Here is a brief missive from Exam Crazyland, USA: it's nice to have a viable workspace at home, finally. It's also nice that I'm fortunate enough to be inside a wireless cloud emanating from somebody else's apartment so I don't have to jimmy the laptop into my cable modem. I can sort of see why people get paid hundreds of dollars per hour to deal with this corporate law stuff: it's really maddening. But I can't see myself getting into it for the long term.

Recent entertainment: "Rear Window" (somewhat overrated, especially because of some of the plot twists or non-twists that I couldn't get my brain around), the first episode of "The Prisoner" (now I wanna see the last episode), Spike Lee's "Bamboozled" (very ambiguous...will be well worth rewatching with the commentary track on).

"Diary of an ex-1L"...that will be true forever!

When trial dockets get overloaded, why can't you just impose a "tax" on monetary judgments and use it to hire more judges and build more courtrooms?

I have some idea of how you get to be a law professor and how tough it is...but how do you get to be a judge? I mean, I understand you're elected or appointed, but judicial elections are virtually just appointments by the political parties or the bar association so far as I can tell.

Numbers!

586 posts (not including this one), and over 40,000 words. That's getting into novella territory, if I had been writing a novella!

"Diary of a Law Student" doesn't seem to be currently taken...but how boring can you get?

F9/11

I sort of don't want to actually see this movie, but I have somewhat of an urge to buy a lot of tickets for it and then not go or give them away, à la "The Passion". Of course, all this money is going to go to Michael Moore, who is a terrible, horrible, repulsive human being and a jerk moreover. "But he's our jerk" says my brother.

By the way, I think that I've realized that I've talked a whole lot less about law school since Spring Break in particular. Maybe I should change the name of the blog to something non-law schooly for the sake of truth-in-advertising. But I still want people to be able to find me.

Now there's an interesting election law issue...

Fahrenheit 9/11 ads as political ads...hmmm...if you're a group with many millions of dollars, you could make a $50,000 movie bashing a candidate, show it in one city, and then air ads for it all over the county. For that matter, why not a direct-to-video production? So the new tagline for soft money ads wouldn't be "Call Mr. Whatever and Ask Him Why He's a Jerk", but "Go to www.fakemovie.com and Buy This DVD Entertainingly Telling You Why Mr. Whatever is a Jerk".

Is that Banana Sauce peeking in on me from Japan?

And you know what else? Prof. Shipman hasn't said "The law is a seamless web" in class yet!

Come on independent study project!

I got some good vibes on my proposed teaching project from one of the deans a few minutes ago. I hope I hope I hope I can do it! If I'm going to do it, I need to really snap to it because school starts for Worthington about the same time as here. I will probably put a lot of the materials I'm going to gather for the course here on my web page so you can watch it develop. I think I'm going to do "web handouts" to save money on copying.

Aikido!

I tried something new yesterday. I went to an Aikido class! I had just watched one before, but this time I actually participated. I fully expected that I would wake up sore today, but I'm feeling a little off in an absolutely indescribable way. I think my chi got rearranged! I think I'll go back for more, though. It was pretty cool.

Stop me if I'm repeating myself, but why are so many of you still using IE? Get on the Mozilla train! Choo choo!

That was fast!!!

A copy of the Bill Clinton book is already on reserve for me at the Worthington Library! Geez, that was really, really fast! How many copies did the library buy? 178!!! That's, let's see...about $6,000 worth! Given the bad reviews, though, I can't imagine really slogging through the whole thing, especially when there's a final coming up and I already have a zillion books out of the library that I'm not reading. But I feel like it's some kind of duty. What a great library to have the big new book on reserve for you the very day it comes out!

Maybe I shouldn't have taken a class this summer. It's a pretty good class with an excellent professor, but I think I could have used a break from that grind. I'm kind of burning out, and I have very little time to get unburned out.

Recipe!

Bachelor Chow

• One (1) one-pound package of frozen strawberries
  
• 1/2 cup of unsweetened applesauce
  
• 1 banana
  
• 1 cup apple or orange juice (or half of each)
  
• 1/2 cup of non-fat powdered milk
  
• 2 cups quick oatmeal
  

In this campaign season, something is just plain bugging me. Does anyone remember a TV ad campaign from a few years back that goes something like this: a generic presidential candidate stands at a podium and says "If I am elected, I will lower taxes, raise spending, and balance the budget!" While he says "balance the budget", he does this gesture where his hands are like the two sides of a scale. Then the commercial says: "You can't believe everything you hear, but you can believe this!" Then I think it talks about some kind of car sale. Does anybody else remember this ad, or is it just my imagination?

Actually being a lawyer...

It's on the wane at the moment as a possibility for my future. I haven't been engaged much lately in thinking about common problems of the average person. I think that's what I'm most interested in. Also, it's totally unrealistic to think that publishing statutes gives basically anybody any notice of what the law is. If the law is anything like common sense, then people know what they should and shouldn't do. If it's not, then it will be a total "gotcha" afterwards.

Lawyers, judges, and law professors need a reality check about just how real, regular people view the law. Shouldn't the law work the way regular folks expect it to, or better?

Happy Bloomsday!

I completed the easier of my two established life goals when I finished reading Ulysses by James Joyce about five years ago. Did I get it? Did I read it carefully? Do I remember anything important from it? Not exactly. But I read the whole freakin' thing!

My other established life goal? Write a book and get it published! Any kind of book! A novel? Sure! A casebook? Uh, I suppose that'll do. A Really Important Book About An Important Issue Of The Day? Yes, Yes, A Thousand Times YESSS!

