Dan Bern is a folky rocker (a rocky folker?) who's just not going to hit the big time, and has spent the last few years with Bush-bashing tunes instead of the charming goofy genre-bending lyrics he did with a Dylanesque voice in the mid-1990s. Songs are heavy with references to musical culture and 1970s sports heroes. One of my favorites is the bouncy "Tiger Woods," which has very little to do with the golfer:

If certain girls don't look at you
It means that they like you a lot
If other girls don't look at you
It just means they're ignoring you
How can you know, how can you know?
Which is which, who's doing what?
I guess that you can ask 'em
Which one are you baby?
Do you like me or are you ignoring me?
Do you like me or are you ignoring me?
Do you like me or are you ignoring me?

There's another verse from the song that I like almost as much, but isn't going to be repeated in a family blog. (Think of the children!) There's also the whimsical "Jerusalem," which has more abrupt plot swings than a Simpsons episode:

Everybody's waiting for the messiah
The Jews are waiting
The Christians are waiting
Also the Muslims
It's like everybody's waiting
They've been waiting a long time
I know how I hate to wait
Like even for a bus or something
An important phone call
So I can imagine
How darned impatient
Everybody must be getting

The Dan Bern site has sound clips and lyrics, but no MP3s.

Cafe Dalat is a hole-in-the-wall on Wilson Street in Clarendon, but, with the exception of some pho specialty shops, its Vietnamese food is perhaps the best available close to a Metro. Perhaps a little bland, and they don't include mint when they provide greens with the meal. Service is a little indifferent for my tastes. But what they do well, they do well: the skewered-meat dishes are pleasantly marinated and savory; the spring rolls are crunchy explosions of peppery flavor. Thumbs down on the seafood kabobs, however. The lunch buffet may be the best bargain in DC: $5.95 for a spread of two tables of their best dishes, one of the tables vegetarian. Hurry, because it's closing.

Confidential to W.: I'm guilty of spreading misinformation about the pronunciation of "pho", which I correct now.

Queen Bee, down the street, is famous in DC for being one of the first Vietnamese restaurants here, but, while it's a nicer environment than Dalat, one suspects it's seen better days. The food was unmemorable and bland.

Thai at Silver Spring. Pearl was staying with a friend in NE DC, so we tried finding food in Silver Spring; almost went to Crisfield's on Georgia Avenue, but wasn't happy with the parking and lighting situation there, so we went to the new pedestrian mall, and ended up at this Thai restaurant, because we were starving. It was either here, or wait twenty minutes for Macaroni Grill. And I don't think we made the right decision. I probably won't be back at this mall.

Southeast Asian snack-foods: Ruth introduced me to Koh-Kae peanuts, which come in a fried shell of coconut or coffee-flavor; I found an Indian variant that's masala-flavored. Very tasty, very unhealthy. Similarly unhealthy is another snack I discovered in an Indian market, chana jor garam, squashed chickpeas fried in spice and salt. Disturbingly addictive, given that it's about 150 calories an ounce. Just one more reason for me to avoid Indian markets; at least I avoided purchasing cashew chikli (ingredients: ground cashews and fried sugar). Still haven't found any place that has the similarly evil coconut berfi, which is just as well.

And... that's it. I haven't been dining at too many new places lately, mostly going to old standbys like Bombay Bistro and Sushi Taro.

So says Reuters. NPR appears to have been fooled, also. Hard to imagine how they raised $5 million; the starless poster looks like it could be from William Blair, the legendary Usenet spammer and star of "Agent Action!" Sadly, this site appears to be the only web legacy of the delusional actor/writer/producer/director.

Very funny.

Doubt is easy when it is not a matter of survival: We are as skeptical as we can afford to be, and it is easiest to be skeptical about things that do not fundamentally sustain us. It is easy to doubt the existence of a table. It is hell to doubt the legitimacy of one's love.

[...]

Lovers cannot remain philosophers for long; they should give way to the religious impulse, which is to believe and have faith, as opposed to the philosophic impulse, which is to doubt and inquire. They should prefer the risk of being wrong and in love than in doubt and without love.

