BACK FROM THE LAKE: We took the boat to Calhoun’s at the marina, where we took my dad out for an early Father’s Day dinner. We cruised around the lake for a while, played several games of “Sorry!” with my daughter, and generally had a lovely evening. We drove back a little while ago. This afternoon I’m taking her to a little-girls’ pool party while my wife goes downtown to do some editing on her documentary.

Much happened in my absence. Over 50 comments appeared — quite good ones for the most part — on the post regarding the Al-Muhajir confinement. And Eric Alterman ran a letter from one of my former students, Ken Berry (not the guy from “F Troop,” I note in response to a reader inquiry that strangely appeared to be entirely serious). Berry says he’s a big fan of Chomsky, which only proves (along, sadly, with the quality of grammar and punctuation in his email) that I didn’t teach him much. (Actually, I remember Berry as a pretty nice guy; an older student — though not as old as the actor Ken Berry — who was something of a lefty, though his enthusiasm for Chomsky was news to me).

Berry wonders if I’m neglecting my teaching and writing to do InstaPundit. Well, my scholarly output hasn’t fallen off yet (I have 2 pieces in the pipeline and another one in progress) and my student evaluations — for whatever that’s worth — were up by a statistically insignificant margin last year. It’s mostly a question of efficient use of time, especially small increments of available time (like this one) during the day. That’s something that I have to say my years in law practice, where I managed to squeeze in a book and a couple of law review articles on the side, taught me a lot about.

Also, Eugene Volokh has a very interesting post about an important but little-noticed Supreme Court case that’s soon to be argued, and Kathryn Lopez emailed to thank me for taking weekend time off, thus lowering pressure on The Corner to keep up. Puhleez.

Mac Frazier has some interesting observations on weblog traffic, and Bill Quick has inaugurated a new feature on “stupid security tricks.” Finally, reader Micael O’Ronain sent a review of the Postrel appearance on John Stossel’s program last night, which I missed and was too stupid to tape. Micael says Virginia did extremely well, and that the whole show was quite interesting and well done. Maybe this will get Virginia a slot on the revamped “This Week” program — which I expect would benefit greatly from her presence.