Mitzvahpalooza photos (via Gordon).

The Crooked Timber blog is hosting a seminar on Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, including posts by Susanna Clarke on the subject.

Perhaps the most useful page on the entire Internet: a cheat-sheet for avoiding voice-mail hell (via TPE)

Adam Bonin has entertaining speculation about reading between the lines of today's Vows feature. I look forward to Veiled Conceit's take. I can imagine plausible scenarios between the Times version and the Bonin hypothesis. I do note that it no longer seems tasteless to marry on November 11. Perhaps it never was, and I'm just skeptical of November weddings.

Frequent blog commenter (and fellow Easterbrook clerkship alum) Kate Litvak is guest-blogging at Ideoblog, though her first post is a bit half-baked. Keith Sharfman and the Manne family are also guest-blogging, and the forthcoming Truth on the Market blog looks like it will be a must-read.

Everyone else is doing it, and I don't get enough comment traffic. So: I'm taking reasonable requests for blog posts.

Scott Underwood in McSweeney's: In-Progress Ideas for New Yorker Cartoons.

This is why I blog: a beautiful woman has offered to cook a turducken for my birthday party in two weeks' time; with this assurance I made the $30 investment in the frozen meat-stuff (improbably labeled as having just 2 grams of fat per serving). So, wine, women, song, and turducken. And a good cheese platter. Perhaps some Thai food for vegetarian guests. It's been a good year.

Of course, Tyler Cowen had a better idea for Thanksgiving than I did; I just went to the Eden Center with a friend for Vietnamese food.

The Information Leafblower poll is fairly America-centric, which is perhaps why the British band Hard-Fi didn't get a single vote; their energetic Clash-esque/Britpop "Stars of CCTV" (famously made for £300) is one of my favorite albums of the year (for the music if not the dull lyrics), but they're sufficiently obscure that iTunes doesn't even have a legitimate review of the album posted. Not available in stores, available on Amazon as a $23 import, but on iTunes for $9.99.

Their website allows you to play (but not download) songs from the album (click "audio").

I got "Illinois" on Information Leafblower's recommendation (via Karl via a comment thread that started out about a cat). With Sleater-Kinney at #5, the Decemberists at #9, and Mountain Goats at #11, the list had credibility with me, so I decided to try and buy #1 (Stevens), #2 (The National), and #12 (My Morning Jacket).

"Illinois" is the second of a purported fifty-CD cycle on each of the states; it'll be interesting to see what Stevens comes up with when he hits the states that don't even merit their own guidebooks. Question: is it me, or is track 22 of "Illinois", titled "Out of Egypt..." a direct crib from Steve Reich's 1976 "Music for 18 Musicians"? The problem with buying on iTunes is that one doesn't get the liner notes; google only gives me random blog comments with even less knowledge than I have referring to "Reich influence" and arguments whether it's really Philip Glass-influence. The ex-wife got the complete box set of Reich, but I was able to find my earlier purchase of Mf18M, and, other than a slowly plinking piano in the first minute of the Stevens track (which, unfortunately, is what the iTunes 30-second sample comes from), I'm having trouble placing a difference. (Update: a more precise use of my google-fu finds Rolling Stone identifying it as an "echo", as well as someone else who finds the juxtaposition interesting. Also this interview acknowledging the admiration for the piece—and why am I not surprised that Kieslowski's ten-film "Decalogue" is Stevens's favorite movie?)

I like a couple of tracks quite a bit (especially "Chicago" and "Come On! Feel the Illinoise!", the best tracks on the CD not stolen from Steve Reich). But for me, the best aspect of "Illinois" is that it provoked me to get around to ripping my Reich to my iPod; I hadn't listened to it for far too long. I don't mean to be completely down on the Stevens; it is growing on me as I listen through a second time. But my idiosyncratic tastes tend to deduct points from concept albums; I'm just not going to listen to an "Illinois" or "Solex vs. the Hitmeister" that demands more attention without doing enough to merit the extra work through its lyrics or music, and has too many tracks that will need to be skipped in Shuffle mode. This is an entirely unfair way to judge an album, I admit, but I rarely seek out music for music's sake: music is what I listen to when I'm reading or exercising or commuting or sometimes when I'm writing.

