Apropos Amber's comment below, Miss Manners covers the same topic today.

Czeslaw Milosz is dead-- alas. Jacob Levy has thoughts.

More on one or both topics to follow later.

Perhaps the greatest gap in the education of young Americans is our lack of focus on foreign languages. Even if a certain number of years of such instruction is required at some level, one can graduate knowing little and forget what's known in an instant. If one stays in the USA, it's easy to cocoon in the English only world. Travel, though, and one is confronted with the limitations of such an upbringing. Frustration combined with desire produces a babble of languages that would put Eco's Salvatore to shame, with the brain grasping for a non-English word and finding one - if not in the language that's needed.

All this is just to say that I deeply regret my lack of foreign language skills, and not just because it means I can no longer read Russian poetry in the original.

In a long, interesting, post in which he mistakenly tries to liken depictions of sex to depictions of violence, Spencer writes:

I think Will & Professor Volokh might be a bit hasty in separating violent imagery from sexual prurience & offering it blanket protection under First Amendment law. Anyone?

The issue in this case is not violence as such, or directly; it is violent images; and here the symmetry with obscenity breaks down. Classic literature and art, and not merely today's popular culture, are saturated with graphic scenes of violence, whether narrated or pictorial. The notion of forbidding not violence itself, but pictures of violence, is a novelty, whereas concern with pictures of graphic sexual conduct is of the essence of the traditional concern with obscenity.

Should you-- perhaps following Todd Zywicki's advice-- make your way to the National Gallery of Art in the near future, an unfortunate surprise may await you. The gigantic Calder mobile in National Gallery East is undergoing refurbishment.

I found the mobile rather sad last summer, though, because it had to be tied down to the baclony to keep it from enduring further damage; my friend and I entertained various schemes to liberate the mobile, but all of them were rejected as felonious.

The press release linked above implies that the refurbished mobile will once again be allowed to float free. That would be worth the wait.

Time to report on the aforementioned Scrabble game-- 433 to 309, in the end. After Amy got up to an early 148-97 lead, EARRINgS* brought me into the lead for the first time. Her MeALIEST* (also making the delicious Mm) nearly tied things until my TARDYON* on a triple-word score for a neat 100 points.

Hurrah for physics class.