Racism In Action: Watch Your Tips

Ian Ayres writes on the Freakonomic blog that classic racial discrimination is alive and well, at least with regard to tips to service providers like waiters and cabbies. Blacks both got lower tips, and gave lower tips, than their white counterparts in both kinds of transactions. With respect to tipping behavior on racial lines, one has to wonder if blacks and Latinos tip less than whites because they have, on average, less money. Considering that the cabbie study was done in New Haven, Connecticut, that seems a possibility – not to say that there are not affluent blacks and Latinos in those cities, but both of those cities also have significant populations of urban blacks without a lot of money. But the more telling sign is the racial disparity with respect to tips received. Eighty percent of black cabbies got stiffed (which I take to mean no tip at all, rather than darting out of the cab and not paying even the fare) while less than a quarter of white cabbies did.

A little more surprisingly, the article suggests that the effect seems to carry over in the case of a black servers and a black customer – that the lower tip-giving and the lower tip-receiving are independent factors. I haven’t read the underlying study. But reading the article, I have to wonder if the data is not robust enough to support that conclusion – and with respect to food servers, black customers tipped their black servers on average only one-half of one percent less than they tipped their white servers. One-half of one percent is statistically significant in some contexts but it seems to me that a sample size of 140 meals served with various combinations of races of customers and races of servers is enough to really notice a trend.

Prof. Ayres suggests that a possible solution is a “no tipping” policy or, in the alternative, something like a servicio. This is a trick I’ve noticed in some places which is a tip incorporated into the bottom line on the check, which the customer must go out of their way to alter when signing the check. This seems usually to be implemented to defeat the parsimony of (dare I say it, northern European) tourists who typically don’t tip at all unless specifically reminded to do so.

Now, yes, I know that in a lot of places, tips are pooled so that seaters and busboys share in the tips which are typically given to a server or a bartender -- but that doesn't help the cabbie and it also doesn't change the fact that the giving of tips is affected by racial attitudes.

Setting The Bar High For Senator Clinton

Bill Schneider at CNN has just now figured out that it's functionally impossible for Hillary Rodham Cllinton to secure the Democratic Party's nomination for President; he computes that she would need somewhere between 60% to 66% of the remaining delegates up for grabs to do that.

You, however, read the same thing, here, two weeks ago. By my count, it's currently 59% of the remaining delegates up for grabs, which is close enough to the low end of Schneider's estimate.

What Schneider adds, which is interesting, is that this does not mean that Clinton needs two-thirds of the vote. I referenced one analyst who thought Clinton would need to average 23-point margins of victory (that is, a result of something like 61% - 38%) in order to get back over the top. Schneider thinks that she would accomplish that goal with votes in the range of 56% rather than 61%. But he also notes that of the 46 jurisdictions that have already held primaries, conventions, or caucuses, she's only gotten over 56% of the vote in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, and Arkansas.

Now, as a lot of people noted, it appears that neither Senator Obama nor Senator Clinton will walk in to Denver with the 2,025 pledged delegates required to turn the convention into an annointment. But check this out. My friend looked up the DNC's rules for the conventions -- really arcane stuff. Once the convention is convened, the convention starts to be run by the party's rules and not by fiat of DNC National Chairman Howard Dean.

In particular, consider the concept of a credentials committee. At a party convention, a credentials committee is that organ of the party which decides who can and cannot be a voting delegate. Under the DNC's rules, Dean can pick a (relatively) small number of people who sit on the credentials committee of the convention. The rest of the members of that committee are selected by the candidates holding delegate pledges in proportion to the number of pledges that they hold.

This means that if Obama holds more pledged delegates than Clinton going into the convention, he will control a majority of seats in the credentials committee. Only if the total pledges are very, very close will Dean's nominations to the committee be the decisive faction. Right now, the pledges accumulated would not be enough to give Dean the power to shift control of the committee to Clinton (were he to take Clinton's side, which it is not at all clear that he is inclined to do anyway).

And that committee, not Howard Dean or the rest of the DNC, gets to decide whether to (for instance) recognize delegates from Michigan or Florida. They have plenary discretion to make that decision as they choose; if they do nothing or cannot reach a majority decision otherwise, Dean's decision to not recognize those delegate slates will stand. In theory, that committee could refuse to recognize other delegates if there is any kind of credible challenge to them, as well.

There is an appeal from the credentials committee -- if 20% or more of the committee votes to do so, the matter in the committee can be taken to a floor vote of the general convention, where all the then-credentialed delegates can vote on it. But if Obama has more pledged delegates than Clinton, he'll very likely control the convention floor, as well -- unless the superdelegates all bail out on him.

If Clinton wants to be competitive in that kind of environment, she needs to have two things. First, she needs if not an outright majority of pledged delegates, she must be within about 100 or so pledged delegates as Obama. Second, she needs a great inside game -- which must include Dean firmly in her pocket, as well as more than a handful of other party elites who can sway and corral a sufficient number of uncommitted delegates on the floor to vote in her favor. It's becoming clear, though, that most of the superdelegates are going to be inclined to put their support behind whoever has the most pledged delegates at the end of the primaries. So Clinton's inside game appears to be evaporating on her.

What's more, it's been a very long time since the Clinton machine has had to deal with a rough-and-tumble political convention -- not since the mid-1980's. I suspect that Barack Obama, who has more direct experience working the nuts and bolts of Chicago-area local politics, has more skills at this sort of thing than Clinton. Clinton's advantage in the inside game comes from the fact that the Clintons controlled so much money for so long that candidates had to come up to their ATM and borrow favors from them. Obama's fundraising prowess has created an alternative to that.

