Waiter Saves Woman From Bad Blind Date, Or, Yet Another Reason Why You Should Be Nice To Your Waiter

You know when you're on a bad blind date. But you may not know how bad it can be. That's when you need to rely on other people to help you out. If you don't have a friend nearby, you'd better hope you've got an attentive waiter like this guy.

Hat tip: Megan McCardle at Instapundit.

Two Annoyances

1. The scores from last night's competition were published. My kids lost -- 49%-51% out of 100 possible points between the two teams. (Another set of teams tied, 50-50.) This very narrow margin of loss suggests rather strongly to me that the one public defender who effusively praised the other team's objections when they never made any probably represented the margin of defeat. I feel bad for the kids -- it's one thing to lose to a good adversary, but it's another thing to lose because someone wasn't paying attention or was biased. This just means that they'll have to dominate over their opponent next week to make it into the championship seed.

2. We figured out what to do about our vacation, and decided to go to Wisconsin to meet up with all of our families. My parents will be visiting there at the end of June for a wedding, so we figured we'd be out there at the same time and see everyone. But The Wife's flaky colleague had already put in for the time that we wanted to go, so now we need to plan our lives around this person's schedule.

Now I Know

Why did all my professors schedule exams and papers to be due the first day after spring break? Now that I teach every once in a while, I need to take inspiration from the professional academics.

We're Back In March

And in the meantime, there's what promises to be a thoughtful and insightful interview about how the legal and political issues that underlie the series. I'll be watching on streaming internet vision.

My Snippy Future

I didn't enjoy reading this. But if that guy made it through the procedure, so can I. I'm scheduled for two weeks from yesterday. I'll get through it, though, and now I know that I need to shave.

Hat tip: King Aardvark.

Nothing Sharpens The Mind Like An Imminent Trial Date

I thought my kids looked great last night. They were quick-witted, polished, comfortable with the facts, and persuasive. Only one serious mistake -- the student who made the opening argument tok too long, which did not leave enough time for a powerful closing argument and the student who did the closing panicked a little bit because she only had half as much time as she thought she needed. There were a few other minor issues, but nothing that we can't fine-tune with practice. I was very proud of them, especially as they were competing against the returning champions and (in my unbiased opinion) they outperformed them. It seemed three of the four scorers were impressed with them, too, and the fourth one was apparently watching a different trial than the rest of them, because he praised the other team for their masterful objections during a direct examination in which they made no objections at all. The mathematical results should be distributed later today and I'm now quite hopeful for a good result despite the one scorer's apparent abnormality. I'm also satisfied that the kids put their best collective effort into it. I'll meet with them again Saturday and see if we can't get their defense into the same kind of shape as their offense. If so, they'll go far in the competition.

Brace For Competition, Kids!

My kids on the mock trial team have their first round of competition tonight. They are on the prosecution side of this year's case, against last year's championship team. The seeding arrangements are quite complex, but the upshot is that they really only have to do about as well as the champs. I think I've got the prosecution side of my team in pretty good shape -- but it's hard to say what will happen until you actually go into the trial.

At this point, there's little I can do other than to show up, give them a last-minute pep talk, and watch them perform. Once they start competing, I can't communicate with them in any way and I have to sit back in the gallery and watch. I'll take notes, of course, so they can do better the next round.

Personally, I'm having fun with the whole thing. The kids are, right now, experiencing the strange mix of anxiety and excitement that comes before a big performance. That sort of thrill is long gone for me for a trial, but I can hope that at least one of them realizes that this is fun and maybe explores a career in law further.

I'll definitely need to work with them over the weekend; next week they are representing the defendant, and that side of their case needs a lot more work. But I'll worry about that on Saturday. For now, I've got only moderate expectations, and I can just look forward to seeing the kids in action.

Good Show Tonight

I'm so often frustrated in my attempts to appreciate the skies. Clouds happen at inopportune times; I can't get out of the city during the right time to see something. So tonight I was very pleased that the thunderstorm that swept across our little valley blew away in time to appreciate the lunar eclipse. It was a nice one, with a clear line of the shadow across the moon's surface and a nice, ruddy red tint in the umbra.

