The Bond propaganda machine brings you the following announcement:

Jeremy Blachman, the staunchest no-comments dude around without exception, including the exception of Will Baude, recently added two comments to his blog for two hours.

The fact that a being as evil as Jeremy Blachman should see the light, even for such a short space of time, is a Sign, a True and Worthy Indication of the Way Things Are, and the Way Things Must Be, that Crescat needs to get with the times and add comments. For two hours or longer.

This message has been brought to you by the Bond propaganda machine. This has always been our position, and it always will be our position. Reports of a position different than this position are complete calumny, spread by lying traitors and slanderous geese. Thank you.

Heidi's jumped the gun. Two hours into the experiment, I've decided to reverse my decision. Here's what happened:

Since I was changing the template anyway (not completely on purpose, but I clicked one too many buttons and lost my old template, so I ended up having no choice), I figured I'd try the comments out for a day or two, just to see what happened. But I've very quickly discovered that I'm way too easily distracted. E-mail's great, but having a page I'm tempted to reload every ten seconds, to see if anyone's written anything... it's too much. And I had no real reason for enabling the comments other than curiosity... so, curiosity satisfied; I'm back on the evil side of things. Sorry.

Jeremy Blachman, the staunchest no-comments dude around with the exception of Will Baude, has added comments to his blog. First, this means he'll get lots of comments that look like this: LOL!

But second, this is a Sign, a True and Worthy Indication of the Way Things Are, and the Way Things Must Be, that Crescat needs to get with the times and add comments.

A three way compare-and-contrast:
IJ's Lawrence brief:

There are countless private activities that are protected by no tradition or express constitutional provision. It would be unimaginable that they could be prohibited in a free society, even if some objection could be raised to them--cooking unhealthy meals, staying up too late, spending a slothful day drinking coffee and doing puzzles instead of accomplishing something productive. Indeed, almost anything that an ordinary person might spend his or her weekend doing, from gardening to cleaning to touching up house paint, would probably not qualify as a "fundamental" right. Yet such private activities, in the aggregate, are the essence of ordered liberty.

The expansive definition of "public" in Poletown is just the flip side of the increasingly common idea that any negative effects of private activity should be public concerns--that ugly architecture is "visual pollution," vulgar movies are "cultural pollution," and personal habits like smoking cigarettes or eating too much are a matter of "public health." Follow that logic, and pretty soon everything we do has to be either subsidized, regulated, or banned.

Chilling! Except when you think about it, everything we do is either subsidized, regulated, or banned already and, you know what, though this world certainly has it's share of problems, things are basically okay.

The Slithery D writes of the decision to ban some normally-Scrabble-legal words from the ESPN-televised finals. (Not a hypothetical question, in this case, since Trey Wright tried to play "LEZ"):

I'm bored by the game, but I wonder if its afficionados feel the purity of the game is being violated, or is this a fair rule? Would it be so even without the TV aspect?

I was preparing to write a long discussion on the status of banned words in Scrabble (there are a hundred-odd words which, despite not appearing in the Official Scrabble Players' Dictionary, are still tournament legal, and which, apparently, had also been banned from the Scrabble finals). But I am happy to see that Nick Tam, who was at the tournament, has a long discussion of the affair on his blog. If Mr. Tam is correct (and I assume so), then this article is misleading-- no list was "drawn up" and banned for television use, and ESPN wasn't really worried about words like "LEZ", but rather about less fancy four-letter fare. [Mr. Tam's blog, which is new to me, also has a lot of fascinating Scrabble coverage.]

So, the "purity" of the game was being violated a little by the rule, yes, but it is already necessarily violated all the time in semi-friendly play. Just try explaining to your less-Scrabble-savvy friends that, "well, I know it's not in the "Official" dictionary, but it's one of a group of semi-secret special words, that..."

Anyway, the list of Scrabble-banned words is here, and it includes such nasty, unspeakable stuff as "POPISH," "REDNECKS," "JEW," "COMSYMP," "FATSO," "FART," and "FRIG" ("FRIG" was presumably banned under some anti-circumvention rationale that will eventually be used to ban "screw", "F***", "SH**", and "$%#!" from broadcast television). If I recall correctly, "frotteur" remains Scrabble-legal, athough the distinction bears out a logic I cannot fathom.

Last week, I wrote a post about Melton Mowbray Pork Pies. As the intrepid half-dozens who read it will remember, the post discussed the battle between Northern Foods and Dickinson & Morris (or, indeed, Samworth Brothers, the parent) over European protection for "Melton Mowbray Pork Pies". If you want the full story, do read the article.

This morning, I received an email from Gary Johnston, Marketing Director at Pork Farms Bowyers (an affiliate of Northern Foods). He adds some fascinating information to my initial post, and corrects some errors as well.

First, Mr. Johnston notes, Melton Mowbrays (abbreviated MMPP! Don't you love jargon?) have historically been made outside the protected zone -

"Melton Mowbray Pork Pies are a style (premium quality to consumers) and have been produced outside of their "traditional" region for over 100 years. Indeed, during the majority of the last century the volume of the production of these pies was almost entirely made outside this zone. Northern Foods has two sites (in Wiltshire and Shropshire) with rich histories of MMPP production and this PGI application threatens these factories and the associated employment".

And as I guessed, the economic motivations for Dickinson are clear - of course, Mr. Johnston is biased, but I'm sure his figures are near right, and I doubt that D&M would dispute his claim in substance;

"If this application gains approval - and political momentum is driving this - then they will gain a monopoly in this 50 million GBP marketplace".

Finally, and most important, Mr. Johnston reports some good news. Northern Foods has not dropped its legal challenge. Rather, there's been some last minute negotiation in the back room, which I've checked through some news sources. The Government has now agreed to conduct a re-evaluation of its administrative decision.

"[T]he reason that the Judicial Review has been adjourned is not as a result of alterations to the region's boundaries (this ploy was attempted last year). Norther Foods object to the applicatrions whether we have factories within the boundaries or not. Instead, it is because Defra have settled with our lawyers, on the grounds that they will re-assess our objections and make a fresh decision on this application. While this represents a positive move, there remains concerns that the application will still be ratified by our friends in London - romanced by the tale of huntsmen and pig herds. I am glad that you for one have not been so deceived".

I'll keep you everyone updated on this critical (for those of us interested in eating pork pies) story.

Via Professor Bainbridge, I stumble across this article, with the startling claim that in Holland, non-consensual toe-licking is not a crime.

My familiarity with Dutch law is essentially nil, but I find this quite surprising. Rather than creating a special anti-toe-licking law (and persumably an earlobe-nibbling law, and so on and so forth), perhaps they should simple adopt a system of assault law resembling ours.

For the next few weeks, we are happy to be hosting Amber Taylor as a guest-blogger here, as she traverses and trains across Eastern Europe. Her posts will appear in this category-- Places, names, and where it was you meant to travel.

This completes, for a time, the HLS-Crescat-takeover-troika.