IT'S JUST THERE ARE CERTAIN THINGS YOU'RE SURE OF, LIKE LONGITUDE AND LATITUDE: Two related items worth noting on the topic of Aaron Sorkin, Seer --

• As the AV Club's Amelie Gillette notes, this week's SNL debut contained a skit that's a complete ripoff of one from Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip; and


• More seriously, I've talked before here of my huge admiration for the "Somebody's Going to Emergency, Somebody's Going To Jail" episode of The West Wing -- the second Big Block of Cheese Day, the visit from the Organization of Cartographers for Social Equality and the main plot, of Sam Seaborn wrestling with his knowledge that a pardon-seeker's grandfather really was a spy.
  
  It's hard to read yesterday's article about Robert and Michael Meeropol accepting that their father, Julius Rosenberg, was a spy without thinking back to Sorkin. Growing up Jewish and looking at pictures of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, it was always easier to imagine that this meek little couple was the victim of Cold War hysteria (and Roy Cohn) than to believe they had betrayed atomic secrets. Easier to accept a McCarthyite conspiracy than to acknowledge that some Jews on the left were not loyal citizens.
  
  But a new confession from their father's co-conspirator and recently declassified grand jury testimony tell the latter tale, one which the Rosenbergs' sons now accept: Dad was a spy. He really did turn over confidential information to the Soviets, and even though as TPE reminds me other spies have done worse and not so suffered (Ames, Hanssen), he did commit a crime against the state, and if you're going to have a death penalty at all, it's for stuff like this.
  
  Now Ethel, on the other hand? I'm reminded (as I often am) of the line from Crimes and Misdemeanors, "I love him like a brother -- David Greenglass," because it's clear that Greenglass lied under oath to implicate his sister-in-law, whom the evidence suggests was not culpable in all this -- certainly not culpable to the extent that Mom merited a death sentence, and possibly not criminally at all. It was all about pressuring her to flip on suspected colleagues -- a bluff she called -- and the consequences were fatal.
  
  Treason is the only crime specifically defined in the Constitution (Art. III, sec 3), and there is perhaps no more obscure phrase in the Constitution than the one that instructs "no attainder of treason shall work corruption of blood." This ended the British practice through which the descendants of an convict could be barred from inheriting either from the convict or from other relatives through him. Even for the worst criminals, our Constitution refuses to visit the sins of the father on the sons; each generation is free to chart its own destiny. Worth remembering on this 221st Constitution Day.

AS ADAM SAYS, 'THE BAR-BRI NATION MOURNS': If you're going to be stuck in a room all summer listening to lowest-common-denominator lectures to prepare for a mostly multiple-choice licensure test that has not very much to do with your abilities in the trade for which you're being licensed, the difference between "excruciating" and "tolerable" is the quality of the lecturer.

Charles Whitebread, the George Pflieger Professor of Law at USC's Gould School of Law was the best that Bar-Bri had to offer, which really is praise far too faint. Whitebread died yesterday. Many of us sat through those lectures (either in person or on tape), and while Chemerinski's "consti-TOOOOO-tion" and Epstein's "Sharon Stone is not in my shower" may have been more memorable, Whitebread's clear and funny criminal law lecture, delivered with the crisp rasp of a drill sergeant gone soft and capped with some appreciated practical test-taking advice, was the most helpful and least painful.

It would be wrong to reduce a distinguished career to "delivered Bar-Bri lectures," so I'll also mention that while Whitebread taught at Virginia and USC, he also taught FBI agents for 20 years on the faculty at Quantico, where he published the greatest piece ever to be adapted for MCLE drug credit -- a history of the regulation of nonmedical uses of drugs (fun fact: most early marijuana regulation, other than in Utah, was motivated not by drug concerns but rather by prejudice against Mexican immigrants).

Whitebread, per ATL, "is survived by his life partner, John Golden, and his devoted friend Michael Kelly." I don't know exactly how to read that sentence, but I guess I hope it means he was twice as lucky as most of us.

