Osler's Razor

As many of you know, I'm kinda fascinated by Big 10 mascots. In fact, I follow several of them on Twitter, and from that I surmise that they are having some kind of business meeting in New York. I pulled this picture from Goldy Gopher's Twitter feed.

Where is Bucky Badger???? Was he not invited to the meeting? It's like the time they made the cool music video and not everyone was invited...

The Winter Olympics were a blast-- I really enjoyed them, even though they kinda punted on the whole Russian thing. I'm not sure how being an "Olympic Athlete from Russia" is really that different than being a Russian athlete.

Anyways, there are a few events that could use a little more juice: nordic skiing, figure skating, and snowboarding. I've got some ideas for new events that could really make people take notice:

1) Snowboarding Crash-fest!

The snowboarding events that involve jumps-- halfpipe and big air-- are plenty exciting as they are. But the downhill races, which go side-by-side for the snowboarders, are a little less thrilling. What if we had like six of them going straight downhill, though? With jumps? It would be like NASCAR on ice!

2)  Kiss n' Cry Skating!

Figure skating got a lot of air time this Olympics (as it usually does). The part that the camera really ate up, though, was the "Kiss n' Cry" area where the contestants wait for their scores. And, yeah, there is a lot of kissing and crying going on (it is an unusual sport that way).

So, my idea is to bring more of the kissing and crying right out into the rink. There could be a pairs event without all of the dangerous jumps, and a LOT more kissing and crying out on the ice! We could call it, hmmmm... "ice dancing."

3) Nordic Skiing... with guns!

I watched a lot of nordic skiing in large part because it is a sport I enjoy doing myself (in a ponderously slow way compared to the Olympians, of course).  It's kind of interesting... but sometimes it looks like fast walking as much as anything. And the uphill parts, while impressive, aren't really elegant.

So what if everyone got a gun? They could sling it over their back and ski around and then shoot at something every once in a while.

Gavin seems to share my habits:




And so does the Medievalist:




I do want to know more about what the Medievalist hears....

I am at my kitchen table tonight, working on my article and presentation at the MLK50 event in Memphis in April (more info here). This one feels important; this moment has deep roots in the past and real potential for the future.

As I write, I sometimes stop and rework what I have done. It takes a while before it fits, before it takes the form it is meant to have. My dad sculpts sometimes, and I love to watch him do it. Watching, it seems that what he is looking for is in the clay already; he just has to reveal it. I wish I could write that way. Instead, I have to push things around, knock it all down and start over a few times, until the architecture is right.

And sometimes, it takes a while.

But I feel like this one needs to be just right.

It has been an intense year-and-a-half of writing, but now it is done.

Yeah, I'm an eavesdropper. So are you, I'll bet. How can anyone not be? People are just so... interesting!

Let's haiku about that this week: the remarkable (or mundane) things we hear other people say, whether to us or to someone else. Here, I will go first:

Two women run by
"I sold all of his clothes and..."
And what??? They are gone.

Now it is your turn! Just use the 5/7/5 syllable formula, and have some fun!

So tired of politics. I care, but sometimes too much.

Instead, here is some skiing. Nordic skiing!

When I moved to MN from Texas, I was surprised to read that the local high school had 55 guys on the football team, and 140 on the nordic ski team. And that wasn't including the people on the alpine ski team. I wasn't in Texas anymore!

One of the kids from Minnesota, Jessie Diggins, won the first Olympic medal in women's nordic skiing yesterday in a two-person relay thingee.  Which is kind of neat.

So-- today's my birthday.

I've been on this Earth for a little while now.

Consider some of the things that were true on the day I was born:

-- My alma mater, William & Mary had never admitted an African-American student.
-- Women were barred from the undergraduate division of Yale, where I went to law school.
-- John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X were all still alive.
-- The Beatles were largely unknown in the US. They had not released an album yet.
-- There were people around who were alive during the Civil War.