I'm a little saddened to think that a lot of people probably didn't even bother to look up at it. But The Wife and I did.

Michelle Obama Is Proud Of Her Country, And That Shouldn't Surprise Her So Much

And she should be. Here are her controversial remarks, in context. It's clear enough to me that this was not an offhand comment, but one that at least a little thought went into. Very little thought, but more than zero:

Um... What's that again, Ms. Obama?

What we have learned over this year is that hope is making a comeback. It is making a comeback. And let me tell you something -- for the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country. And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change. And I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction and just not feeling so alone in my frustration and disappointment. I've seen people who are hungry to be unified around some basic common issues, and it's made me proud.

This has generated quite a bit of controversy because she said "for the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country." This implies that she had not been proud of America before seeing the enthusiastic reaction to her husband's candidacy. So here she is, "clarifying" her remarks on Chris Matthews:

So let's think about this. We might ascribe the worst possible motives to this confluence of political statements -- Obama's wife and political supporters hate America and want to gain power to drag the U.S. of A. down to subservience to some as-yet-unarticulated concept of international social justice which will trump national autonomy and the Constitution. By extension, then, Obama himself believes these things and is asking for the leadership of a nation that he sees as sufering from a grave moral cancer. That seems unlikely to me. That does not seem congruent with a good-faith understanding of his message.

But if we discard the worst interpretation of this, then what's the best possible motive for this sudden confluence of political symbolism? I mean, what's up with Che? This was not a nice guy; sure, he looked handsome in that beret, but come on. The man was an international terrorist, a man who, along with the Castro brothers, deliberately thwarted the emergence of post-revolutionary Cuba as a democracy through the torture and execution of innocent civilians and democracy advocates who he labelled "enemies of the state."

The glorification of Che can only be the result of colossal ignorance. Whether that ignorance is innocent or willful remains a good question in my mind. I'm not saying that the pre-revolutionary Cuban government was a beacon of liberty and human rights or that Che's enemies (including the U.S.) acquitted themselves with the moral righteousness of comic book superheroes. But none of that justifies annointing Che as a hero. There is no shortage of documentation of Che's use of torture and human rights abuses and no doubt that he considered the United States of America his most profound and powerful enemy. This makes elevating him to be a hero of young Americans a highly questionable act.

So the best motives we can ascribe to the Obama machinery for these remarks are wide-eyed naïveté and political clumsiness. That would mean that these people are not ready for prime time. But they've put together a very sophisticated political machine; literally created it out of nothing over the past two years because the Clintons had closed off all avenues of access to existing Democratic party machinery. So while Obama himself has not held federal office for very long, it doesn't seem right to say this is simply the result of inexperience, either.

I exchanged an e-mail with a politically conservative friend today who, between this remark and the Che Guevara posters on the walls of more than one Obama campaign office, has abandonded his lukewarm willingness to live with an Obama Presidency and become very energized to work for McCain and Obama's defeat. Now, to some extent, I think my friend was looking hard for an excuse to set aside his dislike of McCain. And to some extent, the Che poster was enough. His wife is Cuban and, I expect, unimpressed that Fidel Castro is resigning to let his brother take over the day-to-day repression of her countrymen, including those members of her family who weren't fortunate enough to escape with her parents.

He suggests that the Che posters means that if Obama is the nominee, Florida will wind up being out of play for the Democrats. An exaggeration, but look at the truth it is an exaggeration of -- it's not just Cuban-Americans in Florida who will be viscerally offended by all of this. And Florida is absolutely critical to the McCain campaign.

It won't just be Cuban-Americans because most Americans think that America is a pretty special place. I agree with that sentiment. Now, that doesn't mean I'm looking at the country with rose-colored glasses. I am critical of many things that the U.S. has done and I think that real patriots don't relax their skepticism of what the government does just because it's the government; real patriots don't relax their motal standards just because a bad actor has wrapped himself in the flag. I can understand if the Obamaits are critical of some aspects of our culture. We are far from perfect and we can certainly do better.

