Weekly nonlaw by Simon Foddenfrom Canada’s blawg Slaw

Introduction

I began writing Friday Fillips at the beginning of 2006, some six months after Slaw started publication. As you’ll see from this selection, I felt a need at the outset to touch, even if only tangentially, the themes that then occupied Slaw: legal research and technology. Gradually, though, as Slaw broadened its reach, so I cut loose from a need to be relevant and began to play with whatever I thought might both interest our readers and be some relief from the week’s work at the legal rockface.

I’ve tested the links in each fillip and at the time of writing (May 2010) they were good. Things may change: they have that habit. All of these are still available on, and linked to, Slaw, so feel free to plunge back into the past of our blog and roam around when you get there.

You can find a selection of fillips as well from 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010.

Simon Fodden

2006

Here is a selection of Slaw’s Friday Fillips from the year 2006.

FRIDAYFILLIPS

January 20th, 2006

When your friends (are they really friends?) suggest that you’re spending more time with IT and computers than you should be, you’ll soon be able to answer them back that everything is really a computer, or part of one, so there’s no al-ternative.

Coming in March is a book by Seth Lloyd, a professor of mechanical engineer-ing at MIT, called Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos (Knopf, ISBN 1400040922 / also available now as an e- book). As the title suggests, Lloyd shows how the universe is in fact a computer. Here’s an excerpt (via Cool Tools):

The conventional view is that the universe is nothing but elementary particles. That is true, but it is equally true that the universe is nothing buts bits — or rather, nothing but qu-bits. Mindful that if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck then it’s a duck, from this point on we’ll adopt the posi-tion that since the universe registers and processes informa-tion like a quantum computer and is observationally indis-tinguishable from a quantum computer, then it is a quantum computer.

Apparently, those in the know now say, “All its are bits.”

February 10th, 2006

…[T]he number of known blogs, now somewhere around 25 million, has been doubling every 5½ months… At this rate, in August 2009, the number of known blogs will more or less equal the population of the world.Ongoing: Everybody’s Blogging

For a seriously detailed look at the blogosphere, see Sifry’s Alerts: State of the Blogosphere, February 2006 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth.

© Simon Fodden / Slaw2

February 17th, 2006

A day or so ago, Elizabeth Ellis remarked that someone might help her write accented letters in her posts, so she could use French. It’s fairly easy to tell Elizabeth — and you — how to do that, and to put all sort of other lovely charac-ters into your posts as well. It’s a good deal harder to explain the why’s and wherefore’s of UTF-8 encoding, so, because this is a fillip, I’m not going to try. The curious among you — yes, I’m looking at you — can work at this explana-tion.

How do you do it? You have to have access to a chart that sets out various code equivalents of the characters you might want to use. A handy one is available on Webmonkey, and lists what are called ISO entities. (Sounds like X-Files stuff, no?) In order for your browser to know that there’s an entity coming up, you have to surround each with an ampersand and a semi-colon. All of this is when you’re working in html, of course, as you are when you enter your posts into Slaw’s “write post’ area.

So, for example, an e with an accent grave gets coded as è, an e with an accent acute é.

The more popular entities, like these, can be created with a bit of text between the & and the semi-colon — mdash, ndash, and so forth. More esoteric entitites — indeed, any entity — can be formed with numbers between the markers, as you’ll see when you look at the chart.

Herewith a few of my favourites:§ – (§) the section sign, a very American legal thing» – (») the right-facing double quote mark, very French, and of course its companion left-facing version « («)Þ – (Þ) the Icelandic thorn, uppercase

Try ‘em. You’ll like ‘em.

Oh, and for a brain teaser, think about how you’d do it so that the entity got printed on the web page not as the entity but as the code for it. That is, how did I encode ¶ such that it didn’t simply get turned into ¶?

March 3rd, 2006

\b[A-Z0-9._%-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}\b

Ever searched for one?

© Simon Fodden / Slaw3

We’re used to searching the internet or databases for documents, making good use of Boolean search logic or its local variant I hope. But how good are we at searching within a document for a particular kind of text string or location?

What you see above is a series of “regular expressions” (or regexes) that will find you any email address within a text, at least if searched for with a “regular expression engine.”My own favourite is TextPad, an excellent text editor with a host of great features. Indeed, a great deal of the text processing that I do doesn’t require the jumbo weight of a word processor, so I’d use TextPad even if I never searched with regexes. There’s not a lot you can’t do with this power-ful tool — find the first word that has an “a” in it after the 17th line of text; find all occurrences of the word “jones” that occur at the end of a line; find a word within so many words of another word; and so forth.

Regular expressions aren’t easy to learn, but if you like constructing precise searches, or if you have to search and replace terms in a document that are not straightforward, you may find yourself motivated to try.

If you do — find yourself motivated, that is — take a look at regular-expressions.info. There’s a decent tutorial there to get you started.

March 17th, 2006

What with maps of Mars and maps of parades, there’s hardly any need for a Friday Fillip.

