The final episode of the much-admired series ended with the deliberate misdirection of viewers’ attention followed by a startlingly sudden cut to black. Writer David Chase’s failure to deliver up a more meaningful and definitive ending has provoked apologetic defenses and some scorching criticism.

Alessandra Stanley, in the New York Times (of course!) defended Chase’s pulling his audience’s chain. It was just so ironic, after all.

There was no good ending, so “The Sopranos” left off without one.

The abrupt finale last night was almost like a prank, a mischievous dig at viewers who had agonized over how television’s most addictive series would come to a close. The suspense of the final scene in the diner was almost cruel. And certainly that last bit of song — “Don’t Stop Believing,” by Journey — had to be a joke.

After eight years and so much frenzied anticipation, any ending would have been a letdown. Viewers are conditioned to seek a resolution, happy or sad, so it was almost fitting that this HBO series that was neither comedy nor tragedy should defy expectations in its very last moments. In that way at least “The Sopranos” delivered a perfectly imperfect finish.

But the more demotic Nikki Finke wasn’t buying any alibis, and delivered a real denunciation.

The line to cancel HBO starts here. What a ridiculously disappointing end lacking in creativity to The Sopranos saga. … if David Chase, who wrote and directed the final episode, was demonstrating the existential and endless loop of Tony’s life or the moments before the hit that causes his death, it still robbed the audience of visual closure. And if it were done to segue into a motion picture sequel, then that kind of crass commercialism shouldn’t be tolerated. … There’s even buzz that the real ending will only be available on the series’ final DVD. Either way, it was terrible. Apparently, my extreme reaction was typical of many series’ fans: they crashed HBO’s website for a time tonight trying to register their outrage. HBO could suffer a wave of cancellations as a result. … Chase clearly didn’t give a damn about his fans. Instead, he crapped in their faces. This is why America hates Hollywood. Unlike some network series that end abruptly because broadcasters pull the plug without warning, The Sopranos has been slated for years to go off the air tonight. But instead of carefully crafted, this finale looked like it had been concocted in a day or two. (Some of the scenes were cut so abruptly, they caused whiplash.) … Chase needed to exert himself to a concoct an artful denouement. But he took the lazy way out. The show we all loved deserved a decent burial. Instead, it went into a black hole.

Two days later, people are still talking about that ending, as the New York Times reports today:

After he completed the final episode of “The Sopranos,” David Chase told publicity executives at HBO that he was leaving for France and would not take any calls asking him to comment about the ending of his classic television series.

He also said that he had instructed all of his writers and producers to turn down any requests for information about the decisions that had gone into shaping the show’s last chapter.

The reason for his resistance became clear on Sunday night when “The Sopranos” ended, not with a moment of final summation, but with a literal blank. The reaction to the stunning last shot of an empty screen has been a mix of outrage among some fans at being left sitting on the edges of their seats, where they had been perched for much of the show’s last batch of episodes, and awe among others who have always regarded the show as the most ambitious and unconventional of television series. …

and the Times found a bevy of suitably supportive screenwriters:

Damon Lindelof, one of the creators of the ABC hit show “Lost,” … said: “I’ve seen every episode of the series. I thought the ending was letter-perfect.” …

Doug Ellin, the creator of another HBO hit series, “Entourage,” said: “The show just ended, and I’m speechless. I’m sure there is going to be a lot of heated discussion, but that’s David Chase’s genius. …

For David Shore, creator of the Fox hit “House,” one of the best touches was Mr. Chase’s own refusal to discuss the ending. Mr. Shore said: “Obviously he wants us to speculate on what it all means. Obviously that’s what we’re all doing.”

David Milch, who has created highly regarded dramas like “NYPD Blue” and “Deadwood,” said: “It was a question of loyalty to viewer expectations, as against loyalty to the internal coherence of the materials. Mr. Chase’s position was loyalty to the internal dynamics of the materials and the characters.”

Chuck Lorre, who created and leads the CBS hit comedy “Two and a Half Men” (said:) “People just finished watching that show and immediately talked about it for a half-hour,” Mr. Lorre said. “That’s just wonderful. What more could you want as a writer?”

And Chase has evidently been sufficiently nettled by audience reactions that he actually spoke to Allen Sepinwall, in a long-rearranged interview, you understand.

I have no interest in explaining, defending, reinterpreting, or adding to what is there,” he says of the final scene (just before proceeding to defend it -DZ).