If all that were going on here were that the Obamaites were trying to inspire themselves and other Americans to do better and to be better people, I'd think that was perfectly OK. After all, it is entirely possible to be proud of America and still critical of her missteps and moral lapses. But at the same time, the U.S. is a place to be proud of, warts and all. And the overall message from Camp Obama is that America is not a good country, or at least it hasn't been during Michelle Obama's adult lifetime. That is simply wrong.

We've (mostly) defeated communism -- which was a great evil, a great terror to hundreds of millions of innocents, and a great threat to the freedom of hundreds of millions more.

We've kept the world more or less safe and stable since the end of the second world war.

We've subsidized the redevelopment of our former enemies and now they are in many ways even more prosperous than we are -- prosperity which we would never even think of begrudging them, despite the fact that it was developed under the cloak of our military protection, for which they neither paid for nor bled. We did it for two generations and didn't even ask for a "thank you."

Not only have we kept the world safe, we've fed it. American innovations in agriculture and transportation are responsible for the delivery of wholesome food to formerly-starving people all over the world.

Our universities and colleges and research institutions still represent the very pinnacle of human knoweldge and scientific inquiry. Go ahead -- name the top ten research institutions in the world. I bet a majority, or more, of the institutions you've picked are in the United States.

When new nations are born, as Kosovo was this weekend, they look to the United States Constitution for inspiration about how to organize their own governments. They look at other nations, too -- the UK, France -- but their primary source of inspiration is the system of representative, republican democracy that our Founders created in the 1780's. That most American of icons (although it was a gift from France) is the Statue of Liberty and it, too, is emulated all over the world, to this day. There's a reason for that, and despite whatever misdeeds we may have perpetrated recently, there's also a reason that people want to come here from elsewhere, and it ain't just the money.

So the problem is not that Michelle Obama made a careless remark. That wouldn't be a big deal if it were really careless. But it casually dismisses the powerful history of America acting as a force for good. But it would have never occurred to most people not to be proud of America. It would never have crossed the minds of a lot of Americans to offer a communist guerilla leader as a heroic icon. This suggests a mentality that America suffers from a deep moral cancer; and that, at minimum, such will be the mentality of the people who surround President Obama.

America has flaws, to be sure. But we are also greater than our flaws. All of the good that America has done in recent history cannot be casually dismissed because we currently have a President who made a colossal geopolitical mistake with respect to Iraq, and was then too arrogant to admit it. It even ignores the fact that, belatedly perhaps, we are doing what is in our power to make things right there despite our refusal to admit that we erred. It seems incongruous with the Obama message that we should transcend the problems of the past. Dwelling on our past misdeeds and iconizing some of our most loathsome enemies will not move the nation towards a brighter tomorrow.

While You're Thinking About Good Customer Service

Some people really resist change. Like this guy.

There's an important customer service lesson to be had here. Don't f--- with the sausage.

Breathtaking Cupidity: This Month's PSA

One of the services I provide to my clients is assistance with trademark applications. The application process is not quite simple enough that a layman of average intelligence can do it right the first time, so some of my clients would rather not bother to learn how to do it and hire me instead. But once you've done a few, it's pretty easy and now I can get an application done online in a short, predictible amount of time. So while the fee charged by the USPTO for the application varies, I can charge a flat fee for my service.

Now, I have all the marks registered to my office. That's because I want to present the completed trademark (it comes in a nice cardstock folder with an official-looking Federal gold seal on the front) to the client and be a hero; and also because of stuff like what I got today. Once you register a trademark (or a patent, or a copyright) a bunch of "vendors" start sending you junk mail because the address is right there in a public record for anyone to see. They charge a fee for the "service" of informing you of things that the USPTO would inform you of anyway.

What's underhanded about this is that they all have official-sounding names for their businesses, like "United States Trademark Registry, Inc." or "International Trademark Clearinghouse Organization GmbH, North American Division." They make their junk mail and solicitations look like official government agency forms, although if you actually read them, you will see that they are really solicitations for services. Still, I can see where a lot of people would get these sorts of advertisements in the mail, be deceived into thinking that there are additional steps they need to take to protect their marks, and send money to these vultures. But today I saw one that really takes the cake; it appears to the left of this paragraph.

