It may surprise some of you to learn that I am anti-corporation (at least somewhat, although I keep the healthily normal level of hypocrisy one must have to be an American by remaining an ardent fan of Coke, despite the awful things they have done.) I am also a borderline Socialist, who believes that the State can be the most effective guarantor of basic needs for people. Unfortunately, I am also a fan of HDtv and high speed internet. Just to warn you, this is going to be long, and probably far more than you ever wanted to know about local cable tv.

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I'm on a diet, so I can't plan on eating traditional Super Bowl food this weekend. I'll be eating a bowl of lawn. But I can dream. And when I dream, I'll dream of this. Mmmm . . . bacon.

Spotted at GamingTrend.

Edit: Almost is good is seeing the vegetarians show up in the comments to the post.

My thoughts, that is.  Orwell was a brave man, equipped to to speak the truth with eloquence, which is rarer than profound.

First, the best television commercial of all time ran on Super Bowl sunday, and it ran only once:

Commercials are often entertaining, but almost never rise to great art.  This one did.  It was directed by Ridley Scott, just after he completed Blade Runner.

Second, for years I have been driving by a small summer camp for children somewhere in the vicinity of Charlotte North Carolina.  I did it again today.  Its name has always bothered me, but the memory banks never quite engaged.  This morning, they did.  The place is named "Joycamp."

I wonder how much business that name has cost them.  Probably not much.

Politics makes strange bedfellows. So, too, in Israel, where the newly formed Moral Choice party, looking to pry some attention away from military and security issues to domestic issues, is made up of Holocaust survivors and their advocates, plus advocates of marijuana legalization.

The party is calling for improved social conditions for thousands of Holocaust survivors and for the legalisation of cannabis.

I eagerly anticipate arguments regarding how those are related.

And so it begins.

As expected, the authorities are not taking this seriously enough:

This crime is a class C misdemeanor in Texas, and [Texas government drone Sara] Hartley said it endangers the public.

"The big problem is public safety," said Hartley.

Yeah, the walking dead are a danger to public safety, Ms. Hartley.  They want to eat us, and make us like them.

We'll see how much your threat of a Class C misdemeanor prosecution deters them.

To celebrate the upcoming reboot of the Star Trek movie franchise, soon you will be able to purchase a perfume to make you smell like a doomed bit player. Or a cyclically oversexed alien. Or a rule-defying, personality-disordered ship's captain.

No, really.

GenkiWear, LLC is developing a trio of fragrances celebrating classic Star Trek. "Tiberius," "Pon Farr" and "Red Shirt" fragrances will be available in stores in the spring.

Excellent. But I think GenkiWear, LLC needs to broaden its horizons to other popular science fiction and fantasy franchises. I can see the ad campaigns now: "Who wants to smell like a Wookie?" "Legolas, for Him. Um . . . sort of." "Promise her anything, but give her Ewok."

Frenchman Jean-Paul Nerriere is promoting a new worldwide common language.  But where past attempts at a linqua franca for business and simple communications, such as Esperanto and Interlingua, failed or never made it beyond hobbyists, Globish may succeed.  In fact, it may not be new to you: It's simplified English.

In a meeting with colleagues from around the world, including an Englishman, a Korean and a Brazilian, he noticed that he and the other non-native English speakers were communicating in a form of English that was completely comprehensible to them, but which left the Englishman nonplussed.

He, Jean-Paul Nerriere, could talk to the Korean and the Brazilian in this neo-language, and they could understand each other perfectly.

But the Englishman was left out because his language was too subtle, too full of meaning that could not be grasped by the others.

In other words, Monsieur Nerriere concluded, a new form of English is developing around the world, used by people for whom it is their second language.

According to Narriere, Globish is just a rules-based system for speaking a form of English that is already spoken the world over.

Globish has only 1,500 words and users must avoid humour, metaphor, abbreviation and anything else that can cause cross-cultural confusion.

They must speak slowly and in short sentences. Funnily enough, he holds up the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat as an excellent exponent.

In fact, Globish sounds, in some ways, like a perfect means for communicating over the internet.  Certainly it would be useful to me.  On more occasions than I can count, I have had difficulty communicating with readers who do not understand humor, metaphor, or, most commonly, irony and sarcasm (at least as I practice them).   Oddly, my difficulties in this regard are most noticeable when communicating with fellow native English speakers.  Globish would cut through the knot of sarcasm and irony, by requiring us to avoid them, even, with its tiny, regularized vocabulary, preventing us from using them.

On the other hand, perhaps Globish will never be necessary.  Litigation, hate and harassing speech laws, nannystatism, government bullying, and political correctness will get us the Globish we deserve soon enough.

Via Patrick Joubert Conlon and the Pagan Temple.

Most of today will be spent in training regarding the firm's new document management system. When it was just my partner and I and no secretary, we could just save everything to the server, in the right folder if we were lucky. But three and a half years later, with thirteen lawyers and four staff, document management has become chaotic, and we finally broke down and invested in a system that organizes it all. I expect that it will be a tremendous asset and time-saver in the long run, especially with the much easier management of emails and dramatically enhanced search capability. But for now, it's a pain in the ass.

