Dark Bilious Vapors

"All of us are the parties in an amicus brief (.pdf) written by Lauren Gelman and the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society in the Apple v. Does case. The issue is whether bloggers should be entitled to the same legal protections as professional print journalists under California law and the First Amendment.

I’ve signed a number of amicus briefs as a lawyer, but this is my first time as a client.

Feels weird.

Granfalloon defined for the Vonnegut-impaired.:

If you wish to study a granfalloon, just remove the skin of a toy balloon. --Bokonon
A granfalloon, in the religion of Bokononism invented by Kurt Vonnegut in his 1963 novel Cat's Cradle, is defined as a "false karass". That is, it is a group of people who outwardly choose or claim to have a shared identity or purpose, but whose mutual association is actually meaningless in terms of fulfilling God's design. The most common granfalloons are associations and societies based on a shared but ultimately fabricated premise. As examples, Vonnegut cites: "the Communist Party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows -- and any nation, anytime, anywhere." A more general and often-cited quote defines a granfalloon as "a proud and meaningless association of human beings." Granfalloon was illustrated in the book as referring to Hoosiers, who are apparently Indianans, especially those who play basketball. In the same book, he introduced such terms as foma ("lies") and wampeter, all terms of Bokononism."