“No one was trying to be audacious, honest to God,” he adds. “We did what we thought we had to do. No one was trying to blow people’s minds, or thinking, ‘Wow, this’ll (tick) them off.’ People get the impression that you’re trying to (mess) with them and it’s not true. You’re trying to entertain them.”

Wired reports on the latest alliance between technology and the Humanities.

After a thousand years stuck on a dusty library shelf, the oldest [Oldest Medieval MSS. There are a considerable number of fragments from Antiquity. -DZ] copy of Homer’s Iliad is about to go into digital circulation.

A team of scholars traveled to a medieval library in Venice to create an ultra-precise 3-D copy of the ancient manuscript — complete with every wrinkle, rip and imperfection — using a laser scanner mounted on a robot arm.

A high-resolution, 3-D copy of the entire 645-page parchment book, plus a searchable transcription, will be made available online under a Creative Commons license.

The Venetus A is the oldest existing copy of Homer’s Iliad and the primary source for all modern editions of the poem. It lives in Venice at the ancient Public Library of St. Mark. It is easily damaged. Few people have seen it. The last photographic copy was made in 1901. …

The idea is “to use our 3-D data to create a ‘virtual book’ showing the Venetus in its natural form, in a way that few scholars would ever be able to access,” says Matt Field, a University of Kentucky researcher who scanned the pages. “It’s not often that you see this kind of collaboration between the humanities and the technical fields.”

Venice is not the most convenient work site. All the gear had to come by boat and be carried or dragged up the stairs of the library. Built in the 1500s, the library has been renovated periodically, but its builders never envisioned a need for big lights, a motorized cradle, 17 computers or wireless internet.

The group set up shop in an upstairs room, using their own electrical cables and adapters to harness the library’s modest power resources. They covered the window overlooking the Piazzetta San Marco with a black sheet to keep out sunlight that could damage the manuscript. They placed the book, the size and weight of a giant dictionary, on a custom cradle that holds it steady, and turned the lights down low.

No more than four people were allowed in the room at one time, to keep down heat and humidity. The conservator turned each page with his hands and set it against a plastic bar, where light air suction held it in place. The barn doors covering the lights were flung open for the time it took the photographer to snap a shot with a 39-megapixel digital camera, a Hasselblad H1 medium-format camera with a Phase One P45 digital back. As each page was photographed, the classics scholar on duty in the hallway outside the workroom would examine its image to make sure all the text was legible.

Then Field scanned each page to create a 3-D image. Using an ordinary flatbed scanner was out of the question — it would flatten the delicate parchments. So Brent Seales, a computer scientist from the University of Kentucky’s Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments, decided to use a laser scanner on a robot arm to make a 3-D scan of the pages.

Passing about an inch from the surface, the laser rapidly scanned back and forth, painting the page with laser light. The robot arm knows precisely where in space its “hand” is, creating a precise map of each page as it scans. The data is fed into a CAD program that renders an image of the manuscript page with all its crinkles and undulations.

“The resolution yields millions of 3-D points per page,” Seales says.

To store the data, the team used a 1-terabyte redundant-disk storage system on a high-speed network. The classicists on duty backed up the data every evening on two 750-GB drives and on digital tape. Blackwell carried the hard drives home with him every night, rather than leave the data in the library.

The next step is making the images readable. The Venetus A is handwritten and contains ligatures and abbreviations that boggle most text-recognition software. So, this summer a group of graduate and undergraduate students of Greek will gather at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C., to produce XML transcriptions of the text. Eventually, their work will be posted online for anyone to search, as part of the Homer Multitext Project.

Iliad Manuscripts and Fragments

Walter Leaf (Loeb Library, 1886) on Venetus A

slideshow

Barry Dauphin comments along familiar lines at YARGB.

Virtually all of the features of Christianity which the rational and enlightened portion of mankind find objectionable survive perfectly happily in modern secular environmentalist leftism. Is there any real difference between the flagellant penitents of the Middle Ages and members of today’s militant chorus of greens? Both believed the imminent destruction of the world was at hand, and that it had been provoked by mankind’s instigation of divine wrath via excessive materialism and pursuit of pleasure. The only possibility, then or now, of averting ultimate catastrophe would be a vigorous program of repentance featuring a solid dose of self-inflicted pain and suffering. The key difference is that the medievals used wooden switches while the moderns prefer regulations and taxation.

