Sago Boulevard

It is time to lay Sago Boulevard to rest. Thank you to all who commented here, debated with me on their blogs, linked to me, and otherwise made my blogging experience enjoyable and stimulating.

Goodbye.

Phil Rizzuto, the Hall of Fame Yankees shortstop, passed away today at age 89. He won 9 pennants and 7 World Series Championships with the Yankees between 1941 and ‘55. See here for his baseball statistics.

Holy Cow.

I watched Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a movie I hadn’t seen in years, on HBO last night. I had forgotten just how great it is. First of all, the premise of blending animated, ink-and-paint cartoon characters with flesh-and-blood live actors is amusing. Having grown up with Looney Tunes, I appreciate the tribute it pays to the cartoon industry and its most famous characters. The plot is a clever spoof of hard-boiled American crime fiction. The dialogue, especially between the live actors and cartoon-characters, is witty and hilarious.

The best movies are the ones that are both fun to watch and interesting to think about afterwards. Who Framed Roger Rabbit definitely qualifies in my book.

The “Links” page has been updated.

A boy named Max Hell is having trouble getting into an Australian Catholic School (via Maverick Philosopher).

Mr Hell said he initially decided to enrol Max at the school under his wife’s maiden name, to avoid the ridicule he himself had suffered as a schoolboy.

The decision won the support of the school’s head teacher and parish priest, he said.

But at the last minute, he and his wife decided against the name change.

Mr Hell claimed the priest refused to accept his son as Hell, and was told by the school’s head he had “made a rod for your son’s back”.

“It’s Hell. That’s our name, it’s our heritage,” Mr Hell told The Age newspaper. “It’s who he is, and if he wants to change his name at 18 then that’s up to him.”

For my uncultured readers, the title is a reference to Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue.”

The Yankees have been an incredibly frustrating team to follow over the past 6 seasons. It’s one thing to watch your team rebuilding but it’s quite another to watch an All-Star team falter in the post-season year after year. Hopefully this year will be different but I also thought last year would be different, and the year before that. In an effort to figure out why the Bombers keep on losing in the post-season, I decided to look at the great Yankee teams of late 90s (’96-’00) and what I found was puzzling. The Yankee teams of ‘01-’06 were considerably better, at least statistically, than the teams of ‘96-’00. From ‘96 to ‘00, the Yankees’ winning percentage was .601, an average of 97 wins per season. From ‘01 to ‘06, their winning percentage was .609, an average of 98.67 wins per season. In fact, the worst Yankee team of the past decade was the 2000 team (87-74), which won the World Series. The championship team of ‘96 won only 92 games and the Yankees have won more games than that in every season since 2001!

I can’t figure it out. What is it that made the Yankees better in the regular season and worse in the playoffs? And I’m not interested in any theories of the “Yankees suck” variety. I want serious answers. Anyone?

In the controversy surrounding Bonds’ steroid use, the best his supporters can do it invoke the legal principle of “innocent until proven guilty.” The problem is that the baseball diamond isn’t a court of law.

According to an espn.com article, “On the subject of Bonds, most Hall of Famers take the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ line in public. ” Robin Yount said, “Until somebody tells me for sure that this guy had some ‘artificial help,’ I won’t hold it against him.” Tom Seaver declared himself to be “one of those people who believes you’re innocent until you’re proven guilty” when asked about Bonds. Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig recently announced that he would be there when Bonds hits number 756 “[o]ut of respect for the tradition of this game, the magnitude of the record, and the fact that all citizens in this country are innocent until proven guilty.”

In American law, we presume innocence until guilt is proven and for good reason. Before the government deprives an individual of a his basic freedoms, it ought to afford the accused every reasonable chance to exonerate himself. The law rightly considers a mistaken conviction to be far worse than a mistaken acquittal and this important value is codified in the 5th and 6th Amendments to the United States Constitution.

But we’re talking about baseball. If Bonds were on trial for drug use, the law would offer him the presumption of innocence that all defendants deserve. At issue here, though, is whether the baseball record books or the Hall of Fame should treat Bonds as a cheater. Since nobody is in danger of losing his life or his basic freedoms, I don’t see why the situation calls for the beyond-all-reasonable-doubt standard of criminal court. Simply put, it’s far more likely than not that Bonds used illegal steroids. There is considerable circumstantial evidence that he did, i.e. he first began hitting 45+ home runs at age 35. Bonds also had ample opportunity to vindicate himself by volunteering for drug testing when rumors started circulating. Again, he had a legal right to refrain from testing and if we were in a court of law, his exercising of that right could not be held against him. But we’re on the baseball diamond, not a court of law. And from out here, there’s more than enough evidence to convict Bonds.

