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Snippets

It was only after the midterms that I learned the Urban Dictionary definition of “Red Wave”: “When a close group of girls sync their periods, which can be quite dangerous for everyone else.”

Another year where I was passed over for the title of sexiest man alive. And again I wondered how sexy someone is if they are dead.

Why is it I have never called any of my doctors by a first name?

You can praise a child after a completed task by saying, as many do, “You are so smart.” But then the child may see intelligence as fixed and feel stupid when they cannot do something. You can also praise the child by saying “You did a good job figuring that out.” Isn’t the message then that knowledge and intelligence are expandable with hard work?

“Don’t limit a child to your learning, for he was born in another time.” Rabbinic saying.

“I pay the schoolmaster, but ‘tis the schoolboys who educate my son.” Ralph Waldo Emerson.

On a recent walk, I passed within a few blocks of each other The Den of Splendor and The Gospel Den. I wondered if there was a correct order to visit these places.

When I first came to New York, before bagel shops or at least places selling Bagel Shaped Objects were ubiquitous, the owner of my local deli was offended if a customer asked for a toasted bagel. A bagel was only toasted if it was stale, but in a good shop, of course, no stale bagel was sold. Instead, they were warm from the water bath and oven so that butter or cream cheese would melt into the chewy interior without toasting. Since then, I never have a toasted bagel in a shop, but the other day, I bought a bagel at a place where I had not been before. I should have had it toasted.

Invariably after I watch what I was looking for on YouTube, I spend too much time on the accompanying recommendations. The other day I went looking for Josephine Baker dancing and ended up with the top thirty songs of 1965. But I was happy that I had. I knew the music, almost all of which was great, and I felt that my life had not been entirely wasted.

In a football game, sometimes after a penalty flag has been thrown and the play concludes, the referee announces, as happened the other day, “There was no penalty on the play for offensive holding.” That phrasing seems to imply that there might, however, been an infraction for offensive pass interference or some of the other myriad football possibilities. I think the official should click off the microphone and say, “There was no penalty on the play.” Full stop.

In a glance in the mirror, which are always kept brief, I thought I saw incipient jowls. On the one hand, I thought, jowls add gravitas to some men. On the other, they make Basset hounds look ridiculous.

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Sweet Dreams Aren’t Made of This

          I don’t ever remember being a sound sleeper, the kind who falls asleep (funny expression, falling asleep; It sounds sort of dangerous) and then wakes up eight hours later refreshed. Instead, from childhood to today, I wake up multiple times during the night with the hope each time that I will quickly return to slumberland, a wish that is not always fulfilled.

          I have read that in times past cultures had what was called a first and second sleep. After waking up after several hours sleep, a person would get up and do some non-strenuous activity—read, catch up on correspondence, knit a shawl, sharpen quills—and then go back to bed. This sounds appealing, and I have told myself many times I should try that, but I never have. I did not have projects to occupy me for an hour or so before the second sleep. I would probably have found it hard to resist going to an electronic device, and I have read many times that one should not do that before going to bed. (Although I have seen that admonition, I have never seen the data on it. Do the studies exist?) Instead, when I wake up that first time or any other time, I go to the bathroom, get back under the covers, and, on a good night, fall back to sleep quickly.

          Sometimes, however, sleep does not come easily again. Then my mind seems to go into overdrive, and that has been occasionally useful. Let’s say that I had been working on some mental activity–trying to write an article for the blog, for example– but had reached an impasse. As I lie sleepless in bed, a thought might pop up that breaks the logjam. Sleeplessness well spent, it then turns out.

          However, it is more often the case that I cannot fall asleep easily again because my mind seems caught in an endless loop about something I can do nothing about that has pissed me off. And because my mind won’t let go of the slight or absurdity, I then get angry at myself for allowing myself to work myself into such a state. And when the same thing merry-go-rounds in the middle of the night several times in the same week, I really get upset with myself and that makes it even harder to sleep. I would love suggestions on how to stop this behavior. “Just get over it,” doesn’t seem to do the trick.