Global warming gives a variety of people the way to “make nice” with each other. We can join hands and save the planet. Even scientists decide the issue by “consensus” rather than by thorough, accurate, appropriately cautious data collection, including challenges to the data collection and interpretation as is expected from any discipline that presumes to take the falsification principle seriously. By agreeing it’s the “big” problem, we are to put aside our differences. “Skeptics” are to be treated with derision. The question is said to be “settled” (there we can all agree about that). The remaining questions involve what to “do” about it. And most of the solutions appear to be either quasi-socialism or outright socialism, again to make level, to obliterate differences. There are to be no differences, no competition. We are to all agree.

AGW offers modern people and modern societies a secular sacrament. It is a New Penance: Forgive me, Gaia, for I have sinned. It’s been 5 yrs. since my last recycling. Instead of saying the rosary or davening, we can chant “sustainability” and become pure again. And now virtually everyone is getting in to the act. Even ChimpyMcBushitler is on board, although new religions may seek new sacrificial lambs. We will be told that it is the evil market system, which creates this problem. And that will lead to being told it is the individual’s pursuit of self-interest that lay at the heart of the warming- even life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness may come to be seen as culprits, if they haven’t already been. Top-down enforced social cooperation will save us from ourselves. A new god would be born, until…. Well, that wouldn’t really be paradise, and even the true believers would find that out at some point. But they could wreak a lot of hell in the meantime.

Gallery of photos of views from the tallest (170 meters -557 feet) glass-floored building in Europe: Portsmouth’s Spinnaker Tower.

The press is reporting (a bit late) that the best surviving sword owned by Napoleon Bonaparte still in private hands was to be auctioned yesterday at Versailles by Osenat.

The sword is a Mameluke-style saber, a form of edged-weapon which became fashionable in France and Britain after Napoleon’s Campaign in Egypt in 1798.

The future Emperor, then First Consul, reputedly used this sword at the Battle of Marengo, June 14, 1800.

Napoleon presented the sword after the battle to one of his brothers as a wedding present. It has descended in the same family for eight generations.

BBC

Fox News

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Louis-François (baron) Lejeune, Battle of Marengo, 1801
Musée National du Château, Versailles, oil on canvas
1.8 m. x 2.5 m.

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Doubtless stung by NYM’s criticism for slow reporting, Fox News has stepped up with the results of the auction. The sword sold for $6.4 million.

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Hat tip to Frank. A. Dobbs.

The Sunshine Project, another commie nuisance organization devoted to attacking biological weapons research by non-terrorist, non-totalitarian countries, made the headlines again by releasing the text of a rather old,and distinctly fanciful, Air Force non-lethal weapn development proposal, containing one odd hey!-what-if-we-could-make-something-like-this idea.

CBS 5 is shocked.

Edward Hammond, of Berkeley’s Sunshine Project, had used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain a copy of the proposal from the Air Force’s Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio.

As part of a military effort to develop non-lethal weapons, the proposal suggested, “One distasteful but completely non-lethal example would be strong aphrodisiacs, especially if the chemical also caused homosexual behavior.”

The documents show the Air Force lab asked for $7.5 million to develop such a chemical weapon.

“The Ohio Air Force lab proposed that a bomb be developed that contained a chemical that would cause enemy soliders to become gay, and to have their units break down because all their soldiers became irresistably attractive to one another,” Hammond said after reviewing the documents.

The Edge has a more complete article, noting that the story is old, going back to 2005, but was resurrected by Huffington Post blogger Larry Arnstein.

Air Force Report

The joke’s on them. They already developed it, and tested it on the San Francisco Bay area.

The ineffable David Broder thinks Scooter Libby’s 30 month sentence may have been the result of an unreasonable prosecutorial vendetta, but he still believes that this kind of injustice is nonetheless salutory in affirming the principle that anyone –at least any Republican– can be a victim of our legal system, and as a warning to inner city youth to avoid public service.

Quick! someone on the left tell me again why Bill Clinton’s perjury should not have served as an occasion for the reaffirmation of the universality of the Rule of Law and as an edifying and instructive example of crime and punishment for the young.

And exactly what lesson does the comparison of Sandy Berger’s wrist slap of a $10,000 fine, increased to $50,000 by the judge + two years probation and 100 hours of community service to Scooter Libby’s $250,000 fine + 30 months teach?

