An unexpected part of my bathroom renovation. I removed the trim around the door and the drywall settled — some of it jutted out more than a quarter-inch. Thank goodness I’ve got all those clamps for my boat. Just tightened them up (using a pair of channel locks on the handles) and squeezed the drywall back to its rightful place.

Just got to install the fixtures and paint the trim, and I’ll be done.

Then, I’ll start fairing the boat and covering the bottom with plywood.

Today’s Wikipedia reading: Crystal Skulls.

Great piece on John Yoo in Esquire. As a member of the White House, he helped shape much of Bush’s views on presidential powers:

Yoo’s analysis hinges on the Declare War Clause. Most scholars — most people — believe it was intended to give Congress power to decide whether to go to war and that the founders saw this as an essential bulwark against tyranny. Yoo makes a case that it was really meant as a formal recognition of wars already under way, and the founders intended the real bulwark against tyranny to be Congress’s power of the purse. “Several times every year, Congress has a chance to vote on funding the Iraq war,” he keeps telling me. “It’s an amazing power — if 51 percent of them refuse to vote for it, the war is over.”

Abraham Lincoln is Yoo’s best argument. Congress had already passed a statute laying out an explicit legal procedure for freeing slaves, but Lincoln ignored the law and freed the slaves under his “unilateral executive authority in wartime as commander in chief to take measures necessary to win a war,” as Yoo puts it. Lincoln used the same grounds to suspend habeas corpus, a right the Constitution explicitly grants to Congress. If you really believe that Yoo is all wrong and the unitary-executive theory completely false, you kind of have to say Lincoln behaved like a tyrant.

Good point. His views are shaped by Truman’s actions in the Korean War — Yoo and his family were an obvious beneficiary of that president’s unilateral action.

Yoo teaches law at Berkeley, a campus where his views aren’t widely embraced. Here’s a funny bit:

The anger is often directed at him. Protesters in Guantánamo orange have disrupted his class and dogged him in public forums. I talked to another Berkeley law professor who refuses to attend faculty meetings with him. “Until he atones,” he said, “I don’t want to be in the same room with him.” But Yoo shrugs it all off. He likes living among liberals, he says. “Liberals from the sixties do a great job of creating all the comforts of life — gourmet food, specialty jams, the best environmentally conscious waters.”

Wow, I’d never thought of that. As a big fan of Trader Joe’s and Stoneyfield Yogurt, I’d like to officially thank the nation’s liberals.

Had trouble reaching my oatmeal on the top shelf, so I just glued a box of Everlasting Gobstoppers to its side.

Great reader on the concept of “brand equity“:

The coffee brand? Perhaps you recall its advertising slogan: “Fill it to the rim — with Brim!” Those ads haven’t been shown in years, and Brim itself has been off retail shelves since the 1990s. Yet depending on how old you are, there’s a fair chance that there’s some echo of the Brim brand in your brain. That’s no surprise, given that from 1961 to around 1995, General Foods spent tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars to get it there. But General Foods disappeared into the conglomerate now known as Altria, which also acquired Kraft, maker of Maxwell House. With much smaller sales than that megabrand, Brim soon disappeared — except, perhaps, for a vague idea of Brim that lingered, and lingers even now, in the minds of millions of consumers.

What’s that worth? A small company in Chicago, called River West Brands, figures that it’s definitely worth something, and possibly quite a lot. The firm did its own research a year or so ago and claims that among people over the age of 25, Brim had 92 percent “aided national awareness.” What this means is that if you ask people anywhere in America if they have ever heard of Brim, about 9 out of 10 will say yes. If true, that’s potentially a big deal. Building that level of recognition for a new brand of coffee — or anything else — from scratch would involve an astronomical amount of money, a great deal of time, or both.

Yeah, I’m one of the nine. It was decaf coffee — that’s why you could fill it to the rim — no risk of jitters. Thanks for brainwashing me, General Foods.

The AT&T U-Verse install guy just left. I now have TV and Internet through AT&T. Comcast is coming to pick up their crap-laden equipment later this week.

I’m no shill blogger, but U-Verse is awesome. I didn’t expect my picture quality to improve, but it did — dramatically. (AT&T uses fiber-optic lines, so it’s a far superior signal.) I also now have the ability to set my DVR through the Internet — so if I read about a good show online, I can set up a recording right from my laptop. I’m also getting about 30 more channels than before including BBC America and ESPN U. The service also comes with wireless Internet for the whole house — and their broadcaster is about 800 percent better than my store-bought one.

All of this for $20 a month cheaper than Comcast. How are they going to compete with this?

By the way, it feels good to fulfill my Comcast vow.

The Wikipedia entry on parapsychology makes for good reading.

I haven’t seen the film, but I agree with the sentiment from the opening credits.

Watch this video from two Obama speeches. Looks like Hillary’s not the only candidate who likes to bend the truth for a little self-aggrandizement.

My yoga instructor Kimberly Kirby published an op-ed in the Marietta newspaper today on the processed foods served in our school cafeterias:

(Food and Nutrition Services) proudly proclaims that its elementary schools do not have fryers. But, a quick scan of a typical month’s school menu will reveal nearly a daily offering of fried foods, including several days of shrimp poppers, tater tots and corn dogs. How to reconcile FNS’s proclamation with the reality of the lunchroom? By recognizing what FNS fails to say: that these lunch foods had their appointment with the fryer long before arriving at the schools, leaving the cafeteria workers with the simple task of re-heating.

FNS also touts that they will serve what children are willing to buy. While nobody can argue that one function of school is to help children develop independence, there are certainly limits that we can all agree on. For instance, do we let the children decide what they will study at school? Math or Playstation II? We have adults as teachers because with age there is wisdom, expertise and maturity. However, FNS discounts these attributes and chooses instead to defer to the impressionable taste buds of children as young as 5.

Great points. I’m also struck by the fact that my kids can buy Doritos and Gatorade at school. Here’s my comment I left on the newspaper Web site:

Well said, Kimberly. Consider me another parent concerned about what we’re feeding our kids in the Cobb County public schools.

To claim that parents don’t care what their kids eat seems preposterous given the local popularity of grocery stores such as Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods and Harry’s Farmers Markets. Clearly, a growing number of Cobb County resident are changing the way they eat. We’ve realized that the country started putting on collective weight at about the same time we all started eating processed foods.

Since we teach kids how to eat healthy food in the classrooms, perhaps we should start feeding them healthy food in the lunchroom.