This Should Be An Interesting 'Clarification'

Apparently an important component of today's gun control efforts is going to be getting doctors to quiz you about guns.

Doctors and other health care providers also need to be able to ask about firearms in their patients’ homes and safe storage of those firearms, especially if their patients show signs of certain mental illnesses or if they have a young child or mentally ill family member at home. Some have incorrectly claimed that language in the Affordable Care Act prohibits doctors from asking their patients about guns and gun safety. Medical groups also continue to fight against state laws attempting to ban doctors from asking these questions. The Administration will issue guidance clarifying that the Affordable Care Act does not prohibit or otherwise regulate communication between doctors and patients, including about firearms.

Funny thing about that 'clarification' -- it appears to mean denying that the law says what it very plainly says. Here's the text.

‘‘(c) PROTECTION OF SECOND AMENDMENT GUN RIGHTS.—
‘‘(1) WELLNESS AND PREVENTION PROGRAMS.—A wellness
and health promotion activity implemented under subsection
(a)(1)(D) may not require the disclosure or collection of any
information relating to—
‘‘(A) the presence or storage of a lawfully-possessed
firearm or ammunition in the residence or on the property
of an individual; or
‘‘(B) the lawful use, possession, or storage of a firearm
or ammunition by an individual.
‘‘(2) LIMITATION ON DATA COLLECTION.—None of the
authorities provided to the Secretary under the Patient Protection
and Affordable Care Act or an amendment made by that
Act shall be construed to authorize or may be used for the
collection of any information relating to—
‘‘(A) the lawful ownership or possession of a firearm
or ammunition;
‘‘(B) the lawful use of a firearm or ammunition; or
‘‘(C) the lawful storage of a firearm or ammunition.
‘‘(3) LIMITATION ON DATABASES OR DATA BANKS.—None of
the authorities provided to the Secretary under the Patient
Protection and Affordable Care Act or an amendment made
by that Act shall be construed to authorize or may be used
to maintain records of individual ownership or possession of
a firearm or ammunition.
‘‘(4) LIMITATION ON DETERMINATION OF PREMIUM RATES OR
ELIGIBILITY FOR HEALTH INSURANCE.—A premium rate may not
be increased, health insurance coverage may not be denied,
and a discount, rebate, or reward offered for participation in
a wellness program may not be reduced or withheld under
any health benefit plan issued pursuant to or in accordance
with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act or an
amendment made by that Act on the basis of, or on reliance
upon—
‘‘(A) the lawful ownership or possession of a firearm
or ammunition; or
‘‘(B) the lawful use or storage of a firearm or ammunition.
‘‘(5) LIMITATION ON DATA COLLECTION REQUIREMENTS FOR
INDIVIDUALS.—No individual shall be required to disclose any
information under any data collection activity authorized under
the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act or an amendment
made by that Act relating to—
‘‘(A) the lawful ownership or possession of a firearm
or ammunition; or
‘‘(B) the lawful use, possession, or storage of a firearm
or ammunition.’’.

I suppose that leaves some room to ask if you have unlawfully possessed guns, or stored them in an unlawful manner.

The mental health provisions are the ones that concern me, though. The fact is that there is no lab test for any mental illness -- you can't do a biopsy and prove that someone has a personality disorder the way you can prove they have cancer. By the same token, you can't prove that you don't have a mental disorder.

Subjecting any civil right to a limitation based on an untestable condition is a very dangerous idea. It's not for no reason that psychology was so often misused by Communist governments as a means of marginalizing (or imprisoning, or lobotomizing) regime opponents -- once you are painted as mentally ill, you can never prove your innocence.

Our normal standard is that you shouldn't have to prove your innocence, of course, but rather that the state should have to prove your guilt. Well, it cannot do that here. If restrictions are to be based on mental health, then, they must not depend on proof of guilt. They can only depend on allegations of guilt. Having to prove your innocence is too high a standard even in criminal matters, when it may sometimes be possible. It is far worse here, where such proof of innocence is actually impossible.

Speaking of the South & Politics...

...the Georgia General Assembly is back in session. This looks like an interesting term, because the legislature can only meet for forty days a year, but they may not know what they need to know about the Federal budget within those forty days. Thus, there's a chance they may take a recess of as much as three weeks while waiting on Congress to decide what it is going to do about Sequestration.

