People taking the bar exam probably have no recollection of "Schoolhouse Rock" except through Simpsons parodies, but if Schoolhouse Rock covered the res gestae hearsay exception, and was made up of Lego characters, it might look something like this (via Schaeffer).

Who's sufficiently nerdy to want to wait in line at 12:01 am at the Arlington Barnes & Noble on July 15/16? It might be fun if there's a group doing it, otherwise I'll order on Amazon. E-mail me.

A fascinating variant on Pascal's Wager.

My finance professor and Judge Easterbrook would scoff at my refusal to subscribe to the efficient markets hypothesis and just put my money blindly in an index fund, but I'm pleased with a pre-tax 12.7% return for the last twelve months, especially since the Dow was down over that time and the S&P 500 was up only 4% or so. My return for June was 5.25%—if I thought I could do that every month, I'd never work, but it was just happenstance. Again, though, it was in a month when the Dow was down, and the S&P 500 was flat. I can't brag too much: this good month in June basically erased my losses for January through May, and I'm down 0.3% since December 31—though that's compared to minus 5% for the Dow and minus 2% for the S&P 500.

The year could've been better, but I took profits on my Boeing at 59; it reached 66 today. Most painfully, I rode Wild Oats Markets up to 9, down to 6.40, and got out for a small profit at 7.66 because I didn't want to deal with the volatility—only to see it rise to 10 within a couple of weeks, and now at 11 and change. I'd feel better about it if I hadn't used the proceeds to buy into Carmax at 30: bad timing, as it's since dropped to 26.60; I doubled up at 25.22, ameliorating my losses somewhat. I should've gone with my gut to pull the trigger on GM at 25, but I hesitated, and it popped to 31 within a week, and is now 34 with what would've been a sweet 8% dividend. I showed more patience with my most successful investment: E-Loan, which I first bought in at 2.50, and kept buying as it dropped to 2.10, and held on as it dropped to 2. It's now at 3.34. My Six Flags investment was also a roller-coaster (yuk yuk): bought in September at 5.76, more in December at 4.83, more in March at 4.13, more in May at 3.84, and it's returned to 4.65, just shy of even for me. I still think it's worth 10, but I've already fully backed up the truck.

(As with all my posts, this isn't investment advice, and you'd be an idiot to buy or sell a stock just because you saw some blogger talking about it.)

Man, these days you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a blogger, but I remember when blogging was sufficiently rare that if you went to a bar with a bunch of bloggers, you were obligated to post about it. I crashed the Reason get-together Monday night at Mackey's ($2.75 draft Killian Red on Mondays!) and sat with LA krewe Cathy Seipp, Matt Welch, and Emmanuelle; met all sorts of Reasonites, such as Tim Cavanaugh and Nick Gillespie; and saw cameos from Will Wilkinson and Matt Yglesias. All that firepower in one bar was sufficiently commonplace that no one thought to mention it on their blog, though perhaps Cathy will have some good tales to tell when she gets back to the West Coast.

As the New York Times faints dead away at the thought of Gitmo prisoners allegedly being required to confront their fear of the dark (via Frum), it's worth reading an account of real political torture in Iran.

is Ronald Reagan, according to a poorly-designed Discovery Channel vote. The only sensible answers are George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, or Benjamin Franklin, depending on your definition, with partial credit awarded to someone who names Thomas Jefferson.

To list the top 100 vote-getters is kind of silly: if I vote for George Washington as #1, it gives me no chance to rank Thomas Edison ahead of Oprah (#9) or Teddy Roosevelt ahead of Elvis (#8). So the sensible vote gets split between legitimate historical figures and it only takes a handful of votes combined with time-bias and historical ignorance (what's FDR's Q rating?) to push mediocrities up the list.

It could've been worse: voting options included Ellen DeGeneres, Christopher Reeve, Dr. Phil, Madonna, Mel Gibson, John Edwards (but no John Kerry), Michael Moore, and Martha Stewart. The presence of so many B-list celebrities on the list (criminy, Reeve isn't even the greatest American in a wheelchair) no doubt encouraged votes for Oprah.

As best I can tell, there were only four Jewish nominees (three scientists and a moviemaker), but four prominent anti-Semites.

The Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection is shiny.

