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.