AS HIGH AN HONOR AS ONE CAN RECEIVE IN THE GARDEN STATE, OTHER THAN HAVING A HIGHWAY REST STOP NAMED FOR YOU: Jack Nicholson (Manasquan), Milton Friedman (Rahway), Paul Robeson (Princeton), Carl Lewis (Willingboro) and The Farnsworth Invention antagonist David Sarnoff are among the thirty nominees for the second class of inductees into the "New Jersey Hall of Fame". And per your complaints last time around, Molly Pitcher and Philip Roth are now eligible. Youse can vote now.

XOXO: It's not just the awesomeness of the title OMFGG (for "Original Music Featured on Gossip Girl") that's making me consider buying it on iTunes, but the fact that it includes not only Lincoln Hawk (Rufus' band!) performing, but also the Constance Billard A Cappella Choir performing Fergie's "Glamorous."

"EVERYTHING YOU WILL READ ON THE NEXT 11 PAGES REVOLVES AROUND ONE PHOTOGRAPH": So begins Beyond the Game, the first collection of articles by SI's remarkable feature writer Gary Smith, a searing and heartbreaking collection of profiles of folks like doomed 1950s Yankees prospect John Malangone, whose piece begins with this blog's title, "Ali and His Entourage" and 1991's "Shadow of a Nation" -- a piece I can't think about without being sad -- about Jonathan Takes Enemy and his Crow high school basketball team in Montana, which begins:

I have not told you half that happened when I was young. I can think back and tell you much more of war and horse stealing. But when the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened. There was little singing anywhere. —PLENTY COUPS, Chief of the Crows, 1930

Singing. did you hear it? There was singing in the land I once more that day. How could you not call the Crows a still-mighty tribe if you saw them on the move that afternoon? How could your heart not leave the ground if you were one of those Indian boys leading them across the Valley of the Big Horn?

It was March 24, 1983, a day of thin clouds and pale sun in southern Montana . A bus slowed as it reached the crest of a hill, and from there, for the first time, the boys inside it could see everything. Fender to fender stretched the caravan of cars behind them, seven miles, eight -- they had made the asphalt go away! Through the sage and the buffalo grass they swept, over buttes and boulder-filled gullies, as in the long-ago days when their scouts had spotted buffalo and their village had packed up its lodge poles and tepee skins, lashed them to the dogs and migrated in pursuit of the herd.

But what they pursued now was a high school basketball team, 12 teenagers on their way to Billings to play in a state tournament. The boys stared through their windows at the caravan. There was bone quiet in the bus. It was as if, all at once, the boys had sensed the size of this moment ... and what awaited each of them once this moment was done.

Anyway, SI has just released a new compilation of his work, Going Deep, and the rarely-profiled Smith has sat down with the New York Times. “The more they let you in, the more glimpses you get about why they are the way they are, the harder it is to see them all one way,” he says, opening up at last. “Each person’s life is a problem to be solved, and I try to get a grasp of what problem they’re solving. You’re doing stories about people who do extraordinary things, and that usually comes out of extraordinary pressures and frictions. That’s what I try to understand.”

And then when you're done reading about Smith himself, read his 9/11/2006 piece on a true American hero, Pat Tillman, and ramp up your admiration even further.

BAD HORSE IS PLEASED: Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog has set yet another record, being the first non-Disney musical cast album in I don't know how long to hit the Top 40 of the Billboard Album Chart. (It's also an impressive showing for an iTunes exclusive.)

EXCUSE ME, ARE YOU HOOTIE? When Cameron Crowe wrote Jerry Maguire, it was with the intention that Tom Hanks star. Better movie?

For that matter, the other casting issue -- Crowe offered Janeane Garofalo the Dorothy Boyd role if she'd lose some weight. She lost the weight; he still gave the part to Renée Zellweger.

e.t.a. Okay, here's your challenge: name a Cruise role Hanks would have done better (or, at least, you'd have been interested in seeing), and vice versa. Hanks in Eyes Wide Shut and Cruise in Cast Away?