Radosh and various Throwing Things have been raving about the short-lived 2002 series "Firefly" for some time, but they're fairly promiscuous with their television praise. I had previously skipped the "Buffy" phenomenon, and feel I watch too much TV as it is. Still, the Amazon ratings are phenomenal. And then notorious TV-hater Cowen was converted by other econ-bloggers, so when Shani and Dave also recommended it, I bit the bullet and borrowed the DVD from Dave. So, no surprise, I really like it, and heartily recommend it. Whereas "Star Trek" was a sort of "'Wagon Train' to the stars" in the famous pitch-line, this is more like (a network-sanitized) "Deadwood" in space. The show is formulaic—you can feel the character archetypes being cut and pasted, complete with the inexperienced character that others can have plausible plot exposition conversations with—but it's a good formula, and executed well. I've seen only the pilot and an episode into it, but I haven't had any jarring moments of implausibility like I do with other science-fiction series (not to mention dramas); so far, it hangs together better than "The West Wing" or "Deadwood" does. I hear both that later episodes are better, and more frustrating because of the various subplots that end up unresolved due to the premature cancellation. Too bad HBO or somebody can't pick this up, but I'll be there for the "Serenity" movie opening night in September. And now I can watch the "Serenity" preview and have a better sense of what's going on; I saw it before "Batman Begins" before I'd seen any of the DVD, and then the preview didn't add to my wanting to see the movie.

I saw and enjoyed "Batman Begins," feeling new and additional respect for Christopher Nolan. We're in a golden age of comic book movies: "Batman Begins," "Spiderman 2," "Sin City," and "The Incredibles" are all within the last fourteen months, and all have to be within the top ten comic-book movies of all time, and one of them is probably the best of all time, though I haven't decided which. The combination of CGI and directors and writers who really care about the material makes a big difference. It's fascinating how much Michael Keaton's portrayal fifteen years ago influenced Christian Bale.

It amused me as I watched the movie to think how the plaintiffs' lawyers of today would sue deep pockets like Bruce Wayne, Wayne Industries, and Gotham City for their slight relationship for the actions of super-bad-guys. After all, LA fears a nine-digit verdict in the insane trial of the city for the murder of Notorious B.I.G. Plus the movie showed Hollywood's typical confusion of corporate governance issues. (Paging Larry Ribstein.)

I started to do a post for this blog, then decided to spend twenty minutes making it marginally substantive, and posted it to Overlawyered. Fark picked it up, 34000 people clicked through, and the Batman fanboys went absolutely nuts in the comment section, if you want to read several dozen people expound upon how I have no life because I spent slightly less time writing a post as someone who wrote several hundred words trying to explain the plausibility of possible legal loopholes Bruce Wayne could've used in a movie featuring a "focused microwave beam that can vaporize the water supply" without damaging anything else and an antidote that can be created in under 48 hours to permanently immunize someone from a permanently-acting hallucinogen. (Let's not forget the giant castle of ninjas on the top of a remote mountaintop.)

On suckful.net, via Defamer.

KFC training tapes, Michael Jordan trying to do a Gatorade commercial, and many other worthwhile novelties are among the MP3s on this page.

A datapoint on the question of deadpan. I wrote in Overlawyered about a stupid prank involving boar tusks that resulted in millions of dollars of litigation and a $250,000 settlement. Walter was sent the following e-mail from an apparent law student:

Subject: In Alabama, the Tusks ar Looser? (June 22 issue.)
Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 16:41:38 -0500

Shouldn't this be "In Washington ,the Tusks are Looser" since the story
is about a Washington dentist and a Washington court?

[name omitted]
Montgomery, Alabama

I thought he merited a response.

Mr. [...],

Walter tells me you wrote inquiring about the title I gave a post.  I wish to explain.

75 years ago, Captain Jeffrey T. Spaulding, the African explorer, made his celebrated observation about Alabama, and, though he is an accused Marxist, I decided not to change the quote, as irrelephant as it might be.  No offense was meant to the fine people of Alabama, be they from Birmingham, Montgomery, Decatur, or any other Alabama city—the names of the others escape me at the moment.

Best wishes,

Ted Frank

The last word:

Mr. Frank,
I appreciate the explanation even though I don't understand why an African explorer's comment on Alabama in 1930 would be memorable. Obviously I am missing something.  I thought that the fact that the city in Washington was named Auburn led you to think of Alabama.  Surely you have heard of Auburn, Alabama!

