The company that owns the Knoxville News-Sentinel, the leading daily newspaper in town, has bought out the local alt-weekly, Metro Pulse. Here’s the Sentinel article about it; here’s the Pulse article. (Hat tip: Jay.) Says Glenn Reynolds: “It’s probably a good business move for them, but it makes Knoxville even more of a one-newspaper town.”

Of course, everyone is solemnly promising to preserve the Pulse’s editorial independence, and most of the people saying that probably even mean it. But regardless, this is a terrible trend in journalism, and it’s happening everywhere. It happened not so long ago in Hartford, when the Hartford Courant bought the Hartford Advocate. Big national developments like Rubert Murdoch’s bid for the WSJ get all the headlines, but it’s the consolidation of ownership and lack of competition in local markets that upsets me most, because local newspapers, TV and radio are the predominant non-Internet news sources for the average person, and the realities of the modern market have robbed them — particularly the newspapers — of the journalistic vitality they once had.

There is just nothing good, from a journalistic perspective, about this sort of consolidation. It sucks, but that’s the direction the industry’s moving in, and I don’t see it stopping anytime soon. It’s actually one reason (of many) that I decided not to go into journalism. In so many ways, idealistic journalists in this country — and there’s no good reason to go into journalism if you’re not an idealist about it — are fighting an uphill battle against forces they can’t control: ownership consolidation, lack of local competition, increasingly unreasonable profit-margin demands (which, in concert with the lack of local competition, creates totally perverse incentives and priorities), unfriendly legal developments, sensationalism and bias (and the perception thereof), the general dearth of fellow quality journalists, the overall decline of the industry as the Internet grows, hostility to the profession from all corners, etc. etc. Why work crazy hours for crappy pay in service of an unattainable ideal that nobody really cares if you achieve? Hence my going to law school. At least as a lawyer, you get paid well to work ridiculous hours and have everybody hate you. :)

When Becky and I moved out of the South Bend apartment, we threw out Becky’s old stereo, whose speakers were pretty much shot (and whose tape-deck doors had been half-broken for years). So, we’re in the market for a new stereo. Thing is, I’m having a heck of a time finding one that suits our needs. Here are my requirements:

• Under ~$80, the cheaper the better
• Digital AM/FM radio tuner
• Auxiliary input
• Sounds decent, ideally with a bass boost of some kind
• A reasonably functional remote control

That’s it! That’s all I care about it! Is that so much to ask? These seem to me like pretty basic requirements for a stereo, even an inexpensive one. I’ve been to tons of local stores — Circuit City, Best Buy, Target, Wal-Mart, etc. — and they’ve got plenty of stereos for under $80. Yet every one I investigate seems to have a fatal flaw, whether it’s a crappy analog tuner or a lack of an auxiliary input. One even lacked a volume control on its remote! WTF? And then when I search on the Interwebs and find a stereo that seems to meet my needs, it invariably isn’t available in stores, which means I would have to buy online and pay for shipping, thus pushing the total cost out of my price range. Harumph.

Anyway, I’m just wondering if anybody has any recommendations. In addition to the requirements listed above, a tape deck would be nice, but is not essential. A halfway-decent equalizer would also be nice, but since the primary use of our stereo will be to stream music from our laptops via AirTunes, we can use the iTunes equalizer if need be. Also, I assume any stereo is going to have a CD player, though I don’t particularly care one way or the other; we have our computers for ripping CDs and playing them via iTunes.

As for the “sounds decent” requirement, I’m not some sort of major audiophile… if I were, I’d be willing to spend more money on a stereo! I just want something that doesn’t sound crappy. One thing to keep in mind is that Becky doesn’t tend to like her music or TV to be too loud, so it isn’t essential that our stereo be capable of booming sound. It just has to sound nice when we’re listening to music at normal volumes.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

P.S. If you think it’s simply impossible to suggest a “decent” stereo for under $80, then give me the least expensive answer you can think of. The budget’s not totally carved in stone, but at the same time, resources are limited (must… save… money… for… diapers), and I don’t want to pay extra for something that’s really more than we need.

The Volokh Conspiracy’s Orin Kerr looks at how Justices Roberts and Alito differ from Justices Scalia and Thomas.

Relatedly, Scalia attacks the Roberts majority’s “faux judicial restraint.”

These are the sorts of questions I end up Googling these days. :)

This is of course the Strange Case of the Purportedly Missing Pants. The plaintiff, himself an administrative-law judge, sought 54 million smackers for the alleged deprivation of his trousers. Evidently the Judge judging his Suit wasn’t much impressed by his Briefs. Here’s her 23-page opinion rejecting his threadbare arguments. But the vindicated defendants still face Legal fees size Large.