I've long proselytized for Alain de Botton's 1993 "On Love," and I picked it up again this weekend to see if it held up as well for me this decade as it did last decade. I was prepared to be disappointed and to find it twee, especially since, as de Botton has moved from fiction to non-fiction and documentaries, I've felt some of his more recent work to be self-parodyingly pretentious. Indeed, the novel stumbled early, as I recognized a glaring mathematical error in the first chapter (though that would probably annoy me more than 99% of the book's other readers), and found the characterizations relatively thin and immature.

But I was still pleasantly surprised. De Botton gives a clever voice and taxonomy to numerous concepts, emotions, tactics in the romantic sphere. (E.g., romantic fatalism, romantic terrorism, romantic fascism, and, my favorite pun in the book, romantic Marxism.) The frisson of recognition runs throughout the book, and there's no better therapy than a witty articulation of universal feelings that one would otherwise think unique to oneself. And, very nicely, different sections spoke to me this time around than the last time I read it. I can see why many reviewers blasted the book as pretentious, but I like a novel that aspires to break out of the intellectual box in that regard.

The book was written in 1993, set in modern-day London, with an unnamed (and far from perfectly mature) narrator protagonist, but de Botton writes in a series of numbered paragraphs of pithy pensées, making wide-ranging references to and quotes from philosophy and literature and, to a lesser extent, popular culture. In other words, it's effectively in the style of a blog, before there ever was such a thing. (Quick, someone tell Jeremy Blachman.)

My friend Glenn and I like to tell the joke of the un-Oz-like prison where the prisoners harmoniously sit around the lunchroom and shout numbers at one another, followed by uproarious laughter. A guest is mystified: what's so funny? It is explained to him that there is only one jokebook in the prison library, and the prisoners have become so familiar with it that they resort to the shorthand of numbers (URLs?) to communicate humor. The guest is excited by the concept, and jumps onto a cafeteria table and shouts "74!" Dead silence; crickets chirp. "What happened? Why didn't they laugh?" The warden shrugs: "Must've been the way you told it."

One can imagine a universe of bloggers using the same concept. All they would have to post is 12:6! 3:22! And the readership (perhaps using software equipped with an automatic de-deBottonizer) would sit and nod knowingly. Ah, yes, 3:22, of course.

Spoiler-heavy Bookslut review. The New Republic's review is also spoiler-heavy, but makes a good observation:

One of the novel’s nervy jokes is how perfectly ordinary, how unexceptional, all this is. ... De Botton is well aware of this. And the narrator knows it, too. But that doesn’t keep him from making his textbook-case romance the center of his life, and the improbable springboard for his metaphysical triple flips. So each mini-step forward or setback in his love moves him to microscopic analysis or flights of heroic abstraction.

The man won't let Amber buy cheese.

A conversation I had with my brother where I tried to jog his encyclopediac memory about old movies to answer a question I had leads to this interesting post, which has too many spoilers for my taste.

Crescat identifies a blog perk, but when I registered for the screening, they wanted to hijack my blog to provide a predefined (and insipid) statement about the "Serenity" movie, show up at the theater an hour early, surrender my cell phone, and even then perhaps not get in. I'll pay the $6 and see it in an empty theater on October 2. And I just noted that Shepherd Book isn't in any of the previews.

This week's obscure band is The Magnetic Fields. "Reno Dakota":

You know you enthrall me
And yet you don't call me
It's making me blue.
(Pantone 292!)

Or, perhaps more appropriately, "Technical":

There are no papers on you  
The law doesn't cover what you do  
You and your think tank entourage  
Are all counterculture demigods  

[...]

You're a Libertarian  
The death of the Left was you  
You look like Herbert von Karajan  
You live underneath the zoo

Why do so many good musicians (Herbert von Karajan among them) have such bad political taste? Anyway, the Magnetic Fields had a one-hour concert on NPR last May. Not much free portable music on the Web, alas; Amazon has a cover of "If I Were A Rich Man" that's unrepresentative and largely unlistenable.

A few months before we moved to New Orleans in 1984, the eye of Category 3 Hurricane Alicia passed over our house in Houston en route to shutting down school for a week. Lost power and some tree branches, there was flooding nearby (though not our house, well above sea level).

