Unused and Probably Unusable

Q. What happens when a duck?

A. Nothing, just a duck.

Q. What happens when a duck, again?

B. Reducks.

"Hello, World" from the glamorous foreign shores of PowerBlogs. I'll be blogging here from now on, I suspect; Blogger's free and all, but it's unstable, limited, got a squinky (technical term) interface, and I want to explore the possibilities of Post Chaining and the other powerful tools PowerBlogs (henceforth Powerblogs) boasts. So: Blogger delenda est.

As background information, you can click here for the previous Unused & Probably Unusable site on Blogger. U & PU is, was, and will be a blawg, meaning a "law blog" - one written by a lawyer (or law student, or law professor, but I'm a lawyer) or otherwise covering the law or legal topics.

As a reminder, which should be unnecessary on the web, I'm a lawyer but not Your Lawyer. This is not a site intended to give or offer legal advice, freely or otherwise; if you need a lawyer, feel free to say so, but I can't guarantee that anyone will respond helpfully. This is not part of my job, this is my hobby.

If you happen to be in Philadelphia and need a lawyer and can't afford one or don't know how to look for one, please call the following number: (215) 238-6333. (click below for more information)



As before, I anticipate opening comments to all, but would love to respond directly if you are registered with powerblogs or have an (anonymous is fine) email address and want to converse at more length on any topic you read about here.

For you the reader, and for my own reference and use:

This is the information currently in my blogroll, which is the permanent or semipermanent collection of links to other blogs typically found on the sidebar. (click to reveal the blogroll, same as to the left)


Also on the sidebar are, from top to bottom, the following features:

• my Categories links. Click on the desired one to see only posts in that category (some are cross-listed).



• a way to contact me



• RSS feeds for post titles and for full content



• email notification and Get Posts By Email (not usually recommended; try Bloglines.com, the free online RSS-aggregator, instead). Note: if you want to receive only announcements or Posts in a given category, you can do that by first clicking into that category, above, and then clicking one of the Subscribe links.



• the archives category, with monthly post archives as well as a neat-o Chronological link that simply shows all the posts, in order by date.



• My A legally inclined weblog link, which is probably not that big a deal.



• A Subscribe to This Blog With Bloglines button, which I highly recommend to anyone who wants to spend more time reading things they like and less time checking back on dormant blogs for new posts.



• The above-described Blogroll



• And last but not least, a Powered by Powerblogs button. I love Powerblogs and recommend it for anyone who wants powerful and flexible and cheap hosting.

Introducing On Blogging: My mini-carnival of the anonymous bloggers

[update: A hearty welcome to Blawg Review #21 readers directed here by this week's host, My Shingle's Carolyn Elefant. I highly recommend the other links selected this week, particularly the A3G 20 Questions interview by Will Baude, appearing immediately below this post at the Review, and the Diva of the Disgruntled entry immediately preceding it.]

This post belongs not to the existing legal or linguistic or politics categories, but to a category I am now creating: posts On Blogging.

This self-reflective category turns the mirror on the endeavor itself. What does it mean to Blog? What is the blogging community? What does a blogger do, and why, and how? What is your role, as a reader and hopefully commenter on this blog (and possibly blogger yourself)?

This first edition of On Blogging (although other earlier posts will also be put in this category, such as my post below about my Blogroll and my very first post) covers a fairly obvious point:

I'm an Anonymous Blogger. Specifically, I'm the Eh Nonymous Blawger, usually signing myself as Eh N. for short.

There are reasons for this, but before I go off and talk about me, let's talk about It: Anonymous Blogs and Blogging.

Well, I thinks to myself, how about a roundup of what's been said before? Often this kind of post comes about as a blog carnival, with lots of folks people sending in submissions. This here is more of a do-it-yourself carnival:

the Carnival of the Anonymous.

(click to continue)

Future posts in this category will include:

• Blogging ethics



• The origin and destination of trolling and flamewars



• Is there a "blawgosphere"?



