I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve fallen down on the job. In strict counterpoint to Future Tom and his almost mythological daily posting, my production has withered as my workload has increased. The new move, the new job, the new commute, the new hairstyle — they all conspired to throw me off my game. Instead of posting jocular commentary about the insanity of the virtual world and the plebeian nearsightedness of the PTO, I have been applying myself at work, Hemingway-style, engaged in industry, high finance, and the tedium of document review. My lighthearted moments appear at increasingly longer ends of the sine wave, and tend to strike me unawares about 11:00 at night, when I climb into my IP-laden Tesla roadster and silently zip home on the toll roads to the Elysian hunting camp in which I now reside.

I post here in an almost-but-not-quite embarrassed fashion to explain to you that with respect to my blog — just as with my languishing marathon training — I have adopted a new resolve. I vow to post more frequently and regain the vigor of my misspent youth. If you thought I was amusing before, prepare yourself for an entirely new level of amusement, Rabelaisian in scope, Machiavellian in design, Neapolitan in choice of pastry.

And when, you ask, will this  new romance commence?

Soon. Very soon.  Perhaps as soon as the day after yesterday.

If you misplaced or forgot to bookmark my URL, please subscribe to my feed now. For those of you who hate to subscribe to things but still have sufficient neurological juice left in your big big brains to remember short phrases,  just open up your browser and type “Who Is Your Lawyer” in one of its myriad forms (e.g., Who Is Your Lawyer, whoisyourlawyer, whois your lawyer, whoisyour lawyer, or even “who’s your lawyer” or “whos your lawyer“). Eventually, you will find your way to my site, as all variations of Who Is Your Lawyer? lead to me.

Be forewarned that on occasion these latter variations of my name will attempt to waylay the distractible reader with intriguing articles about the now-defunct series Rex Is Not Your Lawyer. As much as I hate to say it, that is not my series nor my site, as I am not David Tennant  (however much I appreciate his work in Dr. Who).

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First, the chastity belt. Invented by the insecure swashbucklers who brought us the Crusades. Mentioned in passing in that terribly engaging book by Umberto Eco about the millennia old conspiracy to take over everything (Foucault’s Pendulum).

Second, the iron maiden. A metal coffin layered with nasty metal spikes, into which devout Christians blithely enclosed those poor souls predestined to die a horrible death. Slam the lid shut, and kiss your favorite heretic goodbye.

Third, the cat o’ nine tails. One whip wasn’t enough, apparently, and Master Tyree was bored, so after a few pints of rum and a weevil-infested biscuit he crafted a device that caught on like gangbusters in the Royal Navy and sparked a worldwide craze in scarification.

High heels. A diabolical creation from that same mutant Chinese who came up with foot binding. Apparently there is an unspoken consensus that women should not be able to run, or run away, which is entirely ignored by Deena Kastor, Paula Radcliffe, and hordes of women everywhere, including that 92-year-old woman who just ran the Honolulu Marathon. For every woman who loves her Manolos there is a Kenyan running barefoot in the mountains.

The whalebone corset. Another oldie but goodie from the Victorian era. All women should have 16 inch waists like Molly Bloom before she developed a taste for cream puffs. And men should, correspondingly, imitate the long-extinct passenger pigeon and puff out their tubercular 28 inch chests like Leopold Bloom.

Brylcreem. From the artificial spelling designed for easy trademarking to the entirely unnatural nature of the product itself, I am appalled and repelled. Yet fascinated. Its popularity with Royal Air Force pilots in World War II led to their nickname, The Brylcreem Boys. Ironically, Tony Gibson, the model shown in RAF uniform to advertise Brylcreem during World War II, was an anarchist and conscientious objector. My favorite use of Brylcreem’s “a little dab’ll do ya” jingle? That would be Nicholson channeling genius in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest just before they hit him with 50,000 volts.

And speaking of crazy ideas, what’s crazier than pouring lightning into someone’s head to see if it makes him feel better? Golfers flee the course holding 1-irons over their heads as the rain crashes down (on the theory that even God can’t hit a 1-iron), but our best scientific minds give us electrocution as a cure for what ails us while Texas tries to wear out Old Sparky. Vas ist los mit dat, meine freunde?

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1.  The circulation of blood. Each person has a certain amount of blood (based primarily on size) circulating throughout his body in one fixed direction. This fact was first discovered in the 12th century by the Arab doctor Ibn al-Nafis. Remarkably, the knowledge was lost by careless pre-internet humans and only rediscovered by the English physician William Harvey in the 17th-century. This revolution was set forth in an exquisitely written 70-page monograph entitled “Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus” or “Anatomical Essay on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals” commonly referred to as “De Motu Cordis” or simply “De Motu.” It was published in 1628 when Harvey was a mere lad of 50.

2.  Microorganisms. In the late 1600s, when microscopes were new, Dutch lens maker Antoni van Leeuwenhoek scraped some plaque off his own teeth and looked at it through a microscope. As one might expect with the benefit of 400 years of hindsight, it was crawling with animalcules. Less than two centuries later, knowledge of this invisible universe enabled Louis Pasteur to construct his germ theory of disease, which in turn enabled doctors to conquer polio, typhoid, measles, small pox, and a whole host of other diseases that had plagued the world since Babylonian times.

