Uggabugga is to me about the oddest name for a blog. But whoever s/he is, s/he has a way with charts. This week's winner is a chart showing how the single hour that GW Bush says is all he can spare to speak to the 9/11 commission compares to his pre-9/11 vacation time.
I suppose it's sort of a cheap shot in that the better comparison would probably post-9/11 vacations (although there have also been plenty of those), but it's effective.
Our colleague and friend Daniel Murray passed away late Saturday night. Daniel joined the faculty in 1957 and taught and wrote primarily in the commercial law and international sales fields until he retired in 1996. He was recognized as the outstanding teacher of the year several times, the Inter-American Law Review awarded Daniel the Lawyer of the Americas Award in 1987, he served for many years as the faculty advisor to the University of Miami Law Review and he was a prolific scholar. Our students often affectionately referred to him as “Shotgun Murray” because of his rapid fire delivery of his commercial law lectures. We all will miss Daniel
There will be a funeral Mass at San Augustine Catholic Church and Campus Ministry (located at the intersection of San Amaro and Miller Drive) on Thursday, March 4th at 1:00 p.m. Immediately following this memorial service, there will be a reception at the School of Law. In lieu of flowers, the family has requested that donations be made to the Daniel E. Murray Law Review Scholarship Fund at the Law School.
Dan Murray was part of a somewhat vanishing breed of law professor—one whose scholarly career was not much theory-driven, but was mostly about being a master technician. He wanted better and clearer rules, and he wanted to explain the impact of the rules we had. I've always thought that even (especially?) very intellectual and theory-oriented law faculties such as ours should make a bigger place for, and value more highly, the kind of scholarship Dan produced.
By the time I got here, Dan was in the endgame of his career, but he was still writing articles with titles like “Liability of the State and Its Employees in the Mishandling of Security Interests Under Commercial Codes and Motor Vehicle Laws,” “The Extension of Damage and Time Limitations of the Hague, Warsaw and Lausanne Conventions to Agents and Independent Contractors of Shiplines and Airlines,” and “Substitutes for Letters of Credit Sales: A Seller's Lot Is Not a Happy One.” And even after he retired, he kept coming in and keeping up until his health made that too difficult.
We crossed paths for the last time only two weeks ago, at the doctor's office, and he looked frail. “I'm feeling old” he said, but he made a joke of it.
AskTog: Top 10 Reasons to Not Shop On Line contains enough truth that it should make anyone designing an e-commerce system sit up and take notice.
I shop a lot online — I hate malls, and I like the convenience — and I've had about all of the experiences Tog complains about at one time or another. I've also had enough good experiences to make me think all is not hopeless.
South Florida is teeming with dangerous and weird wildlife, much of it non-native and out of control.
And, no, I don't mean the local lawyers or South Beach nightlife.
Forget the Gators: Exotic Pets Run Wild in Florida: The southern end of Florida, the most tropical state outside Hawaii, is teeming with exotic beasts. As if alligators, panthers and other native creatures were not enough, the steamy swamps, murky waterways and lush tree canopies here are a paradise for furry, scaly, clawed, fanged and otherwise off-putting things that have no business roaming this side of the equator.
“This stuff doesn't happen in New Jersey, it doesn't happen in Ohio, but in South Florida it happens constantly,” said Todd Hardwick, whose trapping business, Pesky Critters, gets 60 calls a day from people with peacocks on their roofs, caimans in their driveways and iguanas in their tool sheds. “Miami-Dade County is probably ground zero for exotic animals that are on the loose and doing very well.”
Then again, that last remark does fit some people I know….
Over the years, I have been involved in a number of local political campaigns, albeit none recently, and there's nothing like doing retail politics to meet a lot of regular decent folks, most of whom have a lot of good sense. It gives you some faith in the basic long-run reasonableness of the nation (although that faith sometimes gets shaken during periods of martial enthusiam).
And that's why I think there's a decent chance that the Bush-Rove plan to polarize America will backfire. Consider South of the Suwannee, a blog that never struck me as at all radical:
Haven't I Heard All This Before? What if President Eisenhower had advocated a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court's “overreaching” in Brown v. Board of Education? His advocacy would not have been based on any racial prejudice, but that the desegregation of American society by judicial fiat denied the electorate to have its say through the legislative process. He might have said, regretfully, “On a matter of such importance, the voice of the people must be heard. Activist courts have left the people with one recourse.”
Farfetched? Hardly. I vividly remember the “Impeach Earl Warren” billboards that dotted the highways throughout the South, and the politicians whose opposition to civil rights was couched in terms of the South's “traditions.” I also remember my grandfather stating his belief that the real goal of integration was legalized miscegenation.
Fortunately for America, Ike resisted the call for radical reaction to the Supreme Court's decision and subsequent event proved him right. Contrast that restraint with President Bush's call for a constitutional amendment to defend marriage.
I didn't start out being in favor of marriage for gay couples — and there may be some valid reasons to go slow in this process. But most of the arguments I have read seem to be based either on religious proscribtions, vague calls to preservation of traditions, or advocacy of seizing an opportunity to reign in out-of-control judges.
I've been married (to the same woman) for over three decades, and have a recently-married offspring and another who might not be that far away from “tying the knot.” I cannot see that allowing gay marriages threaten my or my children's relationships. On the other hand, a constitutional amendment does threaten a number of citizens and demeans one of our most significant civil documents.
I think, I hope, that there's a lot of that around.
While on the subject of blog mechanics (a subject that seems to draw more comments than most…up there with the Lord of the Rings and Knee Defender)…I've just installed a new MT plugin by Gavin Estey called MT-flipflop which is supposed to let me have alternating background colors in the comments. I've gotten rid of the divider lines which I never much liked, and have managed to get one of the colors to change; the other stubbornly stays fixed to the blog's overall background color. Well, it's just version 0.1 of the plugin. Update After running a CSS validator, I fixed four errors in the style sheet. The IE and Firefox versions now look much more alike, and both colors in the comments are now quite distinct.
This, however, raises the question just how lurid the background color(s) should be. Should I restrict my choice to a non-dithering color? It's a very limited set of colors. Or should I widen the choices and pick a bright yellow (#EEEE00)? A bold light blue (#63B8FF)? Something sorta purpleish (#CCCCFF)? Living in Miami makes us willing to explore garish choices…
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