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Kentucky Legal Research: Legal Awesomeness

Hiatus

Blog abandoned, for the nonce.

If you need something to read in the meantime, China apparently has millions of blogs to choose from.

Savoring Sagas, Reviling Rhymes

William Safire has proposed that "The Gamaliel," a faux award along the lines of the annual fiction-spoofing Bulwer-Lytton prize, be given to whichever politician proves to be "the most egregious alliterator" in a given year's stump speech.

I've never understood the bad rap that alliteration gets in Modern English. Old English relied heavily on alliteration to great effect, with recurrent initial phonemes forming the frame and livening the pulse of Beowulf, The Wanderer, The Seafarer, and all those other classic Anglo-Saxon texts that still delight us all, young and old, into the wee hours every evening as we bask in the fading flames 'round the homey hearth.

(Of course, there may be some people out there in the world who don't spend their evenings reciting Old English sagas to one another, but if there are, I don't want to know about it.)

Rhyming, on the other hand, a cagey, shifty-versed import from the Romance languages, continues unabated on its silly path through our language, slopping itself onto gooey greeting cards and imprisoning pop songs in centuries-old phonological patterns adopted from medieval French. (Don't get me wrong, though: I'll post about the glories of medieval French another time.)

Point: How many disparate conceits have been ineptly yoked together in song simply because they happen to rhyme? (e.g., Sting's coupling "shake and cough" with "Nabokov.") Another Point: Why is the deft use of similar phonemes at the end of words now more prized than the same phonic effect at the beginning of words?

Most Important Point: Why should the failure to improvise on-the-spot rhymes result in that Most Ignominious of Appellations, viz., "sucker MC"?

I understand that some folks feel that alliteration is a cheap, easy, mostly brainless rhetorical device that, just like rhyme, forces dissimilar words into unhappy marriages based solely on superficial phonological traits, without regard for those words' meanings and nuances. Still, I think that the innumerable "modern" composers of song who unthinkingly write in rhyme out of sheer unexamined habit are at least as deserving of pointed pointing-out by word pundits as are "egregious alliterators."

Any rhetorical device (alliteration, rhyme, synechdoche, metaphor, allusion, pretentious foreignisms, usw.) can be handled badly. But in alliteration, I hear echoes of ancient Angle encampments and long-silent Saxon lullabyes. Don't you?

What a Mess!

Today I had occasion for the first time to view this blog using Internet Explorer as my browser, and My, My, What a Mess it Was! Weird fonts of uneven size, margins all over the place.... My blog looked as if it had been put together by our cat, Arlo, whose indifference to the subtleties of the written word is Legendary.

(Or is at least widely acknowledged by Those In the Know.)

(Or is at least often remaked upon here in South Florida.)

(In our house.)

(By me.)

I know that no one reads this blog because blogs are on the way out, but I strongly encourage my millions of non-readers who are still using Internet Explorer to make the switch to Firefox or some other more secure browser. Not only is Firefox faster and easier to use than IE, but (according to the received wisdom here, here, and most entertainingly here) it's much better at deflecting pop-ups and viruses.

Plus, my blog looks SO MUCH SUPER COOLER when it's not viewed with IE. Even Arlo uses Firefox! (Or at least he uses Firefox when I force him to read my blog.)

Sansei desu!

Yahoo! Japan has recently launched "みんなの政治 (Minna no Seiji)" ("Everyone's Government"), a site that includes profiles of Representatives and Senators in the Japanese Diet who can, at their option, indicate not only how they actually voted on bills that have come before the Diet, but can also indicate their 本音 ("honne"), or true feelings, about whether the bill should have been passed or rejected. About a third of all Diet members are currently participating.



Curiously, regular old U.S. Yahoo doesn't seem to offer anything remotely similar. Also, no Diet members seem to have yet indicated that their honne was in fact the opposite of how they actually voted; the closest they come is to indicate その他 ("other") in the honne column, with a link to further comments.