I intended to respond to Noah Feldman’s diatribe against his alma mater and Modern Orthodoxy in general. Most of what I wanted to say, though, has been said already and said well. See Chana’s terrific breakdown of Feldman’s rhetorical sleight of hand, Gil Student’s post, Rabbi Carmy’s article in Kol Hamevaser, and Gary Rosenblatt’s editorial in the Jewish Week.

The “About Me” page has been updated.

William Lobdell, a reporter who covered the “religion beat” for the LA Times, writes about how the stories he covered influenced his personal religious journey and how they eventually turned him away from Christianity (via Jill). The article’s well-written and I appreciate his candor in discussing what originally drew him to religion and the kind of theological questions that ultimately led him to reject it. (more…)

The Supreme Court has moved to the right but the sky isn’t falling just yet. Jan Crawford Greenburg nicely distinguishes Kathleen Sullivan’s critique of the Roberts Court from some of the more hysterical, “tabloid-style, Jerry Springer-esque” reactions (via Keith Burgess-Jackson).

I’ve been meaning to purchase Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’s recently published prayerbook. So far, I like everything I hear about it (read: what Gil Student writes about it). The conventional translation of the first verse of the Shema begins with “Hear O Israel.” R. Sacks translates it as “Listen, Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is one.” Rabbi Gil has been kind enough to quote from R. Sacks’s explanation of the translation choice.

Shema means not only to “hear” but also “to listen, understand, internalise, respond and obey.” It is translated here as “Listen” because listening is active, while hearing is passive. This, the most famous line of Jewish prayer, is a call to action on the part of the mind, emotion and will. It asks us to reflect on, strive to understand, and to affirm the unity of God. God speaks in a “still, small voice”, and to serve Him is to listen with the totality of our being.

Secular terms for understanding are permeated with visual images. We speak of insight, foresight, vision, observation, perspective; when we understand, we say “I see”. Judaism, with its belief in an invisible, transcendent God, is a culture of the ear, not the eye. The patriarchs and prophets did not see God; they heard Him. To emphasie the non-visual nature of Jewish belief, it is our custom to cover our eyes as we say these words.

R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, pp. 74-75:

The emotion of fear, the sense of lowliness, the melancholy so typical of homo religious, self-negation, constant self-appraisal, the consciousness of sin, self-lacerating torments, etc, etc constituted the primary features of the movement’s spiritual profile in its early years. . . . The halakhic men of Brisk and Volozhin sensed that this whole mood posed a profound contradiction to the Halakha and would undermine its very foundations. Halakhic man fears nothing. For he swims in the sea of the Talmud, that life-giving sea to all the living. If a person has sinned, then the Halakhah of repentance will come to his aid. One must not waste time on spiritual self-appraisal, on probing introspections, and on the picking away at the “sense” of sin. Such a psychic analysis brings man neither to fear nor to love of God nor, most fundamental of all, to the knowledge and cognition of the Torah.

The subtitle to this Salon article about Hilary and Obama reads “In the Democratic presidential pack, the leading man is a woman and the leading woman is a man” (via Keith Burgess-Jackson). The article contrasts Obama’s appeal to female voters and Clinton’s perceived masculinity.

Clara Oleson, an Iowa Democrat and former labor lawyer, explained all these distinctions on a riverbank in Iowa City last week, while waiting to hear Clinton speak to a crowd of about 1,000. “Obama is the female candidate. Obama is the woman,” she said, after admitting that she was one of his supporters. “He is the warm candidate, self-deprecating, soft, tender, sad eyes, great smile.”

So what does that make Hillary Clinton? “She is the male candidate — in your face, authoritative, know-it-all.”

Articles like this make me doubt the merits of democracy. I can’t believe actually choosing a candidate based on who has “sad eyes.” What a pathetic reflection on our culture.

