"There's so little honesty in law and politics. I sometimes feel like retreating from all of it and..."

"... reading poetry, listening to music, and painting flowers. But something holds me into this strange practice of observing and talking about it. If I'm just an observer and a writer, why don't I go find something beautiful to observe and write about?"

I wrote in the comments to "The intemperance of the law professors' 'judicial temperament' letter."

David Begley answered my question: "Go watch the Badgers destroy the Cornhuskers on Saturday. A beautiful WI win. I’m serious."

I answered: "I plan to watch the Brewers dissolve the Rockies tonight. Plus, I am eating grits this morning."



There's been much talk of beer this past week. It's easy to redirect the beer stream to baseball and the team with the beer-based name: The Brewers. In the rock-paper-scissors visualization, beer pours over rock. Beer wins! Brewers and grits. That's something beautiful in this lying, cheating world.

And by "rock," I don't mean ice. Don't put ice in your beer, and don't throw ice at anybody, unless you've got the right fun-loving, ice-throwing relationship with them.

UPDATE: The Brewers won in the bottom of the 10th inning, which is all we saw on TV. The rest of the game we heard on the car radio, as we drove home from Indianapolis, which is where I ate those grits, at a restaurant I recommend, Milktooth.

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TIME stumbles onto the wrong side of the political current.

On the newsstand right now (as photographed by Meade in a drugstore today):

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"Saturday Night Live" does a fantastic cold open with Matt Damon as Brett Kavanaugh.

I've watched this and I still have not read what anyone is saying about it, so let me sketch out a few thoughts before I read what people are saying.

1. Matt Damon was great. For a moment there, I thought he was channeling Chris Farley, with the idea of raging and amping up the rage, but that association left my mind as Damon continued and used a lot of the details observed in the hearing: turning the pages angrily, drinking water, sniffling.

2. Yesterday, I was predicting that "SNL" would do a Kavanaugh cold open, and I pictured lines like "I like beer, do you like beer," and I got them.

3. The character of the prosecutor Rachel Mitchell was very well observed, conveying apt criticisms that I myself have about how she was used. The SNL castmember, Aidy Bryant, did a nice job of playing the bland professional who found herself in a place where she didn't belong, asked to do something she wouldn't be permitted even to begin to do.

4. The Lindsey Graham part was a complete disaster. Kate McKinnon will get credit for suppressing any vanity and dressing as a man, but there were 2 things wrong. First, Graham was the loudest, angriest person in the room last Thursday, so McKinnon needed to top Matt Damon, and Damon set a high baseline. McKinnon has a less powerful voice than Damon, unsurprisingly, so the loudness may have been physically impossible, but she also couldn't begin to match him in conveying intense anger. Second, the writers gave her a script premised on the idea that Graham is a gay man. Some of the lines were like lines in a dating ad, saying he's 5'11" and "uncut," and the part ended with "This right now, this is my audition for Mr. Trump's cabinet and also for a regional production of 'The Crucible,' and let me tell you, queen, I was good." Queen???!!! Did I mishear that? I replayed it 10 times, and we turned on the closed captioning, which simply omitted the word (after pausing, so apparently the closed captioner didn't know what to do).

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"I reported the Bloomberg article to Facebook as 'False News.'"

Writes John at Facebook, linking to a Bloomberg article with the headline, "Kavanaugh Wrongly Claims He Could Legally Drink in Maryland."

From the hearing transcript:

My friends and I sometimes got together and had parties on weekends. The drinking age was 18 in Maryland for most of my time in high school, and was 18 in D.C. for all of my time in high school. I drank beer with my friends. Almost everyone did. Sometimes I had too many beers. Sometimes others did. I liked beer. I still like beer..

That does suggest he drank beer when he was underage, but I don't see him claiming that it was legal.

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