majority holding premised on infallible dogs

It's sad that the best thing we can say is "Well, we survived Andrew Jackson," but - at least we did survive Andrew Jackson.

One component of admission to practice as an attorney is the multiple-choice ethics exam. The best advice I got about this exam was that the people who consistently fail this exam are people who try to pick the most ethical answer; that the goal is to pick the least ethical answer which is still allowed by the rules. This sounds awful to a lot of people, but it's actually very sensible - people are free to behave as ethically as they'd like on their own behalf, but when you're acting on someone else's behalf, it's not OK to limit their rights because of your own sense of what is right. That's the entire point of having rules about what behavior is ethical and what isn't.

And that's why it bothers me when people accuse attorneys (and similarly, politicians, and most specifically, Hillary Clinton) of being unethical because they are always trying to stay just on the right side of the rules. When they're acting with a fiduciary duty, that is their actual job. The shitty attorneys (and politicians) are the ones who act the same way when it comes to their own personal enrichment. I understand how that happens; it's hard to change mindsets like that. But that's what makes a good attorney (etc.) is being able to shut that off when you're not representing someone else.

David Bowie has been one of my favorite artists at least as long as I have had access to a CD player - Hunky Dory was one of the first CDs we got. I've probably listened to that album more than any other single album. But as much as I love his music, and as much as I adore his passionate, spectacular life, the thing I love most about David Bowie is that he taught me that I didn't need to be manly to be a man.

Well, crap. The Girl Who Died / The Woman Who Lived have made me care about Doctor Who again.

But looking at the schedule, I see that the last two episodes of the season are credited solely to Moffat. So I know that only heartbreak lies ahead.

Last year, on the first Sunday in November, I ran my first half marathon in 2:45:36. Since then, I've run over 450 miles, and today I ran another half marathon in 2:06:09. I definitely feel better right now than I did after the first one. The first time, I thought to myself "there is no way I will ever run a marathon." Today, I am thinking to myself, "I really want to run a full marathon, but I really don't know what I'm going to have to do to make that happen." I suspect the only way it's going to happen is if I start finding more 2+ hour blocks of time to run during the rest of the year. On the plus side, this is the first timed race I've run where the first place finisher took longer than half my time to finish! If nothing else, next year I need to try to finish under 1:56:46 - then the world record will be longer than half my time.

Unfortunately, although the race provides a number of statistics, "how many dudes younger than me took longer than I did" is not one of them. But I can count them! It turns out that out of 1522 runners, 82 were dudes younger than me who took longer than I did. So yay for that.

Are the singer-protagonists of Time For Me To Fly and Keep On Loving You addressing each other? I'm pretty sure they are.

So here's a compromise, of sorts. I'm now using Facebook in write-only mode. It's just going to be a mirror of my livejournal from here on out. I'll pop into Facebook from time to time just to check the notifications.

I'm frustrated, because there are so many people I care about that I only interact with on Facebook, these days. Shutting out Facebook means shutting out those people. I don't want to lose touch with anyone, but the only way I can take back the power I've ceded to Facebook is to not mind if I lose touch with people that I only contact through Facebook.

If you don't have my email or phone number, let me know and I'll be happy to share it with you. If you'd like to get together for lunch sometime, I'd love that. Maybe I should talk on the phone more, I don't know. Maybe if I'm not reading Facebook all the time, I'll have things to talk to people about. I don't know. I'm open to suggestions. I'm open to contact! I'm just no longer willing to depend on Facebook for that contact.

P.S. I have no idea what this will look like when it makes the leap to Facebook. Whee.

What we have done in the 35 minutes since waking up, thanks to the two-year-old:
Carried the little elephant and big elephant every where we went ("Carry you elephant, daddy!")
Watched a 14-second video of a trust fall gone wrong over and over again for 8 minutes
Listened to the intro music of the original Bard's Tale continuously until it has become burned into my brain
Changed a poopy pull-up

He's in another room doing something, now, but I can't hear what's going on over the Bard's Tale. Hopefully if things go terribly wrong, his screams will drown it out.

On Usenet* there was a thread about a no-knead bread recipe. Some people had a lot of success with it, some people weren't so impressed, and one dude couldn't make it work *at all*, and was very upset eager to let everyone know how smart he was. So he responded listing all the things he had done to fix the recipe - changing proportions, adding sugar, using a different type of flour - and explaining why each of those things was necessary for the recipe to work. And of course, someone responded to let him know that perhaps he should try actually making the recipe as written before he started "fixing" it.

That's a message that's always stuck with me, because I have a tendency to do the same thing. Normally, I'm good at curbing it, but recently I got a pasta machine for Christmas. The instructions said "mix 500g of flour with 5 eggs." I figured I was safe to make somewhat less, so I used 300g of flour and 3 eggs. Reasonable! But then I mixed it, and kneaded it, and it was still a shaggy mess with loose flour in the bottom of the bowl, so I splashed some water on my hands, figuring maybe they were expecting extra large eggs instead of large. And everything went fine from there until I tried to cut the pasta, and it was a sticky mess.

The next attempt, I stuck to the recipe as written, apart from changing the proportions, and everything went much better. So: a good reminder that if I'm going to bother following a recipe, I ought to actually follow the recipe.

* - initially, I wrote "A long time ago, on Usenet," but I realized the first bit was redundant.

Huh. Apparently, I'm a spammer. I tried to post the following as a comment to this post:

"Also, alien dog-analogs die."

I've occasionally found myself wishing there were a website named "doesthedogdie.com" where I could type in the name of a movie I'm considering watching and find out if I'll be sad. And apparently, wishing makes it so! My favorite entry: "A pet rat named Beany is exposed to some peril (submerged in a breathable goo, put into an inflated ziploc bag to prevent drowning) and at times it seems like he's gone and has died, but he survives and is not injured."

And it was all, 'nuh-uh, spammer!"

I won't lie - part of the reason I'm posting this is to find out if my own journal will also reject it as spam.