Not Your Grandmother's Link Sausage Recipes

Well, for one thing, they're just not that old.

• And for another, my secret recipe is my own, from hard-won experiment and experience. I can't attribute these to a mythical, ethnically-appropriate, media- and meme-friendly grandmother. The one who did cook probably would have rejected any credit anyway.

  The disturbing part of this story, though, is the implicit directive to the author to modify his/her/their factual content for perceived enhanced marketability that is not actually related to the subject matter. If I'm trying to cook a tasty prawn vindaloo, I can't rely on someone's grandmother's recipe anyway… if only because the ingredients she used are not available to me, and vice versa. (I promise, though, that granny isn't in the sausages…)

• But at least I know better than to assert copyright in my link-sausage recipes. Or any other recipes. My tales of a past encounter with one of the asserting law firms (not, to be clear, any of the individual counsel appearing in the record in Coscarelli) might be copyrightable, even though they relate to recipes, if they were expressed with sufficient originality; the Joe Friday approach would not be sufficient.

  Which is precisely why recipes are not protected by copyright without more substantial embellishment: Facts are not copyrightable.

• And it appears that the UCC is dead. No, not that one, "beloved" of law students and commercial lawyers throughout the US; this one, essentially beloved of only Hawley and Smoot. OK, there are a few other reasons that there was non-European resistance to the Berne Convention (starting with that pesky "fair use"/"fair dealing" problem because the US has the First Amendment, and continuing on to the historical disdain of Spanish publishers for Latin American Spanish), but as of now, UCC nations: You have been assimilated. Resistance is futile.
• And then there's the flip side of intellectual property in general, and copyright in particular, to consider: Not passing GO. (The only "free parking" I've seen of late has been for actual monopolists and monopsonists.) Remember, intellectual property rights are an overt exception to antitrust law and doctrine. That said, I haven't seen an awful lot of "consumer welfare" arguments have any traction anywhere around intellectual property; the closest IP ever gets is FRAND regarding established standards, and even that's functionally a limitation on non-Ricardian rents and not on rights.

At noon, I'll start my annual 31 December ritual: Locking the doors until noon on 01 January. I'll be off the roads that way (as if the 13" of snow on the ground might not do something about that, too).

No Room at the Parking Lot

In yet another instance of some very "special people" (just ask them; better yet, don't) demonstrating that their "specialness" is a very different kind of holiday-season "specialness" than they would have anyone else believe…

One of the big issues in this neighborhood — just east of Green Lake — is the longterm homeless problem in the area. It's a real problem, with few easy answers and almost none that don't have "NIMBY" being whispered somewhere in the background. In any event, a camp was "cleared out" just in time for the holidays.¹ One of the residents slept in the neighbors' stairwell to get out of the barely-above-freezing rain on Tuesday night. But it's a commercial building, so the neighbors probably don't know; this particular displaced resident picked up after herself, putting her refuse into the garbage can. (Which is more than I can say for some of the customers of the gas station across the street; I'm getting really tired of old receipts from miles away piling up in the front bushes after a strong wind.) The building doesn't really have a parking lot, just space around back where there probably used to be a small garden.

But there are other parking lots relatively near. They're lots that are used primarily one day per week, on one particular weekend day; and when they're otherwise full of cars, those cars are suspiciously different from those common in the neighborhood. Further, the buildings to which those parking lots are attached are much-lower-density-occupancy than anything else around here, and — at least according to the owners' manual for the building's primary users — supposed to be intensely involved in outreach to the less-fortunate (even those from Samar). But those parking lots are, for some value of the word, "patrolled," or at least the displaced homeless don't feel welcome there.

The irony that there's no room in the parking lot right around the time of "celebrating" no room at the inn will be left for those who actually engage with not just the perceived doctrine, but the actual content, of those owners' manuals. Especially given the… demographic disparity… between the building owners (and customer base) and both the homeless population and general demographics in this neighborhood.² So, too, the spotless late-model SUVs and Beamers and Teslas recently visible in that parking lot, with outside-the-county dealership stickers/license-plate frames — particularly since the new light-rail station opened.³ And the distinctly different treatment of these "gatherings" in those parking lots and in public parks set aside for recreation and greenery — truly, or at least by law, open to all — should also provide some food for thought.⁴

