2 more days

life has been crazy lately = no blog posts.

Today was in Court in Warrnambool - 3 1/2 hours each way from Melbourne. Drove up last night. A very very long day today; in Court, won the case, drove back, preparing for Court tomorrow in a long-running clothes counterfeiting case.

M and I leave in 2 days on our honeymoon.
Israel
Greece
Turkey
Italy
The Netherlands
Belgium
England
China

yay

Fascinating article about Milberg Weiss

I read this article in Fortune quite a while ago and have just come across it again. Absolutely fascinating.

The Brillo-haired Lerach, 60, who bitterly split with Weiss in 2004, taking Milberg's San Diego-based West Coast operation along with him in a new firm, owns a home in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif., and vacation properties in Steamboat Springs, Colo., and Hawaii. Lerach travels the country in a chartered jet, says his exercise is drinking Scotch, and will be married this month for the fourth time, to a partner at his firm.

When police showed up at 20563 Beachwood Drive in Rocky River, Ohio, an upscale Cleveland suburb, they were probably expecting to find just another domestic dispute. It was about 4 p.m. on Aug. 22,1996, and a 37-year-old woman named Pamela Davis had reported that her boyfriend had assaulted her, bloodying her mouth.

What the officers were not expecting was the dizzying tale that Davis began telling. She identified her attacker as James "J.J." Little, an attorney with Arter & Hadden, the big Cleveland firm. She said she'd met Little five months earlier at a bar and that although she was still married and had a young son, she and Little planned on tying the knot in December. She explained that Little had a $1,000-a-week crack habit, that it wasn't the first time Little had struck her, that one time she'd ended up in the emergency room, that Little was usually "a very gentle man," that she didn't really want to press charges, and that she was three months' pregnant with his child.

Lerach signed on in 1976, opening Milberg's California office in San Diego. He was ferocious and creative, and worked like a madman, building "Milberg West" into an operation that competed with the New York office for influence and profits. His special target was Silicon Valley companies, whose volatile stocks made them juicy prey; he transformed Milberg into a lucrative volume business that churned out scores of class actions a year. This business model allowed him to settle cases when he wanted; if defense lawyers didn't buckle, he'd simply cash in on another lawsuit and continue to torment their clients.

A favorite Lerach tactic was to scream at CEOs, telling one: "I'm going to take away your f***ing condo in Maui! I'm going to take away every penny you own!" Milberg sued several companies repeatedly - 3Com (Charts) nine times. T.J. Rodgers, CEO of Cypress Semiconductor (Charts), called him "lower than pond scum."

Nine out of ten cases did settle. Companies reasoned that paying up was safer and cheaper than going to trial, since insurance companies paid most of the settlement bill. On average, investors recovered only about 15 cents of every lost dollar, while Milberg Weiss routinely pocketed millions. Weiss and Lerach saw their personal takes soar from $3.4 million apiece in 1990 to $16 million in 1995. During the 1990s, both men earned more than $100 million. Bitter executives came to view it all as an extortion racket - they called it getting "Lerached."

Myspace photobucket acquisition

It appears the News Corp (through MySpace) is acquiring photobucket - it has not been officially announced as yet but the price is said to be between US$250m - US$350m [presumably details will become clear in time].

A few thoughts:

- a good defensive acquisition; there is a huge crossover of users and this enables tight integration between the services

- the acquisition will cement News' interactive properties as a leading web desination; photobucket has a huge number of enthusiastic users

- if photobucket's video service expands then this could significantly reduce myspace's reliance on youtube for videos

- nevertheless it will not deliver significant 'present day' revenue to News Corp; and US$250m+ is a significant sum to pay simply for 'eyeballs' and 'integration'

- it is worth remembering that $250m+ is getting towards half of what News paid for MySpace and its associated businesses a year ago... with at least 2 implications (both of which are probably reasonably obvious):
* MySpace is now worth very substantially more than News paid for it;
* Web acquisition valuations are presently looking very very stretched by any traditional valuation methodology. And last time traditional methodologies were thrown out the window it turned out very badly for all concerned [except for vendors who were paid in cash or who promptly converted their shares to cash].

My solution (one which I believe News Corp has specifically rejected) is that News should sell a signficant minority stake in its online division, either to private equity or via a stockmarket float. This would validate the valuations (if this were thought to be useful) and would also provide a huge warchest [of other people's money!] to be used to further build the division.