The sheer cupidity of the solicitation is breathtaking. At first glance, and even at second glance, it appears to suggest that my client's U.S. trademark will also be registered with the World Intellectual Property Organization (which is a real intergovernmental entity). If that were true, the service would actually have some value to some trademark holders, so that their marks are protected not just in the U.S. but in every WIPO nation (which is most of the countries a business would care about, except for China). I don't know that the amount of fee that is being charged (over $2,000) would be fair for this service but then again, I've never registered a trademark with WIPO (haven't needed to) so I wouldn't know if it's especially complex. But if you read the solicitation closely, you will see that the service that is actually offered is registry of your mark in this vendor's private database, which is published in book and CD-ROM form quarterly.

This is about the slickest "official" solicitation I've seen -- and the one asking the most money to provide a non-service. So while I've redacted out my client's identifying information, I've left the identity of the "vendor" ascertainable from the picture. If any of you get solicitations like this in the mail, read them carefully before sending money. Just because it looks official does not necessarily mean that it is so.

Undemocratic Democrats, or, Hey, Them's The Rules

The Clinton campaign is complaining that the Byzantine delegate-selection process in Texas is unfair. The argument is that the rules are so complex, and allocate delegates around districts unevenly, that they could easily produce a delegate result disproportionate to the popular vote -- indeed, it could create a situation in which Clinton could get a plurality or even a majority of votes, but Obama could get more delegates than her. The argument is that these delegate-allocation rules are undemocratic in principle and application; the Clintonistas hint that the rule they would prefer would be for delegates to be awarded in strict proportion to the candidate's share of votes.

Huh -- an undemocratic means of deciding elections. In Texas? Really!

Fact is, these have been the rules in Texas for quite some time and no one has bothered to look closely at them since the early 1970's because they haven't mattered until now. No, people only complain about the rules when they think the rules are going to make them lose and another set of rules that they could plausibly argue for would make them win.

Let's also not forget that Clinton is still attracting more of the "superdelegates" than Obama. No one elects "superdelegates" to the convention; they get to go because they are party elites -- officeholders, past officeholders, successful campaign managers, state party chairmen, and big-time donors and contribution bundlers. Whatever else one might say about the "superdelegates" used by the Democrats in their Presidential selection process, they are not chosen in ways that reflect democratic principles.

A look at the results so far shows that almost every state that has had a primary to date produces delegate allocations that are not proportionate to the vote. Clinton, for the most part, has been the beneficiary of the more undemocratic facets of those rules. I've crunched the numbers, and found that in states where the percentage of delegate allocation is different than the percentage of the votes to the point where it matters in terms of the number of delegates, Clinton has actually had a net gain in delegates by a combination of these quirks in the rules and Clinton's advantage in attracting "superdelegates":

State	Votes		Delegates		Disproportion
State	Clinton	Obama	Clinton	Obama
Alabama	223,096	300,321	28	28	Clinton +4
Alaska	103	302	5	10	Clinton +1
Arizona	201,380	167,508	35	27	Clinton +1
Arkansas	202,010	77,970	34	7	Clinton +4
California	2,361,789	1,943,033	229	178	Clinton +6
Colorado	38,487	79,344	13	23	Clinton +1
Connecticut	164,831	179,349	23	32	Obama +3
Delaware	40,751	51,124	9	9	Clinton +1
District of Columbia	27,326	85,534	12	17	Clinton +5
Florida	865,099	571,133	112	70	Clinton +12
Georgia	330,026	704,274	29	64	Obama +1
Idaho	3,655	16,880	3	18	Obama +1
Illinois	662,845	1,301,954	43	101	Obama +6
Iowa	737	940	18	20	Clinton +2
Kansas	9,462	27,172	10	26	Clinton +1
Louisiana	136,959	220,588	21	28	Clinton +2
Maine	1,396	2,079	11	16	none
Maryland	283,846	479,138	38	46	Clinton +7
Massachusetts	704,591	511,887	48	65	Obama +1
Michigan	327,419	236,955	80	55	Clinton +1
Minnesota	65,875	137,394	27	54	Clinton +1
Nebraska	12,396	25,986	8	20	Obama +1
Nevada	5,407	4,805	14	14	Obama +1
New Hampshire	112,251	104,772	11	12	none
New Jersey	602,576	492,186	71	50	Clinton +4
New Mexico	68,084	67,010	14	12	Clinton +1
New York	1,000,915	696,342	176	94	Clinton +17
North Dakota	6,948	11,625	5	12	Obama +1
Oklahoma	228,425	130,087	25	15	none
South Carolina	141,217	295,214	14	26	Clinton +1
Tennessee	332,599	250,730	39	27	Clinton +1
Utah	48,719	70,373	11	15	none
USVI	149	1,772	1	5	Clinton +1
Virginia	344,477	620,919	35	58	Clinton +2
Washington	9,992	21,629	18	29	Clinton +3
Wisconsin	377,852	525,935	25	39	Obama +2

