Is everything also its opposite?

I have been thinking about what happens to a task when it gets taken over by professionals. You might be able to tell that I read a lot. I read a lot of books, I read a lot of newspapers and I read a lot of blogs. To some extent I feel that I missed out on a lot in college because I didn't take any hard science and didn't take much in the way of classics and humanities. Not that there is anything wrong with social science, but it can't give you a rounded education or full view of the world or of human nature by itself. What can I say, I was young and foolish. I didn't discover the fine joys of intellectual calisthenics until law school. So I have been spending much of my adulthood trying to catch up.

I also spend a lot of time trying to keep up. There is a never-ending tsunami of information crashing in waves over my head every day, and there is no way I can possibly assimilate all of it. Part of the reason I feel so unable to keep up is that I simply don't trust any one source. If I want to know what is going on in the world I need to read at least three sources for any one story, because each one will tell the tale a bit differently, depending on what particular axe the author is grinding. Then I have to think about whether my own predispositions are coloring how I read the stories. Somewhere at the end of that process is something that I feel is close enough to truth that I feel comfortable saying I know that particular piece of information. It's a lot of work staying informed and trying to get an accurate picture of what is going on in the world.

Part of the reason it's so much work is that the news generally is reported by journalists. Journalists work in the milieu of the news business, which means that they pick up habits, conventions and modes of thought from others in the news business whom they work with. The newsrooms where they work are filled with other journalists. The editors they report to are journalists. The publishers of the newspapers and producers of the evening news shows are journalists. The concentration of journalists in the news business, and the idea of a journalism profession, means that the journalists acquire from their compatriots habits of mind and ways of thinking about events that make their way into what they report, what they think they should report, and how it should be reported. So what I end up reading in the newspapers is in many ways a homogenized product, sifted through a filter that makes all sorts of decisions about what is and is not worth putting in front of the public, and how to put in front of them what makes it through the filter.

I recognize the phenomenon because I'm in a profession, too. Lawyers get a bad rap for not being truthful. They get that rap because the concept of "truth" has been chopped, sliced and diced in litigation for so long that the idea of something being "true" has taken on a very specific meaning. Typically, when someone has a conversation and is asked a question, what s/he does is interpret the question to figure out what the questioner wants to know, and then provides the information. "Was there anyone in the room when you got there?" Answer: "Karen and Eugene were in the room."

But a lawyer will tell you that the correct answer to that question is "yes." If the questioner wants to know who else was there, the questioner should ask a followup question. The question didn't ask about Karen and Eugene, it just wanted to know if other people were in the room. So talking about Karen and Eugene is like answering "the violins are out of tune this evening." Legal truth is focussed, direct and very, very narrow. Questions that make assumptions will result in misleading answers that are not false. And so on.

I'm used to this somewhat odd notion of truth because I have been practicing law for over twenty years, and I move seamlessly between the real world, where people talk about Karen and Eugene, and the legal world, where Karen and Eugene become subjects of conversation only if someone asks about them.

But I still puzzle over the concept of "newsworthiness" as journalists understand it. There was a contretemps last year in the blogosphere about the US military's discovery of a torture manual and torture chambers used by al-Qaeda in Iraq. It was pretty gruesome stuff: gouging eyes, hacking limbs, burning flesh -- totally revolting, absolutely evil and graphically demonstrative of precisely what al-Qaeda is. Bloggers on the right complained that the media gave the matter very little coverage, in contrast to the nonstop coverage for weeks of the excesses at Abu-Ghraib (example here) ; many on the left explained the relative lack of emphasis by pointing out that, well, of course al-Qaeda tortures people -- they are a collection of terrorists and murderers, after all. Since when is it news that they torture people? For examplae, as Glenn Greenwald said last year:

The reason that it is news that the U.S. tortures, but not news that Al Qaeda does, is because Al Qaeda is a barbaric and savage terrorist group which operates with no limits, whereas the U.S. is supposed to be something different than that. Isn't it amazing that one even needs to point that out?

It's not my purpose here to debate what is or is not torture, whether Abu Ghraib involved torture, or whether torture is ever justified. Andrew Sullivan, Hugh Hewitt, Glenn Greenwald and heaven knows who else have turned this issue over and over, examining it minutely and remonstrating about it endlessly. That's a debate for people who spend more time with the news than I do and have familiarized themselves with the details in a way that I just haven't been able to.

