WEARY GAY RIGHTS ACTIVISTS, as seen by U.S. News:

“[N]obody’s swept up anymore,” says [Seattle gay-rights advocate Lisa] Stone….

A group of nearly 250 gay-rights supporters recently urged less focus on marriage, saying it “has left us isolated and vulnerable to a virulent backlash.” Legislative victories could avoid that backlash. “The politics is driven by the lawsuits,” says Matt Daniels of Alliance for Marriage, which opposes gay marriage. “No more lawsuits, no more state amendments.” Matt Foreman of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force acknowledges, “Our legal strategies got ahead of our political strategies.”

IF, LIKE ME, YOU LOVE “PROJECT RUNWAY,” I’m pretty sure you’re going to love Project Rungay.

“A PATHETIC STICK-IN-THE-MUD WHO WOULD FALL ILL BEFORE BATTLE.” That would be Osama Bin Laden, as described by Dexter Filkins, based on his reading of Lawrence Wright’s new book “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11,” which receives a rave review. There is a lot of surprising detail about Bin Laden in the book. (He’s only 6 feet tall, and he was a permissive father.) Filkins highlights some sharp material about Sayyid Qutb:

[L]ike so many others who followed him, Qutb seemed simultaneously drawn to and repelled by American women, so free and unselfconscious in their sexuality. The result is a kind of delirium:

“A girl looks at you, appearing as if she were an enchanting nymph or an escaped mermaid,” Qutb wrote, “but as she approaches, you sense only the screaming instinct inside her, and you can smell her burning body, not the scent of perfume, but flesh, only flesh. Tasty flesh, truly, but flesh nonetheless.”

It wasn’t much later that Qutb began writing elaborate rationalizations for killing non-Muslims and waging war against the West. Years later, Atta expressed a similar mix of obsession and disgust for women. Indeed, anyone who has spent time in the Middle East will recognize such tortured emotions.

ENGLISH IS FLOWING EVERYWHERE. It’s unstoppable, though some countries try to ban it. (Iran just outlawed “helicopter” — the word.) But with maybe a billion people speaking it now, English is the future.

But the danger is that proper English will be overwhelmed by the English of nonnative speakers, he acknowledged. “This is not English as we have known it, and have taught it in the past as a foreign language,” he wrote. “It is a new phenomenon, and if it represents any kind of triumph it is probably not a cause of celebration by native speakers.”

Leave it to a native of France — a country that itself in the 1990’s briefly required that 3,000 English words be replaced by French ones — to suggest that this simpler English be codified.

Jean-Paul Nerrière, a retired vice president of I.B.M., calls his proposal Globish. It uses a limited vocabulary of 1,500 words, taken from the Voice of America, among other sources, which can be put together clumsily to express more complicated thoughts. Little concern is given to the complexities of grammar, and he proposes that speakers of Globish say the same thing in different ways to make up for difficulties in pronunciation…

“Globish is not a language, it will never have a literature, it does not aim at conveying a culture, values,” Mr. Nerrière wrote in an e-mail message. “Globish is just a tool, practical, efficient, limited on purpose.”

The linked article says the native English speaker might be at a disadvantage, because you’d know so many words that aren’t on the limited list. But would English in the Globish form really take over and remain constrained?

The typical conversation in Globish could be grating to a native speaker, but get the job done between, say, a Kenyan and a Korean trying to navigate a business deal or asking for help at the airport check-in. For nephew, there is “son of my brother/sister”; kitchen is “room in which you cook your food”; chat is “speak casually to each other.”

Hmmm… well, I’m seeing in this article that “chat” is another one of the words that Iran saw the need to ban. I think the kind of crisp short words used in web-writing are going to spread and people won’t confine themselves to a tedious word list that requires them to construct clunky phrases containing boring filler like “in which.” There will be some sort of global English, but I think it’s likely to be, not Nerrière’s 1,500 building blocks, but the kind of clear, straightforward English that makes for good blog writing. And you can write real literature in this language. Man, Nerrière annoys me. His vision of the future is no fun at all. It’s infuriatingly desiccated! Or should I say it is so dry it makes me mad.

“SOME PEOPLE ARE REALLY ANGRY AT CONTEMPORARY ART,” Says Alison Stephen, a “gallery guide” at the Guggenheim Museum. What’s a gallery guide?

