Outside Counsel

After 14 years of faithful service our oven finally gave out. Its final act was to roast our Christmas turkey. Needless to say, we emerged from Orville's with something rather different from the plain white range we'd managed with for the last decade and a half: stainless steel, 16,000 BTUs, convection oven-- a kitchen behemoth that looks like it probably gets hot enough to requre an asbestos suit when sauteing. Can't wait to get it set up and roaring.

I like the idea of Ani DiFranco more than I enjoy her music, although, in fairness, her music is enjoyable enough. She has been a Squeaky Wheel supporter, and is a right-thinking person who puts her money where her heart is in general. She has always impressed me as a thoughtful, intelligent person, and it is interesting to see how clear-sighted she really is. This essay nicely illustrates how genuine she is-- I know a lot of people who think they are rock stars, but I don't know if there are any other rock stars who take what they do this seriously while maintaining a sense of humor about it.

"Try this one on for size: "How is your life different now that you are successful?" A simple question, right? I answered it straight a few times, before a light went off in my head that helped illuminate why it made me so uncomfortable.

"What do you mean by 'success'?" I replied on that day. "The fact that I am appearing in your magazine? Because I think I was successful when I was 19 years old and could sell twenty tapes in one night to an audience of fifty people. I was successful when I quit my last day job at age 21 and supported myself through music without starving. I felt successful when I would show up at some student-union cafeteria, stand under the fluorescent lights and give people songs that would make them cry and stomp their feet and laugh out loud. In fact, it was the very idea that neither fame nor fortune could make you a success in life, but something deeper, that gave me the patience to remain independent all those hard years and not reach for the corporate carrot." (Via wood s lot.)

I'm walking back from my deposition when I pass a guy yelling at someone across the street: "Well you better have it the next time I see you, 'cause I'm gonna make you sweat like a Jane Fonda workout!" I love life's little moments of found poetry.

Via Kottke, Top Ten Consumer Privacy Recommendations, from the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Way back when I started writing "Outside Counsel" I thought that privacy issues would be a large part of what I'd be writing about. After involving myself in the subject for a while, though, I came to the conclusion that there really is no such thing as privacy, and that what we actually enjoy is the illusion of anonymity. Make no mistake, I enjoy that illusion, and I'm sure that many other people do as well, but short of living in Unibomber-like seclusion, there is really no way to keep personal information away from anyone who cares enough to hunt for it. This interesting toy, for example, will find out where you've lived all your life. Not a hundred percent, at least in my case, but an interesting starting place for snooping around. A while back the New York Courts formed a Commission on public access to court records, which went around holding hearings on the question. It was interesting stuff. I've always wanted to testify at something like that, so I signed up; the things the people who spoke before me had to say have been fodder for thought since. The Commission concluded, inter alia, that: "Public case records in electronic form should be made available to the public... over the Internet", although Social security numbers, financial account information, birth dates and the full names of minors should not be included. What's left covers a lot of territory, but the truth is that the barn door has been open for a long time, and the Internet didn't really change much.

Even so, I don't use a Wegmans' Shopper's Club card. Just because I know it is an illusion doesn't mean I can't enjoy it.

Don't you wonder how many of the nutbars that are so hot to force religion into public life have read either the Bible or the Constitution?Judge Ashley McKathan showed up in his Alabama courtroom wearing this, and I have to wonder just what part of Matthew 6:3 he doesn't get. This sort of pious display conveys only one thing to parties that appear before Judge McKathan: "A'hm going to screw you over." You like the Big Ten so much, Judge? Wear it on the inside, where religion is supposed to be. See, also, Matthew 7:1. 

Somehow in all the holiday commotion, I missed the fact that Son Seals died. As with all bluesmen it seemed like he'd been around longer than his actual allotted span; just 62 isn't much at all. Inspirational note from his obit: "In 1997, Mr. Seals was shot in the jaw by his wife, whom he later divorced, and in 1999, complications from diabetes led to the amputation of part of his left leg. But he continued to perform until two months ago. He is survived by a sister, Katherine Sims of Chicago, and by 14 children.

"We try and make everybody feel good," he once told an interviewer."

How to Fix Your Mom's Computer. I know someone who's computer needs this done.

