I like to listen to audio books when I'm on a trip. Some books work better than others as audio books, though. I don't like listening to books that are hard to follow, because I can't give them quite the concentration while driving as I would give while reading. Simon Winchester's Krakatoa fit into this category. Too much detail, too many Dutch names, a little too dry. Books with too many characters or little plot twists you'll forget later aren't fun to listen to, either. That's why I generally prefer nonfiction audio books, but I have enjoyed some fiction an cd. Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons, despite its faults, was very enjoyable as read by Dylan Baker. I doubt I would have taken the time to read it in print, and I probably would have wasted a lot of time lingering over certain passages (either because I liked them or because I found them jarring or unrealistic), but Baker breezed me right through to the end. Life of Pi by Yann Martel was another good audio book -- a compelling story that one can follow while driving. Still, the king of audio books for me is David Sedaris, although it can be risky to laugh that hard while on the road. Regardless of genre, I would say I prefer something light, as opposed to something drearily ponderous or something that will cause me to get lost in thought and miss exits and such.

So far I have only listened to unabridged books. I guess I feel afraid that I'll be missing something crucial, and it also seems like cutting corners, like substituing Cliffs Notes or "Reader's Digest" for the whole book. (The exception is books like Sedaris's -- essay collections that might not include all the essays; I'm ok with that because the chosen pieces are still unedited.) I also probably think that I'll eventually get around to reading the complete book, but that never seems to happen. So now I'm thinking that I may listen to abridged books, on the theory that some is better than none. After all, as the back of the box always says, the abridgement has been approved by the author.

Anyway, I will be travelling out of town for the Veteran's Day holiday weekend, and I would appreciate your tips for books to take along. Please suggest (a) good books that would work well as audio books; or (b) your thoughts on abridged vs. unabridged books. Thanks for your help!

It's that time again. Today's "Buy, Sell, or Hold" topics have been provided by E. McPan, since Fitz is too cool for school.

DVDs of older movies that supposedly have "extras" but not really

Hold. Somebody sounds a little bitter that the original "Milton" cartoons weren't included in the new Office Space dvd. The catch here is that we're in a transition time, because it's not like you can go back in time and do "making-of" docs on old movies, but they'll all have that in the future. Plus, there's always Netflix if you want to save money and just see the movie, if that's all the dvd offers. And moreover, pretty soon they'll be some new technology requiring us all to buy smaller discs or something. Anyway, this is only a "hold" because there might be some movies that are worth owning, even without extras. I'm sure some people feel this way about, say, Disney movies or "The Complete Veggie Tales." Otherwise, sell.

Splenda, which, according to "Newsweek" is kicking the ass of other artificial sweeteners, but is also 600 times sweeter than sugar (not in the online version, it's in the print graphic)

Buy. Long-time readers know I love my sweet tea. I drink a lot of it, and apparently I can write a lot about it, too. I finally decided to try making my sweet tea with Splenda. I've got to say I like it. I don't think I like it as much as my good old-fashioned real sugar sweet tea, but it's certainly fine. And my homemade Splenda tea is still better than most places' sugar tea. I can tell a difference, but it's not bad. The Splenda by itself does taste a lot sweeter than sugar, but mixed in with the tea, it doesn't seem that much sweeter, and there's no aftertaste. It's certainly good enough to be my regular drink and save me the calories. It's not like I'll never make tea with sugar again, but I think I've pretty much switched to Splenda. I'm as surprised as you are.

Trunk or treating

Sell. I was going to say "buy," because as I noted in my "Boo Humbug!" post, Halloween is just ridiculous nowadays anyway. And this phenomenon seems like just the thing for jittery parents too scared to let their kids out of the church parking lot. But now I see McPan's post about someone who found a cocaine baggy in a kid's treat bag after some trunk or treating. This leads me to say "sell" on trunk or treating, and my new conclusion: The only people who distribute goods out of their car trunks are criminals or musicians without record deals. Whoever it was that gave cocaine to kids on Halloween has to fall in one of these categories, and the type of parents who would go trunk or treating don't want anything to do with either one.

Fitz's absence from BTQ

Hold. "Dust in the wind....You're my boy, Blue!" I think he'll back eventually, but I can't say when. This is more like one of those long-term investments like that savings bond your grandmother gives you when you're ten and will be worth $25 when you're 30. I'm just glad you didn't ask my investment advice on BTQ without Fitz!

Rocky 6

Sell. It'll be a Happy Thanksgiving for everyone with a turkey this big.