          Sometimes I senselessly stay awake not from a past event but a future one over which I have little to no control. This has been the situation over the past fortnight. During a sleepless night, I often try to fall asleep again by listening to the radio set on a timer to a news station. But almost all the news recently was about the upcoming election and just the briefest mention of the midterms would set my mind racing with my concerns about the country’s future. And even if I did not listen to public radio programs as I tried to end the day, news that I had consumed earlier in the day would pop into my consciousness and set my mind racing. Even though I have been a news junkie for as long as I can remember, for the past few weeks I have tried to avoid the news, and that did help my sleep. On the other hand, I wondered how bizarre I had become. How many other people lie awake at 3 am tossing and turning and thinking about midterms when their only influence over them is their one vote?

          However, sometimes my mind races at night about a future event, and I am sure that others face the same problem in similar situations. I have had about two dozen medical “procedures” and even more tests leading up to them, and often my nervousness concerning the next day, keep me awake. For example, I needed a new heart valve, and I was part of a clinical trial, which meant that I had to undergo more than a few examinations and tests before the “procedure.” I wanted it over with, and I did not sleep well on the night before my last test. I had discomfort in my lower abdomen with an occasional sharp pain. As I lay–awake–in bed, I convinced myself that I had a kidney stone. My mind raced. I didn’t need to go to the emergency room, did I? Maybe the stone would pass naturally with a modicum of pain and blood. Did I know of a doctor to go to? Did the spouse? Could I postpone my stress test? Would this postpone my valve replacement? Surely, I had to deal with the kidney stone first. Finally, I fell asleep but fifty minutes later I was awake again with a racing mind. What should I do about the kidney stone? How do I cancel my heart appointment? Finally, back to sleep again but awake an hour later. So it went all night long until I finally got up to go to the hospital for the test, and the worries about the kidney stone dissipated. I came to the convincing, and loud, conclusion that it was only gas.

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Snippets

Friends from Pennsylvania said that they do not like John Fetterman, the Lieutenant Governor who is running for the U.S. Senate. When I asked why, they only said that they just don’t like him. None of his positions was mentioned. When asked if they were going to vote for his opponent, Mehmet Oz, they were adamant that they would not. They abhor his political stances and said that he was a charlatan. I concluded (without solid evidence) that my friends’ visceral reaction against Fetterman had something to do with the way he looks. He does not appear to be the kind of refined person that they have worked and socialized with. Tattoo-covered, he is generally seen in a sweatshirt and shorts, neither of which could be described as designer wear. Supposedly, he owns but one suit, which he wears when he presides over the Pennsylvania Senate to satisfy its dress code. I thought my friends intolerant, thinking a bit about Martin Luther King, Jr., since they were judging a person not by his political positions and beliefs but by his appearance. I also, however, acknowledged to myself, that I was less likely to vote for someone if I knew that they wore Brooks Brothers suits. This isn’t because (or not just because) Brooks Brothers got started by ripping off the government and the soldiers during a war. (Is it an exaggeration to say that behind corporate success is a corporate crime?) Instead, it is because when I started in my professional career, Brooks Brothers suits, drab, boxy, and generally unstylish, were the hallmark of corporate conformity. They made young men all look alike. The clothes signified that the wearer was interested more at fitting into a corporate world and advancing in it than anything else. That feeling from years ago still lingers. Ok, you might think that this, too, is a prejudice based on appearances. I can only answer that some prejudices have a firm grounding.

Ted Cruz was born in Canada. A decade ago he was a Canadian citizen.

“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.” Abraham Lincoln

Does this scare you, too: 10% of U.S. children are Texans?

I had not noticed the Manhattan establishment before. It was named something like Chubby, and the window told me that I could get “Injectables and Cosmetics” there. I immediately thought of my clients from yore who went to jail for selling injectables, but I quickly realized that the store sold legal substances that would tighten my skin in some places and plump it up in others. I wondered, Why weren’t people afraid to inject such stuff into their bodies for such purposes? And I then thought that too many people have too much money. I looked through the window. Behind a counter where a couple of people stood was a board that apparently had a menu (without prices) of services. It offered “East Coast Lips” and right below it “West Coast Lips.” I was, and remain, mystified by the difference. And I wondered if Midwesterners don’t have lips. Once again, elite Easterners treating flyover country as if did not exist.