My parents left New Orleans and moved back a block away from our old house a few years later, where they are today. They're riding out the storm rather than making a forty-hour drive out of town, and if the past is any indicator, they already had a three-week store of food in the pantry anyway. Rita's going to pass somewhat to the east, it looks like. On the other hand, it'll be a strong Category 3 or a weak 4, while Alicia was a weak 3. So I have something to worry about this weekend. Hope Mom and Dad, Dylan, and Amber's mom are ok. Underrated Houston blogger Tom Kirkendall doesn't seem to be evacuating, either.

Update: Tom is also blogging on the Chronicle's Stormwatchers blog (via Palmer).

The Complete Calvin and Hobbes will be out for Rosh Hashana, but it will be bowdlerized.

So I was closing windows on my office computer, and mentally calculating the hours I had spent today (2.5 hours reading up on HR 2990 for Tuesday's conference; 2 hours on Katrina litigation and talking to the press about it; etc...) when I had to remind myself for the forty-seventh time since I started my job that I don't have to fill out a timesheet of billable hours.

I'm looking forward to Tuesday's conference; debating First Amendment issues on a panel with Floyd Abrams, who I normally agree with, is perhaps as close as I'm ever going to get to a Supreme Court argument. Then again, there might be twice as many Supreme Court arguments out there under a Chief Justice Roberts as there was under the lazy lazy Rehnquist Court, so that market might open up beyond the dozen or so attorneys who dominate it now.

Time to remind folks of last January's commentary by Tyler Cowen and Daniel Drezner. The Weekly Standard did a similar critique of the Bradley awards.

Speaking of "Destry Rides Again," they do a Gentile version of the "chutzpah" joke of the fellow who murders his parents and begs the court for mercy because he's an orphan. 1939, people. And imagine my surprise when the phrase "No jury would convict you" pops up as a gag in the 1928 silent movie "Steamboat Bill, Jr."—I knew it was the first (one of the first?) instantiations of the gag where the falling building facade misses the hero by virtue of a window (done recently in "Arrested Development"), but who expected a catchphrase that would survive three quarters of a century later?

One of my last conversations with C., before we stopped speaking to one another (for different reasons—at least, I think they were different reasons):

"I got a thumbs-up to go forward on my book. Everyone thinks it's a great idea."
"Oh? What's your book going to be about?"
I told her.
"That subject makes you so mad. You're going to be walking around angry for a year."
"Not mad, passionate. It'll help me write."
"I think she should have won that case. That lady deserved every penny she got."
"Well, let's talk about something else."

Anyway, because I'm attuned to the subject, I've been noticing things I hadn't previously thought of. Such as how the idea of a grievous coffee burn is so much a part of the zeitgeist. Everything from Cary Grant in "Only Angels Have Wings" to Judge Reinhold stopping an armed robbery in "Fast Times At Ridgemont High." Even Jimmy Stewart in "Destry Rides Again": "I wouldn't want to have this coffee spilled in my lap, would I?" And especially Lee Marvin's use of coffee in the 1953 Fritz Lang film noir classic "The Big Heat."

Anyway, I'm going to pull a Volokh-like bleg here: this won't be a big part of the book, but if you know any other good scalding-coffee scenes in a pre-1992 movie or tv show (in other words, the "Seinfeld" satire with Kramer and Jackie Chiles doesn't count), please drop me an e-mail or a note in the comments.

(Will be partially cross-posted at Overlawyered once the server is back up.)

I once joked to a panel that I was well-suited to talk about obesity class action litigation because I was an obese class-action litigator.

In the last year, I stopped being a class-action litigator. In the next twelve months, I plan to stop being obese. An observant eye might even suggest a causal relationship.

With the twenty pounds I've (re-)lost in the last five weeks, I've lost forty pounds since January 2003. This puts me one-third of the way towards my ultimate goal of losing 120 pounds. Ideally, by committing to it publicly on the weblog, I am lashing myself to the mast and providing myself additional shaming incentives to deter me from failing. If I continue losing at a safe pace of two pounds a week, I can hit my goal by the Fourth of July 2006, but I'll settle for some slippage/plateauing and Labor Day. And ideally, the 2005 AEI photo will serve as a "before" for the 2006 AEI "after" photo.

One encouraging fact is that I'm not being perfect on my plan; I'm exercising less often than I planned, and eating more. So I have room for improvement. It's helpful to look at the plan in shades of grey, an improvement over the previous bad habit of a binary "success" or "failure." A friend is trying to talk me into the Governor Huckabee plan of Medifast, which might be quicker, but I'm going to see if calorie counting gets me there.

