The Yin Blog

The (Star Wars) Emperor's Court: the estate of Greedo vs. Han Solo

Frequent commenter Law Monkey sent me a link to this hilarious website, containing a scan of a comic book depicting a "People's Court"-like case brought by Greedo's mom against Han Solo.  For those without the requisite nerdiness rating, Greedo is the green bounty hunter who tracks Solo (Harrison Ford) down in Star Wars, attempting to capture him for the bounty placed by Jabba the Hutt.  In the original version, Solo shoots Greedo first, but in the "Special Edition," Greedo fires first -- at POINT BLANK RANGE and MISSES -- and then Solo shoots him.

Who owns the last out baseball from the World Series?

I don't teach anything close to Property, and it was my worst subject in law school.  That said, I'll go out on a limb and comment on Boston Red Sox first baseman Doug Mientkiewicz's refusal to turn over the ball that was used for the last play of the 2004 World Series:

BOSTON (AP) -- Red Sox fans have seen the video over and over again. A ground ball to pitcher Keith Foulke. He tosses it underhand to backup first baseman Doug Mientkiewicz, who raises it high as Boston celebrates its first World Series championship in 86 years.

Mientkiewicz still hasn't let go of the ball. But now the Red Sox want it back.

Calling the ball, "my retirement fund," Mientkiewicz stored it in a safe deposit box. Red Sox CEO Larry Lucchino said Thursday he's going to ask Mientkiewicz to return it to the team.

I seem to recall from going to ballgames that the announcer would say something like, if a ball is hit into the stands, we are happy for you to keep it -- which suggests it's the team's ball.  Furthermore, given that Mientkiewicz believes that the ball may fetch a large sum (enough to pay for four years at Florida State for his son, he estimates), I can't believe that such a windfall would depend on the fortuity of who made the last putout.  I mean, I doubt Foulke would have done anything differently, but he might have decided to try to make the unassisted putout to be able to keep the ball.

Boo on Mientkiewicz, who hit .215 for the Red Sox and is unhappy with being just a back-up first baseman.  Yeah, I suppose the Red Sox should start Minky and bench David Ortiz, who hit .301 with 41 home runs, 139 RBIs, and a .380 on-base percentage. . . .

Diagnosing Social Security's problems

Here's a pretty good post by Sebastian Holsclaw, diagnosing the problems of the retirement portion of Social Security:

We have allowed the mechanics of Social Security to get away from us by drift instead of intention.  A plan which was designed to protect against old age poverty now give tens of billions of dollars a year to people who are not poor.  A plan which was designed to avoid paying most people by making a high retirement age now has a retirement age which can leave huge numbers of people in the system for more than a decade.  A plan which was designed with a 15-to-1 worker to retiree ratio faces a 3-to-1 worker to retiree ratio.  These changes have creeped up slowly but have changed the underlying deal dramatically.

This is an especially good part of the post, on privatization:

What about privitization?  I like the idea of the government encouraging privately controlled accounts in theory, but I am skeptical of it in practice.  The major benefit of privitization plans is that it gets people used to actually being involved in decision-making regarding their retirement.  I am skeptical about privitization plans for very conservative reasons--I think such plans would lead to nearly inevitable government attempts to tinker with market outcomes.  Our financial system is not perfect, but it has a fair degree of efficiency.  I am loathe to put that at risk.  Even after a medium downturn of relatively short duration (say the market from 1999-2001) the pressure to meddle would become immense.  At least one of the following two things would happen:

1.  The government would intervene directly in the markets, ultimately making the markets much less efficient at exposing market weaknesses; and/or

2.  The government would make up the shortfall, eliminating many if not all of the projected savings from privitization.  Knowing this, some people may take especially risky investments, knowing that if they fail the government will bail them out. 

I particularly agree on point 2, which is why I oppose privatizing Social Security.  I suppose my mind could be changed if there were sufficient attention paid to this problem, but President Bush's proposal is so lacking in anything other than pie in the sky promises that I can't right now.

No kidding?

I'm not sure I agree that these ridiculous labels are the fault of "trial lawyers" (as the news story reports the spin by the contest's founders) so much as of people who are asking for their genes to be removed from the gene pool, but these labels are hilarious:

DETROIT - The sign on the toilet brush says it best: "Do not use for personal hygiene." That admonition was the winner of an anti-lawsuit group's contest for the wackiest consumer warning label of the year.

* * *

The $500 first prize went to Ed Gyetvai, of Oldcastle, Ontario, who submitted the toilet-brush label. A $250 second prize went to Matt Johnson, of Naperville, Ill., for a label on a children's scooter that said, "This product moves when used."

