Bûche de Lardon

Speaking through his character Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde remarked that "The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties." Softy that I am, I disagree. However, there's no denying that your spouse being away awakens a part of your personality that slumbers when they're around. Guy Time is what happens when my family is out of town, and as my friends get married off, I find it's the same with them.

Take Dan, for example. My friend Dan is married to a wonderful woman named Sita who is a professional raw vegan chef. Dan is an amazing combination, equal parts hippie and South Philadelphia, and he is the kind of guy who I imagine gladly gobbles the awesome and healthy cuisine that is a part of the daily life of someone who lives in a raw vegan household.

Still, I know that Dan wasn't raised on nut milk and cashew cheez, so the following IM exchange last Thursday came as no surprise to me:

Dan: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/dining/28bacon.html
Me: Tempted. You?
Dan: I think maybe its important that we try it just once
Me: I think your spouse would have a hard time being present.
Dan: She's gone saturday ... ...

(. . . many instant messages and roughly 7 hours later)

Me: Operation Bacon Log is a go.

And so it came to pass that Dan and I cooked a Bacon Log (or, across the pond, perhaps a Bûche de Lardon) this Saturday. For those of you who are as yet uninitiated, the Bacon Log (called by some The Bacon Explosion) is a veritable pigstravaganza. It is all the swine you would ever want to eat . . . in convenient log form. But why simply describe Bacon Log when we have pictures? Gaze upon the glory:

Bacon Weave
The log starts with a tightly woven mat of raw bacon. I swear I couldn't have gotten these any tighter if I was using a loom. I'm confident this mat could have held water. Those sprinkles are a garlic & onion rub.

The Enbaconing
Atop the bacon weave, you place a roughly 1" thick layer of sausage. On top of this sausage, you sprinkle some crisp cooked bacon — the delicious innards of the log. This crispy bacon will absorb the "juice" as the Log cooks. Yeah. It's "juice."

Pig Sushi (in a way)
Dan has completed the initial roll, trapping the crispy bacon in the middle of a raw sausage roll. Note that the bacon weave is still flat. At this point, it occurred to us that this is a lot like rolling a giant sushi. A GIANT SUSHI FULL OF SWINY GOODNESS, THAT IS!

Initial Roll
Dan is preparing to roll the sausage back over the bacon mat. Tip for those of you keeping score at home: Use aluminum foil, like we did. It'll make if vastly easier to get the bacon to wrap tightly around the sausage without any unaesthetic slippage. No one wants bacon slippage. No one.

The Completed Log
Dan applies the finishing touches to the log, preparing it for the long journey that awaits it.

The Baking
Ever wonder why they call it bacon when it's almost never baked? Well, at this moment Wikipedia tells me that bacon "is derived from the Old High German bacho, meaning 'back', 'ham', or 'bacon'." So bacon is derived from another word that also means bacon? I must say that I'm shocked.

2 HOURS CRAWL BY

Fresh from the Oven
If you look closely, the juice is attempting to escape from the log. The orange hue of the juice indicates that it is laden with Vitamin C. Yep. You heard it here first. The Bacon Log is loaded with all the nutrients and minerals that a growing body needs. My sources tell me that it contains enough Vitamin C to last a normal adult a full year.

Still Life with Bacon Log
This is the finest picture ever taken by a camera. Go ahead. Let the tears come. It's hard to be in the presence of such greatness.

The Carving
Dan carved the log with all the care of a vascular surgeon. I think all these years of living with a vegan has made him more sympathetic to the plight of those animals that become our food. His careful carving honored the pig(s) that had become this feast.

Oh, in the back of the picture you'll see a flask of "juice." I'd like to tell you we each did a shot of this. We did not. Well, there's always next time.

Plated with Salad
It was delectable. I scarfed down my plate and a second, and contemplated a third.

We brought the ample leftovers back to my house, where Steph's mom shared some with me the next day. She was awed at how tasty it was, especially with a baguette (as, I'm told, they eat the bûche in the old country). We agreed that it was perhaps the perfect food for watching a brunch-time football game on a fall day.

Dan had to ventilate the apartment before Sita returned, but I doubt he's in trouble for introducing such a quantity of swine into their abode. After all, she got that cooking sheet specifically for him to cook bacon on. See, Mr. Wilde, it's no life of mutual deception after all. Even the raw vegan chef knows that sometimes her man must answer the primal call of Bûche de Lardon, The Bacon Log.

Unequal Amendments

All men may be created equal—but not all laws are.

Since the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1787–90, the venerable document has been amended 27 times, but from a legal point of view not all of these amendments are equally important. Some amendments, such as the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech, come up again and again in judicial opinions and legal scholarship. Other amendments, such as setting January 20 as the date of presidential inaugurations (the Twentieth Amendment), have rarely come up in litigation or commentary.

Having just graduated from law school, we here at Sauntering decided to produce a visual representation of the vast differences in relative importance of the amendments. What follows is a picture of all amendments written out in a font size corresponding to the relative citation frequency in Supreme Court and federal appellate court opinions. (To get a larger version, click on the image.)

Bill of Rights (First 10 Amendments)

All 27 Amendments

Our Methodology

To get the number of citations of each amendment, we searched AltLaw for “First [Second, etc.] Amendment” and “1st [2nd, etc.] Amendment.” This strategy means that we missed citations to “Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments,” etc.

Furthermore, although AltLaw’s database contains all U.S. Supreme Court opinions back to 1791, it contains only those U.S. Court of Appeals opinions published since 1950. Therefore, we have attempted to account for this by adjusting the citation numbers for the post-1950 amendments.

To deemphasize the immense citation difference between the major and minor amendments, we made the font sizes proportional to the square roots of the citation numbers.

For those readers with more than a passing interest in this little project, feel free to check out our raw data [Google Doc].

A final note: Although I came up with the idea of representing the amendments with font sizes, Sauntering founder and co-blogger Andy did the heavy lifting to research the amendment frequencies and come up with the visual display. Kudos to Andy!

Soundtrack for Obama '08

In the 1979 movie Manhattan, Woody Allen's character lists Louis Armstrong's 1927 recording of Potato Head Blues (RealAudio link) as one of a dozen reasons that life is worth living. Sitting in a jazz history course more than a decade ago, I recall my professor (the inimitable and irascible late Grover Sales) remarking to us that he agreed with Allen, and that if he were forced to choose one song to serve as a soundtrack to life, it'd be Potato Head Blues.

I know it's the sentimentalist in me, but since then I've found the notion of a "soundtrack to life" to be a potent one. Occasionally I'll stumble across a particular song and discover that it captures the emotion of a particular set of experiences in my life.

Now, I haven't written about it on this blog yet, but I'm keenly excited about the Barack Obama campaign. And I'm a bit stunned by how enthusiastically Senator Obama has been received by a needy public. When I read and watch the news, I see time and again stories of people who have invested their fondest hopes in him, and I see how he's responded to the moment, treating it as a call to action.

It's in this context that I stumbled across the song below. To me, this is the soundtrack to the Obama campaign as of February. The energy, the striving, the power, the feeling of being unsettled, the momentum — it's all there. Here's hoping that these themes continue to develop and build through November and then through the next four years.

Perpetuum Mobile by Penguin Cafe Orchestra
(Yes, it is in the completely unbelievable 15/16 time signature.)

A Toast to the Constitution: Temperance, A Benevolent Creator/Brewmaster, Happiness & Avoiding the Gout

(Crossposted from the American Constitution Society :: Columbia Law School)

Here's the toast from the 222^nd Annual Constitutional Law Mixer, held at Columbia Law School on February 4, 2008. As in years past, the event was jointly hosted by the local chapters of the American Constitution Society, the Federalist Society, and the Constitution Law faculty here at Columbia.

First, I want to thank ACS & FedSoc for inviting me to give a toast at the 222nd Annual Constitutional Law Mixer. It's an honor to be a part of a tradition that predates both interchangeable parts and modern plumbing.

As Chancellor Kent was known to say: "Our annual Con Law Mixer? Yeah, that's kind of a big deal."

---

Back in May of last year, I stumbled across Robert Harris's review of the Barbara Holland book The Joy of Drinking. In Harris's review, he noted Holland's research into the role alcohol played in the creation of the United States Constitution. Harris writes that:

[I]n 1787, two days before their work was done, the 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention “adjourned to a tavern for some rest, and according to the bill they drank 54 bottles of Madeira, 60 bottles of claret, 8 of whiskey, 22 of port, 8 of hard cider and 7 bowls of punch so large that, it was said, ducks could swim around in them. Then they went back to work and finished founding the new Republic.” Note the 55 delegates and 54 bottles of Madeira. Which founder was slacking?

PG, a recent CLS graduate and the only person I know whose Constitutional leanings led her to be an active member of both ACS and the Federalist Society, speculated that Thomas Mifflin – at the time the sitting President of Pennsylvania and a Quaker prior to his expulsion for serving in the Continental Army – was the teetotaler; however, given the amount of drink involved, it's unsurprising that the identity of the true abstainer would be lost to history.
Perhaps it was the drink, but there's so much about the Constitution that's been lost to history, so much that the Founders forgot to tell us about the meaning and the crafting of this founding document:

• Dear Founders, is that a comma, a semi-colon, or a fleck of dirt?


• O Breech-pants-wearing Founders, is the office of the Vice President firmly seated within the executive branch, or is it an extra-constitutional floater, like the extra outfielder in a game of slow-pitch softball?


• O Founders, did you really believe that human nature would permit the loser of the Presidential election to serve as a good Vice-President to the winner?


• Founders, why-oh-why did you decide to capitalize nearly every noun in the Constitution? ...and what's the deal with the handful you didn't capitalize? (...and 1L's: That's a gangbuster note topic, by the way.)


• O Founders, are there secret messages in your tortured and inconsistent spellings?

Ultimately, we just don't know the answers to any of these vital questions, so we're left to make like the founders and drink a little Madeira, claret, whiskey, port and hard cider — maybe that will bring some clarity. (Incidentally, I was told that this event would have a bowl of punch so large that ducks could swim in it. Maybe that's coming later.)

In finishing my toast and finally raising a glass, I want to end with a meditation.

Let's meditate upon how the Constitution would have looked if Ben Franklin had had more creative control over the text. After all, historians report that when Thomas Jefferson sent Franklin a draft of the Declaration of Independence containing the line "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable," Franklin returned it to him with the last three words crossed out and replaced by "self-evident." Surely the person responsible for this memorable and meaningful term into the Declaration of Independence could have helped us more with the Constitution. (By the way, for those of you who are measuring the productivity of your lives against the lives of the Founders or choosing your political candidates on the basis of age, please note that Thomas Jefferson was all of 33 years old when he helped draft the Declaration of Independence.)

