This will be the last post in the TypePad incarnation of Puttering in the Study, as I have decided to move the blog to a WordPress platform, where it will have the URL it's always wanted, www.putteringinthestudy.com .
This site will likely stay up since by doing so it'll allow the exported posts to include images, but eventually it will probably be cut down and archived.
About a week ago I downloaded Mastodon to start exploring alternatives to Twitter if it came to that. It took a couple of days to get the hang of how to locate people and subjects I was interested in, but since then I have had a great time meeting new people with common interests. And they're nice. And kind.
When I started I had no intention of stopping using my Twitter account, but the last week changed that. I have followed directions from the New York Times to lock down and archive my Twitter account, and while I will keep it open, and check in regularly, I no longer post in it. The need for it just evaporated as the risk and the up side of staying on it increased in recent weeks, and benefits of it went away.
The people I've started following on Mastodon have helped me come to this decision. Matt Tait has a better explanation than I do here on his PwnAllTheThings blog, and @anildash put a fine point on it when he referred to "that weird mix of performativity and anticipatory defensiveness" that characterized what many of us did on Twitter. And he's absolutely right. For me Twitter was always the middle ground between the personal on Facebook professional on LinkedIn, and I always found myself trying to present a certain image, keeping in mind that an attack on whatever I posted might be right around the corner.
I told @anildash that I thought social media was a balance between building a brand/marketing and engaging with people with similar interests for the sheer enjoyment of it. Mastodon puts substantial roadblocks in the way for the former, for the reason that it protects the latter, and I have decided that I am really enjoying the latter. People who are on Mastodon have made the conscious decision to participate in a site that values courtesy, kindness, and an appreciation for the people who are on the opposite end of the online connection after having had experience with the negativity that can come from other sites.
And the emphasis on use of hashtags means that I can find people with similar interests pretty easily, and I've already started curating my follows to tailor my feed to what I'm interested in. As Masto friends constantly say - there is no algorithm for what you're seeing - you are the algorithm. So, for example, this morning I removed following #Archaeology posts because they were putting too much into my feeds. But I'll still get posts about archaeology from my follows. And I tend to follow people who have archaeology as an interest. I may eventually do the same for #StarTrek as the size of my feed increases. #ScaleModeling on the other hand - I will probably always follow the hashtag because there are not nearly the posts out there.
I will miss many of the brilliant people I interacted with on Twitter - but I expect to see them again soon on one platform or another.
So while Mastodon will still for me be a similar mix of personal and professional interests like Twitter was, I will be dialing down some of the professional activity I had on Twitter, and focusing that more on my LinkedIn profile. Right now Mastodon is just enjoying people with similar interests, sharing what I am doing and reading about what they are doing. I'll try not to bore them with legal posts. But I don't care if they're bored with my scale modeling posts - I gotta be me.
Well, it's the study so I have to post on it.
After almost 18 years with the dark red Pottery Barn slubby silk curtains (with sheers), I finally got new curtains for the study. They are navy blue velvet blackout, with some decorative tassel trim on the vertical edge.
We also raised the R.G. Smith "The Famous Four Minutes" print signed by Dick Best to accommodate the Varidesk, and hung my LBJ and ASU master's diplomas.
I quickly noticed that both monitors were substantially too bright with the light behind them cut down, so they were dropped from 75 – 100% brightness to 55%.
I really like the new look - the contrast of the dark color with the woodwork looks better.
This was a magnificent little book. It focuses on Roosevelt's tenure as Assistant Secretary of the Navy from 1913 to 1919, ending with his nomination to the vice presidency in 1920. It notes that from his earliest days in college he wanted to emulate the career path of his distant cousin Theodore Roosevelt, from Assistant Secretary of the Navy, to Governor of New York, to the White House, and follows his development as a young man and a young politician in Albany to Washington, where he saw firsthand the work necessary to prepare and lead a nation at war.
I have read numerous biographies of FDR, but none that expressly focused on the education he was receiving in playing a significant role in Pres. Woodrow Wilson's administration. FDR's office was next to his chief, Sec. of the Navy Josephus Daniels and only a short walk across the street from the West Wing of the White House, where cousin Theodore had moved the president's administrative offices only a few years earlier.