A $100 third prize went to Ann Marie Taylor, of Camden, S.C., who submitted a warning from a digital thermometer that said, "Once used rectally, the thermometer should not be used orally."

ABC's "Alias": season 4 admits season 3 sucked, but is this any better?

(Some spoilers. . . .)

I'll probably still watch "Alias" all season, but I agree with a lot of what this NY Times critic has to say about the show (though she is more negative than I am):

"Alias," whose fourth season has its two-hour premiere on ABC tonight, is nothing more than a pretentious comic strip: static, allegorical, a pleasure only to addicts, but also headache-inducingly difficult to criticize in these times when American comics have become, through male nostalgia and the canonization of the graphic novel, sacrosanct.

I thought the season premeire last night was . . . kind of lame.  The fights were, as usual, very well-done (still, no female actor makes it look like she's beating the hell out of men the way that Lucy Lawless did as Xena), but too much of the episode seemed almost tired.  In past seasons, no matter how outrageous the episode was, Victor Garber as Jack Bristow (Jennifer Garner's character's dad) was always watchable because of the gravitas he brought, but here he was flat.  And Michael Vartan's Vaughn, hardly the most dynamic character, seems even more bland.

Though Vaughn does get the line of the show: "Last year sucked."

It feels like the writers had Vaughn say what they wanted to say about the show, but last year's amnesia followed by Vaughn's wife who's really a bad guy plotline at least had elan.

And, as my wife pointed out, what's with the fact that on the two occasions we've seen Sydney brutally tortured, it's been by Chinese guys?!?

My final break with California, it appears

I've severed my last current connection to California.  Up to now, I've kept my 310 area code (west Los Angeles) on my cell phone, but I switched carriers from Sprint PCS to Verizon Wireless, and while I could have ported the number over, I decided not to.  Not too many people have my cell phone number, and for many of those who do, it's still a long distance call.

A pity, I rather liked the 310 area code.  I've now had phone numbers in a whole bunch of area codes: 213 and 310 (Los Angeles), 714 (Orange County), 818 (Pasadena), 415 and 510 (Berkeley), 405 (Oklahoma City), 619 (San Diego), and 319 (Iowa City).  Plus, had Pac Bell gone through with its dumb "overlay" to generate more phone numbers in Southern California, I would've had a 424 area code.  I think my favorite area codes have been 310 and 510, from a numerical prettiness perspective.

I suppose another indication of my acceptance of Iowa is that the winter storm dumped 9.5 inches of snow on us, and while it took my three different shoveling sessions to clear it, it didn't seem that bad to me.  It makes me wonder, when you live in a place like Buffalo where you can get 10 feet of snow, how exactly do you shovel all that away?  How do you even get out of your house?!?

Shocking possibilities: a glass ceiling in college FB coaching?

The NY Times has an interesting article wondering why usc offensive coordinator Norm Chow has not been hired as a head coach in Division I-A, considering his acknowledged talent:

Chow was an assistant at Brigham Young from 1973 through 1999. I had never met him before last week, but I had known of his talent for developing quarterbacks and high-scoring offenses since 1983, when B.Y.U.'s Steve Young emerged as one of the nation's top quarterbacks. Young was followed by Robbie Bosco, who guided the Cougars to the national title in 1984, and Ty Detmer, who won the Heisman Trophy in 1990. At Southern Cal, Chow has guided two of the past three Heisman winners, Carson Palmer in 2002 and Matt Leinart this season.

Chow doesn't come out and say it's because he's of Asian descent (and to be fair, he did get offered the head coaching job at Kentucky last year but turned it down), and considering how few assistant coaches there are of Asian descent, there's obviously not a large sample size to draw serious conclusions.

(Thanks to a former student for the heads-up.)

L3's prediction for Kevin and me

Scott (the liberal one) at Life, Law, and Libido has predictions for a number of bloggers, including Kevin and me:

2) Kevin Jon Heller, of The Yin Blog fame, resolves to kick Kevin J. Heller's (of Tech Law Advisor fame) ass until he drops out of the blogosphere. Tung, still recovering from major gambling losses during his ill-advised wagering on Cal and Iowa to meet in the NCAA basketball championship, resolves to promote the battle as a prize fight so he can quit his job and enter next season's The Apprentice.

Hmm, interesting idea.  I better go read some of Trump's books so that I can defend myself in the boardroom if I'm asked how many employees he has (15,000, per Jenn Massey) or what his company's revenues were.  I guess I shouldn't mention that the one thing I do know is that his casinos filed for bankruptcy protection. . . .

