Monitoring Metadata

It appears that the NSA wiretapping is somewhat broader in scope than even I had been led to believe. A database is being compiled of every single phone call -- and I can only assume every single e-mail -- that is either originated in or received in the United States. Eavesdropping is apparently not part of this program, so the contents of your calls (and, presumably, e-mails) are not part of the inquiry. But the fact of the phone call is.

So, here's the question of the day. Let's say that TL, who is a citizen of the US, has a friend -- let's call him "Xavier" -- who is also a citizen. TL lives in Knoxville; Xavier lives in, say, Dallas. Neither TL nor Xavier are suspected of any criminal or terrorist activity (although TL has been known to make subversive posts on the net from time to time, critical of the Administration, which in the minds of some people makes his loyalty to the country suspect).

If TL wishes to communicate with Xavier, he has several options. He can write Xavier a letter and send it by a variety of postal services. FedEx, UPS, the ever-disappointing DHL, and even the U.S. Postal Service can deliver the letter to Xavier in one day for a few dollars. Or, the U.S. Postal Service can send it via first-class mail within several days. If this is the chosen mode of communication, there is little doubt that the fact that a letter has been sent from TL to Xavier will not be recorded by the government; the existence of the communication is private.

TL might call Xavier on the telephone. According to the latest information, the contents of the communication are not examined or recorded by the NSA or any of its computers. But the presumed identity of the callers, the time of the call, the call's duration, and the physical mechanisms used to make the call are recorded. By "physical mechanisms" I mean whether the call was made from a land line or a cell phone. Either way, it is possible for the data thus gathered to reveal where TL was located physically when he made the call, and where Xavier was located physically when he took it. That information is being stored.

TL might also send Xavier an e-mail. Again, the metadata about the e-mail is at least as interesting as the content of the e-mail. Excluding the content of the e-mail from the NSA's analysis, the NSA still likely records the time of the e-mail, various information about the format and any attachments, what internet nodes was used (indicating where the author and recipient were) -- all the same information about the communication that delicately skirts around what is actually being communicated.

Does TL have a privacy right in the "who," "where," "when," "how," and "for how long" of his communications to Xavier, so long as the government keeps its eyes and ears out of the "what" and "why" parts of the communication?

Privacy falls within two general categories: the right to autonomously make personal decisions affecting one's life, and the right to control access to information about oneself. Both are part of the "right to be left alone." Both facets are at least implicated by governmental intrusion on privacy -- the monitoring program might chill otherwise free communication simply from the knowledge that the recordation program exists.

The most objectionable part of the domestic wiretap program was that somebody was listening in on the conversations of American citizens under circumstances in which they had a reasonable expectation of privacy, and for which no judicial authorization was given. But this is substantively different -- the content of the communications has been removed, with nearly surgical precision, from the government's data-gathering information.

As the hour is late, and the question very ambiguous in my mind, I shall need to reflect further on this point. But I may have to conclude that, particularly with cell phone calls and other communication that utilizes public resources, the "when," "how," and "how long" information -- and maybe even the "who" and "where" information, is not subject to reasonable expectations of privacy nor does the recordation of the use of those public media indicate any likelihood of chilling communication itself.

I don't even know right now how I want the issue to be resolved. It makes me uncomfortable, but not nearly as uncomfortable as the programs that include eavesdropping. I want the government to have the information it needs to protect me, and I want the government to protect and respect my privacy. I believe that both objectives can be realized. What I just haven't thought through yet, since this information is still new to me and I'm not thinking at a 100% level right now, is whether this program will achieve either, or both, of these objectives.

More thought on this in the next few days.

How To Buy A House In California

The median home price in California is over half a million dollars for a single-family home. In the high desert, where The Wife and I are going, prices are still below the median, but not by much. How I could ever afford to buy a home under such circumstances has long baffled me. Clearly, The Wife has to work, too, and we won't be able to afford luxuries like food or gasoline.

Or, maybe we could get a fifty-year mortgage. Also known as "a surefire way to never accumulate equity," this product would offer substantially lower payments. Presumably, we could refinance once our earnings power increased or when the rate shifts to variability, and at that point perhaps we could get iunto a situation in which more than a miniscule portion of the payment actually went to principal rather than interest. The good news, though, is that the high percentage of interest woud look very favorable on taxes, and hopefully some equity would accumulate because of market pressures.

How Can They Be So Certain?

I'm just sayin'.

Seriously, though, get better soon, Keef.

