Since it will be quite awhile before Brendan’s annual basketball pools roll around again you might all enjoying entering WIRED’s Greatest Gadget of All Time contest. You pick from a wide selection of gadgets ranging from an 18th century sextant to the just released Apple iPhone in a bracket style competition. The winner of the competition will walk away with an iPhone of their own. Good luck everyone!

It’s being woefully and shamefully ignored in the halls of jurisprudential theory.

That is all. Brendan, hope everything feels better now that it’s over.

The Knoxville News-Sentinel has a nice article about Charles Susano, the judge I’ll be clerking for starting in September.

Tomorrow, all across the country (except in common-law-less Louisiana and essay-obsessed Washington), is the Multistate Bar Exam. For those who don’t know, it’s a 6-hour, 200-question multiple-choice test… so I really will be needing those pencils. :) Anyway, to my fellow NDLS ‘07 grads, good luck!!

Guy next to me: “I didn’t think that was bad at all. I was expecting much worse.”

Me: “I guess that’s why we’re taking the bar in Colorado, not California or New York.”

On news from AT&T that only 146,000 iPhones were activated during the opening sales push on the new device, Apple stock took a $8.81 hit today.

Ouch.

Then again, there’s better news in the linked article. Seems like there’s better evidence to support my prior assertion that seems to confirm that a 3G iPhone is almost here. From the article, it sounds like November.

Sweet. If the stock is currently in the crapper at $134 bucks a share, what’s it going to do when it’s in all out rampaging bull mode?

Saw this letter to the editor in the Knoxville News Sentinel today, and laughed just a bit. I guess this person was sirius..err serious.

Like millions across the world, I saw the new “Harry Potter,” movie, which was even better then I hoped, but I was also struck by a possible underlining message.

As most people know, the issue of the movie is He Who Should Not Be Named is back, and unless everyone starts working together, the world is doomed. But, though there is plenty of evidence to support the crisis, the Ministry of Magic — the government of the Magic world — is refusing to admit that there is a problem and is actually undertaking a media campaign to discredit Professor Dumbledore, Harry and others who are trying to warn the world of the coming danger.

As most people know, each book or movie starts with Harry living in London with his normal family and in a world that knows nothing of magic. The first couple of scenes in the movie take place in blazing hot heat with media reports of a record heat wave.

Is anyone else other than me seeing some similarities between the movie and our nation’s handling of the global-warming crisis? Of course, in Britain there is widespread acceptance of the incredible scope of the global-warming crisis, and both the Liberal and Conservative parties are united in their will to fight.

In the movie, there is no conspiracy — just policy leaders who can’t deal with the scope of the problem and therefore simply convince themselves that the experts are wrong. So, if President Bush is our Minister Fudge, I guess it is up to us to take up the issue.

Right now it looks like He Who Should Not Be Named is clearly winning. Let’s just hope we have enough people who join Dumbledore’s Army to save the day.

Gil Melear-Hough

Knoxville

So I understand how there is some indication of the ineffectiveness of a government bureaucracy and a “none so blind as he who wouldn’t see” motif can come through in the HP books. Certainly makes sense to me. I think that JK Rowling has even stated that there’s some metaphor on governments and bureaucracy in HP. Extending it to global warming? Saying that the government is taking on a media campaign to discredit global warming activists? The logic doesn’t seem to follow to me from what I’ve seen in the news.

Taking the same logical leaps that the writer of this letter did, I’m going to make some broad, unsupported by objective proof (since I don’t feel like researching them now to buttress my case) statements at this point. In our country now, the advocates of the position of human induced global warming tend to get much more favorable press than those that are dubious of the claims. Global warming caused by burning fossil fuels and other man-made activities is taken as absolute gospel truth. The global warming doubters are labeled in the press as Luddites who simply refuse to see what is glaringly obvious. That is hardly the case in HP.

Think about your comparisons in more detail before you try to be cutesy in writing a snippy letter to the editor or a blog post. Read what you’ve written more than once before you send it. Does it really make sense? I know that I’ve written tons of things that I’ve later decided weren’t correct. It’s after this kind of review and analysis that you can determine if there’s a true metaphor there.

I really don’t care what position you take on global warming, and I don’t think it’s particularly relevant to the point I’m trying to make here. Ultimately, we can’t shoehorn every possible pop culture reference to model our personal world view. The drafter of this particularly poor letter to the editor has tried and miserably failed in his attempt to do so.