Now, I happen to know what Franklin would have done if he'd had his way with our overly short & oft-confusing Constitution. He would have included two final clauses.

In fact, I know which clauses Franklin would have inserted.

Truth be told, I find the tension between these two clauses to be roughly analogous to the on-going dialogue that occurs between the Federalist Society & ACS.

The first clause is a quote of Franklin's, taken from Poor Richard's Almanack, 1734. To me, this is the Federalist Society clause: "Be temperate in wine, in eating, girls, and sloth, or the gout will seize you and plague you both."

The second clause does not appear in any published writing of Franklin's, but has been broadly attributed to him. Naturally, the lack of textual basis for this quote (and its feel-good character) makes it more appropriate for ACS. The clause is: "Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."

So please join me in raising a glass: Here's to Franklin, to the other Founders, to their strange and wondrous Constitution, to ACS, to the Federalist Society, to being happy, and – above all – to trying our best to avoid the gout.

CHEERS!

The Right to Bear Ye Olde Arms

(Crossposted from American Constitution Society :: Columbia Law School)

The ACS/Federalist Society sponsored discussion/debate on DC v. Heller – the first SCOTUS case since 1939 to address the meaning of the Second Amendment – won't begin for another 2 hours, but I am prepared to upstage the speakers by offering a workable solution for Second Amendment jurisprudence in the 21^st Century.

Although the language of this amendment provides infinite grist for the mill of constitutional interpretation, my solution focuses exclusively on one word: arms.

My proposal: The Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms as such arms existed at the ratification.

Arms in 1791

Let's look at arms – specifically, guns – as they existed at the time of the ratification.

Guns in 1791 WOULD

• ...be made by a gunsmith.
• ...have rudimentary rifling.
• ...be single-shot weapons.
• ...be loaded through the muzzle.
• ...fire by means of a flintlock.

Guns in 1791 WOULD NOT

• ...have interchangeable parts. (Popularized in 1798)
• ...be revolvers. (Invented in 1835)
• ...be breachloaded. (Popularized in 1810)
• ...use smokeless powder. (Invented in 1885)
• ...use a percussion cap, necessary for modern cartridged bullets. (Invented in 1842)
• ...load bullets from a clip. (Invented in 1890)
  

Courts can't wish the Second Amendment away, but they can construe it in a manner that works in today's society.

Arthur Goldberg, the little-remembered Supreme Court Justice who sat on the bench from 1962 to 1965, has been long-derided by social and political conservatives as something of a fool due to his concurrence in Griswold v. Connecticut, where he found a right to privacy in the Ninth Amendment. Lately, these same conservatives have been quoting and paraphrasing Justice Goldberg when they say things like "while the Constitution protects against invasions of individual rights, it is not a suicide pact," a line Justice Goldberg included in Kennedy v. Mendoza-Martinez, 372 U.S. 144, 159-60 (1963). Applying an admittedly severe form of originalism to cabin the Second Amendment prevents the kind of suicide pact that Goldberg was worried about.

Michelle Obama created a bit of a stir earlier this week when she talked about how the need for guns might vary regionally within the United States. A backstop interpretation of the Second Amendment – one that only protects the individual right to bear arms as they stood in 1791 – permits states to develop right to bear arms appropriate to their circumstances.

So What'll It Be, Oklahoma City?

Last night, the group that owns the Seattle SuperSonics announced its intention to move the Sonics to Oklahoma City. Although Seattle certainly would lament losing its basketball team, Oklahoma City did show itself deserving of an NBA team through its rabid support of the New Orleans Hornets during the two seasons that team played in Oklahoma after Hurricane Katrina.

If the Sonics move to Oklahoma City, the main question I'll have is what the name of the team will be.

The Sonics began in 1966 and were named after the Boeing 2707 airplane, a supersonic plane to be built in Seattle to compete with the European-made Concorde. Environmental concerns and federal budget cuts led to the cancellation of the Boeing 2707 in 1971, before a single plane was manufactured. Thus, the Seattle SuperSonics are named after a plane that was never manufactured. [If other cities followed this example and had sports teams named after things that were never built, I guess we'd have the Chicago Mile-High Buildings and the New York Expressways (or, arguably, the Cathedrals).]

So what are the Sonics going to do with a name that is only relevant if it is in Seattle? Well, they've got a number of examples to follow.

The Region-less Name
First, most relocated franchises aren't in the position of the Sonics. It's not too confusing when the aforementioned Hornets decide to retain their moniker after moving from Charlotte to New Orleans, since no one exclusively associates flying pests with North Carolina. In baseball, the Athletics have marched from Philadelphia to Kansas City to Oakland and (it appears) now to Fremont without changing their name.

The Abandoned Regional Name
If the Sonics dump their current name, they'll follow in the footsteps of the former Houston Oilers.

Before they rebranded their team the Tennessee Titans, the former Houston Oilers played one season as the Tennessee Oilers. Although this franchise (quite bitterly) held onto the rights to the name "Houston Oilers" (preventing Houston from following in the footsteps of Cleveland and returning the Houston Oilers to the field down the road), they escaped to a different (if not more relevant) name the next season.