Regards,

[name omitted]

The tusks. That's not so easy to say. Tusks. You try it some time.

Google's more powerful than you know. Here's a cheat sheet. (via C. Newmark)

We missed the first five, but the Eclectic Econoclast has a schedule of when BBC 3 will make downloads of Beethoven's Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Symphonies freely available.

I spent the day searching census records for records of my great-grandfather, Israel Miller, who arrived in New York around the turn of the century. He was originally from Novaredok, a town between Minsk and Bialystok of 12-14,000 or so at the time, the majority of whom were Jewish. Novaredok was kicked around between Lithuania (for which the city was the nation's first capital in the thirteenth century), Russia, WWI Germany, and Poland, before the Jewish community was extinguished by Nazi Germany. Only 400-1200 Jews out of 7-10,000 survived. (Precise numbers are difficult, because thousands of Jews from surrounding towns were brought to the Novaredok ghetto, and then murdered.) It is now Novogrudok, Belarus; I've also seen it spelled Novogrudek, Navaredok, Navahrudak, Navahredok, Nowogrodek, and Nowogorodok.

Sixteenth century European justice: in 1563, Christian merchants, probably upset at competition, petitioned the King to expel the Jews from the center of town. King Sigismund August ordered the Jews be placed in a ghetto. An appeal was scheduled in Warsaw, but soldiers kept Jewish representatives from attending, and the court ruled against them in their absence. The court did order compensation to be paid—to the Christians, since the Jews were adjudged to have failed to vacate properties quickly enough. NB that Sigismund August is generally viewed as one of the nicer kings with respect to Jews, since he ended prosecutions of Jews for "desecration of the Host." As we marvel at the deadly Islamic riots that have ensued from allegations of Koran mistreatment, it's worth remembering that it wasn't that long ago that Christians murdered thousands of Jews over similar allegations. As late as 1870, the Brussels Catholic community planned to celebrate the 500th anniversary of a mass murder of hundreds of Jews over an alleged desecration of the Host; this "miracle of St. Gudule" can still be seen on tapestries in the Cathedral of St. Gudule, where the crown prince of Belgium was married in 1999.

MTV is doing a "1970s House" show.

in NYC's Union Square.

My brother expresses disappointment that "Spamalot" seems dumbed down.

I think what he's seeing is the equivalent of David Letterman moving from 12:30 to 11:30, where his monologues went from going for laughs to going for applause. (My friend Eric reports that the audience would start laughing in anticipation of the funny bits, which strikes me as taking a lot of pressure off of the performers to actually be funny.) There's just a dilution that happens in order to make the humor more mainstream. It's funnier when the joke is both obscure and isn't explained (the circle of light from the exploding shark in "Robot Chicken"'s imagining of the "Special Edition DVD" version of "Jaws," for example) for those of us ironic hipsters with a certain level of cultural knowledge because the joke is not just funny, but we also get to congratulate ourselves on our superior insider knowledge. But one can either do that, or one can appeal to a large audience, and the commercially risk-averse thing to do is appeal to a large audience: the difference between a $500,000 motion picture and a multi-million-dollar musical. "Arrested Development" is the funniest thing on television right now, but it relies so heavily on the inside joke and running gag that it's just incomprehensible to the average tv viewer who isn't really paying attention to their television and isn't inclined to watch episodes more than once.

Keep in mind, too, that "Spamalot" isn't really "Monty Python" so much as "Eric Idle," and the latter has a different sense of humor. Python worked so well because there were six extraordinarily talented and complementary voices pulling at each other and censoring each other's worst impulses, and one really gets a sense of the balance involved when one's voice is omitted (the last season minus Cleese) or overly dominates (the inferior, if aptly named, "Monty Python's Contractual Obligation Album," which is also mostly Idle's doing (and at least some of which is cribbed for "Spamalot")).

Update: I just noticed that Slate made many of these same points today, right down to the observations of "checks and balances" and "less demanding demographic." I promise that I hadn't read it.

Tom and Katie are creepy, you might be on to something.

in the New York Times.

