Wednesday, January 29, 2003
Call, while supplies last …
Does anyone want a cheap Nigerian 419 Scam email knockoff? It's from Zimbabwe but it has all the hall marks of your classical Nigerian 419 Scam (but only for a paltry US$10,000,000 I'm afraid). I'm tired of the silliness and I know that some of my friends have yet to receive one, so I thought I'd spread the wealth …
Connections
I've had my eye on that state for a while: it seems that whenever constitutional evil is being perpetrated in this country, Florida is mixed up in the mess, and never in a good way.
Florida and the Death of Justice
I feel like I'm in an episode of Connections.
It starts with Spring, looking on the Internet to buy a box of blank white cards—the type she used in language class years ago. She comes across 1000 Blank White Cards, a game created in Boston (Cambridge, but close enough), named after a box of 1000 blank white cards (used by language students, like Spring, to make flash cards) and inspired by Nomic (a game where, like law, you can change the rules). She checks the site out, and finds a link to The Boston Diaries, which has nothing to do with Boston except the name. The author of The Boston Diaries then starts searching for more information on 1000 Blank White Cards and comes across the Seattle Electric Grimmeldeck, which is possibly named after James Grimmelmann, who obviously plays the game and has written an article about Constitutional Law and Florida—Florida being the state where both Spring and the author of The Boston Diaries live.
Where's James Burke when you need him?
Doesn't matter if you're rich or poor, associations are eeeeeeevil!
When Southampton decided, this fall, to place a limit on the size of all new houses, it settled on twenty thousand square feet, on the ground that that figure represents a reasonable limit, given the big-house norms of the area. At twenty thousand square feet, a house has perhaps ten or eleven bedrooms, a dozen bathrooms, a six-car garage, and maybe, oh, a mini-trading floor for the kids. By comparison, Rennert's house, at forty-two thousand square feet, has twenty-nine bedrooms, thirty-three bathrooms, and two bowling alleys. What the Town of Southampton was saying, in other words, is that twelve bedrooms and one bowling alley is fine, but twenty-nine bedrooms and two bowling alleys is not. Think of the twenty-thousand figure as the community standard—a social consensus—for the maximum size a Hamptons monster home ought to be. With that extra bowling alley and those seventeen additional bedrooms, Rennert just went too far.
Sagaponack HOmeowners Association vs. Ira Rennert
It's warming to know that even the insanely stupid rich have problems with associations. Oh, and who is this Ira Rennert to whom a 20,000 square foot home is just too small? Oh, one of those robber barron CEO type people with a penchant for funnelling money into his pocket.