“It is only rarely that one can see in a little boy the promise of a man, but one can almost always see in a little girl the threat of a woman.” Alexandre Dumas fils.

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First Sentences

“I sometimes think of the Supreme Court oral arguments in Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt on March 2, 2016, as the last truly great day for women and the legal system in America.” Dahlia Lithwick, Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America.

“I hear the crack of his skull before the spattering of blood reaches me.” Colleen Hoover, Verity.

“No one knows where America’s Northern Border begins.” Porter Fox, Northland: A 4,000 Mile Journey Along America’s Forgotten Border.

“The coastal steamer attends faithfully to its course, slipping down the middle of the fjord between the mountains, taking its bearings from the stars and peaks and arriving on schedule at Óseyri in Axlarfjörður, its horn blasting through the blowing snow. In the first-class smokers’ lounge, two smartly dressed travelers from Reykjavík are discussing the village’s faint gleams of light.” Halldór Laxness, Salka Valka.


“In this soundless film, it is winter in Arkansas.” Sridhar Pappu, The Year of the Pitcher: Bob Gibson, Denny McLain, and the End of Baseball’s Golden Age.

“Mrs Palfrey first came to the Claremont Hotel on a Sunday afternoon in January.” Elizabeth Taylor, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont.

“In the weeks following the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, a group of Chinese executives traveled to Los Angeles for a crash course in influence.” Erich Schwartzell, Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy.

“When Cal comes out of the house, the rooks have got hold of something.” Tana French, The Searcher.

“As a little boy, lying in his bed, my father would hear the planes overhead.” Malcolm Gladwell, The Bomber Mafia.

“It was an unmarked car, just some nondescript American sedan a few years old, but the blackwall tires and the three men inside gave it away for what it was.” Stephen King, The Outsider.

“The results of Wisconsin’s 2018 election had to be seen to be believed.” Nick Seabrook, One Person, One Vote: A Surprising History of Gerrymandering in America.

“Brown Dog drifted away thinking of the village in the forest where the red-haired girl lived.” Jim Harrison, Brown Dog Redux.

“The sun that rose for the rest of the world that morning was not the one that rose for Lanah Sawyer.” John Wood Sweet, The Sewing Girl’s Tale: A Story of Crime and Consequences in Revolutionary America.

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She Introduced Me to Tom Reiss

I told the literary agent how much I had enjoyed a recent book by one of the authors she represents. I should have added that at least four of my friends had also raved about The Bomber Mafia. This was not just cocktail chatter sucking up to an attractive woman. In the past I have also told her that I did not particularly like one of her author’s books. In that case, though, I had to concede that the rest of my history book group (reading yet another book about Lincoln) liked it very much.

The agent and I both have “cottages” in the same summer community. I first became aware of her a decade ago when she was instrumental in bringing Tom Reiss to the community to talk about his then-recent book, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution and the Real Count of Monte Cristo. I have told the agent that I admire that biography of Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, who was the son of a French nobleman and a Haitian slave and who was the father of Alexandre Dumas, author of the Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. Reiss not only presented a fascinating portrait of this biracial man who became a French general during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era, he taught me a lot about the French and Haitian racial relationships. The Pulitzer Prize the book garnered was deserved.

After Reiss talked, I went to have my copy signed and mentioned something that was in the acknowledgements—I think it was a comment about his mother. He seemed genuinely surprised that anyone had read that section of the book. I felt a bit embarrassed to say that I was OCD enough to always at least skim the acknowledgements to see if I recognized any names. The author wrote a nice inscription, which included a comment about my thorough reading, and signed with a legible signature.

