Southern Appeal is one of my favorite blogs, and I actually sent my father a "Stare Decisis is fo' Suckas" T-shirt for Christmas one year.

Feddie was a law clerk for Judge Pryor, who wrote a wonderful editorial in the Wall Street Journal about the role of judges in society. Yesterday, a California court issued a good ruling, possibly because of the current "backlash" against activist judges (but read Pryor's editorial to compare that backlash with previous outrages).

Feddie has a good comment on what the first year of law school should be like.

The Middle East continues to be the same. But, hey, if we just tried to understand Palestinian terrorists a little more, ...

In my earlier "things I didn't know" post, I forgot one: an Irish colonel once tried to steal the British crown jewels, and his plan included flattening the crown and cutting a gold cross in two.

Orson Scott Card is a man on a mission against homework.

Two things I didn't know before this morning:

The Tower of London houses several ravens, whose official purpose is to pluck the eyes from the heads of executed criminals after they are hung on display (third-to-last paragraph).

And there was a terrible mess obout two princes locked in the Tower of London.

Apparently Paige and I missed quite a lot of excitement last night. A licensed waste holding company (they take in hazardous waste until they have enough to ship somewhere else) released a plume of gas (that included chlorine, but apparently may not have been just chlorine gas) into the air. Then there were explosions, that may have started at the company, or may have come from a neighboring company's oil storage tanks.

Either way, it's not pretty. We don't live that close to Apex, but we were married there. It is interesting that this is precisely the kind of scenario used in annual preparedness drills. The state's response has been incredibly good.

The CNN article includes the quote "'People are going to want to come in and sightsee at this fire scene,' Radford told AP. 'They will either get terribly sick or they will be arrested. No questions asked.'" There was more to it than that. Radford also said that anyone coming to sightsee ought to write their own name and the name of their next of kin on their forehead. That's not a statement you usually get from a city official, but it shows you North Carlina's way of being blunt in a nice way.

It could have been worse. Fewer people live in Apex than worked in the Twin Towers. People are spread out enough in North Carolina that it would take something incredibly large to affect more than a few thousand people.

And although most companies are closed today, there are commuters trying toget to work in nearby Raleigh. So there is an evacuation route set up along with a commuter route. That may well be an example that British culture is still alive in this former colony.

Tempting, but people much smarter than I am have already entered.

But getting free access to all that data is tempting. On the other hand, movie watching patterns just aren't that interesting to me.

Then again, it is a million dollars. But I can turn that down because the chance that I would win that is pretty remote. But it's also a chance to use the CRM Discriminator. Of course everyone else has access to the CRM discriminator, but if I'm just tinkering for the education of what the Discriminator can do, I guess I can walk away with something.

I've been talking about small business/self-employement recently. I think I just found the right product to sell.

I'd love to be self-employed, but for an entirely different reason.

On a related note, have you heard the one about the farmer and the labor department?

The fact I find this funny probably means there's something wrong with me.