Irish Trojan in Tennessee

Quote of the day #2

By Brendan Loy

Peggy Noonan, on why the "unity ticket" is a bad idea:  "[Clinton] undercuts the cleanness of Obama's message. She doesn't turn the page, she is the page." Heh.

More after the jump.

Quote of the day

By Brendan Loy

"Is [Obama] 'elitist,' too condescending and glib and remote and full of himself? I don't find him so—but then again, I myself am an elitist who can seem condescending and glib and remote and full of himself, so who am I to judge?" --Kurt Andersen, in a piece for New York Magazine brilliantly titled "I'm Not Totally Sure We Can."

(I also like Andersen's take on what each candidate must to do pass the, er, commander-in-chief test, if you will: "I'm far more convinced that President Obama would summon up the requisite steel and shrewdness than I am that President McCain would become sufficiently nuanced and diplomatic." Heh.)

CNN Breaking News

By CNN

Dow's 400-point plunge at market's close is year's biggest loss after weak jobs data and oil-price surge.

Don't let John McCain feed your baby

By Brendan Loy

If you do, your baby may get burned by bottled hot water:

Tee hee.

Iconography

By Brendan Loy

Has anyone else noticed Google's new favicon?

(More information here and here.)

Personally, I don't like it.

UPDATE: In other giant-Internet-company news, Amazon is down! (Hat tip: Insty.)

Obama's Gary Hart moment?

By Brendan Loy

Be careful what you wish for: "If somebody has evidence that myself or Michelle or anybody has said something inappropriate, let them do it."

Presumably by "do it," he means "produce it," as in, produce the evidence. Hmm. This would seem to run somewhat counter to his previous statement that his wife is off-limits.

Now, I agree with Obama on the substance of the point he's making -- about how frustrating it is when totally unsubstantiated rumors get lifted out of the undernews into mainstream discussion, and thus in some sense legitimized, simply by somebody in the MSM asking the question -- but still, does he really want to essentially dare the media, and his political opponents, to dig up dirt on him and his wife? We all know what happened the last time a presidential candidate did that!

I love the law

By Brendan Loy

Particularly when, in the course of doing legal research, I stumble across a citation like this:

Validity, construction, and effect of restrictive covenants as to trees and shrubbery, 13 A.L.R.4th 1346

Bring me a shrubbery!

(See also.)

36 hours in Knoxville

By Brendan Loy

New York Times travel writer Allison Glock spends 36 hours in Knoxville, which she calls "a place too unassuming to shout about but too comfortable to leave":

Knoxville, cheerfully ensconced in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains and banked against the Tennessee River, has an intrinsically lazy, soulful feel. The geography is soft, green and rolling. The climate is gentle, breezy and bright. Locals tend to be not just friendly — a given in most Southern towns — but chilled out, too. This is not the Old South of magnolias and seersucker so much as a modern Appalachia of roots music, locavore food, folk art and hillbilly pride. Or, as yet another city moniker aptly states, “Austin without the hype.”

WDVX's Blue Plate Special is prominently featured, as well it should be. Photo gallery here. (Hat tip: InstaPundit.)

McCain: Let's go to Mars

By Brendan Loy

In an obvious and blatant attempt to shore up the crucial Space-Obsessed Law Professors With Highly Trafficked Blogs voting bloc, John McCain said yesterday he would like to put a man on Mars.

Sounds good to me, but what I want to know is, will we do the other things?

P.S. In other John McCain-related news, he's apparently trying to fight off the "age issue" by making references that the youngsters of today will understand -- like, for instance, comparing Obama to William Jennings Bryan.

The year was eighteen ninety-six, and John McCain was just sixteen...

:)

P.P.S. And yet more McCain-related news: he's released his first general-election ad, in which he states: "Only a fool or a fraud talks tough or romantically about war. ... I hate war. And I know how terrible its costs are."

TPM's Greg Sargent says "McCain is using his bio to achieve separation from George W. Bush," suggesting that "even if he's continuing Bush's war policies, he's different from Dubya in that he understands the costs in a way that Bush never did." The subtext, Sargent writes, is: "Even if that reckless chicken-hawk took us to war, someone who actually understands and has experienced the costs of war -- someone you can actually believe -- is here to tell you that we must continue it."

So, to review: John McCain hates war, yet he wants to send a man to Mars, a planet which is named after... war. :)

UPDATE: Glenn links here, and says of my above joke, "somehow the Obama backers manage to make everything about Iraq... Heh." Hey, now! What's this about "Obama backers"? I know it might be hard to believe, given my blog's recent focus, but I repeat:

I am undecided. In fact, if you put a gun to my head right now and made me choose, I think -- *think* -- I'd vote for McCain. But it's really entirely up in the air how I'll vote in November. I like and admire Obama, but that doesn't mean I think he'd make the best president. The best Democratic nominee, yes, but that's only because his opponent is such a lying, conniving, deceitful [bad word]. Against McCain, he doesn't have such an obvious "character" advantage (both candidates are, as best as I can tell, generally good, decent and honest, though of course not pure or perfect), and I'm not at all sure who I think is, on balance, better on policy.

If that confuses you, consider this: "The portion of my brain that views politics as a sport can't help 'rooting' for Obama (he's exciting! he's inspiring! he's shiny!), [but] the rational part of my brain, which governs my actual vote, is totally undecided between Obama and McCain." Obama is the scrappy mid-major going up against the staid, boring, established program; he's Boise State against Oklahoma ("They said this day would never come: a WAC team in a BCS bowl! Yes, we can!"), he's Appalachian State against Michigan, he's Davidson against Kansas. Or, as McCain might prefer to say, he's Hawaii against Georgia. :) The point is, he's fun to root for, and that fact bleeds over into my blog coverage. (Also, my blog coverage has just been generally Dem-dominated because that contest has been much more exciting since late January.) Moreover, it's fun to poke fun at John McCain because, you know, he's old. (In fairness, I've also poked fun at Obama for being messianic and cultish. Whee, humor is fun!) But none of that necessarily means that I support Obama, because in the end, politics isn't a sport, and voting isn't about "rooting" or making jokes, it's about deciding the future of the country. So yes, I'm undecided. Really.

