The "therapy" of exposing yourself to what is said to be a temperature of 200+ degrees below zero.

Cryotherapy � supposedly a fad amongst celebrities.

Starting our Monday off right! A little #risenation and #cryotherapy with this gem, @chaseweideman.

A photo posted by Mandy Moore (@mandymooremm) on Apr 20, 2015 at 11:34am PDT

"You can look at these people and say, 'They are stupid'... I might say, 'That is their personality.'"

Said the psychologist quoted in a WaPo article titled "A 73-year-old base jumper died after intentionally setting his parachute ablaze. Why did he do it?"

Think about it: Maybe stupid is a personality type.

"She would have to be the stupidest murderer in the world unless she was forced, unless she was directed at gunpoint to do these seemingly stupid things."

Said the defense lawyer.

"It's a lot sillier than exercise today is."

"What? It's going too fast! I don't know what you're doing. Explain the move to me."

People of today try to follow 80s workout videos.

"Barbra Streisand/Bitch Attacks Flight Attendant."

You know, that's a funny headline at TMZ but...

Our sources tell us ... a female flight attendant [on some billionaire's private jet] noticed the dog [Barbra's 12-year-old Coton de Tulear ]and went over to pet her, but Sammie snapped, biting the woman's hand ... puncturing the skin and opening a wound that required stitches.

... don't just go over and pet somebody's dog.

(Virtually all the best-rated comments at TMZ make the same point: "Don't jst reach out and pet somebody dog," "You don't walk up to a dog that doesn't know you or that you are not familiar with and try to pet it," "You never pet a dog without the permission of the owner first," etc.)

"Nary a 'no' vote in Louisiana House on resolution urging Ginsburg, Kagan recusal in gay marriage case."

Reports The Times-Picayune.

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan "have each engaged in public conduct suggestive of bias," reads Louisiana House Concurrent Resolution 85, sponsored by state Rep. Valerie Hodges, R-Denham Springs. In engaging on the issue of same-sex marriage, the justices have "thus demonstrate(d) an inability to be objective," and should therefore withdraw from the Obergefell v. Hodges case, the resolution says.

Embarrassing. 

And why Ginsburg and Kagan in particular? What was the "public conduct suggestive of bias"? Just because you can predict in advance where their thinking on a legal issue will lead them doesn't mean they are any more biased and bereft of objectivity than anyone else on the Court. In fact, unpredictability is more suggestive of bias. Consistency in legal reasoning, case by case and in expressions about law, suggests that you are following the norms of constitutional interpretation.

ADDED: A commenter says that the "public conduct" is officiating at same-sex wedding ceremonies. I'm seeing this at The Hill:

�Justices Ginsburg and Kagan, knowing full well that unique legal issues regarding the definition of marriage would soon come before them, deliberately officiated at so-called homosexual wedding ceremonies creating not merely the appearance of bias, but an actual and blatant conflict of interest,� [said Scott Lively, president of Abiding Truth Ministries].

�In my personal view they have committed an unparalleled breach of judicial ethics by elevating the importance of their own favored political cause of gay rights above the integrity of the court and of our nation.�

I don't see how participating in a wedding ceremony is a statement that you think there is a constitutional requirement that states must recognize same-sex marriage. Presumably, same-sex marriage was either already recognized in the place where Ginsburg/Kagan was performing the ceremony or it was a ceremony that wasn't recognized as creating a legal marriage. That probably shows they approve of same-sex marriage, though what Ginsburg did was perform a wedding for a former law clerk. Maybe she just treats all her former law clerks the same.

Anyway, doing something doesn't mean you believe you have a right to do it, and it would be utterly unworkable to say judges who do something must recuse themselves in cases about whether there is a right to do something. Should a judge who's had an abortion have to recuse herself in abortion cases? Should a judge who has given a speech have to recuse himself in a free speech case?

ALSO: A separate question is: Let's assume that doing something does equal a statement that one has a right to do it. Is belief that a right exists bias? I can't see that. I think the argument is more that a decision about the law was arrived at too early. But that doesn't make sense. Judges are always thinking, writing, and speaking about the law, forming beliefs about the answers. There's nothing wrong with that. I know there's this idea that Supreme Court Justices shouldn't express their conclusions about cases that might later come before the Court. That's the stock answer to every other question at confirmation hearings, though the Senators doing the questioning don't seem to think there's anything wrong with repeatedly inviting nominees to tip their hand.