Sadly, I no longer have the book. A young woman who was pulling beers at my local Brooklyn biergarten was named Dumas, with the “s” pronounced. I gave her the book telling her she could learn about her ancestors. On the other hand, I was quite confident that the family of this Ivy League graduate from upper crust Charleston society was unlikely to have a biracial identity. Shortly afterwards, my barkeep Dumas moved on, and I never saw her or the book again. But I digress.

At this recent cocktail party, I asked the agent if she had book recommendations. She said that I might like an earlier book by Tom Reiss, The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life. I had never heard of this biography but set out to read it. Instead of having my local bookstore get it for me, I borrowed it as an e-book from the New York Public Library. (I felt a little guilty about that. I don’t know how these things work, but I assume there are no royalties for the author or his agent when I download a book from the library.)

The Orientalist is a biography of Lev Nussimbaum, but in the book Reiss also recounts his own search to discover the facts of his subject’s life. During his research, Reiss encountered a coterie of colorful characters, often of suspect veracity. Even after Reiss’s extensive research (its copiousness astounded me), much about Nussimbaum remains murky or disputed. However, it does seem clear that Lev was born in 1905 to a Jewish family and was raised in Baku, Azerbaijan, by an oil-rich father after his mother committed suicide when Lev was five. Father and son fled Baku permanently when the Soviet Union annexed Azerbaijan in 1920.

Nussimbaum, who died in Italy at age 36 during WWII, claims to have converted to Islam (the where, when, and even the if of that is disputed). Nevertheless, he is known to have adopted the persona of a Muslim prince and wrote a truly amazing number of books and articles about a wide range of topics under the name of Essad Bey. Many of the books were best sellers. (The accuracy of much of what he wrote is now disputed.) These books are mostly forgotten, but Nussimbaum still fascinates because, according to Reiss, he wrote (under the pseudonym Kurban Said) what is considered a classic of world literature, the novel Ali and Nino. The authorship of the novel is disputed in some circles, but I thought Reiss was convincing in concluding that Kurban Said was Essad Bey who was Lev Nussimbaum.

I learned much from Reiss’s book. I had known little about the world in and around Baku in the aftermath of World War I.  

The Orientalist also reminded me why I have not become the book writer I thought I wanted to be. I am the author or co-author of several books about the law.  A commonality in those books was that I was asked to do them—by a university press, by a co-author, or by an organization. There were other books that I thought I could write if only someone had asked me to write them. Alas, that is not how book publishing works. I did not care enough about any of the topics to drive me to do the months or years of work to put a book proposal together in hopes that a publisher would find it of interest. Such a proposal requires extensive research and a precis of the completed work. The agent told me that a good part of her job was helping the author to shape such a  proposal, which may be forty pages long. The agent also told me that a writer has to be obsessed to do this, and it was clear that Tom Reiss had been obsessed about finding every possible nugget of information about Lev Nussimbaum. I have never had a comparable obsession, and thus, while I have written many law review articles that I knew I could get published, the book portion of the CV is scanty. (However, one of my books still appears to be in print. You could buy it and swell my royalties, which sometimes break the three-figure level in a year.)

Reiss’s book, however, also gave me the pleasure of discovering Ali and Nino, which I again got as a New York Public Library e-book, this time without any guilt since I knew no one involved with it. It is a love story of a Moslem man of Persian ancestry and a Georgian Orthodox Christian young woman set in Baku in the waning days of World War I and its aftermath. There are good reasons for its being regarded as a classic. It was marvelous.

The agent also suggested that I might like a new book by an author she represents, Dahlia Lithwick’s Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America. I bought a copy from my local bookstore, but for now I don’t feel like writing about it. It left me depressed.

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Snippets

I don’t remember where I got the strange book, although The Speaker’s Desk Book, edited by Martha Lupton and first copyrighted in 1937, is stamped with a law school library’s name. It has three sections: Sparklers Anecdotes, and Jewels of Thought. The first section consists of aphorisms grouped under alphabetical headings, such as Business, Marriage, and Revenge. Only a fraction of the pithiness is ascribed to anyone. The section contains a variety of supposed wisdom. For example: “Business won’t come back; you’ll have to go after it.” “Marriage is a state of antagonistic cooperation.—Schlossberg.” “The rocks we hold to throw at our neighbor have a way of getting into our own pillows.”

