Fashion Poll

Should I buy a Chanel suit? There are some consignment shops that have them for only moderately heart-stopping prices.

EC Campaign

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists wants you to ask your doctor for a prescription for emergency contraception. Having a prescription (even an unfilled one) on hand can make it dramatically easier to take the drug in the timeframe in which it is most effective. Of course, you may already have birth control pills that can be used as emergency contraception.

Translations, por favor.

Am I the only person in the world who is seriously annoyed by books that have significant amounts of non-translated dialogue in them? In the wake of this poll, I decided to give McCarthy another try and picked up Blood Meridian. My high school Spanish is just not cutting it, though. Nabokov pulls this stunt too, but he gets a pass from me because he at least uses proper punctuation.

Designer babies

What if you could ensure that your children would not be plagued by the inheritable disease you suffer from? In Britain, now you can.

Predictably, there are some people who think that this sort of screening should be banned. I don't see any of them volunteering to adopt cancer-ridden "snowflake babies," though. Their objection can't possibly be to the destruction of embryos, as this occurs with many IVF procedures that don't involve genetic screening. My question is this: is gene therapy a form of eugenics? Are the same scaremongering ethicists who try to keep people from having healthy children via genetic screening also opposed to gene therapy?

What, me, cynical?

I give the relationship four years, tops.

International currency markets, I hate you.

Just in time for my trip to France, the Euro edges up to 1.29. The forecast predicts clouds and rain. Whee!

Lipstick feminism

people talk about my image
like i come in two dimensions
like lipstick is a sign of my declining mind
like what i happen to be wearing the day
that someone takes my picture
is my new statement for all of womankind

No children

Thirty percent of German women are intentionally childless. (h/t)

So over this

Do you ever resample a youthful favorite and realize it's no longer to your taste? I Netflixed some Kids in the Hall episodes since I liked it when I was a teen (especially the movie, parts of which still make me giggle just thinking about them). The actual shows, though, were not as funny as I remembered. There was one segment with blackface. Blackface! What the hell? I know they're Canadians, but is that not offensive in Canada?

Blackberry vulnerability

Why to send letters via e-mail.


___________________________
Sent by Amber Taylor via the free Email Scheduler service.
Register now at http://www.emailschedule.com

The little prince

This post about abused domestic slaves reminds me of an incident my mother, a nurse, told me about some years back. A Saudi family brought their young son to the U.S. for medical treatment and she was taking care of him. She had to do something moderately uncomfortable to him; I think it was starting an IV. The little boy started to cry and the roomful of female relatives became agitated. Once she finished with the IV, one woman leaned over and slapped my mother in the face. This was, she explained, so the boy would know that my mother had been punished for hurting him. The hospital was not amused and it did not happen there again, but I'm sure that any home nurses who caused the sick boy discomfort were treated even worse.

Justice Thomas picks a GMU grad

GMU has garnered its first Supreme Court clerk, one Will Consovoy. However, it's not clear when Mr. Consovoy will be clerking for Justice Thomas, as he has been known to hire far in advance and at least two of the OT 2007 slots are already full.

Why I don't dream I'm Wonder Woman: She's deformed!

Here's an interesting post on comic book art that's been making the rounds. This related discussion, incidentally, reminds me of my Intellectual Property class's study of Barnhart. Our professor brought in foam shirt forms as examples and spent a non-trivial portion of the period waving a disembodied female torso around.

Luttigator No More

Judge Luttig resigns!

What will the resignation of the biggest Supreme Court feeder judge mean for the clerkship market?

And I trust you with my money?

Note to Clerksville Bank: when a customer comes in and asks what charges are imposed on foreign ATM transactions, the correct response is not "We don't know that," and a blank stare that invites the customer to leave.

I thought about asking for them to change some money now, but I'm not sure they wouldn't hand me deposit slips with "European Dollars" written on the back.

As you may have noticed . . .

. . . I'm toying with the template again.

Everything's better with Photoshop.

You know what's fun? Making stencils out of your photos! Tutorial here. You can transfer them to a wall or other surface with ease. (h/t)

Why can't we be friends?

Relationship stuff around the internet:

• Government incentives result in an entire Chinese village getting divorced. (h/t Bill F.)
• Why do women like bad boys while nice guys get the shaft? I think the answer is self-assurance.
  
• Why did you break up with your ex? There is no right answer.
• Crazy Tom Cruise's very public relationship with Katie Holmes (and other antics) may have hurt ticket sales of MI:III. I am boycotting it, and I love action movies so much that last night I dreamed I was Spider-Man.
  

Alito hires OT 2006 clerk

Via A3G, I see Justice Alito has hired his first OT 2006 clerk: Mike Lee, a BYU grad who clerked for him on the Third Circuit. The master list has been updated.

Every love story has two sides.

As preparation for my trip to Paris next week, I rented He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not, which is sort of the anti-Amélie. Unlike that film and Audrey Tautou's more recent A Very Long Engagement, He Loves Me . . . is just the right length; its parallel structure prevents digressions. I won't tell you anything more about it, but I would recommend this movie highly. The less you know about the plot, the more surprising it will be. Take a chance and watch this! Do not, however, watch Tautou's latest film. (Any American tourist I see at the Louvre with a copy of that abominable book may get a surreptitious kick in the ankle.)

(Here be SPOILERS; highlight and read if you dare.)

The thing I found remarkable about this movie is how Tautou's gamine appearance muffles our reactions to her behavior. A similar plotline with the genders reversed, or even with a less girlish actress in the lead (say, Glenn Close) would have been far more disturbing. But even as revelations of Angélique's behavior spun across the screen, I barked with startled laughter but was not frightened. Would a man find this film more scary, even with Tautou as the lover?

Unlike the NY Times reviewer, I found the ending appropriate. Anything else would have played false. Are we to imagine a final confrontation between Rachel and Angélique? An unending search for the lost love, a la A Very Long Engagement? None of the above? It leaves us with delicious ambiguity.

My heroine

I really enjoy the Dress A Day blog, mostly because it inspires me to get back into sewing and to wear more dresses (which are the lazy woman's paradise, since you don't have to match a top and a bottom). Until today, though, I did not know that the blog's proprietress, Erin McKean, also has the coolest job ever.

The Algebraist

I've gradually become an Iain M. Banks fan, although my first experience with his SF was so underwhelming that I swapped the book for a reprint of Emma in a Prague bookshop just so I wouldn't have to lug it home. His Culture novels have grown on me, but it's the dark psychology (which also comes through in his lit-fic) that put his books a cut above the typical SF. For this reason, I checked out The Algebraist from the Clerksville library despite its not being another foray into the Culture universe.

