Demographics

Of the ten candidates running for three slots on the ACS board reserved for 1Ls, only three were women. All ten were white. Hmm.

Bob Atkinson is a Baller

This afternoon I saw Bob, Assistant Attorney General for Oregon, argue in a moot court to prepare for his oral arguments before the Supreme Court. As you might guess form the title, I was pretty impressed. You have to be insanely good just to hold your ground up there. The exchanges went like this:

"It is Oregon's position that -"
"Counsel, isn't it true that your arguments are complete bullshit?"
"No, your honor. We argue that -"
"Counsel, you're not very smart, are you?"
"I disagree, you honor. I -"
"Moron."
"We believe that pursuant to rule 703 in the -"
"Counsel, wouldn't you agree that you're ugly, too?"

Soul Man

My section had a movie night and somehow we watched the "ridiculously unfunny" SOul Man. This violated my stated No Law School Inspired Media rule, but there was free pizza.

Regret

I'm not sure how I got home last night. My memories are only fragmentary, but I still remember saying a few truly awful things, which only makes me more nervous about what I can't recall. I don't know what it is about school here, but I haven't drank in moderation since I came - I'm either stone sober or fall-down drunk. That's really not okay. I'm worried.

I'm writing this down here so I'll remeber, and hold myself to these words. No alcohol for a month. We can talk about this again on October 18, and we'll see if it's just the start of school, or if i should just give up drinking all together.

Dead Tree Media

I have a column in the law school newspaper. It is for the career issue, but is emphatically not about careers in law. I think this my first ever publication, so that's fun.

My editor tells me that this, my inaugural publication, is the jobs issue. That's something of a problem. I just got here, showed up all bright-faced and blissfully ignorant, and I don't know anything about anything. I still live in wincing fear of "non-traditional" students with their professional lives and civic accomplishments, to say nothing of the casual, offhand mastery of the 2- and 3Ls. I can't say anything useful to these people; my proudest moments in the workplace came when I was a carnie.

Now, it was only for brief while -- more of a stint than a career -- but I definitely spent a long string of hot summer days hard at work at the county fair. I was, I can say with some pride, a carnie. I slaved to prepare the signature dish at the venerable Australian Battered Potatoes booth. In fact, the Australian Battered Potato was the only dish we served, no doubt to preserve brand identity in the cluttered county fair concessions market. The customer could only opt for a slathering of ranch dressing or nacho cheese sauce, or in extreme cases both at once.

Cousin to the Bloomin' Onion, your Australian Battered Potato is a kind of mutant french fry, the sort of thing you'd find in a puddle of glowing ooze among talking turtles and their rat-man sensei. A single piece is bigger than your hand, a flap of potato cut lengthwise to resemble an orthopedic insole and then deep fried to quadruple its thickness. Pre-sauce, it could be tempura fit for ten-foot samurai or an oil and starch scale model of a pockmarked asteroid. Preparing merely a few for consumption might have been a job for one skilled cook, but our stand was situated up front and on the main thoroughfare, which ran directly from the creakily whirling steel of the Fun Zone to the entrance and the open-armed welcome of the statue of Don Diego, spray painted gold for the occasion. Great herds of people rolled by, and we moved product by the plateful, as fast as hurried hands could shovel out steaming heaps of potato and gather up wilted fives and ones in damp bushels. We had a team. We had a process.

Only a small team out front wrangled with the throng, taking orders and distributing plates. This freed up the inside of our cramped trailer as the factory floor, where the real work was done. My turf. It was hot and loud inside; the cramped room we proudly toiled in was full of boiling oil and hard metal surfaces, of hustling bodies and shouted conversations. The space was full of potato: you drank it in with every breath, and your skin slurped it up from the air. But things were best when it was busy, when we were taking a hundred orders an hour and the team hummed with energy. When orders were scarce, we felt dejected and unloved, our talents wasted on an indifferent world.

On bad days you'd be a slicer, feeding whole potatoes into a battering machine that spit out flaps of potato with the slap slap slap of bare feet on wet sand. Acidic juices would sting your fingers, eating through flimsy latex gloves that were crumbling apart by the lunch break. Pigpen to the slicer's Charlie Brown was the flourer, giving each slice a powdery dusting so that batter will stick. He would end his shift caked in a flaky clay of flour and sweat, an apparition out of Shakespeare. These were jobs for sturdy, dependable types, with stout hears and steady minds. He who does it well may take pride. But the true masters of the operation worked the fryers.

There were two cooks working back-to-back, each toiling above two deep pools of bubbling, frothing oil. Soybean, I think. The fryer slapped potato slices through a bucket of batter and fed a steady stream of them to the boiling maws before him, pausing only to scoop out finished pieces with a heavy wire basket. It took nerve and a deft hand to do this well -- potato slices haphazardly slung into the vats, splashing scalding oil all over the trailer and its crew, forcing the cooks to lay them out in a smooth casting motion, all but caressing the oil's surface. Then the slices glided in as smooth as Olympic divers and piled up as quickly as painters' brushstrokes. Such mastery did not come easily, and I have faded scars where ugly blisters once testified to my hard-won skill.

Once fetched from the fryer, newly-crispy slices were doused with salt and drowned in the appropriate sauce. The customer's heavy-duty paper plate had to be supported by two hands lest it buckle under the sheer mass of the assembled foodstuffs. There was enough starch and grease to kill a small mammal, a one-step recipe for artery cheese. But the crew has been made stronger, and it knows it can eat with impunity. It is metal, unstoppable, a machine. It has lived the potato, and mastered it.

Trevor Austin encourages you to share your employment stories with him at taustin@law.harvard.edu. He is currently a 1L, and in a previous life was a rhinoceros.

First, Let's Kill All the Tariffs?

Can W really be serious about his proposal to eliminate all tariffs and subsidies? Because that would be kind of great. Super, even.

Hat tip: Donklephant.

Underground Movements

There were only fifteen minutes left in Contracts, so I was alternating between anxiously watching the clock and staring out the window. Suddenly, I saw a dull flash outside, and waited completely still for twenty seconds before hearing the thunder's unmistakable rumble. By the time class was over, campus was under a full-on rain storm. Dressed for another 80-degree day, I took the tunnels home. I may not walk outside again for months.

