George Rises (and Falls)

As my good friend Charon QC noted this morning, he and I have written and recorded another in our occasional series of "West London Man" satires. You can hear the recording of the latest episode, "The Adventure of the Final Problem", at his site.

As you might suspect from the title, this edition of George's escapades is an homage to the famous Sherlock Holmes story of the same name. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Holmes stories have been popular since their publication and the character is even more popular at the moment, what with the outstanding BBC Sherlock series and not-quite-so-outstanding Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law movies. Of course, West London Man (26) will probably end this Holmes Golden Age. Regardless, it was a distinct pleasure to write and record once again with my friends Charon and George; I hope that you enjoy "The Adventure of the Final Problem" as much.

Charon posted a link to this episode's script along with the recording. I've included a link to that script below, together with links to the other three episodes he and I co-wrote:

• West London Man (23): Half-Baked Alaska
• West London Man (24): Diamonds Are Not Forever
• West London Man (25): The La Guardia Archipelago
• West London Man (26): The Adventure of the Final Problem

Review: Law & Peace: The BabyBarista Files

A couple of years ago, I reviewed and recommended Tim Kevan's first BabyBarista novel, BabyBarista and the Art of War:

This is a book worth reading; it's entertaining and insightful, building upon the best aspects of the much-praised BabyBarista blog and providing greater depth and color (or should that be colour?) to its characters and stories. It's not a flawless novel, but it's well worth your time.

In the second volume of "The BabyBarista Files", entitled Law & Peace: The BabyBarista Files, Kevan demonstrates his growth as a novelist. Law & Peace is as engaging as Art of War and its crisper plotting will likely make it more enjoyable for those who are less familiar with the idiosyncracies of the English bar's pupillage and tenancy system.

While readers of his earlier work will already be acquainted with the motley crew of supporting characters around protagonist BabyBarista, those who haven't read BabyBarista and the Art of War (or as it was retitled later, Law and DisOrder) and don't follow BabyB's adventures online at either The Guardian or Kevan's own BabyBarista site shouldn't be deterred. His convention of referring to all but a few characters by nicknames allows us to follow the story without referring back to the character descriptions preceding the first chapter.

As before, BabyB is an earnest figure who often does the wrong things for the right reasons. Struggling with the debts accumulated in putting him through his schooling and pupillage, this time out he becomes entangled in the unscrupulous schemes of a greedy solicitor, SlipperySlope, and of OldSmoothie, a barrister in his own chambers. As he finds himself out of his depth in their self-dealing and cynical plotting and targeted by TopFirst, a rival whom he bested in Art of War, BabyB relies on his wits to see him through. Ultimately, however, it's his at times discounted, if never entirely discarded moral character which both enables his success and makes it worth cheering.

As was the case with the first novel, Law & Peace is, in essence, a morality play. Various figures embody ideals whereas others are evils who tempt or persecute BabyB in this allegorical story. That and the novel's point-of-view narration allow BabyB to always remain the focus of this story, but it necessarily shortchanges characterization for many of the supporting players. We learn more about some of the characters from the earlier novel and learn enough about those introduced in this one, but none of them are especially deep. They represent types, characteristics, and challenges, but they have little existence beyond acting upon BabyB for good or ill. The continuing adventures of BabyBarista are a Pilgrim's Progress for the legal set; unlike that famous work, thankfully, BabyB's progress is never a humorless slog.

In reviewing Art of War, I wrote that its ending was "a bit too abrupt and convenient". Law & Peace builds to a sudden, sweeping resolution of its various plotlines, but the result is much more in keeping with the narrative to that point and thus is more satisfying. As before, Kevan was kind enough to send me a copy of his novel for review and, as before, I'm glad to send another copy on my own dime to a friend, an expat Geordie lawyer, rather than part with my own.

I'm looking forward to BabyB's next novel-length adventure, though I think Kevan will be hard-pressed to come up with a fiction to rival some real shenanigans involving the English bar. Anyone who reads BabyB's stories of his own and others' misfeasance and malfeasance and thinks that these are simply unbelievable need look no further than today's newspapers. If, as is alleged, a prominent lawyer for the now-defunct News of the World had a hand in the hiring of investigators to gather dirt on the private lives of lawyers representing phone hacking victims, can BabyB's next adventure possibly be outrageous enough to rival reality?

