A quick jaunt through Google on my name will reveal a lot of things, some slightly confusing, some more than embarassing.

But there was one I was particularly proud of: Wikipedia.

Yes, for a brief and shining month in my otherwise drab graduate career, I had defined (as quoted by a vegetarian biker in Massachusetts) for God and the world of Wikipedia users what a transheterozygote was. I was proud--we were proud (I share the spoils of my victory with everyone here at Crescat), but alas, the tenured professors have it once again, and the definition has been replaced by a more worthy (and, even I've got to admit, clearer) explanation.

I would like to point out right now that this post could go horribly awry--that I could be the flailing dictator of some hapless country and clutch onto my meager power, white-knuckled and spitting, decrying the degenerate nature of systems of knowledge and worth.

But (thank God for praeteritio) I'll spare my dignity.

Watch me (and how!) bow gracefully instead. Watch me turn on my heel, head slightly slouched, feet slightly dragging, red tinging my cheeks, moisture welling in my eyes, as I fumble, dejected back again into lab.

After putting together the relevant pieces of information last summer (interest in clean air and water issues, Yale undergrad, untenured law professor), I managed to stop all productivity in the IJ office for about an hour as I got my co-workers to start searching faculty webpages to figure out who must be Juan Non-Volokh, the anonymous guest-blogger on the Volokh Conspiracy. We zeroed in on Jonathan Adler, just as most of the speculators in this thread did, with the one concern that it seemed odd that Adler would be so worried about having too big of an online presence. But as the speculators noted, in 2002, NRO looked a lot different from some blog with a funny V-name.

Anyway, now it turns out that we were right. (My implausible second guess was Peter Appel). It seems silly to say "welcome" to somebody has been here all along, but there you go.

I find it difficult to object to translating the Star Spangled Banner to Spanish. I think it's great that lots of people in America speak English, and unfortunate that more people don't, or can't, learn. It's just that I don't think that translating our national anthem into another tongue in anyway jeopardizes the sanctity or promotion of our own.

That said, the translation of official texts is rife with all sorts of riddles. My dim recollection is that there were proposals in the First Congress to publish the U.S. Code in German as well as English. What a disaster that might have been for the field of statutory interpretation. It's hard enough to be a textualist when the text is written in a single language accessible to all of the legislators.

And of course translating poetry and songs has its own difficulties. As T.S. Eliot put it in his Nobel Address:

Painting, sculpture, architecture, music, can be enjoyed by all who see or hear. But language, especially the language of poetry, is a different matter. Poetry, it might seem, separates peoples instead of uniting them. But on the other hand we must remember, that while language constitutes a barrier, poetry itself gives us a reason for trying to overcome the barrier. To enjoy poetry belonging to another language, is to enjoy an understanding of the people to whom that language belongs, an understanding we can get in no other way.

As few of our readership know, Will Baude and I initially bonded over guns and airplanes, but recent events, especially my discovery of shockingly anti-Terran annotation scrawled in the margins of his Ada (borrowed from him on a recent jaunt to Kaluga, Maine, with his new floramour Milly), have caused me to rethink our relationship. Indeed, the insults have mounted recently, from his refusal to refer to me by my proper ethnic disputation (Jew'panese), and his decrying of fellow resident ethnic genious Sudeep and my posts as substanceless. Well, this charade has gone on for too long!

Should Will decide that he is man enough to confront me in person (provided he pays for the airship passage, and Gamaliel revises the dueling statute before next Michaelmas), I am willing to meet him at the time and place of his choosing (excepting Lone Star, Texas or Stars Hollow, Connecticut). Until then, I suggest that he hone his alpenstock, and keep his poodle, Scrufola, at a safe distance from open windows. My email is [publicly available at this website]. My address is [well-known to my snowman]. My phone number is [probably still on someone innapropriate's speed dial]. And should it come to that point, I am willing to offer you the same choice Pushkin once offered to zany British comedian John Cleese: Gino's or Pat's. With whizz.