The Retained Regional Name
If the Sonics retain their current name, they'll join a strange group of teams whose names hearken back to an abandoned geography.

Two of these regionally confused teams are in Los Angeles. What are the Los Angeles Dodgers dodging? Trolleys in 19th century Brooklyn, of course. What lakes are the Los Angeles Lakers talking about? Well, that'd be the 10,000 lakes of Minnesota, back when they were the Minneapolis Lakers.

Finally, the gem of relocated franchise names: What's the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Utah? Jazz music, perhaps? Mormons in Utah get to swing because the Utah Jazz played five seasons as the New Orleans Jazz before moving to Salt Lake City in 1979.

So what'll it be, Oklahoma City? Are you keeping the Sonics – and with it a Seattle-centric reference to a plane that was never built – or are you going in a different direction?

My advice? Go with a truth-in-advertising name. Giants, Titans, Chargers — these mythic names are generic, for all their braggadocio. I like my teams named after an occupation that is associated with the region: Packers, Steelers, Brewers. (I guess gambling on this theme is what got the Sonics in trouble.)

Since Oklahoma City is home to two of the nation's largest energy companies, how about a name along those lines:

• The Oklahoma City Drillers or Oklahoma City Pumpers (probably too much playground taunting with these two)
• The Oklahoma City Carbon (a name Al Gore would love)
• The Oklahoma City Wranglers (too close to Cowboys?)

Common Eponyms

An eponym is a word that was once a person's name but has come to have a broader meaning. Most eponyms are obvious — even if you don't know anything about the eponymous individuals, it's still clear that phrases like Benedict Arnold or Ponzi scheme or Achilles' tendon reference individuals (whether real or fictitious).

These proper eponyms don't interest me very much. I do enjoy, however, eponyms where the person's name has become such an utterly common word or phrase that the users of that word or phrase are completely unaware that it was formerly a person's name. I suppose the most typical examples of this kind of common eponym are sandwich (from the Earl of Sandwich) or teddy bear (from Teddy Roosevelt).

In the cumbersome paragraph below, each linked word is an eponym of this common sort:

Somehow, the diesel derrick's silhouette reminded the sideburn-wearing chauvinist of the daguerreotype of a mausoleum he had seen back when he was a mere guppy. "Bloomers or leotards?" his mentor asked. "Neither," the guy said. "I'm boycotting them. I'd rather be pierced by shrapnel, guillotined and lynched than to end up looking like a doily."

Link: Wikipedia List of Eponyms

What if MLB Had Promotion & Relegation?

I've mentioned before in this blog that the system of promotion & relegation in European league sports is the "awesome Shiva of sports, destroyer and transformer." US sports leagues are worse for not having promotion & relegation; however, even with 24/7 coverage of sports in this country, most sports fans have no idea what promotion & relegation are and how they'd change their favorite sports.

O Dear MLB Fan, if your sport had promotion & relegation like the European soccer leagues, the bottom three teams in the MLB would move down to the AAA league, and the top three teams in AAA would move up to the majors. The end of the season wouldn't merely mark a battle for the wild card spot: It'd be a life-and-death battle to stay in the MLB and we'd all be glued to our televisions.

If the baseball season ended today, and MLB/AAA promotion & relegation operated the same way it does in the English Premier League, the Nashville Sounds (89W/55L, .618) of the Pacific Coast League and the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees (84W/59L, .587) of the International League would be promoted to the MLB. Playing a 4-team mini-tournament for the final slot would be Sacramento River Cats (.583), the Toledo Mud Hens (.573), the Durham Bulls (.599), and the Iowa Cubs (.549).

As it currently stands, 6 MLB teams – the Chicago White Sox (.433), the Kansas City Royals (.433), the Pittsburgh Pirates (.427), the Baltimore Orioles (.427), the Florida Marlins (.427), and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays (.414) – are seriously at risk of finishing in the bottom 3 slots for the year. Relative to other teams in the league, these teams are horrible. And because we have a system where they're locked into the top flight professional baseball league, they can get away with being horrible.

Under a system without promotion & relegation, the players for these teams will simply go through the motions for the rest of the season, playing their remaining games lackadaisically. The best of these teams, the White Sox and the Royals, are 25.5 games out of playoff contention: What do they care who wins or loses the remaining games?

Under a system with promotion & relegation, these players would be playing like madmen. Presently, sportswriters are shocked when teams that have had a rough season play their best at the end of the season. If we had promotion & relegation, this would be commonplace, as each threatened team battled to stay in the top league.

Owners would be forced to invest in their teams or risk falling out of the league — you wouldn't see them employing a penny-pinching strategy of running a wildly profitable but unsuccessful team (See Bud Selig or (outside of baseball) the Golden State Warriors).

What do we get instead of relegation & promotion? We get a Congressionally-sanctioned monopoly for major league baseball. We get meaningful games at the end of the season only for those teams at the top. We get a farm system where the teams are locked into their divisions and financially dependent on their big-league paymasters. We get less.

7 of the Chicago White Sox's final 14 games this season are against the Kansas City Royals. The team that wins the majority of these games will move up the table. The team that loses the majority will probably end the season in the bottom three teams.

Without promotion & relegation, you don't care about these games and nobody else does, either.

