I think one reason I got a Mac for home was so there would be a lag so I wouldn't immediately be tempted to buy things like this (via Dylan).

The Meryl Streep/Uma Thurman comedy Prime seems to be based on an unrealistic plot twist. What self-respecting 37-year-old would date a 23-year-old, or vice versa?

Two curious and related quotes from a New York Times article on the new popularity of watching tv series via DVD:

"My DVR is my new girlfriend," Mr. [Dave] Kass said. "And she does whatever I tell her to do."

Probably no relation to Leon. And, later in the story:

"There's something exciting - and probably tremendously sad - about finishing one episode of "Lost" and knowing you've got another one all ready to fire up," [journalist Alan Cohen] wrote in an e-mail message. "No more of this waiting-a-week-to-find-out hassle. It's like finding a cache of Playboys as a kid. One Playboy was cool, but it was so much better knowing you've got all these other Playboys on deck, ready to go."

Friend, the act isn't so much sad as the simile is.

Like most New York Times trend stories, this one reads like someone trolled her Friendster list for quotes.

The obscure band of the week is the late-80s/early-90s Canadian group The Pursuit of Happiness, which not only had a great name, but a Jewish lead singer/songwriter named Moe. They never came close to hitting it big in the States, with "I'm An Adult Now" the closest they got to even being a one-hit wonder. ("I don't write songs about girls anymore/ I have to write songs about women.") "The Downward Road" is perhaps their best album, ranging from the sexy "Cigarette Dangles":

Move your hair off your face so I can find your lips
Want to taste pepper on your mouth and on your fingertips
I hear the cats scratching at the door
You say, "I'll feed them later,
Get back on the floor"

To the more humorous and typical "A Villa in Portugal":

She was going to a movie, a friend was gonna pick her up
She didn't say she was going all the way to the Iberian Peninsula

None of their stuff seems to be in print, and they don't have much of a web presence, but Amazon has used CDs. Blogcritics did an interview with Moe Berg that plays some songs. This fan site has an impressive set of MP3s of concert performances that I haven't tested.

This really looks like it's going to be the funniest Albert Brooks movie in at least fifteen years.

The Chicago Tribune's take on Houston.

"Double-Tongued Word Wrester records undocumented or under-documented words from the fringes of English. It focuses upon slang, jargon, and other niche categories which include new, foreign, hybrid, archaic, obsolete, and rare words. Special attention is paid to the lending and borrowing of words between the various Englishes and other languages, even where a word is not a fully naturalized citizen in its new language."

I became an Astros fan when my family became a part-holder of a season ticket on the third-base line in 1979. That year, the Astros had a lead of over ten games at the All-Star break, and sunk like a lead balloon. So they signed Nolan Ryan to a record-breaking contract, and behind his arm, Joe Niekro's, Vern Ruhle's, Joe Sambito's, and the last couple of months of J.R. Richards's, the Astros took a three-game lead with three left to play against the second-place team, the Dodgers—and promptly lost all three (in part because of a teenage rookie named Valenzuela performing brilliantly in a September callup), before winning the division with the 163rd game. That pennant race was quickly forgotten because the Astros then blew a 2-game-to-1 lead in the best-of-five against the Phillies, losing two straight games in extra innings despite late-inning multiple-run leads in both, and the Phillies went on to become one of the most mediocre teams that ever won the World Series.

People forget 1981, but that strike year, with the only eight-team playoff until the 1990s, the Astros became the first team to blow a 2-game-to-0 lead, and lost to the eventual World Series champion LA Dodgers.

Of course, there was 1986, where the Astros lost a dramatic sixteen-inning battle in Game 6 to the Mets, who went on to win the World Series. Game 6 was painful by itself, but the Astros blew two other late-inning leads that NLCS, and really did have Game 7 in the bag with Mike Scott ready to go to shut down the Mets a third time.

In the 1990s, the Astros made the playoffs a passel of times, but regularly went down in the wildcard round against the Braves or the Padres. They finally won a playoff series against the Braves in 2004, and then lost to the Cardinals after blowing a 3-game-to-2 lead.

