Things the Bay Area is Good For, Part XXI

Guess who finally got an iPhone?

Open Thread

Talk about politics here.

Going back to Cali and contracts class

Still alive: don't worry, folks. Tomorrow I get to go to a hearing (yay) and then this weekend I will be in the Bay Area visiting.

In the meantime, a question from a fellow knitter: what is the legal status of sock clubs that make you promise not to sell the club yarns for some extended period? Assume that the rules of the club clearly prohibit sale, but the seller made subsequent clarifying posts on a knitters' message board establishing that trading, even with non-members, is kosher. Assume an existing policy, applying to all yarns by the seller, of no sales for the purposes of profit (but sales are allowed to get rid of yarn that you don't like, although markups are deprecated). What is the import of the parol evidence rule here? The status of mixed cash/yarn trades has not been established (this is important because the pricing differential makes one-for-one trades unlikely).

My inclination is that 1) you're contractually obligated not to sell the yarn, but 2) the chances of actually being penalized are relatively low, as long as you are relatively inoffensive about doing so. Thoughts?

Old Fashioneds = Yum.

My name is Amber and I approve this message.

Amber is a sad panda.

Blackberry, where are you? Also, my brand-new interchangeable needle set came today and the cable broke in the middle of the first row, which nearly caused me to lose half of my sweater. Luckily, it came with two of each cable.

Warning: squicky stuff ahead:

To make my life complete, I have to wear my glasses all week because I lost a contact in my eye and spent the next few hours getting my eyeball scraped and prodded at the urgent care clinic. They said they couldn't find it; I guess I somehow blinked it out without even noticing in my frenzy of attempts to remove it, but just like you have a scratchy feeling in your throat after swallowing a fish bone, it felt like it was still there. Of course, this just means that my eye is actually scratched and I have to put Cipro drops in it and wear my librarian glasses for a few days.

Victim-blame much?

In an article about boorish, drunken British tourists, some hard stats:

A recent report published by the British Foreign Office, “British Behavior Abroad,” noted that in a 12-month period in 2006 and 2007, 602 Britons were hospitalized and 28 raped in Greece, and that 1,591 died in Spain and 2,032 were arrested there.

One of these things is not like the others . . . .

Nuts to Judd Apatow.

Check out this fascinating abortion blog.

My love-hate relationship with puzzles and games

I play a lot of board games, but have never been a huge puzzle person. The trouble is that I play word games and puzzles for the wrong reasons. I like crosswords because solving crosswords typically requires broad knowledge of a variety of cultural touchstones. Being well-read helps you solve the crossword, and therefore solving the crossword validates me as a well-read person, from which I derive a self-esteem boost. The puzzle is only the means to an end. At a certain point, puzzles are just organized mental fidgeting with no purpose or value.

Likewise, I've never seen the appeal of hard-core Scrabble. When I play Scrabble, it is for the purpose of creating interesting words. It validates your large vocabulary. However, at a certain point in Scrabble play you must engage in a rather mind-numbing, uncreative memorization of the two- and three-letter Scrabble-approved words and the placement of words on the board trumps the value of the words themselves. What is the point of putting down a cool word like pixelate or gherkin if your opponent plays some three-letter word straight out of See Spot Run that makes three other boring two- or three-letter words and gets more points?

My gameplaying habits have not won me fans at some gaming events. I enjoy games very much. However, like most people, I prefer to do things I am good at. If I already know how to play and game and that I like it, why would I (absent strong recommendations from a trusted source) set it aside to learn a new game, just of the sake of doing so?

1) It takes much longer to learn and play a new game. I have limited gaming time and want to fit in as many fun sessions as possible.

2) It is less fun to struggle through a new game than to play a game where all the participants already know the rules.

3) There is a chance the new game will suck.

At one local event I mentioned that I don't like to learn new games (if there is an option to instead play something I really like, of course). You'd have thought I killed a puppy before their very eyes. Of course, the same group kept records of the scores of every single player in every single game, even random matches with visitors like me. What is the point of tracking scores in dozens of different games? There is no way to convert the scores into a single metric or ranking, and the rankings would be adulterated anyway by the presence of random entrants and the constant introduction of new games.

Premonetary Barter Economies in the 21st C.

