Doughnuts, Defenders, and Slavery's Constitution - Uncle Orson Reviews Everything

I got this column in even later than usual this week. But I couldn't help it. Everyone else in the office (i.e., my business manager and my personal assistant [i.e., my wife and her sister]) were heading out on a field trip to Donut World at 2509 Battleground, directly across from the Subway and BP station.

It's the second doughnut store by the same folks who run the Donut World on West Market, but after living in Greensboro for 28 years (as of March 2^nd), I have acquired the native attitude that driving all the way across town is just so ha-a-a-ard. (I grew up out west, where you think nothing of driving fifteen miles for lunch and fifty miles for dinner.) So I knew nothing about the original store.

Here's the skinny -- no, that's the wrong word. Here's the dope (and that's much closer to the addictive truth):

Cake doughnuts so delicious you almost don't care whether there's icing on top or not. The cinnamon-crumb topping is great, though, in case you wondered.

Cinnamon rolls with the perfect balance between sugar, cinnamon, and light but not air-filled pastry.

French doughnuts (of a shape and kind I never saw in France, but maybe they're new there or I just went to the wrong shops) with a delicate pastry more like cream puff than doughnut, light and delicious with just a bit of chew to them.

So here I am, fifteen pounds into a save-my-life diet, and a doughnut store this good opens up five minutes from my house. The universe wants me dead. But ... what a way to go.

The bad thing about the way the TV networks debut most new shows in the fall is that I just don't have enough hours to watch them all. So the promising shows pile up on the TiVo, waiting.

That's why I only just discovered The Defenders this past week. It hadn't become a high priority for several reasons. 1. It's set in Las Vegas, the single least attractive "tourist destination" in the world. 2. It's another lawyer show, and David E. Kelley has just about ruined that whole genre for me. 3. It's set in Las Vegas, a city based on activities that I find incomprehensible or socially reprehensible. 4. It's set in Las Vegas, a city utterly without scenery.

On the plus side, it has Jim Belushi. I became a Jim Belushi fan with About Last Night, in which he and Elizabeth Perkins, playing the best friends of Rob Lowe's and Demi Moore's characters, stole the whole movie out from under them. I never found John Belushi funny or interesting, but Jim, now, is a terrific deadpan comic actor.

It also has Jerry O'Connell. Not that I've loved anything in particular that O'Connell has done. But he began his career as a child actor playing "the fat kid" in that Rob Reiner movie based on Stephen King's "The Body" (I'd look up the title but the internet is down at my house right now, and since my memory is always on the fritz I'm pretty helpless without IMDB). Yet somehow he got his weight under control and now his body is absolutely cut. No doubt he pays a high price for that, but the thing is, he did it, and he stuck with it. So as a guy who's been fat and who's been thin, I admire him for that.

The first list is why I hadn't watched it before; the second list is why I didn't erase it.

I'm glad I kept it because this is the smart, funny, sassy, fast-paced morally-alert legal show that David E. Kelley keeps thinking he's writing but is too ignorant and unanalytically smug to actually bring off.

These guys play law partners. Belushi is a husband and father who is going through a separation that seems to be heading for a divorce he doesn't want. O'Connell plays a hotshot younger bachelor with a propensity for having affairs with women from the district attorneys' office -- in other words, the enemy.

But the relationship between the lawyers is merely amusing. The heart of every episode is a morally complicated case. Often they defend people who are guilty of something, even if not the worst crime they're charged with, but that doesn't mean these guys don't care about who's good and who's bad.

There's something heartening about having Jim Belushi, talking to a client who was just acquitted of murder but is about to serve a sentence for arson, say, "You did it, you got two years, take it like a man."

And when O'Connell's mistress, an assistant D.A., keeps pushing to convict in a trial when it has become clear that the defendant is innocent, just because she can't stand not to win, O'Connell's character breaks up with her. There's a line. And it's a line that ordinary people can recognize. It's called "right and wrong," which still exists even in an adversarial system with a lot of rules you can wiggle through.

And then there's the receptionist, who has the look of a bimbo but is actually a smart partner to both lawyers. And the clients -- just the people you'd expect in Las Vegas, which would normally bore me silly (Elvis impersonators? Puh-leeeze. I didn't even like the real Elvis!) -- but The Defenders makes them into real people that you can understand and care about.

The writing in The Defenders is so good that you never notice it -- you think the characters are just talking they way they would talk. So you know what? I'm going to stop trying with David E. Kelley. Once upon a time, shows like The Practice and the first season of Boston Legal made me a fan of his. But he's used up my patience and there's a better legal show on the air than Kelley has ever written. Put me down as a Defenders fan.

