Radio Silence

Okay, that's it. I'm packing my computer up now. Quick vacation to Tahoe with my college buddies, and then straight on through to Orientation. Talk to you again on the 30th, at the soonest.

Songs of Experience

I'm no professional critic, so this review is as much about me as it is about dgm's musical selections. I'm sitting here packing and thinking about moving out of my parents' house, and pretty much never coming back. This summer was probably the last extended period of time I'll ever live here. So there are certain messages that I am, well let's say "ready to hear." But what else do you expect from a blog? And maybe the mix I got is more thought-provoking than the collection of noise I mailed WhyLaw.

The mixtape "Songs I Never Get Tired of Listening To" opens like a firework sent up into an empty night sky. It starts off with a burst of energy from the Black Eyed Peas, and their exuberance fans out into whimsy with the charmingly old-school Rappers' Delight. From her writing at Sunny Side Up, dgm looks to be a big Jason Mraz fan, and the album's mood begins to mellow early on when he shows up with a sweeping Tonight, Not Again that for some reason recalls Tracy Chapman. The Foo Fighters classic Everlong deepens the bittersweet mood with their ballad about joy shout through with foreshadowings of loss. The Beatles ease us the rest of the way down with slightly plaintive calm as the final embers slowly fade out.

Maybe it's just the emotional space I'm in as I sit here packing to go away, but I hear the album as being about emotional maturity, about finally growing up. Except for Dinner Bell. I can't make head or tail of that song, so I'm skipping it here. We get some velvety ruminations on ambiguity from Nat King Cole and a dose of worldly cynicism from Liz Phair. One of my favorite tracks is from Joni Mitchell; California is about homecomings, but also new beginnings. It makes me homesick without even having left yet.

Sittin' in a park in Paris France
reading the news and it sure looks bad
they won't give peace a chance
that was just a dream some of us had
Still a lot of lights to see
but I wouldn't want to stay here
it's too old and cold and settled in its ways.
Ah but California ...
California coming home

We get a gently updated Fur Elise, where I hear a statement about the enduring value of classical beauty. Also, it reminds me for some reason of the Gypsy Kings cover of Hotel California from The Big Lebowski. Maybe Mark Knipfler is singing about living up to your destiny, and Willie Nelson is certainly singing (in one of my other favorites, which almost made in onto my mix) about how some decisions can't be unmade. We hear more about dealing with loss and sadness form Natalie Merchant. Finally, I love the contrast between the desperate confusion of What's Going On and the ultimate embrace of all this difficulty and complexity in Life Is Wonderful. What does it mean that I see the final synthesis in the work of someone as young as Mr. Mraz? Can't be sure about that. But that's okay.

Track List

Pump It Up - Black Eyed Peas
Rappers' Delight - Sugarhill Gang
Tonight, Not Again - Jason Mraz
Everlong - Foo Fighters
Blackbird - The Beatles
Mona Lisa - Nat King Cole
Dinner Bell - They Might Be Giants
Rockville - REM
Shitloads of Money - Liz Phair
California - Joni Mitchell
Fur Elise - Galaxy Trio
One Tree Hill - U2
The Letter - Natalie Merchant
Sailing to Philadelphia - Mark Knipfler
What's Going On - Marvin Gaye
Mammas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys - Willie Nelson
Life Is Wonderful - Jason Mraz
Change Is GOnna Come - Gavin DeGraw

Thanks dgm!

Unhappy, Unhealthy, Unethical

I just finished re-reading Patrick J. Schiltz's "minor classic" about lawerly quality of life: On Being a Happy, Healthy, and Ethical Member of an Unhappy, Unhealthy, and Unethical Profession. It's all very good advice, and certainly a shot in the arm if you catch yourself losing perspective, but something about it bothers me. Schiltz graduated magna cum laude from law school, where he was an editor on the law review. He clerked for Scalia, and wound up teaching at Notre Dame. I don't care how happy he is today, he doesn't get to use himself an example of how to do it right. We all know teaching's a great gig if you can get it, but how many people realistically can?

Imperial Ambitions

I still enjoy blogging here, but It's just not enough for me any more. My spirit chafes at this restriction. Making words appear on your CRT or LCD is just the beginning - towards the ultimate goal of global domination, I'll be expanding into a variety of new media, including gaseous concussions and inked tree pulp. Long-term, I'm looking to move into laser moon-etching.