The downside is the wardrobe issues. My haberdasher visited me today, and tells me that I've lost five inches in the waist, and that all my suits now have "clown pants" and I need to buy all new clothes from him. Also that I look younger from the loss of jowls. (I do understand the incentive structure involved in his making these comments, and take them with a grain of salt.) I resisted; I'm going to work my way backwards through my 1992-1998 suits and clothes packed away in my closet, with maybe the occasional supplement to my wardrobe.

I'm not sure I can still afford a haberdasher, especially this one, who can sell ice to Eskimos, but I was able to avoid spending too much by virtue of not having that much in my checking account. I did buy some new shirts, since my current crop have ballooning fabric that can be grabbed in huge handfuls.

Today's obscure band is the Mountain Goats, though the band is slightly less obscure now that it's gotten ink in the New Yorker for its great new album, The Sunset Tree. Amazon has an interview and a legal free WMA of "This Year", which is mentioned in the Frere-Jones article. Lyrics for a friend stranded in a foreign city:

There will be feasting/
and dancing/
in Jerusalem next year/
I am going to make it/
through this year/
if it kills me

This legal free MP3 of "No Children" is from John Darnielle's divorce album, Tallahassee (via Glorious Noise).

"The sociological significance of it all" would be a good name for a blog. If it wasn't for that "fi" ligature issue.

This post is to invite my readers to tell me who they are in the comments thread. If you don’t want to use your name out of modesty or fear of guilt by association, that’s fine — tell me where you live, and a little something something about your circumstances. (Meme from Froomkin, and Volokh seems to have had the same idea at a coincidentally similar time.)

Update: in the comments, Will Baude claims that my readers don't have the courage to identify themselves. Prove him wrong!

While my close friends enjoy the breezy humor that frequently infuses my e-mails, people who don't regularly e-mail me don't immediately understand my propensity for ironic hyperbole. I got a frantic voice-mail today from a long-lost friend who was needlessly worried that I was deeply offended over an innocuous event of long ago.

Also, this whole post-exercise endorphin release is a good thing. Do this more often.

Also, more sugar-free Jello-brand gelatin, less Kozy Shack rice pudding.

I am tremendously entertained by the perfect casting choice of Mark Feuerstein in this movie. Adam Bonin, Chicago JD '97, husband of superstar author Jennifer Weiner, kvells, tongue in cheek:

In Her Shoes tells the story of Simon Stein (Mark Feuerstein), an intelligent, caring lawyer from the gritty streets of Philadelphia, and how his kindness, wit and animal-like erotic charge helped two sisters patch long-seated grievances. His empathetic demeanor and Semitic good looks form the anchor of this moving dramedy. When he is on the screen, you are transfixed; when he is not, you ask, Where's Simon? Is he okay? Is he having any emotional epiphanies without me?

Bonin and I used to waste a great deal of time arguing with tax protestors on the Usenet way back when, and he now has one of my favorite blogs. I missed the preview when DC Film Society had it, but I'm not going to miss the movie, which is getting good buzz, notwithstanding its chick-flickiness. Congrats to the couple.

My gym recently hung several decorative mobiles, each consisting of differently colored concentric circles. The sequence for the circles in each mobile, from inner circle going out, runs:

Red
Orange
Yellow
DARK BLUE
Light blue
Green

I cannot begin to tell you how distracting I find this, especially when I'm doing shoulder presses and can't help but look at it.

For obvious reasons, this will never be on a law-school exam, but it would be perfect if not for the subject matter.

Two Young Men In Jail After 82 Lap Dances

Two young men ...were arrested when they couldn't come up with almost $2,500 needed for their evening of entertainment.

"Whether or not they understood, they still have to pay up when an agreement is made," [said Albuquerque Police Spokesman Trish Hoffman.]

According to a Metropolitan Court criminal complaint, the two went to Fantasy World, 5000 Jefferson NE, and asked exotic dancers Orchid and Carmela for private dances in the "VIP room."

Each dance costs $30. During the young men's two-hour stay in the room, the manager periodically checked to see if they wanted to pay for some of the dances. Each time the young men told the manager "not to worry" because they had the money, according to the complaint. By the time they were done, they had racked up a bill of $2,460. [...]

