I was reading an article on Yahoo! News about the recent ruling by the Supreme Court on whether or not eminent domain can apply to private projects that a municipality is wanting to encourage. My first outrage is that they ruled that using eminent domain to seize property for non-public use is constitutional. The worse shock though is how the justices ruled.

It turns out I am on the same side as Scalia, Thomas, Rehnquist, and O’Connor (*shudder*). All of the more liberal justices ruled in favor of the pro-business side. I just really don’t understand. I understand that eminent domain is an important tool for municipalities to use when doing large-scale projects such as roads, schools, and public utilities. There are times that the location of the project is paramount and the ability to get voluntary sales for all affected residents is just unrealistic. But I don’t know why one private owner should be ousted from their property in favor of another private owner.

Considering how unethical republicans are turning out to be in real estate recently, has the left side of the court opened up a new form of gerrymandering where you deem blue areas of a district to be blighted or just a convenient place for economic development by their corporate cronies?

Yes, please feel free to read the title again to make sure you are not thinking the wrong thing about me.

Now then, when we got our mattress about 7 years ago, the frame had some strange issue where it was about an inch too wide. The box springs could shift off the rails and fall to the floor. The solution was to wedge something in the middle of the two box springs to keep them pressed against the outer rails.

Being the voracious reader that I am, and one with often poor taste, I always seem to have a stack of bad books at hand, which worked out to be the perfect size. To solve my problem I need three stinkers that I am not planning to read again any time soon.

Seven years ago it was the Homecoming series by Orson Scott Card (ugg… dreadful series). When we moved from DC to San Jose I once again had more bad books and the same problem so in went the Foundation books not written by Asimov. Tonight as we became a little closer to adults and bought a real bed, I found my last set of books to serve the purpose: 2001, 2010 and 2061.

This may all sound a bit strange, but it seems to be my own form of inflicting some of the numbing sensations on the books that did the same to me. Of all of them the Arthur C. Clark books deserved it the most. While the other books were just boring or mildly annoying, Arthur C. Clark committed the ultimate writer sin. He came to believe the movies were better than the books.

When 2001 came out as a movie, there were some changes made to the storyline, and rather than branching the stories, 2010 took the movie, not the book as the definitive storyline. When there were differences between 2010 the book and the movie (both mediocre), 2065 used the movie as the definitive story again. If you only read the books, the series makes a LOT less sense. That plus the fact that by the fact that 2010 the books ends with the discovery that the core of Jupiter is a big diamond made 2061 go waaaay off the deep end.

Anyways, my tradition comes to an end with the arrival of our beautiful new bed that actually works the way it is supposed to. Now I guess I will have to ridicule bad books publicly rather than sleeping on them for years.