Fort Totten Weekly -

Upcoming

Bruce Godfrey — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 16:32:18 -0400

So, here's what you can expect to see around here.

1) All of my blog activity hereout will be under a new umbrella. That umbrella is "Good Catch Media." You will notice common branding, logos and navigation among several blogs, old and new. There will be a new "Good Catch" blog at http://www.goodcatchmedia.com (reserved but not fully up yet) dealing with several topics of general interest. "Crab Media" under my management no longer exists; it's all "Good Catch Media" from here on out.

2) Everything I am doing is going back to Blogger.com. As I had mentioned in another post, I had seriously explored going from Drupal (my current blogging tool) to Movable Type. I have successfully installed Movable Type onto my server and opened a couple of "practice test blogs" with it. Movable Type is a better fit for me than is Drupal, but upon sober reflection I prefer Blogger.com to each. Drupal and Movable Type are more sophisticated than Blogger, but in a way that sophistication is a drawback, for now. I do not have the time or inclination to learn how to create great new blog designs in either platform in their complex PHP driven-structures, whereas I know how to code templates efficiently in HTML and CSS in Blogger.com's format. I have done it before; I feel comfortable with Blogger.com. Most of the advantages of Drupal and Movable Type (save one: the ability conveniently to produce non-blog "pages" within the platform) are available within Blogger.com's new platform. So Blogger.com it is.

3) There will be a blog on crablaw.com that deals predominantly with Maryland legal, political, transportation and economic issues. It will be called "BW&A Blog", for "Baltimore, Washington & Annapolis", the name of the former rail line that connected those three cities. Rail motifs will predominate in the design of that blog, which will not be a big surprise to people who know me well personally or who have read my prior posts on rail transit. It will take the prior content of Crablaw Maryland Weekly from within Blogger and will constitute the "resurrection" of that blog's prior "essence," with formatting adjustments and a change in name. This Drupal-based "Weekly" blog at www.crablaw.com/weekly will stay up for some period perhaps until the first of the year, primarily as an archive. Thereafter I will take it all down, as I don't believe I have made any earth-shattering posts in Drupal without which the fabric of the universe will be fundamentally rent.

4) The Crabopedia resource in crablaw.com will be exterminated and reconstructed, with the goal of keeping Chinese spammers out and interested Marylanders in. I have tried handling the PHP codes for this project but have not gotten it done "right" yet. I remain grateful to Thomas Hardman of Aspen Hill for his kind assistance in this regard, and I hope I can get it done right in the near future.

5) Most of the content of responsivedocuments.com will be reformatted into Blogger.com format. Its pages of updated jobs listings will undergo important reformatting, once my vendor Feed Informer gets its "act together" after its recent sale (a sore point among its many customers for some months now.) Its Drupal content will be removed and a new 404 page will direct readers accordingly. Responsivedocuments.com will hold content on the practice of law generally except as it specifically affects Maryland; Maryland legal content may at time cross-post on both blogs.

6) A new blog will focus on the topic of religion. That blog will be titled "Palimpsest", a reference to the ancient tool of wrapping a piece of leather around a cylinder as an encoded/disguised medium for writing messages. I find this tool, and its propensity to retain old messages while delivering theoretically new ones, to be an apt tool for describing some aspects of religion. While I am non-religious, I believe that people should know their culture very well and there can be no doubt that religious precepts, practices, dogmas, traditions and artifacts are central to an understanding of Western/U.S. culture and, indeed, practically all cultures. I enjoy the topic and look forward to frequent posting on Palimpsest.

7) In sum, there will be four blogs:
Good Catch (on goodcatchmedia.com, pending)
WB&A Blog (on crablaw.com)
Responsive Documents (on responsivedocuments.com)
Palimpsest Blog (on a goodcatchmedia.com subdomain, pending)

and one additional resource:

Crabopedia (at crabpedia.crablaw.com)

8) I am considering additional blogs and have reserved a couple other domains, but, frankly, the above domains, upgrades and blogs will be enough work for quite a while.

9) If I am successful, each of these blogs (not counting Crabopedia) will look gorgeous or at least gorgeous according to my aesthetic (which may not be universally shared.) I want the blogs to look jaw-droppingly good, addictive. I want people to come just to look at them, forget about reading them. This is a high standard, and I am not a graphics genius by any stretch whatsoever. But I want a "crack-addict" response to their aesthetics, sort of the opposite philosophy behind Duncan Black's Eschaton blog, noted primarily for its baby blue background and its total lack of other design. Getting this result is a major goal of this whole conversion to Blogger.com, along with Blogger.com's superior archiving and labeling functions. (In Drupal, I cannot get an archive or label list to appear on my site; in Blogger.com it's a snap.)