I say “Expelliarmus” to this bad piece of writing and to the KNS for printing it. Hopefully the spell will work to exclude nonsense such as this from the paper in the future.

Thoughts on the Lohan arrest?

I can only hope brendan didnt really need pencils for the bar exam.

Get a good night’s sleep, focus in, and knock it out, Chief.

I know it’s not exactly appropriate based on content, but I always think of this Tennyson classic when thinking about the bar exam:

Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;
For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar.

I know that it’s “Crossing the Bar” and not “Passing the Bar,” but I don’t remember any good lawyery poetry on the same subject, so I’m sticking with Tennyson.

12 hours till the bar exam… Oh, the Hugh Manatee!

Ahem. Ladies and gentlemen, the polls have closed, the results are in, and the tally is: Nikki Finke 1, Brendan Loy 0.

As you may recall, I predicted last week that the box-office receipts for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix would be noticeably depressed on Saturday because all the Potter fans would be at home reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I also thought Friday’s numbers might be slightly boosted by fans going out to see the movie before buying the book at midnight. I e-mailed Finke, the L.A. Weekly columnist and Deadline Hollywood Daily blogger, about my theory, but she dismissed it: “personally i dont think book will have any effect on movie either way. different animals.” I, however, persisted: “Well, she’s a box-office expert and I’m not, but I think the Harry Potter book is going to be such a cultural phenomenon that it will have a detectable effect [on Saturday’s numbers].”

Alas, score one for the expert. The final numbers are in, and Potter 5 actually did better on Saturday than on Friday, both in raw numbers ($12.3 million vs. $10.2 million) and in percentage decrease from the previous week (-56.6% vs. -60.5%). If anything, it was Friday’s numbers that were slightly depressed, considering that Saturday and Sunday showed nearly identical decreases from the previous weekend (-56.6% on Sat, -56.4% on Sun) whereas Friday’s decrease was 4 percent more drastic (-60.5%). That could mean that some Potter fans stayed away from the theaters on Friday night because they were too busy anticipating Book 7’s release to want to watch Movie 5 (precisely the opposite of what I expected would happen on Friday), and then perhaps some of those same fans did what Trisha and Mike suggested, and went out Saturday night (after finishing the book) or Sunday to watch the movie. But that’s a real stretch, based on the small percentage deviation between Friday and Saturday/Sunday. There is certainly no need to invoke the book’s timing in order to explain the distribution of the movie’s weekend numbers. They’re perfectly within the normal range.

The bigger question is whether the book’s release dragged down the movie’s numbers not just for a particular day, but for the whole weekend. Overall, the Friday-Saturday-Sunday total was 57.8% less than the previous week’s Fri-Sat-Sun total. That’s a slightly above-normal drop-off from Weekend #1 to Weekend #2, according to what Finke told me last week, when she said “any drop off less than 50% would be considered normal.” However, when you compare Potter’s drop-off with those experienced by this summer’s other big-opening blockbusters, 57.8% doesn’t look so unusual. Shrek the Third dropped 56.4% from Weekend #1 to Weekend #2, while Pirates 3 and Spider-Man 3 each dropped an identical 61.5%. Only Transformers fit within Finke’s “normal” range, at 47.5%.

Anyway, regardless of how you do the math, making $32.5 million in the movie’s second weekend (for a domestic total of $207.8 million and counting) hardly constitutes a bomb, nor a “tank” job, as Marty predicted. So I’d say Finke is justified in writing on her blog: “There’d been speculation whether the new Harry Potter book would cut into the franchise’s movie ticket sales. Nah!“

The first DNC-sanctioned debate airs from The Citadel live at 7-9pm EDT on CNN. I’ll be watching.

In less than 18 hours, I’ll be taking the bar exam. So needless to say, the cramming continues apace. But I figured I’d take a quick study break and show you the beautiful view that Becky, Kristy and V got yesterday when they drove up into the mountains near Denver:

Here’s a shot of V and Becky, looking out at the stunning vista:

And, speaking of stunning sights, check out how blue Becky’s eyes look in this picture that I took this morning:

She’s officially 17 weeks pregnant as of today, by the way. Little Avocado Loy is now “about the size of a large onion.” :)

Okay, back to my last few hours of cramming for the essays…

The Notre Dame-Michigan football series will apparently take at least two years off when the current contract expires in 2011.

Lame.