Seth Abramson

just happened to be a speaker at a panel on living with our loan-forgiveness program. He works as a public defender in New Hampshire, and is every bit as passionate about it in person as this blog post would lead you to believe. All of these public interest lawyers they have come and talk to us are pretty damn inspiring. I fully plan on following some earlier advice, focusing on finding a job I can love and letting the rest work itself out, and it's increasingly looking like doing public interest work is the way to do that.

Prof CivPro Lays it Down

PCP: "So the due process clause of the fifth ammendment only applied to actions by the federal government. State governments could do what they liked."

Gunner (blurts out): "But didn't the fourteenth ammendment extend those protections to cover the states too?"

PCP: *glare* "Do you want to come up here and teach?"

Vonnegut on Stewart

"You're tremendously popular with all the right people."

Everyone watching TV with me kept reverently silent for the entire interview.

I imagine when they put stuff online, including Vonnegut's latest, "A List of Liberal Crap I Don't Want to Hear Anymore," it will go here

Your Senator May Be Reading This

Well not this, obviously, but some blog. I only saw about 30 seconds of the confirmation hearings today, and it just happened to be where Roberts was asked about a post on the Volokh Conspiracy. I know if I was Jim Lindgren, I'd be a lot more stoked than he seems to be.

Why I Am Not A Textualist

A lot of the rules that determine who has standing when were just made up by the courts at one point or another. These seem more like guidelines, and can be contravened if the Legislature says so or if a given court feels like it. But apparently there are some kinds of standing issues that Congress has no power to change, because they are grounded in the constitutional authority of Article III. Scalia argues for the majority in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife that Congress can't empower just anybody to sue if they won't have a legitimate "case" or "controversy."

Of course, Article III isn't very specific on this point. How did we decide what counts as an allowable "case" or "controversy?" That's right. The court made it up. Only earlier.

Professor Civil Procedure had been shooting down gunners all morning and just snapped at Unfortunate Student who brought this up in class, but near as I can tell the best reason for why some standing issues count as constitutional and some are merely procedural is: "Because that's how we've been doing it, and it's been working out okay. It doesn't have to make sense."

Limits

We just got cable in our dorm lounge, which is about 13 feet away from my door. Watch now as my productivity asymptotically approaches zero.

Reinforcements

A student from New Orleans who was a 2L at Loyola moved in to my hall yesterday. Real friendly and laid-back guy, seems remarkably unconcerned that his hometown is underwater. First thing he wanted to know from us was whether LSU beat Arizona State.

Meet The Press

A reporter from the Yale Daily News just called me up out of the blue to ask how I felt about my school having (or being about to have) 5 justices on the supreme court.

"No one cares."
"No one cares?"
"Well, the administration will joke about it sometimes, but the students certainly don't."
"Oh."
"How did you get this number, anyway?"

Reunions

All of a sudden I have this vibrant non-law-school social net.

I saw CM and Josh yesterday, and we talked for a bit about public interest work and changing one's anonymity policy from "token attempts" to "screw it."

Later I met up with a friend from high school (poor fool is taking a practice LSAT right this minute), and ran into someone from my dorm last year on the way there. When I got home, I had e-mails from two other old classmates telling me they're in the neighborhood too. And I'm going to spend most of today trying to track down a certain native Bostonian before she has to head back out to California for school.

I was really worried when I got here that I would lose touch with all my old friends and get sucked into a tiny little law school bubble, so I'm going to take these developments as signs of my uncanny sanity in the face of that threat.

Real Men Study Law

or so said Jack Roberts, father of current nominee to be Chief Justive of the Supreme Court. Full commentary on this, "one of the unlikeliest four-word sentences in the English language" over at Bruce Reed's excellent Slate column, The Has-Been.

I for one need a t-shirt of that.

Stamina

Tonight, as we reflect on a long first day back at the dorm:

A: "Is it bad that I'm already looking forward to the weekend?"
B: "It's Tuesday."
A: "..."
B: "And we had yesterday off."
A: "..."
B: "I feel the same way."

Civil Procedure

Best exchange of the class:

Professor CivPro: "But who makes the rules? This isn't a monarchy, we don't have a king, so who's the sovereign?"
Wisecracking Student: "Dubya?"
*nervous laughter as crestfallen Prof looks down at desk*
General Mumbling: "We The People?"
Prof CP: "Oh thank God. I thought I was going to cry."

Initiative

Two farsighted students in my section started taking up Katrina donations right when school started, and got our section leader (Professor Torts) to match contributions up to $1,000 dollar-for-dollar. The law school has also pledged to match any contributions by students or staff, making for a 4x multiplier that really gets even students to open their wallets. They made an announcement this morning at the end of Civil Procedure that they had collected just over $600 from students so far and wanted to reach a thousand by the end of the day. Professor Civ Pro announced she'd follow Professor Torts' lead, and I think they had a full box by lunchtime.

This is what they're talking about when they tell you your classmates are the most amazing part of the experience.

Naming Policy?

What do you guys think I should do about writing about professors?

I post under my own name and generally make no effort to hide my identity, so I'm always working under the assumption that whoever I write about will be reading this and know who I am (and that I'm writing about them). But I'm still not sure whether to go ahead and use professors' names - it makes things more transparent and possibly more useful to readers, but still feels a little funny. I like the Professor Subject convention.

I ask because I sat next to Professor Criminal Law at dinner and over the course of discussing how we researched schools he mentioned that he scrupulously avoids student blogs because he doesn't want to know what students may be writing about him.

Makin' it Happen

Tonight Professor Contracts made us arm wrestle. It was the Dean's welcome dinner for my section, and Professor Contracts spoke to us for a bit. We're going to play a game, he says, and has us move around the table to sit next to someone about our size. Get ready to arm wrestle - you get one point each time the back of the other person's hand touches the table, and the point of the game is to maximize the number of points you get. No talking, eyes closed.

So of course the trick here is to reciprocate, since you don't care how many points your "opponent" gets and you just want to burn through as many cycles as possible. I can't tell my partner about this plan, but I throw the first round and luckily am strong enough to quickly overpower him on the second and fourth, and they we're off to the races. When the exercise is over a couple of other pairs have had the same idea, and we all each have double-digit points, when almost everyone in the room has between zero and two. Moral of the story, intones Professor Contracts, is cooperate, don't compete. So I thought that was really cool.

