In 1988, I had a summer job working on the VAX at the Brandeis campus, running backup tapes, changing the green-bar paper in the printer, putting print-outs in the alphabetical cubbyholes for various science professors and grad students. And this meant I got access to the rationed computers themselves, which allowed me to send e-mails to my father, using some ridiculous BITNET address involving a lot of percent signs (though, of course, I quickly programmed a macro to get around it). I try not to think how many millions of dollars of Time-Warner stock I'd have if I had the foresight to go to work for AOL's predecessor instead of going to law school. Anyway, I'm sure this already makes me sound like an old fogey to a sizable portion of today's bloggers, and just imagine how much the next generation is going to take connectivity for granted.

I enjoy analogous accounts of technology introduction. Here's one: from the Atlantic Monthly, an 1880 description of that newfangled device, the telephone, by none other than early adopter Mark Twain. And this post is as good an excuse as any to mention one of my favorite non-fiction books, The Victorian Internet, a tale of the introduction of the telegraph, with entertainingly similar societal reactions to the modern day.

The little-people community protest the use of a single actor to play Oompa-Loompas. "'My argument is that if you’re going to computer-generate us out of roles that we have traditionally taken, you have to provide others,' [Eugene] Pidgeon said over the phone from Hollywood." Pidgeon was unclear on the principle by which Hollywood's duty to the short arose; it isn't as if Hollywood encouraged people to stunt their height for a movie career. And I'd think former child stars would get first dibs on any such compensation scheme.

Is this the time to relay the anecdote that I saw Debbie Lee Carrington at a Los Angeles Bloomingdale's in 1998? I recall that she was working there, but a contemporaneous post from my ex-wife says she was simply paying a bill. Couldn't tell you if that's a failure of my memory or her observation.

Eric and I saw a modernized "Tempest" at the Globe in May; the "Troilus and Cressida" that will be performed in August will attempt to approximate 16th-century pronunciations, with the actors memorizing from phonetic scripts. Mark Liberman has details with lots of links, but probably takes a line about the language being "completely intelligible if you happen to come from North Carolina" much more seriously than it was intended. (via Asymmetrical Information)

Toyota Priuses are exempt from the congestion charge in central London. I haven't found the "Disapparate" button that Kendra Okonski posits must therefore exist somewhere in the vehicle.

Of course, if the congestion charge reflects environmental concerns over smog, rather than traffic concerns, there's nothing irrational about incentivizing people to purchase the SULEV. The same rationale is why many states permit the Prius to ride in the HOV lanes.

Up 6.6%; the S&P 500 was up 3.6% for the month. PKS and CBH were both up over 10%; KMX up just under 10%. Nice pops all. For the calendar year, up 6.2% vs. 1.8% for the S&P 500. Of course, it's not good enough to just beat a lackluster index, because I can get a risk-free 5.25% by paying off my mortgage, so that's the floor I need to compare myself against if the market isn't performing.

...it's a subwoofer! (via Anastasia)

I really liked my Good G100 as an e-mail device; alas, it doesn't have a phone, plus I had to give back the one the law firm issued me when I left. Also, it doesn't seem to be sold any more.

What to buy? I wasn't thrilled with the Treo 650; the keyboard reminded me of the Simpsons episode where a phone company recording warned "The fingers you have used to dial are too fat. To order a special dialing wand, please mash the keypad with your palm now." Worse, the backspace was where the enter key should be. I was all set to buy one, however, credit card at the ready, when the Cingular salesperson mentioned on the side that there was an $18 "upgrade fee." This struck me as ludicrous: I have a perfectly good phone working now, but I'm offering to give you money to buy a new phone and double the amount of money I pay you monthly so I can also have an e-mail service plan; plus, my contract has run out and I can cancel at any time, and I'm guaranteeing you two years. And you want to charge me extra for the privilege? It took several phone calls to get a definitive answer thanks to being disconnected several times, but Cingular wouldn't waive the fee. Doesn't their business model understand the concept of an "impulse buy"? I lost interest and walked out of the store. So, over an $18 fee that they could've chosen to hide in the price of the phone, Cingular blew a sale of at least $2300 in goods and services, plus $80/month if I kept the phone beyond the two-year period. (Cingular went on to bill me the $18, and it took more hassle to get that removed.) I decided to do some price shopping.

Sure enough, it's $100 cheaper on Amazon. Great, I'll buy it on Amazon. Except the Amazon deal is only for new Cingular customers. Existing Cingular customers weren't eligible for the $150 rebate. Amazon blames Cingular; Cingular blames Amazon; both lost a sale.

And permanently at that: the Motorola Moto Q was just announced. If the battery life is reasonable, and I can get it with a cell-phone service provider I don't hate, it seems to be what I'm looking for, and I'll wait nine months to get one.