Also, I got the Magic Cookie Mix CD in the mail from dgm at Sunny Side Up. I'll write up a review after I've listened through it a few more times.

Revenge Fantasy

Cary Tennis writes this wonderful advice column over at Salon - in fact, he's the only reason I go over there at all any more. This recent entry (you'll have to watch a brief ad) to a wronged lover who has to keep seeing her ex socially is especially entertaining. In recommending she make a scene (can you see why I love this?) he writes, "It is obvious by now to anyone walking by that a performance is occurring that is well-rehearsed and worth the price."

It always interesting how a group of strangers milling about will sometimes suddenly and uniformly stop being a mere crowd and become an Audience. It's something Terry Pratchett writes about a lot. How old and how deeply embedded is that switch that dissociates the viewer from the immediate action and says shh! Don't disturb! Now we're watching. Do monkeys do this? Do fish?

ETA: Bullshit

Why does the box to The Seven Samurai say it's 141 minutes long when the movie actually clocks in at three and a half hours?

Syracusan!

I just got back from a very entertaining production of The Comdey of Errors at the Old Globe. The play is mostly just one mistaken identity joke told over and over again, so I was happy to see all the ways the production had livened it up. Some things were simple: the opening narration to set the premise was illustrated with a Punch and Judy style puppet show, and there was a lot of slapstick and mad dashing about crammed in wherever it would fit. But other things make you really appreciate comic acting, and how it's distinct from simply having funny marterial. That same worn joke about identical Dromios and Antipholuses (Antipholi?) is funny over and over again, when told with the right tone or expression.

Overheard at Dinner

Adult: "Now I'm a pretty smart girl, but I can't read those Harry Potter books."

Hometown Pride

JD2B links to a Forbes magazine ranking that argues Baltimore, Minneapolis, Columbus, and Sacramento are cooler cities than my very own San Diego. In the next issue: "Who Makes the Best Crack Pipes? A Definitive Guide."

Kung Fu Monkey

I'm saving this for personal use.

Homework: Big Macs

I got a letter today from my section leader, who teaches torts. He says hi and gives us a case to read. It's Pelman v. McDonalds, where the burger chain is sued for making people fat. I like that he'd choose something that we've probably heard about to use as an introduction. Plus, it's only 8 pages, so that's nice. I should be able to read that much in 2 weeks. Maybe.

Bovine Resurrection

Apparently when you switch schools on the facebook, it kicks you out of all your groups. I was upset to see that I had lost my affiliation with such organizations as "People Who Are Probably Going to Hell" "I jeWISH I was Jewish!" and "I Just Tried to Ford the River and My Fucking Oxen Died."

Fortunately, the latter has a local chapter. I feel a bit better now.

What This Country Needs Is More Cowbell

Is Christopher Walken really running for president?

I can't tell if this is a joke or not, but honestly I think it's great either way.

Link via Donklephant.

My Bias Exposed

I don't know about Brian Leiter, but when I hear that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez called America, "the most savage, cruel and murderous empire" the world has ever known, my reraction is most likely to be: "Wow. Hugo Chavez is an asshat."

Red Tide

The second red tide bloom of the summer in my patch of ocean is happening right now, so the other day we went swimming out at midnight to check out the lights. It was as bright as I'd ever seen - you could see the breakers lighting up from over a mile away. And once you got in the water it was amazing. Every movement in the water produced a swirling cloud that glowed bright blue, and every splash lit up the night. We threw handfuls of water into the air, watching as every drop landed with a brilliant flash. Fish would leave lightening-blot trails in their wake as they darted away from us. The whole face of a wave would light up as it broke, so bodysurfing was like riding liquid glow-stick. Being inside a curl, with glowing water surrounding your head, was completely surreal. When we got out, we could slap our boardshorts and leave handprints that would shine for a second and then fade.

So yes, the red tides may be toxic, but if you're careful not to swallow too much water, it can be really amazing.

Advice to Law School Applicants 2: How To Write A Personal Statement Without Having Done Anything Special

Before we leap in here and I share my personal statement with y’all, a quick word about licensing. As the sidebar notes, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons NonCommercial Sampling Plus 1.0 License. This means you, the reader, are free to use it for non-commercial purposes with attribution. So if you want to send Dream Law School parts of my statement and tell them I wrote them you’re within your rights, though that would be a bit unconventional. What you are not allowed to do is try to pass off my writing as your own. Which you wouldn’t want to do anyway, because it would be stupid. After all, if you can find this place, adcoms can too. So you won’t . Good.