So I should be thrilled about 2005. And I really liked the drama of that 18-inning Game 4 NLDS, which was nice poetic justice for the 1986 disaster. And it was cool that the team was in good spirits to what seemed like a repeat of the 1986 ALCS, when Dave Henderson hit that home run off of Donnie Moore, and the Angels lost a chance to win the series against the Red Sox 4 games to 1. That Pujols home run was a monster (and Pujols is an Astros name—it's still hard for me to think of Albert instead of the inferior Luis) that by all rights should have provided the storyline for a dramatic Cardinals come-from-behind in seven games, but Oswalt was Oswalt, and shut them down in Game 6, and the Astros are in their first World Series tonight.

But it somehow seems sullied by the fact that the Astros didn't win their division, and thus don't deserve to be here. I can't get up that much enthusiasm for this team or this World Series. I was pleased to see John Thorn articulate my feelings on the subject, though the op-ed looks like the op-ed editor made some sloppy cuts. I'm going to miss Game 1 tonight to go to a friend's party; will probably miss Game 3 for social reasons; and have dinner plans for the night that Game 7 is currently scheduled. And I don't feel a lot of, if any, regret. I was at one major-league and one minor-league baseball game this year; I've seen the Astros once in the last five years, and it was when their stadium was still called Enron Field. I like Enron Field Creditors' Committee Stadium Minute Maid Park much more than I liked the Astrodome, where I grew up with its particularly perverted brand of cavernous turf baseball (one which RFK seems to wish to emulate, but with worse food), but I don't feel any real passion for that team in the strange brick-red or pinstripe jerseys. Where are the rainbow stripes? I'll even settle for the muted dark-blue-cap shoulder-stripe version.

Perhaps all the sports pages are repeating this, but just because I know it off the top of my head: Frank Thomas and Jeff Bagwell were born on the same day, both won the 1994 MVPs with OPSs unprecedented in the modern era until Barry Bonds' cream and clear years, and are both in their first World Series—and neither can play the field (and Thomas can't play at all) because of injuries. If they were starting, that might've tipped it for me to watch.

Tom Kirkendall is blogging intelligently on the subject, and is still a fan. Baseball Prospectus's Dave Haller explores the history of the Killer B's, and why Bagwell's contract pretty much dooms the team in 2006.

The epitome of Apple advertising (naughty language) (via Slate).

Game-show champion Matt asks for advice on how to deal with especially rude moviegoers.

93-year-old driver doesn't notice pedestrian in his windshield (via Obscure Store).

Two bloggers come to the defense of a post I wrote on Point of Law after a Legal Underground response provokes a comment that my original post was "repulsive". "Unfair" and "nonsense" work their way in there, too, though so does "very skilled writer" and "extremely capable writing style," though the latter two, I think, are deployed to engender sympathy for Evan rather than praise for his adversary.

An interesting debate on social roles for professionally educated men and women that started on Prawfsblawg and Letters of Marque continues somewhat more ribaldly on Opinionistas. It sounds like Opinionista should set up her friend, M, with Heidi.

"Magha" is Nigerian slang for a gullible white person. The LA Times has a good piece from the perspective of the lower-level people behind those Nigerian scam e-mails. A teenager who can type fast can make $900 to $6000 a month this way, a good income for a country where the average income is $300/month.

Stephen Kovacsics of American Citizen Services, an office of the U.S. Consulate, spoke to a victim who had lost $200,000.

Kovacsics says he is awakened several nights a week by Americans pleading for help with an emergency, such as a fiancee (whom they have only met in an online chat room) locked up in a Nigerian jail. He has to tell them that there is probably no fiancee, no emergency.

Kovacsics said victims can't believe that a scammer would spend months of internet chat just to net $700 or $1,000, not realizing that is big money in Nigeria and fraudsters will have many scams running at the same time.

Scammers work with Nigerians living in America to physically intimidate victims who start to get suspicious.