Law & Peace
By Tim Kevan
Bloomsbury Publishing (2011)
Paperback (300 pages)
£6.95 (Amazon.co.uk)

BabyBarista Moves to New Chambers

Last Fall, I wrote a book review praising Tim Kevan's novelization of his BabyBarista blog, BabyBarista and the Art of War. That novel has enjoyed widespread praise and considerable success and has paved the way for a second novel continuing BabyB's (mis)adventures. Through it all, Kevan has kept-up the BabyBarista blog at The Times website; because the landlord there has put a lock on the door, BabyB has now moved to a home of his own at http://www.babybarista.com (the new RSS feed is http://www.babybarista.com/?feed=rss). Kevan explains:

I have today withdrawn the BabyBarista Blog from The Times in reaction to their plans to hide it away behind a paywall along with their other content. Now don’t get me wrong. I have absolutely no problem with the decision to start charging. They can do what they like. But I didn’t start this blog for it to be the exclusive preserve of a limited few subscribers. I wrote it to entertain whosoever wishes to read it. Hence my decision to resign which I made with regret. I remain extremely grateful to The Times for hosting the blog for the last three years and wish them luck with their experiment. I hope very much you like the new site and also the addition of the wonderful cartoons by Hollywood animator Alex Williams who also draws the Queen’s Counsel cartoons for The Times.

I'll certainly follow BabyB wherever he goes as I eagerly await Kevan's second novel; the new digs are pretty spiffy with Williams' illustrations, one of which accompanies this post. Happy housewarming, BabyB!

1,000 Joyful and/or Miserable Posts

According to Blogger, that last post was the 1,000th here at Infamy or Praise.

It seems appropriate that this milestone would be achieved with one of my weekly Schadenfreude posts. Joy in the misfortune of others has been a regular and popular Friday feature here nearly since the inception of the blog.

I'd be remiss then if I didn't take this opportunity to thank the hundreds of kind folks who've beclowned themselves in a particularly shameful manner over the past four-and-a-half years for our "TGIS: Thank God It's Schadenfreude!" amusement. Thanks, dimwits; I couldn't have made it this far without you.

Review: BabyBarista and The Art of War

I'm often frustrated by book reviews for the simple reason that most tend to avoid answering the question "Is this book worth reading?" I'll not make that mistake in writing about Tim Kevan's BabyBarista and The Art of War. This is a book worth reading; it's entertaining and insightful, building upon the best aspects of the much-praised BabyBarista blog and providing greater depth and color (or should that be colour?) to its characters and stories. It's not a flawless novel, but it's well worth your time. Kevan's publishers were kind enough to send me a pre-release copy for review (the book will be widely available on 3 August), but I enjoyed it so much that I ordered a copy for a friend rather than part with my own. I can't think of higher praise to offer than that.

Kevan is a witty and observant writer, skills he's honed at his formerly-anonymous blog. While many other blogs have had decidedly mixed results in translating what worked online into dead-tree success, Kevan shows a keen appreciation of his online audience's tastes. He keeps his pacing brisk without being too choppy; he adds to the roles played by secondary and incidental characters without losing focus on BabyBarista and his circle of friends and rivals; he offers insight into the arcane and insular world of the barrister without playing-down dark satire.

BabyBarista and The Art of War focuses on BabyBarista's death march through his year-long pupillage, a final-stage apprenticeship during which law graduates gain work experience with practicing barristers and compete with other pupils to for a position as a barrister in an established chambers. He describes the process in his diary of his first day:

[T]he ordeal through which the Bar Council continues to force its brightest and best.... A sort of upper-class reality show in microcosm every one of your foibles will be analysed and where a blackball system exists so that if you annoy one person, you're out. [Y]ou're playing to the lowest common denominator. Attempting to be as inoffensive as possible in the sound knowledge that it won't be the votes in favour that get you in but the lack of votes against.

The novel's principal characters come to life without intrusive exposition. BabyBarista is spare with details of his own situation, but what he provides to his friend, Claire, to his mentor, OldRuin, or directly to us serves to illuminate the financial desperation which drives him to succeed in his pupillage both by displaying his own merits and by subtly destroying his fellow pupils' chances. His three (later four) co-pupils seem at first to be mere caricatures of familiar personalities — Worrier is details-obsessed to the point she's unable to function professionally; BusyBody's instinct to be everywhere, to have her hand in every project, and to be all things to all people makes her a whirl of unproductive but frenzied activity; TopFirst's stellar academic achievements and social connections mask a wicked soul. As time goes by, however, these characters acquire greater depth and by the time a fourth pupil-competitor joins the fray, all of their behaviors become understandable. This is not to say that they, or BabyBarista necessarily, become invariably sympathetic characters, but they become real, something mere caricatures cannot be.

BabyBarista's pupillage experiences provide some startling criticisms of the practice of law generally and the pupillage system particularly. BabyBarista and his mother have essentially locked themselves into a high-stakes wager that, against exceptionally-long odds, BabyB can complete his climb from modest origins to lucrative barristers' chambers. As he nears that objective, the added (often unreasonable) financial pressures of the pupillage year heighten his sense of desperation and drive him to trade what he knows to be right for expedient gains or short-term personal or professional advantage. He laments that "[I]t's no different to bear baiting or cock fighting. They plunge us into debt before we get here and then leave us to fight it out, Deathmatch style." Later, after a particularly appalling incident, he warns that "[W]hatever you do, don't let the lawyers start worrying about getting paid. However much they protest otherwise, it's there in their mind. Not even at the back of their mind." His experiences highlight a system which seems designed in part to focus pupils' and barristers' minds on their own finances rather than clients' best interests and to effectively filter out those without independent means from the practice of law.

