TGIS: Thank God It's Schadenfreude! (173)

This week's joy in the misfortune of others comes courtesy of the Associated Press (from Wednesday, June 25; link good at time of posting):

Norwalk police said they nabbed a burglary suspect after he broke out in tears when the homeowner caught him. Police said Miguel Alvizures-Montaya, 35, of Norwalk, cried, handed over his cell phone and told the homeowner to call police.

The homeowner apprehended Alvizures-Montaya after chasing him on foot for a block. The 26-year-old homeowner was awakened Saturday morning when he saw a shadow outside his sliding glass door.

[Previous TGIS]

A helpful reminder from the Supreme Court that the amendments in the Bill of Rights are not listed in order of importance.

Our second amendment rights aren't of secondary importance after all, according to the newly-published decision in Heller. There's already a tremendous amount of worthwhile commentary, both pro and con, on the decision in the legal blogosphere (see here, here, here, and here, just for starters); don't worry, though -- you'll find no such worthwhile commentary here.

Irreverent as always, Dustin Rowles of the QuizLaw blog has, cold, dead hands down, both the best headline announcing the decision and the most succinct description of its key holding:

Supreme Court Allows Heston to Keep Handgun in Cold, Dead Hands

My main concern now is whether this means that my wife will let me own guns again. When she insisted that I get rid of them before, I know she was really just struggling with the then-existing ambiguity in Second Amendment jurisprudence. Now that Heller has established that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual right rather than a collective one, I'm sure she'll have no objections. I wouldn't be half surprised to find a brand-new Glock tied with a big red bow waiting for me when I get home tonight.

As it turns out, this year's Mariners aren't the most hapless baseball team ever.

Over at the sports blog Deadspin, Rick Chandler discusses his day with the worst baseball player since Joe Shlabotnik -- the beloved Charlie Brown. Chandler walks us through the Charles Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, California and highlights the importance of baseball to Charlie Brown and the Peanuts strip:

[According to] Stephan Fatsis, co-curator of the exhibit and creator of the comic strip Pearls Before Swine . . . "Charlie Brown's problems on the mound are emotional conflicts that everyone deals with. It's actually more Biblical than baseball. Charlie Brown is like Job; experiencing these enormous tragedies, yet he continues to strive.

"You see him out there on the mound during Biblical-sized floods, after everyone else has gone home, and he still wants to play," Fatsis said. "At one point even his mitt floats away, yet he still won't quit. Schulz was the first cartoonist to work with those themes. Asking me if my work has been influenced by Schulz is like asking are you influenced by oxygen."

Baseball was the perfect sounding board for Schulz, placing his characters in a microcosm of hope, persistence, humiliation and disappointment.

While Chandler sticks to the Schulz connection to baseball, I also recall from our trip to the museum (it's just a couple of hours drive from our house) the late cartoonist's love of ice hockey. In fact, between the museum and the gift shop is the "Snoopy's Home Ice" ice rink. My daughter enjoyed her first experience ice skating there and especially enjoyed the artificial snow which fell from the ceiling at the end of the kids' free skate; afterward, she topped it all off with some hot chocolate and a snack served in a dog dish at the Warm Puppy Cafe located at the rink.

How to Geekify the Women in Your Life: A Primer

Megan McArdle, responding to an inquiry from a reader, offers a few tips on helping the wives, girlfriends, daughters, and other important females in sci-fi geeks' lives to enjoy science fiction, if not as much as their geeks do, then at least enough to good-naturedly tolerate the genre. She certainly has the bona fides:

I love me some Doctor Who, some Firefly, just caught up on BSG, own two copies of the Oxfor [sic] Book of Science Fiction Short Stories, have four first edition Sandmans, and really haven't emotionally come to grips with the fact that I am never going to have superpowers.

What I'm saying is, there's hope. A love for feminine frippery can be, and frequently already is, paired with a love of laser guns. But even if it's not already there, I think it can be awakened. You just have to explain it right.

. . . .

You might . . . try to ease her into something with a little more human emotion and a little less space opera--I'm very fond of George R. R. Martin's current gigantic series. As far as television goes, start with Firefly, then maybe BSG, and then slowly work your way up to Dr. Who. Do not, under any circumstances, unveil Sliders until you're sure she can handle it. Same with movies: Gattica [sic] before Blade Runner. Graphic novels: Sandman, not V for Vendetta. You get the idea.

. . . . I think science fiction is a habit that can be acquired if you go about it the right way.

[Links added.]

Fortunately, my wife indulges my love of Doctor Who and Star Wars, watches episodes with me frequently, and even discusses them. When you come to think of it, isn't that the geek trifecta -- indulgence, viewing, and discussion of sci-fi? She's a keeper.

