Blog Envy

I saw the movie Julie and Julia, a melange of Julia Child's experience in getting her famous cookbook published and Julie Powell, a blogger from New York City who cooked her way through Julia Child's cookbook and blogged about it.

The movie is endearing and enjoyable, but, speaking from a blogger's perspective, can I just say, wait a minute? This Julie Powell committed herself to cooking the recipes in Julia Child's cookbook over the course of a year and blogged about how it was going? And she got famous doing that? How could anyone possibly be interested?

I must really be doing something wrong in my blog. I suppose I could have visited every historic site, park, and museum in the Washington, DC area and blogged about each of them. Or I could have requested a 15-minute interview with every member of Congress and blogged about that for 535 days. But why would anyone care? I mean, really, if you thought you were going to get famous by blogging your way through someone else's cookbook, I would have told you that the odds were about one in several million.

Well, she started early: her first entry is August 25, 2002. I don't think there were so many blogs back then. Now there are millions. And she persisted. And she had a good focus, instead of just looking at "the News, the World, and Life," the way I do. And it worked! Her blog was made into a book and then a movie, while I'm still waiting.

But my first taste of fame starts tomorrow! Faithful readers, next month's posts will appear here and on Concurring Opinions, a group blog hosted by my colleague Dan Solove. They've got thousands of readers, so I'll have a wider audience. Look out, competing bloggers.

Summer Blockbuster

It's a holiday, so we get to relax from legal posts.

This weekend marks the unofficial start of the summer season, so my girlfriend and I took in the summer blockbuster Angels and Demons. The verdict: don't bother.

(Caution: spoilers ahead. In fact this won't make sense if you haven't already seen the movie)

The fundamental problem is that the movie is absurd. Of course we suspend our disbelief for works of fiction, but we still expect some basic level of plausibility and motivation for what happens. Star Trek scored better on both counts.

Professor Langdon again deploys his exceptional gift for interpreting symbols to unravel an ancient mystery, this time the location of the Church of the Illuminati. But what on earth is going on? First, even though someone will be killed every hour and all of Vatican city blown up in four hours, he and his sidekick sleuth take many minutes to chat about history. Then suddenly they remember the time pressure and start doing far more than could possibly be done in the time allowed. Heck, it would take longer than they have just to tear around Rome each time. I won't complain about his getting every symbolic clue exactly right just in time, but I don't see how they could even beat the traffic back to the Vatican and out to a church again in the available time, not to mention taking up time to prowl around and smash things up in the archives. And it's too much to imagine that he later finds exactly the right spot on the videotape on the first try.

Why doesn't the assassin kill Langdon and Vittoria? He killed everyone else who posed any threat to him.

And are we really to believe that the nefarious Carmelengo dreamed up a plot that relied on everyone's arriving at the antimatter bomb with exactly six minutes to spare? What if he'd been just a little bit off? And did he really think that nothing bad would happen to Vatican City as a 5-kiloton bomb went off just a few thousand feet above it? (By the way, why did nothing bad happen?)

And with the Carmelengo exposed, why does the security team walk toward him very, very slowly until he starts running, then let him get a good long lead, and then start running toward him at top speed?

And while we're complaining, the method of electing the Pope by acclamation quasi ex inspiratione was abolished in 1996 and there is also no requirement that the Pope be chosen from among the existing cardinals. (See paragraph 88 in the previous link.)

But of course the real problem is that the whole idea that the Carmelengo would cook up this unbelievably elaborate plot that included killing the Pope and his likely successors, and all for no very adequate reason, is just too absurd to believe.

So for something much more realistic, go catch the new Star Trek. That was surprisingly good.

Catching Up

Sorry, faithful readers, for the long delay. I was away -- in India.

A few thoughts about my time away:

* On the first day of my trip, India-themed Slumdog Millionaire won the Best Picture Oscar. As I've mentioned before, that was a good picture, but the love interest was not compelling. Let's face it, Jamal spends the whole time mooning after a woman he barely knows. So I liked it but I wouldn't put it quite in the "best picture" category.

* While we're talking about the film, there was an indignant article in the Hindustan Times criticizing the film for its "'factually incorrect' portrayal of foreigners’ shoes being stolen at Taj Mahal, and touts harassing tourists." Having now traveled to the Taj Mahal and many other tourists sites in India, I can certify that (a) no one ever tampered with my shoes, even though I had to leave them at the door many times, but (b) boy, was I harassed by touts. I had a marvelous time and I recommend India to others, but you definitely have to be prepared to have unwanted products and services thrust upon you aggressively many times each day.

* I worked my way through several India-themed books: Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake by the same author, George Orwell's Burmese Days (set in the period when Burma was part of India), and Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance. All quite good but very sad. I presume happy things happen in Indian literature sometimes. But not in these books. I recommend any of them, but reading them all in a row was rather depressing. Don't try that at home.