So unless Clinton can get over the top and by at least the margins Schneider is describing (which she's only been able to do in very friendly jurisdictions), I don't really think she has a realistic shot at the nomination any more.

Eat Like A Cop

Cops know all the best places to eat. Usually for cheap, too. The Fish Wrapper explains why, and gives out some gems. Makes me wish I got down into the big city more often to try some of this stuff out.

Incredible Disappearing Words

No one ever describes an object as "oblong" any more. Is it that nothing is that shape? Instead, I'd expect to hear something described as "rectangular with rounded corners," but that is a much more awkward phrase. So is "lozenge-shaped". And come to think of it, real lozenges are often shaped like blocks or discs rather than oblongs. Is this somehow a dirty or sexual word that must never be spoken?

And no one is ever described with "arms akimbo," either. It's much more likely to hear or even say something like, "She had her hands on her hips." Maybe people are afraid that "akimbo" sounds like somebody's name? That's a word that has fallen into such disuse that it's likely a lot of people wouldn't even know what it means anymore.

Slang phrases go in and out all the time. But these are just regular words, which (based on books I recall reading as a child) were apparently used a lot in the fifties and sixties. Nor are they particularly difficult words at that. There are surely more words that simply fall into disuse; one rarely sees these word used outside of crossword puzzles. Can you think of any more words like these, Readers?

What? It's not always gonna be about politics here, folks.

The Nuclear Renaissance Will Happen Slowly

While lots of countries, including the United States, are exploring the idea of expanding their nuclear power plant infrastructure, a rather critical problem exists. Part of a nuclear reactor core is a containment vessel, which is the thing that actually holds the radioactive metal during the fissioning process. If you don't have one, your reactor core will leak enough radiation to kill the workers in the plant and you could lose control of the rate of fissioning going on with your radioactive metal. (It gets buried underground and encased in concrete as well as the steel.) So obviously you can't have a nuclear power plant without one.

A containment vessel is a very large, heavy, single piece of elaborately-crafted, high-quality steel that is made from 600 pound ingots of stainless steel. So it turns out, you can't just call up your local machine shop and have the guy pop out three or four of these things from his milling machine by next Wednesday. So where do you get them?

The answer is Japan Steel Works, Ltd., a manufacturer on the island of Hokkadio. Theirs is the only plant in the world capable of making these things. Japan Steel Works only has the capacity to make four of them a year, and while they're trying to expand their capacity, they're on back order until 2015.

There are some other companies that are looking at competing with Japan Steel Works for this market. But it is estimated that the closest competitor will take at least five years to have sufficient facilities in place to make these things. What all this means is that even if we were to get our act together today and agree to what I think is the obvious proposition that we do need more nuclear power plants, we will likely not have any up and running until the 2020's.

Huckabee On Obama

Mike Huckabee was interviewed this morning on Joe Scarborough's morning show on MSNBC. Scarborough, and his co-anchor, whoever she is, fail to impress and Scarborough simply can't help but be a nasty partisan. Huckabee, however, has some really interesting things to say.

You know, I'd probably have a chip on my shoulder, too. One interesting thing, though -- why didn't Minister Huckabee drop the line about hating the sin but loving the sinner? Isn't that really the line Obama tried (and succeeded, in my mind) to walk in his speech? Isn't that what a good Christian would do in his shoes?

The Subprime Mortgage Crisis -- In Easy-To-Understand Cartoon Form!

Good link here from Volokh.

A Critical View Of Obama's Speech, And, A Thought About Love

This editorial from the Dallas Morning News expresses as well as I think need be expressed the sentiments of those who, unlike me, hold on to their cynicism about Barack Obama's remarkable speech on race yesterday. It contains disbelief that Obama could have absorbed "only" the nice positive messages and disagreed, silently, with the racial hatred of Jeremiah Wright; it contains the money quote "hate is not to be endlessly analyzed, it is to be rejected without reservation"; it points out that Wright is not the only figure close to Obama who has made remarks suggesting a mindset that America is not worthy of praise, respect, and love, citing in particular Michelle Obama and her remarks about withholding her pride in her country.

One wonders what the Dallas Morning News would have found satisfactory in Obama. The author of the op-ed states that "we need only one thing from Barack Obama - the strong message that [no one] is well served by the spreading of racial hatreds." Throw Wright under the bus, the paper urges. This Obama refused to do. He refused to do it because he loves Rev. Wright.

As I've written before, I cannot find comfort with a mindset that America is unworthy of love. America is a remarkable place unlike anywhere else on Earth and despite whatever mistakes have been made in our history, our nation has earned the respect of the world as a beacon of liberty, a stalwart defender of humanity, a nation that has earned its prosperity through hard work, and a generous neighbor consistently willing and eager to share of its blessings with others.

And as I've also written before, a patriot's duty includes calling his country on the carpet when it falls short of the ideals that have inspired patriotism in the first place. America is yet an imperfect place and daily falls short of living up to the noble principles that underlie our founding.

Which brings me to my other subject for this post -- love. Not romantic love, which sees no fault in its object. A deeper, more mature sort of love.

Let's say you have a young single friend. Let's call him Romeo. He's twenty years old. He meets Juliet, a young single woman who is his age. He falls for her. Really, deeply, intensely, and joyfully falls for her. To year your Romeo talk, she is the greatest thing ever. There is no woman more beautiful on earth than his Juliet; nor any more clever or funny; nor any with whom he would rather spend his time. And best of all, Juliet feels the same way about Romeo. When you meet up with Romeo and Juliet in a social situation, she has her hands all over him, they are kissing and holding hands constantly, and their cheeks flush red when they make eye contact (which is quite often).

