Turtles all the way down

The ability to connect with the audience may be more important than what the actors ostensibly are contending to do (govern / wrestle)

Looks matter.

Assassinating your opponent’s character is apparently a necessary part of the process.

Taking an extreme or stereotypical position is used to garner support.

It’s ok to take cheap shots or hit your opponent when they are down. In fact you’re expected to.

Some audience members buy the illusion of what the actor is saying. Others just laugh.

Waving the American flag is always good for cheap applause.

Some actors keep going at it when they should retire.

Rapid fans support their favorites without question.

The industry is a thinly veiled “work” of the audience (admitting to the audience that they are trying to change the tone of the campaign, then changing the tone of the campaign and pretending it was done for some other reason / admitting to the audience that the outcomes are pre-determined, then pretending that they are not).

I’m sick and tired of both.

Last night I was discussing school and learning with my seven year old. He indicated that he didn’t like learning things, which seemed to be contradiction of his general curiosity and enjoyment of school. I told him that learning things in school was important, but learning was an activity that occurs everywhere. You learn when you play a game, you learn when you read, you learn when you take a trip and you learn when you fix something that is broken.

I finished my little lecture saying, “What you learn inside of school important as what you learn outside is what really counts.”

His response: “You mean at recess?”

In his down-home, folksy way, Joe appreciates straight talk, simple messages, and distrusts big government. Joe is in favor of lowering taxes. After all, Joe says, government should be more efficient and do more with less just like the middle class. Joe is right.

However, Joe also needs to pay attention to how much taxes are being lowered, who is benefiting the most from the cuts, and what Joe might lose (i.e., some health care coverage) if the cuts go through.

Tax cuts always sound like a good idea. But the devil is in the details and Joe needs to acquaint himself with those details.

It was only a matter of time before this had to happen.

Now that the dominate music distribution channel is the Internet, the marginal costs of said distribution are negligible. It no longer makes economic sense to bundle together 8-12 songs for release. Each song can now be released as it is recorded.

For an artist like Weird Al, whose impact tends to be based on individual songs rather than albums, this makes consummate sense. I can see this trend growing for musicians who make hits.

The album as a whole is on the decline. The album first took a hit when better-sounding (ducks) CDs can out with only very limited room for covers and liner notes. Then came along MP3s – pure music, no packaging needed.

I still find the 40 to 50 minute duration of an “album” to be my natural attention span for listening to pieces of related music. Much less than that and there is too music overhead in selecting and cueing up the music. Much more than that my attention wanders. Perhaps this is just conditioning from my growing up with records and CDs.

Nonetheless, I see more than just pop artists releasing one song at a time. Already, classical musicians are doing the same. There is a lot of overhead in the composing, performing and recording of a classical piece. The composer shouldn’t have to wait months or years to bundle this material with other recordings.

However, jazz traditionally operates at the time scale or a “set” which is 30-60 minutes or so. These sets make for nice album-length recordings.

But with the Internet as the distribution mechanism, there are no rules.

In ten days my appellate brief is due. In eleven days a first draft of my law review article is due. I’m not entirely sure why these two major deadline are 24 hours apart. My imagination runs wild at the thought of the faculty getting together, rubbing their hands together to the sound of wicked laughter as they schedule milestones for various classes to be in lockstep.

The brief is looking ok. Currently it is at 22 or so pages with most of the argument worked out. However, it is in a very rough form, needs some additional research, and is going to require a lot of copyediting in order to become even close to persuasive.

My topic is a first amendment case. For the last three weeks I’ve been buried in government speech and public forum doctrines.

For the former, the Supreme Court has never clearly defined the term, yet has applied it on several occasions. The basic idea is that the government can say pretty much whatever it wants to, short of establishing religion or preferring one religion over another.

For example, if the government says that smoking is bad or that exercise is good, the government doesn’t have also represent the opposing viewpoints of the tobacco companies or the Couch Potato Lobby.