Sleep

After a full week of sub-six hour days, I finally crashed and didn't wake up until this afternoon. And I don't even have a ton of work yet - it's mostly just a blur of introductions. Once again, I have been made painfully aware of just how bad I am at learning names. Just when it starts to hit you that 570 really is a lot of people, all the 2 and 3Ls start showing up, too. I ran into Bad Glacier in a volleyball game at one barbecue, and we trounced the opposition.

Safe and Sound

A close friend of mine was a 1L at Tulane and I still haven't been able to get a hold of him, but tonight I was finally able to talk to someone who has. He's okay; he made it out to Virginia before New Orleans went underwater. Still doesn't know what he'll do about school now, but I hope that will work out. Right now, I'm just thankful he's all right.

Big City Life

Today in my inbox:

CRIME ALERT
Armed Robberies
Cambridge Street, Cambridge

On Friday, September 2, 2005, at approximately 2:15 AM a male graduate student
reported to the Harvard University Police Department that he was robbed twice
while walking down Cambridge Street from Inman Square towards campus. As he
walked near Cambridge Hospital, he was struck in the head from behind and
knocked to the ground. When he looked up he was surrounded by four males who
demanded his cell phone, I-POD, and wallet. The victim complied and the
suspects walked away. As the victim continued walking on Cambridge Street
toward campus he was approached by a male who asked for a cigarette. The
victim gave the male a cigarette and continued on. The male then approached
the victim from behind and placed a knife to the victim’s throat and demanded
his money. The victim informed the suspect that he did not have any money as
he was just robbed. The suspect searched the victim and, finding no valuables,
let him go. The victim then proceeded to the Science Center where he reported
the robberies to both the Harvard University Police Department and the
Cambridge Police Department.

Jesus. I walked down to Inman square for dinner yesterday.

First Impressions

Today was the first day of orientation. It's going well so far, mostly touring the campus and picking up papers and buying books. Had a brief class with Professor Torts, who's my section leader. He called on people randomly but it didn't seem like a big deal. We discussed the McDonalds obesity case, so tonight's welcome to law school movie will be Super Size Me. Haven't seen that before, though honestly I'm just grateful it's not Legally Blond.

Arrival

So I got here alive. All set up now. Met some nice folks. I'll get all orientation-schmigelated tomorrow, so we'll see how that goes.

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.

New Planet!

They say it's bigger than Pluto.

Hat tip: Boing Boing.

My First Friday Spies

It comes in bright colors, with all the sharp edges rounded off and no bits I could break off and choke on.

1. What five things should you never buy used?
Food, drinks, and drugs, obviously. People who say that used underwear, swimsuits, socks, and the like have no uses are simply insufficiently imaginative. Sure, you'd never want to use those things as intended, but who says we've got to follow the rules like that? Fourth, then, never buy used anything you could get new for free. Fifth, cursed magical artifacts. This will almost invariably shift the curse to you, the new purchaser. Not good.

2. Sony BMG just ended a payola investigation by settling with New York Attorney General Elliot Spitzer. So let's engage in some reverse payola: What song or artist would you pay to never have to hear again, and how much would it be worth to you?
I would gladly exchange the change strewn across my dash (in excess of two dollars and seventeen cents!) for the right to snap in two the Bright Eyes CD my brother puts in my car stereo.

3. In honor of the new Bad News Bears: Did you ever play little league, or other organized youth sports?
I played little kid soccer like everyone else, running around, eating orange slices and drinking Capri Sun. I played little league baseball too. I mostly stood in the outfield staring at the sky and chewing absentmindedly on the leather of my glove. My parents tried to discourage this with chili powder and bitter apple spray, two tastes I came to appreciate.

4. What was your biggest fashion faux pas?
One Halloween, I went to high school dressed as a Heaven's Gate cultist. That was, in retrospect, a bit tasteless.

5. In honor of all our readers who took the Bar Exam this week: What was the hardest test you ever took?
The final exam in Philosophy 160B: Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. This was the first class I ever took where I maxed out intellectually. I realized that no matter how much I studied or how hard I tried, I would simply never be smart enough to understand what the hell was going on in this class. I left the final an hour early because I'd run out of questions that I could understand.

More Comicy Goodness

I have stumbled upon a new fount of wonder: A Lesson is Learned But the Damage is Irreversible.

Boing Boing

Someone in San Francisco filmed a commercial that involved launching 100,000 rubber bouncy balls down the street. Pictures here, by way of Boing Boing. This is possibly the coolest thing ever done.

It reminds me of the very end of my sophomore year. My roommates and I were packing at three in the morning when we came across an old, cheap set of billiard balls we had never opened. Naturally, we tore open the packaging and headed over to the stairwell.

We lived in a three-story building, and the stairwells were tall rectangular boxes with poured concrete stairs running up around the walls leaving a square area about six feet on a side open all the way down. Our experiments revealed that pool balls dropped form this height not only didn't break, but they bounced back up to almost the same height they were dropped from. A well-dropped ball could get several solid bounces in before it drifted into a set of stairs and began to carom wildly throughout the well. Soon we were throwing out the whole tray of balls at once, watching them fall and rise information before exploding all over the stairs in a glorious cacophony.

After a few minutes a bleary-eyed dormmate wandered out to the landing we were standing on to ask us, incredulously, whether we were throwing pool balls down the stairs. Why yes, we replied, as though this was not only self-apparent, but also perfectly normal. Shaking his head, he wandered back down the hall.

Outer Life

Scheherazade asks why some men refuse to dance, a subject I have touched briefly on before. I don't think my input would contribute to anyone's understanding of the phenomenon at this point. But follow the link to the blog of that first respondent, Outer Life. His work is nothing short of brilliant. No, seriously. Go read this. Right now.

Slackers Wanted

I went to my second California Club summer event yesterday. The returning students were unanimous in recommending that we "pre-Ls" not work too hard. "You're going to look around and see that everyone is killing themselves with work, and you'll think that you should kill yourself too. Don't do it!" Everyone agreed that grades didn't correlate well with effort, and they all swore they did much less work second semester. "There are only going to be like two As per class per section," advised one student, "and you won't get one unless you're really brilliant AND you work pretty much all the time." The others nodded in agreement. Just stay caught up, they told me, and study before finals and you'll be fine.