The overrated "The Big Sleep"

I had Tivo record the old Bogart-Bacall "The Big Sleep" and got around to watching it last night.  Boy, was I disappointed!  According to the TV Guide info box that Tivo provided, this movie rated 4 stars.  The imdb.com users give it an 8.3 out of 10.  I gather it's considered one of the classics of the era.

But to me, it was overly cheesy, slow, and too much of a Bogart-Bacall showcase.

Don't get me wrong.  I grew up reading and rereading Raymond Chandler's novels and short stories, and while "The Big Sleep" wasn't my favorite of his books (I'm partial to "Farewell, My Lovely" and "The Long Goodbye"), I still enjoyed it.  And Chandler's dialogue could verge on cheesy at times, too.  But the movie was just way over the top:

- Virtually every female character swoons over Bogart, to the point where the bookstore saleswoman closes up shop early to spend an hour drinking whisky out of a bottle with him.   Huh?  Maybe standards were different in the 1940s, but Bogart doesn't strike me at all as handsome.  He's got kind of a ferret-like face, and a nasal voice.

- The interaction, the snappy comebacks between Bacall and Bogart, maybe that's a relic of the times too, but it doesn't fit with the novel very well.  (As I recall, the interaction between the detective Marlowe and the client Grayle in "Farewell, My Lovely" was much warmer than that between Marlowe and the Bacall character in the book.)

- This may not be a fair point to raise, but one of the best things about Chandler's books is his unique writing style, which others have tried and failed to copy successfully.  It doesn't translate into a movie.  (I would think that Nabakov's "Lolita" presents similar problems.)

How did Bogart end up playing the two greatest roles in American detective fiction, anyway?  (The other being Sam Spade in Hammett's "The Maltese Falcon"?)

I may have to change my favorite baseball team. . . .

It's bad enough that the Angels are obssessed with "tools" type players like Darin Erstad and Bartolo Colon, instead of following the Moneyball approach (as well as actually evaluating players on useful skill sets, like on-base percentage).

But "Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim"?!?  To review:

Anaheim's not even close to Los Angeles!  (And if you want to be inclusive, as the name change is purported to be, why not go back to the old name, the California Angels?)

The Holiday Bowl . . . and the lame Pac-10

Okay, I should own up to Cal's pretty lame performance in the Holiday Bowl. . . .  On the one hand, it could be that the Big-12 is just a much stronger conference than I've given it credit for, and that Cal didn't play that badly.  Or it could be that Cal was mentally/emotionally unprepared to play.

Add on top of that UCLA's puzzling loss to Wyoming, and the Pac-10 isn't looking so good . . . at least Oregon State beat Notre Dame (though these days, who doesn't, in a bowl game?), and Arizona State's victory over Purdue has to be considered the real deal.

At least in Iowa, we know how to deal with snow

Actually, it's been a very mild winter so far, with virtually no snow to speak of.  There was one day with maybe half an inch of snow on the ground, but I didn't bother shoveling it, and a few days later, it had all melted.

Meanwhile, my former home state of California has not been so lucky:

LOS ANGELES - Heavy snow shut down a major highway north of Los Angeles on Monday and slowed post-holiday travel in the Sierra Nevada as Californians grappled with a second week of stormy weather. Pounding rain flooded roads and dumped snow on Southern California mountains, turning the morning commute into a white-knuckle obstacle course.

About 2 feet of snow shut down Interstate 5 at Tejon Pass north of Los Angeles, stranding some travelers, and the California Highway Patrol said the state's main north-south highway was expected to stay closed there all day. The elevation at the pass is about 4,200 feet.

* * *

At lower elevations in the Los Angeles region, flooding closed the Long Beach Freeway at the Pacific Coast Highway. Downtown Los Angeles measured about 1.5 inches of rain by late morning.

Yikes!  Back when I was going to law school, I often made the drive up and down the state on the 5.  To think I could've been stranded out in the Tejon Pass!!

Elephants to the rescue

Pretty neat story about how Asian elephants are helping tsunami recovery efforts:

BANG NIENG, Thailand - A year ago, they were filming battle scenes for the movie "Alexander." Now six elephants are pitching in to help with the massive cleanup from the tsunami that devastated many of Thailand's prime tourist destinations.

The Holiday Bowl

Well, Cal plays Texas Tech in the Holiday Bowl in a little more than half an hour.  Although Cal got robbed by the stupid BCS formula, I hope that the Golden Bears take this game seriously.  It's unlikely but possible for Cal to finish the season ranked #2, if Auburn loses and Utah doesn't leapfrog ahead (assuming it wins).  Even a top 5 finish would be worth a lot for recruiting purposes.

Go Bears!

Why wouldn't you want to eat your cake?

I've never understood the saying, "You can't have your cake and eat it too."  What purpose would there be for having your cake other than to eat it?

