The Boston Herald reported that Scalia had made an obscene gesture. Scalia responded with a scathing letter to the editor, accusing the newspaper staff of watching too many episodes of The Sopranos. He said the gesture wasn't obscene, but dismissive.
Monument Valley has been eroding for the last 50 million years. Once this area was a flat plateau of sandstone layered with shale. As the Colorado Plateau rose, vertical faults were formed and the plateaus slide upwards from each other. The faulting exposed the lower levels of shale to erosion.
Much of the Long Valley area of eastern California is covered by rocks formed during volcanic eruptions in the past 2 million years. A cataclysmic eruption 760,000 years ago formed Long Valley Caldera and ejected flows of hot glowing ash(pyroclastic flows), which cooled to form the Bishop Tuff.