But I’m going for something a bit more down-to-earth than Mars and more col-ourful even than Irish green: the early crocus, a.k.a. Crocus imperati Ten. Spring will soon be here (folks in the far, far, far West will please put their hands down) and when that particular member of the Iridaceae family graces lawns and flower beds, we know we can start to unclench. We also know that other members of the Liliales order will follow in quick succession, until even the chillier parts of Slaw land are under a blanket formed by members of the Liliopsida class.

Yes, taxonomy. But a real taxonomy, one with legs — and petals and spores. All courtesy of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Integrated Taxonomic Infor-mation System, where you can search for the URI (so to speak) of just about any living thing, whether by common name or some aspect of its scientific no-menclature.

Herewith the “early crocus” in full bloom, as it were:

© Simon Fodden / Slaw4

Kingdom Plantae Subkingdom Tracheobionta Division Magnoliophyta Class Liliopsida Subclass Liliidae Order Liliales Family Iridaceae Genus Crocus L. Species Cro-

cus imperati Ten.

–> ta-da! “early crocus.”

Don’t you love “Liliopsida”?

March 24th, 2006

As befits a Friday Fillip, this one has the merest connection to the law, let alone to legal research — though somewhat more to IT. The connection is the voice. Law is/was an oral discipline in part and this is all about the marvel of the hu-man voice.

It’s a Honda ad, in which a choir impersonates a car, so to speak. No trivial “zoom-zoom” here. Here we have the full experience. You go to http://www.honda.co.uk The intro – Discover the New Honda – starts you off, but then you find yourself in a garage. When you get there, click the Watch Civic sign. [update: go to YouTube - the Honda URL no longer operates] After that, sit back and marvel.

Just in case you feel like re-visiting the experience, you can download the video podcast of the basic choir performance and of the rehearsal sequence. Check it out via iTunes in full-screen mode.

Let’s hear that door slam one more time.

March 31st, 2006

This week’s fillip is a hoot — literally. The buzz is all about Sounddogs.com, where you’ll find a wonderful selection of sound effects ranging from 3 second pops to long clips of a crowd in a food mall, all of which can be sampled and then purchased if you wish. (Think of the possibilities — podcasting about

© Simon Fodden / Slaw5

Quicklaw with thunder and lighting in the background…). When you go to Sounddogs.com, you’re presented with subsets of the “earthquake” category; when the earth’s moved enough for you, use the menu to explore the vast reaches of “sound effects.” Perhaps one of the cartoon noises for your profes-sional ringtone…

April 7th, 2006

Spring is… well, springing, and so this Friday I point you to a site about those warbling harbingers that have taken to harbingeing a trifle to loudly outside my window at shortly before 6 a.m. and would they please knock it off until at least 7.

The United States Geological Survey Patuxent Bird Identification InfoCenter presents “photographs, songs, videos, identification tips, maps, and life history information for North American birds.” Now you, too, can identify the culprits that distract you from abstract thought and juristic ratiocination with their pert plumage and soprano syrinxes.

Take the common loon… not, alas, outside my window… a very Canadian gavii-forme: 75 to 80 days to fledge… found in every province but one… upper wings wholly dark in flight… and not to be confused with Clark’s Grebes, which have “thinner bills marked with yellow and show white wings in flight”… and sound-ing like this.

Checking on the cardinal who thinks he owns the trees in my back garden, I discover that he, like many birds, has both a song and a call. No end of things to learn. So lift your sights this weekend: from the black-chinned sparrow to the greater prairie-chicken, it’s all up in the air here.

April 14th, 2006

The Friday Fillip arrives a little early today, but it’s a holiday weekend and there may not be much posting to cap. (This weekend is Easter, Passover, Bai-sakhi, and only one week off Mawlid al-Nabi, Mohammed’s birthday, and three weeks off the birthday of the Buddha.)

So all of this calendaring, lunar and solar, got me thinking of time.

© Simon Fodden / Slaw6

Charlotte van der Waals has de-signed a marvelously simple 12-sided clock. The concept is bril-liant: no numerals on the face; turn one facet uppermost depending on what city/locale you want to know the time in; the top is noon and midnight, of course, and the rest follows from that. Ameico and Junro offer various styles to choose from, including a flat disc model suitable for traveling. This is the sort of “obvious” design-cum-

function that makes me slap my (large-target, ever-expanding) forehead and exclaim: Why didn’t I think of that.

The good people in Newfoundland will have reason to complain, though, it be-ing tricky in the extreme to balance the thing on an edge.

April 28th, 2006

I’ve recently finished working on part of a website that makes use of icons to symbolize certain concepts — pretty stock stuff on the web. Except that it isn’t easy to find appropriate symbols, at least those that can work as icons, for ab-stract notions or large social institutions (which may be the same thing, now that I come to think about it).

How do we symbolize law in a tiny picture? Court? A lawyer? For the last, the best I could do was draw a mini-person and hope that it was clear the person was a lawyer because of the tabs and the briefcase. But for court I did what I ought not have done: I resorted to a gavel.

Canadian judges don’t use gavels. Candian judges never have used gavels. British judges don’t use gavels. British judges never have used gavels. The gavel is an American symbol.

In the Oxford English Dictionary all but one of the many meanings of “gavel” have to do with “rent” or “payment” or “tithe” (this “gavel” is related to the word “give” — gavelkind, e.g.). The last meaning is stamped “US” and talks about a mallet used by Masons in their rites.

