I'll be giving a talk at 4:30 this afternoon, along with paleontologist Tom Demarre of the San Diego Natural History Museum, at the Thomas Jefferson Law School in San Diego. The genesis of this event is pretty wild. About a week after I published my book -- which is really all about Jefferson's seemingly mad obsession with size and scale (reflected in, among many other things, his search for really big animals like moose and mammoths), and why that matters (a lot) for understanding the Internet (and many, many other things) -- news came that a complete fossilized skeleton of a Columbian mammoth had been uncovered while excavating the foundation for a new building at the Thomas Jefferson Law School. It got weirder and weirder -- a few weeks later they turn up a 40-foot baleen whale skeleton, and then, a few weeks after that, a fossilized giant ground sloth -- of precisely the same species as the one that Jeffeson himself described in a paper he presented when he was being inducted as President of the American Philosophical Society in 1797. In the foundation for the Thomas Jefferson Law School?! You couldn't have made this up.

So I wrote to the Dean, Rudy Hasl, and said, in effect, "this is too good an opportunity to pass up - I've got to come out there and give a talk." And he arranged for Demarre, one of the paleontologists who've been studying these finds, to join. It should be an interesting event - how many times do you get to see a palentologist and a law professor talking together about anything, anyway?

So it turns out that Sen. Kerry's read my book about Jefferson's moose and the Net [see the last few paragraphs of this speech he gave to the Nat'l Cable and Telecommunications Association] [reprinted here]. Kerry, Chairman of the Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet, said:

"I don't intend to display a stuffed moose in the subcommittee's hearing room. But I hope you will keep Jefferson's moose in mind in the days ahead."

Aw, c'mon, Senator Kerry -- bring the moose in!

In case the upload doesn't work well enough for you to read the text, here's a link. The final panel reads:

"And Thomas Jefferson, to prove to an 18th century French naturalist that the New World's life forms were not inferior to those of the Old World, selected the moose to defend the honor of the United States."