As I was sitting around waiting for the fickle finger of fate to point the way yesterday, I had a good deal of time to read. I read the Times. I read the Wall Street Journal. And I read about half of Noam Chomsky's Understanding Power–not quite the most subversive thing I could find to take to read in a courthouse, but I had already read David Hilliard's autobiography the last time I got summoned, and Che Guevara's Motorcycle Diaries the time before that…well, you get the picture. Plus, I had just picked up the latest Noam volume at Atomic Books a week or so ago, so I wanted to break its spine in a bit.

Anyway, jury duty is probably the only major block of relatively uninterrupted reading time I get these days where I don't feel like there's something else I should be doing: working, writing, sleeping, mowing my 250 square feet of urban lawn… and there's nothing better than a good anti-establishment screed to get you in the right frame of mind if you happen to be selected for the average Baltimore trial–young black man, on trial for property theft, arrested with little evidence beyond, say, the word of a police helicopter pilot who identified him from an altitude of 400 feet without the benefit of a stabilized video camera.

I recently added a summer vacation countdown clock to the website of my kids' school:

var backToSchool = new Date(“August 26, 2002”);
var today= new Date();
var msecleft = (backToSchool.valueOf()) – (today.valueOf());
timeleft = Math.floor(msecleft/(1000*60*60*24));
document.write(“

Days left until school starts:

” + timeleft + “

“);

I think I'll show it to my kids every now and then.