M. Davis-Wilson

Small mercies

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 21:04:49 GMT

The October GQ has Olivia Wilde on the cover, with the headline "Why We're Wild About Olivia Wilde". Which is sort of cheesy, but hey, such are headlines. We learn in the accompanying article that she changed her name when she began her acting career; her parents are named Cockburn.

I can only imagine the headline writers at GQ are really glad she made that choice.

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 16:41:58 GMT

For those who don't follow Jen's LJ: Holy crap, I have a kid.

He does, in fact, have two arms. He's just so fast you can only see one at a time.

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 23:13:38 GMT

I think it's kind of awesome that I have to program my spellchecker at work to accept "lol" as a word.

It would be more cool if it weren't just shorthand for limitation of liability, but you gotta take the joy where you find it.

(Did I take foolish delight in titling my memo on permissible upper limits on limitation of liability "Lolcaps"? Oh hell yes I did.)

Accomplishments!

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 05:34:33 GMT

My first sole-byline legal publication was released today: a Focus piece in the San Francisco Daily Journal. (My first legal publication was an article last summer I assisted a partner with. It sorta counts.)

I have a particularly bad case of the feeling-like-a-frauds on this one, but the people who've read it seem to think it adequate.

Iss mah birfday uh-morrow!

Sat, 07 Mar 2009 04:20:22 GMT

It having been almost a third of a century since I came into this world, some observation of the day seems appropriate.

It having been almost a third of a month since I had a proper day off, a big hullabaloo seems less than totally appealing. (Especially as Sunday will almost certainly be spent reading reams of supplier agreements.)

Thus, in honor of my natal day, we will be At Home to Guests tomorrow, starting around lunchtime. If people would like to come and say hello, we would love to have you. There may well be snacks and tasty beverages. Weather permitting*, we might even break out the hot tub.

Email me if you haven't been to our new place; it turns out that Google Maps lies.

*disclaimer: weather may not be permitting

Three Dog Night

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 03:46:53 GMT

So we have two guest dogs with us this weekend. They're having fun tearing all over the place and somehow inspiring Finn to do things like climb up on the dining room table. And periodically, all three dogs will decide to come see me and look at me soulfully, as if to say:

Finn: I'm the cutest dog in the whole wide world!
Skipper: No, I'm the cutest dog in the entire universe!
Brigid: O HAI I HAZ A BALL

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 06:07:42 GMT

For years I have wanted a particular utility. I want a program that I can feed the names of everyone I want to stay in touch with, and the last time I contacted them. It would then prod me whenever it had been some set amount of time since I communicated with X, Y, and Z.

Does anyone know if such a thing exists? It seems like it would be a fairly simple Facebook app. I know that professional contact managers like sales reps use would probably do what I want, but that seems excessive.

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 06:45:43 GMT

I have spent all goddamn evening trying to get my computer to connect to the wireless. Even now, I have only managed to get my Ethernet to work correctly. I've tried everything I can think of, but no matter what I do it just won't give me a freaking IP address. Plus my computer keeps connecting to the trailer park next door's router. Which won't give me an IP address either. Which suggests that something is probably wrong with my computer, but damned if I know what.

On days like these, I really wish there was somewhat I could blame for wireless networking. Because they would probably live in my neighborhood, and then sweet vengeance would ensue.

In which I vent like an aging coal plant

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 03:51:01 GMT

I saw an article today about a poll which asked whether people thought that global warming was predominantly due to human activity or natural activity. This appears to be a major part of the debates surrounding climate change and appropriate policies thereto. I think it's an extremely pernicious framing of the issue, and sensible people should resist it (even those people who are skeptical about climate change but interested in rational policymaking).