The practicing barristers who mentor BabyBarista illustrate both the best and worst aspects of legal practice. OldRuin provides an aspirational view of the lawyer as a professional, held by others and himself to a higher standard of conduct; he is at times unrealistic about the realities of modern legal practice and unwilling to challenge its more base practitioners, but he also offers some insights which should make clear to all of us who practice law that ours is a profession and not merely a business. TheBoss is a cautionary tale from start to end; he behaves unethically and cowardly, but even he becomes more real as we come to understand that he is like a Ghost of BabyBarista Yet to Come (apologies to Dickens). TheBoss is in many ways the product and victim of the finance-obsessed side of legal practice which afflicts BabyBarista; whereas BabyB sees the riches of practice, rightly or wrongly, as his and his mother's salvations, for TheBoss it has become a damnation, trapping him into an increasingly-desperate cycle of misdeeds to perpetuate his lifestyle and social position. In lesser hands, characters like OldRuin and TheBoss would be like the stereotypical angel and devil perched on the protagonist's shoulders, whispering in his ear, but Kevan writes his secondary players far less clichéed.

As I've said, though, BabyBarista is not a flawless novel. Structurally, the ending is a bit too abrupt and convenient; considering how effectively Kevan paced and plotted his novel to that point, he could have arrived at his destination with greater style and less haste. More broadly, while Kevan ventures beyond the constraints of his successful blog, he doesn't venture very far beyond. It seems that BabyBarista's chambers are meant to be at least somewhat representative of other chambers and of the larger bar. Nonetheless, the exclusive focus on the misfeasance, malfeasance, and nonfeasance within BabyBarista's chambers without even passing looks at others' (despite his extensive interaction with Claire and other pupils in the shared library and elsewhere) creates an impression that BabyB's chambers are an aberration. This tends to undercut the universality of his struggles and experiences, diminishing them as broader commentaries on pupillage and legal practice. Those on the inside of the profession, barristers particularly, will relish the satirical elements but may find it somewhat too easy to dismiss Kevan's deeper criticisms when his satire strays a bit too far in places into broad comedy. If readers find Kevan's insights into the practice of law easier to dismiss for these reasons, that's an opportunity lost; these issues deserve to be considered and discussed seriously.

It's churlish of me to note that what Kevan's done, he's done very well, but to then mark him down a bit for expanding on an excellent blog but not transcending it. Please understand, however, that this is the criticism of someone who greatly enjoyed BabyBarista and The Art of War and recommends it highly, but who can still imagine how much more it might have been.

BabyBarista and The Art of War
By Tim Kevan
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC (2009)
Paperback (288 pages)
£7.19 (Amazon.co.uk)

An undigested bit of beef...

I dreamed last night that the renewal of my bar membership was being held until I completed a new required continuing education seminar -- Music Appreciation -- for which I would have to write a lengthy research paper on a notable band. Although it seemed odd, I dutifully headed off to bar headquarters to attend. Unfortunately, I arrived late and all the better bands were snapped-up already. None of my favorites were available; no Beatles, no Oasis, no Pet Shop Boys, and no Afghan Whigs. There was no Nirvana, Screaming Trees, Soundgarden, or anything else from Seattle. Even O.A.R. was unavailable.

With my career hanging in the balance, I was assigned "Whitesnake" as my subject. I've never been so glad to be woken by an alarm.

It's named after a bull, so perhaps it's suited to these bullsh-- commutes?

I'm not sure who I feel more sorry for after a nearly two-hours-long commute this morning in stop-and-go post-holiday traffic -- myself or the guy beside me the whole way in a Lamborghini Gallardo. At least my car was built for this at one-seventh the cost of his. I don't even know if he has a radio in that thing, much less Sirius XM; that'd be a shame, as the saving grace of this morning's drive was a thirteen minute live version of "Prove It All Night" on the all-Springsteen channel.

100 Things I Didn't Know Last Year

At the start of last year, I came across a very interesting article from BBC News Magazine Monitor. Each week the site's writers compiled a list of ten things which they did not know the previous week; their list published on January 1, 2008 pulled together one hundred of the more notable items from those weekly lists. Intrigued by the concept, I not only started reading the site's lists each week but also began to put together one of my own.