The article made me feel much better about the counter-site, 419eater.com, where I had previously just guiltily enjoyed their cruelty. The site defends itself here.

"Satiety" (unlike "satiate") has a hard t.

How good is Arrested Development? Even the Parents Television Council attack on the show made me laugh out loud. (Spoilers for the "Meet the Veels" episode if you read past the first couple of paragraphs, but you can watch the clip safely. I like the "protest too much" warning about the dangers of the clip.) I hope they distribute that press release widely, it might result in an uptick in ratings. Related Overlawyered post from March.

I regularly say that this blog is limited to unserious topics, because I have other places to write seriously. But because I'm getting an A3Groupielanche from her link to me in her post on Judge Easterbrook, I feel compelled to rebut an item I personally know to be untrue: the claim that the judge is "not very easy on his clerks."

When I first met Frank Easterbrook, I was a 22-year-old just out of college attending a reception for new 1Ls. Wearing an ill-fitting Men's Wearhouse suit, clumsily holding a vodka and tonic at what might very well have been my first grown-up cocktail party (my parents were essentially teetotalers outside of Manischewitz), I found myself standing next to the judge and noone else, so I attempted small-talk: "I really liked that piece you wrote for last week's New Republic." The judge chuckled, and answered "That wasn't me. That was my brother Gregg."

A similar tale, six years later: the judge has flown to Washington, D.C., to attend my ill-fated wedding. He already knows my friend Pete from his clerkship with Judge Posner, and introduced himself as "Frank" to my college friend Dan, who was attending a Boston-area law school. The three are chatting and the judge mentions an article he's writing, and Dan expresses interest: "Oh, are you a writer?" before learning why this is an embarrassing question for a law student to ask. "He said he was 'Frank'!" Dan protested to me later. "How was I to know? I thought he was just a cousin or something."

It would've been very easy for a more arrogant man to treat rudely both of these slights from punk law students; for all he knew, he wasn't going to see either one of these people ever again (and didn't, in the case of Dan). I can think of a certain Supreme Court Justice who at social events looks right past anyone below a certain political caste. But both times, Judge Easterbrook responded in good humor; he never mentioned my faux pas to me ever again, and went on to hire me as a clerk thirteen or fourteen months later. (That year, I singlehandedly and inadvertently disrupted the first attempt at creating a judicial clerkship cartel. But that's another story.) He was similarly generous with his time when my father visited me in Chicago, taking the time to chat with him for several minutes about Macintosh computer set-ups.

Perhaps there are clerks out there saying that the judge didn't treat them well. I haven't met them yet—and attendance at the annual clerk reunions/Star-Wars-movie events is remarkably high. Even the year it was held in Alaska. The clerks weren't to call him "Judge" or "Your Honor"; it was always "Frank." There were lunches, birthday parties, entertaining war stories, and helpful career advice sessions. As working conditions go, the year clerking for Frank was far superior to any of the eleven years I spent at a law firm.

Frank Easterbrook had a John Roberts-caliber legal career in the Solicitor General's office and in private practice—and then also had a top-notch academic career and twenty years as the best (and second-most prolific) appellate judge in America, and he's younger than Harriet Miers to boot. (Miers is being praised for her real-world legal experience, as she should, since that aspect is missing from the Court, but even there, she hasn't had a fraction of the influence of Easterbrook on antitrust and corporate law.) If he hasn't gotten a nomination, it's because no Republican president since Reagan has had the courage to nominate for the Supreme Court anyone who has written a law review article that challenges the conventional wisdom. Even though a Justice Easterbrook would have no power to legislatively implement his views on insider trading. And, indeed, he has written opinions to uphold laws he noted as economically inefficient:

Just as the Constitution does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social Statics, so it does not enact prescriptions from the pages of The Journal of Law & Economics—where, we may assume, an article will appear in due course adding this ordinance to the long list of laws whose costs exceed their benefits. "[A] law can be both economic folly and constitutional." CTS, 481 U.S. at 96-97 (Scalia, J., concurring). Chicago's law may well be folly; we are confident that it is constitutional.

