Peg Duthie's Blog, page 47

Kenji Yoshino on Richard Posner

Posner spends significant firepower assailing The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation. This compendium (The Chicago Manual of Style for lawyers) might seem an unworthy target. Yet he is excoriating not just the Bluebook, but also the substitution of style over substance it represents. When created in 1926, supposedly by the great appellate judge Henry Friendly, the manual was 26 pages. A recent edition spans 511 pages. Posner appears to believe that following the Bluebook is about as bad as rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic -- and by reverse order of manufacture, no less. He casts the Bluebook as a neurotic reaction to external complexity; if you cannot control what is important, you make important what you can control. Posner notes that Friendly himself recommended that later editions be treated as the Greeks treated their unwanted progeny.

Beneath the great seal of the United States, Posner's chambers should have a crest of a mongoose, encircled with Kipling's dictum: "Run and Find Out."

[Posner's statement re an opinion he wrote on voter ID] has been interpreted as a recantation, yet it's less an admission of error than an admission of uncertainty. This is consistent with his general approach: to acknowledge complexity, vacuum up as many facts as possible and then do his best.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/books/review/richard-a-posners-reflections-on-judging.html

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resilience

I've neglected the arugula since the ides of September, except to harvest what I thought each time were the last of the leaves -- tiny, feathery little kicks of fresh, peppery bitterness.

And yet new leaves keep poking out of the tired, graying pockets of soil.



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two years ago today

...I was in Larnaca with my big sis. It was our last full day there, so we made a point of visiting what had become our favorite cafe (Paparazzi) one last time and getting our photos taken with the waiter who always greeted us with "Hello, my ladies!"



(My fondest memory of Paparazzi is of drinking an entire bottle of red wine there while watching Roger Federer on TV: the bug bites on my arms had gotten so out of control that they were drawing gasps from baristas and everyone else catching sight of them, and the Fucicort we'd picked up from a pharmacist wasn't working nearly fast enough, so we figured we would try applying merlot to my overactive immune system. [It worked.] Our waiter that night was a younger man from South Africa, and thus was another Federer fan -- so that was a fun conversation, and I also remember him becoming visibly worried about how much I was drinking until S. explained our mission and reassured him that she would make sure I got back to our hotel safely.)

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filters, they are handy

when you know you'll have more fish to fry:



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more ghostly goodness!

Nic Sebastian has added a video of "Playing Duets with Heisenberg's Ghost" to The Poetry Storehouse.

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ghosts and harvest

Nic Sebastian has created a recording of Playing Duets with Heisenberg's Ghost and uploaded it to The Poetry Storehouse. Squee!



The first buds on the Christmas cactus in our library room have appeared. The plant is from one of my mother's plants, which I split into three smaller plants this year. I haven't had much luck with small cuttings/breakings (I did get some to root this summer, but then rain or critters got the better of them), but the three big chunks from the mama plant (so to speak) seem to be doing fine.



The first fall frost of the year will hit us any day now, so Saturday's chores included harvesting the last of the Kentucky Colonel mint:



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storehouse and hollyhocks

An invitation to remix: five poems at The Poetry Storehouse (which I heard about from Rachel Barenblat). Come and play!



It's looking like the first fall frost may hit us this Sunday, so I will be devoting part of my Saturday to tucking kraft paper, dog hair (to continue deterring bunnies), and mulch around the hollyhocks. The yard provided an excellent therapy break this afternoon: things had gotten messy around the Kentucky Colonel mint. Detangling it perfumed my hands, and clearing away the weeds and stray leaves and weeds soothed my mind.

And now I'm going to make shrimp korma, and then dive back into work.

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more moose

At YVR, my husband queued up for coffee and I headed to the washroom. I told him, "Meet you by the moose."

When I found him again, he said, "You realize that at this airport, 'Meet me by the moose' is not exactly specific enough?" But he'd known which moose I meant:



(He also asked, "Why is the moose the only one anthropomorphized?")

It was fun sitting by the fountain. Behind us, people studied it at length:



In front of us, various passersby petted the moose, the wolf, and the bear, and sometimes stopped for pictures. An older woman posed by the wolf, and then her partner slung an arm around the moose. A little girl snuggled herself into the bear as if he were a tree-cave, ready to shield her from the rain. (I didn't get that on camera, but here's a shot of the bear by himself.)



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"thunder and rain with you"

( more snapshots under the cut )

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feeding the fish

The highlight of Sunday's visit to the Sun Yat-sen Garden was watching the ritual of feeding the koi, around 11:40 am. The young lady hit the gong and dipped it into the water to send the vibrations to the fish. The oldest koi in the pond is a forty-something named Madonna.

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