High above the kitchen is more like it, actually:

That would be one of Butter’s favorite spots in the new apartment: on top of the kitchen cabinets. (She gets there with a three-step jump: up onto the counter, then up onto the top of the fridge, and finally up onto the cabinet-top.) We’ve been trying to keep the cats off the kitchen surfaces, but it’s hard to catch her jumping up there, and nearly impossible to get her down once she succeeds; even I can barely reach that high, and she can easily squirm out of my reach if she wants to (which she generally does, since my reach means I’m trying to get her down from her favorite spot!).

Oh well, if you can’t fight ‘em, join ‘em, or in this case, take pictures of ‘em and admire their cuteness. Aww.

P.S. Just now, as I was cutting up a watermelon on the kitchen counter, Butter walked up to me and started meowing loudly and vociferously. Becky walked into the kitchen and carried Butter into the living room, trying to calm her down. But when the thunder from a passing storm rumbled again, Butter bolted back to the kitchen and resumed meowing at me. At that point, Becky realized what was wrong: Butter wanted to jump up to her “safe spot” on top of the kitchen cabinets to hide from the storm, but she couldn’t get there because I was blocking the kitchen counter (her jumping-off point). So I picked her up and plopped her in her spot. She immediately calmed down, and has been hanging out there ever since. Heh.

Okay, can we at least agree that these Newsweek poll results are at least a cause for concern (if not, necessarily, signifying that us Americans are dumb as dirt, per se)? I mean honestly, only 10% know who the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court is (note, Newsweek does not know what his title is either)… rather scary.

…if only by a 5-4 margin:

The Supreme Court loosened restrictions Monday on corporate- and union-funded television ads that air close to elections, weakening a key provision of a landmark campaign finance law.

The court, split 5-4, upheld an appeals court ruling that an anti-abortion group should have been allowed to air ads during the final two months before the 2004 elections. The law unreasonably limits speech and violates the group’s First Amendment rights, the court said.

Gee, ya think? In the words of Chief Justice Roberts: “Discussion of issues cannot be suppressed simply because the issues also may be pertinent in an election. Where the First Amendment is implicated, the tie goes to the speaker, not the censor.”

Although I’d say the court didn’t go far enough — I’d have voted with the Kennedy-Scalia-Thomas trio, which “would have overruled the court’s 2003 decision upholding the constitutionality” of McCain-Feingold’s issue-ads ban, rather than with Roberts and Alito, who distinguished this case by saying the ads in question “are not the equivalent of explicit campaign ads and are not covered by the court’s 2003 decision.” (Quoting the AP, not the justices directly.)

Meanwhile, in other Supreme Court news, if you’re across the street from a public school, then the First Amendment does not live.

P.S. According to Orin Kerr, two of the five justices in the public-school case “joined the majority opinion on the understanding that the holding was really very very narrow. According to Alito, the case is really just about speech that promotes illegal drug use in schools without a plausible claim to making an argument relating to a social or political issue (whether about the war on drugs or something else).”

On the flip side, Justice Thomas, if left to his own devices, would have held that “public school students don’t have First Amendment rights at school at all.” (Quoting Kerr, not Thomas.) So, I agree with Thomas on one of today’s two big cases, and completely disagree with him on the other.

P.P.S. This analysis suggests the opinion may not be as “narrow” as Roberts and Alito would like.

Weekday-only readers of the Irish Trojan’s Blog should be sure to go back and read my Saturday post announcing Becky’s and my big news: We’re pregnant!

More specifically, Becky is officially 13 weeks pregnant, as of today. According to BabyCenter.com, our little guy (or girl) is currently about three inches tall — “roughly the size of a jumbo shrimp” — and weighs about an ounce. However:

Despite the small proportions, there’s a fully formed baby inside [Becky’s] womb now. Much more proportional than it was a few weeks ago, his head is now only about a third the size of his body. His tiny, unique fingerprints are already in place. His kidneys and urinary tract are functional, and he’s starting to urinate out the amniotic fluid he’s been swallowing.

Aww. The little tyke is learning how to pee! ;)

There’s more here, including: “Little hairs, known as lanugo, will start to cover their body this week, as their sense of taste and smell are further refined.” (The use of the pronoun “their” in this instance is just a grammatically improper substitute for “his/her,” not a reference to twins or triplets — he says, shuddering. Heh.)

Anyway, our baby has grown an awful lot in the last few weeks, and has started looking a lot less like an alien (or fish, or frog) and more like a human. :) Check out this comparison of fetal development at 5, 8 and 13 weeks:

For some ultrasound images, go here or here.

Oh, and hey, check this out:

Pretty cool. It updates automatically as the weeks go by. I might have to put one up on top of the homepage or something.

P.S. Incidentally, for those who aren’t familiar with the way these things work (I certainly wasn’t, until quite recently), the due date and the number of weeks aren’t specifically based on the, ahem, conception date — they’re based on the start date of the mother’s last menstrual cycle before pregnancy. This leads to the somewhat odd result that the baby hasn’t necessarily even been conceived yet during the first and second “weeks of pregnancy,” which doesn’t make much sense to me, but what do I know?