So, anyway, that's the big news over here at ~~Crab~~ Good Catch Media. Thanks for your patience.

Crab Media, Denouement

Bruce Godfrey — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 16:21:57 -0400

This is a very long post, even when broken down into two posts. Don't feel bad if you don't want to read to the end.

Over the last four years, blogging has meant a great deal to me as a hobby, as a chance to meet great, smart people who think very differently from myself and as an occasional personal outlet during difficult times in my life. Since the original Crablaw Maryland Weekly post on the Thursday after President Bush's victory over John Kerry on Election Day 2004, there have been almost 2,000 posts under the crablaw.com top-level domain or various subdomains. It is astonishing how quickly four years can pass.

In my activities elsewhere in the blogosphere, I am often identified with the name "crablaw". It is the closest thing that I have to an "internet identity" other than my own name. While I believe the domain name was a pretty good one for a Maryland attorney, a lot of my interests in blogging have gone beyond the specifics of Maryland law or even Maryland public policy and politics. In the interim, the Maryland-specific political blogosphere has grown and matured, led by liberal community blog Free State Politics and Red Maryland, the Free State's most prominent conservative blog and many others. During the last four years, this blog (along with its predecessors in snarkitude) has focused less and less on the specifics of Maryland and more generally on national issues.

This shift in blog focus has followed my unusual career path taking my attorney work from the suburbs of Baltimore to within 5 blocks of the White House for most of the last three years, and from mostly Maryland-specific work for Maryland clients with faces or, at least, local business licenses to clients with national and occasionally international issues. Due to confidentiality concerns, I cannot talk even generally about most of my work in DC, whereas a lot of my work in Maryland occurred on the public record with documents that I personally drafted or appearances made on the record. Furthermore, in my Maryland work, I was the "commander" of my cases in a way that I have not been in DC; my own sense of discretion about how to talk about the law professionally in Maryland is a lot more secure and confident than my sense about my large-scale litigation processing work. In short, I not only have had less to talk about re: Maryland law, I have had less to talk about professionally for multiple reasons.

The "crab" part of my name has caused some problems with the business end of this hobby. I cannot go into all of the details but a small example is that I get pelted with emails from vendors seeking to supply me with aquacultural goods such as nutrients to support a good seafood harvest, presumably in some sort of hatchery. The Maryland connection is a fine one from "crab" but it's both over and underinclusive of what the blog has become. Ditto with the phrase "law." – this blog is neither really a "crab" blog or a "law" blog.

I have struggled with the name of the flagship blog many times. For reasons of continuity (i.e. tradition/habit), I have maintained the word "weekly" as part of the name of the flagship blog of this site for the entirety of the past four years. I chose it originally because I did not expect to be able to post more than once a week due to family and professional commitments. In the last 200-odd weeks I have made about 2000 posts total, about 1800 of which have been on "Weekly" and its successor blogs. Other minor project blogs on specific topics have come and gone, largely because I lacked a full-time professional mindset. That's no crime of course; most people who blog, like most people who smack a white ball with an odd-shaped stick onto a contoured grassy plain, don't take the professional approach. But if you want to be Arnold Palmer, or even the resident assistant golf pro at the local public golf course, you need to take a different methodical approach. Part of that approach needs to be an acceptance not only of daily posting but of the need and desirability of daily meaningful content, starting with a rejection of a "weekly" content delivery moniker. It’s not per se bad to promise low and deliver somewhat higher, but "weekly" doesn't cut it either as a promise or as a performance for a winning professional web log in 2008 in most genres, if it ever did.

During the course of my four years of blogging, my political philosophy has moved from the left wing of the small-and-Large "L" libertarian community to the libertarian edge of liberal and Democratic politics. This shift came with some pain and sense of personal loss. My wedding in February 1999 in northern Anne Arundel County could be fairly characterized as a "Libertarian Mafia" wedding, with a Libertarian state party chair as my best man and another staunch libertarian activist announcing (after a glass or two, I must assume) that he would do something with extreme prejudice to anyone who would harm me or my wife. Changing my registration to Democratic in Maryland from Libertarian was a much bigger purely personal step than most voters would probably assume, but in substance it was the culmination of a gradual shift, over a period of several years as evidenced increasing on later posts on CMW.

I need to retire the names "crablaw", "Maryland" and "weekly" from use in the main feature of my blogging operations – to reflect the real changes in what I am actually blogging about and will blog about in the near future. But not only the names. The perspective and tone of this blog have oriented themselves increasingly to the left, sufficiently that the Crablaw Maryland Weekly of 2004-2005 can be said, objectively, not really to exist in late 2008, except perhaps in some sort of pre-Socratic philosophical sense (can one step in the same river twice?) But for several reasons I also don't want to "abandon" Maryland, though of late I have not done much local blogging.