In so many ways, the world is a better place now than it was then. There is more freedom in more places. There is cleaner air and water. There is nationhood in many places that were colonized when I was born. Women have more autonomy and opportunity.

This world is what we make it. And there is much more to do-- for me, and for us all. I'm in.

It was 50 years ago yesterday that Mr. Rogers Neighborhood started it's long run on PBS. For a lot of Americans, including me, Fred Rogers had a real influence on what we thought life could be like.

That is that it could be gentle.
That it could be decent.
That it could be about things bigger than ourselves.
That it would go forward in a world where we had a responsibility to one another.

We needed to hear that. We still do.

Sometimes I really regret the limitations of the form of haiku, because I really  want to know the rest of the story. For example, this nifty little piece from the Medievalist (oh, and George Greenia says "hi!"):




Also, confidential to Nate: No. No you're not.

What made him so mad?

What is inside a mind that thinks the right thing to do is to head down to a school with a passel of guns and shoot everyone you can?

Almost always, it seems to boil down to revenge and resentment. It comes in different packages, but that seems to be the common core of the motivation.

And that is such a failure of the spirit, not just of the shooters but of our society. We unfortunately rely on resentment to fuel victories in our three of our most important public forums: entertainment, sports and politics. So many movies and television shows have a hero with a gun and a hurt, intent on revenge.  In sports, it is a recipe that works: to convince athletes that they have been disrespected, and that they must go out and "fight" to avenge their loss of honor. And in politics, both parties stoke resentments openly to get people to come out and vote. It isn't subtle; it is all there is to many  political messages.

And yet it is such an un-Christian message. Christ taught selflessness, over and over. If there is one word that sums up his message other than "love," it would be "humility."

And yet, we teach the opposite in public, and lionize those who avenge. Should we be surprised that, when tossed into a mind that is already hurt and strained, it leads to such terrible outcomes?

Even as we seek to change laws, we need to revive our own spirits, and those of the community, in what we celebrate and honor.

Man, what a week.

Does anyone else feel like this was kind of a turning point, a moment of national consciousness where we realize that if people keep shooting other people at random, maybe there is something wrong with our culture?

But there are good things, too, and it can be healing to turn to those now and then.

Small kindnesses are game-changers, especially in dark moments. Let's haiku about those this week. Here, I will go first:

Last week, Virginia
Old friends drove to see me talk
Such warmth in a smile.

Now it is your turn! Just use the 5/7/5 syllable pattern, and have some fun!

There have been 18 gunfire incidents at schools this year, including the 17-death horror in Florida yesterday. For schools that started on January 3 and got MLK day off, there have been 30 schools days so far this year.

30 school days. 18 incidents of gunfire-- mass shootings, suicides, a kid shooting off the security guard's gun-- bullets and schools. More than one every two days. And yes, that is an accurate figure for incidents of gunfire at schools this year. It's appalling.

"Thoughts and prayers" apparently are not working.

One of the arguments against doing nearly anything about school shootings--other than training kids to be terrified of school shootings--is that any one "fix" won't prevent them all. It's a dumb argument. In criminal law, which is pretty much the science of trying to limit tragedy, nothing we do, nothing, ever "prevents" a category of crime. We settle for the little we can do to make things somewhat better. And that saves lives, if we do it right.

Here are four things we can do.

1. Ban assault rifles--semiautomatic rifles capable of accepting a large magazine-- like the one used in Newtown and again yesterday (and in the Las Vegas shooting, and the Pulse nightclub). They were banned before, from 1994 through 2004. These guns are designed to allow a soldier to enter a building and shoot a lot of people; there is a reason they are a favored weapon for urban combat-- and those are the same characteristics that make them ideal for school shooters. Yes, there are a lot of them out there already, but it makes sense to staunch the flow now.

2. Close the gun show loophole, and require background checks for all gun transactions. When I was a prosecutor in Detroit, I went to a gun show out at the Gibralter Trade Center in Macomb County. It was a building full of unregulated gun dealers, and one book stall with titles like "Kill 'Em All" and "So You Are Going to Prison." I was appalled. I still am.