PKD article in NYT

The New York Times has a (fairly lengthy) article on one of my favourite authors, Phillip K Dick. I really should write a full-length post on him sometime soon. The article is a little derivative of things I've previously read about PKD (and a little obvious: it doesn't really break through the surface of who/what PKD was), but it's nevertheless a good read.

I've set the full article out below.


A Prince of Pulp, Legit at Last

ARTICLE By CHARLES McGRATH
Published: May 6, 2007

ALL his life the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick yearned for what he called the mainstream. He wanted to be a serious literary writer, not a sci-fi hack whose audience consisted, he once said, of “trolls and wackos.” But Mr. Dick, who popped as many as 1,000 amphetamine pills a week, was also more than a little paranoid. In the early ’70s, when he had finally achieved some standing among academic critics and literary theorists — most notably the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem — he narced on them all, writing a letter to the F.B.I. in which he claimed they were K.G.B. agents trying to take over American science fiction.

With his inquiries of reality and what it means to be human, Mr. Dick’s influence extends into science and technology. Left, a Dick android developed by a roboticist.
Joseph Lederer/Paramount

Nicolas Cage and Julianne Moore star in “Next,” taken from “The Golden Man,” the latest Hollywood adaptation of a Dick story.

So it’s hard to know what Mr. Dick, who died in 1982 at the age of 53, would have made of the fact that this month he has arrived at the pinnacle of literary respectability. Four of his novels from the 1960s — “The Man in the High Castle,” “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch,” “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” and “Ubik” — are being reissued by the Library of America in that now-classic Hall of Fame format: full cloth binding, tasseled bookmark, acid-free, Bible-thin paper. He might be pleased, or he might demand to know why his 40-odd other books weren’t so honored. And what about the “Exegesis,” an 8,000-page journal that derived a sort of Gnostic theology from a series of religious visions he experienced during a couple of months in 1974? A wary, hard-core Dickian might argue that the Library of America volume is just a diversion, an attempt to turn a deeply subversive writer into another canonical brand name.

Another thing that would probably amuse and annoy Mr. Dick in about equal measure are the exceptional number of movies that have been made from his work, starting with “Blade Runner” (adapted from “Do Androids Dream”), 25 years old this year and available in the fall on a special “final cut” DVD. The newest, “Next,” taken from a short story, “The Golden Man,” starring Nicolas Cage as a magician able to see into the future and Julianne Moore as an F.B.I. agent eager to enlist his help, opened just last month. In the works is a biopic starring Paul Giamatti, who bears more than a passing physical resemblance to the author, who by the end of his life had the doughy look of a guy who didn’t spend a lot of time in the daylight.

Mr. Dick died while “Blade Runner” was still in production, already unhappy about the shape the script was taking, though not the kind of money he hoped to realize. “Blade Runner” is probably the best of the Dick movies, if not the most faithful. (That honor probably belongs to “A Scanner Darkly,” released last year, in which Richard Linklater’s semi-animated technique suggests some of the feel of a graphic novel.)

There’s no reason to think Mr. Dick would have approved any more of the others, especially “Total Recall,” in which Quail, the nerdish hero of Mr. Dick’s story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” turns into Quaid, a buffed-up Arnold Schwarzenegger character. Meanwhile, as several critics have noted, movies like the “Matrix” series, “The Truman Show” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” though not based on Dick material, still seem to contain his spark, and dramatize more vividly than some of the official Dick projects his essential notion that reality is just a construct or, as he liked to say, a forgery. It’s as if his imaginative DNA had spread like a virus.

Part of why Mr. Dick’s work appeals so much to moviemakers is his pulpish sensibility. He grew up in California reading magazines like Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories and Fantastic Universe, and then, after dropping out of the University of California, Berkeley, began writing for them, often in manic 20-hour sessions fueled by booze and speed. He could type 120 words a minute, and told his third wife (third of five, and there were countless girlfriends: Mr. Dick loved women but was hell to live with), “The words come out of my hands, not my brain, I write with my hands.”

His early novels, written in two weeks or less, were published in double-decker Ace paperbacks that included two books in one, with a lurid cover for each. “If the Holy Bible was printed as an Ace Double,” an editor once remarked, “it would be cut down to two 20,000-word halves with the Old Testament retitled as ‘Master of Chaos’ and the New Testament as ‘The Thing With Three Souls.’ ”

So for the most part you don’t read Mr. Dick for his prose. (The main exception is “The Man in the High Castle,” his most sustained and most assured attempt at mainstream respectability, and it’s barely a sci-fi book at all but, rather, what we would now call a “counterfactual”; its premise is that the Allies lost World War II and the United States is ruled by the Japanese in the west and the Nazis in the east.) Nor do you read him for the science, the way you do, say, Isaac Asimov or Robert Heinlein.

