BobHarris.com - Mooooot Court

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-- The New York Times Book Review

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"A surprisingly touching memoir"

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-- Joss Whedon, creator, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

"I haven't seen Jeopardy! since I was a kid, and yet I was charmed and amused by Bob Harris's fascinating and surprisingly suspenseful book. Through sheer force of personality, he takes this brainy TV show and makes it funny and easy to relate to."

-- Ira Glass, creator and host, This American Life

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Books I'm Getting

Who Hates Whom:
Well-Armed Fanatics, Intractable Conflicts,
and Various Things Blowing Up —
A Woefully Incomplete Guide™

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— Boston Globe

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— New York Observer

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— Ken Jennings, author of Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs

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— John Hodgman, author of The Areas of My Expertise
and correspondent for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

"All three [presidential] candidates should read all three of these [recommended] books, but McCain gets first crack at Bob Harris's "Who Hates Whom“... a lighthearted overview of the insurrections and civil wars in the world today."

— Steven Pinker, author of The Stuff of Thought, in the New York Times Book Review

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Thursday, 12 June 2008

Hard to make this any more marvelous -- the judge in a big L.A. porn case turns out to have his own unusual peccadillos:

In an interview Tuesday with The Times, Kozinski acknowledged posting sexual content on his website. Among the images on the site were a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows and a video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal. He defended some of the adult content as "funny" but conceded that other postings were inappropriate.

[snip]

Kozinski is one of the nation's highest-ranking judges and has been mentioned as a possible candidate for the U.S. Supreme Court. He was named chief judge of the 9th Circuit last year and is considered a judicial conservative on most issues. He was appointed to the federal bench by President Reagan in 1985.

Mentioned for the Supreme Court? By whom -- the United Dairy Farmers?

UPDATE: Then again, dude might be getting treated unfairly. Or not.

Seems to swing on whether he was responsible for material on his own publicly accessible server. Which may be a bit like the online equivalent of being responsible for what people can see through your window if they look in from the street. The argument now seems to be over whether the weirdness was deep inside, and you had to squint, or pressed up close enough to the window that anyone would assume it to be visible. So even a judge caught with cow porn while doing an obscenity case is still in an ethical gray area. Holy crap. That's almost more fun to get your head around about than the story itself.