3. Stop hobbling the ATF as they try to do their job. Congress, goaded on by the NRA, has stood in the way of modernizing gun tracing: the picture above depicts the file boxes they deal with instead of computers. There is no national database; instead there is just a guy named Charlie. Seriously, that is all we've got-- a guy named Charlie, a small staff, and a bunch of paper records in boxes.

4. End the effective ban on federal funding of research into gun violence prevention. Yup-- in 1997, a law was put into place that has been interpreted as barring public money from being spent to figure out where this public menace comes from. This is crazy, and the NRA's motivation is clear: to protect the status quo regarding guns in America, which includes kids getting gunned down every other day at school.

Do politicians care? Well, no. No, they don't.

And if they can't do these little things, it is worse than not caring. It is cowardice.

First, I need to say this: I think that the government should spend much more money to feed the hungry, here and in other places. And, yes, there is food insecurity for a lot of people in the United States, many of them children and the elderly.

How we do that is a fair question. I don't quite understand the Trump administration's proposal to just give out boxes of food ("like Blue Apron"), and I'm not sure that they do either. It sounds like it would be an administrative nightmare, and one that would not meet the varying needs of the many people who are in need of food assistance.

An article at Yahoo News yesterday described the top ten items purchased through the program that used to be known as "food stamps" (and is now called SNAP):

1.   Soda
2.   Milk
3.   Ground beef
4.   Bagged snacks (ie, chips and pretzels)
5.   Cheese
6.   Bread (which, oddly, is described as "baked bread"-- what other kid is there?)
7.   Cereal
8.   Fresh chicken
9.   Frozen snacks (ie, Hot Pockets)
10. Lunch meat

Generally, this tracks what non-SNAP buyers choose; for example, soda and milk are the top two purchases for non-SNAP buyers, though the order is reversed. I suspect that a lot of Americans would support taking soda and chips off the list of available items, but Coke and Lays are a powerful countervailing political force (and others will argue that SNAP recipients should have the same choices as everyone else).

I really, really love the Winter Olympics. Like, a lot. When you have sports spectacular that features sledding, why would anyone complain?

A few days ago, American skater Mirai Nagasu did something remarkable-- landed a triple axel, a jump that very few women have been able to do do. Tanya Harding was the first, in 1991. That seems all the more remarkable after watching this:

Great haiku last Friday! But... will someone tell the Medievalist that he lives in Texas?

Yesterday I flew out of Patrick Henry Airport, south of Williamsburg, headed home. The plane banked up and over the James River, and I was filled with memories.

Here in Minnesota, the rivers move right along (except when they are frozen). Minnehaha Creek runs close to my house, rushing through twists and turns and plunging over little waterfalls until it gets to a big one, where it drops 53 feet into a misty pool. Even the Mississippi speeds along, even tumbling into whitewater as it passes by downtown Minneapolis.

The James is not like that. It is old and slow and wide. Sometimes, even up by Williamsburg, it can stop or flow backwards. You can throw in a stick, and just sit there and watch it not do much for an hour. When I was in college, I sometimes went and sat on the shore to think; it was calm there.

Things move slowly some places. But they do.

I have great admiration for those who can navigate slow waters.

35 years ago I was a student in Professor Braxton’s class on African American literature, a Yankee from Grosse Pointe, Michigan. Professor Braxton was described to me by a fellow student as “an actual poet.” I was skeptical.

When class began, I found out what that meant. Professor Braxton wasn’t a poet just because she had published poetry; she was a poet because her words were well-considered, strong, worthy of our time. A question would be asked, and she would pause, nodding a little. We waited anxiously, and then the answer would come out in a way I had never heard before. Her responses had an architecture to them; they weren’t said so much as constructed. We listened, really listened, motionless. I began to think differently about race and history, and also about the power of language. I resolved to have some poetry in me no matter what I did; I wanted a bit of that soaring architecture in what I said and wrote. I still do.

