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Trojans 43, Huskies 23, final. Hurrah! Meanwhile Northern Illinois is losing late. In other news, BUFFALO WON!!!
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Categories: College Football, Mobile Blog (Moblog)
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Woohoo! It’s 43-17 Trojans!
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Categories: Mobile Blog (Moblog), Baseball
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It’s USC 29, Washington 17 near the end of the third quarter. At left in this photo is my classmate and fellow Trojan Hall alum Brandon Guererro.
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Categories: College Football, Mobile Blog (Moblog)
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It’s 20-14 USC at halftime. I’m still en route to the bar, thanks to absurdly long subway and bus delays… :(
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Categories: College Football, Mobile Blog (Moblog)
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Uh-oh: Washington has jumped out to an early 7-0 lead over USC.
The game isn’t televised locally, so I think I’m going to head over to the Ship of Fools bar on the Upper East Side, where the USC alumni club meets every weekend to watch the game on satellite TV. That will probably mean fewer updates.
Fight back and fight on, Trojans!
UPDATE: USC has rallied to make it 14-7, and they’re threatening to score again, as the first quarter winds down. Yay! I’m leaving for the bar now.
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Categories: College Football
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It looks like I picked the wrong weekend to hang out in Evanston, Illinois! Perennial Big 10 cellar-dweller Northwestern — where Adrienne goes to grad school — is stunning #20 Wisconsin, 17-6 with less than with less than five minutes to go in the game. Go Wildcats!
Meanwhile, another big upset could be brewing in Athens, Georgia, where unranked, 3-4 Alabama-Birmingham (a.k.a. UAB) is beating #4 Georgia, 13-10 in the third. Wait! News flash! It’s 13-13. Hang in there, UAB! A Georgia loss would be huge for USC’s Sugar Bowl hopes.
One more game I’m following closely: in East Hartford, UConn is trailing Akron in a close game. It’s 31-28 through three quarters.
UPDATES: Northwestern won!!! UConn has taken a 35-34 lead. Georgia is now leading, 16-13, but UAB has the ball. Notre Dame has mounted a huge comeback and now leads Boston College, 25-24, with three minutes left… but BC has the ball, and is already in field-goal territory.
MORE UPDATES: Boston College got the field goal, and Notre Dame’s final drive fell a second or two short of a chance for a field goal of their own. So BC wins, 27-25. And it looks like Georgia will survive, too. Meanwhile UConn is driving, down by two with under two minutes to go.
SECOND-TO-LAST UPDATE (PROBABLY): Georgia wins, 16-13. Still, that’s not a very impressive victory. If USC dominates Washington, methinks we could overtake Georgia for #4 in the AP poll — which would, in turn, help us in the BCS.
UConn is still driving with 48 seconds left… just converted a huge 4th-and-10 to stay alive…
OKAY, I LIED: So this is the second-to-last update on this post. UConn is down by two, with five seconds left, with a 28-year field-goal attempt forthcoming. Hold your breath…
FINAL UPDATE (REALLY): YAY!!! UConn’s kicker — Matt Nuzie, a redshirt freshman from Trumbull, Connecticut — had missed a potential go-ahead field goal a few minutes earlier, but he redeemed himself with a perfect kick as time expired. UConn wins, 38-37!!! And what a fantastic drive by Dan Orlovsky & co. to set up the winning field goal! Way to go, Huskies!
And now… GO TROJANS! (Future football updates will be covered in a new post, above.)
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Categories: College Football
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For USC football fans, today’s top priority obviously is to root for the Trojans, ranked #7 in the BCS, against Pac-10 rival Washington. That game, in Seattle, begins at 3:30 PM Eastern time. Beat the Huskies! (Hi Dave. :)
But there are other important games for USC fans today, too, all over the nation. Here is a summary, with boldface text marking the teams that loyal Trojans should root for:
Root against USC’s BCS rivals
Indiana vs. #6 Ohio State, underway
UAB vs. #4 Georgia, underway
Wake Forest vs. #5 Florida State, 3:30 PM
Colorado vs. #1 Oklahoma, 7:00 PM
(Maybe there’s not too much hope in any of those games, but hey, you never know. We’re already 1-0 in these sorts of games this week, thanks to West Virginia’s Wednesday win over Virginia Tech.)