Annoying, isn't it? But at the same time, you're happy for your friend Romeo because surely you know he is enjoying a very pleasant moment in his life. We've all been there. We would say they've fallen in love. But is "love" the best word to use here? I would suggest "infatuation" is more precise. They've only just met, after all.

Now, let's say you don't particularly like or trust Juliet. You might want to say to Romeo, "Dude, I think she's only dating you for your money." If you did so, you would expect a defensive reaction like, "No she's not!" Romeo would see this as an attack, even if that wasn't your intention.

After all, you have a perspective on the situation Romeo does not. You know that when the first flush of infatuation leaves a relationship, that relationship goes through a crisis. When the infatuation evaporates as it inevitably will, will Romeo still want to be with Juliet? Romeo and Juliet have that yet in their future, and if their relationship doesn't survive that critical phase, then you have no need to confront him. So you might choose to not raise the issue and adopt a wait-and-see attitude and reserve the confrontation until a later, more opportune date.

Sadly, not all relationships create a foundation of mutual respect and acceptance during the phase of infatuation, which often results in one or both partners realizing that without that irreplaceable rush of new attraction, there really isn't much there. In fact, the partners are sometimes repelled to notice in one another things that were really there all along, but to which they rendered themselves blind earlier. Such relationships fail, because there is no love. (Heartbreak typically occurs when one partner moves into this phase faster than the other.)

The relationships that work for longer amounts of time are the ones in which the partners become clear-eyed and understand that their partners have faults, but find the good in one another anyway. The faults are forgiven and that which is good becomes the foundation for something which endures. This cannot happen, by the way, without recognizing one's own imperfection and receiving forgiveness. So I distinguish "love "from "infatuation."

Love is unconditional and unqualified. But "unconditional" is not necessarily "uncritical." Unqualified acceptance does not exclude the idea that the one who accepts must also withhold criticism. It means that one accepts the other despite the flaws.

A personal example: several years ago, a friend disclosed to me participating in an extramarital affair. I told my friend that the right thing to do was to end the relationship, but my friend was infatuated with the partner and would not. Instead, in response to my insistence that this was a morally wrong thing to do, my friend accused me of being a bad friend because I was not expressing support "no matter what." But to this day I think I was still being a good friend because I maintained the friendship without stepping away from my criticism of what was going on. It seemed imperative on me to challenge my friend to act morally, and I could not do that by simply turning my back entirely by dismissing the matter as none of my business. (I suppose it was none of my business initially; but when my friend had sought my blessing, that was deliberately putting the "approval" ball in my court and I could not find it in myself to return that serve as requested). The extramarital relationship did eventually end, when the glow of infatuation faded, and we remain friends to this day, a friendship I value very much.

So I am impressed by Obama's finding this same line, by rhetorically pulling off the balancing act of simultaneously expressing love for America while yet challenging us to improve. I am impressed because I can see that if one criticizes America, that does not diminish one's love for it. Love does not demand withholding criticism -- sometimes, love demands that one offer the criticism. What distinguishes this from an attack is that love criticizes from a place of acceptance and with a constructive attitude. If Michelle Obama had said, "If we elect another Republican, I'm moving to Canada," that's not love or acceptance. (Which is why the Che posters -- being revolutionary propaganda, after all -- remain a bit disturbing.)

I love my wife; I love each member of my family; I love my friends. None of them are perfect, but I love them all the same. If my wife or my father or my very close friend were to say or do something that I thought was morally bad, my love would not change. Just as with my friend who had a fling with a married partner, though, my love would not blind me to the gravity of what was going on, or prevent me from urging my friend to make the bad thing stop.

What Obama did in his speech was to affirm that indeed he does love his wife. He loves his pastor, a man who has been a very close friend to him for much of his life. And he loves America. America, at the end of the day, is the sum total of its citizens, and we its citizens are all of us imperfect people who every day realize our own failures but try to do better. You cannot express love for such a people without also challenging them to do better than they have in the past.

Hate is not to be endlessly analyzed, but neither is it to be simply dismissed and ignored. It is not enough for a parent to tell her child to "ignore" the playground bully, because the bully will force his will upon his victim if ignored. We understand that terrible things like 9/11 happen because other people hate us -- and it is useful in responding to such events to understand why they hate us. So we do not dismiss the hate-filed ramblings and screeds of an Osama bin Laden; we should instead understand what he says, identify where and how we can prove him wrong, and fashion a response to him that not only protects our people but maybe removes the cause of the hate and thus prevent future attacks. Understanding (without agreeing with) what bin Laden says about America can be a tool we might use to disarm him, if only we can use that knowledge properly.

What is disappointing to read in things like the Dallas Morning News editorial is an inability to distinguish between criticism and attacks. The op-ed is a wordier version of a bumper sticker that reads "America: Love it or leave it!" That isn't love -- it's infatuation. Love is deeper and more complex than that. America: Love it by making it better.

The Jeremiaid

I was pretty cynical about the Big Speech On Race today. Seemed to me that Obama had been maneuvered into the issue and that having repudiated the statements of his own pastor should have ended the whole Jeremiah Wright issue, and I was convinced the matter would blow over pretty quickly. It also seemed to me that the controversy was coming to light now at the hands of the Clinton machine, since it does not really benefit McCain for an attack that vicious to be made before it is really clear that Obama will be the nominee. So if there was anything to wait for, it would have been for the source of the controversy to get traced back to Camp Hillary and see what was going on there.

But I misread the playfield and the issue had a lot more legs on it than I gave it credit for having.

