I'll be talking about the state's report on the Virginia Tech murders on RNN tonight. The things I do to procrastinate from writing a book review.

With about one day to go before debate is closed, 36 out of 52 Wikipedia editors (not including abstentions) think I am notable, though some just barely.

I don't know if this National Law Journal story, which wasn't supposed to be published until Tuesday, makes me more notable or less notable.

I imagine it would amuse Slim that I have a Wikipedia entry three times longer than Arthur Miller, even though my entry has only two sentences (only one of which is accurate) describing my legal writing. (My cousin Garance beat me into Wikipedia by a few months, but her article is only a paragraph. Our million-book-selling aunt and newspaperman grandfather have no Wikipedia entries.) Of course, there are minor Pokemon characters with Wikipedia entries longer than all three of us combined.

Slim, unlike me, has been notably mentioned by the notable Dahlia Lithwick and the DC Examiner, and notably invented a notable national holiday that was noted by notable blogger Glenn Reynolds, so I eagerly await Slim's Wikipedia entry.

It's a little embarrassing that my law school graduating class has several Supreme Court clerks, a prosecutor (and former roommate) whose criminal-trial victory over a CEO garnered national headlines, an attorney for the president, and several law professors, but I appear to be the only one with a Wikipedia entry. An ex of mine, the author and NPR commentator, is absent also.

Notable people (as determined by Wikipedia) who have attended my Super Bowl parties, in alphabetical order: David Bernstein; Christina Kahrl; David Lat. Am I leaving someone out?

In the August 27 Legal Times:

To the editor:

I appreciated the chance to speak with reporter Tony Mauro about Stoneridge v. Scientific-Atlanta, an upcoming Supreme Court case that will be discussed at an AEI panel on Oct. 5. Unfortunately, a sentence in his Aug. 20 article [“High Court Head Count at Issue,” Page 1] incorrectly implied that I thought the decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit in the case was an “anti-investor ruling,” when that characterization is solely Mauro’s.

On the contrary, as I have written in The Wall Street Journal and told Mauro, I believe that the 8th Circuit’s dismissal of the case redounds to the benefit of investors in general and that the best result for investors (if not for trial lawyers) would be affirmance by the Supreme Court. And I say that even though I am a putative class member in Stoneridge.

Theodore H. Frank
Resident Fellow
American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research
Washington, D.C.

Wikipedia somehow puttered along without an article on me for quite some time, and it's extraordinarily unlikely that a schoolchild hoping to do research on me was disappointed.

Today?

Me: Take a look at this. It's hilarious, akin to watching the angels judge you at the Pearly Gates.
Slim: "Early life and career"?! Did you write this?
Me: Heck, no. Would I get the name of my own blog wrong? Look at the article history. Ten editors suddenly thought it exceedingly important that this gap in the Wikipedia archives be filled, and be filled immediately: sixty edits to the article in four hours.
[Slim reads through the talk page debate over photo copyrights.]
Me: Don't you want to read about my "Early life and career"?
Slim: It's kind of creepy, actually.
Me: I'm really enjoying watching the debate over whether I'm "notable" enough for Wikipedia. I don't know which verdict is worse. I think Oscar Wilde said the only thing worse than not having a Wikipedia article written about you was having a Wikipedia article written about you.
Slim: Who's "Wikidemo"?
Me: Heck if I know. He or she's convinced I'm important, though.
Slim: You should make "Like it or not, a political activist can boost himself to prominence and notability by writing a lot, taking part extensively in the public debate in America, and catching people's attention. He seems to have done so." the slogan for the blog.
Me: I'm partial to "He is a lawyer. One of millions it seems." But poor Sara. She works so hard finding court files for me and one guy thinks she doesn't even exist. Little did she know that she was critical to the research-assistant-criterion of the Wikipedia notability test. The good news is that I don't have to worry about the construction noise next door because I don't even have an office.
Slim (moving on to a different web page): I thought you were going to blog about bacon.
Me: The really fun part is going to come after they delete the article, and then the press coverage comes out with the announcement of the new job September 5 and then someone will create the article again and then someone will nominate the article for deletion again and complain about the bad faith of the first person and the first person will complain that the situation has changed and how dare his good faith be challenged.

Slim reads Pandagon to get annoyed, I correct typos at Wikipedia.