I've got a couple of very short history books for you. How short? Around two hundred pages -- and they're small pages. I read one of them in a night; the other I deliberately spread out across a couple of days so I could think about the important issues he raised.

First, the slightly longer but somewhat slighter book, Edward G. Lengel's Inventing George Washington: America's Founder, in Myth & Memory. It's not any kind of biography -- for that, I'm hearing great things about Ron Chernow's biography of Washington. Instead, Inventing GW is an account of how Washington's image was managed and manipulated for various purposes both during and after his lifetime.

There were people who wanted to tear him down right from the start; but then there were people who wanted to build him up to help bolster people's patriotism.

One of the best things about this book is that it pinpoints exactly when some of the most colorful lies about Washington were first put into circulation. I bet you'll be surprised how many are still around, and still being believed.

But then Lengel goes on to show that the debunkers had such a need to discredit Washington that they showed about the same disregard for factual truth as the worshipers. As a study of political image-making and remaking and unmaking, the book is very informative.

The shorter book, however, is about matters much more substantive: Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification by David Waldstreicher. In recent years, people with an axe to grind have charged that the American Constitution is evil because slavery was built into it.

Most notorious is the "three-fifths" clause, which counted slaves as three-fifths of a person for purposes of apportionment. But then there's the clause that allowed states to continue the slave trade until 1808 -- even though the Continental Congress had already abolished it.

Remember when the new Republican majority read the Constitution in Congress at the beginning of this session? Remember how they were ridiculed for not reading the parts about slavery?

Of course they didn't read them -- they are no longer in the Constitution, having been removed when slavery was abolished. It's worth pointing out that slavery's abolition came through the prescribed method: amendment. It's also worth remembering that it took a civil war that killed more Americans than any other war we've fought in, so that the anti-slavery amendments were possible.

The fact is that if your goal was to make the original thirteen colonies into a single nation, it was not going to happen without slavery in it. In the 1780s, the planters of Delaware, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia simply would not have tolerated any hint of abolition. And while Virginia had lots of statesmen who openly opposed slavery, they never quite got around to abolishing it for themselves.

The slavery issue was complicated in ways that we can hardly understand today. To us, it's so obvious slavery is wrong that we want to think of all the slaveowners as vile human beings. But we also have the perplexing image of many people we count as great statesmen who owned slaves.

Here are the complications (though I don't count them as excuses): The movement toward abolition of slavery was relatively new in Europe. European empires were founded on slavery (Spain, Brazil, all Caribbean colonizers) or on the slave trade (Britain). So it's not as if America was the sole advocate of slavery. Britain and France were self-righteous about having abolished slavery at home, but their colonies continued to own and traffic in slaves for quite a while after the American Constitution.

The reason America was singled out for abuse was because of the hypocrisy in claiming to be a nation founded on principles of liberty and democracy, while a high percentage of the population was treated as property and kept in chains, with few if any rights.

And the Founding Fathers were keenly aware of the contradiction. Not only that, Waldstreicher is absolutely right to point out that no other issue played anywhere near as important a role in the Constitutional Convention as slavery -- though it was only occasionally mentioned out loud.

In the slave states, what made you a person of wealth and substance was not land, because the land had value only because it was worked by slaves. It was your slaves that gave you social position. And if you freed your slaves, you could not compete, dollar for dollar, in farming your land with workers you had to pay. So the land would become effectively worthless.

If everybody gave up their slaves at the same time, then there would be no competitive disadvantage; abolition by government was essential. Yet that was precisely the thing that slave-state representatives came to the Constitutional Convention determined to prevent.

So here you had Massachesetts and Pennsylvania, states that had already taken steps to abolish slavery, trying to create a unified nation that included a practice they considered loathsome, because they could not create such a nation without allowing slavery to continue.

To which we might then ask: Who needed the unified nation, then? Why become the United States? Or why not make a no-slavery union out of just the northern states?

Several reasons come to mind. First, Virginia was already claiming most of the western territories; if they were not inside the United States, then such disputes would lead to international incidents and, probably, war.

Second, the industrial revolution was just getting under way in England and had not really touched America yet. So the northern states were not yet industrial powerhouses. Most of American trade was in commodities produced by slave labor: Cotton, tobacco, indigo.

New England's ships depended on carrying those cargoes in order to make money. If New England and the Southern states were not in the same nation, what was the point of having a nation at all? Why not just remain individual states?

