The House Judiciary Committee hasn't posted my testimony yet, so I've put it on SSRN.

We're watching the beginning of Double Indemnity.

Slim: Is he shot?
Me: What? In the shoulder? He's holding his arm funny. Maybe. It's not colorized, so I can't tell.
Slim: There isn't a lot of blood.
Me: It was 1944. Less blood then. There was wartime rationing.

Slim: Readin' my blog?
Slim (singing off-key): Readin' my blog... way to say you love me, reading my blog.
Me: You're weirder than a Truck-O-Saurus. A defective Truck-O-Saurus. With 85,000 documents from In re Truck-O-Saurus Product Liability Litigation.

Via Overlawyered, the Times reports about an anti-supercollider lawsuit worried that it will generate particles that will destroy the world:

Dr. Arkani-Hamed said concerning worries about the death of the Earth or universe, “Neither has any merit.” He pointed out that because of the dice-throwing nature of quantum physics, there was some probability of almost anything happening. There is some minuscule probability, he said, “the Large Hadron Collider might make dragons that might eat us up.”

Left out: Arkani-Hamed was talking about a possibility so small that the experiment could be run a million times a second between now and a billion years from now, and the odds are astronomical that it would not generate "dragons that might eat us up". Unfortunately, the English language word "minuscule" doesn't quite capture that quantum mathematical concept that anything could happen, and minds not trained in physics aren't quite able to grok the idea of the impossible being actually tremendously improbable. In quantum theory, all the atoms in your body might suddenly jump simultaneously six feet to the right. They almost certainly won't. It would be better if scientists discussing absurd possibilities used actually absurd (and equally unlikely) possibilities like "the CERN supercollider might generate a Welsh-speaking replica of Frank Sinatra in a blue tuxedo." Even Richard Posner gets it wrong in his book on catastrophes, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt that he was writing in the law-professorish sense of creating an interesting hypothetical.

My ordinally-numbered mental list ranking exes by their craziness needs to be reordered. But the nice thing about a post like this is that the craziest ones will suffer from the Carly Simon effect. ("Why do you say that? Have you done anything recently that should change my perception of your relative craziness?")

In a glum twelve months of investing where my portfolio dropped in value over 40% from its peak at one point (up nearly 25% since then, but you can do the math and see that isn't even half of what I lost), I thought I was a genius for buying Bear Stearns at $4.10 and flipping at $5.70. Apparently, I could have been even geniusier.

Here, if only as a block quote of the earlier inaccurate Rosen piece. Twenty years ago, my New Republic subscription had me aspiring to be one of the people with bylines in the magazine. Of course, since then, TNR has zigged left, and I've zagged right as I've gotten more educated and well-read, so that precise instantiation of the aspiration isn't going to happen, but it has a lot to do with the pay cut I've taken.

Our five-year-old television broke in December; it was clearly the power supply, so we spent $300 (and me a day home from work) getting it repaired. It broke again last week. Sony customer service on the phone had no answer why the speakers were making a regular popping sound, the web similarly had no answers (other than an unsuccessful "tighten connections" and unplug it for sixty seconds), so faced with the choice between another $300 service call for perhaps three months of working television or buying a new Panasonic plasma, we'll do the latter, and hope it lasts longer than five years.

Meanwhile, Sony sent me an e-mail asking me to fill out a lengthy web form for customer service. After spending a few minutes conscientiously filling it out, when I submitted it, I got an error message. When I e-mailed them to let them know their webform didn't work, I got another error message. So they won't find out how they're losing customers unless they have a Google Blogs alert.

Or, as a Boing Boing commenter put it, "not only have the robots started shooting people, but they're smart enough to make it look like a suicide as well. We're really in trouble now."

Soren Dayton, whom I've never met, but is, according to Facebook, a friend of many of my friends, a friend of many more friends of a friend, and a boyfriend of an ex-girlfriend of an ex-boyfriend of a girlfriend, lost his job with the McCain campaign for using his Twitter account to link to this clumsy YouTube mashup of Obama speeches and Pastor Wright speeches, something also linked to by mainstream blogs like Powerline. Aside from that video, there are good critiques of Obama and Wright to be made (e.g., Kaus; Frum; Thernstrom; York; Taranto; Maguire; Freddoso).

