1) Quite right too.

2) About time.

3) Grand Wizard would be a better title, wouldn’t it? Shame that someone had to go and spoil it for everyone.

(announced)

Happy Leap Day!

In the famous seventeenth-century case of The King v Lockwood, 99 Eng Rep 379 (KB 1682), it was established that no person may be punished for any crime of poaching on the King’s manor committed before midnight on Leap Day. 

“For the Kinges writte doeth notte runne,” the court explained, “On this lawless, irregular, and unholie daye. Onlie the judgement of God or the courts of Faerie may punnishe a man for his crimes on this daye.”

Later decisions of U.S. courts have extended this venerable principle of common law to a number of crimes, including but not limited to: smuggling, see United States v. Curtis, 147 F.2d 1001 (2d Cir. 1952), horsetheft and murder, see State of Texas v. Sanchez, 11 So. 317 (Tex. 1933), credit-card fraud, see State of New York v. Manella, 644 N.E.2d 1220 (N.Y. 1994), violations of Section 10b of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, see United States v. Milken, 19 F.2d 971 (2d. Cir. 1988), and sodomy, see Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003). 

Now’s your chance!

This post does not constitute legal advice, and no attorney-client relationship is created hereby.  Let me know how it goes, though.

Isn’t he adorable? We call him Wilbur, after my grandfather, who he resembles.

You can’t really train siphonophores for much, but they’re surprisingly affectionate pets.  

(via)

Do you live in New York? Do you have nothing very much to do on Tuesday nights?

No you don’t. Stop pretending.

Would you like to be indoors, somewhere warm and reasonably quiet? Somewhere where for an hour or two you can get away from the wild dogs, the gangs, the fucking pigs hassling you? Somewhere with chairs?

Me too!

On March 4, 2008, I will be reading — along with Sarah Beth Durst – at the Melville Gallery, South Street Seaport, for the New York Review of Science Fiction.

Something to bear in mind, anyway.

BYOB, please.

Two sockpuppets offer a highly persuasive Marxist/Foucauldian analysis of the psychological contradiction underlying Larkin’s Toads.

Happy Neo-Marxist Sockpuppet Sunday, everyone!

ToadsWhy should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?

Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison -
Just for paying a few bills!
That’s out of proportion.

Lots of folk live on their wits:
Lecturers, lispers,
Losers, loblolly-men, louts-
They don’t end as paupers;

Lots of folk live up lanes
With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines-
They seem to like it.

Their nippers have got bare feet,
Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets - and yet
No one actually starves.

Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout, Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that’s the stuff
That dreams are made on:

For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow,

And will never allow me to blarney
My way of getting
The fame and the girl and the money
All at one sitting.

I don’t say, one bodies the other
One’s spiritual truth;
But I do say it’s hard to lose either,
When you have both.

– Philip Larkin

Happy Poetry Sunday, everyone!

Jonathan Schwarz unearths a treasure:

Imagine that there were a Beatles record only a few people knew existed. And imagine you got the chance to listen to it, and as you did, your excitement grew, note by note. You realized it wasn’t merely as good as Rubber Soul, or Revolver, or Sgt. Pepper’s. It was much, much better. And now, imagine how badly you’d want to tell other Beatles fans all about it.

That’s how I feel for my fellow William Kristol fans. You loved it when Bill said invading Iraq was going to have “terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East”? You have the original recording of him explaining the war would make us “respected around the world” and his classic statement that there’s “almost no evidence” of Iraq experiencing Sunni-Shia conflict? Well, I’ve got something that will blow your mind!

I’m talking about Kristol’s two-hour appearance on C-Span’s Washington Journal on March 28, 2003. . .

Good times, good times.

(via)

Some discussion of John McCain downblog. This video’s worth a look, if you’re interested in that sort of thing. One of our most respected political journalists offers his predictions for the first 100 days of a McCain administration:

Exciting stuff!

People who have drifted over here from Joshua Palmatier’s Livejournal may be interested to know that I’ve just put up a guest entry on Joshua Palmatier’s Livejournal inviting people to drift over here. Take a look!

Non-US persons unsure of the difference between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama: let these videos sum the issues up for you.

One:

Two:

That pretty much says everything you need to know.

UPDATE: Bonus video summing-up of John McCain: