I caught up on the last few weeks' worth of Chuck episodes the other night, and had a few thoughts that started out as an email and ended up as this post. Obviously, beware of spoilers.

First, I agree with the EW PopWatch that Chuck's relationship with his sister Ellie is a little odd, at least in that they're supposed to be brother and sister. I like them, but they don't seem siblingy. I understand that they established that she basically took care of him, but I thought the whole plotline about their mother leaving them was piling it on a little thick.

Also, eventually the sister and Chuck's best friend Morgan are going to have to learn about his big secret, because (a) it allows for more plot development, and (b) they risk making him look like a jerk if he constantly lies to them and blows them off. I get that the cover-up is supposed to be the cause of the comic tension, but I would almost prefer wacky madcap hijinks like when Alex P. Keaton accidentally invited two girls to the prom and had to run back and forth all night to try to pay attention to both. (Yes, in this scenario, Morgan is Skippy and Ellie is Mallory and Captain Awesome is Nick and Casey and Sarah are...um...Steve and Elyse?)

And, I noticed how the boss at the Buy More said that he wouldn't fire Morgan because he's the only Hispanic they have there, and he didn't want a lawsuit. I was like, Wait, he's Hispanic? His last name in real life is Gomez, but it wasn't really obvious to me. Maybe it's the beard. Either way, they must live in the white part of L.A.

Finally, this show is crazy-violent for 8:00 eastern! Not that it really bothers me, but I'm just surprised. I would have expected something like the old A-Team model where people got blown up or shot but it didn't really hurt them. But there are a lot of actual dying people on this show. I'm not sure if that will help or hurt in the long term in building an audience.

I think Chuck is the only new show I'm watching with any regularity. I've taped all the episodes of Reaper (based on the buzz) but haven't watched any yet. I've caught a few episodes of Fox's Back to You. It's a very traditional sitcom. It's almost retro, actually. So it's predictable and bland overall. But Kelsey Grammer, Patricia Heaton, and Fred Willard are good enough that it's palatable for a half hour if nothing else is on.

The only other new show I've paid much attention to is the CW's Aliens in America, even though I'm probably a little older than its target audience. I'm not the first to compare it favorably to The Wonder Years. Not only does the main character do a "That's when I learned an important lesson..." voice-over, but it also shares similar themes of the horrors of high school and the weirdness of the family dynamic (although unlike the Arnold household, it's played for laughs and not tragedy and pathos).

Aliens is about a geeky kid in Wisconsin whose mother signs up for a foreign exchange program, hoping to get a cool instant-friend for her son and boost his popularity. Instead, they get a devout Muslim kid from Pakistan. The predictable wacky misunderstandings and cross-cultural insights ensue, but it's subtler and smarter than it could be. The parents are especially well-written, and the show manages that tricky job of developing the peripheral characters with just a few lines or a look. It's not as good as NBC's stellar single-camera Thursday sitcoms, and I never got into How I Met Your Mother (I hear it's good), but it's much better than Back to You, and definitely worth checking out.

The reason I don't ask for a free review copy of Prof. Daniel Solove's new book The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet is that I want to keep my identity private. This crazy modern world.

This is a follow-up to my previous post about a Second Circuit opinion that was issued a few days ago, then withdrawn, and then the next day re-released with some redactions. Uber-blogger Howard Bashman got a copy of the original opinion and posted it, even though the Clerk of the Second Circuit asked him to take it down. (I originally thought he did take it down only to later put it back up, but I seem to be wrong on that; my earlier unsuccessful attempt to load the opinion from his site may have been due to server issues or a malfunction on my end.)

There's been plenty of coverage of this little matter. See Howard here and Wait A Second! here and the Co-Op here and the Legal Blog Watch here and the BLT here and the LawBeat here and Patterico here and some solid coverage of the opinion itself at Psychsound here. I think I found all those links via Howard, which shows how much I count on his blog, even though I'm a tad critical of him this time.

I understand Bashman's reasons for not taking down the opinion. First, he says, "No one from the Second Circuit has attempted to explain to me the so-called security concerns" behind withdrawing the opinion, and Howard analyzes the opinion and finds any such concerns unavailing in any event. Second, to quote Patterico's analogy, the genie was already out of the bottle anyway, and it wouldn't do any good for Bashman to pretend it wasn't. I have a couple of responses.

First, the apparent reason for the Second Circuit's withdrawal was that sealed material made its way into the publicly-released opinion. Patterico suggests that the material was sealed -- and omitted from the re-released opinion -- to save the government from embarrassment. (The case dealt with an FBI agent's coerced confession.) Likewise, Howard doesn't see any "security concerns" in the mistakenly-unredacted material. But is that their call? The material was sealed for some reason -- maybe in the district court, and maybe by mutual consent of the parties. Even if it shouldn't have been under seal, I think attorneys have a responsibility to respect a court order sealing portions of the record.

Second, sure the genie was already out, but did Howard need to keep rubbing the bottle? As Bashman noted, and I readily concede, the Second Circuit wasn't in any position to retrieve all the copies of the opinion that were already out there. And yes, that had damaged, probably "irreparably," whatever security concerns existed. But by leaving the opinion up after the Clerk expressed those concerns to Howard, he essentially said he wasn't going to take the court's word for it and take whatever admittedly minimal steps he could to minimize the damage. If hundreds or even thousands of people read the opinion before all this blew up, I'm sure many times more read the unredacted opinion afterwards, and Howard could have done a great deal to reduce that number.

I understand that all this is complicated by Howard's role as a journalist, discussed in more detail at some of those links above. I don't dispute that characterization, and I would assume that under Bartnicki v. Vopper, he has a First Amendment right to post the unredacted opinion. But even journalists who are not also lawyers should respect some limits. I'm sure that in the five-plus years Bashman has been running his blog, he's had occasion to become privy to other court secrets. Has no judge's law clerk out there ever slipped him advance notice of the outcome of a case before it was released? I'm certain Howard wouldn't publish something like that.

Let's even leave aside any concerns about the reliability of a tip like that, and assume a situation where Howard gets an insider tip and absolutely trusts that his source is correct. If he wouldn't publish that (and I feel confident saying he wouldn't), why is that categorically different than this situation? I'm willing to be persuaded, but I haven't been yet. Is it enough that the opinion was publicly available for even a brief time? What if the mistakenly-unredacted material was something like a party's social security number, or the full name of a sexual abuse victim who should have been referred to by initials? Is it still up to Howard to decide, on his own, that the "security concerns" present in those cases are sufficient for him to respect the court's seal? Like I said, I'm willing to be convinced that this case is different (for some reason other than the fact that it's the government getting embarrassed here). But I haven't yet heard any articulation of why this case is so different from some other one where the lawyer/journalist would respect the court's order sealing material in the record.

UPDATE: Howard collects some more coverage here, and see also AL&P here and here and Patterico's updated post, complete with Instapundit link.