Despite the absence of any underlying crime, Fitzgerald filed charges against Libby for denying to the FBI and the grand jury that he had discussed the Wilson case with reporters. Libby was convicted on the testimony of reporters from NBC, the New York Times and Time magazine — a further provocation to conservatives.

I think they have a point. This whole controversy is a sideshow — engineered partly by the publicity-seeking former ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife and heightened by the hunger in parts of Washington to “get” Rove for something or other.

Like other special prosecutors before him, Fitzgerald got caught up in the excitement of the case and pursued Libby relentlessly, well beyond the time that was reasonable.

Nonetheless, on the fundamental point, Walton and Fitzgerald have it right. Libby let his loyalty to his boss and to the administration cloud his judgment — and perhaps his memory — in denying that he was part of the effort to discredit the Wilson pair. Lying to a grand jury is serious business, especially when it is done by a person occupying a high government position where the public trust is at stake.

Knowing Judge Walton a bit, I was certain that he would never be party to allowing a big shot to get off more easily than any of the two-bit bad guys who used to show up in his courtroom for sentencing. When he goes to his next school session, he wants to be able to tell those young people that no one is above the law — and mean it. You see, Walton is not just in the business of enforcing the law. He is also committed to steering youths in the right direction. This case will help.

I didn’t report on the giant pig story, because I didn’t believe it when I first encountered it. This one looks like it could well be authentic.

Bud Bolen of Jacksonville, Florida says he received the above photo from a friend (presumably the lady herself), and posted it on Archery Talk.

Bolen identifies the bow used to slay the elephant as a PSE X-Force.

He quotes her saying:

I was pulling 85 [38.64 kg.] on the bow before I left. When I got over there, I lowered it to 83 [37.73 kg.]. It was getting 103 ft lbs of kinetic energy at 83. The bow was awesome. I think it fit me well.

I had been hunting hard for 8 days before I got a chance to draw back. I had to hold the bow for a minute before I could take a shot. I shot the elephant at 12 yards with one arrow. It was shot near dark. We went back the next day and found him. I was in the middle of 37 elephants when I took my shot. This was my first bow kill and first woman to take an elie with a bow. The safari will be on Versus at the end of Sep or beginning of Oct. It is suppose to be the premiere show of the season. I will let you know the date when I find out.

The huntress is also quoted here:

The Outfitter was Tshabezi Safaris – Dudley Rogers. If anyone would like to book a safari with him, I can set it up.

The main camp was in Gokwe north.

As for the equipment, PSE set up the bow including stabalizer (sic), rest and site. I used a Little Goose release. The broadheads were also set up by PSE. They [the arrow shafts] were Black Mombas [sic] 550 grains. The broadheads were German Kinetics at 180 grains. The total grains equaled 730.

I wore Danner boots and Foxy Huntress clothing.

Mike Christianson was my bow mentor. Dr. Hugo Gibson was my chiropractor. I had to have him along because the heavy bow was pulling and pushing my shoulders out.

I trained for 14 months to be able to pull the big bows.

Her hunt probably cost $800 per day on a 10-16 day safari plus a trophy fee of $8000. Minimally $16,000 plus air fare.

Ross Douthat‘s guess is that

the finale will end with the Soprano nuclear family still intact and even with Tony back on top, in some limited sense at least; if any mob boss gets capped in the final hour, I’m betting that it will be Phil Leotardo.

He links several other predictions, including Jeffrey Goldberg at Stale:

I think Tony survives next week; to kill him would be to send a message that crime doesn’t pay, and my guess is that David Chase believes that, in this corrupt world, crime does, in fact, sometimes pay, and to telegraph otherwise would be dishonest. This is not to say that I think Tony will get off without consequence: His travails this season suggest that the series will end on some sort of ambivalent note, something that underscores the tension and the physical and emotional dangers in the life Tony has chosen for himself.

Peggy Noonan mourns the show’s passing in the the Wall Street Journal:

The Sopranos” wasn’t only a great show or even a classic. It was a masterpiece, and its end Sunday night is an epochal event. With it goes an era, a time. …

The drama of Tony, the great post-9/11 drama of him, is that he is trying to hold on in a world he thinks is breaking to pieces. He has a sense, even though he’s only in his 40s, that the best times have passed, not only for the Italian mob but for everyone, for the country — that he’d missed out on something, and that even though he lives in a mansion, even though he is rich and comfortable and always has food in the refrigerator and Carm can go to Paris and the kids go to private school — for all of that, he fears he’s part of some long downhill slide, a slide that he can’t stop, that no one can, that no one will. Out there, he told his son and daughter, it is the year 2000, but in here it’s 1950. His bluster, his desperate desire to re-create order with the rough tools of his disordered heart and brain, are comic, poignant, ridiculous, human.