Perhaps I was doomed to be mildly disappointed. Since Banks creates a new universe out of whole cloth, he has a lot of world building to do, but the book went beyond that and began to feel overstuffed in general. The characters are classed as Quick (a variety of species living roughly humanoid timespans, with some technological enhancement and relativity-based extension) and Slow (Dwellers, who can live for billions of years and experience time at a much slower rate). Without giving away too much of the mystery plot, I will say that certain things kept jerking me out of the story: Why are creatures with lives that potentially span billions of years not risk-averse as adults? Why are AIs anathema? What exactly does a Dweller look like? (Even after pages of descriptions, I could never get a good mental image, which was not helped by the decidedly contradictory cover art.)

There were a few bright spots: a language of patterned knucklings and strokes that two lovers use to communicate secretly; the aside that it's often necessary for AIs in hiding to pretend to be conjoined twins since a solitary, secret AI would be likely to go mad; the over-the-top, Caligula-like villain who tries to conquer a system to get a valuable secret. But sifting through this epic tome to get to these bits may be a chore that only the most enthusiastic Banks fans are up for.

Anthropologist Wanted

Emailed to me by two different people: The American Scene boys have a party.

“Over here is like the conversation party, and over here is like the dance party,” pronounced Mr. Salam. He danced vigorously, and alone, in the living room to Ghostface Killah, the Libertines, the Clash, the New Pornographers.

These two lines in juxtaposition amused me:

"So far, no one had established any reverse traffic up to the bedrooms."

"Mr. Douthat proudly declared in the dining room that the corkscrew had been broken from use."

Public sex at the Volokh Conspiracy

Alas, I have been remiss in responding to the continuing debate on public sex and nudity, but Ilya Somin and Eugene Volokh have taken over.

In other news, I am in Washington D.C. for the weekend, so if any friends of Amber would like to get together for board games or lunch, email.

Poor-Off!

Can anyone beat the two ladies in this Jane blog poor-off?

Teasing out theories of sexual ethics

PG weighs in on the sexual morality issue and contends that we each have many theories. Take note of the difference between her first and second examples.

More regulation of public sex

The discussion on regulating public sex continues apace. Some of the more interesting threads:

• Public sex as it relates to public nudity: Most people assume that no ban on public sex would mean no ban on public nudity, although you can have one without the other. Some think seeing naked people is qualitatively different than seeing sexual acts. There's disagreement over whether we can make principled distinctions as to what body parts can be banned from public view.

• Health concerns: Many seem convinced that allowing public sex would result in increased transmission of STIs or that there might be health risks to other users of public spaces. Does the risk of increasing STI rates or of making public spaces less sanitary justify the regulation? (With respect to the latter, it might apply equally to public nudity, at least the below-the-waist variety.)

• Public sex and sexual harassment: While some have attacked the analogy of sex to speech as invalid because people are rarely attempting to communicate to others when they perform sex acts in public, on the occasions when they do, it may be an attempt to harass others (the popular example is the dirty old guy on the subway). Does allowing public sex mean allowing this? It looks to me like you're damned if you do and damned if you don't: if you're intentionally trying to make someone watch you have sex, it might be harassment and thus bannable, but if you're totally oblivious to the people around then it's not communicative and thus bannable.

• Public sex and minors: While some think seeing sex in public traumatizes kids, this doesn't hold cross-culturally. Public sex might mean more minors would be sexually active, but if it coincided with a switch to a liberal (read: European) view of sexuality it might be accompanied by more responsible behavior.

• Public sex and offensiveness: At least one person claims that public acts can be regulated if they are offensive to the community without this being oppressive. Others have disagreed. Whether or not offensiveness is a legitimate ground in general for exercising the police power has come under fire, especially with respect to speech.

I'm glad that this has provoked so many different kinds of responses. I'm not glad that I have apparently caused at least one person to reconsider the merits of a flag-burning amendment. Carry on!

UPDATE: I will be moderating the comments section. If you are not substantively contributing to our discussion of the harm principle's application to regulation of public sex or nudity, you will be deleted. Please read the main comment thread before weighing in. Many of your ideas have already been discussed in some detail.

Ouch.

Opinionista should just be glad she's not a hyena. (h/t )

The regulation of public sex

Instead of derailing the general discussion of sexual morality in this Feministe comments thread, I thought I'd take my hobby-horse back to PTN. To summarize: the discussion is on the appropriate extent of legal regulation of sexual behavior. One commenter, in the course of arguing for minimal restrictions based on the harm principle, tossed off this line:

Public sex, where it would be clearly offensive and/or disruptive to others, is probably within the harm principle and should be (and is) illegal as well.

I have been puzzling over this particular extension of the harm principle for years. I asked Randy Barnett about it once and didn't get a satisfying answer (apparently all will become clear to me once I breed, which means I'll never get it!). I asked the Feministe folks what they thought. One person made what I thought were some rather off-topic remarks about schools and businesses and confused content neutral regulations like decibel limits with content based regulations like limits on public sexual expression. The original commenter replied:

I agree that there’s a fine line there, that we need to be careful with. It’s one we’ve got to draw though, as we draw it with free speech. In a general sense, I don’t think it’s repressive: expecting some degree of cultural and contextual sensitivity of people living in any society seems reasonable. The question is what degree? In London, or Mumbai, I could walk down a crowded street holding hands with my boyfriend and be reasonably sure I’m not doing anything context-inappropriate: making out with him would probably cross the border in Mumbai, and standing too close to him would cross it in some village in the Punjab. A policeman coming up and advising me not to do it wouldn’t be “repression”, I don’t think. Being attacked by the policeman, on the other hand, would.

Now expecting people to be sensitive to others is nice, and should be encouraged by civil society, but I'm more interested in the appropriateness of state regulation. A police officer who tells you not to engage in some kind of sexual behavior presumably has more authority than the average citizen; you might be fined or punished in some other way, or you might be arrested and taken into custody. This part of the argument seems unpersuasive.

Other people are unwilling spectators to our offensive expression and conduct all the time. I can stand on the steps of the Supreme Court and wave gory, graphic photos of dismembered fetuses at passing schoolchildren. I can wear a jacket that says “Fuck the draft” in a courthouse. I can put cartoons of Mohammed on t-shirts and wear them on the street. Lots of people would find these things offensive, but we don’t allow their religious fervor, patriotic sentiment, or just plain weak stomachs to be grounds for censoring the public sphere. Why is sex special? To use legalistic language: unlike decibel limits, this is not a content-neutral restriction. (Or is it? Is a dimension of expression, not content of expression? Can I really express myself sexually if I am not permitted to act on my feelings? In the same way that no other words really convey the sentiment "Fuck the draft," does any other mode of expression really get across what a physical gesture like a kiss does?)

Even if you don't buy the sex-as-expression argument, even though it's clearly communicating something between the parties engaged in it, why is preventing offense a legitimate state interest in this case and not in other cases? If you have a right to have sex in your home, we can't regulate it, even if your community knows what you're doing and finds it totally offensive. Why does the public actually seeing it, as opposed to knowing about it, make a difference?

It just seems odd to say that we can burn flags in public (something many people find so offensive that it provokes violence) but we can’t have sex in the bushes at the park because someone might get the vapors.