Primarily, this is because it DOESN'T MATTER. If we found out tomorrow that we face massive climate disruption because of Carbo, the Earth Serpent, who farts several million tonnes a day of a toxic brew of methane, CO2, and sulfur hexafluoride, and that all human industrial activity is dwarfed by Carbo's epic flatulence, but that a combination of carbon taxes, regulatory reform, and sequestration programs could offset Carbo's lethal poots and save us from deadly hurricanes, desertification, and rising seas, I think the appropriate course of action would be obvious. The question is not why climate change is happening, it's whether we can do anything about it. The causes of climate change are only relevant insofar as they tell us what we might be able to do about it.

Secondly, I think the human/natural framing confuses the issue by dragging in another debate entirely. There are people who feel that industrial civilization is inherently unsustainable, and there are people who think the first group of people is a bunch of dirty fucking hippies. Framing climate change as the fault of human activities is an opportunity for industry-skeptics to feel vindicated, but if history teaches us anything, it teaches that a significant minority of the American public would eat their own children if it would irritate those dirty fucking hippies. The corollary to this is that it is incumbent on all who love things getting done to keep the DFH issue off the table if it can be avoided.

So let's not waste our time allocating blame; it's not like we could make the polar bears cough up their share of the carbon tax, anyway. If you want to argue that our carbon policy can't affect the climate for the better, fine; if you want to argue that the benefits of an aggressive climate policy are outweighed by its costs, even better; if you want to argue that nothing is happening and it's all experimental error induced by Al Gore's beard, well, good luck with that. But let's keep our focus on what we can do now, not what we might have done differently.

Besides, everyone knows it's all China's fault.

The trials of homeownership (selected highlights)

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 20:04:37 GMT

So we got our property tax assessment, and it sort of encapsulates what's happened to Bay Area real estate over my lifetime. When the previous owners bought this house twenty-odd years ago, the assessed value of the house was divided more or less evenly between the value of the land and the value of the improvements to the land, weighted slightly toward the land side. (It's a big lot.) Since then, the improvements have increased about 60% in value, which is actually somewhat less than keeping place with inflation. (Makes sense, I guess; stuff gets old.) The value of the land, meanwhile, went up 425%.

I came home the other night to a pronounced smell of gas in the house. All our pilot lights were on, and I couldn't figure out where it was coming from, but I had run into a PG&E guy that morning who asked if I had smelled gas. So I called PG&E, but it turns out that their customer service is terrible after hours. Then I tried the non-emergency services number for Mountain View, and they advised me to get out of the house and sent out the fire department. So after a few minutes three fire trucks roll up, and a half dozen firefighters are looking around for where the gas smell is coming from. (Apparently it was a slow night.) Eventually they conclude that the smell ebbs and flows depending on where you're standing, and does not appear to be coming from the house, and smells more like sewer gas anyway. So that's that. Poor Finn was traumatized; he fears trucks and strangers, and I don't think I've ever seen him quivering with anxiety like that before.

Over the last couple of days, our floor furnace has been misbehaving; the pilot has gone out a couple of times, but Jen has been able to relight it. Then this morning there was a faint gas smell, but the pilot was on, so I figured we were probably OK. Then a few minutes ago there was a loud THUD noise, like someone dropping something heavy. Jen and I both went to see what the other one had done to cause it, and we found a burnt-hair smell over the floor furnace, and the furnace was actually fully on now. "I told you I smelled gas", says Jen. I think if this keeps up we should probably call someone.

This actually makes an old memory of mine make sense; I was sitting at my childhood kitchen counter when a gas leak blew out* the back wall of our kitchen, but the memory is much less violent than I would have assumed a gas explosion would be. I remember my mom jumping back in startlement (she was cooking at the time), but my actual memory of the event itself is...pretty much a loud THUMP. So there you go.

*"Blew out" maybe overstates the case. But there was a hole in the wall afterward.

Lessons of the Wriggly Wranch (not a brothel in Nevada)

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 05:03:23 GMT

Composting really does teach you things about nature.

