Justice You Feared it Would Be

Hello. Happy Fourth. Today’s Gene Pool is focused on the sometimes tepid miracle of democracy. But first we will be continuing very briefly on the subject of medicine and health. I have the worst pharmacy known to humankind, at least in the United States. (I suspect there may be thatched-hut apothecaries in primitive countries that cheerfully dispense shark cartilage, cactus pus, emu fat, and fermented goat bladder as cures for cancer.)

My pharmacy is a small outlet of a very large chain; I decided not to name the chain because I didn’t want to waste weeks trying to get the company’s PR team to respond to questions, in order to be “fair,” so I’ll just say the chain rhymes with a common mispronunciation of the word “mischievous.” Anyway, here is what my pharmacy does:

They are late with almost all prescriptions. Whenever you arrive, they tell you that it isn’t ready yet. This is true even if the prescription was called in by your doctor two days prior. I know this is true because it happens to me constantly, but also to everyone else in line — the line is usually long because the place is understaffed. It seems there is frequently a fistfight about to break out between the exasperated customers and the implacable clerks delivering the bad news with a smile.

When you ask why the prescription is late, they lie. Always. They say it is “on back order,” which you know it is not true because the med is usually some very common drug that’s always in stock, and also because they always seem to fill the “back-ordered” med about a half hour after you arrive and start yelling. The second thing they will tell you — they’ve told it to me twice, and twice that I know of to other people — is that “someone” put it “on hold,” and when you ask who and why, they do not explain but say that they’ll take it “off hold” and have it in a half hour.

What is apparent is that they are so short staffed, or incompetently staffed, that they practice triage on prescriptions — putting them aside until someone comes in to yell.

Here is today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll.

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Several people wrote in to ask me for my thoughts on the recent Supreme Court rulings, which surprised me because I am known for trenchant analysis of bodily functions, not judicial bodies. I do have certain opinions, however, and they are a little different from many that are out there. I am happy to share them.

We have a terrible Supreme Court, among the worst in history, because of the stubborn, callous, uncompassionate right-wing supermajority. They fail not just jurisprudentially, but morally. Their major decisions are cruel and their personal ethics are shocking. They do not recuse when they must recuse. They take expensive gifts, as though they are unaware that their friendship and gratitude are commodities. They act above not just the law, but above the dictates of decency and common sense.

The question is, how did we get here, and the answer — as it is to so many disturbing things today — is Donald Trump. I do not think a different Republican (say, Mitt Romney) would have opted for the volatile, arrogant Neil Gorsuch, the religious nut Amy Coney Barrett or the clearly tarnished, sputtering, red-faced, conspiracy-minded, wildly unjudicially-tempered Brett Kavanaugh.

But you can’t stop there. How did the Trump Trio become what they are — as opposed to the Obama-Biden Trio? That’s where things get interesting. It’s a matter of class privilege, breadth of social experience, and compassion. How they grew up is who they are. We will continue this thought in a moment, but first some boring boilerplate.

After the intro (which you are reading now), there will be some early questions and answers added on — and then Gene will keep adding them as the hour progresses and your fever for his opinions grows and multiplies and metastasizes.  To see those later Q&As, refresh your screen occasionally. 

As always, you can also leave comments. They’ll congregate at the bottom of the post, and allow you to annoy and hector each other and talk mostly amongst yourselves. Though we will stop in from time to time.

Back to the Supreme Court.

So who are these people?

Justice Amy Coney Barrett grew up pretty wealthy. Justice Elena Kagan’s family was not as wealthy but they were not poor, either. Comparing them by affluence would not be fair. Both women were the daughters of lawyers, for example. Except. Justice Kagan’s father, Robert Kagan, represented poor families who rented New York apartments and were trying not to get thrown out of their homes by opportunistic landlords. Justice Barrett’s father represented Shell Oil in its efforts to get offshore drilling permits over the objections of organizations concerned with environmental protection.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor grew up in the Bronx, roughly one decade, and one mile, from where I grew up in the Bronx. I kind of know what her childhood was like, I think, because it was at least a bit like my childhood — the streets were not fully safe, there was internecine tension between different cultures, and family love and support was essential to staying focused and safe. There was one enormous difference between us, which is that Justice Sotomayor’s dad — a tool-and-die maker and a raging alcoholic — died when she was nine. She lived in a Bronx tenement, and then a housing project, and went to Cardinal Spellman High School, a Catholic institution where tuition costs were nominal . She was raised by her grandma and her mom, a nurse, whom she calls “the inspiration of my life.”