Can anyone tell me when "Gourmand" began being used interchangeably with "Gourmet"? The dictionary definition of "Gourmand" is "glutton: a person who is devoted to eating and drinking to excess". A "gourmet", on the other hand, is defined as an "epicure: a person devoted to refined sensuous enjoyment (especially good food and drink)". I'm versatile-- wings and beer or Grilled miso-citrus scallops with mixed greens and Kim Crawford Sauvignon Blanc 2004 (Marlborough, New Zealand) are both fine with me, but let's be precise about nomenclature when we are describing the experience.

I have to admit, my iPod has made me think about what would be involved in switching to Mac.

EGA got me "Our Cancer Year" by Joyce Brabner, Harvey Pekar,and Frank Stack for Christmas. I've been a fan of "American Splendor" for years, and, of course, I loved the movie. This is a different sort of work for Pekar, however. First and foremost, it is a collaboration, and the voice is really two voices. It is also the longest project he has produced-- rather than a collection of interconnected stories, this has the feel of a story that was composed with the intention of having a novelistic scope. Part of the way that this is accomplished is to reference Brabner's work and involvement with refugee children, and Operation Desert Storm, bringing the outside world into what Pekar usually portrays as a more contained universe. The fact that only one artist illustrates this book also gives it a unity that "American Splendor" doesn't typically possess. The effect is interesting: in some ways it softens Pekar-- he comes off here as less of a wiseass, and more like a borderline compulsive personality. Although "American Splendor" has always been notable for its candor, "Our Cancer Year" is less guarded that anything else I've seen from him.

The story is well told, and emotionally involving, and Stack's art is particularly well suited to it. I want to see the movie again, now, but I am more convinced than ever that Pekar's best outlet is his own chosen medium-- he is a remarkable artist, and this is something that I think gets overlooked by reason of the fact that he has chosen to make his subject his ordinary seeming life. There are a lot of books about surviving cancer, but this one is accessible in a way that a lot of the other sorts of things I've read are not.

Interesting 10 Best Jazz releases list from Fred Kaplan; when we saw Matt Wilson I picked up several of his sides, but I went with the ones that featured the band we saw, not the Arts and Crafts ensemble. I've seen Wake Up! on a couple of lists, though, and I suppose I should expand my Matt Wilson holdings. I liked Chris Potter fine when I saw him with Dave Holland-- Lift: Live at the Village Vanguard sounds like it'd be worth having. The Keith Jarrett/Gary Peacock/Jack DeJohnette work, "The Out-of-Towners" also looks like it'd be good-- we saw DeJohnette a few years back and were suitably impressed.

I need a better system for picking up on jazz, I guess. Right now I am largely dependent on who Bruce Eaton is able to book, and although that works out fine, I think I'd feel more like a hipster if I were better attuned. Because then I would be more of a hipster, I suppose.

Somehow I knew, without having to be told, that Ricky Williams' hero would be Bob Marley. It would have to be Marley-- or Cheech and Chong.

A signed us up for Netfilx, and asked what I wanted for our first three movies. Out of nowhere I said, "True Grit", a movie I haven't seen, or probably even thought of since before I was old enough to grow cool sideburns like Glen Campbell. It was flat out terrific. Robert Duvall plays one of the bad guys, Dennis Hooper has a nice turn, and the principals are brilliant. What struck me most was the writing-- just about everything the characters say is cleverly said, with no wasted talk at all.

"Rooster Cogburn: I aim to kill you in one minute, Ned. Or see you hanged in Fort Smith at Judge Parker's convenience. What'll it be?
Ned Pepper: I call that bold talk for a one eyed fat man.
Rooster Cogburn: Fill your hands, you son of a bitch."

It also was beautifully filmed-- in Technicolor, I might add, so that the whole thing just looks great. The Duke won the Best Actor Oscar, which, as I recall, was viewed as being something of a valedictory award, but, with the benefit of hindsight it can be asserted that he earned it on the merits. (The other nominees were Richard Burton, for "Anne of the Thousand Days", Dustin Hoffman, for "Midnight Cowboy", Peter O'Toole,for "Goodbye, Mr. Chips", and Jon Voight, for "Midnight Cowboy".)