Perhaps that's because I think that black Americans have quite a lot to complain about. I can understand how a black man, particularly one who grew up in the age of segregation, would say "God damn America." That doesn't mean I would agree with the sentiment, but I could understand where the sentiment was coming from. Same place that produced Malcolm X's following, and a close look at Malcolm X reveals that he was actually a good deal more subtle in his criticism of American society than simply race-baiting. So it seemed to me that Rev. Wright's remarks were perhaps less artful than Malcolm X's, but nevertheless expressed (albeit crudely) a general sentiment that has a place in political debate.

Whether such political remarks have a place in a church is a different story, but that's not what I'm writing about today.

And perhaps, as someone who has an interest in constitutional law, I know that intemperate, crude remarks are often the ones that yield the most value from close examination. So I may well have over-analyzed what he said and in the process lost some of the visceral reaction to the ultimately indefensible statements. That would be a lawyer's mistake.

No, what's become very interesting is Obama's political response to this turning to a huge issue. Perhaps he saw that if mishandled or ignored, it could derail his campaign. Unless he did something to change the terms of the debate, it would continue to do him massive harm. And, being a politician, he perceived the harm in more palpable terms than I, sitting on the outside and not even technically a supporter of Obama (although I still like him better than Clinton) was really seeing for myself. So that was the motive force behind the speech this morning.

I heard some snippets of it on the radio, and read some excerpts at work, but didn't have time to read or listen to the whole thing until tonight. And now that I have read it, I can react to it from a better and more informed perspective.

Wow.

Somehow, he managed to be uncompromising in his insistence on justice and treating all people the same regardless of race. He acknowledged that there are still problems that society needs to address and that a lot of those problems can be traced back to the Bad Old Days. But he also pointed to the fact that it isn't the Bad Old Days anymore and we have shown we can make progress. That we have made progress. We're a long way away from perfect and acknowledging that progress has been made does not relieve us of the burden of continuing down that road.

He condemned Wright's remarks again. I wish he could have been more direct about it, but the condemnation was there and it was not made with code phrases or weasel words. And he adroitly got out of the trap of trying to defend Wright and instead indicated that the very controversy was an indication that there is still a long road ahead of us, with much soul-searching and debate and disagreement along the way, before we are truly a fair and equal society. Impressively, he pulled no punches and was very clear that the racial attitudes of all racial groups have a negative impact on society as a whole. He leaves the impression of being fair and even-handed in his take on race relations in contemporary America.

I was impressed with telling the story of living with his white grandmother. He described her as being unreservedly loving, kind, and generous with him; protecting him and doing what she could to raise him as a good man and seemingly unconcerned at all with the fact that he was half black. His love for his grandmother is apparent. At the same time, she would use racial slurs to describe people which made young Barack cringe, and utterly failed to see anything wrong with her use of such language. In that way, he personalized racial issues into himself and his own experience, rendering himself a microcosm of the whole country struggling to live up to its own ideals. And he showed that we can love and forgive those among us who fall short of those ideals, for no reason other than that they, too, are a part of us who we must embrace despite not giving up our commitment to doing better than the past has done for us.

But most of all, he did it in a way that left the listener (or reader, in my case) with hope that we can eventually get there. He leaves the impression that by working together towards our common goals, we will come to realize that the racial divisions among us are simply unimportant and useless to making our lives better. And he conveys the conviction that we are a better people when we are united than we are when we separate ourselves.

Another knock-it-out-of-the-park moment for Barack Obama. My initial cynicism has been mostly replaced by admiration.

Surveillance Technology Imitates Nature

Super-villians, beware the unimaginatively-named COM-BAT! Amazing. And kind of scary. The device is being developed for the military with urban combat situations in mind, but there could be other uses of the device too, some of which should be pretty obvious. Privacy concerns abound, although at the end of the day, I have to conclude that when you’re out in public, people can see you, and there isn’t any real cause to complain about being seen in public. Note also that the pictures in the linked article are computer-generated artist’s conceptions – this device does not yet exist. I’m also fascinated with the idea that the DARPA grant for this thing will support twelve faculty members and eighteen graduate students at the University of Michigan for five years, and presumably similar numbers of staff at UC Berkeley and the University of New Mexico. That's in addition to the facilities and materials that are being paid for. This is going to be an expensive, nifty, and controversial robotic bat.

An Individual Right

Today was one of the most interesting days in Supreme Court history. District of Columbia v. Heller involved a challenge to the District’s gun control laws, which pretty much outlawed all firearms in private residences within the District. Heller was a security guard who wanted to keep a handgun in his house for personal protection, and he brought a declaratory relief challenge to the law. The federal court for the District of Columbia struck down the law, saying in its holding that the Second Amendment provides a fundamental, personal right to own a weapon.

There has been no Supreme Court jurisprudence on the scope and application of the Second Amendment aside from a single case in 1939 that obliquely indicated that the “well-regulated militia” clause indicated that the purpose of the amendment was military in nature and not intended to create private, individual rights. The argument derived from this case is that back in the 1790’s, it was thought that all wars would be fought like the Revolution, so every able-bodied man needed a musket in case he was called to muster to arms and serve in the local or state militia. Since then, we’ve created a professional military, both at the federal and state level (the “state militia” being replaced now by the National Guard) and therefore there is no need of individual firearm ownership and the Second Amendment is little more than an anachronism.

I’ve never bought into that argument. Seems to me that the Second Amendment does create an individual right to own a weapon. Perhaps the framers of the amendment were thinking about local militias but at the same time, it is abundantly clear to me that they wanted to make sure that people could have weapons. But the fact of the matter is, we really don’t know; the case from the thirties only discussed the “militia” argument in dicta and there has never been any case that has directly addressed the Second Amendment at all.