No, what I'm interested in is what this illustrates about "newsworthiness." Presumably it's not newsworthy that the sun rose in the east this morning, nor is it newsworthy that on the average weekday about four million people enter Manhattan to work and leave it in the evening. Traffic on the Harbor Freeway in LA isn't news, and neither are the hundreds of flights that go in and out of O'Hare Airport every day. Why? Because these things are routine. It's what people expect to happen. Routine breeds complacency. Things people are complacent about aren't newsworthy.

What's usually viewed as newsworthy is the proverbial "man bites dog" story. Something unusual. So a subway train that makes twelve round trips a day from the Bronx, through Manhattan and into Brooklyn is not newsworthy. But if the train is derailed? Newsworthy. Millions of mothers feeding their children breakfast before putting them on the school bus in the morning is not newsworthy. But a mother who suffocates her baby then kills herself? Newsworthy.

Viewed this way, Greenwald has a point. Of course al-Qaeda tortures people. That's al-Qaeda for you. It's who they are, it's what they do. It's not unusual, it's to be expected. So of course, page 37 of the newspaper is where the torture chambers and torture manual belong, with the streaks of blood on the walls and the depictions of how precisely to aim the electric drill to cause the maximum pain when making holes in an enemy's head. On the other hand, if some American intelligence agents or soldiers mistreat some prisoners or use rough tactics (I'm choosing my words carefully here because I do'nt want to get into the whole business about how to define torture), then that certainly is newsworthy.

I understand the argument and it makes some sense if you don't think that torture by anyone is the sort of thing that should be newsworthy. That bad people do bad things isn't news, but that good people occasionally do bad things, is. But this whole imbroglio got me thinking about the nature of news and what sort of picture of the world it gives us.

If we form our mental view of the world based on what we see in the newspapers, television and radio, then we live in a truly frightening place: life is a succession of wars, murders, car accidents, floods, psychopaths, terrorists, disasters and criminals. How can we possibly live our lives if we are told by the news outlets, day in and day out, that the world' s events that they consider worth telling us -- what is "newsworthy" -- is death, doom, destruction, decay and dysfunction? How do we know it's ok to leave the house, cross the street or enter a store and not get swept away by a hurricane, gunned down by a thug or run over by a drunk driver? Obviously we factor into our daily lives the humdrum of the routine, otherwise we couldn't function -- but isn't there reason to think that most of the world - or the country, or the city, or the neighborhood -- is a horrible, dangerous place? And if that is the case, then aren't the people whose job it is to tell us what is going on in the world actually doing the opposite: telling us not what the world is really like, but instead focussing on the sores and scabs and diseased parts of it. The professionalization of news has brought us the opposite of news: not an accurate picture of life but its opposite.

It's almost like what I see going on in my professional life. In theory litigation is a search for truth. But, crushed under the pressure of inventive, intelligent and aggressive attorneys, the idea of truth has become so specialized, so sharpened into defined categories, so overanalyzed, that what comes out is something bearing perhaps a family resemblance to the facts as a normal person would see them, but that's about it. The professionalization of the legal process has brought us not truth, but a ritual that pretends it is truth.

I'm not suggesting there is anything to be done about this. Media need eyeballs, otherwise they can't survive, and eyeballs are drawn to the freak shows. Drivers rubberneck at accidents, not at other drivers motoring safely. If people need perspective -- and they do -- they have to supply it on their own, from their own common sense and everyday experience. It's just a shame that perspective sometimes seems to be in such short supply.

I'm back.

Hello again. It's been a while, hasn't it?

I make no excuses, other than to note that real life occasionally gets in the way. But I think my head is clear now, so I guess it's time to resume posting. Dare I inflict more of my thoughts on the world?

Sure, why not?

A post about sex.

When I turned fourteen I discovered that suddenly I wanted to have sex with almost every female I came across, or at least the ones within a few years of my age. This caused me some difficulty because I wasn't a jock and wasn't particularly charismatic. Brainy types with offbeat senses of humor don't gather much attention from the opposite sex in high school. So I wanted to have sex with them - any kind of sex, anything that resembled any kind of sexual activity - but most of them showed no sign of even being aware I was breathing the same air they were. That meant I spent an awful lot of time thinking about sex: on the way to school, during class, while eating meals, while reading books, while doing homework, in the gym and, inevitably, in synagogue, especially during the interminable stretches when the Torah was being read or the rabbi was speaking. Thinking, but only thinking. You can just imagine.

