Peculinarities

McDonald's and Burger King have veggie burgers. Reeses has various odd (but enticing) limited editions. Oreos come inside-out. Soon, it will be Raining Frogs and Fishes.

Newsbits

Spanish pay music site Puretunes ("No Rules. No Limits.") markets itself as authorized but doesn't specify by whom. Not the major record labels apparently. The Los Angeles Times reports on a provision of Spanish copyright law—requiring "artists and record companies to be paid equal royalties when there is no agreement on how to divide the payments from the sale of their work"—that could enable Puretunes to deeply undercut competitors' pricing: "For the price of four songs at the iTunes Music Store, someone with a fast Internet connection could download more than 400 from Puretunes." ("Spanish Site Brings Pay Into Play;" more from c | net; Reuters)

c | net reports on the Future of Content conference last month at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. This year's theme: "Cooperation & Rivalry in the Digital Age: The Changing Dynamics of Content Creation & Distribution." ("How tech shapes entertainment's future")

Dave Winer is working and teasing.

Console your favorite Buffy fan, today may be tough: "'Buffy' saved television a lot." (Los Angeles Times, "RIP 'Buffy': You drove a stake through convention")

Congratulations Are In Order

To Marty Schwimmer, for the one year anniversary of the preeminent Trademark Blog.

To Frank Paynter, for the resumption of his dance-this-mess-around interview series, this time with Ryan Irelan.

To Doc (more, yet more, even more), Dave, Scoble and Professor Lessig for writing brilliantly lately about transparency, competition, and how coming to the party might just score you a tastier slice of cake.

To Chris Locke, for elucidating matters of HTML and haute cuisine.

To the ladybug who even now is gamely ascending the exterior face of my thirtieth-story window without the aid of oxygen or crampons. (Matthew Weathers has some lovely photos of the challenging terrain.)

Circuses And Bread

L.A. Times writer John Healey in an article profiling Grokster attorney Michael Page: "The key is to find analogies that help extend a well-established principle to new technologies."

Berkeley organizational behavior professor David I. Levine, in an L.A. Times article examining Sun's iWork program: "Humans were designed to communicate and be affectionate and break bread together. . . . It's going to take a long time to figure out how to break bread over the Internet."

(Weblogs: A Multigrained Solution)

Three Times In One Week!

(We late-thirties married types are proud out of all proportion whenever we can make such a claim.) The last of this week's blawgrollees mostly came my way from Blawg.org (which also mentions the ABA Litigation Section's RSS feed, via Robert Ambrogi, by way of Tom Mighell—neat! Are there more ABA feeds? Are they listed anywhere?):

• Concur In Part either is the joint effort of two law students who go by Reason and Jophiel, or one law student named Jophiel who intermittently is interrupted by the Voice of Reason. I haven't quite decided, but I have decided you should pay them/him a visit.


• Amy Campbell has a Weblog at Harvard, as well as a marketing business (Infoworks!), and in her spare time she helps law firms create award winning newsletters.


• If you've got to have a pseudonym, make it an entertaining one. Like Omnibus Bill, "just another Beltway lawyer," who writes Crimen Falsi and may or may not answer with a Dead Kennedys lyric should you greet him on the street.


• Fragrant Lotus practices law in New York City and remarks on the uncanny staying power of the Swatch.


• Janell Grenier is a benefits and ERISA lawyer in Pennsylvania, and as far as I know is the first to cut a bloggy swath through that particular legal briarpatch.


• Maize-N-Bluebook attends the University of Michigan Law School.


• And in case you thought only the judges were curmudgeonly, The Curmudgeonly Clerk seeks to dispel that misconception.

Finally, blawg news continues to hit my radar the old-fashioned way (links and email). I think I just flashed on the meaning of the title of Joe's blog, B2FXXX (that, or I'm hopelessly depraved), where he writes about law, the Internet and society, and the Baseball Crank emailed to confess he's a lawyer who from time to time will blog about things legal.

I'm off to Eureka, California—not to partake of the Hemp or other secondhand effects of Humboldt State's commencement festivities (though it probably couldn't hurt), but to wish my grandmother-in-law a very happy 80th birthday. Have a delightful weekend.