Latest Japanese trend that I'm oddly intrigued by: ear-cleaning parlors.

Alas, speaking of Japanese trends, Sony appears to be shutting down its robot production just as it was starting to get interesting. (More.) On the other hand, if I end up having a couple of cats living with me, it's just as well that I don't get a robot dog.

Via Slim, a story of a sad clown, and the resulting chat with the journalist over the ethical implications of driving a gambling addict to Atlantic City for a story.

I'm a tad peeved that Mozart's 250th is getting so much more attention than Franklin's 300th.

Good news: Matthew Perry signs with "Studio 7". Bad news: only a 13-episode commitment, so without a big opening, it could disappear fast. NBC's schedule is so empty, however, the show will really have to bomb for them not to pick up the back nine.

1. Slim, obviously trying to provoke me, sent me this interview with Opinionista Melissa Lafsky. Oh, you mean Lafsky had to work sixty hours a week at Littler Mendelson? I hadn't realized that she had to work 9-to-8 five days a week, plus every other Saturday, for what must have been fourteen whole months (minus the one month she spent studying for the bar the second time). In a hellish faceless office with fourteen other attorneys! And was writing three blog posts a week on top of that. Well, then, that changes my opinion completely.

2. "Quaker Penn" wants to blame the Blackberry for making associates more summonable and reachable. This naively assumes that law firms didn't expect their attorneys to be available on the weekend before the Blackberry became common. As an attorney who practiced both before and after remote e-mail devices, I can assure you that my weekends got a lot better when I didn't have to be sitting at a computer to check e-mail.

The "Law Professor Blogs Network" blogs are of variable quality, some better than others. But it's especially annoying that they don't provide useful links to things (such as, say, cases) freely available on the Web if it's material that Lexis would otherwise charge someone to look up. It's fascinating to watch posts come up on my Bloglines only to see them edited a few hours or days later, with the useful link sent to the memory hole and replaced with the for-pay Lexis link. It makes me less willing to read them.

I also don't like the "open new window" aspect to their hyperlinks, a growing problem in too many blogs and websites (including the Point of Law sidebar, for some reason). I know how to open a new window if I want to open a new window. Don't hijack my browser.

Update: Network member Bill Childs states that there's no official policy of favoring Lexis links. Upon a query from Childs, I found that the post that had originally caught my attention in Bloglines was replacing a dead free-web link with a Lexis link—though another edited post that also caught my attention did delete a Westlaw link. Both of these modifications do have innocent explanations (though my complaint was not that such a policy would be sinister, but rather that Lexis, if they had such a policy, was being annoying). Still, the site in question does seem to have a Lexis bias: a quick skim of the site finds at least one other post that uses a Lexis link instead of the publicly available web link. The blog in question was not Childs's blog, which has generously linked to Overlawyered, Point of Law, and the Liability Project.

you can order a 100x100 at In'N'Out. Though I can understand why the person who ordered it never wants to go back again. What amazes me is that they seem to have ordered fries on the side.

The Internet has made the secret menu considerably less secret: this blog even has pictures.

For the month down 0.5% (vs. -0.1% for the S&P 500). For the calendar year 2005, I was up 5.9% (vs. 3.0% for the S&P 500 and vs. 5.25% opportunity cost). I beat the market, and even beat my cost of capital, but I feel dissatisfied. The frustrating thing about this year was how many of my decisions were to switch from a stock still in an upswing to a stock (like BBI) that was plummeting or (like EK) that was about to plummet or (like WMT) was just sort of meandering sideways. I missed out on a 50% increase in BFT and a 40% increase in OATS that way; by profit-taking 80% of my PKS holdings at 7.45, I've mostly missed its run-up to nearly 11. In fact, if I had just sat on the portfolio I held on January 1, 2005, and didn't make a single trade, I'd be up over 15% today (instead of up 8%, as I've had a pretty good January 2006 so far).

The BBI hit was the biggest drag on the portfolio. If I had liquidated my BBI position on January 2, 2005 instead of repeatedly investing more into it, my return would've been 10% higher. Of course, with that sort of perfect foresight, I could've put my life's savings into Apple Computer on January 2 and more than doubled my money.

Speaking of investing in stocks that are plummeting, I bought into PIR at 9.27 today, and was rewarded with an immediate one-day decline to 9.03.

My January 2005 return was -7%, so my 12-month number will look a lot better next month, and I'll feel better again.

Lafsky is shocked that people are reacting negatively to her attempt to portray her experience at Littler Mendelson as representative, and reprints a nasty e-mail. Two interesting things:

1) As several people have noted, "X'XXXXXXX & XXXXX LLP" doesn't really hide the name of the firm if it's O'Melveny & Meyers LLP (by coincidence, my former firm). Except OMM doesn't quite compute. It's possible that an attorney there was dumb enough to sign his firm name to a nasty e-mail, and risk it being republished, and suffer a stern talking-to from firm counsel for signing the firm name (or using firm e-mail) to send that sort of note. But it seems unlikely. Then again, people send embarrassing e-mails all the time, so who knows? But there are other unlikely elements: (a) O'Melveny attorneys don't generally view themselves as "Top Ten" except with respect to some subspecialities; and (b) O'Melveny recruiting policy was so absurdly grade-conscious in the 2003 timeframe (dictating to on-campus recruiting interviewers required class rank for various schools with ridiculous specificities of "top 4%" and "top 12%") that it seems unlikely that it would've given Lafsky an offer out of 3L year. But, again, neither of these things are impossible. Other possibilities: Lafsky is actually referring to a different firm; Lafsky made this e-mail up, too.

2) But, assuming the e-mail is real, it was entertaining that Lafsky found it to be a validation of her philosophy that a law-firm career is inherently unrewarding. Presumably, Lafsky also finds positive reinforcement to be a validation of her thesis. In short, any e-mail she receives makes her feel more right, and her thesis can't be falsified, at least in her head.

A lot of writers who heavily rely upon their life-story for their material suffer from inevitable recursive problems that make their writing less interesting: as their life inevitably ceases to be about the real world and more about the internal life of the writer, they don't have a lot to say. Philip Roth somehow worked around the fact that he was so frequently writing about a middle-aged Jewish writer to produce worthwhile material; but a memoirist acquaintance of mine was eventually reduced to writing pieces for Salon.com about how she was surprised and offended that her fans felt they knew about her life on the basis of her memoir. It took less than a week for the main focus of the Opinionista blog to be her in-box. Once she starts posting about e-mails about posts about e-mails about her blog about herself is when we'll know that her writing can no longer extend past the Schwarzschild radius.

Xoxohth thread 1 and 2.

Congratulations to frequent Ethnic Dining attendee and former anony-blogger Trout Almondine for his well-deserved success in this week's Radosh New Yorker Cartoon Anti-Caption Contest.

In case you're an anonymous blogger hoping to quit your real job to write a novel, the Title Scorer has an algorithm to rate the marketability of your title.

in the NY Times. As Amber notes, the author has trouble reconciling Lat's right-wing views with his sense of humor.

Speaking of right-wingers with a sense of humor, Amber's blog has a new tagline that references a famous hoax rather than an Elvis Costello song.

West Wing over May 14 (via ALOTT5MA). The post-Sorkin episodes were pretty bad, and suffered from lack of consistent characterization, dropped plot threads, and an unrealistic presidential primary campaign, which appears to be followed by an unrealistic presidential election.