By comparison, Justice Neil Gorsuch grew up quite wealthy— he attended the elite, snotty Georgetown prep in Washington D.C. — but, to be fair, was also influenced heavily by his mom! His mom was Anne Gorsuch. She was not a nurse. She was not a widow. She was Ronald Reagan’s choice to head the Environmental Protection Agency, where she served for two years. According to Wiki: “During her 22 months as agency head, she cut the budget of the EPA by 22%, reduced the number of cases filed against polluters, relaxed Clean Air Act regulations, and facilitated the spraying of restricted-use pesticides. She cut the total number of agency employees, and hired staff from the industries they were supposed to be regulating. Environmentalists contended that her policies were designed to placate polluters, and accused her of trying to dismantle the agency.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s parents worked in public schools, and she went to public schools. She attended Harvard and Harvard Law School and graduated magna cum laude. Her senior thesis was titled "The Hand of Oppression: Plea Bargaining Processes and the Coercion of Criminal Defendants." At the time, one of her uncles was sentenced to life in prison for a nonviolent cocaine conviction. After a couple of brief clerkships and a job at TIME magazine she decided to become a federal public defender, a government lawyer who represents the indigent; inspired by her uncle’s case, she became an expert in disparities — racial and class-based — in criminal sentencing. Her field was social justice.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, like Justice Gorsuch, went to Georgetown prep, and then to Yale, apparently as his grandfather’s legacy. Like Justices Kagan and Barrett, Kavanaugh’s dad was a lawyer, too! For two decades he was president of the Cosmetic, Toiletry and Fragrancy Association at a salary that started high and reached $5 million a year. In the elder Kavanaugh’s last years the organization spent over $600,000 on lobbyists to fight against California Senate Bill 484, which required cosmetics manufacturers to label any ingredient that is on state or federal lists of chemicals that cause cancer or birth defects. The bill passed anyway, and was signed into law by a Republican governor.

Young Kavanaugh clerked for some judges, including Ken Starr, and joined Starr’s investigation into Bill Clinton’s misadventures. It was Kavanaugh who persuaded Starr to expand the investigation to pursue the absurd conspiracy theory that Clinton lawyer Vince Foster had not committed suicide but had been murdered, allegedly on the orders of Bill and/or Hillary Clinton. After three years the investigation concluded it was a suicide. Justice Kavanaugh famously likes beer.

For one group, government was an imperfect but potentially mighty tool to improve people’s lives. For another group, government was the enemy, an annoying hindrance to what rich people want to do. One group lived life for the experience of life. The other group lived life for ambition, to protect privilege and to settle scores. These last three are the people who make up the Supreme Court supermajority today.

I don’t think I am overstating this. We are who we are, but we are also who we grew up to be. There’s a subtle distinction. This entitled aristocratic trio was excreted onto us by the guy who inherited a fortune from his slumlord father.

A few weeks ago, I published in this space a fairly harrowing accounting of my recent medical experience, and then I talked to my good friend and colleague and co-author Gina Barreca, who linked me to something she had written in Psychology Today. It is more than “fairly” harrowing. It put everything in perspective for me. It’s short. I urge you to read it. We’ll all wait right here while you do.

And now we begin your questions / anecdotes and my answers / observations. Some are in response to this shocking article about a top aide to the DC mayor who sexually harassed a young staffer. Some are medically related, but most involve my call in the Weekend Gene Pool for anecdotes from your education — anecdotes, in general, that make either you or your teachers look bad.

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Q: In eleventh grade English we had a quiz on The Scarlet Letter. Question number 3 went something like this: "Hester Prynne, Roger Chillingworth, Arthur Dimmesdale. Do the characters' names tell you anything about their personalities?" My response was, “No. People can’t help what they are named.” I tell this tale to make you aware that not all your readers are above average.