In the meanwhile, here's a brief on what the session is likely to include:

State Representative Ed Rynders (R-Albany) says some of the biggest issues that are up for discussion are ethics reform and a right to bear arms.

“I believe in a right to bear arms,” said Ed Rynders, State Representative.

Although gun control is expected to come up during the legislative session, Rynders says the biggest topic is the state's budget.

“Everyone here is committed to not raising the taxes, which of course means that we have to live within our means. The governor has asked for a three percent across the board cut in programs and departments everywhere except for education. Public education will not be cut,” said Ed Rynders.

That's the kind of prioritization that the Federal government is refusing to consider. You can keep taxes low and still have one priority that you won't cut, or a few priorities that get cut less. It is possible to do this through the democratic process. States do it, but then again, states can't print their own money. Maybe the most important priority for the Federal government is a balanced budget amendment, to keep them from doing what states aren't permitted to do.

The South in the Last Days of the Republic

There's been a lot of ink spilled just lately on the South in the Obama era. I'm disinclined to respond to it, mostly, because I think the frame is wrong.

For one thing it's wrongheaded to call the South "Neo-Confederate," and would be even if it were actually attempting secession over limited-governmenet principles. Nobody in the South intends to restore the Old Confederacy, especially on racial or slavery matters. The South retains most of its complaints as defiantly today as in 1875, but not those. On those points its heart has changed.

For another, conservatism has done very well at the state level -- and not just in the South. Conservatives are doing great things at the state level even in frozen Northern regions like Michigan and Wisconsin. It's only the Federal government that has turned solidly against conservatives, and really that makes a kind of sense. Conservatism is opposed to what the Federal government has come to represent: an ever-growing, all-encompassing force with the power to regulate all aspects of life via the state. Conservatives believe in institutions that shape and guide life, including the state but only in a limited form. A state that is too strong ends up interfering with other institutions that are at least as important: the family, the church, the bonds of individual friendship, and freely-chosen organizations such as professional organizations and private clubs.

The Federal game is still a game of patronage: elect me, and I'll vote to send power and wealth your way! Naturally conservatives are doing badly given that they want nothing to do with the game; naturally what remains of the allegedly-conservative party are trying to limit the influence of their actual voters. That's an old sport, and it's a blood sport, but the power and wealth are running out. When the Federal government falls, a fate rapidly being brought about by what have become its ordinary modes of operation, it will be conservative states that remain strong enough economically and politically to survive. Whatever the new order looks like, it will be built on that strength.

So I'm not inclined to respond to the frame. However, I did want to draw attention to two things from the debate that I particularly liked. The first is that the New Yorker piece did something I rarely see done: it took a moment to appreciate what benefits the nation has gotten out of having Southerners within it.

[T]he Southern way of life began to be embraced around the country until, in a sense, it came to stand for the “real America”: country music and Lynyrd Skynyrd, barbecue and nascar, political conservatism, God and guns, the code of masculinity, militarization, hostility to unions, and suspicion of government authority, especially in Washington, D.C. (despite its largesse). In 1978, the Dallas Cowboys laid claim to the title of “America’s team”—something the San Francisco 49ers never would have attempted.... That same year, the tax revolt began, in California....

At the end of “The Mind of the South,” Cash has this description of “the South at its best”: “proud, brave, honorable by its lights, courteous, personally generous, loyal.” These remain qualities that the rest of the country needs and often calls on.

One of the Southern voices cited by that piece responded to it, and that is the second piece I wanted to cite.

I encourage you to remember these words: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.”

With that in mind, I have reached out to Mr. Packer. Many of my friends hoped I would excoriate him – not only for his misrepresentation of my work, but also for the overall tone and content of his column. Others suggested that an insult from The New Yorker constitutes a compliment. And still others pointed out that any attention is good attention. (I’ve raised toddlers; I find it hard to agree with that one.)

Instead, I chose to apologize for any failings of my own that may have led him to his incorrect assumptions. I also offered to buy him some good ol’ fashioned Southern cuisine should he ever venture down this way. I sincerely hope he does.

In The Three Musketeers, Athos responds to a generous proposition by saying, "Thus spoke and acted the gallant knights of the time of Charlemagne, in whom every cavalier ought to seek his model." Likewise do I appreciate a noble and gentlemanly gesture, given that the author of the original piece made that rare effort to understand and not only to criticize.

