Sleep Spent

OMG, yes.

So there’s starting to be all sorts of talk about a filibuster. Which makes sense, since Alito is a more conservative appointment than Roberts was, and has far less charisma.

Here’s my question. Suppose Alito is filibustered. Suppose the Republicans aren’t having it and employ the rule-breaking Nuclear Option. The minority party can no longer withhold cloture on judicial nominations.

Then fast forward one year. The Abramoff scandal has taken its toll, and the Democrats have gotten their act together. (I know, I know. Work with me, here.) Maybe the Alito nomination has helped some. The Dems win back the Senate. They up their seat count by 10 to swap places with the Republicans.

Should they now reinstate the judicial filibuster? In this case, would they even be able to, without breaking the rules in the same way the majority will have to now to remove the judicial filibuster? Would any Republicans join in this mission? It would be a pretty clear admission that they were wrong to remove the option now, but wouldn’t it be The Right Thing To Do?

Also, would the answer be any different if they got 60 seats?

I wonder how the crazies at Red State would react to this scenario.

I look forward to your insights. I’ll post more if I get any more information.

So I was reading this Dr. Seuss cartoon (you can find a passel of them here), and I saw the word hock. And I thought, “that’s odd.” Because I’d only ever seen that word in the context of a part of a cow or pig.

Then I thought of hawking something, agressively selling or peddling. “Is this just another spelling of that?” I thought.

But no, they’re two different words. If I’ve heard “hock” (meaning “to pawn”) before, I must have assumed it was included in the definition of “hawk,” and conflated them by virtue of their homonymy.

I love our language. :-)

Oh, and another awesome word I discovered today while reading the February issue of Harper’s, which just showed up in my mailbox today: qua. Meaning, “in the capacity of.” As in, “I’m speaking to you qua computer scientist.” Sounds like a useful Scrabble word to me.

This was used in a really great article by the great, great grandson of Charles Darwin about the recent kerfuffle in Dover over Idiotic Design. It’s good reading; BigChalk’s eLibrary should have it, though you may have to wait a few days. (Your school/public library does subscribe to eLibrary, doesn’t it? Mine does.)

Today, John Gale and I went to Stacks’ for breakfast. As I pulled into the parking lot behind the restaurant, I saw these two pedestrians, a woman and a girl of maybe 8 or so. They were walking along the right side of the alley I had turned into. They were clearly walking forward, but then made a sudden jog toward the middle of the lane. I believe I slowed at that point (we’ll get to that later), but they corrected their course, so I continued past them. The woman freaks out and starts yelling at me as I pass them. “Wow,” I think.

We find a parking spot. As we’re walking to the restaurant, we see her and the kid. (Not sure if it was her daughter or her granddaughter.) The kid is clearly being difficult and throwing a tantrum. At this point, instead of being upset at the crazy lady, I tell John I now feel sorry for her. And it’s true, I did. For about 5 seconds, until she notices me and John. And freaks out all over again. We’re walking away, and the woman starts yelling, “hey you!” and “you skinny punk!” and “get back here!” She didn’t actually say anything abusive, I don’t think, but it was still quite a spectacle.

John turned around to look at her when she started yelling, but I told him to ignore her and keep walking. We get into the restaurant, put our names down and go out on the balcony to wait. I asked John why he had turned around when she started yelling at us. What was he going to say to her? He said he would have apologized. I told her I wouldn’t have, because I didn’t feel I’d done anything wrong.

No sooner had we propped ourselves against a railing than here comes the woman up the stairs to confront me.

“I believe you owe me an apology,” she says.

What I should have said was, “Is that so, you skinny punk?” which would have presumably injected some humility into her righteous indignation. Asking me for an apology. Anyway, I believe I said “Is that so?”

“Yes,” she says.

I tell her what I think happened (though it became clearer later after I thought about it more; I think I got it a bit wrong). That they had jogged out into the lane after they had been going straight. (“Because we didn’t see you.”) That they had continued straight on afterwards.

She says “when there’s kids around, you stop.” Which is a fair point. I shudder to think what would have happened if I hadn’t stopped and the child had continued on into the center. But if she had, I feel like I would have stopped. I don’t know. It all happened very quickly. I know I had slowed down, and I was already going a lot slower than usual because I was coming out of a turn.

And then we get to what really upset her, I think, which was her accusation that one of us had flipped them off. This was news to me: I don’t do that, and neither does John. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I said. “We did not do that.”

“Then what was this?” she demands, making a gesture.

John tells her that it was just him putting his hand up to grab the oh shit handle (though of course he only said “handle”).

She finishes off with a final burst of vitriol, “Everything’s just perfect for you, insn’t it? Well you can just go on thinking that the world is yours” or something. She then attempted to storm down the stairs, which doesn’t really work on concrete.

“Have a nice day,” I called after her.

I did not bring up her screaming child and attempt to explain to her that she was just sublimating her frustration with her child into an attack on me, an adult. I thought about it and decided against it. I think that would have really got her upset (in addition to being a pretty cheap shot, though true), and I didn’t want to upset her. I wanted her to leave me alone.

I’m posting about this because I can’t stop thinking about it, and I’m hoping writing this down will help me work through it enough to move on. I know I’m a nice person and I am confident in my driving abilities. I don’t feel like I did the wrong thing at any point, though screetching to a halt wouldn’t have been the wrong thing either. But even that might not have satisfied her. Then it would have been, “there’s kids walking here! Why are you speeding around?!?”

John’s response to the title of this entry is, “because you’re nice,” and I’m happy with that. I wasn’t going to let her shout at me, so I walked away. But I gave her a fair hearing when she approached me without screaming, and I feel like we handled the misunderstanding that was responsible for most of her anger.

At the end of the day, though, I guess I just have to learn to deal with crazy people.

A few years ago, Harvard did a survey of a whole bunch of people across the US, asking them how they said different words. And I found a website where you can take the same survey, and I did.

Here’s how I pronounce things.

Turns out, my dialect is 52% popular. Would you believe, most people say “sir-up” not “sear-up”?

It’s too bad he didn’t ask about “bagel.” :-)