Saturday, 17 January 2004

I Fought the Law: Of all the blogs I've discovered over the past few years, the one that never ceases to amaze me is Howard Bashman's How Appealing. Day in, day out, the man takes a topic that by all rights should be deathly dull — appellate litigation — and makes it enjoyable, informative, and even educational for an engineer like me. If someone had told me two years ago that I'd be reading federal appeals court decisions for the entertainment value, or that a site dedicated to that narrow topic would rank among the web's most popular destinations, I'd have never believed it.

That said, I am going to destroy Howard Bashman in the Best Australian Blog competition. Why, you ask? Because I'm actually in Australia, that's why! Who the heck nominated a blog about the U.S. legal system as the best darn blog in the Land Down Under? (Not that I'm exactly dipped in vegemite myself, what with being an American and all, but at least I'm here in Oz, gosh darn it!)

I don't care how many times Bashman sends his swarming minions to the polls: I'm going to beat him anyway. You hear me, Howard? I even cover Australian legal issues, in a completely haphazard and incomplete fashion! How can you possibly compete with that, huh? Huh? Didn't think so.

I'd withdraw and spare myself the embarrassment, really. There's just no contest.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 11:16 am. comments.

Saturday, 17 January 2004

Three months later the photos from my six-week vacation to Japan, Sweden, Germany, Singapore, Malaysia and the Czech Republic (not in that order) are finally online. (Check the blog archives from October and November for some on-the-spot blogging from various exotic places.)

My photos are all free for the taking under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial license; you don't need my permission to use them in your non-commerical newsletter, web site, or other work, provided you (1) give me a photo credit and (2) use your own bandwidth. (There's a home page on the Free Republic web site linking directly to one of my photos of Cambodian torture victims [and using it as the punch line for a joke about a local homeowner's association, I think], which is why I bring this up.)

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 5:17 am. comments.