There is, I discover, a Gavel Store: http://www.gavelstore.com, where you can find for purchase upwards of forty of these things and as well something known

© Simon Fodden / Slaw7

as a “gavel bouquet” (“Nothing says it better than a Gavel Bouquet!” — which may be true in Provo, Utah, but ain’t the case in my Canada.).

I used to cavil at gavels, but now I’m part of the problem. You, however, are un-compromised and, so, free to go on a gavel hunt and hammer home the point that these are foreign objects whenever you see a transgression.

May 5th, 2006

Words, words, words. Where would we be without them. #+)&%~! — that’s where. And we’d all be out of jobs.

But since we do ‘ave ‘em, I’ve got a pair of places to point you to today that ought to offer hours of lexical — the other ‘lex’ that is — edification and amusement.

First up is WordNet. The official word from the site is that:

WordNet® is an online lexical reference system whose design is inspired by current psycholinguistic theories of human lexical memory. English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are organized into synonym sets, each representing one underlying lexical concept. Different relations link the synonym sets.

Yes. Well. It’s a tad more interesting than that suggests. For the non-linguists among us, WordNet functions as a dictionary and thesaurus combined, lacking the precision of classical dictionaries — because words are grouped by a com-mon thread — but providing a wider, more inspirational set of meanings.

You can explore WordNet online, or download it and have it all to yourself for those special offline moments. (By the way, the nifty Visual Thesaurus is built on the WordNet hoard.)

Site number two is the search mechanism that operates on the Oxford English Corpus, which is “a collection of texts of written (or spoken) language pre-sented in electronic form. It provides the evidence of how language is used in real situations, from which lexicographers can write accurate and meaningful dictionary entries.” You get to query the corpus by using the Sketch Engine, once you’ve registered (which is free for 30 days). Look up a word and you get a ton of information, only some of which I’ve been able to comprehend as yet. Simplest is to look at the Word Sketches, which show you the word in action — that is, in actual sentences from the corpus sample queried. You can pursue things to find out exactly which book, newspaper etc. the instance comes from, if you wish.

© Simon Fodden / Slaw8

It might be fun to cross-ruff the two engines, and see what emerges.

`?/©6•œ∑´#!

May 12th, 2006

“Rabbit Stole the Pumpkin“, “ Les Flammes d’Enfer“, “Sulphur Breakdown” … just three of dozens of songs on Cajun Music, tunes from the 20’s, 30’s and more recent times, all free to download in mp3 format.

Get back in touch with those Canadiens errants, kick out the jams, and laissez les bons temps rouler.

May 26th, 2006

© Simon Fodden / Slaw9

Though not the worst of its kind, this “signed post” is a visual equivalent of cer-tain portions of the Income Tax Act. On a Friday morning at 8 a.m. with a cou-ple of kids in the car and only two spots to choose from…

Yet signs like thse are the only way to go if you have to have microscopically small jurisdictions. Most of that spot legislating happens in neighbourhoods and on roads. The Ontario government, like the rest, I assume, puts the drivers’ handbook on line, with its pages about road signs. Like an Interpretation Act, the page on regulatory signs might help our early morning chauffeur — if there were a BlackBerry handy.

Now, there aren’t many images here: the P, the P struck out, and the arrows (left and right). Some signs that regulate conduct are a good deal more depend-ent on icons, and what I wonder — and don’t know about — is whether there are statutes or regulations (leave aside by-laws for the moment) that, using both images and words, explicitly set out equivalences between them — for ex-ample, between the P-in-the-circle and the word “parking,” or, indeed, the phrase “parking is permitted between the hours of…” Or must our “real” laws all be in words alone?

June 9th, 2006

I just want to clear something up before we be-gin this Friday’s Fillip. No worries: not a philip-pic. More of a prolegomenon really. It has to do with birds, as you might imagine, and more to the point, with a seeming interest in birds. See, the thing is that some people think that birding is the natural result of being retired, along with sporting Tilley hats and acquiring RVs. Isn’t true. I know lots of people who noticed birds even before they retired. And another thing: I know I’ve posted about birds before in the Fri-day Fillip spot, but that doesn’t make me a birder, okay? I am retired, though. More or less. I lost my Tilley hat; it floated away during a ca-noe trip.

With that cleared out of the way, I offer you a lyrebird, courtesy of the Daily Mail and David Attenborough. The British nature broadcaster (also retired, now that I come to think of it) was recently the sub-ject of a poll to identify viewers favourite scenes from his various TV shows. The winner [now on a YouTube clip] involves a Superb Lyrebird in Australia.

© Simon Fodden / Slaw10

I’ll leave the explanation to Attenborough, but I’ll simply say that you’ll be blown away by the bird’s ability to mimic certain sounds. Promise.

June 30th, 2006

Because tomorrow’s Canada Day, I thought we’d have a look at the maple leaf — or, rather, a listen. It just so happens that Slawyer Ted Tjaden has been “ab-sent with leave” to work on his truly comprehensive site on classic ragtime pi-ano music. And of course one of the songs he deals with is Scott Joplin’s first and biggest hit, the Maple Leaf Rag.