But that's a good question -- why not remain individual states? Remember that the Constitution was vehemently opposed by anti-federalists who argued for exactly that proposition -- and much of their argument stemmed from their loathing for slavery and the hypocrisy of allowing it to continue in a supposedly free republic.

It's hindsight to point out that the War of 1812 is a complete demonstration of why America desperately needed to become a single nation in order to survive at all. Given the way the Brits treated the United States on the high seas until after the War of 1812, imagine how they would have treated thirteen individual colonies. At best we would have been returned to quasi-colonial status, always getting the short end of the stick in that mercantilist system. At worst, we would have become a surrogate battleground for warring European powers.

So as Waldstreicher shows how deliberately hypocritical the federalists were, telling northerners how anti-slavery the Constitution was and southerners how pro-slavery it was, the fact is that they were trying to create a system that would allow these former colonies to keep out from under European domination. Slavery stank in the nostrils of most of them, but they created a Constitution that postponed any change in the existing system in the interest of unifying the states into one country first.

I think Waldstreicher goes just a bit too far with his title and with his conclusion. He gives the impression that the purpose of the Constitution was to promote or preserve slavery, which is not true. But it certainly is true that the preservation and even promotion of slavery was the undoubted effect of the Constitution.

Because everyone at that convention had their eyes on the future. They assumed, as most people do, that "current trends will continue." So everyone assumed that Virginia would remain the most populous states, and the slave states would continue to grow faster than the free states. Indeed, the continuation of the slave trade for twenty years was specifically designed to let the slave states jack up their slave population as much as possible to try to preserve their population advantage.

As for the notorious "three-fifths" clause, it's worth remembering that the Constitution explicitly calls slaves "persons," which was not at all what the slaveowners would have preferred (to them, slaves were not persons at all, but property).

When it came to taxation, it was in the interests of northern states to count slaves as full persons in assessing how much the southern states should pay in taxes to the federal government; the southern states did not want the slaves counted at all.

The northern argument was that slaves created taxable income at about the same rate as free workers in the north, and should be taxed accordingly.

The southern argument was that slaves could not be fired; they had to take care of slave children and old, ill, unproductive slaves, which northern manufacturers did not have to do for their workers.

That was taxation. Representation made them switch sides. In determining how many congressmen each state was entitled to send to the House of Representatives, and how many electoral votes each state should get in choosing the President, the South wanted their slaves to be counted as full persons, and the North didn't want them counted at all!

The southerners were smart enough to realize that in order to hold onto enough votes in Congress to keep abolition from every prevailing nationally, they had to beef up their representation -- even if it meant being taxed for their slaves.

The three-fifths rule was the compromise, not so much between North and South, as between the contradictory interests on each side. The South would pay three-fifths of the slave numeration in higher taxes, but that was worth it to get the stronger representation; the North would accept the South paying lower taxes (by two-fifths of the census of slaves) in exchange for the South not getting full representation in Congress and in Presidential elections.

So nobody was saying that African slaves were "three-fifths of a person." The North won on the issue of calling them persons, period. And the compromise was a matter of how much advantage and disadvantage slaves were allowed to be in apportioning taxes and representation.

Slaves were, in the South, not persons at all, but property. In the North, they were regarded as full persons, but could not be fully counted for purposes of apportionment or the South would rule over the North forever.

Another key issue was "domestic insurrections." The South lived in terror of slave revolts. It was a vivid possibility -- because the British had emancipated slaves during the Revolution in order to cripple the Southern (and therefore the American) economy. Those slaves were recruited and put under arms; with British encouragement, many revolted and slew their masters.

That is why the South did accept some compromises with the North, in exchange for the promise that troops from Northern states would be sent by the federal government to put down "insurrections" (i.e., slave revolts) in the South.

But the pertinent clauses do constitute a contract stipulating that the anti-slavery states would be obligated to send their militias to help the slave states keep their slaves in bondage! The federalists downplayed this in the North as they tried to win ratification, but this aspect of the Constitution made the North complicit in slavery even as they were abolishing slavery within their own borders.

One reason the northern states went along with the Constitution's pro-slavery provisions was the promise that the first action of the new Congress would be to create a Bill of Rights -- amendments that would go a long way toward securing the liberty of the citizens (not the slaves) in all states. The benefits of the Bill of Rights were seen by many as outweighing the hypocrisy of a free country that tolerated slavery.

The federalists won; the Constitution was ratified. But the anti-federalists did not go away. They set out to make sure the federal government remained as weak and ineffective as possible. Meanwhile, the federalists, once in power, set out to make the unity of the nation pay off in every possible way. Hamilton brilliantly set the American economic engine going, and his work was strong enough to survive Jefferson's mutton-headed effort to destroy everything Hamilton had done.