It is possible to read the Supreme Court’s discussion of government speech as dicta, and even the Federal Appellate courts have been quite open in their confusion over exactly where to draw the line between government speech and private speech.

In my case, this is a big problem because the government is attempting to adopt the private speech of a third party as its own. The government can do so and still argue that the result is government speech. But the water is muddied when a reasonable observer might be unable to determine whether the speech is private or public. If the speech is private, then the government may have to provide an opportunity for opposing parties to speech as well.

A possible exception is if the government has clearly established reasonable and viewpoint-neutral criteria for speech in the given forum.

I told you it was complicated.

That magic change of months from September to October, or maybe the magic change from Summer to Fall, or the magic change of temperature in Chicago from the 70’s to the 50’s…

Whatever the cause, both the person in front of me and the person in back of me were coughing up a lung on the train this morning.

Of all days to forget to take my vitamins.

Zemanta gets my vote for the coolest new software application of the month. They have a Firefox plugin that integrates with Wordpress and goes out and finds contextual pictures and links for blog posts. I’ve been using it heavily on AMN and am loving the result.

I have no idea how they make money, but I hope they do.

Nice job guys.

Well, it was the weekend, but other than the fact that the days were called Saturday and Sunday, they didn’t seem too different from the rest of the week.

I spent just about all of my time working on my appellate brief and unraveling the legal knot of government speech and forum analysis with respect to the first amendment. I managed to write a reasonable draft of everything in my brief sans the argument (which of course, is the meat). However, I’m feeling pretty good about my progress, and I get to meet with my professor tonight to discuss the fine details.

Saturday my younger son had a soccer game. I can’t say that he’s that into the competitive nature of these types of sports. Also, it was rather hot and uncomfortable, which led to the game being shorted anyhow. After working on said brief most of the afternoon, I hit the gym, then returned home for dinner and family time (board games).

Sunday I did most of my reading for today’s and tomorrow’s classes and further refined the brief. I found a few good law review articles that are helping me form my argument.

We did cosmic bowling around noon, which was a blast despite my lackluster performance. The kids can now more or less bowl on their own, which is nice. After bowling we hung around for some overpriced and underwhelming video games.

Returning home, we found that one of the cement slabs on our driveway had sunk about an inch, making it difficult to get the van into the garage. I suspect this was cause by a combination of wear and tear, chipmunks mining under it, and recent heavy rains. Now we need to figure out whether it is worth it to try to get it fixed or to replace the entire driveway.

I worked the rest of the afternoon, skipped the gym for the Wii Fit, wrote up my law review research plan, and then we did the usual dinner and bedtime ritual with me getting a little more reading in.

Basically, I got done everything I wanted to get done and didn’t entire blow off the family in the process. I’m hoping we can hold it together over the next three weeks while I finish the brief and then switch over to my law review article, which will be slightly less pressurized.

Boo!

Deep-seated political differences aren’t simply moral and intellectual: They’re also biological.

In reflex tests of 46 political partisans, psychologists found that conservatives were more likely than liberals to be shocked by sudden threats.

Accompanying the physiological differences were deep differences on hot-button political issues: military expansion, the Iraq war, gun control, capital punishment, the Patriot act, warrantless searches, foreign aid, abortion rights, gay marriage, premarital sex and pornography.

Except that it’s hard to convince the conservatives that don’t believe in biology that this is true.

I bought some clothes through jockey.com. The transaction was smooth, convenient and the clothes were fine. But they kept sending me emails a couple of times per week with ads and info on specials and sales.

I clicked on the link at the bottom of the email to opt out of getting more email like that. I kept getting email from jockey.com. I tried several more times. Still more email.

So today, I put their entire domain in my spam filter blacklist. I’ll never see another email from jockey.com. This will make doing business with them very inconvenient, so it is unlikely that I’ll be buying anything from them again.

I’m sure you can figure out the moral to this story.