Miller Center Summer Institute

Back home now. Was in NY, at Columbia Law School, for Tikva-Hertog.

And then in Pasadena, for Miller Center. Amazing students, in both cases. Scary smart people, really interesting and accomplished.

There is a tradition (blame the Admiral, I expect) of "toasting" at the Miller Center.

These can get a bit rococo. But, in this case, even more. It was... It was.... well, I have pictures.

I did my usual shy, balanced, fair-minded discussion, in two lectures. Okay, actually, I was pretty tired, and I went full-out teller of ungentle truths, "you maggots need to get to work, nobody likes you anyway, you all suck!" on them.

At the dinner on Thursday night, the toast took the form of a male maenad (if you can be a male maenad; is that a "gonad," perhaps?), a frenzied follower of Bacchus.

He mounted the stage, which was a table. Now, this particular gonad was not a small gonad. So there was some question whether the table would be able to do its job here, adding dramatic tension.

Then, the gonad held forth, in quite an impressive Shakespearean form, about my outrages and errors of the previous day. The list was long (and, I should add, quite accurate).
We, as the British say, fell about. Well played, young gonad.

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(Thanks for DS for the pix)