Side note: it's now so easy to duplicate with electronics what Reich did with musicians acting with utter precision thirty years ago that the jaw-dropping majesty of it probably doesn't register completely today (imagine keeping perfect time with a marimba for an hour, with one slip completely destroying an entire piece, since the phasing is the essence of it). But I have to wonder if the Reich "cover" helped to push "Illinois" to the top spot in the straw poll among bloggers unfamiliar with the earlier work and whose jaws dropped when they heard it for the first time.

This site has Windows Media Player 30-second samples from a 1999 recording of "Music for 18 Musicians." Thirty seconds doesn't do it justice, of course.

The Harris Teeter had a 4.5-pound frozen turducken breast and I almost made an impulse purchase until I realized that it would take 36 hours to thaw and I don't trust myself not to destroy it in the process of roasting. Plus, what am I going to do with 4 pounds of turducken? But, one day.

For October, I was down 3.9% vs. -1.4% for the S&P 500. That gives me a 12-month return of +19.4% (vs. +6.8%) and a calendar-year return of +4.0% (vs. -0.4%). As always, I'm also competing against the opportunity cost of paying off my mortgage at 5.25%. At least November looks to be better.

Made some changes to my portfolio in October. I took profits on my insurance stocks, AOC and UNM (which turned out to be premature, as they're up 10-20% since I sold them), took profits on SGP with good timing (though didn't see fit to undo my similar position in Bristol-Myers), liquidated 80% of my Six Flags position, and got out of Kroger. I bought into Wal-Mart big at the low price of 45.12, and that's now 50; and doubled up on 1-800-Flowers at an average price of $6.60 (now 7). (Warren Buffett just announced that he's been buying into Wal-Mart, too, which is a nice validation.) All in all, I was slightly better off standing pat, in part because I ended up in a bigger cash position after the trades than before, and somewhat missed out in the run-up in the market in the last five weeks.

I continue to pour money into the pit that is Blockbuster. Needless to say, my returns would be much sexier if I had sold Blockbuster at 10 when the merger with Hollywood Video fell through, rather than keep doubling up on it as it has dropped to $3 and change.

And there was a surprise celebrity in attendance, with whom I had an interesting conversation afterwards about federal jurisdiction, if not the dormant commerce clause.

And now I'm going to have dinner and work late at the office writing a law review article I didn't finish this weekend, so no non-inscrutable blogging tonight.

I noticed the same anachronisms in a satire of a "1958" Thanksgiving special that my brother did. I'm not sure why I watch SNL still, even with the use of the TiVo to cut it to 35-45 minutes or so. More importantly, I'm not sure why I have neurons devoted to the knowledge that The Misfits wasn't made in 1958.

NYT: Websites give advance notice of "Black Friday" sales.

Above-average drug ad entertainment. (Via Medpundit)

Amber's tagged me:

1. Go into your archives.
2. Find your 23rd post.
3. Post the fifth sentence (or closest to it).
4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.

"Whatever happened to Chandra Levy?"

5. Tag five other people to do the same thing.

You're not the boss of me.

Oh, ok. I tag David Lat, John Cusack, Arianna Huffington, Trout Almondine, and Lily the anonymous "female" "right-leaning" "YLS '03" blogger. Not sure that any of these people actually exist, though.

I think I'm just cranky because my weekend travel plans got postponed, I have a gift basket of cheese that I can't get rid of, and I'm dead tired from two glasses of wine with dinner. But there's the moral code of the tag to obey.

My next attempt will involve the following recipe:

1 lg onion
6 cloves garlic
1 oz fresh ginger
1 lb spinach
1 c plain yogurt
4 oz buttermilk
2 tsp chili powder
2 tsp garam masala
pinch white pepper
pinch cayenne pepper
1 c half and half
6 oz cubed paneer
pinch sea salt
fresh cilantro

Grind onion, garlic, and ginger into a fine paste.

In a medium saucepan, combine the paste, spinach, yogurt, buttermilk, chili powder, pepper, and garam masala. Simmer at medium heat for 20 to 30 minutes. Mash the ingredients with a potato masher. Add half and half. Simmer until the mixture has a creamy consistency, 10 to 15 minutes. Add the cheese, simmer 5 minutes. Season with salt. Garnish with cilantro leaves to taste. Makes 4 to 6 servings.

Will report back in a few weeks. Previous attempts hadn't thought to use buttermilk, and that might be the ingredient I've been missing in trying to replicate my favorite instantiation. Not sure the half-and-half will work, but I'm reluctant to make this any unhealthier by using full cream. You'll note that I'm still resisting using ghee, which probably also has quality implications in these recipes.