A few notes on the table: Where applicable, pledged state-level delegates are substituted for votes in cases of caucuses being used in place of primaries (e.g., Iowa). Voting and delegate reports are incomplete as represented in the cases of Florida, Iowa, Michigan, New Hampshire, and South Carolina -- because in those states, John Edwards earned votes above the 10% threshold for awarding of delegates. So although not illustrated, Edwards' votes have been considered for proportional delegate allocation in those states in determining whether Clinton received more, less, or exactly the right amount of delegates based on her proportional share of votes. Florida and Michigan are currently allocated zero seats for the convention by the DNC, and it's looking like that will matter. The votes and delegates counted for Obama in Michigan combine the "uncommitted" votes and delegates along with two "superdelegates" from Michigan who have announced for Obama.

But as the table demonstrates, in 23 states, Clinton has got more than her share of delegates. Obama has got more than his share in 9 states, and 4 states have given delegates close enough to the actual proportion that rounding the numbers up and down shows that the candidates got the delegates they actually earned in the primary elections.

The result of these arcane methods of allocation and selection of delegates is a net 63 delegate advantage for Clinton. It becomes a net 50 if Florida and Michigan are excluded, but as long as Clinton is cheating, she may as well cheat big and get those delegates added to the pot, too. The undemocratic rules of the Democratic party favor Hillary Clinton. (Even so, she's still be behind in the delegate count.)

These very rules, about which Clinton complains through her surrogates, have actually worked to her advantage for the past two months. Were the Democratic Party to have dispensed with those rules and adhered instead to a strictly proportional (above the 10% minimum) delegate allocation method, Clinton would have fewer delegates today than she does, and Obama would have more delegates today than he does.

This brings up some interesting questions. First, given that these are the rules, is it possible for her to win? Second, given that these are the rules, does she even deserve to win? Third, given that these are the rules, what principled reason exists to change them? (A principled reason is not "Because if they were changed, Hillary would win.") It's remarkably facile for her to suggest changing the rules in media res, too; she and her husband have dominated the inner workings of the Democratic party for fifteen years. In a very real way, she had every opportunity there could have been to re-write the rules before running for President -- something that she has to have known she was going to do for quite some time.

More than anything else I've seen in the campaign, this makes me prefer Obama to her as a potential President. Obama seems to at least be playing "fair" so far as that word has meaning in Presidential politics. He's playing far not just by way of skipping Florida and Michigan as he promised to do, but he isn't asking for the rules to be changed incrementally; instead, he's assessed the playing field as it is, and has figured out how to win on it the way it is. I'll still vote for McCain over either of them, but McCain losing to Obama will not sting nearly as bad as McCain losing to Clinton.

Unsatisfying Day Trip (Updated)

Yesterday, The Wife and I took a day trip to Santa Barbara. I came away from the experience unsatisfied and unrefreshed. I think I underestimated the toll that the just over 100-mile drive would take on me. I'd wanted to look aroud The Earthling, one of the last great independent bookstores -- but discovered that it was gone, gone, squeezed out of existence long ago by Barnes & Noble and Borders.