I was thinking this week about the reasons that Fourth Circuit Judge Michael Luttig wasn't nominated for the Supreme Court. Among other possible reasons, I started to wonder if one reason was that he's blonde. Compared to some of the other potential nominees, Luttig looks really young. I wonder if the White House worried (among other concerns, and only as a trifle) that Luttig would (a) look so young he would really drive home the point that many Supreme Court justices serve for a long, long time, and/or (b) look so young he might seem unprepared. To be sure, I don't think Luttig's looks have anything to do with his qualifications, and I'm not saying I expect to see him in short pants, but in a world ruled by judicial super-hotties, it's hard to say looks aren't a factor at all.

Anyway, it all got me thinking about how there are so few blondes in positions of power. Senator Hillary Clinton is probably the most prominent incumbent blonde. I hit up poli-savant Centinel for other suggestions. He came up with a half-dozen or so other senators, with Mary Landrieu being the most well-known. I found seven or eight governors. Among prominent judges, there's Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and Judge Edith Jones, who come to mind because they've been in the news so much lately. Speaking of those in the news, I thought Scooter Libby's greying hair seemed blonde, but I think it was actually light brown. It's like discerning the difference between partly sunny and mostly cloudy. But I'm calling Karl Rove a blonde.

Centinel also reminded me of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and even though she can look like a brunette or even a redhead depending on the photo, I'm going with blonde because artists seem generally to depict her that way. The British Empire seems okay with blonde leaders, considering former Canadian Prime Ministers Jean Chretien and Kim Campbell. And another friend I consulted on this post made sure I mentioned the new James Bond.

Anyway, after a lot of thought, I realized that Jimmy Carter is probably the most powerful blonde ever elected to anything. I don't have anything against blondes, but I'm not sure that's who you'd want as your standard-bearer. It's beyond my brainpower to suggest a reason why blondes don't ascend to more positions of power. (Well, aside from overall scarcity -- about 7% -- in the general population, and they still may be underrepresented in politics.) The best I can come up with is that blondes really do have more fun, and politics is boring. Either that, or blondes are attractive, and politics is just show business for ugly people.

I'm confused about some of the talking points I'm hearing in regard to the nomination of Third Circuit Judge Samuel Alito to be an Associate Justice on the Supreme Court. This has nothing to do with the merits of the nomination; it's just something that perplexes me. Among the reasons I've heard for supporting Alito's nomination is that he was confirmed by unanimous consent for both of his previous positions: U.S. Attorney for New Jersey and Third Circuit Judge. The argument that follows from this is that, to put it bluntly, Alito can't be too crazy if the Senate confirmed him so easily twice before. This argument is especially targeted at Democratic Senators who were around back then. Note: I am 100% convinced the Democrats would do this as well with, say, any Clinton I judges who were nominated as justices by Clinton II (and probably did it for Justices Ginsburg and Breyer). But since the Republicans are the ones doing it now, I'll talk about them.

I suppose the goal of this argument is to paint the Democrats who didn't oppose Alito then but do now as hypocrites or flip-floppers or spineless or whatever. But think about the obvious strategy in response to this argument. Doesn't it make the opposition party more likely to fight lower court -- and even U.S. Attorney -- nominations as bitterly as it would contest Supreme Court nominations? If they know their votes for these lower offices will be held against them in the future, isn't it in their interest not to go along? At a minimum, it would deprive the nominee's supporters of that "unanimous consent" talking point; at best (for them), it derails the lower-office nomination entirely. See, e.g. Estrada, Miguel.

But the Republicans try to have it both ways. On the one hand, they argue that the Democrats shouldn't filibuster lower court nominees like Estrada because it's unprecedented and, after all, it's only an appeals court judgeship. But the Democrats had to know -- and now have proof -- that even an iota of support on their part would be used as a club against them in the event an Estrada were nominated to the Supreme Court. Essentially, what the Republicans are saying is that since a nominee might wind up on the Supreme Court one day, the first confirmation vote is the only one that matters, because after that, you'll be estopped from ever arguing he can't be confirmed again.

Oh, I suppose the Republicans might be willing to concede that the Democrats would be justified in voting against a nominee if the Democrats pointed to some dramatic, unforeseen change since the original confirmation. But they're probably going to say that the supposed change isn't substantial enough. I haven't seen Republicans who are willing to concede that the standards for evaluating U.S. Attorney nominees might possibly be different than those for evaluating Supreme Court nominees. I wish I had sense enough to use that logic at Duke: "But I was admitted to the university as an undergraduate, so you really have no basis for not admitting me to the law school!"

My point is just that if the Republicans are going to treat every vote in favor of a U.S. Attorney or circuit judge nominee as a de facto vote in favor of a later Supreme Court nomination, the Democrats have every incentive to treat the earlier votes in the same way that they would treat Supreme Court votes. (As I said above, this strategic theory works regardless of which party is doing it.) My guess is that the Republicans wouldn't like to start that precedent. And besides, it's not like dropping that argument would leave them bereft of others; Alito clearly has a lot going for him in addition to particular votes from decades ago.

