Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezrich. I was hoping this book would be as enjoyable as Positively Fifth Street (reviewed by me here). It wasn't. In short, it's the true story of a group of MIT whiz kids who developed a card-counting system and used it to win lots of money playing blackjack. Eventually, greed divided the group, and the casinos got wise and banned the players (and may have back-roomed another). I guess Mezrich wants readers to identify and root for the math geeks, but I couldn't. They were cheaters. They tried to elide this fact with the technicality that the winning player wasn't "counting cards." But his confederate was, and would signal the count to the money man. Even if this doesn't technically violate the rules of the casinos, it's shady at best. If that weren't so, why did the MIT crew wear disguises? And, I think I'd have more sympathy for a Rain Man-style savant who takes down the house than a crew with rules and roles and ruses like something out of The Italian Job.

Overall, while it's a quick and light read, it was hard to sustain my interest over the length of the book. It would have been a stellar long magazine article, but stretched over a book's length, it gets a little repetitive, and I found myself flipping ahead looking for the next scene. I kept saying "Hit me," and Mezrich kept dealing me threes.

Eat This Book by Ryan Nerz. This was a fun book, but be careful about reading it before a trip to the grocery store -- it will make you hungry. Nerz was a writer casting about for something to do, and stumbled into the world of competitive eating. Eventually he became a judge and emcee (more like carnival barker-cum-Don King-cum-Michael Buffer) at several major eating contests. Along the way, he gives us the insider's view of the sport, introducing us to many of the biggest characters in competitive foodstuffing. Yes, there are some gruesome digestive details, but it answers all the questions you had but were afraid to ask.

Naturally, there's a competitor out there for your competitive eating literature appetite. Last month, "The Atlantic" ran an excerpt from Jason Fagone's Horsemen of the Esophagus. It's good, and seems deeper. Fagone has more in-depth profiles of fewer eaters, while Nerz tries to give us a glimpse into the lives of most of the major figures on the circuit. While Nerz deals to some degree with what competitive eating means (Ralph Nader called it one of the biggest "signs of societal decay" in America), he's largely uncritical, more of a cheerleader. What I've read of Fagone's work shows it to be more objective about the path of competitive eating's star in our cultural firmament.

Still, sometimes you need a salad, and sometimes you want a hot dog. Nerz can be a hoot to read, and his tournament-announcing voice comes through when he makes these competitors seem larger than life (even 103-pound Sonya "The Black Widow" Thomas), like any other modern-day sports hero. Eat This Book is an earnest and pleasant defense of competitive eating, although you're never sure how seriously to take it.

31 Days by Barry Werth. I liked this book for what it was, but I don't think it succeeded as intended. This is a meticulous, day-by-day (literally) examination of the period between President Nixon's resignation and President Ford's pardon of Nixon. There are pluses and minuses to this format. The biggest drawback is the lack of perspective. Werth does pretty well fleshing out the players with asides and flashbacks. But it's necessarily limited. You just can't describe a character like Al Haig -- let alone Nixon or Ford -- with brief snippets appending the narrative. It's also hard to give readers a sense of the bigger picture. People like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan pop up throughout, but despite a flimsy tacked-on epilogue (that feels like the "what happened next" titles at the end of a movie like Animal House), we really don't get a broader, deeper analysis of the impact of Ford's ascension and the Nixon pardon.

On one level, that's fine. I loved this book as pure history. I've long found Ford to be a very intriguing and underrated President, and have long been interested in the pardon decision. (I wrote a big paper on it during college. Oh, how helpful this book would have been then!) 31 Days is well-documented and backed up with several interviews with some of the principals. If you've read All the President's Men and The Final Days and Ford's memoir A Time to Heal, you'll want to read 31 Days. Okay, granted, I'm probably the only person reading this who's read Ford's book. But I think Nixon-philes will like it too. It's fascinating as an examination of the mechanics of a sudden presidential transition and the competing forced pulling at Ford in those early days, including the first battles over the ownership of Nixon's White House tapes. (By the way, the Justice Department memo advising that the tapes were Nixon's property was written by a young staff lawyer named Antonin Scalia.) Many of the details have been described before (as evidenced by the wealth of sources Werth uses), but Werth does an able job compiling and synthesizing them (along with new tidbits from his interviews) into a coherent chronological story. This book will clearly become the definitive account of the pardon.

