A Frolic of Her Own

Instant devolution

I know the TTLB Ecosystem has been widely criticized as a bad measure of popularity, right-wing-biased, etc., and I signed up for it more for fun than as a serious gauge of readership.  Moreover, I've noticed in recent weeks how backward-looking its links-centric system is.  That is, plenty of people never update their blogrolls, so certain blogs that have been defunct for a while, like Calpundit, still have high rankings. 

So I'm glad to see the system getting the revamping it badly needs.  Still, it's disconcerting to check out your blog and see that you've taken several evolutionary leaps backward overnight.  Yesterday, I was an insect - not a large or well-liked creature, sure, but at least visible to the naked eye.  Today, I'm . . . a microbe.  Sigh.

Too many hours?

A recent, rather alarming Posner opinion - finding, in essence, that 13.7 hours were simply too many for a firm to spend on a 4-page brief - has generated a wealth of commentary.  This prompted me to calculate how many hours per page it's taken me to produce briefs so far in my short law-firm career.  The answer: according to Posner, apparently far too many.  I've always considered myself a relatively fast writer, and the briefs I've written so far have not been terribly complex.  However, writing in a highly structured format in a way that will be acceptable to a relatively large group of people simply takes a lot of time.  If anything, the number of hours I bill doesn't fully reflect the time I spend; my billable hours don't, for example, account for the time I spend thinking about the brief when not in front of a computer, even though that's often considerable.

Some commentators have pointed out the irony of Posner, of all people, determining that a price the market will clearly bear is nonetheless, as Posner puts it, "too high."  I have to wonder if Posner's pride in his own legendarily prolific output trumped ideology here.  I'm sure Posner can't imagine needing 13 hours to write a four-page document himself; he could probably churn it out before breakfast.  On the other hand, it has probably been many years since Posner had to write work that had to meet specific page and format constraints, or that was subject to anyone else's approval.  Further, as another Prawfsblawg entry coincidentally points out, there are times when Posner's own work could use a little editing.

La Vie Bohème

Via Lawyers, Guns and Money, I came across Carina Chocano's LA Times review lavishing hipster condescension on the film version of Rent.  I find this, frankly, a little unfair.  Whatever you may think of Rent, it's hard to deny that its origins were perfectly "authentic."  The show isn't, as Chocano's review suggests, the product of some nefarious Broadway effort to capitalize on "faux Bohemia"; it was written by someone who had a pretty good claim to be part of the culture it depicts.  It didn't even start off on Broadway.  Moreover, the show in its various incarnations has retained remarkable continuity in its cast and in its overall feel.  I find Rent a bit sentimental, a bit formless, and a bit overlong, but it's hard to deny that it's meant earnestly.  At any rate, it was the second most enjoyable of the three movies - all above average - I saw this past weekend, the others being The Ice Harvest and the most recent Harry Potter. 

Though I realize my praise of Rent may have shredded my own hipster credibility, I nonetheless highly recommend The Ice Harvest.  The book it's based on is pretty good, too.  I'm always on the lookout for good neo-noir, and I picked up a remaindered copy of the novel at a local bookstore for a couple of bucks a few weeks ago.  No sooner had I finished it than I learned it was a soon-to-be-released movie with several perfectly cast actors and one of my favorite screenwriting teams, the Rick Russo/Robert Benton combo.  How's that for instant gratification?

Blogfight of the week

Going by sheer content generated, Althouse-Atrios beats Zywicki-Myers hands down, although if you're going to hurl an unjustified insult in a moment of pique at a fellow blogger, "Lysenkoist" is slightly more creative than "misogynist."

Some reasoned analysis of the former here and the latter here.

Times boosterism

OK, I know the Times has fallen on some hard times lately, but is it really credibility-enhancing to use their famous notable books of the year list to shill for books by Times staff writers?  I count a total of seven, the two most immediately outrageous-seeming of which - Friedman's and Dowd's books - garnered respective scores of 53 and 34 on Metacritic.  By contrast, none of the books on the 2004 list were identified as being by Times writers.

The worst?