UPDATE: I neglected to mention my other objection to Annie's response. Does anyone else have a problem with saying that our right to engage in public sexually-charged behavior is entirely dependent on community norms? If that sort of relativism is the standard, then we're one reactionary religious movement away from sexual segregation.

UPDATE II: Welcome, Instapundit readers. This old post suddenly has become relevant again.

I will be moderating the comments section. If you are not substantively contributing to our discussion of the harm principle's application to regulation of public sex or nudity, you will be deleted. Please read the main comment thread before weighing in. Many of your ideas have already been discussed in some detail.

Good for the gander

I'm slowly getting back on the makeup wagon after nearly two years of blotchy-faced, low maintenance living. The experience of shopping for the stuff is pretty intimidating. I wasn't aware that SOP for makeup these days included "primer." My face is not a car! I ended up getting this foundation and powder and calling it a day.

Now can someone drag this guy down to Sephora? You'd think he could afford to not look like someone's attacked him with a sandblaster.

PTN Book Club Lives

Some people are still interested in doing the book club thing, so we're soldiering on. New members are welcome! Discussion on future book club selections is taking place here. May's selection will be the Volokh-Conspiracy-approved I Promessi Sposi.

Unwise in the presence of so many writers to publish such dreck.

Sometimes reading bad books is like starring in your very own episode of MST3K. And sometimes it makes you want to scoop out your eyes with a melon baller.

I saw this book in the Clerksville public library and immediately recognized it as being the one that gained infamy at a convention last year for its unintentionally hilarious prose and dialogue. A sticker on the spine proudly proclaimed it a "Bond Book." Somehow I don't think the voters realized that their tax dollars were going to be used in quite this way. But some said (link fixed) that it was an unfairly criticized work of feminist SF, so I gave it a shot.

I think this review pretty much sums up how I felt after reading it. One thing that's not emphasized there, though, is how astonishingly stupid the characters are. Why not use men's urine to cure the plants? How dumb do you have to be not to notice that your mother and sister have green and brown skin?

I hope that books two and three are never published. UPDATE: Book Two comes out this summer. Augh!

Future of the PTN Book Club?

Thanks to those of you who participated in the book club. Is there any interest in picking new books and continuing with it? I felt like we got off to a bad start by choosing books the first two months which most of us didn't like.

PTN Book Club: Anansi Boys

This may be our most popular selection yet.

Amber: "Unlike the rather plodding, dark American Gods, Anansi Boys has plenty of laugh-out-loud moments (making me reassess whether the laughs in Good Omens came from Gaiman or Pratchett)."

Karl: "I would venture that the style of the book is often Pythonesque (or prehaps Gilliamesque, a la Time Bandits)."

Donna: "Anansi Boys is funny."

Zubon: "The destruction of Earth was perhaps the best thing that could have happened to Arthur Dent, since he lost everything immediately and all at once. There was no lingering suffering as his life was shredded one bit at a time. He would have become an annoying character, wandering about Islington wishing for tea while Ford Prefect acted strangely on the side. Fat Charlie is that tedious, earthbound Arthur Dent."

Tom: "I was struck by Gaiman’s ability to occasionally drop something beautiful and profound into his narration without losing the zany tone and pace of his story. "

"Pistols or swords."

The former EIC of the Yale Law Journal appears to have challenged another student to a duel.

PTN Book Club: Amber on Anansi Boys

I put off getting a copy of Anansi Boys because of how underwhelming I found Neil Gaiman's last novel, American Gods. This resulted in my having to pay cover price at Barnes & Nobel after realizing that the library copies were checked out and it was too late to order it from Amazon. Anansi Boys may not have provided $30 worth of enjoyment, but it was still the most pleasant of the books we've read so far.

We start with Fat Charlie Nancy. Fat Charlie isn't fat, or at least he isn't anymore, but when he was younger, his father gave him the nickname and it stuck. Fat Charlie's father had a knack for naming things, along with an uncanny ability to embarrass his son and a way with the ladies. Fat Charlie hasn't seen his father in years, and is preparing to wed Rosie, an English do-gooder, when he gets some bad news: his dad is dead. He flies from London to Florida and arrives just in time to help bury his father and to find out from an old neighbor that he has a long-lost brother. When he drunkenly invokes the mysterious sibling, all hell breaks loose.

You see, Fat Charlie's father was a god, and even dead gods have plenty of enemies. This goes double for trickster gods like Anansi, the spider deity that was Charlie's father.

Unlike the rather plodding, dark American Gods, Anansi Boys has plenty of laugh-out-loud moments (making me reassess whether the laughs in Good Omens came from Gaiman or Pratchett). And unlike On Beauty, Anansi Boys has well-drawn, subtle black
characters. Interestingly, no black character is ever described as such; other characters are instead differentiated from them by their whiteness, like Grahame Coats, who looks like "an albino ferret in an expensive suit."

I flew through Anansi Boys, but some stand-out bits were Gaiman's explanation that everyone has their own life song (this is the tune we sing in the shower, and the words are usually too embarrassing for public consumption), the descriptions of Rosie's mum, a desiccated Eartha Kitt-lookalike who holds a grudge against Charlie for trying to eat her wax fruit, and the amusing response of some islanders who can't believe that anyone would take a holiday with nothing but a lime as luggage. The only part that rung false was the easy escape of Charlie's brother from the avian emissaries of a rival god. I've read The Dark Half. Birds will tear you up.

Anansi Boys deserves the success it achieved (it premiered at #1 on the NYT bestseller list), and it provided a solid $10.95 worth of reading pleasure. Recommended.

Why not "Oftom"?

Katie Holmes is now Kate Holmes, according to Tom Cruise:

Tom explains, "Katie is a young girl's name. Her name is Kate now – she's a child-bearing woman."

Shudder. (h/t)

Attorney in trouble for blogging

A litigation associate on loan to the San Franscisco prosecutor's office got in hot water for some blog postings he made about a pending case. The associate, a Boalt grad, subsequently left Keker & Van Nest to write musicals. (h/t)

The moral of the story? Don't call your opposing counsel "chicken" or refer to her with obscenities or discuss inadmissible evidence on your blog. And if you really want to work in theatre, don't go to law school.

Recovering Objectivist relapses

Angelina Jolie is Dagny Taggart.

UPDATE: David Bernstein thinks Dagny should be played by 56-year-old Sigourney Weaver or 48-year-old Sharon Stone. Such appreciation of older actresses is admirable (if utterly divorced from the reality of Hollywood), but Dagny Taggart and John Galt are thirtysomethings during the novel. Why reduce the film's potential audience by casting older actors with a narrower appeal?

Regardless of his being a decade too senior, though, the only choice for d'Anconia is Antonio Banderas.

Achilles/Patroclus: The First Slash?

Recently a fanfic writer tried to sell her unauthorized Star Wars novel on Amazon. The reactions of authors and publishers were negative. An interesting discussion on fanfic in the literary world ensued. The most recent winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction is essentially a novel-length fanfic about Little Women. Any interest in making it a book club selection?