Does anyone know how to make sense of this saying?

The Washington governor's race

Watching the back and forth of the Washington gubernatorial race (the Republican candidate won the initial count and the machine recount; the Democratic candidate won the most recent recount, that included hand counting of disputed ballots from King County) brings to mind the power of Paul Bator's  thesis concerning relitigation of factual issues on federal habeas corpus.

To recap for those not familiar with Bator's work, the 1953 decision of Brown v. Allen, 344 U.S. 443 (1953), expanded (or merely confirmed, depending on your reading of the history) the scope of federal habeas corpus.  According to Bator, prior to Brown, habeas corpus existed to ensure that the convicting court had proper jurisdiction over the defendant, as well as to ensure that the conviction was not obtained through mob justice.  But habeas did not exist to relitigate all federal issues that had gone against the defendant in state court.  Brown changed that by making all federal issues open for relitigation.

Bator thought this was an undesirable result, because there was no reason to believe that the second court reviewing the matter was any more likely to get things right than the first court.  Hence, he preferred the "process" view -- if we can say that the first court had a defective process, then we have reason to doubt its conclusions.  But if the process was adequate, there is no reason to believe that a second court would get it any more "right."

Of course, a critical assumption on Bator's part was that the first and second courts are equally competent.  (This is known as the "parity" assumption.)  Critics of Bator's position argue that federal courts are superior to state courts at deciding federal matters, and hence there is no parity.

Bator's analysis strikes me as having relevance to the Washington election mess.  Maybe one can argue that the hand recount is "better" than the initial count or the machine recount, but given the extremely small margin of victory reported in each count, I'd be inclined to think that no count is necessarily better than any other count.  The repeated recounts and threatened litigation only worsen an already bad situation.

ACS blog opens competition for law students

Via Fed. No. 84, I see that the American Constitutional Society blog is running a competition for law students to join the blog writing team.  I'm not sure if there's a cash prize (none is mentioned), but this looks to be an interesting opportunity for any law students who have the blogging bug.

"The Amazing Race": to be continued?

What the . . . ?!?  Last week's "The Amazing Race" ended with a shot of married pro wrestler's Lori and Bolo about 12 hours behind everyone else, sleeping outside in Germany on benches and facing what seemed to be sure elimination, only to fade out with "to be continued."

But in a sense, every episode is "to be continued" until the finale!

It makes me wonder if what happened is that another team (say, abusive Jonathan and passive Victoria) gets disqualified on an elimination leg, which would mean that two teams get cut in one episode, which would leave the series short one episode.  Stretching one episode into two here would solve that problem, wouldn't it?

The more likely explanation is that CBS is just milking the series' new-found popularity by adding extra episodes, but you never know. . . .

Minivans vs. SUVs

Sometimes when I go to pick up my baby son from daycare, the parking lot resembles "minivan row."  We bought a minivan recently, and I'm quite enamored with the vehicle.  Yet, my mother, father, and brother all seemed to think that an SUV would have been a better choice.

I don't get it.  I don't have the knee-jerk hatred of SUVs that some environmentalists do -- how could I, when our minivan gets only a mile per gallon better gas mileage?  But I do think that SUVs are kind of ugly, like cars on steroids, whereas minivans look somewhat pleasant.  Mostly, however, I prefer the extra space that the minivan provides, as well as the ability to get from the front seat to the middle row without having to exit the vehicle (useful if, say, the little guy needs his diaper changed when it's 15 degrees outside), as well as the sliding side doors.

I suppose some people might argue that SUVs are sportier.  But once we're into the realm of buying large vehicles useful for transporting lots of people and/or cargo, why even bother with some marginal additional sportiness?  Sportiness is for two-seaters.

Finally, four-wheel drive might be useful if you do a lot of off-roading.  But I don't, and therefore buying a car because of that feature would make me feel a bit like a poser.  (Kind of like how I do already when I read Outside magazine.)

In-class exam software -- any disasters?

I haven't quit blogging, and I'm fine; I've just been taking a short break.  Thanks to everyone who weighed in on in-class versus take-home exams.  The great majority of you indicated a preference for in-class exams, though some definitely preferred take-homes.  Moreover, a number of readers thought that Iowa should embrace the technological age and allow laptops to be used for in-class exams.

Since I personally give open book exams, I wouldn't need to have students use any disabling software; however, other professors may want closed-book exams, in which case, commercial software would be needed to disable the laptops.  It sounds like a number of readers who are students (or graduates) of other programs have experience with such software.  I'm curious whether anyone has any disaster stories (such as corrupted files, crashes, etc.), and if so, how those were resolved.