You blog less when you must position your computer at your bar and sit on a rather hard bar stool.

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Tomorrow morning at the crack of dawn, I am off for the 2006 Battered Mothers' Custody Conference in Albany, NY. The schedule of presenters looks like a who's-who of people whose names I've been seeing as I've researched how the system deals with domestic violence. It should be very interesting.

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Does anyone else find it amazing that I can be driving down the street, hear a song, come home, type a few selected lyrics into Google, figure out the name and the artist, download it for $.99 to my computer into a little white oblong thing that holds, at this moment, 2.4 days of songs (3.31 GB of information), and then plug it into a tape player and flood my apartment with the sound, all in about ten minutes?

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BTW, the song is "Bad Day" by Daniel Powter.

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The other day, I was in Borders and I picked up a book that I'd seen before that looked interesting, Courtroom 302: A Year Behind The Scenes in an American Criminal Courthouse. I read the first few pages and was hooked, and have remained so.

I worked for a prosecutor's office during the summers from the time I was a sophomore in high school until the summer before my final year of law school. One of the perks of the job is that you get to work with police officers, who put their lives on the line daily to ferret out the bad guys and keep everyone protected.

One of the things that is difficult for me reading this book is that it deals with some officers who aren't very professional. For instance, I didn't think the fellow who was being processed into jail and was asked why he was shaking by a deputy was treated very professionally. He replied, "MS," to which the deputy replied, "Oh, he has PMS." I also didn't like the officer who told a woman charged with drug abuse, "Your life is over. You might not want to hear it, but it is."

Well, there's an incentive to straighten up and fly right.

OK, if I had to deal with the folks these officers do, too, I would probably have a jaded view. I still find it disturbing.

But most disturbing is that it becomes clear from the book that the idea of the system in a place as large as Chicago is not finding justice or the truth or trying to prevent people from reoffending, but rather to achieve the all-powerful "dispo" or disposition. Move the case along, get it closed.

Now, I'm all for moving justice along. (For instance, there's a divorce that was filed during my first week of law school and is still going on, and I'd be all in favor of that one being concluded.) But I'm also for making sure that we know what we're doing and what's going on and that the "dispo" that we're choosing has some chance of getting at the heart of the problem. Because cases don't involve numbers; they involve people.

The book raises a host of other issues, including the question of whether we are truly waging an efficient war on drugs, as well as whether we would do better to invest in kids BEFORE we pay however much we pay to house them in prisons for years on end.

I think anyone who is a lawyer should be encouraged to read it. And anyone who wears a black robe should be required to.

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I can't stop wondering whether Daniel Powter is related to the rather manic Susan Powter.

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Me: "I think I've decided the first step to dealing with domestic violence more effectively in this country."
Anonymous: "What's that?"
Me: "Quit holding the Battered Mothers' Conference in Albany, New York during the first weekend in January. "
Anonymous: "Yeah, I guess they figured we haven't suffered enough."
Me: "Or else they figure they're all destitute, and rates are really cheap in Albany, because NO ONE IN THEIR RIGHT MIND GOES THERE IN JANUARY."

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I'm sorry, but in my unbiased opinion, Bassett's Market has the best muffins in the universe.