Root for USC’s non-conference opponents
Notre Dame vs. Boston College, underway
BYU vs. UNLV, 7:00 PM
Auburn vs. LSU, 7:45 PM
Hawaii vs. UTEP, 12:05 AM
(Why? Because these outcomes would help boost our all-important strength of schedule.)
Root for outcomes that are just generally good for humanity
Buffalo vs. Ohio, underway (because every losing streak has to end sometime, and this is probably Buffalo’s best chance for a win this season)
Northern Illinois vs. Bowling Green, 4:00 PM (because the BCS system needs to be undermined by an undefeated mid-major team)
Marlins vs. Yankees, 7:35 PM (because the Yankees are the Evil Empire and Derek Jeter is an annoying pretty boy)
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Categories: College Football
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I don’t know what, exactly, it says about my ideology — or about my possible future in the legal arena, for that matter — that I think Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal article by Philip Howard, “When Judges Won’t Judge,” is bloody brilliant. But whatever the implications, that’s what I think.
Howard’s central point is that judges have allowed America’s litigious culture to spin out of control by refusing to, well, judge anything. He says they act instead as purely neutral referees, having “lost sight of the idea that lawsuits concern not only the particular parties to the dispute, but everyone in society.”
He makes several points of which the Gnostic Watch would surely approve, arguing that penalizing risk using the “standard of hindsight” is surefire strategy for a very boring world. “By making people potentially liable for their negligence, law provides incentives for reasonable conduct. But the converse is also true. Allow lawsuits against reasonable behavior, and pretty soon people no longer feel free to act reasonably.”
Since the WSJ doesn’t make its archives publicly available, I’ll have to excerpt generously. (Boldface added.)
The American judiciary abdicated its role as gatekeeper in the 1960s, and started letting anyone sue for almost anything. Embarrassed by their complacency on racial and gender discrimination, the white males on the bench embraced a new philosophy of judging — instead of a paternalistic model (most famously symbolized by Justice Potter Stewart’s line “I know it when I see it”), judges would be merely referees in a neutral process. Instead of neutrality, however, they left a vacuum. At first gradually, and now at a blinding pace, that vacuum has been filled with new theories and escalating claims by those who see justice as an entrepreneurial activity.
Judges today consider civil justice as a private dispute, rather than a use of state power. They can’t imagine on what basis they should have the authority to limit claims. Just let the two litigants slug it out in front of the jury. As one judge suggested to me, “Who am I to judge?”
But there’s a victim that judges have forgotten. The reason judges must take the responsibility of deciding whether claims are excessive, as a recent decision from the House of Lords in England reminds us, is not because of fairness between the litigants, but because lawsuits affect all of society.
The case before the House of Lords, the equivalent of our Supreme Court, could have been picked from any court in America. On a hot day in the Cheshire region of England, an 18-year-old named John Tomlinson went for a swim in the lake at Brereton Heath Country Park. Racing into the water from the beach, he dived too sharply and broke his neck on the sandy bottom. He was paralyzed for life.
Mr. Tomlinson sued the Cheshire County Council for not doing more to protect against accidents. The Council, he discovered, knew about the risks — there were three or four near-drownings every year. “No Swimming” signs had been posted, and widely ignored, for over a decade. The popularity of the park — more than 160,000 visitors every year — made effective policing almost impossible. Fearful of liability, the Cheshire Council had decided to close off the lake by dumping mud on the beaches and planting reeds.
But before the work was done, Mr. Tomlinson had his accident. The Cheshire Council should have acted sooner, as his lawyer argued, to prevent “luring people into a death trap” and to protect against a “siren song strong enough to turn stout men’s hearts.” The lower courts accepted this argument because the County obviously knew the danger.
The Law Lords took the appeal, and, this past August, ordered the case to be dismissed. Whether a claim should be allowed, they held, hinged not just on whether an accident is foreseeable but “also the social value of the activity which gave rise to the risk.”