Any other ideas? I'm looking for a phone with e-mail capabilities and a tactile QWERTY keypad. I can live without the camera and the music player (especially since I'm now locked into the proprietary iTunes format).

Lori Gottlieb is pregnant. Via anonymous sperm donor (which would actually be a good name for a blog).

I haven't decided yet whether I like the idea of the Fordham Spire. The torque is interesting, but I'm not a big fan of the "slender skyscraper"; they don't seem practical, and I wince to think of the elevator waiting time that something that tall with such a small footprint must have. Worse, it doesn't seem to fit into the skyline. But I also feel that way about the Trump International, which will dwarf Tribune Tower and its flying buttresses. (If I had known that the Chicago Sun-Times building was going to be demolished just a month or two after I visited Chicago, I would've ogled it some more. Meanwhile, all the lawyers on one side of the IBM building lose their view and get construction noise for three years.)

Notorious Russian spammer found murdered. Not that I'm condoning vigilantism. As it turns out, it appears to be a bar pickup scene gone bad.

I've been Betsy-lanched, so I'm putting this post at the top of the page to make it easy for people to find the Harry Potter posts and discussions.

Brian Doherty's January post (which my brother pointed out to me) attributing an alleged shortage of little people to the Depp/Burton Wonka movie is falsified, given that that movie used a single 4'4" actor to play all 165 Oompa-Loompas. I doubt the Gringotts Bank scenes in the Harry Potter movies monopolized that much of the little-people-acting community.

Three-issue Firefly comic-book (sorry, "graphic novel") series, written by Whedon (via Radosh).

For a fraction of the money they're planning to spend on an intrusive and pointless bag search, Metro could possibly train their staff to handle actual security risks a bit more sensibly.

The New York subway search scheme seems especially pointless: because there's no profiling, and since the police can't require people to submit to a random search (and probably can't even condition entry to the subway upon a search without probable cause), a bomber can just choose to turn around if they happen to be one of the people randomly selected, and walk a few blocks to the next stop and try the 80% chance of getting through there. So the only thing the New York policy accomplishes is to burden law-abiding citizens at substantial cost to taxpayers. (Update: I see Radosh has made precisely the same point, even using eerily similar language. Coincidence.)

Since we live in a society where it took years to get rid of the equally pointless "Did you pack your bags yourself?" blanket questioning, I'm not optimistic. But money spent on inefficacious searches is money that's not being spent on real crime and terror prevention.

Teresa Bouza of EFE, the Spanish-language equivalent of AP, writes:

Ted Frank, analista del American Enterprise Institute, un centro de estudios conservador de Washington, dijo a EFE que la postura del juez frente al aborto se exagera.

Frank recordó que durante las audiencias para su designación como juez del Tribunal de Apelaciones del Distrito de Columbia (Washington) en 2003 Roberts señaló que se guiaría por la legislación existente.

Of course, I went on to say that Roberts' answers for how he'd rule sitting on an inferior court aren't dispositive for how he'd rule as a Supreme Court justice, but there's only so much one can fit into a soundbite.

I'm glad to see a thinktanker thinking even harder about Snape's role (spoilers!) in Book 6 than I am. But I think Kopel's wrong about a couple of things, as I discuss in the comments.

This he said, she said tale from the New York Times about the demise of a relationship caught my attention. I certainly empathize with the concept of a piece that "uses a sprinkling of facts to decorate a work of fiction."

Looking for blogosphere reaction on the Johnson/Kirtz split, I found the entertaining Breakup News blog, good for cynics.

All via literary superstar Jennifer Weiner, who wrote a book where a similar event drives the plot.

where do I go to buy yuan?

If you've read Book 6, you'll enjoy this Guardian contest to write about a major plot event in the style of another author. The Chaucer entry won, with Helen Fielding ("Hermione Granger's Diary") and Irvine Welsh pastiches as runner-ups: spoilers within (via Bonin).

I'll be on "AirTalk" hosted by Larry Mantle on Los Angeles's KPCC radio (89.3 FM) between 10:30 and 11 AM Pacific Wednesday morning, talking about the Supreme Court nomination. There should be a Podcast available afterwards.

I'll be on ABC News Now, ABC's webcast service, at 5:35 PM Eastern, talking about the Supreme Court nomination. There will be a rebroadcast at 9:05 PM Eastern.

In the comments section.

I haven't been eating out as often, but it's been months since I did one of these:

Burma (Chinatown). I got a group together for this second-floor walkup hole-in-the-wall. Burmese cuisine is sort of a cross between Thai, Indian, and Vietnamese, as you might expect. The food was very good (people were especially enamored of a noodle dish with chicken) but perhaps we ordered wrong, as many of the dishes tasted like one another. They forgot to bring us a second order of Kokang chicken, like we had requested, but there was still food aplenty, and it was remarkably cheap.