Advice to Nissan Employees

It has been suggested to me elsewhere that I would reap good karma if, instead of writing "whiny, homesick, highbrow haikus," I provided advice for the hundreds of Californians who are moving or are about to move to Tennessee as a result of Nissan North America moving its headquarters to the Nashville area. This seems like good advice, so here goes. Nissan transplants -- here are my top ten tips for how you, too, can succeed in Tennessee.

1. Be Republican. Don't think too much about what politicians say or do; this is a matter of "good guys" versus "bad guys" and you needn't waste your intellectual resources on matters of such obviousness as evaluating the merits of individual public policy proposals. Only watch FOX News -- it's fair and balanced, after all.

2. Become a Baptist. Tithe more than the requested 10%. Tell everyone who comes within twenty feet of you that you do this.

3. Have a daddy who has held elected office. If you don't have a daddy, you will need to buy one in the form of your state house or state senate representative. Tennessee's state government will not work for you until the skids are greased, you know what I'm saying?

4. Have a high school diploma from a high school near where you live. Have a college diploma from UT. A degree from UT is worth more here than a degree from Harvard or Stanford.

5. Men: Your wife should join the Junior Legaue. Speaking of your wife, you will need to vouch for her when she applies for a driver's license. I'm not kidding. Women: Your first name is about to become your husband's first name, as in "Mrs. John O'Connor."

6. Learn to live without easy access to affordable wine. $20 doesn't go nearly as far here as what you've become used to in California. There is no Trader Joe's in Tennessee; the nearest ones are in Cincinnati and Washington D.C. You cannot get wine or booze in supermarkets, although beer is available six days a week in a majority of counties.

7. Tell everyone that your greatest ambition is to finish the AT (pronounced "ay-tee"). Learn how to fish, and learn to enjoy doing it.

8. Learn about NASCAR. Pick a driver and follow him all year. Figure out his number and put a sticker of that number on your rear windshield. Also, wear a lot of orange clothing.

9. Get a gas-powered weed whacker, and don't eat the wild onions that grow in your front yard. Prepare to spend a lot of time thinking about your lawn.

10. This is my most important bit of advice; if you disregard everything else I say, listen to this carefully. Never, never, never, under any circumstances, tell anyone that you have ever even been in California, much less that you lived there. Yours is an Arizona accent. If you slip and your Golden State history somehow comes out in conversation, explain that you "had to get away from all those fruits and nuts out there." Shake your head and shudder, and explain that you would rather change the uncomfortable subject.


Seriously, you can't understand until you get on the ground here exactly how people feel about California. They are often completely ignorant of what California is like, and remarkably afraid of the state. I've had people ask if there are gang members hanging out on every street corner selling drugs. I've had other people say that they were surprised to learn that I married a woman because they thought everybody in California was gay and that Christianity was somehow outlawed there. I suspect many Tennesseans would tell you they would be more comfortable in Iran than in California -- and they may be right, because about the only thing that some of these Tennesseans think that the mullahs in Iran have got wrong is their choice of holy book.

Battlestar Galactica Meets The Simpsons

I should get to sleep. But sometimes you find the most amazing stuff when you follow links at random. Sometimes you get some interesting insights on someone's blog, sometimes you find something funny, sometimes you find something really surreal. This time, I found someone with way too much time on their hands who produced a remarkable hybrid parody.

And when you find something good like that, you share. So that's what I'm doing.

Hey, any word yet on when the show will be back for the third season? They're teasing it but I haven't got any dates yet.

Albert Knew What I Should Do

Thursday, I got something like this:


I should have been heeding the professor's advice:

Changing of the Guard at Langley

Tomorrow, President Bush will likely announce that General Michael V. Hayden will replace Porter Goss as head of the C.I.A. This has been controversial, particularly amongst Republicans, who fear that the nomination will effectively subordinate the C.I.A. to the Pentagon. Certainly suggesting that an active-duty military officer should head a civilian agency raises a few eyebrows, particularly at a time when the Secretary of Defense has come under fire.

On Friday, I pointed out that somebody blew the call before the war about the WMD's, resulting in our being in Iraq and in a quasi-permanent state of quasi-war. This is not the sort of call that gets blown by a single person. Assuming good faith on the part of our leaders, this blown call was the result of incompetence in, at minimum, the intelligence sphere. When there is incompetence, the appropriate thing for executive leaders to do is attempt to remedy the incompetence -- by changing personnel if need be. Now, Porter Goss is no longer head of the C.I.A. because of a political struggle with John Negroponte, but the fact of the matter is that the bulk of our intelligence comes from the C.I.A. and we know something went wrong there. Those in the know are better-positioned than the public to understand what and why that was.