The inevitable question: is George W. Bush the worst president ever?  Hard to say, but for the combination of incompetence, irascibility, inability to compromise, poor judgment, and overall moral blindness, it's hard to beat Andrew Johnson.  Let's not forget, however, that Johnson's decision to run around the country in 1866 giving increasingly batty speeches led to one of the most spectacular midterm election losses in history, not to mention a Congress that soon began plotting his impeachment.  Maybe Bush just needs to get out more.

En banc candidate of the week

I've only skimmed it, but at first glance, anyway, this hot-off-the-presses Ninth Circuit copyright case seems blatantly wrong in concluding that a memoir Eisenhower wrote for Doubleday was intended to be a work-for-hire.  It seems wrong not only in its curiously aggressive efforts to label CCNV v. Reid passages "dicta," but also in its view of the facts.  Just because an author asks his publisher to come up with a "single package to cover the whole affair" so that he doesn't "have to argue with too many people" about "various kinds of publishing rights," is he really expressing an intent to enter into a work-for-hire relationship?  At any rate, if the Ninth Circuit wants to try out its shiny new en banc procedures, this might be the moment.

Puzzler for Rick Santorum

Forget "man on dog" - what exactly is the deal with politicians and ungulates?

Secrets and lies

Concurring Opinions has a useful discussion about how to prevent your blog from being linked to your real-life identity.  While a lot of the discussion focuses on protecting yourself from a subpoena, I imagine the goals of many bloggers are more modest - as long as their mother and/or their employer doesn't find out about their blog, they're happy.

I haven't tried very hard to hide my identity (how many Bay Area-based JD/MFAs are there, really?), and at this point I'm just trying to maintain the most primitive level of anonymity: not having this blog come up in a google search for my name.  My sense is that many bloggers are happy having their identities being this sort of open secret.  I confess that I've occasionally tried to live out my fantasies of being a private investigator by attempting to figure out who certain bloggers are - not with a plan of exposing them or for any other malicious purpose, but just to satisfy my private curiosity about whether it can be done.  I don't have any fancy IP address-tracing skills, so my efforts have mainly consisted of putting together bits of revealed information.  From this experience, the following observations:

1.  Lawyers with Martindale entries are the most traceable people in the world.

2.  As Solove's post points out, it's really hard to have any blogging personality without dropping a few identifying details, real or fictional.

3.  As the case of A3G suggests, a little misdirection goes a long way.

In the relatively decorous world of blawgs, which is mostly where I hang out, nearly everyone seems to use their real identity.  But outside legal academia, people may be a bit more uptight about the whole blogging thing.  At any rate, as this recent nutty fracas illustrates, sometimes concealing who you are has the perverse effect of making some people all the more obsessed with you.

Vices of the law-abiding

In this blog's short existence, the number-one driver of traffic to this site has been Google searches for "Tradesports legality," so I feel obliged to give back to my readership by linking to this Conglomerate post on the subject (answer: no one, apparently including the DOJ, really knows).

Conglomerate poses the question of why the "de-criminalization" of gambling has been relatively rapid compared with that of other "morality" offenses like prostitution.  I don't really have the answer, but I do find it fascinating how many of the same people who are most scrupulously rule-following in general are also the most eager to exploit the many legal gray areas created by the Internet.  To illustrate how rampant such opportunities have become, I note that today's NYT contains not only the celebrity gaming endorsement story, but also - in a totally different section of the paper - an article about people swapping antidepressants on message boards.  And with opportunities come elaborate legal justifications. It was from another judicial clerk that I first heard a rather ingenious, if not entirely convincing, argument downloading broadcast TV is merely time-shifting and hence does not violate copyright laws.

Taken to its extreme, the attempt to spin justifications for such activities sometimes seems disturbingly reminiscent of, say, the legal urban legends of the tax-protester crowd.  But there do seem to be genuine fuzzy areas, and offshore gambling is probably one of them.  Certainly there are enough movable parts to the question to generate some interesting law-review-type hypos (what if my celebrity endorsement induces someone to access Tradesports on their cell phone while they're standing in an Indian casino in California?  You get the idea).

As to whether I have any quasi-legal vices of my own - like, say, downloading a missed Gilmore Girls episode now and then - I'll just leave that to reader imagination for now.