• and reader-requested topics, if any.

As I indicated above, I want to keep adding links to this entry. Anonymous blogs and bloggers not already mentioned: please drop me a line. Got a favorite anonablawger? Leave a comment, and I'll add it to the list.

Jots is a meta-surfing accessory. Jots is useful. Jots is in its infancy. Jots is still getting the bugs out.

What's Jots?

A "collaborative bookmarking system" (think of flickr, of del.icio.us, of any of the sharing-and-improving programs out there which help others build on your knowledge) which "allows you to Store, Share and Discover relevant links."

Jots is probably experiencing growing pains; right now I'm not sure if it lets you "ignore" users who are trying to spam the site. But here's the beauty: spam is instantly degraded in a collaborative system. Nobody other than the spammer, and the spammer's confederates, are going to point to spam. So if you feel that a given Jotting is spam, then the person who thought it was good is worth Ignoring. You don't have to listen to them any more.

On the flip side, if someone is posting links you like, then maybe some of their other favorites are worth checking out.

As Jots gets a bit less geek-friendly and a little more user-friendly (bigger fonts, please?), I suspect it will hit like a tidal wave. Maybe a small one.

You can view my bookmarked sites and posts of interest at http://www.jots.com/users/ehnonymous. It's much, much, much easier for me to drop a link (to a website, to a post, to almost anything) than it is for me to blog about it here. So if it doesn't merit its own post, it's going to be Jot-ted.

The best part: Jots should be just perfect for supplanting my blogroll. Now, if I can just organize it - aha! I can add the "blogroll" tag to my Jots.

Also, Jots is alleged to cleanly import del.icio.us tags, so if you have an account there, you can bring it in, with no lossage.

Rating and recommendation: B+, needs some improvement for prime time, worth glancing at.

(alternate title: HotJotSpot. Or not.)

I won't keep saying it - and shortly, I hope to not have to. If Jots won't automagically post all my most recent Jot-tings from the previous day directly here, then I can at least put a link to my Jots page at or near the top of the blog. But one more time:

Read my Jots!

I post new ones frequently, and it's not all brand-new material. Some of it is brand-old, including articles and blogs that have been around a while. They're all helpfully tagged, so if you want you can view just the ones by dahlia (lithwick, of Slate.com), or just the ones involving bigotry (there are plenty of them - Kip, Esquire and Dave Neiwart are particularly active in identifying basest prejudice when they see it), or just my blogroll or my list of useful references (both still being added to).

So come here, by all means, when you need a Heinlein Friday (or the second or the third)...

But if you want what _I'm_ reading, go to Jots! It's my best of the web, with a ton of links and not too much commentary.

Contrary to my usual practice, this week's Heinlein Friday will issue later than usual, perhaps by 8 p.m. today.

This week, I plan to reveal the perhaps non-obvious connections between the new movie Superman Returns (it's great, by the way) and Heinlein's work. Heinlein worked on, or wrote the source material for, three movies: Destination Moon, Starship Troopers (and its sequels and spinoffs, I suppose), and Robert A. Heinlein's The Puppet Masters (long name used to distinguish it from a prior, unrelated movie). His books themselves, though, provide a more apt and more interesting comparison for the distinct and distinctive form of media - and sensation - that is the new Superman.

Also, check out this cutting and skeptical article at CSICOP, titled Critical Thinking: What Is It Good for? (In Fact, What is It?), by Howard Gabennesch [sic - the For was not capitalized in the original, it appears, despite the capitalization of Is and It. Highly irregular]. The article appears also in the March/April 2006 issue of Skeptical Inquirer.