Athos goes on to say, "Unfortunately, we do not live in the times of the great emperor, we live in the times of the cardinal." In a similar way we are unfortunate. Still it is good to hear noble words spoken, and to see a man carry himself like a gentleman.

No Government Believes in Democracy

An open letter from the UK protests the American invocation of how interested we think we are in having the UK remain in the EU. There's a tremendous irony in the United States lecturing the UK on the need to maintain a political union its people no longer find acceptable, of course, but the author lets that pass. He's after a more serious point about democracy:

The President of the United States is considered by many to be the leader of the free world, and the United States itself considered to be a beacon of democracy. So it is profoundly disappointing to see the United States administration endorsing and encouraging something that is fundamentally undemocratic. I would like to ask you the following questions.

* Would it be acceptable to you and your fellow United States citizens that over 70% of the laws and regulations they were forced to comply with across all 50 states were created by a supranational government comprising layers of complex political and judicial structures, mostly unelected and unaccountable, and made up of delegates from not only the US, but Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, El Salvador, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela and Peru?
* Would it be acceptable to you, your fellow United States citizens and members of the Senate and House of Representatives that they were routinely handed diktats from the various bodies that make up the supranational government and were bound by law to implement the directives or be fined or dragged into a supranational court operating an alien form of judicial code and process? Further, that Congress was denied the ability to draft, and the President sign into law, other legislation of national interest whenever the supranational decided it was not appropriate?
* Would it be acceptable to you, your fellow United States citizens and the Justices of the Supreme Court that decisions made by the bench, the highest court in your land, could be appealed to a supranational court overseas with the hearing presided over by foreign judges and if overruled the Supreme Court would have to accept that as a binding ruling?

If these scenarios do not sound very democratic or judicious to you and your fellow Americans it is because they are not.... No one who believes in democracy – people power – would endorse and encourage a continuation of this anti-democratic situation for the United Kingdom.

The problem is that the author has just made a criticism of the EU that is just as valid a critique against the UK itself, viewed from the perspective of Scotland's independence movement. Indeed, it is just as valid a critique against the United States government. There is simply no possibility that such a criticism, however valid, can be entertained by the political class of either nation.

The only difference between the EU and the US in the first point is the question of whether the super-sized government is 'alien' or not. Measured in the most obvious way for a democracy, that is by the values that the people hold dear and want to see protected and furthered, the complaint may be no better. Probably the people of Belize, a former British colony, have at least as many common values with the people of the UK than the people of Alabama do with the delegates from California (whose people include some conservatives, but whose government no longer does). The Federal government here also generates a massive percentage of regulation via bureaucracy rather than democratic processes. These bureaucracies are staffed by people never elected to make law, who lack any actual Constitutional authority to make law, and who are only in a small percentage of cases vetted by elected representatives.

The same is true for judicial fiat. Is it acceptable to have laws settled upon by the state legislature, approved by state courts, overturned by the Supreme Court in direct defiance of the ordinary values of the people? It has become usual. When the Supreme Court set aside the laws of thirteen states in Lawrence v. Texas, the Bush administration said that they considered the issue a state matter. Linda Greenhouse replied that the SCOTUS had said otherwise: what had been a state matter was now a matter of "binding national constitutional principle." Yet this was only the latest occasion when the SCOTUS had taken a matter where states had legislated according to the traditional morality of their people, and pronounced the issue was one on which the democratic process could not be trusted. It has likewise removed the power from Congress to legislate on issues very traditionally ordered by law, and is considering whether to do so again in the Defense of Marriage Act. We find that more and more issues are matters of "binding national constitutional principle" from which no dissent from democratic organs is tolerated.

This is not democracy. The invention of "binding constitutional principles" by the court is the repudiation of the method by which such principles were meant to arise: that is, following rather than preceding the development of constitutional consensus. A new Constitutional principle was supposed to follow the process described in Article V of the US Constitution, whereby a supermajority of support from the states would be required. That was the democratic ideal: that we would alter the fundamental bargain governing American life only when the vast majority of Americans agreed it was wise and proper. Instead the Federal government has learned to pretend that the bargain always was whatever it now wants the bargain to be. We are told that we simply misunderstood the bargain when we ratified it, and perhaps for two hundred years after.