Mr. Dick was relatively uninterested in the futuristic, predictive side of science fiction and embraced the genre simply because it gave him liberty to turn his imagination loose. Except for the odd hovercar or rocket ship, there aren’t many gizmos in his fiction, and many of his details are satiric, like the household appliances in “Ubik” that demand to be fed with coins all the time, or put-ons, like the bizarre clownwear that is apparently standard office garb in the same book (which is set in 1992, by the way; so much for Dick the prophet): “natty birch-bark pantaloons, hemp-rope belt, peekaboo see-through top, and train engineer’s tall hat.”

To a considerable extent Mr. Dick’s future is a lot like our present, except a little grungier. Everything is always running down or turning into what one of the characters in “Do Androids Dream” calls “kipple”: junk like match folders and gum wrappers that doubles itself overnight and fills abandoned apartments. This sense of entropy and decline is what Ridley Scott evokes so well in “Blade Runner,” with its seedy, rainy streetscapes, and what Steven Spielberg misses in his slightly schizoid “Minority Report,” in which Tom Cruise waves his hands at that glass console, as if it were a room-size Wii system.

The theme of “Minority Report” — pre-cognition, or the idea that certain people, “precogs,” can foresee the future, with not always happy results — was an idea that Mr. Dick began exploring in the mid-’50s, along with themes of altered or repressed memory, which became the subject of “Total Recall,” “Impostor” and, more recently, John Woo’s “Paycheck.” Most of the Dick-inspired movies come from short stories of this period — several of them, including “The Golden Man,” written in the space of just a few months.

In the ’60s Mr. Dick turned his energies to novel writing, and with the exception of “Do Androids Dream” (considerably dumbed down in “Blade Runner”) and “A Scanner Darkly” (published in 1977 and, incidentally, the first book Dick wrote without the assistance of drugs) the novels don’t lend themselves so readily to the Hollywood imagination.

That’s because they’re much harder to reduce to a single concept or plot line. Three of the novels collected in the Library of America volume — “Do Androids Dream,” “The Three Stigmata” and “Ubik — are arguably Mr. Dick’s best. (Some diehards hold out for “VALIS,” his last major work, but that’s really his “Finnegans Wake” — a book more fun to talk about than to read.) All three are less gimmicky than the stories and are preoccupied with two big questions that became his obsession: How do we know what is real, and how do we know what is human? For all I know, you could be a robot, or maybe I am, merely preprogrammed to think of myself as a person, and this thing we call reality might be just a collective hallucination.

This kind of speculation — the stuff of so many hazy, bong-fed dorm-room bull sessions — takes on genuine interest in Mr. Dick’s writing because he means it and because he invests the outcome with longing. His characters, like Rick Deckard, the android-chasing bounty hunter in “Do Androids Dream,” desperately want something authentic to believe in, and the books suggest that the quality of belief may be more important than the degree of authenticity.

“The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch” and “Ubik,” written five years apart, are in many ways two versions of the same story, one tragic and one mostly comic. The title character of “The Three Stigmata” (1964) is not much to look at — his stigmata are steel teeth, a robotic arm and replacement eyes — but he still possesses Godlike, or perhaps Satanic, powers, and is able, with the help of a drug called Chew-Z, to enmesh people in webs of hallucination, one within another, so slippery and perplexing that even the reader feels a little discombobulated. The book is a horror story of the imagination gone amok.

“Ubik” (1969) is more redemptive. The godlike figure here is an entrepreneur named Glen Runciter, who runs what’s called a “prudence organization”: for a fee, he will debug your company and rid it of “teeps,” or secret-stealing telepaths. He manages to communicate with some of his former employees even when they’re dead and supplies them with a salvific aerosol spray, called Ubik, that appears to at least temporarily resist the tendency of everything to regress backwards to the way it was in 1939. Mr. Dick describes Depression-era artifacts — Philco radios, Curtis Wright biplanes — with great affection, however, and in this book death turns out not to be so bad; it isn’t eternal extinction, but a kind of half-life partly imagined by a restless young man (also dead) named Jory.

Jory is a bit of menace, but Mr. Dick has a soft spot for him as a dreamer and fantasist, as he does in “The Three Stigmata” for the colonists on Mars who, bored silly, like to get stoned and play with their Perky Pat layouts, elaborate Ken and Barbie sets that let them make up nostalgic stories about life on Earth. He also likes to embed in his books still other books, emblems of imaginative possibility, like the novel in “The Man in the High Castle” that postulates an Allied victory.

