Today's Selection

An unusually diverse smorgasbørd of internet link sausages.

• Only ten days until Obama's Crackberry addiction moves to the White House. Will the wingnuts have to call it the Half-Black House?
• Russian justice still sounds like something written by Kafka (although maybe — just maybe — it's because the victim this time is a lawyer).
• Speaking of Kafkaesque legal proceedings, the producer's "open letter" on Watchmen was rejected by the judge as improper. In this instance, the judge was correct; he could only consider input from one of the parties, and the producer was not himself a party. This is an unintended result of WFH doctrine — the court won't get relevant information for its decision. Although if any copyright case ever called for application of laches, this one is probably it.
• Global warming's first visible effects will concern agriculture rather than coastlines, leading to more opportunities for Solomon to split the tuna.
• If you're an inmate in an Alabama jail, you don't have to wait for global warming to go hungry while feeding the fat sheriff's bank account. If that happened in some third-world dictatorship, don't you think we'd be condemning it at the UN? Oh. Alabama. Never mind.
• "Amateurs" are leaving fine-art auction market, resulting in price drops. Considering that the artists (often because they're long dead) don't participate in the profits anyway — leaving the European "sharing" system aside, as it doesn't benefit seventeenth-century woodcarvers — I'm not too distressed by this.
• New Scientist has a thoughtful essay on "immoral" research . Keep in mind, though, that the research per se is (and logically cannot be) "immoral" — it is the application of knowledge, or the particular research method (e.g., the Milgram experiment) that might be "immoral."
• Carrie Vaughn deconstructs so-called "urban fantasy" (although she's ultimately much to nice about it) — part 1, 2, 3, 4. Her innate niceness makes her presentation less condemnatory of the commercial pressures and metooism involved... but then, I'm definitely not nice.
• One of the responses to publishing problems is renewed, louder advocacy of self- and vanity publishing as a "solution." I've criticized the semicanonical list of purported success stories as mere autobibliophilia before. There's a new one out there, though; sadly, it's no more valid than any of the other myths. And the self-/vanity publishing end of the "industry" isn't immune to consolidation and its problems, either.