Legal Research

New Game to Annoy People in Blogland

By Michel-Adrien Sheppard

Many people may remember the “meme” that went around the blogosphere about a year ago, something called Five Things You Didn’t Know About Me.

The idea was simple: reveal 5 pieces of information that people might not know about you and then contact other people to contribute. A bit like a chain letter. But much more fun in terms of time wastage.

Well, there is a new meme zipping around the Net: open the nearest book to page 123, go down to the 5th sentence and type up the 3 following sentences. Then, pass the message along to other people you want to invite to contribute to the game.

If someone decided to follow this from the beginning of the chain and put together all the sentences, this could turn out to be a variation of the Surrealist game known as “Cadavres exquis”.

Anyway, here is my contribution. Actually, I thought we can put a legal research twist on the game. Take one book on a legal topic and one book on a non-legal topic.

1) legal topic from Jeffrey Miller, Ardor in the Court: Sex and the Law, ECW Press, Toronto, 2002 (p.123 describes a California court case against the punk rock group The Dead Kennedy’s art work for their awesome unforgettable album Frankenchrist): “Penis Landscape is a painting by the Swiss artist H.R. Giger, who, in 1979, won an Oscar for his art direction on the movie Aliens. According to news reports, the painting depicts ten interacting ’sets of male and female genitalia’ and has been exhibited in several European museums. But when Mary Sierra found a copy of it in her 14-year-old daughter’s room, inside the cover of Frankenchrist, she was not carried away with its aesthetic and semiotic correlatives”. OK, that was weird, but that’s the idea: total randomness produces often surprising results.

2) and now I lean over to the nearest bookshelf and grab the first book on a non-legal topic. It is from Robert A. Donnelly, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Statistics , Alpha, Indianapolis, 2004 (p. 123 is the beginning of the chapter on the ‘Poisson Probability Distribution’, ouch!): “Now that we have mastered the binomial probability distribution, we are ready to move on to the next discrete theoretical distribution, the Poisson. This probability distribution is named after Simeon Poisson, a French mathematician who developed the distribution during the early 1800s. The Poisson distribution is useful for calculating the probability that a certain number of events will occur over a specific period of time.” Yeah, right! I knew that! :)

Anyone want to be next?

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on February 13, 2008 (boomark / email).