The apartment rental office says that they won't send an exterminator, but I can go and pick up something called an "ant packet". I don't know what's in it, but at least I can use the packet itself to slap the ants senseless.

My apartment is under attack! I'm the commander-in-chief of my apartment! I must lead my apartment into battle against the ant menace. It's War on Ants!

Insects up in my business again

Ignorance is bliss...I just discovered a huge ant colony right under my bed. GROSS!!!! There's probably no way I'm sleeping tonight, at least there. This might be a blessing in disguise: I have my BA books and I can play catch up. But I need to sleep sometime.

Er, duh, they seemed to buy into WMD. But they didn't think it mattered.

By the way, speaking of Iraq...the folks at the Cato Institute have been impressively right at every turn, going all the way back to December '01...I wish I could say "I told you so", but I never wrote anything down. Cato is on record, and they were just dead-on right every time. You're not going to probably like what they think about economic policy and taxes and blah de blah blah, but either they've totally brainwashed me or they say everything that I would want to say, only better.

It's interesting that you have to take positive action in order to find out your grades. You never get a report card. If you don't go on the web and get your grades, you can be entirely oblivious to them for as long as you want unless you're in danger of getting kicked out, but basically nobody ever is.

Summer Reading, Summer Viewing, Summer Crush

I finished "Johnny Got His Gun" by Dalton Trumbo yesterday (well, technically early this morning). I was inspired to read it by my Timothy Bottoms discovery. I can kind of spot where it's a propaganda piece, but I'm certainly sympathetic to its anti-war message.

I watched "The Virgin Suicides" the other day, too, a good moody mood piece. It's a good model of how high school feels to me now looking back.

And so...now I have a crush on Sofia Coppola! She's such a good director and she's so cute! She's on the market now, too! She divorced Spike Jonze. But then again, how do you top Spike Jonze? He made the video for "Sabotage"! You can't beat him for awesomeness. But maybe he was a jerk.

Heroes for the Day

Here are some heroes for the day...great songwriters! In no particular order!

• Paul McCartney (let's say up to 1974)
  
• Marc Bolan (pretty much up to the day he died)
  
• Stephin Merritt (somebody had a "69 Love Songs" T-shirt in my BA class today!)
  
• Paul Caporino (of M.O.T.O., pretty much usually my favorite band)
  
• Ray Davies (especially "Village Green Preservation Society"...the whole album)
  
• Johns Flansburgh and Linnell (of They Might Be Giants...but mostly up to, let's say, 1993ish)
  
• All four members of Queen (who, remarkably, all had #1 hits during the band's career: "We Will Rock You" was by Brian May, "We Are The Champions" was by Freddie (not to mention "Bohemian Rhapsody" and "Crazy Little Thing Called Love"), "Another One Bites The Dust" was by Mr. John Deacon, and "Radio Ga Ga" was by Roger Taylor)
  
• Pete Townshend (also probably one of my top three guitarists, along with the above-mentioned Brian May)

I'm behind already in my summer class. On the one hand: it's a summer class! How the heck did I let myself get behind? On the other hand: it's a summer class! Why get all bent out of shape about it?

Ah...a card table solution. The only downside is that the monitor is kind of jiggling around, making me dizzy.

And oh yeah, I was supposed to give a shout out to Steve a long time ago. Sorry dude! I don't know if you're still reading, but here's to you and your old school coin collecting knowledge.

Noooo! My computer desk!

Okay, so don't try to move a flimsy chipboard computer desk across carpet without taking the monitor and CPU off of it. Now I'm sitting on the floor and typing. Oh nooooo! Now I'm going to actually have to vacuum!!!

Yesterday was mostly a huge downer. Who wanted to see a different horse win the race? We wanted the same horse again! And who wanted to see Calgary not bring the Cup back to Canada? See, Mom, that's the tradeoff that's simply balanced differently in fake wrestling: the result may be fixed, but because it's fixed it's never boring or ultimately disappointing. At least our hometown Columbus Comets were victorious over the Indiana Thunder. But I must say that at a score of 90-0, the amount of legitimate competition in this particular contest was about the same as in professional wrestling.

You know what would be fun?

Somebody (maybe me) should start a legal equivalent to the Journal of Irreproducible Results/Annals of Improbable Research. I thought the Green Bag was like that, and it is somewhat light and eclectic, but it's not farcical or even generally silly.

I was thinking if I ever get to argue before the Supreme Court, I should stop in the middle of oral argument and go: "Hey wait, I'm on Westlaw, aren't I? Hi Mom! Look at me! I'm in a Supreme Court Transcript! Help! Let me out of this transcript!" Then the Marshal of the Court would punch me in the face and I'd get instantly sued 15 times over for malpractice and triple double dog disbarred.

"You should always see a lawyer when faced with this situation, because look at the bad stuff that happened in this case!" Yeah, but how many other similar situations were satisfactorily resolved without any legal action? Of the situations that got messed up, how many of them were messed up because somebody decided to make it a legal matter?

I was just reading the brief for the appellee in the oral argument I'm helping out which. So many shades of gray! It's kind of painful to read somebody strenuously bashing the position you're helping to argue for. It kind of makes you question what you're doing. Every once in a while, I get this twinge like I wish I'd stayed in physics.

Another nother name

How bout..."Diary of a Something-L"? Like "twenty-something"? For that matter, "Diary of a Twenty-Something"? That one would work for another five years. I don't even think it's taken!

Yay, Better Late Than Never! You go!

I feel like such a tool. I keep telling myself I'm not going to get all worked up about my grades, but my heart is pounding right now. Ick. I hope they get finished posting them before I have to leave tonight or else I'll worry about it all night.