I really wanted to write a note about the legal status of fanfic, but it's already been done.

Don't forget: Anansi Boys is this month's book. Email links to your thoughts on it by Sunday.

UPDATE: If you are actually looking for Achilles/Patroclus, maybe this link would be helpful.

You oughta be in pictures

I borrowed this book from Steve on Monday and read it on my way back to Clerksville from D.C. (where the job hunt goes on). Like Eugene Volokh, I found it to be a gripping read. I usually don't care too much for nonfiction, but this has a great storyline in addition to providing tons of weird information about the legal institution of trial by combat in France.

In brief: two friends, vassals of the same liege lord, become enemies as the lower-born but politically suave Le Gris rises in society and obtains the advantages to which the more aristocratic Carrouges felt he was due. When the down-on-his-luck Carrouges remarries, his beautiful young bride catches the eye of his adversary. She later claims that Le Gris found her alone and raped her. He denies it, and his friend and liege supports him. Carrouges believes his wife's claim and demands trial by combat. Surprisingly, the king and parlement of Paris grant his request. Three lives hang in the balance: Le Gris's, Carrouges's, and Marguerite's, who watches from a black-draped scafford and will be burned at the stake for the crime of swearing a false claim if Le Gris triumphs. The battle is intense, starting with a joust, progressing to axes and swords, and continues until a dagger decides the case. Will justice be done? Was Marguerite raped by Le Gris, or is this just another attempt by Carrouges to bring down his rival? Could it be a case of mistaken identity?

I'm thinking this should be a Studio Canal production with Gerard Depardieu as Carrouges, Jean Reno as Le Gris, and Eva Green as Marguerite. Who should be cast in the inevitable American remake?

Suggestion Box

Is this blog not pink enough? Is the authorial voice insufficiently feminine? Do my posts about Supreme Court clerks not drip with the required ratio of envy to hero-worship? Tell me how you really feel.

Harvard Plagiarism: Undergrad Edition

Wunderkind chick-lit author exposed as a plagiarist. Metafilter is there.

(Previous posts on HLS's plagiarism woes here, here, and here.)

Come on, sugar.

We finished the first season of Veronica Mars last night, and more threads were left hanging than mysteries were solved. What happened to Logan's note? What was in the secret message pen? Where did the rest of Lily's duct stash go? And why did Abel Koontz know about Kane and V's mom?

Incognita?

I had a very strange experience today at a Mexican restaurant. The waitress was acting very weird and giggly and gave me this very significant look when she thanked us for coming. The only way I can explain it is that she was acting like she thought I was someone else. Is there some D.C. or Latina celebrity who looks like me?

Happiness is a warm gun

One blogger asks: what if gun safety was taught like sex ed?

• allow everyone to own a gun (even more, they'd require it: gunlessness is an abomination), but they'd insist that kids could never, ever take them out of their holster, sheath or gun rack
• it would be illegal to expose your weapon or even talk about it
• exposing a gun on TV would outrage viewers, who would deluge the network with complaining phone calls
• blanks, trigger locks, and even safeties would be forbidden
• there would be accidental discharges every night in every teenager's home, but no one would ever talk about it
• it would be a shameful sin to go off by yourself and practice shooting at targets
• the only acceptable use would be to kill something, although it would be OK to miss if you were sincerely trying to kill something
• most hunters would be desperately hoping to miss every time they went hunting, and would try to contrive situations in which they could fire their guns without actually hitting anything

Is this a useful analogy? If not, why not?

Some things never change

Should you send your daughter to Tulane? Tyler Cowen helpfully points out that "the renaissance ends at the edge of campus." That was always true; one of my main turnoffs from Tulane when I visited it in high school was the length and seriousness of the crime report in the student newspaper.

Lyrics.ch: RIP

As an exercise in community, tell us your favorite song lyric. Mine may be the second stanza of School Night, although that song deserves some kind of prize for greatest disparity in lyrical quality within a single piece; everything after that is terrible. Another contender might be this bit from Shy:

the door opens, the room winces
the housekeeper comes in without a warning
i squint at the muscular motel light
and say, hey good morning
as she jumps, her keys jingle
and she leaves as quickly as she came in
i roll over and taste the pillow with my grin

Who's Who? III

By request, an updated list of the OT 2006 Supreme Court clerks. Has Alito hired yet?

I fell behind on posting about the Elect because nobody was sending me any information about them; if you have gossip, photos, or other hot information about any of the clerks who have not yet been profiled, email me! I will post on them as soon as I have a full Justice's worth of profiles. I especially need info on the non-HLS clerks.

Kennedy:

1. Dave Foster (Harvard '05/Kozinski)
2. Mark Yohalem (Harvard '05/Rymer)
3. Eric Murphy (Chicago '05/Wilkinson)
4. Lisa Marshall (Yale '05/Leval)
   

Souter:

1. David Han (Harvard '05/Boudin)
   
2. Daniel Tenny (Michigan '05/Tatel)
   
3. Bryan Leach (Yale '05/Cabranes)
4. Boris Bershteyn (Yale '04/Cabranes)

Scalia:

1. Dan Bress (UVA '05/Wilkinson '05-'06)
2. Louis A. Chaiten (Northwestern '98/Sutton '03-'04)
3. Joshua Lipshutz (Stanford '05/Kozinski '05-'06)
4. Hashim Mooppan (Harvard '05/Luttigator '05-'06) source
   

Stevens:

1. Nick Bagley (NYU '05/Tatel)
2. Chad Golder (Yale '05/Garland)
3. Jamal Greene (Yale '05/Guidomaniac)
4. Lauren Sudeall (Harvard '05/Bleeding Reinhardt) source
   

Ginsburg:

1. Kate Andrias (Yale '04/Bleeding Reinhardt '04-'05)
2. Scott Hershovitz (Yale '04/W. Fletcher '04-'05)
3. Daphna Renan (Yale '04/Edwards '04-'05)
4. Arun Subramanian (Columbia '04/Jacobs '04-'05/G. Lynch '05-'06) source

Breyer:

1. Stephen Shackleford (Harvard '05/Boudin) source
2. Thiru Vignarajah (Harvard '05/Calabresi)
3. Tacy Flint (Chicago '04/'05, Posner)
4. Jaren Casazza (Columbia '04/Jacobs '04-'05/Wood '05-'06)

Thomas:

1. John Adams (UVA '03/Sentelle-tubby '03-'04)
2. David Bragdon (UVA '02/S. Williams '02-'03)
3. Brandt Leibe (Yale '05/Luttigator '05-'06) source
4. Adam Conrad (Georgia '05/Sentelle '05-'06)
   

Roberts:

1. George Hicks (Harvard '05/Brown)
2. Felicia Ellsworth (Chicago '05/Boudin)
   
3. Paul Nathanson (Harvard '04/Niemeyer/Silberman)
   
4. Keenan Kmiec (Boalt '04/Alito/Sentelle)

Alito:

1. Mike Lee (BYU '97/Alito) source
   
2. Chris Paolella (Harvard '99/Alito)
   
3. Matthew A. Schwartz (Columbia '03/Alito)
4. Gordon D. Todd (UVA '00/Beam) source
   

Roberts Completes OT 2006 Clerk Hiring

The last two OT 2006 Roberts clerks are Paul Nathanson (Harvard '04,
Niemeyer, Silberman) and Keenan Kmiec (Boalt '04, Alito, Sentelle).
Full profiles to come. Post gossip in the comments or email me!