But in the long run, the slavery built into the Constitution came close to tearing the nation apart. Between the industrial revolution and the lack of slavery in the North, the North became the destination of choice for most immigrants.

No one had guessed during the Constitutional Convention and ratification effort that immigration would far outstrip natural population growth -- but only in the free states. No one guessed that American manufactures would be far more valuable in trade, over the long haul, than the products of slave labor on southern plantations.

So the three-fifths rule was actually quite ineffective for the South, after all. They lost control of the House of Representatives surprisingly soon, and all their power centered in the Senate -- which was supposed to be the protector of the small states. (Southern reliance on the Senate was so intense that when slave-state Texas was admitted to the union, it was given the right to split itself into five states whenever it wanted -- thus adding eight more pro-slavery senators if the free states ever seemed to be gaining an advantage there.)

Well, differential population growth had made the Southern states relatively smaller than the northern ones! But one could hardly expect poor immigrants to go South, where they had to compete with slave laborers for work, when in the North all workers had to be paid a wage!

The Constitution created a single nation, but one riven with a single deep contradiction that came close to destroying it. Freedom for the slaves came at a high cost in blood and treasure -- but it came. If insistence on the abolition of slavery had kept a single nation from forming, it would not have slowed down the progress of slavery, but would in all likelihood have guaranteed its further spread.

The protections for slavery in the Constitution do not prove that the Founding Fathers were evil or even pro-slavery; they simply regarded the formation of a single nation as being a higher priority than getting the Southerners to give up their subjection of African slaves.

That evil was a hard one to get rid of, even after the abolition of slavery -- the legal oppression and extralegal terrorization of African-Americans continued until the landmark court decisions and Congressional legislation of the 1950s and 1960s.

It's a bit unfair to condemn the framers of the Constitution for failing to deal with a system of oppression that continued into my lifetime, even after the Constitution's protections of slavery were swept away.

David Waldstreicher's Slavery's Constitution therefore seems to me to be required reading, both for those who think the Constitution was perfect and for those who think that it was evil. It was the only means they could find to make a nation out of these thirteen quarrelsome colonies, and on the whole, in this imperfect world, it turned out the most benevolent superpower the world has ever known.

The tragedy is that America's black population was ground underfoot, not just during the slavery era, but during the Jim Crow/lynch law era that the nation tolerated long after slavery was supposedly dead.

The shame does not belong to the Constitution or its framers; the shame belongs to Americans in all generations who did not speak out or actively seek to end the oppression of the Africans who were brought to this country against their will, and of their descendants who continued to be punished for being born black in a supposedly free country.

Every Day Is Special

First appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC.

Sword Swallowers, Oscars, Route Numbers

Thursday, February 24^th -- National Chili Day

Please notice how "chili" is spelled: with an i at the end. When you write "Chile," you're naming a country in South America. The plural of "chili," in English, is "chilies." Now that we've got that settled, let me point out that after years of having only "chili powder" in the grocery store spice racks, we are now beginning to see variations: chipotle chili powder, hot Mexican chili powder, etc. We have learned that any name other than simple "chili powder" means that it's hotter than your recipe probably expects.

If you have accidentally made your chili (or other sauce) hotter than you want, remember that the "heat" in chili comes from a base or alkali; to counter it, you need an acid like vinegar or sour citrus (lemon or lime). These will temper the heat of the chili -- but they bring their own flavor to the dish. So, for that matter, does chipotle chili powder.

In some places, like Texas, the goal of chili is to make people cry. Be warned -- room service chili in any hotel in Texas is likely to keep you up all night, and it burns on the way out even more than on the way in. Personally, I think chili is meant to be edible, with flavor predominating over pain -- which makes me a wimp in Texas.

Technically, "chili" is a sauce (or salsa). You can add it to beans (making it "chili con frijoles" and/or meat ("chili con carne"). But most of us, when we speak of a main course called "chili," mean a thick spicy bean stew containing chilies of one kind or another, often with meat.

Remember that the hottest substance known to man is habanero chili, next to which jalapeños are about as hot as cottage cheese. Chipotle is just roasted jalapeño, just as anchos are dried, possibly smoked poblano peppers. Poblanos are much milder than jalapeños. There are also cayenne, serrano, wax, bell, banana, and so many other varieties of hot and sweet peppers that it's not worth pretending I can list them all or even most of them.