To summarize: "critical thinking" does not mean "critiques of generally accepted institutions and norms. "Critical" means hard-headed, rational, and logical, not ideologically biased in a different direction. It is not "critical" (in the sense of critical thinking) to say that the cosmetics industry is a monstrous money-making machine which "perpetuates the myth" that older women are less attractive. It is critical, surely. It is not unbiased. It is also not necessarily an honest formulation. As HG suggests, a more critical approach might recognize that the cosmetics industry is a monstrous money-making machine which is both a cause and an effect of society's reflection of the fact that there is differential attractiveness of adult women with respect to age, due in part to biological differences, such as fertility and related reproductive (and thus evolutionary) advantages.

Also, as always, check out my Jots page for some of the best recent (and not so recent) links I've found, neatly cross-categorized for your reading convenience. And finally, check out the outstanding coverage of the wonderful result in Hamdan at SCOTUSblog. There are literally a dozen or more interesting end-of-term posts, particularly this one by Marty Lederman.

More to come!

Eh N.

Just like last week ("Pending Post: Heinlein Friday & Superman"), I'm choosing not to publish this week's HF before I head off to work in the morning. But, here's a preview.

I've been talking about "Jerry Was a Man" for the last three weeks, in the Superman, Aliens / Combatants, and Courts posts. That story's time has come, its day in the sun is here.

(Hey, why not? After all, It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia....) (FX official site; Wikipedia entry). [That new tv show, by the way,


Right, end of digression. Oops, just one more: anybody heard anything good about Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest? I did so like Jack Sparrow (channeled portrayed - or is it perpetrated? - ably by Johnny Depp, one of my handful of favorite male actors) but the current movie's getting mediocre reviews at best, unlike its predecessor. So many p's.

Back to the subject: HF

Last week's HF had me looking outside of Heinlein's work to shed light on what he was doing, and whether it was successful. This week, I'm back to focusing on his writing as my main source material. "Jerry Was a Man" is a 1947 short story, collected in Assignment In Eternity, and although there are some (to me, today) inexplicable words or phrases, most of the story has aged quite well in 53 years. It's timely, even, in part. But if the racial and sexual politics (and sensibilities) have changed, have the scientific ones? Maybe. Possibly not. We have 50 more years of genetic modification, of experience with the nuclear age [if it's proper to describe the End of Innocence as if it were an Age, of Steam or of Information (aside - which last we are assuredly in, even as most new American jobs continue to be in the service industries, and the professions, rather than in dealing with "pure" information)... nested parenthesis problem... perhaps a ']' would help. ]. The world is older and not necessarily wiser. People are much the same. And Jerry? Is he a Man? We'll open it up, later today. You have about 10 hours to submit comments or questions, and then the post is up. Of course, since it's a blog, unlike a newspaper, I can then make corrections/ additions/ emendations to the piece - that's why I consider every post to be New, for purposes of discussion. Heinlein doesn't go stale - or any staler than he already is.

So if you see anything in any of the HF series (full list at the bottom of any HF post), leave a comment (until the comment period expires - and I may extend them) or drop an e-mail. This is my forum, and I'm inviting your reactions.

Next topic: the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany

The greatest single-sport athletic event the world has to offer is nearly at an end, to return in another four years. Several countries have distinguished themselves. A greater number did not. A few embarassed themselves - or were humiliated by others. Brazil, which had so effortlessly cruised over lesser teams, bowed out ignominiously, not even making it to the semifinals. Finishing below the top four, when you are defending champs (2002, hosted in Korean/Japan) and have won outright many times, is a major fall.

The last non-Brazil winner, France, won in 1998, and will be playing in the finals this Sunday, at 1:30 p.m. eastern time, against Italy, which has a long history with the finals. I remember watching Baggio in 1994, when Italy last made it to the finals, losing on penalty kicks. A sad end, and not the best way to decide a soccer game, if I had it to design over again. I stopped watching games in this tournament when they went to PKs. That's why I was so glad Italy beat Germany in the final seconds - scoring twice at the end of the second period of (non-sudden death, aka "No Golden Goal") overtime, in the 119th minute overall, and at 120 + 1 minute of injury time, only a minute or so before the final whistle.