The job of the Guggenheim’s eight gallery guides is in some ways unique: although all of New York’s major museums have educational programs, only the Guggenheim hires people to mingle full time in the galleries, interacting with museum patrons in all their quirky diversity. And though she had been on the job only three weeks, Ms. Stephen had already noticed a recurring phenomenon. “Some people are really angry at contemporary art,” she said reflectively.

If the Guggenheim had simply needed better security, more guards could have been hired. The guides program exists because the public’s confusion about modern and contemporary art is alive and well, which is brought home to the guides every day.

“Modern art baffles,’ said Jim Fultz, the longest-serving guide, who was hired in 2004. “It alienates. It frustrates. But part of what we do is make them feel comfortable with it. A lot of people are afraid to ask questions. They don’t want to seem dumb about something they already feel is elitist.”

So the modern art keeps pissing people off, and they’ve hired people to pass as ordinary museum-goers and try to manage the mood. I’m slightly offended by this ruse, but also charmed that there is a job like this, which I think would be a really nice day job for a struggling artist or actor. I would have loved to do this when I was young and fancied myself an artist. I’d even like to do it now. I could see myself, retired from professorhood, roaming around the museum looking for the surly folk and saying something to guide them back onto the track of art-love. I’d be happy with a collection of jobs like this. I would, for a price, go sit in a movie theater crowd and cue the flow of laughter on the subtler jokes. I would, for a price, eat in a restaurant and make slightly audible favorable comments about the menu and, with a co-worker, contribute a pleasant sound of conversation and even make up gossip about fictional characters to give the other diners something to eavesdrop on. Or maybe I should just start a business, designing jobs like this and selling businesses on the notion that they need fake patrons to improve the attitude of the real patrons. And all you artists and actors in need of an amusing day job can come to me. I’ll just take 10%.

ADDED: I should say that — based on the photo accompanying the linked article — the Guggenheim guides are wearing tags, and are not as stealthy as the artists and actors in my job fantasy scenario.

“CONTROL YOUR INTEREST IN PUBLICITY FOR YOUR IDEAS,” UW-Madison Provost Patrick Farrell told Kevin Barrett, the part-time instructor who believes the U.S. government is behind the 9/11 attacks. Barrett is planning to teach students about the factual truth of this theory in a course called “Islam: Religion and Culture.” Citing our university’s tradition of academic freedom, Farrell rejected demands that Barrett be fired. But the political uproar has continued, and Barrett — unsurprisingly — has gotten numerous invitations to appear in the media. And now, we see that 10 days after Farrell made his decision to retain Barrett, he warned him about all that media activity:

“[I]f you continue to identify yourself with UW-Madison in your personal political messages or illustrate an inability to control your interest in publicity for your ideas, I would lose confidence … ,”…

Announcing his decision on July 10, Farrell declared, “We cannot allow political pressure from critics of unpopular ideas to inhibit the free exchange of ideas.”

Farrell said he wanted Barrett to know that he could reconsider his decision if he did not meet expectations. He said Barrett has “modestly made some efforts” to cut down on publicity.

“I was trying to be fairly careful to not inhibit his privilege of speaking freely,” he said. “My point was that he should be aware as he exercises those rights there may be a time when I have to rethink the assurances he has given me about his ability to separate his opinions from what happens in the classroom.”…

Farrell scolded Barrett for identifying himself as a UW-Madison instructor in e-mails in which he challenged others to debate his theories. The provost said the challenges suggest “that you speak for the university — precisely what I told you was inappropriate in that context.”

Barrett, for his part, says that he isn’t seeking this publicity. It’s seeking him. And what, exactly, is wrong with his speaking publicly? His reprehensible conspiracy theory is fine to inflict on students, but please stop showing your face to the general public because it’s making trouble for the university? That Barrett is teaching at the university is — unlike his crazy theory — a plain fact. It’s an embarrassing fact, and we can easily understand Farrell’s interest in suppressing it. But the public is entitled to know this fact and to react to it. This too is part of free speech. Why are we so keen on airing all sorts of ideas within the university but averse to letting the general public have access to those facts?