We got a vermicomposting rig a few months ago. The Wriggly Wranch is a set of three plastic bins; the bottom one is solid, with a tap, and the other two are filled with holes on the bottom. You put all your vegetable scraps in along with a bunch of worms, and they produce dirt and "worm tea", which is basically water with various dissolved nutrients in it. (OK, technically what they produce is not so much dirt as worm poo, but it basically looks the same.) When one bin fills, you switch the bins and start putting new vegetables in the new bin; the worms migrate through the holes, and after a while you can empty out the now-abandoned dirt. Liquid collects in the bottom bin, and periodically you drain off a pot of worm tea.

Now, I was basically friendly to the whole composting thing, but I wasn't sure what we would do with all the dirt. We don't use that much fertilizer. (I guess we have enough ground to fertilize now, but we didn't in Menlo Park.) This, I imagined, is the core problem with a lot of green living solutions -- the logistics. It's great to turn our biowaste back into soil, but how would we then get these mountains of soil back where they would be useful?

As it turns out, we have not yet gotten a single load of compost out of our Wriggly Wranch. After three months, we just swapped the bins yesterday, and the worms haven't started migrating yet. As it happens, worms eat really slowly; the vegetables mostly rot before the worms really get into them. And they're kind of fussy; we have a lot of citrus waste because of our ornage tree, but apparently they turn their noses up at citrus when there is other fare. Also, they produce a *lot* of liquid; we've probably poured off a few gallons of worm tea.

It makes me rethink my attitude about not retrieving stray bits of trash just because they're biodegradable. I always assumed nature was pretty speedy about processing our wastes, but it appears not so much. At the same time, I am no longer concerned about urban composting drowning us in excess dirt.

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 23:05:37 GMT

Fenwick had a firm holiday on the day after New Year's, which made this a glorious opportunity to have a four-day weekend with time to relax and to get things done. In the same weekend! Unfortunately, as has long been its wont, my body has decided to take such a broad uninterrupted span of free time to get its sick on. This makes me sad. Also bleary and congested.

In other, unrelated news, Checkpoint by Nicholson Baker is an absolutely terrible book. Baker more or less writes by pouring out raw id onto the page, which in the past has made for entertaining if rather pervy prose. However, Checkpoint is a 2004-era Bush assassination fantasy rendered as a dialogue between two old friends, one of whom has apparently gone off the deep end and decided to kill the president. While he accomplishes his usual feat of expressing clearly and accurately the things that people think but would never, ever say, in Checkpoint that insight doesn't lead us anywhere. In large part this is, I think, because after the two characters have between them expressed the key dilemma of an assassination fantasy -- the target deserves to die, but it would be Wrong to kill them -- there's not really anywhere to go. It's basically the dramatic equivalent of a long blog thread on "Bush: Worst President Ever?" It would, I think, have been much more interesting if Baker had written a book about someone actually killing the president. There's interesting conflict in killing the president, but not so much in wanting to kill the president, and only slightly more in admitting that you want to kill the president.

Woo!

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 02:25:59 GMT

Esquire, bitches.

One Reason Why Civil Unions Don't Cut It

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 05:54:41 GMT

After election day, I did some research on the law of California domestic partnerships, and I found something interesting that I thought y'all might also find interesting.

In California since 2003, domestic partners receive all the rights and responsibilities of spouses under the law. (The original domestic partnership law in 1999 had only granted same-sex couples (and elderly couples, interestingly) a limited subset of marital privileges.) Now, at that time, it wasn't entirely clear why legal equivalence wouldn't be an adequate solution to the question of same-sex marriage, and I had sort of assumed a few years ago that that was probably where we would wind up for a generation. The discussion has advanced a great deal since then, but I think one issue is that many people don't understand why civil unions don't satisfy.

