While posting over at my own site, I discovered Sign That You've Been Doing Some Sort of Legal Writing For At Least A Week Straight #438 ("STYBDSSLWFALAW #438"):

After an off-the-cuff post,* my first instinct was to review it to make sure no footnotes were needed. I think I need one of those people that deprograms cult members.

*Readers of my blog and/or folks that have not bothered to ignore my writing in this space know that I don't really ever make any "on-the-cuff" posts.

[PS - STYBDSSLWFALAW #439 occurs when you start internally referencing your own conversations. E.g., "As I explained in our discussion of the New Hampshire Primary, supra 5:00pm Tuesday, Howard Dean may not be able to carry Pennsylvania."]

It gives me great pride to guest-blog with Crescat's fine bloggers based in Chicago.

And what pride they must have in Chicago, which regained its rightful place as the murder capital of America.

Something clearly needs to be done. For the sake of Chicagoans, I hope that something comes sooner rather than later.

If you used to read Tim Sandefur's great blog Freespace and then stopped when he switched to an unreadable color scheme-- great news. Due to "bitching" by some certain bloggers, Freespace is actually readable again!

If you like both jazz and classical music, then you really need to buy, or listen to Jacques Laussier's renditions of Beethoven's seventh. Even if you only like jazz or classical, you really ought to listen to it-- Beethoven writes a catchy tune and Laussier can make it catch. In fact, if you like neither jazz nor classical, maybe this will be the thing to coax you out of your libertine ways. (And, yes, if you buy it through this link, we will receive some small sum of money).

At the moment I'm sitting in my room blogging from my laptop as my visiting co-blogger, Amy, sits less than three feet away blogging from hers. Given that our laptops are almost identical-looking, it's a funny scene. If I could figure out how to take a picture of it, I'd send it to Dell.

to make less of a grimace when drinking bad coffee.

I don't like adding anything sweet to my coffee and only add milk if I need to cool it down so I can drink it fast, so I'm left with the full flavor of whatever I'd rather not taste. This could be difficult, since it eliminates most coffee on campus. All four of my classes are packed into Tuesdays and Thursdays. At least, Prof. Drezner's course is second thing in the morning, one of the times when I'm most alert. The afternoons will be tricky, though.

A public health roundup for the new year:
Dealing with dying
Progress in Alzheimer's
Snuffed out
and my personal favorite*
Pesky public health practitioners

*Though I have a strong interest in health (and even public health despite the protests of my classmates), I object heartily to the social-engineering motivations and methods Torrance so aptly points out in this article. I recommend it if you aren't yet convinced of how sinister well-meaning people can be when they want to subordinate personal freedom to public health objectives.

Also, though I advocate fat taxes, I don't desire them to in any way make purchasing fatty foods prohibitive (like cigarrette taxes currently do). I think that the regular sales tax on fatty foods (where there is a tax) should be apportioned to health care expenditures as people who disproportionately eat these foods account for huge health care expenditures.

Lawrence Solum calls us "intelligent and wide-ranging". I, at least, am incredibly flattered as Solum's is one of my favorite blogs. It may not be as wide-ranging, but it makes up for that with its great intelligence.

Popcorn, you will be relieved to know, is now the official snack food of the state of Illinois.

The same article also notes that a new law requires ATM-manufacturers to set up ATM's so that you can enter in your PIN number backwards to summon the police (if, presumably, some mugger marches you and your ATM card to the nearest ATM). The article doesn't note what will happen to anybody whose PIN number is palindromic.

Will's entry reminds me of an encounter I had with a wasp last summer. It was particularly aggressive and I'm particularly allergic. I always write eulogies for departed creatures in my life so here is the Elegy for the Wasp.

Mine aggressor hath succumbed on battlefield this day. The event should give me reason to shout hip hip hooray, As I lived in constant fear of trespassing wasp little For its deadly sting would send me to the hospital.

But it's with heavy heart I say goodbye to the beast,
The insect whom I sprayed and then its little life ceased.
Were its demands any different than mine?
To live free in the world and to roam with its kind?

To be trapped in this house, that is not what it wanted
And I trapped with it, we were mutually haunted.
'Tis a sad fact of war, one of us had to go.
And it was my chemical weaponry that ended the show.

An acetylcholinesterase inhibitor bathed my enemy,
Vanquished, he was done.
The war has finally ended and it is I who has won.

The bookcases in the various houses he lived in were always crammed full, and the bedrooms and hallways were turned into narrow passes between steep cliffs of books and mountains of errant documents that proliferated as he passed and pursued him without mercy in their quest for archival peace. He never was able to read all the books he owned. When he moved to another city he left them in the care of his most trustworthy friends, although he never heard anything about them again, and his life of fighting obliged him to leave behind a trail of books and papers stretching over four hundred leagues from Bolivia to Venezuela.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez; The General in His Labyrinth

I woke up this morning to discover a wasp in my shirt pocket. After a brief chat, we agreed to go our separate ways. Like ladybugs, they're ubiquitous in certain parts around here.
[From Ada:]

An individual's life consisted of certain classified things: "real things" which were unfrequent and priceless, simply "things" which formed the routine stuff of life; and "ghost things," also called "fogs," such as fever, toothaches, dreadful disappointments, and death. Three or more things occcurring at the same time formed a "tower," or if they came in immediate succession, they made a "bridge." "Real towers" and "real bridges" were the joys of life, and when the towers came in a series, one experienced supreme rapture...

Her plump, stickily glistening lips smiled.

(When I kiss you here, he said to her years later, I always remember that blue morning on the balcony when you were eating a tartine au miel; so much better in French.)

The classical beauty of clover honey, smooth, pale, translucent, freely flowing from the spoon and soaking my love's bread and butter in liquid brass. The crumb steeped in nectar.

"Real thing?" he asked.

"Tower," she answered.

And the wasp.

The wasp was investigating her plate. Its body was throbbing.

"We shall try to eat one later," she observed, "but it must be gorged to taste good. Of course, it can't sting your tongue. No animal will touch a person's tongue. When a lion has finished a traveler, bones and all, he always leaves the man's tongue lying like that in the desert" (making a negligent gesture)...

"All right. And the third Real Thing?"

...Van, getting no answer, left the balcony. Softly her tower crumbled in the sweet silent sun.

Happy New Year's Day.

I'm sure the great minds at Vice Squad know more about this than I do, but I noticed a sign when I stopped at the grocery store yesterday, warning us that it was illegal to sell alcohol in Indiana on New Year's Day, so we ought to stock up before midnight.

What purpose does this law even putatively serve? Is the idea to keep people from going on 8 AM drinking benders on January First? To encourage them to lay in extra provisions in case they do feel the need to keep drinking?

Just one set of poker odds to report this morning. A-7 of Hearts are a definite favorite (60/40) against an unsuited King-Ten. Nonetheless, luck rewarded my irrational love of the K-T and my choice to go all-in with it.

(repeated often as a player mucks his pre-flop hand): "Just because they're high doesn't mean they're good!"

Like Snow, by Robert Graves:

She, then, like snow in a dark night,

Fell secretly. And the world waked

With dazzling of the drowsy eye,

So that some muttered 'Too much light'

And drew the curtains close.

Like snow, warmer than fingers feared,

Though to soil friendly;

Holding the histories of the night

In yet unmelted tracks.