With promotion & relegation, you'd care, the players would care, the owners would care, and you can rest assured that the people of Chicago and Kansas City would care.

Simple Rules for Jaywalking in Manhattan

This week, New York City launched a new tourism campaign called Just Ask the Locals. The campaign is devoted to making tourists feel in-the-know about the city. The program provides them with helpful tips and encourages visitors to, as you might have guessed, ask local New Yorkers if they need help.

Though the thought of a Bermuda-shorts-wearing tourist asking Johnny New York for directions sounds at once dangerous and amusing, I think the campaign is a winner. I've found the average New Yorker to be shockingly friendly, bordering on chatty. A New Yorker's friendliness is borne of necessity: We're all in this together, living right on top of one another — we might as well make it livable.

In the spirit of Just Ask a Local, I thought I'd provide visitors to Gotham with some simple guidance that will help them navigate the city and avoid calamity. I'm going to help you jaywalk.

Jaywalking is ubiquitous in New York City, especially Manhattan. However, crossing at the crosswalk in the face of a DON'T WALK sign is not due some lawless impulse lurking deep in the hearts of all New Yorkers, it's due to the layout of the city.

In Manhattan, the roads running roughly north/south (or uptown/downtown) are avenues. At Central Park, Manhattan Island is 15 avenues wide. Generally, these are 4 lane boulevards, sometimes with a median. Crossing 15 avenues on foot would mean walking nearly 3 miles.

Conversely, streets in Manhattan run roughly east/west. There are almost 300 streets from the southern tip of Manhattan to its northern end. (Although highest numerical street in Manhattan is 220^th Street, 1^st Street is not even close to the bottom of the island.) Most streets in Manhattan are one-way, one-lane affairs. Crossing 15 streets translates into walking a little over a half mile.

So let's say you're a New Yorker walking south down 10^th Avenue between 46^th and 45^th. It took you a little over a minute to traverse this block, and now you're facing an illuminated DON'T WALK sign, even though you can clearly see there are no cars coming down this one-way, one-lane, 30-foot-wide street. Like everyone else, you're going to jaywalk. Here's how you're going to do it.

Sauntering's Simple Rules for Jaywalking in Manhattan

1. At an intersection, if you can cross the street at a casual pace, you may jaywalk.
   
   This is really the only rule. If you are able to casually cross the street, walk signal or no, you may do so. Naturally, the rule has a number of caveats:
   
   
   • So you want to jaywalk across an avenue or a through street.
     Manhattan jaywalking is an art developed for the one-way, one-lane streets, not the broad avenues. However, the same rules apply. If you can see clearly and walk casually across multiple lanes of traffic, feel free. If you run, we will secretly believe that you have robbed a store.
   
   
   • So you want to jaywalk with your infant, your luggage, or your dog.
     You still may jaywalk while encumbered with cumbersome, precious, or cumbersome & precious cargo, but please do so only when you can still obey the casual pace rule. Watching a person hurriedly jaywalk with a stroller makes even the most thick-skinned New Yorker wince.
     
     • Note: You will occasionally see people in this category engage in Principled Non-Jaywalking. These are the conscientious objectors of the New York City streets. You look at them and you know that they know the deal, yet they choose not to jaywalk. Maybe they're teaching a child to obey the traffic signals (a useful skill elsewhere in the world, if not in Manhattan) or maybe they're a nanny, eager to appear concerned with their charge's welfare, should a friend of the family be about.
       
   
   
   • So you want to jaywalk in the presence of other tourists or the elderly.
     Jaywalking in Times Square or near Rockefeller Center means jaywalking in the presence of people who have never been exposed to Manhattanite jaywalking. They will follow you into the intersection, oblivious to the signals and the traffic. Unawares, they will take terrible risks and tempt death. Look out for them a little bit.
     
     • Note: When walking in one of these touristy areas, you will be able to discern local New Yorkers from the rest of the throng because locals will walk in the gutter/parking lane.
       
       Tourists walk umpteen abreast, choking foot traffic on even the broadest sidewalks. Staying near the gutter guarantees locals that their pace will not be impaired by the skyward-looking mob.
     
     One of the joys of New York is that the elderly live among the rest of society, not sequestered away in their suburban homes or care centers. Yet, one of these senior Gothamites might follow your example without your locomotive ability, jaywalking dangerously. Please keep an eye out for them.
     

What does the NYPD think about jaywalking? In 1998, then mayor Rudy Guliani announced a crackdown on jaywalking. A year and a half later, the New York Times reported that a "spokesman for the Police Department wavered between saying the anti-jaywalking initiative was over and that there never was an anti-jaywalking initiative."

So there, New York visitor. Jaywalk to your heart's content, but please jaywalk correctly.

Drama Chipmunks/Prairie Dogs & the DMCA

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My Teacher, Richard Rorty (1931 - 2007)

One of my friends has a strange job. He works for a broadcast television network, crafting obituaries for people who are still alive. Now, as I try to cobble together a few words on Richard Rorty, the person who changed the way I see the world more than anyone else (outside my family), I realize why they write these things ahead of time.

I'm going to write about the second time Richard Rorty changed my life.