And for me, that was enough. That was all I was really looking for, and, nerd that I am, I couldn't put it down. Unfortunately, it just doesn't quite live up to the book's subtitle, "The Crisis That Gave Us the Government We Have Today." Nixon was the crisis. His crimes and cover-up and impending impeachment were the nearly unprecedented constitutional quandary. But he turned over the tapes and resigned. He didn't barricade himself behind the National Guard and refuse to leave office. The pardon decision was vexing, and raised some novel issues, but it wasn't as if the fate of the Republic hinged on it. The best case that can be made is that a long trial of a former President would have been such a spectacle that the nation would have ground to a halt, the economy would go (deeper) in the tank, and someone like the Soviets or the Syrians would have taken advantage of the distraction. So, yes, Ford's pardon forestalled all that. And there's some argument it saved Nixon's life. (There was real concern that he was near death just after the resignation, and he was briefly hospitalized after a phlebitis flare-up.)

I think Ford deserves credit for his action, and I think a Nixon trial would have been terrible for America. But I think it's a bit of a stretch to say the pardon "gave us the government we have today." Maybe one could argue that it restored the legitimacy of the Office of the President, and Ford insiders like Rumsfeld and Cheney are applying those lessons now, or in fact are trying to make the Executive Branch as "imperial" as it was before Nixon resigned. But Werth doesn't make that argument, and to the extent he hints at it, he doesn't convince me. Again, I'm not saying he had to make that case; as I said, I think the book is exemplary as a documentary record of the pardon decision. But the subtitle leads readers to think the book is really "31 Days that Shaped the Following 31 Years," and it just isn't that book.

No, that's not some joke about how we really choose a President. The reason is that there's a bill progressing in the House of Representatives that would expand the size of Congress.

The House currently has 435 members. The bill would add one at-large seat to Utah's delegation, to account for the Beehive State's growth as reflected in the last census. Adding a seat, of course, would save some other state from losing a seat. And making the representative an at-large member would thwart gerrymanders.

The more interesting tidbit in the bill is that it would give the District of Columbia an actual vote in the House, bringing the total voting membership to 437. (Now, D.C. just has a non-voting delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton.) So, whaddaya know -- a Missouri Compromise for the 21st Century!

I predict this bill, even if it passes, won't be the prelude to D.C. statehood. One-of-437 in the House won't matter in the big picture -- the odds of a bill's fate hinging on the D.C. rep's vote are tiny. But two-of-100 in the Senate would be a huge deal, especially since those votes would be reliably Democratic for the foreseeable future. Plus, actual statehood brings up a host of constitutional, statutory, and logistical problems, and it's doubtful that the Congress would ever give complete Home Rule to a local D.C. government.

But, I do predict that this bill, if it passes, will be a precedent for future census-based shuffling. Legislators like gerrymandering too much to totally abandon the current method of swapping seats from population-losing states to population-gaining states. But at some point, it's not fair to take a seat away from one state even when another deserves a new seat. I won't get into the math, but I can envision a situation where one state gains a lot of people, but the losses are dissipated over several, and thus none of the losers clearly deserves to drop a seat.

Moreover, taking one seat from a state with, say, nine or ten Congressmen is a huge loss, proportionally, in that state's delegation. Is it fair that this state loses so much when it's still vastly more populous than the single-member states? If we can't knock them down to, um, 3/5 of a vote when they lose people, the fair alternative is to occasionally add a seat to the House. There's probably an upper limit to how big a working body could be. India's lower house has a maximum 552 members for a population of over a billion. I don't see the U.S. House of Representatives getting that big, but I don't think adding one or two seats every couple of decades would be a big deal. Of course, we all know what the original Missouri Compromise led to, so let's be careful just in case.

I was driving down Stripmall St. tonight and a thought occurred to me. It's a very heavily travelled business thoroughfare, but it's very pedestrian-unfriendly. This is no shocker. They don't build these streets for walkers. There are no sidewalks in many places, and the lights often aren't red long enough to allow safe crossings (as an 82-year-old Angeleno recently found out).

But tonight I realized that most of these streets don't even have the Walk/Don't Walk sings to inform pedestrians of the light cycles. I walk to work, so I sort of take them for granted. I guess I understand why they don't have them at some of the big suburban intersections, even if it's not that cool.

What irks me, though, is not having them when they're so useful for drivers, too. When the Don't Walk light starts blinking, you know the yellow is coming soon. I like that advanced warning. I get used to it: I know one intersection in Clerksville where the Don't Walk light blinked exactly thirteen times before the yellow.

