Getting Geek

Doc cracked me up recently by merely mentioning getting small, which as a kid I could spiel off from memory, air banjo and all.

Talk about a banner year for artistic endeavor: Let's Get Small came out in 1977, same as Star Wars. My latest guilty pleasure has been the podcast from TheForce.net, which is a great way to eavesdrop on how the dearly devoted are gearing up for the last ever new release of a Star Wars film. Can't wait until May 19? Neither could I. So I caved and bought the audio book. (Haven't listened yet, we'll see how long that lasts.) Apparently I'm not alone: the based-on-the-screenplay novel is No. 3 on the New York Times Bestseller list.

[Update]: I mean, we're talking about a watershed year bar none for creativity. I wonder if there have been studies. Also from 1977 (via a promo on the Daily Source Code): Don't Give Up On Us Baby.

Blawger Amici

Justene Adamec and Jeff Lewis advise:

Today, the Bear Flag League — a coalition of 80 bloggers who are current and former California residents — filed a friend of the court brief with the California Sixth District Court of Appeal in O’Grady v. Superior Court. [...]

The brief filed by the League today urges the Sixth District Court of Appeal to afford these website publishers and all bloggers the same privileges and protection from discovery that traditional print and broadcast journalists enjoy under the United States and California Constitution. Because these website publishers targeted by Apple are engaged in the same news gathering and reporting activities as print journalists, broadcast reporters and Internet bloggers, they have the right to protect their confidential sources and thereby maintain a strong, independent and free press. [...]

Queue These Up

• Malcolm Gladwell at SXSW Interactive: fascinating presentation about the highly untrustworthy nature of supposedly well-considered decision making processes.


• Rethink(IP) Aloud Three: dead on discussion about the benefits of tapping information from outside your normal stopping points and areas of expertise. (Note what kind of bloggers head up my blogroll — i.e., not the legal ones. That's no accident.)

A Rave Review Of Blawg Review

Wow! Ok, I get the whole "Carnival" thing now. These have never been on my regular reading list, but as of yesterday's inaugural installment, Blawg Review sure is. Evan Schaeffer did an amazing job of selecting and highlighting 31 posts from the world of law blogs. I see now that by having different volunteers do this every week, you wind up with a unique cross-section of material you might never have found or thought to look for yourself. (That is, if everyone includes links they selected themselves in addition those that were submitted; I hope they do.) My current mood meter is registering high in the "spread too darn thin" range at the moment, so I can't quite muster the initiative to volunteer to host a week yet. But I can see I'm going to enjoy and look forward to these posts immensely. Great organizational effort Evan, Kevin, and whoever you are. The blawgosphere needed this. Hopefully it will be a vehicle for introducing the long tail of law bloggers to a diverse and dispersed readership.

Though Evan's whole post deserves your rapt attention, my nugget of choice is (unsurprisingly) from his "not easily classifiable" category: Professor Shaun Martin on judicial linguistics. Can someone please explain how it can take four whole months for a weblog by a law professor writing on California appellate and Ninth Circuit decisions to come to the attention of a California appellate lawyer/blogger?? Steve Gillmor, take me away! (Here's Professor Martin's Atom feed, by the way.)

Carpal Kid Syndrome

Here's a bit of hard won advice for new parents I fervently wish someone had given me 16 1/2 months ago: don't carry your child on the same side of your body all the time, switch it up. I feel like a complete nimrod because they're always drilling these kinds of balance notions into us in yoga, and I own perfectly good implements for taking some of the little guy's weight off my arm, shoulder, and neck. But between the sleep deprivation, the natural feel of the left side grip, and the fact that freeing up my right hand is the most multitasking–friendly way to go, I habitually tote him around with the same arm. The result is what I can only self-diagnose as a pretty wretched repetitive stress injury. This doesn't start to manifest itself until your bundle of joy is more like a bushel — too big for other carriers and too heavy for your joints to bear all the time without complaint. By that time, month after month of damage has had its way with you.

So switch sides frequently, or just bear in mind there's a lot they can do down there on the floor, too.