There was a famous instance of a recusal by a Justice who tipped his hand about a pending case. Back in '03, Justice Scalia dropped out of the case about whether "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance violated the Establishment Clause:

According to press accounts, in his talk to the Knights of Columbus, Justice Scalia adverted to the lower court rulings in the Newdow dispute twice -- both in his prepared remarks and in response to a protestor in the audience.

First, Scalia mentioned prior rulings by his own Court indicating that government could not favor any religious sect or religion over non-religion. He observed that such rulings were "contrary to our whole tradition, [and] to 'in God We Trust' on the coins," and said that these rulings had created inconsistencies that lent "some plausible support" to the lower court rulings in Newdow.

Second, when Scalia saw a protest sign in the crowd, he remarked: "The sign back there which says, 'Get religion out of government,' can be imposed on the whole country. . . . I have no problem with that philosophy being adopted democratically. If the gentleman holding the sign would persuade all of you of that, then we could eliminate 'under God' from the Pledge of Allegiance. That could be democratically done." Scalia thus arguably implied that the elimination of the "under God" phrase could not be accomplished by any Court -- even his own.

Was that recusal required or even advisable? I don't think so. And I'm suspicious. I think the recusal served the interests of conservatives. As it happened, the Supreme Court weaseled out, but if the Court's liberals had not figured out a way to avoid the merits � they used standing doctrine � they might have had to say that "under God" violated the Establishment Clause, and that would have been very useful to conservatives in the 2004 presidential election. It was well-remembered that in the 1988 election, George H.W. Bush had battered Michael Dukakis over the Pledge of Allegiance:

With President Reagan at his side in a raucous campaign rally here, Vice President Bush intensified his argument with Michael S. Dukakis today over the Pledge of Allegiance. He said he would have signed a bill that Mr. Dukakis vetoed in 1977 requiring teachers to lead their classes in the pledge.

'What is it about the Pledge of Allegiance that upsets him so much?'' Mr. Bush said of Mr. Dukakis, as an enthusiastic crowd roared its agreement. ''It is very hard for me to imagine that the Founding Fathers - Samuel Adams and John Hancock and John Adams -would have objected to teachers leading students in the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States.''

Newdow was a rich political opportunity, and I'm sure Scalia knew that. So one could say that his recusal was biased, since he would have voted on the side that would not have leveraged the conservative presidential candidate.

"They weren�t thinking about me, just about my mother. They just ripped me out and tossed me aside," said Frank Sinatra.

Sinatra was a gigantic baby, the year was 1915, the setting was the family's kitchen, and the midwife had to call for the doctor, who arrived, with forceps, to save the mother. 

The doctor cut the cord and laid the boy - huge and blue, bleeding from his wounds, and apparently dead - by the kitchen sink, then quickly shifted his efforts to �saving the nearly unconscious mother�s life.

The women all leant in, shouting advice in �Italian. At the back of the scrum, one of them looked at the seemingly lifeless baby, picked up it up and, just in case, ran ice cold water from the sink over it and slapped its back. It snuffled and began to howl....

In a nightclub with a lover named Peggy Connelly, he flinched when, in the dark, she caressed his left cheek and her fingertips touched his ear. Though she had barely noticed the deformity, he told her how sensitive he was about it....

Connelly recalled: �There was no �outburst of emotion, just a �lingering bitterness about what he felt had been a stupid neglect of his infant self to concentrate on his mother, otherwise his torn ear might have been tended to in time.�

As for the mother, Dolly Sinatra:

After Frank was born, there were no more babies, possibly because the birth rendered Dolly unable to have any, but more likely because she �simply decided � and she was one of life�s deciders � she didn�t want to go through that again.

But she compensated for her trauma in the strangest of ways. She chose to become a midwife and an abortionist, for which �illegal activity she got the �nickname �Hatpin Dolly and a �criminal record.

The link goes to an excerpt from the book "Frank: The Making Of A Legend" by James Kaplan. I ran across that this morning because last night we were watching the new HBO documentary "Sinatra: All or Nothing at All," which isn't based on Kaplan's book, but goes through the same story of the birth and contains that brief, startling fact: Sinatra's mother was an abortionist.