It's usually not a big deal if I anticipate the lights based on the Walk signal downtown, where no one is going that fast. But I wondered how that would work way out Stripmall St. where the cars are flying. It's a wide, three-lanes-each-way mini-Indy. If drivers had a countdown to yellow, I think they would speed up to beat the light. Conversely, if they saw across the intersection that the light was about to change, they might jump the green. Obviously, both tactics could have disasterous results. So, all in all, I guess it's for the best that there are no Walk/Don't Walk signs out there.

Such are the thoughts that occupy my mind.

(This post's title inspired by one of the greatest instrumental songs ever, "Walk, Don't Run" by The Ventures. You can see a modern-day incarnation of the '60s surf-rock kings playing the tune here.)

What I am doing at work: I've been busy lately, but surprisingly it's not all on account of a bunch of work being heaped on me and me waiting until the last possible moment to do it. I've actually been working like a house afire recently. I can't explain it; this has never really happened to me before. I've just been in a heck of a groove. I've been knocking projects out left and right, with time to spare. And then a day or so ago, I remembered, I don't have to work this hard -- I have a blog!

I've had several employment discrimination cases in the last few months. When I took employment discrimination in law school, we spent a lot of time talking about the elements of the prima facie case, and legitimate nondiscriminatory reasons, and proving pretext. The professor even had a statistician come in to explain standard deviations for discussions of pattern-and-practice discrimination.

But we didn't spend a lot of time on the little hurdles than can wreck a discrimination case even before it gets to a merits decision. Things like internal complaints, exhaustion of remedies, simple pleading mistakes. I've used the phrase "Plaintiff has pled himself out of court" many, many times (from basic things like never saying the employer's decision was based on discrimination to admitting the employer's other grounds for firing were legitimate). Even with notice pleading, the plaintiff has to allege some facts to support a finding of discrimination. I'm not saying they're all like this, but lots and lots of pro se plaintiffs try to turn workplace personality disputes into federal cases, even though Title VII protects against only a limited set of specific acts.

I've seen some winning discrimination claims, but I've seen a lot fewer even make it past summary judgment than I ever expected in law school. I realize law school gives a very distorted image of most types of cases, but I mean I had figured that most discrimination cases were the kind of he said, she said cases where it all comes down to who the factfinder believes. But I don't see many even get to that point.

What I am doing at home: At the moment, laundry. As much as I hate that project, I'm glad I can at least do it. I came home yesterday at lunch and I had no water pressure. The water came out at a trickle, but there was no force behind it. I knew I wouldn't be able to shower or run the dishwasher or washing machine until that got fixed. So I was a little nonplussed. It turned out that the city was doing some work down the street, so it got turned back on soon, so crisis averted.

Otherwise, I've been kind of domestic. Hanging new curtains, shopping for a new chair, that kind of thing. I felt like a goon after accidentally locking myself out of my bedroom not long ago, but felt pretty manly after dismantling the door to get back in. So that's a trade-off. I've been doing some travelling to see some family lately, and that's another reason it's been quiet around here.

What I am watching: My usual tv appointment shows are winding down their seasons. As you may recall, I decided to start watching "24" season. I've hung in there, and I'll stick it out till the end of the season (three "hours" away), but not again. That show is ludicrous. I watched a really neat documentary on PBS about the fiddle classic "Orange Blossom Special." If you like the tune, check your local listings; it's worth watching. I was quite upset last weekn when I tried to record Matewan, one of my favorite movies ever, and instead the station played Mr. and Mrs. Bridge. WTF? So I'm on the lookout for Matewan now.

What I am listening to: At the moment, some Clash. I've been listening to Bob Weir's greatest hits album a lot lately. I'm not sure I need a two-disc set, though. I may make a derivative work and consolidate my favorites on to one album. I went on a music-buying binge not long ago, and I'm going to do some music reviews here soon. Some eclectic stuff.

What I am reading: I'll have some book reviews soon, too. I just finished Eat This Book, 31 Days, and Bringing Down the House, and I'm working on some new ones. Quick hits: Bringing Down the House: Don't bet the ranch on it; 31 Days: At least you don't have to read it in real time like "24"; Eat This Book: Tasty but not filling.

I got an SOS email from a friend today: "I have not heard anything from you in a while via email and the blog has been quiet for a week almost. Let me know what is going on with you."

This is why I feel bad when I don't post. People are counting on me! Okay, the short version is that I've been busy with various things, and bereft of anything interesting to blog about. But I'll have an update posted tomorrow, I think, and I'll get to work on some longer-term projects that should at least provide some content. Thanks to everyone for checking in; come back soon.