P.P.P.S. Speaking of the Red Planet, Andrew Sullivan this morning posted a picture from 2005 of Sunset on Mars. He should have included it in his "The View From Your Window" series!

All good things...

By Brendan Loy

[NOTE: Before you begin reading this post, understand that I will be taking no action until mid-July. So there's no need to say your "goodbyes" just yet!]

Wednesday afternoon, as I was walking through the parking garage after work, I had a shocking, momentous, revelatory, revolutionary thought. It's the sort of thought you would never expect me to have all on my own, totally unbidden and unsuggested by anyone. Lost in thought during the walk to my car, I was pondering my future in the months ahead -- as my clerkship ends and I start actually practicing law -- and, like a bolt of lightning, the thought popped into my brain:

Maybe I should give up the blog.

Now, you might expect me to reject this notion out of hand. Just a silly thought flitting across my brain, not worthy of serious consideration. Give up the blog? That's crazy. I've been blogging -- "hyperactively," as the title bar says -- for more than six years. I practically get the shakes when I go 24 hours without blogging. I've built quite a little community here, and I greatly enjoy the give-and-take, the feedback, the creative outlet, and frankly, the ego boost that this blog gives me. In short, I love my blog. And it's not as if the blog is causing any major identifiable or tangible problems for me right now. In fact, things are going swimmingly, both in my life generally and on the blog specifically. I've been getting more serious, positive blogospheric attention in recent months than I have at any time since Katrina. With a hurricane season and a presidential election coming up, such attention only figures to increase. So why on earth would I want to give it all up -- to quit cold turkey?

But the answer, or rather answers, to that question popped into my head just as quickly as the original thought did. There are the privacy concerns, which will only increase as Loyette gets older; there is the potential for conflicts and problems related to my career; there is the needless emotional energy expended dealing with trolls and such; and so forth. But above all, blogging is a very time-consuming activity. The blog is a beast that must be fed, and as long as this site exists, it's awfully hard for me to resist the temptation to blog, blog, blog.

Now, as I said, my blog isn't particularly causing me problems right now. During this first year of my post-school life, I think I've been able to strike a pretty reasonable balance between family, work, and the blog. But striking that balance promises to get much harder as I begin practicing law, as the hours will certainly be longer and more intense. Moreover, if I want to be a civic-minded person who is involved in his community (and I do), it's going to become increasingly important for me to be involved in other activities during my free time. The same goes for establishing and maintaining a healthy social life as I begin my career in earnest. Also, just as increased work hours will squeeze my free time from one end, increased family obligations are likely to squeeze it from the other end as Loyette gets older, and even moreso if Becky and I eventually have more kids.

In other words, although the blog isn't really presenting problems now, it's very, very easy to see how it will begin to create problems in the near future. There is only so much time in the day, and every hour I spend blogging is an hour I'm not spending on being a good father, a good husband, a good lawyer, a good friend, or a good citizen of the real world (as opposed to the virtual one).

I could say that I'll "cut back" or "take a hiatus," but resolutions like that just don't tend to work well for me. I can't half-ass a project like this. I'm just so used to having a blog, and posting to it regularly, that if it's there to update, I'm inevitably going to update it. Besides, having painstakingly built up this audience, having made this platform what it is, I can't stand the thought of slowly frittering it away by posting infrequently and/or failing to cover topics of interest to my readers. The reality is, I have neither the desire nor the discipline to let an active blog sit idle for long periods of time. Either I blog or I don't blog.

What makes this tricky, and difficult, is that my blog has been, on balance, an overwhelmingly positive thing in my life. I've made friends through the blog. I've gotten a job, in part, because of the blog. I've earned respect and admiration -- from people in real life as well as online -- because of the blog. I've received, because of the blog, a type of exposure I never could have dreamed of otherwise: the New York Times, the Washington Post, Tucker Carlson, Spike Lee, and on and on. And not just the Katrina stuff; more recently, my thoughts on the 2008 election have been read by many thousands of people, thanks to links from places as diverse as the New Republic and Free Republic, The Economist and the National Review. More broadly, the blog has simply given me an outlet to share, well, lots of stuff that I've enjoyed sharing, from diatribes on sports and politics to photos of my baby and my pets. And it's kept me connected to friends and family who I might well have lost touch with otherwise, and has simultaneously connected me to all sorts of new people. All in all, the blog has been good to me.

But I feel now like it's reaching a point of diminishing returns. I've accomplished just about everything I can hope to accomplish as someone who keeps a multi-topic blog as a hobby. In fact, in a real sense, I need to start accomplishing less, for the reasons I've stated already. In order to keep up my current pace of bloggy accomplishments -- of earned attention and recognition, of bloggy community-building, and of new and different exploits of creativity -- I would necessarily have to start impinging on my career, my family life, or both. But of course, I can't do either of those things, which means the blog must necessarily suffer. So I feel as if maintaining the blog is almost like fighting a losing battle against the evolution of my life. In a very basic way, it's simply time to move on.

All of which is why, within 60 seconds of having that revolutionary thought -- "maybe I should give up the blog" -- it morphed from a passing fancy into a concrete plan. Yup. I will give up the blog.

Not yet, though! :) I'm looking at the middle of July as the time I'll most likely hang up my blogging shoes. Details after the jump.