Well, as this is being posted, I'm in an airport hoping that thunderstorms don't delay my flight; I have a long day of driving and herding cats tomorrow. (Not that I'm posting from the airport, mind you; this is a time-delayed post.)

My referrer logs sent me scurrying to an earlier entry (why did I mention Munger Tolles?), and it struck me that this blog was a lot more interesting fifteen months ago. Sorry about that. I'm not permitted to blog about the most important event happening in my life right now; nor am I permitted to blog about the second-most important event; I don't particularly want to blog about some other recent things in my life; if I blog about my poker game, someone in my game might discover my analysis of a hand and use it against me (as it is, I do far too much talking at the table) and I'd like to keep making a profit there, as it's a non-trivial supplemental source of income; even frivolous topics, such as an amusing anecdote about an answering machine, implicate earlier verboten topics, keeping those off-limits. I'm eating out less often between trying to lose weight, save money, and spending money on travel to visit Slim, so very few food reviews; I've been to two new DC restaurants in the last four months, and it didn't seem worth the effort to give either of them a bad review.

And I don't blog about things that happen at work, because that's just indiscreet, but work is clearly a huge part of my day.

So all in all, the blog is less interesting than when it was in the two months between quitting the firm and starting at the new job, and I could dish about bad dates with women I'd never see again. My apologies.

I'll break the rule about blogging about work to say that I doubt I'll ever be as proud to be affiliated with AEI as I was when I heard that we'd hired Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Here's her first piece on the AEI site, and here's her first AEI event.

A Little Rock friend of mine had an emergency gap in his law review, and solicited me to write about the fast-food litigation. I'm not a big fan of the eight-footnotes-a-page-style that law reviews like, but I think the piece is a good overview of what has happened to date. The article, "A Taxonomy of Obesity Litigation," 28 UALR L. Rev. 427 (2006), can be downloaded at SSRN (help me catch up with Bainbridge!) or at the AEI Liability Project website. (cross-posted at Point of Law)

I worry that events have outstripped me; one sentence in the article, "Why is selling soda [to 17-year-olds] an attractive nuisance, but selling ... Internet connectivity is not?" predates the MySpace litigation.

Nice CSM piece on the Lichtenstein Cow Triptych.

In this case, "Not Buying It" describes both the title of the book, and the action I intend to take with regard to Judith Levine's book about supposedly going shopping-free for twelve months. For those who enjoy reading deservedly scathing reviews, Cheryl Miller does a good job.

Update: Greg Newburn performs ju-jitsu in a new blog about the benefits of shopping.

Here's a photoessay of its main cathedral.

Equal time for creationists.

Iain Banks' next book delayed by Civilization.

From a law review article I recently wrote:

In the 1993 Seinfeld episode “The Non-Fat Yogurt,” Kramer invests in a store that sells a popular, tasty frozen yogurt that is advertised as non-fat.17 Seinfeld and Elaine become suspicious when they gain weight.18 When they eventually test the yogurt, it turns out to contain fat, and humorous complications ensue.19

17. Seinfeld: The Non-Fat Yogurt (NBC television broadcast, Nov. 4, 1993).
18. Id.
19. Id.

The editors made me add footnotes 18 and 19. "I have to footnote 'Humorous complications ensue'?"

Lat has a well-written review on Blachman's book that comes to conclusions similar to mine. I do think he's being generous in comparing the lead character to classic performances like Jeremy Piven's Ari Gold or Michael Douglas's Gordon Gekko, though; the Anonymous Lawyer isn't even Tom Aldredge's Herb Myerson, much less David Paymer's Marty Rossen. And this sentence made me wince on behalf of my much funnier brother: "A television pilot is in the works."

1. Sequence: Tony Kornheiser debuts on Monday Night Football, gets mixed reviews, including a pan from his own newspaper. As I predicted, TK throws a fit, as he tends to do when the WaPo criticizes him, creating a newsstory of its own (also NYT). Gene Weingarten satirizes this; lots of idiots don't get the joke. The irony is that Kornheiser's reaction was relatively muted compared to incidents in the last few years where he had critical reporters fired.

2. Weingarten also gets the story about jdate-r Darren, who turns out to be even more of a jerk than the Costanza-like scenario much blogged about.

3. Netflix warehouses.

4. I'm more environmental than Al Gore.

5. This page about Thai food in Chicago makes me hungry.

...it means that enough people are on vacation that National Review Online is desperate enough for content that they'll return my emails and publish stuff I send them. (To be fair to myself, they only ignored my email once, and it probably wasn't intentional.)

Bees on a Plane: "For whatever reason, they seem to like the smell of jet fuel, and especially the yellow color of the Southwest airplane."

One hopes they don't have to evacuate and burn Houston this time.

...of the increasingly bizarre Robert Wone murder case that I haven't seen anyone mention: It’s really reassuring to know that, if there’s a 911 call that I’ve been stabbed in the middle of the night in Dupont Circle (just on the edge of the downtown business district) it will take the cops “only” 13 minutes to reach me. Sheesh.

Go wish my brother a happy birthday.

I have an op-ed in today's New York Sun on shenanigans in recent Vioxx litigation, and what it means to the calls for a "global settlement."

The miracle of the Internets. And the best use of a Breeders song, ever. Has it really been ten years since I've seen them? Wow. (via Sepinwall)

I strongly suspect that I was the only American Enterprise Institute resident fellow at the Sleater-Kinney show at the 9:30 tonight, though I did run into an attorney from my old firm. (But not Matthew Yglesias.) The real show didn't start until the encores, when they performed "Ironclad," "Little Babies," "Dig Me Out," "Words and Guitar," and "Turn It On," inter alia. NPR webcast the show and has the full set-list.

I had stopped blogging, which meant I had stopped updating my posts on my investments. It's not good news.

	April 2006	2006 YTD	Last 12 months	Annualized rate, life of portfolio
Ted Portfolio	-2.1%	17.8%	37.4%	21.8%
S&P 500	+1.3%	5.6%	15.4%	12.9%
Mortgage (cost of capital)	0.4%	1.75%	5.25%

	May 2006	2006 YTD	Last 12 months	Annualized rate, life of portfolio
Ted Portfolio	-11.0%	4.6%	17.0%	13.1%
S&P 500	-2.9%	2.6%	8.6%	10.0%
Mortgage (cost of capital)	0.4%	2.2%	5.25%

	June 2006	2006 YTD	Last 12 months	Annualized rate, life of portfolio
Ted Portfolio	-1.9%	2.5%	9.0%	11.4%
S&P 500	+0.1%	2.7%	8.6%	10.0%
Mortgage (cost of capital)	0.4%	2.6%	5.25%

	July 2006	2006 YTD	Last 12 months	Annualized rate, life of portfolio
Ted Portfolio	-6.5%	-4.4%	-4.7%	+7.1%
S&P 500	+0.6%	+3.3%	+5.4%	+9.8%
Mortgage (cost of capital)	0.4%	3.0%	5.25%

There are now CDs offering slightly higher interest rates than my mortgage rate. I had sold my BBI at 3.70 and winced as it immediately shot up to 5, but now that it's back below 4, I don't feel so bad. I got out of my Six Flags at 8.62, and now it's around 5. But everything else was a disaster. Cigna, CBH, EK, HAS, OSTK, PIR, FLWS, all dropped a bunch; PIR and OSTK almost 50%. Easy come, easy go, but it's painful to watch one's portfolio drop a quarter of its value in a few months.