*I almost went with "Have your cake and Aliting it, too," but decided that pun would be so groan-inducing that you might not read the post.

The folks at PrawfsBlawg and Will at Crescat have been discussing the ethics of editing blog posts. I thought I would pitch in my one-fiftieth of a dollar. I feel like I have pretty much carte blanche to edit for typos or grammar, at any time. In practice, I won't go to too much trouble to fix something after it's a few days old. If blog posts are like a snapshot of whatever's on my mind that day, well, some days I blinked, and I'm willing to live with that.

Substantive changes are a little trickier. Usually the first thing I do after posting something is to re-read it. Sometimes it looks different on the page, and I see something in a different way and want to clarify or restate it. More often, in re-reading something, I think of another point I want to make in support of my position, and tag that on. So, in that sense, I guess I don't really consider my posts "fixed" for a little while immediately after I post them. I don't want to overstate their fluidity, though. Probably 90% of them never change after I first hit "publish," and probably 90% of the rest of them are only edited for spelling or something minor, and 90% of those within ten minutes of first posting. I'll admit that I edited the previous post a few hours after it went up. I changed "lemon juice" to "club soda" because it sounded funnier, and is probably more accurate.

If I feel like I need to make a substantive change to a post, I will usually add an update. But, I will probably only do that if the post is, say, less than a week old. It hasn't been my practice to go revisit every old post of mine every time something happens that might change what I wrote months ago. Also, given the nature of the interaction between me and my reader(s), I will do some revisiting in the comments. There have been a couple of occasions where I've completely deleted a post. One was a childish outburst, and I'm still sorry it hurt the feelings of someone who read it. (I've apologized publicly and privately.) There were a few others that I took down after some thought, and my risk-averse nature, led me to worry they might be a little too close to work issues. I didn't mention those deletions because drawing that attention to them would have defeated the purpose of the deleting.

Perhaps some readers would find this unethical, which I guess assumes there is an ethical norm for the blogosphere. That's more than I can tackle here and now, but ultimately I think it comes down to expectations. My assumption is that readers expect posts to stay up and available and in essentially their original form. (I'm also assuming they're fine with typo changes.) But let's compare something like newspapers. If I find an old newspaper article on microfiche, I wouldn't know if the paper had run a correction weeks later, most likely.

But I think people see that as a negative quality, and expect the interconnectedness of the web will alleviate that. It's impossible to reprint the old paper to correct the article. But it's fairly easy to add an update to a blog post. I guess I'm willing to internalize that cost, but not the cost of keeping up with everything that could possibly impact any of my former posts. I've been doing this less than two years, and I've already forgotten many most of my posts. But if you see something way back in the archives that you think needs correcting, bring it to my attention, and I'll address it. I hope that gets me in line with the blogosphere collective ethical code.

Browsing the entertainement headlines, I saw this story about Martha Stewart, and how she originally thought she would be "firing" Donald Trump from the "Apprentice" series, instead of just getting her own spinoff.

Well, if that wasn't evidence enough of how powerful Martha thinks she is, check out this quote she gave when asked about her lesson from her prison ordeal: "I have learned that I really cannot be destroyed."

Translation: "You should worship me like a God." I suppose now she'll change the name of her company to Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Omniscient, Omnipotent.

I've never been a huge fan of Halloween. I honestly can't remember anything I dressed up as when I was a kid. I know I did the trick-or-treating thing a few times, but I probably did generic costumes -- and knowing my Mom, they were hidden under a jacket anyway. I know I wasn't still doing it at that age when you're really a little too old to be doing it; I quit early. I guess I never got into it partly because we didn't have a great neighborhood for trick-or-treating. I remember one lady who gave out dimes and another who handed out Bible tracts. (I was looking for pictures of a particularly crappy candy I always used to get -- I'll never remember the name -- and found this: Who would name a candy company Horlick's?! Sounds like trick and treat!) The other reason I think Halloween wasn't ever a big deal was that it wasn't as if that day was the only day I could get any candy. I ate a lot of candy as a kid. Actually, I ate a lot of candy well into young-adulthood, until I gave it up for Lent one year and pretty much broke my habit. I still eat some now and again, but I don't subsist on it like I used to.

Anyway, I never enjoyed participating in Halloween from either end. I'll admit that there were years when not only would I not answer the door, but I would turn out the lights to avoid trick-or-treaters. I have gone so far as to cover my windows so I didn't have to turn off as many lights. I never wanted to act enthusiatic about a bunch of kids interrupting me and taking my food. I suppose I've mellowed a bit. I would at least be willing to answer the door and hand out candy to kids now. However, for the last few years I've lived in a relatively urban setting that would not be very appropriate for trick-or-treating. (You're more likely to find Horlick's.)

