My favorite part of the newspaper is the comics.  I personally like Calvin and Hobbes, but that one hasn’t been in the papers for about fifteen years.  I settle for the “news of the weird” stuff these days.  You know, stuff like “Kitten Rescues Family from Burning Home” or “SWAT Team Requested for Violent Midgets” that makes you chuckle for a few seconds.  (The name of the newspaper in the second article is one letter away from The Onion, which made me do a double-take.  It’s just good to know the police are available to take care of even small problems.)

Sometimes, they involve crazy lawsuits that make you scratch your head and curse lawyers.  You don’t read a lot of these cases in law school, since by definition “the crazy lawsuits” aren’t really good for demonstrating an awful lot of law or legal theory.  But they’re still hilarious in their own right.  For instance, Destructoid has an article about a lawsuit filed by a man who claims the creators of a video game made it “too addictive.”  Scoff!

Cindy Cohn, the legal director at the EFF, has written a wonderful review of the Google-Verizon deal that seems to have the entire internet aflutter.  If you’ve never heard of the EFF, rest assured that they’ve worked tirelessly to advance civil liberties on the internet before any of us had even heard of the internet.

I had the good fortune to meet Ms. Cohn this past Spring; she’s remarkably brilliant, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find a more cogent analysis of the Google-Verizon deal from a net-neutrality perspective than the EFF’s take.

Google has recently struck a deal with Verizon: I think they’re both hedging their bets in case this whole “Net Neutrality” thing doesn’t pan out.  Google managed to wring out of Verizon a promise to leave the “regular” internet open, but the mobile internet (which is increasingly becoming “the internet”) is apparently fair game for all manner of tiered services.  Reaction to this agreement has been varied; Epicenter has a nice roundup of the varied op-eds from around the blagonet.  [Click a Doodle Doo]

Fresh off the testgasm known as the New York Bar Exam, I’m visiting my folks in the Deep South: Atlanta.  Everyone’s unflappably friendly here, but I’m convinced they’re secretly trying to kill me with pulled pork and racks of barbecued ribs.  The thing is, the folks down here don’t pretend this stuff is even remotely healthy.  They just let the food speak for itself.

As far as I can tell, three pounds of slow-cooked porcine perfection doesn’t scream “healthy choice.”  There’s something to be said for letting me make up my mind about whether I want to live to see 40.

Now, this Vitamin Water stuff, that’s a pig of a whole different color.  There’s an article on the Huffington Post about a recent lawsuit against Coca-Cola over false advertising for Vitamin Water.  John Robbins completely misses the boat by calling Coca-Cola’s defense “a staggering feat of twisted logic,” when it’s actually a perfectly mundane and unremarkable legal defense.  To explain, it’s best to start at the beginning.