bob tarantino

Another Attempt + New Comment Policy

Right then.  Regular readers might have noticed that this blog went into rather steep decline over the course of 2008 - a three month dormant period in the first quarter of the year followed by stuttering, half-hearted attempts at revival over the course of the summer, until finally limping to a shuddering collapse in August.  Of course, perhaps no one noticed.  *ahem*

There were a few reasons for my limited commitment over the last year, none of them particularly interesting.  But what finally brought my posting to a halt was where I've been for the last few months, namely, attending the University of Oxford in pursuit of a BCL degree.  We'll see how that pans out.

The months off work have given me an opportunity to reassess various matters and one thing that's become clear is that I missed blogging, so I've decided to give it another shot.  This still won't be a revival of the late, unlamented Let It Bleed, but will continue on in largely the same vein as prior to my shut-down: some politics, more entertainment law stuff, some things about how my freelance writing is coming along.  Which functionally means that it will be of interest to a predictably small audience - but if you're here, thanks for coming along for the ride.  I have a backlog of "starred items" in Google Reader that I need to get through, so for the first little while you can expect a fair number of posts about "news" which is a few months old.

Finally, a word about comments.  Those who were around for Let It Bleed and the previous iteration of this blog may recall that I took an extremely liberal approach to comments - I can't recall ever deleting any comment that wasn't obvious spam (except for once accidentally deleting an entire post and attendant comments), and that worked fairly well: comments were relatively robust but also fairly respectful towards other readers and bloggers.  I encourage readers to comment, but have instituted one change: comments will now be moderated, due to the increasing likelihood that some comments that were posted on some blog or other will at some point soon be held by some Canadian court to be defamatory and thus subject the author of the blog to liability.  I don't have any particular interest in being a test case, so comments will be held pending my approval.

Whatever.  Let's see how this works out.

Wonky Typefaces

Forgive the behind-the-scenes dorkiness.  I've had at least one person tell me that the text on this blog is all messed up.  Here's the problem - on both my computer screens (i.e., at work and at home), everything looks fine.  It's probably arising from me cutting and pasting text from other websites - but is this something that everyone (except me) is seeing, or is it just some of you?  Which posts?  Is it in the sidebars as well, or just the posts?

published stuff

You may notice that at the top of the right-hand column there are links to pages called books and articles.  These are intended as handy collections of links to various things I've managed to sucker people into publishing over the years, and will be updated from time to time as new material becomes available.  You will note that the books link is somewhat painfully lame - consisting of only mention of the "forthcoming" Under Arrest - Canadian Laws You Won't Believe.  The goal is to fill that up with more items.  I swear.

Like We Never Even Left

Fine.  So I owe Kathy Shaidle ten bucks.  I'm back to blogging.  For those of you with fond (or... other) memories of the late Let It Bleed, this current iteration of ramblings will be slightly different.  To the extent that the political can ever be stripped out of anything, this blog will be somewhat less about "politics" per se, and more about law, culture, history, photography, interviews, music, writing, movies... just more about more stuff (with an emphasis on the stuff, moreso than the more - I can't promise a posting schedule to match that in the early days of LIB).  Of course, every once in a while I'll feel some unavoidable tug to point out that Haroon Siddiqui is a shmuck, so for fans of LIB, keep an eye out.  For those who otherwise have an ardent desire to know what I think about various items political, well, you should've been around from late 2003 to mid-2005 - you snooze, you lose.

So what have I been doing since May 2005?  Working, mostly.  Reading.  Getting married.  Wrote a book.  Which brings me to one of the other primary motivations in getting back to blogging: as evidenced by the tagline above, I now (or will shortly) have something to sell, so this is as much an exercise in the somewhat loathsome endeavour of self-promotion as anything else.  Plus, I figure it would be helpful to have an online repository of my various published writings, so those will be showing up here as well.  The story of how Under Arrest - Canadian Laws You Won't Believe (scheduled for publication in June 2006 by Dundurn Press) came to be will be the subject of an ongoing series of posts, which will hopefully give some inspiration/guidance to others who are as desperate as me to get published.

Anyone interested in getting in touch with me can send an email by clicking on the link at the top left of the page.  This is still a bit of a work in progress, so the format and the contents on the sidebars will be changing over the next little while as I figure out where to put everything.  Oh, and a blogstravaganza seems appropriate as well - if I can pull it together, expect one before Christmas.  Let's do this.