We were watching the Sinatra documentary because we'd gotten tired of that other, much more noticed HBO documentary "Going Clear," which is based on the Lawrence Wright book "Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief." I'm sure the book is much more worth your time. The movie is just too dumb for my taste. In the part I put up with, there were too many boring people on camera stating that they were indeed taken in. But why? Some of the clips of L. Ron Hubbard were interesting. He was brilliant/crazy/devious. He's a good character. The rest of the cast... well, one wonders what they would have done with their lives if they hadn't entered the "prison of belief" in Scientology.

I was surprised to see that both documentaries were made by the same guy, Alex Gibney. If he could have been allowed to stay with the interesting character in "Going Clear," I might have liked it as much as "Sinatra: All or Nothing at All." But left to delve into the mystery of ordinary people getting and staying inside of religious belief, he had little insight. At least not in the part I put up with.

Maybe I'll finish it at some point... or, more likely, switch to Wright's book or just Wright's New Yorker article, "The Apostate, Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology." I could get interested in Scientology's complicated legal problems, but I don't want to hear long accounts of dumb people getting trapped in "the Prison of Belief." Why are other people's beliefs a "prison"? If some beliefs are prisons, what beliefs are not prisons? Now, if the point is, the organization threatens and bullies anyone who tries to leave, then it's not belief that is the prison.

ADDED: Lawrence Wright goes on the podcast "Here's the Thing with Alec Baldwin" which I was in the middle of listening to when I tried to watch HBO's "Going Clear." This morning, having given up on "Going Clear," I went back to the podcast and was surprised to get to hear Alec Baldwin complain that what the movie was missing was just about exactly what I'd thought. Go to 23:32. Baldwin had seen the movie, and he said: "There wasn't any sense, to me, of: What are the people who are in Scientology, who remain in Scientology, who are dedicated to this, what do they perceive they're getting out of it?... What does it do for them? Why are they there?" Baldwin suggests "maybe it's in the book," and Wright is able to give some answers � but these are answers that make me want to ask whether the motivations are different from what brings people into other religions.

By the way, at the "Here's the Thing" site, the title of Wright's book is misstated as "Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Unbelief." That's a good (if unwitting) response to my statement (above) it's not belief that is the prison.

"He's not a suicide bomber, he's a patriot."

"I didn't want to get all of D.C. in an uproar and it turn out he was just practicing or something or he was just pulling my leg."

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigates a blogger who quotes a lyric from the Beatles' "Magical Mystery Tour."

The blogger � a Democratic activist named Daniel Tilson � made fun of an on-line "tax cut calculator" as "Gov. Scott�s Magical Mystery Tax Cut Calculator" and used the line from the song "Coming to take you away, take you away..."

Some person at FDLE (an �analyst,� the agency said) eyeballed those words on Tilson�s blog and perceived a potential threat to the governor. Could somebody be plotting to take him away, take him away...?

Not since Charlie Manson got mesmerized by �Helter Skelter� has anyone twisted the words of a Beatles song so ludicrously � and Manson, let�s remember, is crazier than an outhouse rat.

Yet the FDLE, the top crime-busting force in Florida, detected possible ominous undertones in the lyrics of �Magical Mystery Tour.� An agent was promptly sent to interview Tilson....

I thought no one took song lyrics seriously anymore. Anyway, "coming to take you away" meant that whatever it is that is coming � the mystery tour or the tax cut calculator � is going to transport you on a journey into ecstasy or madness. The song "Magical Mystery Tour" is quite obviously about going on a psychedelic drug trip. It's hard even to try to project a threat of violence into "coming to take you away" in that very 1960s songs. Other coming to take you away material from those simpler times:

1. "They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!," the 1966 novelty single by Napoleon XIV. The "they" who were coming were the "men in white coats" � which is an expression you don't hear anymore � who would take him to "the funny farm" � you don't hear that either.

2. Calgon "Take me away" advertising. For some, it took drugs. For others, a simple bath:

The Post Office screws up its effort to honor Maya Angelou with a stamp.

They've put her smiling face next to a quote � "A bird doesn�t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song" � that she didn't write.



As WaPo reports, the quote appeared in a 1967 children's book by Joan Walsh Anglund called "A Cup of Sun." Anglund � who is 89 � says it's her original quote (except that her "he" has been changed to "it").

A Postal Service spokesman, Mark Saunders, initially said he had never heard of the Anglund quote until The Washington Post informed him of it. In response, he sent a link to a 2013 blog post interview that quoted Angelou saying the phrase. In a later statement, he also said �numerous references� attributed the the quote to her as well.