It's a shame that neither of the Bushes have confidence in the wisdom of the Senate or the American people to recognize and reject an unfair attack.

Sidenote: Cass Sunstein would tell a story to his law students that implied that Judge Posner was unprincipled: "Strom Thurmond asked Posner at his confirmation hearing, 'Does the Constitution say what it means, and mean what it says?' And Richard Posner, who certainly has a more complex view of the Constitution than that, answered simply 'Yes, sir.'" A year later, in a legal interpretation seminar with Judge Easterbrook, the question of the Strom Thurmond confirmation hearing inquiry somehow came up, and Easterbrook told the same story—except, in his version, Posner went off on a lengthy monologue that confused Thurmond, while Easterbrook, four years later, was the one who politely replied to the same question "Yes, sir"—which is, I imagine, an honest answer. I looked at my friend Neil, who had been in the Sunstein class with me, and with whom I had marvelled at the Posner tale, and he looked at me with the same surprise. Moral: don't believe every apocryphal rumor you hear about Chicago judges, even if they come from seemingly reliable sources.

Because Aaron Schwabach has a grievance with him.

Another telling link from Defamer.

On the other end of the spectrum, I've been rewatching Arrested Development on DVD, and am amazed how much I missed the first time around. The show is amazingly subtle. Which is why it's doomed. Speaking of which, you have a moral obligation to purchase the Season 2 DVD for everyone you know in a futile effort to encourage Fox to keep the show alive notwithstanding its microscopic Nielsen ratings. It's half the price of a month of cable, and you'll laugh twice as much.

The Miers-esque casting choice for the role of James Bond continues to have repercussions (via Defamer).

Ian Fleming did describe Bond as looking like Hoagy Carmichael, but, at least since "You Only Live Twice," and probably before that, Bond has long stopped belonging to Fleming.

Update: I was mildly pleased with my post title, but Adam Bonin clearly beats me: "We Expect You To Dye, Mr. Bond." And, hey, Adam has a cameo in the October 2005 Philadelphia magazine (scroll down, due to poor web-page design).

Does my recent purchase of several striped shirts make me a metrosexual? But I like striped shirts. (That's Josh Arieh, not me, but if it works for him...)

Related: I'm at the secret Thai restaurant with Kevin and Ruth shortly before they leave for Mumbai. Kevin and Ruth are commenting that they were worried it seemed silly that they were color-coordinated.

Me: Have you seen the new Milwaukee's Best tv ads?
Kevin and Ruth indicate no.
Me: Oh, well, they're an appeal to the blue-collar male demographic. They show men in a group drinking beer, and one does something like daub oil from a pizza slice or give baby talk to a puppy, the others react in shock, the trangressor looks back uncomprehendingly and is suddenly crushed by a giant beer can falling from the heavens, followed by the tag line "Men should act like men." Kinda funny, if neanderthal. Anyway, in one of the ads, the beer can falls on the guy who's wearing the same sweater as his girlfriend. But, I don't think that applies in your case. Ruth's wearing a sort of scarlet, while Kevin's shirt is more of a brick red.
Ruth: I think the giant beer can just dropped down on you.

(By the way, Ruth, who spent two years in Chiang Mai, was skeptical about the fifty-mile round-trip, but then endorsed the restaurant as authentic. Huzzah!)

The Cowgirl Creamery is opening a branch on 9th and F in April. I'm reliably informed that this is good news. I can certainly second the recommendation for Cowgirl's Mt. Tam, but I can do that because that cheese is already available in town. But if the store introduces other artisanal cheeses into the local market, and has interesting cheese-tasting events, it will definitely be a worthwhile addition.

On a different note, the Metrocurean blog, where that link comes from, looks like it has potential, but it seems to be both a bit too DC-centric (I think some of the best restaurants in the area are in Northern Virginia), and a bit too biased towards the frou-frou dining experience where one goes to eat to experience superior interior decorating and $12 signature drinks.

