It has occurred to me in the past that class action lawsuits involve some degree of invasion of privacy. As I understand it, the lawyers preparing these suits will find out who a company’s customers are, and then contact them to see if they want to sue.

So, guys, consider this fair warning. If you’ve been to a strip club in Texas recently, you may want to make sure you get to the mail before your wives for the next few weeks or so.

A lawyer for Meekey and Fulmer said the lawsuit may be made a class-action.

That could mean notifying a lot of other men who used credit cards to pay for lap dances in recent years.

And that might not go over very well in some households.

“They are going to want the (strip) clubs’ credit card companies to give them the names of all the different people who have charged dances there,” said Albert Van Huff, attorney for several of the clubs.

If there’s no chance of getting the mail before your wives, you’d be well advised to come clean about your lap dance purchases now, before the letter arrives.

( þ Gut Rumbles)

Scott Kirwin, over at Dean’s World, writes about the relationship between art and politics:

If there is one thing that I have completely lost patience for is artists using their popularity as a soapbox for their (usually naive and ill-conceived) political ideas. Just because you have a hit song doesn’t give you the talent to solve, say, the Arab-Israeli conflict. Seeing actors and singers spout off about politics makes about as much sense to me as Condoleeza Rice signing a record deal with Sony. Rice has a talent for foreign policy but that doesn’t mean she also has a talent for carrying a tune, so why should those with the latter assume the former?

I agree with this stance, in general, but there’s a part of me that asks why I think my computer engineering degree gives me the right to comment on politics, while I criticize artists for not having a talent for foreign policy.

Of course, the answer is fairly simple. I don’t think that I’ve got a right to speak out on political issues because of my degree. I think I have a right to speak out because the right to share ideas is a fundamental right (one that happens to be spelled out in our Constitution’s First Amendment). I have no issue whatsoever with Peter David or Wil Wheaton sharing their political views on their blogs, even though I rarely agree with them. The problem arises when artists share their political beliefs to an audience lured in with the promise of seeing the artist perform (Barbra Streisand comes to mind as being notorious for this). If I paid to see Wil Wheaton reading from his book, Just a Geek, and he instead decided to have a diatribe on politics, I’d be angry.

Being an artist (or a computer geek) doesn’t preclude one from being interested in and having opinions about politics. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t share those opinions. However, all of us have a responsibility not to force those opinions on others.

The stats page is showing that I’m getting a few hits from people searching for “Exploading Toads.” I would like to point out that, while I did use the phrase in this post, I only did so because that was the title of the article I linked.

It worries me a bit that so many people are searching for the incorrect spelling (and possibly thinking that I didn’t know it was an error), so I’ve added a sic to the title in that post.