Checking the flyleaf, I see that they've been putting out "Best American Essays" since 1986, so I guess I've been reading this collection every year since the Reagan Administration. I used to read the "Best American Stories" collection, too, but back then I rode the subway and had more time. The essays collection has been one of the little treats in my life for 18 years, which means I've been reading them since EGA was born, I guess.

Most years I have read three or four already-- in "The New Yorker", or "The New York Review of Books" g-d help me, or "The Atlantic", or "Harpers" mostly, but sometimes I pick up something more esoteric, and when I find it in the anthology I'm always pleased-- even in my Collyer Brothers existence, magazine articles that I like disappear, and I'm glad to have them in a form that I can put on a shelf and revisit.

Some years are a tougher read than others-- Susan Sontang's year as guest editor was
rough, I remember. Always it is a collection that is filled with things I'd like to share, essays about stuff that I know everyone I like to talk to would enjoy. Unfortunately, not everyone I like to talk to is quite as omnivorous as I am. I could pass it around, but the way I like to read it is to bomb straight through-- not the way most people read collections like this, I think, even people who read collections like this. Part of it with me is that it is a perfect book for a plane or a train-- I spend a lot of time in between places, and a collection of writing about a lot of different stuff is just what I'm looking for this time of year, when the light gets short, and I am in between no place much, and no place at all.

This year's collection, guest edited by Louis Menand, is as good as it's been in a while. It kicks off with a terrific James Agee piece, recently discovered, about casual racism, and wishing to stand up to it better. Written in 1943, it is as true today as it was then, maybe truer, and is as good an example of the sort of pure, luminescent quality that Agee's writing possessed as I have ever read. Kathryn Chetkovich contributes a piece from "Granta" called "Envy" which discusses the corrosive effect the emotion on her relationship with a lover that knocked me out-- it made me want to teach a course on the Seven Deadly Sins just so I could include it. I'd read Adam Gopnik's piece on the "Matrix" trilogy before, but it is good to have it here, for future reference. Anne Fadiman, who I assume is Clifton Fadiman's daughter, was last year's editor, and has an essay here about Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the Arctic explorer that is simply terrific. Jonathan Franzen's high school reminiscence was in "The New Yorker"-- after being just frustrated with "The Corrections" I was glad to read it. Laura Hillenbrand may only ever write two things, but "Seabiscut" and the essay here about her struggle with chronic fatigue syndrome are both so amazing that I'd have to say she is in a class by herself. Rick Moody contributes a piece called "Against Cool" that I wish I'd written. I take issue with some of his interpretations, but it is a nice piece of scholarship all the same. Similarly, Alex Ross' "Rock 101"-- perhaps a bit too infused with the arch quality that editors for "The New Yorker" must strive to help their writers overcome, but still a piece of work that mines material I want to work, and shows me how the pros do it.

In fact, let's dwell a bit on the Ross piece. It opens with Ross describing an interview with Duke Ellington from "The New Yorker" in 1944. Duke is asked whether he ever felt an affinity for the music of Bach. "[B]efore answering, he made a show of unwrapping a pork chop that he had stowed in his pocket. 'Bach and myself,' he said, taking a bite from the chop, 'both write with individual performers in mind.'" Ross uses this story to make a larger point, but I've been thinking about this for the last two days, and I think that the pork chop story is made up. I cannot imagine Duke Ellington carrying a pork chop in his pocket, even though the words are pure Duke. The rest of the essay is about attending a conference on pop music, and about the dichotomy between taking pop music seriously and enjoying it at the same time. The piece fits well with Moody's article about cool, but I spotted errors in both, and Ross's use of the pork chop anecdote as his lede made me suspicious of a lot of what he had to say.

And so it goes with this collection-- I will come away from the book this year having
learned a little about Yiddish that I didn't know, thanks to the late Leonard Michaels, and a little about taxidermy (a newer thing than I'd thought-- really a Victorian invention), and something about knitting (the only piece I broke my rule about- I suspended reading and gave it to A. for her enjoyment). And I will also have something to gnaw on. I want to know about that pork chop, and I will, I expect, find out sooner or later.

Checking the flyleaf, I see that they've been putting out "Best American Essays" since 1986, so I guess I've been reading this collection every year since the Reagan Administration. I used to read the "Best American Stories" collection, too, but back then I rode the subway and had more time. The essays collection has been one of the little treats in my life for 18 years, which means I've been reading them since EGA was born, I guess.