When interviewed by police, the young men told officers they didn't realize that they were getting multiple dances. Since it was their first time in an exotic club, they said they didn't know that each new song started a new dance, police said.

Q. "Whether or not they understood, they still have to pay up when an agreement is made." Assume the defendants are telling the truth.

1. Is Ms. Hoffman's statement of the law correct?
2. Was an agreement made? What additional information, if any, do we need to determine the answer to #2?
3. Bonus criminal law question: have the defendants committed fraud?
4. Bonus tort law question: has the strip club committed consumer fraud?
5. Bonus business law question: How can the strip club avoid this problem in the future? Why might they not want to do so?
6. Bonus trial practice question: No longer assume that the defendants are telling the truth. Is their story credible? How would you approach their deposition?
7. Bonus law and economics question: Evaluate this scenario under the concept of economics information. No peeking at the answer to #7.

Isn't Katrina going to slow the deflation of the housing bubble (via Palmer)? Hundreds of thousands of homes and apartments have been removed from the housing stock, and construction resources are going to be diverted to the Gulf Coast, increasing the pricing of new housing. I also distrust an economist who uses the sort of graph that Gross does with his "X marks the spot" chart.

Craig Newmark and John Palmer analyze Gregg Easterbrook's claim that first-round draft choices who hold out cost themselves lots of money by putting themselves behind the curve in competing for spots on the team. Newmark gives a couple of possible explanations why Easterbrook might be wrong, the first of which I agree with; Palmer suggests why the players may not be acting rationally. (Newmark's second reason may apply to agents, but I don't think players have a sufficient number of opportunities to benefit from being a repeat player in the bargaining game.)

But Palmer's explanation—that the players are being big-headed because their retinue of yes-men punish anyone who tells the player "no"—doesn't explain why the teams may not be acting rationally. There's a large opportunity cost in making a first-round pick; one could have traded the pick for an established player. The importance of the pick is illustrated by the fact that the Minnesota Vikings were crippled for years when they traded three first-round picks to get the past-his-prime Herschel Walker from the Dallas Cowboys, while the Cowboys' picks ended up winning three Super Bowls in four years.

I think Easterbrook is wrong, and camp is not as important for players' careers as avoiding injury in camp is. If teams, knowing the importance of camp, low-ball a player, the player can either hold out, sign a low-ball deal, or go to camp without a deal and risk career-ending injury. The risk of career-ending injury is not small. The risk of career-ending poor camp performance is not terribly small, either. In such a circumstance, the players are going to hold out, and, with backwards induction, the team knows the player is going to hold out—so why lowball the player if doing so is so damaging to the team's capital investment in the draft pick?

What percentage of players who show up to camp early only sign one contract in their lives? What percentage never collect more than the signing bonus? I think these two numbers present a high enough percentage that players aren't hurting their careers that much by holding out, especially when agents collectively hold out every first-round pick, as has happened this year. There's anecdotal evidence on both sides, and it's worth empirical exploration.

The original looters post is on Point of Law, not here.

Seamus (née Satchel) Farrow is starting Yale Law School. Ok, he's a teenage prodigy, but still. The article goes into some detail about the child custody dispute but somehow forgets to mention that Farrow made phony child molestation allegations against Allen.

Which reminds me of one of my favorite Simpsons moments, where the family, visiting Japan, runs across Woody Allen filming a commercial:

Hello. So many rice crackers claim to be low-cal, but only Fujikawa Rice Crackers make your interiors go bananas!

[to self] What did I do to deserve this? ... Oh, right.

Related Vows column. Both have since left Wilmer.

Hilarious account of Sean Penn's unintentional self-parody of an attempt to rescue New Orleans victims. If it was in a South Park episode, you'd think they were being over the top.

Malkin; Loy.

I had an iconoclastic high-school history teacher, a Chilean named Diego Gonzalez-Grande, who discarded textbooks and taught four different, sophisticated, history classes, all from lectures and the occasional Douglas Richard Hofstadter book, each more intense than any liberal arts class I took in college. Gonzalez also coached the soccer team, and was perhaps the most successful swim-team coach who didn't swim: the team trained by practicing arm-strokes across the blacktop, since there was no swimming pool. He'd give simultaneous chess exhibitions during lunchtime (the building had no food service in the cafeteria, so students had autonomy for lunch, and only a few of the 18-year-old seniors bought a liquid lunch at the daquiri shop a couple of blocks away); that I beat him four times in three years felt like a significant accomplishment. Diego had no recollection of me when I returned to the school in the summer of 2001, but, still, I was concerned about him, single, living on a teacher's salary, doesn't drive. A popular t-shirt featured a student's rendition of Mount Rushmore with the faces of Diego and three other iconic teachers.

