This week has been uncommonly busy and the trend continues tonight with a performance of The Importance of Being Earnest at the Guthrie. While I’m getting my culture on, check out the new Avatar trailer. The plot doesn’t look all that original (the “bitter gimp” motif is alive and well in science fiction), but I’ll still go for the alien-on-giant-robot action.
IRAC is a mnemonic they teach you in first-year legal writing classes. The letters stand for the four components of a legal brief or exam response: Issue, Rule, Analysis, Conclusion. Millions of law students learn the IRAC method every year and they use it to write dry little briefs arguing whether or not X breached a contract to make widgets for Ms. Y. It probably wasn’t intended to be employed as a means for a horny law student to argue, via Craigslist, why she and a fellow student should totally do each other, but modern lust knows no rules. Here’s an excerpt:
ISSUE:
Should we have wild, crazy, meaningless animal sex?
RULE:
Distractions can be very detrimental to success in law school, and should be eliminated whenever possible.
ANALYSIS:
As detailed above in the facts, my desire to be plowed by you is a major distraction from my studies. It’s got to be a distraction to you as well since it’s probably unnerving to be stared at by a predatory sex-starved woman as if she wants to take a bite out of you. Per the above rule, this distraction to both of us needs to be eliminated for us to graduate from law school and pass the bar exam.
It’s not Oliver Wendell Holmes, but it does demonstrate a good grasp of the IRAC method. With a little more focus, she might even make law review next spring.
Oh, Craigslist, where were you when I was in law school? I get wistful when I think of all the hopelessly desperate ads I could have posted late at night in the vain hope that the cute blonde in Health Law would read them.
Credit to BoingBoing for the tip.
Here’s a question I’m sure everyone’s asked themselves at least once: what do government attorneys talk about when they go out for a beer? Work, politics, work, comic books, work, reminiscences from law school, and football. It’s a good thing there were only four of us around the table; one more and we would have had enough to start up a firm or a political campaign.
Can someone invent me some kind device that will keep my fingers warm when I go outside on cold days? And no, I’m not talking about mittens. As annoying as it is to wait for sensation to return to my fingertips before I can type, I still have my pride. I inhabit a strictly no-mittens zone, as well as a no-tossel cap zone.
Progressives scored a tactical victory today when Senator Reid announced that the Senate floor version of the health care bill will include an opt-out version of the public option. This doesn’t mean that the final bill will include a public option, but it will be difficult for opponents to strip it out. The grassroots and advocacy organizations did a magnificent job of keeping the the public option’s prospects alive, even when the political environment seemed rather grim. Reid’s decision is probably grounded in politics rather than policy–he faces a tough reelection next year and will need all the liberal allies he can round up–but I can tolerate such calculated behavior if it produces a better bill.
Senator Snowe is already whining that bipartisanship is dead, but she may still be won over if the good people of Maine apply enough pressure. The more important task is to convince the few fence-sitting moderate Democrats that they will suffer real consequences if they enable a Republican filibuster. Consequences such as vigorous primary challenges.
Democrats are also realizing that, after all this sound and fury, people are going to want to see actual benefits before 2013. That might change the final price tag a bit, but probably not enough to matter. If people who were previously denied insurance can at least get some affordable catastrophic coverage, it could have payoffs in the next election.
It’s as if Democrats are finally getting a clue.
After reading all the (mostly) enthusiastic reviews of Windows 7, I’m tempted to make the upgrade from XP. Yet I think I’ll wait until I have a long weekend to give myself sufficient time for reformatting and reinstalling all my applications. I’m enough of a geek that I actually look forward to spending a couple days making my system all shiny with that new OS smell. That said, XP continues to work like a champ. Since I rebuilt my computer a couple years ago, it’s been a paragon of stability and reliability. But I’ll be able to resist the siren call of the new new thing for only so long, so XP and I will do our best to enjoy whatever time we have left.
And yes, I’ve also been eyeing the new iMacs. But a new iMac, along with the necessary accessibility software, would cost me close to two grand. I’d have a hard time justifying that expense, especially now that Windows 7 and OS X approaching parity in terms of features and ease of use.
Like I needed another reason to sit in front of my computer all day. Amazon recently announced that it will soon be releasing a PC version of the Kindle Reader (a Mac version is also reportedly in the works). Barnes & Noble already sells e-books that can be read on a computer, but I haven’t tried it because the reading software looks a little klunky. Hopefully, Kindle for the PC will be more polished. I’m still holding out for a voice- or twitch-activated reading tablet that I can take with me. Hint, hint, Mr. Jobs.
Senate Democrats seem poised to include a public option that includes an opt-out provision for states n the floor version of the health care bill. OMG!
The White House may be trying kill the Senate’s progressive tendencies in favor of the weaker public option “trigger” in order to secure Republican Senator Olympia Snowe’s vote. WTF?
This is like watching a particularly wonky episode of West Wing, only without getting to watch the urgent hallway conversations. Six weeks ago, all the smart money seemed to be on a final bill that didn’t include any sort of public option. But the political process is unpredictable and chaotic. All it took was a butterfly fluttering its wings to change the climate (in this case, a Washington Post headline re-discovering that the public option is popular with voters). There’s still plenty of opportunities for Democrats to get spooked and run screaming back to the political center, but for the moment, I’m cautiously optimistic.
Even if a public option with an opt-out provision passes, more battles lie ahead. Governor Pawlenty is already indicating that he would opt Minnesota out of the public option. Of course, Pawlenty knows that he’ll be out of office by the time Minnesota needs to make that decision, which gives him the freedom to pander to Republican primary voters. But I hope other state Republicans take the bait. Our state already has a public option (MinnesotaCare) and it’s proven to be pretty popular.
The few of you who actually responded to yesterday’s informal poll liked the idea of an advice column. So here’s the deal. You send me questions and I’ll pick at least one for a Friday post. Questions can cover any topic and your anonymity will be carefully preserved. I have no idea if this will turn into a regular feature; I guess that depends on your willingness to continue telling me about your problems and my ability to write responses that are both entertaining and at least somewhat useful. If nothing else, this could be an amusing experiment.
Go on, tell me everything.
I used to check my blog statistics every day, but that started to feel like I was feeding my inner narcissist, so I let a whole year go by before looking at them again. I finally allowed myself a peek at Sitemeter stats a couple days ago and discovered that, over the last twelve months, traffic to the Floor actually peaked last October with approximately 2,500 hits that month. Since then, I seem to have settled into the 1,500-1,700 range of hits per month. Not bad, but I’m still getting less hits than some grandmother in Ohio who posts the many hijinks of her cats.
So my question for all of you is this: how can I attract enough hits to pull me out of the blogosphere’s basement? I’ve been kicking around a few ideas.
Thoughts? Suggestions?