The C.I.A. has been run, in the past, by military officers; its first four directors were all active-duty general officers. These officers were, like General Hayden is now, officers who have substantial intelligence backgrounds as well as the personal confidence of the President. The situation today isn't much different from that, as far as I can see. So there is precedent for an appointment of this nature.

It appears, furthermore, that General Hayden's political loyalty runs to John Negroponte, not Donald Rumsfeld. Since Negroponte is the National Intelligence Director, the "spy czar," if you will, that does not strike me as a bad thing. Future Presidents will name new CIA directors and new National Intelligence Directors, and they will do so for their own political reasons -- just as the current President is.

So politically, I think Hayden is well within the realm of acceptable choices to lead the C.I.A. Politically, it is an acceptable choice; I see nothing wrong with consolidating the power of the National Intelligence Director over intelligence-gathering operations and I am not terribly concerned that an active-duty military officer at the helm of the C.I.A. will somehow make that agency subordinate to the defense department or otherwise alter its civilian character. These concerns by Congressional Republicans are all inconsequential, and to that extent, I will suggest that the President gets to pick who he wants to run agencies because he's the President and that is that.

Now, with that said, General Hayden has at best a poor understanding of the Fourth Amendment, and appears to have been a strong proponent of the warrantless wiretapping program of which I have been such a critic. This is the issue worthy of Congressional inquiry. It is not the only issue with which Congress should be concerned, to be sure. There are administrative matters, there is the question of how data analysis can be improved and what assets are needed, comparing "human intelligence" to the clean data we get from satellites and wiretaps, and a myriad of other intelligence and administrative issues.

But I do think it is important for Congress to challenge General Hayden on what role he sees for the C.I.A. in detecting terrorist activity that may be occuring in whole or in part within the borders of the U.S.A., and if so, what the role of the judicial branch of government may or may not be. At minimum, I would expect Congress to demand that General Hayden indicate that he intends to use the FISA process to provide for minimal judicial review of intelligence-gathering activities that may affect U.S. citizens or take place within the borders of the country. I've said it before, and I still mean it: it's just not too much to ask.

Strange Wifely Behavior

After our RET meeting today, The Wife and another member opted out of going to lunch with the other members of RET -- not that she didn't want to hang out, she just didn't want to eat Thai food. So she bailed out and ate at Panera Bread with another member of RET who preferred not to eat Thai.

She couldn't wait to get home and pretty much the moment we got in the door she wanted to start packing our stuff up in boxes to get ready for the move back to California. So now we've got six or seven moving boxes of stuff where we used to have furniture and books. I guess there's no time like the present to get a head start on packing, but we're not scheduled to close on the house until June 5, so it feels a bit early to me. I wasn't pleased about having my nightstand replaced by a moving box containing a nightstand.

And, I grilled up some chicken for dinner. The last time I did this, The Wife complained that it was too spicy, and she wouldn't eat it. So tonight, I left most of the spice off of hers. Then, she complained that the chicken was bland. However, I have a tip for you all: green beans, with butter and a teaspoon of honey. Use a slotted spoon to serve them, but they taste great. The Wife loves them.

I love my wife. She does things I don't understand sometimes.

Haiku

Tennessee is nice

But very provincial, too.

So we’re going home.

It’s not paradise

But the place where we belong

Is in California.

To be near our friends

Access to wine and produce

And all the culture.

I can practice law

And The Wife get her degree,

Trader Joe’s is there.

Antelope Valley:

The desert is dry and hot.

There are few bugs there.

There are things we’ll miss,

Family, friends, and also

Low cost of living.

There can be no doubt

This is the right move for us.

California, soon.

Rumsfeld Gets Nailed

Yesterday in Atlanta before a mostly friendly audience, Ray McGovern, a retired 27-year veteran CIA analyst, asked Secretary Donald Rumsfeld some tough questions in a recent news conference. You can watch the video here, and this is is my best effort at a transcript of the events, a little better, I think, than what is transcribed in the link above:

MCGOVERN:
Sir, I would like to ask you to be up front with the American people, why did you lie to get us into a war that that was not necessary that caused these kind of casualties? Why?

