You must see Malkovich. Better yet, Malkovich this site.

...we have two authors on this site. Esta is so much better than I am at finding the right news to counterbalance the news about Doug while still honoring him: our friend Mary's expecting.

The New York Times finally ran the profile on Doug Ketcham, my friend from Monroe Hill at Virginia who was in the World Trade Center when it collapsed. As should surprise no one, Tin Man wrote a much more evocative eulogy for him two months ago.... It still doesn't seem real. I had lost touch with him after graduating and didn't even know he was working in New York. Seeing it in the Times just adds to the unreality.

A more appropriate time to be re-reading The Waste Land than I had realized. From "The Burial of the Dead" (which is ironic since Doug is still officially "missing"):

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.

Man, this just about says it all: "Earlier this year he was a middleware programmer...Today he was pumping gas to pay the rent."

Interesting issue. When I paste text from an email, it comes in with line breaks -- which are ignored in the HTML and end up running words together. Got to do something about that--maybe a new scripting challenge. After I finish my exam today, of course.

Good morning! I have to get some work done this week, so I'm making a pact with you, my reader. I will only write about hideous abuses of power and civil liberties once a day, so I can do it once and then ignore it, and I'll start tagging those hideous abuses with a special icon, so you can ignore them if you want to. How's that?

Speaking of civil liberties, my lawyer friend Greg is somewhat fixated on that side of the problem right now. He's a born blogger, but has never set up one of these sites for himself--that could have something to do with the fact that he's actually employed ;). He writes,

At The Nation , you can read about a detainee -- since that's what we're calling them -- who died while being held. Well, so much for our first plaintiff ...

There's a great description of the synergies between the new detention, eavesdropping and tribunal rules at Slate, courtesy of Slate magazine's very own lawyer babe [and wickedly funny writer] Dahlia Lithwick.

Finally, at Findlaw, a link to the most inspiring legal opinion I read during law school -- and it just happens to be about a man detained on Ellis Island until he could return home, oh, and don't mind that he had no country to return to. Read the dissent by Justices Jackson and Frankfurter; search for the clause "Frankfurter joins, dissenting" to find the starting point. The parallels with current times should roll out with the very first sentence.

Even though the detainee lost, it's cases like that one that remind me of the worth of studying law.