The first time, it was 1998 and I was a college senior taking a year-long course from Rorty during his first year at Stanford. The course listing indicated that by taking the class I'd get the chance to reacquaint myself with the Western canon. Instead, what I learned was that I wasn't the only person who cherished religion without living a life of belief, that a school of thought called pragmatism echoed many of the ideas I'd stumbled across in philosophical Taoism & Buddhism, and that Theodore Roosevelt more or less captured the meaning of life when he said "Do what you can, with what you have, where you are." (In class, I once asked Rorty what he felt the meaning of life was. I distinctly recall his answer: "To envisage new modes of being." Let's stick with Roosevelt.)

That was the first time. This is the second time:

The last time I had a long talk with Richard Rorty was October 2001. I was a struggling entrepreneur, back at Stanford half-time to finish my masters degree while the company I helped found was itself foundering (It would miraculously recover). I was taking a graduate course with Rorty – I think it was called Kant, Nietzsche, & Heidegger – and I paid him a visit in his office. I remember the conversation like it was yesterday.

As it was early October 2001, we started the conversation the way all conversations began in early October 2001. We talked about 9/11.

I asked Rorty if he'd written anything about 9/11. He said that he had not, but that he suspected American culture would react to this shock the same way it had reacted to similar shocks before — with xenophobia and a temporary loss of civil liberties. I was still in my post-9/11 complacency. Rorty was not.

Rorty was unflaggingly patriotic but despised chauvinism, recognizing that it's the latter that passes for patriotism today. In his brief 1994 essay The Unpatriotic Academy, Rorty (a lifelong leftie) criticized his fellow academic lefties, expounding a view that others would later condense into the t-shirt/bumper sticker slogan Dissent is Patriotic:

There is no contradiction between such identification and shame at the greed, the intolerance and the indifference to suffering that is widespread in the United States. On the contrary, you can feel shame over your country's behavior only to the extent to which you feel it is your country. If we fail in such identification, we fail in national hope. If we fail in national hope, we shall no longer even try to change our ways.

The obligatory 9/11 discussion out of the way, we moved on to other matters.

Mainly me.
...and my life.
...and me not knowing what to do with it.

It was 2001 and I was completing my second degree in Religious Studies. I knew enough to know that I didn't have the desire or the talent to get my PhD. Having been pulled into 1999's online tulip mania, I had about 2 years of experience with technology startups, but did I want to be the guy with the Religious Studies degree, pretending to know Thing One about how to build The Next Big Thing? Here I was, about to ask Richard Rorty – the most subtle, inspiring mind I'd ever met – what to do with my life.

(I know I said I remembered this conversation like yesterday, but things get a little hazy here. Rather than bore you with "and then I said" followed by "and then he said," I'll just fast-forward to way I felt at the end of the conversation.)

Leaving his office, I knew I had just lived through a Eureka moment. I felt physically changed. I'd felt great before, I've felt great since — but I'd never felt quite like this. As I bid Rorty adieu and descended the interior steps of Building 260, I reflected on these ideas that had hit me like such a freight train.

Long before this conversation, Rorty convinced me that it is pointless to pretend that there is some unique thing called philosophy — I recall him characterizing it as little more than "boring poetry." Although statements like this earned Rorty more than his share of academic enemies, few would dispute the assertion that the best painters, the best writers, the best thinkers, the best musicians do little more than introduce us to new modes of being. Their fields are more similar than they are different. They all show us a glimpse of what is possible.

I'll never forget what I thought as I walked down those steps: The Law is simply the social laboratory in which ideas do battle. To become a lawyer is to become someone who is a tiny part of a gigantic idea project. A lawyer's job is to sculpt ideas as people change and sculpt people as ideas change.

I went home and told my surprised girlfriend – not yet my fiancée – that I had an epiphany and was going to law school. The following summer, I took the LSAT exam. That fall, I applied to a few law schools. I deferred law school for two years until that girlfriend – by then, my wife – finished her own law schooling. In 2005, that girlfriend/fiancée/wife and I moved to New York, and I started law school.

Now, almost six years after talking to Richard Rorty, I believe more firmly than ever that the lawyer's role is to shepherd ideas through society and society through ideas. I'm working at a law firm that guides startups, startups like the one that I worked at when I talked to Richard Rorty in October 2001.

Richard Rorty died on Friday at age 75. A few years ago, he changed my life. Thank you, Rorty. Thank you for changing my life.

Why I am a Fulham Fan (...and Why You Should Be, Too) — Part III

(Check here for Part I of this post, and click here for Part II.)

Part I of this post argued that the EPL is worth your time and attention. Part II helped guide you away from 19 EPL teams not quite worth your fandom. Now, it's time for me to convince you, probably-a-Yankee blog reader, why you should be a Fulham fan.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I must admit up front that my wife's friend's boyfriend plays for Fulham. Naturally, you understand that this 3-degrees-of-separation relationship makes it more difficult, not easier, for me to be a Fulham fan.

First, football players move around a lot, and there are no guarantees that this guy will be playing for Fulham in the fall. Because of a new global television deal, EPL teams will receive a massive influx of cash next year. As a result, Fulham – like many other teams in the league – is cleaning house in anticipation of purchasing players away from other domestic leagues. He's still a Cottager (Fulham's stadium is called Craven Cottage, and thus the players are sometimes called "Cottagers."), and I expect him to be a Cottager in the fall. But I won't hold my breath.