I'd have loved to see a German home final. I'd also have loved to see Portugal (an underdog favorite for me since their defeat of Mexico in the opening round) in the final, but it was not to be; they had opportunities but could not convert. For that matter, a Germany/ Argentina final would have given me a chance to make lots of Fascist jokes, which would apparently get me arrested in Germany. Freedom and democracy, at the cost of limited freedom of speech. A suspicious proposition, in my view. Portugal/ Brazil, had it happened, would have been a "former colony/ former colonialist" match, and would also have been an opportunity for interesting social commentary beyond the match itself.

The Third Place match, between the losers of the semifinal matches, will be played by Germany and Portugal at 3 pm EDT on July 8th, tomorrow, Saturday.

Next World Cup, in South Africa, we'll see who has stepped up and who can't handle the stiff competition.

As a side note, Jots seems to be performing quite poorly. I may have to migrate from Jots to del.icio.us, which has an inferior interface (but if it works, that's necessarily a better interface), or switch to something else entirely. BlogSpot has a Blog post feature; I may check that out. (Free *is* a good price). Or I may try Tags.

And that's all, until later today.

(Heinlein) Friday is just three hours away, so keep your eyes (or RSS feeds) peeled. In other news, I've had it with Jots. It was a noble experiment. I'm fed up.

My new non-blawg links collection is available here: My del.icio.us. I have 80 links posted so far, none duplicative, and they're neatly categorized (and cross-categorized). They are not, alas, saved cached versions, so the expiring pages (like my most recent addition, Jeremy's brilliant WSJ op-ed piece) will someday no longer be found at the addresses posted.

As most of you know already, delicious (I'm tired of putting in the dots, please assume them) is a wildly popular site that takes advantage of collaborative tagging. See the Main page (clever use of the .us suffix, no?) for more.

I have other useful pages elsewhere, besides this blog, and the previous iteration of this blog: There's also my Wikipedia profile (minimal, to say the least; Wikipedia isn't about the User, it's about the Project), and as I've noted previously I also am a big fan of Bloglines, so I have a Bloglines subscription (free) which aggregates my favorite feeds. Check it out by clicking here.

The upcoming Heinlein post will finally get to one of my favorite topics: Science Fiction Crimes! After all, if a story doesn't have a science-fictional element crucial to the story, it shouldn't be set far in the future, or under the blazing twin suns of Fomulhaut VII, or anywhere other than in a standard contemporary setting. So if a story is appropriately set in a what-if ficton, and there's a crime, it's much more interesting if it's not a normal crime happening to normal people who happen to live in a futuristic or high-tech setting.

The best part of the intersection between Law and Heinlein: coming up next, in the sixth Heinlein Friday.

As I've got my act (more) together this week than last week, when I needed to make the HF post mostly not about Heinlein, and come out on a not-Friday (HF: Judge Jones speech report) - does that make it a non-H non-F post? - let's kick things off with a Wednesday preview of this week's HF.

So far, to recap, we've discussed

• Courts and judges



• Crime



• Lawyers



• Justice



• Aliens



• And there was a special post one week on Jerry Was a Man, which implicated humanity - implicated Being Human.

This week, I turn to another interest of mine: Intellectual Property. HF: Inventions will discuss patents, trade secrets, and invention in Heinlein's fiction.

Not all the inventions Heinlein discusses (or "discloses," or "particularly describes") are covered by IP. Intellectual Property, for anyone without a background is "an umbrella term for various legal entitlements which attach to certain types of information, ideas, or other intangibles in their expressed form." (Wikipedia, which covers the topic nicely).

In other words,

with IP, instead of "owning" a house or a shirt or a wallet or a pile of sprockets, you "own" rights in the plans of the house, or the shape of the shirt, or the design of the wallet, or the name of your sprocket business.