In my research, I found one distinction in the law that seems initially unimportant, but seems more significant to me the more I think about it. To get married in the state of California, you must go to your local county clerk to apply for a marriage license; you must have your marriage solemnized by an officiant approved by the state (essentially, a state official or a religious figure); you must have your marriage license witnessed by two people. This leaves a considerable amount of leeway for whatever marriage practices you want to follow, but it creates a certain floor of ritual. Your local community (the county) must be involved; your personal community (the witnesses) must be involved; and you need to have some sort of ceremony (solemnization).

To form a domestic partnership, you get a form from the Secretary of State, you both sign it, you get it notarized, and you send it back to the Secretary of State.

So, to get married, you need to go to church, or to City Hall; to get partnered, you need to go to Kinko's. What this means is that we have offered same-sex couples a close equivalent to *being* married; we have not offered them anything remotely like *getting* married.

And frankly, the latter is arguably more important. In the five years I've been married, I haven't made much use of the rights and responsibilities of a spouse. Preferential tax treatment is nice, and we've saved a bit of money on health insurance. And to be clear, it's good to know that all of the other perquisites of marriage are there -- hospital visitation, spousal confidentiality, and so on. But the nuts and bolts of my everyday life are not that much different from what they would have been if jendaviswilson and I had just cohabited indefinitely.

What is different is that we made a commitment to each other before ourselves, our families and friends, and the community at large. The involvement of other people makes a difference. The involvement of the community makes a difference. We talk about weddings binding two people together, but I think in most marriages that work is already done by the time you walk down the aisle. The wedding ritual affirms that bond, and then demands the community's support for it. And that last part is what domestic partnerships don't do. The state of California recognizes same-sex relationships; it doesn't bless them.

Incremental progress!

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 03:17:48 GMT

The state of California has concluded that I do in fact possess the moral character suitable for a member of the bar. (Yeah, OK, shut up.) The competence bit remains to be seen. Thanks to everyone who vouched that I am neither a meth dealer nor a serial killer, that you know of.

Holy crap, I'm a lawyer

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 05:12:05 GMT

This morning I finished my first actual assignment as an actually employed lawyer. It's been a very long time since I had a real job.

They assure us that while the sky may be falling, it is probably not falling on us. It is still a slightly nerve-wracking time to be the new guy.

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 16:28:57 GMT

Sarah Palin is a gift to comedy in ways that you couldn't even dream up. I was looking at a still of the SNL debate sketch this morning, and realized that while Sarah Palin and Tina Fey do look eerily similar, Palin's hairdo is flattering to Palin but not to Fey. Thus, they don't even have to do anything to create a slightly ridiculous effect; they just have to dress Fey like Palin, and she looks sort of goofy even before she does a thing.

Talk to your dogs about mud...before someone else does

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 02:40:25 GMT

The dog park we go to in Menlo Park has poor drainage, and hence when the city waters, certain low points turn into mudholes. Somehow, by a mysterious confluence of geology and landscaping, the city of Menlo Park has succeeded in creating crack for dogs. And not just crack, but Movie of the Week crack.

A few months ago, Finn would occasionally take a nibble of mud if he happened to wander by one particular mudhole while at leisure during a dog park visit. As time passed, he started eating mud whenever he would get bored with the other dogs. As it became clear that we disapprove of his new pastime, he started to get furtive about eating mud -- stealing a nibble, then running away before we could grab or interrupt him. Recently, he started ignoring other dogs who are his friends in favor of eating mud.

Today, he ate mud IN THE MIDDLE OF WRESTLING WITH ANOTHER DOG.

Our puppy is a junkie.

Why do they lie about the details?

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 02:08:20 GMT

The latest McCain flap is over his story of sharing a Christmas moment with one of his Vietnamese guards over a cross scratched in the dirt with a stick. Some suspect that this is a fabrication, because the story is eerily similar to an incident that supposedly happened to Solzhenitsyn and which is a popular inspirational story among the evangelical right (though there are some indications that it may be an urban legend; the story appears nowhere in Solzhenitsyn's works), and McCain apparently never talked about it before 1999. One of his fellow POWs has confirmed the basic story, but says that it didn't happen at Christmas and the cross was drawn by foot, not by stick. (Of course, this was Bud Day, who was one of the key Swift Boat Vets, so take that with however much salt seems merited.)