Heard it through the grapevine

A rumor is going around that more OT 2006 Supreme Court clerks have been hired (Roberts was the name I heard). Can anyone validate?

Motion for fist fight

Via Orin Kerr, evidence that Montana lawyers have a cowboy mentality.

The case apparently involves drunken brawl in which a larger man jumped a smaller man in the presence of a crowd of onlookers. The smaller man then stabbed his attacker 13 times, killing him. Defense counsel, angered by what he perceived as the prosecution's contention that the smaller man should have stuck to fists instead of using a knife to defend himself, apparently wanted to put the opposing attorneys to the test and challenged them to a similar fist fight. The judge was not amused.

Homosociality, boo!

This post takes a long look at male homosocial interactions and isn't happy with what it sees. Do you think that this dynamic affects your own relationships? What are the homosocial norms for females? The Caroline in the City anecdote could just as easily been scripted for three women; lots of women espouse similar post-relationship standards, and few feel that it's necessary to inform their exes of them, since the relevant parties they wish to discourage are their female friends.

Smells Like Teen Spirit

If this gets really popular, could it have a Fourth Amendment impact?

The Bluebook makes me blue

Ann Althouse is right; the new Bluebook rules for blog citation are horrible.

Things I Hate III

• Photoshopped pictures of politicians
• The term "Congresscritters"
• Paper towel dispensers that are placed high enough on the bathroom wall so that water runs down your forearms when you reach for a towel
• Bicyclists who ride two or three abreast instead of in the designated bike lane
• When people talk to me on airplanes even though I have a book open on my lap
  
• Suits made of acetate (why is it so hard to find a well-tailored women's suit made out of wool or silk?)

UPDATE: Added:

• Skinny jeans
• Blogs that update the same post in nonobvious ways two or three times a day for a week
• Looking for airfares to Paris on four different search engines simultaneously
  

Small bunny pilfering a cookie

small bunny pilfering a cookie
Originally uploaded by Benjamin Breen.

The title kind of says it all.

Cravings

I read this and this the other day and was seized by a sudden craving for Cadbury Creme Eggs. Like so many foodstuffs that tasted great when you were a kid, those things are nasty.

PTN Book Club Reminder

Don't forget that this month's selection is Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman. There's nothing like decompressing after doing your taxes by curling up with a good book.

Fur. Will. Fly.

Have a happy Easter, people.

You crave one kiss of my clay-cold lips / But my breath smells earthy strong.

In the comments to this post, Jacob Levy points out another odd statement by Catharine MacKinnon:

In the interview, MacKinnon complains that

"Sex with a dead body is necrophilia but it isn't regarded as rape."

I must admit to not really seeing what's wrong with that...

In response to a short digression on the possibility of ex ante consent to such conduct and its relationship to organ donation, he elaborates:

And yet necrophilia absent such consent still wouldn't be rape! Which suggests that consent, ex ante or otherwise, isn't really the operative concept at all...

There is probably an elaborate literature, or at the very least a weird law review article, dealing with this topic, but I'm going to skip searching Lexis and ask the readership: What is the operative principle at work here? When an individual (or the state; say, Texas, which until recently confiscated corneas without consent unless family members objected) infringes on the bodily integrity of a corpse, whose rights, if any, are violated? Are laws prohibiting such things moral regulations of a piece with bans on public lewdness?

My intuition is to feel that some violation takes place when a body is used against its previous inhabitant's wishes, but I watch too much Six Feet Under and am thus biased toward respecting the wishes of the deceased above all things. This sentiment may clash, moreover, with my otherwise consistent materialism. Force consistency upon me!

No drugs for you!

Pharmacists in Washington State have refused to fill prescriptions for antibiotics and vitamins. Apparently the objections stemmed from the fact that the scripts came from a women's health clinic that provides abortions. (h/t)

That'll show him, Catharine!

Sometimes I wonder whether I would have enjoyed taking a class from Catharine MacKinnon. Things like this make me think I was better off skipping it (although if the choice is between MacKinnon and Janet Halley, who I did have at HLS, I'd pick MacKinnon; she appears an unlikely baklava thief).

Civil law, she says, is more effective. For example, she was asked to represent raped Bosnian and Croat women in a lawsuit against Radovan Karadzic. The result has been Kadic v Karadzic, and she is very proud of it. "We have an injunction against this man ever engaging in genocide again and people he's in contact with ever doing it again. We were also awarded $745m, which he has and our clients are entitled to. That's two forms of civil relief that actually could make a change in the situation." The important word there, surely, is "could". (Emphasis added.)

Always be my baby? (remix)

Is it just me, or does this relationship remind you of this relationship?

"An appeal run amok."

For appellate lawyers: Here's a case study in what not to do.

UPDATE: The attorney who wrote the brief has been disciplined once before.

I know what you did last summer. Want to get coffee?

I have posted before about my propensity to make inadvertently inappropriate rental choices. I still get teased about Atanarjuat. The first time I spent the evening with my high school boyfriend's uber-Catholic family, I, under the impression it was a generic courtroom drama, brought over a copy of Primal Fear. And the last time I stayed at my grandparents' house, I freaked them and myself out by renting Oldboy, which I thought was a standard action flick but which turned out to contain extended episodes of incestuous sex, complete with heavy moaning, and numerous scenes of graphic maiming.

Despite that last bit sounding like not much of an endorsement, Oldboy is an excellent if disturbing movie, and the New York Times Magazine's profile of its director, Park Chanwook, is great. (It does contains some plot spoilers for his films, though, which annoyed me greatly.) At the end of the piece, Park throws out this little anecdote about the internet and human relationships. I thought it was very perceptive, but that might just be because I like Googling people. Your thoughts?

Park told me a story that showed how much tradition can matter, even in cyberspace: "A young woman, working in our office, fell in love with a man through the Internet. The young man was so taken with her that he not only scrutinized her blog but followed all the links in her blog as well. He traced her family relationships, but also her entire private history, including her boyfriends going back to high-school days. Not only their names, but even their digital pictures came up through the links. In the end, he knew everything about her, without having to hire a detective."

Park continued: "You might find this invasion of privacy a bit scary, but young Koreans like it. It is, in a way, a revival of village life, a revival of community, where everyone knows everything about everyone else." But it is a peculiar community, where human intimacy takes place without physical contact.

Shelving the past?

Some people are talking about how they organize their books. I posted about this some time ago, but my book collection has been moved, reorganized, and enlarged since then.

