Goodbye, Uncle Walter

Back from Planet California. Opposing counsel in that appeal I was out there to help handle (I did the prep work; my colleague actually argued) blew it. There's an old aphorism that one cannot win an appeal at oral argument, but one can lose it. Although the court's remarks prior to beginning the argument indicated that we had won on the briefs, opposing counsel did not help her client, and her inaccurate "correction" to the judge's question about the record probably did lose the matter if we hadn't already won by then.

• The Grauniad offers an interesting, if somewhat shallow, profile of Ray Bradbury as part of a series on short fiction. Elsewhere, consider which words you love/hate.
• Adam Roberts offers a well-reasoned rant on why shortlists/finalists should be selected by juries. However, he's much too nice to fandom and "home-towning" in the process.
• Just before the fortieth anniversary of man leaving his footprints on another world, Professor Arend provides some thoughtful notes on a possible new outer-space treaty.
• Noted courtesy of SCOTUSblog: The oral argument in Muchnick (aka Post-Tasini... required, in part, because then-District Judge Sotomayór had a lot of help from incompetent lawyers in producing a virtually unintelligible mess in the trial court) is scheduled for Wednesday, 07 October 2009, at 11am.
• Now even the pro-theatre news is recognizing that uncomfortable theatres deter audiences. After spending over seven hours in airplane seating on Saturday, I can definitely relate.
• When The Economist points out that modern economic theory has failed us, you know something is seriously wrong... and that there's plenty of schadenfreude to be had.
• And now, a short rant on Amazon's Kindle fumble. This really was Amazon's own fault. For years, the company has had a policy of dealing only with the "publishers"... and accepting anything that publishers say at face value. The face value of this particular publisher, though, was less than zero; just compare the whois results for the imprint to the whois results of the purported parent. There is no excuse whatsoever for a commercial operation — like a publisher — using an anonymizing registrar. There's even less excuse for using a different one for the imprint than for the purported parent. It took all of fifteen seconds to spot this, and no money. Then add in the dubious origins of one of those anonymous registrars... and Amazon never should have allowed that publisher to sign up; it could even have rejected it via an automated script!

And that's the way it is, Monday, 20 July 2009. RIP Uncle Walter.