These rights are different in some respects from Property Rights, which most people instinctively understand. If you own your home outright, only one person can be The Owner - sell it, and you no longer own. You can exclude others from entering (in general, with exceptions for emergencies, the police with a warrant or exigent need, etc.), you can let others in, you can allow others to trespass on your rights. And you can divest, as I said, by selling (or giving) your property away.

In intellectual property, you can do many of those things - but the law has to change, as always, when the underlying nature of the property alters. A song, for example, is not a fixed Thing until you record in some form (on a music sheet, or on tape, or in the head of a parrot) - at which point, there's a song AND a thing. The song can't be reproduced - it's a song. It can be imitated. It can be captured, replayed, edited, mocked. But the Thing can be copied, and copied, and copied - that's the nature of Things.

IP sometimes lets you prevent people from copying Things, and also sometimes from copying the Idea expressed in the Thing.

Heinlein didn't usually spend a lot of time discussing all this, the policy and nature of IP. But he certainly used it.

In "The Door Into Summer," the entire plot hinges on patents. And not in a normal way - TDIS is a time-travel story, with at least one paradox or bootstrapping problem. In other science fiction, authors (who often understand far too little biology) may ask, what if you go back and become your own grandpa? (Cf. the song - also note that things are different if a woman goes back and becomes her own grandmother.)

In Heinlein's book, Dan patents a design - but he does it after he's already seen it invented. This convoluted result is one of the things I'll discuss for Friday. The story also contains IP fraud, trademark issues, brand naming, and various new inventions, including Stik-Tite (think velcro on steroids), and "grabbies" (think movies, then extrapolate - they "null the theater on some shots" so "buckle your seatbelt").

Other stories I'll discuss include "Let There Be Light," "Lifeline," and "Friday." But you'll have to come back on Friday for the rest.

And since I've got your attention, and did this before, let me take one more opportunity to flog my del.icio.us page. It's HIGHLY linky, it's got my commentary, and it's much more categorizable (and categorized) than any blog. It's only bloggy in two ways: Newest added entries are at the top, and I post new (and old) links frequently with a note or a description if needed.

This week's Heinlein Friday may be a bit delayed by the unavoidable, inevitable, ineffable unfolding of the Universe. Current ETA is this coming Friday, August 11th.

However, I can tell you that the next HF will involve

- discussion of Heinlein
- discussion of the laws governing the military, and their conduct in warfare
- " of the Geneva conventions
- " of war crimes
- " of detaining combatants
- " of detaining civilians
- " of killing civilians (hint: don't)

There's already been some mention of the above, particularly when I mentioned law and justice in the military, like in Starship Troopers.

It will also, I warn you in advance, be very quoteful. Quotatious, I'm calling it.

More soon.

Also, I always in these preview posts take the opportunity to plug my del.icio.us page - check it out for the latest links, breaking news, rare resources, and surprising facts that make blogging so interesting. But instead of having to embed them in a post, with the inevitable wondering about how unique or "post-worthy" the link is, I can just post the link itself, and let you the reader decide what’s interesting enough to click on. I promise, there’s something for everyone.

Just browse to http://del.icio.us/eh_nonymous - and enjoy.

Or don't, see if I mind. :)

To my disappointment, the Heinlein Friday for this Friday wasn't done yet - not even half done yet, which would have let me post Part 1, to be followed next Friday by part 2.

So, mea culpa, and let me just leave a few good links here as a taste of what I'm going for. The real HF will be posted... but not before midnight. Maybe not even before next Wednesday. :)

• Wikipedia "Laws of War"


• Fred (Slacktivist) on "You're Not Allowed to Kill Civilians"
  
  
  
  • the Title post
  
  
  • YNATKC continued (for those who didn't get the message after part 1)
  
  
  • Nagasaki - for those still unclear on the concept
  
  
  • Perverse Arithmetic - for those who eagerly look for permission from the prohibition
  
  
  • Terrorists are Bad - for those eager to hide behind labels, particularly when they are unfamiliar with history, war, or both
  