Tempt Asian (Alexandria). I got another group together for this one. Normally, one can rule out restaurants with names like this, but the Washingtonian suggested that it was an aberration and, indeed, it was. Good Szechuan food, lots of interesting dishes I haven't had elsewhere. The orange duck was a little disappointing; I loved the spicing of the rabbit hot pot, but just can't stand meats that involve so many hidden bones. Everything else was excellent, and remarkably reasonably priced. There are three menus: a standard Americanized Chinese-food menu that we avoided, a more exotic menu in Chinese and English, and then a secret menu completely in Chinese too dangerous to be translated. We'll see what happens if I ever bring Barak and Lora here.

Pho 75 (Roslyn/Courthouse). They serve pho. If you like pho, you'll like this place, because it's good pho. If you don't like pho, but you're still open to the concept, it's worth a few bucks to risk it here at this no-frills place to see if it's pho you don't like or ersatz Georgetown attempts to make pho.

Eden Center (Seven Corners). Went here twice, once with Ruth and Kevin. Ruth was skeptical that it could measure up to her trip to Hanoi, but seemed satisfied with the caramelized fish at Viet Royale, though we both felt the fish was unusually... soapy, as was the sour fish soup. I'll still be back. The other time, I explored some of the delis: for $1.00, I got an amazing chicken bun, warm from the oven, sort of like the rolls I used to covet in my elementary school lunchroom, but filled with spicy Vietnamese chicken. Yummy. I still haven't found the shop that sells the banh mi that measures up to the first banh mi I had in a hole in the wall underneath a bridge at the foot of Manhattan with Eric, but there are still a couple of dozen places at the Eden Center I haven't tried and I'm confident one of them will do it just right. The place looks like a huge strip mall, but there's actually an even huger warren of shops hidden within it. If you're in DC and have never been, it's worth a half-day trip that's almost like visiting a foreign country.

Bombay Bistro (Fairfax). If 66 wasn't such a parking lot, and if it wasn't so difficult to make a left-turn onto 123 from the restaurant, I'd go here more often: it's my favorite Indian lunch buffet. This weekend, they had whole bluefish, various kebabs, goat curry, three kinds of bread, two kinds of rice, raita, chutneys, salad, and six vegetarian entrees, three of which are as good as anything in the area: a sublime and spicy aloo bhaji, a very good paneer makhani, and saag chole. And only $9.95, $7.95 weekdays.

Sushi Taro (Dupont). A regular for me, and will be more so now that I work four blocks closer to it. This is the place to go in DC if you want a traditional Japanese sushi bar. I'm still unsure if it would break the top twenty in Los Angeles County, though. I was a little annoyed that they had a $7 sushi special that was served overwhelmed with too much wasabi; a real sushi chef that had that little faith in the fish would discard it. Anyone know which night they get their fish deliveries? Some nights the place is just perfect, but other times it's off, and it's clearly a matter of timing. I'm still amused by the twenty-foot ramp that leads to an impossibly steep staircase to the second-floor restaurant.

the secret Thai restaurant (I'm not telling). I made it back here because I was in the neighborhood for other reasons, and the crispy duck was as good as ever. Sorry, even though the place isn't in Zagat's or the Washingtonian, and even though it's about as expensive as any other Thai restaurant in the area, and even though it's a ridiculous 45-mile roundtrip for me, it's already too crowded from word-of-mouth, so no public announcement.

Picking up the baton from Tyler Cowen:

That is favorite, not "best," and the years are approximate:

early - The Wizard of Oz

1977 - Star Wars

1979 - Animal Crackers

1980 - Airplane! (as my brother reminds me)

1982 - Monty Python and the Holy Grail

1986 - Brazil

1991 - Annie Hall

1993 - Trust

1994 - Pulp Fiction

1997 - Casablanca

This may not be accurate, because I may not have seen Trust until after Pulp Fiction in 1994.

I tag Daniel, John, Rondi, and Betsy, assuming she's not too famous. (It really does say something about the Post that they think a polite mainstream conservative is a "very conservative" blogger and the right-wing counter-part to a Kossack flame-thrower. But perhaps they were looking at the demographic issue.)

Update: my brother has more similar tastes than I realized. Or he was four years ahead of me, you decide.