A: The above was one of my favorite stories this week about education. The next post is something completely different. I don’t know its provenance, which is awkward. It is one hell of a poem, sent in anonymously. It’s titled “University.” I have consulted with my two literary gurus (brace yourself for irony and insane coincidence), Gina Barreca, who knows everything in English, and her very much still-alive husband, Michael Meyer, author of the Bedford Introduction to Literature, who knows every poem ever written, and neither recognized this, but both admired it. So:

She left his office smiling, buttoning her shirt,
Ignoring me except to adjust her skirt.
I closed the door behind me and he said
”A shitty life among a bunch of kids
With too much money.” He took another drink.
I didn’t. His drinking made me think
I should. But I could not get past the taste
Although perhaps I wasn’t trying hard.
Not hard enough for him, at any rate.
His pupils wide. He stared at me.
“A waste,” He said, “a waste. I might have been a bard,
But then I found that whiskey barred the gate!”
He belched. “My life is shit, excepting for the case
Of sex and whiskey.” He looked at me and smiled,
“The case of whiskey.” I wished that I were wild;
I wished for half his drunken wit.
I wished I really felt that life was shit.
I wished that I could have what he had got.
Oh, I was very young, and I wished for a lot.

This is Gene: Not a perfect poem. There are a few needless rhyme and scansion inconsistencies, but it is mighty good. Whoever wrote it has real talent. If you are that person, please contact me at the regular questions button below. I don’t need to use your name, but I might have some advice for you. If you are not that person but know who wrote it — is it published, and I missed it? — please tell me the same way. Here’s the talk-to-me button:

TIMELY TIP: If you're reading this right now on an email:   Click here to get to my webpage, then click on the top headline (In this case, “Profiles Injustice … “) for my full column, and comments, and real-time questions and answers. And you can refresh and see new questions and answers that appear as I regularly update the post from about 11 to noon ET today.

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Q: When I was born in 1959, moms and babies stayed in the hospital for several days. My father had to travel for work after my birth, so his friend Wayne came to fetch the two of us. A nurse wheeled my mother to the car and kept making remarks about how much I looked like Wayne! It was simpler to just smile and skip the explanation.

A: Okay, this is unfair and too easy and no intended disrespect to your ma, a fine and saintly woman,, but, um: Maybe you DO look like Wayne ….

Q: My senior year I was editor of the college paper and spent about 60 hours a week in the newspaper office and I didn’t have time for no stinking classes. Especially Statistics for Social Science Students, which was taught in a big lecture hall on the farthest reaches of campus. The required textbook cost 100 bucks, used. Uh, no. I did manage to show up for the first few classes, and even sans textbook I scored 100 on the first test. So I got this. No need to buy the book, or hustle cross campus for the classes. The flaw in the ointment was that the first part of the class was a review of the elementary groundwork, recognizable math for sane people. The rest of it, the parts I was missing, got crazy complicated, and when I showed up for the subsequent tests I pretty much resorted to Christmas treeing the answer sheet. As a result, even with my initial 100, going into the final I had a D- average. My only chance was the final. So I shelled out the money and bought the book, scored some black beauties and stayed up two nights in a row studying. Bleary eyed on the morning of the final, with no time to spare, I funneled some coffee down my throat and raced my bike to the obscure technical sciences building that I barely remembered how to get to. Arriving to the minute of the test time printed in the course catalog, I threw my bike down and raced up the stairs into the amphitheater style lecture hall. Deserted. Silent. Chalkboard blank. It was the recurring nightmare come to life.

Turns out the change in venue for the final had been announced weeks prior. In class.

I got the grade I deserved. 

A: I can gleefully report this was submitted by my editor, Tom the Butcher. 

I’m not going to elaborate, because I have told this story more than once, but I twice took a class that I realized I never had to attend – grading was entirely based on a final term paper.  The first time I wrote a fine paper. All I had to do was deliver it.  I went to the building in which the class was taught – like Tom, a building I had never entered — and asked the first person I saw where Dr. Smith’s office was.  He said, “I am Dr. Smith.”  I, too, deserved the grade I got.

Hey, this is Gene.  Regarding the Bowser sexual harassment story, check this out!  It was just published by the NYT.  Startling similarities, but Japan is a very different place. 

Q: Did you ever remind  your high school English teacher what he had said to you? 

A: Not initially.  Or at least I hadn’t intended to.  I phoned him to reject it in person, not in a letter; I felt he deserved that.  He was very friendly, and appreciative of the call, and finally, I said, “You know, this is not the first time we talked,” and told him.  He was flabbergasted and said he cannot believe he had ever told any student that.  Then he asked me to hang on, and left the phone for a full five minutes.  When he came back, it was with my class records.   In his garage, he kept all his records from a 20-year teaching career.  He said, “I gave you an 85 for the year.”  I laughed. “I know. Solid B, in writing.”  He said, “Okay, maybe it should have been an 88.”   We hung up as friends, 20 years after the fact.

Q: Have you seen Hamilton (the musical)? If so, how has it changed your opinion of the Founding Fathers (and others from that time)?

