Lost Wallet

During an early morning jog with Taco on the 5th of July, we came upon a wallet lying alongside the sidewalk.

We opened it, extracted the cash and credit cards, and threw it into the bushes.

Actually, we took the wallet home. No point in knocking on the door of the property -- it was very early, and the previous day was a holiday, with the neighborhood filled with folks congregating at nearby Lake Murray to watch the fireworks. We should be able to identify the owner from the material contained within.

And we did. There was an out-of-state drivers license, but more interestingly, a business card -- of a law firm that Carol was familiar with, because a friend of hers worked there.

So Carol called her friend at the firm. "Does so-and-so work there?"

"Why, of course! Right next to me! How do you know her?"

"I have her wallet."

"You're joking!"

It happened that the wallet's owner had gone to watch the fireworks at her boyfriend's house in San Carlos, where we live, and dropped her wallet.

Both the wallet owner and Carol's friend live many miles from us -- but we were the ones that found it in that place on that day. If we hadn't taken that route (and we take different routes every morning), we wouldn't have found it.

Something to think about.

Just Curious

Locally, we pay $9-$10 for a "brushless" or "hand" car wash -- the only kind I use when I don't have time to do it myself. My question is: why don't they do the tires and wheels? If you want the tires and wheels to be cleaned (you know, to get the brake dust off), you have to pay another $4-$5 for "wheel treatment."

You see, I thought wheels were already part of the overall car system. You know, like the roof. Car washes wouldn't dare to try to charge extra for cleaning the car's roof, or windows, for that matter. Why the wheels?

Just curious.

Sandra Day O'Connor

Ramesh Ponnuru says it best on The Corner on National Review Online:

Her split-the-difference, compromising jurisprudence may have been designed to promote social peace, but if so it backfired. In two ways, it made the politics of Supreme Court confirmations more bitter. First, it tended to inflate the role of the Supreme Court in American life. When the Court sets itself up as a micromanager of policy decisions and provides no clear guidance as to what passes "constitutional" muster and what doesn't, the stakes in any confirmation get higher. Second, her career on the Court--along with those of Justices Kennedy, Souter, and to a lesser extent Stevens--made the Right suspicious of nominees whose loyalty to conservative principles had not been explicitly demonstrated. Conservatives learned that nominees often drifted left, and almost never drifted right, and adjusted their demands accordingly. It may not be the legacy she wanted, but it's the one she's left.