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1. Even the headline on that story is a hint. Why not "people" or "persons"? Think about the connotations of the word "individuals" in the context of civil rights for a moment, and how it is distinct from "people" and "persons." But don't think too hard about the slightly-right-of-center ownership of that particular media outlet, and how that ownership might relate to pressure on headline writers.
2. Even before asking about Samar, and precisely what the cultural meaning of and understood-by-all-the-right-people referents in that story (from a slightly different part of that owners' manual) were by the time of the Council of Damnia, or what it was just about two millenia ago. It's also worth remembering that all of the peoples of the Levant were and are "semitic."
3. I walk around this area — mostly for exercise and for my own shopping needs (like the pharmacy), but also for situational awareness. Do not get me started on the relationship among "endemic racism," "inherited wealth and/or persistent schemes to defraud," "current political climate," and that "owners' manual." We don't have that much time, and your screen will fry.
4. Probably a microwaved burrito from that gas station, just about the closest thing to a balanced meal available here… because we're not going to get into the problem with the largest and most-convenient other within-bad-weather-walk-of-the-removed-encampment food outlet being a massively-virtue-signalling organic-food cooperative grocery store whose clientele looks a lot more like Mayberry than May Creek. Which might be just a little bit too reflexive before diving deeply, deeply into that heavily-fortified bowl of eggnog (you do have a designated driver, right?).

I Hate Bagpipes

…when I can hear them all over the building.

• I'm a Grinch. No, really; without the Hallmarkish episode of hypercardia, followed by the carefully hushed-up coronary infarction that was kept off-camera and partly explains the lack of a publicity tour in support of the 1966 masterpiece. But if you've actually read this blawg more than once, you already knew that.

  And if you're one of the many publicists and "critics" who misunderstand the nature, use, and value of "reviews" whom I've eviscerated over the years, you definitely knew that. Today, though, I'll make it a little bit less personal, a little bit more "the entire system is corrupt," and demand that y'all just stop running "best of the year" lists before the end of the year. It's bad enough that all too often, the publicists are doing their very best — sadly, it's a very effective indeed "best" — to coopt, to corrupt, the entire system, ranging from "goody bags" for loyal reviewers on up. (Merely because you've succeeded in putting the cart 100m in front of the horse doesn't actually move the bloody cart, you maroons.) But "best of the year" lists based on prerelease private viewings, and unedited ARCs, and unlawfully-marked-"Not-for-Resale"¹ records/CDs, also run the risk of including (or missing) substantial changes between the version reviewed and the version actually put in circulation. Not to mention little things like proper crediting (right, J____s C_____n)?

• None of which is really going to kill lazy-ass remakes in the foreseeable future. "Yeah, it sucks; but the IP recognition is rock-hard" has been H'wood's guiding principle since Beau Geste; how else to explain the middle of the Bond franchise, or indeed the concept of "franchise"?

  Inquiring minds who've ever pondered The Anxiety of Influence — the good and the bad, and there's a lot of both, and even more not-invented-here problems, but it's still an essential set of memes with which to at least engage — will ponder the connection between this sausage and the preceding one. I recommend leaving the eggnog for later, though; it's vertigo-inducing enough without ethanol.

• Or maybe we could just learn something else from New Zealand, other than Mr Waititi's brilliant improvised line (as I understand it) in the preceding sausage. Like, say, civility in representative democracies actually being of value… and being, in the end, one of the distinguishing characteristics from authoritarianism and theocracy, but context obviously doesn't matter when you've got graft, corruption, and nepotism to get on with.
• I've started one anticipated New Year resolution early. On a couple of sites I visit frequently, there are some ideological trolls who refuse to accept when specific portions of their ideology have been responded to — repeatedly. I've tried to be patient and not hijack someone else's site; I'm now just no longer going to engage.

  Until there's an appropriate virtual dark alley. And plausible deniability. My first career taught me that much.

Die Hard is a holiday movie, dammit. And Yo-yo Ma rulez.

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1. You make copies available to the public — any public — and you've just exhausted your first-sale-doctrine rights. That's been true since the 1976 Act was passed, even under prior versions of § 109. I snickered at what ended up in used record stores with those goofy stickers on them even as an undergrad…

   As one of my math professors remarked repeatedly, applying this to related circumstances in the real world is left as an exercise for the student. The final exam in that course consisted almost entirely of such applications to related circumstances. You have been warned, especially when you try to claim that noninteractive fixed material is being offered only as a "license."

Two Incidents in Crosstown Traffic

Two fascinating traffic incidents today…

The first one was before I even got out of the neighborhood. I needed to pick up some supplies on the way, so I parked in an urban lot across the street from an urban strip mall. (Believe me, there's nothing suburban about it.) Or tried to. There were two crossover-type SUV-thingies parked especially badly in two adjacent "compact vehicle only" spots (with a number of other, full-sized-but-an-additional-row-farther-away-from-the-store spaces empty), both plastered with virtue-signalling bumper stickers. Hint: A "compact SUV" is not a "compact vehicle." Making things worse, both were so badly parked — a good two and a half or three meters between the front of the vehicle and the front of the spot — that a "normal-sized" vehicle across the aisle needed a spotter to help get out of her spot. (At least the spotter knew what he was doing.)