A: Yes, it turns out they were really cool, and King George was a dickhead, and James Madison was Black!

No, it didn’t. I knew the stories pretty well, good and tarnished.

Q: How mad should we be at RBG?

A: It’s like asking if we should be mad at Jesus, or Mandela. Yeah, maybe a little, but leave us keep our perspective.

Q: On the sexual harassment article: While the supervisor's position of authority over the woman certainly means he behaved inappropriately, I must say that I believe she did, also. Her actions, texts, willingness to undress, and verbal statements as reported in the article go WAY too far. I have no sympathy for his initial come-ons to an employee. But my sympathy for her is severely impacted by her own behavior. If I were a juror in this case, based merely on the evidence presented in the article, I would vote against her lawsuit.

A: It’s not clear she is suing, I think, but several readers made exactly the argument  you are making.  He has to lose his job.  He is awful.  He took advantage of someone, and in a particularly revolting fashion.  But from a purely judicial standpoint, she has damaged her ability to make him pay by eroding her credibility – not in the sense that she is lying (she quite obviously is not or her story would be less self-abasing ) — but because there is more than a whiff of entrapment.  I am not sure I agree.

Q: Our high school sophomore English class assignment was to create a double-dactyl poem. I was pretty proud of mine, until the teacher called me over and pointed out that -- in the second line of the second stanza (which is supposed to consist of one six-syllable word) -- I had used a word I had obviously read, but had never heard pronounced: "indefatigably." Well, I showed him: I went on to win the Creative Writing Prize when I graduated. (I was especially proud of this because it wasn't something you tried out for -- in fact, I had never known there was such an award.) So obviously my use of "indefatigably" was creative, not wrong.

A: Unless it is pronounced IN-de-fa-TIG-a-bly your teacher was right, you were wrong, and you must return the award now.  Never too late to correct an injustice. 

Q: Re: Falcicchio 's victim Read without context, the woman can be seen as making some poor choices which are graphically covered in the article so I won't bother repeating. What the general public (meaning everyone other than the brilliant subscribers of the Gene Pool) wants to see is one person 100% the aggressor and the other refusing clearly 100% of the time -- no nuance, no complicated picture to put together, no need to really try to understand what the victim was feeling in making the choices she was making. But 100% of anything is not the reality, and that's certainly not to be expected in this situation. There was a massive power differential in play, making the choices she made difficult and, well, understandable if perhaps sometimes naïve under the circumstances. She had no interest in a romantic connection and wanted his attempts to stop; some of the things she tried hoping to limit/end it, to most of us and in retrospect even to her probably, only encouraged him sometimes, but I did not come away from that article at all thinking she ever intended to encourage him at all. In the end, he put her in a position where she had to make choices she should not have been forced to make, especially in juggling personal decisions against career impact. He's at fault; she's a victim. Nothing I read in that article changes that.

A: This is closer to what I think.  But it’s a mess.

Q: Your pharmacy sounds a lot like my pharmacy, down to the lying, which happens to belong to the same corporation. They’re lousy, especially compared to the grocery store pharmacy just around the corner from them that we used to use, but were forced to switch away from by our insurance provider. Not a question, just confirmation and a quiet commiseration.

A: The obvious question is, why don’t I change pharmacies. My answer is so weak I dasn’t give it. It’s basically inertia and convenience.

Q: I took a class in college taught by a young TA. In an essay on learning styles, I wrote that some people take in information best “aurally.” The teacher corrected it to “orally.” I had a solid A going; I did not argue. But I also didn’t try very hard after that.

A: See next. 

Q: I had a coach who taught social studies in high school. He pronounced everything incorrectly but would "correct" students who used the right pronunciation. Some I remember were Joe-han Gutenberg, gilly-o-teen for guillotine, and Ring of Terror for Reign of Terror. The Gutenberg one I talked to him about, and I stated I had German heritage and knew for a fact it was pronounced Yo-han. He nodded along with me and thanked me for talking to him about it and continued to say Joe-han for the rest of that unit of the book.

A: I had a social studies teacher whose two favorite words were “tenet” and “forte.”  He pronounced them “tenant” and “for-TAY.”   I never said nothin’.

