I am going to bed rather than wasting further time blogging, but there are things I will never remember to blog about or link to unless I mention them now. Here are a few:

Phoebe Maltz bids farewell to Chicago in her final What Would Phoebe Do? column for the Maroon (which is far less purple or maudlin than mine was).

Dan Solove has insightful reflections on his first month of blogging ("blogging is more addictive than crack"). PrawfsBlawg, indeed, is rapidly becoming one of my favorite blogs. I don't think I was nearly as addicted after so little time, but then again we started very very small before anybody began to read this thing.

Janice Rogers Brown is now going to be a federal judge.

Will is apparently too polite to explore the depths of the Class Day lunch today, so I'll do so instead. It consisted somewhat puzzlingly of soy drenched asian noodles topped with slices of chicken breast, followed by what I think was a tinned fruit tart (the kind with a custard base) with some bottles of water labelled "Harvard Law School'. There was, thankfully, some cold lemonade. And the company of my classmates helped it all go down.

EDIT: I should add that I agree Jeff Fisher was interesting, but couldn't help chuckling when he said "just another Supreme Court clerk". I can't think of anything that better demonstrates the interfolding hierarchies of prestige upon which the law is built. Everyone knew, even before the recent revelations, that John Kerry's grades at Yale weren't any good - because no financially secure person would turn down Harvard for BC. Being on the law review is better than not, but being on the law review's board is better still, and the articles committee best of all. And now, we're told, there are *kinds* of Supreme Court clerk, which I had hitherto assumed was a position of such august-ity that comparisons between one of those striding luminaries and the other failed entirely.

I'm currently in rainy Cambridge (MA, not UK) witnessing the graduation proceedings for Ms. Amber Taylor (and co-blogger Raffi Melkonian), so my blogging is touch and go, especially since I ought to be finishing my law journal write-on (due Friday!).

But a brief report on food-- the HLS provided lunch was embarrassing, the cocktail snacks were delicious, the wine was tolerable, and for dinner tonight I just had my first lobster, which was quite a treat (although not, truth be told, as good as the heavenly clam chowder).

Also, whatever the rhetorical merits of Eliott Spitzer (I wonder-- does he still write his own speeches or is he cognizant enough of his future political career that he's already invested in a speechwriting staff?) Jeff Fisher, the class-day speaker, was a really fascinating guy. He apparently just stumbled into the chance to push Crawford and Blakely into the Supreme Court (he got cert on, argued, and won both). He is of course fantastically credentialled (Michigan Law, Supreme Court clerkship, &c.) but pointed out that he couldn't have really done what he did if he'd just been one more eager Supreme Court clerk with an entry-level firm or DOJ job in D.C.

I'm busy enjoying my graduation from law school (Eliot Spitzer is a charismatic speaker, incidentally, though I think him quite wrong about regulation), but decided I would add another annal to this blog's obsession with roast birds (chickens and ortolans alike (here and here ) .

I'm reading the truly excellent biography of the French chef Bernard Loiseau, who tragically killed himself after losing a Michelin star. I'll discuss this book in detail later next week. But for the moment, the following passage caught my eye:

"There was also a new development, motherhood, accomplished by the step-by-step procedure of achieving goals that the scientific method had taught Dominique. Postulate: They both wanted kids. Given: The Union with Chantal had been barren. Proposition: Seduce Bernard at the right moment. . . Nor, for his part, had Bernard been inactive. He prepared a special diner intime (what else would a chef think to do?) of a once in a lifetime quality - ortolans. The tiny, fat, delicious, melt-in the mouth little birdies did their duty, the pluckly little things, and that very night Dominuque conceived their first child, Berangere, who was born in a Dijon clinic in July 1989".

The whole episode reminds me very much of the French monarchy's problems with Louis XIII. Having married the king off too young, they were unable to persuade him to consumate the union with his wife. They tried oysters. They tried invigorating drinks. And finally, they tried locking the Most Christian King in a room with the unfortunate woman and what people at the time thought were suggestive paintings and statutes*. Nothing worked, until Louis XIII was supposedly caught in a rain storm, and was forced to stay with his wife in her (but not his) country retreat. Shivering, Louis apparently found the comfort of his wife's bed tempting. The result, in lore, was the conception of Louis XIV, who for that reason was called the Dieudonne, ("given by God") long before being know as the Sun King.

But forget all that. They could just have used the then plentiful ortolan!.

* That should obviously be statues rather than statutes. But I am just finishing up law school. So there.

UPDATE: It turns out that Loiseau never actually lost that third star - he shot himself on the rumor that he might lose it the next year. Ironically, it turns out that the restaurant has kept three stars even after his death.