And you know what, that all sounds like good advice. I have no intention of killing myself with work. I was glad to hear people advise against it. Now, maybe that's just the kind of person my state produces, but I think I'd be sort of fine with that.

Advice to Law School Applicants

Josh's post today reminds me of this time last year, when I was just a wide-eyed prospective applicant, scouring the internets for wisdom and advice. That's how I found all these blawgs in the first place. It seems like it would be good karma to pass on now what I learned in the process, so I'll go ahead and do that.

The June round has come and gone, so I'm going to skip writing about the LSAT. My experience was pretty unusual anyway; I was taking practice tests on my kitchen table in Berlin this time last year. My experience as a sub for Kaplan didn't teach me all that much about what most people need either, since I never saw a given set of students more than twice. Still, if you want to ask me about the LSATs for October or December, feel free to shoot me en e-mail.

I'll be back later to the specifics of writing a personal statement, and I'll go through how I wrote mine. The first thing I did, and I recommend you do the same, was to start getting down on paper as many ideas as possible. It was surprisingly difficult for me to write about myself, to describe what I would be like to another person. I always knew who I was, and never had to worry about describing me to myself. So when I had to talk in the abstract about who I was, I had no practice at it. Coming up with meaningful insights is hard.

Luckily, brainstorming can help a lot. I started out by writing, in a complete stream of consciousness style, things that I thought were true about myself. It looked something like this:

Okay, so I like fixing things. Finding problems and fixing them. See this in CS. Like thinking in the big picture, don't like wroking out pointer details. Like finding clever solution. "it's a big hack" inelegant, but effective. Umm, what else? like to talk in section, argue debate. easily distracted, like to focus on one thing at a time ...

Worry later about making this into a meaningful statement. Right now the idea is just to off-load all of these thoughts about yourself onto the paper, so you can address them visually rather than from memory. If you're like me, this will already help you get a better sense of who you are than you had before. It sounds silly, but for me writing this thing was kind of a process of self-discovery.

More about that process later. Now, I have to go watch The Wedding Crashers.

Fantastic!

Janine at Very Unnecessary has graciously agreed to send me my her spare copy of Eddie Izzard's Glorious. For those unfamiliar with is work, Eddie is a British transvestite standup comedian, and he's absolutely hilarious. You should at least try to see his Dress to Kill. You would never have thought that riffs on imperialism, the Protestant Reformation, and squirrels could be so funny. Sharp-eyed observers may recognize him from a cameo in Ocean's Twelve, as the guy who makes that weird hologram thingy. Anyways.

I really wanted to throw an Eddie track on the tape I'm making for the Magic Cookie mix swap, but I figured that two standup tracks would be too many, and I couldn't resist opening with some Dane Cook. Don't touch me you drink!

Path Dependence

For you to really understand me, you first have to understand my frame of reference. I would scoff when people would tell me that a few hundred students in a class is "pretty big" at a school; I graduated from high school in a class of 647. That's normal to me. What a class of this size meant was that the TV-land dyhnamics never played out. There were always enough geeks, theater wierdos, goths, surfers, skaters, and what-have-yous that every high-school stereotype had its own clique and self-reliant subculture.

So I spent today hanging out at the beach with a bunch of firends of mine from high school, who rolled in the same Advanced Placement circles as I did. So there's six of us, strectch out in the sun and we get to talking about what people will be doing next year. One was already getting into politics, focusing on environmental issues. Three of us are starting law school in the fall, and a fourth took the test with us, but opted for banking. The last? He's doing Teach for America, but studying for the LSAT.

The Funny Meme

Yeah so I did the quiz too.

the Wit (56% dark, 39% spontaneous, 27% vulgar)

your humor style: CLEAN | COMPLEX | DARK You like things edgy, subtle, and smart. I guess that means you're probably an intellectual, but don't take that to mean you're pretentious. You realize 'dumb' can be witty--after all isn't that 'the Simpsons' philosophy?--but rudeness for its own sake, 'gross-out' humor and most other things found in a fraternity leave you totally flat. I guess you just have a more cerebral approach than most. You have the perfect mindset for a joke writer or staff writer. Your sense of humor takes the most effort to appreciate, but it's also the best, in my opinion. Also, you probably loved the Office. If you don't know what I'm talking about, check it out here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/theoffice/. PEOPLE LIKE YOU: Jon Stewart - Woody Allen - Ricky Gervais

My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 47% on dark You scored higher than 33% on spontaneous You scored higher than 35% on vulgar

Link: The 3 Variable Funny Test written by jason_bateman on Ok Cupid

It seems to me that it doesn't work well to give you a point on three axes. Some of us hapen to have a comic range, able to enjoy both the subtle ironies of great literature and great honking farts. I think it would have been better if the format was more, "check all that you find funny."

Harry Skywalker and the Half-Blood Prince

I finally broke down and read the new Potter book. My brother had just finished and it was lying around so I picked it up, resigning myself to enjoy it without the sonorous voice of Jim Dale. I'm going to try not to give anything away, but I'm still going to write about it now, and if you're concenred that I might let something slip, you can stop reading now. Josh, this means you.

I read the thing practically cover-to-cover, so clearly I thought it was gripping and exciting. But I also loved how dozens of little things were done. I love the attention to detail in the social dynamic of Harry, Ron and Hermione, and all of their petty squables. I love how Dumbledore handles it when Harry disappoints him. I love that there's good reason for why the battle goes as well as it does. I love the gimmick in the first Quiddich match, even if you see it from a mile away. I love the way Fleur is handled throughout, and especially at the end. I especially love Dubledore's talk with Harry about the special power he has, and I love the Obi-Wan Kenobi act where that kind of power shows its true strength. And of course I love the violent suddenness of the marquee death - how like the real world!

Only two small quibbles: I don't understand why the silent loner hero thing at the end is so easily accepted, and I wonder what they'll call the seventh book now that Harry's dead.