Constant thoughts of sex accompanied me through my teen years. My hormone-addled brain somehow managed to focus well enough on studying that I got good grades, but of course back then nerds weren't ever cool, so getting good grades never helped me. By the time I got out of high school my mindset was fixed: things having to do with sex occupied some mythical, mystical, magical land, distant and unattainable. It was the stuff of fantasies and dreams, not anything people like me actually ever did. And "girls" - well, they were creatures of great beauty and charm, but totally unreachable. A different species for all I knew.

Yes, there were girls in my day to day life, but they had nothing to do with sex. I was fifteen before it occurred to me that "hey, every single female on this planet has a vagina." Yup, my sister and mother, too. The fat lady across the street, the school secretary, the next door neighbor - yes, these women whom I knew well and paid no mind whatsoever, all of them had real live vaginas! What's more, every one of those females that had kids had actually, and beyond any doubt, used her vagina and done the old wicky-wacky. Just think of it: there were actual vaginas everywhere! Fifty percent of the population had them! And they were being used! What a revelation!

Of course that only made things worse. That meant I was conscious of being literally surrounded, every day, by the intensely sought-after but utterly unattainable. At that time I had never actually met a vagina face to face (so to speak), and the prospect of actually coming in contact with one filled my mind with a combination of intense longing, deep melancholy, despair, excitement and desire. It was everywhere, and I couldn't have any. It was pretty much all I thought about until I was well into my college years. Well, except for getting good grades.

In college things got better. Nerds weren't shunned anymore. Queens College is a commuter school, so there weren't any dorms, there weren't any fraternities, there was no varsity football team so far as I was aware - so the usual markings of the classic collegiate social pecking order just weren't there. And I discovered that girls would actually talk to me. Some even would go out with me. And though I'm not going to get into the sordid details of what passed for a sex life back then, what I will say is that by my senior year I was going out with a girl I have mentioned before (I'm referring to her here as Karine). All I'll say about her right now is that she was wonderful. Even all these years later, I still have a very fond spot for her. (And I wonder from time to time where she is and what she is doing.)

But having a girlfriend wasn't quite as life-altering as I might have expected it to be. The mental habit hadn't changed. Girls were still mysterious miraculous creatures to me -- I just happened to have lucked into a relationship with one, totally inexplicably. Sex was still something unattainable, ethereal and magical -- I just happen to have apparently fooled the universe's powers-that-be, and mysteriously found myself engaging in various sorts of sexual activity that, if it were ever discovered by whoever polices these things, would doubtless result in monstrous upheavals in the very fabric of nature. After all, nature must revert to equilibrium. E=mc2 was no less an immutable law of nature to me than "boldface gets no girls or sex." For some reason that wasn't then apparent to me, I had managed to do the equivalent of bending time and going faster than the speed of light. I was sure it couldn't last.

One late summer day I took Karine to the Bronx Zoo. I hadn't been there since I was a little kid. At that time, the Bronx Zoo still kept a lot of its animals in buildings, so the "Monkey House" really was where the monkeys were kept. (Nowadays they are mainly outdoors.) When i was a kid I always liked looking at monkeys, so the monkeys is where we went. Just inside the Monkey House, in the first cage, was a bunch of the little primates swinging and screaming and having what I'm sure monkeys consider a great time. There was a little narrow plank suspended from the ceiling, too, so that the monkeys would have a place to stand when the swinging became tiresome. One monkey was sitting there, mellowing out. And then, as I watched, another monkey came up behind and started thrusting his hips. The one in front - obviously the female - looked thoroughly bored, but didn't try to move away either. After a few minutes the one in back moved away and strutted off with a satisfied look, obviously very pleased with himself.

I watched the spectacle and started to laugh. I called Karine over to watch, and she joined the laughter too. Right there, in front of a steadily growing audience, these shameless monkeys were doing the nasty, seemingly oblivious to the assembled admiring spectators. And truth to tell, it was funny. Especially when you realize that what we were observing was, quite literally, "hot monkey sex."

