I don't understand

why men in robes and funny collars who get up in public and say such silly things as "I oppose birth control" get any more of a hearing than anyone else irrationally proclaiming that they don't want somebody else to do/have/say something that they are entirely free to do/have/say. I mean, I start to foam at the mouth when people talk loudly on the phone in public space. I don't think anybody should make more than 500K/year for anything, ever. I think that state universities should not pay for college sports. Why doesn't the newspaper put my objections on the front page? Why does some guy's opinion of what goes on in women's uteruses deserve column inches??? Seriously, can somebody explain?

where else?

*okay it just occurred to me why this deserves column inches: it is crazy and people need to know that this sort of insanity is happening so we can be prepared when they take away the pill. Uh, carry on.

Und Now, für a Little Comic Relief

Part of the deal when one communicates only with cats and doorpersons and does not check the weather regularly is that one finds oneself in unexpected situations, such as in a torrential rainstorm, or wearing woolen stockings when it is an unseasonable 65 degrees in November. I dropped by my apartment this morning to pick up mail and water plants and work a bit on organizing my bookshelves. Three hours and several shelves of LOC call numbers later, I looked up to realize that I had been severely, gloriously snowed in! The windows looked like huge lint traps from a load of your whitest whites, making the living room into the inside of a very large and cozy dryer.

So then I knew that fate had spoken and decided to continue with my organizational quest guiltlessly. Looking through all my books, I realized it would also be a good time to plan the course I'm going to teach later this spring, an introduction to art history for high school kids. The goal is to get kids who wouldn't necessarily be headed there interested and excited about college. I'm going to interpret that broadly as: "how awesome is art history?!" If you were lucky enough to have a high school teacher or college prof hit you over the head with how awesome something you'd never realized existed is, then you know what I'm talking about.

The rest of the evening was spent geeking out on the course, planning the raddest visual comparisons, group activities, drawing up lists of goals, thinking about all the different methods for talking about art that I'm going to introduce them to, looking up all my art history heroes on wikipedia, and getting sucked into reading Ernst Gombrich's children's history of the world, most of which is right there on google books.

But all of this is not what I came here to tell you. What I came to say, or rather, quote, is a cute anecdote told to wikipedia by Erwin Panofsky's particle physicist son, Wolfgang. It is this:

Panofsky was known to be friends with Wolfgang Pauli, one of the main contributors to quantum physics and atomic theory, as well as Albert Einstein. His son, Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky, became a renowned physicist who specialized in particle accelerators. His other son was a meteorologist. As Wolfgang Panofsky related, their father used to call his sons "meine beiden Klempner" (German: "my two plumbers"), which revealed the usual attitude of the German elite educated in the humanities, who looked down upon those trained in the sciences.

Unlike Gombrich, who wrote an entire history of the world for children, Panofsky seems to have had a little of the Sarcastic Patronizing Dad in him. For some reason - and probably because I never had to experience it myself - I find this very cute.

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