Rush Limbaugh Is a Retard

... and so is anyone who objects that today — the start of a Jewish holiday that has been blithely hijacked by people who don't understand English — is supposed to be somehow "devoted" to stamping out use of a common English word as slang for the intellectually challenged. (Normally, "politician" works just fine for that.) Don't feed me any bullshit about how I "can't possibly understand" — I'm an atheist living in East Central Redneckistan who just walked out of a polling place because the County Clerk wouldn't remove archly fundamentalist-xtian signs from the polling place when there's a church-sponsored referendum on the ballot. Y'all would be much better off concentrating on misuse of words that do not have legitimate, nondiscriminatory and technical meanings, like "Washington Redskins." Better yet, you could spend your energy objecting to coded invocation of "Real America" as meaning semiisolated patriarchal 90+% white, 95+% xtian communities well removed from any large segment of the population that relies on skull sweat more than muscle sweat.

So, yeah, I'm a little pissed off at hypocrisy today. Like that's unusual...

A while back, I wrote about the Lampack v. Grimes matter, in which an agent (wrongfully) tried to claim compensation for option books that he did not himself arrange for licensing. The Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of the State of New York, 1st Department (the intermediate court of appeals in New York's strange system) has now affirmed the denial of the agent's claim. Peter Lampack Agency, Inc. v. Grimes, 2012 NY Slip Op. 01576 (App. Div., 1st Dept., 01 Mar. 2012). Hopefully, this will bring an end to this litigation. I do have two snarky observations, though: First, that this is probably the first time in history that a court has managed to claim that a publishing contract is "not ambiguous" and keep a straight face (or unstained sheet of paper, anyway) while doing so. (At least it correctly noted that the agent's strained interpretation would create "an absurd result.") Second, it's a bit frustrating — but entirely unsurprising — that the Appellate Division remained entirely silent about the missing document and its role in the dispute.

Finally for today: Apple has announced a new iPad with higher screen resolution, a faster processor, a "better" camera, 4G WiFi availability, and so on... at the same price. Meh. It's still hooked into the censorship-prone, oligopolistic/oligopsonistic Apple sales channels... and appears to have done nothing for the anemic battery life, the difficulty with glare, interoperability with existing standards, or anything else. News outlets (whether general or techy or even gadget-happy) don't seem to have noticed that even aside from price, the tethering both power-wise and library-source-wise is a major barrier to adoption.