Q: In my high school US History class, we had to do a team project centered around the time between the World Wars. I, of course, chose to work with my best friend. As we were both AV geeks, we proposed, creating a radio broadcast with the news of the day. Think, "Good evening, Mr. & Mrs. America and all the ships at sea. Flash..." Being AV geeks, we could use what meager recoding equipment the school had. Miraculously, the project was accepted. This was, by the way, the equivalent of a modern Advanced U.S. History class. We. of course, waited until the night before it was due to start. We were in my friend's bedroom, and every time we tried to start, one of one us would just bust out laughing. At 9:00pm, his mother kicked me out because we keeping his younger siblings awake. SA I left he said, don't worry, I'll take care of it. The next morning I asked him about it. He said "don't worry, I took care of it." I asked where it was so I could hear it. He said he already turned it in. A few weeks later we're getting the grade and the teacher calls us up to her desk and shows us a "C" and says, I only passed you because you made me laugh. Now, being in South Jersey we were well aware that one of (if not the first) Drive-in Theater opened in South Jersey around that time period. My friend did a little radio bit about the opening of the drive-in theater, and then recorded THE ENTIRE SIDE OF THE CHEECH AND CHONG ALBUM ABOUT SNEAKING INTO THE DRIVE-IN! The WHOLE thing.

A: “Did you get something?  Yeah, but I don’t think I’ll be able to open up the trunk with it.”

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Q: You called Justice Barrett a religious nut.  Harsh much?  

A: She has been a long-time ardent member of a Catholic sect that believes, as a founding principle, that women must be subservient to men, and obey them.  That is nutcakery.   

Q: In high school, I felt that my primary responsibility was to make people laugh. One day I told the "kangaroo joke"--out loud, to the entire class. The joke makes no sense (Two kangaroos are in the bathtub. One says, "Pass the soap," and the other kangaroo responds, "No soap. Radio."), but the idea is that when everyone laughs, the one person--in this case, the teacher--feels left out and so laughs, too, without any reason. Well, the teacher didn't like this and sent me to the principal's office. As a result, I didn't get to take a test, got a C as a final grade in the class, and missed being in the National Honors Society by a tenth of a point. Still, it's a good story.

A: I am publishing this because it is the first time I ever got a coherent explanation of “No soap, radio.”  It is apparently a prank on one person by at least two others.  Never knew it. 

Q: A week or so ago you wrote that your ear was so numb that someone could drill into your ear with a masonry bit and wouldn’t wake up.  That’s a lie unless your ear itself was not functioning.  Drills are loud.

 A: The drill I had in mind was hand-cranked.  I am never wrong about anything.  

Q: Since you didn't specify whether "First dirty joke I ever heard" should go by when I heard it or when it was invented, I will now tell the first joke ever, written on a Babylonian tablet in cuneiform in 1900 BC. "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap." See, fart humor is the oldest kind of humor, we now have proof. There is also a 3,500 year old tablet that included the riddle "…of your mother is by the one who has intercourse with her. What/who is it?"" but alas, it was so worn down that we don't know the answer. I suggest when time travel is invented, you travel back in time 3,500 years and ask the Babylonian schoolboy who wrote it.

A: I presented that fart joke in my chat years ago, to make exactly that point.   Farts are the earliest joke, delivered by God Himself. However your second partial joke is intriguing.  Can anyone complete the joke?   I can’t.  Props if you can.

Q: Two teaching horror stories, if those count: One, I was a novice teacher (many eons ago) and feeling pretty good about how I was doing in a particular class. At one point, carried away by my own self-apparent excellence I made an overly enthusiastic gesture and all of a sudden felt an alarmingly free and breeezy sensation. After a second or two I realized that my front-closure bra had spontaneously opened. I spent the rest of the class trying to write on the board and conduct discussion without moving. Not sure what this could have looked like from the students' point of view. Since then I've only worn back-closure bras and they've never let me down (as it were). Two, in a similar sartorial-mishap vein: one sweltering late August beginning of the semester a few years later I foolhardily wore a pair of thin cotton pants to keep cool in an un-airconditioned classroom. Again at some point during class something felt odd but I kept on trying to impart knowledge and push back the borders of ignorance. In the bathroom afterwards I discovered that the entire back seam of my pants had given way sometime during the class. Not sure how the students managed not to react in any discernible (by me) way, but I'm sure glad this happened long before cellphone cameras and social media. Since then I have gained age and wisdom and girth and wear sturdier clothing to class.

A: Teacher anecdotes count.  Thank you.   I am not an expert in bra dynamics; can anyone enlighten me as to what the outward evidence of a popped bra would look like, under (presumably) a shirt or blouse?  Or why not moving much would help?  Would the problem really be evident? 