Wilhelm Carl Grimm was born 225 years ago today, in 1786 in Hanau, Germany. Wilhelm and his brother Jacob not only published folk stories that had thrived among women (and had been collected by educated young women, including Wilhelm's and Jacob's sister Lotte, and Wilhelm's future wife; you must read Clever Maids: the Secret History of the Grimm Fairy Tales by Valerie Paradiz), but Jacob also discovered and publicized "Grimm's Law," a description of the rules by which Indo-European pronunciations diverged as the language transformed into Latin and German. Thus Latin "pater" came from the same root as German "vader" (and then English "father"). So while Jacob was thinking of all this cool linguistic stuff, what was Wilhelm doing? Oh, yes, marrying one of the women who helped him collect those fairy tales.

American artist Winslow Homer was born 175 years ago today, in 1836 in Boston. He specialized in rural landscapes and nautical paintings, and was noted for the realism of his work. He managed to convey action, beauty, character, and a kind of nostalgia all at once. Here's a link to the chronology of Homer's paintings in the National Gallery of Art: http://www.nga.gov/feature/homer/homerchron01.htm

Friday, February 25^th -- Mr. Magoo Day

Actor Jim Backus was born in Cleveland on this day in 1913. Though he was of Lebanese ancestry, he generally played characters with an "upper crust" accent. He is best remembered (and most easily imitated) for playing the voice of Mr. Magoo and Thurston Howell III on Gilligan's Island. But he also played James Dean's father in Rebel Without a Cause and many other characters. Rumor has it that in his youth he was expelled from the Kentucky Military Institute for riding a horse through the mess hall. He died in 1989.

Cassius Clay, who changed his name to Muhammad Ali upon becoming a Black Muslim, became world heavyweight boxing champion on this day in 1964 by defeating Sonny Liston. I remember that our week-night church meeting in Santa Clara, California, fell apart when everybody went out into the foyer to listen to somebody's transistor radio reporting on the fight. Cassius Clay came across vain and boastful, but so exuberant that everyone liked him better than the surly Sonny Liston.

Your Show of Shows, the first great sketch-comedy variety show on TV, premiered on this day in 1950. Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca starred in the 90-minute NBC show along with Carl Reiner and Howard Morris, and its writers included Mel Tolkin, Lucille Kallen, Mel Brooks, Larry Gelbart, Neil Simon and Woody Allen. Carl Reiner modeled the dictatorial boss of the comedy show-within-a-show on The Dick Van Dyke Show after Sid Caesar, and Neil Simon's play Laughter on the 23^rd Floor is reportedly modeled after the writers' room of Your Show of Shows.

Saturday, February 26^th -- International Sword Swallowers Day

This is the birthday of entertainers Johnny Cash (1932), William Frederic "Buffalo Bill" Cody (1846) of "Wild West Show" fame, Jackie Gleason (1916), who is probably best known as creator and star of The Honeymooners, and French author Victor Hugo 1802, whose many novels include Les Miserables.

The Federal Communications Commission was created by act of Congress on this day in 1934. It was established by Congress to oversee communication by radio, wire and cable. TV and satellite communications later were placed within its purview.

The reason for regulation was that the airwaves are a limited resource. For instance, if you were running a radio station broadcasting at one frequency, another station in another town could broadcast at the same frequency, with more power, and drown you out.

For many years, the Fairness Doctrine turned the FCC into a political instrument of the two major parties. In 1968, for instance, when Democrats wanted to hold debates between their nominee, Hubert Humphrey, and the Republican nominee, Richard Nixon, they proposed adding third-party candidate George Wallace to the debate. They believed that most of Wallace's support would be siphoned away from Nixon's vote. But for this to be lawful, Congress had to suspend or amend the Fairness Doctrine, or all the other "third party" candidates would have had to be included. Republicans in Congress deftly delayed and postponed the vote on this issue (Democrats had enough votes to pass it easily) until it was too late.

Afterward, it turned out that it was impossible to say whether Wallace took more votes from Nixon or from Humphrey, as he won 13.5% of the vote and became that last third-party candidate to win electoral votes by winning majorities in one or more states. Meanwhile, the Fairness Doctrine was exposed for its deliberate unfairness; when politicians talk about restoring the Fairness Doctrine, they always propose doing so in ways that will hurt only their opponents.

Sword-swallowing is not for the faint of heart. When I was a kid, I always thought it was pure fakery -- that the sword either telescoped inside the "swallower's" mouth or was somehow lowered beside his face. Au contraire -- sword swallowers train themselves to overcome the gag reflex, and really do lower the sword down their esophagus. If they're smart, they use a sword that is blunt at tip and edges. If you doubt the reality of it, here are some X-rays: http://www.swordswallow.com/xrays.php . Not that these couldn't have been faked; but in live shows, sword swallowers often invite audience members to handle the sword before, after, and during, viewing the act from every possible angle. It's no fake, folks. Which makes it all the more appalling. How do you decide you even want to learn to do this?