Now, before we get any further with this, it’s important for me to let you know that I know (thanks to Ted’s website) that the title of the Joplin rag almost cer-tainly doesn’t have anything to do with our fair land. But I don’t care. The myth is more interesting than the reality and the myth is that Joplin gave it a Cana-dian name because of Canada’s role in the Underground Railroad. Still another Canadian connection, also unlikely, has to do with the fact that in Sedalia, the town where Joplin lived when this rag was published in 1899, there was a Ma-ple Leaf Club owned by two men from London, Ontario. But it seems that they didn’t name their club after the Canadian symbol, either; and the likely source of both names was the actual trees that linked the streets of Sedalia.

On myth and the leaf in question: When my older daughter was in primary school, her teacher would from time to time read to them from a book that she and others understood to be called “Magic and Maple Leaf,” but which was in fact named “Magic and Make-believe.” Because of this “mondegreen” I’m li-censed to press ahead with the magical belief that the rag is connected to our red rag.

Once upon a time — five years ago, in the middle of winter — there was a brou-haha about this term when Bernard Landry said “Le Quebec ne ferait pas le trottoir pour un bout de chiffon rouge.” Translated as “Quebec is not for sale for a few bits of red rag,” the ROC was apparently enraged for a day or two. somehow.

And when it comes to the true magic of ragtime piano music, especially by Joplin, you simply must listen to it. Here are three versions of the Maple Leaf Rag:

1. The first is from our own Ted Tjaden, who kindly agreed to do an experi-mental recording just for us and Canada Day even though he hasn’t fin-ished setting up his recording system properly. Thanks Ted! And keep checking his site for updates to his recordings.

© Simon Fodden / Slaw11

2. The second, by another Canadian, Vera Guilaroff, dates from 1926. It’s full of interesting improvisations and, as Ted says, played at breathtaking speed perhaps as the result of a speeding up in the recording process. The recording, by the way is made available by the marvelous Canadian His-torical Sound Recordings’ Virtual Grammaphone.

3. And the third is different again. It’s a Maple Leaf Stomp , a Jelly Roll Mor-ton interpretation of the rag, set to “midi” by one “Perfessor Bill”.

Listen to them proudly.

Of course, you can’t leave the topic of the maple leaf and music without advert-ing to the Maple Leaf Forever, the song that for a long while was Canada’s unof-ficial anthem. Here’s Alan Mills singing a bit of it. Not quite as… catchy as the rag or stomp, is it? And in need of a modern re-write in which the lily joins the rose, thistle and shamrock in that bouquet. For a more upbeat instrumental version try this Virtual Grammaphone recording, though: it’s a 1902 release of the Kilties’ Band from Belleville, Ontario, a group that styled itself Canada’s greatest concert band.

Because I neglected la Fête Nationale last week, and because our country has always done the two solitudes dance one way or another, I thought I’d close with a rag written by a Quèbecois, Jéan-Baptiste LaFrenière (“Strauss of Can-ada”), in 1907, “ and called, perfectly appropriately, Silly-Ass: Two Step.” To round things off nicely, the player is our Ted Tjaden.

July 7th, 2006

This one’s a strange one. It’s an imaginary city — the city of Galvez — revealed in a slideshow. The texture of the place, the skewing of the known into a 1930’s future-city, is what makes it strange. On top of that there’s a melancholy music track behind the pictures that evokes, for me at least, a kind of nostalgia for things that never were.

Once you’ve clicked on the main picture to get things going, choose the link to the slideshow that you’ll find on the upper right of the screen. You can, of course, go through the pictures one at a time if you prefer.

July 28th, 2006

This week’s fillip may be a little too much like work. If so, I apologize. I’ll spend the weekend working on being frivolous to see if I can improve things for next time.

© Simon Fodden / Slaw12

The deal is that Which Canadian Supreme Court Justice Are You gives you opinion snippets for 10 SCC Charter decisions. Elect the snippet for each judg-ment that most closely matches your view of what’s correct or right, and Mat-thew Skala’s device comes up with the name of the judge whose views most nearly mirror your own. As he himself acknowledges, the site is a little outdated now — but then so am I, so I don’t mind.

I know this is the closest I’ll get to judicial office, let alone benchly apotheosis. Of course, if you think you’ve got a shot at the real thing, don’t bother with this fantasy.

August 18th, 2006

Somewhere in between “Cest la vie”, “Whattya gonna do?” and “Shit happens” falls my new zen koan “Snakes on a Plane”.

WIFE: “Honey you stepped in dog poop again. ”ME: “Snakes on a Plane…”DOCTOR: “Your cholesterol is 290. Perhaps you want to mix in a walk once in a while.”ME: “Snakes on a Plane…”WIFE: “Honey while you were on your cholesterol walk you stepped in dog poop again.”

You get the picture.

Josh Friedman’s blog “I find your lack of faith disturbing”

I’ll never see the flick, but I might use the line if milk ever spills in my life. Le mot juste is something I enjoy — as, I imagine, do most Slawyers. “Juste-ice” depends on context, which most of the time is pretty mainstream for me, but every now and then I stray into somewhere a bit unusual and want to know a word or two in the local lingua franca. If you ever find yourself out of the office, shall we say, The Urban Dictionary might help.