When I go on radio or TV, I am introduced as a professor at the University of Wisconsin, whether I’m talking about law or politics or culture or some other topic I presume to blab about. It’s never even occurred to me that stating this true fact — where I work — means that I “speak for the university” or that listeners might be confused into thinking that I do. You’d have to think ordinary people are idiots to believe that they think Kevin Barrett is speaking for the university when he spews his offensive theory. The problem is not confusion about whom he speaks for, but the embarrassment to the university that he thinks what he thinks and he teaches here. How can you justify suppressing this factual information of great public interest?

And why should Barrett have to refrain from publicizing his ideas in order to keep his job? It’s acceptable for him to teach here, but please, be very quiet about it? And this is held out as an attempt “to be fairly careful to not inhibit his privilege of speaking freely”? The letter makes a connection between speaking out publicly and being able to “separate his opinions from what happens in the classroom.” But what is that connection? And would we use that reasoning on other teachers? Promoting a strong political position in the public arena raises a suspicion that you can’t fairly present material in the classroom anymore? All politically active academics would feel threatened if we thought the university would apply that reasoning across the board. And if Farrell is not going to apply that reasoning across the board, why is he inflicting it on Barrett?

KOS COY? Why?

PEAK AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE. Readers of my blog know that two things I love are driving my car — an Audi TT Coupe — through a beautiful landscape and listening to my favorite radio show Theme Time Radio Hour with Bob Dylan. I just completed a drive from Madison, my home town, to San Jose and back, going out by a southern route that took me through Arches National Park…

… and returning by a northern route that included the Grand Tetons, Yellowstone, the Big Horn Scenic Byway, and — yesterday — the Badlands. The Thursday morning rebroadcast of this week’s radio show began as I was entering that spookily ravaged landscape. The theme was the devil, and I was steering my car through swooping curves past eerie rocks like this:

On the radio, it was Robert Johnson, singing Me and the Devil Blues:

It must-a be that old evil spirit
so deep down in the ground.

HIS FAVORITE COLOR IS GREEN! He keeps Hershey’s Kisses in the office! It’s a new book about Chief Justice John Roberts by Lisa Tucker McElroy, author of “Meet My Grandmother: She’s a Supreme Court Justice.”

Roberts still takes his kids to school or camp, and during the school year works with them on homework assignments — including a styrofoam model of the planet Neptune with Josie, and a paper Thanksgiving turkey in a pirate’s outfit with Jack, who is deeply into pirates these days. One priceless photo in the book, from last Halloween, has Josie adjusting Groucho glasses on the chief justice’s face.

Come on, you know you want this book! I’ve got McElroy’s book on Grandma O’Connor on a shelf in my office, and I’ve seen lawprofs get rather excited about it.

IT’S ALL ABOUT INTENSE MOTIVATION. Amba reads an article in Scientific American about what it takes to become an expert — in chess, in brain surgery, in hunting. She writes:

And motivation operates in a feedback loop: the pleasure of difficult success feeds the drive for more such challenges and rewards. It’s easy to see that the reinforcing rewards are both internal — the aesthetic rush of solving a problem — and external: praise, status, opportunity.

Ah, but how to get started on that loop? Our ancestors had the easy start-up motivation of hunger, but we — or our children — could wander aimlessly through life, never feeling the initial motivation. Perhaps nothing is more valuable and mysterious than becoming interested in something in the first place.

WHEN BLOGGERS CAUSE TROUBLE for the candidate they support. You know those bloggers, with their daring, feisty ways. Sometimes when they’re trying to help, they hand ammunition to the other side. (Better hire a blog wrangler.) Then there’s the secondary effect, where bloggers criticize the bloggers who are politically aligned with the offending blogger, for not speaking out: “I only see righties that posted criticism of this weird use of blackface.” Meanwhile, Jane Hamsher apologizes, and it’s that sorry if you were offended form of apology with the extra oomph of implying that a lot of the offense was bogus and an immediate descent into justification for giving offense. Ah, bloggers and politics! Who knows what these free-swinging characters will do next? Do you even want them on your side? Do you even know how to figure out if you do?

THE MARY MATALIN/JAMES CARVILLE REALITY SHOW. Would you want them in your high school? I think it sounds like a cool show, and I’d be tempted to say yes, but I think the proper answer for school authorities is no. If you know anything about reality show editing, you know it’s not fair to the real individuals who produce the footage and who often don’t understand how they are providing the material for their own humiliation. If you don’t know what I’m talking about — or if you just want to see the greatest TV comedy of all time — get the DVD of “The Comeback” and see what happens to our darling (fictional) character Valerie Cherish.

