Phonespelling.com makes the game I'd play every move easier.

People taking the bar exam probably have no recollection of "Schoolhouse Rock" except through Simpsons parodies, but if Schoolhouse Rock covered the res gestae hearsay exception, and was made up of Lego characters, it might look something like this (via Schaeffer).

Who's sufficiently nerdy to want to wait in line at 12:01 am at the Arlington Barnes & Noble on July 15/16? It might be fun if there's a group doing it, otherwise I'll order on Amazon. E-mail me.

A fascinating variant on Pascal's Wager.

My finance professor and Judge Easterbrook would scoff at my refusal to subscribe to the efficient markets hypothesis and just put my money blindly in an index fund, but I'm pleased with a pre-tax 12.7% return for the last twelve months, especially since the Dow was down over that time and the S&P 500 was up only 4% or so. My return for June was 5.25%—if I thought I could do that every month, I'd never work, but it was just happenstance. Again, though, it was in a month when the Dow was down, and the S&P 500 was flat. I can't brag too much: this good month in June basically erased my losses for January through May, and I'm down 0.3% since December 31—though that's compared to minus 5% for the Dow and minus 2% for the S&P 500.

The year could've been better, but I took profits on my Boeing at 59; it reached 66 today. Most painfully, I rode Wild Oats Markets up to 9, down to 6.40, and got out for a small profit at 7.66 because I didn't want to deal with the volatility—only to see it rise to 10 within a couple of weeks, and now at 11 and change. I'd feel better about it if I hadn't used the proceeds to buy into Carmax at 30: bad timing, as it's since dropped to 26.60; I doubled up at 25.22, ameliorating my losses somewhat. I should've gone with my gut to pull the trigger on GM at 25, but I hesitated, and it popped to 31 within a week, and is now 34 with what would've been a sweet 8% dividend. I showed more patience with my most successful investment: E-Loan, which I first bought in at 2.50, and kept buying as it dropped to 2.10, and held on as it dropped to 2. It's now at 3.34. My Six Flags investment was also a roller-coaster (yuk yuk): bought in September at 5.76, more in December at 4.83, more in March at 4.13, more in May at 3.84, and it's returned to 4.65, just shy of even for me. I still think it's worth 10, but I've already fully backed up the truck.

(As with all my posts, this isn't investment advice, and you'd be an idiot to buy or sell a stock just because you saw some blogger talking about it.)

Man, these days you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a blogger, but I remember when blogging was sufficiently rare that if you went to a bar with a bunch of bloggers, you were obligated to post about it. I crashed the Reason get-together Monday night at Mackey's ($2.75 draft Killian Red on Mondays!) and sat with LA krewe Cathy Seipp, Matt Welch, and Emmanuelle; met all sorts of Reasonites, such as Tim Cavanaugh and Nick Gillespie; and saw cameos from Will Wilkinson and Matt Yglesias. All that firepower in one bar was sufficiently commonplace that no one thought to mention it on their blog, though perhaps Cathy will have some good tales to tell when she gets back to the West Coast.

As the New York Times faints dead away at the thought of Gitmo prisoners allegedly being required to confront their fear of the dark (via Frum), it's worth reading an account of real political torture in Iran.

is Ronald Reagan, according to a poorly-designed Discovery Channel vote. The only sensible answers are George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, or Benjamin Franklin, depending on your definition, with partial credit awarded to someone who names Thomas Jefferson.

To list the top 100 vote-getters is kind of silly: if I vote for George Washington as #1, it gives me no chance to rank Thomas Edison ahead of Oprah (#9) or Teddy Roosevelt ahead of Elvis (#8). So the sensible vote gets split between legitimate historical figures and it only takes a handful of votes combined with time-bias and historical ignorance (what's FDR's Q rating?) to push mediocrities up the list.

It could've been worse: voting options included Ellen DeGeneres, Christopher Reeve, Dr. Phil, Madonna, Mel Gibson, John Edwards (but no John Kerry), Michael Moore, and Martha Stewart. The presence of so many B-list celebrities on the list (criminy, Reeve isn't even the greatest American in a wheelchair) no doubt encouraged votes for Oprah.

As best I can tell, there were only four Jewish nominees (three scientists and a moviemaker), but four prominent anti-Semites.

The Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection is shiny.