So today the Heller case became the biggest thing to hit the Supreme Court since Bush v. Gore, the 2000 Presidential election case. Akin Gump’s Supreme Court blog has a summary of the oral arguments which may be faster to read than the arguments themselves, which result in a ninety-one page transcript because the argument was more than two hours long. For instance, I’m heartened to note that Justice Kennedy, who looks like he’ll be the swing vote, considers the Amendment to possess an “operative clause,” meaning that there must also be a clause that is something other than “operative”. Of course, we’ll just have to see how it goes, but it’s looking like a 5-4 finding in favor of the existence of the individual right.

How I Think I Broke My Toe After All

It's been about three weeks since the rain stopped and the grass started to grow again. The lawn service that we hired has not come back, probably because they weren't paid, which was because they didn't sent me an invoice even after I asked for one. So the lawn is looking pretty shaggy and I want to have it look nice again.

So, The Wife and I went to Wal-Mart and got a lawn mower. A big concern was getting the thing to fit in the Ninja -- there's only so much room in the back of the car; it's not a pickup truck. Happily, we found an affordable lawn mower which just fit into the trunk. Then, we went to go see The Other Boleyn Girl (see movie review below), which was The Wife's pick of movies since I picked the last one.

We got home, and it was starting to get late in the day, so I let the lawn mower alone for the night, planning on getting to it the next day. Which I did.

Assembling the lawn mower was actually pretty easy; I just had to take it out of the box and secure the handle at the length and angle I wanted. From there, I had to find where to add the engine oil, which took some searching. And then I had to go get gas.

Well, that was an inconvenience. The Arco station near Soffit House was suffering some kind of technical difficulty and could not take my ATM card. So the nearest gas station from there was a few miles away. I combined that with another errand and got home much later than I said I would, but at least some things got done. So then, all that was left would be to pour the gas in, and start 'er up. So in goes the gas, closed goes the safety handle, as TL reaches down to pull the starter cord and...

Nothing. I pull on the cord and it barely even moves. I know I'm stronger than that, so I pull again. I figure, maybe the oil hasn't got all the way around the gears and the driveshaft yet. So I really heave.

This time, the cord moves back. The engine stays absolutely silent. And the cord goes slack.

I confess -- I said a bad word.

So I search around for a manual retractor or some kind of crank to retract the cord. No luck. I try turning the spindle with my fingertips, reaching underneath the housing to manually turn it. After fifteen minutes of puzzling over the damn thing, I finally turn it on its side and try to turn the blade by hand. I do this, and hear a *cough* from the engine.

Oh, that's not a good idea. Unless, that is, I didn't really need those fingers.

But the thing is, now I've got a lawn mower that won't start and no way to get it started, and I don't know how to fix it. So, I call my dad in Tennessee. He figures there's a spring on the retractor that's busted. That sounds about right to me. Which means, take the thing back to Wally World and get a new one.

That's when I realize that I probably threw the receipt away at the movie theater watching that not-very-good movie. So, that means exchanges only at the Wally World, no refunds to get a better product from elsewhere. So, I pack up the fifty-pound lawn mower back in the box and drive it back to the store.

There, I wait in line at the customer service counter for about fifteen minutes while the lone clerk working the counter looks panicked and distressed at the twelve people in line ahead of me, who are returning things like bras, faucets, some unidentifiable bottle of cleaning product, and I-kid-you-not, a mango. Eventually, I get to the front of the line and by now the supervisor has returned from (I guess) her break. The clerk says to me, "That thing still have gas in it?"

"Yeah."

"We can't take it back if it has gas in it. Next?"

So I haul the thing out to the car, heave it into the trunk again (it's now been heaved in and out of my trunk six times already) and go back into Wally World to buy a portable gas container. I get back out into the parking lot and realize I need a funnel, too. Easy enough -- I have a two-month old copy of The Atlantic in my back seat and the front cover with its slick-paper cover of the stylized photo of Barack Obama will work just fine. I didn't think Barack would mind his photo being used in this fashion.

The real problem is how to get the gas out of the mower. A look around the thing (now heaved out one more time and taken out of the box to rest on the tarmac) revealed no bottom-mounted drain for the gas reservoir. So that means to get the gas out, I need to invert the entire engine and pour the gas out the same hole I poured it in. So, I bend down, pick up the mower and turn it upside down.

Standing there all alone holding a lawn mower upside down in the parking lot of Wal-Mart out in thirty-mile-an-hour winds in Lancaster, my hand slipped while draining gasoline into my Barack Obama 2008 slick paper funnel, and I dropped it. Right onto my left big toe.

Once again, I said a bad word. Loudly. My toe hurt. A lot.

I picked up the mower and finished the job. I actually think I did a pretty good job, considering the astonishingly clumsy circumstances under which I'd drained the gas -- I recovered more than half the tank. Once more, I put the mower -- which seemed by then to have gained something like twenty-five pounds in weight -- back in the carton again and again took it back into the store. Same as before, only now everything smelled like 87-octane, including me.

Once again with the line, this time with every Wal-Mart employee walking in an out of the break room walking by me, crinkling their noses, and saying, "It smells like there's a gas leak!" Eventually the customer service representative shouted at me, "Did you drain out all the gas?" (In her defense, it was pretty loud, what with the infants screaming and playing and the parents spanking their children and forty-six clerks simultaneously ringing up orders of chewing gum, deodorant, and breakfast cereal.)

"Yes," I shouted back. "That's what you smell. Sorry!"