Now, I don't know the truth, and I'm willing to believe that something along those general lines happened; there have been other stories of North Vietnamese guards who were either closet Christians or just sympathetic to the Christian faith of American POWs. But it seems unlikely that John McCain experienced an event almost identical to a popular story among a key demographic that he needs to woo, then forgot about it while writing multiple memoirs, only to recall it upon developing Presidential aspirations.

It reminded me of a story about John Edwards from Bob Shrum's book: that when he discussed the VP slot with Kerry, he shared a story he had never told anyone before of holding his dead son at the funeral home and promising to make the world a better place, except that Kerry was dismayed because Edwards had shared the exact same story that he had never shared before with Kerry four years previously. It also reminded me over the controversy about whether Mitt Romney could possibly have seen his father march with Martin Luther King, and other incidents with public figures that I don't want to propagate.

It also reminded me of another incident which I think illustrates what may underlie all these shenanigans. My mother met David Gergen briefly at some point. Later, at my graduation (he was a member of the Yale Corporation at the time, I believe), she ran into him and greeted him. He responded as if he knew exactly who she was, which he almost certainly did not. This is, I have later learned, one of the early lessons in being a politician: always say "Great to see you" rather than "Good to meet you", because it avoids embarrassment in the event that you've met already. If you can pull this off, it creates the illusion of a titanic memory for people.

An essential part of a public figure's job is creating a sense of intimacy with more people than one person could ever have a genuine relationship with. All the fabrications I mentioned above, and others of their kind, involve tweaking the events of one's own life to make them more immediate or to create intimacy with the listener. They are, I think, an occupational hazard of public life; you get used to crafting your own story for maximum effect until one day you get caught.

Privatization troubles 2

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 07:41:28 GMT

I'm also reminded of a hypothesis I had a while back. One hears bandied about (though less so in these post-Washington-Consensus days, largely because no one seems to want to nationalize industries anymore*) the principle that nations with leftist tendencies suffer from a dearth of private investment because capital shuns the risk of nationalization. I wonder if there may be a parallel phenomenon wherein nations with rightist tendencies suffer from a dearth of infrastructure because the electorate shuns the risk of privatization.

This was, for example, what I thought when I heard about the high-speed rail plan proposed for California; I think it's a good idea on the merits, but I think it's highly likely that we would wind up spending ninety hojillion dollars on the thing and then Sacramento would sell it to private investors for eighty-five cents and a meatball hoagie.

*Except for Hugo Chavez, and really, what point is there in lecturing him? Unless you want ringtone fame, I guess.

Privatization troubles

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 07:23:49 GMT

I was listening a bit ago to a piece on NPR about the privatization of Ghana's state telecom company, which is apparently being protested by folks who think that Vodafone isn't paying enough. This seems to be a frequent problem when state-controlled industries get privatized -- consider, for example, Russia's oligarch problem.

Now, it may be that simple corruption, or its "what's good for GM is good for America" cousin, adequately explains this phenomenon. But I also wonder if there may be a market failure stemming from inadequate competition that contributes. It's not easy to assemble the resources to bid on a large national company, and many of these sales have a handful of potential buyers at best. In particular, though, I'm thinking about the apparent lack of a reserve price in privatization sales; the government in question has generally more or less committed to sell to somebody, which would seem to exercise downward pressure on price. The power to walk away is often the strongest gambit a seller has; combined with a limited number of potential buyers, the state seller is fighting an uphill battle.

(I should also concede that another explanation would be that people who object to the results of privatization sales are whiners, and the prices are in fact generally fair. I am dubious of this result, because a) I'm a IP lawyer, and thus market failure looms large in my picture of the world, and b) I'm a pinko.)

