"I am a respectable lady" (and more)

First, this from the AP:
A woman paid off a $1 parking ticket from 1976 with $20 and a note:

"I always had good intentions of paying it. I put it aside and every once in a while I would come across it and said 'someday I'm going to pay it.' Now I think it's time."

The woman apparently hopes the matter is closed. There's no return address on the envelope. And the notes says, "Please don't try and track me down. I am a respectable lady."

Secondly, this from Scalia's dissent in Washington State Grange v. Washington State Republican Party, in which the majority found that it was constitutional to allow candidates to list their party preferences with their name on the ballot, even if they don't have the party's backing. In a concurring opinion, Roberts said that calling the law unconstitutional would be like telling someone they're not allowed to say they like Campbell's soup, giving Scalia prime fodder for his dissent. The ruling was handed down in March, but I just found this part of the text (via Dahlia Lithwick's story on Scalia's new embrace of the media). Without further rambling...

If we must speak in terms of soup, Washington's law is like a law that encourages Oscar the Grouch (Sesame Street's famed badtaste resident of a garbage can) to state a "preference" for
Campbell's at every point of sale, while barring the soup company from disavowing his endorsement, or indeed using its name at all, in those same crucial locations.
Reserving the most critical communications forum for statements of "preference" by a potentially distasteful speaker alters public perceptions of the entity that is "preferred"; and when this privileged connection undermines not a company's ability to identify and promote
soup but an expressive association's ability to identify and promote its message and its standard bearer, the State treads on the constitutionally protected freedom of association.

And finally, this entertained me, mostly because I like to think about what happened after the famous boombox scene in Say Anything. So he stands there for 3½ minutes, a neighbor probably yells from an upstairs window, "TURN THAT DOWN!" But John Cusack continues to stand there, waits until the song ends, maybe calls her name once or twice more before deciding his grand gesture was ineffective, probably mumbles to himself something along the lines of, "Well that didn't work," puts the boombox back in his car, gets in the driver's seat and drives away, all sad. But they don't show that. Which makes me sad.


OK, writing now...