Second, rooting for a sports team because your wife's friend's boyfriend plays for them sounds an awful lot like a man crush. With professional male sports leagues standing as the last conspicuous bastion of rank homophobia within mass culture, fandom based on a foundation of mancrushery simply would not do.

Now that you've waded through pages and pages of preamble, it's finally time for the final list of...

Reasons You Should be a Fulham Fan

1. They Have the Most Americans of Any EPL Team. Sorry, international readers, but this article presumes a Yankee audience, so this is point #1. US players Brian McBride and Carlos Bocanegra anchor the Fulham team. Clint Dempsey joined the team in January from the US's MLS league, and provided the goal against Liverpool that kept Fulham in the EPL. Although he's from New Zealand, reserve midfielder Simon Elliott attended college in the US and played in the US's MLS afterward.
   
   Because of all these US ties, commentators will occasionally refer to Craven Cottage as "Little America." Between regularly playing Americans and featuring team colors that are red, white, and black, Fulham is one hue away from looking like a US team in international play.
   


2. They Have the Right Kind of Tycoon Owner. Many EPL clubs are owned by eccentric people of gigantic wealth. Chelsea is owned/ruled by Russian oil oligarch Roman Abramovich. Manchester United is owned by Malcolm Glazer, a US food executive despised by ManU fans. Liverpool was recently acquired by US investors George Gillett Jr. and Tom Hicks in a move that has Reds fans on edge.
   
   Compare this motley crew with Fulham's owner, Mohamed Al-Fayed. Yes, that's the same Al-Fayed who owns the Harrods department store in London, and whose star-crossed son Dodi was alongside Princess Diana that fateful night in 1997. Some might find Fulham's association with Al-Fayed to be off-putting, but when forced to choose between Al-Fayed and a Russian kleptocrat or a bunch of American conglomerate executives, I'll pick Al-Fayed any day.
   


3. The Underdog Factor — They're Not Even the Best Team in Their Neighborhood. As noted in Part II of this post, I'm averse to picking a team at the top of the EPL table. You should pick a good team, but not a great one, and Fulham is on the cusp of good-ness (A 10-game winless streak from February 4 through May 4 of this season argues against them being good right now.) When Fulham wins a game, it's because they really labored at it. Maybe I just like the struggle.
   
   According to Google Maps, Fulham's stadium is less than 2 miles away from Chelsea's stadium, Stamford Bridge. (For comparison, the closest MLB ballparks are New York's Yankee and Shea Stadiums, which are nearly 10 miles apart. ) This kind of close proximity to big, fancy Chelsea lends middle-of-the-table Fulham with a kind of hardscrabble legitimacy.
   


4. Your Friends Will Say, "Fulham Who?" Once you get to the point where you recognize the jerseys of EPL teams when you see them on the backs of people walking around in the US, you realize that 99% of these jerseys are either Manchester United, Chelsea, Liverpool, or Arsenal jerseys.
   
   ...but when you start rocking a Fulham jersey, your friends will ask "Which team is that?" After explaining that it's Fulham, they'll ask you why you're a Fulham fan.
   

...and you'll launch into a 3-part narrative explaining your allegiance, a move that will wear down their resolve and simply force them to order the next round of beer.

Go Fulham!

Why I am a Fulham Fan (...and Why You Should Be, Too) — Part II

(Click here for Part I of this post, click here for Part III.)

Now that you've decided the EPL is worth your attention, it's time to choose your team. We start with 20 teams.

Why the Other 19 EPL Teams
Don't Quite Deserve Your Support

1. You cannot start out your EPL fandom rooting for the Goliaths: Chelsea, Manchester United, Arsenal, or Liverpool. For purposes of illustration, imagine this conversation:

   New Fan: "Hey, I picked my favorite baseball team."
   You: "Oh yeah? What team did you pick?"
   New Fan: "The All-Star Team"
   You: "..."

   These teams have better players and spend drastically more than the rest of the league. The result is that they are too good relative to the other squads and should be promoted to some kind of intergalactic football league. Cheering for them is like cheering for Goliath.
   
   16 teams remain.


2. Forget about rooting for newly-promoted Sunderland, Birmingham, or Derby. Choosing a favorite team without a preexisting geographic affinity skirts dangerously close to poseur-dom. To choose newly-promoted teams – teams you couldn't possibly have watched on TV, ever – would ring hollow.
   
   13 teams remain.
   


3. You're not taking a vacation to Newcastle, Greater Manchester, Portsmouth, Liverpool, or Middlesborough and thus cannot support teams based there. Bill Simmons applied this rule, and it makes sense. Having chosen a team, you'll eventually want to experience the real thing and go to a game or two. A family vacation to post-industrial England or the Northern English coast? Not happening.
   
   Sorry Newcastle United, Middlesborough, Wigan Athletic, Bolton Wanderers, Blackburn Rovers, Everton, Portsmouth, or Manchester City.
   
   5 teams remain.


4. Reading is not ready for you. I want to root for Reading. They were promoted this season and had an awesome year, finishing in the top half of the table. They play with admirable reckless abandon. Yet Reading's high crime rate recently earned it the title of Worst Place in Britain to Raise a Family. Also, Reading has not been granted city status by Queen Elizabeth, a snub that leads me to suspect that Reading lacks a certain je ne sais quoi. A certain joie de vivre. ...and a bunch of other pouty French phrases that presently escape me.
   