I have exiled the law books to the living room, kept the Ayn Rand and free books in the second row, and largely maintained my lit-fic/trashy SF/fantasy divide. But I acquired a fair number of battered paperbacks from the Book Thing last summer; some of them even made it to Clerksville. My frequent air travel has necessitated the purchase of several underwhelming books which currently lie dejectedly on the forepart of the shelves, waiting for someone to purchase them off Half.com. I even received some books as gifts (for example, this one, an odd epistolary fantasy currently being made into a film starring Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, and Scarlett Johansson's bosoms).

I'm currently debating whether or not my shelfworthiness strategy, which almost always involves purchasing books after I have read them, should be modified to accommodate the needs of a more harried lifestyle. Constantly renewing library books because I forgot to bring them on court week may be more of a pain than sucking it up and paying six bucks for my own copy of Moby-Dick.

Scary.

How to unmask an anonymous blogger.

Crossing the picket line

This comment in a discussion on the Duke rape case caught my eye:

We already have an economy of sex where the slut is a figure of contempt because she’s like a scab that refuses to honor the picket line (withhold sex and sexual displays in exchange for a real relationship, a socially approved, heteronormative relationship).

Do you think this is an appropriate analogy? If not, why not?

Even if you disagree with the premise, it is darn catchy.

Red in tooth and claw?

The normally mild-mannered Lily has a dark side:



Snape, on the other hand, is mostly nonviolent.

Google is whacked.

My Google PageRank hardly seems fair. Is this site really as high quality as Prawfsblawg or better than Concurring Opinions?

Angels in the angles

It's a shoe! It's a chair leg! Either way, I must convince myself not to buy this oddity.

Freaky-Deaky Neighbor

Check out this bizarre AskMe post in which a young woman tries to figure out why her new neighbor has more than a dozen visitors, each with a key, come by his apartment for less than five minutes between the hours of 5pm and 10pm.

"It's great being blonde; with such low expectations it's easy to impress."

I'm a brunette. At various times I've played up my hair's faint reddishness with chemicals, but it's always been dark. Last night, Steve jokingly proposed that I go blonde.

"No way. It's all wrong for my coloring, and besides, the neverending cycle of root touchups and highlights is too expensive."

(Seriously, that article made me want to break things. For every uber-rich Manhattanite who spends $500 per month on her hair and can afford it, there are two dozen other women there and elsewhere forking over half that to the salon when they could be saving or paying down debt. I've seen it. Meanwhile, a men's haircut is how much?)

Besides, when the reaction of others to less than 100 percent successful attempts at "self improvement" is something like this, I'm sorely tempted to keep my money and maintain my present look. Then again, not all women think being a girl is all about instantaneously and superficially judging every other female in range.

Maybe a new pair of shoes would be nice.

Like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football . . .

. . . I keep trying to order the third disc of House, M.D. from Netflix. They sent it to me three weeks ago. The disc and sleeve said "Disc 3," but the episodes were from Disc 2, which I've already seen. I sent it back and reported it mislabeled.

They reshipped the disc once they received the defective copy two weeks ago. I played it: Same problem. It was probably the same disc. I reported it mislabeled, sent it back, and shot customer service an email. They wrote back without really saying anything but sent me another copy from a different distribution center.

I played that copy today. Who wants to guess whether or not it had the episodes from Disc 3 on it? Who?

I just want to see Hugh Laurie and the cute blonde doc flirt awkwardly! Is that so much to ask?

UPDATE: In response to an angry email demanding that amends be made, Netflix comped my next month's service. Yay.

When lawyers divorce

Via E. Spat, an illustrated divorce petition that will have you snorting inappropriately and even, dear reader, laughing out loud.

Not our finest hour.

A former classmate points me to this postscript from an article based on Larry Kramer's remarks at the 2003 Federalist Society Student Symposium. Your thoughts or comments are solicited. The citation, should you wish to read the piece in its entirety, is Larry Kramer, On Findng (And Losing) Our Origins, 26 Harv. J.L. & Pub. Pol'y 95 (2003).

POSTSCRIPT
The text above is a slightly elaborated version of my oral presentation at the conference. While it scarcely reflects anything radical (or even original!), it does take strong exception to the idea that we can or should be trying today to implement an eighteenth-century constitution as it was originally understood. In truth, I do not believe that anyone who is actually familiar with the eighteenth century would say otherwise. Originalism is a political slogan that stands for strong disagreement with a particular subset of modern decisions, not an unqualified commitment to wholesale restoration of the Founders' Constitution.
I doubt, for example, that the same people who want to undo the New Deal are also prepared to give the middle third of the country back to France, though from an originalist perspective the Louisiana Purchase stands on no firmer footing than the NLRB. Likewise, I imagine that the people who insist that Congress has no business enacting conditional spending programs probably are not likewise itching to tell President Bush that he must bring the troops in Afghanistan home right now, that all our executive agreements are void, and that the President must consult with the Senate before beginning talks with foreign leaders. We could, moreover, easily generate a very long list of similar examples, things so extravagantly implausible in the modern world that strict originalist talk begins to look silly.
These arguments are, I think, clear enough from the discussion above. What was striking, and somewhat dismaying, however, was that when I tried to make this point during the question-and-answer period of our panel, I was jeered. Nor was this the first time something like that has happened to me at a Federalist Society event, and I have seen it done to others, too. I confess that, when the laughter began, I grew angry, and I regret making my point by saying that anyone who held strict originalist views was either ignorant or an idiot. That was a product of frustration at being invited to speak to an audience that apparently had no interest in listening.
I was a second-year law student at the University of Chicago when the Federalist Society was founded. While I did not agree with its founders on most issues, I thought they had a point that something like the Federalist Society was needed because liberals had grown smug and stopped listening to arguments from those who disagreed with them. And in its early years, what gave the Society's events energy and legitimacy was its genuine commitment to honest discussion. The first conferences worked because of the Society's willingness, indeed eagerness, to create an environment where liberals and conservatives actually listened to one another. Liberal colleagues would sometimes joke that they had been invited to serve as meat for the audience to chew on, but we went because, in truth, it seemed like a place where ideas were taken seriously. No one expected to change anyone's mind (including their own), but one could still learn from people with different views.
Twenty years on top changes things, I suppose, and somewhere along the way the Federalist Society lost its original sensibility and became what it started out criticizing. The smugness and failure to listen are coming from the other side of the aisle now, and the rest of us, it seems, really are there just to serve as lunch meat. What a pity.

Because A3G would have posted about this . . .

It's not every day that a federal judge shows up in a blog comment thread to defend a colleague's recent opinion. (h/t)

In which I succumb to pop culture

Veronica Mars is my new favorite show. It gets bonus points for making it seem unnecessary for me to ever watch Twin Peaks. Miss Mars, however, sometimes makes inexplicable and repeated mistakes. Why send out dozens of *somethings* to a variety of addresses, hoping that one will make its way to the sought individual, and not have some manner of tracking which *something* is being replied to? And couldn't a blood test performed within 24 hours detect the presence of rohypnol?

