Just preparing to take the bar on February 23 and 24. That means I'm studying most of the day, then going to class from 6:00p to 10:00p every night except Sundays. The theory is that, once I've completed the bar, I will have more time for... well... anything. d^_^b

See you on the other side!

...to stop blogging, apparently. Sorry about that. So in lieu of meaty intellectual content, have a pair of pictures. They're worth a thousand words--apiece!--or so I have been led to believe. And while I recognize that two thousand words is nowhere near my usual rambling verbosity (can you believe spell-check lets me get away with that one?)... well, it's going to have to do. d^_~b

Unemployment at 10.2% means...

You know, I'm not really sure what it means. Maybe unemployment would have been ever higher without the stimulus and recovery plans.

But I doubt it.

The 1980s were a challenging decade. Recession, cultural upheaval, and probably the worst fashions in human history--and yes, I am familiar with the Baroque d^_~b. I was born in 1980, so my awareness of the world doesn't really start until about 1984, with He-Man, Superfriends, Transformers, and (early in 1985) Thundercats. I wasn't a G.I. Joe fan, but yeah, I watched that too sometimes.

Anyway, in 1986 we got The Karate Kid, Part II. Somewhere in there, the Disney Channel aired Unico in the Island of Magic, which both terrified and fascinated me. I would not see another anime--or even know it was called anime--until the 1990s, but my on-again, off-again love affair with all things Japanese is clearly another bit of memetic 80s detritus, washed up by the storm that brought MTV to our televisions--and Nintendo to our shores.

Why do we care more about laws that sound good than laws that do good?

My short-form argument is this: the First Amendment applies to bigots, too. What somebody says while brutalizing another person may interest the jury (e.g. probative of motive), but they should ultimately go to jail for the beating, not the speaking. The speaking should not serve as a magic wand for transporting the matter to federal court--and it definitely should not be the basis for increased criminal sanctions, because that would be a clear violation of the First Amendment.

(And it should go without saying that we ought never assume bigotry simply because the victim belongs to a politically powerful superminority, so some expression of hate is presumably necessary to make it a "hate crime.")

I haven't had any spam in a long while. Apparently it is because my spam filter was broken and forbidding any new comments from anyone. You people need to tell me when things are broken, I just assumed you didn't love me anymore.

...hello? Is anyone there? Hello? d^_~b

Anyway, it should be fixed now. Hopefully this means the return of valuable comments, and not just the return of the bots.

I was noticing the other day that my daughter writes almost all her letters from the bottom up. This mystifies me. I write all my letters from the top down. Not that I've ever given it a ton of thought. I have extremely legible handwriting; if you look at the subtitle of my website--"In the Words of Kenneth R. Pike"--that is in my handwriting. I always print and I write all of my letters in as few strokes and direction-reversals as possible. No fuss, no muss. I'm a complete efficiency freak.

Except with my lower-case "g."