My family and friends were much too generous to me this holiday season. Among the gifts I received:

• A new leather jacket to replace my battered and tattered leather jacket that I’ve owned since college. The new one is black, so I guess I’ll have to start riding a motorcycle and smoking cigarettes.
• Books! Like, real books with actual paper and covers and stuff. I almost forgot that they still made them like that. 
• Several sweaters and shirts that will make me look very respectable at the office. I think I’m going to need a new dresser just to hold my vast sweater collection.
• The 25th anniversary Blu-Ray edition of The Goonies. I can report that while this bit of 80s cheese still has its charms, it’s not quite as awesome as it was upon my first viewing at age 12.

It’s occurred to me that I haven’t posted my annual holiday wish list. That’s probably because I’m entering that phase of middle-aged adulthood where I can simply buy the things that I really want. Of course, if some anonymous benefactor wanted to give me a European vacation or new van, I wouldn’t turn either down. But it feels silly to ask for a book or sweater when I can easily purchase them myself. Nobody can spoil me like I do.

I don’t know why I didn’t think of this. Law and the Multiverse is a blog focusing on legal issues that could arise in the alternate worlds of comic books. For example, how does Tony Stark get around federal arms control laws? How does insurance function in a world where frequent battles between superpowered humans results in massive property damage? One post even addresses whether the Americans with Disabilities Act could apply to those with certain mutant abilities.

The blog is authored by a couple attorneys and has been in existence for only a few weeks, but it’s already been featured in the Times and geek überblog Slashdot. The Times article suggests that the site demonstrates that “in the grand Venn diagram of life, there appears to be substantial overlap between lawyers and the people Mr. Daily [one of the site’s creators] lovingly refers to as ‘comic book nerds.'” It also demonstrates that a legal education has some practical applications.

Best of luck to these new bloggers. If they can inspire at least one law school professor to formulate an exam question that includes Cyclops and Magneto rather than Whiteacre and Blackacre, they will have made the world a better place.

If all goes as planned, I’ll be greeting you on Monday with an upgraded computer. For the geeks, here are the specs:

• Asus M488TD-V motherboard
• 4 gigs of DDR3 1600 memory
• Radeon 5770 video card
• AMD Phenom X4 955 CPU
• 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black hard drive
• Windows 7 64 bit

Sexy, huh? It will do pretty much everything except give me a massage. But don’t worry; I’ve got that covered as well. My new rig should be sufficient to handle the gaming goodness that will be forthcoming in the next few years. And I’ll finally have enough storage for my massive collection of…nature photography.

We’re still digging out from the massive snowstorm that hit the Twin Cities over the weekend. I’m guessing that a significant number of people with disabilities and the elderly have become homebound since then. If not for the skyways and my van, I probably wouldn’t be going anywhere. Many of the sidewalks are still impassable or the cut-offs are blocked by huge piles of snow. The storm’s aftermath is making it difficult for everyone to get around and I know cities are struggling to clear the streets, but it might help to remind their workers that not everyone can climb over the mountains of snow and ice left behind by the plows.