Sunday, February 27^th -- Oscar Night

The 83rd annual Academy Awards will be broadcast tonight at 8:00 p.m. on ABC. It happens that this year there are some very good movies and performances nominated, so there's actually somebody to root for. But even in years when the nominees were pretentious rubbish, the broadcast is worth watching for the pure trainwreck fascination of it.

After all, it's vastly entertaining to watch grown-up women wear humiliatingly ugly and unflattering dresses in public and to see award winners embarrass themselves by revealing their stupidity about politics and world affairs. Some of the great moments:

When second-rate actors refused to applaud a special Oscar for one of the great directors of all time, Elia Kazan, because in the 1950s he obeyed the law and named people who had been Communists obedient to Stalin's orders during the time when he was one of them. (Contrary to the accusations against Kazan, he did not "betray his friends." As he pointed out, they had denounced him when he left the Communist movement and had definitely not been his friends for years.)

When Al Gore was given a triumphal Oscar for his "documentary" An Inconvenient Truth, almost every aspect of which has since been shown to be deceptive or outright false. Now it would need to be reclassified as a "mockumentary" with Gore himself as chief clown, since he had been manipulating and faking-up "evidence" about global warming since his days in the Senate.

When Sally Field, accepting her second Oscar, meant to humbly express her realization that her first Oscar wasn't a fluke -- people really did respect her work -- but chose the unfortunate phrasing "you like me; you really like me." Apparently she forgot that the best-actor or best-actress winner is, at that moment, the most hated person in the room.

Other moments include the streaker who flashed behind presenter David Niven, who commented on the naked runner's courage in "showing off his shortcomings"; Sacheen Littlefeather refusing Marlon Brando's Oscar for him; Jack Palance's one-armed pushups, proving that he was still physically fit enough to be hired for movies; emcee David Letterman's no-laughter "joke" making fun of various unusually-named actors by introducing them to each other: "Oprah ... Uma! Oprah, Uma ... Keanu!" There are so many other humiliating, pretentious, and appalling moments in Oscar history that it would be an unusual ceremony that didn't have any.

The best moment in recent years has been the "in memoriam" video reminding us of all the film greats who died in the previous year.

Here is Moviefone's printer-friendly Oscar ballot, in case you want to mark your predictions or preferences: http://o.aolcdn.com/os/movies/awards/2011-oscar-ballot . We and our guests have a contest every year to see whose predictions are most accurate. We give out prizes for the best predictors, but none for those whose preferences are most-often victorious, because that is its own reward.

There are ten nominees for Best Picture this year, just like last year (and several years in the more-distant past). But what do we mean by "best" anyway? Toy Story 3 made me laugh and cry more than any other nominated film; but The King's Speech was the most brilliantly acted film, and The Social Network was a triumph of excellent writing, and all three of these were moving, funny, and intelligent. I'd be happy if any of them won.

The short-film categories are usually the ones we know least about, but for the second year the Carousel Cinemas on Battleground in Greensboro is one of the 70 theaters nationwide showing the five animated and five live-action shorts before the Oscars. We watched the nominees last year and, while a couple of them were pretentious twaddle, most were very enjoyable and some were brilliant. (Brilliance did not prevail over twaddle, however, in the actual awards.)

The Oscar Shorts are shown at the Carousel at 2:00, 4:30, 7:00, and 9:30, alternating between the animated and live action programs. Or you can see The Illusionist, the "unknown" nominee in the animated-film category, at 2:30 or 7:30. The Oscars are more fun if you've seen the movies!

American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born on this day in 1807, in Portland, Maine. He is best remembered for Evangeline, The Song of Hiawatha, Paul Revere's Ride, The Village Blacksmith, and The Children's Hour. For more than a century it was impossible to get through an American school without having to memorize all or part of at least one of these.

Presidential term limits were established by the 22^nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which was ratified on this day in 1951. Until Franklin D. Roosevelt, all American presidents had followed George Washington's example and declined to run again after serving two full terms. (Teddy Roosevelt had served nearly two terms when he ran again as a third-party candidate in 1912, but the first term was really finishing out William McKinley's second term.)

So Congress set up rules to make sure we wouldn't get another president-for-life. The Constitution now says that no one can be elected more than twice to the office of President. If a Vice President succeeds to the presidency because of the death, disability, or resignation of the President, then if he serves less than half of the former President's term, he can still be elected to two full terms of his own. If he serves more than half of his predecessor's unexpired term, then he can only be elected once on his own.