My list follows, with the facts presented in the order I learned them in 2008 and, where applicable, a link to the source of my newfound knowlege:

1. The FBI no longer believes that legendary bank robber D.B. Cooper was an experienced parachutist because, amongst other considerations, he didn't notice that his reserve chute was intended only for training and had been sewn shut. (Yahoo! News)
2. When President Lincoln was assassinated at Ford's Theatre, the president was accompanied by his wife and a young engaged couple, Major Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris. During a fit of insanity in 1883, Rathbone killed Harris, who was by then his wife of more than sixteen years, and was confined for the remainder of his life in an asylum for the criminally insane. (Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer)
3. The Apple iPod was so named due to the prototype device's similarity in appearance to the EVA Pods in Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey. (Wikipedia)
4. If you want to emigrate to North Korea, you need to send "your complete CV, copy of your passport and certificates to korea@korea-dpr.com". (Positive Liberty via Prettier than Napoleon)
5. For every ten dollars the price of a barrel of oil increases, the United States Air Force's annual operating costs increase by $610 Million. (GovernmentExecutive.com via WorldwideStandard.com)
6. In 1985, the mayors of Rome and Carthage signed a peace treaty which officially ended the Punic Wars, 2,248 years after the Romans burned Carthage to the ground in 146 B.C. (Military History Podcast)
7. Google Calculator can perform conversions and other calculations using the Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures, a system defined in a 1957 issue of Mad Magazine. (Google Blogoscoped)
8. Pizza Hut restaurants in Japan offer a "Crab & Shrimp Mayo King" pizza which includes snow crab, shrimp, broccoli, onion, and corn. (Trademork.com)
9. The Astrologer Magazine abruptly ceased publication in December 2007 "due to unforeseen circumstances beyond our control". (Neatorama via The Consumerist)
10. Prior to 1870, fire alarm boxes were kept locked to prevent false alarms from being raised. At the start of the great Chicago fire, a neighbor of the O'Learys was unable to gain access to an alarm box and no alarms from the vicinity of the fire were registered until the fire had grown out of control. (Schneier on Security)
11. Disneyland's Matterhorn mountain was originally conceived to cover a support tower for the now-discontinued cable car ride; Walt Disney felt that the uncovered tower was "unsightly" and detracted from the atmosphere in Fantasyland. (Disneyland "Walking in Walt's Footsteps" Tour)
12. One month before the company's IPO, the top three executives of Google made a pact to work together for twenty years. (Reuters via Engadget)
13. In Japan, Cheetos are available in strawberry and chocolate varieties. (Consumerist)
14. The still-unfinished and unoccupied 3,000 room gray concrete Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang, which has cost approximately two percent of the North Korean GDP to build, is so hideous that the government airbrushes it out of photographs and official guides pretend it's not there when pointing out the city's skyline. (Esquire and Daily Mail via Reason Online)
15. In an evolutionary response to ivory hunting in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, significant percentages of elephants -- fifteen percent of females and nine percent of males -- are now born without tusks, versus only one percent of elephants overall in 1930. (io9)
16. The substance now known as Play-Doh was originally a wallpaper cleaning product; when Americans switched from coal-burning furnaces to oil-fueled ones, demand for the cleaner lagged and the manufacturer re-branded the substance for sale as a children's craft item. (Mental Floss)
17. The Pirate Bay, a Sweden-based BitTorrent index site notorious for its connections to pirated films and music, has its corporate offices in the same building as Sweden's copyright agency. (Gizmodo)
18. As the 2007 NFL season wound down, ESPN.com provided sixteen sets of expert projections for all division and wild-card winners. None predicted that the Giants would reach the Super Bowl or even had the team making the playoffs. Princess, a camel at the Popcorn Park Zoo in New Jersey, predicted that the Giants would win the Super Bowl and finished 9-2 with her playoff predictions overall. (Tuesday Morning Quarterback)
19. A thirteenth-century Scottish law permits women to propose marriage on February 29 during leap years and establishes modest penalties for eligible men who refuse such proposals. (What About Clients?)
20. A 1986 British National Space Centre policy prohibits involvement by the United Kingdom in manned space flight missions. [Slashdot]
21. Google observed Israel's Earth Hour celebration by changing the background of its homepage from white to black although, on most LCD monitors, rendering black actually consumes more energy than white. (Valleywag)
22. Keith Richards cuts his own hair and never eats cheese. (GQ)
23. A secret unit of the East German People's Army was tasked with producing pornographic films for the general staff. (Telegraph.co.uk via QandO.net)
24. Edwin Webster Sanborn, a Dartmouth graduate, bequeathed a significant sum to the college but conditioned the gift on the English department providing a daily tea service to its faculty and students at a nominal charge; Dartmouth continues to serve tea each day in the building named for Sanborn, at a cost of ten cents per cup. (New York Times)
25. Charles Babbage, who designed the Victorian-era Difference Engines now recognized as precursors to modern computers, also invented the locomotive cowcatcher. (io9)
26. To prevent anti-Chinese protests, the Olympic torch relay in Jakarta, Indonesia consisted of carefully-selected torch bearers running laps inside a stadium in front of an invitation-only crowd. (USA Today)
27. Approximately 70,000 years ago, a series of severe droughts in Africa nearly caused the extinction of humanity; at one point, researchers believe that only 2,000 humans remained, living in small isolated groups. (Associated Press)
28. Stern Pinball, based near Chicago, is the only manufacturer of pinball machines remaining in the world. (Gizmodo)
29. On May 3, 1978, Gary Thuerk sent the first Spam e-mail message -- a promotion for a new computer product. The message reached more than fifteen percent of the e-mail addresses then in existence. (Business Technology)
30. During the Cold War, the government of Great Britain had analyzed and was highly concerned about the probability of a severe tea shortage should the British Isles be attacked in a nuclear war. (BBC via Charon QC)
