It has recently come to my attention that John Quincy Adams was nominated and confirmed to the Supreme Court in 1811. [No, this does not bear on the Land Use exam that I am assiduously studying for, but reading a case (Eubank) for land use led me to David Currie's discussion of the case in The Constitution in the Supreme Court which led me back to Currie's The Most Insignificant Justice article, which led me to Judge Easterbrook's reply to the article, which mentions the fact in a footnote.]
Apparently Q.Adams declined the nomination partly because he was busy working for world peace in Russia, and partly because his wife was pregnant and not ready to travel back to America, but there may be more to this, and I have acquired the relevant books to look into when my exams are done.

At any rate, I find JQA an increasingly fascinating character, not just because I am still traumatized by the report I had to do on him in elementary school, nor because he seems to be the only ex-president to argue before the Supreme Court (Nixon and Taft both argued before the S.C. as future presidents, but not after they had been Chief Executives), although these things certainly help. Apparently he also took a dim view of Thomas Jefferson, so I may yet be persuaded to join the Wilkinson line.

UPDATE: A reader corrects me:

I learned something from the blog post reproduced below, but it is incorrect in another respect. JQA is one of three ex-Presidents to argue before the Supreme Court. Grover Cleveland argued a case in 1891 before a bench that included two Justices he had appointed: Chief Justice Melville Fuller and Justice Lucius Q.C. Lamar. Peake v. New Orleans, 139 U.S. 342 (1891). Benjamin Harrison, after serving as President from 1889 to 1893, argued six cases before the Supreme Court between 1896 and 1898. He appeared before Justices David J. Brewer, Henry B. Brown, and George Shiras, Jr., whom he had appointed. He never appeared before his other appointee, Justice Howell E. Jackson, who died in 1895. ...

All of this information, and more information that probably will interest you (including citations for B. Harrison's six post-presidential arguments), comes from Allen Sharp, Presidents as Supreme Court Advocates: Before and After the White House, 28 J. S. Ct. Hist. 116 (2003).

As Raffi (hard not to keep writing his name as "Waddling Thunder") pointed out, there has been some should-I-or-shouldn't-I iPod blogging around here. Now that my latest chintzy CD player (bought at the Crow's Nest clearance sale) has once more shuffled off the digital coil, it is time to reassess again.

I am currently feeling a bit flush with scholarship money (and a drop in my rent by an order of magnitude next year), or else I would be ashamed to even contemplate the extravagance. I will also face a 30ish-minute commute to and from work this summer, so having some method of listening to music would be nice. It would also be nice to have something to take into the gym. I have about 10.3 GB of music and other audio files at the moment, but that will increase as I finish converting all of my CDs to MP3s (almost all are MP3s and about a dozen songs were bought using iTunes's and are therefore infected with DRM). I'm not a computer whiz, so I don't demand that it be able to hack into the Imperial Scomp Link or anything, but it should work, last, and not annoy me; I'm also not computer-illiterate, so if it requires a little bit of playing with to use, that's fine. And I will feel better about buying one the less it costs. If I am too racked with indecision I will buy another cheap CD player until it breaks 15 months later, but at some point this becomes about as inefficient as leasing a car rather than owning it.

I have already found thoughts on portable MP3 players from Heidi Bond, Ask Metafilter (here, here, and here), the November 2004 Consumer Reports (which favors something called the Creative Zen Touch and the iPod a close second), Amber Taylor, and from three friends-of-Crescat who own them, two in New Haven ("nice but too pricey") and one in Firenze ("basically diabolical ... part of the need of minds unable to cope with silence, with the challenge of meditation, with being still. 'WE ROT OURSELVES WITH MOTION.'"). More Comments are very welcome.