Since my posts have been coming a little too sporadically, I need to make up for some lost time, and what better way to do so than by bringing the dots out of mothballs...

• Sometimes being the type of paralegal I am means researching interesting issues about our case. And sometimes it means spending weeks comparing two copies of the same document redacted by the FBI, seeing if the redactions are unique or if one is simply less legible than the other, and keeping one or both as appropriate. Let's just say we're not in a glamour phase.
  
• I know buying a jersey and wearing it around is something of a financial and emotional investment on some level, but at some point it just says something about you if you don't stop. Yesterday I saw a guy in a #39 Bears Curtis Enis. Dude, just throw it away.
  
• Some of the CDs I've been listening to over and over again lately: Add It Up (1981-1993) (still), Pulp's Different Class, Uncle Tupelo 89/93 Retrospective, Springsteen's Greatest Hits (especially Atlantic City and Badlands), The Strokes' Is This It?, and The Refreshments' Fizzy Fuzzy Big and Buzzy.
  
• Carl's Jr. is advertising this monstrosity as bigger than a Big Mac, a Whopper, and a Jumbo Jack combined. Are they just deliberatly thumbing their noses at Morgan Spurlock?
  
• I saw The Day After Tomorrow yesterday, (man that clause doesn't work out loud!) or as I'm calling it from now on: I'm Cold And There Are Wolves. I have two specific bones to pick with what is a serviceable-to-good disaster movie. One is that while I appreciate sticking with the formula of having a small group of disaster victims choose the counterintuitive-yet-wise path while the vast majority choose obviously and unwisely, it's important that we as the audience know all of the people who choose wisely and why they have chosen wisely. We're never introduced to some of our survivors here until after they have chosen, such as the Gutenberg Bible guy and his blonde counterpart. Bad form. Secondly, good Hollywood movies establish why characters are doing things before they do them. So why exactly does Dennis Quaid think physically going to NYC with no provisions or transportation is going to work out? It does, but at the time it's unclear that he's headed off to do anything but freeze or starve with his kid when the time comes.
  
• After the movie I went to Cold Stone Creamery. I know it's all petrochemically goodness, but DAMN if the cake batter ice cream doesn't taste just like cake batter.
  
• And shouldn't that be the $12 Burger?
  
• Is it a bad sign that, since listening to the first track of the Uncle Tupelo disc, I can't stop signing to myself, "I'm going where, there's no redactions..."
  
• I recently read PJ O'Rourke's Peace Kills. I generally enjoy him even when we disagree, but he really mailed this one in. Fewer than 200 pages, and a huge font. And some really stupid arguments--like saying "don't you know about Adam Smith?" at the suggestion that anything but maximizing individual good maximizes collective good, to which I replied, out loud, at the laundromat, "haven't you seen A Beautiful Mind?!" Adam Smith needed some revising. (And don't even get me started here about contemporary CEOs throwing around Adam Smith, who saw unmitigated evil in the joint stock corporation.)
  
• Finally, Ralph Wiley is dead and that just sucks sucks sucks. Don't take my word for it, just read some of the columns.