Sometimes a glimpse is not enough.

Over at Marginal Revolution, a meditation on the ephemeral nature of contemporary art:

more and more artists make works they never expect will be lived with, looked at day in, day out by the same person; that much art is made for fairs or museums, designed to grab a distracted passerby's attention without needing to be experienced twice.

The one time I took an art class, I was actively mocked by both the professor and my fellow students for wanting to make things that I'd enjoy living with or seeing every day. This, they informed me, was the province of "arts and crafts classes," not capital-A Art classes.

PTN Book Club: Saturday

If you've read Saturday and have some blogged thoughts, send me a link to them and I'll post it.

My own review will be up later today.

Karl: Saturday would ordinarily be Perowne's most contented day, but the main theme of Saturday is the ways in which events conspire against that contentment, starting with an omen in the early morning sky and drawing ever closer to Perowne as the day unfolds.

dgm: As he notes in a passage I dog-eared, "misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack." And there you have my major complaint about most contemporary fiction and music. McEwan cracked the nut.

Zubon: I like a lot of things about Henry, which is good. Too much modern literature decides that the way to give a character depth is to make him horribly horribly flawed.

Amber: Despite how easy it would have been to contemptuously slant his portrayal of Henry and make him into some kind of materialistic bourgeois philistine, McEwan keeps every one of his characters human: fallible, but with comprehensible motivations.

Carina: It's refreshing to read a novel written from the point of view of a man who would never write a novel.

Amber on Saturday

The last time I read an Ian McEwan book, I found the ending excessively bleak. Saturday ends on a somewhat happier note, and was generally a more pleasant reading experience to boot.

Too many authors, if they were to base a novel around a day in the life of a particular person, would take the traditional advice to write what you know and make the protagonist an author. I am thoroughly sick of this unimaginative, self-obsessed wankage (amusing from a blogger, I know) and was thus thrilled to note that Henry, our hero, is a brain surgeon with little tolerance for the meandering stories that constitute most literature. This viewpoint was so refreshing that I was able to ignore the sneaky incorporation of writer-characters in the forms of Henry's daughter and father-in-law.

Likewise, I was pleased to see a character in a literary novel who understands the deep appeal of loving monogamy.

Who else could love him so knowingly, with such warmth and teasing humour, or accumulate so rich a past with him? In one lifetime it wouldn't be possible to find another woman with whom he can learn to be so free, whom he can please with such abandon and expertise.

Too many books these days seem populated entirely with disconnected individuals who lack interpersonal bonds (and, in some cases, appreciation for the very concept of bonding). A family joined by love, not merely by DNA, is a glorious and complex system, and McEwan subtly and deftly shows us how having such a family affects nearly every aspect of Henry's day, and how nearly everything Henry does redounds to hearth and home.

Despite how easy it would have been to contemptuously slant his portrayal of Henry and make him into some kind of materialistic bourgeois philistine, McEwan keeps every one of his characters human: fallible, but with comprehensible motivations. Even the thugs who bring chaos to Henry's otherwise pleasant and unexciting life are well-drawn, not least because Henry, being an intelligent man, tries to understand them.

The best fiction, unless we, like Henry, find it mostly useless, reveals something new about our fellow human beings. Saturday shows us people as real as those we see every day, and shows us more about them than we are likely to see. Sometimes books are better than life. This is one of those times.

No man's woman

These sorts of appeals really bother me.

If indeed that girl was raped, she is certainly some father's little girl, and she could be some brother's sister. If she was your sister, would you refuse to come forward with the truth to protect the "code" among your teammates? That would be a really poor choice. The fact that she isn't your sister is irrelevant to the moral implications.

That's right; whether she's your sister is irrelevant. But who cares if the woman was someone else's daughter or sister? Her moral status as an individual does not depend on her relationship to another man. We don't live in some kind of tribal honor-based society where an offense against a daughter could be repaid by making restitution to her father. You do not get a free pass to rape people because they're not under male protection.

Something I did not know.

Orin Kerr reads xoxohth. He seems to agree that it's sometimes useful.

Why we fight

Feminism: still necessary at home and abroad.

Side note: When is this coming to the U.S. market? If it does, would insurance plans be more likely to cover it than existing pills, since it may act as a preventative for breast cancer?

Creating problems to solve

This is why I don't read fashion magazines. (This weekend I picked up an In Style, which you may have noticed immediately took over my brain.)

Fashion magazines teach readers to cultivate an aesthetic sense. What can one say about Star? Does it have any socially redeeming value?

A lot of the traditional women's magazines are too much work. They are full of how-to service information, and that can feel like homework. It's like how to ace a job interview, organize your desk, make a good impression on a first date, make sure he will call you back, paint your kitchen, not to look needy.

But didn't you yourself promote that how-to-do-everything-better trend at Glamour?

It can make you feel inadequate!

If you blog, they will come.

Want a delightful nerd boyfriend? Get a freaking blog! (h/t)

Of interest to Rose alumni

A jury awarded $100 million in punitive damages to the family of Gregory de Villers in order to prevent Kristen Rossum from profitably selling her story to the media. (h/t Overlawyered)

No woman is a fashion island.

My new celebrity inspiration may be Zooey Deschanel. Seriously, how gorgeous is this dress? Or this one? These two are beautiful also.

I was toying with the idea of following what looks good on Maggie Gyllenhall, but her frequent appearances on Go Fug Yourself point out that she doesn't look great that often.

Were you aware of it?

- March submissions for the PTN Book Club are due in one week. I've finished the book already, and it's better than our previous selections put together.

- Ian McEwan, author of Saturday, also wrote the screenplay for creepy Macaulay Culkin vehicle The Good Son.

You can have my laptop when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.

Like Daniel Solove, I was puzzled why the AP thought one law professor banning laptops in her class was newsworthy. Janet Halley's been doing that for years at HLS, although the policy is announced in the course description so laptop-dependent students can beware. Since this is a 1L class, the students probably had no choice about being in Entman's section, which seems unfair.

Warning to professors: if your class is boring, students will avoid eye contact by doodling.

Drop that hero and get with a zero!

Read this uncharacteristically lucid post from Reihan on punching above your weight romantically and why beta males with inflated egos may destroy monogamy.

Also in the relationship arena, the feminist blogosphere has been going ape about this post about "false advertising" in LTRs. Most of the reaction stems from the post's focus on weight, one of the third rails of blog discourse, but there's something to the concept, more generally. What changes in a partner would be dealbreakers for you: Religious conversions? Full-body tattooing? Hair loss? Hair gain (werewolf and non-werewolf associated)? Etc.

UPDATE: in the comments, dgm gets to the heart of the matter:

I don't think the question is whether he (or men) "should" lose their desire, but whether they actually do and how much a spouse cares about the other one's reasons for a lack of sexual intimacy (and it goes equally for women, btw.) can the marriage be saved? not so long as one person is indifferent to and morally outraged by the other's reasons for lack of intimacy.