  


• Some links at my del.icio.us page on the Global War on Terror, starting at p.2, which includes some goodies. Of note: Neat Katyal's plea to finally start where we should have, and try courts-martialing detainees; Fafblog's biting satirical comment on the coordinated suicide of three Guantanamo detainees "6/10 changed everything!"; a guest post at Concurring Opinions about how a law clerk grew up, got appointed to the Supreme Court, and turned his former judge's great dissent into the law of the land, eviscerating a terrible precedent, in "Who's the Greatest Law Clerk Ever?" (referring to the recent Hamdan decision).


• The first page of same, which includes the intriguing comment by Prof. Gerber at Intel Dump that perhaps not trying detainees at all would be the right way to go. Why go with kangaroo courts, when you can just decline to try (or punish) them at all? I need to review this, see what he's basing his argument on.

There's lots to say - including about ongoing events, including political ones such as the defeat in Connecticut of a certain formerly Democratic Senator by Democratic nominee Ned Lamont, a rich progressive liberal who won because the primary voters were sick and tired of the incumbent's refusal to vote or talk like a Democrat on a wide range of issues. The first and foremost being the need to show skepticism towards whether the Administration should be credited with competence and good will in the war in Iraq, neither of which it has actually demonstrated. And, of course, the War In Iraq (is it Civil yet? Is it Accomplished yet?) is not really a front in the GWOT - until our leaders turned it into one. "Come on," he taunted.

The Vice President talks as if Iraq were part of the War on Terror. The Senator (soon to be former Senator) talks as if "terrorists" (meaning guerilla warriors, or meaning terrorists? Does he even know?) will take heart if we stop fighting the wrong war and begin fighting the right ones. Both ignore the reality that Saddam was not behind 9/11. Saddam cheered when Americans bled, but that's not enough; many of our enemies did. Anarchist fanatical theocrats have remarkably little in common with westernized despotic secular tyrants. And just where did Saddam purchase that poison gas he used on the Kurds?

Much, much more when I get around to it.

As I noted last week, the promised Heinlein Friday post on the Laws of War was delayed by the utterly predictable, yet totally unexpected unfolding of the Universe.

In the meantime, here's what's up.

I've been blogging since June of 2005, and show no particular inclination to stop thinking, reading, commenting on (er, meaning "at" - er, meaning "at the location of") other blawgs, caring about politics, or writing about law, language, science fiction, or anything else that comes within my sights. Sight? No, sights.

Blogging serves a number of functions for me. It allows me to say what I cannot say at work - or at least, cannot say at such length. Work is for work, which is to say, is not the right place for a rant about Scalia, or a scholarly review of Heinlein's fiction pertaining to sex changes (pending...), or a snarky commentary on Tom Cruise's wacky religious beliefs.

Blogging is writing - and publishing, all in one. It's not journaling, at least not if done right. People can see this - will see it, if I point it out or their browsing brings them here. It's public expression, as well as personal exposition.

As Jeremy recently noted, blogging is (also, or especially) a way to get inside people's heads. He gets to eavesdrop on the thoughts and feelings of others, observe their mental processes. See his commentary at Powell's Book Blog. To the same effect, see architecture columnist Inga Saffron's thoughts on her recent BlogDay (anniversary of blogging). Her comments are thoughtful and, to me, quite interesting. They are the opposite of the fear that journalism will be killed by blogging:

I started the blog without knowing what I was getting into. I saw it as a place to channel odd bits of information that didn't quite measure up as column material, and to try out oddball ideas. It's been a dream situation for a journalist: No deadlines. No limitations on story length. No dumb headlines. No annoying editors. No plodding bureaucracy. What you see is what I write, flaws and all. I never expected that getting rid of the middleman would be so liberating. I also never expected the kind of feedback I see in the comments. Until recently, journalists could never be quite sure of how their work was being read. No more. I've learned a lot just by eavesdropping.