RUMSFELD:
Well, first of all, I haven’t lied. I did not lie then. (Applause) Colin Powell didn’t lie. He spent weeks and weeks with the Central Intelligence Agency people and prepared a presentation that I know he believed was accurate, and he presented that to the United Nations. The president spent weeks and weeks with the Central Intelligence people. And he went to the American people and made a presentation. I'm not in the intelligence business. They gave the world their honest opinion. It appears that there were not weapons of mass destruction there.

MCGOVERN:
You said you knew where they were.

RUMSFELD:
I did not. I said I knew where suspect sites were and –

MCGOVERN:
You said you knew where they were — near Tikrit, near Baghdad, northeast, south, west of there. Those are your words.

RUMSFELD:
(Flustered) My words — my words were that — (to security guards) no, no, wait a minute, wait a minute. Let him stay one second. Just a second.

MCGOVERN:
This is America.

(Applause)

RUMSFELD:
You’re getting plenty of play, sir.

MCGOVERN:
I’d just like an honest answer.

RUMSFELD:
I’m giving it to you.

MCGOVERN:
Well we’re talking about lies and your allegation there was "bulletproof evidence "of ties between al Qaeda and Iraq. Is that a lie, or were you misled?

RUMSFELD:
Zarqawi was in Baghdad during the prewar period. That is a fact.

MCGOVERN:
Zarqawi? He was in the north of Iraq in a place where Saddam Hussein had no rule. That’s also…

RUMSFELD:
Yes he was. He was also in Baghdad.

MCGOVERN:
Yes, when he needed to go to the hospital. Come on, these people aren’t idiots. They know the story.

RUMSFELD:
You are... (pauses) Let me give you an example. It’s easy for you to make a charge, but why do you think that the men and women in uniform every day, when they came out of Kuwait and went into Iraq, put on chemical weapon protective suits? Because they liked the style? (Laughter.) They honestly believed that there were chemical weapons. Saddam Hussein had used chemical weapons on his own people previously; he'd used them on his neighbors the Iranians, and they believed he had those weapons. We believed he had those weapons.

MCGOVERN:
That’s what we call a non sequitur. It doesn’t matter what the troops believe; it matters what you believe.

At this point, the moderator of the session cut off McGovern so that other people in the audience could ask other questions. Rumsfeld was visibly upset with the challenge although he did his best to keep his cool.

Rumsfeld was right about the belief that Hussein had chemical weapons. But McGovern was right about Rumsfeld's statements regarding the WMD's -- he made those statements to George Stephanophoulos on March 30, 2003: "It happens not to be the area where weapons of mass destruction were dispersed. We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat." (Near the bottom of the link). And it's also true that Rumsfeld has claimed that firearms novice Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi's visit to Baghdad in May of 2002 to seek medical care was "bulletproof" evidence of a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda, and now the Administration seems to be backing away from that claim.

So as for McGovern calling Rumsfeld out on his prior statements, well, McGovern has the facts on his side. In the law business, we call this sort of thing "impeachment by prior inconsistent statements." This is a successful impeachment, in my book. But being impeached is not exactly the same thing as being caught in a lie -- a "lie," after all, is an intentional untruth. We know now that what Rumsfeld said in 2002 and 2003 was incorrect. But, did Rumsfeld lie or not?

I know that things looked different back in 2002 and 2003 than they do now, and that hindsight permits not only more facts to be considered but also a substantially less emotional atmosphere to weigh options that could have been. To give Rumsfeld and the rest of the administration the benefit of the doubt that they believed everything they said in good faith is to render the substantial part of the information that we based our decision to go to war on a tissue of fiction, conjecture, and incompetence. Perhaps our leaders didn't "lie" to us in the sense that they knew what they were saying was untrue. But the only other way I can reconcile the information we have now with what we were told then is that a mistake of colossal proportions was made.

It's no defense to that mistake to say that we're better off now with Saddam out of power and an uncertain future for Iraq. I'm not at all sure that's the case -- if Iraq descends into a militant Muslim theocracy with overt hostility to the U.S. (like several of its next-door neighbors), as seems to be a likely scenario even if a democratic government is created -- then it's hard for me to understand exactly how we're better off in the endgame than we were in the opening plays.