I think this virtu-space for comment and explanation at Minna no Seiji is a fantastic opportunity for politicians and voters to address the complex compromises inherent at the "yes/no" nexus of legislative voting. Don't you?

"Eutopia"

A Proposal: Could we all just agree that, in general parlance, "utopia" (Little Tommy More's coinage from Gk. ou- "not" + topos "place") has come to mean "A Really Super Nice Place," and has shed its original meaning, "Not a Place At All Because It's an Impossible Ideal," BUT that when coupled with "dystopia," as in this recent NYT book review, it should be spelled "eutopia"?

This isn't a proposal based on logic, because "utopia" has essentially been used to mean "eutopia" for almost 400 years now, thus under this proposal we'd have two words, "utopia" and "eutopia," running around meaning the same thing.

But isn't that the case as it is now anyway? "Eutopia" is a "real" word*, after all, even if seldom used. And don't "eu" and "dys" always make a lovely couple on the page?

*BTW, the top two Google results on a search of "eutopia" are (1) a site for pornographic movies, and (2) Eutopia, "a Lay Journal of Catholic Thought."

Desideratum

Think your life is tough? Put yourself in the shoes of the NYT reader who identifies with this introductory sentence from Sunday's travel section:

"If you go to great lengths to choose the perfect vacation spot and a hotel that offers everything from a pillow menu to a flawless view, it can be somewhat dispiriting to arrive at the car rental lot and slide behind the wheel of a generic four-door sedan."

Now that's a heartbreaker: the indignity and shame of driving a generic four-door sedan! And while on vacation, no less!

Keep this hardship in mind, dear readers, the next time your child is hospitalized or your landlord evicts you. At least you're not driving a Corolla!

(My apologies to those of you who do, like me, drive a Corolla. Last year, my wife had the audacity to donate her old Mazda Protege to the American Lung Association. Our apologies now go to the recipient; we didn't mean to dispirit you.)

Joe the Plumber

Sunday morning, I discovered a puddle of water on the downstairs bathroom floor. A steady tick, tick, tick behind the wall suggested that either (a) we had a leaky pipe, or (b) our house's innards had become home to an incontinent analog clock.

The plumber, who couldn't come out until Tuesday, was a jolly, foul-mouthed fellow named Joe who appeared to fix the problem pipe through the sheer force of his mumbled profanity. Upon learning that I was to become a father, Joe congratulated me and confided that he was soon moving up to Delaware, to a place out in the country. "Why're you moving up there?" I asked, gently concealing my jealousy. (Delaware does sound nice: The Shore! The Fields! The Change of Seasons!) "Well, we got us a daughter, and after she's been hangin' out with those Spanish girls and Haitian girls and Cuban girls.... Well, you know what I mean. Up there, they're all like us!" (laughs)

Joe was looking at his plumbing handiwork in the wall as he said this, thus he missed the sudden dimming of the friendly sparkle in my Aryan eyes. I can't remember the last time I'd been in the presence of such casual, cozy racism. I didn't engage Joe in a discussion about how his use of the phrase "like us" is narrow-minded bigotry: defining who's "us" and who's "like" us is something all human beings do, but skin color and national origin are completely unreliable factors in that process. Didn't he know that? Didn't he care that he's dismissing out of hand whole swaths of humanity whose qualities are, in every salient respect, identical to his own? And to his daughter's?

I felt terrible as I paid the bill. Am I fostering further racism by not telling Joe that I think he and I are not, in fact, alike in the way he seems to believe is important? Am I a hypocrite for accepting his plumbing services, while any non-white customers of his may receive inferior service?

The lawyer part of my home-repair-addled brain pipes in: "Well, you don't know that he's treated other customers differently because of their race or national origin. Moreover, he's part of a national company (Roto-Rooter), which charges a flat fee for this sort of repair. Thus, there's no room for race to enter into it; your white guilt is misplaced here. Pay the man and see him out."