As what isn’t nowadays, it’s a participatory venture, with definitions flying in from all parts. But the parts are noted and the definitions are voted on, so you can more or less judge what kicks ass and what’s wack. There’s also a kind of thesaurus section at the top of each definition that lets you run through similar terms — though I find it wanders a lot, which may not be a bad thing. And if you go looking in one of the alphabet sections, you’d be best off going straight to any word you happen to know via the text entry box, because each letter seems to spawn a dozen pages of acronyms that can weary.

© Simon Fodden / Slaw13

If the site is to be believed, 1022 new definitions were added today, though most of what I see is fairly lame and most of it is… sexual or scatalogical. But should you wish to stay current, use this URL — http://www.urbandictionary .com/yesterday.php — to see the latest list, because it’ll get updated each day, apparently.

A bit more conservative is The Dictionary of English Slang and Colloquialisms in the UK. And for the truly adventurous among you, who wish to wander yet further afield, there [was] “The Alternative Dictionaries: Slang, profanities, in-sults and vulgarisms from all the world“, where you [once could find] the com-mon way to say it from Acadian to Zulu.

August 25th, 2006

This week’s fillip comes from a sugges-tion by Slawyer Steven Matthews.We’ve given you the Which Supreme Court Judge Are You test. Now it’s time for the Which Superhero Are You quiz. I mean, it’s one thing to learn that you’re Chief Bev, but it’s quite another to discover that under that ‘casual–Friday’–70%–cotton–30%–man–made–fibres–Guayabera–top there beats the secret heart of [Adjective] Person!

Sadly, I have to report that one of the superheroes you can’t be is Plastic Man, a favourite of mine from that part of my youth when comics cost a dime. He sublimated up into that recycling pot in

the sky quite some time ago. (Yes, that’s good old Plas pictured here; no that’s not Steven Matthews.)

Nor, alas, can you be The Spirit, The Human Torch, Phantom Lady, The Hu-man Torch, or Aquaman, all of whom are now hors concours, having gone the way of Odin et al.

When Steven passed this idea on to me, he failed to mention his test results. In that tradition, I fail to mention mine, except to say that my intials are S…

© Simon Fodden / Slaw14

September 1st, 2006

Because I’m an academic, September will always be the new year for me. I get a kind of excitement when the first threads of coolness enter the air, and part of that excitement has to do with beginnings, new beginnings, if that isn’t redun-dant. There’s something liberating about fresh starts. Too, these are often asso-ciated for me with having moved to a new town or country and taking up life there as an unknown person. I used to consider becoming someone other as I stepped of the plane, so to speak…. maybe hair slicked back and sunglasses, with a derring-do approach to life; maybe someone who, for a change, wouldn’t give a fig for the opinion of others… You get the idea.

I can’t offer you the chance to change your per-sonality, not even with a Friday Fillip. But I can let you play with the notion of rearranging a person’s looks, making faces, so to speak, that don’t fit the usual moulds. Or, rather, Eric Myer can.

He offers you a 4 x 5 matrix of photos of the faces of people who are already not your usual suits. And then he arranges things so by clicking on the pics you can mix and match the bottom halves and the top halves of these 20 faces — to somtimes hilarious effect. After you’ve done it “by hand” as it were, you may wish to run the “slideshow” and let Eric’s website ring the

changes for you, but if you do, then be sure to poise your finger over the stop button so you can capture that perfect combo, that new face with which to be-gin that new day… year… life.

Have a happy Labour Day!

September 8th, 2006

Believe it or not, but legal prose can be turbid, turgid and really quite impene-trable. It can, it can. (It might be fun to share our own favourite “paragraph of shame” from lawyerly or judicial — okay, okay, or legal academic — writing, a Slaw version of the “It was a dark and stormy night” contest.)

© Simon Fodden / Slaw15

But if you want to have a good laugh and shake your head at some seriously bad writing, take the Postmodernism Text Generator for a spin. It’s a marvelous machine that can generate horribly lifelike swatches of Foucaultian or Lacanian prose all wrapped up in the guise of an academic article. Here’s an excerpt:

“Society is fundamentally a legal fiction,” says Lacan; how-ever, according to Werther[2] , it is not so much society that is fundamentally a legal fiction, but rather the fatal flaw, and some would say the futility, of society. The paradigm, and subsequent collapse, of Marxism which is a central theme of Gaiman’s Neverwhere emerges again in Stardust, although in a more self-justifying sense. In a sense, the premise of post-dialectic Marxism holds that art is part of the absurdity of reality.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been sentenced privileged to read poststructuralist writings, but if so, you’ll appreciate how uncannily accurate this machine-made language is.

Kick the reload button for another iteration, completely different and always and everywhere the same.

If for some reason you tire of reading pomo, give the Sub-Genius Brag Generator a go.