While the wife may not share my level of fandom, she's at least agreeable when I attempt to indoctrinate my daughter. Thus far, the results of my efforts have been somewhat mixed. She enjoys the Lego Star Wars video games and will watch the movies from time-to-time; she also liked the younger kids' version of Doctor Who, The Sarah Jane Adventures. I'm hoping that as she grows older, she'll come to appreciate (as George Lucas unfortunately did not) that Jar Jar Binks is a travesty and that Yoda's primary importance to the saga is not that he's the cutest Jedi, but we'll work with what we have regardless. Frankly though, the prequels haven't given me that much to build on and, even as a fan, the "New Jedi Order" and "Legacy of the Force" book series are a bit of a slog. Perhaps the forthcoming Clone Wars film and series will pique her interest like the original series has.

After all, it takes a galaxy far, far away to raise a child.

UPDATE: At The Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin has an interesting take on McArdle's post:

Somewhat surprisingly, Megan doesn't mention the most common explanation for the relative paucity of female SF fans: that the genre is mysogynistic and/or lacks strong, well-rounded female characters. Although this conventional view probably had some accuracy forty or fifty years ago, I doubt that it accounts for the gender gap in SF today. Over the last several decades, many left-wing and libertarian writers have entered the SF and fantasy fields, portraying women very differently than in the early days of the genre. And even those early days weren't quite as completely sexist as some think. Say what you will about Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, which has plenty of flaws; but it did portray women serving in combat units on an equal basis with men back in the 1950s. Today, there are even quite a few prominent explicitly feminist SF and fantasy writers, such as Marion Zimmer Bradley, Octavia Butler, and Ursula LeGuin.

. . . .

That said, recent data suggest that the gender imbalance in SF fandom may be overstated. This 2001 National Science Foundation surveyshows that 31% of men say they read science fiction books or magazines - a number statistically indistinguishable from the 28% of women who claim to do so.

The NSF's results are so contrary to conventional wisdom that I wonder if there's something wrong with the methodology. The most obvious potential flaw is that many of the women say they read SF only do so on rare occasions and aren't real fans of the genre, whereas the men read more often. However, the NSF did a follow-up question in which 17% of female SF readers say they do so "regularly" compared to 16% of the male ones. The NSF data do still suggest that SF has greater appeal to men than to women. Other studies reveal that women generally read far more than men do, especially in most fiction genres. So if men and women read SF at roughly equal rates, that suggests that the genre is of greater interest to men once you control for their generally lower propensity to read.

Blawg Review Gets a French Kiss

This week, Nicolas Jondet hosts Blawg Review #165 at his French-Law.net blog and continues the Bloomsday/Ulysses theme started last week by Eoin O'Dell at cearta.ie. He notes that:

As it happens, France also has its own version of Ulysses. It is not as famous as the Irish masterpiece, but has had a lasting impact on a generation of children growing up in the 1980s. The Franco-Japanese animation series “Ulysses 31” sets the classic storyline in the future, the 31st century to be precise. In this version: “The Gods of Olympus are angered when Ulysses, commander of the spaceship Odyssey, kills the giant Cyclops to save a group of enslaved children, including his son, Telemachus. Zeus sentences Ulysses to travel the universe with his crew frozen until he finds the Kingdom of Hades, at which point his crew will be revived and he will be able to return to Earth. Along the way they encounter numerous other famous figures from Greek mythology given a futuristic twist.”

Highlights in this week's edition include punishing young Canucks for their online copyright transgressions, speculating about the "what ifs" were employment law applied to the presidential campaigns, and the possibly permanent shift in advantage to plaintiffs which electronic discovery provides. Geeklawyer hosts next week's Blawg Review. God save us all.

Mr. Watson -- come here -- I want to... borrow your mobile phone.

Sometime during the past few evenings, the pay phones were uninstalled from the lobby of my office building.


In the two years I've worked in this particular building, I've neither used nor seen anyone else use those phones. I suppose the fact that I snapped the above picture with the camera built into my BlackBerry just about says it all.

Although these buildings are not especially old (judging by the location of that middle phone, probably newer than the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990), mobile phone technology has been so widely and rapidly adopted across all demographic groups and professions that the bank of pay phones in this alcove seemed nearly as anachronistic as a hitching post would out front.

Once the wall is patched-up over the weekend, I wonder what this little space will become. I'm guessing that, come Monday, there'll be a Starbucks there.

TGIS: Thank God It's Schadenfreude! (172)

This week's joy in the misfortune of others comes courtesy of The New York Post (from Tuesday, June 17; link good at time of posting):

Over the weekend, spies said, Paris Hilton was on her way to a photo shoot and "wanted a puppy in the picture with her so it would look cuter." Hilton waltzed in [to The Puppy Store in Los Angeles] and tried to buy a Yorkie but was rebuffed by an employee who said it was clearly "an impulse buy." Hilton, who has a menagerie of neglected animals, went "ballistic," we're told. "She started screaming, 'I love my puppies! I want my baby!'" - but to no avail.