Instead, I realized that the businesses on State Street were becoming homogenized, with fewer interesting local shops and more national chains like Z-Gallerie, where we actually shopped becuase there is no such thing near us anyway. Upscale, nice shops, to be sure, but still the same ones you see in upscale malls everywhere. The only big advantage is that there aren't huge billboards and the shops are set up in nice-looking arcades with palm trees and mission-style architecture. Very pretty. And the density of the homeless population seems to have increased.

The Wife seemed to enjoy the trip, though. She did not seem to enjoy touring the mission; it seemed to me like she barely even glanced at any of the exhibits and practically sprinted through the church itself. Alas, The Wife does not enjoy a visit to a museum the way I do and I should not have been surprised that she would have zipped through the exhibits.

While the church at the mission is not a place of worship or devotion for us, it is something I found to have historic and cultural significance and I wanted to take some time to appreciate it. It occurred to me that the natives would never have seen anything as large as the building, and must have been astonished and overpowered by the Spanish settlers and priests who had it built. At the same time, particularly after first learning to communicate with the Spanish, they would have been mystified and perhaps horrified to learn the Christian gospel story, and to see the crucifix the friars would would brought with them, with the realistic-looking image of Jesus being tortured to death as the object of the Europeans' worship. The dissonance of the two cultures was something I found easier to think about while there and surrounded by the artifacts of the era and the structure itself. I also thought it was interesting that the family of Edward Ord, the famous Civil War commander, was interred there (General Ord himself is buried in Arlington National Cemetery, of course).

The Wife and I also disagreed about the weather there. I know from many years' experience that it can be cool and humid there, which it was, and I'd advised The Wife to bring something warm to wear, which she did. But she thought it was cold enough that she actually bought a scarf while we were there. As the afternoon wore on, I wished that I'd brought shorts as I would have been quite comfortable in shorts and a T-shirt. My only complaint about the weather was that it was too overcast to see the islands.

By the time we came home, I was simply exhausted; my back hurt from all the driving and I was beginning to wish that we'd just stayed home. But The Wife said that she had a good time, and that made it worth the effort. And I don't feel that way this morning; at least I got to be out of the area for a little while, to be somewhere closer to the ocean and in a place where the air smells good -- the salt of the ocean air and the fragrance of the eucalyptus trees perfumes Santa Barbara nicely. It would be great to live there -- although prohibitively expensive. The whole area feels a lot like the Italian cities where my grandmother comes from -- a thin strip of flat land between steep mountains and the ocean, graced with palm trees and good restaurants. Well, this is not to be -- the city itself is much more crowded than The Wife and I would like, even if we could afford to buy and live there, and the suburban peripheries of Goleta and Carpinteria are every bit as expensive as the city itself, but less interesting.

Update: I realize that I really ought to have no right whatsoever to complain about taking a day trip to Santa Barbara. But it really wasn't what I remembered it as being, nor was it what I hoped it would be. I'm usually a big one on trying to take places for what they are and not for some romantic expectation of what they should be. I expected a lot of expensive import shops and clothing stores and tourist-priced places to eat on State Street. We didn't go by the college, and that was OK with me, too, but it meant that I was not really around the part of town with most of my old hangout spots, assuming that many of them have survived, either.

This Can Only End Well

Kosovo is set to declare its independence tomorrow. This can only end well. No, no possibility of bad feelings on anyone's part. After all, an independent Kosovo has been the lynchpin of southeastern European stability ever since the Ottomans overran it.

Well, congratulations to the Kosovars. I hope it lasts for a while.

A Little Early

I'm thinking that maybe I've written the Clinton campaign's obituary a bit early. She's got double-digit leads in Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, although Obama seems to be winning everywhere else. And given that there will be somewhere between 800 to 1,000 superdelegates, it's quite likely that the primaries will not actually determine anything. Most of the superdelegates are not committing to either Obama or Clinton, it seems -- and looking at the various counts from yesterday, Obama's lead, while significant politically, is not so great numerically. So it seems likelier to me upon more sober reflection that they will be within tens of pledged delegates of each other upon completion of the South Dakota primary.

