Howard Cosell on John Lennon’s Death and “This Sick, Sports-Obsessed Country”

Several places have parts of this interview, but its originally from Jonathan Cott & Christine Doudna, The Ballad of John and Yoko (Dolphin Books 1982), at page 228. This book is a collection of Rolling Stone interviews and miscellaneous remembrances of John Lennon, published a little more than a year after he was killed.

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Random Pro-Reading/Book Bumber Sticker

Seen yesterday on the streets of New Orleans:



Many variations on this theme are available but the only one I could find with the coffee cup - NICE TOUCH! - is through a shop where you can personalize them for your own store. Need to find me a blank one, or get them for our library.
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Random Nude Art

In the "you never know what you'll find" category, we saw this on a routine walk in our neighborhood over the weekend:

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Missing Pages in Dune Paperback

I picked up an old paperback of Dune last month - been wanting to re-read it for years. The classic paperback cover:

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Seventh Annual Jazz Fest Global Warming Update

Long story short (and read my past posts from 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, or 2014 for more details), this was the 28th - out of 43 - warmest Jazz Fest. Despite this prediction:

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USN&WR Law School Rankings, Color-Coded Changes, 2015 to 2016 Editions

March 30 Update: A slightly revised version is now embedded below. Apologies to one school for having their two editions' data reversed (they know who they are - thanks for the polite heads-up!), and to Wake Forest for misspelling their name all these years.

(Original post:)

Last's year's color-coded table of all changes to the published metrics in the U.S. News and World Report law school rankings proved to be useful to some folks, so here is this years version:


As the document itself says, contact me for any questions, or if you find any errors. (I spent about half a day chasing down one erroneous number, but didn't see anything else that stood out as looking wildly out of place.)

Also as the document says, because USN&WR uses but doesn't report median LSAT and UGPA, I got those figures from the ABA's Standard 509 Disclosures. I found one discrepancy between those two sets of data, but it doesn't affect that schools' rankings: USN&WR publishes the 25th and 75th percentiles of LSAT and UGPA, though its the median figures they use in their rankings. One school provided a different 25th percentile LSAT score to US News  than they did to the ABA, and one of the statistics people at US News confirm that they indeed got that number from the school - and it was the same as their median LSAT figure - statistically possible if you have a very flat distribution of numbers, but unlikely. Which indicates it wasn't their fault, except that they didn't notice that the school provided the same number for the 25th percentile and median LSAT. More on that in a future blog post, perhaps (I'm waiting to hear back from the associate dean there - but really, it did NOT affect their rankings and was a harmless mistake - it just goes to issues of quality control, verification, etc., etc.)

In some e-mail exchanges last year, I learned about the usefulness of standard deviations - if I have time, I'll make those charts and also upload them here. Using Excel's conditional formatting you can visually represent the standard deviation and easily see if your school has a better (or worse) ranking by a particular metric, compared to your overall ranking. 

And if I figure out how to embed it like I want, I'll post my raw Excel file - its just what U.S. News publishes so they can't complain if I put up a sortable version of their numbers. 
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Law Library Awards Spam

Got the following spam earlier today:



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Wikipedia and Case Briefs

Checking something in the computer lab, I saw a student left their Word document open - this is a screen capture of it - a noticed it had a lot of linked text and an option that most Word documents don’t have:



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Caught Another Possum, This Time "Playing Possum"

Its been 15 months since I last trapped a possum; in 2013 I trapped three at our house and one at a neighbor's place. And a few have passed through mooching on the outside cats' food, but I wasn't able to trap them and they moved on.

But another one showed up last week and Saturday night I trapped him - photos after the jump ...

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Protest Banner, with U.S. Code (Mis-) Citation

I saw these hand-made banners riding my bike around before Mardi Gras:

Looking closer, I noticed a U.S. Code citation - how helpful! But there is no 8 U.S. Code 1234a! But Googling that, it was probably supposed to be a cite to: 8 U.S. 

Code § 1324a - Unlawful employment of aliens 

And now, looking at my close-up of the first sign:




I see what looks like a docket number, but I can't make out the numbers - will have to go by again and see if these are still there.
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