An interview between a potential juror and the judge illustrates the famous Liar’s Paradox. Daniel Ellis was trying to get out of jury duty. So on the questionnare given to potential jurors, he confessed to not liking homosexuals and blacks. In the interview with Judge Nickson, Ellis added that “I’m frequently found to be a liar, too. I can’t really help it.”

But how can we trust the words of a self-proclaimed liar? The judge then asked Ellis, “So, are you lying to me now?” Ellis answered “Well, I don’t know. I might be.” He then confessed to intentionally trying to avoid jury duty and was taken into custody. He may face perjury charges.

Jayson Stark presents ESPN’s annual baseball mid-season awards. After weighing the relative strengths of Alex Rodriguez and Magglio Ordonez, he sides with Ordonez as the AL mid-season MVP. His argument reveals an anti-Yankee bias. While conceding that A-Rod has “had a more eye-popping year,” his dismisses A-Rod’s accomplishments because “the Yankees haven’t been a factor in the division or wild-card races for more than about 20 minutes all season.” Yet, Stark’s NL MVP is Matt Holliday. Holliday’s Rockies enter the All-Star break at .500, half a game ahead of the Yankees. If being a major factor in the division or wild-card races were so crucial, Holliday should be disqualified along with A-Rod.

Stark’s bias aside, A-Rod has been far more valuable to his team than any other player in baseball and precisely because the Yankees have been playing so poorly. In April, with Wang injured, Mussina pitching poorly, and Rivera blowing rare save opportunities, A-Rod’s bat kept the Yankees in games they deserved to lose. And, now with Giambi injured, A-Rod’s homers are that much more valuable.

As far as statistics go, A-Rod and Ordonez are fairly comparable. Ordonez’s OBP is better, A-Rod’s SLG is better. Combined, A-Rod comes out on top by a hair. But there’s one statistic that removes all ambiguity. In the 9th inning, A-Rod is hitting .542 with 7 HR and 18 RBI. His OPS in the 9th is a whopping 2.145, which includes two grand slams. So much for A-Rod’s reputation for not hitting well in the clutch.

A drunk driver causes a car accident which leads to a death. In most cases, the applicable crime is involuntary manslaughter but law isn’t my subject today. Pam Stubbart of The Excluded Middle wonders about the seeming lack of mens rea in this kind of case. (via Philosophers’ Carnival #49). Since alcohol impairs one’s ability to reason, a drunk driver may lack the very ability to intend to kill. One obvious response is that the drunk drivers chooses to drink and is thus responsible for his subsequent actions. To this, Stubbart responds that (more…)

Historian Howard Zinn doesn’t like Walter Kirn’s NYTimes review of his book, A Young People’s History of the United States. He even accuses Kirn of believing in objective truth, which, he claims, even “bright 12 year-olds” realize is nonsense.

The reviewer seems to hold to the 19th-century von Ranke idea that there is one truth to be told. Most historians, and most intelligent people, including bright 12-year-olds, understand that there is no such thing as a single “objective” truth, but that there are different truths according to the viewpoint of the historian.

The absurdity of Zinn’s relativism quickly reveals itself in the next paragraph. (more…)

(via Jill)

I suppose this is good news.

The American Medical Association on Wednesday backed off calling excessive video-game playing a formal psychiatric addiction, saying instead that more research is needed.
. . .
AMA delegates instead adopted a watered-down measure declaring that while overuse of video games and online games can be a problem for children and adults, calling it a formal addiction would be premature.

Tales of Modernity hosts the Plato-themed 49th Philosophers’ Carnival.

There’s something deeply troubling the the political conversation surrounding Mitt Romney’s Mormonism. When politicans and pundits lament the fact that Romney’s faith is a campaign issue, they insult and trivialize religious faith on a much deeper level.
(more…)

R. Hershel Schachter has a great devar Torah on common sense and emunat chachamim at TorahWeb.org (via Hirhurim). According to the Midrash, Korach challenged Moshe’s authority by appealing to “common sense” arguments about tzitzit and mezuzah. (more…)

From the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog (via Jill):

“The emotional distress of law students appears to significantly exceed that of medical students and at times approach that of psychiatric populations.” That’s the conclusion of a new study, suggesting that law school has a corrosive effect on the well-being, values and motivation of students.

That sounds about right.