3.  Electricity and magnetism.  Stay with me here on this one, all you non-techies.  Read it twice, and then read it backwards to see if it’s secretly an anagram (hint: it’s not). Ørsted’s discovery in 1821 that a magnetic field existed around all sides of a wire carrying an electric current indicated that there was a direct relationship between electricity and magnetism. Moreover, the interaction seemed different from gravitational and electrostatic forces, the two forces of nature then known. The force on the compass needle did not direct it to or away from the current-carrying wire, but acted at right angles to it.  Ørsted’s slightly obscure words were that “the electric conflict acts in a revolving manner.” The force also depended on the direction of the current, for if the flow was reversed, then the force did too.  The phenomenon was investigated further by Ampère, who discovered that two parallel current-carrying wires exerted a force upon each other: two wires conducting currents in the same direction are attracted to each other, while wires containing currents in opposite directions are forced apart. The interaction is mediated by the magnetic field each current produces and forms the basis for the international definition of the ampere.

4.  The electric motor.  Ørsted’s recondite musings on his discovery were extremely important, as the relationship between magnetic fields and currents led to Michael Faraday’s invention of the electric motor in 1821. Faraday’s homopolar motor consisted of a permanent magnet sitting in a pool of mercury. A current was passed through a wire suspended from a pivot above the magnet and dipped into the mercury. The magnet exerted a tangential force on the wire, making it circle around the magnet for as long as the current was maintained. The electric motor, of course, led to the invention of the automobile, which led to the asphalting-over of half the known world, killing a remarkable number of indigenous species with very little in the way of bad publicity prior to the enactment of the EPA. Now we can drive wherever we like, but we are prohibited from building a new house half a mile away because the Blue Spotted Butterfly has been spotted there twice this decade.

5.  Genes. Not Lucky, nor Levis, and certainly not your old childhood Wranglers. I’m referring to the scientific code, what the head of the Human Genome Project called The Language of God. Despite hints from Pavlov and Mendel, it wasn’t until 1953 that Francis Crick and James Watson discovered the structure of DNA, a molecule shaped like a twisted ladder and contained in every cell. DNA manipulation is already changing the world in ways that you only notice subliminally — Monsanto has genetically modified corn to resist disease, the  Koreans have cloned a sheep (and perhaps a human), and now you have the option of selecting the sex of your child (“I’ll take that spermatozoa over there, Doctor. The big one.”). Soon, with the aide of stem cell therapy, we may be able to conquer diseases and genetic flaws that we  have been unable to even think of approaching using traditional techniques of Western medicine.

With any luck, in the next 10 years all of these inventions will be combined into a fantastic Chitty Chitty Bang Bang automobile of the future that will cure what ails you as you race through Biarritz with a horde of angry agents of SMERSH hot on your heels. (You did remember that Ian Fleming wrote Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, didn’t you?). Think Tesla on steroids, with a stem cell injector that adds charm, wit and insouciance on demand — and makes a mean martini to boot.

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The Universal Constant π

The Pythagorean Theorem a² + b² = c²

The Law of Universal Gravitation F = GMm / r²

Newton’s Second Law of Motion F = ma

The Law of Special Relativity E=mc²

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Thanks, Bob. You know I love the easy ones. Briefly, UNIX was the brainchild of  Bell Laboratories computer genius Ken Thompson. Thompson developed UNIX in 1969 on a scavenged DEC PDP-7 minicomputer as a platform for a game he had written called Space Travel. Ultimately, it became a means of testing  theories about operating system design. With the aide of Dennis Ritchie (who invented “C”) Thompson rewrote UNIX entirely in “C,” allowing it to be used on different computers. When UNIX was licensed to universities for educational purposes, recipients of the – originally free — UNIX source code began developing modified versions of the operating system. Dozens of different UNIX versions appeared in a short time, each with unique qualities, yet all sufficiently similar in character to the original design to be deemed variants of UNIX (much like French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Catalan and Romanian are all Romance languages stemming from a common Latin root). In the early 1980′s, the market for UNIX systems had grown so large that industry noticed it, and the question “What is UNIX?” transformed into “How can UNIX be used for business?” Universities, researchers, state and federal agencies, and software companies all used UNIX to develop technologies which were revolutionary at the time — computer-aided design (CAD), factory automation, computer simulations, and the Internet itself all began life with UNIX. Today, of course, UNIX is part of the infrastructure of the world; without UNIX the Internet would not function, telephone calls could not be made, and e-commerce would come to a screeching halt.

Now let’s go for the big money — lob me the predictable softball question about LINUX’s not-quite-successful bid to take over the universe and I’ll split my winnings with you. Promise.

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Though the RIAA’s litigation strategy apparently has a certain surface appeal to music industry egos, in real life the RIAA’s rigid litigation model has not yielded meaningful results. Apart from alienating the general public and creating an enormous amount of superfluous litigation for the courts’ already overcrowded dockets, the results have been abysmal. The RIAA has failed to discourage file-sharing, and created an underground file-sharing community that — like Ninja assassins — quietly creep up out of nowhere and download billions of songs on ever-changing platforms. Every time a file-sharing company gets big enough to be noticed and sued by the RIAA, it is replaced by yet another start-up providing exactly the same service at a new location, with better cloaking technology. While the industry can sue LimeWire, Pirate Bay, Napster, and all and sundry for all they’re worth, eventually a compromise is going to have to be made. The “we’ll sue you into the ground” business model is not working, is not good business, and is quite possibly not good law — just yesterday the 16 year old cheerleader who got sued for downloading 37 songs and was ordered to pay $27,750 filed a Petition for Certiorari with the Supreme Court asking the court to overturn the decision against her on the (frankly quite believable) grounds that she didn’t realize that file-sharing was against the law.

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If you’ve never taken a look at what you can read for free, check out Project Gutenberg. Over 30,000 titles are available at the click of a mouse, including works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Saki, Alexandre Dumas, Franz Kafka, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, James Joyce, and many other acclaimed writers. And soon Google will be adding 4 million more titles for your reading pleasure. Time to upgrade your RAM (so you can read faster).

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