...so why not waste even more time? OK, here we go:

I was sort of disappointed that the Hollywood Reporter didn't let TV columnist Ray Richmond call his new blog Who? Ray For H'wd! But Past Deadline is also an excellent name, even though it would have been more appropriate, given her history, for Nikki Finke. (But maybe Missed Deadline is still available.)

My dad turned 77 yesterday and my sister came over for his birthday. I picked up the birthday cupcakes at Gelson's because I don't share her tolerance for second-rate food, and she is partial to the cheap-o crap at Ralphs.

"Oh, right, I forgot about how you can't have anything like that going down your royal gullet," she snapped, "you get scar tissue." After dinner we watched the Showtime resurrection "Liza with a Z" and danced around with Liza during the finale, miming all those grisly hand gestures. (Question: Is it actually possible to watch "Liza with a Z" and not do this?) By that time our dad had gone to bed, though. We felt it unfair to subject him to Liza Minelli on his birthday, as I remember when "Cabaret" came out he said he liked her about as much as ground glass on his food.

NRO worked Maia's blog posts about last week's school lockdown into a piece today.

Poor Lewis has been under the weather with stomach problems but refuses to tell me exactly what's wrong. I went down the list of all the obvious things but he said no, no, it wasn't that, so I had to keep guessing:

"Aliens shooting out of your ass?"

"No..."

"Syphilis?"

"I did go to the drugstore to ask for a tube of Syphilis-B-Gone, but they said it wouldn't work in my case."

He's a big liar though so I think I did guess the reason but he won't admit it.

I have become a regular reader of Lewis's brother Barry's blog of life among the cube dwellers.  Today Barry writes about his back-to-school jitters (at UCLA Extension); the other day he wrote about his latest shopping spree:

I bought some new clothes today. One pair of jeans and one pair of pants. I guess the jeans are pants too, if you want to get technical. How about one pair of jeans and one pair of 300 thread count grey cotton twill trousers? I guess the jeans are trousers too. I digress. If my pantalon shopping doesn't interest you, maybe the fact that the jeans came with earplugs will. Still not interested? How about the fact that I have the ear plugs in right now as I type this?

It is such a weird feeling, not being able to hear. I am sitting on the couch in a very peaceful silence. My apartment could be burglarized as we speak and as long as the bandit didn't walk in front of me I would have no clue. Okay, now I freaked out. These things must leave my ears immediately. Why did my pants come with them anyway?

Someone commented: "They come with earplugs so that you won't hear me calling you a homo for telling me your pant's threadcount."

Time for a trip-down-memory-lane/it's-a-funny-old-small-world-dept: A regular NRO reader emailed yesterday to say that he'd never clicked over to my blog before (I guess  "Pepper Dennis" just brings in a whole new demographic), but that, re Maia's college acceptance:

I attended UC San Diego many years ago after failing to gain admittance to my father’s more prestigious alma mater in Cambridge, MA. The first time Dad visited my surfside sophomore apartment on 25th St. in Del Mar, he said “Geez, I thought it was a big deal when I got into Adams House… F*ck Harvard.”  In a Posting further along, you write “…that's the difference between Andover and Los Alamitos High School…” I’m not sure the context, but that provides a further amusing confluence of circumstances for a second note of commentary, as I attended Andover in the 70’s during which time my Dad was a Cmdr. at NAS Los Alamitos, the culmination of an evolution first begun in NROTC at Harvard many years previous. The point I’m getting to, albeit in painfully dilatory fashion, is that, as you noted (and I was pleased to read), UCSD now has three ROTC programs, whereas Harvard shamefully caved to the Strike rioters and dismantled theirs in the 60’s.

The mention of the old Los Alamitos Naval Air Station brings back nostalgic memories of my own, because  I spent many pleasant hours, when I was about 8 or 9 years old, climbing over the barbed wire fence with the kids across the street and running happily around the air field until the spoilsport men in uniforms yelled at us to get the hell out. What I could never figure out at the time was why barbed wire was supposed to be some sort of impediment. If they don't want us to climb over, I kept wondering, why do they leave exactly the width of our hands and feet between the barbs?

