Brief Ruling: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia...

Brief Ruling: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made light of the heavy legal writing that lawyers often submit to courts. Legal briefs are “a subject full of paradoxes, not the least of which is the name brief . . . . These things are 50 pages long,” he said at a lawyers’ meeting in Snowmass Village, Colo., over the weekend. The word has its origin in the “ancient Saxon word braf ,” and another word--made with the same letters arranged slightly differently--”that means, roughly translated, to go on and on at great length until it makes you sick.”

Different Message: Steve Gobie, whose relationship with Rep. Barney Frank led to a reprimand for Frank by the full House, has been on Capitol Hill again. This time he showed up as a messenger for a local delivery service. He was spotted several times in the corridors of Congress making deliveries to congressional offices without being readily recognized.

Change of Course: It’s not easy playing second fiddle to the nation’s second fiddle. Especially if you’re ambitious, says Vice President Dan Quayle’s wife, Marilyn, who was a straight-A law student at Indiana University and a career-minded woman when she met Quayle 18 years ago. “I was never going to get married. I was never going to have children,” she said Saturday. She married Quayle 10 weeks after they met. She spoke in Grand Rapids, Mich., to the Michigan Bar Assn. while her husband played golf at a Republican fund-raiser.

Old News: Former CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite is writing his memoirs at last, after signing a contract for his autobiography 20 years ago. Cronkite, 73, who signed with Alfred A. Knopf, said the book won’t be a tell-all about CBS News. “There have been enough books about all that,” he said. And the title? “I’m going to have to fight the publishers to keep them from calling it ‘And That’s the Way It Is.’ ”