In fact the exterior of the West Wing shown in this picture I had taken on what is still called the Navy Steps is (despite extensive renovations during FDR's tenure) is still that that was there when FDR worked in Room 278 of what was called the State, War & Navy building (ignore the parapet FDR added - he was hoping Congress would) under Daniels.
The book is a very insightful analysis of FDR's decisionmaking process - good and bad - as a young politician, but its strength is pointing out the experiences he had that helped foreshadow what he would do as president when faced with similar challenges to those he saw Wilson face in 1914-1919. Of course at the time FDR was looking backwards towards his Uncle Ted's tenure in the office and how he could use the office to similarly promote his subsequent political career. But what he took from the experience of watching Wilson would in the end play a much larger role in FDR's management of World War II and the creation of a postwar international organization.
One point I'd never seen mentioned before was when Roosevelt was confronted with the absolute need to arm merchant vessels in face of Germany's decision to begin unrestricted submarine warfare. His problem was that the ships could not purchase the necessary ordnance, and the Navy could not provide it to them. FDR's solution was to have the Navy "lend" the necessary ordnance to the civilian vessels. Although Daniels and Wilson eventually decided against even this halfway measure (I think - on rereading I am not certain what happened to the proposal) it may have been in Roosevelt's mind over 20 years later when he came up with Lend-Lease.
Any treatment of FDR in 1916-1918 must include a treatment of his relationship with Lucy Mercer, but the book's is remarkably slender. It spends less than four pages on the issue, but only because there is so little to draw conclusions from. And because it bears little relationship to the larger issues the book is concerned with. In the end, Roosevelt - confronted by his wife and his mother - reluctantly made the decision that stopped the relationship before it hampered his political career. That he restarted it 25 years later is a subject for another book.
On a recent New York Times recommended reading list is a new legal thriller – this time set in Marshall and featuring a (fictional) local patent lawyer. I thought readers might like a review from a local perspective.
The book is a murder mystery set in Marshall, and features a native Marshallite (and former law clerk) who works as local counsel in the burgeoning patent docket. So the three things you might want to know are (1) how close is the book’s EDTX patent docket, compared to the real thing; (2) how close is the book’s Marshall, compared to the real thing; and (3) is it a good read?
Authors of fiction have the privilege of altering reality when selecting the setting for their book. For example, Jake Tapper’s recent political thriller posited a world where vacancies in the U.S. House of Representatives are filled by appointment by governors. That allowed him to install an unusually politically inexperienced congressman as required for the plot of his book.
Similarly, here, either because he didn’t consult sufficiently with a patent lawyer or decided for his own reasons to alter the structure of the local patent docket, Hartstone created a docket where patent venue can be established wherever a single act of patent infringement has occurred, and the entire Eastern District of Texas consists of a single district judge presiding over a court where jurors are drawn exclusively from the citizens of Marshall Texas, which he assumes would mean six high school degrees between eight jurors, with at least one not only illiterate but vocal about it. So when the courtroom deputy came up one copy of the court’s instructions short in a patent trial, Juror Number Three tells the judge not to worry about it because “I can’t read none anyway.” Uh, not quite.
Hartstone’s EDTX docket originated with judge-created patent rules, which is accurate enough, but he departs from the real district by characterizing the docket as being based on EDTX jurors awarding “ungodly sums of money” which he attributes to jurors “who are overlooked for their entire lives” being given a modicum of power. In truth, local patent verdicts tend to skew low – not the 20x what the (fictional) plaintiff asks for, establishing the docket. The reason the EDTX docket started out with 18 straight plaintiff wins in the early 2000s had nothing to do with the jurors, but with the defense trial teams from patent prosecution shops who simply didn’t know how to try a lawsuit before a jury compared to the former personal injury lawyers that were representing plaintiffs. By 2006 they had figured this out, and ever since verdicts have been almost exactly even, with some years (2007 and 2013 come to mind) representing bloodbaths for plaintiffs. In general, the district portrayed in the book is the district portrayed in the recurring hatchet jobs about the Eastern District in the popular and legal media – right down to the skating rink “that Samsung put up.” Locals know better – in fact I was the city commissioner that moved approval of budget for the city purchasing and installing a skating rink for our Wonderland festival two decades ago - years before Samsung knew that Marshall was spelled with two “l”s.