My correspondent also mentioned he was at Andover with Newsweek's Jonathan Alter, and coincidentally my stepfather's daughter is married to Jonathan's younger brother Harrison. Years ago I gave Harrison a very hard time at some family dinner after he began complaining about a magazine article he'd read by a divorced woman wishing she got more child support; he expected me to agree with him that her point of view was wrong and anti-feminist, and then of course we were off and running.  

"The Flying Nun" wins, of course, with some help from "Gidget." From this week's National Review column:

Wretched as Pepper Dennis is, it serves as a useful guide to various unexamined messages and wish fulfillment fantasies pop culture sends to girls in 2006. You can see how radically these have changed over four decades by checking out the old Sally Field TV comedies Gidget and The Flying Nun, both of which were just released on DVD last month. These strangely delightful shows are just as corny as I remember, as well as even weirder.

Why did Gidget, who had two parents in the novel and movie, have no mother in the TV series? Evidently so she could have her father all to herself, just like all those Shirley Temple heroines, and in one episode they actually even sort of address this. Gidget was cancelled after just a year (not enough surfing, too much quality time with Dad, I'd say.) So 19-year-old Sally Field became The Flying Nun, who because she only weighed 98 pounds was regularly carried aloft by that wing-shaped hat and the winds of Puerto Rico. Mother Superior didn't like it, but still, Sister Bertrille just kept soaring away, regularly dropping in on Carlos the playboy casino owner and hitting him up for money whenever the convent needed new plumbing or something.

My sister and I found The Flying Nun absolutely riveting when we were small, and now I can see why: its connected themes are anorexia and the power of adolescent ecstasy, which in the show disapproving adults can only partially suppress. You don't need to be a compulsive dieter to understand the magical notion of impossible skinniness connected to superpowers. The Flying Nun was no more inane than Pepper Dennis and probably only superficially more wholesome, but I think there's a reason it ran for years and odds are the WB show won't.

I guess I shouldn't have been surprised to find some Internet fan fiction imagining a Harelquin romance ending to "The Flying Nun," in which Sister Bertrille and Carlos finally get together. I didn't think that would fit into the NRO piece, though. But even the fan fiction was better than "Pepper Dennis," which premieres tonight.

I think my L.A. Times op-ed last week, about how Maia got into UC San Diego despite our ignoring guidance counselor advice not to skip 12th-grade etc., was pretty mild-mannered, all things considered. But I won't pretend I was surprised that many people took offense, especially those high-anxiety type parents on College Confidential. I guess they detected, just beneath the surface, my usual impatience with officious blowhards and took it personally.

But I can't imagine why anyone's feathers were ruffled by the piece it was packaged with, an op-ed by Times editorial writer Karin Klein about her alarm at the ferocious pressure her 15-year-old son will be under if he hopes to get into a highly selective college. Klein didn't really argue against the prospect of homework until 2 a.m. every night; she just wondered if this is necessarily a great situation for kids, that maybe they should have time to spend at the beach with their friends.

And yet, a few days ago, Klein's piece moved one Kathi Smith of Ojai to write the Times:

The college track is made up of an assortment of interesting classes that explain the world to youngsters: history, calculus, physics, literature, writing, foreign languages and cultures, art and music. My daughter told me that when she signed up for her first Advanced Placement courses in 10th grade, she wanted to learn "everything in the world." She also was a four-year cross-country runner. Between six periods of high school and three hours of cross-country practice every day, she was spending loads of time with other teens.
 
If Klein's son is not one of those who wants to learn "everything in the world," I can assure her that he should not be forced to and that there are plenty of teens out there who are working on it. My daughter goes to college in Palo Alto with a whole bunch of their big brothers and sisters.