So I went inside, picked up those supplies at two adjacent stores, and walked back out to the lot… only to see one of those SUVs back up and ding the vehicle across the aisle. I got a good look at Karen 1 driving it (that name is foreshadowing — your sign of quality multipart stories). With three bags of Whole Paycheck groceries on the front seat and an oversized Nordies bag in the back…

But things got better — or at least weirder. An little while later, I was toodling along in the left lane of the interstate, passing traffic at a few kph over the speed limit (in a lowered-speed zone with two partly-blind entrances), when a hoity-toity imported blue SUV wove through traffic and started tailgating. Since it wasn't safe to move back right, I continued passing for about another kilometer; just as there was enough space for me to safely move right, the SUV zipped over, passed me on the right doing at least 20kph over the speed limit, and zipped back in front of me. I was then regaled with single-finger salutes from the blonde female driver (she rolled her window down, at highway speed, just to make sure I'd get the point), then resumed her 20kph-over-the-limit speed.

For about another kilometer, when she zoomed from the left lane off at a right-hand exit. The only thing at that exit, especially with the road construction, is a casino. (Hey, "Karen 2": If you'd really like to press your luck, I've got your license-plate number.) And despite the whingeing about how bad traffic is around here, it's still less nerve-wracking than London, or Tokyo. Let alone Riyadh.

Courtesy of the Tannery Next Door

Moooooooo…

• The cow can come home now, as this ridiculous slimebag leaves Congress for a job in which he'll get paid even more to lie (at least until he pisses off the boss). Of course, we're talking about the Central Valley here — the probability of getting someone with both brains and ethics as a replacement is about the same as for an unexpected vacancy on the Chicago City Council. (That's a comment what both parties select for more than anything else.)
• At that, he's got better ethics than the asshole who wrote this misleading headline (and the assholes who wrote the underlying report). "Millions of incorrect copyright claims"? If one skips down to the second paragraph, one discovers that "millions" means "2.2 million"… an error rate, out of 729 million claims, not of "less than 1 percent" but of 0.3%.

  It would actually be much more valuable if the article (and the report) distinguished between pure audio basis and audiovisual basis. That, however, is not what anyone really wants to talk about.

• Or the City (an appellation that, interestingly, referred to Istanbul at the height of Ottoman corruption). As bad as Wall Street is/can be, with all of the Maxwell's Daemons masquerading as hedge-fund managers, the City is worse — and has been for over three decades. Even the Grauniad has been slow to catch on; can I just whisper "Robert Maxwell was very, very average" and leave it at that?
• OK, I can't leave it at that. Time for a few drinks at a dubious club. Followed by a few more drinks at an even more dubious club. And the, perhaps, time for something that probably doesn't work (a conclusion that I reached watching its woeful success rate among military members and their families). To the extent that addiction is a "disease," it can be treated in isolation with little more probability of long-term success than just giving a few good meals to victims of kwashiorkor. And to the extent that there's an actual biochemical issue, less than that.

An Article on [of?]…

You gave us a king. He was very bad. The theocrat who followed was worse.¹

Worse yet was the pretense earlier this week that theocracy had nothing to do with what was at issue. Not in the precincts. Not among the rightly disgraced. Not in the legislatures and governors' mansions. Not in ignoring part of the Constitution we are all expounding… and that that is precisely what we are doing is pretty definitively demonstrated by the diversity of arguments not just that are made, but that are taken seriously by enough people to be taken seriously as arguments.

The fundamental logic problem with the debate, at least in terms of the "viability is not a Constitutional measure" prong being proposed by theocrats (and their allies), is this: If "viability" is too much a moving target for law and its limited competence to accurately reflect reality, then what is the basis? I think there's little doubt that "upon live birth" is an acceptable outer limit of the conversation; but how far prior to that point can we go without playing unacceptable hidden-agenda games?

Not nearly as far as the existence of the current argument implies. Not nearly as far as any tunnel-visioned reference to "advances in medical care" that fail to, well, acknowledge advances in medical understanding at the core of those advances in medical care implies. I will, however, refrain from puns about "bad faith" after this closing bit of snark.

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1. Interview notes, name and circumstances redacted (translated).