More so for me. Never mind that my computer prowess peaked with the Apple IIe. As the partner who is both an identifiable geek and usually here, I am the de facto tech guru of the firm, a role for which I am woefully unprepared. My willingness to learn how to unplug the DSL modem for 30 seconds, and my tendency to Google things rather than expect meandering My-Dinner-With-Andre-style dialogues to spontaneously produce technical answers, are my only qualifications. So I'll be spending an extra five or six hours in training to learn how to hold other people's hands, technically speaking.

Not that I am bitter.

I am not a good boss at all. I am certain of it. I have a pathological need to be liked, and I often give vague and unclear instructions to things I want done. Still, my assistant has performed admirably. No doubt looking at me & my perpetual state of panicked befuddlement and smiling. We are both acutely aware that her job is not a life-long endeavour, and does not involve anything she is really interested in.

Alas, that might have started to creep into her work. I gave her a rather large project determining how many members we had at each of the large firms in our county. I have to say, the results were disappointing. I have now double checked over half of them and see where corners were cut, obvious mistakes made, etc.

Here's the problem, how do I (who has been known to do some pretty shoddy work from time to time) have any have any basis to criticize her work? Heck, I remember my days of clock watching and just trying to get through the day as quickly as possible. I think that describes Yesterday, actually.

My feeling is I'm just going to give them back to her redlined, and ask her to take another pass. I still feel relatively uncomfortable with the whole boss thing.

I had intended to return to the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008, a law I find to be of interest as illustrating the perils of hasty legislation in response to media-generated threats, a little later, but as today is CPSIA blogging day, I'll get to it now.

Short version: This is a law that may wreck thousands of small businesses over a scare in which no one was hurt.  Long version, and how I determine that no one was hurt, follows:

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Previously I praised Miss Manners for endorsing the use of the cut direct with jackasses who ask rude questions about adoptive families. Such rude questions are a well-established pet peeve of mine. So via TJIC (who has a rather different take on it than I do), I was pleased to see her make another attempt to reassure adoptive parents that they need not be doormats, and perhaps even educate a few socially stunted twits.

The letter writer identifies the problem with coy or ambiguous responses designed to deflect the questions:

I've tried asking with the slightest of remonstrance "Excuse me?" but, of course, that just led them to believe that I couldn't hear what was being asked, and the question was repeated even more loudly.

Miss Manners offers admirable advice, which amounts (in pleasant Miss Manners speak) to responding to rude questions with "Why, it's because fuck off!"

Nosy people have already proven themselves to be rude, so you should hardly expect them to make tactful remarks. The important thing is to cut them off at the first question. The only explanation necessary is, "That's personal."

Miss Manners also aptly reminds us that assuming a general approach of civility and decency does not mean we must license all of the crapweasels of the world to walk all over us:

But you must also teach your daughters not to fall for two common arguments: that curiosity is natural and that people who don't disclose personal information must be ashamed of it. Dignified people value their privacy, and being curious is no excuse for demanding that it be satisfied. Under such pressure, they should merely smile and repeat "That's personal" as often as necessary.

Brava.

Via How Appealing, I see that the Second Circuit ruled that New York's law banning possession of nunchuks (or, if you are a colossal nerd, "nunchaku") does not violate the Second or Fourteenth Amendments.

The court made short work of the appellant's argument that the law lacks a rational basis, probably thinking correctly that people seeking to carry nunchuks recreationally should be encouraged to return to the basement and level their Night Elf hunter some more instead. What's slightly more interesting is the court's treatment of the Second Amendment argument. Rather than indulge in the fascinating question of whether the term "arms" extends to weaponry other than firearms, the court simply held that the Second Amendment has not been incorporated — that is to say, it is a right that binds only the federal government, not the state. As the court correctly concedes, the Supreme Court in Heller declined to decide whether Second Amendment rights bind the states, as that question was not before it. Some commentators have suggested that Heller signals that SCOTUS will, in fact, find that the Second Amendment is incorporated through the Fourteenth. This case now squarely presents that question.

I'm not sure if any other cases are in line to present that issue to SCOTUS. It would be highly amusing if the question were presented by a guy with some nunchucks.

We had a legal ethics CLE program the other day, and the speaker had a couple of good quotes.

"Sex to lawyers is freedom of association. We have a Constitutional right!"

and on the problems of workplace romances:

"I define the romance part of office romances as the period between the first kiss and the lawsuit."

I enjoy the fact that a major chunk of an ethics workshop was suggesting attorneys not have sex with their clients. I also enjoy the fact that we received a comment on an evaluation after the session wondering why the speaker "kept harping on ethics." Yeah, why did he keep bringing up ethics in an ethics workshop?

Come to think of it, I should start a feature where I post some of the more random comments we get.

Someone just used the "report" feature on this, my blog, to report me for using a bad word in a comment.

I am woefully behind the times, and anytime I post a "you have to see this!" post it is something that was passe in the Carter administration, but in this case I don't care. There is a Wrath of Khan opera, and I need to shout it's existence to the mountain tops!

The fine folks at Robot Chicken have outdone themselves this time. Somehow capturing the feel of both Star Trek II and an opera. Ken would be better suited to discuss the form, and it's possible deconstruction but even a plebe like me recognized the classic death aria. I also enjoyed the Ring Cycle shout out of having Kirk & Khan carried on their "shields."

I have to admit, there was a part of me hoping that Shatner would somehow be involved with this, or at least hearing a classically trained tenor bust out a Shatner impersonation. No such luck, alas.

I have now watched this twice on TV and twice more on this link. I think you owe it to yourself to watch Le Wrath de Khan. Bravissimo!