Book Review: Lazy B

One of my heroes is Sandra Day O'Connor. She's an easy figure to respect for being a trailblazer in the legal profession and a powerful role model. She created a practical, balanced, non-doctrinaire school of jurisprudence, criticized by some as too variable for the requirements of modern law and bitterly condemned by others for failing to vote as anticipated when she was elevated to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Reagan in 1981, back when I was ten years old and had not yet learned to care about the legal system. At the time, I did not appreciate what a big deal it was that a woman would hold such a position and today it is taken for granted that a woman could and would do so. But it took a special sort of person to be the first, and I now have a better appreciation of what went into molding her into the person she became.

O'Connor's family memoir, Lazy B, is not about how she became a lawyer or how she entered politics or how she rose to the very pinnacle of the legal profession -- at least, not directly. Those things are mentioned, but the focus of the book is elsewhere. It is a loving, unblinking portrait primarily of her parents and of her family generally portraying life on the ranch, largely in the 1930's and 1940's. Like her judicial opinions, the memoir is lucidly written and uses apparently plain, simple language to efficiently convey rich, complex thoughts.

O'Connor grew up on the Lazy B Ranch, which straddled the border between Arizona and New Mexico. The ranch complex and one of its distinctive features, Round Mountain, are located here; the total area of land is about one-fifth the size of Rhode Island, going from the south bank of the Gila River and encompassing spurs of two mountain ranges. A Google Earth search for the same area will reveal many of the place names she discusses in the book.

She has fond memories of her family and the cowboys who worked there, and expresses unvarnished admiration for all of them, but does not flinch from describing some of the rougher realities of what ranch life was like. It was difficult for me to read the stories about how horses are broken, for instance, because the process seems so cruel to the animals. But that is part of what it is to have horses. Her description of her father, Henry Day, is also unflinchingly true to life; the picture of a man at once friendly and full of love for his family but at the same time a stern, uncompromising taskmaster is well-told in O'Connor's description of the day that she had to bring the chuck wagon out to her father and a crew of cowboys on the roundup. The everyday heroics and danger of ranch life are also well-illustrated in a gripping description of her younger brother Alan and some cowboys caught in a flood while trying to bring a sick cow back to the ranch for treatment. It's one thing for us city folk to say that ranch life is a lot of hard work -- it's something else to have to confront the physical danger involved, too.

Particularly interesting to me were the descriptions of the various cowboys who worked at the ranch. The steady-working cowboys were part of the young Sandra Day's extended family, and her love for these distinctive characters shows through -- perhaps with less intensity than her love for her parents but with the same clarity.

Substantial portions of the book focus on stories involving O'Connor's younger brother, Alan Day, who took over management and operations of the ranch from the late 1960's until the family sold the ranch in the mid-1990's. It's not clear whether Mr. Day did some of the writing, provided source material from his own memory and his archives, or something in between, but Mr. Day's contribution to the book is clearly invaluable and Justice O'Connor obviously could not have provided all of the information she did on her own. Less clear, though, are the sources of the descriptions of ranching and cattle operations -- while Mr. Day personally was involved in every aspect of the business during his stewardship of the ranch, it is also clear that all of the Day children participated in cowboy-style work. The image of a future Supreme Court Justice changing tires on old pickup trucks in the dust, helping fix broken windmill parts, and soothing startled cattle is initially incongruous but becomes as natural as rain after only a few pages -- out on the range, it doesn't matter how much education you have (the best cowboy on the ranch was illiterate) or whether you're a boy or a girl. What counts is whether you get the job done right or not.

Seeing how that objective, competence-based, independent, frugal, uncompromising, and self-reliant ethic played out for a young girl who future fate is now known to all to be one of the more extraordinary stories of the legal world is a remarkable bit of insight. Out on the Lazy B, the ultimate reward for a job well done was a job well done. Effusive thanks and praise were nonexistent even after doing extraordinary work; one had to find one's own motivation and satisfaction and anything less than excellence was unacceptable. Hard lessons for young children, but lessons learned well and which had a powerful effect on all three of the Day children who grew up on the ranch. This makes it easier to understand what propelled O'Connor to achieve such excellence in her legal work and to catch the eye of so many powerful people, and at such a peculiar time in American history.

While occasionally autobiographical and more frequently biographical, the book is really a portrait of a vanished way of life and a celebration of the "cowboy ethic" that served this family so well for so long. Parts of the book made me marvel at the realities of ranch life, parts made me laugh out loud, and parts were moving to the point of inducing melancholy, if not necessarily tears. I enjoyed the book immensely and would recommend it even if the author were not so illustrious as she is. But because she is who she is, it gives a tremendous bit of insight into how she became that person; how she got to where she did; and why she did what she did when entrusted with a very special kind of power. The book is a fast and pleasant read, and as I mentioned above, O'Connor has one of the clearest and most powerful styles of any writer I have come across. It's well worth your time to read.