When ordering a birthday present over the phone, don't use five- or six-syllable words in the gift card, even if they're really clever, because no matter how many times the phone rep spells the word back to you, he or she's still going to get it wrong. Especially don't use a six-syllable word that sounds a lot like the five-syllable word elsewhere in the gift card.

Tim Goodman argues (via Marcotte) that "Arrested Development" may not quite be cancelled yet. Fox told AD that it wouldn't pick up the "back nine" (limiting this season to 13 episodes), but the rest of the Fox schedule is so moribund that they may be willing to give the Nielsen-challenged show a fourth season rather than dump one of its few Emmy-winners. In the alternative, Fox has given show creators permission to shop the show elsewhere. AD would probably work better on cable, where it could be repeated several times a week: the show is so intricate that missing a single episode means that one's missing out on a quarter of the jokes (though it would lose the significant meta-humor of its dancing on the line of network censorship if it were to go to a Comedy Central or other channel where anything goes). HBO doesn't take lateral projects, but there's a rumor that Showtime is considering picking it up—which would indeed be the one thing that could get me to subscribe to Showtime (though it would be more cost-effective for me to wait until it came out on DVD, since I would buy the DVDs regardless). If a fraction of AD's miniscule 4 million viewers are persuaded to upgrade to Showtime, it would certainly be a profitable transaction for them.

There are those anonymous writers who get more attention when they're anonymous, because it's fun to speculate on who they are; no one cared when Joe Klein wrote a sequel to his Anonymous novel "Primary Colors"; Jessica Cutler's blogging and novel-writing under her real name has been understandably ignored, and I half-expect Jeremy Blachman's "Anonymous Lawyer" novel to be similarly remaindered. In other cases, anonymity hurts: blogger "Robert Musil" got a lot more attention when he started blogging than in today's more crowded blogging market; in 2002, Eugene Volokh paid attention to anonymous bloggers in a way he doesn't now with over 100+ law-profs blogging. Other pseudonymous entities, like Joe Bob Briggs or Atrios, continue to have success after the mask is pulled off (Briggs in a ludicrous 1985 political-correctness scandal at his Dallas home paper), and Wonkette and Defamer haven't been hurt by revealing who they are. And now, Article III Groupie, in a deja vu of fellow pink-themed blogger Libertarian Girl, reveals herself to be a himself, provoking some pretty funny reactions. David Lat figured out that anonyblogging is good for avoiding the blame, but also succeeds in avoiding the credit, and decided he couldn't resist the fifteen minutes of fame that would come by revealing his identity. Can he maintain the A3G persona, like Ed Zotti does with Cecil Adams or the late Herbert Stein did with Dear Prudence, or does pulling back the curtain on the great and powerful Oz spoil the illusion for fickle blog-readers? (My friend Glenn disputes the Ed Zotti notion: "If Ed Zotti were writing as Cecil Adams, that means he would be using a pseudonym, and Cecil Adams would never associate with someone who uses a pseudonym.")

Lat hurts himself with the inapt Rowling/Potter comparison; Joe Bob Briggs or Libby Gelman-Waxner, bless her heart, are better analogies.

Speaking of anonymous bloggers with female personas, Opinionistas is sure making a lot of noise about outing herself and burning bridges.

I'm not the only one who thinks the Decemberists' "We Both Go Down Together" sounds like REM's "Losing My Religion."

True story: Heinrich Himmler's great-niece married an Israeli descendant of Warsaw ghetto victims.

My friends know I love the North Korea travelogues; the (relatively tiny) downside of my job is that it's fairly certain now that I'll never get a visa. Here's the LA Times version from today's paper, which is far too short on detail. Other accounts on the web: BBC ("There is a road called Restaurant Street, which has several food outlets, all of which are empty"), the tale of a visiting pizza chef, and a must-read account of the Ryugyong Hotel, a structure out of the Mordor School of Architecture (an amazing photo—note the seven "revolving restaurants" at the top). The best account, of course, is Scott Fisher's eleven-page opus, which is a good substitute for actually being there.