�The Postal Service used her widely recognized quote to help build an immediate connection between her image and her 1969 nationally recognized autobiography, �I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,�?� the statement said.

So, the Postal Service's answer is don't blame us, blame Angelou, who is not alive to say she never said she wasn't quoting somebody else.

Anglund is handling the spotlight well:

"It�s an interesting connection, and interesting it would happen and already be printed and on her stamp,� Anglund said. �I love her and all she�s done, and I also love my own private thinking that also comes to the public because it comes from what I�ve been thinking and how I�ve been feeling."

Bash the Post Office, say what you will about Angelou, but consider rewarding Anglund by buying her little book, "A Cup of Sun."

"The hated Blue Devils win a national championship, and literally the only thing written by Slate is how this teenager looks like Ted Cruz?"

"Wow. Maybe time to find a new sportswriter who is not so propelled by this irrational hatred of a successful team (with the highest graduation rate of any other team in the Final Four), coached by the most successful individual of all time, from a university that does great things for the community where it is situated. And has he not watched any other basketball game to see nearly every player who ever dunks a basketball celebrate? Time to move on. Hate to break it to you, but Duke is NOT the hated program it was a decade ago. I know people who have stopped reading Slate because of the negativity. Tempting..."

Comment at an incredibly stupid Slate article titled "Duke Wins NCAA Championship Thanks to Heroics of Ted Cruz Look-Alike."

"The Problem Isn�t That Trevor Noah Is Offensive. The Problem Is That He�s a Giant Dope."

Headline at Slate.

The problem is not that Trevor Noah tells offensive jokes. It�s not even that he routinely breaks The Daily Show's covenant of speaking truth to power in favor of speaking truth to fat chicks or Thai hookers or, as the Washington Post�s Wendy Todd points out, black Americans who give their kids names that Noah disapproves of. The problem is that Noah�s jokes are so annihilatingly stupid.

Jeez, they're swarming this poor man. A giant dope? Isn't that insult dopey? I read the article, and it seems that Noah's problem is he needs better joke-writers. I'd say: He's getting "The Daily Show"'s joke-writers, so the question is only how he looks, how he delivers the jokes, and how he manages the interviews. If you're not going to rest on the ground that his old jokes were so offensive that he can't be the face of the brand, what's the problem? He's a giant dope? That makes zero sense. It's as if the writer � Jessica Winter � doesn't know that there are writers. That's annihilatingly stupid.

Now, the Wendy Todd article (linked above) makes a much stronger point: It seems that "The Daily Show" may be installing Noah because he's been getting away with mocking black people. Todd, who is black, says:

[On "The Tonight Show"] Noah joked that black people are misidentified as African Americans. �They�re not African, but we�ll play along,� he said, adding, �Many of them really try to connect with Africa, you know? Some of them have these African names. They�ll be like, �Yeah, yeah, that�s my girl Wanda, yeah, yeah. Yeah that�s right, that�s Dashiqua, or dat�s Taniqua.� Noah emphasized all this �hilarity� by using stereotypical B-Boy hand gestures to drive it home � because this is how all black people communicate, obviously. Leno�s predominantly white audience ate it up....

Not only did Noah get away with these routines, now he�s being rewarded for them. And the sadder thing is that the next time we have this �there aren�t enough people of color in the late night arena� conversation, people will point to Noah and say, �See, we gave you another one.�

"I grew up listening to classic rock, and I'll tell you sort of an odd story: My music taste changed on 9/11."

"And it's very strange. I actually intellectually find this very curious. But on 9/11, I didn't like how rock music responded. And country music collectively, the way they responded, it resonated with me. And I have to say, it just is a gut-level. I had an emotional reaction that says, these are my people... So ever since 2001, I listen to country music. But I'm an odd country music fan, because I didn't listen to it prior to 2001."

Said Ted Cruz, quoted in Rolling Stone (where I got via Jaltcoh, who said "On 21st-century rock music, I don't like how Ted Cruz responded").

I can understand feeling so different because of 9/11 that your preference for music would changed. You might resist loud, harsh guitars and self-involved, cynical words. You might find succor in mellower instrumentation and sincere-sounding lyrics. But Cruz's isn't only talking about how he felt, subjectively. He does speak of what "resonated with" him, on a "gut-level." But he's also passing judgment on musicians, how they responded.
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