When I got up to the front of the line, the clerk said, "Okay. Replacement? Go on back and get another one." Which I did, and waited in line another fifteen minutes to fill out a form. "So what was wrong with the one you returned?"

"The retractor spring on the engine's vertical driveshaft isn't working properly so I think the entire starter needs replacement and that means the manufacturer has to fix it."

The clerk looked back at me with the same dull incomprehension that cows exhibit while watching trains pass through the prairie at night. I tried again: "You pull on the cord and it doesn't start."

"Oh. Okay. Sign here, please!" And with that, I had a replacement lawn mower to take home.

Well, by now it was getting dark and my toe was throbbing and I was thoroughly disgusted. So much so that I haven't tried to assemble the new lawn mower yet. The Wife found a video offering hints for how to tell if you've actually broken your toe. The first tip was "Does your toe hurt?" As it turned out, I had about half the symptoms of a broken toe, so we concluded that I'd just bruised it.

But all day today, my toe has hurt. After court this morning, I walked around the office in my socks, because it hurt to wear my wingtips. It doesn't hurt so bad to stand on it, but it hurts when I wiggle it and it's swollen up pretty good. I don't have a fever but it sure still hurts.

So that's how I broke my toe trying to mow my lawn. Why must mowing my lawn be such a struggle?

Movie Review: The Other Boleyn Girl

Story: Implausible re-telling of the affair of King Henry VIII and Mary Boleyn, followed by slightly more plausible re-telling of the affair, marriage, and eventual divorce-by-execution of King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. The story is really one of conflict and reconciliation between the sisters, and the king is more of a prize for which the two young women compete rather than a person of any depth or even interest. There is virtually no romantic element to either story; you never understand exactly what it is, aside from power and wealth, that either woman sees in Henry, yet you are asked to believe that they both, in their own ways, fell in love with him nevertheless.

Script: The story moves along very quickly; it attempts to cover nearly fifteen years of Henry's reign in about two hours. Because the focus of the movie is Mary Boleyn and her relationship with her family (particularly her sister) there is very little about the politics of the day aside from her scheming uncle the Duke of Norfolk's plans to pimp out his nieces to the pleasure-loving King in order to gain favor. We are not even given much of a chance to appreciate how the characters feel about Norfolk's wretchedly evil plan until the very end, and then it comes from a character who hasn't really mattered all that much anyway. All in all, an awkward script for an awkward story.

Cast: Brilliant. Scarlett Johannsen is the heroine of the movie, the eponymous Mary Boleyn. Natalie Portman is even more beautiful than her as Anne Boleyn. There is a point in the movie when the power struggle within the Boleyn family shifts in Anne's favor, and Portman does a phenomenal job of showing how she takes that power, learns how to wield it, and finds she rather enjoys the role of master of the game. Best of all, Eric Bana really looks like a young, athletic version of the Hans Holbein portrait of King Henry. The other characters -- Lord Boleyn, the Duke of Norfolk, and the girls' shallow brother George -- are all convincing both in appearance and demeanor.

Cinematography: Either the cinematographer or the director was very fond of starting shots focused on a column in some kind of all or room, and then slowly panning to the left or the right to focus on a character giving a speech. Sometimes the pan would continue past more columns, obscuring and then revealing the character. I understand that there was some sort of artistic statement to be made this way. But the visual effect was annoying because you couldn't see who was talking, and instead you get to look at an unlit piece of limestone. Waste of a perfectly good Natalie Portman, if you ask me, and an annoying technique.

Costumes: Spectacular. Tudor-era costumes are spectacular when made correctly, and these (as well as the hairstyles) appear to be entirely historically accurate as well as gorgeous to look at. The green dress Natalie Portman wears is inspiring prom dresses and bridesmaid's gowns across the country, and rightly so. But it's only the most stunning of a series of really great outfits that the women get to wear. The male nobles wear great costumes, too, with the brightly-colored velvet ruffles, hose and pantaloons -- it sounds ridiculous to modern sensibilities but we must remember that was the style and the men appear both comfortable and even proud of their rich, expensive finery worn at court.

Effects: Few to speak of. In ballroom, banquet, and party scenes, a very good job is done of making the lighting appear authentic, particularly the candlelit indoor balls. The dancing also appears authentic for the period, and the actors and dancers hired for these scenes obviously worked hard to recapture the elaborate and tightly-choreographed early sixteenth-century dance moves -- and in some cases, make them look sexy.

Music: Appropriate, orchestral score. Period music used in shots.

Comments: There are numerous historical inaccuracies which are quite jarring. For instance, by the time Henry VIII took Mary Boleyn as his mistress, he had already fathered a bastard son by another lady of the court. No mention whatsoever of this in the movie, which depicts Henry as without a son of any kind (who survived infancy). Mary Boleyn is depicted as younger than her infamous sister Anne, but the Boleyns themselves wrote of Mary being older than Anne. Finally, the movie portrays the Boleyns as holding a noble name but nearly penniless and therefore reduced to going along with the Duke of Norfolk's plan to pinp out the Boleyn girls in order to gain favor. Quite the opposite was true; the Boleyn family were less noble than they were social climbers and graspers, and they were quite well-off and well-connected -- Thomas Boleyn had been appointed King Henry's ambassador to France, for instance, and he took his daughters with him where they were quite happy with life in the court of the French king. The movie shows things a good deal differently.

As both The Wife and I are fond of this period of history, and have read both real history and other historical fiction focusing on these events, the inaccuracies were very jarring. It's particularly jarring to compare this movie to The Tudors, which we are working our way through at home, because the actors in that series look very different than the ones in the movie, and different (but fewer) liberties are taken with history in the series than the movie.

Overall impression: Skip it unless you really don't care about seeing a good story. I certainly don't mind seeing Henry protrayed as a monster; a good case can be made that he was exactly that although I think the real historical picture is much more ambiguous than the way this movie chooses to portray him. Perhaps a better way to think about this movie is that it's set in a fictional world that very much resembles Renaissance England, with some characters who coincidentally have the same names as some real people from that place and time, but otherwise should be treated as a fantasy. That being the case, it was not a particularly engaging fantasy.

Eating Plants

This came up at lunch today. To distinguish between fruits and vegetables, it is necessary to remember how plants reproduce. Most plants reproduce sexually but have both male and female sexual organs. The androgynous reproductive organ of the plant is the flower.

The male portion of the flower is called the stamen, which consist of a filament, upon which pollen sacs are usually kept, and a perianth, which are the petals or other outward display of the flower intended to aid in pollination (by attracting bees or other pollinating animals, for instance).

The female portion consists of several pistils. Each pistil consists of a stigma, which is an open portion of the tissue that receives pollen; the style, which is a stalk that moves nutrients to and pollen from the stigma, and the ovary, which contains the seed in a placenta, and fleshy tissue that contains nutrients that can be used by the seed to grow before the immature plant produces roots and leaves.

A vegetable is any edible part of a plant. It can be the flower (broccoli), the seed (beans), the stem (asparagus), the leaf (spinach), the leaf stem (celery), the root (carrot), or the bulb (onion). A fruit is a ripened ovary, including the seeds, of a flowering plant. All fruits are vegetables, but not all vegetables are fruits.

A pome is a kind of fruit in which the fleshy ovary tissue retains the distinction between the ovary and the seed-bearing placenta, which is less edible than the ovary. Pears and apples are examples of this kind of fruit.

A drupe is a seed that is surrounded by ovary tissue when ripe. The placenta is subsumed into the seed. All drupes are fruits. Some drupes have edible fleshy portions and inedible seeds (peaches) and some have inedible flesh and edible seeds (almonds). Others have both edible flesh and edible seeds (coconut).

A berry is the opposite of a drupe; the placenta is subsumed into the ovary. A grape is a berry. But most of the vegetables we think of as “berries” are not actually true berries, like raspberries and blueberries.

An aggregate fruit is an assembly of many drupes, like a blackberry. A multiple fruit contains ovary material from multiple flowers, like a pineapple. The difference between a multiple fruit and an aggregate fruit is that aggregate fruits are made from drupes but multiple fruits are other kinds of fruit, like pomes. Neither are true berries other than in common parlance.

An accessory fruit is one in which the fleshy, nutritive food for the seed is derived from a part of the plant other than the ovary, like a strawberry. Technically, a strawberry is not a fruit at all; it is a false berry. Other false berries include watermelons, bananas, cucumbers, and blueberries. Melons are distinguished from other accessory fruits by their common traits of being grown on vines and protecting the seeds and stored nutrients with an inedible husk. A coconut is not a melon because the coconut is the actual ovary of the plant; a true melon contains more than the ovary.

A tuber is a fruit in which the ovary and seed are grown underground, typically as an evolutionary adaptation to cold winters or other hostile environmental conditions. Thus, the ovary is located in a place different than the rest of the flower. Some tubers put their ovaries in their stems (potatoes) and others in their roots (yams).

A nut is a fleshy portion of a fruit, in which the seed and the ovary are indistinguishable. Thus, all nuts are fruits. A legume is a simple fruit which forms in a pod of some kind. The pod may be edible (peas) or may not be edible (peanuts). When the seed itself contains the bulk of the nutrition used for the seed to grow instead of the ovary flesh in which the seed is found, the legume is called a pulse (like wheat). Some legumes are nuts (like cashews), some are not (like rice).

Now you know.

St. Patrick's Day

I forgot it was St. Patrick's Day. I won't blame it on a largely sleepless night -- I wouldn't have thought much about St. Patrick's Day anyway. I'm not of Irish descent and going out to a bar and drinking prodigious amounts of beer (especially on a weekday) is behavior that is in my past. And my green shirt is at the cleaners anyway. So I thought some history would be interesting instead of a shamrock.

The real St. Patrick is an interesting historical figure, though. Much of what we know of him comes from a long letter he wrote to his monks late in his life, the Confession of St. Patrick. Probably of Roman descent, he was born in Britain somewhere near Hadrian's Wall shortly before the time of the Roman withdrawal from the island. His name, then, would not have been "Patrick" but "Patricus."

His father was a local government official and Patricus grew up with as much wealth and privilege as a young Roman citizen could have enjoyed out at the Wall -- which may well have been, in its heyday, about as luxurious and wealthy a place to be as Londinium, the capital of the province.

Much Combining his Confession with another contemporary attempt to record the history of Ireland, the Annals of Ulster, you'd have Patricus born in 378, and then ministering the Irish from 433 to 493. That have his ministry start when he was aged 55 and then lasting another sixty years -- quite unlikely given the state of available nutrition and health care in the fifth century.

It's likely that the Annals of Ulster confuse Patricus with the first missionary sent from Rome to Hibernia, a man named Palladius. Perhaps to Celtic speakers, the two Latin names of Palladius and Patricus seemed similar and someone got confused when trying to put all of the various oral traditions of the Christian missionaries into a single volume.

So you may think you're celebrating the day of an Irish saint today, but in fact he would have considered himself a Roman from Britian. Oh, and don't believe the nonsense about the snakes, either. It's a colorful story but come on.