They say the personal statement is an applicants opportunity to distinguish him- or herself from the pack of students. My problem was, I wasn’t all that distinguished. I didn’t have an impressive list of extracurricular activities, or a distinguished record of community service, or a resume full of leadership positions. In college I studied hard and then I played hard, and didn’t do much in between to round out a resume.

So I didn’t have a compelling story to tell for my personal statement. What I did have was advice from the Personal Statement chapters of the How To Get Into Law School Books that I read sitting on the floor in Barnes and Noble, and my buddy Mike, who braved the investment banking/management consulting interview gauntlet and made himself its master. Naturally, Mike proved much more useful, and would go on to help me through three drafts of my statement before he pronounced himself “too invested in it” to be an objective judge. You just can’t stress enough how important it is to get a reader (preferably several!) who will see your essay strategically, asking what you’re trying to accomplish with it and evaluating how effective you are.

Since I didn’t have a good story to tell, I figured I’d just talk about myself. Tell the admissions committee what kind of person I am. What makes me tick. In a flattering way, of course. After some serious brainstorming and soul-searching, I came up with something I wanted to say. I’m all about solving problems, fixing things, getting results. This is pretty central to my interests and personality. So I scraped together a few anecdotes that related to this theme, and a few different expressions of it. Then, lacking an obvious intro, I leapt right in and wrote a draft:

I am a pragmatist, a problem solver, and engineer at heart. The most important question to me when I encounter a problem is “what can be done about it?” I want testable hypotheses from academics, and proposals for action from politicians and protestors. I hate fatalism. I love to hear “here’s what we can do better.” I’m impatient. I don’t like to cry over spilled milk.

There is little I find more intellectually satisfying than working out a strategy to solve a problem or accomplish a goal and then watching my ideas succeed in application. While morally there’s nothing more frustrating that continued conflicts with obvious solutions, what bothers me intellectually the most are problems with no apparent answer. This temperament extends beyond academics; it’s more generally how I approach the world. I’m correspondingly wary of ideologies, factions, and theoretical frameworks. I believe in hybrid vigor, convergent evolution, and political Third Ways. I like problems I can get a grip on, and accordingly have little patience for intrigue or Byzantine political machinations. The personality traits I most admire and seek out in others are honesty and forthrightness.

I think there’s something charming about the ad-hoc, the Jerry-rigged, the inelegant but crudely effective. I was talking to an Australian, who traced his country’s mutual animosity with New Zealand to a fateful cricket match, where the Kiwis needed the equivalent of a home run to win the game, and to prevent this, the Australian bowler rolled the ball aong the ground rather than pitching normally. Apparently, this was considered by Aussie and Kiwi alike to be sneaky, dishonourable, and unmanly play. My reaction was to applaud the sound strategy – a tea and crumpets analog to intentionally walking Barry Bonds.

At one point towards the end of my freshman year, students from my second-quarter introductory CS class who had won class programming contests were invited to eat lunch with the professor at the faculty club. The winners of the other contests had come up with fiendishly clever ways of making programs we’d all written for assignments run faster or use less memory when doing math on very large numbers or other computationally intensive tasks. I had done something rather different. One of those programs ran a simulation on a ten by ten grid where very simple programs called critters could move about and turn other critters they came across into copies of themselves. I won a tournament of custom critters by designing programs that would seek out and clump together in the corners of the grid, where they would be protected on two sides and could literally watch each others’ backs. This strategy required very carefully written critter programs to carry out, but what made my critters more successful than the others wasn’t that they better exploited the hardware they were run on, but that their strategy let them better take advantage of the rules of the game they were competing in.

Focusing on the task at hand is just as much about ignoring things that don’t matter as about obsessing over results. As such, I’m not naturally competitive, and am always on the lookout for ways a game might not be zero-sum. I swam competitively and played on the water polo team for four years in high school, but I never had the competitive spirit, the burning desire to crush the opposition, to be better than they were. It was more important to me that I do well, than that I win. Now I play water polo pick-up games in a PE class and to this day I’d rather lose a well-played game to friends and players I respect and come out grinning than to win a win a violent grudge match by throwing elbows at people I can’t stand. I like to think that lets me focus more sharply when there really does have to be a winner and a loser, and it’s certainly better for my sanity in the meantime.