The latest Philosophers’ Carnival is up at common sense philosophy. Enjoy

Gary Bass reviews Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies for this week’s NYT Magazine. Caplan argues that voters are not only ignorant but, worse, irrational - by which he means that they don’t think like economists. (more…)

Via Keith Burgess-Jackson, here’s a transcript of the famous 1948 BBC radio debate on the existence of God between Father Frederick C. Copleston, a Jesuit Catholic priest, and philosopher Bertrand Russell. The debate has a level of sophistication rarely seen. Read the whole thing; it’s terrific.

Halakhically, Jewish identity is determined by matrilineal descent. One is Jewish if the mother is Jewish (save conversion, of course). Whether the father is Jewish is irrelevant as to Jewish identity. R. Meir Soloveitchik explores this controversial and puzzling notion in a 2005 Azure article that I came across recently. (more…)

The latest Philosophers’ Carnival is up at nicomachus.net with an emphasis on practical philosophy.

R. Jonathan Sacks, A Letter in the Scroll (via Hirhurim):

Can we really know whether faith is justified? Do we, citizens of modernity and post-modernity, not take for granted what Hume, Kant and Nietzsche labored to establish, that the existence of God cannot be proved? And do we not as Jews–always inclined to rationality, and now chastened and chilled by the Holocaust–have more reason to doubt than most? Yet I have to admit, even as a professionally trained philosopher, that I am unmoved by this whole trend of thought, rendered trivial by its own circularity. Of course it is possible to live a life without God, just as it is possible to live a life without humor, or music, or love; and one can no more prove that God exists that one can prove these other things exist to those who lack a sense of humor, or to whom Schubert is mere noise, or love a figment of the romantic imagination…

Jewish faith is not a metaphysical wager, a leap into the improbable. It is the courage to see the world as it is, without the comfort of myth or the self-pity of despair, knowing that the evil, cruelty and injustice it contains are neither inevitable nor meaningless but instead a call to human responsibility–a call emanating from the heart of existence itself

Leo Strauss in “The Mutual Influence of Theology and Philosophy”:

When we attempt to return to the roots of Western civilization, we observe soon that Western civilization has two roots which are in conflict with each other, the biblical and the Greek philosophic, and this is to begin with a very disconcerting observation. Yet this realization has also something reassuring and comforting. The very life of Western civilization is the life between two codes, a fundamental tension. There is therefore no reason inherent in the Western civilization itself, in its fundamental constitution, why it should give up life. But this comforting thought is justified only if we live that life, if we live that conflict, that is. No one can be both a philosopher and a theologian or, for that matter, a third which is beyond the conflict between philosophy and theology, or a synthesis of both. But every one of us can be and ought to be either the one or the other, the philosopher open to the challenge of theology or the theologian open to the challenge of philosophy.

The role of state-church separation in American law has been on my mind recently. Here’s what’s bothering me: I have a vague understanding of what “religion” means, although I’m aware that my understanding of the term is heavily influenced by personal religious biases. But I’m really not sure what “secular” means. Everybody, religious or not, believes certain things about the world to be true and certain things to be false. From a constitutional perspective, what’s the difference between a belief that happens to coincide with that of a major religious institution and one that doesn’t? You might answer that so-called religious beliefs simply have a special legal protection. But that’s not good enough. In order for certain kinds of beliefs to enjoy special protection, there must be some difference between those beliefs and others. Even if you make the silly distinction between “faith” and “reason”, the same problem arises. What about entirely secular beliefs that make no sense? (I can think of a few). Or a secularist who expresses beliefs that are often associated with religion? Is it the belief that is either “religious” or “secular” or is the individual expressing that belief? (more…)

If you’re in a war, instead of throwing a hand grenade at the enemy, throw one of those small pumpkins. Maybe it’ll make everyone think about how stupid war is, and while they are thinking, you can throw a real grenade at them.

Maybe we should try that in Iraq.