31. 99% of the data from a damaged hard drive recovered from the wreckage of the Space Shuttle Columbia was found to be usable and was used to complete an experiment to study the way xenon gas flows in microgravity; the results of the long-delayed experiment were published in a scientific journal in April. (Engadget)
32. Spanish Dictator Francisco Franco rigged the vote in the 1968 Eurovision Song Contest so that a Spanish performer prevailed over England's Cliff Richard. (AFP via Reason)
33. Amongst the weaponry at the Unites States' disposal in the Iraq War are concrete bombs. These bombs are not necessarily designed to destroy concrete targets; rather, these are made out of concrete, making their use something like dropping a large rock on a target. (Moment of Truth in Iraq)
34. The children's online social environment Club Penguin adds approximately 500-1,000 words to its chat filters each day, attempting to keep up with new slang. (Boing Boing)
35. When developed in 1873, blue jeans were known as "waist overalls". (Wired)
36. The Astronomical Unit, a standard unit of measurement for interplanetary distances, grows by approximately seven centimeters annually, but there is no generally-accepted scientific explanation for the change. (Science Journal)
37. Pitcher Rick Sutcliffe's only career stolen base came when someone advised Sutcliffe, standing on first after a single, that guest Chicago Cubs play-by-play announcer Bill Murray had bet color commentator Steve Stone a case of beer that Sutcliffe would steal second base. (Kansas City Star)
38. The Village People's "Y.M.C.A." became a sports stadium anthem in 1996 when members of the New York Yankees' spring training grounds crew decided to dance along to it during their on-field work, to liven things up during an exhibition game. (Spin via Deadspin)
39. Landlocked African nation Malawi has a navy comprised of 225 sailors but no ships, whereas its similarly-landlocked African neighbor Botswana has a navy with two vessels but no sailors. (Economist.com)
40. Giraffe meat and milk have been declared to be kosher. (Breitbart.com via The Moderate Voice)
41. Getting a song stuck in one's head results from a glitch in the auditory cortex and can be resolved either by listening to the entire song or doing math. (Wired)
42. Researchers believe that Brazilian soap operas, which highlight "small and stable middle-class families that were much smaller than the traditional Brazilian family" were in part responsible for a decline in the Brazilian fertility rate from 6.3 to 2.3 during the period from 1960 to 2000. (Freakonomics blog)
43. A bronze monument honoring the enema has been installed at the Mashuk-Akva Term spa in Zheleznovodsk, Russia; the statute is of a bronze syringe bulb held by three angels. (Associated Press)
44. A survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that 21% of self-declared atheists reported that they believe in God. (Michelle Malkin)
45. The first grocery item scanned using a UPC code was a pack of gum in a store in Troy, Ohio on June 26, 1974. (Wired)
46. Three pounds of bees can be delivered via USPS for approximately three dollars or a colony of bees can be rented for between ten dollars and $180, depending on the season. (Slate)
47. An official "Fear Forecast" panel comprised of four children -- aged six, eight, ten, and fourteen years -- rate each episode of "Doctor Who", advising how scary each will be. (BBC)
48. Prince Charles' Aston Martin has been converted to run on biofuels -- specifically, unsold English white wine. (Gizmodo)
49. A perfect score in Pac-Man is 3,333,360 points. Such a score has been achieved only once, by a man who described his six-hours-long game as "tremendously monotonous". (Wired)
50. Onions are the only commodity for which futures trading is legally prohibited; the prohibition is the result of legislation introduced by then-Congressman Gerald Ford in 1958. (Fortune via The Club for Growth blog)
51. The Saudi Arabian government runs a resort where it seeks to "de-militarize" radicals with presentations concerning Islamic law and counseling to help jihadists react less emotionally to current events; featured activities at the facility include swimming, ping-pong, and art therapy. (The Moderate Voice)
52. Dueling pistols (using mannequins as targets) was an Olympic event in 1906 and rope climbing was an event in four different Olympic Games. (Deadspin)
53. John Scopes, who was convicted in 1925 for illegally teaching evolution theory to his high school biology class, admitted after the famous "Scopes Monkey Trial" that although he had used a textbook which contained a chapter concerning evolution, he had skipped that chapter in his teaching. (Hit & Run)
54. Each visiting country at the Beijing Olympics was provided a Chinese government-assigned elementary school to cheer its athletes. (Wall Street Journal)
55. eBay does not permit the sale of secondhand underpants at its auction site. (Gizmodo)
56. Nils Olav, a penguin who has been an honorary member and mascot of the Norwegian King's Guard for more than 35 years, was knighted by royal order in a ceremony involving 130 guardsmen. (BBC via The Debatable Land)
57. Although the electronic touch pads in Olympic swimming pools are capable of accurate timing to 1/1,000th of a second, records are kept only to the nearest 1/100th of a second because current building technology is such that it cannot be guaranteed that each pool lane is precisely the same length. (Omega)
58. When Celsius developed his now-familiar temperature scale, 0 degrees corresponded to the boiling point of water while 100 represented its freezing point; criticism from early adopters caused him to swap the values. (Five Equations that Changed the World)
59. The Burj Dubai skyscraper, under construction in the United Arab Emirates, is so tall that construction crews' walkie-talkie radios don't have sufficient range to communicate from the upper floors to the lower ones. (Gizmodo)
60. The athletes' village in Lake Placid, New York, site of the 1980 Winter Olympics, is now a correctional facility. (Slate)
61. Toyota Motor Corporation began its existence as a textiles firm. (BBC World Service World Business Report)
62. An international prize for the "Oddest Book Title of the Past Thirty Years" was presented to Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers, a title which was selected over such early favorites as Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice and How To Bombproof Your Horse. (Reuters)
63. Steve Jobs resigned from Apple in 1985 and returned to the company in 1997 on the same day -- September 16. (Wired)