Among the greatest pleasures and source of growth for me as a blogger has been my association with the Maryland Blogger Alliance, headed by the intrepid Attila. Attila and I have had some intense exchanges of late about the presidential election – he being a committed supporter of the Republican ticket and I a Team Obama phonebank volunteer – but I remain grateful to him for his many kind words and hilarious insights that have pulled me out of the dumps many times over the past several years. Ditto his fellow conservative bloggers Soccer Dad and Maryland Conservatarian, the latter a warm acquaintance from our law school days in the early 1990s with whom I have been delighted to reconnect. I have had the chance to meet each of these three men in person and they are all to a man fine and honorable people. I want to continue my association in this Alliance with a meaningful blog presence covering Maryland (even if from my expatriate location 1000 yards below Eastern Avenue.) In addition, I have enjoyed getting to know online many other bloggers – Kevin Dayhoff, the great team at Free State Politics, the loyal opposition over at Red Maryland, conservative activist David Kyle and many others.

So the long and the short of it is that crablaw.com's Maryland blogging won't die, but won't be the prime feature either.

"Crab Media" as a business name is also over, at least for me. There is another business called "Crab Media" that, appropriately, scavenges electronic media devices and refurbishes them for non-profits and other organizations. While I could probably continue the use of the name legitimately solely within blogging, I don't want to "win" the trademark war, but avoid it.

Part II of this discussion continues in a later blog post from today (10/16/2008).

The Most Beautiful Singing Voice I Have Heard In Years

Bruce Godfrey — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 22:12:04 -0400

Divna Ljubojevic, "Hristos Anesti" (Christ is Risen), traditional Greek Orthodox Christian hymn.

To all Jewish readers of this humble blog

Bruce Godfrey — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 20:56:19 -0400

image courtesy of Wikipedia.

my best wishes for a good, healthy and sweet New Year.

Kool Moe Dee, "Knowledge is King" (1989)

Bruce Godfrey — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 22:51:19 -0400

In my view, the best rap ever. My secular outlook aside, put this sort of music in church instead of Christian contemporary music or the no-self-respect folk-style music that plagues modern Catholic parishes, and I'll be there at 9 AM any Sunday. We indeed got your motivation RIGHT HERE!!

The Crab's lack of an expressed opinion caught the eye of a long-time reader....

Bruce Godfrey — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 20:20:56 -0400

Of late, I have wanted to blog intensely about the Fannie Mae and general capital markets crises. I am limited in what I can say about them in each case due to attorney-client privilege, oddly enough. I do not have formal training in economics beyond average grades on a few upper level Econ courses in college. And a few technical issues surround this site's conversion and roll-out have been vexing me. In general, the lawyer, the libertarian and the liberal in me would all rather us undergo catastrophic default, mass Chapter 11s and reconstruction in the aftermath than to bail these fraudsters out. Accordingly, anyone who is postponing Congressional action on this mess is doing the work of the angels. If we are lucky, Congress will do what it does best: punt.

There is something fundamentally wrong with our society, with our culture, that this happened. While there are economic problems as well with a culture and economy that saves excessively (oversaving has counterintuitive bad macroeconomic effects as well), we are increasingly in the realm of the strange, the twilight zone. Maybe a drop in the U.S. material standard of living from higher taxes and more expensive goods would have some counterintuitive positive effects as well.

I think I am going to borrow Affluenza again, and re-read it after five years.

Crab Media, RIP

Bruce Godfrey — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 18:27:39 -0400

There are some big things happening on my end here with my blogging. Some exciting things. I am rather pleased, but it's too early to say anything.

Get ready for a lot more content, a lot more edge, and some serious expansion around here. There will be big technical changes as well, including a shift to Movable Type, the creation of a number of new blogs and a new strategy overall.

In the past, I have tried building new projects as experiments. These have not all been bad, but I have not had a unified strategy before for getting blogging off of the ground as an expanded, concerted effort. A significant part of the strategy is a meaningful tie-in of all of the new and old blogs with other active non-blog projects.

Movable Type is no joy to install, though I succeeded this time where I had failed some months ago. It may be that the software has been upgraded though my persistent vanity would urge that "I" have upgraded. Obviously, this Weekly blog remains in Drupal format, for now. But Movable Type is pretty similar to Drupal, only a lot more versatile and user-friendly like Blogger with post formatting tools.

One other thing of minor importance. Crab Media is no more.