The Jewels are paragraphs or pages with the authors listed that seem to be a random collection of thoughts on diverse topics, including “Work!” and “Calamaties.”

The most intriguing to me, however, are the 1187 anecdotes which are preceded by a guide for their use. The guide says that the general topic index “should suggest many possibilities to the experienced speaker.” If talking about “courtesy,” look it up in the nearly 500 headings and there are twenty courtesy anecdotes listed. “Another helpful practice is that of grouping stories by race, or nationality such as Jewish, Irish, Scotch, Negro, etc. This aids the speaker who has a preference for dialects.” There are six “Italian stories,” five times that for “Jewish stories,” and even more for the Irish, but only one listed under “Japanese stories.” However, when a speaker really needed something, he could go to the more than one hundred “Negro stories.” The anecdotes, the compiler must have thought, would elicit a laugh or a chuckle from the audience, or at least a smile. Maybe back then they did, and that is frightening. Almost none is funny, and the ethnic “anecdotes” are overwhelmingly cringeworthy. The book makes me despair about our past, but it gives me a bit of optimism that our world has changed at least somewhat for the better.

Elon Musk is an immigrant.

A wise person said: “The remarkable thing is not the money makes fools of great people but that it makes great people of fools.”

He was sitting across from me on the subway. About 45 wearing a trendy jacket, a trendy spiky haircut that should have been too young for him, but he pulled off. He looked a little bit like Elon Musk. He was reading through trendy glasses with almost red frames. Unlike most who read on the subways these days, he was reading a paperback, not on his phone. It was The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz, a marvelous book. His lips moved while he read.

I am old enough to remember when mothers made their kids’ Halloween costumes.

I had an interesting dinner conversation about whether parents should distribute money equally to their children or give more to those who have the greatest need. No consensus. What do you think?

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Denying Arizona

Here an election denier, there an election denier, everywhere an election denier. It does not scan well, but that’s the way it is. The 2020 election was stolen or unconstitutional, so the claims go. We hear about suitcases in Georgia, ballot dumps in Detroit, the Pennsylvania governor illegally changing the election rules, forbidden ballot harvesting everywhere. Time and again, these cries have been shown to be nonsense, but they keep getting repeated. (Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently issued an order changing some election rules in counties hit by hurricane Ian, an understandable action but similar to the one taken by the Pennsylvania governor in response to the pandemic and difficulties with mail deliveries. I have yet to see conservatives railing that DeSantis’s order is unconstitutional and will make the upcoming Florida election illegal.)

If election deniers are asked why they believe what they say they do, many repeat the refuted claims. As Kevin Young says in Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News: “Repeating a lie in two different places counts as verification.”

However, the important question to ask election deniers is not why they assert fraud in 2020, but instead to ask them what information would convince them that their belief is false or at least make them hesitant about their assertions. And, as Arizona indicates, there is no such information that would convince them. There were several Arizona election audits. One that chose random ballots confirmed the official outcome. Another audit of all the ballots again confirmed the official outcome. But these did not change minds. They were done by government officials, and so they must have been part of some giant conspiracy. Therefore, a partisan audit of the most Democratic part of the state was done. This canvass, instead of finding that Trump had the election stolen from him, found that Biden got a few more votes than were officially recorded. You might think that would have ended the claims of Arizona election deniers, but you would have been thinking rationally with common sense. Instead, the Republican nominee for governor, Kari Lake, and others running for various Arizona offices, continue as election deniers. I sometimes wonder if election deniers would change their minds even if Jesus descended to state that Biden got the most votes, but I doubt it. (Author Eddy Harris once described a conversation with a white woman in Mississippi whose mother belonged to a whites-only church in the 1960s. The older woman was asked whether Jesus would have allowed African Americans to worship in his church. “Of course he would have,” she said, “but Jesus would have been wrong.”) The head-in-the-sand stance of election deniers is not just simple ignorance. As Eric Hoffer said, “Far more crucial than what we know or do not know is what we do not want to know.” (I don’t think many election deniers are heavily invested in African proverbs, but a Nigerian one said, “Not to know is bad; not to wish to know is worse.”)

