Friday, June 13, 2008

The prescient Dave Barry

The following passage has been floating around for years as a fortune cookie; I don't know when it was written.

Here is the problem: for many years, the Supreme Court wrestled with the issue of pornography, until finally Associate Justice John Paul Stevens came up with the famous quotation about how he couldn't define pornography, but he knew it when he saw it. So for a while, the court's policy was to have all the suspected pornography trucked to Justice Stevens' house, where he would look it over. "Nope, this isn't it," he'd say. "Bring some more." This went on until one morning when his housekeeper found him trapped in the recreation room under an enormous mound of rubberized implements, and the court had to issue a ruling stating that it didn't know what the hell pornography was except that it was illegal and everybody should stop badgering the court about it because the court was going to take a nap.
-Dave Barry, "Pornography"

Once more, life imitates art.

3 comments:

Tabula Rasa said...

what exactly is a fortune cookie? something that loads itself onto your computer and tracks how many asians you got lucky with?

Rahul Siddharthan said...

Funny to see you use "asian" to mean "Chinese". Anyway, to answer your question, type "fortune" next time you're using a Unix(/Linux) computer.

km said...

Rahul: does Asian mean anything else? (Just trolling.)

But more power to people like Justice Kozinski!