Q: Falcicchio was the criminal. The woman, who had been placed in an untenable situation, perhaps made mistakes but in no way did she wrong him, only herself. (Please keep my name out of the following.) I had a situation, a long, long time ago in which a college professor of mine forced herself on me. My situation was nothing as bad as this, I don’t want to claim any kind of victimhood to that degree, but I can say definitively that when it happens it’s a complete and total mindfuck and while we can sit back later and objectively point out where the accuser may have erred, I cannot judge her for anything she may have said or done in the panic and confusion and uncertainty that he caused her.

A: Again, this is closer to my feelings about this.  Being a juror in a lawsuit would be an interesting epistemological mind-experiment.

Q: My first semester of college, I took a “science for non-science majors” class. We were learning about how different cultures use plants. The professor wrote on the blackboard: “A woman, a dog, and a walnut tree. The more you beat them, the better they’ll be.” This was the mid-1990s. I was young and afraid and sat there in stunned silence. I remember reading a couple years later in the student newspaper that someone had complained (he apparently did this every year), and he argued that his First Amendment rights were being violated.

A: Whoa, does this bring back a memory.  One day in the mid-60s my father came back from the office with a joke:  My father was a good guy, a gentle, decent man.  His joke:  “What’s the difference between a drum, a wife, and sex?”  “You can beat a drum and you can beat a wife, but you can’t beat sex.”  (Later, I realized he had, with delicacy, substituted “sex” for “a blow job,” which was not as good, joke-wise.)   We were kind of all savages back then.

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Q: Back in the early 80s, I was an Air Force Officer enrolled in the University of Southern California's Masters of Science in Systems Management Program. This was on Oahu, Hawaii on an extension campus for us military officers. (USC was chasing the GI Bill money.) I liked all of my instructors, but one turned out to be a real character. The class itself was okay, and he gave us the final exam. Weeks went by.... Finally I was contacted by a USC staffer; it turned out that our instructor, having been denied tenure, decided to hold our grades hostage. USC didn't cave in to his demands; instead, they assigned another instructor to give us our final exam and course grades. That was wild. – Cheryl

A: Wow.  To paraphrase a famous observation: Academic extortion is the cheesiest form of extortion, because the stakes are so low… 

Q: I was always a straight A student, magna cum laude, etc. Until I got to law school, where I hit a brick wall. I just didn't get right away what law school was about, what the professors were looking for. By the time I figured it out, it was too late. My experience is best captured by an exchange I had with my Civil Procedure professor at the end of my first semester. In law school, there is one exam at the end of the semester per class -- that's the entire grade. I got a solid C on my CP exam. When I went to talk to my professor, she was very kind. She said that my essay was one of the best- written exams she'd ever read. It was thoughtful and cogent, and she couldn't believe I'd been able to write so well off-the-cuff in a high pressure exam situation. However, and I quote, "It's a shame you don't know what you're talking about."

A: My second experience in a class I never had to attend: It was a philosophy class where grades were given entirely  based on a final term paper.  I wrote something excellent, examining a question of perception as a Socratic dialogue, between Socrates and a blind man.  The professor gave me a C, on the grounds that the paper was a delightful masterpiece but had absolutely nothing to do with anything taught in the class, envisioned by the class, and in fact violated a central precept of philosophy, as taught by the professor.  

Q: My private middle school in the early 1980s was really scraping the bottom of the barrel for science teachers. I remember word for word one of his extra credit questions (that obviously had nothing to do with science whatsoever): "What does the letters OJ stand for in OJ Simpson's name stand for?" Not being a football fan, I didn't know. This was before his name was splashed all over the news. I hear that that same teacher got fired a few years later for going crazy and, in a diabetic fit, climbing the bookshelves in the classroom. But that's just hearsay.

A: Thank you. 

Q: Regarding your paper on Thoreau, which you tragically spelled Thorough throughout, maybe you should have told the teacher that you thought he or she would have appreciated a little more Thoroughness. -Ted Dreyer

A: Also, thank you.

Q: Why are so many SCOTUS members graduates of Harvard or Yale? Isn’t such exclusivity typically bad?

A: It’s a self-perpetuating mess. The most brilliant and nakedly ambitious students feel they HAVE to go to Harvard or Yale to have a shot at the top-dog jobs, particularly SCOTUS.

Hey, this is Gene. I’m calling us down. Very high participation given what day it is. I thank you all for that. PLEASE keep sending in questions by punching this orange button. I will answer many of them on Thursday, in the Invitational Gene Pool.