Ray, a class of '82er, has set up the Ben Franklin Alumni Katrina Blog, which I was thinking of doing if no one else did. Another '82 correspondent (apparently only a few blocks from my AEI office) reports "Diego apparently is in Chicago," so that's good news.

Since I graduated, Franklin relocated from its crumbling 19th-century courthouse in Uptown to a much larger Taj Mahal of a facility on the University of New Orleans campus. This blog reports that the nifty Scipionus site (which I haven't been able to get to work consistently with my browser) reports the new building is underwater, which doesn't surprise me, given its location a few blocks from Lake Ponchartrain on the east side of town. Wired story on Scipionus.

Update: You can see the water in the Google satellite photo. Leon C. Simon Boulevard is completely underwater. If I recall correctly, the ground floor of the high school's new building was beneath street level. The top floor may be alright, but damage to the lower floors may require razing. Most of the city's landmarks are in the older part of the city that was built above sea level, on the natural levee created by the Mississippi, and they've largely seemed to survive (hat tip: Cowen), so if the arsonists can be stopped, there will still be a (considerably smaller) New Orleans.

Alas, satellite photos had a cloud covering Riverbend, so no telling what the status of the courthouse is. It should be dry; it was above street-level, and street-level was above sea level.

There was a lot of complaining that the federal government didn't send buses until Saturday the 3rd. But the city of New Orleans has 365 buses that it could have used to evacuate 22,000 people in a single trip. And Mayor Nagin failed to issue the evacuation order until after Greyhound and the airlines had shut down. This post has more detail, though I disagree with his claim that two round-trips to Houston could have been made—traffic gridlock would barely have permitted a single trip.

The main problem is that New Orleans only has so many roads out of the city, and several of those led to other places that needed evacuation. The comparison to a WMD attack on a city isn't quite precise; a hurricane creates devastation over a much larger area, and New Orleans wasn't the only place that needed immediate assistance.

This WaPo story (via B. Newmark) buries the lede that the Army Corps of Engineers didn't tell anyone about the levee break for several hours. How many people could've been evacuated from New Orleans East and the Ninth Ward in that time?

As an earlier post of mine noted, New Orleans had surrendered to its criminal element long before the flooding, and this article has more on that subject.

Fellow Ben Franklin High alum Anya Kamenetz (blog) writes in the Village Voice (Aug. 31).

As residents of war zones and the Midwest probably know already, the national news is almost useless when you want to find out what's happening to your own city. To take just one example, both The New York Times and CNN at first showed multiple dramatic shots of tall palm trees downed on Canal Street, the downtown hotel strip south of the French Quarter. They obviously didn't realize that those were non-native, promotional trees, planted just a year or so ago. Meanwhile, the first detail that broke me down, out of all I've seen and read, was a casual note about oak trees felled on St. Charles. This wide avenue, the one the streetcar rolls down, is the jewel of the city, and the trees that shade it on both sides are spreading live oaks a hundred years old or more. I don't know how many have fallen, but each one is like losing a tooth.

Then she devolves into Bush-bashing, which I suppose is mandatory for the Voice. But you'd think she'd make the connection between the police letting looters run rampant at the Wal-Mart and the fact that looters then proceeded to attack Children's Hospital.

Must-read post documenting NY Times editorials in between 1993 and 2005 complaining that too much money was being spent on flood control and the US Army Corps of Engineers. Remember this when hindsight is being used to criticize Bush for budget cuts made in June 2005 that had absolutely no impact on the floods.

13 April 2005:

Anyone who cares about responsible budgeting and the health of America's rivers and wetlands should pay attention to a bill now before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. The bill would shovel $17 billion at the Army Corps of Engineers for flood control and other water-related projects -- this at a time when President Bush is asking for major cuts in Medicaid and other important domestic programs.