When the time comes to unwind, I find myself impatient with tragedies and melodrama, where characters are doomed to misery, or worse, doom themselves to it. I take a road trip up to Ashland every year for the Oregon Shakespeare festival, but no matter how beautiful their speeches, I still get angry at Juliet and Romeo. I’m a sucker for a happy ending. My favorite books and movies are all comedies, and I have a dry sense of humor that I have been advised not to attempt to exhibit in this statement.

I’m making a conscious effort to keep it snappy. Keep your sentences short. I wanted something readable that wouldn’t bog down an admissions officer, and the blunt style plays well into my theme. I was hoping clean, spare prose would be refreshing to weary essay readers. Not entirely successful at this. Still, I’m especially proud of the finish there, which remains unchanged throughout the revisions.

And of course there are revisions to come. There are some obvious flaws (like: what’s the CS paragraph for?), and plenty of places where the language can be tightened and the sub-themes sharpened. But this post is too long already. I’ll talk about revising later.

Gone West

First, a toast to the glory that is Netflix. If there were any justice in this world, the post office would get me their DVDs more than once a week, but there is not, so what can you do.

I mentioned HBO's Deadwood briefly earlier, but didn't give it its due. This is the most enthralling television program I have ever seen. It's better than the Sopranos. You get deep and complicated characters, characters who feel like real people that actually inhabit this mining town that's been created for them. And what a place! Deadwood is a mining town set up in Indian territory, in contravention of the US government and its army. So it's not just a frontier town that doesn't have any law, it's a town that can't have any law, because setting up that would be taken as insurrection. Then the whole series explores how social order forms and is maintained in the absence of law, and how people behave in that order. And what you get is the most amazing picture of people in all of their contradictions and imperfections. The finale is so good that as soon as it was over I had to go back and watch it again immediately. It's like the great literature of television. In a hundred years you'll have to watch it in English class. Okay. Clearly, I just can't say enough good things about the show, so I'll move on.

Firefly is unlucky to have come after Deadwood's unalloyed brilliance, because it's actually very good. After Deadwood, you can't help but notice that its characters really are characters, even if they are a fun mix of them. In particular, Kaylee's personality seems more like my cat's than any person's. Hopefully they'll flesh out in later episodes (I've only seen the first disc so far). Already, though, there is much to love. The best summary (and some of the highest praise) I've seen is from one critic/fan who wrote : "Think of it as Star Wars, if Han Solo were the main character, and he still shot Greedo first." So it's got the right style. Actually, better style, since there are more dusters and six-guns. In one of my favorite sequences, the captain is hurrying back to his ship and walks right into the middle of tense hostage standoff. Before even making it into the foreground of the shot he draws and fires, shooting the bad guy in the head without breaking stride. As in Deadwood, the series centers around outlaws; in this case the crew are salvages, thieves and smugglers joined by drifters and fugitives.

Joss Whedon is clearly having a lot of fun playing with genre conventions - there are even savage Indians in the form of the Reavers, a kind of psychotic serial killer space pirate. We still haven't seen them in person, but they're used to great effect, especially in the silent space sequences. I haven't seen Battlestar Gallactica yet, but I can say that keeping things quiet certainly works well when our heroes' only options in their weaponless ship are ever (1) run and (2) hide. I caught myself holding my breath in two of those sequences. The craft is just good all around, with solid pacing and clever dialogue. All this lets Whedon pull of the space western thing rather well. Fittingly, everyone is just a bit exaggerated, and things have a slightly Romantic cast. At the end of the pilot episode's wild adventures, the captain leans back and declares that it's been a good day. A crewman is aghast: they've run from the law and from pirates, killed a lawman and taken on fugitives, deals have gone bad and half the crew has been shot.
"We're still flying."
"That's not much."
"It's enough."

A New Kind of Naked

To round out the summer, I've been press-ganged into painting the house. After a few false starts, I got started in earnest yesterday, painting up under the eaves. The good news is I get to use all manner of bright yellow toys to do this. There's a pressure washer rated up to 2400(!) psi, with shiny warning stickers telling you it'll cut right to the bone given half a chance. I do that actual painting with a power sprayer whose shiny stickers tell you not only will it cut you deep, it'll inject the offending limb full of paint, posing A Serious Risk of Amputation. But these tools aren't just dangerous, and therefore cool, they make the job go a lot quicker. That Wagner sprayer is my new best friend.