Amber Taylor claims to be from Houston, yet she's somehow unaware of the law of physics that states that the quality of BBQ is in inverse proportion to the number of letters the establishment uses to spell "BBQ." (Capital Q is eminently edible.)

Taylor's duplicating the path I took eleven years ago when I dropped into DC for the summer before my clerkship to stay with my significant other and study for the Bar. Of course, I was clever enough to turn down Harvard Law and go to University of Chicago, which goes deep enough into June that I had an excuse to miss the first week of bar classes—which in turn made me eligible to skip the classes and use the tapes, which I could then listen to at double speed, slowing down only when they were telling me something I didn't already understand. On the other hand, I never cooked duck for a significant other's birthday (though I regularly make a mean jambalaya), so I'm probably behind overall.

...said the sign in Dulles Airport. Everything's gotta be a goddam metaphor.

Speller No. 222, Dominic Ranz Ebarle Errazo, spells "chinook," and confuses the ESPN announcers considerably. (via Bonin)

Mildly related: Napoleon Dynamite soundboard.

"Silly Giblets, everything is commerce!" (via Volokh)

The book's authors, Dubner and Levitt have a great new New York Times Magazine column, which I look forward to reading in its monthly incarnation. (And there's also a blog, which is a tad inconsistent.)

But I was disappointed by the book itself. Not so much the book qua book, but if you had read the excellent 2003 Dubner New York Times Magazine article on Levitt, the book doesn't add that much to your life, a problem that's doubled for me because I regularly read Tyler Cowen's excellent blog, which anticipates many of the same issues. Too, it's discouraging to see so much padding of a slim 242-page book (the last 35 of which are the endnotes and index) by use of a large font, leading, and white space. Still, if you haven't read the magazine article, and you're not familiar with Levitt's fascinating work, the book is worthwhile, and I'm encouraged by the success of the book. The book's chapter on the economics and structure of the crack market was especially interesting: street-level crack dealers are making close to minimum wage at huge risk of death or imprisonment, but they do so because of the tournament possibility of moving up in the organization and making all of a low-six-digit salary at the head of a highly leveraged pyramid. It makes the exploitation complaints of law firm associates look petty.

Via Cowen, Kottke channels best-selling pop science authors on restaurant menu decision-making. Quite funny, and also links to this handy Harvard Law Record piece on ordering wine in restaurants.

For those of you who care about such things, my brother tells me that, on the morning of June 9, TV Land is broadcasting an episode of "Gunsmoke" written by my mother's cousin, the recently deceased Hal Sitowitz, that features a young Richard Dreyfuss (on the eve of the release of "American Graffiti") and a storyline about a Russian-Jewish immigrant family allegedly based on that of my great grandfather. Hal made an admirably comfortable living writing, directing, and producing the sorts of television shows ironic hipsters like me and you like to sneer at: the last ten seasons of "Gunsmoke," "Cannon," "The Streets of San Francisco", "The Rookies," and many well-meaning and/or exploitative topical movies-of-the-week. This episode, "This Golden Land," appears on some "Top Ten" lists for the 633-episode "Gunsmoke" series; one blogger calls it "Dostoevskian," [spoilers in link] which may be laying it on a little thick. I haven't seen the episode, nor met my great-grandfather, so I can't vouch for quality or historical accuracy.

I'm not a big Wiki fan, but I have to say that Wikipedia's Star Wars entries are awfully useful in trying to understand the whole thing without having to read loads of krep.

A Duke student in Britain last week was also annoyed by the proliferation of the Crazy Frog advertisements there. (Via Evanier.)

Saw a matinee today in a mostly empty theater. I was going to say that this was the longest I waited ever to see a Star Wars movie, but then I remembered that I was a deprived eight-year-old who waited seemingly forever to see the movie because my parents didn't want to wait on line. I remember seeing lines stretching forever in the Houston Galleria, this in the days before several-thousand-theater releases. Of course, "forever" to a small kid might just be a few weeks—does anyone remember when the Star Wars phenomenon stopped crowding the theaters so? I did see it in a full movie theater, I think for Keith Goehring's birthday party, though it may have been that of some other E.O. Lovett Elementary classmate, and went on to see it another six times that year. I'm trying to remember the last time a movie enthralled me so that I saw it multiple times in the theater during its opening release. Probably "Pulp Fiction."

