NOTE: this blog is no longer active as of 12/07. New one: http://blog.kirchhof.com
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Sat, 18 Dec 2004
On Your Rights
First, how many of you actually know your rights when you encounter
a police officer? The Center for Constitutional
Rights does, and they have an excellent "HowTo" article available here, dating from the RNC. Get it. Memorize it. Utilize it.
All of this comes from a link in an article by John Perry Barlow, who is
doing us all a service by challenging an airline search on
Constitutional grounds. His account of his arrest makes for extremely interesting reading.
After you read that one, this
article will bring you up to date -- the court appearance was on
Wednesday.
Posted at 11:26 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
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They're In!
This year's Bulwer-Lytton
Fiction Contest results are in. Dave Zobel of Manhattan Beach, CA
is this years winner, with the poignant entry:
She resolved to end the love affair with Ramon tonight
. . . summarily, like Martha Stewart ripping the sand vein out of a
shrimp's tail . . . though the term "love affair" now struck her as a
ridiculous euphemism . . . not unlike "sand vein," which is after all
an intestine, not a vein . . . and that tarry substance inside
certainly isn't sand . . . and that brought her back to Ramon.
(For those who are unfamiliar with the contest, here's the blurb:)
An international literary parody contest, the competition honors
the memory (if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward George
Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest is childishly
simple: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to
imaginary novels. Although best known for "The Last Days of Pompeii"
(1834), which has been made into a movie three times, originating the
expression "the pen is mightier than the sword," and phrases like "the
great unwashed" and "the almighty dollar," Bulwer-Lytton opened his
novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal words that the "Peanuts"
beagle Snoopy plagiarized for years, "It was a dark and stormy night."
This year's unintentional (e.g. real prose) winner comes from Lyman Littlefield, "Sights from the Long Tree":
'Twas morning--the sun rose under the brightest auspices, and the thin, vaporous clouds that flitted in the heavens, continued gradually to flee away before the gentle morning breeze, that seemed wont to greet their golden visages with the soft rustle of its dewy wings--until not a hand's breadth of them were seen remaining to mar the spotless beauty of the ethereal blue.
I kind of like the Historical Fiction winner:
Galileo Galilei gazed expectantly through his newly invented telescope and then recoiled in sudden horror -- his prized thoroughbred's severed neck, threateningly discarded in a murky mass of interstellar dust (known to future generations as the Horsehead Nebula), left little doubt about where the Godfather and his Vatican musclemen stood on the recent geocentric/heliocentric debate.
Good times, good times....
Posted at 10:21 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
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