The downside is that I'm working in a perpetual cloud of atomized white latex. I wear a hat pulled low to keep it out of my eyes, and this big industrial dust mask with screw-in air filter mounted on the sides. I look like the bastard offspring of Darth Vader and a chipmunk. And some parts of me are still exposed to the paint. Paint settled on my cheekbones where they weren't covered by the mask, leaving me with perfect white triangles under my eyes, like a mime. I acquired a faint halo in the back of my neck and across my shoulders. And of course it got all over my arms. By the end of the day, my forearms could have belonged to an especially skinny Yeti. They were covered in a thick mat of sticky gray fur, fur that covered ghostly gray skin beneath.

I couldn't wash this stuff out to save my life, and eventually had break out the electric clippers and shear off all the hair on my arms below the elbow. So now I'm prickly, and feel strangely exposed. I've never been so self-conscious about my ulnas in my life.

Friday Spies: Who Moved My Cheese Edition

1. What's your favorite cheese?
Pepper jack. In a quesadilla. But I'm lactose intolerant, so too much cheese = sick T.

2. Cheesy movie: If you were in Top Gun, what would your call sign be?
Preacher. My roommates called me this for a while and it fits the random noun theme. Occasionally I am given to wax overly poetic. Also, I just learned that the real life version of new-fictional-character-hero Seth Bullock was known as Bishop. There's only one other possibility: when I played Halo online it was under the moniker "J S Mill."

3. Big cheese: Tell us a boss story -- best boss, worst boss, a time when you were the boss, etc.
I was working at a company that made underwater lights, cameras, and sonar that had recently bought by a big Norwegian company. My boss, a native Scotsman, used to pace around the office muttering darkly that "the bloody Noggies ruin everything!" in a thick brogue.

4. Say cheese: Are you a photobug? Are you photogenic? Or, in 1000 words or less, tell us about your best picture.
I don't take many pictures. Here's one I have on my computer labeled Good Picture Of Me:

I'm in the middle.

5. Just cheesy: What's the worst pick-up line you've ever used, or had used on you? Did it work?
"Excuse me. Do you see my friend over there? He wants to know if you think I'm cute."
Yes, it did work. I think it's actually pretty clever if played well so she thinks you're acting as some junior-high go-between before the twist in the end. Anyway, this was a favorite of Big Nilla's.

Intelligent Design

I have no choice to participate in Leiter's google bombing of intelligent design, seeing as I'm part of Chuck D's posse and all.

You know, part of me wants intelligent design mentioned in school. Let the ID proponents put together the best case they can, and have the kids read that and then The Blind Watchmaker, or have them report on the contents of The Panda's Thumb, or some other serious-minded responder.. You know, win in the marketplace of ideas, that sort of thing. But this may be an overly optimistic assessment of the analytical skills of elementary school kids.

Meanwhile, here is a less-serious-minded response from Giblets at fafblog. Fafblog? Yes! Fafblog!

Stuck In The Middle With You

I'm a serial joiner. I love signing up for new things and becoming a part of new groups. Teams, clubs, societies; it's all good. So when I went to the student activities fair thingy they had at admit weekend, I put my name down on about half of the student groups around. Especially if they had food.

So in addition to the California Club, the Parody crew, and La Alianza ("Uh, but I'm not Hispanic." "It's okay. Just sign here."), I put my name and e-mail down for the Federalist Society and the American Constitution Society. This seemed perfectly natural to me, since a lot of the things I believe aren't always that well-represented electorally. Besides, I think of myself as a maverick (so much sexier than "moderate") voter and want to hear both sides of things. Not to go all Hegelian on you, but surely there's something to be learned by seeing both parts of the Fed-ACS punch-counterpunch.

So even though Tokyo is big into the ACS and speaking partly in jest, his comments over at Josh's today troubled me. If it's true that, "you should discover that thereÂ’s two sides of things, the ACS, and the Feds. Sure people can be conservative on some issues, and progressive on others, but I think most people are probably mostly one way or another," then that's just really depressing.

So support maverick thinkers! Go read Donklephant today.