* I visited Delhi, Agra, Jaipur, Jodhpur, Udaipur, and Varanasi. Highlights of the trip included the Presidential gardens in Delhi (magnificent, but only open in February), the Taj Mahal in Agra(however high your expectations are, it will exceed them), the Jantar Mantar in Jaipur (it looks like a bizarre, abstract sculpture garden, but it's actually an 18th-century astronomical observatory), the Fort in Jodhpur, the palace in Udaipur, and a sunrise boat trip on the Ganges in Varanasi.

Back to business.

Economy Still Going Strong

OK, maybe it isn't. But I'll tell you this: my girlfriend and I went to see a movie in Georgetown yesterday (Slumdog Millionaire -- pretty good, although the love interest part is not compelling), and on the way back we stopped into Tretorn to look at some athletic shoes. Someone on M Street had offered us free hot cider and a $25-off coupon, and my girlfriend had been looking for Tretorns anyway. As we were browsing, I observed that the store had a DJ spinning vinyl records. Putting this point together with the cider and the coupon and the fact that I had never noticed this store before (although it's up a flight of stairs, not easy to spot), I decided it must be the grand opening. But no, it turned out that the spinmeister was a regular feature of the store. And it's not as though he did anything else. That was his job.

And then as we walked home, we passed an Adidas store that also had a DJ spinning records. And he didn't seem to have any other work either.

Now, I'm not a corporate mogul. I don't know what packs in the 20-something customers that these stores seemed to be aimed at. But I will say that, in a down economy, these jobs looked pretty expendable. I don't know what they're pulling down, but it has to be something.

The stock market may have hit its lowest level in 11 years, but things haven't reached the point where Tretorn and Adidas have realized that they could put a CD on the stereo and have one of the shoe sellers change it from time to time. So there must be some life in the economy yet. In a real downturn these DJs would be axed. As John Cleese pointed out to the pantomime horses when telling them that one of them would have to go, the management consultants were questioning why the bank employed a pantomime horse at all.

Iron Man Ironies

I saw "Iron Man" this weekend, and while I thought it was good for its genre -- I freely admit to being entertained -- I was somewhat disappointed by the physics. Of course the whole thing was a cinematic comic book, but when the hero is supposed to be a brilliant engineer, one expects at least a mild dose of reality. Here the physics was just part of the film's general otherworldliness. (Caution: spoilers ahead.)

This physics professor complains primarily that the amazing Iron Man suit would require too much power to carry around. Well, that, I think, can almost be forgiven -- a vital part of the premise was that Tony Stark, the hero, invents a fabulously miniaturized power source. Of course, if he'd really done that, one might imagine that when he gets home he would find better and more profitable things to do with it than to build a flying, fighting suit (zero emission cars? clean power plants?), but OK, he's in the weapons business, so that's what he naturally thinks about. But there were so many other bad physics cliches -- standing in a huge shower of falling broken glass without getting so much as a scratch; being 10 feet from an explosion that destroys a huge building, ditto -- that it required a little too much suspension of disbelief.

And the physics was just the beginning. What really got to me was the idea that all it takes is a supersuit to solve any military problem. There wasn't much recognition of the need for actionable intelligence. We already have the ability to make things blow up a long distance away. But you need to know what to blow up. It's one thing to put on a supersuit that can fly you halfway around the world in a few minutes -- you still need to know where to go. Somehow Stark didn't have to spend even a moment asking anyone for directions -- he just flew straight to the exact spot where the bad guys were hassling their prisoners. Also, the suit magically distinguishes enemies from civilians. In real life, you could send someone in wearing a supersuit and he'd end up killing at least a couple of friends and civilians for every 10 enemies, I expect.

The cybernetics were also a little too much. We already have voice recognition software, so I wasn't bothered by Stark's ability to talk to his computers, but where is the computer that understands everything you say and answers back in perfect natural English -- with delightfully wry sarcasm thrown in? Where is the program that provides perfect Pashto-English voice translation at the touch of a button? If he's really got these things, he could be making far more in civilian software than in weapons technology, I would expect.

And by the way, why does Stark almost keel over when his power source is turned off? As far as his personal body was concerned, all it was doing was powering the magnet that kept the shrapnel away from his organs. It's not like it was keeping his heart pumping. He should have just casually said, "Damn, I'd better replace that soon -- gotta keep that shrapnel away from my heart."

Still, I enjoyed the flick more than I thought I would and recommend it as an action film where they actually expended some effort on the story line. It's not just a bunch of meaningless explosions.

And for a great site on movie physics, go here.

Your Non-Legal Movie Review

Sorry about the lack of recent content, faithful readers. The end of the term is coming -- always a busy time.