There's nothing magical about a "national" as opposed to a "super-national" government that gives the national government a better claim to legitimacy. Legitimacy was supposed to arise from adherence to the Constitution, whose limits and forms were meant to ensure that the government remained within the bounds of the powers actually delegated to it. The EU and the US are no longer different forms of government at all. The citizen of the United Kingdom who works to move her nation out of the EU is acting wisely, and in the defense of what remains of her democracy. But she can expect no support from the 'leader of the free world.' Our political class has learned to hate the ideal she advocates.

Non-fiction

Some months ago I posted skeptically about the idea of requiring schoolkids to spend 50% of their time reading bureaucratic white papers of the "Chicken production and transportation issues in Willamette County" variety.  Maggie's Farm linked to an American Thinker article today that does the idea more justice.  Although I have real doubts how the program would be carried out in actual schools, the notion started by David Coleman is to introduce students to evidence-based argument using texts like de Toqueville's Democracy in America.  As he puts it:

It is rare in a working environment that someone says, "Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday, but before that I need a compelling account of your childhood."

Not that I'm crazy about the idea of all students aiming for jobs in which they have to churn out market analyses, but the same principle applies to a request for an analysis of any proposal or policy.  Why do you believe this is true?  And come up with something more powerful than the more-or-less grownup equivalent of "all the cool kids think it."  It's the rare corporation or government bureau -- or any other human endeavor -- that couldn't use more of that skill.

The author of the American Thinker article does have a funny approach to categorizing writing as fiction or non-fiction, though.  This is a list of what he describes as the proposed "fiction standards":

Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby; William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying; Thomas Paine's Common Sense; The Declaration of Independence; Frederick Douglass's "What to the Slave is the 4th of July?"; Allen Paulo's Innumeracy:  Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences; Mark Fischetti's Working Knowledge:  Electronic Stability Control; and George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language."

I'm listening to a series of lectures about Winston Churchill.  He was an indifferent student who hated Greek and classics.  In some dismay and contempt, his father sent him off to a kind of military or administrative professional school, where he was given practical works to study; he loved them and excelled.  Without being at all in the "special snowflake" school of thought, I do believe that the task of education is to develop the different strengths of different students.  Especially as they get older, students should be offered a wide variety of higher-level materials that will challenge whatever their talents happen to be.  There will be some who can be nourished by Working Knowledge:  Electronic Stability Control in a way they never could have been by War and Peace.

Heh:

President Barack Obama was “totally furious” he spent a week of his time posing for a trillion-dollar platinum coin that would never be minted, a White House source confirmed today....

Mr. Obama devoted much of last week to posing for the trillion-dollar coin on the assurances of outgoing Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who told Mr. Obama that the coin had “a way better than fifty percent chance” of being minted.

Based on Mr. Geithner’s advice, Mr. Obama carved hours out of his schedule to pose for the ill-fated coin, even cutting short meetings with world leaders such as Afghan President Hamid Karzai....

When Mr. Geithner delivered the news to the President that the coin idea had been scrapped, according to the source, “to say that things got ugly would be a massive understatement.”

That's one of the most perfect satires I've ever read.

Risk

From Maggie's Farm, a link to an interview with Fred deLuca, who started the first Subway sandwich shop in 1965 with a $1,000 loan from a college professor who was also a family friend.  Almost half a century later, they still share the profits 50/50 -- no quarrels, no lawsuits.

DeLuca says he was lucky when he started to be so young that he didn't really understand the danger of failure.  His first intended franchisee had a more typically grown-up attitude:

"When we first began franchising, I knew we needed a first franchisee, and the only person I could think of was [our good friend] Brian.  So I went to him and said, 'I’ve got this opportunity for you.'  He gave a practical response, which was, 'Even though I’m not crazy about [my job], I get paid every week.'  He didn’t feel comfortable taking the risk of quitting. 

"Then one day he showed up for work and his employer had gone bankrupt.  So he called me and said, 'Hey, is that offer still available?'  That’s how we got started.

Walk the Plank

Here's a theory about Republican re-orientation that sounds really exciting: Peggy Noonan says "It's pirate time."

Now is the time to fight and be fearless, to be surprising, to break out of lockstep, to be the one thing Republicans aren't supposed to be, and that is interesting. Now's the time to put a dagger 'tween their teeth, wave a sword, grab a rope and swing aboard the enemy's galleon.

