Hey, You, Get Offa My Lap

With so much national legal news today, I thought you might also be in the mood for a bit of local color. Here in Los Angeles, the city council is refusing to take lap dancing sitting down: "An ordinance that would prohibit lap dances at strip clubs was agreed to in concept Wednesday by the City Council but will be reviewed for further study by city staffers.[*]" ("L.A. Council approves lap dance ban in concept," AP; Reuters also reports that "the council embraced the measure in principle...")

*Bet they didn't have too much trouble scaring up a couple of volunteers.

Affirmative Action Upheld At The University Of Michigan Law School

So says NBC News, with the Supreme Court opinion on undergraduate admissions policies expected soon to follow. Howard Bashman's and the SCOTUSBlog will be good places to go for more as this continues to unfold.

Read Her

I am a little late to the party on this one, but will chime in anyway.

Halley ("Read Me"): "Weblogs work the way women work, they invite conversation and interaction in order to solve problems. They are not designed with women in mind, but they are all about cooperation, conversation and transparency. They are perfectly suited to a woman's view of business."

This is a compelling essay (and I'm a huge fan of all things Halley), but I can't go along with its generalizations on gender lines. My days are too filled with encounters that blow such stereotypes to out of the water. Like:

• men who were built for collaboration, women who can't stand it;


• moms who can and do run big businesses, happily married to dads who can and do run the home front; and


• couples who arrive at dynamic and mutually respectful divisions of domestic labor without judicial intervention of any kind

—to name just a few. Of course there remain enormous distances for women to cross in business and beyond. Of course the world is full of societies with values radically different from those I see every day. It is, however, a mistake to ignore how much Western corporate culture has changed and is changing still, and an even bigger mistake to make assumptions about a person's abilities, tendencies, likes, wants, needs or desires based on his or her gender. Reading a good cross section of weblogs is excellent proof of this concept.

Yeah, I know: "Just you wait 'til that baby is something more than a mere wardrobe inconvenience, and this might all begin to look a little different." But my take on this partly explains why I'm reluctant to find out if our kid-to-be is a boy or a girl. That, and I always liked Christmas gifts to be a surprise. =0

Blogging Softly

Microsoft Watch: "[I]t seems as if Microsoft corporate is beginning to take more of an active interest in how its employees are expressing their opinions in their Web logs. On Tuesday, as part of its ongoing series of discussions about Microsoft and community, the company is holding an internal panel to discuss employee Weblogging."

Robert Scoble has more: "From when I compared notes with Beth Goza afterward, it was similar to a panel session that happened a week ago at the Weblogger conference. No more or less sinister than that."

Speaking of more or less sinister panels from last week's conference, I'm assembling the feedback from my panel to Phil Wolff's questions and hope to post it this weekend. Sorry for the delay, but I still need to be writing and editing other things at the moment.

Livin' It Up

The firm's summer program is in full swing, and as we were going over one of her writing projects one of our summer associates just reminded me of this oldie but goodie. (Here's a techie twist on the classic.)