Hobbled

Without my laptop and the six months' worth of information stored on it, I have very little way to access a lot of knowledge that I need. I feel unarmed to take on the world. For instance, today I wanted to contact the real estate agent in Palmdale and start lining up places to live for our return in just over a month. But the number was on my old e-mail program and I had no way of getting it from the new one. I'll have to call back and get the information again and feel dumb for having to ask for the same stuff more than once.

Now I need to reconstruct the online classes, which will be a project for tomorrow morning. In the meantime, the work keep piling up in California. So there's no rest for the weary.

On the other hand, I was complimented by my students after my class tonight. Maybe they were sucking up, but since they know there is an objective test, it wouldn't do them much good.

And it's always amusing to learn of the incompetence of one's enemies. I particularly like the bit in which the most feared man in Iraq and his trusted advisors "do things like grab the hot barrel of a machine gun and burn themselves." He wears "New Balance" sneakers and can't switch his gun from single-shot to automatic. I'd put a "DUMBASS" graphic here, but all my stored graphics are on the laptop and I don't feel like searching the net for new ones.

New Blog Name

Since I'm soon going to no longer be a transplant in Tennessee, the blog name needs to change. I've decided to go back to my first choice of titles for a blog about a lawyer. Lawyers of my vintage will get the joke even if no one else does.

Down With Bill Frist!

He is a supporter of the $100-per-taxpayer extension of the deficit intended to bribe voters into keeping the Republicans in power with our children's money. And he thinks that a constitutional amendment protecting the flag from being burned in legitimate political protests is more important than debating whether or not to open up American wildnerness areas to oil exploration or deciding whether the proposed Clean Air Act will or will not properly balance jobs and the economy.

I'm quite pleased that in just over thirty days' time he will no longer represent me in the halls of government. This Tory nut is an abomination to all the reasons why I originally self-identified as a Republican. He likes big government telling people what to do and spending their money on stuff they don't want or need. I'm even more pleased that in eight months, he will no longer represent anyone in the halls of government.

Here's who you should be for: Anyone but Bill Frist in '08. Looking at this list, I see a lot of people I'd be reasonably happy to see as President. Rudy Guiliani. John McCain. Condoleeza Rice. Colin Powell. Liddy Dole. George Pataki, even. If we've gotta have a Republican from Tennessee, then Fred Thompson. But I'm close to saying I'd rather have a Democrat as President than the excerable Bill Frist. The Democrats are clueless. Maybe that makes them harmless. The Republicans, however, have a plan. That makes them dangerous.

Portfolio Update II

Among other problems, I took a bath last week. American Physicians slid three points, Apollo Group slid half a point, Ford lost 1% of its value, Boston Beer lost a quarter point, Rural/Metro lost half a point, and my big loser, XM Satellite Radio, lost three and a quarter points. My only winner was GlaxoSmithKline, which gained three and a quarter points. And I should have bought Unilever after all. My portfolio is now worth $99,562.50, an overall loss of more than three grand in six days of trading. My strategy for this week: hold 'em. Ride it out. Check in next week to see if the bath continues.

A Series of Bad Days

I had a bad day. My video card on the laptop went on the fritz, and Gateway wants to take it in their shop for repairs. I'll be without my laptop for at least seven days, and that's with expedited service. That led me to drive out to The Estate and retrieve the old desktop, which had been wiped when it went out of service during the holiday season. My classes are all gone; I'll have to reconstruct them from whatever remnants I can find. Of course my last backup was two months ago. And The Wife and I had sharp words today over the cleanliness of the house (I thought it was just fine, she did not) because the realtor came over and it looks like breaking even on the house is going to be a very close shave.

So that all sucked. I also got a call from my old law partner. His pet lizards died in the care of one of his Army buddies. While I personally would have a hard time forming an emotional bond with a reptile (they're just not very expressive with their emotions like mammals are), they were his pets and he loved them. I know the guy who was charged with the care and feeding of the lizards, and I'm not surprised at the result.

At least that gives me the answer to the age-old question -- we've all heard the joke that some people should not be allowed to have children because they will obviously make bad parents, but how are we to decide who that will be? The answer is, give the applicant an animal, a living, breathing thing to care for. If the animal dies in their care, chances are, you're not dealing with someone responsible enough for a child.

