Foxy Grandpa

In the short story "Welcome to the Monkeyhouse," Kurt Vonnegut envisions a world in which senility, death and (mostly) aging have been cured--leaving a huge population explosion, which society tries to deal with by staffing "Suicide Parlors" with beautiful "hostesses" who try to cajole the elderly into ending it all. A particularly troublesome type of customer for the hostesses is the "foxy grandpa":

A foxy grandpa was any kind of old man, cute and senile, who quibbled, and joked, and reminisced for hours before he let a Hostess put him to sleep.

So does anybody remember the days when Antonin Scalia was an ornament of the Supreme Court? No, probably not; Bush v. Gore was a dozen years ago, and Scalia's days as a supporter of free speech for thought he hated are a quarter century ago. We mostly know Scalia nowadays as the guy who is willing to scrag the Supremacy Clause and whine about reading the statute at issue before him.

But this may just be the moment when Scalia crosses the line into Foxy Grandpa-dom:



Did you follow this? It's not a "politicized" Court; it's just that the Democratic-appointed justices follow their party's shoddy principles, why we Republicans nobly stick to the text.

Got it.

(Fun fact about the silent, nodding figure on the panel with Scalia, his co-author Bryan Garner, himself the author of a reasonably good manual of legal style called by him The Redbook in a doomed effort to displace the ubiquitous Bluebook? If you take all three of his seminars or book him to speak at your law firm, you can win a Bryan Garner bobble head! Why you would want one, of course, is a question for you and the therapist of your choice. Still Scalia takes his everywhere, even TV appearances...)