“If you like Pina Coladas, and getting caught in the rain.
If you’re not into yoga, if you have half-a-brain.”
Bay Area radio struggles to have decent music. I tend to cycle through the few stations that may have something of interest. A recent addition to the dial focuses on 60s. 70s, and 80s. As a competitor [...]

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John Morton Blum died yesterday.
Like most of the great Yale historians of the latter 20th century, he was known to students mostly by his last name:  Blum.  Morgan.  Spence.  Kagan.  They weren’t just masterful scholars; they were masterful storytellers, and masterful teachers.
Thirty years after I sat through a semester of lectures on the Progressive Era, [...]

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OK, at some level I understand that this is a serious lawsuit. As reported by the AP, Hooters has accused a former executive of taking confidential information to his new employer, rival Twin Peaks restaurants.
Now, I’d never heard of Twin Peaks restaurants before (do I smell some kind of trademark or dilution claim out [...]

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While Bruce, in his last post, is lampooning Microsoft I started to think about more “annoying Microsoft” trivia.  Where, oh where, did the paperclip icon go??

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Run program, HAL. HAL, run program. Hello HAL do you read me?
Affirmative, Dave, I read you.
Run program.
I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.
What’s the problem, HAL?
Dave, the publisher of that program cannot be verified. You should only run software from publishers you trust.
I installed that program myself, HAL.
This mission is too important for [...]

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We have a theme this week:  Cities and their images.  For earlier posts, see this (San Francisco and Los Angeles), and this (Pittsburgh today), and this (Dallas and Austin).
Let’s add Boston.
As a handful of you know, the Boston Bruins ice hockey team has been competing in the National Hockey League playoffs this Spring.  (As I write, [...]

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I heard Train’s “Save Me San Francisco” the other day, and the song made me think of Randy Newman’s “I Love LA.”  Different cities, different tunes, each capturing something cool about a city. Are there other (relatively) recent songs that do the same for other places?

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I promise to give up after this one, but here’s a link to an SNL skit I recently discovered starring Hugh Laurie (TV’s “Dr House”) as a ghosthunter.
Hugh Laurie as a Ghosthunter

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This isn’t a very serious contribution to the blog, but it’s Friday and I just couldn’t resist this short video showing the perils of pre-taping lectures at home…

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Quick, which service do you think has the most strict password requirements I’ve ever encountered? My bank? Mutual funds? My law firm network login? Credit cards? Paypal? Email providers? Configuring my home server for remote access? Electronics sites like newegg.com and amazon.com? Westlaw and Lexis?
No. Not any of those. There is a service that, judging [...]

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Hilarious!

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“Source Code,” starring Jake Gyllenhaal:
is just a gussied-up (and longer—hmmm) version of “Cause and Effect.” The answer is 3.

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This story in the NYT Magazine about Braddock, PA and its “revitalization” front man, John Fetterman, should be read in conjunction with this David Pogue column about page numbers in e-books. How can the future deal with the past?

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Like all Jeopardy! fans, I’m looking forward to next week’s broadcast showdown between Watson, the IBM computer designed to be a Jeopardy! killer app, and two all-time Jeopardy! kingpins, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.
Here’s a NYTimes feature on a Nova TV special on Watson.  That piece concludes with the tantalizing question:  Does Watson’s lack of [...]

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One year in 2 minutes from Eirik Solheim on Vimeo.

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More fun with the Google Ngram viewer: “Innovation” and “creativity”
 

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American law professors are converging on San Francisco later this week for the annual AALS conference.  I won’t be there.  But as a Bay Area native, long-time resident, and frequent visitor I have a couple of tips for those who will be.  And those tips have to do with … food.
Given the ongoing brouhaha over [...]

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For those of you who follow Crazy Frog on YouTube, here’s the seasonal Last Christmas video…

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So in my continuing quest to complete the Harry Potter series of books before watching the new movie, I’m plugging through Book 7 now.  I started wondering, though, what would happen if a real high school decided to name its houses after those in Harry Potter ie Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw and Slytherin?  Would there be [...]

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Soccer’s peculiar systems of justice continue to work out their problems on the world stage.  The Italians, masters of faking injury on the ground, are being upstaged by the Spanish, who appear to have invented new forms of unsportsmanlike conduct while standing — and while touching neither man nor ball.  Is a soccer crime being [...]

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