Archive for January, 2008

More NYC Stupidity

With no offense intended to all my NYC friends, of course. Some tosser with the NYPD has asked the City Coun­cil to give the police the power to autho­rize peo­ple in New York City to pos­sess envi­ron­men­tal test­ing devices, and pro­vide for crim­i­nal pros­e­cu­tion of per­sons pos­sess­ing such equip­ment with­out per­mis­sion. Air qual­ity meters, chem­i­cal snif­fers, Geiger coun­ters. It appears that the NYPD would even be licens­ing smoke detec­tors, radon test kits, and car­bon monox­ide mon­i­tors. And any­one merely pos­sess­ing these things with­out per­mis­sion could go to jail. The jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for this invid­i­ous tid­bit of leg­is­la­tion is the fear that unreg­u­lated [ . . . ]

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Untrammeled Whimsy

[E]ven more regret­table than the fail­ure to either fol­low or unequiv­o­cally over­rule the cited cases is the char­ac­ter of the “rule” which is now pro­mul­gated: the major­ity assert that hence­forth “a statute or other rule of law will be char­ac­ter­ized as sub­stan­tive or pro­ce­dural accord­ing to the nature of the prob­lem for which a char­ac­ter­i­za­tion must be made,” thus sug­gest­ing that the court will no longer be bound to con­sis­tent enforce­ment or uni­form appli­ca­tion of “a statue or other rule of law” but will instead apply one “rule” or another as the untram­meled whimsy of the major­ity may from time to [ . . . ]

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Snappy

I went to visit Tai­lor today. Excite­ment! I decided to get a suit made. And some shirts. I had fun. I spent a *lot* of money. I sat there thumb­ing through hun­dreds of dif­fer­ent cloths for suits and shirts. I chose a light­weight medium gray with a deli­cious tex­ture for the suit, and four solid col­ors for the shirts. I’m not ready to grad­u­ate to stripy-​​​​ness yet. Tai­lor is going to make the suit just how I want it. For one thing, it won’t have a breast pocket. Stu­pid, silly, point­less thing. So I got rid of it. Hooray! And I’ll finally get trousers that make me look as if I actu­ally have [ . . . ]

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There Will Be Blood

Spoil­ers, as always. My sis­ter and I went to see There Will Be Blood yes­ter­day. Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil!, on which the film is based, is lit­tle in evi­dence, thank­fully. I do not enjoy Sin­clair, because his nar­ra­tives expect the reader to sym­pa­thize with his Social­ist views. I am a mis­er­able fail­ure at sym­pa­thiz­ing with Social­ists. I was wor­ried that There Will Be Blood would be all anti-​​​​industrial in theme, and it mostly wasn’t. The first three acts are really quite good. Plain­view is com­pe­tent and knows it. He puts on a hard sell, but he doesn’t swin­dle peo­ple. He expects only what is com­ing [ . . . ]

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Over-​​the-​​Shoulder Boulder Holder

William Gluckin & Co. v. Int’l. Play­tex Corp., 407 F.2d 177 (2d Cir. 1969), is an opin­ion uphold­ing the issuance of a pre­lim­i­nary injunc­tion against Play­tex, man­u­fac­turer of, ahem, ladies’ sup­port gar­ments, pro­hibit­ing Play­tex from pros­e­cut­ing a law­suit it had filed against Wool­worth & Co. for sell­ing brassieres man­u­fac­tured by Gluckin at Woolworth’s stores in Geor­gia. See, what hap­pened was this: Play­tex had a patent, and Gluckin (allegedly) infringed the patent and sold the infring­ing unmen­tion­ables to Wool­worths, who sold lots of them in Geor­gia. Woolworth’s, Play­tex, and Gluckin were all New York cor­po­ra­tions amenable to suit in New York, but Gluckin was not [ . . . ]

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The Office of the President

The Pres­i­dent of the United States is not a man, but an office occu­pied by a man. And the office car­ries only those pow­ers enu­mer­ated in Arti­cle II of the Con­sti­tu­tion of the United States. §1 The Exec­u­tive Power shall be vested in a Pres­i­dent of the United States of Amer­ica. . . . §2 The Pres­i­dent shall be Com­man­der in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Mili­tia of the sev­eral States, when called into the actual Ser­vice of the United States; he may require the Opin­ion, in writ­ing, of the prin­ci­pal Offi­cer in each of the exec­u­tive [ . . . ]

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Oh, Alex IV

This one isn’t a faux pas. Atlas Shrugged was fea­tured as the ques­tion to the $200 answer in this evening’s “Lit­er­ary Titles” cat­e­gory (Jeop­ardy Round). It was the first answer of the game. I don’t think the Jeop­ardy! peo­ple like hav­ing clips from the show up on the YouTube, so I can’t post a video. The clue was cute. Alex gave a spo­ken clue (“1957 novel about a strong female exec­u­tive”) while a video clip ran. The clip depicted a mem­ber of the “Clue Crew” with a giant inflat­able globe on his shoul­ders, which he set down and “shrugged” in an exag­ger­ated fash­ion. The other clues in the cat­e­gory [ . . . ]

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