I’m so ugly the Speed of Light can’t slow me down and Gravity won’t tug at my cuffs! I drank *Mother Nature* under 13 tables, I am too *radio-active* to die, I’m insured for acts o’ God *and* Satan! I make a *spec-tacle* of myself. I *cannot* be tracked on radar! YEE! YEEE! I’m a bac-teriological weapon, I am *armed* and *loaded*! Now give me some more of…

September 15th, 2006

Corn today — instead of jam. As the Queen says, “The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday — but never jam to-day.” Of the common grain kind, and, so, corny, which the OED tells us is:

Of such a type as appeals to country-folk; rustic or unsophisticated; tiresomely or ridiculously old-fashioned or sentimental; hackneyed, trite; inferior.

© Simon Fodden / Slaw16

Can’t claim to be a country bloke, though I am less and less sophisticated with every passing year. But I do, I confess, have a “ridiculously…sentimental” streak that I have to guard against, particularly where nostalgia is concerned.

When I was young and my dad had a Hudson (you see what I mean?) we used to drive down U.S. highways, my head out into the wind like Fido, and watch things go by. Some of those were signs for Burma-Shave, an early brushless shaving cream. Spaced maybe 50 yards apart, four or five signs would feed you doggerel one line at a time — capped by the additional Burma-Shave punch line sign.

The heroWas brave and strongAnd willin’She felt his chin–Then wed the villainBurma-Shave

If harmonyIs whatYou craveThen getA tubaBurma-Shave

These defined what corny was. Starting in 1927 with no fun at all…

Shave the modern wayNo brushNo latherNo rub-inBig tube 35 cents drug storesBurma-Shave

…they quickly found their metier…

Does your husbandMisbehaveGrunt and grumbleRant and raveShoot the brute someBurma-Shave

© Simon Fodden / Slaw17

Etcetera, for nearly forty years, the last set of signs appearing in 1963, having hewed remarkably true to the corn-pome:

The chickHe wedLet out a whoopFelt his chin andFlew the coopBurma-Shave

Read ‘em all at the Burma-Shave Slogans site. And then compose your own dit-ties on the topic of…legal research, let’s say.

She workedOn lineQL and LexisNo book in sightToo bad — a text isNecessary

September 22nd, 2006

Occasionally the Friday Fillip makes you work and today’s is another one of those. But the work is as hard as flipping through a catalogue, which, if done with a refreshing libation at hand, can be merely exhausting for a finger or two.

The catalog through which to flip is Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools website. I know what you’re thinking… (Well, actually, I don’t, which is a nuisance only some of the time.) This is not simply an electronic gadget site, though it can be that if you sincerely want it to be. “Cool” is an expansive term of praise and a tool is just about anything that makes us human, so there’s something here for every-one.

Readers send in their candidates and Kevin publishes the best. Each “tool” is given a brief description and review, and then we’re pointed to where we can get it if it appeals.

So, for instance, I find in the “media tools” category this, er… electronic gadget, called TV-B-Gone, which, when activated, emits 200 of the known signals that turn off television sets, with the effect that when the barkeep simply won’t get rid of NASCAR reruns your companion cannot avoid being captured by, you can gain a few moments peace.

© Simon Fodden / Slaw18

There’s a backpacking category, where you’ll find a nifty tent that sets up in two seconds when you fling it into the air… In the craft category, the cheapest port-able (reliable) sewing machine… Kitchen: the Dexter-Russell S496 dough scraper…

A low-tech sand castle construction manual, foam latex puppet making, an igloo making tool, a place to get mini portions of stuff… It’s all here, including in-structions on how to keep your boots tied with this surgeon’s knot.

October 13th, 2006

Ever feel like one of these people? If so, it’s probably because it is still a paper world, despite IT. Those who till the hard soil of law have more reason to know this than most. So come the end of the week, when you’re still hanging in there, it can be refreshing to see that there are other things to do with paper than to cover them with texts.

English artist Peter Callesen makes cut-outs. Only unlike those sidewalk artists that crowd the tourist spots who’ll do your silhouette for a few bucks, he’s really good — and very inventive. You have to scroll through his site to appre-ciate what he can do, which is often funny and sometimes a trifle dark or macabre.

If you don’t expect perfection — which would let out most of those who read

Slaw, agreed — you might find it fun to give it a go yourself. You’ve got the same tools as Callesen available to you nearly all of the time, and it might even help you think about work as you snip away the inessentials to reveal a thing of near beauty.

© Simon Fodden / Slaw19

October 20th, 2006

I know someone who sends me those annoying email jokes that do the rounds. Usually I toss ‘em; occasionally I read ‘em and toss ‘em; but for some reason I accorded the last one a place on my hard drive — where I found it today when browsing through the oddments section looking for a Friday Fillip. It’s a list of “euphemisms” for stupid.

Stupid is one of the prime things we who read Slaw cannot be, at least in our professional lives. We got where we are by being or appearing smart, and smart is what lets us hang on. So there’s a weird fascination for me at least with stu-pid, makes me nervous perhaps, and I find some of these expressions funny.

I’ll only regale you with a few here. Promise. But if they appeal, there are a very great many out there.