But after the laughter died down and my brain went back to its thinking mode, I realized something. How special can sex be if even flippin' monkeys do it? It obviously takes no great talent or skill to copulate. There are no secret instructions or occult mysteries about it. In and of itself, it's just a bodily function -- a fun and fascinating one, to be sure, but just another bodily function.

So what makes sex so special? What on earth is so fascinating about it? Those monkeys made me understand that what makes it special is what makes us human: the mental interaction and the bond with the other person. Without that human element it's no different than monkeys copulating out there in public, a few thrusts and it's over. Monkeys don't think about it much, but humans have to use their minds. Understand, I'm not saying people should have sex only when they're in love. There are literally hundreds of reasons to have sex, and love is only related to a few of them. People in all kinds of relationships, casual and not, can have sex, and very good sex - but what makes it interesting, even the most casual fling, is that there is another person there, someone to think about and take into consideration. Otherwise it's just another bodily function, a couple of thrusts and good-bye, precisely like those monkeys.

So that was my epiphany about sex. Less mystery, less occult aura, more simple interpersonal exchange. And that's what makes it interesting in the first place. And that's the boldface theory of sex. It's about the other person, because if it was just about you, you'd be a monkey.

OK, enough of that heartwarming stuff. It's all true, but there is a punchline to this story. See, as I sit here all these years later, I realize that what I saw the monkeys doing might not even have been sex in the first place. Monkeys fornicate when the girl monkeys are in heat, I believe. I can't imagine the zookeepers just leave horny women monkeys in extreme estrus hanging around to display their behinds at the roving bands of man-monkeys in the same cage unless they are anticipating problems. But who knows? Maybe it was monkey sex, maybe not, but I sort of doubt it. So for all I know, my greatepiphany about sex might have been triggered by just some primate back-scratching.

I'm back.

Hi. Sorry I've been missing for a while. It's not that I never came here to try to put something together. I did. Several times. But what happened was that I was never happy with what I wrote. I have probably a dozen draft posts in various degrees of completion. Some are whimsical, some are serious, some are incoherent. But I was never happy enough with any of them to be willing to bite the bullet and press the "publish" button.

Just to give you an idea of what sorts of things I had started on:

> a post about sex. (but of course! and I bet you're wondering what I possibly could have written about sex and not been happy with. Sorry, but for now you'll just have to wait until I figure out how to write this with profundity and a lack of prurience.)

> modern artistic performances often dwarf the performers.

> does professionalizing an endeavor pervert it?

> is history just an ongoing struggle between the passive and the passionate?

> when is coercion a good thing? does it all depend on who is doing the coercing?

> do people walk differently in different places? is gait culturally determined?

> is religion a good thing or a bad thing? or is it religiosity, not religion, that's the problem?

> what are people doing when they camp out for a new iPod?

As I scan this list I see grist from some really good ruminations - some you might even be interested in reading (besides the one about sex, of course). But for now I'll just leave them to ferment a bit. My next post will be something completely different. Stay tuned!

Oh, and I do take requests.

How many holes?

It's much more pleasant to think about the Beatles than to think about almost anything else that is in the news nowadays. I was just about eleven years old in 1970 when the Beatles broke up, so most of what I know about their music I picked up in arrears, years after the music was first created and after it was already canonical. By the time I started high school in 1972 the Beatles were already classic. It's odd that things should have worked out that way because I vividly remember being four years old, almost five, when the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan show, and all my friends were admiring them and their absurd hairdos. We played fake guitar on yardsticks and shook our heads back and forth like Paul doing that hybrid sing/yell "Awwoooooo!" Some time after kindergarten I abandoned the Beatles and took up instead with the Mets. It wasn't until eighth grade that I started paying attention to music again. By then, even though the Beatles had already broken up, they were of course unavoidably everywhere.

What this means is that I came to Sergeant Pepper a few years after it was already established as an Important Statement and a Musical Masterpiece. Once a teenager is conditioned that he is supposed to like something, it's very hard for him to formulate a contrary opinion. I was a typical teenager, which means that the first few times I heard Sergeant Pepper my mind refused to consider it on any terms other than "this is great!" Which isn't to say that there is something wrong with liking Sergeant Pepper. Like most Beatles music it has a certain exuberance and basic happy subtext that sweeps out of the speakers and bobs along, splashing against the brain merrily so that you can't help but walk out humming. But is Sergeant Pepper really so much better than the Beatles' other stuff that it should be viewed as their magnum opus?