The portrayal of what local counsel do is also a little off - we rarely get to close, and no lawyer in Harrison County has ever stood in front of a local jury and said “Go Mavericks”. Why? Because whether it is a state court jury chosen from the citizens of Harrison County, or a federal court jury chosen from six counties, Marshall is only one of many high schools in the area, and the quickest way to piss off anybody locally is to make a derogatory comment about their high school. But, again, the book assumes that both federal and state juries are chosen only from the residents of the city of Marshall, so the above doesn't apply. And that actually enhances a few plot points, so, again, I’m not certain that the author – a screenwriter – didn’t deliberately simplify the judicial system for his own dramatic purposes, building in a local bias. Which, again, is completely legit. I just mind when Congressmen do it.
But for purposes of the book it is a distinction without a difference, since while I was expecting Hartstone to base the novel on a patent infringement case, and the supposed predilections of local jurors in federal court, which is what he initially seemed to be laying the groundwork for (and knowing the shows he’s written for it seemed likely) the novel goes in a completely different direction.
Thus while the novel’s characterization of practice in federal court - with banging of gavels and multiple fistfights in court and f-bombs lobbed at district judges by lawyers and litigants alike - is quite entertaining, if something less than accurate, the action quickly moves out of federal court.
Okay, no book about Marshall that was written without someone from Marshall looking over the author’s shoulder is going to be perfect, but this one is pretty damn close. Hartstone has clearly never actually been to Marshall (he repeatedly refers to the Confederate soldier statue on the square as bronze, and makes a mistaken topographical assumption that will become important later) but he gets the big things right – how much we know about each other, how far back experiences and disputes go, and how important high school football is. I particularly enjoyed his illustration of just how much of a jackass someone in a small town can be. It's a full-time job for some people. Sometimes an inherited position. And characters repeatedly identify with and relate back to incidents in high school football, and that’s exactly how we are. I was walking the first New York Times reporter around town 20 years ago and told him that the right question would start a 15 minute story about the late 1980s and early 1990s Marshall football teams – and not just the one that won the state championship in 1990, but the one built around Odell Beckham a few years earlier. (Like my dad, Odell went on to play football at LSU, and later had a son who played football too). Hartstone knows where the closest federal correctional facility is, what the hotels are, and if he doesn’t describe the downtown parking arrangements around the courthouse with complete accuracy (to say nothing of the security ones), it becomes clear later in the book that he needs a specific setting for his plot. And no, the old courthouse courtroom doesn’t have mahogany floors, but it is a terrific place to try a lawsuit.
So points for a pretty accurate depiction of the town, even if the constant references between fictional Marshallites to the “old Harrison County Courthouse” and the “main/town square” are a little grating. (It’s the “old courthouse” and “the square”).
One other thing. Every book club in town is interested in who the characters “really are”. It is to the author's credit that it is absolutely plain that none are based on a real person. Clearly the judge at the beginning of the story did the same thing that Judge Ward did in 2000 coming up with patent local rules, but neither that character nor any of the others bear any similarity to any of the judges or lawyers that I know either in federal or state court. Which isn’t surprising – Hartstone is an experienced screenwriter and didn’t develop the story by coming to Marshall and talking to local lawyers and judges and then lightly fictionalizing a story about a case. He came up with a story and characters, and realized the story could grow out of a setting he’d heard about from patent lawyer friends. It's not a story about the patent docket per se.
So how good is the actual story? I read it three weeks ago when our family was on vacation. I downloaded the morning we started one of two half-day tours in Vienna, and stayed up till almost 3 am to finish it.
As I said, Marshall and the federal patent docket is only the setting for the beginning of the story. After that, you’re in a small Southern town familiar as a legal thriller setting for generations, and your attention is on the characters and the plot twists. And that’s what kept me up half the night finishing the book – I just couldn’t put it down until I knew whodunit.