The Firm

So apparently David E. Kelley is making a reality TV show around courtroom performances by trial lawyers. I can't say whether or not I'll watch this. Not because I have self-important notions about how it may reflect on the legal profession, or self-righteous condescension towards reality television but because I'm just not a very reliable television viewer. I wanted to watch 24 and Alias religiously because I thought they were engaging, but I was only able to because Mike watched them too and would remind me when they were on. The Daily Show has been my favorite thing on television for over five years, but I still only catch one or two episodes a week because I always forget when it's on. This is a show that airs literally every day in the same time slot. But I still regularly miss it.

Anyway, the story about the show ends with two people who think this show is Bad For America. Quips professor of legal ethics Victor Goode, ""What's next for reality TV? Which doctor can take out a gall bladder the best?" You know what? I'd watch that.

Wonderland

I love Las Vegas. Yes, I am easily charmed by bright shiny lights, and by places that will serve you alcohol literally at any time. But it's more than that. I love the town because it is completely shameless. There is a fake pyramid, a fake Eiffel Tower, and a fake New York skyline. There's a small handful of buildings styled after European palaces, except fifty stories tall. The Bellagio has an enormous lake in front of it, so you can only enter from the sides, a lake filled with jets to shoot the water tens of stories into the air. The strip is one long string of egregious baubles. It's all so colossally, monumentally stupid. But, and this is the key, it's also normal there. Never mind that it's a hundred and fourteen degrees outside, in the middle of absolutely nowhere, it's perfectly reasonable to put faux European capitols down in there side-by-side. They belong there. So does everyone else. High rollers that want to bet thousands of dollars on a dice roll or hand of cards next to pasty tourists in shorts too short and sandals with socks. Five-star restaurants and unkempt migrants handing out escort service playing cards. I-banking hotshots in for the night from SF and chain-smoking eighty-year-old grandmothers. It all belongs there, and when it's in Vegas, needs not apologize for itself. You get fifty-year-old men in factory-ripped jeans and shirts a size too small unbuttoned to the navel, busts "enhanced" with silicon and saline to make them perfectly spherical, taxis with custom rims, and all of it is ready to meet derision or despair with perfect nonchalance. Everything is in Vegas is stupid and crazy. But it's okay. In Vegas, stupid and crazy are just fine.

At one point there was a brief discussion about the word "egregious" and what it really meant which led to it being adopted as a synonym for awesome and the new catchphrase of the trip. "Yeah man! You just hit the hard eight! That was egregious!" I met a cool 3L, and together we decided we would do all the monosyllabic Vegas nightclubs one better by opening our own joint called "Of." I think someone stole my cell phone at one of those places. I rode with two college friends up from LA and the drive both ways flew by as we had those long and far-reaching conversations about everything that articulate TV characters have and that real people never seem to. The last night we were there we were out a club until 6:30 in the morning, and spent the whole cab ride home dazed and blinking. The driver described himself as a "ho-ologist" and spent much of the ride laying out an elaborate taxonomy of his own devising.

Swingin'

I'm leaving for Vegas tomorrow morning. Talk to you all when I get back.

The Last Man

My brother just got back from preview night at the Comic Con, and he brought back two amazing trades, Vertigo's The Last Man, volumes 1 and 2. The premise is that some (so far unexplained) catastrophe instantaneously kills off every mammal on Earth with a Y chromosome, except for the main character and a Friends style helped monkey he was unsuccessfully trying to train. The story stays fresh and inventive through both books, but you can tell you're into somehting good right from the first few pages. Yorrick (for that's his name), is an ameteur escape artist, and you watch him wriggle out of a straghtjacket in flat, cramped drawings, inside a shuttered apartment while he talks about agoraphobia with his girlfriend, pictured hiking through sweeping Australian vistas. You've got all your thematic elements laid out form the start, but in a way that works without being showy. I mean, there are so many layers. It's like an onion, man.

God I'm a geek.

Limited Invulnerability

I went to the doctor today to get a new tetanus shot - apparently my old one was out of fashion. Or at least I thought I was only getting a tetanus shot. Turns out it was a setup, an ambush, and once they had me down there they decided to stick me with drugs for hepatitis A (again), meningitis (again) and the whooping cough. Newly impervious to so many different kinds of harm, I now feel the need to do somehting needlessly reckless to compensate.

Nazis In Texas

When I got back from more basketball tonight, my parents were watching a show on PBS called History Detectives. They were talking to some woman from Hearne, Texas, who thought that some land her ancestors owned housed an internment camp during World War 2. An internment camp for Germans.

This sounds crazy right? It's not. Apparently at one point there were over half a million German POWs being held on American soil. Sure enough, the government appropriated 300 acres of this woman's family's land and built a POW camp, right in the middle of Texas. You see, it turns out that there's a provision in the Geneva conventions about what kind fo climate prisonerts can be kept in. Soldiers held in Hearne, Texas had been captured while fighting in North Africa, and the Powers That Were decided Texas had the most North-Africa-Like climate of any allied territory.

Imagine being drafted into the German army, being shipped off to Africa, suffering some of the first German defeats of the war, being taken prisoner, and then being shipped off to Texas! You just have to be thinking, "Was?" Then when you get there, they're allowed to put you to work, including in agriculture, so you wind up picking cotton. They hold old photos of the prisoners doing exactly that. THat kind of culture shock has to be near-fatal.

There was also a slightly scary bit about the underground activities of former Nazi party members. They published an underground newspaper inside the prison and even built a short-wave radio they used to contact other POWs. They ran their side of the camp until they murdered an informant one night and the guards segregated the prisoners by ideology.

So I thought that was a cool story and I wanted to share it.

Combat!

Bad Glacier has challenged me for rights to the Evil Twin title, to be settled by honorable combat between Giant Battle Monsters, in accordance with prophesy and ancient custom. No doubt he will be left quavering in fear when he comes to behold the monstrosity opposite him in the Arena:

T Sinister is a Giant Lizard that has Enormous Tusks, carries a Ray Gun, is Covered with a Thick Slime, and can Regenerate and Change Colour. Strength: 12 Agility: 6 Intelligence: 3 To see if your Giant Battle Monster can defeat T Sinister, enter your name and choose an attack: fights T Sinister using Strength Agility Intelligence

If anyone else wants a piece, I'll be stomping around right here, using my powers for Awesome.