Here, then, a few:

- A room temperature IQ [Works even better in Celsius.]- Gates are down, the lights are flashing, but the train isn’t coming.- He’s so dense, light bends around him.- If he were more stupid, he’d have to be watered twice a week.- If you stand close enough to him, you can hear the ocean.- A couple of blocks behind the parade.- A flash of light, a cloud of dust, and. What was the question?- A legend in his own mind.- A quart low.- All foam, no beer- As bright as a nightlight- Strong like ox, smart like tractor- Couldn’t pour water out of a boot with instructions on the heel.- Dock doesn’t quite reach the water.- Failed the Turing test.- Half a bubble off plumb.- Never finishes a thoug- One too many rides on the Zipper.- When a thought crosses his mind, it’s a long and lonely journey.- He’s so stupid he’s the president.

© Simon Fodden / Slaw20

October 27th, 2006

I had a conversation recently with a young person who was in a state of wonder and scepticism about evolution and natural selection: how could mammals have come about, what about eyeballs, etc.? Now don’t worry: I’m not about to step in front of anyone’s religious bus; we don’t go there on Slaw. No, it’s just that, as I explained to him, one source of our puzzlement is that we can’t easily imagine the effects wrought by small changes taking place an immensely large number of times. What’s a billion? to paraphrase someone whom I can’t recall at the moment. Or, to pick an example from yesterday’s news about the brew-ing scandal at the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation, we’re told that the odds of the insiders’ having won as frequently as they have are a trillion trillion trillion to one. Oh, I say. Right. Long odds, those.

So big numbers baffle. But how then to see the impact that many, many… many small changes may bring about? One answer is the Game of Life. Developed by a British mathematician (natch) way back in 1970 (see the Wikipedia article on it) for somewhat different purposes than those I’m suggesting today. It enables us to see the impact of four simple rules on an initial state of affairs played out accross any number of “generations” of rule applications. It’s done on a grid into which you insert occupied cells in a pattern of your choice; these become your starting units — your primordial slime. (This has a fair bit to say about chaos theory, but that’s another gallimaufry.)

The game is available on the web and you can download a version to play offline. It offers you a variety of starting options, such as how large a “world” you want your “life” to develop within, how fast you want generations to zip by, and whether or not you want to begin with one of the configurations that others have discovered produce interesting results.For me, it’s fascinating to see how objects emerge from the random input. Some of my worlds are wiped out within a measly few generations. Others freeze into stable, unchanging blocks. Some produce winking objects that I think of as quasars, while others emit offspring in a neverending supply. One of these last is a starting pattern known as Gosper’s Glider Gun (available as an initial state in the game), which produces a perpetual stream of “gliders.”

Play god. Play the Game of Life.

November 3rd, 2006

Simon C’s post earlier in the week about the law book poem foreshadowed this week’s fillip, which is about poetry. Well, doggerel, more like. I thought we’d do

© Simon Fodden / Slaw21

a quick tour through some of the many kinds of quicki-verse invented to please and amuse.

LimerickEveryone’s favourite, this ya-ta-ta-ya-ta-ta-ta-ta verse was popularized — but not invented — by Edward Lear, one of the Victorian age’s eccentric versifiers and artists. Since his time, we’ve moved from nonsense to bawdiness, which makes it a bit tricky to feature a real limerick here. I mean, where do you go when you start with “There once was a legal re-searcher…”? The whole genre is one big double entendre. Even so…

I point you to OEDILF — the Ominificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form,

wherein you’ll find more than thirty thousand of these perky pomes, which can be dipped into via categories, such as “legal terms.” Whence:

An appellant is one who does plea;Begs the Court of Appeals to agreeThat the lower court erred.Wants reversal declared.The opposing one’s called appellee.[Carol Lyons]

MirlitonnadesOf which I’d never heard until the recent Harper’s reprinted one that appeared in the TLS. The difficult Samuel Beckett wrote what he called this “gloomy French doggerel.” These are dense and gnomic:

rêvesans finni trêveà rien

In the TLS and Harper’s piece a number of poets presented their translations. Roger O’Keefe, for instance, rendered Beckett: dream / without cease / or treaty / of peace

I’ve only been able to find one other mirlitonnade online:

en facele pirejusqu’à cequ’il fasse rire

© Simon Fodden / Slaw22

The author of the book containing the poem [PDF] says “a rough crib might render the poem as ‘ahead / the worst / until the point / where it begets laugh-ter’”. Have a go yourself at a translation. Less than a dozen words in French. How hard can it be?

HaikuAs compact as Beckett’s mirlitonnades but not gloomy, haiku is Japan’s “one breath” poem. The conservative rule is 17 syllables in three lines of 5, 7, and 5, though some argue that 11 syllables in English (3, 5, 3) more closely approxi-mates the compaction of the original Japanese form.

Here’s a classic by Basho (za saraba / yukimi ni korobu / okoromade – 1688) for the upcoming season:

now then, let’s go outto enjoy the snow… untilI slip and fall!

If artifice is not your thing, try the Random Word Haiku generator, which, on my visit, came up with:

Repulsive catbird,hussy musket mammiform,simplex smokily.

ClerihewDefined by Wikipedia this way:

• It is biographical and usually whimsical, showing the subject from an unusual point of view; but it is hardly ever satirical, abusive or obscene

• It has four lines of irregular length (for comic effect) • The first line consists solely (or almost solely) of a well-known person’s name. • The form was invented by and is named after Edmund Clerihew Bentley.