Compromising to accommodate the preferences of your partner is not necessarily some evil manifestation of control or the triumph of the patriarchy. Sometimes it's just common sense. Altering your appearance in a manner that you know will have a serious adverse effect on your partner's sexual desire and telling the other person to "get over it, because I'm just being myself, man, and if you can't handle that then you don't really love ME" is adolescent. Part of being in a relationship is considering how your decisions affect the other person. Whether that person deserves your consideration (i.e. is not a clueless jerk) is a separate issue.

UPDATE II: L, the wife of the guy I flippantly described as a clueless jerk, says we were too hard on her hubby. She knows him better than I do, so I stand corrected, although the general point holds.

What's funny?

Donna asks, "What makes you laugh?" A non-exhaustive list:

• Fresh Pepper
• Wonder Showzen
• Doctor stories
• Dogs in elk
• Blackadder
• Monkey v. Robot
• Catchy public service announcements
• Reenactments of famous films with fuzzy creatures
• Beekeeper impersonations
• David Foster Wallace. David Sedaris. Augusten Burroughs.
• Music videos combining children's entertainment and naughty lyrics (at Geoffrey's suggestion)
  

More will be added as I recall instances of hilarity.

Word to the Wise

Someday you may be offered the opportunity to order a one pound cheeseburger. Do not take it.

Tom Stoppard should stick to plays.

His political philosophy leaves much to be desired. In the course of attacking the right of free speech, he manages to drop in this howler:

The interests of the group is the only game in town.

and to produce this stunning passage, which would be equally true if the abolition of slavery or female autonomy were substituted for free speech:

A "human right" is, by definition, timeless. It cannot adhere to some societies and not others, at some times and not at other times. But the whole parcel of liberties into which free expression fits has a history. . . . To say, therefore, that the right of free speech was always a human right which in unenlightened societies was suspended from the year dot until our enlightened times is surely beyond even our capacity for condescension.

(h/t)

It's what's for dinner.

Argentines have been urged by their president to eat less beef. The strategy seems doomed to fail, though:

"What are people going to do, buy chicken?" said the skeptical 65-year-old butcher, whose shop sits across the aisle from a poultry vendor. "Chicken's no good -- it's full of water. If you eat a piece of chicken for dinner, you'll be hungry a half-hour later."

Funny, I thought that was Chinese food.

Two Minutes Hate

One minute each:

• FedEx
• Delta Airlines
  

That is all.

Movie Review: V for Vendetta

The new film version of V for Vendetta takes a coherent, if complex, set of narratives, and excises most of the sense but none of the style. It's a very sleekly done movie, and like many of the recent comic book adaptations borrows freely from the panels of the original work in staging scenes.

Aside from the ham-handed insertion of a conspiracy theory involving pharmaceutical companies, which disrupted the internal timeline and altered the villains' motivations,* there were some tweaks here and there that shifted one of the important themes of the graphic novel entirely out of the picture. In doing so, it betrayed the underlying work in a serious way. (Spoilers for both the graphic novel and film follow.)

In the novel, Evey is an impoverished prostitute with a day job at a munitions plant, not a middle class television employee late for a date with one of the network's stars. She has a sexual relationship with a thug after she is abandoned by V. By whitewashing Evey's character, the film makes her easier for us to relate to, but it also whitewashes the sins of the society in which she lives, and it keeps her pure for her "true love," V, who never consummates the attraction. Apparently we can be expected to identify with a terrorist girl, but not a terrorist girl who has sex. By transforming Gordon's character from rough trade to chaste homosexual, all opportunity for Evey to fall from grace is removed.

Other subplots from the comics dealing with the downward slide of a Party member's widow and the Evita-like aspirations of one of the leadership were neatly (and perhaps necessarily) excised. But that means that the seedy underbelly of Norsefire England, in which women can only rise to power or remain respectable through their men, was obliterated. Instead we have the virginal Evey, pure and deadly as Joan of Arc. Neutering Evey and deleting the other female characters meant refusing to deal with fascism's impact on women. Moore's original novel was sensitive to this issue. I cannot understand why the Wachowskis were not.

* If Norsefire only came to power after the post-St.Mary's virus riots, how did they have the authority to put homosexuals and non-whites in the camps where the virus was engineered months before?


UPDATE: PG agrees that the changes made to emphasize the Evey/V relationship were negative.

Who's down with OED? Not Supreme Court clerks, apparently.

Does Justice Stevens hire time travelers from A.D. 1750? If not, what's the deal with the use of "incredulous" in this email when any inhabitant of our century would use the more conventional "incredible"?

From the OED:

1. Unbelieving; not ready to believe; sceptical. Formerly used of religious unbelief, but no longer applicable in that sense. Const. of, rarely to.

b. Of action, etc.: Indicating or prompted by incredulity.

2. Not to be believed; = INCREDIBLE. Obs. (Last usage noted in date chart: 1750)

b. as adv. = INCREDIBLY. Obs.

(h/t to emailer Liam, who knew I'd have the chutzpah to call out someone for something this nit-picky.)

Take your Grey Poupon, my friend

ashok asks:

How did your undergraduate education shape your view of the world, and how did that change in law school?

I didn't realize when I applied to my alma mater that it was one of the more conservative liberal arts colleges in the country. The original plan, which was to study international relations, fell by the wayside and I ended up a straight-up econ major. This jibed well with my still-extant world view, which emphasizes reason, choice, and individual preferences.

I think the biggest change in my view of the world came when I went to law school. CMC is a very middle-class college; it was founded as a result of the GI Bill, and it has a generous financial aid policy. This meant that nearly all of my classmates were kids much like those I went to high school with; comfortable, many more so than me, but not rich. I never really understood the concept of class warfare, or even class resentment.

You know how some people have life-changing experiences when they join the Peace Corps or TFA and see "how the other half lives" and have their hearts embiggened by being exposed to people who struggle with poverty? I had the opposite. Moving to Cambridge meant I was suddenly surrounded by people with IIIs after their names whose first name was not Jim-Bob. People whose families owned vacation homes and went skiing. People who went to law school not because of some interest in politics or law or desire to practice, but because they sold their dot-com for a few cool million and needed someplace to settle down and regroup for a while, or you know, when you're a liberal arts graduate with no job prospects and parents who write blank checks, a $120K degree that might be useful seems like an okay idea. That lost and found ad in the student newspaper about the gold Gucci sunglasses was not, as I first thought, a joke.

There are rich people, I realized. This is the wealthiest one percent we're always hearing about. People who regular wear clothing and accessories that cost more than my old car (admittedly, not hard to do). These people are mostly annoying. And it's contagious. After three years surrounded by this miasma of wealth, fundamentally stupid things like spending $1000+ on a purse seem reasonable. Dropping hundreds of bucks at a charity auction for a pie made by a plagiarist sounds like an amusing lark with an altruistic twist, not a sick joke.

I may not be gung-ho about Clerksville, but at least I am out of the hothouse that is the old money northeast.