64. By law in Israel during the Jewish day of atonement, Yom Kippur, there are no radio or television broadcasts, airports and businesses are closed, and there is no public transportation. In recent years, secular Israeli teenagers have ridden bicycles en masse through the empty streets during the holiday, causing Yom Kippur to become colloquially known as the "Festival of Bicycles". (Wikipedia)
65. New details revealed by the restoration of Leonardo DaVinci's The Last Supper suggest to some researchers that the supper in question depicts not lamb and bread but grilled eels garnished with orange slices, a popular dish at the time the painting was made. (The Food Section)
66. Engineering analyses have established that in baseball a head-first slide is more effective than a feet-first slide, owing to several factors including more efficient placement of one's center of gravity and additional energy generated by legs when entering the slide. (Live Science)
67. Since 2004, when the Federal prison system banned smoking, cans of mackerel have replaced packs of cigarettes as the de facto currency amongst prisoners. (Wall Street Journal)
68. At the time, Commander Byrd's flight over the South Pole, rather than the stock market crash, was judged by the New York Times to be the biggest news story of 1929. (Wall Street Journal)
69. During the baseball off-season, Cincinnati Reds manager Dusty Baker coaches his son's 10-and-under little league team in Roseville, California. (Associated Press)
70. Heavyweight boxing champion Vitali Kitschko recommends wrapping bruised hands in urine-soaked diapers to reduce swelling after a fight. (Deadspin)
71. The Bee Gees' "Stayin' Alive" provides an ideal rhythm to follow while administering CPR chest compressions to a heart attack victim, according to a recent medical study. (Reuters)
72. Sculptor Auguste Bartholdi received an 1879 design patent for the Statue of Liberty. (Patently-O)
73. The stick was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame in 2008, joining, amongst prior honorees, the cardboard box. (Associated Press)
74. On November 1, Microsoft stopped selling embedded licenses for its Windows 3.11 operating system, more than fifteen years after that version debuted. (Ars Technica)
75. Spam e-mailers get only one response per 12.5 million messages sent, but even that low rate is enough to make them profitable. (TechRadar.com)
76. A widely-distributed firefighting manual prepared by the Federal Emergency Management Agency contains a chapter on UFO preparedness. (io9)
77. The author of a 2004 New Yorker profile of then-Senate-hopeful Barack Obama chose not to include interviewees' comments that Obama could be president someday, as he judged such comments to be "absurdly premature". (Kottke.org)
78. In the audio version of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, narrator Jim Dale reads the book using 146 separate voices, a Guinness World Record. (The Seattle Times)
79. Anticipating that rising sea levels will swamp its nation, the government of the Maldives is seeking to buy a new homeland in Sri Lanka, India, or Australia. (Guardian)
80. James Bond is not English; his father was from Scotland and his mother was from Switzerland. (Wall Street Journal)
81. Famed journalist Nellie Bly invented and patented the metal barrel upon which the modern 55-gallon drum is modeled. (Wikipedia)
82. The Department of Veterans Affairs has authorized 36 different symbols for use on military headstones, including the Buddhist Wheel of Righteousness, the Mormon angel Moroni, an atomic symbol favored by atheists, and a Wiccan pentagram. (Wall Street Journal)
83. A person can endure thousands of lashes without being killed if those lashings are administered correctly. (Slate)
84. Musician Prince is now a celibate Jehovah's Witness. (USA Today)
85. In 2008, Elvis Presley, dead for 31 years, earned $8M more than Justin Timberlake and $12M more than Madonna. (Forbes via Seattle Trademark Lawyer)
86. The Wat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew Buddhist temple in Thailand was constructed using a million beer bottles. (Treehugger via Andrew Sullivan)
87. Einstein's well-known mass-energy equivalence theory, represented by the equation e=mc², has only recently been corroborated for the first time, by a team of French, German, and Hungarian physicists. (Agence France Presse)
88. The support cables for China's Siduhe Grand Bridge, which will be the world's tallest when completed, were strung using rockets. (Gizmodo)
89. Kevin Werbach, President-elect Obama's Federal Communications Commission transition chair, is a Level 70 Tauren Shaman in World of Warcraft. (Boing Boing)
90. In an early version of the "Star Wars" saga, Han Solo was married to a wookiee. (io9)
91. President Jimmy Carter installed solar panels at the White House; his successor, President Ronald Reagan, had them removed. (Slate)
92. The "Yorik" skull used by David Tennant in Royal Shakespeare Company performances of "Hamlet" is an actual skull. Under the terms of his will, pianist Andrew Tchaikowsky's skull was willed to the company for use in performances. (Outpost Gallifrey)
93. For sale only to restaurants and other food service operators, Kraft makes "Extra Heavy Mayonnaise" which has five times as many calories as reduced fat mayonnaise but which offers "superior binding and cling." (Tuesday Morning Quarterback)
94. There are 613 commandments, or mitzvahs, in Judaism. (Aish.com via Slate)
95. The film Memento was based on a true medical case. Henry Gustav Molaison had brain surgery to prevent seizures he'd suffered from since childhood; while successful in relieving the seizures, the surgery to his hippocampus left him unable to form new memories. (Minor Wisdom)
96. Amounts donated to the government are considered tax deductible contributions to a qualified charitable organization and are thus tax-deductible. (Tuesday Morning Quarterback)
97. Winston Churchill once wrote a work of alternate history in which the Confederacy won the Civil War. (io9)
98. Tenants in the Fuggerei area of Augsburg, Germany pay an annual rent of one Rhein Guilder, equivalent to approximately $1.23; in exchange for this low rent, which has not been raised since 1520, they agree to pray daily for the souls of a family of German bankers. (Wall Street Journal)
99. A leap second was added to the end of 2008 by the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service in order to synchronize the world's clocks with the Earth's slowing rotation on its axis. (Reuters)
100. The Air Force's public affairs office has a detailed assessment flow chart, akin to a "rules of engagement" analysis, to determine when and how to respond to blog posts concerning the USAF-related matters. (Global Nerdy)