A friend writes:

All our friends evacuated in time, but our hearts are heavy as we watch the carnage from afar, and we know they will likely have nothing to return to — if their homes survived the hurricane, they will have succumbed to the looters. Not to mention all those sick and old people we see on TV who couldn’t leave at all.

Did I ever tell you how it was that we ended up leaving New Orleans last year? We got a much smaller taste of the lawlessness and corruption we’re witnessing on such a massive scale now — a man broke down our front door one evening while we were home, and as he was breaking in, we were on the phone with 911 and the dispatcher wouldn’t believe us. The guy kept trying to run into the house every time [my husband] pushed him back (he must have been high or something), so we had to exercise self-help, i.e. [Husband] beat the crap out of him — thank goodness he’s a big, burly ex-football player! Blood all over the foyer, splattered on the silk curtains... It was hideous. The guy was in really bad shape when [Husband] was finished with him. We keep thinking of that experience, how symptomatic it was of what we’re seeing now. Anyway, we are of course thrilled that we left, and we should probably be sending that guy flowers, because we’d probably still have been living there otherwise.

Elsewhere on the web, here's an annotated gallery of Uptown Monday and Tuesday, which looks like it can avoid being razed if it isn't burned to the ground by looters. And, in a small detail, the Ted's Frostop giant mug is no more. And good news: Oakwood was partially saved after all:

In Terrytown, the fire that threatened to destroy the Oakwood Shopping Center was brought under control Friday at 1:30 a.m. Firefighters who had abandoned the blaze Thursday afternoon returned that evening after water pressure increased and renewed hope that the structure could be saved, said chief Bryan Adams of the Terrytown 5th District Volunteer Fire Department. About 10 stores inside the sprawling shopping center were completely lost.

Adams said the fire appeared to have been set by looters. Firefighters entering the building were "bumping into looters."

On Friday, as firefighters boxed up a jewelry store's merchandise, Councilman Chris Roberts predicted it would be many months before Oakwood could reopen - a sharp blow for the local economy. He estimated that 500 to 700 jobs could be temporarily lost and said the closing would drain millions of dollars in sales tax revenues from the parish.

For Adams, who had broken into tears after calling his men back from the fire Thursday, it was a victory.

"My guys busted their tails," he said. "We decided we were not going to give up the shopping center to nobody."

David Frum helpfully compiles a list of links debunking the various accusations that Bush is somehow responsible for the destruction of New Orleans.

When I was in New Orleans, I lived on the West Bank and went to high school in Uptown. Both of which appear to have been spared from the flooding, but they probably won't survive the looters. Times-Picayune reports:

Looters set fire to Oakwood Shopping Center in Terrytown today.

The fire was reported at 12:56 p.m., and firefighters fought the blaze for more than an hour before giving up, said Bryan Adams of the Terrytown Volunteer Fire Department.

"There's just no water and the fire was out of hand,'' an emotional Adams said, adding that crews had to fight the blaze with one hose and water from a canal. "I've lived in this communitiy all my life --45 years. It's tough.''

Adams said the fire was intentionally set in multiple locations by people who apparently went in to loot the mall. Authorities found a ladder on the side of a building and a vent ripped off the roof allowed suspects to gain access, he said.

Oakwood was the location of my first first date, many many years ago, where I saw some bad movie with a ninth-grader Goth who rode on my schoolbus. (Come to think of it, I think we sat next to each other for something like four or five weeks, even holding hands occasionally, before her friend Gretchen got fed up with our mutual fear and passivity and made me ask her out—the first in a long series of incidents of my obliviousness to women liking me.) We walked around the outside of the mall, kissed by the wall of the Sears. We were in the food court, and she seemed troubled.

"What's bothering you?" I asked.

She paused, and said hesitantly, "J'aime tu."

I was surprised. "Actually, it's 'Je t'aime,'" was all I could say in response, the first of many acts of bad karma in my dating career. In retrospect, I'm surprised she waited three weeks to dump me. I hope she's okay.

Glenn Reynolds likes my piece on New Orleans looting. Eric Muller and commenters don't.

Tony recommends the AEI cookies at the Vioxx panel I'm hosting.

New Jersey lawyer "lawhawk" thought my Able Danger op-ed was "interesting"; prominent lefty blogger Pandagon thought it grounds for sarcasm and stereotype without addressing anything I actually wrote.