Person A wants Good X. Person B has Good X. Person B declares that she will barter Good X for Goods Y or Z of undisclosed types. Person A doesn't have those goods but could acquire them. Should Person A acquire several samples of Goods Y & Z for purposes of trading with Person B and similar individuals? If only there was some medium that would allow Person A to exchange with Person B in a straightforward fashion . . . .

Baby Lawyer Advice Thread

Over the next few weeks, thousands of first-year lawyers will be starting work at firms. Do you have advice for them? Hints? Exhortations? Products of bitter experience? This is the place to share your wisdom. If you want to post extremely specific or personal stories, you may do so anonymously.

What lies beneath

Egyptian women in hijab report more sexual harassment than women who go without. Awesome quotes:

"It makes a woman happy when I call to her. It makes her know she's attractive," 20-year-old Alla Aldin Salem said on the sidewalk in Mohandisseen, after going out of earshot of the glaring fellow vendor in hijab.

"The woman herself is the one who makes men harass her," said Fawzi Tahbet, a 50-year-old man selling kitchenware on another stretch of the sidewalk, under the shade of a tree. "If she's walking, swinging as she goes, of course it will happen."

I like how men have no independent will or agency here. If you see a woman walking down the street, you have to harass her. No choice. If this is true, then women should be the guardians of the men, not vice versa.

Mooning strikes me more as a C-X thing.

You can always pick out a former high school debater. I knew that there was some reason that I didn't participate. I'm sure the persistent stage fright had nothing to do with it.

Cheerleading is evil.

In a controlled experiment, n = 2, using the youthful inhabitants of my childhood home, the issue of whether cheerleading is in fact a life-destroying, crippling hobby was studied, with one individual participating in this subsidized evil and one individual taking part in activities with no physical component, like the high school literary magazine.

I have never broken a bone or had surgery, and I have no joint or tendon problems.

What Would Wes Buy?

He hasn't made a good movie since the Royal Tenenbaums, but Wes Anderson has decent taste in other media.

My internet is boring.

I am devoid of bloggable topics.

Not so crazy about the cotton candy eel.

Steve and I went to minibar last night. There was much liquid nitrogen and foam had by all. Most of the same courses on this website were present last night as well. If you plan on going, though, it might be smart not to click that link; the element of surprise was half of the fun.

Oh COME ON.

Ann Bartow is totally off base.

This discussion reminded me of this old post about message boards that try to exclude specific populations from certain fora, even for browsing, while refusing to implement technological solutions to enforce their rules. Is it "bullying" to lurk in a WOC-only thread? It's hard to say that someone's bullying you if the whole point is that you don't know you're being injured.

UPDATE: A nuanced, charitable exploration of these issues.

Vampire babies? There's some other kind?

This sounds almost as bad as Touched By Venom.

AUGH.

You'll never guess how I spent my day! Was I:

A) Stumbling around in the grip of a severe migraine.
B) Stumbling around while gorked out on migraine medication.
C) Attempting to compensate for previous hours of stumbling around.
D) All of the above.

In the spirit of crabbiness: I really wish that whoever invented the word "glibertarian" would take a long walk off a short pier.

50 Book Challenge # 46: The Post-Birthday World

Lionel Shriver is probably my favorite contemporary writer. Her last novel, the Orange-Prize-winning We Need to Talk About Kevin, was a wringing and thought provoking look at maternal ambivalence and the potential innateness of evil.

The Post-Birthday World is a very different kind of work, but it is similar in that it reflects back on a woman's life and choices, and asks us what might have been. Where Eva, the narrator of Kevin, could only speculate on what her life would have been like without her unwanted child, in World we follow Irina McGovern on two dual paths and see where each would have led. Did you see Sliding Doors? It's like that, but good. The book alternates timelines by chapter, following Irina as she muddles along in a relationship with a think tank intellectual who is secretly cheating on her, and another course in which she leaves her partner for the snooker playing ex-husband of a former colleague, who gives her a more tumultuous kind of love but can never really connect with her.

Shriver has a quiet, cutting sort of insight into human psychology and relationships, and she doesn't hold back from showing us the very real benefits of each track for Irina, as well as how Irina's behavior patterns and limitations channel her toward similar outcomes no matter what her macro-level choices. We may sometimes ask how our lives would be different if we had made a certain choice, but in many respects the course is set by what is in us, not what we do. Very highly recommended.

(Flashback post: I read this book a couple of months ago.)