Most years I have read three or four already-- in "The New Yorker", or "The New York Review of Books" g-d help me, or "The Atlantic", or "Harpers" mostly, but sometimes I pick up something more esoteric, and when I find it in the anthology I'm always pleased-- even in my Collyer Brothers existence, magazine articles that I like disapear, and I'm glad to have them in a form that I can put on a shelf and revisit.

Some years are a tougher read than others-- Susan Sontang's year as guest editor was
rough, I remember. Always it is a collection that is filled with things I'd like to share, essays about stuff that I know everyone I like to talk to would enjoy. Unfortunately, not everyone I like to talk to is quite as omnivorous as I am. I could pass it around, but the way I like to read it is to bomb straight through-- not the way most people read collections like this, I think, even people who read collections like this. Part of it with me is that it is a perfect book for a plane or a train-- I spend a lot of time in between places, and a collection of writing about a lot of diferet stuff is just what I'm looking for this time of year, when the light gets short, and I am in between no place much, and no place at all.

This year's collection, guest edited by Louis Menand, is as good as it's been in a while. It kicks off with a terrific James Agee piece, recently discovered, about casual racism, and wishing to stand up to it better. Writen in 1943, it is as true today as it was then, maybe truer, and is as good an example of the sort of pure, luminescent quality that Agee's writing possesed as I have ever read. Kathryn Chetkovich contributes a piece from "Granta" called "Envy" which discusses the corrosive effect the emotion on her relationship with a lover that knocked me out-- it made me want to teach a course on the Seven Deadly Sins just so I could include it. I'd read Adam Gopnik's piece on the "Matrix" trilogy before, but it is good to have it here, for future reference. Anne Fadiman, who I assume is Clifton
Fadiman's daughter, was last year's editor, and has an essay here about Vilhjalmur
Stefansson, the Artic explorer that is simply terrific. Jonathan Franzen's high school reminesence was in "The New Yorker"-- after being just frustrated with "The Corrections" I was glad to read it. Laura Hillenbrand may only ever write two things, but "Seabiscut" and her essay about her struggle with chronic fatigue syndrome are both so amazing that I'd have to say she is in a class by herself. Rick Moody contributes a piece called "Against Cool" that I wish I'd written. I take issue with some of his interpritations, but it is a nice piece of scholarship all the same. Similarly, Alex Ross' "Rock 101"-- perhaps a bit too infused with the arch quality that editors for "The New Yorker" must strive to help their writers overcome, but still a piece of work that mines matirial I want to work, and shows me how the pros do it.

In fact, let's dwell a bit on the Ross piece. It opens with Ross describing an interview with Duke Ellington from "The New Yorker" in 1944. Duke is asked whether he ever felt an affinity for the music of Bach. "[B]efore answering, he made a show of unwrapping a pork chop that he had stowed in his pocket. 'Bach and myself,' he said, taking a bite from the chop, 'both write with individual performers in mind.'" Ross uses this story to make a larger point, but I've been thinking about this for the last two days, and I think that the pork chop story is made up. I cannot imagine Duke Ellington carrying a pork chop in his pocket, even though the words are pure Duke. The rest of the essay is about attending a conference on pop music, and about the dichotomy between taking pop music seriously and enjoying it at the same time. The piece fits well with Moody's article about cool, but I spotted errors in both, and Ross's use of the pork chop anectode as his lede made me suspicious of a lot of what he had to say.

And so it goes with this collection-- I will come away from the book this year having
learned a little about Yiddish that I didn't know, thanks to the late Leonard Michaels, and a little about taxidermy (a newer thing than I'd thought-- really a Victorian invention), and something about knitting (the only piece I broke my rule about- I suspended reading and gave it to A. for her enjoyment). And I will also have something to gnaw on. I want to know about that pork chop, and I will, I expect, find out sooner or later.