Last night, my girlfriend and I saw Shine a Light, currently playing at DC's last remaining big-screen movie theater, the Uptown. It was sadly misbooked -- the company (which owns pretty much every screen in town) miscalculated and put the film in their big theater, which must have a capacity of 500 or so, but there couldn't have been more than 50 in the audience.

The movie is a concert film -- it's Martin Scorsese's filming of a concert given by the Rolling Stones in New York City in 2006. After a brief intro in which Scorsese gives you some sense of the frenetic preparation work for the concert and the difficulties of filming it, most of the movie is just a film of the concert, with a few clips of earlier Stones interviews spliced in.

All I can say is this: it was terrific. Mick Jagger was sixty-three when he gave this concert, but he filled the entire theater with his energy and intensity. He's up there singing, dancing, strutting, and shaking his ass better than most thirty-year-old performers. His face is craggy and saggy but his body looks great and his stage presence is undimmed -- particularly amazing was how he brought the same vitality to the last number as to the first, after a couple of hours of work that would have tested a professional athlete.

I hope I have that much energy when I'm his age. I'd settle for half as much. One only has to recall Britney Spears sleepwalking through her number at the MTV awards to realize that there's no guarantee that even the best performers will do a good job on any given night. It takes real dedication. Jagger feigns coolness and unconcern, but you can see that he's determined to give the audience its money's worth -- he's putting it out there for us and he won't be satisfied with anything less than his best.

That's what I try to give to my students. I don't always feel up for the game -- professors have much other work to do, of which students are sadly unwaware, not to mention personal lives that could be going well or badly -- but the students have paid big bucks to be there. If you run the numbers the tuition alone amounts to about $100 per class hour, so in my big class the students have collectively paid over $11,000 for me to step into the classroom each day. They're entitled to their money's worth, and I try to give them an appropriate amount of energy and intensity. I'm no Mick Jagger, but I do my best.

Anyway, whatever Mick Jagger is on, I want some. Well, perhaps not -- it's probably something illegal. But boy, he's still got it, and it's an inspiration knowing that you can still be going that strong after sixty.

Your Legal Movie Review

I finally saw the Oscar-winning movie Juno, which was pretty good -- although I did think some of the characters were unrealistically quick-witted for alleged teenagers. But my real interest was, naturally, in the legal aspects of the movie. You need to know the basics of the plot, but it's hardly a spoiler to say that the film is about a 16-year-old girl who gets pregnant and decides to have the baby but to give it up to a childless couple in a private adoption.

Here's the thing: did you notice that everyone (including the lawyer whom the adopting couple hires to ensure the adoption goes off legally) assumes that the decision to give up the baby belongs entirely to the biological mother? What about the father? Doesn't he have anything to say about it? No one seems to think that it's necessary even to ask his opinion, much less get his permission. Even he just sits on the sidelines and does hardly anything for the entire movie.

After doing a little research (all right, what I really did was to ask one of my colleagues who has expertise in this area), I was somewhat surprised to discover that the movie got it right: a biological father who exhibits no interest in asserting parental rights does not have to be consulted before his child is adopted and his parental rights terminated.

Does this make sense? In the age of the more-involved father -- an age in which, in fact, there's a big societal push from those who support women's rights to encourage fathers to play a more active role in child-rearing -- it seems unfair to say that the father would be on the hook for child support if the mother chose to seek it, but that he has no right to claim his child if the mother wants to put it up for adoption.

Fortunately, the matter is not quite so simple -- the biological father's rights are not automatically terminable by the mother's choice to put the baby up for adoption. But the father needs to take more active steps to assert his rights. Had Paulie, the father in the movie, wanted to raise the baby, he would first have had to register with the state's "putative father registry" (luckily for him, Minnesota has one -- only about half the states do). Then he would at least be entitled to notice that Juno was planning to put the baby up for adoption. But even then, state law might or might not recognize his right to the child. He might be limited to being able to keep the child if he could show that that was in the child's best interests.

Normally, a state can't take a child away from its biological parents without their consent unless they are shown to be unfit. Parents otherwise have a right to their children, even if it would be in the child's best interests to be raised by somebody else. But an unmarried biological father may not have such rights under state law. He may be required to take active steps to assume parental responsibilities, and some states have pretty strict requirements. A biological mother who acted badly in the period immediately after her child's birth wouldn't be in this situation -- the father (if he were around) couldn't decide to put the child up for adoption without her permission just because she wasn't taking what state law regarded as a sufficiently active role in raising it. She'd have to be shown to be unfit.

Well, it's a complicated area. Giving biological fathers too much rights to their children could put them in a position to keep adoptions in limbo for a long time, which would be harmful to the child, especially if the father had no real interest in the child and was just acting out of spite or some other improper motive. And it would be too much to require the father's consent in a case in which the father has disappeared or is otherwise unreachable. But there is some tension between the societal desire to encourage fathers to take a more active role in raising their children and telling unwed biological fathers that they may have no protected right to do so.