Tony became a new and instantly recognizable icon, and his character adds to American myth, to America’s understanding of itself. It’s a big thing to create such a character, and not only one but a whole family of them — Uncle Junior, Christopher, Carmella. This is David Chase’s great achievement, to have created characters that are instantly recognizable, utterly original, and that add to America’s understanding of itself. And to have created, too, some of the most horrifying moments in all of television history, and one that I think is a contender for Most Horrifying Moment Ever. That would be Adriana desperately crawling — crawling! — through the leaves in the woods as she tries to flee her lovable old friend Silvio, who is about to brutally put her down.

Here is a question that touches on the mystery of creativity, and I’ll probably put it badly because I can’t define it better than what I’m going to say. David Chase is the famous and justly celebrated creator of “The Sopranos,” the shaper of its stories. The psychological, spiritual and emotional energy needed to create a whole world, which is what he has done, is very great. It is a real expenditure, a kind of investment in life, a giving of yourself. You can’t do what he does without something like love. Not sentimentality or softness or sweetness, but love. And yet in a way, if you go by “The Sopranos,” Mr. Chase loves nothing. Human beings are appetite machines, and each day is devoted to meeting and appeasing those appetites. No one is good, there are no heroes, he sees through it all. The mental-health facility is a shakedown operation where they medicate your child into zombiehood and tell him to watch TV. Politicians are the real whores. The FBI is populated by smug careerists. In the penultimate show, a table full of psychotherapists top each other with erudite-seeming comments that show a ruthlessness as great as any gangster’s. I guess I’m asking where the energy for creativity comes when you see with such cold eyes.

Not that they’re unrealistic. They’re not. One of the reasons the show was so popular — one of the reasons it resonated — is that it captured a widespread feeling that our institutions are failing, all of them, the church, the media, the law, the government, that there’s no one to trust, that Mighty Mouse will not save the day.

In Mr. Chase’s world, everyone’s a gangster as long as he can find a gang. Those who don’t are free-lancers.

And what he seems to be telling us, as the final season ends, is that all your pity for Tony, all your regard for the fact that he too is caught, all your sympathy for him as a father, as a man trying to be a man, as a man whose mother literally tried to have him killed, is a mistake. Because he is a bad man. He has passing discomfort but not conscience, he has passing sympathies but no compassion. When he kills the character who is, essentially, his son, Christopher, he does it spontaneously, coolly, and with no passion. It’s all pragmatism. He’s all appetite. Tony is a stone cold gangster.

There have been shows on television that have been, simply, sublime. In drama there was “I, Claudius,” a masterpiece of mood and menace — “Trust no one!” — from which writers and producers continue to steal (see HBO’s “Rome.”) And PBS’s “Upstairs, Downstairs.” A few others. “The Sopranos” is their equal, but also their superior: It is hard to capture the past, but harder to capture the present, because everyone knows when you don’t get it right. It takes guts to do today.

David Chase did, and he made a masterpiece. I’ll be watching Sunday night, but I’ll wake up that morning with a blue moon in my eyes.

Michael Hodges, in Time Out London, looks ahead with optimism to London’s Islamic future.

Islam is not an alien religion to London. At the end of World War I the city sat at the heart of an Empire that had 160 million Muslim subjects, 80 million in India alone. London was the largest Islamic capital in the world. Forty years later and the end of the Empire, unrest and war and poverty in south Asia had lead to mass immigration to the mother country and London became a Muslim capital in another sense.

According to the 2001 census there are 607,083 Muslims living in London (310,477 men and 296,606 women). The majority of Muslims live in the east of the city and, by 2012, the Muslim Council of Britain estimates that the Muslim population of Tower Hamlets, Newham, Waltham Forest and Hackney will be 250,000. There are plans afoot (though no formal application has yet been submitted) to build the UKs biggest mosque – capable of welcoming 40,000 worshippers – near the 2012 Olympic site, a move which has prompted predictable outrage from some quarters. Consequently, Muslim disillionment with a reactionary and often ill-informed press is at an all time high.