There is doubtless an autobiographical element to Mr. Dick’s novels; they read like the work of someone who knows from experience what it’s like to hallucinate. Lawrence Sutin, who has written the definitive biography of Mr. Dick, says that he took LSD only a couple of times, and didn’t particularly like it. On the other hand his regular regimen of uppers and downers, gobbled by the handful, was surely sufficient to play tricks with his head, and Mr. Dick worried more than once that he might be turning schizophrenic.

The books aren’t just trippy, though. The best of them are visionary or surreal in a way that American literature, so rooted in reality and observation, seldom is. Critics have often compared Mr. Dick to Borges, Kafka, Calvino. To come up with an American analogue you have to think of someone like Emerson, but nobody would ever dream of looking to him for movie ideas. Emerson was all brain, no pulp.

Tolo TV - Washington Post

The Washington Post has an article today about media freedom in Afghanistan, including coverage of the current Tolo TV controversy.

Last month, a nasty clash erupted between Tolo and the country's attorney general, an aggressive and flamboyant figure who took issue with a video clip of his comments suggesting that certain accused criminals would be executed soon, even though they had not yet been convicted. He accused the TV channel of misquoting him and sent a large squad of police officers to the Tolo offices, where they detained several staffers. The incident set off a high-profile bureaucratic and legal battle that is still playing out.

"Things are going wrong for the government, and they are trying to kill the messenger," said Saad Mohseni, one of three brothers who own Tolo TV. "It is the only sector that is holding the government accountable, but they see any criticism as a direct threat."

The master of the universe?

Interesting counterpoint to the recent Murdoch / Citizen Kane picture. I still think he's the ultimate biopic subject

Tolo TV update

See article from the Afghan Recovery Report, produced by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting.

Mohammad Abdullah, legal advisor to Tolo TV, denies the accusation that the station is partisan.

"It is absolutely untrue that we are taking sides," he said. "We are very careful about balance, accuracy, and fairness in our news. And we do not pick on one group—everyone complains about Tolo."

"Tolo is against Islam," said Mohammad Rahim, 35, a Kabul resident. "The prosecutor did a very good thing. Tolo is always insulting famous people. It goes completely against our culture. When I wake up at 4:30 in the morning and turn on the television, I want to hear a reading of the Koran or other religious programs. But Tolo is dancing at that time."

Another Kabul resident, Rahmin Karimyar, agreed. "If Tolo had no mistake with the news, why were they afraid to go to the prosecutor general's office?" he said. "Most of Tolo's programs are against the government, against the regime. It's okay that we have freedom of speech, but that does not mean that you can say anything you want."

My wedding speech

I FINALLY have my computer back; F***N Volante took about 6 weeks to fix it. Thanks M for lending me your old computer in the interim. Much appreciated.

And very excitingly I have access to my files - so here is what I know you've all been waiting for... my notes for my wedding speech.
Try not to get too excited.
And feel free to skim through the thankyous at the start; the good (or at least better) material is towards the end.
I freestyled a little while up on stage; but I think I kept pretty close to my notes.

Samizdat7's speech at his wedding on 18 March 2007

Thanks
M and I would like to thank a very large number of people. First, our parents for hosting our wedding and for making today possible. My new sister L, who is responsible for our amazing invitations and for so much more. E, T, M, V, P and R for their invaluable help with logistics today. My brother D for his help in making today a success.

L and D for being supportive and beautiful bridesmaids for M. I would like to thank L and A for their speech, and also to note that their time will come. In fact for A it is imminent; she will be married in May. L may keep us waiting a little longer. M and L for their assistance as MCs. M, L, D and D for keeping the Chuppah from blowing away. M, J and D for being called up at Shule with me. And of course I must thank J for bringing M and I together on Cup Day in 2004.