I know there is a substantial body of thought that considers the answer so obvious as to make the question seem stupid. "Of course Sergeant Pepper is their masterwork, you nitwit," goes this school of thought. "What else would their masterwork be? Hard Day's Night?" But I really think this view is influenced more by history than by music. Sergeant Pepper was the loudest part of the soundtrack for 1967, the most insistent background music for the legendary "Summer of Love." For someone like me who was way too young to have any idea what the Summer of Love was or meant, the historical aspect of Sergeant Pepper's significance fades. Whatever fondness I have for Sergeant Pepper has nothing to do with 1967 and all the baggage that the memory of 1967 carries with it for so many people. For me, the album has to be judged as a musical work.

On that basis I have to say it's a really good album. Not because the tunes are especially complex or that the words are so deep. The lyrics and melodies are, to be sure, of very good quality -- and the songs fit well together, sometimes complementing and sometimes contrasting. That's not the striking thing, though. What strikes me about Sergeant Pepper as I listen to it now is how much diverse musical history was packed into it and how much of what came later it foreshadowed. It refers to its immediate surroundings by picking up all of the bouncy saccharine of 1960s pop, but does it without having a cloying aftertaste. More interesting, though, it layers on top of the bouncy stuff some otherworldly noises and sounds, and mixes them up with lyrics that run the gamut from the banal to the obscure to the bizarre.

There's nothing I could say about "A Day in the Life," for instance, that someone else hasn't already said before. But because I'm writing about Sergeant Pepper now in 2007, with the benefit of forty additional years of musical history behind us, I can see how deeply it has embedded itself into our cultural soundtrack. The Beatles scavenged sounds from all over the musical universe, used the electronic equipment at Abbey Road studios to incorporate new sonic elements into the music and used even dissonance to make their music.

I'm a big Pink Floyd fan. I've been one since 1973. The best of Floyd's music has a certain majesty and intensity that is irresistible. But some of Floyd's best sounds like the Beatles. "A Day in the Life" could have been on the "Wish You Were Here" album. Floyd's "Free Four" (from the "Obscured by Clouds" album) echoes "With a Little Help From My Friends." And "Lovely Rita" has an air of otherworldliness, with the double tracking and that windy tinniness in the vocals, that would have been comfortable nestled on some of Floyd's spacier albums. Floyd, of course, recorded its greatest work at Abbey Road. It must have been in the air.

But just because Sergeant Pepper was really well done doesn't mean it has aged as well as one would hope, or that it has Beethoven-strength timelessness. Coming back to Sergeant Pepper now, it has a pop feel to it that seems almost incongruous. My daughter is something of a musician - she plays piano - and she grew up listening to the music her dad played in the car. That means a steady diet of Pink Floyd, as you might imagine. But recently I played Sergeant Pepper in the car. She was able to tell it was the Beatles, but didn't know which album it was. I told her, and she was flummoxed: "This is supposed to be the greatest album ever made?" I guess she'll need to listen to it all the way through to pick up the ingenuity of the work, and I don't know if she'll ever do it. But that underscores how Sergeant Pepper was far more influential and striking for the first few years after it came out than it likely will be going forward. Technology has made into pabulum much of what made Sergeant Pepper great. Anyone can do anything with the sounds on an album. It's similar to how Citizen Kane strikes one today as a good movie, but nothing earthshattering: its pioneering touches have now become standards.

That doesn't mean it sounds old, though. Good melodies and interesting lyrics always sound good. So here's to John, Paul, George and Ringo: congratulations on this milestone. Too bad John and George aren't around to celebrate.

Question of the day.

"How come you don't write about sex? When are you going to discuss sex?"

Soon, my friends. I promise.

Stuffed Rodent Heads.

No, that's not the latest underground delicacy or transgressive college food fad. Stuffed rodent heads is my personal shorthand reference to a little pub in the English countryside where I was fortunate enough to visit one summer between my second and third years of law school.

