NINOMANIA

 Subscribe in a reader

:: Thursday, January 28, 2010 ::

Credit where it's due: Linda Greenhouse nails Obama's con law misstatement in SOTU

:: David M. Wagner 3:37 PM [+] ::
...

:: Tuesday, January 26, 2010 ::

Why I haven't as yet enabled comments on this blog. H/t: Walter Olson.

:: David M. Wagner 9:57 PM [+] ::
...

Re "Justice Scalia's Musical Interlude"




Hey, that's Zerbinetta! If you read my other blog, you probably know all about her, but in case not, here's the brief.

In this appearance as an extra at the Washington National Opera, as once several years ago (with Ginsburg), Scalia was an extra is Richard Strauss’s ARIADNE AUF NAXOS. This is a strange opera in two parts. The second part is actually the opera, ARIADNE AUF NAXOS. The first part is about an opera troupe hired by a rich man (vaguely modeled on Moliere’s Monsieur Jourdain) to put on an opera called ARIADNE AUF NAXOS. The obstacle they face is that the rich patron wants the opera to be followed by a performance by a commedia dell’arte troupe, headed by a coquettish clownette called Zerbinetta. This outrages the youthful composer of ARIADNE.

Then the patron takes it to the next level: the opera and the comic entertainment are to be performed simultaneously. The Composer is about the walk out, but Zerbinetta talks him down. He’s very young and she’s very pretty, so things work out. Meanwhile the soprano who is due to sing Ariadne and the tenor who is due to sing Bacchus complain about their costumes.

In part two, the opera proper, the opera and comedy are integrated by the clowns trying to cheer up Ariadne, who has been abandoned by Theseus on the island of Naxos, and by Zerbinetta singing her an aria about how men are like that and you can’t really take them very seriously. Eventually Bacchus appears and woos Ariadne, and the opera ends happily.

The extras would be the guests and the rich man’s house in part one, and it would be just like Zerbinetta to sit in the lap of one of the men, especially a famous one. (And no, exactly as the Justice says, I don’t this meets the standard definition of a lap dance.)

:: David M. Wagner 5:07 PM [+] ::
...

:: Monday, January 11, 2010 ::

Prop. 8 trial: playing anti-Prop. 8 ads, asking plaintiffs how they made them feel. Relevance, acc. to Judge Walker: to "establish homophobia." What a thoughtcrime trial looks like.

:: David M. Wagner 4:56 PM [+] ::
...

Ted Olson at Prop. 8 trial: marriage is "highest expression of self." Pretty much the syllabus of the thing, no? Whether it's an expression of self (the "highest," no less), or a social institution that happens, incidentally, to "express selves" (assuming w/o deciding that that's even a meaningful phrase) when those "selves" align themselves with the goals (permanence, fidelity, rearing of the children of the union) that society seeks to promote.

:: David M. Wagner 4:40 PM [+] ::
...

The Ted Olsen-initiated Prop. 8 trial -- which, if successful up to the Supreme Court, would make same-sex marriage the "law of the land" by virtue of the 14th Am. Equal Protection Clause, overturning all state laws against it and the wave of recent state legislative votes rejecting it -- starts tomorrow, pending a possible Supreme Court ruling on (George H. W. Bush appointee) Judge Vaughan Walker's bizarre need to have the trial broadcast on YouTube.

NRO's Ed Whelan explains: Judge Walker’s “Immediate Need” for a YouTube Circus—Part 3

I am informed separately that one amicus supporting Prop. 8 has already pulled out due to threats to his family. As Whelan understates it: if there was ever a case in which the traditional American presumption against the broadcasting of trials, a presumption still officially favored by the U.S. Judicial Conference, ought to prevail, this is it.

:: David M. Wagner 1:27 AM [+] ::
...