Guests
• D & K from Amsterdam – after travelling more than 40 hours and missing their London connection due to fog– nevertheless I hope that our wedding is a welcome respite from an Amsterdam Winter
• W all the way from Kabul, Afghanistan – I’m sure she’s welcoming the opportunity to leave the bodyguards at home and attend a social function without the presence of an armed militia
• M & M from Tokyo – I haven’t seen you in years and I’m very happy that you could make it here today
• S from Brisbane – thankyou for making it down to Melbourne for our wedding
• A & J, L, M & R, K, J and E & M from Sydney – well the obvious comment is that today they’re being given the opportunity to experience one of the Major Events Melbourne is famous for

My family
• As many of you will know, I have followed my parents into the law. Proof that some people never learn, no matter how clear the lesson.
• I feel very fortunate to have found a profession that I love and in which I hope to build a long career. I thank my parents for giving me the opportunity to obtain an excellent education and for instilling in me a belief in justice, integrity and the importance of reputation.
• My parents are crazy about M; which is fantastic, except when I get the feeling they are much more excited when they hear she is coming to visit than they are when they hear I am coming.
• Thankyou H and T for making today happen and for the love and support shown to me throughout my life.
• Thankyou also to D and his beautiful wife K – I am very very happy that you are able to be here to share this special day with us.

M’s family
• Have been made to feel very welcome both by M’s immediate family and by all of her extended family.
• From the first family function I attended – Pesach at the R’s in 2005 – I have been warmly welcomed.
• When I told S I planned to ask his daughter to marry me at C’s first birthday party last year he avoided the obvious temptation to make me sweat, for which I will be eternally grateful.
• Thankyou all

Commitment
This weekend M & I have made a number of commitments to each other.

In plain English, a form of language for which lawyers often strive but rarely achieve, M I promise that I will love you, that I will be there for you, that I will work with you to solve any problems that come up along our journey and that I will be true to you. And that we will have a lot of fun.

I am so excited about building a happy, Jewish home with you and about creating a family together and of course about the adventures we will have together over the years.

M
Apart from the obvious – that she’s beautiful, smart and a lot of fun – what can I say about M?
• Never met anyone like her
• As you’ve heard, we met on a blind date. Yes it does happen.

• Less than 2 months after we met, M and I headed off together for a holiday in New Zealand. Obviously it was too early in this new relationship to show my true colours, so I said yes to whatever was suggested.
• This explains why on that trip I somehow ended up blackwater rafting, hiking the Tongariro Crossing, kayaking in Able Tasman National Park and staying in a youth hostel for the first time. And not just any youth hostel. For some reason M organised for us to stay at “Extreme Backpackers” in Turangi
• I really should tell you about my blackwater rafting experience on that trip. When M suggested it in the safety of my apartment in Balaclava, I said ‘yes, sounds like a great idea’. Of course I had no real idea what it involved.
As a lifetime claustrophobe, I hadn’t appreciated that blackwater rafting means dressing in a wetsuit and floating for a couple of hours down an underwater river in the inner tube of a truck tyre. In a cave. I think my veneer of cool was somewhat tarnished when I started hyperventilating as I clambered down and realised that the last of the natural light was vanishing somewhere behind me.
Nevertheless, going back (and humiliating myself further) seemed somehow worse than continuing. I made it through the next hour and a half by breathing shallowly and refusing to contemplate what was happening.
Eventually we made it back out. And I announced that never, under no circumstances would I ever be doing anything like it ever again.
• Of course the next year we ended up hiking through Khao Sok National Park in Thailand. A rainforest teeming with life. Dangerous, terrifying wildlife. After a further exploration of the true nature of terror we made it back to our accommodation, which consisted of a treehouse where the wildlife was just slightly further at bay.
Luckily it wasn’t until after we returned to our treehouse that I read more about the park and the leopards, tigers, bears, cobras, pythons, vipers, scorpions, tarantulas and other members of the animal kingdom to be found there.
• M has introduced me to jogging. Despite a couple of years of half-hearted attempts, the highlight of which was a 10km funrun (aka a deathmarch) M has steadfastly refused to make fun of my speed, style or stamina. For which I will always be grateful.

• M has boundless enthusiasm and energy and is the most positive-minded person I’ve ever met.
Despite 2 ½ years of trying, I haven’t yet managed to break her spirit. And I hope I never do.
• It is hard to avoid clichés at a time like this and I’m not going to try too hard; sometimes they really are appropriate.
• M and I are very different but our differences, generally, bring us together.
• She sees the positive side of everything, she loves life, she gets things done and she is incapable of accepting ‘no’ as an answer.
• She encourages and supports me to pursue my passions and embraces my idiosyncracies.
• M's confidence, vitality, optimism, intelligence and support give me confidence and mean a lot to me. She challenges me and she loves me, and together M and I are capable of much more than we would be separately. I love her and look forward to sharing many, many more adventures with her over the years ahead.

The next chapter in Australia's most incredible career

I can't wait for the inevitable (but surely some years off) K Rupert Murdoch biopic.

From Today's NY Times (referring to the Dow Jones / WSJ offer):
And now for the charm offensive.