His Confession says that when he was about sixteen years old, he was captured by raiders -- probably Picts, a tribe of Celts who lived in what is today the Scottish lowlands -- and sold as a slave in Hibernia (what we today call Ireland), probably somewhere near County Mayo on the Hibernian west coast. As a slave, young Patricus converted to Christianity and in prayer found solace from his labors and captivity.

He escaped rather than buying his freedom or waiting for manumission (which was a common enough Celtic custom after a period of good service, albeit the manumitted slave would have owed continuing debts of service and loyalty to his former owner), walked across the island and somehow got on a ship to Gaul, where he entered the Christian priesthood. Traditionaly, he returned to proselytize in Hibernia in the year 432, but that is far too early given his background and what is known of the timing of events in Roman Britian and the kind of training that priests were given at the time; his mission to Hibernia may not have begun until as late as the 450's. Sort of Junipero Serra for the eastern half of Hibernia, Patricus set up a series of monasteries and worked hard to meld Christian teachings with the pagan Celtic customs familiar to his converts.

The most famous of these, of course, was Armagh, which is today just north of the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. St. Patrick's Cathedral there looks beautiful. You can tell from the architecture that the cathedral today was not the same structure that Patricus and his followers would have built in the fifth century. But it is remarkable to have such a prominent Cathlolic cathedral in the Protestant-dominated lands of the north counties.

So if you're Irish and celebrating the day, you can think about not just the happiness of being Irish and the rich traditions of that land, but also spare a thought to the real St. Patrick. Think about how he used his new religion as solace and comfort after having had a life of relative privilege and education substituted for that of a slave forced to provide hard manual labor. Think about how he might have escaped from his masters and made his way, without money or friends, to Gaul. Think about what the church would have represented to him -- not just a place of safety but also of knowlege and education, and a return to the culture of his youth. And then, most of all think about how he must have felt being sent back to go try and convert the very people who had enslaved him to a new religion, one to which many of the local kings and chieftans were hostile, in some cases violently so. This does not diminish Patricus in my mind -- the historical reality, while perhaps less charming than cartoon leprechauns and shamrocks, is in many ways more impressive than the legends.

Intended As Satire, But Maybe Too Subtle For Me

Prof. Michael Stokes Paulsen at Balkinization uses the Spitzer scandal to attack Lawrence v. Texas. It's an interesting legal amusement. It's also, I think, a plausible extension of the theory of Lawrence v. Texas, albeit a highly unlikely result of making that argument.

For my part, I fail to see what exactly was so objectionable about either the basic reasoning of Lawrence v. Texas or its result. Prof. Paulsen is particularly upset (as are many legal conservatives) at Justice Kennedy's opening statement of the issue:

Liberty protects the person from unwarranted government intrusions into a dwelling or other private places. In our tradition the State is not omnipresent in the home. And there are other spheres of our lives and existence, outside the home, where the State should not be a dominant presence. Freedom extends beyond spatial bounds. Liberty presumes an autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief, expression, and certain intimate conduct.

But isn't all of that true already? Hasn't all of that been a clearly understood line of Constitutional law since Griswold v. Connecticut, a case from 1965? I can see using that line of reasoning without irony or snicker if one were to offer a Constitutional challenge to a prostitution law.

With that said, I think such a law would wind up being upheld despite this Constitutional challenge. Prostitution carries undesirable "secondary effect" such as crimes of violence and (when done carelessly) the spread of venereal diseases. Otherwise-protected conduct can be regulated to limit such "secondary effects," City of Renton v. Playtime Theater (1985) 475 U.S. 41. Consequently, the state has an interest in its regulation -- and one form of regulation is criminalization. It may not be the best form of regulation from a policy perspective, and it certainly is not very principled for a society that claims to value freedom to criminalize this kind of conduct. But within the limits of state power defined by the Constitution, it doesn't seem like it would be a difficult call to uphold a challenge to a prostitution law despite the holding of Lawrence v. Texas.

What the law should be and what it is are often very different things.

By Special Request (Updated)

I really haven't paid a ton of attention to the Jeremiah Wright story that I still think is going to go away pretty quickly. And I took the weekend off blogging to be lazy. But if you're hungry for commentary on it, here's Rick Moran.

Update: And Michael Reynolds with the pro-Obama counterpoint to Moran's criticism. Well, it looks like I was wrong -- this one isn't going away just yet. Apparently Obama is being forced into giving a speech on race relations tomorrow in Philadelphia. Stay tuned.

Bear Dreams

At my age, it seems silly to be awoken in the middle of the night with scary dreams and then be unable to fall asleep again. Maybe it had something to do with going to bed earlier than usual. But after a dream in which The Wife and I were trapped in our old beater car, in the snow by a riverbed, and being attacked by a grizzly bear who had been enraged by a thoughtless stunt skiier, I found myself unable to get back to sleep and I've stayed up for something like four hours. I may try to get a little more sleep later this morning, skipping breakfast if need be.

A Difficult Claim To Double-Blind Test

Can you really tell the future using asparagus? This doesn't seem like it would be any more accurate than any other kind of augury (which is to say, as good as or slightly worse than chance). But then again, I don't know how one would structure a double-blind test to really verify whether asparagus thrown on the floor can accurately predict the future any more than, for instance, a magic 8-ball.

Newt Gets Freaky

A really good online interview with Newt Gingrich. Worth a read, whether you're liberal or conservative. In particular, Gingrich offers his take on the "Republican Reboot" theme I and many others have been writing about -- he thinks that social conservatives aren't the problem and that the basic GOP coalition is just fine; but his concern is that they have taken too much of the limelight and there needs to be greater emphasis placed on agenda items offered by moatdiggers, budget hawks, and tax-cutters.