Permitting Mr. Tomlinson’s claim, the Lords held, means that hundreds of thousands of people would not be able to enjoy the park: “There is an important question of freedom at stake. It is unjust that the harmless recreation of responsible parents and children with buckets and spades on the beaches should be prohibited in order to comply with what is thought to be a legal duty.”
The County’s ineffective efforts to prevent swimming, instead of establishing negligence, the Lords held, demonstrated how a misguided conception of justice hurts the public. “Does the law require that all trees be cut down,” one Lord asked, “because some youths may climb them and fall?” “Of course there is some risk of accidents . . . but that is no reason for imposing a gray and dull safety regime on everyone.”
This is the missing link in American justice. Judges have lost sight of the idea that lawsuits concern not only the particular parties to the dispute, but everyone in society. The mere possibility of a lawsuit changes people’s behavior. That’s why judges must act as gatekeepers, deciding who can sue for what.
Law is supposed to uphold social norms of right conduct. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said that this was “the first requirement of a sound body of law.” By making people potentially liable for their negligence, law provides incentives for reasonable conduct. But the converse is also true. Allow lawsuits against reasonable behavior, and pretty soon people no longer feel free to act reasonably.
Welcome to America. Mud and reeds have been dumped on natural and necessary human activities throughout American society. Playgrounds have been stripped of all physically active equipment, like monkey bars, with the effect, among others, of contributing to a crisis in childhood obesity. Health-care costs are skyrocketing, in part because paranoid doctors are in the habit of ordering unnecessary tests to provide a possible defense in case there’s a lawsuit. Because of fear of legal claims, teachers can’t put their arm around a crying child.
Lawsuits are easy. Whenever anything goes wrong, it’s easy to come up with a theory of what might have been done differently. There could have been a warning. There could have been more supervision of the playground. The doctor could have ordered an MRI for the headache, just to make sure. Exposing people to liability against the standard of hindsight, however, creates not a safer world but one in which people simply avoid socially useful activities. Obstetricians quit. Seesaws disappear. Businesses stop giving references. The City of New York did, in fact, cut the limbs off trees near playgrounds so children would not be tempted to climb them.
All life’s activities involve risk, and therefore the inevitability of accident and disagreement. The role of law is not to provide a consolation forum for those who have felt the misfortune of risk, but to support the freedom of all citizens to make reasonable choices, including taking reasonable risks. That requires judges, whenever someone makes a claim, to balance the seriousness of the risk against the social utility of the claim. Those rulings are the building blocks of our common law system, which, the English Law Lords recently reminded us, “is just the formal statement of the results and conclusions of the common sense of mankind.”
Hmm… maybe this means I should be a civil defense lawyer. :)
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Categories: The Law & The Courts
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Around the world, BrendanLoy.com readers are preparing gala celebrations and massive street parties to greet the “Third Bloggennium” as the blog-post counter ticks upward toward 2000.
Technically, according to experts, the Third Bloggennium does not begin until post number 2001. However, according to everyone else, those experts are dorks and nobody cares what they say.
Adding to the anticipation surrounding the Bloggennial celebrations is the threat of the GOP2K bug, a computer glitch that, if unchecked, would rewrite every BrendanLoy.com post into a conservative diatribe. For instance, an innocent post about solar flares might be altered to read, “Those flaming liberals really have a flair for being unpatriotic sons of b–ches.”
But technicians say the GOP2K bug is under control, and will not have any major or lasting effects. Still, it has inspired some threats of terrorism and violence. Prominent liberal blog-commenter Dane Lindberg has reportedly chained himself to the blog archives and threatened to blow himself up if the “Republicanization” of the blog is not stopped, though Lindberg this evening dismissed that report as a “Fox News fabrication.”
For his part, BrendanLoy.com webmaster Brendan Loy said he is unconcerned about ideological computer bugs and possible blog-related violence — but there is one thing that worries him. “It would suck if the 2,000th post were a CNN Breaking News alert,” he said. “I’d better get cracking before they beat me to the punch.”
