Minor Wisdom

Just when you think you've seen it all, ...

Via Electronic Ephemera (no idea how Richard found this one), here is the most outré offering I've ever perused on the Web: Attractive Corpse. Here's the home-page pitch:

If you are seriously, sincerely suicidal and want to make a good impression on your way to a better place, Attractive Corpse can help make your final wish a reality.

We offer our clients a full range of services  — from method, location, and fashion consultation to suicide note editing and final-state photography — and guarantee that your suicide will be an event that nobody will easily forget.

Ghoulish, yes? The wedding-planner approach to suicide consultation.

At the bottom of the Services page it says: "Note that all services must be prepaid." Well, yeah, I guess so.

p.s. This reminds me of the "Empire Hancock" routine on Cheech & Chong's Big Bambu. Anyone out there remember that?

Huckabuck: A new search engine

Chris Schultz of New Orleans has launced a new search engine called Huckabuck (www.huckabuck.com). It's a meta-search engine that queries Google, Yahoo, and MSN. And it has an interesting feature, a "search tuner," which looks like a stereo equalizer and allows you to assign varying weights to the search-engine results. (The description sounds complicated, but the operation is easy.) For more information about Huckabuck, read this story in New Orleans CityBusiness.

"It will be years before the tale of lost essentials is complete ..."

The Free Dictionary offers this quotation of the day, which reminds me of the losses suffered by many hurricane victims:

A man's house burns down. The smoking wreckage represents only a ruined home that was dear through years of use and pleasant associations. By and by, as the days and weeks go on, first he misses this, then that, then the other thing. And when he casts about for it he finds that it was in that house. Always it is an essential — there was but one of its kind. It cannot be replaced. It was in that house. It is irrevocably lost... It will be years before the tale of lost essentials is complete, and not till then can he truly know the magnitude of his disaster.

Mark Twain (1835-1910)

Too much trust?

"I know God will not give me anything I can't handle. I just wish that He didn't trust me so much." — Mother Teresa

Garner's Usage Tip of the Day is back

A couple of years ago, I signed up for Garner's Usage Tip of the Day, a daily e-mail containing one or more selections from Garner's Modern American Usage, with a bonus pithy quotation. Several months ago, the e-mails stopped. But just a few days ago, they re-started. You can subscribe by clicking here.

Yesterday's bonus pithy quotation is an excellent digest of the writing process, applicable to any form of expository writing:

We should "first think, and then write": think till we have thoroughly assimilated our materials and have determined what we would say, and then write as rapidly as possible, with minds not occupied with choice of word or turn of phrase but intent on the subject. After the first draught has been made, we may at leisure attend to matters of detail, criticise from various points of view, curtail here, amplify there, until each part has its due proportion of space and effectiveness; but unless we have a conception of the whole before beginning to write, and unless we write with an eye to that whole, there is little likelihood that our work will be a unit.

— Adams Sherman Hill, The Principles of Rhetoric 243 (rev. ed. 1896).

Some good news to share

For an appellate lawyer, this is as good as it gets.

p.s. (4/4/06): To read my firm's press release about the case, click here.

Faithlessness

"Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens." — J.R.R. Tolkien

Help paint my house

Or more precisely, help my wife and me decide what color to have our house painted. At left is a picture showing how the house looks now. Shortly after we bought the house in late 1992, we decided that we wanted it painted to look like a margarita. The result is what you see here. A controversial choice: some love it; some hate it. In any event, the paint is peeling, and the house is full of cracks in need of calking. It's in dire need of a paint job. And though we like the current color scheme, we've decided to try on something new.

This is where you come in. Last night I found a Color Visualizer page on the Sherwin-Williams web site. The page lets you try various color schemes on houses of various architectural styles, among them Victorian. So if you like, click on "Continue reading" below to see some of the color schemes we're considering. And if you're so inclined, leave a comment telling us what you like, what you don't like, what colors you think might look good that aren't pictured below, or anything else that you think will help.

How to cite a blog

From Legal Writing Prof Blog, I learned this morning that the ALWD Citation Manual (3rd ed.) has a rule for citing weblogs: Rule 40.3. (And — lucky me — my copy of the manual arrived late last week.) For a full citation, include:

• the full name (if available) of the person who posted the entry
• the name of the weblog in ordinary type (abbreviations are okay — see Appendix 3 of the manual)
• the title of the weblog entry in italics
• the blog URL
• the exact date the cited entry was posted in month-day-year format. Put the date in parentheses and abbreviate the month per Appendix 3.

Example: Raymond P. Ward, Minor Wisdom, How to Cite a Blog http://raymondpward.typepad.com/rainman2/2006/03/how_to_cite_a_b.html (Mar. 27, 2006). I would add that, if the citation will appear on-line, then it should incorporate a hyperlink to the cited material. My suggestion is to use the URL as the linking text, because most computer users nowadays are familiar with URLs as links.¹

For a subsequent short-form citation, use id. if appropriate. For a different URL on the same web site, add "at" followed by the new URL. If id.is not appropriate, use one of the following:

• the author's or owner's last name, or
• if you used a "hereinafter" form for the first full citation, a partial title.

Then add a comma and the word supra. If needed for clarity, you may insert a comma after supra and include the URL.

I should add that this rule applies to formal legal writing. If you're writing a brief or an article for publication, follow the rule. If you're writing something less formal (e.g. a blog entry), feel free to adapt according to the writing's level of professionalism and your own style. Most blog writers incorporate the citation information with hyperlinks in the stream of narrative, letting the hyperlinks serve as the citation. E.g., "Over at Minor Wisdom, Ray Ward gives us ALWD's rule for citing blogs." That style is fine for blogs. But for professional legal writing, follow the rule.
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¹ P.S. As originally posted, the URL in this paragraph was hyperlinked. But I discovered that the hyperlink was causing a formatting problem, chopping off the bottom of the entry when the text column wasn't wide enough to display the URL on one line. So let me change my suggestion to this: if possible, provide a hyperlink to the cited material.

"Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?" 1

We saw: In Katrina's aftermath, New Orleans Police officers joining in the looting at Wal-Mart, pushing shopping carts full of looted stuff. (If you haven't seen the video, click here.)

You'd think: These officers need to be fired, then arrested and charged with theft.

Instead: The NOPD disciplined the officers for failing to stop others from looting, but not for the officers' own looting. The NOPD's story: the looting officers had received permission from their superiors to help themselves to Wal-Mart's merchandise.

The Times-Picayune's Jarvis DeBerry calls it right: According to the NOPD, "what we see is less important than what police officials say."

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¹ Richard Pryor, on being caught in flagrante delicto by his wife.