Wednesday, April 09, 2008 - Posts
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Here's my favorite news story from this morning's batch: The New York condo smoking suit has been settled. I did an introductory item on this two months ago when the suit was first reported. Basically, the plaintiffs accused the defendant of letting smoke seep out from her apartment, around a closed door, and into the hallway, where it allegedly endangered the health of their child. The story has several juicy angles, including that both members of the plaintiff couple are lawyers and that the defendant is named Huff. According to the New York Times, the plaintiffs also accused the defendant of "encouraging her Chihuahua to urinate on their son's stroller in retaliation for their complaints." Evidently unable to refrain from putting his worst thoughts in writing, the lawyer-plaintiff husband added an e-mail message to the Times, stating, "I am confident you will find a way to make us look like terrible people all over again for insisting on such an onerous thing." The Times duly reprinted it.
I've been amazed by the speed and scope of the worldwide crackdown on smoking. In this case, I'm particularly sympathetic to the defendant, since she lived in the building 10 years before the plaintiffs arrived. On the other hand, I regard smoking as equivalent to constant farting, except for the fact that farting—apart from its carbon footprint (buttprint?)—doesn't harm anyone else.
So how did the case settle? Apparently, initial reports of the suit prompted a company to offer a free air-filtering system. Ms. Huff has "agreed to use the donated air filters and a smokeless ashtray, which is all we ever asked her to do," the plaintiff husband explains. Technology to the rescue again! And since the filtration company offered its goods and services gratis, let's make sure it gets the publicity it was angling for all along: http://www.aerusonline.com/.
Now for the really interesting question. Which is worse: smokers or lawyers? My answer is that it depends how far they're standing from you. Lawyers can make a lot more trouble by phone, mail, and electronic text. But for companionship in close quarters, I'll take a lawyer any day. In fact, I already did so, nine years ago, when I got married. So don't send your smoke under my front door, or you'll have to answer to my lawyer.
Outdoors is another matter. If, after this post appears in Slate, you find my clothes and furniture out in front of our house, feel free to park on the sofa and enjoy a cigarette.
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My wife gave me grief a couple of days ago for sending a link to Slate's home page that, when clicked, took people to the Human Nature home page and ultimately to plain old headlines. She was expecting something I'd written instead of something I'd linked to.
I see her point. Let me explain what I'm trying to do, and I'll keep looking for ways to improve it. I'm trying to use the new headline-only links—here for News, and here for Hot Topics—to flag stories I find really interesting. I can't blog or write pieces on all these stories, but I do a lot of scouring and weeding to select them. You don't have to click on any of them if you don't want to. But if you're looking for cool stuff on any given day, I think you'll generally find them the most efficient way to get it.
The thing I'm getting a sense of as I tinker with the new format is that people expect to hear my voice. I'm a bit reluctant to push my voice into everything. By and large, the Internet, and the blogosphere in particular, is way too full of people opining rapidly, ignorantly, and thoughtlessly. I don't want to add to that problem. If possible, I'd like to help rectify it. That's part of why I wrote the old Human Nature news items the way I did: I wanted to lay out the evidence and arguments without injecting my instant opinion all the time. Eventually, I gave in and started adding a line here or there.
I set up this blog in part to create a space for this kind of informal thinking out loud. I'll try to make sense of things. Often, I'll get it wrong, and that'll be OK, as long as you and I keep working to correct the errors and improve the thinking. The lesson I'm going to draw from my wife's complaint, for the time being, is that when I post new headlines to the News and Hot Topics pages, I should write a blog post announcing them and saying at least a little bit about them. So the blog can be the place where a human voice (mine) introduces you to what's new each day. And you and I can take it from there.
Got a better idea? Let's hear it.
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