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Categories: Website News
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I just sent the Albuquerque Journal three photos of me posing with Lord of the Rings paraphernalia, as requested. I doubt they’ll use this one, since it doesn’t show my face clearly, but I rather like it:
Note the contents of my left hand: the Nazgul have the Ring!!! OH NO!!!
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Categories: Lord of the Rings
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I just received, moments ago, a phone call from SpaceWeatherPhone.com indicating that the “Planetary K-index” — a measure of geomagnetic activity — has reached a level of 7 (out of 9). That means a “strong” geomagnetic storm is in progress, and if it continues at its current intensity, Northern lights are possible tonight in the Northeast, the Upper Midwest, and Canada (see map).
UPDATE: Here is SpaceWeather.com’s latest summary of the geomagnetic situation: “A coronal mass ejection (CME) swept past Earth at approximately 1500 UT (8:00 a.m. PDT) on Oct. 24th and triggered a strong (Kp=7) geomagnetic storm. This ongoing storm will probably subside before nightfall over North America. Even so, skywatchers should remain alert for auroras because another CME is coming. It could reach Earth tonight or tomorrow and trigger a new round of storms.”
CNN’s top story declares: “Satellites, pagers, cell phones and electrical grids could be affected this afternoon by a powerful stream of energized gas and particles from the sun. The coronal mass ejection, or CME, is expected to reach Earth about 3 p.m. EDT and its effects could last 12 to 18 hours, according to space weather forecasters. The solar blast erupted from a cluster of sunspots on the surface of the sun.”
UPDATE: This could potentially be the worst solar disruption since the “perfect space storm” of September 1 and 2, 1859, according to some reports.
ABC News explains:
The long cables that made up a telegraph system, or that are part of our existing telephone systems and power grids, are conductors that are highly susceptible to such fields. During one intense geomagnetic storm in 1859, telegraph operators in New England disconnected the battery that powered telegraph transmission between Boston and Portland, Maine, and operated strictly using the electricity generated by that evening’s aurora for nearly two hours.
Such currents can be problematic for sensitive electric grids because they can cause the voltage to vary between grounding points on a system, leading to power surges that can wreak havoc, overloading transformers and overwhelming voltage regulators. This is what happened to Hydro-Québec during a widespread blackout in 1989 that left 6 million Canadians in the dark.
Researchers believe that portions of the North American power grid that happen to be situated in more northerly latitudes (which is closer to the ring where aurorae are most likely to occur) and atop geological formations that consist largely of igneous rock (which has high electrical resistivity) are especially vulnerable. That would include most of eastern Canada, a good deal of New England, and a big swatch of the Pacific Northwest.
ANOTHER UPDATE: MSNBC says the first expected solar blast actually hit at 11:30 AM, and wasn’t too bad. “This is not a strong enough storm” to knock out power grids, solar forecaster Bill Murtagh said.
I’m not sure whether there’s really another blast expected at 3:00 PM, as CNN says, or if CNN is simply behind the curve regarding this morning’s impact. SpaceWeather.com says another coronal mass ejection is “en route to Earth, due to arrive later today or tomorrow.” That’s not nearly as specific as CNN’s estimate of 3:00 PM, so I don’t know quite what to believe.
Stay tuned, as they say.
There are two Jupiter-sized sunspots roaming across the Sun’s surface, solar wind gusts and coronal mass ejections are buffeting the Earth’s magnetosphere, and cell phones could stop working because of all the activity. (Thanks to my Aunt Patty for the link.) As always, SpaceWeather.com has the scoop.
When Roger Clemens earned his 300th win and his 5,000th strikeout in the same game, that was pretty cool. But BrendanLoy.com can top that. :) Today, this website could well surpass 2,000 posts and 1,500 comments. Stay tuned!
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Categories: Website News
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Hooray for the Fish! The Yankees are one game away from losing the World Series!
Could an ignominious loss to the Marlins be enough to spur George Steinbrenner to fire Joe Torre — thus giving Boston a chance to hire him? Hopefully we’ll find out… Go Florida!
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Categories: Baseball
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