But rather than fear the inevitable changes this will bring to London, or buy in to a racist representation of all Muslims as terrorists, we should recognise both what Islam has given this city already, and the advantages it would bring across a wide range of areas in the future. …

Islam offers Londoners potential health benefits: the Muslim act of prayer is designed to keep worshippers fit, their joints supple and, at five times a day, their stomachs trim. The regular washing of the feet and hands required before prayers promotes public hygiene and would reduce the transmission of superbugs in London’s hospitals.

Alcohol is haram, or forbidden, to Muslims. As London is above the national average for alcohol-related deaths in males, with 17.6 per 100,000 people (Camden has 31.6 per 100,000 males), turning all the city’s pubs into juice bars would have a massive positive effect on public health. Forbid alcohol throughout the country, and you’d avoid many of the 22,000 alcohol-related deaths and the £7.3 billion national bill for alcohol-related crime and disorder each year.

‘The world is green and beautiful,’ said the prophet Muhammad, ‘and Allah has appointed you his guardian over it.’ The Islamic concept of halifa or trusteeship obliges Muslims to look after the natural world and Muhammad was one of the first ever environmentalists, advocating hima – areas where wildlife and forestry are protected. So we could expect more public parks under Islam, but halifa also applies to recycling: in 2006, 12,000 Muslims attended a series of sermons at the East London Mosque explaining the theological evidence for a link between behaving in an environmentally sustainable way and the Islamic faith. …

Application of halal (Arabic for ‘permissable’) dietary laws across London would free us at a stroke from our addiction to junk food, and the general adoption of a south Asian diet rich in fruit juice, rice and vegetables with occasional mutton or chicken would have a drastic effect on obesity, hyperactivity, attention deficit disorders and associated public health problems. As curry is already Londoners’ and the nation’s favourite food (see our Brick Lane food feature), it would be a relatively easy process to encourage the adoption of such a diet. Not eating would be important as well. The annual fasting month of Ramadan instils self-discipline, courtesy and social cohesion. And Londoners would benefit philosophically and physically from even a short period when we weren’t constantly ramming food into our mouths. …Each Muslim is obliged to pay zakat, a welfare tax of 2.5 per cent of annual income, that is distributed to the poor and the needy. If the working population of London, 5.2 million, was predominantly Muslim this would produce approximately £3.2bn each year. More importantly, everyone would be obliged to consider those Londoners who haven’t shared their good fortune. London would become a little less cruel.

Under Islam all ethnicities are equal. Once you have submitted to Allah you are a Muslim – it doesn’t matter what colour you are. End of story.

What would Richard Coeur-de-Lion say?

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Hat tip to David Ross.

In the dog-bites-man department, famous conservative legal scholar Robert Bork is contributing to the contemporary flood of tort litigation.

The New York Times quotes from the text of Judge Bork’s complaint:

(On) “the evening of June 6, 2006,” …The New Criterion magazine held an event at the Yale Club in honor of Hilton Kramer, the magazine’s co-founder. Mr. Bork, a contributor to the magazine, was among those invited to deliver remarks.

The event was held in a banquet room, the suit explains, where the club’s staff had erected a dais atop which a lectern had been placed for the speakers. It is the Yale Club’s “normal practice,” the suit contends, to provide a set of stairs so that the speakers may ascend easily to their appointed perch.

“At the New Criterion event, however, the Yale Club failed to provide any steps between the floor and dais,” the suit claims. “Nor did the Yale Club provide a handrail or any other reasonable feature to assist guests attempting to climb to the dais.”

Mr. Bork fell backward while ascending the dais, striking his left leg on the side of the dais and bumping his head, the suit claims. As a result of the fall, a hematoma formed on his leg and later burst. The injury required surgery, extended medical treatment and months of physical therapy, the suit contends.

“Mr. Bork suffered excruciating pain as a result of this injury,” according to the suit, “and was largely immobile during the months in which he received physical therapy.” Not only was he forced to use a cane, the suit maintains, but he also still walks with a limp.

How many 80 year olds normally limp or need to a cane, after all?

I can see how it could easily be difficult for a senior citizen to mount a tall platform without the assistance of some steps and something to hold onto, and whoever set up the room was doubtless inconsiderate of the aged. But service requests are typically quickly honored at the Yale Club.

If the room arranger lacked foresight about those missing steps, so too did Judge Bork, who could easily have beckoned a Yale Club waiter and demanded some portable steps and a handrail be provided.

Even when Michelle is wrong, she’s cute.

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