The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Need to post more

The all-time Daily Parker posting average has inched up from 1.24 to 1.34 over the past five years, due to a pretty consistent pattern since February 2011 of posting around 42 entries a month. But in 2015, for a variety of reasons (mostly because I've been pretty busy), I slacked off, such that last month the 12-month moving average came within 0.005 of the all-time average, and would have dipped below it for the first time since July 2011 had I not posted yesterday:

The blue line is average posts per day per month; red is the all-time average; and green is the past 12 months moving average.

There are a couple of blogging milestones coming up in the next few days, so more on this later.

Thinking of Orlando Gibbons

When I read this, I couldn't help thinking of this:

The silver Swan, who, living, had no Note,
When Death approached, unlocked her silent throat.
Leaning her breast upon the reedy shore,
Thus sang her first and last, and sang no more:
"Farewell, all joys! O Death, come close mine eyes! 
More Geese than Swans now live, more Fools than Wise."

In other burials of Caesar, former University of Chicago law students have had some unkind things to say about how Scalia treated minorities:

Ben Streeter, now an attorney with the Federal Election Commission and a former black student of Scalia’s, told Gawker that although he in fact passed Scalia’s course, he, too, noticed preferential treatment towards white students. Streeter said the final exam in one of Scalia’s classes included an unprecedented short-answer section, with answers that weren't covered in class. Streeter suspected Scalia had mentioned the material with students who came to visit him outside of class.

“In those days, the only students who came by to visit him were in the Federalist Society group,” Streeter told Gawker. “There was not a single black member of the Federalist Society in my three years at the University of Chicago.”

Phillip Hampton, the former president of the University of Chicago’s Black Student Law Association, told Gawker that he found it strange that “every black student’s lowest grade was in Scalia’s class.” He also remembered Scalia once saying that he could “usually tell papers that were written by African Americans,” even if they had no names on them.

Scalia at least remained perfectly consistent in these attitudes throughout his tenure in the Federal Courts. Remember last December, when he said black students should stay on the short bus?

The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones; so let it be with Tony. We'll be clawing back Scalia's revanchist, racist, repulsive judicial legacy for two generations—or if not, we'll be a country I don't want to live in.