I did dress up for our law school Halloween parties. My first year I went as, well, a hillbilly of sorts. I grew up in the sticks, so I felt okay about it. I had camo and my "Wild, Wonderful West Virginia" three-quarter sleeve ringer t-shirt, and a banjo I borrowed. I was probably somewhat reminiscent of this guy from Deliverance. Second year I went as a convict, complete with orange jumpsuit (Wal-Mart hunting supplies with a jail name stenciled on the back) and shackles. Oh, and a cheesy mustache so I looked extra-skeevy. I left enough slack in the shackles (rigged together from leather dog collars and chains) that I could drink, but not enough that I could walk normally. I had to do the inmate shuffle, kind of skipping along as the chains rattled. I was really glad no police cars happened to drive by while I was walking to the party. Our third year, Fitz and I went as Jay and Silent Bob. I had to grow a full beard for that, and then shave it the next day for an interview. (The best story from that party is that the police did drive by while a classmate was drunkenly sitting on the curb. You do not want to get arrested while dressed as a princess. That story would be a lot funnier if the classmate were a guy, but you take what you can get. Actually, the best story of that party might have been the prize for best costume: a wheelbarrow full of porn. Fitz and I still maintain we were robbed.)

So I'm willing to put some effort into Halloween, for the right reasons. But it's hard to get into Halloween when it gets more and more ridiculous all the time. The stores have a problem because they try to make their Halloween displays as big as their Christmas displays, while at the same time already bringing out their Christmas junk. Pretty soon, we'll be seeing pumpkins next to Fourth of July fireworks. Plus, the stuff the stores have is worse every year. Target was selling a "Magnum, P.I." costume consisting of a Hawaiian shirt, a lei, a fake mustache, and a baseball cap. For $40! Forty damn dollars! If you're not man enough to grow your own mustache for a Halloween costume, you deserve to get ripped off that badly! Also, the candy-grab is getting so over-managed by parents, like everything else in their kids' lives, that it's not as fun as the days when we just roamed around the neighborhood unsupervised till all hours.

Anyway, I was trying to come up with a name for the general sentiment I have towards Halloween. The very talented E. McPan came up with "Boo Humbug!" which was perfect. It turns out not to be an original concept, but she's the first person I heard it from -- which is funny because she's about the least Boo Humbug-ish person I've ever seen. So while her ilk are busy Monday night promoting tooth decay and Satanism, I'll be pretending I don't hear the doorbell.

I'm no expert in architecture, but I'm interested in it. I'm especially interested in the planning aspect of it -- fitting a building's form and function into the surrounding community. I love wasting time looking at buildings on web sites like this one. And I'm a big fan of the National Building Museum. Courthouses are a great example of a type of building where a lot of competing considerations grapple during the design process. Naturally, I was quite pleased to see this "Legal Affairs" article about courthouse architecture.

There's a lot of neat information in there about the history of federal courthouse architecture. Around the turn of the last century, there was a boom in courthouse construction, and several of those buildings were architectural marvels. The key figure in this building spree was chief federal architect James Knox Taylor. Perhaps the best example of his influence is the Italian Renaissance-style Ninth Circuit courthouse in San Francisco. During the Depression, a slew of new courthouses were built by the Works Progress Administration, and many of them were in a neo-classical style then quite prominent in Washington. (The Supreme Court building, completed in 1935, is a good example.) In the 1960s, the trend was for multi-purpose federal buildings, and fewer stand-alone, grand courthouses.

We're now in a new boom cycle of federal courthouse construction, but one full of debates over what makes a good courthouse. The article discusses some of the various problems. We have to be concerned about security, but we also want courthouses to be open and accessible to the public -- courthouses aren't prisons, after all. Their design should inspire us to think about all our justice system stands for, but should also be appropriate within their surroundings. But, courthouses can't just be showpieces; they have to be functional as well.

I posted here about the security issue specifically, but I also included a link to the General Services Administration's design guide for federal courthouses. It's telling that the document is about 400 pages long. Any time so much bureaucracy is involved, it's hard to avoid some compromise of architectural vision. But it's good to know that the GSA does care about asthetics, to the point of giving out design awards. (I think the award-winners are showcased at the Building Museum, another reason to make it worth a visit!) Okay, so some of the winners aren't perfect. See page 6 of the document linked here for some pictures of the O'Connor Courthouse in Phoenix. All that glass in the desert heat has been somewhat uncomfortable for the building's inhabitants, I gather -- see question 18 here. So that's an example of a lovely building that doesn't fit well where it is. (Another award-winner is the federal courthouse in Las Vegas, which has a pretty neat design, and might be more suitable to the local weather.)

Anyway, the "Legal Affairs" article highlights some recent buildings and how their architects have dealt with these issues. Highly recommended for the courthouse buff!