[Previous TGIS]

Bloomsday Blawg Review

Dr. Eoin O'Dell hosts Blawg Review #164 at the cearta.ie blog. Celebrating Bloomsday, the anniversary of the day in 1904 during which the events of James Joyce's Ulysses occurred, this edition of the carnival of legal blogging is structured by the chapter headings in Joyce's best-known work. Highlights include determining the right amount of copyright in Canada and elsewhere, inappropriate language in the workplace, and leveraging the blogosphere for fun and profit (academically, at least). Next week, we'll skip Britain altogether and jump from Ireland to France and Nicolas Jondet's French-Law.net blog for Blawg Review #165.

TGIS: Thank God It's Schadenfreude! (171)

This week's joy in the misfortune of others comes courtesy of the Associated Press (from Tuesday, June 10; link good at time of posting):

A judge halted a drug conspiracy trial Tuesday after some jurors were found to have been playing the puzzle game Sudoku while evidence was being given.

Sydney District Court Judge Peter Zahra ended the trial Tuesday for two men facing a possible life sentence for drug conspiracy charges. The trial had been running for 66 days and had cost taxpayers an estimated $950,000.

The judge was alerted after jurors were observed writing vertically, rather than horizontally. It had been assumed they were taking notes.

"Yes, it helps me keep my mind busy paying more attention," the jury foreman told the judge Tuesday. "Some of the evidence is rather drawn out and I find it difficult to maintain my attention the whole time, and that doesn't distract me too much from proceedings."

The foreman admitted to the judge four to five jurors were playing puzzle games for up to half the time the trial had been going.

"Jurors are sort of the judges of the facts and it's very disappointing they weren't giving our clients a fair trial," said Robyn Hakelis, a lawyer for one of the defendants.

[Previous TGIS]

TGIS: Thank God It's Schadenfreude! (170)

This week's joy in the misfortune of others comes courtesy of The San Francisco Citizen blog (from Tuesday, June 3; link good at time of posting):

Peace Mom Cindy Sheehan Campaigning [for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's Congressional seat] at the Steps of San Francisco’s City Hall.

Cindy Sheehan and one of her intrepid supporters today at the main entrance of City Hall during today’s primary election:

[Previous TGIS]

Baseball, Bench Thyself

Mike Masnick updates the Major League Baseball statistics case, a matter which has been of considerable interest to me for some time (see here, here, here, and here). As Masnick reports, MLB has continued its losing ways in defending an essentially indefensible position -- contending that it owns the statistics produced by its games such that rotisserie or fantasy league players must pay licensing fees. Masnick hits it out of the park with his analysis:

As MLB realized that claiming ownership of game data was never going to cut it in court, it changed the story somewhat, saying that it was really about the players' right of publicity, which also (somehow) included owning their stats. A district court quickly saw through this argument and told MLB that it had no case. Rather than admitting defeat (and recognizing that more widespread use of baseball info should bring more fans into the game), MLB appealed. The appeals court wasted little time in again telling MLB it had no case. But those folks at MLB are nothing if not stubborn. So, they asked the full appeals court to rehear the case and were turned down

So, again, rather than recognizing that perhaps all of these courts (and common sense) had a point, MLB appealed to the Supreme Court, who (as noted) turned them down. If you're keeping score at home (and, we're not claiming ownership of the score), that now makes 4 - 0 for the courts over MLB, and I think we've pretty much hit the 9th inning, as there are no more appeals. The only thing MLB can hope for now is for a different circuit to somehow (unlikely) come to a different conclusion and the Supreme Court to revisit the issue.

All dead on. In fact, Mike had me eating out of hand until he made this gratuitous dig:

But that seems about as likely as, say, the Seattle Mariners somehow coming back to win the World Series this year.

Sure, in only the first week of June, my Mariners are 15½ games out in the A.L. West, but we're only 14½ out in the Wild Card. Mike obviously hasn't the first clue about anything. And he's a big meanie.

Truth be told, I learned all the Chinese I know from "Firefly".

Now that I've returned home from a brief sojurn away and worked my way through the most pressing of the matters which accumulated during that time, I've had a chance to read through this week's Blawg Review. Frankly, it blows.

No, of course it doesn't, but I figured that someone who sees my Blawg Review posts most Mondays (or as soon thereafter as work permits) would think I'm on auto-pilot, praising each week's effort -- some weeks more than others, granted -- and never offering a critical word. While I try to be a generally positive person (outwardly at least, for politeness' sake), the truth is that week-in-and-week-out Blawg Review is pretty damned good because its' hosts make it so.

This week's another case-in-point. Dan Harris hosts Blawg Review #162 at their China Law Blog. They term this edition the "World Peace Edition" and with the nineteenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre coming only a day later, wars continuing in Iraq and Afghanistan, and disquiet in abundance around the globe, a World Peace Edition of Blawg Review comes none too soon. Highlights include civil wars and proper manners in the blawgosphere, learning law firm management from vending machines, and those age-old disputes -- guns versus butter, biofuels versus food, and coffer versus roller derby. Commenter "Marsha, Marsha, Marsha" probably speaks for many when she urges Harris to do one of these every week. He's humbly demurred, but the proprietors of the More Partner Income blog will take up the challenge when they host next week's Blawg Review #163.