As for the movie itself? I entirely endorse my brother's take on the movie. I couldn't hear Yoda talk without thinking of Anthony Lane's hilarious line "Break me a f—ing give." (Ah, how Mr. Shawn rolls over in his grave.) And the continuity errors! Lane notes the implausibility of the lack of ultrasound in the high-tech Star Wars world. The effort to shovel every member of the original trilogy into the backstory seems mistaken to me. Now that we know that Chewbacca fought with Yoda side by side, are we to believe he never breathed a word of the Jedi to Han Solo, even as the legendary last of the Jedi, Obi-Wan Kenobi boards the Falcon? Rumors about a moon-sized battleship didn't sweep the galaxy in the twenty years it was being constructed? How come Leia's going after Kenobi instead of Yoda? If Vader's already the Emperor's life-saving sidekick in III, why is he so deferential to the Peter Cushing in IV? How come the technology has regressed in the twenty years between III and IV? What happened to all of R2-D2's powers? If one can program a droid to be nearly top-level Jedi Master-quality, and individual Jedi Masters can wipe out hundreds of droid army regulars, why not build a handful of General Grievouses instead of millions of cannon-fodder Roger Roger robots? (Damn government contractors!) And how come General Grievous gets a cool name instead of a letter-number combo?

Tyler Cowen gives a public choice reading of the double trilogy, gives a not entirely convincing defense of the movies as movies and links to Easter Eggs in the new movie (like the blink-and-you'll-miss-it scene with the Millennium Falcon, as well as Jar Jar Binks's only line).

Special bonus: my February 21, 1997 review of the rerelease of The Empire Strikes Back. The date brings back memories, since it was the week I met the woman who'd later divorce me, and I know she'd be upset if she googled me and found no reference to her whatsoever.

I'm back in Arlington, Virginia, arriving Tuesday evening after fourteen hours of travel (including an hour queueing at Customs at JFK—and there was a bit of another delay there because of the $#($% Horlicks I bought my father). I didn't blog because my Internet connection was on the fritz for a few days, and I didn't get around to figuring out what it was until today, just because the irony of having easier access to the Internet on a different continent than in my own home amused me. Turns out that a neighbor named Murphy (or a neighbor with a system named Murphy) had set up his own '02.11b wireless network and it was interfering with mine until I changed my channel. I haven't tried to connect to Murphy's wireless yet.

In other irony news, I refinanced my Wells Fargo mortgage with another company, who, while I was in London, proceeded to sell my new mortgage to Wells Fargo. It seems like Wells Fargo and I could've cut a deal that would've made us both some money by avoiding the few thousand in taxes I had to pay with the county to record a new mortgage, but I imagine there's some federal regulation out there prohibiting the bank from offering to cut my interest rate in exchange for a thousand bucks up front.

I spent an hour the morning of Saturday, May 14, programming my TiVo with the utmost of precision to ensure that it would capture precisely the fifteen hours of television and movies I wanted while I was gone, and not clog up the hard drive with Seinfeld reruns. I left for the airport about 3 pm. At 8:09 p.m., Saturday, May 14, as my TiVo was happily recording the full sequence of "Clone Wars," the cable went out, and, because I wasn't home to reset the cable box, my TiVo recorded nothing but static for 17 days. Comcast rebated the 17 days of cable I didn't get, I'll catch the "Deadwood" episodes I missed on June 10, I'll survive without seeing the encore performance of Lindsay Lohan on SNL, and I'll eventually catch reruns of the other shows. Still, as I belt-tighten my budget to account for my paycut, I imagine Comcast shouldn't be demonstrating to me how easy it is for me to live without my $85/month cable. Amusing TiVo bug: because a blank screen apparently takes up so little hard-drive space once it goes through the TiVo compression algorithms, the device had room to select 337 episodes of static it thought I might enjoy.

I didn't use my auto until today. I have keyless entry, and I was curious whether I had successfully shut it off so as not to drain the battery for the three weeks I was gone. I nervously approached the car with the key in hand... and discovered I had left my car unlocked for three weeks. Good thing I have honest neighbors in my garage.

My tremendous thanks to Ruth and Kevin, who put me up for a week and a half, to Eric for being a good traveling companion for another week, and to the readers who wrote with suggestions and good wishes.