Thus:Sir Christopher WrenSaid, “I am going to dine with some men.If anybody calls,Say I am designing St Paul’s.”

So how do you finish:

Chief Justice McLachlin…?

© Simon Fodden / Slaw23

November 10th, 2006

Some food for thought, today. Actually a kind of tapas for the mind. You’ll find it in Wikipedia’s list of cognitive biases. Who knew there were so many ways to skew understanding?

Roam down the crooked paths of thought (yes, I changed metaphors; wonder if that’s a cognitive bias?) such as congruence bias, neglect of probability, the planning fallacy (important for lawyers), or illusion of assymmetric insight. Not every bias is explained by a good article, but there’s at least a description of the nearly 70 ways we are persuaded or resistant to persuasion.

Just remember, though: this learning is not to be used in domestic situations. That’s the avoidance of strife bias.

November 17th, 2006

Because PlayStation 3 and Nintendo’s Wii are due out today and Sunday, re-spectively, I thought it might be appropriate to make a very brief visit to one small aspect of an internet subculture. Gaming is not something I do — though I suspect that within it lies much of all our digital futures, law people’s included — so I’m going to deal only with a part of gamer language — “leet” or “leet-speak”.

What is it? Leet is a kind of cant or jargon designed to create a community in the know and to exclude all others, rather like law, when you come to think of it. In fact “leet” is a shortened form of “elite.”

Rather than invent new words, though there are some in leet, leetspeakers (who really write more than speak) pervert the spelling or form of current words, which is why the really good Wikipedia article on it calls leet a cipher. “Leet” itself is a good example. It might be written 1337, because if you turn 1337 upside down you get . There are other letter-to-number transposi-tions that can be used right side up, such as 5 for S and 4 for A; though, there’s no one-to-one correspondence here, and S might just as well be $. As well z gets used for s but typically only at the end of a word; thus, “warez,” which is “wares” as in software (not the Mexican town Juarez). This last example shows that there’s no rule about how many transpositions or transformations are used in a word: there may be only one.

Some new words have emerged, the most popular one, perhaps, being “w00t,” an exclamation of joy. Others, for example, are “kekeke,” for laughter, taken

© Simon Fodden / Slaw24

from Korean; “pwn,” referring to someone’s superiority in a game; and “n00b,” for newbie, a person new to something.

I’ve only scratched the surface here, and it may be a good time to warn about “little learning,” as the author of ElectricBiscuit’s Guide to Simple Leet Speak [no longer online] does. I’ll use his words because they put it just right:

Realize, first, before you use these words… They are not cool. I mean, they are cool, but they aren’t. Simple Leet Speak’s main objective is to sound akin to a twelve year old. They were probably originated by a twelve year old. Why? Because they were borne forth from this ether by the gaming commu-nity, and possibly warez community…

Realize, that it is not cool to use these words. As I stated above, they’re meant to sound stupid, childish, and lame… Also, think before you use them. The margin of error for us-age of these words is high… You might feel inclined to use them improperly. Don’t. True gamers will laugh at you.

But where’s the fun in such timidity? Because you’ll want more, check out the Wikipedia article referred to above and the ElectricBiscuit piece. There’s also a good article by James Thornton. And for the lazy among us, there are a number of translators or converters that will change English into leet with the push of a button:

http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/text/leet.php, which actually let’s you adjust the percentage of leet you want,

http://home.no.net/hellshl/main/translate [no longer functioning], which also can translate into something called “|_|17|2@” (try searching Google for that!), and

http://www.computerhope.com/jargon/l/leetspea.htm

I thought it might be fun to use them to find out what “slaw” would be in leet. They gave me: 514w, $£4\/\/, and $|@\X/. My own version (“sleet”?) would have it: ^^V75, which you’ll need to turn upside-down to appreciate.And now that you’re versed, head on over to Google-H4×0r and see if you can make sense out of it. Might become your SE of choice, d00d.

December 15th, 2006

Although I gather it’s been out for quite a while, I only recently downloaded SketchUp. It’s a 3-D drawing program now part of Google’s stable that is simply

© Simon Fodden / Slaw25

phenomenal. I can’t draw for beans, and if you start with me about horizon lines and all that high-tech art talk I leave the room and doodle. But with SketchUp you can create buildings, you can construct rooms full of furniture, you can represent actual structures and attach them to Google Earth’s map of everything.

The program is very deep — even the free version — and it’s going to take me some time to uncover all of the bells, whistles, sirens, horns and bull roarers in the thing. For example, I just stumbled across the fact that you can introduce shadows into your de-signs. Big deal, you say? Hah! These are not just any shadows; they are shades that occur at a precise time

on a precise day (okay, I haven’t figured out how to fix the lat. and long. yet); so in the crude graphic I made for this post (click on it to see the proper full size), you’re seeing shadows as they are at 3pm on December 15, which I think is fairly cool.

So try your hand at castles in the air or just a few boxes in anticipation of Box-ing Day. Whatever you do, I think you’ll find that a D beyond 2-D is rewarding.

© Simon Fodden / Slaw26