Marion Jones' decision to sue Victor Conte for defamation is a strategy born of two important legal concepts: collateral estoppel and chutzpah. The law makes agnostics of us all, so I'm prepared to look at the case as a neutral: there has been no adjudication on the question of whether she was using performance enhancing drugs, she has denied it, and all we have seen are bits of proof to the contrary. To be sure, that proof is pretty damning, consisting as it does of admissions against penal interest by both the former Tower of Power bass player and her ex-husband, but I can see a jury believing that both Conte and C. J. Hunter, her ex-husband, had reasons to lie about her drug use. Jones has got to fight this on multiple fronts, and that's difficult to do, but the stakes are pretty high. The United States Anti-Doping Agency is investigating her, and so is the IOC. Presumably USA Track and Field is, too. Frankly, I'd say that the odds of her competing internationally ever again are pretty long, but where she makes her money is on endorsements, probably mostly from Nike. I didn't see any pictures of her in Niketown yesterday, and Phil Knight has got to be thinking about how to back out of writing her any more checks. It'd be interesting to see what the contract looks like. It's got to have some provision giving Nike an out if she is barred from competition for doping, but that might not be enough. I don't know if a verdict in her favor in the defamation action would be res judicata or would collaterally estop the Court of Arbitration for Sport, but for sure it could make a breach of contract action an interesting adventure. At a minimum it could make the question of her use of performance enhancing drugs a jury issue, and if she already had a verdict in her favor, Nike might be inclined to come to the table. Actually, just the fact of the defamation action might be enough of a wild card to incline Nike to come to the table, but if they do, they'd better bring their lunch: Jones is getting some high-powered legal advice, and those lawyers are going to want to be paid.

I still have my copy of Christina's "Sleep it Off", although I haven't listened to it in years. I didn't know she was a writer for the Village Voice, but I knew that "Ticket to the Tropics" was smutty and hilarious, the way good dance music ought to be. I used it on a few mix tapes back in the day. If it were a box set with her first album (who knew there were two?) I'd be more tempted; I'm sort of tempted now.

Worth registering for, The Times of London's round-up of humorous law stories. "Interesting trials abroad included the sentence by a Berlin court of 13 months’ probation for a right-wing fanatic who trained his alsatian dog, Adolf, to raise its paw in a Hitler salute. (Roger Boyes wrote in The Times that the dog was not in court but would, no doubt, have pleaded that he was only obeying orders.)" Nice to see that it isn't just the courts in the US that can be disfunctional, notwithstanding the impression we get from our press.

I remember reading about the burgers at Le Parker-Meridian, but somehow it slipped my mind. I think I'll check it out. "The Burger Place is hidden in the lobby of Le Parker Meridian. To get there you enter through the modern glass façade of the hotel, walk through the shiny lobby past the check-in desk, and follow an enormous floor to ceiling curtain long a narrow passage running perpendicular to the desk. At the end of the corridor is an unmarked door on the right. Stepping through the door is like entering another world. You go from glitzy New York hotel to divey, greasy, burger haven in the distance of a threshold."

To Nancy Nuzzo's gig at St. Paul's this afternoon (and a shout out to the other members of the band: Kelley A. Omel, soprano, and Roland Hayes, lute). I know just enough about Renaissance music to be ignorant-- enough, I guess, to find the sackbut jokes in "The Ladykillers" funny. Notwithstanding this gap in my cultural awareness, I found the music this afternoon so beautiful that I lost track of where I was. For a half hour I was in another place, and I walked out feeling refreshed, happy and renewed. The experience was completely unexpected for me-- I'd thought it would be mildly pleasurable, and instead it hit me just right.

Nancy, by the way, really knows her way around her axe. She'd said to be sure to stick around for the last number-- a rule with me anyway. What we got was "What Child Is This" in what I have to believe was an unusual arrangement that allowed the two instrumentalists to stretch out a bit and solo. It really was all that, and very impressive.