September was a bad month, if only with respect to my portfolio. CBH dropped 9%, CarMax also took a hit, and Blockbuster continued to plummet. I liquidated my E-Loan, since the potential downside was so much more dramatic than the 10-cent upside. S&P was up 0.8% for the month (2.8% for the calendar year including dividends), but my stocks were down a painful 4.7% for the month. Calendar year to September 30: up 8.2%. Last 12 months: up 21.0%.

The secret menu at In-N-Out is not only not such a secret any more, but now it's trademarked. But I like their use of Gill Sans.

From the NY Times Magazine. He interviews a man after my own heart:

"All right," he finally said, "but then you got to get the story exactly straight. There was one other reason I stayed. It wasn't as important as the cats. But it wouldn't be a true story unless you mentioned the other reason."

"What's the other reason?"

"The traffic."

"What?"

"It took my wife 12 hours to drive from New Orleans to Jackson on Sunday," he said. "She left Sunday at 1 p.m. and arrived in Jackson at 1 a.m."

"So?"

"That's usually a two-and-a-half-hour drive."

"Right. So what?"

"You don't understand: I hate traffic."

I'm not a big fan of the MGM Grand hotel, but add Craftsteak to the list of restaurants I want to go to. The most amazing thing about that LA Times story is that someone would be so irrational as to order a $320/pound steak medium-well. Why not just flush the money down the toilet?

Does anyone understand that cutting the mortgage interest deduction, on which so many long-term housing purchase decisions have relied for leverage, is not just the quickest way to ensure that the housing bubble will pop overnight, but that it would also lead to a Japan-style deflationary collapse in wealth? Apparently not, since noone mentions it in this New York Times article.

Remember that I look much better on television when I smile than when I don't.

This was my first tv appearance with an earpiece. Three minutes before I went on the air, I learned that Edith Brown Clement had announced that she was not the nominee. Cato's Mark Moller and I were crammed into a tiny studio, with the cameraman complaining that he didn't have room to be able to focus on two people sitting side by side.

Because Amber says she's amused by the idea of a "Hottest Blogger" page, and because her comments section doesn't let me post multiple links, I will now tell a related old fogey tale. Just over ten years ago, when the Inter-Web was a much much smaller place, a fellow by the name of Robert Toups created a page called "Babes of the Web", an alphabetized listing with the copies (and 1- to 4-star ratings) of pictures of what was then every woman who had a web page with a photo on it, a number that was in the low hundreds. This was viewed as tremendously threatening and controversial. But if he had had the foresight to accept advertising, reserve a good domain name and issue an IPO, he'd be a rich man right now.

Short shameful confession: I dated two (and married one) "four-Toupsie"-rated women.

Related: Kottke Web nostalgia comment thread, though Mahir hardly counts as the early days of the Web.

Web-page reservation systems that are poorly programmed.

1) If you're a US business, and over 90% of your customers are domestic, and you're going to require "Country" and have a pull-down menu for me to select the country I'm from, why on earth are you not putting "United States" at the top of the menu instead of forcing me to scroll through the entire United Nations from Afghanistan on down?

1a) Why won't my Safari browser let me handle a pull-down menu through the keyboard?

2) I just checked the box that told you that my billing address is the same as my profile address. So why did I get an error when I submitted complaining that I haven't entered my address and country in my billing address? You're really going to make me go through your stupid country pull-down menu again and also re-type my address?

3) If you're going to demand that my username be between 6 to 50 characters and require my password to have both alphabet and numeric characters, why didn't you tell me this before I got an error message and had to re-enter all my data?

4) I've entered a check-in date of 10/29 and a check-out date of 10/31, both manually and then through the pop-up calendar menu. So why am I getting an error message that my check-out date needs to be later than my check-in date?

5) Oh, also, when I click on a pop-up link, it tries to find an address beginning "http://http://", so naturally gives me a 404, which I can't even manually fix, because heaven forfend your popup window contains the address bar.

So I've just wasted ten minutes (not including contemporaneous blogging) and still don't have a reservation and have to make a phone call. And, oh, by the way, your reservations department is closed now, but you don't say this on your website, so I wasted several minutes going through your automated phone menu to learn this.