The details will be fleshed out shortly. Just get ready for some changes

Leave Governor Palin's Religion Alone

Bruce Godfrey — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 02:03:32 -0400

Atrios is making sense:

Most religious beliefs look "crazy" to outsiders, and suggestions that some are crazier than others are just a way of measuring how mainstream the religion is. What people want to do if they get in power matters, what they do on Sundays in their ideally private churches doesn't.

I am glad to see secular liberals including explicit atheists like Atrios urging us who want privacy in people's bedrooms to extend a similar privacy to people's houses of worship. This is a liberal value but we have seen a lot of illiberal garbage thrown at Palin of late. Certainly there are more than enough business reasons to go after Governor Palin; we should leave her personal life including her religious beliefs or participation (as opposed to her policy priorities, i.e. "business") strictly alone.

Of course, a good liberal blogger would realize that it makes Jesse Helms smile in the next realm whenever we are talking about Palin without talking about, you know, McCain. Guilty. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.

UPDATE: From Paradosis, Orthodox Christian "James of the Northwest" regarding Governor Palin's faith and his own:

When's the last time someone publicly and personally decried YOUR religious beliefs and used them as a point to question your ability to do your job? Given that our Lord told us that we ought to expect as much, should we wonder why this HAS NOT happened to us? Now look, I work in science and what would people think if they knew I had strange images of dead people on my walls and I burned incense in front of them and prayed? And what would they think if they knew that I often go to Church at LEAST 4 times a week? And what would they think if they knew I would sometimes talk to a "crazy" dead woman from Russia and ask her to pray for me in the hopes of recovering a lost item? What would they think if they knew I believed that the stuff I eat and drink on Sunday mornings really is the body and blood of someone? What would they think if they knew I believe in miracles...crazy miracles like myrrh gushing cadavers and that I would kiss such things? And what would they think if they knew I prayed for our scientific work in Uganda...that it be God's will and He bless it.

Not all religious traditions explicitly embrace the supernatural. Buddhism and Unitarian Universalist beliefs don't require an explicit belief in a deity, miracles or other interventions against the laws of nature.

But most religions do. To mock Governor Palin for her relatively conservative beliefs is no different in indecency than mocking a liberal United Church of Christ member for believing in, well, the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. We secularists stand outside the Judaeo-Christian tradition by the fourth word in the English King James translation of Genesis/Bereshit: "In the beginning G-d...." I would rather mock for pretending to oppose the earmarks that she so aggressively and insistently praised as a candidate and sought as a governor of the proportionally most "porked-up" state in the Union. But we should respect her privacy and freedom in her church life - even if she would not return the respect - because that's how liberal values work.

Did Palin Oppose the Bridge to Nowhere? You Decide

Bruce Godfrey — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 19:46:57 -0400

HAT TIP to the crew at Talking Points Memo for this helpful can of b________ repellent.

Luxury Rail Company Closes Operations

Bruce Godfrey — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 23:10:32 -0400

AP via Maryland Daily Record, September 3, 2008:

A company that offered luxurious rail tours aboard refurbished vintage cars and was a major charter customer of Amtrak has gone under.

For Amtrak, the closure of GrandLuxe, formerly known as American Orient Express before it came under new ownership in 2006, means the loss of several million dollars in annual revenue, Amtrak spokesman Cliff Black said. He declined to be more specific.

GrandLuxe relied on Amtrak to pull its train on various scenic routes. The national passenger railroad provided locomotives and engine crews for the trips, which lasted seven to 10 days and cost upward of $4,000. Amtrak did not provide onboard staff or marketing for those tours, Black said.

.....

However, the service, originally planned for three routes, was scaled back to just one train, the California Zephyr between Chicago and Emeryville, Calif. The partnership was not renewed this year.

A few points.

1. Emeryville, CA is the actual location of the main Amtrak station serving Oakland and San Francisco; it is connected to each by the San Francisco Bay area's BART subway lines.

2. It will never cease to amaze me that Russia can maintain a decent, successful train network with a much lower population density than we have and with a much lower per capita income. This article deals with luxury trains under charter, but the basic weak structure of U.S. passenger rail would be tolerated in almost no European country. Now the traditional excuse is that the U.S. has a lower population density than many European countries. While this is true, if you subtract out Alaska, (which actually has a simple but vitally important rail link between its two largest cities and the port at Seward for both passengers and cargo), the U.S. has a population density nearly twice that of Sweden and over three times that of Norway or Finland. Russia's population density is 1/3 that of the U.S., less than 1/4 if you subtract out Alaska - AND Russia is a major oil producer, so the political hostility to rail from oil-producing states like Oklahoma is not really an excuse either.