• My MAC Tech color for TV appearances (knock on wood) is NW30.
• Relatedly, I now understand why my credit card bills from Nordstrom's were so high when I was married.
• Just because Borders promises a Harry Potter celebration on their website doesn't mean they'll have one, even if you bring a dozen people to their store. (The group escaped back to Books-A-Million, which did have face-painting.)
• Unit 1207 in my building, which the sellers purchased the same time I did for about the same price, sold for a profit of over 50% and 5% more than 707 did two and a half months earlier, so the real estate bubble hasn't quite burst yet.
• That great album always playing in my car CD player that I've been telling everyone is by the Long Winters is actually by Snow Patrol.

The thunder's getting close, and I have a lot of Harry Potter left to read, so I'm signing off.

The AP answers my earlier question yes in this article: Williamson is a Davis Polk attorney working in London. And Williamson won her trip to Las Vegas at Gutshot, where Eric, Kevin, and I played in London. Barry Martin is also featured in the article, though not his charming accent. As the article indicates, she's had some luck, spiking an ace when she foolishly went all in with a million-chip-preflop raise of AQ and ran into KK.

Down to the final three tables, blinds are 20k/40k with a 5k ante, and Fossilman's still in it, in fourth place with 3 million chips, which gives him about a 1-in-19 chance of winning the whole thing if the remaining players are evenly matched. 10th through 27th pays between $300k and $600k; final table players are guaranteed $1M each, and first place is $7.5 million. And ESPN has to be salivating at the fact that the chip leader is Mike Matusow, whose confrontation with Raymer last year made for great television and left Matusow in tears. Best web source for news appears to be Pokerwire.

Anyone know if the Tiffany Williamson of London who's the last woman left in the tournament is the same one who's at Davis Polk's London office now and graduated Columbia Law in 1999?

Defending champion Greg Raymer has amazingly clinched a six-digit payday; he even started today in first place, but lost half of his stack on a couple of bad hands, and is now faced with an slightly-above-average-sized stack at the end of Day 4 with eighty-odd players left, about 750,000 in chips, down from a million at the beginning of the day, and 1.5 million mid-day. Of course, after winning last year, he doesn't need investors any more, so this time he'll get to keep his entire after-tax winnings.

Hey, my very own webpage.

The lovely aggregator Katie Newmark is on a roll, with posts about the historical dispute over the Orson Welles version of "War of the Worlds and a nifty catch of a Alex Tabarrok WSJ discussion on rental-car pricing. Katie's popular mom links to me, too. I was going to say her dad, the second-most famous Craig Newmark, did, too, but the cite turns out to be to Walter's discussion of the Ford Pinto rather than mine, so I still have as many Franks linking me as Newmarks.

Update: The Newmark family noses ahead thanks to a gratuitous link. And it's only slightly eerie that my mother is also a schoolteacher and my father is a former professor who looked like Craig when he was that age. But my mother doesn't blog. Yet.

Speaking of gritty science-fiction, Virginia Postrel recommends the new Battlestar Galactica, which looks halfway decent according to the LA Times story linked above. I still think it won't be the same without the metallic scanning-LED-eyed/speech-synthesized Cylons of my childhood and the Universal Studios tour. The question is whether I devote several hours of my TiVo to the first-season marathon Wednesday.

Postrel also links to the charity Any Soldier, which sounded good to me at first glance, but now feels like a bad idea, given that it's designed to get around Pentagon restrictions put in place for safety reasons.

And are you a neo-con? There were a lot of places where I wanted to check two answers, but the test won't let you.

Pearl Gluck's Divan is on the Sundance Channel Thursday morning at 10:35 Eastern; it's a pleasant, worthwhile, funny documentary by a friend that I helped finance and won't get a dime from except for the tax write-off I'll take this year. No regrets.

When I was eight or nine, one birthday or Hanukkah I got Bjo Trimble's "Star Trek Concordance," a geek's seeming paradise of systematically-compiled information about all of the episodes of the original series, plus the now-long-forgotten cartoon series.

In the days of the Internet, of course, the Concordance, with its cast lists, plot summaries, illustrations, and cross-indexed history of the show and stardates, is child's play to what's available on line regarding far more obscure shows. (Indeed, here's a link to a fanboy site complaining how errors in the Concordance messed up later reference works based on the Concordance.)

Case in point: Firefly. It's heartening to learn that the Chinese spoken in Firefly was authentic, as well as a nifty way to get around the censors. The webpage also teaches me that I learned a lot more Chinese than I realized in Los Angeles poker rooms.

These other links I'm never going to have the time to check out (I affirmatively avoid podcasts, plus I don't trust websites to avoid spoilers), but they look shiny. Here's a page with all the shooting scripts, a blog, a bulletin board, a video of a Firefly panel at last year's Comic-Con, another bulletin board, a fanboy podcast, and an entire gorram encyclopedia.

Phonespelling.com makes the game I'd play every move easier.