To you students: The heart of teaching is love. I learned that from this teacher.


This ancient place has been blessed to have her near, and so have I. 

Thank you, congratulations, and welcome, Professor Joanne Braxton."

And then she slayed them. 

The newest drama from the White House is that staff Secretary Rob Porter has resigned in the wake of allegations that he was physically abusive to two of his ex-wives.

Other than the fact that he was Hope Hicks' boyfriend, it is hard to understand how Porter had this job in the first place. Because of the allegations (the FBI had interviewed the ex-wives), he did not receive a security clearance-- yet as Secretary, one of his jobs was conveying classified information to the President. It's really bizarre how things happen at the White House-- the only test seems to be that of loyalty.

And maybe it is just me, but it seems like perhaps President Trump just does not view women as possessing human dignity in the first place.

Yesterday I walked out to my car at the end of the day and couldn't help but notice the little BMW in the spot next to me. The driver had parked it on a diagonal; not crossing the line but just kind of sideways in there (we have wide spaces). It looked like they had wheeled in with alacrity and then just ditched it; it kind of made me laugh to think about.

That wasn't really a bad parking job, relatively speaking, for the garage I use. It apparently is a magnet for bad parkers, and a special Minnesota variety of bad parker-- not the inconsiderate slob who takes up two spaces or uses the handicapped spot before jogging off to work. No, it's more like this:

-- The guy who backed his car in a little too far and got smushed into the wires back there
-- The person who parked in the corner where there is no wall and got her car completely covered in snow and then just left it there for weeks
-- The doofus who parked directly in front of the door to the stairs, so that people coming in and out have to basically climb over his car.

I know... not much to complain about, really. What do you see?

A lot happened here in Minneapolis last week. In the run-up to the Super Bowl, they pretty much transformed the downtown into an NFL-focused city-state. My walk to the gym through the skyways took me past most of the action, so I got to see it over several days. In all, it was just kind of weird.

You know how there are really great amusement parks, the ones that get everything right pretty much? And then, at the other end of the spectrum, there are those old goofy local places that get a lot of things wrong (like safety, perhaps) but are endearing and fun. But in the middle are these places that are neither glamorous or authentic, but just kind of.... manufactured.  That's what Super Bowl World felt like. The city looked great, but this city looked great already.

In the end, the city sunk a lot of money into it, and the NFL made a lot of money off the game. It's like the stadium itself; the taxpayers pony up and the owners of the team get the resulting cash flow. It's little-- a lot-- like getting used.

Sorry, but Justin Timbertoes just did not do it for me. And, didn't it seem like most of the time there was singing, he wasn't singing?

Also, dude is starting to look like late-career Phil Collins.

 But... I wish I could have seen what the Medievalist was up to, since he was apparently planning a costume malfunction!

Americans create two kinds of memorials.

One kind is formal and stolid. A headstone, for example, set into the lawn of a cemetery, a name chiseled into the stone with the dates of birth and death. A statue, perhaps, of a man on a horse with a sword. They are the products, in a way, of commerce: someone was paid to create it. There is an industry to do that. The good thing about these memorials, of course, is that they are there for a very long time--you can go and pay your respects, or just marvel at the history of a place.

The second kind is informal, anarchic, the pile of stuff people leave in the place where something terrible happened. There is no industry for this, except perhaps the inadvertent involvement of those who sell stuffed animals or flowers. In one setting, it might seem like detritus, but here it is this wild expression of memory, raw and real.

When I see the second, I stop and I walk over and look. Do you?

Do I care about the game? Not so much (though it has made my commute a lot easier this week, since they have basically cut off my part of downtown Minneapolis).

Do I care about the halftime show? You bet! Let's haiku about that this week. Here, I will go first:

Me? Never perfect
I'm always a half step off
I am Left Shark.

Now it is your turn! just use the 5/7/5 syllable pattern, and have some fun!

So, here is IPLawGuy's intriguing take on what is going on these days (that is him, pictured above, celebrating International Denmark Appreciation Day):