UPDATE: My [evil/goody-two-shoes] twin at Bad Glacier demonstrates great [cunning/cowardice] and, seeing that no beast of his could match T Sinister for sheer stompiness, elects to go with a nimbler and cleverer champion, some kind of rusted, rabid robot. I have been temporarily defeated, and must retreat to my [glacial fortress/secret volcano lair] in order to [recover my strength/plot and scheme], before I can hope to return and [bring him to Justice/claim what is rightfully mine].

Frenching Volokh

Eugene Volokh suddenly and enthusiastically gets into the kissing day spirit, if a little late. Volume to compensate for tardiness?

Just Like Old Times

I got together with three friends from high school last night, guys I know from the swim and polo teams. We played basketball at the Boys' and Girls' Club where we used to swim, and let to play some low-stakes poker. I still can't shhot worth a damn, but against a bunch of swimmers I can be an inside presence. Still have to work on finishing with my right, though.

London

Our thoughts and prayers go out to the people of London this morning.

Fellow Travelers

Found and put up links to a small host of other incoming 1L's. You can access their compelling stories and whatnot from the links at right. And if you're an incoming 1L with a blog of your own, e-mail me, or leave a comment.

Nothing Nice To Say

is a comic, mostly about the punk music scene. I've never really been sympathetic to the kind of tribal warfare that hardcore music fans get into, but there's a kind of cheery misanthropy that they pull off well there. For example, this strip warmed the black depths of my soul.

Charles Darwin Has A Posse

Head over to this page at Swarthmore and print out a sheet of stickers that look like this one:

Link via BoingBoing.

New Copper Comic

Kazu at Bolt City puts these out once a month. There's a new one up now. The joke is a very old one, but there's some good visual humor that's well executed. My favorite bit, though, is that the hatter is right at first: Fred looks better in the blue than he would in Maroon. Oh just shut up and go read the comic.

Media Gluttony

One of my favorite things about having this place is that I can take something I've been thinking about, something I saw or read recently, and just off-load it onto the site. Once it's set down here, I don't have to think about it actively, until it comes up again. But lately, I've been building a backlog. Lazing around on my ass, but frantically fleeing boredom, I move on to the next thing before I have a moment to compose my thoughts about it. I don't want to write anything unless it looks interesting, but that means I don't write anything, and I get this kind of mental indigestion. So forgive the extended metaphor while I brain-vomit all over this page.

The War of the Worlds is creepy, especially because you never see any politicians or other figures of authority. It's all just about one guy, and it seems like he's all on his own against the invaders (and the rest of humanity). It's pretty scary.

I was originally cynical about Peter Jackson's announcement that he wanted to remake King Kong, but we saw the trailer before War and it was breathtaking.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith is thoroughly silly, but I like that sort of thing. Said one companion, "Poor Jenny Anniston never had a chance." This is true.

I've got my hands on an advance review copy of Rick Moody's (forthcoming?) The Diviners, which seemed slow and self-indulgent for the first sixty pages but suddenly reached critical mass and all of a sudden is quick and funny.

I wouldn't really recommend anyone reading Accelerando, even though it's free. It's about how the world will undergo almost unthinkably radical changes as AI and neural input technologies develop, but the universe is too damn consensual. The main characters all get out of binds by making incredibly clever legal moves, trying to trick and outsmart their enemies. It's dirty, but everyone plays by the rules. Nobody ever just flips the board over and uses force. This becomes tiresome, and doesn't sound very realistic.

I've been re-reading the Calvin and Hobbes tenth anniversay book, whic has all kinds of interesting commentary by Watterson.

And I've been listening to the Willie Nelson compilation Revolutions of Time. i like the first two discs, but the tird one with all the guests doesn't feel right.

Ah, there. I feel better now. Must learn to use drafts, pace self. This would be be valuable skill.

How Can You Tell If You're The Evil Twin?

Bad Glacier sounds a whole lot like me. You know what they say: fools seldom differ.

Bangkok 8

I finished reading Bangkok 8 last night. Of course it was great, or it wouldn't be worth talking about. The story is two parts detective thriller and one part Buddhist magic realism. The book aggressively defies conventioanl plot dvices and morality, and if you're willing to go along for the ride it's a lot of fun. With all that messiness, I don't think I could have readit and enjoyed it a few years ago, so I'm glad it came along when it did. I remember now Erem telling me about reading House of the Spirits, "Sometimes there's some crazy shit, but that's just how they roll."

Edit: Man, I can't even spell "Bangkok" when I've got the book right in front of me.

Jim Dale

I have a confession: I've never read a Harry Potter book. This isn't so strange in itself, because though they are engaging stories they are also targeted at a slightly younger demographic than mine. They are children's books. Which is why it's somewhat embarrassing to admit that I haven't read any of these children's books because, like an illiterate barbarian, I have listened to them on CD instead. In my defense, the recordings are top-notch, done by an actor named Jim Dale, who does voices for all the characters and everything. There's a story about him and the Potter recordings in this morning's Wall Street Journal, so that's what made me think of it. I'll probably go buy the CD's of Half-Blood Prince when they come out, too. Because I can't read.

Also, O'Connor has retired. And so it begins.

Bizarre and Wonderful Law Rap

First, a taste:

I put you punk-ass bitches in crisis--
I'm unprecedented; fuck stare decisis

All this found in a sprawling comments thread over at Unfogged. Many thanks to Scheherazade at Stay of Execution for the link.

Atheist Camp

This sort of thing sounds like a terrible idea. Even as a non-believer myself, I'd never send kinds of mine to such a place - what do people like us need to get all worked up about our kids' faith (or lack thereof) for? I don't know about the Maledictorian , but I did just fine at regular summer camp. Over the years I went to ranch camp, sailing camp, even a week one summer at YMCA surf camp, and the man upstairs never came up. Apparently, all the C in YMCA stands for is "no swearing."