That sounds great. Throw out the rules, grab a blade, and start swinging. And what does she go on to suggest that these wild swashbucklers do?

Endorse gun control, tax increases on the very rich, and "immigration reform."

Apparently when Republican Pirates yell "Surrender!" they are to precede the exclamation with "I."

Condolences to FPS Russia

Our condolences to FPS Russia on the apparent murder of their producer. I had not realized that they were close physical neighbors to the Hall, but they are apparently located quite close by (and not at all in Russia, as you might think).

Here is their top five list, in memory of the good work they have done.

Fluidity and locusts

Winston Churchill addressed the House of Commons in 1936.  He quoted the First Lord of the Admiralty, who was opposing direct efforts to prevent Germany's remilitarization:

"We are always reviewing the position."  Everything, he assured us, is entirely fluid.  I am sure that that is true.  Anyone can see what the position is.  The Government simply cannot make up their minds, or they cannot get the Prime Minister to make up his mind.  So they go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.  So we go on preparing more months and years -- precious, perhaps vital to the greatness of Britain -- for the locusts to eat.

Justified

Happiness, a new season. This is a good trailer:

Two on Tolkien

Richard Fernandez writes a review of the new Hobbit movie, which makes me think I might ought to go see it after all. I hated Jackson's treatment of LoTR very much -- well, the first movie, which I hated so badly I didn't see the others. The MTV swinging-cameras and technicality seemed to me to do violence to Tolkien's vision. I can't imagine he wouldn't have hated the movies at least as much as I do.

Still, Fernandez mentions a couple of Jackson's additions to the plot kindly. That's another thing of which I was suspicious. I can't imagine that Jackson's ideas about what the plot should contain are so superior to Tolkien's that the expansion is a great idea. Usually a novel benefits from cutting, not expanding, extra elements.

A man much more after my own heart, Lars Walker, writes the second piece for today on the subject. He looks back at older editions of LoTR that meant a great deal to him. Now this is the kind of thing that Tolkien would have understood!

Lucky Gunner on Brass v. Steel

For those of you interested in arms-related questions, the folks at Lucky Gunner email to draw your attention to their recent tests. They've passed tens of thousands of brass and steel cased ammunition through Bushmaster AR-15s, and have a report on the effects of each on weapon accuracy and reliability. Conditions were pretty rough at times, between rain and sandstorms in the Arizona desert.

Learn more at LuckyGunner.com

Of course, if any of you are inspired by this to go out and buy an AR-15... good luck! As D29 points out, there's little need for gun control on these weapons right now. You couldn't find one to buy if you wanted.

Comfort food

Over at Maggie's Farm, they're featuring a series of old favorites like chicken pot pie. Today's topic is chicken tetrazzini, which inspired me to write about the difference between the turkey tetrazzini I once whipped up using an undistinguished recipe off of the net, and the immensely superior one my husband made up shortly thereafter. It was like a demonstration from a cooking school: how a real cook makes even ordinary dishes something special. His didn't even take longer to make. It left mine in the dust.

This recipe is pretty close to what he did. It starts with a light roux, which is just flour stirred into butter in the saucepan until it thoroughly dissolves. You add equal parts cream, stock, and white wine and cook them down a bit. In the meantime, cook your noodles and hold them to one side. Also, start sauteeing the vegetables, whatever's handy, but a good mixture is celery, onions, carrots, garlic, and mushrooms. Add some salt and pepper as well as some herbs; he used thyme and sage. Grate up some parmesan and get your bread crumbs handy. Then all you have to do is mix up the diced turkey or chicken with the veggies, sauce, 1/3 of the bread crumbs and cheese, and the noodles. Pour the mixture into a casserole dish, then top it with the rest of the bread crumbs and cheese and bake it until golden brown and delicious.

This is a forgiving dish, but it will be better if only read food goes into it. That means actual butter, actual parmesan, stock you made yourself, crumbs made from actual bread, and dry wine you wouldn't object to drinking on its own. On the other hand, most of these ingredients are leftovers. We make stock whenever the pile of chicken carcasses and leftover chicken bones, innards, and necks gets too big in the freezer, and stock freezes just fine in conveniently-sized containers until you're ready to use it. While it takes several hours, it's not like you have to be doing anything to it while you wait. It would be a fine thing to leave bubbling away in a crockpot while you're away or busy. It's nice to add vegetables or herbs to the stock while it's cooking, but you'll get a fine stock even if you dump in nothing but the chicken parts. When the chicken is cooked to pieces, strain it and reserve the liquid. Our dogs love to eat the mush that I pull off the bones. With the chicken bits in the dogs and the stock in the freezer, all that's left of many chicken carcasses is a tiny pile of bones.

