirt get into, much less use, an outhouse?

I know someone who doesn’t like sweetbreads.

I wondered what Donald J. Trump is like when he is alone in a room. My friend, stealing a line from John Maynard Keynes, responded, “When he is alone, there is no one there.”