The Herald won't give up

The Boston Herald is still insisting that gesture Justice Scalia made Sunday was obscene.

Their evidence: two comments a photographer claims Scalia made at the time. Scalia denies it, and nobody else heard them. That, and lukewarm support from the cast of "The Sopranos."

The Herald claims that the gesture Scalia made was not the one he described. So why investigate it?

On the other hand, when the Herald polled Italian American members of the cast of "The Sopranos" (which Scalia had said members of the Herald staff watched too much), they were divided. The consensus: it was a crude gesture, but not a grossly crude one- "not as bad as the middle finger," but "not something I'd do to my mother." One specified that it could, indeed, be interpreted as meaning exactly what Scalia said.

Since no cultural anthropologist was located to explain exactly what the gesture means in Sicily (though several authorities provided diverse meanings from other parts of Southern Europe, none of them terribly offensive and all of them reasonably close to Scalia's explanation), I guess the cast of "The Sopranos" will have to serve as our experts.

HT: Drudge