sorryeverybody.com, a gallery of apologies. Really, that's how I feel. As I mentioned some time earlier, I vote against my interests most of the time: I should favor lower taxes, but what I actually favor is liberty. I don't believe that the default presumption should be that the cops are always right. I think women should be in control of their own bodies, and that people should be allowed to marry who they want. People should be allowed to say what they want (no First Amendment is why I won't ever actually move to Canada or the Nederlands). Most of all, though, I want my America to be an example for the rest of the world, a leader that stands for freedom. How strange it is to follow the news from Ukraine and think, "I wish my countrymen still thought like that." I am getting to the point where I wonder if Americans are even capable of governing themselves responsibly. Last night, minutes away from midnight, at the last possible moment, the Erie County Legislature voted for a budget that included a tax increase necessary to keep, inter alia, the sheriff's department's road patrols on the road, the libraries open, and nurses in the schools. The budget remains a pusillanimous and dishonest piece of work, and everyone associated with it should be ashamed. This latest financial crisis was brought about, in part, by budgetary mismanagment from the New York State Legislature, a governmental body that would be in ashes were it situated in Kiev. Of the US Congress, of course, nothing really needs to be said: this is an organization that considers the likes of Joe Biden (or Bill Frist-- take your pick) to be intellectually and morally equiped to perform the actual work of government. I keep telling myself that I'll only read the sports pages, but I'm afraid that my responsibilities towards the rest of the world are greater than that. Starting with an apology is the right place to begin.
 

Although probably not particularly safe for work (unless you are an automobile mechanic in Milan), the 2005 Pirelli calendar is a beautiful thing.

In response to a letter I wrote to her a while back our judicial district's Chief Administrative Judge invited me to a meeting of her committee on civility. It was an interesting group, and an interesting conversation. The issue is one that is a big deal with New York's Chief Judge, and the problem is that the lawyers who are the principal offenders are, almost by definition, oblivious to the concept. There was a fair amount of talk about what, exactly, can be done about incivility-- what sort of sanctions are or might be available, for example, but I think this largely misses the point. Sharp practitioners are recognized for what they are, and their reputations suffer accordingly. One effect that this has is that these lawyers find that the matters that they are handling are harder to handle. Courtesies that are otherwise routinely granted are not extended to such individuals, discovery responses are more carefully scrutinized, documents and details are haggled over-- everybody knows who the bad guys are, and nobody cuts them any slack. You know, like Tina Turner says, you can do things nice and easy, or you can do it rough.

It has not been my experience that this is a big problem around here. Predictably, the people at the table all thought that it is more of a New York City thing. I said nay, except perhaps in Brooklyn, where the atmosphere of judicial corruption has so pervaded the system that it is almost like practicing in the Third World. I didn't say the part about the Third World aloud, of course, but it is true-- Kings County is the only place I've ever been where I have seen a fist fight break out at a deposition, and the whole place is so inside baseball that it is hardly surprising that nobody much uses party manners. Christopher Ketcham has an interesting article about Brooklyn machine politics in this month's issue of Harper's. It is not online, unfortunately, but it is a must read for anyone interested in reforming this sort of thing.

I think I'll try this tonight. From á la Cart, Ragoût Gratiné d’Oignons et Échalotes
25 grams butter
150 grams sliced yellow onion
75 grams peeled, trimmed, and quartered shallots
20 grams peeled, de-germed garlic
fine salt and freshly ground black pepper
25 grams raw sugar
100 milliliters water
6 slices, 3-mm thick brie
1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat. Add the onion, shallots, and garlic. Fry for a few minutes until the onions start to soften. Season with salt and pepper.
2. Add the sugar and increase heat to high. Stir for about 3 minutes while the sugar starts to caramelize.
3. Add the water, bring to a boil, and lower heat. Simmer the mixture, uncovered, for about 20 minutes.
4. Preheat broiler.
5. Using a slotted spoon, divide the onion mixture between individual gratin dishes. Place a single layer of 3 slices of cheese on each plate. Brown under the broiler, about 3 minutes.
Yield: 2 servings.

At Sua Sponte, a rant about law school casebooks. Indeed they are as useless as they are expensive. They are also difficult to get rid of-- we still have 'em, all over the house. That's four abodes since we graduated. We use a couple to prop open windows in the summer, but mostly they are just around.

Oh, and jca? Hornbooks are almost as bad. There aren't immutable black letter rules in American jurisprudence, for the most part. I can't tell you the last time I thought a peek at Prosser would reveal the answer-- that one sits on top of the secretary desk in our front hall, under a pile of papers that must have seemed important once, and a basket full of keys that don't open anything any more.

"The Morning News" profiles television "journalists" to help America find a new news source.