In American politics, compromising and building consensus are greatly valued. And rightfully so. Speaking broadly, we believe that people in a given community should ideally have equal decision-making power. We further realize that different people have conflicting views about issues of great importance. Compromise seems to be an appropriate way to accommodate varying political values among our citizenry. However, Ronald Dworkin demonstrates that a certain kind of political compromise would be unacceptable. In Law’s Empire, he offers the following puzzle. (more…)

David Klinghoffer asks whether God is a Republican (via Hirhurim). He begins the piece by describing the rituals surrounding tum’ah and taharah (ritual purity and impurity, respectively), as explained in Vayikra. There nothing particularly remarkable about his treatment of the subject. He correctly explains that “a key to cleansing out impurity is ritualized immersion in water.” He also points out a common gloss on ritual contamination - tum’ah resembles death and taharah, life. So far so good. Then Klinghoffer starts talking about the great 19th-century German Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch and Charles Darwin. It’s all downhill from there. (more…)

Virginia Tech Professor Liviu Librescu saved his students’ lives by blocking the door with his body while they escaped out the window (via VC). Haaretz reports:

“My father blocked the doorway with his body and asked the students to flee,” Joe Librescu said from his home outside of Tel Aviv. …
“He himself was killed but thanks to him his students stayed alive,” an Israeli student who survived the massacre told Army Radio on Tuesday.

May God comfort his family among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.

This New York Times article about Hispanic immigration and secularism is misleading (as I see Keith Burgess Jackson points out). It claims to describe the phenomenon of Hispanic immigrants rejecting the religion of their country of origin. Hence the title: “For Some Hispanics, Coming to America Also Means Abandoning Religion.” Yet, the instances documented in the article imply that while Church membership and attendence may fall among immigrants, belief in God doesn’t. Consider a few of those interviewed. (more…)

Self-hating Jew Norman Finkelstein finds himself in a tenure battle at DePaul University. Dean Charles Suchar has recommended against tenure, claiming he found “the personal attacks in many of Dr. Finkelstein’s books to border on character assassination.” But Finkelstein doesn’t hold the university president or dean responsbile.

[Finkelstein] explained that since the fall the university has been “bombarded” with such pressure that it “had to make a choice between two disasters — deny me tenure and get outrage from students, or have me on the faculty for another 20 years and every month face another hysteria and claims that I am a Holocaust denier and a self-hating Jew. Between the short-term and the long-term disasters, it was prudent to go for the short-term disaster.”

I wonder why anybody would think Finkelstein is a Holocaust denier and a self-hating Jew.

Norman G. Finkelstein’s book, “The Holocaust Industry,” alleges that Jewish leaders have exploited the Holocaust for profit…

Let’s say an academic wrote a book about how the black community exploited slavery for profit and political gain. Do you think he would tenure at a major university?

David Novak has an excellent review of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. Already in the first paragraph Novak sets a scholarly tone by taking Dawkins argument seriously and by addressing the important philosophical issues without resorting to the dismissive rhetoric so common in today’s religious debate.

Being an argument (however badly presented), the basic assertions of this book deserve a reasoned response, even though its overall tone is more likely to elicit an emotional reaction–either a positive reaction from those who love Dawkins’ atheism or a negative reaction from those who hate it.

Novak indeed provides a reasoned response. In doing so, he articulates a key philosophical problem with Intelligent Design and offers an alternative view that I think is much more in line with traditional Judaism. (more…)

See Rob Harvilla’s brilliant logical analysis of the breakout single from Mims, “This is Why I’m Hot”.

It’s hard to overstate just how good Sidney Crosby is. Yahoo! Sports drives home the significance of Crosby’s break-out season. (more…)

Bill Vallicella explores three concepts of salvation and argues that “religious salvation” cannot be either merely physical or merely mystical. I think he’s basically right and, although he deals specifically with orthodox Christianity, the idea he develops can be applied, at least generally, to Judaism as well. In fact, Judaism probably emphasizes bodily resurrection even more than Christianity.

Religious salvation is not a mere physical salvation. But I doubt that it can be identified with what I am calling mystical salvation: it is not (though it may involve) a transformation of consciousness in which the apparent meaninglessness and evil and vanity of life is redeemed. Religious salvation seems to involve both elements. Or at least this is the case in orthodox Christianity which preaches the resurrection of the body. The Christian does not look forward to existence as a pure spirit after death, but to an embodied existence. Thus he looks forward to having his individual physical life saved. Saved, but also tranformed, since the post-resurrection body will be a body not heir to the usual fleshly incapacities and debilities.