But then I heard my other friends had their house robbed. Their computer got stolen, along with a lot of other valuable stuff, some with sentimental value, others with high material value.

So I guess out of the three of us, my day was the least sucky. But hearing about how someone else's day sucks worse than yours doesn't make your sucky day any better. It still sucks that I have to do all that extra work because my computer flipped out on me through no apparent fault of my own. Hearing about dead pets and home invasion robberies does put things in perspective, though.

Looking about for something positive to come out of the day, I did find one thing -- I listened to an interview with Philip Roth, and it occurred to me that there might be a way of overcoming my seeming inability to sustain narrative and plot arc in my writing and still come up with a novel-length piece of fiction that is actually about something. Roth said two things that were useful to me. First, he observed that being a good writer means being able to read your own work and see what's missing. The work is done when you don't see anything missing that's important, when all the questions worth asking have been answered. Second, he observed that in his novels, which are mostly focused around a central theme his most recent one is about sickness and mortality the story is told in a series of scenes, which in his most recent novel is a story of a man's lifetime obsession with his own mortality. Every major section in the book is about a different episode of the man's various sicknesses. In a throwaway line, Roth described the flow of his narrative as including, "And for twenty years, he didn't ever really get sick, so I glossed over it in one sentence because I didn't want to write about it."

So it occurs to me that the focus of a novel need not be on a single piece of narration; it can be on a central theme. If Roth can skip over twenty years of his hero's life story in a sentence to keep his narrative focus intact, then maybe that gives me a different way to keep focus on what I really want to write about rather than getting bogged down in stuff that eventually is a distraction anyway. It could make the basis of a good avant-garde film, although probably not a mainstream one. If I can come up with twenty pages or so at a time, maybe in a few months I'll be able to put something together that's pretty good.

Now I need to find the time to write. By about 9:00 tonight I was too mentally burnt out to do much of anything but veg out with a video game. Tomorrow will be similarly intense as I get about the business of trying to put my live class together for Thursday and pick up the pieces of my online classes in some way that might be useful to my students (and myself).

Just As I Thought

People ask why I'm so ironic and bitter all the time. Here's a perfect example. When I turn 70, and become eligible for Social Security benefits, that will be the exact year that the Social Security trust fund runs dry. Proof, as if I've ever needed it, that Social Security is nothing more than the old using the government to steal from the young. And both Congress and the public in general refuse to do anything about the way this program works or how it is funded. The only thing that they do is put Social Secruity "off-budget" as if that meant Congress lacked the power to do anything about it and that makes it somehow no part of our government's obligations (and the national debt). Privatizing Social Security is an idea with some merits, although may not be the right answer to this problem, I know. But at least it's an idea. Means-testing benefits (at least more than is done now) seems like a sensible idea. Bill Gates does not need social security. But this concept has "bash the rich" populism behind it, and that is a political theme that seems to have worn out its welcome in this generation of the country's historical cycle.

My parents tell me that they don't expect that Social Security will always be there for them. I think it's wise of them to have planned for their imminent retirement on that basis, but I disagree with their assumption. My parents are baby boomers, and as a result their generation has a tremendous amount of political clout. The system will be reformed to make sure that people of that generation (who are larger in numbers than people of my generation, and who vote in higher percentages than people of my generation) are given what they were "promised" as younger workers. No, it's the children of the boomers who will get slipped the green weenie, because demographically, we're less important. Even Nostradamus could predict what's going to happen in the long run here.

Tapas

By special request from a Loyal Reader, following are the tapas I made for last week's dinner party.

Cool Ham Wraps
Break about 1/2 pound raw asparagus spears from bases. Steam top portion of spears for 5-6 minutes, until mostly cooked. Sprinkle with dill weed when done. While asparagus is steaming, cut about 1/4 pound ham into thinly-sliced strips about 2" long and 1" wide. Mix cream cheese and chives. Spread cream cheese mix on tortillas with moderate thickness -- more than enough to moisten but not so thick as to clump in mounds. Place ham strips and asparagus spears in top two-thirds of tortilla; roll tightly (should wrap about 2 times) so that the end of tortilla with only the cream cheese is on the outside. Cream cheese acts as a binder to hold the wrap together. Slice in half.