Monday, February 28^th -- Floral Design Day

In my opinion, the most beautiful floral designs are the ones that don't look designed. When flowers are arranged too symmetrically they look (and often are!) stiff and unnatural. I guess I prefer arrangements that give the impression of having been gathered up in your arms in the garden, then plopped into a vase.

To achieve such an effect, of course, requires a lot of careful stem-clipping and arranging, and I have no quarrel with arrangements that show their art more obviously. Just because I prefer one style doesn't mean that I dislike all others!

On this day in 1983, the final episode of the TV series M*A*S*H became the most-watched television show up to that time, with 77 percent of the viewing public glued to their sets. VCRs were still fairly new and quite expensive, so few people were able to time-shift their viewing the way we routinely do today. Two-and-a-half hours long, the series finale concluded a 255-episode run. In my opinion, it would have been better at less than half that length.

Tuesday, March 1^st -- Yellowstone Day

Yellowstone Park, in northwest Wyoming (with strips of Montana and Idaho) was designated on this day in 1872 as the first national park, not just in the U.S., but anywhere in the world.

Today is the beginning of the following:

American Red Cross Month. One of the few public institutions that still remembers why it exists.
International Listening Awareness Month, "dedicated to learning more about the impact that listening has on all human activity." A lovely idea, but given the way most politicians and newspeople talk, aren't we better off not listening?
Irish-American Heritage Month. A serious effort to remember the Irish contribution to American culture, or an excuse to keep drinking for weeks before and after St. Patrick's Day?
National Craft Month. I've tried learning several crafts, but if it requires manual dexterity and an artistic eye, I pretty much suck at it. So I will celebrate crafts by buying and using the work of genuine craftsmen instead of mocking them by trying to do my own.
National Nutrition Month. If you only think of good nutrition one month out of the year, you're not going to make much headway.
National Peanut Month. I grew up loving peanuts, blanched, redskin, or in the shell. I didn't discover that I loved peanut butter until I was in my twenties, and I still don't like peanut butter in chocolate (though peanuts in chocolate are just fine; I don't understand it, either). But some people are at risk of death just being close enough to peanuts to smell them, and the older I get, the more I break into a rash when I eat more than a handful or so. Isn't it lousy the way that whenever there's something wonderful, somebody discovers it's an allergen or carcinogen or lipifacent so we can't enjoy it anymore?
National Umbrella Month. I annoy my family by insisting that we have umbrellas in every car and by the front and back doors. When it's raining and they reach for an umbrella and it's there, do they thank me? Ha ha, I laugh.
National Ghostwriters Week. Ghostwriters are the nearly invisible heroes who allow famous people to "write" books that are far better than they could actually have written themselves. Ghostwriting ranges from "as told to" or "with" credits to completely unnamed and unthanked "editors" who actually wrote almost every paragraph.

This is also National Pig Day. Does that mean we eat no pork, to demonstrate kindly feelings toward living pigs? Or that we eat lots of bacon, ham, and pork, to celebrate the fact most of the world's millions of pigs are alive precisely so that we can eat them? America's observant Jews and Muslims are excused from paying even the slightest attention to this day.

Polish national icon Frederic Chopin was born on this day in 1810. A virtuoso pianist, he managed to compose in a wide range of musical styles, so that only some of his work was designed to make lesser pianists look bad.

Wednesday, March 2^nd -- King Kong Day

The black-and-white movie King Kong premiered today in 1933, with Fay Wray as the screaming beauty who "tamed" the beast. For its time, King Kong boasted extraordinary special effects. Each of the two remakes (Dino De Laurentiis's in 1976; Peter Jackson's in 2005) has tried to push the envelope on special effects, but with little to show for it. While it's easy now to top the FX of the original movie, the story does not allow the filmmakers to show us anything dazzling and new. It'll always be a fight between a giant ape and a curious shrunken dinosaur, and then an ape climbing a skyscraper with airplanes buzzing around to shoot it down.

Besides, the original movie has a kind of sweet gosh-wow feeling to it which the remakes utterly lacked. If there is ever another remake, I hope somebody realizes that the only way to top the original is to not remake it at all; rather they need a new storyline. For instance, what if, instead of a giant ape, they have a giant Santa Claus? That would bring new life to the story. Saint Kong. It totally works for me. Or a giant crab: King Klaw. Or a giant rooster. You see the possibilities?