Some deniers do try to shift the topic and claim that their concern is that voters don’t have confidence in election outcomes, and it is important for the country to have faith in the balloting. This “concern,” of course, places us in a land of circular reasoning. Present and former government officials, media hotshots, and other notable people promote the lie of a stolen election and then act aghast that people who listen to them distrust our election system. (I have wondered how the MyPillow guy became an important person when he seems by looks and reasoning as if he should only be a minor joke in a Pixar feature. French Proverb: “Ignorance and incuriosity are two very soft pillows.”)

So how do we restore faith in our elections? Of course, the right answer is for all those who have created the problem to admit that the 2020 election was secure, but they have not found that path to such righteousness. Instead, their answer for people to feel better about elections is to make it harder for some people to vote. This, at least, makes a bit of sense. You might believe that the fewer who can vote, the less chance of fraud. If we can rig it so that I am the only voter, I assure all that there will be absolutely no fraud in the elections. Democracy might suffer, but who cares?

When there is no information that will change your mind, you live ignorantly. A philosopher said: “The recipe for perpetual ignorance is to be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge.” Ignorance has always been an unfortunate part of America. If you can’t cite examples, you haven’t been paying attention. Maybe America’s greatness has depended on ignorance, or at least that is what election deniers seem to believe. Their unspoken slogan really should be Make America Ignorant (Once) Again. MAIA. That could have a nice ring to it and could become a popular name for this generation of Arizona baby girls, and surely so named, their parents should be completely confident that their children will absolutely, positively never be able to be groomed for anything on the LGBTQ spectrum. On the other hand, I counsel the election-denying parents from naming their sons MAGA, as tempting as that must be, unless they want their children to avoid the military and affront God by breaking that commandment on adultery.

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Memories Put Back in Disorder

“Our memories are card-indexes consulted, and then put back in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.” Cyril Connolly.

I was wiped out on the first days when I had Covid. I mostly slept and ate. By day three, I had regained some strength. I read a lot, but I always read a lot. I watched a lot of television, but I always watch a lot of television. As the days hit mid-afternoon, however, I got tired enough that I could not concentrate for long on anything. By evening, I was tired and incredibly bored. I was too tired and bored to read any more, but not tired enough to fall asleep through the night. No streaming shows or movies held my attention. I just kept clicking the remote, and that is my explanation as to how I was on an obscure cable channel secreted in the 1270s on my system. I had landed on a half-completed episode of The Rockford Files.

Fifty years ago Rockford was one of my favorite shows, and I regularly watched it on NBC on, I think, Friday nights. Seeing Rockford’s car (a Firebird?) and hearing the theme music, I instantly recognized the show, which was confirmed when Jim Garner stepped out of the auto, windows always rolled down, wearing a trademark off-the-rack sports coat. Memories flooded back to our first Brooklyn place, which was referred to as a garden apartment (aka basement). We had little money, and we had built a loveseat and other seating out of milk crates, for which the spouse had made foam rubber cushions covered in maroon suede. I had found the suede in a leather warehouse in a part of Manhattan that now has multi-million-dollar homes. (We were not what you’d call sophisticated about upholstery. One evening a guest wearing white pants left our place with red suede dye all over the back of her pants. The spouse and I exchanged a look that indicated we would keep to ourselves what her backside looked like.)

Seeing Rockford brought back the memory of a real-life shooting incident. Back in the ‘70s I never felt particularly unsafe, but this event was a semi-serious one. One Friday night during a Rockford commercial, I went to throw out the garbage, and I found our street lined with police cars. I asked one of the officers what was going on, and he told me to go back inside because there was a report of gunshots down the block. I was concerned mostly for my car which was parked across the street with a cop crouched behind it using it for cover. It was a scrap heap, but still. I heard another cop very hyped-up say that he thought the shooter was on a rooftop on my side of the street and had fired his gun at him. It turned out whomever he saw was not the shooter but probably another cop. It turned out that the shooter was in an apartment building halfway down the block on the other side of the street. That man apparently had let off some random rounds not aiming at anybody. Negotiators came, but the shooter committed suicide without harming anyone else.

