…so this week, my article for TheCourt.ca is about Boumediene v. Bush instead.

It counts because we consider American precedents to be somewhat persuasive!

In honor of this event, I feel the need to contribute to the “I Am Aware Of All Internet Traditions” meme freshly being birthed into the web.

So.

(because lolcats are now traditional, see)

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

A mock-Tijuana Bible featuring John McCain and George W. Bush.

Explicit, NSFW, and more than a little gross, frankly.

Via Norman Wilner.

Pick one:

A) Racist people making “fun” of Barack Obama

B) The most incredibly stupid boosterism ever

My second post at thecourt.ca this week is about the sentencing of a fairly notorious asshole.

It’s worth noting that sometimes, in criminal justice, you have situations where judges are looking for a legal excuse to really nail someone to the wall. This is, I think, one such.

Go to Google reader.

Hit the following keys: up arrow, up arrow, down arrow, down arrow, left arrow, right arrow, left arrow, right arrow, B and A.

(Heh.)

As always, my weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Also, this week I’m pulling double duty at TheCourt.ca, starting off today with a post about R. v. Walker and its implications for judicial reasoning requirements in criminal trials.

This week from me at The Court: brief commentary on the Supreme Court’s decision in R. v. J.H.S., a case about the necessity of preserving the principle of “beyond reasonable doubt” in the jury instruction process in criminal trials, and what that necessity requires.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Another week, another posting from me at The Court – this week is a critique of the recent ruling in Canada v. Khadr, which should be of interest to some of my American audience, seeing as how it concerns a Guantanamo Bay detainee.

The amount of drama and sheer stupidity being generated by the Livejournal Advisory Board election is beyond belief.

For those of you wise enough to stay the hell away from Livejournal (“going downhill since 2005”), a brief summary. The Livejournal Advisory Board is exactly what it sounds like: a bunch of people who advise Livejournal about their corporate policies. With no actual power beyond that to advise. Hence, “Advisory Board,” you see. And Livejournal decided that they would have a user election to put a Livejournal user on said advisory board, to advise the new Russian corporate powers-that-be about capitalism and drinks other than vodka. This is rather blatantly a position with no actual power worth mentioning.

Naturally, Livejournallers having the collective sense of perspective as Salvador Dali drunk on absinthe and wearing an eyepatch, the user election for the position has become all but the campaign to be President of Livejournal or something. The drama got ratcheted up to fever pitch when Jameth, who is exactly the sort of completely harmless troll that you want a dickhead on the interwebs to be (loudmouthed, often annoying, but essentially harmless if you are capable of, say, ignoring a person), signed on as a candidate and got the Something Awful goons and their Livejournal equivalents to vote for him, mostly to piss off the Harry Potter fandomsphere.

The Potter fans responded exactly as you would expect the least rational, most spoiled fan base on the entire goddamned planet [1] to react when you poke them with a stick: they exploded and launched a massive campaign to deny Jameth the nomination by giving it to one of the various fanboi/grrls running for nomination. Currently their favored candidate is Legomymalfoy, who is already on the Livejournal Support Team. You might think that working for the company and simultaneously representing the userbase might be a pretty basic and obvious conflict of interest. Thankfully, LMM has responded to criticisms on this score by banning comments and locking posts from public view.

HP fans have spread rumours about Jameth “attacking” epileptics by having flashing icons. I was curious about this, and it’s easily disproven, but the dynamics of the Livejournal election are an interesting microcosm of how the Internet makes people stupid in regard to elections – say, for example, real ones that matter, where certain candidates are said to be Muslims or something. The parallels are honestly kind of striking: you have people accusing others of using their sockpuppet RP/troll accounts to gin up vote totals (election fraud!), baseless attacks from both sides (meaningless propaganda!)…

…and, since we’re talking about the Livejournal election as an example in microcosm for the real thing, it is worth noting that now, the fever pitch over this completely meaningless election has escalated to include violent threats.

For a meaningless position with no real power and no monetary compensation.

SWEET JESUS.

Fresh air, people! Go out! Walk in the park! Watch little doggies play! Or whatever it is you do in parks.

[1] Seriously, sometimes I think the entire Harry Potter fan phenomenon is just a massive psychological experiment by J.K. Rowling to see if she could create a subspecies of nerd more despised than furries.

Twitter. I utterly fail to see the appeal of Twitter. Understand that I am someone who is online a lot – I am not offering up the standard crank “why you kids playin’ with those danged computers dang it” rant here. But this need for total connectedness is beyond me, and frankly it’s not even total connectedness because it’s entirely a one-way conversation: you blather whatever into Twitter and other people see it, but you don’t have to listen back to them. Which, come to think, is pretty ego-driven communication in a passive-aggressive sort of way. You can tell people what you’re doing and you don’t have to listen to their responses, and not is this the expected norm, it’s the driving design principle!

What the fuck is up with that? People have suggested this is the evolution of the Facebook status message, but Facebook exists primarily for the purpose of two-way communication, obsessive as it might be. (Well, that and Scrabulous.) Twitter in essence takes the self-absorption that the connected lifestyle demands (all the co-presence of a community, without the niggling demand of learning to tolerate the in-person social quirks of others) and caters to it.

All of this might be forgivable if Twitter produced clever, interesting communiques, but it doesn’t – it’s an endless parade of banalities. Another way of looking at Twitter’s general pointlessness is to consider how many Twitter messages would be worthy of mention when replying to the question, “so how was your day?” Easily most would not qualify, because in person when someone asks you that, you don’t tell them about the thousand little annoyances in your day; it’s just the (relatively) important stuff.

The “Green Arrow goes to supervillain jail” movie. People recently started talking about this again and I just don’t see the appeal. The concept isn’t bad, but I can tell you right now the execution will be hamfisted dogshit.

Why will it be hamfisted dogshit? Well, other than Green Arrow being a terrible superhero concept (“has a bow”), this is the sort of movie that demands immense, immense amounts of exposition to explain what the hell is going on. The problem is that most filmmakers are really, really bad at delivering details of a differing world without simply vomiting up a horde of banal, boring, patronizing explanatory dialogue.

(This is one of the things that people who mock the original Star Wars trilogy really miss – Lucas created an entire expansive universe and, unusually so for him, resisted the temptation to explain anything more than necessary. It is a rare achievement, which is one of the reasons the original trilogy is so good and the second prequel trilogy is not.)

This is not to say that the movie might not be good. It might well be good. It just very likely won’t, because it’s setting itself up for failure right from the premise by choosing such a difficult focus, and let’s be honest, you are not going to get a Bryan Singer or Christopher Nolan making this movie. This is the Steel of this generation right here, people!

Also, “Supermax” is a terrible, terrible title, sounding not unlike a giant Japanese fighting robot. GO SUPERMAX! ELECTRON JUICE ATTACK SUPREME! Et cetera.

People who bag on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. It’s a better movie than Last Crusade, people – a movie which gets by mostly on Sean Connery’s charisma and the extra import added by the Holy Grail. (And I like Last Crusade, people, so don’t start.) Yes, Kate Capshaw is kind of annoying. Yes, Short Round is a questionable character idea. But it’s got the best action in the entire series – moreso than Crusade and even Raiders – and its closing sequence is easily the best, most exciting in the series. It’s simply the most daring movie of the franchise.

Grey’s Anatomy. It’s like Scrubs, except not as funny, not as good at the dramatic moments, and twice as long.

A Livejournaller-slash-driving enthusiast tours a brand new Tesla Motors dealership.