Radosh and various Throwing Things have been raving about the short-lived 2002 series "Firefly" for some time, but they're fairly promiscuous with their television praise. I had previously skipped the "Buffy" phenomenon, and feel I watch too much TV as it is. Still, the Amazon ratings are phenomenal. And then notorious TV-hater Cowen was converted by other econ-bloggers, so when Shani and Dave also recommended it, I bit the bullet and borrowed the DVD from Dave. So, no surprise, I really like it, and heartily recommend it. Whereas "Star Trek" was a sort of "'Wagon Train' to the stars" in the famous pitch-line, this is more like (a network-sanitized) "Deadwood" in space. The show is formulaic—you can feel the character archetypes being cut and pasted, complete with the inexperienced character that others can have plausible plot exposition conversations with—but it's a good formula, and executed well. I've seen only the pilot and an episode into it, but I haven't had any jarring moments of implausibility like I do with other science-fiction series (not to mention dramas); so far, it hangs together better than "The West Wing" or "Deadwood" does. I hear both that later episodes are better, and more frustrating because of the various subplots that end up unresolved due to the premature cancellation. Too bad HBO or somebody can't pick this up, but I'll be there for the "Serenity" movie opening night in September. And now I can watch the "Serenity" preview and have a better sense of what's going on; I saw it before "Batman Begins" before I'd seen any of the DVD, and then the preview didn't add to my wanting to see the movie.

I saw and enjoyed "Batman Begins," feeling new and additional respect for Christopher Nolan. We're in a golden age of comic book movies: "Batman Begins," "Spiderman 2," "Sin City," and "The Incredibles" are all within the last fourteen months, and all have to be within the top ten comic-book movies of all time, and one of them is probably the best of all time, though I haven't decided which. The combination of CGI and directors and writers who really care about the material makes a big difference. It's fascinating how much Michael Keaton's portrayal fifteen years ago influenced Christian Bale.

It amused me as I watched the movie to think how the plaintiffs' lawyers of today would sue deep pockets like Bruce Wayne, Wayne Industries, and Gotham City for their slight relationship for the actions of super-bad-guys. After all, LA fears a nine-digit verdict in the insane trial of the city for the murder of Notorious B.I.G. Plus the movie showed Hollywood's typical confusion of corporate governance issues. (Paging Larry Ribstein.)

I started to do a post for this blog, then decided to spend twenty minutes making it marginally substantive, and posted it to Overlawyered. Fark picked it up, 34000 people clicked through, and the Batman fanboys went absolutely nuts in the comment section, if you want to read several dozen people expound upon how I have no life because I spent slightly less time writing a post as someone who wrote several hundred words trying to explain the plausibility of possible legal loopholes Bruce Wayne could've used in a movie featuring a "focused microwave beam that can vaporize the water supply" without damaging anything else and an antidote that can be created in under 48 hours to permanently immunize someone from a permanently-acting hallucinogen. (Let's not forget the giant castle of ninjas on the top of a remote mountaintop.)

On suckful.net, via Defamer.

KFC training tapes, Michael Jordan trying to do a Gatorade commercial, and many other worthwhile novelties are among the MP3s on this page.

A datapoint on the question of deadpan. I wrote in Overlawyered about a stupid prank involving boar tusks that resulted in millions of dollars of litigation and a $250,000 settlement. Walter was sent the following e-mail from an apparent law student:

Subject: In Alabama, the Tusks ar Looser? (June 22 issue.)
Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 16:41:38 -0500

Shouldn't this be "In Washington ,the Tusks are Looser" since the story
is about a Washington dentist and a Washington court?

[name omitted]
Montgomery, Alabama

I thought he merited a response.

Mr. [...],

Walter tells me you wrote inquiring about the title I gave a post.  I wish to explain.

75 years ago, Captain Jeffrey T. Spaulding, the African explorer, made his celebrated observation about Alabama, and, though he is an accused Marxist, I decided not to change the quote, as irrelephant as it might be.  No offense was meant to the fine people of Alabama, be they from Birmingham, Montgomery, Decatur, or any other Alabama city—the names of the others escape me at the moment.

Best wishes,

Ted Frank

The last word:

Mr. Frank,
I appreciate the explanation even though I don't understand why an African explorer's comment on Alabama in 1930 would be memorable. Obviously I am missing something.  I thought that the fact that the city in Washington was named Auburn led you to think of Alabama.  Surely you have heard of Auburn, Alabama!

Regards,

[name omitted]

The tusks. That's not so easy to say. Tusks. You try it some time.