I share this letter with you because I kept reading it over and over in fascination,  as it just may be the single most insufferable letter I've ever seen printed in a newspaper --  from the "I can assure her," to "college in Palo Alto," to "big brothers and sisters." Kathi Smith of Ojai's cross-country-running daughter may be fleet  indeed, but I'll bet when her high-school classmates' parents saw Mom Smith approaching, they broke speed records of their own racing off in the opposite direction.  

As I mentioned the other day, Maia and I only argue about facts, not emotional stuff like most teenage girls and their moms. Saturday we were having coffee at the Silver Lake Farmers Market and Maia insisted that a shopper there sporting big biceps, a flat chest, narrow hips and a mohawk was a woman. Why she imagined this I have no idea. Also, she kept insisting that a cat on a leash there she'd gone over to pet was a male.

"No way is that person a woman," I said. "And the cat has to be female, because it's calico."

"But its name is Rusty!"

"Rusty can be a girl's name."

"But it has a big penis!"

Now she was just being ridiculous, because cat penises are not exactly easy to see under all that fur, and in any case they're never big.

"What are you now -- a cat urologist?"

"April Fools!"

Speaking of which, you'd think commenter LYT could have told me about this, but NO-O-O-O, I guess he was scared, so I had to find out via L.A. Observed.

Today I went for an early morning walk and saw a small hawk on top of a telephone pole, tearing strips off a mouse and eating it. That was pretty interesting, although I felt bad for the mouse.

I'm going to be on an L.A. Times Festival of Books panel about the media and free speech, moderated by my friend Karen Grigsby Bates of NPR's "Day to Day," Sunday, Apr. 30. The other panelists are Arianna Huffington, Jules Witcover and Chris Mooney.  I'm the only rightwinger (surprise, surprise) but will have full access to that spread in the greenroom!

Yesterday I asked Maia why she thought her old private school seems to send less kids to top colleges than her current public one.

"Blue collar parents with money," she said.

True, that's basically the old school's demographic, and maybe also why she didn't always fit in so well there. She spent a lot of time playing Korean card games with the international exchange students in the lobby. But just what did she mean by that?

"At the old school, a lot of kids said it didn't matter where they went to college, since they could always go into the family business. At Marshall, there's more first-generation immigrants, and they say they want a good education so they can make more money than their parents."

***

Weekend update: Speaking of Arianna, commenter Gaius Arbo has a funny post on George Clooney's new movie, "Syriantarctica," co-starring Mrs. Huffington and some penguins.  

Rob Long only ever yells at me about two things: (1) When I say I actually didn't mind AFTRA forcing us to pay that $1500 initiation fee, because I know that otherwise CNBC  never would have coughed up $577 every time we appeared on Dennis Miller; and (2) When I suggest he check out my comments section, which he always describes as "a swamp."  I guess I just enjoy the hoi polloi more than he does (thus my union sympathies), but I'll refrain from going on about that's the difference between Andover and Los Alamitos High School, lest Andrew Breitbart (of Brentwood) and Lewis Fein (of Fancyville, N.J.) start trading snipes about me and Matt Welch again.  

But I have to say, many of yesterday's comments, about the reaction  to my L.A. Times piece about Maia's getting into UC San Diego despite ignoring advice not to skip 12th-grade, were really pretty good. Like this one from RPC:

An old newspaper colleague who had spent a little time as a high school teacher always swore that the only pre-requisite to becoming a guidance counselor was a deep hatred of kids. I never saw any reason to disagree.

But my favorite is from Harriet Wrath, about the disapproval my piece elicited from some College Confidential discussion board frequenters:

I believe the hardcore CC parents keep ranting about this because Cathy's column represents an alternative that scares the crap out of them, i.e.: What if you don't devote your entire life to agonizing over your child's education -- and THINGS TURN OUT OKAY.

When I started grad school this fall, there were parents in every line I stood in --registration, financial aid, ID photos. Sometimes just holding a spot, but often doing all the forms, etc. Seriously. STEP AWAY FROM THE KID.

I appreciate, by the way, those commenters who piled on angry Cal, who resented my "placid enjoyment" that Maia got in to UCSD considering her "extremely unimpressive" test scores and grades. But the truth is I rather enjoy (if not always placidly) people like that. I mean, what's Groucho without Margaret Dumont?  And how can I not get a kick out of a guy who last year compared me to Hanoi Jane Fonda?

I'm afraid that Cal and his ilk (he contributes to Football Fans for Truth) will be even more miffed to learn that Maia's high-school resume included not one team sport. You don't know how grateful I am that her lack of interest there saved me untold hours of boring chauffering and pretend cheering. Oh, I know, I know -- girls should be encouraged to play sports so they won't be anorexic or obsess that boys don't find them attractive, etc. But I say it's P.E., and I say the hell with it.    

So you can imagine I was just as amused to find that, on the opposite side of the political spectrum from Cal and friends, Sadly, No! disliked my op-ed because my "soccer mom mendacities regularly pollute the L.A. Times." Soccer mom? Happily, no.

All this reminds me that this week education blogger and journalist Joanne Jacobs has organized a blogburst to buy her excellent new book "Our School: The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea, and the School That Beat the Odds" and since March 31 is her birthday, that would be a nice day to send it shooting up those Amazon rankings. I've read "Our School" and will write more about it here later. In the meantime, just know that Joanne makes a fine and moving case that charter schools can serve a far more important function than allowing limousine liberals like Lawrence O'Donnell to imagine that they're ordinary public school parents -- these schools can also rescue failing kids from a failing system. ("Our School" is also something of a page-turner -- Maia stayed up until 2 a.m. reading it.)

Joanne addresses those parents who were shocked at my writing about Maia here. And my stepfather, who just called, wants everyone to know he thinks the very notion of ultra-high grades and test scores is "full of crap," along with the idea that Maia should consider consider herself at all lucky to get into UCSD. "They should have let her into UCLA and anywhere else she wanted to go!" he yelled. "Just tell them the old man thinks they're all full of crap." It's funny, because "full of crap" is his favorite expression, but normally he uses it about me.  

***

Note to those who have emailed about my "graciousness": Oh hell yes Cal gets a link. That's the least I can do after he jumped in my barrel and swam around in it like that.  

I was surprised to learn how many of those College Confidential parents disapproved of far more than Maia's beginning college instead of 12th grade next year. Some thought she was uppity for expecting to get into any UC except maybe Riverside or Merced — although, as one of the reasonable commenters noted, since Maia was indeed accepted to UC San Diego her hopes couldn't have been that unrealistic.

Others accused me of being naive, or "gaming" the system — presumably by raising a daughter who unfairly impressed admissions officers with all those after-school college Russian classes. And one wondered what can you expect anyway from a mom who writes for National Review Online, which everyone knows is located near Dante's sixth circle of hell.

Speaking of that, here's an excerpt from today's column:

The school’s head, though, Mr. S., kept insisting he knew best. He argued that Maia needed another year to raise her grades by taking more AP classes. Now, unlike me at that age, she is always deferential and soft-spoken with adults, but she also has a peculiar ability to politely drive them up the wall. One technique is responding to annoying questions with endless deadpan questions of her own.

For instance, one afternoon during our battle with the school about graduating early, Mr. S put his foot up on the bench where Maia was sitting reading some Russian novel and announced, “So, here’s a hypothetical: Who do you think has a better chance getting into Harvard — someone with a 3.4 GPA or a 4.0 GPA?”

“That depends, Mr. S.,” said Maia, whose GPA then was around 3.4. “What if the person with the 3.4 GPA has a lot of extracurricular activities and the person with the 4.0 doesn’t?”

“Let’s say they both have a lot of extracurricular activities.”

“But what if the person with the 3.4 GPA wants to major in Russian and schools don’t get many applicants wanting to major in that?”

“Maia, just answer the question! Who has a better chance?”

“But there’s too many variables, and why would a person with a 3.4 GPA apply to Harvard in the first place?”