In the end, I didn't need to have dinner surrounded by portraits of notable atheists, and I suspect I would not have taken kindly to Bertrand Russell staring me down as I ate overcooked spaghetti. God is the ultimate authority figure and we won't banish Him by indoctrinating children. Heck, sent to this camp I might have come out a believer, if only out of spite. Instead, my spiritual outlook developed under a kind of benign neglect. It seems to me that if it's terribly important to teach one's children that it's okay not to believe in God the way to do it is to show them how a life lived with any mention of the divine simply omitted works just fine.

Botox in my Milk

Crooked Timber links to an article in The Chronicle about a paper describing how terrorists could kill thousands of people with an attack on the nation's milk supply. My friends that took terrorism and national security classes at Stanford all told me about the exact same scenario, so I guess it's a good idea to publicize it more widely. Doing so certainly isn't providing the terrorists with a road map they couldn't find otherwise.

Genius

Perhaps we can kill two birds with one stone by floating a rumor that Taiwan is acquiring nuclear weapons from North Korea . . . .

-Instapundit

I Hits the Links

I played my first game of golf this afternoon, at a short course near my house that has cheap greens fees after 5. I was thoroughly awful, but I was hitting switch (for those paying attention, this means I shot right-handed. Played with four friends and someone's dad, who was impressed that I was keeping up. "So if you're playing almost as good as us hitting right-handed, you must be pretty good, huh?" he asked. Ha! If only he knew.

Stankowski Reports

A first-year associate provides periodic updates on his life at the firm. My favorite quote:

However, contrary to the old saying, when you ask me if I have finished that 20 page brief that you assigned me ten minutes ago, and I say (in my most nonchalant of voices) "Well, no," and then you yell at me and curse a lot, I am not really "being cut down to size." This is easily demonstrated when I stand up to follow you down the hall as you continue to yell. I am still much taller than you. Also, it is not an insult to tell me that I am "lazier than a bean-picking Mexican." I have seen Mexicans pick beans. They work really hard.

Optimism

This Madisonian Theory blog and its recommendations for incoming students has me felling pretty good right now. Tip 1: get fit. Couldn't be happier to see that advice. Tip 2:read Cryptonomicon, "or even the whole Baroque Cycle." Check. Tip 3: Read Gödel, Escher, Bach. Check. My whole UGrad major was about that stuff.

Am feeling psyched, and even more confident about my decision to scorn The Paper Chase, 1L, and related media.

Also: why doesn't Blogger's spell check recognize the word "blog?"

Batman

I saw Batman Begins on Saturday in Santa Cruz on my way back down to SD, asnd I really liked it. Yes, I too noticed the curious problem with the microwave generator that people are talking about. For what it's worth, my Scottie-must-have-been-addled-by-his-time-in suspended-animation continuity hack is that the microwaves must only have made water boil becuase it was in metal pipes, under pressure. If you've ever tried to reheat food that came in a foil wrapping, you'll know your microwave doesn't like metal. Lucky for me, I am ignorant of just enough physics to be happy with this explanation.

Of course, it doesn't answer other questions raised by the we've-been-adding-the-airborne-hallucinogen-to-the-water-for-weeks scenario, like why people in Gothan weren't tripping balls every time they took a hot shower or made spagetti, but I'll let that slide too. Batman is a ninja. With those cool spiky armband thingies. Cool.

Spam

The signal-to-noise ration on my email has plummeted since graduation. When I was getting 10+ emails a day that I would need/want to read, I never really noticed how often I tapped the delete key to get to them. Now that school's out and I receive practically no mail, it sure seems like there's a lot more spam. At least my old school account will die soon. Planned obsolescence, baby.

Reply to Jobs

Paul Andrws, a columnist for the Seattle Times, replies to Jobs' address (which, in fairness, he calls "a moving life statement," adds a tongue-in-cheek fourth story to Jobs' commencement address. It begins:

There's a fourth story about me that I decided to omit from this talk. It has to do with the many people in my life whom I've cheated, abused and otherwise screwed on my rise to fame and riches.

As they say, read the whole thing.

Neal Stephenson Agrees With Me

about Star Wars:

Likewise, many have been underwhelmed by the performance of Hayden Christensen, who plays Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader. Only if you've seen the "Clone Wars" cartoons will you understand that Anakin is a seriously damaged veteran, a poster child for post-traumatic stress disorder. But since none of that background is actually supplied by the Episode III script, Mr. Christensen has been given an impossible acting task. He's trying to swim in air.

In sum, very little of the new film makes sense, taken as a freestanding narrative. What's interesting about this is how little it matters.

From a piece he wrote for the New York Times.

Steve Jobs: You're All Gonna Die!

Yes, he actually did say that at commissioning, but it wasn't completely morbid. Jobs told three stories about his own life, stories that I'll agree with the media in calling "surprisingly candid." It was not at all what I expected from a media-darling celebrity captain of industry. His anecdotes look like unusual choices for a graduation ceremony: dropping out of college, being fired from his own company, being diagnosed with terminal cancer. But once you got past that the message was damn good: you can't see how the future will play out, so stick with your instincts, and don't worry about connecting the dots until after the fact.

Jobs' ruminations on mortality rubbed some of my fellow graduates the wrong way, but I thought the message came through. Of course, literally living every day as if it were your last isn't such a great plan, but living every day mindful of your limited time here is a darn good idea. Maybe we need all that death talk to shake us out of adolescent complacency.

The complete text can be found here.

Stay hungry. Stay foolish.

The Study of Seduction

Just got a link off LSD to a new blog, Legal Seduction. It's by an incoming 1L who's decided to take a systematic approach to improving his game. As one who habitually muddles through both dating and life in general, I find this kind of thing incredibly interesting. I'm putting a link up under Law Students, but maybe we should tentatively pencil it in under Awesomeness.

Home At Last

Back from a post-graduation mini-vacation. Much to say. Only just got wireless up and running, using my AirPort express to bridge the signal to a linksys wireless router. Apple said it couldn't be done. Well it can. It's just very, very slow.

David Kennedy on America's "Mercenary Army"

Professor Kennedy, about whom I've blogged before, was the faculty speaker at the Senior Luncheon today. Excellent choice. He talked about graduating in general, and the real world vs. the academic world in a very engaging way, and everyone was smiling and laughing.