As for the wine, it's a great way to use up any wine that's sat out overnight; this year we used the tag-end of a bottle of Champagne that sat out in the back yard overnight after New Year's Eve losing its fizz. It goes without saying that the bits of fowl are leftovers, and the veggies can be anything you have handy: peas or whatever. For bread crumbs, we keep a bag of heels from loaves of bread in the freezer and periodically pulverize them.

When this "leftover" dish is finished, you'll wish you had more.

This Is What I Want To Do For Vacation:

About five minutes into this video and the wife veto'd the idea, but I think I can talk her into it.

Some of you may recognize the road.

The 15-Hour Workweek

An economist writing in Aeon has an article on the rise of a leisure-based society, long predicted by Keynes and others. He asks, "Are we ready for it?" It's kind of an interesting reading for a notion of where the Left thinks we are.

The social democratic welfare state, supported by Keynesian macroeconomic management, had already smoothed many of the sharp edges of economic life. The ever-present threat that we might be reduced to poverty by unemployment, illness or old age had disappeared from the lives of most people in developed countries. It wasn’t even a memory for the young....

[F]or the first time in history, our productive capacity is such that no one need be poor. In fact, more people are rich, by any reasonable historical standard, than are poor....

If work was distributed more equally, both between households and over time, we could all be better off. But it seems impossible to achieve this without a substantial reduction in the centrality of market work to the achievement of a good life, and without a substantial reduction in the total hours of work. The first step would be to go back to the social democratic agenda associated with postwar Keynesianism. Although that agenda has largely been on hold during the decades of market-liberal dominance, the key institutions of the welfare state have remained both popular and resilient, as shown by the wave of popular resistance to cuts imposed in the name of austerity....

In a post-scarcity society, everyone would be guaranteed an income that yielded a standard of living significantly better than poverty, and this guarantee would be unconditional.

What is most interesting to me about this is that it is unmoored from any discussion of means-to-ends. The assumption is that the means are already in place: the problem is that the market distributes those means to the wrong people. What looks to me like a "Kill the Golden Goose" issue looks to them like an opportunity for golden eggs for everyone, whether they work or not.

In any case, the 15-hour workweek seems to be on its way. Obamacare brutally punishes businesses that have more than 50 full-time workers, where "full-time" is defined as 30 hours a week or more. Whole industries are now pushing low-wage workers onto 15-29 hour schedules, which means that they will be going on food stamps (if they aren't there already). Many of these jobs are no longer paid minimum wage, using the 'seasonal' or 'temporary' loopholes.

You'll have lots of time, I guess, to sit around and worry about how poor you've become. But of course there's a solution for that: the new 'guaranteed income' will ensure that no one is poor. (How will we pay for that when we can't pay for Social Security or Medicare or Medicaid or already-promised pensions? And we, the richest nation on earth?).

That's the Spirit!

A review of Scottish fencing.

Re-think that bicycle

And maybe the modern trend toward excessive personal grooming is not such a hot idea either, not to mention zippers.

Avalanche

“If you swim out in the ocean, the ocean’s always alive,” Saugstad said. “You can feel it. But the mountains feel like they’re asleep.”

This New York Times article about an avalanche is a virtuoso piece of multimedia presentation, combining a riveting story with fantastic links and video.

We watched "The Pink Panther" the other night, which came out when I was eight years old.  I believe that was the last time I had seen it.  My husband objects to the gratuitous insertion of musical numbers into movies from this era, but the jazzy/samba lounge-singer scene in the ski lodge is the only bit I remembered from childhood, apart from the theme song and the tiny pink flaw in the great diamond.

The dancing looks like fun, even for poor hapless Peter Sellars, the comic cuckold.  The people in these conventional American thrillers and comedies from the early 60s were so sophisticated and at ease in their society.  There was nothing sullen or dreary about their rebellion.

The fellow presenting the movie remarked that David Niven expected his jewel-thief-Don-Juan character to become a successful franchise.  No one guessed that Inspector Clouseau would steal the show.