In her view, journalists are liberated by being bloggers. In Jeremy's view, a writer can (finally) connect with his audience, not just letter by letter or one at a time, but in a wave of two-way communication and reaction and reply.

As I am (purposely) a low-profile blogger, I don't have quite the same experience.

I've been asked why I bother blogging at all if I don't keep track of my number of hits, my blog traffic, my ranking, how well I'm linked, who links me, etc. etc. ad nauseam. Frankly, I don't care. I write because I need to, and the fact that I can get feedback (and, indeed, accountability for what I write) is a bonus. The icing on the compulsion cake.

I don't do this to change the world. I do this because it helps me out.

Blogging lets me:

- get things off my chest
- store my thoughts in their most coherent (sometimes) or cogent form
- try out various writing styles, from the most formal to the least
- store my links in one useful location

So expect more of the same, to my second Blogaversary, and on into the foreseeable future.

In the meantime, thanks for reading, to those who do, and thanks for commenting - you know who you are. You help convert this from meaningless self-referential solo gymnastics into an exercise (literally) for the reader - and the blogger.

And now, to get back to work on this overdue (and still imposing) HF post. Maybe if I can find a better way to break it into pieces...

So, "Eh," if that is your *real* name, why the blawg hiatus?

Well, me, since me asks, I've been busy.

Blogging grew out of my need to get it all out, and onto the page. I had been commenting anonymously (or pseudonymously) on blogs for some time, including at my favoritest, Evan Schaeffer's Legal Underground, as it was then known.

I had spare time. I had unexpressed thoughts. I was visiting blawgs that had no commentability, and that annoyed me. I felt like, if the author had something to say, and it was provocative enough (or wrong enough), that they had an obligation - a duty! - to let me comment on it.

Obviously, that's not how writing works, but it is how blogging works - or one of the ways it can work.

Blogging was a hobby, but it was also fun. I could link, I could make snarky comments, I could vent - but I could also indulge my obsessive reading of news and blogs. Suddenly, being overinformed was not a sign of weakness; it was a source of inspiration.

When life gets hectic, as it has lately, I fall behind on my blog reading. Right now my Bloglines page has over 500 posts that I haven't had a chance to pore carefully over - or even skim or skip past. I love blogs - this is the Blogroll created for me by Bloglines, and here's what I have blogrolled at del.icio.us - that is, the same sort of thing, but more haphazardly, since delicious is about impulse and saving everything, like a magpie, rather than carefully selecting only those posts, blogs, or webpages I really and truly need.

I notice that I have 39 blogs on my delicious blogroll; that includes new addition Lawyers, Guns & Money, and Conglomerate, as well as "215 words," the sorts of things I would never have added to bloglines. That's because bloglines pushes posts to you, and they look like they pile up in the aggregator unless you read them. I prefer to lay out the links for myself to peruse at leisure, no obligation to buy, no money down.

I'm about to go on vacation. I'm winding up a document review and preparing for a filing - which will occur while I'm on vacation. I have family duties pressing. I have social responsibilities calling. There's a Jim Henson / Muppet exhibition down in D.C. at the Smithsonian's museum of American history, and not just the exhibit but the museum closes on September 5th, 2006 for a good several years for renovation.

Also, I have a headache, and the water's too cold, and I don't feel like it.

***

I have less to say about the Laws of War than I'd thought - and also have written far, far more words for that post than I can usefully use. When you write a lot and have nothing to say - and does that include this post? - you know you're deep in trouble.

***

'Tis better to keep one's mouth shut and be thought a fool, than open it and remove all doubt. Or so 'tis said by people who say 'tis and 'tain't a lot.

In that vein, I posted to del.icio.us this classic, originally run in Pl*yb*y (name munged to protect the guilty; after all, only illicit and licentious writing ever appears there, cf. this other favorite author of mine)...

The Dark Truth About Comp 101, blogged at Thus Blogged Anderson.

