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"If New Jersey had better beaches it would almost be Florida."

Senator Robert Torricelli (D) decided to end his reelection bid on September 29th, because he was in a horrendous hole of his own making; namely, his ethical lapses came to light and he slipped behind in the polls. Certainly you can't make people run for office. On the other hand, it's clearly not legal to replace Torricelli with an alternate Democratic candidate; New Jersey law says if someone ends his bid within 51 days of the election, his party can't put someone else in his slot. (Or her slot.) So in theory the Republican candidate is going to be elected no matter what.

Except that the state Democratic Party petitioned the New Jersey Supreme Court to allow a replacement, and won. The decision was unanimous: 7-0, and 6 of those judges were appointed by a Republican, just to get that on the record.

Very sloppy, and the same sort of "we'll do what's right regardless of the law" thinking I often condemn. The fact that it benefits the Democrats is immaterial. The fact that it came from Republicans amuses and does not surprise me, but it's really only an ironic tidbit. If the problems with this are at all unclear, Eugene Volokh makes some excellent points.

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In a spate of weakness and nostalgia, I picked up Callahan's Key earlier this week. (I am riding the bus to work these days, which means I get to read all the good books I haven't gotten around to yet. But also that I run out of books to read.)

Sum total of information imparted is this: Key West was a great place to live in 1989, and the current owners of the marina at which Travis McGee docked are ignorant idiots. Thanks, Spider!

Normally I'd review the plot, but when one of the characters has the power to be amazingly lucky, there's not really much point in the narrative. Events occur, and by fortunate coincidence, they're the right events at the right time. Quel surprise.

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Purists keep kvetching about the wild card in major league baseball. The common argument is that the wild card makes pennant races meaningless. I'm sorry, but was I somehow hallucinating when I watched the Red Sox straining to get back into the wild card hunt? Was the race between the Dodgers and the Giants somehow less interesting because it was for the wild card, not for the pennant?

In fact, the wild card increases the opportunity for meaningful races in September, because it is not limited to teams within one division. If the Yankees and the Red Sox are sparring for the pennant, there's no way the Twins can challenge either of them for that spot. If the Red Sox and the Blue Jays are going for the wild card, the A's may well be involved -- and to me that's more exciting than watching the A's sit around 10 games behind Seattle with nothing meaningful to do than play spoiler.

Sure, it didn't work out that way this year; there were no meaningful wild card chases in the last weekend of the season, and there clearly would have been a meaningful pennant race without the wild card. Let's not, however, extrapolate endlessly from one season's example.

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Speaking of typefaces, I'm not quite sure how I feel about this.

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daidala is another one of those cursed typographical blogs; lovely stuff, written by a man with a wise enthusiasm for the craft of typography. He points me at Bitstream's Cambridge Collection. $200 for 200 fonts, none of them spectacular showy display fonts, most of them rather nice: that's what I call a good deal. And the license is for five users! And it comes with a poster! And a Gill Sans clone in three weights!