Behavior

I appreciate the prayers for what I now understand to be my hell-bound soul from readers appalled by God's recent letter in this space. Recall that the thrust of this little satirical note was my take that we've gone way overboard in sports with public, pious displays. I'm not a big fan of the kind of grandstanding shout-outs to Jesus we'll almost certainly see today from members of the Super Bowl's winning team.

For some defense lawyers, the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was less about racial profiling than about how persons can be arrested simply for speaking angry words to a police officer. The laws against "disorderly conduct" give police wide power to arrest people who are said to be disturbing the peace or disrupting the neighborhood. In Massachusetts and elsewhere, courts have said the "disorderly acts or language" must take place in public where others can be disturbed.

Indonesia's most powerful Islamic scholars weren't looking for a debate when they handed down their latest fatwas on how to be a good Muslim. But they still got an argument and, perhaps worse, a chorus of "Who cares?" after decreeing that it is haram, or forbidden, to smoke in public, or for children and pregnant women to have a puff of tobacco anywhere. It didn't matter that the clerics were providing sound health guidance.

If one question rises as yet another politician falls from the love nest and lands with a splat, it's this: What the heck was he thinking? Elizabeth Edwards has scarcely finished her book tour of scorn. Eliot Spitzer is energetically engineering his comeback from shame. And there goes South Carolina's governor, Mark Sanford, another of the political high and mighty, hurling himself into a pit of adulterous disgrace. This time it was a South American tryst with a lover reportedly named Maria.

When it comes to wine tasting, pleasure is in the price. Using brain scanners to monitor the minds of wine drinkers, scientists found that people given two identical red wines got more pleasure from tasting the one they were told cost more. The study, reported Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, demonstrated for the first time how marketing tactics -- such as raising the price of a product -- can cause the brain to play tricks on itself.

When it comes to the glare of the paparazzi, age apparently has its advantages. Just ask actor Kiefer Sutherland, who walked out of the Glendale jail early Monday mostly to a collective shrug of tabloid indifference. He'd done 48 days behind bars without fanfare, judged uninteresting in the age of Britney, Paris, Nicole and Lindsay. Fame, a Santa Monica-based photo agency, sent a photographer, to little avail: Only one publication called with a request.

Because of my deep family ties to the University of Oregon and my long-held sense of Eugene as an open-minded and tolerant place, the ugly, bigoted way that some Ducks fans behaved during the men's basketball home game last week against UCLA was an embarrassment. That feeling, and my outrage, deepened when a school spokesman said after the game that little could have been done to keep unruly fans from yelling whatever they pleased.

People in this town know the man with the stooped, halting walk and the burning eyes. They point out his house, and they talk about "what he did" and about how they admire "what he did" and wonder if they too would have the strength to do "what he did."

The man did not seem to be a serious student of wine. Disheveled, unshaven and reeking of booze, he demanded a glass, rested his head on the tasting-room counter and loudly moaned. Knocking over a "wet floor" sign and lurching into displays, he stumbled into eight wineries in one afternoon last week, and six refused him service.

Some people think Sam Zell should reread his new employee handbook. During a meeting last week with Orlando Sentinel employees, the Tribune Co. chairman ended his answer to a photographer's questions about hard news coverage by directing a two-word obscenity at her. A video of the meeting made its way to YouTube and on Monday was on the media gossip website Gawker, which described Zell as a "salty billionaire."