Or instead of climbing a skyscraper, Kong climbs Mount Everest, where he dies of oxygen deprivation while the girl only faints. The ape clutches her as he tumbles down the mountain, and she emerges from his hand unscathed except for a certain tasteful deshabille. Then the ghost of the ape returns to haunt her whenever she tries to establish a relationship with a regular-size man, and romantic screwball comedy hijinks ensue.

Or it's not a film crew that finds the ape, it's a team of environazis who came to fake up evidence of the devastating effects of global warming; on the way home they find that the ape's flatus is so full of methane that he is single-handedly (so to speak) responsible for all the global warming since 1850. They kill him and the world at once grows so cold that we have to burn fossil fuels just to try to warm it up again.

You see what a little creativity can do? And my suggestions are no more destructive of the original story than Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings was of Tolkien's masterpiece.

National highway route numbers were introduced on this day in 1925. A joint board of state and federal highway officials created the first system of numbering highways that ran from state to state, along with standardized road signs so there was some hope of finding your way through cities where the number ran through the streets like a rat in a maze. Later the system was improved with the use of odd numbers for north-south routes and even numbers for east-west routes.

This convention was continued with the Interstate freeway system, only the freeways were numbered starting in the west and south instead of the east and north. That's why the old U.S. route 1 is on the east coast and 101 on the west, while Interstate 5 runs from San Diego to Seattle and I-95 runs from Florida up to Maine (with an absurd interruption between Philadelphia and New York so that New Jersey can force everyone to drive on their filthy toll roads).

In the old system, diagonals were handled by sticking another digit on the front, so that the north-south Route 21 spawned diagonals like 321 and 421. The Interstate just tacks regular numbers on the diagonals, so that I-85, a diagonal, can't be distinguished from north-south highways. The Interstates also brought us beltways (which usually begin with even numbers) and spurs (which usually begin with odd numbers).

One thing that took them forever to get right was the numbering of exits. For decades, some states numbered the exits ordinally from west to east or south to north. This caused problems when new exits were inserted between two previously existing ones -- we had lots of "5-A" and "17-D" confusion. Now the exits are numbered according to the nearest milepost, so that exit 5 is not the fifth exit, but the exit located about five miles along the highway from its beginning point.

What no one expected was that the interstates would do what the railroads once did -- kill any "downtown" that wasn't near the freeway, and create new shopping districts and town centers near freeway interchanges, particularly around the big-city beltways.

I think these new commercial centers should be named for the freeway and exit numbers. Then they would be much easier to find.

Meanwhile, the original U.S. highway numbering system persists. However, as sections of the original routes were widened into four-lanes and then freeways, they began to be called bypasses, while the original routes were labeled "business" -- both with the same number. So you can find yourself at an intersection with small signs indicating that the route number you're trying to follow goes in every direction, and only by using binoculars to spot the difference between "bypass" and "business" on the sign can you even guess which is the right way. When you add in the state and county road numbering, the result is a superfluity of enumeration that can drive a poor navigator mad.

My favorite part of the numbering system is the "north-south" or "east-west" designation. These are labeled for the route's general direction, not the actual direction of the road. Thus in Virginia, just east of Wytheville, I-77 and I-81 join together for a stretch. However, if you're going north on I-77, you are simultaneously going south in I-81, and vice-versa. In fact, of course, you're actually going east or west.

And when it comes to beltways, directions are a joke. No matter which way you go around a beltway, it will end up going north, south, east, and west. And it doesn't help to have signs saying which city or exit each direction heads for, since no matter which way you go, you'll reach all of them eventually. The most useful beltway directions are "inner loop" and "outer loop," since in our drive-on-the-right country, inner loops of beltways always go clockwise and outer loops always go in the unscrewing, counterclockwise direction.

At least back in 1925 somebody tried to create a rational system.

The movie version of the hit Broadway musical The Sound of Music premiered on this day in 1965. For many years it was the top-money-making movie of all time, and it won the Best Picture Oscar. When I first saw it, I was thirteen and an idiot. Therefore I loved Julie Andrews and all the kids and Richard Haydn as Uncle Max, while I thought Christopher Plummer was kind of an old stick and Eleanor Parker (as the Baroness) was completely awful.

Years later, having learned more about acting and directing, I realized that I had instinctively divided the cast quite correctly into two groups: Group 1 was mugging like Broadway musical actors, while Group 2 was acting far more naturally, the way you're supposed to do in movies. Now when I watch the film, Christopher Plummer and Eleanor Parker seem like the only natural actors in the whole cast, while everybody else, from the nuns to the Nazis, is prancing around like a trained monkey or Jim Carrey.