I helped my friend Pearl with her "Shtreimel Envy" essay, personally know two of the other contributors to The Modern Jewish Girl's Guide To Guilt, enjoyed Rebecca Goldstein's The Mind-Body Problem, and had a curiosity about the train-wreck essay I imagined Ayelet Waldman could produce for the book, but I was going to pass up on the anthology as too obviously gimmicky. But what look like close-to-home essays on Christmas tree conflicts and the perils of being a Santa agnostic have me intrigued again.

A reading is in DC on November 13 at the JCC.

After a lame summer, there's actually some good movies I want to see over the next few months. I saw Serenity last week; I'm seeing the new Wallace & Gromit with friends Monday. Here's my list, in no particular order:

Grizzly Man (oops—I think I've missed the window for that)
In Her Shoes
Proof
Corpse Bride
A History of Violence
March of the Penguins
Jesus Is Magic
Bee Season
Jarhead
Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World

What am I missing? Keep in mind I'm going to miss at least half of these.

Not that I'm a knitter, or someone who would wear this, but: How to make a Jayne Cobb hat. The result.

Cheese tourism in Vermont.

Here in Arlington, I live near Arrowine; I occasionally make the trek into Del Ray for Cheesetique; and I'll settle for Whole Foods, the overpriced Georgetown Dean & Deluca, and Sutton Place Balducci's. (I love Wegman's, but haven't been that impressed by their cheese selection, given that the other five options are closer to me.) Am I missing a cheese shop in the area that will change my life?

Underneath Their Robes has reached a well-deserved critical mass that has made it a quite successful blog. I was amused by Article III Groupie's answer to Question #17 in her Crescat 20 Questions interview referring to "status anxiety" because I recommended the book "Status Anxiety" to her last year in an e-mail conversation about our "shared and continuing struggle with our status as members of the Great Unwashed." I may not have the status to merit a Crescat 20 Questions interview, but I'm influencing the discussion!

The power of the Internet finds the cutest kittens (via PtN).

Don't try this at home, but it will attract yellow butterflies. All part of the Periodic Table Table.

This LA Times article shows that Joss Whedon apparently understands that higher wages often reflect higher productivity.

Everyone in the blogosphere who was going to see the movie already saw it opening weekend, so doesn't care what I think. Still, go see it if you haven't yet or are scared by the Firefly-fan-obsessiveness; the movie is self-contained without the need to be aware of the eleven hours of teevee that preceded it, and does so in a way relatively inoffensive to the people familiar with the characters already.

I liked Serenity a lot, though the conspiracy-driven plot, like most conspiracy-driven plots, doesn't really hold up to close scrutiny, but one doesn't notice this during the roller coaster ride. The controversial spoiler added something I thought was missing from the television series. I agree with the oft-made criticism that Whedon's directing seemed too televisionny, but, reading between the lines of the Times article, that appears to be a side-effect of making a $100 million movie for $39 million.

And, nicely, it was the most overtly libertarian movie I'd seen in a long time.

I had somehow thought from the Firefly DVDs that there was a working set of the entire ship interior, but they apparently had to rebuild the whole thing for the movie.

Short shameful confession: I spent the whole movie (and several hours afterward) thinking that the Operative was Jubal Early, until I got an e-mail from a friend sneering at the fanboys who couldn't tell the difference. Fortunately, I like it when my friends correct me, because it gives me confidence when they're not correcting me that they're not just being polite.

They're cleaning out the school, and going to try to reopen it as a charter school. (Paging Katie Newmark.)

Ask Ben Kunkel.

Nicholas Cage names his son "Kal-El," but he should really know better (via Bonin).

Yay!

The AEI panel I'm moderating on Katrina insurance litigation will be on C-SPAN 2 Monday morning; the panel was supposed to start at 9:15 Eastern, but the tv schedule seems to say that C-SPAN won't be cutting in until 9:30, so maybe the schedule will change somewhat.

Update: here's the video (for 15 days, anyway). I need a haircut.