I'll post a link to BBC News Magazine Monitor's list of things it learned in 2008 once that list is available. Here's to an educational 2009!

UPDATE: The Beeb's list of 100 things they didn't know last year has been posted.

West London Man Returns

Charon QC's always entertaining West London Man series returns today with an episode which spans the big pond. West London Man (23) finds George in desperate straits as he attempts to forestall a planned visit by his distant American cousin, with whom we're all familiar but with whom George is eager to deny any connection. Assisted quite ably by his wife, Caroline, and not-so-ably by an American lawyer friend, will George manage to safeguard his professional and social reputations or find himself an outcast from West London?

Abandon hope, all ye who podcast here

My love of Dante has been well-documented (see here, here, and here) and rewarded (see here, here, and here). For those of you who've yearned for a more scholarly treatment of the first canticle of Dante's Divine Comedy, Inferno, the most recent episode of Melvyn Bragg's BBC Radio 4 program, In Our Time, covers the topic and is available online.

5 Blogs & 5 Blawgers

Today is the anniversary of King's lesser-known "I have a meme" speech.

Well, actually it's not. It is, however, the day the Blawg Review Editor chose to honor the recently-passed Blog Day with a meme: "The idea is to post links to five great blogs (other than law blogs) on your blawg and tag five of your favorite blawgers to do the same under the post title '5 Blogs & 5 Blawgers'."

In the sidebar of the main page, I maintain a blogroll of fifty different sites which I highly recommend. Although the list of feeds I read regularly has grown to more than three hundred, I've always kept that list to just fifty. For a new site to be added to the list, someone already on it has to rest on their laurels, give up their blog, or otherwise fall from "Fifty Recommendations" grace. That's a pretty tall order, frankly. As result, there are a number of other sites always waiting in the wings. In response to the Editor's call, here are five of those -- five blogs which are consistently great reads but for one reason or another haven't yet made that list of fifty:

• The House Next Door -- Dozens of contributors provide a running commentary with a focus on popular culture.
• Iowahawk -- David Burge regularly offers the best political satire available anywhere, as this past week's Homeric tribute to Obama's convention performance ably demonstrates.
• The Inquisitr -- Former TechCrunch writer Duncan Riley has struck out on his own and the result is anything but a strikeout.
• Pajiba -- QuizLaw scribes Dustin Rowles and Seth Freilich (and others) maintain this site, which bills itself as "Scathing Reviews for Bitchy People". It has those, certainly, but also offers some of the more to-the-point, insightful, and reliable assessments of current movies and shows, together with a number of thought- and argument-provoking "best of" and "worst of" lists.
• U.S.S. Mariner -- This site is not just the best web coverage of the Seattle Mariners, but probably the best coverage of any baseball team in any medium. That the site's writers have managed to unfailingly provide such deep insight for what is inarguably the worst team in baseball this season makes their achievement that much more remarkable.

