Minor Wisdom

Brain games

Games for the Brain is a collection of 20 games to exercise your mental muscles. Warning: Many of them are addictive; don't get started unless you have time to kill.

(Hat tip to Internet Legal Research Weekly by Tom Mighell.)

A prophet?

Isaac Bashevis Singer said, "If you keep saying things are going to be bad, you have a good chance of being a prophet." By that description, Jim Kunstler is a prophet, prophesying at Clusterfuck Nation. His message is prophetic: The world as we know it is passing away. Hard times are ahead. But the downsized, austere world we're headed toward just might be more human than the one we live in now. A recent post, The Rapture, sums up his prophetic vision.

I find Jim's world view somehow exhilarating—but then I live in the city that may have invented the hurricane party. Seriously, though, there's a lot about modern life that is literally depressing. We try to be self-sufficient, and end up isolated from one another. Might we be happier if we need and are needed by the people we live with? If the things Jim foresees come to pass, we will find out.

Interview with Linda Ellerbee

Chris Rose asked: "Why do writers drink?"

Linda Ellerbee answered: "To keep from writing. And why do writers write? To keep from drinking."

The rest of the interview is here. It'll only take you 60 seconds.

Encore for Triumph the Insult Comic Dog

Today's première of Revenge of the Sith reminded me of this video, which has been called the all-time funniest 11 minutes on TV.

Unnecessary suffixes?

In a concurring judge's opinion, I just came across the word disproportionality. Seems to me that the noun disproportion says the same thing, without the extra three syllables. What we have in disproportionality is:

• a root noun, disproportion;
• the suffix –al tacked on to convert the noun to an adjective; and
• another suffix, –ity, tacked on to convert the adjective back to a noun.

If we need a noun, can't we just use the root noun without all the suffixes?

High impact through plain words

For a clinic on using plain, direct language to deliver a credible and powerful message, read this transcript of George Galloway's statement to the U.S. Senate, delivered yesterday. (Via Arbitrary & Capricious and Body & Soul.)

Does your brain need a laugh?

If so, read some of these quotations by Steven Wright (courtesy of the Quotations Page). You'll find a few more here.

Tchoupitoulas Barathon 2005

On Friday the 13th, I ran the 23rd anniversary Tchoupitoulas Barathon--about the most fun you can have with your clothes on. I took a couple of disposable cameras along for the run, and I had my trusty Nikon  digital camera for some before-race and after-race snapshots. To see the photos, just click on the sidebar link.

p.s. 5/17/05: Dogscalder has started a Barathon thread on LetsRun.com.

Legal news off limits for law-firm web sites?

Law Firm A has a web site with a "Hot Topics" section. One "Hot Topic" was a news item about Law Firm B, including a headline, a blurb that mentioned Law Firm B by name, and a link to the on-line version of the newspaper story about Law Firm B. Does Law Firm A have a legal problem? It does, according to this story in today's ABA Journal e-Report. Law Firm B sued Law Firm A under a New York statute, which provides that "[a] person, firm or corporation that uses for advertising purposes, or for the purposes of trade, the name, portrait or picture of any living person without having first obtained the written consent of such person … is guilty of a misdemeanor." Law Firm B claims that Law Firm A's web site is an advertisement which unlawfully uses Law Firm B's name.

Some experts quoted in the story think that the First Amendment protects Law Firm A's conduct. I hope they're right. If they're not, then bloggers everywhere must heed this caution by Doug Isenberg, author of The GigaLaw Guide to Internet Law:"

Any adverse decision against the defendant law firm’s Web site here would clearly have enormous chilling effects on countless Web sites, including popular blogs that often include even minimal advertising, as many of them do.

I found you, Hans Landis! I found you!

Chalk this one up to the wonderful combination of TypePad and Google.

As some of you will recall, my mother died about three months ago. Looking for a will, I found a typewritten sheet of paper, showing one root of her family tree going all the way back to the 1500s in Switzerland, which I copied into the on-line obituary I wrote. Her great⁹-grandfather, according to that paper, was "Rudolf Schiesz Landis (1547–?), Hetzel, Switzerland (brother of Hans, born 1553, beheaded 1614)." The family has since been intrigued: Who was Hans Landis? And what did he do to get beheaded? My wife, Suzanne, guessed that he must have professed the wrong religion in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It turns out that Suzanne's guess was on target. It seems old Hans was an Anabaptist—the last one executed in Zurich. Here is his story, as reported by John E. Sharp, Director of the Mennonite Church USA Historical Committee:

But there remains another visible expression for future generations: a simple granite tablet on a low wall on the west side of the Limmat River, which divides Zurich. Inscribed on this tablet is the Anabaptist story, no longer suppressed by the Reformed but claimed as part of their own revised history:

"From a fishing platform here in the middle of the Limmat, Felix Manz and five other Anabaptists were drowned between 1527 and 1532 during the Reformation. The last Anabaptist to be executed in Zurich was Hans Landis in 1614."

Hans Landis was the elderly farmer pastor of a congregation across Lake Zurich in Hirzel. When the authorities threatened to banish him and confiscate his property, Landis challenged their right to do either. After all, the "earth is the Lord's" he quoted stubbornly. After his arrest, the 70-year-old man was rowed ashore from the stone Wellenberg prison tower in the middle of the Limmat River. Like a lamb led to the slaughter, Landis was taken to the place of execution a few blocks down river and beheaded.

Now what do TypePad and Google have to do with this? A little while ago, I was scanning my TypePad stats to see where the hits are coming from. Someone's Google search hit my mom's obituary. So I checked it out, and it turned out to be someone's Google search for Hans Landis. So I poked around to see what else the searcher had found, and found the story of my great¹¹-grand uncle, who (it turns out) is a somewhat famous 16th-century Anabaptist martyr. (It hadn't occurred to me to Google someone who's been dead for nearly four centuries.)

(Another famous ancestor is my maternal grandfather, Carney Landis, a psychologist, prolific writer, and sex researcher, whose collection is housed at the Kinsey Institute. Who knows what the 16th-century Reformed types in Switzerland would have thought of him?)

I guess all writing is self-discovery; it seems blogging can add another dimension to that self-discovery.