Oral defense

I have to prove I know all about the Dreyfus Affair, and that I can convey this in spoken French. This is set to happen next Thursday. Hot iron prongs may be involved. If there are posts from me between 3 and 3:30 PM, that's a bad sign.

In other news...the Westchester County District attorney, Jeanine F. Pirro, was quoted in an NYT article about suburban teens' partying habits as saying, "Teenage drinking is an epidemic," and, "If people think kids are drinking a beer or a glass of wine with a slice of pizza, they're wrong." Well, the problem is, it's illegal for teens (and a large number of 20-somethings) to have a glass of wine or a beer with dinner. I've been carded ordering a glass of wine with dinner in Chicago, not because I'm likely to drive drunk (I'm not likely to drive, period) but because that's the law. What I'm getting at is, it doesn't so much matter whether the kids in the suburbs are fools or budding oenophiles, they're still breaking the law, and if the cops knew about a super-sophisticated underage wine tasting, they'd be obligated to break it up. So it's sort of pointless to discuss whether or not the Westchester kids are reasonable drinkers, when the law permits plenty of idiotic drinking from the of-age and no drinking whatsoever from the underage.

In other other news...Sorry, but no beards. I don't care what the Thursday Stylists say, clean-shaven's the way to go. But to make one more point about male appearance before the BA-writing for the evening begins in earnest...men, even skinny men, do not look good in women's pants. I understand that there's this impulse--which I applaud--to abandon baggy pants in favor of something a bit more fitted. But pants made for women tend to make men look like women, and some of them guys I've seen in these pants seem not to be otherwise effeminate, do not appear to be the target audience of UChicago's infamous gender-neutral bathrooms, but seem more like confused hipsters. Let the confusion end and the narrow-cut men's pants begin.