Chipotle Crab Spread
Add to food processor: 8 oz. crab meat (or imitation crab meat, which is a blend of real crab meat and haddock precooked in crab stock), lemon juice, 4 sticks celery, 1 quartered apple, chipotle powder, garlic powder, salt, and black pepper, and 1 tablespoon mayonnaise. Pulse food processor until mayonnaise is blended; repeat adding mayonnaise until desired consistency is reached. Chill until ready to serve.

Vegetable Fiesta
Crudite platter with celery, carrots, julienned raw bell peppers (red and yellow), and cucumber spears. Artfully arrange on platter, perhaps with crab salad.

Fruit and Cheese
Treat apple and pear slices in lemon water to prevent browning. Arrange apples, pears, grapes and kiwifruit in alternating columns with slices of varying kinds of cheese. Havarti, gouda (especially smoked), meunster, and white cheddar are good options for this platter. Crackers optional but good for starch content.

Fried Ravioli
Buy pre-made cheese raviolis from the deli section. (Who has time to make their own raviolis?) I prefer mine unbreaded; fry them one side at a time over medium heat in preheated olive oil. Do not overheat olive oil; it burns easily. Raviolis will require several flips until pasta softens and browns in oil. Drain well before serving.

Sweet Spinach Salad
1 lb. raw spinach leaves, 1 handful each dried cranberries, chunks of quartered apples, and candied walnuts. For more pungent taste, add several slices of raw Bermuda onion. Toss with vinagrette made from 1 part extra-virgin olive oil, 2 parts balsamic vinegar, a dash of salt, and a dash of sugar.

Mostly cold tapas; we lack extensive warming facilities here at La Casita Knoxvilla and our dining room table seats only four comfortably; so the dining room table was converted to a buffet spread and we and our guests ate outside on the screen porch, enjoying the nice weather and pleasant company.

Nuestro Himno

The recent controversy over the Spanish translation of the U.S. national anthem is silly. The words aren't exactly the same, but what do you expect when you translate from one language to another? The sense of the song is still substantially the same. You can listen to it here, and following is a literal translation, with the original English lyrics presented for comparison.

The day is breaking, do you see it? In the light of the dawn? (Oh, say can you see, by the dawn’s early light)
What we so acclaimed at nightfall? (What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming?)
Its stars, its stripes, (Whose broad stripes and bright stars)
Flew yesterday In the fierce battle (Through the perilous fight)
In a sign of victory, (O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming)
The glow of battle, in step with liberty (And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air)
At night they said: “It’s being defended!” (Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.)
Oh say! The voice of your starry beauty is still unfolding (Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave)
Over the land of the free, the sacred flag? (O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!)

It’s not exactly the same, to be sure, but the main sense of the poem is there. There is the reference to American defenders keeping the flag flying despite incredible odds, and the inspiration of seeing the flag flying despite a blistering military assault. You've got to allow some liberties in translation or the resulting work will be cumbersome and ugly.

The second verse of Nuestro Himno goes on to wax poetic about the value of equality. In this sense, it diverges from the inspration that Francis Scott Key felt after seeing the British assault on Fort McHenry repelled in the war of 1812. But, equality is an American virtue and it should be celebrated. I don't understand why celebrating an American virtue is somehow unpatriotic. I think people are just startled by the idea that the anthem could be sung in a language other than English.

BFD, I say. Sure, I like to hear the anthem belted out by a singer with a big strong voice, like Whitney Houston at the Super Bowl, and of course as an English speaker I'm more comfortable with English lyrics. But that doesn't mean that alternative arrangements of the song, and even a translation of it into a language other than English, isn't t just as valid an expression of patriotism. The American national anthem is a symbol of America. It should be for all Americans.

Student Writing

I have some students who can really write well. And I also have the author of this passage. This is the conclusion of a 1,700 word paper which was supposed to analyze two different proposals for tort reform. Let me assure you all, it is the distilled essence of this student's writing:

What are liabilities without rebuttal? What is neglect without mediation? Through years of lawsuits and reform issues, political government and businesses of all types either agree or vaguely find room for remorse of coming to a consensus. With every analysis of subject that all teams in class reported, all have their fair share of “pros and cons” to elaborate their stance.

Furthermore, how long will it take or will there ever be laws that actually limit both settlement and punitive damage claims. These claims are what cause premiums and others prices of retail products to rise. Equality is crucial in managing mutual sacrifices.

I have no clue at all what this means. It looks like the student picked out words at random from Black's Law Dictionary and used them as a global search-and-replace for a conclusion from a previously-submitted paper. I guess technically that's original authorship, but the result is, as best I can figure out, nonsense.