David Van Biema makes a compelling case for teaching the Bible as literature in public schools in last week’s Time Magazine. The article does a good job of going over arguments for and against, reviewing some of the constitutional issues involved, and the impact such classes may have on upcoming elections. It’s obviously a very thorny issue and I appreciate the sentiment that, in a largely Christian country, it would be difficult to maintain objectivity. But the Bible a simply too important to leave out of school curriculum completely. And I say this knowing full well that much of what’s discussed here is only applicable to the Christian Bible. The fact is that Christianity has played and continues to play a major role in shaping American culture and politics. I went to a Jewish high school and, in 10th grade, my English teacher spent a few classes going over some basic Christian themes so that we could identify them in our reading. I wrote a paper for that class on references to the Trinity in Kafka’s Metamorphosis.

[W]hen your seventh-grader reads The Old Man and the Sea, a teacher could tick off the references to Christ’s Passion–the bleeding of the old man’s palms, his stumbles while carrying his mast over his shoulder, his hat cutting his head–but wouldn’t the thrill of recognition have been more satisfying on their own?

If literature doesn’t interest you, you also need the Bible to make sense of the ideas and rhetoric that have helped drive U.S. history. “The shining city on the hill”? That’s Puritan leader John Winthrop quoting Matthew to describe his settlement’s convenantal standing with God. In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln noted sadly that both sides in the Civil War “read the same Bible” to bolster their opposing claims. When Martin Luther King Jr. talked of “Justice rolling down like waters” in his “I Have a Dream” speech, he was consciously enlisting the Old Testament prophet Amos, who first spoke those words. The Bible provided the argot–and theological underpinnings–of women’s suffrage and prison-reform movements.

And then there is today’s political rhetoric. For a while, secular liberals complained that when George W. Bush went all biblical, he was speaking in code. Recently, the Democratic Party seems to have come around to the realization that a lot of grass-roots Democrats welcome such use. Without the Bible and a few imposing secular sources, we face a numbing horizontality in our culture–blogs, political announcements, ads. The world is flat, sure. But Scripture is among our few means to make it deep.

Chag Sameach to all.

A great NHL season is coming to a close next week and the playoffs start on the 11th. Unfortunately, law school has pretty much kept me from seeing any games this year but I’ve caught a few on TV and followed the standings pretty closely. As a Rangers fan, it pains me to watch such a talented team play so poorly. They may end up in the playoffs after all, but I don’t expect them to go all that far. Jagr, Straka, & Shanahan lead an above-average offense and Lundqvist is the best Rangers goalie since Mike Richter retired. But a weak defense plagued the Rangers all season and it will be an even bigger problem in the playoffs. (more…)

Stephen Barr has a good article in First Things about moral relativism (via Keith Burgess-Jackson). He’s responding, in part, to Robert Miller’s article - which is also worth reading. I think Barr is basically right. He explains well how modern relativsm emerged from positivism and its effect on public morality and political discourse. Barr has a philosopher’s gift for picking out key nuances in complex arguments and this article puts that skill on display. (more…)

Newsweek lists America’s top 50 rabbis. The criteria:

[A]re the rabbis known nationally/internationally? (20 points.) Do they have a media presence? (10 points.) Are they leaders within their communities? (10 points.) Are they considered leaders in Judaism or their movements? (10 points.) Size of their constituency? (10 points.) Do they have political/social influence? (20 points.) Have they made an impact on Judaism in their career? (10 points.) Have they made a “greater” impact? (10 points.)

I don’t take the list seriously but one aspect jumped out at me. After each name, the article notes the denominational affiliation of the rabbi in parentheses. Featured were the usual four: Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, and a fifth: Lubavitch!

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

Paul Horwitz, guest-blogging at Volokh Conspiracy, writes on the Religious Test Clause in Article V of the Constitution (”[N]o religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States”) in the context of recent judicial nomination hearings. (more…)

Gary Larson, in The Prehistory of the Far Side:

[T]he key element in any attempt at humor is conflict. Our brain is suddenly jolted into trying to accept something that is unacceptable. The punch line of a joke is the part that conflicts with the first part, thereby surprising us and throwing our synapses into some kind of fire drill… And the emotional response to this kind of conflict can range from laughter to a broken nose. In any humorous vehicle (comedy, cartoons, Pintos, etc.), this conflict, whether subtle or blunt, is mandatory.

What will you be doing tomorrow, between 10AM and noon?