THE MAGNIFICENT BISON.

How did Althouse get that shot? Like many a candyass Yellowstone tourist, this way:

I put some thought into whether it’s okay to write “candyass” on Instapundit, but I was stumped for synonym. I don’t like “lame” in this context, because it makes me think of the disabled persons who might need to tour by car. So I tried a Bartleby search for “candyass” and got exactly one hit, and it’s not from the thesaurus. It’s a quote… from Nixon — “What does that candyass think I sent him over there for?” — miffed that the Secretary of the Treasury George P. Schultz wouldn’t authorize tax audits for his critics. Wow. That amuses/disturbs me so much I’m going to read it as authorization to write “candyass” on Instapundit. You know, that bison reminds me of Abraham Lincoln. Look at the profile. And doesn’t he seem rather depressed? He was trudging along the side of the road, as if he’d been given the job of making it really easy for the tourists to get a good look at a big animal and he’d been doing it for years and years.

ON BLOGGINGHEADS, Robert Wright explains why homosexuality is a purer expression of male sexuality: it’s not compromised by having to accommodate to women. “You’re dealing with somebody who agrees to your rules.” This is part of a discussion of whether it’s bigoted to say — as Ann Coulter did — that male homosexuals are more promiscuous than male heterosexuals. But go watch the whole thing. There’s a texture to the whole brilliant conversation that I’m not even going to try to reproduce here: Mickey Kaus wields an Ann Coulter doll on camera and has some juicy things to say about narcissism and “fruity” gestures, there’s plenty of analysis of Bill Clinton as a gay man, and much, much more. Meanwhile, over on Kausfiles there’s a supplemental transcript with Peter Beinart badgering Coulter about bigotry and Kaus’s opinion that Beinart “comes off as a posturing fool.” (To get in on a conversation about this, come over to my home blog, where we’ve got comments.)

“DON’T TOUCH IT.” Indeed. (Via Metafilter.)

THE NYT IS COVERING THE KEVIN BARRETT STORY that is dogging my university.

Mr. Barrett and Chancellor Wiley both said the controversy might actually be helping provide Mr. Barrett with a larger platform to voice his ideas.

Oh, really? Just maybe? If only everyone could have kept quiet and let him teach his course in peace. In fact, all of you people, look away, pay no attention to what goes on inside the university. If you see something you don’t like and criticize it, you’ll only be amplifying it. So, go, scrutinize something else. But please, send us your kids and your money.

HAVE A GREAT TRIP, GLENN. And thanks for inviting me back. Hi to Megan, Michael, and Brannon.

I’m in the process of returning from a trip myself. I was just in San Jose for the BlogHer conference. Did you know women bloggers have our own meetings? Do you think anyone complained about how male bloggers dominate and how they don’t link to women bloggers? It was nice to be on a panel in front of a large group when someone did, because it gave me a chance to say that hasn’t been my experience at all. Glenn’s name came up.

My panel was about political blogging, and my take on political blogging is that I’m surprised to find myself doing it at all, because I’d never seen myself as the political type, and I certainly don’t blog to push a political agenda. I blog to see what I think and for the sheer joy of self-expression. One of my co-panelists was Lindsay Beyerstein, who might think I’m just posing as the nonpolitical type. She says:

My only regret was that the discussion was more discursive than adversarial. I was hoping for a vigorous debate about the norms of citizen journalism, or the role of the netroots in ’06, or the latest controversies in the political blogosphere. Instead, we focused more on our personal approaches to blogging, our subject matter, and the balance between the personal and political facets of our writing

That amused me, because makes it sound as though we were in some stereotypical women’s mode, but in fact, I read it as a criticism of me. But it wasn’t just me. With our deft moderator Lisa Williams, we really were talking about how we feel about blogging. Maybe some of the conference-goers who opted for one of the other panels — on art and knitting and “transforming your life” and “staying naked” — would have liked our panel more than they thought. And maybe some of those who came to our panel were, like Lindsay, frustrated that we didn’t have more to say about netroots and campaigns.