She told me later, “Just because he used to be a lawyer he wanted me to be an expert witness or something, and I don’t see why I should unless he paid me.” She was a little unclear on that concept, obviously, but in any case the exasperated Mr. S eventually gave up.

He only gave up that particular argument, though, not trying to convince us to stay at his school. Bizarrely, he didn't give up that even after the decision had been made. I'd thought he would have realized how firm I was about this after I began refusing to even acknowledge the notion Maia would be graduating "early."

"Dear Mr. S," I emailed him, a month before Maia finished 10th grade. "After much thought, I now agree with you, so Maia will not graduate early from your school next year."

"Instead, she'll graduate on time -- from Marshall High, where she begins her senior year in September."

Alas, my carefully crafted two-paragraph sucker punch was for nought, as I found out later the school's email system was down when I sent it. So he learned the news less dramatically.

But Maia and I had many discussions about good old Mr. S. Unlike many mothers and teenage daughters, we don't get into emotional arguments, but we do often disagree about perceptions of fact -- like whether Dean's hair on "Gilmore Girls" was dark blonde or light brown, for instance. Maia always insisted that Mr. S., who I think looked like George Segal, was the spitting image of Tony Randall.

I eventually gave up trying to persuade her about that one, but I did have to put my foot down regarding her notion that Mr. S. might be Jewish just because he looked like Tony Randall. (Or George Segal.)

"No way is that man Jewish," I snapped one day, after Mr. S., shocked that Maia actually would be switching to public high school rather than staying through 12th grade at his, left repeated voice mail messages trying to get me to change my mind.

"Why not?"

"Because he was truly surprised that we didn't do what he wanted us to do. Obviously he didn't grow up around Jewish women."

Maia gets out of Marshall High at 12:30 p.m., so on the days when she doesn't go to L.A. City College for her Russian classes we sometimes meet for lunch at a cafe on Hyperion before going home. Not possible today, since all L.A. public high-schools are on lockdown until 3:30 p.m. because of the anti-anti-illegal immigration protests. Above is a picture of that Emmanuelle took yesterday morning, on our Silver Lake end of Sunset Blvd. Westsiders were relieved that the protests didn't snarl up traffic near the Federal Building where they live. But as Emmanuelle -- who's had enough trouble dealing with the bureaucracy there as a legal immigrant -- noted, "I think the last place illegals would want to be is the Federal building."  

Yesterday Maia showed me this parents' discussion thread at the frighteningly addictive website College Confidential, about my L.A. Times op-ed the other day, in which I discussed how Maia was rejected from UC Santa Barbara and UCLA but accepted at UC San Diego. Many (but not all) commenters there disapproved heartily of both of us. But one -- I presume some boy dropping in on all the parental sniping about a girl who got into UCSD despite less than stellar grades -- said forget all that, what does this Maia chick look like anyway?

Here's her favorite picture of herself, taken last summer at Washington & Lee's program for high-schoolers:



She had a great time there and enjoyed the South. But she also realized she's probably better off going to college here. In Virginia she felt a bit odd being surrounded by white people all the time.

And this is my favorite picture, taken a couple of years ago -- just as Maia was beginning her after-school college Russian classes -- by our friend Robert Avrech, an orthodox Jew and screenwriter:



Many of the College Confidential commenters seemed annoyed that Maia did not take the usual path to college and ignored advice not to skip 12th grade. Robert's path has been unusual too. Not everyone would expect a Yeshiva boy, regularly slapped around by his principal for unimpressive grades, to grow up to be so successful in Hollywood. Robert wrote "A Stranger Among Us," the 1992 movie about detective Melanie Griffith investigating murder among Brooklyn's orthodox Jews, as well as "Body Double" (also starring Melanie Griffith), the sexy 1984 Brian De Palma thriller, which I don't think he's let his children see yet.

We had a great time at the wedding of Robert's oldest daughter a couple of weeks ago, with about 300 guests and more food than I've ever seen at a wedding in my life. The men circle-danced with their hats on fire, wearing Dodgers shirts, and even all the way up the escalators.