I bought a bunch of Six Flags stock at an average price of $4.7 or so, and the stock is up substantially (effectively cancelling out my 50% losses on Blockbuster, which is all the more painful because I was 30% in the black at one point). The company is in the middle of a proxy fight right now; current management wants to auction the company, while a group led by Dan Snyder wants to take over the company without an auction. It was thus significant when the Associated Press announced that "shareholder Tigris Management LLC" was voting its shares in favor of the dissident movement. Six Flags probably spent a lot of money on attorneys drafting a press release responding to the Tigris story, and noted that they didn't even know Tigris owned stock. Tigris then issued its own press release—and it turns out that they own less Six Flags stock than I do (though I've liquidated 80% of my holdings at around $7.40). Maybe I should issue a press release.

The Lakers are having trouble with Kwame Brown. Especially amusing is the fanboy comment imagining that the Lakers could trade Brown for Kevin Garnett.

One of the reasons I miss Chicago is its tongue-in-cheek theater scene: Office Space: the musical (via Bonin).

I'm out of town for a couple of days. Go read my brother's blog:

My brother posting on grocery shopping has noticed, as I have, the absence lately of 99-cent two-liter soda specials. Yet the soda companies have been reporting record profits lately. We need a tax on these excess profits to force Big Soda to ease the burden on consumers of these record soda prices.

The 21-employee Transit Systems Management was paid $7 million to manage the Las Vegas Monorail.

I don't watch much football any more, but I was flipping through channels this evening as I was waiting to be called for the Bob Barr radio show. With under a minute to go in the first half, the 49ers, who have a quarterback I never heard of, threw a long pass to inside the 5, and the receiver made a spectacular catch. But there was a flag; the play was called back for a holding penalty. On the replay, it was clear, the defensive lineman was about to cream the quarterback from behind, and the left tackle illegally pulled him down. The announcers kept talking about how the tackle cost the team a great gain, but this seems to confuse the causation; in the but-for world where the offensive holding isn't committed, the quarterback is sacked hard, perhaps fumbles, and there's no long throw and great catch. At a minimum, the holding saved the Niners a down; it quite possibly saved the team a turnover; ex ante, there's a chance there's no flag, and the catch counts. Blame the tackle for missing the block to begin with perhaps (I couldn't tell from the replay whether that was his fault), but there's nothing to complain about with the hold qua hold.

1) If I eat half a box of cereal a week, I really should stop buying four boxes every time I go grocery shopping. It was just that Honey Nut Cheerios were on sale for buy one-get-one-free at Giant plus I had a $1-off coupon, and I had just bought two boxes of other cereal at Harris Teeter. Still a bad purchase decision.

2) My Harris Teeter trip was $43.16. Then I went to Giant, and that trip was $43.16. What are the odds? (Ok, about one in 2000-3000, probably less given my range of shopping purchases. Not that special.)

3) Tomato paste prices are way up. And I see 99-cent two-liter soda sales less and less.

by the Daily Mail on Sunday.

Josh Malina and Timothy Busfield married sisters. Who knew?

David Levinson Wilk makes a persuasive case that Alito will be to Supreme Court justices what Asta is to movie dogs and Eero Saarinen is to architects.

(One more thing I learned last month: Saarinen isn't just responsible for Idlewild/JFK and Dulles Airports and the University of Chicago Law School, but also did the St. Louis Arch. It somehow never occurred to me what a relatively recent development the Arch is because I never knew a world without it.)

Lockhart, Texas (via Cowen). As Tyler blogs more and more about BBQ as he writes his book, I'm going to have to stop reading his blog while I'm in Virginia.

A bright and beautiful woman once realized with embarrassment that, for our first date, she took me out for BBQ, the counterman exhibiting surprise at the unexpected sight of a woman paying for our platters at the register, rolls of paper towels on the tabletops, four-feet tall trophies in window, picking up the heavy glass of water with both hands because the nervous adrenaline rush made it impossible to lift with one shaky right hand. Our first kiss in the parking lot afterwards was sweet and tasted of brisket and it was easy to imagine being happy if it was the last first kiss I ever had. What's embarrassing and unromantic about that? Nothing, I say.

...you're quoted by the World Socialist website. I was hoping for an "imperialist running dog" in there, though.

For a mere $15, you can hear "Constitutional Law Expert" Ted Frank on the Dennis Prager Show explaining such experty things as what the Third Circuit Court of Appeals is. Luke Ford must be so jealous. I was also on KTSA in San Antonio last night.