I'll tag Ann Althouse, Anne Reed, Justin Patten, Jordan Furlong, and Ron Coleman to continue the meme.

UPDATE: Jordan Furlong has posted his "5 Blogs & 5 Blawgers" list at his Law21 blog. I've already added a couple of new links from his list to my own reading list.

UPDATE II: Anne Reed has her list posted at her Deliberations blog. Welcome back, Anne!

West London Man... Home and Dry.

Charon QC has gathered together all of his brilliant "West London Man" posts/podcasts (thus far) on a single page at his Insitelaw Magazine site. Now that George and his family have found a comfortable home on the web, don't miss this opportunity to avail yourself of one of the best characters in British social satire (this side of Jeeves at least).

Worst Consumer in America

Over at the excellent Consumerist blog, after months of exciting bracket-tourney-style action, the blog's readership has finally awarded the "Lucky Golden Shit" award to the "Worst Company in America". In the final, my mortgage company, Countrywide, decisively defeated my cable and internet company, Comcast. Either certainly would have been a worthy "victor" in this match-up. Ultimately, it just confirms that when it comes to financial or consumer decisions, you should wait to see what I'm doing and then do the opposite.

Perhaps a nail salon instead?

My earlier speculation has thus far yielded no Starbucks. It seems somewhat less likely now.

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.

Scribbled on the Back of an Envelope Seven Years Ago Today

Some men wish for sons to achieve great things, to build great things, to discover great things, to teach great things. My daughter will accomplish all these and charm her father's heart as well.

Hey, I was a bit sleep deprived at the time.

Happy seventh birthday, Natalie; your daddy loves you very much.

Hoy, decidía aprender español.

I think that post title means "Today, I decided to learn Spanish." I'll find out later, I suppose.

Spanish is a very useful language to know these days, particularly so if one lives in California. Frankly, for any number of personal and professional reasons, I should've learned it some time ago. So, after all this time, what's finally tipped the balance?

In short, my ham-handed mousing.

It's somewhat disquieting to try to ship an urgent package when, for the second or third time in recent memory, I've inadvertently selected my location at the FedEx site as "U.S.A.-Español" rather than "U.S.A." To prevent this circumstance from hampering me in the future, I'll just learn a foreign language. That seems like the most sensible course of action.

All in all, I should be grateful that it's just Spanish. If the webmasters at FedEx had decided to put Hungarian or Urdu or something else at that spot in their menu, I would've had to do something drastic like switch overnight accounts.

Woo Who!

Doctor Who (shown on the Sci-Fi channel and BBC America) is the best show on television, bar none.

The guiding force behind the relaunched series has been Russell T Davies and there's been a considerable amount of angst amongst the show's considerable fan base concerning the future direction of the program when Davies leaves for new challenges. Fear not, it seems.

The Beeb has announced that Steven Moffat has been named to succeed Davies starting next season. Moffat wrote every episode of the wonderful Coupling romantic comedy series, which still shows on BBC America and hasn't aged badly at all. He wrote the immensely creepy and entertaining Jekyll miniseries which showed over here last year. A Doctor Who fan since childhood, Moffat has also written for the new series the award-winning episodes "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances", "The Girl in the Fireplace", and "Blink" (which remains one of the most frightening programs I've ever seen on Doctor Who or any other show). In addition to these regular episodes, he's penned one-off programs like the recent "Time Crash" (which linked-up David Tennant's current Tenth Doctor with Peter Davison's Fifth Doctor) and the 1999 Comic Relief parody of/homage to Doctor Who, "The Curse of the Fatal Death".

With Doctor Who in safe hands for the foreseeable future, I can now turn my attention to less important matters like world peace and global warming.

I'm Hot... You're Hot... He's Hot... She's Hot...

Considering the fact that normal human body temperature is approximately 98.6°F, why does a day when the ambient temperature is in the high nineties seem so hot? Is it just because it's somewhat unusual vis-a-vis the average daily temperature (in most places, anyhow)? I have no idea.

NOTICE: Duncan Riley Is the Source of the Following Information

At his new Inquisitr blog, Duncan Riley offers a very sensible guideline for something which has vexed many a new (and not-so-new) blogger -- when and how to give attribution to sources of information.