So given that there are more unallocated delegates than either candidate has pledged or committed to either of them, and they've been breaking about 60/40 in each state for the winner, it's pretty clear that this won't really be decided until Denver, and while Obama will have the argument that he is both more popular (got more votes) and polling better against John McCain, Clinton will have the argument that she has more machinery available and more people owe her favors. I'm now limiting my prediction to a brokered convention, and I can't get a good read on who wins, or how many ballots it takes for the Democrats to figure this out. Maybe John Edwards and his 26 delegates really will be kingmakers.

Et In Arcadia Erat

Archeological evidence of sacrifical worship of a god in Greece before Zeus. Titan-worship, perhaps?

Burro Schmidt

I learned a bit of local history today. Back in the days when the major industry out here was gold mining, some guy with a claim out in Last Chance Canyon near Ridgecrest decided it was too much work and too dangerous to take his ore to the smelter in Mojave over the ridge on his two burros. So he spent thirty-eight years hand-carving a tunnel with a four-pound jackhammer through the mountain instead. Even after the railroad and a highway were built, he kept on making the tunnel.

This is an astonishing amount of work to even contmeplate. The guy levelled the floor of the tunnel (so you can run an ore cart on the tracks) using a bowl of water and his only light was a two-cent candle. In the process of building the tunnel, he removed sixty tons of granite, gold, iron, quartz, and other metallic ores, and because he used only the natural rock (mostly granite), he would not allow himself to try to pull out any of the gold or other ores from the veins he came across.

The Google Earth coordinates are 35° 24' 37.55" north, 117° 52' 26.80" west. I don't know if the idea of walking through a half-mile long tunnel is anyone's idea of a good time, but it's there and apparently quite safe to walk through.

Frog Pajamas and Centurions

That was my gift to The Wife for Valentine's Day -- a set of pink flannel pajamas with frogs (playing leapfrog and wearing pajamas themselves). She loved them. Better than the flowers and chocolates that I brought over to her office after court yesterday, and better than the pasta I made for her for dinner. She got me the DVD's of the first season of HBO's mini-series Rome, which is really good stuff. She chose well.

Romney Ends GOP Primary

Mitt Romney's endorsement and delegate pledge to John McCain effectively ends the GOP primary. Technically, McCain doesn't have enough pledged delegates yet to clinch the nomination, but the states coming up next -- Wisconsin and caucuses in three territorial caucuses -- do not appear to be winnable by the Huckabee campaign. So it's possible that before the next big primary day (Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island and Vermont on March 4) McCain would have a lock, or close enough to it that even little Rhody could put him over the top. I'll continue to monitor the delegates, but the Republican primary is functionally over.

The Democratic primary, however, is still an exciting horse race, even if the momentum has shifted decisively to Obama -- indeed, his come-from-behind advancement makes it all the more exciting. Stay tuned for more developments and events.

A Question For People A Little Older Than I

Is the guy on the left selling the same stuff today that the guy on the right was selling thirty-two years ago?

I wasn't really cognizant of politics back in 1976. I knew that "the President" was an important man and I knew that a lot of people were talking about politics and the government, and that people were happy that it was the bicentennial, which I learned was a word that meant "two hundred years old." So I don't remember what it was about Jimmy Carter that caught fire and propelled him to the Democratic Party's nomination and, given the prevailing political conditions of that year, inevitably to the Presidency. I know (now) that he tactically figured out how to game the Iowa caucuses before anyone else had ever done so and that really helped his candidacy, which was at the time a very clever political move. So clearly the guy had some ability, and despite Watergate and the bitter aftertaste of Vietnam, Carter only won by 3% of the popular vote and 57 electoral votes -- not a decisive victory.

Reading back over discussions of the race that year, I have to think that he was pitching honesty, transparency in government, racial unity, a "different kind of politics" from what Nixon had brought, and a healing process after a morally and strategically ambiguous war. Is that right? Is that the stuff that Carter was selling? If so, why should we think that Obama can deliver on that promise in the way that Carter could not?