One thing we did talk about was hyper-local blogging. There are some blogs that are completely focused on one place. Lisa’s blog is all about Watertown. One panelist, Courtney Hollands, writes only about Plymouth. Another, Jarah Euston writes only about Fresno. I’m impressed. I like to write about my city, Madison, Wisconsin, but only as one of many things. Kety Esquivel keeps her focus on a political-spiritual place — she’s progressive and Christian. It takes resolve to fix your perspective like that. It’s not the way I like to blog, but in blogging, there are many paths.

WELCOME BACK, GLENN. Thanks for giving us the run of the place. It’s time for me to slink off and watch “Six Feet Under.”

“ON AUGUST 14, 1980, LECH WALESA ILLEGALLY SCALED THE WALL” – 25 years ago.

THE ERROL MORRIS SERIES “FIRST PERSON” just came out on DVD, and I’ve been greatly enjoying watching one episode at a time. Each episode is an interview with one person, done with Morris’s brilliant Interrotron technique. Yesterday, I watched “The Killer Inside Me,” about a woman who was quite pleased about the fact that she’d had a sexual relationship with one serial killer and then sought out a second serial killer (in prison) and got him to fall in love with her. This is a fabulous DVD set, but I have one big complaint. Every time you start one of the discs, before you can get to the menu to select an episode, you have to watch a long, jarring message about how pirated DVDs are stealing. I bought my DVD set, so this message isn’t aimed at me, but I’m forced to listen to crude, pounding rock music and have shaky flashing images and the word “STEALING” strobing at me each time I want to watch one of the 17 episodes. It was bad enough to have to watch it once, but 17 times? That’s just crazy!

IF I LINK TO THE BRITBLOG ROUNDUP, I’m going to feel awfully guilty about all the “carnivals” we guestbloggers failed to link to this week. The consistent carnival-linking is one of the many admirable things Glenn does around here. Today’s our last day of guestblogging, and I have a feeling that leaving Instapundit without linking the carnivals is like borrowing the car and returning it with an empty tank! So, please, if you’re looking for more things to read, consider these. There’s Blog Mela, from India, and the New Jersey Carnival, from New Jersey. There’s Carnival of Cordite. There’s the Hillbilly Carnival, the Carnival of Comedy, the Carnival of the Capitalists, the Carnival of Liberty, the Carnival of the RINOS, and the Carnival of the Clueless. The Carnival of the Liberated brings you the best of the Iraqi and Afghani bloggers. If you want to listen and not read, there’s the Carnival of the Podcasts. Did you know there’s a Carnival of Personal Finance? Nothing puts me in a less “carnival” mood then the whole topic of personal finance, but the list of links over there looks reasonably fascinating, so try it out. Michael linked the Carnival of the Recipes already, so I think we’ve hit them all now. The Insta-tank is refilled!

UPDATE: The easiest way to keep up with all the carnivals is to go to this page of the always-informative Truth Laid Bear.

ANOTHER UPDATE: (From Glenn) Here’s the Carnival of the Vanities, too!

“WHO HAS BENEFITED MOST – AND LOST MOST?” Joe Gandelman asks as he analyzes the debate about the Iraq war as re-organized around Cindy Sheehan.

BEATING THE DEADLINE FOR THE IRAQI CONSTITUTION. President Talabani predicts they’ll be done Sunday, a day early: “We have reached agreements on many points but I am not authorized to announce them because we want to make the declaration all together.”

ON NOT LISTENING TO THE 9/11 RECORDINGS, from Ambivablog. A small excerpt:

“One reason I don’t want to listen is that I’m familiar with an all-too-vivid account of what it’s like to be buried alive: my husband’s. As an 18-year-old slave laborer in a Soviet coal mine, in his third winter, weakened by cold and hunger, he was caught in a mine cave-in.”

Read the whole thing.

THE WORLD MEMORY CHAMPIONSHIP COMPETITION is going on now at Oxford University. The current champion is Ben Pridmore, 28, who can memorize a pack of cards in 32.13 seconds. I wonder if the people who actually have the best memories use their super power to do things like memorizing packs of cards. Shouldn’t they want to fill their heads with things that will be beautiful or useful to think about – volumes of great literature or the complete tax code and regulations, perhaps? But no. Competition is intrinsically rewarding. My question is like asking the fastest runner why he competes in the Olympics instead of running around looking at the trees and flowers or traveling back and forth to work.