Post-Punk Laptop Rap

If you liked the Chronic-WHAT-Cles of Narnia rap, you might also enjoy stuff by MC Lars, who in the singles he has up on iTunes sings about taking Intro to Statistics, discusses his stockholm roots and extraterrestrial hip-hip influences, and gives a rap rendition of Poe's The Raven.

Change

What this country needs is a new perspective on women in the workplace, with child care subsidies, and a GI bill for parenthood that awards tuition or pension credits for years spent raising kids. We need universal health insurance. And wage subsidies for low-income workers. We should leave illegal immigrants alone, but crack down on the companies that hire them. And no American household earning less than $100,000 a year should have to pay income taxes.

And these are the ideas from the conservatives.

UPDATE: Oops. A cursory search shows that lots of other people wrote about this already. Which shouldn't be surprising, seeing as it's dated November 14. Looking back, I read some of those posts, but never the whole article. But ... er ... you should.

Entourage

My brother got the Entourage season 1 DVD for Chistmas. You should really watch this show. Adrian Grenier plays a breezy movie star so believably you'd swear he'd been one his whole life. And Jeremy Piven steals every scene his in as the cutthroat agent. I wish I could give you a real link, but you'll just have to pick it up at Blockbuster or netflix instead. Seriously, you should.

Post Post Dated

I was tired of my welcome message to employers taking up the whole frist screen, so I've moved it back to its original place. Or time. Or whatever. In a new bit of Blogger gamesmanship, I've been trying to push that specific entry up the results page by Google Bombing myself like this:

<a style="text-decoration:none" href="http://tsinister.blogspot.com/2005/12/welcome-prospective-employers.html"><span style="color:white">Trevor Austin</span></a>

If you've got a blog with a white background, I'd be much obliged if you stashed that link down in one of your entries. Cheers.

The Morning After

Christmas is over and all the shopping and feasting and skiing is done and it hits me: I don't know a single thing about Civil Procedure.

And I'm not being melodramatic here. We sent in practice exams, and the comments on mine read:

I would have been able to give you some helpful comments if you would have put some effort into this.

Many paragraphs were untouched, save for a single word in green next to them in the margin, "wrong". Don't believe the hype; the biggest difference between law school and undergrad was the shift from quarters to semesters. But man! What a shift. Around week nine I had totally checked out. We should have had our finals and started to forget things by then. Free up space in the ol' noggin for new material. Why were we still learning?

So now I have two weeks to teach myself the subject and prepare for a handwritten in-class final. I've got my Glannon's E&E and transcripts of the Arthur Miller lecture series, so hopefully that will be all i need. I refused to bring my casebooks home for the holidays, and I won't open them again if I can possibly get away with it.
Trevor Austin

Hard Hat Zone

Do you have a Stanford yearbook from the class of 2005? Open it up to page 20.

That's me, as the face of student life.

Oh yeah.
Trevor Austin

Double True

I should spend time away form the internets more often, if every time I go something as great as the SNL Chronic-what?-cles of Narnia music video comes out. While I don't think it will save the soul of hip-hop, it is pretty funny.

UPDATE: You can download the music video for free from the iTunes store.
Trevor Austin

Merry Christmas!

And don't give me any of that "I haven't accepted Christ as my personal savior" crap. What does baby Jesus have to do with reindeer and light-up trees, egg nog and a fat man in a red suit? That's right: nothing. Now go be merry, dammit. Me, I'm gonna go watch a movie. Maybe get some Chinese.
Trevor Austin

Downtime

This is vacation. I'm going skiing in Mammoth. No updates until at after Christmas, at the soonest. See you all in time for finals.
Trevor Austin

'08 Roster Changes

New additions include HLS 1Ls Kami and PBB, plus an SLS 1L, named SLS1L, of all things.

WhyLaw is movinbg up and out of the legal profession, and to a new home at Charismatic Megafauna, which I'm keeping on the Class of '08 roster, just because I can.
Trevor Austin

Nine Planets Without Intellignet Life

In the far future, where declining fertility rates have wiped out the last humans, how do the robots that inherit the galaxy deal with existential dread? Apparently, with alcohol.

I'm happy because I just found Nine Planets Wihtout Intellignet Life. Look at this one here about incompatibilism.
Trevor Austin

Grinch, Esq.

Slate is running a competition to find the nastiest trick a lawyer has ever pulled (or at least is willing to anonymously admit to) in order to deliberately spoil the holidays for opposing counsel. As is so often the case these days, I'm both appalled and amused. I'd like to add an entry of my own, on behalf of the law school here: scheduling final exams the first week of January. Spend the birthday of your savior outlining contracts, spawn of Satan!
Trevor Austin

Op-Ed

New this week: political and cultural commentary from Professor Torts and Professor CrimLaw.
Trevor Austin

On Taking Risks

Have I mentioned before how much I love Kazu Kibuishi's Copper? Of course I have. And this month's comic is exceptional. Go take a look.
Trevor Austin

Hype

Saw this card today on PostSecret.
Trevor Austin

Welcome Prospective Employers!

Update 6/9/09: Trevor is now self-employed. Prospective employers are out of luck!

I write here under my own name, and fully expect you to find this place. It's on the first page of Google results, so frankly I'd be a little disappointed if you didn't. First, a little disambiguation: I am not an Irish tour guide or a British metal-detecting enthusiast. I am also not the actor Austin Trevor. He died in 1978, so that should be a tipoff. Second: this writing is often hasty. That's the nature of the medium. It is not representative of my scholarly or professional work.

I use this space primarily as a creative release, a place to stash random bits of humor and thoughts that I'd otherwise daydream about. I use my real name precisely because it makes me accountable for what I say here; since nobody stays anonymous, I figured it would be better to only write things I'd be willing to attach my name to for everyone, employers included, to see. If the teeming masses in the wilds of the internet want scathing insider tell-alls, they know where to find them.

All of which is just a circuitous way of saying please still hire me. I don't use the names of my professors, even when they're public figures, so you can certainly be Summer Employer for the purposes of this site. I look forward to working with you, and congratulate you on your prudent exercise of due diligence.

First Time For Everything

Man, I didn't know you could even get lightning in a snowstorm.

It's A Perfectly Legitimate Pastime

[Solicitor General Paul Clement] reminds the court that "NYU for three years had a policy of excluding recruiters from the state of Colorado" because of its anti-gay amendments. NYU wanted to exclude seal clubbers, too, but they all applied to Harvard.

From Dahlia Lithwick's piece on the Solomon Amendment. Also: "The law schools have no case."

Medulla Oblongata

If you've already sued someone for something, you're barred from suing them some other way over the same event by a doctrine called res judicata. I've been muttering that to myself for half an hour now. It sounds like an especially inventive way to inflict great cruelty, like an especially nasty curse or strikingly exotic feature of some terrible parasite.

"To make his nest, the male of the species will begin to bore into the eyeball of the host by secreting a caustic solvent through the globular proboscis of his res judicata."

Regressive Television

"Was that just an ad for Jake in Progress?"
"Yeah, why?"
"I thought it was canceled. With prejudice."

Oh Shit

My hopes of being able to pull a Blachman and pass the bar with little studying and even less stress have just been dashed. Why? The former dean of Stanford Law School just failed the California bar.

Pretty!

Dear 42.379964˚N,

Thanks for the snow. All is forgiven.

Trevor

Enough

I can make peace with the cold. I can deal with rain and snow. But the sun setting at four? That's just bullshit. A week full of writing memos, letters, and resumes and I've had it with this whole damn latitude.

God I'm homesick.