Compare McCain's overcautious high-road approach with that of his opponent: Obama certainly wouldn't fire a staffer for making race-baiting comments about, say, Bush appointee Hans von Spakovsky, given that Obama has made them himself.

Previous stupidity on Twitter.

Update: Speaking of mutual Facebook friends, Garance Franke-Ruta reports that Dayton was suspended, rather than fired. Which I would've seen if I'd read the other stories I linked to more carefully, but, in my defense, a lot of newspaper website front-pages are reporting "fired."

And see Krauthammer on Obama and Wright, for the definitive take.

Seinfeld's Larry David and Michael Richards first worked together on the sketch comedy Fridays, which I remember only for a sketch where time travelers go to Ford's Theater to prevent the Lincoln assassination, and run into dozens of other time travelers attempting the same thing. The joke never gets old, as a 2005 MIT prank and this 2007 Desmond Warzel short story show.

Update: My brother, who has a much better memory for obscure sketch-comedy shows that lasted thirteen episodes, credibly tells me that the Lincoln time traveler sketch comes from The New Show, and an SCTV fan site seems to confirm the sketch ran January 13, 1984.

...I'd make a facetious bet with Adam Bonin over the Amherst-Brandeis Final Eight Division III basketball game, but I'm pretty appalled at Brandeis these days.

Send your expired coupons to military families, who can use them six months past expiration date. (Via WaPo, which failed to give follow-up information.)

Awesome (starting around 0:50).

Old-style Astros caps are a Crips gang sign.

I can't find the blog comment where I criticized the trade, but I thought the Suns got severely taken by the Heat in giving up one of the best players in the league for the desiccated bones of Shaquille O'Neal, who simply isn't the Shaq of five or even two years ago. Even three years ago, O'Neal demonstrated in the Detroit-LA series that he no longer had the stamina to play every other day, and the Suns have gone from a team with a 15% or so chance of winning the title needing only some breaks in the playoffs to a team that may well not make the playoffs: they're 3-6 with Shaq in the lineup (only 1 of those wins against a playoff-contending team) and in the hypercompetitive West, that's dropped them from on top of the league to sixth seed, only 2.5 games ahead of ninth-place Denver with 20 to play. Phoenix can probably eke in to the playoffs at 51-31, requiring an 11-9 finish, though they're helped by a relatively easy schedule: two games against Memphis, two against Portland, one against Minnesota, Sacramento, Seattle, and New Jersey. Critically, they have a home-and-home against Denver Mar. 31 and Apr. 1.

Letter:

Dana Milbank's Feb. 28 column on Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker operates on the premise that the winner of any Supreme Court argument should be whoever can best appeal to the justices' sympathies regardless of the merits of the case. Such an approach is more appropriate for coverage of television game shows than the law.

The Post would do better to treat its readers like grownups and have its Supreme Court reporting done by journalists who don't "yawn" at questions about the appropriateness of jury instructions.

-- Theodore H. Frank

Washington

The writer is director of the American Enterprise Institute's Legal Center for the Public Interest.

How to plan ahead to get bumped and the associated free travel vouchers (via lifehacker).

More people notice at the the Wall Street Journal and Dealbreaker (where the finance guys are generally going, "Of course, that's obvious, why do you need a post for that?", an amusing contrast to the freak-out of the lawyers seeing the same information, e.g., the Patent Baristas blog, which clamps its hands over its ears and says "I don't believe you").

The anonymous S.COTUS promises analysis of the spreadsheet, which no doubt will show the same incisiveness he/she has shown elsewhere when trying to understand mildly complex subjects. (Or even simple ones: the next blog post claimed as of March 5 that the Second Circuit ruled against the libel tourist in Ehrenfeld v. Mahfouz.)

A bug in the spreadsheet: it underestimates the Obama tax increase for people with taxable incomes of over $357,000 or so, not likely to affect law firm associates, but would affect investment bankers and law firm partners. I'll have to do v. 3.0 at some point.

Esquiver: "My impression of Philly after visiting last month is that it's a very graceful oasis of about half a mile in every direction around City Hall, surrounded by mile after mile of…well, reavers."