"Tim Russert (NBC)
Russert is the king of Meet The Press, an NBC news program considered the most rigorous and influential of the political interview shows. Its format is emulated throughout the industry: Host respectfully asks a politician a softball question with multiple exits; politician ignores question and opens party-rhetoric spigot all over a different issue; host nods respectfully—always respectfully—and moves to the next question. Repeat.
Positives: So sublimely intelligent you can barely see his brain working.
Negatives: Sweaty. Resembles pork."

Don't miss The Ten Least Successful Holiday Specials of All Time.

A Canadian Christmas with David Cronenberg (1986)
Faced with Canadian content requirements but no new programming, the Canadian Broadcasting Company turned to Canadian director David Cronenberg, hot off his success with Scanners and The Fly, to fill the seasonal gap. In this 90-minute event, Santa (Michael Ironside) makes an emergency landing in the Northwest Territories, where he is exposed to a previously unknown virus after being attacked by a violent moose. The virus causes Santa to develop both a large, tooth-bearing orifice in his belly and a lustful hunger for human flesh, which he sates by graphically devouring Canadian celebrities Bryan Adams, Dan Ackroyd and Gordie Howe on national television. Music by Neil Young.
Via Making Light)

Venerable weblogger Jason Kottke has apparently wandered into a buzz saw by posting about the "Jeopardy" guy's winning streak coming to an end. It is very uncool of Sony to be doing this, of course, and all I can see coming of it is bad law. Jason links to a NYTimes op ed by Professor Volokh discussing the idea of a journalist's privilege extending to bloggers-- I don't really buy the necessity of such a privilege, to be honest, and I don't see that it would apply in this circumstance but, as usual, Professor Volokh has interesting things to say, with his characteristic clarity of thought.

It is interesting to think for a moment about what the IP explosion may mean. One of my favorite engineering concepts is the Law of Incompressibility of Troubles-- the idea that if you fix a problem over here, a new problem will pop up over there. Sony is trying to protect its IP rights, and it is doing it, apparently, by means of the time honored method of sending a lawyer's letter. Fair enough, but all resources are finite, and the number of potential IP violations that potentially exist for something like the "Jeopardy" story far exceed the number of lawyers available to write letters-- and the number of dollars anyone has to pay the lawyers. Kottke complains that he does not have the resources to fight Sony, and of course that's true, but Sony is still fighting a losing battle. Much better to pick your fights, I'd say. Enough people read Kottke to make it at least hypothetically possible that he'll be able to mount a legal defense, based on fair use, or something else. I'm half of a mind to volunteer myself. When that fight is over, what will be left will be bad law.

When we started our practice one of our principal accounts was with New York's comp insurer of last resort. They walked a fine line, and were at pains to preserve the independence of counsel, but when it looked like they were wandering into a place where there were two possible answers to a legal question, and one of the answers would make for bad law, they were at pains to avoid that fight. Working for them taught me a valuable lesson-- don't pick fights you can't win, sure; but especially don't pick fights you can't afford to lose.

If Sony shuts Kottke down it'll be a shame, but I don't see Sony winning this argument in the long run.

Although I find it interesting that Babar went to see Thelonious Monk, I still must insist that the elephant king is an imperialist pawn. Let's look at the evidence: he witnesses his mother killed by European hunters, and flees to France. He becomes the pet of the Old Lady, who schools him in Continental manners, and returns to his home country, where his stylish attire and sophisticated manners so impress the elephants that he left behind that they make him king. "When I am King," he tells the toadying Cornelius, "You can have my hat." You bet. This is the history of Africa, without the extraction-based economy. Count on it: there are elephants working the mines in Babar land, and there are no petits-fours for them. I'll buy that Babar is not racist-- as a son of Africa, I wouldn't expect him to be. He is, however, clearly a colonialist. And his relationship with the Old Lady has always impressed me as exploitive. Did I read it to my kids? Sure-- I love it when the floorwalker tells him, "The elevator is not a toy, Mr. Elephant." I have never seen an illustration that made me want pastries more. And I like the spidery text, and the fact that some of the charactors speak in word baloons, and that when the old king dies from eating a bad mushroom he turns green, but not "a becoming shade of green"-- that's the color of Babar's suit. We always enjoyed Babar in our houshold, but I was always at pains to point out where the politial value system went off the rails-- just as I did with "Doctor Dolittle."