And it was only at the end that I figured out why the story wasn’t making sense to me – it was because I’m too Marshall. The plot of the story places particular emphasis on the local counsel’s office at the corner of Franklin and Bowie, and what could be seen of the federal courthouse from there. But I could never get past that - because that was my Aunt Toddy’s house. She was actually the aunt of a friend of my dad’s, but I grew up mowing her yard, and when after she passed her home became everyone’s favorite downtown restaurant, it was actually where my wife and I had our first date. And I knew you can't see the back door of the federal courthouse from there.
I finally figured out that the author had assumed there was a line of sight from the fictional law office to the back door of the courthouse. And there would have been, had the topography not resulted in a drop of several dozen feet between the courthouse square which, as locals know, is on the hill where in 1843 Peter Whetstone pulled out his whiskey jug and proceeded to get the commissioners deciding where to site the new town so drunk they decided to call it a day and put the town square on Whetstone's property.
So yes, I highly recommend it. But not for the patent docket or local counsel aspect. That’s just where the story starts.
There hasn't been a comprehensive biography of Fleet Adm. Nimitz since Craig Symonds' mentor E.B. Potter wrote Nimitz in 1976 - and this isn't it either. Instead, Symonds has written an account of Nimitz' command leadership during the Pacific War, leaving out, except where a look back is necessary, Nimitz' prewar career.
As a result, the book focuses on what readers are most interested in – what did Nimitz do during the war, why, and what effect did it have on the course of the war?
I am familiar with Symonds' prior work – I have read and listened to his book on Midway multiple times, as well as his his overall book on the history of the war at sea, and had the pleasure of meeting and conversing with him at length about Midway and Dick Best at the 2019 World War II symposium in New Orleans, where I brought first editions of all his books, which he was kind enough to sign. I don't mean the battle of Midway, by the way – I mean the movie Midway where we compared impressions on the historical accuracy of the movie. He was, as you might expect, less enthusiastic than I was, although I recall we both would have loved to see Dick Best's reaction to his movie portrayal.
This is the point where I usually complain that I had a problem because I was reading the book at the same time I was reading another book on the same subject. I didn't have that problem here – I'm actually watching Prof. Symonds' lectures on the Pacific war through a Great Courses program, so I had the benefit of hearing his voice as I was reading his words – it might as well have been an audiobook.
But it is a very good addition to the literature on an extraordinary individual, and I highly recommend it. The Potter book is good for background, but it was nice not to have to slog through the long peacetime career.
This was my second read of this interesting little book.
Kennedy studies five problems that the Allies faced in World War II, from how to get convoys safely across the Atlantic, to winning command of the air, stopping a blitzkrieg, seizing and enemy-held shore, and defeating the "tyranny of distance". He explains the role that engineers played in solving each of the problems. It's a good story - as usual it suffers when I am simultaneously reading other more global accounts of the war which slice the issue differently. I think a reader who was not reading something else on the same subject at the same time would probably enjoy this more than I did. As it was, I was reading parts of the same story in at least two and at times three books at the same time, which I am learning is not conducive to an enjoyable experience with the book
I knew I'd be interested in the topic, but not "this" interested. 33 years ago my professional report (LBJ lingo for master's thesis) was on the American vice president, with a preceding paper on the "accidental presidencies."
Admittedly I focused on the 20th century accidental presidents, but even so, Cohen's book brimmed with things that I did not know. I knew nothing about the very interesting presidential accessions in the 19th century, and given that they occurred approximately 20 years apart for 120 years it was interesting to see how the same figures actually played a part in more than one transition.
Terrific book on the White House in the 19th century, and on the many stories surrounding the 20th century presidential deaths and offices well. I learned a lot about the Harding to Coolidge transition that I did not know, as well as some excellent commentary on what Lyndon Johnson didn't do right in the author's view. But, again, the best part of the book was in the highly entertaining accounts of the transitions and personalities in the 19th century. I will never look at John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, James Garfield or Chester Arthur the same again.
