Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

The (Maybe) Princess and the Metaphor

I never thought I would care anything about the British royal family one way or another, but I’m actually starting to feel sorry for the woman who attracts this sort of press coverage:

Kate, as she is fast becoming known by the English (actress Kate Winslet and model Kate Moss are still two-namers), is a middle-class descendant of a coal-mining family, with an art history degree and conservative hemlines.

She is as English as thickly buttered toast, and roughly as controversial. Her courtship with William is chronicled by the press the way lions chronicle antelopes.

I think it’s that metaphor what did it.

And I imagine that I’ll get over it.

Posted in UK | Comments Off on The (Maybe) Princess and the Metaphor

Pandora’s Peculiarities

I love Pandora, but it has done two strange things recently.

I recently took the Secunia Software Inspector out for a spin, and it in addition to finding all sorts of obscure software that it thought needed updating, and I thought needed deleting, it also found multiple outdated copies of Java and the flash player. So I deleted them all except the newest. Alas, now that I had only the newest version of the Flash player, Pandora stopped working — it was convinced I was blocking the flash player from storing its data locally, even when I wasn’t. I laboriously followed the directions in Pandora’s FAQ and went through the flash privacy panel (I hate that obscure thing) and gave Pandora the rights to everything short of my first-born, but no dice. I eventually had to uninstall version 9.x of the flash player and downgrade to 7.x to make Pandora work again. This is odd.

And then there’s the station I created with Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy”. That’s one weird station.

Posted in Internet, Software | Comments Off on Pandora’s Peculiarities

Prize Snark from Talking Points Memo

Joshua Micah Marshall,

Charles Stimson, deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, says there should be a boycott of law firms defending Gitmo detainees. Too bad one of those firms, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison is representating Scooter Libby in his trial that starts Monday.

Guess Scooter won’t be honoring the boycott.

The widespread pushback against Stimson’s little piece of thuggery has been amazing. One more way in which this administration is alienating even its allies in the ruling establishment.

Posted in Law: Ethics | Comments Off on Prize Snark from Talking Points Memo

The Latest

Digby has much more information about the US and Iran than I found in my newspaper.

Posted in Iran | 2 Comments

The Conservative Crack-Up Begins

Glenn Greenwald points to an NPR essay by a New Republic stalwart — Rod Dreher: “Hadn’t the hippies tried to tell my generation this”?

Better late than later.

Posted in Politics: US | Comments Off on The Conservative Crack-Up Begins

Jim Morin on Bush’s Speech

The Herald’s Jim Morin is frequently predictable, but now and then he hits one out of the park:

Posted in Iraq | 1 Comment