Blogroll

Weekend Edition: 11-27

Blog Post of the Week Year

Nonbookish Linkage

Bookish Linkage

  • Of this year’s NYT 100 Notable Books, I’ve read two, am at some point in two, and have four more on my tablet

Woke up this mornin’
With nothin’ on my mind
Nothin’s all I’m a lookin’ for
Nothin’s all I’ll find

“Welcome to Goose Creek,” Goose Creek Symphony, Eponymous Album

Weekend Edition: 11-20

Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubez

QAnon Droppings

  • Don’t worry, RFK Jr. will be here

But What About the Templars?

  • The QAnon Shaman can use his prison term continuing to connect Freemasons, the Illuminati, the Skull & Bones society, MK-Ultra, alien reptilians, an “artificial monolith” on Mars’s moon Phobos, fluoridation, British royals, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeffrey Dahmer, and a “spirit cooking” event with “semen, breast milk, and blood” on the menu

Nonbookish Linkage

Bookish Linkage


[Birds] are also the only creatures to regularly defecate on us. …. Humans generally prefer to be the ones shitting on others.

Erin Sheehy, “Call of Nature, Facility, Issue 2 (2021)

Weekend Edition: 11-13

Blog Headline of the Week

Legal Advice of the Week

Nonbookish Linkage

  • Although not reference material for the legal advice, here’s the early history of human excreta

Bookish Linkage


Ninety percent of all problems are caused by people being assholes.

Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

Loco Lawsuits: Who taught you to drive a getaway car?

The best-laid plans — well, you should know the rest.

On June 17, 2007, Michael Espinosa, Angel Vertiz, and Kenneth Kirkwood, Jr. decided it would be a good idea to burgle a house in Riverside, Calif. They left the house in a car driven by Kirkwood. Police spotted them and, as happens in California, a car chase followed. It chase ended less than a mile from the site of the burglary when Kirkwood’s car collided with three other vehicles, rear-ending one stopped at an intersection.

Kirkwood tried to escape on foot but all three men were arrested. Kirkwood and Vertiz were convicted of burglary, while Espinoza was convicted of attempted burglary. So much for the escapade, right? No. Eleven months after the burglary, Espinosa and Vertif sued Kirkwood for allegedly serious injuries they claimed were due to Kirkwood’s negligent driving.

The pair brought the suit despite a 1996 law prohibiting someone convicted of a felony from recovering damages for injuries caused by another person’s negligence if the injuries were “caused by the … commission of any felony, or immediate flight therefrom.” Unsurprisingly, the trial court said the statute required dismissing the lawsuit.

Espinosa and Vertif (or their lawyers) were undeterred. They appealed, somehow contending there was an issue whether their participation in the burglary or the flight from it caused their injuries.  Their reasoning isn’t clear. Apparently, they thought the burglary itself didn’t cause their injuries, that they weren’t injured immediately upon leaving the house, or perhaps that the law didn’t apply because they weren’t driving.

Regardless, the appeals court gave their arguments short shrift. “If they had refused to escape with the defendant in the defendant’s car, they would not have been involved in the collision which resulted in their injuries,” the court wrote. “Their own conduct of committing the crime and entering defendant’s vehicle to facilitate their immediate flight therefrom proximately caused their injuries and damages.”

While left unsaid, it would seem that crashing less than a mile from the scene of a crime would be considered negligent getaway-car driving as a matter of law.


Let down the curtain, the farce is played.

Last words of François Rabelais in Peter Motteux’s
“The Life of Dr. François Rabelais”

Weekend Edition: 11-6

Nonbookish Linkage

Bookish Linkage


There are different rules for reading, for thinking, and for talking. Writing blends all three of them.

Mason Cooley, City Aphorisms, Twelfth Selection (1993)