I'll try a different plumbing service next time, but that's probably where this will end. Joe didn't say anything that Roto-Rooter should be alerted about: his remarks to me couldn't constitute a cause of action under the law or under a company's personnel policies. But it left me feeling icky, hypocritical, and a bit out to sea. What will I do the next time I'm invited to express my allegiance to the White Man's Club? Will a dimming of the eye-sparkle and a stony silence be enough? (The Lawyer Mind pipes in again: "Who says there'll even be a next time? Racism, especially the overt kind, is on the way out, right? You just happened to hear Joe exhale one of racism's death-rattles. Just relax now and go watch some TV....Oh, look! That show featuring a cast of white people is on!")

Indeed.

Silly cells

NPR had a story this morning about "polite cell phones," phones that can learn your answering habits and thereby deduce when they should and should not ring. For example, once the phone learns to recognize the sound of your boss's voice near you, it'll know not to ring at that point because you're likely to be in an important discussion. (The picture at left illustrates the point: that's me, unwisely taking a call last month while my boss was in the middle of prattling on about my lackadaisical work performance and easy distractability. The call, which ended up costing me my job, was only from a pea stuck to the bottom of the can.)

Since a cell phone would have to be very, very smart indeed to know when the incoming call is more important than whatever's going on around you, researchers have proposed that such phones give each caller (1) information about your present situation, and then (2) a choice about whether to cause the phone to ring (e.g., the caller would hear, "He's [driving to the hospital/daydreaming about unicorns/arguing with a pea] right now. Would you like to interrupt?").

The problem, immediately apparent, is just how much information does one give out, and to whom? Does just anyone get to know that I'm at Border's leafing through this month's Ferret Fancy? Or do I allow one set of information to go to my boss ("He's wowing a client right now. Would you like to interrupt?") and another to my spouse ("He's sorry about the whole 'using the cat as a floormop' thing. Could you please just let it go?")?

What's most striking about the NPR piece is this comment from a developer at Motorola:

"If I could just know if my kids are safe, or if I could just know that my wife is thinking about me, or if I could just know that my parents are OK today, that would be a really cool application that I would love to have on my cellphone."

My goodness, that's epistemological ambition, indeed! Would that we could know all of these things at all times!

Somehow I don't think a cell phone is up to the task of eliminating harm and risk from our lives, which is, at base, what the "smart cell phone" makers are trying to develop and sell to us. Until those annoying physical laws about not being able to be in more than one place at one time are repealed, we can't always know what's up with our spatially-differentiated children and spouses and parents at a given moment. Just ask Schroedinger's cat.

Maybe Motorola has some pan-dimensional, quantum superstring spacetime-phone in development, but me, I'm sticking with my two tin cans on a string. That pea might call back with a job offer.

Bobo's Big Career Choice

Our cat, Arlo,* apparently has no wish to become an attorney. At left is a picture of what he did to a book on the subject.

Contrast this with another volume that he consistently and tenderly paws down, unharmed, from the lowest bookshelf, a volume we often find earnestly beckoning up at us from the bedroom floor:
"The Conversation Begins: Mothers and Daughters Talk About Living Feminism."

Delighted as we are that our cat refuses to conform to gender stereotypes, we are nevertheless hoping he'll soon be able to support both himself and us in whatever career he eventually chooses. After all, he's been freeloading off of us for almost seven years now.

Maybe he wants me to start marketing portfolios of cat-clawed books to local galleries. Surely if elephants can go around trumpeting themselves as "artists" for producing this stuff, then our cat's provocative "clawrifications" of selected books lying around our house constitute brainy, postmodern aesthetic and textual comments.

Or at least comments on the clutter lying around our house.
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*a.k.a. Bobo, Lolo, Hobo, The Littlest Hobo, Harmo, Larlo,
Motion Boy, Crazykins, Dardo, Munkin Mops, Parple-bo, Moan-mo, Bo-bot, Go-bot, Ho-bot, Crying Eyes, Dinky-Do, Home-Bo, He Who Refuses to Touch His Specially-Bought Scratching Post, or Doodles.