That was creepy

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 21:43:29 GMT

Last night, someone knocked on our door. I'd been sort of expecting this, because there's a vacant unit in the complex, and the management always puts their "RENT" sign on our shutters, so people decide to come talk to us, and then Finn has a conniption and we have to calm him down. However, I did not expect people to come knocking at ten at night.

So I open the door, and there stands a sort of portly middle-aged guy with a mustache and a just slightly lazy eye. He says "What room is Elizabeth in? 'Cause I think she's in a situation that she doesn't want to be in."

"I...don't know."

"Yeah you do."

"No, I really don't."

"Don't play games. You know. She lives in the complex back there."

Now, I think maybe I've met Elizabeth in the parking lot, but I'm not sure which of the other tenants she is, and I certainly don't know which unit she's in, and I'm not really comfortable unleashing this guy on her.

"Look, I just live here. I don't know the other tenants."

"Oh." He seems slightly taken aback. "You're not the owner?"

"No, I just rent this unit. I don't know where Elizabeth lives."

"Well, she's drunk, and this guy drove her home, and I ... followed them back here, and I waited five minutes, and he hasn't come out yet, and I just want to go check on her, and if she's OK, then I'm out of here." He pauses. "She's a friend. We work together."

...OK, so now we're out of mysterious hostile creepy and into stalker creepy.

"Sorry, I don't know which unit she's in."

This is a little bit of a lie. I suspect it was Elizabeth who came home about an hour ago and felt bad because we disciplined Finn for barking at her. She parked next to our car, and that spot belongs to unit 3. However, I have no reason to help this guy, and a general "don't be complicit in the creepy" reason not to.

"Do you mind if I go around back?"

I kinda do, but it's not really my business, and I'm not sure what I could say.

"Go ahead, if it's open."

I guess it was, because I didn't hear from him again. I feel sorry for Elizabeth, though, and vaguely complicit in the ew.

I LIVE!!!

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 04:30:28 GMT

I have nothing to do tomorrow.

Or the next day.

Or the day after that.

I haven't been this happy in three years.

OK, this has gotten a little tiresome

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 02:58:13 GMT

In a little more than twelve hours, I need to have my butt in a chair at the San Mateo Event Center, there to endure the excruciating ordeal that is the California bar. In order to preserve my vital energies and peace of mind against commuting troubles and dogs who, while cute, occasionally bark at 4 am, I got a room at a hotel in San Mateo so I can just walk over in the morning.

The subtitle of this post is "Online Travel Sites Can Lick My Fragrant Crack".

There was some sort of problem with the booking system, which made a passel of reservations this week for rooms that were not in fact vacant. Thus, I have no room. There are no rooms to be had in San Mateo. I'm not really down to walk to the event center from Foster City.

It's not the worst fate to have to drive back and forth to the exam, but the timing is not good. And I'm really a little tired of these unexpected crises. This is the second time this year that I've gotten to a hotel only to discover that my Internet booking was not to be honored.

Now I go to have some quality customer service time, where they are going to reverse every damn charge or I will personally pull out their entrails and then sue their spleen.

In other news, wish me luck.

Help with my cunning scheme!

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 04:17:02 GMT

The final hours are upon us, and the bar exam is...60 hours away. One of my concerns about this week is that lunch is likely to be dicey; several hundred dazed lawyers will be descending on the area around the San Mateo Event Center all at once, and I'm told that the bar exam can impair one's ability to successfully find and consume food. Plus we only get an hour, and I won't have the car.

My clever plan, therefore, is to find kind and charitable souls to have lunch with me each day of the exam, and (this part is key) for them to acquire said lunch before the hordes descend. I think I have Tuesday and Thursday covered, but if anyone would be willing to do me a solid and bring me food and conversation about something other than law at noon on Wednesday, that would be totally awesome.