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 [ . . . ]

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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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