Category Archives: Personal

I’m Back

I’ve been away for a couple of weeks, but now I’m back–and even over jet lag.

I used to announce when and where I was going before I left, but a commentator here once chastised me for inviting burglars to the house. Despite my doubt that any readers of this blog are potential burglars or that burglars clever enough to do searches on blogs looking for ‘away’ type posts would bother burglarizing me, I’ve been shy about announcing everyone-in-the family departures ever since. Watch what you say in the comments – I’m paying attention.

Caroline and I had planned to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary by going to Paris, but life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans, and just before we would have gone, her father, who had suffered a long illness, died. There was a lovely service in a (partly) 13th-century edifice.

We will figure out some way to celebrate our whatever-you-call-it in due course. (She still got her present.)

Posted in Personal | Comments Off on I’m Back

True Enough to Hurt

Posted in Personal | Comments Off on True Enough to Hurt

Mentioned in Dispatches

Today had more than its usually dollop of ‘net-fame, in that I was mentioned by Robert Paul Wolff at The Philospher’s Stone and by Cory Doctorow at boingboing.

As for me, I spent a good chunk of the day mastering Expresso and Scholastica and sending off my new article to law reviews. Maybe law review editors read boingboing?

Posted in Personal | Comments Off on Mentioned in Dispatches

Speaking at American University on Friday

I’ll be presenting my latest draft paper, now entitled Regulating Mass Surveillance as Privacy Pollution: Learning from Environmental Impact Statements at a faculty workshop at the American University Washington College of Law at lunch time on Friday. So I’m off to DC early Thursday morning.

This will likely be my last chance to learn what I may need to do to punch up the paper before I send it out to law reviews, which I plan to do very soon. I’ll post a link to a draft of it here once I’ve incorporated the next round of comments.

As far as sending papers to law reviews is concerned, I’ve actually been very spoiled: almost all my work for the past decade has been book chapters or conference papers, so I have not had to send them out en mass to law reviews the way most law professors do most of the time. In fact, the last time I sent a paper out to law reviews seems to be … in 2003. (Has it really been that long?) And in that case, I was even luckier, as that paper was picked up by the Harvard Law Review.

I really think this is the best paper I’ve written in many years; that of course doesn’t necessarily tell one much about where it will end up. It isn’t short (23,000 words and counting), which is unfashionable. And I think it has two ideas, which could make it unwieldy. The political feasibility of what I propose is certainly open to question. But I think it might be somewhat original.

After this, there’s another paper in the pipeline on a very different topic. It’s good to think that I’m over the productivity hiccup caused by my aortic dissection almost exactly four years ago. Coincidentally, I had been scheduled to fly to DC on Feb. 12, 2010, the day I collapsed, but the conference I was planning to attend was snowed out. Had I gone, my aorta likely would have burst in the air, or I would have likely not gone to a hospital quickly enough had it happened in DC. In either scenario, I’d be dead as once it bursts you have less than an hour to be treated or it’s curtains.

So I guess I’m hoping it is the 2003 history, and not the 2010 history, that repeats itself.

Posted in Personal, Talks & Conferences | 2 Comments

Today’s Procrastinator

Take the The New York Times’ interactive regional dialect quiz.

Not surprisingly I confused the heck out of it. After all I have non-native speaking (but very very fluent) parents, married a Brit, grew up in NY & (mostly) DC, then spent seven years in New England, intermingled with five years in the UK and a year in Chicago and another in DC, followed by 20+ years in South Florida. It’s no wonder I talk a bit funny.

It did find some New England in my diction, and also did identify one apparently distinctive word I use as coming from Arlington, VA (which is pretty close to DC), so that’s something.

Posted in Personal | 2 Comments

Happy Thanksgiving 2013

Happy low-sodium, low-sugar, low-cholesterol, low alcohol, measured Vitamin K, Thanksgiving!

(Turkey, at least, isn’t on any of the lists of proscribed foods. Cranberries, alas, are.)

Posted in Personal | 1 Comment