   4 teams remain.


5. You're not going to root for a team with colors that belong on a pastry. You're not rooting for Aston Villa or West Ham. With West Ham narrowly escaping relegation this past season, the EPL has two teams clad in a magenta and sky blue color scheme. Whatever else they are, these squads are a garish visual insult.
   
   2 teams remain.


6. Tottenham Hotspur is a solid choice, but Fulham's a better one. It's tempting to root for Tottenham Hotspur, if for no other reason than it sounds like it belongs in Hogwarts with Gryffindor, Slytherin, and the other magical houses.
   
   Tottenham's logo includes an homage to cock-fighting. They're in London, so you might actually see a game. The team's record is good, but not great, so you're not just picking a favorite. Yet, whatever positives Spurs have encouraging you to root for them, you'll see in Part III that Spurs don't compare with Fulham.

Why I am a Fulham Fan (...and Why You Should Be, Too) — Part I

(Check here for Part II of this post, and click here for Part III.)

This time a year ago, I couldn't have told you that it's a sleepy time of the year for soccer/football fans. I would have only the vaguest idea that the English Premier League – arguably the best domestic football league in the world – had wrapped up its games for the year. I probably couldn't have told you that there won't be many games until the domestic leagues start back up in August (this being a non-World Cup year).

You see, I'd been Tivoing the occasional English Premier League ("EPL") game for the past 4 years, but I didn't really care. Kind of like having a baseball game idly playing on the TV or radio during the summer, I found these games to be pleasant background noise while fussing about the house, doing chores. When I'd hear the fans roar as I was taking out the recycling, I'd come back to the living room to replay the goal.

Something changed this season and I became vastly more interested in English soccer than previously. I'm not sure what prompted this bout of johnny-come-lately fandom. Perhaps this phenomenon is merely the flourishing of my long-budding Anglophilia, a condition nurtured by law school's frequent reference to the English heritage underlying our legal system. Whatever the cause, I'd Tivo all 5 live games available on the straightforwardly named Fox Soccer Channel, hyperwatching them on fast-forward later. I battled a restless night or two by perusing Wikipedia, learning about the various teams and traditions.

Halfway through this past season, I determined that this diffuse interest in the entire English top league would not do, and that I'd need to actively root for one team above all others to enjoy the sport more fully. A friend referred me to a piece written by the popular and silver-penned sportswriter Bill Simmons, who guided his readers on a similar journey at the start of last season (I won't spoil it by revealing his choice). Simmons (whose column on ESPN.com is probably the most widely read sportswriting in the US) prompted other web denizens to offer their odes to the EPL. This is my ode.

Yet, before I advance the argument made clear by this post's title, let me explain for a minute why you, probably-a-Yankee blog reader...

Why You Should be Enthusiastic About the EPL at All

1. This sport is the most popular sport in the world. Occasionally you'll hear that the Super Bowl is the most watched event globally, or that such-and-such cricket match is where it's at. These are silly distractions. Soccer/football is the mama of all sports. Billions and billions of Elvis fans can't be wrong. Give it a chance.
   
   Of the domestic leagues, the EPL is globally the most popular and uniformly attracts the best players from the top of the table to the bottom. An Anglophobe? France's Ligue 1, Germany's Bundesliga, Italy's Serie A, and Spain's La Liga are also quite good, but I can't help you much with any of these.


2. The winner of the regular season wins the league, unlike US sport leagues, where the winner of a season-end tournament wins the league. No tournament = no lucky team to win the league at the end of the year after a forgettable season. You're rewarded for consistent play all season long. Somehow that seems more fair.
   
   The downside of lacking a year-end tournament? Sometimes a lopsided league winner will be determined a few weekends or a month before the end of the season. Combating the ennui of a long-determined winner is...


3. The Wonder of Relegation. Relegation is the awesome Shiva of sports, destroyer and transformer.
   
   England (like many a soccer-addled country) has multiple professional soccer leagues. Relegation means that the bottom 3 EPL teams are sent to the 2^nd flight league, the Championship, and the top Championship teams rise to the EPL. This happens serially, with each league sending their best teams up and their worst teams down.
   
   The result is something like Darwinism for sports. Good teams are rewarded, bad teams are punished. You don't have the Milwaukee Brewers — a profitable team that will never, ever do anything meaningful in the top US baseball league. Since team owners are not monopolistically locked into their leagues, and since the lower league teams aren't farm teams, owners of EPL teams simply cannot field a mediocre product year-in-and-year-out and count on reaping profits from an over-loyal fanbase.
   
   Winning the league – as Manchester United did this year – is great, but a string of victories resulting in a league cup lacks the life-or-death urgency of those clubs locked in a struggle to stay afloat in the league. This year, the final relegation slot came down to a duel between two bottom teams on the last weekend, exacting such an emotional toll that both the winning and the losing managers quit after the game. That's crazy, tense, exciting stuff. Compare that to the games at the bottom in US leagues once teams have been mathematically eliminated from the playoffs. Those games are so boring and lifeless that admission should be free.

It should be easy to get excited about the most popular sports league on earth. More difficult is deciding which of the 20 teams deserves your allegiance, your hopes and your heartache. For guidance on this daunting task, and to read about why you should be a Fulham Football Club fan, check out Part II of this post.