Say, interested in writing? See more links about it (del.icio.us/eh_nonymous/writing).

***

You know, you read a 1,600+ page opinion now and again, and people think you're obsessed. Still, sometimes a case will involve a lot of writing for a judge. See, e.g., this news story on the tobacco decision by the D.C.-based federal judge.

You know, if you like reading legal opinions, I should recommend that you check out del.icio.us/eh_nonymous/pdf for all my links to opinions (except the ones in html format, of course), as well as other PDFfy items of interest. That includes a teaser for an article by Prof. Nate Persily on Scalia's decision in the LULAC race-based gerrymander case, and advice on geting a clerkship, and a long philosophical paper by a soldier on why Don't Ask, Don't Tell violates the military's own ethical standards. Not to mention some of the Best Judicial Opinions On the Web, selected entirely by my own caprice and blind chance.

Prefer funny stuff? Or all the links that relate to law? Some categories overlap - they're tags, after all, not a filing system in the normal sense - but they're all pretty helpful.

Or if it's advice you need, I've found plenty of that too.

As with blogging, the best part about all this is: it's not just for you. It's for me, too. I get to have a flexible, endlessly interconnected set of bookmarks for myself. Oh, right, I also bookmarked some items to look over later. Hm. Must clean that out soon and add more.

***

So, while the Heinlein post (and the series as a whole, in fact) are in limbo, do like I'm doing: take a vacation from it. Get away from it all.

When I come back, I'll decide which way I'll wind it up. I might do it straight, as I've done most of the others, but I was also thinking about laying out the process of creation. Of course, that might be like explaining a joke, or dissecting a frog. It's messy, it takes a while, and in the process the frog dies.

Have a good August!

To quote another legal epistolary writer (Aaron Streett; the extra T at the end is probably for Terrific), "Greetings, sportsfans!" See here, for the first March issue of his periodic chatty Supreme Court opinion, order and grant roundup. I highly recommend it to all SCOTUS groupies. Prawfsblawg reprints them, but you can get them delivered straight to your inbox by mailing him at the link at the end of that post. Streett, an associate in Baker Botts' Houston office, provides all the inside baseball commentary one could want, in a breezy and entertaining tone. Oh look, there's links to all of them at Baker Botts.

Anyway. Hello to those who enjoy watching athletic events. How's your NCAA tournament treating you? Thought so.

I had an intention to write about Gender and Change in Heinlein's writing. So that'll be my next topic, because I think it's got more juice for me right now than the grim-seeming discussion of war crimes that I had planned. I'd planned to unroll that one in mid-August 2006, and then the topic so disheartened me that I went and did things I felt like doing more instead.

So: forthcoming, a discussion of gender-bending, gender roles, stereotypes, cross-dressing, a bit about sexuality (although that's not the focus), and gender as a mutable characteristic in the works of R. A. Heinlein. Because after all, if I can't write what I feel like, what am I doing out here in the blawgoverse, anyway?

Other posts I'm brewing up: a quick perusal of the controversial No Child Left Behind act, which has been heavily criticized as elevating testing, and particularly apparent improvement in testing, over real education, as well as skewing priorities in educating students - like, how much to test-prep vs. other skills, how much to the bottom quintile vs. the next vs. the next. My favorite example of unhappiness was the NY Times article about an excellent school that had been deemed a failure under NCLB. I might do a more searching review of what's being said about it. Wikipedia now notes in the No Child Left Behind Act article that "a new Congress has already started considering major revisions, as one group of 50 Republican senators and representatives introduced legislation in March 2007 that would provide states much greater freedom from NCLB's controls and punishments." - but as always, trust Wikipedia only so far. How do we KNOW that they introduced such proposed legislation unless we go looking through THOMAS ourselves?

Also, a possible HF post on addiction, and another on wealth and power.

Until next time, that's today's unused & unusable inside baseball! (Again, a tip of the imaginary hat to this guy.)