His main point, or his main serious point, that he eventually came around to is that he's concerned that America today has a "mercenary army." He was careful to distinguish between the character of the men and women in uniform, "these are not the hated Hessians that George III hired," and what actually concerned him, the amount of civic participation involved in deploying the armed forces. In short, he's worried that the unprecedented power and lethality of the American armed forces can be deployed without burdening or even inconveniencing the general American public. He spoke about how citizenship used to be partially defined in terms of an obligation to defend the population, but that most people never feel this obligation, and that makes us insufficiently involved in where great violence can be inflicted in our names by a professional military. Like any other speech in the circumstances, it ended with a call for the graduating seniors to go out and change the world, take on civic responsibility, and so on, but it was an interesting and unexpected twist to hear a humanities professor at a bastion of liberal thought say, in effect, "Go join the army. It's your duty."

Now on one hand it's tempting to dismiss Kennedy's comparisons to World War II America, where we were involved in a total war against vicious ideologies supported by powerful industrial nations. Today's vicious ideologies are, thankfully, far less well endowed and equipped than Nazism, fascism, and Soviet communism. Islamic totalitarianism doesn't pose an existential threat to America, and maybe it's okay for a minority to really worry about the fight, when that fight has to do with making sure that a fairly limited set of Very Bad Things don't happen. Maybe these concerns would evaporate in the face of an enemy that demanded full mobilization. But assuming that Kennedy is on to something, and that it's problematic for most people to barely feel the costs of military action, how could that be fixed?

For all the talk of the dignity of the citizen-soldier, from a policy perspective it's hard to argue with results. If a professional, all-volunteer force fights better, it looks like lunacy to advocate compulsory service for domestic policy reasons. The first responsibility of armies is to win. And looking forward towards increasing use of automation, it actually looks like the human costs of war will be borne by ever-fewer living, breathing, and voting Americans.

In what other ways, then, could costs be shared? Have military expenditures earmarked on everyone's taxes? Require everyone to serve a limited term in support roles? I'm worried that if this is actually a problem, potential solutions aren't very apparent.

Update: Welocme Mudville readers. You can find a full transcript of Kenndey's remarks that day here. There are still valid criticisms of the column: it's not a good idea to change the structure of the military to achieve social goals, and as some have pointed out, an all-volunteer force can be a check on adventurism (Marginal Revolution makes that point here). But the hysterical "he's a crazy leftist who hates America" criticisms splashed all over the place don't look to me like they hold water.

Ouch

I'm a really terrible boxer when I'm drunk.

Graduating: Time Doesn't Always Fly

Everyone always says that college just whips by, and after four years you'll be left wondering where all the time went. Maybe I'm just lucky, but I don't feel that way. I feel like I can look back on my four years of undergrad and say that I've done good work here; I've lived well. My undergraduate experience seems full, complete. It brings me great satisfaction to be able to say that.

I hope that I can keep this up, so that when I'm old I can feel this way about the rest of my life too, and not just college. I think I need to make mysleft something to that effect to hang on my wall.

David Brooks, Asshat

Link, via Crooked Timber.

Star Wars Marathon, Blink

So we were originally scheduled to have a big Star Wars mega-marathon today, watching all six episodes "back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back," as Colin's email had it. But we didn't get started until after 10:30, so after Episode 2 we wouldn't make the 3:00 showing of 3, and we couldn't go to the 5:00 show or we'd miss dinner, so now we have to wait until 7. Which means that so far today all I've done is watched the first two movies, which I though were horrible. An interesting thing happened though: I enjoyed them a lot more this time around. I sat through The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones back to back, and was happy and entertained the whole time.

I have a couple of theories about why this might be. First, I understand the Byzantine plot beforehand, and can pay more attention to the little clues about what's going on, and less trying to figure out who the hell is on what side. If nothing else, this makes the battles more enjoyable. It certainly makes some of the more strained conversations believable when you understand what the characters are getting at.

What really surprised me, though, was that those god-awful love scenes didn't look so bad anymore. I think that this is because I stopped holding Padme and Anakin to regular standards of human behavior. Hayden Christensen's lines still set my teeth on edge, but it seems like they should. He's playing an adolescent ex-slave warrior space monk prodigy. That kind of thing would certainly have had me saying some weird shit at seventeen. After Revenge of the Sith, you don't just know in some abstract way that this kid with the funny haircut is supposed to become Darth Vader, you've seen it from the inside. You understand it. It's his destiny man, in a very literal cinematic way, and you expect him to act funny.

I've heard that Lucas intended to create a new myth for our time, and on reflection the movies do a lot better considered in that light. Think about the Odyssey, for example. The little jaunt to the island of the lotus-eaters would be pretty crap as a stand-alone story; it's much better in the context of the entire narrative. Ditto for Star Wars. I feel like, as with any good myth, we're supposed to know the basics of the story ahead of time. They're supposed to be just understood as part of the culture. Well, as a full-bore geek, Star Wars is certainly part of my culture, and I've found that once you've got the whole thing in there, each individual movie is actually a pretty good "telling" (what in Linguistics we'd call a "token") of that part of the larger myth.

Anyway, while we wait for dinner I've been reading Blink, at a rate of about a hundred pages an hour. A lot of it is stuff I've heard before, either in descriptions of the book or in CogSci classes, and I've read enough synopses that by this time the whole "thin-slicing" idea doesn't even seem all that weird. What I really want, is to hear some music by this Kenna character.

So You CAN Play Water Polo In Boston

One of my best friends from high school played polo for MIT, and will be staying in the Boston area next year. Turns out there are club teams one can join, so I can keep playing back East. I'm so happy I could fart.

RSS Feed Bag

I just downloaded the NetNewsWire RSS feeder and started playing around with it. It's pretty cool, though I'm not sure if the formatting is ideal. I like browsing from one blog post right down to another, without popping each one open at the subject line. But it'll be good for keeping track of who's posted, at least.

Go Play Jade Empire

That's an order. I love this game.

I'm Poor

Between traveling this month, a nasty speeding ticket, and my housing deposit, I seem to have run completely out of money. I have here my VIsa bill and chscking account statement, and one of them is distressingly larger than the other. My roommates all joke that we should just go donate at the California Cryobank. Their ad in the daily says they'll pay you $600 a month, and as Big Nilla says, "Dude, out of everybody on this earth, I would want your sperm."