These half-century-old memories did not make me feel young, but then scenes from rest of the Rockford show reminded me further how old I am. At the beginning of this episode Rockford had been hired to do something, and he had felt set up by whatever had happened as a result. He sought out the woman who had hired him. She was another private investigator who was using Rockford to decoy police officers. After he learned that, Rockford told her that the two of them were going to the scene of the crime (or someplace). She was not happy about that but, protesting, got into the Firebird, with, of course, the windows rolled down. I began to wonder when air conditioning in cars became common and wouldn’t Rockford have had AC in Los Angeles? But, of course, the weather was always perfect wherever Rockford went. And besides riding with the windows down was super cool. When Rockford stopped at a light, his reluctant passenger pulled on the door handle to escape. He smiled that great James Garner smile and held up that little rod-like thing that you used to push down to lock the doors. He had apparently unscrewed it, and she could not get out. (Clever, that Rockford!) And so I wondered when that locking device (which some of my criminal defense clients knew how to spring open with the use of a bent coat hanger) had been sensibly replaced in cars. I could not remember the last car I had that had come equipped with them. But my attention returned to the show. I was intrigued what Rockford was going to do to keep the woman in the car when he pulled into a gas station. I thought that when he went to the gas pump, she would be able to scoot across the front bench seat to get out. But, of course, this was fifty years ago. A station attendant came to the car, and Rockford remained behind the wheel. Back in the day, you did not pump your own gas. (Still true in New Jersey, but nowhere else that I am aware of.) And Rockford said what–sick as I was–almost made me laugh. He told the attendant, “Three dollars’ worth.”

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Snippets

These didn’t used to be such scary words: The Supreme Court is back in session.

A headline asked: “Will Election Deniers Deny Their Own Defeats?” I wonder if they are principled enough to deny their own victories.

There is a lot of speculation about the importance of abortion in the upcoming elections. Women’s votes might be crucial in deciding outcomes. Nevertheless, while the power of women is undeniable, I don’t think that women will be on a par with men until they have a bald spot and still think they’re good looking.

What was the last restaurant to give women (or in this case “ladies”) a menu without prices?

A lot of people these days tell us that this country was founded on Christian principles or, sometimes, being more inclusive, Judeo-Christian principles. I assume that they do not know that North Carolina’s constitution banned Jews from public office and that in other states only members of certain Protestant denominations could hold office.

The first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence does allude to the Creator and religion, but it mentions neither Jesus Christ, Jehovah, Moses, God, nor Christianity.

Some of my friends and I bemoan the fact that many Americans lack a basic idea of our governmental structure. By some reports, people running for Congress cannot name the three branches of our government, and certainly many in the electorate cannot. Better civics education is needed, some say, but I also realize that I only dimly understand the powers of the Speaker of the House, the Senate majority leader, and committee chairmen. And what is a senatorial “hold” and how is it overcome? But this election also highlights how important state governments can be, and I realize that while I have at least a superficial understanding of the federal government, I, like (I think) many others, know even less about all the ins and outs of decision-making in the state legislatures. I do know that with the increasing demise of local newspapers, less and less good reporting comes out of state capitals. That can’t be good for good government.

A friend said he supported Republicans not so much because he supported their policies but because all his life, he was anti-Democrat. That reminded me of the time I was asked why I was a liberal. I said that I was not sure that I believed in liberalism, but I was definitely anti-conservative.

“People vote their resentment, not their appreciation. The average man does not vote for anything, but against something.” Munro

Peter Thiel is an immigrant.

“The foolish saying of the rich pass for wise saws in society.” Cervantes

And Queen Elizabeth is still dead.