One of the nice things about doing well in law school and going to a high-ranked law school - I went to Columbia - is the almost amazing competition among law firms to get students to come work there. The result is that students at first-tier law schools get recruited very avidly, and the summer between the second and third years of law schools turns out to be a lovely boondoggle for law students. They are wined and dined, given (at times) interesting work, taken out for shows and parties and boat rides, and paid the same as a first-year associate, which back then, in the paleolithic year of 1983, wasn't as rich as it is now, but was still pretty good. In fact, my then-girlfriend and I had a fabulous, luxurious, fun-filled summer for almost no cost at all, which was lousy training for our eventual life together as husband and wife. But that's a tale for another day. The point here is that during the summer I made enough money to pay half my law school tuition for the following year (a student loan covered the other half) and still have some left over to cover a trip to England for ten days. It was a good trip.

I met my friend David at Gatwick Airport, and we spent a pretty hectic week and a half gamboling around Old Blighty. Being young and thus heedless, we rented a car and explored the countryside. (One day I'll write a post about the pleasures of driving on the left side of the street.) Our itinerary covered a bunch of scenic and historic towns far from London, stretching from Stratford-on-Avon to Bath to Stoke-on-Trent and on up to Chester, the Lake District and York, and then back down Cambridge, ending up back in London.

Our first night on the road was spent in Stratford-on-Avon. Being young and relatively penurious, we were willing to forego the pleasures of regular hotels to get cheap lodging. So we set about to find a nice bed and breakfast at the outskirts of town. Since we were good New Yorkers, we could not resist one at the edge of the town that was named "Brooklynne." The proprietor of the Brooklynne inn was a nice woman named Mrs. Barnacle. Unfortunately, when we asked Mrs. Barnacle after dinner what there was to do in the area of Stratford-on-Avon, she had no idea. So we ended up wandering around the outskirts of town and found our way into a local pub.

I don't remember the pub's name but I do remember that pub. How could I forget it? It was very dimly lit. Very dimly. We could see some of the clientele. Some of them seemed not to have moved a muscle in decades and probably had cobwebs under their arms. They all seemed so......... well, so dingy. But the pub itself was a wonder to see. It may have been a few hundred years old, with lots of wood beams and a wood plank floor. The tables lined the walls and spilled into the middle of the big room. The bar itself was a large rectangular affair jutting into the front of the room, with glasses hanging upside down from its top and rows upon rows of taps gracing the space behind the bartender. The guidebook we were using said that the drink of choice in that section of England was called "scrumpy," which was just a local name for hard apple cider. It came in varying degrees of hardness; the maximum one, I'm told, was so alcoholic it almost burned the nose to drink it. David and I stuckwith medium strength.

We sat down at one of the tables near a window. The place was almost deserted except for the immobile denizens at the front, so we had our choice of where to sit. One seat seemed as good or as bad as another because, after all, it's not like there was much of a view out the window -- just the unhurried side street where the pub was located. So we sat down and started on our scrumpy.

Only two sips into the mug I looked up just above head level and realized we were being watched. No, not by a passerby and not by a waiter. There was a stuffed chipmunk head on the wall, and the little rodent's eyes were fixed on us. I had never seen a stuffed chipmunk head hanging on a wall before. A stuffed moose head, yes. A stuffed bear head, yes. But a chipmunk? Who would bother to pay a taxidermist to stuff the head of a chipmunk, much less mount it on the wall? Could it really have been someone's hunting trophy?

Actually, it probably wasn't a hunting trophy. I knew that because, as it turns out, every open wall space had a small stuffed rodent head on it. Not only that, but the stuffed rodent heads were all wearing clothes: each one had a small cap and a little wool scarf wrapped around its dead stuffed neck. There were chipmunks, squirrels, what looked like raccoons, some other varmint-like things. They all were attired in caps and scarves, very colorful caps and scarves, in an array of plaids and tweeds. They all looked solemn. And we were apparently the only people to take notice of them. Everyone else in the place was looking down into their glasses of whatever they were drinking. Apparently they were used to having stuffed rodent heads gazing down at them from the pub walls.

We were young back then and didn't have the nerve to actually ask someone why there were stuffed rodent heads all over the walls. It was England, after all, and from what we had heard the place was supposed to be a bit eccentric.

Looking back on it now, though, the stuffed rodent heads are nothing more than the prime example of "different strokes for different folks." No doubt the cobweb-festooned denizens of the place thought it was perfectly natural to have their drinking overseen by a collection of wall-mounted, scarf-bedecked, haberdashery-wearing furry mammals. After all, they had probably been doing it for years. So why not?

That's why, when I see someone doing something that initially strikes me as unusual, what I immediately think of is stuffed rodent heads.