But Lord knows I'm not going to touch that article (or deletion debate) myself, as much as I'm tempted to correct the guy who read this and comes away thinking I was responding to John Fabian Witt when I was talking about a completely different subject. It's actually much more interesting to see it get put together by others on the fly, and if I were to copyedit it, not only would a bunch of people scream bloody murder that I was editing the article, but I'd miss out on the social experiment of seeing how accurate Wikipedia is on the one subject where there is no question I am the world's leading expert. And it has sort of the weird sensation that must be similar to reading one's own misprinted obituary.

I almost hesitate to comment on the errors in the current version: for whatever reason, the blog they link to is this one, with less than 1% of the readership of the other two blogs I wrote for in the last three years, and also the one I write for the least often, albeit the only one where I'm going to talk about my Wikipedia entry. (Speaking of which, you, gentle readers, all twenty of you, shouldn't touch that deletion debate. Unless you have something really clever to say for or against my notability. But even then, Wikipedia disregards the opinions of editors with no history of editing Wikipedia.)

But if I did mention mistakes, some Wikipedia editor will correct the mistakes, and I'll lose the social-experiment value. And the article is perversely more entertaining when it includes the minor factual errors and awkward phrasing (such as the decision in the first sentence to use ellipses and a prepositional phrase instead of simply repeating the original quote's sparer adjectival noun). I especially like seeing the Wikipedia tactic of anticipating accusations of failing to meet the notability standard by adding the adverb "notably" to the article. Hey, only notable people get that adverb.

There are certainly interesting examples of systemic bias: the most widely-read and influential stuff of mine is behind the Wall Street Journal subscription wall, so none of it ends up in the article, which heavily leans to the easily Googlable. And since Google searches for "Ted Frank" don't know to look for the pages with my full name...

And, of course, the interests of the editors creates its own slant. Class actions and the theory of scheme liability are so boring, so instead I'm quoted on poppier matters like Michael Moore, the Virginia Tech murders, and, of course, Wikipedia itself (the last from a CBS story I'd completely forgotten about). (The quote section has since been completely edited out of the article.) Reflecting perhaps the ages of the editors, my college life gets a full paragraph, albeit luckily without the now-ironic interview the Boston Globe did of me my sophomore year. Bruce Borowsky would be proud that The Watch (which apparently limped on through 2004 and still has a live web-page in a school where not a single one of its four-year students has seen an issue) makes the cut for my notable achievements over multi-million dollar litigations won or controversial Supreme Court briefing disputes.

I'm surprised Mr. Zywicki did not mention the simple solution to the "two-income tax trap," which many couples, both young and old, have discovered: Don't get married.

Donald J. Libert
Lancaster, Ohio

This ancient video from CBS News is fascinating not only for the appearance at the 4:20 or so mark of a very young Karl Rove, but for the fact that there is a 4:20 mark for a single tv news story and that the people getting interviewed get to speak in complete paragraphs.

Speaking of short soundbites, I am quoted briefly in both Forbes (and see related Overlawyered post) and in the Legal Times (again).

September 25: Moderating panel on patent litigation reform at AEI

September 28: Speaking at AEI panel on Supreme Court term

October 5: Stoneridge v. Scientific-Atlanta panel at AEI

Frans de Waal rebuts the recent New Yorker article expressing skepticism about his take on bonobos.

I'm appalled by the massive amounts of carbon wasted by all the white pixels on Chris Goodall's website. Plus, it should be all text with no fancy graphics, so less energy is used in downloads and programming.

Cowen: Goodall "can mail back his Harvard MBA by boat."

Slim: Look! I reorganized the bathroom!
Me (looking in garbage): You threw out my brush!
Slim: It's not your brush. It had blonde hair in it.
Me: It doesn't mean it's not my brush. It just means a blonde used my brush.
Slim: Many, many, many times. It had lots of blonde hair.
Me: Where did you find it?
Slim: In one of the drawers.
Me: It must have been my ex-wife's. How can you throw that away? It's the only thing I have to remember her by.*
Slim: Look in your wallet.
Me: Huh?
Slim: Remember her by looking in your wallet and seeing how there's less money than there should be.

*That, and the maple syrup.

The inspiration for Omar is out of prison after 17 years and getting married.

The Twisted House in Sopot, Poland, just outside of Gdansk. See also the advertising-laden About.com. It's not clear to me that the official Sopot website has a license from Warner Brothers; it seems to have no mention of the Twisted House itself.

More on DailyKos anti-Semitism. There are certainly right-wing blogs that are just as bad, but they don't have presidential candidates pandering to them.